In Streets, Shacks, Boats, and Bars

What Jules Dassin did for New York in 1948's The Naked City, using extensive location shooting to present a remarkable artefact of the city as it actually was at the time, Elia Kazan did for New Orleans in 1950 with Panic in the Streets. It's not an especially insightful movie into human nature, nor does it present a particularly interesting story, but it's a police procedural told with engrossing intelligence, performed by actors far superior to most of those in The Naked City, and every shot is beautifully complex and gritty.

You know, I haven't been seeking out Richard Widmark movies, I just somehow wound up seeing him a lot lately. Here, unusually for his career in the 1950s, he doesn't play a hood. He plays a military man in charge of the Public Health Service in New Orleans. He spends the movie trying to track down the men who murdered a guy who was infected with pneumonic plague, because somehow I guess finding them will prevent an epidemic. One would figure that after twenty four hours or so, the killers would've spread the disease to enough people it would be kind of a moot point, so I guess it functions more here as a sort of metaphor for the damage done to society by the criminal element.

Two of the killers, meanwhile, assume the cops are looking so hard for them because the guy they killed had been carrying something extremely valuable. The leader of this small gang is played by Jack Palance in his first role, whose character is pretty captivating despite being fairly uncomplicated. He's interesting not only because of Palance's effective, idiosyncratic performance but because, at such a young age, his face looks even weirder.

His face is rigid, like a mask, with his large facial bones, but his performance is still expressive. He really was unique.

Widmark's character is mostly concerned with getting city officials to take him seriously and with finding out where these criminals are. He does get a little subplot about his home life, presenting the typical conflict about the cop/doctor and the importance of his work versus his home life causing strain and anxiety with his wife, who in this case is played ably by Barbara Bel Geddes.

This is the first movie I can remember seeing her in outside of Vertigo and I see she was actually quite beautiful when she wasn't being made to look dowdy, though she still has that same smug, patronising (matronising?) delivery, always seeming to speak down her nose. It's not hard to see why Hitchcock wanted her as Midge.

Paul Douglas plays the police captain who works alongside Widmark for most of the movie. Douglas lends great presence to a not especially interesting character. It's an unpredictable movie as we follow the twists and turns of the chase that take us from one fantastically detailed location after another, the real grime and human existence seemingly carved from shadow by cinematographer Joseph MacDonald's great, expressionistic camera work.

The finale, a chase at the docks, is wonderful as Widmark and the cops pursue Palance through a cohesive maze of factories, warehouses, docks, and ships, all very obviously shot on location.

Across the Universe

I dreamt last night I met Grace Zabriskie in a coffee shop and I was telling her about a dream I had where I dreamt I met her and was telling her about a dream where something horrible happened to her and her husband and she didn't believe me. And when I told her that, she thought it was silly because, after all, why wouldn't she believe me? I think it was because I watched the second episode of Twin Peaks' second season last night when I probably wasn't dreaming, an episode where Grace Zabriskie actually only appears in Cooper's dream, in footage from a previous episode.

I do really like a challenge, even if it's something that's not necessarily a challenge for other people, which may be slightly pathetic, but in any case I had a lot of fun spending three hours last night figuring out the mass of Jupiter from simulated observations of the positions of its four largest moons over the course of eight nights (0.0009 solar masses if you want to know). The whole class was about Jupiter but the teacher never mentioned the object that was recently recorded impacting Jupiter.

She told us the assignment should only take about an hour, so it taking me the whole three hour class period tells you again how bad I am at math. But it gave me something of the thrill I have when playing chess, when my whole concentration is entirely focused on one activity. Maybe I would've gone faster if I hadn't had so much pasta for lunch but, then, I figure Galileo must've eaten a lot of pasta.

I had a combo meal at the place called O's American Kitchen which used to be called Pat and Oscar's until the bank took it over. I feel if I keep getting lunch there I'll have a heart attack--this combo meal was two breadsticks and a big pile of potato wedges with a big bowl of pasta with marinara sauce. I didn't finish the potato wedges possibly because the man and his daughter sitting next to me found an enormous cockroach behind the napkin dispenser.

The Girl

The best orgasm I've ever seen on television. I guess it doesn't translate from the screenshot, but this dame cumming in "D-Girl", a second season episode of The Sopranos, was just really great. No screaming or thrashing--I mean she's pretty frenzied at first but the best is when she settles, straddling the guy. Not even necessarily realistic--she's not sweating or even flushed. She just looks supremely pleased. The guy, Christopher, almost looks more curious about her reaction than in his own moment.

And this is the first time I thought of Christopher, Michael Imperioli's character, as Christopher and not as Spider, his briefly lived, tragic guppy mobster character in Goodfellas. Mazel fucking tov, Christopher.

The buildup is so nice, too, as on their first meeting he coolly scares off a rowdy guy who'd been bumping into her at a nightclub. And right away I was thinking she was peculiarly gorgeous, sexy, and oddly familiar. But it wasn't until after I watched the episode that I looked up the actress.

Yeah . . . she's the little piano girl from Twin Peaks. So that felt a bit weird.

Anyway, I should say that my appreciation for The Sopranos has grown quite a bit. The story with Tony's mother was even interesting at the end of the first season, though I still mainly find her annoying. And I almost felt like the director was trolling us when after that great sex scene there was a cut to the elder Mrs. Soprano's chest and a pan up to her face. That's fucking mean.

I see there are a number of people involved with The Sopranos who would later be involved with Boardwalk Empire, most notably Terence Winter. But there's a life to The Sopranos that Boardwalk Empire didn't seem to have. Boardwalk Empire was good, but it felt so still, like a series of carefully arranged portraits. The Sopranos clips along at a nicely organic pace.

Twitter Sonnet #425

Steel hinged bacon opens the lung dressing.
Salads step back from all slave ownership.
Familiar police leapt from squash crossing.
Dirty cats retired a dealership.
Hops dripped with liquid spats happen to us.
Sixteen bit governor servers crash late.
Clicking sacks of Halloween cannabis.
Zemeckis zombies distribute bait.
Boring numbers scream for my attention.
Dancing anvils step on lemurs that dream.
Important tissue page pressed for mention.
I guess stale skittles will march home unseen.
Ants say, "Worlds change under patterns of sand."
Time tattoos doors for mushrooms on your hand.

The Flaws of Binary Systems

I think the reason 1988's Dead Ringers was my favourite David Cronenberg movie for so long was that it's so reliably disturbing. I watched it again Friday night and it still feels fresh after viewing it many times over the past decade. It still gets under my skin and the ideas it presents still inspire new thoughts and reactions. I don't think I ever before quite appreciated the way it deals with psychological dysfunction the way I did Friday night.

It's loosely based on a true incident of twin gynaecologists being found dead in their apartment from drug overdose. But I got to thinking about whether or not, for the issues Cronenberg was exploring, the gynaecology aspect of the plot was important or if it was a distraction. I don't think it was for fidelity to the true story that Cronenberg kept the angle--certainly the "instruments for operating on mutant women" are a uniquely Cronenbergian invention.

I doubt I'm the first to say it, but it seems the concept of identical twin minds being peculiarly co-dependent here is used to illustrate a psychological dysfunction of one mind through dialogue and interaction of two characters.

It's the story of a small fracture in a perfectly functional adult psyche being disastrously enlarged by circumstances. We first meet the Mantle twins as children and a montage takes us through their college days to their present day situation as extremely successful and well respected gynaecologists, inventors of a surgical instrument with their own private practice.

When we see them as children, we see them analysing sex, at this point coolly grossed out by the idea of physical intimacy, but the two approach a little girl anyway and ask her to have sex with them purely for research purposes.

By the time they're in college, they've settled into an MO of one brother, Beverly, doing the brainier, research and developmental stuff at home while the other, Elliot, gives the speeches and performs other public relations functions which, by adulthood, extend even to getting women for the both of them.

Women and women's bodies in the movie are used to show not only how the brothers have dealt with their feelings about women but also to show the mechanisms they've developed to deal with life itself. Claire Niveau, whose very name suggests something new, serves as the shock of new experience the brothers had thought they'd overcome through a purely Apollonian approach to existence. Niveau is a personification of the inevitable Dionysian--she's a famous actress with mutated sexual organs. She sleeps with both brothers--through their usual technique of deception--and is appalled at first by being deceived but, perhaps more disastrously for the brothers, she eventually forgives them.

Or at least, she forgives Beverly because she's in love with him and decides to learn to accept Elliot as a friend in the interest of maintaining a good relationship with Beverly. This is what she says to Elliot in a private meeting, and one can see how disturbed Elliot is by the idea that he and his brother can really be so different.

The twins have a dynamic somewhat similar to the two Kirks in the famous Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within", when a transporter accident divides Kirk into two beings, one who's considerate, passive, and has difficulty making decisions, and another who's aggressive, passionate, and selfish. But the breakdown isn't quite like that in Dead Ringers--Beverly is made uncomfortable early in their relationship when Claire points out that he has a woman's name, perhaps for the horror at identifying with the body on the operating table or the people he uses through his brother. He's not simply "good Kirk", he's passionate himself, traditionally feminine as he has the supportive role in the dynamic between himself and his brother.

When he attempts a relationship with Claire, his immature instincts make him needy, unable to understand why she can't be with him constantly the way he's used to his brother being.

So we can see this as a story of the insulated environment of one mind being broken into by strange and unpredictable life. Something as simple as Claire going away for a little while thoroughly rocks mentally unequipped Beverly's world and he retreats to the sanctity of his brother but that's not enough for them to digest the fruit of knowledge Claire had innocently imparted to them. The downhill slope of the movie's latter portion sees the brothers trying to assimilate the knowledge of themselves and the world but they're too fixed to the track they made in their youth. Extreme measures of drugs and mutilation in the end can't make up for their weakness when faced with unpredictability.

The Agent without a Secret

I dreamt last night I was watching a new Secret Agent Super Dragon movie, the original Secret Agent Super Dragon being a 1966 Italian James Bond knock-off I first saw years ago on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. In my dream, the movie was new and I was watching it in a theatre. It was shot in a modern fashion, but the star was either the same guy, un-aged, or someone who looked just like him, but the female lead was Olivia Wilde. She seemed to be his girlfriend and, as in the original film, there was little tension between the leads and everyone was pretty bland.

The strangest thing about the movie in my dream was that nothing in it worked. It was a James Bond type film, with lots of gadgets, but all of them were clearly props. Even the phones weren't real, but all the characters pretended liked they worked. It wasn't a Get Smart sort of parody of a spy movie, there was no punch line to anything, it's just nothing worked. The disturbing part was the lack of security--when you watch a James Bond movie, you get used to seeing people in swimsuits or in otherwise ostensibly vulnerable positions acting very cool and confident as though they possess unseen abilities or are backed up by unseen henchmen and could in any case thwart any but the most extraordinary of assaults. That whole poise was based on a lie here. I remember one scene of Olivia Wilde coolly sunbathing next to a huge pool and nearby a group of giggling teenagers who'd just wandered into Super Dragon manor or wherever.

Orange Dream

Autumn has come to Chess Garden and I've tried to decorate accordingly.

It's a good thing I've got a simulated autumn because I sure don't feel like I've got the real thing so far. It's still oppressively hot outside all the time during the day and difficult to sleep under the covers at night. I went to the mall with Tim last night and got a soy pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks in an effort to create the mood. Damned expensive, but still not a bad drink, or it wouldn't be if I could get unsweetened soy milk. I don't know what they use to sweeten soy milk but it makes it taste like gum.

I should listen to Elvis Costello's Brutal Youth album--that one always feels like fall to me.

Twitter Sonnet #424

Springsteen curls convey a communal mind.
Bipedal brows beckon with a small hand.
Orange pulp balloons from the fantasy rind.
Electric rooms rain tickets on our man.
Tailless corn pins kernels of Harry Mudd.
Abalone abacuses slip by.
Damage destined downloads forget Paul Rudd.
Ravishing robots smile from the sky.
Wal-Mart lasers laminate nations.
Scissor pomegranate rots paper cup.
Nightly lacquered rocks distribute rations.
Chalky loaves of vampiric bread stay up.
Somnambulant Circle Ks sell dead pop.
Pig iron Plato builds a copper cop.

When on Safari, Bring an Egyptian Queen

Amy Pond looks so much better with subtler eye makeup. And she's written better, too, in the second episode of this season of Doctor Who, "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" which may have been more accurately called "King Solomon's Ark in Space". It's a delight in any case.

It's amazing to see dinosaurs that look about as good as the ones in Jurassic Park on a show with infamously low production values. It's certainly a step up from the sad hand puppet dinosaurs in the third Doctor serial Invasion of the Dinosaurs. But as I indicated, this episode also reminded me of episodes in the old series about attempts at preserving a race from the destruction of their planet by putting them in stasis on a spaceship--the twist here is the bounty hunter Solomon who's attempting to mine, if you will, this ark for its valuable biological cargo in the form of dinosaurs.

So the Doctor naturally employs Allan Quatermain, or an Allan Quatermain surrogate in the person of an Edwardian game hunter named John Riddell. With Queen Nefertiti tagging along unexpectedly as well as Rory's father, the motley expedition aboard the space ship does feel rather satisfyingly like the one King Solomon's Mines.

I might have liked a slightly more brutal Nerfertiti, but that's the only misstep I can think of in an otherwise entertainingly written character who plays off the game hunter very nicely. And when she's threatened by Solomon, she contributes to the impression of him as being one of the most effective villains I've seen on the show.

I mean, I really hated this guy. I wanted to see him defeated by the Doctor and Nefertiti. Yes, he's a mass murderer who promises to torture his captives for sadistic pleasure, but it's more than that. The Master does these things and I've never found him terribly effective. Perhaps it's that David Bradley gives such an unvarnished portrayal of the man, he doesn't seem evil so much as totally amoral and that makes him more credible. When he does bad things, you hate him more because you get the sinking feeling that it makes so much sense that there'd be a guy doing what he's doing if he had the means.

So this season's two for two for me so far. Looking forward to next week's episode with Ben Browder, too, since I am a big Farscape fan.

Glass Caesar

And twenty five years before he directed The Bad Seed, Mervyn LeRoy directed Little Caesar, a less ambitious but far superior film. Despite its simplistic view of organised crime, it's an effective story of the hazards of a life that obliges one to bury one's feelings.

At the centre of the story is Edward G. Robinson as Rico, "Little Caesar", already, in a time when cinematic acting was consciously artificial and stilted, giving a performance that would still seem effortlessly natural beside the prominent emergence of method acting in film twenty years later. Like the other gangsters in the film, Rico's portrayed as a simple creature who can't see much worth in life outside fortune and status, behaving in a broadly childlike manner, impressed by his picture in a card and driven to reckless fury by small prods at his pride from the police.

The film starts with Rico and his friend Joe, played adequately by Douglas Fairbanks Jr., just getting into the city where they dream of making it big. But Rico's already worried about Joe's aspiration to make it as a dancer instead and threatens him with violence to deter him from leaving the fold.

The Wikipedia entry says a lot of viewers have speculated Rico may have been meant to be taken as gay, which is possible--the fervour with which he tries to keep Joe in his organisation seems borne out of more than brotherly love, and there is a scene where Rico talks about how little he thinks of women.

But regardless of whether or not he's gay, his affection for Joe pays off the opening title card's promise of a story relevant to the bible quote;

Every time Rico usurps a mob boss, he remarks on how it's because the old boss was soft, how he could dish it out but no longer take it. It's his own unavoidable softness that precipitates his downfall, blows to his fragile pride coming with the unravelling of his status until he's a heavy drinking transient when before he often remarked on how he never touched liquor. One senses in Robinson's performance a man dealing with an irrevocably shattered self image.

I love this shot of his reaction to the moment when he might actually have to kill Joe. You can see in it how very strange he finds it that killing Joe is to him such an unfathomable possibility, something that trumps even his cold drive for control of the mob.

Kids Like to Break Things

I've never liked kids, even when I was a kid. Kids are assholes. People often act surprised or shocked when a child does something particularly heartless or cruel, which always makes me wonder if these people have ever spent real time among children. There's a reason the same laws that govern adults don't govern children--kids don't have a real moral compass, the world revolves around them and they take behavioural cues from their parents. This seems like pretty basic stuff and yet somehow a lot of people tend to forget it, including a lot of fantasy authors who often write children as tender creatures with an innate sense of right and wrong. I would imagine some authors do this knowingly in order to provide an example for the children reading and help them on the path to maturity (The Chronicles of Narnia) or in order to write a child that's actually more representative of aspects of an adult psyche (Neon Genesis Evangelion). But there's evidence that some writers simply forget about the crucial differences between real and fantasy children, in which case you might end up with a movie like 1956's The Bad Seed. Based on a stage play (which was based on a book), the movie has few locations and feels stage-bound not just by the few sets but by the broad, loud performances of the cast who were drawn from the cast of the original play. Its ideas of child behaviour and psychology are naive and simplistic, yet it manages to be an entertainingly wicked film.

Patty McCormack plays the little sociopath Rhoda Penmark, a name that's a little on the nose as much of the plot concerns her burning up over a penmanship award she feels she ought to have won, so she murders the little boy who did win it. A normal child would probably eventually feel sorry for such thing and Rhoda doesn't exhibit any signs of remorse, though I think the other characters in the film jump the gun a bit in considering her an irredeemable monster.

When I was a kid, there was a boy and girl on my street--they were both around ten or eleven years of age. One day, the boy wanted to break up with the girl so she marched over to his house and uprooted a tree in his front yard.

I could tell you so many tales of kids being cruel. I imagine you could tell me some tales too. And it's not hard to imagine a kid, in a fit of selfish rage, really hurting another kid.

Putting the film into unintentional comedy territory is mainly the adult lead, Rhoda's mother Christine, who's in almost every scene of the movie. She's played by Nancy Kelly, an actress whose voice puts one in mind of Liza Minnelli and Nathan Lane, that standard Broadway affectation delivered always loud enough for the cheap seats and in this case contributes to the impression of Kelly's character as someone whose reactions are often much more dramatic than the situation calls for. She always either seems like she's reacting too big for the situation or too artificially for something truly bad that's happened.

The only really good performance in the movie is Henry Jones, the guy I remarked on as being particularly Innsmouthian when I saw him in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? a little while ago. Here he plays a groundskeeper for the wealthy Penmark family, apparently a cruel minded man who likes to tease Rhoda because she reminds him of himself--"You wanna know how I know how mean you are? 'Cause I'm mean. I'm smart and I'm mean. And you're smart and you're mean."

He's so wonderfully nasty.

It quickly put me in the mind of several Alfred Hitchcock movies--Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, Rope--all movies that featured at least one character who delights in talking about murder and methods of murder, perhaps avatars for Hitchcock's own sense of humour. That last movie, Rope, featured a professor with such a sense of humour who inadvertently, to his horror, influences an actual killing.

I remember first hearing about Rope from Caitlin, and she, on her journal a few weeks ago, commented that it was deeply sick for someone to think the movie We Need to Talk About Kevin was a comedy. She was reacting to saying he remembered someone, he didn't remember who, calling We Need to Talk About Kevin a dark comedy. Whether he was actually thinking of me and didn't mention my name because he knew it might get him instantly banned from Caitlin's journal or he was thinking of someone else, I don't know. But I did say I found We Need to Talk About Kevin to be essentially a comedy. It's certainly not news to me in any case that Caitlin thinks I'm sick.

Kevin, in We Need to Talk About Kevin, is more persuasively a sadistic sociopath than Rhoda to me. The comedy comes primarily from Tilda Swinton's badly written character--although Swinton is certainly a better actress than Nancy Kelly, her reactions as written to Kevin's behaviour were wrong in a similar way. Where Kelly's performance suggested narcissism to me, the writing of Swinton's character seemed indicative of a screenwriter with a perhaps unconscious martyr complex. This explains why, after living with Kevin for years, Swinton's character still reacts as though deeply wounded when he's rude to her, yet fails to take the appropriately extreme steps in response to his more extreme behaviour. Well, the movie's also funny for the persistent obliviousness of John C. Reilly's character. I did feel bad for the little girl who falls victim to Kevin, but that was like watching a kitten being drowned, a relatively cheap ploy for pathos.

It's interesting, then, that these two movies, separated by more than half a century, should tackle such similar subject matter and take such similar missteps.

The Bad Seed seems somewhat more confused, apparently arguing that Rhoda needs to die before showing at the very end Kelly, apparently out of character, giving the little girl a spanking.

I'm sure there were more than a few parents in 1956 who would have said this is exactly what Rhoda needed, though a spanking presented more sincerely in We Need to Talk About Kevin seems to have the opposite of the desired effect.

Twitter Sonnet #423

Decisive acid ventures too quickly.
Running ronin negate gasoline holds on fall.
Positive television shades strictly.
Some large still parrots look like a rock wall.
Orange cursors retreat to the teal tree line.
Eyes simmer on the mouldy frying pan.
Off white tile sweats a strawberry slime.
Yellow as a mustard bottle is man.
White cone fingers figure distant centaurs.
The premature hour hides the sharp book.
Cowboys replace the shoes lost on Star Tours.
Ice cream tales were Peter Falk's final hook.
A Playskool knife lodged in a Tonka heart.
It's Mattel love will tear Kenner apart.

Paper Yellow Grape Ideas on Thousands of Years of Granite

So tired. In the small pieces of time in which I managed to get some sleep last night I dreamt Star Trek: Voyager was still on the air and that it had gotten really dark, really tediously dark. I mean, I don't remember specifics, but it wasn't like the writers were exploring ideas that naturally took the show in darker directions but like they were desperate and just started throwing in more death and stuff to get attention. I remember the holographic Doctor turning into some kind big blood thirsty monster.

I'm not sure why I couldn't sleep aside from the guy working on something outside. It seems like I was already having trouble before that. This should be a fascinating day anyway. I have that astronomy lab until 9:30pm I had trouble puzzling through on a full night's sleep.

I feel really shitty. Why couldn't I sleep? I may need a haircut. Some of my hairs have just gotten to the length where they're tickling my nose. Maybe it was the movie I watched last night which indeed got my mind working busily at my bed time. If I get enough sleep to-night, I'll write about it to-morrow. Since I have to be in class in less than two hours, I'll just leave you now with some hints as to what the movie was I watched last night. Here you go;

1) Henry Jones

2) We Need to Talk About Kevin

3) Affectation

4) American theatre

Items three and four may be redundant.

And, no, the movie wasn't We Need to Talk About Kevin.

What Makes a Dame a Dame? The Answer is Weirder than You Might Think

"Look out Uncle Tom Hemingway, here comes Mabel Legree a'crackin' her whip." So racist, but so sexy. This line was spoken by Joan Blondell in 1934's Busby Berkeley musical Dames, a movie that was originally to have included a line from Blondell to one-up Mae West's famous, "Come up and see me some time," with, "Come up and see my pussy some time," according to Wikipedia, but it was scrapped before it even got to the censors. As it is, dated attitudes about race aside, it's a nice little musical.

Ruby Keeler has a larger role than Blondell, and she can't act or sing any better than she could in 42nd Street, but somehow that makes the surrealism of the "I Only Have Eyes for You" sequence even weirder.

This isn't quite as weird as when the male lead's face burst's through an image of a number of women whose bodies are arranged in a pattern.

Dames, with its climactic number "Dames" indeed asks us to contemplate dames. Berkeley's tale here takes us among a seeming warehouse of female dancers waking up in the morning and being beautiful before gathering in clumps to toss one another at the viewer.

These dames are dameing as hard as they can, that's for sure. And it makes about as much sense as that sentence, but it is pretty damn cute.

Otherwise, the movie is an entertaining screwball comedy containing particularly entertaining performances by Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert as the stuffy old rich people who approve and/or fund the scandalous musical stage show the young people are putting together. Herbert in particular had a pretty entertaining face and he seemed to know how to get the maximum amount of comedy out of it. I loved how they kept giving him elephants to play with.

Anxious Young Man Who Inadvertently Injures in Clumsy Self Defence

Sometimes we have to relearn the lessons of our youth. Lately I've been relearning that Roger Corman is a terrible filmmaker. It was something impressed on me well in my youth by Professors Robinson, Servo, and T. Robot with the use of It Conquered the World and Swamp Diamonds as examples. But the past few weeks I've sought out Corman movies and I've paid the price for my short memory. Last night it was a film he didn't direct, only produced, a movie called The Cry Baby Killer. With a running time of sixty minutes, it consists entirely of interminable padding.

If only the movie had borne some resemblance to its sensational poster;

Jack Nicholson in his first role, playing a guy called the Cry Baby Killer, one imagines a wild tale of an emotionally unstable psychopath's bizarre killing spree. Maybe a wonderfully trashy punch up of Rebel Without a Cause. I mean, that's fair, right? Instead we get a guy who not only never kills anyone, who not only never cries, or is noted for crying, but is barely in the movie and is in fact portrayed as a dull, typical 1950s idea of an average teenager who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The teenage gang stuff in the first five minutes is sort of entertaining. They beat up Nicholson because he's hung up on the gang leader's, Manny's, girl Carole, who used to be the girlfriend of Nicholson's character. There's a pretty funny, transparently misogynist angle in the movie's almost catatonic plot as everyone, from the waitress, the cops, and Nicholson's parents holds her responsible for the fact that Nicholson accidentally wounded two boys who were trying to beat him up and now he's holed up in an outdoor kitchen storeroom with a cook and a woman carrying a child. All because she broke up with him and had started going out with Manny. How dare she! Obviously she's, "gone bad," as more than one character observes.

Manny and his gang, who were the ones who actually beat up Nicholson and brought the gun, are quickly taken out of sight after the start of the film and are barely mentioned again. Most of the movie consists of the police lieutenant and bystanders commenting on how kids to-day (1958) have an undeserved sense of entitlement, lawyers are crooked, and reporters obstruct police in the process of seeing justice done and ensuring the public safety.

Maybe the movie really is directed by Joe Addis, and he's just Corman's apt pupil, but the tendency to frame actors' faces always directly in the centre of the screen and the downright bizarrely prodigious pace sure feel like Corman.

There are things like a cop asking another cop if he still has his megaphone, then a cut to a new shot of this other cop saying, "Yes," then back to the lieutenant saying, "Okay, go get it." It's almost Lynchian but without the magic.

Then there's weird uses of time that make three minutes seem like three hours, like when Nicholson's mother says she's going to talk to Nicholson through the megaphone to try to get him to release the hostages, then we cut to some conversation in the watching crowd, then the waitress telling off Carole inside the diner, and two other conversations before finally cutting back to the mother actually taking up the megaphone and talking to her son. The scenes in this movie almost feel randomised and it creates a sensation of stasis.

At one point a cop remarks that the standoff has been going on for three hours. It was only around a half hour into the film, but I felt like he had to be low balling the estimate.

Twitter Sonnet #422

Ink ankle neutrons stitch stale black velcro.
Shots of tar trail towards tottering autumn.
Two colour stains tangle cancer macro.
Pez palace iPads drain the wit alum.
Armadillo lactations shroud the court.
Gradual annual quarters halve hands.
Hiltons hover in the airplane export.
Thinning white locks conceal Julian Sands.
Gangrenous granola gourmets know much.
Multitudes of tissue tulips change hue.
Foggy submarines make a nuke sandwich.
Rebellious hair buns are bad to subdue.
Celebratory tarantulas break
The discretionary shame coffin wake.

The Sheep of Knowledge

Oof, it's September, it's supposed to stop being summer now. And yet it's so damn hot still. Ugh.

I didn't sleep too well last night, I think because I played two games of chess before bed. I should know better--that sort of thing leaves me wired. I didn't even watch anything last night. I played chess, read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for thirty minutes and went to sleep.

I'm around sixty percent through the book, according to my Kindle. I know, a Kindle isn't the most ideal format--20,000 Leagues Under the Sea seems like something I'd want to read in a big, antique leather bound book but it's free on the Kindle and I simply can't argue with that.

Again, I love how the narrator, Aronnax, uses so much technical detail. I like looking up terms in Wikipedia like fucus or zoophyte. I love the illustration in the zoophyte article of a Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, a plant which supposedly grew sheep as fruit.

Where Do You Get the Milk and Eggs?

Well, okay, I'm ready for a companion changeover. One thing I can say for sure about "Asylum of the Daleks", the premiere episode of the new season of Doctor Who which aired to-day, is that Oswin's, the new companion's, subplot was much better than Amy and Rory's. And rather nicely laid the groundwork for her arc which I assume begins when she becomes a proper companion in the Christmas episode. Overall, it was a good episode.

I will avoid spoilers here--I won't mention any plot points that aren't discovered within the first half of the episode.

"Asylum of the Daleks"' two big Dalek hooks are, of course, crazy Daleks and then also humans converted into Dalek "puppets". The latter aspect follows up on the effective horror of Dalek to human conversion from Revelation of the Daleks better than the new series human to Cybermen conversions have.

Thematically, the episode goes back to the subject of an internal conflict between love and hate beginning with an unexpected reference to Night of the Hunter that made me smile and later represented by the Daleks' eradication of all emotions except hate and Rory and Amy's hastily assembled marital troubles. Perhaps it's because so much else is happening in the episode, or because Amy is wearing too much eye makeup, or because Steven Moffat is just tired of writing them, Amy and Rory just don't get an emotional foothold in the episode. Watching the web miniseries "Pond Life" didn't help, either.

The Doctor's trouble of giving into a downright bloodlust when it comes to Daleks is lightly touched on, though it's something I really wish the show would move away from. We have quite enough of that in modern superhero fiction--not just kicking your enemy but thumbing your nose at them too. When the Doctor grins as he watches a bunch of Daleks being destroying, I thought of the grim acknowledgement of the necessity of such death we might have seen in the fifth Doctor's reaction, for example, to the same event. I would ask the writers to remember why the Doctor doesn't carry a gun because it's starting to not make sense based on his behaviour.

But whatever faults the episode may have, the last fifteen minutes or so worked perfectly well for me. No, there's nothing terribly original going on--and I could've done without the Doctor's last line in the episode--but I was pleasantly surprised to find how very effective Jenna-Louise Coleman as Oswin is and the episode ending was able to lean on her. She sort of reminds me of Zoe, except I'm also looking forward to the Doctor with lone female companion flirtatious dynamic coming back. I loved this exchange, when he asks how she managed to do something exceptionally brilliant;

OSWIN: "There a word for total screaming genius that sounds modest and a tiny bit sexy?"

DOCTOR: "Doctor. You call me the Doctor."