I was just listening to a bit of Bill Maher's interview with Charlie Kirk from four months ago. Of course the views on it have skyrocketed. I hadn't listened to it before because I wasn't interested in Kirk. He didn't seem like a particularly big fish. Well, his killer has made sure he is now and will be for a long time. I've already being hearing soundbites from his speeches and talk show appearances being spread around. So martyrdom accomplished.
By the way, the guy I saw in footage yesterday ended up not being the killer, who's still at large. So I guess the cops just humiliated an old guy for no good reason. But shit happens. The cops could've been a little gentler with him but I know they had a job to do in a hectic situation. In the Maher interview, he and Kirk discuss how the Left has demonised cops, which is something I agree with the two of them on. We need cops and they're often painted with too broad a brush. As an artist, I guess, I'm more interested in inevitable human complexity than subscribing to the political convenience of conceptualising whole segments of humanity as soulless blobs.
That said, Kirk comes across as an honest but dopey guy. He kind of reminds me of one of the kids my age who lived on my block when I was a kid. He was a nice guy but he was Mormon and held a lot of opinions I thought were fundamentally daft. But I still played with him. That's just how life was before the internet sorted everyone's social life into vacuum sealed echo chambers, You had to make friends with the people who were in proximity because you had no other options.
I was reading about the riots in Nepal this morning, too. It's not the first time I've heard about the class conflicts tearing apart that country. Before I came to Japan, there was a wealthy Chinese student I was tutoring who went to Nepal and came back telling me how astonished he was at the visible wealth disparity, how he saw garbage and starving people next to expensive cars. I met a wealthy girl from Nepal a few years ago through a mutual friend. We went hiking together and she listened to me ramble about the English Civil Wars. No wonder she found the topic so interesting.
Reading about Japanese history lately, I've been fascinated by how many riots and attempted revolutions there have been in this country famous for its conformity. A man named Oshio Heihachiro led an attempted revolt in Osaka that ultimately failed. Born into wealth and privilege, he was nonetheless angered by the disparity he saw between the lives of the rich and the lives of the poor. He seems admirable in retrospect but I find myself reflecting more on the inefficacy of violence. It's a snake that seems, more often than not, to turn on and bite its master. It's a poor substitute for intellectual development and cultivated compassion.
The alleged shooter of Charlie Kirk appears to be an elderly white man in footage being dragged away by police with his fallen pants around his ankles. The impression I have of his repeated attempts to stop and kneel is that he's trying to pull his pants up but the cops just keep moving. I'm reminded of the now commonly repeated story about the English army at Agincourt shitting themselves in the midst of a battle that was later immortalised as a great and glorious triumph. I wonder how this guy's pants falling down will be used or will it be edited out, either to show him as more heroic or a less pathetic threat.
I saw the footage on an X account of a Jewish woman who admires Charlie Kirk, whose Wikipedia entry calls him a believer in "the antisemitic Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory." I'd heard conservatives use the term before though I never would have thought it an antisemitic theory considering that Marx himself was unmistakably an antisemite. I've been looking for something this morning that would explain to me how the belief in Cultural Marxism is antisemitic but have been so far unsuccessful. Many sites and articles just seem to reiterate the claim in multiple ways without supplying evidence.
The shooting of Kirk follows a couple weeks after the shooting of two Catholic school children by a shooter who left behind several disturbed statements including the unmistakably antisemitic "Six million was not enough."
Trump himself was shot before the election. Left and Right live in different realities concerning the January 6th event when a crowd of Trump supporters entered the U.S. Capitol Building. One of the people, an unarmed young woman named Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed, an incident that also differs in the apparent reality experienced by the different political factions.
It doesn't surprise me that people on the Left are committing so much violence against those on the Right. Leftwing rhetoric in the U.S. has become increasingly violent towards the Right for twenty years. I've spoken against it again and again and rarely received encouraging responses. Trump's crimes and corruption are clear yet they're obscured when people are doing shit like this.
X Sonnet 1960
The boiling bubbles pop above the pot.
Below, the flame forbore the need for gas.
The sun's obscured behind a human spot.
A deadly game began about an ass.
The iron grid was fast and barely seen.
A cross of fire carried blood and lead.
What strangled thoughts would prod the jumping bean?
Who seeks a spark among the ghastly dead?
As smoke dispersed, the room was tattered drapes.
The chairs were broke and people crawled away.
Beyond the door, the creatures hid in capes.
A street was filled with glass and strange dismay.
Like shivered shades are human lives at dawn.
The movie veil has dropped and hearts were gone.
The difference in quality between Tim Burton episodes and all the others is really stark in Wednesday season 2. After Burton's episode 4, I was primed for more and proceeded to the next two, which were directed by Angela Robinson. Both were equally braindead. Maybe episode six was a little worse.
Six has a body swap plot in which Wednesday trades bodies with her peppy, polar opposite roommate, Enid. It's a predicament that would be so much easier for the two if they explained it to their friends and family, which seems like it would be the obvious thing to do in a school filled with gorgons, werewolves, and sirens. There's not rational reason for them to go to any great lengths to keep it secret except that it's an allegory for teenage anxieties, which reveals once again the fundamental flaw of allegory that Tolkien famously disliked (and I mean famously, a lot of people seem to point to Tolkien's dislike of allegory these days). The two actresses do such a great job mimicking each other anyway that everyone else seems like moron for not figuring out what's going on.
I noticed episodes five and six have a fairly self-contained plot involving Wednesday trying to track down and neutralise the Hydes. It's more or less resolved by the end of episode six, as though they were clearing the decks to make way for Lord Tim Burton's final two episodes. There's definitely an impression of a firmer hand at the rudder this season.
Over a hundred and fifty years after it was written, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland continues to influence people all over the world, including here in Japan. This year brings us a Japanese anime adaptation called Fushigi no Kuni de Alice to: Dive in Wonderland. The Japanese title of Alice in Wonderland is Fushigi no Kuni no Alice (不思議の国のアリス), which translates to "Alice's Mysterious Country". This new movie's title is slightly different, translating to something like "With Alice in the Mysterious Country". The central protagonist is not Alice but a young woman called Rise (Hara Nanoka) whose adventure is a virtual reality exploration in a film I found to be surprisingly progressive with a pro-A.I. message. And not a bad film.
It's the political angle that may have made the film unpopular in Japan. It's playing at the movie theatre a few blocks from me, which is where I saw it on Sunday, but none of the students I've mentioned it to so far have even heard of it. Japan, like seemingly all first world countries, has been leaning increasingly to the right.
Rise has the usual preoccupations of a young woman of her age in Japan. She worries about interviews and her professional future. When she can't sleep, she kills zombies in a first person shooter game on her phone.
She's summoned to her deceased grandmother's lavish manor with enormous gardens modelled on Alice in Wonderland. Rise's fondest memories from childhood involve reading the Alice books with her grandmother. Upon entering the manor, she's escorted to a waiting room and given a virtual reality helmet. She puts it on and her phone is transformed into an apple which is immediately stolen by an angry White Rabbit whom Rise then chases throughout the film. The Fall of Man allegory here is intentional. When Rise finally catches up with the apple, she starts eating it and is transformed into the Jabberwock, a transformation which begins with her turning black and sprouting bat wings, an obvious visual reference to Satan. But the film doesn't go in the direction you might think and in general has a message very much in support of smart phones, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. Alice (Maika Pugh) is an A.I. character, perpetually cheerful and always supportive of Rise, lacking the petulance the girl occasionally exhibits in the books and in other film adaptations.
Ultimately, the film's message is one of self-creation in which the distractions Rise's been encouraged to feel ashamed of are revealed to be expressions of her true wants and needs. I don't agree with the film's whole-hearted embrace of technology which has already shown a capacity for manipulating its users to sinister ends but I do admire self-creation and this was certainly a more interesting film than I was expecting. I was disappointed the chess pieces in the film were black and white instead of red and white as they are in Through the Looking Glass.
Fushigi no Kuni de Alice to: Dive in Wonderland is in theatres in Japan.
Last night I had Laura Palmer's favourite dinner, potato pancakes and cream corn, while I properly watched Wednesday season 2, episode 4. I said yesterday I'd gotten to episode 4 but only a brief part of it when I woke up after sleeping through episode 3. I'm glad I went back and watched it properly because it's an amazing episode.
It has a lot to praise. Joanna Lumley is amazing, sharp and funny, and Christina Ricci is going full steam as a wacko, being much more captivating than she ever was in season one. Generally, the impression I get is of everyone saying, "Oh, shit, people are actually watching this!"
The winner, though, has gotta be Fred Armisen's Uncle Fester who seemed like an afterthought in season one. Here, he's integral. The makers of the show realised what made the character so good in Addams Family Values, that he's basically indestructible and loves pain.
Oh, and there's that adorable new stalker character. Wednesday choosing to exploit her instead of fight her actually feels genuinely Wednesday Addams-ish. There seems to be a genuine attempt to make the protagonists immoral, which I appreciate.
I loved the action scenes in the asylum which Burton put together really well--episode 4 is the second to be directed by Burton this season, after the first episode. The makers of the show (I'm careful not to say the writers because the jump in quality makes me question who's creatively responsible) are good at considering how the superpowers of the different "Outcasts" play off each other, getting me to think this team would be perfect for creating an iteration of X-Men before I realised, "Oh, this is X-Men." A boarding school for people born with special abilities, shunned and misunderstood by normal society. No wonder it doesn't feel like The Addams Family. I'm sure I'm not the first to point it out.
The episode uses a bit of music from the Vertigo soundtrack. I guess whoever chose to do so doesn't remember Kim Novak taking out a full page ad to accuse The Artist of rape when that film used a bit of the Bernard Herrmann score. Or maybe they just didn't care. As for me, it didn't bother me as much as its use in The Artist, maybe just because Wednesday is a better product altogether. I will say it's confusing. It's a very short excerpt, when Fester kisses Louise at the end of the episode. Not everyone would recognise the music--I'm sure most viewers don't. But they went to the trouble of securing the rights to the music (presumably) so it must have had some meaning. I really don't know what it could be, though.
I started watching season 2 of Wednesday a couple days ago. So far the writing's been better than the first season's but that's really not saying much. It still feels like a show about Addams Family cosplayers rather than a show about the actual Addams Family but at least so far there hasn't been anything outrageously stupid like the group teamed with Wednesday walking out of the room in protest over the fact that she's going to torture someone instead of, you know, stopping her from torturing someone. Or Wednesday storming off to fight the big bad and her strategy ending up being standing there, starring blankly, and waiting for someone to rescue her she has no reason to expect. So far there's been none of that nonsense but I'm only four episodes in and I slept through episode three.
It was smart of the show's makers to spread out the Tim Burton directed episodes this season instead of lumping them all in the first half. After the first half of season one, I felt very little motivation to watch the rest of the season. However bad the writing gets, I could always rely on Burton to at least come up with some interesting compositions and shot juxtapositions. He and Jenna Ortega really are a good team. It's so late in his career but he may have just now found his Marlene Dietrich to his Josef von Sternberg.
Catherine Zeta-Jones returns as Morticia Addams in a much larger role, now also investigating murder instead of committing it as the real Morticia would do. Zeta-Jones looks so different to how she looked in the first season, I really thought she might have been recast. I think it's a combination of plastic surgery and self-starvation. She looks like a completely different person.
There are lots of illustrious actors hopping onto the bandwagon this season, including Steve Buscemi, Christopher Lloyd, Joanna Lumley, and Billie Piper. I appreciate them all. I'm looking forward to Lady Gaga in the second half.
Ratings haven't been so strong as last season. I'd say that's the effect of bad writing. I also heard Jenna Ortega didn't want to do any romance in season 2, which was the most interesting thing about her character's story in season one. Hopefully it'll prove a false vow as when Peter Capaldi said he didn't want any hint of romance between the Twelfth Doctor and Clara on Doctor Who.
The Phantom of the Opera music in the trailer is distractingly recognisable.
Since I know the Spirit Halloween shops have been open back in the U.S. for at least a month, I figure we're well into the Halloween season. I've been in the mood for vampire movies lately so I watched 1970's Scars of Dracula again. This is a Hammer film starring Christopher Lee in the title role, his fifth Dracula movie for Hammer studios, and the second to be released that same year.
I often want to watch Scars of Dracula but end up watching the wrong film because I forget the title and all I remember is that Patrick Troughton plays his assistant. So it's been a few years since I watched it instead of Taste the Blood of Dracula or Dracula Has Risen from the Grave. It's certainly an interesting role for Troughton who here plays a hideous henchman who constantly lusts after the female lead, Jenny Hanley, who's gorgeous but kind of boring. 1970 was just a year after Troughton had retired from Doctor Who. One of the differences between modern and classic Who is that some of the new actors seem to get more of a boost to their careers. Troughton's name isn't even mentioned in the trailer.
Scars of Dracula was directed by Roy Ward Baker who also directed The Vampire Lovers, also released in 1970. What a year for Hammer. The Vampire Lovers is a far more interesting film but Scars has one of Lee's best, most understated performances as Dracula. I like the scenes where he meets his unexpected guests at the castle. Lee never leers for whines. He seems slightly distracted but intense, as though he's constantly calculating the risks and the quickest ways he can get to arteries.
Unfortunately, the movie prominently features fake bats. It's amazing how many decades went by in which rubber bats on wires were a special effect that somehow contented audiences. It's hard to imagine how they could've done it better with the technology at hand. I feel like animated bats would've been an improvement but that would likely have required more of a budget.
This week's new Panty and Stocking featured a rare reference to a classic Japanese movie followed by two John Hughes parodies. It wasn't bad.
The first story is also unusual for focusing on Stocking. The title is "The Ohagi of Doom", with the very different Japanese alternative title of "大御菓子峠", which roughly translates as "Super Snack Pass". Both titles reference the Nakadai Tatsuya samurai movie The Sword of Doom/大菩薩峠 though the plot bears no resemblance to the film. Stocking is after a fabled sweet, competing with thousands of other sweet fanatics and, finally, a ghost.
After this, the show's back to American movie references and sexual gross out humour with two shorts parodying John Hughes movies. First there's a Home Alone parody called "Not 2 Home Alone" in which the two new boy Angels infiltrated Panty and Stocking's home, encounter some kinky gadgets, and accidentally masquerade as the angels. After this is a short called "Six Hundred and Sixty Six Candles", easily the best of this week's three, consisting of a parody of not just Sixteen Candles but also featuring references to Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club.
One of the demon sisters, Kneesocks, is depressed because her sister is absent on her 666th birthday, an important milestone for any demon. Already I appreciated this clever parody premise. Panty, feeling oddly benevolent for once, decides to cheer Kneesocks up by taking her as her date to the local high school prom. Of course, they end up fighting a ghost, at which point Panty is reminded to her regret that she'd gone commando for the evening, and the show's creators don't shy from showing this clearly. I was a little surprised there was no reference to Anthony Michael Hall getting Molly Ringwald's panties.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.
Last night I dreamt I was living in a large, dimly but warmly lit room with big, worn couches and various other bits of furniture and props that had seem better days. It had the vibe of backstage at a theatre. I looked in a mirror and saw I was a different person, a young man in his twenties with a couple days' growth of dark blonde beard and high, wide cheekbones. In each hand, he or I held a light bulb and one of them was illuminated like I was Uncle Fester.
I put on a black hat and went outside where a crowd was gathered around a woman who was quizzing people about a blurry picture of type-writer text projected on a brick wall. She was looking for one word. I said, "Research!" This was the correct answer. I felt like I'd cheated, though, because I'd seen her give the same presentation to another group. She raised her right leg and spat at the bottom of her bare foot. She offered it to me and I shook it.
X Sonnet 1959
Determined rain was fifty percent ahead.
Of nine, a pair of pins defend the ball.
What bowling storms can say's already said.
And yet parades approach the lightning hall.
With glitter drops, a party bucket tips.
You know the scene was made in velvet gum.
Your dancing shoes will stick on diamond chips.
Your thoughts reverse to power absent Lum.
Another planet brought the stormy girl.
Confused, the storm besought her flying dad.
As warnings came, the dancing lobsters curl.
A hundred years have failed to stop the fad.
A snail and whiting ever need release.
You see, it's violence keeps the ocean's peace.
Speaking of the pervasive influence of Tolkien, I started watching Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (葬送のフリーレン) recently, an anime series that premiered in 2023. It's likely more directly inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, though Dungeons and Dragons is largely based on Tolkien, demonstrating how Tolkien continues to shape the fantasy genre worldwide, even indirectly. I would describe Frieren as Tolkien meets mono no aware, the Japanese artistic concept manifested in contemplating evidence of slowly, inexorably encroaching death. Arguably there's plenty of mono no aware in Lord of the Rings already since much of the story concerns the passing of people and civilisations, though Tolkien ultimately places more emphasis on returning glory than Japanese mono no aware stories tend to do. Frieren is clearly a low budget series but it's not bad.
It's available on Netflix in Japan where I see it's rated 16+, despite the fact that it was a thirteen year old student who recommended it to me. I guess folks don't pay much attention to these age ratings. Anyway, for the life of me I can't figure out why the show's rated 16+ though I'm only three episodes in. Maybe there'll be a violent orgy in episode 10 though it would require a pretty drastic shift in tone.
The title character is an elven mage whom we meet as a member of an adventuring party that also includes a human priest, a human hero, and a dwarf. There's no swordplay on this show because it's more difficult and expensive to animate. Even anime series that do include swords usually depict the fights as consisting of glowing swords shooting beams of power.
In the first episode, after a great victory, the party go their separate ways. We follow Frieren for a montage of her studying and wandering over a span of decades before returning to the hometown of one of her former companions to find the formerly vain and feminine young man has aged into a bald, bearded old man. As in Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons, elves have much greater life spans than humans, a fact that Peter Jackson emphasised with the Arwen segment in his adaptation of The Two Towers. Tolkien used the concept as an underlying tragedy in the stories of Beren and Luthien and Aragorn and Arwen, romances between a human male and an elf female. Romance is absent from Frieren, as it generally tends to be in anime, so the dramatic problem here is just in that Frieren has to live longer than her friends. She's described as "cold-hearted" multiple times but she does cry at her friends' funerals.
The show reminds me a bit of Violet Evergarden, another show in a Japanese fantasy version of Europe about a beautiful, emotionally withdrawn girl of supernatural abilities who lives with memories of a dead, handsome man with whom she shared a formative adventure but not a romance. It's notable that none of Frieren's former companions marry or have children. The priest, Heiter, adopts a girl named Fern whom he asks Frieren to take on as an apprentice. The wanderings of Frieren and Fern together make up the present time narrative of the series though most of their wanderings consist of Frieren revisiting important places in her adventures with the Tolkien-esque party. The show finds various ways to gently imply the ongoing tragedy of existence and the passage of time. Even a monster that Frieren and Fern fight, one that had previously been a difficult foe for the adventurer party, is now mainly interesting because his formerly powerful attack is now considered a simple, rudimentary spell. He's been outmoded by progress.
I saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was on Netflix so I watched it for the first time since I saw it in the theatre last year. It's good for a second viewing in how it successfully conjures a sense of place and an ensemble of characters. I maintain my opinions from my original review though the flaws seem less important.
Monica Bellucci's character still seems superfluous. She looks so much like Morticia Addams I wonder if Burton originally wanted her for Wednesday. She would've been a lot better than Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Justin Theroux's character is the funniest in the movie. I'm impressed how consistently the screenwriters make him credibly say exactly the wrong thing. I'm not a fan of excessive exposition but I'd kind of like to know why Lydia became such a pushover. It's not that I don't believe it and certainly people can change a lot between adolescence and middle age but the difference here is so extreme I'd like some kind of insight into it.
The "MacArthur Park" sequence falls completely flat. It really feels like a studio note insisting Burton repeat one of the most memorable aspects of the original film. It doesn't help that I keep being reminded of "Weird Al" Yankovic's funnier version, which isn't even among Yankovic's best parodies.
I am kind of hoping Winona Ryder gets her wish for a romance between Lydia and Beetlejuice in the third film, especially if the writers are bold enough to make it deeply wrong at every turn.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is available on Netflix in Japan, I'm assuming on HBOMax in the U.S.
Did you know Charlie Rose is still doing interviews? I didn't. But he's been releasing new video interviews on his web site and on YouTube since 2022. Rose was one of the high profile figures whose career was effectively ended by the MeToo movement in 2017. Last year, Rose reached a settlement with his accusers:
“On reflection, and after having the benefit of discovery, we realize that different people could interpret the conduct in different ways, and therefore we have resolved the claims,” the women said. “We do not assign any bad motive or ill intent to Charlie Rose.”
I assume it was a written statement and the group of women didn't recite this in unison.
I don't think this settlement in itself will do anything to repair Rose's reputation but his re-emergence is more facilitated by the public and media generally stepping back from a propensity for extremely severe judgements in the years following Trump's first election victory and the downfall of Harvey Weinstein.
I was never particularly a fan of Charlie Rose, although he's been a respected interviewer for all of my 46 years of existence. But Rose has been a kind of journalist never intended for fandom, one who seems to see his job as presenting his subject as clearly as possible without the noise of his own opinion. It's not that he actively conceals his opinion and I've heard him give voice to it now and then, it's just that he seems to hold himself secondary to the person he interviews. So while I may not have felt a fondness for Rose himself, I might greatly appreciate his interview with George Lucas or Jimmy Carter or Quentin Tarantino for the clarity with which Rose allows his guests to present themselves. Its this almost invisible quality that constitutes Rose's greatest asset though it's a philosophy of journalism that has been falling out of favour with the public over the past forty years.
So far it doesn't seem like he's gotten many opportunities to interview the kinds of high profile figures he once did, though his first episode in April 2022 was with Warren Buffett. The biggest names he's gotten in the past few years are Isabella Rossellini, Jimmy Carter, David Petraeus, Candice Bergen, and Chris Christie. Last month he interviewed Douglas Murray, which may be as much a marker of Murray's fall as Rose's rise.
This is largely, I believe, the fallout of Murray losing the argument with Dave Smith on Joe Rogan's show, which I wrote about at the time.
I should note that while I respect Murray's commitment as a journalist, I fundamentally disagree with him on many topics, especially his opinion on transgender people. A key moment I would point to is a somewhat recent appearance made by Murray on Real Time with Bill Maher in which Maher and he directly stated their divergent opinions on whether people can be born in the wrong body. Maher believed it happened, Murray did not. Plenty of people on the left have criticised Maher's tone on trans issues but I think it's important to recognise prominent allies to a cause rather than dumping them for their imperfections. At the same time, I think a component of potentially one day healing an increasingly divided culture is recognising when the opposition is cogent, graceful, and presents reasonable arguments without resorting to ad hominem.
The fundamental problem is that so many people seem disinclined or unable to dispassionately evaluate evidence. I'm not actually convinced it's a new problem, though.
I've been living in a town called Kakogawa in Hyogo prefecture since April. The town's famous for producing multiple shogi champions and it's known for its delicious katsumeshi--fried, breaded meat on rice. One of the first things I noticed about the town, though, were the bronze statues of naked boys in sensual poses everywhere. Here's one near my apartment:
I haven't seen any statues of girls so far though I saw plenty of great ones when I visited Kobe two years ago, like this one:
I wonder if that statue's still there, though, because to-day I see there are news articles on various web sites (like this one) about how Japan is removing statues of naked women and girls all over the country. Many of the articles just say "nude statues" are being removed but, clearly, it's primarily female statues being targeted, which may explain why Kakogawa has a surfeit of boys.
The article I linked to above quotes a university professor named Takayama Yoko as saying, "Japan is the only country with so many statues of naked women in public spaces." These statues appeared in the years after World War II to replace statues of military figures that had been melted down to provide material for weapons manufacturing. To the Japanese, these depictions of naked women symbolised peace. At least, that was the belief, but depictions of womens' bodies are now scrutinised under a new lens.
Anyone who compares Japanese manga and anime from the '80s to manga and anime to-day will notice a difference in quantity of nudes depicted. The recent anime remake of Ranma 1/2 is almost identical to the original except for the absence real nudity.
This kind of artistic circumspection will be familiar to western students of art and literature of the past forty or fifty years who've become acquainted with the term "male gaze", a term I've written about multiple times. One flaw evident in it is that it would likely not be applied to the statues of nude boys even though they were mostly made by men according to their ideas of beauty. Western critical concepts digested by Japanese culture don't always emerge in their same essential forms. To-day's Japan has been called a post-modern culture because in many ways it's a product of deliberate social engineering in an attempt to emulate the west. In the Meiji era, scholars, artists, and statesmen from Japan visited Europe and America with the specific intention of studying and importing western ideas to Japan's culture and institutions. This 19th century phenomenon was followed by another artificially imposed influx of western culture and ideas after World War II. In Japanese art using importing western ideas, there is often a marked sense of artificiality and imitation, as in the Panty and Stocking song I posted yesterday. In her review of 1954's Seven Samurai, Pauline Kael wrote:
There is no specifically Japanese tradition for film music, and the budgetary allowances for composers are minuscule. The result is what sounds to us like a parody of European music.
I can easily imagine Japanese intellectuals visiting Rome, seeing statues of naked people, and coming back home saying, "Okay, we gotta have statues of naked people if we want to be civilised." Now, as western culture is becoming neurotic about depictions of women's bodies, Japanese intellectuals are saying, "Okay, we gotta remove statues of naked women if we want to be civilised." It's strange how much this seems like the neuroticism of the colonised when Japan has never been colonised since the first migrations of people from continental Asia.
But it's not like the Japanese just saw statues and made statues. The statues of naked women were intended to symbolise peace so there was an idea behind it. As in the west, a victim of the crusade against the male gaze is the idea that the beauty of the human body is an aspect of nature that reflects the better qualities of the human psyche, be they sexual or spiritual. Mechanical morality continues to place the human spirit in smaller and smaller boxes.
X Sonnet 1958
The young gorilla paints a hero's face.
A champ'yon wears the C across his shirt.
We never think of pecs the brand replaced.
Abandoned muscles lie in dust and dirt.
Another jumper cleared the clearance rack.
To sweater weather, gymnasts now distend.
A Spirit shop foretells the march of Jack.
The ides of eight on zombies now depend.
To cure a walking corpse requires salt.
It short supply, the yahoos march to war.
Laputians keep a floating seasoned vault.
Their soup is mined from rainy clouds of ore.
It's dinner now at noon like olden times.
So breaking fast requires fewer dimes.
This week's new Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt had some of the best and the worst gags I've seen from the series. The first two of the three segments had nothing I could recommend about them. Written and directed by Amemiya Akira, they formed two parts of one story in which Panty and Stocking help a rookie "Impact Cop" defeat the internet, manifested as ghost. The story is apparently a reference to a YouTube series created by Amemiya about these Impact Cops who appear to be action figures with flaming skull heads. The essential joke behind the concept escapes me in these Panty and Stocking shorts, maybe I'd appreciate it more if I'd see the original series.
The third story, though, was almost entirely golden. Co-written by series creator Imaishi Hiroyuki with Yamazaki Rino, the short is a parody of La La Land called "Fa Fa Fuck". Fed up with Panty's foul mouth when she interrupts his viewing of a classic musical on DVD, he invokes the power of Heaven to put a ring on her tongue that cuts it off every time she says a swear word. Since she's an angel, the tongue immediately regenerates but not without a lot of blood and pain. She figures out, though, that the ring can't detect swear words if she sings them, leading to her marching outside with a musical number consisting almost entirely of profanity and dodgy Japanese English with, for some reason, a slightly British accent.
The makers of this show have an odd fixation on swear words that sadly makes the show frequently feel out of touch. Panty singing "fuck" over and over did remind me of the opening number in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
But that movie's twenty-four years old now and even then swear humour was starting to feel kind of stale. Nowadays, the MPAA rules on how many times someone can say "fuck" or "shit" have gotten gradually broader in PG-13 movies, reflecting a culture in the U.S. where they're often not considered a big deal. The genuinely verboten lingo is all related to racial and sexual identity now.
But "Fa Fa Fuck" has some exceptional gags. My favourite was Garterbelt seeing the gradually expanding pile of severed angel tongues and seeing a business opportunity, promptly selling them to sushi restaurants where angel tongue sushi immediately becomes all the rage.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.
While walking to and from work lately I've been listening to the audiobook for The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. The Twin Peaks tie-in was first released in 1990 but the audiobook was recorded in 2017 by Sheryl Lee, who played Laura Palmer in the series. The book's better than I remember, I think because when I originally read it in junior high school or high school I saw Laura as a peer. Now, she's around the same age as my students.
The diary begins on her twelfth birthday and ends just before her murder when she was seventeen years old. Wnen I was a teenager reading it, I enjoyed the book up until Laura really starts analysing herself. At the time, I felt it was too self-indulgent. Now it seems quite natural for a teenager with insecurities to write like that. It's almost difficult to judge the Diary as a creative work because any flaws it has can be attributed to the fact that it's supposed to have been written by a character who was a child and not a professional writer. So any flaws can be taken as virtues.
The diary was written by Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David Lynch, the mastermind behind Twin Peaks. She was 22 years old at the time and therefore could certainly remember with accuracy what it was like to be a teenager. Her father asked her to undertake the project because he remembered her telling him that she fantasised about finding another girl's diary to see if the things going through her own head were things that went through other girls' heads when they were teenagers. So the diary consequently touches on a lot of topics the series does not, like Laura's fears of being laughed at, her self-image, and her preoccupation with sin and punishment. But, of course, Laura's life was not that of a normal teenager. She was systematically abused from an early age by the otherworldly series antagonist, Bob. But even having an abnormal life doesn't mean she doesn't have the normal mental and physical development stages. She, however, has no vantage point to see the difference between what is normal and what is not, something Jennifer Lynch captures really well.
I was surprised by how much more the book ties into the series than I remembered. There's a scene where she meets the Log Lady at a gas station after seeing the gas station in her dream. I wonder if this was the same gas station and convenience store seen in season three and first referred to by Mike in the dream sequence in season one.
Sheryl Lee gives the same brittle yet at times fiery performance that's so captivating in the 1992 film.
I'm three more episodes in on season three of Sandman, episodes that basically cover the Brief Lives graphic novel in which Dream and his sister, Delirium, personification of delirium, set out on a road trip to find their missing brother, Destruction, who abandoned his role at some point before the events of the series. So the show skipped over the Game of You graphic novel, which is not very surprising since Dream only briefly appears in it and it's odd for a conventional television series to leave out the main character for several episodes. So I guess producer David S. Goyer decided to make this more of a conventional series. Characters from Game of You were introduced in season one like they were being set up for an adaptation of the volume so maybe there was a change of plan when Neil Gaiman was forced out of the writers' room.
One character from A Game of You does sort of appear in these episodes, though; Wanda, played by Indya Moore, whom Time named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2019. I guess I fall outside their sphere of influence because I'd never heard of them but they give a good, charismatic performances as someone with a completely different appearance and personality than the Wanda of the comics. Actually, this Wanda replaces a character called Ruby who was Dream and Delirium's driver in the waking world. I don't know why they thought it was so important to crowbar Wanda into this story. If they'd left her out, they could've left the door open for an adaptation of Game of You somewhere down the line.
Actress Esme Creed-Miles plays Delirium as generally dim, which I guess works, although she doesn't seem to change much in the brief scene where her mind clears.
The two begin searching for Destruction by looking up his old friends, the second of whom is Ishtar, formerly a goddess of sex and war, now a dancer at a strip club. She's played by Amber Rose Revah who played Madani on Punisher. She gives a decent performance but I wish they'd gotten a professional dancer who could've done something really special for the dance sequence that concludes her story. The makers of the show did get someone who could sing to play Orpheus, an actor named Ruairi O'Connor, and his song to Hades and Persephone is genuinely effective.
I'm still mostly enjoying the series. The Sandman is available on Netflix.
A free-spirited young woman and her fussy friend go on a madcap road trip in 2024's Drive-Away Dolls. This was the first of Ethan Coen's "Lesbian B-Movie Trilogy", the second entry of which premiered over the past weekend in the U.S. but not here in Japan. So I settled for watching this one which is available on Amazon Prime here. It's good and Margaret Qualley is fantastic in it but, like the lesser Coen Brothers' comedies, its silliness overstays its welcome at some point.
Ethan Coen is half of the famous Coen Brothers, makers of the famed cinematic masterpieces Fargo, Miller's Crossing, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men. Some years ago, the duo split up after more than thirty years together to start directing their own projects. Among other things, this gives us an opportunity to gauge the particular tastes and talents of the brothers whose individual artistic voices were previously always combined into one.
The other brother, Joel Coen, has so far directed just one project, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth starring Denzel Washington in the title role. The vastly different tones of the two projects suggest Ethan may have generally been more responsible for the comedic aspects of their films and Joel for the more sombre. But who can say for sure? Maybe their time apart is to test territory each had previously always left to the other.
Ethan co-wrote Drive-Away Dolls with his wife, Tricia Cooke, and they pitched it originally as something in the vein of '70s exploitation films or John Waters movies. I don't find it has the accidental sincerity of the former or the rambling camp of the latter. It really feels, as I said, like one of the sillier Coen Brothers' comedies like Hail, Caesar or even The Hudsucker Proxy. However, the two main characters are well established.
Qualley plays Jamie, a southern gal who's recently broken up with her angry cop girlfriend, Sukie. Jamie decides to go on a road trip with Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), whom we meet fussily correcting her co-worker's grammar in their workplace of nondescript office cubicles. So the odd-couple set up is clear from the start as the two characters are almost polar opposites. Both are quite charming, particularly Qualley who reminds me here why I thought she was the most impressive of the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Manson girls. Qualley captures the hare-brained, easy-going energy of the Lou Costello half of her double act with Viswanathan. Viswanathan's Marian is sweetly uptight, staying up in their hotel room reading Henry James, only to be disturbed when Jamie returns drunk with some strange girl she'd picked up in a bar.
There's a plot involving murderous thugs and a corrupt senator that's mainly entertaining for another double act, the pair of thugs on the lesbians' tail, a grimly violent enforcer and a chatter-box, reminiscent of Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare's characters in Fargo. Both sides of the story are better in the first half of the film but I found myself restless with the silliness by the latter half. Your mileage may vary.
Drive-Away Dolls is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.
Sony and Netflix are currently drinking Disney's milkshake with this year's surprise hit, KPop Demon Hunters. This simultaneously fresh and derivative film delivers a former hallmark of Disney animation, pretty people falling in love, that Disney has turned its nose up at for about fifteen years. This new movie also presents an LGBTQ coming out allegory that resembles Disney's current fixation. And it beats Disney to the punch by becoming the first animated American film to successfully exploit trendy Korean culture. It's one of those things that seems like it should've been obvious in hindsight but nevertheless seemed to take everyone by surprise. Its songs are genuinely catchy with music by an ensemble of American talent with a score by Brazilian musician Marcelo Zarvos. The film's story is told with economy and sparkle.
The story centres on a K-pop group called Huntr/x (pronounced "Huntrix") comprised of three members: Rumi (Arden Cho), Zoey (Ji-young Yoo), and Mira (May Hong). Each character is voiced by an American actress of Korean heritage while their singing voices are provided by Ejae, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami, all Korean Americans. The characters lead a double life: known to their fans as idols, they secretly also engage in demon hunting as a part of a tradition among Korean singers stretching back generations. However, Rumi conceals a secret from her two compatriots; she is half demon, a fact betrayed by her distinctive body markings which she's obliged to conceal. The girls' mentor, Celine (Yunjin Kum), a singer from an '80s pop group, like Elsa's parents in Frozen instructed the girl to "conceal don't feel", commands Rumi to keep her half demon nature a secret in the hopes of one day obliterating the race of demons entirely and Rumi's markings along with them. Celine instructs all the girls to repress their emotions.
You can, I'm sure, already see the familiar pattern from Frozen, Turning Red, Encanto, Elemental, and numerous others as family pressures and/or traditions come in conflict with the main character's instinctive needs.
Meanwhile, another K-pop group rises to prominence, a boy band called Saja Boys who are secretly a group of demons. Despite her better judgement, Rumi finds herself falling for the group's handsome leader, Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop, singing voice provided by Andrew Choi). It's the kind of romance that really hasn't been spotlighted in a Disney movie since 2010's Tangled but used to be their stock and trade in the Disney Renaissance of the late '80s and '90s. Back then, Disney deliberately presented audiences with sexy characters like Jessica Rabbit, Ariel, Aladdin, Jasmine, and Pocahontas whose stories revolved at least partially around romance. After the success of KPop Demon Hunters and the failures of Elio, Wish, and Strange World, will Disney finally be willing to go back to that well? God, I hope so.
KPop Demon Hunters comes from Sony Pictures Imageworks, the same studio that made the Spiderverse movies. Those movies' idiosyncratic blend of cgi and imitation cell drawings also introduced audiences to a form of animation that seems to have a deliberately rough flow, as though every third frame were removed from the reel, giving the character movements a quality somewhat reminiscent of stop motion animation. KPop Demon Hunters uses the same effect without the conceptual premise of 3D blended with 2D. I'm not sure it helped the movie.
KPop Demon Hunters was directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans from a screenplay by Kang, Appelhans, Danya Jimenez, an Hannah McMechan. Three members of the K-pop group Twice perform one of the film's songs in the closing credits. I wonder if the K-pop industry will take note of this film's success and start making their own movies.
I keep thinking about how funny the New York cover with Neil Gaiman is (on the left). I felt compelled to make that version with the Master from Doctor Who last night. This is kind of separate from what I think of Neil Gaiman or any of his work but just my general compulsion to mock manipulation in media. They chose the picture showing he has bad posture, so they know how they want you to make up your mind.
I still think the evidence against him is extremely weak at best (I've gone over that already) but I do find it ominous that he's gone completely quiet this year and no-one seems willing to say anything in his defense, unless you count Tori Amos saying, "That's not the Neil I knew," when prompted in a Guardian interview. Amanda Palmer, his estranged wife who's also had allegations levelled at her, has spoken publicly about how difficult it's been for her to be cancelled and has posted photos of herself with an assemblage of celebrities to show that she does have friends and a support base. Gaiman seems to be going it alone and I have to suspect that's at least partially his choice. I wonder if he'd gotten tired of being a celebrity and in some small way saw this as an opportunity to get away from it all.
Anyway, I still think his Sandman series from the '90s is among the best comics I ever read. I remember Fridays, pay day, going straight to the mall and buying the next collected volume and devouring the whole thing. His work in subsequent years has been a mixed bag for me and I felt the American Gods television series and the second season of Good Omens even more so seemed like they came from writers who were deeply out of touch. How much of that is his fault, I don't know. But I have Netflix again for the moment and over the weekend I finally started watching season 2 of Netflix's Sandman adaptation.
It's close enough to the original, and the performances are good enough, that I find it engrossing. All the divergences from the source material I've been able to spot have degraded it. I've watched three episodes so far which cover the Season of Mist collection, the story in which Lucifer gives Morpheus the key to Hell and he has to decide whom to pass it on to. He, meanwhile, is on a quest to save a woman he condemned to Hell for 10,000 years. A lot of people complained about this aspect of the story, which was introduced in season one, but one of the things I really liked about the comics is that it felt like Gaiman was writing the Endless, his pantheon of anthropomorphised concepts; Dream, Desire, Destiny, Delerium, Destruction, Despair, and Death; as they were throughout history, not merely as they are to-day. So when Morpheus, Dream, condemned Nada, he was operating from an infant form of human morality that is unimaginably different and more primitive than we have to-day. That's how gods behaved back then. Think of the Old Testament or Zeus. But a failing of the show is its fundamental shying away from that. A flashback to Nada's country in the past was changed from an early agrarian culture to what one article called "steampunk"--though to me it looked more like simply a standard, cheap, high fantasy rig, one that doesn't differ much fundamentally from modern culture. Yes, it's probably impossible to imagine the past with complete accuracy but the attempt can be much more interesting than what the show manages to offer.
When Morpheus does finally reunite with her, she certainly doesn't seem anything like someone who's been tormented for 10,000 years and, in that scene, he does not seem like an anthropomorphised version of human dreams. He stumbles through his apology and she indignantly chastises him for his wording. The tone of the conversation is more like he bailed on the speakeasy when the cops were raiding it and she had to spend the night in jail. Think of articles or documentaries you've read or seen about people who spent two years locked in a basement or people who were held captive for ten years. They undergo profound physical and psychological changes. If you're not going to attempt to show something like that, there's no reason to introduce the concept of 10,000 years of torment in the first place.
Some viewers complained about Death being played by a black woman when she was a white woman in the comic. What bugged me is that the white actor plays Dream in all his dialogue with Nada. There are brief flashes of Dream as a black man, but they're so brief that they're confusing more than successful in conveying the idea from the comic that the Endless appear to be beings from whatever community the beholder belongs to. Which makes sense. When Nada sees Dream take the form of a human, she's never even seen a white man before. He's not really a man, he's a concept, so I always liked how he and his siblings were reflections of the people and animals they interacted with. Outside of those interactions, depictions of the Endless as goth white people frankly seemed to me an intentional reflection of the author.
But enough of the dialogue is close to the original that enjoyed it. The fun of reading the comic was in looking at it two ways at once, as both a fantasy story about these powerful characters in negotiation over a realm, but also as a complex metaphor for how these concepts were operating in the real world. I look forward to seeing the rest.
Sometimes I feel like writing art criticism is the ultimate quixotic endeavour. It's what I do here on my blog almost every day but the hazy line between subjectivity and objectivity seems to render it pointless sometimes. This past week I've been listening to a lot of YouTube critics while drawing pictures. They're not a fair sample if I'm talking about the fundamental quality of criticism itself, I guess. I ought to be be talking about Pauline Kael or William Empson.
Paul Schrader wrote this on his Facebook recently:
AI FILM CRITICISM. It should be fairly simple to program chatgpt to review a new film in the manner of, say, Kael, Sarris or Farber. Chatgpt would need simply watch the film, read every review written by the designated critic, see every film the designated critic reviewed, see every previous film made by every talent (directors to actors to prod designers) in the new film, watch every film in the new film's genre, read every review written about those films and read all other reviews of the new film. That should take chatgpt about thirty seconds.
Ironically, I think the real appeal, at least for me, of criticism is the feeling of shared experience. As seeing a movie in a theatre is a communal experience, reading or hearing criticism is another facet or manifestation of that experience. The balance between comments I agree with and comments I don't are like echo location to map my own feelings while at the same time carving an impression of the other human being. Which kind of describes group communication in general. It seems computers are on the verge of simulating this, the ultimate result being, I guess, that everyone can more successfully lead completely solitary lives.
It's not just the computer's image we mould, though, it's our own. ChatGPT won't notice if you have a pimple or if you're bald. It's Satanic self-creation. I say that as a fan of Milton's Satan. Of course, it's only the rich who will go extinct or upload themselves to a hard drive. There are still vast swaths of Earth's population who have no hope of meeting ChatGPT.
I'm aware a lot of people don't read criticism the way I do. The number of people who do so only to be told how to think are multiplying. So it's important to note how lousy YouTube criticism often is.
I was listening to a YouTube critic called Sheev Talks last week. He mostly talks about Star Wars stuff and is slightly unusual for the fact that he compares criticisms of other YouTube critics. I appreciated his retrospective on The Phantom Menace for how he discussed the ways in which The Phantom Menace is often discussed, singling out the influential Mr. Plinkett reviews on the RedLetterMedia channel and pointing out just how bad and sloppy they are, even though Sheev Talks agrees that the prequels are bad. Personally, as I said before about criticism being for me part of the communal experience, I appreciate RedLetterMedia more for the hosts' rapport and personality than for the insights of their reviews. The original Mr. Plinkett reviews seemed to be me to be partially a parody of criticism itself, of the idea of even spending hours and hours talking about movies that most people supposedly don't like. The channel's content has generally shifted away from parody into doing something more straight-forward.
Despite his tirade against the flaws of other YouTube critics, I find Sheev Talks' criticisms to be equally flawed, as when he says that the houses on Skeleton Crew too much resembled suburban '80s American houses and uses the '50s diner in Attack of the Clones for comparison, saying that the diner was different enough to fit comfortably within the Star Wars universe but the houses were not. The footage he himself provides seems to belie this comparison. I would actually say the diner is more of a diner than the suburban houses are suburban houses.
Despite calling the prequels bad, Sheev Talks says that he loves them and has watched them repeatedly since childhood (he seems to be in his 20s). In a sense, I can appreciate separating what I like from what I think is objectively good--Vertigo is my favourite movie but I think Citizen Kane is more deserving of the "Best Film of All Time" title. But surely how a movie makes us feel should be a vital part of the criticism. If he loves them, why doesn't he analyse himself to see why he loves them? Since art is often popular and effective despite how well they do or don't follow the conventional rules of storytelling, surely our feelings should factor into any judgement of a film's quality. Whatever problems a film may have, do we find it satisfying at the end of the day? Most filmmakers would say that's the only point.
I wonder if, as AI becomes more emotional, human beings are becoming more mathematical. Recently, the YouTube algorithm has been encouraging me to watch this conservative book critic called The Second Story. She has a video bemoaning the omnipresence of sex in women's fiction and lamenting the fact that people repeatedly pursue titillation. Watching her and noting her form fitting clothes and dead-eyed delivery, I couldn't help thinking of Nicki Brand in Videodrome.
Second Story's critiques seem entirely meant for people who are already willing to agree with her and she tends to offer no evidence for any argument she makes. I will give you some evidence for my argument, a particularly amusing one in which she argues with GRR Martin's assertion that JRR Tolkien created the modern fantasy genre.
Second Story goes on at length to say and reiterate that Tolkien, though talented, did nothing new or special. I would think the obvious thing for her to do would be to provide examples of fantasy fiction written before The Lord of the Rings that have qualities that are erroneously believed to have originated with Lord of the Rings. She does not. Meanwhile, anyone watching who knows anything about fantasy will know that, yes, certainly fantasy existed before The Hobbit in the works of Clark Ashton Smith or Lord Dunsany, but The Lord of the Rings nonetheless provided a basic blueprint that was followed by thousands of publications in the fantasy genre ever afterwards, all over the world. The numerous books published under the Dungeons and Dragons banner replicate the party of adventurers depicted in Lord of the Rings of different representatives of fantasy races and specialised professional classes. Martin's work replicates the epic war in a fantasy world that Lord of the Rings introduced. Elements of Tolkien's works certainly existed in a number of forerunners but Tolkien was undeniably the first to put them together into something of The Lord of the Rings' depth and scope, having something of the true war account of Wilfred Owen while also having the grandeur of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. And I have the sinking feeling ChatGPT would've seen this.
X Sonnet 1957
The young macaque is guarding station food.
You hunger now for bread about the cheese.
Around the dairy stuff the tasters brood.
As global honey holds the yankee bees.
Partake and run, the banquet threatens peace.
You have to wait and bid before you buy.
A hundred yen could buy the golden fleece.
And yet a billion fails to budge a fly.
You see the dappled sun become a coin.
The darker spots were never what they seemed.
As owls watch the agent's soggy groin.
The rest of us were watching Orson Bean.
A later hobbit bought his leaf for cheap.
Safari dwarves repaired to Thorin's jeep.
Apparently a belief has arisen over recent years that guys who like breasts are right wing and guys who like butts are left wing. I encountered a few comments referring to this during the Sydney Sweeney ad controversy. A few days ago I saw this article on The Guardian praising the resurgence of thong bikinis. This paragraph from the article is such a bald attempt at social engineering and manipulation that I find it sort of thrillingly revolting:
Gen Z, in particular, are less inclined to restrict themselves to clothes deemed to be “flattering” – a term that has fallen spectacularly out of favour. Thong bikinis, once the preserve of those who conformed to a particular body type, are now being manufactured in a more inclusive range of sizes and marketed more diversely.
Fallen "spectacularly" out of favour? Did someone throw it off building?
Yes, here's another left-winger from a tiny, wealthy percentage of the world's population implying that the vast majority of people are living under the delusion that some people are prettier than others. "Flattering" is so over, don't you know. Meanwhile the article itself only has pictures of fashion models in the bikinis.
As I wrote a few weeks ago in my post about Sydney Sweeney and beauty, I'm a liberal who's forced to watch while my side digs itself deeper and deeper into a rhetorical trench of a rarefied reality perception that makes us seem crazy enough that even someone like Trump seems preferable to many. Please, please stop doing this, folks. I mean, isn't dividing up a woman's body for political purposes inherently anti-feminist anyway?
Well, I'd be lying if I said I didn't see the logic. Large butts are more common than large breasts, making them vaguely more--what?--democratic? Natural butts are not markers of gender, a transwoman has a better chance of having a naturally curvy butt than large breasts. These guys tie large breasts to Nazi Germany and the stereotypical image of the Bavarian barmaid with a lowcut blouse.
However, when you're talking about sociological philosophies influencing impressions of body parts, dividing them up among factions seems to be putting the cart before the horse. People have bodies first and political opinions second. And, as I argued in my previous post, beauty is too mysterious, too full of contradictions, exceptions, and oddballs to be truly adaptable to any box. Beauty has power, but a lot of that power comes from the fact that no-one's really sure how to attain it. All you can really say is . . .
One of the biggest differences between this new season of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt and its first season is that there are women on the writing staff, which seems appropriate for a show about female sexual liberation (or tyranny). This week's new episode featured two for the two vignettes comprising it. Yamazaki Rino, who wrote the teleplay for the first half (from a story by Wakabayashi Hiromi), started as a production assistant before writing scripts in recent years for Darling in the Franxx and Spy Family among other titles. Ueno Kimiko, meanwhile, both conceived the story and wrote the teleplay for the second of the two vignettes in the new Panty and Stocking. Her credits include Little Witch Academia and multiple Crayon Shin-chan movies. Crayon Shin-chan, while not well known outside of Japan, is an enormously popular series for small children. So it's a little surprising seeing her writing for a series with such adult humour.
Ueno's vignette also features a series of references to American culture that I would estimate only a very tiny fraction of the Japanese population have heard of. The story's called "Longest Bitch Yard", a reference to the American film, The Longest Yard, which is about American football, a sport about which the Japanese have very limited awareness, at least based on my experience. In the episode, Panty and Stocking and the demon sisters are thrown in prison where they organise an American football team. Panty makes numerous references to Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday, another American football movie, which she admires for its depiction of locker room genitalia. The episode also features a lot of references to The Shawshank Redemption, which a number of Japanese people I've spoken to have heard of. Interestingly, there seems to be a high awareness of Stephen King works in Japan and both Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption are popular but many people don't seem to realise that King wrote Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. Stocking manages to smuggle in a spoon so they get the idea of digging their way out and hiding the hole with a poster. Instead of Rita Hayworth in Gilda, Panty puts up a poster of hunky guy starring in Cool Cock Luke, a reference to Paul Newman in Cold Hand Luke, which is a movie I think most of the show's Japanese and American viewers are unaware of.
But is the episode funny? Ueno's vignette is pretty good. Yamazaki's, called "Independence Dick", is less so. The title's a reference to the movie Independence Day but the plot has very little to do with it. It features Garterbelt and Geek Boy bonding with the new male angels in a place called Casino City where they go to gamble.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.
Milla Jovovich dons leather boots and a cocktail dress to fight a zombie infestation in 2002's Resident Evil or, as it's known in Japan, Biohazard because "evil" doesn't translate well to Japanese. I'd seen the beginning of the movie years ago and stopped because it seemed lousy but I stuck with it this time because I've become a more generous viewer. It's not so bad once you get used to the fact that it's really bad. By which I mean, if you look at it as watching someone else playing a video game rather than a good, visceral depiction of what it might be like if hordes of walking dead took over an underground lab, you can enjoy it. At least as much as you can enjoy watching someone else play a video game. A lot of people do, there're lots of playthrough videos on YouTube, after all.
Director Paul W.S. Anderson shoots the underground facility with consistent, even lighting and liberally employs some of the worst cgi in cinema history. It is, generally, a very uncinematic film. Season one Buffy the Vampire Slayer felt more cinematic. Resident Evil is all soundstages with basic lighting, camera angles, and compositions. But to Anderson's credit, he doesn't waste time. We get the lab outbreak after introducing a few characters to humanise the place, then Alice (Jovovich) wakes up in a shower with amnesia shortly before elite shock troops break in and take her and her possible amnesiac husband underground. Making her an amnesiac really helps capture the feeling of a video game because we all start video games usually knowing next to nothing about what we're jumping right into or about our own character.
It can be quite fun, again in a very video game kind of way. I enjoyed the security lasers that cut people up. The zombie dogs, though fake looking, were still a cool idea, presumably imported from the games which I never played. Jovovich gives a good performance and was game for the old pulp convention of heroines being scantily clad for progressively insensible reasons. She even gets a creatively cut-up hospital gown, a nod to her claim to fame from Fifth Element. The film also has young James Purefoy and Michelle Rodriguez ably performing in supporting roles.
Resident Evil/Biohazard is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.
A college boy becomes suicidal after being hazed for his femininity in 1956's Tea and Sympathy. Vincente Minnelli directs the film, based on a stage play, as a decadent melodrama with lush, gorgeous colour cinematography by John Alton.
Deborah Kerr stars as Laura, wife of an influential coach who also runs the boarding house where Tom lives. Tom is the boy bullied for the way he walks, the fact that he knows how to sew, and the fact that he's seen talking to women without intending to date any of them. Tom's played by John Kerr who is supposedly not related to Deborah Kerr but, I have to say, the two kind of look alike.
Dig those giant fish cake moulds. The cake moulds all seem to be the same colour as Deborah Kerr's hair. The film has a fairly consistent copper and blue palette. I wonder how much of it was intentional and how much was a limitation of Metrocolor.
The story's in line with a lot of other movies from the '50s about the breakdown of traditional family structure centred on a maladjusted boy like Rebel without a Cause and The Wild One. Like a lot of those movies, it suffers from characters delivering social commentary at each other as exposition but some of it is pretty insightful, as when Laura argues to Al (Darryl Hickman) that virtually anyone can be smeared by gossip for the most trivial, arbitrary physical or personality trait.
This leads to a slightly amusing scene of Al trying to help Tom adopt a more manly stride only to discover Al himself doesn't know exactly what's not manly about Tom's stride, that it was a phantom impression entirely conjured by the bigoted social group.
The original stage play directly referenced homosexuality but the film was not permitted to, despite coming a few years after the Hays Code was judged unconstitutional. It's hardly a surprise the studio was afraid of tackling the issue directly in the '50s.
I don't know exactly what the differences were between play and film but I suspect a character other than Tom turns out to be gay, which would really turn the story on its head.
Occasionally, Minnelli's desire to hit the high emotional notes leads only to awkwardness but for the most part the film's fairly satisfying. Deborah Kerr always gives a great performance though she may be a little over the top in some instances here.
Tea and Sympathy is available on The Criterion Channel until the end of the month.
A spacecraft embarks on a dangerous journey to Alpha Centauri in 1963's Ikarie XB-1. An eerie and influential science fiction film, it was based loosely on Stanislaw Lem's The Magellanic Cloud.
The crew are comprised of scientists, mathematicians, and technicians. A mathematician called Anthony (Frantisek Smolik) has a robot called Patrick who resembles Robbie the Robot slightly so this film was also influenced in turn by films that came before it. Forbidden Planet had some of the eeriness you find in this one but Ikarie XB-1's dark, black and white cinematography evokes something more of the coldness and emptiness of space, a feeling emphasised when encounters prove deadly.
There are two major encounters. First with a derelict Earth ship and then with a mysterious "dark star" that's only perceptible for how it obstructs the view of the normal star field. It's here that the film takes on a Lovecraftian quality that's appropriate for a truly alien environment.
Much of the story is focused on the sociological and psychological impact on a human community adapting to life on a spacecraft voyaging further and further from Earth. Director Jindrich Polak conjures tension really well, especially when one crewman goes mad and the others are forced to find ways to deal with him. There's also a nice bit about the psychological impact of time dilation as the characters muse on the fact that fifteen years will pass on Earth while the voyage seems to be only a matter of months to the crew. This story element isn't explored to its fullest potential as it is in Gunbuster or Interstellar but it's certainly an interesting point of anxiety for the characters.
Ikarie XB-1 is available on The Criterion Channel.
Terence Stamp has passed away at the age of 87. The actor is best known to-day for playing General Zod in Richard Donner's Superman movies and his performance was certainly what solidified the character's status as one of the most famous comic book villains of all time. His vampiric makeup and subzero demeanour give the impression of merciless, unshakable will.
His role in 1978's Superman and 1980's Superman II was by no means the beginning of his career. He had starring roles in films by William Wyler, Ken Loach, and Pier Paolo Pasolini throughout the '60s and '70s. In the 1980s, he transitioned gracefully into mostly supporting roles in films. He played the Chancellor in Star Wars: Episode I and fans of the Elder Scrolls video games remember him as one of the villains in Oblivion, which also featured Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean. Oblivion was re-released just this year with updated graphics so a whole new audience is being introduced to him again.
But his career as a lead didn't end after Superman. He had well-regarded lead performance in 1999's The Limey and 1994's Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. He was one of those actors whom I never looked for but was always happy to see.
For the past couple months, Criterion has had a playlist featuring movies with Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith's con artist character who appeared in a series of novels. I watched 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley last night, based on the first novel from 1955, which had already been adapted as Purple Noon with Alain Delon in 1960. The primary distinction of the 1999 version is that it makes the story's subtextual homoeroticism textual. It has kind of a "straightening out the slinky" effect, rendering the story less nuanced and making the character of Tom Ripley much simpler. It does have some terrific performances.
The film basically renders Tom's compulsion to become another man as entirely a symptom of sexual attraction, which is frankly less interesting than a guy who wants to swap places with another. But Matt Damon as Ripley and Jude Law as Dickie Greenleaf, the man whose life Ripley infiltrates, have fascinating chemistry and there's a lot of tension in scenes where Dickie is trying to suss out Ripley's true motives while also wrestling with his own hedonistic proclivities. Ripley's compulsion rendered as simply a sexual infatuation feels a little too commonplace to be the film's centrepiece, though. I have to say Purple Noon also had better clothes and was better shot. The murder of Freddie, Dickie's friend, was far more effective in Purple Noon, though I was impressed with how gory another murder was in the 1999 movie.
What a cast. Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. This was director Anthony Minghella spending the clout he'd attained from making The English Patient, a movie I was a fan of in high school and the reason I saw his Talented Mr. Ripley and even bought the soundtrack back in 1999. But I guess the movie didn't impress me so much because I didn't watch it again until this past week, I think. I'd kind of forgotten how much I'd loved that soundtrack, though. I think it's what ignited my love for jazz with its inclusion of tracks from Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. I also totally forgot that it has a really beautiful Sinead O'Connor track called "Lullaby for Cain".
X Sonnet 1956
The animal you know is never real.
A phantom fur enshrouds the happy beast.
You see, he takes from cans the chunky meal.
But ever plots to take a better feast.
The friendly pup will watch your wobbly arm.
Your trusted friend dissects your meaty thigh.
So far from thought that Fido ponders harm.
Within his very jaws you mayn't cry.
His seeming size belies a mountain ghost.
The infiltrator damned the friendly house.
You play the gentle human, gracious host.
He eyes tomato stains upon your blouse.
No safety here in friendly furry eyes.
Your mascot suit will choke your startled cries.
On a very special episode of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt this week, a pair of angelic boys come down from Heaven to spank the titular fallen angels and their demon sister housemates, culling half the population of the city in the process. It was impressive.
This week's primary pop cultural reference seems to be John Carpenter's They Live, a movie in which Roddy Piper finds a special pair of sunglasses that allow him to see a significant portion of the world's population are secretly sinister aliens who keep humanity enslaved with media and bureaucracy. In the new Panty and Stocking, the characters get similar glasses allowing them to see that many of the people in town are really ghosts of the variety they're charged by both Heaven and Hell to execute.
Normally, every episode is made up of three vignettes but this story takes up the whole twenty-two minute run time, similar to the first season episode which introduced the demon sisters. That one frankly featured a much more impressive action sequence but this new episode was plenty interesting. The boys from Heaven are given a theme reminiscent of the Backstreet Boys' "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" and are clearly meant to capture the boy band aesthetic which remains intensely popular in Japan to-day.
Not to be outdone, Panty, Stocking, and the demon sisters also get an ultra-sexy new transformation sequence (not yet available on YouTube).
It was around this time I started thinking seriously about Panty and Stocking. The They Live stuff could be seen as basically just a reference without substance and yet . . . We have denizens of Heaven killing half the populace to settle a bet--Panty and Stocking, whose angel names, we learn, are Pantiel and Stockiel, make a bet with the angel brothers that they can kill more ghosts than the boys can and the winner gets to be the official overseers of Daten City. Anyone who's accused the Book of Job of making God look petty for taking a bet with Satan would have no trouble seeing this Panty and Stocking as a true criticism of religion. But in terms of Japanese morality, the angels working hard, putting in the extra hours and effort to actually do their jobs, there should be nothing wrong with them having personal motives that don't necessarily align with Heaven's creed. Though, of course, the makers of the show are relentlessly critical of Japanese morality, too.
This is only the latest example of the Gainax crew simultaneously invoking Christian symbols while criticising Japanese sexual hypocrisy. But the world has changed since the alien attacks on Neon Genesis Evangelion were construed as a war with Heaven. I was watching some '90s music videos this morning, thinking again how amazing Mark Romanek's videos were for Nine Inch Nails and Fiona Apple. But what meaning do "Closer" and "Criminal" have for people to-day in the U.S.? I've noticed that, as fantasy movies have become increasingly chaste, to where the modern version of pulp babes are Florence Pugh's androgynous look in Thunderbolts or the downright masculine portrayal of Peggy Carter in the What If series, portrayals of women in music videos have become decadently kinky. Compare Madonna's "Express Yourself" to Cardi B's "Wet Ass Pussy". That's not just expression, it's secretion. Sorry.
That's Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, the latter of whom guest starred on She Hulk so she could twerk with the title character who, like the other Marvel heroines, was dressed and shot in a doggedly asexual manner otherwise. I guess possibly the difference is that She-Hulk was meant for a primarily male audience (I don't buy that) and "Wet Ass Pussy" for a primarily female audience (I don't buy that either). Of course, when I first saw the "Wet Ass Pussy" video, the first thing I noticed was the apparent Twin Peaks influence of the chevron patterned floor. But those sets bear the influence of Tim Burton, Stanley Kubrick, and we could even go all the way back to Jean Cocteau's Blood of the Poet. The makers of the video wanted to invoke a sense of awe--the pussy may be wet but it's not easy and the ladies who are calling the shots should be regarded as distant, unknowable goddesses. So it makes sense the filmmakers would reach for some of the most arch, sepulchral, and unnervingly cold, imagery of Lynch, Kubrick, Bergman, or Cocteau, even if they were perhaps only subconsciously inheriting cinematic tradition.
But then you have Sabrina Carpenter and her controversial submissive chic.
In any case, the sense of conflicting guilt and desire for liberated sexuality present in songs like "Closer" and "Criminal" crossed a barrier the younger generation only know the resulting effects of. In the '90s, they said let's fight the old sexual morality, to-day they only know it's gone, replaced by new contradictory, half-assed, poorly considered but stridently enforced, morality.
But back to Japan and Imaishi Hiroyuki, the Gainax alum who created Panty and Stocking. If you look at Kill la Kill, Evangelion, or FLCL (which featured an ode to South Park, a series whose satirical portraits of Jesus and Satan used to push more buttons), you can see the idea pushed again and again: Japan needs to be less ashamed of sex. This is a message that seems even more pertinent now as Japan deals with a worsening population crisis due to young people not having sex. Of course, there are plenty of people who blame that on porn, as plenty of people have blamed porn for all sorts of things. Maybe the old Gainax crew was somewhat in agreement with this when they made their "Me Me Me" short film in which a young man gets so wrapped up in porn that he neglects his beautiful girlfriend. The end of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies seemed to drive the message home that young men ought to pay attention to the perfect, beautiful, brilliant, and carefree women in their lives, a sadly far more simplistic message than the brutal and complicated character of Asuka in End of Evangelion who mercilessly took Shinji to task for his simplistic, selfish conception of the girls and women in his life.
In any case, there's more going on with Panty and Stocking than crude humour, perhaps more than was intended by its creators. It's tempting to read a lot more into what it could mean that the horny, unabashedly self-serving babes declare war on the shadow cult of They Live ghosts infiltrating society. Can rampant sexual liberation really save everyone? As with so many things, it feels sort of like Japan is just catching up to 1960s American culture.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.
A pretty, wealthy girl is about to turn 16 and men in their 40s start eyeing her for marriage in 1942's Le mariage de Chiffon. It's based on an 1894 French novel and set in he same period so maybe this attitude should be expected but it's still pretty jarring. The film is a romantic comedy that does occasionally succeed in being charming though mostly I'd say it does a pretty good, unintentional, job of demonstrating why its basic conception of romance is creepy as hell.
I tend to avoid passing judgement on how other people live their lives. Everyone's complex and I think it would be folly for anyone to presume to say they know all the ends and outs of another couple's relationship dynamics. But I really don't like the ideal presented by this movie and my dislike for it is only intensified knowing it was common.
It begins on a dark night in Paris in which a middle aged military officer, Le duc d'Aubieres (Andre Luguet), meets a pretty teenage girl in the street called Chiffon. Chiffon is played by Odette Joyeux who was actually in her '20s at the time, only 12 years younger than the man playing d'Aubieres.
She doesn't look like a teenager, either, especially not with those carefully sculpted 1940s eyebrows but Odette's performance conveys Chiffon's naivete and her strong will that operates from a worldview that has been carefully orchestrated by the adults in her life, one of whom is her uncle Marc (Jacques Dumesnil), another middle aged man who forms the third point in the film's love triangle (he's her uncle by marriage and not by blood).
d'Aubieres carries Chiffon to her home in that first scene because she's lost her shoe (actually, he's stolen it and stashed it in his pocket so he can have an excuse to hold her). They learn little about each other but d'Aubieres is smitten by the sight of her pretty bare foot.
Chiffon had decided to marry Marc when she was six years old but has given up on the idea because she knows about his affair with a prominent woman of society who's about the same age as him. There's a lot of comedy about the confusion surrounding her missing shoe and how it turns up again at a hotel where all three principle characters are staying and Marc's mistress just happens to have the same pair of shoes.
The crisis in the film involves the possibility that it will be left up to Chiffon to decide whom she will or will not marry. Her angry mother, tragically, controls the family wealth, not her kindly father, so it's up to d'Aubieres, Marc, and the family butler to discreetly arrange things so that Chiffon ends up marrying the right middle aged man. That means one of the men is left out of the equation in the end and the pathos of the film's conclusion is wrapped up in his noble sacrifice--despite his desire to be the custodian of Chiffon's physical and mental life, he will allow another man to assume that role after the men have passed around a page from Chiffon's diary that they believe makes the true object of her affection clear.
Maybe that's a fantasy you can enjoy. I wouldn't even say that if you enjoy the fantasy it means it's what you want in your real life. But my personal dislike for this relationship dynamic kind of kills the movie for me. Mind you, I find it just as tiresome when the woman is the dominant partner, as is often the case in modern depictions of relationships. I don't find it attractive as a fantasy though (it ought to go without saying) I don't altogether object to its depiction in fiction, whether for psychological exploration as in the case of the domineering man with the meek German wife in Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander or the case of the domineering wife of the constable in The Lower Depths.
Le mariage de Chiffon is available on The Criterion Channel.
