tonari no shibafu

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...

Independent films in Beantown

I'd go if I could.

schedule

via Bradley's Almanac

Gotta see Brick

A review by Bob Mondello of Brick (HD link) has me chomping at the bit to check it out.  I always loved the dialogue of noir-, Raymond Chandler-esque films... probably similar to the joy that was the first few seasons of Sports Night, The West Wing, and Gilmore.  I'm not sure what makes me like the best of Woody Allen, or the dialogue in Mamet's About Last Night, the screenplay of which I read when I worked in the library and it is exactly like the movie, or Heist, but there is just something about the way that some dialogue flows together.  Something that makes it seem believable that, say everyone in a small Connecticut town (or on a starship), is clever, competent, artistic, has good taste in music, and is well-read. 

I think it was probably around the time that I was watching Kicking and Screaming (the Baumbach one), Barcelona and the other Whit Stilman stuff, Watch It, and Pulp Fiction that I realized that there are certain types of screenwriting (dialogue) that just hit me where I live and breathe.  I am thankful that there are movies like that out there (occasionally), but it does make the usual Hollywood fare that much more unsatisfying.

Seems pretty obvious that I'm cleaning out the newsreader, doesn't it?

Basic Instinct 2...not

Is there a more amusing critic when eviscerating a flim than David Edelstein?

NPR permission policy

IMDB RIP

So I'm doing my normal bit of sleuthing in order to find out how tall someone is or to see if Lili Kane's mom on Veronica Mars is the girlfriend of the Jake in Sixteen Candles, and I can't get there.  The staple of our Clerks-esque existence has been the ability to say that 'yeah, Janet Ashikaga is responsible for the casting on some of my favorite shows', and our world was made so much easier by imdb.  Now, it seems that some of the information beyond the first page, like the recurring cast and special guest stars, now requires registration at imdbpro.  While i love useless knowledge as much as the next guy, can't really see paying 12.95/month for it.

Todd and Thomas, beware the Dark Lord

My friends Todd and Thomas often direct links my way to film reviews/previews from IGN sites.  While I am not often one to throw out the baby with the bath water -- I still watch The Simpsons, Family Guy and other Fox shows -- I am going to have to watch the IGN content from now on with a more critical eye.

News Corp, the media firm owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, has agreed to buy IGN Entertainment, an internet video game company, for $650m (£354m).

News Corp is looking to increase its online interests and earlier this year spent $580m buying Intermix Media.

The acquisition is further proof that Mr Murdoch has abandoned any aversion to the internet and online companies.

California-based IGN runs a number of websites including gamespy.com and film review site rottentomatoes.com.

After the acquisition, News Corp estimates that the traffic at its US sites will be close to 70 million unique users and more than 12 billion page impressions every month.

San Francisco-based IGN will become part of News Corp's Fox Interactive Media unit.

via the BBC

Boston Film Festival

For my Boston-area homies:

Bradley's Almanac has a post with a summary of the movies at this year's Boston Film festival.  Looks like there are some things worth seeing (for those of you not starting a new semester).

What I really want to do is direct...

Anybody who knows me remotely well knows how much I love movies. I LOVE movies. and tv. The problem is that I hate most of the mainstream Hollywood schlock and am unaffected by the 4 or 5 overly flogged tropes that get repackaged with interchangeable leading men and women.

Most of my friends feel moreorless the same way that I do, which, I guess, is part of the bond that we share in this world wherein tribes seem increasingly defined by the type of media that its members accept/reject. In order to get to know ya'll better, I would like to ask a few questions.
Please post your answers to the questions below in the comments.

1. Big screen or little screen?
2. Do you have a movie that is a favorite, that very few people have seen? Do you often recommend it?
3. Where do you like to sit in the theater?
4. Has the term 'independent film' become anachronistic?
5. Have you ever seen a foreign film with English subtitles? If so, what was the last one?
6. What do you think of the science fiction genre?
7. Is there a particular actor/actress whose movies you will see on faith? Won't watch on principle?
8. same as #7, but director?
9. same as #7,8 but studio?
10. Do you like japanimation/anime?
11. Name any/some movie(s) that you have seen more than 5 times.
12. Which is best: Godfather, Godfather II, Godfather III, or all of them?
13. Ever cried watching a movie? If so, name one?
14. Is there a particular reviewer whose opinions are inline with your own?
15. Recommend a movie to me.

UPDATE: Turned on comments....my bad.