Movies Watched -- After Life (1999)

In Japanese. 118 minute running time so about 20 minutes too long. This is by Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose “Shoplifters” I like a lot … this one was a really interesting idea, a neat conceit about the space between life and death, but in the end it turned out to be a little bit too precious for me. But it was a god idea, darn hard to execute perfectly in the end… Farr is right to say that “Kore-eda fashions a deeply affecting homage to the sweet here-and-now,” but it may be a little bit too sweet. I’m torn, in some ways I liked it a lot, but in other ways I thought it was heavy-handed, I guess.

Next!

Movies Watched -- Old Enough (1984)

92 minute running time … not sure why it was in my queue, not a John Farr reco … anyway, the story of a rich 12-yo WASP girl in Manhattan who one summer makes friends with a working-class Italian Catholic girl … it’s sort of a culture clash / coming of age movie … what interested me is that it was made by a Jewish woman (a low-budget movie underwritten by her father?), and the story must be semi-autobiographical, but she made the star a WASP, which is odd. I wasn’t thrilled with it, and the terrible electronic music score (made in the early 1980s) is unbearable.

[Smack!] And that goes for your friend, too.

Too Much To Carry Alone

Thought they were black at first, but no, The Teskey Brothers are a bunch of white boys … good stuff, I dig it:

Gotta Keep It Moving

Thanks to the Spotify algo for surfacing St. Panther for me … I dig it:

An interview with Daniela Bojorges-Giraldo

I Don't Want Clever Conversation

José James (from Minneapolis) covering the great Billy Joel song:

Movies Watched -- Swoon (1992)

90 minute running time, but I didn’t make it too far in … the horrific true story of Jewish homosexual lovers who kidnapped and murdered a child in 1920s Chicago (ya know, Leopold and Loeb) … I was not in the mood for this, esp. the artsy fartsy style in which it was made … I thought this was a John Farr reco (“a crucial work of new queer cinema [no caps],” said Dick Brody), but shockingly it isn’t. I don’t know how it got in my queue.

Babe and Dickie

The Plural of Lexus is Lexi

Dr. Goose a big fan of the LC500 … I like it in Flare Yellow or Cadmium Orange (below), and yes, I do like that grille:

View fullsize

Click to enlarge

GSP Ozu

I like a lot of stuff Gotts Street Park puts out … Ozu transported me back to the days when I would spend a lot of wee hours in expensive hotel bars with beautiful women, which was not that long ago, but feels like a lifetime ago:

Jack Kellogg Trades, First Half of 2021

Jackaroo put out a video detailing his first six months of the year. He’s generous to share all the details with the rabble (like me) … here are his first half 2021 trades if you want to study all 927 of them one by one. I, of course, already have.

My buddy @nawkk used OCR to make a useful spreadsheet from these useless screenshots:

Movies Watched -- Caché (2005)

In French. 118 minute running time so at least 20 to 30 minutes too long … I loved Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon so I thought I’d try another of his movies, but this was no good and it’s certainly not a “thriller” … I didn’t know about the Paris massacre of 1961 … but I don’t know why the guy wouldn’t straight-up tell his beautiful wife (Juliette Binoche) the truth about his past … why would he feel that guilty about it?!? I did like the video-in-a-video gimmick where you couldn’t tell if you were watching reality or a taped version, you know, toying with the audience… with the final long shot the ultimate gimmick.

Andrew Sarris got it right when he wrote: “Too much of the plot's machinery turns out to be a metaphorical mechanism by which to pin the tail of colonial guilt on Georges and the rest of us smug bourgeois donkeys.”

One day he was gone, and I was glad.