Arr, Pirates be Unmotivated!

If you're going to make a pirate movie, you should probably know what a pirate is. Or maybe the makers of 2026's The Bluff have a different idea of what a pirate movie should be. It's a shame because the cast of this movie is pretty good.

Priyanka Chopra plays a former pirate called Bloody Mary trying to live a normal life in the Cayman islands, now going by the name of Ercell. Of course the past comes to call, in this case in the form of a former partner and lover, a Captain Francisco Connor, played by Karl Urban. Urban is really well suited to playing a pirate and he looks good in his black justaucorps, wielding a small revolver.

Yes, he wears what appears to be a late 18th century coat while wielding a gun from the latter half of the 19th century. We're told this movie is set in the 19th century but it's not clear exactly when. This isn't really a problem since the film is essentially a fantasy movie. The problem comes when Ercell explains to her son what a pirate is.

Hiding out in the caves within a bluff while the pirates terrorise the island, she explains to her son that real pirates aren't like the ones in her son's books. Real pirates, she says, are "colonisers" who worked for the East India Company. She says they took her as a child and made her an indentured servant.

In real life, as in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, pirates were the natural enemies of the British East India Company and any other European company with an official charter for trade outside of Europe. So this begs the question: if pirates weren't fighting against the colonies and the merchants, whom were they fighting? The movie never answers that question. Trying to think about it logically leads one into a nonsensical loop. If pirates are basically the East India Company's private navy, then they would naturally fight against people who would unlawfully attack and rob East India Company ships. Such an assailant would, in plain English, be called a pirate, or possibly a privateer. But if a pirate is, by definition, an employee of the East India Company, whom did pirates fight? The line of thinking just goes in circles.

Some would say, oh, the movie's a silly fantasy, don't worry about it. Except Ercell's past is integral to the plot. She's trying to protect her son and sister-in-law, the two of whom come across evidence that Ercell had done terrible things as a pirate and we're invited to wonder with them if they can trust her. How can we participate in this puzzler if we don't know what she did? We're shown flashbacks of her on ships, apparently fighting individuals that go unnamed. She had a mohawk in the past. The real logic here is wrapped up in the anachronistic term "coloniser" which some academic screenwriter is clearly trying to turn into as easily a comprehensible villain as "Nazi". Certainly, the East India Company was responsible for colonising India, where Ercell is presumably from, though we're never told. But why would an East India Company ship capture a little girl and force her to be a sailor? The filmmakers rely on audience prejudice to fill in a lot of blanks. The action scenes are okay, if a little silly and outright nonsensical, as in one standoff where Ercell faces off against the pirate crew clutching ropes that she somehow attached to bombs that are buried in the sand under each of them. Not since Ator built a hang glider in ten minutes has a fantasy movie asked me to suspend my disbelief this hard. The actors are all good. Tamuera Morrison is also in the film as Karl Urban's second in command. What a wasted opportunity. The Bluff is available on Amazon Prime.

She Sells Cereal by the Silo

I was going to skip 1984's She (1985's by Amazon's reckoning) because it looked like it was totally unrelated to H Rider Haggard's novel and it looked terrible. But damn it, I'm too much of a completist, and there it was for free on Amazon Prime. So I soldiered through it. It turned out to be a terrible movie but not totally unrelated to Haggard's novel. It has a quote from the book at the beginning. It features a female ruler as one of the main characters. The male lead is a handsome blonde. Otherwise, there's no resemblance.

It's kind of like a cross between Conan the Barbarian and Mad Max with a dose of Terry Gilliam. It's labelled as "post-Apocalyptic" but I seriously started to wonder, halfway through the movie, if that was the filmmakers' intention. After the Haggard quote comes a caption that informs us it's "Year 23, After the Cancellation". This is preceded by crude but effectively creepy animations of burning corpses and floating skulls. It could have been a depiction of apocalypse. On the other hand, we're never told what "the Cancellation" was exactly or how "Year 23" relates to our calendar. If it is meant to be a post-apocalyptic story, writer/director Avi Nesher must have decided everything would be totally random after the apocalypse. This movie has a mad scientist wearing an 18th century justaucorps and a baseball helmet, a society of werewolves who wear short Roman tunics by day and tuxedos by night, and a comedian guarding a bridge who spawns duplicates of himself whenever one of his limbs is cut off.

The title character is played by Sandahl Bergman, the biggest name involved with the movie, except perhaps Gordon Mitchell, who appears very briefly (Mitchell's Wikipedia page says this movie was made in 1982). Bergman is best known for playing Valaria in Conan the Barbarian and she seems to still be wearing her costume from that movie in this one. Since this is an Italian production (though the director's Israeli) the real protagonists have to be men, of course, so we have a Clint Eastwood-ish guy named David Goss played the handsome blonde, Tom, accompanied by his best friend, Dick (Harrison Muller) and his sister, Hari (Elena Wiedermann). So, yes it's Tom, Dick, and Hari. Hari is kidnapped at the beginning of the movie and is absent throughout. This is not to remain a source of tension, Tom isn't on a quest to rescue her throughout the story. The movie just seems to forget about her, possibly because Wiedermann was clearly no actress, and she bears the same blank expression in every scene she's in.

She, the Sandahl Bergman character, has what appear to be a dozen or so people worshiping her as a goddess. She goes through a trial that requires her to be topless at one point. She captures Tom and Dick, who escape, then she chases them with her second in command, Shandra (Quin Kessler), they all team up for no apparent reason, and they have a series of bizarre episodic encounters. They meet several groups worshiping an apparent human as a god, the most powerful being a guy named Godan who can shoot green lasers from his eyes. He's adopted the hammer and sickle as his symbol for no apparent reason.

Perhaps this was meant to be more post-modern than post-apocalyptic. But if this movie was trying to say something, anything, damned if I know what it was.

She (1982/1984/1985) is available on Amazon Prime.

Sweet Dead Weight

A woman finds ingesting the ashes of cremated human corpses helps her lose weight. Unfortunately, it comes at the cost of being haunted by the ghost of the deceased in 2026's Saccharine. The story becomes an obvious allegory for the psychological issues surrounding a young woman's body image but, despite some unconvincing makeup and prosthetic work, it's an effective film, largely due to its star, Midori Francis.

It doesn't make sense for Francis' character, Hana, to have an American accent, but Francis is so good, I forgive her. It's an Australian movie and almost everyone else in the movie has an Australian accent, though the location is never specified. Like Francis herself, Hana has a white parent and a Japanese parent. Hana's Japanese mother is obsessed with cleanliness (not far-fetched for a Japanese woman) while her father is an enormously obese man who, through much of the movie, is not shown. We know he's there because we hear him breathing behind a door or hear his thudding steps in a nearby hall. As the movie progresses, we see a little more of him; the back of his head while he's watching TV, a glimpse around a corner. The obvious reason for this is to convey a sense of the relationship Hana's parents have to her own anxieties about her weight and eating habits.

The movie is told from Hana's point of view. She's a young medical student and she and her classmates have just begun dissecting a human corpse. Among her classmates is the film's only other male character and his contribution to the film is to name the corpse they've been assigned "Big Bertha". Hana's a lesbian, her friends are lesbians, and, naturally, her love interest is a woman, so most of the time it's women we see onscreen. But the two men at the periphery cast long shadows over the film, very like personifications of repressed issues. Despite Hana's and her friends' attempts to maintain progressive attitudes about weight, Hana automatically refers to the corpse as Bertha.

Hana is herself overweight but it's difficult to tell. Francis is an extremely skinny actress and this seems to have proven a challenge for the effects crew who made her fat suit. She doesn't look fat so much as oddly shaped. The fat suit on her father, when we do see him, is similarly odd.

Of course, it doesn't make sense for human ash to work as a weight loss tool, but I kind of liked how the film took the time to lampshade it. When Hana is given the capsules that hold the ash at a bar, she takes them to the lab and analyses them, which is the point at which she discovers it's human ash. She remarks that the sodium content should be more likely to facilitate weight gain than weight loss. This conundrum is never mentioned again, its presence there not to explain anything but to help establish Hana as a character with a logical thought process. It does explain how Hana is able to make the pills herself by harvesting material from the cadaver she and her classmates are dissecting. Of course, this leads to Hana being haunted by the dead woman.

The ghost is nice and creepy. The enormous, naked cadaver of a fat woman when it's following Hana can only be seen in convex reflective surfaces, like a tea kettle or a spoon. There are a couple of times Hana sees her directly, as in one dream sequence when Hana, now tiny and skinny after regularly taking the human ash, sees the cadaver floating above her, slowly lowering until it crushes her.

The symbolism is very obvious but Midori Francis is captivating with a sharp, naturalistic performance. She grew up in New Jersey and I think she'd be perfect for a Kevin Smith movie, if Smith were still making good movies.

Saccharine is available on Shudder.

Hal Jordan Goes to Hogwarts

I had this idea that Damon Lindelof was supposed to be a good, exceptionally clever writer. I guess because I still think Prometheus is underrated. But last night's pilot episode for Lanterns, which he co-wrote with Chris Mundy and Tom King, was pedestrian at best. Maybe Mundy and King are to blame, but I heard King was supposed to be a good writer, too. Maybe sometimes things just don't work and it's no-one's fault.

I wonder who first pitched the idea of a Green Lantern show that aped True Detective. There's also kind of a Taylor Sheridan quality here, too, with all the cowboy hats and midwest milieu. It all felt slightly cynical, especially since the teleplay makes it clear that the writers do not share the politics of the people the show's ostensibly trying to appeal to. But the main problem is that the show's just boring. When we see the young black child getting inspired by the white superhero I thought, yeah, I've already seen this on Wonder Man and it felt cheaply manipulative there, too.

The actors are fine, particularly Kyle Chandler, who's charismatic despite being stuck in ornery mode like every other character on the show. I was surprised and happy to see Kelly Macdonald, an actress I like, though, as with her character on Skeleton Crew, she's again playing outside her range. She was perfect as the sweet, guileless wife in No Country for Old Men and the slowly awakening New Woman on Boardwalk Empire but, like Mary Elizabeth Winstead, or like Tommy in Goodfellas, she seems to have an inferiority complex. For some reason it seems to be important to her that people see her as a badass.

The most interesting part of the episode was the interrogation scene but its clever part was the same clever part of Invasion USA, the 1952 film featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, in which a spy gives himself away due to his lack of familiarity with the Chicago Cubs.

I don't know, maybe it gets better.

Lanterns is available on HBOMax.

The Ones Who Do Not Shoot

After two awkward people decide to get married, a revelation about one's past threatens to destroy their lives and make them both even more awkward. 2026's The Drama is superficially in the tradition of Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman, a movie in which actors explore the psychological depths of characters through intellectual dialogue. But writer/director Kristoffer Borgli has a very clear message he wants the audience to come away with and he sticks to it over the course of the film to the detriment of the characters and the story.

Robert Pattinson and Zendaya star as Charlie and Emma. We meet them as they meet each other, in a coffee shop, where Charlie awkwardly approaches Emma to stumble over his words, praising the book she's reading, which he later admits to not having read, but she can't hear him anyway because she's deaf in one ear and the other has an earbud in it. When she realises he was talking and evidently feels attracted to him, too, she awkwardly suggests starting over, and so he goes back to his seat and musters his courage. It's a little funny but mostly it's uncomfortable.

One night over dinner with another couple, Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), maid of honour and best man at Charlie and Emma's upcoming wedding, the four of them, after many glasses of wine, decide to talk about the worst thing they've ever done. After the three others make their confessions, Emma reveals that when she was fifteen she planned a mass shooting at her school. Rachel is unable to restrain expressing her extreme disgust, telling the group how her cousin was paralyzed after having been shot in a mass shooting. The rest of the movie is told primarily from Charlie's point of view as he struggles to cope with Emma's revelation.

Halfway through the movie, the thought came to me that Pattinson was endeavouring to play the most awkward man in history. He is the Woody Allen character in this movie except without Allen's cleverness or insight. The morning after the revelation, he sees a mug in their cupboard with a picture of a gun on it and immediately throws it in the trash. When Emma confronts him about the mug she saw in the trash, he denies that he threw it away despite the obvious fact that she wouldn't have brought it up if she hadn't seen it in the trash and then he explains he did it because it was broken though she could plainly see it wasn't. This becomes a pattern throughout the film--he lies badly when he doesn't have to about impulsive actions he's prompted to take by his discomfort.

Pattinson is so intensely awkward I realised I was thinking about his awkwardness much more than the issue the film was apparently aiming to tackle, which was how we deal with the increasing number of shooters in the U.S. But then I realised this was Borgli's strategy, and it became clear when Charlie had his one non-awkward, insightful moment in the film, when he confronts Rachel and Mike and says that, with so many people in the U.S. committing mass shootings, there must be an enormous number of people who think about it and don't do it. As he's saying this, Borgli presents a montage of people walking the streets, predominately attractive young women, some of them with anguished looks on their faces. The sequence concludes with a pretty blonde woman on a park bench looking like she's about to cry.

There's one scene, a flashback to Emma in school, in which one of the other students mentions that the shooters are always boys, and Emma counters that the song "I Don't Like Mondays" was based on the true story of a female mass shooter. It's clear why Emma would have thought about this but, along with that montage, I realised that Borgli was subtly trying to frame this as something girls go through despite the reality that mass shooters are 99% of the time boys. And then I considered how the opposite side of the argument was presented in the film.

Rachel had confessed to locking a child in a closet in an abandoned house when she was a teenager. This prompted the whole town to search for the boy whom she claims was eventually found. She also points out that the human brain doesn't finish maturing until the age of 25. Her reaction to Emma's confession is so strident, so indignant that she comes off as an obnoxious hypocrite. We see the cousin she refers to later in the film, briefly, at which time she's shown to be a little put off by Charlie's awkwardness. Charlie's most cringe-inducing, awkward moments are prompted by his poor attempts at managing his feelings about what Emma had confessed. Most viewers at some point would reflexively want to say to the guy, "Jesus, get over it."

Since the movie has no sympathetic moments for the victims of mass shootings, and makes those who condemn mass shooters come off as obnoxious or annoying, the apparent strategy of the film is to make us sympathise with mass shooters.

Emma's discomfort is always portrayed as more deserving of sympathy than Charlie's. In addition to framing the urge to commit a massacre as a woman's problem, Borgli also racially codes the problem by making the black characters, Emma and Mike, invariably more level-headed than the white characters. Mike's "worst thing" was that he once hid behind his girlfriend when it seemed an angry dog was about to attack them. Throughout the rest of the film, he's shown trying to convince Rachel to cool down a little and guide Charlie into being less awkward.

Borgli is a Norwegian filmmaker and, for once, Pattinson uses his native accent, playing an English character. The outsider's perspective on American culture is deliberately invoked when Charlie presents the sympathetic montage and explicitly describes the cultural problem as "American". His "worst thing" was that he claimed to have cyberbullied someone in high school. From his tone, like so many of the things he says, it seems likely the story was a lie. If Charlie ever in his life did anything truly wrong, he has repressed it so far that he's not consciously aware of it.

It's certainly worth pondering the psychology of shooters in America. The reflexive media and law enforcement morality is to conceal personal details and opinions of shooters as much as possible and even aspects of their lives that would otherwise be portrayed as positive tend to be shown as evidence of their monstrousness, as though the people discussing have no faith in their own ability to assess the personalities of the shooters and so apply the same reproach to all details they can't suppress. This film is not really the long overdue exploration of that psychology, though. We know Emma was harassed and bullied by her classmates but we don't get any insight into why she chose violence as a solution. I was kind of reminded of Lars Von Triers' Dancer in the Dark, which was partly inspired by Von Triers' negative opinion of America's continued use of the death penalty but, having never visited the U.S. himself, his movie is more of a fairy tale than an insightful indictment. Von Trier knew what he was doing but I'm not sure Borgli did.

The Drama is available on Amazon Prime.

What Now, Miles?

Trouble comes to Miles O'Brien again in "The Visionary", a February 1995 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. As usual, Colm Meaney as O'Brien does an excellent job of being human and exasperated in a weird situation though the time travel mechanics in this episode aren't as consistent as they are in some other episodes.

O'Brien's problem this time is that an accident has left him doused with radiation that reacts to a singularity orbiting the station to make him randomly jump forward in time about five hours. It's a lucky thing, too, because he tends to witness disasters he's then able to prevent in this volatile couple of days on DS9.

For most of the episode, he appears to those nearby to faint and awaken with future knowledge. But when Quark sees a duplicate O'Brien appear, everyone realises O'Brien wasn't hallucinating. The trouble is, an uncredited Ron Moore added a plot twist in which past O'Brien stays in the future and future O'Brien comes back in his place, wearing a different outfit. But wasn't past O'Brien's body supposed to be unconscious back in the present, apparently having fainted?

It's still basically an entertaining episode and all the performances are good. I particularly liked Odo in the episode. He spends much of it investigating the Romulans and Klingons and questioning suspects. That's the Odo I like, not the one getting emotional about the Changelings.

Sonnet 2005

Recursive folds defined her paper map
Across her country, lines were making kings
Important trees were thick with golden sap
From pans emerged the cakes of which she sings
At breakfast time, decisions rocked her world
She piled numbers over beds and sheets
At fire's edge, her little dollar curled
A final note when cutting costs and seats
You see, her rusty car was hollowed out
She couldn't find a pipe to warp away
And so she folds her arms and starts to pout
The news was full of tales about delay
At last, contraptions took her heart to Hell
And there she rang the Devil's golden bell

Mushroom Dreams

Last night I dreamt I was staying in a large, labyrinthine manor, in a room on the bottom floor. It was the middle of the night and I somehow sensed something outside my door. I opened it and in the darkness I could just see the butler, a short, bald man who didn't say anything. He looked mildly perplexed and walked away. I immediately lost track of him in the pitch black darkness.

Has anyone noticed how dreamlike AI videos are? Yesterday, my five year old nephew visited my parents' house, where I've been staying the past few months, and while we were eating lunch he wanted to watch some Super Mario Brothers videos. YouTube's algorithm immediately offered up dozens of shorts, from various accounts, that seem to have been written, directed, and animated entirely by AI.

There are lots of these, all of them uploaded within the last five days. I assume Universal or Nintendo has these routinely removed but they're so easy to make quickly that they keep coming back. My nephew was intrigued by the idea of Peach being abandoned in the rain and so he wanted to watch the video. It turns out, Peach is never abandoned in the video but, instead, the series of short stories rapidly told are various, simplistic morality tales emphasising teamwork, friendship, and family. They generally had a more conservative quality than the recent, human created animated films. In one, Mario and the boys are trying to impress the three princesses, Peach, Rosalina, and Daisy, on the beach. AI seems to like showing characters looking straight at the camera, even if it doesn't make sense, and each shot is short, probably because if a shot lingers too long, errors start to become too obtrusive. But I noticed constant errors anyway. Clothes frequently change between shots. The length of the princesses skirts radically change from shot to shot. In one scene, King Koopa is wearing a vest under his coat but in the next shot it's gone. And there are countless other little things, like characters' gloves changing colour, moustaches disappearing and reappearing. In one of the more dreamlike moments, Baby Rosalina decides to run away from home but what we see in the shot is her house sliding away across the landscape, away from her--her home running away from her.

I found myself laughing at these mistakes, much as I'd laugh at the zippers on the Eye Creatures in Attack of the the Eye Creatures, one of the old movies made fun of on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. But no-one else was laughing. My nephew was just enjoying seeing these characters he likes. A little earlier, I was showing him an episode of the infamous Super Mario Super Show from the '80s which features the unintentionally disturbing live action sequences. But he wasn't disturbed by them. He just liked seeing the characters he liked.

So I realised, or was more forcibly made to contemplate, two things. The flaws in AI aren't so different from cheesy, low budget television shows from the '80s, and both can be enjoyed sincerely by small children and the uneducated in media matters. Those of us who grow up contemplating how art is made and why art affects us the way it does are much more in the minority than we tend to think we are. And I also realised that asking people to support only human made content is like asking people to buy American made products when imports from China are cheaper. People might have some sympathy for those who will lose their jobs and the cheap labour that will be exploited. But such social consciousness is too abstract to ever make a real impact. People have enough to worry about, they have to live their lives and find respite where they can.

More and more, I think this is the future, particularly for Disney, which is already notorious for cutting costs in the writing department. They may copyright strike AI videos but they're also looking at how popular and easy to make they are. I would say we're two years away, at best, from Disney officially releasing barrels of AI content every day.

Reduced She

The latest, and worst, film adaptation of H Rider Haggard's She was made for television in 2001.* Screenwriter Harry Alan Towers, known for schlocky fantasy babe movies like Gor and Warrior Queen, turns the story into one mainly about scantily clad models fighting over Leo Vincey.

In this version, Holly is played by Edward Hardwicke, who's best known for playing Watson to Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes, much as the 1935 version cast Nigel Bruce in the role, another actor best known for playing Watson. I guess people saw Holly as a Watson kind of character. I guess I can see that from the point of view that he is the narrator of the book, much as Watson is of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and the story would seem not to be about him but about Ayesha and Leo. However, that's a very shallow reading of the book. Holly is a very peculiar character and his preoccupations with gender--his self-described misogyny, his ape-like appearance, and his feminine name set him up as an intriguing person to be meeting an immortal matriarch. Film versions seem to want to drain him of any possibly interesting qualities.

Leo's father, in a very brief role, is played by a pre-fame Christoph Waltz, here called Michael Vincey. As in the 1935 version, Leo is actually present when Vincey explains everything to Holly, unlike in the book. Also unlike in the book, but like every film adaptation, we actually see She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed within the first few minutes of the film. I guess filmmakers generally believed for some reason that if the movie's called She, we gotta meet She as soon as possible (again, in this version, "She" is used as a name, though she does reveal in this version to Leo that her real name is Ayesha). However, the characters don't actually meet her until 52 minutes in to the hour and twenty minute movie. A surprising amount of time is spent with Leo, Holly, and Job among the Amahagger, who are once again shown to be white in this version. Otherwise, Towers freely invents and shuffles around characters. In the book, a young Amahagger maiden named Ustane falls in love with Leo while an elder Amahagger man, a chief called Billali, acts as guide and patron for the three Englishmen. In this movie, Billali has been removed and replaced by Ustane who functions just like Billali in the plot except she wears a fur bikini. Meanwhile, a new character is introduced called Roxane to function exactly like Ustane in the book. Yeah, they called this member of an isolated tribe in a lost world "Roxane". Why not call her Jennifer or Caroline? Ustane is played by the very beautiful Martina Colombari who must not be able to speak English because she was clearly dubbed over by another actress. Roxane is played by Marie Baumer who accidentally shows her nipples in one scene. Ian Duncan, who plays Leo, accidentally shows his genitals in another scene. In both cases, the bits were clearly meant to be cropped out of frame or the director was relying on low resolution television. Or maybe they just made a mistake and no-one noticed because hardly anyone even watched this movie.

Randolph Scott, in the 1935 version, played Leo as an American because that's how American movies did things in the '30s, studios not trusting audiences to accept a foreign hero. Maybe that's why, in this 2001 version, Leo, though still being English, is shown to have spent time living in Texas, coming back complete with two cowboy hats (which he wears in just two scenes) and anecdotes about Wyatt Earp. It was one of a few things that made me think the filmmakers were much more familiar with the 1935 film than they were with the book. I can't think of another reason why they'd think it so important to establish a connexion between Leo and America.

Ophelie Winter is the least impressive actress to play Ayesha and perhaps the filmmakers knew it. Or maybe she had too many demands for her role because her presence in the film is oddly subdued, showing up late and leaving early, her famous jump into the fire coming before the film's real climax, a fist fight between Leo and Ayesha's captain of the guard.

Who would be my dream casting for Ayesha? Beauty is subjective but I think any film Ayesha ought to be someone whose beauty is known to be consistently admired all over the world. The most obvious choice for me would be Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, who has the added bonus of a regal bearing. A sense of intelligence and wisdom is also lacking in all the actresses to have played the character, except maybe Betty Blythe.

*I'm skipping over the best adaptation of She, from 1965, because I've already written about it twice. First in 2015, before I'd read the book, and again in 2023, after I'd read the book.

Queen Kong

The location is moved from Africa to Siberia and Leo's first love interest becomes an American woman. These are among the many deviations from the source material in the 1935 version of She. Many of the changes were due to the Hays Code, which had begun to be strictly enforced the previous year. All the changes diminish the film either by degrading the quality of the story or introducing racist elements. But this movie has some impressive special effects and Randolph Scott is pretty good as Leo.

This is the only version I've seen so far that treats "She" as a proper name. People say things like, "That was She's idea." It sounds really awkward. I don't think the name "Ayesha" is even mentioned.

Altogether, it seems a misbegotten film. It was produced by Merian C. Cooper, who made King Kong, and he reused some props and sets from his more famous film because he was forced to work on a reduced budget for She. According to Wikipedia, Cooper considered She to be the worst movie he ever made.

One might assume moving the location from Africa to Siberia was to avoid the imperialist trope of a savage African tribe being ruled by a white person. But it was in fact racism that motivated the change, not Cooper's or Universal's but the Hays Code's, which forbade depictions of miscegenation. The Wikipedia entry says that that the book depicts a white man marrying a black woman but that's actually not true. The woman, Ustane, is a member of the Amahagger people whom Ayesha rules. Haggard describes the people as having yellowish skin and aquiline features. People of colour, maybe, but not black. In other adaptations, including the ones previous to the 1935 version, they're generally white, as indeed they are in the 1935 version. But Ustane's replacement, an American girl named Tanya played by the scrumptious but vacant Helen Mack, doesn't even marry Leo in this version.

Mack is in fact prettier than the woman who plays She, Helen Gahagan, though Gahagan is beautiful. But another effect of the Hays Code was that the title character of the story was no longer permitted to be in any way ambiguous; she must very clearly be a villain every second, so even the dumbest guy in the back row won't get the wrong idea. She's cruel, and the interesting dialogue she has in the book about the difficult decisions she has to make as ruler when administering justice is reduced to a cock-eyed speech in which she explains she must rule with terror. When she goes into the flame at the end, she does so while continuously heaping insults on Tanya. In addition to this, the Hays Code meant that Gahagan didn't get anything like Betty Blythe's see-through clothes or jewel bikini. Her black silk coif with a crown was used as inspiration for the evil queen in Disney's Snow White. In any case, it's understandable that Leo and Holly aren't haunted by the memory of her beauty in this version, especially not Leo, with Tanya clinging to him.

Holly is played by Nigel Bruce, best known for playing Watson to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes. His version of Holly, like his Watson, is played for broad comedy. So much for the tragic, hirsute professor from the book.

The movie has some good matte paintings and Max Steiner's score is good. In contrast to the director's feelings about the film, Steiner evidently considered this the best score of his long career. There's also a surprising, randomly well choreographed dance sequence near the end. Something about the fact that it's so well choreographed makes it incredibly silly. I couldn't help laughing.

Shes

I've been watching every film adaptation of H Rider Haggard's She: A History of Adventure. Yes, there were multiple productions. For almost a century, this was one of the all time most famous fantasy novels. The earliest adaptation is from Georges Melies himself, a very short film made in 1899 called The Pillar of Fire, which really only depicts the very end of the book.

I'm not sure who that little green devil's supposed to be. The set, too, seems to be entirely a product of Melies' imagination. But what a set!

The next adaptation of the book, called She and made in 1911, is short at only 24 minutes but still decides to spend a lot of that time telling a different story from the book, beginning in ancient Egypt and depicting Ayesha's relationship with a pharaoh.

The 1925 version certainly blows the 1911 version out of the water. H. Rider Haggard himself actually wrote the intertitles and the actress playing Ayesha, Betty Blythe, starts to make it believable that men lose their minds over how beautiful she is. Not that's ever truly believable in any adaptation of the book. That's the kind of thing maybe you can only accomplish in prose. But at least Blythe isn't wearing a big shapeless robe the whole time, instead opting for sheer clothing that leaves nothing to the imagination or a jewel encrusted brassiere.

It's edifying to note how different a sexy fantasy babe outfit looked in 1925. It was the dawn of skimpy clothing in western culture and they evidently hadn't figured out that consideration for the natural contours of the body should be involved in designing and tailoring seductive wardrobe. What's meant to look glamorous and regal often looks sad and frumpy. Personally, though, I like how everyone has bad posture by to-day's standards.

Title by Jimmy Two Times

A gorgeous English girl tries to assimilate in an Italian high school where everyone speaks English. Sexually exciting tension arises when she meets a hot young MMA fighter in 2026's Love Me Love Me. This whole movie is unabashed sexual role play. The plot is absurd until you consider it as just a pretext to serve and exacerbate the sexual tension between the two charismatic leads, Mia Jenkins and Pepe Barroso Silva.

This is an Italian movie, despite its English main character and everyone speaking English most of the time. It kind of reminded me of old Spaghetti westerns and Giallo movies in which many of the cast spoke Italian on set to be dubbed over by English speaking actors. I don't know if that was done in Love Me Love Me but a lot of the actors did seem dubbed, especially Silva.

He plays the bad boy MMA fighter. Like most bad boys in this kind of story, it turns out to be a veneer for a complete sweetie pie. It turns out he was only rude to June (Jenkins) because he wanted to protect his best friend, Will (Luca Melucci) from her. There are a lot of excuses for James (Silva) to be openly rude to her or manipulatively seductive, as when he prompts her to orgasm with sexy texts.

Mind you, despite all the sex in this movie, there's no nudity. I wonder if this was actually intended for teenagers.

Anyway, the two stars really make this movie captivating, particularly Mia Jenkins, whose combination of lust and loathing she feels for James is really believable. And hot.

Love Me Love Me is available on Amazon Prime.

To the Bigger Body Goes . . .

Arnold Schwarzenegger invaded Tales from the Crypt in 1990 to personally direct a story about a man trying to improve his physical appearance. As far as I can tell, it was the one and only time Schwarzenegger directed anything, so I guess he decided it wasn't for him, but he doesn't do a bad job. He goes for the gusto and the mad scientist in the story is broadly played, living in a broadly decorated spooky castle.

"The Switch" is based on a 1955 issue of Tales from the Crypt and stars William Hickey (whom you'll most likely know as the voice of Dr. Finkelstein in The Nightmare Before Christmas) as an elderly millionaire who wants to marry a beautiful young woman (Kelly Preston). However, he hasn't told her he's rich because he wants her to love him for his other qualities. He doesn't see the irony when, after she tells him he looks too old for her, he decides to gradually replace every part of his body until he looks like a young man.

It is interesting Schwarzenegger would choose this story to adapt. I suppose he took the opportunity to show people there are no shortcuts to bodybuilding or, at least, none worth taking.

Tales from the Crypt is available on Shudder.

White Ladies

A young mediaeval woman fights the patriarchy with a little help from some forest witches in 2024's Heresy (Witte Wieven, "White Ladies"). It's unimaginative and it's derivative. Despite only being about an hour long, it's also dull and hard to get through.

A lot of people compared this movie to Robert Eggers' VVitch. As much as I disliked that movie, Eggers at least knew a little bit about the period he was portraying. All the makers of Witte Wieven seemed to know is that men are all evil and women are all pure. It's amazingly consistent. Frieda (Anneke Sluiters) lives in a miserable little hut with her mediaeval husband who berates her for not getting pregnant. So she follows the gloomy old wisdom of the village and pisses into a miserable wooden bowl and buries it to see if grimy, grey little worms show up in it, thus signifying that she's barren. Everyone trudges through the mud in their grey and blue world for another miserable day. Then, in the gloomy, miserable forest, Frieda encounters shapeshifting, giant white forest women with crimped hair. Perhaps because Frieda's hair is also anachronistically luxuriant, they bond.

When the miserable menfolk discover Frieda's gotten miserably pregnant despite the miserable worms in her miserable bowl of piss, they scream about her being the devil. Only the other miserable young woman in the village sticks by Frieda. Everyone's miserable.

So this is not the movie to see if you're curious about history. However, if you're curious about vague, uneducated, contemporary impressions of the Middle Ages, this movie's illuminating.

Heresy is available on Shudder.

Sonnet 2004

Concealing smiles trapped the imp in space
No time was right when clocks were jammed with toast
Remember thoughts when scanning ev'ry face
Or otherwise you'll think each man's a ghost
Connecting miles sapped the plane in air
No rhyme was wrong when socks were jammed with feet
Remember seats assigning ev'ry chair
Or otherwise you'll dream each butt's elite
Condoning styles raised the trade to art
No dime is lost when stocks were bought in bulk
Remember threats when throwing ev'ry dart
Or otherwise you might become the Hulk
No fine excised the ships from out the bay
Forget the thoughts and choose a thing to say

Crypt Justice

It's funny how the anti-heroes of Tales from the Crypt are so often trying to get rich quick. The second season, which premiered in April, 1990, stars Demi Moore as a gold digger who marries a slob played by Jeffrey Tambor. She does this after a fortune teller foresees Tambor getting an inheritance and then dying shortly thereafter. The episode is based on an issue of the comic Shock SuspenStories, published in 1953. Interestingly, the adaptation sets the story in the '50s instead of updating it for a contemporary setting, as other episodes do. The two stars, particularly Moore, are effective and the episode's a nice little slice of demented fate.

Tambor apparently wore a fat suit for the episode with unpleasant facial prosthetics, all to show how implausible it is for the beautiful young Demi Moore to be attracted to him for real. But in the horror tradition, Moore's character receives a comeuppance far more severe than she likely deserves.

Tales from the Crypt is available on Shudder.

Or Take on Vacation

A free spirited, goofy young woman is best friends with a handsome, emotionally supportive young man and the two go on vacations every year together. Will they ever become more than friends? 2026's People We Meet on Vacation relies on us not to expect the idea to have ever occurred to either of them for five years. The film clearly aims to be something like When Harry Met Sally but without sensible underlying character motives it can only hope to be a distant pastiche.

Poppy (Emily Bader) is the young woman. She's a travel writer who's become bored with travel. But then she meets Alex (Tom Blyth) whose company suddenly enlivens any location, whether it be Tuscany or New Orleans or any other picturesque place to be drinking a glass of wine.

During a camping trip with a group, one thing leads to another and Alex reluctantly agrees to go skinny dipping with a few other people while Poppy stays chatting with a man in her tent. Of course, Alex's clothes get washed away while he's swimming and he's forced to make his way to Poppy's tent with one hand on his crouch. When she sees his abs she says, like it's the funniest little surprise, "You're ripped?!"

The movie discretely avoids allowing the characters to mention any attraction to each other, allowing the viewer to indulge in the fantasy of sexual innocence until the, er, climax. It's a cute movie.

People We Meet on Vacation is available on Netflix.

Up, Left, Down, Left

Train stations in the big Japanese cities can be labyrinthian but usually not as bad as what you see in 2025's Exit 8 (8番出口). A young man trying to leave finds himself repeatedly walking through the same corridors with strange instructions on the wall. It's a clever and effectively eerie idea. Apparently it comes from a video game of the same title. The movie uses this concept to tell a story about a young man's reluctance to start a family.

The young man (Kazunari Ninomiya) has a girlfriend who's pregnant. As he tries to find the right way out of the train station, there's a consistent background tension surrounding his delayed decision as to whether he will commit to his girlfriend and child. I was reminded of Me Me Me, the GAINAX video designed to compel young men to step away from fantasies and start normal families. The trouble with both cases is they present the decision as being between an endless, soulless rut and a perfect life with a beautiful woman. The audience knows it's not a fair argument and even happily married people are likely to recoil from such heavy-handedness.

Ironically, though, Me Me Me is really sexy and Exit 8 is still effectively creepy, especially if you've spent a lot of time in Japanese train stations. The young man's reluctance to help the woman functions like a moral flaw in a horror movie protagonist so the audience senses he's a ripe candidate for demoniac justice.

Exit 8 is available on Shudder.

Late Messages

A young woman leaves voicemails for her deceased sister, not knowing they're being intercepted by an attractive young man in 2026's Voicemails for Isabelle. It's a charming, old fashioned romantic comedy that indulges in the familiar tropes and plot patterns. There's a slightly Hitchcockian element to the film, too.

If you have any familiarity with romantic comedies, you will quickly perceive how the movie will play out. Jill (Zoey Deutsch) is so vulnerable and goofy in an approachably attractive way, but not threateningly attractive, making her a suitable point of view character for the film's target demographic. Wes (Nick Robinson) is so enamoured with the voicemails that he moves to San Francisco, where Jill lives, and tracks her down. Their relationship develops and he struggles with his dark secret.

The tone aimed for here his akin to You Got Mail or Shop Around the Corner but the San Francisco location inevitably reminded me of Vertigo. Wes isn't like Scottie as much as he's like Judy. By meeting Jill under false pretenses, he draws her in in the same way Judy/Madeleine drew Scottie in, though he spends less time crafting a persona. But the dynamic between the two is affected by the fact that she doesn't know he's heard her voicemails to Isabelle, much as the dynamic was fundamentally different before Scottie finally realised the woman he loved may have been a complete fantasy. But Voicemails for Isabelle sticks to a standard three act romantic comedy plot--the couple meets, the couple experiences conflict and separation, the couple resolve their conflict and reunite.

Wes avoids being creepy because he never becomes a point of view character. He is the handsome stalker who flatters the vanity of the point of view character in a way that makes him guilty, thereby making him simultaneously in service to and indebted to Jill. If he were a point of view character, we'd be more inclined to evaluate the intrinsic merit of his actions. He exists to complement Jill. The two are cute together.

Voicemails for Isabelle is available on Netflix.