Tag: review
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EIGASAI 2023
The Japan Foundation’s Japanese Film Festival has been a highlight of my annual viewing experience for a few years now. This is, after all, the festival that introduced me to long running favorites like If Cats Disappeared From The World (2016, dir. Akira Nagai) and Anthem of the Heart (2015, dir. Tatsuyuki Nagai), along with…
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To Be Bourgeois and In Love
This week I discovered the “Screen Time” feature on my Apple devices, which not only tracks how long I use the devices themselves and the individual apps therein, but also allows me to set certain rules and limitations as to their usage. Let me tell you, what a confirmation it was to see the number…
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READING: Sequoia Nagamatsu’s Unflinching Study of Mortality
It’s happening. I’m taking book recommendations from TikTok. To be fair, TikTok has a vibrant community of readers, writers, and booksellers, all posting under the #booktok tag. It feels almost reminiscent of 2010’s era Tumblr, when people would write reviews and headcanons of Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Sherlock Holmes. Except now there’s the earworm-y…
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Laundry and Taxes
The fiancée and I had a fun little discussion before watching this film about the possible reasons as to why there’s been this sudden revival in interest towards the idea of a multiverse. Is it just COVID? Is this the collective delirium of an overburdened society taking comfort in the idea of a parallel universe…
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The Trappings of Wealth
I cannot care less about wealthy people. Which is probably why I’ve put off seeing Succession until only recently. I’ve heard great stuff about it. I am constantly exposed to media (for instance, the Tiny Meat Gang podcast hosted by Youtube comedians Noel Miller and Cody Ko) by people who are in awe of it.…
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Don Quixote, Japanese Mobsters
Every time I sit down to watch a movie, I am reminded of how much Youtube and Tiktok have absolutely trashed my attention span. All the hard work I’d put in during college reading long winded classics and watching marathons of the likes of The Godfather put to waste. Now I can’t even follow half…
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Ebbs of Nostalgia
I am a sucker for movies about loneliness, especially when that loneliness is set against the backdrop of the looming metropolis. This is probably a result of my having grown up on the novels of Bret Easton Ellis and and Jay MacInerney, paired with the cinema of Wong Kar Wai and Lino Brocka. It’s an…
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Chasing Shadows, Looming Doom
It occurred to me recently that my entertainment of late has been largely defined by the cultural outputs of (beside the United States, which naturally dominates the online space) South Korea and Japan. And I’m not just talking about IZ*One. If I’m not at M’s place in Las Pinas, blasting the full discographies of our…
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February 2021 in Reading: Going Back to Print
February did not open well for me. Late in January I was introduced, through a Youtube video by Wisecrack on the philosophy behind The Office probably the one TV show I can claim to absolutely love (other than Community, that is), to David Graeber’s book, Bullshit Jobs. My interest piqued, I got a hold of the…
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January 2021 In Books: Women, Men, and Money Problems
As we were all expecting, 2021 is turning out to be the overhyped sequel to 2020. The virus is still a reality for most countries, and here in the Philippines the vaccines are finally available – but not quite yet, though at the very least they have distributed the forms. Indefinitely I am still stuck…
Dominic Dayta 