…A world-weary Tokyo cop, Kenzo Mori (Takehiro Hira), is sent to London to find his wayward brother, an enforcer for the Japanese crime syndicate the Yakusa, whose activities in the UK are primed to ignite a gang war back home in Japan.
I’m three and 1/4 episodes into the series Giri/Haji on Netflix and I’m hooked. A co-production with the BBC, it’s a slow burn but masterfully written and acted. I can’t wait to get through the rest of the series.
Infinity Train is a Cartoon Network series about a young girl who finds a mysterious train where each car is its own universe. She has to unlock each car, which presents its own logic and mystery, to continue to the next car. They’re short, only about 12 minutes each, but the writing is excellent and the story picks up steam—and weight—as it goes. (via)
I grew up listening to Howard Stern on the radio, and when he made the switch to satellite I lost track. Sometime in the intervening years he embraced his ability to be an excellent interviewer. He had Hillary Clinton on last week, and the whole thing is fascinating: he’s empathetic and insightful, and she’s a human being. It’s depressing how much of the current political process strips the personality and warmth from our candidates; I like this Hillary and I wish we’d seen more of this side of her on the campaign trail four years ago.
I’m writing this at the dining room table in my pajamas on Friday morning, after a breakfast of pumpkin pie and coffee. Breakfast of Champions!
(Spoiler alert: if you don’t see a bunch of redacted text below, force-reload your browser to update the CSS. Hover over the text if you dare.)
- Christmas was great! A little understated this year, because we made our major Christmas purchase earlier in the month—more on that when it happens—but fun and full of cheer. Finn got her first MP3 player: not an iPod, to her dismay, but something just as good (and cheaper) if/when she loses it, preloaded with music she requested.
- We hosted Jen’s family here for Christmas dinner that afternoon, and it was great to see everyone under the same roof. I was able to navigate the new head unit to provide Christmas music into the living room, and we had a blazing fire going all night. Hazel was super-chill with the little kids, to our relief. We all ate way too much good food and topped it off with excellent dessert. I think we were all in bed by 10PM.
- My cold has still not lifted. I’ve been swilling cough medicine by the gallon since last week, and because my immune system is still compromised it’s taking much longer than normal to fight this thing off. I don’t have a fever, and I’ve been able to get up and move around OK the whole time, but I’m tired of coughing and blowing my nose. I may be visiting the urgent care clinic today.
- Thursday was a relaxed, sit on the couch and fart around kind of day. We did eventually get up and join the Geblers across the street at the playground, and then walked up to a neighborhood cafe for some lunch. Hazel was happy to get a good walk in, and it felt great to be out in the warm weather. We left at about 3:30 because we had Rise of Skywalker matinee tickets, so we loaded our pockets with Christmas candy and settled into our seats. The verdict: I agree with a lot of the criticism I’ve read since we saw it—there’s way too much retconning away from Last Jedi in this script, some of the characters introduced in that movie got completely sidelined, and it introduces—and then forgets—a gigantic number of plot holes and questions. The first 20 minutes felt like a speed run through a department store, and the big set pieces could have used another few minutes to breathe and let us feel the stakes. I feel like Abrams did a better job on the first movie; this was good but pales in comparison to the best movies in the series.
The empathy and wounded optimism of Short Term 12 is the film’s calling card, but its position as the source code for the future of Hollywood—both its ensemble and its director—is, for better or worse, the most remarkable part of its legacy.
I loved this movie when I saw it, and I’m happy it’s making end-of-decade lists. The Ringer did a piece on the incredible casting of the movie before anyone really knew who they were. Go find it.
I forget how much I love this fucked-up movie.
Mead: The first thing Ridley said out of his mouth was, “This is not going to be Logan’s Run.” I thought, “Well, that gives me a clue.”
Jesus, I’m old. Blade Runner was set in November 2019, and we’re…there now. LAist (I hate that name) put together an oral history of the movie’s groundbreaking visual design.
I’ve been playing Fallout 4 since I was recovering from cancer, off and on, and while I enjoyed it immensely, I’m pretty much finished with and bored of it. I haven’t seen any new single player campaign games that I’ve been interested in spending money on, and I refuse to subscribe to Xbox Live to play games online (this is why I haven’t moved to Fallout 76). But the folks behind Fallout: New Vegas have come up with a planetary exploration game called The Outer Worlds that borrows all the best elements from that series and puts it INNNNN SPAYYYYYCE. Ars Technica gave it a glowing review, so it’s at the top of my list of games to try next.
Vulture did a great interview with Rian Johnson about Brick, his 2006 debut that remains one of my favorites. In it, he explores seven ways he deconstructed the detective movie and leaned into each of the tropes. For example:
He’s not gathering clues or doing anything clever with a magnifying glass; it’s going around annoying people until one of them says something that leads him to the next person he can annoy. There’s really no plan.
Huh. How have I missed Locast all these years? It’s a way to watch local broadcast TV over broadband networks. Apparently the major networks are trying to sue them out of existence, which makes little sense to me in the long run, but for right now it’s a nice way to watch local news (such as it is) in bed on my laptop.
On a related note, our 7-year-old TV doesn’t support Audio Return Channel, which as I understand things means we can’t watch broadcast digital TV on our existing A/V setup. But I have to do some more digging.
And on another related note, looking at that 7-year old TV post, I’d forgotten to revisit Serviio as a media player for all the content on the server in the basement after I switched from the old G5 tower to an Intel box. iTunes can be slow and laggy; apparently there’s a way to get Roku to talk to Serviio. This too requires some more research.