I loved Sorry to Bother You, so I was hoping I'd love this one, too. There's a lot of great stuff in here: wonderful production design, lots of laugh-out loud moments, and I admire (fuzzily) it's fuzzy Marxist (or pseudo-anarchist?) politics. But for my taste, there was too much explanation of its theories and yet, at the same time, not enough (I still don't understand deconstruction mode on the space portal thingamabob or how LaKeith Stanfield's pussy-eating vampire is related…

This one's pretty great. It's centered on a group of orphaned boys after the war. The boys latch on to a few adults. But the adults, too, are orphaned in their own ways. Such is the nature of postwar Japan. The kids learn early on the basic premise of the adult world: if you want to eat, you must work. So they work in salt fields, lumber yards. Then they travel in order to find more work. As with Mr.…

I finished watching the second half of this movie for the third class in a row this morning. My students at Tisch today were angry, ashen. What could I say to them? In the 8am class, I was in tears throughout a lot of the film. Every time Sarah Jane or her mother spoke I had to choke back a gasp. The funeral was more moving than anytime I’d ever experienced it. But in this screening, my usual ironic antagonism…