Less Machine Now than Man

Watching so many MCU shows lately, it occurred to me I hadn't seen Iron Man since it came out in 2008. So I watched it again on Friday and marvelled at what a remarkable movie it is. The film's Wikipedia entry has lots of quotes from cast and crew about the independent film vibe of the production. Which, as a start for a massive franchise, would make it reminiscent of Star Wars. The '70s had a lot of strange, interesting films until one strange, interesting film, Star Wars, made a blueprint. And that's what Iron Man did. Having this in mind, one looks at those first films and wonders why they couldn't just do that again. Do we really need to hear so many stories about directors leaving MCU and Star Wars productions over creative differences? Didn't they learn anything?

Anyway, Favreau had to push to get Robert Downey Jr. cast in the role and everyone was terrified of the fact that actors improvised their dialogue on set during principal photography! That is remarkable. Especially given how golden the chemistry is between Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Two performers who'd already had whole careers behind them, suddenly they created a new starting point for themselves. Just by goofing off in front of a camera for a few months.

A lot of superheroes movies fail because they have enough material to be a good film but make the mistake of trying to be a great film. Iron Man became a great film by just trying to be a good film. There's no massive, overwrought fight scene, just a couple guys duking it out in metal suits in the end. Tony and Pepper don't roll around on the beach. Even the wonderfully underplayed heart-surgery scene zips by while still feeling critical. A lot of it works because Downey Jr. is extraordinarily believable as simultaneously a reclusive engineering genius and a notorious playboy.

Another lesson this movie taught that many subsequent superhero movies forgot is that it puts the protagonist's motives onscreen and believable portrays the steps he takes to his goal. There's real sanctification in watching Tony build his armour through his messy trial and error process. The way he talks to his robots emphasises that he's not he extrovert he seems so we get some extra filling out of this character along the way.

It's such a tightly made film. I want to say little film. And it's a compliment. It's as perfect as freshly cut norimaki.

Iron Man is available on Disney+.

Fruits of Various Labour

This is a photo from a curry restaurant I go to most Saturdays. Someone had brought fresh strawberries and a young woman, another regular, arranged them into a heart. There were pink, red, and white ones but a tiny elementary school girl carefully picked out and ate all the pink ones. They were damned good strawberries.

In Japanese communities, some restaurants are known places for kids and tutors to congregate so I teach some English, get a free dinner, and feel like I get to know the community a little better.

On a very different topic, to-day I read "Pump Excursion", a story in the latest Sirenia Digest by Caitlin R. Kiernan. It's not a new story, it was in a collection of hers called Frog Toes and Tentacles that I've always wanted to read, but it's a rare and expensive volume. So I was glad to be able to finally read one story from it in Sirenia Digest.

On the one hand, it's a simple story about a woman having sex with a prostitute. But the core of the thing is the strange biology of the prostitute and the weird, subterranean location. References to places and cultures not of our world occur without much explanation and the prostitutes gills and flaps are only mentioned as they become important to the first person narrator--organically, in other words. When blood is described engorging a body part, I was compelled to ponder the very concept of flesh and how it connects to the brain. And then the dirty talk between prostitute and customer, dealing with power dynamics of totally non-existent cultures, invites sociological contemplation as well as psychosexual. It's a really nice story and it reminded me of the days when Caitlin's online community commonly discussed such things, mixed in with generous doses of Farscape and Lovecraft commentary. Good times.

Twitter Sonnet #1570

The mellow moon divests the marsh of sweets.
The baker piles flour back in time.
To make a cake the mistress buries beets.
An ice addition mixed a drink of lime.
The extra spider legs could carry cars.
We timed the trip to make a bonus train.
The babysitter combed the Easter bars.
The thought of trees disrupts the ocean brain.
The back became a front for business lost.
A trade occurred when doors were locked at night.
With gentle damage, rain defrayed the cost.
A gathered crowd observed a tattered kite.
A sun was swinging mad for weighty rocks.
Ideas of days condemned the life of clocks.

The Vamps Around These Parts

In the hot, dusty landscape of New Mexico, James Woods hunts vampires in John Carpenter's 1998 film, Vampires. There are plenty of good ideas behind the film, particularly combining a vampire film with a western, but the whole production is too cheap and too many points in the film weren't adequately thought through. When one recalls that From Dusk till Dawn was released two years before Vampires, Vampires seems even more of an embarrassment.

The film opens with a team of experienced vampire hunters, led by a man named Jack Crow (Woods), raiding a vampire nest in New Mexico.

And right away we're introduced to two problems that will persist throughout the film--James Woods is terribly miscast and every interior looks conspicuously like a sound stage. I mean, every god damned room is practically a high school gym. Just look at this room at a supposedly dive hotel:

I do want that couch and loveseat.

James Woods, the arch-nebbish, is so wrong for the role of the hard-bitten tough guy. Apparently he was last in a long list of people Carpenter tried to cast first--according to Wikipedia, "Clint Eastwood, Kurt Russell, Bill Paxton, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and R. Lee Ermey." Any one of those would have made more sense and R. Lee Ermey, the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, would've been an inspired choice. Can you just imagine? "Are you a vampire, maggot? Let me see your vampire face. You don't scare me, you worthless piece of scum!" That would sure make sense of all the movie's random lines about dicks.

Apparently one of Carpenter's influences for the film was The Wild Bunch and there is something William Holden-ish about James Woods. But the character of Jack Crow is a calloused brute in the way Holden just wasn't in The Wild Bunch.

The team has a whole system set up for yanking vampires into the sunlight with a winch attached to a car. They drive big, specially modified armoured cars, too. I thought, "These guys know their shit so they must hole up in some kind of fortress at night." But, no, the night after the raid they party in a motel with a bunch of strangers, complete with liquor and prostitutes.

And, yeah, that's a cheap motel room and not the living room from Family Ties.

Sheryl Lee plays one of the prostitutes named Katrina and she's the whole reason I watched this movie. Sadly, she's kind of wasted on it. I actually kind of like how Carpenter doesn't flesh out all his supporting characters. Jack Crow is the only one we get some backstory on. And that's realistic--we don't get backstories on most of the people we meet in life, we have to take our measure of them from what we see. It would've been nice if she'd had more lines, though. After a master vampire ambushes the crew, she gets bit between the thighs and gains a mental connexion with him, like Mina and Dracula. So Jack and Tony (Daniel Baldwin) unceremoniously drag her along.

They treat her like shit for no real good reason. Maybe that's to establish that these guys have been turned into sons of bitches by their vocations, an impression that would have been helped a lot with R. Lee Ermey in the Jack Crow role. But some of it just feels odd, like when Tony decides to tie Katrina naked to a bed.

There's a kind of half-hearted romantic subplot between the two but the best part about it is that Sheryl Lee seems to be confounded by the whole thing. I love the look on her face when Tony kisses her in the climax.

She seems just to be thinking, "What the fuck is going on?" Like I said, she doesn't get many lines but Lee shows how excellently she can deliver with just facial expressions and screams.

It really is a crime she didn't get more roles after Twin Peaks.

What to Do About Destiny

A solid new Moon Knight last night. This second episode wasn't quite as extravagant as the first but I felt like I was settling into a decent serialised adventure. It felt a bit like classic Doctor Who.

My favourite characters so far are Khonshu and Arthur Harrow. Arthur's kind of like Thanos, I guess, in that he's operating from a rationale based on helping the world with very tough love. It is nice when villains actually have an intelligible motive. Ethan Hawke is doing a good job in the role, too. It is kind of a drag they're using Bob Dylan's "Every Grain of Sand" ironically, though. It's not like Dylan ever advocated killing babies.

Arthur's argument is basically based on a belief in predestination, like a Calvinist or other hardcore Protestant, i.e. a Puritan. Except he feels he has a direct line with a deity in the know. Steven's (Oscar Isaac) counterargument is basically that you shouldn't kill babies or other innocent people but he doesn't say whether this because he doesn't believe Arthur can see the future or if it's because that doesn't matter or if, like Yoda, he thinks, "Always in motion is the future." Which is fine, Steven is operating on instinct, not philosophy. I would expect Marc or Khonshu to have more of a counterargument, though, and maybe they will at some point.

I don't mind Steven but I'm kind of glad Marc takes over at the end of the episode. I hope we get a chance to know him better next week. The same goes for Layla, who's pretty and May Calamawy gives a decent performance, but she still needs some fleshing out. I would like to see some of her adventures with Marc.

But my favourite thing so far is Khonshu. I love that big bird skull with F. Murray Abraham's voice.

He's a nice blend of comedy and horror.

Moon Knight is available on Disney+.

The Last Blossoms

I took this picture at Shin-Osaka Station this morning. I was in Osaka for a meeting, in a part of northern Osaka called Ibaraki, one station north of Shin-Osaka by Rapid Express.

Here's a street in Ibaraki from an elevated platform.

The meeting involved a whole room full of foreign English teachers like myself. It was strange being in a room with so many native English speakers. The majority of the teachers seem to be either Australian or Filipino but there were a few Brits and Yanks. There were also a few whose first language isn't English. Japan is even more desperate for English teachers now due to Covid.

The cherry blossoms are famously short lived. I noticed some trees were already starting to turn green when I left.

Twitter Sonnet #1569

The easy eyes were rolling tens or twelves.
We counted more than cash to crack the scales.
The heavy tree was thick with Keebler Elves.
The violent sea was choked with screaming whales.
With heavy hair the climber gripped the snow.
From mountain heights connexions froze the frame.
Discussions turned around the things we know.
The wind and rain revealed a second name.
Dessert attacked before the dinner rose.
A field of cake was easy not for sweets.
A candy button pressed the guarded rows.
Assume the kitchen salts the larder meats.
Across the city, green consumes the pink.
The flames await beyond the falling brink.

A Disconnected Web of Shadows

A beautiful young American tourist witnesses a murder in Rome. Perhaps. It's hard to say what's really happening in Mario Bava's preposterous 1963 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much ( La ragazza che sapeva troppo), aka The Evil Eye. But it sure is beautiful.

Italian actress Leticia Roman plays the tourist, Nora, and American actor John Saxon plays her Italian love interest, Marcello. Like most Italian films from the period, a lot of the stars aren't speaking the same language and everyone's dubbed.

One night, Nora's mugged and, lying dazed on the ground, she witnesses a woman being stabbed. Everyone says it's her imagination because she has a habit of reading pulp murder novels. Later in the film, a neurosurgeon she meets at dinner explains that she must have had a vision of a murder that had occurred ten years earlier. He says it like it's the most natural thing in the world. And that's one of the more sensible scenes in the film.

It's a serial killer targeting victims who line up alphabetically--first a victim whose name began with A, then one whose name began with B, then one whose name began with C. Now it's Nora's turn because her last name is Davis (Drowson in the cut called Evil Eye). When the killer's revealed, it makes absolutely no sense of the clues that had led up to the reveal, particularly a fantastically creepy scene where Nora wanders into an apartment of white walls and bare, swinging light bulbs.

Bava brings the visuals to be sure. There are so many gorgeous shots of Roman.

And a few nice ideas, like when Nora decides to make a spider-web of yarn to frustrate any intruders.

If only the writing matched the visuals. Well, I guess it all kind of works in a sort of dream logic way.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much/Evil Eye is available on Shudder.

Time and Gods on Ancient Roads

Two itinerants embark on a pilgrimage across time and space in Luis Bunuel's 1969 film The Milky Way (La Voie lactée). Bunuel uses his talent for surrealism to show up hypocrisies and absurdities in Christian doctrine and interpretation as his two heroes stumble across scenes of importance to Christianity throughout the centuries. It's funny but Bunuel's dry humour also has some of the impressively awful mystery of his subject matter.

The itinerants, Pierre (Paul Frankeur) and Jean (Laurent Terzieff), first encounter Alain Cuny playing a sinister man in a black hood and cape.

Quoting from scripture, the stranger gives Pierre money only because Pierre already has some money, and he makes a prophecy apparently based on Hosea--the two wanderers will have children with a prostitute. The man walks away and a dwarf inexplicably appears at his side.

Bunuel's surrealism complements the strangeness of placing religious ideas in realistic scenarios. Christ (Bernard Verley) remarking that he comes as a sword in a conversational tone highlights how bizarre the statement is. Arguments between a priest and another man in a tavern about transubstantiation show an increasingly untethered rationalisation of ritual. And yet, in episode after episode, the realistic contexts also serve to show how these abstract concepts are deeply connected to human behaviour and history.

My favourite scene is almost pure surrealism, though. Another pair of travellers stay at an inn after one of them has a vision of the Virgin Mary. When the innkeeper takes them to their rooms, he urges them not to open their doors if they hear a knock, not even for the innkeeper himself. They shrug and lock their doors. While one man is undressing, a beautiful woman randomly appears in one of his twin beds and remarks that she hopes she isn't disturbing him. Meanwhile, the priest and the innkeeper knock on the door so that the priest can explain more about the Virgin Mary. True to his promise, the man won't let them enter the room, but the priest randomly teleport in during his improvised sermon anyway.

The whole scene tantalisingly hovers on the edge of meaning. It's magnificent.

Perhaps Bunuel's point is to show how insensibly people keep two ideas in their minds at once. The priest lectures on the purity of the holy Virgin while a man and woman who are total strangers to each other are in bed. Albeit twin beds.

The Milky Way is available on The Criterion Channel.

“Caroline Laughs and It's Raining All Day . . .”

It's cherry blossom season here in Japan so I went around town to-day with some friends to journey through the ephemeral clouds of pink.

One of my friends took a picture of me taking pictures. This was by a river in Gose.

I took some macro shots:

It was rainy and a bit chilly.

This was by a river in Asuka:

We also visited Abe-Monjuin Temple in Sakurai.

This stone tomb on the grounds dates from the 7th century:

These flowers are for the Year of the Tiger. Can you tell?

Twitter Sonnet #1568

Revolving plates were laden last with leeks.
The ham was burned to pull the juices out.
The heavy wolf had taxed the penguin beaks.
Insightful steam emerged from Jeffries' spout.
The message turned the pigeon back to ponds.
Reverting trees to paper caused a deal.
To cast a book, we turn a page to wands.
The picture text could make the sentence real.
The yarn's a waving line between the beats.
To summon beasts, extend the film a day.
The grill accepts a vast array of meats.
There's something else the fat would like to say.
The atmosphere was pink and flowed to earth.
A petal cloud engulfed the stony berth.

Iron Cage

So I've started watching Iron Fist and Luke Cage with the idea of finally being caught up enough to watch The Defenders. I'm three episodes into Iron Fist and two into Luke Cage--I've been alternating--and I'm further with Iron Fist because I watched its premiere episode first. I did this because I remembered everyone hated Iron Fist and I like to get unpleasant things out of the way first. But, while it's nowhere near as good as Luke Cage, I am enjoying Iron Fist. The writing is astonishingly bad but it has a kind of momentum to it that keeps me engaged. Luke Cage, though, appropriately enough, really is a love letter to anyone who likes Blaxploitation, and I'm definitely in that category.

A lot of people think the term "exploitation film" means lots of gratuitous sex and violence, that such films exploit the basest human instincts. Exploitation films do have a lot of sex and violence, but not always. What defines an exploitation film is that it takes a hot-button, "ripped from the headlines", topic and exploits it for entertainment. Blaxploitation films exploited the public imagination in reference to racial strife in American cities in the civil rights and early post-civil rights eras. So a film like Coffy or Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song or Across 110th Street spend an improbable amount of time, for crime films, featuring characters discussing the larger significance to the black community of a particular heist or drug deal. Sometimes it can be truly thought provoking, like Mahershala Ali in the second episode of Luke Cage, playing the gangster Cottonmouth, discussing how becoming a ganglord is the appropriate path for a black man seeking to upend racial power dynamics in America.

Head-writer Cheo Hodari Coker undermines Ali's speech by showing two of his thugs going against his orders to kill one of his oldest friends. Is his power an illusion, a pretty veneer over ugly chaos? Luke Cage nicely introduces things for us to think about.

The original comics came out in the '70s and were influenced by Blaxploitation at the time. The TV series wisely follows those films in other ways, including with a really groovy soul soundtrack and lots of sex.

It's kind of silly to think of how people made a big deal about a sex scene in The Eternals when Luke Cage has a topless woman giving a lapdance in the first episode. The sex scene between Luke Cage (Mike Colter) and Misty Knight (Simone Missick) is much more sensual and evocative than the scenes between Cage and Jessica Jones, as much as I do like Krysten Ritter. Overall, Colter gives a much better performance on his own series than he did on Jessica Jones. He seems more relaxed and conveys a broader range of emotion. I guess it's not unlike David Boreanaz after he left Buffy the Vampire Slayer to star on Angel.

Iron Fist has been pretty uneven. Sometimes I think Finn Jones is okay as Danny Rand/Iron Fist, sometimes he sounds a little flat, possibly due to trouble with his American accent. It doesn't help that his character seems to change from episode to episode, even scene to scene. In the first episode, he's a cheerful bare-footed wanderer, come to New York on a lark to reclaim is vast inheritance. But the third episode, he's lawyered up--with Carrie Ann Moss's character from Jessica Jones--and is staging angry scenes in restaurants with the Meachums, the siblings who usurped the Rand corporate empire.

Ward Meachum (Tom Pelphrey) is a pretty broad, uninteresting villain so far. David Wenham plays his powerful father, also a villain, and mercilessly chews scenery and seems like he'd be at home in the Adam West Batman series. Danny befriends a kendo instructor called Colleen Wing, my favourite character so far. Though she's another English actress playing an American and her accent tends to sound a little like Elmer Fudd.

The worst parts are whenever Danny flashes back to the mythical monastery and we're treated to fake snow that looks like it belongs in a Christmas department store window.

And yet I am caught up in the story and really do want to see how he finally gets his company back. So they did get me hooked. Still, I'm not sure I could do it if I didn't know The Defenders was at the end of this road.

Iron Fist and Luke Cage are available on Disney+.