Finding the Right Randomness

I think at some level I'm always going to like an Alice in Wonderland reference. Like last night when, playing Arkham City, I discovered the Mad Hatter is apparently part of Batman's rogue's gallery and appears in this side quest where you fight him in a hallucination. Well, you fight an endless number of Arkham inmates in rabbit masks on a big watch.

It was a challenge and mildly amusing, though I have to say the Hatter seems somewhat redundant and indistinct as a Batman villain.

This was a very short side quest. The main quest, and much of the gameplay, I'm finding to be tremendously inferior to the writing in Arkham Asylum. The previous game, while not Tolstoy, was still a nice little story about Batman suddenly having to deal with Joker taking over the place. It was paced well as Joker took over security systems one after another and took people hostage.

This game's writing sucks in a rather Jeph Loeb-ish way. There's a plot about how Joker's infected with a deadly disease which he gives to Batman (after capturing Batman rather easily and then deciding not to take his mask off). This is to give Batman incentive to find the cure. As extra incentive, Joker has also somehow infected half of Gotham city. So then there's an unlikely plot about how Batman has to team up with Mister Freeze to find the cure, which doesn't prevent a boss fight with Mister Freeze even after you rescue him. Or fights with Joker's henchmen, for that matter, despite the fact you're supposedly doing the Joker's bidding.

Then there's an extremely stilted, video game-ish sequence with Ra's al Ghul who wants Batman to kill him to take over al Ghul's society of assassins for justice. Batman refuses to kill so . . . you're supposed to fight al Ghul. This rather pushes the concept of Batman's always non-lethal knockouts to the extreme, especially since al Ghul turns into a giant sand statue of himself with a barrier of clones of himself swirling around with one gap you need to aim your electricity disruptor gun through for some reason with just the right timing. The only reason you know this is because the game tells you, there's absolutely no way you'd figure it out on your own.

There's a lot of that, including the quest I completed last night where I died trying to get across a pool of water before the hints it gives you after you die explained to me I had to use Mister Freeze's freeze ray on the water to make a raft of ice. Obviously.

Another problem I had last night was Avast Anti-virus had suddenly, for no apparent reason, decided the exe file to start the game was malware and moved it to a chest. I'll say this for Avast--when it thinks a file is dangerous it makes it really hard for you to use it. Which I guess means it's doing its job. First I had to move the file out of Avast's virus chest and then disable Avast's "shields" for ten minutes. Maybe the fight against Ra's al Ghul wasn't so unrealistic after all.

Twitter Sonnet #556

Rain enveloped speeding liquorice roads.
Ghost beans sprout horizontally at night.
Blueberry haze concealed concerts of toads.
Yellow echoes spark off rocks out of sight.
Emerald gum stumbles on the purple stage.
Ancient china collects on the boxer.
A comedian android defies no age.
Spider Toupee covets the bobby soxer.
A shaved wookiee lurks behind the dentist.
Chopstick bones creep from under the cabinet.
Wire feathers slowly coat the sexist.
Dark cast iron smoke squeezes the outlet.
The first step is locked in the virus chest.
Ice guns ferry you at the bat's behest.

So the Hunter and the Hunted have Become the Strawmen

From the pile of movies with the word "naked" in the title I've finally come across one that meets the expectations one's likely to have from such a title. 2007's Naked Fear feels like a young, ambitious porn director's attempt at making a mainstream film, influenced by the exploitation movies of the 70s. And yet it was directed by Thom Eberhardt, a director with more than thirty years experience having directed several Hollywood films including Captain Ron and the Sherlock Holmes spoof Without a Clue starring Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley. To say the acting talent in Naked Fear falls well below the calibre of Caine or Kingsley would be to cover only one flower in the bouquet of mediocrity on display.

The biggest star in Naked Fear is Joe Mantegna who one senses took the role so he could play against type as a redneck cop in a small New Mexican town. His role is very small, though. Mainly the movie follows the new deputy, Dwight, as he tries to find out why prostitutes have routinely turned up missing over the years. He faces inexplicable resistance from his co-workers in doing so--resistance that's never explained--and a young, seemingly psychotic wife who inexplicably demands he quit trying to find the latest woman to go missing, Diana Kelper (Danielle De Luca).

Diana's the other main character, the subject of the film's "Most Dangerous Game" style plot as we see the fate of the missing prostitutes--Colin, the owner of a local restaurant, kidnaps the women and flies them in his little plane to New Mexican wilderness. He leaves them naked and unconscious and hunts them with high powered rifles and crossbows when they wake up.

The fact that De Luca looks absolutely fantastic naked is the best part of this movie. It's certainly not her acting. But I was captivated for the fifteen or so minutes she spends wandering before she finds a shirt at an old camp site.

But we don't get to this, the main hook of the film, until around a third of the way through, before which we follow Diana as she's extorted into taking a job as a stripper and the movie spends a lot of time telling us how terrible it is women are exploited for their bodies before we get to the fifteen or twenty minute sequence of a beautiful woman wandering naked in the wilderness.

The film was written by a woman named Christine Vasquez which makes it seem especially strange that none of the female characters are half as complex as the male characters (not a one of whom is exactly Hamlet, mind you). We watch the deputy and Montegna as they struggle between following their consciences or doing their jobs. There's a lot in the first section about male bonding in sport hunting, making the not subtle statement about how men presume privilege over the physical existence of others. This approaches being an interesting statement though it's sabotaged by the deputy's wife whose nagging failure to comprehend her husband's desire to do the right thing can be traced to misogynist character types crafted in Madigan and Dirty Harry.

But the most significant failure is in the crafting of Diana's character. The screenplay and De Luca's performance dehumanise her far more than Colin. She's introduced as a gullible, star struck kid who thinks she's come to town because she won a contest to be in a Dancing with the Stars style reality show. When Colin's chasing her, the essential challenges of a "Most Dangerous Game" story are continually mishandled. This interest in such stories is in watching two people matching wits. Diana succeeds in clubbing Colin over the head with a rock and knocking him unconscious but for no apparent reason does not take his gun. Then, when a family of campers find her, she's suddenly overcome with a form of shock that renders her incapable of speech, despite screaming for help several times when she's alone. It's not hard to see that this was because it would have ended the story much quicker if she could've told people there was a psycho hunter roaming nearby with a gun.

There's a real irony here--this movie was clearly meant to criticise misogynist attitudes that treat women like animals but, thanks to extremely lazy writing, attributing animal intelligence to any character in this movie would be very generous.

Rivers and Bays

It rained yesterday, a real hard downpour, exactly when I had to walk up the big hill to school. Now to-day I don't need to leave the house and it's only partly cloudy outside.

I only saw two car accidents yesterday, no fatalities, not bad considering rain tends to lobotomise San Diego drivers.

Sometimes there's no accounting for my own taste and I walked to Taco Bell for lunch. While eating, I read the decidedly more nutritious sixth chapter of The Drowning Girl. I know, only chapter six. I'm a slow reader.

But it's really good. I last wrote about the book on September 12th, here, when I was only three chapters in. I talked about how "drowning girls" tend to be rendered in fiction.

Lately I've been comparing the story to Vertigo, which may be inevitable since I see Vertigo everywhere. The book, told in journal format by India "Imp" Phelps, a young woman with mental health issues related to her perceptions of reality. She discusses her relationships with two women, Abalyn Armitage and Eva Canning, the former being India's girlfriend and the latter being a mysterious, ghostly woman somehow tied into India's mental issues.

I started thinking about how Abalyn might correspond to Midge in Vertigo, Eva to Madeleine/Judy, and India to Scottie. This impression is heightened by Eva's relationship to India's unreliable perceptions, the fact that Eva is associated with a painting in a museum of a woman who committed suicide in the nineteenth century (EDIT: as Caitlin pointed out to me, there's actually no indication the woman in the painting committed suicide), the fact that Eva discusses India having initiated a bond between the two of them by stopping and helping Eva. Like when Scottie tells Madeleine about the Chinese proverb that says when you save someone's life you're responsible for it forever--more importantly, there's a similarity in how it relates to the protagonist's self-image and how the self-image is founded upon a person whose existence may at least be partially the protagonist's misperception or delusion.

Abalyn, like Midge, is closer to what the average reader might call normal than India or Eva, or Madeleine or Scottie. Well, provided the reader isn't transphobic (Abalyn is a transwoman). Like Midge, she can't quite understand, or is afraid to understand, the strange world of perception that India lives in.

For some reason, I never much thought about the fact that Midge disappears two thirds of the way through the movie. Maybe because I'm aware of the alternate ending Hitchcock was forced to shoot for the Spanish censors where we see Scottie at Midge's apartment, but this scene is unquestionably false--Hitchcock makes it clear by including an absurd story on the radio broadcast Scottie and Midge are listening to in the scene.

But reading The Drowning Girl made me think about how obvious it is Midge leaves Scottie simply because she can't handle the issues he's dealing with. Like Abalyn who India later sees with a woman and a child--Midge needs a nice, normal family unit. It's hard even to think about the word "normal" without hearing Midge say it about her sex life emphatically at the beginning of the film.

I also thought about Scottie's dream where he sees himself falling from the bell tower and correlated it with the scene of India in the bathtub. A seeming identification with the partially illusory subject of obsession.

Not an Endorsement for Wax Lips

The opening scene of 1964's The Naked Kiss suggests a far more interesting film than it turns out to be. A scene of a bald prostitute in lingerie beating senseless a man who for some reason continually says, "I'm drunk, I'm drunk!" There's an intriguing and brash dream logic to this scene sadly undermined by a heavy handed moralistic story that follows it. Though the bulk of the movie isn't completely bad.

The prostitute, played by Constance Towers, is known throughout the film only as "Kelly" or "Ms. Kelly", making it uncertain whether it's her first or last name. Somehow, no-one ever asks her for another name. The credits just list her as "Kelly".

After that first scene, we see Kelly turning up in a small town some time later having re-grown a healthy head of blond hair. Her first and last john in town is the sheriff, Griff (Anthony Eisley), who recommends she go across the river to get a job in a brothel run by a woman named Candy. But Kelly, looking in the mirror at wrinkles around her eyes, sees a bleak future ahead of her and decides it's time for a career change.

Kelly takes a room in the boarding house of "the town virgin", a little old lady who never loved another man after her fiancé, Charlie, was killed in World War II. Kelly gets a job as a nurse in a hospital carrying for disabled children and quickly wins the admiration of all the staff as she takes to the rigours of her job with ease, having a natural rapport with the children.

Child actors in the 50s and 60s aren't generally known for being convincing performers but the kids in this movie come off especially artificial thanks to director Samuel Fuller's tendency to cut to isolated close-ups to emphasise certain lines, something that makes even the decent adult actors look occasionally, inappropriately mad.

Kelly takes up residence on a moral high horse, procuring a thousand dollars to enforce her command to a co-worker that she not get an abortion (it's vaguely suggested the woman has her baby outside town and puts it up for adoption). Kelly takes a twenty five dollar advance from Candy away from another nurse and shoves it into Candy's mouth after beating the shit out of her.

Meanwhile, Kelly becomes engaged to J.L. Grant, the rich young man who owns everything in town. Miraculously, he doesn't mind when he learns she used to be a prostitute. The only problem is he has what Kelly describes as a "naked kiss", something that indicates perversion. I won't spoil it for you but it's part and parcel with the high handed morality of rest of the story.

The most interesting thing about the movie, aside from its occasional brassy surrealism, is in its portrayal of male sexual hypocrisy as the sheriff, who's happy to pay for sex with Kelly, is disgusted by her attempts to live in decent society. The too-good-to-be-true Grant's reasons for wanting to marry her again reflect irrational condemnation of Kelly's former profession. The tyrannical morality Kelly exhibits which seems to reflect a self hatred can be seen as evidence of damaging social conditioning. Even as she'd lived relatively happily as a prostitute, somewhere at the back of her mind this thing from society had apparently always been incubating.

Twitter Sonnet #555

Tin foil mites blossom with cold yam scraps.
Graphic problems sting sidewalks like loud glass.
Low suns dripping with bad lard taint the taps.
Slow moving lines stab the edge like Saul Bass.
Pumpkins done injustice hide in the soy.
Red dehydrated skies drop brittle rain.
Cattails hide the marooned moderate's ploy.
Oozing green curtains signify the sane.
Pixel hooks dry on a great desert stone.
Baby balloons pop with passive cooked thought.
Quicksand dances on a bleached aurochs bone.
The lawn mower collapsed the grass to a dot.
Shock webs split the leaves from Halloween's tree.
Frozen mosquitoes rattle a decree.

Trees Move for Invisible Reasons

For some reason I woke up two hours before my alarm this morning and said, "Zasu" over and over. Fortunately I went back to sleep. I get anxious the night before a busy day.

Not much time for an entry to-day so here are some pictures I took a couple days ago of this neighbourhood's tortured trees.

The Elusive Cat

So I was finally able to play as Catwoman in Arkham City. This is the only screenshot that saved for some reason but it's in-game--right after I beat up all those guys. Which is pretty satisfying. It's also nice using a character whose shoulders and cape don't obscure a third of the screen in third person mode. For some reason you can't zoom out very far in this game. Or if you can, I haven't figured it out.

Don't get me wrong, it is fun to play as Batman. The really immersive mechanics for him from the previous game are transplanted to this sandbox world, a walled off part of Gotham City called Arkham City (not to be confused with the city from H.P. Lovecraft's writings after which the original asylum was named). It's a super prison for the criminally insane, which doesn't seem like the best idea however many helicopters and security cameras are around monitoring things. People who can't be relied on to take care of themselves left in unsanitary conditions, hundreds of impossible to monitor zones of crumbling infrastructure. It is a massive scandal, if you ask me. It does make for a good game, though.

There's a quest where a serial killer calls Batman from a pay phone threatening to kill a hostage if Batman doesn't answer another ringing pay phone somewhere else in the city within two minutes. This is a subquest you have while doing other quests, which means at any moment you might find you need to get across the whole city, fast. Which is a fun challenge--switching between running, gliding, and grappling. Batman can make pretty good time.

Catwoman uses her whip in place of Batman's grapple, which isn't as long, so you have to scamper up buildings part way. But unlike Batman, she's able to crawl upside down on ceilings. With her greater agility and conveniently smaller size she's effectively the Grant Danasty of this game. Which makes it unfortunate that, instead of being able to switch to her at any time, you only get to play as her at specific points in the plot. So far there've only been two of those for me. At least it's not forcing me to play as Robin, so far.

"I Sit and Watch TV, I See Only Me, but I Look for You There"

A couple nights ago, I dreamt I finally got around to going to Disneyland and seeing the new Star Tours. It turned out to be an underwater voyage involving dark, very deep water and hundreds of silently screaming, drowning elks flowing by in place of a star field. This probably at least partially comes from me wishing they'd bring back the submarine ride.

It's going to be a busy few days for me. I hosted a chess tournament to-day, I'll be hosting another on Tuesday night and in between I have school, an appointment to see my counsellor, and of course I can expect the homework I receive on Monday night to take an obscene amount of time.

I watched no movie last night, just television--The Thick of It, Hit and Miss, and Doctor Who. I'm halfway through Hit and Miss and while I'm still mainly enjoying it I feel as though it might have been better as a two hour film rather than a six episode series. It treads water a bit, forcing characters to back up slightly in the second episode. Mia's confrontation with the landlord at the end of the first episode I think must have seemed to the writer to have dissolved too much tension too quickly because suddenly in the second episode Mia's a little more shy about how tough she wants to get with him. In the third episode it's a little better but keeping things to a two hour running time might have helped.

I've been watching and posting an episode of Doctor Who nightly to my Facebook page, partly to help my friends gear up for the fiftieth, partly just for myself. Probably mostly just for myself as I suspect most people aren't actually so interested in watching the old series. But that's fine--I'm enjoying this second look since I watched through the series the first time a couple years ago. Instead of watching it in order, I'm going partly on whim, partly on aesthetic inspiration, partly on what episodes I think are probably most important to have watched before the fiftieth. Incidentally, I'm finding seemingly every episode of the series has been posted to France's answer to YouTube, Daily Motion, which seems to be like YouTube used to be, before YouTube went paranoid and ravenously capitalist.

I may start posting mainly horror or gothic oriented serials for October. I'd like to start watching exclusively horror, gothic, or otherwise Halloween appropriate movies for the month. If anyone wants to suggest some titles, I'd appreciate it.

Otherwise I have a huge pile of movies now with the word "naked" in the title. Which includes a surprising variety. Naked Weapon, for example, is a very different movie from The Naked Gun and The Naked Prey is probably not what most people would hope.

Twitter Sonnet #554

Heaven's bedbug tastes angel food futon.
The bow climbed belongs to the ship's fake cliff.
Sun's pulse makes John Crichton a big crouton.
You know sunspots animated your gif.
Parabola eyelids discard gender.
Antimatter corsets expand the waist.
Pumpkins don't impress the moneylender.
Smudged fingerprints result from a cop's haste.
Native languages wave on foreign tongues.
Suits may stumble into a chemist's sleep.
Dense pine needles deceive the weary lungs.
Roland saw more strangers inside the keep.
Star fields sift past eyeballs like frightened deer.
Gelatinous blue skies bruise the cold beer.

Wheels Turning with Pistols

There is a double standard for psychopaths. In his review for 2000's Baise-moi (Fuck Me), Roger Ebert says, "''Baise Moi'' would be perfectly acceptable if the women simply killed men, and no sex was involved. At some level it seems so ... cruel ... to shoot a man at his moment of success." I have great respect for Roger Ebert but I would have asked him what he thought he meant by "success". The men slaughtered by the pair of rampaging nymphomaniac psychopaths tend to see women as objects of sexual gratification. Even the rich man who opens a safe for them in one scene, who heaps praise on their infamous killing spree, does so with a barely suppressed leer. This movie certainly isn't as good as Kind Hearts and Coronets or Dial M for Murder. But it is a good time, and why shouldn't we be able to have vicarious fun through a female murderer as much as a male one?

I don't think men ought to be killed for noticing a woman's body while not respecting her personality. But I certainly don't hold it against women for fantasising about it. I'm not even talking about rape or assault here, although that does take place in the movie. These women are declaring war on the fundamental way most men have organised gender in their minds.

The film stars two porn stars and was written and directed by two women who also worked in the sex industry, Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. As such, the film contains unsimulated sex but I don't connect it to the content of the story in the way many critics seem to have. To me, sex on film is simply part of the artistic palette these four women access. I think the story might have been told just as effectively without hardcore sex, but, on the other hand, it would have been a fundamentally different film. This is because style is substance. The aesthetic modifies how one interprets a work of art in some ways that cannot even be articulated because the language of vision and sound isn't always translatable into, well, language.

But it's only natural for artists to use the tools they've honed in their professional lives, to draw on the devices of relating to others they've developed in their personal lives. In other words, this is a song from the land of the porn star, and it is sung in the traditional melodies and structures of its people.

The two leads seem like thinly veiled fantasy versions of the writing and directing team. Manu (Raffaela Anderson) is a sexually jaded and bitter pornographic actress and Nadine (Karen Lancaume) is a tall, quiet woman who is obsessed with pornography. After Nadine murders her nagging roommate and Manu murders her boyfriend when he threatens to kill the man who raped her, the two women decide to travel to Paris together. Along the way they seduce men, have sex with them, and kill them.

In this review/interview with the filmmakers from The Guardian, Trinh Thi talks about the difference between the rape scene at the beginning of the film and the mayhem that follow;

'The first part of the film,' says Trinh Thi, 'the rape scene and the scene in the tabac, that's all part of everyday France. After that, the film becomes much more like a cartoon, a comic strip. It's a fantasy, a rather joyful fantasy. There's a kind of irony in the choreographic death scenes.'

That latter portion of the film might be described as a Grand Theft Auto movie. It's exactly the kind of visceral fun one takes from extreme, fake violence.

I generally don't find rape scenes very effective in movies--they tend to get too caught up in the sexuality of the scene instead of focusing on it as an assault, as they ought to. This one, possibly because it was made by women, kind of gets it right, though the inability of most of the porn stars to give effective performances hamstrings it somewhat. However, the two leads, despite having worked in porn, actually give effective performances, particularly Raffaela Anderson who's quite natural as the uninhibited ball of rage. And I don't mean sexually uninhibited--even before the murder spree, she walks around like she owns everything.

When she's raped, she tells her fellow victim (who is another woman, not Nadine) that, much as one removes their valuables from the car when leaving it in a bad neighbourhood, she has left nothing valuable in her vagina, leading to a coldness in the encounter that prompts one of the assailants to say it's like having sex with a zombie.

There is indeed a fundamental sadness in this woman's disconnect from her own body which is part of what enables her to happily commit multiple homicide. It's an interesting contradiction that she doesn't seek revenge on her rapist but instead kills the man who wants to kill her rapist--to her, the man who would avenge her is in so doing proclaiming her to be his possession more than the rapist. Because the rapist assaults her body, something she has disconnected from, while her would-be avenger values her body as part of her and her as his responsibility. In a word, patronising.

It's not so different from the rich man mentioned above who opens the safe for them. In the catharsis of the murder spree, you see two women striking against the common phoniness of men.

Keeping Up with the Steeles

I think Edith Head deserves a credit in the Indiana Jones movies. The woman best known for her work with Alfred Hitchcock also designed Charlton Heston's costume here in the 1954 Jerry Hopper film Secret of the Incas. In addition to being an obvious influence on Raiders of the Lost Ark it's a very fun adventure film in its own right.

There are several adventure films in which one can see ancestors of Indiana Jones--the 1950 version of King Solomon's Mines, The Treasure of Sierra Madre. But Secret of the Incas not only has the look and the genre, it comes close to having the same plot, tone, and even chemistry between the male and female leads who are more contentious than was normal for films at the time.

Harry Steele (Heston) gets by running a tour guide racket in the Peruvian city Cusco. On the side, he hunts Incan artefacts and does various roguish jobs for a man called Ed Morgan (Thomas Mitchell).

I love the look of this bar where Steele meets with Morgan.

The movie takes place during a confluence of events that sees beautiful Romanian refugee Elena Antonescu (Nicole Maurey) enter Steele's life and a private plane enter his possession. In exchange for giving her a lift to the U.S. later, she helps him steal the plane so he can take it to an ancient temple where he hopes to plunder a legendary artefact before some legitimate archaeologists can.

There are a few musical numbers by the supposed natives that slow the movie down a bit, partly because one of them was used in The Big Lebowski and it is very difficult not to picture a topless woman on a trampoline followed by the introduction of Jackie Treehorn when hearing it.

But this sets up the conflict between Steele wanting to take the artefact for his own profit or acquiring it so he can give it to the people who worship it as an idol, a fundamental conflict present in the first two Indiana Jones movies.

Maurey is a bit of a cold fish as Elena, but Heston seems to have a lot of fun with his character, outwitting a hitman Morgan puts on him at the beginning of the film or casually handling priceless artefacts at the museum. His slowly awakening conscience at the temple is portrayed credibly and satisfyingly enough to make up for the somewhat limp portrayal of the natives.

Ghost Autopsy

Most of to-day has been wasted on a single math problem. I almost broke my mind staring at this thing, this area of a quadrilateral inside three triangles with the lengths of only three sides given. Please, gods, turn the math off, I don't want anymore.

A couple nights ago, I installed Batman: Arkham City, which I bought on Steam when it was on sale for eight dollars.

I'd been jonsing for some real, satisfyingly kinetic video gaming and I remembered how Arkham Asylum had been such a brilliant combination of fluid combat, story, and atmosphere. I was excited, too, about being able to play as Catwoman in this one though, sadly, it's mostly still forcing me to use Batman at this point.

I've still been playing The Secret World which has some really nice storytelling in terms of writing and atmosphere. This is my character, Alicia "Knep" Bergman;

But the mechanics of MMORPG gameplay I can only take so long. A good example being a series of quests I just completed in a place called the Franklin Mansion, an ancient home in the middle of zombie and mutant infested Maine. In the quests, you touch a mirror in the attic which sends you to different points in the mansion's history. In one, in the late Victorian era I think, you try to find a little boy among a number of copies of him which turn into shadowy "child's nightmares" when you get too close. In another, you face a number of dead hippies and a Charles Manson type in the aftermath of a Sharon Tate style massacre.

These two stories are really eerie and would be pretty effective if every time I ran into a child's nightmare or blood soaked clone of a hippie psychopath the fight didn't turn into a monotonous "click single sword sweep attack to build resource, click more powerful sword sweep to spend resource, click single sword sweep attack to build resource, click more powerful sword sweep to spend resource, click single sword sweep attack to build resource, click more powerful sword sweep to spend resource, click single sword sweep attack to build resource, click more powerful sword sweep to spend resource, click single sword sweep attack to build resource, click more powerful sword sweep to spend resource," rinse, repeat, and I start to wonder who the real zombie is here.

It's like if you were watching The Shining and Wendy spent fifteen minutes exchanging identical punches with the fellatio ghost in the bear costume. The main appeal of it seems to be in becoming more powerful which feels a bit like a compulsion.

Speaking of The Shining, there's a poorly considered essay at Salon by Laura Miller about the differences between King's novel and Stanley Kubrick's adaptation. She spends about a third of the article talking about how Kubrick "fanboys" assert the superiority of the film over the book without substantiating their arguments. This leaves little room for her own argument which may be just as well since she doesn't appear to have one. I'll respond to a few bits directly;

In Kubrick’s film, Jack’s madness becomes that of an imperious auteur, convinced of his own importance, running amok and seeking to wipe out the mere human beings whose inconvenient presence muddles his vision.

Yet in fact Jack is creatively blocked, as evidenced by the famous "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" printed over and over on his supposed manuscript. Jack isn't an auteur--his impulse to destroy his family comes from misplaced resentment. He wants to get away from distractions, he increasingly blames Danny and Wendy for getting in his way. With no other object for him to blame his own failures on, they become the focus of all his impotent rage. He can't create, but he can destroy, so that's what he'll do.

But while everything in Kubrick’s “The Shining” — especially Nicholson’s suppressed energy — pushes eagerly toward the spectacular release of Jack’s rampage, in King’s novel the man’s disintegration is a tragedy.

Actually, both are still tragedies, if one remembers that a tragedy is a misfortune that occurs following from one's own actions. The difference is that in Kubrick's version it's easier to see what Jack finds attractive about doing the wrong thing.

But in Kubrick’s “The Shining,” the characters are largely in the grip of forces beyond their control.

This directly contradicts the premise (established in Miller's essay and commonly espoused by King) that Jack starts the movie crazy. If he's controlled by outside forces, his craziness is irrelevant.

As King sees it, Kubrick treats his characters like “insects” because the director doesn’t really consider them capable of shaping their own fates. Everything they do is subordinate to an overweening, irresistible force, which is Kubrick’s highly developed aesthetic; they are its slaves.

Miller falls prey to the very error she accuses Kubrick's defenders as being guilty of--she makes an assertion without a supporting argument. In fact, while Wendy was certainly terrified, she and Danny still managed to escape due to their own actions and decisions.

She concludes the essay with the enigmatic statement, "Kubrick can be the bigger genius; King would rather be the bigger man." So she's saying Kubrick's work is better while King is a better man which makes King's work better? Or just that it's better to be a better man than to make a great work of art? What evidence is there that King is a better man? What is the point of this essay?

Twitter Sonnet #553: Government Shutdown Edition

The three headed coin swallowed all its tails.
A dead jacket crushed the old rifle butt.
If a tale's tree falls in public it fails.
Combining pants'll solve a growing gut.
Bourbon streaked through pine and cherry wood scales.
Tears may squish like jam in socket sandwich.
Bad air collects in dusty golden pails.
No symbol shows through amateur cross stitch.
Bursting lamp post sprinklers cannot canter.
Dizzy tinsel squeezed off the speaker's vein.
Eyes clasp the pre-existing mind's splinter.
Impotent sheets may show a porto stain.
Paper meatballs fall from woollen noodles.
Dorito tumours scratch membrane doodles.

Who is at Liberty in Paris?

If you believe in personal freedom, is it right to prevent someone from committing suicide? It's this problem that propels the wonderful 1932 Jean Renoir comedy Boudu Saved from Drowning. Its eccentric and fascinating star and Renoir's way of slyly portraying the absurd in social etiquette would be enough to make this movie amazing but, particularly in the Blu-Ray edition, it is also a remarkable collection of pristine footage of Paris as it was in the early 1930s.

The movie opens with a man and woman on a crude stage re-enacting a vaguely classical scene of the man, possibly meant to be a satyr or Dionysus, attempting to woo a nymph. This dissolves into the bookshop of Edouard Lestingois who's making love to the housemaid. He presents himself as a gentleman of intellect and sensitivity, happily giving away two books by Voltaire to a customer for no reason.

It's no surprising, then, that when he sees Boudu through his spyglass leaping into the Seine (having delightedly spotted him moments earlier, calling him a perfect tramp) he rushes to save the man.

To say Boudu is a tramp, even a consummate tramp, doesn't begin to cover it. Boudu is unique, to say the least.

We meet him in the park, picking fleas out of this dog's fur, fur which bears a remarkable resemblance to his own beard. When the dog runs away when he's not watching, he begins stumbling about in a gloomy, discouraged search. He asks a police officer to help him look but, seeing Boudu's shabby appearance, the officer tells him to walk away if he doesn't want to get arrested. A moment later, the officer agrees to help a beautiful, wealthy woman find her dog.

He finally despairs of finding the animal who is possibly his only friend and jumps into the river. After Lestingois saves him, the bookseller decides to take full responsibility for Boudu's life, much to the irritation of Lestingois' wife and mistress.

However, Boudu eventually seduces and sleeps with both women. What's so attractive about this suicidal, bearded tramp? Perhaps it's his complete lack of restraint and evident liberation from all social considerations.

As though in an effort to embody the counterargument to Lestingois' impulse to save a suicidal man, Boudu wanders the home and shop of the bookseller, spitting in books, laying on tables, or pulling apart the kitchen in an effort to shave his beard.

Boudu is played by Michel Simon, a rather remarkable man in himself, according to Wikipedia;

Michel Simon was at various times, a boxer, a boxing instructor, a right-wing anarchist, a frequenter of prostitutes, pimps and petty crooks. He was extremely well read, a talented photographer, a hypochondriac, a misanthrope, owner of a vast collection of pornography and with a reputation for unorthodox sexual behaviour which he did not bother to deny.

I don't know how much of that is true but I'm inclined to believe it. He had a unique array of physical behaviour and a face funny enough to rival Laurel and Hardy.

The Grown Up is the Child's Ultimate Form

Forty-six percent of respondents would blame congressional Republicans, 36 percent would blame Obama and 13 percent would blame both. Sixty-nine percent said that the GOP is acting like "spoiled children" in the budget fight, while 58 percent think that of congressional Democrats and 49 percent think that of President Barack Obama. Six in 10 respondents reject the GOP's approach and think it is more important to avoid a shutdown than to make major changes to the Affordable Care Act.

This is from this article about the current shutdown of the U.S. government. That politicians are immature and unable to see past their own careers and reputations to the actual job of governing is hardly a new revelation. This seems like as good a time as any to talk about Armando Iannucci's wonderful 2009 political comedy In the Loop.

It's a loose spin-off of his BBC series The Thick of It, the most important carryover being Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) as Director of Communications. A crucial question about In the Loop and The Thick of It is, why is a viewer so inclined to like Malcolm Tucker? Capaldi's sometimes improvised rants as the character are legendary--you'll find no shortage of clips on YouTube. So how do you feel about a blog entry being written about you, Mr. Tucker?

One person who posted clips of Tucker to YouTube wrote, "I wish I were Scottish so I could be this crude and yet casually classy at the same time." It's not simply that Capaldi is Scottish that makes what he does seem classy. Calling someone a cunt is crude. But say this to someone:

Don't get sarcastic with me, son. We burned this tight-arsed city to the ground in 1814. And I'm all for doing it again, starting with you, you frat fuck. You get sarcastic with me again and I will stuff so much cotton wool down your fucking throat it'll come out your arse like the tail on a Playboy bunny. I was led to believe I was attending the war committee.

That's poetry. Tucker's rants come quickly, contain vivid and often grotesquely bizarre imagery combined with esoteric references the mind automatically searches for before deciding whether or not it even wishes to view the portrait Tucker is painting.

This is much more viscerally satisfying than anything "Queen of Rage" Michele Bachmann might say. The beauty of Tucker's anger wins far more hearts than a man like that in real life really ought to. But this is one of the great things about The Thick of It and In the Loop. As the titles suggest, you're drawn into this world and you begin to share in the fundamentally absurd and irresponsible motives of these characters.

Gina McKee plays Judy Molloy in In the Loop who works with an MP named Simon Foster played by Tom Hollander. She's an actress I've seen in two other movies recently, Croupier and Naked. And it got me to thinking how one doesn't see the interest anymore in making movies like the ones Mike Leigh became known for in the 80s and 90s, or Kevin Smith, or Gus Van Sant--the raw tale of average young people and their naturalistic or creatively obscene dialogue is no longer something one sees gain prominence in independent or mainstream film. Gina McKee's presence in this film made me wonder if In the Loop is something for Mike Leigh fans who've gotten older.

Unlike the television series, In the Loop actually features references to real policy affecting the people rather than being completely submerged in bureaucratic catfights. Somewhat satirising the lead-up to the Iraq war, the film focuses on British and U.S. government officials jockeying about the possibility of presenting the idea of going to war as a good thing. What we see is a world of earnest emotions on a foundation of cynicism. People like Tucker are consumed with the importance of the pissing contest but aren't directly interested in the effects of policies that are instituted incidentally.

SIMON FOSTER: "Yep. That's that, then."

TOBY WRIGHT: "'That's that, then,' is your line for the ages, is it?"

SIMON FOSTER: "What?"

TOBY WRIGHT: "Well, yeah, 'I remember the day war was declared and I turned to the minister and he said, 'Yep. That's that, then. Anyone want a mint?'"

SIMON FOSTER: "Piss off, Toby."

Toby (Chris Addison), Foster's assistant, hadn't expressed any especially great indignation about going to war before. The horrible moment seems to bring this reaction only because it seems to confirm the cynicism upon which his whole world is based, the uselessness of it all that compels him to concentrate entirely on relationships and social manoeuvrings instead.