Happy Thursday, everyone! I'm buried in work today so these are going to be shorter entries but I have a good amount to talk about.
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Someone at Criterion has a real love for Japanese cinema and samurai/ronin pictures. Director Hideo Gosha is someone I'm less than familiar with but I think maybe this weekend I'll dig into both Three Outlaw Samurai and the other one I own, Sword of the Beast, both of which appear to be about outlaw samurais, so it might be interesting to compare and contrast on the different movies.
I always love how Japanese trailers of the time open with these big blasts of music over the studio trailer. Three Outlaw Samurai is currently only on the Criterion Channel for streaming.
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We're members of the completely excellent Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, but sadly I missed their recent exhibition on The Guitar In American Art. But I did pick up this book about the exhibition and even flipping through it, I can see this was a well-done exhibition, not only talking about the art but also how important the guitar is in American history, in pop history, in civil rights and so on. Also, the author obviously knows his stuff when it comes to playing guitar and talks about specific chords in specific pieces and how work in them.
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Yes, he was a horrible racist. No, even for his time he was a racist. I would never dismiss those who think we can just let him go and not go back to him. But I till think he's a cornerstone of fantastic fiction in the USA and still worth reading. But yeah, horrible racist.
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Is it over 9 hours long of interviews and footage of the camps as they are now? (There is infamously not one piece of archive footage in this movie.) Absolutely. Is this essential viewing, even if you have to split it up over a few days? Absolutely. I'm going to quote Ebert on this one, because his review of Shoah in 1985 it nails it. (CW for that review, it talks about a lot of specific details of the Holocaust.)
For more than nine hours I sat and watched a film named "Shoah," and when it was over, I sat for a while longer and simply stared into space, trying to understand my emotions. I had seen a memory of the most debased chapter in human history. But I had also seen a film that affirmed life so passionately that I did not know where to turn with my confused feelings. There is no proper response to this film. It is an enormous fact, a 550-minute howl of pain and anger in the face of genocide. It is one of the noblest films ever made.
Shoah is streaming on AMC+, of all places.
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On to something much more pleasant! I'm a huge fan of the work of both Skottie Young and Humberto Ramos; Young is both a writer and artist and Ramos has a particular skinny-people-action style that really works for Spider-Man, but this combo of their work, where Doctor Strange has opened an academy for young magic users in New Orleans (of course) is a damn good use of both their talents. It's a little goofy of your standard "disparate kids getting to know each other at a boarding school" with also Marvel's use of magic (there's some deep cuts here as to who the faculty is). Strange Academy is a ton of fun.
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Finally this week, I'm a sucker for alternative history work and this collection of "what if the other guy had won?" works about Presidential elections in the US has some very interesting stuff. The "what if RFK had survived to the 1968 convention but died there" is genuinely chilling. The final entry, where Dukakis learns about all the aliens that have been working with the US, is one of the goofiest pieces of science fiction I've read in quite a while.
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My recommendation for this week is, like everyone else on Film Twitter, make the effort to see Past Lives. Did you like the Before series? How about the 2007 movie Once? Get thee to a theater and see this. It's my best of the year so far and a stunning feature debut for Celine Song.
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