Life is Politics!

It's never too soon to start plotting how to rule the world. We catch up with such an ambitious young man in high school in 2017's Teiichi: Battle of Supreme High (帝一の國, "Teiichi's Country"). A screwball comedy with just a pinch of genuine pathos, it's mostly about pretty boys being silly. Which is certainly a worthy enough subject, as legions of Japanese girls may tell you.

The quick cutting and cartoonishly exaggerated mannerisms will remind the viewer slightly of Amelie but this kind of live action cartoon isn't so groundbreaking in Japan as Amelie was in the west. We meet Teiichi as a young boy whose passion is for piano until his father, lost in the ecstasy of delivering corporal punishment, accidentally drops his son's head onto the piano keys.

This sounds like a serious episode but the filmmaking style places an ironic distance between us and the violence. It's more like watching puppies gnaw on each other's ears than human domestic violence.

Flash forward ten years and Teiichi (Masaki Suda) is entering the prestigious Kaitei High School. He wants to be prime minister of Japan. To do that, he needs to get on the council of ministers. To do that, he needs to get on the student council of Kaitei High. To do that, he has to be a class monitor. The first step in Teiichi's political career is to support an upper-classman's campaign for student council, and he chooses the suave and conspicuously artificial Roland Himuro (Shotaro Mamiya).

Naturally there's a scene where all the boys, wearing nothing but thongs (fundoshi, traditional Japanese underwear), play drums for an audience with fierce, earnest expressions.

But it's not all titillation, a lot of it is genuinely funny and sweet. I liked a scene where Teiichi, depressed in his bedroom, repeatedly has his door broken down by his friends.

There's also a very small and sweet romantic subplot between Teiichi and a girl played by Mei Nagano. The two cutely keep touch with each other via cup phones.

Teiichi: Battle of Supreme High is available on Netflix in Japan.

Twitter Sonnet #1576

A changing skull accounts for lumpy heads.
The smoke or steam engulfed a sleeping throat.
Intentions dance beyond the hands of meds.
A crinkled picture showed a birthing goat.
The doubled drop was lost in pouring rain.
Successful leaks delivered sea to bed.
There's none of love in wrinkled sheets of pain.
But tales we told to tired ears are dead.
The painted fire turned another spit.
Survival breeds in plastic budget cups.
The city power sees the torches lit.
A morning rage possessed the wakeful pup.
A symbol spots its shadow off the rail.
Your spam proclaims the sky suspicious mail.

Behind the Sylvia North Story

If you're a David Lynch fan, it's been a good time to have The Criterion Channel. In addition to having his first film, Eraserhead, the channel also has Fire Walk with Me, numerous interviews with and about Lynch, and the two movies most people regard as his greatest, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive leaves the service at the end of this month so I took the opportunity of watching it again. I realised it'd been quite some time--I don't think I've watched it since before Twin Peaks season three aired in 2017. I found it a different experience, watching it through the lens of a post-Twin Peaks 2017 viewing.

The ends of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive are a bit similar. They move the characters out of one reality and into another in which familiar characters have different names and identities. Even Cooper leading Laura by the hand is similar to Camilla leading Diane by the hand. The most popular interpretation of Mulholland Drive is that the first half is a dream Diane has before her death. What if it's another reality? The film could then be a statement on just how potently aware someone is of the alternate possibilities in their lives because those alternate paths actually play out somewhere.

An explanation isn't so important, though, as much fun as it is to speculate. Lynch isn't presenting a puzzle to be solved but a puzzle that compels you to contemplate it. The juxtaposition of experiences is the important thing, an explanation would only be a distraction. The differences and similarities between Betty and Diane, Camilla and Rita, are interesting regardless of whether or not they're in any sense explicable.

Clearly Diane is in some way aware of Betty. Or of the aspects of herself that resemble Betty. I assume Diane must have met the elderly couple at some point. But, then, maybe she only glimpsed the encounter between them and Betty through the interdimensional mists.

I find myself thinking of the lines from the Eddie Vedder song, "Running out of Sand", he performed on Twin Peaks--"Who I was I will never be again . . . There's another us around somewhere with much better lives." It's amazing to think that the song wasn't written for the season and that it was Laura Dern who recommended Vedder's inclusion in the series.

What a cruel thing Hollywood is. Or maybe it's better to say, what a cruel thing a dream is. Of all the masterful scenes in the movie, the one that haunts me the most is that dinner party near the end, where Diane watches Adam and Camilla together. She sees Camilla kiss another woman and Camilla is clearly in some kind of relationship with Adam. It isn't just that Camilla has broken up with her, Diane is realising how different Camilla is from her impression of her. She's not Rita, maybe she never was. Or did Diane see something in Camilla that Camilla has buried? It's the kind of question we can't answer for sure about our relationships with people in real life so Lynch appropriately avoids answering it, too. But he does present possibilities.

Is it better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all? I find that a difficult question to consider because I can't imagine never having loved anyone. Unless, of course, I've unknowingly never experienced the depths of true love. Either way, it's an unanswerable question. All we can consider is possibilities. I suppose you could say Diane's downfall is her need for the impossible--for a stable reality and identity. The end of the film clearly implies her horror at the contrast between who she's become and who Betty was. She can't accept that any more than she can accept the differences between who she thought Camilla was and who Camilla seems to be now. Diane's motivation to protect her worldview with violence would be seen as admirable in another context. How often has corruption come from a desire to protect purity?

It would be cheap to condemn her for it. It would be heartless of us. We've shared in her vision and, if we're watching with feeling, we've, to some extent, loved the things she's loved. What's the alternative to not having something you love so much that you'll lose your mind when you lose it? To have nothing? Or does one inevitably have nothing? I'd say the point of the Club Silencio scene is to say that, however hard someone tries to prove something isn't real, it's still real if you feel it. It's the opposite of what Jean-Luc Godard did by randomly shutting off the score in Vivre sa vie and Une femme est une femme. Or further down the same train of thought. Godard seems to be saying the music is making you feel something unwarranted, Lynch seems to be saying your feeling is warranted because of the music.

Our Idea of Fun

What could be more fun than terror? It sounds strange but it's basically the idea behind funhouses, as demonstrated in 1981's The Funhouse. Directed by Tobe Hooper, it portrays events that form a commentary on the concept of fear as entertainment. I'm not sure Hooper has a point precisely but it's an interesting rumination on how humans get their kicks.

Several horror movies are directly referenced. Right at the beginning we get an enjoyably gratuitous reference to Psycho. The film's protagonist and obvious Final Girl, Amy (Elizabeth Berridge), is taking a shower when her little brother intrudes to stab her with a rubber knife. Furious at the prank, she chases him to his bedroom where she promises to get him back for it someday, somehow. We see the little boy's room is covered with horror memorabilia, including three stills from Bride of Frankenstein.

Downstairs, their father is actually watching Bride of Frankenstein on TV. Later, at the carnival where most of the film takes place, we get our first sight of this film's monster (Wayne Doba), looking fairly inconspicuous in a Frankenstein's monster mask.

These aren't just references to movies, they're put in the context of performance. The little boy was trying to scare his sister, the monster is wearing a monster mask as part of the funhouse. But then there's real horror also presented in an audience/performer dichotomy, first when the film's teens see a pair of real deformed cows on display at the carnival, then when they actually witness a murder.

They witness it through the slats of floor boards above the room where it takes place, much like a movie audience watches events take place between characters unaware that they're being observed.

Again, I don't think Hooper is making an argument with any of this--of if he is, it doesn't come through very well. But that's okay. It's a good jumping off point for ideas. I suppose you could say it mischievously implicates the audience for gawping at the strange and pathetic.

The monster commits the murder of the fortune teller, Zena (Sylvia Miles), after he's prematurely ejaculated after he paid her to have sex with him. As a teen film, in which the main teenage characters are contemplating whether or not to have sex, it's a nice way of exploiting a young person's discomfort over sexuality. I like how the monster does all this wearing a Frankenstein's monster mask. The immobility of the mask gives it the same kind of creepiness as Michael Myers or even, of course, Hooper's own Leatherface. The fact that it's one movie monster wearing the mask of another movie monster is kind of intriguing.

I liked Elizabeth Berridge as Amy. She's pretty. It's pretty clear at the beginning that she's going to survive longer than the other teens because she expresses reluctance about going to the carnival and about having sex. But she's not as morally pure as other Final Girls--she laughs with her friends at the deformed cows and at the old fortune teller. But I was still rooting for her to escape.

The Funhouse is available on Shudder.

On a Clear Night

Last night's Moon Knight was better than I expected, even better than last week's. The teleplay by Rebecca Kirsch and Matthew Orton had things I even loved though it also had the kinds of problems I would expect from something rushed.

I loved the dynamic between Steven and Marc (Oscar Isaac) in this episode. I loved how you could read everything Steven says as something Marc says to himself or as an something a separate and independent character would say. It makes sense of the resentment Steven has for Marc and for any kind of violence. Steven is a mechanism to avoid confronting the reality of their abusive mother but he's also an internalisating of her implacable morality. Marc is forced to live in a world of greys while Steven has the freedom to see things in more black and white terms.

I loved how Dr. Harrow (Ethan Hawke) actually gave him useful advice about opening up to himself. I wonder if there's anything actually of Harrow in him or if Marc's mind is just using his face.

I wish a little more time could've been spent on the dynamics of Marc/Steven's family. I like the idea of him having an abusive mother but the way she's portrayed feels too much like an After School Special. I'd have liked some clues about how his father was handling the situation. Did he ever confront her?

I wish Kirsch and/or Orton had not written Taweret, the hippo goddess, as incompetent. That felt a bit hackneyed. She's been doing this for thousands of years, there's no reason she should need cue cards.

But in the main, I really liked this episode. I liked the bird skeleton Steven sees when chasing the kids into the cave, a little omen of Konshu or another thing to make the boundary between dream and reality less certain. I hope Steven is actually dead. As much as I like him, I want him to have the dignity of the episode's nicely tragic ending.

Moon Knight is available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1575

The time it ticks to crack a clock is one.
The weak it breaks could foster depths of foam.
To seek a debt in purses cut is done.
The stranger's eye is sculpted straight from home.
A rainy heat abused the drop of names.
To walk in wind invites the mad to dunk.
The man to think of crowns in hock remains.
A metal gripper brained the heartless lunk.
Decisive sand was changed for sugar dust.
But grains of stone were never solid ground.
A second colour claimed the name of rust.
A Spanish song arranged the morning sound.
A tiny bird could make you think of caves.
But never blink to raid Egyptian graves.

Last Call for Nachos

I found the ending to last night's Better Call Saul very satisfying though it mainly involved the Nacho subplot. Mostly I find Nacho intensely dull and for the most part that held true last night.

The episode began with his continued escape from Mexico which continues to be shot through a yellow filter. I'm not even the only one complaining about productions doing that anymore. Why are they still doing this?

There were about a hundred logistical problems in Nacho's (Michael Mando) hiding in that old oil tanker. It doesn't even seem possible he could've climbed back out of there.

But the Saul (Bob Odenkirk) plot was great as usual. It featured another intriguing scam, this one involving a valet and Huell (Lavell Crawford).

I also liked Kim's (Rhea Seahorn) confrontation with the DA (Julie Pearl) and Kim's insistence on using the name Saul. Damn, I want to know what happened to her.

The Crucial Choice

One of my favourite questions to ask students at the junior high schools I work at here in Japan is, "Who do you like better, Chip or Dale?" The characters are popular here so most of kids know who they are. And they think it's a silly question so they laugh, which I think helps make the grammar memorable. I suppose it's not entirely meaningless, though. It's kind of like asking, "Which is better, the brain or the heart?"

Have you seen the trailer for the upcoming Rescue Rangers movie?

It's hard to imagine anyone thinking this was a good direction to go in. I suppose people at Disney thought this was a different tactic than the unsuccessful DuckTales reboot but it's really the same--lazy, heartless, postmodernist humour. And just like they gave distinct, adult voices to Huey, Dewey, and Louie, they've given distinct, adult voices to Chip and Dale. They want to use these beloved old characters, but somehow they fail to grasp the basic qualities that made them popular. I guess it's because they hire celebrity voice talent and they baulk at the idea of disguising those voices. And somehow they just can't shove their reasoning over the hill blocking them from seeing that they'd save money on casting and make a better product if they just did their voices the old fashioned way.

I was surprised to find Scrooge McDuck isn't well known in Japan. There's limited awareness of Scotland so that might be part of it. Also, he's not so cute and cuddly. It really is a shame the DuckTales reboot was so wrong-headed. David Tennant was such perfect casting. I'd love to see his Scrooge on some genuine adventures instead of just the usual tedious stream of self-aware gags.

A Sudden Glimpse of Normal

Two detectives embark on a stakeout of a young, beautiful lover of a murder suspect. They're surprised to find out how boring she is in the 1958 noir Stakeout (張込み). At turns a fascinating procedural and a melancholy rumination, the film's a really nice detective story from Studio Shochiku.

Two detectives, an elder named Shimooka (Seiji Miyaguchi) and a younger man named Yuki (Minoru Oki), follow the trail of a robbery murder suspect called Ishii (Takahiro Tamura). They travel from Tokyo southwest to Saga in Kyushu, a hot province in a hot summer.

The heat and the realism of the depiction of train travel and town life are two of the things that make the movie reminiscent of Kurosawa's Stray Dog. But I found myself thinking more of Hitchcock's Rear Window.

The detectives find a room in an inn next door to the woman's home, a perfect spot with a bird's eye view of her front yard. As the two detectives watch, the younger man, Yuki, remarks that he's surprised to find the woman is so boring. The older man, Shimooka, merely replies, "Most people are boring."

So they're interpreting what they see and drawing conclusions about how well it reflects life in general, much as one might do after watching a movie. The sense of the film commenting on the audience/film relationship is heightened by the fact that the woman, Sadako, is played by the film's biggest star, Hideko Takamine, but she hardly gets any closeups until the film's climax.

She's married to a businessman--not the murderer--who has three kids from a previous marriage. She gets along with the kids and the husband is stingy but not outright abusive. It's not truly a bad setup but Sadako certainly doesn't seem to be appreciated.

Director Yoshitaro Nomura keeps things interesting as the stakeout drags on, using the second floor inn room with its commanding view to create a number of interesting shots. The inn employees gossip both about the detectives--who've told them unconvincingly that they're travelling salesmen--and Sadako, who comes by at one point to borrow money for groceries because her husband "forgot" to give her some that morning. When action does finally strike, it's sudden and Yuki finds himself madly scrabbling back across country. Unable to send messages except for a single hasty telegram back to his partner, the film nicely stays with his POV as he struggles first with finding Sadako and Ishii and then with deciding how to handle a very sad situation, made sadder by how loveless he knows quite well her home life is.

Stakeout is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1575

The cool of dusk provides the frozen grill.
As often times the dove will buy the snake.
There's something cracked about the human will.
They see the cut between the knife and stake.
Repeated notes were layered over frost.
A sharpened broach was stuck in frizzy hair.
The spoon in boiling soup was slowly lost.
Across the sky there rode an angry mare.
A world of boiling air denies the norm.
Routinely trains would carry blood to work.
Oppressive heat became the average warm.
Behind the bomb the grim detectives lurk.
Entrancing shade awaits in past returned.
A boiling spring in error seasons burned.

Whatever Happened to Hardy Amies?

Dig this briefcase I bought at Book Off a couple months ago. It's the best one I've ever had. It's solid and big enough I could carry an outfit or two if I wanted in addition to a laptop. And it was only around 2000 yen, or twenty dollars. Much less if you consider how far the yen has fallen recently.

Book Off sells used stuff but Japanese people treat their things really well, it seems like new. I was deciding between this one, which is Hardy Amies, and a Samsonite in a similar colour, more of a yellow green than this one's blue green. Ironically, in his book, ABC of Men's Fashion, Amies himself said, "It should be noted that greens with a brown cast--i.e. olive green--are much more becoming than blue greens such as bottle green which is as ugly as its name."

And the book has a blue green cover!

So, yeah, I liked the case so much I bought his book. First published in 1964, it features Amies opinions and advice ordered with alphabetised headings. Not everything holds up--see, for example, his vision of the man of the future:

Under the entry for "Brim" Amies writes, "Today the tendency is to have as narrow a brim as can be achieved without looking ridiculous." I would say "ridiculous" has in fact been achieved in the above picture.

He has plenty of smart things to say, though. He has a lot of praise for Chelsea boots.

When Chelsea boots first appeared in the late 1950s it quickly became certain they were the most appropriate form of footwear to wear with narrow trousers and formal suits. When a new style is tried because the customer thinks it is fashionable or amusing and he then finds in wearing that it is practical, you can be pretty sure that you are going to get an established trend. The style is practical because elastic sided boots are very easy to put on and off as time and trouble for tying laces are avoided.

Which sure is useful in Japan when you have to take off your shoes all the time. That's why I exclusively wear Chelsea boots outdoors now:

Also because I do a lot of walking in the countryside and the rain. The brown ones are waterproof. The black ones, which I bought at H&M a year ago, are already wearing out with big holes in the bottom.

Amies could be witty. Under "American Styling":

The American will not be uncomfortable. This has led him to an insistence on lightweight cloths which in their turn can only be used successfully in suits the lines of which are more loose than restricting. From this they have developed a typical look in urban clothes. Dark in cloth and usually white as to linen; and completed either by a tie too violent in colour or pattern (rarer now) or going to the other extreme of a plain black knitted tie.

Whilst this conservatism is often admirable for the middle aged it can be criticised as being completely unadventurous. The American seems to have a horror of being different; except in play clothes where he is quite happy to be a horror.

Amies, who designed clothes for 2001: A Space Odyssey and Queen Elizabeth II, died in 2003. His company went bankrupt in 2019. I guess it goes to show how important the head is to the body.

Rubble Rumble

I finally saw 2021's West Side Story last night. I think it's better than the 1961 film, primarily because Tony Kushner's screenplay cleared up many of the problems I had with the first adaptation. And, of course, Steven Spielberg's unrivalled instincts for telling a story with a camera are always a boon to a production. But this film has its own problems and, while I'd say it's not bad, it falls well short of the goal it sets for itself.

Poor Steven Spielberg seems like he's consistently failing to get himself back into the zeitgeist. His trouble is that, like a lot of the old guard in Hollywood, he spends too much time listening to younger people in Hollywood, the kinds of people who think specific bubbles of internet discourse represent the public appetites as a whole. If the U.S. public really were on the crusade Twitter makes it seem, West Side Story would be the perfect tale for our times. The story of racial tensions in lower class New York would be crucially relevant. But even the people who passionately push such dialogue aren't, I suspect, much interested in contemplating ideas in that arena as much as they are in using them as cudgels.

The misconception of public appetite diminishes the screenplay a bit, too, leading to awkward moments like dialogue early on between Tony (Anson Elgort) and Doc (Rita Moreno) in which the elderly Puerto Rican woman proclaims to him and the audience that he doesn't hate Puerto Ricans. We shouldn't need her to tell us that but those obsessed with the ever elusive phantom of internalised -isms would need that box checked.

Moreno gives a fine performance but changing Doc from an elderly Jewish man to an elderly Puerto Rican woman creates too many problems. It doesn't make sense that the Jets would use her shop as a base and it's part of the reason the attempted rape scene doesn't work.

Why would a frail old Puerto Rican woman be able to stop a gang of white guys from raping a Puerto Rican girl? The resolution of the scene in the 1961 film strained credibility, too, but the Jewish man would be more likely to be taken as a respected authority by the Jets, as much as they can respect authority. He also provided interesting perspective by comparing the Jets' problems with the ones he faced in Nazi Germany.

The whole tone of the attempted gang rape scene doesn't work, though, because I think Spielberg just didn't have the stomach for it. Anita (Ariana DeBose) too quickly and easily gets to a safe position of dignity and defiance than such a situation would allow her.

One of the improvements in the 2021 film is that the Jets have much clearer motivation. Spielberg establishes it right a way with a sweeping crane shot starting from rubble, passing over a demolition sign, and then establishing a whole neighbourhood being torn down. Anyone who thinks about the rampant gentrification in the U.S. to-day would see the relevance right away. The Jets, who shortly thereafter make their first appearance, are no longer in the bright clean colours of the 1961 film, but are dressed in dingy, greasy hand-me-downs.

You can see why they feel cut off from this world and desperate to form and defend their own community.

The romance between Tony and Maria (Rachel Zegler) works much better. Kushner irons out the nonsense in their dialogue about Maria wanting Tony to stop the rumble. She no longer demands it of him and sees his point when he says it's probably impossible. When suddenly he insists he's going to do it, they've believably worked themselves into an optimistic delusion.

I'm not a fan of Anson Elgort but Spielberg works a lot of magic with him. Spielberg clearly seems more interested in him than in Zegler. With pans and cutting, Spielberg adds to Elgort's muscularity to flattering effect when he climbs the fire escape or just leans provocatively against a wall. Spielberg seems similarly taken with Lieutenant Schrank (Corey Stoll) who might be my favourite character in the film.

Rachel Zegler never comes out of the shadow of Natalie Wood and I don't even think Natalie Wood was that great in the 1961 film. Zegler's Maria is still like a vague idea of a pretty girl. Again, the insightful poetry Shakespeare gave to the dialogue of Romeo and Juliet is sorely missed.

Ariana DeBose is sexy as Anita and her grief when she learns about Bernardo (David Alvarez) is gripping. She's not so effective in her other big scene, the attempted rape, but I actually blame Spielberg more for that.

The songs are still good. The dance choreography isn't bad.

West Side Story is available on Disney+.

The Opportunities of a Plastic Surgeon

A host of beautiful women and Cary Grant starred in 1934's Kiss and Make-Up. Grant gives a better performance than this otherwise fairly disposable little romp deserves. Though, since it is pre-Code, it's a novelty now just for how much sex it has.

Grant plays a cosmetic surgeon named Maurice Lamar. It's heavily implied that he sleeps with all the women who come to him, and that all the women adore him.

Trouble arises when an aggrieved gentleman (Edward Everett Horton) confronts him about his attentions to his wife, Eve (Genevieve Tobin). Meanwhile, romantic tension starts to blossom between Lamar and his down to earth secretary, Annie (Helen Mack).

The jokes are mostly pretty dopey but the women are all beautiful. Grant actually sings in a couple scenes and you can see why he never starred in any major musicals. There's a gag at the expense of Edward Everett Horton at the end of the film I thought was genuinely funny.

Kiss and Make-Up is available on The Criterion Channel.

Moon Mind

Last night's new Moon Knight was my favourite episode so far. The Indiana Jones vibe swerved into a Hellboy vibe for an episode that's finally delivering on the promise for the MCU to lean more into horror.

I loved that reanimated mummy Layla fought. He was right out of a Hellboy comic or movie. The whole sequence in the tomb really captured the adventure serial tone it was going for. All it lacks is a character to anchor it as strongly as Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, or Hellboy. Neither Marc/Steven nor Layla has a good enough costume in this episode to rival the iconic looks of those characters. Layla's character has been too hazily designed, kind of a classic example of a female lead being written entirely based on her reactions to the male characters--her career is motivated by her father, her revenge is motivated by her father, her affections are torn between Marc and Steven. So far we haven't gotten a good impression of Layla's own core personality.

Marc/Steven is much better and it's becoming more and more entertaining to see their exasperation with each other. And even more rewarding when they actually start to show each other respect and even affection, as when they run into each other in the mental institution.

I don't know if people have competing theories on what's going on but I'm pretty firmly in the belief that this is all occurring in Marc/Steven's head, or in some special psychic space built from his mind that other entities can enter. Which makes it a pretty well-worn plot type. I found myself thinking of the sixth season Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Normal Again". Which is fine but the tomb stuff was so much better. Hopefully they'll move on quickly, maybe this'll just turn into a gateway into the realm of the Egyptian gods so Marc and Steven can rescue Konshu.

Moon Knight is available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1574

Distracted muppets ride the acting suits.
A face and face compete for feet and fists.
The clunky box was stood on ugly boots.
A six again's revealed in yellow mist.
Transported blinks were notches short of eyes.
If letter one or two would care to snap.
The rented sheets became a special prize.
And here we think it's surely time to nap.
With desert ghosts the tourist took the sea.
Sufficient grains could build a healthy beach.
You'll find the captain makes the fo'c'sle tea.
A solid park returned the empty peach.
The ruddy doctor fought a walking tan.
Beneath the crescent sleeps a desert man.

Saul is Called Again

The first two episodes of the new season of Better Call Saul appeared on Netflix last night. These are the first new episodes in two years and they're pretty good. It really feels like the show picks up where it left off right down to having the same strengths and weaknesses.

The subplots involving Gus and Nacho and Lalo are still not remotely interesting while Jimmy's decent into Saul-hood is captivating. But I think the question on everyone's mind is, "What happens to Kim?"

I like how she's become a co-conspirator in the creation of Saul. The scene in the country club was terrific fun and I was happy to see the show has gone back to the original concept of Jimmy playing he Jewish sounding name, "Saul Goodman", as an angle.

The scene also featured a cameo from James Urbaniak. whom you may know as Doctor Venture from The Venture Brothers. He gives a pretty funny and subtle performance here as Saul's tour guide at the club. You can see the gears working in his head as he tries to keep up with Saul's grift.

This season's also supposed to see the return of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. I hope their presence is worked in organically.

The first episode of this season notably didn't begin with a "flash forward" of Saul's life post-Breaking Bad as the show has routinely done in previous seasons. I hope this means there'll be a time shift to the present this season. Bob Odenkirk doesn't resemble his younger self much at all anymore so it's gotten a bit awkward watching him play younger. It's too bad de-aging technology hasn't gotten flawless and cheap. Anyway, he's still giving a good performance and if 50 year old men can play Romeo surely Odenkirk can play Saul.

Better Call Saul is available on Netflix.

A Half-Hearted Plunder

So the new Doctor Who special was really bad. I won't confidently predict this one'll be universally hated, as I did for the last one, though I'd once again be surprised to learn it isn't. I mean, it's remarkable how an episode's every step can be a misstep. There was something wrong with almost every line and every shot.

Never has Jodie Whittaker seemed less like the Doctor. Too many people said, "That's impossible!" in this episode but it's particularly bad for the Doctor to say it when seeing a flying sailing ship. Even if this weren't the same character who'd starred in Enlightenment, the Fifth Doctor story about space-faring ships made to look like 18h century sea vessels, surely the Doctor's seen plenty enough strange things by now to know better than to immediately proclaim something impossible.

She also remarks on the strangeness of Sea Devils having ships, wondering why sea creatures would need ships. I don't know, Doctor, why would land creatures like humans need cars? Use your head. She wonders what Sea Devils are doing in 19th century China. Why wouldn't they be there? The Sea Devils are a variant of the Silurians, an intelligent species who dwelt on Earth long before humans. What difference would human territorial borders mean to them?

The Doctor is pleased to join forces with Cheng I Sao (Crystal Yu), based on the real life pirate queen. I wonder if the Doctor would so casually ally with a pirate with such a murderous and tyrannical record if it had been Captain Kidd or Henry Morgan. Madame Ching may from here commence a reign of terror on the coastal villages of China but at least they stopped those dratted Sea Devils from . . . What the hell were they trying to do?

There's a basic absurdity to Ching being introduced as a pirate queen immediately from the fact that she's all alone. She even has a massive junk that looks a lot more like an English man'o'war that she somehow crews entirely on her lonesome. The explanation? Her crew are being held hostage along with her two little boys. The boys make sense but her whole crew? Is she really trying to get a ransom for the random tars who'd signed articles on the promise of plunder? Who would think those men would be any kind of worthwhile hostage? What kind of pirate is she? What kind of queen, for that matter? The real life Cheng I Sao commanded a fleet.

Of course, a lot of decisions were clearly made due to Covid restrictions. But why even attempt a story like this? Why not have a bottle episode, or even one like the New Years special which, despite its faults, at least only needed a few characters.

The stuff about romance between the Doctor and Yaz (Mandip Gill) was a little better because at least it slowed the pace down. I've complained about the excessive closeups in the 13th's era plenty of times but here they were particularly bad in the jumbled, incoherent action sequences. However, again, the Doctor is saying all the wrong things. She calls Yaz "one of the greatest people I ever met." We know that's not true. Surely the Doctor should be old enough by now not to be given to simp hyperbole. She mentions her wife and then says she shouldn't have. Why not? And which wife is she talking about? Why does it sound like she'd only had one?

The two still don't have any chemistry. At least they seemed to be on the same soundstage, though.

Doctor Who is available on the BBC iPlayer.