The Legend of Masty Huba
Dersu Uzala
Black Panthers
One Piece ep51
Superman: The Animated Series (couple episodes)
Jeopardy (one episode)
Star Trek: The Next Generation s1e5 "The Last Outpost"
Animania
It (1990)
Leave it to Beaver "Beaver's Old Friend"
Transfer Students
A lot of stupid Youtube videos.
There's nothing I feel strongly about from the last couple of weeks.
Masty Huba is a great local documentary that never made a big impact and has completely disappeared. If I were in charge of building up local culture, this would air at least once a week on WSKG for the benefit of the entire community.
Dersu is Kurosawa doing a Mosfilm joint and the result is magic. I don't even know if I fully understand what people mean when they call something a "bro" film, but I get the sense that it's all Christopher Nolan and David Fincher. In a better world, the "bros" would be watching Dersu Uzala repeatedly to learn about self-respect and mutual respect and love among competent men.
Black Panthers is a short film from Agnes Varda which documents a specific group of people in a specific time and place without any agenda beyond representing those people. It's the sort of thing that every documentary should be.
I've watched one more episode of One Piece in two weeks. At this rate, I'm on target to catch up and finish the series in the 22nd century.
Superman: The Animated Series is fine. It's a great example of peak 90s animation, when visual style aspired to be lovely and telling stories was more important than awkward anti-comedy cringe humor and deconstruction of aesthetic forms.
I like watching Jeopardy but I often forget to do it.
ST:TNG sucks. At least this Ferengi episode sucked. I'm starting to regret committing to this monthly rewatch.
Animania was Zak's streaming of old school Japanese stuff, curated by him. Dream Hunter Rem was not entirely awful in terms of plot/pacing/production, but it's also definitely hentai/pornographic and an example of the worst sort of 80s anime featuring demon rapists and elementary school girls. :pukeface: The episode of Sakigake!! Otokojuku was fun, but I was rooting for the Americans to steal all the Japanese girls, but they get their butts kicked out of the country. World Ninja Tournament Jiraiya was the hit of the night for me and others. I would have been happy just binge-ing all 50 episodes. It's basically a Power Rangers/Kamen Rider/Ultraman type show... featuring awesome ninjas from around the world. Dimension Hunter Fandora was light fun, "sword & planet" genre stuff that used to exist so effortlessly in the 80s. Keiko Mask? So stupid. I watched about ten minutes, was falling asleep, looked it up and realized that it was nearly an hour. So that's when I tapped out of Animania. I don't regret the time spent, especially trading comments in the chat, but there was nothing truly great discovered.
I hated reading It and I hated watching the 1990 TV adaptation. I must hate myself. Admittedly, Tim Curry is great in this. Everyone else kinda sucks. As much as I resented the length of the novel, the movie felt like it took a few plot points and created a Talking Points summary of the novel that hit enough of the right notes that you could tell which symphony this is, but left out enough that all the real heart and soul of the piece is missing.
The Leave it to Beaver episode I watched with the kids was probably my favorite thing I watched the past couple of weeks. Just a story of a kid rescuing his old teddy bear from the garbage truck.
Transfer Students? I wish I had been more impressed by this Obayashi film or that I felt like writing about it at all. It fits in well with the recent "body horror" theme exchange I've had with Brandon, but I really wasn't satisfied with it. Besides the "oh wow, I have different genitalia now" ha-ha aspect, there's just not much exploration of anything interesting in this film. Kazumi (a girl) swaps bodies with Kazuo (a boy). At the beginning of the film, Kazumi is bold and outspoken, but when she's in Kazuo's body, she just becomes a weepy baby who can't pee standing up. Kazuo at the beginning is annoyed by everything and has no real personality, but when he's in Kazumi's body, he becomes the outgoing bold one. My conclusion is just that the actress Satomi Kobayashi was just more interesting to Obayashi and she was the active character and focus (her body at least) of the film regardless of which person in the story was supposedly inhabiting her body. I also resented the idea that this is a "sci-fi" plot. It's terrible science fiction. Two characters swap bodies after falling down the stairs. That's not science fiction. Instead, I think the film is better understood as some sort of fable, but I can't figure out what to take away from it besides don't roll down the stairs with someone else.
Youtube is a stupid trap full of stupid "content," but I tend to default to Youtube in the Winter when my early mornings are spent building a fire in our wood stove. I should prefer silence or even WSKG Classical, but, sigh, I tend to default to Youtube. [I should note that I use adblock on my PC browsers and Newpipe on my tablet. I will not watch Youtube ads.]
Most of "#booktube" is people rambling about books in a really shallow way. There are a few more in-depth analytic channels that I like focused on genre fiction, but my favorite Youtuber in the Rambling Style is Michael K. Vaughan. Alongside 28,000+ other fans, I find his "Stately von Manor" and "Roger" schtick charming. I have similar (though not the same) tastes in books and just enjoy listening to him talk about books. It's the perfect sort of video that I can have on and listen to with watching as a back-up mode of engaging when I'm done doing the primary non-video task I'm doing (building a fire). It's my version of the television Morning Shows that my mother always had on every day, but instead of a panel of hosts talking about current events and pop stuff I don't care about, it's someone talking about books. It's still a bad habit to engage in this sort of "background viewing," I think, but this sort of curated half-watching of real people sharing real interests that Youtube allows for at least seems preferable to the old commercial pop culture way of doing things.
I don't mind these #booktube videos, the lectures and the interviews one can find on Youtube, or the so many great old clips that can be found, but I do get angry with myself when I fall into the trap of clicking on videos that the algorithm suggests to me, which is always about some current event that I'd be better off not having an opinion about based on a 3 minute Youtube video or some "life hack" video that's explaining to me how to improve my life, which I never do because I move on to the next video. But the less said about all of those videos, the better. Just like the choice to watch or not watch them, silence is almost always the better choice.