Bite Me, Tony

If you've followed this blog at all then you'll know that I am not a regular consumer of conventional, popular, white-bread entertainment fare that follows a predictably straightforward path towards a tidy ending. I love a sense of mystery so I'm not a stickler for tying up every loose end of a storyline unless, of course, the grand finale's opacity or lack of closure is presented in such a way that it fucks up everything that came before it.  That's kind of where I'm at with Limetown , a two-season podcast that originally ran in 2015 and 2018, and spawned a one-season television series of the same name. Of course, I'm always late to the game (we're waiting to see both Barbie and Oppenheimer until later this week, and I have yet to make it to the theater for MI7: Dead Reckoning, Part One ). In any case, Limetown was initially well-received by critics and listeners alike, so I decided to give it a listen during my daily ministrations at the gym. With ...

The truth is that I have suddenly found myself watching a lot of Korean films lately, in spite of the fact that our friend Kevin has been raving about them for years. Ironically, that fact has been my chief motivating factor for avoiding these movies for as long as I have but don't tell Kevin I said that. Instead, let's talk about director Park Chan-wook , who's been around while but just now came to my attention. I first watched his most recent feature, Decision to Leave , a couple of weeks ago. Released in 2022, Decision to Leave has a slightly Hitchcockian feel to it without recalling any Hitchcock film in particular. A detective obsessed with cold cases is called out to investigate the mysterious death of a climber whose body has been found at the base of a cliff he regularly scaled. The man, a former immigration officer, may have accidentally fallen but something about the victim's much-younger Chinese wife arouses the suspicions of the lead detective. He begins s...