Thimbleweed Park – funny, ingenious and astonishingly rich game, a worth winner of the Adventure Gamers 2017 award for best adventure. It’s 1987, and two FBI agents investigate a murder in an American small town, to find a pair of plumbers dressed as pigeons, a haunted hotel, an abandoned pillow factory, a circus clown who insults everyone, a toxic late-night diner, and the daughter of a technical genius who wants to become a computer game designer. Completely mad, but conforming to a twisted logic all of its own.
Ordeal by Innocence – Agatha Christie drama, in a cracking TV adaptation by Sarah Phelps with typically magnetic performances by Bill Nighy and Anna Chancellor, the tension being kept up with constant flashbacks to the night of the murder, revealing more each time. Coincidentally an earlier attempt to craft a Geraldine McEwan Miss Marple story out of the same novel was repeated on TV several weeks later: very flabby and pedestrian by comparison.
Youn Sung Nah, Momento Magico – Korean skat singing?
An Art Lover’s Guide – TV series in which Janina Ramirez and Adrian Sooke (who seem to have really cracked the double-presenter problem) show each other, and us, round Lisbon, Beirut and Baku.
The Little Mermaid – breathtaking ballet adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson’s story (not the Disney movie), Northern Ballet accomplishing the extraordinary as usual, this time having dancers move like they’re swimming underwater.
Sully – well-crafted docu-drama about the pilot who landed his airliner on the Hudson river following a total engine failure shortly after takeoff. Interestingly the focus of the film is his airline’s efforts to prove through simulator trials that he could actually have landed at an airport, and Sully’s demonstration that when they took account of the human factor the simulator pilots crashed in the middle of New York, every time.
Catch Me If You Can – amusing true life drama, with Leonardo di Caprio magnificent as a loveable rogue, living the high life, literally, as a fake airline pilot in the era when huge glamour was attached to air travel, and Tom Hanks as the pedestrian FBI agent who pursues him.
Experiment 20 – dramatic reconstruction from audio recordings of the experience of several women who took part in Stanley Milgram’s “Obedience to authority” experiments in 1961 – and who rebelled, refusing to (fake) kill the supposed experimental subjects (really stooges) as the experiment “required” them to do.
No Time to Spare – final collection of writings, blog posts, from Ursula Le Guin (d. 22 January), the title taken from her comment on a survey questionnaire from her alma mater, asking amongst other things what she did with her spare time. “What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare.”
America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keefe to Hopper – disappointing exhibition at the Ashmolean, the O’Keefe and Hopper works on show being striking enough but there was nothing else of note. The excellent tabouleh in the museum café was far more memorable.
Prague "old car tour" – the highlight of our stay in the Czech capital as part of Polymnia’s concert tour, other memorable moments being a lunch of dumplings at a restaurant on the Old Town square while national dances were performed on a nearby stage, walking across Charles Bridge, singing to a packed St Vitus cathedral for a drop-in concert evening, and an evening dinner cruise on the Vltava river busking our way through as much of our repertoire we could summon from memory ending up (of course) with Good King Wenceslas.
Conversations on writing – a final collection from Ursula Le Guin, being a transcript of radio conversations with fellow novelist David Naimon. (Excerpt.)
Kathy Rain – beautifully constructed adventure game with an engaging steadily unfolding plot and logically sequenced actions, plus an underlying feeling of menace with a few genuinely scary moments. Kathy herself is a great protagonist – a journalism student from a dysfunctional family, with a stroppy attitude but a kind heart – and I’d be happy to see her again (as the narrative hints).
Her – surprisingly intelligent SF film, given the premise: man falls in love with the female persona of his computer operating system. I was expecting a teenage nerd without social skills, but he’s actually a middle-aged man, just separated pending divorce, and an expert crafter of personal letters: he has the ability to write those personal and tender things which people do not know how to say for themselves. With both humans and operating systems, the film balances constantly on the question-edge: is this just excellent linguistic simulation, or is it genuine?
Kung Fu Panda 2 – pretty decent sequel to the wonderful original. Nice to discover Po’s backstory and to find that there’s still good mileage in the joke of a slobbish panda who wants to be a kung fu master.
RED – enjoyable thriller, with Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren playing elderly secret service agents dusting off their kick-ass skills. I rather like the title acronym: Retired, Extremely Dangerous.
Matilda the Musical – great family show, and good value despite the price of the tickets. The child cast was superb and the songs were actually good; Miss Honey has two particularly moving numbers. My only quibble with the adaptation: the nasty adults have redeeming features; they’re allowed (occasionally) to be funny and cool, as well as horrible, which is absolutely not the spirit of the book. Children prefer things to be more black and white.
Tacoma – very fine adventure game, from the makers of the structurally similar Gone Home. This time you’re exploring a space station, recovering data after evacuation of the crew. (But did they really evacuate? Was there really an accident? Those are things you have to discover. And what are you yourself doing there? That is only brilliantly and unexpectedly revealed at the end.) The core game mechanic is the recovery of recordings of the crew’s final months and days, which you view in augmented reality: the people appear and talk around you, in outline form, and you have to follow them around the station in order to hear all of a conversation. Added to that the personal artefacts (including numerous books!) and communication records of the crew members, and you really begin to care about them and worry about what’s going to – or rather did – happen to them. A lovely story, involving corporate greed, AI replacement of human jobs, and the way people cope with difficult or impossible situations. See this 15 mins of gameplay video, and this interview with the designer.
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