Happy Lunar New Year, everyone! Good luck from dragon fire breathed into your lives with excitement and creativity!
2024 is the Year of the Wood Dragon. It is particularly a favorable time for change, growth, and progress. The combination of the dragon’s dynamic energy and the grounding and stabilizing influence of the wood element will inspire imagination, leadership, and the creation of new ideas. In general, the dragon is a harbinger of great fortune, yet unpredictable, regardless of what type of Dragon year we are in. Its mystery is never...
My Top 12 Movies and Series for 2023
While we are all going into our fourth year of Covid, many of us craved new content to watch, and felt like there weren’t as many good movies and series to choose from. Certainly, the screenwriters’ strike contributed to the dearth of content. Well, this year I still have twelve to recommend. Some are less well-known and under-the-radar. Also, there seemed to be more selections from DEI producers and writers, for a welcomed change!
Here are the reviews I wrote this past year with the criteria that they were available online. Of the 48 reviews I posted...
Hunger (2023)–Parasite Anyone?
This Thai thriller features a beautiful young woman, Aoy, and a terrifying megalomaniac celebrity chef Paul. Aoy stir-fries noodles in her family’s noodle shop as a fast-food cook alongside her brother and her parents. In contrast, Chef Paul berates his staff mercilessly. In an upscale restaurant environment, Chef Paul is a culinary darling among the very wealthy.
Invited to join Chef Paul, the perfectionist, Aoy is thrilled at the opportunity. Hunger soon reveals sadism and disturbing egomania in the rarified and unsavory restaurant industry. But the young noodle-fryer refuses...
Fauda–Crisis after Crisis
Based upon their experiences serving in the Israel Defense Force (IDF), Lior Raz (who also stars as Doron) and Avi Issacharoff have developed a Netflix international sensation, Fauda. Produced from 2015 through 2022 as a four season series, each season features a Palestinian terrorist or terrorist cell that IDF sets out to eliminate . Fauda seems to rip from today’s headlines the bloodshed between Israel and Gaza.
The main character, Doron, is a rogue: even the IDF cannot control his actions in every battle mission he is ordered to...
Living–A Life Worth Remembering
Inspired by the Japanese cinematic masterpiece “Ikiru” (“to live”) by Akira Kurosawa, Living is set in a post-war 1950s London office, the Department of Public Works, responsible for issuing building permits.
In a stultifying, paper-shuffling bureaucratic agency, septuagenarian Williams (Bill Nighy in his 2023 Academy Award nominated role) manages a crowded office crammed with young civil servants. They are terrified of the old geezer, whom they have nicknamed “Zombie” for his lack of apparent emotion and his robotic demand for propriety at all times.
Williams...
Stranger (Season 1)–Let the sleuthing begin
Stranger is a Korean crime thriller in two seasons (2017-2020) and was included on the New York Times 2017 list of Best TV Shows.
Prosecutor Hwang Si-mok (Cho Seung-woo) underwent surgery as a child removing part of his cerebral cortex so that he would not suffer from the excruciating pain of hearing high-frequency sounds. However, the postoperative result was an extreme absence of empathy, a lack of social skills similar to autism spectrum disorder and its associated lack of communication, difficulty in expressing emotion through facial expressions, and lack...