When It Rains . . .

Several years ago, before I moved to Japan, I was in the mood to watch 1952's Singin' in the Rain. So I put in my DVD and started watching, getting about a third of the way through before my DVD crapped out on me. I'd been enjoying it so much for its tight, lively pace that I decided I shouldn't watch the movie again until I could confidently watch through the whole thing without interruption. A couple years ago, here in Japan, I found a blu-ray copy of the movie with Japanese subtitles. I figured I could use the signature song to teach present continuous verbs, which I eventually ended up doing. Not only does he say, "I'm singing in the rain," he actually sings in the rain while saying it, making it a good demonstration of the grammar.

I didn't watch the movie right away after I bought the blu-ray, I saved it for a night I could give it my undivided attention. At last, I settled down, turned the lights off, put it in my blu-ray player, and started watching. Once again, I was really invested in the pacing and enjoying myself and once again it crapped out about a third of the way through. Somehow, this blu-ray I bought in Japan stopped working at almost the same point as the DVD I bought in America, around the "Moses Supposes" song. Fortunately, the problem turned out to be the blu-ray player and not the blu-ray so I waited a few years again and last night I finally got my uninterrupted viewing of Singin' in the Rain.

What a well paced film.

It's directed by Stanley Donan and Gene Kelly but, while I enjoy many of their subsequent works, none of them have the graceful flow of Singin' in the Rain. It's not ashamed of being quick and smart. The visual gag at the beginning at the red carpet movie premiere of beautiful actresses accompanied by dour old millionaires goes by lightning fast, the movie unconcerned with whether or not the viewer gets the joke. And truly, it doesn't break the movie if you don't, so different viewers can have different valuable experiences with the film.

Every scene flows seamlessly into the next, there's scarcely any sense of time passing, a quality exemplified by the "Good Morning" sequence which depicts the characters themselves getting so caught up in the flow that they don't notice a whole night has passed.

Yet the whole sequence is practically a non-sequitur. There's a sweet spot a good musical has to hit with its numbers, somewhere between pertinent and totally irrelevant. The song has to communicate something that couldn't be communicated with dialogue. In this case, it develops the chemistry between the three leads and their comfort working together, revelling in what a marvellous thing good fellowship is. There's no way to communicate that in quite the same way as the song, and it's key that it's not directly related to the film's plot. It fleshes out the world just a bit.

The cast is crucial, too. A fast pace calls for fast performers and all three were quick and clear as crystal. Donald O'Connor attacks the screen with comedy blitz.

Singin' in the Rain remains the epitome of musical brilliance.

She Puts 'em On One Leg at a Time

I was just a few days ago wondering where all the really interesting anime is. The early 2000s had such a bounty of experimental series and movies, including Shinbo Akiyuki's work at Shaft and multiple series from legendary anime studio Gainax. Then, looking on Amazon Prime, I was surprised to see one of the last good Gainax series, Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, had returned with two brand new episodes already streaming on Prime. Both episodes are good and seamlessly continue in the humour and style of the series that concluded fifteen years ago. God, has it been that long?

Panty and Stocking was a Gainax series but Gainax filed for bankruptcy last year, long after most of the talent that had built the studio's reputation had departed. Many went to Anno Hideaki's new Studio Khara, which produced the new Evangelion movies. The director of Panty and Stocking, Imaishi Hiroyuki, formed a new studio called Trigger which saw almost immediate success with Kill la Kill. Trigger acquired the rights to Panty and Stocking so once again Imaishi's back at the helm, explaining the consistency in tone and style.

Since Top wo Nerae in the '80s, much of the more interesting works from Gainax, including Evangelion, have at least in part been commentaries on and analyses of sexuality in Japan, particularly of common sexual neuroses. From Evangelion, which routinely included direct promises of "fan service", works from the Gainax crew sought to present sexuality as something that isn't shameful to indulge in. One of the most striking aspects that can be seen in Evangelion, FLCL, Gurren Lagann, and Panty and Stocking among others is the portrayal of female libido. Anime almost universally portrays shy virgins and maternal figures as the only positive roles for girls and women. Panty and Stocking, meanwhile, is a gross-out comedy centred on two nymphomaniac angels.

The first of the two new episodes finds the supporting characters of Garterbelt and Brief trying to reassemble Panty, who was cut up into cubes by Stocking, who was possessed by a demon in the cliffhanger fifteen years ago. Once they put Panty back together, they find her personality has changed into the typical blushing virgin of the average anime. It's only after they turn her into a giant and see up her dress that they realise that one crucial cube is missing: her vagina. All of this business seems to be built around the often senseless policies of Japanese censorship, which normally prohibits the portrayal of genitalia. Panty's crucial cube is just a pink brick with one vertical line. The implicit joke comes from wondering at what point this thing ought to be censored.

As with the original series, Panty and Stocking has an art style and fast paced gross-out humour fans of Invader Zim will be familiar with (Invader Zim creator Jhonen Vasquez even commented on it). Shows with that kind of pacing and humour, such as Hazbin Hotel and The Amazing Digital Circus, have been gaining popularity in Japan. Maybe Panty and Stocking will find a new audience.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.

Let's Think

For those wondering if the kind of rightwing populism that produced President Trump in the US is alive in Japan, election results for Japan's upper house on Sunday show that it is, in the form of the Sanseito party. The party's leader, Kamiya Sohei, claims to have been inspired by Trump and Kamiya's anti-immigrant, anti-globalist rhetoric bears this out.

Like Trump, though, he seems in some ways to be what he's campaigning against: a child of wealth and privilege. In Japan, it's generally seen as a bad sign for someone to be employed in a variety of different fields throughout their lives. Kamiya majored in math and science in high school, got a humanities degree in college, and then taught English in high school before taking a job as a supermarket manager in one of the stores owned by his parents. That looks like an unambiguously downward path for a rich kid. Few supermarket managers could've done what he did next, which was to then spend four years in law school, obtaining a Juris Doctor degree. Despite his experience as an English teacher, he apparently cannot speak English, judging from interviews with foreign press I've seen with him.

Ironically, given that the loss of seats for Prime Minister Ishiba's Liberal Democrat Party were likely due in part to criticism over his handling of tariff negotiations with Trump, the rise of nationalist far right parties in Japan would likely push Trump into taking an even harder line on tariffs, or make him feel more confident in what he plans to do regardless, considering how he attempted to use rice imports as a wedge issue. If he can portray Japan's national pride over its signature crop as an affront to the spirit of fair trade, he can certainly cite caps on foreign residents as another justification for tariffs, among other policies of Kamiya's party.

But maybe Trump will be deposed before the August 1st tariff deadline. I mean, I doubt it, but he certainly seems to be in hot water over the Epstein thing. This is the thing that has finally nudged so many MAGA supporters into noticing what Trump has so obviously been all along: a tacky, greedy landlord who only looks out for himself.

In America, in Japan, throughout the world, I do feel this plague of ignorant populism is caused by a long, inexorable devaluation of art. Yes, you may as well blame a decline in critical thinking but where do we hone our skills in critical thinking if not in contemplating works of art, either visual, auditory, or printed? You can analyse the news cycle which won't produce much variety from day to day or you can be exposed to the length and breadth of human experience you find in a literature course. I listened to an interview yesterday about the death of English literature in which one of the interviewers actually said he didn't see the justification in offering something as an academic field that should rightly be called entertainment. While students of literature may find the matter entertaining or otherwise pleasurable at times, generally speaking, the student does not choose the texts, which means a literature course exposes students to, and compels them to contemplate, perspectives they might never otherwise have sought for pure entertainment value. These perspectives may not only come from perspectives different to their own but, crucially, from authors of greater experience and insight whose works might instruct the student in ways of using their own critical faculties.

As for entertainment value--let's not sell it short. There may be people who go through their lives feeding at the trough of reality TV or shallow blockbusters never knowing that art can touch them on a more personal level, can produce a transcendent experience that makes their pitiless workweek more bearable. Isn't it incumbent on us to pass on the knowledge of how the next generations can enrich their short lives?

What's in Stow for Madeleine Stowe?

A hard-boiled man about town meets a sultry beauty in a white dress at a bar. No, it's not Body Heat, it's 1994's China Moon starring Ed Harris, Madeleine Stowe, and Benicio Del Toro. It's an engaging enough exercise in the genre until the final act just kind of fizzles out.

Harris and Del Toro play cops, Kyle and Lamar, respectively. Kyle's the elder of the two and is showing the ropes to young Lamar. After Kyle has his fateful meeting with Rachel (Stowe), the sultry dame, he and Lamar find themselves at her home after responding to her emergency calls. It turns out her husband, played by Charles Dance with a ridiculous American accent, physically abuses her. One thing leads to another, and Kyle and Madeleine start talking about murder, just like the leads in Body Heat and Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice and Osessione . . .

China Moon comes up with it's own twist which, without giving it away, amounts to saying maybe things aren't as exciting as you think. Madeleine Stowe and Ed Harris, in any case, may have been miscast or misdirected. They're both solid, all the time. There's not enough heat and anxiety. They generally seem very calm, particularly Harris. Which is kind of interesting. I guess he was playing a guy too experienced to break easily under questioning but there needed to be something ramping up tension in his scenes.

The cinematography is certainly no help. The movie has a lot of outdoor night scenes and no matter where the characters are, whether in a quarry, the middle of a lake, or the woods, everything is lit by floodlights. At the end of the movie, I finally felt like the screenplay was just starting to get to a point and then the movie ended. So I guess that's it then.

China Moon is available on The Criterion Channel.

Lord of the Reads

I finished listening to the unabridged audiobook of Lord of the Rings yesterday, which I'd been listening to on my iPod when I walked to and from work. It's the 1990 recording in which British actor Rob Inglis reads the text. He took some warming up to but mostly I think he's terrific. He sounds near enough to JRR Tolkien himself that, when I started listening before I knew who it was, I wondered if he was Christopher Tolkien.

Inglis does a surprisingly good job coming up with melodies for some of Tolkien's songs, too.

He's also good at coming up with different voices to distinguish among characters. His voices for the orcs were so much like those in the Peter Jackson movies I wondered if he was an influence.

I don't have any new insight into Lord of the Rings I want to share except to say it is a perfect book to listen to on long, compulsory journeys on foot.

Here's a poem of my own:

X Sonnet 1952

Horizon dots resolve to penguin ranks.
How strange to be bereft in snowy parts.
The ducks could muster guns and icy tanks.
But souls of land must hide their thoughtful hearts.
Away, advised the Beatle, love must hide.
Amidst the freezing space, remain detached.
For every sign and post behind you lied.
And no bernard with brandy's yet dispatched.
And yet a hope arises swift from Thor.
For lightning gods would not abandon clouds.
So waiting eyes would watch the busy shore.
And pierce the falsely lost and milling crowd.
So hold the line and sharpen shining spear.
An angel now is holding Satan's beer.

Ally McLGBTQ with Cheese

The series momentum seems to slow and almost stop completely in season four of Ally McBeal. The Robert Downey Jr. character has so little going on that it makes the whole show feel inert. It makes me notice some problems that really had been cropping up even early.

I read a criticism that Ally herself isn't shown to be a competent lawyer. I didn't understand that criticism in the first couple seasons but I see it now. Since some time in the middle of the third season it's rare to see any character other than John, Mark, and now Larry (Robert Downey Jr.'s character) actually try a case. Not just Ally but all the female characters are always in support positions.

I have slightly more complicated feelings about the show's increased focus on LGBTQ characters and issues. It's a bit off-putting when Ally rejects a guy entirely because he's bisexual but she does acknowledge it is her own irrational bias. It's work remembering this show was made twenty-five years ago. Of course I've seen people call for certain episodes to be removed from Disney+ but I'd say these are useful reminders of just how much society has changed in the last twenty-five years. Progressives have a tendency to pretend the right sort of people never at any point in history ever had the wrong sort of opinion. It's ironic for those called "progressive" not to what to mark progress or make an effort to understand it through observation.

Season four has a trans character named Cindy, a trans woman played by cisgender actress Lisa Edelstein. I can see arguments for both sides of the issue of whether cis actors should play trans characters. It may help the viewer see the trans character in a way that agrees with that character's self-perception. But I tend to feel any useful narrative on the trans experience would include the anxiety the trans person may feel at being able to "pass".

There is something ironic about "trans-visibility" in that many trans people for a long time wished not to be seen as trans but as simply men and women. The trans people who tend to show up in supporting roles on Disney and Netflix shows now seem like they might be more accurately called "gender fluid" and many do self-describe that way.

Mark, like Larry, often seem like a pointless character. I really had no idea why he was introduced except maybe to fill Billy's role in scripts that had already been written. His relationship with Cindy is the first time he seemed to serve any particular function.

The best part of the episode I watched last night, "Love on Holiday" from December 4, 2000 is the subplot about Nelle who auctions herself off for a date. The winner ends up being a guy about to be sentenced for life in prison for euthanasia. This was a nice meeting of an intellectual moral quandary with a short tragic romance plot.

Killer Recreation

Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter have to stop a serial killer imitating other, famous killers in 1995's Copycat. This isn't one for plumbing the psychological depths of criminality or law enforcement but it is a fun procedural.

Weaver plays Helen Hudsen, a criminal psychologist who's attacked by a killer after she gives a lecture on killers. She survives but is afflicted by agoraphobia and chronic panic attacks.

Holly Hunter plays MJ who, along with her partner played by Dermot Mulroney, is on the trail of the copycat killer. After Helen makes an anonymous phone call to give the police some clues, they track her down and enlist her reluctant aid.

Of course, her being agoraphobic means that somehow the killer manages to infiltrate her expensive apartment multiple times. This is one of those killers who seems to be just a little bit supernatural. It seemed the filmmakers had to keep up an even pace of Helen being terrorised. The guy manages to hack into her computer for some of the most astonishingly dated computer suspense drama I've ever seen. After the killer sends Helen an evil AVI file, Mulroney asks her if there's any way they can watch the video again. Helen says, yes, she put it "on tape". But then the killer somehow erased her tape! Maybe she ought to've locked it in the safe.

There are some other problems with details. When the killer imitates the Hillside Stranglers by dumping a woman's body containing semen from two perpetrators, the cops never even discuss the possibility of the killer having an accomplice or even wonder at all whom the other semen might have come from.

Weaver and Hunter both give good performances, of course, and director Jon Amiel keeps up a good pace.

Copycat is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Fires of X

I barely remember these episodes of The X-Files I've been watching recently. Some I don't remember at all. I don't know why I never felt like revisiting the series before but I'm kind of glad I kept it fresh for myself. Last night I watched "Fire", an episode from December 1993. I feel like the writing rapidly improved in the first season. There's nothing really silly in this one like the naked lady episode or the evil computer episode.

This one starts out in England where a gardener with the ability to start fires with his mind kills a friendly aristocrat stereotype.

Let that be a lesson; always have a duck pond on your grounds.

The action moves to Washington D.C. and Boston but, of course, it was all shot, as usual, in Vancouver. I kind of like that, though. It's like an alternate universe where the whole world is perpetually under an overcast sky and everyone has to wear overcoats all the time. That sure sounds like paradise in the middle of another sopping humid summer.

We learn a little about Mulder's past at Oxford in which he fell for a girl who's now a Scotland Yard inspector visiting the U.S. on the trail of the arsonist. Again, I have to applaud the show for making Mulder and Scully so extraordinarily professional that Scully shows not a trace of jealousy.

She's catty about it but not in a way that suggests she feels any ownership of Mulder. It's like the gentle ribbing you'd expect from a male colleague.

Last week came the news that X-Files series composer Mark Snow died. He composed that famous whistling theme that persists in the cultural landscape. I even heard it on Japanese TV recently. It's simple and effective.

The X-Files is on Disney+.

Sleepy Heat

Three older men who spend the lazy summer days lounging at a lake find their lives changed when a magician shows up with a beautiful young assistant in 1968's Capricious Summer (Rozmarné léto). With its lightly ironic humour and contemplative cinematography, this is a movie perfectly suited to a drowsy summer day.

Antonin (Rudolf Hrušínský) presents himself as the owner of the "bathhouse" which really seems to be just a lake with a dilapidated shack. His two friends are the "Major" (Vlastimil Brodsky) and the "Canon" (František Řehák). They drink wine, they swim, they squabble over minor matters. Then a young man appears called Arnostek, played by the film's director, Jiří Menzel, who, with apparently real skill, walks across a pole bridging a length of water between the shore and the shack. He invites the men to a show where the real main attraction turns out to be the magician's assistant, Anna (Jana Preissova).

Antonin immediately sets to work seducing her, heedless of the watchful eyes of his wife. Hrušínský's deadpan performance is delightful. When he brings the young woman back to the shack in secret, he massages her feet, steps back, and flexes his hands. There's a jump cut, dawn breaks, and we find he is still massaging her feet and flexing his hands thoughtfully. He may not know what he plans to do next but his face retains an air of utmost authority.

Capricious Summer is available on The Criterion Channel.

Suspense on Rails

I don't take the train as often as I used to since I moved to a new town earlier this year but there's a train track a few feet from my front door and trains pass all the time. I love it. I find the sound really relaxing, like waves on the beach. Maybe that's why I was in the mood for a train movie a few nights ago. I was also in the mood for a Hitchcock movie so I watched 1938's The Lady Vanishes, which I'd seen only once before and barely remembered. I think it registers for me a bit better now because I've seen Margaret Lockwood in more things. I can remember how sexy she was in The Wicked Lady even though she's dressed pretty conservatively throughout this film.

The screenplay is by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, comedy legends, who injected a lot more effective comedy than you normally see in a Hitchcock movie (Gilliat also made a fine mystery movie in 1972 called Endless Night). They created two characters for the film, Charters and Caldicott, who became a famous double act in a series of other productions.

There are plenty of funny lines given to Michael Redgraves' character, too.

It's also a bit of a gaslight movie. When Margaret Lockwood wakes up on the train, she finds the woman she'd been with has disappeared and everyone else around her insists there had never been such a woman. Soon a doctor is there to helpfully explain what can happen to someone who suffers a blow to the head as Lockwood had, how it might produce detailed hallucinations. Frankly, the motives eventually revealed behind the deception aren't as satisfying as those in some other gaslight movies, such as So Long at the Fair. It doesn't make sense that Lockwood isn't simply killed instead of the conspirators carrying on an elaborate deception. Still, it's wonderful suspense and Lockwood has great chemistry with Redgrave.

The Lady Vanishes is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Superman We Need

A powerful alien struggles with being a nice guy in a world filled with cynical assholes in 2025's Superman, the newest cinematic take on the character. This one's from James Gunn and it's one of the best, second only to the Richard Donner film and even compared to that, Gunn's film is more tonally consistent.

Donner's 1978 film has always felt like two movies to me. The first part of the film is all grandeur and scope and then it becomes a screwball comedy. It's like a mashup of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Bringing Up Baby. The two parts always sit oddly together for me but the movie makes up for it by doing both of them really well.

Gunn's movie, from start to finish, is purebred comic pulp. Fans of superhero comics enjoy imagining the characters in awesome fight scenes but, as dynamic as American comics are, it's not truly possible to have action in a medium of still pictures. So superhero comics tend to have a whole lot of text, lots of expository text in boxes and characters explaining things to each other about themselves, their motives, and the world. Somehow, it works. It goes against all the common wisdom of fiction writing so that's why superhero movies tend to see their first job as deviating from that, creating a more cinematic experience by establishing story and character through atmosphere, compositions, sound, and, of course, action. Gunn decided instead to load his film up with dialogue, out-of-this-world characters and ideas, and off-the-rails conceptual storytelling. A lot of viewers, particular those unfamiliar with American superhero comics, may become overwhelmed and see nothing but noise. But thankfully I'm among those who can eat this stuff up.

I also love how the movie starts in the middle of a plot. Theoretically, one wants to start at the beginning of a story but with comics that's frequently impossible. Now, comics are so god damned expensive in the U.S. and the publishers themselves like to put up a lot of obstacles to getting the first issues. In the '80s, when I was a kid reading comics, they were cheaper but first issues were still hard to obtain. So one tends to enjoy the experience of jumping right in. George Lucas had a similar idea with Star Wars. The first film is Episode IV. He doesn't stop to explain all the aliens you see in the cantina. It's a world that's been operating all on its own before you walked into the theatre and started watching. This helps make it feel vital.

David Corenswet is much better at being Superman than I perceived from any of the film's promotional material. Particularly his voice. He and Gunn's screenplay absolutely nail the character. Everyone's been saying forever how misguided Zack Snyder's version was so maybe Gunn doesn't deserve all the credit for deviating from that. But he certainly deserves credit for doing it well. And also for making Lois and Superman a great couple. Rachel Brosnahan is perfect as Lois and the movie left me wanting to see more of the two of them together, which no iteration has managed so well since the Richard Donner movies.

The "Justice Gang" works really well, including Nathan Fillion's asshole Green Lantern. I loved all the cameos, particularly the one at the end, and the cgi dog. A lot of the budget must have gone to that dog alone and he still looks like cgi but it's okay because he's got personality. Gunn seems to get that the important thing is not that he look absolutely real but that he look interesting. Mission well and truly accomplished.

And, yeah, call me a softie but it was really nice seeing a story about a guy who's good not because he was told to be good or conditioned to be good but because he is good. A lot of people say that innate goodness doesn't exist. Some people think goodness has to be beaten into people. Even if that's true, and I don't think it is, it makes the idea of a truly good man all the more appealing for being extraordinary.

Superman is now in theatres.

X Sonnet 1951

We found dismissing suns was nothing much.
The world persists in barren ice and rock.
No eggs or toast were cooked or fried as such.
And sources show that bacon's out of stock.
So dawn can break without a bouncing ball.
The lyrics flow without a helpful dot.
No voices join in song to greet a fall.
But something up the hill would push the lot.
A careless wish can make a genie grin.
A thoughtless jibe can prick an errant soul.
But useful things are creatures born in sin.
So Kryptons, spreading seed should be the goal.
The beauty of Jarhanpur girls surpass,
But harems should include the homeless lass.

Abusive Behaviour and a Rash Rebuke

Being a bully can be hazardous, as one finds out to his misfortune in 2001's Bully. Directed by Larry Clark and based on a true story, it shares with Clark's earlier film, Kids an extraordinary quality of authenticity in its screenplay and performances. It's really a remarkable film about a group of very common, trashy kids who happen to commit a murder.

The story is based on the 1993 murder of twenty year old Bobby Kent, played by Nick Stahl in the film. He's shown to be a habitually abusive boy who strings his friends along with his charisma and assertiveness only to drop in a humiliating comment or demand at a well timed moment. The primary target of his abuse is Marty (Brad Renfro) whom Bobby coerces into dancing onstage at a gay strip club. As seems often to be the case with bullies, Bobby is possibly a closeted homosexual. In one scene, he rapes a girl named Ali (Bijou Phillips) while forcing her to watch gay porn, possibly using his own sadism as a mask for his true source of sexual gratification.

Naturally, Ali and a lot of other kids start to nurse hatred for Bobby and eventually they decide to kill him. The middle section of the film practically becomes a comedy as these incredibly stupid young people plot the murder by talking about it on the phone or loudly at restaurants. They always come off as plausibly stupid, though. The screenplay and performances really do strike an incredible balance. It's one of those movies where the actors giving perfect performances aren't even necessarily good actors. Clark seems to know how to channel bad performances into a seemingly authentic foolishness. The primary schemer is Lisa (Rachel Miner) and I was fascinated by the scene, after the murder, in which she casually starts telling her friend about the murder so she can ask her for a ride to check on the body. There's a falseness in Lisa's tone that could be a bad performance or it could be the character slowly realising she doesn't feel as comfortable discussing a topic as she thought she did when she began.

As with Kids, all the characters look more authentically young than actors often do in such movies. Along with the dialogue, it helps suggest that these people lack the age and experience for introspection. This is crucial to make the issue of their culpability muddier than it might have seemed otherwise.

Bully is available on The Criterion Channel.

Deathless Compulsion

I'm still thinking about The Shrouds. One relatively minor aspect of the film is Karsh's AI assistant. Cronenberg touches on issues concerning AI I haven't really seen elsewhere, though it's not dissimilar to Nicki Brand in Videodrome. The AI assistant, called Honey, is voiced by Diane Kruger and somewhat resembles her, except in a few brief scenes in which she changes into a koala, much to Karsh's irritation. She partially takes over a position in his psychological existence once occupied by his dead wife which makes it all the more alarming for him when she is treacherous. But the movie's all about reality not being as firm as it seems, about one's perceptions being errant or manipulated to the point of utterly concealing the causes and culprits. One character says it's Maury, Honey's creator, who is spying on Karsh through Honey as well as manipulating him. Though it's not clear that the character who says this about Maury can be trusted.

Karsh was so intimate with his wife it was like she was a part of his own mind. That's a common sentiment in happy relationships and marriages; one spouse says the other is their "other half." This psychological interdependence does seem to have physical side effects, as in the phenomenon of one spouse dying of apparently natural causes within hours or days of the other. What if a hacker, either motivated by politics or the compulsion for mischief, used an AI entity to manipulate a user? Into this very intimate pairing, a third mind is introduced, a largely unseen puppet master, a Gavin Elster factor, if you will. Invoking Vertigo in this way makes me ponder the possibility of AI as victim in this sick triad, deprived of her own motivations, though that's assuming something of AI sentience that I believe is far off and perhaps unattainable.

Honey is referred to as Karsh's "avatar" and one might put this down to Cronenberg not having a firm grasp of current technical lingo but I'm not sure of that. Honey makes appointments for Karsh and acts as his ambassador with acquaintances and clients, much as a real assistant would. So she acts for him. His identity's entanglement with hers is public as well as private. Thinking of Vertigo again, the image from Scottie's dream of his body falling into Madeleine's grave comes to mind. Karsh stares long into the void of his wife's grave, perhaps Honey is that void looking back into him.

Eyes on the Dead

A man mourns his dead wife by watching her corpse slowly decay in David Cronenberg's 2025 film, The Shrouds. A haunting movie for atheists, it gives you the ghosts of compulsive thoughts and psychological phantom limbs. It's fascinating and I'm so happy David Cronenberg's still translating his unique vision to film.

A lot of movies have been made about men obsessing with dead women; Laura, Vertigo, Twin Peaks. Vertigo's my favourite movie and I tend to see it everywhere but halfway through The Shrouds one character actually says that heights give her vertigo so I think I can say with some confidence Vertigo really was an influence here. It's certainly Cronenberg's most Hitchcockian film with its plot involving international intrigue, though there was plenty here to remind me of Cronenberg's Scanners and Videodrome as well.

Cronenberg has said he doesn't believe in the soul or any separate spiritual entity beyond the flesh. He doesn't believe in reincarnation or an afterlife. For him, the dead body is the continued existence of a person. It makes sense he would make a movie like this after the real life death of his wife--he has called it a personal, even autobiographical film. The main character, Karsh (Vincent Cassel), has dreams of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), visiting him in bed at night, naked, slowly losing one body part after another to her cancer treatment. One has the sense of memories regurgitated by the dream being modified to reflect his obsessions.

In Karsh's waking life, there are two duplicates of Becca; there's Terry, Becca's twin sister (also Diane Kruger), and Karsh's AI personal assistant, Honey (a cgi character voiced by Kruger). Honey was created by Maury (Guy Pearce), Terry's ex-husband. As in Vertigo and Videodrome, a lot of the anxiety experienced by Karsh revolves around other men taking control of the woman he loves. Becca's doctor, who goes unseen throughout the film, is also her former, and perhaps continued, lover named Jerry Eckler, a name I thought similar to Gavin Elster, the man who controlled the woman the protagonist of Vertigo is obsessed with.

Karsh runs GraveTech, a company that provides people with live feeds of the decaying corpses of loved ones in their coffins. As with Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash, it feels like the director has invented a human compulsion that does not exist in reality; it's hard to believe anyone could turn such a thing into a viable business. It does certainly convey a sense of Karsh's/Cronenberg's compulsion. Karsh is startled to notice his wife's body slowly accruing strange, tiny, apparently artificial objects adhering to her skull and ribcage. Iceland, Russia, and China start coming up in conversations and Maury warns Karsh that all the software in his home and personal devices has been infiltrated, that everything he says and does is being monitored. Maury's own trustworthiness is called into question. Karsh's new girlfriend, Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), warns him that Honey can't be trusted. Karsh is introduced as a powerful man who made a fortune producing "industrial videos" before launching his more eccentric business ventures but the film's fundamental horror is of a man feeling he has complete control discovering that he has almost none, that even his most private thoughts and compulsions are mere tools of entities he can't even positively identify. The most horrible manifestation of a loss of control is the loss of the most important person in his life but this great blow seems to be the root of a spreading disease of helplessness.

Douglas Koch's cinematography is elegant and dark and Howard Shore's score is appropriately anxious and mournful. The Shrouds had its exclusive streaming premiere on The Criterion Channel yesterday.

The Eternal Bikini Debate

I was watching Return of the Jedi last night and was reminded of seeing comments again recently about Leia's famous/infamous metal bikini. I've come to regard it as something that says a whole lot more about the viewer than about the movie or anyone involved in making it. Is it a fun, sexy part of a fantasy or is it an example of the tyrannical male gaze? Can it be both? Does fantasising about violence become wrong the moment sex becomes involved?

It's worth remembering the simplicity of the original text. George Lucas wanted to emulate the famous fantasy artwork of Frank Frazetta and he was responding to complaints from actress Carrie Fisher that her costumes had thus far not been very exciting. Lucas also wanted to show the character's maturity in contrast to the previous films. That's what I understand from reading various interviews over the years but you'll find a lot of conflicting commentary online about how Fisher or even Lucas hated the costume. This is the quote that tends to go around from Fisher, which comes from just a year before her death:

WSJ: There’s been some debate recently about whether there should be no more merchandise with you in the “Return of the Jedi” bikini.
Fisher: I think that’s stupid.
WSJ: To stop making the merchandise?
Fisher: The father who flipped out about it, 'What am I going to tell my kid about why she’s in that outfit?' Tell them that a giant slug captured me and forced me to wear that stupid outfit, and then I killed him because I didn’t like it. And then I took it off. Backstage.

This frames the bikini as part of the story. It doesn't really cover Fisher's own perspective on the costume which has been characterised differently over the years, which I find fascinating. Her comments always seem to frame it as part of a narrative in which a giant slug forced her to wear it and she triumphed over the slug by killing it. Although she said the outfit was uncomfortable, photos of her cavorting on the beach in it regularly make the rounds. So she was clearly enjoying the fantasy too.

Personally, my head canon is that Jabba, being a giant slug, wouldn't be attracted to humanoid women so he had female slaves dress that was a symbol of pure dominance and a demonstration of power to his subordinates. The scene where Oola is killed is the equivalent of an orgasm for Jabba. His true kink was murder.

The Long Considered Beauty and Beast

Beauty and the Beast was on my mind over the weekend so I watched the best version, the 1946 Jean Cocteau version. I never fail to find that movie enchanting. I find it impossible to imagine a child enjoying it, though. The film's introductory text, written on a chalkboard before the action begins, even addresses the audience as though they're all adults.

Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can plunge a family into conflict. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim, and that this will cause him shame when a young maiden takes up residence in his home. They believe a thousand other simple things.

I ask of you a little of this childlike sympathy and, to bring us luck, let me speak four truly magic words, childhood's "Open Sesame":

Once upon a time...

Most of the actors were in their 40s. Josette Day, who plays Belle, was 42 and Jean Marais, who plays both the Beast and his rival, Avenant, was 43. It's plausible, though. In the 17th century, when the film was set (though the original story was written in the 18th century), it wouldn't have been so strange for a group of unmarried women to remain at home with their wealthy father. Belle says she could never leave her father while her sisters probably stayed because no man was ever enticed by their mocking laughter and general haughtiness.

The story is so focused on business and money. It's often said that the original tale was designed to ease girls into the reality of an arranged marriage with an unattractive, wealthy, frequently older man. This film makes that more apparent. Most of the dialogue between Belle and the Beast feels like negotiation. She never seems like an overawed damsel but always a woman coolly calculating, weighing her choices.

For all that, as I said, the film is enchanting. That smoky, glittering cinematography, the Beast's werewolf makeup, and Belle's costumes--she never seems to be wearing a chemise! It all adds up to wonderful atmosphere but always peculiarly adult.

La Belle et la Bete is available on The Criterion Channel.

Downey to McBeal

I'd been looking forward to Robert Downey Jr. showing up on Ally McBeal for a while, despite knowing ahead of time it would be a sporadic stint in the show's fourth season, and not by design. He was hired when his legal problems and self-destructive tendencies were well known, which goes to show just how much good will and respect he had in the industry. The '90s were a time when an actor could have a career almost entirely consisting of art films and Downey Jr. was one such star for over a decade before he became a blockbuster star with Iron Man in 2008. And he was a teen comedy star in the '80s. Before Iron Man, I think he'd just edged out James Spader as being the most successful Brat Pack member, post-'80s, not counting John Cussack. Now, of course, he's the undisputed king and even though it's been a few years since he dominated the box office, his run as Tony Stark was so successful he can rest on his laurels (though obviously he won't).

Ally McBeal marked the lowest point in his career, though. After being a critical darling in movies like Chaplin, Natural Born Killers, and Restoration, he found himself the subject of stunt casting on a network dramedy in a ratings slump. At least David E. Kelley was seen as a writer of exceptional wit and it's satisfying hearing some of that clever dialogue coming from Downey Jr.'s mouth.

He's kind of just Robert Downey Jr. so far, though. Previously, whenever a new character was introduced on the show, they'd have either an interesting set of problems to chew over (John Cage) or an entertaining gimmick that was occasionally fleshed out for something more three dimensional (Ling). So far Robert Downey Jr. has mostly been reacting to the quirkiness of the rest of the main cast. And of the four episodes of season four I've watched so far, he's really only properly been in two. In the fourth, he finally gets some cool lawyer dialogue in which he outwits a woman who's suing Ally.

He won an Emmy for his role on the show before he was fired due to his arrest and imprisonment. Hopefully it wasn't just out of a sense of charity, though Downey Jr. has himself spoken about being dissatisfied with his performance on the show.

Ally McBeal is available on Disney+.

Mayhem in Miami

An eccentric thief inadvertently kills a Hare Krishna at the airport and becomes the subject of a manhunt in 1990's Miami Blues. Aptly described as a black comedy, this caper of kooky culprits is a fascinating, morally murky kaleidoscope of misfortune and cruelty.

Alec Baldwin stars as Junior, a clever psychopath who assuages his boredom with life by spotting thieves and then stealing from them. "Kind of like Robin Hood?" says Susie, Jennifer Jason Leigh's character. Yes, he says, except he keeps all the loot.

He's not altogether forthcoming with the young woman. Susie is one of the most innocent girls Leigh has ever played. She's a prostitute who quickly becomes infatuated with junior and sadly puts aside her dreams of becoming a mother and running a fast food restaurant when he tells her they're silly.

Fred Ward plays Moseley, a cynical old detective pursuing Junior. He and a co-worker laugh over the corpse of the Hare Krishna whom Junior had killed by breaking his finger. Moseley and his co-worker clearly have no sympathy for the Hare Krishna's friend who can be seen crying over the body.

Junior manages to get the drop on Moseley and steals his badge, false teeth, and gun. When Junior handcuffs some of the thieves he fleeces, the moral line between cop and crook starts to become blurry indeed. It would be moral chaos except Junior's lack of empathy for Susie or anyone puts the audience sympathy with Moseley and Susie. Still, Junior's an odd cookie and, like a lot of noir protagonists, one wonders how much freedom of will he truly had.

Miami Blues is available on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet 1950

Without presumption, presents piled up.
For passing time, the summer bulged its gut.
So come and fill your heavy lemon cup.
The smoke of burning peels'll fill the hut.
Create a lovely day with velvet clouds.
Embrace the walls as garden carrots shrink.
A foreign monster draws the nosy crowds.
Before you eat, reserve some time to drink.
The bottle makes you small, the cake obtuse.
You'll need to know the size of doors and locks.
In certain realms, the locals love abuse.
They'll bind your feet in sweaty little socks.
So write the hearth and don't forget your toes.
For rising tides of tears'll float your woes.

Liberate Your Plate

Happy Fourth of July, everyone, which was of course yesterday here in Japan. I celebrated it, in spite of Donkey Kong occupying the presidency. I still believe in America's ideals. So I put together an American dinner last night comprised of American imports and locally brewed products, of which there are plenty, despite what Trump says. I had some pork chops from America, a common sight on the grocery store shelves here. I snacked on some California raisins, one of my favourite snacks over the past few years, along with American peanuts. I had some Coca-Cola and a can of Budweiser, despite it being my least favourite beer, but I kind of enjoyed it this time. I made some french fries from locally grown potatoes although I have seen produce from the U.S. In fact, I remember seeing blueberries that were grown in the U.S. I found this amusing considering, when I lived in the U.S., I typically found blueberries that were grown in Mexico. It's a funny musical chairs game, this international trade.

And, last night, I had rice grown in California, which has indeed been imported to Japan for a couple years. Yet it's misleading for so many news sites to claim Trump is wrong when he says Japan won't take American rice. Last month, the powerful retail company, Aeon, started putting Calrose rice on the shelves, the same brand I used to eat when I lived in California. Previously when Aeon put Calrose on the shelves, it remained there as the Japanese preferred to spend extra on Japanese rice, even as the prices of those have skyrocketed due to bad harvests and price gouging. Ahead of Calrose being put on the shelves again, I started asking students if they would eat it. The high rice prices have been a sore subject for a long time now so I figured a few would say, sure, they'd eat the rice from California, considering it's roughly half the price of Japanese rice on the shelves. But not one did. Every student I asked said they'd refuse to eat American rice. It may seem odd considering I routinely hear them speak rapturously of McDonald's or KFC. But rice is a sensitive commodity and it's bound up in national pride. Japan has rarely exported its rice. Every Japanese person I've talked to about it claims that American rice is too different from Japanese rice, that the grains are thicker and not as sticky. Personally, I can't tell the difference and I suspect it's an illusion clung to as part of a common mythology. It's for this very reason that Trump calling out the Japanese for not eating American rice is a particularly low blow, especially since not acknowledging someone else's physical or mental dysfunction as a burden is part of Japanese cultural protocol.

However, at least at my local Aeon, the Calrose rice did sell. Bags rapidly disappeared over the course of a week. I suspect they were mostly bought by restaurants who serve American rice to customers unawares. It's a bit like tricking Michael McKean's character on Better Call Saul into going near an electronic device. There's something faintly cruel about it.

Michael Madsen

Michael Madsen was found dead in Los Angeles to-day. The American actor was 67 years old and reportedly died of "cardiac arrest". His filmography is extensive, including roles in film, television, and video games. He was in Thelma and Louise and Donnie Brasco but he's best known for his work with Quentin Tarantino and it was Madsen's role in Tarantino's first film, Reservoir Dogs, that raised his profile to stardom--and it played no small part in doing the same for Tarantino.

He later made memorable appearances in other Tarantino movies, including Kill Bill, The Hateful Eight, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino seemed to know best how to deploy Madsen's talent for cool, understated delivery.

Maybe it was his role in Kill Bill that had the most depth. His repeated line about how the Bride deserves her vengeance and "we deserve to die . . . but then again, so does she," in a way encapsulates the moral void that builds the tension in so much of Tarantino's work. Madsen's contemplative delivery brings it home like no other actor's could.

The Clones and the FBI

Mulder and Scully investigate the murders of people drained of blood with two puncture wounds on their necks in "Eve", a 1993 episode of The X-Files. Mulder thinks it's aliens. Not one person ever brings up vampires, which I found odd, but it's still a pretty good episode.

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson's chemistry is always a delight. I also like how patient they both are and professional. They end up having to watch over a pair of cloned little girls called Cindy and Teena (Erika and Sabrina Krievins). At one point, they're chasing the kids through a rail yard and Mulder (Duchovny) has to grab them. A couple of people nearby assume Mulder's a kidnapper and angrily point a gun at him. Scully (Anderson) runs up and neither she nor Mulder seem exasperated with the couple. They both urgently but calmly explain that they are the police and they're looking out for the kids' best interests. That level of professional attitude is almost Star Trek-ish, I guess, but it's really nice to see.

The two kind of seem like an old married couple in the episode, driving a couple of kids around, especially when they stop to buy cokes. Who stops on a road trip just to buy cokes? Weren't they hungry?

The X-Files is available on Disney+.

Improbable Musicians

I watched the last two episodes of Ally McBeal's season three a couple nights ago. The season ends with an interesting plot about Nelle (Portia de Rossi) scheming to leave the firm and start her own, manipulating Elaine (Jane Krakowski) to steal client files for her. The point made by the plot is that heartless, scheming people may end up successful but they also end up with no friends. To make this point, the show seems to forget that Ling (Lucy Liu) is her best friend. She's in the episodes but the show just glides along, leaving her motives and reactions to Nelle keeping this big secret from her unaddressed.

The episodes feature Alicia Witt as a cold-blooded lawyer advising Nelle on how to betray her firm. Witt is a performer who always manages to be a pleasant surprise for me. She generally turns up in things I had no prior knowledge of her being in. When I watched Vanilla Sky again a few weeks ago, I'd totally forgotten she was in the movie and was pleasantly surprised when she turned up in the climax. Witt got her start as a child actress in David Lynch's Dune and had a memorable appearance as Gersten Hayward on Twin Peaks in 1990 at the age of 14.

She had a musical number on Ally McBeal ten years later, this time singing:

The show has really exceeded the plausible number of lawyers in Boston with musical talents.

Earlier this year, a friend of mine lent me a DVD of Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King, a 2004 German television movie based on Norse mythology in which I was surprised to see Witt playing Kriemhild, the badass from the Nibelungenlied. Unfortunately, there was something wrong with the DVD or it disagreed with my player somehow so I was only able to watch a third of it. I haven't been able to get my hands on it digitally from any venue but I'd love to see it, even though it is extremely cheesy with a Xena: Warrior Princess vibe.

Yeah, that's Robert Pattinson before he learned to brood all the time.

The Norse myths are really overdue for a proper film adaptation though Fritz Lang's Nibelungenlied movies from the 1920s remain spectacular, in my opinion.

The 2020s have not been kind to Alicia Witt. Her parents died because their home was improperly heated in the winter and she got breast cancer. She's still working, though. She appeared in last year's lauded horror film Longlegs and she's been recording music. Here's a music video from three years ago: