Quentin's Weeknotes 1/22/23-1/28/23
This Week:
- My parents were visiting, which was a wonderful second Christmas. It was also a wonderful second birthday for my daughter, who had a cracking good birthday party at local institution Noah’s World. It’s been a good week to be surrounded by family.
- I continued to help get our Micronesia exhibit up on the walls.
- I did some more collections research work.
- I mostly watch movies in small chunks, when I have a few minutes. This week, I finished watching two movies. The first was “Computer Chess”, a strange love-letter to early computer culture, about a computer chess tournament and the colorful and unusual people who attend it. It was filmed with a very poor quality video aesthetic that added to the surreal mood of time-travel that it created.
- The second movie I finished was “Cure”, a late 90s ancestor of modern J-Horror, directed by Kurosawa (but not the one you’re thinking of). It’s a dark supernatural police procedural about a series of grisly murders, committed by random individuals who both admit the murder and also have no sense or reason for doing so. They are, in turn, all connected to a strange and anonymous man who may have amnesia, but may also have a hypnotic power to manipulate anyone he meets. It was a brilliant and shocking film, with a strong social criticism about mental illness, lonliness, and fate.
- Continuing our Criterion Channel streak, my wife and I watched Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” which was funny and exciting. As my wife said, despite being almost 90 years old, if feels very modern and fresh. Plus, movies on trains are awesome.
