A Road Paved Beneath the Moon

Robert Mitchum roars across Tennessee and Kentucky in 1958's Thunder Road, totting moonshine. The action in this movie still largely works from the atmosphere conjured by a lot of shadows and Mitchum's ragged demeanour.

Mitchum plays Lucas Doolin, who delivers the whiskey his father makes in an illegal still. Doing so often means having to dodge government agents and gangsters alike, the latter having an interest in taking over the business.

Mostly Lucas is able to keep his cool but he doesn't want his younger brother, Robin (played by Mitchum's son James) following in his footsteps. Lucas seems to take equal shares of pride and shame in his lifestyle and Mitchum's performance helps convey the sense of a man who's made a grim peace with his own ambiguities.

There are two women in love with him, one them a decent jazz singer played by Keely Smith who has a couple of numbers in the film. Robert Mitchum co-wrote a song called "Whipperwill".

Thunder Road is available on Amazon Prime.

A Hunter's Return

I've started reading Allan Quatermain, H. Rider Haggard's 1887 sequel to his King Solomon's Mines. So far I'm finding Allan Quatermain to be a pulpier fare but not bad.

The book begins with Allan mourning the death of his son. He's joined by his old friends from King Solomon's Mines, John Good and Sir Henry Curtis, who entice him to go on an adventure seeking a lost civilisation in Africa. So far, the best parts of the novel were the scenes following Quatermain and his companions through the wilderness as they're stalked by Masai warriors. Following this, Quatermain and his friends find a lavish, European style home run by a Scottish missionary called McKenzie. The comforts Quatermain finds there, along with a cowardly French cook, feel a bit disappointingly cartoonish. We meet McKenzie's perfect, innocent teenage daughter, Flossie, who in short order becomes a hostage of the Masai, mainly to provide an excuse for a great, bloody battle sequence.

Surely one of the most distinguished features of the novel is the introduction of Umslopogaas, Quartermain's friend and deadly Zulu prince. The description of Umslopogaas' axe is memorable in itself.

By a piece of grim humour, he had named this axe “Inkosi-kaas”, which is the Zulu word for chieftainess. For a long while I could not make out why he gave it such a name, and at last I asked him, when he informed me that the axe was very evidently feminine, because of her womanly habit of prying very deep into things, and that she was clearly a chieftainess because all men fell down before her, struck dumb at the sight of her beauty and power. In the same way he would consult “Inkosi-kaas” if in any dilemma; and when I asked him why he did so, he informed me it was because she must needs be wise, having “looked into so many people’s brains”.

I took up the axe and closely examined this formidable weapon. It was, as I have said, of the nature of a pole-axe. The haft, made out of an enormous rhinoceros horn, was three feet three inches long, about an inch and a quarter thick, and with a knob at the end as large as a Maltese orange, left there to prevent the hand from slipping. This horn haft, though so massive, was as flexible as cane, and practically unbreakable; but, to make assurance doubly sure, it was whipped round at intervals of a few inches with copper wire—all the parts where the hands grip being thus treated. Just above where the haft entered the head were scored a number of little nicks, each nick representing a man killed in battle with the weapon. The axe itself was made of the most beautiful steel, and apparently of European manufacture, though Umslopogaas did not know where it came from, having taken it from the hand of a chief he had killed in battle many years before. It was not very heavy, the head weighing two and a half pounds, as nearly as I could judge. The cutting part was slightly concave in shape—not convex, as is generally the case with savage battle-axes—and sharp as a razor, measuring five and three-quarter inches across the widest part. From the back of the axe sprang a stout spike four inches long, for the last two of which it was hollow, and shaped like a leather punch, with an opening for anything forced into the hollow at the punch end to be pushed out above—in fact, in this respect it exactly resembled a butcher’s pole-axe. It was with this punch end, as we afterwards discovered, that Umslopogaas usually struck when fighting, driving a neat round hole in his adversary’s skull, and only using the broad cutting edge for a circular sweep, or sometimes in a mêlée. I think he considered the punch a neater and more sportsmanlike tool, and it was from his habit of pecking at his enemy with it that he got his name of “Woodpecker”. Certainly in his hands it was a terribly efficient one.

Such was Umslopogaas’ axe, Inkosi-kaas, the most remarkable and fatal hand-to-hand weapon that I ever saw, and one which he cherished as much as his own life. It scarcely ever left his hand except when he was eating, and then he always sat with it under his leg.

I still can't upload files to my webspace so here's Dizzy Gillepsie:

The Tortuga Lot

'Twas the year 1961 and director Robert D. Webb ruthlessly plundered the footage of older pirate films to make the mild, stage bound adventure called Pirates of Tortuga. Yet Webb did shoot some decent sword fights for the film and some of the performances are terrific, though not necessarily extraordinary.

Most memorable is Italian actress Leticia Roman as Meg, a hastily conceived Moll Flanders pastiche. Captain Bart (Ken Scott) rescues her from a mob after she's caught pick-pocketing. She repays him by stowing away on his ship and taking a bath in his cabin. Then she changes into one of the many expensive dresses he has in one of his sea chests. Why is his sea chest filled with women's clothes and jewellery? This is never addressed.

All the men are wearing little tricorne hats so I figured it was set in the 18th century but then Bart gets orders from Charles II to track down Henry Morgan. My guess is Webb just didn't want his guys wearing big Restoration wigs. But that's not all the monkeying he did with historical accuracy. In this timeline, Henry Morgan has turned pirate again after being appointed governor of Jamaica.

Dave King is pretty entertaining in the film as one of Bart's officers called Pee Wee and there's a memorable scene of him giving fencing instructions to members of the crew. A lot of time is wasted on recycled footage, though. A bear fighting scene is taken from Anne of the Indies and several shots come from The Black Swan for ship exteriors. Since those older movies were shot in 4:3 and Pirates of Tortuga is a wide Cinemascope picture, all the old footage is obtrusively blurry and cropped.

At least sets were built for the film but I'm pretty sure a lot of the same parts used for the streets of London were reused for this film's really unremarkable looking Tortuga.

Picture if You Will

I'm having some trouble getting pictures online. The web hosting service I've used for over twenty years now is starting to seem a bit worse for wear. Everything I uploaded before Saturday seems to work fine but, starting Saturday, everything I've uploaded, while appearing to be on the server, will not load in a browser, despite reloading and re-uploading. I suppose there might be better, cheaper services than the one I've paid 18 dollars a month for for all these years. But I have no idea how to move my massive backlog of files, or if another service truly would be better.

I started out using Yahoo small business which then got sold or rebranded to Aabaco which was then sold to Verizon and was then recently sold to something called Turbify. Turbify seems to be the least reliable. I can't even use an FTP programme. When I am able to upload anything properly, I have to do it one file at a time on the Turbify web site.

So I finally had to use the image hosting on my blog sites. I mirror this blog on three sites--Dreamwidth, Live Journal, and Blogger. Live Journal lets me upload full sized photos, I suppose because I have a paid account, and Blogger lets me do it for free, but no joy on Dreamwidth. Ugh, here's something else that's going to gobble up my time, I guess.

Well, here's a sonnet about pirates:

Twitter Sonnet #1673

They left before the sun could stuff the bay.
The morning air awash in rum and sweat.
Abreast, the dozen ships were well away.
A stack of coin at port comprised the bet.
Instructions late at sea were last obtained.
Alone across the placid sea she drew.
Repast denied for months, the men complain.
The lure of corn diverts the hungry crew.
At last ashore, the captain's horde advanced.
With child dreams of Drake's doubloons they armed.
And over hunger, fear, and rotten luck they glance.
But gaze ahead at spoils past the farm.
At morning light, the pirates slashed it down.
Despotic fingers felled the mighty town.

The Battle of Sea Demons

It remains a mystery to me that 1942's The Black Swan exists and that people don't seem especially interested in it. I watched it again a few days ago. For my money, it's a better movie than Errol Flynn's pirate movies. Certainly it surpasses The Crimson Pirate or any number of other pirate films that get talked about.

I love how the beginning of the movie feels like the climax to another movie we didn't get to see. We catch up with Tyrone Power, Thomas Mitchell, George Sanders, and a host of ravenous buccaneers storming a Spanish fortress. First Power is caught and put on the rack, then the tables are turned and the Spanish governor gets a stretch. And then the daughter of an English diplomat turns out to be there and it's Maureen O'Hara.

Power as the pirate Jamie Waring without hesitation pins her to a wall and tries to kiss her. This follows from a scene where he and Sanders, as the pirate Billy Leech, got drunk over the prone bodies of two bound girls in their shifts. Why does Jamie become the hero and Leech the villain? Tyrone Power is handsomer? It's as good an answer as any for this totally amoral film.

How did this movie get made in the era of the Hays Code? I really don't get it.

It's perfectly cast, too. In addition to the four excellent folks I mentioned, Laird Cregor gives us the best screen depiction of the famous pirate Henry Morgan.

As in real life, he's appointed to the governorship of Jamaica. In the film we see he's plagued by petty backstabbing from government men who led more respectable lives. I wonder if the film was sold as some kind of precursor to the American revolution. Maybe pirates were just generally presumed to be exceptions to the rules.

Special effects and cinematography are top notch in this film, too.

Leiji Matsumoto

Leiji Matsumoto passed away eleven days ago, I just found out two days ago. A legendary manga creator whose influential works in the 1970s helped forge the distinctive identity of Japanese comics and animation, his style was nonetheless appreciably atypical.

His most famous works are Space Battleship Yamato, Captain Harlock, and, my favourite, Galaxy Express 999. Japanese fiction is too often plagued by an overabundance of sentimentality but Matsumoto's work balanced sentimentality with extraordinary brutality. When the child protagonist witnesses the brutal killing of his mother, and quickly exacts violent revenge, the ghostly sentimentality of his encounter with an android who resembles his mother is well earned. The scale of destruction that sets up Space Battleship Yamato, both within the story of a post-apocalyptic Earth and in the aftermath of World War II in real life Japan, justifies its depiction of a desperate crew relying on a symbol of Japan's past.

I hadn't seen Captain Harlock so I watched the first episode last night. As a fan of the Golden Age of Piracy, I loved the show's indulgence in that fantasy. Like Space Battleship Yamato and Galaxy Express 999, it marries futuristic imagery with anachronistic, antiquated aesthetics and technology. It's all held together with an honest emotional core. It's not hard to see why Matsumoto has left such a lasting impression and will continue to do so.

The Ghost of Bill Sikes Strikes Again

Last night's Bad Batch was okay. Not quite as interesting as last week's but a nice enough retelling of a pretty standard adventure story. It was written by Moises Zamora, creator of Selena: The Series.

It's really Oliver Twist, or at least, the thieves' plot from that book, with Bill Sikes/Fagin this time being a threatening enough big alien called Mokko. This is an often used story formula and we even saw it in one of the Star Wars movies, at the beginning of Solo, in which Han himself was an Artful Dodger.

The Bad Batch's Artful Dodger is Benni Baro (Yuri Lowenthal), who stole the Batch's ship in the previous episode. Can the Batch win over this little rogue who's never had anyone he could trust his whole life? Yep. I'd have recommended Zamora read Dickens' Hard Times.

This is is another visually nice episode, with all the backgrounds looking like paintings and all the characters well animated. The action scenes weren't very well conceived but were good enough.

The Bad Batch is available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1672

The drinkers divvy up the street for blood.
To choke the city, velvet cinched the throat.
A row of teeth emerged from crimson mud.
Beneath the altar bleats a snoozing goat.
Ferengi fingers fix the liquor air.
Assembled houses shade the slapping hand.
Aggressive waters move the salmon's care.
His startled face is shoved in river sand.
Her flimsy arms were straw and golden dust.
Another morning marks the field for grain.
Between the sun and sky accrues a rust.
A man in charge divides the wet from sane.
With crimson straps the ankles carry on.
Her arm conveyed the nameless, careless fawn.

Rolling Dice on the Cheap

It seems like Chris Pine's arms have gotten really small while his neck has gotten really big. Maybe he needs to vary his workout routine.

The above trailer is the first one that made the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons movie look any good to me. Since it does so by cutting out all the hackneyed jokes in the other trailers ("He missed!" Of course he didn't), which are presumably still in the film, I still think it's going to be a terrible movie.

Chris Pine is such a good leading actor. How was he reduced to this? Is it the arms? Anyway, I saw the above trailer ahead of the new Ant-Man movie at a Japanese movie theatre. The film's Japanese marketing team must be smarter than its American counterpart. Or maybe just having some distance precludes the possibility of flaws being hidden behind a veil of pride.

It's weird how much this movie seems to be adopting the same disastrous tactic of the previous D&D bomb; trying desperately to make it a hip modern movie for mainstream audiences. Meanwhile, all those bestselling Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms books gather dust. At least this movie is set in the Forgotten Realms setting. But judging from the artwork in the newest Players Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, the franchise doesn't seem to be under the best stewardship at the moment.

His Name was a Sharp Cutting Edge

Wesley Snipes beats down vampires in 1998's Blade. Poorly written and with average direction, this one at least has some good action sequences and good performances.

Snipes sure is great as Blade. Adopting a gravelly voice and stoic demeanour--broken up by the occasional wicked grin--he's believably intimidating and quite fast with his fists.

Kris Kristofferson is captivating as his mentor, Abraham Whistler, and Stephen Dorff, as the villain, Deacon Frost, isn't too bad. He has a somewhat Near Dark/Lost Boys punk vampire vibe which jives with him leading a coup against the "pureblood" vampires led by Udo Kier.

Kier is playing another laughably ineffectual vampire here, similar to the one he played in Blood for Dracula. Only in Blood for Dracula, there was a point to it and at least that character attempted to put up a fight. As Dorff asserts his dominance, the purebloods placidly but uncomfortably shuffle to their dooms with the attitudes of tourists being told they can't take the scenic route.

It's nice to revisit some typical '90s production design but, I must say, there's an awful lot of paper in this fantasy version of New York, or whatever city it's supposed to be.

Blade is available on Netflix in Japan.

The Careful Face

The owner of a bar finds her normal, relatively pleasant life slowly pulling her towards her ultimate fate in 1951's Ginza Cosmetics (銀座化粧). The English title makes it sound like it's about a cosmetics department in a department store yet it is a literal translation. Funny old thing, language is. Anyway, Kinuya Tanaka stars as a widowed mother trying to maintain good relationships in the community while financially keeping her head above water. Directed by Mikio Naruse, it's another of his many brilliant films that quietly but undeniably reveal the tragedies of normal life.

Yukiko (Tanaka) runs a bar and acts as a hostess along with several women working for her. The job of such hostesses in Japan extends to maintaining friendships with patrons. When we meet Yukiko, she's in her room, applying her makeup, while a nervous man offers his profuse thanks. But just as we're thinking she may have slept with him for money, he asks if he can borrow some money from her.

She's caught between a rock and a hard place. Maintaining good relationships is integral to maintaining a good reputation, and maintaining a good reputation is essential for the success fo her business. She nearly faces disaster in a later scene when she can't resist crying, "Thief!" when she spots a man who didn't pay his bill at the bar. Immediately she clearly regrets it and, after taking his money, tries to quietly flee while he tries to make a scene amid the gathering crowd.

Yukiko is forced to rely on the hope that she'll meet a truly generous man who's willing to support her and her son. It's a little similar to Naruse's later film, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. Ginza Cosmetics is not quite as complex or emotionally effective but it's still a good little slice of quiet despair. Ranko Hanai and Kyoko Kagawa are very good in supporting roles.

Ginza Cosmetics is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1671

Without a dwarf, the princess couldn't sleep.
Resorts denied a pleasure sun from home.
Enormous mice construct a tiny meep.
Construction starts to forge the mighty dome.
Assorted guys were making trouble glow.
Collective bugs could save a glowing rock.
Descendants shrink before they start to grow.
Enlargement changed around the magic clock.
To sate the angry turtle cookies came.
Bereft of paper ones the twos were cut.
Decisions split to make a wing the same.
Humongous shoes approached the wearer's butt.
Repeating circles turn us back in time.
Below the deck she hears the warning chime.

Quantifying Quantumania

I'd have never expected Michelle Pfeiffer to carry the first blockbuster of 2023. But that's just what she did with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Mostly a mediocre entry in the MCU canon, it's not as good as Wakanda Forever or Doctor Strange 2 but I'd rank it above Thor: Love and Thunder.

Even more than Loki, it was clearly, very strongly influenced by Rick and Morty and was written by Jeff Loveness who, like Loki and Doctor Strange 2 writer Michael Waldron, started writing for Rick and Morty in its fourth season. From its second season and a little bit in its first, Rick and Morty has prominently featured multiverse plots mixed with other weird stories involving shrinking, transmogrification, and space travel. It seems obvious to everyone at this point that Kevin Feige watched Rick and Morty and thought, "This could be a story told over a phase in the MCU." Again, though, why he chose only writers from after Rick and Morty's best era is beyond me. Obviously Justin Roiland's unemployable now but that still leaves a whole lot of writers from the first few seasons.

The new Ant-Man movie also carries over some of the amorality and politics from Rick and Morty, uncomfortably yoked to Disney's morality imperatives. The villain, Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), is a character from Marvel comics with a history of timeline variants, though, in the comics, several years would be spent with each variant before another was introduced. The MCU version seems clearly to be influenced by the vast civilisation of variant Rick Sanchezes on Rick and Morty with whom Rick occasionally clashes. To be fair, this aspect of Rick and Morty may have drawn influence from the comics' Kang. But I doubt the comics had so much ironic humour. One major character dies in Quantumania and it's basically played for laughs.

All the irony diminishes Paul Rudd's Scott Lang quite a bit and Rudd's performance somehow doesn't have enough heart to round him out. No-one gives such a performance except Pfeiffer.

They don't give her as many jokes, either, but I think its Pfeiffer's own abilities that actually made her the only character I felt any investment in. And she gets all the meaty dialogue, too, and although Kang's motives are vaguely written and his plan and arguments infamously unclear, I believed there were really things at stake when Pfeiffer was talking because she seemed to believe them. The only other actor in the movie who actually sells an emotional reality in the cgi realm is Bill Murray. He appears all too briefly as an old flame of Pfeiffer's but he quickly establishes something nuanced and interesting. It really is a shame people are in the process of trying to cancel him.

I loved some of the creature designs, particularly of a sort of red paramecium character called Veb (David Dastmalchian). I wish they'd avoided including humanoids among the Quantum realm's citizens but that might have been a budgetary problem.

Lang's daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) is pretty but really bland. I did like that she brought up the homeless crisis in US cities. When even the MCU is talking about it, hopefully we're getting to the point where people who can do something about it will finally get off their asses.

Evangeline Lilly's character, Hope van Dyne, is utterly pointless. She contributes nothing to any scene of dialogue and feels entirely like an afterthought. She dramatically saves Scott a couple of times but only serves to dilute the drama by doing so. Without a personality, she's basically a dull deus ex machina. If Feige were wise, he'd just make Pfeiffer the main Wasp. Hell, make her a star of the next Avengers movie. Her character was a founding member of the Avengers in the comics anyway.

I heard Jonathan Majors was influenced by Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight and, once I knew that, it was hard not to constantly see it. Still, he's entertaining to watch and he transforms his imitation of Ledger's radical performance into a more conventional, but fun, exercise in scenery chewing.

Michael Douglas is fine, of course, though a scene where he extols the virtues of socialism when talking about his hordes of voiceless ants is funny for reasons I don't think were intended. Really, if you're trying to sell people on socialism, maybe using infamously mindless social insects is not the best idea. On the other hand, it's a good anti-socialist statement.

I don't think I laughed at any point the movie intended me to. Neither did the other three people at the 6pm Saturday night showing I went to. And this movie's doing well at the box office? Well, I do live in Japan.

Visitors We Have Gotten

To-day I read the new Sirenia Digest which contains "Crotalus (Murder Ballad No. 13)" by Caitlin R. Kiernan. It was good, a mysterious, disjointed linking of recollections related to a strange occurrence. I thought of both Picnic at Hanging Rock and Tristram Shandy. One of the narrators of "Crotalus" also talks about getting off track from the intended narrative. Maybe it's easier for me to take from Caitlin because she isn't trying to tell a hundred jokes a minute. Also, the narrative skirting around a description of a sinister object in the sky is ultimately more interesting than the humorously hinted at destruction of Toby's genitals in Tristram Shandy.

I found myself also thinking of the Japanese junior high school where I work because the story features something we could literally call a UFO--an unidentified flying object--and one narrator is preoccupied with the proper use of past tense and past participle. In talking to another teacher, I discovered the use of "got" as past participle ("I have got a present") is actually the normal thing in most English speaking countries and has been since the 17th century and only we Americans have clung to "gotten". That's according to Google, anyway. Yet other English speaking countries still use "forgotten" so I don't get it. George Elliot used "chase-gotten" and "ill-gotten" as past participle adjectives in Middlemarch.

"UFO" is one of the new vocabulary words for second year students. The teacher I was working with asked the class if they'd ever seen a UFO. One girl said she saw one by a train station, that it was shaped like a triangle. A boy said his father saw one and took two pictures. It was visible in one picture but not the other.

I sure wish I would see a UFO. Especially one with aliens.

Here's a song I've been using to teach future tense:

Twitter Sonnet #1670

Encroaching rest absorbed the wealthy night.
Refreshing plants described the tower wall.
Enraptured vines assist the luckless knight.
Between the walls resounds a lover's call.
Before the dancer's choice was made she ran.
Beside the moving car a cheetah sleeps.
Announcements brought a golden cutting man.
Condemned below the house a secret keeps.
Director lists began the day with lunch.
Descending feathers pull the jerkin down.
Advancing humans ruled the beauty bunch.
Majestic seats reject the golden clown.
For golden busts, the treasure voyage stalled.
Asleep, the dreamer asks if devils called.

Raquel Welch

I wasn't sure I had anything to say about Raquel Welch, who died at the age of 82 yesterday. Then I realised she grew up in my hometown, San Diego, and even graduated from San Diego State University, like me. I tend to think of her as European I guess because she was part of a wave of popular actresses with relatively strong nasolabial folds in the 1960s, most of whom were European. Sophia Loren, Ursula Andress, Julie Christie. Actually, when I try to think of Raquel Welch movies, sometimes I realise the movie I'm remembering is actually an Ursula Andress movie.

Welch is most famous for a poster to One Million Years BC, a Hammer horror movie. I couldn't actually remember if I'd seen the movie, as much as I love Hammer. I had to search my blog and, yes, I reviewed it in 2014. So it's not the most memorable movie. It is a nice poster.

I remember Hannie Caulder a little better, a 1971 western she filmed with Christopher Lee and Diana Dors. But I guess my strongest memory of her is her cameo in 1969's The Magic Christian in which she whips topless galley slave girls on a modern cruise ship.

She certainly was sexy.

A Good Mine

Last night's Bad Batch was really satisfying. It was solidly written by Brooke Roberts, a woman with a long career in television writing including Boston Legal, Family Guy, and The Flash. Before that, she was a linguist for the US Army specialising in Arabic. So she would seem eminently qualified to write for a show about a former military squad.

The episode was also notably better looking than other episodes. The Batch land on a planet that looks like Monument Valley in order to extract some valuable ore from a mine Cid purchased. They find the mine with less ore then expected and, meanwhile, their ship gets stolen. And that's just the start of their problems.

I loved how logical everything felt. Every problem felt credible and the steps the Batch take to deal with each obstacle felt plausible, good ideas or bad. The fact that Wrecker didn't think to keep the ship in sight when he was on watch seemed like a plausible mistake for him to make, especially considering he couldn't keep the mine and the ship in sight at the same time. Simply put, the episode wasn't stupid, which made me happy.

Also good was the ongoing tension between Omega and Tech. I've known plenty of people like Tech who can't understand why a logical explanation doesn't "fix" the emotional reaction someone else is having.

The only part I didn't like was when Tech told Omega at the end that his way of dealing with things doesn't mean he feels them less than she does. The show should have simply acknowledged that some people have stronger emotional reactions than others. It bothered me because that's a big problem in modern culture--people who simply can't believe that other people have different internal emotional landscapes to themselves.

But, on the whole, this was a great episode, certainly one of the best in the series.

The Bad Batch is available on Disney+.

To His Lady's Bower

For Valentine's Night, I chose something a little more tried and true and watched 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood again. Now that's a romantic film, in the classical sense, and Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland certainly had chemistry.

How lovely is that scene where he visits her chambers? She's so innocent but clearly smart enough we know she knows what she's getting into. And somehow subsequent iterations have never managed anything like Flynn's blend of sauciness and gentleness.

I love de Havilland's shiny costumes and how every set was cavernous, as though it were a requirement in the '30s for every Hollywood set to be capable of supporting a massive dance number, should inspirations strike. I'd love to have a massive stone room with a fireplace big enough to be another room.

Being the king's ward certainly has its perks. Maid Marian does represent a fantasy of cultivation. Now the standard impression is that being raised in privilege inevitably corrupts a person but at one time people thought prudent, expensive upbringing could produce refinement. That's a lovely dream. No, it's not fair. But when has life ever been?

Some Enchanted Week

For Harrison Ford, 1998's Six Days, Seven Nights was just another in a string of lukewarm, forgettable films. For Anne Heche, who suffered a painful death after a horrific car accident last year, it was the biggest role of her career. It was directed by Ivan Reitman, who also died last year. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

Ford and Heche both give good performances that don't quite line up with their characters. Ford's famous for playing scoundrels but here he plays a horny scoundrel, something that tends to make a romantic lead much less attractive. It worked for Bill Murray in Ghostbusters but with Ford it's hard to shake the feeling he's Deckard play-acting to get into the Zhora's dressing room.

He and Anne Heche have no chemistry. Neither seems really into the other. I believe Heche as a high powered magazine editor. But there's something cold about her in the film and I can't imagine her being attracted to anyone. It doesn't help that not one single joke lands in this purported comedy. I never laughed. Some of the action adventure stuff, though, is pretty good and I wonder if this film would have done better if it'd given up on any idea of being a comedy.

I like how much practical effects were used and the location shooting. Ford, as a scoundrel pilot taking advantage of tourists, is arguably even closer to Charleton Heston's character in Secret of the Incas than he was in the Indiana Jones movies. He and Heche run afoul of pirates played by Temuera Morrison and Danny Trejo.

Impeccable casting there. I wish the film had focused more on fights with pirates.

Six Days, Seven Nights is available on Disney+ outside the US.

Twitter Sonnet #1669

With masks and masks we met the op'ra ghost.
Revolving canes precede the sausage joke.
Divergent routes commend our loopy host.
No wonder that the squeaky ride was broke.
Confections filled the box with testy frogs.
Advancing eyes were curled beyond a hope.
Euphoric futures pass behind the fogs.
Another night the Phantom ties a rope.
Rotund with hope, the plane began to climb.
Resurging sea would scrape the flyer down.
Emerging beasts resist the parent slime.
Ahead awaits the unsuspecting town.
Below the choppy plane the waves await.
Behind the slender years they offer bait.

Back Under the Opera House

After more than a decade of delays, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera finally hit the big screen in 2004. Directed by Joel Schumacher, it's generally considered a disappointment, which perhaps should not be surprising given the fact that Schumacher directed two of the worst Batman movies of all time. Yet it was on the strength of Lost Boys, a decent film, that Lloyd Webber originally hired Schumacher and, while certainly a flawed, inferior work, Schumacher's Phantom isn't all bad.

Gerard Butler in the role of Phantom is certainly miscast. He's charismatic and his muscular frame is attractive. I can even believe the Phantom would strive to keep himself in peak physical condition. However, Butler's singing voice lacks skill and sensitivity, which is, I think, the main reason that Raoul (Patrick Wilson) actually comes off as more appealing in the film.

Emmy Rossum can sing, though notably not as well as Sarah Brightman, but she lets her beauty do a lot of the work in her performance. I do appreciate her beauty but, having seen the role performed by actresses who were both beautiful and capable of emotional complexity, she is also somewhat of a disappointment.

Minnie Driver stands out as Carlotta because she's Minnie Driver and seems odd in the role. Maybe more perplexing is Ciaran Hinds in the role of one of the theatre managers--Hinds can't sing at all.

However, Miranda Richardson is fine in the role of Madame Giry and Jennifer Ellison is cute as Meg. I also liked the production design which keeps the wonderfully lewd opera house statuary.

If this musical is ever adapted again, I would urge a director to consider how much heavy lifting the music does and refrain from too many close-ups. Also, the Phantom ought to look worse than someone having an allergic reaction to a bee sting when his mask's removed.

The Phantom of the Opera (2004) is available on Netflix in Japan.

The End of the Sausage

I finally did it, I finally finished reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, originally published in segments from 1759 to 1767. I started reading this book back in 2019. I brought it on the plane with me to Japan. But, while I think it's undeniably brilliant, I found only sporadic pleasure in reading it.

It's not even especially long and in the three years since I started it I put it down to read much longer works many times. I read The Faerie Queene again, Paradise Lost twice, three Horatio Hornblower novels, two Robert Louis Stevenson novels, Moby Dick again, various Lovecraft and MR James stories, Interview with the Vampire, and I don't even remember what. 18th century English novels are known for their ridiculously excessive verbosity but I managed Swift, Smollett, Fielding, DaFoe, and even Richardson without too much trouble. But God. The jokes. Tristram Shandy does not let up with the goddamn jokes.

The novel is deliberately anti-narrative. The author, Tristram himself, proposes to write his autobiography but is continually prevented by his own lengthy digressions. Author Laurence Sterne sought continually to undermine any sense of awe or any impression of one person or situation deserving more attention than another. I think this is perhaps why Karl Marx was such a fan of the book. But it mostly made me think what valuable a thing stories are in giving us narrative respite from the impossible complexity of real life.

Tristram begins with the intention of describing his birth but he cannot justify focusing on it without thoroughly describing his father and Uncle Toby and the conversation they had that night. If the novel truly has a main character, it's Uncle Toby, whose genitals are continually hinted at as having been terribly wounded in battle. Of course, when Tristram sets out directly to discuss his uncle, he's immediately sidetracked by describing his own journeys through France. He even illustrates his tendency:

I am now beginning to get fairly into my work; and by the help of a vegetable diet, with a few of the cold seeds, I make no doubt but I shall be able to go on with my uncle Toby’s story, and my own, in a tolerable straight line. Now,

These were the four lines I moved in through my first, second, third, and fourth volumes——In the fifth volume I have been very good,——the precise line I have described in it being this:

By which it appears, that except at the curve, marked A. where I took a trip to Navarre,—and the indented curve B. which is the short airing when I was there with the Lady Baussiere and her page,—I have not taken the least frisk of a digression, till John de la Casse’s devils led me the round you see marked D.—for as for c c c c c they are nothing but parentheses, and the common ins and outs incident to the lives of the greatest ministers of state; and when compared with what men have done,—or with my own transgressions at the letters A B D—they vanish into nothing.

As I said, the jokes are non-stop. Some of them are funny, but most of them left me feeling exhausted quickly. The double entendre is constant. See this portion of a story told by a character called Trim:

As Tom perceived, an’ please your honour, that he gained ground, and that all he had said upon the subject of sausages was kindly taken, he went on to help her a little in making them.——First, by taking hold of the ring of the sausage whilst she stroked the forced meat down with her hand——then by cutting the strings into proper lengths, and holding them in his hand, whilst she took them out one by one——then, by putting them across her mouth, that she might take them out as she wanted them——and so on from little to more, till at last he adventured to tie the sausage himself, whilst she held the snout.——

——Now a widow, an’ please your honour, always chuses a second husband as unlike the first as she can: so the affair was more than half settled in her mind before Tom mentioned it.

She made a feint however of defending herself, by snatching up a sausage:——Tom instantly laid hold of another——

But seeing Tom’s had more gristle in it——

She signed the capitulation——and Tom sealed it; and there was an end of the matter.

Maybe I'd have enjoyed the book more as it was originally published, in short volumes. In any case, I'm glad I can finally move on.

Twitter Sonnet #1668

For half a minute games can play themselves.
In trouble's eyes, the ship's a bottle first.
With crowded thoughts we filled organic shelves.
Another crash occurs to prompt a thirst.
Absorbent table cloths could answer stains.
Resourceful spoons could serve a crimson punch.
Resentful ladles shake with metal pains.
Revolving legs convene to carry lunch.
Bananas range about the seventh yard.
Resulting heavy pictures build a thirst.
Concise as armies steal a science card.
Replies reveal a single talking burst.
With final pastes imposing pages sleep.
Ingenious jokes compel the board to keep.

The Subtle Difference Between Stupid and Smart

What will it be, a world ruled by science or a world ruled by tyrants? Such is the too simplistic question posed by 1936's Things to Come, a visually splendid but philosophically daft science fiction film conceived by HG Wells and produced by Alexander Korda.

We begin with "Everytown", a place presumably meant to be a generic stand-in for any city in the world but is pretty obviously an English one. It's 1940, four years in the future from the film's release, and John Cabal (Raymond Massey) is worried about reports of impending war, despite recent assurances from authorities there will be none. To a British audience in 1936, that would've sounded awfully familiar.

And of course there is war. In one of the film's best scenes, a pilot from Everytown is shot down. Dying from his wounds, he sees a little girl approach as his allies above deploy gas. He gives his gas mask to the child, marvelling that he did so after he probably killed her parents, deliberately. It's a nice moment to show the senselessness of war.

The decades pass and endless war reduces Everytown to rubble and its people to a primitive tribe. A ruler emerges played by Ralph Richardson, who hams it up admirably. He lords it over the town in a furry vest and helmet, angrily demanding the deployment of aircraft despite the total absence of petrol to fuel them.

Now John Cabal returns, wearing futuristic tights and a calm demeanour. He talks about a new society of scientists ruled by reason. He's not worried when Richardson takes him hostage. Some time later, his allies arrive in force--a fleet of massive black bombers dropping "peace gas"--a gas that puts everyone to sleep instead of death.

Okay, a fair enough argument for science triumphing over infantile tribalism. Except as decades advance, Wells' vision of a society ruled by reason grows less acute. We see a marvellous future city sadly designed with ugly, featureless walls and balconies. We meet a sculptor, chipping away at a vaguely Native American figure, who complains of this new world where humans are trying to do things they weren't meant to, like going to space. Based on this vague argument, he somehow rouses millions of people to try to tear it all down. Meanwhile, on the other side, an old man tells his granddaughter how humans used to have foolish things called "windows" because they hadn't invented artificial sunlight yet. Mind you, that's not presented ironically. Wells evidently longed for a future in which fresh air and sunlight were not such disgusting necessities.

In obviously being inspired by the emerging tyrants of the 1930s, Wells fails to address the issues that actually made them popular. That they presented a vision of glory in contrast to a reality of poverty, something, ironically, Things to Come also does. So when the film concludes with Raymond Massey, playing the noble grandson of John Cabal, waxing triumphant on the glories of "progress" and "conquest" as the mob is massacred offscreen by concussion from the launching spacecraft, one is more astonished by the extremity of the film's tone deafness than by any of its astonishing special effects.

Things to Come is available on The Criterion Channel.

AKA Number Three

I loved the first season (2015) of Jessica Jones but found the second (2018) to be uneven. I'm four episodes into season three (2019) now and so far I'm really liking it.

Like the other Netflix Marvel series, this season of Jessica Jones spends a lot of time contemplating what it means to be a hero. Jessica's friend, Trish (Rachael Taylor), having recently acquired superpowers, desperately wants to be the ardent do-gooder Jessica (Krysten Ritter) is too cynical to be.

The second episode of the season, "You're Welcome", directed by series star Krysten Ritter, is surprisingly amusing as we follow Trish through basic superhero training only to find it's actually kind of difficult to come across crimes being committed. After she finally stops a mugging, the need for a secret identity becomes clear when the mugger sues her and she neglected to get information from the victim. It's stuff like this that's sorely missing from The Boys. I only wish the Marvel Netflix shows weren't so allergic to superhero costumes.

Jessica herself has a couple interesting plot threads. Her new love interest is a shady character called Erik (Benjamin Walker), based on the Marvel Comics character Mind Wave. Walker is an actor with a lot of natural warmth who serves as a good foil for the caustic performance from Ritter. Mind you, I still like Ritter in this role. She's really good in the third episode after she's lost her spleen following a stabbing in the first episode. It works as a source of tension not unlike Jack Nicholson's injured nose in Chinatown.

But, once again, the character of Jeri Hogarth played by Carrie-Anne Moss threatens to upstage everyone. The ruthless, high powered lawyer happens to be dying and is trying to reconnect with an old lover. With her time running out, and her history of playing hardball, there's a lot of tension around how far she'll go to get someone to love her before she dies, if she'll do something really repulsively manipulative. I kind of feel like I know where the show's going with this, and with the other subplots, but I'm still enjoying it.

Jessica Jones is available on Disney+.

Think of the Clones

We were treated to a double dose of The Bad Batch last night. Two episodes of political intrigue premiered. I enjoyed both episodes but found the first, written by Manifest writer Ezra Nachman, much better than the second, written by Star Trek: Picard writer Damani Johnson.

The first episode, "The Clone Conspiracy", seems like it may have been influenced by Andor though it reminded me more of the arc on Clone Wars when someone was assassinating senators. I kind of wish there'd been some kind of visual distinction between the senate chambers between then and now, though obviously the U.S. senate hasn't changed that much in the past hundred years.

Beginning with a nice hook in which one clone trooper (Dee Bradley Baker) is shot for daring to question the massacre on Kamino, the episode shifts to following Senator Chuchi (Jennifer Hale), another returning character from Clone Wars. Now she's the lone voice supporting clone rights. One wonders where Mon Mothma is in all this.

It's not until the second episode, "Truth and Consequences", that the Batch themselves finally show up. I didn't get caught up in their effort to steal footage of the Kamino massacre and I thought it was silly for Omega (Michelle Ang) to tag along with the senator. It felt kind of like Ezra witnessing the duel between Obi-Wan and Maul on Rebels--there was no reason for her to be there other than some vague worry that children wouldn't be interested unless there were a point of view character closer to their own age.

Phil LaMarr returns to voice Bail Organa. Normally I like LaMarr but for some reason he gives the character a thick Spanish accent which Jimmy Smits doesn't have.

But it was all worth it to get an appearance by the Emperor voiced by Ian McDiarmid. It was satisfying that he'd twisted our heroes actions to suit his own ends. McDiarmid's voice made it all seem twenty times cleverer than it was. It's nice he seems willing to play the character so often. I hope he shows up on Andor next season, I really want a scene between him and Mon Mothma.

The Bad Batch is available on Disney+.