The Korean remake of this, starring The Housemaid's Kim Tae-ri, has been one of my favorite movies of 2018, and now that I had some free time, I watched Junichi Mori's earlier, four hour adaptation of the same manga. Split into two features for its release, but really four discreet sections (every season has it's own title sequence and end credits), it follows a young woman's thoughts as she lives for a year on her mother's farm and cooks a…

Since I was in high school and first ran across Thoreau, every once in awhile I think about how I too could go into the woods and live deeply, in tune with the land and the seasons. Then I remember that I'm afraid of spiders and bees and plants make me sneeze. I'm not built for the farm life, even my more rural ancestors had inside jobs: schoolteachers and barbers and butchers and such.

A movie like this though, designed…

Undecided as to which is more offensive:

1. The implication that Hawking's work can only be understood, or even be relevant to us, an audience of normal dumb people, in how it validates or invalidates our concept of God.

2. The depiction of infidelity in which Jane's is fraught and melodramatic, to the point that mere knocking on another man's tent causes her husband to collapse into coma and never speak again (someone should do the math on this causality…