Sadly, this movie only impressed me on the superficial and technical level: the Carpathian scenery is gorgeous, and the practical special effects for bringing the ochi creatures to life are great. I don’t think A24 is big on merchandising1, but the toys would fly off the shelves.
Unfortunately, I had a hard time staying engaged because I found the story to be really thin. The main (human) character, Yuri, decides to help the baby ochi, in spite of her father’s hatred of them… but why? Her father later comes around, and supports her quest to return the baby to its family… but, again, why? The movie doesn’t really offer many answers beyond Well, look at the cute little guy!, and because of that, it feels quite empty.
First, the positives: the visual design and rhythm of this film are full of energy, which makes it fun to watch. It goes really over the top with the gore—I watch everything with subtitles, and I’ve never seen the word squelching used as much as this film does when describing its sound effects—but then I found myself desensitizing to the squirmy discomfort, to the point where I was giggling gleefully at the gruesome moments by the end.
Unfortunately, I found the storytelling to be weak otherwise. The Substance in the film causes the main character Elisabeth (Demi Moore) to “birth” a second, younger version of herself named Sue (Margaret Qualley). The rules that come with the Substance state that they “are one,” and that they must switch every seven days.
After watching the film, I couldn’t help but brainstorm about the possible permutations of the idea. In essence, the movie could have explored the concept in three ways, each with differing psychological consequences on the characters.
Pantheon covers a lot of cool sci-fi concepts, the main one being the idea of “Uploaded Intelligence,” i.e. the ability to scan a person’s brain and have them live as a piece of software in the cloud. The conceit is fertile ground for exploring ideas like, what makes a person a person, and what makes this person this specific person? On paper, it’s right up my alley, but I didn’t enjoy the show as much as I expected to.
I think I had trouble connecting with the characters because the animation and voice acting felt a bit flat. The story deals with a lot of heavy emotions, like grief for a departed loved one, and the choice of whether to accept the Uploaded version of that loved one as the same person. But those feelings didn’t come through for me because the animation just didn’t have the same expressiveness as, say, Arcane, or anything from Studio Ghibli.
On the positive side, the action scenes are pretty fun to watch. The various Uploaded characters often “fight” each other in the virtual world. Technically, there shouldn’t be anything to look at, as it’s essentially pieces of software trying to hack into each other’s networks, but the creators of the show chose to visualize it as if the Uploads were superheroes. They fly around and use “powers” against each other… sometimes it feels almost like a Dragon Ball fight.
This Japanese comedy takes place in a spa/hotel in a small town, and follows the staff and guests as they get stuck in a mysterious time loop. A twist on the Groundhog Day formula, with a couple of key differences:
the loop is only 2 minutes long, rather than the whole day, so we can see every iteration in its entirety, in real-time
all of 10 or so characters are experiencing the same thing, which introduces an aspect of project management, as they assign tasks to each other and scramble to complete them within the 2 minutes
The first act is a lot of fun as the characters figure out what’s going on. Seeing how each person reacts is pretty funny… for example, one of the guests is a writer under pressure from his publishers, and he decides to use the time loop as a chance to rest, because it means that his deadlines will never come.
The movie surprised and impressed me with how it used its structure to illuminate emotional truths for some characters. For example, a young couple challenge themselves to escape from the others, by running away as far as they can. At first, it felt silly to me, since they know that they’ll always end up back where they started. But then I realized that the futility of the game was the point, and that it was a way for them to connect with each other, like a series of rapid-fire “dates.”
Along the way, the major characters wonder whether they caused the loop by wishing for time to stop. Everyone has a reason for fearing the future, and the natural response to this fear is wanting to just keep things as they are. The movie has a real “Monkey’s Paw” kind of message: there’s a fine line between staying in our comfort zones, and becoming stuck in a rut. We need time to move forward, even with all the scary uncertainty that progress brings.
Who do I have more of a crush on, Michael Fassbender or Cate Blanchett? I think it’s a tie.
He’s a spy. She’s a spy. They’re married. There’s a mole in the spy agency. He has to find out who it is. It might be her. The other four suspects are conveniently also paired romantically. What are the HR policies like at spy agencies? Emotional attachments are a huge risk to national security. Relationship discord, an equally huge risk. Fassbender and Blanchett, their relationship: solid. The others, not so much. I’m all for workplace romances, but with far-reaching, world-changing stakes like these, I’m not so sure.
He wears cool glasses throughout. I changed my mind. I think he wins.
Here we are, at the end of the original Foundation trilogy. Over the course of reading the three books, I could sense that Isaac Asimov was gaining in confidence and skill. The style of the first novel was somewhat staid and dry, but by this third book, his writing had gained some flourishes, making it more fun to read.
By introducing the Mule and his powers in Foundation and Empire, the series added a new layer to the plotting. Both the Mule and the Second Foundation—a secretive parallel counterpart to the First Foundation that we’ve been following so far—possess mental abilities, which allows them to brainwash and control the actions of ordinary people.
Much of this novel feels like a spy thriller. Characters form alliances, but nobody can be fully trusted, because anyone can be a secret agent under the control of the other side. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the conclusion involves a series of scenes where an answer is revealed, only to be turned around with a twist, and the real answer being revealed… but then there’s another twist, etc. It’s almost comical how many times it undercuts itself, but I had a blast with it.
I’m not a parent. That ship has sailed for me, and there was a time when a twinge of envy would come over me whenever I encountered someone with children. A show like Adolescence takes that feeling of envy and replaces it with a deep appreciation for just how hard parenting can be.
The miniseries tells the story of a teenage boy who gets arrested and charged with stabbing and killing his classmate. It explores his motives, his school life, his relationship with the victim—a girl who he was involved with, in a confused teenage way—and especially, the effect of these events on his parents.
The current hype around this show mostly centres around the fact that each of the four 1-hour episodes is filmed in a single shot. I don’t have much to say about that aspect of it, other than kudos to the whole cast and crew for pulling it off. It’s truly impressive.
I don’t usually write about magazines, but they are a part of my regular reading diet. Recently, I picked up the January 2025 issue of National Geographic from a Little Free Library. My family used to have a subscription when I was a kid, and I must have flipped through dozens of issues. It’s nice to see that the magazine has endured, in much the same form as I remember.
Let me give a quick rundown what I found interesting in this issue:
The wreckage of the Endurance has been discovered under the Antarctic ice. The ship sank in 1915 during a legendary expedition, and the mission to find the wreck, even aided by modern technology like sonar and underwater drones, was just as difficult as the original voyage.
All tea leaves come from the same species of plant, Camellia sinensis. I always thought that the many varieties of tea—e.g. green tea, oolong, pu’er—were taken from different plants, but it turns out they are all the same leaf, just processed in different ways. Pu’er, the subject of this particular article, can be fermented for up to 10 years or more. On Jingmai Mountain in China, a small indigenous community has been farming an ancient forest for centuries.
In New Zealand, there’s a conservation project underway to eradicate invasive predators (rats, possums, stoats, etc.), in order to protect the native bird species, like the iconic kiwi. At first glance, it seems brutal and violent to kill millions of animals, but the sad fact is that they should never have been there, since they were brought in by settlers coming from overseas1. The article describes some cool technological advances—e.g. self-loading traps, computer-aided visual identification of predators—that have helped the project along.
Footnotes
We’ve been playing a board game called Spirit Island, for which the theme is to defend an island against (human) invaders. It has put me in a mindset that has made it easier to understand the rationale for eradication, as unpleasant as it may sound. ↩
In Consent, author Jill Ciment reflects on her relationship with her late husband. They got together when she was 17 and he was 47, and stayed together until he passed away in his 90’s.
At the core of the book are the questions:
Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning?
[…]
Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?
I don’t think it’s a conflict that can be resolved: her and her husband’s long-lasting love was genuine, but he was her teacher and surrogate father figure when they met, which is indisputably icky. Through her writing, she does a good job of expressing her doubts, while also showing that she is ultimately at peace with the relationship.
My favourite parts of the book involve her revisiting her previous memoir, Half a Life, which she published in the midst of their marriage. In that book, she now sees a sort of self-censorship, where she glossed over the uncomfortable truths of how they first met, and made it seem like she had made all of the advances. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like this before, a double-layered memoir, showing in such a literal way how our recollections of the past change over time.
See also: the film May December, which covers some of same themes.
I much preferred this to the previous book, especially the second half, called “The Mule.” In the original Foundation novel, there’s a feeling of inevitability, which is kind of the point. The fledgling Foundation faces crises, i.e. threats from other planetary civilations, but it always turns out that Hari Seldon predicted what was going to happen. When the crises are resolved, always in the Foundation’s favour, it’s revealed that it was the only way that events could have unfolded.
Foundation and Empire turns the idea on its head by introducing a character called “The Mule,” who conquers planets at an alarming rate, and threatens to take over the Foundation. Without spoiling too much, I’ll just say that the Mule is unique, and since Seldon’s predictions only work on broad social events, the Mule throws the preordained plan into chaos.
In contrast to the “everything always works out” ethos of the previous novel, the Mule creates real tension and suspense. We experience the story through characters who don’t know what’s going to happen next… which is basically like most stories we read, but feels refreshing in this world of predestination.
