Due to director Bong Joon-ho’s track record alone, we would have gotten around to watching this eventually. Yet I am still struck by how successful this has been, both critically and commercially. Many critics have named it the best film of 2019 and it has been so talked about that it has become a meme. It’s quite an extraordinary achievement for a foreign film to gain such a cultural foothold in the US. For myself, I don’t quite see where the greatness lies. It’s a good film, of that there is no doubt, but the widespread acclaim it has garnered has made it feel overrated to me.
So I finally finished the third book of Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy and it really took some effort as it is far longer than the previous two books. This is a true epic in every sense of the word, with a prelude that takes place before the previous two novels, covers events in parallel with them, and then picks up after them until what amounts to the heat death of the universe. It’s by far my favorite of the three books and lays out some genuinely terrific ideas.
As I’ve mentioned on Broken Forum, Ne Zha can be thought of as China’s current best answer to Marvel and Pixar. It predictably sold well in China but performance outside of it has been lacklustre. Non-Chinese audiences probably found the title mystifying and I have to say that its trailer looks unimpressive as well. I was prepared to critique this heavily but ended up being rather surprised at how decent it is.
As I mentioned to my wife, our cinephile friend would never watch something like this, but I’m a soft touch for the occasional teenage romance or coming-of-age story. In addition, I like to think of this, together with Crazy Rich Asians and Andrew Yang’s campaign to be the Democratic nominee for the US presidential race, as part of the welcome phenomenon of Asian Americans coming out and becoming more visible amidst the broader American culture.
Playing this in 2019 just highlights to me that game graphics are already good enough that I don’t really care about chasing the state of the art any more. Honestly while obviously not being perfect, they look fine to me even though this game was first released in 2015. This is especially true for this series given that when the sequel, Just Cause 4, was released only last year, many people complained that its production values and graphics seemed to have regressed.
I have zero interest in sports so a documentary about doping in the world of cycling is hardly something that I’m likely to get excited about. However while this was director Bryan Fogel’s original plan for his film, subsequent events played out in a way that must have been far beyond anything he could have predicted, and so he seemed to have pivoted his film in response. The result is a riveting watch that tests the boundaries of what documentaries are supposed to be.
