Watched and Read - July 5, 2026

 

Here is what I watched and read last week…

 

MOVIES

Pale Flower (1964), directed by Masahiro Shinoda. I am continuing to watch Criterion’s curation of Japanese noir. Pale Flower places more emphasis on atmosphere rather than plot, with some excellent black and white cinematography. But the standout moment is the haunting imagery of Muraki’s dream. Very cool movie.

The 400 Blows (1959), directed by François Truffaut. One of Truffaut’s best and most personal films. I teach this for the French New Wave and art cinema in my Introduction to Film course. The film beautifully captures the theme of freedom and entrapment, using many of the characteristics associated with the French New Wave, such as handheld camerawork, on-location shooting, and a loose ordering of narrative events. This is a must-see if you are interested in learning about cinema.

No Down Payment (1957), directed by Martin Ritt, is a very good and dark film about four suburban families. The film begins by emphasizing the surface, which is then slowly deconstructed. What we may think is a typical all-American family is underpinned by a dark underside that involves racism, alcoholism, trauma, and money, to name but a few.

Phil Lynott: The Long Goodbye (2022), directed by Remarni Ramchaitar-Jackman, is a good documentary on the legendary singer and bass player for Thin Lizzy. I did learn some new things about Lynott, but I kind of wished the documentary went a little more in-depth into his life. But it is definitely worth checking out if you want to learn about him.

Cover-Up (2025), directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, is an excellent documentary on journalist, Seymour Hersh, exploring the major stories he reported on, such as Vietnam, Watergate, and Abu Ghraib. If you are interested in journalism, this is a must-see. It is currently streaming on Netflix.

The Wizard of the Kremlin (2025), directed by Olivier Assayas. I did not connect with this. It was very hard to believe Jude Law as Putin. I also thought Paul Dano was miscast in the film.

Jaws (1975), directed by Steven Spielberg, is a movie I watch every Fourth of July. It is one of Spielberg’s finest and scariest films. I am working on a book on Hitchcock and horror, and discuss The Birds as a precursor to Jaws. Both films feature creatures that defy the laws of nature—what I call supernatural creatures. I also highly recommend The Jaws Log, which explores the making of the film.

---

TV

We finished The Boroughs and thought it was a good and entertaining series with a lot of nostalgia. The finale was very good, with some touching moments. I also enjoyed how the series addressed the themes of death and grief.

---

BOOKS

I finished reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar II and thought it was a lot harder than Seminar I. The standout section is Lacan’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” For Lacan, the letter hiding in plain sight stands for the unconscious. This leads him to claim that the unconscious is on the outside. Or, as he puts it, the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.

I very much enjoyed Ray Bradbury’s Green Shadows, White Whale. At first, I thought he was going to write about his process of adapting Moby Dick for John Huston. Instead, it is mostly about the people he met in Ireland, their stories, and their culture. Although he does not delve deeply into his relationship with Huston (he even discusses why at the end of the book), you do get the sense that Huston was difficult to work with. I think this book is more for Bradbury fans than for film buffs.

 

Watched and Read - June 21, 2026

 Here's what I watched and read last week...

 

MOVIES

Equinox Flower (1958), directed by Yasijuro Ozu. Ozu’s first color film is beautifully shot. Like many of Ozu’s films, the pacing is leisurely and emphasizes the theme of generational tension. The narrative focuses on the father, Wataru Hirayama, who does not approve of his daughter marrying Masahiko. This is another great film from Ozu’s late period.

Always (1989), directed by Steven Spielberg. I’ve seen this film a bunch of times. This was my first time watching it on Blu-ray. Always is one of Spielberg’s minor films, but it is worth checking out, especially for its cinematography and on-location shooting. There are some very nice moments in the film. The fire sequences are amazing, especially considering that they were done in the analog period. Even great filmmakers’ lesser-known films or failures are worth a visit.

Eno (2026), directed by Gary Hustwit, is a great documentary that is now streaming on the Criterion Channel. Eno is very personable, funny, and remarkably talented. I particularly enjoyed the scenes of him producing U2’s great album, The Unforgettable Fire. And I very much enjoyed listening to his perspectives on art and creativity. I highly recommend it.

---

TV

I finished the first season of The Wonder Years. This is a great series that creatively uses nostalgia. Daniel Marcus wrote a great chapter in How To Watch Television about the cultural and political component of nostalgia in the series - how it evokes warm memories, but also signals the political and social context of the late 1960s. It is a series, according to Marcus, built around collective memories that debuted during the conservative Reagan era.

---

BOOKS

David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas is epic storytelling involving six interconnected stories. What impressed me the most is the language of each story, particularly the first tale, which had a Melville-like style. I also loved all the names of characters, such as Mr. Horrox, Sixthsmith, and Bill Smoke. I had seen the film before reading the book and pretty much remembered most of the different plots. But when I heard Joe Hill on a podcast saying how much it influenced King Sorrow, a book that I loved, I decided to read Cloud Atlas. I’m so glad that I did.

 

A.I. - Kubrick and Spielberg

Like many who love cinema, I was devastated when Stanley Kubrick unexpectedly died in March of 1999.   

 

Kubrick is known for his highly calculated approach to filmmaking - both in terms of narrative and aesthetics. The preciseness of the Kubrick's approach to cinema suggests that his movies as being cold and vapid, which is, for example, evident in his symmetrical photography. At the same time, there is also an argument to be made that Kubrick's films are very much about what makes us human.

A theme that repeats itself in Kubrick films are the dangers of systems such as war, computers or even the family.  And Kubrick likes to show the consequences when human emotions circulate within these systems. For example, when a character expresses an emotion, it tends to feel strange or out of a place. A notable example is Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) over-acting or melodramatic conversation with Brady the bartender in The Shining. Or, even better, the scene where Jack and Wendy (Shelley Duvall) debate over the state of their son Danny.

Or, probably the best example is the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, who seems to have more emotions than the humans that created him. 

These scenes suggests that when one goes against the system, whether it is a haunted hotel, the family or futuristic computers, it creates an abstract or surreal disruption within the narrative.

Another oddity of Kubrick is how he was able to meld his modernistic vision of cinema within the framework of pop culture.  Take for example how A Clockwork Orange and Dr. Strangelove has been parodied in popular television show such as The Simpsons. Or, the famously quoted dialogue from Full Metal Jacket: "Let me see your war face" or "Here's Johnny!" from The Shining.

This brings me to Spielberg's A.I., which tells the story of a robot named David (Haley Joel Osment) who is programmed with real emotions. A.I. was suppose to be Kubrick's final film. It had been reported that Kubrick decided to film Eyes Wide Shut first, so the digital technology would catch up to his futuristic vision of artificial intelligence. Kubrick had been working with Spielberg on developing A.I. At one point, Kubrick and his brother-in-law/partner Jan Harlan were even considering Spielberg to direct. But when Kubrick died in 1999, Jan Harlan reached out to Spielberg to make A.I. in honor of Kubrick.

My experience of seeing A.I. in the summer of 2001 was quite disappointing because I was expecting to see Kubrick's dystopic futuristic vision. I mean, I had been hearing about this film since the early 1990s! I admit now that I did not like the film because it was too close to Kubrick's death. But after speaking with a friend, he recommended I see the film again. And then hearing that A.O. Scott from the New York Times picked A.I. as one of the best films of the decade, I decided to revisit the film.  And glad I did.

A.I. is a frightening, yet beautiful film about a robot who goes on journey to to find the Blue Fairy who will transform him into a real boy.  The imagery and special effects are fascinating. A notable sequence is when David and the other deformed robots escape from Lord Johnson-Johnson (Brendon Gleason) who runs the Flesh-Fair, a ceremony that destroys robots for public spectacle. Lord Johnson-Johnson's moon balloon hovercraft that seeks out the robot is a strange melding of E.T. and Orwell's 1984.

 

Most points of tension on A.I. center on its bizarre ending. I am not going to say much about it, in case you have not seen it.  One can certainly add that the end tends to fit with Spielberg's sensibility and probably not Kubrick's. Though, we will never truly know how Kubrick would have handled the materials for A.I. But above all, it should not block one from seeing, arguably, one of Spielberg's best movies.