Noriko (#164)

This still frame comes from the breathtaking new Criterion Blu-ray of Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story, restored and remastered from a 4K film transfer. It is a noticeable upgrade as compared to the BFI's Region B Blu-ray, from which I've previously featured stills.

I finally saw a 35mm print of Tokyo Story three months ago, thanks to an Austin Film Society screening. I suggested a pair of screenings that I realize I've just missed, of A Story of Floating Weeds and its color sound remake, Floating Weeds. I hope people enjoyed them. I'm actually quite sad to have missed them, but there are worse things to have happen in life, you know?

The Cure for Love (#159)

I prefer Chaplin to Lloyd and Keaton, and I think at least part of it is due to my not thinking much of the latter two's use of black people in stereotyped or buffoonish caricatures, where Chaplin never did. White people will look at me funny when I say something like that, usually responding with "not like you're black", though it turns out I am, in part. I'm also part Chinese and part Latino on top of being half-white. I don't hold the racial mores people grew up with against them, but I do award extra credit for being ahead of one's time.

Whatever Chaplin's other indiscretions or flaws were in life, at least he was beyond progressive on race, and that's something. I like very much that biographer Jeffrey Vance makes a particular point of talking about this on the Criterion commentary for City Lights. I may be teetering back toward calling it my favorite Chaplin, over Modern Times.