Paths in the Dark Woods

Two teenage boys run desperately through the woods. We learn very little about them but we know they escaped a truck bound for a concentration camp in 1963's Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci). Based loosely on the autobiography of Holocaust survivor Arnošt Lustig, it's a film with very little dialogue, instead telling a visual and auditory tale of raw human experience.

The point of view stays more with the prettier of the two boys, played by Ladislav Jansky, whose confused memories and dreams we're privy to. In ways strikingly evocative of human thought we see potential actions and circumstances repeated as he considers them, and memories of past events recur as he dwells on them. He remembers trading his shoe with the other boy (Antonin Kumbera) for some food. When he breaks into a cottage, he stares mutely at the woman he finds in the kitchen and we watch ideas play out on screen--he hitting her with a stick, an image of her smiling on the bed. We see her slice a loaf of bread and giving it to him. This is probably what actually happens but it's as dizzingly ambiguous to us as it probably is to him.

The film gives a very good impression of being malnourished, out of your wits, humiliated at a young age, and compulsively assigning shame and guilt to senseless circumstances.

Director Jan Nemec and his cinematographer Jaromir Sofr make this human experience beautiful even as it is horrible and appropriately brief, only an hour and seven minutes. Diamonds of the Night is available on The Criterion Channel.

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A button waits behind the morning hill.
A thread and needle stitch the start of day.
The night dissolved beneath the window sill.
The gloveless hands were offered keys to play.
A walking lunch was mainly bone and plant.
A face was shrinking past the point of babe.
The leaky shack was built upon a slant.
In secret bibles, Abram changed to Abe.
The choicest legs could punch a telephone.
As wheels entrap the digits ink'd call.
A distant number faintly heard the tone.
The final wire will connect them all.
Asleep, the moving toy examines gears.
A thousand plastic beads determine years.

Plant versus Animal

A distress call from a beautiful woman menaced by a "beast" reaches the beleaguered heroes of Farscape. So begins a thoughtful episode about how stories are passed on from one group or generation to another and how difficult it can be disentangling them from self-interested motives.

Season 1; Episode 21: Bone to be Wild

The first reaction Crichton (Ben Browder) has to the idea that anyone would ask them for help is to laugh hysterically and ask, "How stupid is that?" The crew of Moya are huddled in the dark and cold, power on the ship reduced to minimum in the hopes of avoiding Peacekeeper scans.

But the strange, pale faced M'Lee (Francesca Buller) might have maps to help our heroes escape the asteroid field without running afoul of their pursuers so Crichton, D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe), and Zhaan (Virginia Hey) take a transport to M'Lee's location. After being sidelined for a few episodes, it was nice to see a story that brought Zhaan and D'Argo back to the foreground, and we learn a bit more about Zhaan--significantly that she's a plant.

As in flora, as she puts it herself. Which explains why she was so into sunlight in "Till the Blood Runs Clear". Her plant nature takes on importance in "Born to be Wild" as the conflict between M'Lee and the Beast, whose name turns out to be Bernie, I mean, Br'Nee (Marton Csokas) turns out to be one between a bone eater and a plant lover. This concept is used to create a recontextualised story about the plight of indigenous peoples versus the value of advanced science and medicine.

And, by the way, they're two of the best examples of the show's fantastic makeup effects. M'Lee is a beautiful demonic lady with a cool glowing headpiece while Br'Nee is an asymmetrical marvel of fungi, soil, and plantlife with a weird double mouth I couldn't take my eyes off of.

While Crichton, D'Argo, and Zhaan are forced to choose between two competing narratives, Aeryn (Claudia Black) finds herself having to pitch one to Moya's offspring, the new living ship that was born in the previous episode. Standing on the bridge, Aeryn has to explain to it how the Peacekeepers who created him aren't to be trusted while also convincing him that she, Aeryn, ought to be trusted.

To be honest, I'm a little disappointed Aeryn is so clearly set against the Peacekeepers now. I liked how the ending of "Bug's Life" left her feelings ambiguous about the the Peacekeeper commando she was falling for. Then, in "Hidden Memory", she had a confrontation with Crais (Lani Tupu) during which she took her revenge on him while renouncing everything about the Peacekeepers. I can understand her hating Crais, but since Crais himself is pretty much on his way out from the Peacekeepers it doesn't quite make sense for her to tie him in with the whole organisation.

And we see in this episode Scorpius (Wayne Pygram) taking command of Crais' carrier. Now the show is playing for bigger stakes as the overall story moves away from tales of asserting one's place in a culture or people and becomes one about dealing with physical and emotional survival in a destabilised universe.

. . .

This entry is part of a series I'm writing on Farscape for the show's 20th anniversary. My previous reviews can be found here (episodes are in the order intended by the show's creators rather than the broadcast order):

Episode 1: Pilot
Episode 2: I, E.T.
Episode 3: Exodus from Genesis
Episode 4: Throne for a Loss
Episode 5: Back and Back and Back to the Future
Episode 6: Thank God It's Friday Again
Episode 7: PK Tech Girl
Episode 8: That Old Black Magic
Episode 9: DNA Mad Scientist
Episode 10: They've Got a Secret
Episode 11: Till the Blood Runs Clear
Episode 12: Rhapsody in Blue
Episode 13: The Flax
Episode 14: Jeremiah Crichton
Episode 15: Durka Returns
Episode 16: A Human Reaction
Episode 17: Through the Looking Glass
Episode 18: A Bug's Life
Episode 19: Nerve
Episode 20: The Hidden Memory

Who Knows What Gold Lurks in the Coffins of Men?

A faint sound of mechanical music, maybe a shadow on the wall, that's all the warning you'll get and If You Meet Sartana, Pray for Your Death. Or so says the title of the 1968 Spaghetti Western that introduced the popular character to audiences. Definitely closer to a superhero film than most of the best films of the genre, the first Sartana movie is like a wilder adaptation of Yojimbo than A Fistful of Dollars with The Shadow as a protagonist.

Sartana (Gianni Garko) may be more supernatural than The Shadow, though. The film begins with the first of a few instances where it clearly looks like the man in black and red is shot and killed--only to inexplicably calmly walk back into frame and gun everyone down.

But he misses Klaus Kinski, who's set up with a rifle on the hill. Kinski plays a character called Morgan and his role is small enough he's credited as making "a special appearance". He doesn't have much dialogue, allowing Kinski to play without the inevitable dubbing, and his mysterious gunman character wears a bell on one of his spurs. This ominous sound that somehow effectively communicates his prowess is overshadowed when Sartana starts using a music-playing pocket watch he took off a dead man to announce his presence.

Sometimes a guy will hear the pocket watch and look around wildly for Sartana and never see him at all. It's just a reminder that Sartana is watching, that Sartana knows, somewhere in the shadows of bright desert sun reflecting off brilliant white sand.

What does Sartana want? He says he wants gold, and that sort of seems to be the general trend of his activities as he foils bandits and a Mexican militia headed by Fernando Sancho from the Ringo movies. But it doesn't explain Sartana's sadistic psychological games, his theatricality, his tiny mechanical gun, and above all his apparent invulnerability.

The ambiguity works, though, and I found myself smiling along with him when his complicated plan involving a rope trap in a prostitute's room proves effective, or when he ominously tells a story to be overheard by Morgan and Lasky (William Berger) in a barber shop. He also likes to gamble but there's never any hint of a possibility that he could lose at it.

It's a decadent pleasure, far from the more beautiful or challenging films of the genre, but by no means bad. If You Meet Sartana, Pray for Your Death is available on Amazon Prime.

A Sudden Fatherhood

Choosing a Doctor Who episode to watch for Father's Day is much easier than Mother's Day. There are several good candidates--obviously "Father's Day" from the 9th Doctor era would be one--but I watched "The Doctor's Daughter". I think it was the second time since I first watched it. As is so often the case, it feels like a good episode that would've been a lot better in a four or five episode serial format but in this case the concept does kind of work with the rushed feeling, with wars occurring rapidly and people being created instantly to fight it. It's a good, thoughtful episode, one that nicely harkens back to classic kinds of stories.

The Doctor (David Tennant) and his companions Donna (Catherine Tate) and Martha (Freema Agyeman) exit the TARDIS amid some anonymous rubble. Almost immediately, the Doctor's grabbed by Gendry from Game of Thrones and hooked to a machine from which his DNA is extracted and his daughter is created, aged up to her early twenties, and implanted with military tactics.

This was a couple years before Game of Thrones premièred so I couldn't have recognised Joe Dempsie, the actor who went on to play Gendry. I'd quite forgotten Nigel Terry is in the episode, though, his presence as the leader of the human faction giving an enormous sense of gravitas to the role.

He passed away in 2015, never having quite separated himself from his role as King Arthur in John Boorman's Excalibur. I'm pretty sure he fits most people's mental image of the legendary king. He was in other things, notably The Lion in Winter and Caravaggio, but when the Doctor and Donna are ushered into the camp, my first thought at seeing the leader was, "Oh, these soldiers are in service of the rightful King of England, Uther Pendragon's son."

But, of course, most Doctor Who fans remember the episode for Jenny, the Doctor's sudden daughter, played by Georgia Moffett, the daughter of Peter Davison, the Fifth Doctor. And now David Tennant and Georgia Moffett are married and perhaps we're seeing the emergence of a bona fide Doctor Who dynasty.

While the Doctor, Donna, and Jenny meet with the humans, Martha makes peace with the Hath, the traditional enemies of the humans on this world, a sort of fish people who seem to communicate with bubbles produced in little jars they wear clamped in their mouths.

Martha understands them thanks to the TARDIS translation circuits but we don't, which is odd but maybe helps speed things along. I would've liked subtitles for them or something--not understanding them kind of takes the audience out of Martha's point of view.

The Doctor, meanwhile, struggles with accepting the fact that he's a father again, something that Donna misinterprets as the Doctor being uncomfortable with being a father for the first time. When they find Jenny has two hearts, her heritage as a Time Lord becomes an issue in a scene that plays as an intriguing distillation of generation gap. The Doctor can't accept her as a Time Lord (or Lady, the dialogue deftly dodges the official terminology) because she hasn't any sense of the history and culture normally received by members of the species. I'm not sure if it's ever been spelled out but in other episodes I've had the impression that Time Lord (or Lady) was a title bestowed only on a particular group of Gallifreyans. That would certainly make more sense, in any case.

The episode climaxes in one of the many Doctor as Christ Figure moments from the Russell T. Davies era, though in this case it doesn't involve the Doctor being sacrificed but rather him demonstrating his preference not to take revenge when most people would say he has every right to. Which is a good idea but in the general rush for the episode to come to a conclusion, the Doctor essentially spells out the concept for everyone, which doesn't quite work, any more than Martha suddenly being able to say with some certainty whether Jenny really is a Time Lord (or Lady). In any case, Moffett is fun in the role and I don't understand why she's never made another appearance, particularly now that Tennant is no longer playing the Doctor so it wouldn't be weird to have his wife in the role of his daughter.

Twitter Sonnet #1246

A team of fingers worked to ink a wing.
An empty tank revealed a heavy car.
Goliaths gently lift machines that ping.
A troupe of giants packed the sagging bar.
The dungeon warmth would welcome wayward strays.
A treasure piled 'neath the stone awaits.
The rock reflects a warning sound for days.
Adventure greets the dice determined mates.
The stairs were etched in pliant plaster walls.
The hottest places fell beneath the shade.
A tinny beam returns for urgent calls.
In seas of pudding soldiers stoutly wade.
Returning tea would taste of diff'rent spots.
An empty room was filled with chatty bots.

Don't Think of Kissing

Now it's Aeryn's turn to rescue Crichton but she'll need a little help from a rival for his affections. Not that Aeryn or Crichton are at a point where they would admit Gilina is a rival or that a situation even exists where anyone could be a rival.

Episode 20: The Hidden Memory

Which seems a bit silly at this point considering they seem to have already had sex and have now both put their lives on the line to save eachother. But maybe the idea of being able to take anything slow is just too appealing in their lives which otherwise seem to be constant crises.

Crichton (Ben Browder) is still being subjected to torture by Scorpius (Wayne Mygram) and Crais (Lani Tupu), strapped into the "Aurora Chair", a device that painfully forces memories out of its victims and onto a little round screen. I like how the screen kind of looks like the mirror on a dentist's chair.

Scorpius thinks Crichton's hiding memories about wormholes but he's really concealing memories of Gilina (Alyssa-Jane Cook) who's still a PK Tech, right there on the station. And she's helping him, eventually sabotaging the chair to implant a false memory that turns out to be rather embarrassing for Crais.

I love how deadpan Gilina is when she does it. There's no cutesy little, "Looks like Crais is in for a big surprise!" kind of line. She just solemnly delivers a clip to Crichton's brain that makes it seem like Crais is his collaborator.

Meanwhile, Moya's finally having her baby and the only crew aboard the mother is Rygel (Jonathan Hardy) and Chiana (Gigi Edgley). After watching her be a stone cold badass in the previous episode, it's an intriguing contrast watching her complain about Rygel's farts when they're forced to huddle together in a little compartment while Moya decompresses.

And I guess we see what we can sort of call Chiana's maternal side when defies death by cutting part of Moya while straddling a cannon. It's almost like something from Toni Morrison.

The episode climaxes with a pretty good gunfight amid some ruins. Crichton and Stark (Paul Goddard) have a temporary buddy dynamic, bonding as former prisoners of Scorpius, that they never really have again after this. Which is kind of a shame but Stark's still a good presence on the show.

. . .

This entry is part of a series I'm writing on Farscape for the show's 20th anniversary. My previous reviews can be found here (episodes are in the order intended by the show's creators rather than the broadcast order):

Episode 1: Pilot
Episode 2: I, E.T.
Episode 3: Exodus from Genesis
Episode 4: Throne for a Loss
Episode 5: Back and Back and Back to the Future
Episode 6: Thank God It's Friday Again
Episode 7: PK Tech Girl
Episode 8: That Old Black Magic
Episode 9: DNA Mad Scientist
Episode 10: They've Got a Secret
Episode 11: Till the Blood Runs Clear
Episode 12: Rhapsody in Blue
Episode 13: The Flax
Episode 14: Jeremiah Crichton
Episode 15: Durka Returns
Episode 16: A Human Reaction
Episode 17: Through the Looking Glass
Episode 18: A Bug's Life
Episode 19: Nerve

Movies from the Future

I feel like talking about a few trailers to-day. Plenty have come out recently that may finally get me back in a cinema. I still haven't gotten around to seeing Endgame, though, and I fully intended to see that, so who knows.

Mackenzie Davis has a great physical presence, in her own way like Schwarzenegger. Her distinct body shape is striking and she has the good reflexes of an action star. It's good to see Linda Hamilton back though maybe she lacks some of the raw ferocity she had in Terminator 2. Still, her presence makes clear that recasting Sarah Connor in previous instalments was completely unnecessary. This might be a good movie but, then, Terminator: Salvation had a great trailer and I heard that movie sucked--though I've never seen it. And I'm certainly not sold on Tim Miller as a director; the action scenes weren't really what stood out for me in Deadpool. But I'll keep an open mind.

Elsa, another perfect killing machine, is back in Frozen 2. This could be a good movie, anything's possible, but it'll be hard to come out of the first film's shadow. The first film worked with Elsa as a Satanic or Byronic hero, a character embracing the powers that horrified all of her friends and family. It looks like maybe new characters will be introduced to be horrified. Mostly it just seems like she's going to be a superhero now.

This one definitely won't get me back into a cinema but only because it's a TV show. The series format should work better for a Veronica Mars return than the crowd-funded film which came out a couple years ago--and which wasn't so bad, but not as memorable as the show. J.K. Simmons and Patton Oswalt are good additions and I like how Bell delivers the "small package" line in the trailer. The strip club line falls flat, though. But she and Enrico Colantoni look more and more believably like father and daughter.

There's a longer trailer than the above out now for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood but I like this shorter one better. It lets the lines work for themselves, especially the lovely wisecracks from Brad Pitt. But the newer trailer doesn't diminish my anticipation for the film. The only thing I really worry about is that my expectations have been set much too high. But I guess, like Budd said, we'll just see. Won't we?

Off the Tracks and in the Game

"Fight yourself and the part that wins doesn't count. It's the part that loses." There's a great film noir line for you from 1948's Inner Sanctum, a film based on a long running anthology horror suspense radio show. A low budget B-movie by the short lived M.R.S. productions, it nonetheless features an intriguing and subtly weird story.

Charles Russell plays the film's anti-hero, a murderer whose name we never learn but who calls himself Harold Dunlap. His voice is a dead ringer for Jimmy Stewart but he's not so bad in his own right--he certainly has an effectively unnerving gaze.

He impulsively murders his angry girlfriend at a train station then dumps her body in a passing caboose amid some distinctly noir-ish shadows. He's unaware he's been seen by average, innocent kid Mike (Dale Belding). Lucky for the murderer, Mike doesn't realise what the "bundle" was that he saw being dumped and the murderer gets away with hiding his face. He starts calling himself "Dunlap" when he's picked up on the road by a friendly local named McFee (Billy House).

They take turns driving but, when it's Dunlap's turn, he ends up driving the two of them right back into town because roads have closed due to flooding. And then, as luck would have it, McFee deposits Dunlap at a boarding house where none other than kid Mike resides.

Ending up here could be put down to rotten luck but a lot of the bad breaks Dunlap gets can be traced pretty quickly to his own decisions, beginning, of course, with his choice to murder his girlfriend. Mike doesn't recognise Dunlap but for some reason Dunlap decides to make extra sure by forcefully telling the kid he was never at the train station and telling the kid to remember that. If he'd told the kid directly, "Yeah, that was me at the station," he couldn't have more strongly impressed the idea on him.

Also staying at the boarding house is the beautiful Jean Maxwell (Mary Beth Hughes--MST3k fans will remember her from I Accuse My Parents), a frustrated, small town girl with dreams of depraved and glamorous city life. When she tries to get Dunlap to play Checkers with her as part of her designs on wooing him, he sits across from her but just sullenly stares into the night instead of playing. When she remarks on how she's sure to win if she plays against herself he delivers that significant line which certainly seems appropriate after he's damned himself time and again.

A framing story involving a mysterious stranger on the train (Fritz Leiber, Sr.) gives the film a supernatural element, something reflecting the nature of the radio series and its likely influence on Tales from the Crypt. He tells the story of the film as a warning to a young woman who accidentally hurts herself with a nail file when the train hits a sharp curve. The end of the film reveals the strange man has actually been telling her future. But how much of what he said was really meant as a warning? Or did he just mean to mock her and Dunlap, who were always doomed to make their own choices? Inner Sanctum is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1245

Returning faces change to newer scalps.
A careful watch predicts a passing train.
As Holmes and Watson climb the pretty Alps.
Attempts to dodge the mind were all in vain.
A rapid current wrought a distant screen.
Banana bones were crunched in tightened grip.
The light of travel painted blue or green.
Along the glowing veins the faeries slip.
A gang of phones intrudes in phantom class.
In steady marches students learn to speak.
As ev'ry thought congealed in spoken mass.
A better word could drift from corner squeak.
The pieces paint a certain red and black.
The ghostly fleet begins an eastern tack.

The River is Beautiful but Difficult

Maybe the idea of an Otto Preminger movie starring Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe put my expectations too high the first time I watched 1954's River of No Return. I find I like it a lot more now--those beautiful location shots in Calgary, Robert Mitchum's performance, Marilyn Monroe's beauty, and the story about necessity and relative morality. It doesn't compare well with Bicycle Thieves, the Italian Neorealist film that influenced it, but it's not bad.

As much as I love Robert Mitchum, and as much as I love him in this movie, he's a key part of what makes Bicycle Thieves the better film. Even though Lamberto Maggiorani wasn't a professional actor, the anxiety that naturally came through his stony face established the pain and desperation as he was forced to make increasingly bad moral choices while his son looked on. Mitchum's version, Matt Calder, always seems cool and satisfied with his own choices, something Mitchum's natural, gentle melancholy makes great to watch but which makes for a less interesting film.

Instead of a father and son whose bicycle is stolen, upon which their livelihood depends, Robert Mitchum and Tommy Rettig play a father and son whose horse and rifle are stolen. They're farmers in harsh, if gorgeous, territory and Matt astutely observes they'll never survive without the horse to plough the fields and without the rifle to protect them from Indians. The 1950s into the 60s had several westerns that began to cast Native Americans in a more sympathetic light; this wasn't one them. But the threat they present to the protagonists is certainly credible.

Marilyn Monroe plays Kay, a dance hall performer who'd befriended Rettig's character, Mark, while Matt was in prison. I don't think Monroe was a bad actress--she gives one of the greatest performances of all time in The Misfits--but in River of No Return she was the victim of bad advice from an elocution coach. The coach infuriated Preminger but Monroe insisted she remain with her on set. An insistence on perfectly enunciating every single word results in a stilted performance as different from her strikingly natural turn in The Misfits as could be. Her musical numbers aren't bad, though, and, of course, she's always easy on the eyes, even if her hair and makeup really aren't appropriate for the scenario.

It's her boyfriend, Weston (Rory Calhoun), who steals Matt and Mark's horse and rifle after Mark helped the couple when they were on a raft, caught in the rapids of the nearby river. He leaves her with them when she refuses to abandon Mark but the moral dialogue of the film mainly consists of Kay defending Weston as a desperate victim of circumstances who needs forgiveness more than punishment. In this, the film almost seems to be a rebuke of Bicycle Thieves, seemingly saying that it's only a foolish, soft-hearted woman who forgives a horse thief. Matters are complicated a little when we find out why Matt was in prison and, like the son in Bicycle Thieves, Mark is forced to assess his father's worth. But Matt, for the most part, never does anything really questionable--his crime was killing a man in defence of another--and Mitchum's performance is perfectly appropriate for the screenplay.

The only really challenging scene is when Matt starts roughly embracing Kay, forcing her to the ground as she struggles, though this follows from a dialogue in which she offered her body in exchange for Weston's life. Later it's implied Matt was trying to make a point, that Kay really didn't understand what she was offering, but the violence of the scene is by no means normal in a 50s Western. Maybe this was the point where Preminger and screenwriter Fenton wanted to show Matt doing something truly wrong but the motivations come across as too muddled.

But it's a beautiful film. The locations are great and I loved the raft scenes created without process shots, where you can actually see the actors or the stunt people are on a raft in the river, even if the rapids aren't quite as rapid as they need to be to imply peril.