A Vampire Day

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone.

I was in the middle of a re-watch of Angel a couple years ago when Disney+ in Japan decided to pull it. A decent VPN was no longer in my budget and the free ones only sporadically worked on Disney+. I don't even currently have Disney+ but I finally got too frustrated at being cut off mid-Angel and bought some season four episodes on Amazon. Last night I watched Orpheus from March 19th, 2003, an episode in which Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer guest stars in order to restore Angel's soul.

This was also the episode where Cordelia kind of abruptly goes full villain. It feels kind of like the writers decided to take this course after realising that the writing for her character in season four had been kind of lame and making her a villain was the only way to make sense of things like her deciding to sleep with Connor. Cordelia's character was just a mess by this point anyway. I guess this was around the time the behind the scenes drama was happening between Charisma Carpenter, the actress who played Cordelia, and series co-creator Joss Whedon. I wonder if anyone's taken into account the possibility that the tensions were arising because Cordelia had become dead weight and no-one knew how to confront it. Willow and Wesley have a slightly too tongue-in-cheek dialogue about how they both went down dark paths since they last interacted in Buffy season three. Somehow the transition feels more natural for both characters than Cordelia's transformation from shallow comic relief with occasional hints of hidden depths to holy team mom. What could they do with that moral certitude but make a villain?

I'd forgotten about the flirtations between Willow and Fred. It's a shame that never happened.

Still Walking

I wonder how many times I've seen Fire Walk with Me. That's a question I might've asked myself when I was in high school three decades ago and have trouble coming up with an answer. But I was watching it again last night, having recently finished another viewing of Twin Peaks season two. I fell asleep about halfway through the movie, though.

How many times have I willingly watched and unironically enjoyed Chris Isaak's lousy performance as Special Agent Chet Desmond? It's strange how often great singers make for poor actors. There's so much nuance in his vocals when he's singing but he just delivers every line flat as old coke when he's acting.

Still, I do like him and Kiefer Sutherland together. Sutherland's performance as the dopey but still basically competent Sam Stanley makes their double act work. It was originally supposed to be Dale Cooper in Chet Desmond's place but Kyle MacLachlan wanted to minimise his role. If it had been Cooper in Desmond's place, it would've made more sense of all his comments in the pilot episode about local law enforcement not playing nice with the FBI and Albert being more on the ball than Sam. It still basically works, though.

Not all singers are bad actors, as we can see when David Bowie shows up shortly after Chris Isaak's character disappears. It's a shame Bowie couldn't have come back for the role in season three.

The Corrupt and the Cruel

I'm having two lines of thought this morning that are converging. I'm thinking about the Epstein files and Gothic fiction. The connexion is ruthlessness and an untrustworthy world.

I haven't read the Epstein files because I don't have a year to devote to them. I'm amazed when articles say "only" three million or so e-mails have been released. The impression that any name just mentioned in the e-mails is an indication of shared guilt in Epstein's crimes has led to some people, like Jon Stewart, feeling compelled to explain brief mentions of their names in e-mails Epstein exchanged with various people. This morning I watched a video of physicist Sabine Hossenfelder explaining that her name is mentioned in one of the e-mails simply because Epstein knew someone who went to one of her conferences.

I like how she takes the opportunity to criticise the spreading lack of conscientiousness in her field. A lack of conscientiousness similarly exists in journalism which often seems not only driven for sensationalism but by personal vendettas. This is the impression I got from coverage of Neil Gaiman. I was reading the substack of TechnoPathology, the guy compiling evidence of the malfeasance in coverage of the allegations levelled at Neil Gaiman. TechnoPathology has shared posts from a sexual assault survivor named Effie who draws attention to one of the most obvious things about the Vulture article, which was the tone. It was not the dispassionate tone of a journalist but of someone crafting a narrative about a villain.

What ruthless and vengeful person have I been reading about lately? Oh, yeah, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Repeatedly throughout the book, characters ask Heathcliff if he doesn't have any morsel of compassion in his soul and proves again and again through his words and actions that he has none. No guilt haunts him unless it's the literal ghost of Catherine. It's a reminder that Gothic fiction was in many ways a reaction against the Romantics, specifically the love the Romantics had of nature and for the "Byronic hero", the hero who casts aside all fidelity to any kind of moral system and pursues only his own pleasures. Frankenstein, by the way, operates both as a work of Romantic fiction and Gothic fiction in this way. Mary Shelley's portrait of the creature simultaneously sympathises with and condemns him.

But characters in Gothic fiction, in its full bloom, like Heathcliff, like Dorian Gray, like Dr. Jekyll, like Captain Ahab, like the killers in Edgar Allan Poe's stories, all show us the horror and disaster wrought by men who act solely in the name of they own selfish urges. Generally they're not bothered internally but externally, by supernatural forces. In one of the Epstein files, Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein talk about Trump losing sleep because of dirt the two of them have on him. On the contrary, I think Trump sleeps perfectly well. He's shown again and again that he doesn't particularly care if he's seen as moral. As the title of Kurosawa Akira's 1960 movie says, "The Bad Sleep Well (悪い奴ほどよく眠る)". That movie was based on Shakespeare's Hamlet and it's noteworthy that it's not the murderer who's haunted in that story but the protagonist, Prince Hamlet. Likewise, Richard III isn't haunted, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund aren't haunted. If you want to find a bad person, look for someone who seems utterly content with his or her moral position.

The Hazardous Lives of Pretty Journalists

A beautiful woman is found dead in the hotel room of a famous double act and, fifteen years later, another woman tries to get to the truth behind the matter in 2005's Where the Truth Lies. Another Atom Egoyan film featured on Criterion this month, this one's much closer to what I would have expected from the director of Chloe and Exotica; a pulpy, slightly campy daydream dressed up as a thriller. It's a lot of fun.

Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth play Lanny and Vince, a double act very obviously modelled on Martin and Lewis. One morning, just before the two are scheduled to host a telethon, a dead woman is found in their bathtub. The autopsy is said to point to a drug overdose but, fifteen years later, a young reporter named Karen (Alison Lohman) gets to work ghostwriting an autobiography for Vince and starts to realise there's something fishy about the dead woman, or, more accurately, lobster-y. What do I mean by that? That would be a spoiler but, suffice to say, we see her with lobsters at one point.

Some critics said Lohman was miscast but I would say that's precisely where critics didn't understand the movie. Lohman is absolutely perfect, if you ask me, because she seems so wrong. Her elaborate, anachronistically '40s hairstyles never look natural on the ruthless, trashy teen from Bully. She seems like a kinky gal engaged in sexual role play. It may be fairer to say Kevin Bacon was miscast. Someone with a sense of comedic timing would have been better in the Jerry Lewis role. I've been watching The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel again lately and this movie almost seems set in the same universe in which the viewer has to strain their imagination to take the professional entertainers at the centre of the stories as geniuses despite nothing they say on stage being funny.

The film's mostly interior locations, shot in England though set in L.A., add to the sense of artificiality. I was interested in the murder mystery but mostly as an aphrodisiac, a pretext for the sexual tension and sex.

Where the Truth Lies lies on The Criterion Channel.

Himeji Besieged by Snow

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.

Miss Kimura's picture of me taking pictures:

Me taking a macro shot:

And the shot:

Diminishing Heights

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.

Tarantino State of Mind

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.

The Mystery Science Continues to Evolve

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:

Fall Off

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.

Fallout is available on Amazon Prime.

On To-day's Cloistered Virtues

Sometimes the evidence of your own eyes is text.

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?

Shadow on the Ground

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.

The Listening Part

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.

What's Really Happening?

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

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:

The Caterer and the Lost Lamb

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.

The Free Will of Deathclaws

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.

Fallout is available on Amazon Prime.

The Responsibilities of the Open Road

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.