All the Action Figures are Here

Star Wars: Rebels, or Star Wars: Stunt Casting, has released a new trailer for its upcoming season three. Sadly, the most impressive thing about its first two seasons has been the casting and maybe the persistence with which Disney demands the show stick to its at turns annoying and boring main stars. But how to top James Earl Jones as Darth Vader in season two? Well, you really can't but Grand Admiral Thrawn is pretty exciting. He'll be played by Mads Mikkelsen's brother Lars--I understand Lars has a role on House of Cards, a show I've never seen. But if he's anywhere near as good as Mads, I'm happy with the casting.

I do like Thrawn despite the numerous problems in the Timothy Zahn books for which he was created (everything related to the ysalamiri). Considering writing has been the weakest point on Rebels so far, though, I'm doubtful the show will manage to put together the displays of cleverness and nuance Thrawn is known for. It is nice the trailer shows him investigating cultures through their art--that's something I've always liked about him. Maybe he'll finally be the one to tell Sabine she's the Girl Least Likely To.

But the main reason I'm going to be suckered into watching season three, and the reason I'm talking about it on the day of the week I normally reserve for Doctor Who, is that Tom Baker's going to be on the show. He looks like a giant yak in the trailer, some kind of neutral Force master. I guess this is the secret Star Wars project Baker alluded to in an interview last year. The guy just gleefully spills in every interview, I do kind of love that about him. I did slightly hope he'd be in Episode VIII but oh, well.

Even aside from the fact that he played the best Doctor, Tom Baker's great casting for any voice role, really.

I listened to two audio plays from 2008 this week, a Seventh Doctor story called Dark Husband and a Fifth Doctor story called The Haunting of Thomas Brewster, neither one especially good, the latter being slightly more entertaining. The Dark Husband is the first time I've ever seen or heard a romance hinted between Seven (Sylvester McCoy) and Ace (Sophie Aldred). It comes at a point when Ace is much older and more experienced than the confused pyromaniac we met in the television series though somehow it still feels kind of wrong. I don't know why. I'd have happily accepted Twelve and Clara making out and I'm pretty sure their age difference is even greater. Maybe it's that McCoy feels like one of the most sexless Doctors, maybe it's just that their rapport feels so grandfather/granddaughter on the show I just can't get past it.

Dark Husband actually introduces a love triangle between the Doctor, Ace, and the audio companion Hex (Philip Olivier), a young man around Ace's age and I do kind of like him but somehow I fancy an Ace/Hex match-up even less. Maybe it's Ace. I like Ace a lot, she is deservedly considered one of the best companions. Maybe I'm just too old for her myself to fantasise about her. I guess there are some occasions when sex just isn't called for.

The Haunting of Thomas Brewster is set in a self-consciously Dickensian Victorian London. Brewster (John Pickford) has memories of Five (Peter Davison) and Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) strewn throughout his young life which began at a very Dickensian workhouse. The Doctor mentions the Bootstrap Theory which Twelve asked us to Google in the previous television season. Unfortunately the writing for The Haunting of Thomas Brewster has a particularly bad ear for period. It's nice that there's a gay character in it but it feels pretty anachronistic for a nineteenth century street thug to tell Nyssa that he has more than a friendly feeling for another guy "if you know what I mean." I don't think that was really a topic for casual conversation between a young man of the streets and an apparently aristocratic young woman. Certainly he wouldn't have expected her to know what he meant.

The Doctor is stranded in London for a year during which he gets a house and joins the Royal Society. In one of my favourite bits, Nyssa is shocked when she thinks the Doctor may be sharing future scientific knowledge. The Doctor reassures her that he's careful to only tell his colleagues things they already know adding, "I think that's why they like me so much."

I Ain't Afraid of No Fear but Fear Itself

Paul Feig's Ghostbusters is about 30% Bridesmaids, 60% Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin, and about 10% whatever wonderful entity Kate McKinnon is. She's fucking great in this. But mostly what Paul Feig has done for Ghostbusters is what Schumacher did for Batman, and I don't mean in terms of quality, though that's a factor, but in terms of camp. Like Schumacher with Batman, I think Feig went into this thinking the darker elements of the property aren't all that interesting and it's not what people are interested in when they go to see the movies. Feig and Schumacher thought, people want to see bright colours, silly tongue-in-cheek villains who play things way over the top, and, above all, threats that are so goofy and insubstantial everyone feels safe laughing at them. And they might be right, a lot of people might enjoy movies like that more than the kind of movie the original Ghostbusters was. The three drunk girls in the audience when I saw the movie, who sang along with the theme as they left the theatre, certainly seemed to like it and I don't begrudge them that.

And I enjoyed the Bridesmaids and Kate McKinnon percentage of the film. Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy work well together as they did in Feig's earlier film, though now they're playing insecure academics, something Wiig in particular does well. Her scenes at Columbia University trying to hide her past as a writer of books on the paranormal from her boss (Charles Dance) are funny and in this respect alone the movie most matches the tone of the original film where the stars began at a university they're kicked out from after an adversarial relationship with the dean. But this similarity vanishes when McCarthy and McKinnon's characters are kicked from their university by a dean who does a prolonged shtick about giving them the middle finger. Like much of the film, it deliberate strays very far from realism in the situation. Albert Brooks in Scorsese's Taxi Driver asked the director to let him be funny not like a comedian is funny but like a regular cut-up at the office is funny, a decision that helps that film's sense of realism as Brooks makes dumb, fawning jokes about pencils and coffee mugs while a mildly besotted Cybill Shepherd reacts. In Feig's Ghostbusters, everyone is funny like a comedian from the apparently improvised backs and forths between McCarthy and Wiig to the hotel manager who tells the Ghostbusters he has what people have told him is a disturbing shriek.

It's all part of a very deliberate and successful effort to create an insubstantial reality for the movie. It's reflected in the sets and locations in contrast to the original film. The first film begins with the New York Library with a very credible plain interior. This movie begins with something that's more cartoonish than Disneyland's Haunted Mansion and a ghost from a painting that seems as though it's meant to mock the one from Ghostbusters 2 with its over the top scowl. The climax of the film has the villain coordinating a dance routine for a possessed crowd of police, officials, and onlookers in what looks like a candy coloured backlot putting me in mind of The Mask except campier. Instead of the realistically grimy fire house used as headquarters for the Ghostbusters in the first film, Feig's stars make their base in the surprisingly spacious and clean upstairs of a Chinese take out restaurant. The film has been banned in China due to references to the supernatural though I wonder if the fact that absolutely no Asian actors are in the film had anything to do with it. I like the idea of having them above a Chinese restaurant but its an idea whose potential is never realised. They never even do anything as simple as walk through the restaurant itself, we never see anyone eating there and the only employee we see is a delivery man played by a Middle Eastern actor.

It made me think about what was so extraordinary about the original film. The connexion the characters share to a very real feeling New York City is an enormous part of what makes the original work. The beginning of the film gives you no real hint that these guys are going to be heroes you root for so when at the climax a massive crowd of people gathered to cheer them, clearly actually in the city, it's actually really exciting because it's kind of unexpected even as it feels earned. The new movie features a lot of the characters cheering themselves on without real weight. This is unrelated to the camp aspects of the film and I think it might have been a better camp film if it had avoided any sincere attempt at making heroes.

I'm not alone in praising Kate McKinnon in this movie. Andrew Lapin at NPR says she resembles a young Bill Murray and I think that's right on the nose. I think her character was actually meant to be the Egon analogue but her acting style is much more reminiscent of Murray's with its relaxed flippancy and subtle, constantly simmering anger. There's a dare in her every line mixed with nonchalance. When an FBI agents asks them how many laws they think they've broken, McKinnon's character asks, "Is it one?" He says no, she says, "Is it two?" he says no again and she says, "Is it one?" again. The agent, played by former Daily Show correspondent Matt Walsh, is peevish and doesn't recognise that McKinnon's character is fucking with him. Camp is a form of irony, irony by nature subverts sincerity. McKinnon, like Murray, has a kind of irony that subverts irony to go back to sincerity again. Only a few performers are able to reach this perfect plateau--Tom Baker is the only other one that comes to mind. I would happily see a regular Ghostbusters movie starring her character.

I wonder if the tone of the film was always intended. There's scene where Leslie Jones' character goes on the subway track to say to a ghost, "Sir, you're not supposed to be down here." The ghost is glowing bright blue and floating in the air, the idea that someone would mistake him as a normal person who wandered onto the tracks is absurd which makes me think Jones, when performing the scene, was informed she was seeing what looked like a normal, living man. Which might have actually been scary and also closer to the original film's style of having both physical entities and the glowing, floating kind. Considering the track record Sony has had over the past ten years, I suppose I can't really say for sure this is a Paul Feig film as much as it is a committee film.

Swim or Not, In You Go

Teenage boys can inspire both disgust and pity, sometimes at the same time, as they try to navigate their raging hormones and cultural instructions to conquer. So it's a fascinating and potentially cruel experiment to toss one into the Deep End, as in the wonderful 1970 film of that name. This isn't simply a cautionary tell about sexuality, it's also gorgeously weird and funny. I love it so much.

Poor, dumb little Mike (John Moulder Brown) gets a job at a bath house where his co-worker, Susan (Jane Asher), explains to him that the older women who come to the establishment like to use the boys employed there for their sexual fantasies. It does nothing to prepare him when Diana Dors in an absolutely fantastic cameo uses him to masturbate.

Later, Mike finds himself in a prostitute's bedroom who, after Mike describes his job, observes the two of them are basically in the same line of work. But Mike's not there to buy sex, he only has eyes for Susan.

Amidst all the casual petting and sex going on at the bath house, Mike still is compelled to make the usual immature error that because he has a crush on Susan it means he has a claim on her. Few women could be a more hopeless target for a possessive guy--Susan is regularly sleeping with at least two men and even peeps on Mike when he's changing. Jane Asher is so great in this movie, her face very pretty and conveying an unashamed, sharp intellect.

So that's the already pretty entertaining set up, but I love the ideas director Jerzy Skolimowski has to explore the issues and the characters. I love Mike pacing outside the club where Susan and her fiancé are having dinner--he orders hot dog after hot dog from a nearby cart and starts to feel sick. Earlier, he stalks Susan in a porno theatre she's gone to with her fiancé--she kisses Mike and calls the cops on him.

John Moulder Brown is so fresh faced and hapless, it's hard to determine how much to hold him responsible for his actions, particularly when Susan's instincts are playfully sadistic in a way Mike has no hope of handling. I love that the film never seems to apologise for anyone--it's almost like the exact opposite of The Rachel Papers in terms of its male protagonist. There's no sentimentalising of Mike's awkwardness. When he pesters Susan like a kid pulling pigtails on a playground, he's annoying. When he demands Susan explain a nude, life size cardboard cutout of her displayed in front of peep show, his indignation is ridiculous and pathetic. Susan's instincts to playfully torment him range from the mean to the actually kind of helpful, as when she punches out the head of a poster showing a pregnant man--meant to make men think about using contraception--and puts the poster around Mike's neck.

And, of course, this kid has no idea what she's trying to do and just smiles at her like a puppy. Ah, this movie is so good. Even the songs by Cat Stevens couldn't ruin it.

Twitter Sonnet #891

Aquittal won't embody Sabbath toes.
Inside a digit did the Fingers think.
Fallacious hands can hold the cabbage rows.
Inside the collar tells the secret rank.
Courageous shade assumes the role of rook.
A Christmas light alone below the eve.
Disast'rous claims convert the juicy book.
Some garments can be hat and also greave.
The stems of dauntless calcium remains
O'ertook the class assembled on the stress.
A pocket file closely now pertains
To where the legs of pants confirm the dress.
Delay has marked the veil for shipping down.
A place reserved on spec conceives the clown.

The Douche Event Horizon

First I wanted to punch Charles Highway in the face. But halfway through 1989's The Rachel Papers, I also wanted to kick him in the groin. By the end of the film, he developed into a guy I wanted to tie to a wheelchair and push down the stairs like Tommy Udo. I don't blame the stars, I don't blame the Martin Amis novel the film's based on--I completely blame director Damian Harris for displaying some of the absolute worst storytelling instincts of a writer director I've ever seen assembled in a single film.

It's an old fashioned story of an awkward young man with a bad personality, Charles (Dexter Fletcher), falling in love with a young woman who has no personality, Rachel (Ione Skye). Really, if a girl was ever No-One, move over Arya Stark, it's Ione Skye in this movie.

Here we see her intrigued by a video Charles has sent her of his baby pictures and testimonials from his sister and brother-in-law (Jonathan Pryce amusingly playing Cockney) about what a great guy he is. He sent her the video unprompted--she barely knows him. All she knows is he's the guy who showed up at her party uninvited, insulted the guests, then tracked down her phone number and asked her out despite seeing she has a boyfriend named Deforest played by James Spader. James Spader basically plays the snotty rich kid he played in Pretty in Pink and still I think she'd have been better off with him than with Charles.

What is his big offence? He shows up unexpectedly when she's on a date with Charles. She apologises to Charles for Deforest later, explaining how that's so Deforest (and I can't help thinking, "Damnit, Rachel, I'm a doctor your boyfriend not your brother."). Yeah, that jerk, turning up where his girlfriend works and seeing she's about to get coffee with another guy and still being polite to him.

The only reason we know it's bad is because it's bad for Charles. Which is the key problem with the whole movie--it presumes a universe that revolves completely around this douchebag. The movie doesn't show him as making flawless decisions but there's this loving attention given to all his mistakes that made me want to throw up. This is maybe the worst expression of the the 80s teen loveable brat genre, Dexter Fletcher descending from Matthew Broderick, John Cryer, and Anthony Michael Hall. I'm not even blaming Fletcher, who looks like a young Mick Jagger and is charming enough. The film has him looking directly at us and explaining his technique, putting me in mind of Kind Hearts and Coronets but updated with adorable 80s movie computer technology.

Charles aces all his classes and is getting into Oxford but still he doesn't know how to use an apostrophe. Or maybe she's one girl with multiple aliases, I don't know.

But there's no pleasure like in Kind Hearts and Coronets in watching Charles do wicked deeds because he's thoroughly inept. Everything he tries backfires--he insults the party before finding out Rachel is the hostess, he tries to look uninterested following his brother-in-law's advice and then sends her that pathetic video tape. But it's inevitable Rachel will be drawn to him because the film acts like he's the only source of gravity.

Rachel is training to be a teacher and beyond that we learn practically nothing about her. Ione Skye seems slightly drugged during the whole thing, every scene between her and Charles is defined by Charles' motives. When he takes her to see a Naturist film at a porno cinema on the advice of his brother-in-law, she surprisingly laughs and says the movie's actually kind of funny. They run into Charles' father at the theatre having a date with a woman who's not his wife for an embarrassing moment to get Rachel to fall for Charles just a little more.

When she finally does not only sleep with him but move in with him it seems less like her choice but a reflection of everything Charles has done and experienced, like a video game where he's reached the final level. And egad, what awkwardly shot sex scenes. And they seem to go on forever.

I don't mind the idea of a movie about an awkward guy who's not half as brilliant as he thinks he is. For all I know, the book the movie's based on might actually be pretty good. But Rachel being a walking doll designed to reward Charles' successes and comfort his failures is the tip of the iceberg of what's wrong with this movie--every time Fletcher turns his star wattage at the camera, all the commercial perfect cinematography, it's all meant to be an easily digestible fantasy. It's like a carton of ice cream that's been sitting out on the table for nine years.

Dekpa Successfully Immigrates to England

I've finally gotten another chapter of Dekpa and Deborah online. Enjoy. I can't believe how long this comic takes to me. I thought I'd finish this chapter on Friday, then I thought I'd finish it on Saturday but finally had to admit defeat before spending all day on it on Sunday and still not finishing it until I spent all day Monday on it. Maybe it's that there were so many characters in this chapter. I always think there must be some easier technique I'm missing that would enable me to make comics faster in the same quality but I don't know what that technique is. Mostly I just wish I could clone myself and delegate tasks.

Anyway, happy birthday, Henry David Thoreau, Tod Browning, Milton Berle, and Ben Burtt.

With Nowhere to Govern

I'm seven episodes into the the fourth season of The Walking Dead and the changeover to Scott M. Gimple as showrunner has improved the show in exactly the ways I'd hoped. Mostly just by focusing on simple things instead of the increasingly campy war between the prison and Woodbury. It's kind of a shame I don't have more time to watch the show, it'd be nice to get through the whole series before Comic Con next week. Hopefully I won't need to sit through a spoiler ridden Walking Dead panel.

Spoilers for Walking Dead season four after the screenshot.

And there's a Lewis chess set on the show now! That's a reproduction of a chess set from the 12th century. They're shown in the sixth episode, "Live Bait", written by Nichole Beattie, which did the impossible and actually got me interested in the Governor, David Morrissey's character, now known as Brian. After he gunned down a bunch of innocent people just because they didn't want to help him conquer Rick's team, it wouldn't seem like there was anywhere particularly interesting for the character go. But the writers wisely instead of looking to ramp things up did the exact opposite.

Running into two women, a little girl, and an old man hiding out in a building, the near-zombie now Governor listlessly falls into helping them. Even this guy who's gotten to the point where he can murder a whole group of people at the drop of a hat is a pretty decent fellow under the right circumstances. It's an interesting exploration on how an obsessive virtue can be bad in the right context. If they didn't run into Martinez (Jose Pablo Cantillo) things might have even ended happily ever after, or as close to that as one can get after a zombie apocalypse.

I loved that Brian is so quiet. He doesn't try to justify himself or make himself look like he was different than he was. Martinez has to assume from the fact that there are now two women and a child depending on him (again with the gender roles!) that he's not a murderous psychopath. Then, in some down time with a couple other guys, Martinez had to ask Brian directly if he's changed. Before Brian spoke, I knew immediately that if he said, "Yes," that would mean he would go back to murder. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the show for being predictable--it's a nice moment of insight. Like Oscar Wilde said, "Only the shallow know themselves." Once Brian asserts something about his personality, now he has to demonstrate for himself whether or not it's true and the last thing this guy wants is some introspection. He's so afraid of it he has to kill Martinez who has unwittingly become a mirror. Really nice stuff.

I also like that the existence of Rick's camp is threatened by a flu. That's the great contrast between seasons three and four--the writers realised it's the little things that get the best mileage.

Twitter Sonnet #890

Inside a back a front was hid from sides.
Around the circuit rings were looped in curves.
A bump impacts a crash as Cloud collides.
As useful handy nick of time it serves.
A floating graph delineates the air.
So springs a portioned guest for gusted bread.
Aligned with lunches chosen glibly rare.
No sign or letter told where ribbons led.
There's nothing super 'bout the ball ensquared.
A shining surface took the knives for cheese.
In half, the cutting board collapsed, it glared.
Obnoxious graphics tech; migraines appeased.
A double jointed satyr sat upon the rail.
A hist'ry watched from in the oaken whale.

Just Some Spoonfuls

Any imagined problems from a mixed race population and homosexuality pale in comparison to good old emotional abuse in 1961's A Taste of Honey. This black and white vision of grimy Salford in England entrances with its awkward, fractious heroine as she proceeds from one credibly written, self-consciously antagonistic relationship to another.

Like a lot of socially conscious progressive films of the 60s, its minority characters are the nicest people in the film. Jimmy (Paul Danquah) is a sailor in town briefly but long enough get Jo (Rita Tushingham) pregnant. Their initial flirtation feels so real, the two smiling at each other while the usual compulsive abrasiveness from Jo doesn't prevent finally a kiss.

Jimmy doesn't want to leave her--he tells her, in a line later borrowed by Morrissey for The Smiths song "Ring Around the Fountain"; "I dreamt about you last night and I fell out of bed twice." But both seem to realise that once he's gone to sea they'll never see each other again. Neither one seems to make much of the fact that he's black and she's white except for one scene where he pretends to play drums and she dances, telling him there's still some jungle in him despite the fact that all the ancestors he remembers came from Liverpool. It's just the right kind of ignorant, awkward statement from Jo to keep her from becoming a flat, unlikely paragon. She doesn't accept Jimmy because she's enlightened; it just feels right.

She's not afraid of what her mother (Dora Bryan) thinks, either, though the two fight about it. But they can't seem to say anything to each other without tearing each other down. When Jo's mother flings insults at Jo about her looseness, Jo is quick to return with variations of "You should know!" apparently inspiring The Beatles' "Your Mother Should Know", according to Wikipedia.

It does feel slightly odd that Jo kind of takes a tour of oppressed groups when she befriends a young gay man named Geoffrey (Murray Melvin), who provides The Smiths with another line: "The dream is gone but the baby is real." He's not quite as amiable as Jimmy, having the reflexive insults at ready like Jo and her mother. Jo infers that Geoffrey has no home to go to and when he says she has a large flat she chides, "Thinking about moving in?" at which he scoffs, "Not likely" but somehow both know that's exactly what they both want to happen. He becomes a caretaker, adopting many of the roles that have become stereotypical for gay characters in film but the self-consciously insecure dialogue somehow makes everything feel much more credible. I found myself really wanting these two to have a nice life together.

Back in Time's Back in Time

I listened to three momentous Doctor Who audio plays this past week--The Girl Who Never Was from 2007 and The Bride of Peladon and The Condemned from 2008. The Condemned follows The Girl Who Never Was chronologically for the companion Charley (India Fisher) but not for the Doctor--she leaves the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) in the first story and starts travelling with the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) in the second, a significant downgrade for her on a variety of levels. But both stories are nicely written. though the Eighth Doctor story is easily superior.

Featuring Danny Webb, McGann's costar from the soon to be kicked from continuity Alien 3, as a mercenary that manages to charm Charley, the story seems to have been the inspiration behind the arc in the Twelfth Doctor's first season where Clara is fed up and wants to leave the Doctor but they decide to have one last, farewell adventure. In this case, though, Charley is fed up with the Doctor because of his cold attitude to the death of their mutual friend. This is a theme that's carried over in the other audio dramas released around the same time for the Fifth and Sixth Doctor with the line, "Everybody leaves." The Girl Who Never Was also has Anna Massey in a supporting role. The plot is an interesting, threatening time paradox--also introducing the idea that the Doctor doesn't feel any different about a companion based on her apparent age--but it's mainly entertaining for some exceptionally snappy dialogue by Alan Barnes. I liked a bit where a mechanical captor tells Charley and her fellow prisoners that their conversation is irrelevant and Charley responds, "Than you don't mind if we talk."

Having a companion move backwards through a Doctor's history, without being all over the place like River Song, is an interesting idea. I'm wondering how they'll eventually address the fact that the Eighth Doctor doesn't recognise her when they meet in Charley's first story. Already in The Condemned, I was disappointed by Charley's failure to ask certain questions. She doesn't seem to wonder if Six is a past or future incarnation of Eight. Maybe she's not even sure he's the same person, the story leaves a lot of area to cover. But the main plot is a really nicely eerie story about Charley being kidnapped by a young woman in Manchester and being held in a flat where light seems to be disappearing and a mysterious man keeps calling on different phones, saying he's trapped in the basement.

The Bride of Peladon features the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) and Peri (Nicola Bryant) and it marks the final story of the audio companion Erimem (Caroline Morris), the pharaoh from ancient Egypt. I'll miss her; she was very good, especially when the writers remembered to write her as a ruler from an ancient, brutal culture. I think my favourite stories with her were Nekromanteia and Son of the Dragon, both stories that were decidedly less kid-friendly than Doctor Who tends to be.

And of course, The Bride of Peladon returns to Peladon, the place visited on television twice by the Third Doctor in The Curse of Peladon and The Monster of Peladon. Like those first stories, this one mainly involves court intrigue and of course the Ice Warriors and the genderless Ambassador from Alpha Centauri, a character whose concept might have been more surprisingly progressive if the other characters could finally agree on their pronouns and their design didn't accidentally turn out to resemble a giant penis.

The Bride of Peladon begins with a pretty unambiguous Hamlet reference as the current prince is visited by the ghost of his mother, informing him she was murdered and demanding vengeance. But things drift away from there and while it is oddly entertaining hearing Peri buddy up with an Ice Warrior it's not one of the best written stories--somehow, when a prophecy demands the blood of a royal sacrifice, no one thinks that Erimem might be in danger.

Indiscriminate Poison

Bigotry is part of human nature. To suggest that someone is incapable of bigotry is to deny their humanity. Micah Johnson ruined his life yesterday and ended others because he wanted to kill white people in retaliation for the unjustified violence and killing perpetrated by white police. I've been hearing and reading people assert over the past few years that black people are incapable of being racist against white people, that any member of an oppressed group cannot be bigoted against the oppressor group. The definition for racism at Merriam-Webster is "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race." This is also how the term is generally understood yet there are many who would load an extra value judgement to the word that makes oppressed groups exempt. When you do this, you're telling people that there's something fundamentally different about their minds than the minds of others, it's a philosophy that divides and makes it easier for one side to see the other as another species.

I watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon again for the first time in quite a few years last night. I saw it nine times when it was in theatres sixteen years ago, watching it again felt really good. Like all of Ang Lee's movies, the main attraction is his ability to direct faces, to tell so much of the story through the subtlest shifts in facial expression.

It's a story of women dealing with traditional patriarchy. Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-pei) murders Mu Bai's (Chow Yun-fat) master because he refuses to train a woman and now Fox is the mentor to Jen (Zhang Ziyi). The movie is a wonderfully effective portrait of the differences between generations in many ways but with the central complicating factor of genuinely bad things about the system in which the older generation operates. Mu Bai is forced to acknowledge he must train Jen, despite tradition, because otherwise, he observes, she may become a "poisoned dragon".

The general idea of the movie is being open to the humanity of others regardless of whether their part of the oppressor group or not. Most of the conflict in the film comes from Jen's persistent inability to trust other people. She can't even rationalise to herself why she does half of what she does--her fear drives her to violent contrariness. First she pursues and attacks Lo (Chang Chen), the thief who stole her comb, beyond all reason--then she wants to rebel against her family to stay with Lo, then she rejects Lo, Jade Fox, and Mu Bai, holding obstinately to things she said and things other people said to her in heated moments.

Mu Bai seems to be the antidote, being a supernaturally gifted fighter whose skills seem less about attack than about finding a perfect harmony with nature--most of his action scenes are him calmly defending himself against attack with no thought of killing. Yet even he is vulnerable to the same poison and must pursue his revenge against Jade Fox.

When a white cop shoots an innocent black man, part of the dialogue that should come in the wake of the incident is how a system might exacerbate irrational patterns the human mind is vulnerable to. The human mind, not the white mind. Hearing recently lectures about how oppressed groups were incapable of bigotry, I couldn't help thinking of a book I've been reading lately on 17th century Ireland. What a complex history of overlapping groups with passionate, ancient grievances and commitments. Which group is the one exempt? The Old English Catholics, the old natives of Ulster, the Protestants, the members of the Confederacy--and which of the groups that splintered in the Confederacy? One of the benefits of studying history is seeing that all humans are susceptible to being human.

Twitter Sonnet #889

A waiting egg defaced its call with Hell.
Incarceration stakes a vintage bolt.
Decreasing circles claim a canvas bell.
The soundless linen cools the skinny colt.
A tumbling monkey graced a plastic mould
Implored to bend a knee on ev'ry stair.
A curving lid was striped in shade to hold.
The steel reflected kitchen beams to spare.
Two marriages offered to stop a war.
A door to stone passages checked a friend.
As dreams the flowers lived centuries more.
A space reminds the ship it's not the end.
Metallic poison turns from jade to green.
The ghosts of pins progress on backs unseen.

The Risks of Talking

The more you trust someone, the more integral they become to your identity, both because you trust their decisions, and therefore they become, in essence, your decisions, and because you begin to believe in their impression of you. Trusting someone completely means, as the title of 1989's Say Anything . . . suggests, that you feel you can say anything to them and that they feel just as open with you. Maybe no two human beings were meant to trust each other quite that much or face the consequences of damaged self-image that comes when such complete trust is betrayed. Certainly the three central characters of Say Anything . . . have a pretty painful experience though as John Cusack's character proclaims at the beginning of the film, "I want to be hurt," maybe such pain is a necessary part of life. The film is good, its attention to this idea only sidetracked by interesting and entertaining portrayals of supporting characters.

At the party that Lloyd (Cusack) and Diane (Ione Skye) attend after their high school graduation are some of the most believable drunken high school students I've ever seen in a film. The guy who passes out sick in the bathroom, Eric Stoltz as a distracted host, the way everyone subtly works in disbelief that Diana agreed to go out with Lloyd in conversations with them both, all feel like they were crafted by writer and director Cameron Crowe with an extraordinary ear for how people actually talk. Corey (Lili Taylor) sings angry songs about her slimeball ex-boyfriend she's still obsessed with that are just the right kind of mediocre.

Diane is established as an unsociable academic, having no time for friends but having a great and deeply trusting relationship with her father, Jim (John Mahoney). It amazes Lloyd the first time he has dinner with the family just how at ease Diane and her father are with each other with none of the apparent friction or layers of resentment common between teens and their parents. Diane's social isolation is related to how well she's succeeded in school--the movie's vague about what Diane's actual passions and talents are, the principal at her school lists just about every subject but unfortunately Diane's genius never comes into play once during the film. She functions more as the centre of gravity between Lloyd and Jim.

Which is not to say she's like a doll being tugged by two children on the playground. Her issues of love and loyalty and how they inform her motives are an active part of the film and in a scene where Lloyd feels like a scumbag because she seems to be rejecting him the scene is especially effective because both sides of the issue are clear.

Lloyd, telling a group of guys how satisfied with himself and the world he felt when he thought Diane loved him, begins to doubt everything about himself because he finds his trust in Diane misplaced. These guys he's talking to, a random collection of losers hanging out by a convenience store, throw him the typical bullshit about how all women are the same and how one should use them rather than trust them. The scene is comical but it's actually a pretty good insight into how misogyny begins. Meanwhile Diane finds herself in crisis because she finds her father isn't quite who she thought he was. When he makes a surprisingly thought-provoking argument about his misdeeds the movie resists becoming a simple matter of the boyfriend versus the dad. It would have been nice if Diane had had a scene of similar insight but there's enough to her character to make this film a very effective character drama.

The Street Value of a Mountain of Snow

It's hard enough when your girlfriend dumps you for the annoying stock jock character but sometimes you also have to deal green blobs for dinner that slither off your plate, an eight year old brother who can build lasers and spaceships, and hallucinations of singing hamburgers. 80s teen comedies seem to exist in some distinctive crossroads between absurdism and post-modernism; 1985's Better Off Dead has a young man attempting suicide repeatedly due to the stress imposed by humiliation on the ski slops and the terror of the local paper boy demanding his two dollars. The film's departures into fantasy save it from being an unremarkable exercise in romantic comedy.

Lane is played by a refreshingly soft looking John Cusack. And he's supposed to be an athlete--he's cheated out of the running in his first attempt to qualify for a ski competition and it's at this point his girlfriend, with whom he's so obsessed he has her face plastered all over his room and glued to all the hangers for all the clothes in his closet, promptly leaves him for the alpha male. Meanwhile, a cute foreign exchange student named Monique (Diane Franklin) pines for Lane from where she's staying across the street. Pretty standard stuff. Except it's all delivered with a nightmare logic.

When Lane's dad gets him a job at a fast food restaurant, Lane has to wear a bizarre pig mask. His boss turns out to be a guy whose care Lane has twice crashed into while trying to drag race with an Asian man who learned English by doing Howard Cosell impressions. While Lane isn't able to measure up for his girlfriend, his little brother also outpaces him by somehow throwing a party for himself and five beautiful twenty something women in his bedroom. Lane's mother (Kim Darby) destabilises even Lane's source of food by experimenting with oozes and alien creatures in every meal.

Every fear and humiliation is magnified cartoonishly which has the simultaneous effect of conveying the grave extent of Lane's problems while rendering them almost meaningless. It's pretty fun.

Fake Deaths and Real Funerals

A young man obsessed with death meets an old woman obsessed with life in 1971's Harold and Maude. A broad romantic comedy with a trite perspective, it's entertaining for its novelty.

Harold (Bud Cort) is the son of a fabulously wealthy woman (Vivian Pickles), her endlessly disposable assets allowing Harold to buy whatever car he wants, whenever he wants, and stage elaborate fake suicides, much to his mother's annoyance.

He also likes to attend funerals in his spare time--so does Maude (Ruth Gordon), and this is how they meet. Maude is 79 and wears bright colours all the time and she's obsessed with finding new stimuli at every moment. So why does she like going to funerals? It's not clear. Obviously it's so she and Harold can meet in a context outside his family and that somehow reflects the routine he chooses for himself.

This is a story about Harold and Maude is there to facilitate that story. Harold's mother is played broadly by Pickles as cold and domineering but the advice she gives him, to break out of his funk, find something new to do and get a girlfriend, isn't actually that much different from what he finds so exhilarating about Maude. In an oddly prophetic scene, Harold's mother creates a profile for him in a computer dating service, unselfconsciously answering every question for him. The three women that turn up are insufferable to Harold because they don't get it when he pretends to commit suicide in front them. That is until the last one, an actress, who really seems to get into it, turning Harold's seppuku into the scene at the end of Romeo and Juliet. But he's already fallen for Maude at this point.

Maude has a magical set of keys that allow her to steal whatever car she wants and she and Harold go on joy rides. I guess, except for her age, Maude is what's called nowadays a "Manic Pixie Dream Girl". The Wikipedia entry on Manic Pixie Dream Girls has this definition by Nathan Rabin; "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." That does sound an awful lot like Maude. He doesn't even mention age. I'm a little irritated, though, by the Wikipedia entry having that quote followed by "MPDGs are said to help their men without pursuing their own happiness, and such characters never grow up; thus, their men never grow up" and a list of examples that includes Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve and Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. First of all, who says exposure to someone who won't grow up won't help someone else grow up? Witnessing immature behaviour can be pretty edifying. Secondly, Stanwyck and Hepburn very obviously pursue their own happiness in their respective films, and very obviously have an existence outside the lives of the male characters. Certainly there's nothing remotely manic about Jean in The Lady Eve. I suspect the list was compiled by someone with a different definition for the term. Which is one of the reasons I hate these lazy new internet critic labels.

But back to Maude. I don't think it's a problem that she's there just to facilitate Harold's story--we have some hints that she was in a concentration camp during World War II and that her love of life is due to a knowledge of suffering that goes well beyond Harold's. This gives her a little depth and it's mainly there to instruct him. But his problems are so broad, the characters in his family so like caricatures, it's hard for his character path to gain traction. Bud Cort gives Harold some over the top, mad scientist expressions sometimes, it's a little like watching Frank Gorshin as the Riddler learning how to fall in love. Actually, that might have been kind of fun.

The film features a soundtrack by Cat Stevens which is about as excruciating as you might expect. It helps solidify the film's ultimate message of encouraging wealthy people to do whatever they want with life.

Twitter Sonnet #888

Predictions wavered bright for yon foothill.
A stout reflected fork applies the food.
Let's all review the tape we bought a meal.
No butter does the shiny ribbon good.
A circuit board subsumed what's left of cheese.
In plastic wrap the diodes clutch a snack.
No ghost there was to give the hour lease.
Midnight in gowns the carbs assay like crack.
In blue important light a banjo breaks.
Excess of maize amassed atop the tomb.
Nutrition squelched in view of gazing steaks.
The webs create the sun on cursed loom.
A burn without a light reminds the bank
To place a pyramid within the tank.

"Tho' Modesty is a Virtue, Bashfulness is a Vice"

This seems like as good a day as any to defend Benjamin Franklin. Against whom? Tories? Slave owners? No, I'm going to defend him against Laura Fraser. Not the Scottish actress from Breaking Bad and Neverwhere but another Laura Fraser who I can't find online but she wrote an essay called "The Inner Corset: A Brief History of Fat in the United States" I was required to read for a class I recently took on Women's Sexuality. The essay gives a history of the fluctuating fashionability of fat and implies that rhetoric which casts fat in a negative light--in terms of aesthetic or health--is part of a propaganda campaign to sell weight loss products or is a reflection of classism.

Americans believed that it was not only a sign of class to be thin, but also a sign of morality. There was a long tradition in American culture that suggested that indulging the body and its appetites was immoral, and that denying the flesh was a sure way to become closer to God. Puritans such as the minister Cotton Mather frequently fasted to prove their worthiness and to cleanse themselves of their sins. Benjamin Frankin, in his Poor Richard's Almanack, chided his readers to eat lightly to please not only God, but also a new divinity; Reason: "Wouldst thou enjoy a long life, a healthy Body, and a Vigorous Mind, and be acquainted also with the wonderful works of God? Labour in the first place to bring thy Appetite into Subjection to Reason" (Franklin, 1970, p. 238). Franklin's attitude toward food not only reveals a puritanical distrust of appetite as overly sensual but also presaged diets that would attempt to bring eating in line with rational, scientific calculations. "The Difficulty lies, in finding out an exact Measure;" he wrote, "but eat for Necessity, not Pleasure, for Lust knows not where Necessity ends" (p. 238).

I can hardly say derisive attitudes toward weight are not manifested in classist attitudes after watching The Neon Demon last week. I don't think it's rational to suggest being fat is a reflection of bad or weak character. After all, I admire a fat man named Benjamin Franklin. And friends of mine who fluctuate between fat and thin due to dieting generally seem happier when they're not dieting and my friends happy and fat look a lot better to me than my friends miserable and thin. But my use of the word "rational" a few sentences ago implies that I think being rational can be positive. Fraser framing Reason as a "new divinity" is characteristic of several of the readings that were required in Women's Sexuality.

When I signed up for the class, I had no real idea of what the class would entail, I only knew that it was included on a list of possible classes I could take to satisfy an "explorations" requirement. It wasn't until the end of the course that we got to things I might have expected, like excerpts from The Vagina Monologues. A surprisingly large percentage of the class was given over to discussions of race and LGBTQ politics. I had nothing against reading about these things and I do think they're important subjects for students to discuss and to be confronted with. Maybe labelling the whole class "Women's Sexuality" is too restrictive, but maybe the professor was obliged to operate within an academic framework that did not allow her to choose her own labels. Certainly, these subjects were related to women and sexuality in some way. Though I wonder what kind of biases about women it suggests that these things can only be discussed under the heading of "Women's Sexuality" and not simply "Sexuality".

One section of the class involved discussing how science was used as a tool of oppression. I agree that bogus disciplines like phrenology are harmful to human beings but I was a little disturbed that pseudo-sciences were consistently referred to as simply "science". At the beginning of the class, the professor explained in unambiguous terms that the class philosophy was anti-religious, that religion was antithetical to feminism and social progress. The inclusion of a text that branded Reason as a "new divinity" and the language regarding science as being entirely subjective seems to indicate she included Reason and science as being among religions, an attitude I'd encountered before. A mythology class I took a few years ago included scientific theories like the Big Bang and human evolution among various cultural myths. This seems to be a growing misconception, perhaps related to the misunderstanding of the word "theory" as used in science. In general parlance, a theory has long been more like what science calls an hypothesis--an idea or inference based on some observation or experience. Science does not, like religion, claim this sort of thing to be true out of hand but rather uses it simply as a prompt for experimentation which then might lead to a theory, a theory in science being a summation of what an overwhelming amount of evidence indicates. Of course, bias can contaminate things labelled as theories--like phrenology--but failing to meet the demands of rigorous evidence makes these things by definition not science.

At the same time I was taking Women's Sexuality I was also taking Oceanography and I don't think I've ever had two classes at the same time that more explicitly, directly contradicted each other. Pollution was an important topic in Oceanography and connected to it was the topic of overpopulation. The exploding population of the past century and its continual, exponential increase poses dangers not only in terms of pollution but more broadly in terms of how many people the planet can support. In Women's Sexuality, one piece of evidence used to show that science was a tool of oppressors was a series of non-consensual sterilisations conducted on Mexican women in the 1970s by doctors in Los Angeles. It's suggested the doctors justified their actions with fears of overpopulation. It was implied that these fears are unfounded rather than arguing that targeting Mexicans for sterilisation was racist and certainly not scientific and that such sterilisation would have a minuscule and meaningless impact on global population growth. This is not an example of Reason as a culprit, this is a case Reason being absent.

Also, among many other accomplishments, Benjamin Franklin contributed to Oceanography and the material I read in Oceanography only had good things to say about him.

For the record, Benjamin Franklin was not a Puritan. His parents were and certainly philosophies of moderation and self-discipline can be traced to a Puritan influence. But still I use the term "Puritan" where maybe I shouldn't. The professor I had last year for the class I took on John Milton was against using the term as it was originally a pejorative applied in England to a wide range of Protestant sects who were dissatisfied with the monarchy and Catholic aspects in the Church of England. Certainly the rejection of tyranny and the embracing of toleration for other beliefs were some other "puritanical" qualities in Franklin's writings. And, I might add, discussions focusing on identifying "privilege", pursuing justice for marginalised groups, and dismantling hierarchy in the Women's Sexuality class I took--and in Social Justice rhetoric generally--could just as easily be traced to the Puritan Levellers or Diggers or even Oliver Cromwell. But so far there seems to be no steam for tracking Puritan intersectionality.

Here are few quotes from Benjamin Franklin on Reason:

Would you persuade, speak of Interest, not of Reason.

...

Force shites upon Reason's Back.

...

It's common for Men to give pretended Reasons instead of one real one.

...

Anger is never without a Reason, but seldom with a good One.

...

To-day I also read the new Sirenia Digest which includes Caitlin R. Kiernan's excellent new story "Whisper Road (Murder Ballad No. 9)". A wonderfully subtle, almost Hitchcockian exploration of a killer's preoccupations during, and reflected by, a mysterious supernatural occurrence. A very good story and just the sort I like, where internal feelings of responsibility and guilt are in harmony with an unknown and threatening force. A really lovely piece.

More Lives than Can Live

Long ago, in the nineteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution took hold in Wales, entire villages of men worked in the coal mines. The men gradually began to outnumber the jobs, a transition portrayed with breathtaking beauty in John Ford's 1941 film How Green Was My Valley. Told from the perspective of a child growing up in a small, South Wales village, it tracks with personal drama the effects of industry and religion before settling on a story with much smaller scale. Sharing many of the same actors with Ford's later film The Quiet Man, this movie is a bit more detached than some of the director's films about more vibrant characters but the beauty of the photography makes How Green Was My Valley endlessly fascinating.

It makes you stop and marvel that so many perfectly composed images can exist in one movie. In one of my favourites, the camera follows Angharad (Maureen O'Hara) at her wedding as she walks slowly down from the church, her veil whipping slowly up and about like a kite.

And this same, continuous shot ends after her car drives away, moving to left slightly and we see Gruffydd (Walter Pidgeon) standing, little more than a silhouette on the hill.

You don't need one word of dialogue to know what's happening in this scene.

The whole film was shot in California because World War II prevented the production from going to Britain. It looks like they built an entire village with terraced houses and mine works.

The story is told from the perspective of Huw, played by a very young Roddy McDowall, the film's narration by an adult Huw voiced by Irving Pichel, and he explains at the beginning how green the valley where he lived was when he was a child before the effects of the coal mines became more and more visible.

He's sent to school in the hopes that he'll find another way of supporting himself as unemployment increases and his brothers find themselves without work. More focus is given, though, to the romance between the preacher played by Pidgeon and O'Hara's character. Arthur Shields, who plays the gentle Protestant vicar in The Quiet Man, plays a snarling, sanctimonious deacon in How Green Was My Valley and he leads the charge on a passive aggressive denouncement of a woman who had sex before marriage, a spectre of guilt that casts a shadow over any thoughts Pidgeon or O'Hara might have of consummating their feelings.

All of the dark, overhanging trees and black etched landscapes Ford gives us feel quite appropriately grim even as they're beautiful.

His Watch Won't End Thanks to Time Travel

The season of Game of Thrones might be over but I was treated to an extra dose of Owen Teale--Ser Alliser Thorne of the Night's Watch--courtesy of the 2007 Doctor Who audio play The Mind's Eye. A very short story accompanied by another short called Mission of the Viyrans, both are written by Colin Brake and both use some very Star Trekish concepts. Or stories that I first encountered on Star Trek, who knows if Star Trek found them somewhere else. Mission of the Viyrans is the superior story of the two but neither or bad.

The Minds Eye finds the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) and his companions Peri (Nicola Bryant) and Erimem (Caroline Morris) falling prey to plants on a tropical world that give them each detailed hallucinatory dreams, alternate versions of their lives. The Doctor recovers quickly to find a survey team led by Hayton (Teale) who are trying to turn some kind of profit from the insidious plants. Peri dreams she's the girlfriend of a divorced single dad and Erimem dreams she's the queen of a new version of Cairo on an alien world. The story has the pretty standard stuff about how they'll die in real life if they die in the dream and the Doctor has to go into their dreams to somehow save them. But it's entertaining enough.

Mission of the Viyrans turns out to have a basic premise from one particular episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation--this isn't revealed until the end of the audio play so I won't spoil it for you. Featuring only the Fifth Doctor and Peri--Erimem is absent for some reason--it's mostly told from Peri's perspective as she has increasingly disturbing experiences where the people she's talking to turn into copies of herself. That's the cool part of the story. As for what it took from Star Trek, I still feel like Doctor Who has license to take as much as it likes from Star Trek from the debt owed by the Borg being basically wholesale copies of the Cybermen.

Twitter Sonnet #887

A solemn chalk dissolves in carbon assault.
The edge attained in points reverts to crumbs.
In paces slow and wet the boots default.
In muddy strips of plaster walls are sums.
A green's more vivid for its lack of hue.
A man was old at six, his hair an axe.
Tipped o'er pits of coal and caps he grew.
The gloves in boxer's church now stripe their backs.
In threes, the eyes recurse beneath the dome.
A launch in green expensive dough begins.
The carbs can hope to find in us a home.
But broken up the molecule descends.
In shouldered fur the vapour thought emerged.
A set of porc'lain joints unseen converged.

A Century of Maid Marian

You've probably already heard the news--after all, the story on Huffington Post has exploded with five whole comments--but to-day one of my favourite actresses turns 100 years old. Olivia de Havilland, the Brit born in Japan who became an American star and who now lives in Paris where she apparently still climbs five storeys to her apartment every day. Maybe the secret to longevity is elevation.

De Havilland's career took off in the 1930s. Nearly every article I read about her mentions her as one of the stars of Gone with the Wind but before that she was already a leading lady, appearing as Maid Marian in what still remains the best film version of Robin Hood opposite Errol Flynn in the title role. She starred with Flynn in numerous swashbuckler and adventure films, including one of the best pirate movies ever made, Captain Blood (pictured at the top of the post).

After single handedly changing the entire film industry in the late 1940s by suing her studio and winning, de Havilland was finally able to break out of the endless stream of damsel in distress parts to take on more complex roles that won her Academy Awards. My favourite is The Heiress--directed by William Wyler, De Havilland's performance is the most crucial element of the film as we watch how the thoughtless devices of society custom mould a loving and open hearted young woman into someone cold and withdrawn.

Happy birthday, Olivia de Havilland, here's to many more.

But Who Isn't?

How vulnerable is same sex marriage? Not in terms of legality but in terms of how it weathers the strangeness and preoccupations of human behaviour. Lisa Cholodenko's 2010 film The Kids Are All Right subverts perceptions of novelty in same sex marriage, presenting a lesbian couple who have become boring, middle aged parents contrasted with, and threatened by, a virile and fun heterosexual man. Featuring very nice performances by Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, and Mark Ruffalo as well as entertaining dialogue, the film ultimately seems an essay on marriage in general and spousal instincts. I enjoyed the characters but found the film's ultimate argument somewhat disappointing and unimaginative.

The concept isn't all that different from Ang Lee's 1993 film The Wedding Banquet which also features a gay couple whose relationship is threatened when one has sex with someone of the opposite sex. If we look at the two films as yard sticks for how far perceptions of same sex relationships have progressed in the public consciousness in the seventeen year period separating them it's hard to see much difference. Though this might have more to do with Lee being an innovative filmmaker. In both films, children are an issue but as Annette Bening's character, Nic, throws at Jules (Moore) in an argument, Jules cheating with Paul (Mark Ruffalo) is particularly painful because Paul is the sperm donor for the children Nic and Jules have been raising for the past 18 years, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson).

Yeah . . . they named him Laser. But okay, evidently he's All Right.

It's the kids who initially reach out to Paul at the beginning of the film. Paul turns out to be cool--he loves David Bowie, owns a restaurant, rides a motorcycle, and has fantastic sex with his beautiful girlfriend. Laid back and seeming to exude a kind of animalistic wisdom Joni in particular seems to respond to, he's clearly meant to be threateningly "natural" in contrast to Nic and Jules' stuffy old relationship.

Jules always reminds Nic how many glasses of wine Nic's had at parties prompting Nic to complain about her wife's compulsive micromanaging. Nic puts together a romantic evening with bath salts when she senses Jules' dissatisfaction only to be distracted by a work related phone call. It's not a remarkable relationship and the problems aren't remarkable. Which I suppose is kind of the point.

I've said it before, I really don't get why cheating is regarded as relatively normal. I don't understand why it's supposedly so hard to resist sleeping with someone when you have a spouse somewhere else who loves and trusts you. That being said, there's a whole pile of presumptions about marriage, sex, and cheating that the film doesn't seem to feel compelled to discuss while indulging in. Why is Paul deemed more responsible for the affair when Jules clearly instigated it and perpetuated it? Why is Paul's affection for Jules treated with disgust? If Nic were a man, the movie would look like an extremely conservative story about a wise patriarch who's responsible for shepherding his morally weak woman. I'm not sure the fact that Nic is a woman makes the concept better. It almost seems like Cholodenko wanted to present relationships as fundamentally comprised of a Nietzschean master and slave dichotomy. This may indeed be how many people really prefer to see marriage but it made the conclusion of the film, that affirms a very traditional dynamic, a bit sad to me.