Kris Kristofferson passed away a couple days ago. I'm not familiar with most of his music though I do often listen to Janis Joplin's rendition of "Me and Bobby McGee". It's primarily as an actor I know him. I admired his work in Peckinpah films, Convoy and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. I remember seeing Millennium as a kid and being freaked out by it.
Even when he was young, he seemed to convey a sense of world-weariness and empathetic sturdiness. It was easy to see why Ellen Burstyn went for him in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. It seems he was something like that in real life. I see a lot of people on Facebook to-day talking about the moment he offered encouragement to Sinead O'Connor when the crowd was against her at a Bob Dylan anniversary concert. Bob Dylan wrote the music for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, including the line, "Billy they don't like you to be so free." Kristofferson exhibited a particularly attractive image of American freedom as it manifested in the '70s. He had a presence that made you feel better about humanity.
So I got Disney+ again. I guess I saved two months of subscription money. But I really wanted to see the new season of Only Murders In the Building. It's just not autumn without it. I'm two episodes in and I'm very glad I came back for it--so far I think this may be the best written season. The first episode features the characters visiting a movie studio in Hollywood, Paramount, in fact, surprising given that there was actually a line in the previous season disparaging Paramount+. It was a funny sequence, particularly a moment on a backlot where the show satirised how New York is depicted in Hollywood films. I was just recently showing a powerpoint to students I made about New York and L.A. and I spent a lot of time telling them how many of the depictions of New York they're familiar with actually came from L.A. (or, these days, often from Georgia). I might have shown this sequence to them.
I also watched the first episode of Agatha All Along which was really quite funny. I know, ratings-wise, it's suffering for how Secret Invasion demolished the Marvel brand on TV. But, at least for the first episode, Agatha is a really funny parody of HBO crime shows like True Detective.
By the way, I get Only Murders in the Building with Disney+ because I'm in Japan, where, as in most countries, Disney+ comes with a "Star" section which includes content from Hulu. Oddly enough, I couldn't sign up for a Japanese plan, which is a shame because Disney+ is still only around seven bucks in Japan. But I can't use an American card to pay for most Japanese streaming plans (Amazon Prime seems to be an exception). I had to use a VPN to get access to the American page and spend my American money. Fortunately I found a free VPN that was good enough to allow me to do that. In the process, I discovered I was able to access my PayPal dashboard for the first time in three years. They evidently fixed something that was preventing me from accessing it without an American phone number. These are just some of the hurdles in the obstacle course if you want to buy anything foreign in Japan. At least now maybe I won't be punished for not paying 75 dollars a month to have an American phone number just so web sites can outsource their security. One can hope.
I liked 2024's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. I left the theatre feeling happy, wanting to whistle the theme, but it's considered bad luck to whistle at night in Japan. And I felt like respecting the power of accidental spells.
If I could change one thing about the movie, Beetlejuice wouldn't be introduced until Lydia and Justin Theroux summon him fifteen or twenty minutes into the movie. So many of these nostalgia sequels somehow fall into a trap of having too many subplots, feeling compelled to cut between different plot threads simultaneously. In this one we have Lydia's issues, Astrid's issues, Deelia's issues, and Beetlejuice's trouble with Monica Bellucci. The first movie was grounded by following the Maitlands in their normal lives in the small New England town, then seeing their lives gradually shift into their afterlives.
The new one kind of achieves this atmosphere once it gets the noise out of the way. A highlight is Jenna Ortega riding her bike through that same town which we get to see even more of--it's supposed to be in Connecticut but is actually located in Vermont. I don't quite understand that. Do we not talk about Vermont? Anyway, it's in the full glory of autumnal beauty and it really gives you the feeling of dwelling there for a time. Like The Quiet Man or Shadow of a Doubt.
I saw Winona Rider said in an interview that she fantasises about Lydia and Beetlejuice actually getting together. Maybe she wouldn't if the movie made it clear what Beetlejuice actually spends most of his time doing as a "Bio-Exorcist"--that's killing people. What movie did I say it about recently, the reverse of the Dark Knight line? You either die a villain or live long enough to see yourself become the hero. That's pretty much what happens to Beetlejuice here, aside from his faithfully disgusting gags.
I'm not actually sure Jenna Ortega's a good actress. She imports some of her flat line delivers from Wednesday here. Gary Cooper was kind of like that, though. It's a choice and it's cute. She's sort of a Rei Ayanami type in live action. Maybe not Rei herself but like one of the many anime characters she influenced, like Lain from Serial Experiments Lain, Yuki in Haruhi Suzumiya, or Rem in Re:Zero. Usually stoic which makes her occasional blush all the more satisfying.
I wonder when they'll let Tim Burton do something totally original again.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is now in theatres.
X Sonnet #1884
Bestowing blades on guards, the swords conclude.
When halberds grace the merry arch, we dine.
But paper thin, the stones would fain collude.
Our last dessert was first among the wine.
No skates escape the wrath of pushy thumbs.
No cloud could carry castles north of Hell.
Intrusive cookies crack your phone to crumbs.
No taco comes for those who ring the bell.
The space between tortillas brokers cheese.
Condemning phantoms led to op'ra change.
The ancient soup was formed of pork and peas.
The dripping meal contains a massive range.
When lunch is served, you eat at someone's home.
Remember grace when choosing far to roam.
I wasn't sure if I was going to talk about Maggie Smith, who passed away yesterday at the age of 89. I only ever saw a few scenes from Downton Abbey. Otherwise, I know her as a solid supporting performer in a number of films of varying quality. She seemed typically to play fussy matrons, as she did in Room with a View and the Harry Potter movies. Considering how popular the Harry Potter movies are with my students, I wish I liked them more. I don't hate them.
She had a delicacy of manner that infused her performances with nuance on the rare occasion when she wasn't obliged to play a caricature. I do think she elevated those caricatures.
Here's something out of her usual way: her performance as Desdemona in Lawrence Olivier's Othello:
I appreciate the anxiety and affection mingling in her performance. She was certainly one of the best of her generation.
Now here's a real treat. A 1964 production of Hamlet actually shot at Elisinore Castle, the very castle at which Shakespeare's play is set. Not only that, but it stars Christopher Plummer as Hamlet, Robert Shaw as Claudius, and Michael Caine as Horatio. It's quite good. Sometimes the sound quality is a little rough and the picture quality leaves much to be desired due to the tragedy of the BBC insisting things be recorded on tape as much as possible.
Everyone's dressed for the period instead of as circus clowns or Nazis or retail clerks or Nazis or inmates at a women's prison or Nazis (it usually seems to be Nazis, doesn't it?). I suppose that's probably to do with the location. Whatever the reason, I'm quite happy about it. I wish there were a few tracking shots of the castle, some establishing shots of extras in armour in a grand hall. You'd think the camera would linger, given the extraordinary nature of the locale.
Plummer is great as Hamlet though perhaps a bit restrained. He's a great, solid performer and consistently makes captivating choices. I love Robert Shaw as Claudius and Michael Caine as Horatio is like a precursor to his Alfred Pennyworth. Donald Sutherland is also in the production as Fortinbras and he's fine, as brief as that role is. I thought Alec Clunes as Polonius was a little too broad and Jo Maxwell Muller as Ophelia is pretty but forgettable. On the whole, though, this is well worth seeing.
This Hamlet is on the Shakespeare Network on YouTube, embedded above.
While I do like Steven Moffat, my favourite Twelfth Doctor episode of Doctor Who was written by Jamie Mathieson, "Mummy on the Orient Express". It's odd because the next episode, also written by Mathieson, is just so-so, "Flatline".
I like the concept of the Doctor and Clara facing two dimensional aliens. I also like how the asshole foreman of the community service workers isn't killed off as a moral retribution for being an asshole.
The shrinking TARDIS in the episode is cute and I like how Clara carries it around in her purse. I wonder what Hitchcock would make of that--purses in Hitchcock movies are said to symbolise female anatomy. That first season with Twelve and Clara was supposed to be moving away from romantic subtext between the two but of course every attempt the writers made to do that ended up intensifying it.
I think "Flatline" is the first one where Clara attempts to adopt the role of the Doctor, trying to act as he would while he's stuck in her purse. It adds a nicely somber note to the comedy when you know where it ultimately leads her.
X Sonnet #1883
Concerted dogs could trust the trains and sleds.
Partakers told the tell of radish rum.
These skulls of yours are only in your heads.
The mindless snow was made of sugar gum.
Authentic castles change the trodden stage.
As night delivers day, the ghost remains.
The numbered year was never given age.
For all the sweat, no summer's yet retained.
The flattened people seek to kill the round.
Resentment burst forbidden gum at birth.
A cautious tread concludes where nothing's found.
And yet a castle's shadow carries worth.
Offensive eyes would stick to hair like glue.
The sky remembers something close to blue.
A schlubby young man decides to go into smuggling to replace the money his mother gave him for renovations and he has misspent. 2018's Dzidzio Kontrabass (DZIDZIO Контрабас) is a little like A Hard Day's Night meets Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back as we follow fictionalised versions of the Ukrainian band Dzidzio's members having goofy adventures across Ukraine. A lot of the humour doesn't translate but I found one or two jokes to be effective.
The film's protagonist is played by lead singer Mykhailo Khoma, also called Dzidzio. As the film opens, he goes to a wedding with the intent of bolstering his reputation and gaining cash but immediately has the misfortune of crashing into a car belonging to a gangster. So he robs a church donation box, disguises himself as a priest, and buys a bunch of cigarettes to smuggle into Poland. A lot of the humour in this movie seems to be blasphemy humour. It reminded me a little of the '90s in the U.S. If Marilyn Manson had been a comedy band, they might have been like Dzidzio.
As I said, a lot of jokes require greater familiarity with Ukrainian culture than I have but some of them really land. I really liked a bit where Dzidzio has a friend call his mother to lie to her about the progress of renovations in the house they're standing in, only the friend unknowingly has the phone's camera facing the wrong way so she sees Dzidzio himself standing anxiously amid the tattered, neglected construction materials and bare plywood walls.
Dzidzio Kontrabass is available on the band's official YouTube channel (it's embedded above).
A boring old banking executive decides to become Rock Hudson in the 1966 horror film Seconds. It feels like a feature length episode of The Twilight Zone. Well, a bit like the contents of a thirty minute episode are stretched to a couple hours. There are some effective moments of horror and Rock Hudson gives a good performance.
After Hamilton (John Randolph) gets a face transplant, he becomes Wilson (Rock Hudson) and a secret organisation relocates him to the life of an artist living on a hippy commune. I found it subtly amusing that the movie never discusses whether or not he has the artistic ability to convincingly assume the life of an artist.
There's a bacchanalia scene where folks get naked and stomp grapes to make wine. The abandoned frenzy meant to be conveyed by the scene is undermined by Hudson and costar Salome Jens' unwillingness to be seen naked. It kind of mirrors the fact that it's all a facade anyway--half the people at the party are secret agents of the company, there to observe if "Wilson" is able to play ball. He gets drunk and proves that he can't keep a secret.
The movie gets a little more interesting when Wilson tries to reconnect slightly with his old life and he realises he's still not satisfied, that he wants to change yet again, causing him to wonder just what it is he wanted all along.
Seconds has some intriguing similarities to the Japanese film The Face of Another (他人の顔) released the same year. The Face of Another is a bit better. Both movies are available on The Criterion Channel.
A young woman helps with the hard sell of unionising in a small southern town in 1979's Norma Rae. It's certainly a pro-union film and the screenplay doesn't even try to be even-handed--union dues are never mentioned. But the effective realism of the location shots and Sally Field's creative performance make it an absorbing film.
Norma Rae (Field) works in a textile factory. Employees suffer from low wages and their boss' lack of consideration for their health. Still, when a national union rep called Reuben (Ron Leibman) shows up and starts handing out pamphlets, no-one seems interested.
As time passes, Norma's life becomes more difficult after she gets married and struggles with balancing her family duties with her union obligations. There's also some effective romantic tension between her and Reuben. She's quite charming in the film, being both remarkably charismatic and convincingly normal, that rare, essential trick for a star in this kind of movie.
It's notable Norma Rae came out a year after Blue Collar, a far more realistic and complex take on the relations between union, employee, and employer. But even more than the automotive industry depicted in that movie, it's sobering to realise the textile industry depicted in Norma Rae has moved all factory work overseas to escape the very union Norma, and her real life counterpart, Crystal Lee Sutton, fought for.
X Sonnet #1882
The blameless morning fell before the end.
We'd carry weeks for trunks of falling suns.
Processions veered around the deathless bend.
A cagey man collected empty guns.
With double handed hammers, break the coke.
Courageous cougars clobber bouncer rats.
With certain bicycles, the brain's bespoke.
Your cave requires scads of screaming bats
A day absorbed in spells was spent with swords.
Conclusive weather apps deny the sky.
On clouds, the angels gather candy hoards.
A rain of bourbon fell to drizzled rye.
Refining light reformed the mirror bill.
Conditions shaped the dying egret's will.
I'm feeling somewhat vindicated now that Dave Filoni is generally considered to be a bad writer. I was only a little ahead of everyone else. Before Disney bought Star Wars, I thought Filoni was a genius like everyone else watching Clone Wars. But his first Disney era project, Rebels, rapidly diminished my esteem for him and I was compelled to realise he probably wasn't the reason Clone Wars was so great--and there was a reason he's almost never credited as a writer on that series.
After Filoni's work on the live action Ahsoka series, the Tales of the Jedi series, and The Bad Batch, everyone has been forced to acknowledge his mediocrity. Now I'm noticing different parts of the fandom are handling it differently. This morning I watched a YouTube video by a guy accusing Filoni of ripping off Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 film Notorious for the 2009 episode "Senate Spy". The YouTuber seems to have deleted the video, or YouTube is hiding it from me for some reason, since this morning.
As grounds for called Filoni a "Hack" (as the YouTuber summed up his analysis) it's not a very potent example considering it was written by Melinda Hsu, not Filoni. But what about this idea that basing the episode on Notorious is theft? No-one said that about the episode based on Seven Samurai--or about any of the other movies and shows based on Seven Samurai. Or about the stupid Zilla monster episode based on Godzilla. I suppose it's because Notorious isn't as well-known. Cinephiles know it but usually when I mention Notorious to anyone else they think at first I'm talking about the Notorious B.I.G. biopic. Still, it's different enough I think it's fair to call the episode an homage rather than a rip-off--though some special thanks in the credits would've been nice. That's not to say the connexion went totally unacknowledged: there was this blog post on the official Star Wars web site. Padme's motives for going on the mission are much different to Alicia's in the Hitchcock movie. That, and the context of Star Wars itself makes it different enough, in my opinion.
The YouTuber, whose name I can't remember, presented Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as an homage done properly. He argues Temple of Doom takes its plot from Gunga Din but that it's okay because the movie acknowledges it, two claims that make me wonder if he's even seen Gunga Din or Temple of Doom. Unless there's a cut of Gunga Din that involves a singer at a Chinese nightclub, a village with kidnapped children, a set of magical stones, brainwashing, and a mine car chase. Temple of Doom was certainly influenced by Gunga Din and both films feature the Thuggee as villains. But to say that Temple of Doom copies Gunga Din's plot wholesale would be like saying Hellboy is a copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Temple of Doom isn't even as close to Gunga Din as Raiders is to Secret of the Incas.
It's like the guy knew that Temple of Doom was an homage to Gunga Din based on other analyses or commentaries but had no grasp of how homages actually work. How the hell does Temple of Doom directly acknowledge Gunga Din? I bet the guy doesn't know the Thuggee were a real cult in India.
Speaking of Indiana Jones, a YouTuber I usually enjoy, Ryan George, has been uploading odd, nitpicky episodes of his popular Pitch Meeting series about the Indiana Jones movies. One of his jokes is about the fact that Indy and Elsa slept with each other on brief acquaintance for little reason beyond the fact that they were attracted to each other. Are we really at a point where modestly depicted consensual sex between pretty people occurring off-screen is too perverted? It's weird to see that kind of morality alongside the Selena Carpenter videos YouTube's algorithm has been offering to me lately.
I watched The Hand of Fear again last week, the Doctor Who serial from 1976. The whole four part serial is good but I especially admire the first episode. I mean, I guess the special effects for the first few minutes don't hold up to-day, though if you're like me, it's no impediment. But I'd unabashedly stand by everything else after that. It's a magnificent cascade of suspense.
You have the suspense while the Doctor and Sarah play around foolishly in the quarry while we can see the demolition crews. Then there's the suspense as the Doctor frantically tries to find Sarah in the rubble. And the wonderfully weird moment when Sarah grasps a severed stone hand. I love how quickly the episode turns the show on its head.
All the stuff in the hospital is good, too, and the nuclear power plant in the second and third episode.
Another day, another movie clearly inspired by Vertigo. This time, I watched 1976's Obsession, which has been acknowledged as Vertigo-derived by its director and screenwriter, Brian De Palma and Paul Schrader. Very much like De Palma's Blow Out, I appreciated the sentiment of a fellow Vertigo nut but found it not quite as satisfying as other Vertigo-derived films such as Mississippi Mermaid or Mulholland Drive.
I did like it more than Blow-Out, though. It actually has a score by Bernard Herrmann and it's among his best. Vilos Zsigmond's cinematography is lush and lovely, especially for the location shots in Rome. Most of the film's set in New Orleans, though, and that looks good, too.
Courtland (Cliff Robertson) is a wealthy real estate magnate married to Elizabeth (Genevieve Bujold), with whom he has a nine year old daughter, in 1959. His wife and daughter are kidnapped and when a police scheme to foil the kidnappers goes wrong Courtland loses both wife and daughter. Sixteen years later, Courtland is still obsessed with his departed loved ones. Like Scottie wandering listlessly in Vertigo before he spots the spitting image of Madeleine, Courtland comes across a woman who looks just like his wife, in the exact same Roman cathedral where he met her, no less.
I figured out the twist ending at this point. It adds a salacious quality to the Vertigo blueprint that I felt flattened the story a bit, draining it of nuance and psychological complexity. Apparently Schrader's original screenplay was much longer and made a point about obsession transcending time and space. It actually sounds a lot like Wuthering Heights. I'd have liked to have seen that version of the film.
Say goodbye to logic and restraint, it's time to talk about another giallo movie. This time it's 1972's Don't Torture a Duckling. A hazy chain of events in a small town links together a series of child murders in this mildly engaging horror flick.
Get ready to see a lot of obvious mannequins covered with obviously fake blood to stand in for the dead children. One of them was so bad that the film was obliged to cut back to shots of the actor to show which character we were supposed to recognise the dummy as being.
Investigating the murder are a number of fabulously moustachioed cops and one journalist (Andrea Martelli). Who are the suspects? There's a witch (Maciara) whom we see repeatedly putting pins in voodoo dolls. There's a very pretty, spoiled rich girl (Patrizia) who belittles one little boy's sexuality while she relaxes naked by a pool. There's a priest (Marc Porel) who considers himself a brother to all of the town's unfortunate youths.
The movie repeatedly shows one character in suspicious circumstances with all the victims before they die. Then the killer ends up being someone totally different. Never expect a giallo to play fair, however dispiriting it might be.
Don't Torture a Duckling is available on The Criterion Channel.
X Sonnet #1881
A family name consumed the robber bank.
Persuasive barrels blocked the servant's door.
Concessions built to pay the thieves a tank.
The prideful heart would leave the liver poor.
With grapes at heart, the damage won a spar.
Deserted ships convene to anchor void.
Contain the wooden deck with pails of tar.
Diverted pizza slams against the Noid.
A small town of beans was wrought with wheat,
Diminished time arose again for clocks.
For silly watchers, any bug was meat.
A lad's collection starts with special rocks.
The smallest birds will bear the logic quiz.
In ancient times, the beer was bubbly fizz.
Cinderella gets brainy in 1998's Ever After. Well, sort of. It's an escapist fantasy presented as a subversion of escapist fantasy, so you really neither have your cake nor eat it but, ideally, you think you do. It's kind of sweet.
My favourite part is the stepmother and stepsisters. Angelica Huston gives a good performance as the stepmother and she's given a couple scenes where she's allowed to be sort of complicated. Interestingly, one of the stepsisters, played by Melanie Lynskey, becomes sympathetic to the Cinderella character, here called Danielle, played by Drew Barrymore. It was mostly interesting for me because I imagined how much Lynskey's character in Heavenly Creatures would've enjoyed this.
Danielle likes to read and has a fondness for Thomas More's Utopia, though not a great understanding of it. The movie apparently thinks "Utopia" means "paradise". I wonder how audiences would have felt if the film acknowledged that the book was really about a big gated community. It also introduces a chronological problem to the film since, ten years after receiving Utopia as a present from her father, Danielle meets Leonardo da Vinci who, in reality, died three years after Utopia was published. So much for realism.
Dougray Scott plays the prince, the love interest, and he comes off as arrogant but with a basic sense of justice. It's not really clear why Danielle likes him so much since she's supposedly against hierarchy but I guess all that's just a thin glaze of faux-realism. There's no real reason for this movie to have avoided talking mice and pumpkin coaches.
In 1972, two men tried to rob a bank in Brooklyn. In 1975, Sydney Lumet made a movie about it called Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino in one of his greatest roles.
The film begins with naturalistic footage of the streets of New York City. It is a story about New York and New York culture. The way the robbers and the bank employees quickly lapse into a rapport, almost against their wills, shows them to be part of the same community.
The employees consist of a bank manager--a large man whose idea of professional behaviour is to be as accommodating as possible to the robbers--and a group of women who are so authentically drawn I had no trouble believing this is a true story. When Sonny (Pacino) takes one woman to the bathroom because she complains she'll need to go if she's locked in the vault, they find another woman in the bathroom who'd been oblivious to the whole robbery. The woman Sonny was escorting immediately starts complaining that the woman in the bathroom always takes longer breaks than she's supposed to.
Everyone's more driven by subconscious sympathies and patterns of behaviour than they are by the true logistics of the situation, right down to the end when the woman from the bathroom gives Sal (John Cazale), the other, more psychopathic, robber, her crucifix because he's anxious about going on a plane for the first time.
It's in this atmosphere that Sonny interacts with the police and the crowds outside who gather and start to consider him a hero. Even when it turns out Sonny's gay and has a transgender wife, the crowd is still on his side despite the '70s U.S. not being as enlightened on gay rights as it is to-day. It seems to me the movie fits with Vanishing Point and Convoy and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as part of a series of '70s movies about a criminal who quickly achieves a kind of folk hero status. But the robbers are so clumsy--they don't wear masks, Sonny never makes much effort to conceal their names. If the crowds love him, it's more out of pity than respect.
Pacino is certainly on fire in this role. For all the clumsiness and bad luck, he seems to hold the operation together by the pure tenacity visible at all times in his eyes.
Mostly the film has the sense of realism that distinguishes most of the best American movies of the '70s except, for whatever reason, everyone in the movie is impeccably dressed. Even psychopath Sal has a nice burgundy suit with a window pane patterned dress shirt and peach and white patterned tie. Everyone's perfectly colour coordinated. It's nice but kind of a false note in an otherwise impressively authentic endeavour.
Dog Day Afternoon is available on The Criterion Channel.
I think Eli Roth is the Bill Forsyth of horror movies. I finally got around to watching Roth's debut movie, 2002's Cabin Fever, and I was impressed by how already he had such a distinct artistic voice in evidence. But it's such a subtle one that it doesn't surprise me it has been widely misinterpreted.
Just like Forsyth's famous "gossamer" humour, the balancing act Roth plays with a group of obnoxious college kids, between laughing at them and sympathising with them, is too narrow a path to walk for many reviewers who just found them puzzlingly irritating. One of my favourite moments is when the most obnoxious of the group, Bert (James DeBello), first sees the guy with the horrific skin infection. He accidentally shoots him, thinking he's a squirrel, and he's apologetic. But as the guy with the disgusting skin draws closer, we can see Bert's fear and repulsion in conflict with his guilt and tiny shreds of empathy. And of course he chickens out, runs away, and forgets even about contacting authorities, like he wants to wipe the experience from his memory. His cowardice is funny in contrast to his boisterousness but it's also strikingly pathetic.
The two girls are less interesting possibly because at this point Roth was reluctant to attribute negative psychological traits to women. But both Jordan Ladd and Cerina Vincent are very cute. I just felt bad for the latter when she was threatened by the infection but Ladd kind of worked as a figure in Paul's story, the character played by Rider Strong. He has a crush on her and his physical and emotional compulsions are cruelly mocked by manifestations of the disease. At the same time, even he, despite being more or less the film's moral centre, makes decisions that complicate his moral standing. Some of it's downright Hitchcockian. I loved a scene where he was running around the woods looking for help and he comes across a house where he can see a naked woman through a window. He pauses until the woman's husband comes across him. The husband's understandably angry and as Paul pleads his innocence we're left to think back on just how long he watched the woman. How innocent is he really? Supposedly David Lynch was an uncredited producer and the moment does savour very slightly of Blue Velvet. The moral is, watch your voyeurism, kids.
The last part of the movie doesn't work quite as well. There's a joke about an apparently racist shop owner that doesn't make any sense and falls flat. Like Forsyth, Roth loses his stride when he steps away from that delicate balance. Which could explain Borderlands, though that seems like studio interference is the main culprit. It's a good thing he got Thanksgiving out before Borderlands hit.
I really struggled with the first half of 2005's The Cave. It seemed like it was deliberately edited to mute all of the tension and suspense. Then, halfway though, a pretty girl in a tube top tries to climb a sheer wall while fighting a gargoyle and it got kind of good.
Piper Perabo plays the girl in the tube top and she barely has a presence in the movie before that scene. I don't even think she gets one closeup as the film mostly focuses on a team of interchangeable bros with a lot of looped dialogue and odd cutting choices that make me think it was all edited down from a much longer cut. This combined with the boring cinematography and featureless glob of action music and sound effects made the first half of the film a torturous purgatory.
Then it seemed like the filmmakers woke up because Piper Perabo took off some clothes and tried something dangerous. It certainly got my attention. Suddenly the pacing became perfectly sensible and logical, the cutting between reaction shots and POV shots of gloom and shadowy movements were genuinely gripping.
The story follows a team of spelunkers investigating a cave system in Romania. They encounter monsters, possibly meant to be vampires, but they're consciously styled on the alien from Alien. Lena Headey and Daniel Dae Kim were the only other performers I recognised and their parts were relatively small. Headey does have a few interesting moments.
X Sonnet #1880
A golden pen was filled with yellow ink.
Arrested leaves prevent the winter's start.
Tomato sauce enticed the present link.
Heroic chains would bind the page's heart.
An icy swim would not appeal to skates.
Corruption turns the rubber blades to props.
Beneath the icy cake, the sprinkle waits.
Sorbet is not sorbet when gummy drops.
The sticky word would track the dough to home.
When nothing sticks, the batter flies above.
The winds of folly scatter salt to Rome.
A squawking metal bird would kill the dove.
As heat decides the time of storms we wait.
Not ev'ry star will take a moon to mate.
My journey into the world of contemporary pop music continues with Sabrina Carpenter, a singer recommended to me by a student. This one's really current; her biggest hit, "Espresso", came out this very year. I'm feeling so relevant, by gad.
I like "Espresso", the lyrics of which are not grammatically incorrect, despite a claim by a supposed linguist whom Vulture interviewed.
“That’s that me, espresso” has burrowed into everybody’s head. What do you make of that line?
I always believe that pop music, especially bubblegum pop, is not meant to be taken seriously. So “That’s that me, espresso,” that’s not grammatically correct, right? The reduplication of the word that is there to foster a sense of playfulness, to catch attention. I think it also has to do with the rhyme scheme and the number of syllables, to make each word fall into place.
Vulture or the linguist added the comma to the line. Here it is in context:
Now he's thinkin' 'bout me every night, oh
Is it that sweet? I guess so
Say you can't sleep, baby, I know
That's that me espresso
To see how this line makes perfect sense, substitute "Sabrina" for "me".
That's that Sabrina espresso
If that's still not clear enough, replace it with Starbucks.
That's that Starbucks espresso.
"That" here is a perfectly acceptable repeating pronoun accommodating the inclusion of the verb "is" to make a proper sentence. In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson described the manner in which Carpenter uses the first pronoun:
It sometimes serves to save the repetition of a word or words foregoing.
He cites Shakespeare's Henry IV:
I'll know your business, that I will.
Carpenter's second use of the word was described by Johnson as:
Not this, but the other.
He cites Shakespeare again:
He wins me by that means I told you.
And that's that.
I'd recently been comparing Fiona Apple and Billie Eilish. Both singers broke through with trashy, fun songs ("Criminal" and "Bad Guy", respectively) but the rest of their output is more introspective or stream of consciousness, and doesn't seem to reach the public imagination in quite the same way. I guess you could put Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" in the same category though she has other songs that approach "Blank Space" in popularity. All of Sabrina Carpenter's songs seem to be in the trashy fun category. She strongly reminds me of a young Madonna. She even kind of looks like her.
She's also dating talented young Irish actor Barry Keoghan. Another young person I've heard of! I feel so alive. They'll soon remember the vampire I was, Louis!
In the wake of the inevitable failure of the new Crow movie, I saw Amazon Prime has the original 1994 The Crow. So I decided to give it another shot. I mean, I never really liked it. I remember hating it, actually, though I loved its famous soundtrack, of course (except for the Henry Rollins and Jane Siberry tracks), and its achievement of peak Goth aesthetic is pleasant. I thought maybe I'd like it better now that I've developed a taste for revenge movies thanks to Quentin Tarantino. It turns out, no, I still don't like The Crow.
The thing about Tarantino's revenge movies is that he makes them about characters. Everyone on the Bride's list is fleshed out in varying degrees and it gives some weight to what she's doing. Even Stuntman Mike had something more to him than just being a cartoon character. My dislike for The Crow is about the same as my dislike for Death Wish. Except Charles Bronson was a better actor than Brandon Lee. Even The Crow's legendary soundtrack is largely misused. The Cure's "Burn" is cut all to hell.
At least he's a superhero who fights crime. That's pretty rare nowadays. And when I consider the same people who used to get caught up in the romance of revenge in the name of great love now tend to spend their days posting memes about micro-aggressions I do long for the days when The Crow had cache.
I honestly thought Kamala Harris was going to just wipe the floor with Donald Trump but yesterday's debate was pretty even, as far as I could tell. He was as bad as I expected. He even said two exceptionally stupid things--I mean, stupid even for him. The first was his claim about immigrants eating dogs and cats. When the moderator said that the mayor of the town in question reported no such incidents, Trump's exceptionally lame retort was to say that he heard someone talk about it on TV.
Harris' strongest point was when she went after Trump's naivete when dealing with foreign leaders who could manipulate him with flattery. Even people in Trump's camp may have been clear-eyed enough to squirm a bit. But they're not clear-eyed enough that Harris shouldn't have categorically denied Trump's claim that she supported executing babies (that was the other exceptionally stupid thing he said). I think Trump sometimes says things so outrageously stupid and ugly that his opponent thinks they don't deserve a response, but Harris and others have to consider that they're trying to sway people who think voting for Trump is a reasonable option. So she should absolutely deign to mention, "I will not support the execution of babies." Might as well cover her bases and say she won't support the genocide of Americans or forcing people to eat snakes. Try to ride ahead of the crazy wave.
Harris was also hampered by having to maintain the Left's picture of the January 6th mob as an "insurrection", though thankfully she avoided using that word. Trump recovered from a blunder some weeks ago when he failed to recall the death of Ashli Babbitt, the only true fatal casualty of January 6th, and she was one of his supporters, an unarmed woman, no less.
Despite the strong handshake at the beginning, Harris' biggest flaw may be that she sounded much weaker than Trump, particularly when she took to using a plaintive tone in the second half of the debate when she seemed to be begging viewers to embrace hope and optimism. She came off as pathetic and, sadly, I think that would be enough to sway some voters Trump's way. A lot of people genuinely feel it's better to be stupid than weak.
X Sonnet #1879
Attempts could crowd the longest amber night.
The dummy pool was still a sloppy string.
Decisive faces chose the floppy fight.
A smokey finger picked the magic ring.
In fact, eternal rain on Venus holds.
Revenge was not a dish for boring oats.
Amazing music fell to painted scolds.
To Mars, let's take the nifty flying boats.
The lava path was later black as night.
The sketch of dogs was traded high and fast.
Collapsing rails displaced the local fight.
Some empty words have drenched the puddle past.
With suits and ties, the figures fumble serves.
The av'rage soup is choked with stringy nerves.
