There's a new chapter of my webcomic, Dekpa and Deborah, online to-day. See if you can spot anything sexual in the imagery or story.
Happy Birthday to King John of England, Matthew Arnold, Michael Curtiz, Howard Hughes, Franz Waxman, Ava Gardner, and Nicholas Meyer.
And Merry Christmas Eve, of course.
The trailer for Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey is out. I don't know, I like Christopher Nolan but I kind of think he's wrong for this material. He said, as usual, he wants something that seems grounded in reality. Sometimes his idea of reality is monotone.
Yeah, I think serious and grim fit within The Odyssey. But there's so much more to it, much like life itself. So I question whether having everything the same colour is truly grounded in reality. The Odyssey is also about beauty and astounding weirdness. I won't judge the film before it comes out but so far I'm thinking it'll fall short of the Kirk Douglas version. That one had Silvana Mangano, how could anyone else compete?
X Sonnet 1971
A private stock became a public punch.
A gracious juice was flowing over folks.
A golden egg was served to all at lunch.
With festive hearts, they drank the dripping yolks.
Balloons of roasted fowl were floating by.
A manic grin displaced the deadened beak.
A candle flame pursues the firefly.
The honey spleen has sprung a tasty leak.
With onion microphones she danced above.
The crowd, entranced, beheld the siren bot.
A stack of burning cards was sold for love.
They work on those averse to careful thought.
A drunk parade dissolves to blurry men.
Be sure to use the labelled garbage bin.
In 1993, a battle occurred in Somalia called the Battle of Mogadishu in which 19 American military personnel were killed. The event is dramatised in Ridley Scott's 2001 film Black Hawk Down. I finally watched it and it was about what I expected--a relentless depiction of deadly modern ground warfare, shot with consummate expertise and creativity.
People had been recommending it to me since it came out. My friend and former film teacher, Martin Johnson, even gave me a copy of the soundtrack in his enthusiasm for the film. I am open to enjoying film of any genre but if there is a genre that I'm reluctant to watch it's the modern war film. It's the same reason I prefer the peace sections to the war sections of War and Peace--there are no women in the war sections. But, also, a story like Black Hawk Down is meant to convey the interminable slog of such a horrific circumstances and it does so ably. So it's a slog. A well made slog, but a slog. It is certainly a useful piece of perspective and edifying to know such hellish conflicts are often occurring in the world.
Quentin Tarantino recently said he considered it to be the best movie of the 21st century so far and, a couple weeks before that, a teacher at one of the schools I work at recommended it. And there it was on Netflix so I figured it was time. The famous men in the movie look so young, Ewan MacGregor, Eric Bana, Josh Hartnett, Orlando Bloom, Jason Isaacs, and Tom Hardy. Harnett and Tom Sizemore were the two Americans in a cast otherwise filled with Brits and Aussies. Director Ridley Scott has never really cared how accurate the accents are.
This was made when Scott was already more than twenty years into his career which is dotted with intermittent masterpieces and turkeys. How could the same guy who made Black Hawk Down have also made that terrible Robin Hood or Napoleon? Anyway, I love that he keeps going and keeps trying something new. But like a lot of people, I miss the element of fantasy and poetry of his earlier films that seems to have been eclipsed by a colder pragmatism. The Martian was really good but only Prometheus seemed to have anything of the magic found in Alien, Blade Runner, or Legend.
In Black Hawk Down, he still had his fondness for glittering sweat. Everyone's got shadows down the middle of their faces with contours carved of tiny wet droplets. The film's not without its grace notes.
Black Hawk Down is available on Netflix.
The episode successfully makes the viewer want to see the protagonists get back at the Dominion and the season three premiere, from September 1994, introduces the Defiant, a warship assigned to the station. It was widely seen at the time as part of an effort to make DS9 more like other Star Trek series because DS9, in its second season, was not drawing viewers in the same numbers as The Next Generation. Whatever the case, the Defiant is an interesting idea and I still like the way it's introduced as a barely functional, overpowered prototype.
The premiere, though, is a two-parter and it screws itself over with the second part, which abruptly changes the plot from one of a dangerous voyage into the Gamma Quadrant to confront the Dominion into one about the captured crew being caught in a simulation and Odo meeting other members of his species for the first time.
It's very obvious that most of the crew are in a simulation from the beginning when Starfleet decides to completely roll over for the Dominion. So there's very little tension created after the rising tension of the battle scene in the previous episode has been completely negated by the sudden new premise. Odo's meeting with his people, the Changelings, is a little more interesting. I like a bit of dialogue between Odo and the Changeling representative in which he protests against the Dominion's tyranny by saying that he's been an advocate of justice throughout his life. The Changeling replies that the Dominion means to impose order on the galaxy, effectively a twisted variant of Odo's love of justice. So this plot does tie more into Odo's occupation as a security chief than I remembered. It's also interesting that a species of liquid based shapeshifters would be obsessed with order. I'm not sure that contradiction ever comes to anything more than an intriguing premise but it's something that sets them apart from the Borg.
Oddly, after all the buildup, the Defiant is entirely absent from the second part.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix.
Since then, various actors and directors and other Hollywood professionals have publicly defended Dano's acting chops. I find this to be another amusing example of Hollywood's adoration of itself which cannot abide even the tiniest crack in the mirror.
I disagree with Tarantino on a lot of things. I don't agree with him on Matthew Lillard, who gave a very good performance on Twin Peaks. Naturally I don't agree with him on Vertigo, which he dislikes (despite idolising all of Brian DePalma's remakes of it). But he's 100% right about Paul Dano and There Will Be Blood and I don't think everyone would be defending Dano so vociferously if his work spoke for itself. There's a reason that Daniel Day Lewis is a living legend in the acting world while the best role Dano's had in the past twenty years was as the Riddler in Matt Reeve's Batman.
I tend to think Paul Thomas Anderson movies are overrated. On the other hand, maybe Tarantino's wrong that the movie was meant to be a two-hander. The posters generally more prominently feature Daniel Day Lewis but maybe the marketing team just knew what they had better than Paul Thomas Anderson. Dano is playing a morally weak man, a hypocrite, so maybe a bad performance even makes sense. Maybe he was deliberately playing false notes that Tarantino interpreted as accidental. All I know is I remember appreciating Daniel Day Lewis' performance a whole lot more when I saw the movie.
Ethan Hawke talked about Tarantino's comments on Joe Rogan and he had kind of an interesting take:
As she reveals in this clip, it was not her intention but instead a result of one of the physical tics that come along with Tourette syndrome:
Having worked with a student with Tourette syndrome, I can say Heche's performance is exceptionally good, though the teleplay does occasionally indulge in the typical comedic use for Tourette syndrome by having her yell inappropriate things at the worst moments. Her performance makes the character three dimensional and is very effective. She ends up sticking around for several episodes.
Heche certainly had plenty of experience with mental illness, leading her more than once to exhibit bizarre behaviour publicly until the car accident that cost her her life in 2022. As you can see above, we really lost an amazing actress.
She's certainly more interesting than Robert Downey Jr. in the episode. I continue to be astonished that the show had Robert Downey Jr. in the cast but gave him such an incredibly boring character. And he drags Ally down with him because, since he and Ally are steady, she can't date anyone else, and it was her dating that provided the show with so much fodder for interesting episodes.
Notice how infrequently Ally speaks in this clip:
The show had basically become The John Cage Show by this point. She is his Watson. Peter MacNicol's certainly a good and interesting actor but it is strange how much Ally McBeal was sidelined on Ally McBeal.
Ally McBeal is available on Disney+ and/or Hulu.
The first episode of Fallout, season 2 premiered on Amazon Prime last night, written by showrunners Geneve Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, the worst writers on season one. But this premiere episode wasn't quite as bad as their first season offerings, though they still struggle to write material for the wasteland segments. I did think a scene where Lucy buys a bowl of flea soup was pretty funny, though an earlier action sequence in which she and the Ghoul trick some bandits was kind of lame. The makers of the show still seem to have no interest in imagining what surviving in such a scenario would be like, still believing it's best for the Ghoul to slowly strut around in the open rather than seek cover. The show continues to fail at capturing what makes up 90% of the game experience, which is exploring and fighting in the wasteland.
This season is based on what has slowly, over the years, become recognised as the best game in the franchise, Fallout: New Vegas, though, of course, a TV show can't replicate what makes that game so great, the fact that it happens to be one of the best dialogue tree games ever made. Bethesda games are famed for their world building, not so much for their dialogue. New Vegas was different, its dialogue by John Gonzalez being genuinely interesting and responsive to player input. New Vegas managed to find that elusive sweet spot between allowing players total freedom and giving them a structured story to inhabit.
A TV series can't have that, by definition. So far, in episode one, the focus has been primarily on the people still dwelling in Vaults and on the Ghoul's flashbacks to his life before the nuclear bombs fell. The latter continue to be the show's weakest point by far, consisting of cloak and dagger dialogue that fails utterly to make up for the fact that we already know where all of it is heading. The Vault stuff is basically a slightly more twisted version of The Office and that's where these writers are at their best. It's no surprise, given that it's the closest thing to their own lived experience.
Fallout is available on Amazon Prime.
What would it be like to live in constant, unrelenting, physical pain? I'm lucky not to live with such a condition but the protagonist of 1949's The Small Back Room is not so fortunate. After films of famed visual splendour, The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, the directing duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger turned to this small film noir about one man's struggle with pain and mortal fear while doing his job and living his life. There are a couple creative decisions in the film that don't quite hold water, but mainly it's impressive.
David Farrar and Kathleen Byron star in the film, the two having appeared together in Black Narcissus. Byron had the more interesting role in that film, here it's Farrar who takes centre stage as Sammy, a bomb squad and weapons technician on the home front during World War II. He has a prosthetic limb that causes him constant pain and he struggles with the urge to get blind drunk in order to manage it. Though, as he says, the whisky doesn't make the pain go away, it only makes him care about it less.
Byron is Susan, his steady, supportive girlfriend, at least until they have a row, which I consider one of the film's weak points. Her motivation for it isn't at all clear after she'd stood by him for so long. It's not exactly a movie about alcoholism, in fact no-one's telling Sammy he ought to go cold turkey, just that he oughtn't drink for the wrong reasons. A surrealistic sequence in which he struggles not drink a special bottle of scotch he'd been saving for celebrating the end of the war is interesting in itself but sits oddly with the rest of the film. I suppose The Red Shoes makes a similar abrupt shift from procedural to phantasmagoria but it doesn't quite work here. Maybe because The Red Shoes, after all, is about two sides of the same coin; art as it's made and art as it takes effect on the mind of the audience and artist.
The Small Back Room is better in scenes where Sammy is negotiating with military brass with outdated and bureaucratic attitudes or when he's confronting the deadly, technical problems of the booby trapped canisters Germans have been dropping on England. The scenes between Farrar and Byron are mostly quite lovely, too. We should all be so blessed to have a stalwart and sensitive girl like Susan in our lives.
The Small Back Room is available on The Criterion Channel.
Here in Japan, Stand By Me is one of those handful of American movies that students and teacher frequently bring up to me. I can tell many of them truly do love the movie.
Last year, in June, I wrote about The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally after I had what I called a "Rob Reiner festival" over the weekend. The Princess Bride was a charm that never failed. When I was a kid, it was something I could always watch with friends and family and it remained great after I'd grown up. It's a parody but its longevity is due to its sincerity. It may mock some of the conventions of '30s swashbucklers, but it honours the best intentions behind them, the simple philosophy of love and chivalry.
When Harry Met Sally is almost the same thing for adults, though now that we're caught between the sexually repressive forces of the religious right and the neurotic left, it's something more of an artefact of a time when a healthy middle class was having enough casual sex to incorporate the experience into nuanced thoughts about life. That was the world in which When Harry Met Sally was made. It was a movie that recognised the gravity of challenges normal people faced but showed life to be something funny and bearable.
Rob Reiner made some of the best movies to help people just get through the bullshit of life. Who the fuck would murder him? Apparently it was his own son, who co-wrote a 2015 movie his father directed. It was about a troubled young man with a history of substance abuse, perhaps it was autobiographical. One could infer a motive for the murder just from that but, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, it's a capital mistake to draw conclusions without all the facts. One thing's for sure, it's a monstrous event.
Yesterday I was at McDonalds for lunch reading a book on Japanese history. I read about the formation of the Takarazuka Revue, an all female troupe founded in 1914 that retains great popularity to-day. I came home and was reading Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix, a manga I borrowed from a friend, pleased to find most of its Japanese was simple enough for me. I read a bit about it on its Wikipedia page and there saw that the Takarazuka Revue staged a production based on the manga. It also turns out the troupe was a big influence on Osamu from an early age. Then I realised the Takarazuka Revue is based in Hyogo Prefecture, not far from where I live.
It's an interesting alternative to the traditionally all male kabuki troupes. From what I've read, kabuki initially had female performers but they were banned after it was decided that they incited too much lust in their samurai patrons. I guess that concern was gone by the twentieth century but the Revue's fanbase seems to be primarily women. I kind of wish I could afford to see one of their shows.
X Sonnet 1970
A winter ghost would only meet with thieves.
Beneath the cells of hardened thugs she waits.
With icy tears through frozen hands she grieves.
She daily guards the shining silver gates.
Intruders came in form of screaming wisps.
The snow was granted life by evil eyes.
A liar cited Crosby's song in lisps.
The gullible believe a sack of lies.
She tries to write on rocks with frozen pens.
But hardened ink results in empty scrawls.
To spy on her they use a secret lens.
They lust for her but pay her vicious calls.
Twixt walls of ice she sadly dreams and waits.
While trolls who watch her hone their petty baits.
At this point, Kira (Nana Visitor) is in a relationship with Vedek Bareil (Philip Anglim), a Vedek being a Bajoran religious leader somewhat analogous to a cardinal. Like Roman Catholicism, the Bajoran religion seems to be a major part of the government so the upcoming election to Kai, a rough equivalent to pope, is a big deal. Bareil is running for the office and so is the recurrent antagonist Vedek Winn, played by the late Louise Fletcher. She's great in the episode, too, with her trademark, venomous tone of courtesy. She has a juicy bit of dialogue with Sisko in the episode in which you can feel the contempt behind every word of phony politeness.
Her strategy to defeat Bareil is to tie him to a Cardassian collaborator, a man who worked with the Cardassians when they were occupying Bajor and using the people for slave labour. She does so while maintaining the superficial veneer of one only in quest of the truth for the good of all. The trail of breadcrumbs that Kira and Odo (Rene Auberjonois) pursue in investigating the link is just the right level of complex to seem credible yet easy enough for the casual viewer to comprehend.
At one point, they enlist Quark (Armin Shimmerman) for help in a scene that begins with some business that's a little funnier than it was intended to be if you know something about how Star Trek episodes were produced in the '90s. On almost any show or movie, you have actors with speaking parts and you have actors who only appear in the background or have brief bits of business with the main actors. They're called extras. On '90s Star Trek shows, there was a big difference between the paychecks for main actors and for extras and the productions were obligated to pay more money to anyone with a line of dialogue, even if it was just one line. So sometimes you'd see a character who really seems like they should speak but don't. This scene with Quark begins with one of his employees inexplicably communicating with him through pantomime. Ironically, he's reluctantly paying her wages in the scene.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix in Japan.
Patrick Bateman has loomed over the landscape of American cultural commentary ever since the film's release and his presence only became more relevant with the election of Donald Trump. Trump was the epitome of precisely the cold, rich, yuppie New York culture that the film parodies. But while Bateman and his friends have the oddly childish, vicious hot takes in casual conversation that recall Trump, Bateman also spends time with carefully crafted moralistic bullshit to cover the left wing psychos, too, like his feigned concern for the environment and cultural sensitivity.
To be sure, there are many qualities to Bateman's madness to be found anywhere in the world. You don't have to be American to be a vicious hypocrite. But Bateman's madness is a perfect perversion and consummation of Puritan ethics that were part of America's formation. It was the Puritan who had no power to affect their own salvation and so compulsively constructed a psychological mask in the hopes that the inside would match the outside. Cognisance of it being a mask would, one would think, shatter it, but by the 1980s, the American Pscyho could comfortably look into a mirror and say
There are a lot of different uploads of precisely this clip on YouTube. It obviously struck a nerve.
The studio, Lionsgate, wanted Leonardo DiCaprio to play Bateman but director Mary Harron chose Christian Bale, an Englishman. I always felt that casting a non-American was perfect for a character whose persona is a consciously crafted shell. Harron also liked Bale, according to Wikipedia, because Bale didn't think Bateman was at all cool, as some of the other actors who auditioned for the role did. Nevertheless, he has his place in the line of late '90s, '00s anti-heroes with whom audiences found themselves sympathising. The movie bashes Bateman's world constantly while Bateman's only honest moments are when he is bashing it too, physically. Perhaps the excessive violence of the novel, which was toned down for the film, was meant to sicken even the most jaded horror fan.
American Psycho is available on Netflix and on The Criterion Channel.
I came across this fascinating little interview with Winona Ryder a couple weeks ago in which she talks about watching Bram Stoker's Dracula this past Halloween. She talks a little about her experiences in the production but her tone overall is of a fan discovering the film rather than of an actress who was actually in it. It feels more and more like she's become a different person. Compare her enthusiasm to this interview from around the time of Dracula's release:
I remember Coppola, on the DVD director's commentary, complaining about how detached Ryder often seemed during filming. I wonder if she's aware of those comments. In any case, detachment certainly doesn't seem to be a problem for her now.
Anyway, the movie is, as Ryder says, a marvel of practical effects. The costumes, the sets, and above all the transitions. The strange and sort of delirious ways Francis Ford Coppola and Roman Coppola devise for moving from one shot to another give the film a sense of dangerously unstable perception.
I almost bought some absinthe this past weekend. I found a liquor store, Nishiumi, with a really impressive liquor selection, though the only absinthe they have is Absente. I still remember Absente as the fake absinthe that didn't have wormwood, back when it was illegal in the U.S. Supposedly they bottle the real McCoy in the U.S. now but I wonder if the Japanese version has it. I haven't been able to find information on it. I imagine it's not popular here because of the anise flavour, which is similar to liquorice and is generally associated with medicine or toothpaste in Japan. Liqourice is unpopular and very difficult to get. A bucket of Red Vines on Amazon is around 10,000 yen, or 60 dollars! I tried to tell a class of students about liquorice yesterday but they didn't seem interested. I guess it's a bridge too far.
The plot of the two part episode is itself kind of weak. We meet a best friend of Sisko's whom we've never seen before and never see again, there obviously to set up a personal conflict between the Starfleet officer and one of the Maquis. There's an uneasy friendship formed between Sisko and Gul Dukat, a Cardassian and the former commander of the space station that would be renamed Deep Space Nine. It feels a lot lest nuanced than it did when I watched it as a kid.
Then there's a subplot between Quark and a Vulcan member of the Maquis who goes to him in order to procure weapons. The two are arrested and they have this dialogue in jail:
I really like the idea of Quark's ruthless capitalism being a driving factor of a logical argument for peace. It's nice when a cultural aspect leads to motivations that you wouldn't expect but nonetheless make sense. It's too bad about the Vulcan. First, you might think, "Wow, he surpassed a Vulcan at logic," but when you consider the simplicity of the argument, the strange thing is that it never occurred to the Vulcan before. It's hard for Star Trek writers to really differentiate Vulcan characters. How different is this lady really from Saavik in Star Trek II and III? She's just a little dumber? In order for Quark to clear the bar, it has to be set pretty low.
I don't see how the Maquis would settle for anything less than reintegration into the Federation. What other goal could they have, unless it's to get the Cardassians to promise not to be tyrants, at least to the former Federation colonies? The problem has obvious parallels to a lot of real world conflicts and it's useful for thinking about hypotheticals, the story being distant enough from real world factions to divest it of bias.
Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix.
Although I've mainly been enjoying my rewatch of The X-Files, I found the first season finale, "The Erlenmeyer Flask", to be a bit disappointing.
It has plenty of good points. I enjoyed the exciting chase scene at the beginning of the episode, in which some unlucky cops pursue a mysterious man with superhuman abilities. There were some effective moments of coalescing paranoia. I really liked a scene where Mulder, sneaking through a scientist's office, takes a call from the mysterious man, pretends to be the scientist, and all the while he's being watched and listened to by another party.
However, and I don't usually like to complain about "plot holes", this one has the show's sceptic character, Scully, find herself able to obtain an alien foetus by bluffing her way past one security guard, wrapping the thing up in a cardboard box, and apparently just walking right out again without being stopped. Later, another mysterious character is apparently killed and we hear nothing about her attempts to identify the body. I dimly remember that this is all revealed to be a charade in the next season (my memory could be wrong) but that still wouldn't explain why Scully didn't stop and question any of this.
Maybe everyone was tired because it was the last episode of the season.
The X-Files is available on Disney+/Hulu.
In Kobe, there's a pretty fantastic set of shopping malls that are connected to each other by bridges and underground tunnels which also connect them to Kobe Station but no one mall takes up as much space as the Kashihara mall or a typical American mall, which makes sense given how much more limited land space is in Japan.
But I like the little malls here in Kakogawa, though many of the students I talk to about malls prefer to go out of town, to nearby Kobe or Himeji. There's a Starbucks a couple blocks from Ario, the mall I went to on Sunday. It's always a nicely nostalgic feeling to visit a Starbucks now, particularly since I can only afford to on a rare occasion. I bought a coffee and a sausage sandwich and sat down and read some MR James, MR James being one of my personal Christmas season traditions of the past several years. I read "A Neighbour's Landmark", first published in 1924, but here's an audiobook read by Michael Hordern in 1985:
I always look forward to finding out what oblique manner James will come up with to effect his particular brand of roundabout horror. As is often the case, this one includes a narrative within a narrative, a character giving a narration to the first person narrator. This gentleman describes poring over tomes in a country library and coming across a passing reference to something strange and sinister walking in the local woods, using an old expression alluding to it in order to make a political point. What the political point is, we're not told because of course the gentleman is immediately more interested in the Betton Woods phenomenon. His next step is to interview some of the locals and MR James indulges in some effective colloquial English. It's amusing when the gentleman obtains his information by exploiting one man's pride in his extensive local knowledge against another. All this, of course, is to build a bedrock of verisimilitude that makes the supernatural details feel more credible and authentic. And, as always, it makes for a cosy Christmastime read.
I've finally had a chance to watch the new short Kill Bill film, "The Lost Chapter: Yuki's Revenge", which Quentin Tarantino made for the MMORPG Fortnite (you can watch it, too, embedded above). Actually, I've watched it twice now. It's pretty damned good, of course, with expertly choreographed action and cunning dialogue. Uma Thurman returns to voice the Bride while Zoe Bell did motion capture stuntwork. The new character, Yuki, is played by an actress named Miyu Ishidate Roberts. The short comes from a scene Tarantino wrote for 2003's Kill Bill: Volume One that was cut. Gogo's sister, Yuki, comes to California to avenge her sister's death at the hands of the Bride.
I've heard Tarantino say that he doesn't play video games (not that he dislikes them, simply that he doesn't play them) so I wonder how this came about. Tarantino's an auteur director who doesn't believe in compromising his work, but here he is making a short film in the kid-friendly Fortnite universe in which the blood is all replaced with glowing blue gel and the Bride's famous "Pussy Wagon" has its name changed to an image of a cat followed by the word "Wagon". I guess he can be flexible.
The short also functions as promotion for the new cut of Kill Bill that combines what were previously two separate volumes into one film. Sadly, I can't see that in Japan. I haven't met many people in Japan who've expressed interest in Tarantino. Generally, any movie older than 20 years isn't talked about unless it's gone through a rigorous communal approval process, like Back to the Future. Once a woman asked me and another American if I liked Tarantino in the presence of a bunch of other Japanese teachers and it was clearly one of those rhetorical games designed to demonstrate to everyone in earshot what uncultured foreigners we were. This is the kind of thing Tarantino actually captures really well in the dialogue he writes for Japanese characters, like Yuki, whose oddly effusive praise for the Bride is a pretty common kind of bullshitting in Japan.
I've never played Fortnite but as a nerd in general I can appreciate how Tarantino took care to include familiar characters from the Fortnite world in the short. A lot of the students I work with actually play Fortnite. I wonder how they'll react to the short.
Herzog does not narrate this documentary as he usually does. Instead, a French journalist named Michael Goldsmith, who was imprisoned and tortured by Bokassa, conducts interviews with a number of people in Bokassa's life, including his wife, possible daughter, and the president of CAR that both preceded and succeeded his rule. This president, David Dacko, confirms to Goldsmith that the rumours that Bokassa routinely dined on human flesh were true. Here Goldsmith demonstrates how Bokassa broke Goldsmith's glasses:
It's a poignant symbol of how despotic regimes prefer people do not see clearly. The purpose of the documentary is to evoke the atmosphere and essential emotional landscape of the aftermath of Bokassa's reign. We see the ruined palace Bokassa once occupied, we see a strange topless photo of his vicious Romanian mistress, we see aging footage of Bokassa parading in bizarre, antiquated European attire. I read a bit more about Bokassa online. He established a morality brigade to prowl dance halls and bars, he imprisoned people for being unemployed. On the plus side, he abolished female circumcision.
The documentary does spend a lot of time covering the victims of his tendency to imprison and torture people, which he did on the most tenuous and personal of provocations.
Mostly the film doesn't feel the need to list atrocities. Herzog instead contemplates the pageantry and personal relationships. The effect is to underscore the performative nature not only of Bokassa's decadent displays but that of all the brutal men he admired and imitated, of human governmental regimes in general which rely heavily on ritual and costume.
Echoes from a Sombre Empire is available on The Criterion Channel.
X Sonnet 1970
The velvet shreds expose a yellow wall.
With jealous eyes, a people stalk the house.
A thousand claws assaulted heaven's hall.
The mighty king became a crazy mouse.
His dreams were dipped in gold and super glue.
His victims checked their voices into dreams.
The blazing sun was painted black and blue.
Its jam was squished between its ruddy seams.
And now the ghosts are screaming through the cracks.
The paint has peeled beyond repairing fists.
The opulence recedes on cloudy tracks.
The bones were ground to clouds of choking mists.
The obelisk repeats its famous line.
And only mould remains of spoiled wine.
So this marathon stream was the 25th anniversary marathon last year. This year, it's the 26th anniversary marathon. It seems the Jim Henson company or Hallmark or whoever owns the rights has no desire to take it down. I assume the idea is to generate interest in the show enough to maybe justify a revival or new movie or something. Every time I check in on the stream, there always seems to be around 40 or 50 people watching. There ought to be a lot more, it's one of the greatest science fiction series of all time. If you like sci-fi and space opera, you should check it out. I'll embed the stream below. I have no idea what episode it'll be on when you click it. Maybe you'll be lucky and get "Crackers Don't Matter" or "Liars, Guns, and Money." But every episode is worth watching.
Garbo was a silent film star who successfully transitioned to sound films, though only for about a decade. Caricatures of Garbo and impressions of her generally are of someone cold and aloof so it always feels like a revelation seeing how emotional she was in her roles. The silent film star always had to convey a lot with expressions and gestures and in her trembling brows and lips you can see how finely tuned her instrument was. Far from cold, she's startlingly warm and natural.
Joan Crawford, though she'd been in silent films, was the future. Her brash, almost swaggering performances were paired with a different kind of vulnerability. How I love early Joan Crawford. I wouldn't say my addiction to old movies started with her but it was certainly given a shot of adrenaline when I watched a marathon of her movies from the '30s on TCM about twenty-five years ago. Beautiful, sharp, and aggressive, she effortlessly took control of every scene she was in.
John Barrymore is cool, too.
Grand Hotel is available on The Criterion Channel.
Plato's The Republic, which is basically Plato transcribing the ideas of Socrates, has this:
I left that enquiry and turned away to consider whether justice is virtue and wisdom or evil and folly; and when there arose a further question about the comparative advantages of justice and injustice, I could not refrain from passing on to that. And the result of the whole discussion has been that I know nothing at all. For I know not what justice is, and therefore I am not likely to know whether it is or is not a virtue, nor can I say whether the just man is happy or unhappy.
At any rate, it's a widely recognised truth. From this, we must realise that there are a lot of people in the world whose lack of knowledge is inversely proportional to the extent of knowledge they believe they possess. Many people who know little tend to believe they know everything, or at least everything important. I got to thinking about this yesterday when reading Caitlin R. Kiernan's journal in which she talked about encountering people who believed watching random assortments of TikTok videos was a superior experience to watching a full length movie. Quoting from Caitlin's journal:
So, this morning I'm taking some time off from work, and I'm paying the latest expansion to Guild Wars 2. I realize it's basically Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I mention in map chat. And two different people tell me they wouldn't know, because thet watch nothing longer than TikTok videos. Horrified, I look online, and surprise, this is not uncommon among Gen Z. Here's a post from Quora. But there is a LOT of this stuff, this attitude:
"Why would I watch a 1 hour long movie? I'd rather watch TikTok. On TikTok, I can watch 120 different videos in 1 hour. Watching a movie is like eating a 1 foot long bread, watching TikTok is like eating a diverse salad with meat in it."
By the way, I found out recently that many people in Japan don't understand the significance of italics so perhaps there are a number of people in foreign countries reading my blog who don't know that when a section of text is presented in italics it's meant to be a "block quote". That is to say, the long sections of this entry presented in italics, or the letters that are slanted to the right, are quotes and did not originate from me.
Anyway, Caitlin goes on to talk about neuroscientific studies that show the frequent viewer of TikTok videos suffers from brain degradation. I don't think one needs to produce scientific studies to show that viewing bundles of short TikTok, Instragram, or YouTube videos is not superior to the experience of viewing a full length movie. I also don't think the problem's as new as it seems, at least in terms of the layperson's perspective. The power and significance of art has always been widely underestimated. I've had conversations throughout my life where I've had to argue the significance of volume, the significant difference between watching a video with 30% of its original image cropped out and watching the original version, and the importance of colour proportions. But for this topic, I think the most significant, often overlooked issue is that of sequence.
Sequence matters. If you burn your eggs and spill your coffee in the morning, you're likely to go into work with a different mood. That probably seems obvious. But it's just as true that a piece of comedic media will have a different impact if it directly follows something frightening. This is where the term "comic relief" comes from. After tension has been built up over time, some writers and filmmakers find it useful to break up the tension with something funny. After characters spend some time running in the dark from the scary alien, maybe one of them makes an observation about how they never ran so fast in gym class. This is also a natural way for people to talk in stressful situations in order to relieve tension that might be otherwise debilitating. For the filmmaker or writer, sequence is another pigment on the palette. The filmmaker changes the significance of a scene where a wife embraces her spouse with genuine affection by placing it after a scene in which people coldly ignore each other on the train. The juxtaposition is a statement. Then, after the romantic scene, maybe we see another of the man going to a mistress for another embrace. That's another statement. Add one statement after another and you have a narrative and you have something that is different depending on whether it's shown over the course of two hours or over the course of 30 seconds. Paul Schrader, on his Facebook, was recently commenting on the phenomenon of YouTube films in which complicated narratives are presented in less than a minute. But of course, this is a different experience to a two hour film because a scene in such a film is also filled with a number of waypoints in other series of sequences. Imagine the scene of the married couple again. Does it start with the woman washing dishes? Or is she typing away at a laptop on the couch when the husband comes in? Does he take off a hat, is he wearing a shabby coat, does he clear his throat? Is there time before she chooses to acknowledge his presence? The length of time is also significant.
This also makes full length film an experience closer to real life than a TikTok video. We don't experience reality in isolated snippets, we experience it in sequences. Therefore cinema is an artform more in tune with the human experience, one from which we have a better chance of having a meaningful experience.
The previous episode was "Playing God", an episode focused on Jadzia Dax who's mentoring another member of her species. He's a young man who wants to be implanted with a symbiote organism to achieve the combined consciousness only select members of their species can attain. Meanwhile, the two of them accidentally pick up a small "proto-universe" which they bring back to the space station to study. The thing starts to expand and threatens to destroy the station in the process, bringing about the ethical question of whether they can destroy an entire universe just to save themselves. Their eventual solution, to dump it in a distant part of the galaxy, seems to me like it would be only temporary if the thing is truly going to expand to universe size. Still, it's an interesting idea, but I feel like it was expanded on better in the Futurama episode in which the robot, Bender, becomes God.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix, Futurama is on Disney+ and/or Hulu.
Catholicism is pitted against Japanese tea ceremony in 1962's Love Under the Crucifix (お吟さま, "Lady Ogin"). Shot in colour and set in the 16th century, this was the last film to be directed by Tanaka Kinuyo. I imagine the cost of the film against a low box office was likely a contributing factor in this. Tanaka has enjoyed more fame as an actress, particularly for her work with Mizoguchi Kenji. Mizoguchi was not supportive of his star's directorial career but while Love Under the Crucifix lacks the depth of thought and profundity of Mizoguchi's films, it's a decent romantic melodrama.
The story revolves around Ogin (Arima Ineko), the daughter of a real life tea ceremony master named Sen no Rikyu, a favourite and confidant of the rulers Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He's played by kabuki star Nakamura Ganjiro II in the film who imbues the character with serenity and gentleness to contrast with a Christianity portrayed as oppressive and cruel.
Like any good heroine of women's pulp romantic fiction, everyone loves Ogin, particularly the man who converted her to Christianity, Ukon Takayama, played by Nakadai Tatsuya. When she pleads with him to become her lover despite the fact that he's married, he visibly restrains his violent emotions and tells her how physical love is a sin. In a later scene, Sen no Rikyu talks about the natural attraction between men and women as something that should be acknowledged and acted on, in congruence with the honesty of tea ceremony. I'm not sure the contrast between unyielding restraint in Catholicism versus a free love philosophy of tea ceremony is quite an honest depiction, to put it mildly.
Tanaka directs like an actress, like so many actors and actresses turned director--She uses lots and lots of closeups. Despite the period setting involving major figures in Japanese history, the story feels very small because very little is given emotional depth outside of Ogin's romantic predicament. We see vassals and farmers and merchants with a lot of props and costumes but all their dialogue is stiff exposition explaining the historical context or ruminating on the motives around Ogin and the men in her life.
The cinematography's a bit bland--everything is lit like a department store. The performances are really good, though, particularly from Nakadai and Nakamura.
Love Under the Crucifix is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a collection remembering Nakadai Tatsuya.