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Movies reviewed this week: Colma: The Musical, Room at the Top, All Dogs Go to Heaven, and A Kiss Before Dying.

Or: ”A Lyric Scenario for The Yellow King RPG” Gather no more than three people. Watch Last Year in Marienbad together in silence. Select characters from those depicted in the movie. Discuss your motivations, remaining in character. It is unnecessary to agree on the facts of the fiction. If there is disagreement on motivations, play Nim to resolve them. “It’s a stupid game.” “There’s a trick.” “Just take an odd number.” “There must be rules.” ...

Movies reviewed this week: Crimes of the Future, Madame X: An Absolute Ruler, Leningrad Cowboys Go America, Tokyo Story, Sweetie, and Happy-Go-Lucky.

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. ...

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! ...