My Cousin Vinny

Added on by C. Maoxian.

The best part of Roger Lowenstein’s book, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management:

“Badly in need of a lift, Meriwether called an old friend, Vinny Mattone, who had been the fund’s first contact at Bear Stearns. Mattone, who had retired, was everything that J.M.’s elegant professors were not. He wore a gold chain and a pinkie ring, and he showed up at Long-Term in a black silk shirt, open at the chest. He looked as if he weighed 300 pounds. Unlike J.M.’s strangely wooden partners, Mattone saw markets as exquisitely human institutions — inherently volatile, ever-fallible.

‘Where are you?’ Mattone asked bluntly.

‘We’re down by half,’ Meriwether said.

‘You’re finished,’ Mattone replied, as if this conclusion needed no explanation.

For the first time, Meriwther sounded worried. ‘What are you talking about? We still have two billion. We have half — we have Soros.’

Mattone smiled sadly. ‘When you’re down by half, people figure you can go down all the way. They’re going to push the market against you. They’re not going to roll your trades. You’re finished.’”

Movies Watched -- After Life (1999)

Added on by C. Maoxian.

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!

Next!

Movies Watched -- Old Enough (1984)

Added on by C. Maoxian.

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.

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

Too Much To Carry Alone

Added on by C. Maoxian.

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

Movies Watched -- Swoon (1992)

Added on by C. Maoxian.

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

Babe and Dickie

GSP Ozu

Added on by C. Maoxian.

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: