Ken and Robin Consume Media: Tong Wars, Fassbinder Noir, Korean Cooking 101, and a Japanese Crime Jazz Musical
July 16th, 2024 | Robin
Recommended
Killers on Parade (Film, Japan, Masahiro Shinoda, 1961) Fresh-faced newcomer (Yûsuke Kawazu) wins a competition against eight outlandishly garbed assassins to perform a hit for a corrupt construction firm. Breezy crime jazz musical with an undernote of war trauma radiates early sixties cool.—RDL
The Lower River (Fiction, Paul Theroux, 2012) Unmoored after a late life divorce, a stolid Massachusetts menswear merchant makes an ill-considered return to the remote Malawi village he idealizes from the time he spent there in his twenties as a Peace Corps teacher. Precisely told narrative of literal and conceptual captivity.—RDL
Martha (Film, Germany, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974) After the death of her father, an unworldly librarian from a wealthy family (Margit Carstensen) weds an eccentric engineer (Karlheinz Böhm) who subjects her to a systematic program of psychological abuse. Fassbinder’s satirically heightened riff on the domestic noir, based on a Cornell Woolrich story, savages patriarchal marriage norms and the German upper class.—RDL
Simply Korean (Nonfiction, Aaron Huh, 2022) YouTuber Huh presents about 100 recipes for the beginning Korean cook, and so far I haven’t hit one that isn’t clear, delicious, and relatively simple. If you’re past the beginning stage of home cooking, this gets you past the beginner stage of Korean home cooking. A must-get if you have a good Korean grocery available nearby.—KH
Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York’s Chinatown (Nonfiction, Scott D. Seligman, 2016) Lucid account of the conflict between Chinese criminal organizations that led to four violent gang wars between the late 19th and early 20th century in New York City and beyond. Deploys contemporary research methods to peer through obscuring layers of racist mystification, revealing groups who to a surprising degree wove themselves into the city’s power establishment, one with Tammany Hall and the other with their reformist opponents.—RDL
Good
Dicks: the Musical (Film, US, Larry Charles, 2023) A company merger unites two sales department jerks (Aaron Jackson, Josh Sharp) in the realization that they are identical twins separated at birth, leading them to seek the remarriage of their eccentric parents (Megan Mullaly, Nathan Lane.) The supporting cast (also including Bowen Yang and Megan Thee Stallion) outguns the writer/leads in this exuberantly foul-mouthed, out-and-proud stage adaptation, which delivers big weird laughs before running out of steam.—RDL
