All Hallows' Streaming

Happy Halloween, everyone in the time zones where it's October 31st. It was another lean Halloween for me. It's a good thing I spend the whole month watching horror movies. This past week, though, my internet speed has been shit so streaming services were frequently interrupted by the old spinning loading dot with its little comet trail. I wonder if I added up all the minutes I've spent watching that, how many years it would be.

So I've been watching my DVDs and blu-rays. Coppola's 1992 Dracula, of course. Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow which, despite having a screenplay I really don't like, which deviates from the original story severely, still has beautiful cinematography, costumes, and score. And a great cast. I also watched The Vampire Lovers again, another one with a great cast.

I've found myself really craving 12th Doctor era Doctor Who and I've been watching that. Peter Capaldi is so damned good. I suppose I should try watching that new Amazon series he's on, The Devil's Hour I think it's called. Except, of all the streaming services, my internet hates Amazon the most. Certain sites seem to have a particular brew of cookies that my provider, Softbank, likes to throttle. Amazon and Google are at the top of the list. Whenever I load g-mail, it knocks my internet out for ten minutes half the time. I've taken to only checking e-mail on my phone, which uses the same service provider but always works fine. I guess that goes to show where Softbank's priorities are.

Anyway, last night I watched "The Girl Who Died"/"The Woman Who Lived". I love how most of Twelve's second season are two part episodes. I enjoyed this one a lot more than I did the first time. In particular, the Doctor's interpreting the baby, which I usually found cloying, is ominous and sweet. There's no clips of that on YouTube but here's a nice deleted scene:

"Outside Another Yellow Moon"

Happy Halloween now to those in countries still in my yesterday. Here in Japan, we had a nice lovely pumpkin moon for Halloween, though most of the pumpkins in Japan are small and green. I did see an American style pumpkin at the mall but it was around 2000 yen, or just under twenty dollars. I hope as Halloween becomes more popular in Japan, Halloween pumpkins will become less scarce and go down in price.

Last night, I just watched Bram Stoker's Dracula again, Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation. It was always a favourite, but for some reason it's one of the movies I keep coming back to in recent years. Maybe it's because it's just so damned pretty.

It's gotten to the point where I'm speaking dialogue with some of the characters like I'm singing along to a favourite song.

Even the weakest part of the film, Keanu Reeves, doesn't seem so weak anymore. At least now I can look at him and say, "Look how young John Wick is!"

I was talking to some students a few days ago about Keanu Reeves and they were surprised to learn the guy's in his 50s. He really has had a long, strange career, it seems mainly from being such a nice guy in real life, rather than acting ability. I would say he's shown himself to have great reflexes.

Remember how angry everyone got when Matthew Perry took a random dig at Keanu Reeves in his memoir? "Why is it that the original thinkers like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger die, but Keanu Reeves still walks among us?" Now Matthew Perry is suddenly dead, surely it's too tacky to joke that Reeves still walks among us.

It's funny how much Reeves looks like Gary Oldman's Dracula in this photo:

He may walk among us for centuries to come. Bram Stoker's Dracula will be on The Criterion Channel this November.

Where the Green Pumpkins Grow

Happy Halloween, everyone, from where it's happening now, Japan. This is my third Halloween in Japan and now I'm working at a junior high school that, I was surprised to find, really embraces the holiday. When I started there a couple weeks ago, I found a massive Halloween display at the entrance presumably created by the handmaking club or art club. There are crocheted jack o'lanterns everywhere--orange ones, despite the fact that I can't get orange pumpkins in Japan. I've heard it's possible to get them in some shops in Osaka or Tokyo but I haven't had opportunity to search. No-one I've talked to has ever seen them and some people don't believe me when I say they taste different from the green Japanese pumpkin, or kabocha.

This school also has an English club, which is a nice extra outlet for me since, at this school, it seems many of the Japanese English teachers are exceptionally afraid of having a native English speaker in the classroom (it's really not hard to see why Japanese English is a joke around the world). I showed the club the Sleepy Hollow segment of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mister Toad, just as I showed a class at a different school last year. Once again, I found they were able to understand it well enough despite not understanding most of what Bing Crosby says.

I wasn't able to stream a movie last night because my internet was running very slow. So I had to rely on what I have on tap and watched Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula yet again. But it's such a sumptuous film, it always makes for a satisfying meal. And it's hard to think of a sharper contrast, as far as production design, to Malignant. The effort Malignant couldn't manage for entire rooms is poured into the tiniest nooks and crannies of Coppola's Dracula. Just look at all the details in Lucy's bedroom:

There are details of character, like the hatboxes on the bookcase, and details of idiosyncrasy, like that glorious headboard and the cupid lamp. It's a feast.

The Recurring Wolf Problem

Last night brought the first MCU Halloween special, Werewolf by Night. It was a cute little thing, a potentially decent beginning of something, which makes it a little puzzling that it's a one-shot.

The writing isn't great. Various monster hunters gather to decide who will inherit the Bloodstone, a magical device used to hunt monsters. The heiress by blood is Elsa Bloodstone (Laura Donnelly), but it's implied she's been disinherited for choosing some kind of vague, alternative teachings. We're meant to take all the monster hunters, and Elsa's stepmother (Harriet Sansom Harris), as simplistically evil villains, to help justify the use of extravagant, bloody violence in the special. It leads to a similar problem endemic to The Boys--the show has to constantly side-step the question of whether or not these corrupt superbeings actually ever do help people. It's a worse problem on The Boys but it also makes for a weak foundation in Werewolf by Night. If we know these people help others in the course of their career, even if they also end up hurting innocent monsters, it complicates the question of whether or not they deserve to die. If the hunters have never helped anyone with their actions, it makes them cartoonishly delusional and cheap. The writers are too cowardly to deal with either problem so they just keep things vague.

Elsa and Jack (Gael Garcia Bernal) have a nice, sweet, meetcute in the cemetery. Jack has nice rapport with the cgi Man-Thing.

The special was directed by Michael Giacchino, best known as a composer for films. I respect his attempt to emulate the style of classic Universal monster movies but it's all undermined by the fact that he shot on digital. This really needed to be shot on film to get the right look.

I'm also not a big fan of the "ape-man" style werewolf. I know there are a lot of filmmakers and aficionados who have a hard on for the Lon Chaney, Jr. movie, who like having an actual human actor's expression on the beast. But I like my werewolves to look like wolves, not one of the monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. At best, Jack just looks as good as Seth Green on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Werewolf by Night is available on Disney+.

Green, Glowing, and Alive

Happy Halloween, everyone. Though, of course, I already had my Halloween yesterday here in Japan. What good luck it fell on a weekend this year. I spent the day watching horror movies and television, watching some things I hadn't seen before and revisiting some others. Nearly all of my DVDs and blu-rays are back in the U.S. but two DVDs and two blu-rays, randomly stashed in boxes of books, found their way here to me in Japan. One of the DVDs was my big, two disk special edition of 1985's Re-Animator, still complete with the syringe highlighter pen.

From this you might be led to assume I'm a massive fan of the film. Actually, I came upon the box set at Cosco fourteen years ago for around ten dollars and just thought it was a nice little deal. I do like the movie.

Based very loosely on H.P. Lovecraft's Herbert West--Reanimator, the film takes the great author's Frankenstein pastiche and makes it into something Pauline Kael compared to Luis Bunuel. I might argue it's closer to William S. Burroughs than Bunuel or Lovecraft except the libido infusing the grotesque action has a more youthful blush than Burroughs'.

Certainly all that sex wasn't in Lovecraft. Lovecraft's story doesn't even have the alien horror sexuality that bubbles up in many of his more famous works. Stuart Gordon's film, meanwhile, climaxes in a free-for-all of naked, mutilated, re-animated corpses, one of whom was a headless megalomaniac.

Gordon frames Herbert West like a hero, giving him some charged close-ups with key lines punctuated by beats on the score early in the film. But he's an anit-hero WHICH DOES NOT MEAN HE'S A ROUGH AROUND THE EDGES "DARK" HERO. It irritates me how many people misuse the word "anti-hero" now. Herbert West is an anti-hero because he's positioned like a hero in the plot but he's a straight up murderer out for his own interests.

The film's version is much further gone than Lovecraft's is for most of the story. Film West is already murdering people and cats as part of his effort to find a way to make people immortal. It's pretty credible, if you think of it; how many political hard-liners promise salvation for humanity at the other end of massacres, massacres that somehow never seem to be final?

There's not really a moral centre to the film. Dan is presented that way, sort of, but Bruce Abbott's performance is so weak he renders the character practically invisible.

Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West, meanwhile, knocks it out of the park with every breath. It's stunning how good he is in this. Choices for his line deliveries are so weird yet credible. He never projects a corny duplicity when he tells an obvious lie. When he tells Dan he found his cat dead, there's no projected wink for the audience. He's really trying to lie. Just as credible is the passion he can't subdue when talking about his work. Here is a man with a single focus dominating everything. He's the only one not in love with Megan.

Barbara Crampton's performance isn't much better than Bruce Abbott's but you have to admire how game she was for the nudity and violence. We need more Barbara Cramptons in the movie industry.

David Gale, as the film's worse to West's bad, is an unsung asset to this film. That leer from his decapitated head when Megan's naked on the table next to him is worthy of Lon Chaney.

The Signs are Everywhere

Halloween has definitely landed in Japan, as you can tell from the decorations at the mall to-day. It's even more pervasive than last year.

You'd never guess it only recently started to catch on. I was with a Japanese friend, Shuichi, and he told me he was amazed how quickly Halloween was catching on, too.

We were there to get lunch at a shabu-shabu restaurant with a friend of his. It was my first time eating shabu-shabu, which is a sort of buffet style restaurant where you pick up dry noodles and uncooked vegetables at the bar and then boil them in water or dashi at your table. You're given strips of raw meat sliced paper thin and you swish each piece in the boiling stock, cooking one bite at a time. We had various dipping sauces, too, as well as a small dish of raw egg for dipping the meat in. It was good but I couldn't keep up with the quantities of food my companions were capable of eating. After four trays of pork each as well as noodles and tofu they also had ice cream and fresh waffles for dessert. I contented myself with some ice cream with pineapple.

Here are some more big beautiful spiders I've seen recently lately:

The Unbustable Film

Happy Halloween, everyone. I haven't had as much time this month for horror movies as I usually do but this morning I found myself watching Ghostbusters during breakfast, by which I mean the original 1984 film. I wonder if anyone rewatches the reboot. Why has every attempt to follow up on the original film been unsuccessful? It seems a question worth asking considering yet another attempt has just finished shooting. Directed by Jason Reitman, son of the original film's director, Ivan Reitman, and a successful filmmaker in his own right, the new film looks to be avoiding the controversy of backtracking on the all female reboot by making a family the central focus, a mother and her kids.

I hope it's a good movie but I suspect it'll miss the mark once again. If it's a good movie, it'll be a very different kind of good movie than the original film. Ghostbusters has always been a fantasy but a story where children are the heroes is a fundamentally different kind of fantasy. In such stories, children typically need to act more like adults or the world around them has to make allowances for them being children or the story has to be something in between. Central to the success of the original film, that every subsequent film has missed, is the credible feeling of the world of adults. The first half moves at such a fast pace with some kind of rough spots--like the transition in the beginning from the theme song over the title to Venkman administering his ESP test. It gives the film a natural feel, quick and dirty, miraculous given its budget. The idea of such an unprecedented film getting made to-day seems impossible. The pace and roughness gives the film an incidentally personal quality--one senses the characters talk about taxes and mortgages and New York dialect as much because these things were intimately familiar to the filmmakers as for any other reason. And they're adult issues--they're the problems of people trying to navigate life in the city without a roadmap or a safety net.

A few weeks ago, I was watching a video by a YouTuber named Lindsay Ellis (whose videos on the Hobbit movies are really good) who points to a fundamentally 80s capitalist message in the film. It's true, it's a story about a bunch of guys who start a new business and become wildly successful. Of course, when I was a child, I didn't think of it that way. I just remember thinking how great it was these funny guys beat the scary ghosts and demons. But if that's all a kid sees, why didn't kids like the 2016 film as much? Well, there are a whole lot of other reasons. But I think you could say that the kids respond better when the filmmakers feel personally connected to the story, even if the kids don't understand why.

A strictly economic reading of Ghostbusters is a mistake, in any case, as narrow applications of critical theory usually are. Any good work of art is too much of an interplay of details, too much of a tapestry for a single thread to be pulled out alone. More generally, I think it's a movie about faith. I was stuck on the line from the Ghostbusters's commercial--"We're ready to believe you." I can imagine that really being comforting for someone who just saw a demon in their refrigerator like Dana Barrett did. The team of guys would certainly know all about that after having been kicked out of the university because the administration doesn't believe in them. One of the reasons Bill Murray's performance works so well is that it reads as a kind of masochism coexisting with hope. That scene where he almost sings talking to Ray about how they're going to get the money--he sounds encouraging but also like he's laughing at himself slightly and at poor Ray. It's actually kind of a beautiful leap of faith moment because you can see that it's not a blind leap. Venkman is no fanatic.

It's hard to imagine the new film supporting an emotional subtext like that. But I guess I'll have to wait and see.

Back to the Old House

Halloween month has officially begun so it's time I started watching more horror movies. I got started this month where Mario Bava finished, his final film, 1977's Shock. It's gory and stylish, as you might expect from Bava, but with a kind of nastiness unlike Bava's earlier work, a nihilistic plot about murder and revenge with heavy tones of incest. The movie's excesses become so absurd as the film progesses, though, I found myself enjoying it more. It's rigorously illogical but star Daria Nicolodi gives such a committed performance that the film comes off like a decadent nightmare.

The movie begins with Dora (Nicolodi) moving into a house where she'd previously lived with her now deceased husband. She has a seven year-old son from that marriage, Marco (David Colin Jr.), and a new husband, an airline pilot called Bruno (John Steiner). Bruno's at work for much of the movie, mostly he shows up to tell Dora to pull herself together after she's seen a floating x-acto knife or a zombie hand has sprung from the ground to grab her ankle.

Some early scenes feature Marco looking on wrathfully while Dora and Bruno have sex and we learn that his father, Dora's first husband, had committed suicide. One might easily imagine, maybe accurately, the screenplay was written by a vindictive misogynist. There are some similarities to American horror fiction of the 1970s, particularly works by Stephen King, that focused on horror based on domestic issues but Bava's instincts lead him to much more operatic places. So the process of punishing Dora with supernatural manifestations becomes much more about jump scares and weird sounds--pretty good jump scares and weird sounds, mind you.

The camera's focus on Nicolodi, though, and her persistent portrayal of raw terror anchor the film more in her perspective and it feels less like an exercise of bashing a woman as conveying the experience of being caught in a world of inescapable pain and shifting metrics of guilt. Dora's responsibility in her first husband's death is never entirely clear to us or to herself.

There are lot of impressive dream ideas and creative shots. I love a vision Dora has of an off-key piano being played that precedes her attempting to play piano but being cut by a razor between two keys. There's also a really neat shot that appears to have been accomplished by strapping Nicolodi to a bed and then slowly rotating the bed but keeping the camera fixed on her face. This seems to have been done entirely for the purpose of making her hair seem to wave about in an unnatural manner.

Shock is available on Amazon Prime in the U.S.

Twitter Sonnet #1283

To choose a car above a boat's for land.
To fly a plane beyond a desk is real.
To sail a ship beside a fish is bland.
To catch a trout inside the net's a meal.
An extra sock encased the travelled foot.
A welcome chill accords a pleasant class.
Remember where the granite marker's put.
Between the licking rocks some dragons pass.
Between the roads a lake condemns a dam.
The mountainsides endorse the running car.
In awe the walking boat ingests a dram.
A week of bottles broke the lucky bar.
A steady house'd shake the tenant's feet.
Between the choppy waves the horses meet.