We got breakfast at the Newport Cafe and I got to eat my first ever oyster omelette. We then headed back up the road to the Devil’s Punch Bowl. (Well, one of them…) Though it was often cloudy or hazy or foggy on the coast, and sometimes quite windy, it was never stormy. And on …
Riley Drives from Portland to San Francisco Day 3 Monday May 15, 2023
We had to set an alarm in order to get started. We walked across the road to a neat place called the Elephant Delicatessen, which is sort of like the Portland, non-Italian version of Pusateri’s. When we checkd out and booked a Lyft (since our cab was so expensive and the Red Line would take …
Riley Drives from Portland to San Francisco Day 2 Sunday May 14, 2023
We woke up relatively early – jet lag – but I slept pretty well this night (though not some future ones). We went to find a coffee shop and had some breakfast burritos. After breakfast, we walked up to Washington Park. We got a tiny bit lost on the way but we eventually found our …
Riley Drives from Portland to San Francisco Day 1 Saturday May 13, 2023
I’ve been on the west coast of the United States for the past week, fulfilling a tiny part of a lifelong dream of driving down the west coast of the Americas. This was only about 1200 kilometres of that dream, from Cannon Beach, Oregon, to San Francisco, but…baby steps. It’s the first proper road trip …
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (2016) by Cathy O’Neil
I should have read this when it came out. So much has happened since the book was published – it hasn’t rendered the book irrelevant so much as not detailed enough, not broad enough, and perhaps not as nuanced enough. Also, I need to tell you that I finished this book on a plane 9 …
Heima (2007, Dean DeBlois)
This is so cool. It’s the kind of thing that, had I any musical talent, and had any kind of success with that talent, I’d like to think I would want to do. At least, in the indie music word, Sigur Rós were pretty huge in 2006. To put on free concerts like this, in …
Hot Docs 2023
This was our first time attending Hot Docs in person in a number of years. I don’t remember the last year we went pre-pandemic. We did participate at least once during the pandemic, when the festival was online. But it had been quite some time since we’d been in person. (From my posts on this …
The Cemetery of Cinema aka Au cimetière de la pellicule (2023, Thierno Souleymane Diallo)
This is a an alternately fascinating and almost goofy documentary about one man’s search for a lost Guinean film which may have been the first film ever made by an African in French West Africa. I’m pretty sure it’s the first film I’ve seen made by someone from Guinea, explicitly about Guinea. (I have seen …
Soviet Barbara: the Story of Ragnar Kjartansson in Moscow (2023, Gaukur Úlfarsson)
I had never heard of Ragnar Kjartansson of before. In art circles he is apparently a big deal. He is an Icelandic artist who works primarily in “living tableaux” but on film, though he also paints, sings songs and does basically anything he feels like. He seems like an interesting artist and I would like …
Summer of Soul (2021, Questlove)
I have been reading about popular music history since almost before I can remember. Before I had the internet, I had a Billboard book that I read and re-read for some reason. And, once I had the internet, and AllMusic, among other websites, I read everything I could about every artist and genre I had …
Praying for Armageddon (2023, Tonje Hessen Schei, Michael Rowley)
Apparently there is a term in investigations called “scope creep”; the longer the investigation goes, the greater the scope of the investigation and the more unfocused it is on its initial target. Well, this film about US evangelicals funding Israeli settlers to bring about Armageddon suffers from something like scope creep. There is just too …
Que Dios te maldiga mi corazon (2023) by The Mars Volta
I remember ahead of either Octahedron or Noctourniquet, Cedric or Omar said their upcoming album would be acoustic, and then of course it wasn’t, it was just softer than the past. Well, they finally made their acoustic album, only it’s just a remake of their reunion left-turn album. And, listening to it, I imagine that this …
I’m Just Here for the Riot (2023, Kathleen Jayme, Asia Youngman)
This is a forthcoming episode of 30 for 30 episode which we watched at Hot Docs, not knowing it was part of the series. It’s a nuanced look at the riot after Game 7 of the 2011 Stanley Cup Final and the subsequent fall out for some of the participants.
Time Bomb Y2K (2023, Brian Becker, Marley Mcdonald)
This is an amusing documentary about the Y2K bug and subsequent moral panic based almost entirely on archival footage. (This is a little bit of bad CGI, and that CGI might be deliberately bad.) However, the film doesn’t actually satisfy, despite making me laugh. I really wanted to watch this but it didn’t really give …
Satan Wants You (2023, Steve J. Adams, Sean Horlor)
This is an entertaining and swiftly-paced documentary about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Specifically, it is focused on Michelle Remembers, and its authors, and the damage that book caused. It is the kind of thing I would highly recommend watching if you have no idea what the Satanic Panic was, but it is a …
Call for the Dead (1961) by John le Carré
I have never read le Carré before but I have seen a number of movies based on his books – at least 5 – and parts of at least two TV shows. That turns out to be a bit of a problem for a few reasons. For one, I have some idea of Smiley, one …
Your 2022-23 Toronto Raptors
The Raptors have missed the playoffs twice in the last three years so things have changed for this team. Before this, they were in the playoffs seven seasons in a row, in the conference semi-finals five years in a row, and in the playoffs eight seasons out of nine. (Oh yeah, they also won a …
American Republics (2021) by Alan Taylor
This is the third Alan Taylor history of the early US that I have read and it’s just as valuable, eye-opening and depressing/maddening as the other two. Once again, his scope is far greater than the usual American history books, spending time on area of North America that were not yet, and in some cases …
Sciuscia [Shoeshine] (1946, Vittorio De Sica)
This is a pretty bleak early Italian neo realist film about two shoeshine boys who get into trouble and whose relationship is, um, “tested” we’ll say by the WWII Italian version of juvie.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, Celine Sciamma)
This is a slow burn of a romance set in an absolutely gorgeous setting off the coast of Brittany during the 18th century. It’s an impressive film with two pretty stellar performances by the leads.
Deadpool 2 (2018, David Leitch)
Though I was laughing I initially had reservations about this sequel. But it pretty soon won me over and I think I liked it almost as much as the first film, if not just as much.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019, JJ Abrams)
The ninth and final film of the now rebranded “Skywalker Saga” is the weakest of the the final films, I think, though I haven’t seen the other two in some time. Like the first two, it’s too long. But the real problems centre around how similar it ends up being to previous films in the …
Money Shot: The Pornhub Story (2023, Suzanne Hillinger)
This documentary isn’t so much the story of Pornhub as its the story of Pornhub from “Traffickinghub” to the present. It’s a reasonably balanced look at internet pornography in the 2020s, and, specifically, the biggest company in internet pornography, that I wish was a little broader in its scope.
The Town (2010, Ben Affleck)
This is a sort of one-last-job heist film that focuses almost as much on relationships as it does on the heists. Though I appreciate the (mostly successful) attempt to situate the film in a place that feels real, I also feel like the film is tugged in two different directions and that doesn’t completely work. …
The Jinx (2015)
This is a pretty masterful documentary about Robert Durst, the son of a New York real estate baron who inspired the fictionalized film All Good Things and who was accused of murdering three people. I saw All Good Things sometime after this came out. But, fortunately, I waited something less than eight years to watch …
American Revolutions (2016) by Alan Taylor
grew up on the “history,” lore and mythology of the United States. My father grew up in the 1940s and 1950s and so got a very specific, and I’d argue somewhat inaccurate, story of his country from his pre-university education. He passed that on to me in what he told me but also in his …
Smultronstället aka Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman)
This is ruminative and briefly surreal film about ageing that feels fairly indebted to A Christmas Carol, unless there is a Swedish work that covers something similar.
Magic Mike XXL (2015, Gregory Jacobs)
I was pleasantly surprised by the first Magic Mike, a movie that was both funnier than I thought it would be and much more about the Great Recession than I thought it would be. But this is an entirely different movie.
Såsom i en spegel aka Through a Glass Darkly (1961, Ingmar Bergman)
This is stark but pretty to look at drama about mental illness that I suspect won the Oscar in part because of how foreign in form and content it felt from Hollywood films at the time.
Django & Django (2021, Luca Rea)
This is a brief documentary about the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Corbucci that really feels like it was meant to be a DVD extra or something. I haven’t gotten around to seeing any of Corbucci’s films yet, so watching it might have been an odd choice. But I watched it because Quentin Tarantino was in …