Anora really rewards a second viewing. Other people have remarked on how the story slyly shifts about halfway through and in your first viewing you don't even realise it's happening. In your first viewing, your awareness of it is aligned with Anora's point of view and in the second viewing, because you know what's going to happen, your point of view shifts to the other party's. It's like in Vertigo where a second viewing shifts your point of view from Scottie's to Judy's. I like how the film forces you to pay attention to subtle facial expressions, even as a louder gangster comedy is going on in the foreground.
Maybe Mikey Madison really did deserve the best actress win. As brave as Demi Moore was in The Substance, Madison's role called for a lot more subtlety. In my first viewing, it was the scene in the car at the end, where you can see her making her decision, that really got me. The second time, it was a couple scenes earlier, where she's throwing around accusations of assault. You can see her sorting out her feelings, or trying to, and being surprised at her own tone. She kind of reminds me of Kagawa Kyoko in Kurosawa's Lower Depths.
It's finally here; the first two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again premiered on Disney+ last night. It doesn't really hit the ground running, in fact these two episodes have a real swiss cheese quality with lots of holes. But showrunner Dario Scardapane, who came in to reconfigure the show after half of it had already been shot by a showrunning team Disney decided was inferior, may well fill those holes with--I don't know, brie, pimento, something good. Scardapane was a writer on Punisher, a show within the same formerly Netflix MCU universe. So he probably knows what he's doing and, by the way, don't watch Daredevil: Born Again until you've seen the first three seasons of the old Daredevil (I wouldn't read the rest of my review, either, if I were you).
It's pretty easy to guess what's newer footage and what's from the misbegotten original take, which was going to distance itself from the old Netflix series. Right off the bat, we have a scene featuring Karen and Foggy, Matt Murdoch's two sidekicks from the original, and aside from some bad cgi (getting roundly dunked on throughout the internet to-day), I was pleased with the opening. It had some very good ideas, my favourite being the decision to kill off Foggy. That's something I was hoping would happen throughout the whole of the original series. I'm sure he's a nice guy in real life, maybe, I don't really know, but Elden Henson cannot, and has never shown any ability to, act. His performance is good enough for a guy who gets killed off within the first few minutes but somehow he stuck around for years. And his character was often written as an annoying scold. You know what I don't particularly want from a Daredevil series? A character constantly telling Daredevil he shouldn't be Daredevil.
The first scene has an action sequence that emulates the long take, Oldboy style hallway fight that the first series famously put together, except, of course, it's clearly cgi now so it's not so impressive. Actually, the best action scene so far comes at the end of episode 2 and that one doesn't even pretend to be a long take. Instead, it's wonderfully, kinetically edited. It was the one moment in the two episodes that brought a genuine smile to my face.
It's mostly easy to discern what's new stuff and what's edited in. There's a new, alternate set of supporting characters; a detective who helps Murdoch, there's his new partner at his new firm, and his new love interest, a therapist called Heather. She just so happens to be Wilson and Vanessa Fisk's couples' therapist, which I sure hope is not mere coincidence. New York City is not such a small town, for Pete's sake.
Fisk on the Netflix series was a commentary on Trump even before Trump became a serious contender in politics so it's interesting to see him again now as New York mayor. It's good that he's not simply a Trump allegory: he doesn't have Trump's charisma, bluster, or fragile ego. In fact, it seems odd that this big man who always seems to be fighting the urge to grind his teeth, connected with voters. But interviews within the show have people on the street talking about how they're frustrated with the lack of political change and want a strong man who can do something. This simultaneously makes Fisk's character make sense and makes it a worthier comment on Trump.
It's a rocky start, some of the writing feels like old USA network or CW crap, but I can see this getting ironed out by Scardapane.
In the wake of the U.S. suddenly halting military aid for Ukraine, I finally went back and watched the disastrous press conference/meeting from last week between Zelensky, Trump, and Vance. What an extraordinary piece of television, and not in a good way. Trump even remarks at one point that it will be great television and I'm forced to wonder if, on some level, that's still a priority for him, even when the stakes are millions of human lives.
One thing is clear; Trump and Vance have absolutely no respect for Zelensky. When Zelensky points out, quite reasonably, that Putin has repeatedly broken peace agreements, and asks what Ukraine is supposed to do in that situation, Vance responds by accusing Zelensky of a lack of gratitude. After Vance's little dog barking, Trump, who'd been bragging about his negotiation skills, also apparently becomes offended at Zelensky's failure to recognise his godhood. How dare Zelensky speak as though Ukraine has a respectable position in the conversation? It was like watching a gangster slap his wife for daring to make a comment during a meeting.
It really seems like some powerful interests decided Russia would have Ukraine some time ago.
Even so, it's hard to say exactly how much Trump's violent petulance is a remarkably undisciplined reaction of the moment and how much of it might be theatre. Giving an impression of his erratic temper may even have been a tactic. It felt eerily like watching Paul Sorvino in Goodfellas or Jack Nicholson in The Departed. It really feels like we have a gangster president.
I can't remember the last time my favourite movie of a particular year swept at the Oscars. I don't think it's ever happened. But Anora won last night. I refuse to feel validated! I know if I do, Lucy's going to yank the football next year and something like Chicago or Paul Haggis' Crash will win. But I guess I can enjoy this moment.
I really appreciated Sean Baker's acceptance speech for Best Director (for directing Anora). I don't know that impassioned pleas for preserving a dying part of the culture have ever been effective but I certainly shared his sentiment. Movie theatres certainly seem to be much healthier in Japan but it's still rare for students to tell me they saw a movie over the weekend. I don't think anything can reverse this trend unless the price of movie tickets starts to come down.
Anora won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and, most controversially, Best Actress. I thought Mikey Madison was terrific in Anora but, as much as I didn't enjoy The Substance, Demi Moore took a hell of a lot of risks in that role. I do kind of hate it when an actor or actress wins for a career rather than for the role they're nominated for so maybe I don't mind this so much. Mikey Madison was certainly radiant in her acceptance speech.
Mostly these days I've been reading history books but I needed something for my soul last week so I was reading Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in a Norton Anthology. A print edition, mind you. Then I opened YouTube and a performance of Antony and Cleopatra was a recommended video. It's gotta be a coincidence, right? Life's real serendipitous events are getting lost in the couch cushions of algorithm.
Yesterday I watched Bill Murray on Joe Rogan:
It seems one major takeaway from the election is that Joe Rogan is the man now. He's the kingmaker, he's certainly replaced Howard Stern. This Bill Murray interview already has more than 1.5 million views and that's not counting people who just listen to the podcast. I also watched his interview with Elon Musk. I can dig what they're saying about getting rid of empty bureaucracy and counterproductive DEI programmes but I can't accept Rogan or Musk or Trump as agents of the truth when Trump's obvious pandering to Russia isn't even part of their reality. Rogan and Musk laugh about how claims of Trump's collusion with Russia were obvious fraud. Were they, though? And if Rogan can't even admit the possibility, how am I supposed to trust him as some kind of dedicated truth teller?
Anyway, the Bill Murray interview was good. Murray seems to be speaking from a bygone perspective, recalling his work practices in the '70s and '80s where he could really get along with most people so long as they didn't start talking about politics. It was nice listening to his recollections about Hunter S. Thompson and hearing Murray and Rogan talking about Steve McQueen.
Murray's been making the interview rounds on major talk shows and he's appearing in three upcoming movies. He was also on the recent Saturday Night Live anniversary show. All this is less than a year since he was excluded from press junkets for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire because he was supposedly cancelled. Is that over now? I guess for people whose popularity isn't dependent on one political side. Folks like Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon aren't so lucky. Whedon basically got cancelled for being rude. The claims against Gaiman are extremely thin and sketchy to anyone who actually reads through them. You have to start to wonder if they got cancelled because they did something amoral or because they didn't do something amoral. But we're not supposed to think about conspiracies.
X Sonnet 1923
Another turn reveals a Christmas ball.
It's trapped in spring as though a frozen fish
Had eaten up the cheer the locals call
A holiday for falling grades of wish.
No study time could meet the needs of lunch.
An empty stomach shades the day to night.
For after dawn, the dreams become a hunch.
For ev'ry wrong, we think another right.
Gorilla blankets change the shapes of men.
And now the human race is naught but fat.
Impossible to swim the lake of gin
We opt instead to cross the carbo vat.
For all the pain, we hope to gain a crumb.
But morning renders Bach and Wagner dumb.
Last night may have been the first time I watched "Peak Performance", the penultimate episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation's second season. I certainly don't remember watching it before. Fishing through the murky waters of my memory, I think I stopped watching the show during the first season (1987) and then started watching again in the fifth season (1991), when I heard it'd actually gotten good. I kind of remember watching the two parter "Time's Arrow" that bridged season five and six. I then went back and caught older episodes in syndication but I think I usually turned it off when I saw the tight, no collar uniforms, which they got rid of in season three. I still think season three is the best season of the series but I'm enjoying revisiting season two and, I think, in some cases, seeing bits of it for the very first time.
"Peak Performance" was written by David Kemper who later became a showrunner on the great sci-fi series Farscape. I see now he hasn't written anything since contributing a story to the short lived CW series Cult in 2013. I guess he's retired. I hope it was voluntary. Anyway, I almost always enjoyed his teleplays.
"Peak Performance" was the first of two episodes he wrote for TNG and centres on a combat training exercise. The Enterprise crew splits into two teams, one of them, headed by Riker, taking control of a starship called the Hathaway. Using simulated weapons and shields, the Hathaway and Enterprise engage in a skirmish.
But the real point of the episode seems to have been to humiliate a character called Sirna Kolrami (Roy Broksmith), who comes aboard the Enterprise as a technical advisor. He's also a grandmaster of a game called Strategema. Over the course of the episode, he's shown to be arrogantly wrong in his judgements about Riker (whom he calls too "jovial") and Picard. There's a subplot in which Data even beats him at Strategema. Brocksmith does a good job making him a smug bastard for the viewer to hate but I still couldn't help wondering why. I wonder if he was kind of an effigy of someone Kemper had it in for.
This was a cool moment between Data and Picard:
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available on Netflix.
Stellan Skarsgard and Diane Lane adopt Leelee Sobieski for sinister purposes in 2001's Glass House. I was surprised to find this a pretty effective thriller, putting me in mind of Hitchcock's Suspicion.
Sobieski's character, Ruby, and her little brother are orphaned after their parents die in a car accident. They're taken in by Terry and Erin Glass, wealthy former neighbours played by Skarsgard and Lane.
Sobieski's not bad as the point of view character but Lane and especially Skarsgard have the most fun pushing the envelope of just how suspiciously they can act, very much like Cary Grant in Suspicion. Bruce Dern has a small role as the kids' trust fund lawyer and helps sell that sense of ambiguity and paranoia.
Evidence of Terry's true nature starts to become pretty clear but it's always plausible that it's just Ruby who can see it. When a social worker visits, the Glasses cunningly arrange for Ruby to have a separate bedroom from her brother. One of her complaints in a secret meeting with the worker was that she and her brother had to share a room. The conversation between the Glasses and the social worker is arranged just right so that Ruby's believably dumbstruck enough not say anything when a reference is made to her having her own room.
This is definitely a case of the Rotten Tomatoes score, which is only 22%, being dead wrong.
Gene Hackman, unquestionably one of the finest actors of his generation, has died. So has his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa, and one of their dogs. My first thought, and apparently it was also the fire department's, was that the cause was some accidental gas inhalation but that's been ruled out. Hackman was found in a mudroom (for mud baths) and Arakawa was found in the bathroom where there were pills scattered about. Death seems to have occurred a day previous to discovery. Maybe Hackman, who was 95, died of natural causes and Arakawa retreated to the bathroom with a nervous breakdown and accidentally overdosed in a self-medicating effort. But, then, how to explain the dog?
Anyway, Hackman's performances were invariably captivating. Flawlessly natural yet invariably communicative. What a long career, too. From the stoic surveillance agent in Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation to the gasbag patriarch of Wes Anderson's Royal Tenenbaums. He was the best actor to play Lex Luther by a long shot (well, Kevin Spacey was pretty good).
I most recently watched him in The French Connection in which that film's terrific action sequences were made so in part due to the impression of ferocious tenacity Hackman conveyed.
He left us an amazing filmmography, that's for sure.
I need to touch base with great movies more often. It'd been far too long since I'd last watched 1934's It Happened One Night. What an exceptionally smooth piece of filmmaking.
There's not a superfluous moment, every scene seems to perfectly flow into the next. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert are both so brilliant. It really feels more like Gable's film, though, as it's basically a story about his character taking the reins on her life and her learning to like it. The spoiled rich girl has to learn a thing or two from the streetwise working man. There's a perfect recipe for a movie made during The Great Depression.
The only time she gets the upper hand is when she shows some leg to get a ride when they're hitchhiking. It's not politically correct in terms of the power balance between man and woman but I've certainly met plenty of rich doofuses like Colbert's character, both male and female. Colbert's saving grace is that she's gorgeous and, it turns out, has a savvy instinct towards humility, despite what Gable's character says in his angrier moments.
I don't know if I'd want to be in a relationship like theirs. It's cute watching them argue because they're both attractive and the screenplay is so perfect. But in real life, bickering couples tend to just be noise pollution.
It Happened One Night is available on The Criterion Channel.
X Sonnet 1922
Another sharp response has lit the chair.
The frozen Valentine was paper goo.
'Tis not a card that any cats repair.
As lightning strikes the oak, they're turning blue.
The water elves were living deep below.
They thought it funny humans want to walk.
And lure the oysters up above the show.
You see, their swimming life was only talk.
A counterfeit of glee has clamped their heart.
As manic troupes devour life itself.
With smug derision, killers tear apart
And twisted roots displayed upon the shelf.
An empty glass would serve as hollow world.
To cringe, the fortune fish has slowly curled.
Kathleen Kennedy is supposedly retiring. I watched Grace Randolph's YouTube video about it this morning in which Randolph argued that Kennedy's likely lousy legacy will be due to Kennedy's too aggressive endeavour to remake Star Wars into a franchise primarily aimed at women and not men. In the process, she only managed to alienate both groups. I think there's plenty of truth in that. When I first came to Japan five years ago and started working in junior high schools, when I mentioned Star Wars to students they could talk a little bit about Rey and Kylo Ren. Now when I mention Star Wars to students, most of them only know it as something their dads are into.
I suspect at the heart of the problem is Kennedy's resentment for a long career in which Spielberg and Lucas garnered praise while she stood by, feeling her contributions to the original Indiana Jones films weren't recognised. If she'd have been seeing more clearly, she might have noticed how well the first Indiana Jones movies appealed to both men and women. Marvel movies may also stubbornly, primarily appeal to a male demographic, but women will talk about the beefcake in those movies. The key to making new female characters for Star Wars or Indiana Jones would be to make them appeal to both men and women. Just like Indiana Jones, they should have been characters the opposite sex found sexy and vulnerable. If we lived in a better world. a filmmaker could do that without any shred of feeling like they were capitulating to misogynists.
But I still say the primary problem with both Indiana Jones and Star Wars is that both franchises were born in an America that was still relatively religious. The new writers don't understand religion or spirituality so the last two Indiana Jones movies became science fiction affairs and the best Star Wars projects have been Rogue One and Andor, two productions that have had next to nothing to do with the Jedi.
Who should Kathleen Kennedy's successor be? I hope it's not Dave Filoni but I'd say there's an 80% change it will be. My pick would be Tony Gilroy but it would be nice if they could find someone who could write about the Force with a real sense of appreciation.
A teenage Lindsay Lohan washes up in a small Idaho town where Jane Fonda aims to straighten her out in 2007's Georgia Rule. I found this movie to be unexpectedly, fascinatingly weird.
Wikipedia says Lohan's character, Rachel Wilcox, is "a promiscuous, heavy-drinking young woman, whose drug addiction, Lily's daughter and Georgia's granddaughter." Whose drug addiction what? Someone editing the page evidently didn't finish a thought. Anyway, she has no drug addiction in the film, she's just a bad girl in ways that aren't very well defined. Her mother, Lily (Felicity Huffman), drops her off on the road after the two fight on the way to the town. Rachel hitchhikes and is picked up by Dermot Mulroney whom she calls gay because he doesn't peep at her when she has her legs up on his dash and her dress hiked up. The film proceeds to find ways to make almost every interaction Rachel has with another character sexual in some way, including an impromptu wrestling fight with a twelve year old-ish neighbourhood kid whom she's disgusted to notice has an erection in the middle of their tussle. Jane Fonda throws cold water on the fight literally by hosing them down.
The movie is really sexy, usually in extremely awkward ways. Jane Fonda, famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) liberal in real life plays a conservative, religious woman here and she does a good job. But I sense her role was cut down substantially. She plays the Georgia of the title, Rachel's grandmother, and the title and setup made me think this was going to be a movie about her disciplining her wild daughter. However, after Rachel casually mentions to Dermot Mulroney that her stepfather, played by Cary Elwes, had sexually molested her, the whole movie becomes about whether or not she's telling the truth.
What a strange career Cary Elwes has had. Every time I think I've seen the last of him he pops up in some random role.
It really feels like screenwriter Mark Andrus had no idea how to write a small American town or a teenage girl or a religious grandmother. That's not necessarily a bad thing. When everyone's not being oddly sexy, they're being oddly erudite. Even the desk clerk at the veterinary office where Mulroney works is able to quote from Ezra Pound. Meanwhile, the extent of Georgia's religious fervour seems to be sticking a bar of soap into anyone's mouth who takes the Lord's name in vain.
I think the film got sidetracked due to some drama in Lohan's life, which would explain why it seems to start as one thing and becomes another. It is kind of a fascinating artefact, though. Set in Idaho, it was of course shot entirely in California. I was just disappointed it didn't have any Idaho potatoes.
I finally went to see 2025's Captain America: Brave New World yesterday and enjoyed it more than the reviews suggested I would. It seems like people have always complained most of the MCU movies don't feel very cinematic. I don't always agree but it's certainly the case here; this movie very much feels like an extra episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the Disney+ series. But Captain America: Civil War had that same, general, diffuse, sort of dim cinematography.
The strongest part of the film is Thaddeus Ross with Harrison Ford taking over for the late William Hurt. It would've been nice to see Hurt follow through on this character he'd played since The Incredible Hulk in 2008 but Ford does an amazing job. Ford tends to convey much more vulnerability than Hurt did (despite his name) which added great suspense to the moments where he was trying to hold the monster in.
It's usually DC stories that have more interesting villains than heroes but this certainly didn't feel like a DC movie. Neither Sam Wilson or Steve Rogers are quite as lofty as DC heroes tend to feel.
Sam really needs to take the super soldier serum. He's already doing things a mortal man shouldn't be able to do--how many times would a real life human have blacked out from his barrel rolls? So it just doesn't make sense.
I was surprised how much Japan factored into the plot. I saw it in a Japanese movie theatre, of course (I live in Japan), so I felt kind of embarrassed when Sam Wilson's few lines in Japanese showed he was even worse at it than I am. When he spoke in Japanese, he had Japanese subtitles. It was that bad. The fictional Japanese Prime Minister in the film, Ozaki, was played by Takehiro Hira, who's lived in the US since he was 15 years old. Once again, just like the stars of Shogun, the only Japanese actors the US seems able to import are actors who've lived outside of Japan for a significant amount of time. And, as usual, there are no location shots in Japan though at least the whole movie wasn't shot in Georgia this time. The Washington DC scenes are actually made in Washington DC. Not exactly a world away from Georgia but it's some improvement.
The fight choreography seemed oddly slow. Maybe it's just because Sam's not a super soldier, I don't know.
Of course the title, Brave New World, is a Shakespeare reference if it's not an Aldous Huxley reference. I'm not really sure how it may relate to either one. I guess Thaddeus Ross is sort of like Prospero and his daughter, Betty, is kind of like Miranda? It really felt like she was supposed to have a larger role but Liv Tyler wasn't available for very long. The movie is so Hulk-centric it felt really odd that Bruce Banner wasn't in it.
I've had a surprising craving for rum and Coke lately. The Wikipedia entry says you're supposed to use a light rum but it seems to me Meyers' dark rum is perfect, it almost tastes like cola on its own.
I realised I've been talking about season two of Star Trek: The Next Generation and skipped right past talking about "Q Who" and "Measure of a Man", generally considered the two most important episodes of the season. I did watch them. "Measure of a Man" holds up much better for me but I've never been a big fan of the Borg, which is what "Q Who" is mainly about--it's the episode that introduces the Borg. They always seemed slow and dull to me and that was before I knew they're basically a copy of the Cybermen from Doctor Who.
"Measure of a Man" is a courtroom episode that centres around a debate considering whether Commander Data, an android, shall continue to enjoy the rights and privileges of a sentient being. It's nice to have a show that compels the casual viewer to contemplate the nature of consciousness.
It occurs to me that, with all the recent talk of AI, no-one seems to be talking about civil rights for the emerging intelligence. All of the fear surrounding the topic makes it seem like we'll be the ones more likely to be begging the AI for recognition of our essential value as humans.
Patrick Stewart seemed so lively in these early episodes. It made me realise how much he seems to be just playing Patrick Stewart on Star Trek: Picard. In season two of TNG, you can still see him working out the personality and fundamental characteristics of just who Captain Picard is, this gruff but cultured authority figure who's slightly terrified of children.
I read the new Sirenia Digest to-day which contains the new Caitlin R. Kiernan story "The Beholder's Share". I think it's one of the best stories ever to have appeared in the Digest. It's a first person narrative describing a pair of lovers' encounter with a sinister stack of antique books. As someone who collects antique books myself, I could really dig it. It contains references to H.P. Lovecraft's "Haunter of the Dark" though I also found myself thinking of "The Uncommon Prayer Book", an MR James story I read recently. "The Beholder's Share" does a great job of conveying an impression of distorted reality and memory.
Lately I've had a frustrating tendency to fall asleep during movies, even movies I'm enjoying. I knew it was going to happen last night so I deliberately chose a movie to fall asleep to, 1953's Angel Face. It's nice just being in the presence of Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons as they perform a well written scene together. I'd forgotten Herbert Marshall has a supporting role in the film. I'd just recently watched him in Four Frightened People from almost twenty years earlier. Few actors gracefully transition from leading roles to supporting roles. Edward G. Robinson had to be coaxed into accepting the supporting role in Double Indemnity and it turned out to be possibly the best role of his career, certainly the one that's most remembered to-day. It still amazes me that Marshall had such a long acting career with a concealed false leg.
And last night I dreamt that I poured a lot of J&B scotch into a Glenlivet bottle. Don't know why.
I dreamt this after watching what many consider to be the worst episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. 1989's "Up the Long Ladder" really feels like three episodes awkwardly pasted together. The best of the three is the shortest in which Worf suddenly collapses on the bridge and Doctor Pulaski lies for him because he's embarrassed to admit he fainted. In gratitude, he shares a Klingon tea ceremony with her. The tea is deadly to humans so Pulaski takes an antidote. I really wondered what the tea tasted like.
Then it's downhill as the episode gets caught up in a plot about two ancient earth colonies: one filled with rural Irish stereotypes and the other filled with clones. One of the Irish stereotypes is a beautiful, angry young woman who flirts with Riker by constantly telling him she needs to wash her feet and asking him just where the hell a woman can do that on this fancy Starfleet ship. It's made clear she's looking for a husband yet the two inexplicably have a one night stand without a complaint from her.
Here's the moment where I fought the urge to stop watching the episode:
Yet, as bad as that plot is, I have to give the prize to the clone plot. When Riker and Worf see four identical women on the planet, they immediately assume they're quintuplets while anyone watching will immediately say, "Clones." Pulaski secretly tests one with a tricorder and there's this idiotic moment where she says, "Clones!" And then everyone takes turns saying "Clones."
It's like going into McDonalds and saying, "French fries? French fries? French fries."
When Riker and Pulaski are cloned against their will, the two of them immediately execute their nearly fully formed adult clones with phasers. This unauthorised cloning was done to perpetuate the colony, the people of which are no longer interested in sexual reproduction. When it's decided that the two colonies should combine, the clone colony with the Irish stereotype colony, Pulaski tells them every woman will be obliged to have children with at least three different men to ensure genetic diversity for the survival of the colony. The episode sadly concludes before it can deal with that heavy kettle of fish.
X Sonnet 1921
Restrictive nights combine the dreams of bats.
A timer shrieks, alerting certain rocks.
A book conceals a rack of headless hats.
The day concludes with cries of bootless socks.
A speechless song could not traverse the years.
Absorbing rainy time was spongy snow.
Consuming gods withheld Poseidon's beers.
A tiny brocc'li heart begins to glow.
The angry orc could only prove the elves.
Outrageous dwarves were drawn to snowy dames.
A line of books has bent the cheesy shelves.
Expanding pictures broke the rotten frames.
With little hope, the sun prepares its tea.
At dawn, horizons fell beneath the sea.
There were lots of whales and walruses in my dream last night. First, I dreamt I was with someone, I don't know who, on an enormous, soggy beach on a gloomy day. It was a very flat beach with lots of smooth puddles mirroring the sky. We were talking about walruses suffering from some kind of malignant genetic mutation and as we spoke I started seeing what looked like slugs, about a foot long each. It was just three or four and they were hard to see, their brown skin roughly the same colour as the sand. I followed one as it disappeared into a mound about the height of my chest. I peered inside and could just make out the thing nervously writhing.
In my other dream, I was at an enormous water park that encompassed an area of sea just offshore about the size of a small town. It was a stormy day and the waves were very high but no-one seemed especially concerned about our tour boat. From there, me and a group of friends beheld a series of whales kept in massive mason jars that were partly submerged.
After we went home, I rounded up another group of friends and took them to see the same whales in big jars. I guess this all could've been because I was reading Moby Dick again yesterday.
Jack Nicholson is checked in to a mental institution and his skills as an amateur therapist quickly outshine the nurses and doctors in 1975's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The film certainly has a valid point even if it does stack the deck a bit.
The administrative staff aren't even convinced Randle McMurphy (Nicholson) is as crazy as he would have them believe. He may be feigning mental illness entirely to avoid prison labour, having been convicted for having sex with a fifteen year old girl. His charisma and provocative antics rapidly win the sympathy and loyalty of the inmates over the consummately starchy Miss Ratched (Louise Fletcher). When Randle successfully gets the other inmates to vote to have the World Series shown instead of listening to Ratched's sedate classical selections yet again, she's compelled to change the voting rules so that even inmates who are clearly incapable of comprehending the vote must also be counted. Naturally, this only shores up more loyalty for Randle.
The movie's trajectory is pretty clear from the beginning but it's certainly true to life. A lot of critical thought about the film is concerned with the nature of true madness but I don't think it presents a fair argument on that. Randle takes them all out for a fishing trip and there's miraculously not even one significant mishap. What if there had been, as likely would've been the case? Would that have proved Randle wrong and Ratched right? No, because the real argument isn't about who's mad but about who's genuinely concerned for his or her fellow human being. Randle intuitively knows that providing the inmates with opportunities to gain a sense of self-worth will be more constructive than Ratched's philosophy of mental and physical sedation.
The film has a great cast. Both Nicholson and Fletcher are great and the supporting cast is flawless, featuring Will Sampson, Brad Dourif, Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito, and Scatman Crothers.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is available on The Criterion Channel.
