Fire on Six Legs

An earthquake occurs in the middle of a sermon and unleashes a horde of fire-breathing cockroaches from the depths of the earth. 1975's Bug depicts these traumatic events and those that follow. It's cheesy, the screenplay was co-written by William Castle, but a cheap '70s horror flick sometimes can feel like a balm.

The insects crawl up from a big crevasse opened by the earthquake. They bag their first kills in the form of an old man and his son who try to get their truck started, not knowing some of the fateful cockroaches have crawled into the tailpipe. So they explode.

As is often the case with '70s movies these days, I want every single shirt the men are wearing in it. You know that western style shirt with the pointy pockets and the yoke on the shoulders, they're usually plaid? I saw John Foggerty on Club Random a couple weeks ago wearing one. He said his wife makes them because they can't buy them anymore. Actually you can find a few on Amazon. I have two. One of them was a very lucky find at a Sears that was closing six years ago, it was less than ten dollars.

Anyway, bugs keep attacking. There are two scenes of them preying on young women. In one case, the bug camps out on a telephone receiver and when she unwittingly puts it to her ear the bug latches on. She runs around screaming, for some reason not even attempting to pull the bug off while it starts to set fire to her ear canal. "Make an effort," I said to the screen.

Much of the film follows a professor (Bradford Dillman) who tries to preserve this quirky new species in spite of everything. He's pretty good, he has slight Herbert West vibes.

The Djinn is In

A group of young friends looking for a better buzz decide to try summoning the dead in 2002's Long Time Dead. It didn't set the world on fire but it's a basically enjoyable horror flick.

The group is renting a house where they hang out, get high, and have sex. There's a vibe slightly like Trainspotting. They all head for the club one night where someone gets the bright idea to use a ouija board.

Lucy (Marsha Thomason) is the one who knows about all this stuff. She doesn't live in the house with the others, she has a houseboat in which we see various eastern and middle eastern symbols and icons tacked up on her wall. Yet when the spirit at the ouija board calls itself a "Djinn", she's never heard of the term. So that's a bit silly but it's the only thing that really bothered me about the movie.

The evil djinn starts to pick the kids off, one by one. I was a little disappointed he went for the girls first, I was kind of hoping the one played by Lara Belmont would last to the end. I guess the "final girl" is a tired trope but the alternative is a letdown.

No Crusade

I've been having some vivid dreams lately. A few nights ago, I had one about Bruce Wayne kind of failing to become Batman. But only kind of. Gotham City was partially deserted and lawless. Bruce was still putting together the materials to become Batman but he didn't have quite the enthusiasm, and from the state of the city, I could kind of see why. I saw lots of deserted streets and debris. It was the Robert Pattinson Bruce Wayne and I saw him in a simpler mask and costume. Does the city need a Batman if it's barely a city anymore?

I had another dream that same night about my hometown, Santee, California, also partially deserted and cluttered with debris. The trains weren't running so I couldn't get from the grocery store and back home. When I woke up, I remembered it's only since I moved to Japan I've regularly been taking trains places. There was a never a train from the particular grocery store I remembered.

Seems like political commentary, doesn't it? It's not so different from how I remember the U.S. being just before I left for Japan. Everything I read indicates things have gotten worse. It makes me sad to read about how shopping malls are dying. I read a few days ago the Wal-Mart was closing at Parkway Plaza Mall in El Cajon. I remembered when Wal-Mart opened there I felt like it was a sign of the place's degradation. Now Wal-Mart's too good for it! I read one article about a couple of girls who stole a whole cartload of goods quite brazenly. They loaded it all into their car and weren't stopped until a cop pulled them over on the freeway. Employees, of course, wouldn't have stopped them because the employees are told not to do anything. I've heard cops, in many cities, aren't supposed to chase thieves either. Doesn't anyone think there's a relationship between this and the fact that everything's getting impossibly expensive? I suppose it's a chicken and the egg question.

X Sonnet #1848

The sooty sky defies the rival sun.
But pleased, the suns defer to pregnant dust.
Through pigment portals, rubber legs'll run.
Accepting ceilings feed the spring of lust.
A quarry dives beyond the distant hill.
In want of sleep, the witch defers a day.
A dirty cloud congealed to make a will.
A sort of sea combined to make a bay.
The slowly loading rain distorts the wife.
To husband seeds demands a rainy time.
Productive soil draws the bounds of life.
Another tuber starts its lonely climb.
Contentious dreams confirm the falling sky.
The amber past consoles the frozen fly.

Ancient Cartoon Cat

For years, the SyFy Channel made a series of intentionally bad movies in imitation of imitations by Tarantino and Rodriguez. I'd never watched any of them until recently when I saw 2005's Attack of the Sabertooth. I have to admit, I enjoyed it.

It's primarily a Jurassic Park knock-off. The main difference is everyone's an asshole. I mean, aside from the low budget and general sleaziness.

The John Hammond analogue is a more typical, tyrannical tycoon (Nicholas Bell) who doesn't want some escaped sabretooths to spoil his party for investors. There are lots of scenes of the security staff trying to deliver bad news to him at the party and him telling them to deal with the problem, "That's what I pay you for!" "I don't care how!" etc.

Our heroes are two of the security people, a lazy rogue called Brian (Brian Wimmer) and his sexy girlfriend, Savannah (Stacy Haiduk). Even after bloody body parts of their coworkers show up, she still wants to slack off for some workplace sex. He's only put off when another coworker, a native to the island, tells him several of her previous boyfriends died mysteriously from her "evil eye". I guess the screenwriters figured Fiji islanders and gypsies are pretty much the same group. He says things like, "My people believe," etc. I kept expecting him to actually use the "We people of the mountain" line from Tod Browning's Dracula.

Added to the mix are a group of frat and sorority pledges who have to break into the park and steal various items. How they got there in the first place or how they even heard of Primal Park is not clearly explained. They get more than they bargained for when pursued by the big cloned cats. As you might expect, the cgi is bad. Actually, it's probably worse than you might expect. Most of the time, the sabrecats are portrayed by physical props, dummy heads and paws. Very occasionally we get a full size cartoon cat who doesn't seem to be part of the same physical reality as anything else.

Richard M. Sherman

Richard M. Sherman died a couple days ago at 95. Following his brother Robert's death in 2012, both Sherman Brothers are now gone, the team who composed memorable songs for quite a lot of movies. Winnie the Pooh, The Sword in the Stone, and The Jungle Book were all theirs, but I think Mary Poppins remains their crowning achievement.

Like the heroine's self-description, the movie is practically perfect in every way. The cast is flawless, remarkable for such a large ensemble. It has gorgeous matte paintings and a decent story. But if I had to pick one element that's more crucial than any other, I'd say it's the songs. Wistful, ominous, and playful, often all at the same time, the Sherman Brothers songs help give the film that subtle air of melancholy and dread that underlies all the hijinks.

It's a movie kids love but, like so many great children's stories, it's really about the adults. The climax of the film depends on a change of heart by Mr. Banks, a character who's on the periphery for most of the film. When Bert unexpectedly takes Banks' side after rescuing the children in those scary alleyways, it's to explain the essential tragedy of adulthood; Banks has no parents or nanny to go to. Bert's own financial circumstances are never really addressed but the fact that he does a variety of odd jobs and wears dirty old clothes implies luck that does not match his cheery demeanour. The chemistry between him and Mary Poppins is left understated and can never be addressed. There's no time for it, the children are more important. Poppins has to leave them, too, whatever her umbrella might insist her true feelings are. I'm not sure the sense of sacrifice would be much felt at all if it weren't for the Sherman Brothers' work.

Walt Disney. who died a few years after Mary Poppins was released, had a particular fondness for "Feed the Birds". Richard Sherman himself explains:

X Sonnet #1847

The scavenged ones'll add to make a new.
To-morrow dogs replace the cats at work.
Refuting chalk excludes the stub of blue.
It's only now the monkey ghost'll lurk.
Select informants crushed the metal can.
In time, the bars constrict about the eye.
No glasses kept the sight from living man.
A string of words conformed to cast the die.
Controlling motion cons the eye when wide.
To see the squishy beans, traverse the rocks.
His car departs the solid mountain side.
There something sad about the heavy socks.
As blackened clouds deform for magic fun,
A weird and wistful herald's life is done.

Goyer Wants to Be Born Now

Some folks in Hollywood compel one to marvel at their continued ability to get work despite continually producing mediocrity. One of the most infamous is David S. Goyer, who manages to hide his lack of imagination by befriending genuine talent. When he stands on his own, with a movie like 2009's The Unborn, which he wrote and directed, the truth becomes painfully clear; the guy's got nothing.

Casey (Odette Yustman) is a pretty girl with no personality that the film can think of mentioning. She has scary dreams of dogs and dead people with twisted heads resembling monsters from Japanese horror and David Lynch movies. She keeps hearing "Jambi wants to be born now" which of course brought to mind the genie from Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Unfortunately, the truth is not so entertaining.

Her investigation leads her to an old woman who informs her the ghost child pursuing her is a dybbuk and recommends that she see a rabbi named Joseph Sendak (Gary Oldman). God knows why she recommended him in particular since he basically tells Casey he doesn't believe in this stuff. But he finally agrees to help and since getting rid of the dybbuk is an exorcism of sorts, he enlists the aid of an episcopal priest played by Idris Elba. It's kind of sad Goyer, who's Jewish himself, thought this was necessary. It's not like Max von Sydow brought in a rabbi in the Exorcist. Maybe it's part of a postmodern, all religions are equal, compulsive plot point.

I'd like to say something nice about the movie. Gary Oldman and Idris Elba are always great. Odette Yustman looks really good in her underwear . . . That's all I got. Like I said, the jump scares don't work. The lighting is bland, there's not much going for the production design. I kind of liked the outfits worn by Meagan Good, who plays Casey's friend.

At a Distance

After his first couple episodes this season of Doctor Who were just so-so, I was starting to lose faith in Russell T Davies a bit. Fortunately to-day brought "73 Yards", which is mostly excellent.

Hey, do people still say yards in Britain? I thought it was all metric there.

Anyway, the first half of the episode had the sort of cosily creepy quality of a First, Second, or Third Doctor serial. Ruby pursued by that stationary figure who seemed to render anyone who talked to her permanently terror stricken felt like The Web of Fear or The Demons, especially when Ruby met a group of characters in a pub. I was hoping the episode would involve this group and stay in that little Welsh town. But I like the story it became.

I partly wish the story gave no explanation at the end but, on the other hand, it kind of didn't. I kind of figured early on who the woman was likely to be but there's no explanation for how she got to be where she was, or why she was doing those hand signals. A lot is left up to viewer interpretation, which is probably for the best.

I don't have any complaints about the episode, except possibly to say I found it odd the woman in the pub chastised Ruby for not having a coat when she was clearly wearing one. Sure, a heavier coat would have been warranted but it was yet another moment where it felt like people involved with the production didn't quite read the script closely enough.

Doctor Who is available on the BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ elsewhere.

The Second Time

I'm not exactly sure why Michael Keaton looks different in these trailers to how he looked in the original film. Maybe it's just that he's skinnier.

I'm looking forward to the movie, I guess, despite the fact that its writers come from Wednesday. I liked Jenna Ortega on that show but I'm not getting any strong vibes from her character in this movie so far.

Tim Burton's changed so much as a director since the first movie, generally to seem more tired and less passionate a filmmaker. But I'll be happy to hear that Danny Elfman score and I'm sure Keaton will give a good performance. The first movie is kind of unique and did such a good job of creating a sense of a world. I'm glad to see they've apparently gone back to the same town which was so integral to the first film's flavour.

I fell asleep last night trying to watch David S. Goyer's The Unborn. I don't generally consider jump scares something that makes or breaks a horror movie, mostly because they're cheap, but it's kind of fascinating that Goyer's instinct for jump scares is so weak. Not one of them landed, hence me falling asleep. Maybe I don't give jump scares enough credit.

X Sonnet #1846

The jungle breeds an agile blonde for trees.
No horse could pass the zebra gate with paint.
Delicious days were like a cake of cheese.
The mad flamingo's cry was passing faint.
Inviting ghosts detained a drinking pair.
A morning beauty saw no sign of clothes.
A sleepy bar was open late to care.
An early building claim its right to prose.
Repression cast potato chips for lunch.
As growing fields demand a muffin, cook.
There's stuff to make a pastry sing a bunch.
So gather all the sugar at the brook.
Demand for stone secured the creek's support.
Recycled ghouls confirmed the ghost's report.

Treacherous Comforts

An attractive young couple find themselves drawn into the web of a strange, elegant man in 1990's The Comfort of Strangers. It's a fascinating little gem of a movie, a subtly crafted piece that compels contemplation.

There are no weak links on the staff. It comes from a book by Ian McEwan with a screenplay by Harold Pinter and it's directed by Paul Schrader. It has music by Angelo Badalamenti. Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson play the young couple, Christopher Walken plays the sinister man and Helen Mirren plays his wife.

The film's typically described as an erotic thriller but, while eroticism is certainly an element, it addresses a broader aspect of human nature. Everett and Richardson find their accumulated instincts for politeness and socialisation draw them into Walken's company like gravitational pull. There are only a few explicit hints that he has an agenda that's alien and hostile to them.

Nowadays, Walken's performances accentuate his peculiar mannerisms but here they're used to speak volumes on their own. Mirren is also quite subtle. The really sinister thing about them, what eventually makes sense of the behaviour, is that it's a kind of pantomime, a veneer of humanity to cover a carnal interest in the young couple with complete disregard for their humanity. Walken's character is like a fascist dictator without a country.

Or he and Mirren are like a country of two. I was reminded how xenophobia can make a people regard foreigners as animals and they therefore feel comfortable taking whatever liberties you might take with a cat or a dog.

The film also has beautiful cinematography and production design. The Comfort of Strangers is available on The Criterion Channel.

Here's to Sheena

1984's Sheena, based on the Sheena, Queen of the Jungle comics, is widely considered a bad film. I guess it is. The dialogue is hokey, as is much of the premise. It's also really charming, though.

Maybe it's because they just don't make 'em like this anymore. I love to bring up the fact that Disney was too cheap to shoot the Black Panther movies in Africa. The notorious Sheena was shot entirely in Kenya and it pays off with plenty of gorgeous location shots, embellished further with the gorgeous Tanya Roberts in nearly every frame.

Sometimes it's a stunt double, and it's pretty obvious when it is, but that also means it's easy to see how much Roberts herself did. And that's surprisingly a lot. People who complained about her acting ability should consider how remarkable it is she could swing from a vine, gracefully land barefoot on the ground, and smoothly initiate dialogue. She has the simple-minded earnestness of the type of fantasy girl she's playing, quite convincingly enough. She delivers what the role calls for. According to the Wikipedia entry, Paeline Kael was the only critic who appreciated Roberts' work at all.

Let's not forget how comfortable Roberts was doing quite a lot of nude scenes. It's remarkable to think this was a PG movie. I mean, when you consider PG means "Parental Guidance", it makes sense. It goes to show how ratings have migrated.

The score by Richard Hartley recalls Vangelis' "Chariots of Fire", which gives an oddly tranquil tone to the action scenes. But it also reminded me of the general Lucas/Spielberg influence on film in the '80s, when filmmakers strove to make adventure stories that inspired a sense of awe and wonder. Watching Roberts riding a horse bareback, painted to look like a zebra, the score, location, and cinematography invite us to savour how wonderful it is to witness a world in which a beautiful jungle girl exists.

Beauty on the Treadmill

The life of Gia Carangi, one of the first supermodels, is depicted as a tragic deterioration in 1998's Gia. Part of me thinks I'd have enjoyed this movie more if I'd ever been a drug user and had some first-hand experience with drug addiction. Then I remember I like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Naked Lunch and consider the possibility this is just a tedious movie. Angelina Jolie looks fantastic in it, though.

The first part of the film is the best, in which we meet Gia working at her father's diner, wielding a switchblade as a guy nervously tries to flirt with her. In the above trailer, you can see another memorable scene with the knife in which she carves her name into a receptionist's desk.

There's also a nice nude photoshoot, awkwardly filmed but made palatable by Jolie's beauty. She has a relationship with a makeup artist played by Elizabeth Mitchell that seems promising at first but ends up being the route to a reductive addiction story. Gia promises to stay clean, there's another disaster, she takes drugs, things get worse, she lies, etc.

Mila Kunis plays a young Gia in early scenes. It never occurred to me before how much she looks like Angelina Jolie.

Sending Your Money to Space

Yesterday I watched another really long YouTube video, this one four hours, Jenny Nicholson's long gestating review of the Star Wars Galactic Cruiser. I always enjoy Nicholson's coverage of theme parks but I don't think I realised how curious I was about this particular theme park experience until I started watching the video.

Well, I mostly listened to the review while playing Skyrim. If you want something to listen to while doing chores that you can glance at now and then, I recommend it.

What a peculiar topic for our time. As the gap between rich and poor increases, theme parks in the US are increasingly becoming the exclusive domain of the rich. Nicholson argues that perhaps there are middle class families who splurged and spent the 6,000 dollars on two nights at the Star Wars Hotel. I don't think Nicholson's aware of just how small the middle class has gotten. But even for rich people, she doesn't defend this price. It's not a favorable review by any means.

I'd sort of forgotten how much I loved Star Tours as a kid. Star Tours, of course, was free with the price of admission to Disneyland in those innocent days of the 1980s. I assume it still is.

Galactic Cruiser seems like the natural next step in evolution but obviously it was botched spectacularly, as more commentators than Nicholson have noted. One thing Nicholson doesn't mention is the lack of celebrity cameos. One of my favourite things about Star Tours was the animatronic C3PO, voiced by Anthony Daniels himself. Animatronics never really looked human but an animatronic droid was kind of perfect. It was like really seeing C3PO. It's a shame Disney made Star Wars merch and attractions so damned tacky but maybe if I were a kid I'd find it just as magical as I did the original Star Tours back in the '80s.

I like the idea of staying at a hotel that was a good simulation of a spacecraft but, frankly, for six grand, I would expect to be on an actual spacecraft. Though I see now that SpaceX charges between 50 million and 100 million. That's a lot of money for going nowhere.

X Sonnet #1845

Reluctant dudes returned to fill a week.
Denial rose to relish pedal bikes.
With extra feet, the rider ploughs a peak.
So time at last would end the hobby hike.
Mosquito master burbles blood at brunch.
Embarrassed staff removed his tray of flesh.
Containers cracked to fill a honey hunch.
The day of bugs concludes with nothing fresh.
Impressive stunts succeed on shoeless feet.
Conflicting tongues disrupt the verbal fight.
Reversing time returned to bone its meat.
Ideas composed a foul but fragrant night.
Beyond the sky, a metal sausage choked.
For thousands spent, the plastic goose was broke.

Baiting

A few days ago, I was listening to Bill Maher's Club Random podcast and he was talking to the comedian Bill Burr. I like Burr and Maher and the two seemed to be having an amusing back and forth with a little ribbing. I didn't have time to finish listening to the whole thing but then a few days later I started seeing on X all these messages about how Burr had totally owned Maher. A few other quotes thrown about suggested that things had gotten really nasty. Burr evidently likened Maher to a fantasy football enthusiast on the topic of the Israel/Palastine conflict and insisted Maher had no right to talk about the subject because he had no practical experience. Which is certainly a funny view for anyone on X to champion.

I suspected the "fight" was blown out of proportion so I watched the whole thing and, yes, it was. The two never even entered a proper argument, the most that could be said is that each occasionally seems to misread the other's comedic insult as a genuine one.

Now there are a lot of digest videos of the original with titles like "Bill Burr Ruthlessly Mocks Bill Maher in Incredibly Satisfying Watch" and "Bill Burr MANHANDLES Bill Maher on Club Random". These videos have hundreds of thousands of views. It's really amazing.

When something like this happens, like when there were suddenly a bunch of insubstantial but rigorous articles trashing Russell Brand, it really creeps me out. It clearly indicates a malevolent manipulation of media, whether it's at the behest of a government or just a bunch of resentful assholes in the business, I don't know. I have come to the opinion that Brand is taking money from Russia somehow. In one of his videos, Brand casually brushed aside the very idea that Alexei Navalny's death, when he was imprisoned for criticising Putin, might have been murder. Which was a depressing moment. But it got me thinking, does the opposing government psy-op force look at this and say, "Okay, we can't just present this clear evidence to people. We have to manipulate them with salacious headlines into coming to the right opinion."

I've known people who do that and I've always hated it. You know, when someone has a strong opinion about something they don't think you will agree with or understand so they tell you a lie to inspire an equivalent level of hatred. Of course a government agency would do something like that. But it's hard to believe they'd be so ham-fisted. Or maybe I'm just too conceited.

It was weird hearing Burr criticise Maher for knowing big words, for being familiar with My Fair Lady. I know they were doing a comedy bit, but there are people who have real resentment about that stuff. I think it's a side-effect of lousy higher education. People get a liberal arts degree and feel a sense of accomplishment--then they meet someone who's actually read Moby Dick and the cognitive dissonance is painful. They feel that if they, with their expensive degrees, don't have that level of accomplishment, then no-one should.

Is Bill Maher arrogant, sometimes obnoxious? Yes. These are his faults. Oddly, it's one of the reasons I always preferred him to Jon Stewart. Stewart always presented a neat, clean package and often enough I, too, ate up his carefully edited clips from various news channels. But Maher is like Fred Astaire, dancing without the edits. His faults are one of the reasons you know what you're seeing is real. And that's too rare a commodity these days.

War Algorithm vs. The Doctor

That old Moffat magic is back. To-day's new Doctor Who, "Boom", was a potent reminder of why Steven Moffat is the best writer of modern Who. Even though the story wasn't airtight, even though there were things I didn't wholly agree with philosophically, it was well constructed from a storytelling perspective, filled with genuine tension and a real sense of threat to the main characters.

We start off with a precarious situation built on a precarious situation. Two soldiers, one of them apparently blind, wander through a foggy minefield and one of them suggests the fog itself could be a threat. The blind soldier gets a call from his little girl and he promises her he'll be home soon. Ain't it ominous.

Then the 15th Doctor, wearing his best outfit yet, dashes out of the TARDIS in the direction of screams, heedless of mines he so far knows nothing about (but beknownst to us). All this is before the credits roll. I don't care how much you hate Steven Moffat, and he's one of those people who tend to be hated to a degree that mystifies me, you must see he's damned good at this.

In a lot of ways, "Boom" harkens back to the 12th Doctor's first season in its dwelling on soldiers and war, though I believe the Anglican military dates back to the 11th Doctor's first season. The relationship between a cutthroat, capitalist military organisation and a faith based soldiery is somewhat simplistic conceptually but it's cleverly delivered and Monday felt like a real person, despite living out these big concepts.

There were some logistical problems I think Moffat overlooked--why couldn't Ruby just shoot the ambulance? But the climax of the episode felt earned and was very effective.

I loved some of the lines, too, which Moffat tailored for Fifteen. I especially liked, "I'm more explosive than I look and I know how I look."

I like Russell T Davies but I think this episode shows again he can't hold a candle to Moffat. I was happy to hear Moffat is also writing this year's Christmas special.

New episodes of Doctor Who are available on Disney+.

Ghosts and Gossip

A group of young friends are beset by a supernatural something-or-other in 2007's Dead Mary. It's low budget and feels like a Sci-Fi Channel movie but manages to evoke some genuine creepiness before getting too distracted by gossipy drama.

The group gathers at the usual cabin in the woods (usual for them and the movie's genre). Someone proposes the idea of playing "Dead Mary", which is exactly like Bloody Mary except you say "Dead Mary" in the mirror three times instead of "Bloody Mary". Maybe the filmmakers thought Bloody Mary was too well known or something, I don't know.

Anyway, nothing much seems to happen after a few of them do the recitation in front of a mirror. I liked the film's slow build-up and afterwards there was a nice ambiguously paranoid aspect to what exactly was happening. Sadly, the kids spend too much time bickering about who's sleeping with whom. But it can't take away totally from the film's enjoyable qualities.

Dead Mary is available on YouTube.

X Sonnet #1844

A proven case was thrown to feed the birds.
Corrupted voices crowd the noisy dame.
A burning eye denounced reflective words.
Collected cam'ra fingers dodge the blame.
A relay race informed the life of keys.
Batons were made of metal hooks for doors.
Among Brazilian plants, avoid the bees.
In dread of ghostly hounds, avoid the moors.
Percentage rain permits a lonely cloud.
For leaders eating lunch, the dinner calls.
A better moose constructs the antler crowd.
Between the roof and floor we hid the walls.
A crazy cabin crunched a bunch of sods.
The folly forest thrived against the odds.

The Latest Last

Last night's finale of X-Men'97 ended the season as it had been from the beginning--sticking fairly close to the comics. The teleplay by Beau DeMayo and Anthony Sellitti brought famous bits from the comics with a few minor adjustments. It was a satisfying episode though perhaps not quite as astonishing as some earlier episodes from the season, particularly "Fire Made Flesh" and "Remember It".

It was a delight watching Rogue pummel Bastion. I knew she wouldn't be able to finish him but it was nice fantasising about her beating his brains to putty.

A lot of the story featured Charles and Magnus in the mind of Magnus as Charles tries to revive Magneto in a more benevolent form. It was kind of neat seeing their first meeting. Young Charles was looking oddly sassy.

I'm a little disappointed that the injury Magnus got from Wolverine didn't turn out to be more serious than it was.

Wolverine's in a coma, meanwhile, with Morph watching over him, a departure from the comics in which Morph didn't exist. Morph takes the form of Jean to proclaim love for Logan. I think some people really want romance between Logan and Morph. I prefer Logan lusting after Jean but an affair with Morph having to constantly take Jean's form for Logan might be entertainingly messed up. Still, I see Logan as being too principled for that.

X-Men'97 is available on Disney+.

The Shifting Family Shape

In this day and age, a kid can't always expect the same people to be their parents throughout their childhood, but few have had the parade of fathers that little Mitan has in 2018's Soshite, baton wa watasareta (そして、バトンは渡された, "And, the baton was passed"). It gets bogged down in sentimentality in the last act but this is a basically entertaining little drama.

Initially, the story is presented with two separate threads, following Mitan as a small child (Inagaki Kurumi) as well as the girl once she's in high school and goes by the name of Yuko Morimiya (Nagano Mei). For all we know, they're different people, at first. Mitan lives with a father who works in agriculture and Yuko's father is a shy man with an office job.

Mitan's mother has recently passed away and one day her father meets a beautiful young woman, Rika, (Ishihara Satomi) with expensive tastes. You expect the voraciously smiling dame to be a ruin to the family but she and Mitan actually develop a bond over shopping for clothes and makeup. Then, Mitan's father gets a job in Brazil. He wants to relocate the family but Rika won't have it. So he moves alone to Brazil and Rika hides all of his letters to Mitan. And she finds another husband, a wealthy man, and tells Mitan he's her new father.

That's dad number two. Eventually she absconds with a third, the shy man whom we first met as Yuko's father, and at last, the stories connect at about the halfway point.

Yuko's story is less interesting, being a fairly average teen romance in which she falls in love with a handsome young man who, like her, also loves playing piano. The filmmakers wisely realised that Rika was the most interesting character in the movie and the last part of the film focuses on solving the mystery of why she's no longer in Yuko's life, as well as the mystery of why she collected fathers for Mitan/Yuko. The latter is never quite answered satisfyingly and, unfortunately, the last act of the film indulges in the kind of overwrought sentimentality that plagues too much modern Japanese cinema. But for the most part, it's an enjoyable film.

Soshite, baton wa watasareta is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.

The Pleasing Phantom of Perfection

Sometimes two people with a miraculous quantity of interests in common meet and fall in love. Then things get complicated, as we see in 2021's Hanataba mitaina koi wo shita (花束みたいな恋をした, "Fell in love like a bouquet"). This is a cosy little romantic drama, refreshing among modern Japanese love stories due to having a lower level of implicit contempt for imperfection. It owes a lot in tone to American romantic comedies of the '90s and early '00s. The stars are cute and genuinely charming.

Mugi-kun (Suda Machiki) is a comic artist who loves trendy movies and music. He's a bit of a snob. One day at a cafe, he remarks to a friend that someone seated at another table can't be a true music fan because they're not paying attention to the left and right labels on their earbuds. Unbeknownst to him, a pretty young college student, Kimu-chan (Arimura Kasumi) is making exactly the same observation. But it's not for some time that these two connoisseurs properly meet, when they both miss a train one evening.

Once they get talking, they grow increasingly excited by how perfectly their tastes align. It's fun watching them have fun, they're both very cute and the viewer can bask in the warm glow of this depiction of a perfect little relationship.

I was surprised to see a modern Japanese romantic movie that depicts two people moving in together, having premarital sex, and ultimately shows the urge for financial success being the issue that finally drives a wedge between the two. One thing I really liked about that was that I could easily see people in the audience sympathising with each character's opposing point of view. Kimu wants to keep love of art as a top priority in life, Mugi wants to focus on accumulating enough money so that they can eventually have a comfortable marriage. It's not entirely realistic, of course, the two already have a fabulous apartment. But it's a fair argument.

I was pleased by the ending, which I won't give away. It seemed like a ray of hope for Japanese culture.

Hanataba mitaina koi wo shita is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.

Roger Corman

Roger Corman died last week. It's hard to think of a bigger name in the movie business that became big primarily for its association with bad movies. Corman made bad movies, many of them popular, for more than 70 years, as director and producer. As producer, it's well known he helped foster the talents of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson, Jonathan Demme, and many others.

I love many of his schlockier movies. In addition to providing fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000, movies like Swamp Women with Marie Windsor had sleazy charms of their own. Who doesn't enjoy a gang of girl thieves, bare-legged in a swamp, somehow never getting one mosquito bite? As a producer in the '80s, he made some fantastically unrestrained pulp genre films, chock-full of naked women and slimy aliens. A lot of the problems in Corman productions evidently stemmed from his money anxieties, as director Jack Hill discovered when his fantasy film Sorceress faced erratic, sudden budget cuts that shredded Hill's original vision.

Yesterday, Paul Schrader said on Facebook:

ROGER CORMAN. Let's not too sentimental about Corman. Even in my exploitational extremes I couldn't interest Corman in my scripts. Rolling Thunder began at AIP but moved on to 20th. Roger wouldn't touch Blue Collar even with Pryor. As soon as they could Coppola, Scorsese and Demme all moved away from AIP. Roger was better at hyping his rep than at making good films or supporting good filmmakers.

It's a fair point, if slightly awkwardly timed. I'd argue Corman made some genuinely good movies in the 1960s, though. The Little Shop of Horrors is a genuinely sharp and nuanced satire, even if the musical remake is definitely superior. Corman's string of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, many featuring Vincent Price in his best remembered roles, are fantastic indulgences in atmosphere. The Haunted Palace is one of the best adaptations of an H.P. Lovecraft story, though the bar is admittedly low on that one.

He was the best of producers, he was the worst of producers. Rest in peace, Roger Corman, though your movies will continue writhing on screens for eternity.

X Sonnet #1843

Redundant thralls displease impatient bats.
Devoured time returns, becoming space.
Collected answers yield illusion stats.
Dissected clues construct a plastic face.
Dishonest motives break the happy stride.
Kentucky bourbon blots the summer start.
Refreshing liquor battles stubborn pride.
Appointments scrabble cool and careful art.
Success revoked the cheaper charms of us.
Loquacious plants devoured many men.
Recruiting Price at cost of Pallas bust,
Delicious junk sustained the movie tin.
Contraptions spin the image story's gleam.
Parentheses of tombs define the dream.

Terror of the Healer

One of the great unsung performances in film history has to be Christopher Lee in 1966's Rasputin the Mad Monk, which I watched again last night. For all his association with cheap, lurid horror movies, Christopher Lee was by no means a chewer of scenery. He had a strong belief in restraint. That's what made him so great as silent, stoic monsters. But casting him as a boisterous madman results in a magnificent chemical reaction.

Lee's Rasputin is every bit as hypnotic, enigmatic, capricious, and physically intimidating as you would want from Rasputin in a movie.

A huge man with big black hair and beard, gazing with wide eyes and sadistic smile is lurking in the doorway. Then this frightful monument laughs and grabs someone and dances madly.

His miraculous healing powers are never explained. His supreme confidence suggests it's a fruit of conquest rather than any bargain, anything that might have required him to relinquish something. If he had a soul, he certainly doesn't seem to miss it. He exists totally outside the rules of civilised Russia but he knows the rules to flaunt them, to use them to his advantage, to plunder the privileges of the Tsarina.

But we first meet him at a little countryside inn where he saves a woman from fatal illness. Her husband, the innkeeper, is understandably grateful and willing to accede to any request. Rasputin seems to make a game of just how far he can push the man's appreciation, right up to taking the man's daughter into the barn.

In a long career of playing villains, Rasputin may be Lee's most admirably terrible.

The Doctor of Music and Mucus

We got not one but two new episodes of Doctor Who to-day, both written by Russell T Davies. They're good, not perfect, but who is? Who is. Right up front, though, I want to say I'm really glad the show is taking risks again. Would we have seen a snot monster in Chibnall's era? Would we have seen one of the companions get said snot in her hair? My feeling is no.

The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) is perplexed that he ran away from the roaring monster with huge teeth. I wouldn't beat yourself up too much, Doctor. Maybe he is a noble snot monster, last of his kind, but he also has huge teeth and rending claws and a bit of a temper. Don't you remember what you said in "Listen" about the utility of fear and it being a superpower?

I did really like the concept of the "Bogeyman". I wasn't so into the talking babies but that's personal taste, I wouldn't really call it a flaw.

Davies gives us a Doctor and TARDIS introduction, reinventing that scene yet again. This time the Doctor tells his new companion that the nice thing about his life is that he pays no rent, has no job, and has no boss. That's certainly relevant to a lot of people in the western world as it seems like crowds of them in increasingly greater numbers are being pushed into the streets for, as the kids say, "reasons".

But that has always been an unstated part of the Doctor's appeal. He has a stable home he can always go back to called the TARDIS. It's not quite accurate to say he doesn't have a job, though. At the least he has a vocation. You could call him a knight-errant. He makes sacrifices, he expends a lot of time and energy for selfless goals. He's not just loafing about. Sure, there's plenty of sightseeing.

The second new episode to-day, "The Devil's Chord", has some really tragic flaws. The premise of the Doctor and Companion going to meet the Beatles is a fine idea though it's, again, Davies failing to keep up with wokeness as much as he'd like. Expressing hatred for the Beatles has become kind of a woke dog whistle (see the latest season of True Detective). I suspect he thought he was actually going to be able to use at least one Beatles song in the episode. Disney's partly footing the bill now and there was just recently another Beatles documentary put up on Disney+. But Disney has exhibited disastrously budget conservative behaviour in the past.

Not only are there no Beatles songs, there are no '60s rock songs whatsoever, and boy, did it need it. I would have recommended, if he couldn't get any of these songs, that Davies have made the episode about Bach or someone else equally public domain. Everyone loves the Van Gogh episode (actually, I'm not particularly fond of it).

How much funnier when the dance number at the end have been if they'd actually used Chubby Checkers' "The Twist"? It's nice to have Murray Gold back doing the music but he collapses under the weight of what's required of him in this episode.

I do like the idea of a musical battle--it was something I really liked in the last Doctor Strange movie--though it was another scene that would've worked a lot better if they could've licensed music composed after 1900, like "The Devil Went Down to Georgia". I also liked the idea of music being crucial to civilisation.

I have nitpicks. Ruby's idea to change clothes for the '60s was good but might've been better if she and the Doctor weren't already wearing clothes that clearly would've passed in the '60s.

Ruby pretending they were there to relieve the tea cart lady was really weak. I fully expected the woman to say, "Yeah, right." Given what Ruby and the Doctor were wearing, and that it was a record studio, it would've been more reasonable to assume they were two young musicians perpetrating a gag.

Does it seem to anyone else that Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson talk just slightly too loudly, like they're a little deaf? Maybe I'm just getting old.

The new episodes of Doctor Who are on Disney+ or, in the UK, the BBC iPlayer.

We All Celebrate Differently

Sometimes you have to celebrate your birthday alone because you've gone on a homicidal rampage and repressed memories of the killings. This is the predicament presented in 1981's Happy Birthday to Me. Directed by J. Lee Thompson, the beginning of the film nicely builds tension and there are some genuinely exciting scenes with effective dark humour. Unfortunately, the film suffered from some very obvious late stage rewrites that gave it a ridiculously arbitrary conclusion.

Melissa Sue Anderson of Little House on the Prairie fame plays Virginia, a student at a high school where for some reason everyone wears the same purple striped scarf.

I guess it's a kind of school uniform.

There's a really nice drag race sequence in which Virginia and her teen friends drive over a raising drawbridge.

The film proceeds as you would expect a slasher movie to do. The characters get picked off one at a time. For some novelty, Glenn Ford shows up to help Victoria deal with the fact that she's starting to get repressed memories back from before she had brain surgery. The film builds to an obvious conclusion producers evidently were embarrassed to realise was too obvious. So to avoid the dreadful fate of having an audience predict the ending, they changed it to something that didn't make any sense. It's kind of funny, though. The final scene pretty much becomes a straight up comedy. At least I left with a smile.

X Sonnet #1842

In silhouette, the nose bespoke a knight.
A danger lurked around the shady town.
But fear rebounds and fills the vicious night.
A fool for just a day assumes the crown.
The busy sax was lost to lands of dream.
No questions burned the roasted chicken feast.
A star was born above the sunless beam.
A beauty mixed a boozy liquid beast.
The infant ball suspends the watching crowd.
Parades were made to house a raucous mind.
But answers never changed to sate a cloud.
And pulp'll never cut away the rind.
Dessert's a thought designed to please the folks.
A moral egg contains a thousand yolks.

The Ex-Friends

The second part of "Tolerance is Extinction", the season finale of X-Men'97, seemed to hold nothing back, faithfully adapting some brutal moments from the comic. Not for the first time, I wonder if the reason Beau DeMayo was labelled "difficult to work with" was that he wasn't willing to compromise on this stuff, forcing Disney, against their will, to release something actually good.

There's a whole lotta betrayal goin' on. Magneto turns on the team, Rogue and Roberto join him. There's even a moment where Cyclops blasts Professor X.

Unlike so many weak Disney productions these days, this isn't some simple-minded, "good vs. evil" narrative, dumbed down so even a sea otter can follow it. Magneto's point of view is more understandable than it's ever been. But so is Xavier's.

It was good to see Storm in action though I thought maybe they were saving her return for a more dramatic moment. Still, it was cool seeing he summon up tempests in her classic costume. By the end of the episode, though, most people are going to be thinking about Wolverine.

This is a famous (some would say infamous) moment directly from the comics. Wolverine's big vulnerability against Magneto finally has a gruesome pay-off. The mutant who can control any and all metals with his mind versus the man with a metal skeleton. It's still a terrific cliffhanger.

X-Men'97 is available on Disney+.

When Water Breaks Stone

A wealthy man of leisure and his similarly carefree daughter find their lives changed by a woman of firm morals in 1958's Bonjour Tristesse. Based on a famous French novel and directed by Otto Preminger, the film successfully holds a dark mirror up to hedonism.

Cecile is played by Jean Seberg a couple years before she was in Godard's Breathless, and Godard has said that he regarded her role in Breathless as a continuation of this one. Both Godard and Truffaut liked her but I feel like it would be reasonable to mistake Seberg for a bad actress. I guess she was really just suited for a particular role, that of a capricious, psychotic, and yet not vicious, young woman.

All she wants is to maintain a life of constant partying on the Riviera with her father, played by David Niven. But his latest affair with a boozy French version of Marilyn Monroe (Mylene Demongeot) is interrupted when Deborah Kerr shows up as his old acquaintance, Anne. They soon become better acquainted, in fact engaged, at which point Anne begins to feel responsibility to Cecile and forces the girl to spend more time on her studies.

It's not like Cecile needs a career. Why shouldn't she and her father carry on as they always did? She argues with Anne that their old friends seem perfectly happy in their depravity. "Then why do they drink so much?" asks Anne.

Still, by the end of the film, it's debatable whether Anne's morals are true in themselves or if the tristesse, the sadness, that comes about comes more from Cecile and her father's particular affection for Anne. Kerr's role here is not so different from her roles in Black Narcissus, The Innocents, or Night of the Iguana. She had a real knack for playing women of firm resolution who are simultaneously, attractively vulnerable.

Bonjour Tristesse is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Menace Grows Ever More Concrete

It was kind of big news that the re-release of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace was number two at the American box office over the weekend. Fall Guy was number one and it's said to be a disappointing number one so maybe the standards aren't exactly high. Still, Phantom Menace took in 8 million dollars. That's pretty good for a movie everyone's got on their streaming services or on their shelves. It did better than the re-release of Return of the Jedi a couple years ago.

Where's the cultural brainwashing on the prequels? Is it a bad movie everyone has been tricked into thinking is good, or is it a good movie everyone was tricked into thinking was bad? This really fascinates me. I like the prequels, not as much as the original trilogy, but I like them. It wasn't like everyone hated them at first and then they grew in esteem. Roger Ebert gave Phantom Menace four stars when it came out. I remember I bought the big deluxe VHS copy (which one of my cousins took). I had a Queen Amidala doll and a Phantom Menace CD case. Generally people didn't like Jar-Jar. One white friend described him as being like Amos 'n' Andy in terms of being an anachronistic racial caricature. But a black woman I worked with at the time said she and her kids adored Jar-Jar. That's anecdotal but Jar-Jar says "'tis" and "boyo". He doesn't really fit the racial caricature profile except he's the cowardly sidekick like Stepin Fetchit often was. A perspective on film history would have better informed my coworker and her kids they should be offended. But it's all perspective, it's all subjective.

Well, the main problem with the prequels is they lacked anything like the Han/Luke/Leia chemistry and that mostly comes down to Lucas' luck with casting the first time. People have really warmed to the chemistry between Obi-Wan and Anakin in the second and third films but it's somehow never as raw as those original trilogy actors. Maybe the cultural difference is key--younger audiences don't connect with such natural interactions. Maybe it's just because I live in Japan and in my professional circles there's a lot of weird resentment and backstabbing but I haven't met a Gen Z person who's comfortable speaking openly and honestly, at least not outside the internet. I also watched an episode of Ally McBeal last night in which the characters debate whether you should look in a partner's eye during sex. Having sex in itself would be too much of a novelty in a more modern production. So for younger audiences, the lower heat levels between the prequel actors may actually be a selling point.

Watching Phantom Menace last night, I really felt like it's a remarkable film. The levels of creative detail are fascinating. There are lots of little moments, like Jabba flicking that little animal off his balcony during the pod race and the thing screams as it falls like bloody murder. Was that a sentient lifeform? Is this a sign of Jabba's cruel indifference or did he basically just kill a bug? We can't really be sure and it feels alien because of that. We easily understand but we also don't. It's like the cantina in A New Hope.

The set designs and costumes are all amazing. For all the criticism of the boring title crawl, the movie actually maintains a lot of tension and a very brisk pace. It helps to listen to it with the volume up high. Ben Burtt's sound design helps the basic general background sense of terror that comes along with the space scenes and the dizzying camera twists. There's something odd about the pilot of Qui-Gon an Obi-Wan's ship. Then there's a double cross and the ship's destroyed. The Jedi switch between fighting for their lives to trying to reach the bridge to complete their mission. What are these Trade Federation guys doing? It may take time for the kids to understand but once you do, it is interesting that this merchant fleet has suddenly decided to blockade a sovereign territory.

The politics, which are supposed to be the big snooze fest, have aged really well. When Palpatine's talking to Amidala about the senate bureaucrats who can't get anything done, we can all sympathise, even as we know that he's the crooked puppet master. Hell, that's not so different from Trump. For the people who remember seeing Episode I when they were kids twenty years ago, discovering the insight into politics to-day seems a revelation and maybe kind of a comfort that George Lucas understood this aspect of human nature all those years ago. Maybe we can cope with this.

And then, of course, there's final duel. The pod race is also pretty good and has, again, a level of detail you don't see nowadays.

Holidays and the Machines

As sure as the sun rises in the morning, Cinco de Mayo has followed Star Wars Day. I had too much tequila and watched Desperado last night, which was May 5th in Japan. Cinco de Mayo isn't celebrated, nor does there seem to be many people aware of it, here. May 5th happens to be Children's Day in Japan but this year it's being observed on May 6th because of fairly recent legislation to allow people to have a day off work for the holiday. Children's Day is part of a string of holidays known as "Golden Week". Perhaps one day Star Wars Day and Cinco de Mayo will form part of an American Golden Week. Cinco de Mayo does seem like more of a Mexican American holiday than a Mexican holiday at this point. That's why I watched a Robert Rodriguez movie instead of a Luis Bunuel or Guillermo del Toro movie.

Something that surprised me about Tales of the Empire yesterday was that they didn't use the digitally recreated voice of James Earl Jones as they did for the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. Instead, Vader just never speaks during his brief appearance. I was kind of disappointed. I suppose I should be against it to be consistent in my position that machines should not be permitted to take jobs away from creative talent. But it kind of makes sense for Darth Vader and James Earl Jones did give his consent. Though, it's true, there's something unsatisfying and lifeless about the "performance" on Obi-Wan Kenobi. Will it always be that way or is it only a matter of time before these machine voices learn to give effective performances?

Lately I've been playing Skyrim using a new mod called "Dragonborn Voice Over". Originally in Skyrim, the player character has no voice, you only hear the people your character speaks to. Now with this mod, not only does your character have a voice, there are a whole range of user made voices, many of which are derived from samples of voice work in other games. The software is able to take these voices and reshape them to fit the dialogue in Skyrim seamlessly. There's even an imitation of choices for emphasis and emotion.

It occurs to me that artificial life forms may very capably be able to simulate sentience long before they actually achieve it, if they ever truly do. I suppose sentience may be inevitable but I find it very hard to believe somehow. Maybe that's surprising coming from someone who grew up on Star Trek but Commander Data never squared with my conception of technology. I regarded him as a fantasy being.

Sci-Fi stories about artificial intelligence usually follow the outline of something that everyone thinks is a toaster eventually exhibiting signs of human-like cognition. I can't at the moment think of any opposite example. I mean, a story in which some specimen of artificial intelligence everyone thinks is capable of human level cognition turns out to be just a complicated toaster. I guess that would be like one of those episodes of the original Star Trek in which a society's god turns out to be an unfeeling computer, or like that Henry Mudd episode with the killer sexbots. But imagine something like that movie Her in which the Joaquin Phoenix character believes his AI mate is as good as human but then finds out she was never more than algorithms. I imagine that would be kind of soul crushing. It's still hard for me to even imagine getting attached like that to a specimen of AI, though. It's not like we love cats and dogs for their human-like intelligence. There's something else there which computers don't have. Maybe it's just the sense of need.

X Sonnet #1841

A little loud, the singer cleared the room.
Of seven tables, two were kind of full.
A book collapsed to make a dusty "boom".
But down a better house you'll never pull.
Decisions split the spider's heart in two.
Conclusions culled the silk from oil cloth.
A dozen busy maidens sewed a clue.
Persistent snobs could never greet the moth.
Tequila soaked the sober soil fast.
Tortilla plans negate the spicy rice.
But limes and margaritas never last.
A warning song was heard this morning twice.
A space burrito crashed in salsa seas.
A drunken droid has switched to herbal teas.

Tales of Dave Filoni

This is how Dave Filoni bakes a cake.

Dave stands up and walks to the kitchen. His arms swing at his sides at a slow, steady pace. His legs seem to swing below his floating torso as though they don't make contact with the ground. He takes a popular recipe book off the shelf, opens it, and smiles. "I'm going to make a cake," he says.

In a mixing bowl, he deposits a cup of flour and smiles. "I've added the flour. Oh! Now I will add some water." He proceeds to add the water. He stirs mechanically with a placid smile on his face. He pours the mixture into a mould and places it in the oven. "Time to start baking!" he says, turning the knobs though his eyes don't seem to focus on them. Twelve hours later, he opens the oven to find a charred mess. "No!" he says, leaning forward slightly, "I can't let this cake die!" The scene fades out.

Hours later, Dave is seated at a clean, nondescript table with two human friends, each with short, nondescript haircuts and wearing nondescript jumpsuits. There's an empty plate before each person with a few crumbs. "That was a delicious cake!" says one. "How did you save it?" says the other.

Dave smiles his placid smile. "With a little help from an old ally. But that's a tale for another time."

Roll credits.

So, yeah, Tales of the Empire is typical Filoni. The new six episode series, consisting of very short, ten to seventeen minute episodes, presents first the unremarkable tale of the unremarkable Morgan, whom we met first on The Mandalorian. We see how she survived the attack on Dathomir by General Grevious, one of the best story arcs from Clone Wars (written by Katie Lucas with some help from her father, one assumes). So it's a suitably plump vein for the Disney leech to suckle and supplies us with a few wisps of excitement. The second three episodes mine an even better vein, finally continuing the story of Barriss Offee, a former Jedi who turned traitor and was arrested on Clone Wars before Disney bought Star Wars.

There's some genuinely interesting moments as we see some bitter inner conflict manifest in Barriss. Unfortunately, Disney's edict that all bad people be dumb as rocks seems to be in effect in this series (how Andor was spared that, I don't know). When the Fourth Sister, the Inquisitor a turned Barriss is apprenticed to, starts grumpily killing people all the time, even when it directly works against her own interest, Barriss' choices don't seem to be between Light and Dark but between common sense and intense stupidity. Oh, well.

Tales of the Empire is on Disney+. Happy Star Wars Day.

Crossing the Streams

In case anyone was wondering, I did get my refund from Amazon. So for future reference, for anyone wishing to cancel their Prime subscription, the current procedure seems to be to chose the "won't renew" option on the subscriptions page and then, after Amazon renews your membership and charges you anyway, you need to ask for a refund, which you will receive in "three to five days". Funny they can charge you instantly but when it comes to giving you money they were never supposed to take to begin with, well, that takes some processing time. Naturally.

Of course, I still have Japanese Amazon Prime, which is a whole lot cheaper. I said five dollars a month a few days ago but I forgot how weak the yen is now so it's probably more like three dollars. I don't have access to the various channels I did on American Amazon Prime and of course there's a lot of content unavailable in Japan. I also can't rent movies because, although I can pay for the subscription with my American debit card, I'm required to have a Japanese card in order to rent or purchase any streaming content off Amazon Prime Japan. I have no idea why. I'm able to get Japanese Netflix with my American card. Currently I only have Disney+, Criterion, and Japanese Amazon Prime, though. I've been tempted to cancel Disney+ but Doctor Who's starting next week.

I miss Netflix sometimes. I read to-day that David Lynch had two projects in the works for Netflix that've been cancelled by the streamer. So much for Netflix being more open to maverick filmmakers. It's a shame Criterion doesn't have the money to finance Lynch. I wonder what he'll try next. Whatever he does, with so many Twin Peaks cast members dying, and Lynch himself getting no younger, it seems like time is running out. It's really sad. Here's a man, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest filmmakers, if not the greatest filmmaker, alive, and yet he can't find a studio to produce his work. It's not like Twin Peaks: The Return did so poorly in 2017. But maybe people figure its success was due to coming back after a couple decades and any new endeavours wouldn't have that appeal. It seems like Lynch wasn't totally happy with his experience making the show for Showtime. I wonder if that would change if Sony does manage to buy Paramount, as they've put forward a bid to do. Given Sony's rigidity, I can't imagine things would change for the better.

Too bad he doesn't have wineries to sell, like Francis Ford Coppola did. Coppola's wineries became legends in themselves and he was able to sell them in order to attain every auteur filmmaker's dream; total creative control over a big budget movie. I'm so looking forward to Megalopolis. But even for Coppola, this is likely something he'll only be able to do once. This is why, as much as I love movies, I never wanted to pursue a career as a filmmaker. Even the greatest talents in the industry have to go through hell and high water just to get a movie made.

A Lot Can Happen After Birth

The Wikipedia entry for 1950's Born to Be Bad describes Joan Fontaine's character as "a manipulative young woman who will stop at nothing to get what she wants." But the interesting thing about this Nicholas Ray noir is that she isn't actually all that vicious and it's unclear if she deserves the moral retribution dished out to her by the film's universe.

We meet her as an apparently shy young woman called Christabel who's come to stay in the San Francisco home of Donna (Joan Leslie), who works for Christabel's uncle. Donna's engaged to the fabulously wealthy Curtis Carey (Zachary Scott) and when the two go out for the evening Christabel is shocked to find Robert Ryan has let himself into the kitchen.

Ryan plays Nick Bradley, a smug, swaggering young author who effortlessly disarms Christabel. She hates him but she's drawn to him for the same reason, you know the drill. But it's Robert Ryan and Joan Fontaine so it's legitimately sexy.

Now, I would say Christabel is a manipulative woman but I wouldn't say the course of events that unfold are the effects of her complex Machiavellian scheme. Christabel goes shopping with Curtis to help him pick out a birthday gift for Donna. She comments on how marvellous a particular necklace is but changes her focus when she sees the price tag. The salesman is peculiarly aggressive with it, following Curtis and Christabel about the store with the necklace until Curtis is finally persuaded to buy it. Christabel remarks that perhaps Donna wouldn't want something so extravagant. When Donna receives the necklace happily, the issue of whether she's marrying Curtis for his money is introduced and becomes a subtle wedge between them.

All of Christabel's manipulations are like that. She gives a little push here and there but it seems other issues independent of anything she does end up persuading Curtis to marry her instead of Donna.

When they do marry, Curtis complains that Christabel has arranged to make herself a board member of so many charities entirely for the purpose of spending little time with him. It's possible the implication here is that she's doing something bad but she actually does seem to be devoting her time to these charities. If she were a soulless, "bitchy" (as multiple reviews inexplicably describe her), gold digger, wouldn't she be spending all her time just partying and shopping? What finally proves to be her downfall is that she can't resist having a rendezvous with Nick instead of visiting her sick aunt. Is Christabel selfish and unfaithful? Sure. But "stop at nothing?" What unfolds from there is arguably more tragic than just. Much like Cat People or Leave Her to Heaven, this is one of those in which the ostensible villainess is the most sympathetic person in the movie.

Born to Be Bad is available on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet #1840

A wild shade dispenses spirit hands.
As proud as apples, people rise above.
Convene the force of regal hunting bands.
Remember now that arrows signal love.
A stack of random junk ensures the sky.
No people came without a bridge of earth.
The god was rocks or days when finches cry.
The growing crop was twice a human's worth.
Performance cleans the apple cart of care.
As cleaning deems the students real, commence.
Remember times when hearts would take a stair.
No bin returns the dust you might dispense.
A dreamy stroll has pierced the workaday,
Confusing crowds from Guam to Paraguay.

The First of the Finale

X-Men'97 delivered a solid first part of its three part finale last night, "Tolerance is Extinction". Co-written by Beau DeMayo, it capably weaves together story threads based on the comics and includes some really impressive action scenes.

Wolverine finally shows some proper participation fighting the Sentinel zombies. He's joined by Nightcrawler in one of the best action sequences so far in the series. I have to say Nightcrawler outshined Wolverine a bit. The animators gave him a real dancer's grace and his teleporting was as impressive as it was in the second Bryan Singer movie.

Meanwhile, Jean, Scott, and Nathan have a nice creepy sequence with Trask's mother. Everything has that great feeling of a pulp serial. Even the subplot about Jubilee and Roberto doesn't feel preachy.

I'm looking forward to next week and finding out what Magneto's up to. He seems to be exerting some kind of ultimate power that shuts off machines everywhere. I wonder why he didn't use it in Genosha.

X-Men'97 is available on Disney+.