The thing about Europe is its economy is permanently stuck in the doldrums, a global cautionary tale. And no wonder. Europeans enjoy August off, retire in their prime and spend more time eating and socialising with their families than inhabitants of any other region.
I was not expecting to see such a pro-Europe article from The Economist of all places.
Oh, and no EU leader has ever launched their own cryptocurrency.
YET, Economist. No EU leader has launched their own cryptocurrency YET.
Figure 1: Blue Prince, my current contender for GotY
Note: I’m going to do my best not to spoil Blue Prince but it’s a hard one to talk around and everyone has a different tolerance for spoilers. If you feel like I’m giving too much away, let me know!
I spent the weekend playing Blue Prince with my kids. And they seem to be enjoying it? They’ve gotten into videogames recently but rarely stray outside of the standard kid’s fare like Minecraft and Mario Kart. I think they like the fact that Blue Prince is cozy and slightly cerebral, even if they don’t quite understand all of the things that are happening or why I might draft one room over another. But in the game, each room is a puzzle or a layer to a puzzle and I love hearing them theorise what each element of the room might be.
(Incidentally, they’ve occasionally been really helpful. There’s a picture on a wall that I just couldn’t figure out. For hours, I kept thinking “Is that Donald Trump??”. And my daughter copped it first time. I’d still be bashing my head against it if it wasn’t for her).
Playing it yesterday with my 7-year-old beside me and I reached a room with a load of things in it that I didn’t understand. “I’m not sure what these are but I’ll bet they’re important”, I said to him. So I grabbed screenshots of all the things, and asked him what he thought they were. And so we came up with a little story of what they were, and then moved onto another thing.
A couple of runs later, we were doing something else in the game and came to a whole new area I’d never visited before. As I was looking around, getting an idea of what I was looking at and I said “does this look kinda familiar?”. And at the exact same time, we both came to the realisation that these were the things we’d been looking at just an hour ago and that I’d screenshotted. The delight on his little face as he realised he’d worked it out was spectacular.
(The other take-away from this is that I have the same mental capabilities of a 7-year-old but let’s just skip over that for now.)
Anyway, Blue Prince is a really great game. But even better if you can play it as a multiplayer experience with two little buddies.
The first half is overstuffed with too many story threads that don’t go anywhere (although we can largely forgive this because “Black Leather Rock” is great). And good Christ it is molasses-slow. The second half is much more straightforward Hammer fare, albeit a fairly middling entry, with radiated children being kept under wraps by a secret government agency.
There’s an interesting streak of nihilism peeking through here that I wish they’d leaned into.
Do you like watching an entire film through a tiny pinprick of light? Then boy do I have the film for you.
The Blair Witch Project comparisons are obvious - a bunch of young people head off into the wilderness with video cameras and go slowly insane - but the second half goes off in such a weird hallucinogenic, experimental cosmic horror tangent that it suffers slightly in the comparison. People expecting a straightforward found footage horror will be disappointed.
A better point of comparison is The Evil Dead (there are a couple of shots toward the end that seem to directly reference this as an influence). And this is what unlocked the film for me. Once I realised this film was just a bunch of genre sickos armed with a microbudget, a camera and buckets of caro syrup and having lots of fun, I vibed with the film a lot more. Unfortunately the many, many (way too many) frustrating torch scenes meant I’d already semi-checked out by the time I saw what they were actually trying to do and it wasn’t enough to fully save the film for me.
It’s a testament to Noah Hathaway’s performance that multiple generations have been so deeply traumatised by something that happens to a horse that we’re introduced to barely one scene before.
Oof this is a hard one to score. On the one hand, my kids absolutely loved it and it was everything they wanted from a Minecraft movie. There’s a reunion late in the film that had my son slapping both his knees with relief and delight and he was fully invested. For kids, this film is absolutely delivering the goods.
On the other hand, “kids like it” isn’t an excuse for a film to not really try. What we’re left with is a film about creativity that demonstrates almost no creativity in itself. Jack Black’s entire direction appears to have been “just do your normal Jack Black thing pls”. The main characters have no arc and are completely forgotten for large parts of the film, completely lost in the messy action. There were a couple of nice creature effects, but most of the effects felt flat and volume-y.
On the the other other hand (we’re on our third hand now), this really could have been a lot worse.
This just didn’t work for me. The first act was a bit of grim fun but ultimately felt like Director Bong on auto-pilot. Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, the film becomes something else entirely when Ruffalo and Colette appear giving career-worst performances and completely upend the film’s tone and pointedness of the satire.
A fun mash-up of spy film styles. The understated, rigidness of Le Carre combined with the jazzy smoothness of Bond, Black Bag is entertaining enough and breezes along but I’m afraid this wasn’t a total success for me. From a purely aesthetic point of view, it’s impeccable as you’d expect from a film shot by Peter Andrews (I know). But narratively, it was all over the place. The stakes of the story are Hollywood-enormous ‐ literal nuclear meltdown ‐ but the protagonist’s main concern are some very British dinner parties. In video games, they call this ludonarrative dissonance and it’s confusing as hell.
All the same, I’m glad someone gave this a go but I doubt I’ll ever watch it again..
I know England in the 80s looked post-apocalyptic but holy shit Alan Clarke really pushes it in Road, turning it into a Beckettian primal scream of working-class rage. Lesley Sharp’s monologue is heartbreaking and the obvious highlight of the film but the real genius is the camera: unflinching and constantly moving, refusing to give us comforting edit breaks. I don’t think a fourth wall break has ever made me as uncomfortable as they did here.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Microsoft, Bill Gates has released this really terrific memoir of how they got started, including the source code for the original Microsoft Basic, which he claims is “the coolest code I’ve ever written”. It’s such a great artifact and the presentation is chef-kiss perfect.
johnke.me
