Barter Economy

My favorite foreign release is Tampopo, and if I torture myself into buying the DVD and then selling it back, or Amazon gets the instant viewing rights, or in longer odds, it plays on my broadcast channels, it is ripe for dissection, however much I might wish for a photogenic memory, this is not one of my gifts. Culling the vignettes I can recall is not entirely satisfactory, though it might startle some of you that a film like this gives me a rare light-hearted delight, a sense of resolution that allows me to hold out, surviving gravel lungs and all, inclusive of supporting the Japanese if they harbor any future hope of continuing to humiliate China. If the boys of WW2 had played their cards with more acumen, Mao might not have ever had the opportunity to lay the mainland to waste.

Let me roll back a prior hostility slightly: Douglas's A Solitary Man turned out to be a wicked enjoyment, a rare moment when I could set aside my antagonism toward the actor and relish his deconstructions. This film is a subtle amalgam: a more incisive war of the Roses absent the poignant finality, an inside commentary on long winding A list twilight, and a softer, if still edgy, Falling Down, which I've mentioned is Michael as the anti-hero that I liked; but Falling Down slams the brakes and winds itself up in law and order moiety. A Solitary Man refuses this safety catch, and is stronger for it, such that may lend itself to future use.

I should not be posting, but my lungs have nearly reset, and depending on how much I catch up, we'll return to The Brothers Rico shortly. Off to bed.

Down Time Binaries

Some philosophers believe the key to solving certain age old metaphysical problems is to embrace contradiction, but I haven't been able to resolve that I can enter into empathy with the father, who is able to draw me in to the hard flint of his psyche, while the son keeps me on the outside, pushing me away with a visceral animosity, the 1993 Falling Down being a notable exception.

Kirk Douglas exudes certain qualities in the best of his 20th century work, qualities that offer a subtle exchange on mind/body vulnerability, that can be exemplified by his black and white films like The Juggler 1953. His game theory with Jewish identity and diasporia doesn't always reach the depth of later Hollywood and foreign film Holocaust revisionism, and I only touched on it briefly in earlier posts, but he is certainly more successful with it at times than Paul Newman, and you may consider this a working outline, to which I shall add, as carefully as the late Christopher Hitchens, that I am critical of Jewish exceptionalism that seemingly makes the modern state of Israel a necessity.