Movies reviewed this week: Crimes of the Future, Madame X: An Absolute Ruler, Leningrad Cowboys Go America, Tokyo Story, Sweetie, and Happy-Go-Lucky.
Month: August 2022
Movies reviewed this week: Fail Safe, Midnight Cowboy, The Princess, Dark Waters, Cronos, Paddington 2, Lola, Accused of Murder, The Boxer from Shantung, and Enemy.
Before the pandemic, I’d been thinking about writing a little aggregator to pull movie times at my favorite local indie theaters into a calendar. I’m bad at remembering to see that cool showing a month from now but if I had a calendar that would theoretically help.
Obviously I didn’t need it for the last couple of years but the silver lining is that I got better at Python. I spent some time coding over the last week of my sabbatical and voila: the Seattle Arthouse Movie Calendar.
The code is here. I was sort of fiddling around with making it a real library but decided not to chew off too much at once. It was enough fun learning how to use classes to make it super-easy to add a new theater.
Lots of potential improvements. I am probably going to generate separate calendars for each theater next, for convenience. I’d also like to render maybe three days worth of calendar on the Web page. I feel like doing more than that risks pulling traffic away from the official theater sites, which I’d prefer to avoid, but three days seems reasonable.
I’m going to write up some notes on using the code for other cities too. If you’re decent with Python you could probably figure it out from reading what’s there but documentation is a good practice anyhow.
Movies reviewed this week: Rainy Dog, Veronika Voss, Not Okay, and Medusa.
Movies reviewed this week: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The Badlanders, Drifting Clouds, Streets of Fire, The Crowd, Amores Perros, Black Widow, Lost Bullet, La Dolce Vita, It’s Not Silence, and The Heroic Trio.
Got a wild hair, updated my ten-years-fallow technical operations blog with a reading list I wrote up for my last job. This inexorably led to changing themes and doing some maintenance. This sort of industriousness will never last.
In no particular order:
- Bainbridge Island (Streamliner Diner, Poulsbo and viking cups)
- Goofy train rides in Snoqualmie
- Ape Caves & maybe staring into the crater of Mount St. Helens
- Poke my nose into Cougar Mountain
- Big Four Ice Caves
I’m off work for a few weeks till my new job starts! Since I’m watching movies as a hobby this year, and since I like having some structure in my freedom:
- Finish up Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy (I’ve seen The Marriage of Maria Braun)
- Finish up the Black Society Trilogy, by Fassbinder’s spiritual child, Takashi Miike (I’ve likewise seen the first movie, Shinjuku Triad Society)
A brief pause. How is there not an essay out there discussing the similarities between these two directors? A few people have mentioned their similar prolific tendencies, and okay, Miike isn’t out there working in experimental theater, but they’re both making movies about outsiders scraping to get by in an unjust society and at their best, they’re both cynically lyrical. I don’t think Miike was heavily influenced by Fassbinder and as far as I know Miike didn’t ever recalibrate his style after watching a lot of Douglas Sirk, but come on! They’re practically brothers!
Where was I?
- Take advantage of Scarecrow Video to watch some of the movies on my Criterion Challenge 2022 list that aren’t streaming on any services I have
- Do the usual run through some of the movies leaving the Criterion Channel this month
- Depending on my comfort level going to theaters:
- August 5-11: The Heroic Trio at NW Film Forum
- August 5-17: Medusa at Grand Illusion
- August 12th and 15th: La Notte at the Beacon
- August 17-21: Executioners at NW Film Forum
- August 18th: Miracle Mile at the Beacon
- August 19-25: Guillermo del Toro Auteur August at SIFF
- Maybe Nope somewhere, maybe Thor somewhere
Man, when I lay it out like that it’s more being around people than I’m totally stoked about. We will see; the trends are in the right direction around here right now.