Chairman of the bored

I don't choose what to watch or read with a view to posting on this blog, but given I've set myself finding something to say twice a month, sometimes you sit down and think oh good, I'll definitely have something to say about this...

Which brings me on to Everything Everywhere All at Once.

That's winner of seven Oscars Everything Everywhere All at Once. The best written, best directed, indisputably best film of 2022, Everything Everywhere All at Once. You know, the one with three of the best four performances of 2022. Yes, that Everything Everywhere All at Once.

And... And... To be honest, I'm struggling.  Struggling to make sense of it, but not in a peeling back the layers of metatextual meaning sort of way, more in a poking its amorphous mass and wondering is-that-it sort of way.

Don't get me wrong: it's very well acted, and fits together amazingly, and the effects are what we've come to expect as the second quarter of the twenty-first century comes into view on the horizon: seamless and mesmerizing. But it has minimal story, and the continual balletic fight scenes were done way better in The Raid. Plus who the baddie turns out to be felt tonally clunky and made the whole thing cartoonish, so much so I could imagine this being a Jim Carey vehicle thirty years ago. In fact, is it a comedy with insufficient laughs?

Or is it the diverse casting that has everyone wetting their pants over this? Is that still a thing worth commenting on? We've had Oscar-winning Parasite and a Black president. Don't we all know that you don't have to be white or male or straight to be talented? Hasn't this all drifted into the world of 'so what'?

Which is what I've filed this under. Sorry.

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2084 - The Meschera Bandwidth

2084. The world remains at war.

In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.

The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.

Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.

Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.

24 0s & a 2

Twenty-four slipstream stories.  Frequently absurd, often minimifidian, occasionally heroic.