Movies Watched -- Stray Dog (1949)

Added on September 29, 2021 by C. Maoxian.

117 minute running time so 20 minutes too long … Kurosawa movie, neat to see post-War Japan, how down and out it was, but getting back to normal (the ball game footage priceless) … story was sort of interesting at first (a homicide detective has his gun pickpocketed on a bus) … Toshiro Mifune is gorgeous (which may partially explain the Farr reco) and his relationship with the older cop is well done, but the movie could have been tightened up a lot … I get why it’s a “classic,” but it doesn’t get the nod from me.

The World Is Bigger Than Her

Added on September 29, 2021 by C. Maoxian.

Delta Maid singing ‘Better Love’ live … I can’t get enough of her, she’s so good…. I’m interested to know the whole story about her early Nashville?!? stardom under Geffen Records and how that has all been disappeared … weird.

Movies Watched -- The Party (1968)

Added on September 28, 2021 by C. Maoxian.

100 minute running time but could have lost 20 minutes or so … Peter Sellers doing his hilarious impersonation of an Indian gentleman (racist, but funny racist, not racist racist, even with the skin coloring) … Blake Edwards pic, there are some very funny bits and it’s interesting as a period piece, but I wouldn’t recommend it, I don’t second Farr’s reco…

This Shit Is Physical

Added on September 28, 2021 by C. Maoxian.

Love the little panther, she’s talented and works hard:

My Cousin Vinny

Added on September 21, 2021 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 September 19, 2021 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.

Movies Watched -- Old Enough (1984)

Added on September 19, 2021 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.