Failure to Control Nature at Every Level

A strange creature threatens man's domain and there's also a giant octopus in 1955's It Came from Beneath the Sea. This giant monster or kaiju film has some really impressive effects from Ray Harryhausen but most of the movie is about a budding romance between a submarine captain and a marine biologist. The movie's perspective on sexual politics is adorable and fascinating in its apparent awkward sincerity. And one really ought to wonder, what can we make of the modern, professional woman when confronted with a giant octopus?

Obviously very influenced by the original Godzilla which came out in Japan the year before, this American film also features a monster from the depths of the sea who's awoken by nuclear testing. And, like Godzilla, it features a love triangle involving two men, a ship's captain and a scientist, and a woman. In Godzilla, the woman is the daughter of an older scientist while in It Came from Beneath the Sea, the woman is a scientist herself.

Faith Domergue as Professor Lesley Joyce puts the cheese in cheesecake as she plays the role with the knowing smirk of a streetwise chanteuse. At one point, she uses her feminine wiles to get a sailor to open up about encountering the monster. She has him light her cigarette and sits on the table in front of him.

She's great. I couldn't stop smiling whenever she was on screen.

The Navy captain, Pete (Kenneth Tobey), doesn't know what to make of this woman and is surprised when she's offended when he wants her to break off attending a conference in Cairo just for him. Of course, he still has the right to extort her into dancing with him at the hotel, taking her insistence she doesn't want to as a "yes"--which ends up being apparently the case when she kisses him later.

While she may be okay for identifying an octopus, it takes the male scientist, John Carter (Donald Curtis)(no relation to the hero on Mars), to team up with Pete for some undersea fighting to actually defeat the thing. In Godzilla, the male scientist is driven mad by jealousy when the woman breaks up with him favour of the ship's captain. But while John had seemed to be interested in Lesley, he doesn't seem to take it hard at all when she chooses Pete over him. He ends up being kind of superfluous, mainly there as an initial obstacle for Pete and then he's there to do the manly yet scientific things that Lesley can't do.

Godzilla featured mainstream stars like Takashi Shimura, it was directed by Ishiro Honda who'd been assistant director to Akira Kurosawa, and had music by one of the great film composers of Japanese film in the 50s and 60s, Masaru Sato. It Came from Beneath the Sea actually had a pretty good composer, Mischa Bakaleinikoff (though I'd swear I was hearing a lot of Wagner), but mainly all the star quality was in Ray Harryhausen.

That octopus outperforms all the actors. A sequence where men with flamethrowers fend off a tentacle in particular holds up surprisingly well.

It's the Throne Game

Last night I dreamt I was at a big outdoor concert festival like Coachella and a guy asked me to watch an ant he was fighting while he used a port-o-potty. The big black ant ended up being about the size of a cat and it was just standing there wiggling its head in the air. I couldn't believe I was seeing such a large ant so I started taking pictures, feeling slightly frustrated there was nothing near the ant to show the scale. Then a little black Scottish Terrier attacked it and it ran. I chased after the two, following them into a network of caves but I had to stop because Donald Trump blocked my path. The dog and the ant raced past him. He was saying something to me about how horrible he thought Jews and black people are and he started talking about troubled youth and blamed the problem on their "parent nets".

"You mean parents?" I asked and he admitted he meant parents. I realised I was taking video with my camera and I was about to start asking Trump some questions that would show how foolish he was in a satisfying way when Trump said to someone behind me, "You need to lose weight."

I looked back and Kyle MacLachlan was reclining on a chaise lounge dressed as Agent Cooper. He shrugged and smiled. He didn't seem that heavy but I said, "Well, after all those years of doughnuts and cherry pies, it would make sense for him to be fatter."

Nothing in my dream was apparently inspired by last night's Game of Thrones but it was my favourite episode of the season so far. Though it still feels a bit like the show is in fast-forward.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Although I would have liked to have spent some time on the road with Brienne, Podrick, and Sansa getting to know each other, it was really nice seeing Sansa and Jon reunite. Now we see why Jon has been struck with the inexplicable reluctance to help anyone, it was to give Sansa something to take charge about. Well, good for her.

Meanwhile, Cersei takes control of the situation in King's Landing politics, Daenerys becomes the first woman to rule over all the tribes of the Dothraki, and Yara finds she might have a shot at being the first female ruler of the Iron Islands thanks to the timely arrival of a mutilated and cowed Theon. Let's not forget that the Sand Snakes took over Dorne so it looks like we're seeing a spontaneous feminist revolution in the world of Game of Thrones. That's a whole lot of coincidence in these supposedly patriarchal cultures but, hell, why not. It's fun, it's fantasy.

It's a shame poor Margaery is benched for it but she and the High Sparrow had my favourite version of the repeated scene where the High Sparrow comes off as really nice and humble despite being at the head of a group of mute, weird assholes. Jonathan Pryce sells that story about being a cobbler and we share the feeling Margaery seems to be having of slight entrancement. This season is actually making the High Sparrow seem credibly dangerous and I'd say it's almost entirely due to Pryce.

Although, here's a lighting tip--if a character is using her hand to shield her eyes from the light, you should probably make it so that her hand is shielding her eyes from the light.

Seeing Tyrion getting the ball rolling on some possibly brilliant, possibly disastrous political manoeuvring was great, vintage Tyrion.

It was nice to see that beautiful location again in the reintroduction of Littlefinger. Is it Ireland? Anyway, it's gorgeous.

With Davos bringing up Shireen to Melisandre, I wonder if by some implausible means the truth that Stannis sacrificed Shireen at Melisandre's urging is going to come out. Realistically, it shouldn't, but according to melodrama logic it will inevitably come out. I hope not, I don't think anything interesting can come out of it. It'll probably end up with an argument between Davos and Melisandre that comes to nothing. It's so hard not to type "Davros". Now that would be interesting.

Well, just when we thought we'd seen the last of Emilia Clarke's boobs, there they were, making the dramatic reappearance Game of Thrones is known for. I know, it's not exactly the same as a character from three seasons ago unexpectedly returning but, then, it kind of is. We got to know these boobs over the years and then they were gone. Just like Kit Harrington was doing all kinds of press about how Jon Snow was truly dead, Emilia Clarke was going around saying she wasn't doing nude scenes anymore. As Clarke put it:

"I'd like to remind people the last time I took my clothes off was season 3. That was awhile ago. It's now season 6. But this is all me, all proud, all strong. I'm just feeling genuinely happy I said 'Yes.' That ain't no body double!"

Which is great, I'm glad she feels empowered by it, regardless of what Bette Midler might tweet at Kim Kardashian. Only . . . Well, the shot is actually kind of awkwardly framed. Really, it should have been a full body shot and then maybe an extreme close-up of her face. A waist up shot says, "This is how much we're allowed to show." A full shot says, "This is what the people watching, ostensibly the POV, are seeing," while an extreme close-up would be, "This is what the people watching are focusing on," as well as giving us the emotional perspective of the character, an extreme close-up reflecting the power of her will.

I know, I know, there's no pleasing some people. Really, I thought it was a badass moment, a pleasing echo of Daenerys' badass moments from previous seasons.

There was really only one scene I genuinely didn't like and of course it was Ramsay's scene. I had no particular investment in Osha--I didn't love her or hate her. It's not that I minded that she was killed after only just recently showing up again after two or three years, but there are too many layers of implausibility in the scene;

1) Why is she there at all? Why did the bearded guy think Ramsay would care about some random Wildling?

2) Why did Ramsay have her bathed and brought to him if he was just going to execute her?

3) Why is Ramsay able to kill her so easily? I know, he's been established as a martial arts badass, but since that didn't make sense to begin with, I don't see any reason why I shouldn't remind everyone that still doesn't make sense.

Oh, well. It was a mostly good episode. I'm glad Julian Glover got a scene that restored some of the mystery about his character.

A Mad Spiral in Copenhagen

Bad luck and incompetence may combine to make a really bad week. A drug dealer named Frank in Nicolas Winding Refn's 1996 film Pusher finds himself in a perfect storm as multiple accumulated bad decisions abruptly come crashing down on his head. He finds himself desperately bullying his way through the Copenhagen criminal underground in this nicely brutal piece of gangster cinema.

My exposure to Nicolas Winding Refn's films as so far been from within the past ten years--Valhalla Rising, Drive, and Only God Forgives. So after those extremely stylised films of carefully composed artificial lighting, frequent slow motion, and deliberately glacial acting, it was surprising to find he'd begun with such a naturalistic film. Maybe not too surprising given it's harder to make the kind of carefully constructed art pieces of those later films on an indie beginner's budget. And there are some scenes in Pusher, particularly in bars and nightclubs, that seem to presage the director's current stylistic predilections.

Here a woman at the bar rebuffs some crude, rough flirtations from Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen) while Frank (Kim Bodnia) covers his face in laughter. A moment later, the two men kiss on the lips, the two having a closer relationship than either has with any of the women in their lives. Tonny describes pissing on a girl's face in a car ride while Frank talks now and then about Vic (Laura Drasbaek), a prostitute he stays with but doesn't like to have sex with.

Whether or not there's repressed homosexuality beneath the drug addled machismo is never explicitly addressed because most of the movie is about Frank desperately trying to collect debts from buyers after a deal goes bad and he finds himself suddenly owing a massive amount of money to his supplier.

I don't know anything about being a drug dealer but it seems to me Frank is extraordinarily bad at it. He's apparently given drugs to all kinds of people on credit. When he goes to deliver on the big deal that goes wrong, he just gets into the car with the prospective buyer, unarmed, and carrying the drugs. It's no wonder he finds himself in hot water. I said he had bad luck, but thinking about it now, it's a wonder he's lived this long.

Mind you, this isn't a criticism of the movie but of the character. Frank's incompetence is a wonderful source of tension. He, Tonny, and Vic are all characters with that sense of addicts who simultaneously put everything on the surface and suppress everything. Vic talks about how she's not a whore but a "champagne girl" and how she could do anything she wants but she just doesn't want to.

Winding Refn is often--and justifiably (as he is apparently first to admit)--criticised for not writing women as effectively as he writes men. But the pretty standard concept of the deluded prostitute takes on plenty of life thanks to the naturalistic lighting and Laura Drasbaek's portrayal of the character whom she infuses with a very credible vulnerable obstinacy.

But it's Frank's misguided belief in his own strength that's centre stage here. As we watch him make one obviously bad decision after another, usually involving him beating someone or begging for money with a stone face, we wonder how on Earth he expects this to work while finding it absolutely believable that he does.

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Through turquoise sky the lightning bleeds of years.
In sinks of scratched and greying paint are bills.
A whitefly eats a dollar hid by peers.
The melted throne attracts the ants by hills.
Ornate investors clink along the bank.
A cube of ice the size of Spain relaxed.
Geometry once melted breaks the tank.
No car in sight the cherry's not yet taxed.
The uncrushed thought, velvet too loud in hand.
The steeple turned, a dropper caught in rise.
A step is manifold, a copy band.
The burning moons insist from spinach pies.
The golem eyes of cheese misspoke for green.
Hors d'oeuvres in space took on a slimy sheen.

The Fatigue of the Cloister Bells

This is my current desktop wallpaper--it's one of about 40 pictures my desktop cycles through every thirty minutes. It's a promotion photo from Tom Baker's last season as the Doctor on Doctor Who (making it 1981-ish). Those faces speak volumes. Tegan (Janet Fielding) and Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), so chipper and happy to be there, to score such a nice gig. Baker, meanwhile, seems barely able to conceal his lack of enthusiasm. He began his run as the free spirited fellow with the orange scarf; seven years later and the curl's just about gone out of his hair and he just wants it to be over. Doctor Who was moving from Dionysian to Apollonian. No more improvisations, the humour and horror always so close to the hearts of Baker, Holmes, Hinchcliffe and Adams. Now was the time for Christopher Bidmead to put it all in a tight can in which Baker couldn't fit.

It's wonderful how the audio plays have given better stories to the Fifth and Sixth Doctors than they had in their run, a couple miracles like The Caves of Androzani notwithstanding.

Last night I listened to a Sixth Doctor audio play from 2007 called The Wishing Beast. With Colin Baker as the Doctor and Bonnie Langford as his companion Mel, it's possibly the worst Doctor/Companion combo from the television series but it works in this decently written audio. The Doctor and Mel receive a transmission from a couple young women who turn out to be a couple very old women living in a house in the woods. They're taking care of a "wishing beast" with which they seem to have a peculiar relationship. It has a wonderfully creepy atmosphere assisted in no small part by the fact that none other than Jean Marsh plays one of the women. These audio plays do get some impressive guest stars. I wonder if there's any chance of her appearing on the television series. As Sara Kingdom, the character she played on Doctor Who in the 60s, or as Morgana Le Fay, whom she played on Doctor Who in 1989 (basically she was reprising her role as the evil queen from the Ron Howard movie Willow), or as someone new. Maybe 1989 counts as too recent. I seem to remember there being an unspoken rule instituted on the show that guest stars had to wait three years before appearing again as another character. It seems a waste to have her only on audio if she's game for more.

On I Dream of Michael Rooker

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone. I always seem to have a nice day on Friday the 13th. I may stand an especially good shot because I had a rather unlucky day yesterday. While I was cleaning the oatmeal bowl I've used almost every morning for five or six years, it slipped in my hand and broke on the sink, cutting my left pinkie. Then I ended up wasting hours making a chess arena in Second Life that ending up being unusable because the castle walls construction pack I bought had parts that disappear when the camera's only a short distance away. From the full bag of potatoes I had for dinner, it turned out all of them were emerald green and had to be thrown away, so I had rice and made a mess making tortillas for quesadillas. Then, around the sweet potato I'd had growing in a mason jar for almost a year, I noticed swarms of tiny white flies when I tried to trim it so I had to throw it away. But my day was still better than Daryl's in episode five of The Walking Dead, season two.

Spoilers for The Walking Dead season 2 after the screenshot

I can see why everyone likes Daryl now. Just when I was wondering if I could get any further through the "Who the Baby Daddy?" story in the excruciatingly shallow Rick/Lori/Shane love triangle, Daryl's horse throws him, he falls to the bottom of a hill, and has to fight two zombies after being impaled by his own crossbow arrow. He didn't have to wear their ears as trophies, he probably didn't have to eat a dead squirrel, but I'm so glad he did.

And Michael Rooker as Merle came back! Sort of, in visions. I hope he comes back for real.

I love that Daryl believes in Chupacabra, too. He presumably has some of the same bigotry as his brother but there's a stunted innocence about him that's really sweet. If it were the Merle and Daryl show, the dysfunctional redneck brothers after the apocalypse, I'd be really happy with The Walking Dead. If the show does turn out that way, though, don't tell me, I'm trying to avoid spoilers.

It's a Marvel World

With nearly every review of 2016's Captain America: Civil War talking about how it succeeds in precisely the ways Batman v Superman failed, for me to do the same would feel like piling on at this point. So I'd like to talk about how Civil War succeeds in all the ways Batman v Superman failed. Because I want to kick it when it's down. When one of the cynical contraptions designed to keep money flowing through unimaginative douchebags falls down we should put as many nails in its coffin as possible. And Civil War is a marvellous piece of Marvel in its own right and I enjoy recognising that even more.

Unlike the the deck stacked against Superman from the beginning of the film, where we only see the collateral damage and very little of the saving Superman's meant to be doing, the Avengers have a good track record of saving people. Age of Ultron even had Captain America specifically talk about getting civilians out of harm's way. But when you're toppling buildings left and right at breakneck speed, some casualties are inevitable. These superheroes are weapons of mass destruction and some U.N. oversight is pretty reasonable though Tony Stark needs to meet with a grieving mother of collateral damage before he's convinced.

Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow asks William Hurt as a government rep what happens if the Avengers simply don't agree to U.N. oversight. Which speaks to an ironic fact that manifests over the course of the film in a natural way--the U.N. can impose laws on superheroes all they want, and presumably they're already bound by the same laws that govern civilians, but when the only people who can stop a superhero when he or she decides to go rogue are other superheroes, then whether or not the superheroes agree to those laws seems like kind of a moot point.

Except, as Paul Bettany's the Vision points out, it leads to some dangerously arrogant thinking. Shouldn't the Avengers at least agree to making the symbolic gesture? The fundamental argument here is between two very real, very old ideological perspectives: is submitting to the law abdicating personal liberty or is it recognising the responsibility inherent in it? Spider-Man's in this movie but he never says, "With great power comes great responsibility," thank goodness.

Todd Holland is great in the role, by the way. I love that they've put him back in high school and of all the film incarnations this one feels most like the original comic book character in the early 60s. Here's the awkward kid really excited by all this weird stuff with a genuine desire to do good. He beautifully brings in a reminder of the original motivation to be a superhero, something Batman v Superman completely lacks. The adorable scene where Tony Stark and Peter Parker meet presents wonderful chemistry between the actors with Robert Downey Jr.'s Stark being something like an older brother; a mentor but one who has to take a pause--which the innocent Peter doesn't see--when the kid reminds him what's important without trying.

Robert Downey Jr., at this late stage, brings the most interesting performance and character to the film. Just when one might have been justified in thinking both were worn out, Stark is not only the most conflicted character in the film, hidden under a desperate layer of bravado, but he presents the most convincing argument for and against the regulation of superheroes, unintentionally, with his actions. The movie reminds us--in a way that, again, Batman v Superman failed to--just what it means to be personally affected by that collateral damage.

Chadwick Boseman is good as Black Panther and he's the one who most internalises the struggle over the justification of vengeance. I wasn't impressed by Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch in Age of Ultron but under the guidance of the Russo Brothers she becomes the dark opposite of Peter Parker, a young person with great abilities who's already had to face the fact of how dangerous she is. Olsen's very effective, her scenes with the Vision working very well, almost as well as Anna Paquin in the first X-Men movie.

The writing, the action scenes, the characters--in every way, Civil War crushes Batman v Superman. There's one more aspect I'd like to draw particular attention to: the casting. Not only is there no-one grievously miscast in the way Ben Affleck was, Civil War benefits from the MCU's tradition of pitch perfect casting it's enjoyed since the first Iron Man. There's no-one better suited for the role of Tony Stark than Robert Downey Jr.; Tom Holland is the perfect slightly weird, straight shooter kid; Paul Rudd's face somehow reminds me of ants, even. And Scarlett Johansson, well. You just can't go wrong with her. Okay, she probably shouldn't be cast as Miss Havisham but for anyone in her age group, let's say.

Twitter Sonnet #870

The bending choc'late coats the ground at dusk.
The party ends with grapes again so late.
A leg protrudes from awls affixed to husk.
Appropriate, the tool permits the gate.
A push at odds was deemed a pull of space.
Now checked unpaid-for shirts cay they're striped.
A maple tear descends from plastic face.
Through hearts the music beep was roughly piped.
When ants and spiders danced the world was won.
The war of conflicts fell to mouse's ears.
In cookies brought from home there's never sun.
In dreams of phones the thumbs were all in tears.
At twenty feet the walls will disappear.
An age's bowl was broke for time's vizier.

Root Territory

We should count ourselves lucky nature doesn't generally seem to know what it's doing. A young family finds out just how bad it can be to earn the wrath of powerful forest beings in 2015's The Hallow, a rigorously effective horror film reliant on sharp but subtle character work.

Adam (Joseph Mawle) and Claire (Bojana Novakovic) have come to live in a beautiful old house in a remote, beautiful Irish forest. Unfortunately, they're there because Adam is working with a company preparing to deforest the area. The local people try to warn Adam and Claire about the Hallow, or fae folk, who will not look kindly on trespassers. A scientist, Adam doesn't listen, of course.

The film begins with a wonderful piece of tension as Adam wanders the woods, taking samples of weird black goo, with his and Claire's baby Finn in a harness on his back. One has to remember Adam doesn't know he's in a horror movie before saying, "Why the hell are you going into that creepy cottage with your baby on your back? Why are you handing weird goo when you have your baby?!" But it's entirely credible. People probably do get too accustomed to carrying their babies everywhere and just don't think, particularly a scientist on the trail of some weird new organism.

So the Hallow appear to have some basis in fantasy science. I wonder if audiences would accept the idea of them being magical anymore. Maybe not. Otherwise, from amongst the influences cited by director Corin Hardy, the film most resembles The Evil Dead as the bulk of the movie features the protagonists fighting for their lives against a menace from the dark woods at night whose powers are unpredictable and possibly unstoppable.

There's even a book that resembles The Evil Dead's version of the Necronomicon.

Unlike The Evil Dead, though, there are a few consistent ground rules. Like the fact that the Hallow are put off by iron and light. The latter makes the film's bad lighting choices particularly unfortunate. I always dislike bright flood lights used for night in the country--the potential for tension from a realistically pitch black forest was mined again and again in cheaper horror films from the 70s. Here, though, it's a particularly odd choice when Adam and Claire are trying to get the generator working to turn on the house lights while it appears to be broad daylight outside.

Some of the lighting makes the forest look really pretty but there are other ways to create beauty on screen that doesn't sabotage the logic of the horror.

The only other problem I had with the film was its pretty unimaginative sound design. The Hallow make that same dry throat clucking noise the ghost kids from Japanese horror films make. I wonder if there's a name for it.

Visually, the Hallow are great combinations of costumes and make-up with really lovely designs that support the concept of it being some kind of disease that causes derangement along with physical changes.

The movie mainly works, though, because of the constant sense of guilt that comes along with the punishment the Hallow seek to inflict on Adam and his family. Adam loves nature and he has to deal with the fact that he works for a company that wants to destroy it, something he may have suppressed but is forced to face in the form of living monsters.

An Unfamiliar Cat

Well, it's the end of the semester. I know this because I saw End of the Semester Cat to-day. The last time this cat approached me was at the end of last semester. It's not so strange, maybe--I took the trolley almost all semester this time so I only parked in the neighbourhood off-campus where the cat lives a few times. I saved a whole lot of money I otherwise would've spent on gasoline by taking the trolley and I was able to do a lot of reading.

End of the Semester Cat started calling out to me from quite across the street and then ran out to meet me. She has a good memory. She also left the moment I started to leave so I think she's good at reading body language and taking cues.

I took a final exam to-day for a class on literary criticism. The exam was partly on a novel from 2000 called White Teeth by Zadie Smith. She was only in her twenties when it was published so I had to overcome jealousy while reading it. It's not a bad book though it's not my cup of tea being a Post-Modernist examination of normal people in first and second generation immigrant culture. I had to write an essay on the book for class and in doing so I came across an interview with Zadie Smith where she said something I really love:

It was lovely to have such a large audience with White Teeth, but it was unnerving to have people come up to me and say, "I love this part of the book" -- and it's the part of the book that is similar to their own life. So the Indian guy will say, "I loved Samad, but I didn't like that stuff with Archie at the end." The black woman will tell me, "I loved Hortense, but why all that stuff about the kids?" You want people to read the thing that isn't them. I abhor the idea, if you're an unmarried woman in your early thirties, of reading Bridget Jones; or if you're a guy in your late thirties, of reading Nick Hornby. You want to swap those books around. All across western readership people want this comfort reading. They want to have a reflection of themselves. I think really great fiction doesn't always give you that. I never pick up a book about a young, mixed-race woman in London. That doesn't interest me. And, of course, that's the book I get sent constantly by publishers. They think I want to read books about young, mixed race girls in London. That's the last thing I ever want to do.

Yes. So many wrong-headed reviews and reactions I see to books and movies come from people complaining they had no-one to identify with because there was no-one who resembled them in some superficial way. One of the greatest things about art is that it allows you to step into someone else's shoes. Wanting someone like you in a novel is like going to France and wanting to eat at McDonalds. That people are losing touch with this suggests to me a diminishing of empathy and imagination.

If Looks Could See

Ah, how nice to wake up in the afterglow of HBO's five or six drips of story from Game of Thrones. There were some satisfying moments last night and a few disappointing missed opportunities.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Just as she was about to become Zatoichi with a quarterstaff, Arya's given her sight back. Already! Three episodes in. It makes it all feel a bit pointless. I can understand, though--she's the point of view character in a place that already messes with the senses. It's hard to have a blind point of view character in visual media--you can do it in books or audio plays but whenever you can see things a character can't that immediately puts you on different footing from them. I wonder if Arya's blindness might last a bit longer if George R.R. Martin ever publishes a book again, though.

Yeah, I'm beginning to doubt he ever will. Not that I've read any of the books he has published but I feel kind of sorry about it because the show was much better written back when it had plenty of source material to burn through.

So we still can't see Jon Snow's penis, which is purportedly smaller than Jesus', but that's okay because we also can't see Daenerys' breasts due to her refusal to show her body from now on. She giddily expressed her reasons recently on a talk show as being a lack of balance between the number of women's breasts and men's penises. Which reminds me for all the dragons we've seen on the show we've seen no comparable number of basilisks, which is obviously a crime. We have seen some penises and I'm pretty sure we've seen zero vaginas. But who's keeping score? I suppose I might be too jaded to know how breasts rank on the immoral meter.

The real disappointing thing, though, was seeing Melisandre look so excited to see her magic actually worked but before she could say much of anything Davos inexplicably kicked her out of the room--with which she inexplicably complied--just so he could say, ain't this shit weird?

And then, after all the trouble they went through, Snow hangs up his cloak and stalks off. Why did they go to the trouble, anyway, especially after the Wildings had taken over Castle Black? What did they need Jon for, exactly?

Well, I should talk about the good stuff. Nice to see Diana Rigg and Julian Glover back though Glover being reduced to a fart joke was pretty sad after the trouble the show had gone to to suggest there might be something more to him. Jonathan Pryce was wonderfully effective in his creepy sit down with Tommen.

Apparently Varys' "little birds" were children? So he's had time in Meereen to give out enough candy without anyone noticing and develop a network of kids? Good thing suddenly the Sons of the Harpy aren't able to pop up anywhere they want in gold masks. Blocked by Tyrion's mojo, I guess, or the writers, as usual, not being interested in thinking through the logistics.

Skyrim sure has paid off for Max von Sydow who after his voice in the trailer, along with the great music, basically sold the game for Bethesda was quickly cast in Star Wars and Game of Thrones. His role here is much better than in Force Awakens. I still don't care about Bran but it's cool having the knight from Seventh Seal guiding us through flashbacks of the show's lore.

Finally, yes, it was nice to see Ramsay finally being slapped down by reality a little bit. Of course, realistically, the bearded guy shouldn't have a hard time organising a coup against a prick whose duplicity and sadism is well known. Roose was right last week in his line about a mad dog being put down but in this case the mad dog has somehow been able to coast through several fox hunts. The sooner Ramsay is written out the better.

Is there any reason for Ramsay to keep Rickon alive? I suppose he probably will but I can't think of a reason currently. To torture him? I guess Ramsay might be that stupid. Not sure why Ramsay was meant to care about Osha.

Twitter Sonnet #869

A beige and black spherical bean came down.
Identical the belt was looped for farms.
The last red sequin broke the backless gown.
We call the straws what polls would call our charms.
Two pines have redefined the fruit of lungs.
The upside down echo condensed a thumb.
A finger taped beneath the desk expunged,
The team can now proceed into the crumb.
An ashen knee surprised the picnic bad.
They thought somewhere within the bog were ghosts.
A small construction crew revealed the lad.
Around the bones were packed the peat and hosts.
A stutt'ring internet in protest drools.
The shining tape reluctantly unspools.

Dream Colour versus Reality

It's fine and easy enough to say you're going to live according to your own principles and not give a damn what anyone says but the practical reality of doing so can be pretty rough. A wealthy widow finds this out when she tries to marry a younger man with a meagre income in 1955's All That Heaven Allows. Directed by Douglas Sirk, the intense Technicolor at work breathes life into a story that would seem otherwise peculiarly tame.

Akira Kurosawa was late to colour film--he didn't make one until the late 60s--and his complaint was that colour films looked like postcards. Maybe he had All That Heaven Allows in mind but I found it absolutely wonderful. There's a world created here, not just with colour but also shadows, I want to crawl into and just relax a while. Look at the powerful blue dress on Agnes Moorehead.

She's not the star of the film, she plays the best friend of Cary, played by Jane Wyman, who has two kids in college, the father, Cary's husband, having died a couple years earlier. In the country club social circle, several older men are eager to fill the vacant space in Cary's home. No-one can handle it when Cary chooses her gardener, Ron (Rock Hudson).

Jane Wyman was 38 years old in this movie, which makes the other characters treating her as old seem funny, though it is mentioned in dialogue she had one of her kids at seventeen so it technically adds up. What's really funny about it is how stark an example it provides of Hollywood's weird treatment of women when they hit 35. In 1948, seven years earlier, Wyman won an Academy Award for playing a childlike young woman in Johnny Belinda. In 1950, she played a kid just trying to make her break as an actress in Stage Fright. Five years later, she's an old lady.

Rock Hudson was only eight years younger than her but that is a pretty abnormal spread for a Hollywood picture in the 50s--unless it's a movie starring Joan Crawford or Marlene Dietrich. Neither Hudson or Wyman give bad performances but they're not exactly amazing, either--Hudson has that distinctly 1950s way of answering a woman's concern with a smug "Uh huh." The writing isn't bad, especially if you take it as code for a more transgressive relationship, like the mixed race couple portrayed in the 2002 film Far from Heaven which pretty heavily drew inspiration from All That Heaven Allows.

All That Heaven Allows sets up a conflict between a hazy, mainstream impression of Sigmund Freud and a somewhat firmer grasp of the writings of Henry David Thoreau. Cary's daughter, Kay (Gloria Talbott), handily delivers exposition on society's impressions of what an older widow should do with her life, inaccurately quoting Freud on the subject and giving a glib, imprecise definition of the Oedipal complex when her brother complains about Cary's red dress. After Kay learns about Cary's relationship with Ron, the certainty of Movie Freud deserts her as she falls to weeping beneath a Technicolor glass rainbow.

At the home of Ron's vaguely beatnik friends, Cary finds an open copy of Walden and is deeply moved by two quotes combined for the film:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Though as one of the rich old men points out at a cocktail party Cary takes Ron to, one has to have money in order to afford the luxury of being disgusted by it. The movie never provides a counterargument for this, nor, of course, does it mention that Thoreau was pretty well off himself. But like Thoreau's work, there's a real beauty in the film's celebration of personal liberty.

Don't Leave the Pond

I took this picture of a crow across the street from where I live yesterday. In the general see-sawing of the weather, the past couple of days have been cool and rainy. The pendulum swings back to hot about a week from now. It really feels much more like early spring than May in the way Autumn has become hotter than summer.

At the university yesterday, I came across this turtle making steady progress up a hill.

He was striding confidently away from the koi pond towards the hard, inhospitable library. Probably the rain had confused him. I picked him up and carried him back, setting him on the edge of the pond.

He just looked at me as though to say, "What's your problem?" I imagine with all the students normally clustered around the pond the turtles are pretty used to people.

I hope he didn't immediately resume his march the moment I left.

I only had time to listen to one Doctor Who audio play this week, a 2007 story called Valhalla. It's interesting for apparently being a Seventh Doctor story set not long before the events of the TV movie that introduced the Eighth Doctor--he's travelling alone and thinking about hanging up his hat, applying to a career placement office on Jupiter's moon, Callisto. It features Michelle Gomez, who currently plays Missy on the television series, as a one-off companion named Jevvan. So she's met both the Scottish Doctors.

She's very good, too, giving some imaginative inflection to lines for a character who's basically an average office clerk. The story, written by Marc Platt, who wrote the very good Seventh Doctor television story Ghost Light, is not terribly remarkable, being an alien invasion in the midst of a colonial revolution. But it's pretty good for that.