Warm Space

How can a hot lesbian sailor named Citlalic Snell not be a fictional character? Yet here she is, as part of the first lesbian couple to take part in a Navy tradition;



I feel kind of sorry to-day for agreeing that 2001: A Space Odyssey is cold. I watched it again last night for the first time in several years. I guess we don't see any hugging and kissing, but it has a different kind of warmth. I think you need to be keyed into Kubrick's dry humour.



I love Dr. Floyd, the consummate phoney. I love how he uses the same patronising tone of voice with his daughter as he uses with some Russian brass and the administrative committee on the moon. It's no wonder the monolith repels him and his friends.



It's hard to think of a more perfect visual metaphor than the monolith. What it means is unmistakable, but it's hard to describe what it is. It's not just inspiration--it's strange, it's frightening, yet it almost has a familiar visual meaning, all important parts of what it means for humanity.



I like how, for the most part, when we first see it, it's a lengthy static shot. It's the subject, we're meant to be thinking about what it is along with the apes, but the camera doesn't pan or cut around it, it's not a moment where the magician's going, "Look, nothing up this sleeve, nothing up this sleeve." There could be something on the other side of the monolith, the apes could be seeing something we don't, but we kind of know they aren't. That tease is so much part of it.

I watched the film through the prism of the review I'd just written for The Tree of Life, and I found myself wondering if Dave is an every man, a more or less blank character meant to symbolise humanity. Yes, but at the same time, he's distinct. He sympathises with HAL more than Frank does--when we're watching them interact, the movie sets us up to carefully observe how the humans react to the computer. It's interesting how reasonable Dave sounds with HAL--he never seems unnerved by HAL's intelligence and is friendly with HAL when they play chess.



By the way, this site has a pretty cool walk through of the game Dave and HAL play, which is apparently based on a real game that took place in 1910. It's a pretty cool mate, but it seems people too infrequently think about pieces other than the Queen when they're putting together a checkmate. I love when mate is achieved by creating a particular environment for the King.

The futuristic designs for the movie look pretty dated, of course. I found myself feeling a bit nostalgic for it, though. What happened to the "let's upholster everything" school of interior design?

Plastic Tree

"Most women are so artificial that they have no sense of Art. Most men are so natural that they have no sense of Beauty." - Oscar Wilde

The Devil is in the details, as they say. So's God, if he exists, I'd say. Half of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life seems to share this point of view. But the other half, and most literal aspect of the film, is told in a way that intrinsically values broadness and archetypes to achieve revelation. The movie's about a duality of philosophy, and maybe it's in part because of this that Malick chose this duality of storytelling. Regardless, the duality of the storytelling does not serve the movie and makes this ambitious film good rather than a masterpiece.

A lot of critics compare the movie to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Roger Ebert going a step further to say 2001, "lacked Malick's fierce evocation of human feeling." There is more of a coldness to Kubrick's film, but I don't think that makes it inferior. In fact, it's in the, I think, intentional simplification of human behaviour for emotional impact and clarity of argument that The Tree of Life is most flawed.

I was actually reminded more of Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror and Bergman's The Seventh Seal. I suppose one could draw a similar comparison to many of Bergman's films--part of me suspects the reason Bergman made a lot of his movies was that the previous one didn't satisfy him on the point of whether or not God exists. Several of his films involve one or more characters seeking an answer to the question. In The Seventh Seal, a vision of the dead characters dancing at the end suggests at least the existence of an afterlife, as does a scene at the end of The Tree of Life, where various characters, living and dead, meet up again on a beach.



If 2001 lacks the evocation of human feeling found in The Tree of Life, The Tree of Life lacks the pure humanity found in The Seventh Seal, which I always say works as a great road movie. Yes, you have types--the knight, the squire, the peasants. But each one of those characters is more complicated than that type. Antonius Block is eccentric, obsessed, and aloof, Jons is peculiarly fearless and unpredictable. The characters in The Tree of Life never rise above their types, again, I think, on purpose. But while the idiosyncrasies of Bergman's characters underlie the pertinence of the question about God's existence and how He can allow so much suffering to exist in the world, the simplicity of Malick's characters de-claw the question, and the resolution of The Tree of Life comes off as trite.

From the beginning, Malick sets up the duality between Jack's, the protagonist's, parents. They represent two forces in conflict within Jack himself. Jack is given very little characterisation, and use of him as an adult as a pure POV--shots are almost always framed behind his back, we only get a slight view of his face--suggests he's an avatar of humanity. His mother represents "grace" and his father "nature". In a voiceover at the beginning, his mother explains grace as being self-sacrificing and nature as being selfishness. Grace, "doesn't try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. It accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. And get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things." Which seems like a contradiction. If the whole goal of nature is to please itself, why would it look for reasons to be unhappy? I'm certainly not suggesting there aren't people who look for reasons to be unhappy and that this impulse isn't the root of destructive actions. Just that the definition for nature here doesn't work because what Malick's really trying to say is "good and bad" not "grace and nature" and he pulls back from what he really means. Maybe an even better pair of words would be "slave and master".*



One might say the opposite of nature is artifice. But I don't think Malick would approve of the Oscar Wilde quote in reference to his film. It is exactly what Jack's mother is, though--artificial. Wilde was referring to a facade prescribed by vanity, and the woman in The Tree of Life is borne of an idealisation and a belief in a manner of storytelling. In my review of Tarkovsky's The Mirror, I wrote about the woman whom Tarkovsky shows as being both the protagonist's mother and ex-wife;

She seems to represent the perennially longed for and yet unreachable woman, tied also to a childhood Alexei longs for when, as he says, life seemed open to possibilities. His present life, in his run down old home, seems much narrower than the memories shown of the forest he grew up in, where Tarkovsky's palette seems to borrow its soft darks from da Vinci along with the halo shots often give to Alexei's mother.

Malick seems influenced by the strange POV of Tarkovsky's film, the overlapping of whispered thoughts with indirectly related footage, but everything about Malick's story can be put into words. You can't really describe why scenes like the one of a roof crumbling while a woman washes her hair in The Mirror work so well. It's the visual poetry of incredible filmmaking.



The best parts of The Tree of Life are unrelated to the more literal plot. They consist of beautifully shot forests, animals, galaxies, special effects--done by Douglas Trumbull, the effects are gorgeous and strange except for some curiously bad cgi dinosaurs. The cgi looks especially awful next to some truly amazing pictures of nature. Pictures which in themselves argue that nature is more capable of grace than is suggested by the dualistic argument Malick presents.



There's something academic about a lot of the footage, though. Out of context, bits of the movie could be a Hewlett Packard ad, which emphasises again the flaw in the film, the lack of appreciation for the significance of human complexity.

Ask yourself this question, if you've seen both; which movie says more about human nature and life, The Tree of Life or The Big Lebowski?

*It recalls the dynamic of the Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within". When Jack's father goes away on a trip, the kids run rampant, getting into trouble, and the conclusion seems to be that the good mother needs the evil father to be assertive. I compared Black Swan to "The Enemy Within" as well, and perhaps this is a meme in modern movies. One wonders how much of it is influenced by politics--we had the Bush administration who made their bad ideas reality, and the Obama administration that often seems too passive to make their good ideas reality.



Twitter Sonnet #335

Bald sharks weave a candy green tapestry.
Hollow brass feet footsteps sound like a horn.
Fateful fish forays into forestry;
In a rabbit womb river luck was born.
Broken grandma glasses in the teaser.
So shall Il's final Kaiju film begin.
Foam asteroids assault the dry greaser.
Kim's learned guys in rubber suits always win.
Parties pass the paper captain helmet.
Candle wax songs waft from vein vibration.
Scores melt into one muscular hermit.
Novelty deer take powder libation.
God knows all furniture is disgusting.
But Satan says all it needs is dusting.

Eyes Above

A neighbourhood is watching you.

The gang was around when the lighting thanks to patchy storm clouds at sunset was just perfect. I'd have taken more pictures except the battery ran out on my camera.
















I also beat the main plot of Skyrim last night, which involved pursuing the super dragon, Alduin, to the Elder Scrolls version of Valhalla. It was a lot of fun fighting the dragon, and it's a beautiful atmosphere. I even like the mythology about life and death, but I can't help wishing the game had been written by the same people who wrote Fallout: New Vegas. Those folks were so much better at writing characters you can get invested in--I was always genuinely interested in the backstories and quests for the companion characters in New Vegas, while in Skyrim almost all the dialogue feels like placeholders. Max von Sydow, Joan Allen, and Christopher Plummer are all cool to have around, but they do little more than facilitate a plot about how the two warring factions need to put aside their differences to face the threat of the dragons.

I haven't done much of the faction stuff yet in Skyrim, and it looks like the plot and world change significantly based on the side you choose, either the Imperials or the Stormcloaks, which seem to be loosely modelled on the Romans occupying Great Britain and/or other parts of northern Europe. It has something like the moral ambiguity of New Vegas in that both factions have their good and bad points, except Skyrim establishes two genuine "bad guys" in the High Elves and the dragons. I miss the complexity of New Vegas, particularly the dialogue influenced by character stats. There's very little wiggle room in Skyrim's dialogue that way.

Still, a fun and beautiful game for exploring and fighting. I imagine I'll continue playing it for a long time to come.

The Next Evolution in Rehashing

I don't know why X-Men doesn't explore its potential for S&M stories more often. Here in Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class, the possibilities between Emma Frost and Magneto are suggested but not really explored. The movie is a bit more satisfying when it comes to exploring the characters, though it stops far too short. Mostly it's only a reasonably entertaining comic book film.



Michael Fassbender as Magneto is the single best part of the movie. This is only the second movie I've seen him in, after Inglourious Basterds, where he played an Englishman who speaks German with a noticeable accent. Here he plays a German speaking English with a barely noticeable accent. He carries both roles off very well--one can also see Ian McKellan's take on the character in there. A man who harbours an unflinching resentment for the world that he sees as fundamentally intent on keeping him down. The movie provides ample motivation for him, as we see him experimented on as a boy by a Nazi scientist played by Kevin Bacon.

James McAvoy is established somewhat less effectively as Xavier, lacking an equally interesting story about his motives, but he does look remarkably like he could be a young Patrick Stewart.



The gang of young mutants making up the "class" itself are considerably less interesting, their dynamics coming off as more like a mediocre teen drama. There are a couple of interesting moments, like a dialogue between Beast and Mystique about how they ought to feel about their natural appearances, but of course it covers ground trodden past the bedrock by other X-Men media. Angel, who's a stripper before she's recruited by Xavier and Magneto, has an interesting line about how she'd rather take her clothes off for guys than be subjected to the insults of people calling her a freak for being a mutant. But actress Zoe Kravitz quite flubs the line, putting weird emphasis on the taking her clothes off part and you come away thinking the actress thought the line was about how much Angel liked getting naked in public.

There's actually a lot of terrible dialogue not at all the fault of the actors, though. When the characters first go to Xavier's mansion as a group, Magneto dryly observes, "Honestly, Charles, I don't know how you survived, living in such hardship."

Mystique, who in this version of the story grew up with Xavier as an adopted sister, says, "Well, it was a hardship softened by me."

Yeesh. What? First off, it's weird if it's supposed to be taken as sexual. Either way, it's really . . . lame. I picture Mystique lying on the ground while Xavier plans to jump down from a window above.

There's some decent action, almost all of which involves Magneto. It's great watching him finding new ways to use metal. My favourite was when he threw a knife at a guy then caused the knife to snap right back to his hand.

Anyway, it's a decent little two hour and six minute movie.

Sarcastic Fish

This is one of those days when it feels like there are a million different things asking for my attention simultaneously. At least I finished with Christmas shopping, so that's something.

I really wanted to see a movie yesterday but even the Sherlock Holmes movie wasn't playing at the theatre in the mall I was at. It's got to be one of the worst theatres in town, the sound system's shit, too. I almost went to see The Descendents since it was nominated for a Golden Globe, but I just couldn't work up the desire to spend ten dollars on it. It is funny, though, in my mad 2011 movie binging that none of the movies I've watched is a Golden Globe nominee. There's a pretty amazing skewing in the nominees towards very recent movies, too. I mean, it's always a little like that, but it's incredibly sharp this year. Where's Tree of Life, which all the critics were raving about? I may try and watch The Help, since it's one of the few actually out on DVD, though if the trailers are any indication, I'm not going to like it.

And last night I ended up just watching Mystery Science Theatre 3000, The Blood Waters of Doctor Z.



Twitter Sonnet #334

Spray paint water webs tear on the knee wound.
Dry black beak is reshaped for a stomach.
Pages printed on horn never lampoon.
Two faces screamed on the skull of Saavik.
Ninjas in orange beat red from the fat fake.
Honest Santas line up for hard milk war.
Cookie fields soak up blood too dear to take.
Lost feet remember what stockings are for.
Curving soldiers break on the flat limestone.
The wooden liars are force-fed peanuts.
Soft white petal perfume melts to cologne.
Always cook eyeballs for thirty minutes.
Checker pieces slice into the blimp brain.
Rubber stress ball moons in synchronous wane.

Nothing and Sex

After taking a week or so to slog through the intensely boring penultimate episode, I finally watched the season and perhaps series finale of Boardwalk Empire last night. I kind of wish I hadn't wasted my time.

I think most TV shows should be written by one writer or a couple of really tight knit writers. Even the best shows are too unfocused otherwise. The best exception I can think of is the classic Doctor Who series, and then you had writers doing serials by themselves and a script editor overseeing entire seasons, and this led to more cohesion. Plus it helped that television back then wasn't addicted to Barbra Streisand moments.

Head writer Terence Winter wrote the season finale of Boardwalk Empire and he tried to tie everything together, ending Jimmy's arc showing him to be a guy who's been running from a truly fucked up personal life to finally having nowhere else to go, no war, no disinterested but sweet lesbian wife. His plea to Richard, the masked sniper, that he find a "home" somehow, that he get himself mentally away from the trenches, is a pretty good moment for both characters. Nucky ties together a bit easier as all Winter endeavours to say about him is that he's a ruthless motherfucker.

At two seasons of twelve episodes, if you looked at Boardwalk Empire as a roughly twenty-four hour movie, there's so much I would cut. I'd probably want reshoots, too. We could lose a lot of the time wasted with soap opera, who's sleeping with who?! plot business. Oof, it's so tiresome. It may not have been so bad if the writers could've gone the distance and had the characters process these things, but every episode the mad tea party moves chairs, there's a new writer in the seat with his own idea of how to write a scene of someone cheating on their spouse, or his own aspect of early twentieth century history he wants to perfunctorily establish. We could certainly lose the scenes about midget wrestling.

Maybe it's the inevitable result of so scandalous sex scenes piling up that you eventually get to an incest scene. That's the only way you can keep that party, such as it is, going. In this case, we have it in a flashback scene where Jimmy and his mother make good on the vibe between them that's been building all season. Except the flashback takes place before the series began and establishes Jimmy as being totally unable to deal with it. Michael Pitt, who plays Jimmy, delivers a completely different performance after the flashback in the present. So in that sense, the incest bit doesn't work. It also doesn't work in that his mother, played by an actress only nine years older than him, never came off even remotely like his mother.

I may watch next season, if there is one, for the actors. I hope they maybe advance the story by ten years or something, taking advantage of knowledge gained from the mistakes of these two seasons with a reboot.

On a brighter note, I read the new Sirenia Digest to-day. A good Science Fiction story that read like a very serious cross between the Futurama episodes "Godfellas" and "Parasites Lost". But with sex.

Super Kids

There seems to be a near universal critical consensus on J.J. Abrams' Super 8 that the first two thirds of the film are wonderful and the last bit loses its way. I have to add my voice to the chorus--the first part of the film is wonderful. Sincere characterisations like you don't see anymore. The movie follows the adventures of a group of twelve year old boys. I remember remarking when I was ten years old that I wanted to be twelve because that was the age all the kids in the coolest kids' movies were.

There's certainly a lot of Spielberg homage in Super 8, especially in Abrams' economy of shots, turning close-ups into long shots the way Spielberg did, trying to cut as little as possible for transitions from reaction to subject. But Spielberg really only directed one kid adventure movie like this, E.T.. Jurassic Park as well, to a certain extent, and Super 8 certainly has a few Jurassic Park inspired moments, but Jurassic Park's not really from the period Abrams is paying homage to. E.T. probably got the ball rolling on a genre of films I remember eating like candy--Explorers, Flight of the Navigator, The Monster Squad, and almost all of Fred Savage's filmography.* It's among these films that Super 8 really belongs, particularly in that these kids are really written more like 16 year olds than 12 year olds. But that's perfect--kids don't want the real awkwardness and helplessness of that age in their movies. They want characters who are like them but who are a little more proactive, have little more control over their worlds. Here's a shot I like a lot;



Joe, the protagonist, is here visiting the slightly older Alice who lives with an abusive, alcoholic father. He's trying to convince her to continue participating in a film he's making with his friends when her father pulls up to the curb behind them--that's what he's looking at in the shot. Alice is small in the background, in the shade, showing her as already having been beaten down to fit into the world comprised of herself and her father. The low angle on Joe is like a hero shot, but he's a little kid, sticking out like a target, but his assertiveness in coming to see Alice puts him in a place of responsibility. The nail to be hammered down. Here's the beast, coming up on the porch, what are you going to do, hero?

Part of the reason the film loses its way in the last act is Alice's father abruptly finding redemption. I mean, it's fine Alice giving Joe some information that makes us sympathise with her father a little, but it would have been so much more effective if he was shown to actually be physically abusive to her and really lost in his self-pity. I know a lot of people would say that's too far for a kid's movie, but I'd say that's exactly as far as a lot of kids would need a movie to go.

Where was this Abrams when he made Star Trek? There's nothing like the cheap, broad glibness of Kirk eating an apple on the Kobayashi Maru test. It felt to me like every step of the way in Super 8, Abrams asked himself, "What would Spielberg do?" Though, whether he realised it or not, what he was really asking himself was, "What would the ideal Spielberg of my memory do?" I think he made good decisions in the first part of Super 8 that Spielberg may not have done.



The broad resolution for Alice's father is just one of the ways Super 8 loses its way, but I think the problems go back to the same fundamental reason--Abrams stopped asking himself what would ideal Spielberg do and started asking himself, "What ought I to do?" He obviously felt a need to tighten the focus on Joe, making him stand up to the threat by himself, giving him a pretty corny line at the climax to tie back to his earlier established hobby of train model making.** If the movie had been made more organically, the focus in the last portion would have shifted to Alice, who was in a place and was given knowledge pertaining to a solution before Joe was (look at me, being vague to avoid spoilers for once!).



One problem that's present throughout the film is the fucking lens flares. They look even more out of place outside of Star Trek. I get the feeling Abrams is using them out of spite at this point. I bet if Abrams ever does stop using them it'll be at the same time he starts making movies with bolder commitments to character.



The best scene in the movie is Joe putting zombie makeup on Alice. Partly I think it's Abrams' effectiveness at bringing us into this world of twelve year olds, partly it's Elle Fanning's excellent performance, but the fourteen year-old girl actually seemed older than me in this scene. Well, maybe the darkened cheeks helped a bit. The relationship between her and Joe is so tenderly, so smartly established, it's a joy to watch, and would by itself make the movie worth watching. The nice kid adventure aspect is welcome icing on the cake.

*Nothing sticks with me like Time Bandits, though, sort of the anti-kid adventure film. My mom rented it for me when I was a kid probably thinking it was just another of these and it freaked the hell out of me. Or maybe Empire of the Sun is more of a kid adventure film antithesis--I saw that as a kid and that freaked me out, too.

**"He's making a model."

"Really?" I thought, "Probably he ought to have made the real thing, don't you think?"

Everything About War in One Easy Lesson

I'm back from watching Fear and Desire. And I can see why Stanley Kubrick didn't want people seeing this movie, wow. Amateurish indeed--if I'd seen it without knowing whose movie it was, I'd have said this kid has no future making movies. I guess this goes to show there's hope for everyone.

Mind you, acting as his own cinematographer here, Kubrick shows himself to be a very skilled still photographer. No wonder, considering he'd been working at it for seven years at this point. But the heavy handed characterisations loomed bigger than the pretty compositions. We can sort of see a precursor to Full Metal Jacket in the soldier who loses his mind, but this guy cracks far less believably, pretty much heading for the deep end with the starting pistol. Though one shot of him, black silhouette standing in the river, the sun at his back, is effectively creepy.

Kubrick experiments a lot with POV. Acting also as his own editor here, though, the inserted shots of soldiers punching at the camera come off as silly. And Kubrick just wasn't a very good editor technically at this point--some shots cut off weirdly in the middle of dialogue, and there are even quick flashes of deleted scenes.

The story, about soldiers from an unnamed country engaged in a war with another unnamed country, kind of reminded me of Les Carabiniers, another minimalist commentary on the nature of war. Both attempt to discuss war with their stripped down symbols, neither film really succeeding in my opinion, though Kubrick's feels more like a filmmaker biting off way more than he could chew. Characters maniacally discuss their motives of self-fulfilment and survival, too vehement too quick. There are references to The Tempest that don't quite make sense.

Certainly it's an interesting movie to the avid Kubrick viewer. Now the only Stanley Kubrick movie I haven't seen is Killer's Kiss. I'm keen to see how he went from this broad, young man's work to the subtler and more complex The Killing, though I can see some of Fear and Desire's heavy handedness in moments in The Killing like Elisha Cook falling wide eyed to the floor. But you're more willing to buy into it because Cook's relationship with his wife is so great and pulpy. All the characters are so well drawn and weird in that movie, from Sterling Hayden down to the sniper who can't open teeth for some reason. Maybe the main difference between Fear and Desire and The Killing was that Kubrick had gotten over the novelty of making a film.

Somewhere There's a Portrait of Me That Doesn't Age

Mmmm, do I smell pasta?

Yes, at the request of a family member I actually had to go in and get some inevitably awful JC Penney photos of myself. Boy, was that ever awkward. Has there been any instance of these things not coming out looking hopelessly hokey? Mine have the added bonus of my apparently really fucking bad skin. I just don't notice it as much normally somehow.



Arrr! Me newspaper plunders the high seas of yellow journalism, arr! The photographer told me to push my hat back to show more of my face. I'm pretty sure that was a bad idea.

Anyway, I think I'm going to try to catch Stanley Kubrick's Fear and Desire which starts in ten minutes on TCM. So, ciao.

Twitter Sonnet #333

Amphibious kleenex corks burger wine.
Guitar gum rocks rotten cartoon wolf teeth.
Girls just want guys to mention iodine.
Catherine spilled chemicals all on the heath.
Uncooked stomachs affront all the raw food.
Ancient commercials sold psychos to God.
Cold tea impacts the astrologer's mood.
During Christmas, it's a snow globe holds Zod.
Grey smiles surround a senseless infant.
Walter Burns' thoughts through thoughtless photographs.
Wookiees shave for nostalgic elephant.
Hacker codes are naked in telegraphs.
Movies shorten for gift card MacGuffin.
Guerrilla kids spawn in Starbucks' muffin.

Flat Lines

I wonder when we stopped empathising with characters who are shocked by murder. Or did we ever empathise with them, really? I suppose it depends how it was written. I finished reading The Dain Curse, Dashiell Hammett's excellent 1929 novel yesterday. It's a first person narrative, from the perspective of The Continental Op, an unnamed narrator in Hammett's early work, a detective who seems to have grown emotionally calloused by his years of exposure to murder and the worst of human behaviour. This detachment serves him in his work as it allows him to manipulate characters to their doom and to process crime scenes on an analytical basis. But I didn't really think about what kind of guy he is through Red Harvest, Hammett's first novel, and I might not have paused to in The Dain Curse before a young woman suddenly calls him a monster.

When we're talking about fictional characters, we all start from the perspectives of psychopaths. Why should we care if some hypothetical person gets killed? Whether or not we care is on the artist, whether he or she reveals the character in ways we empathetically respond to. In Hammett's work, characters are usually drawn so broadly that their deaths usually only serve the certainly engaging plot. The first guy killed in The Dain Curse, Leggett, had been fleeing from a blackmailer for years, at one point taking a raft with one other man across the Atlantic ocean, at one point being forced to eat the other man in order to survive the journey. He's also some kind of a chemist--we don't really get to know him.

But then a lot of the distance from the characters is due to the Op's voice, the voice telling us about all of them. Before finding him dead, the Op had described Eric Collinson as a guy who got in the way, but was basically innocent and good. When he finds Collinson dead on a beach below a cliff;

It was Eric Collinson's body. Bones showed through flesh and clothing on his shattered back. The back of his head--that half of it--was crushed. I dragged him out of the water and put him down on dry rocks. His dripping pockets contained a hundred and fifty-four dollars and eighty-two cents, a watch, a knife, a gold pen and pencil, papers, a couple of letters, and a memoranda book. I spread out the papers, letters, and book; and read them; and learned nothing except that what was written in them hadn't anything to do with his death. I couldn't find anything else--on him or near him--to tell me more about his death than the uprooted bush, the hat caught between rocks, and the position of this body had told me.

I left him there and went back to the ravine, panting and heaving myself up it to the cliff path, returning to where the bush had grown. I didn't find anything there in the way of significant marks, footprints, or the like. The path was chiefly hard rock. I went on along it. Presently the cliff began to bend away from the ocean, lowering the path along its side. After another half-mile there was no cliff at all, merely a bush-grown ridge at whose foot the path ran. There was no sun yet. My pants stuck disagreeably to my chilly legs. Water squunched in my torn shoes. I hadn't had any breakfast. My cigarettes had got wet. My left knee ached from a twist it had got sliding down the ravine. I cursed the detective business and slopped on along the path.

Those sensory details at the end help bring us into the scene at the same time they reinforce the Op's hardboiled personality. In a sense, I'm reminded of how the thieves and lowlifes in Oliver Twist seem more human than the "good" characters. There's a certain pretence of morality we don't have anymore, maybe. And yet there is something sad when Gabrielle rejects the idea of a relationship with the Op because of his evident monstrousness. The scene's quoted in the Op's Wikipedia entry;

"You came in just now, and then I saw -"

She stopped.

"What?"

"A monster. A nice one, an especially nice one to have around when you're in trouble, but a monster just the same, without any human foolishness like love in him, and - What's the matter? Have I said something I shouldn't?"

We sense the Op has opened up a Pandora's Box in himself we all posses. That's what Gabrielle senses, I think--a monster isn't something mindless as an avalanche, or some brutality out of left field, it's something you can kind of understand, and it's an understanding it's frightening to acknowledge. It's no wonder noir really took off during World War II, then. Hammett's next novel, The Maltese Falcon, was made into movies three times, but the one everyone remembers is the third, the one made in 1941.

This seems to mark a turning point in Hammett's fiction, as after The Dain Curse comes novels that focus more on interpersonal relationships and are more about the sad observation of dysfunction between these hardboiled men of action and the women who are like them and who aren't like them.



This adherence to a certain morality about death in pulp fiction continued for decades, as was shown in the 1968 movie I watched on Saturday night, Bullitt. Which is a good movie, its car chase in the middle of the film deservedly one of the most famous of such scenes ever filmed. There's such a wonderful messiness about it, these cars seeming like they're about to come apart as they bound down San Francisco's famous hillside streets.

Bullitt, too, featured a woman horrified at Detective Bullitt's (Steve McQueen) casual behaviour at a murder scene. Just as I was thinking I'd finally found a cop movie from the 60s where the female lead wasn't portrayed as an unreasonable thorn in the side of the detective. But, to be fair, she's not the rabid chihuahua seen in a movie like Madigan. She's just upset at what she's seen, yet we feel, I think, a reflexive impatience with her. We don't see that any more in this world of CSI. I'm not sure if this is because we don't buy into the reality of fictional characters as easily, or if we're all a little more psychotic.

What You're Looking For, What You're Seeing

Aw, Katsushiro and the flowers. The guy's constantly visually juxtaposed with flowers, emphasising his innocence, and also serving as a context for beautiful shots. Though just about every shot in Seven Samurai is beautifully, remarkably composed.



I've seen the movie eight billion times. I watched it again last night and it still has an impact, even though I was able to anticipate a lot of lines and had to stop myself from analysing too hard during certain scenes. I first saw it in high school, the last time I watched it was around a year and a half ago with Amee when she visited and it still felt like yesterday. Amee liked Kikuchiyo best, like me, and like most people. Why is Kikuchiyo so great?



Like Katsushiro, he's pursuing an ideal of being a samurai. Perhaps we respond better to him because he does so from a less innocent perspective. He's seen samurai abusing helpless farmers.

I think the fact that Kikuchiyo continues to believe in the ideal despite reality is what makes him great. Even the reality of his own abilities--he doesn't have the poise and the tact of the men who were born and bred into the lifestyle and he doesn't have the training. He constantly screws up, as when Kambei and Gorobei finding him sleeping on the job.



I like that Kurosawa doesn't show Kikuchiyo's pursuit of his dream as automatically making him a practically effective warrior. It honestly reflects the all but impossible nature of what he's trying to do, and somehow that makes what he accomplishes the more effective, the more sharply universal even as he's so different from every other character.

Apes in the Night, Birds in the Day

I dreamt last night I was at a school, not the school I go to, comprised of a series of bungalows with pale beige aluminium siding. It was night, the ground was covered with red and orange autumn leaves. Gorillas roamed the campus. I was busy replacing the inside of one classroom with the frozen, tilted deck of the Titanic when I came across a baby gorilla and I realised its mother must have abandoned it. I picked it up and it wrapped its arms around my neck. I began to search for the mother, wondering how I'd keep her from killing me when I found her. I got to the other end of the campus when I began to worry the mother had actually been closer to the area where I found the baby and that I was actually responsible for taking the baby further away. I started taking the baby back, feeling like what I was doing was pretty hopeless. There seemed to be something wrong with the baby, too. When I set it down, it put its head against the ground and seemed unable to lift it, despite having normal strength in its body--it was as though the head was abnormally heavy. I woke up without finding the mother.

I wonder if the baby gorilla was related to Artie Lange in any way--"Baby Gorilla" is the nickname Don Rickles gave to Lange. Possibly it was about the fact that I have all my finals to-morrow, which I'd better go back to studying for now . . .

Here are some pictures I took walking to lunch to-day;
























Twitter Sonnet #332

Soft Sith keyboards sweetly smoosh evil Force.
Sugar letters drill in your fingerprint.
Stucco brushes the too tall morning horse.
Secret floors never have to pay their rent.
Wisps of ancient hair hide white packing foam.
The third slice of toast came from the round end.
Sharpened wooden rain waits outside of Rome.
It's the slinkiest blades that never bend.
One renegade follicle curls the hair.
Recycled cave paintings deceive the man.
Lich Kings have stolen all the silverware.
Golden peas melt on the opposite pan.
Advanced heat is the old fashioned lukewarm.
Floorboards bend for perpendicular porn.