Scavenging and Running

Within the first few minutes of last night's new Bad Batch, I was happy to observe it must have been written by one of the better writers. And indeed, it was written by Christian Taylor, who also wrote the other best episode of the series so far, "Cornered". Last night's new episode, "Reunion", again showed his ability to credibly give an impression of character thought processes relative to their environments and relationships.

Hunter (Dee Bradley Baker) and Tech (Dee Bradley Baker) come up with the bright idea to loot the Jedi cruiser while they're there. This motivation for the characters shows Taylor's ability to think for them. The action that followed was a satisfying cat-and-mouse conflict between Crosshair (Dee Bradley Baker) and his former comrades. I was even amused by Wrecker (Dee Bradley Baker) physically tossing a proton torpedo at some troopers.

Wrecker continues to have my least favourite Dee Bradley Baker performance but I like how Christian Taylor writes him as crazy instead of stupid. I love the fact that Crosshair ended up with what looks like some extensive scars. There's some very Star Wars-ish poetry about it. Maybe he'll end up with cybernetic parts?

The Guest Star of the Week didn't show up until the very end but it was worth the wait--the long anticipated return of Cad Bane (Corey Burton) was effected with a distinctly Spaghetti Western flourish, reminding us that was the mode Lucas himself intended for the bounty hunters long before Jon Favraeu went that route with The Mandalorian. The showdown between Bane and Hunter seemed straight out of a Sergio Leone film, though of course it was much faster, which diminished its impact a little.

Bane's familiar broad brimmed hat is noticeably smaller which I'd say is a sure sign he's going to be making his live action debut in one of the new upcoming series, probably The Book of Boba Fett.

Incidentally, Temuera Morrison recently confirmed in an interview that Robert Rodriguez is directing several episodes of the Boba Fett series. I suspected this would be the case but I'm overjoyed to have it confirmed. This makes The Book of Boba Fett the Star Wars project I've been most excited for since Disney bought the IP. Jon Favreau is a good director but Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi which is a better film than anything J.J. Abrams, Rian Johnson, Taika Waititi, or Jon Favreau have ever made. And Rodriguez is a bona fide action director. In a world less bogged down by corporate overhead, a director like Rodriguez would have been an obvious choice for a Star Wars project from the beginning.

I feel so happy for Boba Fett right now. Congratulations, man.

The Bad Batch is available on Disney+.

A Pleasant Day's Voyage Through the Epochs

A group of small boys find a trilobite fossil and decide the only reasonable thing to do is embark on a Journey to the Beginning of Time (Cesta do pravěku). This 1955 Czech Science Fiction film is intensely charming. It combines enthralling special effects with a credible sense of childlike thought process and also an appreciable sense of adherence to contemporaneous scientific knowledge of prehistorical animals and environments.

Director Karel Zeman introduces four little explorers who figure since most of the things Jules Verne wrote about came true they ought to be able to find a cave they can go through to travel back in time. And so it proves. Rowing a boat through a dark cave, they emerge onto a river partly frozen over and soon observe a woolly mammoth.

The film combines a number of different kinds of effects technique including stop motion, puppets, costumes, and matte paintings. As is usually the case with practical effects, they age so much better than cgi because, even when they're not convincing, they still have a sense of life to them. There's a great deal of artistry to these, too, and I love how they're shown side by side with mediaeval engravings of dragons while the boys muse on the connexion between these real beasts and the beasts of human imagination.

I also admire the film's attention to prehistoric plant life and the kids talk about the different kinds of trees and shrubs they see, things that are as extinct as the dinosaurs and mammoths that crash through them.

After the weekend's less than inspiring look at a dinosaur movie, I decided to watch this after seeing it recommended on Caitlin's blog and I'm glad I did.

Journey to the Beginning of Time is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Mischievous Time Guardian

Last night's new Loki, the second episode, didn't have any big moments as great as the first episode but the writing was more consistent in quality. It comes from first time writer Elissa Karasik whose previous credits include working as an assistant on Bones and Backstrom and appearing as an actress in a short film called First Handjob. I continue to be mystified by Disney's hiring process.

Karasik's episode takes advantage of the format of a television series and allows the characters to settle into longer, quieter scenes and get to know each other. It's also a procedural with Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Mobius (Owen Wilson) being detectives, spitballing ideas and doing research.

The show definitely has a very strong Doctor Who vibe to it, particularly bearing a strong resemblance to the Eleventh Doctor's first couple of seasons. The idea of the Variant Loki hiding near apocalypses isn't as satisfyingly complex as the kinds of things Stephen Moffat could dream up but it was still pretty fun watching Loki goof off in Pompeii.

I don't quite understand why the TVA don't disguise themselves when visiting different eras. Overall, they seem pretty clumsy and easily outwitted and it seems less and less credible they've never betrayed their presence before. But the chemistry between Hiddleston and Wilson is so good I'd be willing to forgive worse crimes than that.

I don't have any strong feelings about the Loki Variant being female. Since Loki is capable of changing sex at will, I'm not sure it even really means anything at all. Actress Sophia Di Martino has a long resume but I've never seen her in anything before. It'll be interesting to see her play off Hiddleston. I hope she's not going to be the replacement Loki in the next MCU Phase if only because it seems kind of silly to have this happen to every single Phase One character.

Loki is available on Disney+.

The Antlers of the Season

On a recent trip to Nara Park, I noticed the antlers on the deer are looking a lot bigger. Yesterday, I started working at the school where I spend most of my time again. I'd last been there in April and, since then, the third year students had graduated and everyone else moved up a grade. I can't believe how much the little first years have grown now that they're second years.

Mostly this week I've been working with third year students, though, and I was happy to see many of these former second year students, too. We played a game to-day to help them learn present and past participle adjectives. One teacher had come up with some "Who am I?" cards--the teacher reads three hints on the cards and then students have to guess who the teacher is. He asked me to make some additional cards that were more fun than what he had, which he could count on me doing because I know plenty about Kimetsu no Yaiba. One thing that's definitely not changed from last year is Kimetsu no Yaiba is the bible for these kids. All the cards I made ended up being much too easy.

I was struck by the subtle reverence the students exhibited when the answer to one card was Rengoku Kyojuro. It's easy to see why he would be an icon to students--the hero of the Kimetsu no Yaiba movie worked and trained all his life, respected his family and honoured his mother's wishes, and still he failed. With all the work these kids have to do, the pressure they're under and all the tests they have to pass, it's no wonder they'd sympathise with someone like Kyojuro. Though when I saw the Kimetsu no Yaiba movie, Kyojuro reminded me of Kyuzo in Seven Samurai. I sometimes wonder if Kyuzo was related to the psychological blow of Japan's loss in World War II. Now I wonder if Kimetsu no Yaiba is the latest iteration of the same story of sincere, rigorous effort rendered meaningless by a single, overwhelming catastrophe.

It's been hot and rainy here, it being the rainy season. Thus all the wild growth, the massive tide of green and flowers. It's nice to live somewhere with seasons.

Twitter Sonnet #1453

The giant wasn't big so people slept.
In dreams of rope the copper lantern falls.
In dusty flowers poison hearts are kept.
A sugar habit hardens sturdy walls.
A leather string connects the cows to years.
A ticking clock observes the frightened man.
The golden sun recalls a dearth of fears.
A chip of gold could scratch the iron pan.
The question cornered words across a sky.
Across a sea, the sentence fished for art.
The random seeds produced a myst'ry pie.
The brain absorbed an extra, senseless heart.
A steady rain encouraged second trips.
Encroaching sun in ocean coffee dips.

Thanksgiving in June

"Pangs" is an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that has either aged very well or terribly depending on your politics. The drama in this Thanksgiving episode from 1999 hinges on a spirit of California's native Chumash people rising from the grave to murder various people of European descent. Writer Jane Espenson constructs the story as a vehicle for philosophical argument in a way that feels very natural for the characters and organic overall.

Willow (Alyson Hannigan) has started to inherent some of her mother's ideological attitudes which Espenson had mocked in the episode "Gingerbread" from the previous season. Now Willow, in college, condemns the idea of even celebrating Thanksgiving as reinforcing the values of European settlers who violently appropriated territory. Once a Native American spirit (Tod Thawley) starts committing race based assassinations, Willow and Giles (Anthony Head) take up opposite positions. Willow thinks maybe they should help the spirit while Giles feels its madness to help the spirit murder innocent people. At the time the episode aired, Espenson's own position would hardly have been subtle, but to-day, when people commonly argue for the idea of racially inherited malevolence (now often called "whiteness"), Willow's position is entirely plausible.

I really like how Espenson uses the supporting characters of Spike (James Marsters) and Anya (Emma Caufield) to bring complexity to the argument in ways that are both funny and meaningful. Xander (Nicholas Brendon), who's been infected with syphilis and various other diseases by the ghost, doesn't hesitate to side with Giles and makes a sweeping statement about the irredeemably of "vengence demons", forgetting that the woman tenderly wiping his brow, Anya, is herself a former vengeance demon.

It's been very amusing that the former mass murderer has been accepted into the Scooby Gang but in this moment we're compelled to question our own sympathies. We can apply that to the argument at hand in two ways--either to realise that a person (or a group occupying the conceptual space more suited for an individual person) can be redeemed of even the most horrific of past sins or that its habit for the person/group mind to selectively forgive past transgressions based on the convenience of circumstance. Looking at it either way compels us to probe the validity of either position.

It takes a villain, Spike, to finally clear things up and point out the spirit is trying to kill them so that, whatever the history, now it's a matter of kill or be killed. Spike now takes up an interesting position on the series as a neutered villain who essentially becomes an amoral chorus. It's not unlike the idea behind Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, a story in which ideas normally impermissible in public discourse can be engaged in because the people expressing them are all understood to be villains.

It's episodes like this that make it seem little wonder the modern Left wants to disassociate itself from this former cornerstone of Internet liberal culture.

Fortunately for humanity, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is available on Amazon Prime.

The Stone Tomb

Yesterday my friend Shuichi and I visited Ishibutai Kofun, a nearly 1400 year old tomb.

It was the tomb of Soga no Umako who was his period's rough equivalent of Prime Minister. He died in 626.

The stones forming the ceiling weigh around 77 tonnes.

The sarcophagus was destroyed and looted long ago.

Outside the tomb is a reproduction of the sarcophagus.

Twitter Sonnet #1452

The long and turgid tuna dipped to depth.
The tips of waves were painted white and grey.
To speak of whitings nicks the plate to death.
Incautious cuts could carve the brittle clay.
A duck of ham is pink but beaked and squat.
A porpoise posed would ink a squeaky bomb.
And that's the rap that sussed the sprinkler bot.
A billion boots of juice'd stomp the calm.
To splashing heaven noodles dived with cakes.
The dish of fish put crinkled eyes aflame.
On painted hugging apes the goblet bakes.
Your toe reboots a crack'ling tricky game.
Balance pits a peach beside its gut.
Sleepy gods attain the plushy rut.

Disney Blog Entry

Sometimes, Disney gives us breathtaking, groundbreaking cinema. Sometimes Disney gives us mediocre cinema. And sometimes Disney gives us something totally forgettable. I had absolutely no memory of 2000's Dinosaur. I didn't remember seeing it, I don't even remember seeing promotional material, commercials, or trailers. It seems impossible that I completely missed a film in the Disney animated canon, the first to follow the Renaissance, so I wracked my brain. And then a name floated to the surface: D.B. Sweeney. "Is D.B. Sweeney in this movie?" I checked. Yes. With this recollection I expected other memories to come flooding in but none did. It may be Disney's most forgotten film except if there's another one I totally don't remember even now it would obviously have rights to the title. I think the first half of Fun and Fancy Free, with Bongo the Bear, has a solid claim, too. Dinosaur, though, is remarkable in the number of qualities that have rendered it irrelevant--the chief points being its plot similarities to Land Before Time, its unimaginative title, and its extraordinarily bad cgi.

At best it looks like a Syfy channel original movie, at worst it looks like Tim and Eric's Awesome Show. And it came out six years after Jurassic Park after eleven years in development. Incredibly, Wikipedia quotes several glowing reviews of the film's computer imagery. I guess it's sort of like cellophane. When cellophane first came out in the mid 20th century, it was so new and strange that people marvelled at it, as evidenced in the lyrics to Cole Porter's "You're the Top":

You're the top
You're Mahatma Gandhi
You're the top
You're Napoleon Brandy
You're the purple light
Of a summer night in Spain
You're the National Gallery
You're Garbo's salary
You're cellophane

Overconfidence in cgi is a problem that continues to plague studios. Contemporaneous reviews were less impressed by the film's story about dinosaurs travelling to a valley that has remained miraculously green after the devastating meteors fell to earth. The similarity to Don Bluth's Land Before Time is unmistakable. Bluth was a former Disney animator who left the studio acrimoniously in the '80s to start his own animation studio. Bluth's American Tail outgrossed the Disney film released the same year though subsequent Bluth films were consistently outgrossed by his Disney competitors. There's no reason for Disney to want revenge in 2000 but they got it anyway--the forgettable, cheap looking Dinosaur brought in more than triple the box office of Land Before Time, a solid victory even adjusting for inflation. On the other hand, everyone remembers Land Before Time.

Dinosaur is also kind of reminiscent of Disney's Tarzan--it starts with a foundling, an Iguanodon in this case (D.B. Sweeney), being raised by primates, lemurs in his case. I suspect Disney was trying to make up for the questionable choice to exclude black actors from Tarzan because both of the Iguanodon's surrogate parents are African American (Ossie Davis and Alfre Woodard) and Della Reese plays a Styracosaurus. Her performance and Joan Plowright as her Brachiosaurus friend are two of the most effective in the film. Their characters are older, slower dinosaurs who are always in danger of getting left behind due to the herd's leader, Kron (Samuel E. Wright), insisting that the weak shouldn't dictate the pace of the whole group.

Kron is an annoying, superfluous villain. The struggle against hunger and fatigue and the gloom inherent in the devastated landscape provide enough dramatic conflict. Kron set up as a maniac who despises the weak who comes in conflict with D.B. Sweeney--who insists that any less than everyone reaching the nesting grounds is unacceptable--seems like the writers trying to use the principle of survival of the fittest to argue against the idea of a social class system. It's a fundamentally stupid idea that misunderstands the nature of both concepts and the stupidity plays out when events improbably arrange themselves to make D.B. Sweeney's arguments right and make Kron look like a bloodthirsty monster.

By coincidence, last night I'd been watching King Dinosaur on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, a movie set on an alien planet of dinosaurs that also features a lemur. I wondered if at some point in development Dinosaur was going to be a remake of King Dinosaur.

Dinosaur is available on Disney+.

...

This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
Fantasia 2000

Fixing Wrecker

A lukewarm new episode of The Bad Batch aired last night written by series co-developer Jennifer Corbett. There were some nice underlying ideas that didn't quite produce exciting television for reasons I'm not entirely clear on.

Order 66 is finally starting to show itself in Wrecker (Dee Bradley Baker), mostly taking the form of bad headaches, but thankfully at this point the other members of the team have figured out what's happening. Luckily for them, Guest Star of the Week, Rex (Dee Bradley Baker), shows up, having been tipped off by the Martez sisters. Much as the previous episode ended with the Batch refraining from teaming permanently with the Martezes for no apparent reason, this episode ends with the Batch not teaming up permanently with Rex for no apparent reason. And once again the guest star feels gimmicky and empty, even more so considering there's not a whole lot to distinguish Rex from Hunter, who have the same face and are voiced by the same actor.

It is pretty impressive Dee Bradley Baker can perform capably enough to differentiate Wrecker and Tech though maybe that's why both of their performances come off kind of flat and one-note. Especially Wrecker whose relationship with Omega (Michelle Ang) should be at the core of this episode. Part of the problem is that Wrecker is essentially just Drax and Dee Bradley Baker's one-note imitation lacks the big-heartedness of Dave Bautista. Michelle Ang is much better but I wish she'd been directed to play this episode with a greater sense of urgency and panic as she waits to see the results of Wrecker's surgery. I like the idea of a bond between the two characters and I like their tradition of eating snacks together after a mission but something about the idea isn't catching hold on a visceral level.

Partly I think it's because Star Wars writers have been bullied so much by fans that they're afraid to write emotionally vulnerable characters.

The episode has nice light rendering and the action scene with the squid monster is kind of effective even if it is just basically the squid monster from Fellowship of the Ring.

The Bad Batch is available on Disney+.

Cruelty in the Circus and on the Stage

Awareness of one's own inadequacy is not sufficient to transcend it. Ingmar Bergman's 1953 film Sawdust and Tinsel (Gycklarnas afton "Evening of the Jesters") is about Hell on earth but not really a strange Hell. This accentuates its cruelty but also elevates it above exploitation. Still, its argument about the dissolute lives of circus performers omits the value their work has for the people they entertain and in this way The Magician, a later Bergman film ruminating on some of the same ideas, is superior. But Sawdust and Tinsel is memorable in its own right for the piece of life's cruel puzzle it so successfully portrays.

The premise kind of reminded me of Ozu's Floating Weeds, enough to make me wonder if Bergman had seen the silent version of that film. Ozu's story about a kabuki performer who has a wife in his troupe and another one in a small town with his child leaves its characters much more dignity and solace. Bergman's film about a travelling circus gives us a ringmaster, Albert (Åke Grönberg), and his girlfriend, Anne (Harriet Anderson), who both want to escape the crushing spiritual void of their livelihood but tragically lack the personal qualities necessary to do so.

To show this, Bergman takes the story to the point of grotesque, beginning with a sort of prologue, a vignette about a clown (Anders Ek) who finds his wife (Gudrun Brost) swimming naked with a regiment of soldiers. Described by a heartless narrator--the story is told by a bored low level performer at the circus to a dozing Albert--as beautiful but a little past her prime, the clown's wife had been delighted enough by the soldier's attentions to strip for them only to find their appreciation was less lustful and more sadistic once her husband's shown up. Then follows the sad spectacle of the clown ineffectually trying to carry his naked wife back to the circus.

This provides a sort of thumbnail for the main drama. The circus loses a lot of costumes in a storm and Albert decides to ask a local theatre troupe to lend them some wardrobe. The theatre director (Gunnar Björnstrand) undisguisedly mocks the circus performers, fully aware that his is the higher artform despite the fact that both groups are more or less equally derided by the authorities and general populace. Anne finds herself attracted to the effeminate star of the theatre troupe, Frans (Hasse Ekman), and goes to visit him when she figures out Albert has a wife in town (Annika Tretow). Each one comes face to face with the fact that their preferred lovers see in them only brief, disposable value.

The fantasy ending would be to show Albert and Anne having some kind of quiet moral or professional victory over Frans or Albert's wife but Bergman never gives us that respite, instead piling humiliation on humiliation while Albert and Anne are shown as intelligent enough to have real awareness of their nightmare but lacking the capacity to reason past their wounded pride. The only consolation they have is each other but considering part of their problem is the desire to escape each other it's a somewhat sickly solace. Personally, I'd be happy to be saddled with Harriet Andersson any day.

Sawdust and Tinsel is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1451

The ancient tomb is waiting past the trees.
With time, we walked again among the bugs.
The heat precedes a fleet of drowsy bees.
The grass would braid itself to make the rugs.
The varied tea awaits in gauzy bags.
The faces crack on dusty clocks at home.
The rusty iron hand of ev'ning sags.
Between the seconds hours slowly roam.
The sand was soft beneath the fire blue.
A weapon's glow was dimmed beside the cuff.
To amber light the crimson paint was due.
The scales of screens display its visions rough.
Invested grain produced a crop of sand.
The ear of corn resembled Vader's hand.

Another Layer of All Powerful

Last night brought the best premiere of an MCU series on Disney+ and the lion's share of the credit goes to Tom Hiddleston. The writing and direction on Loki aren't really bad but far from perfect. Michael Waldron is head writer on a series for the first time in a career in which his biggest previous credit was one episode of Rick and Morty. Now not only is he in charge of this show he's written the screenplay for the upcoming Doctor Strange movie and he's working on Kevin Feige's Star Wars movie. The people at Disney, for whatever mysterious reasons, really seem to like this guy.

I loved last night's premiere of Loki but the writing was decidedly uneven. Loki (Hiddlestone) is apprehended by the Time Variance Authority, which seems to be a sort of all powerful DMV presiding over the multiverse. Loki has gone from a frustrated attempt at becoming supreme god of the Earth and Asgard to being a regular schlub in a jumpsuit under the thumb of bored, slightly braindead office workers. Somehow, the God of Mischief has never heard of the TVA. It would have been nice if Waldron had given him some knowledge of it, especially since we see the TVA agents are pretty fallible. Considering they preside over all space and time, it seems like they should have left some evidence of their presence here and there in some way or another.

Loki is stripped of his clothes and forced along his path by cattle prods but it's only when he's finally before the judge (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) does it occur to him to try to use his powers. All of this does feel like it comes from someone more accustomed to writing cartoons than something that's supposed to be at least halfway dramatic--the focus is more on getting gags than on making sense.

Things improve considerably, though, when Loki sits down with Mobius, a TVA agent played by Owen Wilson. The two have enough acting chops between them to make the show captivating but Waldron's writing starts to get more interesting as he sets up the show's themes of free will and predestination. Loki himself had already been talking about his "glorious purpose", which sounds nice and all, until you consider it might mean he's stuck in the role of villain. Will the TVA be his chance to break out of this path the universe has written for him?

This is a very old story, one that goes at least as far back as 1667 and Milton's Paradise Lost in which Satan said of God's plan for him:

If then his providence
Out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil

This gave rise to the whole archetype of the Satanic Hero which saw a new manifestation in the late '60s and '70s with stories about traditionally villainous characters from a new, more complicated perspective. There's always going to be plenty to mine from this premise because any of us who've contemplated ourselves and the universe have always had some anxiety about our own worth and ability to do anything meaningful with our lives.

Hiddleston draws us in with a performance filled with bitterness yet still with a kind of vulnerable agony. One is reminded that his character in Kenneth Branagh's Thor was originally meant to be a version of Edmund from King Lear. There's a lot of potential here and I'm looking forward to next week.

Loki is available on Disney+.

Sensitive Demons

For being created by a man famous for his liberalism, the stories on Angel and Buffy could have some episodes with pretty conservative ideas at their core. A pair of season one Angel episodes show this well--"Sense & Sensitivity" and "The Bachelor Party". The former is an episode that amusingly pokes fun at workplace sensitivity training (an idea that's certainly become more conservative) and the latter questions the idea of blindly accepting the cultural traditions of a foreign community. They're both good episodes but "The Bachelor Party", written by Tracey Stern, is an exceptionally well structured piece of television.

I always liked Doyle (Glenn Quinn) and was disappointed he only lasted nine episodes before being killed off. Joss Whedon took a lot of the blame for that but now we know it was due to Quinn's personal issues. In any case, he's intensely charming in this episode intended to explore his character.

If the idea going in was to have the drama centre around the possibility of Doyle finally getting with his crush, Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter), the mission was thoroughly accomplished, believingly and entertainingly bringing the characters within a hairs breadth of a date only to have it snatched way just as believably and even more entertainingly.

Doyle barely survives protecting Cordelia from a vampire attack after she's had a disappointing date with a stock broker. After Doyle's heroics, Cordelia seriously starts to contemplate Doyle's potential as a boyfriend and is on the point of asking him out . . . when in walks Doyle's wife (Kristin Dattilo).

She wants Doyle to sign divorce papers so she can marry Richard, played by Carlos Jacott, one of the few actors to appear on Buffy, Angel, and Firefly ("Anne", "The Bachelor Party", and "Serenity"), always playing different characters but always playing a guy who starts out seeming friendly and then turns out to be a villain. In this case it turns out his family are demons whose culture demands Richard devour the brains of his fiancee's previous husband.

The humour is so wonderfully deadpan at the bachelor party itself. When Angel (David Boreanaz) directly condemns the practice, one of the demons calls him racist without a trace of irony in his line delivery. All of the actors play it absolutely straight which of course makes it so much funnier.

Doyle thought that his wife had left him because he was a demon until he finds out she was getting ready to marry another demon. This also works as a nice bit of introspection for his character.

Angel is available on Amazon Prime and on Disney+ in many countries.

Seeking Someone Who's Not Himself

A young woman travels across Japan searching for her missing husband in 1961's Zero Focus (ゼロの焦点). An eerie procedural, it becomes a cool nightmare about fractured lives.

Teiko (Yoshiko Kuga) is entering her late 20s and facing increasing pressure from her mother to get married. Finally she meets a successful ad agency employee named Kenichi (Koji Nambara) who proposes to her. Only one week after their marriage, though, he gets on a train and no-one hears from him again.

A lot of the movie deals with trains as Teiko explains on voiceover the specific train lines she needs to take from Tokyo to Kenichi's hometown of Kanazawa as she investigates his disappearance. She's genuinely concerned about him but there's something dispassionate in her narrative and about her almost expressionless face. Maybe that's not surprising given the circumstances of the marriage.

It turns out Kenichi might not have been intensely interested in Teiko, either, because one thing Teiko finds out is that he'd been living a double life and already had another wife. This fits with Teiko's story and that of a villain introduced late in the film to create a film about people forced by circumstances and societal pressures into leading fraudulent lives. The coolness of the filming and the procedural narrative emphasise the painful, emotional detachment of this kind of hell.

Zero Focus is available on The Criterion Channel.