I had plans for to-day but I think I'm mostly just going to eat snacks. I got a bunch of Christmas snacks and candy from students and teachers yesterday at a Christmas party for the junior high school's ESS or English club. It also happened to be my last day at the school and my last chance to see the third year students at school. I knew I was going to miss them but I don't think I counted on just how much. In the almost five years I've spent as an English teacher in Japan, working with this group has been by far the most rewarding English teaching experience. It was rewarding for their friendship and for the ability to work with them somewhat unfettered by standard Japanese English education procedure. It's with enormous pleasure I can say these third year students are now among the strongest English speakers I've worked with. One boy in particular exhibits an astonishing capacity for communication in English. We'd gotten to the point where we could have real casual conversations every morning that went beyond the usual small talk about the weather into genuinely novel topics such as the particular details of individual interests as well as opinions and perceptions of events and ideas.
But all of the club's students have impressed me in one way or another. Two of the girls are about as good as the boy I mention. I could always rely on them to give intelligible responses to questions that went beyond simple greetings. I can't take all the credit because a lot of their success in learning English comes from their extraordinary individual courage and curiosity. I can only hope I'll be lucky enough to work with another group like that again in such a productive environment.
X Sonnet #1906
A silent beach was mirror flat at noon.
The thought of gulls was naught but fancy's flight.
Ahead, a broken box contains a demon's boon.
Your hand would freeze before its burden's sight.
A buried orange provoked a stranded thought.
As time dissolved the soil, ghosts arose.
A million tides distort the picture lot.
Another Christmas charts how silence grows.
The cakey chalk constructs a lively base.
Detectives gather late to study Yule.
The warmth of life adopts a fleeting pace.
But pockets form to dodge a savage rule.
As candy days depart behind a screen
The metal clouds descend to end a scene.
We have a new Superman trailer. At first I wasn't enthusiast. Shots of Superman bloodied in the snow and flashbacks to the Kent farmstead with golden sunlight behind silhouetted figures seemed like a retread of Zack Snyder. The titles announce it's directed by James Gunn and note that he's the director of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. I thought, yeah, you need to point that out to generate any excitement from this lacklustre trailer. But then Gunn's new angle starts to become clear when Superman is rescued by none other than Krypto, the Super Dog. Miscellaneous superheroes are thrown in including Hawk Girl and a Green Lantern with an unflattering bowl haircut. Gunn's version will, to some extent, and for the first time in any Superman movie or TV series, embrace some of the super whimsy of the comics.
Any tempted to proclaim this will never work would do well to remember than Gunn made the talking racoon work in the Guardians movies. In the latter half of the trailer, an electric guitar version of John Williams' theme from the Christopher Reeve movies kicks in and my hopes were genuinely raised for this movie. Really, that should just always be Superman's theme. Why reinvent the wheel? Bryan Singer used it for his Superman movie, too, and it's one of the things he definitely got right.
I like the concept that's being pitched for the movie in which Superman must show kindness in a world where kindness has become devalued. That's certainly relevant. Rachel Brosnahan looks like a dynamite Lois. I'm still not sold on David Corenswet but I can see him growing on me.
Gunn's The Suicide Squad is a movie I love to rewatch and I think his Guardians movies got better and better. Peacemaker was a terrific TV series, too, so I think there is a fair chance of this being a good movie.
Last night's new Skeleton Crew was fine, I suppose. It mostly felt like filler, which is odd considering it was directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, writers and directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once. This is their follow-up to that awards darling? Well, okay. It was written, once again, like most episodes of the series, by Christopher Ford and John Watts.
The crew find themselves on a ruined duplicate of their homeworld, At Attin, called At Achrann. Immediately I thought, here's a budget minded episode. Sure enough, most of the sets from the first episode are reused here. Gangs, constantly at war, control this world and their costumes are all cobbled together presumably from whatever was lying around the Lucasfilm wardrobe department.
The show continues to not quite succeed at making the kids into Disney's Stranger Things crew. I wish they'd have let go of that idea early in development and reduced the number of children to two. At this point, Wim, supposedly the lead, feels totally superfluous. The kids should've just been Fern and Neel. KB is obviously meant to be the Spock but there's no time to give her the nuance a Spock character needs. They could've just made Fern a little more compulsively logical or dumped that whole aspect of the group entirely.
Now the kids are slightly more reluctant to kill people though they still seem oddly attracted to violence. Maybe it's because I've spent so much time around Japanese children (I've been working in Japan for the past four and a half years) who generally aren't as violent as American children. Still, there's something oddly forced about how into guns the kids are. It reminds me of the really odd moment at the end of the Obi-Wan series when Obi-Wan gave Leia a holster. It's like executives at Disney had a conference that concluded with the idea that kids love guns, no-one knows why, but every show should be stuffed wherever possible with moments of kids expressing their affection for weaponry. I mean, sure, I liked to play with toy guns when I was a kid and I still like violent video games now but the behaviour exhibited by these kids feels alien to me.
Neel's relationship with the girl soldier was cute and I liked the moment where he tried to describe Slap Ball. But the arc ended with one of those moments that often seem to come on Disney Star Wars shows where I know how the scene is going to end from the beginning. As soon as it started, I knew she was going to kiss Neel. At that moment, their whole little arc felt like something that came from a TV writing handbook.
I think Wim's question about the gang war being between children and adults was meant to be a reference to the episode of Star Trek called "Miri", which again shows the problem of trying to do Stranger Things without the ability to use actual pop cultural references. We would know why a kid in the real world would make that connexion but the only way we can get anything from Wim's observation is to see the show through a slightly detached, postmodern lens. It's one of those things that keeps the show from feeling organic and unlike an algorithm produced it.
Two women trying to make careers for themselves in the women's section of a castle find themselves confronting a demon in 2024's Mononoke the Movie: Phantom in the Rain (劇場版モノノ怪 唐傘). This is basically a feature length episode of the Mononoke television series from 2007, which in turn was a spin-off of another series, none of which I knew when I hit play on the movie's Netflix thumbnail. I guess that explains why the animation seemed slightly cheap and the plot felt somehow incomplete despite being a self-contained story. I kind of enjoyed it. It was relaxing.
Asa (Kurosawa Tomoyo) is an ascetic young woman who surprises the gatekeepers of the Inner Chambers (the women's section) when she reveals she has no attachment to objects in this world. This marks the beginning of her meteoric rise in the ranks of these ladies who abjure all worldly things to focus on looking beautiful and being demure. Asa befriends a more free spirited new girl named Kame (Yuki Aoi) who has lots of precious keepsakes from her hometown. In the spirit of going with the flow, though, she gamely tosses her precious snacks from home into the ceremonial pit.
There's a demon afoot and it's up to the travelling Medicine Seller (Kamiya Hiroshi) to investigate and sort it out. I found out later he's the main character of the series but like the women there's not a whole lot more to his personality than his looks. The anime's aesthetic is flat and brightly coloured with few, if any, shadows. I think it was meant to look like a mural painted on a screen. It reminded me of some of the experimental scenes in Shaft anime series though this comes from a studio called EOTA. It's interesting at first but becomes a bit dull after about fifteen minutes. I do like the idea of a demon residing in the relationships of people in a place, though, as this ends up being. Well, there's also a haunted umbrella.
Despite being set in what is essentially a harem, this is a modern Japanese movie so don't expect any sex.
Mononoke the Movie is available on Netflix. This is not to be confused with Miyazaki Hayao's Princess Mononoke. A mononoke is a kind of ghost or monster.
A little girl is critically ill and only one brave canine can save her in 1995's Balto. The last traditionally animated film from Amblin Entertainment, I remember my friends and I turning our noses up at it at the time of its release as just another Disney imitator but now I see it's an excellent artefact of an all but lost art in America.
Sure, a lot of the dogs look like they were cribbed straight from Oliver and Company and Lady and the Tramp. But the talent and dedication that went into such expressive and fluid animation are no less admirable.
Balto is loosely based on a true story. The real life Balto was a purebred husky while the film's Balto is made half wolf in order to give the story a racial conflict theme. It kind of works; the fact that we're talking about dogs and wolves, divorcing the story from human racial groups, gives the conflict a valuable universal quality.
When Balto catches up with the benighted sled carrying the urgently required medicine, he has to deal with the egotistical leader of the dogs who won't hand the reins to a half breed. Then he has to deal with an implausible number of obstacles and action sequences that put a little too much strain on the audience's suspension of disbelief. Still, the animation never stops being amazing.
I think the film is primarily loved now among furries. "Balto head" is almost ubiquitous among male furries. I don't want to kink-shame but I have to admit I've never come close to understanding furry culture which seems to me populated by people who got lost in some intricate self-constructed irony trap. Fortunately, one doesn't need to be a furry to appreciate Balto.
X Sonnet #1905: Viking Raid Edition
Approaching ships were marked with walrus blood.
Their ragged crews digest the frozen north.
The splintered hulls were patched with mould and mud.
To brittle shores the vessels struggle forth.
The breakfast fog admits a single maid.
The cold and fertile beach would yield a clam.
'Twas she who spied the nigh approaching raid.
But ships to her could seem but ghostly sham.
Like grains of glass, the sand was crushed by boot.
Some burning eyes beheld the wayward mouse.
Now tearing dreams of grass conduct to root.
The looming fire dwells in ax and house.
Confusion warps the wooden beams to grey.
A hidden girl discerns no end of day.
Sharon Stone falls for a cheesy voyeur in the sleazy 1993 thriller Sliver. But when I saw the screenplay was by Joe Eszterhas I knew what I was in for and was quite prepared to enjoy his distinctive brand of greasy imitation Hitchcock.
I think the concept here, either conceived by Eszterhas or Ira Levin (who wrote the source novel), was of a world where Marion Craine fell for Norman Bates. Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins would've made a slightly more plausible couple, though, than Sharon Stone and William Baldwin. There's a reason William never approached top Baldwin status.
Stone plays Carly, a book editor who, as one character directly states, likes to be in control. She counters this by saying that she stayed in a bad marriage for seven years. So she certainly has her subservient side, which becomes clear when she succumbs to the advances of the wealthy owner of her apartment building. She stays with him even after she finds out he has a secret room filled with television screens monitoring everyone in the building, including her. So he's seen her doing such things as masturbating in the shower.
Baldwin's character, Zeke, tells her his mother was a soap opera actress and, for him, watching the private lives of his tenants is clearly like watching soap operas. This is Eszterhas world so it turns out everyone does behave as though life is a soap opera in their private lives. The screens show scenes of dramatic revelations and racy sex scenes. One shot of a woman shaving her face with an electric razor is the only nod to the truly embarrassing things people are likely to do when they think no-one's watching.
Audiences and critics didn't go along for Eszterhas on this one, they evidently preferred his version of Vertigo (Basic Instinct) to his version of Psycho. The real problem is that Zeke is never for a moment attractive. Eszterhas wants him to be some kind of dark, Phantom of the Opera anti-hero but he just comes off as a pathetic dweeb. The film originally had an ending more sympathetic to him but test audiences disliked it for being "immoral". I think you can get audiences to vicariously enjoy immoral behaviour, as in A Clockwork Orange. The problem is that voyeurs aren't just immoral, they're pathetic. You can give a worm all the dramatic noir lighting you like; a worm is still a worm. Most people watching this movie are rooting for Carly to dump this guy and it's somewhat satisfying when she finally does. But the fact that she was in any way attracted to him remains inexplicable.
I'd avoided watching 1993's Falling Down for decades. Everything I ever heard about it told me it wasn't something that would interest me and the fact that it was directed by Joel Schumacher did nothing to commend it. But a friend asked me to watch it a couple weeks ago so I finally did. It's pretty much what I expected but I was more entertained than I had anticipated.
I shouldn't dismiss Schumacher out of hand, I did like Lost Boys. Just because I didn't like his Batman movies or Phantom of the Opera adaptation shouldn't make me assume I'd always hate one of his work. I guess it's easy to see the recurrence of a dark or anti-hero in these movies. Michael Douglas' Bill Foster in Falling Down is certainly closer to an actual anti-hero than how the term is usually meant to-day. He occupies the space of a protagonist for much of the movie but he engages in villainous actions. Robert Duvall plays a cop with extraordinary patience and empathy for contrast. As Bill responds to small infractions with excessive violence, Duvall's character, Prendergast, responds with excessive restraint to his extraordinarily abusive wife and co-workers. Prendergast's journey in the film is to somewhere in the middle while Bill's journey is to somewhere further out to sea, "past the point of no return," as he says. Was this a reference to The Phantom of the Opera?
A lot of critics of the movie scold its fans for sympathising with Bill. I don't know how many people actually do. It should take no more than the barest scrap of intelligence to see that, yes, it's silly McDonalds stops serving breakfast at 10am but, no, pulling an uzi on the store manager is not a constructive response.
Both Duvall and Douglas give good performances but I found Schumacher and screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith's manipulations a little too broad to take as anything more than campy fun. It's easy to see that at the start of the filmmaking process they set a rule, "Everyone in this world is an asshole," and proceeding accordingly. It's hot and there's a traffic jam but everyone, from the drivers to the motorcycle cop who stops to get Bill's car out of the road, is about ten times angrier than is natural for the situation. The panhandler who tries to scam Bill by telling him he's starving is actually holding a hot dog at eye level the whole time. It's true, sometimes panhandlers can be surprisingly stupid but they're never as persistent as this guy is when Bill walks away from him. Generally the last thing these guys want to do is cause a big scene.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised to get this kind of material from the guy who's primarily known now for putting nipples on Batman's costume.
There are a lot of pointless remakes out there but I think I've seen the most pointless remake of all time. I got Netflix for the month for a few reasons, one of them being I really wanted to see the new Ranma 1/2 series. It's an adaptation of the same first volumes of the manga that the first anime series adapted back in 1989. In many cases, it's a shot for shot replica of the old series only now it's drawn and coloured on computers instead of with pencil, ink, and paint. Nudity has been censored with "doll anatomy" and it has a new score by a different composer.
Even many of the voice actors are the same. Hayashibara Megumi returns as girl-type Ranma and she's still great. But many of the actors playing teenagers certainly don't sound like teenagers, particularly the character of Nabiki who now sounds like an old woman.
I don't know why this thing was made. I work in Japanese schools and I hear kids talking about Ranma 1/2 exactly as often as I heard them talk about it before this new series came out.
Was there anything I liked? The scene where Ranma meets Kuno has the same dialogue--Kuno demands to know Ranma's name but before Ranma can reply Kuno says it's better form to give his own name first. In the new version there's a slight pause and Ranma says awkwardly "douzo", "go ahead." That was kind of funny but it didn't justify a whole remake.
Ranma 1/2 (the new one) is available on Netflix. Oddly, when I searched for "Ranma", it wasn't even the first title that came up. I'm not sure what that means but if it means the show's not popular I wouldn't be surprised. Some people on YouTube have made compilations of clips comparing the new and old versions. Sometimes the dialogue overlaps precisely:
I guess this is like when Gus Van Sant remade Psycho. At least he had a new cast and shot it in colour so he made some effort to be different.
X Sonnet #1904
Exhausted words for "red" deplete the shade.
Infernal rings diffuse the air and sky.
With phony coins, the counterfeiter's paid.
The only dream became a daily lie.
Surprising spots of time return to mind.
Betrayal lurks in slowly boiled brains.
The ghost of vengeance seeks a kill to find.
The story's told in blood and whisky stains.
Reforming cities never costs a god.
Deserving roads obey the wheels above.
Some greater damage rusts a metal rod.
The lack of lightning killed a demon dove.
A couple eggs were lost beneath the grill.
For making yoghurt, raise a local mill.
Teenagers rebelling against the social order and the demented adults trying to put them down all attract the ironic sympathy of the filmmaker in 1990's Cry-Baby. I don't know if it's John Waters' best movie but maybe it's his most appreciable, coming at a transition period from his wilder early films into his attempts at somewhat more mainstream fare. He's helped immensely by Johnny Depp who makes the titular Cry-Baby a character the audience can feel more than ironic affection for.
It's an affectionate parody of '50s delinquent films. Depp's Cry-Baby is cut from the same cloth as James Dean and young Marlon Brando characters but he's in a movie world that is closer to cheap knock-offs of those movies. The supporting cast including Traci Lords and Ricki Lake recall things more like Girls Town and The Beatniks.
The story's just an excuse for musical numbers and equally ornamental campy dialogue. Allison (Amy Locane) is the good girl from a good family who can't help being attracted to the low life Cry-Baby (Depp). Waters adores Cry-Baby's trashy relatives, he adores the preppy guys who burn Cry-Baby's prized motorcycle, he adores how sensitive Cry-Baby is about it. I suppose you can just take these characters straight on but it's easier to appreciate the movie as fetishised mediocrity. To simply enjoy watching the parade of the odd, awkward, and pretty in their Sunday best, earnestly singing their hearts out at the jailhouse.
Cry-Baby is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a playlist of John Waters movies.
The third episode of Skeleton Crew is definitely an improvement on the previous two despite being directed by David Lowery, director of that detestable adaptation of The Green Knight from a couple years ago. At the same time, I'm getting a better sense of the show's fundamental flaws.
Episode three works entirely because of Jude Law's character, both for the writing and Law's performance. He's obviously patterned on Long John Silver and his position in the story is very similar to Long John's position in Treasure Island--he's a surrogate father figure for the point of view child protagonist and the problem of his true moral character is constantly in play.
I don't like the name "Crimson Jack". I know, having written pirate fiction myself, how difficult and yet tempting it is to find variations of "Red" and "Black" and other simple, lurid adjectives invoking death and violence. But for a pirate's name, it has to be something you believe people would casually say in conversation and "Crimson Jack" doesn't roll off the tongue like Long John Silver.
Law's performance is good and you can see the layers of thought in his mannerisms and line deliveries. I like the moment where he's challenged with a line about never leaving a man behind being a Jedi ethic. He starts saying, "That's not--" and then catches himself and says, "That's not a Jedi thing." Just something about Law's attitude and inflection makes me feel like he was about to say, "That's not true." I think the idea hit close to home, that he feels he was left behind by Jedi he formerly trusted. The fact that I'm compelled to speculate and read into his motives is an indicator the character has been effectively created.
I also liked the line from the otherwise lame owl alien character in which she cautions one of the kids not to listen to her gut but to her head. It's believable that someone would stridently offer this advice and yet, at the same time, it's not really useful since, when we talk about our gut, we are actually talking about our heads. In a dangerous situation where the kids have to make decisions quickly they don't always have the luxury of doing so with all possible evidence gathered. So it sounds like logical advice but really all it does is raise the tension.
Unfortunately, the episode also highlighted how poorly conceived and written the children are. Their home planet's odd resemblance to Earth is like a bone fracture that gets worse the more the show walks on it. The worse part was when the two kids were so excited to shoot at the X-Wings chasing them. What in their backgrounds has made them so eager to shoot at people? When Long John Silver gave Jim Hawkins a pistol, Jim wasn't chomping at the bit to blow someone's brains out. The scene was obviously meant to echo the Death Star escape from the first Star Wars movie but the makers of Skeleton Crew evidently don't understand what motivated Han and Luke shooting at the TIE Fighters. Luke had been dreaming of being a fighter pilot all his life and now he and Han were both fighting for their survival. The kids in Skeleton Crew don't know if the X-Wings are trying to kill them and, as far as we know, all they've been dreaming about are sterile descriptions of Jedi on tablets. The problem is the kids are written more as Star Wars fans than as characters who are organically part of this universe. I wonder if this show was originally conceived as something more like The Last Starfighter; maybe the kids were originally supposed to actually be from Earth but someone at Disney or Lucasfilm thought the idea was too far outside of what Star Wars should be. I would agree, but the fact that filmmakers are looking for postmodern concepts shows their imagination is somehow blocked from properly exploring what should be a galaxy sized field of opportunity.
2009's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans has been on Criterion Channel for a while so I watched it again. I can't believe it's fifteen years old, it still feels like a recent movie. Legendary director Werner Herzog makes movies all the time, often attracting star talent, but it's kind of rare for any of his movies to break through into mainstream consciousness. His Bad Lieutenant achieved some notice thanks to the perfect casting of its star, Nicholas Cage, delivering one of his most memorable madman performances.
The key to his character is that he suffers a back injury at the start of the film that leaves him in constant physical pain for the rest of his life. You can see that pain in every second of Cage's performance, too.
The movie is somewhat mysteriously linked to Abel Ferrara's 1992 film Bad Lieutenant--some sources say Herzog's film was meant to be a second in a franchise all along, some say the two stories had nothing to do with each other, that Herzog's film was slapped with the name but some opportunistic producer. But it's hard not to see Herzog's film as a counterargument to Ferrara's, which is about a bad cop played by Harvey Keitel who has a religious experience, leading to him becoming a true agent of justice. Herzog's film argues that this hypothetical lieutenant can be good and bad at the same time, shifting from circumstance to circumstance for occasionally explicable reasons. The man is in constant pain, most of us can't imagine what that's like, so it puts a perpetual asterisk on all of his actions. How much responsibility does he have for his actions, does he bear more responsibility for some actions than he does for others? It's a very noir kind of existential question.
The movie is so "street", with it's intimate and complex knowledge of drug and police culture in New Orleans, it hardly feels like a Herzog film. Herzog's presence is better felt in dreamlike moments like Cage's visions of iguanas and his line at the end, pondering whether or not fish dream.
His relationship with Eva Mendes' character is strangely sweet. She's really sexy in this movie and it was nice screenwriter William Finkelstein didn't write her as the typical strung out shrew.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is available on The Criterion Channel.
X Sonnet #1903
Including hay, the horse's home was full.
Aversion choked the guest from ringing bells.
A linen flag depicts a frightened bull.
Arranged about his hooves are seven hells.
Like boxing rocks, the pointless fight was dumb.
Consorting crabs would stick their pincers out.
Dominions damned the life of Wrigley's gum.
It clogged the cruel crustacean's kettle spout.
The aging picture cleaned the error town.
Abroad, the place retained a scruffy life.
The people play beneath a sky of brown.
The clouds were thick beyond the cutting knife.
A turtle team invades the peaceful cloud.
Attack was swift and cruel but never loud.
Last night I dreamt I was watching an animated movie written by Dave Filoni and directed by Robert Rodriguez. It was terrible, which is no surprise from Dave Filoni but I thought I was a Robert Rodriguez fan. Maybe my subconscious isn't anymore. Hypnotic was underwhelming but I didn't hate Book of Boba Fett as much as most people seemed to. Still, it was far from his best work.
The movie in my dream was hand drawn animation and seemed to be emulating Ghibli, which wouldn't be a first for Filoni. It was only an hour and twelve minutes but the credits didn't stop until 58 minutes in. Mostly executive producers and producers taking a piece of the inflated budget pie as usual. I don't remember much about the movie itself except it took place in a forest and was derivative and bland.
Fortunately, this film is only available in my subconscious.
Somehow, David E. Kelley's writing really improves on Ally McBeal season two, which premiered in September 1998. Maybe it's the contrast with scripts produced under the influence of heavy fatigue at the end of the previous season. I'm still amazed he wrote every single episode while also working on The Practice.
The first three episodes of the second season bring in Portia di Rossi and Lucy Liu as new characters who become regulars. This is the role that made Liu a star. Her performance and character hold up. She seems like a twenty-four hour ball-buster but then she can suddenly be convincingly vulnerable. Hers and de Rossi's characters are pretty similar. I don't remember which of them Jane Krakowski's character suddenly makes a rather graphic joke about; "Maybe her gynaecologist pulled the wrong tooth." I'm not sure if this is the last show I expected a vagina dentata joke from but it's gotta be close.
The second episode features Wayne Newton of all people playing a Howard Stern clone called Harold Wick. Liu's character sues him for something he said on the radio and it all ends up somehow being a pretext for Ally to go on Harold's show so he can ask to see her naked and make comments about her short skirt. You know, her skirt was really short. I wonder if many lawyers actually wore skirts like that in the '90s.
It goes to show just how big Howard Stern used to be. Now, people criticise Kamala Harris for not going on Joe Rogan's show. No-one even mentions the fact that she went on Howard Stern's show. He's become a non-entity in the pop cultural landscape. It's hardly a surprise; he's walked away from everything that made him successful. He didn't ask Harris even one question about sex. Of course, she never would've done his show if he were the old Howard. I guess when he got to a certain age it felt better to be part of the establishment than to be a rabble rouser.
Ally McBeal is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere.
It looked like Notre Dame Cathedral was done for. Five years and over 800 million euros later and it's back in business. December 8 is the official reopening and present at the ceremony were U.S. President-elect Donald Trump as well as his prominent supporter Elon Musk. As an affirmation of the glory of ancient cultural splendour, it's fitting that the reopening should coincide with a political triumph of conservatives, or at least the right.
Also present at the ceremony was Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a somewhat odd fit considering that Putin has rhetorically tied his dreams of conquest with a resurgence of institutional Christianity. The pope, who was not present at Notre Dame's reopening ceremony, has even mildly encouraged Ukraine to surrender. Of course, French Catholicism has historically had its differences with the pope.
So yes, solidarity beneath the grandeur of Heaven, sort of.
I don't mean to suggest I'm unhappy about the cathedral's reopening. I'm overjoyed. For me, art is the most important thing humanity has ever made, and few examples of artistry can rival Notre Dame. It fulfills the objective of a Gothic cathedral admirably, inspiring awe with its splendour. Could that 800 million have been spent on starving families instead? Well, theoretically, yes, practically, no, if you have any idea of the maze of politics and bureaucracy that this money would have to navigate. And at some point, I still think it's worthwhile to consider what humanity can achieve beyond survival. If just living to see another day is your highest goal, you're already losing.
These cultural edifices serve a less quantifiable public good. That's certainly clear here in Japan where, every year, people of all political stripes and economic strata gather at ancient shrines and temples. Large and ornate, these places give dignity to people and culture beyond the ugly day to day struggle for physical and professional survival.
Last night I found myself watching Carl Dreyer's 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc. I didn't even mean to watch the whole thing but, like a lot of great works of art, it's hard to look away from it. Mostly it's because of all those closeups on Renee Jeanne Falconetti but all those sanctimonious and subtly twisted men sitting in judgement of her are also fascinating to watch. Their authority is so absolute, their verdict so preordained, woven by a web of cultural, professional, and personal interest. This beautiful, earnest soul, committed to the same God these men are meant to be representing, is a tool for their own validation and, increasingly as the film proceeds, their sadism.
These cultural edifices can lift everyone up but it's worth remembering that sometimes they can be used to crush misfits.
You know the economy's bad when Great Depression movies start to hit close to home. 1933's Man's Castle stars Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young as a homeless couple who scrape out a living with odd jobs and scams. Both stars are great in the movie and some of Tracy's diatribes sound like they could've been taken from Reddit.
Shortly after she meets him, Trina (Young) finds herself being escorted to a swanky restaurant by Bill (Tracy). But despite his top hat and tails, he's just as penniless as she. He reveals this by calling the restaurant manager and berating him with a speech about how restaurants throw away food while people starve in the streets, a practice mirrored by American agriculture disposing of enormous amounts of edible food. These remain good points.
He's not exactly homeless. He lives in a shanty town by the river. He and Young strip and swim naked in it because this is a pre-Code movie. Another thing this movie can get away with because it's pre-Code is that characters can get away with crimes without legal or supernatural repercussions. Despite being a hell of a good movie, it wasn't popular on its original release. I guess everyone preferred to fantasise about being rich with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies rather than examine the reality of being poor.
Man's Castle is available on The Criterion Channel this movie as part of a playlist celebrating pre-Code Columbia films.
X Sonnet #1902
The bubble bev'rage cleared the ace's throat.
Corrosive coke condemned the bee to flight.
Important planes conveyed the vocal goat.
The cola sky returned to make the night.
A term of noise concludes with purple space.
Advancing visions cut the Christmas short.
Observing matter changed the raptor's pace.
Prolonged decisions plagued the faerie court.
Potato time devoured nights at home.
The dream of books was just a wall to knock.
No knowledge kept as well as ancient Rome.
Apostates breed a crew of thinking stock.
Determined foes were quiet kings of rust.
The feathered creep would find a chop to bust.
Lately I've been reading The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien again and The Making of Modern Japan by Marius B. Jansen. Those are both heavy hardback books so when I need something lighter to take on the train I've been reading Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess' Stardust. In one of the boxes of my old books that my grandmother sent to me was my trade paperback copy of the novel with the original Charles Vess illustrations. It was a lucky find many years ago at a Barnes and Noble. I wish it were the hardback, though, because the cover's become a bit delicate over time.
The novel was adapted as a film in 2007 starring Charlie Cox and Claire Danes, with Peter O'Toole, Robert DeNiro, and Michelle Pfeiffer. I've only seen it once and didn't hate it but I greatly prefer the novel, particularly with the Charles Vess illustrations. His aesthetic along with Gaiman's Lord Dunsany inspired narrative tone provides a vastly different experience to the film's big budget Princess Bride concept.
Now I have to read it amid the controversy of "sexual assault" allegations against Gaiman. I put that in quotes because one thing I find especially creepy about the coverage is how strong language is applied to matters that really aren't resolved and definitely aren't clear. But the novel, which includes at least one scene of a young man kissing a woman who does not express her consent beforehand, would be seen as a smoking gun by some critics. Such critics would be arguing in bad faith since spontaneity has been a part of romantic portrayals since, well, always. The madness of modern western Puritanism, which the results of the recent presidential election were largely a reaction against, as usual assumes not only the obvious correctness of its new moral dictates, but retroactively applies them to the whole of preceding history.
The sad thing is that the one paraphrased quote from Gaiman that seems to have the most traction is his characterisation of his pushing writer Julia Hobsbawm onto a sofa and kissing her. He says it was a young man misreading a situation. So he feels he acted wrongly, that he made a mistake, but has apparently over the years forgiven himself. One might detect some indignation in his response at the idea that a public who are not participants in a piece of his private history feels entitled to pass judgement on it. Which I'd say is reasonable. But woe to the celebrity who dares question the public's right to pass judgement on any celebrity's private life, however biased and incomplete the coverage.
I'm not really sure if Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is a good show. I didn't like the trailers and watching the first two episodes didn't raise my enthusiasm. I didn't like the concept of '80s American suburban kids in the Star Wars universe and the show has done nothing to convince me I should. But, on the other hand, if you do like the concept, it's entirely possible you'll like the episodes. They have a basic competence in their execution. They come from John Watts and Christopher Ford, the minds behind Spider-Man: Homecoming, and I did like that movie.
Why can't I get behind this concept? It seems only natural. Elliot in E.T. and a few other kids in those many junior high school aged stories of the '80s were seen playing with Star Wars toys. What could be more natural than putting such a kid in a Star Wars story? Oddly, it drains the show of nostalgia because, unlike Stranger Things, older viewers like me can't look at what the kids are interested in and say, "Oh, wow, I remember liking that." These kids like Jedi and Jedi is all they know. It's not just the nostalgia, it kind of shaves the tree down to the trunk. There's no sense of fullness to it. Like a lot of Disney Star Wars stuff, the galaxy it depicts feels very small and the odd similarity to '80s suburbs makes it feel even smaller.
The elephant kid is kind of cute. Maybe this show will win me over, I don't know.
