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:

Versions of Bird Stories

Two girls work through their issues while honing their skills as musicians in 2018's Liz and the Blue Bird (リズと青い鳥). The deft touch of storytelling and insight into human nature recall Japan's golden age of filmmaking and the likes of Ozu and Naruse. It's a treat.

Mizore (Atsumi Tanezaki) and Nozomi (Nao Toyama) are members of their high school's concert band. Mizore plays the oboe and Nozomi plays the flute. The piece the band is currently practicing calls for a duet between their two instruments, symbolising the relationship between a woman named Liz and a bluebird that takes the form of a human girl. The music is based on a fairy tale which is shown as a film-within-a-film, depicting Liz as a young woman in a fantasy European town and the bluebird as a chipper girl with blue hair. Liz finds the girl injured one day and takes her into her home.

As someone who's worked in Japanese junior high schools for the past five and a half years and has frequently hung out with the school brass bands I can tell you the film is remarkably true to life. A lot of manga and anime are set in schools but rarely do they feel so authentic. I've known plenty of students like these. Mizore in particular is soft spoken in a way I very often see in life but rarely see in anime. There are many girls who rarely speak and when they do they can be very difficult to hear. This is often interpreted as shyness, and some of it is shyness, but a lot of it is tact.

I often see pairs of girls like Mizore and Nozomi. In America, too, it's not unusual for girls to have intensely important best friend relationships which you don't see among boys but I think such relationships are more important in Japan because of the collectivist nature of the culture. Looking for social guidance among peers is more important and the Japanese are much more afraid of embarrassment. So for many, having a best friend is a crucial life raft in the troubled sea of social interaction. I was impressed with how well the film captured this while also conveying a sense of just how new relationships with complex psychological depths are for the girls.

The movie is a spin-off of Sound! Euphonium, which I saw a few years before I came to Japan. You don't need to have seen the series to understand the film since it focuses on different characters but, for those who have seen the series, it's fun to spot the main characters in the background. It helps create the sense of a living world.

Liz and the Blue Bird is available on The Criterion Channel as part of their Queersighted: Coming of Age playlist. The filmmakers have stated they did not intend the relationship between the girls to be homosexual. I suppose it's fair to read it that way though it's a bit like saying Frodo and Sam are gay in The Lord of the Rings. Maybe that's satisfying if it's what you're looking for but it misses the cultural differences between western culture to-day and the one Tolkien is depicting. The same goes for the differences between American and Japanese culture. The Japanese do many things Americans would regard as clearly homosexual. It's very common, for example, for boys to sit in each other's laps. But the Japanese don't see it as gay so, of course, it's not. I'm a firm believer in art being open to interpretation and of people being able to have multiple, valuable experiences for one work of art. But if you see Liz and the Blue Bird and Lord of the Rings as gay, you may be oversimplifying from your cultural perspective and missing a glimpse into another facet of possibility in human relationships.

The Old Trek Footage

I put in Star Trek II on Saturday night expecting to fall asleep during it. I dozed off once, backtracked a little, and ended up watching the whole movie. Unlike Star Wars, which, especially lately after Andor, always seems to be vital and new, Star Trek is beginning to feel more and more like a time capsule. It was really smart for George Lucas to set Star Wars in another galaxy, in the past. So much of Star Trek is about a vision of the future and that's just the sort of thing that can be horribly dated. When Star Trek II came out in 1982, we thought maybe the future could be somewhat like that. Now we're all wiser (of course, I was three years old in 1982). We can enjoy the movie as a fantasy, but now the audience is compensating for the film.

All this is ironic in light of the film's themes of youth and rebirth. Admiral Kirk is starting to feel his age, something that's also ironic as to-day actor William Shatner is a 94 year old of remarkable mental acuity. So seeing him play old in 1982, a mere lad of 51, is another instance of the audience doing some work for the film.

The film is still a pleasure to watch for its enthusiastic venture into a slightly different pulp genre for the series, away from science fiction and more towards Horatio Hornblower style, naval battle suspense. In this, it's sort of like Andor--revivifying an old franchise by shifting into a different genre. Star Trek II set the tone for all Star Trek films to follow, one wonders if Andor won't do the same for Star Wars.

Khan's a good villain. Ricardo Montalban hams it up but he comes off as truly mad rather than cheesy. I think about what it must be like to be so obsessed with making someone else suffer. I've met a few people like that, who seem to be so overcome by resentment that they think nothing of compromising their own integrity, mental health, and reputation in the pursuit of causing pain to a specific target. I do have an obsessive personality myself, which can be useful if properly applied, but the last thing you want to get obsessed with is anything as unpredictable and mysterious as a human being. It certainly does Khan no favours.

Rebekah Del Rio

And now Rebekah Del Rio has died, the singer who made two significant appearances in David Lynch media, first in Mulholland Drive and then on Twin Peaks. Her performance of "Llorando", a Spanish language version of Roy Orbison's "Crying", is one of the highlights of Mulholland Drive, a movie which just this past week ranked number two in a poll for the best ten movies of the 21st century. Mulholland Drive has topped many such lists and anyone who's seen the movie knows Del Rio's performance is key to the film's impact, thematically and viscerally.

So many people from the show have died since the final episode of Twin Peaks aired in 2017. For so long I hoped to get another season, now I really hope I don't. Maybe Mark Frost, Twin Peaks co-creator, could make a spin-off series. I'd be down for that. But there's no Twin Peaks without David Lynch. Lately I've felt kind of angry that he's dead. He wasn't finished, he was making something called Unrecorded Night for Netflix. It bothers me he didn't get to complete that.

At least we'll always have season three and Rebekah Del Rio's incredible, haunting, and piercing performance of "No Stars". The lyrics of the song, which Lynch wrote, seem be from one lover to another, imploring them to return to a good time in their mutual past. Somehow it's a night with "no stars", and this is somehow comforting to the singer. It tends to remind me of the scene in the first episode of season three when the young couple are killed mid-coitus by a demoniac being, presumed by the show's analysts to be Judy, the series' hidden antagonist. The fact that there are no stars may be an implication that no observing, sadistic, antisexual being will impede the will of lovers. It's a beautiful song lamenting, like so many Twin Peaks songs, a love out of reach. And Rebekah Del Rio sang it beautifully.

X Sonnet 1949

An idle question stopped the talk at lunch.
The workers glanced around and sipped their tea.
But then, below they heard a sloshy crunch.
The devil's sun would melt the frozen key.
A sense of dread disturbed the gathered gents.
It seemed the railings changed to shady spies.
And floating eyes emerged from cooling vents.
They pooled some cash and left uneaten pies.
Another year and now the caf's a bust.
The noisy devil drove the crowds away.
And so the diner trappings gather rust.
And only tacky ghosts within will stray.
Another business bites the phantom shot.
A bullet aimed above but hit the spot.

Iron Falls with a Thud

I finally got through the first three episodes of Ironheart that premiered on Wednesday. I find it very dull. I think the main problems for me are the characters, performances, and plot. The special effects are okay. It's not, and I want to be emphatic about this, it's not bad because it's woke.

It is woke. Ironheart was filmed some time ago, before Disney reportedly decided it was going to backtrack on some of its stridently progressive politics. I haven't actually seen evidence they're doing that but, anyway, Ironheart has Riri Williams join a group of thieves planning a heist, three of whom just happen to use they/them pronouns. And, you know, I might not even have cared a couple years ago but now I was really happy to see them. Back when I lived in the U.S., gender non-conformists had gotten to be a pretty normal sight so the inclusion of three in a group doesn't feel strained to me. It feels perfectly normal, at least in a major city (kudos to the series for being set in Chicago instead of New York yet again). Now, it feels refreshing in Trump's America, where transphobes seem to be having a moment in the sun. I was watching the Critical Drinker's review on YouTube and I was disgusted when he showed a still image of one of the three characters in question and he gave it a long, protracted, fake laugh. Maybe he lives in some rural, far-flung hamlet in Scotland and has never had a barista with blue hair and chrome lipstick but he's a grown man living in the modern world. Laughing at someone for wearing something unconventional for their sex is like laughing at someone for wearing sandals at this point. It's the forced laugh of a bully and it made me really want to champion this series.

But, fuck, like I said, it's dull. I remember how good the first episodes of Ms. Marvel were because it was aggressively creative, the star was charismatic and surprising, and everyone had clear motives. Somehow or another, Riri Williams doesn't pop. I saw Black Panther 2, which I liked, but I don't remember her presence being all that noticeable there, either. Now it's not really clear what's motivating her, why she's committed to this knock off Iron Man suit. No-one even talks about her using it to catch murderers or thieves. Well, I guess she is a thief.

Ironheart is available on Disney+.

The Elven Beauty Tragedy

Sometimes I type questions into Google just to gauge how many people are asking the question. This morning I started typing, "Why are Elder Scrolls--" and before I could get any further, Google autocompleted for me, guessing exactly the question I was going to ask: "Why are Elder Scrolls elves so ugly?" Of course, I already know the answer; it's poor design. Well, to be exact, it's a bad 3D interpretation of a 2D design. Here's some original concept art from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind:

They're not pretty but they're clearly inspired by Brian Froud, intended to have a mischievous forest creature quality. Somehow in 3D, it just translates to all hard, blocky angles. I remember Caitlin once said they all looked like Beavis from Beavis and Butthead.

Of course, one of the things the modding community has been busy with is making the elves pretty, as they are in pretty much every other high fantasy setting. One of the modded companions I've been playing with lately is the very popular Auri, a wood elf.

In terms of writing and voice acting, Auri is much better than the average Skyrim follower mod. I like how Auri makes canon aspects of the wood elves, a.k.a. Bosmer, interesting. They're a tree-hugging people, in love with the forest. Sometimes in fantasy settings, this means the people are vegetarians but, logically, it makes more sense that they avoid eating plant matter entirely. So Elder Scrolls wood elves eat only meat. Even humanoid meat. Auri takes it a step further by filing her teeth to sharp points.

Default Auri is still ugly but there are plenty of visual replacers for her. Yes, there are mods of mods.

When Straight Shooting Won't Suffice

A rural Arizona lawman heads to New York City to extradite an LSD fiend and killer in 1968's Coogan's Bluff. Clint Eastwood stars and Don Siegel directs. It's an entertaining crime thriller.

Coogan (Eastwood) garners mockery for his cowboy getup and expectation to transfer custody of the killer, James Ringerman (Don Stroud), without much paperwork. NYPD Lieutenant McElroy (Lee J. Cobb) explains to him he's gotta talk to the D.A. and then the New York supreme court and wait an indeterminate amount of time for the doctors to release Ringerman from Bellevue, where he's recovering from LSD withdrawal. So Coogan waltzes right into the hospital and bluffs his way all the way to Ringerman's doctor whom he convinces to release Ringerman to his custody without any paperwork whatsoever.

You might expect this to be a conservative fantasy about a lone cowboy navigating the waters of liberal lunacy, bureaucratic and psychedelic, and you'd be right. But the politics here aren't so obnoxious, though when Coogan decks a guy for fondling a woman's breast against her will, I didn't believe that she would've chewed Coogan out for it the way she does. But I suppose for a particularly avant-garde psychotherapist it wouldn't be out of the realm of imagination. Susan Clark plays Julie, the psychotherapist who wants to obstruct Coogan's attempts to track criminals with relationships to Ringerman. But she succumbs to Coogan's charm and what she doesn't give up to him he steals from her filing cabinet.

The movie takes a page from Yojimbo--establishing its protagonist as a kind of ultimate badass and then having him ambushed and worked over by a couple of lowlife thugs. Coogan's Bluff does this early in the movie and it works as a great source of tension and motivation. I think most viewers will be incensed by the injustice and the film firmly puts us in Coogan's corner.

Coogan's Bluff is available on The Criterion Channel until the end of the month.

Bring Your Own Values

A couple years ago, I attempted to watch 1993's Addams Family Values, the first time I'd watched it in the 21st century, but found myself too distracted by how it's been co-opted by modern politics. Over this past weekend, I enjoyed watching it through, after having talked about it with a student. Of course, any political co-opting among Japanese junior high school students will be different than the kind you'd find in the western cultural landscape. But at its heart, The Addams Family really has no philosophy but comedy.

Those seeing Values as pushing progressive ideals conveniently overlook that Morticia talks about naming her baby "Benito" or "Mao". When I was a kid, I saw Wednesday's assault in Indian cosplay for what it really is--an amusing pretext for violence and mayhem.

This month, Criterion is presenting Addams Family Values as part of a playlist of "Queer Sighted Cinema". I had an inkling of how the film's inclusion on such a list, despite having no gay characters, might be justified but I watched the playlist's introductory conversation between curator Michael Koresky and filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow, We're All Going to the World's Fair) anyway. Schoenbrun discussed how Wednesday at the summer camp is placed in a faction of outsiders--ethnic minorities and disabled kids. In this sense, the film is "queer" in something like the older sense of the word which, sure, can absolutely also function in the modern sense. But the student rebellion against the faculty is a standard plot that can speak to many different political perspectives. Certainly in recent years, the voices of students rebelling against an ideologically progressive academic faculty have been very strident.

I will say the film certainly adores BDSM. Morticia even rapturously praises the pain of childbirth as she maintains her perfect poise. It's odd to watch in this particular cultural moment. The troubles surrounding Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer seem to me a massive blow against the cultural acceptance of BDSM. Regardless of which party you believe or if anyone is lying, it leaves the impression of a practice where consent can be withdrawn at any time and the joyous exploration of the relationship between pain and pleasure can be recast at any time by participants and observers as criminal and perverse. The Addams Family, of course, are basically immortal so we can laugh along with them as they're electrocuted and crushed and stabbed. There's a liberation cartoon characters can enjoy that perhaps humanity never can.

Addams Family Values is available on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet 1948

Illusion makes the forest teeth of woods.
A splintered 'chomp' resounds between the hills.
A fungal crowd demands the algae goods.
There's always ghostly Ken to pay the bills.
In error's season, grains were glued to bread.
Refusing food's the right of rich and dumb.
The dancing bones made sport of fleshy dead.
Museums compete to show the precious crumb.
A jungle wrought of lies condemns its kids.
A singing orphan swings from vines and brains.
In chorus, little monkeys offer bids.
But cheaply goes the blanket marked with stains.
The heavy golden dawn reveals her leg.
A sexy limb shall crush the safety egg.

The History of Sex on the Internet

It's always fascinating, at least to me, going back and watching media from the early days of the internet that tried to deal with some of the more radical cultural changes on the horizon in the new arena of human interaction. Last night I watched "Do You Wanna Dance?", an Ally McBeal episode from May 8, 2000 in which Ally has "internet sex" and later discovers that her partner was an underage boy, played by guest star Jonathon Taylor Thomas.

It seems absurd to-day that Ally would be arrested for this and, of course, when it goes to trial, her innocence is quickly established. With all the anonymity on the internet, a rendezvous like this probably happens millions of times a day. It's not so much an issue of teenagers displaying unexpected sexual maturity but people expecting lower sexual maturity from adults.

It seems unfortunate kids are always in such a hurry to become adults. I imagine this leads to lifelong repressed sexual issues as teens have experiences their own immature prejudices will compel them to regard harshly. I'm reminded of watching Evangelion again recently and the penultimate episode in which the Human Instrumentality Project is implemented and everyone--man, woman, child, friends, family--is forced into becoming the same entity. In the segment focusing on Misato, the young woman who cares for 14 year old protagonist Shinji, she finds herself being watched by the boy while she's having sex. As a child insecure about sex, he's disgusted, and now their relationship is different. How is humanity supposed to function when adults aren't free to be adults, when they're under constant potential surveillance by children? It would be a world in which no-one could escape high school.

The Ally McBeal episode aired just two months after Kirsty MacColl released her song "Here Comes that Man Again" which is about her having online sex with a Dutchman.

Both the song and the Ally McBeal episode imply a certain enthusiasm about the potential in this new form of sex but I think we can all agree that sexting isn't quite as satisfying for the observer or third party as more conventional forms of media. Without the excitement of actually being a participant, it's not visual enough or imaginative enough in its description. I think in the '90s people were thinking online sex could one day be an end unto itself but, for the most part, sexting still seems to be something people do only when something physical is off the table. At least that's the impression I have. Maybe there are some people who'd be content with sexting all their lives.

Force versus Jedi

I was lying in bed, thinking it was nice how Andor made the Force obscure, something that it was reasonable for Cassian not to believe in. It's unfortunate that Rebels is considered canon, with two Jedi wandering around in the same period, part of the same organisation, even visiting the same Rebel base where Cassian is living. I was thinking about that then I opened YouTube and saw this video was recommended:

Are algorithms using the Force to read my thoughts?

Anyway, the premise of the video isn't very well thought out. Han says he doesn't believe in the Force, not that he doesn't believe in the Jedi. You can believe the Knights Templar existed without believing in God. Since the Empire had to justify slaughtering the Jedi, it's probable Han was exposed to propaganda throughout his life labelling the Jedi as frauds. One might think it strange that Palpatine and Vader would preside over a system that discredits the Force, especially since Vader finds lack of faith "disturbing", but reserving true knowledge for an elite class is the sort of thing a fascist government might do. Common people being able to read the bible for the first time in the 16th century was a major part of the changes reshaping Europe in the period. I often think of the scene in The Thief of Bagdad in which the Sultan shows Jaffar his clock and Jaffar says that the common people must never have such a device or the Sultan will cease to be the master of time.

Anyway, the Jedi were a relatively small group. A crucial point of the prequels is that the Jedi were not an army. Yoda said that Jedi could use the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack, so demonstrations of their abilities would've been relatively rare. Han may have seen some telekinesis on holovids but he could easily right that off as "simple tricks and nonsense."

The idea of an old, true religion replaced by a new one lacking demonstrable power seemed to be a recurrent theme in a few examples of '80s fantasy. I'm thinking of Excalibur and Dragonlance. Both were influenced by Star Wars but I wonder if this preoccupation was part of the cultural longing for a unifying belief system that had been effectively abolished in the '60s.

Default Man

I was watching Matt Reeves' The Batman again last night, the first time I've seen it since seeing it in the theatre. My initial impression of it being the most vanilla Batman movie remains. The Tim Burton ones, the Christopher Nolan ones, even the Joel Schumacher ones, always felt like they were trying to do something radical. Reeves' movie takes the radical aspects of those films--Burton's gothic aesthetic and Nolan's grittiness--and deploys them as standard issue. The actual plot is mostly procedural and reminds me more of the animated series than of any of the comics. I'm still puzzled that some called it the darkest Batman movie. None of the main characters die and Paul Dano's performance as the Riddler is about as zany as Jim Carrey's, albeit with Zodiac killer dressing. The ending is certainly more softball than one of Burton's or Nolan's.

I guess the only aspect I really think pushed the envelope was the score by Michael Giacchino which is mostly low key and seems to be built entirely around Nirvana's "Something In the Way". I suspect a lot of the praise for the film was politically motivated as the plot deals with class resentment and touches on privilege, not only financial but also racial. These aspects are dealt with at about the same level of sophistication as an episode of Columbo. Bruce Wayne is shown to be flawed, almost childlike, for his low capacity for empathy. The line "I am vengeance," always seemed like it was meant to be powerful in previous incarnations of Batman; here he's openly mocked for it.

But I find these political elements mostly unobtrusive in the film which is more concerned with how point A connects with point B, with how one clue leads to another, with how one character's connexion to another is relevant to motivation. It has some of the fetishistic qualities of the Burton and Schumacher films as Reeves doesn't feel Nolan's need to maintain a sense of realism at all times. It's fun.

The Batman is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.

And More

I love how people are obsessively talking about Andor. It's so good having a show like that around again, something intelligent that prompts intelligent conversation.

This morning I watched this video by a guy called the Feral Historian who makes the point that the Rebellion, while largely leftist coded, can be interpreted as a right-wing group since their goal is better described as restoration rather than revolution. From that perspective, you could almost call the Empire progressive. In Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine does make the point that it is the first Galactic Empire. You could hardly call that conservative, reorganising the system of government into something that had never existed before. The Empire may be closer to Soviets than Nazis.

I keep waiting for someone to point it out and I'm sure someone has but the shots of stormtroopers coming down the steps during the Ghorman massacre seem pretty clearly modelled on the famous sequence of Russian troops coming down the steps in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.

X Sonnet 1947

The laundry waits for sun beneath the clouds.
We hear the steady drip of soapy socks.
An army's worth of clothes defend the crowds.
But maybe sort them towards a prison box.
The river flows with soap as time would clean.
Another year would pass before the suds.
An olive tree emerged from Lucy's bean.
The brittle branches launched a fleet of buds.
Intrusive birds would crowd the fragile perch.
Their talons broke their stockings ev'ry time.
But rarely crows could fail a garbage search.
We took to gest'ring notes by cour'yer mime.
The edifice of useless days awaits.
A foolish block of bone and brain it baits.

The Gentleman Vanishes

A young woman in a foreign country is subjected to psychological manipulations by the locals in 1950's So Long at the Fair. Jean Simmons plays Vicky, an Englishwoman who wakes up one morning in her Parisian hotel to find not only has her brother disappeared but his hotel room has vanished with him. The story that follows, based loosely on an urban legend, is an effective entry in the gaslight genre.

Of course, the hotel staff insist they have no memory of her brother or of room 19 ever being anything other than a washroom. I thought it unlikely that any explanation the film provided could satisfactorily make sense of this. I thought it would be like Dangerous Crossing, another movie with a similar premise in which the explanation ended up making very little sense. But actually So Long at the Fair's explanation, while unlikely, does make sense, so long as one remembers that real people, even communities, occasionally do very strange and unwise things.

There's a nice contrast between the normal, sensible world Vicky goes to sleep in and the nightmare she wakes up in, in which everyone behaves as though all her memories of her brother are her delusions. Matters are made more difficult by the fact that Vicky's command of French is weak. It's rare for a movie of this period to make language differences an important aspect of the story and I certainly appreciated it here.

Inevitably, there are flaws in the elaborate deception, the most significant being a young man named George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde), an artist from England. He assumes an heroic role but the film maintains its tension. He enlists the aid of a doctor played by none other than Andre Morell. It's always nice when he turns up.

So Long at the Fair is available on The Criterion Channel.

Get Your Threepenny's Worth

A notorious killer marries the daughter of the king of beggars in 1931's The Threepenny Opera (Die 3 Groschen-Oper), GW Pabst's adaptation of the famous stage musical by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. The stage play's socialist message was diminished in favour of portraying humanity of all stripes as thoroughly corrupt. It's grimly amusing with a standout performance by Lotte Lenya in the role of Jenny.

The story's set in Victorian London though, being a German production, everyone's speaking German. Mackie Messer/Mack the Knife (Rudolph Forster) runs a gang of thieves and enjoys the attentions of all the prostitutes in town, particularly the sinister Jenny.

Lenya has such an odd, angular beauty. She really doesn't need to tell us she has secret connexions to pirates; something about her body language and face suggest violence. When she learns that Mack has abruptly married Polly (Carola Neher), it's easy to believe Mack's in real danger of her revenge.

Polly's father (Fritz Rasp) is chief of all the beggars in town and organises them like the head of a workhouse. Rather than a leftist rabble-rouser, he's a cynical caricature drawn straight from that old right wing urban myth about the secretly wealthy street beggars. I remember hearing people still repeating it now and then back when I lived in the U.S. People would talk with a straight face about someone in rags who'd sneak behind the corner and drive off in a Lamborghini.

He demands the chief of police, Tiger Brown (Reinhold Schunzel), capture and execute Mack but it takes some convincing because, of course, Brown and Mack are bosom buddies.

The Threepenny Opera is available on The Criterion Channel.

There is Escape

I was watching some vintage commercials this morning, getting ready for an activity in class to-day where the students are going to write commercials. I found this Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial from 1967 impressively creepy:

Next they'll be wearing trousers!

Amongst the cheap, provocative spam Facebook occasionally puts on my page, I saw that once again the media had its ax to grind with Morrissey. Googling now, I see the Guardian has an article called "Nick Cave says he declined Morrissey’s request to sing ‘silly anti-woke screed' on new song" and Rolling Stone has an article called "Nick Cave Did Not Want to Read Morrissey's 'Silly Anti-Woke Screed' for New Song". What did Nick Cave actually say? The source for the articles is the recent Red Hand Files in which Cave said:

I’ve never actually met Morrissey, which is probably why I like him. He is undeniably a complex and divisive figure, someone who takes more than a little pleasure in pissing people off. As enjoyable as some may find this, it holds little interest for me, but for the fact that Morrissey is probably the best lyricist of his generation - certainly the strangest, funniest, most sophisticated, and most subtle. We had a few pleasant email exchanges last year in which Morrissey asked if I’d sing on a new song he had written. I would have been happy to do so, however, while the song he sent was quite lovely, it began with a lengthy and entirely irrelevant Greek bouzouki intro. It also seemed that he didn’t want me to actually sing on the song, but deliver, over the top of the bouzouki, an unnecessarily provocative and slightly silly anti-woke screed he had written. Although I suppose I agreed with the sentiment on some level, it just wasn’t my thing. I try to keep politics, cultural or otherwise, out of the music I am involved with. I find that it has a diminishing effect and is antithetical to whatever it is I am trying to achieve. So, Astrid, I politely declined. I said no.

A few articles elaborate further to show this isn't actually the beginning of a feud as the article titles suggest. But how many people are going to read past the headlines? With war between Israel and Iran, and ongoing between Ukraine and Russia, the media still has time to kill picking fights with Morrissey. I can't help thinking of one of Morrissey's own lyrics, "There's so much destruction all over the world and all you can do is complain about me."

X Sonnet 1946

A giant kitten's face replaced the wall.
No clocks could count above the critter's eye.
With clouds below, no angel thought to fall.
But something tempts about the earthly pie.
So spiralled down, the airy spirits drop.
About the kitchen crowds the seraphim.
But local gossips call a nosy cop.
The streets were washed in klaxon siren's din.
Their pearly robes would thwart the feet of grace.
In haste, they dash across a private field.
The godly herald falls upon his face.
But fertile ground to gods would ever yield.
As Heaven merged with Earth without a fight,
The morning light reveals a hybrid wight.

Possible Return

A group of women deal with death, sexual assault, and possibly ghosts in 2006's Volver. Writer/director Pedro Almodovar continues to explore his fascination with women in this sweet, amusing, and slightly messy portrayal of a community.

I think I'd seen this movie before. Maybe I saw another Almodovar movie starring Penelope Cruz. I'm pretty sure I saw this at the Landmark theatre in Hillcrest, San Diego when it was new. Or maybe not. I sure miss those Landmark movie theatres. Googling just now, I see the Landmark in Hillcrest closed in January this year. I suppose the wonderful indie movie theatre will probably be replaced by another fake sushi restaurant of the kind that replaced the wonderful bookstore in the same neighbourhood or anonymous office space. Or maybe just lie vacant as the owner of the space awaits some soulless entity to fork over an obscene amount of money.

The poster art for Volver is striking and its style is replicated in the animated closing credits which feature coalescing borders of spinning flowers reminiscent of Saul Bass. There is a kind of Hitchcockian quality to some aspects of the film, particularly the sequence in which Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) must hide her husband's corpse. Her daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo), had killed him after he'd tried to rape her. Raimunda stashes the body in the freezer of the restaurant next door. The owner of the restaurant had entrusted Raimunda with the keys while he was out of town. When a film crew spots her coming out of the place, they ask if they could eat there on a regular basis during production. She can't resist the opportunity and borrows food from other women in the community and opens the restaurant to customers.

Meanwhile, Raimunda's sister, Sole (Lola Duenas), hears the voice of their dead mother coming from the trunk of her car. The title of the film means "return" and seems to refer not only to the dead returning but to unresolved issues manifesting anew. Mostly it's a funny, cosy movie.

Volver is available on The Criterion Channel.

Comedy is Hard Labour

Be careful with your intellectual comments; they might get you six years hard labour in a communist country as the protagonist of 1968's The Joke (Žert) discovers. Made during the Prague Spring, a brief period of freer speech, this film by Jaromil Jires employs a fascinating kaleidoscoping of flashback and present to create a sense of dislocated reality.

Ludvik Jahn (Jodef Somr) is a scientist. In narration he sounds bored and disaffected. Returning to his hometown, he offhandedly remarks on how he doesn't really like anyone there. We find he's being interviewed by an older woman called Helena (Jana Dítětová) who rapidly begins to adore him. Upon seeing a photograph of her husband, Pavel (Ludek Munzar), and recognising him, we see Ludvik's memories from years earlier. We see the hearing that resulted in his stint in forced reeducation. Shots of the panel of judges and crowd of people don't cut to reaction shots of Ludvik at the time but to Ludvik in the present, reclining on a sofa with his perpetually bemused expression. The impression this creates is of the airtight world of the communist moralists, a world living in a bubble of editing.

As the title of the film suggests, this is all over a joke. Ludvik made the mistake of falling for the beautiful and passionately communist young Marketa (Jaroslava Obersmaierova) to whom he quite wittily remarked that "Optimism is the opiate of the masses. A 'healthy spirit' stinks of stupidity. Long live Trotsky!" In this, Ludvik shows the not exactly difficult insight that the communists had truly traded one religion for another, even more dogmatic and restrictive, religion of gossip and resentment. In the hearing, Marketa confidently raises her hand when the vote comes to sentence Ludvik to hard labour.

It's not hard to see why Ludvik feels so isolated. How can he find meaning in human relationships? Even revenge holds little meaning and he barely manages the passion to pursue it. How could he feel any of his actions could have a meaningful impact? Maybe that's worse than having to swing a pickax in a quarry for six years.

The Joke is available on The Criterion Channel.

What Manner of Cheese Would Drive Us Hither?

Last night I dreamt I was with a group of friends and we were lost in a labyrinthine department store. We finally came out through some doors on the north side beyond which there were some blocky apartment buildings. There was some kind of demoniac entity above our heads that had an obsessive hatred of free will. To pass unnoticed, we had to avoid any creative thinking, even fairly simple things like deciding what we might wear the next day.

I've been kind of lagging on the sonnets lately, haven't I? I guess I got tired of writing a quatrain every night. I was operating under the idea that something weird would come out of my brain if I were sleepy, now I feel like crafting them after my morning coffee. You can judge for yourself if they're any better:

X Sonnet 1945

The liberated ghost was wanted west.
The eyes of supermarket lights were peeled.
Suspicion spots a heart beneath a vest.
The diamond brains would see the card repealed.
A savage shade usurped the role of rain.
As pouring lead reduced the land to steel.
Their vital organs beat their chests in vain.
Organic life has lost the right to feel.
A party crossed the guarded mall at night.
Beyond the northern doors there waits a beast.
No question now arose to hazard flight.
For greedy minds on desp'rate souls would feast.
Preserved with blood, the dead assume a name.
A city bleeds to come a drinker's game.

Day of the Andor

I was pleased to see yesterday that Andor topped the Nielson streaming chart during its final week (for some reason Nielson ratings are delayed a couple weeks so this was only released yesterday). Even a lot of fans of the show have called it niche, something that could only appeal to a small segment of hardcore Star Wars fans but that's plainly untrue. I believe this is the first truly successful Star Wars media since the first season of The Mandalorian. You can see the difference in the way it's being talked about; it's not just a bunch of shills. Even RedLetterMedia mumbled approval for the first season.

The most interesting thing to me about the reactions to the show is that it's touching both political extremes in our notoriously politicised current era. On YouTube, the popular right-wing critic called The Critical Drinker praised the series and a left-wing YouTuber called Jessie Gender recorded a four hour analysis. Both are fairly weak as far as analyses go but, as is often the case with weak but confident analyses, they say a lot about the analysts. I continue to think Syril and Dedra are the best part of the series which has many other fine qualities and it's fascinating how both Critical Drinker and Jessie Gender discuss Syril. Critical Drinker is rapturous over the shot of Syril nearly strangling a woman for rather fishy reasons while Jessie Gender takes Syril's initial behaviour with Dedra, even long before that scene, as a sign of the fundamental need to dominate women in all men. Both reactions seemed wild extrapolations to me and I would've assumed they'd seem that way to the average viewer in saner times. But in any case, it's fascinating that the show provokes such passionate and opposite interpretations.

Maybe it's worth remembering that we all hate fascism, even as we disagree on who the fascists are.

It's hard not to see Andor's relevance to current events. How many people are recalling the Ghorman Massacre when they watch news about National Guard being called in to quell protesters in Los Angeles? And just as with the prequels, it comes from a writer not making the story an allegory of any political event, or chaining himself to a particular ideology, but simply expressing the patterns he saw presented by a study of historical events. It turns out Andor's great and popular. It's a uniquely useful piece of art.

Harris Yulin

Harris Yulin, who passed away on June 10th at the age of 87, is one of those actors you're bound to have seen at some point if you regularly take in American film and television. I saw him just recently in Night Moves. A lot of people vividly remember him as the ornery judge in Ghostbusters 2. But as illustrious as his film career was, it was on television he indelibly made a mark. He played major characters on Frasier, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The X-Files. He was on Murphy Brown, two iterations of La Femme Nikita, Kojack, Barnaby Jones, Wonder Woman, the list goes on.

For many people, judging from reactions I've been reading, his most impressive performance was on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the 1993 episode "Duet". It's one of those dream roles for an actor seeking a challenge. He played a character pretending to be another character and the effectiveness and psychological motivation for his deception were both integral to the story. He rose to the occasion and the episode remains fascinating to watch.

Such a ubiquitous actor seems like part of the bedrock of an era in film and television media. His death feels like the end of one, or part of a transition to another.

For the Discerning Crow

Gene Hackman and Al Pacino are a pair of tramps in 1973's Scarecrow, a film that largely rides on their performances. Well, Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography is gorgeous but, despite a few interesting ideas, the film never quite wholly satisfies.

Hackman was a big guy and it seems most of his roles didn't really take advantage of it. Here, he plays an ex-con named Max, wandering the roads with a pipe dream about opening a car wash. He seems like pleasant enough company but slowly you start to realise that, in most conversations, he's trying to start a fight, something his powerful physique allows him to successfully do. The film gets its title from a sort of joke Pacino's character, Francis, tells him about how crows aren't afraid of scarecrows--they actually find them quite funny and so do the farmers the favour of leaving their crops alone in exchange for the entertainment. Max laughs in what seems like appreciation before remarking on what a stupid idea it is. Francis has the deer in headlights look of someone who's not used to the twists in conversation a compulsive bully might employ.

The two are an effective double act; Max always spoiling for a fight and Francis persisting in his friendliness. The two get brief jobs and meet women on their journey from California to Pittsburgh, most memorably a horny southern woman called Frenchy (Ann Wedgeworth).

The climax of the film calls for an intense performance from Pacino, and he rises to the occasion. There's kind of a Man Who Shot Liberty Valance spirit to the film about the value of peace and human connexion in a world that seems to inevitably demand violence.

Scarecrow is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a celebration of the late Gene Hackman.

Billy Bye

I watched Ally McBeal again last night, the March 27, 2000 episode called "Boy Next Door". This one (spoilers) brings the ongoing plot about Ally and Billy to a conclusion with Billy's sudden death by cerebral haemorrhage during his closing argument in a trial. I've said it a couple times now but I'll say it again; I really admire how David E. Kelley handled this problem. Billy was clearly intended to be a character audiences rooted for Ally to get back with but actor Gil Bellows gave such an unintentionally slimy performance that it was actually very uncomfortable whenever there were sparks between the two. Kelley didn't ignore that problem; he took it and used it. He made Billy's sliminess explicit by turning him into an unapologetic chauvinist which was good for laughs. And then Kelley used that for the brain tumour plot, making his death actually mean something. If "good" Billy had died, I'd have just said good riddance. This way, it became something interesting about the human mind and how much control someone has over who they are. A broad comedic bit turned into a real existential tragedy. There's a writer using craft and improvisation remarkably well. I'm compelled to think this is facilitated by the fact that Kelley wrote every single episode.

Ally McBeal is available on Disney+ in Japan, probably on Hulu in the U.S., I don't know.

The Lala Way

I was watching Ally McBeal last night and noticed the episode was directed by Rachel Talalay, a director with a very long career in television, perhaps most distinguished for the many episodes of Doctor Who she directed in the Twelfth Doctor era. So I dozed off watching Doctor Who last night, though not episodes directed by Talalay. I started with the first episode of The Ark in Space and then moved on to "The Pilot", the first episode of Twelve's final season, in which we meet his companion, Bill.

How frustrating it is to reflect on how well everything was working in Twelve's final season. "The Pilot" has the wisdom to start small instead of trying to cram a million plot details and special effects into every minute. Bill is introduced and allowed to breathe, the Doctor is allowed to be reintroduced as a mysterious professor. To think it was panic over this season's tendency to be watched by only around five million people that led to the revamp that saw ratings decline to the four million range before settling to-day in the two million range. I guess a lot of what makes a great creator or producer of television is to know when to hold 'em, know when to walk away, etc.

X Sonnet 1944

Spaghetti messes mount above the rim.
The blackened pot could speak in heated tones.
But speaking plain could make the lights go dim.
The kitchen tiles hid the preacher's bones.
Like fingers finding herbs, the roots advance.
A cooking ground defined the lonely house.
A barren garden waits for worm romance.
The lurid scene has shamed the watching mouse.
Some screws of hate are twisting little minds.
With slime, the wretched cauldron bubbles hot.
A des'prate chef prepares some rotten rinds.
A bloated heart would smother infant thought.
The march of stupid men would crush the school.
The imp aspires now to be a tool.

The Sillier Adventures of the Predator

Three separate Predators set out to hunt three different human warriors in 2025's Predator: Killer of Killers, an animated film from directors Dan Trachtenberg and Joshua Wassung. Trachtenberg was the mastermind behind the popular Predator movie Prey a couple years ago and the writing on Killer of Killers is just as ridiculous. The animated format may be better suited to cartoonish logic but I found the third segment of the film too vigorously lame.

Like Prey, Killer of Killers features some actors with tenuous connexions to the ethnicities they're portraying. Louis Ozawa, an American actor of Japanese and Chinese descent, plays a pair of samurai brothers, the only voice role in the mostly wordless second and best segment of the film. Set in 1609 in no more specific place than "in Japan", a detail that may be less obtrusive to those of you not living in Japan, the story follows the lives of the two men whose father has pitted against each other for the right of succession to shogun. The two learn the value of working together against the extraterrestrial foe, who in one shot is visually linked to their psychopathic father. It's not a story that fits well in feudal Japan, nor does it seem right for a Predator movie, particular in its posing the Predator as a thematic ghost of the boys' father. But the action sequences are the best of the film.

I preferred the concept of the first story, in which a Viking matriarch is robbed of her moment of glorious revenge but the sudden intrusion of a Predator. I liked the idea of the alien foe also disrupting culture and tradition.

The third segment, about a young fighter pilot in World War II, was just a relentless stream of stupid ideas. On this kid's first flight, he wears no helmet, everyone in the squadron is able to communicate with each other without apparent headsets; at one point the boy crawls out onto the wing of his plane in midflight in order to fix something. He also somehow knows that the Predator's vision is based on heat so he decides to cut his engines, apparently making his aircraft ice cold. Sure, it didn't make a lot of sense when Schwarzenegger was able to hide behind cold mud but at least he felt constrained to also be still when the Predator was looking directly at him.

It's not a very satisfying film but it's a good accomplishment for animation studio Third Floor.

Predator: Killer of Killers is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere in the world.

The Late Tide

I finally managed to get through 2011's Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides last night. Every time I'd tried to watch it before, all the cgi slapstick and lousy writing stopped me cold. But somehow I kind of enjoyed it this time.

Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz are both fine in it. Depp really disappears into the Jack Sparrow role and, in spite of everything, I see the character and not the very over-exposed actor. Which certainly says something about said actor's abilities. Penelope Cruz was pregnant during filming which would likely explain the excessive number of close-ups she has. Something about her lacked the flair she has in other roles.

I asked Google's AI why Ian McShane, an Englishman, uses an American accent in his role as the English pirate Blackbeard. I received this answer:

Ian McShane's character, Blackbeard, in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, has an American accent, likely due to the character's portrayal as a "North American pirate" or "colonist pirate". The film draws upon historical depictions of pirates who plundered Caribbean islands and were associated with the Americas. While McShane is British, the film's narrative and Blackbeard's characterization suggest a connection to the American colonists and their language.

The interesting thing about it to me is that it's a rationale and not the obvious, actual reason, that McShane, at the time, was best known for his portrayal of Al Swearengen, an American character on the HBO series Deadwood. If he'd been cast as Blackbeard when he was best known for playing the title character on Lovejoy, who spoke with an English accent, he probably would've also used an English accent for his portrayal of Blackbeard. Why can't the AI think of this? It's like it's afraid of offending someone.

Accents in the 18th century would've been noticeably different than they are to-day, whether you're talking about people in England or in an American colony, so any accent would be an anachronism anyway. There's no reason for Jack Sparrow to have an English accent. The rationale for speaking with a modern English accent is about as valid as speaking with a modern American one.

On Stranger Tides was directed by Rob Marshall who went on to direct the live action Little Mermaid remake. Perhaps it was the use of mermaids in On Stranger Tides that made him seem right for the job. The mermaids in On Stranger Tides, though, were certainly much hotter.

I generally find Marshall to be a bland filmmaker and this is a mostly bland film though mostly due to the poorly considered plot than anything to do with direction. The screenwriters seem to struggle to string thoughts together. When Jack tries to organise a mutiny on Blackbeard's ship, Blackbeard hadn't appeared yet up to that point. Jack asks if any of the crew have ever seen Blackbeard and they all say, no, that the captain never leaves his quarters. From this, Jack, reasonably enough, concludes they've all been deceived, and this isn't Blackbeard's ship at all. But after executing the mutiny, who should emerge from the cabin but none other than Blackbeard himself. Why had he never come out of his cabin before? No explanation is given. Had he truly never been on deck during any previous attack or raid? This is left unaddressed. There's a lot of stuff like that in the movie: scenes that depend on you at least half forgetting previous scenes in order to function.

I was delighted to see an old friend, the Surprise, the ship used by Captain Barbossa in his new position as a Captain in the Royal Navy. The Surprise is a replica 18th century ship that docks at the San Diego Maritime Museum, where I was a volunteer hand for a few years, until six years ago. My first day volunteering at the museum, I spent around three hours sitting on the Surprise's poop deck, learning to splice lines, a skill I sadly did not retain. Though I can't imagine when I might next use it. I was subsequently to spend quite a lot of time on that ship and it was genuinely nice to see her again.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is available on Disney+.