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Yasujiro Ozu Film One: Good Morning (1959)

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I had never seen a Yasujiro Ozu film, including his oft-mentioned classic, Tokyo Story (1953), when I watched this movie a couple of years ago. I started with Good Morning  (1959) because I figured a comedy would be a good place to start and felt the premise of Tokyo Story to be somewhat daunting. It made me excited to see more examples of his famous "pillow shots," where Ozu cuts away from the narrative to focus on a landscape, an empty room, or a household item, and build his world. This interest in Ozu's framing was only a starting point because now I plan on watching his entire filmography for narrative as well as cinematography and everything else that makes his mise-en-scene and ideas so enjoyable. I will write about fifteen of them for the blog and rank them.  One of his later comedies,  Good Morning  examines how two young boys challenge their parents' rules because they want them to buy a television to watch Sumo matches. As with most of Ozu's ouevre, t...

Brief Film Journeys: Djibril Diop Mambéty's Touki Bouki

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Sight and Sound 2021 #93. Senegalese magic realism meets the French New Wave in the guise of a lover's journey.

Brief Film Journeys: News From Home

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I watched another film from the 2022 Sight and Sound Critics' poll: # 52, Chantal Akerman's 1976 documentary, where she reads letters from her mother in Belgium over footage of her new home, New York City. The distance between them feels more palpable with each letter.

Track This: Joan Baez's Interpretation of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

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Joan Baez's interpretation of "Don't Think Twice, It''s All Right" is my favorite because her vocals add soulful clarity to Bob Dylan's thorny narrative. Track This  is a recurring feature of Snobbin' that turns the music appreciation dial up and rips it off of your stereo. It introduces a new track, allows readers to rediscover an underappreciated one, and serves as a forum to discuss a song that falls into the ear candy category and should be listened to unabashedly for years to come.

Brief Record Revisits: Sufjan Steven's Avalanche

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It's that time of year when I start listening to records from my Wintry mix that skirts the borders of autumn and winter. While Illinois is an amazing record, Avalanche has "Springfield, or Bobby Got a Shadfly Caught in his Hair" and three more interesting versions of "Chicago." These Sufjan Stevens records grow on me more each year. There's history and depth in these grooves.

Election Song : The Foremen-"What Did You Do On Election Day?"

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This jaunty folk song parodies how different Americans act on this important day, particularly along party lines that never seem to change. Showing how frustrated those who vote are with those who do not, the song, prime Foremen tradition, makes fun of various sides of the political spectrum. Even though the song is always pertinent because voter turnout tends to be low, this year many of the lyrics feel particularly relevant, including "I kicked the pamphlets off the porch" and "felt distinctly disenfranchised."  Perhaps these are always perennial concerns, yet most of the characters that are asked what they did on election day tend to have done very little, so when one says that they voted, it seems surprising. That he is a "distant cousin" is telling as those closest to the speaker are too busy thinking briefly about politics before doing something odd like tossing out their Bee Gee records. These actions demonstrate the disregard that many have for vot...

Track This: Jets To Brazil's "Further North"

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Jets to Brazil always makes me think of fall, changing seasons, and remembrance. I started listening to them at a pivotal moment when I was figuring out my identity and becoming an adult. I had long been a fan of Jawbreaker, and when Black Schwarzenbach started JTB, I went to one of their first national tours in 1998 for Orange Rhyming Dictionary in Milwaukee. They played with Fugazi, Compound Red, and the band I saw play most Milwaukee shows at that time, Promise Ring. It was an amazing show for the most part, and I met Blake before the show. For many Jawbreaker fans, Jets to Brazil took some getting used to, mainly because they toned down the former band's punk tendencies for more indie rock and pop influences. While 1995's  Dear You , Jawbreaker's final record, was moving in this direction, JTB added keyboards and sometimes resembled 1980s bands like The Psychedelic Furs or 1990s indie bands like Wilco more than the punk stylings of many of the Jawbreaker releases, Howev...