Tag: Japan

Ponty Pans: Ghost of Yotei

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Ponty has done real yeoman’s work this week, helping to cover some key posts for yours portly.  He delivers once again with this review of sequel.  He loved the original; as for the sequel, well… read on!

Sequels are an interesting thing in video games, something about which I’ll opine on some other time.  It’s fun going back to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), for example, back before any “knew” what a video game sequel should be.  Just look at the second installments in the Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda franchises for prime examples of how wildly different sequels can be from their originals.

Now, the expectation feels something a bit like what we see in the film industry:  take the original concept, but make it bigger.  Unfortunately, widespread wokeification over the past decade has twisted that into “take the original concept, but make it woker.”  To be fair, Ponty does not point to wokeness as the downfall of this game; rather, he offers up a very detailed and well-supported analysis as to why this sequel fails to live up to the grandeur and beauty of its predecessor.

One other note:  several of the links in this post are Amazon Affiliate links; I receive a portion of any proceeds made through those links, at no additional cost to you.

With that, here is Ponty’s review of Ghost of Yotei:

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Exhuma (2024)

The Portly Politico12 Comments

There must be magic in Korea—and, according to the subject of today’s Monday Morning Movie Review, there might actually be—because the Korean film industry just keeps hitting homeruns.  Since the release of the Oscar-winning Parasite (2019) and the smash series Squid Game (2021), South Korean movies and television shows have been on the West’s radar.

Koreans seem to excel in the horror genre; indeed, I’d argue that both Parasite and Squid Game, while not precisely “horror” films, certainly have very strong horror and thriller elements.  They’re good, too, at putting messages into their art that feel both timely and organic, but never overtly preachy; Parasite and Squid Game both touched on issues of class, for example.

This week’s film, 2024’s Exhuma, is overtly a horror film, and also has a message embedded within it, as most horror does.  Instead of pointing out the disparities of class, however, Exhuma is a thoroughly nationalist film, in the way that East Asian nations embrace their national identities with a deep, ancestral reverence.

More importantly, it is an excellent—and scary!—film.

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Phone it in Friday XXIV: A Fresh Corporate History International Sighting with KitKat Bars

The Portly Politico7 Comments

For the first time since 20 December 2020, musician, actor, and writer Frederick Ingram has posted to his niche blog, Corporate History International (with the great, if somewhat cumbersome, URL of https://corporatehistory.international).  It’s a short piece about the KitKat Bar, that delicious, wafery little delight with the memorable jingle:

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Phone it in Friday IV: Conferencing

The Portly Politico5 Comments

It’s been a very busy week, and with a slew of lessons and some open mic nighting yesterday—plus an early start this morning—I was unable to get a post written last night to go live this morning.  Further, I attended a teachers’ conference in a city about 90 minutes from my school, so I was unable to sneak in any surreptitious blogging amid sessions.

For tomorrow’s SubscribeStar Saturday post, I’m going to write more about one of the conference sessions I attended, which was about the importance of faculty culture to the functioning of an independent school.  I think it holds within it some important lessons about culture more broadly, and is worth discussing in more detail.

For this evening, though, my time is quite limited, so I thought I would share some general reflections on today’s conference.  I’m scooting off to a very cold pressbox for the evening, from which I’ll be announcing a playoff football game, and getting some hastily-rehearsed singers out onto the field for a brief Veterans’ Day presentation.  When the head of your Board of Directors wants something, he gets it.

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Ocarina of Time Soundtrack Review

The Portly Politico1 Comment

While I was up in New Jersey—I’m mentioning that about as frequently as Ben Shapiro mentioning that his wife is a doctor—my older brother sent me a review of the original soundtrack for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  I highly recommend you check out both the review and the soundtrack.

Ocarina of Time was the major Legend of Zelda release for the Nintendo 64 (N64), and it was an instant classic.  It’s also a testament to the strength of its soundtrack that I never really appreciated how different composer Koji Kondo‘s pieces were for the game.

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