Blurred Light in a Drowned Night

Your average crime movie, even a good one, will probably be about a guy's choice to lead a life of crime, the danger of perpetrating a heist, and how the sinful lifestyle leads to the protagonist's downfall, even if he isn't evil at heart. 1981's Thief, meanwhile, is about the hazards of the unregulated company structure of organised crime as compared to freelance crime, the prison system as an incubator of criminal behaviour, and how the police are without reservation organised to get a steady income of bribe money from the mob. As the protagonist, a thief called Frank played by James Caan, says during a beating from cops for refusing to give them a cut, "It never occurred to you to try to work for a living, take down your own scores?"

This Michael Mann film is based on a book by a real life thief, John Seybold, and several real thieves served as technical consultants for the film. The tools used to break into safes are real tools, used in the way such tools were really used to crack safes at the time of filming. The system of fences and thieves portrayed with Mann's restrained style has the feel of authenticity. What I loved is the way the characters portrayed internalise this rich cache of detail.

The people in the movie, crooks and cops, seem like strange, emotionally malnourished beings who've attempted to put roots through a bedrock of cynicism. Leo, a mob boss Frank reluctantly does a job for, equates investing a portion of Frank's agreed upon earnings into business fronts with familial bonds. The cops don't have the faintest idea of being law enforcement, they see lucrative bribes as their meat and potatoes. Somehow Frank has managed to nurture a work ethic in this world--he and his partner pull a difficult job, they get paid for it. He's managed this so far by keeping his business small and fiercely independent. But it's fostered in him some peculiarly innocent dreams.

He carries around a little collage he made from magazine clippings and photographs he's personally taken that represent everything he wants out of life. As the movie begins, he decides it's time for him to marry a woman and have a kid and big, proper home.

So he asks a waitress named Jessie out on a date he shows up two hours late for, grabs her by the arm, throws her into his car, drives off and proposes marriage.

The scene that follows could have gone quite wrong, could have fallen apart as simply absurd, but instead works brilliantly thanks to the writing, direction, and performances. Caan is very good as he explains to Jessie, played by Tuesday Weld, how he spent ten years in prison for stealing forty dollars--an initial short sentence was gradually extended as he got in trouble in prison--how he now has to catch up with life in a hurry.

It's not just what he says but how he says it that brings Jessie over. With his actions and manner, Frank clearly is a guy who's been short changed in a lot of ways in his emotional maturation. He doesn't have any idea why his tactics with Jessie are bad and awkward and with this he exudes a vulnerability that stands in contrast to the story he tells her of how in prison he had to shut himself down. To beat the other guys, he had to stop caring about himself, about them, about everything. But of course the fact that he would resort to any kind of self preservation is evidence that he does care. His stone face is a boy standing still in a man's body.

Throughout the film, Mann's filmmaking style is well suited to these damaged personalities. Rather than describing it as heavy with shadow, it's more like colour comes in small, isolated spots in blackness. And those spots are often luridly bright and bleeding.

The Yellow Sun and the Super Lizard

This lovely lady was waiting for me right outside the front door this morning. She suffered me to take two macroshots before wriggling off.

Lizards this size always seem to flee out of annoyance more than any fear of me.

A few days ago I had a longer photo session with a wasp;

I don't think I've seen a wasp like this around here before. I love how the wildlife around here never stops surprising me.

I've been colouring all week. I ought to pick up the pace, I suppose. I don't see how I can, though, now that I do so much airbrushing. It takes me twice as long now to colour a page as it took me to colour the average Venia's Travels page. I keenly feel I'm doing the work of three people.

Sometimes while colouring, I've been listening to Carl Sagan's Cosmos this past week. Still a great series but how sad it is to hear him enthusiastically talking about how 1980 was just at the beginning of the era of space travel. And it is sad to hear him talk about creationism as though it's a curiosity from a primitive part of human history. Now I have a creation museum in the town where I live which Caitlin told me is infamous.

I usually stop colouring at eight or nine o'clock feeling like I'm several days behind where I ought to be and play a couple hours of The Secret World, which I finally feel like I'm starting to make headway in again. There's an "Innsmouth Academy" in the game which has a lot of good missions and unlike in World of Warcraft you're able to repeat missions as many times as you like, which is a much nicer way of grinding than killing monsters over and over.

My brain feels a bit mushy to-day which is what usually happens on the Saturdays where I delay lunch and afternoon caffeine for a chess tournament. And, as usual, I only won two out of five games. Everyone I play against either seems insanely good or like they just started playing a few days ago. Well, my friend, and co-owner of my chess club, Celia took home the top prize, so I'm happy for that.

Twitter Sonnet #535

Oysters open to gulp down acid rain.
Angels strung on fishing line dress the Bride.
Industrious Vulcans soon go insane.
In murky murals goddesses confide.
Blue pastel rings surround the pale swimmer.
Steam pulverised bear skins under pink flesh.
Softly, the reclined jaundiced eyes glimmer.
Blue stained marble bends the floor's waxy mesh.
Horizontal figure eights trick the knight.
Silhouette goblins hate "Mood Indigo".
Banner tongues lick hydrogen at great height.
Altitude and nuns trigger vertigo.
Soft eyes stand at the metal chimp vanguard.
Lizard noblemen will waddle westward.

Dreams in the Box

I dreamt last night I was Kim Novak and in my backyard I had what might be called a backpack tree. It was an extremely large version of the backpack I have in waking life with a hole in the bottom and a large sequoia trunk going up through the middle of it, suspending it at least fifteen feet off the ground. Inside were enormous versions of various old things I own, not limited to the sorts of things I carry in the backpack--there was my sleeping bag I've had since I was twelve, lots of papers including a stack of manila folders with the cellophane still on, and socks. I needed to get something out of the backpack tree, so I climbed up the trunk and was searching inside when I found a nest with three enormous baby birds with sparse, spiky black plumage and glittering green eyes that all stared at me from the darkness of the backpack tree. I decided I was going to take the birds as pets--I was going to name them Jimmy, Scottie, and Johnny. I somehow knocked down the tree and brought the backpack inside. It occurred to me afterwards I might have injured the birds, but when I searched through the bag with a flashlight I could find no trace of them.

I've mentioned I'm a big fan of Vertigo, right?

I didn't watch a movie last night, just a lot of television. I watched the final two episodes of Game of Thrones' third season. Not quite as impressive as season two but still quite good. Daenerys taking over the army of slaves relied on her opponent being improbably stupid but it was still a rather satisfying moment. I didn't really care about Theon Greyjoy from the beginning of the series but I came to really despise him as he bored me, whining through dull scenes where he's tortured by a stock psychopath character. I hate all the Greyjoys--the whole section from season two where Theon goes back to them, I was annoyed by what a whiney bitch he was and I was annoyed by his sister and father smugly mocking him. I really hope to see Daenerys kill all the Greyjoys. The White Walkers could kill them, too, that would be fun. Either one of those would be more entertaining than the boring torture guy. This may be a reflection of how jaded I am, I get the feeling viewers were supposed to be kept occupied in those scenes by the novelty of medieval torture portrayed on screen.

It was disappointing Tyrion had a less proactive role to play this season and a lot of the stuff between him and his father felt redundant--how many times can Tyrion act surprised when his father tells him he's ashamed of him? I get the feeling this may be one of the drawbacks of adapting novels for a television series--there's pressure to give a lot of the characters plenty of screen time even if they don't appear in the books for many chapters so the writers have to tread water with them a little bit. On the whole, though, I'm still very excited about this format. I love how organic the character arcs feel. Standard television character development feels really stilted by comparison--Game of Thrones has brought a virtue of the novel to television I didn't expect ever to see. One of my favourites is Arya Stark's story. Her progression from Eddard Stark's little tomboy to death worshipping, lost teenager works really nicely. I love how everywhere she goes, everyone seems to die or meet with disaster and her personality development as a result of it is nicely complimented by her actress' physical maturation. A lot of the child actors on the show began season one as twelve and thirteen year olds and are now fifteen or sixteen. It must be a strange way to grow up.

The Red Wedding sequence was terrific, especially since the Starks were generally pretty dull next to the Lannister and Targaryen plotlines. David Bradley is pretty delightfully disgusting as Walder Frey, but I kept looking at him thinking about how he's playing William Hartnell in An Adventure in Space and Time, an upcoming special about the making of Doctor Who for the show's 50th anniversary. He does actually kind of look like William Hartnell.

Part of me wonders if An Adventure in Space and Time isn't a big ruse, like Blue Harvest for Return of the Jedi. Maybe the sets constructed and actors cast in the name of An Adventure in Space and Time are secretly part of the real anniversary special's production and they've cast another actor for the First Doctor, just as was done for the twentieth anniversary special. That would be kind of nice. I'm hoping all the lies Steven Moffat claims he's telling about the special are concealing very cool things.

Also last night, I watched "Forest of the Dead", the second half of the Tenth Doctor two parter Moffat wrote, the story that first introduced River Song. It all takes on a new meaning after one's seen River's whole story during the Eleventh Doctor's run. The quality of the Tenth Doctor story actually seems to be diminished somewhat by knowing how weakly developed River turned out. The strangeness of her familiarity with the Doctor in that first story was actually rather endearing when I first saw it but it became pretty tired in subsequent episodes as she never seemed to move past that square. Moffat's much better at writing meet-cutes than he is at writing relationships, I think. Maybe that's not surprising as his chief virtue seems to be in constructing disconcerting, often pleasantly surprising, plotlines.

After that, I watched the first part of Pyramids of Mars and went to bed. Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen have really great chemistry in that story, I enjoy it a lot more every time I watch it.

Enlarging Whale Men

Among several inaccuracies in the Wikipedia entry for Herman Melville's novel, Moby-Dick, is its identification of the book as an example of Romanticism. Moby-Dick is a Gothic novel and like Melville's other works, and those of Poe and Hawthorne, it is in many ways a reaction against Romanticism. Captain Ahab is a parody of the Byronic hero.

But Wikipedia wouldn't be the first to categorise the story wrongly. Such a mistake is at the heart of why the 1956 adaptation doesn't work despite direction by John Huston and a screenplay by Ray Bradbury.

I thought Bradbury was a strange choice as screenwriter from the start. His best works depend on an underlying morality in the universe, people who are genuinely, fundamentally good or evil and Moby-Dick is an enthusiastically amoral work. In another unfortunate example of Wikipedia editing, the film's entry contains a section on what it says are the only four, very slight, differences between novel and film. The differences it lists are indeed differences between novel and film but they are neither slight nor by any means are they the only differences.

Naturally there would be a lot of changes made to fit such a famously long novel into a two hour film. Among changes not mentioned by the Wikipedia is a general streamlining of the narrative--Ishmael meets Stubb at the Inn and first sees Ahab on the street outside. The filmmakers still manage to keep Ahab's face hidden until over twenty minutes into the film--the Captain doesn't emerge from his cabin until the Pequod's been at sea for some time, just like in the book.

Queequeg is rather unfortunately portrayed by a fifty six year old, skinny Polish actor with a great deal more subservience than is ascribed to him in the book, though the way he follows Ishmael like a porter onto the Pequod may have been intended only as condensing.

I like the film's very beginning where Ishmael's description from the book of the pull of the sea is juxtaposed with Richard Baseheart as Ishmael walking beside creeks.

But after the first third of the film, it's no longer a story that bears much resemblance to the book. There are a lot of things Bradbury and Huston did possibly just in the name of streamlining that in fact exert an entirely different philosophy than the one presented in Melville's work.

Morality and Christianity are brought to the forefront much more. Early in the film, Orson Welles plays Father Mapple impressively and Huston gets some terrific shots of the bow/pulpit in a somewhat exaggerated version of what's described in the book;

Welles' version of the sermon--supposedly Welles scripted this scene himself--is a short version of the one from the novel that retains its peculiar call to self-assertion.

"But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"

Queequeg is shown refusing a bible offered to him in the movie, but in the book the pagan's character is juxtaposed with Christianity a little more markedly, as this description of him immediately follows the sermon;

Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.

One of the changes made at the end of the film--one of the few noted by Wikipedia--is Starbuck suddenly zealously pursuing Moby-Dick after Ahab's failure. The reason for this wasn't hard to see as another of the differences in the film was to give Starbuck a more strongly dissenting voice in Ahab's pursuit of the whale and to tie it conspicuously with Starbuck's religion. Starbuck continually remarks on how Ahab's behaviour isn't Christian. So Huston or Bradbury needed an explanation as to why Starbuck is damned along with the rest of the crew.

Unlike in the book, Ahab prevents the crew from taking other whales in order to get Moby-Dick. Again, this was probably done in the interest of streamlining but the crew's compliance is given a somewhat magical quality because of it.

The characterisation of Ahab in the movie is a big problem. Gregory Peck was unhappy with his own performance in the role, I didn't think he was so bad, though my friend Ada mentioned that Klaus Kinski would have been better suited to it and I couldn't agree more. But the main problem is that the filmmakers were too much in awe of Ahab. The movie lacked some of Ahab's more humiliating episodes involving his false leg, as when he attempts to climb aboard the Samuel Enderby.

But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel at a moment's warning. Now, it is no very easy matter for anybody—except those who are almost hourly used to it, like whalemen—to clamber up a ship's side from a boat on the open sea; for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope to attain.

This is one of a number of jabs Melville takes at the Romantic, Byronic hero. Moby-Dick is much more realism than Romantic--instead of Manfred who can use magic to stand alone against heaven and hell, Ahab is a man in a world with a million realistic considerations that make heaven, hell, and his belief in himself absurdities.

The white whale is the physical embodiment of horribly un-Romantic reality. A murderous, dangerous animal next to the unforgiving, lethal sea itself is the perfect foil for the Romantic notion of nature intrinsically offering spiritual salvation, redemption, and comfort. The whale is portrayed by not wholly ineffective models in the film.

Some of you who've only seen the film in its pan-and-scan, overly saturated televised versions may be surprised by the muted colours of these screenshots. This is actually how the movie was meant to look--despite conventional ideas in the U.S. of how Technicolor ought to look, John Huston rather boldly experimented with subtler palettes in films like this, his 1952 film Moulin Rouge, and his 1967 film Reflections of a Golden Eye, the entirety of which he tinted yellow.

The Wallpaper Goes and I Do Too

My latest Twitter sonnet is based on my randomised desktop wallpaper--I usually write a quatrain at about 8pm so I decided to just write about whatever my wallpaper happened to be. It cycles every thirty minutes through a selection I made of about twenty wallpapers.

Twitter Sonnet #534

Burgundy hands briefly imprint on black.
Red lids inspected as dumb petals pass.
The proud pommel of scimitar drew back.
Dark currents said many birds here won't last.
White eucalyptus leaves watch from pink limbs.
Earnest acorns repress a blush over bare throat.
Naked shoulders frame two clasped white gloved thumbs.
A fawn's adoptive mother seeks a goat.
Candles march out from a busy darkness.
The ruddy men ready musket and drum.
Shock cries by a chick to brocade harnessed.
Sleepless faithful figure a shifting sum.
Seeming purple petulance blackens red.
Pale bystander can't hear the louder dead.

Embarrassingly enough, the first quatrain was based on some of my own artwork, the wallpaper of Nesuko I made for my new comic;

Burgundy hands briefly imprint on black.
Red lids inspected as dumb petals pass.
The proud pommel of scimitar drew back.
Dark currents said many birds here won't last.

It is one of the first wallpapers I've made myself I'm almost happy with. I always feel awkward doing cover or pinup images--I need some kind of motivation for the character. It was a little easier with Echo Erosion since the protagonist was a pin-up model and I felt drawing those gave me some good practice. Here, I wanted some nudity to help entice people into reading the comic and I also wanted to try making a really pale nude with a dark background like a Pre-Raphaelite painting. I ended up basing the image on some photographs of the nearby river on an overcast autumn day. Having Nesuko wash up after a kill provided me with some of the motivation I needed for her.

The second quatrain is based on this publicity still of Audrey Hepburn from Funny Face.

White eucalyptus leaves watch from pink limbs.
Earnest acorns repress a blush over bare throat.
Naked shoulders frame two clasped white gloved thumbs.
A fawn's adoptive mother seeks a goat.

I wrote about the movie in 2008;

It was a decent movie. Fred Astaire was still fantastic at 58, seeming as though he walked right out of a movie from the 30s--his style and everything about him was an unconscious anachronism, except maybe for the dopey cardigans and ascots he wore. Audrey Hepburn's cute as a button, and even the fact that she can't quite sing is kind of cute. I don't know if she's much of a dancer, but it's hard to tell because she's definitely a charming dancer. Gawky and elegant at the same time, which is pretty much the essence of Hepburn's charm. I see Cyd Charisse was originally up for the role--something I suspected all through the movie--but although Charisse would've been a better dancer, it's Audrey Hepburn who has the real funny face.

There were some annoying beatnik caricatures in the movie, but I find that's something I often have to put up with from Hollywood movies of the late 50s. There seems to have been a real resentment for the new culture, even as there was an attempt to adapt. Hepburn dancing in the club in black sweater and slacks and Astaire dancing with the unexpectedly great Kay Thompson, are nice sequences, but exist way off in their own dimensions.

The third quatrain is about The Night Watch or The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq by Rembrandt.

Candles march out from a busy darkness.
The ruddy men ready musket and drum.
Shock cries by a chick to brocade harnessed.
Sleepless faithful figure a shifting sum.

Like the Pre-Raphaelite paintings I was seeking to emulate, Rembrandt was great--really much better--at using light to make things pop naturalistically. I love the rich, waxy look his people have. But I didn't really appreciate him until I heard he was a huge influence on cinematographer Jack Cardiff.

The final couplet is about The Play Scene from Hamlet by Edwin Austin Abbey.

Seeming purple petulance blackens red.
Pale bystander can't hear the louder dead.

As it happens, I was watching a bit of Kenneth Branagh's version of Hamlet last night. I didn't get too far, I'm afraid. There are elements I like, mainly the costumes, sets, and locations. But the tone is completely wrong for me, particularly the first scene with Jack Lemmon as Marcellus, the night watchman. I like Jack Lemmon but next to the two British actors who clearly came from an entirely different school of acting he sticks out like a sore thumb for more reasons than his familiar face. And the rushed and urgent manner with which Horatio delivers his exposition about Denmark's relationship with Norway feels odd. Usually it comes across like, despite the ghost of the dead king turning up, the sentries have to pass the long night with conversation and they're all stuck with a growing dread. Here, it sounds like Fortinbras is about to attack in twenty seconds.

This is followed by Claudius and Gertrude addressing an enormous assemblage and then having extremely private discussions with Hamlet in front of them. It makes more sense when Claudius is delivering his initial speeches to a smaller, more intimate gathering of councillors and family.

What Branagh does here is create a more, almost cartoonish hugeness to Claudius and Gertrude trying to talk Hamlet out of his grief. There ought to be a discord here--that Hamlet is made to feel weird for grieving for his father but I felt this overplayed it.

I do like Derek Jacobi and Julie Christie as Claudius and Gertrude, though, maybe I'll give it another shot. I did watch the whole movie at some point in the late 90s and I think I remember enjoying it.

A Matter of Everything and Nothing

One perhaps does not expect a 1946 movie about a man dying and going to an afterlife to be at all reminiscent of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. And yet that's precisely what I thought of as Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death opened with a slow camera crawl through an illustration of space and a narrator informs us when we're seeing a globular cluster of stars or a supernova. The filmmakers didn't like the film's American title, Stairway to Heaven, and didn't want the afterlife depicted to explicitly be the Christian conception of heaven. It's heavily hinted that the experiences David Niven, the World War II RAF pilot protagonist, has in this other world are due to neurological damage.

I find this view far more interesting not from the point of view of my philosophy on religion but because a man's brain creating this elaborate and strange set of experiences is to me a far more interesting story than one of a man hovering between Earth and Heaven. For me, this is not one of Powell and Pressburger's best films but it's certainly a very good and moving portrait from the human brain.

And Marius Goring as an angel of death is the prettiest little French leprechaun ever to grace the screen. He embodies one fascinating bit of weirdness, benefiting from Jack Cardiff's peculiar Technicolor chiaroscuro. All the scenes on Earth are in colour, all the scenes in the other world are in black and white.

Something I thought rather appropriate because black and white is not natural, at least not for those of us who can see colour. The real world is colour, the world possibly in Peter's (David Niven's) mind is like a movie, black and white.

There's an extraordinary sense of authenticity in the diagnoses from the doctor treating Peter who remarks on how Peter smells fried onions whenever he sees Marius Goring. The doctor's played by Roger Livesey, an actor whose voice I just feel happy hearing, probably from watching The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp a few hundred times.

Livesey has such a charming fundamental, wise affability. Niven is somewhat more insecure by contrast but he's disarmingly laid back in his first scene as he plummets to certain death and yet flirts with the American radio operator, June, played by Kim Hunter.

Otherwise there's not a great deal distinguishing Peter's personality--aside from his love of chess--which is why it's helpful to think of the other world as the activity of his mind.

In the trial, there's argument as to whether Peter's apparently accidental survival--according to records in the afterlife--constitutes "borrowed" time, something which Peter actually had no right to. When considering whom to choose for his defence council, he's inexplicably adamant in not choosing someone famous like Abraham Lincoln or Plato.

These things add up to a subtle existential statement, that a man's life is his own and that any human is worthwhile. It's in this way Peter's mind tries to harmonise his own personality with frightening scope of existence made plain by World War II, an impression strikingly given as the Saganesque tour of the universe at the beginning is drawn to the gravity of fog and bombs on Earth, the narrator's tone becoming urgent and frightened as it does so.

Vague Dream

I think A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is overrated. It's lazily written with no indication anyone ever cared about the characters while making the movie and the music, by Angelo Badalamenti, proves that when separated from his usual collaborator, David Lynch, a decent musician can produce tripe.

"But wait," you may say. "Calling it overrated implies someone's gone on record as liking it."

Yes, as a matter of fact, just last year Joss Whedon listed a character from the film among his top five favourite horror characters.

She was so badass. [Dream Warriors] changed the dynamic of the horror movie in a way that I appreciate—the idea that the people facing horror could be empowered by it and confront what they were fighting. It’s very Ur-Buffy as well.

He's talking about Jennifer Rubin as Taryn White.

In her dreams she's "beautiful . . . and bad!"

Not bad enough for a real mohawk, apparently. She has perhaps one whole minute of assertiveness for the whole movie--this moment where she introduces her dream "power" and an awkward knife fight she has with Freddy that ends quickly with her being injected with Freddy's finger syringes.

The hazy, After School Special junkie story is actually what dominates her subplot. I did kind of like the effect of little eager mouths for the needle scars on her arms.

The cartoon logic of Freddy's dream tricks is the best part of the film probably because the writers didn't have to do any research for it or consciously write about things genuinely important to them. The Ray Harryhausen-ish Freddy Skeleton Warrior was kind of cool, too.

The big concept with the third Nightmare on Elm Street movie was that the kids in this one were using the fact that one can do and be whatever what one wants in a dream in order to fight Freddy, the malevolent ghost of a child molester who attacks them in dreams. I think even when I saw the movie as a kid I wondered at the surprisingly weak abilities the kids picked out for themselves, most glaringly Patricia Arquette's power to do somersaults.

But outright insulting is the Dungeons and Dragons guy, who was written as though someone said to the writers, "You know who'd really be into dream powers is one of those role playing geeks."

And the writers grudgingly said, "Yeah . . . okay . . . but we're not going to spend any time figuring out what role playing is or how Dungeons and Dragons actually works."

As a result, the kid's written like a sitcom nerd who feels the need to say, "In the name of Lowrek, Prince of Elves . . . demon, begone!" And Freddy beats his power just because. The nerdiness, I guess.

Actually, you never get the impression anyone's dream power means anything.

Also, Heather Lagenkamp's back in the movie as the heroine from the first film. I don't think I can describe her performance better than I did in 2009 when writing about the first film;

Heather Langenkamp delivers one of the most anesthetised performances I've ever seen. She always seems like she's had a gallon of novocaine injected into her skull a few seconds earlier, and when she speaks her head subtly sways like a wind sock, her eyes seem to be aimless blue jelly beans. There's a guy in Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale who was totally blind playing someone who had sight, and watching him, I was more convinced of his ability to focus on objects than I was of Langenkamp's.

Who's the Same?

So the Twelfth Doctor already has a Wikipedia page of course. Here's a reliable quote from Wikipedia, if ever there was one;

Prior to the revelation of Capaldi as the next Doctor, there was extensive media speculation on the subject.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]

You get it, people? EXTENSIVE SPECULATION, undeniably!

The Twelfth Doctor, it was announced to-day, (and I have this from a number of sources, including the BBC) will be portrayed by Peter Capaldi (pictured). He comes with a pretty impressive background including an Academy Award (for directing a short film). The only thing I've seen him in was the Neverwhere miniseries where he played the angel Islington and that was so long ago I don't think I could form an opinion based on it. But, I will say, as nice as it would've been to see a female Doctor, I am glad to see that it is an older Doctor. At 55 years old, he'll be the oldest actor to play the Doctor since William Hartnell, the First Doctor, who was also 55 when he accepted the role (even Jon Pertwee was only 51). It's a bold move, casting this guy--you know the BBC must have been pushing for another handsome young man.

I wonder if they'll cast a beefy male companion to be a Harry Sullivan/Ian Chesterton type to handle any action scenes. Or maybe Madame Vastra and Jenny will travel with him permanently now to take that role. Then again, the Doctor hasn't really been involved in any vigorously physical stories in a very long time.

Yesterday I finished reading The Red Tree, Caitlín R. Kiernan's excellent novel from a few years ago. And to-day's August 4th, by complete coincidence, the last recorded date in the book which is written in diary form by its protagonist, Sarah Crowe--August 4, 2008, actually. This may have something to do with August 3rd 1995 being the day when Elizabeth Tillman Aldridge, a young woman with whom Caitlín was in love, committed suicide. Sarah Crowe also had a lover who committed suicide, Amanda, one of several details of Crowe's life that mirrors Caitlín's own, the book being, as she has often said, largely autobiography in fictionalised form. In fact, knowing as much about Caitlín as I do, it's difficult at times to parse the novel as a work from impressions of Caitlín I have from reading her blog.

One certainly fictional element is the eponymous Red Tree itself though, there again, Caitlín describes being inspired by a real tree she'd discovered in Rhode Island. This real world Red Tree has not provided any of the vivid episodes of supernatural encounter of the kind described in the book, at least none that Caitlín has publicly divulged.

Sarah Crowe, like Caitlín at the time she was writing the novel, has recently moved from Atlanta to Rhode Island. She takes up residence in a large, remote old house in proximity to the Red Tree about which she soon forms an obsession. Her foray into the house's cellar and discovery of a manuscript by someone else obsessed with the tree has the effective and pervasive menace of a point of view in an eerily, subtly sinister environment that recalls the best parts of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a novel by H.P. Lovecraft from whom Caitlín has frequently drawn inspiration.

The connexion between autobiography and Lovecraftian supernatural fantasy is in the latter's effectiveness at portraying the cosmic isolation of the former. The horrible cheat of an existence that denies a person's fundamental needs, the voicelessness of both the deceased lover and the invisible and insoluble forces that led to her death are given a suitably cold and frustratingly unknowable persona in the Red Tree. The supernatural here functions as a palette for the painting of enduring and waxing pain arising from a natural, irrepressible compulsion to find answers to or comfort for things which have none.

It's a brilliantly written novel which demonstrates how fantasy can be uniquely suited to explore human experience.

Twitter Sonnet #534

Verdant repose amused the white moth girl.
A black pond presents no djinn to the moss.
Petticoat hems darkened like a burnt pearl.
Hidden eyebrows furrow 'neath golden gloss.
Karina's wrist signals a welcome sill.
Unheeded heights mean a breeze has smiled.
Turning air cools and sculpts for Iceman's will.
The best, as worst, tooth's found in the wild.
A mixed drink reflected micro-gingham.
Sleepy questions rebound off the black wall.
Velvet gloves take a doubly mute Gotham.
Burning glasses see a champagne drenched fall.
Painted stones support quivers quietly.
The white fletched arrows return there nightly.

The Weight of Beauty

"My need to transform reality was an urgent necessity, as important as three meals a day or sleep," Yukio Mishima explains in voiceover narration as a scene depicts his younger self having his first experience of sexual arousal while viewing Guido Reni's painting of Saint Sebastian's martyrdom. This is from Paul Schrader's 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, a biopic of the famous author Yukio Mishima who committed seppuku in 1970 after a failed attempt to take over the Japanese military. The line quoted reflects everything at the centre of this extraordinary, brilliant film.

Paul Schrader is best known as the screenwriter for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Mishima has a great deal in common with Travis Bickle, the protagonist of the Scorsese film. Both are men with intense interior worlds, both "God's lonely man".

Mishima shifts between black and white depictions of the man's life as he grows up and intensely colourful, stage-bound renderings of some of his most famous novels.

I was reminded of the dream sequences from Kurosawa's Kagemusha which used soundstages decorated to resemble the director's Expressionistic paintings for dreams. Kagemusha was produced by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas and so was Mishima.

In fact, despite being produced by Coppola's American studio, American Zoetrope, and directed by an American who could not speak Japanese, Mishima is set entirely in Japan with only one brief scene where any English is spoken. In its initial release, Roy Scheider provided narration in English but in the final version the narrator speaks Japanese, too. Yet the movie has never been made widely available in Japan due to the controversy surrounding Mishima.

Mishima formed a private army that was allowed to train with Japan's real military and it was the affection military personnel had for him that allowed him and five of his officers to take a general hostage in the general's garrison office. Mishima, despite being apparently comfortable with his homosexuality, subscribed to an extreme rightwing philosophy. He and his followers wished to return Japan to a monarchy and restore the Emperor to power.

The movie does a remarkably sharp job of exploring Mishima's personality and the bedrock of his convictions and in so doing it explores how an artist's obsessions inform the subject matter of his or her work.

In the first story depicted, The Golden Pavilion, we see a young man afflicted with a stutter. He's a virgin, an aspect of his life which has seen him meeting various forms of rejection so that he comes to see sexual arousal and beauty of any sort to be so intense, so unapproachable that it must be destroyed. His symbol for this beauty is the Golden Pavilion.

His more worldly friend explains that "Beauty is like a rotten tooth. It rubs against your tongue, hurting, insisting on its own importance. Finally you go to a dentist and have it pulled. Then you look at the small bloody tooth in your hand and say, 'Is that all it was?'"

It could be said Mishima's whole life was dedicated to proving that beauty had an objective, paramount significance.

In the second tale, Kyoko's House, an attractive young man sells himself to a female yakuza boss in order to erase his mother's debt. Here Mishima ties the beauty of martyrdom with physical beauty, like the painting of Saint Sebastian he admired. One might also note the resemblance to his relationship with his grandmother as a child, who kept him from going outside, kept him from his mother, and forced him, in one early scene, to massage her legs.

As he grows older, Mishima grows more and more dissatisfied with his lack of direct participation in his stories. He refers to novels as the ultimate form of voyeurism and he wished to be more of an exhibitionist. So he begins posing as characters in his novels and publishing the photographs. After a lover deeply wounds his pride by calling his body flabby, he becomes a body builder, a model, and an actor.

The final novel depicted is Runaway Horses about an attempted coup d'etat by a group of young man that ends with the leader committing ritual suicide. This leads to the culmination of Mishima's obsession with restructuring reality for his aesthetic and his attempted coup in real life.

It's interesting to see how, as with Travis Bickle, the reality of Mishima's experience doesn't precisely match up with what he desired yet it could be argued he ultimately accomplishes his goal. One can see the distress in Mishima as his speech to the soldiers after he's captured the general does not inflame their imagination, in fact they reject him. Whether or not his suicide fulfils his desire to finally destroy the golden pavilion is a question the film wisely leaves unanswered.

Where the Comics Are

A few days ago, I was woken by a light, arrhythmic tapping sound. I searched about in the clutter on my bedside table and found the flyer one of the women in this photograph gave me was being hit by the breeze from my ceiling fan.

When I posted the photo with my Comic Con reports, I misidentified the two women as performers in "some kind of Sherlock Holmes burlesque show". Turns out they were actually promoting a comic, a time travel, Sherlock Holmes, steampunk adventure comic called The Legion of Molly Doves.

I should say that if I misidentify you as a burlesque performer, it's a compliment. Unless you're a stripper, then it's kind of an insult--strippers always trump burlesque performers, however talented the burlesque performer may be.

Now that I've won the hearts of women everywhere, I'd like to mention I'm selling The Casebook of Boschen and Nesuko at DriveThru Comics now. This means when you buy it--it's still only one dollar--you'll receive it instantly. Also, DriveThru comics provides an eight page sample of the 25 page comic, the first eight pages, so if you haven't bought your own copy of The Casebook yet, now's your chance to see a bit of what it's all about for free. Be sure to rate it!

Making a Pres Out of U and Me

Pope Innocent III, I presume? Nope, it's Harrison Ford in 1990's Presumed Innocent, a simple hearted whodunnit about an assistant prosecutor (Ford) who's charged with murdering and faking the rape of his colleague played by an unfamiliar homogenous 80s actress who looks like a composite of Michelle Pfieffer and Virginia Madsen.

It's a decent enough little legal mystery movie. I used to love watching Ally McBeal and The Practice when they were on the air but I think I got exhausted on legal dramas watching them. They tend to be more like puzzles than character explorations or thoughtful examinations of human nature. But I don't mind a puzzle now and then. I will say I'm rather proud of being able to guess the killer's identity halfway through Presumed Innocent--I'm not usually able to do that. In this case I just thought about which aspect of the story was periodically brought up again but which was never quite brought into the foreground. Then I had it.

The solution to the mystery actually impairs the potential of interesting character development. Raul Julia as the attorney Ford hires to defend him is really cool, a smooth and smart delicious movie lawyer. Ford has a rather juicy role as a high-strung A type personality which, as his boss notes, seems to barely cover a constant anger.

It's partly because of this and partly because he had an embarrassing breakup with the murdered woman who, it turns out, had only been sleeping with him to further her career despite the fact that he'd fallen in love with her, that he looks guilty. When he casually refused on ethical grounds to use his influence to get her a promotion, she broadsided him with the breakup. Ironically, I don't think anyone really presumes he's innocent.

One feels for him as at every turn he finds someone or something else he shouldn't have put his faith in. I won't spoil the end for you except to say this poor man's life really sucks.

Twitter Sonnet #533

Auspicious stains entrap paper slug trails.
Grassy eyelashes bat nature's garage.
Poisoned parietal lobes bloom like whales.
Masochistic krill shades barrage.
Albino Ronald X McDonald screams.
The stars strangle a long dry yellow throat.
Liver legos slip off in purple teams.
A dark mascot is trapped on the big boat.
Asking axes to now arbitrate print.
No damaged roots know a splint end's trouble.
Plastic hotels are Hot Tamale sent.
Tea and ice cream can't touch in a bubble.
Deeper rain mud may hold to a blank flag.
Ancient notes blur on a Colour Forms rag.