Lost in the Snow

A small community in a remote Canadian town is torn apart after fourteen children die in a school bus accident. Atom Egoyan's 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter is about as cheerless as you could imagine from the subject matter but, although it's really an ensemble film, the whole thing is elevated by a central performance by Ian Holm.

Holm plays a lawyer from the big city called Mitchel Stephens who comes to town to drum up support for a class-action lawsuit against . . . someone. For something. Bruce Greenwood plays the father of two of the kids who died. He was driving behind the bus at the time it slid off the icy road onto the frozen lake and could plainly see it was no-one's fault but bad luck. But someone has to be held responsible, right? Surely there was a screw loose in the bus or the railing was faulty. Once, when speaking with the parents of one victim, Stephens awkwardly uses the word "compensation". Even as he says it you can see in Holm's performance he's aware of how feeble the word is in this case. No-one seriously thinks "compensation" can come of this or of any effort in their power. But something must be done.

I saw an interview with Egoyan on Criterion before I watched the movie in which he said one thing that interested him in the story was the character of Nicole, one of the survivors, played by Sarah Polley. In the interview he explained that he was interested in how the entire community was aware that her father, Sam (Tom McCamus), sexually abused her but never spoke about it. In the film, for the most part, Egoyan allows the viewer to read between the lines, as Stephens has to, instead of directly explaining what's happening to her. I suppose the influence of Twin Peaks is pretty obvious and maybe, to a lesser extent, Fargo. It's almost unfortunate because until one thinks of those influences one doesn't really see the flaws in Sweet Hereafter. Both Twin Peaks and Fargo do a much better job of establishing a sense of community with idiosyncratic characters and layers of secrets and willful ignorance. One can almost hear Bobby Briggs saying, "We all knew she was in trouble."

Again, Ian Holm is amazing in the movie. His character is also dealing with his own family problem, a daughter who's grown up to be a drug addict. One moment, we watch him trying to appear compassionate while trying to convince people to join the lawsuit and in another moment wrestling with his love for his daughter and the knowledge that he can't trust anything she says. It's really a terrific performance.

The Sweet Hereafter is available on The Criterion Channel.

Banish the Boring

Well, here's some good news. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot is dead. Obviously I love the Buffyverse considering how I've been talking about Angel and Buffy here lately. When I heard that series creator Joss Whedon was to be shut out of the reboot, that it would instead be directed by Chloe Zhao, I figured it would be dull, soulless, studio drivel. Well, it turns out the filmed pilot was just dull, soulless drivel that the studio wanted no part of. Good for them.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Twenty years ago, talentless directors like Brett Ratner or Paul Haggis mysteriously kept getting work in Hollywood despite plainly being inept. Now they're both cancelled and Hollywood has retrained their policy to prop up a different group of undeserving rich people. Or maybe Chloe Zhao's used up all of her chances. Maybe we can hope that the Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy directed Star Wars movie won't get off the ground. Or are we to really believe that the one episode of Ms. Marvel she directed really demonstrated that she should be directing a Star Wars movie?

There has been some interesting work on Disney Star Wars and Marvel shows, work done by women and ethnic minorities. Why not work more with Steph Green who directed good action sequences in the second episode of Book of Boba Fett? I also think Deborah Chow deserves a second chance. I think all the problems with the Obi-Wan Kenobi series were down to actor and studio meddling.

Anyway. I'm just happy, at least for now, Buffy's tomb remains undesecrated.

Sonnet 1984

Another voice diverts the normal band.
But who are they when swapping singing birds?
Another name denotes another brand.
No reason now to hum with perfect words.
So people gathered late to hear the songs.
The million dollar tickets sold to gas.
Who are the spenders turning up in throngs?
A jiggling, laughing orange pumpkin mass.
Collaborations melt to single grots.
The alloy brings a crew of ghostly gents.
The naked babes interpret inky blots.
And they must pay their catastrophic rents.
So this was how the show continued on.
Computer art created shadow spawn.

Dare to Believe in Quality

A new teaser for the upcoming season of Daredevil was released to-day. Supposedly Elden Henson's character Foggy can be briefly glimpsed but, if so, it goes by too fast for me. I sure hope they're not going to resurrect him. I continue to be puzzled that fans want him back.

Am I a sucker because I'm holding out hope this season could be good? I watched the first few minutes of Wonder Man and, despite the good reviews, found it to be the usual flavourless gruel. But Disney always buys good reviews.

The original run of Daredevil was so good and I love Jessica Jones, I'm so happy to see Krysten Ritter in the role again. And her and Karen teaming up as Daredevil's sidekicks is a terrific idea. I sure hope this thing ends up being good.

汚名

I discovered Prime Video Japan has a lot of classic American movies but only if you search for them by their Japanese titles.

They're all hard-subbed, which means you can't turn off the Japanese subtitles, but that's a small price to pay for such a treasure trove. I was watching Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 film Notorious last night, which used to be a movie that I watched repeatedly. Watching those conversations between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in the first part of the film felt like coming home.

His performance in this film is often cited as the best in his long career. He's so restrained but you can see what he's holding in. And she's at the end of a long tunnel of despair. I could watch these two talk for days.

The Japanese title of the film is 汚名, "omei", which Google translates as stigma or infamy. It's funny, I've asked a few teachers if there's a word for "infamy" in Japanese, or an opposite of fame, and I've been told no. It's hard to know anything for sure these days. This fog gets me.

30.0 Years

This brand new Neon Genesis Evangelion short was released to YouTube a few days ago, following its screening at a special event in Japan. It marks the 30th anniversary of the franchise's inception. It definitely leans hard into the light comedy side of the series rather than the dark, psychological elements that originally made the title famous. It's effectively funny and cute. I always did like Asuka, she and Misato being my two favourite characters. I remember seeing an interview with one of the creatives involved with the project, I think it was even Anno Hideaki, the director, in which he said Japanese fans tend to prefer the quiet, submissive Rei and Americans like the loud, assertive Asuka. I guess I fit that stereotype. All the same, it's easy to forget that Asuka's supposed to be half-German.

The short features two versions of Asuka, one from the original series and one from the Rebuild of Evangelion movies, amusingly appearing as a comedic double act as they explore alternate realities, presenting different outcomes to the series' events for Asuka. The Rebuild movies did not end with Asuka ending up with Shinji but with one of Shinji's high school friends instead. Apparently this did not sit well with the original Asuka.

Shortly after the release of this short, it was announced that there's going to be a new Evangelion series spearheaded by Tsurumaki Kazuya, a director who's increasingly taken the reins in Anno's Gainax splinter company, Khara. I loved Tsurumaki's work on Gunbuster 2 and FLCL, not to mention the Rebuild of Evangelion movies. His work doesn't have the depth of Anno's original but it's always impressive. I'll certainly watch the new series, even if it probably is a cash grab. I guess it'll have to be in another alternate universe. Hopefully it'll work out better for Evangelion than it did for Marvel.

The Conquering Screen

One of the most spectacular absurdities of American culture is the televangelist. The often flamboyantly dressed, vociferous carnival barkers of televised faith somehow inspire devotion and millions of dollars of donation. To properly examine such a phenomenon, it might help to be a foreigner. In 1981, Werner Herzog made God's Angry Man, a documentary about the televangelist Gene Scott. It's not a moralising film that seeks to come to a conclusion about the nature of American televangelism but, instead, like all of Herzog's films, focuses on the peculiar passion of an extraordinary individual.

Herzog interviews Scott's parents as well but most of the film consists of Herzog's interviews with Scott himself interspersed with clips of Scott's broadcast. In the interview segments, Scott complains about persecution and the burdens of his vocation, even his desire to give it up. The segments from his broadcast fulfill the film's English title, showing a man raving at the camera, occasionally relieved by amateur bluegrass performances. The film's centrepiece is a bizarre tirade in which he berates the audience for not sending the final 600 dollars of a pledge drive. He precedes his rant by quietly staring at the camera for several minutes, threatening that he will remain silent if no pledges come in.

It's hard not to think this man's business owes its existence to masochism. Why else would anyone willingly send this man money? Of course, Herzog is focused on one aspect of Scott's personality. Maybe there are other times in Scott's broadcast in which he provides his viewers with comfort or insight. But Herzog doesn't provide any perspective from Scott's audience, this is not an analysis of the televangelist phenomenon but an exhibition of a bizarre personality. It's certainly fascinating. Scott's presumption of dominance in relation to millions of strangers makes it seem that his delusion is absolutely flawless.

God's Angry Man is available on The Criterion Channel.

Blu-Ray Bebop

Watanabe Shinichiro in The Criterion Closet to-day. He's the director of the original Cowboy Bebop, an anime series that's not widely known in Japan, at least not in my experience living here. I had one student a few years ago who was a fan. He was one of those students whom I wish I could have done more, for whom I wish I could have been a better, more insightful teacher. The fact that he was a Cowboy Bebop fan is enough to show how relatively isolated he was.

Watanabe's picks aren't so surprising. Maybe the Jacques Tati box set is most surprising but Watanabe's work does sometimes have the detached, deadpan quality of Tati's comedy. I didn't expect him to pick Suzuki Seijun's Branded to Kill as the only Japanese film among his choices but if I'd thought about it beforehand I probably would've predicted it. It's a stylish, postmodern gangster film, which is basically what Cowboy Bebop is. I have not met one person in Japan who's told me they've heard of Suzuki Seijun, by the way.

It's funny how the trailer promotes the film as "humanity laid bare" over a clip of one of its most absurd scenes, of a gangster dancing hysterically while under a hail of bullets. Branded to Kill is one of Suzuki's most detached, most ironic films. It's closer to some of Watanabe's post-Cowboy Bebop work than it is to Cowboy Bebop which, though it is postmodern, has warmth to it, a kind of warmth that almost seems to come through accidentally through the characters' chemistry. More like Tati, I guess.

Where's the Harm?

For a season of television that's primarily impressive for how grim it is, Angel season five has a surprising number of fun episodes, really the best comedic episodes of the series. A January 14th 2004 episode called "Harm's Way" uses the short version of the character Harmony's name for a pun, one of several episodes to do so. It must have been a surprise to everyone that Harm turned out to be one of the most consistently funny characters in the Buffyverse.

Played by Mercedes McNab, Harmony first appeared as a background character, one of Cordelia's snooty high school friends in the first seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By season five of Angel, she gets to be the unapologetically shallow character that Cordelia used to be. She fits right in with the new premise of Angel's crew running an evil law firm when she takes the role of Angel's secretary. In "Harm's Way", we see how her job entails fetching Angel's mug of pig's blood and handling the catering for a meeting between two demon clans, resulting in the untimely appearance of a camel. The episode uses a dovetailing of premises to present the audience with something that challenges their complacency in accepting plot formulae. In the standard language of television, we would be compelled to sympathise with Harmony, and we do, in her attempts to please the implacable Angel, complaining at one point that she works extra hard because she doesn't have a soul. And that's the catch. She doesn't have a soul so compliance with the new policy that forbids killing people for pleasure or sustenance doesn't come naturally to her.

Just like with Spike in the middle seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, some of the best stuff in both series comes from when it plays around with its hazy mythology around what defines a character with a soul compared to one without one. This issue is also explored with Spike, now a part of Angel's cast, when he resumes an exploitative, casual sex relationship with Harmony even though he now has a soul.

What the heck is a soul anyway? I'm sure someone will figure it out one of these days.

Who's the Family To-day?

I gotta say, I'm becoming a real fan of Atom Egoyan. I watched his first movie a few days ago, 1984's Next of Kin, which is a fascinating film about performative family dynamics.

Peter (Patrick Tierney) is 23 and lives at home, quietly traumatised by his constantly bickering parents. They go to family therapy and Peter ends up sneaking into the office after hours and seeing tape of another family's session, an Armenian family whose son went missing. So he goes to their home and pretends to be their son.

Not as though he's trying to fool them. They all engage in role play and soon they're engaging in different scenarios and everyone seems to gain a kind of delight or contentment from performing an idealised or exciting family dynamic. There's an absurd, almost manic energy to the last portion of the film as though the characters are revelling in some kind of liberation. Each member of the group is very generous with the other in a way reminiscent of a good improv troupe. When one person starts something, the others support it from the point of view of what kind of emotional impact they're trying to achieve. It's a fascinating perspective on human relationships. Maybe we all ought to live life more like performance art.

Next of Kin is available on The Criterion Channel.

Sonnet 1983

Without a spark, the meaning wasn't clear.
No energy expended lit the bulb.
Conducting thoughts occured through mild beer.
More dreams distilled than little bubbles hold.
We went where dizzy crows discussed their war.
The glowing watchers know what's going down.
"It never changes," says the mutant boar.
A tragic day befell the stormy clown.
Across the beach, he chased the pranksters off.
At sea, his loopy girl was laughing hard.
Zosima told the girl she shouldn't scoff.
Alyosha held a torn and worthless card.
The curtains couldn't catch the sun or moon.
But clouds appeared to cool the heavy noon.

Another Last Day

Tuesday was my last day at one of the junior high schools where I've been working over the past year. I was surprised by the very kind expressions of farewells. One of the second year English teachers I worked with gave me this bouquet of artificial flowers:

She was one of the most hard-working and resilient teachers I've worked with. Another teacher gave me some kind of bread snack, sort of like bruschetta but frosted with a cherry flavoured substance. It was really good. He was one of the most sensible of the younger teachers I've worked with, as was a young woman who also teaches English to first year students. I worked with several impressive teachers.

It's an amazing school, a big one, with a surprising number of non-sports related clubs. It has an art club, a literature club, a handmaking club, a drama club, a brass band, and an English club. Of course I got to know the English club members and I was always impressed by their energy. I also generally hung out in the art club and occasionally in the brass band and drama club. I was continually astonished by the high level of work coming from the art club and I think the drama club has members who'll become skilled filmmakers. I wish I'd had more time for the literature and handmaking clubs. I spent a lot of time talking with a pair of sisters in brass band, the elder of whom was particularly keen on practicing English and was always a delight to speak with.

This was the first school where I spent some time observing classes of other subjects, primarily to see how differently other subjects are taught in Japan and gauge student attitudes toward them generally. I was surprised how often the Japanese language teachers were friendly and interested in talking about English. There was also a really impressive third year social studies teacher whose ability to remember information related to her subject enabled her to display some engaging extemporisation.

The school principal took me to dinner at a really amazing izakaya. It was easily the best food I've had in this town and I've had a lot of good food here. I ate so much sashimi, quail eggs, fried squid, and Japanese style fried chicken. The meal concluded with some incredible green tea over rice. This is normally considered the poor bachelor's easy meal but this restaurant turned it into a culinary masterpiece with a pitted umeboshi on top that combined with the rest for a perfectly balanced set of flavours.

It was a fitting experience to cap off a memorable year at a memorable school.

Unanswerable Questions

The parents of a murder victim and the parents of the killer meet for a discussion in 2021's Mass. It's an effective little chamber piece.

The victim and killer were high school students and the incident was a school shooting in which several people were killed, including the killer, who shot himself. It's an all too common scenario in the U.S. these days. The film stars Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton as the victim's parents, Jay and Gail, while Reed Birney and Ann Dowd player the killer's parents, Richard and Linda. I wonder if that's a Twin Peaks reference. Richard and Linda were the two mysterious names on the note Cooper finds in the last episode of Twin Peaks.

The dialogue goes as you might expect. There's a sense of horrible futility while at the same time there's the unstoppable compulsion to do something. Details of the killing and the killer's motives remain superficial, mostly the focus is on the grief and anguish of the two sets of parents. It's not Bergman but it's not bad.

The film was written and directed by Fran Kranz, an actor, best known for his role as Topher on Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. Mass is available on Amazon Prime.

[REDACTED]

My biological father passed away last week. He was [REDACTED]. Most of my formative years were lived with my step-father, [REDACTED], but I saw [REDACTED] occasionally throughout my youth before living with him for a time in my 20s. I've often wondered if my fondness for Shakespeare's Henry IV was related to this experience of growing up with two Dads. I'm not sure who would be the Falstaff and who would be the King Henry IV.

When I was a kid, I was a fan of Dungeons and Dragons, particularly the Dragonlance franchise. I used to tell [REDACTED] about these stories and he'd listen patiently even though he was a huge Lord of the Rings fan and knew Dragonlance was but a pale shadow of Tolkien's work. I think it was his influence that finally led to me reading The Hobbit in high school. I'm certainly grateful for that.

He was a guitarist and had been in bands. After retiring and moving to Tennessee, he played with a group called [REDACTED]. He gave me two guitars when I was younger but I never got especially good at playing them. He liked Led Zeppelin and Johnny Cash among many other rock groups. I remember he often recommended Mountain to me as a band that was too often overlooked. So this is for him:

Voice of the Hobbit

I just finished listening to Nicol Williamson's 1974 reading of The Hobbit again. Williamson is now best known for playing Merlin in John Boorman's Excalibur but at one time he was well known for playing Hamlet. If you see him in multiple roles, you'll be impressed by what a chameleon he was, able to change his voice and accent and come off naturally. He uses this talent for his Hobbit audiobook to provide distinct voices for all the various characters. I find I quickly forget that Gandalf and Bilbo are voiced by the same guy.

Certainly it's a better experience than any of the film adaptations of the story, though I think the Peter Jackson films had some good qualities. I liked Howard Shore's work on them, particularly the dwarves singing.

The Errant King

After carelessly inciting a violent incident over the radio, a shock jock slums it with a homeless Robin Williams in Terry Gilliam's 1991 film The Fisher King. As much as I love Terry Gilliam movies, I've only very infrequently watched this one but I found it perfectly suited my mood on Sunday.

The main character played by Jeff Bridges always seemed like he was based on Howard Stern to me. Googling now, I see Gilliam tried to get Stern as a consultant at the time but that was a period in Stern's career when being hard to get for any project was part of his shtick. Nowadays, I suspect a good portion of the people reading this probably don't know who Howard Stern is. That would have been almost unimaginable at one time when he was the dominant voice on the car radios of millions of Americans. Now, in this world of fractured audiences and podcasts and audiobooks, it may be impossible for someone to achieve such a status. Stern's interview with Kamala Harris during the last presidential election that failed to attract much if any notice, even among her supporters, was probably a nail in the coffin of both Stern's notoriety and Harris' campaign. But at one time, he was a figure of prominent controversy so people really worried about something like what happens in The Fisher King.

Bridges' character, Jack, tells a listener that rich people are basically non-humans and ought to be disposed of. After the careless remark, a listener to Jack's show takes a shotgun to a restaurant and murders several people. I was reminded of the podcast about Nazis I listened to last week in which I heard that the Nazis had a hatred for aristocrats, tied with Hitler's populist rhetoric that exploited resentment for the wealthy. But The Fisher King never becomes explicitly political.

The story takes Arthurian legend as an influence and Jack's downfall and quest for redemption are linked to the quest for the Holy Grail. I like how the film never explicitly states this motive for Jack but instead compels the viewer to find it through tactics of storytelling and filmmaking. Gilliam and his screenwriter fill the film with symbols and clues. At one point, Jack, drunkenly wandering the streets of New York, is given a Pinocchio puppet by a child. Jack's not exactly a liar but perhaps it's an indication that he is, in a sense, not real. A significant scene before his downfall has him practicing a line from a sitcom he's supposed to play the lead in, a catchphrase that consists of just a sarcastic, "Forgive me." As he practices different ways of saying it sarcastically, one is compelled to wonder if he's capable of saying it with genuine feeling.

Robin Williams is quite good as Parry, a man who loses his mind after his fiancee is killed. His subplot with Amanda Plummer as his love interest is very sweet.

The Fisher King is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Clanker's Clankers

I've been watching a couple of these Star Wars AI videos on YouTube. They're pretty lame. Actually, they remind me quite a bit of Ahsoka. The writing, which seems to linger just a bit too long on obvious dialogue, the shots that ponderously move from dull observations and simple statements, feels identical to the Ahsoka scripts. I wonder if these videos were written by the AI or if the producers of the videos are just exceptionally unimaginative.

I suppose AI will get better and we'll see fewer mistakes like the bit where Lando's spear suddenly sticks to the back of his hand because he needs two hands to take the box. Perhaps faces will maintain more consistent shapes, too.

The concept of "formulaic" writing has long existed in writing criticism. Maybe that's the best AI can do. I bet the reason Disney hasn't asked that these videos be removed from YouTube is they want to gauge audience interest in AI Star Wars content. Of course, formulaic writing has always been good enough for a lot of Hollywood executives and editors, especially risk averse ones. Or lazy ones, like Kate Beckinsale's character in The Last Days of Disco.

The Best Books

My mind is occupied to-day with some things I can't write about at the moment. So here's something I made yesterday after I saw Caitlin R. Kiernan had posted her top ten favourite novels. I thought I'd do the same but some of my favourite books are poems, not novels. So I'll just say top ten fiction books. This is my current list, subject to change, of course:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Beowulf, author unknown
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett
She by H. Rider Haggard

The list is in alphabetical order, it's not a ranking. Books that almost made the list were Moby Dick, Treasure Island, On the Road, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. It seems slightly odd, maybe, to have Roderick Random on the list and not Treasure Island but I asked myself, "Which book did I compulsively read repeatedly?" All the books on the list are books that I could not resist reading multiple times, books that demanded repeat reading. In the case of The Bell Jar, I remember reading it immediately after I read it the first time. While Treasure Island may be objectively a better book than Roderick Random, Roderick Random was the first book, or, really, the first piece of media I was ever exposed to that felt like it was being honest with me about what it takes to pursue a career as a young man. I'd say it's as true now as it was in the 18th century.

X Sonnet 1982

The friendly shades would tell you many names.
You see the shadows cheap across the train.
One circuit holds reflective little games.
The human mind becomes the human bane.
Now other folks are boarding metal doom.
The vet'rans know the demon sprites and mesh.
The imps were real, the Cyberdemons loom.
But no-one trained, no player equals Thresh.
A vanished art of PVP returns.
But helpless mortals fall between the cracks.
Confusing books and ammunition burns.
So gleeful goblins stuff you up in sacks.
For scores of years, the world now changes hands.
And no-one sees the ghosts that roam the lands.

Spike the Ghost

The first episode centring on Spike in Angel, season 5, is "Hell Bound", an October 22, 2003 episode written by Steven S. DeKnight, the writer who later went on develop the first season of Marvel's Daredevil series for Netflix. He takes advantage of Spike's situation, stuck in a ghost state, to have him start seeing of gruesomely mutilated apparitions.

According to the Buffyverse Wiki, this is the only episode in either series to have a viewer discretion advisory, though I think the end result is not nearly as creepy as "Hush". But it's not bad. It's a lot of opportunities for James Marsters to react to things and he was really good at doing that. He had a range of subtle facial expressions that were very effective at pulling the viewer into his character's experience. Why am I using past tense? He's not dead.

Looks like he's mainly doing voice work these days. I wonder why. Wikipedia shows how often he won awards for his work in the Buffyverse. Maybe he's just not ambitious. I can relate.