Haven't updated since May, ugh

I haven’t updated this in several months! It’s a bad habit to let this blog lie fallow. I should read more and write more.

Well, I’m going to try to update more regularly, now that I’m back from a 2 ½ week trip to Europe. What can I say? It was good to see family. Ate a lot of Western European sweets that put Taiwan to shame. We spent several days in Paris and nobody was rude to us -- it seems we missed out on a classic cultural experience. For the record, Marseille is a delightful, underrated city. And if you’re going to see immensely popular European tourist attractions, buy your tickets ahead of time whenever humanly possible.

Flying long-haul airlines is a good time to see movies. On the way to France I saw:

Toy Story 4: I like Pixar. I’ve never disliked a Pixar movie (bear in mind I’ve never seen any of the Cars movies). Oddly enough, I’ve never seen the very first Toy Story, a weird omission that I’ll have to rectify at some point. I’ve never really had an emotional connection to the Toy Story series, so I feel unqualified to say if it’s a good thing that they keep making movies after Toy Story 3 seemed to provide a definitive and satisfying end. But I can say that Toy Story 4 is quality entertainment and is as inventive as I would expect from any Pixar film.

Rocketman: An enjoyable look at Elton John’s music, though to be honest if you strip away the music and costumes there’s not much here. Actually, that’s a silly thing to say. The music and the costumes are the whole reason to watch.

Vice: I was curious about the oddball casting, especially Steve Carrell as Donald Rumsfeld, which kinda works if you accept he’s creating a new character rather than impersonating a real person. Overall though, although Vice has a few genuinely clever bits, it also has a lot of sarcastic snark that thinks it’s more clever than it actually is. A sober look at the Late Ante-Trump Era of the Republican Party could make for an interesting movie; whatever Vice is, it is not sober.

And on the way back I watched:

Amélie: I saw this one on the way home from Paris, feeling that I may as well watch it as it’s a well-known film, it hadn’t crossed my path before, and I’d just been in Paris. My verdict? I see what they were aiming at, but it wasn’t really to my taste. But allow me this one flight of fancy. Upon arriving in Paris I had managed to immediately lose my wallet (long story short, I’m an idiot). No one ever found it; it might as well have vanished into thin air. Watching Amélie, it suddenly occurred to me: Amélie is a real person, she found my wallet, and she was taking her time trying to think of the most whimsical, quirky way she could return it to me! Well, screw you, Amélie, I just wanted my wallet back.

Stan & Ollie: Having seen a bunch of Laurel and Hardy’s films as a kid, I was suitably primed for this film about L&H’s attempts to revive their career in the 1950s. As with all films of this type, great liberties have been taken with the real-life chronology, but the main thing most viewers will remember will be the acting by Steve Coogan and John C. Reily. The two actors, especially Reilly, do a superb job channeling L&H -- it’s an astonishing oversight that neither one received an Academy Award nomination. This is a low-key, understated film produced by people with an affection for a bygone era of show business.

As I said, now that I am back in Taiwan I shall try to post things more semi-regularly...