Top Five Unavailable Movies

Most nights, I like to watch a movie I've never seen before but every now and then I like to revisit a favourite. Now that I've moved to Japan, I'm even more dependent on streaming services for content and there are certain films I repeatedly look for on Amazon Prime, Netflix, Criterion, and Disney+ only to come up with nothing. So to-day I've compiled a top five least of such films. Many of these films are available on DVD, some with only five or six copies left on Amazon. And almost all of them are on YouTube in lousy quality. But I want some nice HD or at least solid SD versions.

It could be any one of these films is available somewhere I don't know about. If so, please, please let met know in the comments. By the way, I mirror this blog in three other places and I'm not used to receiving comments on this one--so I don't tend to look for them. A friend of mine pointed out a comment I missed over a month ago and I felt really bad. If you want to comment here, please feel free, I'm going to try to keep a better eye out in the future.

5. She (1965)

This uncommonly lavish Hammer film isn't the first adaptation of H. Rider Haggard's novel by a long shot. It's not a perfect film but it's a fun adventure in typical Hammer style. Ursula Andress has great screen presence and Christopher Lee in a small role is wonderful. But what keeps me wanting to come back are Peter Cushing and Bernard Cribbins, both in essentially sidekick roles to the handsome but dull John Richardson. Playing old war buddies trying to have a good time in Palestine now that they've been discharged, it's great fun watching Cushing in a role that isn't a superhero, supervillain, or stuffy professor. He's just a regular red-blooded Englishman and he and Cribbins seem like they'd be terrific to have along in a tough spot or a desert strip club.

4. Moonfleet (1955)

Not a very faithful adaptation of the 1898 novel, one still can't deny the creative brilliance on display. The great director Fritz Lang shoots on some of the most beautiful, stylised soundstages ever constructed for film. On top of that, the movie features a robust score from Miklos Rozsa, one of my favourites from that composer.

3. Hell and High Water (1954)

Steven Spielberg used to carry a print of this film around in the trunk of his car back in the late 70s, as he showed Samuel Fuller when Fuller filmed a cameo in Spielberg's 1941. It's not hard to see how the film influenced Spielberg, centring on a hard bitten American adventurer played by Richard Widmark. As usual for Fuller, it's a splashy and unreservedly inventive story, in this case about a secret American and Japanese collaborative submarine mission against the Soviets.

2. Secret of the Incas (1954)

Speaking of films that influenced early Spielberg films, Secret of the Incas is often cited as essentially the original version of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I wouldn't say that, exactly--a number of other films influenced the first Indiana Jones film including the 1950 King Solomon's Mines, several Cecil B. Demille movies, and the 1950s religious epic films in general, particularly for elements relating to the Ark of the Covenant, like 1951's David and Bathsheba. But Charleton Heston as Harry Steele is a dead ringer for Dr. Jones both in attire and attitude.

1. The Stone Flower (1946)

Or really any movie from the great fantasy filmmaker Aleksandr Ptushko. This guy made some of the most visually wonderful films of all time with innovative effects and techniques. A massive influence on many other great filmmakers, for far too long Ptushko's films have only been available in butchered forms with bad dubs. His great epic Sadko was re-editted and dubbed by Roger Corman and a very young Francis Ford Coppola as a Sinbad movie featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. As much as I love that episode, the real Sadko doesn't deserve to be ranked with Manos the Hands of Fate. The Stone Flower, one of his earlier films, is a beautiful colour fairy tale.

Twitter Sonnet #1386

An errant leaf recalls the onion tossed.
A yellow orange reminds the curry well.
The faster fly in flight was quickly lost.
Reflections told the phone about the bell.
An icing thought returns to buy the cake.
For lemon chance the bottled rind was peeled.
Some ginger troops decide the stay and bake.
The set of candles now were strangely healed.
Between the leaves a game of go was played.
Reflected clouds observed exchange of stones.
Disturbed in thought, the watching turtle stayed.
It seems the game employed the use of bones.
Neglected frames were clearer after now.
A giant dolphin pushed against the bow.

Is Anyone Safe from the Bee Girls?

A strange epidemic runs rampant and a curfew is instituted, despite complaints that such measures encroach on civil rights. But at first this seems the best way to stop a series of deaths by orgasms caused by seductive bee girls in 1973's Invasion of the Bee Girls. A low budget exploitation film, it has a screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, the same guy who directed Star Trek II, though apparently the final film reflects many changes he didn't approve of. It's certainly not even one of the best Grindhouse movies I've seen but it is an amusing, kind of sexy movie with lighting at turns distractingly terrible and kind of interesting.

This is one of the kind of interesting shots. Special Agent Neil Agar (William Smith) is uncovering a clue about the queen bee, Dr. Susan Harris (Anitra Ford), referred to previously by gossiping colleagues as an "ice queen".

But when the mysterious bee persona takes over her body for reasons that are never very clearly explained, she takes one of those gossiping colleagues home for a dimly lit sex scene that goes on much too long, however beautiful Ford may have been.

I'm a fan of genuinely dark lighting but one has to recognise the filmmaker, in that case, needs to do a lot more work to communicate ideas to the audience. In one scene, Agar runs from some enemies but it was some time before I could figure out who anyone was in the shots of figures scampering about in near total darkness.

Agar's a terrible detective. Somehow he just guesses the culprit is a group of bee women. When he goes to interrogate Dr. Harris, she reluctantly leaves the lab after he tells her his questions are very urgent. Then he just asks her how often a queen bee mates. Then he leaves.

I kind of wonder if in some draft of the screenplay Agar was meant to be kind of dumb, though. There's another scene were he just laughs distractedly while one of the characters drops about a billion clues to the identity of the killer. Nothing gets through his skull, well past the point an idiot would've asked, “Wait, are you talking about Dr. Harris?”

But Smith gives a decent performance. And it's just fun watching the bee women do their thing, especially when they're all assembled, wearing nothing but labcoats and shades, and inducting new members by stripping them down and coating them with some kind of plaster.

Invasion of the Bee Girls is available on Amazon Prime under the title Graveyard Tramps.

It's a Monk's Life

Renouncing profit and material pleasures, a group of monks headed by Saint Francis experience a series of adventures and dilemmas in 1950's The Flowers of St. Francis (Francesco, giullare di Dio ("Francis, God's Jester"). Director Roberto Rossellini, true to the Neorealist style, employed mostly non-professional actors--in fact, real life monks--and shot in nature and existing structures. With a screenplay co-written by Federico Fellini, the resulting film is amusing and very pretty.

The film is based on a 14th century book about St. Francis and Rossellini draws from it to tell a series of unconnected vignettes about the monks. Each one amusingly highlights their innocence or sweetly shows their goodness. In one, Francis (Brother Nazario Geradi) meets a leper, in another, St. Claire (Arabella Lemaltre) visits.

Most of the stories seem to concern a monk called Ginepro (Brother Severino Pisacane) whose devotion seems to lead him on the wrong track, as in one episode where his passion for helping the poor prompts him to give away the clothes on his back.

An interview with Rossellini's daughter, Isabella, is included on The Criterion Channel and she talks about how her favourite scene is one where Ginepro goes forth to preach to a group of barbarians. Of course the men immediately start tossing him about but he only smiles.

The sequence features one of the film's few professional actors, Aldo Fabrizi, as the tyrannical leader of the barbarians who judges whether Ginepro is an assassin. Isabella Rossellini remarks on how you can appreciate her father's preference for non-professional actors because you can immediately see Fabrizi's "intentions" in what he does. Maybe so, but, while I think the monks may have provided valuable insight, I think this is a case that demonstrates the limits of the Neorealist tendency to avoid professionals.

I don't care how innocent and faithful these guys are. A real monk would've at least flinched when he was picked up and tossed about. Of course Pisacane knew this was all only a film and he was perfectly safe.

And Fabrizi is terrific as big blustering warlord.

The Flowers of St. Francis is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Short Distance from Toad to Horseman

Many dangers are faced by the wayward, adventuring gentleman, particularly if he's prone to foolishness. For their 11th animated feature film, 1949's The Adventures of Ichabod and Mister Toad, Disney chose two classic tales that may not seem to have much in common to the casual viewer. But the source materials, 1908's The Wind in the Willows and 1820's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, are both centred on deeply flawed, cultured gentlemen. One foolhardy and the other a coward, both are driven to satisfy sensual urges, and both meet with tragedy. The stronger of the two stories, the one about Ichabod Crane, is also the one most faithfully adapted from its source material while the one about the master of Toad Hall is by no means bad and also kind of fascinating for its deviations from The Wind in the Willows. In any case, I would argue that Ichabod and Toad have one very important common ancestor, none other than Sir John Falstaff, the footpad knight, the tavern fixture, the renowned, disreputable, and beloved creation of William Shakespeare.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame is a very strange book, particularly by the standards of modern fantasy. Unlike Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia, the underlying rules governing the world of intelligent animals are never clear and rarely consistent. In one scene, Rat and Mole secretly observe the world of humans one night, peeping in windows in a village. In another scene, Toad is arrested and processed in a court of law. Toad hates being underwater but Badger and Mole feel a deep affinity for underground dwellings. Sometimes the animals are essentially people with animal shapes, sometimes they're plain and simply animals. You could say the inconsistency is a bit like Alice in Wonderland but Alice in Wonderland explains it with a framing device that makes everything Alice experiences a dream.

You could also say Wind in the Willows feels like two distinct stories mixed together--a tranquil tale of friendship and communing with nature centred on Rat and Mole, and the story of absurd, foolish adventure centred on Toad. An eerie scene where Rat and Mole apparently encounter Pan is more reminiscent of Arthur Machen than a gentle child's tale. Other scenes which dwell on how much Rat and Mole enjoy being comfortable hardly seem as though they could interest a child.

So it's hardly surprising that Disney completely removed Rat and Mole's adventures, converting the characters into purely supporting characters in a story about Toad.

This was the last of Disney's series of anthology films of the 1940s and both stories feel more like self contained, complete, traditional narratives than anything in the previous anthology films. Aside from the "Mickey and the Beanstalk" segment in Fun and Fancy Free, Mr. Toad is the first of these shorts to feature a full cast. Basil Rathbone serves splendidly as narrator but even better is Eric Blore in the role of Toad. It's hard to imagine better casting than the English character actor whose Toad-like appearance and affectation would be familiar to anyone who saw The Lady Eve or Shall We Dance or any number of films from the 1930s (according to his Wikipedia entry, he appeared in over 60 films between 1930 and 1955).

As good as he is, though, it's in the character of Toad that Disney deviated so significantly from Grahame's book. Where the Toad of the book is a blowhard, a genuine thief, and completely incapable of accomplishing a heroic deed, the Toad of the Disney film is wrongly convicted of the crime of stealing a motorcar, actively contributes to the plan of recovering Toad Hall, and is directly responsible for the final victory of recovering the deed.

Toad in the book is described as "a thoroughly good-hearted animal" who's willing to admit when he's wrong but he's also petulant and jealous and willing to verbally abuse his friends to conceal his own sense of inadequacy.

"Oh, you silly ass, Mole!" cried Toad, "You've been and spoilt everything!"

"Mole," said the Badger, in his dry, quiet way, "I perceive you have more sense in your little finger than some other animals have in the whole of their fat bodies. You have managed excellently, and I begin to have great hopes of you. Good Mole! Clever Mole!"

The Toad was simply wild with jealousy, more especially as he couldn't make out for the life of him what the Mole had done that was so particularly clever; but, fortunately for him, before he could show temper or expose himself to the Badger's sarcasm, the bell rang for luncheon.

Toad also composes songs about his own greatness, including one referred to by the narrator as "perhaps, the most conceited song that any animal ever composed." When he tells Mole about his exploits when escaping from prison, he lies and exaggerates his own accomplishments and brags about stealing a horse, not unlike Falstaff bragging about besting an ever multiplying number of assailants in Henry IV during his attempt at robbery. In both cases, one might also wonder just why we love this guy so much.

This may have been precisely Disney's thought in morally rehabilitating the character. Would American audiences believe the Toad of the book really deserves to have Toad Hall and his fortune restored to him? Or would it just be too disgustingly amoral? The motive for Disney to change the story may lie in a latent Puritan morality that insists rewards directly correlate to virtue. One could almost describe the book as Royalist--Badger, Rat, and Mole never question the propriety of restoring Toad to his birthright. It's just natural that Toad would inhabit Toad Hall.

This is part of the subtle charm that he is a Toad. Every time the story ascribes to him some petty, obnoxious action, there is an indirect invitation to remember that he is a toad, after all. How would you expect a toad to act? In this, the story's logistical inconsistency is brilliant and very like a folktale.

The changes made to Toad's story are more puzzling because Ichabod's story is so faithful. In fact, it remains the most faithful adaptation of Washington Irving's story that I've seen. I like the Tim Burton film but its story bears almost no resemblance to the original tale. And don't get me started on the TV show from a few years ago.

Unlike the Toad segment, the Ichabod segment is voiced entirely by one man--Bing Crosby. His voice is magnificent, of course, and the three songs, "Ichabod", "Katrina", and "The Headless Horseman", are all made greater by his delivery. Surprisingly, much of his narration is taken directly from Washington Irving, including the physical description of Ichabod Crane:

He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snip nose, so that it looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of Famine descending upon the earth or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

From this, too, the film's character design finds ample inspiration:

The story of a superstitious teacher, who comes to reside in a small Dutch community in pre-1800 upstate New York, who's beloved by the local women, who covets the coquette Katrina Van Tassel as much for her own charms as her father's fortune, who enters into rivalry with the local Brom Bones, are all elements directly taken from the short story. Disney adds to this some of the best physical comedy sequences in their animated canon. I particularly like Brom and Ichabod slyly brawling outside Katrina's door as Ichabod manages to avoid and inflict damage on his opponent with all the graceful inattention of Buster Keaton.

Yet he's a complicated character. He's kind of a hero--we instinctively like him better than Brom--but his motives, his love of good food and Katrina's beauty and wealth, are certainly not "pure". And yet they're human, too.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was originally included in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, an anthology written by Irving while he was travelling in Europe. Most of the stories feature European subjects, too, particularly relating to England. And one name that comes up again and again is Falstaff. One story is devoted to a search for the original Boar's Head, the inn in which Falstaff dwelt in Shakespeare's plays. Another of Irving's stories is devoted to inn culture in Europe in general and begins with a quote from Falstaff: "Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?"

At the start of his journey to Europe, Irving had recently lost his family fortune due to his brother's imprudent investments. Not unlike Toad's loss of Toad Hall, Irving saw his impending life changes as being unsuited to his nature and he was very melancholy about it, as can be seen in the gloom of stories like "The Voyage". Irving's fixation on Falstaff seemed partly to do with the nature of Falstaff's inn as a place where rich and poor may dwell in the comforts of community and also find life's basic necessities. But in both of the collection's most famous stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, we find ourselves sympathising with distinctly Falstaffian characters.

It's hardly a surprise that The Legend of Sleepy Hollow so much resembles The Merry Wives of Winsdor. In Shakespeare's play, Falstaff covets women for their wealth and beauty and the final scene involves a staged supernatural encounter with Herne the Hunter, a supernatural figure from folklore not unlike the Headless Horseman (arguably, Herne is related to the Germanic folk tales Irving drew from for the Horseman). Some would say the conclusion of Irving's story makes it unclear whether the Horseman Ichabod encounters is really Brom Bones in disguise or in fact the spectral menace. I would say it's obviously Brom Bones but naturally no-one wants to hear that. Which is more cruel, really? That Ichabod was randomly slaughtered by a ghost or that Ichabod was rejected by the community and the woman he coveted? In the story, Ichabod has lost the affections of Katrina before encountering the Horseman.

Was her encouragement of the poor pedagogue all a mere sham to secure her conquest of his rival? Heaven only knows, not I! Let it suffice to say, Ichabod stole forth with the air of one who had been sacking a hen-roost, rather than a fair lady’s heart. Without looking to the right or left to notice the scene of rural wealth on which he had so often gloated, he went straight to the stable, and with several hearty cuffs and kicks roused his steed most uncourteously from the comfortable quarters in which he was soundly sleeping, dreaming of mountains of corn and oats and whole valleys of timothy and clover.

Disney's film never mentions any change in Katrina's feelings for Ichabod, implying she married Brom Bones simply because Ichabod had been "spirited away". Perhaps a terrifying encounter with a headless ghost is a more attractive fate--at least it's grand. But the story is maybe a subtler comment on how a community can reject an outsider, even the manifestation of that community in the heart of one woman. Or maybe it's just because he looks like scarecrow. In any case, like Falstaff and Toad, there is something oddly attractive about this morally imperfect, entirely too human, character.

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mister Toad is available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1385

Behind the face moustaches grew awry.
The deepest spine could dine at early dawn.
The organ tube at last could just comply.
A suite of games obscures the grassy lawn.
A spindly new display arrives to sup.
Decisions flake the dough to fluffy dreams.
The sugar flutters down inside the cup.
The snow remembers suns the size of teams.
A double figure danced along a fence.
The storied hall was passed from hand to paw.
A shaking engine changed the shining cents.
A wayward teacher broke a shadow law.
The rusted anchor slips through weightless sand.
The brittle branch avails no sinking hand.

Some Sea Monsters are Bad Suitors

Nowadays, a fish monster is a respectable match--he's good for skinny dipping and dancing and you win an Oscar. But there was a time when Roger Corman presented a different vision. 1980's Humanoids from the Deep (aka Monster) portrays legions of fish men who are only interested in rape and murder, though oddly tongue-in-cheek when it comes to the former. The film has some decent monster design but the story is a complete mess, a cross between different kinds of mediocrity due to competing, lousy cooks in the kitchen.

The credited director is Barbara Peeters and this was her last feature film. Having worked for Roger Corman before, she finally threw in the towel after this because he added in the rape scenes without her permission. This was certainly bad manners on Corman's part but, to be fair, it's easy to see what kind of lame, run of the mill Alien and Jaws rip-off it would have been if Peeters had final cut.

Jim (Doug McClure) is a fisherman in a small, northern Californian town. He finds himself caught between two local factions when an American Indian fisherman called Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena) protests a new cannery run by Canco. A bunch of racists from the cannery start fights with Johnny and Jim always takes Johnny's side, even though, ultimately, Jim thinks the town needs the cannery.

It turns out Johnny's concerns about the cannery polluting the bay are more right than he knows after Dr. Susan Drake (Ann Turkel) tells them the company accidentally lost some mutant salmon. Some coelacanths fed on the new fish and before long there's, of course, man sized murder fish.

The subplot about working class racism may be a sort of nod to the monster's Lovecraft ancestry. I suppose it's better than portraying the racists as tentacle monsters themselves but a morality tale about racism is always going to be disappointingly small compared the scope of an actual Lovecraft story.

Murders increase and the monsters are discovered until there's chaos at a summer festival. Jim, as the film's hero, is always kind of useless. His solution at the end doesn't seem like it would finish off the creatures and the movie's vague about whether anyone thinks it will. The climax feels a lot like one third of the way through Jaws--they know there's a problem and they're talking about solving it. Then the movie just ends with a scene nicked straight from Alien (as Dan O'Bannon himself apparently complained).

Dr. Drake is a little more assertive as a hero though her thought process is inscrutable at times, as when she pleads with Jim and Johnny not to shoot at the beasts trying to maul them. I like the creature design which looks like Creature from the Black Lagoon with an exposed brain.

But the story is such a mess I welcomed the odd, incongruous porn parody scenes. It's hard not to see the humour in a sea monster chasing the "Miss Salmon" beauty queen. But my favourite is a weird scene where a guy with a Charlie McCarthy puppet is getting his girlfriend to strip for him by degrees by slowly removing the puppet from a bag.

When the monster attacks, the puppets eyes continue to move for no reason at all. I guess the logic is that, in a horror movie, no matter what kind, all puppets are haunted. I'll accept that.

Humanoids from the Deep is available on Amazon Prime.

A Big Nose for Big Heat

This Chinese soft shelled turtle really won at evolution, at least as far as noses go. I think I keep seeing the same one, chilling in the water with his snout in the sky. Meanwhile, I saw the more common Japanese pond turtle swimming pointlessly against the current directly at a sheer wall.

I hope it kept him cool. The temperatures here in Kashihara, Japan have been getting up to 100 Fahrenheit/37 Celsius. Still not as bad as San Diego in October but it's a lot more humid. I've been sweating a lot. To replenish myself, I've been drinking the sweat of someone named Pocari:

It's pretty good, basically like Gatorade, but refreshingly weird.

I try not to go out much but there are always things I need to do. A few days ago I walked through a neighbourhood I hadn't walked through yet and came across this Buddhist Temple:

From their entrance sign:

It was a lovely place though their roses didn't seem to be doing so well. This is the best one I saw:

Maybe they'll perk up in November.

The Return of Nine

Last week brought the news that Christopher Eccleston will finally be returning to Doctor Who in his role as the Ninth Doctor. He's going to be recording a series of Big Finish audio dramas, reprising the character he portrayed in 2005 for new audio adventures. Just another reason the audios are more interesting than the TV show now. It'll be nice to have him back and maybe hear him with other Doctors. So last night I rewatched a two parter from his one season in the role, fifteen years ago, "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances".

This story contains a couple firsts--it's the first real episode to be written by Steven Moffat (not counting a parody he wrote a few years earlier) and it introduced the recurring supporting character of Jack Harkness (John Barrowman).

We meet him scoping out Billie Piper's ass while she clings to a rope high above 1941 London during the Blitz. I do miss how much sex used to be on this show. I guess it's no surprise Jack wasn't allowed within ten yards of the Thirteenth Doctor.

Of course, Rose (Billie Piper) is quite amenable to Jack's attentions despite this funny exchange:

ROSE: You used to be a Time Agent, now you're some kind of free-lancer.

JACK: That's a little harsh. I think of myself as a criminal.

ROSE: laughs I bet you do!

Or perhaps partly because of this exchange. He is a gentleman, after all.

The second half of the episode puts the ball back in the Doctor's court in the understated competition for Rose's affections. I do love how he holds her hands while they talk about her rope burns and dancing.

The Doctor is mostly busy trying to sort out the main plot about a strange kid in a gas mask repeatedly asking, "Are you my mummy?" It's effectively creepy. When it all ties back into a crashed alien device, the story starts to feel a lot like Quatermass and the Pit. Both that story and this do a great job of using a Science Fiction metaphor to convey the strangeness and sense of general instability of the Blitz. It's not just about buildings falling down and people dying, it's about people's worlds being suddenly reconfigured both in terms of physical landscape and emotional landscape. Quatermass and the Pit is kind of Britain's Godzilla, where one comes out of the Blitz and the other comes out of the atomic bombs.

It's interesting that the episode ends with the day being saved because Nancy (Florence Hoath) is forced to acknowledge a suppressed truth from before the war. I like the idea that boldly facing uncomfortable truths makes us stronger in the face of other dangers or may even be integral to combating them.

Before playing the Doctor, Eccleston was best known for playing villains. This is what made him such an interesting Doctor, the contrast between his sometimes childlike enthusiasm and naturally threatening voice and mannerisms. I'm glad he's coming back.

Spider Computer Generated Image

Peter Parker is beset by dopey jokes and stupid, contrived situations in a story with no emotional weight in 2019's Spider-Man: Far From Home. It's far from great but there are a couple funny moments.

It's time for a class trip to Europe and all Peter (Tom Holland) wants to do is take a break from being Spider-Man. He doesn't even pack his suit--Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) sneaks it into one of his suitcases. Turns out, he doesn't need it anyway. When trouble goes down in Prague, to avoid the risk of Spider-Men being connected with Peter Parker, he dons a black outfit. Amusingly, this earns him the name of "Night Monkey".

He has to take action because giant, elemental cgi monsters are attacking European cities and the only other super-being around is the mysterious Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal).

The special effects in these movies have gotten really bad. I'd heard about the cost-cutting measures being employed for cgi lately but this movie makes it seem like there was absolutely no effort to make anything look photorealistic. It's most noticeable when Peter's hopping around Venice in his civilian clothes. Sometimes he looks like Rubber Man, sometimes he's clearly Tom Holland or a stuntman carried on erased strings.

All he wanted was to be a real boy.

Soon he's contacted by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the famous leader of something-or-other. I guess they're still in this awkward position of not confirming or denying the canonicity of events in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. I guess that time is finally almost at an end, though, now that the terms of whatever arcane contract Disney made with the Whedon brothers has reached the end of seven years and the network show written by the illustrious Jed Whedon is finally wrapping up.

Samuel L. Jackson seems really fatigued in this movie. Of all the awkward lines he has to deliver, somehow the awkwardest is a simple, "Bitch, please." Something you'd think would sound very natural coming from Jackson.

The screenplay was written by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers who'd previously worked on the Lego Batman movie. They also co-wrote the screenplay on Spider-Man: Homecoming along with Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Jon Watts, and Christopher Ford. Normally I'd say that many writers is a bad sign but the fact is Spider-Man: Homecoming is a much stronger film than its sequel. McKenna and Sommers are good at little quips and comedic ideas--I like how the movie incorporates the "blip", the period in the last Avengers movie where half the population were "dead". But mostly they're really only good at being silly and there are a series of bits that completely dissolve the film's tension and the integrity of character development. Moments like when Peter "hilariously" orders a drone strike on his classmate on accident. Or when one of Peter's classmates catches him with his pants down in a dark room with a strange woman.

There are multiple layers of stupid in this particular sequence so I thought I'd break them down and demonstrate what I mean about the movie generally.

1. Peter tells Nick Fury that he doesn't want to leave the vacation with his classmates just to help save the world. Fury shrugs, says okay, and seems to leave it at that. Then Peter's teacher happily accepts an "upgrade" from the tourism company and thinks nothing of ushering his students into an unmarked black van with tinted windows and a grim faced Russian driver who stares back silently when asked a question. Hilarious.

2. Upon arriving at the hotel, the Russian directs Peter to enter a room with a tall, attractive blonde woman who orders Peter to undress in front of her because she's brought him a new costume. You can see the idea here--Tom Holland's cute and he's even cuter when flustered. Okay. But why wouldn't he simply go to the next room to change? Why wouldn't he question any of this? This is an example of a joke that would work fine in a parody, like Lego Batman, but is deadly for a film that wants to be taken seriously on any level.

3. Peter's classmate unexpectedly enters the room and takes a picture. Why wouldn't the S.H.I.E.L.D.-ish agent have made sure the room was secure? Why would she let the kid go away with a picture of her on his phone, let alone a picture of her with Peter Parker?

This would be bad enough if it were one or two scenes. But it's constant. Along with the bad cgi, it becomes consistently impossible to get invested in the story.

An unsuccessful attempt is made to make Mysterio slightly sympathetic like the Vulture in the previous film and there's a smart idea about people trying to engineer things for people to believe in to fill the spiritual void in this modern world. Mysterio thinks appearances are all people need--a good counterargument from Spider-Man might have been to say that people need more than an illusion, they need a superhero who actually embodies worthwhile ideals. But the film only goes halfway thinking out this concept, spending too much time on Peter's cringe-worthy awkward gags as he tries to woo Mary Jane like the protagonist of a bad sitcom. Zendaya, stepping up as the central love interest now that Gwen Stacy is out of the way, is dull and has no chemistry with Tom Holland. Their kiss at the end is so formal it's like it was arranged by diplomats. Remember how sexy Kirsten Dunst and Tobey Maguire were? To quote the lyrics by "Weird Al" Yankovic;

Now Harry the rich kid's a friend of his
Who horns in on Mary Jane
But to his great surprise it seems she prefers guys
Who can kiss upside down in the rain

What song could anyone write about Far From Home? Something about forgettable quips and cartoonish effects, I guess.

Twitter Sonnet #1384

A stack of shells contends with pipes of lead.
The silver letter tipped behind the hill.
A trail of squares bedecked the narrow bed.
Arrays of runes adorned the lengthy bill.
Important parts combine to make the brain.
For chompers dull the chewing time was rare.
A list of gums contract the ancient plane.
The group of homes construct a roomy dare.
The door was walking south on wooden legs.
The ceiling feel between the Christmas minds.
The walls resound with pasted paper eggs.
The windows crash to suit the shuttered kinds.
The paper clip presents a tactic pinch.
Elastic string provides a handy cinch.