What I watched the last two years

 I have been faithfully logging my films over at Letterboxd, and I note that I watched 213 films in 2020 and only 107 in 2021! I'm amazed that I watched so many movies in 2020. Either I watched more series last year or I guess we were all just less hunkered down in our COVID isolation. I didn't see my mom at all for most of 2020. This past year, with the vaccines, I actually went out to stores and even to see movies in the theaters. I'm so glad I felt safe enough to get back on public transportation to see my mom in the last year of her life. Yesterday I spoke to my therapist and ended up recounting mom's last day and crying. I haven't cried like that for a little while. We decided to cancel the Celebration of Life event we had planned for the end of the month, due to heightened risk of contagion. Everyone understands but it still makes me sad. 

There is a batch of Hitchcock films set to leave Criterion at the end of the month. We rewatched Vertigo. Next up will be Marnie, which I have never seen, and which someone on Pop Culture Happy Hour mentioned as a favorite film about sex that doesn't have explicit sex. I will watch it later today. I'm still in the middle of season two of The Witcher and halfway through the Chinese drama Luoyang; all caught up on my Korean shows.

Il Mare

Il mare is a Korean film made in 2000 that was an early role for Jun Ji-Hyun, a super popular actress who starred in the very first kdrama I ever watched (My Love from the Star) , and Lee Jung-Jae, also super famous, and most lately of Squid Game fame. It was later remade as a vehicle for Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock after their hit with Speed, as The Lake House. The idea is that a man and woman live in a special house on the water with a magic mailbox that allows them to exchange letters across time; he lived there first and she lived there two years later, but they find they are able to communicate across time and fall in love with each other. Being a Korean film, there is a "car of doom" incident, not once but twice. The OST has some good music too.