Sometimes I wonder how much of the apparent progress of AI is an illusion conjured by human regression. I've talked before about some of the inaccurate or oddly subjective responses I've gotten from Google's AI, such as misattributing the source of a John Milton quote or supplying oddly diplomatic opinions in place of factual responses. How often are such things taken as accurate responses by people who obviously don't know any different since they were googling the question in the first place? Is quality control even possible, since it would likely mean someone whose breadth of knowledge is comparable to a computer database?
I noticed recently that Google Translate isn't as good as it used to be. Google used to be better at translating English to Japanese than it was at translating Japanese to English since Japanese relies more on context. Yesterday I was checking the translation for a word for alien in Japanese, "宇宙人", which I've always heard pronounced as "uchuujin." But Google now insists it's pronounced "uchuubito". Except when I hit the "sound" option, in which case the AI voice pronounces it as "uchuujin". I'm guessing the sound option is still drawing from an old AI framework while the text is drawing from a new one.
Google's own AI overview in its search function apparently also disagrees with its choice of pronunciation.
When you try to translate "alien" from English to Japanese, the first option you get is just the English word "alien" written in Japanese characters, which seems suspiciously lazy.
Hopefully this won't impact interstellar diplomacy.
Yesterday I went to a three hour concert for the brass band of one of the junior high schools I currently work for here in Japan. It was special because it was the last concert for third year students in the band (junior high school is three years in Japan). Now they have to focus on studying and getting ready for high school. One of them I talked to said she doesn't want to go to high school and instead plans to immediately pursue a career as a musician (high school is not compulsory in Japan). I'd say she has a good shot, given how good this particular school's brass band is, but all the junior high school brass bands I've seen in Japan have been amazing.
I suppose I don't have much frame of reference since I can't remember paying much attention to my high school brass band and my junior high school didn't have one. But I always enjoy watching the band's planning, procedure, and practicing. Unfortunately in this town, it's more difficult to build a rapport with students than it was in my previous town since I tend to be assigned to schools for only two weeks at a time with occasional longer or shorter spells of one to four weeks. I go back to the same schools--I'm working in only three this year--but I miss how in my previous town I'd be with the same school for four or five months at a time. This made it easier to get a sense of where the students are in their studies and decide what material to use or develop.
Yesterday's concert also featured students from another school I haven't worked at and I was delighted when they performed "Brazil", the same song featured in Terry Gilliam's great film of the same title. Though considering how that film skewers bureaucracy, it may be a little too close to home for Japan. But the students are of course unaware of that association. The students from the school I work at played a medley of Deep Purple songs, including "Smoke on the Water". I wonder how it got in their repertoire. I've seen their archive of music sheets, some of it looks very old. At one point someone must have been a rock fan, or maybe it was an inherited repertoire from some other source.
I discovered to-day Deep Purple released an official music video for "Smoke on the Water" just last year, much like Talking Heads only recently made a video for "Psycho Killer". I dig this trend.
X Sonnet 1966
As questions raised regarding hope arose,
We found a book describing black despair.
The channel page was choked with buggy prose,
But seemed to show a dance from Fred Astaire.
The group recalled that Rogers followed suit,
With cherry syrup squibs she laced her shoes.
This was a fact to grief the girlish moot,
We know the secret sauce was blood and booze.
Arise, o floor of dancing digit tombs.
Your kindle now aglow with burning veins.
Above, a falling flock of ghosts resumes,
Their haunt above the bay of rusty chains.
No blame could chase the turkey 'cross a year.
So gather feathers, make a poultry bier.
Criterion Channel has some terrific playlists this month. They've got a Werner Herzog playlist that has all of his most famous movies (Grizzly Man, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and Nosferatu) as well has his collaboration with David Lynch (My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?), his gloriously off-the-rails, Nicholas Cage led Bad Lieutenant movie, and about three dozen other movies.
This month there's also a playlist of four movies with Trent Reznor soundtracks (Natural Born Killers, Lost Highway, The Social Network, Bones and All), and a playlist of "Blackout Noir", that's films noir in which a main character's memory loss plays a crucial role.
It's from that playlist I chose a film last night, 1946's Deadline at Dawn, which I thought I hadn't seen but it turned out I'd seen at least twice before. For some reason I tend to forget its title, I just remember it as, "The one in which Susan Hayward plays a dime-a-dance girl." She's engaged in this occupation when she meets a guileless, good-natured sailor called Alex (Bill Williams) who'd gotten blackout drunk the night before and woke up with a wad of cash. His helplessness finally thaws Susan Hayward's cold front and she accompanies him to the apartment he remembers going to with a lady the previous night. Unfortunately, said lady is now a corpse.
The movie's intriguing opening scene is of this lady (played by Lola Lane) having an argument with her blind but sinister ex-husband. There's so much about it that's unusual for an American film of the '40s, it's amazing I tend to forget about this scene. But maybe I only have eyes for Susan Hayward. It's a shame she was never in a really great movie. I think The Lusty Men was probably the best one she was in, or that South American western with Richard Widmark I can't remember the name of. The movies where she was centre stage, Smashup and that prison movie she won an Oscar for, really don't hold up. But she was a great actress.
Criterion Channel also has an amazing Howard Hawks playlist this month, including not only his great screwball comedies (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday) and crime movies (The Big Sleep and Scarface) but even some of his westerns (Red River, Rio Bravo, and The Big Sky). When I get a hankering for a John Wayne movie, it's very rare I can find one on any streaming service. Now I got two of his best at my fingertips. November somehow does seem the right month for old westerns.
Criterion proves again why it remains for me the one indispensable streaming service. I can go months without Netflix or Disney+ but Criterion's always golden. It doesn't hurt that it's about six to ten dollars cheaper than the big boys, too.
Happy Halloween, everyone. Halloween night was last night for me. I had some bourbon and watched Ghostbusters. I thought about getting candy but my sweet tooth seems nonexistent these days. I feel nostalgic about it. I go to the store and look at candy but then when I imagine what it tastes like it's not remotely appealing. Just a few months ago, I was routinely snacking on chocolate bars but the desire seems to have totally vanished.
Halloween candy is very different in Japan. There's a lot of cookies, cakes, and wafers. Candy corn is totally absent. Unlike candy canes, I can't even order candy corn on Japanese Amazon. I don't especially want any, I guess. I can enjoy a candy corn but two of them generally seem to be slightly more than enough for me. Japanese candy is said to be not as sweet as American candy. I'm not sure that's an adequate description of the difference. American candy tends to more of a waxy, oily, or gelatinous quality while Japanese candy tends to a breaded or creamy quality. KitKats are very popular in Japan and they famously come in a variety of unique flavours here. The chocolate covered wafers fit in pretty well with home grown Japanese products like Pocky and Melty Kiss.
I've been in the mood to watch a Hammer movie but I always get decision paralysis when trying to pick one and end up watching something else (like Ghostbusters). It's easier to just keep moving forward and watching things I've never seen, I guess.
Happy Halloween, everyone. Well, it's the 31st here in Japan. I wanted to watch a horror movie last night but there was no time so I just watched another episode of The X-Files instead, "Tooms" from season one. It's a sequel to an episode earlier in the season called "Squeeze" that introduced the character of Eugene Tooms, a man who can stretch and contort his limbs to fit through any space and who eats human livers to maintain his immortality. "Squeeze" was not as solidly written but it was more satisfyingly weird. "Tooms" seems to run out of ideas for Tooms himself and ends up focusing on show mythology and the relationship between Mulder and Scully.
They actually have a flirtatious moment when Scully convinces Mulder to let her take a shift staking out Tooms.
It's really amazing how natural and effective their chemistry already is at this point. The whole "will they or won't they" tension is different from so many other series because there's kind of no tension in it. They're so comfortable with each other and neither one seems especially driven to seek a physical relationship. There's a kind of serenity in their acceptance of whatever permutation their relationship is set to take, perhaps because the problems they routinely deal with seem so big in comparison. Or perhaps they're just so damned cool. I like the artfully placed curl of hair by Scully's mouth.
When I came to Japan in 2020, a new smartphone game was taking the country by storm called Twisted-Wonderland. It's a Disney property developed in Japan and created by Toboso Yana who'd previously made the Black Butler series. Twisted-Wonderland ties not only into Alice in Wonderland but several of Disney's more famous movies (though some of them, like Hercules, are not at all well-known in Japan). The concept seems much closer to Harry Potter, though, as it follows students at a boys' magical university called Night Raven College. Five years after the game was released, the anime adaptation premiered on Disney+ a couple nights ago.
The main character is Yuu (I guess in the game this means you are Yuu). He's captain of a high school kendo club, getting ready for a tournament when he's suddenly teleported to the entrance ceremony at Night Raven College. The room, which looks like a massive gothic cathedral, is filled with students. Since the game primarily focuses on collecting and nurturing magical college students, quite a few of the students depicted in this scene, which takes up the bulk of the episode, are familiar to fans and each likely has its own devoted fanbase of girls who have nurtured their own version of the character through an academic career. This results in a scene where the makers of the show feel obligated to give reaction shots to each and every one of the characters after something dramatic happens, and each one of them gives a little, "Ah!" "Eh!" "Hmm!" "Huh!" etc.
Very little happens in the first episode as a result. The character designs are pretty cool, especially Headmaster Crowley, who wears a creepy mask. The students are all the handsome boys you'd expect from a game aimed at girls. I find myself wondering if a female character will ever show up. It'll be a challenge for the writers to come up with a satisfying story while not short-changing any of the many characters. There was one line I thought was funny when one character refers to another as "Juice" and that character indignantly reminds the other that his name is "Deuce!" I also like the aesthetic of the Alice in Wonderland area shown in the trailer.
It's been a while since I even thought of trying to predict the killer's identity on Only Murders in the Building. Last night's season finale had a reveal that felt particularly arbitrary, as though all the character names were in a hat and one was drawn at random. But it was a funny episode.
Seeing the events of the murder in flashback with all the clues in place was maybe unintentionally funny. Lester running and texting about his murder as though he already knew it was going to happen certainly didn't feel natural. I don't know why they'd bother being so pedantic when the killer's identity wasn't especially tied to any narrative.
The most memorable part was the setup for next season at the end and the characters bickering over what constitutes a murder "in the building".
Only Murders in the Building is available on Disney+/Hulu.
I also watched a second season episode of Deep Space Nine last night on Netflix. I don't like to pay for both services at the same time but my pause on Disney+ doesn't go into effect until November 7th.
"Invasive Procedures" is an episode in which the space station is taken over by a group of criminals headed by a Trill played by John Glover, best known now for his role as the media mogul in Gremlins 2. The Trill are a species that can use large, slug-like "symbionts" to form a consciousness comprised of their humanoid brain and a mass of life experiences contained in the symbionts from previous hosts. In this episode, the John Glover Trill wants to take the symbiont from Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell). I do miss the days when we could have an hour of prime time television exploring what it means for a sentient being to have its consciousness divided between an internal organ and a surgically implanted slug.
Mulder and Scully head to the woods to fight bugs in a 1994 episode of The X-Files called "Darkness Falls" written by series creator Chris Carter. This follows from "Shapes", another episode in which the pair of investigators visited woodland, which makes it feel slightly odd that this one spends more time with buildup. It's a welcome difference, though, as the tension in this episode derives from their distance from civilisation, the state of their vehicle, and the reliability of a cabin generator.
The episode really needs all this because the evil bugs turn out to be a fairly unconvincing glowing green glitter effect. However, the cocooned, desiccated bodies of victims they find are pretty cool. I also like how the episode plays with the relationship between eco-terrorists and loggers in Washington State. Washington is of course near Vancouver, the show's normal filming location, which seems like it should have made filming easy, though according to the Wikipedia entry it turned out to be an unexpected nightmare due to weather conditions.
A nun's frequent, bizarre visions of holy figures and manifestations of stigmata upend the normal life of a 17th century convent in Paul Verhoeven's 2021 film Benedetta. Beautifully shot with great performances, this is one I've been wanting to see ever since it came out. The first half of the film exceeded my expectations but I was a little disappointed in the second half. On the whole, though, this was a very worthy experience.
We meet Benedetta as a child on the road to a convent in Pescia. There, her parents hope to deposit the girl who routinely has wild visions of the Virgin Mary. They're waylaid by bandits, one of whom attempts to steal a necklace from Benedetta's mother. Benedetta calls down the wrath of the Virgin and immediately a bird flies out of a tree and poops in one bandit's eye. They laugh, return the necklace, and leave. I would have preferred at least a hint of awe in their reaction.
The tension between whether Benedetta is actually experiencing and/or causing miracles is one of the driving forces of the narrative. After being accepted at the convent, the film jumps ahead 18 years. Now played by Virginie Efira, Benedetta the young woman is something of an embarrassment to the Abbess Felicita, played by Charlotte Rampling.
Felicita is one of the film's more interesting characters and I sort of wonder if this was due to a stipulation from Rampling. Felicita's daughter, Christina (Louise Chevillotte), is more vigorous in her hatred of Benedetta and is even willing to stretch the truth when making accusations. Felicita is wise, tactful, and prudent and that same doggedly rational thinking prevents her from wholeheartedly persecuting Benedetta.
The film's loosely based on a true story of a 17th century nun. The primary mistake Verhoeven makes is focusing too much on Benedetta's sexual relationship with a novice nun, Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), making it the crux of Benedetta's troubles with church authorities. In reality, it was Benedetta's bizarre ceremonies and possessions that mainly landed her in hot water. Verhoeven transplants too much of a modern attitude about homosexuality to the 17th century. He does avoid using the terms "lesbian" or "homosexual", neither of which were yet in use to refer to same sex physical attraction, the latter not being coined until the 19th century. But part of the reason for this is simply that people just weren't much concerned about what women were doing with each other in bed. The biblical Book of Ruth may even have been used as an example to support an intimate relationship between Benedetta and Bartolomea. Maybe this is why Verhoeven awkwardly chose to add a wooden dildo to their relationship. Maybe he'd have argued that a movie in which Benedetta's claims of being possessed by holy figures would simply not satisfy a modern audience.
I really liked Bartolomea as she's first introduced, running from her abusive shepherd father. She introduces a carnal element to Benedetta's life and I appreciated small details of historical perspective presented by her character, as when Benedetta tells her she's beautiful and the girl remarks that she didn't know, she'd never even seen a mirror. She and Benedetta use the latrine together, the first time for Bartolomea to experience such a luxury. She remarks that she'd normally just go out and shit among the animals. The two women use straw for toilet paper which certainly adds some perspective as to the probable state of their nether regions during the sex scenes.
Benedetta strongly reminds me of Flesh and Blood, Verhoeven's 1985 film. Both films are periods pieces (Flesh and Blood set in 16th century Italy), both feature main characters who adopt messianic roles of uncertain legitimacy, and both feature the characters in somewhat anachronistically extravagant sexual relationships. Both films are otherwise admirable for their attention to, and inspiration drawn from, historical detail. Both films seem to lose focus a bit in the second half. Both were box office disappointments, not even coming close to recouping their substantial budgets.
Both are well worth watching, though. Virigie Efira is a worthy successor to Sharon Stone in Verhoeven's Basic Instinct and Total Recall, delivering a similarly cocksure, slightly unhinged performance.
Benedetta is available on The Criterion Channel in their Nunsploitation playlist.
I have to admit, I often don't understand why something becomes popular. I saw the new Netflix series, Black Rabbit, was number one in the U.S. Nielson ratings so I watched the first episode last night. I don't get it. I mean, good for Jude Law and Jason Bateman, I think they're both good actors. But why is this number one and Jude Law's previous series, Skeleton Crew, not? I guess people really like Jason Bateman. Was Ozark this popular?
Black Rabbit focuses on a New York restaurant founded by two brothers, played by Law and Batemen. Law's character is in charge of the place when the show starts while Bateman's getting into trouble out west. A deal where he's trying to sell a collection of coins to some shady guys instead of at a collector's shop for some reason goes sour and he kills one of them. So he high tails it back to New York.
It's not bad I guess but it's . . . not much. No witty dialogue, no interesting plot twists or fresh premise. It's a couple of guys and a restaurant with some crime thrown in. Maybe it's a slow burn. No idea why this is number one.
Black Rabbit is available on Netflix.
X Sonnet 1965
Aggressive white was pushed with chalk and paste.
A green became a faded black by dusk.
The gleeful ghouls of rot patrol the waste.
Their noses root a blackened pumpkin husk.
Unsated by the candle throat, they burn.
They ravage suns from careful patterns stitched.
From nature find they nothing sweet to learn.
At every chance their sour humour switched.
To rule the body, all the heads were guts.
To covet rule, the brain was turned to squash.
On every candy corn, the strawman gluts.
With stinking orange goo, the bastard washed.
A pumpkin patch is sinking 'neath the bog.
To fill the void, there comes a poison fog.
I woke up at around 2am and read the latest Sirenia Digest, which contains a new Caitlin R. Kiernan story called "PALE ROLLERS". As Digest stories go, it's uncommonly straightforward, the narrative book-ended by a present tense account of the narrator's trip to sea in a small boat. His destination is a mysterious spot related to an object he acquires in the middle section of the story, in the past, at a curiosity shop where objects choose their purchasers.
By keeping the supernatural and narrative experimentation to more of a minimum than usual, Caitlin achieves a milder, but potent sense of threatening weirdness.
Of course, people love to talk about Ohtani here in Japan. I don't follow professional sports at all but I kind of like how Ohtani has an old fashioned, Joe DiMaggio, national hero quality. I guess Ohtani would be better called an international hero.
"Shapes", an episode of The X-Files from April 1, 1994, is another one to feature a familiar face from Twin Peaks. This time it's Michael Horse who, like Don Davis before him, basically plays the same character he did on Twin Peaks, only now it's in a werewolf story. Not a bad one but this is not generally considered The X-Files' finest hour.
Mulder and Scully go to investigate some killings on a Native American reservation. A naked man is shot by a rancher who claims to have seen not a man but a vicious animal. It turns out to be part of a pattern tied into ancient legends of the manitou.
The episode's Wikipedia entry claims it was criticised for portraying a manitou as essentially a werewolf. The current Wikipedia page for manitou is very short, It begins by describing the manitou as "the fundamental life force in the theologies of the Algonquian peoples." If you check the editing history of the page, you find the word was once considered to have more variant meanings among the Algonquian people. In 2013, the entry said, "Manitou are the spirit beings of Algonquian groups of Native Americans. Manitou is similar to the East Asian qi, the Hindu Brahman or the Japanese kami." There's no citation for this reference while the new version of the entry cites only a book published in 2001.
It's fun watching Mulder and Scully pitted against a werewolf. As usual in pre-cgi movies and television, the werewolf looks more like a gorilla so you rarely get a good look at it. Actually, I still don't feel like anyone's done a proper werewolf in a movie. I do like the one in Skyrim quite a bit.
In my recent Twin Peaks rewatch, I came to episode 14 a few days ago, the one in which Laura Palmer's killer is revealed. It's been said since that Lynch never intended to reveal the killer's identity and that he wanted it to be a perpetual mystery in the background. I can see the appeal of that. When I watch the show with someone who hasn't seen it, I'm made freshly aware of how much of the show's excitement lived in the uncertainty surrounding most of the characters. Almost anyone could be Laura Palmer's killer. But it's hard to wish for a world in which the perfectly constructed episode 14 doesn't exist.
I love the sense of overlapping realities and perspectives. There's the murder scene which continually switches between the two actors who represent the killer in the dream world and the waking world, there's the shift between the performance by Julee Cruise at the roadhouse and the Giant in that other reality, communicating to Agent Cooper.
I suppose this is the real pivot point, this is where the show stops being a murder mystery and becomes a fantasy series as the driving narrative arc slowly becomes exploring the mystery of the Black Lodge. Before it was the supernatural serving the murder mystery, from here it's the murder plots serving the supernatural. It could be argued that this is what lost the public as much as David Lynch's absence. It's hard to separate the two, I guess, if Lynch truly didn't want the killer to be revealed. Yet it's a very influential aspect of the show, most obviously on The X-Files. In returning to direct the final episode, Lynch manages to make it viscerally as well as conceptually interesting, something he does more fully in the third season.
The other direction could have been something like Fire Walk with Me, using the supernatural as a means of exploring the emotional state of someone involved in otherwise earthly concerns, following in the vein of Laura Palmer's Secret Diary. I'm not sure if that could've been sustained successfully for a full season. The domestic problems haunt the supernatural problems in season three like soil on which strange plants grow. There's Diane's recollection of assault and what it means considering what her character ends up being. There's the contemplation of the relationship between Cooper's moral nature and the fracturing of his identity across multiple characters whose motives and actions vary in purity. One things for sure, none of it would be even half as interesting without Lynch.
Last night's Only Murders in the Building was directed by the prolific Jamie Babbit and featured a tighter focus on this season's murder mystery. This season, it's been the murder of the building's elderly doorman, Lester. One of the gags recurring throughout is about a robotic replacement for the dead man called LESTR. LESTR partially narrates the episode. It was kind of funny.
The suspect becomes Lester's human replacement, Randall. Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez all fail to run after him, two of them because they're too old and one of them because she's wearing awkward shoes. Nathan Lane returns to have wine with Selena Gomez. None of it was riotously funny or gripping but it was cosy viewing.
Next week's episode is the finale. This show has been one of the things that mark autumn for me in lieu of an actual change in the weather though the past couple days have suddenly been really chilly. It's amazing, it's like someone flipped a switch.
Only Murders in the Building is available on Disney+ and/or Hulu.
A teenage boy discovers his best friend is not his best friend but a mysterious entity that took his friend's place in 2025's The Summer Hikaru Died (光が死んだ夏). I've watched the first two episodes of this intriguing series that conjures a sinister, anxious mood.
Yoshiki (Kobayashi Chiaki) and Hikaru (Umeda Shuichiro) are sitting and chatting one day when Yoshiki casually remarks that Hikaru is not really Hikaru at all. Hikaru laughs sheepishly and admits the real Hikaru died in the woods and that the boy sitting beside Yoshiki is a counterfeit, the creation of an entity that struggles to describe itself. Evidence of its supernatural nature becomes clear when part of Hikaru's face melts into an iridescent fluid mass that begins to reach for Yoshiki's face.
The two remain friends because, with all the normal stresses of teenage life, Yoshiki needs a best friend. I've often observed how important best friends are to students in Japan, which makes sense in Japan's collectivist culture in which self-perception is formed by a continuous feedback loop of perceived impressions from others. This makes the nature of this Hikaru entity all the more intriguing and gives the show a great deal of relevance for the real adolescent experience. As puberty causes the world to seem bigger and stranger, our own identities become as uncertain as those of the people around us. The uncertainty of Hikaru's identity and true nature creates a fundamental uncertainty in Yoshiki's own self-perception.
I can see the influences of Evangelion and a few other things. There's even a touch of Cronenberg in the second episode when Hikaru opens his shirt to reveal a large vertical slit similar to the one James Woods has in Videodrome and the vaginal symbolism is just as apparent and intended. As the relationship between Hikaru and Yoshiki becomes stranger, it seems inevitable somehow that it would become more intimate.
A boy holds onto his dreams of music stardom for a journey into the underworld in 2017's Coco. Among the more beloved Pixar films, Coco succeeds in being more than a Day of the Dead gimmick by offering genuine insight into family psychology at odds with the youthful desire for self-realisation.
I remember in Desmond Morris' Human Animal series a scene of a baby crawling away from his parents and Morris remarked on how from even a very early age the human child has an instinctive desire to run away from safety in an effort to find its own identity. In Coco, Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) is a boy whose passionate desire to be a musician is at odds with his family's peculiar, systematic hatred of all things musical. It's more than just an aesthetic preoccupation, of course, it's an indicator of skeletons in the family closet, both literal and figurative.
Disney, for a long time, was criticised for repeatedly giving us rebellious teenage protagonists but teens are often rebellious. It's simply human nature. If Miguel gives up music, what can he be but just another caricature in the assembly? One could argue life's bigger and more complex than a choice between two extremes, a fact grasped better by adults than children, which leads to their inability to understand the child's polar thinking. But that's as much naivete on the adult's part as it is the child's rashness, because the dichotomy is real because the conflict is real. So it makes sense that Miguel, being trapped in the Land of the Dead, refuses his great grandmother's blessing because it comes with the condition that he renounce music. He runs deeper into the underworld even though it may cost him his life. And he's quite right to. If he can't live according to his principles, is he truly living?
The other side of the coin is existence for adults, whose need to be remembered is here prompted by true existential peril. Just as Miguel needs to define himself, Hector needs to be remembered--crucially for his creative prowess and ability to delight others. What may seem an adolescent vanity to impatient adults remains a crucial aspect of existence throughout life and afterlife.
I found the movie extremely predictable. I knew exactly what would happen when Miguel met the famous singer and how the plot would transpire with Miguel's new friend, Hector (Gael Garcia Bernal). But it didn't matter. The performances and animation are both good and the Day of the Dead aesthetic is fun and lovely. I loved all the marigold petals.
When one first hears the term "nunsploitation", one likely imagines something like 1977's Behind Convent Walls (Interno di un convento). It's crazy nuns, running around, indulging in sexual mayhem with themselves and each other. It also happens to be a very well shot film with some stills resembling Caravaggio paintings.
It was a time when people were trying out erotic film as a serious artform and sometimes gave it production values to match. Director Walerian Borowczyk was described by critics as a "genius who also happened to be a pornographer" according to Wikipedia.
The film doesn't really have anything to say that wasn't said better by Black Narcissus or Mother Joan of the Angels but it has a lot of charming moments. In one scene two nuns bicker over the handsomeness of the men they have sketched in their notebooks, hidden between the pages.
Behind Convent Walls is available on The Criterion Channel now as part of a Nunsploitation collection.
X Sonnet 1964
The angry weakened bird was watching paint.
Compelling boredom packed its sugar tight.
A syrup corn has made a cheapened saint.
Some extra chalk can ape a fractured light.
The board was dry as bone by morning crow.
The rooster roots for hens who like to love.
So Cupid draws his modern super bow.
The feathered shaft was just a ragged dove.
You see in dreams, a troupe of troubled nuns.
They divvy beer to stave the hunger off.
And wish for wheat to bake their daily buns.
A fast can pierce the heart in reckless sloth.
The shadows dance a copy caper slow.
What near the chapel has a ruddy glow?
