Turned in my 40th column for Cemetery Dance magazine last night. That’s a lotta words, especially factoring in how long the early ones were.
We watched a fascinating movie on Netflix called The Birth of Sake, a documentary about the sake makers at the family-owned Yoshida Brewery in northern Japan. For seven months a year, these men devote their lives to all the steps needed to convert rice into wine. They live at the brewery and get two days off a month during this period. Some of them get up at 5 am every day to tend to the vats. Others have to check on things every couple of hours during the night. It’s an intensive process, far more demanding than normal wine making. Many breweries have automated the process, but Yoshida is one of the few that still does it the traditional way. You have to believe that their attention to detail produces a significantly superior product in order for their sake to be competitive in the marketplace, but boy it sure does look like a lot of hard work.
We also watched Miles Ahead, the Don Cheadle-driven (co-written, directed, co-produced, starring) biopic of Miles Davis. I saw Davis at the JVC Jazz Festival in June 1991, three months before he died. At that time, he couldn’t or wouldn’t speak when he was on stage. He held up placards with single words on them from time to time. In this film, Ewan McGregor plays a putative reporter from Rolling Stone who wants to get the big story of Davis’s prolonged hiatus. The McGuffin is a tape of Davis’s most recent recording sessions, claimed by the studio but stolen by Davis at gunpoint. A lot of people are after that tape, and viewers hope that there’s something worth hearing on it. Unlike many biopics, this one doesn’t show much of Davis’s life overall, focusing instead on this very brief period in the late seventies, with the occasional flashback. It’s almost a gangster movie, with shootouts and street chases. Fun stuff.
Getting out of the house, we saw the 3D version of Star Trek: Beyond, which was fun but not terribly memorable. We only opted for 3D because that showing fit with our schedule. There aren’t many 3D moments in the movie, but there is a level of added depth. Probably not worth the surcharge. I liked the Jaylah character quite a bit. Idris Elba was virtually unrecognizable save for his voice throughout much of the movie. There were entire minutes that I had no real idea what was happening because so much was going on at once. A little bit chaotic and dark.
I finished my re-watch of Stranger Things yesterday, in preparation for doing a tag-team review with Hank Wagner for Dead Reckonings. It was every bit as good the second time around.
