Double DD Day

For some reason, two new episodes of Daredevil: Born Again were released on Wednesday, episodes two and three, written by Dario Scardapane and Heather Bellson, respectively. I have to say, the Heather Bellson episode was much stronger but I'm not feeling good about the writing on this season overall.

Scardapane's episode ended with Karen punching out a guy in full body armour. I've complained about this with Disney Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Disney seems to think the only qualification someone needs to knock someone out with a single punch is to be a main character. One of the most egregious examples was at lease only in a comic, when Princess Leia knocked out a stormtrooper with a single punch. That's something no-one ever did in the original trilogy. I know we've seen Karen training with Matt but even Daredevil usually has to have a fight scene with the AVTF guys. Maybe the intention was to imply that Karen had an extended fight scene off-screen but that wouldn't make sense given that the guy ends up being someone who wants to work with them. At the beginning of the third episode, at least a metallic sound effect was added to imply Karen used some kind of metal object to knock the guy out. I think during editing someone realised One-Punch-Karen was a dumb idea. I thought this season wasn't going to be sloppy.

There was also a scene in the second episode in which Detective Kim shows up at the bar and it's not clear if she's a threat or not. Then there's some obvious ADR in which she hastily praises "the resistance" and being a rebel. Is this one of those things for people who are scrolling through their phones while the show is on? It really doesn't feel like a good idea to use the term "resistance" again.

Okay, there were things I liked, particularly in the third episode. Lili Taylor as the New York governor immediately has a strong presence and seems like a real threat to Fisk. Tony Dalton and Michael Gandolfini both gave exceptional supporting performances, particularly Dalton who's as effective in the extended action scene as he was in the courtroom or in prison.

The similarities between the AVTF and ICE were both stronger and weaker. The AVTF guys seem more driven by ideology while the ICE guys seem more like armed thugs. But as the AVTF seems to be targeting immigrants more and more it's harder to believe the resemblance is accidental.

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.

The Train's Various Occupants

Since I'm leaving Japan to return to America soon, and will be visiting Tennessee relatively soon, it seemed like a good time to watch Jim Jarmusch's 1989 film Mystery Train again, a film I'd not seen since high school. It's one of Jarmusch's best, probably my favourite of his films. It's an anthology film featuring three interconnected stories about foreigners visiting Memphis, Tennessee.

The first story features a Japanese couple. Having lived in Japan six years now, I was surprised at how authentic the characters seemed in terms of dialogue and performance in comparison to depictions of Japanese people from other American films. Then I read that the film was co-produced by a Japanese company and it made sense. The couple's reaction to a fast speaking American woman in this clip is not unlike reactions I've occasionally seen among students when they hear English.

That's Nagase Masatoshi as Jun and Kudoh Youki as Mitsuko. Since this movie was made decades before A.I. we can all be impressed by Nagase's skill at lighting a cigarette:

I wonder how many times he practiced that. He's so nonchalant.

Mitsuko might be classified nowadays as a "manic pixie dream girl" but I've met a lot of Japanese girls like her. They're just as fun to talk to as you might imagine but you shouldn't mistake enthusiasm for a lack of depth.

The second segment features an Italian woman (Nicoletta Brashci) stranded in Memphis and the third story features Steve Buscemi, Joe Strummer, and Rick Aviles as a trio of low-lives who rob a liquor store. Joe Strummer is the same Joe Strummer you may know as the lead singer of The Clash and I enjoyed his performance here. He's from England, of course, but Buscemi is also a kind of foreigner here, being from New Jersey. All the segments are good but the Japanese couple are by far the best. Their segment best captures the idea present in all three stories of cultural exchanges mysterious in their simultaneous intimacy and inscrutability.

Screamin' Jay Hawkins is in all three segments as the hotel night clerk and Tom Waits plays a DJ heard on the radio in each segment.

Mystery Train is available on The Criterion Channel.

Who's the Custodian of a Relationship?

Kim Novak's commented on an upcoming film about her relationship with Sammy Davis, Jr. Apparently she's unhappy with Sydney Sweeney playing her in the movie. Novak complains Sweeney "sticks out so much above the waist," and fears the movie will focus too much on the sexuality of the relationship.

"There’s no way it wouldn't be a sexual relationship because Sydney Sweeney looks sexy all the time," Novak said. There's some irony here because, in her day, Novak was criticised for being all sex appeal with no real acting talent. Even Alfred Hitchcock described her as "terrible" in his interview with Francois Truffaut while Truffaut praised her "passive, animal" quality, which may have been another way of saying she was sexy.

I think Sweeney's a good actress, I enjoyed her performance in The Voyeurs a few days ago. She certainly does "stick out above he waist" more than Novak ever did but I can't honestly complain about that. I mean, she has extremely nice breasts. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the epitome of muscularity in film, Sydney Sweeney epitomises the bust. In addition to this, her face and mannerisms don't much resemble Novak. Better casting might have been a young Christina Ricci. Jeez, can I think of anyone who's in the right age group now? Jenna Ortega? I must have Wednesday on my mind. Well, both Wednesday actresses exhibit that "passive, animal quality" Truffaut talked about. Natalie Portman or Patricia Arquette would've been good.

Kim Novak is 93 years old and it's worth noting that works of film media have become much more preoccupied with overt sexuality than they were when Novak was a major player in Hollywood. She remembers the relationship between herself and Sammy Davis, Jr. as something valuable for having "so much in common." Sex was probably a very small component of the relationship for her. On the one hand, there's a difference in generational values at play, but on the other hand, Novak is quite justified in being offended that a personal relationship of hers is being mischaracterised and potentially dismissive of the thing she felt was truly valuable in it. Instead of just saying she's old fashioned, I think it's worth pondering whether or not our society has become one that prioritises sex too much and has lost the ability to value other aspects of a romantic relationship, aspects that, in the long run, are far more important.

Slayers Excluded

I noticed a lot of positive PR for Sarah Michelle Gellar has been turning up on my Facebook feed. I guess it's damage control after the Buffy reboot failed to take off. Meanwhile, I'm still watching the original and I got to one of the weakest plot points in the final season, coming from an April 29, 2003 episode called "Empty Places" written by Drew Z. Greenberg. In this one, Buffy is kicked out of her house by her sister and all her friends because she wants to attack the season's villain, Caleb (Nathan Fillion).

I feel like the way this happened in the writers' room was that someone made an outline and said, "Wouldn't it be wonderfully dramatic if Buffy was rejected by everyone only to come back at a crucial moment to save the day?" Yes, but can this be accomplished in a sensible way? They're fighting a monster that can overpower their most powerful fighter easily and who apparently can attack them any time, anywhere. So Buffy's plan to go on the offensive isn't preposterous. But even if everyone disagrees with her, it hardly seems sufficient justification to throw her out and shun her.

If they really wanted this particular dramatic arc, they needed to provide better motivation for Buffy's friends and followers. Maybe they could've had Buffy cross a line, apparently break some part of the group's moral code. Maybe she could have acquired some kind of dangerous demoniac power that made her proximity seem a threat to everyone. I don't know.

Anyway, with Buffy gone, the other Slayer, Faith (Eliza Dushku), takes over, the original outcast bad girl. She is a more interesting and concrete character than Buffy overall. It was nice having an appearance by Harry Groener as the mayor in the subsequent episode, her boss from season three, giving her an opportunity to show how she's matured and become more self-possessed.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is available on Disney+.

Sonnet 1986

The milk of knowing plants was rare and warm.
Decisive snails were slowly taking charge.
Collected dolls did not foresee the swarm.
They only saw the gang of crooks at large.
Dalmatians mount the stage of turtle woe.
No spots would grace the pigeon's fluffy coat.
Combustion turned the steamy cup of joe.
Ideas began to overtake the goat.
The placid mammal raised a group of cubs.
Concussive ropes resound about the brig.
No players joined the wood tobacco clubs.
No grabbers took the candy coated cig.
The gentle balance fell between the sheets.
The soap contains excessive boiled beats.

Living In a TV

A young man's moral crisis is experienced in a dreamlike series of events involving video tape in 1989's Speaking Parts, a Canadian film directed by Atom Egoyan. The film's subtext regarding the simultaneous distance and extraordinary intimacy of video media is fascinating and reminded me a bit of Inland Empire or Videodrome.

Lance (Michael McManus) and Lisa (Arsinee Khanjian) are housekeepers at an expensive hotel. One day, Lance finds a movie script in a hotel room and cons his way into getting an audition. Around this time, he stops speaking to Lisa, who was possibly his lover. Lisa claims Lance was her lover but it's not clear if Lisa understands reality in the same way most people do.

Lance has worked as an extra on various movies and Lisa regularly rents them at the local video store so she can watch him in the background of various scenes. Eddy (Tony Nardi), the proprietor of the video store, takes an interest in Lisa. They get to talking about Eddy's sideline as an event photographer and occasional interviewer and immediately Lisa wants to conduct interviews for Eddy. This is a job Lisa is woefully unqualified for. In her first attempt, she interviews a bubbly, happy young bride at a wedding. Lisa is a foreigner with a thick accent and unshaven eyebrows. She's clearly never spent time in Hollywood circles or even among the popular girls at school. She's an introvert and all of her questions sound demanding and uncomfortably fervent. She's the food lover who thinks her love can make her a good chef. But getting people to talk and open up is a skill one has to develop and the poor young bride starts to panic and cry in response to Lisa's existential questions, particularly a strange one about how you "feel your love" in your partner.

So from this, it's not entirely clear if Lisa and Lance were ever together or if it was all in Lisa's imagination. We never see Lance actually speaking to her as a lover.

Meanwhile, Lance gets to know Clara (Gabrielle Rose), the woman who wrote the script he found. It turns out the script is a true story about Clara's brother who donated a lung to her. However, the director wants to fundamentally alter the script so Clara implores Lance to demand changes once he gets the role.

Lance and Clara sleep together but after that they communicate almost entirely through video conference. At one point, they masturbate for each other, Lance watching her on the little CRT television. The director of the film Clara wrote the screenplay for only speaks to her through the same method, signifying the communications barrier he puts between them.

It's hard to imagine what it was like in 1989 now that we live in this world where video communication is common and porn is ubiquitous. But the movie doesn't feel irrelevant. If anything, it makes me wonder at some fundamental aspect of human perception that may have been lost or altered in the years since.

Meanwhile, Lisa begins to experience what may be full blown hallucinations involving video that somehow may make a real link between her and Lance. The line between subjective and objective becomes increasingly difficult to perceive. Which is a point well taken.

Speaking Parts is available on The Criterion Channel.

I Wonder You

I felt bad for casting aspersions on Wonder Man without watching it properly so I went back and watched the first two episodes. It's not as bad as I originally thought though it does fail the test, "Would I Watch This If It Weren't the MCU?"

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Simon Williams. In the comics, Wonder Man was a supervillain who became a superhero who eventually became a Hollywood actor. In the MCU version, Simon watches Wonder Man movies as a kid and grows up wanting to play the fictional superhero. In the first episode he meets Trevor Slattery, a recurring MCU character played by Ben Kingsley. He first appeared in Iron Man 3 and in short films. The director of the first two episodes of Wonder Man, Destin Daniel Cretton, directed Shang-Chi, in which Trevor Slattery also appeared.

In this show, Slattery is a pathetic has-been, a more forlorn version of Steve Martin's character on Only Murders in the Building. Simon's youthful over-enthusiasm gives the two nicely contrasting personalities. Kingsley gives a good performance, of course. Abdul-Mateen II is a little bland but sometimes charismatic. It's nice listening to them trade movie trivia.

Joe Pantoliano plays himself. In the MCU, he used to star on a hospital drama with Trevor. There's a funny scene in the second episode involving him. Pantoliano is so good, gives such a sharp, witty performance, it's kind of a shame he isn't playing a superhero or something. Maybe he will anyway.

Hollywood loves to make movies about itself but they're only occasionally successful at the box office. Here's my top ten list:

10. Tropic Thunder
9. The Other Side of the Wind
8. All About Eve
7. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
6. In a Lonely Place
5. Inland Empire
4. Sullivan's Travels
3. Sunset Boulevard
2. Singin' In the Rain
1. Mulholland Drive

Wonder Man is available on Disney+.

A Human Work

Yesterday, Melania Trump appeared at the White House with a robot who speaks with pronounced vocal fry. I guess if your robot's going to resemble a berserk killing machine from Evangelion, having it sound like a 20 something barista is one way to counterbalance the horror.

Should I say it or she? I don't know, there will need to be a courtroom drama about robot pronouns.

Commander Data provides a Merriam-Webster definition of "android"--"an automaton made to resemble a human being." Melania's robot refers to itself as a "humanoid" which, on Star Trek and elsewhere, typically means an alien life form that bears at least some rudimentary resemblance to a human. I suppose they didn't use "android" for fear of legal troubles with Google's Android phone. Ironically, Google's Android was originally to be called "Droid" until there was the possibility of legal trouble with Lucasfilm because that's the word for robots in the Star Wars movies. So we have a little game of copyright musical chairs to reshape the landscape of our language.

Melania's robot notably doesn't take any questions and it seems like the barista speech was pre-recorded, possibly by a real barista. Though AI and synthetic voice generative software would seem to be far enough along to have such a level of communicative ability in a robot. Maybe there's not enough room for it amidst everything it needs to sense its environment and control its own movements in response. Human bipedal motion is a more delicate and complicated procedure than we're typically conscious of.

It was an altogether unimpressive demonstration, now that I think about it. Why am I even writing about it? Well, artificially intelligent robots seem like an inevitability at this point. Maybe this is a sign we can at least rest easy that they won't be working for Trump.

The Devil's in His Kitchen

The first episode of the new season of Daredevil: Born Again does feel more solid than season one. I don't know if this indicates a better season overall but the pacing felt more natural, conversations didn't feel oddly crammed into blocks of a few minutes. The action scenes are better but still nowhere near the level of the old Netflix series. The performances are good with one new supporting character being a standout.

During the whole Paul Dano non-controversy in which Quentin Tarantino criticised the actor, Tarantino also took a swipe at Matthew Lillard. This basically confirmed for me that Tarantino had not watched Twin Peaks season three because anyone who's seen that amazing 18 hour work of art knows that Matthew Lillard can be really impressive. As a new character on Daredevil, he infuses a lot of life and intrigue into the scenes he appears in.

He plays Mr. Charles, some kind of fixer working for Fisk. A lot of people are talking about how eerily Wilson Fisk's "Anti-Vigilante Task Force" resembles ICE under the Trump administration, especially considering that people who worked on the show claim everything in season two was written two years ago. I don't necessarily believe that. Although the makers of the show obviously wanted to avoid the schizophrenic quality of Born Again's first season, Disney and Marvel are, I think, too addicted to late stage tampering to have abstained from it entirely.

But Vincent D'Onofrio's version of Wilson Fisk was always based on Trump, at least a little, even in the first season of the Netflix series. He was a greedy, tacky landlord in that, just like Trump was primarily a greedy, tacky landlord in the '80s. Though one of the best things about the Netflix Daredevil series was how complex Fisk's character was. I think some people are afraid of making villains too sympathetic so they actively avoid making them complex. But one thing Andor showed was that you could reveal the humanity of your villains without making them enviable. The audience sympathises with Dedra Meero but no-one would want to follow in her footsteps.

So the Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF) resembles ICE because they work for a Trump figure and they're a bunch of chubby guys in bullet proof vests, beating up innocent people. They're a simplistic bunch of comic book thugs; it's not hard for them to superficially resemble something because they're not very complex. So I don't find the parallel very interesting in itself but I do find it interesting that such a broad, two dimensional villain resembles people in the news. Partly this is an indication of the oversimplified narrative presented in modern news media, partly it's an indication of a real moral void in American leadership and law enforcement.

So far I'm not getting a whole lot from the character development this season though I did like the conversation between Karen and BB about her uncle. I really like the line Karen repeats, "The easiest people to manipulate are manipulators." I think that's a line from the old series, I'm not sure. In any case, it's a surprisingly astute observation from a show like this.

I didn't like the dialogue doubling down on the "Nelson, Murdoch, and Page" thing that seems to be retconning the old law firm to have included Karen as a partner. Does she have a law degree now?

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.

The Malaise of Dangerous Men

Terence Stamp rats on his former comrades in the London mob and is thenceforth marked for death, pursued by John Hurt and Tim Roth in 1984's The Hit. This Stephen Frears film has a surprisingly effective tone of detached, melancholic comedy.

For his courtroom betrayal, Stamp's character, Willie, is rewarded with a new life in Spain under witness protection. However, a pair of hitman working for his old crew track him down, kidnap him, and start driving him to Paris, where they expect to meet up with the boss. At this point the film becomes a road movie.

John Hurt and Tim Roth play the two hitmen, Braddock and Myron. Hurt is cool, detached, and experienced while Roth, whose first film this was, plays Myron as a naive young hoodlum. Willie is surprisingly calm and jovial and subtly starts trying to play his two captors against each other.

Braddock is experienced but he starts making a number of mistakes. He takes a woman hostage, Maggie (Laura del Sol), whom Willie observes ought to have been executed immediately. Both Braddock and Myron seem attracted to her, Myron the more foolishly, but Braddock's hesitation from harming her seems strange when the filmmakers go to such pains to establish him as a cold blooded psycho.

According to Wikipedia, this is one of Wes Anderson's favourite British films and it makes sense with the film's subtly twisted moral comment and delicately comedic chemistry.

The Hit is available on The Criterion Channel.

Who are You Watching?

Sydney Sweeney finds out there's more to spying on your neighbours than you might expect in 2021's The Voyeurs. It's basically a loose remake of Rear Window but it's quite good for that. The moral crisis Sweeney's character finds herself in in the climax is kind of exquisite.

Sweeney plays Pippa, an optometrist who's just moved into a fabulous new apartment with her boyfriend, Thomas (Justice Smith). Their apartment has massive floor-to-ceiling windows through which they can easily see into the apartment across the street. That apartment also has the massive windows but the curtains are never closed and the lights are always on. Inhabiting the apartment are a professional photographer, Seb (Ben Hardy), with a studio inside the apartment, and his girlfriend, Julia (Natasha Liu Bordizzo). The two don't seem at all conscious of the fact that their most private moments are on display for everyone across the street.

One flaw in the film's logic is that it doesn't consider the possibility of anyone else in Pippa and Thomas' building being able to see these neighbours and events proceed as though only Pippa and Thomas can see in. They are thus forced to grapple with the responsibility they have for witnessing disturbing incidents.

Some reviews say the second half of the film is ludicrous but I'd say those critics forget the fact that first part of the film is also ludicrous. It's just that the first part of the film gives us a premise we're more used to accepting in fiction. Hitchcock played with this idea in Vertigo in which the first half of the film gives us a bunch of absurd stuff we're used to accepting from movies, but then Hitchcock pulls the rug out from under the viewer. The Voyeurs doesn't do that but it does go somewhere interesting. I suspect the second half of the film was taken in a slightly different direction than what was originally in the screenplay after Sydney Sweeney was cast because it makes very good use of her famously "good genes". But it works wonderfully.

The first half of the film does a good job of slowly building Pippa and Thomas from characters who can't help watching what's very much on display to actively spying, going to complicated lengths to improve their surveillance methods. It's Pippa in particular who compulsively concocts moral justifications despite the fact that she's primarily deriving sexual gratification from the experience. This shaky moral ground leads to some scenes of impressively sexy subtext when Pippa finally meets the two neighbours, particularly in the case of Seb who, with his photographer's eye, turns the tables on Pippa. What happens to Pippa after that is a bit underplayed in my opinion. She's subjected to such severe physical and psychological violation that I feel like her trauma would've been far greater than what we see. But there is a sequence of Pippa really losing her shit and smashing things and Sweeney's performance does convey the idea of someone being stripped of both confidence in her capacity for rational thought and all sense of moral justification so. She's almost bestial, driven back to a primal motive.

The Voyeurs is available on Amazon Prime.

Homecoming

Nine years later, Spider-Man: Homecoming holds up really well. Yeah, that's right, it was made in 2017, it's been almost a decade of Tom Holland's Spider-Man. I was watching Homecoming last night and feeling really surprised at how much better it's written than the follow up films. I vividly remember how badly written Far from Home was. I guess the late 2010s marks the shift in Disney's policy, away from hiring quality writers in favour of cheaper, more easily dominated young writers.

Homecoming's screenplay is credited to three separate writing duos--(1)Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, (2) Jon Watts and Christopher Ford, and (3) Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers. Watts is the director and he and Ford later wrote Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. McKenna and Sommers are the sole credited writers of Far from Home, No Way Home, and Brand New Day. Goldstein and Daley are the writers and directors of Game Night and Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, movies that have thrived on streaming, the true test of a film's writing quality. When a film attracts regular viewing even though it's either not connected to a popular franchise or it's connected to a franchise audiences had low expectations for (Dungeons and Dragons), it's a pretty reliable metric of quality. That's why Homecoming is so good, that's why Disney won't work with Goldstein and Daley anymore. Yes, I think Disney's current regime actively discourages quality as cost-prohibitive.

Also I wonder if Disney's current administration actively discourages tension in their movies, for fear of movies being too traumatising for young viewers. The set pieces in Homecoming are wonderful back-and-forths between tension and comedy. When Spider-Man has to save his friends from the Washington Monument, the filmmakers squeeze every ounce of tension they can from the scenario. They even use comedy to feed it as when the elevator operator's banal reassurances of safety are directly contradicted by the computer in Spider-Man's suit. They throw in the tension around Spider-Man being actually stunned by how high and isolated the monument is, underlying that if he were to fall, his spider tricks couldn't save him. There's a basic sense of the physical reality at play that's missing from so many newer screenplays.

Anyway, I'm still looking forward to Brand New Day but I wish Disney would prioritise writing. People seem to be complaining about the special effects but the effects wouldn't matter so much if the screenplays were better. Also, I think the trailer is showing alternate versions of shots from the final film in which certain spoiler related elements have been removed. A lot of people seem to think Peter is becoming a mutant in the trailer but I maintain my interpretation that he's in fact acquired the Venom symbiote.

Nicholas Brendon

Nicholas Brendon has died at just 54 years old. Some may find it odd that I mention his death when I didn't mention Chuck Norris. I've never been a Chuck Norris fan and it seems like most of his fans are ironic fans anyway. Even now they're sharing memes showing Norris readying for some smackdown in Heaven. The underlying joke generally seems always to have been, "Isn't it funny that this guy's supposed to be a badass?" I'm not a Chuck Norris fan but I can't get onboard the irony train.

Now, Nicholas Brendon was not among my favourite actors. He was one of the stars of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of my favourite TV series, which aired for seven seasons starting almost thirty years ago. He was probably my least favourite character but only by default. I didn't hate him. He played Xander, one of the core group of high school friends around Buffy who helped her slay vampires. Xander was generally seen as a stand-in for series creator Joss Whedon, who was cancelled a few years ago. In a video streamed a few days before his death, Brendon condemned the recent attempt at a reboot for trying to start the show up again without Whedon, whom Brendon said had been "punished enough". Brendon did voice some support for Charisma Carpenter when she made allegations about Whedon's "toxic" behaviour.

Brendon himself was guilty of unambiguously worse behaviour, having been arrested for domestic assault at least three times, in one case even attempting to strangle his girlfriend. He pleaded guilty to charges at the time. But to-day, Brendon's Buffy co-stars are publishing odes to the actor. Charisma Carpenter qualified her statement by saying, "I will miss the version of the man I once knew."

Meanwhile, I haven't found one article that even mentions attempting to contact Whedon for a comment on Brendon's death.

Sonnet 1985

As shadow shipment passed inspection late.
No citizen arranged the go between.
The crucial figures met, discussing fate.
Some story actions truth cannot redeem.
The tea was poured but all the cups were gone.
And now the table's wet and no-one knows.
The sketchy hostess holds an extra pawn.
His heart, beholding her, now warmly glows.
Some strings of garlic line the kitchen walls.
The water flowing out the door is deep.
Beyond the hills, a cloudy monster calls.
A stolen watch was really very cheap.
Mistaken thieves were taken back in time.
The markets now are all bereft of lime.

It's a Twin Peaks World

I started watching Twin Peaks season three again last night. That first episode is so brilliant. I think most people got the impression, when Twin Peaks first came out, that it was the citizens of Twin Peaks who were remarkable oddballs. Season three makes it clear that it's humanity in general that's odd. There are weird people in New York, in Las Vegas, and in a town called Buckhorn in South Dakota.

One of my favourite sequences in David Lynch's oeuvre is the one around Ruth Davenport's apartment. I wish there were clips of it on YouTube. Lynch shows again how inimitable his knack was for creating weird characters. People who try to imitate him are unable ot strike the balance required for credible weirdness. The characters use common phrases in such a way that you suddenly realise how odd common language is, like when Ruth's neighbour calls the police and can't remember her own address, saying helplessly, "You know I know this!"

I love the conversation between the police and the handyman who's immediately suspicious that police are there for him. I love how the character has a clear line of thought, how he's clearly working things out but from a completely wacked out standpoint, as when he asks the police, "How did you know I was going to see Chip?" Maybe this guy's a conspiracy theorist but he clearly also has something to hide that makes him anxious about the sudden appearance of the police. Even people who aren't up to anything get nervous when the police show up.

It almost seems like Lynch and Frost were trying to set up a spin-off set in Buckhorn. Maybe they were but, with the Roadhouse vignettes, it feels more like they were trying to set up an impression of this world of strange narratives all around us, happening all the time, that occasionally bump into each other leaving odd impressions. Again, it's strange, but also extremely realistic.

Alas, I can't find any Buckhorn clips. There are plenty of short Black Lodge clips though.

If You're Gonna Murder, Make It a Perfect Murder

Michael Douglas and Viggo Mortensen conspire to commit the perfect murder of Gwyneth Paltrow in 1998's A Perfect Murder, a loose remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder. It certainly doesn't improve on the original but its blander title is a fitting indicator of how unremarkable but not exactly bad the movie is.

Douglas plays another Wall Street guy, this time his name's Steven, and he's married to Paltrow's character, Emily. She's having an affair with pre-Lord of the Rings Viggo Mortensen who plays David, one of those bohemian movie artists who live in a massive loft space in a major city. Let's go back to that economy, okay?

It turns out Steven knows about his wife's affair but his reaction is to offer David half a million dollars to kill her. He gradually accepts the offer after some reluctance.

Well, let's get to the obvious question. Is it a perfect murder? The plan is to have David enter the wealthy couple's luxury apartment through a service door using Emily's key which Steven leaves taped under the railing of the stairwell. Steven knows Emily takes her bath at the same time he goes to his normal poker game which puts her in a vulnerable position while he has a solid alibi. It's very similar to the plot of Dial M for Murder and goes awry in basically the same way.

What are the flaws in this plan? Steven doesn't have as much leverage on David as Ray Milland's character has on his stooge in Dial M for Murder. Steven can reveal to people in town that David has a criminal past and an assumed name, but he doesn't have the blackmail material that Ray Milland has in the Hitchcock movie. A Perfect Murder combines two characters from the Hitchcock movie; the man the wife is having an affair with and the con-man who has to commit the actual murder. This makes Steven's proposal much riskier. There's a chance that David really does love Emily, as she apparently loves him, and the two might collude to effect Steven's demise.

Direction by Andrew Davis and cinematography by Dariusz Wolski are standard fare for a '90s thriller. Gwyneth Paltrow is very pretty and gives a good performance though there's not much to her character. She's a simultaneous translator fluent in multiple languages, reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn's character in Charade.

A Perfect Murder is available on The Criterion Channel.

Movie Business

I almost forgot all about the Oscars, even though I made predictions back in January. I was right about One Battle After Another winning in most categories but I was wrong about Teyana Taylor winning Best Supporting Actress. The award went to Amy Madigan from Weapons, which I've not seen. Taylor was also accidentally barred from taking the stage by a security guard. Someone must be sticking pins in her Voodoo doll. It sounds like she was pretty gracious, too, even celebrating the actress who won.

I'd say an even bigger scandal was the absence of Brigitte Bardot from the "In Memoriam" section. If the victory of One Battle After Another didn't tell you about the Academy's political alignment, Bardot's omission makes it perfectly clear. Whatever her politics in later life, Bardot's status as someone who fundamentally changed the global film industry can't be denied. Omitting her from the "In Memoriam" is absurd.

Also this week, a trailer for the upcoming Spider-Man movie has finally been released:

I'm surprised by how prominently the Punisher is featured in the trailer. I really like Jon Bernthal's portrayal of the character on Daredevil and Punisher, I hope it'll feel like the same character.

It looks to me like Peter Parker's going to get the Venom symbiote in this movie. It looks a lot like the comics arc with Peter investigating a spacecraft and then something appears to jump from one bystander to another, altering their personality. If it is the symbiote, I guess it won't be the one from the Tom Hardy movies, despite his cameo in No Way Home.

A Long Time Ago, in an Ireland Far, Far Away

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, everyone, though it's already the 18th now for me here in Japan. I listened to the Dubliners when walking home after work and then I had a bottle of Guinness Extra Stout and a glass of Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey. I also roasted garlic and spread it on wheat crackers with sliced cherry tomatoes, basil, and oregano. Not exactly Irish but it was tasty. For a movie, for some reason I wanted to watch The Phantom Menace. Liam Neeson is Irish so I guess it makes a kind of sense. I fell asleep watching it, though. The last thing I remember was Obi-Wan Kenobi saying, "The negotiations were short."

Yesterday was also graduation day for third year students and my last day at the school I was working at. Also, my last day working at a school in Japan because I'm going back to the U.S. next month. It's been an educational six years but for now I just want to talk a little about the school I just finished working at. This relatively small school has one of the best art clubs I've seen in Japan. The junior high school art clubs are always amazing and the students are always light years ahead of anyone I remember from when I was in junior high school, myself included. But this particular school has an art club amazing even by Japanese standards. Several of the second year students are making what I would call professional quality work. The club leader is a girl with a refreshing reverence for art history and I was pleased to see her interest in Gustav Klimt and a variety of Renaissance artists. I introduced her to the Pre-Raphaelites and I was pleased to see she took a liking to them.

I also hung out with the brass band a little and had some great summer afternoons talking with two students in particular. One girl had an amazing knack for natural language acquisition. I've been telling people for years they ought to watch movies in English but this girl was living proof of the efficacy of doing so. Freely talking to her about English idioms and common phrases felt like the kind of thing language education ought to be most of the time but too rarely is, at least in Japan.

Anyway, I hope all the students have bright futures ahead of them. Many of them certainly have skills and talents for brilliant careers.

A Convergence of Storms

I was watching Kurosawa Akira's 1946 film No Regrets for Our Youth (わが青春に悔なし) again last night. It's the first time I've watched it since reading more about the political situation in Japan in the 1930s. The beginning of the film is based on an incident in 1933 when a professor named Takigawa Yukitoki was threatened with dismissal from Kyoto University after giving a lecture deemed too radical. This sparked a reaction among the students and protests against incursions against free speech. In Kurosawa's film, the students are divided between moderate leftists and outright Communists but they're all actively opposed to fascism, Japan's invasion of Manchuria, and militarism in general. The movie was made under the auspices of the U.S. occupation of Japan so one has to take some of the messaging in the film with a grain of salt and it's worth noting that Kurosawa was unhappy with changes made to the ending of the film.

Still, his dynamic camerawork is already remarkable in this early stage of his career. The rapid sequences of shots of Hara Setsuko are electrifying as Kurosawa frames her as the wild, spiritual counterbalance to the boys' political radicalism. There are few clips on YouTube, this one has French subtitles, but the students are ironically extolling their university's virtues as a haven for free speech and freedom when they're interrupted by the sound of gunshots.

More striking than the gunshots is the angle of Hara's back as she leans on her arms, her head turned away from the camera, before Kurosawa's cut to her face as she turns to face her classmates. Later, there are energetic sequences of her playing piano, low angle shots from behind as she slams the keys, like a goddess of thunder, unable to articulate her displeasure in words. She's magnificent in this movie.

No Regrets for Our Youth is available on The Criterion Channel.