Mooooooooovie Monday

And A Bit of Dear Vicky

Jul 15, 2025

The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals, and to avoid feeling that because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn. —JFK to Ben Bradley

(This quote will be relevant later.)

Hello! Hello! Hello! You decent humans of Substack!

I hope you all had a good weekend. The weather proper summer last week. Sunny, and warm, and cloudless. But this is Ireland. Good weather never lasts. As I am typing the rain has returned.

I am happy to report that I watched two movies. I watched Ozu Yashujirō’s Tokyo Story on iTunes. It was a masterpiece. When I watched Oppenheimer in London’s BFI IMAX theatre, I saw a trailer of the restored version of Tokyo Story. The trailer looked stunning on the big screen. The scene where the old couple sit by the beach burned in my brain. I didn’t get to see it in theatre, but I got it on iTunes.

The movie told a simple story masterfully told: aging parents go to Tokyo to see their adult children, and are met with mostly cold reception. Mr. Ozu had a unique visual style. 50mm lens, shooting from a low angle. He gave the audience a front row seat, but at an arm’s length. It reminds me of the proscenium arch. The shots are simple, straightforward, and symmetrical. The movie flows quietly from scene to scene, no dramatic development, no pounding music, and yet the tension creeps up on you. It’s a great movie, and a master class on cinematography. It made me want to get back to 50mm lenses.

And then on Sunday, I watched Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, in theatre. Whoa! I am not even gonna try to offer my worthless thoughts on how good the movie is. Here’s where the JFK quote comes in. I kept thinking of that quote during the film. It seems America got high on the WWII victory and kept that high by going to more wars in the decade since. Most of the times it didn’t know who it was fighting and why. Vietnam was clearly one such case. The justification became, as I understand it, the body count. Apocalypse Now was a fairly critical look at Vietnam, and sadly, America learnt nothing. More recently, there was Iraq and Afghanistan, Saddam Husain’s WMD, bin Laden, nation building, turning the corner. It’s all bullshit. Obama didn’t have the balls to withdraw from Afghanistan, either he believed the turning the corner lies from the generals, or he thought it’d be politically inconvenient for him. He made some chickenshit excuses for himself in his autobiography. If only he had gotten that JFK advice…. Anyway, it’s all bullshit, and we are all gonna die. The horror! The horror! Great movie! Great cinematography again! Also, Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyrie is a choice!

To honour Ozu Yashujirō’s cinematography style-, which I am not qualified to do-, here’s a few photos shot with 50mm lens from Hong Kong.