Painting Ain't Just for Elephants Anymore

These are two of the images I got when I typed "Elf warrior princess" in NightCafe, the AI art generator site. I'm not impressed, though maybe it's better than my own art.

Certainly it looks like more work went into the shading in the AI art and there are no black contours. Pretty good for something generated in three seconds.

When I went to NightCafe this morning, it was with the intention of seeing if it could reproduce my art so the first thing I typed in was actually "Sexy elf warrior princess" but NightCafe said "Sexy" was a prohibited term. Of course it is.

Then my puerile little brain took up the challenge. Can I force it to give me nudity? I had four credits left to spend before I had to create a login so I chose my words carefully.

First I tried simply "Lady Godiva" and all I got was this:

Uncultured mechanical brute!

Okay, what about "Elf maiden bombshell"?

I'm definitely not feeling threatened.

Then I got a bingo:

Nevermind it looks nothing like James Gurney's art. I got a nipple!

There was nothing in my prompt about crotchless panties. NightCafe, you pervert!

Should artists feel threatened? Absolutely. Even if it's not good at replicating a specific style, it certainly can make to order an oil painting in two seconds. If you don't particularly care what style it imitates and you're flexible on the fine details, this is a more than adequate substitute for a hack job.

Am I worried about AI art imitating my art? Nope. Who the hell would want to imitate my lousy art? If I can speak honestly about myself for a moment without making you cringe, I don't think the value in my art is in my skill to replicate reality or to conform to a marketable or academically respectable style. No artist, AI or human, can produce what I need to express my ideas better than I can. For the simple reason that I'm me and they're not. Ideas are more than intellectual concepts reducible to thirty or so words of text. Even something like a haiku, if it's good, is bigger than its character count because it relies on insight, drawing out shades of reference in precisely placed ambiguities. An AI can't reproduce that because it doesn't understand the human mind. It might be good for scientifically accurate illustrations, but for art, which is fundamentally an act of communication, it would need to have something to communicate first.

It doesn't surprise me that AI art is winning prizes, though. Some fine art does require a cultivated eye to interpret, a concept that has been systematically devalued in the humanities over the past few decades. So academia has fallen back continually on the mathematically provable rather than place faith in the treacherous mysteries of the human heart, any product of which can always be interpreted as shameful or blasphemous at a later date.

This is like when photography was invented in the 19th century and people said, "What's the point of paintings now?" And the Impressionists said, "Here's the point." It's the human soul transplanted to the canvas and it wasn't exactly a new invention. Photography hasn't replaced Rembrandt and AI art hasn't replaced Rembrandt, either. This is a call for artists to show what they can do that computers can't--or, to put it more precisely, it's a call for artists to remember what they always did best, the thing that made them artists and not machines.

The Tangled Webs of Debt and Adultery

The problems in loveless marriages may come to a head in surprisingly complicated circumstances. But life is reliably complicated, as we can see in 1954's Chikamatsu Story (近松物語). Based on an 18th century story by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, this is part of a series of Kenji Mizoguchi films of the 1950s that criticised Japanese society. In this case, he takes aim at the taboo against adultery, and he delivers his argument effectively. Though, unlike issues he confronted in his other films, like prostitution and feminism, I think he was likely preaching to the choir.

Mohei (Kazuo Hasegawa) works for a wealthy scroll maker in Kyoto called Ishun (Eitaro Shindo). Ishun presides over a vast household of apprentices and servants and he provides all the official calendars for Edo and Kyoto. It's Mohei who bears most of the labour, forced to work day and night despite being sick with a cold.

Meanwhile, Ishun's beautiful wife, Osan (Kyoko Kagawa), is having some embarrassing financial trouble. Her brother has appropriated some deposited funds to pay off a loan and now needs to borrow money from his sister. Ishun is too hard-hearted to help her so she goes to Mohei.

While this drama is unfolding, Ishun is trying to seduce a servant girl called Otama (Yoko Minamida) whom he has been raping repeatedly, sneaking into her room at night. She's traumatised and can't think of accepting Ishun's offer of a private house to become his official mistress. Also, she happens to be in love with Mohei.

This movie can't be called a melodrama because all of these circumstances are plausible, so when all these stormclouds clash at just the right moment, it's an effectively horrific tragedy. It ends up with Mohei and Osan on the run together, fugitives accused of adultery when the only real crimes that have been committed are Ishun's selfish actions.

Once again, Kyoko Kagawa, who's renowned for her work in Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff, delivers a terrific performance. Chikamatsu Story is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1650

The warmth of velvet cooled behind the fence.
A future past was blown above the flame.
A quiv'ring string declared the air was tense.
The woods at night would never sound the same.
Important teas could break the hardest tin.
A game of cards destroyed a sense of pace.
The number nine accounts for more than ten.
A counting duck could save the human race.
A many pointed hand was half at fault.
The ancient map was missing half the roads.
We took the dancing clowns with heaps of salt.
A student said the moon was holding toads.
The cloud of cotton eats a human eye.
The guiltless snow became a cherry pie.

Back to Old Nockmaar

The writing on Willow continues to be weak but I continue to enjoy it for some reason. Last night's episode had the Everyone Finds Out Everything problem I've noticed is recurrent in modern television writing. In this case, Willow using his disappearing pig trick to beat Bavmorda was made secret and everyone found out the truth via the most hackneyed way possible, by inserted footage from the movie as spectral manifestations.

It was kind of cool seeing Jade fight General Kael.

Maybe I just liked last night's episode because it was basically a story about a group of people trapped in a haunted house, a story type for which I'm a sucker.

I'm still trying hard to like Boorman. Amar Chadha-Patel has such an interesting face, with such large features.

I did like a little exchange between him and Willow about the people Bavmorda turned into pigs. A lot of the dialogue really feels improvised, which is mostly a good thing.

Willow is available on Disney+.

Angelo Badalamenti

Angelo Badalamenti passed away two days ago. Here's a man whose work has been a truly vital part of my life for thirty years. His work isn't just the music of my formative years. At different stages of my life, particularly his soundtracks for David Lynch movies and TV, his work took on new vitality and significance. We all have songs that take us back to certain points in our lives. But with Badalamenti's music, I can go back to my bedroom when I was in high school, to my college days, to driving late at night in the early 2000s, to the excitement around the Twin Peaks revival in 2017, to the seemingly solitary bright spot in a mad world Twin Peaks often seemed to be at that time. I could take it back to last year when I was showing Twin Peaks to students here in Japan.

Badalamenti did a lot more than collaborations with Lynch. He cowrote songs for the great Nina Simone early in his career:

I've always been fond of an arrangement of George and Ira Gershwin's "A Foggy Day" he did with David Bowie:

He composed scores for notable films like Nightmare on Elm Street 3 (the best of the franchise), City of Lost Children, and Secretary. But it is undeniably his work with Lynch that bore the most impressive fruit. His score for Blue Velvet is divine and luscious. His score for Mulholland Drive, in which he also acted in a brief role, is sad and eerie. In 2017, his contributions to Twin Peaks: The Return were limited, I always suspected due to health problems, but his work is a big part of the strange atmosphere of sorrow and mystery in this remarkable scene:

But if I had to pick a golden era of Badalamenti, I would say his best work spanned the time from the final episode of Twin Peaks season two through Fire Walk with Me and Lost Highway. The Fire Walk with Me soundtrack is just simply one of the greatest soundtracks ever recorded. Its movement through different tones, from foreboding melancholy with a hint of panic, through gentle affection, through frightening mania, is all part of a tapestry of nightmare. It was spellbinding when I first heard it in the '90s, it's spellbinding now.

A great artist is gone and his music will be with us forever. I'll see you in the trees.

The Snows of the Human Heart

If you ever have to arrest someone far out in the wilderness of Canada in the dead of winter, you'd better hope it's as nice a guy as Jules Vincent. 1952's The Wild North follows this affable character, played with maximum charm and absurd French accent by Stewart Granger, in an arduous journey with a Mountie played by Wendell Corey. The friendship between the two men that develops is terrific and the film's engrossing because of it.

Jules is introduced as just the nicest guy, so nice it's slightly absurd. As he saunters into town, he rescues a kitten from a dog before carrying it into a tavern where he starts to chat up a sad luck dame played by Cyd Charisse.

She has a melancholy musical number and ends up being an important character, Jules' love interest, but somehow she's only credited as "Indian Girl". She's Chippewa, according to the dialogue, and Jules agrees to escort her back to her tribe miles to the north. But before they can go, a big drunkard picks a fight with Jules.

One thing leads to another and the big man ends up accompanying them. Jules is forced to shoot him in order to protect Charisse but, since the two men were seen fighting in a tavern, Jules looks guilty. After a visit among Charisse's people, he goes on the lam, alone. Constable Pedley (Corey) tracks him down to a little cabin in the middle of nowhere.

Immediately the two men seem to respect each other. After Pedley formerly arrests Jules, they sit down to a friendly game of checkers. The bulk of the film is spent on their long journey back to town and there's constant tension over whether Vincent is going to have to flee and whether the two can maintain their odd friendship through it all. It's an oddly cosy movie and Granger and Corey have great chemistry.

The Wild North is available on The Criterion Channel.

Everyday is Like Wednesday

I finished watching the fourth episode of Wednesday, which means I've finished watching all the episodes directed by Tim Burton. Mostly I enjoyed it, although obligatory wokeness did creep in and it was sad hearing Wednesday deliver such popular sexist terms as "mansplaining" and "male gaze". But at some point, someone decided all Goths should be woke.

I guess many people cherish the summer camp sequence in the second Barry Sonnenfeld Addams Family movie, when Wednesday, in Native American cosplay, launches a raid on the kids dressed as pilgrims. There's a divide between those of us who enjoy it as a slightly absurd pretext for Wednesday's bloodlust, and those of us who think the politics are the point.

The pilgrims are certainly taken through the wringer in the new series. I wonder how the original pilgrims would have felt after suffering religious persecution, harsh months at sea, and winters of starvation, they'd have their reputations consistently demolished for decades starting in the late 20th century. There were conflicts between the English and Dutch settlers and the Native Americans, generally more complicated than is usually talked about. Certainly not as bad as what the Spanish did. It's certainly not fair to say they committed genocide. Lumping them in with the Salem witch trials that occurred decades later is also a bit lazy, though really not so different from the politics Tim Burton inserted into Sleepy Hollow. Where are the revisionist fantasies of English Protestants being imprisoned and massacred by Anglicans?

The Addams Family, with its difficult logical balance between deadpan morbid humour and its characters' genuine desire to do good, provides fertile ground for propaganda, I guess.

Anyway, Jenna Ortega continues to be a delight. The dance sequence in the fourth episode is being talked about so much I couldn't avoid hearing about it. And it was worth the hype as Ortega is pretty sweet and sexy dancing to "Goo Goo Muck".

I feel like the cinematography improves after episode two. And I like the teen drama story centred on the girls. The Addams Family humour translates well to Wednesday being the odd girl whose humour manages to be just out of step with everyone else. In this incarnation, the contrasting "normal" people are more complex, which makes Wednesday's attitude more satisfying. I thought it was a great idea to have Wednesday lose the fencing contest in the first episode, which ups the dramatic value of her being excellent at most things most of the time. By the fourth episode, I felt like we needed to see her caught off guard a few more times.

Anyway, I guess I give the show a B- so far. It's available on Netflix.

Twitter Sonnet #1649

The longer day extends beyond itself.
Revolting bays deny the carrack's keel.
Redeemed, his ancient power moved the elf.
A rugged ground can smooth the roughest heel.
A crooked arm concealed a ball of rice.
The sweetened beans embrace the roasted cake.
A ticking clock was cold, bereft of spice.
A precious wine predicts the lot'll bake.
The sodden cotton clogged the sunken eyes.
A boarded corpse retained a spoiled saint.
Erasure robbed the lead of vicious lies.
The savage sky deployed a rain of paint.
Reluctant stomps decide the groovy odds.
A clock creates the sloppy rhythm gods.

What Would Wood Do?

A wouldbe boy is made of wood.

--A wood bee? Can it fly?

No, no, he would like to be a boy.

--Why would a bee want to be a boy?

Not the bee, the wooden boy would!

--Wooden Boy Wood must have really weird trees.

No, no . . . It's like this, Guillermo del Toro has made a new movie, 2022's Pinocchio. It's a remake of the 1940 classic film, its plot resembling the Disney film much more than it does the 1883 Carlo Collodi novel. As such, it really can't compete with one of the greatest animated films of all time, particularly in terms of songs. But it's not bad and its design and stop motion animation are amazing.

Del Toro moves the story to 1930s Italy and adds a dead son to Geppetto's past. Part of Pinocchio's path to becoming a real boy in this one is stepping out of the shadow of Geppetto's human child. References to World War I and World War II are also contributions from del Toro, making the film somewhat reminiscent of The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth.

The best contribution from del Toro is an afterlife Pinocchio visits every time he received a fatal wound. Partially decayed rabbits carry his coffin to a waiting room before Pinocchio goes off to chat with the Blue Fairy's sister, an amazing sphinx-like creature with a mask and wings covered with tiny eyes. She's voiced by Tilda Swinton, too.

But the main story has the same themes as the Disney film, delivered as a plainer allegory, making it feel slightly too long. But the voice actors are all excellent, particularly David Bradley as Geppetto. Cate Blanchett is also really interesting in the role of a monkey whose lines are mostly cries and grunts. Blanchett's always full of surprises.

Pinocchio is available on Netflix.

Back to the Dungeons

Twenty-six years after I last played it, I played Dungeons and Dragons again, two days ago.

At the Japanese junior high school I work at, a couple second year students (14 years old) are native English speakers--one has a parent from Australia and the other has a parent from Canada. The half Canadian student is a big fan of Stranger Things, a show that, oddly, is mostly unknown in the Japanese schools I've worked at. When I asked if she'd be interested in trying out Dungeons and Dragons like the characters on the show, she jumped at the idea. I could tell she wanted the experience of a group of friends like the one on the show and I sure wanted to make it happen.

I told her to ask around for students who might be interested in joining. The other native English speaker wasn't interested but the half-Canadian's best friend, a Japanese student, was interested. I announced the game in a couple of classes and got one more interested student, another girl. I recruited two boys from the English club so we ended up with three girls and two boys, all second year students except one of the boys, who's a first year student.

I ordered dice and the latest editions of the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide off Amazon, English editions both. Japanese versions are being released only later this month, though the older, "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons", was released in Japan years ago. I discovered the tabletop RPG Call of Cthulhu, based on the HP Lovecraft mythos, is widely available in Japan and is displayed prominently at the bookstore in my nearby mall. Which explains why the students recognised the big octopus headed monster I was doodling on the chalkboard one day. One of them was surprised when I told her it was created by an American writer. Whatever the quality of the tabletop RPG, it is nice to know Lovecraft's monsters and mythos are well known while his status as a political football in the US is meaningless.

Anyway, since Dragonlance is what I know, and my copy of The Art of Dragonlance managed to migrate to Japan with me, I decided to use the classic Dragonlance campaign. This meant I also had some ready-made characters if making characters proved to be too difficult or time-consuming for the students, assuming I could convert them to the new rules without any trouble. And generally speaking, I found the new rules to be simpler. I remember how long it took me to understand THAC0. Now THAC0 has been replaced by an attack roll modified by a relevant ability score (strength for melee weapons, etc.) and a proficiency score. I'm not sure if it's functionally simpler but it's easier to understand.

The artwork in the new Dungeons and Dragons books is pretty sad compared to the beautiful stuff in the old Dragonlance material.

Everything looks like it was hastily coloured with a graphics programme algorithm. Gone are the meticulous oil and acrylic paintings by the likes of Larry Elmore and Clyde Caldwell.

Which made me glad I was using old Dragonlance material.

I managed to get a classroom with a big TV I could hook my laptop to, which was helpful for visual aids, and I also used a playlist of fantasy movie soundtrack selections (from Conan the Barbarian, Willow, and The Thief of Bagdad, among others).

We ended up meeting for a total of two sessions. The students all have club activities and, in the wintertime, they all have to leave school at 4:45pm (whenever I tell students I went home at 2pm in junior high school, I'm met with astonished incredulity). So we could only meet on Thursdays, the only day none of the five students had club activities, and only for about an hour. I spent the whole first session explaining what Dungeons and Dragons is and how to make characters. We were still doing ability rolls when we ran out of time.

So before the second session, I made sure to have all the Dragonlance characters converted and distributed print-outs. Even so, most of the students seemed to be overwhelmed and opted not to come back. So for the second session, I had only the half-Canadian and the first year student boy. He's a real champ, that one. In the English club, I have them all practising sections of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" and he has the section when Santa says, "On Dancer, on Dasher" etc. Every time he does it he tries to shout it louder and louder. He records himself on his Chromebook which he takes out into the hall to practice. Even so, everyone can hear him from across the school.

I gave him Caramon Majere because he wanted to use a human Fighter. Among the changes he wanted to make was to have him be 10,000 meters tall (converting everything to metric was another headache). When I had the two of them fighting a group of goblins and I asked what he wanted to do, he said he wanted to beat them all. It took some time to bring him down to earth but, once I did, he really got into it, running at the lead goblin with a spear. The half-Canadian student, meanwhile, managed to create a character I helped her with by rolling most of her stats. She wanted to use a spellcaster but chose mostly non-offensive spells. Even so, she managed to kill a goblin with her dagger (I had them both starting at Level 8). At the end of the second session, I was pretty happy, and now the first year student is asking for more. It's a shame next week is taken up by testing and my last day at this school is the 19th. Hopefully, the two of them will find a good way to feed this RP beast I helped them create.

The Phantom of the Transcript

Several students pointed out the setting sun to me as I left school yesterday. So I took a picture.

On the train home, I read MR James' "Martin's Close", a short ghost story from 1911 mostly told in the format of a murder trial transcript. James takes his usual penchant for suggestion to new levels as hints of the murdered woman's ghost turning up are mentioned casually as incidental aspects of the evidence presented to establish the murderer's guilt. James really knows how to make the reader's imagination work for him.

Then the Lord Chief Justice called upon the prisoner to make his defence; which he did, though at no great length, and in a very halting way, saying that he hoped the jury would not go about to take his life on the evidence of a parcel of country people and children that would believe any idle tale; and that he had been very much prejudiced in his trial; at which the L. C. J. interrupted him, saying that he had had singular favour shown to him in having his trial removed from Exeter, which the prisoner acknowledging, said that he meant rather that since he was brought to London there had not been care taken to keep him secured from interruption and disturbance. Upon which the L. C. J. ordered the Marshal to be called, and questioned him about the safe keeping of the prisoner, but could find nothing: except the Marshal said that he had been informed by the underkeeper that they had seen a person outside his[315] door or going up the stairs to it: but there was no possibility the person should have got in. And it being inquired further what sort of person this might be, the Marshal could not speak to it save by hearsay, which was not allowed. And the prisoner, being asked if this was what he meant, said no, he knew nothing of that, but it was very hard that a man should not be suffered to be at quiet when his life stood on it. But it was observed he was very hasty in his denial.

But my favourite part is in a witness testimony, a woman from the inn where the murderer, Squire Martin, was staying:

S. Sir, it was this. It was about nine o'clock the evening after that Ann did not come home, and I was about my work in the house; there was no company there only Thomas Snell, and it was foul weather. Esquire Martin came in and called for some drink, and I, by way of pleasantry, I said to him, "Squire, have you been looking after your[305] sweetheart?" and he flew out at me in a passion and desired I would not use such expressions. I was amazed at that, because we were accustomed to joke with him about her.

L. C. J. Who, her?

S. Ann Clark, my lord. And we had not heard the news of his being contracted to a young gentlewoman elsewhere, or I am sure I should have used better manners. So I said nothing, but being I was a little put out, I begun singing, to myself as it were, the song they danced to the first time they met, for I thought it would prick him. It was the same that he was used to sing when he came down the street; I have heard it very often: "Madam, will you walk, will you talk with me?" And it fell out that I needed something that was in the kitchen. So I went out to get it, and all the time I went on singing, something louder and more bold-like. And as I was there all of a sudden I thought I heard someone answering outside the house, but I could not be sure because of the wind blowing so high. So then I stopped singing, and now I heard it plain, saying, "Yes, sir, I will walk, I will talk with you," and I knew the voice for Ann Clark's voice.

Att. How did you know it to be her voice?

S. It was impossible I could be mistaken. She had a dreadful voice, a kind of a squalling voice, in particular if she tried to sing. And there was nobody in the village that could counterfeit it, for they often tried.

What I liked about this is the blending of the suggested ghost encounter with the flirtation of a suggestive song being sung. It seems to connect two unrelated things that were living in the same part of the brain all along.

Will Low

Well. For all its problems, Willow is still better than Rings of Power. I'm still enjoying the cast and their chemistry with each other. I wonder if they're improvising at all. Young and old, the cast are all terrific, playing off each other. There's more going on in the catty dialogue between Willow and Boorman than in the tired plot device about Willow's visions and questionable magical abilities.

It's kind of funny watching this, Angel, and Wednesday--all three shows have a character who's occasionally overcome by a vision to move the plot forward.

The action sequences on Willow are just as bad as the ones on Rings of Power but at least Willow has the excuse of a low budget. But the scene at the beginning of last night's episode was a new low. Heavily edited shots of the actors swinging swords very slowly concludes with Willow using . . . a smoke bomb? It's really unclear. He does something and then there's smoke everywhere and then the bad guys have gotten away with Elora. It's really confusing.

The worst part of the episode was these two ladies Elora runs into in the forest:

I know the show is low budget but good grief. It looks like the costume department just took things off the rack in a Wal-Mart. It's true, the original Willow wasn't a hardcore recreation of mediaeval Europe but most people have a certain instinct for what should fly in a mediaeval fantasy and what shouldn't. This doesn't.

I've since learned the taller one is an actress called Hannah Waddingham, apparently a big Broadway star. That explains why her appearance felt utterly pointless otherwise. Is she wearing denim? It might be a kind of flannel made to look like denim.

Anyway, somehow I still want to see the next episode.

Twitter Sonnet #1648

Returning worms discover warmer dirt.
A pocket clung across the normal hip.
A nerveless wall could yet be badly hurt.
Recalling clouds they float across the dip.
Required fights were ever just the same.
A tired hall was squishy socks combined.
She asked the movie orc to give a name.
Admired horns adorned the maid of Rhein.
The bacon beckons far across the sea.
An ocean pig demurely charted fate.
Behind a veil of smoke, the scene's a C.
The modern shirt I saw was seventh rate.
Construction paper broke the stack of gold.
An open can of worms is never old.

The Day is a Girl

Happy Wednesday, everyone, or to everyone east of Belarus. I guess this is a good time to talk about Wednesday, the new Netflix Addams Family spin-off. I finally got around to watching just the first episode and mostly enjoyed it.

It's funny that it's directed by Tim Burton, whom many people mistakenly believed directed the two films from the early '90s. It seems to be his first successful project in years, too. Danny Elfman's new music is great, referencing the style of the classic Addams Family theme while being something new and his own.

Most of the casting is great. Jenna Ortega, in particular, is great, finding shades of expression in a character famous for only occasionally smiling.

I seem to recall a lot of people getting called racist or something for saying Luis Guzman is miscast. Well, whatever it is, you'll have to call me that, too, because he's no Gomez Addams in my book. I'm not wild about Catherine Zeta-Jones, either. Neither of them have a sense of depth to their wit, neither seems morbid. And they have no chemistry.

But so far they're not around a lot. I like the look of the Nevermore Academy which Wednesday is forced to attend and her colourful werewolf roommate is thankfully a little more than just a one note foil.

The show was clearly designed for girls and Wednesday, the point of view character, is given some suitable suitor selection, so far mainly between a mild mannered coffee shop employee and a tortured poet. I like that the show doesn't make everything easy for Wednesday, too, and the thing that ultimately keeps her from trying to escape Nevermore seems to be the challenges it presents to her.

There are a few hints of ironclad woke requirements that Netflix seems to impose on shows occasionally but so far nothing as silly as Rose beating up thugs in an alley on Sandman or any of the bullshit on the live action Cowboy Bebop. At least Wednesday is established as someone who trained in deadly arts.

Wednesday is available on Netflix.

Vampire Baby

I'm still watching Angel and Buffy. Last night I watched the third season Angel episode, "Offspring". This is the one where Darla shows up pregnant and it's also the first episode where the idea of romance between Angel and Cordelia is introduced to be taken seriously.

The episode came out in 2001, which enabled a demon in the episode to refer to it as "the first year of the last century." It was written by David Greenwalt, one of the better writers on the show, though I don't really like the way Darla's pregnancy is handled.

First it's used to swing the pendulum of Angel and Cordelia's increasing affection. Suddenly, evidence that Angel has been sleeping around shows up and everyone (except Fred) adopts a superior attitude to that cad Angel. This would just be cheesy if the viewer doesn't remember that Darla had been systematically breaking Angel down with the intent of getting him to sleep with her, appearing in what he thought were his dreams, and when he finally did sleep with her it was when he thought he'd lost everything. It's weird to have him treated as some kind of horndog for it. Cordelia has multiple lines that are variations of just, "Men!"

It is kind of satisfying when Darla tries to kill Cordelia after Cordelia had been stupid enough to dote on her like she was some innocent random pregnant woman. But everyone, including Cordelia, should have been smarter than that, so it's just kind of odd.

Fred is really fun in the episode, though, babbling about demoniac etymologies and interpreting Latin. In 2001, you could have a character who's supposed to be intensely shy who wears micro-miniskirts and sundresses all the time. My head canon is just that she had Cordelia pick out all her clothes and she'd spent too long in a cave wearing rags to know what was really appropriate anymore. It's L.A., and these clothes really aren't so far fetched.

Angel is available on Disney+ in most countries and presumably Hulu in the US.

Somewhere Between Everywhere

The recent trend of multiverse stories reached a high point with 2022's Everything Everywhere All at Once. The directors, known as the Daniels, use the concept as an allegory for the current culture wars in the west but the first two thirds of the film manage to be a pretty effective story regardless.

Michelle Yeoh shows again she can be a great lead as she plays Evelyn, a Chinese immigrant who runs a laundromat in the U.S. She had all kinds of aspirations, as we learn when she visits the IRS and an ornery woman with a bad haircut (Jamie Lee Curtis) tries to tell her she can't write off the professional expenses of a singer or a novelist.

Evelyn also has the responsibility of brokering a relationship between her elderly father (James Hong) and her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who has an American girlfriend. All of the conflicts in Evelyn's hectic life are exacerbated when her husband (Ke Huy Quan) is suddenly possessed by an alternate reality version of himself and teaches her how to tap into the skills of her alternate lives. She'll need all of these skills (especially martial arts, of course) to fight the villain, a young woman trying to pull the universe into some kind of interdimensional black hole.

Surprisingly, Evelyn, a conservative, is positioned as the heroine of the allegory. Her desire for the universe to remain relatively stable sure seems more reasonable than the postmodern nihilism of the film's villain. But the film is a negotiation between the two political extremes as it is a conflict between generations. Some change, certainly, is in order, but past experience does have meaning and significance.

The film kind of reminds me of Netflix's Russian Doll, which also begins by taking a well trodden Sci-Fi path in an interesting new direction, but falls apart in its final act. Everything Everywhere All at Once falls apart in exactly the same way. It's as though the writers panicked and thought the audience wouldn't get exactly the message they wanted to transmit, so they threw all of the established logic of the world they created out the window so the characters can directly info-dump their motives at each other. It gets a little tedious and if the over two hour film had been trimmed by about thirty minutes, it would have been great. As it is, it's pretty good.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is available on Showtime.

Twitter Sonnet #1647

Another chore begins a life repeat.
Again the dishes stack beside the arm.
The dull progression spells a long defeat.
The sluggish action chews pistach'yo charm.
The shrinking coin reflects a rising price.
Discussing bread, the girls dispersed to play.
To bake the dough, the mistress treats it nice.
And now is how an hour comes a day.
Aloft, the lizards fight for chimney rights.
Escaping clouds were warned of dimming skies.
The stars converse and hold the twinkle lights.
Prevention stirs the heart to wanting pies.
The crawling numbers smear the dawn and dusk.
A sightless hulk departs the waxy husk.

Al Strobel

The One Armed Man has died. Al Strobel played the character of Philip Gerard/"Mike" on Twin Peaks and had one of the most consistent presences on the show. He had one arm, an unusual feature, but he also had a great voice and was a decent actor, two more things you don't run across every day. He's one of the few actors who appeared in the original 1990-1991 run of Twin Peaks, 1992's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and the 2017 relaunch of the series.

One of the things director David Lynch is renowned for is sound design and Strobel's voice fits so perfectly in Lynch's soundscape.

Often it sounded as though there were an echo effect on his voice and I often thought of the talking skull in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

He starred in one of the most lauded scenes in the film, Fire Walk With Me, in which he confronts Laura and Leland on a busy street and Lynch ratcheted up the tension with car horns and engines (I'm not posting the video because it has spoilers).

And he returned with the series in 2017, becoming a kind of ambassador for the dream realm called The Black Lodge.

And now he really has left this world. May he guide us all to cherry pies and winning slot machines.

Watching Paint Dry Voted Greatest Movie of All Time

Sight and Sound finally got around to releasing their famous list of The 100 Greatest Films of All Time, a poll of critics that's been conducted every 10 years since 1952. This year, 1975's Jeanne Dielman took the top spot, rising from #35 in the 2012 poll, knocking my favourite movie, Vertigo, to second place. In one stroke, Sight and Sound has rendered itself irrelevant to anyone who understands cinema and the general movie going populace alike.

Are these sour grapes? Frankly, even when Vertigo won back in 2012, I questioned whether it deserved it. Vertigo is my favourite movie because I have a personal relationship with it. It doesn't surprise me that quite a few people don't appreciate or understand the significance of Vertigo. Meanwhile, I've never shown Citizen Kane to someone who didn't see what was great about it. Whether someone is a cinephile or only interested in popcorn flicks, it's clear as crystal from the way the 1941 film jumps through time and hits the ground running, its pacing, performances, and compositions are still so compulsively watchable it can't be denied.

Art is inherently subjective but I feel like there are ways to strive for objectivity. You can measure a film's relative greatness by its influence on other artists in the industry, by the techniques that the film popularised, by the people who worked on the film who subsequently produced highly regarded work. On all three of these counts, Citizen Kane is a clear winner. Vertigo's influence is obvious, too, to anyone who's paid attention to romance in almost any suspense film made after it. But Jeanne Dielman? In the lists I've seen of directors who've acknowledged its influence, the only prominent name is Gus Van Sant. When I watch the film, I mainly see the films it was influenced by.

The influence of Ozu is obvious. The unmoving camera and compositions using architecture and furniture to create layers of proscenia. There's even often the single red object, like the ones Ozu used to stand in for the seal typically seen as a signature in traditional Japanese painting. The film's tone also owes something to Tarkovsky and Bresson and Melville.

The essay by Laura Mulvey included with the Sight and Sound poll results this year predictably hails the film as "radically feminist". Mulvey has her own personal relationship with the film and in this age in which academics esteem their own creative readings of a text above the intentions of the artists, Jeanne Dielman is a perfect choice.

The almost three and a half hour film mostly consists of watching a woman--often identified in reviews as a housewife despite the fact that she's unmarried--going about the mundane activities of her day. It's like a Rorschach test. As we watch her going about her mindless chores--cooking dinner, doing the dishes, polishing her son's shoes--we're giving so little information that the mind, or the mind with the will to focus, compulsively starts to generate interpretations. The more active the mind, the more willing to impose an interpretation on the film, the more rewarding the experience. If art is a mirror, this is one that shows critics to themselves in the most flattering light. It shows anyone looking to have a good time at the movies the door. Or, for a great many, the inside of their eyelids. And, of course, the arduous task of watching the film in itself places a barrier between the critical clique and the rabble.

I don't believe a film has to be "accessible" to be great. I'm sure many people could say a Tarkovsky or Dreyer movie is just as boring. And Jeanne Dielman has its merits. Careful viewing of its title character reveals aspects of her personality that will be important for the salacious climax that finally shows up. The fact that the film spends an excessive amount of time establishing its clues make them seem more profound than they are. In reality, a control freak who starts making mistakes, who has an experience like the one she has in bed at the end of the film, doesn't necessarily take the action she takes. To say that one inevitably follows the other could almost be called misogynistic, even misanthropic. As a portrait of an individual, though, rather than a symbol, the film is an interesting image of a zealous desire for conformity.

Jeanne Dielman is not an everywoman. Anyone who takes her as a symbol of the lives of women anywhere isn't paying attention. This is a woman who sleeps in a room with wood the same colour as her hair, who wears clothes the same colour as her spotless walls. Neither she nor anyone around her engage in small talk that ever comes off as believably human. It's like watching a film about living mannequins. It's consciously stylised, again, clearly influenced by Ozu, but lacking Ozu's interest in human warmth. Mostly it feels like exactly what it is, a film made by an inexperienced, somewhat interesting filmmaker who has yet to establish her own voice from the collective of her influences.

As a film ranked anywhere in the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time, it's obviously a political choice. But politics are clearly a heavy influence on the list which includes also movies like Moonlight and Parasite but lacks a single Tarantino film, a filmmaker whose name has become a byword for great filmmaking. It lacks a single Steven Spielberg film, a John Huston film, a Roman Polanski film. If influence truly were the metric, obviously Star Wars should be on the list. So now we can toss this on the pile that includes the Oscars and much of the academic establishment, an institutionalised parody of a time when people used to have real belief in the merits of art, rather than zealous fixations on theory and politics.

Jeanne Dielman is available on The Criterion Channel.

"While all the critics find great meaning in the telephone book" - "Pixie", Ani DiFranco

The Compulsive Runner

A guy who can't trust anyone meets a girl who can't help trusting him. 1951's He Ran All the Way is a particularly tragic film noir about two kinds of fools who accentuate the pain of each other's circumstances too well. The writing isn't always strong but the performances by John Garfield and Shelly Winters are dynamite.

Nick (Garfield) is unemployed and wakes up to the sound of his mother constantly berating him about it. So his friend convinces him to take part in robbing the payroll of a nearby factory.

His accomplice is killed so Nick, alone, runs off with the 10,000 dollars. He's not cut out for this work, though, he's all nerves. He tries to blend in with a crowd but he can't stop darting his eyes everywhere, sweating, and compulsively dashing for cover at every opportunity. Finally, he has the bright idea to go to a public pool. He rents a locker and stashes the cash, changes into swim trucks, and jumps in. And meets Peg (Winters), who can't swim.

Instinctively, he tries to teach her, and, instinctively, she clutches him when she's afraid. As the film progresses, this initial impression is continually reaffirmed--she compulsively trusts him. Even after he takes her whole family hostage and holes up in their apartment.

A lot of the plot doesn't make sense. Nick is content to let anyone leave the apartment to go about their regular lives, even Peg's kid brother. No-one ever seems worried the kid will blab, the mother never thinks of telling the kid to run away and stay at a friend's. It's a bit silly, but the movie continues to be watchable for Garfield and Winters. He's like a cornered animal and she has a guileless, unshakable faith in him. Not that she kids herself, she just looks more and more wounded as he demonstrates again and again her trust is misplaced.

He Ran All the Way is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1646

Enclosing felt, the notice sent a word.
A buzzing built to break the purpose out.
Condensing soup provoked the slurpy bird.
Approaching steeds described the castle route.
Above the falling tree the foot descends.
Returning boots embroiled toes and nails.
Abiding birds absorb the egg amends.
A wooden boy would soon devour whales.
The crashing frost dispelled the goblin's turn.
A luncheon test distorts the dollar bill.
Expanding socks destroyed the ancient urn.
Absorption chewed the ashes out the will.
The helpless run collides against the pool.
A dizzy driver damns the hapless fool.