Matthew Culnane

Relatively well reviewed, and I don’t understand why. “A love letter to Hollywood’s golden era”, perhaps, but only for its first half; once the talkies arrive it decamps to fifties sci-fi and a save-the-world blob plot. The references are real enough (Muybridge’s horse, Keaton’s collapsing house front, some Lovecraft) but recognising one isn’t the same as the film doing anything with it. And the voice work is mostly phoned in. Not Jesse Eisenberg, who does well as a robot who appears for no reason. Trey Parker just does Cartman, in a children’s film, because nobody seems to have asked him not to.

I’ve read plenty about Nintendo from the outside. This is the rare book from inside: Hobonichi columns and interviews, collected and translated after Iwata’s death. President on the business card, developer in his mind, gamer in his heart, and he plainly ranked those in reverse.

The bits about controllers are my favourites, because it’s the one component where hardware and software have to agree before either is finished. Iwata sets out the Nintendo loop: hardware passes a controller idea to the software teams, who build prototype games with it and report back. The games come out of that accumulation, not from fitting software to a device someone has already signed off, like at other games companies.

I was surprised how stubborn he was about the Wii’s name. “We absolutely need to call this a remote,” on the grounds that the TV remote is the one object in a house anybody will pick up unprompted, and a controller isn’t. The same instinct covers the D-pad, which in the 1980s struck most people as a peculiar thing to be handed.

As a book it’s slight. Aphorisms grouped by theme, the same instincts circling back, and by halfway you can guess the shape of an answer before it arrives. Iwata was president through a stretch when I was paying less attention to games than I had before, or have since, so I don’t carry the memories of him that other people do. I knew his name from the NES days, though, and I know how much he’s missed.

Corporate thrillers are my thing, and ones set in broadcasting doubly so. Mann films the CBS half with the tension he’d normally give a heist: lawyers, standards meetings, the slow discovery that the network absolutely, in fact, will fold. His characters keep fucking up their own shit on principle, and I’ll watch that every time. Crowe is very good as Wigand, all clenched jaw and short fuse. Pacino does a lot of stock Pacino, which is fine by me. But Christopher Plummer’s Mike Wallace is the best thing in it, vain and shrewd and a lot better at his job than anyone in the room wants to admit. At 157 minutes it isn’t flabby, though nobody would miss, oh, let’s say, fifteen of them.

Obsession, loneliness and grief, all routed through parochial matters: a visitor centre, a walking tour, a few plaqued rocks that a historically Important man once sat on to think. I don’t quite know what it’s like to build a life around something that disappears overnight, but Peter Mullan’s Kenneth gives me a strong sense of it. It runs with comedy and sadness at the same time rather than alternating between them and, similarly, Gazelle Twin’s score keeps a low hum of unease where otherwise there might be whimsy. A curious little film with lots to like about it, and a last act that goes somewhere I wasn’t expecting, shifting what was in balance more clearly over to one side.

Bought in a sale in late 2023 and left alone until last week. 2D side scroller with puzzle-platformer and even light metroidvania elements.

Four hours covered the story and the trophies I could reach on my own; the co-op ones require a second player and everyone else in this house is busy with their own games. The humour is very well done. Mr. Sunshine arrives in the village to hand out free money, the villagers are delighted, and nobody thinks to ask what he wants in return. Broad satire, played straight. The look is flat shapes and poster colour, with a surprising amount of expression wrung out of two dots and a pair of legs.

It was only as I was putting it down that I remembered seeing a sequel announced. I’ll buy it on day one, largely out of guilt.

The cultural awareness class demonstrating an appropriate slow dance to Hot Chocolate is the best joke in the film, and it happens in the first five minutes. The deadpan continues after that, but relatively thinly, and I spent much of the runtime waiting for it to come back at strength. Otherwise: humanising; at times uplifting; quite beautifully shot.