21 January 2023, late morning
I have finally watched Everything Everywhere All At Once! I didn’t think the film could live up to all the hype that’s built up in my head, but somehow it was even better and weirder than I thought it would be. The always incredible Michelle Yeoh plays an bitter old immigrant mom who runs a laundromat being audited by the IRS; her sweeter husband is played by Ke Huy Quan; rounding out the main cast is Stephanie Hsu as Yeoh’s daughter, and Jamie Lee Curtis as the IRS auditor. There is a multiverse, and Michelle Yeoh and her family are all up in it. There is much more to the film, but you should watch it to find out what’s up. The movie feels like it moves between genres and moods with ease and grace: one minute you’re watching a Jackie Chan film, the next a Wong Kar Wai film. It feels like the best of Hong Kong cinema, but somehow made in the US. The cast does a wonderful job with their roles: funny when they need to be, and then all of a sudden so serious. Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan won Golden Globes for their roles, both well deserved. A film well worth watching. I wish I had trekked out to the cinema to see it.
Movies
14 January 2023, mid-afternoon
My brothers are in town. Last night we sat down and watched My Neighbour Totoro together. The story is simple: two sisters move to a rundown house in the countryside to be closer to their hospitalized mother; they explore the wilderness, and meet a magical creature called Totoro. The stakes are never too high. It’s a film set in the countryside that feels like it perfectly captures the pacing of the countryside. The animation is beautiful, full of now iconic images. The film’s score somehow is just as excellent. How had I made it to 42 without having seen it?
Movies
14 January 2023, early morning
RRR, the latest film from SS Rajamouli, tells the incredibly fictional tale of the revolutionary bromance of two real people: Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem. This film is throughly ridiculous and amazing. Every performance is over the top in the best way possible. We have two bros: Raju, a British officer and totally jacked Indian man, alongside Bheem, a Liam Nielsen-esque protector of his tribe, who is also totally jacked. Comically evil British people have stolen a child from Bheem’s village. He is off to rescue the child, and Raju is off to stop him. The film is 3 hours long and is electric throughout.
Movies
A link log without a link is basically a microblog, right? Twitter is imploding and I have been casting a net trying to figure out where to go next. I made accounts on Mastodon, as one does, but Mastodon really feels like the Linux of Social Media. Really what I should be doing is blogging, here. No one is policing how long your posts are. People need to take back their presence online.
- Welcome to hell, Elon. Nilay Patel writes about Elon's purchase of Twitter. Imagine paying 44 billion dollars for that hell site. Disney bought Marvel and Star Wars for 4 billion each, and those things both print money. [1]
1 November 2022, early morning
It’s weird to break this blogging hiatus after my mom’s death to talk about how the character encoding on this blog seems to be broken, but it does make me crazy every time I visit this site right now. I assume at some point Dreamhost has upgraded MySQL and/or PHP and left my site in some weird state. One day I’ll have some time to figure this out. Till then, use your imagination when you see some garbage characters.
Weblogs
28 January 2022, early morning
My mom wrote down all her last wishes on sheet of paper from a cheap notebook back in the summer of 2018. I’m not sure why anymore. We had come back from a big trip to Australia months earlier. She had “beaten” her stomach cancer, for now. It seems like a random time. But the note exists and it opens with “Send me happily. No crying.” An unreasonable ask, perhaps, but she hated those Sri Lankan funerals with wailing relatives.
She wanted to be cremated within the day. And so the last two days have been a blur and a race. Now that’s done, what comes next? I don’t know.
It’s hard to think about a person in the past tense. To write about them as someone here before, but not now. I’ll have to write more later. When I have the words.
Life
- Living While Black, in Japan. It speaks to just how dark things are in America that people will happily brush aside some of the casual ignorance that comes with living in such a homogeneous place. Everyone is so happy to be in Japan. They feel free in a way they never did in the US. Such an interesting little video. (via Kottke)
21 June 2021, late morning
I bought a new TV a little while ago, to go with the PlayStation 5 I bought a little while ago. Now I can watch things in 4K and HDR and all that fancy stuff. I bought a few movies to see what all the fuss is about. One of the films was Sam Medes’s 1917, something I had wanted to see for some time. Man, why did I wait to watch this? Sam Mendes, the director, has really made something memorable here. The movie follows two fellows trying to get a message to another battalion at the tail end of the First World War. It’s a really good war movie, about one of the most futile and pointless wars people have fought. Lots of famous British actors you will recognize littered throughout the film. I wasn’t familiar with the two leads, but they were both great. It is such an incredible film. One of the best films I’ve ever seen? Certainly one of the most technically brilliant: the film is presented as one continuous shot. Roger Deakins was the cinematographer on the movie and certainly deserves the Oscar he won. There are some impressive sequences I want to watch again already. Shima and I watched all the documentaries on the disc about making the film, we were so enthralled with the film. If you haven’t seen this movie go see it out.
The trailer for 1917.
Movies
19 April 2021, early morning
I used to write about every movie I watched, and then stopped, probably because there is just too much friction. A shame, it’s sometimes nice to look back and review what films I’ve seen and what I thought at the time. I watch YouTube clips and Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White enough that the great algorithm started funnelling me towards clips from a 2015 film, Burnt. Seeing as this is as close I will get to get to Michelin star dining for some time I decided to watch it yesterday, and it certainly scratched that itch. I’ve seen lots of documentaries about Michelin star chefs and the experience of chasing that star. (Boiling Point about Gordon Ramsay is excellent if you are looking for one. Apparently as part of getting ready for the film Bradley Cooper worked in Ramsay’s restaurant.) The film stars Cooper as a chef returning to the world of fine dining after destroying his career through addiction. He gets his band back together, so to speak, and starts a new restaurant with the hopes of getting 3 stars. The movie features all the French brigade system yelling you’d expect. There is a small love story between Cooper and Miller, but it’s not central to the film. I enjoyed it a lot. It made me so hungry.
[2] Movies
- Is Trump Actually Still in Control? It's funny to me that Trump is too dangerous to be on Twitter, but apparently not too dangerous to be the president of the United States of America. That guy has nuclear launch codes.
- Twitter, Facebook, etc, have finally removed Trump from their platform. This newsletter opens with a great discussion of this topic.
I am tired of letting these companies try to convince us that their violent and racist users with hundreds of thousands of followers creating content shared millions of times are somehow not indicative of what these websites fundamentally are. Trump is a not unique outlier on Facebook and Twitter, he is Facebook and Twitter.
