I thought the setup was somewhat preposterous, and upon reflection, it is exceedingly preposterous. But afterwards I discovered this is a sequel to Dentist in the Chair (1960), so I'm a little less weirded out by the casual "I'm trying to find a sinecure for these two incompetent dentists who are best friends with a thief" setup in the opening scenes. Those characters have already had a whole movie to set their dynamic, and we're just shoehorning them in to this one.
Kay Lenz reminds me of my sister Susanna, and Eddie Albert has another great role (cf. The Heartbreak Kid) that I really didn't expect from "the Green Acres guy." Of course, Fred MacMurray is best known for being in a dull sitcom, but he was great in noir and western roles. Actors take the jobs they can get, is what I'm saying.
Good news for Leonard's Japanese reading practice, but bad news for any gaijin trying to watch this movie: there is so much on-screen Japanese text in this one that subtitles weren't enough to follow the story. When it was just corporate emails and text messages, it was usually clear from context what was happening, but once we started getting "we're in a time loop" Powerpoint presentations and Ken Burns pans over pages of manga, Sumana and I were pausing a lot and making heavy use of Google Lens.
The only other movie I can think of that's so text-heavy was Shin Godzilla (2016) and there the details of the text, like all human efforts to thwart Godzilla, turned out not to matter. Also, as I recall there was an English translation layer superimposed over the Japanese text, like what you see in subtitled anime, so if you read quick enough you could catch it all.
Speaking of which, the Television Spotlight this month shines on Laid-Back Camp, a relaxing anime series that Sumana and I both enjoyed watching, and she didn't mind me constantly pausing to sound out signs or text messages. Fun and calming, with lots of katakana on the signs so I felt like I'd figured out what they were saying once I decoded the sounds.
BTW there's another movie I regret missing in the 2019 Japan Cuts festival: Samurai Shifters, the nerdy samurai librarian story, which I still haven't found anywhere. Just putting that here for my own future reference.
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(2) Sun Mar 03 2024 11:55 February Film Roundup:
Some of these transcripts were created by running Whisper on my computer; others I created by paying someone else to run Whisper on their more powerful computer. Now that I've put it all up, one transcript per page, it doesn't seem that impressive, but it's a solid [runs script] 63.80 hours of transcribed text; that's after all the music was filtered out.
I've also updated the dataset with some previously missing information, thanks to Reddit user kiyyik. Remember, if you've got any Schickele Mix recordings, I'll take 'em!
Although the .srt files available for download are the originals as they came out of my/someone else's Whisper process, I wrote some code to tidy up the transcripts for the HTML views. Apart from cleaning up common hallucinations such as transcribing orchestral music as "ΒΆΒΆ" or "Thank you.", I caught and corrected forty different ways to misspell Peter Schickele's name. Here they are:
Who could forget Captain Picard taking on the Shikolik? Thu Mar 21 2024 20:32 Tapes And Transcripts Are Available!:
I've updated The Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive with... transcripts! All of the 130-ish episodes archived by fans now include transcripts of Peter Schickele's wisdom and silliness, cross-referenced to the corresponding timestamps on the Internet Archive. Here's a random example: the transcript of Episode 84, "Clarinet Plus".
