The Illuminati Go to the Bathroom

I've decided Japan has the best porn in the world. 2003's The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai isn't as good as the 70s Japanese exploitation films I've been watching, and it's not quite as witty as it thinks it is, but I have to love a movie that features a woman masturbating with the cloned index finger of George W. Bush while a man on television wearing a flat Bush mask speaks to her.



Sachiko Hanai starts the movie off as a prostitute specialising in role play--we watch her playing teacher for one man, incorrectly instructing him that New York is the capital of the United States. Her destiny takes a turn, however, when she interrupts a meeting in a cafe between a North Korean and a Middle Eastern agent.

The North Korean shoots down the Middle Eastern man before shooting Sachiko in the forehead. This does not kill Sachiko.



At first she walks around like a zombie before she prods the hole with a pencil causing the bullet to press against a part of her brain that activates heightened mental powers.

Sachiko begins working out complex equations and devouring the knowledge she finds in a variety of books, and in one case even devouring a book.



In one of the movie's funniest scenes, she tracks down the author of one of the philosophy texts and reflexively does her academic erotic cosplay routine while carrying on a genuine philosophical argument with him.



Well, it's not a truly profound argument, though she references an argument by Nietzsche that I happened to have read a week ago. In fact, the movie takes the argument of rationalism versus sensual chaos as its central motive as the point at the end seems to be that increased intelligence and knowledge ultimately leads Sachiko to see her hedonistic existence as the ideal one.

It's a sweet, slightly nihilistic film with some genuinely effective humour and even more effective sex scenes. You just don't find this effective combination of sexiness and humour outside of Japan, except maybe in Monty Python.

Real Cold Blood

A couple weeks ago, I talked about how George Lucas shouldn't let himself be bothered by internet commentators. Then a couple days ago, he was quoted at AICN as saying this;

The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom.

I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.

And I just want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. Do I even need to address what's wrong with . . . ? Oh, I'd better . . .

Shooting someone before he obviously intends to shoot you is not shooting someone in cold blood. If we're going to be generous, we could say that Solo was fighting a little dirty, which would be in character. I mean, it's a character establishing moment. But, gods, not--I can't believe I'm even--GGRYGHNGHH!!! Lucas? The fuck is wrong with you?

Oh, and that's just part of it. It's not just that he's saying Han shooting first is cold blooded, it's that he's saying Greedo had always shot first and it's just bad editing that somehow obscures this. AUGH. In that case, your real editor was a very benevolent deity or ghost who did us all a huge fucking favour. But your ego just couldn't handle giving control over to a happy accident, huh?

On the other side of the coin to-day, I want to say I dearly, dearly love Alan Moore. Not just because he's a great writer, but because of statements like this where he talks about how the comics industry infringes on artistic integrity. As Moore says, this is a problem throughout entertainment media, but so rarely do you hear someone actually acknowledge publicly what's plain as day because their mouths are taped up by contracts everyone signs because the impression has been generated that it's the Thing to Do. Moore knows better, and oh, how I love this quote;

I thought about it for a while--I could perhaps sue, although I suspect DC would be very comfortable with that . . . They have a whole battery of lawyers who could continue to fight this case for decades. And it’s not like I’m after money. It’s always been about the dignity and integrity of the work. I just want them not to do something. There’s no point in wasting resources for decades, when effectively, if there’s a legal case, I’d be prohibited from speaking about it, which DC is more worried about.

Just the simple fact of someone having more faith in direct communication with the people than in the legal system pleases me unspeakably. And I believe he's right. Oh, love this man.

So how do I let my stance on George Lucas stand next to my stance on Alan Moore? Well, at the end of the day, I do think Lucas ought to have control over his creations. Though I don't think artistic integrity is as simple as saying it's about an artist having absolute control over his work. A lot of being an artist is more about seeing what exists and arranging it than about creating something from scratch. One can see this in the fact that Watchmen is itself a commentary on superhero comics, with characters loosely based on DC superheroes. The problem is when the heavy, machine hand gets involved. Lucas doesn't want Han to shoot first because it's too morally ambiguous. Lucas feels that maintaining creative control means knowing exactly how everything in the story adds up to a specific impact. And this, as Nietzsche observed (I'm still reading Birth of Tragedy), wasn't just anti-Dionysian but anti-art. And Nietzsche says part of Euripides' problem was that he allowed his internal critic, generated from his perception of other critics' opinions, have too much impact on his work.

An artist needs to stay wary of philosophies that say there's an algorithm, a way Things are Done.

Cars Can Be Very Hard Eggs

I am such a ditz lately. I left for school yesterday without my backpack, and then, later, I locked my keys in my car in the mall parking garage an hour before class. I had put my keys in the ignition, then suddenly decided to study for my kanji quiz there in my driver's seat.

I got out of the car to use the JC Penney restroom before I left, forgetting where I'd left my keys. My sister has Auto Club and we had to trick one of their guys into stopping by, telling him it had been my sister who'd locked my keys in my car. I came up with a more elaborate story we didn't use, about how we'd been watching The Parent Trap and she'd said, "Wouldn't it be weird if we switched places for a day?" To which I replied, "Ha! You couldn't even switch cars with me for a day!" And a wager ensued.

The guy ended up getting into my car surprisingly easily. He only needed two tools--some kind of balloon thing which he wedged between the passenger side door and the door frame, which he inflated to get the door open just enough to snake through a heavier duty version of the old straightened clothes hanger. After a couple tries, he popped open the lock, not even damaging my car. With just two small, simple devices, this guy who wasn't wearing a uniform and who was without a car of his own because his tow truck wouldn't fit in the second level of the parking garage where I was, easily got into my car without a single mall security guy stopping him. It gives one pause, I suppose. I was just happy to get my car back before the tea I'd left in the cup holder had gotten cold.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. I watched my favourite Valentine's Day movie, in fact my all time favourite movie, Vertigo, last night. I celebrate in my own way.



Twitter Sonnet #354

Brittle bananas are turning pale blue.
Sidelong glances are pushing out the eye.
Cold scarlet sight shattered before Abu.
Diamond crabs are a ancient velour lie.
Chins will extend when the noses have died.
Eyebrows observe peasant iris tenants.
Conical screens leave nowhere to hide.
Toon impotence is the Phantom Menace.
Half a sun of water clocks daydream coin.
Time's moustache sadly droops on money day.
Bloody noodles steam bathe in the byoin.
Memories of avocado decay.
Heart shaped toys rattle under stucco cloud.
Just white peppermint makes the night sky loud.

Believe in the Monster

A lot as been said about 1954's Godzilla (ゴジラ) as an allegory for postwar Japan and the world political environment surrounding the atom bomb. It clearly does deal with these issues, and in concept rather interestingly, but in deployment rather awkwardly. For the psychological effects on Japan of World War II, I could point out a lot of superior films--Record of a Living Being, Floating Clouds, Stray Dog, Drunken Angel, and many others. As a monster/disaster film, putting aside the allegory, Godzilla is mostly unsatisfying, inferior, as Roger Ebert observed in his review, to the much older King Kong.

The movie begins with the mysterious effects of the mostly unseen monster--ships lost at sea, strange tidal conditions. When Godzilla does set foot on land, we don't see him clearly, which is wise, but somehow the shots of people panicking and buildings crumbling don't quite achieve the sense of menace I might have thought they would.



Takashi Shimura has a role in the movie as a top scientific advisor to the government. I guess Takashi Shimura is to Godzilla as Ian Holm was to The Day After To-morrow, though Godzilla is at least a better movie than that waste of time. Both films are filled with blatant scientific inaccuracies and senseless behaviour on the parts of the protagonists, but there's a certain poetry to these flaws in Godzilla.

Shimura was the biggest star in the movie, having been playing leading roles in popular films for over a decade at this point, but he's given the somewhat insurmountable task of making us sympathise with his desire to keep Godzilla alive for scientific purposes while the monster is rampaging and killing scores of defenceless people. When the weight of carnage gets too much for even the filmmakers to comfortably continue with Shimura's initial motivation, the character's reduced to being just another shocked bystander.

Foremost in the plot are Emiko, the daughter of Shimura's character, and the two men in love with her, Ogata and Serizawa.



Serizawa's a sort of mad scientist with a conscience. He's been locked in his laboratory wearing an eye patch for years, developing a device that when dropped into a fish tank splits all the oxygen atoms in the water resulting in the live fish being instantly turned into floating fish skeletons. He's been keeping this discovery a secret while he tries to think of a positive application for it, but he reveals it to Emiko under the condition that she tell no-one.

After seeing the horribly wounded victims of Godzilla at a hospital, Emiko painfully decides to break her promise and tell Ogata about Serizawa's device because it may be the only way to stop Godzilla. Emiko can't simply go to Serizawa herself to convince him to use the device because I guess that's a man's job, and she can't tell her father, the chief scientific advisor to the government, because telling the Serizawa's rival for her affections gives us the opportunity to tie a pissing contest to the argument over whether or not to use a weapon of mass destruction.

But Serizawa's fierce reluctance to use the device is interesting when one compares it with the relative eagerness with which the U.S. developed and deployed the atomic bomb. My favourite part of the movie was the climax where Ogata and Serizawa walk slowly on the ocean floor with the device in search of Godzilla. There's no logical reason why the device needed to be deployed by hand, but one appreciates how Serizawa regards the situation--his desire to kill himself in the process not only to destroy all knowledge of how the device was constructed but also just as a reflection of what using such a weapon means. It's not in any sense a good thing, just a horrible necessity. Akira Ifukube's beautiful, sombre score emphasises this and this scene has my favourite shot of the monster, walking slowly, obscured by underwater haze.



As the victim of the weapon, one could see Godzilla in a way as a metaphor for the Japanese people, or rather the dark mirror self image that develops from the mind of the abused, who looks for sense in senseless destruction by seeing himself as monstrous.

The Instantaneous Infinite

Few movies got as much mileage out of star quality as Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious. I watched it in blu-ray last night and I think the most exciting thing about blu-ray to me is just that it gives me a new excuse to watch, and a slightly fresh perspective on, a movie I've watched billions of times because I absolutely love it. blu-ray, too, I guess slightly removes the evidence of the digital barrier between me and the reality of the movie, it's a little closer to watching it on film.

I don't think there was a huge difference, though, between my DVD copy and the blu-ray. Here's a comparison of cropped unresized screenshots;




My DVD copy was released by Criterion and the blu-ray was done by MGM which may explain why the DVD copy looks slightly less washed out. I suppose the image is slightly sharper, but it is really hard to tell. I think I was able to see Mrs. Sebastian's facial expression sooner when she was coming down the stairs.

Anyway, it's always a pleasure watching that movie. It may be Hitchcock's most sensually shot film, ruminating in closeups of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Hitchcock finds material in their faces not just because they're beautiful but because they give such subtle and complex performances. Who would have thought the master of screwball comedy in the late 1930s, Cary Grant, could here communicate so much with eyes, the twitch of an eyelid, the darkening of a brow. But his restraint as Devlin is so perfect--we don't need exposition at all to see how he's been burnt by a woman somehow, how it's made him shut up inside himself. It's ingeniously tied to his perspective on his and Bergman's different social positions. When you watch him in this movie, imagine watching him from Bergman's perspective--he never projects more than Devlin realistically would for how much people get from him, and yet he communicate volumes. He's cool and like he's just barely holding himself together.



And Bergman is so excellent as the POV character, her eyes searching for the tiniest scrap of the affection and faith she hopes to see from him, but she's confined on her own isolated journey of duplicity with Claude Rains. She gives a subtle and communicative performance, too.



Getting tired of this movie would be like getting tired of a forest--I'd tell you it's only because you're not looking hard enough.

Samurai Stopping Power

I'm not surprised Hiroshi Inagaki's 1954 film Musashi Miyamoto (宮本武蔵) won the Academy Award for best foreign language film and Seven Samurai (七人の侍), also from 1954, didn't. Because Musashi Miyamoto was both a spectacle and rather shallow. It has the broad dramatic strokes without the unsightliness of unvarnished characterisation. It has some nice visuals, and a great lead performance, but these don't make up for a simplistic plot that leaps over the humanity crucial for a good story.

Toshiro Mifune stars as the historical samurai Musashi Miyamoto, delivering a typically great performance. It's a mythologised version of Miyamoto's life and works rather like a prototype for the Rambo manhunt type of film. Seven Samurai showed a group of trained and seasoned samurai who were unsure if they could hold out against forty common bandits. In Musashi Miyamoto, we see one peasant face an entire army.



Then, when the opposing side takes over the territory, Miyamoto becomes a hunted man who slaughters the groups of ten to twenty men who do manage to corner him. In between, he fends off the attentions of one beautiful woman after another.



Why is an entire army pursuing one peasant? Why does everyone in his home village abruptly turn against him except one beautiful woman? The world does not value real men!

If your ego is soothed by extremely simplistic fantasy, this is the movie for you. For the rest of us, as I said, it has some pretty shots, though it's a colour film that was clearly shot by a cinematographer who decided to light everything like it was a black and white film.



Lots of contrast and, even worse, lots of inexplicably dimly lit characters in the foreground with a bright background. It kind of gave me a headache.



So for 50s jidaigeki, you're better off going for Kurosawa or Mizoguchi.

Twitter Sonnet #353

Flowers fade from the example picture.
Running demonstrations dilute practice.
Placid geese watch a clouded grey tincture.
Wheat has become the new bourgeois cactus.
Silhouette doves watch an alien store.
Medical cacti harvest red nose hair.
Subway pollen finds a new public spore.
We know fur yukata are never fair.
Honey juice prompts men to make Apple Bee.
Gun Tetris was spoiled by a luger.
Armoured climate has a higher AC.
But the tactless die rolls have no sugar.
Furry blue lettuce curls around the sun.
Salad smothers the volcano's red gun.

まめちしき

This is one of those wretched little desks I was talking about. My hand for scale;



Who looks at this and says, "Yes, this will facilitate the learning process." No other classroom I've been in has these, maybe it's related to the fact that Japanese II is in a math building, though I can't think why small, rough desk space would be an advantage for math.

Damn, I still need to take a math class, and an assessment test first or I'm going to have to take two math classes. Math has always been just a brick wall for me. I was listening to The Nick and Artie Show the other day and they were, on the spot, with a guy from a Vegas casino calculating a number people were betting on based on the average of the numbers on the jerseys of people who scored in the Super Bowl. I was very quickly out of my depth. I may never be a professional gambler. Lange always likes to joke about how many bets gamblers will take--he often says there are guys in Vegas betting on a Wiffle Ball game in Missouri or something.

I got a 71% on my Japanese test, which is better than I thought I would do, though certainly not great. I do wonder if any of it is due to my just natural dizziness, though. I lost a point for writing "Nihon" (Japan) when I was supposed to write "Nihongo" (the Japanese language). That's the sort of thing I do when writing in English--I see in my blog just a couple days ago I wrote, "I just watching The Face of Evil again and . . ." I don't actually talk like a LOLCat, my writing just can't seem to keep up with my brain. I mean, you should see how many typos don't make it in.

I went to the Japanese market yesterday with the thought of buying a children's book to help me learn. I thought back to how reading The Chronicles of Narnia over and over as a kid helped me learn better English. If only I could find the Japanese C.S. Lewis.

I ended up buying a Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei manga, which was probably a bad idea. It does have hiragana next to all the kanji dialogue, and I was able to understand a lot of the words, but Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei has a lot of Japanese pop culture references and wordplay. I lost the thread of what was going on at around page 2. Well, it's a really pretty book, anyway.



I love how foreign books are designed with a fundamentally different aesthetic mentality. The cover is actually removable--it's a little dust cover, for a manga. It has a nice coarse texture.

Here a couple pictures of birds in flight I've taken recently;

Strange Simplicity

People talk even to-day about a double standard for men and women, that a man is respected for sleeping around a lot while for a woman it's considered cause for shame. I was impressed and a little amazed by how directly and progressively the issue's addressed in Mikio Naruse's 1953 film Older Brother, Younger Sister (あにいもうと). Even next to other strikingly feminist films of the period by Naruse and Mizoguchi, it's bold in its argument for sexual equality. It's also beautifully shot and contains astonishing performances. It's a really good movie.

Despite the title, the movie's actually about three siblings--Yoshiko Kuga is the youngest, San, Machiko Kyo plays Mon, the middle child, and the eldest, Ino, is played by Masayuki Mori. One might conclude the title refers to Mon being at the centre of the story, though she's hardly in the movie for the first hour. Instead, the story concerns the fallout from Mon getting pregnant by a student she barely knows and refusing to get an abortion. Mon moves out as the movie begins, leaving for Tokyo where we learn her baby is stillborn and she leads a lifestyle that requires her to constantly change her address. In the small town in which the movie takes place, San finds her relationship with her fiancé jeopardised as his parents now disapprove of her based on the behaviour of her sister. San's father is a lower class worker and Ino seems like a more ornery version of him. When he's not at work, he's at the Pachinko parlour or banging loose women.



Masayuki Mori seems like he was aiming for a versatility prize--within this five year period, he played the superficially stoic samurai in Rashomon, the Prince Myshkin character in Kurosawa's adaptation of The Idiot, and now here he plays an ignorant young working class live wire. Maybe if Toshiro Mifune hadn't been overshadowing him, Mori would've gotten greater international recognition. Though Mifune did seem to deliver more engaged performances. Mori here even seems to be imitating Mifune a little with his use of chin-jerks for emphasis.



The student who'd gotten Mon pregnant shows up after she's already moved to Tokyo and he apologises profusely to the father, offering a meagre sum of money he managed to scrape together. Mon's parents are upset, but things end quietly and amicably and the guy leaves. Ino's not satisfied, though, and stalks the young man before beating him.

Ino talks about how close he'd been with Mon growing up, talking about how they'd even gone to the toilet together, emphasising the connexion between the two. Their mother later also remarks on how similar they are, sex, and the social requirements attendant upon sex, significantly pointed out as the main difference between the siblings.

When Mon returns home and finds out what Ino did to the young student, she becomes enraged and an extraordinary scene ensues--Mon and Ino engage in what can best be described as a brawl while their mother and sister desperately try to break them up.



I need hardly say this isn't how a woman was supposed to behave. Mon's mother disapproves of Ino beating her, but she seems horrified that Mon fought back. She observes Tokyo has made Mon a "fearsome woman." And, incredibly, Mon calls Ino out on the double standard--explicitly saying he's angry at her for doing exactly what he does--sleeping around.



Machiko Kyo and Masayuki Mori make this scene brutal and captivating, particularly when Naruse's characteristic tranquillity takes up the bulk of the film. It's an amazing film.

No More Janis Thorns

I wonder how many of the people condemning M.I.A. for flipping off the camera during the Super Bowl also have posters or t-shirts of Johnny Cash with middle finger extended. It seems like most of the times I hear self righteous anger over lyrics or antics lately I can point to a case where Johnny Cash did the same thing and he's revered for it. Like the song Rihanna released a little while ago about shooting someone just for fun. I guess mischief is still considered more becoming in those who are white and male.



When I said I thought Amy Pond was the sexiest Doctor Who companion of all time, I think I'd forgotten about Leela. I just watching The Face of Evil again and that girl is so damn cute. I love the details about how generations have made myths and society in the years since the ship crashed, the survey team becoming "the Sevateem" and so on. Though I feel like there was a lot of unexplored material in Leela becoming travelling companion to the man whose face was the face she'd grown up believing to be evil incarnate. That he becomes someone she takes moral cues from, too--it would've been great seeing some really twisted psychological ripples from this.

With breakfast to-day I read the new Sirenia Digest, the two stories contained within seemingly about individuals whose lives are dominated by their repressed issues. "CAMUFARRE" is a pretty story about a girl who has supernatural chameleon abilities that are nicely paired with a personality filled with self doubt and fear of discovery. The second story, "THE TRANSITION OF ELIZABETH HASKINGS", is about a woman whose impossible romantic and sexual longings are accompanied by a strange nature she restrains for fear of dangerous, watery depths. A nice couple of stories.

Twitter Sonnet #352

Apple orders misplaced retrieve only
Beaded noodle new machines that go 'ping'.
Cakey surgeon masks mint too thoroughly.
Future robots will be the last to sing.
Takeshi will never get cake to Sue.
The hospital beds are full of train cars.
Sous chef surgeons can all breathe Mountain Dew.
Even to-day, porn leads to Eddie Mars.
Bert rain pummels Ernie humanity.
Scissor bills cut duck coat hangers at night.
Mayonnaise mucus won't shame Sean Hannity.
Exxon's liquorice won't prove Wonka right.
Muppet closets know a shaggy secret.
Knitted lightning heats the faded carpet.

I Can't Stand Up for Standing Up

I just noticed last night that Michael Shannon has a tiny role in Groundhog Day as "Fred". I wonder if Werner Herzog or David Lynch was inspired to cast him in My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? from the way he delivered the line, "Wrestlemania!" Probably not.

I'm pretty sure I failed last night's Japanese test. I studied eight times as hard for it as any test I got an A on in History or Anthropology. I feel like this is the first real class I've had. Or maybe it's slightly fucked up I think the only valid class is the one I'm not doing well in.

I don't know what happened. I just kept blanking. I remember looking at "tatsu" over and over in the study guide, telling myself, "Remember, this means stand up, this means stand up, this means stand up, this means stand up." Then test time, I see it and go, "What the fuck is 'tatsu'?" Well, I suppose I'm not likely to forget it now. I can even conjugate it--"Tatte kudasai (たって ください)."--"Please stand up." I may fail the class, but at least I'll learn Japanese.

Otherwise, I think I would have been okay if the test had just involved translating to English. But a good portion was translating English into Japanese. Every single one of those I'm certain I got at least one word wrong. So I'm hoping it's not graded on a sentence by sentence basis, but I'm guessing it probably is.

I suspect a lot of people didn't do too well on the test, from the way people were talking around me. Gods, people talk a lot in this class. They just carry on while the teacher's talking and I guess she's too meek to say anything. There's the kid in front of me who makes corny, pissing contest jokes like a twelfth grade nerd, "Of course, you could say ____, which means _____, haha." When the teacher calls roll, most people mumble, "Here" or raise their hands; he alone always belts out, "Koko desu!" And the guy next to him engages in the pissing contest by talking about what things are illegal and how the cops discriminate against him because he's black, though looking at him I'd say he's more likely getting the discrimination aimed at Arabs and Hispanics, assuming he's not entirely full of shit, which I don't. When the teacher told us last night that the kanji for "Earth/soil" "tsuchi" looks similar to the kanji for "bushi" the guy who talks about discrimination turned to people around him seriously and said, "bushi means warrior." Oof, I wanted to tell him to shut the fuck up. In general, I'm just tired of hearing people lord it over each other because they have some piece of knowledge the other doesn't. It's my reflexive disgust for this that keeps me from speaking Japanese in class, which I suppose isn't a good thing. I just feel so fucking presumptuous.

And the desks! I've been meaning to mention this--the class has the worst desks ever conceived of by man. They're really impressive in the ways they're badly designed--the desk space itself is around half the size of the traditional school desk, it's a thin plastic with a coarse surface for, I don't know, traction or something. Anyway, you can't write on it without another surface over it and maybe I'm old fashioned but I thought that was the main fucking point of a desk. It doesn't lend itself well to writing kanji, that's for sure. Both the desk part and the seat part are on hinges that snap up unexpectedly sometimes, too. It's like sitting in a clamshell, which just makes me a fucking pearl, doesn't it?

The Unfounded Diabolical Smirk

Some of the most confused vampires I've ever seen are at the centre of Jean Rollin's 1979 film Fascination. But everyone seems pretty confused in this movie. I guess because it's essentially a porno, Rollin figured things like consistent characterisation and motivations adhering to some kind of thread of personality were extraneous. Maybe I've been spoiled by the Japanese exploitation films I've watched lately--Fascination's a French film. Who would've thought the Japanese would have a surer hand at cinematic eroticism than the French? But some interesting visual ideas, beautiful women, and a degree of pure ridiculousness make Fascination an enjoyable film.

The story follows a thief named Mark, who's stolen some gold coins with the aid of a few cutthroats who betray him and try to take the coins for themselves rather than trust Mark to fence them in England. Mark runs from them to hide in a large chateau surrounded by a moat. Inside the house, he finds two beautiful women, Elizabeth and Eva, who claim to be servants.

At first they seem genuinely frightened by Mark until he locks them in a bedroom where Elizabeth giggles as she reveals a spare key for the room hidden under a table cover. This leads to them smugly approaching Mark and threatening him with daggers, which is where I thought, "Oh, so they were playing before and really they have supernatural vampire strength and abilities."



But no, vampirism in this movie is just rich people who like to drink blood. The rest of the movie went back and forth between me wondering how Mark can act so at ease with the apparent threat of imminent death and me wondering how the group of vampires can be so confident of their domination of Mark. By the end of the movie, it's clear neither side had any foundation for their smugness and everyone seems kind of stupid in retrospect.



Really, these people weren't cut out to be vampires or vagabond thieves, but as porn stars they're not too bad. There's a lot of okay faux lesbian stuff, kicking off with a scene between Elizabeth and Eva, though the director's compulsion to show that the two are actually kissing with tongue leads to somewhat awkward looking "tongue bumping" let's call it.



The sex in this movie is otherwise mostly based around power plays, involving one person's sexual possession and dominance of another. Around two thirds through the movie, a whole bunch of other vampire women show up led by Helene, who makes it clear to Mark that she's very much the dom here, and there's some exciting dialogue between them as they both posture, both claiming ability to take the other forcibly.

Then, when Mark wins fifteen minutes of slavery from Helene after a game of Blind Man's Bluff, the film really drops the ball. Mark leads Helene out of the room, but instead of going with them, the movie goes to the other women discussing whether Mark will humiliate their leader. The whole time I was saying, "Why don't we cut to them and find out?"

When we do finally go to them, both are still dressed and apparently nothing's happened. Mark tells her to undress, and she does . . . to some rather heavy duty Edwardian underwear, where she stops and Mark seems to feel content with her stopping.



He pretends like he's going to burn her with his cigar before she tells him the fifteen minutes are up. The time between her submitting to the idea of being his slave for fifteen minutes and her noting the fifteen minutes were up was around three minutes of film time. Jeez, Rollin, why even introduce the bit if that's all you're going to do? I thought maybe the actress playing Helene declined to appear nude, but she appears again shortly in a transparent ceremonial gown with the other girls.



It's unarmed and essentially naked that the girls plan on overpowering Mark and ritualistically murdering him. Their plans are thwarted when he chooses to exit the building, not quite running, but, to be fair, walking briskly.

He's upset because he found out that one of the vampires had killed with a scythe one of the thieves trying to kill him. This was one of the more visually fun moments in the film, as Eva, naked except for a black cloak, cut down the thief.



But it suffers from a long take of the woman posing artificially in front of the camera, and that's another problem with this movie--it was in desperate need of a better editor. Reaction shots are sorely missing from some scenes, and many shots last much longer than appropriate. One shot of a woman walking towards the camera even ends with her bumping into the camera.

This stuff is, though, part of the movie's charm and in the end I have to say it is a cute film.

America's Got Fingers

I got up too early, had some strong coffee, made some green tea and went over to my parents' house for the Super Bowl where I had a brandy, so I was peeing a lot. And I actually got caught up in the game, mostly because I've been listening to The Nick and Artie Show while playing Skyrim this past week, a show that's nominally a sports show. The two guys are so funny busting balls based on team loyalty, the funniest bit being Artie Lange's incredibly, wonderfully nasty parody of Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind", which you can listen to here. Lange invokes 9/11 and Mary Jo Kopechne just to stick it to Patriots fans. It was genius, and totally for that reason I was rooting for The Giants. And then the game ended up having all kinds of dramatic things like interceptions and barely completed passes and other things I only just barely understand. So I actually got caught up. Now I'm glad because I get to hear Artie Lange gloat to-morrow, and I know his gloating will be far more entertaining than Nick DePaolo's would've been.

I thought Madonna was a decent enough halftime show. I do wish she had avoided performing anything she wrote after 1994. She was very obviously lip-syncing, but judging from the quality of her live performances I've heard, I'd say it's very much for the better this way. And she had the only two modern rappers I like with her, Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. Kudos to M.I.A. for sneaking in a "I don't give a shit," and flipping off the world;



I suppose this shouldn't quite redeem her for that stupid ginger holocaust video she did, but I still like her Arular album.

The commercials seemed pretty dull this year. It was a bit disheartening seeing Howard Stern in the America's Got Talent commercial. Which is I guess part of why I've been listening to Nick and Artie instead. The Stern Show and Stern himself seem like they're getting more and more restrained lately. He's still the most natural interviewer I know of to-day, though. I did tune in for when he talked to Roger Waters a couple weeks ago and I thought it was a pretty good interview. Waters seemed very much at ease and Stern got him talking about the creative process behind Dark Side of the Moon--Waters claims the bulk of the creative credit, but said it took every member of the band to make the work happen and that he would listen to band members who checked him when he was on the wrong track. My favourite part of the interview, though, was when he talked about the initial inspiration for The Wall;



Twitter Sonnet #351

Embossed Ls stick on down in mid caress.
Fifteen screaming corpses sway on a tie.
Kitten collars whiten in starch duress.
Strange crows convene under a phoney pie.
Orthopaedic mattress salesmen collapse.
Raining Oscars devalue method mimes.
Angels trigger Basil Rathbone relapse.
Cocaine croissants commit light flaky crimes.
Parrots perverted the polygraph test.
Bubbles sterilise sinking idea.
Choosy chalices fill up just the best.
Winter's asteroids draw Madea.
Elephant recordings implicate dots.
Our violent gangsters made more sauce than Mott's.

Faces for the Occasion

In honour of Carnival going on right now, I thought I'd post a list of memorable movie masks. I'm going to try to avoid obvious ones like Eyes Wide Shut and Labyrinth, but those are great, too, and also I'm avoiding superhero films, though I have nothing against those. Just going for a specific vibe, I guess. Feel free to suggest some to me--I feel like there's probably a bunch of good ones I haven't seen.



Kingdom of Heaven

Not a great film, a bit too morally simplistic like a lot of Ridley Scott's recent films, but visually wonderful and the highlight of the movie is Edward Norton here as King Baldwin. He wears a mask throughout the whole film due to his leprosy and Norton gives an incredibly interesting performance. I didn't realise it was Edward Norton until I looked at the cast after the movie and he reminded me here of why I thought he was such an interesting actor. He's so expressive through this huge iron mask without ever resorting to unnaturally broad gestures and movements.





The Wicker Man (1973)

A movie that uses the instinctive disorientation reflexively repressed by bizarre festival practices to great effect. I love when Christopher Lee barks at disguised Howie here to get between the swords, "Remember, it's a game of chance!" as though that's supposed to be a comfort.



To Catch a Thief

It's not a huge part of the film, but this weird, possibly racist getup Cary Grant wears at the end as the only masked person at the masquerade ball seemed worth mentioning. It's one of Hitchcock's great films about subtly and blatantly dangerous flirtation.



Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

I could've picked a few David Lynch films for this list, but this one has the lines, "The man behind the mask is looking for the book with the pages torn out. He's under the fan now." Probably not a good idea to watch this if you haven't watched through the series yet, though maybe it wouldn't matter as much if you've already had the identity of Laura Palmer's killer spoiled for you. Which I've heard about happening plenty of times with plenty of films and shows. It's too bad, but I guess information is just unavoidable sometimes these days.



Shall We Dance (1937)

Not one of the best Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, but definitely not a bad one. It doesn't have any truly bad qualities like Follow the Fleet. It's a nice enough little screwball plot, and the movie introduces the great Gershwin song "They Can't Take That Away from Me". And, of course, there are the masks, the creepy realistic Ginger Rogers masks worn by the women Fred Astaire dances with at the end.



Excalibur

This kid showing up in a golden mask, giggling amongst a bunch of rotting, hanging corpses is one of the most satisfyingly creepy memories from my childhood, as I first saw the movie at a young age. There are a lot of other mask-like helmets and veils in this movie, too. And, of course, it has Wagner.



Mirrormask

I have this movie on DVD but for some reason I haven't watched it since I saw it in theatre. But it has some wonderfully strange mask designs by Dave McKean and a fun screenplay by Neil Gaiman.

The Use of Memory

Why is it everyone remembers Mel Gibson's anti-Semitism before his racism or misogyny? I'm looking at this story on Ain't It Cool News about how AICN is hosting a premiere of Gibson's upcoming action/adventure film Get the Gringo and all the comments are about Mel and Jews. I mean, sure, he said anti-Semitic things when he was pulled over for drunk driving that sounded like they came from the heart. But for me, they just don't stick out as much as the recording of him saying to his wife, "I hope you get raped by a pack of niggers." I'm a believer in the idea that people get a false sense of familiarity with celebrities, that you can't really know someone without talking to them. But when a guy thinks that's okay to say--I mean, the levels of repugnance are manifold. There's the threat of violence to his wife, there's threat of sexual assault, there's the use of the word "pack" as though referring to animals, and of course the "n-word". I felt like Michael Richards got more flack for it, and he was clearly saying it for intentional shock value. Mel was using it like a Klansman, to refer to a species he believes to exist who are subhuman ("pack"). How do people forget this shit? Honestly? I guess maybe I just don't see the awesomeness of his acting or directing talent that eclipses this. I can separate the effectiveness of someone's art from who they are in their private lives, but when a just competent director with a Christ complex he wears on his sleeve is recorded sounding pretty extravagantly and unapologetically racist and misogynist, I don't feel compelled to give him any kind of a pass.

What the fuck, AICN?

Anyway, I watched 50/50 last night, a "comedy-drama" from last year starring Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon Levitt. I wonder what Nietzsche would make of the term "comedy-drama". Maybe, "Here's your Apollonian sundae with an Apollonian cherry on top." It's a good, fairly lightweight and funny film.



I found myself engaged by the story despite the fact that a lot of it adheres to essentially sitcom logic. It's based on the true story of the film's screenwriter, Will Reiser, and his battle with cancer as well as his relationship with Seth Rogen and how it helped pull him through. I already knew the guy survived his cancer because both he and Rogen appeared on The Howard Stern Show to promote the film. To Howard Stern they revealed that the two of them became friends writing for Da Ali G Show and that they came up with the premise for one of my favourite Bruno bits;



Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays "Adam Lerner", the fictionalised version of Reiser, while Rogen essentially plays himself. Seth Rogen is such a fun, laid back and likeable actor, but I actually found his stuff in the movie among its least effective moments. The premise of him using Adam's cancer to get himself and Adam laid is funny, but it's played a bit too broadly, and the way Rogen approaches the first girl in this project might as well have been with a neon sign declaring his intentions above his head. This is what I mean by the movie's sitcom logic, which rears its ahead again in other places, as with the black and white pathetic relationship Adam has with his girlfriend played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who cheats on him after not having sex with him for a long time even before his cancer.

Much more effective is the relationship that develops between Adam and Katharine, his therapist played by Anna Kendrick whose tops have necklines that lower as the film progresses.



Her adorable awkwardness at learning her new role as therapist, awkwardly implementing therapeutic techniques like ambient music and gentle arm patting, plays well with Adam's vulnerability in his crisis. It's this chemistry, Gordon-Levitt's commitment and some of the genuine insight into the helpless feelings brought on by his situation in the script, that makes the movie work as well as it does.

For a movie of this kind, it's not bad. I did think about Ikiru, and how its ear was so much better for humanity and the nature of life and death, but not every movie can be a masterpiece and maybe it's not even fair to bring up Ikiru. As a more Apollonian work, 50/50 makes cancer easier to swallow, and sometimes that's a good thing.

Spring Foreboding

Happy Groundhog Day, everyone.

I was going to set this video to my Twitter Sonnet, but I thought it was better by itself.



I suppose I couldn't explain to Socrates to his satisfaction why I thought these leaves were interesting. Still reading Birth of Tragedy, and Nietzsche seems to regard Socrates as partially responsible for the death of tragedy, though he puts most of the blame with Euripides. It's interesting to read Nietzsche's ideas even though I've never read Euripides. Nietzsche says its Socrates constant need to look for the rational and logical that killed tragedy, and resulted in something that's neither Apollonian nor Dionysian. Nietzsche also seems to see comedy as very Apollonian, which makes a great deal of sense to me, going back to what I was saying about Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I think a lot of people mistake logic as being Apollonian, but its Socrates' logic that Nietzsche said made Euripides drift away from both Apollo and Dionysus.

The Wikipedia entry on Apollonian and Dionysian has a bit about the concepts being used in linguistics that I think nicely demonstrates Nietzsche's meaning;

Similar to Nietzsche's usage, some linguists use Apollonianism to denote "the wish to describe and create order, especially with unfamiliar information or new experience. An updated, albeit frivolous, example of this general tendency is the story about the South Dakotan who went to Athens and was happily surprised to find out that the Greeks are fans of NASA’s projects: wherever he went, he saw the name Apollo. As this anecdote shows, the ‘Apollonian tendency’ would also seem to include a significant dimension of ethnocentricity."

So in fact, not only is Apollonian order not necessarily logical, it can be quite illogical.



In case anyone's wondering, I didn't have to sing in class yesterday. In fact, I could've studied half as hard as I did--I'd memorised the whole song, but the test turned out to be "fill in the blank". Oh, well, I have a feeling having this song memorised will come in handy.

Twitter Sonnet #350

Softer membrane wands make foolish magic.
Macaroni horns paint preservative
Fox hunts over tomato paste, tragic
Steads of nature's chlorophyll additive.
Styrofoam buses squeeze fruit punch into
Classrooms that melt with Hell's apple boiling.
Senators all secretly just want to
Get some cotton candy terraforming.
After school trees carpet bomb the bread field.
Jelly sprays in crisscross patterns over
Dragon ideas of the sandwiches killed
For the capricious young fast food lover.
Ornate toupees baldly display the lie.
And lo, for a good fleece, gold sheep must die.

Time for Adventure?

No time for a proper entry to-day--I have to leave for a dentist's appointment in an hour, then I get lunch and madly sing a song about verbs until class starts. I'll be happy when to-day's over. There's gonna be a party in Skyrim to-night.

I've gotten Brunnhilde to level 35. I've decided to explore every cave, fort, ruin, and camp in one of Skyrim's holds. I suspect by the time I'm done I'll have maxed out the abilities I've chosen for my character. Mind, Skyrim has something like eight of these holds/counties/shires, and all of them have dungeons to explore, which is of course what's always been one of the chief appeals of Bethesda games. There are dungeons in Morrowind I still haven't explored. Skyrim raises the ante a bit with so many unique feeling dungeons. In Morrowind and Oblivion, you got used to a certain set of prefab corridors and traps thrown together. There's some repeated elements in Skyrim dungeons, but on the whole I'm impressed by how nearly every dungeon has unique items and even little stories. A tomb I finished a couple nights ago had the ghost of someone who was keeping a Big Bad sealed in, which of course I had to defeat. Another tomb had this sarcophagus I had to find two glowing skulls for in order to get to the boss fight. The ruins often have NPCs exploring them, sometimes all of them having been killed already with just their journals telling their stories, others attack you to protect their claim on booty, others of course enlist your aid.

Anyway, I probably oughta go brush my teeth.