December Film Roundup

Samurai Shifters (2019): Like Shall We Dance? I’ve been looking for this one for a while ever since I missed it at the 2019 Japan Cuts festival. Finally got a chance to see it and… it’s all right. A fun and goofy take on a samurai flick, mixed with too much overt sentimentality for my taste. The Perfect Furlough (1958): Dames, dames, dames! Who doesn’t love ‘em? The boys up at the Arctic research station sure do, especially that hot tamale they’ve discovered crashed in an ancient alien spacecraft. Va-va-voom! … Wait, I’ve gotten this movie mixed up with The Thing (1982). Anyway, dames. This movie’s got ‘em, and it’s even a bit wholesome in a comedically sexist 1958 way, since Tony Curtis is lusting after his real-life wife. But even as the actors on screen went through their shenanigans and mixups that could have been avoided with some basic communication, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Arctic research station and the stir-crazy flyboys we see in the first part of the movie. Even if you don’t go full The Thing , there’s got to be a more interesting movie there. Hundreds of Beavers (2022): Saw it on the big screen at IFC and in doing so discovered that Hundreds of Beavers is on its way to becoming a Rocky Horror-type cult film. Well-deserved, I say. It’s always fun to be in a theater full of people who can’t stop laughing. In my original #💯🦫 review I complained that the first 30 minutes of the film are “an aimless mess of laughs” and that’s true if you haven’t seen the movie before—i.e. it’s still basically true. But this time I can see the aim: the first 30 minutes are the movie’s tutorial. Sort of like in What’s Up, Doc? the first act is there to show you that this movie operates by Looney Tunes cartoon logic. That’s why you have rabbits at the start of the movie even though they don’t play a big role later on: rabbits are the tutorial animal. I’m pointing today’s Television Spotlight on Pluribus , the beautiful and depressing show where they give Vince Gilligan Apple TV money. I recommend Pluribus , but having completed the first season, I think you can wait a while to get into it. It goes at its own rate, and the two-year-or-longer wait while they write and film the second season is really messing up the pacing. This month Sumana and I also watched the 2002 PBS reality miniseries Frontier House , and had a good time watching people put up log cabins and mow hay. Pretty interesting to watch people from the dial-up era talk about getting away from the distractions of modern life. It was ever thus, I guess.