Boats and Pharaohs

What if Moses was a brain surgeon? 1954's The Egyptian is a lavish sand and sandal film about a physician in Egypt who was found as a baby abandoned in a little boat of reeds on the river. The movie has some spectacle, some beautifully garish Technicolor, beautiful women, good performances, and a plot with a few intriguing ideas sadly lacking in much natural character interaction.

The two best characters in the film aren't even the top billed stars--Bella Darvi as the Babylonian enchantress Nefer and Peter Ustinov as the one eyed servant, Kaptah.

There's not much to Kaptah--he's a thief who for no particular reason pleads with the orphan physician, Sinuhe (Edmund Purdom), to take him on as a servant. His antics--calling out for a crowd to promote his master while he's healing someone or lifting some food from a market stall while Sinuhe argues with the owner--aren't very original pieces of business but Ustinov makes the man so wonderfully human, particularly compared to Edmund Purdom's endlessly dreary, stiff performance as the main character.

The name Sinuhe comes from an ancient Egyptian story, one that apparently bears little resemblance to the story depicted in The Egyptian or the book its based on, though I wouldn't be surprised if the original tale has some similarities to Moses' story. In any case, the resemblance is certainly played up in the film--it's almost the exact opposite of Moses, actually. Instead of an infant from a marginalised group being taken in by royalty, it's a royal infant taken in by a poor brain surgeon and his family.

Yes, brain surgery. The adoptive father of Sinuhe is the only one who has the secret knowledge of curing people by cutting their heads open, a knowledge he passes on to Sinuhe. So I guess Sinuhe didn't wind up with just any poor family. His best friend, too, is auspicious--Horemheb, played by Victor Mature, one of several characters in the film based on a real person.

Sinuhe and Horemheb save the Pharaoh (Michael Wilding) from a lion and so Sinuhe is made court physician and Horemheb becomes captain of the guard. But from here the story immediately gets sidetracked as Sinuhe is seduced by the beautiful Nefer.

In a movie that also has Jean Simmons and Gene Tierney it's saying something that Darvi is the standout. She's terrific in a role that's pretty badly written, a role, according to Wikipedia, Marilyn Monroe coveted but was given to the virtually unknown Polish actress who was destined to star in only three Hollywood films because she was the lover of producer Darryl Zanuck. I recommend reading Darvi's Wikipedia entry which tells about the beautiful, openly bisexual Jewish actress who was imprisoned by the Nazis when she was a child and committed suicide in 1971.

Sinuhe still seems improbably dumb for giving her the deeds to his and his parents' houses even though she never asked for them but in this clumsily conceived seduction plot Darvi's charm works magnificently. Even an Atlas of charm couldn't hold up this turkey but Darvi does have some help from the Technicolor, simulated nudity (flesh coloured underwear), and Bernard Herrmann's score.

The film, atypically, has two credited composers--Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman--it's in the scenes with Darvi that Herrmann's contributions are unmistakable and one hears something of the Wagnerian, cycling strings from Vertigo in the scenes between Sinuhe and Nefer. If Purdom had been a decent actor, the scenes might have even overcome the screenplay. If only someone working on the film had had the idea to swap Wilding's and Purdom's roles.

Of course, it almost wouldn't be a 1950s sand and sandal epic without Jean Simmons who plays an innocent barmaid who falls in love with Sinuhe. She only has one decent scene in this one where she meets Sinuhe at home to try to draw him away from Nefer. When she talks about the men she's studied in the tavern and how Sinuhe's the shy sort who, because they're afraid of being happy with a good woman they end up falling for a dangerous one, might have come across as insightful if Nefer actually came across as responsible for all the stupid things Sinuhe does.

As sister of the Pharaoh, Gene Tierney has a small but important role, this from the period in Tierney's career when severe depression and physical illness were getting in the way of her memorising lines. But she has great presence and looks perfect in costume. The film also has Henry Daniell in a small but very effective role as a sinister high priest.

His priests are trying to maintain their customs despite a Pharaoh who's decided to push a monotheistic worship of the sun god Aten, apparently something that the Pharaoh Akhenaten, whom Wilding plays, actually did. Though the movie, with Sinuhe's Moses stuff, embellishes the similarities of the Aten worship to Judaism and Christianity a great deal. It's interesting the filmmakers felt such a strong urge to support Christian morals even in fantasy a story set over a thousand years before Christ. Though they don't seem to have thought it through very well as the events in the film implicate God in the pointless slaughter of hundreds of innocent people.

Each Doctor is Unique

Reading about the lawsuit brought against Led Zeppelin recently claiming "Stairway to Heaven" rips off a song called "Taurus" by Spirit, I was amused by the fact that Jimmy Page has apparently invoked "Chim Chim Cher-ee" from Mary Poppins on the witness stand. A music expert brought on by Zeppelin's lawyers testified that the chord progression at issue has been in use for 300 years. It seems like a lot of unnecessary trouble--listening to "Taurus" I can hear a slight resemblance but suggesting Led Zeppelin ripped off Spirit seems like saying The Sopranos ripped off Johnny Eager. I'm no music expert but it seems like an argument only capable of swaying people much more ignorant than me. But that doesn't stop me from trying to hear "Stairway to Heaven" in "Chim Chim Cher-ee".

Here's a pretty fascinating video that walks through the very long history of songs that use the chord progression:

The Sixth Doctor continues to improve his reputation thanks to good writing in the Doctor Who audio plays. I listened to 100 last night, an anthology audio play from 2007 that features four approximately thirty minute stories by different writers, including one by Robert Shearman--in fact his latest one to date. I am still truly puzzled as to why he hasn't written more for the television series given how well received his Ninth Doctor episode "Dalek" was--and the audio play he wrote, Jubilee, which "Dalek" was based on, is even better. I can just imagine what he'd do with a two part episode of the kind that the 2015 season was made of.

Shearman wrote "My Own Private Wolfgang", the second story in the 100 set, which features John Sessions as Mozart. The story begins with the Doctor (Colin Baker) dragging his companion Evelyn (Maggie Stables) to a Mozart concert despite the fact that she's not interested in the mediocre musician whose latest CDs end up in the bargain bin. The story thus begins with the amusing idea that our timeline, the actual timeline, is one that's going to be created by the end of this Doctor Who story. But it ends up being more delightfully complex than that and before the end the Doctor and Evelyn find an argument that's not very clear involving futuristic clones of Mozart and scones. It's a very funny audio, different from Shearman's others which tend to be effectively scary.

"Bedtime Story" by Joseph Lidster follows and is a bit more nightmarish--also very clever having the Doctor and Evelyn visit the family of one of Evelyn's former students to find that this family has for generations lived with the fact that every time a new one of them is born one of the older members of the family simultaneously dies. It's an interesting metaphor for the sentimentalised "circle of life". It has Frank Finlay as an older member of the family.

The first story in the set is "100 BC" by Jacqueline Rayner, another of the nice history nerd stories I've been digging in the monthly audios. This one begins with the Doctor and Evelyn strolling through ancient Rome, 101 BC, as the Doctor tells her who is and isn't born yet. When Evelyn wants to see Cicero, the Doctor remarks Cicero wouldn't have much to discuss beyond toys being at this time only five. But the story mainly revolves around Julius Caesar and the Doctor and Evelyn's apparent accidental creation of a female variant called Julia Caesar, an error that is quickly illuminated for anyone listening who already knows a lot about Julius Caesar's family (I wasn't aware of the pertinent facts and was pretty amused at the climax).

Only the final story, "The 100 Days of the Doctor" by Paul Cornell, was a disappointment. Coming off as a bit too fannish, it has the Sixth Doctor, in the effort to cure some mysterious virus he's contracted from an assassin, secretly watching his Fifth, Seventh, and Eighth incarnations--though none of the other Doctor actors feature in this audio. He tells Evelyn about each of them and his commentary isn't that interesting, being mainly self-pity about how he doesn't measure up to Seven always being a step ahead and Five being so dashing.

I also listened to the third episode of the Nicholas Briggs scripted War Doctor stories. As expected, it wasn't very good. I look forward to hearing John Hurt performing scripts by other writers, though. It's a shame there aren't any by Robert Shearman.

The Bad and the Captured

I finally finished season three of The Walking Dead a few days ago and while I still feel it was generally weaker than season two its final two episodes were much better than I'd hoped for.

Spoilers for Walking Dead season three after the screenshot.

It was a season filled with change: there's a new character, Michonne (Danai Gurira), who was captured and had her sword taken away by the new villain known generally as the Governor (David Morrissey). She escaped and was later captured by Rick (Andrew Lincoln) who took her sword away. But then Rick sets her free. Then the Governor offers Rick a deal where Rick would give him Michonne in exchange for the safety of Rick's people. Rick is going to at first but decides not to--however, Merle (Michael Rooker) captures Michonne and takes her sword away. But then Merle lets her go and sacrifices himself while Michonne walks home.

Okay, so there was a lot more to the season than that but it was pretty disappointing that the character who seemed like she might be pretty cool ended up basically being a sack of potatoes. I should note that Andrea (Laurie Holden), Glenn (Steven Yeun), and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) were also captured over the course of the season--Andrea slept with the psychopath first and the same psychopath made Maggie strip for him when she was captured. Glenn had the snot beat out of him. Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Merle were also briefly captured. The reason I'm dwelling on this is just how remarkable I find the gender roles on this show so sharply demarcated and that the ostensibly badass, independent, self-sufficient women are constantly being symbolically castrated or otherwise humiliated.

Apart from that, I hated the melodrama of the war between Rick's people at the prison and the Governor and his people. The worst was the third to the last episode of the season where Andrea tried to reach the prison to warn them the Governor was going to betray them and every step of the way the Governor was magically able to find her. I did like the idea of Andrea and the rest of the original group ending up accidentally on opposite sides, and it seemed like a good opportunity to have the characters deal with people on both sides having killed people on the opposite--Andrea shot one of the nice prison inmates and Rick's team shot a nice young lady Andrea taught how to shoot. None of this is directly addressed, though, and this aspect of the season's themes were dealt with best in one of the season's two best episodes, two episodes that were so completely better than the rest of the season--"Clear" and "This Sorrowful Life", the only episodes of the season written by Scott M. Gimple who I understand became showrunner later.

He killed my favourite character, Merle, in "This Sorrowful Life". Merle was my favourite in season one because he was such broad character played with complete abandon by Michael Rooker--a thorough, disgusting racist asshole with absolutely no apparent shame. But I grew to like him in season three for different reasons. He feels almost like a different character and I liked the relationship between him and Daryl. Daryl's hallucinations in season 2 made it seem like Merle bullied Daryl but we learn in season 3 that both brothers were abused by their father and that Merle left home before the quieter, weaker brother. It's true "This Sorrowful Life" has yet another example of Michonne getting captured but the two Gimple episodes are the only ones where Michonne actually gets to interact as a character with the others, aside from the time she stabbed the Governor in the eye. Gimple's episodes put her in a maternal role, first acting as big sister to Carl in "Clear" and then acting as a surprisingly sympathetic ear for Merle in "This Sorrowful Life".

I love that the show didn't just sweep the tension under the rug when Merle joined the same team as Glenn, the guy he'd tortured in an earlier episode. Rooker's performance is a big part of what makes "This Sorrowful Life" work and we can see in him just how hard it is to live with the fact that you've done something horrible you can simply never atone for. Michonne sees him for what he is--everyone else assumes Merle's always been a killer but Michonne calls him out on his bluster and what a truly thin defence it is against the cognisance of his own actions. I guess given his dilemma his death was inevitable but it would have been nice to have him around longer to see where his development might have gone.

Twitter Sonnet #882

They say the lobster captures lamps in suns.
The eye enclosed its walls with anticlocks.
Like tears, the coldest air condensed the sums.
In traces left on broken lava rocks.
A single print inhabits white lockers.
Without a word the buckled belt arose.
A shirt is fine without some brown Dockers.
A kangaroo defeats the static pose.
The questions asked in socks can foot the step.
The Appalachian apple sauce is mashed.
Diffused in filters like a cat too hep.
In plastic cups the softened pear was stashed.
A starfish button chose in five shires.
A universe condensed in stove fires.

The Innocence or Guilt of Shape

I started following Rian Johnson's Twitter yesterday, the director of the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VIII and a very nice low budget neo-noir called Brick. He also directed a movie called Looper I haven't seen yet but on the basis of Brick I'm very much looking forward to Episode VIII. He's a director with real vision and honest style, something that's increasingly rare in Hollywood. And his tweets are pretty good.

Rian Johnson ‏@rianjohnson May 12

yes I'm fine with your cookie policy yes I accept your cookies yes whatever you want with the cookies YES ALL COOKIES YES FINE COOKIES YES

I saw on May 9th he retweeted this very interesting article by Emily Yoshida on the upcoming live action adaptation of Ghost in the Shell. It's the first properly written article I've seen that addresses the fact that Kusanagi was never meant to look Asian. But instead of supporting the casting of Scarlett Johansson, Yoshida still thinks it's a bad idea. She also mentions that a Japanese actress shouldn't play Kusanagi, ultimately saying that Ghost in the Shell shouldn't be an American production at all. Well, I agree in the sense that it's kind of a pointless remake. There's nothing wrong with the original and indeed, British and American filmmakers aren't likely to have the same sense of Japanese cultural history that subtly informs the aesthetic of the film. I'm not sure I agree that's necessarily a bad thing or a good thing. It's just another thing. I don't think every story has to be an authentic representation of an existing culture. A futuristic, cyberpunk world that presents a cultural mishmash in particular seems like fair game for alternate interpretations. The post World War II cultural history of Japan, which Yoshida goes over pretty eloquently in discussing how anime reflects it, is present in the original Ghost in the Shell probably incidentally to the filmmakers' intentions. I don't mean the obvious things like Japanese signage and conversation customs but the things Yoshida refers to like the history of the anime style, its ancestry in Disney art and how this reflects a Japanese culture assimilating American culture.

Yoshida posts a video where a man interviewed various people in the street in Japan asking about the casting of Johansson and about the rejection of an Asian actor for an upcoming adaptation of Death Note:

Yoshida says these interviews are "predictably depressing" and I agree with respect to the girls who think a white actress would be more beautiful. But I feel like Yoshida is actually exhibiting the very arrogance that criticisms of cultural appropriation were originally meant to examine when she subtly implies all Japanese people should be ashamed of themselves for wanting to see a white actress in a U.S. adaptation of a Japanese film.

Japanese audiences, unlike American audiences, don't understand Motoko to be a Japanese character, just because she speaks Japanese and has a Japanese name. This speaks to the racial mystery zone that so much anime exists in, allowing viewers to ignore such unpleasant dynamics as oppression and discrimination even as they enjoy stories that are often direct responses to those dynamics.

This doesn't seem like a bad thing to me. Why does someone who speaks Japanese and has a Japanese name have to be Japanese? It's ironic Yoshida makes this point because she moves on to discuss how Japanese Americans feel about the issue, Japanese Americans being people often with Japanese names but who are in fact American.

Is it really anyone's place to tell Japanese people how they ought to feel? One of the women interviewed mentions how blonde hair only suits white people. I was thinking about Ritsuko in Neon Genesis Evangelion, a Japanese woman with blonde hair, not because she's in the stylistic mystery zone Yoshida refers to but because we learn via flashback that she dyes her hair. Does this make Ritsuko a tool of cultural oppression? I think this would be an ironic statement to make when talking about Ghost in the Shell because I think one of the things that movie shows is that a new culture is born on these old symbols and effects of old cultures. This "mishmash" is dizzying precisely because the new people born in this time grow up internalising and liking things that, while they may be products of war or oppression, now have completely different meanings, have accumulated new significance or may have been stripped of significance entirely except for aesthetics. Sometimes blonde hair is just blonde hair.

Anyway, speaking of the influence of technology in modern culture, I wrote this to-day:

The Shooter Checked His Facebook

Revenge apparently is served in void.
All grievances redressed without notice.
A tale that's told in hopes to woo a droid.
Like Dee and Dum exhorting young Alice.
No cause in blunt effect, a flash in cold.
Unmet, connexions fried beyond the deep.
A public wank insists that life is sold.
Into a fungal brain the kittens creep.
On roads that grow more dry the numbers fall.
A funnel draws the stars from gutter rain.
In trees the eyes pretend that stumps are tall.
A dip in graphs demands returns in pain.
As bodies turn to fingers cut from grace
A hardened sugar skull dissolves its face.

To Dream is Better

Is love only a pose, are the most passionate feelings of which the human heart is purportedly capable arbitrarily assigned by nature and circumstance? This is what makes William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream really more nightmare than dream. Believed to have been written around the same time as Romeo and Juliet, it's arguably a devastatingly insightful parody of the kind of romance Romeo and Juliet exemplifies. I watched a very good 1968 adaptation last night.

Of course, a direct parody of Romeo and Juliet might be seen in the rendition of Ovid's tale of Pyramus and Thisbe presented at the end of Midsummer Night's Dream. People point out that the story of Romeo and Juliet resembles Tristan and Isolde but Shakespeare himself may be pointing out a far earlier inspiration by invoking Ovid's tale here where the tragic double suicide of lovers is enacted by fools, one of whom is a confirmed ass, for the amusement of the main characters of Midsummer Night's Dream and at the behest of one of the play's two central patriarchs, Theseus, the Duke of Athens (here played by Derek Godfrey).

After the night's strange events, Theseus makes a famous observation about lovers.

The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

It's tempting to impute this opinion to Shakespeare himself but it's more valuable to remember the character--the Duke controls the lives of the young lovers. If Demetrius hadn't changed his affections to Helena, the Duke had threatened to punish Hermia:

Either to die the death or to abjure
For ever the society of men.

When, under influence of the faerie spell, Lysander says he won't kill Hermia even though he hates her and she responds, "What, can you do me greater harm than hate? Hate me! wherefore? O me! what news, my love!" Helen Mirren in the 1968 film delivers these lines with effective heartbreak. One wonders, if the spell only makes Lysander love Helena, why should it make him hate Hermia? It's as though the memory of his own previous love is a hateful thing to look on, as though it suggests something disturbing.

The love spell is an element from Tristan and Isolde not present in Romeo and Juliet. In Wagner's opera version of Tristan and Isolde from the nineteenth century, the potion functions as a revealer of true human nature behind the mask of civilised custom and so we might take it in Midsummer Night's Dream. The spell has its source in the film's other central patriarch, Oberon, king of the faeries. And what does Oberon want, why is he doing this? He's jealous of an orphan child his queen Titania has taken in. One might expect his response would be to use the love potion to make Titania devote herself to Oberon and ignore the child. Instead, he makes her fall in love with an ass.

His purpose is similar to Theseus' in lumping lovers, madmen, and poets together as delusional, helpless victims of emotion--he wants to show Titania how meaningless and arbitrary her love is. And Theseus is talking to his fiancée and Oberon is talking to his wife! You might think the last person you'd want to convince love is meaningless is your spouse, unless, of course, you're asserting the control of a cool intelligence over the anarchy of feeling. Madmen and poetry might be just as threatening to a ruler.

Hermia says Lysander can do no greater harm than hate her but she doesn't try to kill herself. No-one does, however intense their feelings. The faeries are anthropomorphisations of nature and the love spell then like the capricious nature of the heart. The 1968 film is directed by Peter Hall, a theatre director, which may explain the film's biggest flaw, which is its overuse of close-ups. I suspect his thought process must have followed from him asking himself what he can't do on the stage that he might take advantage of in film--of course, close-ups. It adds to the dreamlike quality of the film, though, making the forest feel more like an interior world, the actors faces often obliged to be close together, intensely intimate. Hall has the faeries painted green and they seem to blend into the foliage, an effective reflection of the fact that they are articulated nature.

The cinematography is by the great Peter Suschitzky (he of The Empire Strikes Back, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and most of David Cronenberg's films) who displays his genius for using flat, dark colours and small pockets of glimmer. Scenes with the faeries are often backlit by obtrusively artificial lights.

This is surely the greatest cast ever assembled for a film of A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of the greatest casts of any Shakespeare film adaptation in history--Helen Mirren, Diana Rigg, Judi Dench, Ian Richardson, Ian Holm, and David Warner are all in this film. And Demetrius is played by Michael Jayston whom Doctor Who fans might recognise as the Valyard.

The costumes are sort of vaguely 17th century inspired 1960s--the men with lace collars and knee breeches while the women are basically in 1960s dresses and go-go boots.

I always prefer period costume but I was okay with this. I think the goal was "unobtrusive" and I think it was achieved.

Judi Dench plays Titania practically naked except for pasties, panties, and body paint and she looks pretty great.

It's Not a Road, it's Water

Somewhere out in the Pacific Ocean, I think, there's not an island called Kaigoon but somehow a couple Americans ended up stuck there in 1940 on the Road to Singapore. The first in the popular Road to series, it stars the incredible chemistry of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope (and to a lesser extent Dorothy Lamour). The performance instincts of Hope and Crosby are wonderfully vital and the movie works whenever it's these two goofing around or trying to get away with something but it gets a bit dull when it's focusing on the vaguely Polynesian culture of the Kaigoon natives and on the love story.

Though Dorothy Lamour is beautiful and I'd have liked to have seen one or both of the heroes make love to her. Or maybe Anthony Quinn who as a small role as the cruel lover she's with when we meet her.

It's made clear later she's trying to get away from him but Lamour doesn't really sell it--it's tricky because they're doing an act where he uses a whip to hit her cigarette and I think we're meant to take it as simultaneously an act and not an act. It's a bit muddled and I was suren't at first how to feel about the fact that Hope and Crosby carry her off into the night. When they take her home to their little hut, she immediately starts cooking and cleaning for them.

Well, okay, it's 1940. It's still fun watching Hope and Crosby trying to sell a miracle cleaning fluid or doing their "Pat-a-Cake" routine in order to start fights. My favourite bit is later in the film where Hope is carted away to be deported in a big van. When the van doors open, without any preamble, Hope emerges in the guard's uniform and the guard comes out in Hope's clothes and handcuffs.

It's a simple gag but Hope's timing is keen as a razor, hovering somewhere between really clever and impressively stupid.

There are some nice musical moments--the dopey native festival not among them--and of course it's always nice to hear Bing Crosby sing but none of the songs in this film are in themselves memorable.

Twitter Sonnet #881

A touch of balanced grain explodes the dye.
However tall, the crane evolves its draughts.
There's gold in glasses cracked for ev'ry try.
With hands together say, "No more Will Tafts."
With careful watch the clocks could jump the gap.
As ticks descry the reach of serpent teeth.
A grace unpassed by hay a crown could trap.
Unseen the stars are ants that sew the heath.
The edge of plastic curls on mem'ry's thumb.
The stocking deity reflects a sock.
Innate like cream, the radish pulls the sum.
Pangaea questions took a distant rock.
In non-specific countries custom's vague.
The table takes the clock from in the egg.

Game of Face

I wondered if I was the only one who thought Maisie Williams was starting to look like Peter Lorre so I googled "Maisie Williams Peter Lorre" and found that, no, I'm far from alone in this. Well, I for one, approve.

Spoilers for last night's new Game of Thrones after the picture of Peter Lorre.

I assume she didn't carve the face off his corpse to wear it. Last night marked the apparent conclusion of the poorly executed Faceless Ones storyline, Benioff and Weiss finding a way to make that conclusion kind of satisfying. Though let us count the problems: 1) Assassin from the greatest assassin guild in the world stabs Arya in the gut multiple times and fails to kill her. 2) An actress stitches up what ought to be a fatal gut wound and uses the healing power of opium. 3) The assassin is forced to chase Arya through the streets in broad daylight because of her incompetence. 4) Jaqen says Arya is finally No One just because Arya killed the girl who was trying to kill her which kind of suggests the whole creed is a bullshit veneer for the typical king of the hill set up.

Thematically, there's plenty of potential inherent in this storyline. It pits pride in identity against complete self-abnegation and it might have been a good way for Arya to confront the difference between who she was and the idea that she was beginning to worship death. Arya had seen so many of the people she loved die and her desire in return was not to bring peace to Westeros, which seems to be Jon and Sansa's motive, but rather to kill the people who killed the ones she loved. Nothing outside this seemed to matter and the more she was denied her revenge the more the revenge mattered. The Faceless Ones are a manifestation of this winnowing down to a pure focus on death--for them, it is not about choosing whom to kill, they are merely pawns to facilitate the arbitrary nature of death. So one way this could end up being valuable is to have Arya realise there's more to being Arya Stark than death. I don't know if I trust Benioff and Weiss to understand this subtext, though. This seems to be the main difference between the things they come up with themselves and the things that come from George R. R. Martin--Martin's stuff seems to have a better insight into human nature while Benioff and Weiss only seem to be clever at organising plot.

So the part of last night's episode that, from what I've heard, drew most from Martin's source material ended up being the strongest part--Jaime Lannister.

Distilled to the plot points, it's not remarkable: Jaime threatens Edmure's family and so Edmure surrenders the castle to him. And yes, that's something Donald Trump has advocated as a tactic against terrorists. It's a pretty standard tactic for gangsters and warlords. What makes the scene interesting on Game of Thrones is the discussion between Jaime and Edmure.

Edmure takes the point of view that Jaime is nothing like him, Jaime is a monster. Jaime can see outside the dehumanising aspect of war far enough to know he and Edmure have a lot in common, they're both willing to do terrible things "for love". By the end of the conversation, Jaime has taken Edmure from believing that Jaime is an inhuman monster with whom he won't cooperate to believing that Jaime is worst than that, Jaime is like him, and therefore he must cooperate. Jaime wins because he knows Edmure would be just as ruthless. The scene is good because it forces us to contemplate uneasy questions. Jaime took the castle with almost no bloodshed, does this justify threatening the man's family? Of course, it relies on Edmure truly believing Jaime will do what he says and such tactics, while they have short term good results, can have very bad ones in the long run, as I think we're about to see with Ramsay next week. Threats don't work unless you're willing to back them up and backing them up, with things like the Red Wedding, tends ultimately to make people distrust and hate you.

And Brienne was there, sadly with not much to do but go from one guy to another and hear about how she's respected before being conceded very little or nothing. While some might say this is a backward step for the strong warrior woman, it was helpful in having a point of view character frustrated in having to deal with the intractable sides in a conflict.

And Again

The "deadliest shooting in American history" happened yesterday, presumably not counting incidents in the American Civil War or Revolutionary War. We know what it means--it's the deadliest of the familiar series of the past few decades where a small group of people, in this case one person, opens fire on a larger group of civilians. President Obama has delivered another speech and seems beyond tired now. Everyone expressed condolences and sorrow, Donald Trump and a few assholes like him took the time to say they told us so. That the attacker identified as Muslim and affiliated himself with an Islamic terror organisation is proof enough many need that this is the evil of Islam, the horror of the recent event helping them to evade the fact that most of the people killed by Islamic terrorists are peaceful Muslims.

That said, part of the horror of last night's attack is the realisation that there have been fewer attacks on the LGBT community reported in media than one might expect with anti-gay rhetoric in the air like Pat Robertson partly blaming Hurricane Katrina on acceptance of homosexuality. It's interesting reading reports of law enforcement unsure whether to call yesterday's shooting an act of terror or a hate crime. Ultimately the distinction is surely entirely rhetorical. It's easy enough to blame religion because believing in things on faith seems absurd when they're not the things you believe, so absurd that it seems only a crazy person can believe them. So to say a religion is at fault is to attack only one expression of the human capacity to fall down false paths of reasoning. The same capacity in the human mind that leads to blinded resentment and hate.

It's particularly strange for me to hear Islam called a religion of exceptional hatred when I've been studying the Reformation and England in the 17th century for the past year and a half. I could mention that Parliamentary forces in the 1640s took to massacring some citizens in England without restraint on the grounds that they were Catholic. Or I could just mention the Thirty Years' War where millions were killed in the conflict between Protestants and Catholics.

. . . it is disgraceful and disgusting that the Christian religion should be supported by violence. Without this freedom [to express alternative opinions], we are still enslaved: not, as once, by the law of God but, what is vilest of all, by human law, or rather, to be more exact, by inhuman tyranny. There are some irrational bigots who, by a perversion of justice, condemn anything they consider inconsistent with conventional beliefs and give it an invidious title--"heretic" or "heresy"--without consulting the evidence of the Bible on this point.

The above quote is from John Milton's Christian Doctrine (translated from Latin by John Carey). One of the fascinating things to me about Milton is his evident capacity for great rational thought in conflict with a persistent religious faith. He wrote beautifully both here and in Areopagetica on the necessity for people to be allowed to express "heretical" ideas without fear of punishment yet even he maintained a hatred for Catholics and was persistent in condemning them, partly in support of Cromwell's government which massacred people in Ireland on what was arguably religious grounds.

Condemning a religion is much too easy and filled with the potential to exacerbate the problem. The best thing is to remember that people were killed yesterday for no good reason and therefore to help cultivate empathy and sound reasoning.

Back to the Sea Base

I didn't have time to listen to a Doctor Who audio play this week but I did watch the Toby Whithouse television series two-parter from last year again. Now that it doesn't matter that one twist in the second episode was predictable I enjoyed it even more. The Doctor playing detective among a nicely thought out group of new characters makes me like the first episode of the two parter, "Under the Lake", a bit better. I think the Doctor talking about how he has nothing to lose since he knows he's going to die as an attempt to hit that high note from Caves of Androzani but somehow it just doesn't come off. This two parter would've done well to have continued on the lower key all the way through though I like that a likeable character is killed off without magically coming back.

Just now looking at the ratings for Doctor Who over the years, I never realised how much more popular Ten's run was than Eleven's. On the whole, I think the writing was better in Eleven's era but I think Tennant gave a more interesting performance than Smith. Though I wouldn't say Smith was bad.

Of course, I agree with Tennant in his celebration of Capaldi's Doctor:

I watched Doctor Who because I felt like I needed a break from The Walking Dead. Although I liked the beginning of the season, I'm generally finding season three to be far weaker than season two as it's getting bogged down in the cheesy war with the Governor (David Morrissey). It's like watching kids play cops and robbers. I just watched the thirteenth episode of the season where the Governor and Rick have a sit down, both talk about how they want to kill each other, both have an opportunity, and neither one starts shooting. The come down is especially harsh after the brilliant twelfth episode of the season where Rick, Michonne, and Carl go back to the town from the first season for supplies. It gets rid of the increasingly airless Governor plot temporarily in favour of focusing on what made the second season so good, a contemplation of the meaning and value of survival in this hellish future. And Michonne was finally given an opportunity to say and do things apart from getting captured and scowling.

Twitter Sonnet #880

It all was not a thing at any point.
In ev'ry beam there was a bleached carrot.
Like ghosts the nutrients have left the joint.
In state arrives the star of Pat Garrett.
A star returned a cloud for parcels nixed.
In stripes like pins a sky was glued to tracks.
Beneath their hats the players loosed were fixed.
A couple beans and hanger plants grew slacks.
The flow of air intrudes on bricks of slime.
A gust of chilly wind has blown the flames.
A triple six meant nothing at the time.
The thatch and tiles black across the lanes.
The only butter went to sculpt a hand.
In reddened skies there grows this cloudy band.

She Asked for His Hat, Filled with Jumbled Names and Places

One of the problems following a war where a defeated army is disbanded is that it leaves resentful trained killers with nothing to do. So in 1945, Universal released Salome, Where She Danced in which Yvonne de Carlo as a German ballerina dances her way into America's hearts. Appearing at various points in the story are Robert E. Lee, Otto von Bismarck, and a mysterious Chinese wiseman. De Carlo is lovely and gives a starmaking performance and the colour is really pretty but rarely have I gotten so strong an impression the filmmakers had no idea what they were doing.

Jim Steed (Rod Cameron) is an American war correspondent who soon after his report on the surrender of Robert E. Lee is sent to Vienna where he sees on stage the beautiful Yvonne De Carlo as Anna Marie. De Carlo's a decent dancer but no ballerina. She jumps about the stage beautifully enough, though.

I'm not sure what the ballet is about--the music is "The Blue Danube" by Strauss--but De Carlo's dancing partner appears safe from Illuminati mind control.

It certainly doesn't seem to have anything to do with Salome, in fact nothing in the film does, unless maybe Anna Marie seducing a Prussian general to get intel for Steed ended up with the general's head on a platter in an earlier version of the script. But Anna Marie is too nice a girl for that. Instead, after her true love, an Austrian prince, is killed in battle, she travels across the U.S. with Steed and "The Professor" (J. Edward Bromberg) until they end up at a frontier town. A third of the way through the film, Steed crosses paths with the actual star of the film, David Bruce as stage coach robber Cleve Blunt.

Someone at the studio must have said at this point, "Uh, okay, it's Western! Right?" Anna Marie performs her dance for hootin' and hollerin' cowpokes until Cleve and his gang show up and rob the till. They kidnap Anna Marie, Cleve looks exactly like the Austrian prince (same actor) and everyone goes to San Francisco.

We'd met Cleve before as a Confederate soldier who tearfully asks General Lee (John Litel) what's he supposed to now? To which Lee hands down some wisdom like only a Confederacy besotted 1940s Hollywood version of Lee could about the honour of winning peacetime battles. This starts the one and only character arc in the film where the post war years lead Cleve to become a western outlaw who talks like a 30s gangster ("It's a frame up!") and plunders Chinese ships on the high sea. This allows Anna Marie to appear in Chinese wardrobe and jewellery for absolutely no reason.

The mysterious Dr. Ling is behind it all! He's played by that jack of all stereotypical foreigners, Abner Biberman, whom you might remember as Louis Palutso in His Girl Friday and Charlie How-Come in The Leopard Man.

Lest you think none of this is adding up, the film climaxes with a terrific sword fight between Cleve and the Prussian general (Albert Dekker).

And I didn't even mention the Russian Colonel who controls San Francisco or "Madam Europe".

A Sinking Ship

A captain at sea wakes his senior officers at one in the morning to ask who ate the frozen strawberries. There were other signs, but this may be the last straw in confirming the madness (not really madness) of a U.S. Naval captain, provoking his crew to mutiny in the completely and absolutely fictional 1954 film The Caine Mutiny because, as a title at the beginning informs us, there has never been a mutiny on-board a U.S. Naval ship. This nervous tiptoeing in the film was to placate the Navy so the film could use actual Navy ships and locations. In spite of the starchy restraint evident throughout the film, it's still an interesting drama about how to deal with a madman in charge (who isn't mad, U.S. Navy captains are never mad, please remember that).

Humphrey Bogart plays Captain Queeg who takes over command of the Caine from a gentler, weirdly permissive captain. Queeg finds a crew accustomed to not shaving or tucking in their shirts or bothering to wear helmets when operating guns. A control freak, he demands harsh punishments for the smallest infractions, placing most of the responsibility in the officer of the deck, a young man named Keith (Robert Francis).

The story is told mainly from Keith's point of view and he's one of the weakest links in this film. Francis isn't much of an actor and his personal life is all dream logic, at best.

We meet him at a rendezvous with his girlfriend, May (May Wynn), who is a knockout and it would've been nice to have her on screen more often.

Though it would have meant dealing more with a subplot that barely makes sense due, I suspect, to huge chunks of story excised from the novel the film's based on. Keith is in love with May but is reluctant to introduce her to his devoted mother (Katherine Warren) because May is a singer. Keith and May go on vacation to Yosemite where Keith asks May to marry him but she refuses because he asks her even though they both suspect his mother might not approve. May then becomes frustrated because she thinks Keith doesn't want to marry her.

Well, at least it's not the standard story of the wife or girlfriend at home, angry about her military lover taking risks in the ordinary course of his duty.

Oh, this film is supposedly set during World War II but everyone dresses like it's 1954 and we only see one scene where the Caine is engaged in battle.

Mainly it's about Lieutenant Keefer (Fred MacMurray) and Lieutenant Maryk (Van Johnson) scrutinising Queeg's behaviour to see if it really is time to relieve him. Maryk is second in command and is more reluctant at first than Keefer who quickly seems sure Queeg is dangerously paranoid. Jose Ferrer appears later in the film as the Navy lawyer who has to sort things out after, as the title suggests, the mutiny finally occurs. I'd say it's primarily Bogart, Johnson, and MacMurray that make this film work. Bogart is so on edge and vulnerable, terrified of the slightest thing getting out of control.

It's the strain from his job because obviously he's not mad.