WISDOM OF THE SAGES
EPISODE II: WINTER 2022
Hello People of the World;
Boy, these are getting later and later. I write and take notes but things are just so strange right now. I started this to keep writing about mundane things. I gave myself a deadline every month to help me maintain this web log. So, here I am completing this writing of the February Episode in March. I will most likely be late again for this month.
As always: Stay safe. Stay home.
All right, let’s get going:
1:[ This virus really showed how equal we all really are: how we are all easily distracted by the media.
2:[ Saw “The Godfather” once again. It is doing a 50th Anniversary run in theaters. Bonn and I braved the outside worlds to catch it. Who doesn't know the story of Mario Puzo's "The Godfather", Coppola's treatise on the American Dream. I loathe seeing the YouTube reactors cheer on Michael, calling him badass, when you are supposed to lament his fall. This is why Vito turned down the Turk, to allow Michael a clean slate to being the legitimate player in the game.
Seeing this, we see how much more corrupt the world is in the subsequent films. The higher the level of "legitimacy", the more corrupt it is; ie: GF - "Business" corruption, GF2 - "Government" corruption, GF.C - "Religious" corruption. So you see, Michael never stood a chance. You should be sad for that, not cheering on his murders. My two-cents.
Also, since Char pointed this out, I cannot un-see the foreshadowing of Luca Brasi when we see him enter the Tattaglia bar. Cool.
3:[ My next writing projects under various pen names will be a series of books:
"I saw it on TV" by That One Guy
"It Has a Blue Cover" by Someone
"It's About World War Two" by That Guy Who Writes About That
"I Can't Remember the Title" by That Actor Who Did That Show
They will all have blue covers.
4:[ Bonnie and I came up with a fanfic crossover that could appeal to all ages: Kolchak: Pokemon Hunter
5:[ Why I think “Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse” is the best Spider-man movie: Coming on shift at the movie theater I worked when this movie opened, a screening had just got out and a ton of little brown and black kids came rushing out doing the Spider-man hands. One Latino boy, about 6, super excited said out loud to his dad, "Dad, I can wear the mask!" That alone showed me the importance of this film.
6:[ Been catching up on my Mikio Naruse films. I have heard the name in the same circles as Kurosawa and Ozu, and he delves into the same territory as Ozu a lot. But I have come to appreciate how he depicts women in his films. More so than Ozu, he strives show form well-rounded people in his women characters.
The films film of his I watched was “Scattered Clouds”, considered his final film. It had some actors I was familiar with due to my Ozu watching. I find that there are similarities between the two. Camera angles and topics and themes. Yet,
7:[ Speaking of Janpanese films, I have been tracking the movies I watch via Letterboxd and 50% of the films I have seen so far this year (end of Feb.) have been Japanese films. This stretches from my discovery of Niruse, to the films of Itami, to the early work of Setsuko Hara and the ouvre of Hideko Takemine.
8:[ We cannot go back to “Normal” all after this: with all of the dropping of mask mandates, we are only stretching out this pandemic into a endemic and giving credence to our willful ignorance of the facts….
9:[ I saw the Best Movie of 2022 already: “Rustic Oracle”.
10:[ People care more about the accurate representation of video game hedgehogs than Native American people.
That is it for this month.
I’ll probably be late again with the March 2022 Episode. But I am working to keep this up, even if no one reads it. It may be my own little time capsules come ten years from now. I can actually look back that far now. Maybe I will begin posting partials from past blogs. Stay tuned.
As always, I invite you to comment, correct, or contradict anything I write here. I am open to a critical debate. Thanks for taking the time to check out what I write here and I will see you in a month.
Until next time, remember “I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control everything really are.”
2022 Ernest M Whiteman III
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