Teenagers rebelling against the social order and the demented adults trying to put them down all attract the ironic sympathy of the filmmaker in 1990's Cry-Baby. I don't know if it's John Waters' best movie but maybe it's his most appreciable, coming at a transition period from his wilder early films into his attempts at somewhat more mainstream fare. He's helped immensely by Johnny Depp who makes the titular Cry-Baby a character the audience can feel more than ironic affection for.
It's an affectionate parody of '50s delinquent films. Depp's Cry-Baby is cut from the same cloth as James Dean and young Marlon Brando characters but he's in a movie world that is closer to cheap knock-offs of those movies. The supporting cast including Traci Lords and Ricki Lake recall things more like Girls Town and The Beatniks.
The story's just an excuse for musical numbers and equally ornamental campy dialogue. Allison (Amy Locane) is the good girl from a good family who can't help being attracted to the low life Cry-Baby (Depp). Waters adores Cry-Baby's trashy relatives, he adores the preppy guys who burn Cry-Baby's prized motorcycle, he adores how sensitive Cry-Baby is about it. I suppose you can just take these characters straight on but it's easier to appreciate the movie as fetishised mediocrity. To simply enjoy watching the parade of the odd, awkward, and pretty in their Sunday best, earnestly singing their hearts out at the jailhouse.
Cry-Baby is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a playlist of John Waters movies.
The third episode of Skeleton Crew is definitely an improvement on the previous two despite being directed by David Lowery, director of that detestable adaptation of The Green Knight from a couple years ago. At the same time, I'm getting a better sense of the show's fundamental flaws.
Episode three works entirely because of Jude Law's character, both for the writing and Law's performance. He's obviously patterned on Long John Silver and his position in the story is very similar to Long John's position in Treasure Island--he's a surrogate father figure for the point of view child protagonist and the problem of his true moral character is constantly in play.
I don't like the name "Crimson Jack". I know, having written pirate fiction myself, how difficult and yet tempting it is to find variations of "Red" and "Black" and other simple, lurid adjectives invoking death and violence. But for a pirate's name, it has to be something you believe people would casually say in conversation and "Crimson Jack" doesn't roll off the tongue like Long John Silver.
Law's performance is good and you can see the layers of thought in his mannerisms and line deliveries. I like the moment where he's challenged with a line about never leaving a man behind being a Jedi ethic. He starts saying, "That's not--" and then catches himself and says, "That's not a Jedi thing." Just something about Law's attitude and inflection makes me feel like he was about to say, "That's not true." I think the idea hit close to home, that he feels he was left behind by Jedi he formerly trusted. The fact that I'm compelled to speculate and read into his motives is an indicator the character has been effectively created.
I also liked the line from the otherwise lame owl alien character in which she cautions one of the kids not to listen to her gut but to her head. It's believable that someone would stridently offer this advice and yet, at the same time, it's not really useful since, when we talk about our gut, we are actually talking about our heads. In a dangerous situation where the kids have to make decisions quickly they don't always have the luxury of doing so with all possible evidence gathered. So it sounds like logical advice but really all it does is raise the tension.
Unfortunately, the episode also highlighted how poorly conceived and written the children are. Their home planet's odd resemblance to Earth is like a bone fracture that gets worse the more the show walks on it. The worse part was when the two kids were so excited to shoot at the X-Wings chasing them. What in their backgrounds has made them so eager to shoot at people? When Long John Silver gave Jim Hawkins a pistol, Jim wasn't chomping at the bit to blow someone's brains out. The scene was obviously meant to echo the Death Star escape from the first Star Wars movie but the makers of Skeleton Crew evidently don't understand what motivated Han and Luke shooting at the TIE Fighters. Luke had been dreaming of being a fighter pilot all his life and now he and Han were both fighting for their survival. The kids in Skeleton Crew don't know if the X-Wings are trying to kill them and, as far as we know, all they've been dreaming about are sterile descriptions of Jedi on tablets. The problem is the kids are written more as Star Wars fans than as characters who are organically part of this universe. I wonder if this show was originally conceived as something more like The Last Starfighter; maybe the kids were originally supposed to actually be from Earth but someone at Disney or Lucasfilm thought the idea was too far outside of what Star Wars should be. I would agree, but the fact that filmmakers are looking for postmodern concepts shows their imagination is somehow blocked from properly exploring what should be a galaxy sized field of opportunity.
2009's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans has been on Criterion Channel for a while so I watched it again. I can't believe it's fifteen years old, it still feels like a recent movie. Legendary director Werner Herzog makes movies all the time, often attracting star talent, but it's kind of rare for any of his movies to break through into mainstream consciousness. His Bad Lieutenant achieved some notice thanks to the perfect casting of its star, Nicholas Cage, delivering one of his most memorable madman performances.
The key to his character is that he suffers a back injury at the start of the film that leaves him in constant physical pain for the rest of his life. You can see that pain in every second of Cage's performance, too.
The movie is somewhat mysteriously linked to Abel Ferrara's 1992 film Bad Lieutenant--some sources say Herzog's film was meant to be a second in a franchise all along, some say the two stories had nothing to do with each other, that Herzog's film was slapped with the name but some opportunistic producer. But it's hard not to see Herzog's film as a counterargument to Ferrara's, which is about a bad cop played by Harvey Keitel who has a religious experience, leading to him becoming a true agent of justice. Herzog's film argues that this hypothetical lieutenant can be good and bad at the same time, shifting from circumstance to circumstance for occasionally explicable reasons. The man is in constant pain, most of us can't imagine what that's like, so it puts a perpetual asterisk on all of his actions. How much responsibility does he have for his actions, does he bear more responsibility for some actions than he does for others? It's a very noir kind of existential question.
The movie is so "street", with it's intimate and complex knowledge of drug and police culture in New Orleans, it hardly feels like a Herzog film. Herzog's presence is better felt in dreamlike moments like Cage's visions of iguanas and his line at the end, pondering whether or not fish dream.
His relationship with Eva Mendes' character is strangely sweet. She's really sexy in this movie and it was nice screenwriter William Finkelstein didn't write her as the typical strung out shrew.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is available on The Criterion Channel.
X Sonnet #1903
Including hay, the horse's home was full.
Aversion choked the guest from ringing bells.
A linen flag depicts a frightened bull.
Arranged about his hooves are seven hells.
Like boxing rocks, the pointless fight was dumb.
Consorting crabs would stick their pincers out.
Dominions damned the life of Wrigley's gum.
It clogged the cruel crustacean's kettle spout.
The aging picture cleaned the error town.
Abroad, the place retained a scruffy life.
The people play beneath a sky of brown.
The clouds were thick beyond the cutting knife.
A turtle team invades the peaceful cloud.
Attack was swift and cruel but never loud.
Last night I dreamt I was watching an animated movie written by Dave Filoni and directed by Robert Rodriguez. It was terrible, which is no surprise from Dave Filoni but I thought I was a Robert Rodriguez fan. Maybe my subconscious isn't anymore. Hypnotic was underwhelming but I didn't hate Book of Boba Fett as much as most people seemed to. Still, it was far from his best work.
The movie in my dream was hand drawn animation and seemed to be emulating Ghibli, which wouldn't be a first for Filoni. It was only an hour and twelve minutes but the credits didn't stop until 58 minutes in. Mostly executive producers and producers taking a piece of the inflated budget pie as usual. I don't remember much about the movie itself except it took place in a forest and was derivative and bland.
Fortunately, this film is only available in my subconscious.
Somehow, David E. Kelley's writing really improves on Ally McBeal season two, which premiered in September 1998. Maybe it's the contrast with scripts produced under the influence of heavy fatigue at the end of the previous season. I'm still amazed he wrote every single episode while also working on The Practice.
The first three episodes of the second season bring in Portia di Rossi and Lucy Liu as new characters who become regulars. This is the role that made Liu a star. Her performance and character hold up. She seems like a twenty-four hour ball-buster but then she can suddenly be convincingly vulnerable. Hers and de Rossi's characters are pretty similar. I don't remember which of them Jane Krakowski's character suddenly makes a rather graphic joke about; "Maybe her gynaecologist pulled the wrong tooth." I'm not sure if this is the last show I expected a vagina dentata joke from but it's gotta be close.
The second episode features Wayne Newton of all people playing a Howard Stern clone called Harold Wick. Liu's character sues him for something he said on the radio and it all ends up somehow being a pretext for Ally to go on Harold's show so he can ask to see her naked and make comments about her short skirt. You know, her skirt was really short. I wonder if many lawyers actually wore skirts like that in the '90s.
It goes to show just how big Howard Stern used to be. Now, people criticise Kamala Harris for not going on Joe Rogan's show. No-one even mentions the fact that she went on Howard Stern's show. He's become a non-entity in the pop cultural landscape. It's hardly a surprise; he's walked away from everything that made him successful. He didn't ask Harris even one question about sex. Of course, she never would've done his show if he were the old Howard. I guess when he got to a certain age it felt better to be part of the establishment than to be a rabble rouser.
Ally McBeal is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere.
It looked like Notre Dame Cathedral was done for. Five years and over 800 million euros later and it's back in business. December 8 is the official reopening and present at the ceremony were U.S. President-elect Donald Trump as well as his prominent supporter Elon Musk. As an affirmation of the glory of ancient cultural splendour, it's fitting that the reopening should coincide with a political triumph of conservatives, or at least the right.
Also present at the ceremony was Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a somewhat odd fit considering that Putin has rhetorically tied his dreams of conquest with a resurgence of institutional Christianity. The pope, who was not present at Notre Dame's reopening ceremony, has even mildly encouraged Ukraine to surrender. Of course, French Catholicism has historically had its differences with the pope.
So yes, solidarity beneath the grandeur of Heaven, sort of.
I don't mean to suggest I'm unhappy about the cathedral's reopening. I'm overjoyed. For me, art is the most important thing humanity has ever made, and few examples of artistry can rival Notre Dame. It fulfills the objective of a Gothic cathedral admirably, inspiring awe with its splendour. Could that 800 million have been spent on starving families instead? Well, theoretically, yes, practically, no, if you have any idea of the maze of politics and bureaucracy that this money would have to navigate. And at some point, I still think it's worthwhile to consider what humanity can achieve beyond survival. If just living to see another day is your highest goal, you're already losing.
These cultural edifices serve a less quantifiable public good. That's certainly clear here in Japan where, every year, people of all political stripes and economic strata gather at ancient shrines and temples. Large and ornate, these places give dignity to people and culture beyond the ugly day to day struggle for physical and professional survival.
Last night I found myself watching Carl Dreyer's 1928 film, The Passion of Joan of Arc. I didn't even mean to watch the whole thing but, like a lot of great works of art, it's hard to look away from it. Mostly it's because of all those closeups on Renee Jeanne Falconetti but all those sanctimonious and subtly twisted men sitting in judgement of her are also fascinating to watch. Their authority is so absolute, their verdict so preordained, woven by a web of cultural, professional, and personal interest. This beautiful, earnest soul, committed to the same God these men are meant to be representing, is a tool for their own validation and, increasingly as the film proceeds, their sadism.
These cultural edifices can lift everyone up but it's worth remembering that sometimes they can be used to crush misfits.
You know the economy's bad when Great Depression movies start to hit close to home. 1933's Man's Castle stars Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young as a homeless couple who scrape out a living with odd jobs and scams. Both stars are great in the movie and some of Tracy's diatribes sound like they could've been taken from Reddit.
Shortly after she meets him, Trina (Young) finds herself being escorted to a swanky restaurant by Bill (Tracy). But despite his top hat and tails, he's just as penniless as she. He reveals this by calling the restaurant manager and berating him with a speech about how restaurants throw away food while people starve in the streets, a practice mirrored by American agriculture disposing of enormous amounts of edible food. These remain good points.
He's not exactly homeless. He lives in a shanty town by the river. He and Young strip and swim naked in it because this is a pre-Code movie. Another thing this movie can get away with because it's pre-Code is that characters can get away with crimes without legal or supernatural repercussions. Despite being a hell of a good movie, it wasn't popular on its original release. I guess everyone preferred to fantasise about being rich with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies rather than examine the reality of being poor.
Man's Castle is available on The Criterion Channel this movie as part of a playlist celebrating pre-Code Columbia films.
X Sonnet #1902
The bubble bev'rage cleared the ace's throat.
Corrosive coke condemned the bee to flight.
Important planes conveyed the vocal goat.
The cola sky returned to make the night.
A term of noise concludes with purple space.
Advancing visions cut the Christmas short.
Observing matter changed the raptor's pace.
Prolonged decisions plagued the faerie court.
Potato time devoured nights at home.
The dream of books was just a wall to knock.
No knowledge kept as well as ancient Rome.
Apostates breed a crew of thinking stock.
Determined foes were quiet kings of rust.
The feathered creep would find a chop to bust.
Lately I've been reading The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien again and The Making of Modern Japan by Marius B. Jansen. Those are both heavy hardback books so when I need something lighter to take on the train I've been reading Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess' Stardust. In one of the boxes of my old books that my grandmother sent to me was my trade paperback copy of the novel with the original Charles Vess illustrations. It was a lucky find many years ago at a Barnes and Noble. I wish it were the hardback, though, because the cover's become a bit delicate over time.
The novel was adapted as a film in 2007 starring Charlie Cox and Claire Danes, with Peter O'Toole, Robert DeNiro, and Michelle Pfeiffer. I've only seen it once and didn't hate it but I greatly prefer the novel, particularly with the Charles Vess illustrations. His aesthetic along with Gaiman's Lord Dunsany inspired narrative tone provides a vastly different experience to the film's big budget Princess Bride concept.
Now I have to read it amid the controversy of "sexual assault" allegations against Gaiman. I put that in quotes because one thing I find especially creepy about the coverage is how strong language is applied to matters that really aren't resolved and definitely aren't clear. But the novel, which includes at least one scene of a young man kissing a woman who does not express her consent beforehand, would be seen as a smoking gun by some critics. Such critics would be arguing in bad faith since spontaneity has been a part of romantic portrayals since, well, always. The madness of modern western Puritanism, which the results of the recent presidential election were largely a reaction against, as usual assumes not only the obvious correctness of its new moral dictates, but retroactively applies them to the whole of preceding history.
The sad thing is that the one paraphrased quote from Gaiman that seems to have the most traction is his characterisation of his pushing writer Julia Hobsbawm onto a sofa and kissing her. He says it was a young man misreading a situation. So he feels he acted wrongly, that he made a mistake, but has apparently over the years forgiven himself. One might detect some indignation in his response at the idea that a public who are not participants in a piece of his private history feels entitled to pass judgement on it. Which I'd say is reasonable. But woe to the celebrity who dares question the public's right to pass judgement on any celebrity's private life, however biased and incomplete the coverage.
I'm not really sure if Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is a good show. I didn't like the trailers and watching the first two episodes didn't raise my enthusiasm. I didn't like the concept of '80s American suburban kids in the Star Wars universe and the show has done nothing to convince me I should. But, on the other hand, if you do like the concept, it's entirely possible you'll like the episodes. They have a basic competence in their execution. They come from John Watts and Christopher Ford, the minds behind Spider-Man: Homecoming, and I did like that movie.
Why can't I get behind this concept? It seems only natural. Elliot in E.T. and a few other kids in those many junior high school aged stories of the '80s were seen playing with Star Wars toys. What could be more natural than putting such a kid in a Star Wars story? Oddly, it drains the show of nostalgia because, unlike Stranger Things, older viewers like me can't look at what the kids are interested in and say, "Oh, wow, I remember liking that." These kids like Jedi and Jedi is all they know. It's not just the nostalgia, it kind of shaves the tree down to the trunk. There's no sense of fullness to it. Like a lot of Disney Star Wars stuff, the galaxy it depicts feels very small and the odd similarity to '80s suburbs makes it feel even smaller.
The elephant kid is kind of cute. Maybe this show will win me over, I don't know.
Have you even thought about killer bees lately? What if they overrun your home, as in Rockne S. O'Bannon's 1995 TV movie Deadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare? Think about it, won't you? Well, it's a competently made, sometimes pleasantly cheesy, movie.
There are two moments that stick out for me. One is a teenage couple going joyriding in the desert in a convertible with the top down. The girl sits on the headrest of her seat and takes her top off for a passing trucker who nearly drives off the road. Then the couple find a spot by an old billboard where a hive of killer bees are hidden. Of course, the bees morally punish our teens for their immodesty. Puritanism lives on in the bees!
The other part I liked was when the bees attack an outdoor wedding. The bride spots a kid curled up in a foetal position so she drops her veil to use it like a beekeeper's hood and goes out to save him. Now that's some clever thinking.
The movie stars Robert Hays as the patriarch trying to keep his family safe. You might remember him from Airplane!. It's a bit odd having the star of a panic movie parody starring in a sincere panic movie. Among reasons it was difficult to take the movie seriously it ranks a little low, though. Still, it was fun.
X Sonnet #1901
Comedic dishes sink to murder bowls.
A time of hills was passed to mountain shade.
Inverted ears resemble rabbit holes.
So hither came the nymphs to cupid's glade.
Relentless eyes demand a death a day.
The killing time was based in broken clocks.
Conniving winter rigged a ghost of May.
A Christmas gift was bound in metal socks.
In water times, the sand was never shown.
Convincing coral not to blanch was wrong.
The gauge of flesh was dark beside the bone.
Confusing bees would sing a troubled song.
Returning films were laden full of gold.
The metal demon's never getting old.
A poor young man with aristocratic tastes finds his fortunes rise when he meets a beautiful heiress. But all's not as it seems in 1972's Endless Night. Based on a 1967 Agatha Christie novel, it follows in the footsteps of Peeping Tom and Psycho to portray a seemingly innocent young man with a hidden, dark persona. It's part cosy English mystery, part psychological nightmare and I got a kick out of it.
It was the last film of the filmmaking team of Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, a duo primarily known for comedies in the '50s. They prove they were just as capable of making a murder mystery and they're helped a lot by a score from Bernard Herrmann and a terrific cast.
Hywel Bennett plays Michael, a chauffeur who likes to visit art galleries in his spare time. One day, taking photos in the countryside, he runs into Ellie, a beautiful American girl played by Hayley Mills. Mills' American accent is never convincing for a moment but it didn't bother me too much. It turns out she's rich and after they're married Michael draws the cagey suspicion of Ellie's lawyer uncle played by George Sanders, who committed suicide the same year. He does seem slightly detached in the film but he still gives a perfectly good performance.
Britt Ekland plays Ellie's domineering German assistant, Greta, whom Michael seems to detest.
The film's filled with subtle hints. We get some glimpses into Michael's childhood and the significant presence of a picture of God's eye in his bedroom, which seems to haunt him like the Eye of Sauron. As in Peeping Tom, there's a sense of Michael being psychologically damaged by not having privacy in his youth. I was also reminded of Lost Highway and Fred Madison's fear of cameras and video preventing him from remembering things his own way. Of course, I also think of Detour and Black Angel. Endless Night is a nice addition to this psycho tradition.
An architectural historian is shocked to find gargoyles coming to life in France and tearing people's heads off. 2009's Rise of the Gargoyles is a SyFy channel movie with cheap cgi and actors from daytime soap operas. I found the screenplay's inscrutable chain of logic kind of interesting.
One question no-one asks is, "Why?" Why are gargoyles coming to life and killing people? Why some people and not others? The architectural historian, Jack (Eric Balfour), has to be coaxed by a friend into visiting an 19th century church that's about to be demolished. Why does he have to be coaxed if this is his specialty? They rouse the wrath of they gargoyle for reasons that aren't clear. Jack manages to get some footage--his camera is busted in the escape but some news reporters manage to retrieve the footage. However, all the data is wiped the next morning as part of a routine in which all systems are rebooted at the news station. Why?
So Inspector Gibert can't see it of course. He's played by Welsh actor Ifan Huw Dafydd who puts on the most ridiculous, Pepe Le Pew accent you can imagine for the role, which stands in contrast to actual French speaker Caroline Neron who plays the news reporter--she's Canadian. The movie was shot at least partially in France, why doesn't it have any French actors? These are the enduring mysteries of Rise of the Gargoyles.
What happens when someone with no political acumen and poor education but with a reputation for honesty enters the arena of American politics? You get a madcap comedy like 1984's Protocol starring Goldie Hawn as a cocktail waitress who rises to political fame after saving a Middle Eastern politician from assassination. Oh, the innocence of '80s political comedy.
Quickly, a cadre of political handlers swoop in and try to control Sunny's (Hawn) rising stardom. But she foils them again and again by doing things like taking dignitaries to the local bar for a good old fashioned American time of drinking and carousing, presumably things that are not done in the fictional middle eastern country of Otah.
Despite all the scandal and hijinks that ensue, the public loves Sunny because she seems real and just like them, eventually propelling her to political office. Just imagine something like that happening in real life!
Lots of couples have troubled relationships, few are so lucky to have their woes set to music by Tom Waits. It leads to the dreamy atmosphere of Francis Ford Coppola's 1982 film One from the Heart. It's never been a popular film, certainly not enough to justify its massive budget (a recurrent theme in Coppola's career), but an excellent film if you like Tom Waits and film history.
Waits is joined by Crystal Gayle on vocals and Coppola lets their lyrics play out, accompanied by scenes of Hank (Frederic Forrest) and Frannie (Teri Garr) fighting, reconciling, and sleeping with other people in a deliberately artificial movie version of Las Vegas. This was piano jazz era Tom Waits and the mellow, whiskey lounge vibe of his music pairs smoothly with Crystal Gayle's crystalline vocals.
A lot of people criticised the characters for being too thin. They are kind of archetypes more than characters and I think the film is set in the same universe as the 1941 Thief of Bagdad, a film with which Coppola is obsessed. The artistic artificiality of the film's aesthetic is very similar. There's even an appearance by the All Seeing Eye from The Thief of Bagdad, marvelled over by Nastassja Kinski as a circus girl called Leila. Teri Garr's performance lends a lot of humanity to Frannie but I actually found Kinski's character more intriguing.
While Hank is being unfaithful with Leila, Frannie has a tryst with Ray (Raul Julia), a down on his luck piano player. They have some good moments, too.
Maybe the film is no magnificent epic but it sure put me in a great, mellow mood.
One from the Heart is available on The Criterion Channel until December 1.
Happy Thanksgiving from Japan, everyone, where most people haven't heard of it. Of course, it's actually now Friday here, and most people have heard of Black Friday because shops can't pass up an excuse for a sale. Black Friday sales are pretty pathetic here, though. 30 or 40 percent off, yay.
This week I've been making burritos with roast chicken and boiled pumpkin. Maybe I should call them wraps since they have no beans. I guess they're kind of Thanksgiving-ish. Turkey is notoriously difficult to get in Japan though I've heard kids have been getting it at Universal Studios Japan. I plan to celebrate this weekend with a few glasses of Wild Turkey, as usual.
Last night I watched The Maltese Falcon--it's about a bird, anyway--and some of the annual Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Turkey Day Marathon, which, as I write, is still streaming. This year they're doing some kind of "Potluck of the Stars" with occasional cameos from celebrities. I think Mark Hamill shows up.
X Sonnet #1901
A score of cats began to climb a dream.
My open dream to which the moon was sent.
Some critters caper up the silver beam.
But stooges smelled her sweat and effort spent.
Eternal teens usurped the office ball.
Returning champs were naught but paper bags.
The human beings aped coyote's call.
With stupid games, the sickly morning sags.
Unlucky birds became the blackened toast.
Before the mob acquired sales, they ate.
Another bird was found to slowly roast.
We left an ear of corn as tempting bait.
With thanks, the giving gnomes destroyed the pot.
The oven served to cook the basted lot.
Jim Abrahams passed away at the age of 80 on Tuesday. Best known for directing absurdist comedies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun, Abrahams made a lot of movies I haven't seen since I was a kid but I still remember a whole lot of dialogue from. Watching a bunch of '70s panic movies recently, I was compelled to remember the running gag in Airplane! of Lloyd Bridges ruefully observing it was a bad time to stop smoking/drinking/doing cocaine.
I have a very clear memory of the kids on my street being really pumped to see Hot Shots: Part Deux. I'm not sure if I ever even saw the first one but I was excited to go along with everyone for the second.
Periodically, I have to watch clips from Police Squad, which Abrahams co-created, to maintain my sanity.
Not all of Abrahams' films were absurdist comedies. Last night I watched his 1990 film Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. It stars Winona Ryder as a misfit teen named Dinkie who lives in a small, gaudy town obsessed with a legendary former resident, the Roxy Carmichael of the title. Ryder's performance is great and I found it to be an insightful film about a teenage girl desperate for a role model. It's not Abrahams' typical absurdist comedy and yet there's definitely a surreal element at play. No-one's quite sure why Roxy is so famous, she's like a tall tale that would've been more at home in another era, like Paul Bunyan or Hercules.
Abrahams directs from a screenplay by Karen Leigh Hopkins to make a film that connects a slightly dreamlike reality with a girl's struggle against normalcy and with a simultaneous need for validation. It's nothing I'd have expected from Abrahams. It's available on The Criterion Channel now as a part of a Winona Ryder playlist.
I watched the finale of Ally McBeal season one a few days ago and who should I see but Bob Gunton. I've also been watching Daredevil season one which also features Bob Gunton and I also saw him in Bats, the cheesy '90s sci fi movie in which he plays a prick scientist. He always plays a prick. In fact, someone made a supercut of him being a prick on Daredevil.
And, of course, he's most famous as the warden in Shawshank Redemption, a prince of pricks.
There are rare occasions when he's not a prick. Apparently, he was in Ghostbusters: Afterlife as Egon Spengler--he was the stand-in on whom Harold Ramis' digital likeness was superimposed. And on Ally McBeal he was kind of a nice guy. He plays the rich head of a company whose best friend is a janitor. The two want to have a heart transplant--the janitor wants to give his healthy one to the rich man so the rich man's kids don't grow up without a father. Gunton is kind of not a prick in the episode. It has to be believable that someone would want to trade internal organs with him.
He was also a prick on "The Wounded", a good Star Trek: The Next Generation episode written by the recently deceased Jeri Taylor. He's still alive but I see, aside from Ghostbusters, he hasn't been in anything since 2019. I hope he's okay.
As much as I like the Coen Brothers, I hadn't seen 1987's Raising Arizona in a very long time, not since the early '90s, I think. This month, Criterion has a playlist of Coen Brothers films so I thought I'd reacquaint myself with this one. It's a zanier comedy than I was in the mood for, I think, but still has its charms.
I love the way Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter meet, how he starts flirting with her as she, a police officer, is taking his mug shots. Nicholas Cage in this movie made me feel like I was actually more in the mood to watch Wild at Heart.
The Arizona kitsch aesthetic of Raising Arizona isn't as pronounced as the visual and tonal themes of later Coen Brothers films but I still appreciated shots of gaudy wardrobe set against landscapes of cacti and sand.
Raising Arizona is available on The Criterion Channel.
X Sonnet #1900
A wicked plant deployed its poison seeds.
Across the sky, the thorny stars would run.
A goblin girl was hid among the reeds.
At dawn, the locals found a poison bun.
Abundant killers clog the morning bar.
Beside the train, a hundred villains scheme.
The nearest cop was really very far.
But fools will trade a cap to thread a dream.
Informed dismissals rat the kitchen out.
Regressing staff remind their gods to eat.
Another time recalls a noodle bout.
The deadly pasta built a home for meat.
Arriving meals would break the diner flat.
The truth was writ on someone's welcome mat.
I watched Captain America: Civil War, the first time I'd seen it since I saw it in the theatre when it came out in 2016. Now that the novelty factors have worn off--the introduction of Spider-Man and the concept of superheroes fighting each other--it's kind of a disappointing movie. I never feel convinced the two groups would actually come to blows over the issues at play.
It is kind of neat seeing the beginnings of the romance between Vision and Wanda. When WandaVision came out, it seemed like their relationship was something just barely touched on by the movies. Now I find myself watching it closer, looking for some hint as to what drew these two people together to begin with. I'm still not sure about that but they are a cute couple.
Civil War's based on a 2006 comic storyline. I wish they'd adapt classic stories from the '60s, '70s, and '80s more. Some actual Stan Lee stuff. It'd be great if the new X-Men movies just adapted Chris Clairemont's run that began in the '70s.
Robert Downey Jr. gives a good performance in Civil War and I can kind of believe him going off on Bucky at the end, particularly with the footage of his parents. Ironically, by attacking Bucky, Tony proves the point of his side of the argument that superheroes need some supervision.
Captain America: Civil War is available on Disney+.
A woman is murdered and police are frustrated to find that no two people can offer the same account of her personality. 1950's The Woman in Question is an English film that came out two months after Rashomon, though I think it unlikely the makers of The Woman in Question saw the Japanese film. I guess it was an example of two minds thinking alike though The Woman in Question is not as subtle or profound as Rashomon. In Kurosawa's film, truth seems like an unattainable objective, buried beneath nuance and perspective. In The Woman in Question, it's simply a question of different people having degrees of fondness for a woman, and one of them is lying (the murderer).
Jean Kent gives a terrific performance as Astra, the murdered woman, as she adopts a different persona for each flashback, from the account of each person interviewed by police. There's her sister, who remembers her as a scoundrel; there's the pet shop owner across the street who remembers her as a saint; there's the landlady who remembers her as a refined lady down on her luck; and there's the Irish sailor who was in love with her and remembers her as, er, Irish. At least, she speaks with an Irish accent in his flashback.
Dirk Bogarde plays another of her suitors and at first I thought his American accent was terrible. Then, in one scene, he admits to her that he was born in Liverpool and has never been outside of England. So he was intentionally doing a bad American accent! That's pretty impressive. Compare that to Hollywood movies at the time in which characters from a variety of countries regularly spoke with American accents.
The Woman in Question is available on The Criterion Channel.
Star Trek fans wanting to see William Shatner return to the role of James T. Kirk finally got their wish a few days ago with the release of "Unification", a ten minute film officially produced to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Star Trek: Generations. You can view the whole thing on YouTube:
Obviously the cgi isn't perfect. When you can't even make Shatner's hair look more realistic than his toupee, you know your special effects method is flawed. It was still cool seeing Shatner take on the role again. His face, his particular patterns of expression, are familiar to me from very early childhood and on down the years, which I know is the case for a lot of people. The YouTube comments I've looked at come from people in their 70s and 80s who remember watching the original series when it aired in the late 1960s.
I'm not sure I'd really enjoy the film if it weren't for Shatner. There's not much to it. It leans on a lot of cliche shots, including the one of some guy running his hand through tall grass. Who was the first one to do that, Ridley Scott? I kind of can't believe people are still copying it.
I suspect Paramount is testing the waters for a proper return of Shatner's Kirk, which would seem like an obviously good idea after the success of Picard season three and the fact that Shatner, at the age of 93, is in astonishingly good health. His voice hasn't even changed. I'd certainly watch it though I hope it would be less derivative than Picard was and have the guts to try some new things. Maybe the inclusion of Shatner would even be enough to lure Tarantino back to the table.
Rock Paper Scissors, or Jan-ken, is really important among children in Japan. It's frequently played to make decisions. This morning I saw that YouTube's "The History Guy" produced a video on the game and gives a detailed account of the game's journey from China to Japan to the West.
It's funny he compulsively pronounces the j in Jan-ken like a Spanish j. Otherwise, it's an accurate video, to the best of my knowledge.
Students have taught me various rude gestures, which I'm always delighted to learn. Apparently putting the backs of your hands together in a sort of reverse prayer pose is an insulting gesture. Unfortunately, or fortunately, it's not one available to me as the particular configuration of my joints won't allow me to comfortably twist my arms that way.
A few years ago, a student taught me what seemed to be an extremely rude gesture I copied into a notebook I've sadly misplaced. I still don't know what precisely it meant because she wouldn't explain it. Sounds like a good start of an MR James story. Which reminds me, we're getting into MR James season, I should start reading him again.
It has stars, fabulous international locations, and all the bare bones of a movie. But 1957's Interpol, aka Pickup Alley, hardly feels like a proper movie. It's like a sandwich made entirely of bread.
Victor Mature stars as Charles Sturgis, on the trail of an international drug fiend, McNally, played by Trevor Howard. Howard plays the role surprisingly broad, putting on a cartoon villain's sneering tone and maintaining it at all times. His favourite victim is Gina, played by the always glorious Anita Ekberg. The best moment in the movie is when she shoots a guy who's trying to assault her and there's some hints at a plot revolving around her legal peril in the aftermath, but there's little drama in it.
Mostly it's just a movie about a good cop chasing a bad drug dealer, a procedural but not one with much of a sense of authenticity, portraying its villains as the usual raving madmen stereotypes you see in most '50s movies about drugs. I guess the filmmakers may've felt justified in building a movie around such a plain plot by using real locations in London, Rome, and New York. Maybe in the '50s that would've been enough but I don't think so, judging from all the film's unimpressed contemporaneous reviews.
Pickup Alley is available on The Criterion Channel.
X Sonnet #1899
The biggest sandwich ever fully crushed the shop.
Courageous cads condemn the use of boats.
United suits promote the android cop.
The naked castles sold their stylish moats.
A plane of smoke was flat against the face.
A bunch of bags were burnt to harvest prunes.
The warping deck rejects its only ace.
A vital source was killed and writ in runes.
The shapes if friends were burnt across the glass.
With savage dreams, the pickle cured the roast.
Balloons arise, propelled with magic gas.
No science hat was won with idle boast.
The lying dogs would dream of honest cats.
The walls were filled with stupid, greedy rats.
Yesterday came the news that Japan has fallen even further from its already low ranking in English proficiency. It ranks 92 out of a list of 112 countries where English is not the primary language. Notably, it ranks far below South Korea, which is at number 50. Since the difficulty for Korean speakers in learning English is comparable for a Japanese speaker learning English, this deepens the mystery of Japan's consistent decline.
A lot of articles and videos have been made offering various theories and explanations. One common criticism, with which I certainly agree, is that Japan focuses too much on grammar and translation, leading to a deficiency in oral communication skills. The impression I often have in a Japanese English classroom is of watching an alien autopsy. English is the cold and bizarre corpse on the slab whose minutiae are endlessly described in technical details to an audience which struggles to pay attention.
I intend to write at greater length about my own experiences teaching English in Japan but I want to work in a bigger city before I offer a comprehensive view. I currently work in a town particularly hostile to English, which I think is a useful experience in truly understanding the problem but not enough in itself. I can see this from how Japanese teachers from out of town are astonished by the culture here. I've even heard students ask Japanese people from the city if they're "gaijin", foreigners.
I think one thing that sets Japan apart from other countries with low English proficiency is that Japan seems to believe it's very good at English. One might judge this from the abundance of English signage throughout the country. All over the world. certainly in America, people marvel at the apparently professionally produced signs in weak English. Here's an example from the town I live in:
It's hard to imagine what "For your JUST" is even supposed to mean. In this case, the English is accompanied by Japanese to give us a clue: "あなたの暮らしに、ちょうどいい。" It means something like, "Exactly the right thing for your professional life." The sign is for an electronics store similar to Best Buy.
This sign must have gone through layers of the bureaucracy Japan is famous for. One might wonder, how do signs like these consistently make it through committees of people who have been studying English since elementary school? The problem is that confidence levels are disproportionate to proficiency levels because the whole educational system is geared towards something different from actual language learning. I've frequently noticed that students who are best able to communicate with me in English do poorly on the tests while students who routinely get scores of around 100 are unable to have simple conversations with me. So the vast majority of students must have the sense of working towards something and achieving it after struggle. Who wants to be told that their whole struggle was meaningless? But, of course, the flipside is that students who deserve praise for their English skills frequently receive abuse instead.
A team of researchers face off against cgi sharks in 1999's Deep Blue Sea. If you're looking for an effective shark horror movie, watch Jaws. If you're looking for a big ball of cheese clutched in a massive ham fist, you might enjoy Deep Blue Sea.
What's the best way to research cures for Alzheimer's? Turns out it's to genetically modify sharks into massive killing machines. Well, except when they're small enough to swim around half flooded corridors and chase LL Cool J and a parrot.
What a cast. Samuel L. Jackson, Stellan Skarsgard, and Thomas Jane. I feel like, this late in a solid career of supporting roles, Skarsgard has only recently crossed over into true stardom thanks to Andor. It's funny seeing him in this role in which his character is put through quite a lot that does not require a performance of any quality from Skarsgard. A big chuck of it is him strapped to a gurney with a mask covering most of his face. He has very few lines.
Thomas Jane is the right guy to lead a movie like this. Someone really needs to give him a breakout Duke Nukem kind of role. Maybe he should play Duke Nukem? Does anyone still care about Duke Nukem? I guess I should say, someone should give him a role like Bruce Campbell's in Evil Dead or Roddy Piper's in They Live--you know, one of the characters Duke Nukem ripped off.
I was really surprised by how bad the cgi was. I think there's a "bad cgi valley" from the late '90s to about 2010. Sure, there's a lot of bad cgi now but I think that was a period, after the scrupulous work on Jurassic Park, when people routinely underestimated how much effort it actually required to make cgi look good.
Anyway, who doesn't like some cheese now and then? Deep Blue Sea is directed by Renny Harlin, a man practically made of gouda.
I couldn't sleep a few nights ago and found myself watching Naruse Miko's final film, 1967's Scattered Clouds. I hadn't seen it since coming to Japan and, like all Japanese movies I saw in the U.S., I see it through a much different lens now.
One thing I often marvel at with these older movies is how much they look exactly like the Japan I live in to-day. The trains look different but I see the same rows of wooden posts by the tracks. Apartment buildings look the same with the same external utility boxes and pipe systems.
Scattered Clouds was one of the few colour films Naruse made. It has a lovely, doggedly consistent colour palette. Pale greens like matcha paired with yellowish tans and faded pinks.
I found myself noticing how much the music seems to borrow from Bernard Herrmann's Hitchcock scores. The story is about a man and woman in a strange romance, which is a little like Hitchcock, I guess. There's certainly a lot of tension in it.
Yumiko (Tsukasa Yoko) is a young woman whose husband is killed after being struck by a car. The car was driven by a man named Mishima (Kayama Yuzo). It was found to be an accident but Mishima, a deeply conscientious man, feels the weight of responsibility and wants to give the widow any financial aid he can. She, however, wants nothing to do with him or his money.
Yet, fate draws the two of them together and they have an accidental meeting at a hotel where they deliver drunken speeches to each other. As time passes, they develop feelings for each other. But of course Yumiko can never forget her first husband.
You could look at the movie as a more melodramatic version of Tokyo Monogatari. Is Yumiko really so devoted to her first husband or is her pulling away from Mishima motivated by a guilt over how disloyal she truly is in her heart? She cares for Mishima when he falls ill which excites her sympathy for him. It's suggested also the psychological pain he feels for having killed her husband also attracts her. It's a short step from that to wondering if she's attracted to him, on some level, because he killed her husband.
It's such a sedate, gentle film but the premise ultimately recalls the idea of brides won in battle and how fundamentally a woman might be attracted to status, even against her will. It could be seen as a war between Yumiko's morals and Yumiko's instincts. Mishima's, too. Considering how guilty he felt, surely, every time he takes the liberty of smiling at Yumiko, some part of him must say, "I have no right."
Scattered Clouds is available on The Criterion Channel.
Twitter Sonnet #1898
The little minds would steal a soul a day.
With empty hearts, the bugs devour life.
The ugly stamp of brutal feet delay.
The glacial tackle blunts a lazy knife.
Averted war has left a stock of bombs.
A cloudless sky was choked with ash and ghosts.
Ironic fields distort the peace of psalms.
The wayward lad was took by heartless hosts.
A raven passed through countries sans a name.
A blend of birds obscured the view of God.
A morning song would shift the guilt to Mame.
But luck would spare nor even yet nor odd.
Pervasive sloth reduced the woods to mulch.
The river cut has trickled down to gulch.
A wild grizzly starts eating people but has cute cubs in 1999's Wild Grizzly, an unmistakably made-for-TV movie set in a beautiful mountain town and featuring Daniel Baldwin in a minor role. It's exactly what you'd expect but there's something oddly sincere I found engrossing about it.
So the grizzly eats a guy's leg one night and it's tranqed by a guy inexplicably dressed as Indiana Jones (as a fedora wearer myself, I shouldn't laugh). There's a town hall meeting about having the bear with her cubs displayed in the middle of town. Daniel Baldwin and the mayor (John O'Hurley, J. Peterman from Seinfeld), being villains, oppose this idea. With a grin of malevolent satisfaction, Baldwin plots to kill the bears so that he and the mayor can get rich . . . somehow. The nature of their scheme is never remotely clear.
Rachel (Michele Greene) and her moody teenage son, Josh (Riley Smith), move to the small town from L.A. When Josh accidentally breaks the windshield on a sheriff's car, the sheriff (Fred Dryer) drafts Josh to help take care of the grizzly and her cubs. Naturally, Josh is framed when they escape. In his attempts to capture the bear, which he alone realises is suffering from a toothache, he's joined by a plucky blonde with a captivating rack (Courtney Peldon). The writers give her a lot of stuff that's supposed to be endearing and quirky but come of as psychotic. When Josh is sneaking around the woods looking for the animal, she sneaks up on him with a recording of a bear roar and a bear claw glove to grab him on the shoulder. This is after the bear has killed someone.
Sometimes I thought the movie might be intentionally bad, like someone was aiming for "it's so bad it's good." Whenever a filmmaker claims this about their own film, I tend to doubt their sincerity (to be clear, I don't know if this filmmaker has done so). But there are shots that are so flagrantly lazy that I wonder. In the first attack scene, the man's little boy sneaks out of the safety of the car, ironically to retrieve his teddy bear. We get a shot of the teddy bear and the boy runs into frame, picks up the item with a blank expression, then turns to look off camera with an expression that clearly says, "Okay, I hit my mark. Now what?"
But the weirdest bits were when the grizzly ate people. There are these long, slow shots of people writhing in stage blood and guts and shots of the actual bear and shots of the dummy bear head being shoved in the fake gore. There's something so peculiarly detached about the tone of these shots, I can't explain it. It's like the filmmaker had no instinct for composing violent sequences but decided to just linger anyway hoping inspiration would eventually strike. As though he were gently contemplating his inability to express any feelings in the shots. It's sort of like listening to a tone deaf person sing "Ave Maria" with a total lack of self-consciousness. I guess that sums up the movie.
I read the newest Sirenia Digest to-day, which contains a new series of vignettes by Caitlin R. Kiernan called "THE ULTRAVIOLET ALPHABET". Each vignette corresponds to a letter, from A to M. A few of them are just like nice miniature lectures from a palaeontologist, which Caitlin indeed happens to be. I particularly liked "K is for Komodo Dragon" which discusses the komodo dragon's effect on the human imagination since its relatively recent discovery in 1910. Caitlin also goes into detail about an Australian ancestor of the komodo dragon, a much larger lizard that coexisted with aboriginal humans. I hadn't heard about it and it was interesting.
Other vignettes harken back to the Digest's original purpose, as a showcase of Caitlin's weird erotica. "C is for Clit" is an affectionate rumination on that renowned female body part while "J is for Journey" ponders a strange and exceedingly beautiful naked woman. All the vignettes have good qualities though I was a little puzzled by a reference to An American in Paris paired with a reference to Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. Was Caitlin thinking of Funny Face? I enjoyed the vignettes in any case.
I walked along a river to work yesterday and got this song stuck in my head:
Peter Lorre immigrates to America only to find remarkably evil luck in 1941's The Face Behind the Mask. His luck is so bad as to defy credibility but Lorre is an excellent anchor for this nightmare.
Janos (Lorre) is an improbably talented young man arrived from Hungary in New York. He's an expert watch maker and a pilot so his hopes of getting a job and being able to send for his girlfriend back home are not unreasonable. Unfortunately, the hotel his stays in burns down and the fire hideously scars his face. Unable to find work or even kindness in the law-abiding world, he turns for aid to the first man too kind to be bothered by his looks, a cheap crook hanging out on the docks.
Janos gets a creepy mask and turns his talents to crime like a Batman villain without a Batman. Lorre is vulnerable and tenacious, dominating the screen and breathing a lot of life into this noir melodrama. The sequence of extremely bad luck put me in mind of Detour, though The Face Behind the Mask doesn't lend itself to an "unreliable narrator" interpretation, due to multiple points of view. I suppose it's best taken simply as a particularly cruel nightmare, which it succeeds at being.
The Face Behind the Mask is available on The Criterion Channel and on YouTube.
Above is the only picture on my Instagram so far, real_setsuled. It's a weasel I saw on my way to work recently. "Real" because, if you remember, I was banned from Instagram despite never having used it. I had somehow violated their terms. My best guess is that someone impersonated me on Instagram at some point.
It felt like such a triumph to finally get an Instagram but now I don't know what to do with it. I usually post photos here on my blog. It may end up like my tumblr or other online platform accounts I created which I've forgotten about.
I've seen a few weasels around here but they're usually too quick for me to photograph. The above photo is cropped, here's the full image:
He was jumping back and forth across that little irrigation canal.
X Sonnet #1897
Another Swiftie shook the haters off.
Another frisbee took the schnauzer's air.
Another bug forsook a stranger's cough.
Another army brooked the serpent's dare.
Diminished dimes revert to metal lumps.
A standard gold replaced the running tabs.
Across the stars, we felt the spacial bumps.
A stack of kings control the haunted cabs.
Repeated masks conceal the smothered face.
As digits stick to dials, feathers fly.
The paper birds collide with wooden grace.
There's many tales to scar the storied sky.
A team of monkeys smuggled steel to phones.
Diverging planes could write a cloudy tome.
Christopher Reeve and Kirstie Alley team up to fight a town of white haired kids in 1995's Villageof the Damned, John Carpenter's remake of the 1960 film of the same name. It's not as effective as the original film, and drifts pretty far into camp, but it's an effective premise. The first act is the best part.
One day, for no apparent reason, everyone falls asleep in a small town. When they wake up, all the women are pregnant. That's a great start. All the mystery and dread is both personal and public. Alley plays a swaggering FBI agent who comes to investigate and she, along with Mark Hamill in a small role as a priest, is primarily responsible for bringing the camp.
Hamill almost sounds like he's doing his Joker voice. There's nothing in his dialogue to suggest he's evil, I guess it was an interpretation Hamill decided to bring. I guess maybe he figured there just aren't enough evil priests in American cinema.
Christopher Reeve gives a more earnest performance. That poor guy should've gotten more work. So what if he was really buff. I guess that's what kept him from a diversity of roles. It is kind of odd here that this small town doctor just happens to look like Superman.
Actually, I'd say the most effective performance in the film is Meredith Salenger as a virgin who's impregnated by the phenomenon, something I was surprised the priest didn't make more of. Her husband dies in a car crash and she's unsurprisingly depressed. She was the one sincere note in the movie that otherwise felt very tongue-in-cheek, perhaps unintentionally, once the kids started showing up and being creepy. That stuff is fun, though.
Gloria Grahame is trapped in an extraordinarily tangled web of abuse and misogyny in 1954's Human Desire. Fritz Lang directed this film noir based on Emile Zola's 1890 novel La Bete humaine, deviating from the source material in intriguing ways. The film ends on an oddly ambiguous note but I suppose, in the '50s, it was the best possible conclusion to such an impressively messy human drama.
Grahame plays Vicki, the wife of a big train conductor named Carl (Broderick Crawford). She used to work at a magazine stand where he started flirting with her. The two eventually married despite, as is repeated several times throughout the film, the fact that he was substantially older than her--my guess would be about 20 years. It could be no less than that for it to be seen an issue in the '50s.
One really interesting point where the film deviates from the novel is that, after losing his job on the train, Carl sends Vicki to see his boss, Owens (Grandon Rhodes), who's implied to have once had feelings for Vicki. Carl seems to insinuate that Vicki ought to seduce Owens to some degree in exchange for getting Carl his job. What else could Carl think he was doing by telling her to go see him alone? And yet, when she's gone, he works himself into a jealous rage as though the idea were only just occurring to him.
Vicki is very much at the centre of the film and the problem she finds herself in is captivating as you wonder along with her just how she's supposed to navigate these waters of psychosis, how she's supposed to deal with the man who will hit her for doing what he told her to do, what she'd made clear she didn't want to do. It's hard to be loyal to a spouse who can't control his own train of thought.
Top billing goes to Glenn Ford who plays another railroad worker. He's poised as one of those noir heroes torn between the sweet girl next door (played in this case by Kathleen Case) and the femme fatale (Vicki). But Vicki, while positioned as the deceiving, adulterous woman, always has good intentions but is presented with impossible choices. There seems to be some attempt near the end to morally simplify her, to make the film fit into a more typical framework, but the ambiguity remains strong enough that most people watching will be hard pressed to imagine what Vicki ought to have done.
I was kind of reminded of Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, which has a similar problem of a woman's infidelity arising from her loyalty to her husband. Shoot the Piano Player presents a more plausible and effectively tragic scenario but Human Desire is plenty impressive.
Human Desire is available on The Criterion Channel.
In addition to Trump getting voted into office again, there were a few smaller stories that caused me to despair for humanity a bit. Many young American voters are now unable to sign their names, causing "chaos" with mail-in ballots. It's funny, in Japan, people are trying to phase out the hanko, the traditional stamp used as a personal sign on documents, in favour of written signatures. Maybe the U.S. should switch to hanko. Eventually perhaps the pantomime of digital signatures will be done away with as various algorithms assign to happily accepting users a lifetime of work and consumer habits.
The other story that made an impression on me was the unprecedented turnout of Amish voters for Trump. The Amish, a religious community in Pennsylvania dedicated to living without modern technology, as long been a quaint, bemusing presence in the U.S. But they're not so cute when the reason they're voting for Trump is that they feel the government was overreaching by investigating illnesses related to milk production at an Amish farm. Hey, I love traditions. But everyone getting sick from bad milk doesn't sound like a good one to me. Fucking idiots. And I'd bet good money Trump isn't going to do shit about this issue.
Tony Todd passed away a few days ago at the age of 69. While rarely a headliner, Todd is one of those few actors indelibly stitched into the fabric of genre television and film roles due to a remarkable number of supporting roles and guest roles. He played multiple characters in the Star Trek franchise, including Worf's brother on The Next Generation and an older version of child character Jake Sisko for an episode of Deep Space Nine. That episode, "The Visitor", quickly became one of the most beloved Star Trek stories in the franchise history, in no small part due to Todd's performance.
Todd was also part of the fan made Axanar project, which may explain why he hasn't been seen on "official" Star Trek media in a long time. Like many Star Trek exiles, he appeared on The Orville.
An imposing figure with a distinctive, deep, raspy voice, Todd's best remembered leading role is of course as the titular character of 1992's Candyman and its many sequels.
Sci-fi, horror, and fantasy media have lost a core presence. But we'll all be seeing him again, I'm sure, as long as people watch movies and TV.
Mulder and Scully chase naked cannibals in the 1993 X-Files episode, "The Jersey Devil". This is one of the silliest episodes of the series.
A man is found with his leg chewed off and the autopsy reports that the bite marks are human. Mulder therefore assumes it's a missing link in the human evolutionary chain. I dimly remember finding this hilarious when I first watched the episode, too. Evidence says it's human, therefore Mulder says it's not. What?
The episode, written by series creator Chris Carter, is so invested in the idea of a missing link, it forgets to provide a shred of evidence of it. Mulder appears to be excited about naked people living in the forest. His inferences get more ridiculous when, after the man is killed, he immediately presumes, for no reason whatsoever, that he had a mate and this naked woman is now running around an abandoned industrial district in the city. SWAT teams and scores of officers converge onto the scene. I bet she would've felt really special had she known. You know how many naked homeless people there are in my hometown who don't rate attention from even one cop?
I imagined some alternate dialogue for the episode.
MULDER: We could've done it, Scully. We could've caught a naked woman.
SCULLY: *sigh* Mulder . . . You only had to ask.
The naked woman was played by Claire Stansfield. Wikipedia notes she was the first of many guest stars to have also appeared on Twin Peaks, not counting David Duchovny himself.
I've been watching the first season of Daredevil again lately, from 2015. It sure holds up, particularly since this is the kind of story Marvel desperately needs to be telling now. No postmodernism, no mulling over civil rights issues from the '60s. Instead, the hero is pitted against Wilson Fisk, a man whose power was primarily in his finances and his control of the buildings in New York where people lived. I've heard he was even partly modelled on Donald Trump. The show's still a fantasy, but at least it's dealing with issues that are actually critical to people to-day; the effects of a shitty economy and the powerful people who keep the corrosive status quo. Andor did this, too, taking the story away from literary theories and showing how economic and political oppression actually effected people's daily lives.
One criticism I've heard about the Democrats is that they've become too attached to white collar votes and have thereby lost the working class. That's painfully clear. Hollywood is obviously part of the Left's apparatus, inconveniently popular new Clint Eastwood movies notwithstanding. If they were wise, they'd be focusing more on things like Daredevil and Andor, showing exactly how someone like Trump negatively impacts their lives. There was a rumour the new Spider-Man movie would feature Wilson Fisk and Daredevil but that Sony wanted it to be about Venom. After the success of the recent Venom film, I'm afraid Sony might get their way, but a Spider-Man versus Wilson Fisk movie would be so very much the story we need right now. If done properly, of course.
Daredevil is available on Disney+, despite Netflix being written all over the above trailer. It's from nine years ago when Daredevil was on Netflix. It's weird Netflix doesn't take down those videos. They're basically hosting commercials for their competition.
X Sonnet #1896
The legless leap o'erreached the shortened pant.
With short'ning bread, the mother ship was taxed.
Arrays of sensors marked the spacial rant.
The Klingon vessel's shields were set to max.
A pace behind the Devil walks a crab.
In silent shades, the picture turned to fall.
A brittle leaf directs the villain's stab.
The dragon's blood ordained the hero's fall.
A fighting dog replaced a singing cat.
In ev'ry tree, the birds were making eggs.
The squirrel's dreams could squash a soulless gnat.
A swarm of bugs retains a million legs.
Coyotes yip and howl on phantom phones.
Conversing wolves and dogs agree to bones.
Trump's victory was inevitable. I felt that way before Harris took over the campaign from Biden. Harris was more qualified than the ailing Biden so I hoped that might turn it around but, let's face it, Harris had lost the primaries when she'd properly run for president and when she became the presidential candidate this time she had a fraction of the time to campaign most candidates get. Trump had at least two traditional edges, being a former president and a man. But he had a lot of uncommon assets, too. He'd survived a public assassination attempt. His followers generally have the sense of him being wrongly persecuted.
It's remarkable that we have a convicted felon for president. Think back to over twenty-five years ago when Democrats fought tooth and tail to argue Bill Clinton didn't deserve to be removed from office for cheating on his wife (the surface argument about him lying was just that, a surface). Expecting the public to go that way on the issue then adopt a different standard for Trump was deranged.
As in 2016, but even more clearly this time, I have the sense this is an election the Democrats lost rather than one Trump won. You're not crazy if you think Trump is obviously unqualified, but the key word for his supporters is not "unqualified" but rather "obvious". Trump's motives are always plain. Even when he doesn't follow through, people excuse him because they understand the motive behind his bluster and hyperbole. Trump is dumb, but he lives in reality. The Democrats have failed to adapt to a culture whose zero fucks for traditional values have been reduced further into the negative range by a steadily diminishing economy. So, yes, people feeling oppressed by grotesquely high rents preferred to vote for a greedy landlord. They're that put off by the obfuscations and radical politics of the Left.
Trump's interview with Joe Rogan really made it clear, contrasted with the Harris interview with Howard Stern. Hardly anyone even deigned to notice the Harris interview with Stern, or Biden's interview with Stern. In the '90s, a presidential candidate going on The Howard Stern Show would have been big news. To-day, it's all but meaningless. Things changed. The Democrats didn't.
Oh, well. Here we go again. Hopefully next time the Democrats can find themselves another Obama. Someone who seems real and qualified.
A woman tests a small town's morality and patience in 1963's Il Demonio. It's a film that avoids giving the audience easy answers and highlights how abominably people can behave in ambiguous situations.
A beautiful young woman called Purif (Daliah Lavi) is passionately obsessed with Antonio (Frank Wolff), a young man of her village. He vigorously rebuffs her as she continues to physically cling to him, but he can't resist a few kisses. Nor can he resist the wine she gives him. After he drinks it, she tells him she mixed her blood into it.
Purif is a practicing witch and as her antics become more severe, she's subjected to religious punishment and exorcism, which inevitably becomes sexual abuse. The spirit of a dead boy seemingly converses with her. There are signs that Purif really is in contact with Satan, yet this actually contributes to a sense of the villagers' diminished moral standing. As their punishments of Purif become excessively cruel and clearly driven by sexual compulsion, Satan starts to look like a fellow of comparatively good integrity. At least Purif has no delusions about who she is or what her motives are. Of course, provoking the town into brazen moral hypocrisy may have been Satan's plan all along.
The film's beautifully shot and Daliah Lavi gives a brave, unrestrained performance. Il Demonio is available on The Criterion Channel.
I've been having some interesting dreams lately but I've been doing a bad job of remembering them. So, a few nights ago, when I woke at 2am after having one, I immediately typed up a description as best I could with eyes that were not quite ready to open and look at my bright computer screen. Here's the description I wrote, typos and all:
Dream about a big yellow dog
girl looking for him
Indoor park
dark street
she stares at tehe camera, short hair, big eyes
Dog is mustard cooour
eats cildren
is sometimes '80s acto
I have no idea what "'80s acto" is supposed to mean. I guess the dream must have been set in the '80s. I do remember the dog seemed dirty, streaked with black and dark green, like egg yolk with black, melted rubber.
Anyway, Happy Guy Fawkes Day, everyone. It comes early to Japan, where it's unobserved. In America, where people used to not know about it, of course it's election day this year. Quite a confluence since one candidate is accused of inciting a mob that stormed the U.S. capital. I think the left has largely mischaracterised that event but, all the same, I want to urge any Americans reading to vote for Kamala Harris. If you're worried about getting a president manipulated by powerful outside interests, Trump's the one you gotta worry about, not Harris. If the demons spinning yarn around his head can be considered outside interests. I'm not just talking about his bizarre hair style. He's clearly possessed by ideas, recklessly fueled by resentment, possibly also by the inability to cope with his position on the world stage, about his own unrecognised merit. He'll cling foolishly to anyone who flatters him as a consequence. This speaks to the basic lack of the maturity requisite in the leader of a country. Please, don't make us joke again. Or not more of a joke, anyway.
X Sonnet #1895
The heartless robber stole the horse's hoof.
A captive plant would dream of aphid death.
Entire teams were seen on Scrooge's roof.
The track could only lead to Walter Neff.
The clown was routed back to Hades' court.
Reversing time required counter spin.
The game's diminished, it's a console port.
When all the lot would conquer, none could win.
With helpless hands, the gloves discussed a meal.
Without the buns, the burgers changed in shape.
A simple food would prove its health is real.
The flying man would wear a crimson cape.
A whale collision rocked the briny deep.
Pervasive error coos itself to sleep.
A whale collision rocked the briny deep.
Pervasive error coos itself to sleep.
People don't tend to think about how dangerous a crocodile is, but one is certainly bad enough to serve as a horror movie villain. 2007's Black Water shows this quite well, so well that it remains effective despite a kind of ridiculous third act.
Grace (Diana Glenn) and Lee (Maeve Dermody) are on vacation with Grace's husband, Adam (Andy Rodoreda), and decide to take a boat tour through a swamp. Their boat is capsized by a croc, their guide is chomped to bits, and the three of them are forced up a tree.
The film builds tension nicely and the editing is intuitive as we follow their lines of thought about what the best course of action is. Should they try for the boat, should they try hopping from tree to tree, risking short swims here and there? The croc is fast, appears suddenly, and keeps his victims, and the viewer, guessing about his speed, reach, and location.
Then it gets a little silly. Obviously, not everyone can die right away, or there's no movie, but the reasons the movie gives as to why some people survive a croc attack are pretty flimsy. At some point, it's clear the movie's playing by video game rules. But it never becomes truly bad.
I watched this, I supposed you could call it a debate, yesterday. I was fascinated by how one sided it was. I'd heard another conversation between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson, a sort of impromptu meeting at a university, and Dawkins had come off much better than Peterson. Each was respectful of the other but Dawkins had no patience for Peterson's inferences about meaning in recurrent mythological symbols in disparate cultures. This time, though, it was almost like a Jordan Peterson lecture in which Dawkins occasionally spoke to say that he wasn't interested in what Peterson was speaking about. And yet, by the end, incredibly, Peterson seemed to bring Dawkins around.
Peters expresses something I've long thought needed to be brought across to hard line atheists who tend to be so dismissive of religion as to see it as comical. Peterson articulates, and I think finally manages to convince Dawkins of, the importance of religion as an anthropological subject and in many ways a constructive phenomenon, regardless of whether or not one literally believes in a divinity. Peterson finally drags Dawkins into the epiphany via memes and how religious ideas are kinds of memes, which seems like a bit of an appeal to Dawkins' ego. It's basically pointing out to Dawkins that he is interested in the thing because he's most famous actually for rephrasing the thing.
I was a little shocked by Dawkins' admission that he knew little of scientific history and the relationship between Christianity and the development of science as a discipline. It made me wish I were there so I could show him the connexions between the Reformation, the Puritans in England, and the development of the Royal Society, all a continually refining process to find the methodology for determining observable, objective truth to the absolute best of human capability. But surely he must have read all this at some point? I simply can't believe that his education never encompassed that. Hell, if he'd just watched Cosmos, he ought to have some idea. I guess it goes to show atheists are as capable of selective perceptions as anyone. I've often thought that people who believe themselves most immune to unconscious bias and selective memories are the most susceptible to them.
Both Dawkins and the moderator try to get Peterson to definitively answer whether or not he believes in the miracles described by the bible, such as the virgin birth. I'm not the only one who clearly understands why Peterson avoids directly answering the question--I see even some of the commentators on the YouTube video picked up on it. He doesn't want to alienate his Christian fans. But he's certainly not being deceptive when he says such questions are kind of irrelevant, particularly the question as to whether or not Cain and Abel actually existed. As Peterson puts it very well, if Cain and Abel were real people, the characters described in the bible we have to-day would likely bear very little resemblance to them for all the changes and revisions the text went through over the centuries. It isn't important that those two brothers were real, it's important that they represent an obviously real, observable phenomenon in human behaviour. It is really strange that Dawkins, a man who came up with the concept of a meme, wouldn't be interested in stories that survive the centuries due to their enduring utility.
I don't think Peterson's interpretations are as inevitable as he seems to believe they are, though. I think the real debate ought to have been about how religious texts can just as well be utilised for twisted, oppressive interpretations. At the same time as scientific thought was developing in 17th century England, Galileo was imprisoned in Italy for his heretical observations. It was an interesting conversation but strange for a number of omissions.
The two part Agatha All Along finale was good television. Not amazing but nonetheless satisfying and possessed of a storytelling integrity notably lacking in most of the Marvel series on Disney+. I suspect this is something Drew Goddard alluded to in a tweet about the new Daredevil series, that Disney/Marvel is abandoning the "treat series like movies" policy and going back to the format that made the Marvel Netflix series so consistent. Even the weakest of those, Iron Fist, benefited from the lack of the indecisive committee mentality that I think undermined so many big budget Disney+ shows.
The contrast is particularly clear when it comes to the differences between Wanda/Vision and Agatha All Along. Both series were created and ran by Jac Schaeffer but while Wanda/Vision had suspiciously odd plot twists, the most infamous being the Ralph Boehner one, Agatha All Along had elements that were clearly planned from the start and which Schaeffer followed through with in the finish. There was Patti LuPone's mental dislocation last week, and this week we get the reveal that Agatha knew from the start about Wiccan/William and that the Witch's Road was entirely his creation. If one goes back and watches the series again, the reveals at the end will lend new meaning to everything in a way that a Boehner style twist does not.
That's not to say I don't think people making film and television can't change course in the middle of production, that such a thing can't yield good results. I think the motivations behind such course changes matter, though. If it comes from a good storytelling instinct, it can be as interesting as the Darth Vader hallway sequence in Rogue One. But if it's a studio being indecisive over issues of branding and product roll-out, the results tend to be pretty lame.
Agatha All Along sure made good use of that song. Good thing it's a good song. Wanda and Wiccan creating realities, and thus creating narratives, is kind of reflected in Agatha and Nicholas' creation of the song. It's like micro-propaganda; Agatha took a melody crafted with artistic sincerity and then used it as a tool to manipulate her victims (I'm so happy the show didn't try to morally redeem her). It's like the Nazis using Wagner or the Soviets using Eisenstein, just on a micro-level. Of course, it's very Postmodern.
Lately I've been thinking about a trending criticism, the tendency to say some people act like "they're the main characters of their own stories". This one really puzzled me for a while until I realised most peoples' exposure to fiction is much more limited than mine so they assume "main character" is another term for "hero". Naturally, if your life is a story, then you're the main character. If not you, who? Name anyone and you'll sound pretty pathetic. "My boyfriend/my mother/my dog is the main character of my story." Oof. It's Wiccan and Wanda who actually make everyone else be supporting characters in their own stories, a much better way of getting at the egocentrism the criticism is supposed to be aimed at. Agatha may be the main character of this series, but from Wiccan's perspective, she's definitely a supporting character, a morally complicated villain.
One of the things I really liked about Wanda/Vision is that Wanda did not act heroically. Yet there were people who defended her, taken in by the tone of the story and sympathy for Wanda's love for her children. Agatha All Along's superior artistic integrity allows that moral complexity to sit in the minds of the viewers unfiltered, allowing for more interesting debate. I'm happy about that.
