The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952)

I am a huge fan of tea, especially green tea, so when I stumbled upon Yasujirō Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Japanese: お茶漬けの味 Ochazuke no aji), I knew I had to watch it (and try green tea over rice as soon as I feel better). 

The film tells the story of Takeo (Michiyo Kogure), a capricious wife from Tokyo high-society who is bored by her dull husband, Mokichi (Shin Saburi), an executive at an engineering company. While she doesn't bother to hide her contempt for his dullness and stupidity, he is unhappy but never argues back. 

At the same time, the film also tells the story of Setsuko (Keiko Tsushima), Takeo's niece, who uses the couple's marital problems as an excuse for not attending arranged marriage interviews as she is terrified that she will end up in an unhappy marriage and become cruel like her aunt. 

Thursday Movie Picks: Bad Parents

I don't talk from experience as I don't have kids and I plan on keeping it that way but parenting is not easy. You can read books, you can ask people, but the truth is you'll never be prepared enough to be a good parent. But at least most try. For this week's Thursday Movie Picks, the weekly series hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves, we are looking at parents who do not try or if they do try, they fail miserably. 

Carrie (1976)

Stephen King's Carrie has been on the shelf, waiting for somebody to read it, for decades (my mother bought it in the 80s and never read it). It was February when I finally decided to read it and, being a King fan, I found it rather disappointing. It wasn't terrible but it sure wasn't great either. I still decided to check out this movie because Brian De Palma directed it and Sissy Spacek plays Carrie, and, like just the book, it was disappointing. 

Brought up by her religious fanatic mother (Piper Laurie) almost in isolation, Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is a shy 17-year-old whose classmates constantly makes fun of. When she gets her first period, she is teased by the girls more than before and the gym teacher (Betty Buckley) disciplines the girls severely. One of them, Sue Snell (Amy Irving), feels sorry for her so she asks her boyfriend (William Katt) to take Carrie to prom instead of her. Christ Hargenson (Nancy Allen), on the other hand, is determined to have revenge and, with the help of her boyfriend (John Travolta), starts plotting against Carrie. But Carrie has telekinetic powers and messing with her won't be a smart move.

Catfish (2010)

"The final forty minutes of the film will take you on an emotional roller-coaster ride that you won't be able to shake for days.", "A bizarre and completely unpredictable mystery.", these are a couple of the very misleading reviews used in Catfish's trailer.

Presented as some sort of real-life thriller, Catfish is actually a pretty boring and bland documentary by two bored young filmmakers, Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, who, in late 2007, decided to document the life of Ariel's brother, Nev. Why? Simply because Nev met a girl, Megan, on Facebook and started a relationship with her.