Big Love for Small-Batch Baking
During the pandemic, home bakers clamored for scaled-down versions of their favorite recipes.
The Medium Doesn’t Live Up to Its Best Ideas
Bloober Team’s newest horror title is a bad deal at $50 but a great way to pass a weekend on Game Pass.
PLAYINGThe Medium, a new horror game on Xbox and PC from developer Bloober Team, is like watching The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix. The Medium has some fun ideas that it executes well, but the overall experience is bland and forgettable. It’s not bad, but it’s not good. Like Sabrina and a thousand other shows on Netflix, The Medium is inoffensive. It’s a pleasant way to pass the time, but you probably won’t finish it and you won’t remember it a month after you put it down. It’s the perfect game for Xbox’s Game Pass, the service that seeks to be Netflix but for video games. The Medium is a third-person adventure game that follows Marianne, a medium able to communicate with the dead, as she navigates both the spirit world and an abandoned Soviet-era resort in Poland. Marianne travels to the spirit world to solve puzzles, avoid monsters, and help the dead move on to what comes next...Bliss Is the Worst Kind of Open-Ended Sci-Fi Movie
The director Mike Cahill loves ambiguity—and he used to be good at it
DOES MIKE CAHILL feel seen? The 41-year-old writer-director of science fiction has now made three films, each higher-profile than the last, about ways of seeing. This is literalized most literally in the second of these efforts, I Origins, which is also, not unrelatedly, the worst titled. Released in 2014, it’s about vision scientists searching for the origin of the human eye—look, a pun—which, if you didn’t know, is “the window,” as one character literally says, “to the soul.” They find it in the genes of a sightless worm, but not before Karen, played by Brit Marling, warns her lab partner that she, at least, has no interest in getting famous, in being seen: “Recognition makes me nauseous,” she says. Recognition, for Cahill, has meant two things: more money and less Marling. She both starred in and cowrote Cahill’s first sci-fi, Another Earth, which came out in 2011 and was reportedly made for a scant 100 thou. I Origins cost 10 times as much, and Marling only acted in it. In Cahill’s latest film, Bliss, budget unknown but starring Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek and out now on Amazon Prime, she’s nowhere to be found. (In more recent years, you may have seen Marling in the Netflix show The OA, her baby.) Not saying she’s his inspiration, but the money/Marling tradeoff seems to have muddied Cahill’s cinematic vision. Another Earth was the best kind of sci-fi-on-a-shoestring, conceptual but contained. Of the Cahill trilogy, it’s also, not unrelatedly, the best titled. All sci-fi is the metaphorical made literal, but so much of the time, it’s blown out of proportion. (Or it just blows up, in space, in the last act.) Here, the scale is human. One night, Marling’s character, Rhonda, gets drunk at a college party and decides to drive home. On the way, something appears, out of the blue, in the sky. It’s a planet, seemingly identical to our own. As she looks up at it, she slams into another car, extinguishing two lives in an instant. Thus the question raised by the title: Is there another world in which that didn’t happen? One in which Rhonda didn’t just ruin her life? The film hints at an answer but doesn’t commit, going out instead on a startling gasp of possibility.
Albert CHARPENTIER