Greg Egan is still my favorite science-fiction writer and I’m glad to see that he is still producing work. Even so his more recent work has been disappointing and this one with a length somewhere between a novella and a novel, is so underwhelming that I find it impossible to recommend to anyone. It’s still a quintessentially Egan story in that longtime fans will immediately recognize what it is in here that interests him but it’s such a narrow conceit that it’s hard to imagine many people would be similarly enthusiastic and Egan fails to develop an interesting story around it.
This being a film by Luca Guadagnino and once again starring Timothée Chalamet, I thought for sure that this would be a serious drama. So I truly was shocked by the sudden turn to cannibalism. We’ve seen this work already in Raw and thankfully Guadagnino isn’t trying to do quite the same thing. Yet while the production quality here is gorgeous and features great acting, I struggled to find a coherent theme that brings the whole film together while not doubting that Guadagnino does intend for there to be some meaning. In the end, it seems to come down to eating the ones you love and that’s just so banal and shallow.
This is apparently considered one of South Korea’s greatest films and is highly regarded internationally. Surely that’s a good enough reason to watch it, yet having done so I can’t see what’s so great about it at all. I think it’s melodrama, ramped all the way up to eleven and given a horror twist. There are some bold choices such as how deeply the children are involved in a drama involving adult themes. Yet I find myself unable to look past the deeply rooted misogyny at its heart and the predictable soap opera style drama in practically every one of its scenes. I hated it and it reminded me why I don’t watch Korean dramas in the first place.
Once upon a time, I trained as a journalist so news video editing is actually the kind of thing I’m supposed to be able to do. So when this game which puts you in the chair of the editor of a news program came out, I just knew I had to play it. A full playthrough isn’t really supposed to take very long but I agonized over improving my score and rewatched the full broadcasts and the rushes, so I took much longer than necessary. I felt unnecessarily stressed about doing a proper job, was enthralled by the emerging stories of all of the characters and, needless to say, had a great time.
The films of Lars von Trier have a mixed record for me though it’s true that at some point I need to go back to watch his best known ones. The fact that he’s such a unique auteur is undeniable however and I’d rate this one both as one of his strangest and yet most affecting to me. There’s so much that is experimental here, the imagery, the way it tries to hypnotize you, the shifts between black and white and color, and so on, and all of it serves a coherent purpose. Most of it, the core idea of it, exploring Germany in the immediate post-war period and all the pain and humiliation of being a citizen of a defeated and occupied country, is so refreshing and resonant.
I’ve had this on my list of potential television shows to watch for ages now as I keep hearing about how great it is. It’s four seasons in the Danish language so it’s quite an investment and I’m not sure how much my wife would appreciate a show that is all about politics. As it turned out there’s plenty of family and interpersonal drama in addition to the politics. The structure of the episodes in the first season has the main character Birgitte Nyborg needing to solve only one major crisis each episode, making it easy to follow. Most of all, it really does an excellent job of portraying how parliamentary politics works, albeit in a simplified capsule format, such that even we here in Malaysia can see the parallels. We will certainly be watching the remaining seasons.
As so often happens in cinema, this film is eerily similar to The Menu in and both were released in the same year. Unfortunately while this film feels like it has some depth in its first sequence about the two models Carl and Yaya, it goes off the rails later and eventually becomes a very crude treatise against capitalism. The worse part of it is that it doesn’t really seem to care about its characters at all, putting them on and off stage as director Ruben Östlund likes without any sense of continuity. It’s amusing enough to watch but it feels too dumb to be properly considered an arthouse film being so clumsily made and so on the nose.
