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Mad Max (2015)

From a rusty dirt box to a golden muscle car in 46 hours.

First I didn’t like how the game forced me to do looting and progress painfully slow to be able to get to the story progression, but soon enough I got hooked and unlocked some of the idle loot generation methods so the engine started working and it was more about exploration, easy but fun fighting, and earning progress at a nice enough pace. At the end, I could help but max it out completionist style. My favorite bit was the beautifully done post-apocalpytic style: this game has almost ten years on it at the time of me playing it, but I had zero complaints about visuals, it looked fantastic to me.

Overall, it was definitely a memorable experience, and a true Sisyphusian Mad Max storyline.

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The Black Dog – Other, Like Me

These guys are churning out new albums like a factory, and what’s socking is that none of these records feel like coming from a conveyor belt. This one’s on the darker side, introvert slow to mid tempo techno, some fine IDM noises, some industrial touch, some nice synths. It’s very well crafted electronic music.

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Be Kind Rewind (2008)

Such a great premise, it’s hilarious and fun. The lead-up about how the tapes get wiped is so unnecessarily over the top, but already sets the tone for what level of ridiculous one should expect. It’s also funny and full of heart. This is a new entry on my favorites list.

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Godzilla Minus One

It was interesting how old school, physical-looking, slow-moving kaiju met top-notch, realistic, modern visual effects. Also, great angle to look at the post-war Japan’s life as drama weaved into a monster movie.

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Crashing (2016)

Funny and quirky, full of moments of “omg, can’t watch, why, can’t not watch”. In a way it’s a very British take on the Friends-template: starting-out young people hanging together, just not living in an unaffordable large apartment over Manhattan, but squatting in a run-down hospital.

Also, I adore Phoebe Waller-Bridge, I cannot imagine why the industry doesn’t squeeze more producing and writing out of her, she’s an absolute blast both as a creator and as an actress.

Finally, this is a dense piece, because there’s not just one but two manic pixie dream girls in a seven-person cast. Although I could argue that besides Lulu and Melody, Fred is also one (being Sam’s pixie) so that would make it three.

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Emily the Criminal (2022)

I loved to see Aubrey Plaza in a drama role, and both her and Theo Rossi killed it in terms of performance. The movie wasn’t an extremely deep ride but rather a “moment in life” thing, but it’s a really good one for what it is.

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Alien: Romulus (2024)

There are pros and cons, but it’s easily the best Alien movie in a decade. In my ranking Alien and Aliens are on the high pedestal of 10/10, and then Alien 3 and Resurrection are both 6/10 movies. Romulus fits somewhere on the benchmark of the latter two, perhaps a half mark upwards, and definitely way ahead of any of the prequels or Predator crossovers.

What’s going for it:

  • I really appreciated ground time, showcasing what a mining colony looks like, streets, a slice of society, struggles outside of the scope of a single mission.
  • We got glimpse of a new part of alien life: we’ve never before seen them between bursting out as an alien baby and reappearing as a big black monster, and now we saw that there’s an in-between cocoon phase.
  • The whole movie was beautifully shot: colors, atmosphere, consistency of the retro-futuristic setting. As for props, the scenes were built amazingly well, and the aliens looked bad-ass.
  • Acting was fairly good, and the writing had no painful “why would you do that?!” moments.

What felt hmm:

  • The whole cast felt very young, had a bit of a Children of the Corn vibe to it. Although I could think that miners die young, working class has children early, so this is just what this society’s reality looks like.
  • Sometimes I felt that the retro-futuristic technology to be kinda gimmicky. Like I’d see today’s youngsters playing with old props, well, which is the case. Maybe it’s just a hiccup of my suspension of disbelief.
  • The alien-human hybrid was creepy but rather in an odd-weirdo than a frightening way. I liked the Newborn version better in Resurrection.
  • CGI recreation of Ian Holm looked underproduced.
  • There were a lot of plot vehicles that felt exactly like plot vehicles and not embedded well enough so that I don’t see behind the scenes. For example, “you have 36 hours to pull it off”, so there’s a time pressure; “now you have rather 20 minutes”, so the time pressure is elevated; “there’s no air in there”, so you have some limiting factor to overcome; “the gravity switches on and off every X minutes”, so we can use this later as a physical stunt; etc. I know elements like this are part of a story as it is, but still, I can hear the conversation in the brainstorming session how these ideas came about and what plot needs they answered. It’s just too on the nose, like an exercise at a creative writing class.
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CMPLEX – Headspace

Cinematic ambient, like straight from a movie. After listening to his latest EP (Polyform), I went back and listened to his entire catalogue back and forth a few times. Easy to get sucked in and it’s another kind of backdrop that helps me focus. It would be great to see more long form albums from him.