No Water Under the Bridge

I've decided to try and stick it out in the apartment for the five hours the running water's been shut off to-day. Just one hour to go, so far so only slightly awkward. I've been using a pitcher and the bathroom sink like an old fashioned pitcher and wash basin. Considering I shave with a straight razor I'd be a total anachronism here if it weren't for all the stuff I've been doing on the computer. I filled the pitcher before the water was shut off, if it doesn't come back on I guess I'll need to look for a well.

I liked last night's Game of Thrones, though not as much as "Blackwater", the previous big battle episode directed by Neil Marshall. One thing I really love about the show is how it takes all the glamour out of revenge. I love a good revenge fantasy, I'm a huge Tarantino fan, but I think people too often forget that life is too complicated to facilitate the cleanliness of even Tarantino's typically very thorny paths of revenge.

Spoilers after the screenshot

The series has accrued a massive cache of revenge-lust in the heart of Arya and as her desires are routinely thwarted or delayed we see how revenge has gone wrong for other people--most notably Oberyn in "The Mountain and the Viper". In "The Watchers on the Wall", in a bit that diverges from the book, we have a little boy getting revenge for the murder of his father. Now, how could that go wrong? Well, the person he kills is Ygritte, a character we love even after she's killed a bunch of innocent people as well as a few people we actually know and don't hate. Okay, she's a beautiful woman, but really, why should we feel bad if she's killed? For the simple reason that the conflict we see in her is very human. It's easy to watch John Wayne shoot a bunch of guys who are about as complicated as lunch boxes. It's never that simple in life.

The fight choreography was a thousand times better than in the previous episode's duel, very likely due to Marshall's presence behind the camera. And I loved the giants with their mammoths.

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There are No Flies Here

A very tiny spider who was at my front door a few days ago. I'm glad the work on my ceiling over the past week hasn't scared them all away. My ceiling looks now like nothing ever happened so I guess I'm all set for the next problem.

My German friend, Ada, tells me it's hotter in Hamburg to-day than it is here in San Diego where's it's only 19 Celsius. The world's weather is really getting weird. Or weally weird. Weally weird world weather. The cool temperatures around here lately are helping me back to a more sensible schedule--I managed to sleep in to 8:40am this morning. I miss being nocturnal but being diurnal has it's advantages, mostly sight-seeing related. Maybe I'm crepuscular. Which doesn't mean my muscles are creepy, it refers to creatures who are active around the time the sun is going up or down, twilight. This site has this list of crepuscular animals:

. . . cats, dogs, rabbits, ferrets, guinea pigs, and rats. Other crepuscular mammals include prosimians, red pandas, deer, moose, chinchillas, the common mouse, skunks, wombats, quolls, spotted hyenas, bobcats, tenrecidae, capybaras, and the extinct Tasmanian tiger. Crepuscular birds include the Common Nighthawk, Chimney Swift, American Woodcock, and Spotted Crake.

Maybe I'm a capybara.

I only watched Alien again yesterday, no new movie to talk about. And what else can anyone say about Alien? So many elements come together in that film and create one of the most credible fictional universes ever seen on screen. From the art design to the dialogue and characters that make it feel human and lived in. Yeah, it's all been said, but it doesn't stop being good. A dizzying score by Jerry Goldsmith that's both euphoric and panicked, so much like the actual experience of space travel seems like it might be.

A Portrait of a Gun Range World

In a certain kind of better world, you can kill thirty people, be certain they all deserved it, and still come off as a really good guy instead of a psychopath. That's the world in which the curtain closed on the John Wayne archetype in 1976's The Shootist, John Wayne's last film, made just three years before his death*. It's not a bad movie but it's more of a celebration of what people generally thought was great about John Wayne's movies than what was actually great about them. It's a cosy, elegiac little daydream.

Wayne plays a notorious gunfighter named J.B. Books who comes to Carson City in 1901 on a day newspapers are reporting the death of Queen Victoria. He soon learns he's not long for the world himself as his friend and doctor, Hostetler (James Stewart), confirms a diagnosis from another doctor that Books has inoperable cancer.

Stewart's pairing with Wayne reminds one of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance where the two represented two sides of a mythical American spirit--Stewart on the side of the social contract and its benefit for all and Wayne representing an instinctual code of individualism enforced by fists and guns. That was a John Ford movie, and like The Searchers, another movie Ford made with Wayne, there's a recognition that the kind of lifestyle led by the John Wayne archetype was far from perfect and deciding who ought to live or die was never simple.

But The Shootist was directed by Don Siegel who made Dirty Harry and Madigan, a director who very much had faith in the idea of one good man with a gun versus the whole world, and in that Wayne may have found himself in more comfortable company than he did with John Ford. But the naivete inherent in this world view makes for a far less satisfying film.

What Wayne and Siegel, and maybe fans of Wayne's, take from the Ford film is the sense of isolation, the sense of the lone fellow who's honed an incredible skill for survival in a world that rejects his ideology. The woman in The Shootist isn't quite the annoying misogynist portrait that characterises the women in Siegel's other films but I think it's entirely due to the fact that she's played by Lauren Bacall.

Even so, one senses her character's never able to wrap her head around the violent grandeur other characters feel to be self-evident about Books. Her main contribution seems to be in staying out of his way and not completely hating him.

Her son, Gillom, played by Ron Howard, idolises Books and wants the older man to teach him how to shoot. Books gives some lip service to the idea that young Gillom shouldn't grow up to be like him but by the end the movie can't help undercutting this message.

The film's final shoot-out, where a bunch of two dimensional villains obligingly show up, takes place in an absolutely gorgeous saloon.

I've been trying to find out if it's a real place--I'd love to visit. Dig the designs carved into the bar and all the green and black art nouveau everywhere.

*I just learned John Wayne died exactly two months after I was born. I guess there wasn't room for both of us in the world.

Unsuspecting Ghosts

Ghosts, it turns out, are like wild mustangs and must be broken. And thus the hastily improvised profession of Bob Hope's character in 1940's The Ghost Breakers, a funny film that allows Hope's naturalistic performance to contrast with a sincere investment in the danger of the threats, a comedy that works because of the performers' investment in the suspense. The film features a supporting character who exhibits behaviour reflective of abhorrent racial stereotypes but despite this is still a film that can be appreciated.

Larry's valet is a black man named Alex played by Willie Best whose dull gaze and references to fried chicken are intended to evoke humour related to what was considered the fundamental nature of black people by mainstream white America in 1940. But Best actually also exhibits a keen sense of comic timing in the movie, ironically requiring an intelligence at odds with the very stereotypes his character was reinforcing. It's worth noting, too, that Alex and Larry speak to each other as equals, Alex often displaying more sense than Larry and even figuring out a crucial plot point before Larry does.

As a radio announcer, Larry's got connexions with the mob which, as the film begins, look like they're about to get him killed. Due to a mix up in gunplay at a hotel, he finds himself caught up in another deadly drama involving Paulette Goddard as a young woman named Mary Carter. She's inherited a castle on Black Island off the coast of Cuba but is warned to stay away by sinister figures who tell her the place is haunted and she'll be killed for sure if she stays there.

Goddard, who was married to the very liberal Charlie Chaplin at the time and co-starred with Chaplin in The Great Dictator that same year is interestingly paired with the very conservative Bob Hope and yet the two have a great chemistry. A scene where the two dance to the radio in her cabin perfectly exploits the talents of both actors--Goddard displaying the warmth and intelligence to create a complete circuit of the subtext in the room generated by Hope's self-deprecation and the attraction between them.

This was of course what made Hope an ideal host--in much the way Jon Stewart or David Letterman might do to-day, Hope had the ability to laugh with us at the ridiculousness of himself in a way that seemed neither like he was abusing himself or admiring himself. Goddard reciprocates with a sympathetic humanity rather than merely being the indulgent maternal figure of so many female leads in comedies. They look at each other and you can see the excitement of mutual understanding.

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Continents Colliding In the Dark

Somewhere in the night, driving freight from Liverpool to various parts of Scotland, are big men who are more man than anyone ever dreamed of. And at least two of them have a dame on their minds who's got more woman in her little finger than Demeter, Aphrodite, and Oprah Winfrey combined. And these impossibly big people have big problems in 1957's The Long Haul, a film noir about corruption in the freight industry of northern Britain. It's a movie of captivating visual and thematic extremes about people caught up in hopeless situations that only get worse.

Of all the big lorry drivers, the biggest is the guy who calls them trucks, an American ex-G.I. named Harry played by Samson himself, Victor Mature. He wanted to move back to the U.S. after his service but his English wife, Connie (Gene Anderson), wanted to move with their kid, Butch, back to her home town in Liverpool where her Irish uncle Casey (Liam Redmond) got Harry the job driving.

The boss of the operation's name is Joe Easy (Patrick Allen) but of course he's a hard man, harder than he chews on the cigar that's almost always in his mouth. He's almost as big as Harry, too. But he really can't compete, especially when Harry's holding a puppy.

And that's probably why Easy's girl, Lynn (Diana Dors), falls for Harry even though Harry's married. When Easy stops in a café in order to discipline some of his guys on the way to taking Lynn out, he responds to Lynn's impatience to get out of this "pig house" by tearing her dress, remarking to the guys watching that, "This must be the only café on the road with a floor show."

Easy doesn't count on all the big drivers being huge gentlemen and before long Easy's exchanging punches with a bunch of them while Lynn sneaks out to Harry's truck and he reluctantly takes her with him.

Lynn likes Harry right away. She tells him she likes the way he didn't make a pass at her just because he bought her dinner--most guys assume if they buy her dinner, she says, then she's "the dessert." Then she likes it when Harry kisses her.

The two really are fantastic together but there's so much in between them, both the morally right--Harry's obligation to wife and kid--and the morally wrong--Easy's hold on both of them. The performances by the two actors are really good but the physical assets of both of them do a lot of the talking, from Mature's big shoulders and eyebrows to Dors' soft lower lip and her dresses that always seem to be on the point of bursting.

And there's some great action as the climactic sequence has Harry, Easy, and Lynn taking a truck over what looks like truly impossible Scottish terrain, the film clearly shot on location.

Grasping Cold Islands of Cash in the Treacherous Waters

If in Sense and Sensibility Elinor became the ruthless head of a cosmetics company, and Margaret was older than Marianne, you'd come somewhat close to Miko Naruse's 1950 film Battle of Roses (薔薇合戦). It's the kind of movie Naruse's best known for, a film with female protagonists where everyone's caught in a painful, tightening web of financial anxieties and family obligations. Featuring an exceptionally pretty cast who deliver decent performances, the film is somewhat more conservative than Naruse's later, more feminist films and is somewhat cold in its rapid fire plot--though somewhat exhilarating for it, too.

The Elinor, Masago, played by the talented Kuniko Miyake, is a fascinatingly subversive character to come out of any country in 1950. The movie nicely drops you immediately into some complex goings-on, trusting you to catch up quickly on the fact that Masago's dying husband has embezzled 750,000 yen from his cosmetics company, Lilly, and Masago, along with her two younger sisters Hinako (Setsuko Wakayama) and Chisuzu (Yoko Katsuragi), are bequeathed a massive debt. So Masago goes to the head of Lilly's rival company, Nigera, and asks for help. Of course the guy wants her to sleep with him, which she does, but surprisingly he also wants to put her in charge of Nigera. He's confident she'll turn the company into a massive success and she does.

She quickly adopts the role of patriarch of her family, arranging a marriage for Hinako and even recruiting a boy toy, a handsome and young new company auditor. In one scene, he petulantly describes himself as just her "toy," echoing an earlier scene where Chisuzu's lover, Ejima, says the same thing to Chisuzu but for a different reason.

Chisuzu, the opposite of Masago in many ways--and the Marianne of the movie to continue the comparison to Sense and Sensibility--is cute as a button, is probably around twenty but looks fourteen. In contrast to Masago's cynical navigation of the entrenched mechanics of the business world, Chisuzu is an idealist spurred by romantic western influences--in one scene shown admiring a poster of Errol Flynn as Don Juan.

She doesn't see anything wrong with having sex with Ejima even though they're not married. When he starts to shake her down for 10,000 yen, even though, as she observes, they'd agreed to be independent of each other, he gives her the line about being just her toy. It's easy to see he's trying to manipulate her but naive little Chisuzu trusts him. His duplicity is confirmed when his wife, played by Noriko Sengoku in a brief role, shows up not so much to confront Chisuzu about sleeping with her husband but rather to get another 10,000 yen out of the sister of Nigera's CEO.

Fascinatingly, after all this, Chisuzu still tells her friend she doesn't regret sleeping with Ejima and the internal morality of the film doesn't punish her for it, an extraordinarily progressive moment in a film from 1950.

Hinako is the middle sister and sort of represents the philosophical middle ground between her older sister's cynicism and her younger sister's idealism. Well, it's more accurate to say that Hinako's too timid to take much of any stance, subservient to the point where her life is threatened in one scene. It's somewhat typical of Naruse to show a variety of options that all wind up with the same dead ends, usually because of selfish men. A man decides to blackmail Masago, a man abuses Chisuzu's trust, and Hinako's husband takes her for granted too. There are nice guys in Naruse films, in this case Sonoike (Koji Tsuruta), the head of a small movie advertising company responsible for producing the Errol Flynn poster Chisuzu admires. As Naruse's directorial career progressed through the 50s and 60s, there continued to be nice guys in his films but they became gradually less effectual as Naruse's view of how women are treated by society became increasingly pessimistic--and realistic.

Who Needs Sunday School When You Have the King?

I've only read parts of the King James Bible. I did start reading the thing just straight through--I think I read two hundred pages or so and was amused and impressed with the unvarnished childishness of God and had no trouble seeing why Nietzsche called Christians slaves for following him. I don't remember why I stopped reading, I always meant to go back to it one day. I've read other segments relevant to various discussions I was having but have never done a complete beginning to end read through. A lot of my conceptions of mythological history told in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have come from Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1950s. I was a big fan of Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was a kid and now I'm delighted to see the Ark of the Covenant, more as a prolific cinematic monster than as a biblical reference, turning up in older decadent Hollywood epics. It looks and acts basically the same in Henry King's 1951 David and Bathsheba as it did in Raiders of the Lost Ark and it's basically the same beast in another film made by a guy named King, King Vidor's 1959 film Solomon and Sheba which practically feels like a sequel to David and Bathsheba. In the earlier film, David, played by Gregory Peck, tries and fails to build a temple for the Ark. In the newer film, David's son and heir, Solomon, played by Yul Brynner, succeeds in building that temple. Though Solomon and Sheba may be the weakest of Hollywood's Biblical spectacles I've ever seen, inferior in terms of acting, writing, cinematography, and, well, spectacle.

The luscious Gina Lollobrigida as Sheba is the highlight of the film, though compared to previous Biblical seductresses Susan Hayward as Bathsheba or Hedy Lamarr as Delilah, her performance falls short and her wig looks worse than Barbara Stanwyck's in Double Indemnity.

This is her sexiest outfit and you can almost talk yourself into believing she's naked under there if you can convince yourself she lacks not only nipples but also a belly button. It's a shame the 1921 film with Betty Blythe as the Queen of Sheba is lost.

There is one genuinely good actor in the film--George Sanders as the villain, Solomon's brother Adonijah, who sees the throne of Israel as his birthright. But I was reminded of how Sanders was reluctant to have sword duels with Tyrone Power in the pirate film The Black Swan because he was lousy with a sword. The choreography in The Black Swan is so impressive it really looks like Sanders is having a vigorous duel with the truly talented swordsman Power. No such choreographic magic was at work in Solomon and Sheba, though. We watch the supposed military mastermind Adonijah sluggishly swishing his gladius from side to side.

Maybe Sanders accepted the role because he thought he was going to be playing opposite his old co-star, Tyrone Power, in the role of Solomon but Power died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 44 with still a quarter of his scenes left to shoot. Brynner was brought in to replace him and he's not so bad, probably about Power's equal as an actor, which, yes, isn't saying much. He sure could glower, though.

All in all, Solomon and Sheba pales in comparison to Vidor's previous film, his adaptation of War and Peace in 1956, which was itself a weak echo of its source material except for Henry Fonda's and Audrey Hepburn's wonderful performances. And the battle scenes in Vidor's War and Peace were truly awesome in scope and execution, which made the lameness of the battles in Solomon and Sheba all the more puzzling. I did find a neat beauty in the climactic moment when Solomon orders his men to blind the Egyptians approaching from the east at dawn by raising their polished shields.

There's a really amusing ham-fisted quality to the film, though. All the characters are so broad with big, flat lines. When the Pharaoh (played by David Farrar in a bit part) wonders at the ways of women, Sheba remarks in a sly and decisive tone that the way of woman is after man's. In one scene I found rather funny, Sheba kneels before the Ark and promises God she'll convert her people to Israel's religion if God allows Solomon to prevail against impossible odds. I guess this sounds like a pretty sweet deal to God because immediately afterwards the tide impossibly turns for Solomon. You can't buy publicity like that, God must have said to himself, most of the time.

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Gifts of Violence

Waiting on some guys to come and paint my ceiling. I have my own colouring to do--I figure I need to colour four pages a day so I can finish up this Boschen and Nesuko issue by next week. This issue has pages I drew in September last year. Part of me has always felt anxious about it all these months but also I'm kind of glad I was given time to work out some story elements I wasn't sure about before.

I probably ought to have worked on it yesterday but I took another lazy Sunday instead, mostly playing chess and finished by watching the new Game of Thrones. The episode ended precisely the way I wanted it to end--I haven't read the books and I've kept myself free of spoilers. There was some more incredible stupidity in the writing but there were a few things I really liked.

I'm always a little amused that people talk about the violence in Game of Thrones as being a necessary element of realism. Yes, in this fantasy mediaeval world of dragons and impossibly beautiful people, ridiculous economics and convenient private hot springs in the wilderness for super steamy sex scenes, you're going to have to have ultraviolence, I mean, what're you gonna to do?

But I'm not quite saying that the violence is there because people like it--though I think a lot of people do. I think it's there because it's part of our truth now. There's so much violence revealed to us now as part of the basic mechanics of the world that I think viewers feel uneasy if it's not in our fiction, too. The good things can't be enjoyed if one doesn't feel a certain amount of credible bad things happened before we get to them. For all of its notorious killing of so many beloved characters, Game of Thrones is still a fantasy wherein it's possible for audience avatars to overcome all this in the end.

Now, I'm talking about sword and axe violence, not sexual violence. The rape scenes inserted into the show by Benioff and Weiss--which weren't in G.R.R. Martin's original books--are straight forward rape fantasies, revelling in the sexuality of the scenes, an example being Khal Drogo raping Daenerys in the first episode of the series. Instead of the passionate desire to take revenge most violence seems to inspire in surviving victims on the show, being raped by Drogo eventually seems to cause Daenerys to fall in love with him. This was something that made me reluctant to continue watching the series when I started it but I don't believe people who fantasise about rape are necessarily potential rapists or even sexist--fantasy rape, as demonstrated by the show, is very different from real rape. It's not my cup of tea, however.

Spoilers in my review of the new episode after the screenshot.

Sort of an ironic mirror of this is the S&M fantasy of the current Theon Greyjoy storyline where Ramsay Snow has somehow turned Theon into a completely obedient android by castrating him. I guess some people might get off on this but the whole plot just seems incredibly silly to me. There's nothing in this trajectory for Theon's personality that makes me say, "Yes, that's how a human being would respond." It would be like the Nazis recruiting spies from concentration camps. But the Theon/Ramsay scenes had some gorgeous location shots.

I was really hoping the Mountain would kill Oberyn (it's so hard for me not to type "Oberon"--too bad he wasn't more like Alberich) in the trial by combat. Not because I didn't like Oberyn--I thought he was kind of charming--but because Oberyn winning the fight would have been a very uninteresting outcome. The fight scene itself was very unconvincing with a lot obvious uses of doubles and a Mountain who seemed too clearly lacking in strength and prowess, particularly in the part where he overpowers Oberyn, somehow grabbing Oberyn's neck after tripping him, which was about as convincing as watching a muppet walk. It's somewhat made up for by a very effective prosthetic of Oberyn's head being crushed.

The shot, and the Mountain's personality as exhibited in the previous episode, were obviously reflected in Tyrion's anecdote about his cousin who liked to smash beetles, and Tyrion's obsession with trying to figure out what compels people to commit pointless acts of violence. Sadism and where it comes from is one of the most interesting aspects of the series. It's a truth, as I said, people seem to need now, and like Arya's storyline, a familiarity with violence can eventually lead to taking comfort in it.

It was All for a Tree

Bitter debates over slavery leading eventually to war between the states turning countryman against countryman, unbelievably horrific violence occurring as the basic human right for liberty struggled to assert itself in the consciences and lives of mid-nineteenth century Americans. But 1957's Raintree County would prefer to talk about the trouble with women. Set mostly in a northern county (Raintree), the film sees the conflict through the story of a young northern man who marries a southern woman. Its use of a dully good guy (made somewhat interesting by Montgomery Clift) trying to deal with his emotionally unhinged wife (a very emotive Elizabeth Taylor) sort of works as a metaphor for the conflict between states but mostly it's reflective of 1950s misogynist attitudes. There's some impressive visuals and a relatively engaging story but it all drowns under the influence of dated attitudes the film lacks the imagination to move beyond.

Scenes of Taylor crying in Clift's arms as he helplessly tries to console her about some buried issues she can't articulate recur frequently throughout the film and invariably end up with Taylor's character, Susanna, doing something incredibly destructive and implausible. Like sneaking away from Raintree with her and Johnny's (Clift) son Jim to safety in the south right in the middle of the Civil War.

Johnny doesn't help matters much by encouraging Susanna to trash her beloved dolls as part of a vague effort to get her to mature. He also keeps hanging around with his childhood sweetheart Nell (Eva Marie Saint) who is always supportive, dispassionate, and about as exciting as a bar of soap.

All of Susanna's issues seem to stem from a fire that destroyed her childhood home. She seems to believe a slave who worked in her home was her real mother, or maybe there was a half black child who was killed, in any case part of her deeply loathes black people but she has an affection for this slave that is greater than the love she has for her white mother. But there aren't any black characters in this movie--there are a couple of household slaves Susanna frees when she's living with Johnny in the north but they both stay on as servants because of some implied love they have for Susanna. We never get to know them, their struggles apparently immaterial next to Susanna's problems.

I was never able to track down a decent copy of the movie. I looked on Amazon where the best option was a Chinese edition transferred from VHS. Arina pointed me to some online versions of the same VHS copy and my mother told me she could order the film through NetFlix. So I waited for the NetFlix version to see if that one was any better but it ended up being the same Chinese VHS transfer. At least it was widescreen but part of the image was still noticeably cropped.

Even in VHS quality, it's still easy to spot the shots of Clift that were shot before and after his car accident and extensive facial reconstruction surgery.

It's fascinating partly because it reveals the sequence in which scenes for the movie were shot. There are crowd shots with pre-accident Clift that cut to close-ups of post-accident Clift and vice versa.

Even Clift's voice was different after the accident, shakier, more plaintive. I've always felt he was a better actor after the accident. It's as though the trauma had broken down a psychological barrier and left his emotions forever unmasked and raw. It lends some interest to his character who for the most part just spends the film trying to live with Susanna.