Films and Feelings

  The newest season of Stranger Things find our players scattered geographically, battered emotionally. Almost a year after the battle of Starcourt mall, Joyce moves her kids, including newly orphaned El, to California, away from the site of her grief. Meanwhile, those left in Hawkins get to try and put the pieces back together, and across the sea, Hopper fights to stay alive in the hopes that he might see his family again one day. It's not an ideal time for Hawkins to come under attack from the forces of the Upside Down, but when the Mind Flayer unleashes his newest threat, the cancerous Vecna, our heroes are all that stand between their home town and bottomless evil. I'll acknowledge I miss the levity of the ten-year old players, but maturity looks really good on this cast. (The emotional depth, that is. I will never get used to Noah Schnapp's booming tones.) The best parts of this season feature our characters finally sowing wisdom from their experiences. They're no...

          I think every filmmaker hopes that their film will change the world for the better, but how to measure that when the exact effects a film has on society are impossible to quantify? Did Patty Jenkins’   Wonder Woman   instigate #MeToo, or were both just natural products of the shifting social dynamics that had been morphing for a long time? Maybe we're just kidding ourselves when we put our faith in movies to heal the wrongs of the world.  After all,  Kramer vs Kramer has been out for over forty years now, and some dads still struggle to prioritize love and attention for their kids.          I'm also thinking of  Raya and the Last Dragon. Disney's 59th animated film takes place in a fictional world known as Kumandra, a land that was once home to the benevolent and majestic dragons. In the film’s prologue we learn that the dragons disappeared thousands of years ago to seal away an ancient evil know...

    Since this month's theme was the cinema of Japan, let's start with a way too broad overview of Japanese film.  Some of the country's most notable offerings include the works by Akira Kurosawa, who helped popularize the jidaigeki genre. These were period pieces focusing on the feudal era of Japanese history, the heyday of the samurai. These a hold a similar place in Japanese culture as Westerns hold in the culture of the U.S. Indeed, Kurosawa's Seven Samurai was even remade as an American western, The Magnificent Seven . Many American filmmakers, like John Ford and George Lucas, cite Kurosawa specifically as a creative influence. Indeed, many have noted the similarities between "Jedi" and "jidaigeki" and wondered ...      In addition to jidaigeki films, you also had gendai-geki films. These were drama pieces set contemporary to the times they were made. Ikiru , also directed by Kurosawa fell into this category. This film followed a middle-aged bu...