Italy makes some damn good movies. I just finished watching Il Postino - what a great movie.
I also saw the new James Bond movie over the weekend. It was good - but I mean, come on - it got a 95% on rottentomatoes out of 183 reviews counted! That is almost unheard of. I guess I was expecting too much. I thought it was good, but not great like Il Postino - or Cinema Paradiso or Best of Youth or The Bicycle Thief or The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.
I’ll have to check out Fellini and here is a list of some other suggestions.

Since I am updating my movie picks and North Korea just tested a nuclear bomb, I thought it would be an appropriate time to recommend the movie A State of Mind. This British documentary about two North Korean girls as they prepare for the Mass Games was really interesting to me because I had no idea that the country was so brainwashed to hate the USA - it was nuts. Even though the documentary wasn’t about the country (it was about the girls preparation for the Mass Games), it is interesting to see how they live and what they think. Like any good documentary, it wasn’t biased and let viewers decide for themselves. The footage of performances during the Mass Games is pretty amazing.

I haven’t been updating my movie recommendations much lately, but Best of Youth is one that I’ve been meaning to add to the list. The thing I found most interesting about this movie is how close I became to the characters after spending so much time with them. The movie is over six hours long, so in some ways it is similar to reading a book - I didn’t watch it all at once, but over the span of a week. In this way it is different and can offer more than your standard ~90 minute films.

Bushi No Ichibun, Yoji Yamada’s third and final samurai movie, is set to premiere at the 19th Tokyo International Film Festival October 21st through the 29th and is scheduled to open in Tokyo on December 1, 2006. I was disappointed to learn that Yamada is done making samurai movies, as he is one of only a few remaining who make them well. His first two were great, Twilight Samurai and The Hidden Blade, and I’m very excited to see Ichibun.

I watched Emperor of the North Pole tonight. It’s a good movie for guys - the hobos against the railroad bulls. Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine are two tough dudes. At one point, ‘A#1′ -the veteran railroad tramp - gives a lecture to the kid, Cigaret. I thought it was also a good pep-talk for new traders:

You come in here like you was a millionaire.
Well, you’re not. You’re a casual.
You ain’t even seen a first-class hobo yet…
You’re a punk, a deadbeat.
No bum worth a damn is gonna let himself be picked over.
How long you been out? Thirty days?
Where do you think you’re at?
You let some two-bit cop cut you down, and now you’re gonna come in here and figure on cuttin’ me and Shack down at the same time?
Damn, boy.
You ain’t even ready for a half-grown girl.
One of those New Orleans women get a hold of you, you’d cry for your mama.
But it’s plain you’ve already cried for your mama.
Get your head up!
What have you learned? Spit it out. How much?
I’m gonna tell you once, never again, so listen tight.
You’ve got a chance to be a good bum.
You can be a meat eater, kid - I mean people, not their garbage.
I wanna see you rough as a jungle cat.
Keep on goin’ the way you are.
Keep on gettin’ knocked around in the same places till the knocks don’t hurt anymore.
Then you run with the train.
Remember it.
But don’t ever grab unless you’re sure you can hold on.
If you ever let go, she’ll throw you under.

That’s lesson number one. If you want to know lesson two, watch the movie - it’s at the end.

Scott Reiniger, who starred as Roger in the 1978 classic horror film Dawn of the Dead, is also the Prince of Ghor. He is Josiah Harlan’s great-great-great-grandson and heir to the title. But as of May 2004, Reiniger said he had “no intention of claiming his title officially, and added that he felt his brother should have it anyway.”
Josiah Harlan was the first American to set foot in Afghanistan and is believed to be the subject of Rudyard Kipling’s book The Man Who Would Be King. If you are interested in learning more about the royalty of Ghor, I suggest watching two great films: Dawn of the Dead and The Man Who Would Be King.

Money, money, money.
They walk through the night crowd protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money.
No least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere… and still not enough.
And then no money or little money or less money. Or more money, but money, always money.
And if you have money or you don’t have money, it’s the money that counts, and money makes money.
But what makes money make money?

- Henry and June

I just watched the first four episodes of Samurai Champloo, a samurai anime series with a hip-hop soundtrack. You can see the intro here. I rented the first disc of the 7-disc series just to see if I wanted the rest. I thought it was pretty good, so I’m going to have to add the rest to the queue. The series was only allowed to be aired past 12:00am in Japan because the network deemed it too graphic for prime time television.
Actually, the entire first episode is available on youtube.
Actually here is the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th episodes on youtube. Okay, I’m not going to add it to the queue, I’ll just watch it here. If you want to see more episodes, just search youtube.

Sexy Chinese actress Ziyi Zhang will star in The Banquet, a new kung fu movie that is a “loose adaptation of Hamlet.” It looks pretty cool - you can see a trailer here.
She will also star in Weinstein’s upcoming remake of Seven Samurai, in which she will play a village girl who dresses as a man to protect herself from bandits.

Lucky Seattlelites will get a chance to see some of the best samurai movies ever made this week through July at the Northwest Film Forum. I highly recommend Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and Seven Samurai, and Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri.