Time to carve this tiny corner of the internet again with another random post of my recent past life.
A couple of movies
Lets start with movies. I went to see Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar for the first time in a movie theatre. I’ve seen it on Bluray for at least three times and I think it is easily one of the better sci-fi movies from the past 25 years.
The theatre version was a nice 70mm copy with no subtitles. Even though I know the plot inside out now, it still maintained my attention the whole runtime and I left the theatre a satisfied moviegoer. Still a good movie and would watch again.
I also watched Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which reminded me of Perfect Days, but here the daily routines take a darker, almost torturous tone amplified by a lifeless relationship between mother and son. Glad I finally saw this, but I hesitate to rank it as high as some.
Finally as a double bill, I watched The Bridge on the River Kwai, followed by Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve seen River Kwai during my lifetime, but it still remains a jolly good show of grand cinema (the ending is still a bit clumsy though).
On the other hand, it has been ages since I saw Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence the last time, so it surprised me how different it was than I remembered. Okay, David Bowie’s casual acting still didn’t quite gel with the rest of the film, but otherwise it was a different take on prisoners of war in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. Not a bad movie, either.
A couple of games
In the gaming front, I played Alan Wake (Remastered). It came with my retail copy of Alan Wake 2 as a digital download, so I thought I better play this important piece of the Finnish gaming industry first.
This is what the game Alan Wake looks like most of the time.
While I had no complaints with the updated graphics and smooth frame rate, I have to agree with other reviews that the limited and repetitive combat got old really fast and hampered the overall enjoyment of the game. But I finished it in around 15 hours and I’m better prepared to continue towards Alan Wake 2.
Yet, the next game I cracked open was instead Still Wakes The Deep, a horror game which takes place on an oil rig in the North Sea in 1975, where some weird anomaly takes over it and not surprisingly the player was to figure out a way to survive the situation.
So far, it feels very linear with little exploration allowed, which is a pity. Hopefully there are some sort of twists in store as I progress further.
Cadal Beira, the name of the oil rig in Still Wakes the Deep
How to wrap up this post? I did a cooper test for the first time in thirty years and the result was good in my age group. Guess I’m in some decent physical shape after all.