In this second prequel novel for the Foundation series, we follow Hari Seldon as he works on his theory of psychohistory, while the Galactic Empire of which he is a citizen begins to decline. There’s a race against time, because he hopes that his theories will lead to make a recovery plan, a way for humanity to continue after the fall. Much of the decline takes the form of political unrest, and also the more mundane processes of failing infrastructure. The machinery that keeps society running continually breaks down, and there’s not enough money to maintain it. I felt somewhat unsettled because it’s hard not to see the same symptoms in the real world.
The novel is divided into four main sections, each occurring about ten years apart. In each section, he has to solve some crisis, like the increasing popularity of a demagogue politician, or an assassination attempt on him and the Emperor, or simply the difficulty of obtaining the funding needed to continue his research. Along the way, seeds are planted for where the series will go. Sometimes, it feels a little perfunctory, like when a character just brings up the idea of establishing a second Foundation, without really going into detail about how they arrived at this idea. I can forgive a little bit of prequel-itis, as the actual stories were enjoyable enough on their own. Plus, I was actually left feeling excited to continue the series, because I’m looking forward to seeing how these seeds will pay off.
I was so impressed with Nell Tiger Free’s performance in The First Omen that I sought out some of her other work. Servant is a suspense/thriller series on Apple TV+, and also boasts the involvement of M. Night Shyamalan, who I still have a soft spot for, despite the roller-coaster ride that his reputation has (not undeservedly) gone through over the years.
The show has four seasons, and I think it’s worth giving my impressions about halfway through. The premise alone is a great source of suspense: a couple welcomes a nanny, Leanne, to their home to care for their infant, but we find out that the baby is a doll, and that the actual baby had died sometime before. Substituting the child with a lifelike doll was the only way for the mother to cope with the loss, but her delusion is so deep that she went ahead with her plans to hire a nanny. When Leanne comes onboard, strange things start happening around the house, not least of which is the doll’s transformation into—gasp!—a real, live baby!
Leanne (played by Free) carries herself in a creepy, detached way. Her performance is one of the highlights of the show for me. She has the kind of face where the smallest change in expression can switch her vibe from innocence to malice, from fear to aggression, in a split second.
A quirky, silly film about a woman who reincarnates and lives several lifetimes, each one taking place in a different century, starting in the 1600’s. In every life, she becomes obsessed with incarnations of the same man, and keeps trying to connect with him. He never seems to return her affections, though.
The production value is extremely low-budget, but it works. The various historical time periods are portrayed via costumes and set dressing, but the locations themselves are often just an empty room with hanging curtains in the background. It’s going for the impression of a time period, rather than a realistic portrayal, which I respect as a stylistic and pragmatic choice.
Ultimately, I had a hard time connecting to the story. I think the film is satisfied with cracking silly jokes, like dubbing the protagonist’s boneheaded husband with dog sounds because his previous incarnation was her pet. I did have a couple of good laughs, but there wasn’t much substance overall.
Eventually, the protagonist is reincarnated in the 80’s, and the object of her desire happens to be a famous pop star. I thought that the film had the opportunity to take a turn and comment on the nature of what we call “parasocial relationships” nowadays. But the movie sticks to its frivolous tone, and leads to a kind of empty conclusion.
The Master Plan is a play produced by the Soulpepper theatre company. Adapted from the book Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy, the play tells the true story of the ill-fated project to develop an unused plot of Toronto land into a futuristic “smart city.”
The project would have been a collaboration between Sidewalk Labs (a subsidiary of Alphabet), and a government agency. Predictably, the opposing forces of profit-driven capitalism and regulatory bureaucracy ended in a stalemate, and the project was scrapped. The public generally disapproved of the idea, because of understandable fears that residents of the neighbourhood would be spied on, their data sold for profit. Nobody knows if data privacy would have been a real issue, because the project never got very far; on the other hand, even if the project had started off in a benign way, the pattern of enshittification predicts that the lives of the “customers” would have eventually deteriorated due to the profit motive.
When I travelled to London, England earlier this year, I visited many bookstores, as I am wont to do whenever I explore an unfamiliar city. On many of the shelves, something immediately caught my eye: the minimalist white and blue covers of the British publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. I had only heard of them from a podcast, and their reputation for publishing award-winning books, but I’ve never seen them in North American bookstores, and so I made it a mission to get a few. The Observable Universe was one of my selections.
The author, Heather McCalden, lost both of her parents to AIDS when she was a child, and was raised by her grandmother. Because she was so young, she hardly knew her parents, and they’re defined more by their absence than by the scarce memories that she has of them. This memoir is her attempt to process the loss, and is made up of many “chapters,” many of which are only a few sentences long. Rarely are they more than two pages.
Each page of this graphic novel is formatted like a Sunday comic strip: landscape orientation, with the title appearing in the first panel, followed by three rows of illustrations. It follows the mishaps of a suburban family, kind of like For Better or For Worse or Adam@home, where the kids get into trouble and the parents get flustered. Isn’t it hilarious how the father keeps forgetting the kid’s name? Or how the mom is always sleeping in too late? Some strips have a punchline, but other times, it relies on awkwardness and cringe comedy.
But then, a darker story arc develops beyond the individual jokes. It becomes clear that the mother is suffering from depression and alcoholism, and that the father’s bumbling absent-mindedness is not just a lovable quirk: he’s genuinely disoriented and confused about the world around him.
I’ll discuss spoilers further down, but before I do, I’ll just say that I recommend reading this book. Something strange is going with this family, and the mystery box opens gradually and has a fun solution. It also gives the characters a satisfying emotional arc. Once you find out what happens, you can’t blame them for their earlier flaws.
It’s been a couple of weeks since the US presidential election, which seems like the perfect time to watch this film. During my viewing, I held a question at the back of my mind: could America actually erupt into violence? It’s depicted so realistically in the film that sadly, I feel like the answer is yes. But also, the film avoids commenting on the specific political realities that would lead to such a scenario, which I think is to its credit. If its messaging were too true to life, I would be so filled with dread while watching it that I would miss the more personal story at its core.
The protagonists of the film are photographers who pride themselves on documenting the truth in a neutral way. As someone who dabbles in photography, I bought into the film’s insistence on the power of images. Visually, the film gets a lot of mileage out of juxtaposing iconic American imagery—e.g. a Christmas village, a small-town Main Street, the many monuments of Washington D.C.—with soldiers in battle. The action scenes are intense and appropriately scary. Ultimately, the movie shows the inevitability of war journalists becoming hardened and traumatized by the death that surrounds them, and makes you wonder if it’s worth it.
Spoiler warning: Out of necessity, I have to reveal the plot in order to discuss my opinions of this film.
On the surface, this movie is fun to watch. It’s suspenseful and propulsive, and features a great performance by the lead actor, Willa Fitzgerald. However, I ended up disliking it after giving it a few minutes’ thought.
After watching the recent and presumably ongoing TV series, I felt the urge to revisit the classic sci-fi Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov. I had read the original trilogy for a course in undergrad, and remember enjoying it back then. I don’t think the TV show is great, but I’m still fascinated by the core idea of “psychohistory.”
Briefly, and without spoiling too much, psychohistory refers to a mathematical theory, created by a man named Hari Seldon, which can predict the path of human societies into future centuries.
Prelude to Foundation is a prequel to the original trilogy. I’ve chosen to read the series in chronological order (as opposed to publication order), because Asimov himself recommended it this way. As the novel starts, a young Hari Seldon has just presented his ideas at a conference—kind of like a TED Talk, I imagine—and it has caused quite a stir. But, as Seldon repeats many times throughout the book, he doesn’t know how to practically apply psychohistory yet to make actual predictions.
For this year’s first TIFF Secret Movie Club screening, we saw this Australian stop-motion animated film, about the tough life of a young woman who loses her family to various tragedies. Her emotional refuge is collecting—and hoarding—snails and snail-related paraphernalia; anything that evokes the spiral shape of a snail shell is irresistible to her. Like Uzumaki, this manifests as dense repeated visual patterns that I’m sure would reward repeat viewings. The jerky motion of claymation is inherently “cute,” but the colour palette of mostly browns and greys, as well the perpetually droopy-eyed expression of the protagonist Grace, serve to offset the quirkiness with a dour mood.
One of last year’s Secret Movie Club selections, The Iron Claw, depicted so much tragedy and loss that were it not based on a true story, I would think that the writers were overdoing it, sacrificing believability in order to tug at viewers’ heartstrings. Memoir of a Snail, because of its biopic-like structure, and of course, its title, had me believing that it also was a true story, despite its fantastical and whimsical visuals. I kept thinking, Wow, how did this person endure so much pain and trauma?, as if it were a real person.
It’s only in hindsight that I realize that it must be mostly fiction. Unfortunately, this leaves me feeling deceived. In my opinion, by putting its main character through the ringer, only to give her a twist happy ending, the film strays into emotionally manipulative territory. In the Q&A session afterwards, writer/director Adam Elliot says that he wants to achieve two things with his films: make the audience laugh, and make the audience cry. I think he tries a little too hard to reach this goal.
