Yesterday I visited Himeji Castle with my friend and co-worker, Miss Kimura. Himeji Castle is the largest in Japan and most of its current structures date from the early 17th century.
The castle has appeared in a number of movies, including Kurosawa's Kagemusha and Ran and the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice.
I don't know the lady with the interesting coat.
The lane leading up to the castle was decorated with Japan's ubiquitous nude statues.
What saxophonist wouldn't want to be memorialised wearing only a flatcap while playing?
Miss Kimura pets some naked pigeon statues.
Here we are together with the castle's main keep in the background, photo courtesy of a passerby.
By gad, my feet are big. Those boots are actually a size too small for me, too.
There was a surprise snowstorm while we were there. It was intensely cold but very dramatic. After lunch at a terrific noodle shop recommended by Miss Kimura, who is a resident of Himeji, we visited the castle's adjoining garden.
The snow came down the hardest when we were inside a little tea house. It was very picturesque.
I've been listening to an audiobook of Emily Bronte's great 1847 novel Wuthering Heights lately, I suppose because of the Emerald Fennell movie coming out next week. Here's the trailer:
Fennell is best known for directing Saltburn which starred Barry Keoghan as an outsider charming his way into the world of rich people. Wuthering Heights is also a story about class and wealth disparity so it makes sense as a followup project. Unfortunately for Fennell, most of the discussion about the film so far consists of disapproval for Fennell's apparent and stated disinterest in the source material. "It's just a book," she said when asked about whether she felt pressure to stay faithful to it. When confronted about casting a white actor as a character that is clearly described as not white in the book, Fennell gave this evasive and vague response: "The thing is, everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so, you can only ever kind of make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it."
Paradoxically, she has also claimed to be deeply passionate about the book, calling it her "favourite book in the world." Maybe that's not saying much if her "just a book" quote is an indication of her feelings about books in general. It may be like naming a favourite mailbox or fire hydrant.
When the casting was first announced, I knew immediately people would complain about Jacob Elordi in the role of Heathcliff. I'm not in principle against changing the race of a character from source material to adaptation but I was surprised she would invite the headache. Wuthering Heights has been adapted to film many times and Heathcliff has usually been cast with a white actor, the most notable version being the William Wyler film with Laurence Olivier in the role.
Of course, in 1939, a movie depicting romance between people of different races would not likely have been funded by any major studio. Heathcliff's race is an important aspect of the novel so it's difficult to see how someone who claims to be passionate about Bronte's work would fail to retain this element. This line from Heathcliff in the book makes it quite explicit:
“But, Nelly, if I knocked him down twenty times, that wouldn’t make him less handsome or me more so. I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!”
Heathcliff is the only brown skinned person in the small Yorkshire community. The experience of being so isolated is plainly a prominent aspect in the formation of his personality. Every time I read the book, I marvel again at Bronte's ability to create a work of such psychological complexity, particularly considering that she finished writing it when she was only twenty-eight years old.
Fennell has made some other unfortunate choices. Margot Robbie is too old for the role of Cathy and there's an overall sense of a modern fashion photoshoot. The book's location, the harsh landscape and weather, is another crucial aspect to the story though Fennell's inability to connect with physical reality is more in step with the current culture that psychologically lives in an incorporeal digital space.
On the positive side, it does look pretty. Normally I'm all for an artist saying "Fuck everything" and pursuing an original vision. But, jeez, it's such a great book. Fennell may feel superior to it but I can't help suspecting she's not.
I've been back in a Tarantino mood over the past couple weeks. Is there any other director who has so successfully combined unfiltered artistic vision with mass appeal? I would say only Steven Spielberg is comparable among directors who've been working since 1980. His undeniable power to attract audiences has kept off the harpies of resentful press. That's how we all know he'll survive the stupid kerfuffle around his Paul Dano comments, and why spiteful people made those comments go viral in the first place. I watched 2012's Django Unchained again on Amazon Prime and 2007's Death Proof on The Criterion Channel.
If he'd never made any other movies, Django Unchained would have been enough to make Tarantino a keystone in the history of 21st century cinema. Its existence and continued popularity despite swimming gleefully against the grain of Hollywood politics make it a rare reflection of true American cultural morality.
Death Proof, meanwhile, is almost the opposite of Django Unchained. With Django Unchained, Tarantino tapped a rich vein in the cultural zeitgeist while Death Proof was too much of a cinephile's daydream to be successful at the box office. It remains Tarantino's only true box office disappointment. All of Tarantino's movies are post-modern in one way or another--that is, to truly appreciate his intentions, one must have some outside knowledge of cinema history. Most of his movies, though, can be appreciated by audiences who have no such knowledge. Most of the audiences who cheered in the theatre for Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained had little to no knowledge of Spaghetti Westerns and didn't understand that Tarantino was making a statement by deliberately importing aspects of a dead sub-genre to deal with a culturally sensitive topic. They didn't understand the genius of his alchemical experiment but they didn't have to; all they knew was that it was cool to see a former slave get back at the system and people that had wronged him and that was more than enough. Death Proof kind of requires some familiarity with '70s exploitation films. Appreciation for such films, or faux-appreciation for them, has grown in the years since Death Proof's initial release but at the time a lot of people really didn't get it. I remember being in a movie theatre lobby and hearing some people deriding the poster of Rose McGowan with the machine gun leg from Death Proof's companion film, Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror (the two were originally released as a double feature). They didn't understand how the plain absurdity was a feature, not a bug. Though there's a difference between Tarantino's love of '70s movie cheese and Rodriguez's. Rodriguez's vision is much more ironic than Tarantino's.
One of the most interesting aspects of Death Proof for me is the intentionally bad editing. I love how the conversation between the girls in the car in the film's first dialogue scene is edited. There are little stutters breaking up lines and then some abrupt cuts right in the middle of lines of dialogue.
Anyone watching without knowing that Tarantino is deliberately imitating the ragged prints of cheap exploitation films from the '70s he adored since childhood might just assume Death Proof is poorly edited. That in itself might sound absurd to people with dyed-in-the-wool perceptions on American media, who doubtless feel like they've possessed familiarity with the concept of cheap old movies since birth. But imagine you grew up in a different culture with a different media landscape and randomly clicked on Death Proof on some streaming service.
The lucky few will view Death Proof with the same innocence that inspired Tarantino to love the rough editing in those old exploitation films. Those of us in the know, meanwhile, are invited to stretch our imaginations and try to see what Tarantino saw. The eeriness of the disjointed editing, the sense of the characters carrying on with their lives beyond the limits of the filmmaker's intentional manipulations.
Death Proof, despite its amazing car chase in the final act, also suffers from a deliberate lack of momentum. A lot of the fun of the movie is just hanging out with these beautiful ladies in dive bars.
Criterion Channel currently has Death Proof on a playlist of movies showcasing exemplary work from stunt performers.
Finally, some good news out of Minnesota. There's big news in the world of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, from just this past week but also stuff from last month I wasn't aware of. Apparently series creator Joel Hodgson has sold the series to Shout Factory's parent company. This, in turn, has led to MST3k's second most famous host, Mike Nelson, starting production on a new series of four episodes for his successful website, Rifftrax.
That's really a key point here. Rifftrax has kept itself afloat for twenty years. Meanwhile, Hodgson's second stewardship of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 was a period of steady decline marked by unfortunate creative choices, like the decision to hire a new cast and crew when the audience was clearly primed for familiar favourites to return, and overspending.
Hodgson originally launched Mystery Science Theater 3000, also called MST3k, in 1988 as an extremely low budget comedy series in which he and other comedians operating robot puppets "riffed" on bad movies. Mike Nelson came aboard as a writer a couple years later and became head writer before replacing Hodgson as host in the show's fifth season. Here's one of the best Joel episodes on which Mike served as a writer:
The show was finally cancelled in 1999, after which cast and crew moved on to other projects, frequently working together. Hodgson relaunched the series after reacquiring intellectual property rights and raised funding through the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. But in the years in between the series cancellation in 1999 and Hodgson's relaunch on Netflix in 2017, Hodgson had made another movie-riff series called Cinematic Titanic that did enjoy the same level of success as Nelson's Rifftrax.
As I said, the rebooted MST3k went through a steady decline. After Netflix was unwilling to host a third season, Hodgson launched his own streaming site that proved cost prohibitive. It seems things finally fell apart entirely in 2023 when the show's kickstarter reached only 68% of its $4 million dollar goal to produce six episodes.
By contrast, Mike Nelson's kickstarting effort this month set a goal of merely $20,000 for four episodes. As I write this, the kickstarter has vastly exceeded its goal, receiving over 1.5 million dollars in donations after just a few days. This seems to fit a pattern in Nelson's career which cannot help being compared to Hodgson's. Nelson always seemed to have a better sense of how to keep things financially viable. Why did Hodgson need so much money when he himself recognised that a fundamental part of the show's appeal was its low budget aesthetic? He hired expensive talent and got celebrity cameos, the puppets were upgraded to more complicated models. He also changed the name of the character "Gypsy" to "GCP" under the erroneous belief that the word "gypsy" was widely seen as an ethnic slur, taking advice from a new consultant. Along with the hiring of new cast and crew, I suspect a lot of the problems in Hodgson's new version were the result of him taking advice from people he really oughtn't have listened to.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to Mike Nelson's new iteration, particularly since Kevin Murphy is finally returning to the role of Tom Servo. For me, Murphy is the definitive Tom Servo and it was his conspicuous absence from the role that was one of the biggest flaws in Hodgson's new era. Murphy, along with Bill Corbett, has been a consistent collaborator on Rifftrax for which he recorded this beloved classic, a parody love theme for Jaws:
Last night's season finale of Fallout was really unsatisfying. It was written by Karey Dornetto, who wrote one of the better episodes of season one, and I suspect that the problems aren't her fault but rather the fault of producers who didn't want anything truly substantial to occur in the finale.
The fight with the Deathclaws was kind of cool though I wish they hadn't made them seem so easily dispatched. The scenes with Hank and Lucy seemed to end with something momentous but it's the kind of thing that could be easily reversed at any time. Meanwhile, Cooper has a "Our princess is in another castle" moment when he finds the cryogenic pods for his wife and daughter. I really don't much like this quest as his sole driving motive. I was also completely uninterested in the flashback of him getting arrested. That's no kind of cliffhanger when we've already seen him at the beginning of episode one hanging out with his daughter at a birthday party just before the bombs fall.
And just where the hell is Ron Perlman? They introduced his character for no purpose it seems.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Neil Gaiman hadn't been posting on social media for a year since allegations of sexual misconduct were made against him. Now he has posted, a couple days ago, on his blog. Among other things, he commends the efforts of a Substack journalist called TechnoPathology, who has been conducting an investigation of the coordinated smear campaign conducted against Gaiman. When I read the original articles that came out in 2024, I thought the case against Gaiman was thin at best but just in the introduction to his series TechnoPathology finds even more points that I was unaware of, such as clear undisclosed conflicts of interest, such as the fact that one of the accusers happened to be the best friend of the woman in charge of the original Tortoise Media article, or the fact that the voices most vociferously aiming condemnations at Gaiman were consistently of the same ultra-rightwing political and ideological persuasions.
Again, it's absurd the left has convinced itself that it shouldn't call something a conspiracy under any circumstances. Or was it anyone on the left who got that virus rolling?
TechnoPathology says he didn't originally create his Substack with the intention of exonerating Gaiman but rather with the aim of analysing how information is currently being manipulated, and how people consuming that information are in turn manipulated, in the news media currently. The "social internet" as I saw John Green refer to it in an unrelated video I watched this morning but which also touches on the tangle of cognitive biases we currently find ourselves in:
But while I'm unashamed of using the word "conspiracy" and I'm glad there's at least one person making an effort to expose the one maligning Gaiman, I still find myself most disturbed by the people whom I knew were no part of the conspiracy but who nonetheless turned on him at the first mention of allegations. Like Pavlov's bell. Can I ask if these psychological triggers for compliance were planned or incidental?
Happy Groundhog Day, everyone. Looks like we'll have six more weeks of winter, or the U.S. will. I'm not sure if the groundhog magic applies globally. Of course, here in Japan, February 2nd was yesterday. To-day is February 3rd, the Japanese holiday of Setsubun, when people throw soy beans at oni.
I actually watched 1993's Groundhog Day last night. Somehow it felt particularly good to revisit this year. Maybe because the Year of the Horse is so far living up to its reputation as a year of change and it's nice to rewatch a movie about things staying the same every day.
At one point, I looked at Andie McDowell and vividly saw her daughter, Margaret Qualley. I was tempted to wonder if Qualley is a more successful actress than her mother. I realised it might seem so to me because I watch more avant-garde movies, the kind Qualley tends to be in, while her mother was typically in mainstream films I'd never even consider watching. But she was a good actress. What am I saying? She's not dead. Apparently she's been on several Netflix series over the past few years, including one with her daughter called Maid, which, according to Wikipedia, was Netflix's fourth most watched show of 2021. I never even heard of it. There's that audience fractioning people talk about.
One sign you might be living in a communist country is that you're under constant surveillance. This is the problem faced by a married couple in 1969's The Ear (Ucho). Haunting, expressionistic cinematography captures two terrific performances as we watch the two characters whose fraught private lives are invaded by unseen men.
Ludvik (Radoslav Brzobohaty) is a prominent official in his country's communist party. He and his gregarious, hard drinking wife, Anna (Jirina Bohdalova), attend a lavish party where Ludvik learns that a colleague has fallen out of good standing with the regime and has therefore fallen out of the world. Whatever mysterious offense this colleague was deemed guilty of is never clear but other men in his circle are also being disappeared, naturally causing Ludvik to worry. As he and his wife head home, a series of little clues tell them something's not quite right. Their chauffeur has been swapped out for a man they've never seen before. At the gate of their home, they find neither of them is in possession of the house keys. Ludvik climbs the fence before Anna discovers the gate is unlocked. The power is out in their home even though it's not out in their neighbour's house.
Ludvik starts flushing documents down the toilet in a panic while Anna starts drinking straight from a bottle of vodka, laughing and griping. They both feel relatively sure there's no listening device in their bathroom, because that's what they've been told. Of course, it would be useful for those conducting the surveillance to give them the impression that there is a room which is not being surveilled.
The Ear was banned in its home country of Czechoslovakia until 1990 when the Soviet Union had lost control of the country. It's now available on The Criterion Channel.
This new Bruce Springsteen song has nearly four million views as I write this. For the first audio only upload, there are over 5 million views. These videos were released two days ago. It's the first new release from Springstreen to exceed a million views since 2023. Fascinatingly, most of the comments I see on the "Streets of Minneapolis" videos seem to be from Germany, Portugal, Poland, and even South Korea, alongside some statements from Minnesotans expressing gratitude for Springsteen's eloquent expression of solidarity. I think this song will be remembered long after 2026.
In a crisis situation, people often talk about how things seem unreal, even people who are direct witnesses. Some comments I've seen since the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have wondered why there hasn't been a more profound reaction to this violation of law, community, and social order in the United States. This song is an example of one way art functions. To say art is a mirror often makes it seem like art is insubstantial or meaningless but without a mirror you can't see yourself. Art is the mirror. Undeniably real things sometimes don't seem to take form until the human race finds some way to process it, to find and communicate the meaning to itself.
I see a lot of people reposting the line from George Orwell's 1984, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” It's an apt quote for how blatantly Trump, Noem, and their cohorts have lied. Unfortunately, it's too often also applicable to leftwing media. The two sides of the political spectrum in America have seldom been more at odds and yet, if you take a view from outside the bubble, they've also seldom been more alike. If you think back to the bizarre excuses and gratuitous exultation in the wake of Charlie Kirk's shooting, it's easy to see the left is just as capable of reckless rancor. Overall, it's clear a new kind of rhetorical methodology has come to dominate the landscape. It's brought us to this point where laws are increasingly unable to serve their function as abstract processes, a civilised substitute for the physical violence of war. There's too much bad faith. Springsteen's known for being something of a partisan but he's a genuine artist and his song can't help but evoke the plain reality.
Two innocent people were murdered by people endowed with authority.
It's not just murder, it's a crack in the social order. There are only two possible outcomes now; civil war, or the mechanisms of American justice rally to hold the guilty accountable. The latter seems almost impossible at this point.
I was a little hesitant about Alex Pretti at first because I didn't see any of the video of his murder for a few days. I saw he was a guy in military colours with a black cap low over his face and I heard he was carrying a gun. I'm not disputing his right to carry a gun but he certainly seemed like a guy who was there to start shit while there was nothing ambiguous about Renee Good's murder. But then I saw one of the many videos of Pretti being shoved to the ground, being disarmed, and then just being executed. As I saw Sam Harris say in a video, it doesn't matter if Alex Pretti were the worst person in the world. He was restrained and there was no reason for ICE to use deadly force. Even Anakin Skywalker had a better excuse for executing Count Dooku.
Yeah, I'll use a Star Wars reference. Again, art is what helps us see reality. That's one way we can tell good art from bad art.
I guess that partly explains why one man dressed as Batman to protest ICE. I guess we've reached a turning point when political speakers are more likely to dress as Batman than as the Joker.
X Sonnet 1979
Where shuffling feet attract their ragged shoes
The walkers want a rubber stop to clear
The fragile floor, inviting scratching clues
To win a prize beside the puzzled bear
Who turned his head in time for pastry shows
Designed to teach a penguin how to talk
Discerning birds who wear tuxedo bows
And stamp the brutal ice to hotly walk
Away from cold, ahead to ifrit town
Partaking of the fire beer and gin
Which renders peace beneath pierrot's crown
Of lollipops and someone's stupid grin.
We play it all beneath the common house
And petty brains prostrate before the mouse.
Catherine O'Hara has passed away at the age of 71. She's best known for playing mothers, particularly in Home Alone and Beetlejuice. She was in the sequel to Beetlejuice just two years ago and she seemed so vital, her comedic timing and line delivery just as snappy and quick as they were back in the '80s. She was also recently on The Last of Us and Schitt's Creek, neither of which I've seen, but she was clearly very active still. So far no details seem to have been released about the sudden illness that took her life.
She was one of the many famous comedic performers of the '70s and '80s who came up through SCTV, possessing that rare combination of beauty and great comedic instinct. A lot of videos are being uploaded on YouTube of her and I was fascinated by this David Letterman interview from 1983:
A guileless, innocent young Irishwoman is taken in by a kindly English serial killer in 1999's Felicia's Journey. Directed by Armenian-Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, it's based on a book by Irish author William Trevor and the concept seems like a metaphor for the history of Irish/English relations. I don't know if that was intended but it's in any case an oddly sweet, understated Hitchcockian delight.
Bob Hoskins plays Joseph Hilditch, the manager of an expensive catering company. It's not hard to see some economic commentary when the portly Hopkins is shown loading up his shopping cart with groceries before going home to make a weird, elaborate plate of pork ribs in his enormous kitchen just for practice. Meanwhile, the young Irishwoman, Felicia (Elaine Cassidy), is wandering the streets looking for the young man who ran out on her. She's come to Birmingham looking for him, even though the only information he gave he was that he works at a lawnmower factory. I doubt any viewer will have any illusion that such a factory exists which makes it all the more tragic that Felicia's faith never wavers until the proof is incontrovertible. Elaine Cassidy's performance is always credible, though, and you always worry for her, especially when Hilditch takes an interest in her as we're gradually let into some of the more disturbing aspects of his personality, such as his collection of secretly recorded videos of previous girls he's cared for.
I think the Hitchcock influence is quite intentional. I was often reminded of Hitchcock's Suspicion and one shot very nearly replicates the one of Cary Grant carrying a sinister glass of milk up the stairs at the end of Suspicion. Hoskins gives a terrific performance, of course. I'm so used to him playing tough guys. Here, he affects a slow, perpetually smiling, saccharine but somehow also genuinely warm demeanour, just right to set Felicia's worried heart at ease. But he also gives nuance to a character that might otherwise have been simplistic.
The two characters are both archetypes and mostly the story succeeds from Egoyan's pacing and compositional juxtapositions. But there are some curious, haunting depths to Hilditch's character.
Felicia's Journey is available on The Criterion Channel as part of an Atom Egoyan playlist.
Last night's new episode of Fallout was another mixed bag though I'm starting to think the negative qualities of this season are less to do with the varying abilities of the various writers but more to do with a general lack of desire or ability to give firm narrative direction to the season overall.
I liked the stuff between Lucy and her father. I liked how things were complicated by the realisation that he really was a good father. This is added to the fact that Lucy really doesn't have a good argument as to why he shouldn't deploy his brainwashing tactics to pacify the violent gangs of the wasteland. But this also means when Lucy betrays him the lack of rationale for her betrayal is conspicuous. If this were a good Star Trek episode, this would be the point where Kirk or Picard makes a great speech about free will. Fallout defaults to "Just 'cause."
Meanwhile, despite Ron Perlman being introduced as a super mutant in the previous episode, he's totally absent from this one without any explanation. It feels really odd. It's like they made this episode before the previous episode and didn't know Perlman was going to be in it. This episode also has to deal with the problem of the Deathclaws on the Vegas strip and here it's heavily implied that the monsters are somehow confined to the strip. There's no explanation or comment on how or why. It did lead to a good action sequence, though.
Although I continue to dislike the flashbacks for Cooper, I did like the backstory established for Stephanie as a Canadian who was hardened by the annexation of her country by the United States. This is a a detail from the first game and I liked that they brought it back. Sadly, it's also no longer so far fetched. I also like how it gives some complexity to Stephanie's character.
A man and his wife carefully and prudently map out getting away from all of life's responsibilities in 1985's Lost in America, a film co-written by, directed by, and starring Albert Brooks. At times, this comedy is more of a fascinating thought experiment than it is a funny movie but it's thoroughly enjoyable.
David (Brooks) is so sure he's about to be promoted to senior vice president of the ad agency where he works that he's already sold his house and is in the process of buying another one. When it turns out his boss wants him to move to New York from Los Angeles instead, with no change to his salary, he has a meltdown in the office. He visits his wife, Linda (Julie Hagerty) at her workplace and she's bewildered by this turn of events. Shortly thereafter, the two go over their finances and determine that they can liquidate their assets and live unemployed in a mobile home for the rest of their lives.
Back in the '80s, when the American economy wasn't the nightmare it is to-day, this probably seemed like a plausible daydream to a lot of people. Albert Brooks decided to see what it would be like if one actually did it and he thought through all the angles. When that wasn't quite exciting enough, he has Hagerty's character lose almost all their money gambling in Las Vegas.
David wants to have a life like Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, a movie he refers to repeatedly, but, for people like him, it turns out to be an existence of constant anxiety. It's some really impressive work from Albert Brooks whose performance somehow manages to have the energy of a young Jack Lemmon even while he's in charge of directing duties. Julie Hagerty is a perfect foil as an unflappable but invariably supportive ditz.
Lost in America is available on The Criterion Channel.
What if this life is just a computer simulation? It's not a new idea, sure, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1973 series, World on a Wire, is based on a 1964 novel. Fassbinder does a lot of interesting things to conjure the sense of a simulated world with minimal special effects and I like the ambiguous sense of panic undergirding the whole story.
Klaus Lowitsch plays Fred Stiller, the new technical director at an institute housing a supercomputer that hosts a complex simulation. But the truth of the matter isn't even that simple.
The production design features a lot of reflective surfaces and a pretty consistent blue/white/orange colour scheme. There are suggestions of artificiality in the dialogue and the people whom Stiller interacts with. Why do beautiful blondes keep turning up? Why is Stiller consistently compared to James Bond?
It's understandable why people would want to escape an entirely simulated existence but mainly on an instinctive level. Would the real world really be better? How could they know? At least life in the real world wouldn't just be someone else's interpretation of reality of how reality ought to be. That's the real suffocating part of it, I'd think. No-one can come to grips with reality when everything is fake. The film may be less a commentary on technology and more of a satire of a country dominated by propaganda. It's one of those things that makes me think science fiction may be the only genre capable of honestly analysing human society.
World on a Wire is available on The Criterion Channel.
A lone bellhop finds himself spending News Year's Eve handling four strange predicaments in 1995's Four Rooms. An anthology film consisting of four stories directed by Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino, it features the bellhop played by Tim Roth in each one. Unsurprisingly, Tarantino's is by far the best segment but the other three all hold points of interest.
In the first, a coven of witches checks into the hotel and Ted the bellhop (Tim Roth) finds himself seduced by a topless Ione Skye, the lead from Cameron Crowe's Say Anything. She looks fantastic in this movie as one of the witches. The other four instruct Ted to "make her smile" and there's an amusing moment when he tries to make funny gestures before finally getting that they mean he should have sex with her.
One of the witches is played by Madonna. It's a very small role yet somehow she won a Razzie for Worst Actress. Like Lady Gaga's nomination for Machete Kills, this feels like misogyny, or at least resentment directed at Madonna. She's hardly in the movie long enough to establish herself as a bad actress, let alone the worst actress.
The second story is the least interesting. Ted accidentally enters a room where a man (David Proval) is holding his wife, Angela (Jennifer Beals), hostage, gagged and tied up. Ted has to think fast to save himself and there are some funny moments.
The third story, from Robert Rodriguez, has Antonio Banderas and Tamlyn Tomita as a wealthy couple who leave their two children (Lana McKissack and Danny Verduzco) alone in the room, paying Ted to look in on them routinely and answer their calls. The kids are both talented and they have an amusing running gag about smelly feet that turns out to be something more sinister.
Finally, the Tarantino segment has Ted going up to the penthouse where Tarantino himself plays a big shot called Chester Rush. He's having a party with Angela (Jennifer Beals, the same character from the second segment), a guy named Norman (Paul Calderon), and an uncredited Bruce Willis playing a guy named Leo. Pacing, dialogue, and composition quickly show how Tarantino's filmmaking instincts set him apart from the average director. The plot hinges on an obscure Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode in which Peter Lorre and Steve McQueen make a bet with one of them staking his finger on a chopping block, the other his new car. The whole segment builds up to a moment when Ted might actually have to cut off Norman's finger. Tarantino builds it up beautifully with long tracking shots punctuated precisely with quick cuts at the appropriate moments.
How many martial artist ballerinas have there been in fiction? There was Summer Glau's character on Joss Whedon's Firefly. There was a South Korean movie on Netflix a couple years ago. My own webcomic, Boschen and Nesuko, features a ballerina martial artist. Now there's one in the John Wick universe played by Ana de Armas in 2025's Ballerina. Much like the John Wick movies, it's almost a feature length action sequence on conspicuously stylised soundstages. It's fine, as far as that goes, but somehow de Armas' character, Eve, doesn't connect as well as Wick. Maybe it's the lack of profound weariness that Wick seems burdened with throughout the series.
This movie was directed by Len Wiseman of the Underworld series and it certainly seems a perfect fit. Returning John Wick cast members include Ian McShane, Lance Reddick, Anjelica Huston, and Keanu Reeves himself, and they're all good. Equally so are new characters played by Gabriel Byrne and Norman Reedus. But, sadly, Eve sucks the air out of the film. Which is odd because I really like Ana de Armas. I think the trouble is that the film is, like the John Wick movies, really asexual and sex appeal is one of de Armas' best assets. She was so memorable in No Time to Die because of it. She can't draw on that asset here and nothing else is introduced to compensate, not the peculiar weariness of Wick nor anything else. There's no hook. Maybe her being a ballerina was supposed to be it but nothing really comes of that. She's a ballerina but in her action scenes she's usually wearing some nondescript dark street clothes and all of her fighting moves just look like the usual kicking and karate chops. Maybe it would be silly to have her fighting in a tutu. But they needed to go somewhere with the concept. Maybe bladed ballet slippers? Maybe they didn't feel like they needed to try so hard when they already had the brand recognition.
Ballerina is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.
X Sonnet 1976
In avocado news, the things are green.
The skin is dark and bumpy, be afraid.
'Tis not a yam nor yet a giant bean.
Its pit a ball of life that God hath made.
For God creates the greener things at hand.
From frogs to Hulk, they owe their lives to Him.
The crowning grace enlarged a jolly man.
He sells his peas without the stain of sin.
For what is green if not a second hue?
'Tis chlorophyll imbues the tree with blood.
The light reveals a yellow mixed with blue.
Its ostrich roots invade the safety mud.
So wander forth and think of spring to-day.
That's all a goblin has betimes to say.
The full list of Oscar nominees was released earlier this week. Of the movies I've seen, I'm not especially fond of any. I suspect One Battle After Another will sweep the awards. If nothing else, Teyana Taylor is a shoe-in for Best Supporting Actress. And she was good in the movie, the stuff between her and Sean Penn was the best part of the movie. And I'm glad the Oscar category is still called "actress" instead of "female actor" like the Golden Globes. Where are the people who used to be angry about "female" being somehow a sexist term? I suppose in a couple years it'll be "woman or girl actor". Whatever sounds the most inelegant, the most like a crude AI translation.
The Oscars, as usual, are all about politics, both Hollywood's internal politics and U.S. politics at large. One Battle After Another arrived just as ICE was solidifying its reputation as America's less competent version of the Gestapo. Everyone's gonna feel good sticking it to them, even if it is ultimately an impotent gesture. Maybe this year someone will make a really good movie about how fucked up the ICE situation is. At any rate, I'm sure more than a few people will try.
I'm not surprised Kokuho wasn't nominated for Best International Picture, though it did pick up a nomination for Best Makeup. I think the film was in part crafted specifically with the intention of getting international awards attention but the makers of the film lacked an understanding of the politics of American and European cinema. Japan previously won Best International Feature Film with 2021's Drive My Car, which fit the mould much better with its story from the iconoclast Murakami Haruki and featuring an ambiguous relationship between a man and a younger woman. At its heart, Kokuho is a very conservative film.
I think Frankenstein has a solid chance at winning Costume Design and Production Design but I don't think its screenplay has received more than polite affection.
