Ghostly Roommates

Cordelia changes apartments in an entertaining episode of Angel written by Jane Espenson, "Rm w/a Vu". The episode ends with the introduction of her phantom roommate, Dennis, whose presence is sadly lacking after season one.

One of the best things about this episode is that Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) is fully Buffy era, spoiled brat Cordelia in it. After being chased out of her apartment by cockroaches and brown water, she beats on Angel's (David Boreanaz) door until he comes out of the shower to let her in.

You wait for Cordelia to acknowledge dragging Angel out of the shower as she piles her belongings in his arms, spewing complaints, and presuming her right to stay with him. You wait, but it never comes, she even ends the scene by demanding use of the shower. That's the Cordy I know and love.

Meanwhile, Doyle (Glenn Quinn) is dodging demonic loan sharks, a subplot that merges with the ghost plot in an amusing way in the climax. He also finds the haunted apartment for Cordelia after she tries apartment hunting herself.

There is one throwaway line where Angel asks how she can afford this place but everyone hustles past it. Just like how Buffy can afford a sprawling two storey house working in fast food, the economic logistics never add up on Angel. Which is partly why I can enjoy the fantasy of Angel having a hotel entirely to himself later on--I love that damned hotel. If the show had aired to-day, when L.A.'s homeless crisis is even more pronounced, it would have seemed too crass for a "Helper of the Helpless" to hoard a bunch of perfectly good living spaces. So it's best not to think too deeply about money in the Buffyverse.

Angel is available on Amazon Prime and, in many countries, on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1448

Aggressive humans shoot banana guns.
The arching brow betrays the skinny dream.
A burger waits between concealing buns.
The waiter fled and lost a burning team.
The error waits with flowers wreathed around.
A team of four defines a stack of pies.
A shelf of books could not describe a sound.
The tracks would curl in heat for lousy ties.
The hollow wall contains a bullet shell.
Tomatoes grew despite the rain of leaves.
In green and red we paint the rusted bell.
The haunter's sword is dull yet swiftly cleaves.
The meals arrived in flats exceeding small.
A deal contrived decides a building's tall.

Normal Boys and Normal Peril

Four twelve year-olds embark on a journey to find a dead body in 1986's Stand by Me. Based on a novella called The Body by Stephen King, the film has some of the ambient menace of King's horror fiction though director Rob Reiner and his screenwriters made numerous changes to the story. It's a decent film with some exceptional child performances. I watched it last night because I'd talked about it with one of the teachers I work with. It seems to be popular among junior high school teachers here in Kashihara, I think partly because the underlying story is about kids being abused by parents, brothers, or other people in their lives. It breaks my heart when I meet a kid who I slowly realise is probably in an abusive relationship with his or her parents. I've seen they tend to have special relationships with some of the teachers and staffs of the schools who dote on them a little more. I remember a girl at one school who tended to have wounds on her legs she explained as injuries from falling off her bicycle. She walked with a kind of swagger and talked like a gangster and I thought of her when watching Corey Feldman's character. I like how Reiner doesn't zoom in on his mangled ear but leaves the camera on him during some unrelated dialogue as the narrator (Richard Dreyfuss) explains it's from his dad holding his ear to a stove. All four kids went on to be stars--along with Feldman is Whil Wheaton, River Phoenix, and Jerry O'Connell. They're all pretty good in this. The dialogue is entertaining, especially when they argue about things like the species of Goofy or whether Mighty Mouse could fight Superman. Feldman's assertion that it couldn't happen because Mighty Mouse was a cartoon and Superman was a real guy feels pretty authentic for a 12 year-old in 1959. Most of the dialogue feels authentic and, as usual for movies from the '70s and '80s, it's so refreshing to see actors with realistic skin. But I got a little tired of listening to the kids argue all the time by about the halfway point. The climax doesn't quite work as Reiner tries a little too hard to make the experience of finding the body mix with the personal issues of Wil Wheaton's character. The film would have been stronger if the kids simply found the body, talked about it, and went home. The stuff leading up to the climax, though, is mostly pretty strong. Stand by Me is available on Netflix in Japan.

Tree Surfer

Is a human any different than an animal? This is the question that drives the various incarnations of Tarzan, including the original novel, but it gets lost in the shuffle in Disney's 1999 animated version of Tarzan. It's tragic, too, because this movie is really firing on all cylinders. Glen Keane had returned after an absence of three films to create one of the strangest and most remarkably animated Disney characters, Tarzan himself, and the lushness of the forest backgrounds is breathtaking. But Phil Collins' singing narration is a pale substitute for the characters singing in previous films of the Disney Renaissance and in general the film is lost in the shadows of three predecessors--The Jungle Book, The Lion King, and Pocahontas--for different reasons. Worst of all, in a story that should ruminate on primal urges, it lacks sexual chemistry between its leads.

That's in spite of the fact that Tarzan is so remarkably animated. Supervising animator Glen Keane drew inspiration from professional surfers and skateboarders to depict a Tarzan who races along bare branches, hunched over, more than he swings from vines (though there is vine swinging, too).

Like previous film incarnations of Tarzan, there's no explanation for his loincloth or his lack of a beard, and to this Disney adds inexplicable dreadlocks. But, okay, a man's hair that's never been washed might mat together strangely (though we see him jump in the water plenty of times). The original book, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, does explain the loincloth and lack of beard--when Tarzan encounters human tribes living nearby, he desires to establish his own humanity by imitating their tendency to shave and wear clothes--he takes a loincloth from a man he kills. Of course, Disney's film can't have this because they chose to completely avoid black characters and black actors. And this is how attempts to avoid racism so often end up perpetuating weird racial neuroticism. Edgar Rice Burroughs' original novel, 1912's Tarzan of the Apes, has some dated racial ideas and language and even features Tarzan developing a prejudice against black people but the novel itself is not a racist screed. The stridency with which some scholars deride its perceived racism is of course the same kind of outrage that makes producers at Disney paranoid to this day. Since the rules put forward by such commentators are inconsistent and have no intrinsic logic, the only hope Disney might have to placate them is to avoid issues entirely, which of course can be used as grounds for complaint, too.

In the book, the only people Tarzan meets as he grows up are people with whom he and the apes are in conflict and, it being west Africa, the people Tarzan encounters are black. The handful of shipwrecked white people are nicer to him so it's implied he perceives a fundamental difference between black and white people. But crucially, this is something Burroughs describes Tarzan as growing away from.

Tarzan fitted his bow with a poisoned arrow, but D’Arnot placed a hand upon his arm.

“What would you do, Tarzan?” he asked.

“They will try to kill us if they see us,” replied Tarzan. “I prefer to be the killer.”

“Maybe they are friends,” suggested D’Arnot.

“They are black,” was Tarzan’s only reply.

And again he drew back his shaft.

“You must not, Tarzan!” cried D’Arnot. “White men do not kill wantonly. Mon Dieu! but you have much to learn.

“I pity the ruffian who crosses you, my wild man, when I take you to Paris. I will have my hands full keeping your neck from beneath the guillotine.”

Tarzan lowered his bow and smiled.

“I do not know why I should kill the blacks back there in my jungle, yet not kill them here. Suppose Numa, the lion, should spring out upon us, I should say, then, I presume: Good morning, Monsieur Numa, how is Madame Numa; eh?”

“Wait until the blacks spring upon you,” replied D’Arnot, “then you may kill them. Do not assume that men are your enemies until they prove it.”

“Come,” said Tarzan, “let us go and present ourselves to be killed,” and he started straight across the field, his head high held and the tropical sun beating upon his smooth, brown skin.

And then, later:

“Monsieur Tarzan has not expressed himself,” said one of the party. “A man of his prowess who has spent some time in Africa, as I understand Monsieur Tarzan has, must have had experiences with lions—yes?”

“Some,” replied Tarzan, dryly. “Enough to know that each of you are right in your judgment of the characteristics of the lions—you have met. But one might as well judge all blacks by the fellow who ran amuck last week, or decide that all whites are cowards because one has met a cowardly white.

“There is as much individuality among the lower orders, gentlemen, as there is among ourselves. Today we may go out and stumble upon a lion which is over-timid—he runs away from us. To-morrow we may meet his uncle or his twin brother, and our friends wonder why we do not return from the jungle. For myself, I always assume that a lion is ferocious, and so I am never caught off my guard.

It's not exactly clear if Tarzan includes black people among the lower orders at this point. D'Arnot's idea that "white men do not kill wantonly" is contradicted by the book's inclusion of murderous white mutineers but Burroughs does explicitly espouse a philosophy of breeding, of inherited personality traits, that comes off as more Royalist than racist, though certainly the ideas aren't mutually exclusive.

It was a stately and gallant little compliment performed with the grace and dignity of utter unconsciousness of self. It was the hall-mark of his aristocratic birth, the natural outcropping of many generations of fine breeding, an hereditary instinct of graciousness which a lifetime of uncouth and savage training and environment could not eradicate.

What this puts me in mind of is Oroonoko, Aphra Behn's 1688 novel about a black, African prince whose refined nature is ascribed by Behn to the superiority of royal breeding. So Burroughs' own attitude need not necessarily have been to insist black skin made a person inferior. There are also numerous instances where Burroughs clearly decries the evil of slavery.

The absence of black characters or actors is certainly conspicuous and unnecessary in Disney's film but a bigger problem is a thematic shift from Tarzan as the human whose ingenuity and reason set him apart from his ape community to Tarzan as the funny looking kid who just wants to fit in with the intelligent apes. As is often the case in Disney films, the animals are depicted as being just as intelligent as humans, which works fine in most movies, but in this movie precludes any possibility of Burroughs' original argument having any meaningful place. It's the central, intellectual material the book continually puzzles over--what is Tarzan going to do and why? And what are the implications for human nature?

So that's one fundamental problem with Disney's film. The other problem is the lack of chemistry between Tarzan (Tony Goldwyn) and Jane (Minnie Driver). An instructive comparison could be drawn between this film and Pocahontas. While Pocahontas is certainly not a great film, its lead characters had an abundance of sexual chemistry. It's readily comparable because Disney's Tarzan has almost the same plot--evil colonialists show up, one them meets a sympathetic savage and falls in love, and in the process learns to respect the beauty of nature while the colonialist leader wants only to exploit the land/capture the gorillas. Glen Keane animated Pocahontas and you know he did a fantastic job of making her sexy because of how much prudes complain about her to this day. John Smith, as written, may not be terribly interesting but Mel Gibson's performance is virile and playful in a way that makes him sparkle.

Minnie Driver's Jane is flustered and enthusiastic about exploration but generally kind of sexless. She has a few wink-wink lines about the guy in the loincloth that are redolent of late '90s ironical sexual humour. She might have gained some traction but Tarzan himself is such a wet blanket. Goldwyn's performance is just affable and there's no sense of the instinctive physical attraction that overwhelms him and Jane in Burroughs' book or in previous film adaptations. Maybe this is just too much to expect of Disney but the sexual chemistry between Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan, from the 1930s Tarzan movies, is legendary. And kids watched those movies without being corrupted, one assumes.

It's such a shame because there are signs in this film that Disney was willing to go outside its comfort zone. It actually implies the death of a child and shows the corpses of Tarzan's parents. It's the last film of the Disney Renaissance and the full might of the art department is brought to bear on stunning backgrounds. There are good supporting performances by Lance Henriksen, Glenn Close, and Brian Blessed, the last of whom plays the film's Gaston-esque villain, another humdrum caricature of evil macho men that so much of the younger generation now seem to believe is the whole truth of European history. But it's a fun, campy performance. Oh, well.

Tarzan is available on Disney+.

...

This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan

The Batch versus Monsters

A decent episode of The Bad Batch last night, not as good as last week's but not bad. It was written by Tamara Becher, who is credited in the episode as Tamara Becher-Wilkinson. Interestingly, if I'm not imagining things, I think her imdb page was labelled Tamara Becher-Wilkinson when I looked at it last night. She was credited as just Tamara Becher in projects before 2013 and now it looks like she's Tamara Becher again. Did she decide the release of last night's Bad Batch was a good occasion to finalise her divorce?

This was her first Star Wars project but she's written an episode of Netflix's Daredevil series and two for Iron Fist. Like the hiring of Kari Skogland for Falcon and the Winter Soldier, this shows Disney might be looking at the Netflix Marvel series as a proving ground for writers and directors. It also shows a difference in the kind of writers being hired for The Bad Batch--so far there have been no writers whose top credit is writing for Rugrats, as there was on Rebels. Last night's episode was good, but I suspect Mike Michnovetz received a prominent story editor credit because there were some glaring plot holes, one of which was too prominent not to receive a bit of lampshading at the end.

I'm speaking of the fact that the Batch (Dee Bradley Baker) were hired to retrieve a rancor held captive by slavers but were led to believe their mission was to rescue a child. There's no real reason for their employer to deceive them on this point and it was obviously set up entirely for dramatic effect. It too obviously didn't make sense so some lampshading had to come courtesy of Hunter. He points it out to their employer, Cid, who only gives a musing, mysterious non-response, and moves on. The suggestion is that she had her own secret reasons, but, of course, if she actually wanted the job done, there's no reason she would have impeded her own agents, and if she didn't want it done--what does she have against a baby rancor?

Otherwise, Cid is one of the highlights of the episode, voiced by guest star Rhea Perlman. I believed her as an underworld deal broker.

The mission itself was somewhat less entertaining, with the entire Bad Batch being apprehended without injury, another deeply implausible development that simultaneously undercuts our impression of the Batch as a capable squad and the galaxy as a dangerous place. I really liked the monsters in the episode, though, and the fight between the rancor, who's named "Muchi" and a big flying lizard is pretty cool. I would have preferred some better sound effects when the rancor smashes its head but at least director Steward Lee makes it exciting and fast paced.

Although Omega (Michelle Ang) shows her skills in this episode, first sussing out Cid's identity and then single-handedly rescuing the squad, she's kind of broadly written and the only scene I felt really connected with her as a character is when she was chatting with the gonk droid. I am glad the droid is being used for more than a sight gag.

The Bad Batch is available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet#1447

Distinctive teeth unite the mouths of mice.
To build a room, the mush requires sand.
Tomato songs reveal the singer twice.
A cache of bricks requites the Wall's demand.
Familiar hair reminds the rain to drop.
The longest leaves were waiting round the bend.
With clapping hands we greet the local cop.
The shoulder totes a metal box to send.
Fatigue requites a question asked in rote.
The roses strayed beyond a temple door.
We piled books and shoes to fill the boat.
The apple hides its seeds to heat its core.
The flowers taught a monthly lesson here.
In planters rare we shared a frothy beer.

When the Vampire Investigated

Angel makes a credible stab at being a detective in the fourth episode of Angel season one, "I Fall to Pieces". A teleplay by David Greenwalt comes from a story by he and Joss Whedon about a surgeon who masters the ability to detach his body parts and send them off as minions to harass a woman. It's a decent episode.

The show may not be exclusively about Angel rescuing women but it sure seems to take up the bulk of his time in season one. And once again, Wolfram and Hart are mentioned as the firm helping the rich and powerful man get away with controlling a woman's life.

There are two clever moments in this episode. There's a subplot about Angel (David Boreanaz) finally needing to start asking clients for money. Angel doesn't feel right about it but then Doyle (Glenn Quinn) points out that paying a bill helps the clients feel less indebted to Angel. Suddenly it makes Angel's scruple look more like vanity. Nice bit of nuance.

The second clever bit is when Angel is caught snooping in the office of the villain (Andy Umberger) and gets out of it by quickly weaving a story about how he has a wife that requires the doctor's services immediately. And then Angel uses this pretext to credibly ask questions about the woman's picture on the doctor's desk, who happens to be the victim Angel's trying to help (Tushka Bergen).

There's also a memorable guest appearance by Carlos Carrasco as a former guru from whom the villain gleaned some of his technique. Carrasco is not a famous name. He looked familiar to me but I couldn't remember from where--I checked later and saw he'd been on Buffy and had played three different Klingons on DS9. Here he makes an interesting choice with his mannerisms and puts a kind of twitchiness in his expressions that make it look like his body parts aren't quite securely attached. It's nicely, subtly creepy.

Angel is available on Amazon Prime and also on Disney+ in some countries.

A School Unstable Enough

The Ramones were called upon to face the forces of petty oppression (or one lousy principal) in 1982's Rock 'n' Roll High School. With the schlock quality one expects from producer Roger Corman, this cartoonish teen comedy is nonetheless superior to films Corman made in the same mould in the late '50s and '60s. A lot of credit for that goes to the genuinely punk attitude of Joey Ramone who couldn't be bothered to pronounce half his lines clearly. The result is a subtle matter/anti-matter reaction between formulaic and anarchic.

The story centres on two girls, Riff (P.J. Soles) and Kate (Dey Young). Riff is the school DJ, obsessed with the Ramones but also passionate about good '70s underground music in general, ensuring the film has an improbably fantastic soundtrack also featuring Brian Eno and The Velvet Underground. Kate is her mousy, straight arrow friend who, for reasons I can't imagine, wants to bang a sleazy jock played by Vince Van Patten.

Ironically, the film's villain, Principal Evelyn Togar, is played by a woman who actually worked with The Velvet Underground, Mary Woronov. She puts just the right amount of over the top maniacal into the role for the film's cartoonish humour. Most of that humour falls flat on me, in the best of times (it's just not my bag) but I loved the mouse that mutates after Togar forces it to listen to the Ramones.

But the quality of the film picks up substantially whenever the Ramones themselves are on screen. I particularly liked a creepy/sweet sequence where the band appears in a sexual fantasy Riff has about them.

Something about the bitterly frustrated passion in Ramone as he leans in over a steadfastly safe, blank, two dimensional, comedic performance by P.J. Soles is a good glimpse into the nature of punk and what motivated it.

Rock 'n' Roll High School is available on The Criterion Channel.

Hornblower and the Sutherland

I have to marvel at C.S. Forester's ability to incorporate such detailed knowledge of wartime seafaring in such smooth, compulsively readable prose. I finished his second Hornblower book, A Ship of the Line, yesterday and the climactic battle was so gripping I stood reading it for twenty minutes at the train station. It's not a perfect book, even by the standards of pulp, but it's also a work of singular brilliance.

As I said earlier, as brilliant as it is, it's not right to class it with a masterpiece of prose like Moby Dick. Though Horatio Hornblower is kind of everything Captain Ahab wishes he could be, or possibly believes he is. Ship of the Line presents an even more consistent series of victories at sea for Hornblower in his new command of the Sutherland, formerly a Dutch vessel, a prize taken and refitted by the British. Hornblower cannily uses the ship's hull construction, with a bow curved in a way not characteristic of British ships, to pass himself off as an ally to unsuspecting prey.

Now he finds himself under command of Admiral Leighton, the husband of Lady Barbara, Hornblower's love interest from the first book, The Happy Return. Lady Barbara appears only briefly but she remains as a presence in Hornblower's mind, particularly in an interesting scene where he wrestles with his discomfort at the knowledge that she was probably responsible for getting him his new command.

The only problem I have with the novel is a strange jump from chapter 16 to 17. Sixteen is a brilliant description of the Sutherland's desperate rescue of another ship, Leighton's flagship, the Pluto, in the middle of a storm.

Bush was shouting something now, and pointing away over the quarter, and Hornblower followed the gesture with his eyes. The Pluto had vanished, and for a moment Hornblower thought she must have sunk with all hands. Then a breaking wave revealed her, right over on her beam ends, the grey waves breaking clean over her exposed bottom, her yards pointing to the sky, sails and rigging showing momentarily black through the white foam in the lee of her.

“Jesus Christ!” yelled Bush. “The poor devils have gone!”

“Set the main topmast stays’l again!” yelled Hornblower back.

She had not sunk yet; there might possibly be some survivors, who might live long enough in the wild sea to grab a rope’s end from the Sutherland’s deck and who might be hauled on board without being beaten to death; it had to be tried even though it was a hundred to one against one of the thousand men on board being saved. Hornblower worked the Sutherland slowly over towards the Pluto. Still the latter lived, with the waves breaking over her as if she were a half-tide rock. Hornblower’s imagination pictured what was happening on board—the decks nearly vertical, with everything carrying away and smashing which could. On the weather side the guns would be hanging by their breechings; the least unsoundness there and they would fall straight down the decks, to smash holes on the opposite side which would sink her in a flash. Men would be crawling about in the darkness below decks; on the main deck the men who had not been washed away would be clinging on like flies on a windowpane, soused under as the waves broke.

The desperate rescue is effected by a combination of luck and Hornblower's brilliance . . . then, the next chapter has a quiet scene in the Pluto's cabin and no mention is made of the disaster in the previous chapter.

Hornblower looked round the big cabin, the cushioned lockers, the silver on the table, Elliott and Bolton gorged with the vast dinner they had consumed, Sylvester with paper and ink before him, Villena in his gaudy yellow uniform staring idly about while the English conversation which he did not understand went on round him. On the bulkhead opposite him hung a portrait of Lady Barbara, a likeness so good as to be startling—Hornblower felt as if he might hear her voice at any moment. He caught himself wondering what they did with it when they cleared for action, tore his thoughts away from Lady Barbara with an effort, and tried as tactfully as he could to show his distaste for the whole scheme.

I checked to make sure the copy I was reading wasn't missing a chapter. It wasn't. I wonder if Forester intended to remove chapter sixteen at some point but never got around to it. Sometimes it does feel like Forester writes like someone whose experience is from playing video games of sea battles. There are vivid descriptions of mutilated bodies littering the deck peppered in but the action is so much driven by strategy there are many moments were it feels like visceral details are too hastily passed over. But what what great strategy driven prose it is.

Twitter Sonnet #1446

The chicken swam in yellow space to live.
The lettuce brushed the passing, rusty car.
A pumpkin carries many gifts to give.
The vine can walk but never very far.
With bread she stopped the choc'late river flow.
Her choice of drink deserved an olive tip.
At nine, the lounging cats were all aglow.
In varied lives they caught a savage grip.
We grasped for eyes but all we found were grapes.
The future Nelson fell from flying shrouds.
A forest's sun was changed when viewed on tapes.
Behind the clearer sky we hid the clouds.
The shadow waltz escaped from glowing stores.
Decisive seas dissolved the masted wars.

A Shared Buffyverse

Just three episodes in and already there was a crossover event with Buffy the Vampire Slayer season four and Angel season one. One of the strongest examples of why it's best to watch these shows together.

These episodes both feature the return of Buffy season two villain Spike (James Marsters), though he'd made one, brief appearance in season three. This time he's trying to recover something called the Gem of Amara that makes vampires totally invulnerable--until someone grabs the ring off their finger, which seems to happen pretty easily with the first three vampires to put it on.

The Buffy episode is the stronger of the two here. Written by Jane Espensen, "The Harsh Light of Day" is a more interesting rumination on what makes a good, messy relationship and what makes a bad, comfortable one. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) deals with the heartbreak of finding what she thought was the start of a relationship with Parker (Adam Kaufman) was what he considered a one night stand. Meanwhile, Anya (Emma Caufield) returns, intending to have a one night stand with Xander (Nicholas Brendon) only to find having sex with him isn't the best way to get closure after all. And this episode reintroduces the newly vampified Harmony (Mercedes McNab), whose relationship with Spike, based on his open hatred for her somehow making both of them horny, is at turns funny and sad. It's an interesting example of the storytelling potential in two characters who have no souls. The episode ends with a nice shot of Buffy, Anya, and Harmony sadly strolling around the park.

The Angel episode suffers a bit from the first season designs to make Angel a bit more like a realistic LA crime drama. Angel (David Boreanaz) is busy trying to counsel a young woman in a somewhat cliched abusive relationship when the Gem of Amara problem rolls into the town. The Angel counselor subplot feels more like a hasty thumbnail than anything in itself worth screentime, except for a scene when Spike amusingly mocks the situation when he watches Angel and the young woman in secret. The episode becomes an entertaining enough fight between good and bad.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel are available on Amazon Prime.

Secrets of Plain Truth

To learn the secrets behind another's experience and perception is to become aware of the endless mystery of existence. It says something about Ingmar Bergman that one of his earlier, lesser films, 1952's Waiting Women (Kvinnors väntan), is so fascinating and profound.

The premise is pretty simple. It's an anthology film in which a group of women start to share stories of loneliness and epiphany. The first is told by Rakel (Anita Bjork) who tells a story about her affair with her childhood friend, Kaj (Jarl Kulle), and how it nearly destroyed her husband (Eugen).

I love how it begins, with a very long, single, unmoving shot of Rakel looking into a mirror. The scene plays out with Kaj appearing in the doorway reflected in the mirror, then Rakel standing up and going back to him, before she returns to her seat and Kaj sits beside her. The usual function of the mirror as symbolism for self-reflection deftly shows the place Kaj occupies in Rakel's heart and their movements relative to the mirror punctuate the dialogue and each stage of their evolving affair.

There are no cliches in this movie and the resolution of the first tale is deeply pathetic, yet it's one that seems to confer on Rakel some sense of serenity.

My favourite story is the second and it has very little dialogue, reminding me of Bergman's aptly titled later film, The Silence. Marta (Maj-Britt Nilsson) begins by talking about loneliness in the days leading up to the birth of her first child. Her husband is away, we don't learn why right away, all we know is this sweet young woman is drifting through the complex shadows of her home in a kind of drowsy anxiety.

There's a kitten, her only companion, and when she starts to feel contractions, she absently puts the kitten in her bag and heads to the hospital. One of the orderlies takes her kitten--something that visibly disconcerts her--and then she's left lying alone on the table, watching the erratic shadows of some foliage outside. This dissolves into a memory, an extraordinary sequence of cancan dancers, vigorously marching about a stage while topless women serenely stride about amongst them.

And then we see Marta at a table, looking slightly bored with a cigarette her mouth. She wins a contest by "holding two francs between her thighs"--Bergman doesn't show exactly how--and perhaps this sweet, innocent young woman isn't so inexperienced as we might have thought. She runs from her incensed boyfriend, back to her apartment, and then there follows a magnificently eerie sequence as another man flirts with her, unseen, asking her to open her door "just a crack".

The final story seems oddly trivial after the first two--Karin (Eva Dahlbeck) and her husband, Fredrik (Gunnar Bjornstrand), get trapped in an elevator after a party. They find the situation leads to some abnormally frank discussion. Again, it's fascinating how strangely their discussion of sex transpires, and yet how natural it also seems for her to laugh at and tease him about an affair she's known about. The scene also features a brilliantly sexy bit of business where she massages his sore leg and possibly something else.

Waiting Women is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1445

The phantom hero saved a cage of birds.
The message beasts were sent by accident.
We built a castle waiting years for words.
The time elapsed with little incident.
The rainy pond obscures the speaking frog.
The hidden conf'rence chose a student's path.
Depending branches bloomed in violet fog.
Nocturnal floods erode a quiet bath.
The shaking stone adopts a sacred face.
Resounding chatter drifts from dying leaves.
The ancient snow remains in patterned lace.
The urgent ghost of evening rarely grieves.
In dusty halls a drum was nightly played.
Below the road, in soil, castles stayed.

Demonstrably Mulan

Is your outside allowed to match your inside by your society and culture? It's this question that has made Disney's 1998 film Mulan a touchstone for the Western LGBTQ+ community, though there is, of course, the usual wrangling about how analogies to transgender or crossdresser life experiences should be applied. But the capacity for the story, particularly the song "Reflection", to be applied to different life experiences is one of the great assets of fantasy storytelling. After the lifelessness of the songs in Hercules, it's no surprise Disney parted ways with Alan Menken at last (temporarily--he'd return for 2004's Home on the Range) and for the first time employed Matthew Wilder in the role of songwriter with David Zippel returning from Hercules to write the lyrics. The result is two songs, "Reflection" and "I'll Make a Man Out of You", that have enjoyed greater longevity than anything from the three Disney films preceding Mulan. Meanwhile, the story benefits from a greater narrative simplicity and tonal consistency compared to Hercules and Hunchback and the Chinese inspired visual designs are lovely and simple. They aren't, though, Chinese, any more than the story or the characters, which is largely the cause of the film's low popularity in Asia. Where I live, in Japan, people seem barely conscious of it. Last year, ahead of the live action remake's release, I had to search high and low before I found some Mulan merchandise at the Disney Store on a shelf facing the wall in a corner. The live action remake was never released theatrically here in Japan, only on Disney+, despite the fact that there has not been a lockdown or cinema closures here during the pandemic. And, of course, the troubled releases of both versions of the film in China have been well publicised. One of the complaints about the animated version is that the characters look foreign to East Asian viewers and anyone who has lived in the culture can tell you how very American the characters do look in Mulan, most importantly for their physical mannerisms. But there's also the matter of beauty--there's long been a strange disconnect in Hollywood not just between Hollywood's idea of Asian beauty and East Asia's, but even between Hollywood and western enthusiasts of Asian media. Why, in this day and age, when BTS is wildly popular in the U.S., are casting directors not getting the picture? Just imagine the missed potential for the upcoming Shang-Chi movie, for example. That being said, Mulan's Western sensibility doesn't diminish the film's appeal to me. As a fan of the 1941 Thief of Bagdad, I have a long enduring love for the fantasy version of other cultures courtesy of a Western lens and, while Mulan never reaches the level of The Little Mermaid, I'd say it's as least as good as The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast.

Despite the absence of animator Glen Keane, one of the film's virtues is that it was made before the studio lost appreciation for sex appeal. There are two scenes of Mulan (Ming-Na Wen/Lea Salonga) bathing, the second one with a horde of naked men, which ends with her proclaiming her hope never to see a naked man again. Scenes highlighting the heroine's shyness about her own naked body is a recurring element in movies about women warriors who dress as men--and, yes, there have been lots of those, a few of them starring the great Maureen O'Hara. But my favourite is Jean Peters in Anne of the Indies.

That movie is a heavily fictionalised version of the story of Anne Bonny (not unlike how Mulan drastically differs from the poem that inspired it), an actual, historical female pirate, but whose exploits were much more limited than the various tales about her would suggest. As I happen to have a webcomic about female pirates, I've done a little research into the matter of women at sea in the age of sail. So I can speak to the question as to whether or not women ever dressed as men and went to war in the disguise--yes, they did. And they went to sea, too, in conditions where one would assume it's far more difficult to conceal one's sex. In the often crowded and squalid conditions below decks, there was little to no privacy, more often than not. How did women conceal their sex? For the most part, we simply don't know. But it certainly happened. In the early 19th century, there was even a black woman serving in the Royal Navy. Aspects of her story may have been romanticised but this, too, is a significant detail--the fact that people were pleased to romanticise narratives of female warriors suggests attitudes about women in service weren't quite uniformly snarlingly misogynistic as modern portrayals of the past would seem to suggest. Personally, my theory (as expressed in Dekpa and Deborah) is that many of the women who served aboard ships were known to be women by their shipmates though the exact psychology of such awareness may have been subtle. I suspect there were many cases were shipmates knew on some some level that their crewman was a woman but easily suppressed the knowledge beneath the occupations of normal shipboard routines and chores. And, of course, one of the most successful pirates in history was a Chinese woman.

All of this is to say that, at its heart, Mulan is a very modern story. The humour is certainly very modern, with Eddie Murphy, voicing the diminutive dragon Mushu, making rapidfire pop cultural references in the mould of Robin Williams' Genie. The terms "cross-dresser" and "drag" are thrown about--this is a movie about modern American culture, not ancient Chinese culture.

In light of that, it's interesting to consider how the movie shows Mulan earning the right to her identity within her culture. When her "I Want" song, "Reflection", presents her problem (and it functions much better than the ones in Hercules, Hunchback, Pocahontas, or Beauty and the Beast), the idea that her self-perception is so at odds with how other people perceive her, the rest of the movie doesn't resolve the problem via a change in Mulan's culture but via Mulan's own actions. Mulan changes, not her culture. She proves herself with her valour and cleverness so that, in the end, when she warns her comrades about the Hun attack, they listen to her because she's earned their respect for her past displays of prowess. Notably, most of the soldiers don't want to see Mulan punished when her sex is revealed. The nature of Mulan's arc is emphasised by how it's mirrored in Mushu's--Mushu proves through his endeavours that he's a real dragon, other characters aren't expected to just call him a dragon just because he says so.

And that's where this movie may be at odds with the identity politics of the past five years--and, honestly, how many young people could take a valuable lesson from the film.

Mulan is available on Disney+.

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This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules

A World New and Familiar

I'm relieved to say last night's new episode of Star Wars: The Bad Batch was another good one, this one written by Christian Taylor. Taylor wrote no less than fifteen episodes of The Clone Wars, including the famous arc involving Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka on a strange world inhabited by three Force deities. And yet, Taylor hadn't worked on a single Star Wars project since Disney acquired the property. I hope we get to see the return of more Clone Wars writers and I find myself wondering if this reflects a policy change at Disney.

A lot of the arguments people have about the quality of writing on Disney Star Wars tend to hinge on politics, specifically wokeness, but I don't think that's really the issue. Although I think wokeness, as a priority, can lead to the hiring of creators who are vetted on improper criteria (they're not necessarily hired for being good writers, in other words), there's no reason good stories can't be written for characters belonging to racial or sexual identity groups historically scarce in leading roles. The two real problems that have plagued Disney Star Wars are the absence of George Lucas as a guiding influence and the insertion of ideas reflective of Disney corporate policies. These policies are much older than wokeness and although I've never seen them explicitly stated anywhere one can deduce them from mostly consistent patterns in Disney's creative output--stories must always, in some way, be about family, there must always be a clear demarcation between good and evil, and good must always be superior to evil in ways so clear that even a three year old can grasp it. At first glance, it would seem Star Wars easily fits with these qualities--the Star Wars movies are about family, many people believe they're about the fundamental battle between good and evil, and the difference between the Rebellion and the Empire couldn't be clearer. At first glance, it's a perfect fit, but in practice, things fall apart--the portrayal of comically inept stormtroopers in the first season of Rebels and the generally, absurdly nerfed villains on Resistance and Forces of Destiny are examples of how this completely undermines storytelling in the Star Wars universe. Notably, the Star Wars movies released under Disney have largely been free of this problem, particularly the strongest, Rogue One. I suspect this is because Disney has been more cautious with the films. Beginning with season two of The Mandalorian, I believe Disney has finally learned this lesson for Star Wars television, too, and we're finally seeing stories that reflected the nuance that always underscored Star Wars under Lucas--particularly in The Empire Strikes Back and the prequels.

"Cornered" begins with the Batch (Dee Bradley Baker) and Omega (Michelle Ang) looking for a new place to recoup and refuel. Taylor deftly uses the circumstance to develop the characters--the Bad Batch are a military unit, used to having their basic needs, like food and fuel, financed and supplied by the Republic. Now, even the smartest of them, Tech, is a babe in the woods. It doesn't even occur to him that the proprietor of the port would require a bribe to persuade him not to file the customary report on their landing. Hunter is cannier than the rest, but even he resorts to the somewhat absurd measure of passing Echo off as a droid and trading him.

I also like how excited Omega is at seeing Pantora--I'm warming to Omega faster than any new Star Wars character since The Clone Wars' original run. And I liked the time that was evidently spent making Pantora look interesting and distinct. There are so many little details, too, I only saw later when I was taking screenshots, like this poor beggar Hunter runs past.

The Empire hasn't solved poverty but everyone is happy that the war is ended--another nice bit of complexity. Order and security do come with their perks.

And, of course, this is the episode that introduces Fennec Shand from The Mandalorian, voiced by Ming-Na Wen, who also plays her in live action form.

Her face looks oddly big. Maybe her eyes should've been made slightly larger to match the stylisation on the other characters. Maybe it needed more shading, I don't know, but Ming-Na Wen is much prettier than this in real life. But this is otherwise, frankly, a more interesting introduction for her than her first episode on The Mandalorian. She's a bounty hunter and Omega is clearly her target but she's also oddly kind to the girl, teaching her how to steal fruit from a local vendor like Sabu in The Thief of Bagdad. I have to say, I feel little bad for the merchants on Pantora in this episode.

Director Saul Ruiz also crafts a very effective chase sequence in the sewer and rooftops of Pantora. All in all, a satisfying piece of pulp serial storytelling, just like the better episodes Clone Wars.

The Bad Batch is available on Disney+.