Latest news with #surreal
New York Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Surreal Family Tree of a French R.P.G.
The surreal role-playing game Off, in which players take control of an entity in a black-and-white baseball uniform who is sent on a mission to 'purify the world,' had the steepest of uphill battles when it was released in 2008. Off was freeware, meaning it was not available for distribution on popular digital stores like Steam. Neither its designer nor composer were known figures in the video game industry. And it was in French. But nearly two decades later, after word of mouth among developers and fans, Off's footprints can be found in many R.P.G.s — Omori, Everhood, Lisa the Painful and the 2015 hit Undertale — that feature surreal stories and metacommentary. This week, a remastered version of Off was released for the PC and the Switch. 'It was never supposed to be a big game,' said Off's designer, Mortis Ghost, who primarily works as a comic book artist in Belgium. He added: 'I was like, if I've got 50 players, I'm really happy about it. That was my expectations at the time, so everything since is crazy.' The interest in Off was propelled by developers familiar with its game engine, RPG Maker, and fans of similarly ethereal R.P.G.s like Yume Nikki and the Mother series. Over time, a community formed. Fans created English translations, including a popular one shared in 2011 on the forums of a gathering hub for fans of Mother, known as Earthbound outside Japan. (The remastered version is based on that translation.) Without the language barrier, Off's popularity rose. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Independent
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Voice coaching with Sir Sean Connery was ‘surreal', Nicola Sturgeon says
A voice coaching session with James Bond star Sir Sean Connery was 'one of the more surreal episodes in my life', Nicola Sturgeon has said. She initially thought the famous Scottish actor might be joking when he tried to teach her how to deepen her voice. Recalling how he got her to talk with a bit of paper between her teeth, she said this had 'got to count as one of the more surreal episodes in my life'. It was in 2004, when the SNP were still in opposition at Holyrood, that Connery had asked if she would meet him, Ms Sturgeon said. She spoke about her meeting with the film star to the BBC Newscast podcast as her memoir, Frankly, was published. Ms Sturgeon recalled: ' Sean had been in Edinburgh and asked if I would go see him and I went along to New Club, which is one of these old private members' clubs in Edinburgh, and had this one-to-one session with Sean, where he said he thought I could do with deepening my voice in interviews, and he was going to teach me how to do it.' She continued: 'Basically, it consisted of me with a rolled up bit of paper between my teeth where he gave me things to say, and he said this was how he had learned to deepen his voice in acting. 'And it worked while I was doing it. At first I was like 'is he taking the piss'. 'But then it started to work.' However, she said that while the method 'I guess does work when you are filming scenes as an actor', she said she 'would have looked a bit odd' if she was 'sitting in a television interview with my teeth clamped together'. Connery, a high-profile supporter of Scottish independence, died in October 2020 at the age of 90.
Irish Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Fiction in Translation: The prisons we inhabit
In Good and Evil and Other Stories , (Picador, 192pp, £16.99) Samanta Schweblin once again proves herself to be one the most unsettling and incisive voices in contemporary fiction. The collection, translated by her long-time collaborator Megan McDowell, offers six stories that move from the heartbreaking to the surreal, and are all marked by a claustrophobia that is at once spatial, emotional and existential. While Schweblin's stories are marbled with the dreamlike and the inexplicable, her characters are profoundly human, trapped by relationships, by expectations, by their own spiralling thoughts. Welcome to the Club, the bitterly ironic story about a failed suicide attempt, quivers with tension and fear – not of death, but of the hum and bustle of mundane family life, of the dread inspired by a child asking 'Mommy, are you happy?'. In A Fabulous Animal, Elena, who is dying, calls an old friend she has not seen since she left Argentina, but what might have been just another casual conversation is haunted by the vision of a dying horse, and an accident that shattered both their lives. In the most devastating story, An Eye in the Throat, two parents care for a bright two-year-old who suffered a serious injury when he swallowed a battery. But it's not the panic and the anxiety of illness that leads to the collapse of the family, but a seemingly anodyne incident in which the boy wanders off. Years later, the father's phone still rings in the dead of night, but when he answers there is only the dead air on the other end of the line. This simple supernatural trope offers a brilliant example of Schweblin's ability to make the uncanny feel inevitable, to weave abject horror out of silence and fear and the haunting nature of unresolved guilt. McDowell's translation is exceptional, effortlessly capturing the dark poetry of Schweblin's prose like a series of whispered confessions, and preserving the oppressive tone and the strange tenderness of the original. READ MORE [ Samanta Schweblin's Fever Dream review: extraordinary work full of eerie menace Opens in new window ] Annah, Infinite (Tilted Axis Press, 345pp, £19.99) is not a translation in the customary sense, but is subtitled 'translated from the painting Annah la Javanaise " . Through her writings, poetry and exhibitions, the Indonesian polymath Khairani Barokka has spent more than a decade exploring Paul Gauguin's unsettling and disturbingly sexual portrait of a child that is all-too-often hailed as a masterpiece, with little consideration for the sitter. Little is known about Annah (and, as Barokka points out, like all nouns in Indonesian the name can be singular or plural, so Annah may be multiple, or infinite). Gauguin's art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, claims to have 'gifted' the child to the artist when she was 'about 13', and Annah was widely assumed to be Gauguin's lover. But the painting (now in a private collection) and its digital versions offer no information about this child historically described as 'Javanese', 'mulatto', 'mixed-race', 'Ceylonese', 'half-Indian, half-Malayan'. What Barokka explores in this dazzling, endlessly imaginative piece of non-fiction is Annah, a child, perhaps multiple children, who may have been she/he/they or dia – the gender-neutral Indonesian pronoun used for everyone. Through essay, poetry and image, she tries to understand who Annah might have been, considers their pain, the abusive nature of their relationship, the unbridled license afforded to 'artistic genius', and in particular to men. Through this study of a single canvas and its subject, Barokka presents a brilliant book that defies classification, one that delves into linguistics, colonial history, queer theory and memoir, and is by turns lyrical, angry, tender and pained, harking back to the pioneering work of Linda Nochlin and John Berger, but blazing a new trail that is as unexpected as it is enthralling. A single image is also the inspiration for Capitalists Must Starve by Park Seolyeon translated by Anton Hur. The photograph, taken during the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, shows Kang Juryong, a striking worker sitting on the roof of the Pyongwon rubber factory in Pyongyang in 1931. From the power of this image and the scant details known about the historical figure of a pioneering female activist, Seolyeon fashions a novel that is spare and stark, but shot through with joy, love and sensuality. Capitalists Must Starve begins at the end, in a cell, where Kang Juryong, an imprisoned union activist now on hunger strike, attempts to lift her bruised and beaten body so she can turn her back to the approaching footsteps in a last gesture of defiance. From here, Seolyeon takes us back to West Gando (the Korean name for Manchuria), to the day when, at the age of 20 (already considered too old to be a bride), she was married off to a man-boy of 15. In arranging the wedding, the Jeonbin's parents hoped to prevent their son running away to join the Liberation Army. In this, they failed: Seolyeon delicately and tenderly evokes the passionate conversations and the growing friendship between the mismatched bride and groom that gradually grows into love. Juryong has no wish to stop her husband achieving great things, and when he leaves to join the rebels, she goes with him. Though at first, Juryong is left to cook and tend for the men, she is befriended by Baek Gwangwoon and proves an audacious and ingenious comrade during dangerous missions. Humiliated by Juryong's successes, Jeonbin sends his wife away, though she briefly returns when a comrade comes to tell her that her husband is dying. Having been widowed at a young age, Juryong is horrified to discover that her parents plan to marry her off again, so they might own their house and land, Juryong leaves for Pyongyang. But her determination to be a 'modern girl' founders when poverty dictates that she take work in a rubber factory. Juryong's gradual politicisation and her innate sense of justice are simply and powerfully portrayed – and when the strike led by workers to protest against a decrease in pay is brutally crushed, her decision to climb on to the factory roof and stage a hunger strike seems as inevitable as it is courageous. Hur's taut, masterful translation wisely refuses to pander to what anglophone readers might not know, but maintains the brittle tension of Seolyeon's spare prose, and brilliantly succeeds in conjuring a time, a place and a movement and a pioneering activist who became a catalyst for change from within her cell. [ Translated fiction reviews: the best of China's incredibly deep storytelling tradition Opens in new window ] Imprisonment seems to be a theme in this month's choices. Later this year, Dubliners will have the opportunity to hear the Kurdish poet İlhan Sami Çomak, the first honorary member of the Dublin Book Festival. But when Words that Walk through Walls (Palewell Press, 121pp £12) was published recently, such an event was impossible, since İlhan was a prisoner before he became a poet. Arrested in 1993, at the age of 21, he spent 30 years as a political prisoner in Turkey. While in jail, he published eight volumes of what Ruth Padel describes as 'lyric poems of astonishing beauty, vitality and strength', which garnered numerous prizes. Led by his long-time editor Caroline Stockford, with Kelly Davis Words that Walk through Walls is a luminous, achingly poignant conversation. Writers from around the world (among them Theo Dorgan, Celia de Fréine and Leeanne Quinn) address poems to İlhan, who replies to some with poems of his own. It is a powerful, compelling, often uplifting collection that brings together a host of poets and translators, one that encapsulates, reflects upon and frames İlhan's shimmering work and his resilience as he asks: How much of flight is wind, how much the bird? How much the stubborn call of freedom? Branches follow the logic of light and the natural miracle of reaching. We must reach out.
Yahoo
27-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Julie Pacino on Exploring Female Trauma in Lynchian Feature Directorial Debut ‘I Live Here Now'
Lucy Fry's Rose, a woman haunted by trauma, ends up checking herself into an inn where reality seems to unravel, blurring the lines between past and present, and waking life and dreams. That's the set-up for I Live Here Now, writer-director Julie Pacino's feature directorial debut, which world premieres on Thursday at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal before screening at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland in the out-of-competition lineup and then traveling to the Edinburgh International Film Festival for its Midnight Madness program. 'The film pulses with competing anxieties: the pursuit of perfection, the weight of generational trauma, and the invisible fist of capitalism tightening its grip around the necks of its characters,' the Fantasia synopsis reads. 'Pacino plunges us into a vibrant and nightmarish psychodrama that reverberates with echoes of David Lynch, Dario Argento and the Coen brothers.' More from The Hollywood Reporter Rotterdam Unveils 2025 Hubert Bals Fund Projects Imax Quarterly Revenue and Profit Rise Amid Hollywood's Theatrical Comeback Ukrainian, Iranian Docs, Kenyan Sci-Fi Set for Venice Days Lineup Shot on 35 millimeter film, with some sequences filmed on 16 millimeter film, the movie takes viewers on a surreal, unsettling trip, with an ensemble cast that includes Fry (Godfather of Harlem, Night Teeth), Madeline Brewer (The Handmaid's Tale), Sheryl Lee (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me), Matt Rife, Sarah Rich and Lara Clear. Ahead of the movie's world premiere, Pacino talked to The Hollywood Reporter about the inspirations behind I Live Here Now, the creative input from its cast members, family reactions to the movie and the impact of Lynch on her and the industry. This film is such a roller coaster ride. Can you talk a little bit about the inspiration for? I'm trying to trace it back. I feel like it starts in my childhood. And it was just time for me to start thinking about making my first feature. In about 2020, during the pandemic, I wrote a short film called I Live Here Now. At that point, it was really about me reconciling the fact that I was stuck. And as I started peeling the layers back and getting to the core of who I am, or who I was, this new allegorical concept emerged about what it means to be a woman with a body in today's world and [looking] into yourself and reconciling various aspects. I feel the pandemic was a really internal time for me and a lot of people, and I spent a lot of time self-reflecting and unearthing some of my trauma, which was dark and scary, but also funny and crazy. And so, yeah, that's where the initial seed came from. From the short film in 2020, the thing just came alive. Worries about women and their rights still feel timely in many parts of the world… Yeah, I always worry about women in the world. A lot is about having to deal with certain pressures that women deal with, especially in this business. That's what Rose is also going through: getting older, having to worry about her weight and these things putting pressure on her. Women fighting for autonomy is a tale as old as time. The movie is, really, about a lot of things, but with Rose, it's about her reclaiming ownership of her own body. And a surprise [development] is really a catalyst for her to be able to access parts of herself that she had shut herself off from. It's this sort of revelation: 'I didn't know my body could do this.' I feel like a lot of times women are, at least in my experience, not understanding their body and thinking that outside sources define us and how we should feel about our bodies. So that's obviously a really heavy theme in the film. That's ultimately Rose's journey. You mix funny and hopeful elements into all the heavy, scary and creepy stuff. How key is that for you? You definitely have to have some hope and some humor when you're working with dark material. At least, that's the kind of stuff that I like to watch. I like running the gamut of emotions. Can you explain what went into the vibrant color palette of the film and why you chose that? We shot on 35 millimeter film, which was so amazing and such a dream come true. I work closely with my DP, Aron Meinhardt. I'm also a photographer, and Aron lights a lot of my photo shoots. So, we have a really comfortable shorthand about color and how I like to use color. So when we were talking about how we wanted to approach this movie, definitely shooting on film was a thing from the beginning that we felt we really had to do because of the vibrancy of the colors and the light. That's always reflecting on Rose. We were concerned about how a digital sensor would handle that when we show colorful spaces. And film handles that dynamic range so well. So that was really fun from a technical aspect. From a creative aspect, I love using color to help enhance the symbolism. In a really intentional way, each character sort of has their own color, which ties into a deeper psychological meaning. When Rose is in Los Angeles, it's my version of Los Angeles, which is less about the sun and the palm trees and more about what's underneath, the sort of murky, gray darkness of Hollywood. And then when she checks into the inn, it's vibrant and colorful, and it really comes to life along with her. So, yeah, it was so much fun to work with color in this way to help serve the story. How did you feel directing your first feature, and could we see you direct more? I loved it. Obviously, it is really challenging to make a feature film. But I had incredible collaborators and felt so supported throughout the process. That was a huge thing, just being able to lean on my department heads, and, of course, the incredible actors that just poured their souls into it. So, it was really an incredible team effort. It was a dream come true to have the opportunity to direct a feature, and I would love to do it again, should the opportunity arise. It's definitely a thing that I want to keep doing. It's been a five-year process making this, and I've just learned so much. So I'm excited to apply those things to the next one, hopefully. Tell me a bit more about how you worked with the cast members. Did you know any of them before this film? The only two actors I knew before making this movie were Lara Clear and Sarah Rich, which was cool, because it's really helpful to have a shorthand with actors, especially given this was my first feature, because they just kind of read my mind. Rose was the most challenging character to cast, because the script included a lot of abstraction, so I was really looking for a partner who could help me fill in some of the gaps and be super collaborative. From the moment I met Lucy — we're both with CAA, and so we just kind of got set up for this meeting — we just instantly hit it off in a really creative way. The first thing she said to me was: 'I don't usually do this, but I have a lot of thoughts.' And then she sort of just poured out everything, and some of it was stuff that I was thinking about, but a lot of it was stuff I hadn't been thinking about. So, I knew she could really be a partner in this and help take it to the next level. Since this is a really personal film for me, and she was willing to bring a lot of her deep personal stuff to it, that made me feel safe, and it made her feel safe. So that was an incredible partnership. And then, everyone else around that was just great. Madeline Brewer is an absolute rock star, and she just had so much fun with Lillian. And Matt Rife is incredible. He's really dedicated to his craft as an actor, and he put so much thought and care into developing his character. And then Sheryl Lee, of course, is our queen. She, too, from our first conversation, grilled me. She was like: 'Hey, this script made me feel things intensely, so what's up with that?' And I was like: 'I love this. Yeah, what's up with it? Let's dig!?' So she was also really fun and collaborative and just such a great presence on set because of everything that she's done in her career. It was really cool to have her and for a lot of us to lean on her and ask her questions. She's a master. I got some strong David Lynch vibes while watching . Would you call him a cinematic inspiration? David Lynch has been an incredible influence on my whole life and my art. Every time I watch a David Lynch movie or look at a David Lynch painting or listen to a David Lynch song, I'm just reminded of the artist within me. I feel like David, for me, represented artists' freedom and the ability to just give yourself that permission to dream and to go for it and to not really worry about anything other than just channeling your artwork. So he's had a profound impact on all my life and all my art. It really, really hurt losing him this year. So absolutely, he was an inspiration and a reference. I also love Stanley Kubrick. The way that he and David blend humor and sort of camp is, I feel, really useful in the horror genre. I love creating in the horror landscape because it's fun to lean on those allowances that the horror genre gives you. So yeah, those are two main references for me. Also, [Ingmar Bergman's] Persona was a movie that my team and I watched a lot during pre-production. And Dario Argento, of course, with the colors and the use of color, is also a reference. You mentioned how personal is for you. Have you shown the film to family and friends yet? My mom, my dad, my brother and my sister, definitely, along the way, have seen cuts and have helped me with — my brother in particular. My brother is in video games and very scientific and mathematical. He's a brilliant man, and I always love showing him my stuff, because his feedback is always incredible. He had some really cool theories and really helped me during the creative process, shaping some of the lore of the inn and stuff like that. So yeah, my family was definitely helpful and instrumental in seeing the rough cut. They haven't seen the finished version yet because I'm like: 'Hey, you have to watch this on the big screen.' So hopefully we'll get something set up in L.A. soon, and everyone can come out and see it in that way. Is there anything else you would like to share? I would just say that I hope people can come into the film with an open mind. And I'm excited to be at this part of the journey, after five years of working on it, releasing it into the world. It's like this new chapter to see where it sits with people. Best of The Hollywood Reporter The 40 Greatest Needle Drops in Film History The 40 Best Films About the Immigrant Experience Wes Anderson's Movies Ranked From Worst to Best Solve the daily Crossword
The Guardian
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Friendship review – male inadequacy barbecued in Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd's comedy bromance
Here is a goofy-surreal comedy from first-time feature-maker Andrew DeYoung, starring sketch comic Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd; it is potentially as divisive as a Vimto-Marmite cocktail. This is a shaggy dog tale of ineffable silliness, operating ostensibly on the realist lines of indie US cinema but sauntering sideways from its initial premise, getting further and further from what had appeared to be a real issue: how difficult it is for grown men to make new friends. In this case, a beta-male chump attempts to be mates with his supercool new neighbour and you might even suspect that the film's progressive excursion into stoner unseriousness itself enacts men's avoidant nature, their inability to find an emotionally intelligent connection with each other. The result is not unlike the darkly wacky entertainments of Jim Hosking or Todd Solondz; there's also a tiny hint of Charlie Kaufman and the white-collar-workplace losers of Ricky Gervais and Steve Carell. In a bland suburban close, Craig (Robinson) is a dull but well-meaning guy working in corporate PR consultancy, whose elegant wife Tami (Kate Mara) runs a flower delivery business from the house. She is in remission from cancer, and Craig has patently no clue how to deal with this. At a support group for people with cancer and their partners, Craig beamingly assures her in front of everyone present that there's no way the cancer is coming back, in a wince-makingly misjudged attempt at emotional strength. Now Tami is openly reconnecting with an old flame, in the face of which Craig is as uncomprehending and unjudging as the family dog. It is at this moment that Craig runs into Austin (Paul Rudd), the stylish guy who lives next door; he is a minor celebrity, plays in a local band and is a weatherman on the regional TV news. (This is in slight contrast to his character in Anchorman, field reporter Brian Fantana; Steve Carell's Brick was the weatherman.) Craig is stunned by Austin's worldly sophistication and laid-back charm, and Austin is touched by Craig's heartbreaking vulnerability; he welcomes Craig into his circle of male friends for a 'hang'. Over-excited Craig embarrassingly goes too far and annoys Austin, but discovers a secret that means that Austin can never entirely break up with him as a friend. Until Craig's terrible faux pas with Austin, which he (horrifyingly) attempts to style out by literally eating soap and goofily intoning 'sorry', it's possible to read Friendship as a plausible, if far-detached character study, a cringe-comedy Single White Male heading for disaster. Then it swerves away, following its nose towards something weirder, with an amusing setpiece featuring Craig licking a toad in search of psychedelic thrills and experiencing only a minute-long hallucination of outrageous banality. For some, that will be tiresome; and it's certainly the case that the female characters are under-imagined (Austin's wife hardly exists at all). But male inadequacy is the point; the loopy absurdism grows on you. Friendship is in UK and Irish cinemas from 18 July, and Australian cinemas from 17 July.
