Here's what I watched and read last week...
MOVIES
A Colt is My Passport (1967), directed by Takashi Nomura, is a very good Japanese noir. It has a Hollywood B-film feel, mixed with a Spaghetti Western. Great performance by Joe Shishido. Super cool ending.
Cruel Gun Story (1964), directed by Takumi Furukawa, is another great Japanese noir. I really enjoyed the film’s setup, which reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing. I am starting to become a fan of Shishido. I highly recommend this one.
The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel (2026), directed by Ben Feldman, is a great documentary on the band’s emergence in the early 1980s. It is very tragic and sad about what happened to Hillel Slovak.
Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game (2022), directed by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg, is a very enjoyable film based on a true story. I liked how they structured the film, intercutting Roger Sharpe (not the real Roger Sharpe) talking to the filmmakers throughout the story. It reminded me of American Splendor, which mixes real footage of underground comic book artist, Harvey Pekar, and the fictional account of his story. Pinball is streaming on Hulu.
TV
Pistols (2021). I finished the series and thought it was excellent. They crammed in a lot in the last episode, but overall it was a lot of fun to watch. There is a lot of humor, mixed with gritty realism. Boyle brilliantly captures the feel, energy, and excitement of a punk rock show. I would definitely put this up there as one of Danny Boyle’s great works. I highly recommend it.
BOOKS
I finished reading Ray Bradbury’s collection of short stories in I Sing the Body Electric! And Other Stories. Lots of great stories, especially “The Burning Man,” “The Lost City of Mars, “The Utterly Perfect Murder,” and “Punishment Without Crime.”
“The Possibility of Evil” by Shirley Jackson is a classic short story. Miss Strangeworth is what we would call an online troll. There is no evidence in the mean letters that she sends anonymously to the people of her small town. All she is doing is stirring up trouble. In her view, it is because people need to open their eyes and be aware of the evils lurking in the world. The brilliance of Jackson’s story is that good and evil are not dualistic but dialectical. That is, they are intertwined with each other. The idyllic fantasy is always threatened by something that wants to undo it. I am teaching this alongside Hitchcock’s Shadow a of Doubt. Both are examples of evil within small places.
