This is an absolutely insane wild ride of a high school comedy that went far further than I expected. The thing is, it’s a totally formulaic and predictable story about two buddies who want to get laid and so do something outrageous to become popular. The twist is that the two buddies here are lesbian girls and indeed the entire film is framed through a sort of gay-tinted lenses perspective. I’m not certain I really liked it that much but it’s creative and it left me with so many questions like do high schoolers in the US talk like that these days and are attitudes like this mainstream?
Divinity: Original Sin 2 was so wearying to play that I kept looking forward to unwinding with this relaxed, top down rally game. As you can see from these screenshots, it uses very simplified graphics and it’s meant to be played with just a game controller. Yet that doesn’t prevent it from being a reasonably decent rally game with plausible physics, good enough to win over fans of such games as the Dirt Rally series. It’s a short game and fairly easy for someone already experienced with rallying but I had a great time with it.
Most people have probably never heard of Barbara Loden and this is certainly the only film of note she ever made. Still, it’s an important enough film to be included in the US National Film Registry and most people will have heard of her husband, Elia Kazan. Mostly I am impressed that Loden would write, direct and then cast herself in the lead role of an extremely stupid character. She states that this is partly autobiographical and that too feels profoundly honest. Many films have tried to deglamorize classic Hollywood tropes but this succeeds more than most simply because the characters are such unsympathetic losers that there’s nothing cool about them at all.
Greg Egan is continuing to produce a fair amount new writing. I bought this book because it’s been a while since I last sat down with a good collection of short science-fiction stories and they’re how I first encountered Egan’s work. Unfortunately while many of the ideas in the stories here can be interesting and thought provoking, they’re also very small in scale. So small that they might rate a short blurb or a blog post but struggle under the weight and expectations of even a short story. Combined with Egan’s penchant for writing plain and straightforward stories with no dramatic twists, I’m left wondering: okay, so that happened, is that it?
This Finnish film had the bad luck of extremely poor timing. It’s a film about an unlikely friendship with a Russian man and how Russians in general aren’t so bad underneath their gruff exteriors. Then in 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, kicking off the largest war in Europe since World War 2 and with it went any hopes of this film being a success. It’s a solid art house film, not an especially outstanding one but certainly good enough to win more acclaim under more favorable circumstances. It’s especially poignant to us given that my wife once had a somewhat similar encounter on a train ride in China in her youth.
After quite a spate of Malaysian films, here’s a Singaporean one that has won critical acclaim on the international level. I went into this blind as usual without knowing anything about it and it really makes a difference. The film starts slow and gives little insight as to what the protagonist is really thinking. It took a while for it to sink in for me that this is a somber examination of the death penalty as it is carried out in Singapore. The sparse narrative and plain presentation make sense in order to treat the subject matter respectfully. It doesn’t fully commit to its ending which is a shame but it left me with an uneasy feeling about how capital punishment and the effects it leaves on the executioner and that is a sure sign of a successful film.
I keep adding films to my watch list due to their reputation but that doesn’t always mean that I’ll end up liking them. This epic Western film is considered one of the greatest American films of all time but I struggled for a long time to understand why. It has decent gunfight scenes and a complicated story and that seemed to be it. Later I realized that it has a very cynical take on the genre and that are really no good people in it on any side. I had to read up on it to understand that it’s a response to the Vietnam War and director Sam Peckinpah wanted to show audiences what he felt was the grim reality of real violence. As he later discovered, he failed because it turns out that there is no violence, no matter how horrific or graphic, that we humans won’t glorify and get excited over.
