Seven Samurai (4K Restoration, in theaters) - real good movie! Had only seen it once a decade ago at a friend’s place, the restoration looks incredible. It had been long enough that I had forgotten who lives and who dies, other than Mifune’s character and Gambei. Kind of a bummer that all the coolest ones die. I like that they don’t make the introduction of muskets too heavy-handed in the dialogue, it’s enough to have the purest swordsman killed by a musket, and hurl his sword as he dies, to tell you that this way of life is on the way out. I love all the physical details, Gambei never getting used to having shaved his head, Mifune constantly scratching his lice, etc. The last shot of Mifune, face down, the rain washing the mud off his legs, is just breathtaking.

Local Legends (2013, theater screening) - is this autofiction? An extremely low-budget film by Matt Farley about his creative life, which is dominated by recording novelty songs, often about poop, which get searched for enough on streaming services to allow him to make a decent living. I think he’s up to around 25000 songs at this point - he almost certainly has a song with your name or your hometown in the title. The movie documents him recording these songs, talking with a personification of his Businessman side, and reflecting on his desire to make genuinely compelling creative art, but recognizing that churning out novelty songs is what pays the bills (and allows him to make a movie basically every year). Contains some truly painful stand-up comedy.

Local Legends: Bloodbath (2024, West Coast premiere!) - follow-up to the previous movie, which inverts its cheerful, optimistic outlook on creative projects that almost no one appreciates now that Farley has a minor cult following. In this one, all his previously supportive friends and family secretly hate him, have no time to work with him, are fucking his wife, etc, and his Businessman persona decides to brutally eliminate all these distractions. Very funny, I’ve been meaning to call him to tell him I enjoyed it (he repeatedly includes his phone number in the movies).

Performance (1970) - rewatched this with my gf, I think she liked it. I don’t think people rank this all that highly in terms of Roeg’s films but it’s got a hypnotic quality that makes me happy to watch it over and over again. Having watched Freejack last year I gotta say Mick Jagger’s acting really declined with age. I wish there was more time given to Chas’s mushroom-aided transformation, there’s so little time to explore the gender ideas or the ‘merger,’ maybe it could have cut a little bit of Chas-as-gangster from the beginning. Still great though, I just want to hang out in Turner’s house forever. Michele Breton looks incredible in that gold outfit with the green scarf.

The Sacred Spirit (2021) - judging by the Blu-ray art I thought this was going to be a bit different than it was. Spanish dark comedy about a UFO cult in a town with mysterious connections to the recent disappearance of a young girl. Very well cast, lots of effective scenes of the everyday economic malaise that makes people look for something more incredible. I’m not totally sure if the ending fully works but it’s worth seeing.

Book - The Gate of Angels, by Penelope Fitzgerald - Feels a little like a Tom Stoppard play but less ostentatious about its clever ideas. Set in a fictional Cambridge-adjacent college in 1912, as ideas of body vs spirit, development of atomic theory, etc, are being debated, and a young fellow gets in a bike accident with a recently fired teenage nurse. They end up recuperating in bed together thanks to a good samaritan’s misunderstanding, and he falls hopelessly in love with her instantly. Very charming and deftly written, feels like there’s a ton happening under the surface but doesn’t feel underdeveloped. I recommend it!