The Path of Toys

Social media encroaches on the realm of playtime in 2026's Toy Story 5. The first Toy Story movie made without the involvement of John Lasseter, the helm is taken by series co-creator Andrew Stanton for a story that examines the role of play in children's psychological development. It has some of the effective sweetness of the first three Toy Story movies, a little effective comedy, but mostly this one is more interested in commentary on the experience of childhood and caretaking.

This Toy Story has a remarkably lean writing team with director Andrew Stanton having sole "Story by" credit and sharing "Screenplay by" only with Kenna Harris. All previous Toy Story entries had no less than four writers with Toy Story 4 boasting nine. This is the first feature film writing credit for Harris, who is non-binary, but they wrote and directed "Ciao Alberto", the tie-in short film for Elio. Tiny, nigh-imperceptible portions of LGBTQ content in previous Toy Story films pissed off fringe conservative groups in the U.S. and I wonder if a scene early in Toy Story 5 in which Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) gives mouth-to-mouth to the toy dinosaur (Wallace Shawn) was meant as a deliberate provocation. It was funny. It's notable that all thought of tailoring toys for gender has been abandoned with no-one suggesting it's odd for Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) to be playing with spacemen and dinosaurs instead of Barbies.

Like some previous Toy Story movies, this one involves the presence of an interloper, in this case LilyPad (Greta Lee), essentially a child's iPad modelled on a real tablet called LeapPad. Through LilyPad, the shy child, Bonnie, is able to socialise for the first time via the tablet's automated chat group inclusion algorithm. This pulls Bonnie away from the toys, who are led in this film by the cowgirl, Jessie (Joan Cusack), the film's true lead, as the poster art suggests, despite Tom Hanks and Tim Allen getting top billing.

More than previous Toy Story films, this one is interested in the intrinsic value of the child's play with her toys. There's another reality established with a slightly different animation style in which the toys enact scenarios dreamt up by Bonnie and Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris), another child character. Bonnie likes to dream up weddings for the toys while Blaze, who lives on a farm, concocts an espionage drama for Jessie. This was the first time watching a Toy Story movie I actually thought back to my own childhood, playing with toys. Like Bonnie and Blaze, I would dream up stories that combined my disparate collections of Ghostbusters, Ninja Turtles, and Thundercats figures. I can see this as part of the process through which I became a lover of fiction and storytelling. So when Bonnie's interest is diverted by a more compulsive use of social media it's easy to see the harmful psychological impact.

The problem here is ultimately not put down to technology, though that is Jessie's preliminary diagnosis, but to the proper use and application of technology. LilyPad matches Bonnie with children who deride her interest in toys while Jessie recognises Blaze as a more positive influence. So AI is no substitute for the more human coded Jessie.

What is Jessie, who are the toys? Many critics interpret them as metaphorical parents because their efforts are in support of the child's development and well-being, particularly Jessie in this film and Woody in Toy Story 4. I would say the toys don't fit perfectly to any human corollary. They don't set rules for their humans or impose punitive measures as parents are compelled to do. They're more like devoted servants exercising a superior understanding of psychology and mental health in complete dedication to the child. They could be seen as teachers but maybe the best analogy would be artists. Or court jesters. It's a character type that used to be common but generally isn't thought to be relevant to-day--they're like Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio or Sabu in The Thief of Bagdad or Jim in Tom Sawyer.

There were moments that made me laugh but this film certainly felt more like drama than comedy. There are some inventive and exciting chase sequences but perhaps they might have been better if they'd have been shorter. Blaze's design is kind of odd, her face looks like an adult's face on a child's body. But I don't have any substantial complaints about this film.

Toy Story 5 is now in theatres.

The Serious Life of Playthings

I'm going to see Toy Story 5 to-day with my family so last night I finally watched 2019's Toy Story 4. This was the last Toy Story to have John Lasseter on its crew--he was removed during production and the sense of altered creative direction is certainly apparent in the final film which begins strongly but ends on an oddly weak note.

Now living with their new kid, Bonnie, the familiar gang of toys must provide emotional support for her as she begins kindergarten. One of my favourite moments in the movie is when Woody (Tom Hanks), having hidden in Bonnie's knapsack, puts a bunch of raw materials on a table at school, prompting Bonnie to make a toy out of a spork and pipe cleaners. Woody may be a good toy but he'd have been a great dad. I wonder if he can procreate with Bo Peep (Annie Potts).

The plot mostly revolves around a love story between Woody and Bo Peep who, having separated from the other toys years before, now leads an independent life as a "lost toy". She doesn't like wearing her skirt anymore and gets around in a big mechanical skunk. Somehow she and Woody never manage to have any chemistry and I wasn't much invested in the two getting together, which is unfortunate since that's the subject matter of the film's climax. It pales in comparison to the early scenes of Bonnie at kindergarten.

Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) has a surprisingly small role in the movie, almost an afterthought. I wonder if folks were conspiring to phase out Tim Allen already. I guess they never found anything they could hang on him. Meanwhile, the supposed controversy around John Lasseter has melted away though his career has never recovered.

Toy Story 4 is available on Disney+.

Sonnet 1997

Forgotten yolk was left beside the pond.
The infant frogs would dream of webby feet.
The coffee slush would fade from black to blonde.
Surprising rain degrades the hanging meat.
With neon eyes, the brothel monster watched.
A silver blanket warmed the witness up.
A group of ducks would sleep upon her crotch.
The athlete john advised she wear a cup.
A cigarette replaced the censer smoke.
A leather jacket gleams beneath the glass.
Her mother's cherished necklace fine'ly broke.
Some voyeurs liked to listen for her gas.
Degrading wants will wither watchers too.
The morons tried to fix it all with glue.

Zombies are Forever

It's another zombie apocalypse and another group of survivors take shelter while the hordes roam the streets in 2026's This is Not a Test. This movie's about as average as it gets. There is an attempt to make the zombie nightmare tie in to a domestic drama but it's all undercut by weak writing that forces the characters to behave unnaturally.

Sloane (Olivia Holt) is a suicidal teenage girl living with an abusive father (Jeff Roop). Her sister, Lily (Joelle Farrow), had recently left home, leaving Sloane with an overwhelming sense of despair because Lily was her only ally in the ongoing war with their father. Then zombies attack and Sloane finds herself with classmates, three boys and one girl, hiding in the high school with the doors barricaded.

It all builds towards a confrontation between Sloane and Lily which the zombie apocalypse facilitates in an interesting way. But the story would've been a lot stronger if any time at all had been spent developing their father as a character and detailing exactly what manner of abuse Sloane and Lily were subjected to.

Most of the film is set at the school and the teens bicker with each other about various things. The other girl, Grace (Chloe Avakian), is the twin sister of one of the boys, Trace (Carson MacCormac) and they both endanger everyone with mistakes that aren't stupid in a natural way but more like stupid in the way of a screenwriter who doesn't know how people think.

This is Not a Test is available on Shudder.

Statistic Pride

It's Pride Month. When I googled "Pride Month" just now, Google had a set of related popular questions, the number one being, "What state has the least gays?" To which I immediately said, "You mean, 'What state has the fewest gays?'" before a split second later registering how moronic the premise of the question is. Morbid curiosity compelled me to click it so hopefully Google doesn't think I'm a homophobe now.

The AI's answer to the question is:

Based on population data from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, Mississippi and West Virginia tie for the lowest percentage of LGBTQ+ adults in the nation, each at 4.1% of their respective populations. Because state demographics and survey sizes fluctuate, you'll find that several other states consistently share the bottom of the list, including:

Alabama: 4% to 4.6%
North Carolina: 4.4%
South Carolina: 4.9%

Note: Demographers often observe that states with the smallest documented queer populations sometimes see lower numbers due to a lack of legal protections or a less welcoming social climate, which can make residents less likely to be open about their identity on surveys.

The AI cites The Advocate for these statistics. One might also point out that the numbers would be difficult to calculate because some people may be homosexual without realising it, depending on whether or not you believe homosexuality is invariably genetically determined.

But I've been in Japan for a week, I just got back to San Diego on Wednesday. How's Pride Month going over there? Well, this was in all the APA hotels I was staying in outside of Tokyo:

"日本はもっと強くなれる" translates to something like, "Japan is capable of great power/Japan can become more powerful." One might be forgiven for thinking that Japan has misinterpreted the point of Pride Month. But this is likely an intentional, passive aggressive insult aimed at Japan's LGBTQ community. According to Wikipedia:

APA has been noted in Japan for its proximity to the far right, particularly visible through the works considered revisionist and antisemitic that can be found in the company's hotel rooms, and the links of its founder with far-right figures such as Steve Bannon.

I've been witness to, and the target of, pervasive homophobic harassment in Japan. At the same time, I also worked with a number of LGTBQ Japanese teachers and, of course, I had plenty of LGBTQ students. They were almost invariably among the sanest of my coworkers and pupils. I was amazed at how confidently my LGTBQ colleagues could conduct themselves in such a rigorously hostile environment. One memory that sticks out, and I'm going to be vague on details because I know the assholes read my blog, is of one LGBTQ teacher whom I remember always exhibiting exceptional deportment and intuitive grace. This teacher also had a reverence for traditional Japanese aesthetics and culture. One day, this teacher came to work visibly altered in demeanour, uncontrollably shaking at times. Knowing the invasions of privacy and the intense "waruguchi", vigorously slanderous gossip, that I had been subjected to, I had some inkling of what this teacher had been a victim of, though I suspect, from the extreme change in demeanour, that this teacher had been subjected to something worse than I ever had, something so foul that it's difficult to imagine. That incident, though, made me appreciate the fortitude I regularly witnessed in my LGBTQ colleagues. Their pride is certainly well earned.

You know, there's a lot I love about Japan even now but at the moment I'm real fucking glad to be back in the States.

Who's Fixing Who

Over on The Spectator this week, former Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts lists twenty ways to fix Doctor Who. I hated or disliked every episode of Doctor Who he wrote ("The Shakespeare Code", "The Unicorn and the Wasp", "The Lodger", "Closing Time", and half of "The Caretaker") and I consider his views on gender and transgenderism to be paranoid and abhorrent. But I mostly agree with his list.

At number 12 he has "Stories about Dr Who himself, the Tardis and the Time Lords, the series mythos etc, and overarching narratives in general, are boring and a turn-off." This is generally true of the entire run. I always want to skip The Deadly Assassin when I watch through the Tom Baker era. Though I find Omega kind of interesting.

At 15, Roberts says the Doctor "is beyond sex, money, religion, politics and most other things that children are not interested in. He never ever peacocks or grandstands and is never pious or self-pitying." Yes, absolutely, this needs to be tattooed on the backs of every Doctor Who writer's hands.

I don't wholly agree with number 16, "There should be one (female) assistant only", though I do like Roberts' preference for the term "assistant" over "companion". Generally speaking, it's better when the Doctor has just one female assistant but one of the best assistants was Jamie and his rapport with Zoe and Victoria was great. I also obviously don't agree that the assistant should be "someone from planet Earth" given Romana is one of my favourite assistants. But the general point that the assistant should be someone the viewer identifies with seems sensible to me.

"19. Attempts at profundity and social commentary should be resisted as strongly as attempts at sentimentality." I think we're all sick of social commentary and sentimentality but profundity is too general a term to prohibit. When you're talking about life and death situations one is almost certain to be profound now and then and I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of.

Many of Roberts' points are to do with the idea that the show should not be Doctor-centric, that the stories ought to be self-contained situations in which the Doctor is an outsider who gets involved. I would agree the show is better that way and there are only so many ways you can tell the story of the lonely mad genius in a box but I don't know that audience interest is currently there for a story that isn't fixated on a psychological progression (or regression) of the main character. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the evolution of superhero stories has been to slowly move away from being "A terrible situation in which a powerful being miraculously gets involved" to being "A powerful being finds itself in a situation that provokes self-contemplation and emotional growth". It's a side effect of people growing less interested in having a saviour and growing more interested in being a god.

Trains, Planes, and Shuttles

I'm back in San Diego after living through Wednesday twice. That's what I get for crossing the dateline. Ten hours on an airplane from Tokyo. I was going to take a train from Los Angeles to San Diego. I had such good experiences with trains in Japan. But when I got to the airport I got a text from Amtrak informing me they weren't going to check luggage so I cancelled the trip and got my 54 dollars refunded. I ended up taking a shuttle from LAX to Old Town San Diego for 60 dollars.

The distance between Osaka and Tokyo is 497km and takes about three hours to cross by bullet train. The distance between Los Angeles and San Diego is 194km and takes about three hours when Amtrak has its shit together. I heard Gavin Newsom wanted to get bullet trains for California but of course it got sucked down the usual bureaucratic whirlpools. So it goes.

Does Anybody Remember Laughter?

Here comes a new Disney movie.

Hexed is directed by Fawn Veerasunthorn and Jason Hand. Veerasunthorn co-directed the 100th anniversary Disney animated film. Do you remember what it was? Don't cheat and read ahead. Go ahead, try to remember it. It was the 100th anniversary so they couldn't mess around, it had to be good. It was also Veerasunthorn's first gig as director--Chris Buck was her co-director on that one. Maybe if Hexed is a success Disney will take the training wheels off. Still can't remember the 2023 movie? Here are a few hints. The protagonist was a pretty young woman. Alan Tudyk voiced a character. Give up?

It was . . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
Wish.

That's the name of the movie. I bet you still don't remember it.

I can't forget it. I still occasionally amuse myself remembering how bad it is, particularly the music. I think "I'm a Star" may be the single worst song in the history of cinema.

This morning I've been trying to imagine someone whose life isn't their own origin story.

Maybe Hexed will be better since it's a much simpler story. The YouTube comments are listing the number of other movies and series it resembles. Apparently it looks like something called The Owl House.

Oh, yeah, kind of. The character in Hexed has longer hair.

There may be some credence to the theory that Disney's using a lot more AI than it's disclosing. I almost think this stuff seems too mechanical to be AI.

I've been watching some of the horrible AI Star Wars videos on YouTube. The worst part of them is the pacing. Something about the length of shots and cut points feels so dead, so devoid of any interest in communicating a feeling. They do remind me of Ahsoka.

The strap of her bra constantly changes. At one point it changes when it just moves out of the shot for a second. There's also a split second at the end of the dance where her face suddenly looks very old. Maybe this is Carrie Fisher in Hell. Or maybe this is all of us in Hell.

Heavy is the Head that Wears the Crown on a Famously Slender Neck

Looking at the current Billboard Hot 100 this morning I see there's a new song by Ariana Grande at number one called "hate that i made you love me."

The music video's more interesting than the song. The lyrics are kind of bad. She wishes to part from a former lover but we don't get a sense of the substance of their relationship. The line about how he hates to see "women endure" seems to suggest he's sexist or a misogynist. I would guess she hates to be liked by a particular kind of male fan. The lack of any sense of intimacy in the song makes it seem more like a relationship between a star and fan(s) she's never met. Maybe she doesn't want to be liked by fans who see her as a frail little woman. But, honestly, she looks strikingly frail these days. She'd hardly be the first star with an eating disorder. If she comes to your doughnut shop, don't be precious about money, give her all the doughnuts she wants. Maybe throw in a few extras.

That's Justin Long in the video. Whoever came up with the concept for the video wisely used the vague lyrics as a prompt to create a more tangible story about a man who murdered his girlfriend. Grande's inexpressive performance works as a ghost stalking her killer.

Last night I was letting the YouTube algorithm take me through some music videos. Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" came up, her best song, in my opinion. It's her generation's and succeeding generation's anthem to celebrate being a psychotic succubus. A lot of songs from women about emotionally dominating men, like Billie Eilish's "Bad Guy", Meg Myers' "Lemon Eyes", or Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso", have been popular over the past twenty years. How many songs like that were there before 2010? Grande is an outlier for hating that she makes men love her. Though I don't agree with the current definition of love as obsessive adoration.

I've been reading the current Norton Anthology's selections from Geoffrey Chaucer's famous 14th century work, The Canterbury Tales. It really seems like the whole thing should be included. The Knight's Tale certainly. Anyway, a lot of the introductory texts in Norton have a very clear political perspective. The introduction to The Wife of Bath's Tale says Chaucer "drew upon a centuries old tradition of misogynist writing." The Wife of Bath's famous revelation is that woman's ultimate desire is for dominance. Perhaps the Norton editors would say Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift draw from the same tradition of misogyny but surely that's a highly disputable opinion that doesn't belong in a general introduction. After all, as Tears for Fears told us, everybody wants to rule the world. On the other hand, people are complaining about the strikingly submissive imagery Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo have indulged in. Ultimately, these are games and, outside of academia, most people intuitively understand that this role play isn't meant to impugn the essential humanity of men or women any more than Chaucer was saying that carpenters and reeves were all pathetic cuckolds.

Brutish and Petite

Poor little Carol Kane in 1972's Wedding in White, playing one of the most pathetic characters in cinematic history. Director William Fruet invites you to contemplate how horrible her life is. It sure is horrible, yep. I guess it's worth pondering.

Kane plays sixteen year old Jeanie who lives with her parents in a little house in Ontario during World War II. Her brother in the army comes home with a friend named Billy. Jeanie is shy but utterly transparent, completely emotionally available but mostly everyone's too busy complaining and drinking beer to notice.

Fruet goes out of his way to establish how dumb everyone is. Jeanie's father is played by Donald Pleasence who receives an award from his coworkers but mostly complains about making a speech. He lacks the basic foresight to see how he'll feel in the actual event. When he takes the floor, he's adorably bashful. Jeanie isn't the only one who can't help wearing her feelings on her sleeve.

Her brother's friend, Billy, is rejected by Jeanie's cheaply narcissistic best friend. So he drunkenly rapes Jeanie when she's trying to sleep on the couch. Fruet doesn't shoot it very well, it looks more like Billy dry humps the side of the couch, I was honestly surprised when she turned out to be pregnant later. Remember, everyone's dumb, so her father's solution is to have Jeanie marry his his best friend, a man in his 60s.

It's edifying. I'm sure things like this happen all too often. It kind of reminds me of British kitchen sink movies, like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Those movies tend to feel somehow more substantial, though. I guess Wedding in White feels like the filmmaker is looking down on these poor fools while the kitchen sink movies tend to find a kind of poetry in the characters played by Albert Finney or Rita Tushingham. Carol Kane is very pretty and sweet but I can't remember knowing anyone so devoid of a spark.

Wedding in White is available on The Criterion Channel.

Troopers Endure

One of the biggest oddities in the history of cinema must surely be 1997's Starship Troopers, the red-blooded, sci-fi action extravaganza that's actually a gossamer subtle, viciously smart satire. It was a misunderstood movie on its initial release, much like Showgirls, also from director Paul Verhoeven, but audiences caught up to Starship Troopers much faster than they did to Showgirls.

I remember when it came out, the trailers offered no hint to what it actually was. I think a lot of people approached it like RoboCop, another Paul Verhoeven movie which also featured dystopian satire but its main character was much cooler and more sympathetic. The main characters in Starship Troopers are sympathetic but in a different way. They're built for 1950s teenagers, dewy eyed kids with enthusiasm for good clean living and moral righteousness, unlike any kids in 1990s America, in other words. But if you go with it, you do get caught up in Casper Van Dien's need for personal validation and fulfillment which he finds through the military and for the romantic drama between him and Denise Richards. The propaganda film that it is successfully portrays this military as a place where the young and attractive people forge their careers and identities. One of the dystopian concepts is that military service is required in order to become a citizen. The story shows that military service is required for emotional maturation and self-actualisation, too. It's not just the legal path to becoming a full fledged human being, it's the spiritual and psychological path, too. It's full service propaganda.

There's also a subtle, very sinister aspect to the character played by Neil Patrick Harris who goes through special therapy and training to gain the ability to read the thoughts of the aliens. There's one line where he's asked if this will ever be adapted for use on humans and he gives a coy response about how that's a classified topic. Think about that in the context of that dialogue being propaganda. To the good denizen of the Federation watching, it's like, "We probably can't read your thoughts. But maybe we can. Better stay clean 24/7, inside and out, just in case."

It is a right wing dystopia and, for all the strait jacket bureaucracy of a left wing dystopia, the right wing variety is truly chilling. Behind the message that "might makes right" is the ultimate freedom is the bottomless right wing capacity for disgust that needs an inferior being to define itself against. It'll always find bugs to squash.

Starship Troopers is available on Netflix.

Sonnet 1996

The vanished road was hid behind the shack.
Another drop to sleep invests the bed.
But phantoms dance around behind her back.
The stranger's headlights fade, his batt'rey's dead.
The shops were all the same but folks had changed.
The oranges freshly squeezed were kept engaged.
Beyond essential need, the war is raged.
The tyrant's meaty hand has glued the page.
No baking soda lifts the oil stain.
The desert sun has bleached the beach of charm.
The power tie is weak just like his brain.
She tries to surf on milk around the farm.
They sent her back to shovel hay and shit.
She's not the only one who's sick of it.

Ally Size

About a week ago, back in the US, I decided to get back into watching Ally McBeal, picking up where I left off in the fourth season, only to find that on American Disney+/Hulu, the 4:3 footage has been given a stretch effect to fit a 16:9 screen, whether you want it or not. I hate it when they crop old 4:3 shows but the stretch effect is even worse, making everyone look like they're in a funhouse mirror. I remember the big outcry when it was found that The Simpsons was cropped on Disney+ and Disney eventually capitulated by introducing an option to view the show in original format or cropped. Why couldn't they have just done that for everything?

I could've used my VPN but I travelled all the way back to Japan instead where the show is in its proper format on Disney+. I guess Disney has more respect for the Japanese audience.

I watched "Obstacle Course", an episode from April 16, 2001, with one of the most, let's say, surprising verdicts for a court case on this lawyer comedy series. I'm going to go into spoilers for this one because I need you to appreciate how fucked up it is.

In this episode, Ally and her boyfriend, Larry, played by Robert Downey Jr., end up on opposite sides of a case in which a woman is suing a guy because they had an online romance and he didn't disclose that he's a dwarf. Over the course of trial testimony, we learn that their discussions had more than once revolved around the superficiality of dating based on appearance. Despite this, the woman is so appalled by the idea that she was duped into having affection for a dwarf that she feels she deserves financial compensation.

Ally represents the dwarf and Larry represents the woman and I thought, finally, an episode where we see Ally can be a good lawyer and even beat her brilliant boyfriend, even if the case is low hanging fruit. I mean, who would lose this case?

Ally McBeal, that's who. Yeah, and the show presents it like it's a totally reasonable outcome. The dwarf has to pay the woman 70,000 dollars because he didn't tell her he was a dwarf before they met in person. It's construed as fraud. Has the culture really changed that much since 2001? I don't think so, I think this would've seemed absurd back then.

This is one of the few episodes that wasn't written solely by David E. Kelley. It was co-written by Kayla Alpert who went on to write episodes of Emily in Paris and Wednesday. My theory is that they started out with a discussion about online relationships in which one person does not disclose that they're transgender. And one of them presented the hypothetical that one partner is a dwarf. If it should be fraud for one person not to disclose that they're transgender, certainly it would be fraud not to disclose that one has some other condition that could potentially impact physical lovemaking. I suspect someone stuck to their guns beyond all reason and insisted that, yes, in the case of a dwarf it would also be fraud.

The money awarded to the plaintiff is derived from the fact that she had quit her job and moved to another state in order to be with the man before she found out that she disliked his body. Maybe the stupidity of this idea is clearer in 2026. Who would build a relationship with someone without ever wanting to see what they looked like? Who would completely uproot their lives? Whether we're talking about a dwarf or a transperson or a talking starfish, it should've been child's play for Ally to point out that this woman went out of her way not to see her partner's physical appearance. She threw the dice and she has no grounds to complain about it now. Not to mention the fact that she's a shallow bloody hypocrite.

You'll notice this clip is neither stretched nor cropped but it's 16:9. So it must have been originally shot, like many shows of the time, in 16:3 and then cropped for 4:3 televisions which were still standard. Now I don't understand Disney at either end of the Pacific.

Tokyo in June

Here's a picture from Shibuya yesterday. I'm not in the picture. I see a lot of tourists walking around with selfie sticks. I saw one girl yesterday standing in a crosswalk, smiling serenely into hers. I continue to find it odd that there's evidently an audience for this. It seems kind of kimoi to me, hokey.

So far it's not been nearly as hot as I was expecting it to be, which is good because I no longer have a straw hat and am wearing my brown felt hat.

My brief visits to Tokyo this year have felt very different from my visit just a few years ago. I can see why the locals are so disturbed by the sudden influx of a foreign population but there are points where even people with no ability to speak Japanese are integrating. I took the train from Narita airport into Tokyo where I'd booked a room in Shibuya. I was wandering around on foot, trying to locate a particular neighbourhood. I went into a convenience store and asked a dark skinned young woman of possibly Indian or Indonesian heritage where it was. She didn't understand my Japanese and asked me to speak English. There was a young man, another possible Indian or Indonesian or Nepalese, behind the counter at another convenience store who tried to conceal from me his inability to speak Japanese. It seems this growing service class may be similar to the way Mexicans and Mexican Americans have been siphoned into such work in the US. Still, Japan compares well to my recent memories of the US where a massive visible population of homeless people is in stark contrast to a new population of extremely wealthy people. I have seen exactly one homeless person in my wanderings in Tokyo so far this week.

And here's a giant blowfish.

Doctor Never

I'm back in Japan for a week to handle some unfinished business (interpret that as ominous if you like). So it was here in Shibuya that I read Doctor Who was cancelled. Again. It's 1989 all over again. Well, there are some key differences.

The decline in viewership over the 1980s is generally seen as due to weaker scripts and less popular Doctors. Or it was until fan appreciation for the '80s Doctors was bolstered by nostalgia and audio plays. It's not even cool to say Colin Baker was bad anymore.

The '80s decline was also due to competition from the much better special effects on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Certainly, it wasn't a lack of effects budget that made people dislike the latest era of Doctor Who.

One similarity I would point to is that the '80s Doctors were forever overshadowed by how great the Tom Baker era was. The last couple Doctors haven't been able to reach the heights of quality and ratings achieved in the first Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat eras. Studios don't generally like to hear that the wildly successful thing will henceforth get by on being mildly successful. So they brought back Russell T Davies and they threw more and more money at it. It really is incredible how much that backfired. Russell T Davies now has the distinction of being the man who resurrected Doctor Who and the man who killed it again. I wonder what it'd have been like if Tom Baker came back in 1989 and sucked.

Davies' statement about the cancellation is kind of bizarre:

And so GOODBYE from me to Doctor Who but HELLO to a big new future for the show, as the BBC announces it’s putting the show out to tender. As a result, there won’t be a Christmas Special - we only cooked that up to guarantee a future when no one knew what would happen, but now we do know, there’s no need for it. You’ll have to wait a bit longer for new Doctor Who… but you’ll be waiting for MORE Doctor Who than a one-off. So it’s worth it! For the record: there was no script, I never wrote it, and no actor was ever approached to play the next Doctor. You may disagree; fine, sit in that chair and wait to be proved right. You’ll wait a lonnng time 🪑 Now I’m as excited as anyone to see what comes next! Will they keep the theme tune? Will they lose the blue box? Will they bring back the Drahvin?! It’s all up for grabs, which is so Doctor Who, exciting and unpredictable and new! Here comes the future, vworp vworp

I mean, he directly says that he lied to everyone for months and then mocks anyone for disbelieving him now. Okay, Mystery Master, have it your way.

Russell T Davies has written some great episodes of Doctor Who. Some of the Ncuti Gatwa episodes were great, though I think Davies' last couple seasons will, for a very long time now, be remembered for its lowest points, like the "Space Babies" episode, as everyone now digests it as a period of indisputable decline. Such extravagantly bad moments, along with his bloody minded obsession with being even more woke than Chibnall, seem like symptoms of a massive, if well earned, ego. He got the idea that he could make anything he wanted work on Doctor Who. Turns out some things are impossible for even him.

So we may never find out why Billie Piper's big glowing face was grinning at us like the Cheshire Cat in the final shot of the now final episode. I think more than a few people, more than would care to admit it, predict the answer to the mystery would've been, "Oh, more of this bullshit."

So now what? If Doctor Who returns, it's going to be on a much smaller budget unless the BBC finds a replacement for Bad Wolf and Disney that seems like a surer bet, and I can't imagine what studio that would be. Paramount? And then how do you save face while putting out a budget cut Doctor Who? That's the tragedy of the increased production values that began in the Chibnall era. It became too big to fail. Now it's checkmated itself.

Or they could treat it like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and do an entirely new reboot every three years. God I hope not. I suspect they won't; I suspect we won't be seeing new Doctor Who for at least fifteen years, if ever. Everyone's just too tired and the imagination isn't there anymore.

A Glut of Returners

A lackadaisical young man tends a cemetery where zombies routinely rise in 1994's Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore). Rupert Everett stars in this bizarre Italian film that begins like a pleasantly sleazy giallo and becomes something much weirder, much more impressively surreal.

Francesco (Everett) tends the cemetery accompanied only by a big mute named Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro). Francesco's a crack shot and is accustomed to lazily shooting the occasional wandering zombie in the brain without giving it much thought.

One day, he falls for a beautiful young widow he sees attending a funeral. She's played by the beautiful Anna Falchi, of whom we see quite a lot in this film, by which I mean both that she's naked a lot and she plays multiple roles. Indeed, she seems to take on a supernatural life as the embodiment of Francesco's conception of a desirable woman.

Gnaghi has a love interest, too, the disembodied head of the mayor's daughter. Like a lot of points in the film, it feels like the screenwriter intentionally swerved at the last minute before making a coherent political statement.

Eventually, as Francesco becomes thoroughly desensitised to killing, the world around him becomes increasingly inexplicable. Martin Scorsese named it one of the best Italian movies of the '90s and I can see why. It just gets better and better.

Cemetery Man is available on Shudder.

The Magnetism of Magnani

The Spanish Viceroy in 18th century, colonial Peru orders a splendid vehicle from Europe and is surprised to also receive a commedia dell'arte troupe in 1952's The Golden Coach. This Jean Renoir film is a fascinating and pretty tale of class and romantic conflict starring Anna Magnani. It was a box office failure, which I imagine was due to Magnani's failure to be as charismatic as her character is meant to be--the whole plot hinges on everyone falling in love with her. But there's a lot to recommend about the movie and Magnani's performance.

The set design, cinematography, and costumes are beautiful. The enormous cast of extras fill the screen with so much life and create such a vivid sense of this fantasy version of colonial Peru. The troupe set up their theatre and the first bit of interesting class conflict comes from the reluctance of anyone attending the performance to pay for seeing it. The Italian troupe can't understand this basic failure of protocol but there's a way of doing things in this strange land. It's not until the bullfighter, Ramon (Riccardo Rioli), shows his approval that any money starts coming in but not, of course, from Ramon. Ramon gives a necklace to the troupe's resident Columbina named Camilla (Anna Magnani). A row ensues when Felipe (Paul Campbell), also part of the troupe, brawls with Camilla in a fit of jealousy. And, of course, the Viceroy (Duncan Lamont) is also in love with Camilla.

Magnani was 44 at the time and it never seems plausible that so many men would be in love with her. Granted, I've never been a fan of Anna Magnani, nor did I ever think she was particularly beautiful, even in Rome, Open City. But I can't deny she gives a powerful performance. I can't see why she would attract all these men but I felt a vicarious pleasure when she laughed at the Viceroy and the other dignitaries at the end of the movie's best scene. In this scene, after he's promised to give the golden coach to Camilla, the Viceroy also finds he must promise it to the governing council, who pledge a hefty donation for the use of it. Meanwhile, the Viceroy must attempt to conceal the presence of another mistress in the house whom Camilla has already spotted. Magnani's good when she's kind of vicious. She'd be nice to have on your side in a fight but I can't imagine looking at her and wanting to woo her.

The Golden Coach is available on The Criterion Channel.

Obsession Obsession

I'm really pleased to see Obsession has generated so much discussion. It's nice that a popular movie is so intellectually stimulating. I wanted to talk a bit about it to-day and go into spoiler territory to do so, so if you want to see it and haven't yet, I'd recommend stopping here, unless you just don't care.

Yesterday, Kat Rosenfield wrote about the discourse surrounding the film in an article for The Free Press. Like a lot of people, she uses the film to discuss the nature of love. I don't actually think Obsession is about love. I don't call it love when a girl tricks a guy into eating his dead cat. You could argue it's a film about mental illness. But some would say love is a kind of mental illness.

My idea of love has evolved over time. I think there is truth in the old expression, "Love is letting go." I also don't think of love as selfish. Now, you could say that Nikki is selfless in how she degrades and hurts herself but I see self harm, when it isn't intrinsically related to any solution for a problem in a relationship, as an evasion. Instead of discussing her lie about her father's illness, Nikki's reaction is cause a scene, thereby shutting down discussion. Humiliating herself, as she does repeatedly throughout the film, functions as a form of penance. Penance unrelated to the issue isn't so different, to my mind, from buying absolution, like purchasing indulgences. Of course, Nikki can't address the issues underlying her relationship with Bear because the relationship isn't founded on anything real, only the arbitrary magical forces behind the wish.

Bear's wording is crucial, as it always is in good magic wish stories. He wishes Nikki would "love him more than anyone else in the world." One could interpret this as meaning that there must have been someone for whom Nikki felt slightly less intensely. That, in order for the wish to clear that bar, it had to make her feelings especially intense. It may not be the magic object's fault that Nikki chooses to react to her feelings in this way. She doesn't seem like someone with this kind of personality before the wish takes effect, though we learn very little about her, and there are a few hints that there may be turbulent aspects to her personality.

Of course, we do know that she isn't the real Nikki. The film makes it explicitly clear that the wish device basically traps Nikki's true personality in a non-corporeal realm while some kind of demon or spirit takes possession of her body. From this standpoint, Bear could've rightly argued that the object didn't actually fulfill his wish. He wanted Nikki to love him, not some random demon. But that's a fair idea for a story. How often have you bought something that didn't function as advertised? It's a sensible idea. Though, as I said in my initial review, I found the film was more interesting before it settled on a clear explanation of what had happened.

YouTuber Deep Focus Lens likened Bear to Scottie in Vertigo, which I don't really agree with. Deep Focus Lens herself makes the point that Bear really can't be blamed, at least initially, for what happens to Nikki. He makes the wish without any real expectation that it will actually take effect and, when it does, he naturally doesn't really believe it has. There's no flash of sparkling light, no thunder crack. Nikki just comes back to his car and invites him inside. Scottie in Vertigo does compel Judy to dress as Madeleine, though it's crucial that Judy does agree to do this, albeit reluctantly. Both her reluctance and eventual complicity are derived from her sense of guilt over participation in a crime. They are her penance as well as (possibly) manifestations of affection for Scottie. When Scottie realises that Judy is the same woman he met as Madeleine, he rejects her dramatically, dragging her up to the bell tower to get a confession out of her. Bear, meanwhile, when he realises Nikki is not Nikki, doesn't have the moral fortitude to let her go, which, to be fair, would be no small feat, particularly since what happened should, in a rational world, be impossible, and therefore difficult to incorporate into any rational plan of action.

My impression is that the Wish Willow device is actually malevolent, that it deliberately, not accidentally, twists Bear's wish into something horrific. The inhabiting spirit is under no obligation from the wish to feed him his cat, nor does loving him necessitate taping his door shut or following him around constantly. There's extravagant sadism in her behaviour, both in her treatment of Bear and her treatment of the girl she considers a rival for his affections. We don't learn a lot about Nikki before the wish takes effect but one of the few things we see to establish her character is that she gives money to a homeless man, though she takes the money from another character. This suggests she's generous in one sense but unwilling to pay the cost herself. This is different from how the inhabiting spirit behaves. Yet we do know that the real Nikki had the nickname "Freaky Nikki", and that she hated the nickname, though we never learn why she was given it or why she hated it.

I suspect the nature of the possession was to some extent inspired by Twin Peaks due to one line in the film, when Nikki, apparently regaining temporary control of her body, says, "I'm not me." This is Laura Dern's line from Twin Peaks and, just like in Obsession, it's unclear how much of her behaviour is hers or her doppelganger's, much as it was unclear how much of the behaviour exhibited by the subjects of Bob's possessions was reflective of their true personalities or Bob's. The ambiguity makes it more interesting, at least in my opinion. It's the very thing that makes a work of art, like Obsession, alive in discourse. The ambiguities of the story reflect the ambiguities of life itself, which intensifies the compulsion for discourse and analysis.

Sonnet 1995

A cup of teeth was found beneath the bed.
No other sign of dental health was seen.
But stencilled shadows say the woman's dead.
The story told with flick'ring light was clean.
At Picnic Rock, the stones absorb your app.
Your friendly hollow friend retreats to bytes.
A strange array of limbs is held in sap.
No summer storm, no cold of winter bites.
A rusty bus entombed intrepid boys.
The dusty attic staunched effusive girls.
The Tsar's enforcers march, resembling toys.
In heat, the withered psychic dollar curls.
Exhaustive searches find the bodies lost.
The fire and the land condone a cost.

Anthony Head

Anthony Head has died at the age of 72. That seems young nowadays but it's not as young as his Buffy the Vampire Slayer costars Nicholas Brendon and Michelle Trachtenberg, who were 54 and 39, respectively. But both Head and Brendon died this year and Trachtenberg last year. Head's cause of death was reported to be pneumonia. His wife died last December so I wonder if that was a factor.

Head played Rupert Giles, the elder advisor character to the cast of characters who were mostly teenagers at the series' inception. He was the high school librarian and, secretly, the "Watcher" of title character Buffy, someone appointed by a secret council to guide the young woman born with supernatural powers to fight vampires. He played the stereotype of the stuffy, tweed coated British scholar, but nuance and complexity came to the character via both Joss Whedon's iconoclastic writing and Head's performance. Giles became the trusted and comforting voice of authority, a culturally out of step comedic foil, and one with a violent dark side. Head knitted these contradictions together into an authentic character who was a fundamental component of the series' distinctive flavour. When he was absent for long stretches in the show's sixth and seventh seasons, the tone of the series became drastically different.

Head also made a notable guest appearance on Doctor Who in 2006 and was recently on Ted Lasso.