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Month: June 2024

Tokyo Vice (season 2)–American in Translation

Based on an American reporter’s experience as a twenty-something neophyte journalist in Tokyo, Jake Adelstein, (Ansel Elgort from “Baby Driver”)  is a cocky American. Living in Tokyo during college, Jake becomes fluent in Japanese, both spoken and written, in order to become a reporter for a major Japanese newspaper.  He is the first non-Japanese to have such a position. In season 2 (see June 17, 2022 review of season 1) Jake continues his investigation of the Yakuza who control the police and the government.  Again we see the unlikely partnership between the politically impractical...

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Ripley (2024)–The One Who Got Away?

Based upon Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 classic, The Talented Mr. Ripley, this neo-noir remake reinterprets good and evil, survival and triumph, guilt and psychopathology. Tom Ripley is a young intelligent grifter residing in squalor in the 1960s, sharing a filthy bathroom with sewage backing up into the drain.  Feeling destined for the best that money can buy, Ripley is determined to set out to live that life, leaving his small-time operation as a con-man in Brooklyn.  We know little of his backstory except he was an orphan having been abandoned after the death of an...

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