Bob Hoskins is a low level gangster who helps a snooty, mysterious call girl in 1986's Mona Lisa. This one's a fairy tale in which prostitutes are all gold-hearted damsels waiting for rescue and gangsters are either villains or heroes waiting to happen. It's not a bad movie and it has some truly interesting ideas at play but expect the insights to be about truth versus appearance and the compelling nature of mystery rather than a hard look at London's criminal underworld.
Hoskins plays George, a thug who's just done seven years in prison for his gangster boss (Michael Caine). We meet George showing up at the door of his estranged wife and teenage daughter. The wife immediately starts screaming and shoving him out the door and we eventually learn that she has basically erased the man from existence within the household. In a movie about appearance versus true nature, George himself is already a man of multiple roles in varied contexts.
For reasons that are never explained, George buys a rabbit for his boss. Maybe Hoskins really had a thing for rabbits (this was two years before Who Framed Roger Rabbit). Presumably it's a code of some kind among London gangs. The film continually poses visual or conceptual puzzles with solutions that may or may not be presented later in the film. George goes to stay with his friend (Robbie Coltrane), a mechanic who has a variety of odd side businesses, which results in George walking into the garage to behold tables covered with plastic spaghetti, each serving having its own hovering fork above it dug into a mound of noodles. Coltrane's character explains "the Japanese have cornered the market" on plastic food, which may well be true because I do see plastic food in the windows of nearly all restaurants here in Japan.
Eventually, George is given a job as a driver for Simone (Cathy Tyson), the call girl, who's immediately angry at George's blue collar appearance and attitude. Her business is providing a fantasy for men at expensive hotels and mansions and George's appearance and mannerisms kind of burst that bubble. George is shown to be very slow on the uptake, so much so it strains credibility. Simone wants him to buy nicer clothes so she gives him a wad of bills. He goes out and buys a Hawaiian shirt and tan leather jacket which actually do look pretty chic but aren't what Simone had in mind and she angrily tells him so. The next day, she takes him to a men's clothing store and he can't figure out what they're doing there. He even asks if she likes to wear men's clothes and she finally has to spell it out for him that she's shopping for him. This happens a few times in the film--we in the audience figure things out a lot quicker than George does. I'm not sure how much that was intentional.
The song, "Mona Lisa", plays over the opening credits but the title also seems to refer to the famously mysterious quality of the painting itself. Simone, like the other various visual puzzles throughout the film, is herself a puzzle whose apparent nature changes throughout the movie.
Vampires fight werewolves and worry about miscegenation in 2003's Underworld. If you ever wanted to see a LARPing session filmed with decent special effects and good performances, this fits the bill.
LARP or "Live Action Role Play" is a role playing game where people actually run around pretending to be fantastical beings, the most famous example being Vampire Masquerade by White Wolf who sued the makers of Underworld for its uncanny resemblance to White Wolf's uncanny publications. The entities settled their lawsuit in secret, an arcane mystery never to be revealed to our plebeian mortal eyes.
Underworld's screenplay by Danny McBride (no, not the Danny McBride who stars in Seth Rogan movies) from a story by McBride and director Len Wiseman has the pure pulp, chicken with its head cut off quality of a real LARP session. Kate Beckinsale is at the centre as a badass vampire named Selene who runs around shooting and shooting and shooting, blam blam, her two pistols at werewolves who run around shooting and shooting and occasionally transforming into cumbersome but visceral practical effects.
If you wonder how beings could've carried on a war for a thousand years like ten year olds playing Cops and Robbers, you're asking the wrong question. If you're asking how come vampires and werewolves are so cool, you're on the right page. You're a long way from depth here, it's best to just go along for the ride and Beckinsale is very cool and sexy. Supporting performances from Michael Sheen and Bill Nighy are also appreciably overwrought.
Underworld is available on YouTube.
X Sonnet 1955
Perdition sliced the angel cake from crumbs.
Divine divided beings were sweet and sharp.
She's perfect made from all her toes to thumbs.
A passive maid could never play the harp.
For perfect pluck an iron passion's right.
A must before the golden bust of gods.
As Heaven holds a ball to praise the light,
The flowers by the floor are gauging odds.
No waitress traipsed betwixt the downy wings.
The seraph sipped their sarsaparilla flutes.
While devils dined on spicy chicken wings.
Below the angels, mirrors laced their boots.
Forgotten parties brought the human cake.
Confusing strippers struck for Satan's sake.
A demon girl tries to have a bowl movement while a gigantic ghost turns buildings into sushi; a ninja turtle parody becomes a violent Gamera parody; and a serial killer inspired by Dario Argento movies is thwarted by the infamous angel who uses her panties as a gun in the new episode of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt.
The first two segments are very short with around half of the episode given over the Dario Argento parody of which, alas, there are no clips yet available on YouTube. It's certainly the best part with odes to Argento's 1970s giallo movies Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, and, especially, Suspiria. The killer is fixated on slutty blonde girls who all happen to resemble Panty so she and Detective Dario (a caricature of Argento himself) round up all the slutty blonde girls in town and have them stay together in a reproduction of the ballet school from Suspiria. The show even does the scene where maggots start falling from the ceiling.
Maybe the first two segments were funnier, though. The Demon Sisters, in contrast to Panty and Stocking, who are always fighting, are always praising each other excessively. It's the kind of ironic humour that isn't so ironic if you start to think about people who praise one another to excess.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.
I'd heard 1997's Grosse Pointe Blank was kind of boring but it's on Criterion this month so I watched it anyway. It is really boring. But why? I kept watching, wondering, and analysing. I realised what the problem was in the convenience store shoot-out scene where John Cusack's character blasts a cardboard standup of Pulp Fiction characters. This movie was one of many that tried to follow in Pulp Fiction's footsteps but didn't truly understand what made Pulp Fiction work.
There were a lot of imitations of Tarantino's crime movies in the '90s. Some of them were better than others but none ever came close to the original. The trouble is, many people saw Pulp Fiction and said it was a movie about regular people who just happened to be gangsters and killers. No, it's more than that. When they seem normal, when Vincent and Jules are talking about Amsterdam or Harvey Keitel's joking with Julia Sweeney, it isn't that they're behaving normally in spite of being killers, it's that killers naturally have normal conversations now and then. It's like the kidnappers arguing in Shoot the Piano Player.
Grosse Pointe Blank is about a man going back to his hometown after ten years away to reconnect the girl he'd ditched on prom night. And he happens to be a professional hitman and the film occasionally lapses into ludicrous, over the top action scenes. Joe Strummer of The Clash does the soundtrack, throwing in a bunch of nostalgic '80s songs like Tarantino used '70s songs and the filmmakers must have thought they basically did what Tarantino did. No.
Here's what separates them. Pulp Fiction really is pulp fiction. The situations are slightly bizarre or absurd. Think of the chain of implausible violent events that characterise Bruce Willis' story. Think of the drama in the diner as the robbery is interrupted with Jules' epiphany. Grosse Pointe Blank is just random shoot-outs, and they're tacky action movie shoot-outs, where guys unload their pistols at each other and rarely score a hit.
The other problem is character. Tarantino makes Vincent an "Elvis man" who's slightly dumb, a little belligerent, but can be level headed in a tough situation. Butch is a man caught between his sense of honour and his desire to carve out a life for himself and his girl.
Meanwhile, John Cusack's killer wears a black suit and killing doesn't bother him. The girl he likes, Minnie Driver, isn't sure she should take him back. That's it. There's very little tension between the two because there's very little of anything between the two of them.
Grosse Pointe Blank was directed by George Armitage whose Miami Blues was a lot better.
Where have all the goths gone? I found one making Skyrim mods. This lady named Kukielle reminds me so much of so many girls I knew in high school who liked shopping at Hot Topic and listening to Type O Negative. Yeah, I'm calling that "goth" but I'm well aware there was a pecking order and drama over what is high brow enough to be called goth or if something even has to be high brow to be goth. The point is, this Skyrim modder seems like a throwback to another era. The Skyrim community seems to have had a fractious relationship with her, mostly because it's a lot of whitebread types who don't understand her abuse shtick. They take it personally when the follower character she created insults the player character. When she updated the character so that she has a boyfriend, there were angry voices in the community from people who felt she was cheating on them (although they didn't phrase it that way). All this made the mod author swear off Skyrim modding to focus on her music career.
I recently installed her original mod, Daegon, again after setting it aside some months ago. Kukielle voices the character herself and she often speaks quickly in very low tones obliging me to set the volume on music and effects to zero.
Yet this is something I actually like. A lot of my favourite mods come from authors whose personality constantly comes through in the mod, seemingly by accident. It's like method modding. Do I want some AI doll perfectly enunciating every syllable or do I want this chick who slurs her way through every other "is" and "that"? Call me crazy but I'll take the latter.
Before she quit the scene, Kukielle made a number of other follower mods, all with the same voice. They're available on Nexus Mods.
I was watching Spider-Man: Homecoming a couple weeks ago but I found myself jonsing too much for a better Spider-Man movie. So I went back to the 2002 Sam Raimi movie again. It's flawed, it some ways it hasn't aged well. It's great how the costume's eyes express emotion in the new movies. In general, the special effects in the Raimi films only just barely seemed adequate to the task.
What makes it superior is its unfettered artistic voice. Sam Raimi was unafraid to be downright weird. And Peter Parker's experience would be strange. He achieves this weirdness mostly with just good old fashioned direction; composition and sequence. Danny Elfman's score helps a lot, too. Those dizzying shots among the skyscrapers get a lot of their power from those pulsating string sections that sound like "Ride of the Valkyries".
Danny Elfman's theme ought to be used for all incarnations of the character in film, just like John Williams' Superman theme ought to be for Superman. Or Danny Elfman's for Batman. Is there any composer who's made as many memorable movie scores as Williams and Elfman? I can't think of anyone who even comes close. Jerry Goldsmith made a few, James Horner kind of did the same score again and again.
I am excited for the next MCU Spider-Man film. The inclusion of Hulk and Punisher in the story sounds good to me. I'm not sure I can hope for it to pull the MCU out of the terminal banality that plagues it these days. I didn't see the new Fantastic Four movie. I was going to see it last weekend, its second weekend, but the theatre near me had switched to only showing the dubbed version. The next closest theatres are in other towns which I could've gotten to by train in thirty to forty minutes but it just didn't seem worth it. The casting seems bad. I don't know why Hollywood is so in love with Pedro Pascal. There's nothing about him that says Reed Richards to me. All the actors are talented, though, so maybe I'll enjoy what they made when I eventually see it. It's a shame so few people saw Thunderbolts, that one was pretty good.
I watched Seven Samurai again over the weekend. It's like slicing into a cake, it's always satisfying. I'm not sure how many times I've seen it now since my first time in the '90s. Like the Star Wars movies, it somehow remains alive and vital. Also like Star Wars, it creates a world with its characters and locations.
It also has a different impact for me because I'm different, I know more about Japan and Japanese than the first dozen or so times I saw it. Now I know what it means that it's set around 15 years before the Sekigahara battles. Japan was not yet a single, consolidated country and there was a lot of fighting.
Seven Samurai is also a cultural artefact of 1954, the year it was released. Kurosawa's movies are not generally seen to-day in Japan. His period films use a form of Japanese that many people in Japan can no longer understand. It's a bit like Shakespearean English, I guess, which would make sense, given that Kurosawa was a big fan of Shakespeare.
All the same, I'm able to understand enough of it to wonder at some of the choices made on the Criterion edition's translation. In the scene after the youngest samurai, Katsushiro, sleeps with the farm girl, Shino, the leader of the samurai, Kambei, claps the young man's shoulder and says they expect much in battle from him now because he's recently become "a man," and everyone laughs. But what he says is "otona", adult. The line could've been translated, "You're an adult now," or "You've grown up."
The film presents a very different attitude towards women and sex than one finds in Japanese media to-day. Or at the time. When Kurosawa was making movies, he was criticised for being too American. It's often said he has few female characters but Seven Samurai has two very interesting female characters; Shino, and one farmer's, Rikichi's, wife, who lives with the bandits. The latter appears in only one scene and has no dialogue but the actress's performance and the context in which we see her, after the build up of Rikichi's sensitivity about discussing her, compel the viewer to think about her. The film introduces the ambiguity over how much she was a captive and how much she was a willing defector and the torment caused by that ambiguity.
Of course, it's also striking just how enthusiastic Kikuchiyo, Mifune Toshiro's character, is about finding a girl to sleep with. It's extremely rare to hear anyone in Japan talk about wanting sex. In this movie, it's a fact of life that comes up again and again. There's the amusing moment when Kikuchiyo gripes again about not having a girl causing Kyuzo to ponder a moment and declare he's going out into the woods to practice alone with his sword. Kikuchiyo comments, "There are no women out there." Heihachi laughs and says sometimes Kikuchiyo really, "hits the nail on the head," implying Kyuzo might be doing more than practicing out in the woods.
Seven Samurai is available on The Criterion Channel.
Saturday's new Panty and Stocking was the best of the new series so far. It starts with a parody of Donald Trump, follows it up with Panty using a ghost kitten as a vibrator, and concludes with a satisfyingly surreal homage to Hanna-Barbera superhero cartoons and possibly Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
The term "space ghost", in English, is used multiple times. An alien menace comes to earth and transforms people into various vaguely Marvel-ish characters in the old Hanna-Barbera style. Stocking gets turned into the Thing from Fantastic Four though for some reason Panty becomes a Dragon Ball character. It could be the idea was for the story to be a parody of '80s animation, both American and Japanese.
The Donald Trump parody shrewdly distanced itself from too many distinguishing features but it's not hard to see what they were on about with the blonde man who brags constantly about how he will govern with "business". Of course, he turns out to be a ghost which Stocking must eliminate (which is why they clearly tried to distance the parody from too much resembling Trump).
The second segment was really cute despite having possibly the most explicit moment in the whole series, showing Panty asleep wearing only her namesake garment with an active vibrator on her crotch. This is, unbeknownst to her, swapped out for the purring ghost kitten. She takes a liking to the critter in spite of herself. It was impressively twisted.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.
I've been kind of fascinated by the controversy around the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle jeans ads. At first I was annoyed that liberals were wasting their time over something so stupid when the Trump administration is doing shit that actually affects people's lives. Then I started wondering if it was outrage entirely manufactured by the Right to distract from Trump's Epstein scandal, which seems to be the point of view taken by The Daily Show. But the Daily Show bit only shows looney right-wingers complaining about left-wingers, refraining from showing some of the actual left-wing reaction, like this from The New Yorker:
So is the allusion incoherent or an obvious dog whistle? According to a writer at The Guardian quoting a writer from The Atlantic (there's a sewing circle for you):
“The slogan ‘Sydney Sweeney has good jeans’ obviously winks at the obsession with eugenics that’s so prevalent among the modern right.” Dr Sarah Cefai, a senior lecturer in gender and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, agrees. “Honestly, what were they thinking, that a white supremacist fantasy has permission to be aired so conspicuously?”
So I'm afraid the Right isn't just imagining things. Is it possible this is a deeper psy-op? If a "senior lecturer" is dumb enough to see white supremacy in this jeans ad, perhaps she's also dumb enough to be manipulated into the position by bad actors. That's the kind of conspiracy theory that really demonstrates how comforting conspiracy theories can be.
The Guardian article also quotes from an associate professor of gender and women's studies named Aria Halliday who says, "that while 'Black girls are rarely the target audience for ads,' some may still be curious to try the jeans: 'the desire to be perceived as beautiful is hard to ignore,' she says."
Maybe she didn't see this ad:
The ad has less views and has certainly generated less conversation than the Sydney Sweeney ad. Is that American Eagle's fault?
The topic fascinates me because I'm a liberal who loves beauty but those are two things that have had a troubled history. How can you say all people are created equal and say some people have genetic advantages? It's a complex question that hardliners typically try to bulldoze over. You can say beauty is entirely relative but humanity continually gravitates towards symmetry and large eyes. Not always large breasts which were not popular in the 1920s and medieval Europe. But being born in this time and place certainly confers an advantage to Sweeney. And quibbling over details like this, no-one seriously believes there was ever a time when someone would say Marie Dressler was prettier than Mabel Normand (how's that for a timely reference).
However, beauty often defies beauty standards. As Leo Tolstoy put in War and Peace:
Her pretty little upper lip, on which a delicate dark down was just perceptible, was too short for her teeth, but it lifted all the more sweetly, and was especially charming when she occasionally drew it down to meet the lower lip. As is always the case with a thoroughly attractive woman, her defect—the shortness of her upper lip and her half-open mouth—seemed to be her own special and peculiar form of beauty.
There's something mysterious about beauty. All of our algorithms and equations for it often go right out the window. There's this dialogue from Love in the Afternoon:
Gary Cooper: Everything about you is perfect.
Audrey Hepburn: I'm too thin! And my ears stick out, and my teeth are crooked and my neck's much too long.
Gary Cooper: Maybe so, but I love the way it all hangs together
Few would deny Audrey Hepburn was an extraordinary beauty but she's right. According to the rules, she shouldn't be exceptionally beautiful. It's not fair, is it?
One recalls the tendency of Communist countries to put everyone in identical uniforms, to reduce the advantage of beauty as much as possible, except when it's used in propaganda. It's frequently seen as a bedfellow of capitalism, creating industries of beauty products exploiting the desire to be beautiful. But life is more complicated than that and, as history has certainly shown, depriving people of beauty and opportunity doesn't kill their desire for such things.
In her song "32 Flavours" from her album Not a Pretty Girl, Ani DiFranco reminds us,
God help you if you are an ugly girl
'Cause too pretty is also your doom
'Cause everyone harbours a secret hatred
For the prettiest girl in the room
The American Eagle ad is certainly insipid, as commercials typically are, but the effect of beauty is real, however much anyone may want to deny it. I've always preferred to celebrate it. As Oscar Wilde put it:
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
It seems like a simple idea but it takes maturity to allow the existence of beauty without attempting to exploit it, either as symbol of one's superiority or another's tyranny. As Wilde says, it takes "cultivation", and that's sadly lacking in higher education these days.
How's your climate change life going? You may have heard Wednesday was the hottest day in Japan's history, or since records started being kept, anyway. It was 35 Celsius here or 95 Fahrenheit. Did I stay home under the air conditioner like a sensible human being? No, I walked to work for over an hour under that clear, blinding sky and felt oddly at home. Sure, back in my hometown of San Diego, it was not unusual to see the temperature get up to 111 Fahrenheit but the humidity is much stronger in Japan which can feel stifling. Maybe the humidity melted on Wednesday because I found it a lot more comfortable than usual.
I was due at an elementary school. English events are being held at various schools in town and I've been going to different schools every day. No students ended up coming to that event (possibly due to it being the hottest day in recorded history). At around 11am, I left to go to my shift at a junior high school in the afternoon. I stopped by the river and ate some potato wraps I'd made in the morning and listened to Elvis Presley on my iPod and felt really good. Maybe I was delirious.
I say potato wrap but I've been thinking of them of potato burritos. I make mashed potatoes with salt, pepper, cumin, garlic, and habanero powder and wrap them in my homemade wheat flour tortillas. They're pretty good if I do say so myself. Yesterday I added some lime to them and they were even better. I don't use milk for the mashed potatoes, just a little water and canola oil.
Rockabilly seems to suit walking in this weather particularly well. I've been listening to Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis a lot.
X Sonnet 1954
The frozen boiling point was marbled meat.
She tried to step beyond the rocket pad.
The eager smoke was curling round her feet.
The party coloured warnings drove her mad.
Descending paper pierced the humid clouds.
A thousand cuts of colour stormed the launch.
She climbed aloft on gleaming silver shrouds.
She doffed her top, the leaking fuel to staunch.
A press of roaches clogged the vessel's way.
But acid tides conduct a worthy ship.
And so the captain's laser held its sway.
The hopeless quest advanced a healthy clip.
At dusk she found the stash of hearty rum.
A mission fades when other sport would come.
Noir-ish misfortune finds folks in Argentina in 1952's Don't Ever Open That Door (No abras nunca esa puerta). It's really two short films with beautiful, expressionistic, black and white photography. The two stories, based on prose works by American author Cornell Woolrich, feel very much like Tales from the Crypt, both featuring characters in strange and desperate circumstances that end with a cruel twist.
In the first story, "Anguish", a wealthy man's sister is beset by gambling debts and becomes suicidal. The man decides to take vengeance on the people aggressively demanding restitution from her.
In the second story, "Pain", an elderly blind woman living with her niece receives a visit from her long lost son who's become a murderous bank robber.
The stories both revolve around the dichotomy of fate and free will that distinguishes film noir. Both stories feature characters who try to take control of a dangerous situation only for their efforts to have horrible, twisted results, leaving the viewer with the question of how much the capricious hand of fate is to blame or how much is due to the characters' audacity in trying to assert their own wills. It's good.
I've been watching Twin Peaks yet again, though it's my first watch through since David Lynch died, which certainly casts a pall over it. But I was watching an episode not directed or written by Lynch last night, episode 7 of the first season, written by Harley Payton. I always think of this one as the Best of Audrey and the Worst of Audrey. It begins with her naked in Cooper's bed, which I've always thought was ended in an unfortunate but almost inevitable way with Cooper standing on his principles as an FBI agent who will not sleep with a teenage girl. The scene kills the wonderfully weird energy between the two that made their dialogue so interesting in the previous episodes and they never really get it back.
I did notice something new, though. Cooper says to her, "What I want and what I need are two different things." I remembered Mr. C in season three once remarks, "I don't need anything. I want." This implies he would have handled the situation with Audrey in the opposite way in which Cooper did and foreshadows what is eventually revealed about what he did do to Audrey.
I lament the scene for killing the weird energy between the two but, in real life, a girl like Audrey really wouldn't be in the right place psychologically to give away her virginity and Cooper is right to say that what she needs is a friend to listen to her. So he goes and gets some food and it's implied the two talk for hours as she unburdens herself. I've always wondered what they talked about. In the previous episode and later in this one, she was trying and failing to tell Cooper about the clue at the perfume counter at Horne's department store. Evidently she didn't disclose this in their heart to heart but, if not, what did they talk about? Audrey's relationship with her father? Some girl at school? What?
It's a bit sloppy but the previous episode's cliffhanger left this one with little choice. Audrey turning up in Cooper's bed was simply too far too soon for both characters.
Otherwise, the episode does a terrific job establishing character. I love Audrey's cleverness when she hides in Battis' closet and steals the unicorn. But she's not perfect; Blackie sees right through her false identity, recognising her assumed name from The Scarlet Letter, which says something about Blackie, too.
It's the middle of summer. Time to leave your job and family and live on a stolen boat with a dangerous girl, as in Ingmar Bergman's 1953 breakout movie, Summer with Monika. I watched it again a couple nights ago but wasn't sure there was anything I could add to my old blog entry about the film except, searching to-day, I can't find my old blog entry, perhaps meaning I never wrote about this film. I guess I'd better.
It gained fame and infamy in the U.S. for its use of nudity--a brief scene of actress Harriet Anderson cavorting on the beach. Her character, Monika, and her sensuality are certainly the film's central problem. She's the one who inspires her boyfriend, Harry (Lars Ekborg), to reject society and follow their mutual teenage instincts. They live free for a while in that little boat, stopping just to eat, sleep, have sex, dance, or lounge around. They live like there's no to-morrow.
Another young man spots them at one point. Jealous of the two, he tries to set fire to their boat when they're distracted, leading to a fight between the boys. It feels very primal and Monika passionately kissing Harry when it's over feels like a crude portrait of a family dynamic. Do they really need all that civilisation?
Well, yes, of course, the film doesn't refrain from becoming a wet blanket. They come home to reality and the inevitable financial needs that come with their new baby, home, and place in society. Monika seems to lose her mind. There's a moment where the viewer feels compelled to contemplate just what is going on her mind, what makes her act the way she does. Bergman chooses the right moment for a contemplative close-up of her that seems to dissolve out of reality to focus entirely on her soul. And her eyes seem cold and dead. She's like a hunter who'd rather keep killing than settle down and cook the meat.
Like the films he'd made before it, Summer with Monika is more conventional than the movies he's best known for in which the heart of the material is in the dialogue, in how the characters interpret themselves and their lives. Summer of Monika is more about showing a sociological experiment of sorts. Its statement isn't exactly profound but Harriet Anderson's performance and Bergman's compositions make the film extraordinary.
Summer with Monika is available on The Criterion Channel.
Another episode of Panty and Stocking premiered over the weekend, this one containing three shorts. I enjoyed them mostly because I continue to like the characters but most of its parodies amounted to little more than collections of references. The first season was kind of like that, too, though I remember their Transformers parody being one of the best episodes. That was because they actually went somewhere with the concept instead of just showing Transformers drawn in the show's style.
This new episode features references to The Mandalorian, Pitch Perfect, and The Fast and the Furious. Of those, I'm pretty sure The Fast and the Furious is the only one well known in Japan, where the series goes by the title Wild Speed. The Mandalorian parody features Stocking and one of the demon sisters, Scanty, enrolling in a samurai dojo which seems mainly designed for weebs (foreigners who are obsessed with Japanese culture), a group the show seems to enjoy mocking this season. I thought this was the funniest line from the short, in which the "samurai sensei" tells his students that catching a fly with chopsticks is a sure sign of samurai skill.
The guy's dog ends up being Grogu/Baby Yoda. Again, it's all just there, it doesn't seem to be making a comment about The Mandalorian or Star Wars.
The Pitch Perfect parody, called "Bitch Perfect", was my favourite of the three. Panty and Stocking and the demon sisters compete over how many likes they can get from narcissistic posts to an app reminiscent of TikTok or Instagram. The app ends up being a ghost, which I really liked.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.
A beautiful but clumsy young witch seeks a human ear to stay in the human realm in 1972's The Girl on the Broomstick (DÃvka na koÅ¡tÄ›ti). Petra ÄŒernocká stars as Saxana, the title character, in this amusing and occasionally surreal teen comedy.
A man catches an owl and brings it home in a sack. His son, Honza (Jan HruÅ¡Ãnský), opens the bag and is startled not to find an owl but a beautiful, busty teenage girl. She begs not to be put in a cage.
This is a movie for kids but there are plenty of hints at adult humour. Occasionally, it almost seems to have great artistic ambition, as when Honza's head comes off in one scene and his headless body takes a plaster sculpture of Napoleon's head and places it on his shoulders. He paints it before going outside, as if that would help.
Saxana spends most of her time with three delinquent boys who con her into turning the school faculty into rabbits. There's a lot of transformation humour in this one.
The Girl on the Broomstick is available on The Criterion Channel.
How long has humanity been contemplating the dangers of AI? A couple days ago I was reading John Stuart Mill and I was surprised to come across this bit from his famous essay "On Liberty":
Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery—by automatons in human form—it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilised parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce.
And that was in 1859.
Mill was using the idea to illustrate how bleak it would be to have a world in which humans didn't carve out their own fortunes. "It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself," he says. To Mill, it's incumbent on any human being to make of themselves the best example of a human being they can (he uses "man" and "men" and male pronouns to refer to humanity generally, as was the custom up until seventy or so years ago, but Mill was a noted feminist).
I like this bit:
Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
I used to tell students to not look at life as a train track with just a series of predetermined destinations from which any deviation is a derailment. Instead, life ought to be seen as a large forest in which one can find different paths and opportunities in all directions. Obviously, Japan is well known as a country in which people follow prescribed life paths but somewhere in the philosophy behind the Japanese work ethic someone knew that's not enough. This is why the Japanese love sports so much and why so much care and attention is given to Japanese cuisine. The Japanese are masters of creature comforts. They have the most comfortable toilets in the world, the most efficient and friendly service staff.
Obviously, this isn't what John Stuart Mill had in mind. His idea of hard work for the purpose of self creation rather than for merely fitting in harmoniously with society is a fundamentally western idea and we can see it in both the best and the worst of what the west has produced. Yet many people in Japan are very concerned about AI.
Self-expression is important to me, not just my own but everyone's. I guess that's no surprise given that I'm an artist. I'm always excited by, and I do my best to encourage, students when they express themselves, artistically or otherwise, even on occasions when such expression is meant to insult me. It's these things, these trees "to grow and develop on all sides", that make up the forest of human existence.
But is there objective value in human accomplishment? Can we let machines do everything while we lounge poolside? I could speak to the compulsion for self-definition, to be noticed, to carve out an identity in society. But what if we chemically satisfied that compulsion? What if we had a combination of drugs and virtual reality aimed at satisfying that emotional need? Soma, essentially. Maybe it's time to read Brave New World again.
Suppose machines get to the point where they wonder about the worth of their own expression and accomplishment. Maybe I need to watch Blade Runner again. If we got to that point, when the AI is "more human than human", it could be simply a matter of one humanity abdicating for another. Perhaps current humanity is just the dying body cells to be replaced by others in a continually progressing organism.
I continue to be amazed how quickly quality improved on The X-Files in its first season. I recently watched "Beyond the Sea" from January 7, 1994 which featured a couple notable guest appearances. It was Don Davis' first appearance as Scully's father and he's essentially reprising the Major Briggs role he played on Twin Peaks. How bitter Mark Frost must have been that he couldn't use Davis in Twin Peaks: The Return, that X-Files got all his good years.
I almost typed "Mark Snow" who's the composer for The X-Files. Frost is the Twin Peaks co-creator and Snow is the X-Files composer. Frost and Snow. They're just names, they don't mean there's a big conspiracy. Right?
"Beyond the Sea" features another David Lynch alum, Brad Dourif, who gives a showstopping performance as a medium on death row who gets to Scully. Dourif is a fascinating actor with a lot of great roles under his belt but it seems like he chose this episode of The X-Files to really go all out.
I like his subtle choice to switch accents.
Dourif retired from acting last year except he says he'll continue to provide the voice of Chucky from the Child's Play horror franchise.
The X-Files is available on Disney+
X Sonnet 1953
Contentious stuff contents the content mad.
Abrasive braces break the humble back.
Corruption courts in August's clearance ad.
Remain remorseless rats: effect attack.
No tameless tapered terror pierced the trees.
A needless needle never notched the bed.
The offered gift concealed a bag of fees.
Commercials come to ape the evil dead.
Recessive records reckon vinyl wounds.
A sonic sortie slams the tender drum.
Bombastic bastards lay the founder's boons.
A multitude of muscles scan the sum.
Rehearsing hassles harry out the lie.
Amorphous marbles melt the monster's eye.
Someone ought to come up with a name for the genre in which a young gay protagonist has to deal with various dramas in their extended Chinese-American family because there seems to be an awful lot of these. Last night I watched 2004's Saving Face which, like The Wedding Banquet before it and Everything Everywhere All at Once after it, features a young Chinese homosexual who must deal with a conservative parent and other family members living in America during a time of crisis. So far, I would say Saving Face is the most generic of the genre but it's not exactly bad.
Michelle Krusiec plays Wilhelmina Pang, a surgeon and a lesbian whose mother, Hwei-Lan, played by Joan Chen, comes to live with her. Around the same time, Wilhelmina falls for a beautiful ballerina named Vivian (Lynn Chen, no relation to Joan).
I fear this is one of those movies so caught up in proving gay people and Chinese-Americans are normal that it forgets to make them interesting. The romance between Wilhelmina and Vivian is particularly disappointing. The actresses have decent chemistry but they're written like a daytime sitcom in which Wilhelmina is the clumsy normal guy and Vivian is the self-assured, obvious epitome of all desirous feminine qualities and she calmly knows it. So her mild smirk at Wilhelmina across the room isn't meant to be creepy but an unexpected ray of light from heaven.
The movie labours under the assumption that we all want Wilhelmina and Vivian to live happily ever after but Vivian's kind of a terrible girlfriend. Wilhelmina is a surgeon and although she promises Vivian she will come to her birthday party she ends up having to do multiple emergency surgeries and comes to Vivian's apartment only after it's all over. Despite the fact that Wilhelmina had managed to send Vivian an expensive bouquet of red roses, Vivian is still sulky and hints that she may never want to see Wilhelmina again. At which point, I would have advised Wilhelmina to seek other fish in the sea. But Wilhelmina gratefully accepts when Vivian reluctantly invites her in.
Director Alice Wu doesn't seem aware of the co-dependent relationship she portrays between the two in which Vivian can do no wrong and every problem is due to Wilhelmina's clumsiness and inadequacies.
Meanwhile, Wilhelmina's mother is pregnant. Gossip quickly spreads around the Chinese community in New York and the elder woman in mortified but stalwart. Joan Chen doesn't show any reluctance playing a nagging matriarch after years of playing enigmatic young beauties. At least she's not trapped in a drawer pull.
Saving Face is available on The Criterion Channel until the end of the month.
1998's Wild Things is on two Criterion playlists this month and then it'll be leaving the streamer at the end of the month. These factors felt like mild pressure to watch the film. I couldn't quite remember if I'd seen it or not. I knew Matt Dillon and Denise Richards were in it. I had a vague memory of Bill Murray being in the film and I thought, "If Bill Murray's in the film, I've seen it. If he's not, then I'm thinking of another movie." I looked at the cast list and didn't see Bill Murray so I started watching the movie. Then, at the end of the cast credits was "and Bill Murray." He sneaked in. I had seen it, probably all the way back in the VHS rental days. So at least this was probably my first time seeing it in widescreen.
Few movies are so twisted, by which I mean, it has a lot of plot twists. Characters who are set up as having one kind of personality and set of motives are revealed to have a different, more sinister set of motives and completely different personalities. It all boils down to a pretty cynical idea; you can't trust your impressions of anyone, everyone is ready to rob, cheat, and kill.
It has a reputation as an erotic thriller but there's only a couple sex scenes and a few shots of nudity. I think the label comes from the fact that Neve Campbell and Denise Richards kiss twice and Kevin Bacon has a very brief full frontal nudity scene. But mostly this is a movie in which people scheme and conspire and nurse grudges. Murray plays a cocksure lawyer and he's pretty amusing. The film's clever and decadent but not really insightful or fulfilling. The film manipulates you into thinking one way about the characters before revealing something different and, fair enough, manipulative people exist in real life who manufacture virtuous facades. But it is possible to see through them in life. A better movie than Wild Things might have given the viewer some indications of the characters' true natures. It all feels a bit arbitrary as it is. As Roger Ebert quipped in his review, the film is still explaining itself in the closing credits which are interspersed with new scenes to make it seem more natural that certain characters turned out to be scoundrels. One character is shown to be sailor in order to explain how she new how to pilot a yacht in a crucial scene though, if you come to think about it, it makes very little sense for this particular character to be an avid sailor.
Wild Things is available on The Criterion Channel.
Several years ago, before I moved to Japan, I was in the mood to watch 1952's Singin' in the Rain. So I put in my DVD and started watching, getting about a third of the way through before my DVD crapped out on me. I'd been enjoying it so much for its tight, lively pace that I decided I shouldn't watch the movie again until I could confidently watch through the whole thing without interruption. A couple years ago, here in Japan, I found a blu-ray copy of the movie with Japanese subtitles. I figured I could use the signature song to teach present continuous verbs, which I eventually ended up doing. Not only does he say, "I'm singing in the rain," he actually sings in the rain while saying it, making it a good demonstration of the grammar.
I didn't watch the movie right away after I bought the blu-ray, I saved it for a night I could give it my undivided attention. At last, I settled down, turned the lights off, put it in my blu-ray player, and started watching. Once again, I was really invested in the pacing and enjoying myself and once again it crapped out about a third of the way through. Somehow, this blu-ray I bought in Japan stopped working at almost the same point as the DVD I bought in America, around the "Moses Supposes" song. Fortunately, the problem turned out to be the blu-ray player and not the blu-ray so I waited a few years again and last night I finally got my uninterrupted viewing of Singin' in the Rain.
What a well paced film.
It's directed by Stanley Donan and Gene Kelly but, while I enjoy many of their subsequent works, none of them have the graceful flow of Singin' in the Rain. It's not ashamed of being quick and smart. The visual gag at the beginning at the red carpet movie premiere of beautiful actresses accompanied by dour old millionaires goes by lightning fast, the movie unconcerned with whether or not the viewer gets the joke. And truly, it doesn't break the movie if you don't, so different viewers can have different valuable experiences with the film.
Every scene flows seamlessly into the next, there's scarcely any sense of time passing, a quality exemplified by the "Good Morning" sequence which depicts the characters themselves getting so caught up in the flow that they don't notice a whole night has passed.
Yet the whole sequence is practically a non-sequitur. There's a sweet spot a good musical has to hit with its numbers, somewhere between pertinent and totally irrelevant. The song has to communicate something that couldn't be communicated with dialogue. In this case, it develops the chemistry between the three leads and their comfort working together, revelling in what a marvellous thing good fellowship is. There's no way to communicate that in quite the same way as the song, and it's key that it's not directly related to the film's plot. It fleshes out the world just a bit.
The cast is crucial, too. A fast pace calls for fast performers and all three were quick and clear as crystal. Donald O'Connor attacks the screen with comedy blitz.
Singin' in the Rain remains the epitome of musical brilliance.
