Shakira Kurosawa
Sheven Shamurai is Sean Connery’s favorite movie
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The retrospective making of DS9 Documentary “What We Left Behind” is free on youtube and I’m enjoying it.
Fast Colors was a surprisingly good superhero movie that I had never heard of before. It’s rare to see a scifi movie with a predominantly black and women cast. Gugu Mbatha-Raw is incredible and I loved how minimalistic and “down to earth” this movie was.
Highly recommended!
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Tenet is what would happen if the Primer time travel box was invented by post-capitalist dystopian megacorps instead of 4 dudes in a garage.
I watched “To the Ends of the Earth.” It’s available from Japan Society until the end of the year. I had heard of it, and time was running out, so it was now or never. Here’s a link.
https://film.japansociety.org/film/to-the-ends-of-the-earth/
You know how small countries like to do quaint cultural projects? They’re always talking about stuff like UNESCO heritage sites or having formal diplomatic cultural exchanges with other countries. You know, the kind of thing that a country does when it doesn’t have a superiority complex like the US does? Actually recognizing that other places have value.
These projects often happen to commemorate the anniversary of something. In this case Japan and Uzbekistan teamed up to create a movie. In the words of Wikipeda, the purpose was to:
…commemorate the 25th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Japan and Uzbekistan, as well as the 70th anniversary of the Navoi Theater
Most of the time these sorts of projects are not exactly something you go out of your way for. Obviously, I wouldn’t have written this much if this movie wasn’t an exception. They put it in the hands of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and he ran away with it. It seems almost like it was a challenge. Hey, can you make one of these things good?
The movie is shot on location in Uzbekistan, and you see the country from all angles. You see bodegas and you see fancy grocery stores. Dark alleys and stunning landscapes. This movie is not a documentary. Yet it is doing an excellent job of what a travel documentary should do, give the audience a wide perspective of what that country is like.
The characters in this movie are the members of a Japanese TV crew. They are shooting a documentary, and doing a shitty job of it. The cameras the actors are holding as props are capturing a shitty documentary. The high quality documentary is just outside their frame, but inside the frame that you can see. That meta-narrative concept alone makes this worth watching.
But wait, there’s more. The main character is the TV reporter, and only woman in the crew. There are also very few other women in the movie whatsoever, and the sexism of Uzbekistan is a plot point several times. I read before watching that the actress is Atsuko Maeda, basically the #1 all-time member of AKB48. That didn’t give me high hopes, but she was actually pretty good at acting, and ok at singing. Yes, there is some singing in this.
Anyway, her character, Yoko, is not having a great time, and not just because of the sexism. She texts her boyfriend in Japan whenever she can get wifi. The job is having her put on a happy face while having to do a lot of uncomfortable, or even dangerous, things. When she’s not working, she is brave enough to travel around on her own, but she’s afraid to try to engage with any of the people there. There’s a language barrier, of course, but other people try to communicate with her, and she literally runs.
It ends up actually being really scary at times. The director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, has a lot of experience in the horror genre, and it shows. There are several scenes where she crosses busy highways, and there are no crosswalks. Extremely terrifying, but also what seems to be an accurate portrayal of life as a pedestrian in Uzbekistan’s cities. Mostly it’s just the terror of being alone and lost in a place where you can’t (or won’t) communicate with anyone. The only negative is that I think the terror you feel watching things is often far greater than the danger the character is actually in.
Anyway, there’s a lot of running away from things. At some point early in the movie while running alone, Yoko comes across a goat tied up in someone’s yard.
If you’ve got $12 and 2 hours between now and 2021, you can find a lot of worse ways to spend them than finding out what the deal is with the goat.
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I watched the movie that I mentioned here:
It’s hard to say how I feel about it. There are some really great shots. Lots of visual storytelling without lots of dialogue. It establishes certain motifs, symbols, music, and uses them effectively. Quite well made.
It sets up the exact scenario that is explained in the trailer. The main character is a woman who is a neurosurgeon that lives in New Jersey. She used to be from Hungary, but she’s lived in NJ for many many years. She meets a man at a conference in the US, and falls in love instantly. Coincidence, he’s Hungarian and lives in Budapest. They agree to meet, so she goes to Budapest. He doesn’t show at the appointed place and time. When she finds him, he doesn’t remember her.
The good part about this plot is that the movie effectively keeps the audience guessing. Especially since the setting, and much of the message obviously, revolves around the human mind, you can’t help but come up with all sorts of explanations that aren’t uncommon in movies. Did she imagine it? Is he a completely imagined person? Which scenes are real, and which scenes are in her mind? Is he up to something nefarious? Ghosts come up at one point in the movie, and you start thinking of supernatural explanations.
The part of the movie I don’t like is that a lot of these questions could be simply answered if adults just fucking talked to each other. Just fucking talk and all mysteries will be solved! This is what separates my fav Rear Window, from movies like this. In Rear Window the adults discuss everything, consider evidence, and act within the bounds of some amount of rationality. The audience is in just as much suspense as the characters, and empathize with them.
In Preparations… the characters have likeable aspects, but I didn’t care about them so much. Instead I was mostly just frustrated with their inability to just discuss which each other what was going on so they could figure their shit out. That scenario has been done enough, and in 2021 I don’t think there’s any room to retread that ground ever again.
Attention writers in all mediums. If the core conflicts and mysteries of your story could all be resolved instantly by the characters just talking to each other, throw everything you wrote in the trash and start again.
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The Wolf House is the most unique horror film I’ve seen to date. Not only is it stop motion, it’s a bottle movie (one location), first person, and the horror version of Starship Troopers. That’s a lot to unpack so I will try to explain while keeping as much plot as possible in the spoiler tag.
The framing device is that La Casa Lobo is a film artifact of a German commune ( 
) in Chile, shared to the public to counter uncouth rumors ( ). The story is a dark fairytale. A willful and disobedient girl runs away form the village to escape punishment but finds herself hunted by a wolf in the woods. She finds a cabin with two pigs which she takes care of. She refuses to leave the cabin as isolation, paranoia, and starvation consume her. There is an undercurrent of Nazism/fascism throughout the film, hence the comparison to Starship Troopers. The film is not an endorsement for these beliefs but rather a twisted depiction of the fear that drives them and the mental collapse they bring about.
The film is shot from first person PoV of Mariah, the main character. Scene transitions, memories, or daydreams are not done by panning the camera but by animating movement on the walls of the house. When a new scene begins the furniture emerges out of black shadows on the walls. It’s surreal and claustrophobic, the house at once feels infinite and horribly cramped as we never see real windows, only drawings with artistic representations of the outside.
Mariah herself seems to suffer from a severe case of depersonalization. As stated before, the film is always in first person view, but Mariah the character is often depicted in an out of body-like experience. Whenever she views herself, her body emerges/grows out of the walls with an unsettling flesh noise. “The Wolf” is similarly an overbearing presence and completely invisible. The only true images we get are stock footage of a wolf on TV, but “The Wolf” is both the narrator of the tale and speaks to Mariah directly.
Full spoilers form this point on
Summary
The pigs are the core tension of the story. Soon after finding and caring for them, Mariah uses a “crystal ball” to transform them into children. The process is slow and the humanizing is a chilling metaphor for colonizing and reeducation. One might wonder what two pigs are doing unattended in a fully furnished, stocked cabin. Or why photos of their human forms are already framed on the walls. Or why the more Mariah comes to love them, the whiter their skin becomes and their hair turns from black to blonde. Or why, no matter how much they’ve changed and how much she cares for them, Mariah always calls them pigs.
As Mariah continues to survive with the children the isolation from her community chips away at her psyche. The children keep secrets from her (as children do) and she believes that they are planning to abandon or betray her. As food runs out, she wakes up to find herself tied down, ready to be consumed. In that moment the full ideology of the commune is shown. Mariah calls out to the wolf to consume her children. Their demise mirrors daydreams she pondered on earlier, they are consumed by trees and she is rewarded with the beauty of flowers and fruit to sustain herself.
As the credits play the Wolf narrator talks to the audience, asking if you “wouldn’t prefer to be watched over by the wolf, my little pigs”
It’s chilling and phantasmagoric, I haven’t seen anything like it.
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Been in a Godzilla film mood lately but not easy to get all of them in the US, especially Godzilla vs. Biollante. 
According to the spreadsheet, I’ve watched 100 movies since quarantine started.
Really weird choice to subtitle the girl’s lines in News of the World. Tom Hanks can’t understand her!
Double Indemnity is by far the best insurance movie I’ve ever seen.
“How fast was I going, officer?”
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I’m not gonna recommend SLAXX because of the premise, cause it’s dumb as hell. I’m gonna recommend it because of its themes.
Isn’t it fucked up how corporations incentivize their employees to destroy themselves and smile while doing it? Isn’t it fucked up how normalized it is for companies to flat out lie with wokewashing? That’s what SLAXX is. It’s a late-stage capitalism ghost story. It’s funny and tragic and vicious with it’s themes. Don’t skip it.
Small moments of human kindness. That’s what stood out to me again and again in Eric Andre’s Bad Trip. I dare say this is his most well constructed prank comedy. While his past work on the Eric Andre Show is about helplessly lashing out at the culture which makes as painfully alone, Bad Trip is about how we can always rely on the compassion of others. None of the pranks are done at the expense of others. They are moments of Eric’s character being in absurd danger and capturing the kindness that people will show a total stranger. It is shows how the heroes of our stories are every passing connection that keep us moving forward in a world that wants to kill us.
Just a heads up, this is also the kind of comedy where two guys do drugs and get their dicks stuck in a finger trap, so yeah.
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I finally saw Seven Samurai, on what would have been Toshiro Mifune’s 101st Birthday. I’ve always read about how hugely important it is -not just that it’s been remade and ripped off so many times, but that it’s full of tropes that other action movies use all the time. “Tough guys on horses” is best action genre. I saw The Magnificent Seven and Battle Beyond the Stars before this, but I don’t think it spoiled the experience. I will watch more Kurosawa stuff before I see Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns.
As an aside, I remember when Legend of the Five Rings had a newsletter (“Imperial Messenger”?) with short stories and new classes for the RPG and tourney decklists for the CCG when it was still at the first company and there was an in memoriam to Mifune when he died, considering he was so huge in the Jidai genre, and Jidai was so important for the franchise. I didn’t realize I had already seen him in stuff… He was Lord Toranaga in Shogun.
HBO Max is just terrific in general for my dumb weeb ass, there are so many Toho and Ghibli films in the catalog, and Godzilla vs. Kong just came out, so I’ll get around to that soon.
It’s a fun move. Not deep or complex in any way but just dumb fun. If you want to watch a giant ape fight a giant lizard then you’ll be happy. Tonally, it is closer to the Kong movie than the Godzilla ones but is a nice closer for that universe of films.
Edit for clarification: The ending is not set in a way to be definitive and final for that universe, Legendary just doesn’t have the rights after this film for Godzilla any long unless them or Toho budge on their demands.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night finally made it to the top of my queue, after going in on the strength of this recommendation.
That was the most incredible movie I’ve seen at least since quarantine started. Also, what did I just watch?
Normally I’m Mr. Let’s-speed-it-up-guys, but I was perfectly content to watch long shots with fantastic cinematography. And the second half, just wow.
Is this bit from the soundtrack from something else? Or does it just sound very similar to… I don’t know what, I can’t quite place it. But it feels so familiar. Guess it’s a good fit, considering the movie.
I saw it in the theater. I think it’s actually sort of essential because you put on your 3D glasses at the same time as the main character. Then the final scene starts which is all one cut.
Yeah, didn’t have the goggles at home obviously. But it was still stunning.
12 Angry Men is very good, 60+ years later. Basically one scene.
I wonder how often in real life Henry Fonda isn’t in that room, and the movie ends after 4 minutes.
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I’m watching Fahrenheit 451 (2018), on HBO Max.
I read Fahrenheit 451 every year for Banned Books Week, and have seen the 1966 Truffaut Adaptation. I never played the adventure game from the 80s.
The Novella Fahrenheit 451 hews closer to Brave New World than 1984. The Parlor is Soma, not the Telescreen -distraction rather than panopticon. People want to be happy, and they get something that resembles happiness.
The 2018 adaptation tries to synthesize Orwell and Huxley by incorporating more elements of 1984 -a horrible triptych slogan, constant surveillance with only the privileged being allowed a measure of privacy, and newspeak ("+100" is a merge of “doubleplusgood” and the modern “100” emoji).
Both movies incorporate the famous self-immolation scene and Beatty’s Monologue.
Novella!Mildred is an ugly caricature, so she was toned down in the 1966 adaptation (inexplicably renamed to Linda, but cleverly played by Julia Christie, dual-cast as Linda and Clarisse) and completely removed in 2018. Clarisse goes from ingenue to brave resistance fighter to depressed junkie.
I am impressed by the use of the word “Graffiti” as a euphemism for “banned media” -an adroit criticism of media framing. There’s also a mockery of the “Thin Blue Line” flag -the Paramilitary Firemen have a black and white imitation of Old Glory with a red stripe.
I understand this didn’t receive great reviews, but I’d watch it a second time, if only to see what I missed -or allowed myself to miss.