Slowing Down Doom

There's a common expression, probably going back over a thousand years, "The more I learn, the more I realise I don't know." A lot of people are very confident this quote comes from Albert Einstein. Google's AI says there's no record of Einstein actually saying it, despite a number of articles from the past five years or so attributing it to him. "The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing," is attributed by various sources online to Socrates or Aristotle. The more I google, the more I realise I don't know the source of the quote.

Plato's The Republic, which is basically Plato transcribing the ideas of Socrates, has this:

I left that enquiry and turned away to consider whether justice is virtue and wisdom or evil and folly; and when there arose a further question about the comparative advantages of justice and injustice, I could not refrain from passing on to that. And the result of the whole discussion has been that I know nothing at all. For I know not what justice is, and therefore I am not likely to know whether it is or is not a virtue, nor can I say whether the just man is happy or unhappy.

At any rate, it's a widely recognised truth. From this, we must realise that there are a lot of people in the world whose lack of knowledge is inversely proportional to the extent of knowledge they believe they possess. Many people who know little tend to believe they know everything, or at least everything important. I got to thinking about this yesterday when reading Caitlin R. Kiernan's journal in which she talked about encountering people who believed watching random assortments of TikTok videos was a superior experience to watching a full length movie. Quoting from Caitlin's journal:

So, this morning I'm taking some time off from work, and I'm paying the latest expansion to Guild Wars 2. I realize it's basically Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I mention in map chat. And two different people tell me they wouldn't know, because thet watch nothing longer than TikTok videos. Horrified, I look online, and surprise, this is not uncommon among Gen Z. Here's a post from Quora. But there is a LOT of this stuff, this attitude:

"Why would I watch a 1 hour long movie? I'd rather watch TikTok. On TikTok, I can watch 120 different videos in 1 hour. Watching a movie is like eating a 1 foot long bread, watching TikTok is like eating a diverse salad with meat in it."

By the way, I found out recently that many people in Japan don't understand the significance of italics so perhaps there are a number of people in foreign countries reading my blog who don't know that when a section of text is presented in italics it's meant to be a "block quote". That is to say, the long sections of this entry presented in italics, or the letters that are slanted to the right, are quotes and did not originate from me.

Anyway, Caitlin goes on to talk about neuroscientific studies that show the frequent viewer of TikTok videos suffers from brain degradation. I don't think one needs to produce scientific studies to show that viewing bundles of short TikTok, Instragram, or YouTube videos is not superior to the experience of viewing a full length movie. I also don't think the problem's as new as it seems, at least in terms of the layperson's perspective. The power and significance of art has always been widely underestimated. I've had conversations throughout my life where I've had to argue the significance of volume, the significant difference between watching a video with 30% of its original image cropped out and watching the original version, and the importance of colour proportions. But for this topic, I think the most significant, often overlooked issue is that of sequence.

Sequence matters. If you burn your eggs and spill your coffee in the morning, you're likely to go into work with a different mood. That probably seems obvious. But it's just as true that a piece of comedic media will have a different impact if it directly follows something frightening. This is where the term "comic relief" comes from. After tension has been built up over time, some writers and filmmakers find it useful to break up the tension with something funny. After characters spend some time running in the dark from the scary alien, maybe one of them makes an observation about how they never ran so fast in gym class. This is also a natural way for people to talk in stressful situations in order to relieve tension that might be otherwise debilitating. For the filmmaker or writer, sequence is another pigment on the palette. The filmmaker changes the significance of a scene where a wife embraces her spouse with genuine affection by placing it after a scene in which people coldly ignore each other on the train. The juxtaposition is a statement. Then, after the romantic scene, maybe we see another of the man going to a mistress for another embrace. That's another statement. Add one statement after another and you have a narrative and you have something that is different depending on whether it's shown over the course of two hours or over the course of 30 seconds. Paul Schrader, on his Facebook, was recently commenting on the phenomenon of YouTube films in which complicated narratives are presented in less than a minute. But of course, this is a different experience to a two hour film because a scene in such a film is also filled with a number of waypoints in other series of sequences. Imagine the scene of the married couple again. Does it start with the woman washing dishes? Or is she typing away at a laptop on the couch when the husband comes in? Does he take off a hat, is he wearing a shabby coat, does he clear his throat? Is there time before she chooses to acknowledge his presence? The length of time is also significant.

This also makes full length film an experience closer to real life than a TikTok video. We don't experience reality in isolated snippets, we experience it in sequences. Therefore cinema is an artform more in tune with the human experience, one from which we have a better chance of having a meaningful experience.

Quark Work

I'm still watching Deep Space Nine. Last night was a 1994 episode called "Profit and Loss" in which Quark, the shady Ferengi bartender, is surprised when his old flame visits the station, a Cardassian woman and her two students. She's become a political dissident. Quark goes goo-goo eyes for her and she slaps him. It's really broad and the two characters have zero chemistry. I never got any sense of why the two characters are attracted to each other. A lot of Quark episodes seem to coast on Quark's basic charm, a charm I no longer see, if I ever actually did. But I don't hate everything he does and, in other episodes, I still find him interesting. The episode is more interesting for Garak's part. The only Cardassian resident of the station was at this point a mysterious figure whose connexions to his homeworld were still unclear. Is he a spy? Is he an exile? Is he somehow both? It's fun to try to figure out from watching his performance and I like this scene in which he and Quark discuss fashion.

The previous episode was "Playing God", an episode focused on Jadzia Dax who's mentoring another member of her species. He's a young man who wants to be implanted with a symbiote organism to achieve the combined consciousness only select members of their species can attain. Meanwhile, the two of them accidentally pick up a small "proto-universe" which they bring back to the space station to study. The thing starts to expand and threatens to destroy the station in the process, bringing about the ethical question of whether they can destroy an entire universe just to save themselves. Their eventual solution, to dump it in a distant part of the galaxy, seems to me like it would be only temporary if the thing is truly going to expand to universe size. Still, it's an interesting idea, but I feel like it was expanded on better in the Futurama episode in which the robot, Bender, becomes God.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix, Futurama is on Disney+ and/or Hulu.

Restraint versus Matcha

Catholicism is pitted against Japanese tea ceremony in 1962's Love Under the Crucifix (お吟さま, "Lady Ogin"). Shot in colour and set in the 16th century, this was the last film to be directed by Tanaka Kinuyo. I imagine the cost of the film against a low box office was likely a contributing factor in this. Tanaka has enjoyed more fame as an actress, particularly for her work with Mizoguchi Kenji. Mizoguchi was not supportive of his star's directorial career but while Love Under the Crucifix lacks the depth of thought and profundity of Mizoguchi's films, it's a decent romantic melodrama.

The story revolves around Ogin (Arima Ineko), the daughter of a real life tea ceremony master named Sen no Rikyu, a favourite and confidant of the rulers Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He's played by kabuki star Nakamura Ganjiro II in the film who imbues the character with serenity and gentleness to contrast with a Christianity portrayed as oppressive and cruel.

Like any good heroine of women's pulp romantic fiction, everyone loves Ogin, particularly the man who converted her to Christianity, Ukon Takayama, played by Nakadai Tatsuya. When she pleads with him to become her lover despite the fact that he's married, he visibly restrains his violent emotions and tells her how physical love is a sin. In a later scene, Sen no Rikyu talks about the natural attraction between men and women as something that should be acknowledged and acted on, in congruence with the honesty of tea ceremony. I'm not sure the contrast between unyielding restraint in Catholicism versus a free love philosophy of tea ceremony is quite an honest depiction, to put it mildly.

Tanaka directs like an actress, like so many actors and actresses turned director--She uses lots and lots of closeups. Despite the period setting involving major figures in Japanese history, the story feels very small because very little is given emotional depth outside of Ogin's romantic predicament. We see vassals and farmers and merchants with a lot of props and costumes but all their dialogue is stiff exposition explaining the historical context or ruminating on the motives around Ogin and the men in her life.

The cinematography's a bit bland--everything is lit like a department store. The performances are really good, though, particularly from Nakadai and Nakamura.

Love Under the Crucifix is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a collection remembering Nakadai Tatsuya.

Is It Really So Strange?

The bravest citizens of Hawkins assemble once again to fight the threat of Demogorgons from the Upside Down in Stranger Things, season 5, the first four episodes of which premiered last week. They start good and finish strong with a couple wobbly parts in the middle.

They really should've moved the time period up to the '90s. These are clearly not kids anymore, which is hardly a surprise given that the show first premiered nine years ago. The first episode of the new season begins with a flashback to season one Will in 1983 before cutting ahead to current Will, supposedly just four years later but the guy we see looks like he's cleared a decade at least. At least the show acknowledges that the little nerds have all sprouted into surprisingly big guys when three of them stand up to some bullies tormenting Dustin, who's still kind of short.

Dustin has a dust up with the bullies that built tension really nicely and I was sorry that the subplot evaporated by the third episode. The third episode seems almost like an alternate universe, everyone is so different in it, and then I realised it was probably because it was not written by the Duffer Brothers but by Caitlin Schneiderhan. The auteur effect is real, folks.

The highlight of the four episodes is an action sequence at the end of the fourth. Will finally figures out something I think everyone in the audience saw coming a mile away but it's satisfying nonetheless.

This season's '80s guest star is Linda Hamilton as the villainous Dr. Kay, who's stationed within the Upside Down with a bunch of troops. One of the possible plot holes this season is that, while we see guns have basically no effect on Demogorgons, somehow this base in the Upside Down is perfectly secure and holding a bunch of specimens. It's nice to see Hamilton and it made me immediately switch over to watching Terminator 2 on Amazon Prime.

Stranger Things is available on Netflix.

Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard has died. The playwright and screenwriter was 88. In his long career he wrote many films I admired, many of them without credit. Steven Spielberg has said Stoppard wrote more than the lion's share of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, despite going uncredited. The dialogue in that film is at times corny ("Twelve o'clock!" "What happens at twelve o'clock?") but also filled with surprising nuance and insight. I always like the moment where Indiana complains to his father that they never talked and his father counters, "Well, what do you want to talk about?" and Indiana can't think of anything. As is so often the case, long term resentment just evaporates when confronted.

Stoppard is said to have been most famous for writing Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead and then writing and directing the film adaptation of it. It's been decades since I saw it so I don't remember it very well but the concept is surely one of the most interesting Shakespeare pastiches. Life is bigger than the operatic stuff occurring on centre stage.

Of course, he co-wrote Terry Gilliam's Brazil, one of my all time favourite movies that's essentially tattooed on my mind. I watched it so many times in high school, college, and the years after and I'm always happy to return to it. It's funny, it's devastating, it's above all an uncommonly clear-eyed view of a human compulsion to reduce oneself to a machine. I'll always be grateful for that film's insight and honesty.

Thanks, Mr. Stoppard.

X Sonnet 1969

Comparing things results in stranger stuff.
The people 'round the block report on birds.
No freedom here, we traded all for fluff.
Conditions here presage the sleep of words.
Exchange a normal coin when times are weird.
You mustn't spend a dime where gold is sought.
These things the Scottish duck had never feared.
Advice forsook, a magic dime he got.
A tower held it nigh a liquid state.
The pool of wealth has driven workers mad.
It boxes ears and blocks the balding pate.
But Scrooge McDuck was never plucked or had.
And so the mansion grows with gentle ghosts.
And time has told on secret, vicious hosts.

The Naked One

Happy Black Friday, everyone. Recently, Variety published their list of the top 100 comedies of all time. As usual, there are all kinds of problems with the list. The only Buster Keaton movie is Sherlock Jr., the only Chaplin movie is The Great Dictator, yet there are two Howard Hawks movies and two Coen Brothers movies. Some of the movies, like Poor Things at number 65, barely seem to qualify as a comedy. Withnail and I is kind of funny but I don't know if it belongs in the top 100. Of course, there are very few foreign films on the list, just a few French movies, but comedy is the genre that most rarely translates effectively. Comedy typically relies on a lot of cultural references. The exception is physical comedy, which tends to be universal, so it's not a surprise one of the French movies is a Monsieur Herlot movie, though I'm surprised it's Playtime. I'm a little surprised there's no Jackie Chan movie on the list.

The real controversial choice is the number one pick, 1988's The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad. I don't know if it really deserves to be at number one, but it's certainly a damn funny movie. I watched it last night. I don't think I'd seen the whole thing since I was a kid, though I've watched Police Squad, the series it's based on, a few times, in the intervening years. Police Squad may be a little cleverer but it's hard for any movie to rival Naked Gun for sheer density of jokes of a wild variety of subject matter that the narrative nonetheless flows smoothly through. One moment, you're laughing at the repeated sight gag of Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) invariably crashing into something when he stops his car and next you're laughing at some nonsense wordplay or Frank mistaking someone else's press conference as his own.

The first scene doesn't really work. Frank beating up a bunch of despotic world leaders just seems like an odd daydream but, after that, the movie's consistent gold. A lot has been said about the perfection of Leslie Nielsen's deadpan but Priscilla Presley is pretty good, too.

It's common to portray the hardboiled cop as an untidy bachelor and I love how this scene takes it to an absurd extreme. There's not one item in Frank's fridge that's not impossibly ancient. It's great how Priscilla Presley just keeps nattering on and only slows down slightly when she sees the odd assortment of mouldy objects in the freezer.

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! is available on Netflix.

Sister Routes

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I went to The Criterion Channel's Family Reunion playlist last night and picked out the best looking one, Woody Allen's 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters. It's a comedy about relationships set in New York, which of course describes a lot of Woody Allen movies. This one's more of an ensemble piece than usual and although Allen himself plays a role, he's not the sole point of view character as he typically is.

The title characters are Hannah, played by Mia Farrow, and her two sisters, Holly (Dianne Wiest) and Lee (Barbara Hershey). As the film opens, we're treated to a narration by Elliot, Hannah's husband, played by Michael Caine, who's secretly in love with Lee, or believes he is. He's possibly a stand-in for Allen himself, as in other Allen movies in which Allen himself doesn't star. In any case, it was the first time I ever thought Michael Caine bore some resemblance to Woody Allen.

Allen plays a television producer named Mickey who's Hannah's ex-husband. He's a hypochondriac and much of his subplot concerns his anxiety over the possibility that he has a brain tumour.

According to Wikipedia, the film was influenced by Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, and I was indeed reminded of the Bergman film at the beginning of Hannah and her Sisters, which depicts many of the characters gathering for a Thanksgiving party, much as the characters in Fanny and Alexander gather for Christmas. Unlike Fanny and Alexander, Hannah and Her Sisters has Max von Sydow in a small role. The man who'd starred in so many famous Bergman films had been unable or unwilling to return for his old friend's elegiac effort that was supposed to be a kind of summation of Bergman's career. But here he was, a couple years later, in a film by Bergman's admirer, Woody Allen.

Von Sydow plays Lee's husband and he tells her directly that Elliot's been "lusting" after her. She knows too, of course, but she hasn't put it so bluntly to herself in the thoughts we hear in her narration, she just ruminates on how Elliot blushed when speaking to her and calls it a "crush". I guess that's ultimately what unites the two sides of the film, an exercise in bad faith in the Satre-ian sense of the term. In one plot, two people engage in an affair who aren't honest with themselves about their intentions and, in the other, a man obsesses with illness he has little reason to suspect he actually has.

Hannah herself is a small role, being the calm centre of the storm. Carrie Fisher has a small but effective role as a family friend.

Hannah and Her Sisters is available on The Criterion Channel.

Movie Talk

Patton Oswalt was a guest on Bill Maher's Club Random podcast recently and I was surprised to learn what a cinephile Oswalt is. Maher has slightly better than average knowledge of old films, enough for the two to have a conversation. The two talk about Robert Altman a bit and Maher refers to Altman's 1970 film, M.A.S.H., as "mean-spirited". That's an interesting way of putting it. It's on The Criterion Channel now and I watched it and I'm not sure "mean-spirited" is the term I'd use but it's certainly obnoxious to anyone watching it from an Asian country. It was obviously all shot in California and mostly it feels like we watch Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper (Elliott Gould) goofing off. It's barely more than implied that they're saving lives as field medics, I guess to sanctify their smugness. I guess it's supposed to make up for them humiliating Sally Kellerman's "Hot Lips" in the shower, too. If anyone's wondering if the Japan depicted in the film comes off in any way authentic, the answer is a resounding no. The foreign countries just exist on some hazy periphery while Sutherland and Gould strut around the centre stage.

The constant gong stinger is plenty obnoxious all on its own.

Maher and Oswalt got to talking about Altman by talking about Philip Marlowe and the Marlowe movie Altman made starring Elliott Gould, The Long Goodbye, which I also watched recently (and liked better than M.A.S.H.). They also talked about Howard Hawks' 1946 adaptation of The Big Sleep and Oswalt weighed in on the two cuts of that film; one which hews closer to the original novel, and one made a year later that replaces more expository scenes with scenes of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall having exciting dialogue. Oswalt champions the recut version as an example of the studio knowing better than the film's original director. Personally, I like both versions and to really enjoy the 1946 version--well, either of them, really--one really needs to have read the book. It's famously one of the most convoluted plots of all time in any case. It always amazes me that they changed nothing about the plot involving Carmen Sternwood's nude photos being used for blackmail except the fact that she's not naked in them. So she basically threatens to murder someone over pictures of her wearing a dress. All this is presented to the audience like it's perfectly reasonable. I do like Martha Vickers as Carmen. She really justifies Bogart's line to the butler, "You ought to ween her, she's old enough."

What He Has Done

2009's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is a rare confluence of talent, a Werner Herzog movie produced by David Lynch. I'd been in the mood to watch it again ever since I saw it was up on Criterion Channel and then one of its stars, Udo Kier, died a few days ago. The cast also includes Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Chloe Sevigny, Grace Zabriskie, and Braf Dourif.

Shannon stars as Brad McCullam, a young man who murders his mother with a 19th century military sabre. It's based on a true story but Herzog says about 70% was invented by the filmmakers. He was more interested in creating a portrait of a personality.

The film is set and shot in the actual city where the real crime took place, my home town, San Diego. It's certainly a potent experience for me to watch it now that I've been living in Japan for almost six years. The film even includes a lot of real details from the city. The Coronado Bridge is mentioned significantly, Balboa Park is shown and mentioned. Even the ostrich farm belonging to Brad Dourif's character is true to life--if you drive around the backroads of San Diego long enough, you will indeed come across an ostrich farm or two.

In the film, McCullam goes to the farm with Udo Kier's character, the director of the production of Orestes McCullam's starring in. I felt like Herzog was trying to create a moment by putting the crazy uncle played by Brad Dourif in frame with Kier's character when Dourif's launches into a homophobic tirade about the ancient Greeks. Kier, who was openly gay throughout his career, maintains perfect poise, though.

I know I've seen this movie before but somehow I can't find my old blog entry on it. I feel like I would probably be repeating myself if I talked about the film's religious subtext. I liked how all the oatmeal containers that play a significant role in the film are labelled "Puritan Oats" instead of "Quaker". The kindly face of the mascot is the face of God, McCullam claims. His fiancee, played by Chloe Sevigny with unwavering affection and loyalty, has the unlikely name of Ingrid Goodmanson, like she's an amalgamation of 17th century Dutch and English Protestants just come over on a boat.

There are so many little Lynch touches to the film but it's hard to say if Lynch really did contribute these things or if Herzog was adopting some of Lynch's style. Obviously there's the casting of Zabriskie as the mother; Zabriskie is among the stable of frequent returning performers in Lynch's films. But a lot of the dialogue feels very Lynchian in the way the characters push and savour odd significance in certain words, as when Dafoe's character says McCullum is "Irish, maybe even Scottish," as though in his mind Scottish is a more extreme version of Irish. There's the way characters linger over the term "white water rapids" when they discuss the deaths of the people who went to Peru with McCullam.

This was one of the movies that first solidified Michael Shannon's reputation for playing intense nutcases. McCullam's madness always hovers on the border between tragedy and comedy, familiar territory for both Lynch and Herzog. He takes Ingrid outside in one scene and points first at one house and then another and announces that he's going to buy it for her. She, a good Puritan, takes him in all earnest seriousness, and explains to him he doesn't have that kind of money. He just stares at her with those intense eyes and says, "So what?" like a holy visionary. But the situation is so absurd it only highlights how off the rails he is.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Udo Kier

Udo Kier has died. The German actor was 81. To have seen him is to remember him, whether it was in one of his over 200 films or in a commercial, you remember those striking grey eyes. But he was also an actor of deft, captivating talent.

In the '70s, he starred in a pair of Gothic horror satires for producer Andy Warhol, Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula. It's the former that earned him fame but I'm partial to the latter. Kier plays Dracula as a brooding, tentatively petulant young aristocrat. It's a terrific deadpan performance in a remarkably intelligent and sexy comedy.

He later starred in the experimental French version of Jekyll and Hyde called Docteur Jekyll et les femmes. He covered his Gothic bases.

In his long career, he could leave a mark on a movie with a very brief cameo, as he did in the original Suspiria, while also having major roles in films by some of the greatest avante-garde filmmakers of our time, like Lars von Trier and Werner Herzog. And despite his flawless deadpan, he was ready to join a bizarre comedy, including the infamous Moon Nazi movie, Iron Sky.

Here's a man whose legacy is woven into the fabric of avant-garde cinema history.

Back to Don Quixote

One of the best things about where I'm currently living is that I'm just a few blocks from a Don Quijote, a "tax free" discount store known for its eclectic and expansive selection of merchandise. If you're interested in Japan and you've never been to Japan, you've probably watched YouTubers strolling through its aisles of chaotic kitsch. You can also get groceries there, though their selection of produce is not consistent. But they have a lot of packaged and foreign foods, especially oddball items that evidently didn't find success on other store shelves, such as the Hot and Spicy Stir-Fried Lobster Pringles I bought a few weeks ago (I thought they were pretty good). Their liquor selection is also surprisingly great. You can get Johnnie Walker Red, Black, Double Black, Black Ruby, and even Green Labels, though I've been partial to Cutty Sark these days. They also have clothes, appliances, stationery, Halloween costumes, camping gear, and who knows what else.

A few days ago, I noticed they had a huge display for the 40th anniversary of Back to the Future and I again marvelled at the cultural currency that movie currently exerts in Japan. Now at Don Quijote you can get a variety of remote controlled Delorians, tote bags and thermoses with the fictional Pepsi logo from Back to the Future Part II, and bags with mystery prizes. Apparently in Shibuya there's even a full sized Delorian. You can see a full list of goods on their website. Look at that, I'm using Japanese English, saying "goods" instead of "merchandise".

I can't find any information on the origin of the name and how much it has to do with Cervantes' Don Quixote. I searched and searched but soon realised it was a quixotic quest.

Following Those Fliers Again

One of the Howard Hawks movies I'm fondest of is 1939's Only Angels Have Wings. Cary Grant runs an air freight company in South America. Something about the story of men merrily living between potentially fatal missions in a decrepit little bar appeals to me, I guess.

Jean Arthur is a singer who comes to town. Two flyboys immediately try to pick her up. They succeed in convincing her to let them take her to the bar--she's just happy to be talking to two Americans for once. The flirtatious encounter is interrupted when their boss (Grant) swaggers in wearing the biggest panama hat worn by a lead actor in cinema history. One of Arthur's would-be wooers has to brave the storm. He doesn't make it.

That's just the beginning. Arthur can't understand how the men carry on when life's like this all the time. Of course, she starts to fall for Cary Grant's character. Rita Hayworth shows up as his old flame.

It's about as good an adventure noir as you'll ever see. It's on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a Howard Hawks playlist.

X Sonnet 1968

On closer look, the world's a woeful dog.
His plaintive, searching eyes are seas of ink.
His nose, a molten rock that's spouting fog.
His mouth, a sloppy wet and toothsome sink.
On closer look, the sun's an angry cat.
Her piercing eyes are flares of solar flame.
Her fur, a roiling vast and burning vat.
Her fiery core, a spiteful, sleepless brain.
On closer look, the moon's a frightened mouse.
His floppy ears are secret country flags.
His twitching nose, a small surveillance house.
His little guts are buried body bags.
Our math was wrong, the sun has chased the moon.
The earth is still and waits for violent doom.

Colm Means Quality

Colm Meaney always was, and still is, one of the most successful Star Trek actors at getting roles outside the franchise. Hell, the guy was in John Huston's last movie (The Dead, based on the James Joyce story, currently streaming on The Criterion Channel). The makers of Deep Space Nine certainly seemed to know what they had and I just finished watching three unrelated episodes starring his character, Miles O'Brien. The most lauded of the three is "Whispers", a second season episode from February 1994 in which O'Brien returns home to the space station to find everyone's behaving very strangely around him, even fearful or hateful. It is brilliantly grim, a paranoid, existential tale worthy of a film noir.

O'Brien wakes up to find his wife, Keiko, and daughter, Molly, are rushing out the door at 5:30 in the morning. Molly doesn't seem to want to go near him and Keiko's excuses are rushed and oddly weak. Later, he finds Commander Sisko has been giving orders to a man on O'Brien's crew instead of going to O'Brien first, the standard procedure between Commander and Chief of Operations. Small things get bigger and stranger as the story progresses. There are some odd turns of logic once you find out what's going on but it mostly holds together, especially since the performances are so good, particular from Colm Meaney and Rosalind Chao.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix here in Japan.

Your Dracula

I was listening to a YouTuber talking about Dracula a few days ago and I marvelled again at the story's longevity and reach. Even schoolkids here in Japan know the character somehow, just by pop cultural osmosis. Along with Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, and Alice, it's amazing how well characters from English literature of the 19th century have endured. It strikes me that Dracula has survived for reasons similar to Alice. They're both irresistible prompts for audiences and other writers to expand on the characters.

Dracula is barely in the book. He only has a few scenes of dialogue. In the film adaptations, directors, screenwriters, and actors have free range to make him a charming, seductive psychopath, as in the Lugosi version, or an unearthly night creature, as in the Nosferatu movies, or as a tragic, romantic figure, as in the Langella and Oldman versions. The filmmakers can stride forward, confident they've gotten to what they see as the real essence of the character, only for their interpretations to be, in the end, just that; interpretations. These interpretations inevitably reflect the interpreter. Dracula is the frightening, unknowable Other or a reflection of the artist's own darkened self image.

Alice is much the same. Aside from the prefatory poems, the Alice books are remarkably unsentimental and even amoral, particularly for the Victorian era. But most adaptations can't resist adding a love story for Alice or some kind of moral. And, of course, there are the many "dark" Alices, which somehow never seem to be quite as dark as the hints in the original books. Scenes like the baby turning into a pig or the looking glass house have suggestions of horror much bigger than the brevity of their presence.

Who Can You Trust?

If you're a regular schlub, down on his luck, who enters town by crashing his truck into another, and the prettiest gal in town takes an inexplicable interest in you, exercise caution. That would've been good advice for Glen Ford in 1947's Framed, a film noir directed by Richard Wallace. It's a good one, too.

Ford plays Mike, a mining engineer with a college degree who's nonetheless had to take odd jobs, like truck driving. The shady outfit he's driving for at the beginning apparently couldn't be bothered to give him a truck with functioning brakes but they did make him sign a contract that makes him liable for any damages or legal troubles he might get into with the car.

Fortunately, or so it seems, the luxuriously dressed barmaid he meets before the police nab him decides to pay his fifty dollar bail for no reason.

It all becomes clear to the audience before it does to Mike. It turns out the dame, Paula (Janis Carter), is having an affair with a wealthy banker (Barry Sullivan) who wants to bump off his wife. Mike turns out to be of around the same age and build as the banker, if you get the picture. Mike gets the frame.

Ford is always a solid centre of any noir. He always seems to be just barely containing a boiling fury and there's certainly plenty for him to be furious about.

Framed is currently available on The Criterion Channel. And apparently on YouTube.

Puddle to Man

As much as I liked Odo on Deep Space Nine, I was never much interested in episodes where he sought to uncover the mystery of his own origins. He's set up as a hard-nosed detective character and that's how I mostly liked to see him, working out the clues, trying to crack some case. Usually when he's doing that, he's a supporting character. Maybe actor Rene Auberjonois really wanted opportunities to emote, though, because he always goes to pieces in these episodes about this origins.

But I did enjoy "The Alternate" recenlty, an episode from January 1994. It guest stars James Sloyan, a very familiar face to Star Trek fans. He was on two episodes of The Next Generation and one episode of Voyager, each time playing a different character. He also had frequent guest roles on other shows starting in 1970. His last television credit on Wikipedia is that Voyager episode in 1995.

He plays Dr. Mora Pol, the scientist who discovered Odo when Odo was just a mysterious pile of goo. It was Mora who studied and nurtured Odo in his formative years and Sisko and others around him automatically refer to Mora as Odo's father. Odo himself resists this idea, just like a child with a difficult relationship would.

It's an interesting contextualising of a parent and child relationship. I say "formative" and it's really in more ways than one as it's plain that Odo has modelled his hair style, appearance, and gruff voice on Mora's. Since Odo is a shapeshifter whose natural state is a pile of goo, he can't help but wear his self-image on his sleeve, as it were. When he loses control in his anger at Mora, he becomes a shapeless mass, losing the identity he formed over the years. I could envision telling a story about a shapeshifter who totally changes their default shape at least once a decade as they encounter new "formative" experiences.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix. You know, I'm feeling confirmed in my old opinion that season two is the best season of Deep Space Nine. But I'll have to wait 'til I've rewatched the others.

Unforgivable Misdeeds and Music

A young woman comes out of rehab to attend her sister's wedding in Jonathan Demme's 2008 film, Rachel's Getting Married. It's more cheerful than a Lars von Trier movie but it's gloomier than most. It's filled with good performances and an interestingly staged wedding ceremony.

Anne Hathaway plays Kym, the family black sheep. It's from her perspective we see everything else as she struggles to find a place within her family. She's been a substance abuser all her life but we learn about a third of the way through the movie that the real fissure between her and her family is caused by the fact that she had a little brother who died when he was in the backseat of a car Kym drove off the road when she was high. The sister getting married, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), their mother (Debra Winger), and father (Bill Irwin) hover between determined hospitality and unbridled rage directed at Kym. As the wedding planning moves into the events of the wedding itself, the viewer is invited to gauge how honest any expressions of affection are, or if there can be any true bond left after what Kym had done.

The wedding party was filmed in an improvisational style. Actual musicians can be seen jamming, including Robyn Hitchcock, Fab Five Freddy, and Sister Carol. This is explained by the fact that Kym and Rachel's father works in the music industry. The wedding party has a remarkably authentic atmosphere.

Rachel Getting Married is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a family reunion playlist, presumably for Thanksgiving. This oughta perk everyone up.