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.