Missiles or Knives?

What if tensions between Japan and North Korea could be decided with a rumble between high school delinquent boys? 2005's Break Through! (パッチギ!) presents something close to this solution, the film imagines two high schools in 1968 Kyoto, a Japanese school and a school of North Korean emigrants. A sincere drama that nonetheless skews reality a little bit, this occasionally over the top in sentiment teenage gang film has a great deal of charm.

The film opens with the entire class of the North Korean school taking revenge on the Japanese school for one of the Japanese students spilling ink on a North Korean girl's clothes. The North Koreans retaliate by tipping over a bus full of Japanese students.

No adult authorities would apparently think of interfering in this battle. Which sets the tone of the film which depicts two worlds coexisting in one reality, a world of adults where tensions between North Koreans and the Japanese are based on very real resentments regarding the past, and a world of teenage hooligans who routinely commit acts of extreme violence to satisfy pride.

This is a Japanese movie, which makes it somewhat surprising that the tale's sympathy mostly resides with the North Korean students, particularly with their brash leader, Lee An-Son (Sosuke Takaoka). We still kind of sympathise with him even after he and his guys beat the shit out of a the Japanese school's martial arts club in a bowling alley and force them to eat marbles.

The film also follows Kosuke (Shun Shioya), an awkward, idealistic young man who wants to form a folk group in the hopes of bringing peace between the two groups after he falls for Lee An-Son's sister (Erika Sawajiri). She's so adorable, when she cries, she makes you want to find the punk responsible and make him sorry.

In the end, the film buckles a bit under some over the top emotion but a lot of it, particularly the conflicts between the violent and insecure youths, has the appeal of a 1950s Hollywood teenage misfit film like Rebel Without a Cause or The Wild One. As for how well all this speaks to feelings between the Japanese and North Korean emigrants in Japan I can't say. The film seems to side step questions of communism with the smoke screen absurdity of a Mao worshipping Japanese teacher in love with a Russian prostitute.

Some Things are Exciting to Lose

Manipulative deception has rarely been so seductive or funny as it is in 1930's Monte Carlo. An early Ernst Lubitsch talkie and one of the first movie musicals, it's a good example of the unabashed sexual innuendo distinctive of Lubitsch and his comedy that in turns relies on people being a bit simple and a bit wicked.

Countess Helene (Jeanette MacDonald) is fleeing by train with her servant, Bertha (ZaSu Pitts), from an impending marriage to a dim-witted, cold blooded Prince (Claud Allister). As Bertha says of the Prince, "He looks dumb . . . he is dumb."

Helene tells the ticket man on the train she doesn't know where she's going so she's going to Monte Carlo. There she meets Count Rudolph Falliere (Jack Buchanan) who talks her into stroking his head for luck before she hits the gambling tables.

There's a lot of suggestive head stroking in this movie, the best being when Rudolph, posing as Helene's hairdresser, offers to cure her headache. This is after she's asked him to leave so when he starts massaging her temples she begins by saying, "No, stop doing that. No, no, no . . ." before dissolving into ecstatic groans and flustered laughter, telling him how good it feels. Then the scene cuts to Bertha listening in at the door.

The movie is considered Pre-Code despite the fact that the Hays Code was already in existence--it just wasn't really enforced until 1934. But this was a pretty sly work around, I thought, that depends much on the filmmaker knowing audience psychology. First of all, we have no idea how long Bertha has been listening at the door, and then we have to use our imagination to realise what she probably would have thought if she'd been listening the whole time. And yet, of course, it's all plain as day.

Rudolph's aggressive and duplicitous tactics to win Helene would be off-putting if the misunderstandings and plot turns weren't so clever. Still, it's nice when he lets Helene make up her own mind, even if he does manipulate circumstances to put the choices before her.

Most of the singing is a little awkward despite both MacDonald and Buchanan being trained singers. It seems like their vocals were recorded live instead of what would soon become the regular Hollywood practice of dubbing the actors over with smoother, studio recorded vocals. Otherwise, the dialogue comes off as remarkably naturalistic for the time.

A Pancake Planet Ruled by Lizards

I dreamt last night I showed up to class and it was cancelled, the teacher hadn't shown up. My momentary excitement was tempered by the feeling that this meant the world was ending and, indeed, parts of the city were already submerged in lava. I was living in a dorm in my dream and went back to find that the world ending had made everyone decide it was okay to go through my things. Someone found a script to one of my comics and told me it wasn't bad, I should make a comic out of it. Some other students were rashly cooking all my noodles, which ought to have been rationed more carefully, and were putting chilli powder on my somen noodles.

I made my most successful boxty yet a few nights ago with some advice from my friend, Ada, who told me I should turn down the heat:

All the recipes I'd found online had told me to have the stove on medium heat. Maybe it's because I'm using an electric stove it's a bit hotter.

I've been doing an amalgam of internet recipes and making mine lactose intolerant friendly--I boil two small, peeled and cubed russet potatoes for eight minutes, drain them, and mash them in a little hemp milk. While they're boiling, I grate another potato on a box grater--not two potatoes like every recipe insists. I squeeze out as much moister as I can with my fist then toss the grated potato with one cup of all purpose flour. I whisk an egg in a little hemp milk then add both it and the mashed potatoes to the flour and grated potatoes and mix until it's a smooth batter.

I heat Earth Balance fake butter in a skillet on medium heat and when it's ready I reduce the heat to about two thirds between off and medium. Then I put a dollop of batter down, flatten it a bit with the spatula, and then cook for four minutes before flipping it. Rather like making a regular pancake, I gather, though I've never made one of you normal people's every day run of the mill pancakes.

I leave you with this unfortunately not very good picture. I'm not saying he's Jim Morrison but when I turned a corner and suddenly saw this guy I automatically thought, "The king!"

Actually, I was probably thinking of this:

Twitter Sonnet #724

Feathers find foil lounges in flight two.
Wrong drinking collapsed under the funnels.
A zebra finger drifted to the zoo.
No talented lemur remits annals.
The roofless walls'll furrow the tree brow.
Yellow litigants gargle cocoanut.
Cadavers fall apart from on the prow.
The democratic cranes cook halibut.
Dark corded corsets contain old E.T.
Eyelids that roll down drives crack on asphalt.
Spirits of flame follow a red humvee.
The old optic option omits the fault.
Blue pencils simulate the sky's stomach.
Coke bottle glasses glumly gulp havoc.

A Boiling False Ground

We're not supposed to find dreams interesting, people often roll their eyes at those who like to share their dreams. It's an intellectual laziness, a reluctance to confront the uninterpretable, or worse, inevitably admitting you don't know what something means. But often times, dreams are interesting as much for what's irrational about them as for what's rational about them. Akira Kurosawa's 1990 film, Dreams (夢), is widely considered one of his weaker films--1985's Ran is considered his last great film. Dreams certainly marks a tonal shift from Kurosawa's previous four films and its nature as surrealistic fantasy is certainly very different from the character study realism that distinguishes his most influential films. All this, to me, shows why the real strengths of dreams are unappreciated rather than non-existent. Although it's not as strong as Ran, I'd say it's Kurosawa's most solidly made film since 1965's Red Beard and, even though its themes are anxious and grim, it reflects an unprecedented contentment in Kurosawa. Most of all, it's a beautifully succinct autobiography.

Its tone is almost more reminiscent of Ozu than of Kurosawa, something Kurosawa may have been conscious of when he cast Chishu Ryu in the film as a voice of wisdom--Ryu being Ozu's most frequent star and seen by some as his avatar. But the anxiety I mentioned is much more characteristic of Kurosawa than of Ozu. It's not mono no aware, the aesthetic concept of contemplating death with tranquillity and sadness which manifests in the works of Kurosawa's great contemporaries.

An anthology film, Dreams is a series of short film adaptations of actual dreams Kurosawa had repeatedly. Each dream seems superficially unrelated to another--Kurosawa as a young boy watching a wedding procession of foxes, putting his life in peril in the process; Kurosawa as a soldier confronting dead comrades, though Kurosawa was never a soldier in life; Kurosawa witnessing the dead and irradiated landscape of Japan after Mount Fuji erupts, causing a series of nuclear reactors to explode. One thing each dream has in common is guilt, responsibility, and a tormenting ambiguity about the correct course of action to take.

Even the dream featuring Chishu Ryu as an old man living in a beautiful, peaceful village of water mills has Ryu telling the actor who plays Kurosawa through the film (Akira Terao) how people in modern cities have gone astray with technology, how they shouldn't even have electric light because night is supposed to be dark. Ryu's beautiful aura of acceptance of life's difficulties nonetheless comes from a height of almost impossible, unattainable standards, like the morality of a Puritan.

One dream also addresses Kurosawa as an artist. In it, he walks into a Van Gogh painting on exhibition and eventually meets Van Gogh himself working in the wheat field featured in a number of his paintings.

Van Gogh is played by Martin Scorsese who doesn't physically resemble Van Gogh very much but embodies a feverish energy I think was integral to Kurosawa's impression of Van Gogh. Scorsese as Van Gogh tells him he's "like a locomotive", that his need to paint constantly is painful. This kind of intense energy is implied by Scorsese's fast talking manner and prolific artistic output. In the twenty years where Kurosawa had made four films, Scorsese had made eleven. So one can see how Kurosawa might have looked at the younger director as possessing an admirable stamina. But Scorsese plays Van Gogh far more distressed than Scorsese comes off in interviews. In admiring Van Gogh's output, Kurosawa likely also identified with the man's struggles with despair, as Kurosawa had himself survived a suicide attempt in the 1970s. In that period, he produced a series of impressionistic paintings that would be used as storyboards for Ran, paintings which reflect an unmistakable Van Gogh influence.

The sequence in Dreams contains breathtaking film reproductions of Van Gogh paintings. For Ran, Kurosawa had a wheat field painstakingly painted gold for a scene that ended up being cut but I think we see some of that crop painting on display in Dreams.

The film is also a brilliant showcase for Kurosawa's characteristic use of telephoto lenses which he used almost exclusively from the mid-1950s. I was particularly impressed by this shot, which must have been achieved from an incredible distance to put the people on the top of the hill on the same scale with the little boy on the bottom;

Despite being considered a stylistic departure for Kurosawa, it's not by any means the first time he portrayed dreams in film. Dreams featured prominently in Dodesukaden and Kagemusha and even 1948's Drunken Angel had a brief dream sequence. One genuinely new thing about Dreams, though, for Kurosawa is its inclusion of figures from Japanese mythology, the Yuki Onna and the Oni, the Japanese demon or ogre. But, particularly in the Oni's case, the figures aren't presented in a traditional manner. The Oni are portrayed as mutations after the nuclear disaster despite their traditional red faced and horned appearance. The impression is that even the characters of centuries of tradition are on unsure footing in life's treacherous uncertainty.

Red Beard, Kurosawa's last black and white film and last film to star Toshiro Mifune, was the last movie to feature a sense that life contained at least the potential for hope and stability. I've suspected for a long time Kurosawa's fractured relationship with Mifune contributed to a psychological crisis, a re-emergence of feelings Kurosawa experienced when his older brother committed suicide over a decade before he directed his first film. In losing this surrogate older brother figure, all of Kurosawa's films between Red Beard and Dreams portray worlds where characters dwell on far more unstable ground. Dreams still seems to portray a world like that but there's a paradoxic solidity to the film. There's an attempt to assert a sense of peace that is absent from the disintegrating lives of the impoverished city dwellers in Dodesukaden, the displaced troops and forester in Dersu Uzala, the thief caught up in a monstrously out of control scheme in Kagemusha, or the grotesque world of pride and death in Ran. Dreams seems like Kurosawa's conscious attempt to wake up but the result is a dream which conveys its nightmare anxiety a little more quietly, a little more neatly.

Doctor Boxty

I dreamt last night I was watching the première of True Detective's second season and it ended up being a retelling of the first season from the perspective of woman working at dispatch at the police station. She looked younger than thirty but had salt and pepper hair, very long hair, to her knees, wavy with bangs like an anime character. She wore a big, light blue blouse with leg of mutton sleeves and a blue denim overall dress with white stitching made to look like the TARDIS--the two windows of the TARDIS were at the top front like breast pockets and I realised it wasn't such a bad cosplay idea. Her favourite Doctor was the Eleventh and she made little dolls of him out of cloth when he regenerated and she placed the dolls on a little alter she made at home. She had a big crush on Matthew McConaughey's character and most of the show consisted of her watching him walk past with wide eyes, rarely daring to say hello.

I forgot to mention the TARDIS in Too Many Crooks yesterday. Behold:

I said I was going to note every police box I saw in a movie after I saw one in Peeping Tom. It's nice to be reminded they really were around before Doctor Who. I suppose I'm in the minority in wishing the windows didn't glow on the new series.

I listened to . . . ish last night, a 2002 Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) audio play with Peri (Nicola Bryant) as his companion. It's funny how rarely Six and Peri are paired in the audio plays even though the two spent the bulk of their television time together. Maybe the actors don't get along. . . . ish isn't especially good, especially after Spare Parts. The story in . . . ish involves the Doctor and Peri visiting a university in the future where an ultimate dictionary of the English language is being compiled. It gives Six opportunity to wax smug about his command of the language and deride Peri's Americanisms culminating in a pretty dumb climax where the two spout alternate versions of words at each other ("Lift!" "Elevator!") to cause a murderous dictionary robot to short circuit. . . . ish takes the abrasiveness of Six and Peri's chemistry and adds pedantry and lame turns of phrase.

March, I've decided, will be Saint Patrick's Month so I had some Jameson last night and made my second at attempt at boxty, Irish potato pancakes. The first attempt came out more like like latkes, which was fine but I wanted something closer to the pancake thing I've had in restaurants.

I have nothing against latkes. Are you calling me an anti-Semite?

Er, so I'm a little hungover to-day. Anyway, here's how my boxty came out:

Better, I think, but I'd still like to see it come out more brown and less black and white. I may need to cook on a lower heat for less time or something.

Nature's Perfect Cycle of Theft

Sometimes great comedy is as perfect as an analogue watch. 1959's Too Many Crooks is an example, composed of scores of tiny ticking, perfect elements to make a precisely functioning whole. Perfectly timed performances, silly dialogue delivered at the right pace, absurd situations and characters deployed just the right way, and excellent casting.

You might say George Cole as pathetically inept thief Fingers and Terry-Thomas as unflappably callous rich man William Gordon head the cast but every member of this really ensemble piece is perfect. There's Snowdrop (Bernard Bresslaw), the slow witted wrestler turned burglar who says, "The way I see it is, we kidnapped the wrong woman," in the middle of everyone discussing what they're going to do now that they have the wrong woman. There's Angela (Rosalie Ashley), Fingers' girlfriend whom Gordon has little trouble recognising without her mask after a bumpy car ride acquainted him with features he apparently finds distinctive.

There's a lot implied rapidly in this movie, as when Gordon telling a reporter how he met his physically strong, ex-military wife and before long she was "thrusting me down the aisle."

"Thrusting you where?" says the reporter.

"Down the aisle."

And yet the whole point of this dialogue is actually to establish Gordon's wife was in the military.

And of course, George Cole as Fingers is great as always. Always saying "Don't get up!" when he returns to the hideout nonetheless not forestalling his comrades from all standing and pressing him into the corner. His disguises rarely work, his plans never work, but he remains earnest throughout. His scheme involving a hearse to transport the kidnap victim goes awry and when he comes home in another car he reassures Angela, "We changed hearses in midstream," as though this expression were commonly used to reassure people like "safe as houses."

Terry-Thomas is great, too, first in his utter ruthlessness and then as his bad day gets unbelievable worse and he finds himself explaining to a judge how he ran into a burning building to save not "Mummy" or "money" as onlookers overheard but his pet parrot "Bunny."

Twitter Sonnet #723

A later Zorro rents the tarmac Zs.
Anaesthetic has seized the wrong walrus.
Disoriented banshees scream at bees.
Conan's crude kettle drums herald surplus.
Sketchbook billboards can see for wet charcoal.
Distant distaffs will drag Annie Potts' yarn.
Minute Ringwald proms plant a big pink mole.
A silver braces rain falls on pants farm.
Behold my cup of socks runneth over.
Lemon and lime sleeves fair adorn the Sprite.
All love is like vending machine clover.
Four leaves are expensive and odds are slight.
Blue dreamy sushi planes land on tables.
In Friday bottle ships we're all Mabels.

From the Forest an Electronic Voice Beckons

I've loved Robin Hood since I was a kid, I can't believe it's taken me this long to see 1984's Robin of Sherwood, a BBC series I watched the first episode of a few days ago at the recommendation of my friend, Ada. On the strength of one episode, I like it a lot so far. It's serious 80s, first of all--all that high contrast colour, black shading and light blooms.

There are nods to the Errol Flynn Robin Hood--it starts with Gisburne (Robert Addie, Mordred from John Boorman's Excalibur) confronting Robin (Michael Praed) and Much (Peter Llewellyn Williams) about poaching a deer. Like in the Flynn film, Robin takes the rap for Much and carries the deer over his shoulders.

I wasn't a bit put off by the fact that Praed looks like the lead singer from Journey.

He's a lot less cocksure than Flynn and fades a little bit behind everything else in the story, but there's a lovely mellow melancholy about everything that makes a low key Robin appropriate. The soundtrack by Clannad is deliciously synthesised and dreamy over gorgeous English forest shot with low exposure. Good gods, that's something it definitely has over the Flynn movie, which was shot in southern California. Forests in southern California look different from forests in England, to put it mildly.

Where were these forests in Ridley Scott's film? Actually, Scott could've taken a lot of pages--let's say leaves--from Robin of Sherwood. Like the Merry Men in Robin of Sherwood are actually merry. And no, that doesn't make their situation seem less grim and desperate. There are some writers and artists who think people in miserable circumstances can only say and do miserable things. To those people I'd recommend Sullivan's Travels and Kurosawa's The Lower Depths. Or simply this quote from Frederick Douglass:

I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

I particularly liked Ray Winstone as Will Scarlet who takes on his surname as an oath to repay blood for blood after his wife is raped and murdered. But he laughs and jokes with the others, pushing Robin into a river as a prank after his fight with Little John.

That fight is very similar to the one in the Flynn movie though the one between Flynn and Alan Hale as Little John has a lot more energy. The fight sequences in the 1938 film, particularly the final duel, remain the best of any Robin Hood I've seen.

Rather unexpectedly, Robin of Sherwood also features Herne the Hunter, or a man dressed as him, so of course I thought he was Falstaff at first.

He seems to be Robin's spiritual advisor which I guess reinforces his identity as a Saxon against the Normans. Which also seems really 80s somehow, that pagan injection. It's another thing in the movie reminding me of Boorman's Excalibur or Ladyhawke or Ridley Scott's Legend--what happened to that Ridley Scott?--or any number of works of 80s fantasy fiction. All it needs a beautiful woman with cute, small lips and curly red hair--ah, Maid Marion (Judi Trott).

G, A, Silent D, and Z

It seems like I've been reading a lot more than I've been watching movies, what with trying to get through the bible so quickly. I'm almost done, I'm partway through Corinthians. It's so funny listening to Paul go on and on about circumcision and how, hey, uncircumcised people aren't so bad. Abraham had foreskin until God told him to cut it off, after all, don't you think Abraham was a good guy before that? Then I read in Wikipedia it was Paul trying to ease tension among Jews and Christians in Rome. It's ironic reading someone in the bible getting exasperated with religious hard-liners. I feel like he wants to say, everyone stop obsessing with your dicks, already. Well, God started it.

This morning I also read the new Sirenia Digest where Caitlin R. Kiernan goes back to an alphabet writing prompt, coming up with very short vignettes for each letter of the alphabet, in this case an "Aubergine Alphabet". The new Digest contains A through M and they're all really nice pieces, filled with sinister dream logic. I particularly like "I is for Ichthyophobia" despite the absence of nipples and "K is for Keyhole" which reminded me of an exchange between James Woods and Deborah Harry recounted by David Cronenberg in the Criterion Videodrome commentary: WOODS (on the big vagina like prosthetic on his stomach): I've ceased to be an actor and have become the bearer of the slit. HARRY: Now you know what it's like.

Yesterday I read the newly released volume four of Django/Zorro. Which wasn't bad but it feels like the series has kind of stalled since volume 2. Volume 2 had that really impressive introduction to the Duke of Arizona and his cut-throat, long term scheme. Django and Zorro actually aren't all that interesting by comparison and the series has spent two issues now just introducing the two heroes to the Duke's world. There's a nice scene of Zorro appearing on horseback to give encouraging words to the slaves but mostly so far it's felt like Django has been Dr. Watson to Don Diego's Sherlock Holmes--Django's been the point of view character while Don Diego schmoozes with the swells. I want more Tarantino-esque dialogue, something that lifts everything out of plot autopilot. Esteve Polls' art hasn't been as good since issue 2, either, I feel like his enthusiasm is waning.

Your Committee Sanctioned Rebellion

So no-one noticed Sabine sneaking away for days at a time to paint a TIE Fighter to look like Colin Baker threw up on it. That's a nitpick, I know, and this moment was thankfully overshadowed by just about everything else in last night's Star Wars Rebels season finale but I'm focusing on it because I think it's emblematic of fundamental problems with the series and maybe Disney itself. It's the first moment where Sabine's personality has any real impact on the events of the show, the first time her concept as misfit artist kid comes into play. Can there be anyone worse than Disney to handle a misfit artist character? It's like getting folk art from Target. It reveals more about the cumulative hazy brain perspective of the corporation than it does about the character--they see individually motivated art as ugly because it doesn't conform but have been drilled into respecting the individual as a point of mysterious morality.

Do they find it worrying that "Let It Go", a song originally intended for a villain in Frozen, is about throwing off the yoke of respectable behaviour in society? Elsa in Frozen was an accident, an anomaly born of Disney's shadow coming to life. Sabine is Disney trying to do it on purpose and we see how poorly the conscious mind of Disney understands this kind of character. Sabine is a hideous parody of the sort of people Disney would never dream of hiring or, if they did, it would be to force them into the machine that could tap what little of the creative force could be conditioned to serve the collective.

This is how we get Kanan and Ezra, whose very effective sabre battle with the Inquisitor, directed by Dave Filoni, I enjoyed even though it was unmistakably a version of the sabre battle in the climax of The Phantom Menace. Only safer. There was a moment where it looked like a character died and I thought, "Okay, if he didn't actually die, this whole scene is going to be completely insubstantial." And indeed, that's how it played out, without substance.

The outline of the episode was good. The main cast going to rescue one of their number in a Star Destroyer and a sabre battle. They obviously raised the cgi rendering budget for the episode. I liked that they wanted to give it a feeling of scope but it still feels so much less organic than Clone Wars. They tried to give it scope by following a sewing pattern of scope while Clone Wars always felt like things were propelled by real ideals and real interest in taking the characters to certain places.

Okay, I'm going to go into spoilers now after the next screenshot, albeit spoilers everyone on the internet seemed to know about halfway through the season.

I really was happy to see Ahsoka again. But when she immediately started talking about Ezra my spirits dampened quite a bit. Showrunner Dave Filoni has said now that Ahsoka will basically have the Obi-Wan role which sounds to me like she's going to die pretty soon. Probably in a confrontation with Vader. Which could be great. If the show were willing to focus on Ahsoka for a while instead of relentlessly pushing their generic brand version of Luke Skywalker.

Twitter Sonnet #722

False light sabres cut not a stale cracker.
The painted bulb effects no sundering.
Gold leaf uselessly gilded the tracker.
Lo the apple explodes past numbering.
Multitasked belief grafted Christ to imps.
Puzzles fell on Susan Alexander.
Cardboard rain has revealed the eyelid limps.
Monochrome stencilled the oleander.
Reworked wallaby bypasses are cold.
Nothing removes a mauve made man like red.
Behind the hind are deer of legends old.
The crops cooperate when weirdly wed.
Returned Togruta get a shorter stack.
The stars of God will burn pancakes to black.

The Haunter of the TV Movie

I really wish I could recommend 1991's Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady, a made for television movie which, as it stars Christopher Lee as Holmes, I was looking forward to seeing. I can't blame it all on Morgan Fairchild being cast as Irene Adler--though it's certainly the worst portrayal of the character I've ever seen. The story barely resembles a Sherlock Holmes story involving very little cleverness on Holmes' or anyone's part and the direction is the worst sort of sequence of bland close-ups associated with television of the era.

I've heard Lee has always wanted to play Holmes more often and considers himself especially suited for the role. As far as I know, this was only the second opportunity he'd had to do so in his extraordinarily long career, the first time being 1962's Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace. He has appeared in other Sherlock Holmes films as other characters, like 1959's version of Hound of the Baskervilles and Billy Wilder's underrated The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes where he played Mycroft. Why is it so rare for Mycroft to be played by a fat man, as he's described by Conan Doyle? Well, it's not to say Lee did a bad job.

And as Sherlock, Lee is certainly the best thing about Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady and yet he never feels very much like Sherlock Holmes to me. His friend, Peter Cushing, who played Sherlock in the 1959 Hound of the Baskervilles, was a much better fit. Cushing had that restless, quick quality. Lee is like a walking monument. It's interesting and cool seeing him play the lead in an adventure film. I think he'd make a good Vulcan, actually. What Lee does in Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady is very good but isn't quite Sherlock Holmes.

Well, good except for his pitching woo to Irene Adler. Wow. That strained smile on his face. He can't quite refrain from looking like he wishes he was million miles away as he's forced to perform flustered to her closed circuit chemistry.

Poor Irene Adler. Her portrayal here is so retrograde it makes her original appearance in "Scandal in Bohemia" look like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. In Leading Lady, Holmes and Watson refer to her reverently as "The Woman" and Holmes says he admires her but there's no hint as to why. She's an opera singer and she's kidnapped at one point but she never does anything clever or extraordinary, she becomes a run of the mill damsel in distress, the kind of woman the real Sherlock Holmes would not even begin to be attracted to.

I guess Fairchild looks good in the role even as she's about as receptive to the other performances as a blind and deaf woman. Which I suppose kind of works in a scene where she's hypnotised by no less than Sigmund Freud (sigh). I was distracted by an inexplicable smudge on her breast.

What is that? It's after she was kidnapped so maybe it was meant to be sign of a scuffle? Why only there? Maybe it was Ash Wednesday and they wouldn't let her put ashes on her forehead and her breast was a compromise?

There's not a whole lot else to say about the movie. There's a humdrum murder plot in Vienna sort of tied to World War I. Also in Adler's opera troupe is Engelbert Humperdink, seen here looking remarkably like Ron Jeremy:

We are as Ducklings

Last night I dreamt I went outside my apartment to find a completely different environment, it looked like the grounds of an antebellum plantation in the American south. There were a lot of orange ducks everywhere--they hard curly orange fur instead of feathers. I saw a tiny duckling among a group of them with fur the colour of mustard before it disappeared behind two adults.

"Hey, I saw a duckling," I said to a group of people before noticing that group was gathered around five or six ducklings. The people were a middle aged nun with large glasses and some children, all around six years old, playing with the ducklings. The nun said to me, "We've already figured they're going to die."

I asked why.

"We have no medicines for ducklings," she said.

"Surely plenty of ducks have grown up in the wild?" I said.

She became angry and replied, "Where does it say in the bible that fossil records indicate man should lay with woman?"

Putting aside for a moment everything wrong with that question, I simply said, "How is that relevant?"

She seemed embarrassed. "I suppose it isn't." Then I woke up.

I can think of a few things that might have influenced the dream. Missing the ducks where I used to live, the nun and children from the movie Orfanato I watched a few days ago, and of course having finished reading the Old Testament in the King James version of the bible a few days ago. Though the nun in the dream was probably Catholic.

I read in Wikipedia that a lot of the Old Testament was written to explain why Babylon was able to capture the people of Judah and put out the king's eyes. If you take God as a metaphor for brutal, unpredictable life, it certainly makes sense. It's frequently mentioned near the end that God is "slow to anger". Which makes me think he must be like Bowser in Mario Kart who gains speed slowly but has a much higher top speed than anyone else. Whether God is slow to anger or not doesn't seem to matter when he seems to maintain a constant momentum of rage.

I was surprised by how often Moses or Samuel reasons with God and talks him down from some much harsher judgement. It kind of flies in the face of God as a being of perfect wisdom. The impression I had was of the prophet coming back to people assembled with a worried look on his face saying, "Okay, guys, he's really angry but I managed to reason with him a little and I think if we follow these complex instructions to the letter he just might let us live."

All in all, the Old Testament is exactly what I was expecting. Which is probably inevitable because those of us who hadn't read the bible have nonetheless been inundated with perspectives on the bible all out lives. Somewhere in the middle of all those perspectives is an impression that's probably more or less accurate. I couldn't stop thinking of God in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, wearing a golden crown, looking grumpy in the clouds saying things like, "'Course it's a good idea!"

And as I said before, all the complicated instructions are obviously there to explain why life "punishes" you even when you think you've done everything right. It reminds me of video game puzzles. Like a murder I was trying to solve in Skyrim last night, a quest chain I couldn't get working because I finally figured out I was supposed to take volume 1 of a killer's journal along with volume 2 to a busy body woman on the street who was investigating the crimes. Without both journals and some pamphlets in your inventory she won't even talk to you about the murders even though none of the dialogue actually brings up the fact that you have those items in your possession. That's the problem with allegory, too--you have to assume everyone makes the same assumptions as you.