The Coldest Gold

Who wants to go to the moon with a sinister master of disguise, a gold crazy old inventor, a pet mouse named Josephine, and a stowaway street urchin? Yeah, me too. So I loved Fritz Lang's 1929 science fiction film Woman in the Moon. The story has the feel of irresistible pulp but it also exhibits a vigorous aim for realism that creates a fascinating, complex context.

While it is remarkable how much the film previews of actual experiences with space flight, most notably an extraordinary scene where the crew of the rocket experience weightlessness, the value in the painstaking detail is in creating a sense of depth for the characters' experiences. Inaccurate things, like the strangely swift surface of the spinning moon as the crew observes the Earth setting beneath the lunar horizon, create a beauty effective for its enduring strangeness.

But as I said, the scene of weightlessness seems amazingly accurate, especially a moment where one member of the crew swings an open wine bottle to see globules of animated wine floating in the air.

These two are the happy, newly engaged couple, Friede and Hans, who work for the central character of the film, Wolf Helius, an aeronautics magnate who stonily bears with a broken heart.

He's in love with Friede. Hans is his best friend and second in command. It's when he learns of their engagement that he decides to go ahead with Professor Manfeldt's plan to get a manned ship to the moon to find gold.

The film opens with Wolf visiting the Professor in his tiny, run down apartment where he guards his manuscript of plans on how to get to the moon, plans which include a multistage rocket and a rather credible looking diagram of trajectory and orbit.

The poor old man reluctantly accepts food from Wolf, but he can't help sharing some with the mouse, Josephine, who shares his apartment. It's very clever of Lang or his wife, Thea von Harbou (who wrote the novel the movie is based on), to have created this intensely sympathetic old man who entrusts his precious manuscript to Wolf because the next half hour or so we watch as the above mentioned master of disguise, played by the reliably repulsive Fritz Rasp, and his agents exert all their cunning to get steal the manuscript and all the plans Wolf's team have so far made for the trip.

It's because Rasp succeeds that Wolf is forced to embark on his adventure for a shadowy conglomeration of powerful individuals who control the world's gold. Considering Harbou eventually became a Nazi, it's probably best not to read too much into this.

Wolf had originally decided to go ahead with this crazy idea apparently to distract himself from the woman he loves getting married to his best friend, but now these changed circumstances mean the happy couple is coming along. And a street kid hides out on the ship somehow, offering his pulp magazines as evidence that he's spent his life studying the moon.

The movie nicely avoids playing safe, and it allows even characters we like to die. The impressions created of life's injustices contribute to the story's tension and nicely reflect the isolation of the pioneering space travellers. I love that the movie gives a couple of the characters a scene to panic as the realisation that they're so far from Earth sets in.

Twitter Sonnet #496

Greying sugar waves through the Best Buy lanes.
Faced blueberry shirts stock blackberry soup.
Berry iPods lately grow on pad veins.
Tablet tiles roof the glass water coop.
Sticking wheat knives assassinate barley.
American melted brain spread through mitts.
Spider jeans enveloped the silk Harley.
Babies are absent from survival kits.
Verified anonymity settles.
Smiling, smoking frogs behold their tadpoles.
Steam thought bubbles betray the tea kettles.
Climbing, riding pant plots are full of holes.
Broccoli shadows pale the fresh cut tree branch.
Cowgirls dressing on the salads for ranch.

Time's Turnip Takes Me Again

And so, by my no means infallible reckoning, I am now thirty four years old. And once again, my birthday's a school day. Two quizzes to-day, too.

I bought a daikon at Mitsuwa a couple days ago and last night I experimented by making a boiled daikon and sliced tomato with microwaved couscous and broccoli and small, baked red potatoes . . . thing. With basil. It was pretty good. Maybe too much for one meal.

Anyway, in celebration of, I guess, me, and more importantly, daikons, here's this again;

I didn't notice an equinox in 1970's Equinox. There are several blandly performed, dumb teenagers and a sheriff who looks and sounds like Sterling Hayden but with fake eyebrows. It has some bad special effects, and some incongruously amazing special effects.

The eyebrows on faux Hayden falling into the former category.

Dennis Muren, the great special effects pioneer who later worked on the best known projects of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and James Cameron, made Equinox as a short film in 1967 and it was later expanded to feature length by a guy named Jack Woods. Wikipedia says Muren did all the special effects himself, though I find it hard to believe the same guy who thought this flying action figure Satan was fine;

also devised this extraordinarily seamless, even by to-day's standards, process shot creating two dumb teenagers fighting a green giant;

The giant even pretty convincingly backhands the dumb teenager in the yellow shirt.

The plot is like a 1950s Bert I. Gordon or Roger Corman movie distilled to its most basic details with a male teenager self-fulfilment based on inequitable gender roles fantasy. The two guys are constantly shown making decisions while the two girls inexplicably stay behind, scream, or feebly defend against the sexual advances of Satan.

The Slow, Enlarged Demise

I had two dreams last night I might classify as "nerdmares". In the first, a young woman, the last survivor of a space station's crew, was bearing a Queen Alien like Ripley in Alien 3. The Alien who impregnated her refrained from killing her for that reason, and the two of them, in my dream, were sitting together killing time in a room on the station. The woman asked the alien if it understood English, to which it nodded, though it was anatomically incapable of speech. The woman gradually learned that the alien, in its effort to infiltrate the station, had hacked into the computers and had read through all the personnel files. It had even read personal correspondences between the crew and loved ones back home. "What did you make of those?" the woman asked. Of course the alien couldn't reply except to nod or shake its head, so the woman said, "I suppose you thought they were pretty boring." The alien hesitated and then nodded.

In my second dream, Harrison Ford was hosting a long, old fashioned Christmas Special--not unlike the Star Wars Holiday Special, I suppose, though Ford was playing himself. I think it was the snowed in cabin plot, and the idea was that the show would primarily revolve around cooking. Ford had gained a lot of weight and, though he wasn't drunk, he was acting drunk, very broadly; obviously because he thought he was being funny, though he was really just insufferable. What made it worse was that he spoke in an affected high pitched whine and was wearing only a large apron with a print like a bright orange Hawaiian shirt. His first guest was "Weird Al" Yankovic who couldn't hide behind his shtick how disturbed he was by Ford's behaviour. Yankovic's not one of those comedic performers who gets their comedy from allowing his genuine feelings of the moment to come through, so the experience just put him completely off-balance as much as he tried to crack jokes. It was an excruciatingly uncomfortable broadcast.

Twitter Sonnet #495

The recumbent feathers' asymmetry
Marks the hip that suggests panted thin legs.
No U turn pinstripe remains to sentry.
No non-stick pan can unbutter the eggs.
Serious spun ceiling fans foment roofs.
A damaging mint julep pares out fate.
Calliope paints a portrait of hooves.
See-saw beer kegs beleaguer gods too late.
Damned dock worker pant parts slowly combine:
Double decker Trouser-Tron takes cities.
No man's home hazards fight with machine mind.
Big boar digits disdain little piggies.
Insubstantial smocks may shock Hawaii.
Turkish baths make Batman Patrick Leahy.

The Shiny, Inexhaustible Mollusc

Anime and manga creators, I'll tell you again; if you don't want us to see someone's panties, don't put her in a micro miniskirt and show her being carried over someone's shoulder for half an episode. The solution is not to alter the laws of physics and human anatomy just so the micro miniskirt can cover her ass from every angle. It makes you seem repressed.

This is from the new anime series Suisei no Garugantia (翠星のガルガンティア). Its current English title, which I suspect is impermanent, is Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet. It follows a mech suit pilot for a human civilisation that inhabits space stations and ships, having long ago forsaken Earth. As the episode opens, their fleet is fighting cute space nautiluses and enormous space flower shaped molluscs.

This show borrows so heavily from Gunbuster it's hard to examine it for its own merits. The cockpit of the mech looks like the spheroid cockpits from Gunbuster 2, as do its bicycle handles and the red misty space backdrops. The ships accompanying the mech fighters seem less self-consciously phallic, which is probably related to the fact that this show is far less playfully sexual than GAINAX series tend to be. Gargantia presents the misunderstood guy who rescues all the dim dolls to reassure the people frightened by the series with the violent, sexy complex dames killing or occasionally becoming and/or commanding armies of space monsters.

Maybe the thing that bugs me most, though, is something that's become kind of a norm for anime nowadays, which is the shiny constantly flushed skin.

I may be a bit of hypocrite complaining since I did the same thing in Echo Erosion. It's a device used in illustrations I've seen as old as 1910. The problem with the way it's being used in anime now is that it's so uniform. No matter what direction the lighting's coming from, no matter how brightly lit the area is, the shiny spots are always there now;

I don't know about you, but my eye's started reading them as enormous white heads.

The Lens, the Mirror, and the Knife

For anyone wondering what the Doctor was doing during the events of Michael Powell's 1960 film Peeping Tom, I spotted the TARDIS in this shot;

Someone ought to make a page of TARDIS model police boxes that turn up in films from before the premiere of Doctor Who.

Before last Thursday night, I had previously seen Peeping Tom in high school, over sixteen years ago. It was the first Michael Powell movie I ever saw and I didn't appreciate it as much as I do now. All I actually remembered was the pretty colours and being put off by how skinny Moira Shearer was and how much I didn't like her haircut.

I still don't like her haircut. But now I'm sad she's in the movie only rather briefly.

I think it's hard to ask a teenage Trekkie of the 1990s to appreciate what was so sinister about this movie from 1960. I've been since inundated with the language and style of older films to the point where I empathise with them far more than modern movie making mannerisms, which is one reason I appreciate Peeping Tom more now. The central character, the eponymous peeping tom, Mark Lewis, also kind of reminds me of a hardcore otaku.

He reminds me of reading recently that 30% of Japanese men in a survey reported that they have never dated anyone. Otaku culture is one built around isolated men who collect models of women and watch television shows about simplistically written beautiful women--"slice of life" shows now being particularly popular, wherein these fictional women, which Hayao Miyazaki described as being written like pets, do little more than go about regular routines. It's a phenomenon of behaviour that requires as little possible awareness of the observer on the part of the subject. In Japan, where expectations of career success from family and potential mates tend to be almost impossible, it isn't hard to see how these behavioural patterns developed.

When Helen, the girl living downstairs, first takes an interest in Mark, in a manner that first seems to be pitying but develops into something sweetly, naively maternal, the first thing he thinks of doing in the middle of their first conversation is to show her footage of himself from childhood. His father, a sadistic psychologist whose focus of study was fear, kept cameras on the boy at all times and deliberately, frequently introduced frightening stimuli.

Mark, who we already know is obsessed with his camera, and kills women while filming them, is essentially saying to Helen that in order to introduce himself to her, he has to show her the person in this footage. For Mark, people exist in footage.

I don't think the idea is that Mark is objectifying women, or even that he hates them. I think the idea is that he wants to inspire fear in them because that's the point where he finds empathy. His method of killing, using the phallic leg of his camera tripod, suggests sexual connotations, but the main point is that he sees himself as a frightened, vulnerable creature and can only find connexion with women when he makes them that way, too.

It's a compulsion, one based on a mind too petrified to grow past this view of the world. It's telling that when Helen forces him to go out without his camera, he seems more relaxed and happy than at any other time. It's a rare opportunity for him to begin to nurture a persona not defined by the camera and by fear.

If You're a Planet Put a Ring on It

I love looking at Jenna-Louise Coleman's nose. It's just so damned cute.

Anyway. "The Rings of Akhaten" wasn't bad. The idea seems to have been "What if the Doctor and society were Scheherazade and the king was God?" It kind of reminds me of my friend Caitlin, who I remember having a similar fixation on Scheherazade and who also has a thing for the eleventh Doctor.

It's nice when Doctor Who strays a little bit towards subversive, though of course it's nowhere near the downright treasonous stuff in the seventh Doctor's era or some of the fourth's. Questioning religion nowadays has almost become conventional. So much so that it was nice to see the Doctor choosing not to tell Clara the beliefs of the people orbiting Akhaten weren't true, choosing instead to call their beliefs a "nice story."

This episode was written by someone new to the series, Neil Cross, which I don't think is code for "Angry Neil Gaiman." He's written for other TV shows, but this is the first of his work I've seen and it's good work. The direction of the episode leans it towards sappy a bit, but Cross puts in genuinely thoughtful stuff about the value of memories and story.

The episode looks really impressive, too, with enough prosthetic aliens to seem as though they spent five times more than they probably did.

Oh, and again I heard what I swear is a Vertigo reference. When the Doctor says to Clara, "You remind me of someone . . . Someone who died," and then her assertion she's not the same person when in fact she is. It's making me think she knows it, too. I'm starting to nurse a theory we'll find out by the end of the season that she's been manipulating the Doctor all along.

I also smiled at the mention of the Doctor's granddaughter, the first time I think she's been alluded to in the new series. I hope, but doubt, this means she's be in the 50th anniversary special.

I have to admit, hearing that David Tennant looks to be the only Doctor returning for the anniversary special is dampening my enthusiasm more than I would have thought. At this point it's sounding more like an eighth anniversary special.

Twitter Sonnet #494

A soft sphere yields all that one could partake
Of the sanguine crystal, the beaded page.
Steps of bloodless fingerprints sway and quake;
Satin popcorn on the verdant ribcage.
Glitter of brown octagons take their ease.
Perfume of the dizzy ether sews hair.
Lazy hands from frozen syrup take fees.
Verdure develops on pastures of air.
Waded arenas sing silent plant sex,
Shadow striped feline fumes drug the sweet tongue,
Pulled by carapace digits and so vexed;
Fragile, clear wings reveal fur on the lung.
Pollen painted stars dot the warm thorax,
Burning twisting mists of melted beeswax.

It's a Long Road to Walk in Geta

Sometimes it's hard to tell a pre-World War II Japanese film from a post-World War II Japanese film. Mikio Naruse, like Mizoguchi, made feminist films of struggling, working class women before and after the second World War. Naruse's 1933 film Apart From You (君と別れて) was such a film and it also features elements of Naruse's visual style and thematic preoccupations that would continue to characterise his work throughout his long career. It's a silent film, there are fewer characters wearing western style clothing and more of the architecture still looks like Meiji era, but otherwise Apart from You's tale of two geisha and the teenage son of one of them is similar to several films Naruse made in the 1950s, particularly in its focus on financial troubles, the selfishness of men, and the social conventions that compel women to make greater and greater sacrifices. Apart from You is a simple, somewhat sentimental tale, though not melodramatic and put together with brisk, intuitive editing.

Mitsuko Yoshikawa plays Kikue, a geisha with a delinquent teenage son named Yoshio. Kikue worries she won't be able to provide for her son much longer as she finds more and more grey hairs in her mirror. She confides her sorrows to her fellow geisha, the younger Terugiku, played by the beautiful Sumiko Mizukubo, who becomes the focus of the film.

Everyone in the movie is under one kind of pressure or another--Kikue is under pressure to provide for her son, Yoshio is ashamed of his mother's profession and feels guilt over it, and Terugiku decides to take on everyone else's problems. She's supporting her own family living by the sea because her father refuses to work, she's working to provide enough to make sure her sister doesn't have to become a geisha, she's pleading with Toshio to be nicer to his mother, and she's backing away from patrons who would prefer her over Kikue.

None of the characters have the complexity of Naruse's later films, but it's interesting to see how much of the basic framework is already present. More remarkable is the editing, and the sequences beginning and ending with doors sliding open or closed; the camera cutting then between close-ups; cutting from a character standing to where they drop to a sitting position on the floor, creating a layered composition of faces; all this is familiar to one who's seen his later films.

Losing another Communication

Roger Ebert has died. Oscar Wilde, in his "The Critic as Artist", has a character named Gilbert talk about "Criticism's most perfect form, which is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret of another. For the highest Criticism deals with art not as expressive but as impressive purely."

And so it's with assuredness that I can say Roger Ebert was a great artist, a writer whose impressions of movies in turn inspired much in the reader. He was sensitive to the language of films and was able to communicate his sensitivity and appreciation for the art form in a way that broadened the experience of watching a movie for millions of people. He certainly did for me.

I think it appropriate, then, to discuss a movie to-day. A movie that Ebert wrote about in the Great Movies section of his web site, a 1971 Nicolas Roeg film called Walkabout.

It's a beautifully shot film about two English children lost in the Australian wilderness after their father's committed suicide. Roeg shoots the film beautifully, frequently wandering from the story simply to train his camera on a beautiful animal or landscape.

The children eventually find themselves under the care of an aborigine teenager on "walkabout", a practice wherein a young man is sent to survive alone for months in the wilderness.

In his review, Ebert argues that there's more to the movie than a simple parable about how modern civilisation falls short of the aborigine's, which is closer to nature. Ebert argues "it's also about something deeper and more elusive: The mystery of communication."

One of the two English children is a beautiful teenage girl around the same age as the aborigine. The other English child, a six year old boy, eventually picks up some of the aborigine's language but the more conventional girl never gets across the language barrier. Which is not to say she's particularly dim--she's quick thinking, and has presence of mind to conceal their father's death from her brother and of the two of them is smarter at maintaining their meagre resources as they attempt to cross the desert.

But the aborigine and the English girl do begin to establish a subtle rapport based on physical attraction and the simple family unit the three of them fall into. The English boy quickly comes to see the aborigine as a father figure from whom he learns, while the girl, in a fascinating scene, notices something as much in her own involuntary reactions, when he helps her climb a tree, as his manner about the attraction between them. Roeg intercuts the two of them regarding each other with shots of a tree that are reminiscent of her bare legs.

Roeg frequently uses creative visual juxtapositions, as when we see the aborigine teaching the English boy to hunt between incredibly beautiful shots of the naked girl swimming in a dark pool.

The point here is not only to show that the girl is connected to the shots of nature Roeg makes detours for, but that she's as beautiful.

That the instinctual affection between the two is unfulfilled due to the communication gap is not, I think, merely a commentary on the advantages of one culture over another, as there is, as Ebert remarks, much shown to be imperfect about the aborigine culture. The culture is the context, the subject is the divide.

Stuff and Stuff Besides

Maybe I ought to have slacked off more during spring break. Mostly I spent the week working on a new comic which, as often seems to be the case, won't be online until June. June seems to be my comic launch month, even before I went back to school--Venia's Travels started in June.

To-day I had to rearrange all the piles of stuff in my room for the termite inspectors--turns out we're only getting a wall knocked out upstairs instead of getting the house tented, so hopefully that's one less thing to slow me down. I also spent a couple hours to-day doing long division because we're doing difference quotients in my math class. So much fun.

For my literature class, I read Robert Browning, which I genuinely enjoyed. I wasn't sure what to read--I do have photographs now of the proper table of contents from the newest edition of the Norton Anthology, thanks to another student allowing me to have a look at his copy for a few minutes, but the assigned pages for Robert Browning were 1387 - 1377 and 1418 - 1436. Assuming first of all we aren't meant to read ten pages backwards from 1387, the assigned pages are actually in the middle of the section on Matthew Arnold and in the beginning of the section on Christina Rossetti. The page numbers don't correspond with Robert Browning in the old edition, either. So I've decided just to read the whole Robert Browning section to-day, which I'm halfway through.

I was rather charmed by this recording Thomas Edison made of Browning in 1889 reciting the beginning of his "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix";

As apparently a number of people have remarked, even in his time, Browning's poetry reads almost like prose. So did his wife's, for that matter--"Aurora Leigh" is practically a novella. I love how both the Brownings make the character of the speaker so much a part of the poem, and I really love how Robert's work, like "Porphyria's Lover", are often from the vantage points of twisted or ridiculous people.

Anyway, I'd better get back to reading.

Twitter Sonnet #493

Ribbit ribaldry undulates in slick
Shining green flesh, hidden through the pond night
Slipping in place as a wet paper wick
Dripping from the new wart of frog's delight.
Ambergris soft fibre optics slowly
Push through casserole signals to old worm
Laptops, the enormous 80s paisley
Faded sunflower cloth scrap yarn rainstorm.
Recycled plastic kink nickels drizzle
Down the thigh of government postage stamp
Patchwork quilts which quietly embezzle
Henry's hollow bone salsa wheelchair ramp.
Cement brain crash claims tick corkscrew sawdust;
Beige dry rain cries on powersaw-red rust.

一人侍

It's a deathly cool world. 1967's Le Samourai is one of the coolest movies I've ever seen, a beautifully shot noir with a hit man at its centre; a silent, self-contained, somehow sensitive hit man. It's minimalist, and thereby evocative of a distinctly noir existential tragedy.

Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, the hit man, who goes about his work with few words and fewer facial expressions, his pretty face conveying a lot through twitches of the eye or a pursing of the lips but the viewer often can do little more than speculate at their meaning. He keeps a sparrow in a cage in his spartan apartment and he seems to share a strange empathy with the animal that allows him to infer his room's been broken into by the level of agitation the bird exhibits.

The opening of the film quotes a proverb on bushido, describing a samurai as a consummately solitary man. But Jef knows a beautiful woman named Jane whom he refers to as his fiancée. She seems accustomed to his visits involving few words, and unquestionably maintains an alibi for him, willing to sacrifice herself if need be when the cops bust in on her apartment to strong arm her.

The communication through facial expression between Jef and Jane, and Jef and the beautiful piano player, stand in contrast to the comparatively verbose interrogations from the police. Jef kills for money, but his wordless relationships are somehow far more beautiful, more appealing to our sympathy than the simple, insensitive police and the ruthless mobsters who hired Jef and are now trying to kill him.

The film has a very consistent palette--the few rooms that aren't blue are a pale yellow. Mostly the mise-en-scene is pale blue; black; hard, squared edges; and sometimes one red, or reddish item, reminiscent of Ozu's few colour films which tend to be accented by one red object like a signature on a Japanese painting.

This simplicity of the aesthetic compliments the self-evident but strange humanity of its protagonist, the film an example of how systems of morality are unequal to accommodating the experience of a human being.

April is No Fool

Noir cat is noir. My sister's cat, Saffy, spent Easter Sunday brooding on dames, bank heists, and other people's life insurance policies.

You people, she said, and your powder blue and lavender eggs. So pretty, so sweet, but inside--inside is a chocolate so dark and also sweet that the eggs are in fact candy to the core. Some people can't handle that. Some people get washed up in the Cadbury cream tide. Other people make plans. Other people scheme, make the situation work for them, follow the rabbit and make damn sure he knows what time it is.

And then, one day, when the heat's died down, you sit back and watch all those mice hustle and bustle, caught up in some dream of meaningless cheese while you, you sit high on a pile of eggs and pure, uncut Columbian nip. Top of the world. The world is yours. Cagney and Muni ain't got nothing on you, kitty.

Oh, and here's a zoophyte I saw a few days ago;

It turns out caterpillars grow on plants.