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I dreamt last night I still worked at Pick N Save, a discount retail store I worked at fourteen years ago (it's been renamed Big Lots). Except the store was contained within an endless grid, in all directions--north, south, east, west, up, down--of cheap, run down apartments. And only one sector had a bathroom and whenever anyone needed to go he or she had to go this specific cluster of rooms with really small corridors. For some reason it was always crowded with angry obese people.

Posting rather late to-day--I got home before five o'clock but it occurred to me I wanted to post a specific screenshot from an episode of Twin Peaks and I remembered the Blu-Ray writer I'd gotten for my computer months ago and hadn't gotten around to actually hooking in. So I figured I'd roll up my sleeves and take a screenshot from my legally purchased Blu-Ray instead of going the faster route of simply downloading the video from a torrent site.

Little did I know the tangled labyrinth I'd set foot in.

The hardware was the easy part. The screws were too big for the holes but I had some smaller spare screws in a nearby drawer. No, the hard part is apparently the movie industry doesn't want you playing Blu-Rays on computers. I tried it in Media Player, Media Player Classic, VLC, even iTunes. No dice. I googled and found there's supposedly a way to get VLC to play Blu-Rays--I installed a cfg and a dll file into specific folders following identical instructions on various forums and sites. These instructions all had at least twenty comments saying this doesn't, in the end, actually work--which I can confirm. It doesn't work. Because all Blu-Rays are encrypted.

Now, you can get a trial version of something called Aurora Blu-Ray Media which puts a big watermark in the middle of the video and doesn't use the Blu-Ray's native menu. The full version costs thirty dollars.

Finally I just googled, "How to play Blu-Ray on PC." Google had these instructions in a box above the search results:

To do this:
Install MakeMKV as described in our original Blu-ray how-to.
Insert your Blu-ray disc. ...
Fire up MakeMKV and head to File > Open Disc and choose your Blu-ray drive. ...
When it's done, just double click on the resulting file and it will play in VLC.

Which I'm in the process of doing right now--that is, ripping the entire disk to an mkv file, which is a video file. I'm also downloading it at the same time just out of curiosity, just to see which goes faster.

So why the hell is this so difficult? Are they trying to prevent people from ripping movies? Most people seem to watch movies through streaming services now which of course can be ripped from--I've never done it but my impression is that it's a lot easier than ripping from a disk. Mainly this seems to be a plan to marginalise Blu-Ray and DVD as a format--I'm working with Windows 7, I hear it's even worse on Windows 8 which doesn't even support DVD playback.

Hmm. Looks like MakeMKV is going to take a total of thirty two minutes to rip the Blu-Ray--it's currently showing seven minutes remaining--while the torrent I'm downloading is going to take another hour and a half--that's downloading at around 400kb/s, I'm not sure how big the file is since I just selected the episode I wanted to get a screenshot from from a 76 gigabyte torrent. Though if it were a more popular file, like the latest episode of Doctor Who, for instance, the torrent would unquestionably be the faster route.

And I have to think that just maybe the industry would see less threat from piracy if watching movies legally were at least half as easy as it is illegally . . . Ah, my mkv is ready. At long last, the screenshot:

You can tell episode eleven is directed by David Lynch because of shots like this, a long take of a group of people that seems like it was meant for a big screen--or Blu-Ray--where you can see all the tiny details of people's faces. Episodes not directed by Lynch tend to use a lot more close-ups and have a very TV feel.

That's the last Lynch directed episode before the long season two drought. I usually skip right to the final episode from here but having the Blu-Ray makes me feel vaguely obligated to watch the in between episodes. They have their moments, I guess. Though I don't know if I can put up with the torture of James' relationship with the blonde femme fatale type again or Dale and Annie's gag inducing sugar sweet courtship. Cooper had a naughty streak at the beginning and you could see it in his flirtations with Audrey . . . ah, but I've lamented all this before.

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At the End of Time and Space There is Love

The mind and the heart, in the world of fiction, are typically considered to be two separate things and stories are often written about the conflict between the two--and generally the right path is the path of the heart. Christopher Nolan's 2014 film Interstellar is this kind of story, and it's a true Science Fiction film--and it's so nice to see one nowadays--about a mission to find a new planet for the human race while Earth is in its death throes. It's been compared to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey quite a lot and there are no small number of homages in the film. Though in a way, the message of the film is almost the exact opposite of 2001 and, oddly enough, Interstellar is fundamentally a more conservative story. As a result, the final act of the film feels much smaller in scope but that doesn't change the fact that it has a lot of beauty and intelligence.

I kept thinking of a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo as I watched Interstellar. Madeleine telling Scottie her dream foretelling her death--a dark corridor where she knows she'll die when she gets to the end of it. Scottie says, "If I could just find a key . . . the beginning and I could put it together," and Madeleine says bitterly, almost sarcastically, "So you can explain it away?" There's a term going around the Internet--I guess it's a couple years old now--"mansplaining" which refers to the tendency some men exhibit to explain things to women even when the woman in question clearly knows more about the subject than the man. I have observed men do this to men and women--though I've observed women do this too, I should say. Possibly men do it more often--I suspect there's only anecdotal evidence.

In any case, Interstellar is extremely traditional when it comes to gender behaviour--the men want to explain, the men want to take violent assertive action while the women insist on the existence of ghosts, insist on an inherent power to love that science hasn't identified yet. When Chris Carter created the X-Files and made Mulder the believer and Scully the skeptic, it was exactly this convention he was reacting against. But Interstellar is the sort of story that contemplates those two ends coming full circle and meeting--the wisdom of the heart turning out to have a completely rational explanation and the most rational men turning out to be psychopaths.

Though, if you follow that logic, both men and women are on the "mind" side ultimately but maybe I'm going astray in following logic. Nonetheless, one of the key differences between Interstellar and 2001 is that Interstellar explains just about everything while 2001 leaves a lot to mystery, to interpretation. Interstellar becomes more like a detective movie with a puzzle to be solved while 2001 is a more accurate portrait of how it might feel to encounter things beyond our conception.

There's an anime series called Gunbuster--Top o Nerae--which might well have been another influence on Interstellar. Like Gunbuster, a lot of the drama in Interstellar revolves around Einstein's theory of relativity, relative time--how time is distorted for those who travel closer to the speed of light or close to a black hole, how time is slowed down for those people so that one hour for them may be several years on Earth. Like in Gunbuster, this provides an essential element to the young female protagonist's relationship with her father. Considering how much Neon Genesis Evangelion clearly influenced Pacific Rim (despite Guillermo del Toro's denials) I'm wondering if we're seeing the Hideaki Anno influence on western cinema come to roost.

Though the conclusion to Gunbuster isn't quite as tidy as Interstellar, both are sentimental in their ways. Though I'll be damned if the big "Welcome Home" sign in Gunbuster doesn't get me every single time so I guess I can't really blame people who find the conclusion to Interstellar effective. It wasn't quite my cup of tea and I found myself wishing Stanley Kubrick would come back from the dead and start making movies again. But Interstellar looks great, has some nice action sequences, and performances from McConaughey, Hathaway, and Michael Caine were really good. I particularly liked Caine reciting Dylon Thomas.

The Palace On the High Wire

In America, she's a circus freak, in Europe, she was a goddess. Max Ophul's 1955 film Lola Montes frames its story of the real life sexually adventurous Bavarian countess from Ireland with a fictional depiction of the woman selling her story to an American circus where a ringmaster played by Peter Ustinov narrates her escapades as she walks the tight rope, dances, and struggles to hold back tears. It's an unmistakable, and effective, satire of the morality that would condemn and devalue the woman whom the film doesn't fail to show was magnificently beautiful.

It helps to have the beautiful Martine Carol in the role and the story's further aided by gorgeous costumes, sets, and locations. As Lola, in mock indignation at her figure being insulted, rips her bodice for the King of Bavaria (Anton Walbrook), the scene cuts a servant outside being told to fetch a needle and thread. A long sequence of servants rushing about the breathtakingly opulent palace is simultaneously a genuine exhibition of the beauty of the place and a tease to the audience as anybody watching the movie at this point is going to be thinking about what Lola and the king are doing together while her dress is off and not murals and statues, however gorgeous.

Walbrook plays the king almost precisely like his ballet impresario from The Red Shoes, skilled a seemingly off-hand but deeply calculated authority. But he's only one of a series of lovers for Lola that also includes Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg).

Her story begins on a passenger ship where he mother sends her to sleep with strangers for the first time in a dormitory so that her mother can be alone with a lover. Shortly after, Lola fails to marry a baron her mother intended to set her up with, instead impulsively proposing to her father's adjutant, who ends up cheating on her. She leaves him and now a pattern of capricious love affairs has been set. Though by the time she meets the King of Bavaria she seems exhausted and ready to settle down. Her spiritual fatigue and bitter disappointment over the failure of this relationship is reflected in the physical illness for which her doctor begs she be allowed to perform her high dive into a trampoline with a safety net.

But she doesn't seem to regret her hedonistic way of life. She seems more crushed by the change in tone from her audience regarding her nature which she takes no shame in--from rapturous adoration to patronising and cynical voyeurism.

Wine Against Life, Money Against Beauty

There's an aesthetic to feudalism, to king and serf social contracts, that's seductive like religion. Not just from a compulsion to ascribe order to the universe, but simply in the idea of some people living in beauty and luxury, being closer to divinity than the common people. 1962's Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (The Master, the Mistress, and the Slave) mourns the death of such a world which seemed as though it would be replaced by something inferior, certainly uglier. Though it portrays the basic humanity of the people supposedly given divine right to rule as integral to the downfall of the system. Considered a classic of Bollywood cinema, Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam of course features great songs, dances, and beautiful costumes. But perhaps the film's greatest assets are its two female leads, Meena Kumari and Waheeda Rehman, and dark, ghostly cinematography by V.K. Murthy.

Made just ten years before her death at the age of thirty nine, the film casts Kumari as the Bibi, the Mistress/Queen/madame of the title, Chhoti Bahu, who, as a ploy to keep her husband from spending all his time at the brothel, takes up drinking despite the fact that it's not the sort of thing a good orthodox Hindu woman does. Her alcoholism and the carelessness of the men in her family in business dealings erode the beauty of their mansion. We see the British not only bringing soldiers to be vulgar and disruptive in the marketplace but also introducing cut-throat capitalism.

In the middle of this is Bhoothnath (Guru Dutt), who is introduced as an older, wealthy and westernised gentleman wandering the ruins of the old mansion. Most of the movie is told through his flashback as he remembers his time as a servant there. Also the producer of the film--and, apparently, some argue the uncredited director--Dutt's sad eyed performance as the meek serf in new, squeaking British style leather shoes, recalls Emmett Kelly or Charlie Chaplin. In one of the most impressive musical numbers, he hides behind a curtain and watches one of the ruling brothers of the house being entertained by dancers and a singer. The singer is fully lit while the dancers are dark silhouettes.

Dutt's humble, low key performance as the servant and confidant of Chhoti Bahu is endearing and his awkward, adolescent sensitive arguments with the irritable Jaba (Waheeda Rehman), daughter of the owner of the Sindoor factory where he works, are equally endearing.

Kumari was the poet in real life but it's Rehman's character we see writing poetry in the film while Dutt looks on, hiding absurdly behind a newspaper in her doorway. Rehman's performance is much fiercer and maybe easier for a modern audience to identify with than Chhoti Bahu's rapid decent into alcoholism being put down to the frailty of women.

The Wikipedia entry says the film was shut out of the Oscars with a letter from the Academy stating that "a woman who drinks was not a permissible taboo in their culture." There's no source cited and certainly it doesn't make sense considering Susan Hayward was nominated for Best Actress in 1947 for playing an alcoholic. I think it's more likely a western prejudice against Bollywood that kept it out of the running for an Oscar. Even within the Indian film industry, it seems like there's a lack of respect for Bollywood reflected in the difficulty in acquiring decent copies of films from even just ten years ago. I was amazed to have finally found a copy of something as old as Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam but what I found was obviously cropped into a 16:10 aspect ratio from 4:3 and bore a constant red watermark of some company called Ultra in the upper left-hand corner--DVDs are released with watermarks often and no attempt was apparently made to clean up or restore footage on what is considered one of the greatest films of its country of origin.

It was an obvious VHS transfer and the murkiness in an odd way added to the spookiness of its visuals. The climax of the film, involving a night time assault inter-cut with shots of owls in trees, has an unexpectedly but very effective supernatural quality as things which could not be directly addressed due to censor restrictions are conveyed in a sinister, dreamlike fashion.

Ultra has the entire film on YouTube where it's cropped even further to fit a 16:9 aspect ratio. Here's Meena Kumari in one of the musical numbers (Geeta Dutt is her dubbed singer):

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Objectified by the Supremely Stupid

Even a generally misogynist film might be expected to have one or two moments unrelated to misogyny. Which makes the near one hundred percent misogyny of 2014's Gun Woman (女イ本銃) seem like a statistical improbability at the very least. And yet I find myself contemplating whether or not the movie's plain, garden variety stupidity isn't a more significant defining feature.

The movie begins with an American hit man (Matthew Miller) shooting a naked American woman (Marianne Bourg) from behind while she's taking a shower. He explains to his accomplice, his driver (Dean Simone), as they're going to Las Vegas for "extraction" that the woman was unfinished business of a friend of his. Neither actor gives a convincing performance and the movie looks like it was shot on the cheapest digital camera available.

Most of the film's story is told by the hit man to the driver. The son of a wealthy Japanese business man, who's referred to as "Hamazaki's Son" (Noriaki Kamata) thoughout the film, is exiled in America with his massive inheritance. He's a serial rapist but he especially loves having sex with women's corpses.

The driver expresses surprise at the concept of necrophilia to which the hit man responds necrophilia has been practised throughout history, the two already sounding like dim witted screenwriters more than hard bitten criminals. But this impression deepens as the driver questions illogical points in the hit man's story and the hit man responds with something even more illogical as an explanation.

You see, for some reason, instead of having his elite team of mercenary body guards acquire corpses, Hamazaki's son has to go to a third party which maintains a bunker out in the desert manned by three people. They're armed with finger print ID guns--which only function for one person each--and clients have to be thoroughly inspected before they're allowed to have sex with corpses.

It's at this absurd place that Mastermind (Kairi Narita) plans to take his revenge on Hamazaki's son by putting a sex slave through rigorous martial arts and firearms training, surgically implanting her with the components of a gun which she'll then remove with her hands when she's inside the necrophilia bunker after she's been taken inside in a drug induced, unconscious, corpse like state. She'll then assassinate the target before she bleeds out in twenty two minutes.

Obviously this is an exploitation film and, as a fan of exploitation films, I don't expect them to have iron clad plots but something slightly coherent is nice. Really, a bigger problem is the fact that for all the time we spend looking at naked women being shot and having objects inserted into them while they moan, gasp, and bleed, in the entire film there are only two lines spoken by female characters. One is "Honey!" from Mastermind's wife in a flashback as she's being raped and murdered by Hamazaki's son, and the other is from the female guard at the necrophilia bunker when she reports into her radio that one of the other guards is dead.

Considering it's an awfully small place, it is rather remarkable that Gun Woman (Asami) has a long action sequence with the first guard after which she has time to remove and assemble her surgically implanted gun before anyone notices anything's up. I guess just because a place has top notch security doesn't mean it would have a security camera.

One of several perplexing positive reviews on the imdb page for the film asks if Asami is the new Reiko Ike, star of 1970s Japanese exploitation films like Sex and Fury. This is a useful point of comparison because Asami and her character, other than engaging in full nude action scenes (with a thin merkin), is not at all like Reiko Ike.

Reiko Ike has lines in Sex and Fury. More importantly, she has motives and personality.

After Mastermind has tortured her and made her witness him murdering a naked woman to demonstrate the effects of blood loss, one naturally wonders why Gun Woman doesn't simply turn on him with all of her elite new skills. And at one point she does, the two get in a fist fight and she gets him on the ground and just as it looks like she might finish the job . . . she kisses him and there's a long, slow motion sex scene.

After which, she almost shoots him but stops when he explains that he's training her to take revenge for his dead wife. Which somehow wipes the slate for the woman she's witnessed him killing for no reason, I guess, because she puts the gun down and becomes the physical embodiment of his motives.

There are some nice action sequences and the women are beautiful but nothing of quality really emerges from under the great shadow of stupidity hanging over the film. I wasn't sure at first why I had this movie on my list but I remembered during the exposition sequence about Hamazaki's son. The father, Hamazaki, is credited as being played by Tatsuya Nakadai in a special appearance--Nakadai being the star of Akira Kurosawa's Ran and Kagemusha and having supporting roles in High and Low and Yojimbo and he appeared prominently in several other good Japanese films throughout the 60s like The Face of Another and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. Here is his appearance in Gun Woman:

This screenshot is his whole appearance. As in, the movie presents a still image of Nakadai and slowly zooms in on it while the hit man tells the story. The greatest possible extent to which I can imagine Nakadai was involved in this movie was that possibly someone working on the film met him and asked for a picture. It's more likely the film simply used a head shot or, hell, something grabbed from a google image search. I somehow suspect he had no particular desire to be associated with this film.

There Was Soup at the Top

Why did I watch a movie about Brittany Murphy becoming a ramen chef? I tend to add movies to my list so often that I might watch forty of them between the time I put one on the list and the time I watch it. So I have no memory of why I told myself to seek out 2008's The Ramen Girl, a pretty generic romantic comedy, another in the I Know Where I'm Going template about a girl going to a foreign country to be with her boyfriend only to find herself falling instead for the local culture. The dialogue is plain, the characters are unremarkable and unintentionally crass, but it's a cute, mostly harmless story about a young woman looking for true love and finding self respect instead.

After her boyfriend dumps her, she wanders tearfully into a nearby ramen shop just after it's closed. The proprietors, chef Maezumi (Toshiyuki Nishida) and his wife (Kimiko Yo), take pity on her, serve her ramen free of charge, and send her out into the rain with a loaned umbrella. So suddenly　Abby, Murphy's character, decides to beg Maezumi to take her on as apprentice.

He makes her clean the dishes at five in the morning and, when she fails to do that properly, has her clean the toilet. But Abby persists and he eventually allows her to try making broth. He doesn't speak any English and Abby never learns more than a few words of Japanese so it's hard to accept the movie's premise that ramen is an art of precision when the chef can't even impart basic recipe instructions to his apprentice.

She meets two new guys who vie for her affections, though one of them, because he's unattractive and dresses like Vaudeville's idea of a love stricken nerd, is never taken seriously by the movie and even though Abby thanks him for the flowers he gives her and hugs him he never seems disappointed she never goes out with him. She's into Toshi (Sohee Park), a handsome young man torn between following the typical safe career in business his parents planned for him and his desire to be a rock star. Of course, the Ramen Girl encourages him to follow his dream. I imagined a twist on the scene from Citizen Kane with Abby being the only one applauding at one of Toshi's concerts but the movie isn't as cruel as my imagination.

The movie's remarkably shallow conclusion fails to notice it leaves one of its main characters absolutely ruined and Abby coming off callous and self-absorbed.

Brittany Murphy's performance is relaxed and charming and Toshiyuki Nishida is really good, effectively funny in his exasperation with the weird gaijin girl. The movie really made me want some ramen.

The Whisky of Cinema

Writing about the movie La Piscine a few days ago, I mentioned the "omnipresent" bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label scotch. Its omnipresence in films of the 1950s and 60s extends beyond La Piscine. Here a suspicious mother enjoys the beverage while her daughter embarks on a relationship with a dangerous man in Michael Powell's 1960 film Peeping Tom:

A couple years earlier, another British director, David Lean, prominently featured the scotch as Alec Guinness was successfully coerced with it by a Japanese officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai:

The shared English and Japanese love for Johnnie Walker seems to have been genuine as Yasujiro Ozu used it as his compositional red signature in his 1960 film Late Autumn (秋日和).

Yet Japan has become a formidable producer of whisky itself in recent years--just last week, Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask was named best whisky in the world, beating out all scotches. Yamazaki is owned by Suntory, a company that also owns several distilleries in Scotland and the U.S., including Bowmore, the excellent Laphroaig, and Jim Beam.

Naturally, I was curious about this stuff that beat the Scottish at their own game. But the sherry cask that won is limited to 18,000 bottles and all of them are in Europe. I went to BevMo yesterday to look for just a regular bottle of Yamazaki and was told they'd been out of stock since April. I went to Mitsuwa, one of the Japanese markets in town, and saw that it wasn't listed on the shelf display of whiskies to ask the cashier to retrieve from the back room. So I grabbed some yokan and broccoli and idly asked the cashier if they had any Yamazaki stashed in the back--and they did. I got a bottle of twelve year.

How is it? It's not peaty at all like Laphroaig. Probably because they don't have peat in Japan. It's closer to Glenlivet but slightly fruitier. It's quite good but not as good as most scotches I've had. Certainly not the revelation that was Laphroaig. I do like it better than Johnnie Walker, though.

I have warmed up to Johnnie Walker since I first had it but I still mainly use it as an ingredient for hot toddies.

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Don't Die, the Economy Needs You

This is Armistice Day, mainly called Veteran's Day in the U.S., so let's talk about soldiers some more. A movie about soldiers released in Japan last year, The Eternal Zero (永遠の0), is one of the top ten grossing films in the history of Japan and was praised by both the Prime Minister and his wife but there doesn't seem to be any plans to release it in the U.S. Perhaps because it portrays the attack on Pearl Harbour in a positive light or perhaps because it simply seems too Japanese. While it does seem specifically designed to shame modern Japanese men into holding themselves to a standard of Bushido machismo, it's a point of view on manliness, and the role of a soldier as a yard stick of manliness, that could have meaning for any culture with a history of patriarchy. It has good performances, and some exciting dogfights, but the film is much more interesting as a cultural artefact than for its intrinsic value.

Yoko Ono has praised the film, focusing, as many of its proponents have, on an apparent pacifist message present in it. The central character, Kyuzo Miyabe, portrayed with charisma and heart by Junichi Okada, is a kamikaze pilot who's determined to survive the war. Many of his comrades consider him a coward though he demonstrates almost supernatural piloting skills. His sorrow felt over the deaths of other pilots is greeted with amazement and scorn.

Miyabe's story is framed by scenes set in modern day where Miyabe's grandchildren, Kentaro (Haruma Miura) and Keiko (Kazue Fukiishi), learn of his existence for the first time at their grandmother's funeral. The reason Miyabe's existence was kept secret is never made clear except to give the grandchildren reason to investigate.

Even this isn't enough to motivate Kentaro, though, whom we see awoken by a phone call from his sister in a room littered with junk food and manga, marking him as a typical NEET--"Not in Education, Employment, or Training", a demographic of young men in Japan that numbers in the hundreds of thousands, exciting no small amount of concern in media and politics. One may wonder how a country that formerly produced pilots willing to fly planes into war ships for the Emperor is now producing men unwilling to do anything but indulge themselves. Keiko has to bribe Kentaro with cash just to get him to come along with her as she interviews surviving World War II pilots who knew Miyabe--she's a freelance writer and she's hoping to find material for a book. And yet, halfway through the interviews, she inexplicably ceases to accompany Kentaro as the movie begins to solely focus on his obsession with his newly discovered grandfather.

Almost everyone they interview calls Miyabe a coward until they meet a man dying of cancer who tells them that Miyabe was as far from a coward as you could get, his abjuring common sentiment about honourable death being a mark of courage. Furthermore, it turns out Miyabe had made a promise to his wife and child--Kentaro's grandmother and mother--to return from the war alive.

After this, Kentaro goes alone to interview two other men who speak of Miyabe with deep reverence. One man is an enormously successful CEO whom Kentaro interviews in his top floor office and the other is a powerful and intimidating yakuza, a gangster.

Although Kentaro is obviously a little wary of him, the yakuza is portrayed in a very positive light, partly because his ability to see Miyabe's virtue is a mark of wisdom. Gangsters have a generally more positive presence in Japanese media than they do in the U.S. largely because the yakuza are a significant political power in Japan--there are anime series and live action sitcoms that portray yakuza as rough edged but ultimately good dads not unlike the traditional U.S. sitcom patriarchs. This isn't Tony Soprano, a complicated man with positive qualities whose criminal tendencies are leading him on a downward spiral, this is more like the kind of person Tony Soprano might see himself as--the model of a man who suffers and works hard to provide for his family. That's also Miyabe and that's also the CEO Kentaro meets.

You would think Kentaro's mother would be at least as interested in learning about her father but she has only a peripheral presence. The film is clearly meant to be an instruction to modern, unmotivated young men; be a CEO, be a principled soldier, be a gang lord. But for goodness sake, think of Japan.

Among the people critical of the film is Hayao Miyazaki who said of it, "They’re trying to make a Zero fighter story based on a fictional war account that is a pack of lies . . . They’re just continuing a phony myth, saying, ‘Take pride in the Zero fighter.’ I’ve hated that sort of thing ever since I was a kid." This is a curious position given the fact that he released a movie the same year, The Wind Rises, which tells the story of the designer of the Zero aircraft in a very romantic and positive light. Perhaps the difference is in the focus of Miyazaki's film on the aircraft designer's passion for creating something beautiful. But more importantly, The Eternal Zero, unlike The Wind Rises, is filled with broad stock characters written more out of a desire to influence others based on an ideology. In this way, The Eternal Zero is not far from the propaganda films that endorsed honourable suicide like Mizoguchi's version of The 47 Ronin from 1941.

Of course, with the suicide rates in Japan being infamously high, Miyabe's condemnation of the basic function of a kamikaze pilot could be taken another way in which the film is attempting to influence young people. But it's ironic that the larger than life expectations of becoming a CEO or a gang boss or an impossibly skilled pilot are just the sort of things that make a worthwhile existence seem unachievable.

Cold Blood In the Sunshine

Is bliss an adequate substitute for passion or self fulfilment? An attractive couple live together in what is essentially paradise in 1969's La Piscine (The Swimming Pool), their indolent day to day routines seeming to revolve mostly around their swimming pool where they answer their own and each other's physical needs. When an old friend comes to visit with his daughter, it becomes a remarkably subtle film about the way people read one another and how they do so to satisfy or protect emotional needs.

Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) is a writer whose latest novel was unsuccessful. His girlfriend, Marianne (Romy Schneider), is a writer, too, though it's not clear what sort of writer--Harry (Maurice Ronet) compliments a published piece of writing that Marianne wrote.

Harry and Jean-Paul are old friends and they've known each other longer than Jean-Paul and Marianne have been together--Marianne is Harry's ex-girlfriend. Harry brings along his remarkably mature looking eighteen year old daughter Penelope (Jane Birkin) whom he seems about as fascinated by as everyone else, if not more so.

We learn that he had only recently discovered Penelope when he went back to visit an old girlfriend. Penelope confides to Jean-Paul that Harry loves to parade her about, delighted when people think she's his girlfriend. She tells Jean-Paul that Harry doesn't really like him, that Harry doesn't like anyone but wants everyone to love him.

Jean-Paul and Penelope seem drawn to each other. Penelope probably because Jean-Paul is played by Alain Delon and he has an an incredibly cool demeanour. Jean-Paul seems like someone extraordinarily self-contained. He doesn't talk much and seems most of the time like a contented cat.

We learn he had quit drinking some time ago overnight and he doesn't seem remotely tempted by the omnipresent bottle of Johnnie Walker. Strangely, the impression I had was that it is depression that keeps him away from it.

Why is he drawn to Penelope? Because he sees her as Harry's possession? He seems slightly ruffled by the instinctive physical intimacy between Marianne and Harry though he seems more surprised by Harry's indelicacy than angry. Is he just bored with Marianne? Is it Penelope's youthful innocence? The viewer is invited to consider all these possibilities and it seems as though Jean-Paul is wondering about the answer, too.

This is a story about two psychologically healthy women and two damaged men. Though of the two, Harry's narcissism seems to be the more obtrusive issue, Jean-Paul's emotional disconnect is stranger and at the same time comes across as a more insightful portrait of humanity. In the latter half of the film, Marianne becomes the point of view character and we join her in wondering just who this man is as, she says, she feels like she's seeing him for the first time. She doesn't even seem sure whether she loves him or hates him.