Movies: Rental Family

Brendan Fraser made a comeback for the ages with his Oscar win for The Whale, and he's followed that triumph up with another tender drama, Rental Family, directed by Hikari:

Fraser stars as Phillip, a struggling actor living alone in modern-day Japan. After Phillip gets a call about a mysterious "opportunity," he finds himself at the offices of Rental Family, a company that sends people to play various roles for paying clients.  Some jobs might be as simple as being a mourner at a funeral, but Phillip quickly gets roped into two long-term ones - pretending to be the father to a little girl, and playing a journalist interviewing a retired actor facing old age and dementia.

The movie is inspired by real-life for-hire surrogate companies, and there are some nods toward deeper societal issues (such as the stigmatization of mental health problems in Japan), but for the most part, Rental Family is content with being a lightweight feel-good movie.  Fraser is mostly the straight man, and you don't learn too much about him (one character even calls him the "token white guy"), while the Japanese supporting actors around him steal the show. Still, if you're in the mood for a sweet dramedy with some awesome shots of the Japanese countryside, you could do a lot worse.

Rating: 7/10

Books: Elon Musk

 

I've been pretty impressed by how far Tesla's Full Self-Driving system has come in the past year (even though it is still not really "self-driving"), so I thought it'd be fun to read Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk.

If you're familiar with Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, you'll know what to expect: a portrait of someone who is both a visionary and, at times, a monumental a--hole. The book starts with Musk's childhood in South Africa and runs all the way up to the first launch of SpaceX's Starship in April 2023, so it omits Musk's involvement in the 2024 election and his time at DOGE this past year.

That's probably a good thing, since even without those topics, there's a lot of stuff to cover - the founding of Tesla and its infamous Model 3 production hell, the underdog SpaceX becoming the largest launch provider in the world through sheer force of will (and a whole lot of venture capital), and the chaotic takeover of Twitter after Musk was "red-pilled" during the COVID-19 pandemic. Isaacson was allowed to shadow Musk for two years through all his various endeavors, and the book strains to capture all the drama the world's richest person experiences in that timeframe.

My favorite part of the book was the behind-the-scenes perspective on the engineering challenges faced by Musk's companies - how they settled on stainless steel to make Starship, or used a "Gigapress" to cast huge sections of the Model Y to simplify production. I was less interested in Musk's toxic relationships or his self-inflicted dramas on Twitter.  While Isaacson eventually concludes that it's impossible to separate the dark from the light, that doesn't mean the dark is all that enjoyable to read.

Tech: Hades II review

I mostly enjoyed the first Hades, a hack-and-slash roguelite from developer Supergiant Games, but I eventually tired of the grinding that was required to reach the final ending. That's why I held off on picking up Hades II until it cleared early access and celebrated its 1.0 release on the Nintendo Switch 2:

Hades II takes a brute force approach to solving my primary criticism of the first game.  Now there are two paths you can take: a descent into the underworld to confront Chronos, the Titan of Time, and a "surface route" up to Mount Olympus that unlocks after a few hours.  It's essentially two Hades games for the price of one, with twice the levels, enemies, bosses, and NPCs, all of which goes a long way in staving off the tedium of the grind.

As in the first game, you'll maneuver your character (this time, Melinoë, the Princess of the Underworld) through gauntlets of enemies using six unique weapons (including one that gives Melinoë a homing missile attack a la Panzer Dragoon).  Your character can be buffed by random gods and goddesses during a run, and enemies and levels will vary from run to run, but that still only goes so far - after you've unlocked all the weapons and beaten each path a few times, you've basically seen all the content in the game. 

Hades II may not be a huge leap from its predecessor, but I did like it for what it is.

Rating: 87/100