I haven’t seen enough of Mike Leigh’s work and after taking the time to watch this one, I continue to be wowed by his ability to depict the lives of the British working class. This is ostensibly a film about abortion, one so realistic that it feels like it should be based on a real person. But it’s also about the lives of the working class, their concerns and their problems and how they’re forced to solve them in their own way because the laws as written were made by and for the rich.
This film was made by Zhang Lü, a Chinese director of Korean ethnicity. Its title refers to the White Pagoda that is a landmark in Beijing, said to be shadowless as due to a combination of its white color and sheer size, its shadow is difficult to perceive. It’s definitely one of those arthouse films with depths that are difficult to perceive as said tower’s shadow. In this case, it’s both subtler than I’d prefer and even when I can work out what it’s trying to say, the stakes seem too small to support the weight of its presentation.
The name Peter F. Hamilton was not familiar to me and I thought I knew all of the big name science-fiction writers. While popular and commercially successful, this trilogy is closer to being space opera and so never won any major awards which could be why I never noticed it. The books are also notable for being huge doorstoppers. That kind of length isn’t that unusual for the current era of web series but present real logistical issues when printed on paper. The cast of characters is extensive and Hamilton takes his time to describe his setting so the plot doesn’t really get going until a few hundred pages in. For a long while, I enjoyed the action adventure story well enough but couldn’t see much point in it. Then the action got started and I must admit that I got hooked.
I held off on watching this because I feel that zombies are way overused in media and it didn’t even seem like this adds anything new to the genre. I was persuaded my mind due to a friend’s recommendation and because I have a newfound appreciation for the work of Alex Garland. In the event, this turned out to be a perfectly cromulent action movie and a decent coming-of-age film. Thematically, it’s not that interesting despite an attempt to suggest a mythic link to England’s past. But it is entertaining and even does a bit of worldbuilding.
The slew of awards and international recognition this film won more than qualifies it a must-watch. I was hesitant to approach it however, being cognizant of its contentious and depressing nature. Indeed as the end of this documentary itself shows, the crisis at Masafer Yatta that is its focus, has since been overshadowed by the October 7 attacks. The Palestinian perspective it offers is both interesting and invaluable. Its images show exactly how a people is smothered to death slowly over the course of decades. Yet it probably doesn’t offer much that is new to those who are already reasonably well-read on the subject and is too roughly put together to be a great documentary.
The Remastered version of the game includes all three parts of the so-called The City Never Sleeps expansion. The story takes place after the events of the main game itself and features the characters Black Cat, Hammerhead and Silver Sable. Miles Morales gets a bit of character development as this does lead to his own game but Mary-Jane Watson unfortunately has a reduced role. She does tease Peter Parker over his relationships with other women but that’s about it. I disliked the power-ups Hammerhead gets to make his a worthy adversary here but the rest of the story isn’t bad. It does mean that the combat difficulty is ramped up significantly, enough to encourage me to regularly use gadgets which was no doubt the designers’ intention.
This is lighter fare that my wife noticed while we were browsing through Netflix. One would have expected this to be another manga adaptation but in this instance, the reverse is true. It’s an original story written for animation and then later adapted as a manga. The core idea is cutesy yet sound enough: a teenage girl feels depressed by her familial situation and prefers to escape by turning into a cat. Unfortunately this is also inextricably tied to her infatuation for a boy in her class and this is just juvenile. This is a film that was made for the young adult market and it’s fine in that regard, but it’s not for us.
