Films: 2024
A running list of films I’ve watched in 2024:
- Tampopo (1985) - Don’t let the broth boil or it’ll get cloudy.
- Ikiru (1952) - Last watched this when I was 17 and my mom rented all the Kurosawa films on DVD via the original Netflix.
- The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) - Somehow I went into this movie not realizing it was a musical.
- Wonka (2024) - Also didn’t realize this was a musical.
- Strange Days (1995) - Ultimately a piece of coproganda… Angela Bassett insists multiple times that a film of two cops executing a black rapper should be shown to the media but two white men tell her that the ensuing riot would be her fault. “The scene where the crowd celebrates the turn of the new millennium at the end of the film was shot at the corner of the 5th and Flower streets, between the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and the Los Angeles Public Library. Over 50 off-duty police officers were hired to control an assembled crowd of 10,000 people, who had to pay $10 in advance to attend the event. The filmmakers also hired rave promoters Moss Jacobs and Philip Blaine to produce performances featuring Aphex Twin, Deee-Lite, as well as “all the cyber-techno bands they could garner”. It was reported that a total of $750,000 was spent on the event, which included the rental of half of the 1,300 rooms in the Bonaventure. The event started at 9 pm on a Saturday night and ended shortly before its scheduled end at 4 am, as five people were hospitalized for suffering overdoses of ecstasy.”
- High and Low (1963) - Another piece of coproganda, albeit entralling and beautiful…The scene where the competent deputies each relate their share of the investigation seems like an idealized form of police work. In an effort to entrap the kidnapper in a murder charge which would justify his execution, they inadvertently cause another murder when the kidnapper tests his batch of uncut heroin on a woman in withdrawal. According to Wikipedia, the film spurred “sentencing reform” in Japan (aka longer sentences) for kidnapping cases which involved ransom.
- Mississippi Masala (1991) - It was refreshing to see an interracial story not about a black and white couple and I loved the scenes in Kampala having been there once 15 years ago. Denzel Washington looks particularly young and beautiful.