I’m happy to say that One Battle After Another entertained me more than Phantom Thread or Inherent Vice did. I saw it in IMAX and it was worth it for the close-up performance moments alone, especially by Sean Penn. His character is strange and twitchy and seems deformed somehow, and those quirks really come through when his face fills my entire field of vision.
There’s more action in this than PTA’s usual fare, including a brilliant car chase scene that features rolling desert hills. What starts off as a visual flourish—hypnotizing POV shots that follow the ups and downs of the road—becomes a tactic that a character uses against their pursuer. I would have cheered out loud if I were the type of person to do that.
What I’m struggling with, though, is the politics of the movie. The film depicts a conflict between characters from the extremes of the political spectrum. On one side is a terrorist group, committing violent crimes in the name of immigrant rights, and against the capitalist establishment. On the other side is a secretive, Santa-worshipping white supremacist club, whose members are in positions of high power and who do not shy away from an assassination or two. Both are shown as being ridiculous, and as far as I know, neither actually exist in real life. The US is a polarized country, and I feel like this movie gives fuel for both sides to say, “This is why they are to be feared.” The world of the movie feels just real enough that it filled me with dread about the future of American society. Which I guess was the point.
It’s refreshing to watch an animated movie that isn’t hyperkinetic and full of jibber-jabbering. Flow takes it completely in the other direction: it has no dialogue at all and contains many long unbroken takes with a gently floating virtual camera.
The story follows a cat who lives in a land with steadily rising water levels, and apparently abandoned by humanity. The sense of peril as the cat tries to flee from the flood really stressed me out, both because it evokes the threat of climate change, and because of the danger to the character herself. (I thought of the cat as female, but the film does not state this explicitly.) Eventually, she forms a found family with a group of other animals, including a dog and a lemur, and they set out on a mission to find safety.
I enjoyed watching the animals interact with each other. The filmmakers did a great job of balancing their natural animal behaviours with just enough anthropomorphized personality to make them distinct characters. I imagine it would be fun to watch this movie with a kid, because you could have great open-ended conversations about what each of the creatures is thinking or feeling; the movie doesn’t feed you that information, but rewards close observation and empathy.
Flow was produced using open-source software on a small budget. I’m not going to say that it looks as polished as a Pixar movie—there are some flaws in the rendering and character models—but the aesthetic is pleasant to look at, with a soft colour palette and lifelike animation. I think it’s a great lesson in embracing the limitations of your tools and making the best of them.
This summer, I was doing my volunteer work on Fridays, and since I was out of the house anyway, I took any opportunity I could to catch some blockbusters on opening day. Most of these movies don’t invite much analysis, so this will be a really quick rundown of my thoughts.
I’m glad to report that my journey with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is ending on a positive note. I wasn’t a fan of the previous entry, so I was a little worried about Foundation and Earth. Fortunately, I thought it was a huge improvement. It’s a direct continuation from Foundation’s Edge, so in hindsight, it’s almost as if the previous book was all a setup for the truly compelling part of the story.
I didn’t like the messy parallel plotlines in Foundation’s Edge, and so the main thing I appreciated about this one was its focus on a single group of characters, who are embarking on a single quest. We have Trevize, a member of the Foundation who’s got the weight of the galaxy on his shoulders, and his best bud, Pelorat, a scholar and all-round chill guy. Pelorat’s romantic partner, Bliss, is also part of the crew, and it’s in this three-sided dynamic that I got most of my enjoyment. It’s surprisingly sweet and relatable, how Trevize distrusts Bliss, simply because she’s Pelorat’s new girlfriend, and he doesn’t want his pal to get hurt. Add to that the conflict between Trevize’s and Bliss’s viewpoints about the fate of the galaxy, and you have some real satisfying character development.
The book is by no means perfect… I think it could have used some editing, because the debates between Trevize and Bliss, while thematically relevant, often feel repetitive, hitting the same beats over and over again. And any time a new female character was introduced, I cringed in anticipation of the inevitable tasteless description of her body.
Apple TV+ continues to be the place for solid shows that don’t seem to get much attention1. Drops of God follows the two potential heirs of a deceased wine magnate’s estate—one, his estranged daughter; the other, his favourite protégé—as they compete in a series of wine-based challenges. Whoever wins will inherit a fortune, which fortune takes the form of an extensive wine collection. The premise sounds crazy, and it didn’t surprise me to learn that the story is adapted from a manga. The comic-booky feeling is even more pronounced when we realize that these people have a preternatural ability to identify the component flavours of wine just by smelling it, and that they must train to perfect their “powers” before the big “battle.” But throughout it all, the show has the gloss and high production value of a prestige drama. Attaching a serious tone to a hokey premise doesn’t usually work for me2, but it does here!
A movie that I admire and respect more than I enjoy. It’s always nice to see an independent film receive such high accolades, including the Best Picture Oscar of 2024. I really don’t have any criticisms with it, and I think cast and crew did a great job.
It’s more a case of the film not matching my vibe, or maybe vice versa, that I didn’t have the right energy to fully enjoy the viewing experience. The first act, wherein Ani and Vanya have a whirlwind romance, is like watching a series of the most fun parties you’ve ever been to. As an introvert, though, no matter how great a party is, I’m still going to want to leave.
Once the conflict kicks in, and the adults who oversee Vanya’s life threaten to break the couple apart, the movie becomes a frantic comedy of errors. Characters are almost always yelling at each other. It’s funny, in a Curb Your Enthusiasm kind of way, but unlike that show, it’s turned up to 11 for a pretty big chunk of the movie. Larry David at least knew how to mix up the rhythm so that not every scene is a shouting match.
The final chapter of the movie was my favourite: it slows down and gives us a few reflective one-on-one moments between Ani and Igor, one of the “thugs” sent to enforce Vanya’s parents’ wishes. I would have liked the film a lot less if it didn’t have this epilogue, which makes the characters—and we, the viewers—think about everything that just happened, and what it all meant.
My experiment with 1 Second Everyday continues, but I must admit I’m running out of steam a little bit. There are days where I feel like nothing noteworthy happens, and I end up taking yet another video of the trees or the sky or something boring. But, at the end of the month, when I go back and review the compiled video, it doesn’t feel boring at all. I guess that’s the whole point of the exercise: it shows you that there’s always something interesting happening, and you just need to look for it.
I combined the videos for May and June, which you can view here.
Foundation’s Edge was published almost 30 years after the original Foundation trilogy, and you can feel that distance when you’re reading it. The sociological ideas that were at the forefront of the original books are kind of in the background now, replaced by a more conventional sci-fi adventure.
The setup of the novel doubles down on the mind-control conceit introduced in the previous books: Trevize, a councilman of the Foundation, suspects that the Second Foundation is secretly pulling the strings of human history using their “mentalic” powers. At the same time, Gendibal, one of the leaders of the Second Foundation, also suspects that there’s yet another more powerful force out there, mentally controlling them.
For me, this made the mind-control plot device feel tired: if there’s always the possibility that some unseen force is actually calling the shots, then as a reader, I lose track of the characters’ motivations. I also found the two protagonists too similar: they’re both young and arrogant iconoclasts who don’t toe the party line, hunting for a hidden adversary, and to me, the two parallel storylines started to blend together.
I tried to tell myself not to read this book when I first heard what it was about. I’m already quite cynical about Big Tech, and I thought that this would only entrench my biases further, with no real benefit to my mental health. But I saw it sitting on the shelf at my library and I just couldn’t help myself.
The author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook in the global policy department, where her responsibility was (ostensibly) to help the company negotiate with countries around the world. She started with the optimism typical of tech companies in the early aughts, believing that she would “make the world a better place.” But over the course of the book, she becomes disillusioned by Facebook’s relentless pursuit of growth and profit, which came at the high cost of creating political instability in countries like Myanmar and ultimately the US.
None of this is very surprising, if you follow the news about social media companies over the last few years. But Wynn-Williams’ position gave her access to the top brass at Facebook, Cheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, and she reveals some really bizarre behaviour by the leaders of the company. For example, Zuckerberg once asked her, on a visit to Indonesia, to organize a “gentle mob,” for no apparent reason other than to make himself look cool. These sections were both hard to read and hard to put down, having the feeling of learning some juicy gossip about someone you don’t like. You kind of have to take her word for it, because corroboration from other sources is not really built into the narrative style, but if it’s true, these incidents confirm the old adage that power corrupts.
Based purely on the title, I went into this book expecting something different. Maybe it’s just where my mind is at these days, but I thought it would be a treatise against the democratic backsliding associated with certain world leaders that I won’t name. But it turns out that Dave Meslin’s book is an exploration of the actual governing process, and reads more like a business/management manual, but applied to the systems of democracy. It’s more about logistics than political ideology.
Personally, my experience with democracy is somewhat intermittent: just go vote whenever there’s an election. It’s not very satisfying because it doesn’t feel like you’re contributing much, especially if your choice doesn’t win. Meslin agrees, and puts the blame on the systems and institutions of the government. And from there, he suggests tons of ideas of ways for those systems to change. I had many “a-ha!” moments reading this book, and I appreciated that the book is Canadian through and through, filled with examples and stories from nearby places.
Meslin is an excellent explainer, and simplifies complicated ideas, making them easy to digest. For example, he spends a lengthy chunk of pages describing alternatives to the first-past-the-post electoral system that we use in Canada. It’s kind of a geeky subject, but he makes it really clear how our current voting system leads to polarization and unfair election results.
