Monday, March 18, 2024

The Book at Sea

I've spotted the first turtles of the spring. They occupy their office with unmistakable dignity.

I was going through some books to-day, getting ready to write the next chapter of my comic. Looking at this book about Robert Blake, I was reminded of one of the reasons I like used books so much.

On the inside cover is this:

That address may still belong to an apartment building. When I looked for it on google maps, I found a website for some kind of educational consulting firm, but given the floating world of American education right now, it could very well be a company operating out of an apartment. This book was likely sold at an estate sale, though. I believe I bought it, like so many, at the long gone Fifth Avenue Books in San Diego, which was largely stocked with books from estate sales. It was one of the most interesting shops in town but, like so many things in the process of turning San Diego into the most expensive city in the U.S., it was replaced by some gringo's idea of a sushi restaurant.

The book was printed in London in 1989 and the only price on the dust jacket is £17.95. This Katherine Aaron may have acquired the book in England or it was given to her by someone who'd been there. The neatness of the signature suggests to me someone fairly young, as does the nickname "Caddie", and the fact that she wrote her name in the book at all. My guess would be fourteen or fifteen, except a book about the leader of the Parliamentary navy during the Interregnum seems like an obscure topic for a girl of that age. Maybe she was a little older. But who knows. It's intriguing, in any case.

Further in, there's another name:

Is this the same person? The capital "A" in Aaron is written the same way but Carolyn is a very different name to Katherine. Maybe she was considering changing her name. The lack of spacing between Carolyn and Rose makes me wonder if she spontaneously decided to add the middle name as she was writing. Or maybe she was Katherine's daughter and she inherited the book.

I wonder what became of them and why they had to sell their book about Robert Blake.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

No Green Stillsuits?!

For Saint Patrick's Day Part One I went to see Dune: Part Two. A lot of people I love and respect really like Dune. I think I'm getting to a point where I just have to admit, whatever it is that makes it a phenomenon, it's just not clicking with me. I liked the first book but these Denis Villeneuve movies, which are supposed to be the perfect adaptations, are for the most part bland and sterile ordeals to me.

I went back and read my review for Part One and saw I predicted a weak box office for the sequel. Boy, was I wrong about that, at least when it comes to Part Two. People must really like watching Timothee Chalamet trudging across gloomy orange sandscapes. I still feel like I'm not watching people but chess pieces. Okay, maybe the Fremen don't have access to dyes and textiles but why should the Harkonnens and the Imperial family have such dull, empty living spaces with few signs of culture? The only break we get from visual monotony is the fascinating headdresses worn by the Bene Gesserit and they remain the best part of the story. It's cool just knowing Charlotte Rampling is now part of a blockbuster franchise.

If not for the Bene Gesserit, I'd be compelled to wonder why we need these movies when we already have Lawrence of Arabia. Certainly Hans Zimmer's score can't compete with Maurice Jarre's but Zimmer's score can't even compete with Brian Eno and Toto's score from David Lynch's Dune. When I saw Timothee Chalamet saddling up on his first sandworm, I felt sorry for Villeneuve that he couldn't use the score from Lynch's movie. Repeatedly, watching Dune: Part Two, I had to muster excitement by remembering who was who in Lynch's version. "Oh, that was Sting. Oh, that was Patrick Stewart. Oh, that was Virginia Madsen."

I honestly wanted to like this new movie but, at the end of the day, I have to admit. It pounds sand.

The highlight of the day yesterday was running into some students at the mall afterwards. Last week, the third year students graduated at the junior high schools I work at. Yesterday, I ran into a group of girls from the Colour Guard. The Colour Guard is one of the clubs I hang out with regularly because, up until her retirement last year, the head of the English department was in charge of them. So I was very pleasantly surprised and happy to see them one last time. They were wearing their junior high school uniforms a final time before they were due to get their high school uniforms the next day. I wished them a happy Saint Patrick's Day and explained the holiday to them. I also told them a little about Dune, which the hadn't heard of. Dune: Part 2 opened on March 15 in Japan and there were about ten other people in the theatre with me. So I guess in Japan, at least, it's not likely to strike box office gold.

I saw a trailer for Oppenheimer, which is finally due to open in Japan at the end of the month. They can't put it off anymore now that it's won Best Picture. I was very curious to see how it would be promoted in Japan.

The music and the editing seem to present it as more of a horror movie. The thumbnail is the image from the Japanese poster which I saw in the cinema lobby yesterday. The colour grading is subtly less flattering and the background seems to emphasise something being built rather than something burning.

One of the main obstacles the film faces is modern Japanese movies are usually very morally simplistic. This is why The Boy and the Heron struggled. Most Japanese films now are compelled to have a clear, unambiguous hero so part of the sensitivity around Oppenheimer is that many moviegoers would have trouble grasping a film with a protagonist who isn't morally pure. This may have led to some consternation as to why the U.S. would make a movie about Oppenheimer at all.

Cillian Murphy being Irish, I suppose this is an appropriate Saint Patrick's Day topic. Indeed, I was surprised to see Murphy's The Wind that Shakes the Barley is now highly ranked on many Best Irish Movies of All Time lists.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

A Good Excuse

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, everyone. I've decided, since I'm basically a day ahead here in Japan, I'm going to consider all one day holidays to be two day holidays. So I'll be celebrating Saint Patrick's Day to-day and to-morrow. Though, really, I started on Friday when I watched Miller's Crossing with dinner. It's about Irish Americans so I thought it would be a good way to ease in. Last night I watched a bit of The Butcher Boy, a movie I love just a little more every time I see it. I only watched part of it because I had to get up early to-day for a Second Life chess tournament and I'm frustrated to say I fell asleep while I was watching Miller's Crossing. I've been doing that too often lately. I didn't even fall asleep this often during movies when I was regularly getting just five or six hours sleep in my last days in San Diego.

To-night my plan is to have boxty, corn beef, and cabbage for dinner. I also have some Tullamore Dew. I'll probably watch The Quiet Man but I'm not sure. I'm in the mood for something angrier and darker, I supposed because, naturally, Shane MacGowan and Sinead O'Connor are on my mind, the latter of whom, of course, played the Virgin Mary in The Butcher Boy. I'm slightly tempted to watch The Banshees of Inisherin again, it being right there on Disney+ of all places, at least here in Japan. If you type "Irish" in the search, the top two results are The Banshees of Inisherin and Darby O'Gill and the Little People. Now there's a well rounded double feature for you. Banshees figure into both films, come to think of it, maybe it's not so strange.

X Sonnet #1825

McDonald's passed to us a cup to mark
The war that brought machines to rule the ash,
Remains of waitress lives becoming dark
As lightning struck, the metal skull was smashed.
"Reversing ghosts can make a kind of life,"
The killer shrugged and placed the gun beside
A worthy chump who climbed the ladder rife
With broken rungs and let the floor decide.
At home, the thoughtful lady bakes a score
And twenty cakes before the party kicks
Begin to honour whiskey oaths and more
Than lout or dame can hold for all their tricks.
A troubled rhythm shakes the cooling pie.
The path to-day is doused in verdant dye.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Alternative to Society

This is one of my latest Skyrim characters, Rahv'ael. She's an orc werewolf. Using the Skyrim Unbound mod, which allows you create many of your character's starting conditions, I had her start in the forest with a bounty of 2000 gold on her head. I'm also using Survival Mode which requires your character to eat and sleep or suffer penalties from hunger and fatigue. So Rahv'ael lives by raiding small settlements and bandit camps in wolf form, knocking people down and devouring their hearts for sustenance. It's so much fun playing as a werewolf in Skyrim. You're fast and very deadly. The trade-off is that you can't access inventory items and you can't heal except by eating more hearts. Though, since Rahv'ael can't go into town anyway, there's not much point looting for items to sell. I have a prison mod installed called Raven's Beak in which your character, if caught with a very high bounty, is sent to mining camp and forced to mine ore in order to get a reduced sentence. It's a really buggy mod but it was fun for a while massacring the guards and inmates. When I tried to actually escape, though, the game crashed.

It's actually really difficult playing as Rahv'ael most of the time. If I go into a major city, as deadly as she is in wolf form, she tends to get overwhelmed by the number of guards. I've tried other, similar "rebels against all civilisation" characters and it's always a satisfyingly desperate existence. The backstory I imagined for Rahv'ael is that she's known throughout the region, hated and feared. She was born as a werewolf in an orc stronghold and cast out, left to die, but somehow survived on insects, rats, and pure malevolent will.

When not in wolf form, Rahv'ael is a sneaking character who uses two daggers. I have another mod that requires your character to be of a certain weight and strength to use heavier weapons and armour so she uses smaller weapons by necessity. So with one character I have two extremes of gameplay.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Let's Get This Party Started

In a new world where naked people ate apples that made them ashamed of their nudity, one man decided to build an enormous boat. All this and more can be seen in 1966's The Bible: In the Beginning, director John Huston's adaptation of the Book of Genesis starring John Huston as Noah. He's the best part of his own film, too.

Huston also narrates the film and performs the voice of God. He has a fine voice for it, too, authoritative yet also familiar and amicable. It's why I thought he was actually a good Gandalf in the Rankin/Bass Hobbit. So it's mostly him we hear at the start, guiding us through footage of seas and forests and animal herds, 'till on the--what was it?--sixth day, God created Michael Parks.

The man who would one day feed heroin and butterscotch to Audrey Horne before getting gunned down by Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney looked surprisingly elfin as a young Adam. Huston avoided nudity by copious use of shadow which makes Eden seem a dark, foreboding, kind of alien place. Things start to feel more down to earth when Cain and Abel show up, played by Richard Harris and Franco Nero, respectively, though Abel gets wacked so quickly I didn't recognise Django. Harris gives a performance as Cain that's so stylised it seems like interpretive dance. It's only when Huston himself shows up as a head-scratching Noah that it feels like the movie finally has human characters.

A lot of money was spent making arks, so much so that despite being a popular film all over the world, The Bible didn't make back its budget. It hasn't remained much in the public memory, either. After the Flood, George C. Scott takes over as Abraham and Ava Gardner plays Sarah. Scott seems very out of place, a preoccupied general sparing a few moments in his schedule to hear what God has to say. Gardner is better, exhibiting tormented grace as she's forced to attend her own servant bearing the child that she could not.

Peter O'Toole shows up, very creepy as the Three Angels who come to inform Abraham of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

It's a visually amazing film and John Huston brings some welcome humanity to it. I wish he'd brought some more.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

By the Seat of Their Pants

Despite always getting in each others' pants, the four titular girls of 2008's Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 remain classy, and that's something I really like about them. The second movie's better than the first.

America Ferrera is the best example. Her plot this time involves getting invited by her actress friend to work backstage at a production of Winter's Tale in Vermont. The play's director is played by Kyle MacLachlan (uncredited for some reason) who unexpectedly casts Ferrera's character as Perdita. The actress friend, Julia (Rachel Nichols), is bitter and does something underhanded by way of revenge but actually not extremely underhanded. And Ferrera's character is upset but never throws a fit. It all stays pretty low key and civilised and I admired that.

Amber Tamblyn has the most dramatic plot when she breaks up with Brian, her boyfriend from the first film (Leonardo Nam, now unrecognisably buff) after his condom breaks and she briefly thinks she might be pregnant. It's kind of a movie about things almost happening, which is realistic. A lot of the things we dread might occur end up never occurring but they still take up space in our lives because we dwell on them so long.

Alexis Bledel almost falls for a sleazy nude model and Blake Lively meets her grandmother (Blythe Danner). There's some mild drama. The girls are cute and the movie never overstays its welcome. It's a nice, mild cup of tea, this one.

X Sonnet #1824

The city's edge was marked with paper wolves.
To dust, the walls would crumble far ahead.
No end was signaled clear as horse's hooves.
The comfort drawn at night was laid to bed.
But dawn arose with crimson cars abroad.
Her body, named "Corvette" by Prince, advanced.
What night had made all right was waxing odd.
And yet the day of fire Earth enhanced.
A lizard wet from swimming early came.
His mistress grins behind the mirror veil.
Colliding stars are really just the same.
The black between was lost within a well.
The night became a lovely breakfast time.
A shame the day decays to hour slime.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Oliver Untwisted

Most adaptations of Oliver Twist leave out quite a lot, particularly from the latter half of the book. For those wishing to see a more faithful adaptation there's the 1985 BBC series directed by Gareth Davies. It's good, mainly for the performances, though it's also a reminder of why much of the second half of the book tends to be omitted--it's intensely plot driven melodrama.

Eric Porter plays Fagin, the biggest name in the cast, and for such a sensitive character you need a good actor to have any chance of avoiding an anti-Semitic caricature. That may be impossible anyway but Porter infuses his performance with believably real agony and distress.

Another reason the second half of the book tends to be avoided in most adaptations is that Oliver himself takes very little part in it, staying safely out of sight at the Maylies'. So he does here. One advantage, though, of this more thorough adaptation is to allow Nancy (Amanda Harris) the proper amount of screentime for a character who essentially becomes the book's tragic heroine. Harris gives a good performance too, really the most interesting one in the series, as she has to navigate the conflict between her affection and her morality.

Monday, March 11, 2024

The Gold Man Clutched His Sword

I didn't watch the Oscars because I normally find them nauseating but I mostly agree with this year's winners. Oppenheimer won Best Picture and Director and it was my second favourite movie of the year after The Boy and the Heron. And Boy and the Heron won Best Animated Feature. That's the second one for Miyazaki Hayao and another Japanese movie, Godzilla Minus One, took home an Oscar, too, for Best Special Effects. It seems people are reacting much more strongly to the Godzilla win. Maybe because it's a franchise with a longer history getting Oscar recognition for the first time. It's slightly frustrating, though, because Boy and the Heron is a much braver, altogether much better film. But then, there have been worse Oscar years. It could've been Brokeback Mountain all over again.

I was even happy with Poor Things' wins despite the fact that I do feel the movie's overrated. It won for Costume Design, Production Design, Makeup, and Emma Stone's performance as Best Actress, all of which I too thought were exemplary.

Moments from the ceremony people seem to be talking about are a couple of jabs at Madame Web and John Cena presenting Best Costume while naked. Maybe Sony's doing a better job clamping down on Madame Web criticism in Japan because I mysteriously lost Internet connexion when I tried to google the infamous compilation of bad line readings. Sure, my internet usually goes out when it rains and it's raining heavily to-day but I've heard being a conspiracy theorist is a sign of intelligence so I'm going with that.

While I'm at it, I wonder if some of the Madame Web roasting is covert ops from Disney because they need Madame Web to be more embarrassing than The Marvels in order to keep control of Spider-Man. With Warner Brothers meanwhile burying finished films to get tax breaks we could be entering a very strange new era of competition in the film industry.

X Sonnet #

The herbs and spices came before the beef.
But roasting thoughts were crashing low for days.
A month would pass before the cook's relief.
Before it came, she boiled many ways.
The knowledge came before the fish was caught.
Her wisdom checked the fall of stupid lust.
Forbearance, lest a date be dearly bought.
But trains of steam through metal ribbings bust.
It didn't work but children took the flag.
Regretful tourists dully chomp the roots.
Each chubby hand would fill its owner's bag.
The jig was up when shoppers saw their boots.
For rigging lines above the fly, they won.
For sailing sky around the kite, they're done.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Significant Letters

Mori Masayuki reunites with the love of his life and has to confront the fact that she slept with an American soldier in 1953's Love Letters (恋文). The first film directed by actress Kinuyo Tanaka, only the second female director in the history of Japanese cinema, it pales in comparison to the Ozu and Mizoguchi films that obviously influenced her, in terms of shot composition, editing, plot, and performances. It is an interesting artefact, though, of the first year following the U.S. occupation.

Mori plays Reikichi, a former soldier whose fluency in English has gotten him a job translating. He runs into an old friend (Jukichi Uno) who asks him to translate some letters for a group of women under his employ. It turns out, these women are small time gold diggers, nearly prostitutes, who need help corresponding with the Americans they slept with during the occupation. Mori swallows his disgust and helps them out but he boils over when he talks to Michiko (Yoshiko Kuga), the woman he loves, about her own affair with an American GI.

As someone who studied English and presumably at one time had an interest in foreign culture, Mori's character seems poised to make a relatively balanced argument, so when he throws in Michiko's face the fact that her lover may have personally killed some of her compatriots, the cut is deeper.

Ultimately, Tanaka mainly wants to draw a distinction between Michiko and the cheap floozies who were really only after cash, a simplistic morality that comes off as gossipy and compares poorly with Mizoguchi movies like Street of Shame.

Mori Masayuki, who's normally good in Kurosawa and Mizoguchi movies, is bland and uninteresting here. I suspect Tanaka, like a lot of actors and actresses turned director, didn't like to give actors much direction. Maybe she got better at that as she went along.

Saturday, March 09, 2024

The Long Memory of a Fisherman

It's easy to pooh-pooh jump scares, to call a horror movie composed of little else a trite failure. But when I see a movie that completely bungles each and every jump scare, like 1998's I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, I must admit there's some skill in it. We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone.

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer follows on from I Know What You Did Last Summer, in which the killer knows the teenagers almost killed him last summer. It's hard to forget that sort of thing so the Fisherman (as he's called because he's a fisherman) is still trying to kill Jennifer Love Hewitt in the second film. Also, her new friend played by Brandy.

Somehow, the combination of sound effects, editing, music, and shot composition come together in totally toothless shock moments. Every swing is a miss. Jennifer Love Hewitt's at home alone when she hears a funny noise, she creeps up slowly to her closet where someone is plainly inside going through her clothes, and instead of saying, "Who's there?" she continues to creep up until Brandy pops out and they both scream. But we don't all scream. We cannot share in the terror feigned by these pretty young actresses.

Then it's off to the Bahamas for our young heroines as they seemingly win a radio contest--I say seemingly because the killer has played a trick on them in one of the film's halfway clever moments which I won't completely spoil. It turns out it's the off-season so there are no other tourists and the staff at the hotel are reduced to five while all the exteriors conveniently look like they could've been filmed in California. Cheap sets and minimal cast add up to a very low budget, or a budget that went towards certain unmentioned perks. But that minimal cast includes Jack Black in an early role and none other than Jeffrey Combs as the hotel manager. What a trooper. In the grand schlock horror tradition of established great performers in thankless minor roles, he milks all he can from his exasperated lines about hysterical tourists imagining they've seen corpses.

In the end, Freddie Prinze Jr. personally pilots a boat through a hurricane to save Jennifer Love Hewitt but can even Kanan Jarris save her from a killer who can mysteriously appear right behind someone without being seen by the people talking to him? My favourite part is when the killer ties Jennifer Love Hewitt's tanning booth shut and the solution to this contrived by one of the other teens is to pick up a dumbbell and hit the top of the tanning booth. There's the sound effect of broken glass and somehow the thing swings open. It feels like the filmmakers' disinterest in logic extends to a fundamental contempt for physics and cause and effect.

I wonder if I'll remember this movie next summer.

Friday, March 08, 2024

Inappropriately Groovy

An old, all-girls' private school, deep in the woods, turns out to harbour a horrific secret in 2006's The Woods. I suppose that's inevitable. It's not a bad movie though it feels slightly like it's pulling itself apart.

It kind of feels like the souls of two movies are at war, and one of them halfway devours the other, not out of malice but just blind hunger. There's a spooky little potboiler about a quiet but also rebellious teenage girl called Heather (Agnes Bruckner) finding she's met her match in a quiet but oppressive private school. She's aware her mother kind of hates her and the headmistress (Patricia Clarkson) exploits this with some chilling psychological manipulation. This movie is psychological and melancholy.

The other movie, the one that ultimately wins, is an Evil Dead movie. Bruce Campbell plays Heather's father, Joe, and while it feels like his presence was meant to be minimal in the beginning, by the end he's completely upstaged the whole movie and has basically become Ash. He doesn't say a word of dialogue in his first scenes which led me to notice just how well he can communicate volumes with facial expressions alone. But when one student manages to call him and get him to come pick Heather up, he immediately becomes the hero, ready to hack away at the evil vines that would drag the girls into the woods and to eldritch doom. Not unlike the woods and the vines in Evil Dead.

There wouldn't be such a see-saw quality if Agnes Bruckner could match Campbell's sheer force of personality. But while she was serviceable for all the quieter scenes, she just doesn't have the wattage Campbell has. He's kind of playing on the level of Jack Nicholson in The Shining and I think Shelley Duvall works as a counterpoint because her brittleness is of equal intensity to Nicholson's ferocity. Bruckner is completely drowned out by Campbell even when Campbell has less dialogue and screentime. But I do enjoy me some Bruce Campbell, so what the hell.

Thursday, March 07, 2024

Tech Talk with Setsuled

Yesterday felt like the god of technology, I guess Vulcan, was doing mischief with me. I had to take an online language test called PROGOS for my company, Borderlink. Unsurprisingly, it's sketchy as hell. It uses Cambridge score rankings but is not certified by or affiliated with Cambridge and was made in Japan. The test results included numerous spelling and grammatical errors; "Can give clear, detailed descriptions, highlight significant point", "To point out mistakes and other isues," Which is no surprise since the test is instantaneously graded by an AI. I scored "B2" in everything (the Cambridge scale goes A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2 with C2 being the highest) except "Interaction" in which I scored a B1. Interaction consisted of me responding to recorded prompts like, "What documents should I bring to my interview?" My microphone was crapping out half the time due to my lousy internet so I'm sure that was also a factor. Not that it matters to an AI. But, hey, at least no filthy human was paid to grade the test. Every time I think Japanese English education can't get more tragically ridiculous, it finds a way to surprise me.

After that, I decided to make some blueberry muffins. I put copious amounts of cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg in the batter along with a whole lot of brown sugar. I made enough for twelve muffins but my tray only holds six at a time. Smoke started coming from my convection oven when I was preheating it so I turned it off, unplugged it, let it cool, and cleaned it as best as I could, figuring some bit of food got caught somewhere. It seemed to work better so I put the tray in. In less than ten minutes, it was emitting smoke again and the six would-be muffins had become charcoal. So now I guess I need a new convection oven.

Finally, I decided to relax and play Skyrim. Unfortunately, I've hit a point which often seems to happen when I get a character to around level 40--my rickety scaffold of various mods destabilises and shit starts to fuck up. Which can be a little amusing. I was fighting two dragons and one of them got his tail stuck in a frozen lake and couldn't move. When I got his hitpoints down to zero, he didn't die. When I hit him again, his hitpoints refilled for the amount of damage I did. From then on, striking him with my ebony flail while my follower threw ice shards at him had the effect of gradually healing him.

Maybe all this will work as preemptive penance. My internet is running uncommonly smooth this morning. It probably just means all the hidden cameras are off in my apartment. That's enough, Vulcan, can I get another deity?

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

The Colour of Her Life

I kind of feel like I should dislike 1986's Betty Blue more than I do. It's about two attractive young people who are basically just assholes, committing theft and vandalism with impunity between sessions of passionate sex. The movie ends in a fairly cheap, overwrought pathos. And yet, I found the three hour film beautiful and compulsively watchable.

I was going to watch half last night and half to-night but I couldn't sleep and realised I wanted to finish it. There's very little plot to the film. It begins with a long sustained shot of its two main characters, Betty (Beatrice Dalle) and Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade), having sex in Zorg's cluttered beach shack. The sex scenes throughout the film are explicit and supposedly a relationship developed in real life between the stars but I'm pretty sure the sex is simulated--the performers are never sweaty or flushed.

Zorg is comfortable in his easy life, his job being merely upkeep of the other nearby shacks for a sleazy but fairly laid back landlord. Betty won't accept a comfortable status quo, though. In addition to violently expressing disgust for the landlord, she vandalises the property, eventually setting fire to Zorg's shack. Meanwhile, she has dogged faith that she can get his notebooks filled with stories published.

As Zorg explains to different people throughout the film, most of the time Betty's a wonderful and charming companion but, every now and then, she has these episodes of drastic psychological aberration. At the beginning of the film's last act, he finds her with her hair cut short and her face smeared with lipstick, a scene that probably would have been more effective if actress Beatrice Dalle had actually cut her hair. As it is, the wig she wears is rather obvious and looks much bulkier than her real hair, making it look as though she'd gained hair suddenly rather than was shorn of any.

I didn't find most of the film's comedy to be funny at all. When Zorg and Betty are working at a restaurant, a customer asks Zorg to replace a pizza she ordered because it has ham instead of the anchovies she wanted. So Zorg takes it to the kitchen and pulls rotten food out of the garbage, puts it on the pizza, and sprinkles cheese over it. We then watch the customer rapturously devouring the pizza. This is clearly meant to be funny but I think only a real sadist would find the humour in it. There are several moments like that in the film where I think we're meant to side with Betty and Zorg because they're young and beautiful.

Dalle is really hot and she's always captivating. It sounds like she's not much different from Betty in real life, too, having been caught shoplifting multiple times. She even once, on very brief acquaintance, married a rapist she met when visiting a prison. Dalle later described the marriage as a disaster though it apparently lasted at least a few years following his release. In any case, it seems like she'd be a stressful acquaintance.

Betty Blue is available on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet #1822
To dwell in rotting gaols they rate a perk.
The dizzy, walking fungal men were weak.
So nothing less than zombie crowds'll work.
The ratings tanked in time for sleepy week.
A reigning liar sinks in rancid cheese.
Decisive hate belittles gentle thoughts.
With gestures weak, the paper puppets please.
A rotten sun is seen with fuzzy spots.
A glowing deer was hostile, rushing guests.
The sabre teeth obliged the host with kills.
Their frocks were ranked among the very best.
A dying troupe conveyed their final wills.
Beside the ship's a fish of equal size.
A passion's buried deep behind its eyes.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

The Brazen Moll

Everyone's favourite pickpocket prostitute is back and this time she's Alex Kingston. Well, it was 1996 when the future River Song starred as Moll Flanders in an ITV series based on Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel. Kingston, as she was destined to be on Doctor Who, diminished her character with broad mugging but I liked the supporting performances by Daniel Craig and Diana Rigg.

Craig plays Moll's third husband, the one she really falls for. Despite the fact that this was long before he became James Bond, his role was beefed up so that he could appear in all four episodes of the series and thus take second billing. Rigg plays the mother figure Moll tragically encounters in Virginia and she's also quite good.

Unfortunately, it's Kingston at the rudder for the duration and her broad, winking performance, along with several of her costars' similar performances, sap the story of much of its complexity. There's little ambiguity as to whether Moll's path was of her own choosing or one inevitably laid out for her by society and circumstance, though much of the dialogue nods in that direction. Kingston even looks directly at the camera at moments and insipidly asks, "What would you do?"

It is admirable just how much of the story is adapted, though. Fans of the novel will find things to appreciate.

Monday, March 04, 2024

The Killer's Mirror

High school kids have to deal with a serial killer and their own hidden connexions to him in 2010's My Soul to Take. The last film to be both written and directed by Wes Craven (Scream 4 was his last film as director), it seems clearly intended to be his magnum opus, like he was just throwing everything he could into the pot. I kind of loved it but it's honestly a train wreck.

The influence of Lost Highway is pretty obvious right from the start. We meet a man working on a hobby horse in the basement who hears a news story about a local serial killer with a distinctive knife. Almost immediately, he trips over that very knife and is confused by the familiar way he picks it up and puts it in his pocket. This is all part of a rapidly told prologue segment that ends with the killer apparently meeting his end--but of course he didn't really.

Sixteen years later, seven high school kids who were born at the time of the killer's death supposedly somehow inherited aspects of his personality or are just considered cursed. The dialogue has lots of references to identity and how identity is defined. The main character, Bug (Max Thieriot), for instance, has some amusing dialogue with his best friend, Alex (John Magaro), about how being a man means pretending to enjoy pain and that being a man is entirely defined by pretense.

Where the departures from plain logic in Lost Highway always work as possible delusions of the protagonist, there are many lose threads left in My Soul to Take that just feel like sloppiness, particularly the many little suggestions that Bug has killed people and his memories have somehow been repressed. The movie totally forgets to explain or follow up on that. I kind of liked, though, how Craven doggedly avoided a lot of exposition, leading to a sometimes bewildering experience, as in one scene late in the film when we suddenly learn two characters had been siblings all along and it wasn't even a secret.

For all its faults, the movie has a sense of an artistic identity you don't often see in movies anymore. It definitely has the distinct flavour of Wes Craven.

Sunday, March 03, 2024

Oh, Archibald!

Here's a comic I made for students last week when I was stuck at my desk during testing:



I didn't do my usual lousy lettering but instead awkwardly inserted computer text so Japanese junior high school students can read it. In this world of astounding if, at times, inappropriately surreal AI art, my poorly formatted font looks like 1999. You're welcome!

AI art's kind of starting to remind me of William Burroughs' cut-up technique (attributed to Brion Gysin). It's interesting when it makes unexpected deviations. That's now but I suppose, sooner or later, someone's going to figure how to make AI reliably do what they want it to do. And all the artists who have a hard enough struggle proving they have value in this world will have an even harder time. I can see it being particularly hard in Japan where artificiality has long been seen as an intrinsically valuable. I see the young artists at the school where I work and can't imagine the insurmountable challenges as they try to make careers for themselves three or four years from now. It's good to keep in mind it's always best for writers to write for themselves first and foremost but that might be pretty cold comfort.

Saturday, March 02, 2024

Forever Vanilla

For a sheltered young woman, meeting a handsome, supernatural boy can be the beginning of a passionate adventure, lasting beyond a lifetime. For others, like the heroine of 2002's Tuck Everlasting, such an encounter may be a chaste and pleasant diversion for a few weeks, or even months, but, well, there's never any reason to become too terribly excited. This anemic fantasy romance will make you feel that it's not worth pondering whether your most fantastic wishes may come true.

In the early 1900s, a pretty young woman named Winnie (Alexis Bledel) chafes somewhat against the strict outline her parents have imposed on her future. One day, she escapes into the forest where she means a nice, clean family who became immortal after drinking from a magic spring.

She strikes up a friendship with the good-looking Jesse Tuck (Jonathan Jackson). The two find each other very pleasant and even dance and swim together. Finally, one day the Tuck patriarch (William Hurt) explains that immortality can be a curse. This sets up a conflict between her desire to share a life with Jesse and her preference to avoid becoming an eternal being cut off from human society in some vague, abstract, intellectual way. Whatever her decision, this movie is always ready to gently remind you that nothing is worth getting excited about.

As Roger Ebert aptly put it, "The movie is too impressed with its own solemn insights to work up much entertainment value," it's a movie burdened with "feather-brained sentimentality." Oh, Roger Ebert, I miss you. I know you'd know how to use eternal life. Indeed, he said so; "I know what I'd do: Spend 10 years apiece in the world's most interesting places." Think of all the things you could learn, all the skills, all the experiences you could have. It hardly seems to require that much imagination, which makes it all the more incredible all of the characters in this movie are completely lacking it.

Tuck Everlasting is available on Disney+.