One of the great cock-eyed procedurals has to be William Friedkin's 1985 film To Live and Die in L.A.. Co-written with Friedkin by a former U.S. Secret Service agent, this ranks among the most credible crime movies ever made but also boasts remarkably stylistic cinematography by Robby Muller and a forceful score by Wang Chung.
William Peterson is Richard Chance, an agent whose partner (Michael Greene) goes on a dangerous mission alone, days before retirement, one of the few moments in the film that felt really cliche. But, to be fair, this may have been one of the movies that set that standard.
Afterwards, Chance is driven to bringing down a counterfeit ring headed by a man named Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe). To do so, he poses as a man interested in doing business with Masters and when his boss balks at providing the 60 grand necessary to convince Masters that Chance is a serious investor, Chance contrives to rob another crook for the funds necessary. This detour turns into an amazing car chase sequence that's likely one of the reasons this movie is on a playlist of great stuntwork on Criterion this month.
The detailed twists and turns of Chance's dealings with informants and Masters' dealings with clients always feel remarkably authentic and the dialogue is delivered with terrific performances. Standouts in the supporting cast include John Turturro, Dean Stockwell, and Darlanne Fluegel.
Recently, I was doing some laundry and listening to this decent audio adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I.
It has Julian Glover in the title role and his real life son, Jamie Glover, in the role of Henry IV's son, Prince Hal. Julian Glover has had a long career playing villains. He played villains on Doctor Who, in The Empire Strikes Back, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and various other things. Among the many disappointing things about the last couple seasons of Game of Thrones was the abrupt killing off of his character that had been subtly built up to be a secret badass over the first five seasons. He's so good at playing a villain, though, he makes for a somewhat simplistic Henry IV. One of the interesting points about the play is the ambiguity of the King's moral position. Who's being rash and irresponsible, Hotspur or the King? Does the fighting start because Hotspur wouldn't turn over his prisoners to the King's representative or because the King was being too inflexible? With Glover in the role, it seems unambiguously the latter. Alan Cox as Hotspur actually comes across as uncommonly affable. I really enjoyed the scene where he and his cohorts are hanging out with Glyndwr and the woman starts speaking in Welsh. It's oddly relaxing.
Jamie Glover as Hal is not memorable. Doctor Who fans may know him for playing William Russell in An Adventure in Time and Space. In this Henry IV, his voice comes off as weak, like he's not used to raising it. On the other hand, Richard Griffiths is a fantastic Falstaff. I really wish there were some video of him in the role.
The Shakespeare Network has a lot of Shakespeare plays in audio format. I was also listening to the Romeo and Juliet from the series which has Joseph Fiennes as Romeo and David Tennant as Mercutio, which was mostly frustrating because I kept dearly wishing their roles were reversed. Well, it probably would've been best for Joseph Fiennes not to have been in the project at all.
A few nights ago, I succumbed to the urge to watch Evil Dead 2 again. I'd been in the mood since last Friday, which, as you remember, was a Friday the 13th. I'm not really into the Jason movies so I didn't want to watch one of those but that Friday also happened to be my last day at one of the schools I've been working at at one of the junior high schools here in Kakogawa. I took the opportunity to talk about the superstition around Friday the 13th since part of my job is to talk about western culture. In the past, there's been a 50/50 chance that I'll be working with a Japanese teacher who'll listen to me along with the students when I say no-one really knows the origin of the superstition despite a number of theories or a Japanese teacher who will tell the students a very specific history about how Friday the 13th is definitely related to the crucifixion of Christ.
I was sorry to bid farewell to this school, especially since I'd been with them such a short time. It's a small school so I'd been assigned to work there for only about two months, cumulatively, though that period was spread out in small chunks throughout the school year. This last bit was only a week, actually just four days because Wednesday was a holiday. There were several students with whom I developed a rapport from each of the three grades (junior high school is three years in Japan). Riffing off Friday the 13th with the first year students, we started talking about horror in general. When we were talking about using the verb "have" to talk about illness, I started giving absurd examples like "I have lycanthropy", "I have the plague," and so on, and I looked over at one boy who started smiling in a surprised, knowing way when I wrote "lycanthropy" on the board. He clearly knew the word already, which impressed me, of course. As is so often the case, I had the feeling that Japan would be much better at English if the kids were allowed to get their own imaginations involved more often.
From there, someone mentioned Chainsaw Man, a recent anime about a guy with chainsaw limbs. As always when someone mentions Chainsaw Man, I had the urge to recommend Evil Dead 2. Really, I should've recommended Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. The mixture of slapstick comedy and horror in those movies is so perfect for that crowd of students, it's rare I've sensed such a perfect match of movie and audience.
As usual, I felt like I got to know the art club students the best. There was one girl who got into trouble and was banned from the art club until my last week there, which was really too bad because, like most of the independent-minded students I've worked with, she was one of the most rewarding to talk to.
Among the second year students, there was a guy on the basketball team who had a surprising interest in westerns and with whom I talked extensively about films. There was also a girl with a surprising fixation on the actor Clancy Brown.
The third year students were a little harder to talk to because they had a science teacher who for some reason had an ax to grind with me. But there was a girl on the student council whose English was surprisingly excellent and she and I were able to speak about movies and music quite a bit.
Even if it weren't the end of my period at the school, I wouldn't be seeing the third year students again. Every year is a heartbreak. There's not a group of students I've worked with that didn't have among them individuals who distinguished themselves with fascinating interests and personality traits.
Robert Duvall has died at the age of 95. He had a long and illustrious career as one of the greatest actors to come out of the New Hollywood era. He's best known for his supporting roles, particularly in the Godfather movies in which he played consigliere Tom Hagen. The fact that consigliere became a term with some currency in the U.S. is due in some part to Duvall's performance. When watching the movies, certainly for the first time, it's tough to see him as anything other than Tom Hagen. He was an actor who disappeared into a character. There were times when his characters didn't stand out and that was always in service to the broader purpose of the film.
His first film role, after working some time in television, was in the famous 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird in which he plays the mysterious recluse named Boo Radley. It's not a speaking role nor does it occupy a lot of screentime but it's a crucial role and required an actor who could communicate a lot with subtle body language and expressions. He was more than equal to the task.
He did have lead roles, though, most significantly in George Lucas' first film, THX 1138, a grim, dystopian film about an emotionally oppressed culture dominated by an artificial police force. Duvall's natural humanity contrasts well with the sterile surveillance state.
I also recently saw him in a lead role in The Outfit, a film highly praised by Quentin Tarantino for its dynamics between Duvall and Joe Don Baker.
Duvall's last film came out in 2022 and he passed away at his ranch in Virginia.
That's Japan's prime minister, Takaichi Sanae (on the right), drumming with the South Korean president, Lee Jae Myung. The first song you hear them drumming to is "Golden" from the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack, an interesting choice given that it was at least cowritten by Americans, if not entirely written by songwriters who are products of American culture. Of course, the movie itself was released through Sony, a Japanese company.
I worked for five years in Takaichi's hometown, Kashihara. I don't find her mix of conservatism and rock and roll at all strange, although many of the residents I talked to in Kashihara about music disliked rock, or if they tolerated it, it was nothing heavier than The Beatles. A lot of students did talk to me about their love of rock, particularly early in my tenure. Over time, students seemed more and more inhibited by the Eye of Hazukashi (embarrassment), preventing them from directly speaking of their musical interests. But I still remember the student who was an avid fan of Nirvana and the student with whom I chatted about the differences between punk and metal.
I was thinking about the irony of Takaichi, a woman who has cited Margaret Thatcher as an influence, adopting the trappings of punk. A punk rock Margaret Thatcher is kind of like a Joker Batman. But of course, she's not punk, she's metal, which is almost as opposite to punk as Thatcher was to punk. Punk is about breaking down institutions and oppressive traditions while metal often paints pictures of decadent and cruel satanic hierarchies. I asked a teacher what bands specifically Takaichi likes but he was too much of a partisan to give me an honest answer, telling me her favourite band is XJapan. A google search tells me she in fact favours Deep Purple and Iron Maiden among other influential metal groups while mentioning XJapan as a favourite Japanese group.
But it's fair to say there's something rebellious in Takaichi's spirit. Fareed Zakaria said as much when comparing and contrasting Takaichi with Britain's Keir Starmer. Takaichi has been seen being quite chummy with Trump, who, despite what the American left would like to believe, is about as punk as a politician can be, despite his leanings to authoritarianism. But that's the pattern, isn't? There's the punk of breaking down the institution before there comes the metal of erecting the edifices of a new authority. I'm not sure Trump has the discipline to do that, but Takaichi undoubtedly does.
She's a hawk who wants to change Japan's constitution to allow the country to have a proper military again, empowered to start wars, and with her super-majority thanks to the snap election just over week ago, she may well get what she wants. Outside observers may ask, to what end? Is this the dog chasing the car, not knowing what it'll do when it catches it? With Japan's population decline showing no sign of slowing, this seems hardly the time to for colonial ambitions. Takaichi's anti-immigration policies make even less sense than Trump's. But it didn't make much sense for Japan to enter World War II as Japanese intellectuals said at the time. It was a matter of pride and competitive instinct more than anything. Has Japan gained enough capacity for critical thinking in the years since World War II to stop another such military snowball effect? Time will tell.
The staff of a tabloid find themselves with blood on their hands after exposing a murderess in 1931's Five Star Final. Unremarkably for the period, the film presents a morally simplistic dichotomy of heartless journalists and their innocent victims. But certainly it was true then, and perhaps even truer to-day, that tabloid journalism can be quite vicious.
Edward G. Robinson stars as Joseph W. Randall, an editor who's fed up with his paper's unscrupulous practices. But he reluctantly accepts instructions from the paper's owner to publish a story on a woman named Nancy Voorhees who murdered her boss twenty years earlier. She was acquitted by a jury when it was found that she was pregnant with the child of that boss and that he had cast her aside.
Meanwhile, one of the paper's journalists, played by Boris Karloff, poses as a priest and in this guise speaks to a woman who reveals to him that she is Nancy Voorhees, living in secret. Her daughter (Marian Marsh) is about to be married to a respectable young man. Naturally, Boris Karloff has no compunctions about exposing Voorhees, even though it means scandal and potentially the end of the young woman's chances at marriage.
This is a pre-Code film, on Criterion this month as part of a collection of pre-code Mervyn LeRoy movies. That means this movie has frank references to women's body parts and suicide. The story's climax hinges on something that couldn't even have been portrayed in American movies after the code was enforced in 1935. The extremes LeRoy was able to indulge in contribute to the story's simplicity. One could almost use it as an example of how the code led to filmmakers being more creative. But Edward G. Robinson gives a good performance and Marian Marsh is beautiful.
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. I chose to watch The Age of Innocence again, Martin Scorsese's 1993 adaptation of Edith Wharton's 1920 novel. I first saw the movie a few years before reading the book so I was surprised by how funny the book is. Wharton's merciless satire of 19th century New York high society becomes a melancholy tale of lost love in Scorsese's hands.
The movie's certainly well cast. Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder offer the perfect contrast of a sharp, intelligent woman obliged by society to bear a yoke of quiet indignity and a pretty young woman for whom the world is a simple, pretty place. There's a wryness in Wharton's narrative that's largely absent from the movie. Pfeiffer's performance is more wounded while the impression of the scandalous divorcee in the book is a little more one of boldness. Still, it's a lovely film.
As with a lot of period films, I couldn't help being reminded of Japan to-day. Many of the manners depicted in the film and book, particularly the inability to speak of many things directly, still have currency in Japan.
The Age of Innocence is available this month on The Criterion Channel.
X Sonnet 1980
The roughly mannered goat was given grass.
A tardy status formed the gist of gold.
The other lookers deemed the man an ass.
Still more were wont to call him merely old.
But smarter sorts were wont to ponder on.
A tray of tiny pearls was served to God.
Such actions call for sorting wicked prawn.
But which of them were bad or simply odd?
Let judges show for what they're paid for life.
Let war and peace be brokered by the bed.
The chorus holds there be a better strife.
A pretty kind that ends with no-one dead.
So raise chimeras over states and kings.
And break the fingers wearing evil rings.
Who wants to talk some more about Wuthering Heights? The new one, despite everyone complaining about it, is dominating the box office in the U.S. Probably because everyone's complaining about it. On the other hand, right wing YouTuber Snarky Jay took a break from constantly complaining about the live action remake of Snow White to offer gushing praise for the new movie. You know, I don't think Snarky Jay's very snarky. She's more like Angry Jay.
I don't know when, if ever, I will see see the film (it's not coming out 'til the 27th in Japan) but I did watch the 1939 version> last night. I'd seen it before, just over twenty years ago. Here's my very short blog entry marking the event including a broken link to my old Doll Merchant web comic which used to be hosted on davidbowie.com. I wish BowieNet were still around. Anyway, Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon are very sweet and the cinematography is lovely. Cathy and Heathcliff are so much more effusive than they are in the book and they reminded me quite a bit of 1920s romance movies. Kind of starchy, almost like animated marble. Of course, both performers are white, though I saw one modern review that referred to Oberon as "passing" for white because one of her parents was from India but, in fact, that parent was a Burgher, a group descended from Portuguese and Dutch settlers in India. It's by no means a bad movie but I definitely sympathise more with critics who lament the lack of an adaptation that accurately conveys the story of bitter, relentless revenge in the book.
It's funny Rotten Tomatoes calls it a "David Niven movie". Niven has a supporting role as Edgar Linton. Do they think Niven is better known now than Olivier? Interestingly enough, Merle Oberon originally got top billing.
I feel like I've seen at least part of the version with Ralph Fiennes. I have a vague memory of finding it so frustrating that I switched it off. I'm not sure if that actually happened or if I dreamed it.
This month, Criterion is hosting two adaptations, the 1939 one and the one from 2011, the only one that deigned to cast a person of colour as Heathcliff. I plan to watch that one soonishly. Did I just invent an adverb?
I was in the middle of a re-watch of Angel a couple years ago when Disney+ in Japan decided to pull it. A decent VPN was no longer in my budget and the free ones only sporadically worked on Disney+. I don't even currently have Disney+ but I finally got too frustrated at being cut off mid-Angel and bought some season four episodes on Amazon. Last night I watched Orpheus from March 19th, 2003, an episode in which Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer guest stars in order to restore Angel's soul.
This was also the episode where Cordelia kind of abruptly goes full villain. It feels kind of like the writers decided to take this course after realising that the writing for her character in season four had been kind of lame and making her a villain was the only way to make sense of things like her deciding to sleep with Connor. Cordelia's character was just a mess by this point anyway. I guess this was around the time the behind the scenes drama was happening between Charisma Carpenter, the actress who played Cordelia, and series co-creator Joss Whedon. I wonder if anyone's taken into account the possibility that the tensions were arising because Cordelia had become dead weight and no-one knew how to confront it. Willow and Wesley have a slightly too tongue-in-cheek dialogue about how they both went down dark paths since they last interacted in Buffy season three. Somehow the transition feels more natural for both characters than Cordelia's transformation from shallow comic relief with occasional hints of hidden depths to holy team mom. What could they do with that moral certitude but make a villain?
I'd forgotten about the flirtations between Willow and Fred. It's a shame that never happened.
I wonder how many times I've seen Fire Walk with Me. That's a question I might've asked myself when I was in high school three decades ago and have trouble coming up with an answer. But I was watching it again last night, having recently finished another viewing of Twin Peaks season two. I fell asleep about halfway through the movie, though.
How many times have I willingly watched and unironically enjoyed Chris Isaak's lousy performance as Special Agent Chet Desmond? It's strange how often great singers make for poor actors. There's so much nuance in his vocals when he's singing but he just delivers every line flat as old coke when he's acting.
Still, I do like him and Kiefer Sutherland together. Sutherland's performance as the dopey but still basically competent Sam Stanley makes their double act work. It was originally supposed to be Dale Cooper in Chet Desmond's place but Kyle MacLachlan wanted to minimise his role. If it had been Cooper in Desmond's place, it would've made more sense of all his comments in the pilot episode about local law enforcement not playing nice with the FBI and Albert being more on the ball than Sam. It still basically works, though.
Not all singers are bad actors, as we can see when David Bowie shows up shortly after Chris Isaak's character disappears. It's a shame Bowie couldn't have come back for the role in season three.
I'm having two lines of thought this morning that are converging. I'm thinking about the Epstein files and Gothic fiction. The connexion is ruthlessness and an untrustworthy world.
I haven't read the Epstein files because I don't have a year to devote to them. I'm amazed when articles say "only" three million or so e-mails have been released. The impression that any name just mentioned in the e-mails is an indication of shared guilt in Epstein's crimes has led to some people, like Jon Stewart, feeling compelled to explain brief mentions of their names in e-mails Epstein exchanged with various people. This morning I watched a video of physicist Sabine Hossenfelder explaining that her name is mentioned in one of the e-mails simply because Epstein knew someone who went to one of her conferences.
I like how she takes the opportunity to criticise the spreading lack of conscientiousness in her field. A lack of conscientiousness similarly exists in journalism which often seems not only driven for sensationalism but by personal vendettas. This is the impression I got from coverage of Neil Gaiman. I was reading the substack of TechnoPathology, the guy compiling evidence of the malfeasance in coverage of the allegations levelled at Neil Gaiman. TechnoPathology has shared posts from a sexual assault survivor named Effie who draws attention to one of the most obvious things about the Vulture article, which was the tone. It was not the dispassionate tone of a journalist but of someone crafting a narrative about a villain.
What ruthless and vengeful person have I been reading about lately? Oh, yeah, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Repeatedly throughout the book, characters ask Heathcliff if he doesn't have any morsel of compassion in his soul and proves again and again through his words and actions that he has none. No guilt haunts him unless it's the literal ghost of Catherine. It's a reminder that Gothic fiction was in many ways a reaction against the Romantics, specifically the love the Romantics had of nature and for the "Byronic hero", the hero who casts aside all fidelity to any kind of moral system and pursues only his own pleasures. Frankenstein, by the way, operates both as a work of Romantic fiction and Gothic fiction in this way. Mary Shelley's portrait of the creature simultaneously sympathises with and condemns him.
But characters in Gothic fiction, in its full bloom, like Heathcliff, like Dorian Gray, like Dr. Jekyll, like Captain Ahab, like the killers in Edgar Allan Poe's stories, all show us the horror and disaster wrought by men who act solely in the name of they own selfish urges. Generally they're not bothered internally but externally, by supernatural forces. In one of the Epstein files, Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein talk about Trump losing sleep because of dirt the two of them have on him. On the contrary, I think Trump sleeps perfectly well. He's shown again and again that he doesn't particularly care if he's seen as moral. As the title of Kurosawa Akira's 1960 movie says, "The Bad Sleep Well (悪い奴ほどよく眠る)". That movie was based on Shakespeare's Hamlet and it's noteworthy that it's not the murderer who's haunted in that story but the protagonist, Prince Hamlet. Likewise, Richard III isn't haunted, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund aren't haunted. If you want to find a bad person, look for someone who seems utterly content with his or her moral position.
A beautiful woman is found dead in the hotel room of a famous double act and, fifteen years later, another woman tries to get to the truth behind the matter in 2005's Where the Truth Lies. Another Atom Egoyan film featured on Criterion this month, this one's much closer to what I would have expected from the director of Chloe and Exotica; a pulpy, slightly campy daydream dressed up as a thriller. It's a lot of fun.
Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth play Lanny and Vince, a double act very obviously modelled on Martin and Lewis. One morning, just before the two are scheduled to host a telethon, a dead woman is found in their bathtub. The autopsy is said to point to a drug overdose but, fifteen years later, a young reporter named Karen (Alison Lohman) gets to work ghostwriting an autobiography for Vince and starts to realise there's something fishy about the dead woman, or, more accurately, lobster-y. What do I mean by that? That would be a spoiler but, suffice to say, we see her with lobsters at one point.
Some critics said Lohman was miscast but I would say that's precisely where critics didn't understand the movie. Lohman is absolutely perfect, if you ask me, because she seems so wrong. Her elaborate, anachronistically '40s hairstyles never look natural on the ruthless, trashy teen from Bully. She seems like a kinky gal engaged in sexual role play. It may be fairer to say Kevin Bacon was miscast. Someone with a sense of comedic timing would have been better in the Jerry Lewis role. I've been watching The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel again lately and this movie almost seems set in the same universe in which the viewer has to strain their imagination to take the professional entertainers at the centre of the stories as geniuses despite nothing they say on stage being funny.
The film's mostly interior locations, shot in England though set in L.A., add to the sense of artificiality. I was interested in the murder mystery but mostly as an aphrodisiac, a pretext for the sexual tension and sex.
Where the Truth Lies lies on The Criterion Channel.
Yesterday I visited Himeji Castle with my friend and co-worker, Miss Kimura. Himeji Castle is the largest in Japan and most of its current structures date from the early 17th century.
The castle has appeared in a number of movies, including Kurosawa's Kagemusha and Ran and the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice.
I don't know the lady with the interesting coat.
The lane leading up to the castle was decorated with Japan's ubiquitous nude statues.
What saxophonist wouldn't want to be memorialised wearing only a flatcap while playing?
Miss Kimura pets some naked pigeon statues.
Here we are together with the castle's main keep in the background, photo courtesy of a passerby.
By gad, my feet are big. Those boots are actually a size too small for me, too.
There was a surprise snowstorm while we were there. It was intensely cold but very dramatic. After lunch at a terrific noodle shop recommended by Miss Kimura, who is a resident of Himeji, we visited the castle's adjoining garden.
The snow came down the hardest when we were inside a little tea house. It was very picturesque.
I've been listening to an audiobook of Emily Bronte's great 1847 novel Wuthering Heights lately, I suppose because of the Emerald Fennell movie coming out next week. Here's the trailer:
Fennell is best known for directing Saltburn which starred Barry Keoghan as an outsider charming his way into the world of rich people. Wuthering Heights is also a story about class and wealth disparity so it makes sense as a followup project. Unfortunately for Fennell, most of the discussion about the film so far consists of disapproval for Fennell's apparent and stated disinterest in the source material. "It's just a book," she said when asked about whether she felt pressure to stay faithful to it. When confronted about casting a white actor as a character that is clearly described as not white in the book, Fennell gave this evasive and vague response: "The thing is, everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so, you can only ever kind of make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it."
Paradoxically, she has also claimed to be deeply passionate about the book, calling it her "favourite book in the world." Maybe that's not saying much if her "just a book" quote is an indication of her feelings about books in general. It may be like naming a favourite mailbox or fire hydrant.
When the casting was first announced, I knew immediately people would complain about Jacob Elordi in the role of Heathcliff. I'm not in principle against changing the race of a character from source material to adaptation but I was surprised she would invite the headache. Wuthering Heights has been adapted to film many times and Heathcliff has usually been cast with a white actor, the most notable version being the William Wyler film with Laurence Olivier in the role.
Of course, in 1939, a movie depicting romance between people of different races would not likely have been funded by any major studio. Heathcliff's race is an important aspect of the novel so it's difficult to see how someone who claims to be passionate about Bronte's work would fail to retain this element. This line from Heathcliff in the book makes it quite explicit:
“But, Nelly, if I knocked him down twenty times, that wouldn’t make him less handsome or me more so. I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!”
Heathcliff is the only brown skinned person in the small Yorkshire community. The experience of being so isolated is plainly a prominent aspect in the formation of his personality. Every time I read the book, I marvel again at Bronte's ability to create a work of such psychological complexity, particularly considering that she finished writing it when she was only twenty-eight years old.
Fennell has made some other unfortunate choices. Margot Robbie is too old for the role of Cathy and there's an overall sense of a modern fashion photoshoot. The book's location, the harsh landscape and weather, is another crucial aspect to the story though Fennell's inability to connect with physical reality is more in step with the current culture that psychologically lives in an incorporeal digital space.
On the positive side, it does look pretty. Normally I'm all for an artist saying "Fuck everything" and pursuing an original vision. But, jeez, it's such a great book. Fennell may feel superior to it but I can't help suspecting she's not.
I've been back in a Tarantino mood over the past couple weeks. Is there any other director who has so successfully combined unfiltered artistic vision with mass appeal? I would say only Steven Spielberg is comparable among directors who've been working since 1980. His undeniable power to attract audiences has kept off the harpies of resentful press. That's how we all know he'll survive the stupid kerfuffle around his Paul Dano comments, and why spiteful people made those comments go viral in the first place. I watched 2012's Django Unchained again on Amazon Prime and 2007's Death Proof on The Criterion Channel.
If he'd never made any other movies, Django Unchained would have been enough to make Tarantino a keystone in the history of 21st century cinema. Its existence and continued popularity despite swimming gleefully against the grain of Hollywood politics make it a rare reflection of true American cultural morality.
Death Proof, meanwhile, is almost the opposite of Django Unchained. With Django Unchained, Tarantino tapped a rich vein in the cultural zeitgeist while Death Proof was too much of a cinephile's daydream to be successful at the box office. It remains Tarantino's only true box office disappointment. All of Tarantino's movies are post-modern in one way or another--that is, to truly appreciate his intentions, one must have some outside knowledge of cinema history. Most of his movies, though, can be appreciated by audiences who have no such knowledge. Most of the audiences who cheered in the theatre for Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained had little to no knowledge of Spaghetti Westerns and didn't understand that Tarantino was making a statement by deliberately importing aspects of a dead sub-genre to deal with a culturally sensitive topic. They didn't understand the genius of his alchemical experiment but they didn't have to; all they knew was that it was cool to see a former slave get back at the system and people that had wronged him and that was more than enough. Death Proof kind of requires some familiarity with '70s exploitation films. Appreciation for such films, or faux-appreciation for them, has grown in the years since Death Proof's initial release but at the time a lot of people really didn't get it. I remember being in a movie theatre lobby and hearing some people deriding the poster of Rose McGowan with the machine gun leg from Death Proof's companion film, Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror (the two were originally released as a double feature). They didn't understand how the plain absurdity was a feature, not a bug. Though there's a difference between Tarantino's love of '70s movie cheese and Rodriguez's. Rodriguez's vision is much more ironic than Tarantino's.
One of the most interesting aspects of Death Proof for me is the intentionally bad editing. I love how the conversation between the girls in the car in the film's first dialogue scene is edited. There are little stutters breaking up lines and then some abrupt cuts right in the middle of lines of dialogue.
Anyone watching without knowing that Tarantino is deliberately imitating the ragged prints of cheap exploitation films from the '70s he adored since childhood might just assume Death Proof is poorly edited. That in itself might sound absurd to people with dyed-in-the-wool perceptions on American media, who doubtless feel like they've possessed familiarity with the concept of cheap old movies since birth. But imagine you grew up in a different culture with a different media landscape and randomly clicked on Death Proof on some streaming service.
The lucky few will view Death Proof with the same innocence that inspired Tarantino to love the rough editing in those old exploitation films. Those of us in the know, meanwhile, are invited to stretch our imaginations and try to see what Tarantino saw. The eeriness of the disjointed editing, the sense of the characters carrying on with their lives beyond the limits of the filmmaker's intentional manipulations.
Death Proof, despite its amazing car chase in the final act, also suffers from a deliberate lack of momentum. A lot of the fun of the movie is just hanging out with these beautiful ladies in dive bars.
Criterion Channel currently has Death Proof on a playlist of movies showcasing exemplary work from stunt performers.
Finally, some good news out of Minnesota. There's big news in the world of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, from just this past week but also stuff from last month I wasn't aware of. Apparently series creator Joel Hodgson has sold the series to Shout Factory's parent company. This, in turn, has led to MST3k's second most famous host, Mike Nelson, starting production on a new series of four episodes for his successful website, Rifftrax.
That's really a key point here. Rifftrax has kept itself afloat for twenty years. Meanwhile, Hodgson's second stewardship of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 was a period of steady decline marked by unfortunate creative choices, like the decision to hire a new cast and crew when the audience was clearly primed for familiar favourites to return, and overspending.
Hodgson originally launched Mystery Science Theater 3000, also called MST3k, in 1988 as an extremely low budget comedy series in which he and other comedians operating robot puppets "riffed" on bad movies. Mike Nelson came aboard as a writer a couple years later and became head writer before replacing Hodgson as host in the show's fifth season. Here's one of the best Joel episodes on which Mike served as a writer:
The show was finally cancelled in 1999, after which cast and crew moved on to other projects, frequently working together. Hodgson relaunched the series after reacquiring intellectual property rights and raised funding through the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. But in the years in between the series cancellation in 1999 and Hodgson's relaunch on Netflix in 2017, Hodgson had made another movie-riff series called Cinematic Titanic that did enjoy the same level of success as Nelson's Rifftrax.
As I said, the rebooted MST3k went through a steady decline. After Netflix was unwilling to host a third season, Hodgson launched his own streaming site that proved cost prohibitive. It seems things finally fell apart entirely in 2023 when the show's kickstarter reached only 68% of its $4 million dollar goal to produce six episodes.
By contrast, Mike Nelson's kickstarting effort this month set a goal of merely $20,000 for four episodes. As I write this, the kickstarter has vastly exceeded its goal, receiving over 1.5 million dollars in donations after just a few days. This seems to fit a pattern in Nelson's career which cannot help being compared to Hodgson's. Nelson always seemed to have a better sense of how to keep things financially viable. Why did Hodgson need so much money when he himself recognised that a fundamental part of the show's appeal was its low budget aesthetic? He hired expensive talent and got celebrity cameos, the puppets were upgraded to more complicated models. He also changed the name of the character "Gypsy" to "GCP" under the erroneous belief that the word "gypsy" was widely seen as an ethnic slur, taking advice from a new consultant. Along with the hiring of new cast and crew, I suspect a lot of the problems in Hodgson's new version were the result of him taking advice from people he really oughtn't have listened to.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to Mike Nelson's new iteration, particularly since Kevin Murphy is finally returning to the role of Tom Servo. For me, Murphy is the definitive Tom Servo and it was his conspicuous absence from the role that was one of the biggest flaws in Hodgson's new era. Murphy, along with Bill Corbett, has been a consistent collaborator on Rifftrax for which he recorded this beloved classic, a parody love theme for Jaws:
Last night's season finale of Fallout was really unsatisfying. It was written by Karey Dornetto, who wrote one of the better episodes of season one, and I suspect that the problems aren't her fault but rather the fault of producers who didn't want anything truly substantial to occur in the finale.
The fight with the Deathclaws was kind of cool though I wish they hadn't made them seem so easily dispatched. The scenes with Hank and Lucy seemed to end with something momentous but it's the kind of thing that could be easily reversed at any time. Meanwhile, Cooper has a "Our princess is in another castle" moment when he finds the cryogenic pods for his wife and daughter. I really don't much like this quest as his sole driving motive. I was also completely uninterested in the flashback of him getting arrested. That's no kind of cliffhanger when we've already seen him at the beginning of episode one hanging out with his daughter at a birthday party just before the bombs fall.
And just where the hell is Ron Perlman? They introduced his character for no purpose it seems.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Neil Gaiman hadn't been posting on social media for a year since allegations of sexual misconduct were made against him. Now he has posted, a couple days ago, on his blog. Among other things, he commends the efforts of a Substack journalist called TechnoPathology, who has been conducting an investigation of the coordinated smear campaign conducted against Gaiman. When I read the original articles that came out in 2024, I thought the case against Gaiman was thin at best but just in the introduction to his series TechnoPathology finds even more points that I was unaware of, such as clear undisclosed conflicts of interest, such as the fact that one of the accusers happened to be the best friend of the woman in charge of the original Tortoise Media article, or the fact that the voices most vociferously aiming condemnations at Gaiman were consistently of the same ultra-rightwing political and ideological persuasions.
Again, it's absurd the left has convinced itself that it shouldn't call something a conspiracy under any circumstances. Or was it anyone on the left who got that virus rolling?
TechnoPathology says he didn't originally create his Substack with the intention of exonerating Gaiman but rather with the aim of analysing how information is currently being manipulated, and how people consuming that information are in turn manipulated, in the news media currently. The "social internet" as I saw John Green refer to it in an unrelated video I watched this morning but which also touches on the tangle of cognitive biases we currently find ourselves in:
But while I'm unashamed of using the word "conspiracy" and I'm glad there's at least one person making an effort to expose the one maligning Gaiman, I still find myself most disturbed by the people whom I knew were no part of the conspiracy but who nonetheless turned on him at the first mention of allegations. Like Pavlov's bell. Can I ask if these psychological triggers for compliance were planned or incidental?
Happy Groundhog Day, everyone. Looks like we'll have six more weeks of winter, or the U.S. will. I'm not sure if the groundhog magic applies globally. Of course, here in Japan, February 2nd was yesterday. To-day is February 3rd, the Japanese holiday of Setsubun, when people throw soy beans at oni.
I actually watched 1993's Groundhog Day last night. Somehow it felt particularly good to revisit this year. Maybe because the Year of the Horse is so far living up to its reputation as a year of change and it's nice to rewatch a movie about things staying the same every day.
At one point, I looked at Andie McDowell and vividly saw her daughter, Margaret Qualley. I was tempted to wonder if Qualley is a more successful actress than her mother. I realised it might seem so to me because I watch more avant-garde movies, the kind Qualley tends to be in, while her mother was typically in mainstream films I'd never even consider watching. But she was a good actress. What am I saying? She's not dead. Apparently she's been on several Netflix series over the past few years, including one with her daughter called Maid, which, according to Wikipedia, was Netflix's fourth most watched show of 2021. I never even heard of it. There's that audience fractioning people talk about.
One sign you might be living in a communist country is that you're under constant surveillance. This is the problem faced by a married couple in 1969's The Ear (Ucho). Haunting, expressionistic cinematography captures two terrific performances as we watch the two characters whose fraught private lives are invaded by unseen men.
Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohaty) is a prominent official in his country's communist party. He and his gregarious, hard drinking wife, Anna (Jirina Bohdalova), attend a lavish party where Ludvik learns that a colleague has fallen out of good standing with the regime and has therefore fallen out of the world. Whatever mysterious offense this colleague was deemed guilty of is never clear but other men in his circle are also being disappeared, naturally causing Ludvik to worry. As he and his wife head home, a series of little clues tell them something's not quite right. Their chauffeur has been swapped out for a man they've never seen before. At the gate of their home, they find neither of them is in possession of the house keys. Ludvik climbs the fence before Anna discovers the gate is unlocked. The power is out in their home even though it's not out in their neighbour's house.
Ludvik starts flushing documents down the toilet in a panic while Anna starts drinking straight from a bottle of vodka, laughing and griping. They both feel relatively sure there's no listening device in their bathroom, because that's what they've been told. Of course, it would be useful for those conducting the surveillance to give them the impression that there is a room which is not being surveilled.
The Ear was banned in its home country of Czechoslovakia until 1990 when the Soviet Union had lost control of the country. It's now available on The Criterion Channel.
This new Bruce Springsteen song has nearly four million views as I write this. For the first audio only upload, there are over 5 million views. These videos were released two days ago. It's the first new release from Springstreen to exceed a million views since 2023. Fascinatingly, most of the comments I see on the "Streets of Minneapolis" videos seem to be from Germany, Portugal, Poland, and even South Korea, alongside some statements from Minnesotans expressing gratitude for Springsteen's eloquent expression of solidarity. I think this song will be remembered long after 2026.
In a crisis situation, people often talk about how things seem unreal, even people who are direct witnesses. Some comments I've seen since the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have wondered why there hasn't been a more profound reaction to this violation of law, community, and social order in the United States. This song is an example of one way art functions. To say art is a mirror often makes it seem like art is insubstantial or meaningless but without a mirror you can't see yourself. Art is the mirror. Undeniably real things sometimes don't seem to take form until the human race finds some way to process it, to find and communicate the meaning to itself.
I see a lot of people reposting the line from George Orwell's 1984, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” It's an apt quote for how blatantly Trump, Noem, and their cohorts have lied. Unfortunately, it's too often also applicable to leftwing media. The two sides of the political spectrum in America have seldom been more at odds and yet, if you take a view from outside the bubble, they've also seldom been more alike. If you think back to the bizarre excuses and gratuitous exultation in the wake of Charlie Kirk's shooting, it's easy to see the left is just as capable of reckless rancor. Overall, it's clear a new kind of rhetorical methodology has come to dominate the landscape. It's brought us to this point where laws are increasingly unable to serve their function as abstract processes, a civilised substitute for the physical violence of war. There's too much bad faith. Springsteen's known for being something of a partisan but he's a genuine artist and his song can't help but evoke the plain reality.
Two innocent people were murdered by people endowed with authority.
It's not just murder, it's a crack in the social order. There are only two possible outcomes now; civil war, or the mechanisms of American justice rally to hold the guilty accountable. The latter seems almost impossible at this point.
I was a little hesitant about Alex Pretti at first because I didn't see any of the video of his murder for a few days. I saw he was a guy in military colours with a black cap low over his face and I heard he was carrying a gun. I'm not disputing his right to carry a gun but he certainly seemed like a guy who was there to start shit while there was nothing ambiguous about Renee Good's murder. But then I saw one of the many videos of Pretti being shoved to the ground, being disarmed, and then just being executed. As I saw Sam Harris say in a video, it doesn't matter if Alex Pretti were the worst person in the world. He was restrained and there was no reason for ICE to use deadly force. Even Anakin Skywalker had a better excuse for executing Count Dooku.
Yeah, I'll use a Star Wars reference. Again, art is what helps us see reality. That's one way we can tell good art from bad art.
I guess that partly explains why one man dressed as Batman to protest ICE. I guess we've reached a turning point when political speakers are more likely to dress as Batman than as the Joker.
X Sonnet 1979
Where shuffling feet attract their ragged shoes
The walkers want a rubber stop to clear
The fragile floor, inviting scratching clues
To win a prize beside the puzzled bear
Who turned his head in time for pastry shows
Designed to teach a penguin how to talk
Discerning birds who wear tuxedo bows
And stamp the brutal ice to hotly walk
Away from cold, ahead to ifrit town
Partaking of the fire beer and gin
Which renders peace beneath pierrot's crown
Of lollipops and someone's stupid grin.
We play it all beneath the common house
And petty brains prostrate before the mouse.
Catherine O'Hara has passed away at the age of 71. She's best known for playing mothers, particularly in Home Alone and Beetlejuice. She was in the sequel to Beetlejuice just two years ago and she seemed so vital, her comedic timing and line delivery just as snappy and quick as they were back in the '80s. She was also recently on The Last of Us and Schitt's Creek, neither of which I've seen, but she was clearly very active still. So far no details seem to have been released about the sudden illness that took her life.
She was one of the many famous comedic performers of the '70s and '80s who came up through SCTV, possessing that rare combination of beauty and great comedic instinct. A lot of videos are being uploaded on YouTube of her and I was fascinated by this David Letterman interview from 1983:
A guileless, innocent young Irishwoman is taken in by a kindly English serial killer in 1999's Felicia's Journey. Directed by Armenian-Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, it's based on a book by Irish author William Trevor and the concept seems like a metaphor for the history of Irish/English relations. I don't know if that was intended but it's in any case an oddly sweet, understated Hitchcockian delight.
Bob Hoskins plays Joseph Hilditch, the manager of an expensive catering company. It's not hard to see some economic commentary when the portly Hopkins is shown loading up his shopping cart with groceries before going home to make a weird, elaborate plate of pork ribs in his enormous kitchen just for practice. Meanwhile, the young Irishwoman, Felicia (Elaine Cassidy), is wandering the streets looking for the young man who ran out on her. She's come to Birmingham looking for him, even though the only information he gave he was that he works at a lawnmower factory. I doubt any viewer will have any illusion that such a factory exists which makes it all the more tragic that Felicia's faith never wavers until the proof is incontrovertible. Elaine Cassidy's performance is always credible, though, and you always worry for her, especially when Hilditch takes an interest in her as we're gradually let into some of the more disturbing aspects of his personality, such as his collection of secretly recorded videos of previous girls he's cared for.
I think the Hitchcock influence is quite intentional. I was often reminded of Hitchcock's Suspicion and one shot very nearly replicates the one of Cary Grant carrying a sinister glass of milk up the stairs at the end of Suspicion. Hoskins gives a terrific performance, of course. I'm so used to him playing tough guys. Here, he affects a slow, perpetually smiling, saccharine but somehow also genuinely warm demeanour, just right to set Felicia's worried heart at ease. But he also gives nuance to a character that might otherwise have been simplistic.
The two characters are both archetypes and mostly the story succeeds from Egoyan's pacing and compositional juxtapositions. But there are some curious, haunting depths to Hilditch's character.
Felicia's Journey is available on The Criterion Channel as part of an Atom Egoyan playlist.
Last night's new episode of Fallout was another mixed bag though I'm starting to think the negative qualities of this season are less to do with the varying abilities of the various writers but more to do with a general lack of desire or ability to give firm narrative direction to the season overall.
I liked the stuff between Lucy and her father. I liked how things were complicated by the realisation that he really was a good father. This is added to the fact that Lucy really doesn't have a good argument as to why he shouldn't deploy his brainwashing tactics to pacify the violent gangs of the wasteland. But this also means when Lucy betrays him the lack of rationale for her betrayal is conspicuous. If this were a good Star Trek episode, this would be the point where Kirk or Picard makes a great speech about free will. Fallout defaults to "Just 'cause."
Meanwhile, despite Ron Perlman being introduced as a super mutant in the previous episode, he's totally absent from this one without any explanation. It feels really odd. It's like they made this episode before the previous episode and didn't know Perlman was going to be in it. This episode also has to deal with the problem of the Deathclaws on the Vegas strip and here it's heavily implied that the monsters are somehow confined to the strip. There's no explanation or comment on how or why. It did lead to a good action sequence, though.
Although I continue to dislike the flashbacks for Cooper, I did like the backstory established for Stephanie as a Canadian who was hardened by the annexation of her country by the United States. This is a a detail from the first game and I liked that they brought it back. Sadly, it's also no longer so far fetched. I also like how it gives some complexity to Stephanie's character.
A man and his wife carefully and prudently map out getting away from all of life's responsibilities in 1985's Lost in America, a film co-written by, directed by, and starring Albert Brooks. At times, this comedy is more of a fascinating thought experiment than it is a funny movie but it's thoroughly enjoyable.
David (Brooks) is so sure he's about to be promoted to senior vice president of the ad agency where he works that he's already sold his house and is in the process of buying another one. When it turns out his boss wants him to move to New York from Los Angeles instead, with no change to his salary, he has a meltdown in the office. He visits his wife, Linda (Julie Hagerty) at her workplace and she's bewildered by this turn of events. Shortly thereafter, the two go over their finances and determine that they can liquidate their assets and live unemployed in a mobile home for the rest of their lives.
Back in the '80s, when the American economy wasn't the nightmare it is to-day, this probably seemed like a plausible daydream to a lot of people. Albert Brooks decided to see what it would be like if one actually did it and he thought through all the angles. When that wasn't quite exciting enough, he has Hagerty's character lose almost all their money gambling in Las Vegas.
David wants to have a life like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, a movie he refers to repeatedly, but, for people like him, it turns out to be an existence of constant anxiety. It's some really impressive work from Albert Brooks whose performance somehow manages to have the energy of a young Jack Lemmon even while he's in charge of directing duties. Julie Hagerty is a perfect foil as an unflappable but invariably supportive ditz.
Lost in America is available on The Criterion Channel.
What if this life is just a computer simulation? It's not a new idea, sure, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1973 series, World on a Wire, is based on a 1964 novel. Fassbinder does a lot of interesting things to conjure the sense of a simulated world with minimal special effects and I like the ambiguous sense of panic undergirding the whole story.
Klaus Lowitsch plays Fred Stiller, the new technical director at an institute housing a supercomputer that hosts a complex simulation. But the truth of the matter isn't even that simple.
The production design features a lot of reflective surfaces and a pretty consistent blue/white/orange colour scheme. There are suggestions of artificiality in the dialogue and the people whom Stiller interacts with. Why do beautiful blondes keep turning up? Why is Stiller consistently compared to James Bond?
It's understandable why people would want to escape an entirely simulated existence but mainly on an instinctive level. Would the real world really be better? How could they know? At least life in the real world wouldn't just be someone else's interpretation of reality of how reality ought to be. That's the real suffocating part of it, I'd think. No-one can come to grips with reality when everything is fake. The film may be less a commentary on technology and more of a satire of a country dominated by propaganda. It's one of those things that makes me think science fiction may be the only genre capable of honestly analysing human society.
World on a Wire is available on The Criterion Channel.
A lone bellhop finds himself spending News Year's Eve handling four strange predicaments in 1995's Four Rooms. An anthology film consisting of four stories directed by Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino, it features the bellhop played by Tim Roth in each one. Unsurprisingly, Tarantino's is by far the best segment but the other three all hold points of interest.
In the first, a coven of witches checks into the hotel and Ted the bellhop (Tim Roth) finds himself seduced by a topless Ione Skye, the lead from Cameron Crowe's Say Anything. She looks fantastic in this movie as one of the witches. The other four instruct Ted to "make her smile" and there's an amusing moment when he tries to make funny gestures before finally getting that they mean he should have sex with her.
One of the witches is played by Madonna. It's a very small role yet somehow she won a Razzie for Worst Actress. Like Lady Gaga's nomination for Machete Kills, this feels like misogyny, or at least resentment directed at Madonna. She's hardly in the movie long enough to establish herself as a bad actress, let alone the worst actress.
The second story is the least interesting. Ted accidentally enters a room where a man (David Proval) is holding his wife, Angela (Jennifer Beals), hostage, gagged and tied up. Ted has to think fast to save himself and there are some funny moments.
The third story, from Robert Rodriguez, has Antonio Banderas and Tamlyn Tomita as a wealthy couple who leave their two children (Lana McKissack and Danny Verduzco) alone in the room, paying Ted to look in on them routinely and answer their calls. The kids are both talented and they have an amusing running gag about smelly feet that turns out to be something more sinister.
Finally, the Tarantino segment has Ted going up to the penthouse where Tarantino himself plays a big shot called Chester Rush. He's having a party with Angela (Jennifer Beals, the same character from the second segment), a guy named Norman (Paul Calderon), and an uncredited Bruce Willis playing a guy named Leo. Pacing, dialogue, and composition quickly show how Tarantino's filmmaking instincts set him apart from the average director. The plot hinges on an obscure Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode in which Peter Lorre and Steve McQueen make a bet with one of them staking his finger on a chopping block, the other his new car. The whole segment builds up to a moment when Ted might actually have to cut off Norman's finger. Tarantino builds it up beautifully with long tracking shots punctuated precisely with quick cuts at the appropriate moments.
How many martial artist ballerinas have there been in fiction? There was Summer Glau's character on Joss Whedon's Firefly. There was a South Korean movie on Netflix a couple years ago. My own webcomic, Boschen and Nesuko, features a ballerina martial artist. Now there's one in the John Wick universe played by Ana de Armas in 2025's Ballerina. Much like the John Wick movies, it's almost a feature length action sequence on conspicuously stylised soundstages. It's fine, as far as that goes, but somehow de Armas' character, Eve, doesn't connect as well as Wick. Maybe it's the lack of profound weariness that Wick seems burdened with throughout the series.
This movie was directed by Len Wiseman of the Underworld series and it certainly seems a perfect fit. Returning John Wick cast members include Ian McShane, Lance Reddick, Anjelica Huston, and Keanu Reeves himself, and they're all good. Equally so are new characters played by Gabriel Byrne and Norman Reedus. But, sadly, Eve sucks the air out of the film. Which is odd because I really like Ana de Armas. I think the trouble is that the film is, like the John Wick movies, really asexual and sex appeal is one of de Armas' best assets. She was so memorable in No Time to Die because of it. She can't draw on that asset here and nothing else is introduced to compensate, not the peculiar weariness of Wick nor anything else. There's no hook. Maybe her being a ballerina was supposed to be it but nothing really comes of that. She's a ballerina but in her action scenes she's usually wearing some nondescript dark street clothes and all of her fighting moves just look like the usual kicking and karate chops. Maybe it would be silly to have her fighting in a tutu. But they needed to go somewhere with the concept. Maybe bladed ballet slippers? Maybe they didn't feel like they needed to try so hard when they already had the brand recognition.
Ballerina is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.
X Sonnet 1976
In avocado news, the things are green.
The skin is dark and bumpy, be afraid.
'Tis not a yam nor yet a giant bean.
Its pit a ball of life that God hath made.
For God creates the greener things at hand.
From frogs to Hulk, they owe their lives to Him.
The crowning grace enlarged a jolly man.
He sells his peas without the stain of sin.
For what is green if not a second hue?
'Tis chlorophyll imbues the tree with blood.
The light reveals a yellow mixed with blue.
Its ostrich roots invade the safety mud.
So wander forth and think of spring to-day.
That's all a goblin has betimes to say.
The full list of Oscar nominees was released earlier this week. Of the movies I've seen, I'm not especially fond of any. I suspect One Battle After Another will sweep the awards. If nothing else, Teyana Taylor is a shoe-in for Best Supporting Actress. And she was good in the movie, the stuff between her and Sean Penn was the best part of the movie. And I'm glad the Oscar category is still called "actress" instead of "female actor" like the Golden Globes. Where are the people who used to be angry about "female" being somehow a sexist term? I suppose in a couple years it'll be "woman or girl actor". Whatever sounds the most inelegant, the most like a crude AI translation.
The Oscars, as usual, are all about politics, both Hollywood's internal politics and U.S. politics at large. One Battle After Another arrived just as ICE was solidifying its reputation as America's less competent version of the Gestapo. Everyone's gonna feel good sticking it to them, even if it is ultimately an impotent gesture. Maybe this year someone will make a really good movie about how fucked up the ICE situation is. At any rate, I'm sure more than a few people will try.
I'm not surprised Kokuho wasn't nominated for Best International Picture, though it did pick up a nomination for Best Makeup. I think the film was in part crafted specifically with the intention of getting international awards attention but the makers of the film lacked an understanding of the politics of American and European cinema. Japan previously won Best International Feature Film with 2021's Drive My Car, which fit the mould much better with its story from the iconoclast Murakami Haruki and featuring an ambiguous relationship between a man and a younger woman. At its heart, Kokuho is a very conservative film.
I think Frankenstein has a solid chance at winning Costume Design and Production Design but I don't think its screenplay has received more than polite affection.
I'm getting into the final episodes of season two in my latest Twin Peaks re-watch. Gordon Cole, the FBI chief played by David Lynch, has returned which I think also signalled a return of David Lynch's creative presence, though he wouldn't direct another episode until the final episode of the season.
This also follows from the death of Josie Packard, a mysterious character whom one assumes has importance to the series as a whole because she's the first character we see in the first interior shot after the opening credits in the first episode. She's gazing into a mirror wistfully. The common interpretation of this scene is that it's an introduction of the show's preoccupation with doubles, with people who have split personalities, multiple personae. After Josie's death, Harry, who was in love with Josie, has a conversation with Catherine in an episode co-written by series co-creator Mark Frost. I feel like Catherine's analysis of Josie may be close to the concept Lynch and Frost discussed for her when originally creating her character.
HARRY: What made her do the things she did? What was she after?
CATHERINE: I've been asking myself a lot of the same things.
HARRY: Catherine. I need to understand.
CATHERINE: Well, I think that, early in her life, she must have learned a lesson that she could survive by being what other people wanted to see, by showing them that. Whatever was left of her private self she may never have shown to anyone.
HARRY: So all the stories, the lies were--
CATHERINE: Well, who knows. They may not have seemed untrue to her. What she needed to believe was always shifting to suit the moment. In spite of all the things she tried to do to me and my family I find it curiously hard to hate her for it.
That certainly fits with the character we saw throughout the series and with actress Joan Chen's performance. I feel like every time she asked Lynch or Frost for her motivation for any given scene she must have been told, "She's afraid." Almost every scene of dialogue she had after answering questions about Laura was her pleading with someone. It makes sense that the demoniac character of Bob appears to drag her into the underworld. Yet at the same time her compulsive duplicity gives her a strange form of innocence, maybe the innocence of a shark who doesn't stop to wonder why she can't stop swimming.
Last night's new Fallout was pretty good, I'm relieved to say. It would've been a lot better if they hadn't introduced Deathclaws rampaging throughout the town a few episodes earlier because now it doesn't make sense that they're totally absent from the streets of New Vegas. The episode also featured some of the pointless flashbacks I don't like. But the stuff that was good was really good.
We find Cooper (Walton Goggins) still impaled on a pole in the street that Lucy (Ella Purnell) had shoved him onto with a powerfist. I liked how people just walk by him indifferently. Who would want to get involved with the noseless ghoul struggling for his life and sanity?
Meanwhile, Lucy has a moral quandary when she wakes up in her father's (Kyle MacLachlan) home base. He gives her a pretty vivid demonstration of why lobotomising everyone is a viable path to peace.
And, of course, I was really pleased to see Ron Perlman finally show up. Perlman was a glaring absence from season one. He had been in every major Fallout game since the first one came out in 1997, typically providing the narration for the introduction and epilogue. Here's the one from the first game:
It's kind of a shame the show has changed the nuclear war from being one between different countries over resources to some kind of convoluted internal U.S. conspiracy. Trump unabashedly going after Venezuela and Greenland for their resources is both apocalyptic and cartoonish, the kind of juxtaposition of enthusiastic stupidity and horror the distinguished the tone of much of the Fallout games. However, the plot in the Vault in last night's episode kind of went back to that concept as the denizens foolishly squander their remaining water supply on an inbred support stack club. It hit just the right point between absurd and undeniably plausible.
I was going through my iPod a few days ago and came across Where's Neil When You Need Him?, a 2006 album featuring various singers and groups performing songs in tribute to the works of Neil Gaiman. Nowadays, perhaps the answer would be, "Why would we need him?" At least, certainly that would be the answer on Reddit forums formerly dedicated to him. But where is he? This month marks one year since the last time Gaiman released any public statement aside from court filings. His once prolific social media presence is gone.
Am I the only one who finds this creepy? Leaving aside for a moment whether you consider the allegations against him to be true (they seem flimsy at best to me), isn't it weird that a guy one day had a highly vocal and passionate fanbase and over the course of a very short time was abandoned by them? It seems like a lot has been devoted to talking about how one should be wary of the sense of personal connexion to a famous creator. Maybe the famous creator ought to be just as wary of a fanbase. Maybe it's just another indicator of an increasingly shallow culture. I'm not sure.
I saw people who once expressed their deep, emotional connexion to Neil's work just rhetorically wipe their hands of him. It's like in The Court Jester when the character is hypnotised to change personalities at the snap of a finger. Or the clones in Revenge of the Sith turning against the Jedi when triggered by "Order 66". Could this be psy-ops? Mass brain washing? Surely that's crazy. But is there an angle from which this doesn't look crazy?
I used to love watching Ang Lee movies constantly. Around 25 years ago, if I wanted a guaranteed good time, I'd pop in Eat Drink Man Woman or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. So it's weird that it's been so long since I watched one. The Criterion Channel has had 1997's The Ice Storm online for a couple months and I started watching it again and was amazed how I kind of forgot about this movie that I used to watch repeatedly. It's a Thanksgiving movie and I never even think of it when Thanksgiving rolls around. It's weird.
The last Ang Lee movie I really got excited for was Lust, Caution, which was a decent movie and one I ought to watch again since I've been reading about that period in Japanese history, it would be nice to get the Chinese perspective as well on Japan's occupation of Manchuria. But after Lust, Caution, Life of Pi was just okay and then I didn't even feel interested in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and Gemini Man. I have no idea why.
I'd forgotten how funny The Ice Storm is. Almost every scene concludes with an excellent punchline of some kind, which is strange because when one thinks of it, whether one has seen it or not, one tends to think of it as a grim family tragedy, which it is as well. But it's also really funny. My favourite character is Sigourney Weaver's character, Janey. Of all the confused and conflicted characters, she knows exactly what she wants and has little patience for all these crazy people. She's having an affair with Kevin Kline's character and tells him bluntly she already has a husband and doesn't want another one when he starts trying to chat with her after sex.
I love her reaction in this scene when he tries to talk about his wife suspecting their affair. Her facial expression clearly says, "Why are you even talking?"
Janey's all physical and is impatient she has to put up with this world of abstract thought and morals. My favourite part is when she catches Christina Ricci's fourteen year old character exposing herself to her son. So she pulls her aside and babbles about how her body's a temple and then goes on to a vague story about kids in ancient tribes being sent off into the woods to "learn a thing or two."
This ensemble movie kind of sits at a junction of Hollywood history. It has these two '80s stars, Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline, and then a bunch of up-and-comers--Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood, and Katey Holmes. And they're all good in it.
The Ice Storm is available on The Criterion Channel.
Here's an artefact for you. 2013's Machete Kill, a movie starring Mexican Americans and future Trump supporters that vigorously advocates for illegal Mexican immigrants to the U.S. Robert Rodriguez directed this sequel to his 2010 film Machete as more of an exploitation parody than its more sincere predecessor. It's pretty funny, and it's a lot more enjoyable than its 29% Rotten Tomatoes score suggests.
The divergence in critical reception between the first and second film is likely explained by the presence of Mel Gibson in the second as the villain. The presence of liberal darling Lady Gaga in a minor role was not enough counterbalance. She appears in only a few scenes but still earned a Golden Raspberry nomination, which is hard not to see as politically or misogynistically motivated, considering how well she's distinguished herself as an actress in the years since. I call her a liberal darling but, as a practicing Catholic, I suspect Gaga has more than a few conservative ideals.
Once again, the film stars Danny Trejo as the title character, the badass freedom fighter Machete. The first Machete from 2010 was the first time I ever heard of ICE. The sequel finds Machete working with Jessica Alba as a rogue ICE agent and we join the two ambushing a bunch of military, who ironically look more like ICE to-day. This movie was made three years before Trump was first elected to office and it's almost difficult to imagine how different life was. The film features Charlie Sheen (credited by his birth name, "Carlos Estevez") as a president who answers the phone when he's in bed with three women. This was back when people liked to fantasise about the president being a rule breaking wild man. To borrow a Morrissey lyric, "That joke isn't funny anymore, it's too close to home and too near the bone."
A recurrent line in the film is "Justice and the law aren't always the same thing." In the movie, this justifies Machete doing all kinds of crazy things to get a cartel boss with his heart wired to a nuclear weapon across the Mexican border but it has the clear real world implication for illegal Mexican immigrants. But some might use the phrase to justify the ICE officer who shot a woman in the face. Eerily, Machete Kills features a few instances of women being shot in the face, including Jessica Alba in that opening scene.
But I said this movie was funny, didn't I? Just like the fake trailer from Grindhouse that served as impetus for these films, the concept of every scene seems to be Rodriguez trying to find something to do that's crazier than you'd expect. The first film had a memorable scene with Machete using a man's entrails, this one has Machete throw an adversary's intestines into helicopter blades. Sofia Vergara heads a brothel and brandishes a bra with gatling gun nipples, although there's no nudity in this film, fitting more of the exploitation parody tone than a straightforward exploitation film. One scene in which Trejo has sex with Amber Heard features a caption telling viewers to put on their 3D glasses just as she's taking off her dress and the screen transforms into meaningless, distorted colours.
This was a couple years before Heard married Johnny Depp and it's certainly not hard to see what he saw in her. The film also has Elon Musk in a cameo, a man whom Heard dated after she broke up with Depp, though they don't share a scene.
There are a lot of big names in this film. Also present are Walton Goggins, Cuba Gooding Jr., Michelle Rodriguez, and Antonio Banderas.
Machete Kills is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.
Milkfed is a Japanese brand, despite the fact that they seem to exclusively feature Caucasian models in their advertisements (a common thing in Japan). At first I thought its name was a reflection of Japan's preoccupation with milk but to-day I learned the brand was launched in the mid-90s by none other than Sofia Coppola.
"What do you mean, 'Japan's preoccupation with milk'?" you may ask.
This is one of the enduring mysteries of Japan for me. Before I came here, I figured living in Japan would be really convenient for me as someone who doesn't drink milk. I'd heard most people in eastern Asia were lactose intolerant. Maybe Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans will remember the line from season seven when the Chinese girl thought Giles was trying to kill her by feeding her ice cream. That would be an awfully inefficient method of murder, wouldn't it?
Anyway, I got here and found that not only did people drink milk but the kids at school had to drink milk and all the teachers apparently drank it too, with the school lunch. I've never been able to get a satisfying answer as to "why". One woman I asked a couple years ago gave me the same answer you'll get if you google it, which is that it was heavily promoted after World War II as a source of nutrition for a malnourished populace and retained a reputation as an exceptionally healthy beverage ever since. I didn't feel like this was enough of an explanation for people to continue drinking it despite the bloating and gas it must cause. I suspect the schools, as government institutions, enforce milk drinking because an industry was built up around it in the mid 20th century and it needs money to survive. And consumers aren't voluntarily buying it in sufficient quantities.
I didn't actually know if I was lactose intolerant, just that at some point milk and many milk products started making me gassy and, in many cases, gave me diarrhea. My mother thought I actually had irritable bowel syndrome and, it's true, other things also set me off. So when I first came to Japan, I decided to really test myself and drank the milk with the school lunch. Mostly, I was fine but there were times when I had to run for the restroom because I would defecate uncontrollably after consuming milk. Obviously this was inconvenient when there were two classes scheduled after lunchtime. I also tend to participate in club activities after school and on one occasion I was with an English club I was very fond of and they were about to present me with a Christmas present when I realised I had to make an urgent trip to the restroom. "Really, now?" said the Japanese teacher. I had to run down all three storeys to the teachers' restroom. The wonderful students kindly waited for me.
After a couple more inconvenient and embarrassing incidents, I realised I had to stop drinking milk. At first I quietly put the little carton of milk back into the box at lunchtime. Someone from the lunch staff would ask "Who didn't drink their milk?" I started telling them that I couldn't drink it anymore. I didn't expect it to amount to much but I was astonished to find it was treated as a very serious issue. People who'd previously been friendly to me became hostile. One vice principal remarked that I was clearly not a real teacher, a favourite bullying tactic among a lot of the staff I've worked with. Some people who liked me would occasionally visibly choose not to drink their milk in solidarity, as mirroring behaviour is a common form of camaraderie in Japanese culture. In the past year, there hasn't been much fuss about my abstaining from milk drinking but recently someone had been quietly putting milk on my lunch tray. I didn't pay it much mind and just took it off my tray. The lady on the lunch staff asked me if I was unable to drink milk, to which I said yes. The next day the main dish on the lunch menu consisted of curried rice. I didn't realise at the time that Japanese curry typically contains milk because most recipes I see online call for cocoanut milk, which is how I always made curry back in the U.S. So I was surprised when I had some painful gas after lunch before realising what had happened. No-one had warned me.
Is this all just because milk is seen as nutritious? Is it all just because of the dairy lobby? I feel like this is one of the mysteries I may never get to the bottom of.
Anyway, the past few days I see everyone online has been talking about David Lynch due to his recent birthday and the anniversary of his death. I have been watching a lot of Lynch's Twin Peaks this weekend so here's a milk related Twin Peaks clip for you:
X Sonnet 1975
A commanding milk is marching forth to throats.
No year or age can pass without the stream.
The pearly fluid floats the sickly boats.
From mighty udders flows the costly cream.
The bev'rage choice befits an evil bot.
The sort who leads a crew to acid blood.
For every chest the bursting creatures got
The cow would chew a lump of making cud.
A rain of white obliterates the night.
An endless void became a shapeless pale.
The bane of guts would obfuscate a right.
The precious stuff has filled another pail.
'Twas once for only bovine babies meant.
'Tis now to helpless humans daily sent.
