Movies Watched -- Dogfight (1991)

Added on January 22, 2024 by C. Maoxian.

89 minute running time so the right length, but the story wasn’t very good … I like Lili Taylor (born in 1967, GenX), she’s spunky and has an interesting face (not an “ugly duckling”) … River Bottom is exactly my age (born in 1970), but he dropped dead at the ripe old age of 23 after going on a coke and heroin binge … the soundtrack was the best thing about this movie, which tells you something. No idea how this ended up in my queue… Oh, it’s inexplicably a John Farr recommendation.

Movies Watched -- The Quiet Girl (2022)

Added on January 21, 2024 by C. Maoxian.

In Irish Gaelic. 95 minute running time so an excellent length. Irish Gaelic is an awful language to listen to, sort of like Hebrew or Arabic or some Middle Earth elven tongue, just hard on the ear … this is a tearjerker with well-timed heartstring music to match, so you’re going to be balling like a baby at the end … I have seen so many Tár-ible movies of late that this sensitive, though heavy-handed, movie was surprisingly good … it’s a simple story, too simple of course, the power of love (and silence), “no secrets in this house,” etc., but it was well told.

The little girl is beautiful. The Irish countryside is beautiful (never rains once, but everything is green). The summertime “mother” is beautiful … she looks like she stepped out of the pages of a Ralph Lifshitz WASP fantasy catalog … tall, thin, stylish, so kind, so patient, so understanding … meanwhile the little girl’s bastard Da is screwing all the local women behind his old lady’s back and gambling away the family’s seed corn. Yeah, it was that heavy-handed. But I liked it. Sad that I have to give this a green-go, but that’s what it has come to. John Farr liked it too.

Movies Watched -- Tár (2022)

Added on January 18, 2024 by C. Maoxian.

158 minute running time, lol… that’s TWO HOURS AND THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES, can you imagine sitting through this? I made it 10 minutes in and quit. Cate Blanchett and her cheekbones still look good for her age (my age). Tár baby. Awful. God, who watches this stuff? Who bankrolls it? John Farr screwed me again, but I saved YOU from watching this…

Movies Watched -- Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

Added on January 18, 2024 by C. Maoxian.

139 minute running time … I made it 10 minutes in before quitting … and I speak Mandarin and have a deep understanding of Chinese culture, even messy Chinese laundromat culture and screwed-up parent-children relationship culture, but I couldn’t bear this… who could sit through TWO HOURS AND NINETEEN MINUTES of this?!? Another terrible recommendation from John Farr, he is really letting me down lately. “The viewer should just surrender to it and enjoy all the breathless fun.” Wrong, not breathless fun, but torture.

Fiscal Year 2024 New York State Council on the Arts Grants for Otsego County

Added on January 18, 2024 by C. Maoxian.

Catskill Symphony Orchestra, Inc. | Music | $40,000
Community Arts Network of Oneonta | Arts Education | $49,500
Cooperstown Chamber Music Festival Inc. | Presenting | $40,000
Cooperstown Concert Series Inc. | Music | $15,000
Fenimore Art Museum | Museum | $49,500
FENIMORE CHAMBER ORCHESTRA INC | Music | $40,000
Foothills Performing Arts Center, Inc. | Multidisciplinary | $20,000
Glimmerglass Opera Theatre, Inc. | Music | $49,500
Greater Oneonta Historical Society | Museum | $49,500
Oneonta Concert Association | Presenting | $25,000
Otsego 2000, Inc. (Glimmerglass Film Days) | Electronic Media and Film | $49,500
The Farmers' Museum | Museum | $49,500

Total:$ 457,000

Movies Watched -- Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

Added on January 17, 2024 by C. Maoxian.

In French … 141 minute running time so WAY WAY too long and I struggled to make it even one hour in then wisely abandoned this just as it started the interminable and boring courtroom scenes … this was a terrible French movie … who cares about the story! This was a Letterbox top 10 movie; they did me dirty by recommending this and I paid $6! to stream it, giving me no good way to fast forward. This won the Palme d’Or?!? Awful.

God bless Dick Brody for being the only critic brave enough to pan it : “the cinematic equivalent of an airport read … Triet displays no sense of time, no sense of development, no sense of context, no sense of detail.”

I imagine the rising teen-age cinephile, just beginning to take an interest in world cinema and confidently seeking out such a film, bearing as it does the imprimatur of the art-house cinema’s high and venerable authorities as well as wide critical acclaim. I imagine the bewilderment that would follow the viewing—imagine it developing into a skepticism, or even wrath, that would risk engulfing far better films, ones also endorsed at the same festivals and hailed by the same notables. If this is the art of the movies, I imagine hearing, then movie art is bullshit. In the art-house consensus, the danger facing contemporary cinema is its artistic diminution brought about by the market dominance of commercially ravenous franchise films. The showcasing and enshrining of mediocre movies as masterworks poses as great a danger.

Amen!