The Momentum of Clouds

I couldn't sleep a few nights ago and found myself watching Naruse Miko's final film, 1967's Scattered Clouds. I hadn't seen it since coming to Japan and, like all Japanese movies I saw in the U.S., I see it through a much different lens now.

One thing I often marvel at with these older movies is how much they look exactly like the Japan I live in to-day. The trains look different but I see the same rows of wooden posts by the tracks. Apartment buildings look the same with the same external utility boxes and pipe systems.

Scattered Clouds was one of the few colour films Naruse made. It has a lovely, doggedly consistent colour palette. Pale greens like matcha paired with yellowish tans and faded pinks.

I found myself noticing how much the music seems to borrow from Bernard Herrmann's Hitchcock scores. The story is about a man and woman in a strange romance, which is a little like Hitchcock, I guess. There's certainly a lot of tension in it.

Yumiko (Tsukasa Yoko) is a young woman whose husband is killed after being struck by a car. The car was driven by a man named Mishima (Kayama Yuzo). It was found to be an accident but Mishima, a deeply conscientious man, feels the weight of responsibility and wants to give the widow any financial aid he can. She, however, wants nothing to do with him or his money.

Yet, fate draws the two of them together and they have an accidental meeting at a hotel where they deliver drunken speeches to each other. As time passes, they develop feelings for each other. But of course Yumiko can never forget her first husband.

You could look at the movie as a more melodramatic version of Tokyo Monogatari. Is Yumiko really so devoted to her first husband or is her pulling away from Mishima motivated by a guilt over how disloyal she truly is in her heart? She cares for Mishima when he falls ill which excites her sympathy for him. It's suggested also the psychological pain he feels for having killed her husband also attracts her. It's a short step from that to wondering if she's attracted to him, on some level, because he killed her husband.

It's such a sedate, gentle film but the premise ultimately recalls the idea of brides won in battle and how fundamentally a woman might be attracted to status, even against her will. It could be seen as a war between Yumiko's morals and Yumiko's instincts. Mishima's, too. Considering how guilty he felt, surely, every time he takes the liberty of smiling at Yumiko, some part of him must say, "I have no right."

Scattered Clouds is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1898

The little minds would steal a soul a day.
With empty hearts, the bugs devour life.
The ugly stamp of brutal feet delay.
The glacial tackle blunts a lazy knife.
Averted war has left a stock of bombs.
A cloudless sky was choked with ash and ghosts.
Ironic fields distort the peace of psalms.
The wayward lad was took by heartless hosts.
A raven passed through countries sans a name.
A blend of birds obscured the view of God.
A morning song would shift the guilt to Mame.
But luck would spare nor even yet nor odd.
Pervasive sloth reduced the woods to mulch.
The river cut has trickled down to gulch.

Consider the Grizzly

A wild grizzly starts eating people but has cute cubs in 1999's Wild Grizzly, an unmistakably made-for-TV movie set in a beautiful mountain town and featuring Daniel Baldwin in a minor role. It's exactly what you'd expect but there's something oddly sincere I found engrossing about it.

So the grizzly eats a guy's leg one night and it's tranqed by a guy inexplicably dressed as Indiana Jones (as a fedora wearer myself, I shouldn't laugh). There's a town hall meeting about having the bear with her cubs displayed in the middle of town. Daniel Baldwin and the mayor (John O'Hurley, J. Peterman from Seinfeld), being villains, oppose this idea. With a grin of malevolent satisfaction, Baldwin plots to kill the bears so that he and the mayor can get rich . . . somehow. The nature of their scheme is never remotely clear.

Rachel (Michele Greene) and her moody teenage son, Josh (Riley Smith), move to the small town from L.A. When Josh accidentally breaks the windshield on a sheriff's car, the sheriff (Fred Dryer) drafts Josh to help take care of the grizzly and her cubs. Naturally, Josh is framed when they escape. In his attempts to capture the bear, which he alone realises is suffering from a toothache, he's joined by a plucky blonde with a captivating rack (Courtney Peldon). The writers give her a lot of stuff that's supposed to be endearing and quirky but come of as psychotic. When Josh is sneaking around the woods looking for the animal, she sneaks up on him with a recording of a bear roar and a bear claw glove to grab him on the shoulder. This is after the bear has killed someone.

Sometimes I thought the movie might be intentionally bad, like someone was aiming for "it's so bad it's good." Whenever a filmmaker claims this about their own film, I tend to doubt their sincerity (to be clear, I don't know if this filmmaker has done so). But there are shots that are so flagrantly lazy that I wonder. In the first attack scene, the man's little boy sneaks out of the safety of the car, ironically to retrieve his teddy bear. We get a shot of the teddy bear and the boy runs into frame, picks up the item with a blank expression, then turns to look off camera with an expression that clearly says, "Okay, I hit my mark. Now what?"

But the weirdest bits were when the grizzly ate people. There are these long, slow shots of people writhing in stage blood and guts and shots of the actual bear and shots of the dummy bear head being shoved in the fake gore. There's something so peculiarly detached about the tone of these shots, I can't explain it. It's like the filmmaker had no instinct for composing violent sequences but decided to just linger anyway hoping inspiration would eventually strike. As though he were gently contemplating his inability to express any feelings in the shots. It's sort of like listening to a tone deaf person sing "Ave Maria" with a total lack of self-consciousness. I guess that sums up the movie.

The Vital Past

I read the newest Sirenia Digest to-day, which contains a new series of vignettes by Caitlin R. Kiernan called "THE ULTRAVIOLET ALPHABET". Each vignette corresponds to a letter, from A to M. A few of them are just like nice miniature lectures from a palaeontologist, which Caitlin indeed happens to be. I particularly liked "K is for Komodo Dragon" which discusses the komodo dragon's effect on the human imagination since its relatively recent discovery in 1910. Caitlin also goes into detail about an Australian ancestor of the komodo dragon, a much larger lizard that coexisted with aboriginal humans. I hadn't heard about it and it was interesting.

Other vignettes harken back to the Digest's original purpose, as a showcase of Caitlin's weird erotica. "C is for Clit" is an affectionate rumination on that renowned female body part while "J is for Journey" ponders a strange and exceedingly beautiful naked woman. All the vignettes have good qualities though I was a little puzzled by a reference to An American in Paris paired with a reference to Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. Was Caitlin thinking of Funny Face? I enjoyed the vignettes in any case.

I walked along a river to work yesterday and got this song stuck in my head:

Survival of the Mutilated

Peter Lorre immigrates to America only to find remarkably evil luck in 1941's The Face Behind the Mask. His luck is so bad as to defy credibility but Lorre is an excellent anchor for this nightmare.

Janos (Lorre) is an improbably talented young man arrived from Hungary in New York. He's an expert watch maker and a pilot so his hopes of getting a job and being able to send for his girlfriend back home are not unreasonable. Unfortunately, the hotel his stays in burns down and the fire hideously scars his face. Unable to find work or even kindness in the law-abiding world, he turns for aid to the first man too kind to be bothered by his looks, a cheap crook hanging out on the docks.

Janos gets a creepy mask and turns his talents to crime like a Batman villain without a Batman. Lorre is vulnerable and tenacious, dominating the screen and breathing a lot of life into this noir melodrama. The sequence of extremely bad luck put me in mind of Detour, though The Face Behind the Mask doesn't lend itself to an "unreliable narrator" interpretation, due to multiple points of view. I suppose it's best taken simply as a particularly cruel nightmare, which it succeeds at being.

The Face Behind the Mask is available on The Criterion Channel and on YouTube.

Superfluous Weasel

Above is the only picture on my Instagram so far, real_setsuled. It's a weasel I saw on my way to work recently. "Real" because, if you remember, I was banned from Instagram despite never having used it. I had somehow violated their terms. My best guess is that someone impersonated me on Instagram at some point.

It felt like such a triumph to finally get an Instagram but now I don't know what to do with it. I usually post photos here on my blog. It may end up like my tumblr or other online platform accounts I created which I've forgotten about.

I've seen a few weasels around here but they're usually too quick for me to photograph. The above photo is cropped, here's the full image:

He was jumping back and forth across that little irrigation canal.

X Sonnet #1897

Another Swiftie shook the haters off.
Another frisbee took the schnauzer's air.
Another bug forsook a stranger's cough.
Another army brooked the serpent's dare.
Diminished dimes revert to metal lumps.
A standard gold replaced the running tabs.
Across the stars, we felt the spacial bumps.
A stack of kings control the haunted cabs.
Repeated masks conceal the smothered face.
As digits stick to dials, feathers fly.
The paper birds collide with wooden grace.
There's many tales to scar the storied sky.
A team of monkeys smuggled steel to phones.
Diverging planes could write a cloudy tome.

It Takes a Village

Christopher Reeve and Kirstie Alley team up to fight a town of white haired kids in 1995's Villageof the Damned, John Carpenter's remake of the 1960 film of the same name. It's not as effective as the original film, and drifts pretty far into camp, but it's an effective premise. The first act is the best part.

One day, for no apparent reason, everyone falls asleep in a small town. When they wake up, all the women are pregnant. That's a great start. All the mystery and dread is both personal and public. Alley plays a swaggering FBI agent who comes to investigate and she, along with Mark Hamill in a small role as a priest, is primarily responsible for bringing the camp.

Hamill almost sounds like he's doing his Joker voice. There's nothing in his dialogue to suggest he's evil, I guess it was an interpretation Hamill decided to bring. I guess maybe he figured there just aren't enough evil priests in American cinema.

Christopher Reeve gives a more earnest performance. That poor guy should've gotten more work. So what if he was really buff. I guess that's what kept him from a diversity of roles. It is kind of odd here that this small town doctor just happens to look like Superman.

Actually, I'd say the most effective performance in the film is Meredith Salenger as a virgin who's impregnated by the phenomenon, something I was surprised the priest didn't make more of. Her husband dies in a car crash and she's unsurprisingly depressed. She was the one sincere note in the movie that otherwise felt very tongue-in-cheek, perhaps unintentionally, once the kids started showing up and being creepy. That stuff is fun, though.

That Deadly Noir Rail

Gloria Grahame is trapped in an extraordinarily tangled web of abuse and misogyny in 1954's Human Desire. Fritz Lang directed this film noir based on Emile Zola's 1890 novel La Bete humaine, deviating from the source material in intriguing ways. The film ends on an oddly ambiguous note but I suppose, in the '50s, it was the best possible conclusion to such an impressively messy human drama.

Grahame plays Vicki, the wife of a big train conductor named Carl (Broderick Crawford). She used to work at a magazine stand where he started flirting with her. The two eventually married despite, as is repeated several times throughout the film, the fact that he was substantially older than her--my guess would be about 20 years. It could be no less than that for it to be seen an issue in the '50s.

One really interesting point where the film deviates from the novel is that, after losing his job on the train, Carl sends Vicki to see his boss, Owens (Grandon Rhodes), who's implied to have once had feelings for Vicki. Carl seems to insinuate that Vicki ought to seduce Owens to some degree in exchange for getting Carl his job. What else could Carl think he was doing by telling her to go see him alone? And yet, when she's gone, he works himself into a jealous rage as though the idea were only just occurring to him.

Vicki is very much at the centre of the film and the problem she finds herself in is captivating as you wonder along with her just how she's supposed to navigate these waters of psychosis, how she's supposed to deal with the man who will hit her for doing what he told her to do, what she'd made clear she didn't want to do. It's hard to be loyal to a spouse who can't control his own train of thought.

Top billing goes to Glenn Ford who plays another railroad worker. He's poised as one of those noir heroes torn between the sweet girl next door (played in this case by Kathleen Case) and the femme fatale (Vicki). But Vicki, while positioned as the deceiving, adulterous woman, always has good intentions but is presented with impossible choices. There seems to be some attempt near the end to morally simplify her, to make the film fit into a more typical framework, but the ambiguity remains strong enough that most people watching will be hard pressed to imagine what Vicki ought to have done.

I was kind of reminded of Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, which has a similar problem of a woman's infidelity arising from her loyalty to her husband. Shoot the Piano Player presents a more plausible and effectively tragic scenario but Human Desire is plenty impressive.

Human Desire is available on The Criterion Channel.

Amish Paradise

In addition to Trump getting voted into office again, there were a few smaller stories that caused me to despair for humanity a bit. Many young American voters are now unable to sign their names, causing "chaos" with mail-in ballots. It's funny, in Japan, people are trying to phase out the hanko, the traditional stamp used as a personal sign on documents, in favour of written signatures. Maybe the U.S. should switch to hanko. Eventually perhaps the pantomime of digital signatures will be done away with as various algorithms assign to happily accepting users a lifetime of work and consumer habits.

The other story that made an impression on me was the unprecedented turnout of Amish voters for Trump. The Amish, a religious community in Pennsylvania dedicated to living without modern technology, as long been a quaint, bemusing presence in the U.S. But they're not so cute when the reason they're voting for Trump is that they feel the government was overreaching by investigating illnesses related to milk production at an Amish farm. Hey, I love traditions. But everyone getting sick from bad milk doesn't sound like a good one to me. Fucking idiots. And I'd bet good money Trump isn't going to do shit about this issue.

Tony Todd

Tony Todd passed away a few days ago at the age of 69. While rarely a headliner, Todd is one of those few actors indelibly stitched into the fabric of genre television and film roles due to a remarkable number of supporting roles and guest roles. He played multiple characters in the Star Trek franchise, including Worf's brother on The Next Generation and an older version of child character Jake Sisko for an episode of Deep Space Nine. That episode, "The Visitor", quickly became one of the most beloved Star Trek stories in the franchise history, in no small part due to Todd's performance.

Todd was also part of the fan made Axanar project, which may explain why he hasn't been seen on "official" Star Trek media in a long time. Like many Star Trek exiles, he appeared on The Orville.

An imposing figure with a distinctive, deep, raspy voice, Todd's best remembered leading role is of course as the titular character of 1992's Candyman and its many sequels.

Sci-fi, horror, and fantasy media have lost a core presence. But we'll all be seeing him again, I'm sure, as long as people watch movies and TV.

The X is Not for Nudity

Mulder and Scully chase naked cannibals in the 1993 X-Files episode, "The Jersey Devil". This is one of the silliest episodes of the series.

A man is found with his leg chewed off and the autopsy reports that the bite marks are human. Mulder therefore assumes it's a missing link in the human evolutionary chain. I dimly remember finding this hilarious when I first watched the episode, too. Evidence says it's human, therefore Mulder says it's not. What?

The episode, written by series creator Chris Carter, is so invested in the idea of a missing link, it forgets to provide a shred of evidence of it. Mulder appears to be excited about naked people living in the forest. His inferences get more ridiculous when, after the man is killed, he immediately presumes, for no reason whatsoever, that he had a mate and this naked woman is now running around an abandoned industrial district in the city. SWAT teams and scores of officers converge onto the scene. I bet she would've felt really special had she known. You know how many naked homeless people there are in my hometown who don't rate attention from even one cop?

I imagined some alternate dialogue for the episode.

MULDER: We could've done it, Scully. We could've caught a naked woman.

SCULLY: *sigh* Mulder . . . You only had to ask.

The naked woman was played by Claire Stansfield. Wikipedia notes she was the first of many guest stars to have also appeared on Twin Peaks, not counting David Duchovny himself.

Context Makes Devils

I've been watching the first season of Daredevil again lately, from 2015. It sure holds up, particularly since this is the kind of story Marvel desperately needs to be telling now. No postmodernism, no mulling over civil rights issues from the '60s. Instead, the hero is pitted against Wilson Fisk, a man whose power was primarily in his finances and his control of the buildings in New York where people lived. I've heard he was even partly modelled on Donald Trump. The show's still a fantasy, but at least it's dealing with issues that are actually critical to people to-day; the effects of a shitty economy and the powerful people who keep the corrosive status quo. Andor did this, too, taking the story away from literary theories and showing how economic and political oppression actually effected people's daily lives.

One criticism I've heard about the Democrats is that they've become too attached to white collar votes and have thereby lost the working class. That's painfully clear. Hollywood is obviously part of the Left's apparatus, inconveniently popular new Clint Eastwood movies notwithstanding. If they were wise, they'd be focusing more on things like Daredevil and Andor, showing exactly how someone like Trump negatively impacts their lives. There was a rumour the new Spider-Man movie would feature Wilson Fisk and Daredevil but that Sony wanted it to be about Venom. After the success of the recent Venom film, I'm afraid Sony might get their way, but a Spider-Man versus Wilson Fisk movie would be so very much the story we need right now. If done properly, of course.

Daredevil is available on Disney+, despite Netflix being written all over the above trailer. It's from nine years ago when Daredevil was on Netflix. It's weird Netflix doesn't take down those videos. They're basically hosting commercials for their competition.

X Sonnet #1896

The legless leap o'erreached the shortened pant.
With short'ning bread, the mother ship was taxed.
Arrays of sensors marked the spacial rant.
The Klingon vessel's shields were set to max.
A pace behind the Devil walks a crab.
In silent shades, the picture turned to fall.
A brittle leaf directs the villain's stab.
The dragon's blood ordained the hero's fall.
A fighting dog replaced a singing cat.
In ev'ry tree, the birds were making eggs.
The squirrel's dreams could squash a soulless gnat.
A swarm of bugs retains a million legs.
Coyotes yip and howl on phantom phones.
Conversing wolves and dogs agree to bones.

Another Lump of Trump

Trump's victory was inevitable. I felt that way before Harris took over the campaign from Biden. Harris was more qualified than the ailing Biden so I hoped that might turn it around but, let's face it, Harris had lost the primaries when she'd properly run for president and when she became the presidential candidate this time she had a fraction of the time to campaign most candidates get. Trump had at least two traditional edges, being a former president and a man. But he had a lot of uncommon assets, too. He'd survived a public assassination attempt. His followers generally have the sense of him being wrongly persecuted.

It's remarkable that we have a convicted felon for president. Think back to over twenty-five years ago when Democrats fought tooth and tail to argue Bill Clinton didn't deserve to be removed from office for cheating on his wife (the surface argument about him lying was just that, a surface). Expecting the public to go that way on the issue then adopt a different standard for Trump was deranged.

As in 2016, but even more clearly this time, I have the sense this is an election the Democrats lost rather than one Trump won. You're not crazy if you think Trump is obviously unqualified, but the key word for his supporters is not "unqualified" but rather "obvious". Trump's motives are always plain. Even when he doesn't follow through, people excuse him because they understand the motive behind his bluster and hyperbole. Trump is dumb, but he lives in reality. The Democrats have failed to adapt to a culture whose zero fucks for traditional values have been reduced further into the negative range by a steadily diminishing economy. So, yes, people feeling oppressed by grotesquely high rents preferred to vote for a greedy landlord. They're that put off by the obfuscations and radical politics of the Left.

Trump's interview with Joe Rogan really made it clear, contrasted with the Harris interview with Howard Stern. Hardly anyone even deigned to notice the Harris interview with Stern, or Biden's interview with Stern. In the '90s, a presidential candidate going on The Howard Stern Show would have been big news. To-day, it's all but meaningless. Things changed. The Democrats didn't.

Oh, well. Here we go again. Hopefully next time the Democrats can find themselves another Obama. Someone who seems real and qualified.

Purif the Pure

A woman tests a small town's morality and patience in 1963's Il Demonio. It's a film that avoids giving the audience easy answers and highlights how abominably people can behave in ambiguous situations.

A beautiful young woman called Purif (Daliah Lavi) is passionately obsessed with Antonio (Frank Wolff), a young man of her village. He vigorously rebuffs her as she continues to physically cling to him, but he can't resist a few kisses. Nor can he resist the wine she gives him. After he drinks it, she tells him she mixed her blood into it.

Purif is a practicing witch and as her antics become more severe, she's subjected to religious punishment and exorcism, which inevitably becomes sexual abuse. The spirit of a dead boy seemingly converses with her. There are signs that Purif really is in contact with Satan, yet this actually contributes to a sense of the villagers' diminished moral standing. As their punishments of Purif become excessively cruel and clearly driven by sexual compulsion, Satan starts to look like a fellow of comparatively good integrity. At least Purif has no delusions about who she is or what her motives are. Of course, provoking the town into brazen moral hypocrisy may have been Satan's plan all along.

The film's beautifully shot and Daliah Lavi gives a brave, unrestrained performance. Il Demonio is available on The Criterion Channel.

Dog Dreams in a Dangerous Park

I've been having some interesting dreams lately but I've been doing a bad job of remembering them. So, a few nights ago, when I woke at 2am after having one, I immediately typed up a description as best I could with eyes that were not quite ready to open and look at my bright computer screen. Here's the description I wrote, typos and all:

Dream about a big yellow dog
girl looking for him
Indoor park
dark street
she stares at tehe camera, short hair, big eyes
Dog is mustard cooour
eats cildren
is sometimes '80s acto

I have no idea what "'80s acto" is supposed to mean. I guess the dream must have been set in the '80s. I do remember the dog seemed dirty, streaked with black and dark green, like egg yolk with black, melted rubber.

Anyway, Happy Guy Fawkes Day, everyone. It comes early to Japan, where it's unobserved. In America, where people used to not know about it, of course it's election day this year. Quite a confluence since one candidate is accused of inciting a mob that stormed the U.S. capital. I think the left has largely mischaracterised that event but, all the same, I want to urge any Americans reading to vote for Kamala Harris. If you're worried about getting a president manipulated by powerful outside interests, Trump's the one you gotta worry about, not Harris. If the demons spinning yarn around his head can be considered outside interests. I'm not just talking about his bizarre hair style. He's clearly possessed by ideas, recklessly fueled by resentment, possibly also by the inability to cope with his position on the world stage, about his own unrecognised merit. He'll cling foolishly to anyone who flatters him as a consequence. This speaks to the basic lack of the maturity requisite in the leader of a country. Please, don't make us joke again. Or not more of a joke, anyway.

X Sonnet #1895

The heartless robber stole the horse's hoof.
A captive plant would dream of aphid death.
Entire teams were seen on Scrooge's roof.
The track could only lead to Walter Neff.
The clown was routed back to Hades' court.
Reversing time required counter spin.
The game's diminished, it's a console port.
When all the lot would conquer, none could win.
With helpless hands, the gloves discussed a meal.
Without the buns, the burgers changed in shape.
A simple food would prove its health is real.
The flying man would wear a crimson cape.
A whale collision rocked the briny deep.
Pervasive error coos itself to sleep. A whale collision rocked the briny deep. Pervasive error coos itself to sleep.

He's Nobody's Suitcase

People don't tend to think about how dangerous a crocodile is, but one is certainly bad enough to serve as a horror movie villain. 2007's Black Water shows this quite well, so well that it remains effective despite a kind of ridiculous third act.

Grace (Diana Glenn) and Lee (Maeve Dermody) are on vacation with Grace's husband, Adam (Andy Rodoreda), and decide to take a boat tour through a swamp. Their boat is capsized by a croc, their guide is chomped to bits, and the three of them are forced up a tree.

The film builds tension nicely and the editing is intuitive as we follow their lines of thought about what the best course of action is. Should they try for the boat, should they try hopping from tree to tree, risking short swims here and there? The croc is fast, appears suddenly, and keeps his victims, and the viewer, guessing about his speed, reach, and location.

Then it gets a little silly. Obviously, not everyone can die right away, or there's no movie, but the reasons the movie gives as to why some people survive a croc attack are pretty flimsy. At some point, it's clear the movie's playing by video game rules. But it never becomes truly bad.

Swimming Towards the Blind Spot

I watched this, I supposed you could call it a debate, yesterday. I was fascinated by how one sided it was. I'd heard another conversation between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson, a sort of impromptu meeting at a university, and Dawkins had come off much better than Peterson. Each was respectful of the other but Dawkins had no patience for Peterson's inferences about meaning in recurrent mythological symbols in disparate cultures. This time, though, it was almost like a Jordan Peterson lecture in which Dawkins occasionally spoke to say that he wasn't interested in what Peterson was speaking about. And yet, by the end, incredibly, Peterson seemed to bring Dawkins around.

Peters expresses something I've long thought needed to be brought across to hard line atheists who tend to be so dismissive of religion as to see it as comical. Peterson articulates, and I think finally manages to convince Dawkins of, the importance of religion as an anthropological subject and in many ways a constructive phenomenon, regardless of whether or not one literally believes in a divinity. Peterson finally drags Dawkins into the epiphany via memes and how religious ideas are kinds of memes, which seems like a bit of an appeal to Dawkins' ego. It's basically pointing out to Dawkins that he is interested in the thing because he's most famous actually for rephrasing the thing.

I was a little shocked by Dawkins' admission that he knew little of scientific history and the relationship between Christianity and the development of science as a discipline. It made me wish I were there so I could show him the connexions between the Reformation, the Puritans in England, and the development of the Royal Society, all a continually refining process to find the methodology for determining observable, objective truth to the absolute best of human capability. But surely he must have read all this at some point? I simply can't believe that his education never encompassed that. Hell, if he'd just watched Cosmos, he ought to have some idea. I guess it goes to show atheists are as capable of selective perceptions as anyone. I've often thought that people who believe themselves most immune to unconscious bias and selective memories are the most susceptible to them.

Both Dawkins and the moderator try to get Peterson to definitively answer whether or not he believes in the miracles described by the bible, such as the virgin birth. I'm not the only one who clearly understands why Peterson avoids directly answering the question--I see even some of the commentators on the YouTube video picked up on it. He doesn't want to alienate his Christian fans. But he's certainly not being deceptive when he says such questions are kind of irrelevant, particularly the question as to whether or not Cain and Abel actually existed. As Peterson puts it very well, if Cain and Abel were real people, the characters described in the bible we have to-day would likely bear very little resemblance to them for all the changes and revisions the text went through over the centuries. It isn't important that those two brothers were real, it's important that they represent an obviously real, observable phenomenon in human behaviour. It is really strange that Dawkins, a man who came up with the concept of a meme, wouldn't be interested in stories that survive the centuries due to their enduring utility.

I don't think Peterson's interpretations are as inevitable as he seems to believe they are, though. I think the real debate ought to have been about how religious texts can just as well be utilised for twisted, oppressive interpretations. At the same time as scientific thought was developing in 17th century England, Galileo was imprisoned in Italy for his heretical observations. It was an interesting conversation but strange for a number of omissions.

Narratives All Along

The two part Agatha All Along finale was good television. Not amazing but nonetheless satisfying and possessed of a storytelling integrity notably lacking in most of the Marvel series on Disney+. I suspect this is something Drew Goddard alluded to in a tweet about the new Daredevil series, that Disney/Marvel is abandoning the "treat series like movies" policy and going back to the format that made the Marvel Netflix series so consistent. Even the weakest of those, Iron Fist, benefited from the lack of the indecisive committee mentality that I think undermined so many big budget Disney+ shows.

The contrast is particularly clear when it comes to the differences between Wanda/Vision and Agatha All Along. Both series were created and ran by Jac Schaeffer but while Wanda/Vision had suspiciously odd plot twists, the most infamous being the Ralph Boehner one, Agatha All Along had elements that were clearly planned from the start and which Schaeffer followed through with in the finish. There was Patti LuPone's mental dislocation last week, and this week we get the reveal that Agatha knew from the start about Wiccan/William and that the Witch's Road was entirely his creation. If one goes back and watches the series again, the reveals at the end will lend new meaning to everything in a way that a Boehner style twist does not.

That's not to say I don't think people making film and television can't change course in the middle of production, that such a thing can't yield good results. I think the motivations behind such course changes matter, though. If it comes from a good storytelling instinct, it can be as interesting as the Darth Vader hallway sequence in Rogue One. But if it's a studio being indecisive over issues of branding and product roll-out, the results tend to be pretty lame.

Agatha All Along sure made good use of that song. Good thing it's a good song. Wanda and Wiccan creating realities, and thus creating narratives, is kind of reflected in Agatha and Nicholas' creation of the song. It's like micro-propaganda; Agatha took a melody crafted with artistic sincerity and then used it as a tool to manipulate her victims (I'm so happy the show didn't try to morally redeem her). It's like the Nazis using Wagner or the Soviets using Eisenstein, just on a micro-level. Of course, it's very Postmodern.

Lately I've been thinking about a trending criticism, the tendency to say some people act like "they're the main characters of their own stories". This one really puzzled me for a while until I realised most peoples' exposure to fiction is much more limited than mine so they assume "main character" is another term for "hero". Naturally, if your life is a story, then you're the main character. If not you, who? Name anyone and you'll sound pretty pathetic. "My boyfriend/my mother/my dog is the main character of my story." Oof. It's Wiccan and Wanda who actually make everyone else be supporting characters in their own stories, a much better way of getting at the egocentrism the criticism is supposed to be aimed at. Agatha may be the main character of this series, but from Wiccan's perspective, she's definitely a supporting character, a morally complicated villain.

One of the things I really liked about Wanda/Vision is that Wanda did not act heroically. Yet there were people who defended her, taken in by the tone of the story and sympathy for Wanda's love for her children. Agatha All Along's superior artistic integrity allows that moral complexity to sit in the minds of the viewers unfiltered, allowing for more interesting debate. I'm happy about that.

Agatha All Along is available on Disney+.

All Hallows' Streaming

Happy Halloween, everyone in the time zones where it's October 31st. It was another lean Halloween for me. It's a good thing I spend the whole month watching horror movies. This past week, though, my internet speed has been shit so streaming services were frequently interrupted by the old spinning loading dot with its little comet trail. I wonder if I added up all the minutes I've spent watching that, how many years it would be.

So I've been watching my DVDs and blu-rays. Coppola's 1992 Dracula, of course. Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow which, despite having a screenplay I really don't like, which deviates from the original story severely, still has beautiful cinematography, costumes, and score. And a great cast. I also watched The Vampire Lovers again, another one with a great cast.

I've found myself really craving 12th Doctor era Doctor Who and I've been watching that. Peter Capaldi is so damned good. I suppose I should try watching that new Amazon series he's on, The Devil's Hour I think it's called. Except, of all the streaming services, my internet hates Amazon the most. Certain sites seem to have a particular brew of cookies that my provider, Softbank, likes to throttle. Amazon and Google are at the top of the list. Whenever I load g-mail, it knocks my internet out for ten minutes half the time. I've taken to only checking e-mail on my phone, which uses the same service provider but always works fine. I guess that goes to show where Softbank's priorities are.

Anyway, last night I watched "The Girl Who Died"/"The Woman Who Lived". I love how most of Twelve's second season are two part episodes. I enjoyed this one a lot more than I did the first time. In particular, the Doctor's interpreting the baby, which I usually found cloying, is ominous and sweet. There's no clips of that on YouTube but here's a nice deleted scene:

Teri Garr

Teri Garr passed away on Tuesday. She was 79. Her long career began in the '60s. She made a memorable appearance on the original Star Trek series before her career took off in the '70s when she worked with Mel Brooks and Francis Ford Coppola. She largely disappeared from the beginning of the 2000s, a sadly common fate for actresses famed for youthful beauty, but in her case it was due to the cruelty of nature. She had multiple sclerosis that resulted in a variety of traumatic health problems and eventually her death.

She didn't stop working, though. She had the occasional small role in a film or did voice work. Her role in 2001's Ghost World is so small I had no idea she was in the movie for a long time.

It being Halloween, I imagine a lot of people are going to be watching Young Frankenstein. I imagine a lot of people would be watching it regardless. It is a classic of the season and Garr is an integral part of it. Who doesn't remember the "roll in the hay" or the "knockers"? People used to dismiss the idea that women could be funny because beauty is somehow antithetical to comedy. Garr demonstrates how untrue this is. It's not simply that she happens to be funny and sexy at the same time; that sexiness is a vital component to the comedy, it's why the jokes work. Questions and anxieties about sex are fundamental to the collective human psyche. Of course sex is funny. And Teri Garr made that admirably clear.

X Sonnet #1894

A mindless chuckle pinged connexions weak.
Diffusing cakes became the beef of men.
Discernment split the second mirror peak.
Across the glass, a daughter sought to win.
'Twas bats again the castle cast as staff.
Deserving lords require rarer beef.
Carousing vamps refuse the lonely calf.
Their raucous party filled the steamy bath.
The bouncing word was changed from naught to wax.
With wax we make a clock to pass the time.
A melting dream consorts with heavy Macs.
Another mountain chose a man to climb.
The dodging fly was caught in tangled legs.
The spider people hatch a trillion eggs.

Only Hilarity in the Building

Last night's season finale of Only Murders in the Building was one of the funniest things I've seen in years, following from an exceptionally funny season. I can't remember the last time a movie or show made me laugh so much. The teleplay was by series co-creator John Hoffman and newcomer J.J. Philbin, which sounds like a pseudonym to me but I couldn't guess for whom. Regis Philbin? I doubt it.

The story picks up with Mabel (Selena Gomez) being held hostage by the imposter screenwriter, Marshall P. Pope (Jin Ha), in the apartment across from Charles' (Steve Martin). Mabel tries to stall by criticising a joke Marshall made in his screenplay about America Online. Like many of the effective comedic moments in the episode (not that screenplay), it hinged a lot on the timing of the performers and Jamie Babbit's direction. But there were a lot of clever lines in the script.

Oliver (Martin Short) goes downstairs to meet briefly with his fiancee, Loretta (Meryl Streep), who says the movie she's making is moving production to New Zealand because "the algorithm says it's newer." Streep's delivery on that line was pitch perfect. I'm laughing just thinking about it now. It was one of two digs in the episode at Hollywood studios becoming mindlessly reliant on algorithms.

The second half of the episode felt oddly truncated, being mainly a denouement for this season and setup for the next. There were a few moments I got the distinct impression were edited down from something much longer.

I look forward to next season. Though, if they want to get their ratings up, I think they're going to have to find Mabel another boyfriend or girlfriend.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere.

Peeping Tom and Japan

What makes someone want to watch other people in private? Michael Powell's 1960 film, Peeping Tom, sheds some light on this problem but it presents such a unique case, one may wonder has useful it could be in analysing the phenomenon as a whole. However, watching it again a few nights ago, for the first time in at least a decade, I was astonished by the seemingly fresh insight it yielded. It almost felt like I was seeing it for the first time. Perhaps it's because I've lived in Japan for almost five years now and Japan, along with other east Asian countries, has a fundamentally different perspective on voyeurism.

I remember once a junior high school student told me that her friend wasn't allowed to masturbate until she passed an upcoming test. Her mother forbade her. I was so astonished both by the student's frankness and by what she had told me that I thought I'd misheard her. I asked her to tell me again but the student became shy and changed the subject. I was deeply disturbed that a parent would violate her 14 year old child's privacy so much as even to regulate a deeply personal act and use it as a tool of manipulation. But the concept of privacy is more or less a western concept. In a collectivist culture like Japan's, the idea that someone has an existence outside of society is considered perverse. Mind you, I live in a very conservative part of the country and from what I gather, ideas of privacy, among others, are closer to western values in Tokyo and Osaka. Is it even right for me to judge, though, coming from such a cultural perspective? Maybe not, but every time I spot a neighbour looking through my window, or hear some other insinuation that my privacy has been compromised by someone who doesn't even believe in the concept, I certainly find it irritating to be on the receiving end of such ethnocentrism.

Morality here seems almost entirely external. So long as the subject remains unaware of what is done to him, anything is permitted. Nothing becomes real unless it's seen and digested by society. And then, even if the subject is evidently aware, community rhetoric will repress awareness of that awareness if the subject's awareness is too inconvenient.

I then think of Mark (Karlheinz Böhm), the main character of Peeping Tom, and what growing up under constant surveillance and manipulation by his father did to him. There's something sweet and innocent about him that coincides with a fundamental disregard for the humanity of others. He fervently watches footage of the latest girl he's killed but in all his conversations with his victims and others, he's always polite, soft spoken, and gentle. The real world exists for him in the camera, his father made sure of that, and he'll use whatever tactics necessary to enable him to film, to quietly disappear and become pure observer.

And yet, Mark's existence as object of observation is a constant parallel reality. When other children were learning how to interact with other people normally, Mark's whole personality was built on being something that is watched. Despite being a serial killer, he takes amazingly little care to prevent detection. He has no locks on his doors, he hides the body of a victim in a prop trunk on set of the movie on which he works as a camera operator. He kills coworkers, making no effort to find victims that can't be traced back to him. It's commonly said that Mark wants to be caught but I don't think that's exactly true. I think it's more like he sees his arrest as an inevitable stitch in the fabric of his reality. He is, of course, continuing his father's study of him as an exhibition of fear, though with no intelligent direction. There's no sense that his "documentary" is to be edited to provide insight in narrative form to any student of psychology. There's an exultation in the control he's able to assert over women who exist in a more liberated realm than he can ever broach and yet that very assertion of dominance and control is part of a pattern inflicted on himself by his own internal observer. Sadism is a device for managing reality he inherited from his father but he has adopted it with less volition than his father presumably had.

Now how much stronger would this continual observation and manipulation be if it were carried on down generations?

Peeping Tom is available on The Criterion Channel.

Jeri Taylor

Jeri Taylor passed away a couple days ago at the age of 86. She wrote the above episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Drumhead", of which she was particularly proud. Not seen in the clip is legendary screen actress Jean Simmons who played a key role in an episode about a witch hunt and subtle racial discrimination.

Taylor wrote for three Star Trek series: Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, the last of which she co-created. Her work was often very thoughtful, political, but not ever, as I recall, truly polemical. I don't remember Voyager very well, I tend not to re-watch it. But her two parter for Deep Space Nine, "The Maquis", introduced the rebel group that remained a part of Star Trek for years afterward. It facilitated many of the show's signature, thought provoking analyses of war and attendant issues of loyalty and retribution. Taylor was certainly integral to what was best about that silver age of the franchise.

X Sonnet #1893

Permission froze the words to mean enough.
The heart cannot escape the metal arm.
The coat was cold from sleeve to ruffled cuff.
Embedded code creates computer smarm.
The hand contains intentions weird and dull.
A ceiling swarm attracts the blinding drunk.
A group of eyes were clustered 'round the hull.
Assorted lives fulfilled the secret trunk.
A secret word was passed amongst the mob.
To threaten ants was normal work for men.
A candy corn erodes the wholesome cob.
The holiday was rife with feinted sin.
The pastry shop displayed imprisoned rolls.
Pervasive fear creates reflexive trolls.

The Rogan Bump

So Donald Trump's interview with Joe Rogan went up on YouTube yesterday, as I write, and has 22 million views, 1.3 million likes and no dislikes. The Howard Stern interview with Kamala Harris went up two weeks ago, has 1.6 million views and likes and dislikes are disabled. That last detail is crucial and key to one's popularity over the other--one at least gives the impression of honesty, of a willingness to take public opinion head on, while the other would put up a barrier.

That's the impression. Is it the truth? I find it hard to believe out of 22 million people, not one would dislike Trump. But maybe they'd think of it as a vote against Rogan. The view count could be bots. I don't really think so. Rogan is wildly popular, Stern really isn't at this point. The true test between the two candidates won't come unless Harris sits down with Rogan. I think she ought to at this point and probably won't. The biggest problem the left faces, and Joe Rogan astutely points this out in the Trump interview, is that everyone can see they're trying to manipulate the truth all the time. Rogan could be in Russia's pocket, he didn't really challenge Trump on his relationship with Putin at all. I don't think Rogan is in Putin's pocket, though.

The Rogan/Trump interview is simply easier to listen to. Rogan always comes off as friendly and reasonable and he has a way of bringing up contrary points without seeming resentful or combative. He did confront Trump on his persistent denial of election results and I don't think Trump realised how foolish he came off because of how diplomatically Rogan constructed the segment.

Trump is relaxed and interesting in the interview but to the unbiased listener I don't think he came off well, at least not as a presidential candidate. He rambles frequently--which Rogan charitably calls "weaving", and Trump, with his fragile ego, eagerly accepts the term. And Trump shows himself frequently unable to recall the names of people important to the stories he tells or points he's trying to make. Sometimes he meanders so much he becomes nonsensical and his continually stressing the importance of being friendly with Putin or Kim Jong Un doesn't come off as tactful but every bit as guileless as Harris accuses him of being.

If Harris loses this race, I think it'll be entirely on the lack of transparency. We really do need a candidate outside of the machine Rogan talks about but Trump is simply not suited to be president. He's too simple-minded. But I sure hope Harris accepts Rogan's invitation to do his show.

Get In the Bone

An English family fleeing mysterious scandal in their home country establish themselves at a sprawling homestead in rural Maine. Things get weirder from there in 2017's Marrowbone. Produced by J.A. Bayona, now best known for Amazon's The Rings of Power, it's much like that series in that it feels like the makers of it have seen lots of quality productions and tried to cobble together their own from impressions rather than feelings. The result is formulaic, sometimes ridiculous, but occasionally pretty.

Allie (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a young American woman who meets the family, headed by matriarch Rose (Nicola Harrison). Rose has three boys and a girl. When she dies, Jack (George MacKay) becomes head of the family and the siblings decide to hide their mother's death for fear of being separated and adopted.

The film has clear moments that present us with missing information and most viewers will be waiting for a twist ending, having been trained by various movies from M. Night Shyamalan and his imitators that began to lose popularity roughly a decade earlier. Writer/director Sergio G. Sanchez's answer to this problem is to nest multiple twists in the end. It results in an intensely plot driven film and the characters therefore feel like they're held at arm's length, functioning essentially as pawns in a chess puzzle. Some of the contortions the story's obliged to go through in order to serve the plot are really silly, particularly a crucial moment where Allie is informed of many of the family's secrets via a handmade scrapbook that was left for her in the hollow of a boulder. It's a cloyingly precious moment that will try the viewer's patience since the plot at this point is in a position of critical suspense, in which Allie learning the truth before the following day is crucial to the family's survival.

Imagine the local authorities are due to confiscate all your property, separate your family, publish scandal about you, and your way of handling it is to get out the construction paper, yarn, and crayons and spend all night laboriously designing, compiling, and sketching. I'd say someone deserves a trip to the funny farm.

I won't spoil the end of the film but, I think, it must certainly have come from a devotee of Michel Foucault. Some people might like that but I was rolling my eyes. The cinematography is pretty, though, and there are good performances by Anna Taylor-Joy, Mia Goth, and Kyle Soller.

Tarot Time

Last night's Agatha All Along was good and felt very much like a TV show. That's been a particular asset of this show, er, all along, actually. It's the first one to use the new Marvel Television logo and it seems they're making good on their new strategy to build these series more like television series than like movies.

I wondered why Patti LuPone, with her famous ego, took what was essentially a fifth string role in an ensemble but last night made it clear she was kind of front and centre all . . . er, all along.

It was a pretty cool set up and pay-off and certainly gave her a memorable send-off. I liked how Tarot was woven into it and how it seemed like the show's writers genuinely understood Tarot. The witch cosplay was nice and Agatha was eerily perfect as the Wicked Witch of the West.

Agatha All Along is available on Disney+.

No Question

I watched Howard Stern's interview with Kamala Harris a few days ago. Long time readers of my blog know I was an avid Howard Stern listener fifteen or so years ago. I started listening to Stern in the '90s and went back to him sporadically. When I was making comics full time, his was a perfect show to occupy my ears while I was inking or colouring. But at some point he started to change, around the time Artie Lange left. He santised himself so much it seems strange to think at one time he was the prototypical "shock jock".

Despite not having listened for years, I knew the story he opened the interview with, the one about the Prince concert he attended. I've heard him tell that story a dozen times but it's not as dull as when he does an impression of his mother, which he did at the end of the interview. I can't imagine why he still thinks that's entertaining, except maybe he doesn't think about what he's doing too much anymore.

The interview had little of value. Stern talks about how even Saturday Night Live's mild jokes about Harris make him nervous. No wonder he had no challenging questions for her. More than anything, though, it's the dishonesty that bugs me. Putting aside all the shock and gross-out humour that once defined his show, it was Stern's unvarnished honesty that really kept listeners tuned in. Now he says he can't even understand why people would vote for Trump. This is despite Stern admitting in the interview that Trump was a guest at his own wedding. Trump used to make appearances on the Stern Show all the time. I certainly wouldn't fault Stern for not wanting to vote for Trump or having reasons for disliking Trump's policies, even disliking Trump as a man. But to say that he doesn't even understand Trump's appeal seems like it could only be a lie. If there's one guy in the U.S. who understands why people are voting for Trump, it should be Stern. I think it's that kind of dishonesty, that reflexive fear of even acknowledging empathy with the other side, that makes politics so bitterly polarised.

I prefer Harris because she's competent. But I wouldn't say I don't understand people wanting to vote for Trump. People voting for Trump is like people who prefer to date someone they know is dumber than themselves. They think that's the safe option because a stupid person is easily comprehensible. That makes them charming. But stupid people are capable of making mistakes beyond the limits of a stupidity fetishist's imagination, particularly since wanting a stupid partner is a declaration that you don't like to have to think too much about your partner. But stupidity is a dark and treacherous sea.

X Sonnet #1892

With lazy blasts, the sun destroys the paint.
Contented swallows bask in falling chips.
To watch the pigment dry is vaguely quaint.
To watch it fall's akin to faucet drips.
A hiking man was left in ages past.
Another portal turns the first around.
A race of cats neglects to honour Bast.
A set of teeth would render words profound.
Realities of gesture spill the soup.
No care sufficed to keep the substance flat.
Surprise dispersed among the canny troop.
A chorus girl concealed a gallant's hat.
The moaning singer missed the crucial key.
The victor claimed defeat from evil tea.

Only Fakers in the Building

Last night's Only Murders in the Building, directed by the ever reliable Jamie Babbit, revealed the killer for this season. As usual, there were no real clues that could have enabled any viewer to reason out the killer's identity but I found it to be a very satisfying reveal anyway.

Spoilers ahead

So, yes, the guy with imposter syndrome turns out to be an imposter! I love this idea, especially because I think so many people with imposter syndrome are imposters. How could it not be so when American colleges have basically become expensive daycare centres for adults, particularly in the humanities department? Do you know how many students I met at college who wouldn't dream of reading a book through, let alone going to the trouble of developing their own thoughts? An obscene number, I assure you. But every time someone says, "Gee, I don't think I'm actually qualified for my job," we're all supposed to say, no, no, you just have cold feet. We could be encouraging them to do their diligence instead. Try making an effort, you might feel better.

It's not to say the average professional imposter is a murderer like the guy on Only Murders in the Building. But the kind of whiny hustler he is certainly familiar. His fake beard is even funnier now.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere.

I don't know what video to post so here's another Selena Gomez video:

I liked the joke last night about her "erotic non-sexuality" and her sad reply, "It's the sweaters." I think I was right that it was Gomez's dissatisfaction that led to her sexier look last season.

The Qualifiers of McBeal Appeal

Since I got Disney+ again, I've picked up watching Ally McBeal again. I find myself slightly more irritated by flaws in the show I recognised even when I first watched it back in the '90s. I grew tired of it back then because it got stuck in a pattern of introducing new characters with wacky personality traits to make up for the previous ones growing stale and repetitive. In the episode I watched last night, "Being There", from near the end of season one (May 4, 1998), Peter MacNicol's character, John Cage, goes through a litany of his gags that were mostly just faintly funny when they were first introduced--his mental bells he hears to build confidence, his comfort words he repeats when stressed, and his nose that occasionally whistles in awkward moments. That last one was at least funny the first time. I'm also finding the cuteness around the character of Ally herself a lot more cloying than I did the first time. The previous episode, in which she adorably faints for having to deal with a homicide case, was excruciating.

However, once you weed through all this baloney, David E. Kelley does give you something thought provoking. In the case of this episode, Ally's roommate, Renee (Lisa Nicole Carson), goes on trial for assault when she breaks the neck of a man whom she invited back to her apartment for sex. Suddenly, this character that had seemed little more than a token black character, there to make wise pronouncements about love and life in the service of Ally's main plotline, becomes interesting. I like how Kelley takes something that had been mined for cheap gags in previous episodes, Renee's aggressive flirtatiousness, and turns it into an interesting problem.

With the suspense of a jury response hanging over the dialogue, the mind compulsively finds the ambiguities in the situation. There's great value in being able to watch something like this, from outside our current era of political thinking and neuroses. Is it fair to say Renee has any culpability here?

Bad Hunger

I sure love David Cronenberg and 1977's Rabid has long been one of my favourite of his films. I suppose it's my soft spot for beautiful vampire women. But Cronenberg's irrepressibly strange yet undeniably rational approach to storytelling is always captivating.

I've heard him say in an interview that he sees no separation between mind and body; he doesn't believe in the soul, he believes the brain is one physical organ among all the others. Watching one of his movies, I find myself contrasting this idea with Saint Augustine's idea of the sexual organs functioning independent of the human soul. There's something to be said for that. Just because a girl physically excites a fella doesn't mean it's a good idea for him to have sex with her, for a variety of reasons. So his physical urges may indeed conflict with his true best interest, and I think it's healthiest to recognise physical attraction as something that functions independently of the mind.

On the other hand, can we really trace all the intricate ways the two are intertwined? Most of the commentary I've read on Rabid is that it's a sort of indictment of hypersexualised media and its effect on the culture. The film stars Marilyn Chambers, a former porn star, who, after a motorcycle accident, is treated to experimental, emergency surgery at a plastic surgery clinic. The result is that her body mutates, becoming only able to sustain itself on blood obtained through a new appendage that has formed in a new orifice in her armpit. The people she feeds on then become essentially mindless zombies. So the natural beauty of a woman's body is perverted by an exploitative male doctor and she finds she must play a predatory game in order to survive.

She's at first unaware of what becomes of her victims and she commits her first assaults instinctively, embracing men who come near her out of concern or lust. But is she really innocent of the harm she causes or is she just kidding herself?

Videodrome does a much better job of making a connexion between sexually stimulating media and psychological manipulation on a massive scale. Rabid, to me, functions more like Hitchcock's The Birds in which the delicate, subtextual rules of civilised romance and sex are overturned by the unpredictable permutations of nature. The plastic surgeon may be exploiting the opportunity to try out a new surgical technique, but it also happens to be the only way to save the woman's life. And while I'm not interested in cosmetic surgery myself, I don't consider it morally wrong, nor does the film effectively make the case that it is in any way.

Rabid is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a surprisingly small David Cronenberg playlist, only his earliest works. It's been ages since I watched Naked Lunch or Crash, I'd like to see one of those again.

X Sonnet #1891

A lack of sense became a zombie curse.
Or something took the mall behind a car.
A better sale occurs for something worse.
You know our planet's sun's a quiet star.
Refining fuel requires space to fly.
The clearest choice could hatch a plastic egg.
But choices fall behind the running guy.
I noticed leeches stuck around his leg.
A dozen watchers screamed for service trays.
With pudding running low, we gathered cream.
A fashion model blinks in many ways.
But nothing good evades the greedy team.
Comparing moons has blinded nights of bliss.
Obnoxious heads would butt before they kiss.

Whose Water is It?

If you've ever wondered about the stigma faced by divorced mothers in Japan, 2002's Dark Water (仄暗い水の底から) is a good illustration. And a pretty good horror movie to boot.

Yoshimi (Hitomi Kuroki) is in the midst of her divorce and is fighting for custody of her little girl, Ikuko (Rio Kanno). Her nerves are raw all the time. In addition to having to prove herself constantly, she happens to be an especially sensitive woman who once had to go to therapy to deal with trauma from proofreading manuscripts for horror novels. Having been in therapy, of course, is a strike against her.

She and Ikuko move into a new apartment in which it soon becomes apparent that a water stain on the ceiling is growing and frequently drips water. There's also a little red child's bag that repeatedly turns up and may have belonged to a child who went missing. Yoshimi starts to think she catches glimpses of the missing girl.

She reports the water stain to the building manager but he won't lift a finger beyond noting it in his log. Does he not believe her? She doesn't seem very stable. At this point, the viewer is challenged to wonder if she's imagining everything. How reasonable are the people who dismiss her claims out of hand? How reasonable are the people who say that she's late picking her daughter up from school every day? She claims she's not late every day, only some days, due to work. Is she telling the truth? Does she know the truth?

Although the movie remains within her point of view, it makes the viewer complicit in doubting her. It wouldn't be the first movie that presented its story through an unreliable narrator. This narrative is a balancing act that finally resolves in a way I found satisfyingly creepy and psychologically evocative.

Dark Water is available on The Criterion Channel.

Familiar Waters

A young man's whole life spirals out of control when he provokes the ire of a pretty, psychotic dame in 2002's Swimfan. It is, as most reviews say, a pretty typical Fatal Attraction clone but it's directed with some surprising competence.

Ben (Jesse Bradford) is a swimmer for his high school team with dreams of a professional career as an athlete. His plans are derailed by Madison (Erika Christensen), a femme fatale who seduces Ben for casual sex one night and then never lets him forget it.

Among the other noir elements, Ben's level of responsibility for the ensuing shitstorm is complicated by his own complicity. He didn't really have to have sex with Madison. We also learn he has a criminal history of drug use and theft. Does he deserve what she's dishing out? Does a guy like him deserve to be able to turn his life around?

Sure, there are plenty of movies that have done it better with more stimulating ideas but director John Polson never does anything distractingly bad. The film's an acceptable diversion.

Agatha All at Once

I got caught up on Agatha All Along and watched the newest episode last night. It's not a bad show and there are several moments I really enjoyed. It has a song, "The Ballad of the Witches' Road", written by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, who also wrote the song entitled "Agatha All Along" for WandaVision and are best known for writing the music for Frozen. And it's a good song.

The show's ratings have been low from the beginning and have declined further and further. Agatha All Along was created by Jac Schaeffer, who also created the successful WandaVision, which goes to show how much that show's success owed to it being tied to a still vibrant MCU. A lot of talk has been about who these new movies and shows are for. Agatha All Along seems very clearly aimed at wealthy, middle aged women. With the characters jumping from realities that include one that parodies (but really cosplays) Big Little Lies, one that adopts the aesthetic of late psychedelic rock, and one that resembles a slumber party from an '80s horror film, it's no stretch of the imagination to say the show's target is very clear. And it's not a target classically associated with Marvel fandom. At least they kept the budget down this time.

I would even say the character of William (Joe Locke), whose identity was revealed in last night's episode, is not there to attract a young, gay, male audience but to please older women who like young gay men. His story was kind of interesting. I liked the idea of him being a spirit that takes control of a young man whose consciousness dies in a car accident. That it occurs after his bar mitzvah has a nice symbolism to it.

I preferred the previous episode, though, in which Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) was able to act as a real (if conflicted) villain. I liked the ambiguity over how much control she has over draining the powers of other witches. It kind of takes her into Rogue territory, I suppose.

Agatha All Along is available on Disney+.

X Sonnet #1890

The common break was cruel as glacial Coke.
Replacement soda crushed the child's heart.
Reclining bears alone observe the joke.
Commercials sold the shop around the cart.
A sandwich love would launch a hoagie house.
Resemblance haunts the darling angel cop.
Collected dolls surround the frightened mouse.
To rise, the geese have sold a feather crop.
A pretzel dog beheld the river harps.
A king was sleeping over swords and dames.v A million questions stirred the summer carps.
These pictures melt beyond their paper frames.
The changing road was lit with cash and wine.
A billion dollars burst the human dime.

The Elusive Love Recipe

Does sexuality imprison or empower women? 2016's The Love Witch seems to argue it depends on how you use it and the right way to use it may be unknowable. It's an intellectual but also a pretty, intentionally campy film that I enjoyed.

From what little I've read of director Anna Biller's intentions, the less I know of those, the better. The protagonist is a witch named Elaine (Samantha Robinson) who describes her philosophy as one devoted to pleasing men. Yet, as she expands on what her conception of pleasing them actually consists of, she reveals it's founded on a deeply patronising impression of men. "Men are fragile," she says, and can't emotionally withstand criticism or mentally process contrary opinion from a woman. They also just want sex all the time. So Elaine's idea of pleasing men is basically date raping them with magic.

When we see her with a professor whom she picks up in the park, we find she's not so complaint as she claims. She won't make out with him in the car when he asks, though she doesn't come out and say no. She gives him some drugged booze and asks him to take her inside where she insists on cooking him some steaks first. When they've had sex and he turns out to be whiny and co-dependent, somehow she finds herself murdering him. What else can you do when you can't have a straight forward conversation?

Biller indulges in a meticulous recreation of 1960s style in terms of sets, wardrobe, and editing. Unlike most such nostalgia films, it doesn't seem like an imitation of Tarantino but like Biller actually has a fondness for the style from watching scores of films from the period. Like most Tarantino films, though, it's not actually set in the period--people use cell phones and you can see some modern cars in the background of some shots. It's just an indulgence in style and I can dig it.

The Love Witch is available on The Criterion Channel.

Only Elderly in the Building

I wonder if the reason ratings are lower this season on Only Murders in the Building is that there aren't so many actors of Selena Gomez's generation. Season three was lighter on young actors, too, but it had that big tease of Gomez in the wedding dress and also a lot of oddly sexy outfits for her (I really miss those). This season, there's Paul Rudd and Kumail Nanjiani, both of whom are very funny but have kind of established themselves as guys who show up to garnish old, established IP. I always thought Mabel's romance subplots were kind of awkward but maybe the show needed them.

Anyway, last night's new episode introduced another young woman, a German locksmith who looks like a supermodel, which is kind of cute. There was an interesting ongoing bit between Eugene Levy and Steven Martin in which the former tried to make the latter angry. I found it more interesting than funny. I was curious about Martin's range for physical comedy at this point.

I just realised the guy playing Dudenoff is an actor named Griffin Dunne, who played David's undead best friend in American Werewolf in London. It's a small world.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere.

Perception Most Foul

Kathy Bates picked up an ax for Stephen King once again in 1995's Dolores Claiborne. I wouldn't rank it among the best King adaptions but it's not bad, having a great cast, a score from Danny Elfman, and a solid screenplay by Tony Gilroy.

Compared to the madwoman Bates played in Misery, Dolores just isn't as interesting. The movie acts like her motives and actions are a big mystery but, from the beginning, they somehow never really are. I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe because of how director Taylor Hackford initially presents Dolores standing menacingly over the elderly Vera (Judy Parfitt) holding a rolling pin too obviously indicates there's more to the story than what we see.

Dolores is accused of murdering the woman for whom she was sole caregiver. Dolores' daughter, Selena (Jennifer Jason Leigh), comes back to the small Maine town to defend her mother against the investigation conducted by Detective Mackey (Christopher Plummer). Mackey suspects Dolores of foul play here because he suspects she'd murdered her husband, Joe (David Straithairn), eighteen years earlier.

A lot hinges on Selena's memories and the film spends a lot of time with flashbacks. It's a quite self-consciously feminist film with all three of the female leads remarking on how treatment by men forces a woman to be "a bitch". Selena's repressed memory of a sexual assault is a key dramatic point in the film and marks it as a forerunner of a lot of post-Me Too narratives that deal with women re-interpretting past sexual experiences as assault. An important distinction is that Selena has repressed the memory entirely and the signs of having done so are plainly visible in her erratic and nervous behaviour. The film is in this both ahead of its time as well as truly dated. The next serious treatment of this topic should also deal with the dangers and potential abuse of a system where people are legally able to interpret themselves as victims several years after the event.

In any case, Dolores Claiborne intelligently maps out, through the framework of one woman's life, just how many extraordinary obstacles are put in a woman's path. The movie may have succeeded better had Dolores been a slightly more colourful character. Maybe there was some attempt at this, judging from the odd epithets she comes up with. At one point she calls Christopher Plummer's character "the Grand Poobah of upbutt." The trouble is, there's never really any point in which it seems plausible that Dolores is the malevolent creature Plummer's character makes her out to be. Without that potential in play, there's also no true sense of the unfair perceptions a woman would have to deal with in such circumstances. The trouble in such a real life situation would be in the ambiguity. This film never leaves you any doubt.

Dolores Claiborne is available on The Criterion Channel.

It's the Curried Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

This is what I invented for lunch this weekend: Curry Pumpkin Soba. I boiled buckwheat soba noodles with chopped pumpkin (green Japanese pumpkin, of course) and made a sauce with cocoanut milk, turmeric, salt, pepper, curry powder, red pepper, and parsley. It's pretty good and clears my sinuses.

It's pretty much a result of what I figured out I could do with what I had lying around. I ate it every day this three day weekend. To-day, Monday, is a national holiday in Japan, Sports Day, because sports are that important here. It really is like a religion. That doesn't spot me and many others observing the holiday by staying in and playing video games.

X Sonnet #1889

My internet was slow and full of hooves.
The gelatin arrived because of doom.
The tiny footed thieves bereave the woods.
Conduct yourself with space within the room.
Describe a floating nose without an eye.
Describe an ear without a waxy wand.
Demand insured the smiling ghost was spry.
Of candy, phones become excessive fond.
Defend your life from cocoanuts and beer.
Along the wall, supply your ready men.
Corrections built the prisons free and clear.
The demons built a chart describing sin.
A lovely lass arose from Satan's brow
Inspired man to push a rusty plough.

A Wolf Out of Water

1981's An American Werewolf in London is on The Criterion Channel now. I hadn't seen it in years so I watched it again. I don't know if I remembered what a nihilistic movie it is. That was part of what made it effectively scary when I was a kid, and a lot of other movies from the early '80s. There's no sense of moral order to it, shit just happens.

One of the reviews quoted on Wikipedia argues that the movie is about being Jewish. I'm not sure about that, it feels to me the two Americans just happen to be (possibly) Jewish--aside from a nurse peeking at David's circumcised penis and presuming his religion from that, I don't remember any direct reference to him being Jewish. On the other hand, his name is David and whether or not he is actually Jewish may not matter in terms of the film's subtext. You could see a comment on the Holocaust, I suppose, in that mass murder occurs without any sense of moral order. The ghosts urging David to kill himself might certainly represent religious guilt exacerbated in extreme circumstances. There's even a line, an off-hand joke, when the two American boys decide to stop at the pub in the wilderness--"Whatever happens, it's my fault"/"Whatever happens, it's your fault."

Despite Rick Baker's amazing transformation effects, I find the encounters with zombies and the dream sequences much more effective than any of the actual werewolf stuff. When David's in wolf form he looks more like a bear, he's much too shaggy. But we've never had a good werewolf movie with the special effects it deserves. Why do their hands always get longer? Surely they should get smaller?

Anyway, I really like the dream sequence with stormtroopers with monster faces--oh, yeah, I guess they're Nazis, aren't they? Maybe that critic has a point. Well, that dream always freaked me out as a kid because it seemed to have no logic to it beyond being part of the general dread coming down on David.

Jenny Agutter is so fucking gorgeous in this movie. I need to watch Walkabout again.

Hammer and Disks

I mentioned a couple weeks ago it can be kind of a pain in the ass getting ahold of Hammer films. Well, last year I started collecting some used Hammer DVDs here in Japan.

A Japanese company called SPO Entertainment evidently manufactured some really nice Hammer box sets some years ago. They don't contain the major titles, no Frankenstein or Horror of Dracula, but they do have many that are, as far as I'm concerned, among Hammer's true best. I bought volume I and III of the main line and a special set of Ingrid Pitt's movies.

They don't have really anything in terms of special features or frills but I admire the simplicity and taste of the design. The main line sets simply used the original poster art for the DVD case covers, which was absolutely the right way to go.

Japanese blu-rays are in the same region as the U.S. but DVDs aren't, so I guess these would be almost useless for me if I ever moved back to the States. On the other hand, they might just look nice on a shelf.

X Sonnet #1888

I always check the clock in diff'rent spots.
No time was present past the av'rage cake.
Connexions weld the sloppy people dots.
With buckets full, the berries start to bake
Becoming dull distinguished mighty stones.
A river gushed with flavour over grains.
There's nothing left to warm the jester's bones.
The dog would not arrive to hide his pains.
With brainless imps about the pond we wait.
No rain arrives the slake the crashing thirst.
No plane arrives to stall the walking fate.
A better day attends beside the worst.
Rebirth requires burning blood and beans.
The stranded toad bestows the needed means.

Pre-Raphaelite Joker

In Charles Dickens' blistering 1850 criticism of Christ in the House of His Parents, the above John Everett Millais painting, he describes the painting thusly:

You behold the interior of a carpenter's shop. In the foreground of that carpenter's shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown; who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England. Two almost naked carpenters, master and journeyman, worthy companions of this agreeable female, are working at their trade; a boy, with some small flavor of humanity in him, is entering with a vessel of water; and nobody is paying any attention to a snuffy old woman who seems to have mistaken that shop for the tobacconist's next door, and to be hopelessly waiting at the counter to be served with half an ounce of her favourite mixture. Wherever it is possible to express ugliness of feature, limb, or attitude, you have it expressed. Such men as the carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where dirty drunkards, in a high state of varicose veins, are received. Their very toes have walked out of Saint Giles's.

As expected from a writer of Dickens' immense talent, the criticism is sharp and funny. Which does nothing to diminish the fact that it is plainly and thoroughly wrong. But that goes to show just how shocking the Pre-Raphaelites were in Victorian England.

It's ironic that Dickens embraced such an ideal of art when the most memorable aspects of his own work are the dirtiest, commonest characters. I found myself thinking of Todd Phillips. I haven't seen Joker: Folie a Deux--it hasn't been released yet in Japan and I won't be able to afford to see it when it is. But, while I've made an effort to avoid spoilers, I've read enough about the audience reactions and the film's surprisingly abysmal box office numbers to know Phillips has done one of those infamous "subversions of expectations". I thought back to how the first film was received by critics. A signifying example is YouTuber Jenny Nicholson's review of the film in which a portion of her critique focused on her dissatisfaction with the way some people liked the movie. There was a moral outrage element to criticisms of Joker and Quentin Tarantino correctly identified the film's climax as its most interesting part for how it made the audience vicariously complicit in Arthur's crime. Over time, critics have smoothed their feathers and fashioned a countenance to be hip to Tarantino's insight. But not the film's director, Todd Phillips.

I knew the Joker was not meant to be seen in any way heroic in that first movie. And it doesn't surprise me that Phillips would seek to sabotage what he may see as an excess of sympathy. As interesting as that moment was in the first film, Joker, at the end of the day, really is a Taxi Driver pastiche and never truly approaches the genius of the Scorsese film because Phillips isn't close to Scorsese's genius.

A lot of talk now is about how much autonomy a director should have when making a movie. I would still say a failure with a more unified artistic voice is more interesting than a failure composed of sterile studio formula and market research. It's unfortunate art is obliged to be a business, particularly when so much great art isn't recognised as such until years after it's already lost everyone truckloads of cash. But I don't think Phillips falls into that category.

The Last at Last

Yesterday I showed The Last Unicorn to the English club at the junior high school I'm working at. That's harder than it sounds. You see, I'm in Japan, and The Last Unicorn has never been released here, despite the fact that the animation on the Rankin Bass movie was done by a Japanese studio called Topcraft, a studio which later combined with others to become none other than Studio Ghibli. It was puzzling that it had never been released here. So back in July, I decided my big project for August would be to make Japanese subtitles for the film.

It was a lot more time consuming than I thought it would be, even though, for the most part, I wasn't doing the actual translating. Although the movie had never been released in Japan, Peter S. Beagle's original 1968 novel had, and had been translated. Most of the dialogue in the book happens to be the same in the movie so this meant I could get a translation in much better Japanese than I'm capable of. The main trouble was that it used a lot of kanji I'm unfamiliar with--the Japanese writing system uses three sets of characters; katakana and hiragana are simple pronunciation based characters similar to the English alphabet but kanji consists of thousands of Chinese characters, each with multiple pronunciations and pictographic elements. Only a fraction of them are in common use but this changes from decade to decade meaning that there are characters in books from, say, 70 years ago that average young Japanese people would struggle to read to-day. This is one of the ways Japan keeps itself insulated from common citizens developing critical thinking skills.

So it was very slow going because the characters were too small to simply scan with my phone. I had to look up unfamiliar kanji on Wiktionary by the radicals. For example, the little character on the left side of 信, "believe", is actually a small version of 人, "person". Wiktionary has helpful pages of these "radicals" I could go through to eventually find the kanji I was looking for.

Of course, the songs aren't in the book. I found translations for two of them; the main theme has been covered a few times so I found a translation for it on a blog from about fifteen years ago when some young Scottish singer with some level of fame in Japan covered it. "That's All I've Got to Say" was covered on an episode of The Orville so I was able to get that translation from Disney+. The other songs I had to translate myself. The students said my translations weren't perfect but they got the gist.

So yesterday may in fact be the first time the movie was screened for a Japanese audience since it was first released in 1982. The students seemed to enjoy it though, actually showing it to them, I was reminded what a lousy time the early '80s was for animation. How could I make excuses for the fact that every character was painted exactly the same regardless of the lighting? Or the strange jerky movements of occasionally, improperly aligned animation cells? I couldn't say it was because it was an old movie when older movies like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty stand up against anything to-day. It truly was a Dark Age. At least The Last Unicorn has an excellent story, a superb voice cast, and decent songs.