Cherry Blossom Madness

Springtime in Japan means the beautiful sight of cherry blossoms shedding their petals in peaceful pink clouds. Or horrific clouds of pink madness if you take the perspective of 1975's Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees (桜の森の満開の下). In this delightfully demented horror comedy, a vicious mountain footpad meets his match in an even more vicious, but beautiful, shrew.

The mountain man (Wakayama Tomisaburo) comes upon a small party of city dwellers, a man, his wife, and their servant. He slaughters the man and servant but stops short when he lifts the wife's veil. Struck by her beauty, he decides to add her to the collection of wives he has going up in his little mountain shack. This shrew (Iwashita Shima) never shows an ounce of fear, though, and demands that he carry her up the mountain, which he does. She complains the whole way.

She demands that he behead all his wives, which he does, save one, the meekest, whom the shrew decides to take as a servant. Normal life for this little found family consists of the mountain man robbing and murdering travellers and giving their severed heads to the shrew to use as playthings. She plays with them like dolls, performing all their voices and enacting little dramas. She demands they move to the city where the mountain man can get her a wide variety of heads.

How does she control this wild man? She laughs at him. Never underestimate the power of embarrassment in Japan. She frequently lashes him with that ubiquitous word, "恥ずかしい!" "Embarrassing!" He's supposed to be strong, why can't he carry her? He's supposed to be vicious, why can't he get her more heads? He's supposed to be brave, why can't he live in the city? And this poor dumb brute rises to the bait every time. The film is a sobering lesson for killers everywhere from Shinoda Masahiro.

Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees is available on The Criterion Channel.

Gently Colliding Ingredients

Two young women with clearly delineated personalities find themselves surprised by themselves in Woody Allen's 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Allen has always been influenced by Ingmar Bergman and it particularly shows here but I also found myself thinking of the Archers' I Know Where I'm Going and the early films of Bill Forsyth. Forsyth was famed for his delicate, "gossamer" humour and that's how I'd describe the humour in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Those looking for a plot with a point that's easy to articulate may be disappointed but I enjoyed the ride.

Much like I Know Where I'm Going's protagonist, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) travel to another country firmly convinced of who they are as a narrator directly explains to us. Vicky likes stability and Cristina doesn't know what she wants--she just knows that she wants something wild. With this setup, we expect things to go sideways.

They do in short order when a gentleman called Juan Antonio Gonzalo (Javier Bardem) approaches them and invites them on a trip to Oviedo and to have sex with him. Predictably, Vicky is incredulous but Cristina is intrigued. Of course, they both go with him and some things happen according to the narrator's prophecy and some things don't.

As the story progresses, the personalities of the women as explained to us become a kind of veneer in a way that suggests the superficial quality of any human veneer (this aspect of the film certainly owes something to Bergman). Penelope Cruz won acclaim for her role as Maria Elena, Juan Antonio's violent but remarkably insightful ex-wife. She comes into the film like a sudden storm but gradually her madness starts to look like sanity as Cristina's sanity starts to look like dullness. This was the last of three movies Woody Allen made with Scarlett Johansson and I wonder if she was upset to realise that the essence of her character is that she's a little dumb and Johansson embodies it kind of perfectly. As she enters a three way relationship with Maria Elena and Juan Antonio, she can't keep up with how sharp Maria Elena is and how patient Juan Antonio is. Does she feel pitied? She can't seem to explain it herself when she is the first one to say she finds the relationship wanting.

Vicky's previous love for stability, perhaps inevitably, turns out to be an indication of a fundamentally unstable nature. While Cristina can't seem to get over a certain hill of contemplation, Vicky seems to be speeding madly down the other side.

The film offers no trite conclusions and the ending has a bittersweet feeling of fulfillment perhaps missed and a persistent mystery over what, exactly, the right move would've been for these two ladies.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is available on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet 1931

Here comes a town with talent leaking good.
No actors here could form a building grant.
The trouble is, a few were made of wood.
Performance must produce a man or ant.
But women called the bank and froze a pop.
No snacks were cold when summer came along.
You have to ask the winter now to stop.
Or autumn once to sing an extra song.
As chilly leaves would fall in spring we watched.
We waited 'mongst the pews for whales to speak.
But Orson Welles would preach a shapeless blotch.
The early dawn beholds the conquered peak.
It seems the mountain's made of water still.
No hardened ice would form for nature's will.

What Art?

Okay, I guess I can't put off writing about Wednesday's Daredevil any longer. I hate writing negative reviews but in for a penny, in for a pound. It's particularly disappointing because I had high hopes for this show. Vincent D'Onofrio's Wilson Fisk is truly one of the best things about not just the MCU but comic book film and television of the last thirty years. But once again, Disney was under the impression they could cut corners in one of the most essential aspects of any production: the writing.

"Art for Art's Sake" (Walter Pater is rolling in his grave) was written by Jill Blankenship who also wrote the abysmal episode three, "The Hollow of His Hand", so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

I've said this before; I hate when so many people in a large city just coincidentally know each other. Heather is both Muse's therapist and Wilson Fisk's therapist and Matt's girlfriend. This might have worked had the story been set in a small village but this is just silly. The worst part, though, is that, after all that set up with Muse, he's snuffed out so abruptly, so soon. The police tell Fisk they're positive Daredevil was in the room beating on the guy even though they weren't inside the room. It's all well and good for Fisk to have them take credit for taking out Muse but is Fisk even sure what lie he's telling?

This episode was clearly a reconfigured episode from the first draft of the series. There's a lot of very obviously looped dialogue whenever events from the Netflix series are referred to. When Heather talks about Foggy and Karen, her face is always off-screen. When Fisk talks about his time in prison, his face is mostly off-screen.

Detective Kim reports to Fisk about the Muse investigation because apparently she's lead detective as well as hostage negotiator despite the actress giving a performance on the level of an old AT&T commercial. It's a shame it couldn't have been Misty Knight. Fisk asks Kim if she's certain Bastian is Muse and she says, "Certain, no. Confident." Too bad she didn't think to have him tailed then.

Matt's able to recognise Heather's face by touching paintings. Why not just give him eyesight at this point? This is lazy, lazy writing. Since the cops also found the lair, they could've had Daredevil overhear someone else identifying her from the pictures. Hell, she's probably therapist for the whole damned city.

The action scene where Daredevil comes in to save Heather from Muse is really sloppy. I was just going over it again. Heather's tied up and she taunts him for having a gun and then there's a shot of him holding a gun. Then there's a reverse shot and he's holding a knife and he comes towards her threateningly. Then he's grasping her arms with both hands and shortly thereafter we see the gun on the table. How is it they can't even get the action scenes right?

Well, next week's episode is bound to be better. I'm kind of not surprised the show's ratings haven't been great but if Disney had made the effort from the beginning to ensure this had good writing they could've slowly built a groundswell of support of the show. Andor should've taught them that lesson.

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.

Dekpa and the Pirate Horde

At long last, a new chapter of my webcomic, Dekpa and Deborah, is online. When I finished the previous chapter last April, I didn't expect it would take me a whole year to upload another. I actually drew most of the pages in August but I was unable to finish over the summer because making Japanese subtitles for The Last Unicorn dominated all my time.

By the way, the character of Red Roger Ferguson is my own creation, he was not a real, historical pirate, as far as I know. There were a number of "Red Rogers" though. There's a character in the Robin Hood legend and even a peculiarly muscular kangaroo of the name. I think "Red Roger" sounds more natural than Walter Matthau's pirate captain simply called "Red" in the Roman Polanski movie Pirates.

There's a lot of violence and nudity in this chapter. Clothing seamen in the age of sail was a real problem. The Royal Navy didn't have a uniform until the 18th century (April 1748, in fact) and the only garments issued to crewmen before that were slops, which were typically very cheaply made breeches that did tend to fall apart.

It occurs to me that Dekpa, with her magical companion, has become a kind of demented Disney princess. Anyway, enjoy the chapter.

Happy Birthday to Dorothea Dix, Muddy Waters, Elmer Bernstein, Peter Vaughan, Anthony Perkins, Andrei Tarkovsky, Cherie Lunghi, David E. Kelley, Hugo Weaving, David Cross, Robert Downey Jr., Heath Ledger, and Natasha Lyonne.

Val Kilmer

Val Kilmer died on Tuesday at the age of 65. Those who've seen Top Gun: Maverick may not be surprised as the effects of his cancer were clearly visible onscreen. Even so, he performed a memorable scene with Tom Cruise and his old charisma was still plainly there.

He was an A-lister from his appearance in the original Top Gun in 1986 and remained a big star into the '90s but it seems he wasn't uptight about playing supporting roles. His supporting roles in Tombstone and Heat are certainly memorable. The latter film, which has lately garnered a lot of attention, is considered one of the greatest crime dramas of all time and his role was integral to it.

I saw him in person at San Diego Comic Con in 2010 when he was there to promote Twixt with its director, Francis Ford Coppola. A remarkable experiment, it was initially Coppola's plan to edit the film live based on audience reactions. Coppola demonstrated by showing us a trailer edited live. The audience that day responded most warmly to shots of Kilmer's character being foolish, drunk, and funny.

He was excellent as Jim Morrison in The Doors biopic, though I'm not the greatest fan of its director. I also enjoyed seeing him pop up in films like Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob: Reboot.

For me, though, his greatest role will always be Madmartigan, the "greatest swordsman who ever lived" in the fantasy film Willow. I always loved the European Middle Ages and medieaval fantasy films in particular. When Willow came out in 1988, I was nine years old and it was fantastic.

Sure, the comedy's a little broad and Willow is hardly the finest George Lucas film but Kilmer as Madmartigan exemplified the kind of cinematic hero Lucas and Spielberg were creating; a guy a who makes mistakes and who is sometimes misled by his passions. No fascist hero was Indiana Jones or Madmartigan, even when they were also larger than life. These were human heroes for humans. I, for one, think humanity benefited and I thank Val Kilmer for his part in it.

X Sonnet 1930

Electric blue were words of ancient force.
But boats of twisted reeds conduct a hope.
The winding brook conforms to serpent's course.
The rocks would roll along the broken slope.
As gods of wine beheld their own, they wept.
The mighty sword would rust as trolls would rule.
Within expectant hearts, the dream was kept.
The gun of Holiday's a quiet tool.
The stately raven churned the film of yore.
In days of heat, the lucky thief was warned.
His song would lead us through a spirit door.
No shrink could shrink the bat when scorned.
It seems there's naught for little men to do.
And still he says he'll win this war for you.

The Dawning Horror of a Normal Galaxy

I've been watching Andor again, I guess in preparation for the upcoming second season. Hell, I just wanted to watch it again. I can't remember so enthusiastically looking forward to new episodes of a weekly series since Twin Peaks. It doesn't even feel fair to compare it to the other Disney+ Star Wars shows. Andor doesn't need to borrow any franchise laurels, it stands completely on its own.

What makes it so good? One simple way of expressing it is that it's a show about people slowly realising a bad situation is worse than they imagined and that they'll be required to make bigger sacrifices than they'd ever dreamt of. Andor's progression is mirrored by Mon Mothma's. He slowly realises that getting by as a thief is not only impossible but not really who he is. This is first confirmed when he quick draws on that guy at the end of the heist arc. Instinctively, he shoots someone for betraying the Rebellion, not because it's in his own best interest.

Mon Mothma has already settled into a life of more subterfuge than one traditionally required of a senator but she finds even this isn't enough, she must go further outside her comfort zone. The show builds scenes around these dreadful character epiphanies, like the one in episode 10, which I watched last night, in which Mon Mothma slowly realises she's going to have to encourage her teenage daughter to go out with a gangster's son just so she can move her own finances to fund the Rebellion. In the same episode, Kino Loy's character progression reaches its climax. His reluctance and growing horror is what most creates a sense of the prison break drama. All the Disney Star Wars shows have big name actors but none of them use the opportunity so well as Andy Serkis was used in his role as Kino Loy. With all the sets and costumes and special effects, it's the expression on his face that truly creates an impression of the experience.

I also love just how delicately twisted the relationship is between Syril Karn and Dedra Meero. I love the scene in episode nine when he confronts her on the bridge. He has all these grand words about duty and dedication to justice that all also sound like he's head over heels for her. He doesn't hear that part of what he's saying but she does and she reacts like he's a stalker. It's fascinating watching the two of them and thinking about what's really going on subconsciously and how aware either one of them is of it. Hot damn, this show is good.

Macbeth and Politics

I've been trying to listen to Bill Maher's interview with Maureen Dowd for a few days now. It's been hard because my internet seems to be dropping out a lot. This is the Club Random show, a podcast which Maher hosts, usually while smoking pot, and showcases more casual conversations as opposed to his show Real Time with Bill Maher. Rightwing media has been parading Maher as a hero lately because he calls out woke bullshit, a fact he's remarked on, saying how many among the young Right and Left have two different experiences of him because they watch only clips of him supporting their views instead of his whole shows. Really, it's Maher's ability to be critical of both sides while remaining friendly with them that has made him the most important commentator in U.S. politics of the last thirty years. Can you think of anyone else that has had the prominence and longevity he's had?

Anyway, in this political landscape in which people tend to only listen to voices within their bubbles, Maher is one of the few people who can effectively act as a bridge.

The funny thing about his interview with Dowd, though, is listening to how much they both get wrong about old movies and Shakespeare. Maher identifies Dowd as a Shakespeare nut but when he asks her, after she'd compared femmes fatale to Lady Macbeth, if Lady Macbeth stayed with her man, unlike Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Dowd said no. What? The whole point of Lady Macbeth is that she supported Macbeth more than he was willing to support himself. I remember one of the Shakespeare professors I had in college said she was "a terrible woman but a great wife." I always thought that was pretty accurate. For this reason, she's more complicated than a femme fatale tends to be. She's like a trad-wife Dalek.

I was watching a bit of Roman Polanski's Macbeth last night. I've packed up most of my DVDs and blu-rays because I'm moving to a new apartment, hopefully soon. The one DVD I'd neglected to pack was this Macbeth so when my internet went down yet again last night it was the only DVD I had to watch. If I were superstitious, I might make something of the fact that this cursed play has been popping up in my life over the past few days. Anyway, I think Polanski's film version of Macbeth probably has the best cinematography of any (the cinematographer was Gilbert Taylor, also the cinematographer on Doctor Strangelove and Star Wars). The costumes are great, too. I love how much green is in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's wardrobes.

Richard Chamberlain

Richard Chamberlain passed away on Saturday, two days before his 91st birthday. From Doctor Kildare to Twin Peaks: The Return, here was an actor with a very long and colourful career. Over the past few years, I've seen him in two very different roles; as the worried investigator of eerie phenomena in Peter Weir's 1977 movie The Last Wave, and as the legendary Allan Quatermain in a couple of cheesy, fun movies from the late '80s. He always had a kind of sparkle in his eye and he was suited for both serious and campy fare.

It's weird Rotten Tomatoes labels this as a "Herbert Lom Movie". Lom is in it, playing a villain that, like most other aspects of the film, wasn't in the book. His name isn't even mentioned in the trailer. Surely Chamberlain was the bigger star.

His role on Twin Peaks was small, just one scene, but he still went to the premiere:

At any time, the interviewer could've jumped in and said, "I think you actually caught the movie, Fire Walk With Me." Was he afraid of embarrassing Chamberlain or did the interviewer just not know anything about Twin Peaks? My guess would be the latter.

Chamberlain played a lawyer involved in a love triangle that briefly takes centre stage in the first couple episodes of The Return. I didn't even recognise him the first time I watched it but I did notice the actor brought a gravitas and sparkling kitsch quality that helped establish the story Lynch was telling. Even in a small role, he brought something no-one else could.

X Sonnet 1929

A cup of swirling frogs was sold for tea.
The colour green deceived a sea of kids.
Though older now, they dance the Kappa Boogie.
Their silver pool has fetched a million bids.
In eighty-nine, the store was life itself.
But now the place is broken walls and cords.
Within, there yet remains a heavy shelf.
It holds a hardy stack of vintage cords.
The winters passed when fashion asked for pants.
These trousers gather moths as plastic rules.
But ghosts would give the slacks another chance.
At night, they walk the store and warm the jewels.
The darkness carries clothes of yesteryear.
The dreams survive a despot's stubborn fear.

Day Dawns on Deep Discomfort

Jean Gabin romances two women in Marcel Carne's 1939 film Le jour se leve. This is another example of "poetic realism" in French film but, while I liked it, I didn't find it as effective as Port of Shadows, another Gabin/Carne collaboration.

In this one, Gabin plays Francois, a working class joe in a foundry. I loved his meetcute with Francoise, played by pretty young Jacqueline Laurent. The scene starts with him standing there in full gear and mask, blasting away. Then he turns around and sees her in a nice little dress holding a bouquet of flowers. The incongruity was somehow very sweet and the scene only gets better as they both realise they're named for Saint Francis, whose day it also happens to be (October 4).

The two start seeing each other regularly and one night he finds out she's also seeing a flamboyant dog trainer named Valentin (Jules Berry). Valentin's assistant is an older woman named Clara who swoops in and seduces Francois when she sees him at the bar, watching the dog show.

This movie might have been more effective for me if I understood the appeal of Arletty. She was extremely popular at the time and French audiences felt she had enormous sex appeal. She was 41 at the time and this was even ahead of her greatest film, Children of Paradise, also directed by Marcel Carne. I love Children of Paradise despite my inability to appreciate Arletty but Le jour se leve didn't have enough to compensate for what I find to be an utter lack of sex appeal on her part.

It's true, I generally find younger women sexier but I can appreciate Isabelle Huppert or Susan Sarandon, who looked old even when she was young. Something about Arletty is just so hard and cold. Even before I found out she was sleeping with a Nazi officer during the French occupation. I just couldn't buy the idea that Francois was torn between the two women and I certainly didn't believe Arletty was in love with Francois. I didn't believe her tears at all.

She has a nude scene in the movie which is . . . let's just say, really awkward. I guess not everyone can age like Demi Moore but I can't begin to imagine how Arletty's sex appeal was a selling point for this movie.

The movie ends up being about existential terror as Francois' self-image collapses in the aftermath of his sleeping with Arletty and the revelation that Francoise was sleeping with the dog trainer. He holes up in his apartment with a gun while police and a crowd of onlookers gather outside. He screams at them, "Francois doesn't exist anymore!" It's an interesting idea but I kind of wish Carne and his screenwriters had come up with better reasons for Francois' breakdown.

Le jour se leve is available on The Criterion Channel.

Shinoda Masahiro

Shinoda Masahiro (篠田 正浩) died four days ago at the age of 94. Shinoda was a prominent director in Japan's New Wave though, until yesterday, the only movie of his I'd seen was 1964's Pale Flower (乾いた花). However, I absolutely love Pale Flower, a yakuza movie that runs madly contrary to the trends of yakuza movies at the time which tended to cast handsome young idols as misfit yakuza who glory in tales of tragic youth. Pale Flower features a middle aged yakuza, recently released from prison, inured to the culture, bored of everything, finding ecstasy only in the moment of the kill. A sadistic young woman becomes his apprentice in a story about scraping the barrel of self-gratification in an amoral universe (you can see my review from fourteen years ago here).

So last night I watched another Shinoda Masahiro movie, 1979's Demon Pond (夜叉ヶ池), a very different film to Pale Flower, but a good one.

Based on a stage play from 1913, the story follows a teacher called Yamasawa (Yamazaki Tsutomu) who travels to a region between Fukui and Gifu where a legendary Demon Pond is said to be located. He trudges across dry, hot landscape and arrives at a village with enormous thatched roofs (I think it was probably filmed in Shirakawa, which is actually in Gifu). There's a drought. When Yamasawa enters one building, he finds a few people gathered. He has something in his eye so he asks for water. A woman cheerfully offers her breast milk instead, shoving her nipple at his eye, at which he, shocked, recoils. Leaving the village, he starts up a hillside where he's surprised to find a trickling stream. He washes his eye with the water before realising it comes from the very Demon Pond he sought. The villagers won't take water from the pond for fear of angering the dragon that's said to dwell in it.

From here, the film becomes more stylised and deliberately artificial. He goes to the pond and nearby finds a small house occupied by a married couple, though at first he only speaks to the wife, Yuri, who's played by a man named Bando Tamasaburo. Bando is a kabuki actor, the form of Japanese theatre in which, for much of its history, all the female parts were played by men. This was because, in the 17th century, when kabuki was first introduced, the actresses were seen as too sexually provocative for the male audience. Of course, replacing them with men led to men having sex with men but the taboo against women playing women remained in place. It must have loosened at some point, because we have a kakubi actress depicted in Ozu's Story of Floating Weeds as early as 1934.

Bando is an onnagata, a male actor specialising in female roles. Men like him gain repute for artistically conveying ideals of feminine manner.

The other occupant of the house, Yuri's husband, turns out to be Yamasawa's old friend, a scholar named Hagiwara (Go Kato), who wears a very artificial-looking grey wig for reasons that are not explained. He immediately removes the wig when he speaks to Yamasawa.

No reason is given in the story but the film's symbolism is pretty clear. After Yamasawa refuses to have his eyes cleansed by breast milk in that natural, working class world, he instead washes his eyes with the Demon Pond, and thus has senses opened to an unnatural, or supernatural, world where performance has more reality than reality. In his occupation, Yamasawa is already more connected to this world as someone who deals in abstract ideas. There's also a potential class allegory as the people living on the hill maintain a right to the Demon Pond while the farmers suffer from drought. If a certain bell near the pond isn't rung three times a day, the release of the dragon is prophesied to be accompanied by a flood. Since the villagers have a drought, they start to think a flood might not be so bad. Fluid as a symbol of change and new ideas is pretty common and, as is common with revolutionaries, the farmers become too consumed with toppling the old order to begin to understand the devastation that will follow in the wake of the revolution.

Shinoda was obviously a director of great talent and intellect. Many of his movies are available on The Criterion Channel.

More Moana than I Wanna Watch

I like to think I can meet any challenge, at least as far as movies are concerned. But I just can't get through 2024's Moana 2. It's just too damned boring. I got about halfway through before blessed slumber overtook me.

At least twenty minutes of it was exposition. Maybe it was all exposition. There's minutes and minutes of someone babbling about a magical island or explaining Moana's relationship with someone else or just how cool and perfect she is. Then one of the animal sidekicks makes a funny face and after that it's right back to the exposition mill. I just don't think I can take it anymore.

I don't believe a story has to have an arc or flawed characters. I even think a story composed largely of exposition could be interesting. Somehow Moana 2 is utterly devoid of tension, like every wrinkle that could've possibly produced dramatic effect was inexorably ironed out by committee. We've got no love interest, Moana has no tragic delusion, there's no sense of any real threat to her people.

So Disney seems to be allergic to love stories now. Maybe everyone is tired of the female leads pursuing a boy. One of the favourite replacements seems to be an urge to explore. There's a song in Moana 2, "Beyond", I could've sworn was in Frozen 2.

I get it. The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast both had female protagonists who effectively sang about wanting exploration and adventure and then all they got was boyfriends. It always felt like a promise unfulfilled. The difference is that Ariel and Belle felt more vulnerable than Elsa (in Frozen 2) and Moana. There's a real sense that they'd be taking a risk embarking on those adventures. Ariel has the constant, unspoken tension of being a girl with no legs, like a less funny version of Olaf wanting to experience a summer day. She wants something we can plainly see is impossible. That's a perfect story for a teenager. Teenagers have big ideas and we adults have to stand by, cursed with our knowledge of life's true hardships, knowing just how vulnerable these kids are. But, no, Disney seems to say now, not vulnerable! Never vulnerable!

Anyway, I can't properly review Moana 2. Maybe I'll finish watching it at some point but life's short, you know?

X Sonnet 1928

Eclipses climb the crinkle stage of post.
To mail a razor tooth would quite the shave.
For dinner, try the royal ribbon roast.
You have to find a bat in Robin's cave.
A candy coloured waste expands ahead.
The Otter Pops have melted round the world.
Computers lift the recent dumb and dead.
Around our necks the empty snake has curled.
The bloody orange became a ready sun.
But blue departs the void around the ball.
The Silver Surfer starts an aimless run.
He finds the space concludes with painted wall.
Compactor sides converge to trap the heart.
But something lives beneath the Fam'ly Mart.

Where the Show was Born Again

Two new episodes of Daredevil: Born Again premiered on Disney+ last night and the contrast between the two of them most tellingly shows the difference between the show as it was originally filmed and the show as it was retooled. Episode five feels like it fits with the bulk of Marvel Disney+ content while episode six feels much closer in tone to the Daredevil Netflix series. You can as plainly see the reason for the retooling as episode six is far and away the superior of the two. But I found episode five's echos of Disney+'s previous Marvel content to be unexpectedly depressing. I imagined what could have been if that streaming universe had been of higher quality.

The big surprise of episode five was the appearance of Kamala Khan's father, Yusuf (Mohan Kapur), at his job as an assistant bank manager to whom Matt Murdoch applies for a loan. I hated the way he was written in this episode, basically as a bumbling, Nigel Bruce Dr. Watson type, who, lest anyone not recognise him, dropped one explicit reference after another to his superheroine daughter. I remember I actually liked the first few episodes of Ms. Marvel and I wished I could've been happy to see this connexion between the two shows. There's another reason, too, I was disappointed to be disappointed. Since watching Ms. Marvel, I had a thirteen year old student at one of the schools I work at in Japan who was from Pakistan and she told me how much she liked Ms. Marvel. Sure, I would argue against the idea that people need to see people of their own nationality on screen in order to appreciate a story but, on the other hand, I thought it was nice for this girl, who's so culturally isolated going to a Japanese school, to be able to enjoy a glitzy Marvel series depicting a culture not so unlike her own, and maybe a girl with whom she could closely identify. I feel like Disney/Marvel really let her down.

And, of course, the episode is a ghost of pre-Trump America, when mainstream content was, if awkwardly and ham-fistedly, giving us content promoting cultural and sexual diversity. I never felt so sorry that it didn't go according to plan. I found myself longing for a world in which The Marvels had been a good movie.

But, yes, episode six of Daredevil: Born Again was a lot better. It had good action scenes and good character moments for both Matt and Wilson. Wilson assembling his anti-vigilante squad was another moment that eerily resembled the reality of the new Trump administration, as did Wilson's meeting with the old, moneyed elites (with a nice cameo by the Swordsman).

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.

Mars and Its Humans

Another Earthman must save Mars from barbarian hordes and bizarre aliens in Leigh Brackett's 1951 novel Black Amazon of Mars. The Amazon in question is neither black nor an Amazon but it's still a terrific story.

The protagonist is Eric John Stark and this is the third in a series of books Brackett wrote about the character. The similarities to Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter are obvious though Stark doesn't spend all his time on Mars and, in this universe, Mars is populated by humans wielding mostly mediaeval level technology, descended from technologically superior colonists.

Brackett is best known to-day as one of the screenwriters of the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back. I read Black Amazon of Mars looking for similarities to Empire Strikes Back and there are plenty. There's the mysterious, black helmeted villain, Lord Ciaran, whose face is hidden until a dramatic reveal; the story hits the ground running, with Stark stranded in the desert with a friend who immediately succumbs to wounds, a scene followed by capture by a barbarian tribe and a violent escape; key moments in the plot involve the protagonist having visions.

I love how the story never lets the protagonist off the hook. When he gets to the city to warn them of the impending barbarian attack, the don't believe him and threaten to punish him if the attackers don't arrive. This threat, simultaneous to the attack itself, hangs in the air throughout the buildup.

Stark's an interesting, canny brute, actually reminding me more of Conan than of John Carter. He's able to fight off dozens of attackers at once, which adds to the impact of the climax, when strange alien beings manage to incapacitate him. These aliens are wonderfully Lovecraftian, strange ice creatures with tendrils.

Stark let out one raging catlike scream, and rushed them.

The opalescent bodies slipped away beyond his reach. The creatures watched him.

They had no faces, but they watched. They were eyeless but not blind, earless, but not without hearing. The inquisitive tendrils that formed their sensory organs stirred and shifted like the petals of ungodly flowers, and the color of them was the white frost-fire that dances on the snow.

I was mainly looking for something like the dynamic, pridefully attractive chemistry between Han and Leia. There's a little of that though Stark seems to be a much simpler character, much more secure in his prowess and desires. The women in Black Amazon of Mars are more interesting, more conflicted and brash characters. I suspect Harrison Ford brought a lot of the vulnerability that made Han work so well to the character. Stark has two love interests in the book; the titular black Amazon and a woman named Thanis who, along with her brother Balin, takes the battle wounded Stark into her home when he comes to the city. I liked this moment:

Balin stood up. "Well, for good or evil, at least the sacred relic of Ban Cruach has come home." He yawned. "I am going to bed. Will you come, Thanis, or will you stay and quarrel with our guest?"

"I will stay," she said, "and quarrel."

"Ah, well." Balin sighed puckishly. "Good night." He vanished into an inner room. Stark looked at Thanis. She had a warm mouth, and her eyes were beautiful, and full of light.

He smiled, holding out his hand.

It's a good book; a satisfying bit of amoral pulp.

Or Maybe the Original Text Lacks Something

I watched 2003's Lost in Translation last night. I know it'd been at least twenty years since I'd seen it last. I suppose, since I like Bill Murray and I'm an American living in Japan, it ought to be a touchstone for me but somehow it's not. I suppose because it's really more about marital dissatisfaction and the isolation of being very, very rich, two things I have absolutely no experience with.

The Japan depicted in the film is not the Japan I have experienced. I haven't spent a lot of time in Tokyo, only a couple weeks, though I guess that's more time than the protagonists of the film spent there (I think the action is set over the course of one week). The Japan experienced by Bill Murray's and Scarlett Johansson's characters is one of endless, interchangeable smiling assistants, translators, and indistinct hipsters who want to be their friends.

At its heart, I really think it's director Sophia Coppola's fantasy about dating Bill Murray, or an idealised version of Bill Murray. This is a Bill Murray who is as disinterested in female prostitutes and strippers as any average girl would be. The moment of friction in the film is when he sleeps with the hotel bar jazz singer, and it's clearly shown to be something he regrets even irrespective of Johansson's feelings on the subject. I generally had the impression that Sofia Coppola and Scarlett Johansson, at the very least, didn't form a bond as intimate as the one between Coppola and Murray. I remember a lot of people were kind of shocked when Coppola didn't mention Johansson in her Oscar acceptance speech. Coppola only had eyes for Murray.

I kind of like to think Coppola and Murray had an affair. But maybe he was always just a fantasy for her of the idealised older man. Murray was 53 at the time, Coppola was 32, and Johansson was just 17, though her character was in her 20s. I don't feel like a relationship between the characters has a future. The way Johansson regards Murray suggests someone admiring an idol and from Murray I can only infer physical attraction. The only things they really have in common is uncertainty about their married life and, I guess, cultural isolation in Japan. The latter doesn't really fit with my experience living here and, although I can't speak to what it's like to be married, this problem seems too insubstantially drawn to be interesting. Both of their marriage partners are little more than caricatures. I've never been married but I can appreciate the psychological layers in Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Here, I get nothing.

But Murray is very funny, especially with his improvised lines. His comedic timing is always impeccable. Johansson is gorgeous. I'm not sure why the movie begins with an extended shot of her rear end but I'm not complaining about it. I was surprised to notice she has a bit of a pot belly in the film. She hadn't yet been hammered into MCU shape and I like it.

Lost in Translation is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.

The Walking Peaks

Disney+ in Japan has been aggressively promoting the new season of Gannibal, the horror detective series that began in 2022 based on a 2018 manga. So I gave in and watched the first episode and so far I'm fairly pleased. For one thing, it's nice to see a Japanese live action series that isn't zany or sentimental. This one seems to be a cross between Twin Peaks and The Walking Dead.

A detective named Daigo (Yuya Yagira) moves with his family to a small town to investigate a murder. The locals are a bit eccentric and strangely aggressive. When they find the mutilated body of an old woman in the woods with a clearly human bite mark on her arm, the crowd of locals all draw their rifles on Daigo after he doesn't immediately accept their pronouncement of the death as the clear result of a bear attack.

What could be happening? Daigo's little girl, who has been speechless and emotionless since a traumatic event so far undisclosed, remains speechless and emotionless which she encounters a ragged old man who gives her a human finger. That little girl must have the easiest acting job on television.

So, yeah, in case you didn't guess from the title, cannibalism is involved in the story. It's not bad. Yuya Yagira gives a good performance and I really like Riho Yoshioka as his wife, Yuki. The cinematography is pretty plain with the standard, limited colour palette of a crime drama. It actually really reminds me of European Twin Peaks-inspired series like Dark or Black Spot. The more the merrier, I guess, especially now that David Lynch is dead and we'll never get any real Twin Peaks again. The man certainly has a legacy, that's for sure.

Looming About the Dock on Every Side

A big man in a soldier's uniform, a deserter, hitches into town and becomes a magnet for trouble but also for the affections of the abused. Jean Gabin stars in 1938's Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes), a lovely film noir.

He doesn't want to talk to the people he meets and one senses early on there's something in his past he's running away from, something worse than deserting. He winds up in a ragged little excuse for a tavern run by a guy wearing what he insists is a genuine Panama hat. He takes pity on the taciturn soldier and gives him food and drink, pausing to engage in a shoot-out outside with some local hoodlums. Sheltering in the back room, the soldier, Jean, meets the beautiful Nelly (Michele Morgan).

Over the course of this movie, the two of them share some of the best screen kisses I've ever seen. Something about the way she says "kiss me" is just divine.

There's a slightly meta moment when they first meet in which Jean laughs and explains he likes her immediately, "like in a movie." There's also a pathetic little dog Jean saves from getting run over who also likes him for no rational reason. The dog follows him for the rest of the movie.

Michel Simon plays Zabel, Nelly's jealous boyfriend, though he passes it off with elegance somehow. What an incredible performer Simon was. Even in a villainous role his charisma is undeniable, even with his bad posture. As someone with bad posture myself, the guy's becoming my hero. Posture makes a difference. Notice how carefully the Vulture article chose a picture of Neil Gaiman in profile in their smear piece to show he has bad posture.

It's amazing how different Simon is in this compared to the old man he plays in L'Atalante but he's perfectly believable in both roles.

This movie has all the primary defining features of a noir. It's a crime story, it has stylised dialogue, it has existential tension between fate and free will, and the ending is definitely noir. That tension makes the love between Jean and Nelly all the more painful. Is it tragic or simply doomed? The question keeps the movie alive long after it's finished.

X Sonnet 1927

Confusing buzz of voices won't be cut.
And where do people walk who walk alone?
The absence here is like a novel shut.
A cloud of dust and dusk's as dry as bone.
A kindly candle shows in pixel dots.
The blocks of games remain as fond debris.
A shaken hand commits a row of blots.
Espresso chokes the summoned honey bee.
A drop of cherry syrup changed the joe.
Completing breakfast made the mission start.
A holiday has brought a festive glow.
Untimely though at night the speakers part.
An audience of phones has called the fight.
A lot of little screens composed the light.

A Phantom Nemesis

On Thursday, I found myself impulsively reading "The Man of the Crowd" by Edgar Allan Poe. Here's a story that certainly breaks the modern rules of what a story can be. It has no arc, no sympathetic character. It's simply a first person narrative about watching a crowd and noticing someone interesting and sinister.

The story contains a famous Poe quote at its beginning, "There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told." So the story warns us right away not to expect answers. The narrator watches the crowd and eventually follows the strange man and learns next to nothing. You could say as much for most of the other people in the crowd he observes and draws inferences about. He recognises office workers and pickpockets, "men of leisure and men actively engaged in affairs of their own." I'm reminded of Bob Dylan's line in "Like a Rolling Stone", "You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal." I suppose having no secrets amounts to being entirely secret because humanity stripped of persona and art can only be the enigma of human consciousness itself.

The unnamed narrator of the story says he recently recovered from illness and says he, "found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui—moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs." I think I know what he's talking about, I remember feeling that way after physically taxing illness or exercise. It's like you become a perfect eye with all senses receptive to the world. In this peculiarly active, passive state, one enigmatic figure in the crowd arrests the narrator's attention who, being unnamed and undescribed, slyly substitutes itself for all the reader's faculty for input. It's been suggested that the sinister man is a reflection of the observer, which may as well be so. But just as we are what we eat, perhaps we are what we see. That which repels and that which attracts the observer allow us a sort of echo map of the observer. The fact that the observer decides to follow the man all night and into the next day certainly speaks volumes.

There are a number of AI generated audiobooks of the story on YouTube. Already! How quickly AI is plastering over reality. Here's one that's not AI. At least, I can't imagine AI being so affected:

The narrator describes the man with a number of contradictory elements: "As I endeavoured, during the brief minute of my original survey, to form some analysis of the meaning conveyed, there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of bloodthirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense—of extreme despair." To me, this sounds like an addict. The fact that the man compulsively seeks to be in crowds without seeming to focus on individuals suggests to me that he's addicted to crowds. I guess there really is a fetish for everything. He seems like a kind of vampire, an idea borne out in various illustrations of him, particularly in Harry Clarke's lurid 1923 illustration.

Perhaps this is a vampire who feeds on the very discomfort of being in a crowd. The story begins with an epigraph, a quote from a French book: "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul", "This great misfortune, of not being able to be alone." Perhaps the man literally is this misfortune, anthropomorphised. He is the denial of solitude given face. He anticipates Satre's famous quote, "Hell is other people." The idea of him being a reflection of the narrator works well with this because the perceptions of others do function as a mirror.

In any case, with this story Poe certainly shows his genius for making something so simple so powerful.

Sex and the Impossibility of Financial Freedom

I found a 1972 BBC production of George Bernard Shaw's 1893 play Mrs. Warren's Profession on YouTube. It stars Coral Browne as the title character and Penelope Wilton as her daughter, Vivie. It's a highly moralistic play with an unvarnished political argument but it's also engagingly witty at times.

With this play, George Bernard Shaw resembles the other famously witty Victorian Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde, in that his most amusing character is a supporting role, a leisurely gentleman who casually pronounces scandalous opinions. This gentleman is named Praed and, in the course of praising Vivie for being a very modern, independent woman, describes himself as a "born anarchist".

The main drama of the play concerns Vivie's discovery that her mother has worked as a prostitute for a very long time and also manages a brothel. Vivie's prized independence, as Mrs. Warren points out in the climax, was bought with the money the elder woman earned in the sex trade. Her costly education and upbringing, which exposed her to the ideas that helped formulate her ideals, were purchased with her mother's sex work.

Bernard Shaw, in speaking about the play, said that "prostitution is caused, not by female depravity and male licentiousness, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together." I'm sure this is true in many cases, but people do argue that some people prefer sex work to other kinds of work. And then there are characters like Kathleen Turner's in Crimes of Passion who engage in it as a side profession entirely of their own volition. As I said before in my earlier post on prostitution in fiction, it remains a popular subject among intellectual writers precisely because of these eternally insoluble ambiguities that many people will eternally, nonetheless insist are obviously soluble.

Wilton is perfect as the morally strident young Vivie and Browne is perfect as a worldly and vaguely predatory dame of intelligence. This production is available on YouTube for now. Hopefully it won't be copyright struck, it's been up for six years.

Born Again Properly

What a difference a week makes. The fourth episode of Daredevil: Born Again was so much better than the third, it was like night and day. Mind you, it wasn't perfect. The writing was good and the performances were very good but the direction felt odd at times and the music overenthusiastic. I suspect the problems here were due to this being a Frankenstein's monster episode, with pieces from the original incarnation of the series not quite fitting with the new version.

The episode has two credited writers, David Feige and Jesse Wigutow. I suspect David Feige (who, it seems, is not Kevin Feige's brother) was brought in after the show was restructured and that Wigutow was the original writer. This Feige has the distinction of being an actual lawyer and you can very quickly see the difference in quality. This is the kind of person both She-Hulk and Daredevil: Born Again ought to have hired from the beginning if they really had their hearts set on being lawyer shows.

I wasn't impressed by one of the episode's key moments, though. When Matt managed to convince the pretty Latvian to bring the shoplifter's sentence down to twenty days, and there was a contrast between Matt thinking he'd performed a miracle and the guy's perspective on how hard it is to live on the streets and escape them, I felt like I'd seen the scene somewhere else. I wish I could put my finger on where exactly. But the music was much too foregrounded in the Daredevil version of the scene--the term is "Mickey Mousing", fittingly enough. Quoting Wikipedia:

The term "Mickey Mousing" is also used as a pejorative to imply that a technique used in productions aimed at adults is too simplistic and more appropriate for a juvenile audience. The technique is also associated with melodrama.

Overall, I felt like Daredevil's theme was way overused. I did like Matt flirting with the Latvian woman, though, and would've preferred to see him with her rather than the psychiatrist lady.

I enjoyed a lot of Matt's plot but I think Wilson Fisk had a much stronger showing last night due in large part to Vincent D'Onofrio having material he could really sink his teeth into. You could see the conflict on his face when he was listening to Michael Gandolfini's grovelling. I also liked the tension between Gandolfini's character and Zabryna Guevara's chief assistant character. Her telling Gandolfini he ought to just stop talking was perfectly timed.

Fisk was good across the board in this episode, though, whether he was awkwardly sitting through the children singing or struggling with the realities of bureaucratic procedure. After he'd been nerfed on Hawkeye and Echo, it was so nice to see something like the old Netflix Fisk back again. It's a bit cathartic, too, as Trump is starting to act even more like Fisk in real life. It's nice to be reminded that, in a saner world, this kind of behaviour is easily understood to be villainous.

This episode finally brought in Jon Bernthal as the Punisher for one scene where he and Matt have a confrontation. The premise of the scene felt a little odd. I kind of wonder how Frank knew about Foggy's death and what it meant to Matt. Is there a superhero message board? But, okay, maybe word got around somehow. The energy between the two actors was great and it was nice having the screenplay chew on the concept of vengeance. I also liked the talk about the philosophy of deterrence and punishment. It was really refreshing having one of these shows engage with intellectual topics.

To cap it all off, I liked the last scene with Muse, a comic book character created in 2016 who apparently does "art crimes" like those featured in David Bowie's Outside concept album from 1995. It's kind of odd having a blind superhero fight a graffiti artist but I think we're supposed to believe Matt can somehow "see" and recognise the Punisher logos everywhere. I kind of don't like that but I did enjoy some creative uses of Matt's powers in the episode, like his detecting the cop telling the truth and the way he found the shell casing from the bullet that killed White Tiger. Oh, I thought the daughter of White Tiger gave a pretty unconvincing performance. She becomes his successor in the comics, taking on the White Tiger name and costume. Hopefully she'll be played by a different actress should that ever come to fruition in the MCU and hopefully she won't be a tactical dunce like her father.

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.

X Sonnet 1926

We looked for kingdom dreams in butcher shops.
In there, a map of blood describes a plan.
Where civil thought in hasty action stops,
You'll find emerged a craven breed of man.
A swirling pool of sugar water falls.
The sky was spiked with sickly candy ooze.
The atmosphere congealed to sticky walls.
This kind of winning's really just to lose.
A super collar chokes a super man.
A bluer suit cannot replace a sky.
A gruesome showing faced a moral ban.
Computers make the truth a tired lie.
Touch not the grass lest it touch thee in turn.
The wiser steward knows the time to burn.

Patrick's Crossing

For my last night of Saint Patrick's Day, I gave myself two choices: The Quiet Man or Miller's Crossing. I asked myself, which did the preceding year of my life resemble more? We'd all like to say The Quiet Man but I had to admit it was Miller's Crossing. So I watched that.

My two favourite Coen Brothers movies, The Big Lebowski and Miller's Crossing, are both loosely based on classic noir novels, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key, respectively. Obviously, The Big Lebowski is more of a departure from the novel but it's interesting to reflect on how Miller's Crossing is different. Tom is not as lucky as Ned, his counterpart in the novel. He constantly loses when he gambles. He generally loses a lot more than Ned, who's more of a hyper-competent pulp protagonist. Both the Dane and Bernie manage to get the drop on him multiple times.

There's also the fact that he's Irish, of course. I was surprised to read that it was actor Gabriel Byrne's idea to use his native Irish accent. I guess it makes sense, though. The movie's otherwise a total homage to a '30s gangster movie (moreso than it is to a noir, really). The Irish accent doesn't fit in terms of the homage and yet it fits with the stylised dialogue so perfectly I wish there were more movies like it.

Saint Patrick's Week Continued

Happy Saint Patrick's Day again. I fell asleep watching The Butcher Boy last night. It's strange how hard it is to find that movie, it's so delightful. Sure, it's also extremely grim. Maybe that's it. There's something oddly admirable about Francie Brady's resilience, though. He's hurt by the loss of his friend, Joe, but, despite taking insane revenge, he somehow never seems resentful.

Earlier in the day, I was reading from my copy of The Norton Anthology: The Victorian Age. I read a bit from George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, another example of an intellectual treatment of prostitution.

I also read an excerpt from Matthew Arnold's Study of Celtic Literature and found this bit interesting:

. . . no doubt the sensibility of the Celtic nature, its nervous exaltation, have something feminine in them, and the Celt is thus peculiarly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy; he has an affinity to it; he is not far from its secret.

It's funny Arnold keeps using male pronouns when discussing the Celtic insight into the feminine, as though there were no possibility of consulting a female Celt on Celtic attitudes towards the feminine. I suppose Arnold is using "he" as a gender neutral pronoun, as it could be employed in his time. Even so, it's slightly odd, but it's bound up with the same Victorian conception of the feminine that leads him to apply the adjective to Celtic nature generally. What does "feminine" mean to him that he can apply the word so?

I'm not even saying he's wrong to. I often think Japanese culture is more feminine than American culture. If you took Oscar Wilde's maxim, "Most women are so artificial that they have no sense of Art. Most men are so natural that they have no sense of Beauty," and swapped out "Women" for "Japanese" and "Men" for "American", you'd have a pretty accurate comparison. A popular topic of discussion on the internet recently is how American video games seem to be allergic to portraying beautiful women (here's one of the many YouTube videos on the topic). I wouldn't say it applies universally. The women in the Guild Wars games are pretty and, while the Japanese clearly love the artificial, given the phenomena of VTubers and Vocoloids, there are examples of great art in modern Japan from Miyazaki Hayao and Shinkai Makoto.

Incidentally, I was served by a robot yesterday. It wasn't even some kind of high-tech, fancy restaurant, just a cheap little Chinese ramen place well outside the city centre. It was similar to this one only without the cat ears:

It had a theme song it was constantly playing, a sort of ultra-jubilant, vaguely samba-esque tune, I guess to mitigate any creepiness. It brought over my ramen and explained to me in a child's voice that my side item, gyoza, would be along shortly. As usual with encroaching automation, I appreciate it as an introvert but can't ignore the implications for the labour force. On the other hand, it could be a perfect solution for Japan's declining population.

This was supposed to be a Saint Patrick's Day post. Oh, well.

The Holiday is Young

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, everyone. Yes, I watched 1993's The Snapper for it last night. I have to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day for three days because I have to have an Irish movie to blog about on Saint Patrick's Day morning and then I have to celebrate for March 17 when it comes to Ireland and the U.S. It comes earlier here in Japan, and even earlier in Tokyo where, yesterday, there was a Saint Patrick's Day parade. Tokyo started having Saint Patrick's Day parades in 1992 but the holiday is still not widely known outside the big cities.

Colm Meaney in The Snapper has to be the coolest dad in cinema history. His teenage daughter gets pregnant and you can see it's an effort for him to be angry at her. He can't seem to help being supportive.

The cinematography is pretty good for such a low budget film. The night shots outside the hotel and in the pubs are surprisingly pretty.

There's a scene in a shopping mall that's lit like a shipping mall (pretty plainly). But it occurred to me how similar the place looks to a mall in the U.S. or Japan. Globalism has been happening a long time, I guess.

X Sonnet 1925

Congested frogs replaced some teams.
The other groups were sneezy rabbit fans.
A lightning tuber's never all it seems.
The "You" became a storm of graphic bands.
Resulting questions bounce between the hills.
Alive were all the rocks along the ridge.
A prickly tree has needles charging bills.
A jagged ladder 'comes a rusted bridge.
Competing babes were stopped beside the pub.
Decisive sashes claimed the winner's breast.
She raised her glasses, joined the vision club.
Her heart and diamond clashed beneath her vest.
The three of clovers dashed across the deck.
A tiny king was caught in endless check.

In the Shadow of the Summit

In 1996, eight climbers died on Mount Everest as they attempted to descend from the mountain during a blizzard. The story has been adapted for film twice and exceptionally well in 2015's Everest. An impressive ensemble cast, including Josh Brolin, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke, Emily Watson, Keira Knightley, Robin Wright, Sam Worthington, and Mia Goth bring to life a detail focused, compellingly procedural screenplay.

Shooting was in Iceland, the Italian Alps, and a little bit in Nepal. The film seems to have but minimal cgi. I've never understood why Jason Clarke was in so many movies, maybe this one is the reason. He gives a good performance as expedition leader Rob Hall. Josh Brolin plays one of the survivors, an American named Beck Weathers, who lost his nose and his hands after somehow surviving a night stranded on the mountainside during a blizzard.

None of the characters come off as stereotypes as they sometimes do in biopics like this, though of course many of them aren't fleshed out--there are just too many of them. That's where having such an exceptional cast is a real boon. I don't think Keira Knightley and Robin Wright are in the movie for more than five minutes but in their short appearances as the wives of Clarke's and Brolin's characters, respectively, they ably convey their anxiety and desperate hope.

Everest is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.

That Oldest Profession

Sometimes, you just can't win. The Academy was getting so much shit for anointing Emilia Perez that they turned around and made Anora the big winner at the Oscars. Now people are complaining about how suspicious it is that the Oscars have so very often honoured actresses who played sex workers, even just last year with Emma Stone in Pretty Things.

I know I've written about this on my blog before. I wish I could find one of the entries so I could quote myself, then I'd look really prophetic. Oh, well, I guess I'll just have to repeat myself. The reason there are so many great prostitute roles is twofold; you usually have a beautiful young woman who's either doing a lot of nudity or, at the very least, a lot sexually provocative things, and you have the built-in existential problem. Is prostitution the ultimate liberation or the ultimate enslavement? Pretty Things went all in on the former, movies like Mizoguchi's Street of Shame or Sezuki's Gate of Flesh go for the latter. Then there are movies that tread the line of ambiguity like Vivre sa Vie or Belle de jour. It's a question that can never truly be settled, though, so it always has a lot of drama to unpack. It's always perfect fodder for a story. The fact that sex and beauty are integral to the topic sells it to the groundlings.

It's a preoccupation that predates cinema, to be sure. There's 1633's 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, there's Moll Flanders. It's an issue that traverses the political spectrum as one political side or the other insists on treating women as eternally fragile beings who must be sheltered from moral dilemmas or insists that women are wanton hell-beasts best suited for secret or public exploitation. The enigma of human consciousness can be even more inscrutable when it's coming from someone else (which would be women, given the traditional narrators are men).

That dramatic, existential ambiguity is an essential part of Anora in which the story revolves around the value of the title character's marriage to a young Russian man. Even when the movie's not about that, it's about that. Pretty Things made the mistake of treating the issue like it was a complete illusion, like prostitution is clearly no different from any other job. If that were true, this problem would have been settled a long time ago.

From Slapstick to Vanity

Season two of Ally McBeal is filled with a lot of goofy shit in between intelligent legal drama moments. It's rare for one of the pratfalls or silly sound effects to make me even crack a smile. The romantic subplots are somewhere in the middle; not as tedious as the comedy, but not usually as smart as the courtroom stuff. "Sideshow", an episode from February 22, 1999, is an exception. I actually became interested in the romance between Ally and Billy.

Ally and Billy were childhood sweethearts who broke up some time before the series began. They meet again when they both end up working for the same law firm. Now Billy's married and Ally's still single. Not only that, but Billy's wife, Georgia, is also a lawyer and comes to work for the same law firm, too. In the episode previous to the one I watched last night, Ally and Billy kiss. "Sideshow" is devoted entirely to the fallout as Ally, in her typically neurotic matter, dropping dozens of Freudian slips and stumbling over her words generally (when she's not literally stumbling), tries to analyse herself and Billy. It culminates with the two of them sitting on the couch for Ally's therapist, Tracy, played by Tracy Ullman, who won an Emmy for her performance in this episode.

I liked the conversation despite the fact that the teleplay presumes that Billy is in any way attractive. Mostly it's a mystery to me why Ally or Georgia or anyone is attracted to this weasel. Tracy asks Billy and Ally to imagine their life in old age if they got married and Billy says he imagines Ally will have gotten cosmetic surgery. The conversation becomes about Ally's vanity and she had a line I thought was funny if not entirely truthful; "I don't need to look good, I just do!"

My favourite part, though, was Tracy suggesting to Billy that all of his attempts to rationalise and explain his decision to kiss Ally might only a be a veneer for the fact that he just wanted to kiss the pretty girl, that it was a completely thoughtless action. Honestly, that's exactly the vibe I get from Gil Bellows' performance.

Ally McBeal is available on Disney+ in Japan.

All the Excitement of Jury Duty

Good grief, last night's Daredevil: Born Again was bad. It's no wonder even Disney realised the show needed to be drastically retooled--this was clearly an episode from before Dario Scardapane was brought in. It might be too little too late, though, given how weak the show's been in the ratings. Why, Disney? Why don't you value writing?

Last night's episode, "The Hollow of His Hand", was written by Jill Blankenship, whose biggest credit is being showrunner on a CW superhero series called Naomi. But "The Hollow of His Hand" is barely a superhero story. As the rumours had informed us, Born Again was originally written like a legal drama and that's just what "The Hollow of His Hand" is. I suppose it suffers particularly because I've been watching Ally McBeal lately, a lawyer show written by a lawyer, one with exceptional writing talent. But I can't help thinking Blankenship could've done better than to have the prosecution establish absolutely no motive for Hector Ayala to assault the cops, allowing Matt Murdoch's narrative to completely dominate the courtroom. But Matt nonetheless is shown drinking bourbon like this case is a steep hill for him to climb.

White Tiger is an actual Marvel superhero but one might be forgiven for thinking he was just some yahoo invented for this series. The late Kamar de los Reyes gives a decent performance but he's working with a character who's no more than a stereotype. We learn next to nothing about him except he's a good guy and he dreams about going back to Puerto Rico. Oh, and he wears a really lame costume.

Honestly, Daredevil's costume isn't much better. The old series was usually better when Matt was wearing a black shirt and jeans. This is supposed to be set in the same world as Tom Holland's Spider-Man but while Spider-Man's costume is slick and cool, Daredevil's looks like a standard TV superhero tank. It's amazing no-one considered making it closer to how it looked in the comic; something more like a circus performer, very lightweight and not so different from the shirt and jeans in terms of tactical advantage. It's frustrating because I know Disney wants to set up a Spider-Man versus Kingpin story but they have so completely dropped the ball on making that seem feasible.

Maybe Dario Scardapane can right the ship before the end. That's a lot of pressure for a guy who wasn't even one of the best writers on Punisher. And, oh, yeah, last night's episode had that Punisher subplot, with the cops who apparently emulate the Punisher by . . . executing a vigilante?

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.

The Cruise of a Hitman

Jamie Foxx drives Tom Cruise around L.A. under duress in Michael Mann's 2004 film Collateral. There's Mann's typical neon drenched city footage coupled with a cool score along with a surprisingly philosophical screenplay. I was pleased.

It feels like the movie was following a line of thought in American cinema. It kind of feels like a movie in which Dante from Clerks meets Tyler Durden from Fight Club. Foxx plays a cab driver named Max who has the misfortune of picking up a hitman with errands to run called Vincent, played by Tom Cruise. Like Dante, Foxx has grown comfortable in his low wage job and has pushed his bigger aspirations into the pipe. When Vincent's not executing people, he takes time to rebuke Max's boss over the CB for unfair demands. Max may be in fear of his life, but maybe he learns a little about gumption from the psycho.

With the cab rides and plot elements that end up involving the subway, it feels like this story was originally meant to be set in New York. Maybe Mann changed the location because L.A. suits his temperament better. Ah, I see on Wikipedia now that earlier drafts of the screenplay indeed had the story set in New York.

Cruise is good as a psycho. It could be argued he doesn't have much range as an actor but what he can do, I think, can be applied to a lot of different characters. That sense of intense, unshakable confidence is as effective in a hero as it is in an absolutely amoral serial killer. I guess he's playing a less amiable Lestat in this movie. He starts to get Lovecraftian (or, as Max puts it, "Twilight Zone bullshit") when he starts talking about a cold cosmos that doesn't care if Foxx is a good man or not. I guess it's like "The Enemy Within", the episode of Star Trek in which Kirk is split in two: one Kirk being aggressive and ruthless, the other being empathetic but ineffectual.

Collateral is quite good. It's available on The Criterion Channel.

Love and Contracts

It's interesting how often writer David E. Kelley wove reflections on criticisms of the show into the writing on Ally McBeal. Most often, this leads to episodes about Ally's microscopic skirt. Last night I watched an episode from February 1999 called "Pyramids on the Nile" in which the characters of the Cage and Fish law firm acknowledge they do seem to handle an awful lot of sexual harassment lawsuits.

Season two of Ally McBeal seems to shift from broadly comedic episodes to the courtroom dramas Kelley is more talented at writing. The above closing argument would've been more effective without the Barry White moment. But it's an interesting time capsule anyway since we now live in a time in which bans on workplace flirtation are the norm. In 1999, there wasn't really the alternative of internet dating sites but John's point about prospective romantic partners meeting only in situations where they reveal just the "pina colada sides of themselves" remains relevant. Getting to know someone in the workplace means seeing how they act under pressure, seeing how disciplined they are, how gracious they can be in the face of adversity, and a million other things that people may not even know about themselves to decide whether or not to include in a dating profile or tavern chat up. The workplace romance is sacrificed because a few people can't act like adults. Perhaps to-day even fewer can because they've been isolated from learning organically from experience.

The episode has a subplot about Ally and Billy wanting to hook up despite Billy now being married to Georgia. Part of the series premise is that Ally and Billy were each others' first loves so there's tension because they work together. I've been thinking about the very existence of love recently after reading someone may have claimed it does not exist. If that were true, that basically means Ally and Billy are wrestling over a delusion of some kind. Or maybe the widespread belief in something effectively makes it real?

I don't know but having been in relationships where I was always happy to watch and listen to the other person talk about anything they cared to I don't have any trouble believing in love. Surely we can agree attraction and fondness exist at the very least. If you can love a pizza topping, why not a human, only with a greater intensity commensurate with the complexity of a human being?

The Key to Sexual Revivification

A man attempts to cure his impotence by manipulating his wife and doctor into an affair to provoke his own jealousy in 1959's Odd Obsession (鍵, "Key"). This stylised satire from Ichikawa Kon pokes fun at both human sexual urges and the polite ways we avoid confronting them.

An old artist named Mr. Kenmochi is married to the beautiful and young Ikuko, the two of them played by Nakamura Ganjiro II and Kyo Machiko, who played a very different couple in Ozu's Floating Weeds around the same time. Kenmochi has been fighting his impotence with special injections, one of which we see administered rectally by a young man named Kimura (Nakadai Tatsuya), assistant to Dr. Souma (Hamamura Jun). Kimura is dating Toshiko (Kanou Junko), daughter of the Kenmochis. It's she who lets Mrs. Kenmochi in on Mr. Kenmochi's secret trips to the doctor for the injections.

Kimura visits that evening. Toshiko seems to find him dull and repulsive. Meanwhile, Mrs. Kenmochi gets drunk and passes out in the bath, a circumstance that leads to Kimura examining her naked while Mr. Kenmochi watches. At first, Kenmochi thinks this is an intentional technique on Kimura's part to arouse his jealousy but he soon realises he himself needs to concoct situations that lead to Kimura seeing his wife naked.

Nakadai's performance is really interesting. He starts the movie speaking directly to the camera about the inevitable infirmities of age and he does so with an amused, ironic tone.

He always seems slightly detached from the proceedings, like a devil.

It soon becomes clear that Ikuko is faking her fainting spells because she enjoys being seen by the men, Kimura in particular. This odd menage a troi eventually involves murder.

This is a colour movie and like a lot of good Japanese domestic dramas from the late '50s and early '60s it has a sort of green and brown palette. It's oddly peaceful and renders the sexually frustrated characters even more ridiculous somehow.

Odd Obsession is available on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet 1924

Conveyed beyond the grip of rails were trains.
But errant trains would want excessive slack.
With lumps of coal, they built some sooty brains.
A mighty beast was Locomotive Jack.
By swapping moons, the planets junked the list.
No type could range a clump of rocky spheres.
There's some would say the moon's a lumpy fist.
To punch the ocean down to salty tears.
A dozen islands skipped the Google map.
On one there hides a maiden rare and sweet.
She cooks with turtle shells and amber sap.
Her heart is like a warm and purple beet.
Another day concludes around her bed.
The sun descends and paints her pillow red.

Frankenbot

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.

The Mummy Wakes! I Sleep!

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.

The Mummy is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.

Another Anora

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.

Devil Again

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.

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.