And the Lizards Just Watch

Another of the many lizards I see warming themselves on the brick of the Mormon church next to my college. I've walked past that place for years because I won't buy the forty dollar parking permit but the hour and a half between classes I have now at lunch time is starting to make me want to splurge. I tried packing my lunch for a while but I can't think of anything other than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I can make quickly in the morning and don't take up too much room in my purse. Those peanut better and jelly sandwiches dry out my mouth when the heat is already making me dehydrated.

I've been getting by lately eating the egg salad sandwiches sold at the Peet's Coffee now located on campus. A good source of protein for a vegetarian but I sort of feel like I shouldn't eat them every day. There's a school cafeteria but even assuming I wanted to fight the mob of hollaring recent high school graduates in T-shirts I haven't seen anything come out of that cafeteria that doesn't look like a dog's rubber chew toy. So to-day I walked all the way back down the hill to drive to the nearby shopping centre. I ate at Taco Bell. Out of the plastic pan and into rubbery fire.

I remembered ordering what's called a Seven Layer Burrito regularly thirteen or fourteen years ago. I must have been really small back then because I was surprised by the thin tortilla tube I was handed to-day. I guess I've been spoiled by the real Mexican placed I normally eat at where burritos are normally three times the size of the finger I had to-day for about the same price and made in about the same time.

A Movie is a Movie

How can a film be a strip tease? Films of the French New Wave are enjoyable not because of their post modern, self aware nature but because of the love and enthusiasm the filmmakers feel for their subjects. Yet constant acknowledgement of film as artifice remains an integral part of what is effective about the enduring films of the movement. Jean-luc Godard's 1961 film A Woman Is a Woman (Une femme est une femme) is like an affectionate strip tease. A woman who enjoys taking her clothes off not only because she knows the man she likes is watching and likes to see her naked but also because she knows he likes her clothes, too.

And the movie is about a stripper named Angela played by Anna Karina, Godard's soon to be wife. The wink she gives the camera is simultaneously a wink for Godard and, as Godard intended, a wink to the audience to let them know the filmmakers know what they came for and they're happy to give it.

Part of Angela's routine is that she sings and the camera cuts back and forth from her singing to the audience reaction. Every time it cuts back to her, the background music goes away. This sort of self aware presentation of the score is typical of Godard's films from the period and he does it over and over again. But here, in addition to the cognisance of the artificial quality of film is the charm of hearing Karina singing in rough a cappella.

It's this allure of realism, rather than the awareness of artificiality, that made New Wave so influential. Karina and Jean Paul Belmondo, who's also in this film, wear the medium loosely, always poised to undress. Belmondo casually chats with a character played by Jeanne Moreau and asks her how shooting on Jules and Jim is going, a Truffaut film Moreau was working on at the time. Belmondo has a cool, awkward, precarious grace. His reference to the real world outside the film is nonetheless a line from the script he's performing, he's such a natural and confident actor he still carries it as his character.

The film works also because Godard doesn't linger. A strange, magic doorway in a strip club that instantly removes or changes a woman's outfit who walks through it is disclosed casually as the camera pans along, as though it's inconsequential.

There's a seeming comment on the critical concept of the gaze years before it was established in the specialised circles it has currency in to-day as the film's other male lead, Jean Claude Brialy, watches a stripper in apparent boredom and she stands watching him in equal disinterest.

Each time the camera cuts from his close up, the woman loses a garment until she's topless.

The impression this creates is that her clothing is being removed as a result of his attention. That neither party seems particularly moved makes this feel a little like a precursor to the topless woman at the party in Godard's later film Pierrot le Fou whom no-one seems to acknowledge is topless, as though it's become normal in the course of the continually more revealing trends of fashion.

The life, the film seems to say, isn't in the naked breasts but in the pleasure one feels for seeing them or showing them. In much the way this film succeeds as a musical despite having only one song. A sequence where Karina and Belmondo self consciously pose as Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse is alive with the fact that Karina, Belmondo, and Godard love movies with Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse.

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Critics dream unconditional glories.

Dressing the Timeline

I got caught up on Outlander last night and I'm glad I did. The characters are all still unimaginatively written--except maybe for Dougal, I guess since he's unattractive he's allowed to have rough edges--but it has one thing Game of Thrones doesn't have and that's attention to the peasantry.

The fifth episode, the newest, has a long segment where Claire joins some peasant women in pressing wool. The episode also focuses on a tax gathering, how sometimes peasants handed in livestock in place of money for taxes, and it shows how a rebellion might have rallied people to its cause with Dougal grandstanding in taverns and passing around collection plates.

It's like watching a nice re-enactment. Alongside this there's still the incredible landscape and some costumes that are fantastic in both senses of the word--here's what the village apothecary wears:

And, like Claire, she has a whole different ensemble every episode. Just some couture for mixing crude potions over kettles in the thatched cottage.

Claire, of course, has great clothes, too. Often things to make the best of the actress' extraordinarily long neck--there's this sort of Disney villain matriarch thing from the third episode:

And my favourite is probably this one from the fourth episode:

The ribbon around her neck ties in a nice big bow at the back:

This show is definitely easy on the eyes. Just imagine if the characters were interesting, too. So far the only thing that's interesting about Claire is that she's an experienced nurse. The writers ought to have asked themselves, if they put this experienced nurse in a modern setting, would it still be worth watching the show? A medical drama needs more from a nurse or doctor than experience, of course.

Her love interest, Jaime, I've recently read was inspired by Jaime from Doctor Who, the Second Doctor's longest companion. Here's another question the writers ought to ask themselves--how often was Doctor Who about the fact that Jaime is a nice guy? Or was he simply given opportunities to demonstrate the fact that he's a nice guy because there were other, genuinely interesting stories he was involved in?

For the Monster

Just because someone's a sadist doesn't mean that someone's a bad person. This is what Gloria Grahame's character Laurel feels when she falls for Humphrey Bogart's Dixon Steele in 1950's In a Lonely Place. It's a fascinating film noir with brave performances.

Before playing the hero in movies like Casablanca and Key Largo, Bogart had a career at Warner Brothers in the 1930s playing villains opposite James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. At the end of the 1940s, maybe Bogart was tired of being the nice guy as his role in this film and the contemporaneous The Treasure of Sierra Madre hearken back to his 30s heavies. Though he's certainly nothing as simplistic as a villain in In a Lonely Place.

He's a screenwriter tasked with adapting a book he knows is lousy so he talks a young woman at a club into coming home with him to tell him about the book so he doesn't have to read it. When she turns up murdered the next day, he doesn't seem to care much that the police think he did it. He makes morbid jokes at the police station and aside from muttering "poor kid" when he's going over crime scene photos can't seem to work up any feelings beyond a ragged bemusement.

But as luck would have it, there is a witness who can place Dixon alone at home at the time of the murder, and that's his neighbour, Laurel, who has a habit of watching him because, as she tells the police inspector, she likes his face.

Pretty soon, the two are in a relationship and it seems to go fine. Laurel, like Steele's old friends in the movie business, loves him despite the pleasure he takes in fantasising about violent acts and his tendency to lose control when his ego is bruised. Most of the time, he keeps himself under control. But unfortunately, sometimes he goes overboard when he has an excuse, as when he almost beats to death a motorist in an argument about a near accident--Laurel just barely manages to stop Dixon from smashing the guy's head with a rock.

This leaves Laurel in a tough spot. At first it's only her friends she has to argue with about the relationship but eventually she has to face the possibility that her lover, even though he's never hit her, could one day lose his cool and kill her. And considering how unreasonable he gets when his pride is hurt, the most dangerous thing in the world might be trying to leave him.

This might rank with On Dangerous Ground as my favourite Nicolas Ray film, and they're both films about violent, volatile men who are nonetheless the protagonists. Here Bogart is excellent in conveying the vulnerability of someone who really seems to care about other people but there's just something in his brain that enjoys causing pain, too. He can manage his compulsion but inevitably, as the title suggests, it isolates him.

Things We're Meant to Enjoy Swallowing

A series which began with a lone terrorist using corpses to make apparently political statements about the divide between rich and poor ended its first season disappointingly with a plot about people cheating on their spouses--that's Bron/Broen (Bridge), season one, which I finished last night.

I enjoyed it--Sofia Helin as Saga Noren, the Swedish homicide detective with Asperger syndrome, never stopped being a delight especially as her supposedly unusual ability not to understand the emotionally motivated misdeeds of others worked as a keen internal critic for the show. When Martin (Kim Bodnia) cheats on his wife, Saga asks why and Martin can't explain. Saga inability to accept this mirrors ours--it seems just as stupid to us as it does to her.

In the scene where Martin spontaneously kisses Charlotte, the woman with the bad wig, it's apparently just because she takes off her wig again for no apparent reason. He showed zero interest in her before that and after that. In fact, she doesn't even appear on the show again after this, several episodes before the end, in spite of the fact that she had been a POV character. We never learn her motivation for wanting to sleep with Martin.

And despite all these apparent manifestations of boredom from the writers, they chose to stick with the adultery thing and make it a primary motive for the killer who'd previously been doing things like holding people hostage until rich CEOs donate to homeless relief organisations. I guess maybe the moral questions posed turned out to be too thorny or maybe too Batmannish (I think that word ought to get two Ns, like Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy").

I may yet try the second season if just for Saga. Though a lot of people have been recommending I give True Blood another try, a series I stopped watching after the first episode because of its cheap romance novel feel. I'm two episodes behind on Outlander now for the same reason. Maybe I just need to work up a taste for this particular form of escapism.

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Acid that imitates champagne trickles.
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Academic demonstrations devolved.
The lasagne nourished too slow to sate.
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Apprehensive suspenders hold your heart.
Competitions make the pies too lumpy.
Looping ending themes go back to the start.
A "turbulent Doctor" is too bumpy.
Sorry teeth tranquillise the uneaten.
An Allosaurus roast can't be beaten.

Robbing the Talented and Giving to the Lacklustre

Well, that was stupid, but what can you expect from Mark Gatiss? I'm talking about to-day's Doctor Who episode, "Robot of Sherwood", which bears some resemblance to the Fourth Doctor story The Androids of Tara, which you're better off watching because the Doctor doesn't act like a tantruming five year old in it.

So much for the idea of Peter Capaldi being the most adult Doctor--it's not his fault, course, but when he has a script that forces him to have a pointless argument with an ally, going so far as to inhibit their escape and put the Doctor's companion in danger for the sake of bickering, all the inherent gravitas in the universe isn't going to save Capaldi.

I didn't hate everything. It was nice that Clara, who looked fantastic in costume, had plenty of chances to shine. I liked the duel between the Doctor and Robin where the Doctor uses a spoon instead of a sword. I like that Gatiss evidently feels Robin Hood shouldn't be as dull as Russell Crowe's or Kevin Costner's portrayal. But actor Tom Riley, who plays Robin here, doesn't come close to breathing the kind of extraordinary life into the character the episode unfortunately demanded.

I hate when shows do this. They spend so much time carefully casting and working with their star, and Peter Capaldi is truly great as the Doctor, then they cast some average guy as a legendary figure who's supposed to be able to stand toe to toe with the star. The script forces it like a puzzle piece in the wrong spot and it all feels so false. Even old Who had this kind of silliness now and then but this was what was so great about Tom Baker who always seemed like he was steps ahead of even the lines he'd memorised. Of course, there's no room for improvisation on the new show, which is a shame given how much Capaldi is said to have improvised for his role on The Thick of It.

But okay, it was the one Mark Gatiss episode of the season and we got through it. Now on to glory, let's hope.

Nesuko Does Not Invade Dreams

Happy birthday, Werner Herzog, the latest free chapter of my web comic, The Casebook of Boschen and Nesuko, is online.

The next free chapter, Chapter 12, will be up on Frances Farmer's birthday.

I had to push back the release for the next full issue, five (Chapters 14, 15, and 16), by two weeks--it'll be available on October 4. School is taking up too much of my time and it looks like I'll be moving soon, too. I've found a place around five blocks away, run by a relative of my sister's fiancé. A one bedroom for the same price as the studio I'm in now. Unlike my current place, it has windows large enough for an air conditioner, it's across the street from a bay, it's within walking distance of a grocery store and several restaurants and, best of all, it has reliable running water. It was, as they say, a no-brainer.

I heard late in the day yesterday that Joan Rivers passed away which was weird because I just heard her on The Howard Stern Show a few weeks ago talking about how "everything still works", how she was in good health. And she sounded like it, she certainly sounded like she had a lot more energy than anyone I know. I can't say I liked everything about her--I certainly didn't agree with her hardline support of Israel. But I did enjoy her agile humour and her general insistence on not taking herself or anyone else seriously. She was always a good interview.

They Used to Put Crosses on Bread, But Not This Kind of Bread

If you're in a film noir and you think you're going to turn your life around, you're wrong. But of course, noir heroes don't usually know any better and Burt Lancaster seems to know even less than most in 1949's Criss Cross. It's the usual story of a guy who's lived bad coming back to town after cleaning up his act, the old haunts inevitably pulling him back down again, the custodians of his familiar hell being in this case Yvonne De Carlo and Dan Duryea, both of whom turn in better performances than Lancaster. But it's a good film.

I've never liked Burt Lancaster, I've always quite consciously avoided his films. It might be just me, I guess, but he always seems self-conscious, he never disappears into a role for me. Criss Cross doesn't change my mind about him.

When he comes back to town, he finds his ex-wife, Anna (De Carlo), is still single but Duryea, who runs the local casino and underworld, has his eyes on her. Though she's seen dancing with a young Tony Curtis in one of his first film appearances.

Really, if she'd asked me, I'd have told her to go with Duryea instead of the vacillating and whiny Lancaster. But maybe she hadn't seen Duryea in Black Angel.

Criss Cross is beautifully, expressionisticly shot with plenty of gorgeous dark shadows and De Carlo has one of the best faces for it.

The heist of the armoured car that Lancaster and his father drive for a living is well put together with plenty of tension. The many double crosses in the film, as suggested by the title, are delivered effectively.

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Roller coasters really play hide and seek.
Unknown napkins clean flakes around frostbite.
Returned pirate bookstores stock camera shells.
A merciless seat now holds just bluebells.

Small Kicks in the Big Graveyard

Sometimes, in a mean world, it's good to be cruel. Mike Hammer might tell you that, at least the version of Hammer who appears in 1955's Kiss Me Deadly who was supposedly more sadistic than author of the source material, Mickey Spillane, approved of for a portrayal of his private detective hero. But what the film really does is make plainer the subtext of the noir detective hero and the morally murkier world that results is one of the film version's strengths. Culminating in an unexpected--and effective--Science Fiction climax, the film is about compulsions to power and control.

The movie begins with the first of several beautiful women Hammer encounters--Cloris Leachman, in her first role, naked except for a trench coat, on a desolate road at night stops Hammer's car by standing in front of it.

She tells him doctors at the asylum took her clothes so she couldn't leave--those doctors turn out to be organised crime. The woman's name is Christina and she says she's named after Christina Rossetti whose sonnet called "Remember" is featured prominently in the film.

Remember
by Christina Rossetti

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

The poem emphasises the stakes of the game Hammer eventually finds himself caught up in--played by a young and beefy Ralph Meeker, Christina remarks on the vanity that compels him to keep in shape. His own gratification often seeming to be his primary motive, he goes after the mobsters at first mainly for revenge after they put him unconscious with Christina's murdered body in his car and push it off a cliff.

But he has his secretary with benefits, Velda (Maxine Cooper), to help him recuperate. He flirts with a lot of other women in the movie, including a foggy eyed blonde named Lily (Gaby Rodgers) who also shows up naked but for a trench coat.

The other thing Hammer likes to do is get tough with goons and reticent informants. It starts to look like Hammer's a wrecking ball in soft world but the world shows itself to be a whole lot worse than Hammer. There's a thrilling liberation in Hammer's lack of shame but it can't outpace the fundamental sadness and doom reflected in the lines of the Rossetti poem which hovers over the film like the ghosts of the dead.

Beautiful Dreams

Just look at that. When you start watching a Hayao Miyazaki movie, you see these gorgeous backgrounds and the unique, beautiful animation style and everything else is just gravy. It could maybe even be a bad story, the unique filter of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli would make something trite into something surprising and extraordinary. But last year's The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ), while it's far from Miyazaki's best film, doesn't present a trite tale. It's much too bold, despite a somewhat lukewarm third act. It's about the intrinsic value of beauty and the obsessive nature of artists.

Werner Herzog has a small role in the English language version of the film which is somewhat appropriate as the protagonist, Jiro Horikoshi, who was the real life designer of the Zero fighter plane, is almost like a Herzog protagonist; possessed of an unwavering focus and a poetic sensitivity.

If you're learning Japanese, as I am, one word you'll definitely learn watching the Japanese version of this movie is "美しい", "utsukushii", "beautiful"--Jiro uses the word a lot to describe aircraft designs and dreams. Airplanes are "beautiful dreams" says famed aircraft designer Giovanni Battista Caproni in Jiro's dream--though Caproni says it's actually his dream and in the end settles for saying that it's their shared dream, a rather nice way of describing the shared passion of the engineers.

One flaw in the film is that the tension between Jiro's apparent belief in pacifism and the use of his designs as weapons of war are never really directed confronted. Though the movie begins with a fantastic sequence where Jiro, as a little boy, dreams of flying a plane of his own design and looking up to see the sky slowly filling with demoniac bombs.

The war takes a more peripheral place in the third act which focuses more on Jiro's wife slowly dying from tuberculosis--which did not occur in real life. It was Hayao Miyazaki's mother who had tuberculosis. Much of the Jiro of the film is based on Hayao's father Katsuji Miyazaki who ran a company that made parts for the Zero fighter during World War II. Scenes of Jiro and his wife are about as sentimentalised as one might fear encountering in a work about the artist's mother and father. But even in these scenes, beautiful designs and animation make the film well worth watching.

In light of the fact that his film version of Jiro was based somewhat on his father, it's fascinating that Miyazaki personally asked Hideaki Anno to provide Jiro's voice for the Japanese version. Aside from some scattered cameos, this was Anno's first film as a voice actor. He's a director of both animation and live action films, best known as the primary creative force of the anime studio GAINAX and the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion. He and Miyazaki are old friends--Anno having animated scenes for Miyazaki's 1984 film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

It makes sense to cast a director and designer as Jiro. Though one is tempted to read more into it than that when considering Shinji, the protagonist of Neon Genesis Evangelion, was psychologically deliberately modelled on clinically depressed Anno and was portrayed as insecure, self-loathing, and tortured by guilt relating to the death and destruction wrote by his role as pilot of a machine of war. Miyazaki's Jiro, on the other hand, is a young man of strange calm and clear-sightedness during catastrophe. One of the best scenes, early in the film, shows Jiro without hesitation carrying a young woman, a stranger, with a broken ankle during an earthquake, all the while assuring the woman and her sister that he'll see them through. There's something rather beautiful about Miyazaki conferring the respect he feels for his father to Anno, who's twenty years younger than Miyazaki. In this, Miyazaki is strangely being for Anno both a comforting authority and an admiring fan. To me, it seems to imply Miyazaki's confidence in the perennial value of art.

The Best Coffee is Bad

Too often the reward for doing what's right is chaos and death, even if one succeeds. Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame's characters in Fritz Lang's 1953 noir The Big Heat both find this out though they both start out at two different sides of the moral tracks. Even as films noir go, The Big Heat creates an exceptionally sinister and realistic world and is a captivating portrait of brutality and futility.

Debby (Gloria Grahame) is introduced at the beginning of the film but after that we don't see much of her until halfway through. Nevertheless, her character is the more memorable of the two leads--her boyfriend is Vince Stone (Lee Marvin), a gangster and second in command to Lagana (Alexander Scourby), who essentially runs the city. We see that he even has the police commissioner in his pocket. But Debby doesn't really care--guys come by the apartment and talk business while she enjoys being adored.

When Lagana drops by, he walks in on Debby hopping around holding a little bamboo cane in a childish display for the men. Her whole life is like being a three year old at a big family Christmas party. Feeling safe in the vague security that the grownups are keeping things under control with their impenetrable discussions, she's happy to be the superficial diversion. Then she sees Bannion (Glenn Ford) beat up a guy for robbing a woman and her boyfriend at a bar.

She doesn't seem to know why, but she follows Bannion. She goes up to his hotel room and doesn't quite seem to know what to do. She sits on his bed.

Bannion's a recently suspended police detective--they took his badge but not his gun because, as he tells the crooked commissioner, he bought the gun himself. Unlike Debby, Bannion holds himself as the ultimate authority. He enjoys beating up uncooperative witnesses. It's a good thing he has an improbably perfect wife but his M.O. is part of the reason he's living alone in a hotel room by the time Debby meets him.

Debby gives him information to help him in his one man investigation. Then she goes home to Stone who burns off half her face with a pot of coffee for talking to Bannion.

So now she's never going to be the doll again--she got mixed up in the business she'd always avoided understanding and the fruit of knowledge has gotten her expelled her from the paradise of ignorance.

One could say Debby works as a larger commentary on women's liberation, the difficulty of the road faced by women who attempt to transcend their prescribed, objectified role. But considering the parallel in Bannion's story, the idea is bigger than that--it's about the terrible costs of self determination for anyone.

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