100 Movies List

With the recent release of the Sight and Sound decade poll, my friend Josh and I decided to make our own top 100s, with any restrictions or broadening of terms that we saw fit. I chose to allow myself only one work per filmmaker, and settled on selecting only feature films. After making a list of close to 200 films and having to make some absolutely brutal cuts, I've settled on a rather mixed list that defines my love of cinema. The ordering of the films is totally randomized, because it would be impossible to try and determine which film is number 65 and which is number 66 otherwise.

1. Brick
2. Harakiri 
3. Rosetta
4. Ordet
5. Some Like It Hot
6. Le Samourai
7. Blazing Saddles
8. A History of Violence
9. Defending Your Life
10. Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
11. Taipei Story
12. The Wages of Fear
13. 28 Days Later
14. Millennium Actress
15. Sullivan's Travels
16. Sherlock Jr.
17. Sans Soleil
18. Youth of the Beast
19. Tokyo-Ga
20. Promare
21. The Parallax View
22. Sunrise
23. Shoplifters
24. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb
25. The Raid: Redemption
26. My Winnipeg
27. An American In Paris
28. Blow-Up
29. Kung Fu Hustle
30. Holy Motors
31. Mission Impossible
32. In Bruges
33. Ikiru
34. Groundhog Day
35. Hot Fuzz
36. Rebels of the Neon God
37. Stalker
38. Battle of Algiers
39. To Be Or Not To Be
40. Memories of Murder
41. In A Lonely Place
42. Touch of Evil
43. Children of Men
44. The Conversation
45. Mission Impossible: Fallout
46. The Shop on Main Street
47. First Reformed
48. Drive My Car
49. Pickpocket
50. Band of Outsiders
51. All About Eve
52. Killer of Sheep
53. Casablanca
54. Kind Hearts and Coronets
55. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
56. Spirited Away
57. Rififi
58. Melancholia
59. Moneyball
60. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
61. His Girl Friday
62. Singin' in the Rain
63. Raiders of the Lost Ark
64. Persona
65. Alien
66. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
67. A Better Tomorrow
68. A Matter of Life and Death
69. Where is the Friend's House?
70. Three Days of the Condor
71. Do the Right Thing
72. Son of Rambow
73. Once Upon a Time in the West
74. The Third Man
75. Star Wars
76. Moonlight
77. High Noon
78. Police, Adjective
79. Late Spring
80. Chungking Express
81. The Night of the Hunter
82. Sweet Smell of Success
83. In the Loop
84. Letter from an Unknown Woman
85. The Conformist
86. La Belle et la Bete
87. Notorious
88. Under the Skin
89. The Philadelphia Story
90. Mad Max Fury Road
91. Mulholland Drive
92. Annihilation
93. The Social Network
94. M. Hulot's Holiday
95. The Gold Rush
96. My Man Godfrey
97. The Prestige
98. Pickup on South Street
99. Voyage to Italy
100. Seconds

Angel Beats (Dir. Seiji Kishi, 2010, Studio P.A. Works, Written by Jun Maeda)

In the first episode of Angel Beats, protagonist Yuzuru Otonashi (his name Kanji mean "to tie strings (of an instrument)" and "nothing sound," each tying into the show's emphasis on music) wakes up on the grounds of an impossibly large high school without his memories. Amnesia is perhaps the well most-visited plot device in all of Japanese media, much to the chagrin of many of its most avid consumers. The "Final Fantasy" series is particularly rife with stories of characters who have simply forgotten or misremembered huge chunks of their lives, only to regain those memories at narrative-convenient times and places. So it's fair if this sets off some alarms in your head, but I assure you that you should not give up on Angel Beats within the first five minutes.

Sitting perched nearby with a sniper rifle is a fiery young woman named Yuri who introduces him to the world of the not-yet-dead, and offers him enlistment in her armed forces fighting against God and his Angel, a white-haired young woman standing innocently in the middle of a sports field. Yuri tells him to go die, then explains that she's joking; not because she isn't mad at him, but because it is impossible to die in this world. Unamused by what he believes to be her pranks, Otonashi instead walks down and confronts Angel in the field. He doesn't believe that she's an angel and she confirms his suspicions, but when he insists that he can die in this world she strongly rebukes him by conjuring a blade on her wrist and running it straight through his chest. This will not be the last time that Otonashi suffers a theoretically mortal blow in the first episode.

Angel Beats sets up one of its central theses in these opening moments, before you've even had a chance to orient yourself. That is, that a human life is a long series of pains and traumas, some avoidable through proper diligence but most inflicted by the sheer act of living. Every one of the named characters ended up here through death, literally life's ultimate trauma, but more significantly they are all implied to have suffered a horrible trauma in living that rendered them unable to move on past this purgatory. The tragic backstories we are given lean heavily into melodrama but often touch on central societal issues in Japan: alcoholism, domestic violence, poverty, and the difficulties young people face in finding purpose. Nobody here had lived a completely happy life, and they are fighting against a God they view as unjust for subjecting them to such misery.

Despite the heavy subject matter, this is one of the goofier, funnier shows I've watched. There's an entire episode dedicated to a sort of dungeon crawl, where characters "die" in increasingly silly fashions while attempting to get to the bottom of a hidden area beneath the school. It reminded me a lot of the "get to school on time" episode of Kill La Kill, with all sorts of idiotic traps and tearful goodbye speeches that will mean nothing by the end of the episode. It sits nicely next to other great works in the genre, like Defending Your Life or the seasons of The Good Place that focused more on laughs than grand philosophic gestures.

It is very difficult to balance the tonal landscape of a show like Angel Beats, but the creators did a more than admirable job. I absolutely loved this show, and I still think about its best moments more than a year after I finished the series. It's got a really, really wonderful soundtrack and a refreshing positivity for an anime from an era with lots of clunky downers like Death Note and Code Geass. It's an extremely brisk watch once you get a couple episodes in and have a feel for the tone and pacing, and I highly recommend it. 

My Favorite Things in 2020 (Kelly Lee Owens, Dreamweaver, Denzel Curry x Kenny Beats)

2020 hasn't been a particularly joyful year for most of us, and it certainly has been the worst of my own life, but there has still been an astonishing amount of art to celebrate, particularly in the arenas of gaming and music. So for the rest of the year, hopefully, I will be writing a series on things I enjoyed this year, mostly new music releases but also games and anime series. I will also cover some stuff that didn't actually release this year, but which are new to me for one reason or another. With that out of the way, tonight I'm writing about three fantastic albums from 2020: two electronic albums (one from the UK and the other from Japan), and a short but stellar hip-hop release from my home state of Florida.

It's been more than thirteen years since a teenaged Fleshdog first pressed play on From Here We Go Sublime, but I'll never forget walking through the Plaza of the Americas for Krishna lunch when that classic release by Swedish artist The Field first graced my ears. That minimalist house masterpiece, with its seemingly endless loops going from bare expressions to small parts of a towering whole, endures as one of the best electronic albums of the aughts, and while this album doesn't reach quite the same heights it is undoubtedly worthy of your time. I have not yet listened to her 2017 self-titled LP release, but if it's anything like this year's Inner Song, Kelly Lee Owens is an artist I'll be highly invested in for years to come.

Opening track Arpeggi has a futuristic, spacy chill vibe, especially as the drum breaks kick in during the second half, accompanied by some boopy, wavy UFO sounds. On, with its incomparably sad music video depicting a man's last moments with his dog before he goes off on a ferry to his own death, juxtaposes an upbeat and highly danceable arrangement with enigmatic lyrics about love and loss. Melt! is just a straight to the point club bop, Re-Wild is a slow dreamy vocal track, and Jeanette is the sprawling loop-driven track that most influenced by comparison to The Field. Like Arpeggi, it evokes a futuristic vibe through synths that call to mind Tron but also has some restrained chiptuney elements that come and go. It's probably my favorite track overall, even if it's not as ambitious as some of the other highlights. L.I.N.E. is the most poppy track on the album with hushed lyrics about the pain of vulnerability over a swelling, dreamy tune that reminds me of Chromatics or Purity Ring music from a decade ago. I'll be honest, until I looked it up I had no idea who John Cale is, but his spoken word mutterings on Corner of My Sky make for a cool song to revisit occasionally but a bit of an odd bump on an album that otherwise flows quite neatly from start to finish. Night builds to an absolutely fabulous thudding bass drop that isn't replicated on the album, Flow is another solid instrumental, and closer Wake-Up introduces big strings and a sped-up Donkey Kong Country loop underneath with more dreamy vocals.

The album might benefit from being a bit shorter, with even some of my favorite tracks feeling a touch too long, but it honestly feels like a pretty breezy listen even at fifty-one minutes. If you're talking about this kind of music it feels like the big question is this: if you were entrusted with the aux cable at a cool party, could you put this album on and walk away for a while and not hear any complaints from the crowd? And I think you absolutely could leave Inner Song going without any breaks and only get some questionable glances in the album's final quarter when Corner of My Sky rolls around. If you want to just vibe out this album is a great introduction to this particular style of music, even if it's not the pinnacle.

Japanese artist Dreamweaver's debut LP (EP? it's certainly short enough, but it's apparently an LP) is, curiously, presented in a different order on Spotify than it's intended to be. The second and third tracks have been rearranged, which makes the experience of listening to it slightly different. Opener Between Worlds unmistakably resembles the relaxation music that plays on my meditation app, but then authentic track two 9* (9 degrees) comes on and evokes the cool nighttime air and a fantastical floating night journey. My personal favorite cut on the album comes next, with a much more up-tempo DnB line that sometimes verges into Endtroducing... territory and wobbly, distorted vocals rounding out the fantastic Altered Reality. Dream Home Garden is another slower, mellower track that kind of reminds me of, like, the Nintendo 3DS Home music or something? Not entirely sure but it has that vibe. Hidden by Light appropriately hides a Jungle monster underneath the dreamy synths that dominate the record, FeverDream:raindance is the album's most experimental work and potentially its most grating, but I really love it and its placement right after the lurking but never fully unsheathed aggression of Hidden by Light. Closer Robbie the Rabbit is another chilled out DnB track in the vein of Altered Reality, but it's less interesting and probably my least favorite song overall. If you want something short but sweet, and you like the idea of drum and bass but have never gotten into its traditional sound, this new breed of "atmospheric DnB" might be more your style.

Last but not least, Denzel Curry and Kenny Beats reunited to drop a bizarre short film project as a vehicle for an album that is gone before you know it but lingers on the mind for hours after each listen. I'm not going to bother giving a track-by-track here, because this one is so quick and so unbelievably grimy that it could have wandered out of an early 90s RZA session. It's pretty clear that was the intention from the extremely awesome album art, which calls to mind The GZA's Liquid Swords or Outkast's Atliens. Curry's lyrics are full of witty punchlines but he never resorts to merely settling on these jabs; Pyro in particular includes clever drops for the sort of person who knows Future's real name and still remembers a time when CeeLo was not yet Crazy, but also mixes up rhyme schemes and flows more than once in its sixtyish seconds of lyrics. Take_It_Back_v2 is the song I like the most, probably because it makes me feel like I'm a freshman in college all over again, but this album is so dripping with atmosphere that it really just begs you to rewind and replay the whole thing over and over again. Curry mixes swagger and menace with best of them, and it's incredible to me that even though I've been listening to his music for over eight years he's still only 25 and shows no signs of slowing down or losing his touch. Kenny, meanwhile, is the perfect complement to Curry's style and this project comes together much better than his work with Vince Staples, a similarly talented wunderkind, did. I've always loved Denzel, but if you told me five years ago that I'd be more excited about his future than Vince's, I'd never have believed you.

Anyways, I hope at least one of these three records is new to you (and honestly, if you somehow know obscure Japanese DnB albums you probably don't give a shit what I have to say about music) and that you feel inspired to go find some more new stuff to listen to! And if you have any recommendations, send them my way, because I am always looking for more.

A Place Further than the Universe (Dir. Atsuko Ishizuka, 2018, Studio: Madhouse, Streaming on Crunchyroll)

In the pantheon of things that get a bad rap, Japanese Anime used to be up there with Professional Wrestling as Coolness poison. Like Pro Wrestling, this reputation came as much from its worst excesses and industry grossness as it did from its most visible fans, especially here in America. Lately, like all other things that people wish were nerdy but definitely aren't, Anime has not just crossed over into the mainstream but transformed many of the performers we hear in our speakers, see on our screens, and cheer on in athletic competition. Megan Thee Stallion gets fifty-six thousand likes on a tweet about Naruto and hot young NBA stars wear custom DBZ sneakers in games, yet still there are countless sad sacks posting on the internet about how they can't get a girlfriend because they like anime. But much like Marvel superheroes and first-person shooters before them, Japanese cartoons (especially the ones with lots of fighting) have been swallowed whole by Big Homogeny.

The truth is that anime has more or less always been a diverse medium full of options for any imaginable viewer. There are educational series for babies, filling similar roles to Sesame Street or The Muppets in the U.S.A. There are, yes, thousands of episodes of shounen (lit. 'young boy') action-adventure series like DBZ, One Piece, and Bleach. There are shows about outlaws fighting to save the galaxy and shows about outlaws fighting to pay their bills. Anime topics have covered nearly any sport you can fathom, many genres of music, almost every sort of workplace, and more hobbies than you can shake a dating profile at. Of course, Anime has also covered Anime, with several well-known series that depict life working at an Anime Studio or sharing one's passion at a school Anime Club.

Among all these many paths that the medium has traveled, it can sometimes be difficult to stand out from the crowd. We are seeing that right now, in a market crowded absolutely to the brim with isekai (lit. 'alternative world') series that mostly fail at setting themselves apart from their predecessors and contemporaries. Despite this, we are still seeing the industry create interesting worlds and characters at an astonishing rate, and 2018 was an incredibly good year with many fun new shows and interesting reworkings of old classics. In the former category, many would argue that no series stood out quite like A Place Further than the Universe, a perfect addition to the canon of Cute Girls shows with a heart of gold and pristine polish. A friend who places as this as her favorite show of all-time said she needed a cry break after every episode, a more than valid response that speaks to the emotional weight of a show that intersperses its fluffy comedy with heavy dramatic reflection.

Its story begins with Tamaki, a goofball high schooler whose transition into young adulthood has not gone quite as she hoped. Instead of having purpose, she leads a directionless and bland daily life in a world she has barely explored. Even when she tries to skip school and go on a journey, she fails out of fear of breaking the rules. Her narrow existence reinforces itself, and she struggles to move on. That is, until she meets Shirase, a hardheaded classmate dead set on reaching Antarctica. Shirase seems the polar opposite of Tamaki, disciplined and direct and with little regard for what others think of her. Shirase's mother Takako disappeared on an Antarctic exhibition several years prior, and the daughter has worked every day since with the goal of making it back to that beautiful yet forbidding place. Shirase's persistence sparks Tamaki, reviving in her that thirst for a world beyond her invisible shackles.

Initially cold and distant, Shirase eventually warms to the idea of Tamaki joining her on the trek. Soon thereafter, two more girls join their cause: the bubbly high school dropout Hinata, and the naive child star Yuzuki. The first half of the series circles around the quartet forming their initial bonds, developing their plans to go to Antarctica, and preparing for the journey. You may well be wondering how a group of high school girls going to Antarctica is believable or interesting; both are valid causes for skepticism, but anyone complaining about plausibility in fiction where it relates to plot framework is a joyless simpleton and the early frenetic energy of the girls made me reminisce on plotting tree house escapades in elementary and middle school. The four students each contain multitudes, and their adorable quirks are just as riveting as their deeply-held fears and sorrows.

It's not much of a spoiler to say that the girls eventually succeed in getting their trip to Antarctica, and the voyage there lays the blocks for the crucial dramatic moments that lie in the icy vastness. There's plenty of comedy about seasickness, but the real heart of the show's second act is the budding tension between Shirase and the expedition's Commander Gin, the woman who Takako called her best friend and the last person to see Takako before she vanished. Gin and Shirase share a determination and purpose, but each is unable to fully push aside the wounds in their heart and truly come to terms with their complicated feelings for the other. It's during this build that the show's central themes of grief and mono no aware truly start to shine through.

Without spoiling anything, the show's final few episodes are some of the most moving things I've ever witnessed on a screen, particularly the penultimate episode. The show thoroughly captures both the intense beauty and dull repetition of living at the edge of the possible world with an attention to detail that deserves praise, but it's the unraveling and respooling of each character's very sense of self that makes the conclusion an all-time great. 2018 had a few great series that grappled with how modern technology can affect our lives, but none captured that power quite like this one. Prepare the tissues.

Aesthetically, A Place Further than the Universe doesn't necessarily set itself apart from the crowd all that much. It has pretty typical cute girl character designs, and some of the supporting cast actually looks similar enough that you could reasonably confuse one adult character for another. This isn't a show loaded to the gills with fast action sequences, so the animation is designed to highlight the comedic bits and is never distracting. The illustrations for things like the icebreaker ship and the various parts of the base camp all show a deep affection for the continent and those that travel there. The penguins are also cute. Spoiler Alert: there are no polar bears.

The music is mostly pretty typical, complementary stuff that nicely accommodates the comedy. There's one particularly funny piece of "scary" music that plays during an early comedy scene that I really liked. The opening theme is just average soaring rock music, nothing to write home about in a medium full of absolute classics. The ending is an uplifting poppy bit sung by the four actresses who play the girls. There is, however, one bit of absolutely perfect piece of music to accompany the series' toughest single scene and the ending credits that accompany it. Years from now, fans will still remember those moments in the same way gamers reflect on Aeris' death in Final Fantasy 7 or Konami's total abandonment of the Suikoden franchise (indulge me this once).

No, what sets Place apart from other good and even great slice of life anime series is the broad palette of human emotions that it digs up and lays bare with no sense of irony or cruelty. Each character is struggling with the weight of the past, trying to set a course for a bright and beautiful future yet afraid of the treacherous seas ahead (indulge me again). We all have the capacity to be cruel and cold and thoughtless, not only to others but to ourselves. But we also can be all the best things, to give aid to those in need and to step back when others need their space. We don't always need to forgive, and we can't always simply forget; instead, we must move forward for a better future even when the memories are as bitter as the coldest winds. Let A Place Further than the Universe into your heart, and you may just start to see how.

"Good Time" (Dir. Benny Safdie & Josh Safdie, 2017, Amazon Prime)

A few weeks ago, Aubrey and I sat down and watched two of the short films that the Safdie brothers made in college ("We're Going to the Zoo" and "The Acquaintances of a Lonely John") and we really enjoyed both of them. Each offers tender, warm moments of banality juxtaposed against the harshness of daily living; in one case a hitchhiker orchestrates a dine and dash for the joy of his drivers only to run back inside to secretly pay, and in the other a pair of men who share an apartment building furiously dash to make it through a door the other is holding open. Both films have gas station attendants that you will remember until your last breath. Coming from that base, "Good Time" is tough medicine to swallow, but boy does it do the job.

"Good Time" is a crime thriller slash drama slash descent-into-madness. The complementary film that most easily comes to mind is "Enter the Void," though it trades the Freudian psychodrama and acid-drenched abstraction for fraternal contemplation and acid-drenched reality. It starts with therapy and ends with therapy, and nearly every other one of the films ninety-something minutes is about as far from therapy as it comes, a brutal look at the lives of some perennial fuckups navigating a perennially fucked up world.

Two brothers, one handicapped mentally, the other morally, rob a bank. Connie, the amoral older brother played with gusto by Robert Pattinson, fucks up a good thing and gets his brother Nick (Benny Safdie) into jail. Typical crime drama stuff, but with just an incredible kinetic energy as it moves from long sequences of tight close-ups to bustling and busy chases and prison fights. Nick gets sent to the hospital. Connie hatches a plan to bail his brother out using the stolen money, but comes up short. He manipulates an older woman played by the great Jennifer Jason Leigh into using her mother's credit card, but that doesn't work out either, so he just slinks his way into the hospital and wheels his brother away.

At this point, Safdie more or less vanishes from his own film and finds Pattinson a new partner, the appropriately named Buddy Duress. Buddy plays an ex-convict named Ray, a man who spends his first day out on parole getting drunk, high, and chased by the police before ultimately winding up back in police custody after jumping out of a moving taxi. Connie accidentally rescued Ray from the hospital believing he was Nick, so now the two must work together to foil the lawmen on their tails. There are a few more important details I'm omitting, and I won't spoil the film's gripping final act, but it goes without saying that if you like crime stories this is probably up your alley on narrative alone.

Robert Pattinson gets the most buzz for his performance, and rightfully so. He's given tons of liberty to Act, and Act he does. Connie's sociopathic disregard for everyone around him juxtaposes fantastically with his affinity for dogs. He feints at being a well-meaning older brother and protector, but is unable to accept and love his brother for who he is. He enchants and entrances women young and old alike, charming everyone in sight even as he seethes with ill intent. He is at once both a foolish cad and a cunning operator. Not many actors have the look and grace to make a total piece of shit like Connie believable, but Pattinson is more than up to the task.

My favorite scenes, though are almost all stolen by Duress, especially his madcap recounting of his one day out of jail. If Martin Scorsese were younger, Buddy would be on his way to a long career as a universally-beloved character actor. He's just such a likable goombah, a man of the people despite or perhaps because of his criminal tendencies. We never learn what he was in prison for (though we can certainly make a close guess) or what his life was like outside of a small cadre of his friends, but we feel like we've known him all our lives in his short time on screen. I hope this guy gets to play a big part in Hollywood going forward.

The visuals are kept stylistically tight throughout, with whoever is talking usually doing so in close-up and with a sharp eye for color, contrast, and brightness. The story gradually moves from daytime to night and so to do the interiors smoothly transition from the brightly lit interiors of the hospital and prison to a dark and eerily lit home and an absolutely trippy theme park funhouse. Connie dyes his hair a shocking blonde that looks absolutely fantastic under pink and red neon lighting. There's no use pretending that this isn't a loving homage to the 80s, but it's done with reverence and talent rather than reference and tack. Everything is done with a sense of driving purpose, pushing you into the uncomfortable subjectivity of a man no sensible person would aspire to be.

The score is absolutely fantastic and calls to mind "Drive," another pulse-pounding electronica masterpiece of cinema sound. It perfectly captures the feeling of the walls closing in, of night in New York City, and of the 80s crime cinema it's paying respect to. Even if the film doesn't sound up your alley, I recommend looking up the music. Gucci Chanel makes a brief and hilarious appearance and the ending credits song, written and performed by Iggy Pop channeling his inner Johnny Cash, is fantastic. It accompanies the devatastating credits sequence perfectly.

I'm pushing way past my original intended word count, perhaps because writing about the film has only expanded my love for it, so I'm gonna wrap it up quickly. If you like crime films you'll almost certainly come away with a positive experience in some respect or another. Doubly so if you liked "Drive" or "Enter the Void" or any of the Jean-Pierre Melville's various "crime after the crime" flicks. If you can't handle a protagonist being a bad guy that you're made to inhabit for ninety minutes, grow up or go watch some Disney shit, whatever.

9.5/10

Bong Joon-Ho and "Benevolent Capitalism" in "Okja"

Last week, Aubrey and I sat down to watch "Okja," the newest Bong Joon-Ho transcontinental blockbuster. It's been a few years since I saw "Snowpiercer", but I loved it at the time because it took a concept that was mildly interesting at best and turned it into a suspenseful, dizzying, claustrophobic inspection of justice in a technocrat society. In that film, climate engineers with ostensibly good intentions to save the planet from global warming do the opposite and bring about an ice age that kills nearly all life on the planet. The only remaining civilization exists on a train which hurdles around the Earth in yearly cycles, kept in order by a brutal class division which places the wealthy at the front and in power while the poor eat bugs and cannot rise above their station unless they are taken away as children. So much for subtext. 

"Snowpiercer" works great purely as entertainment because of the power of its stars and its images. Chris Evans gives a pathos-loaded performance as a rebel who has more than his share of regrets. The audience wants him to overcome his hero's journey, but knows that he will never truly win. Tilda Swinton plays a caricature of Evil Incarnate, not some Eichmann-esque flunky but an honest to goodness fairy tale of sadism given flesh. In a film about the banality of much evil, she reminds us that sometimes the world has its Breiviks. Song Kang-Ho, drifting through the film in a drug-addled haze, takes his role as a MacGuffin and gives his character a constant purpose for being there aside from furthering the plot. One of the best scenes in the film goes to Allison Pill (of "Scott Pilgrim" and some other stuff I've never seen) as a cartoonishly charming elementary school teacher, and Ed Harris, as is typical, makes a lasting impression with his small window of opportunity. 

The visuals of the film are even more captivating, and honestly it's hard to use words or even still images to capture just how great some of the sets look. The lower class citizens sleep tightly packed into narrow hallways with minimal comforts, yet the children still find joy in weaving amongst their shabby environs. A bright and colorful school classroom juxtaposes against a black and white propaganda film about the purported savior who built the Snowpiercer. A beautiful sushi restaurant makes you forget for a minute the atrocities and half-truths that are necessary to keep the whole enterprise on the tracks. I don't really think anyone, let alone a hack such as myself, can do justice to the film's visuals; you should just go watch the film.

Beyond its merits as entertainment, "Snowpiercer" works pretty damn well as a rebuke of capitalism. The framing device itself is an assault on contemporary liberal thought. Never mind the fact that there exists some moronic portion of humanity that doesn't even believe in climate change; a real problem lies with many of those who do. It manifests itself in the market-based solutions idolatry that dominates liberal thought, the idea that if we incentivize businesses to use solar power and reusable bags we will correct the course from the Jupiter-sized iceberg that lies ahead. Modern capitalism, driven by constant so-called innovation, glitzy new ways of expressing individuality, and planned obsolescence, creates an unsustainable burden on the Earth regardless of how many electric cars Elon Musk sells. We need more solutions to climate change than simply hoping that science gets us there. And the problems shouldn't fall at the feet of the consumers.

In "Snowpiercer" it eventually is revealed that even greater horrors exist lurking under the surface of an already terrifying enterprise. The young and poor exist merely as pawns and cogs for the elderly and the wealthy, even when they believe they are revolting against that same empire. Only by blowing up the whole damn thing can we begin to work towards a future that might not sustain on oppression alone. It's not particularly difficult to discern that Bong sees this struggle against a near-apocalyptic future as a globalist concern, not merely one limited to the wealthy nations that collaborated on his project. In "Okja," he revisits the concept of the need for a globalist anti-capital solution with what is inarguably a more horrifying setting: the world we live in today.

The story of "Okja" expressed simply is that a megacorporation has developed a "superpig" for wide-scale production and wrapped that inevitable slaughter and devastation in a blanket of "benevolent capitalism." The new CEO of the company (Tilda Swinton, again) promises the world a show of just how wonderful and environmentally friendly these pigs are in the form of a worldwide pig farming contest. A young Korean girl named Mija does not know what is in store for her pig friend Okja, and a group of animal activists with their heads mostly in the right place sets out to save Okja and expose Swinton's company, though not necessarily in that order.

Like "Snowpiercer," "Okja" is just a fun film to watch in spite of its often-grim outlook on the world. The effects used to animate Okja are amazing, and the relationship between the strong-headed Mija and her porcine friend feels more real than anything Christopher Nolan has tried in the last decade. Paul Dano is excellent as the earnest to a fault leader of the activists, equal parts bright-eyed hero and dangerous revolutionary. Swinton is a caricature, again, except that we live in a world where Peter Thiel gets blood infusions to live longer and the President has a doctor who tells him that exercise depletes your lifetime's supply of energy. The film bristles with humor and even triumphant joy, such as Okja's brilliant escapades inside a crowded shopping mall. "Okja" is the kind of movie that could be enjoyed by just about anyone if it weren't so uncompromising in its message.

"Okja" starts off with a ten-year flashback inside the blood-stained walls of a family factory, purportedly a relic of the company's cruel history which Swinton claims she will do away with. In its place will be a benevolent form of big business, one which seeks to exist in harmony with the environment and lead the way to a healthier future for all. This is, of course, a sham, though we only discover the intricacies of the cover-up as the trials mount for the protagonists. I'm not going to spoil the film too much more, because I really want people to watch it and I know how squeamish some folks get about knowing spoilers, but there are a few individual bits I want to talk about. 

First, there's Jake Gyllenhaal as an animal-loving TV personality whose fames and fortunes have slipped in the interval since the contest was first announced. His performance has been criticized in some reviews I've seen, but I liked how the character represents the evil that comes with selling out one's passions to remain relevant. It feels akin to how the media covered Trump, not only during the Presidential race but in the years leading up to it, selling out on honest news to make a fortune printing papers full of audacious Birther claims that only a total dunce would believe. Johnny Wilcox really did love animals, but he loved himself and his lifestyle too much to do the right thing, over and over again until he was arguably even more of a monster than his masters. 

Then there's Giancarlo Esposito, a conniving corporate executive who wants to swap one evil for another. He's basically all the "never Trump" Republicans, preferring the cold and calculating evil of mainstream corporatism to the eccentric, Jobsian ways of his current boss. He's not really some brilliant mastermind; he's just an opportunist who has stuck his thumb out to the wind and determined which way the world is blowing. Why bother pretending to be good when you already have enough power to get away with being bad?

My favorite character, though, has the most minor of parts in the film. He's just a delivery driver, pretty much the lowest of the low on the corporate pyramid. Tasked by his bosses with an extremely important mission, he first shrugs, then rolls his eyes, and finally gives a glorious middle-finger to an establishment that expects everything of him and pays almost nothing in return. Bong takes this inconspicuous job that could be played in just about any typical way and turns it into one of the film's strongest, most relevant political statements: it is not labor that owes capital gratitude, but the other way around. That the actor gets multiple laughs out of his few minutes on screen is just a bonus.

Ultimately, "Okja" is not a film that will leave you feeling very comfortable about your place in the world. If you eat meat without guilt, you will probably still feel affected by the touching microdrama of this one specific girl and her one specific pig. If you are vegetarian, or vegan, and especially if you are an activist, you might feel crushed by the sacrifices that are made, the troops that are lost in the war for righteousness. If you think the world was doing pretty well before Trump came along, and we're only four years removed from going back to the good old days, well, they made this one while Obama was president. 

"Okja" is a Netflix-exclusive big-budget star-studded film, an odd starting point for a film that is so clearly opposed to the accumulation of vast quantities of wealth in the hands of a small elite class. It's impossible to distance the product from its producers, but it's also important to remember that what ultimately speaks is the work itself, not those who put their hands on it. "Okja" is an anti-blockbuster blockbuster, a nightmare for those who believe capitalism will turn around any day now, a strong denouncement of the current order. Go watch it.

Moving In, Making Friends

I live in Wakayama prefecture, on the southern part of Japan's main island. To put it lightly, Wakayama leans much closer to the "stately natural beauty" image you might have of Japan than to the "flashing neon futuropolis" part of the spectrum. On the very low end of the country for population with only one city above 100,000 people, Wakayama has much more to offer for the woodsperson than the weebperson. You will not see many giant arcades (a single Round One in the capital city) or any 7-11s (the superior conbini in the minds of all right-thinking individuals). Instead, Wakayama offers gorgeous mountain trails, luscious views of the sky, and seemingly infinite vasts of rice paddies and other agricultural domains.

After training had finished, I took the Limited Express train, the Kuroshio, to Kii-Tanabe Station. The Kuroshio is not like riding the Shinkansen at all; you have to be extremely lucky to get a seat with a power outlet, and despite its status as an express train it doesn't exactly make for a short journey. Travelling the full length of the Kuroshio's route would take considerably longer than riding the Shinkansen between Osaka and Tokyo. From the middle of Osaka to Kii-Tanabe takes about two and a half hours. As the cars went past Wakayama City, the prefectural capital, I pondered how frequently I would be visiting this decaying metropolis to play music games. As they passed the Gobos and Kainans of the ken, I started pondering if I'd die of loneliness before I had the chance to return north. Finally, I arrived at the station, walked off the train, and began my true Japanese residential experience.

My apartment wasn't ready for move-in that night, so I had to stay in a hotel room provided by my company. I started following the roundabout directions to the hotel that my employer had printed for me off Google Maps, first walking left along a small road, heading past a pachinko parlor and some barbershops and restaurants. The road bent to the right, and at some point I felt like I was basically making a big circle, when suddenly I stumbled across a classically styled Shinto shrine and some sort of festival. There was a a small costumed cutesy samurai character, and little kids were having their picture taken with the mascot. I peeked at some of the small vendors before heading back along the route I had been given, and when I arrived at my hotel a few minutes later I realized that the ambitious route Google had plotted could've been avoided by simply walking out of the station in a straight line for three minutes.

It was a very small hotel room, but comfortable enough, and anyways I had more important things to do than sit around using mediocre free Wifi. I needed to know where the arcade was. Google Maps informed me of not one but two arcades in the city of Tanabe, so I walked to the one that was closest. When I got to the "arcade", I was looking at a Daiei supermarket. I walked inside, and saw nothing resembling an arcade. There was a grocery store, of course, but also a small food court (well, one fast food joint and some tables), a massage parlor (?), a book store, a shoe store, and a cell phone store. I took the escalator to the second floor and saw a hyaku-en store (a dollar store, essentially) and a department store with everything from clothes to dog food, but still no arcade. On the third floor, there was a cafe and a music shop, and I thought that was all, so I left disheartened. Walking back towards my hotel, I settled on a fancy looking restaurant with a nice looking selection of sushi.

In the morning, my apartment manager picked me up from the hotel and took me to the "apaman shop" for a debriefing. After signing some papers and getting my keys, we drove to my landlord's place to say hello to her and then to my apartment in Kamitonda. Kamitonda (basically "upper abundant rice field") is a small farming town, wedged between Tanabe's vaguely metropolitan aesthetics and the decaying yet still tourist-friendly beach resort of Shirahama. Kamitonda spans a fairly wide range of turf, but my apartment is about a five minute walk from our only train station, in the neighborhood of Asso. I live in a small yet comfortable studio apartment on the third floor of a three-story "mansion", the outside of which was swarming with spiders and their webs for most of the spring and summer months.

My apartment manager was preposterously friendly from the outset, and I regret not spending more time with him. He is from Gobo, a good many stations away, yet committed himself to driving me around town so that I could buy a rice cooker and begin the process of setting up internet for my apartment. When the store didn't have my rice cooker in stock, he agreed to pick it up for me at a later date after he got done with work. On the night he brought my rice cooker, he also brought over a large bag of rice from his father's farm as a gift. A month later, after weeks of harassing the ISP to come, he sat with them and patiently installed the internet while I was at work, then cleaned my apartment for me after I had to leave while the finishing touches were applied on my router. This sort of generosity and devotion to good service isn't entirely uncommon in Japan, but he took it to another level and has been a great friend.

The next morning, I went to the town hall and registered my address, then set up my bank account through Japan Post. Although it seems inevitable that I would've eventually befriended my fellow local gaijin, the trip to the town hall expedited the process significantly. The only person who spoke enough English to help me through the process of registering first introduced me to a man named Yasuo ("a very strange name you might not know," she said, as I pulled up a picture of the LoL champion on my phone) and then gave me the LINE ID of my fellow Kamitonda ALT, an Australian named Ben. After some initial discomfort, I got up the courage to message Ben, and he invited me to dinner with another teacher named Peter. As it turns out, Peter is a fellow Floridian and went to FSU with my friends David and Hudson, and this first night hanging out snowballed into meeting the whole gaggle of local JETs.

After having my most important adulting matters solved, I set to work on buying a clothesline to hang my laundry. This gave me the opportunity to walk past all of my schools, as it seemed the closest place to find such a thing was a store called Konan, pretty much our local Home Depot. Konan is about an hour's walk from my apartment, and walking back with a giant metal pole in one hand and a small shelving unit in the other made me reconsider buying a bicycle. I eventually did buy a bicycle, and after riding it about three times some asshole locked my bike and I have no idea where the key is.

Before losing use of the bike, I did manage to haul my ass to THE BIG U a handful of times. Located near the really great Kii-Shinjo park, THE BIG U is a branch of Wakayama University (I guess) with a library and some classrooms and cafes. Most importantly, THE BIG U is a source of free Wi-Fi, so before I had my internet installed I would go there to Skype friends, play games, watch YouTube, etc. THE BIG U is shaped in a BIG U and it's pretty cool, I guess. One day I walked all the way to Shirahama from THE BIG U and did some sightseeing. Along the way I passed a family having a BBQ on their front lawn. They were grilling meats and veggies and having some beers, and asked me to join them. After a few minutes, they offered me the chance to drink some of their homemade umeshu, plum wine, which I greatly enjoyed. Leaving their company, I was no longer afraid of a lonely future. Language barriers could not keep me from achieving happiness.