Agatha All at Once

I got caught up on Agatha All Along and watched the newest episode last night. It's not a bad show and there are several moments I really enjoyed. It has a song, "The Ballad of the Witches' Road", written by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, who also wrote the song entitled "Agatha All Along" for WandaVision and are best known for writing the music for Frozen. And it's a good song.

The show's ratings have been low from the beginning and have declined further and further. Agatha All Along was created by Jac Schaeffer, who also created the successful WandaVision, which goes to show how much that show's success owed to it being tied to a still vibrant MCU. A lot of talk has been about who these new movies and shows are for. Agatha All Along seems very clearly aimed at wealthy, middle aged women. With the characters jumping from realities that include one that parodies (but really cosplays) Big Little Lies, one that adopts the aesthetic of late psychedelic rock, and one that resembles a slumber party from an '80s horror film, it's no stretch of the imagination to say the show's target is very clear. And it's not a target classically associated with Marvel fandom. At least they kept the budget down this time.

I would even say the character of William (Joe Locke), whose identity was revealed in last night's episode, is not there to attract a young, gay, male audience but to please older women who like young gay men. His story was kind of interesting. I liked the idea of him being a spirit that takes control of a young man whose consciousness dies in a car accident. That it occurs after his bar mitzvah has a nice symbolism to it.

I preferred the previous episode, though, in which Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) was able to act as a real (if conflicted) villain. I liked the ambiguity over how much control she has over draining the powers of other witches. It kind of takes her into Rogue territory, I suppose.

Agatha All Along is available on Disney+.

X Sonnet #1890

The common break was cruel as glacial Coke.
Replacement soda crushed the child's heart.
Reclining bears alone observe the joke.
Commercials sold the shop around the cart.
A sandwich love would launch a hoagie house.
Resemblance haunts the darling angel cop.
Collected dolls surround the frightened mouse.
To rise, the geese have sold a feather crop.
A pretzel dog beheld the river harps.
A king was sleeping over swords and dames.v A million questions stirred the summer carps.
These pictures melt beyond their paper frames.
The changing road was lit with cash and wine.
A billion dollars burst the human dime.

The Elusive Love Recipe

Does sexuality imprison or empower women? 2016's The Love Witch seems to argue it depends on how you use it and the right way to use it may be unknowable. It's an intellectual but also a pretty, intentionally campy film that I enjoyed.

From what little I've read of director Anna Biller's intentions, the less I know of those, the better. The protagonist is a witch named Elaine (Samantha Robinson) who describes her philosophy as one devoted to pleasing men. Yet, as she expands on what her conception of pleasing them actually consists of, she reveals it's founded on a deeply patronising impression of men. "Men are fragile," she says, and can't emotionally withstand criticism or mentally process contrary opinion from a woman. They also just want sex all the time. So Elaine's idea of pleasing men is basically date raping them with magic.

When we see her with a professor whom she picks up in the park, we find she's not so complaint as she claims. She won't make out with him in the car when he asks, though she doesn't come out and say no. She gives him some drugged booze and asks him to take her inside where she insists on cooking him some steaks first. When they've had sex and he turns out to be whiny and co-dependent, somehow she finds herself murdering him. What else can you do when you can't have a straight forward conversation?

Biller indulges in a meticulous recreation of 1960s style in terms of sets, wardrobe, and editing. Unlike most such nostalgia films, it doesn't seem like an imitation of Tarantino but like Biller actually has a fondness for the style from watching scores of films from the period. Like most Tarantino films, though, it's not actually set in the period--people use cell phones and you can see some modern cars in the background of some shots. It's just an indulgence in style and I can dig it.

The Love Witch is available on The Criterion Channel.

Only Elderly in the Building

I wonder if the reason ratings are lower this season on Only Murders in the Building is that there aren't so many actors of Selena Gomez's generation. Season three was lighter on young actors, too, but it had that big tease of Gomez in the wedding dress and also a lot of oddly sexy outfits for her (I really miss those). This season, there's Paul Rudd and Kumail Nanjiani, both of whom are very funny but have kind of established themselves as guys who show up to garnish old, established IP. I always thought Mabel's romance subplots were kind of awkward but maybe the show needed them.

Anyway, last night's new episode introduced another young woman, a German locksmith who looks like a supermodel, which is kind of cute. There was an interesting ongoing bit between Eugene Levy and Steven Martin in which the former tried to make the latter angry. I found it more interesting than funny. I was curious about Martin's range for physical comedy at this point.

I just realised the guy playing Dudenoff is an actor named Griffin Dunne, who played David's undead best friend in American Werewolf in London. It's a small world.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere.

Perception Most Foul

Kathy Bates picked up an ax for Stephen King once again in 1995's Dolores Claiborne. I wouldn't rank it among the best King adaptions but it's not bad, having a great cast, a score from Danny Elfman, and a solid screenplay by Tony Gilroy.

Compared to the madwoman Bates played in Misery, Dolores just isn't as interesting. The movie acts like her motives and actions are a big mystery but, from the beginning, they somehow never really are. I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe because of how director Taylor Hackford initially presents Dolores standing menacingly over the elderly Vera (Judy Parfitt) holding a rolling pin too obviously indicates there's more to the story than what we see.

Dolores is accused of murdering the woman for whom she was sole caregiver. Dolores' daughter, Selena (Jennifer Jason Leigh), comes back to the small Maine town to defend her mother against the investigation conducted by Detective Mackey (Christopher Plummer). Mackey suspects Dolores of foul play here because he suspects she'd murdered her husband, Joe (David Straithairn), eighteen years earlier.

A lot hinges on Selena's memories and the film spends a lot of time with flashbacks. It's a quite self-consciously feminist film with all three of the female leads remarking on how treatment by men forces a woman to be "a bitch". Selena's repressed memory of a sexual assault is a key dramatic point in the film and marks it as a forerunner of a lot of post-Me Too narratives that deal with women re-interpretting past sexual experiences as assault. An important distinction is that Selena has repressed the memory entirely and the signs of having done so are plainly visible in her erratic and nervous behaviour. The film is in this both ahead of its time as well as truly dated. The next serious treatment of this topic should also deal with the dangers and potential abuse of a system where people are legally able to interpret themselves as victims several years after the event.

In any case, Dolores Claiborne intelligently maps out, through the framework of one woman's life, just how many extraordinary obstacles are put in a woman's path. The movie may have succeeded better had Dolores been a slightly more colourful character. Maybe there was some attempt at this, judging from the odd epithets she comes up with. At one point she calls Christopher Plummer's character "the Grand Poobah of upbutt." The trouble is, there's never really any point in which it seems plausible that Dolores is the malevolent creature Plummer's character makes her out to be. Without that potential in play, there's also no true sense of the unfair perceptions a woman would have to deal with in such circumstances. The trouble in such a real life situation would be in the ambiguity. This film never leaves you any doubt.

Dolores Claiborne is available on The Criterion Channel.

It's the Curried Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

This is what I invented for lunch this weekend: Curry Pumpkin Soba. I boiled buckwheat soba noodles with chopped pumpkin (green Japanese pumpkin, of course) and made a sauce with cocoanut milk, turmeric, salt, pepper, curry powder, red pepper, and parsley. It's pretty good and clears my sinuses.

It's pretty much a result of what I figured out I could do with what I had lying around. I ate it every day this three day weekend. To-day, Monday, is a national holiday in Japan, Sports Day, because sports are that important here. It really is like a religion. That doesn't spot me and many others observing the holiday by staying in and playing video games.

X Sonnet #1889

My internet was slow and full of hooves.
The gelatin arrived because of doom.
The tiny footed thieves bereave the woods.
Conduct yourself with space within the room.
Describe a floating nose without an eye.
Describe an ear without a waxy wand.
Demand insured the smiling ghost was spry.
Of candy, phones become excessive fond.
Defend your life from cocoanuts and beer.
Along the wall, supply your ready men.
Corrections built the prisons free and clear.
The demons built a chart describing sin.
A lovely lass arose from Satan's brow
Inspired man to push a rusty plough.

A Wolf Out of Water

1981's An American Werewolf in London is on The Criterion Channel now. I hadn't seen it in years so I watched it again. I don't know if I remembered what a nihilistic movie it is. That was part of what made it effectively scary when I was a kid, and a lot of other movies from the early '80s. There's no sense of moral order to it, shit just happens.

One of the reviews quoted on Wikipedia argues that the movie is about being Jewish. I'm not sure about that, it feels to me the two Americans just happen to be (possibly) Jewish--aside from a nurse peeking at David's circumcised penis and presuming his religion from that, I don't remember any direct reference to him being Jewish. On the other hand, his name is David and whether or not he is actually Jewish may not matter in terms of the film's subtext. You could see a comment on the Holocaust, I suppose, in that mass murder occurs without any sense of moral order. The ghosts urging David to kill himself might certainly represent religious guilt exacerbated in extreme circumstances. There's even a line, an off-hand joke, when the two American boys decide to stop at the pub in the wilderness--"Whatever happens, it's my fault"/"Whatever happens, it's your fault."

Despite Rick Baker's amazing transformation effects, I find the encounters with zombies and the dream sequences much more effective than any of the actual werewolf stuff. When David's in wolf form he looks more like a bear, he's much too shaggy. But we've never had a good werewolf movie with the special effects it deserves. Why do their hands always get longer? Surely they should get smaller?

Anyway, I really like the dream sequence with stormtroopers with monster faces--oh, yeah, I guess they're Nazis, aren't they? Maybe that critic has a point. Well, that dream always freaked me out as a kid because it seemed to have no logic to it beyond being part of the general dread coming down on David.

Jenny Agutter is so fucking gorgeous in this movie. I need to watch Walkabout again.

Hammer and Disks

I mentioned a couple weeks ago it can be kind of a pain in the ass getting ahold of Hammer films. Well, last year I started collecting some used Hammer DVDs here in Japan.

A Japanese company called SPO Entertainment evidently manufactured some really nice Hammer box sets some years ago. They don't contain the major titles, no Frankenstein or Horror of Dracula, but they do have many that are, as far as I'm concerned, among Hammer's true best. I bought volume I and III of the main line and a special set of Ingrid Pitt's movies.

They don't have really anything in terms of special features or frills but I admire the simplicity and taste of the design. The main line sets simply used the original poster art for the DVD case covers, which was absolutely the right way to go.

Japanese blu-rays are in the same region as the U.S. but DVDs aren't, so I guess these would be almost useless for me if I ever moved back to the States. On the other hand, they might just look nice on a shelf.

X Sonnet #1888

I always check the clock in diff'rent spots.
No time was present past the av'rage cake.
Connexions weld the sloppy people dots.
With buckets full, the berries start to bake
Becoming dull distinguished mighty stones.
A river gushed with flavour over grains.
There's nothing left to warm the jester's bones.
The dog would not arrive to hide his pains.
With brainless imps about the pond we wait.
No rain arrives the slake the crashing thirst.
No plane arrives to stall the walking fate.
A better day attends beside the worst.
Rebirth requires burning blood and beans.
The stranded toad bestows the needed means.

Pre-Raphaelite Joker

In Charles Dickens' blistering 1850 criticism of Christ in the House of His Parents, the above John Everett Millais painting, he describes the painting thusly:

You behold the interior of a carpenter's shop. In the foreground of that carpenter's shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown; who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England. Two almost naked carpenters, master and journeyman, worthy companions of this agreeable female, are working at their trade; a boy, with some small flavor of humanity in him, is entering with a vessel of water; and nobody is paying any attention to a snuffy old woman who seems to have mistaken that shop for the tobacconist's next door, and to be hopelessly waiting at the counter to be served with half an ounce of her favourite mixture. Wherever it is possible to express ugliness of feature, limb, or attitude, you have it expressed. Such men as the carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where dirty drunkards, in a high state of varicose veins, are received. Their very toes have walked out of Saint Giles's.

As expected from a writer of Dickens' immense talent, the criticism is sharp and funny. Which does nothing to diminish the fact that it is plainly and thoroughly wrong. But that goes to show just how shocking the Pre-Raphaelites were in Victorian England.

It's ironic that Dickens embraced such an ideal of art when the most memorable aspects of his own work are the dirtiest, commonest characters. I found myself thinking of Todd Phillips. I haven't seen Joker: Folie a Deux--it hasn't been released yet in Japan and I won't be able to afford to see it when it is. But, while I've made an effort to avoid spoilers, I've read enough about the audience reactions and the film's surprisingly abysmal box office numbers to know Phillips has done one of those infamous "subversions of expectations". I thought back to how the first film was received by critics. A signifying example is YouTuber Jenny Nicholson's review of the film in which a portion of her critique focused on her dissatisfaction with the way some people liked the movie. There was a moral outrage element to criticisms of Joker and Quentin Tarantino correctly identified the film's climax as its most interesting part for how it made the audience vicariously complicit in Arthur's crime. Over time, critics have smoothed their feathers and fashioned a countenance to be hip to Tarantino's insight. But not the film's director, Todd Phillips.

I knew the Joker was not meant to be seen in any way heroic in that first movie. And it doesn't surprise me that Phillips would seek to sabotage what he may see as an excess of sympathy. As interesting as that moment was in the first film, Joker, at the end of the day, really is a Taxi Driver pastiche and never truly approaches the genius of the Scorsese film because Phillips isn't close to Scorsese's genius.

A lot of talk now is about how much autonomy a director should have when making a movie. I would still say a failure with a more unified artistic voice is more interesting than a failure composed of sterile studio formula and market research. It's unfortunate art is obliged to be a business, particularly when so much great art isn't recognised as such until years after it's already lost everyone truckloads of cash. But I don't think Phillips falls into that category.

The Last at Last

Yesterday I showed The Last Unicorn to the English club at the junior high school I'm working at. That's harder than it sounds. You see, I'm in Japan, and The Last Unicorn has never been released here, despite the fact that the animation on the Rankin Bass movie was done by a Japanese studio called Topcraft, a studio which later combined with others to become none other than Studio Ghibli. It was puzzling that it had never been released here. So back in July, I decided my big project for August would be to make Japanese subtitles for the film.

It was a lot more time consuming than I thought it would be, even though, for the most part, I wasn't doing the actual translating. Although the movie had never been released in Japan, Peter S. Beagle's original 1968 novel had, and had been translated. Most of the dialogue in the book happens to be the same in the movie so this meant I could get a translation in much better Japanese than I'm capable of. The main trouble was that it used a lot of kanji I'm unfamiliar with--the Japanese writing system uses three sets of characters; katakana and hiragana are simple pronunciation based characters similar to the English alphabet but kanji consists of thousands of Chinese characters, each with multiple pronunciations and pictographic elements. Only a fraction of them are in common use but this changes from decade to decade meaning that there are characters in books from, say, 70 years ago that average young Japanese people would struggle to read to-day. This is one of the ways Japan keeps itself insulated from common citizens developing critical thinking skills.

So it was very slow going because the characters were too small to simply scan with my phone. I had to look up unfamiliar kanji on Wiktionary by the radicals. For example, the little character on the left side of 信, "believe", is actually a small version of 人, "person". Wiktionary has helpful pages of these "radicals" I could go through to eventually find the kanji I was looking for.

Of course, the songs aren't in the book. I found translations for two of them; the main theme has been covered a few times so I found a translation for it on a blog from about fifteen years ago when some young Scottish singer with some level of fame in Japan covered it. "That's All I've Got to Say" was covered on an episode of The Orville so I was able to get that translation from Disney+. The other songs I had to translate myself. The students said my translations weren't perfect but they got the gist.

So yesterday may in fact be the first time the movie was screened for a Japanese audience since it was first released in 1982. The students seemed to enjoy it though, actually showing it to them, I was reminded what a lousy time the early '80s was for animation. How could I make excuses for the fact that every character was painted exactly the same regardless of the lighting? Or the strange jerky movements of occasionally, improperly aligned animation cells? I couldn't say it was because it was an old movie when older movies like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty stand up against anything to-day. It truly was a Dark Age. At least The Last Unicorn has an excellent story, a superb voice cast, and decent songs.

Came and Got It

Meryl Streep wrestled Melissa McCarthy on last night's Only Murders in the Building. And even then, Streep came off as effortlessly natural. That's a great actress.

The main trio go to hide out at Charles' sister's house. She turns out to be McCarthy, an obsessive doll collector with a husband who lives in a boat in the driveway. I guess this has become the show where every major star whose career is lagging goes. She was funny enough, I guess. Her heartfelt dialogue with Steve Martin about her missing spleen was a little better than her broad comedy with Martin Short just because it was so intriguingly odd.

I feel like this show should have guest appearances from Selena Gomez's contemporary pop stars. Here she is looking disconcertingly sexy in one of her old videos:

I'm not complaining about the sexiness by any means. It just goes to show what a different world she comes from than her costars.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere (like Japan).

X Reflections

I've been watching The X Files lately, the first time I've gone back to watch the show since it first aired. I rewatched some episodes when the series was first airing but this is the first time in 25 years or so I've actually gone back to those first episodes. One thing that's surprised me is that the show was clearly more influenced by Twin Peaks than I thought it was. The first two episodes, both written by Chris Carter, feature the FBI agents going to small towns and meeting the locals. The first episode has a young woman die mysteriously and the local sheriff talks about how he knew her. The series did get its own identity but I know the Twin Peaks shadow never went away.

The X Files, at least in the U.S., doesn't have quite the legacy of Twin Peaks. Partly, I think this is a benefit of Twin Peaks getting cut off at the end of its second season. The X Files outstayed its welcome by a very long stretch. The revival series didn't generate the interest the Twin Peaks revival did.

Anyway, it's nice to watch a show with decent writing. The third episode, the first one not written by Carter, is a little weaker though the character of Eugene Tooms is great. It's kind of silly that the other FBI agents are scoffing at Mulder for thinking Toom's the culprit when he has the guy's fingerprints at the crime scenes. Mostly, the writing's good but it was pretty lame that they gave Mulder this smoking gun and contrived not to have him share it with the agents who said he was crazy. The episode is carried by how intriguing Tooms is and the great chemistry between Mulder and Scully.

The X Files is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere.

X Sonnet #1887

The broken bulb extends beyond the house.
Reliant names were changed beyond the dream.
Though dark, the fire's more than hats can dowse.
With brick and mortar, walls repel a beam.
Conditioned air resembled frozen flame.
Decipher codes before you send your mail.
We knew the plan before we knew the name.
The lettuce wilts because it envies kale.
The trouble bit the webbing gauze to glue.
Above the startle chimney, moons retreat.
They lied to say that purple's never blue.
Some others say the hat was nigh complete.
Addition tails improve the fish's dance.
Contrition jails disprove the wish's chance.

A Sign of Life or Something Worse

A little boy battles appliances, pipes, and wiring in his step-mother's house in 1988's Pulse. I recommend not reading the plot synopsis on Wikipedia because it provides an explanation for the supernatural events in the film that the film itself does not provide. One of the reasons the movie works so remarkably well is its deliberate avoidance of straight forward explanation.

Little David (Joey Lawrence) is already stressed out by the uncomfortable situation of staying with his dad (Cliff De Young) and his dad's new wife, Ellen (Roxanne Hart), at their Los Angeles home. He'd rather be back home in Colorado. But a strange situation is about to get even stranger.

A man across the street is seen beating the crap out of his furniture before all goes silent. The police walk in to find a man apparently dead by power drill, presumably by his own hand. David starts talking to another kid on the street--another nice thing about this movie is, even though the kids are cute, the movie never makes too much of it, it treats them as people with feelings and information to share. This other kid tells David about how the dead man used to accuse the kids of poisoning his lawn.

David breaks into the house and encounters a strange old man in a fedora who provides an explanation for what David's already starting to experience with electricity in his father's house. But this old man also seems pretty off and later we learn he also has a bomb shelter. Is he really giving us an explanation or is he just another guy bewildered, only a little more confident about articulating his suppositions?

"Lovecraftian" is a word that gets overused but this is a real, genuine example of that quality of menacing ambiguity that distinguishes so much of Lovecraft's work. This movie's got it.

Spading the Reeves and Reeving the Spader

Let's take a moment to appreciate James Spader. There's an actor who'll try just about anything but even in a pretty straight forward role he's good. 2000's The Watcher is a remarkably unremarkable film. Director Joe Carbanic, who has no Wikipedia entry, directed this theatrical release with effects and editing that say "made for TV". Alongside Spader, it stars Marisa Tomei post-My Cousin Vinny and Keanu Reeves, post-Matrix. How and why? It turns out Carbonic forged Reeves' signature on the contract but Reeves preferred to go through with the film instead of engaging in a legal battle! I guess that goes to show how tough such lawsuits can be to prosecute.

I didn't hate the movie. It was kind of interesting seeing Spader in such a normal role, playing an obsessed former FBI agent with no apparent sexual fetishes beyond a scene where he glances casually at a Victoria's Secret catalogue.

Reeves plays against type as the serial killer who's introduced accompanied by Rob Zombie's "Dragula". Despite hard '90s alternative rock being his theme music, he just looks like Keanu Reeves in a nondescript leather jacket. I guess he's believable as a villain, as Reeves is ever believable at anything. More believable than he is as a Victorian real estate broker.

His victims are always friendless women who look like supermodels, who were apparently common enough at the time in Chicago for him to go on a spree. The second victim was the most implausible, a pretty brunette begging for change who approaches older men calling them "Dad" but apparently never has any takers, or even anyone who just stops to chat with her.

Mostly it's just nice watching Spader work. Tomei plays his psychiatrist. She broaches the idea that he and Reeves are linked by mutual obsession but kind of just by rote, like the director figured you had to make some mention of that in a movie like this, and never goes anywhere with it. She and Spader seem set up for romance but the film's flat footed there, too. All the same, I liked Spader's character with his messy apartment and bad habits which are vaguely implied to have caused him to collapse at one point for medical reasons undisclosed to the audience.

How's It Goin' with That Light?

I came home from work yesterday to find my desktop computer monitor was broken. It just shows vertical white lines now. At least I still had my old monitor which still basically works except it has a horizontal white line through the bottom of the screen. It's a slightly smaller Asus, the one that crapped out entirely was a Benq. I never had one just die abruptly, my monitors usually go slowly. There's usually a grace period where I can kid myself and pretend there's nothing wrong, like everything in the upper left corner is just normally slightly pink or the random discoloured dots are a software problem.

This came at the worst possible time. October's traditionally a lean month for me because I don't get paid, since there's no school in Japan in August. I won't be revisiting any visually impressive favourite films until November. It's not a good time to watch 2001, that's for sure. I'm glad I finished my latest watch of Twin Peaks a few days ago. Part of me likes to think my monitor going out is related to the power surge in the Palmer household at the end of season three.

Last night I watched the latest episode of Only Murders in the Building on my laptop. I can't remember any previous season being so consistently funny. Even Paul Rudd, guest starring as the stunt double of his character from last season, is dynamite. I don't even think about Ant-Man when I see him.

I have absolutely no prediction for the killer this season. The show never plays fair with its clues so there's no reason why I should have a prediction. But what the hell, I'll throw out a wild guess and say it's Paul Rudd's character with his phony Irish accent. He's the highlight for me so far on this season filled with highlights.

X Sonnet #1886

A boring man returns the rice to fields.
On lifeless feet, the legs of grass would swim.
Controlling bats contrive to foil guilds.
Demented creeps construct a phony whim.
A field of mice computes a sky of cats.
The wayward boat contains the king of shrimp.
When drinking blood, preserve a thought for bats.
A loving thought does not create a simp.
The broken bulb extends beyond the house.
Reliant names were changed beyond the dream.
Though dark, the fire's more than hats can dowse.
With brick and mortar, walls repel a beam.
Refunding snakes was never planned or done.
A dog was sleeping sound upon the bun.

Bats Entertainment

Why worry about vampires when mutant bats are bad enough? Witness 1999's Bats in which Lou Diamond Phillips battles the cgi beasties, occasionally swapped with noticeably less mobile puppets for closeups. It's cheesy!

It reaches a nadir of cheesiness in one scene where the scientist (Bob Gunton) defends making bats into perfect killers because "I'm a scientist. That's what we do! We make everything a little better." The wise-cracking black sidekick character (Leon) says, "I don't know about you but I don't like anything moving higher up the food chain than me. Period!" And the outraged blonde (Dina Meyer) calls the scientist a "son of a bitch!" It achieves a harmony of stock characters delivering hammy lines that assembles a fine, greasy cheese sandwich. I miss Denny's.

It's all set in Gallup Texas so Lou Diamond Phillips can strut around as the sheriff with an accent and proclaim bats will not make mischief in his town. It's a lot of fun.

When Will Becomes Metal

A young man's only chance at saving his family and his future is to win a cross country dog sled race in 1994's Iron Will. It's kind of Jack London nerfed to shaving foam but it is a fairly enjoyable, family friendly flick.

After Will (Mackenzie Astin) sees his father perish after falling through thin ice, his mother gives him the hard truth that they're going to have to sell their beloved huskies to get by. Then Will gets ahold of an ad for the big race with a big prize.

The cinematography is really bland. Snowy landscapes can look pretty dull at midday. There are a couple pretty standard sunset shots but mostly the look of the film gives it a made-for-TV sense of scale. Kevin Spacey is effective in a small role as a newspaper reporter who turns Will's story into something that inspires the nation. There's some really thinly contrived drama in which Will suddenly becomes angry with Spacey's character for no apparent reason, this setup being there just so Will can feel sorry later when Spacey's character turns out to be a true friend. Maybe something was cut.

Iron Will is available on Disney+.

The Sign of Life was a Sign of Death

It's often said hauntings are the result of ghosts having issues left unresolved from their mortal lives. 2001's Pulse (回路) posits the opposite may also be true, that ghosts are a reflection or symbol of issues left unconfronted by those still living. This film by the other Kurosawa, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, comes from that wonderful post-Evangelion period in Japanese media when artists were exploring daringly insightful psychological analyses in their works.

We meet a young woman, Michi (Aso Kumiko), who works at a rooftop greenhouse in Tokyo. She visits a coworker, Toguchi, at home, speaks to him briefly, and then is startled to discover his corpse hanging from a noose, apparently having been dead for some time.

In another part of town, a college student named Ryosuke (Kato Harukiko) is setting up his first computer with an internet connexion (it was 2001, remember). He's confused to find the site continually loads up footage of unknown individuals walking listlessly around their apartments. Freaked out, Ryosuke visits the college computer lab where he finds a beautiful young student called Harue (Koyuki) is surprisingly helpful and interested in him. As the movie progresses, the characters find themselves compulsively discussing loneliness and the possible futility of attempting to achieve meaningful connexions. It's a little startling how quickly Michi and her coworkers are willing to brush past Toguchi's suicide and carry on work as usual, gossiping as they arrange plants. When Harue asks Ryosuke if he got set up for the internet because he wanted to connect with people, he finds himself baffled and unable to explain his own motivation beyond some vague comment about how everyone else was doing it.

The film's intent on social commentary becomes clearer as the scope of the hauntings broadens to include the entire Kanto region. As ghosts become a more prevalent part of everyone's lives, the living exhibit stranger behaviour. Ryosuke and Michi finally meet when he stumbles upon her car sitting idle in the middle of the street while she sleeps with her head rested against the wheel.

The atmosphere is pretty effective and the ghosts are nice and creepy. Pulse is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a playlist of Japanese horror movies.

X Sonnet #1885

Returning tubes were jammed with people bread.
We toast the night when yeast discovered wheat.
A rising loaf could float attendant dead.
Descriptions labelled ham a deadly meat.
A circle night began with burning guns.
Throughout the night, the riders only thought.
Across the street, a phantom quickly runs.
With gentle hands, the moth was never caught.
Impressions burnt to walls could move the eye.
Important boats were leaving home behind.
Decisions cut the mollusc monster pie.
Of dreams the normal ghost doth us remind.
Repeated tides have left the clothing pale.
A soup of ghosts has fed the lonely whale.