Movies, TV shows, Dramas, Videos in the queue. (Have I missed anything?)
This is the final month for the Japanese Literature Reading Challenge, so I really had to hurry up with this one. I had two main recommendations for this month: Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa, and an anthology of Japanese Haiku poetry compiled by Yamamoto and Addiss. And although not “literature”, also the superbly mind-bending scifi anime, Paprika.
I recently read Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema by Lindy West — and it was just what I’d been looking for! Hilarious relook at old blockbuster movies, with tons of punchlines thrown in. Nobody is spared (not even the movie , which as per West is ““, haha) and every single movie trope and trick is held to the microscope for a close and hysterically funny analysis.
Trust me, this book makes you laugh like crazy. Pick it up on one of those downer days, and watch your gloom evaporate.
Lately, I’ve been consuming speculative fiction centered around Japanese mythology / Shinto creation mythology. Putting up a few reviews here as part of the Japanese Literature Reading Challenge 2021.
This book is part of the Tales of Matagama series but you can also read it as a standalone. Saya lives in the village, with no memory of the past. She finds comfort in her worship of the God of Light and his children. But the God of Light has been at eternal war with the Goddess of Darkness, and only the Water Maiden can wield the Dragon Sword and bring that war to an end. Saya’s world comes crashing down when she discovers that is that Water Maiden.
Finally, 2021 is finally here, and hope this year is better for all of us! Happy New Year to everyone, well-deserved, I say. But before we close this chapter of our lives, it’s also time to recount some of the bright spots — the best of 2020.
Note: Some of these have been discussed in my previous Favorite Books of 2020 list too — so do check out that list as well!
Are you looking for a screwball murder mystery comedy? The 1985 movie Clue is just the right answer.
Based on a board game of the same name, tells the story of six guests who are invited to the castle of an unknown host. Well, it doesn’t go the way of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, but there are six murders before the dinner is through.
The first half is all about getting to know the weird guests and their weird behavioral quirks. Carry on and you’ll be rewarded in the second half. Because when the laughs come, they will be dragged out of you suddenly, and repeatedly. The last whacky hour just whizzes by, as our crazy guests get curiouser and curiouser.
The movie also doesn’t lose track of the whodunnit … And the award goes to the butler for revealing what “really” happened. In that final climax scene of the movie, our butler (Tim Curry) presents three scenarios, and I DARE YOU not to roar with laughter.
I have seen comparisons of with (starring Maggie Smith). But , IMHO, is vastly more humorous and well-orchestrated.
Rating: 8/10. Highly recommended.
Bringing Up Baby is a story about a missing intercostal clavicle, George the digging dog, and a Brazilian leopard named Baby. And what a madcap rip-roaring ROFL hysterical comedy this was!
Cary Grant plays an absent-minded museum director who just wants to polish off his gigantic dinosaur skeleton. But the harum-scarum Katharine Hepburn has other plans, and willy or nilly, Grant just HAS to help her out.
Oh, I felt so sorry for Cary Grant — who has trouble keeping up with all the stories and names people keep assigning to him. Hepburn gives him a really tough time, sending him running after golf balls, stolen cars, misplaced purses, escaped geese, musical leopards, hidden clothes, missing bones … I am laughing as I write this.
I never expected to like Bringing Up Baby so much. I went in thinking they were both an old married couple (they weren’t) who had decided to raise a leopard (not by choice!) and then squabbled over it (not precisely over the leopard).
I was so happy I took a chance on it. There was never a dull moment. No wonder this movie is considered one of the Top 100 Funniest English Movies of all time. Highly, highly recommended.
Watch the trailer HERE.
It’s time for #6degrees. Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up. Inspired by the Six Degrees of Separation Meme hosted every month at Books are my Favorite and Best.
October 2020’s book is The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.
A very young woman’s first job: governess for two weirdly beautiful, strangely distant, oddly silent children, Miles and Flora, at a forlorn estate…An estate haunted by a beckoning evil. Half-seen figures who glare from dark towers and dusty windows- silent, foul phantoms who, day by day, night by night, come closer, ever closer. With growing horror, the helpless governess realizes the fiendish creatures want the children, seeking to corrupt their bodies, possess their minds, own their souls… But worse-much worse- the governess discovers that Miles and Flora have no terror of the lurking evil. For they want the walking dead as badly as the dead want them.
What better book than Turn of the Screw for this Halloween month? Incidentally, since I am also participating in the 2020 Readers Imbibing Peril (R.I.P.) XV challenge this month, here are six spooky reads, all following up from Turn of the Screw.
Are there two more unlikable characters than Rob Reilly and Cassie Maddox? Are there? Probably, yes. But as the show, Dublin Murders, progressed, it was hard to think of more disappointing characters in recent fiction.
A young girl is murdered in the woods of a small (fictitious) Irish town called Knocknaree. There are certain shocking similarities to an unsolved crime back in 1985, when two children disappeared in the same woods. However, back in 1985, there had been a witness – a boy named Adam. But Adam couldn’t remember anything from that day and had to flee town because the folks there suspected him.
The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari) is a 1987 anime movie directed by Gisaburō Sugii and is a surreal, melancholic mix of fact and fantasy. It’s based on (large portions of) The Tale of Genji written by Murasaki Shikibu back in the Heian period (794 to 1185) of Japanese history, also arguably the world’s first true “novel”.
