tonari no shibafu

Free documentaries online

A rich resource.

Some selections I'm interested in:

The Fog of War

Supersize Me

Outfoxed

Sicko

White Light/Black Rain

A life too short and a new word

I just got back from work and found out from Todd that Brittany Murphy has died. Not one of my favorite actresses, but she was in Clueless which is one of my all time favorite movies. Alicia Silverstone, Paul Rudd, the guy that played Carla's husband on Cheers and Turk from Scrubs. I guess I should also mention Stacey Dash who played a teenager in the movie despite being 29. Can't go wrong. My first thought after hearing heart attack at 32 was cocaine. Regardless of the cause, it seems that Hollywood is continuing its run of chewing up people and spitting them out. Once again Dave Chapelle's choice to get the hell out of dodge seems like the reasonable one.

UPDATE: forgot the word: decedent.

24 hours video project

One of my friends is working on a video project that he's uploading to Youtube.

Boondock Saints II

Finally.

Boondock Saints II.

Looks a little cheesed up, and certainly the addition of Judd Nelson doesn't augur well, but I liked the first one enough to suspend my ... cynicism... for now.

Is it too early to stand in line?

This is only the training sequences, it's some of the most dynamic fight choreography I've ever seen.

via Todd

The top stunt movies of all time

Kevin Conley at Slate lists what he believes to be the best stunt movies of all time. His criteria:

some make the list because they've got the best stunt sequences of all time or, at least, of their era. Others because they changed the business. Still others because they contain the most talked-about action sequences.

My boy turned me on to...

...this movie criticism site. I had put in my SKYPE status that I was watching Juno and thought it was one of the better movies that I'd seen in the last decade or so. After reading a review, I started to realize that I've come to ask increasingly less from films. Granted that I love escapist movies that are action-packed or otherwise allow me to turn my brain off for 88 to 93 minutes, but I came to understand that Juno isn't one of those and also isn't quite a most-of-us-are-freaky-and-therefore-freaks-deserve-some-repesentation Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen-type slap in the face of studios and focus-group culture kinda thing. It's good to know that there are people out there doing informed movie criticism and posting it up for free.

For Todd and Amy

UPDATE: The reasoning behind Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline being played at Fenway.
via NPR via Amy

Examined Life

Gotta see this

Cornel quote: I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind; I'm a jazz man in the world of ideas.

Intellectual History

To be filed under nothing good can come of it...

Give a guy with the craziest acrobatic and hand-to-hand fighting skills, weaponry? Add kung-fu-esque movements to his repertoire? Add a three-section staff to the mix?

Ok, Ong Bak 2 has my attention.

Ong Bak 2 Official Site.

via Mark

ong bak, ong bak 2, tony jaa

Not as big an addict as I thought

My film addict results. Somehow I thought I'd get a much higher score. Compare your experience with mine.

via Kottke

The waiting is the hardest part

3 more weeks until Iron Man.

Right now there's seraphim and cherubim kissing converse

Rest well, Mr. Carry.

Free movies on Hulu...

...with one caveat: you have to be in the US. Damn. <link>

via Kottke

Watchmen

Watchmen Trailer.

Drool.

Now the movies

Nosferatu, A Symphony of Terror(1922)
The General (1927)
King Kong (1933)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Gone With the Wind (1939)
Pinocchio (1940)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Casablanca (1942)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
On the Waterfront (1954)
Rear Window (1954)
The Seven Samurai (1954)
Touch of Evil (1958)
The 400 Blows (1959)
North by Northwest (1959)
La Jetee (1961)
West Side Story (1961)

via Kottke

Kevin and I were talking about Rushmore the other day so...

... for Todd

Kung Fu Kun

Gotta see this movie. A young kung-fu expert comes to Japan and, of course, gets into action packed adventures.

via Japan Probe

It'll hurt if I do...

Watched Last Man Standing last night. Best samurai movie adaptation since the spaghetti westerns.

I you haven't been reading Why We Write

You should.

excerpts from Michael Oates Palmer's entry will give you a clue

I write because when I was six years old, my grandfather would take me to his favorite hang-out, the Stop Inn, a dive bar on the corner of a row house street in Northeast Philadelphia. He’d let me sit on a stool and drink a Roy Rogers, while he and his cronies told stories for hours. Then we’d stop at 7-Eleven on the way home, and he’d buy me comic books.

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Because in college, I learned that music journalists got to go backstage. Because I loved rock and roll, but was a lousy guitarist, and realized at around 21 that all of the rock critics I worshipped were having a tough time paying their health insurance.

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Because when the writing’s going well, there’s a high. Because when it’s going poorly, you call another friend up, and then you can talk for fifteen minutes about how it’s going poorly, and then you talk about food.

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Because it was one of only three things I was ever good at, I couldn’t figure out how to earn a living make mix tapes, and the third thing is illegal.

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Because no matter how many times you see them, Duck Soup is still funny, The Manchurian Candidate is still jolting, Rosemary’s Baby is still scary, and, when you’ve had a lousy day, Donald O’Connor’s “Make ‘Em Laugh” bit in Singin’ in the Rain can still put you in a good mood. Every time.

Because it’s therapy, and because it’s church. Because it’s community, and because it’s solitary confinement. Because it’s blood.

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And because, like the song goes, we did it for the stories we could tell.

Oh yeah...

Forgot to mention that I recently watched No Country for Old Men. I went for it because it was a Coen brothers film and didn't realize until the end that it was based on a Cormac McCarthy novel.

Damnit. Paul was right again...

How little they think of us

Kozak, my fellow worshipper at the altar of Sorkin, sent me a link to the Charlie Wilson's War trailer. This was my reply:

Looks good.

Couple of things I noticed right off:

1) All Along the Watchtower (Hendrix version)

2) American Pie

These are two songs that appear (one or the other if not both) in just about every Vietnam movie that has ever been written.

What's the significance of them being used in a trailer about a scandal from the 80s? What are they trying to say? Seems that the whole trailer <snip> seemed a little Oliver Stone-esque.

My tag line would be 'Bartlett. What's he hiding from us now.'

S

I'm all over it, but now I'm going in with baggage...

Kurosawa films

Watch some now-public domain Kurosawa movies online.

via Japan Probe

Happy Birthday Peter Weir

Ahh, the good folks at IMDB were kind enough to inform me that today is Peter Weir's birthday.  Don't have time for any kind of detailed post about how much I loved some of his flicks, so I will simply list my faves for your reference.

The Year of Living Dangerously, who could ever forget Linda Hunts' performance?

The Mosquito Coast (1986)
Dead Poets Society (1989)
Fearless (1993)

NYC prep

Though I grew up only a few hours by car or train from New York City, I can count on one hand the number of times that I've been there.  Being a suburban Massachusetts kid through and through I was never one for the big city vibe, and my experience with the New York kids in my high school was less than inviting.  I had quite an attitude about the fact that many of the people from New York -- not to mention the wannabe kids from Southern Connecticut -- always referred to NYC as 'The City', as if no other cities exist, and it always struck me as dismissive.  It wasn't until after living in Tokyo for a while that I gained an appreciation for what large, cosmopolitan cities have to offer.

So, because I am meant to act as de facto tour guide for some folks that have never been to the US, I thought that I should try to broaden my knowledge of New York a bit.  For me, the obvious medium was video.  I decided to try to get my hands on some movies about New York to try to refamiliarize myself with it, and (hopefully) find some places not listed in the guidebooks that would be interesting to visit.

Of course I could have spent a few months of my free time just watching movies by Woody Allen, Spike Lee and Neil Simon, but I wanted to get a slightly more diverse overview than that.  And, truth be told, a) I have seen all of the Woody Allen movies too many times, and b) I always found Spike Lee's white characters too unidimensional and any interracial relationships (Jungle Fever) too superficially portrayed for me to enjoy his films thoroughly (With the exceptions of She's Gotta Have It and Mo' Better Blues).  Neil Simon is always good, but for me it begins and ends with The Goodbye Girl (ok, ok, and Murder by Death...and The Lonely Guy), for which, at this point, I can do dialogue.

Anyway, the movies that I have chosen are:

The Graduate (though once I found out that Anne Bancroft is only 6 years older than Dustin Hoffman, the illusion was shattered)
Stay
Basketball Diaries
Once Upon a Time in America
Midnight Cowboy
Donnie Brasco
Little Manhattan
Metropolis (The Whit Stillman one)
Wall Street
Annie Hall (gotta have at least one Woody Allen movie)
A movie on NYC Hackers

Of course The Godfather, King of New York, and some others are high on my list of movies either about or set in New York, but again, I've seen them all too many times to really be worth sitting through again at this point.

Also, we're going to watch some episodes of Queer Eye and maybe a few of Sex and the City.  I also have a pretty good library of Seinfeld and may try to hit some of the places from the show.

Ahh, I just remembered the Last Dragon.  There must be some cool locations in that as well.

One of the things that I worry about, however, is my motives for this all.  If it is just to go to some out of the ordinary places then so be it, but I have an inkling that a good part of it all is to have an interesting anecdote or two.  "You know, I decided to go there because I saw it in X movie/show....best decision I ever made."  It takes me back to the way that my childhood friends and I used to compete about music.  Whenever we found someone we liked we would work very hard to find some obscure recording "Live at El Mocambo" or something like that to wow each other with.  Silly really, but I often still find myself thinking about people's reactions to what I am still in the planning stages of doing.  Not my favorite part of my personality.

Anyway, I'm sure that 'the blogging instinct' is another face to that coin anyway, so there's no real need to feel particularly self-conscious about any of the travel stuff.

Ok, it's late.  Must sleep.

Better late than never

Jet Li and Jackie Chan to make a movie together.

Christopher Penn (1965-2006)

First let me assuage any fears that I am planning to turn this into the blog of death.  However, I just learned that Chris Penn died about 6 months ago.

Just wanted to give props to one of the quintessential 'sidekick' actors of my generation.  In addition to his work in such movies as Footloose, Reservoir Dogs, Short Cuts, Best of the Best, and  All the Right Moves (62 stack monster), I thought he did an amazing job in one of my favorite movies:  At Close Range.  How can you go wrong with an 80s movie that has Sean Penn, Mary Stuart Masterson and Christopher Walken?  And with a tag line like 'Like Father, Like Son, Like Hell' you know that it has to be good.  Besides, the film had my all-time favorite Madonna song: Live to Tell, which I had the pleasure of hearing live at the venue formerly known as Foxboro stadium (Level 42 opened up).

Anyway, rest in peace Mr. Penn, and thanks for the memories.

The World Loses Mako Iwamatsu, One Fine Actor

Mako Iwamatsu (1933-2006)

I can't believe it.  He was in so many of the movies that I grew up loving

The Killer Elite
Conan
The Perfect Weapon
Rising Sun

Of course like so many Asian actors working in hollywood he played Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and all manner of ethnicities, and usually with some kind of mystical or martial arts bent.  Still, along with Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Al Leong, he remains one of those actors that always turned in a good performance even in the stereotypical roles -- in admittedly bad movies -- that hollywood wrote for them.

He will be missed.

via Sushi and Sensibillity

The World Loses Mako Iwamatsu, One Fine Actor:

First you see fahzaa...

...then you see me!

Had a surreal Japan moment the other day.  I'm working out at the Komazawa Park public gym, surrounded, as you would suspect, by Japanese people.  All of a sudden Peter Cetera's Glory of Love, came on the sound system.

Abso-f'ing-lutely classic.

Please forgive the expletive infixation, but it perfectly sums up the way I was feeling.

UPDATE:  Bill Simmons' take on the movies.

Ok, so while I'm psyched that there's a Tekken movie in the offing, Bolo Yeung as Heihachi Mishima !?! 

I think not...