2023, Music

Mr. Bungle with Battles Live at HISTORY Wednesday September 13, 2023

When I was younger, I hated the idea of reunions. I don’t remember which came first, my intense music snobbery or my intense dislike of reunions – I suspect the former – but I used to think reunions were awful. But it wasn’t just me: band reunions were regularly looked upon by Gen X with …

2023, Personal, Travel

Riley Goes to Brazil Day 6: São Luís Thursday August 31, 2023

We once again had a very nice breakfast, though this time they forgot our juice for quite a while. Before we left the pousada, I went for a dip in the river. It really was just a dip, though, as it was too shallow to swim.

2023, Personal, Travel

Riley Goes to Brazil Day 4: Maranhão, Tuesday August 29, 2023

We landed in São Luís after midnight to find the airport just full of people. Apparently the internal flights in Brazil don’t stop. There were flights at 2 and 4 AM, for example. Glad we didn’t have to take any of those.

2023, Personal, Travel

Riley Goes to Brazil Day 3: Olinda/Recife Monday August 28, 2023

We woke up and sat down to a slightly different breakfast than the day before. Like most hotels outside of North America, Brazilian guesthouses have great breakfasts, as do their hotels.

2023, Personal, Travel

Riley Goes to Brazil Day 2: Olinda/Recife – Sunday August 27 2023

We slept pretty well despite how warm it was. Breakfast was a fairly elaborate buffet for a guesthouse. The buffet had lots of fresh fruit (standard in Brazil) with a bunch of interesting baked goods and savoury stuff. We tried most of it over the days we were there.

2023, Personal, Travel

Riley Goes to Brazil Day 1: Saturday August 26, 2023

I was a little more anxious for this trip than I had been in our recent “post-pandemic” travel. We had initially planned to go to Africa, which is the story of our travel lives. Why did we decide on Brazil, instead? We couldn’t figure out which country in Africa to go to, Brazil seemed a …

2023, Movies

65 (2023, Scott Beck, Bryan Woods)

This is one of those high concept science fiction films where there concept is so ridiculous that the film itself can probably never recover. You see, the 65 stands for “65 million years ago. But then, it says “Prior to the advent of mankind, in the infinity of space, other civilizations explored the heavens.” And …

2018, Books, Non-Fiction

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018) by Anand Giridharadas

This is a passionate, almost incendiary at times, argument that rich people who claim to want to improve the world cannot do it, based, interestingly, in part on interviews with a few of those rich people. I think it’s really worth reading, even if I think it could be better argued and though I do …

2023, TV

Muscles & Mayhem: An Unauthorized Story of American Gladiators (2023)

This is a miniseries about American Gladiators, a show I definitely watched as a child. There is apparently at least one other documentary out or on its way, but this is the one we found.

1958, Movies

Kakushi-toride no san-akunin [The Hidden Fortress] (1958, Akira Kurosawa)

It’s really crazy how much American action film has taken from Japanese film. More recently, it’s often explicit usually, but it wasn’t always in the past. I remember reading once there was a Japanese film that was a major inspiration for Star Wars and then I forgot. Well, it’s this one. Star Wars is far …

1952, Movies

Saikaku ichidai onna [The Life of Oharu] (1952, Kenji Mizoguchi)

This is one of those incessantly bleak Japanese tragedies that know of few comparables in the contemporary West. Think of it a bit as the Japanese proto Au Hasard Balthazar only it’s about a woman instead of a donkey. SPOILERS

2022, Movies

Poker Face (2022, Russell Crowe)

There is a subgenre of mystery where an extremely rich man invites a bunch of old friends somewhere remote to play a game, most recently seen in Glass Onion, but for me most memorably in The Last of Sheila. (See also Murder by Death and Clue where it’s strangers or acquaintances. Notably, all these are …

2022, Movies

Space Wars: Quest for the Deepstar (2022, directed by Garo Setian

The opening scene of this movie made me think it was going to be an all-timer. The villain was emoting heavily and wearing contacts to make his eyes look weird, and he was flanked by scantily clad women with guns. The CGI was atrocious and the prisoners were clearly in completely different rooms than where …

2016, Movies

Allegiant (2016, Robert Schwentke)

This is the third Divergent film. Netflix does us the honour of not calling it The Divergent Series: Allegiant, though apparently that is the official title. But it does seem it a little less condescending than the second film. There’s a video message to explain what’s going on like in the second film, but it …

2014, Movies

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014, Peter Jackson)

It’s really hard to know what to make of the third film in the ridiculously absurd 3-film adaptation of the 310-page novel The Hobbit for many reasons. One comes from my understanding that the source material for this mostly isn’t even the novel itself but some appendix or something. But that wouldn’t matter if the …

2023, Movies, Sports

Untold: Johnny Football (2023, Ryan Duffy)

I admit I didn’t know much about Johnny Manziel before watching this, beyond his nickname, that he flamed out in the NFL, and that people went a little crazy about him while he was in College. (I’m not sure I remembered he won the Heisman, because I do not care about about college football one …

1973, Movies, TV

Scener ur ett äktenskap [Scenes from a Marriage] (1973, Ingmar Bergman)

As I noted elsewhere, before the Golden Age of Television in the US, it was unheard of for prestigious Hollywood filmmakers and actors to work in TV but that was not the case in Europe. In Europe, prestigious filmmakers would work in TV when they wanted to. I don’t know when that started but it …

1980, Movies

The Mirror Crack’d (1980, Guy Hamilton)

This is an all-star cast Agatha Christie adaptation with a setting that could have been a TV movie. (Though the budget was decent for a feature for its time, so I wonder how much was spent on that cast.) I felt like it wasn’t the best of her plots but apparently it’s partially based on …

1957, Movies

Kumonosu-jô [Throne of Blood] (1957, Akira Kurosawa)

This atmospheric adaptation of Macbeth is the first of Kurosawa’s Shakespeare adaptations, but the last one I’ve seen. I watched Ran (King Lear) when I was quite young and I watched The Bad Sleep Well (Hamlet) a decade or so ago. I can’t compare this one to those other adaptations because it’s been too long …

2010, Books, Fiction

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (2010) by David Mitchell

This is my first Mitchell. I found it in a Little Free Library or on someone’s lawn and I just grabbed it because I’d seen Cloud Atlas (though never read it) and figured it could be interesting. I had zero knowledge of the story or setting.