Animal Catalogue Rebellion

I haven't been able to get any lizards to sit for me so far this year. Not since that baby one a few months ago, anyway. I guess he didn't know any better. The one above scrambled off his post when I stepped up for a macro shot.

After a day of having had too much sleep, to-day I didn't get enough. But I managed to draw a page of comic anyway. I think it's taken me well over a month to draw six pages, ink three and a half, and colour two. I do so hate inking. The pace'll pick up once I'm done with my Japanese final on Monday.

I currently have a 91% in the class, so I guess I don't have a lot to worry about. The teacher spoke to me after class on Monday to compliment me, and asked if I had Japanese friends who were coaching me. I said no, and that I actually felt like I was really struggling. I guess I'm doing better than I feel. Maybe it's just that I want to be so much further than I am. I still can't watch anime without subtitles, and if I can't do that, I haven't won anything, have I?

I'm three episodes into the new GAINAX series, Medaka Box (めだかボックス). The seventh episode aired in Japan yesterday, so I'm a little behind on this one, but I only just heard about it a week and a half ago. I'm reminded of Dantalian no Shoka, GAINAX's previous series, in that it's a much more typical series than what GAINAX is normally associated with, certainly it's a lot more normal than Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt. But at the same time, its consistently good animation and characterisations that don't neatly snap into moe (萌え) cookie cutter patterns set it apart. In fact, it reminds me a bit of 80s high school comedy anime.

It's actually not a harem series. It's a shonen series not about one guy who has a bunch of girls in love with him. Crazy, I know. It has a cast of boy and girl characters in roughly equal number and so far neither sex acts dumber or hornier than the other. At the centre is Medaka Kurokami, head of the student council, and her childhood friend, a boy named Zenkichi Hitoyoshi. There is plenty of fan service, but in sadly almost totally uniquely GAINAX fashion, the show doesn't treat sexuality like something that should never be directly acknowledged by decent women and Medaka's a bit of an exhibitionist. Which is nice, except they've drawn her with breasts so big they're at the point for me where my brain stops taking them as breasts and starts taking them as tumours.

The show is funny, particularly the second episode where Medaka tries to catch someone's runaway dog by dressing as a dog. I'm definitely looking forward to watching more of this show.

To Be Kirk is to Always Touch Kirk

Never separate Shatner from himself. It's too cruel. It's like in the old south when husbands and wives were sold separately to different plantations.

This is from "Return to To-morrow", a pretty good episode about dead, godlike aliens who ask members of the Enterprise crew to allow them the use of their bodies temporarily while they built new android bodies for themselves. Things go horribly wrong, believe it or not. The alien in Spock's body ends up wanting to keep it and convinces the one in the body of Doctor Mulhall to try to keep hers too. This is Doctor Mulhall, who only appears in this episode.

Kirk meets her in the transporter room for the first time when they're about to beam down to the planet. Her appearance interrupts his pre-beam huddle with Spock and McCoy and she's given a close-up from his POV with Most Beautiful Woman in the Galaxy strings on the soundtrack. And she was a looker, which made me almost throw up when I realised she was played by the same actress who played Doctor Pulaski on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Boy, it feels cruel saying that, but it is what it is. Well, to be fair, Pulaski was very boring and she did have a lot of dumb dialogue.

I'm running pretty late to-day because I forgot to set my alarm clock. Fortunately I don't have a very demanding day. Class to-night is just watching the rest of the presentations we didn't get through on Monday. The assignment was to give a presentation based on some aspect of Japanese culture with some visual aid--I did mine on actress Setsuko Hara and I showed clips from Ozu's Late Spring and Kurosawa's The Idiot. They seemed to go over well--I'd post them here, except studio Toho had YouTube send me an angry e-mail about a clip I posted from one of their moves a little while ago. Frustratingly, it was a movie that's not even available in the U.S. Even under the, to say the least, dubious idea that a free clip on YouTube is going to dissuade people from buying the movie--rather than encouraging them to buy it--it makes absolutely no sense and smacks of just a general blanket of corporate meanness.

Career Opportunities

A lot of people seem to be satisfied by a cleverly constructed plot. Last year's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (no commas, commas frighten people) aspires to do more. It doesn't accomplish anything very extraordinary, but it's a perfectly enjoyable spy thriller.

The movie mainly consists of an incredible cast of British actors trying to get information out of one another with casual conversation--John Hurt, Ciaran Hinds, Tom Hardy, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch and, of course, Gary Oldman in the lead role of George Smiley who, as the film opens, is second only to John Hurt's Controller in British Intelligence.

Smiley's story provides an insightful distillation of the whole international cloak and dagger business. He's a cool customer, rarely raising his voice or cracking a smile--his name apparently being a dry bit of humour. He opens up in one scene to his subordinate, played by Cumberbatch, about how he tried to get his nemesis, spymaster Karla, to defect. He tells Cumberbatch that he asked Karla if it wasn't time to acknowledge that the system he served was as meaningless as the system Smiley served.

It's the most emotional part of the movie, which is appropriate since it addresses the buried heart of the whole affair, which is a bunch of men just playing a big chess game with, in the end, little more significance than an actual game of chess except people sometimes get killed while playing.

We learn Smiley's weak spot is his wife, Ann, with whom he has a difficult relationship and whose face we never see. This helps emphasise for us his isolation for his inability to connect with her and therefore helps convey the lonely, disconnected quality of Smiley's business.

Twitter Son6net #385

The three buttons balance in counterfeit.
Cylinders stack in a noisy jacket.
Bubble wedges divide the alphabet.
Streamers stick in the red rusty bracket.
Joke suits excel at storing backup food.
Sins cue yak rook suns to start Doctor Who.
Corduroy token names lighten the mood.
There's nothing a tomato guy can't do.
Taxes interrogate the Latin text.
Orchards of feather dusters sweep the sky.
Unripe limes pelt Tyrannosaurus Rex.
CAT scans of Thor inevitably fry.
Little men pour albums in a young pond.
Rafters taped the film cat auteurs have conned.

The Actress

For class to-day, the assignment is to do a presentation on some aspect of Japanese culture, so I've decided to talk about Setsuko Hara (原節子). It's nice to be doing an assignment that really puts me in my element, though the twenty sentences in Japanese I was required to write for the presentation don't cover quite as much ground as I'd have liked. I found myself wishing I knew how to say things like "played against type in" and "was active from the 1930s into the early 1960s". Though I sort of like the enigmatic way my presentation ends with, "In 1963, Yasujiro Ozu died. Also, Setsuko Hara retired. She said it was because she hated her job."

I read the first story in the new Sirenia Digest to-day, "HAUPTPLATTE/GEGENPLATTE", which comes across as a nice conflict between Science Fiction and Fantasy. Instead of simply the broader treatment usually used for the theme, where a young protagonist must deal with the real, adult world eclipsing youthful imagination, Caitlin gives us a story about two people whose perspectives are at war. We never really find out who's right--the girl who says she's a dragon that's been transformed by a sorcerer or the woman who says she's performing surgery and genetic manipulation on a girl to make her into a dragon. And it's perfect that we never find out, because it keeps us in the volatile neutral zone of creation, as each pole deploys new psychological tactics to make its perspective real. It's a very interesting way of using the fundamental differences between Science Fiction and Fantasy to explore the intimate nature of the creative process itself.

A Scandalous Affair, Within Reason, Don't Let's Get Carried Away

In 1946's Gilda, when asked if she was decent, Rita Hayworth replied with a famous, incredulous, "Me?!" If the same question had been put to her character in 1952's Affair in Trinidad, she may have responded, "Of course I'm decent! How dare you insinuate otherwise! I won't have it!" That's one of the key reasons Affair in Trinidad, while having its good points, isn't half the movie Gilda is.

Comparisons are invited by the fact that Affair in Trinidad paired Hayworth again with her Gilda co-star, Glenn Ford, the story's set south of the border, Hayworth plays a bar singer, and Ford is often shown smouldering with jealousy watching her perform with apparent gleeful abandon.

But while that jealousy and cruel hedonism reflect a truly, wonderfully nasty story of sex and reciprocal psychological torture in Gilda, in Affair in Trinidad it's an infinitely duller story of Hayworth being forced to act interested in her husband's killer by the police so that she can get evidence against him, and she can't, for convoluted reasons, let her husband's brother (Ford) in on it, despite the fact that the two of them have fallen in love.

All the character motives are based on the machinations of the police investigating her husband's death and crimes related to it. Ford's character is sanitised, too--instead of a small time hustler trying to make it big running a casino, he's just some guy who wants to know the truth about his brother. We learn practically nothing about him otherwise.

Hayworth still looked great in 1952, though subtly haggard, perhaps an indication of her private emotional difficulties. She's introduced performing a pretty fantastic number barefoot (she's dubbed with another singer, but the dancing's still good), though its lyrics about men blaming themselves for falling for her are curiously opposite to those from the song used in Gilda, "Put the Blame on Mame", and far less naughty.

A Second Rate Mattress

My childhood memories have a more favourable impression of 1971's Bedknobs and Broomsticks than I did watching it last night. It's not an altogether bad film, but I remember enjoying it more--or enjoying having it on while eating dinner or something when I was a kid. I remember often seeing it piecemeal; I remember often not getting past the animated segment. Yet it was the end of the movie that I liked most when I watched it last night, though I couldn't blame anyone for getting bored during the very lame, sadly typical example of animation in the 1970s.

Angela Lansbury and David Tomlinson are both well cast and their characters aren't so badly written that these two good actors couldn't make something genuinely interesting out of them. There's something I really love about a woman making genuine magic from a guy thinking he's getting away with a con. Eglantine Price is nicely both practical and casually fantastic (until she casually and bafflingly disavows witchcraft at the very end of the movie), and Emelius Browne is a nervous man with small dreams who inadvertently sets big things into motion which Eglantine barely seems to want to slow down to let him process. It's a very nice dynamic, its full potential not quite exploited.

Too much time is spent with the three cockney orphans with which the film's saddled, who rarely react to things with the effective credibility of the kids in Mary Poppins. The Bedknobs and Broomsticks kids cry or fuss almost at random, never when it seems right for the mood of the moment.

The movie had the same (credited) director and musical composers as Mary Poppins, but perhaps we can see the effect of Walt Disney's absence in the far more limply contrived 1971 film. Disney used to have the composers come up to his office and play "Feed the Birds" for him in his office, just because he loved to hear it. I somehow doubt the Disney studio head in 1971 felt the same way about "Portobello Road". As with so many movies, Walt Disney personally oversaw nearly every aspect of Mary Poppins' production.

But of course Walt's absence is most clearly felt in the animated segment in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. It'd been a while since I'd watched animation from Disney's slump period, and I was amazed not merely by superficial things like terribly obviously recycled frames from other movies, but the general lack of life. The football match is a compilation of static shots that feel very static, containing nothing of the mad energy of the fox hunt in Mary Poppins.

However, following the animated sequence is a surprisingly effective climax to the film where Eglantine uses her spell to animate inanimate objects to raise an army of museum armour to attack a small force of Nazis who've secretly landed in England (the movie's set during World War II).

It's wonderful, creepy, and exciting to see the amassed forces of antique medieval equipment on the hills, ready to defend England while the witch commanding them flies above with a sabre. Which makes it all the more depressing when the payoff is just three or four of the armour sets engaging in slapstick comedy with the Nazi buffoons.

So, it's not something I can say is a wholly bad film, but comparing it to Mary Poppins it's certainly an illuminating illustration of how much of what made the Disney company great was Walt Disney himself.

Twitter Sonnet #384

Most microwaves are never fertilised.
Ice thoughts spread in the unborn burrito.
Yellowed edges make no Hot Pocket eyes.
Radiation space sleeps in utero.
Parentheses candy contains white sod.
Airplane aprons staged a home cooked blitzkrieg.
Olympic jewellers pushed a diamond cod.
Breathing basketballs will soon also beg.
We win with tanning bed unicycles.
Hollow, difficult seats push us all up.
Tears tell of pumpkin terraced icicles.
Tiny thimbles filled the space buttercup.
Shorter buzz saws ramble on lemongrass.
Black rain arrests the too cold coffee class.

The Bridge

My bullfrog neighbour again. He sure looks happy. He just sits under his bridge watching everyone go by. I feel like one day he's going to present riddles to those seeking to cross.

Here's a better picture I posted on Facebook last week;

I've been in a good mood for a few days now, ever since my professional registration for Comic-Con went through. I guess it's kind of dumb, but it's a huge relief knowing I'll be able to go. I've been going to the Con for more than a decade and it would feel pretty crummy getting left out this year. I don't know why I love it so much, there's just so much going on there that I'm into.

Professional registration is free, and I'm kicking myself for never trying this before. I think it costs 175 dollars now for a four day pass. I see in 2002 I wrote; "Just found out that the Comicon costs actually 25 dollars to get in instead of the 20 dollars that I thought, so, since I'm paying for both Trisa and myself, I need to figure out to-day where to get an extra ten dollars." I wonder if I went for all four days. Gods, my old entries are annoying. I guess it's not weird I feel ten years older than the guy who wrote that entry. I see it was 2006 when I posted my first long Con Report, which began, "I got into the Comic-Con at about 11:30am to-day, and walked into hall H where, to my surprise, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez were onstage, just starting to talk about their new "double feature" movie called Grindhouse." Things have changed. The idea of just waltzing into Hall H to see a big panel in progress is so far fetched. You have great hairballs of Twilight fans clogging the queue filter now. The hairball metaphor works because of all the frizzy hair.

2009 was the first year I went with a camera and got photos and video. I oughta be posting more this year, so stay tuned, this July.

Wells after Ripper

I'd never have pictured Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells, or even as the hero of a movie, but he plays both in 1979's Time after Time. And he does a good job, as does David Warner as Jack the Ripper. It's a movie with a gleeful lack of modesty, and mostly it's fun, in some ways clever, but also obtrusively dumb and formulaic in others.

The story is that H.G. Wells has actually built a time machine, and he invites some friends over to see it, off-handedly referring to the fact that the bright white illumination in his basement is courtesy of Thomas Edison's new electric light.

When in reality, bulbs weak by to-day's standards were considered obnoxious by many critics of the electric light, the rather modern looking, pervasive white light is barely acknowledged in the movie. There's an attempt at historical accuracy, or at least credibility, by name checking Edison, but the movie really oughtn't to have bothered. When we're talking about H.G. Wells pursuing Jack the Ripper to 1979, I don't think most people are going to get hung up on the fact that Wells has a pretty well lit basement.

The Ripper is amongst Wells' guests, though Wells doesn't know it. He knows him as Dr. John Leslie Stevenson, a prominent surgeon who always beats Wells at chess.

The police track Jack to Wells' house after the time machine demonstration, and the doctor steals it to get away, thus beginning the chase plot. The machine has a lot of plot convenient eccentricities--it has a big key in its side the Ripper immediately asks about that can cause the death of the would-be time traveller if it's simply pulled out. It's like having a destruct button on the trunk of your car. Good idea.

I liked Wells when he's in the future, trying to track down the Ripper. He's not completely unable to handle his surroundings, unlike people from the past in other science fiction stories, who often seem to be all but crippled by the sounds of cash registers. Wells finds the stuff strange, but he's smart and quickly adapts. He meets Mary Steenburgen at a bank, and the two of them have a lot of cute dialogue, from his attempt as a Victorian advocate of women's liberation dealing with her candid sex talk. The movie's set in San Francisco, where Wells' machine resides in a museum--apparently the machine transports the traveller to where the machine is in the future.

Wells tracks the Ripper down with Steenburgen's help, a kind of clever bit of writing--she changes pounds to dollars for British travellers at the bank, and she handled the Ripper's money before Wells and recommended a hotel to the Ripper. Of course, there's no mention of the fact that the two men are using currency that doesn't resemble British currency in 1979, but at least we established that Edison made Wells' basement light.

Mostly the plot mechanics are one bit of dumb after another. When the Ripper's hit by a car and taken to the hospital, a nurse coldly walks away when Wells, seeking to view the Ripper's corpse, tells her he's not family and that the man "has no family". She walks away in disgust from the one man who has information on their John Doe because he says he's not family. This is of course just to provide an excuse for Wells and Steenburgen to go on dates even though the Ripper's still running loose.

Later, when Wells demonstrates his time machine to her and they discover that she's killed by the Ripper a day before the point in the future where she and Wells travel to, he for some reason persuades her to go back to before her murder, and then a series of unlikely developments occur to place her at the exact place and time of her murder, despite the fact that she knows about it beforehand.

But the leads are sweet, and the movie has a bit of charm. Director Nicolas Meyer is good at creating tense, exciting situations even when they don't actually make sense. I sort of have to like a movie, too, that references both Vertigo and The Red Shoes.

Assembling the Young

We have ducklings. In all the years since the duck mob moved in on this territory, this is the first time I've seen little ducklings.

"Now, children, in to-day's lesson you will observe as your mother takes all the bread thrown our way by the human." I don't know, maybe she regurgitated it later. I couldn't get one piece to the kids.

Mother presents vocal arguments on behalf of her progeny.

After this, I went with Tim to see The Avengers, which I liked a lot, though I probably would've liked it a lot more if I cared about the Phil character. Maybe I was never sold on him because whenever he showed up in the other movies it immediately felt like a commercial. The presence of Samuel L. Jackson said to me, "Cool, Nick Fury's here!" The presence of Phil said to me, "Various organisations and individuals keen on making a long term profitable franchise investment are here!" He always seemed like a guy in a cell phone ad and the new movie didn't change that impression.

Otherwise, I'd say Joss Whedon accomplished what many may have said was impossible and actually delivered on four years of build-up. It seems like Whedon's not terribly great at first impressions, and his attempt to make a strong beginning falls a little flat, particularly when Scarlett Johansson's introduction is diminished by some improbably naive and accommodating Russian gangsters. But Whedon's good at the long haul, making a sensible plot entertaining by having it processed for us by credible characterisations. The friction between the humble Captain America and the showboat Iron Man is well played and helps to serve the central theme of control versus freedom, as does Mark Ruffalo's extremely effective, understated performance as Bruce Banner.

Tom Hiddleston's Loki has credibly progressed from the confused and resentful young man in Thor to someone who's decided to cast his lot with world domination, reasoning power is the best way to peace, even as his essentially broken personality won't allow him to keep all the pieces together. Whedon has repeatedly come back to this theme of power versus freedom--going at least as far back as the Jasmine arc on Angel--but it is of course a kind of story that lends itself very well to a superhero universe. And the movie, more than any other superhero movie, felt like a superhero comic put on screen. No attempt is made to "ground" the heroes with realistic mise en scenes, or to give them domestic soap opera plots (how bad does that new Spider-Man look? "All my life I've wanted the truth about my parents." Oy vey). 89% of The Avengers takes place on future technology sets or in the sky. Whedon knows he can trust the characters and the actors to create emotional traction. And I loved the cameo by Harry Dean Stanton.

Twitter Sonnet #383

Torso couches complete a huge jacket.
Steeple cuts replenish divine hair gel.
Mullets are a covert cardboard racket.
Fly notes wrote Ts about when to compel.
Elongated bathtubs quietly point.
Glowing against his shirt, began Alfred.
Emu men mocked magazines by joint.
Lego girls sang a trapezoid ballad.
Compliments will reach the largest lizards.
Potatoes curl on a crimson skillet.
Exits locked with gum are fire hazards.
Mischievous flame once had a cold mullet.
Yellow eggs wobble off the grey treadmill.
Beach sand numbers hide a static crab will.

Across a Sea without Conversation

There are so many great elements to Richard Fleischer's 1958 film The Vikings. It's an incredible and unique looking movie, shot by Jack Cardiff. It features an energetic and interesting performance by Kirk Douglas, a stunningly gorgeous Janet Leigh, narration by Orson Welles, and amazing, copious location shots in Norway, Croatia, and France. Which makes it all the more a pity that the movie as a whole doesn't hold together due to limply constructed lead characters.

Tony Curtis stars as a Viking slave who also, unbeknownst to him, is heir to the English throne. It's his total lack of personality that mostly sinks this film. There's one scene where some attempt is made to inject some flavour, where he rips Janet Leigh's dress so she has an easier time rowing after he's rescued her, but it feels forced and awkward.

Kirk Douglas' character, the Viking Erik, son of the Viking leader Ragnar, is more interesting--he's at the centre of a curiously sympathetically portrayed, for the 50s, bloodthirsty pack of Vikings. It's maybe these tricky moral waters that led to a lack of focus in Erik's characterisation, as he switches at times from petty villain to a man whose conscience is struggling to come out. Off screen conflict between Douglas and Fleischer on how the character ought to be portrayed may also have led to some muddle, but Douglas' performance keeps your attention.

The Vikings are unambiguously established as murderers, rapists, and thieves and when Janet Leigh's English princess Morgana is captured, we fear for her as Erik seems a very real and present threat even though the plot weakly establishes a need to keep the hostage undamaged.

The scene where Erik's longboat attacks Morgana's cog is terrific, even though one suspects a single longboat would have greater difficulty taking out a well armed cog; the Vikings were throwing spears against English longbowmen at the higher elevation and better defended position afforded by the cog. But the scene is great simply for the fact that the people are clearly on actual ships.

The look is the real star of this movie. I wish I'd seen it while I was making Venia's Travels--this is so close to the look I was going for. The costumes are gorgeous, and of course Jack Cardiff's cinematography is great as always. Cardiff and Fleischer also made Conan the Destroyer, almost thirty years later, and there's certainly a similar feel though The Destroyer's budget was clearly much smaller. Conan the Destroyer is the better film for characters rendered far better, but The Vikings definitely wins on visuals.

Long Water Bird Shadows

Last night I dreamt I was in a large, crowded super market where everyone was behaving like it was an MMORPG. Most of the time I couldn't say exactly what it was about their behaviour that made them seem like MMORPG avatars, aside from the fact that everyone moved at a trot and mindlessly grabbed items from shelves. It was more something about the cold hunger of everyone's actions that conveyed the impression to me. I also had a dream about Kirk, Spock, and McCoy trying to leave a desert city during a sandstorm but since only Kirk had a mount, it was decided he would leave alone and come back with help.

I took this picture while my sister was feeding these two ducks in my parents' driveway. I watched Drive again with her last night, and I remain impressed by the film. I understand a woman tried to sue the producers of the film for false advertising because it wasn't a cacophonous video game like The Fast and the Furious. I guess that's why Wikipedia says moviegoers at CinemaScore give it an average rating of C- while it's on virtually every critic's top ten list for 2011. It's such a brilliant exercise in mood and also a great action noir. Though, thinking last night how Taxi Driver was an influence on the film, I couldn't help thinking about what makes Taxi Driver a superior film, which is that Travis Bickle is a much more flawed person than the Driver. Although the action is shot with a satisfying kinetic reality, the isolation of the Driver from people for his violent urges feels more like a superhero story because the Driver's violence always works out for good while Bickle's actions are always more ambiguous and worrisome.

However, Ryan Gosling creates a great sense of vulnerability in the role. He's larger than life, but resonates on a very human level. He's kind of a dark Indiana Jones, maybe.

To-night I need to write an essay in class completely in Japanese. I think I'll do okay, but I feel like I need to prepare a bit. I wonder if it's going to need to be in MLA format.

One of the new words I've learned with the new lesson is the word for "writer", 作家 (pronounced sakka). It uses the kanji for "to make" and the kanji for "house". Not so much to say making a house as to say, I think, someone who makes things inside a house. Someone who doesn't get out much, I guess, which certainly seems appropriate.

Snakes and Rifles

Sure, this guy's wig looks ridiculously bad. Sure, it doesn't make him look even slightly alien. But . . . er. Well, I guess Shatner's toupee looks pretty good by comparison.

"A Private Little War" is the second second season episode of Star Trek to bring in a pretty heavy handed Garden of Eden metaphor, where the Klingons and the crew of the Enterprise take on the role of serpent, as is directly mentioned by Kirk several times. The Adam here is the totally peaceful crude agricultural people who are so innocent they don't even know how bad those wigs look.

Kirk realises he needs to arm the more peaceful natives with flintlock rifles to compete with the villages the Klingons armed with flintlock rifles, this apparently being a pretty broad allegory for the Vietnam War, except the motives for the Klingons are never quite clear. Anyway, while the people of Vietnam were certainly victims of conflicts between larger world powers, I'd hardly go so far as to suggest they would've been perfectly innocent on their own--I wouldn't say that about any culture.

Still, I suppose it is a nice message about the virtues of non-interference. I was reminded of learning about the Yanomami in anthropology class, and how, although they were a people who frequently warred with one another, people died far less often before western traders started giving them guns. Still, there was rape and other forms of violence in their culture before that.

"A Private Little War" may have been a good episode without the religious influence. Something that really annoyed me about it was how it treated the one female character as a result of the Christian influence, the sexy witch wife of the tribal leader who heals a poisoned Kirk with an orgasm, which seems like something that ought to be celebrated on multiple levels.

Instead, the episode portrays her desire to protect their tribe with Kirk's superior weaponry as the antics of a two dimensional villain. When she manages to steal Kirk's phaser, she inexplicably takes it to the opposing tribe, then inexplicably doesn't use it when they try to gang rape her. This is all to provide the super peaceful leader of the good tribe with motivation to use guns against the other tribe.

There is something very evocatively sad about Kirk resignedly giving rifles to one tribe to balance power instead of letting one side annihilate the other. It's a shame so much got in the way of that idea.

Twitter Sonnet #382

Classist sandwiches spread coal on mayo.
Shower boxers welcomed the Queen Mary.
Tub aquarium dreams drenched Scott Baio.
Moonmen sold dim sketches of Chuck Berry.
Airplane upholstery tips a banana.
Heaven's a polaroid of a drugstore.
Cherry dilutes laughter in Montana.
The white shoes dance only for albacore.
Sudden seconds collapse for nerfed cheekbone.
Pizza's stricken by Satan's hula hoop.
Fate dives to stop the crimson vaudeville loan.
Donkey ears are but an incomplete loop.
Purple staples fix brightly cold rainbows.
Flintlock spells ignite the first latex rose.

Fiestas are Illogical

Happy Cinco de Mayo, みなさん. I celebrated it properly last night with a margarita and the second season Star Trek episode "Journey to Babel".

Watching the show in production order is really starting to pay off as it's at around a third of the way through the second season that the Kirk/Spock/McCoy chemistry has really started to come together. The three play off each other so perfectly, Kirk arbitrating the poles of Spock's reason and McCoy's never-ending exasperation.

"Journey to Babel" is about Spock's parents, particularly Sarek, and it's strange how much Sarek looks the same as he does in the Star Trek: The Next Generation third season episode I watched relatively recently, written by Peter S. Beagle. The plots are somewhat similar, too, both featuring Sarek experiencing a serious health issue which requires an Enterprise crew member to put himself in jeopardy in an intimate situation with Sarek, Picard in the Next Generation episode and Spock in the original series episode, which is written by D.C. Fontana, who I only just last night realised was a woman. I guess I assumed they only let guys write lines for Kirk. She might be one of the best character writers for the original series and I like her comments about the episode quoted on the episode's Memory Alpha page.

"One of the points I [...] wanted to make believable in 'Babel' was that both Spock and Sarek were right – as their own convictions applied to themselves – and wrong – as their convictions applied to each other."

It's something you see too infrequently in the first season, a dispute between characters that doesn't arise just from one character being weirdly dumb.

This is Your Knife

Although it ostensibly seems to be about hypnotism, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 1997 film Cure uses the device of fictional hypnotic techniques to tell a story about the power of messages and the human capacity to control the perceptions of others. It's an interesting film, flawed but cunningly shot and with extremely thoughtful and thought provoking dialogue.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is of no relation to Akira Kurosawa nor does his filmmaking style seem to be influenced by the more well known Kurosawa. Wikipedia quotes him as listing Hitchcock and Ozu as influences. I can certainly see Hitchcock, though it's hard to see how Ozu had any particular influence on such a tense, bloody film. Released in 1997, it's right at the beginning of the era in Japanese media heavily influenced by Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's use of train signals for transition shots as well as the psychological quality of the movie are both reminiscent of Hideaki Anno's series.

I've never wanted so badly to see a cop go Dirty Harry on a suspect. Mamiya, the film's antagonist, is an irritating little jerkoff who abuses his ability to make people kill each other like a kid casually wrecking the Porsche his daddy bought him. His technique is to approach his victims feigning amnesia, thereby conning them into telling him all about themselves while he reveals little about himself. In this way he subtly tweaks their perceptions until he makes killing someone seem natural. He uses hypnosis to insert his commands into the chains of motivations he draws out of them.

The really nice thing about this film is how Kiyoshi Kurosawa's technique evokes a sense of the thought process in a way that's difficult to describe.

In my favourite scene, the protagonist, Detective Takabe, tracks down Mamiya's residence while Mamiya's in custody. He sees a bunch of animals in cages, among them a monkey and, as we're watching, we think how odd it is to see a monkey in such a small cage and how cruel it seems to confine the creature in such a small space. But the information doesn't seem important to the plot so we don't really dwell on it until later when Takabe's exploring Mamiya's apartment and in the bathroom he finds a dead monkey tied ritualistically to a shower pipe. Are the two monkeys related somehow? We automatically think about it, but we can't think of anything conclusive based on the information. Then, driving home, Takabe suddenly has a compulsion to run into his house, where has a hallucination about his wife triggered by the monkeys. We can't see precisely how the monkeys relate, but we sense a thematic connexion maybe. It's the inability to define why the things are connected that enhances the effect. Takabe's wife has a debilitating mental problem, maybe we can see her as caged and evoking the pity Takabe must have instinctively felt for the monkeys.

A few reviews inexplicably refer to Takabe as being immune to Mamiya's technique, though the scene I mentioned above shows this clearly not to be true. There's a scene where Mamiya is interrogated by Takabe and he tries to use his technique on him, but is impressed when Takabe thwarts him by taking control of the message--Mamiya tries to present a narrative about how trying it is taking care of a wife with mental problems, talks about how Takabe keeps his professional and personal life separate, but Takabe takes over, altering the narrative so that criminals like Mamiya are the reason he can't devote his full attention to his wife. Now if Mamiya persists, he can only possibly manipulate Takabe into killing Mamiya.

So this is an effective film about the power of memes. The climax of the story, the showdown between Takabe and Mamiya, is incredibly satisfying, though it's followed by another scene that somewhat disappointingly modifies the whole story and Takabe's character. Without its last few minutes, I'd say this was a very good film.

When In Rome, Compromise Your Morals

Is that Captain Kirk or Bluto from Animal House? He's about to fuck a sex slave in any case which brings us to another edition of Yes, This is a Real Episode of Star Trek.

"Bread and Circuses" is a second season episode of Star Trek, one which sees the Enterprise crew encounter a version of Earth where the Roman empire has advanced into the twentieth century and gladiator blood sport has become a reality show, but remember The Hunger Games ripped off Battle Royale and there's no way this has been a plot device that's been floating around for centuries.

Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to the planet in their normal uniforms carrying phasers and communicators and proceed to have a discussion about the Prime Directive and how they should avoid letting any of the planet's inhabitants know about life on other planets and advanced technology. Their conversation is interrupted when they're captured by the planet's inhabitants who take their technology and begin enquiring about Spock's ears. This episode was written by Gene Roddenberry and Gene L. Coon.

The three are eventually brought to fight in the arena, except Kirk, who dines with the guys in charge as they try and convince him to share more of his technology. One of the people in charge has the sex slave brought to Kirk's quarters and Kirk, who has been on a high horse about a culture that runs on slavery apparently decides its okay to go a little native.

It all makes the coda scene, where the three of them are safely back on the bridge smugly talking about how wrong the Romans were, come off as just a touch ironic.

The episode does have a few genuinely good moments. I loved McCoy fighting in the arena--Spock easily outmatches his opponent, but skinny little McCoy can just feebly hold up his shield. "Defend yourself!" pleads his opponent to which McCoy irritably replies with some bruised pride, "I am defending myself!"

He and Spock also have a nice moment in their cell;

Twitter Sonnet #381

Electric liquorice sears the late lamp.
Kitten cuts the coat with a bent needle.
Looks pin garlic paper in the dark camp.
Six foot lashes carry the eye beetle.
Dried rum crust crackles on the banshee's arm.
Strands of sugar webs drift over the moon.
Solemn caviar hatched in a grey farm.
Yellow dust fades on the onyx soup spoon.
Absent rabbits leave school's grass unguarded.
House hair, peek-a-boo cut, takes half water.
Reflections dipped are pictures recorded.
Shadow tongues are milkweed tonsil fodder.
Green felt peels back to show marble blackboard.
Ceiling mirrors do not show the cat horde.

Authorised Appropriation

Last night I dreamt I was playing the newest Super Mario Brothers game, which involved being kidnapped in real life and being placed in a large, white, brightly lit windowless skyscraper filled with a labyrinth of ramps, corridors, and hospital waiting rooms. I wandered for a long time, at one point coming across a six inch or so high diorama of a room with a cupboard and a dressing screen, both made of paper. Some of the waiting rooms I came across were almost empty, one having only a single elderly couple. Other times, the waiting rooms were enormously crowded and had merchants with booths set up to take advantage of the crowd. I tried sliding down a banister and found it to be covered with a woman's thin gold and silver chain necklaces she was selling.

Maybe it's inevitable that an industry characterised by conformity in a country traditionally known for conformity would produce a series with supposed pirates as protagonists that's more than a little confused about itself. Two episodes in, I'd say at the very least Violent Space Pirates (モーレツ宇宙海賊) would be more accurately titled Violent Space Privateers. Maybe there isn't a word for privateers in Japanese, though, I certainly can't find it in my dictionary. In any case, a speech one character gives about how soldiers employed by a government have the luxury of not having to kill on their own authority while pirates always have to face the responsibility of their actions loses some of its punch when the "pirates" are established as an academy of mild mannered school girls funded by a government agency.

One of the ways you can tell this isn't a GAINAX series is that the miniskirts worn by the girls tumbling about in zero gravity magically cover their panties from every angle. But this series does seem to be taking a few of the cues from GAINAX a lot of the other GAINAX imitators don't, most appreciably an attempt at creating scale and a sense of wonder for space travel--starting with the main character on a planet, working as a waitress and being awed by gradual introductions to the world of the pirates. Though she is established at the beginning as being a crack pilot.

Her maid cafe uniform is also somewhat reminiscent of Nono from Top o Nerae 2.

With its undistinguished, sort of bland visual style, the show seems like a corporate attempt to capture some of the fire of creation. It is sort of cute, though, maybe I'll watch a couple more episodes, if only to help sharpen my Japanese until the next good anime series comes along.

Penis Ribbons

Happy May Day, everyone.

I wanted to post a clip from The Wicker Man but all the clips on You Tube have embedding disabled and are loaded down with advertisements. How much you want to bet the people milking it for all it's worth had nothing to do with actually making the movie?

They're all uploaded by different people--I thought the comment for this clip was pretty funny; "saw this movie the other day with my buddy mills. i think it was the basis of resident evil 4. I dont think it was a musical, but it has a lot of the most bizarre sing and dance pieces." You don't think it was a musical? Don't you know? Didn't you just say you saw it? And of course what could distinguish the movie more than being the basis for Resident Evil 4?

The popularity of the Resident Evil games has always perplexed me a little. From what little I've played, the game seems to derive its scares from the fact that you can barely move your character as she's generally pinned in by narrow paths of invisible barriers, made more difficult by remarkably bad controls. It kind of artificially creates situations where slow moving, mindless zombies are actually a threat.

Speaking of video games, I watched Tim play the Guild Wars 2 beta over the weekend. It seems quite simply to be the ultimate MMORPG. It does away with the standard quest giver system to be composed entirely of dynamic events. Instead of getting a quest to collect X number of random items, you get open ended things like agreeing to help so and so with his farm, which could involve tending crops or protecting it from giant worms or bandits who may or may not show up. And there's no limit on how many people can participate in a dynamic event while still receiving credit--the game simply scales the number of enemies for the number of players present in the area. It automatically encourages more cooperation, and Tim told me it was really refreshing not to feel immediately irritated when he saw another player, an indication he would have to compete for a mining node or something that might only spawn once every ten minutes or so.

The game features the most customisable character creation screen I've seen for an MMORPG, it's better looking than any other MMORPG, and, on top of all that, it's subscription free. You buy the game once, and then you never have to pay anything else ever again. If I were of a mind to play an MMORPG again, I'd play this one. Though I think I finally figured out I need a game with a more hands on style, the strategy game point and click thing is just too disconnected for me. Anyway, I have enough things on my plate.

But even having no particular bias, I'm hoping to see Guild Wars 2 trounce all the competition if for no other reason than pure non-partisan schadenfreude. The sweetest thing would be seeing World of Warcraft crash and burn, particularly since its newest add-on, Mists of Pandaria, has such a vulnerable lousiness. I mean, you control panda people. It's so delightfully stupid. World of Warcraft is poised to become the rodeo clown of the MMORPG industry.