Tie Your Shoes

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:

Another Disrupted Vacation

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.

Pasta Bondage

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.

It's that Day Again and Again

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.

Frenchman's Paunch

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.

Marianne Faithfull

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.

How Do You Want the Machine to Scare You?

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.

The Dream of Love

Last night I dreamt about a pretty blonde girl who was a fugitive from the law. She was hiding upstairs in an old gothic chapel when she overheard a tour guide talking to some kids about a giant vampire bat stuck in a cobweb. The man was trying to extract it but the bat was putting up a fierce and noisy fight. She came out of hiding and volunteered to take the bat. In the last part of the dream, she was trying to drive a car while the panicked bat was making a bloody mess of her neck.

Valentine's Day is just around the corner, folks, but Groundhog Day comes first . . .

X Sonnet #1916

The boulder ponders pebbles ranged about.
A rack of stones dissuades the hardened brick.
Seductive masses line the lava route.
The artist works his lonely marble pick.
But rust revokes the axe's might at swing.
For maestro views a prissy stack of fluff.
And now the hills will truly start to sing.
As Venus doffs the mink for classic buff.
His heat had piled stones in silent rank.
But quarry cools as quarry rules the hunt.
She makes a lunch beside the lava bank.
Approaching nigh, he finds his axe is blunt.
The burning corpse provokes her arching brow.
There's no-one left to sculpt her figure now.

Riker's Gotta Rike

Riker goes to serve aboard a Klingon ship in the 1989 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "A Matter of Honor". There's a B plot about a new ensign aboard the Enterprise belonging to a species called Benzite. Both stories are about culture clashes and someone from one culture learning to work within another. It's not a bad episode.

I suppose political correctness would make telling such a story about actual cultures a too dangerous minefield. It seems objectively foolish for the Klingons to have a system in which official career paths involve assassination. Rather than making everyone tougher, I'd think it would make everyone quiet and timid.

Riker's fun in the episode. I remember once when I was a kid my mother said he seemed arrogant. I guess that's really what sets him apart from Kirk. Although Shatner seemed plenty arrogant from one angle he also had a somehow congenial self-deprecation about him, at least in his best moments. But Riker's arrogance can occasionally be fun, as when he fearlessly strides among the tooled up, gnarly Klingon warriors wearing only his season one and two spandex uniform. Boy oh boy, those were awful. It is kind of amusing to see how clearly all the male cast members aside from Patrick Stewart gained a substantial amount of weight between seasons one and seven.

I was impressed by the Klingon cuisine created for the episode. I wonder if any of the fan created recipes would measure up. I suppose no-one's tried eating live gagh.

A Forest of Cameras

A man's entire life is lived under constant surveillance in Peter Weir's 1998 film The Truman Show. The logistics of the concept present so many difficulties that Weir had a lot of creative decisions to make, some more successful than others. I saw the movie when it was released and watched it again last night. I find it enjoyable but I feel there's a lot of territory it leaves unexplored.

The concept of a massive dome constructed in Los Angeles for a single television show is certainly far-fetched, as is the fact that this apparently got off the ground without significant push-back in the interest of human rights. Obviously, what is done to Truman is criminal. Christof, the creator of the reality show, makes the excuse that Truman is free to leave any time he wants, though of course the events of the film prove that many obstacles stand in Truman's way of doing just that, not the least of which is that he's carefully kept in ignorance of the fact that his life is an exhibition for the masses.

One of the problems with the film is that it presents a few days in which Truman suddenly becomes aware of how strange his life is. He calls his wife out on her constant plugging of household products to an unseen viewer but, really, if that's all Truman's known all his life, surely he'd be more likely to imitate that behaviour than call it out. That would be just one of the psychological issues of being watched his entire life, a fate society normally reserves for criminals because we all, on an instinctive level, know how degrading and dehumanising such treatment is. Even though Truman isn't consciously aware of it, the nuances of social cues which the human brain adapts itself to as it develops would have been fundamentally damaged through a lifetime of exposure only to actors improvising parts.

Maybe that's part of the theory behind casting Jim Carrey and Carrey's choices in his performance. On the one hand, Carrey's perfect because he can seem superficially normal yet with an undeniable oddness about him. On the other hand, so much of what he does is part of his standard, Jim Carrey comedic persona here. Is he subtly encouraged somehow to be funnier, to come up with catch phrases?

I found Laura Linney's performance as Carrey's wife a little more interesting. You sympathise with her for having to sacrifice her life for this lie but also kind of despise her for her part in perpetuating it. She's manipulating Truman entirely for personal profit. Christof may be the top of the chain here but her hands are certainly the dirtiest.

The Truman Show is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a playlist of cinema about surveillance.

Shooting the River

It's weird how movies and TV shows can sometimes disappear from memory. All that money and glamour and even decent reviews but, if it's not a smash hit, most people won't remember a TV show ten years later. I recently watched 2012's The River, an eight episode mid-season replacement series for ABC produced by Steven Spielberg, back when people still watched network television. It's a found footage series, coming at the tail end of that fad, and it quickly deviates from that concept, but it's not a bad show.

Bruce Greenwood stars as a sort of cross between Steve Irwin and Indiana Jones, a TV host who goes missing somewhere in the jungles around the Amazon River (the show was filmed in Hawaii and a little bit in Porto Rico). Most of the series follows the adventures of his family and a few co-workers as they try to find him.

Some of the episodes are really good. Episode six in particular, which follows Greenwood's character as his situation in the jungle goes from bad to worse, is riveting. Some of the episodes are a little silly, like the writers are completely lost at sea in this format, like one episode involving a tree of haunted dolls. In the penultimate episode, the group stumble across a vast hospital in the middle of the jungle overrun by zombies. This one really dates the series. Remember how ubiquitous zombies were in the late 2000s, early 2010s? By 2012, Walking Dead was into its second season and its star was rising. So in this atmosphere, maybe it made sense that the characters on The River don't spend much time questioning the existence of zombies or wondering exactly how they function. In moments where it seems like it would be more natural for them to be wondering in terror what the hell is happening, they keep nattering on about Greenwood and drama back home.

The found-footage conceit stretches really thin really fast. The cameramen are established as characters but there are many scenes with shots from cameras that couldn't possibly be in the positions required to get the visible angles. It's hard to believe all these characters would sign off on having cameras on in their quarters at all times, too. It would've been kind of funny if some of the dialogue were shown to be scripted like a true "reality" series.

Much of The River is available on YouTube.

X Sonnet #1915

A lactic swamp seduced the foil stars.
With fruit and toes, the corn was clearly fake.
A grainy monster scraped the screen of bars.
The morning broke like ostrich eggs can break.
A broken line of words derailed the flick.
A girl denounced a novel cheese at lunch.
To cater right, one must avoid the sick.
A zombie fad was launched on someone's hunch.
A market team controlled a tiny boat.
The gondola was meant for Venice ways.
But busy minds created ballast bloat.
It sank beneath the distant ocean waves.
Of this was born computer savaged screens.
A roasted lens condemned a hill of beans.

Digital Recuperation

Of course, these days, all I play is Skyrim. It's hard for a game to get old when it changes all the time. The quality of user made mods has improved by leaps and bounds over the past five years, too. Lately I've been trying out a lot of companion mods, mods that add NPCs to follow your character as friends and allies.

There are followers in the vanilla game with simple quests and even with the potential to become romantic partners through marriage, though a great deal is still left to the imagination. Bethesda, the company that makes the Elder Scrolls series, of which Skyrim is the fifth installment, as well as the Fallout games since Fallout 3, began with a philosophy of RPG making that imposed little to no character traits on the player character, allowing the player's imagination to fill the gaps. The problem with this method is that characters the player interacts with often must be vague in any dialogue relating to the player character's distinguishing traits.

Bethesda has been gradually moving towards a format that confers more backstory to the player character with motives that drive their actions in the narrative. This is what made Fallout 4 so unpopular as Bethesda forced the player into the role of a parent seeking their kidnapped infant. Many people didn't enjoy being handcuffed to the resulting dialogue consisting of plaintive questions regarding that child. The main selling point of Bethesda games for so long has been their open-endedness, the ability for a player not only to explore whatever physical territory he or she wished, but also whatever thematic or moral territory he or she wished.

Modding has proved a method to bring the best of both types of game narratives together. The mods you choose define not only the world of Skyrim as you like it but also the personality of your character and one of the best ways to do that is with companion mods, particularly companion mods with a variety of options of how to interact with the companion.

Val Serano is a companion created by a modder named Axarien last year and voiced by an actor named Krimson Graey. He has custom created clothing, armour, weapons, and even a ship (he's a pirate). Everything, from the 3d models and textures to the voice acting, is professional quality. The writing is, too, and a cut above most Skyrim mods. It's definitely made with a YA female audience in mind--Val is the proverbial bad boy waiting to be fixed. The dialogue is left open ended enough for you to play it as a gay romance but this is the kind of thing you usually find in fiction aimed at women. Val is a rough customer but not too rough who was made so due to a rough childhood and he just needs someone to show him how to love himself. I kind of feel like he switches from mischievous pirate to devoted follower a little too quickly but I'm not the audience for this. The ones aimed at heterosexual male players certainly can't claim moral superiority. The popular Serana Dialogue Add-on converts the vanilla character into a complex romanceable character who's an impressive creation but the level of ego stroking in her dialogue is nauseating at times.

One of the things I appreciated about Val Serano is that he has dialogue asking the player character about his or her past: about religion, place of birth, and outlook on life with a lot of potential answers, allowing you to flesh your character out with dialogue. Val also interacts extensively with another mod follower, called Remiel by maplespice, which adds another level of personalisation for the player. Remiel is a very popular follower, a nerdy specialist in Dwarven technology. She also interacts with the Serana Dialogue Add-on:

As you can see, everything about these mods is professional quality, but they're all free. What's going on here?

A couple years ago, Bethesda started hosting a site for paid mods but the general consensus on mods found through the paid system is that they're shit. All the good stuff is still being made by people working for free. Sometimes mod authors will pay professional actors out of their pocket and many of them have Patreons and sell t-shirts and mugs. It's a strange system but, historically, it's always been hard for artists to get compensation for their art. I think a lot of modders and the actors who participate in the making of mods see this as resume fodder, basically a free-range internship and a number of modders have gone on to being hired by companies like Bethesda. On the one hand, it's a worryingly unstable system but, on the other, I think it facilitates a diversity of creative products we wouldn't see otherwise. One thing's for sure, I'm certainly getting value for the sixty dollars I forked out for Skyrim all the way back in 2011. It's no wonder Bethesda has been so supportive of modding.

Digital Pain

My browser's homepage is still set to load a random Wikipedia article. To-day, it loaded the page for the 1992 SNES Cool World video game, based on the Ralph Bakshi movie. This was a time when absolutely every sci-fi or fantasy movie got a video game tie-in of some kind but I'm still a little surprised that the unpopular Ralph Bakshi movie had one. Of course, it seems to bear no resemblance to the film.

I never played that game but I was reminded of the 1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit PC game, which I did play, despite the fact that it was utterly terrible. I played it over and over. You could say it was a sign of how much of a fan of the film I was (and still am) but it's really more of a reflection of just how limited options were for video games back then. It was terrible, but it was there, so it was played. Watching gameplay video on YouTube, I can't help laughing that I willing returned to that purgatory with harsh PC sound audio, starchy gameplay physics, slow load times, and unrelentingly punishing difficulty.

I can't stop laughing every time I see the car hit the dip puddle. Which it does again. And again. And ever so slowly. Just what lovers of that hilarious madcap movie were looking for in a video game tie-in.

I eventually got past that opening stage after a very long time. It was a matter of months, possibly even a year. It doesn't get any easier from there. I don't remember ever beating the game.

The uploader of the above video describes the game as "an average game based on the equally average Disney movie." Now, love or hate Roger Rabbit, it is in no way average. I mean . . . that's such an obviously absurd statement, I can't even start with it. It's useful but depressing now and then to be reminded that some people blissfully go through life with incontrovertibly wrong opinions. Maybe it was just the frustration talking.

To Know the Android

It's supposed to be one of the worst episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation but I got a real kick out of "Schizoid Man" last night. The episode starts with a joke that seems like it could've come from a modern Star Trek parody; Data suddenly deciding to have a beard. In fact, it's similar to an episode of The Orville in which Bortus had a moustache artificially grown on his face.

Data asks Geordi and Troi, as best friend and counselor, presumably the friendliest audience possible, to come be the first to see his facial hair. Neither of them can keep a straight face, particularly surprising for Troi. Someone asked me yesterday who was my favourite character on Next Generation and I said Troi. She was and I suppose she still is. You can talk to me all day about what a great performance Patrick Stewart gives or all the nuances Data episodes explore about what it means to be human. At the end of the day, Troi is a pretty lady and I'm always going to prefer her company.

It's rare for her to have much to do besides say something like, "I sense something, Captain." That, of course, is sexy, but it's not much. In this episode, it's at least valuable for her to be consulted as Data's personality is overcome by that of a dead man. I feel like the eulogy he gives to the dead man ought to have raised some red flags for everyone, though.

"Unbridled modesty" has become an instant favourite phrase of mine. I dimly remember enjoying it all the way back in 1989, actually, when this episode first aired. The subtle contradiction between the adjective and noun is just so keen.

Again, it plays much more like a parody than a straightforward episode.

X Sonnet #1914

An endless loading time defined the night.
A rage of snacks descends as crispy rain.
A sound like hale pervades the metal site.
The plastic shades about were weak to pain.
In fear, the human Silly Putty merged.
The species ball eclipsed the honest moon.
But on the putty's flank, a map emerged.
The shapes of craters spelled a circle doom.
As questions swirl, the devils reap the dust.
Unchallenged hair was just a style dream.
The hues of tea were paired with darkened rust.
From dunking coffee, elves removed the cream.
Concluded wars were tales in children's books.
Across the room, a canny serpent looks.

Nowhere to Swim

A group of teens break into a posh indoor pool to celebrate graduation only to find themselves picked off one by one by a masked killer. This is the plot of 2001's Swimming Pool, a German movie about English speaking international students in Prague. Its 36% Rotten Tomatoes rating is fair but it's a diverting little slasher.

The cinematography looks like a made for TV movie, the filmmakers evidently felt there was no way they could improve upon the native fluorescent lighting of an actual indoor swimming pool. The actors are in their twenties playing eighteen year-olds but, with the exception of a young James McAvoy, they all look like they're in their 30s. German movies since the '90s seem to like lines on women's faces.

On their way to the pool, the kids listen to an aggressive, techno cover of "Dancing Queen" I suspect was recorded for the movie. Somehow it makes sense that this filmmaker desperately wanted to believe that wild party teens could like ABBA in some shape or form.

The characters break down into he usual character types; the pure hearted girl, the slutty girl, the jock boyfriend and the intense nerdy guy who wishes he could get the girl. Among them is the killer. I can't say I was bored during it, it was fun watching them argue and trying to figure out which one was the madman--I suppose it could've been a woman though the masked figure was wearing a skintight black shirt that showed a male frame. That never stopped a few giallos and American 80s slashers from revealing the killer to be female, though.

Peripheral to Girls

Three women embark on a trip across the U.S. and before the end there'll be tears and occasional laughter. 1995's Boys on the Side is a road movie for people who like Terms of Endearment, a story about three imperfect women who find some kind of meaning in their lives when their luck turns very bad. I'm not sure I'm the right audience for that kind of story but I can appreciate how many people might find it a sort of comfortable, warm mud bath. It has a really good soundtrack.

The film begins through the point of view of Jane (Whoopi Goldberg), a singer who finds gigs are drying up in New York and decides to voyage out to L.A. She winds up sharing a ride with the demure and mousy Robin (Mary-Louise Parker), one of those pretty, affable women with no friends who only exist in movies. They stop in Pittsburgh and pick up Jane's party girl friend Holly (Drew Barrymore) and the trio is complete.

The actresses have good chemistry and play well off each other though the friction between Jane and Robin is often too broad, particularly in the film's climax. The film is at its best when it's not trying so hard, when the women are chilling out in the car or hanging out in the gorgeous desert manor Robin suddenly and inexplicably possesses in Arizona. Matthew McConaughey has a small role as Holly's new boyfriend in Arizona, a cop who starts to suspect she was involved in the killing of her previous boyfriend, an amusing subplot.

The end of the movie forces a dynamic on the characters in the interest of being maudlin and I wasn't into it but, as I said, your mileage may vary.

The soundtrack is pretty fascinating, comprised entirely of female singers. It features a number of notable covers including, I was surprised to hear, The Pretenders' cover of Morrissey's "Everyday is Like Sunday", a recording Morrissey himself spoke well of. I also appreciated Sarah McLachlan's cover of Tom Waits' "Ol'55", which is kind of a perfect road movie song.

The Insurmountable Elementary

I've been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation season two lately. Although Netflix seems to have a lousy selection of movies these days it still seems to have all the best old TV shows. Most people wouldn't consider the first two seasons of TNG great television, though. I still can't get through a rewatch of season one but I am kind of enjoying season two. I think I've even come to prefer Doctor Pulaski to Doctor Crusher, season two's notorious temporary replacement. She was clearly made with Dr. McCoy in mind, meant to be the folksy foil to the invariably logical member of the crew. In this case that means Data.

Somehow Pulaski seems crueller than McCoy. Maybe it's because she seems supremely confident in her superiority and Data seems more childlike than Spock, especially at this point in the series when Brent Spiner's idea of emotionlessness included wide-eyed smiles. On the other hand, AI can do a decent job now of imitating human emotion, why shouldn't Data?

The best episode of season two so far in my rewatch is "Elementary, Dear Data", the one where a Sherlock Holmes themed holodeck excursion inevitably goes wrong. I hadn't seen the episode since I was a kid and now that I'm much more familiar with the Sherlock Holmes stories I can appreciate just how clearly the writers of this episode knew their stuff. References to The Bruce Partington Plans and The Speckled Band come fast and without much explanation so the episode really is a treat for the true Holmes fan.

The main dilemma the characters face in the episode is of Professor Moriarty obtaining a form of sentience, a popular plot element that ensured the character's return in season six and even again in the new Picard series.

I found it really interesting contemplating the character, watching his emotional reactions carefully. Presumably the holodeck AI would still be behind Data's so his emotions would be even more of a pretense. Troi can sense something there so there must be. But how much of it is represented in the person we see? Where does the mask end and the soul begin?

Pulaski's challenge to Data at the beginning of the episode oddly reminded me of teaching in Japan. She accuses Data's impersonation of Holmes as only being rote memorisation, that he would fail to solve a new Holmes puzzle because he lacks the necessary instinct and empathy. This resembles the main criticism of Japanese English education, that it focuses too much on grammar and vocabulary memorisation and neglects instinct. As I've come to understand the forces of traditional belief and social pride that pinion the prospective English learner in Japan, the barrier between students and true language learning may be even bigger than the one between Data and his attaining deductive powers on the level of Sherlock Holmes, though the question of whether or not he can is of course left unresolved by the episode.

The Substance of Paper

Reading about Japanese nationalism and talking to people who long for a pre-World War II Japan, I've naturally found myself thinking of Yamanaka Sadao, the influential filmmaker whose career was cut short when he died in Manchuria in 1938. This was shortly after his final film, Humanity and Paper Balloons (人情紙風船) was released, which is now one of only three of his movies that survive. So I watched it again last night.

The film follows two protagonists, an impoverished samurai named Unno (Kawarazaki Chojuro) and a hairdresser named Shinza (Nakamura Kanemon) who aspires to be a gangster. The two men struggle to better their lives against a system designed to suppress them both.

One thing's for sure, Yamanaka was a genius at economical storytelling. The film begins with a suicide, another samurai whom we never meet. People complain that the man chose a day with such nice weather to kill himself, inconveniencing people from the neighbourhood who can't leave due to the investigation of the death. The man hanged himself and a few people argue that as a samurai he ought to have committed seppuku. Another man points out that the dead man had no sword, that the weapon seen strapped to his side was made of bamboo. It's a splashy introduction that swiftly brings us into the film's preoccupations with identity, tradition, and appearance versus reality.

Unno does have a sword to strap to his side but little else to proclaim his status as a samurai. Throughout the film, he tries, politely but persistently, to make contact with a wealthy and influential local named Mouri, who owes his career to Unno's father. While custom might insist that Mouri owes Unno, the reality of business and social life in the area means that Unno is a nuisance to Mouri and Mouri's acquaintance dispatches yakuza to deal with him as such.

The same group of yakuza are after Shinza, the film's other protagonist, who's been holding unauthorised gambling parties on their turf. Nakamura, the actor who plays Shinza, gives a magnetic performance and with his charisma you can see him easily becoming a leader in his own right. He also has a knack for making friends and the film doesn't have to be too explicit in showing us that Shinza really could become a rival for the local yakuza boss.

But this is a world in which the polite ideals of merit and goodwill earning positions of esteem and fortune are but a veneer. The reality is one of the strong preying on the weak and both Shinza and Unno are too good natured to survive in it. The way Yamanaka reinforces this idea in manifold ways is amazing. The film is in fact mostly a comedy. There's an amusing supporting character who seems to be blind, at least he's regarded as such. There are many little jokes that belie this, as when Shinza says one yakuza has a head like a winter melon and the "blind" man laughs and says it's so true. But truth has little cache in this world.

Humanity and Paper Balloons is available on The Criterion Channel.

Find Some Art

Of course I'm in the mood to watch David Lynch projects lately. But what to watch? I first read of his death early in the morning before I went to work on Friday. I had time to watch one of his short films on The Criterion Channel. The Grandmother had actually been on my mind for a couple weeks because some of the students I've worked with have similar relationships with a grandparent. I guess it's kind of inevitable here in Japan with its aging population and high divorce rate.

The Grandmother, from 1970, is one of Lynch's earliest films. It's not one of his best but it's certainly interesting. Using a combination of stop motion and live action, Lynch depicts a boy and his parents sprouting from the ground like plants. When the boy's parents turn out to be abusive, he plants a seed in the upstairs bedroom and grows a grandmother. The work already shows what was fundamental to Lynch's genius; his ability to show something that's simultaneously very strange and yet perfectly normal. Lynch is often imitated but his imitators almost always fail to effectively strike that balance. It's not that Lynch holds a distorted mirror up to the audience, it's as if he presents an undistorted mirror for the first time and we realise just how weird human beings are.

On Friday night I watched Wild at Heart, Lynch's 1990 feature film starring Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern. There's always something amiable about even the darkest road movie and this one's not particularly dark. It's always a pleasure taking a ride with Sailor and Lula.

On Saturday, I watched the first episode of the 2017 Twin Peaks revival. I'd just finished a rewatch of Twin Peaks last year and I'd intended to give it a break for a while. But I just couldn't resist. It is amazing how captivating that show is. I can't remember another situation in my life where my highest expectations for something were not only met but exceeded. Every scene in that episode is perfectly constructed to keep me absorbed. I love the cops trying to get into Ruth Davenport's apartment. I love the reunion with the brothers Horne. I love Sam and Tracey's tryst and the menacing glass box. I still can't believe we were blessed with eighteen episodes of this.

After Lynch's death, Ted Sarandos, a CEO at Netflix, has spoken about the secret project Lynch had been working on for the streaming service. I honestly thought it was dead but it seems it wasn't. Oh, what could have been!

X Sonnet #1913: David Lynch Edition

A shiny red, her lips seduced the phone.
Receivers hide a mask of clay and fur.
The jagged lines of night disperse the bone.
A diner dance became a drowsy blur.
Erasers sort the fear of life to dreams.
A pachyderm unjustly took the blame.
A vibrant dune enriched the desert teams.
But velvet earned the man his better name.
The logging town concealed its bloody heart.
A broken love in gold was buried wrong.
Eccentric lovers played a dizzy part.
The path of stone precedes the plaintive song.
The real and strangest worlds your soul will tease.
Enjoy your cherry pie with java please.

True Selves and Neil Gaiman

I remember years ago talking to someone about the signs of the Zodiac and I said, "If Scorpios are all promiscuous, that would mean Neil Gaiman is promiscuous, so it's obviously bunk." Maybe Zodiac signs are as reliable as anything else in the media these days.

The conversation about Gaiman has become surprisingly existential in the past few days following the publication of a piece at Vulture and Gaiman himself finally posting a blog entry addressing the allegations, breaking the public silence he's maintained on this and other matters for months. Chiefly, the issue now is over the concept of consent, even enthusiastic consent, being retracted several years after the fact. Counterintuitively, the prevailing opinion seems to be that yes. it can be, particularly in matters in which the individual engaged in activities generally considered to be repulsive in the culture. This is nothing new in Britain where BDSM has long been illegal due to the belief that it's impossible for a person to willingly engage in an activity that will inflict pain or injury upon themselves, a perspective that has long weathered the obvious hypocrisy in simultaneously permitting people to engage in physically intense sports, cosmetic surgery, and body piercing.

The original article on the Gaiman allegations was on a right wing site called Tortoise. Now that a left wing platform, Vulture, has published a piece, voices on the right find themselves compulsively arguing with it. They kind of have to since the right has had to rhetorically push back against cancel culture so they've accrued an armoury of logical arguments that can't be tamped down.

There's an article on the predominantly right wing British site UnHerd called "The Perils of BDSM". Author Kathleen Stock uses the Gaiman situation primarily to take aim at BDSM and concludes with the telling statement;

More often than not, it is very bad for the submissive in the scenario — not just because it leads her to physically dangerous situations, but also because it tends to put her in a state of mind in which agency is undermined and subsequent choices aren’t those of her true self, however confidently things started out.

Her choices aren't those of her "true self"? It's impressive Stock has the chutzpah to unabashedly make such a statement, to presume knowledge of a woman's "true self" without even having met her.

Regular UnHerd writer Kat Rosenfeld did not publish her piece on Gaiman on UnHerd but on her Substack perhaps because, despite beginning the article by saying she believes Gaiman to be "a pretty bad guy," she does not support the narrative that Gaiman's alleged victims lacked agency. People on Twitter who didn't read or understand her article have been attacking her for being sympathetic to Gaiman.

I spend all this time reading long, thought out articles that I forget about masses of people who see headlines and base everything they believe on them. I saw one guy posting on Reddit, replying to someone distraught because she only had very good memories of her encounters with Gaiman, by saying that back then maybe "he still had some good in him." So this guy apparently thinks of Neil Gaiman as Darth Vader now, sorting him into that fantasy narrative because the articles he didn't read were just too complicated. The way people confidently go out into the world with some opinions is like people going out without pants on. I just marvel at the history of intellectual complacency that brought them to that point.

I finally read the Vulture article, which was, like the Tortoise article, behind a paywall. At least the name of the publication is more fitting. The article is called "There is No Safe Word", which is not a quote from Gaiman or anyone else involved but it's one a few people have taken to be. The article was written by Lila Shapiro who garnered accolades for her piece on Joss Whedon. You know, more and more I think the pool of brilliant writers on the cancelled bench should get together and make a fantastic streaming series or something.

As with everything else I've been hearing, I can't help but notice that all tangible evidence, all the texts and videos, points to these being consensual relationships; all the things suggesting they're not are from third or fourth party hearsay or from the alleged victims who have changed their opinions on their own past decisions. It's all starting to seem like alien abduction stories, which Carl Sagan spent some time debunking and wrote about in his book Demon Haunted World, a book in which he also decries a psychiatric industry that profits by coercing clients into constructing false memories of assault not unlike those of alien abduction. And one of Gaiman's alleged victims is said to have changed her "perspective" after spending time with "women who were experienced in dealing with sexual assault and abuse."

That alleged victim, Scarlett Pavlovich, spent time with Kris Taylor, "a doctor of psychology who had lectured at the University of Auckland on coercion, consent, and rape" and his partner, Misma Anaru. "Although Pavlovivh had never used the words rape or sexual assault to describe what had happened to her," the Vulture article states, "both Anaru and Taylor believed Gaiman had raped her repeatedly."

It's strange how few people find it suspicious that these articles which confer on Gaiman nearly supernatural powers of coercion, manipulation, and subterfuge, are unwilling to consider anyone else involved capable of deception.

David Lynch

David Lynch has died, just a few days before his 79th birthday. Although details of his death have not been officially announced, it's not hard to imagine what happened. Only last year he announced he suffered from emphysema from years of smoking. The condition prevented him from leaving his home and he was forced to do that very thing due to the recent catastrophic fires in Los Angeles. You could say simply he was killed by fire but, artistically, throughout his career, he was propelled or sustained by it. He talked about the inspiration he drew from smoking cigarettes and the presence of fire in his films was always remarkable. What filmmaker has more memorably provided shots of fireplaces? There's the sudden blaze in Fred Madison's recollection of a dream in Lost Highway, the shot of Ben Horne spitting into a massive fireplace on the first episode of Twin Peaks. I needn't mention the important place Lynch's work has occupied in my life. Anyone who knows me or has read my blog for a long enough time will know the profound effect his work has had on me. When I was a kid, just figuring out what art is and how it works, Lynch's films were so arresting, so easily evincing of the power of image and sound to communicate thoughts and feelings beyond the scope of language, my capacity for perception couldn't help but be enriched and expanded. Watching Lynch's movies taught me the power of pacing and silence and sequence. Watching his movies was a gateway to appreciating many other filmmakers, from Ingmar Bergman to Jean Cocteau to Alfred Hitchcock to many, many more. It's a consolation to know that Lynch's genius is widely recognised. Not every artist who's passed over for recognition or who garners praise deserves either but in Lynch's case the praise is abundant and abundantly deserved. Already Criterion is showing a playlist of his works and his work in film and television and music can be found on Amazon Prime, Disney+, Netflix, and YouTube. When I think about death, I often thing of "Sycamore Trees", a song from Lynch's Twin Peaks. Lynch wrote the lyrics and the music was by his frequent collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. Here it is performed by one of Lynch's many luminous muses, Chrysta Bell: What else can I say? Only about a billion things. Too many for this space. It's a crime he was never permitted to make another movie after 2017's third season of Twin Peaks but as a final work those eighteen episodes would be hard to top. He directed and co-wrote every episode, he starred in most of them, he designed the sound, he built much of the furniture. Truly, words are insufficient.

Skeleton Through

The final episode of Skeleton Crew aired last night and, due to the show's extraordinarily low ratings, people are saying it's the last of the series rather than merely the season. I found the episode frustrating and out of touch with itself but I can see what was trying to say, that the show itself had actual ideas and themes its creators, John Watts and Christopher Ford, were working through, which is more than I can say for The Acolyte, Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan Kenobi. So, while I think the show was misfire, I do think it had good aim.

The last episode further emphasised the show's similarity to Treasure Island as it seems clear that Jude Law's character, Jod, is meant to occupy the same murky position of audience sympathy that Long John Silver inhabited in Robert Louis Stevenson's classic pirate novel (as well as many of his other novels, including Jekyll and Hyde, Master of Ballantrae, and Kidnapped). It's a tricky balance to pull off and, unfortunately, the show falls right off the tight rope, but I do kind of respect the intent.

The problem is, there's never a moment where I want the kids to win. The show throws us such broad hints that society on At Attin is sterile and really more Imperial than Old Republic, and Jod, despite Jude Law's performance infusing the character with bitterness, remains the more attractive and sympathetic alternative throughout. What is a morally complicated and riveting situation in Treasure Island is all too clear in Skeleton Crew so when characters act like things aren't clear, or clearly opposite of what they are, it's extremely discordant and a little infuriating. It's not helped by moments like when KB successfully pulls off a landing and Fern screams like we just saw her blown to smithereens. Or the pirate invasion where they're shooting at everyone but we never see anyone killed or injured, or the last minute appearance by Rebel fighters who open fire on the pirate ship without warning.

The intention may have been to nod at the undercurrents of Revenge of the Sith, to hint that the identity of the "real good guys" might not be so clear but I would be very surprised if anyone came away from this thinking Jod deserved to be thwarted. It was also kind of frustrating that Kelly Macdonald's character never returned. It would be kind of nice seeing a series about her and Jod having adventures far away from At Attin and those kids.

Skeleton Crew is available on Disney+.

Your Fuzzy Robot Friends

The promise of nightmare inherent in animatronics is somewhat realised in 2024's Five Nights at Freddy's. Based on a popular horror game franchise inspired by those old creepy family restaurants like Chuck E. Cheese and ShowBiz Pizza, the movie somehow avoids ever being scary but it is kind of a fun adventure.

The main character, Mike (Josh Hutcherson), is a security guard at a long shuttered location for Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. At one point he watches an old security training video which reminded me of the vintage ShowBiz Pizza training videos that made the rounds ten or so years ago. Comparing the animatronics and walkabouts seen in those videos to the slick, Jim Henson Creature Shop designed robots in the movie reveals how the film failed to capture the creepiness of reality. The animatronics need to be rickety, they need to have dead eyes. The ones in the movie are almost muppets; they're too effectively friendly, even with the exposed wiring and sharpened metal parts.

It is fun following Mike, his little sister (Piper Rubio), and a beautiful police officer named Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) as they try to unravel the mystery of the place. Some of it doesn't make much sense, as when Vanessa encourages the little girl to befriend the haunted animatronics only to tell Mike never to bring the girl near the things again. She also doesn't warn the little girl that a guitar belonging to one animatronic can electrocute her.

Still, it's a fun movie and has some of the adventurous appeal I assume is present in the video game.

Five Nights at Freddy's is available on Amazon Prime in Japan and on Peacock elsewhere.

X Sonnet #1912

A hooded figure carried plushies north.
Completed rows of fuzzy figures watch.
Among them lives a dream of marching forth.
But not a one can read his tiny watch.
As voices carried, actions built a tube.
Opinions route to sea and sink to sod.
The censors limit words to "Yo" and "boob"
Until the masses make a bugless mod.
Auspicious times were left beside the date.
No date occurs beneath the eyes of kids.
Adults do not arise from studied hate.
No purchase gained from endless, furtive bids.
Cognition dips beneath the waves of sloth.
A tide of blood betrays the ghosts were wroth.

When Angie Harmon was Angie Harming!

Two orphaned kids are adopted by a couple who seem nice at first but, once they get home, things almost instantly sour in 2006's Glass House: The Good Mother. It's the direct to video spin-off of Glass House, a movie critics and audiences hated. The Good Mother hasn't exactly garnered a better reputation so the brand tie-in is a little puzzling, as is the very fact of its existence. It is badly written and the performances are average at best but director Steve Antin makes some interesting choices.

Angie Harmon and Joel Gretsch play Eve and Raymond Goode, respectively. They seem like nice people who've just lost their son. Jordan Hinson and Bobby Coleman play Abby and Ethan Snow, the two kids they adopt at the beginning of the film. Abby is the point of view character and it's through her we slowly gather clues about the Goodes' dark secrets.

The director tries to convey feelings with experimental camera work like sudden closeups in the middle of a suspense scene. Sometimes it's effective but there's a strange abundance of closeups on Jordan Hinson, the teenage girl. She is very pretty but she's the point of view character so we need to see what she's looking at. The director seems to forget. There's a moment where she escapes the house and she's looking around, panicked, and we never get a shot to let us know what she's seeing. The camera stays in closeup which is a bit claustrophobic. It's almost like Detour, like this whole scenario is a dream of some kind whose true purpose is to contemplate Jordan Hinson's face.

This impression is heightened by the dialogue. This is what Roger Ebert used to call an "idiot plot," a plot that depends on people not saying or asking things most people naturally would in such a situation. The kids don't ask why the doors to the sprawling Goode manor have locks on the inside. Eve won't explain why she won't let the kids leave the house. The topic of school is never broached. Abby, stuck in the house, never asks to call her friends nor is there mention of her having friends. Instead we watch her play solitaire with a deck of cards like this movie is set in 1910 on a remote farm during a drought. I guess you could see the house as a brain and the battle of wills between Eve and Abby as a war between two aspects of a personality, maybe anxiety and a longing for personal freedom.

Jason London has a small role in the film as a friendly cop. The movie also has one of the most literal appearances of Chekhov's gun I've ever seen.

The Power of IP Compels You

A badass English Exorcist and his Mexican sidekick battle demons and Catholic conspiracy in 2016's The Exorcist. This Fox series is a direct sequel to the 1973 William Friedkin movie. It lacks the subtlety and sense of realism of that excellent film, owing more of its tone to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and some of the pulpier episodes of The X-Files though its opening theme was clearly inspired by True Detective. For that kind of series, it's not bad at all and features a surprisingly good performance from Geena Davis.

The protagonists are Marcus (Ben Daniels) and Tomas (Alfonso Herrera). Marcus is the experienced and scarred old exorcist whom we meet losing a child to a demon. Tomas is a local priest in Chicago where the show's first season was shot and set.

I enjoyed Daniels' antagonistic performance, making Marcus a man whose patience is reserved entirely for the sick chambers of possessed children. I didn't really like Tomas who gives in very easily to a tryst with a young married woman. Maybe if the woman had been fleshed out a bit more I'd have appreciated it as a believable character flaw but mostly he just seems of weaker will than the show would like me to believe.

Geena Davis plays the mother of Casey (Hannah Kasulka), the girl possessed by a demon. Alan Ruck--Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off--plays Davis' husband who recently had a brain injury that prevents him from accessing certain memories and occasionally impairs his speech. His character also serves as a conduit for the supernatural in a few interesting moments.

There are times in the series where it feels like the writers are killing time, especially early on in circular scenes of people trying to convince people an exorcist needs to happen, that Casey's problems go beyond mental illness. The family needs to be convinced or is trying to convince, the priests try to convince each other, and the church officials also need convincing. But I can understand the difficulty for the writers. What can you do when the actual action of the exorcism involves priests shouting scripture at a writhing and puking kid? The original film succeeds so well by establishing a sense of a real family and the deep violation of their shared reality perpetrated by the demon. The series never feels like real life, just comic book/soap opera life, which, to the writers' credit, is about as high as I think they consciously aspired to. So they had to throw in some more lurid plot details like nuns who keep gardens of belladonna and gangs of organ harvesters.

It's fun. I would single out episode five, the only one written by David Grimm, as an exceptionally eerie episode in which characters trapped in a house together play off each other nicely.

The Exorcist is available on Hulu.

Unnecessary Confidence Wins

An American fella on vacation in Spain finds himself happily and frustratingly tangled up in the life of a beautiful con artist in 1936's Desire. This delightful little screwball comedy was produced by Ernst Lubitsch and bears marks of the famed "Lubitsch Touch".

Gary Cooper is the American, a car engineer on vacation in Europe, promoting the company while he's at it with a gaudy sign strapped to his car. Meanwhile, Marlene Dietrich is the beautiful con artist and I loved how the film casually constructs her traps. She tells a jeweller her husband's a famous psychiatrist and she tells the famous psychiatrist her husband's the famous jeweller and then arranges for them to meet while she's in the other room with a valuable pearl necklace. It's a long time before the psychiatrist can figure out the jeweller's not crazy and by then Dietrich is long gone.

But fate is cleverer than Dietrich and, on the road, one mishap after another brings her and Cooper together. She and Cooper had both starred in Morocco, a far more famous film these days but apparently Dietrich preferred this film. Cooper certainly has more to do it. Despite his frustrations, he can't help but grinning at his luck to be in a car with a beautiful and mysterious woman, his simple-hearted glee being one of the film's chief pleasures.

Desire is available on The Criterion Channel.

Post-Riding Hood

This morning I read the latest Sirenia Digest which contains a new Caitlin R. Kiernan story called "THE HUNGER THRONE". It's a nice postmodernist reworking of Little Red Riding Hood that reminded me of Company of Wolves and Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright. Both Stage Fright and "THE HUNGER THRONE" contain a twist wherein it's revealed the narrative itself contains lies (in the case of Stage Fright, arguably it's still framed as character point of view, but that's not how critics took it). Whether or not it works for you depends on how adventurous you are, I suppose, or maybe I should say how open your mind is. I'm always up for an experiment myself.

Those who complained that the girl in the story never rides or is ridden may be pleased.

X Sonnet #1911

The sugar lumps from other years are changed.
Desserts of vanished futures stop the meal.
Across a cookie board the problems ranged.
A troubled game divides the fake from real.
The question hovers over tractor trucks.
Assembled crew were asked to gas the beast.
The foreman glanced across a hundred bucks.
The knowing faces praised a dollar feast.
The wicked curve defined the rocky moon.
With craters cursing land, the place was left.
Beside the door, a gangster placed his goon.
So stolen cash has filled a lunar cleft.
As chilly day was swapped for burning night
We never found ourselves in want of light.

Heart Wars

Jon Watts and Christopher Ford returned to pen last night's penultimate episode of Skeleton Crew. It was kind of odd because I recognised the story beats of a kids' adventure story from the '80s and Treasure Island and felt like I ought to be enjoying it. Unfortunately, I still feel like the show is out of touch with how sympathy works.

I don't believe stories have to be about sympathetic characters but one thing you need sympathetic characters for is illogical writing. If your audience sympathises with the characters, they're generally more willing to overlook leaps in logic that allow them to win. When a leap in logic favours a character you don't like, you feel cheated. Brutal but sound logic can be devastating but part of a good experience.

When the droid, SM-33, cited a piece of Pirate Code that said a captain could only claim one ship at a time, it was part of the leap in logic that allowed the kids to escape. If I liked the kids, this would've been a happy and exciting moment. But never did I prefer them over Jude Law's character, Jod. So it felt like a cheat. The rule doesn't make any sense. Real life pirates commanded multiple ships. Pirates like plunder and the ships themselves were part of that plunder. Maybe if Jod changed his title to "admiral" the droid would've been more amenable.

So it turns out that there's truly a massive stockpile of wealth which At Attin's gated community is sitting on. Do I have the slightest desire to see Jod prevented from obtaining this wealth that's apparently just gathering dust in over a thousand vaults?

I realise full well that this is likely all a set up for Jod to be revealed as a less villainous character in the final episode. I mean, that is the only way this could be satisfying. But the writers seem to think I'd be conflicted at this point and I'm just not. Is it supposed to be endearing when Wim shouts, "Attack!" and tries to take the whole pirate crew with his fists? Am I supposed to be impressed by Fern's calling "unclaimsies"? I had to check the closed captioning before I even understood what she said. The fact that that worked was a huge leap in logic and maybe I'd have been willing to go with it if I thoroughly despised Jod. But I have the exact opposite feelings so it was entirely a frustrating experience.

Skeleton Crew is available on Disney+.

My Next Guest Needs No Invocation

Things go awry when Satan proves an unruly talk show guest in 2024's Late Night with the Devil. An amusing recreation of a '70s talk show is disturbed by Satanic horror elements in a pretty satisfying way.

David Dastmalchian plays Jack Delroy, the host of Night Owls with Jack Delroy, a late night talk show competing with The Tonight Show. The name Night Owls is hinted to have a relationship to some cult to which Jack belonged. It's a subtle element of the film riding a line between comedy and horror which I liked.

On the fateful Halloween night depicted, Jack's guests are a psychic, a magician sceptic similar to Penn Jillette, and a parapsychologist accompanied by a possessed little girl similar to Reagan from The Exorcist. Things start to get weird when the psychic makes some more accurate predictions than usual and suffers a sudden illness at the same time.

Dastmalchian is believable as a late night host but also keeps his reactions nicely subtle when things get weird, leaving the audience to wonder at his possible secret guilt. That's important in stories about Satanic possession. A cornerstone of that horror is Satan exploiting the hidden sins of his victims.

Directors Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes do a good job recreating some of the vibe of a '70s talk show with graphics and editing though sometimes it feels a bit too clean. But a truly accurate recreation may be impossible. The recreation is good enough to be creepy when things start to get weird.

Alien: Formula

I did see 2024's Alien: Romulus a couple weeks ago. Obviously, it didn't make my top ten list, or even the runners up, but I didn't exactly hate it except possibly for the fact that a once vibrant franchise has become so rote and dull.

Oddly, it reminded me a lot of Alien: Covenant. Ridley Scott was right to go in a new direction with Prometheus but when everyone complained about that movie not being enough like Alien, he went back to more familiar territory with Covenant and created something dull. But even that wasn't enough like the original for some people and now we have Alien: Romulus, complete with a cgi recreation of a dead actor from the first film.

This film's Ripley replacement is a young woman named Rain (Cailee Spaeny). She's a poor orphaned miner but she has an android slave named Andy (David Jonsson)--presented as her surrogate brother but he's portrayed as mentally impaired and willing to follow Rain's commands. One could argue the film's setup is a reworking of Tom Sawyer. It's a little odd that Andy is the only black character in the film.

Somehow, scrap from the Nostromo has returned. Of course there are aliens and mischief onboard.

A lot of reviews have pointed out the logistical problems, like Rain not shooting the aliens because she's worried about the acid blood burning through the hull, only for her solution to this problem being to turn off the artificial gravity before shooting them, as if that makes a difference. For some reason, to audiences these logistical problems were less significant than the scientists behaving foolishly in Prometheus, at least according to the box office. Maybe people just think Cailee Spaeny is prettier than Noomi Rapace, I don't know.

It's vaguely heartening to see that Prometheus was influential enough for Romulus to include pregnancy horror and reference to the Engineer beings. Arguably, though, the film's climax owes a huge debt to Alien: Resurrection.

I would say this is a weaker film than Resurrection, which makes it the weakest of the franchise overall, but it has nice, nostalgic set design and it's not Manos: The Hands of Fate.

Alien: Romulus is available on Disney+.

X Sonnet #1910

The twenty pies of steel were baked at dawn.
No questions asked were answered after dark.
For night was never seen by fliers gone.
As queries clog the phones, the kings embark.
A dwarven city hides a vault of worms.
For sugar lumps, the spoon would quickly rust.
The paper cup condensed a set of terms.
Instructive phrases flowed around the bust.
Some speeding bugs have run afoul of storms.
A gusty day regresses wheat to sod.
Or solely chaff, the mulch revives the worms.
A single figure fooled the plastic god.
Another diff'rance rounds the ship to scrap.
A pointless sphere of junk becomes a trap.

Riley's Head

As Riley grows older, the denizens of her brain increase in 2024's Inside Out 2. Now as Disney enters an era of desperate sequels, this one at least feels natural and the idea of exploring how someone's emotions change as they hit puberty is a good one. The first film even teased the idea at the end. However, the new film switches up directing duties from the lauded and experienced Pete Docter to first time helmer Kelsey Mann. This was also Mann's first screenplay and his co-writers, with the exception of Meg LeFauve, are also newcomers who were uninvolved with the first film. So the writing on the second film feels a bit amateurish with excessive exposition applied to fill out the story. But I liked the new Anxiety character voiced by Maya Hawke.

I started watching the first Inside Out earlier this year and I hated it so much I had to stop. But since I wanted to see the sequel, I went back to it and decided to muscle through it. And it turned out I actually liked the bulk of the movie quite a bit, particularly the imaginary friend character called Bing Bong, voiced by Richard Kind. The first movie never felt the need to explain what it meant that Joy and Sadness were at odds, that Bing Bong had a crucial role to play in Riley's emotional growth. It was like reading Neil Gaiman's Sandman; the metaphors just functioned so perfectly you never had to stop and have it explained to you, and doing so would have killed a lot of nuance.

The second film doesn't succeed quite so well at this and there are constantly moments when the emotion characters find some new place or gadget and they're compelled to explain to each other precisely how it translates to what Riley's actually going through.

But even though Anxiety and the other new emotions are kind of set up as villains, I liked how not everything Anxiety compelled Riley to do was bad. Anxiety has Riley showing up to school early to practice harder for her hockey team, a useful idea for anyone looking to achieve a goal. Hawke's performance was never too extreme. A lot of performers would've assumed Anxiety would be screaming all the time but Hawke adopts this steady, reasonable tone even as she's explaining how Riley must do something extreme.

Considering puberty is the central focus of the film, it is a bit odd that the film totally avoids Riley thinking about dating and boys (or girls). We see inside one boy's head that he panics at having to talk to a girl but that's the entirety of sexual preoccupation presented in the film. I suppose Disney balked at the idea that a girl might ever have impure thoughts. But I suppose that's the modern Puritan culture.

So it's not a terrible film, it just doesn't compare well to the first, which adds to an impression of Pixar's decline.

Inside Out 2 is available on Disney+.

There Never was a Woman Like Anora

Some of the most successful works of fiction of all time have succeeded by presenting a pure fantasy while convincing the audience it's unflinchingly realistic. That's why 2024's Anora is so loved. It's the fantasy of a prostitute with a heart of gold and her quest to find love. Some have even claimed the film is Russian propaganda and, as far as I can see, that may very well be true. But so was Battleship Potemkin and that doesn't make that film any less great, even as I disagree with the political motives behind it.

Mikey Madison has earned a lot of acclaim for her performance as the title character, Anora, who prefers to go by "Ani". Director Sean Baker opens the film with understated slice of life bits of the strip club (as understated as a strip club can be) in which we become acquainted with Anora's normal life. She strips, she dances, she coos into the ears of patrons. Sliding into this sequence is a Russian boy named Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn). Ani's manager sends her out to him because she learned a bit of Russian from her grandmother.

They say a good story needs tension and I'd agree with them. Some would argue this next section of the film is entirely without tension as we watch Ani and Ivan embark on a whirlwind romance that ends with their quickie marriage in Las Vegas. But despite the constant upbeat music and the smiling happy pretty people, the tension is constantly present. We're waiting for the other shoe to drop and the tension is heightened because we like Ani more and more. There's Mikey Madison's natural charisma, her beauty, and her vulnerability. She's leaving her job, possibly even her family, and her whole life is changing. We like her because of her heart, which is made of gold. She's gracious with a former rival at the strip club, she's cautious and truthful with Ivan. Her heart yearns for financial stability and a handsome prince but she's not ruthless.

She started this relationship as one of transaction, over which a veneer of love had been consciously layered. Both parties entered knowing that but at some point, both characters attest, their relationship changed. Or did it? The other shoe that drops could be moralism on the part of the storytelling, but would that necessarily be honest? It could be idealism on the part of the director, in the vein of Pretty Woman or Cinderella, the latter directly referenced by the film. Would that be honest? If the answer to both questions is "no", then many directors would find themselves at a stalemate with nothing to say. Not Sean Baker who navigates these treacherous narrative waters with admirable instinct.

I'm going to go light on spoilers here because I encourage you to let the film unfold its tale for you itself. But I will say the most satisfying, and the most likely propagandistic, element of the film is the romance that takes hold in the second half. It starts subtly and builds delicately through scenes of comedy and violence.

As Oscar Wilde said, "No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an un-pardonable mannerism of style," but "The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an im-perfect medium." Whether knowingly or not, Baker follows Wilde's advice to the letter. After the setup of the first half, the characters are compelled to have a moral perspective in the second half. It's through this, and the lack of its expression in grand terms, that we're gradually led to a fascinating and satisfying pay-off. One could very easily also see it as an allegory for Putin and his invasion of Ukraine and his philosophy of government more generally. One character's slight resemblance to Putin may have been intentional. But you don't have to read the movie that way. Even knowing that it could be read that way won't diminish your ability to appreciate it (at least, I hope not).

A lot of people have compared the film to classic cinema, particularly screwball comedies. Greta Gerwig, who was a judge on the Cannes panel that gave it the Palme d'Or, compared it to the works of Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch. There is something of that screwball rapidity in it but I was also reminded of The Sopranos and My Cousin Vinny. Mikey Madison, a California native, adopted a Brooklyn accent for the film and critics love the kind of brassy New York dame she plays. Like Marissa Tomei or Margot Robbie before her, I think she'll go through a period of critical love that will wane over the next two or three years. But she and we will always have Anora.

2024 at the Movies

2024 was a fantastic year of movies. The art films were good and the mainstream films were good. Even the nostalgia bait reboots and sequels were good. Of all the movies I saw last year, I can honestly say there was only one I genuinely disliked, and that was The Substance. And even in that case, I respected the film's artistic integrity even if I was put off by its misanthropy. So I can't really make a "worst of the year" list. Which is a good thing, I think.

First, the runners up. I thought Dune Part 2 had nice cinematography and good performances but I still find Villeneuve's adaptations to be too sterile. Carry-On was a perfectly competent little Christmas action movie. The First Omen was an entertaining prequel with a terrific lead performance by Nell Tiger Free.

10. His Three Daughters (my review, Wikipedia entry)

This low budget Netflix film is essentially an opportunity for three talented actresses to bounce off each other. It's an engrossing experience.

9. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (my review, Wikipedia entry)

It's a little more cartoonish than I'd hoped for and really does feel like a two hour episode of the animated series. But, hey, I watched that animated series as a kid and, while I never thought it matched the tone or equaled the heights of the first film, I did find it to be an entertaining pulp adventure.

8. Late Night with the Devil (Wikipedia entry)

David Dastmalchian finally got the lead role he longed for in this depiction of a '70s late night talk show being slowly conquered by Satan. It's more fun than scary but there are a few genuinely spooky moments.

7. Inside Out 2 (Wikipedia entry)

A little more literal minded than the first film, this one had a lot of moments where the characters feel compelled to explain the metaphors to each other. However, it's still a solid story with a good ensemble joined by equally effective new characters.

6. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (my review, Wikipedia entry)

It's a welcome return to that lovely New England town and of the foul bio-exorcist who haunts it. It was genuinely nice catching up with the old characters and while Jenna Ortega is never as impressive as she is on Wednesday, she still wasn't bad.

5. Deadpool and Wolverine (my review, Wikipedia entry)

They made the right decision desecrating Logan--repeatedly--since Logan, while being a good superhero movie, didn't deserve the holy status its director sought for it. Thank god Hugh Jackman listened to Ryan Reynolds and we, the audience, benefited. It's a delightful interdimensional buddy comedy with ultraviolence and, surprisingly, one of the best MCU villains to date.

4. Oddity (my review, Wikipedia entry)

This ghost revenge story set in the Irish countryside on the darkest of nights is loaded with atmosphere and brilliantly calculated suspense. It reminded me a lot of great haunting films from the '40s like The Uninvited and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir except its brilliant jump scares might give you a heart attack.

3. Joker: Folie a Deux (my review, Wikipedia entry)

You're not supposed to like this movie, which is all the more reason to watch it. I'm glad I did. It is the DC version of Natural Born Killers as Quentin Tarantino observed and, honestly, a better version of the story.

2. Megalopolis (my review, Wikipedia entry)

This is another one authorities have instructed us not to like but, while it's not as great as its director might have hoped it would be, it's still a wondrous piece of visual and intellectual stimuli. Anyone seriously interested in movie making must see this movie and for anyone else . . . Megalopolis is a unique marvel of the cinematic world. Why not partake of it?

1.Anora (Wikipedia entry)

Yes, Cannes was right. The Oscar buzz is right, for once, this movie really is that good. Some people praise it for the fact that it's not a "prostitute with a heart of gold" story but that's baloney. It is definitely a prostitute with a heart of gold story. But there's a reason such stories are so popular and you can see it in the comments section of star Mikey Madison's Criterion Closet video. Yeah, the simps are lining up but it couldn't have happened to a sweeter character. I suspect she'll probably end up like Marisa Tomei but Marisa Tomei's not a bad actress, either. What makes Anora work is pure, cinematic storytelling instinct on the part of its director Sean Baker. An old fashioned story of the gold-hearted prostitute--inspired by Fellini's Nights of Cabiria according to the director--always has potential to be satisfying but the history of cinema is littered with failed or mediocre attempts. From scene to scene, Baker just knows how to cook it to perfection. This is the best movie of the year because it's an example of storytelling excellence.