I was scrolling through Facebook yesterday and saw some footage of the AI version of Anne Frank, the famous thirteen year old diarist who was executed by Nazis in 1945 for the crime of being Jewish. There's also an AI chatbot Anne Frank that has apparently decided that, were Frank alive to-day, she would tell people to avoid "focusing on blaming" anyone for the Holocaust. How very generous of the AI speaking for her.
I understand the compulsion to make history seem relevant to young students to-day and, as a thirteen year old girl who kept a diary, Anne Frank has long been seen as appropriate for the task, though in some countries her more sexually explicit diary entries are censored, lest anyone get the idea that sexuality is normal.
But, really, what are we doing with the creepy conglomeration of pixels wearing the Anne Frank mask? I found myself thinking of Claudia from Interview with the Vampire. Maybe a child who's made into a vampire would be on the same level of creepy after a hundred years as the AI version of Anne Frank. You know, even when everything on the surface seems natural, when it cuts away before everyone starts sprouting extra hands, there's still some undefinable wrongness about the footage. Maybe I'm just saying that because I know going in that the footage is fake. It only seems like a matter of time before the AI would be able to mimic human mannerisms with perfect accuracy. Then what? New Charlie Chaplin movies?
It only recently occurred to me that Anne Frank's diary probably influenced Laura Palmer's diary. I imagine that occurred to most people sooner. Oh, well. But given the comparison, we can probably look to Twin Peaks as a lesson. What happens when you try to resurrect the murdered girl? Things get weirder and weirder.
When 1999's The Mummy first came out, I thought the trailers looked terrible, like a cheap Indiana Jones knock-off, so I didn't see it. In the 26 years since its release, general opinion on the film seems to have improved so much that the Tom Cruise Mummy movie was called a remake of the 1999 film, not the 1932 film of which the 1999 was supposed to be a remake. So I tried to watch it last night and fell asleep during big chunks of it. I can't say I was impressed by what I saw but I can't call this a fair review. I guess this is just an account of an experience.
I don't really know why Brendan Fraser's been getting such a motivated pity campaign in the past five years or so but he's not an especially bad actor and he's fine in this movie. Rachel Weisz is cute. With her being a ditz and he being so macho, it oddly feels more regressive than the Indiana Jones movies or the original Mummy. But those in a relationship with a male dom and female sub might vicariously enjoy the chemistry between the characters. It's cute. More annoying is Weisz's brother played by John Hannah who was up to some extremely broad slapstick in the moments I was awake for.
The real problem with this film is its cgi. It comes from that period in the late '90s, early '00s when people generally somehow couldn't quite perceive the flaws of cgi yet, which doesn't seem to age as charmingly as limited practical effects. It always feels sort of thin and soulless. The Pyramids of Mars holds up a lot better.
Anyway, maybe next time I have a go at it I'll be awake the whole time and write a proper review. I did kind of appreciate the free-flowing pulpiness of the screenplay.
Anora really rewards a second viewing. Other people have remarked on how the story slyly shifts about halfway through and in your first viewing you don't even realise it's happening. In your first viewing, your awareness of it is aligned with Anora's point of view and in the second viewing, because you know what's going to happen, your point of view shifts to the other party's. It's like in Vertigo where a second viewing shifts your point of view from Scottie's to Judy's. I like how the film forces you to pay attention to subtle facial expressions, even as a louder gangster comedy is going on in the foreground.
Maybe Mikey Madison really did deserve the best actress win. As brave as Demi Moore was in The Substance, Madison's role called for a lot more subtlety. In my first viewing, it was the scene in the car at the end, where you can see her making her decision, that really got me. The second time, it was a couple scenes earlier, where she's throwing around accusations of assault. You can see her sorting out her feelings, or trying to, and being surprised at her own tone. She kind of reminds me of Kagawa Kyoko in Kurosawa's Lower Depths.
It's finally here; the first two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again premiered on Disney+ last night. It doesn't really hit the ground running, in fact these two episodes have a real swiss cheese quality with lots of holes. But showrunner Dario Scardapane, who came in to reconfigure the show after half of it had already been shot by a showrunning team Disney decided was inferior, may well fill those holes with--I don't know, brie, pimento, something good. Scardapane was a writer on Punisher, a show within the same formerly Netflix MCU universe. So he probably knows what he's doing and, by the way, don't watch Daredevil: Born Again until you've seen the first three seasons of the old Daredevil (I wouldn't read the rest of my review, either, if I were you).
It's pretty easy to guess what's newer footage and what's from the misbegotten original take, which was going to distance itself from the old Netflix series. Right off the bat, we have a scene featuring Karen and Foggy, Matt Murdoch's two sidekicks from the original, and aside from some bad cgi (getting roundly dunked on throughout the internet to-day), I was pleased with the opening. It had some very good ideas, my favourite being the decision to kill off Foggy. That's something I was hoping would happen throughout the whole of the original series. I'm sure he's a nice guy in real life, maybe, I don't really know, but Elden Henson cannot, and has never shown any ability to, act. His performance is good enough for a guy who gets killed off within the first few minutes but somehow he stuck around for years. And his character was often written as an annoying scold. You know what I don't particularly want from a Daredevil series? A character constantly telling Daredevil he shouldn't be Daredevil.
The first scene has an action sequence that emulates the long take, Oldboy style hallway fight that the first series famously put together, except, of course, it's clearly cgi now so it's not so impressive. Actually, the best action scene so far comes at the end of episode 2 and that one doesn't even pretend to be a long take. Instead, it's wonderfully, kinetically edited. It was the one moment in the two episodes that brought a genuine smile to my face.
It's mostly easy to discern what's new stuff and what's edited in. There's a new, alternate set of supporting characters; a detective who helps Murdoch, there's his new partner at his new firm, and his new love interest, a therapist called Heather. She just so happens to be Wilson and Vanessa Fisk's couples' therapist, which I sure hope is not mere coincidence. New York City is not such a small town, for Pete's sake.
Fisk on the Netflix series was a commentary on Trump even before Trump became a serious contender in politics so it's interesting to see him again now as New York mayor. It's good that he's not simply a Trump allegory: he doesn't have Trump's charisma, bluster, or fragile ego. In fact, it seems odd that this big man who always seems to be fighting the urge to grind his teeth, connected with voters. But interviews within the show have people on the street talking about how they're frustrated with the lack of political change and want a strong man who can do something. This simultaneously makes Fisk's character make sense and makes it a worthier comment on Trump.
It's a rocky start, some of the writing feels like old USA network or CW crap, but I can see this getting ironed out by Scardapane.
In the wake of the U.S. suddenly halting military aid for Ukraine, I finally went back and watched the disastrous press conference/meeting from last week between Zelensky, Trump, and Vance. What an extraordinary piece of television, and not in a good way. Trump even remarks at one point that it will be great television and I'm forced to wonder if, on some level, that's still a priority for him, even when the stakes are millions of human lives.
One thing is clear; Trump and Vance have absolutely no respect for Zelensky. When Zelensky points out, quite reasonably, that Putin has repeatedly broken peace agreements, and asks what Ukraine is supposed to do in that situation, Vance responds by accusing Zelensky of a lack of gratitude. After Vance's little dog barking, Trump, who'd been bragging about his negotiation skills, also apparently becomes offended at Zelensky's failure to recognise his godhood. How dare Zelensky speak as though Ukraine has a respectable position in the conversation? It was like watching a gangster slap his wife for daring to make a comment during a meeting.
It really seems like some powerful interests decided Russia would have Ukraine some time ago.
Even so, it's hard to say exactly how much Trump's violent petulance is a remarkably undisciplined reaction of the moment and how much of it might be theatre. Giving an impression of his erratic temper may even have been a tactic. It felt eerily like watching Paul Sorvino in Goodfellas or Jack Nicholson in The Departed. It really feels like we have a gangster president.
I can't remember the last time my favourite movie of a particular year swept at the Oscars. I don't think it's ever happened. But Anora won last night. I refuse to feel validated! I know if I do, Lucy's going to yank the football next year and something like Chicago or Paul Haggis' Crash will win. But I guess I can enjoy this moment.
I really appreciated Sean Baker's acceptance speech for Best Director (for directing Anora). I don't know that impassioned pleas for preserving a dying part of the culture have ever been effective but I certainly shared his sentiment. Movie theatres certainly seem to be much healthier in Japan but it's still rare for students to tell me they saw a movie over the weekend. I don't think anything can reverse this trend unless the price of movie tickets starts to come down.
Anora won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and, most controversially, Best Actress. I thought Mikey Madison was terrific in Anora but, as much as I didn't enjoy The Substance, Demi Moore took a hell of a lot of risks in that role. I do kind of hate it when an actor or actress wins for a career rather than for the role they're nominated for so maybe I don't mind this so much. Mikey Madison was certainly radiant in her acceptance speech.
Mostly these days I've been reading history books but I needed something for my soul last week so I was reading Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in a Norton Anthology. A print edition, mind you. Then I opened YouTube and a performance of Antony and Cleopatra was a recommended video. It's gotta be a coincidence, right? Life's real serendipitous events are getting lost in the couch cushions of algorithm.
Yesterday I watched Bill Murray on Joe Rogan:
It seems one major takeaway from the election is that Joe Rogan is the man now. He's the kingmaker, he's certainly replaced Howard Stern. This Bill Murray interview already has more than 1.5 million views and that's not counting people who just listen to the podcast. I also watched his interview with Elon Musk. I can dig what they're saying about getting rid of empty bureaucracy and counterproductive DEI programmes but I can't accept Rogan or Musk or Trump as agents of the truth when Trump's obvious pandering to Russia isn't even part of their reality. Rogan and Musk laugh about how claims of Trump's collusion with Russia were obvious fraud. Were they, though? And if Rogan can't even admit the possibility, how am I supposed to trust him as some kind of dedicated truth teller?
Anyway, the Bill Murray interview was good. Murray seems to be speaking from a bygone perspective, recalling his work practices in the '70s and '80s where he could really get along with most people so long as they didn't start talking about politics. It was nice listening to his recollections about Hunter S. Thompson and hearing Murray and Rogan talking about Steve McQueen.
Murray's been making the interview rounds on major talk shows and he's appearing in three upcoming movies. He was also on the recent Saturday Night Live anniversary show. All this is less than a year since he was excluded from press junkets for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire because he was supposedly cancelled. Is that over now? I guess for people whose popularity isn't dependent on one political side. Folks like Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon aren't so lucky. Whedon basically got cancelled for being rude. The claims against Gaiman are extremely thin and sketchy to anyone who actually reads through them. You have to start to wonder if they got cancelled because they did something amoral or because they didn't do something amoral. But we're not supposed to think about conspiracies.
X Sonnet 1923
Another turn reveals a Christmas ball.
It's trapped in spring as though a frozen fish
Had eaten up the cheer the locals call
A holiday for falling grades of wish.
No study time could meet the needs of lunch.
An empty stomach shades the day to night.
For after dawn, the dreams become a hunch.
For ev'ry wrong, we think another right.
Gorilla blankets change the shapes of men.
And now the human race is naught but fat.
Impossible to swim the lake of gin
We opt instead to cross the carbo vat.
For all the pain, we hope to gain a crumb.
But morning renders Bach and Wagner dumb.
Last night may have been the first time I watched "Peak Performance", the penultimate episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation's second season. I certainly don't remember watching it before. Fishing through the murky waters of my memory, I think I stopped watching the show during the first season (1987) and then started watching again in the fifth season (1991), when I heard it'd actually gotten good. I kind of remember watching the two parter "Time's Arrow" that bridged season five and six. I then went back and caught older episodes in syndication but I think I usually turned it off when I saw the tight, no collar uniforms, which they got rid of in season three. I still think season three is the best season of the series but I'm enjoying revisiting season two and, I think, in some cases, seeing bits of it for the very first time.
"Peak Performance" was written by David Kemper who later became a showrunner on the great sci-fi series Farscape. I see now he hasn't written anything since contributing a story to the short lived CW series Cult in 2013. I guess he's retired. I hope it was voluntary. Anyway, I almost always enjoyed his teleplays.
"Peak Performance" was the first of two episodes he wrote for TNG and centres on a combat training exercise. The Enterprise crew splits into two teams, one of them, headed by Riker, taking control of a starship called the Hathaway. Using simulated weapons and shields, the Hathaway and Enterprise engage in a skirmish.
But the real point of the episode seems to have been to humiliate a character called Sirna Kolrami (Roy Broksmith), who comes aboard the Enterprise as a technical advisor. He's also a grandmaster of a game called Strategema. Over the course of the episode, he's shown to be arrogantly wrong in his judgements about Riker (whom he calls too "jovial") and Picard. There's a subplot in which Data even beats him at Strategema. Brocksmith does a good job making him a smug bastard for the viewer to hate but I still couldn't help wondering why. I wonder if he was kind of an effigy of someone Kemper had it in for.
This was a cool moment between Data and Picard:
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available on Netflix.
Stellan Skarsgard and Diane Lane adopt Leelee Sobieski for sinister purposes in 2001's Glass House. I was surprised to find this a pretty effective thriller, putting me in mind of Hitchcock's Suspicion.
Sobieski's character, Ruby, and her little brother are orphaned after their parents die in a car accident. They're taken in by Terry and Erin Glass, wealthy former neighbours played by Skarsgard and Lane.
Sobieski's not bad as the point of view character but Lane and especially Skarsgard have the most fun pushing the envelope of just how suspiciously they can act, very much like Cary Grant in Suspicion. Bruce Dern has a small role as the kids' trust fund lawyer and helps sell that sense of ambiguity and paranoia.
Evidence of Terry's true nature starts to become pretty clear but it's always plausible that it's just Ruby who can see it. When a social worker visits, the Glasses cunningly arrange for Ruby to have a separate bedroom from her brother. One of her complaints in a secret meeting with the worker was that she and her brother had to share a room. The conversation between the Glasses and the social worker is arranged just right so that Ruby's believably dumbstruck enough not say anything when a reference is made to her having her own room.
This is definitely a case of the Rotten Tomatoes score, which is only 22%, being dead wrong.
Gene Hackman, unquestionably one of the finest actors of his generation, has died. So has his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa, and one of their dogs. My first thought, and apparently it was also the fire department's, was that the cause was some accidental gas inhalation but that's been ruled out. Hackman was found in a mudroom (for mud baths) and Arakawa was found in the bathroom where there were pills scattered about. Death seems to have occurred a day previous to discovery. Maybe Hackman, who was 95, died of natural causes and Arakawa retreated to the bathroom with a nervous breakdown and accidentally overdosed in a self-medicating effort. But, then, how to explain the dog?
Anyway, Hackman's performances were invariably captivating. Flawlessly natural yet invariably communicative. What a long career, too. From the stoic surveillance agent in Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation to the gasbag patriarch of Wes Anderson's Royal Tenenbaums. He was the best actor to play Lex Luther by a long shot (well, Kevin Spacey was pretty good).
I most recently watched him in The French Connection in which that film's terrific action sequences were made so in part due to the impression of ferocious tenacity Hackman conveyed.
He left us an amazing filmmography, that's for sure.
I need to touch base with great movies more often. It'd been far too long since I'd last watched 1934's It Happened One Night. What an exceptionally smooth piece of filmmaking.
There's not a superfluous moment, every scene seems to perfectly flow into the next. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert are both so brilliant. It really feels more like Gable's film, though, as it's basically a story about his character taking the reins on her life and her learning to like it. The spoiled rich girl has to learn a thing or two from the streetwise working man. There's a perfect recipe for a movie made during The Great Depression.
The only time she gets the upper hand is when she shows some leg to get a ride when they're hitchhiking. It's not politically correct in terms of the power balance between man and woman but I've certainly met plenty of rich doofuses like Colbert's character, both male and female. Colbert's saving grace is that she's gorgeous and, it turns out, has a savvy instinct towards humility, despite what Gable's character says in his angrier moments.
I don't know if I'd want to be in a relationship like theirs. It's cute watching them argue because they're both attractive and the screenplay is so perfect. But in real life, bickering couples tend to just be noise pollution.
It Happened One Night is available on The Criterion Channel.
X Sonnet 1922
Another sharp response has lit the chair.
The frozen Valentine was paper goo.
'Tis not a card that any cats repair.
As lightning strikes the oak, they're turning blue.
The water elves were living deep below.
They thought it funny humans want to walk.
And lure the oysters up above the show.
You see, their swimming life was only talk.
A counterfeit of glee has clamped their heart.
As manic troupes devour life itself.
With smug derision, killers tear apart
And twisted roots displayed upon the shelf.
An empty glass would serve as hollow world.
To cringe, the fortune fish has slowly curled.
Kathleen Kennedy is supposedly retiring. I watched Grace Randolph's YouTube video about it this morning in which Randolph argued that Kennedy's likely lousy legacy will be due to Kennedy's too aggressive endeavour to remake Star Wars into a franchise primarily aimed at women and not men. In the process, she only managed to alienate both groups. I think there's plenty of truth in that. When I first came to Japan five years ago and started working in junior high schools, when I mentioned Star Wars to students they could talk a little bit about Rey and Kylo Ren. Now when I mention Star Wars to students, most of them only know it as something their dads are into.
I suspect at the heart of the problem is Kennedy's resentment for a long career in which Spielberg and Lucas garnered praise while she stood by, feeling her contributions to the original Indiana Jones films weren't recognised. If she'd have been seeing more clearly, she might have noticed how well the first Indiana Jones movies appealed to both men and women. Marvel movies may also stubbornly, primarily appeal to a male demographic, but women will talk about the beefcake in those movies. The key to making new female characters for Star Wars or Indiana Jones would be to make them appeal to both men and women. Just like Indiana Jones, they should have been characters the opposite sex found sexy and vulnerable. If we lived in a better world. a filmmaker could do that without any shred of feeling like they were capitulating to misogynists.
But I still say the primary problem with both Indiana Jones and Star Wars is that both franchises were born in an America that was still relatively religious. The new writers don't understand religion or spirituality so the last two Indiana Jones movies became science fiction affairs and the best Star Wars projects have been Rogue One and Andor, two productions that have had next to nothing to do with the Jedi.
Who should Kathleen Kennedy's successor be? I hope it's not Dave Filoni but I'd say there's an 80% change it will be. My pick would be Tony Gilroy but it would be nice if they could find someone who could write about the Force with a real sense of appreciation.
A teenage Lindsay Lohan washes up in a small Idaho town where Jane Fonda aims to straighten her out in 2007's Georgia Rule. I found this movie to be unexpectedly, fascinatingly weird.
Wikipedia says Lohan's character, Rachel Wilcox, is "a promiscuous, heavy-drinking young woman, whose drug addiction, Lily's daughter and Georgia's granddaughter." Whose drug addiction what? Someone editing the page evidently didn't finish a thought. Anyway, she has no drug addiction in the film, she's just a bad girl in ways that aren't very well defined. Her mother, Lily (Felicity Huffman), drops her off on the road after the two fight on the way to the town. Rachel hitchhikes and is picked up by Dermot Mulroney whom she calls gay because he doesn't peep at her when she has her legs up on his dash and her dress hiked up. The film proceeds to find ways to make almost every interaction Rachel has with another character sexual in some way, including an impromptu wrestling fight with a twelve year old-ish neighbourhood kid whom she's disgusted to notice has an erection in the middle of their tussle. Jane Fonda throws cold water on the fight literally by hosing them down.
The movie is really sexy, usually in extremely awkward ways. Jane Fonda, famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) liberal in real life plays a conservative, religious woman here and she does a good job. But I sense her role was cut down substantially. She plays the Georgia of the title, Rachel's grandmother, and the title and setup made me think this was going to be a movie about her disciplining her wild daughter. However, after Rachel casually mentions to Dermot Mulroney that her stepfather, played by Cary Elwes, had sexually molested her, the whole movie becomes about whether or not she's telling the truth.
What a strange career Cary Elwes has had. Every time I think I've seen the last of him he pops up in some random role.
It really feels like screenwriter Mark Andrus had no idea how to write a small American town or a teenage girl or a religious grandmother. That's not necessarily a bad thing. When everyone's not being oddly sexy, they're being oddly erudite. Even the desk clerk at the veterinary office where Mulroney works is able to quote from Ezra Pound. Meanwhile, the extent of Georgia's religious fervour seems to be sticking a bar of soap into anyone's mouth who takes the Lord's name in vain.
I think the film got sidetracked due to some drama in Lohan's life, which would explain why it seems to start as one thing and becomes another. It is kind of a fascinating artefact, though. Set in Idaho, it was of course shot entirely in California. I was just disappointed it didn't have any Idaho potatoes.
I finally went to see 2025's Captain America: Brave New World yesterday and enjoyed it more than the reviews suggested I would. It seems like people have always complained most of the MCU movies don't feel very cinematic. I don't always agree but it's certainly the case here; this movie very much feels like an extra episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the Disney+ series. But Captain America: Civil War had that same, general, diffuse, sort of dim cinematography.
The strongest part of the film is Thaddeus Ross with Harrison Ford taking over for the late William Hurt. It would've been nice to see Hurt follow through on this character he'd played since The Incredible Hulk in 2008 but Ford does an amazing job. Ford tends to convey much more vulnerability than Hurt did (despite his name) which added great suspense to the moments where he was trying to hold the monster in.
It's usually DC stories that have more interesting villains than heroes but this certainly didn't feel like a DC movie. Neither Sam Wilson or Steve Rogers are quite as lofty as DC heroes tend to feel.
Sam really needs to take the super soldier serum. He's already doing things a mortal man shouldn't be able to do--how many times would a real life human have blacked out from his barrel rolls? So it just doesn't make sense.
I was surprised how much Japan factored into the plot. I saw it in a Japanese movie theatre, of course (I live in Japan), so I felt kind of embarrassed when Sam Wilson's few lines in Japanese showed he was even worse at it than I am. When he spoke in Japanese, he had Japanese subtitles. It was that bad. The fictional Japanese Prime Minister in the film, Ozaki, was played by Takehiro Hira, who's lived in the US since he was 15 years old. Once again, just like the stars of Shogun, the only Japanese actors the US seems able to import are actors who've lived outside of Japan for a significant amount of time. And, as usual, there are no location shots in Japan though at least the whole movie wasn't shot in Georgia this time. The Washington DC scenes are actually made in Washington DC. Not exactly a world away from Georgia but it's some improvement.
The fight choreography seemed oddly slow. Maybe it's just because Sam's not a super soldier, I don't know.
Of course the title, Brave New World, is a Shakespeare reference if it's not an Aldous Huxley reference. I'm not really sure how it may relate to either one. I guess Thaddeus Ross is sort of like Prospero and his daughter, Betty, is kind of like Miranda? It really felt like she was supposed to have a larger role but Liv Tyler wasn't available for very long. The movie is so Hulk-centric it felt really odd that Bruce Banner wasn't in it.
I've had a surprising craving for rum and Coke lately. The Wikipedia entry says you're supposed to use a light rum but it seems to me Meyers' dark rum is perfect, it almost tastes like cola on its own.
I realised I've been talking about season two of Star Trek: The Next Generation and skipped right past talking about "Q Who" and "Measure of a Man", generally considered the two most important episodes of the season. I did watch them. "Measure of a Man" holds up much better for me but I've never been a big fan of the Borg, which is what "Q Who" is mainly about--it's the episode that introduces the Borg. They always seemed slow and dull to me and that was before I knew they're basically a copy of the Cybermen from Doctor Who.
"Measure of a Man" is a courtroom episode that centres around a debate considering whether Commander Data, an android, shall continue to enjoy the rights and privileges of a sentient being. It's nice to have a show that compels the casual viewer to contemplate the nature of consciousness.
It occurs to me that, with all the recent talk of AI, no-one seems to be talking about civil rights for the emerging intelligence. All of the fear surrounding the topic makes it seem like we'll be the ones more likely to be begging the AI for recognition of our essential value as humans.
Patrick Stewart seemed so lively in these early episodes. It made me realise how much he seems to be just playing Patrick Stewart on Star Trek: Picard. In season two of TNG, you can still see him working out the personality and fundamental characteristics of just who Captain Picard is, this gruff but cultured authority figure who's slightly terrified of children.
I read the new Sirenia Digest to-day which contains the new Caitlin R. Kiernan story "The Beholder's Share". I think it's one of the best stories ever to have appeared in the Digest. It's a first person narrative describing a pair of lovers' encounter with a sinister stack of antique books. As someone who collects antique books myself, I could really dig it. It contains references to H.P. Lovecraft's "Haunter of the Dark" though I also found myself thinking of "The Uncommon Prayer Book", an MR James story I read recently. "The Beholder's Share" does a great job of conveying an impression of distorted reality and memory.
Lately I've had a frustrating tendency to fall asleep during movies, even movies I'm enjoying. I knew it was going to happen last night so I deliberately chose a movie to fall asleep to, 1953's Angel Face. It's nice just being in the presence of Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons as they perform a well written scene together. I'd forgotten Herbert Marshall has a supporting role in the film. I'd just recently watched him in Four Frightened People from almost twenty years earlier. Few actors gracefully transition from leading roles to supporting roles. Edward G. Robinson had to be coaxed into accepting the supporting role in Double Indemnity and it turned out to be possibly the best role of his career, certainly the one that's most remembered to-day. It still amazes me that Marshall had such a long acting career with a concealed false leg.
And last night I dreamt that I poured a lot of J&B scotch into a Glenlivet bottle. Don't know why.
I dreamt this after watching what many consider to be the worst episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. 1989's "Up the Long Ladder" really feels like three episodes awkwardly pasted together. The best of the three is the shortest in which Worf suddenly collapses on the bridge and Doctor Pulaski lies for him because he's embarrassed to admit he fainted. In gratitude, he shares a Klingon tea ceremony with her. The tea is deadly to humans so Pulaski takes an antidote. I really wondered what the tea tasted like.
Then it's downhill as the episode gets caught up in a plot about two ancient earth colonies: one filled with rural Irish stereotypes and the other filled with clones. One of the Irish stereotypes is a beautiful, angry young woman who flirts with Riker by constantly telling him she needs to wash her feet and asking him just where the hell a woman can do that on this fancy Starfleet ship. It's made clear she's looking for a husband yet the two inexplicably have a one night stand without a complaint from her.
Here's the moment where I fought the urge to stop watching the episode:
Yet, as bad as that plot is, I have to give the prize to the clone plot. When Riker and Worf see four identical women on the planet, they immediately assume they're quintuplets while anyone watching will immediately say, "Clones." Pulaski secretly tests one with a tricorder and there's this idiotic moment where she says, "Clones!" And then everyone takes turns saying "Clones."
It's like going into McDonalds and saying, "French fries? French fries? French fries."
When Riker and Pulaski are cloned against their will, the two of them immediately execute their nearly fully formed adult clones with phasers. This unauthorised cloning was done to perpetuate the colony, the people of which are no longer interested in sexual reproduction. When it's decided that the two colonies should combine, the clone colony with the Irish stereotype colony, Pulaski tells them every woman will be obliged to have children with at least three different men to ensure genetic diversity for the survival of the colony. The episode sadly concludes before it can deal with that heavy kettle of fish.
X Sonnet 1921
Restrictive nights combine the dreams of bats.
A timer shrieks, alerting certain rocks.
A book conceals a rack of headless hats.
The day concludes with cries of bootless socks.
A speechless song could not traverse the years.
Absorbing rainy time was spongy snow.
Consuming gods withheld Poseidon's beers.
A tiny brocc'li heart begins to glow.
The angry orc could only prove the elves.
Outrageous dwarves were drawn to snowy dames.
A line of books has bent the cheesy shelves.
Expanding pictures broke the rotten frames.
With little hope, the sun prepares its tea.
At dawn, horizons fell beneath the sea.
There were lots of whales and walruses in my dream last night. First, I dreamt I was with someone, I don't know who, on an enormous, soggy beach on a gloomy day. It was a very flat beach with lots of smooth puddles mirroring the sky. We were talking about walruses suffering from some kind of malignant genetic mutation and as we spoke I started seeing what looked like slugs, about a foot long each. It was just three or four and they were hard to see, their brown skin roughly the same colour as the sand. I followed one as it disappeared into a mound about the height of my chest. I peered inside and could just make out the thing nervously writhing.
In my other dream, I was at an enormous water park that encompassed an area of sea just offshore about the size of a small town. It was a stormy day and the waves were very high but no-one seemed especially concerned about our tour boat. From there, me and a group of friends beheld a series of whales kept in massive mason jars that were partly submerged.
After we went home, I rounded up another group of friends and took them to see the same whales in big jars. I guess this all could've been because I was reading Moby Dick again yesterday.
Jack Nicholson is checked in to a mental institution and his skills as an amateur therapist quickly outshine the nurses and doctors in 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The film certainly has a valid point even if it does stack the deck a bit.
The administrative staff aren't even convinced Randle McMurphy (Nicholson) is as crazy as he would have them believe. He may be feigning mental illness entirely to avoid prison labour, having been convicted for having sex with a fifteen year old girl. His charisma and provocative antics rapidly win the sympathy and loyalty of the inmates over the consummately starchy Miss Ratched (Louise Fletcher). When Randle successfully gets the other inmates to vote to have the World Series shown instead of listening to Ratched's sedate classical selections yet again, she's compelled to change the voting rules so that even inmates who are clearly incapable of comprehending the vote must also be counted. Naturally, this only shores up more loyalty for Randle.
The movie's trajectory is pretty clear from the beginning but it's certainly true to life. A lot of critical thought about the film is concerned with the nature of true madness but I don't think it presents a fair argument on that. Randle takes them all out for a fishing trip and there's miraculously not even one significant mishap. What if there had been, as likely would've been the case? Would that have proved Randle wrong and Ratched right? No, because the real argument isn't about who's mad but about who's genuinely concerned for his or her fellow human being. Randle intuitively knows that providing the inmates with opportunities to gain a sense of self-worth will be more constructive than Ratched's philosophy of mental and physical sedation.
The film has a great cast. Both Nicholson and Fletcher are great and the supporting cast is flawless, featuring Will Sampson, Brad Dourif, Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito, and Scatman Crothers.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is available on The Criterion Channel.
Cutie Street, a Japanese idol group that formed last year, asks, "かわいいだけじゃだめですか? " Is just being cute inadequate? Not if cuteness is what you seek and it seems to have satisfied the 31 million people who have viewed the video in the past four months.
This was one of five or six groups that students recommended to me recently. On the flipside are groups like Creepy Nuts and Mrs. Green Apple, the latter now having enjoyed ten years of stressing out Japanese English teachers who are trying to get students to refer to married and unmarried women alike as "Ms."
As someone who's never been convinced that words attaching significance to gender or marital status are inherently bad, I say, long live Mrs. Green Apple.
But is cuteness enough? I suppose it ought to be. But I also like violent video games and savoury foods so maybe I'm a lost cause.
I remain grateful to the student who recommended Sabrina Carpenter to me last year. Her career really seems to be taking off, or at least the old guard celebrity elite in America seem to think so. She had a duet with Paul Simon at the recent Saturday Night Live anniversary show and she recorded a new music video for her song "Please Please Please" with none other than Dolly Parton sharing vocals.
I was talking to someone yesterday about how much I used to dislike pop princesses like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilara. With Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, Carly Rae Jepson, and others, we seem to be in a much better era of pop princesses, which is I guess is one way the 21st century has improved on the '90s. There had to be at least one improvement, you know.
X Sonnet 1920
No dancing dollar woke the jolly bird.
Corruption spurned a sweetened halter top.
Resentment builds another loaded word.
And gangsters hoard a vital staple crop.
A desert day obscured the winter morn.
The takers trudge ahead to find a test.
Another group of figures sure were born.
A school will bulge with Mother Gaia's best.
Excessive plants have broken glass and clay.
The pots were made by stingy folks and worms.
A ruthless snow obscures the brilliant day.
But savage fighters take the angry terms.
A paper fight will cut the tiny thumbs.
A vacuum god will snort the trail of crumbs.
I couldn't help thinking of this joke from Futurama when I was watching "Pen Pals", a 1989 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It has to be among the episodes that most spectacularly fail at showing the android Data as incapable of emotion. He intercepts a transmission from a little alien girl on a technologically undeveloped world threatened by volcanic destruction. Data seems to have very little compunction about soliciting Picard to violate the Prime Directive, the Federation rule that prohibits contact with intelligent species who have not achieved space travel. The whole episode hinges on Data's pity for the girl and willingness to transgress any rule to save her and her planet, which it turns out is on the edge of destruction. Which is sweet but, you know, hardly in character.
The episode has a minor subplot with Picard showing off his horseback riding skill to Troi which really felt like something Patrick Stewart must have lobbied for.
It's worth remembering that Picard is being so affectionate with an entirely AI generated animal. Sometimes Star Trek didn't even know when it was being prophetic.
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available on Netflix.
Oh, you didn't think I was finished talking about Lost Highway with yesterday's entry, did you? I feel like I could talk about it forever.
I wonder if many people have considered the possibility that Lynch looked at Mr. Eddie (Robert Loggia) as a heroic character. For all his bluster, the only person we actually know he killed was Marilyn Manson, who may have been a demon. There's the tailgating scene and certainly he's excessively violent there. But I remember an interview with Michael Anderson on the first Twin Peaks season one DVD in which he talked about riding with Lynch and witnessing someone tailgating him. Lynch shrugged it off but Anderson commented that the tailgater was such an asshole that he would have been furious had he been in Lynch's shoes. Then, years later, Anderson saw that scene in Lost Highway and figured Lynch got his revenge. After Lynch and Michael Anderson, who was the dwarf on Twin Peaks, had a falling out, Lynch made a scene in the third season of Twin Peaks in which Agent Cooper nearly rips off a dwarf's hand, egged on by a talking cgi tree that took the place of Anderson in the role. So Lynch was not above indulging in cathartic violence vicariously through his characters.
Loggia believed he got the role as Mr. Eddie because he gave a memorably violent audition for Frank Booth, the role that Dennis Hopper eventually played in Blue Velvet. But Frank is utterly amoral while Mr. Eddie clearly has a kind of moral code. Mr. Eddie was a gangster but consider how the Mitchum brothers, the two gangsters on the third season of Twin Peaks, turned out to be heroic characters. So I think it's possible that Lynch considered Mr. Eddie a better man than Fred Madison. After all, Renee certainly seems to be happier with Mr. Eddie.
Following on from what I said yesterday about Lost Highway and surveillance culture, I remember when I watched the movie with my grandfather he mentioned that the prison you see Fred in, in which guards on a catwalk above could look down on the prisoners in cells without ceilings, was an actual prison design implemented in France.
I suppose I would be kind of remiss for not mentioning the panopticon, the prison designed so that prisoners would never know whether or not they're being watched at any given time. Michel Foucault famously used the panopticon has a point in discussion about modern discipline and it was used in the 1984 film version of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Of all the songs on Lost Highway's famous soundtrack, it's The Smashing Pumpkins' "Eye" that best connects with this idea.
I think my favourite track is Nine Inch Nails' "Perfect Drug", though, even though it's barely in the movie. Mark Romanek's music video for it is still amazing.
1997's Lost Highway is probably about a conflict between perception and reality. I say probably because the one thing everyone agrees on about it is that it's open to interpretation. In fact, it demands interpretation if you want it to be coherent at all. Which, honestly, it doesn't need to be. You know you can enjoy a movie for mood and aesthetic alone and Lost Highway certainly fits the bill.
I've certainly interpreted it plenty of times over the years but great art is always alive, always ready to twist around and change on you. The movie's different because I'm different, to paraphrase Bruce Willis' character in 12 Monkeys when he was watching Vertigo. It's impossible for me to watch Lost Highway now without thinking about surveillance culture in Japan, where I've lived for the past five years. While stalking and illegally recording people are both crimes in Japan, the punishments for them are often light and meaningless and camera technology has advanced and proliferated so rapidly as to be beyond anyone's control. It's not just men secretly recording women, either. Camera technology is advancing in a collective culture for which people maintaining a communal perspective on the activities of one another was already fundamental. The existence of love hotels is testimony to this fact. A dating couple can't expect privacy in their own homes thanks to the constant presence of gossiping neighbours. Even at the love hotels themselves, doors lock guests in when other guests are in the hall, because even there there's a chance of gossiping witnesses.
In light of this, it's hardly surprising that kids are increasingly saying they want to be VTubers, Virtual YouTubers, when they grow up. Why devote yourself to this life where your community is constantly poised to reduce you to walking meat when you can create a beautiful artificial life, tailored entirely to your tastes?
That brings me back to Fred Madison. Every interpretation of Lost Highway highlights that line, early on, when he's asked why he hates video cameras. "I like to remember things my own way . . . How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened." The common interpretation of the film is that the reason the events it depicts are filled with logical problems is that we're seeing Fred's distorted memory. The video tapes that mysteriously turn up on Fred and Renee's doorstep force Fred to see the reality that he would prefer to avoid in favour of his creative memories.
One question I rarely see addressed is over the identity of the person behind the camera. Most people, myself included, assume it's the "Mystery Man" played by Robert Blake, an apparently supernatural entity who demonstrates his ability to be in two places at once or appear and disappear at will. Some people interpret the Mystery Man as a manifestation of Fred's conscience. But if the video tapes are meant to represent unfiltered reality, that can't be true. I generally feel the Mystery Man is meant to be an actual demon, possibly from the Black Lodge if Lost Highway is set in the same world as Twin Peaks. Another thing people tend not to talk about is Marilyn Manson's cameo in the film's climax, surprising considering how significantly the film frames the scene. When Mr. Eddie asks, "What do you guys want?" it's video of the snuff film in which Manson is apparently killed that the Mystery Man shows Mr. Eddie in response. After this, the Mystery Man, not Fred, shoots and kills Mr. Eddie. My interpretation has long been that Manson's character is another demon and the Mystery Man is seeking revenge for his death, using Fred Madison as an instrument of that revenge. Consider how visually similar Manson and the Mystery Man are. Both have shaved eyebrows, white face paint, and dyed black hair.
The Mystery Man may not be merely a symbol within the story but you could take him as one in the more traditional sense of storytelling. He's a demon like Saint Augustine talked about, one feeding a perspective of violence to Fred, pulling at a thread in Fred's psyche. Another thing I'm surprised people don't talk about is just how violently Renee is murdered. Director David Lynch said that he was inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial and Simpson's murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown. Brown was murdered very violently, stabbed multiple times and her throat so deeply gashed as to nearly decapitate her. That's still not even close to what was done to Renee who in the video is shown to be torn in half, her entrails stretched across the floor, and her leg and arms severed. How and why Fred did this are two questions I'd think everyone would be asking.
The woman being torn in half is likely to remind anyone aware of Hollywood history of the infamous Black Dahlia murder. Elizabeth Short was similarly mutilated though her murderer went to the further extremes of leaving her body naked in a public place and carving a Glasgow smile on her face. It's hard not to see the Dahlia murder as a form of demented artistic expression in which the killer used Elizabeth Short's body to make something new. The act itself seems not only to be a denial of Short's dignity and desires but a comment on that denial. He reduced her to meat and a parody of woman, a parody of the idea that a human being can be anything more than meat.
As Shakespeare's King Lear put it;
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm.
Lost Highway is bookended by "I'm Deranged", a song by David Bowie from his Outside concept album which tells the story of a future where artists frequently kill and mutilate people as a form of artistic expression. So I think it's reasonable to assume this was on Lynch's mind.
The video of Fred with Renee's mutilated body is not just forcing Fred into a perspective, it's forcing Renee into one, too. In reality, a human being is blood, flesh, and bone. It's in our minds that we have more than nature needs, where we create personae and sort the narratives of our lives. Some people interpret Fred's preference for subjective reality as an inherently bad thing but David Lynch did not share this view. In an interview about the film, Lynch said,
"So it just shows you how you remember things is not necessarily the way it actually happened. But it's the way you remember it and it's maybe even more valid than the actual thing in some ways." Fred is unbalanced and subject to "psychogenic fugues". But his mind is also the one that perceives the beautiful "This Magic Moment" sequence and the "Song to the Siren" sequence, both cases where Renee, in the form of a character named Alice, is at the centre of exceptionally beautiful filmmaking. The mind may be led astray, but it's also what ennobles our existence. When one considers that, it makes sense that the Mystery Man is both the agent of objective reality and Fred and Renee's ultimate destruction.
Here's what I honestly think happened. At some point during his first term, Trump had a conversation with Putin about how powerful countries used to go out and conquer new territory and why don't they do that anymore? Putin said with his military power he could easily do just that and Trump replied he could do it purely with real estate transactions. Putin scoffed and so the two men made a bet; Putin would conquer all he could militarily, beginning with Ukraine, and Trump would get all he could by negotiation. That's what I think's happening. Trump's making bids for so many countries because he has to make up for lost time.
Maybe that's why I was in the mood to watch Disney's Pocahontas last night (incidentally, Pocahontas is Trump's nickname for Elizabeth Warren because she mistakenly claimed to have Native American heritage). It's the movie with an Australian playing an Englishman with an American accent. It's certainly funny watching such a nakedly leftwing movie starring a man who I heard deny evolution on Joe Rogen a few days ago. Mel Gibson is truly nuts and it's fascinating watching him talk, watching his eyes roll around like a girl speaking tongues for a Salem witch trial. I still say Passion of the Christ is a terrible film, not for its ideology but because it does things like illuminate night scenes with massive floodlights.
Disney's Pocahontas is really sexy which always makes the movie a pleasure to watch. Though maybe less credit ought to go to Glen Keane than is generally given because of how realistic the proportions of the characters are in that movie and how much they resemble the live action models.
It's almost rotoscoping.
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone in this time zone. I could've watched It Happened One Night on The Criterion Channel but I chose poor dated little Pocahontas as my Valentine instead. Maybe I have a soft spot for misbegotten art. It's still edifying, or it ought to be, that Disney thought Pocahontas was going to be the big hit and The Lion King, which was made at the same time, was going to be just a little side project. Hollywood underestimating America's conservatism is nothing new.
X Sonnet 1919
Revealing toys deserve an extra paste.
Connexions break before the bot can walk.
Your morning choc'ate primes your better taste.
Magenta jelly hearts can warmly talk.
The loving coat conducts his dame to court.
Beginning dances blot the soggy card.
The walls were pasted thick with floral sort.
Expensive wine was used to pay the bard.
Her feet were cut with brazen diamond rings.
A rocky floor was thus her battlefield.
The whiles a drunken local crooner sings.
Absurdist dreams do jagged princes yield.
As sharpened crystal hearts would pierce the ball
Her triumph saged the kingdom's boozy fall.
One of the things I love about living in Japan is the wind. It gets really strong and eerie. It kind of kept me up at 2am, though. Something was banging around, hopefully nothing important.
It a nice follow up to a nicely creepy episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation I watched, a second season episode called "Time Squared". The crew of the Enterprise comes across a Starfleet shuttle and when they bring it aboard they find it's in fact an Enterprise shuttle complete with its own Captain Picard unconscious inside. But there's something wrong with both vessel and man. The latter can't regain consciousness though he appears oddly panicked. I like how Troi is brought into the episode by significantly walking into frame after the copy Picard is wheeled off in a gurney. She confirms it's really Picard.
Polanski says the second Picard is "out of phase" somehow. I wish this episode had better technobabble. I know "out of phase somehow" isn't what her tricorder readout says. What exactly are we talking about?
Anyway, it's a good episode. There were a few moments that seem tonally off from what the show became in later seasons and I got a kick out of them. There's a scene were Troi and Polanski debate about Picard's mental fitness that was really awkward and premature but somehow enjoyable for that.
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available on Netflix.
Rebellious Japanese teenagers deal with the presence of Americans and American culture in 1956's Crazed Fruit (狂った果実). The film has a similar flavour to American delinquent movies which dealt with teens in a world of changing cultural and familial dynamics. Crazed Fruit has a mostly average ensemble cast with the exception of a terrific performance from a young Ishihara Yujiro who sells the drama and suspense excellently.
Ishihara plays the elder brother of innocent young Haruji (Tsugawa Masahiko). It's Haruji's innocence that draws the eye of beautiful young Eri (Kitahara Mie).
Director Nakahira Ko uses rapid editing and expressionistic lighting to establish the fast, hedonistic lifestyle of the "sun tribe" (太陽族) boys who even count an American boy named Frank among them--actually played by Okada Masumi whose father was Japanese and mother was Danish. But he passes as American well enough in the movie.
Ishihara's character, Natsuhisa, immediately deduces there's something more to Eri than meets the eye when he dances with her and she doesn't recoil from his closer embrace. It turns out she has an American husband twice her age. Natsuhisa, now concerned for his little brother, confronts her about this and she explains that her relationship with Haruji is meant to make up for youthful experience she was robbed of when she was compelled to marry the American. The situation is a direct commentary on a phenomenon of Japanese and American intermarriage occurring in Japan after World War II and more broadly on fears concerning an erosion of Japanese cultural values and life patterns. Considering the film's noted similarity to American delinquent movies of the period, the problems experienced by these teens may have been more universal than the filmmakers realised. It functions as a good suspense drama in any case.
Crazed Fruit is available on The Criterion Channel.
I read the latest Sirenia Digest to-day which has the new Caitlin R. Kiernan story called "DARKNESS, ON THE FACE OF THE DEEP". It's another nice, gloomily atmospheric piece.
Like many of Caitlin's stories for the Digest, it consists of dialogue between two lovers. It's told in first person by a writer who's gone to stay at a seaside cabin while working on a novel. Strolling on the beach one day, the writer sees something strange and elects not to inform anyone. I'd say it's ultimately a story about communication and how much responsibility one has for their isolation. With the gloomy beach setting, it could've been an Ingmar Bergman movie.
I watched Lost Highway on Sunday, planning to blog about it on Monday but realised I have too much to say about the film. So I've been reading and watching analyses of it made by others in preparation for a much longer essay I'll probably write this coming weekend. Unsurprisingly, most of the videos covering it on YouTube regurgitate the same observations. One of the few unique takes I came across argued that Fred Madison's derangement comes from his bitterness at being a terrible saxophone player. It was no joke. You may not like the song, "Red Bats with Teeth," and it's deliberately designed to be abrasive, but only a highly competent saxophonist could handle it.
I blame the analyst's lack of exposure to avaunt-garde music.
To-day's a holiday here in Japan and I've already squandered most of it playing Skyrim. I've been playing with another modded companion character, this one a really impressive piece of work called Ashe: Crystal Heart. In addition to a number of innovative gaming features, Ashe has easily the best voice actress I've heard in any mod so far. Which is no surprise since she's a working professional named Anna Rust who has appeared in numerous films and television series. She even has a Wikipedia entry. Skyrim modding is getting out of hand and it's great. I reiterate; this is a totally free, user made mod.
It comes from a modder called Martimus who also made the Serana Dialogue Add-On. And, like that mod, the writing is sometimes too cheesy and effusive. But most of it is good enough and Anna Rust's performance boosts it considerably.
Last night I dreamt that Disney took over the world and things got worse and worse by slow degrees. People were prohibited from taking in any media from outside the company and even unedited versions of Disney's own past catalogue. There was a woman who somehow smuggled in goods in her big orange Spanish skirt. It may or may not have been due to this that Disney next demanded everyone's clothes. In our large, brightly lit rooms with walls painted with blue skies and clouds, people were ordered to pile their clothes in the middle of the room under constant surveillance. Somehow I kept a DVD copy of The Return of the King: Extended Edition hidden.
I guess I've always had a kind of love/hate relationship with Disney. I'm fascinated by their best work but put off by their aggressive corporate identity. When I came up with Boschen and Nesuko in junior high school over thirty years ago, the tyrannical Zai'Pi Corporation was based on Disney. In one of the novels I wrote but never published, Nesuko even talks about her conflicting feelings about Zai'Pi, how she remembered loving the animation as a child yet it sits oddly beside the devastating impact the company had had on her life. To be sure, she, and I, had worse problems.
A man goes great lengths to redeem his name from the charge of cowardice in 1939's The Four Feathers. Every source I read on this film sees fit to mention it is "widely regarded as the best of numerous film adaptations of the 1902 novel" it's based on. I've never read the novel nor seen the other adaptations but the 1939 film is damned good.
Directed by Zoltan Korda and actually filmed on location in Sudan and England, it concerns the Mahdist War from the end of the 19th century. Harry Faversham (John Clements) comes from a military family who has pressured him all his life to join the ranks. Only, when it comes to it, it turns out all their stories of bloody war and people shamed for cowardice has had the unintended effect of convincing him to bow out entirely. He seems to think he can do so without any shame and explains to his fiancee, Ethne (June Duprez), in a calm and even slightly enthusiastic tone that he can stay home and build a family with her.
How do you sympathetically show a woman disappointed that her man is not going off to war? With great restraint and an intensely beautiful actress. Deprez in her soft blue gown and magenta lipstick has no reaction but to cast her eyes down in some visible confusion. Harry's three best friends are more strident, each sending him a white feather with obvious symbolism. Ethne won't give him one but Harry bitterly takes one from her fan in ironic self-reproach. That makes four.
After his friends have gone and Harry seems basically separated from Ethne, he regrets his actions and takes the extraordinary measures of going to Sudan and disguising himself as a mute local worker. So begins his adventures that culminate in a terrific sequence where he leads a young Ralph Richardson, one of the three friends who sent him feathers, through the desert after he'd been blinded by sunstroke.
Those looking at this film through a modern lens might deplore the implicit approval for British colonialism, though it would be hard to argue the British were morally in the wrong in this conflict. But I suspect the most jarringly antiquated cultural aspect is in its celebration of bravery. For decades now, placating fear has been more encouraged than overcoming it with emphasis on therapy and sketchy pseudo-psychological concepts like trigger warnings. I sometimes feel I'm one of very few people left on earth who still dislikes cowardice. The imperative to avoid difficult issues and uncomfortable confrontations that has now been deemed a virtue seems to me detrimental to a society's ability to properly function. As John Milton put it, "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race."
So I found The Four Feathers a deeply satisfying film. Ralph Richardson gives a great performance and you can see how carefully he studied the mannerisms of the blind to play his part.
The Four Feathers is available on The Criterion Channel.
Netflix needs a feature that keeps track of when I fall asleep during a show. I fell asleep during the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called "The Dauphin" and woke up in the middle of the next one, called "Contagion". I woke up and Geordi LaForge was tumbling about in a turbolift and I had no idea why. It occurred to me it would be kind of a great prank if an entire 45 minute episode consisted of just that with no explanation.
I went back and watched "The Dauphin" properly, and I'm glad I did because it has a very brief cameo by Madchen Amick I'd forgotten all about. Actually, I probably hadn't watched the episode since 1989 and therefore had no idea at the time she'd be on a show I loved called Twin Peaks.
Wesley Crusher falls in love with the beautiful title character who, along with her governess/nursemaid, turns out to be a shapeshifter. Oddly, when the Dauphin wants to follow Wesley's advice and stay aboard the Enterprise instead of carrying out her destiny to live on a hell world the rest of her life, Picard doesn't even consider granting her asylum. He just tells Wesley to stay away from her. That's sloppy writing. I feel like a couple seasons later, the writers would immediately take that as an opportunity for a conundrum.
The episode really drops the ball by keeping her mission vague. It's hard to decide how selfish she's actually being.
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available on Netflix.
X Sonnet 1918
A thousand steps were melted down to lumps.
To swallow stone, the titan brews a shake.
Ignoring signs, the driver heeds the bumps.
The ladies gather wheat and yeast to bake.
The taste of chalk was packed with message love.
As hand in hand, the perfect lovers eat,
They form a vision like a sugar dove.
Affection's ribbon holds the cattle meat.
A proper meal includes a course of fat.
And happy salt and oil round the man.
But lovers spare but little love for that.
From rolling balls of chocolate, Indys ran.
Discovered love was writ on ancient scrolls.
'Twere chips of grain that filled the screening bowls.
A grown woman poses as a twelve year old to get cheaper train fare and winds up in a military officer's cabin in 1942's The Major and the Minor. This was the first American film directed by Billy Wilder and he hit the ground running with one of the cleverest and most engaging comedies of all time.
Ginger Rogers plays the minor, Susan "Su-Su" Applegate, and Ray Milland is the major, Major Philip Kirby. What innocent days the 1940s were when a guy like him thinks it no more than an amusing lark to invite a 12 year old girl he just met to sleep in his cabin on the trip from New York to Iowa. I was surprised, though, how believable Ginger Rogers, who was 31 at the time, was as a twelve year old. The only one she doesn't fool is Lucy (Diana Lynn), the twelve year old sister of Philip's fiancee, but the two immediately become comrades.
It's a funny and insightful moment when Susan uses cutesy lingo to inquire whether Lucy's goldfish would die and Lucy cuts her off, telling her to "drop the baby talk." Susan's able to fool the adults because she gives them exactly what adults expect of a twelve year-old; guileless innocence. Naturally, Lucy knows better. Lucy has a whole chemical lab set up to open her sister's mail without detection. She has cigarettes hidden under her couch, which she politely shares with Susan. Susan's whole mission of deception aligns perfectly with Lucy's normal routine. That's one of the marks of great comedy, or great art; to show you something strange and then cause you to realise it's perfectly normal at the same time.
Of course, romance must somehow blossom between Susan and Philip. The movie's almost entirely from Susan's perspective and it's not hard to see why she would fall for the kind-hearted guy, though the movie's a little awkward at explaining how he might eventually see her as a woman. Before that, though, Susan has to contend with all the cadets at the academy who, despite their youth, are no more angels than Lucy or Susan.
The Major and the Minor is available on The Criterion Channel in their Love in Disguise playlist.
American politics are really pathetic at the moment. I was thinking yesterday about Trump's executive orders and contrasting it with the swirling cloud of disaster around Emilia Perez, the 2024 Oscar frontrunner with thirteen nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress. It already cleaned up at the Golden Globes and Cannes. All this despite being on no reputable Best Films of the Year list and being widely reviled by people of all political stripes. Its star, transwoman Karla Sofia Gascon, has been cancelled after old tweets of hers were dredged up that have been called racist and Islamophobic. So much for her being a poster child for the trans-community. It's been said before--Republicans seem to be able to hold their noses and stand behind Donald Trump but the Left can't stop paring down every leader and symbol in a quixotic quest for purity.
Of course, a president and a movie are two different things but both ought to be judged on their own merits. I hate prejudice and clique mentality equally, regardless of political affiliation.
It's so weird that the trans community has become a political football when you consider what a tiny percentage of the U.S. population it is. For the Right, they've become a scapegoat, primed for the role by misguidedly aggressive advocacy by the Left. I'm thinking of a few months ago when there was a Twitter controversy over a Japanese McDonalds commercial everyone loved of a mother and father and their baby enjoying french fries contrasted with an American ad of an angry obese transwoman saying, "Stop killing us." I don't want to tell people trying to seduce Americans into eating fast food how to do their jobs but it would've seemed obvious to me they weren't doing themselves or the trans community any favours with the latter ad.
I found myself thinking of the Restoration in 1660 again. Somehow, the republic of competing brands of Puritan gloom and doom and members of Parliament unable to see past their personal interests became less appealing than a decadent royal family who would open the playhouses and let people enjoy a cynical comedy like The Country Wife with said character being played by a woman. Meanwhile, not all of Charles II's interests were the people's, but at least he was able to get things done.
The hatred of transpeople goes beyond scapegoating, though. It's a figurehead for a wider fear of strangeness. Jordan Peterson, like JK Rowling, is a leading voice on this and, like Rowling, I like some things Peterson has written on other topics. But in a number of his YouTube videos, Peterson has mapped a trans-psychological progression involved with children not being normalised properly by society. He talks about how children can pretend to be spacemen and horses but, as they age, they're supposed to be shown the error of their ways by a society that resists acknowledging them as whatever they wish without merit. I recognise the utility of sounding boards, tough love, and unvarnished advice. But I also value strangeness and idiosyncratic thinking. Great artists are guilty of both and average artists can at least be interesting if they learn how to value these qualities in themselves. Anyone can. It seems to me that's the kind of thing conservatives should get behind but the hypocrisy of them advocating mavericks and condemning freaks is nothing new.
For more on the Interregnum Parliament, check out John Milton's History of Britain, Book III:
Fleeing from a plague ridden ship into the Malayan jungle are the subjects of 1934's Four Frightened People, a smaller adventure film Cecil B. DeMille made between two of his massive spectacles. It doesn't rank among his best but it is charming.
It's Pre-Code which means star Claudette Colbert has a nude scene, bathing in a waterfall when the two men, played by Herbert Marshall and William Gargan, accidentally interrupt her. Of course a chimpanzee steals her clothes and Marshall insists on carrying her out of the water before she catches an pneumonia. Herbert Marshall was a good actor and he managed to make this absurd excuse sound perfectly sincere. But I couldn't help thinking of Scottie undressing Madeleine in Vertigo, an instance of Hitchcock highlighting the subtextual perversion of scenes like this. Maybe it wasn't so subtextual; I'm inclined to think DeMille was winking broadly at us.
The fourth member of the group is played by Mary Boland, a wealthy society lady who doesn't stop lecturing everyone who can hear on morality and civility when she's captured by the natives. She carries a placid little dog throughout the film. I was amused that the animal is never even mentioned in dialogue.
Colbert's character is a mousy geographer teacher who's transformed into a bombshell by her trek through the jungle. Results from this makeover method may vary.
Four Frightened People is a pleasant diversion and it's available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a Claudette Colbert playlist.
A man's need for a green card and a woman's desire to become an escape artist come together in 1991's The Linguini Incident, an S&M allegory comedy starring David Bowie and Rosanna Arquette. It's cute.
I'm not sure what it has to do with linguini. It might be a play on words referring to Arquette's character's obsession with Houdini. She plays Lucy, a waitress at a chic New York night club where David Bowie plays Monte, the new bartender from England. They have some fractious flirting before circumstances align so that he's the only one who can save her from the manacles and rope she's accidentally locked herself in in her apartment. But he requires something in exchange: marriage.
The road from there does not run smooth, of course. Despite involving a heist and high stakes betting and, of course, Rosanna Arquette in physical restraints, the tone of the film remains that of a light comedy throughout. Bowie and Arquette have good chemistry though occasionally it's odd seeing Bowie do light comedy. It's hard not to take him seriously.
The Linguini Incident is available on The Criterion Channel in a recently remastered director's cut.
Happy Groundhog Day to people in the U.S. for whom it it is still February 2nd. To-day is already February 3rd here in Japan. I watched the 1993 movie once again last night. It's called 恋はデジャ・ブ, Koiwa deja vu or "Love is Deja Vu" because most people haven't heard of the holiday in Japan. Of course, the holiday wasn't well known in the U.S. before the movie came out and that was part of the fun of the title. But it's pretty typical for an alternate foreign title to be unimaginative.
I told many classrooms about the holiday last week. Part of the process is explaining exactly what a groundhog is. The animal's name in Japanese is just woodchuck rendered in katakana, Japanese characters, and none of the students have heard of that either, though one teacher remembered an old anime featuring a woodchuck. I drew pictures of the animal and showed video of the Punxsutawny event. One group of students was for some reason so disturbed by the existence of an animal there's no Japanese word for that they continued trying to insist it was a hamster, bear, or squirrel.
I really enjoyed watching the movie again though I fell asleep during it. I finished it this morning. It never gets old, a surprising thing for a movie so repetitive.
X Sonnet #1917: Groundhog Day Edition
Emerging late, the seer peers about.
The sheen of snow could blind an aging bat.
But darkness shows the husky rodent's route.
A length of cold, he tells the silken hat.
From out the hole, the marmot blinks at dawn.
The gleaming white of frost conceals his van.
His body's shade precedes his body gone.
"Extended winter," claims the furry man.
The sun arose behind the rising runt.
A league of pretty snow beset his eyes.
In little time, for darkness does he hunt.
"The season lingers late," he harshly cries.
They call him hog who dwells about the ground.
Forever shall he live another round.
Years ago, when I was binging on pirate movies, I read about 1944's Frenchman's Creek but was unable to get my hands on a copy. Of course I wondered why. It starred Joan Fontaine, won an Academy Award for costume design, was a big budget film for Paramount and based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier. Why was it so obscure? Now I know why. It's unbelievably bad.
The first fifteen minutes or so aren't bad. The costumes are beautiful, particularly for a 17th century enthusiast like me. An early scene at a party, in which Joan Fontaine is menaced by Basil Rathbone much as her sister, Olivia de Havilland, was a couple times in the '30s, is kind of marvellous. But as time passed I started to wonder--where's the Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power of this movie? Fontaine's character, the wealthy Dona St. Columb, moves to the countryside and is promptly kidnapped by pirates, the captain of whom turns out to be the leading man, Arturo de Cordova.
Okay, I said the costumes were great, but this is a notable exception. This one has what appears to be a gut window. I was bewildered when I saw this thing. Who thought this was a good idea? Obviously standards of muscular perfection have changed. But I'm pretty sure this--jerkin? Doublet?--would look unflattering on Chris Evans. There is some historical accuracy in it as men did wear doublets unbuttoned in such a manner from the bottom, exposing an undershirt. Why isn't he wearing an undershirt? I can only presume this was for titillation, for those who like their men with soft, hairy bellies.
Even worse, it's the first time we see him, and you know what they say about first impressions. The movie proceeds to be an unabashed, wealthy woman's daydream about leaving her boring old life of comfort and wealth for one in which she gets to rob people and wag swords at them, though, notably, the pirates don't do much killing in this movie. De Cordova's performance is that of a smiling, mild mannered department store clerk guiding his wealthy patroness from one decadent display item to another.
Joan Fontaine, surprisingly, isn't much better. All the subtlety she exhibited in her films with Alfred Hitchcock is gone here, replaced by outright mugging. I was reminded of an Elvis Costello lyric; "She looked like she learned to dance from a series of still pictures." That's how I'd describe her performance here. She lumbers from one facial expression to another, at times seeming totally disconnected from the scene, at other times broadly projecting when her character is supposed to be keeping a secret.
I need hardly say she and de Cordova have no chemistry. She would've been better off with Basil Rathbone.
Frenchman's Creek is available on The Criterion Channel as part of a "Love in Disguise" playlist.
That's Marianne Faithfull, who passed away yesterday, performing her breakout hit "As Tears Go By" in Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 film Made in U.S.A. Typical for Godard in the period, he places a singer in an unusual context to illustrate how music manipulates the audience. It also suits Faithfull as one of the most earth-bound artists ever to break into the heights of pop stardom. Just a few years later, she would be living on the streets, very far indeed from the glamour of fame.
I first encountered the work of Marianne Faithfull in the 1990s. She recorded a song with Angelo Badalamenti for another French film, The City of Lost Children.
She went on to record a whole album with Badalamenti which, as I was so impressed by "Who Will Take My Dreams Away", I bought a copy of. In those pre-internet days, it was some time before I learned of her more successful earlier career.
"Who Will Take My Dreams Away", "As Tears Go By", and the songs on her 1979 comeback album, Broken English, especially the hit "Ballad of Lucy Jordan", share a clear preoccupation with death and passing time that cannot be recovered, a wistful mono no aware.
She was also an actress. In 1968, she starred in The Girl on a Motorcycle, directed by legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff. In 1969, she appeared as Ophelia in a film version of William Shakespeare's Hamlet with Nicol Williamson as Hamlet and Anthony Hopkins as Claudius. It's hard to imagine more appropriate casting for the role. I think she's my favourite Ophelia.
With fears rising lately regarding AI, it's perhaps edifying to look back on how the topic manifested in fiction in the past. The 1993 episode of The X-Files called "Ghost in the Machine" depicts an AI gone mad and killing people by electrocuting them and sabotaging elevators. Oh, well. It's a fun episode.
The first scene feels like it comes from a much cheaper show. Two actors have dialogue in a room lit like a department store where someone got light bulbs just a bit below the requisite wattage. Both actors are conspicuously dubbed giving the scene a feeling like a foreign commercial that was imported to the U.S. Like a Mentos commercial basically.
The evil AI, called "C.O.S." for "Central Operating System", constructs a voice synthesizer for itself to announce its every action like a Dalek; "DELETE! DELETE!" But the influence here is unabashedly 2001; COS starts borrowing lines directly from HAL at the end. One of the writers of the episode later said he was unhappy with it and blamed his own computer illiteracy.
I will say Mulder comes off as especially cool in the episode. I really liked a scene where a security gate comes down on Mulder and Scully's car as they try to enter a parking garage. It sets off the car horn and Mulder gets out of the car, opens the hood, switches off the horn, and says, "So much for the element of surprise." It's kind of an Indiana Jones moment of competence and ruefulness. He needed this after the episode where he was chasing the naked lady.
The X-Files is available on Disney+ in Japan, I think on Hulu elsewhere.
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