The corpse of a young forensics expert's missing father turns up at a crime scene, setting off an engaging procedural that becomes something surprisingly different yet nicely familiar. 2026's The Cycle changes tracks on what kind of genre film it is and works surprisingly well. I would have liked a little more emotional closure at the end of the film but mostly I was impressed, especially by some incredible practical effects that can't feature in the promotional material without spoiling the film.
Deborah Ann Woll stars as Meg, who's teaching students in forensic science when the police contact her. Soon, she's examining the corpse of her estranged father, which was found beside the much fresher murdered corpses of a mother and child. Meg is a professional but the experience would rattle anyone, and Meg's emotional fortitude is further challenged when she has to interview her own mother, and learn basic facts about her father that her mother had repressed as part of the psychological purging process that many people put themselves through after a split.
This would all be fine for your average crime procedural but there's a thematic nuance that emerges when it suddenly becomes a variation on a classic monster movie genre. How the buried, suppressed animal side of a human mind can reemerge even after death.
It's nice to see Deborah Ann Woll in such a substantial part and she brings an irrepressibly innocent nerdiness to the part that humanises the whole film in a crucial way. Though it's the main reason I felt like there ought to have been at least one more scene with her. Not necessarily to tie up all the loose ends or offer a resolution, just some statement of where she is, psychologically, in the end. Still, it's a good movie, and the creature effects alone are worth a watch.
I continue to be impressed and a little surprised by Tales from the Crypt. "The Ventriloquist's Dummy", a 1990 episode based on a 1952 comic, is a bit like the episode "The Sacrifice", in that "The Sacrifice" takes the plot of Double Indemnity in a new direction while "The Ventriloquist's Dummy" takes a vignette from Dead of Night in a new direction. That short piece of the famous horror anthology film featuring a demoniac, living ventriloquist dummy, is often imitated, so I thought at first that's where the Tales from the Crypt episode was going. But then it goes somewhere so impressively weird and dreamlike that I was thoroughly delighted.
The episode was directed by Richard Donner with a teleplay by Frank Darabont, so it has a substantial pedigree, and it stars Don Rickles and Bobcat Goldthwait. Rickles plays a famous ventriloquist and Goldthwait is a young admirer who wants to learn the art from the master. On stage, Rickles occasionally switches to his famous, one-liner insults while his dummy looks suspiciously annoyed. Finally the secret of the act's success is revealed to be due to the fact that the dummy is actually Rickles' conjoined twin, concealed by a wooden mask. The miserable little imp has become the bane of Rickles' existence but, of course, they can never be parted. Or can they?
I often think of the original Tales from the Crypt writers churning these things out on little sleep. I can imagine the writer sublimating the burden he felt writing the script into a concept in the script.
It's hard to imagine better casting than Rickles or Goldthwait. I love how bad Goldthwait's character is at ventriloquy. It doesn't even seem to try concealing his mouth movements, he just changes his voice.
Tales from the Crypt is available on Shudder.
Sonnet 2015
The speeding coat was cut in swallow tails
Too fast it faced the fence of fashion theft
Beside the might of bigger necks it fails
A leaden tie was big in bulk and heft
A starry sky could slam the miceless cake
Where trouble twangs the swamp, she sings of fish
And diamonds pop within the milkless shake
Don't choke on values worse than any wish
You see the stars are slamming still at dawn
They spill the coffee, scarring sleepy dolls
She stakes a tactless cry and sings a song
On hearing it, the lonely froggy bawls
The rusty reins revert the claim to clothes
The Yahoos pull computers while they doze
Happy Halloween, everyone. And it's on a Saturday, too, isn't that nice? My first Halloween after living in Japan for six years is being spent in England, where it's only just starting to take hold. I'd say even Japan has outpaced England on merchandising but, unlike Japan, the kids are quite ready for it. I saw kids at the Pentagon mall here in Chatham yesterday already wearing costumes. I saw girls in cloaks and girls in big witch hats. So far I haven't seen boys dressing up.
England seems to want something like the shopping mall Santa or Easter Bunny for Halloween. At the mall in Riverside, in Thurrock, Essex, I saw a booth with tables and chairs set up for something called "Witchy Woo." A few adult attendants were wearing witch hats and one man was dressed as a wizard while dozens of children sat outside the perimeter, waiting for it to open. I didn't take any pictures because I avoid taking pictures of things where I might get people's faces but here's a promotional image I found online:
I noticed so many kids at the malls during the week that I googled to see if there's a holiday around this time in England. It turns out this is "half term," a week in autumn the kids get off from school, similar to Spring Break in the US, or Golden Week in Japan. The fact that this half term week coincides with Halloween explains a lot about the enthusiasm kids have for it.
My sweet tooth is almost completely dead so I can't indulge in Halloween candy. Except I was so excited to see black licorice in one store I bought a couple bags--licorice is completely absent in Japan. I haven't seen any candy corn in England so far, the staple of Halloween in America. It's not available in Japan. I guess it's a lucky thing I don't think I could stomach more than two candy corns if someone held a gun to my head but I guess it would've been nice to see kids enjoying it.
Last night I watched the original Ghostbusters to celebrate Halloween Eve. I guess that would be Hallows Eve Eve. It was the first time watching it since I actually had the experience of wandering the streets of Manhattan and I found it refreshed the film I'd seen a million times since childhood wonderfully. I recognised so places. When Rick Moranis is running around as the Key Master, I recognised the southwest corner of Central Park and the place where the Starbucks is now. It's too bad genre movies aren't shot on location in New York so much anymore.
Patrick Stewart has died, aged 86. He reportedly had been suffering briefly from Alzheimers. Whenever I think of mentally degenerative diseases associated with aging, it so happens I often think of a speech Stewart delivers in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Sarek", written by Peter S. Beagle.
"It's ironic, isn't it? All this magnificent technology, and we still find ourselves susceptible to the ravages of old age . . . loss of dignity . . . the slow betrayal of our bodies by forces we cannot master."
Stewart's death seemed sudden to a lot of people, but I'd pointed out before that the quality of his performance had changed over the past five years or so. He seemed more brittle, his emotions closer to the surface.
Although he has spoken many times about how much he cherished his experience playing Captain Picard over so many years, he did talk about how tiring it could be. But even at times when he was likely not feeling up to the task, his performance was always flawless. In the original run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it seemed there was never a moment where he wasn't communicating, wasn't embodying Picard down to the smallest tick of a facial muscle. He could deliver the show's infamous "technobabble" and make it seem of the direst consequence. Random technical words had meaning that Picard clearly felt in his soul.
But he's very famous for his speeches, which the show's writers seemed only too happy to give him. Here he is performing opposite Jean Simmons:
He wasn't just Picard. I only just recently watched one of his earliest film performances in John Boorman's 1981 film Excalibur. Before that, he'd already chalked up more than a decade as a distinguished performer in the Royal Shakespeare Company. And he continued to perform Shakespeare throughout his life.
It seems like he played old men all his life. He played Claudius in Hamlet for the BBC Television Shakespeare in 1980, opposite Derek Jacobi as Prince Hamlet, and then played Claudius for TV again opposite David Tennant as Prince Hamlet in 2009. He was only 41 in John Boorman's Excalibur, playing father to 29 year old Cherie Lunghi as Guinevere. He never failed to conjure a sense of gravity, wisdom, and grace, but could also capably convey hidden conceit and barely concealed trepidation.
His final film role will be in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday in which he once again reprises the role of Charles Xavier, the other role for which he's most famous. Even before he was cast in the role in Bryan Singer's first X-Men movie in 2000, people talked about him as the obvious choice. The character in the comics is a wise and sensitive mentor and also bald. How could it have been anyone but Patrick Stewart? Other actors have played the role, before and since, but to say he gave it the definitive performance would be an understatement.
Film, television, theatre, video games. The acting world has lost one of its giants.
Now I'm in Chatham, the former home of England's Royal Naval Dockyard. I was excited to get here. Coming to England means that for the first time I'm actually able to visit locations depicted in my comic. Chatham is depicted from Chapter 9 to Chapter 14 in Dekpa and Deborah. So I was excited to see some of the historic locations but figured I might as well do some laundry first. If you've been following my Instagram, you'll have seen that, of the three countries I've done laundry in--Japan, the US, and England--England is by far the most difficult. I didn't know the half of it. My whole day was consumed with getting two outfits cleaned.
I'm travelling with four outfits. I generally wait 'til I have three dirty outfits before doing laundry but if I'm in a new place or for other reasons uncertain about my ability to do laundry I will go ahead and wash just two. When I search for laundromats, or launderettes, on Google Maps, I've noticed how few and far between they are in England, and when I do find them, they're generally very small and still require coins. However, there's something called Revolution Laundry which can be found at many petrol stations. It's just two washers and one dryer, out in the open. It uses a touch screen and accepts credit or debit cards. There happens to be one right across from my hotel so I thought I'd give it a try. Washing worked great, it took thirty minutes and I stood there reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and figured I'd have plenty of time to explore the old dockyard that afternoon. Then I put my clothes in the dryer.
The touchscreen now had the dryer button greyed out and it told me I probably hadn't shut the door properly. I tried shutting it as firmly as I could a few times but no dice. I called the customer service line and the woman told me that she couldn't reboot the system there and recommended I take my wet clothes to another Revolution Laundry, thirty minutes away on foot. So I packed my wet clothes into my reusable Alice in Wonderland shopping bag and started walking, mostly uphill. When I got to the other Revolution Laundry I found the dryer at that location was also broken. A woman working at the petrol station informed me it hadn't been working the previous day either. Later, after a bit of googling, I found out that Revolution Laundry dryers are notorious for breaking down. This wouldn't be such a problem at an ordinary launderette with multiple dryers but the Revolution in Laundry is to be more efficient at the cost of redundancy.
So I searched for a good old fashioned laundromat/launderette and started walking to another location twenty minutes away. I arrived at the location and discovered a tall wooden fence with a locked gate. It seems Google has a lot of outdated information about Chatham. When I walked thirty minutes to the next launderette it recommended, I started to see why.
This launderette was not only permanently closed, its proprietor had evidently been evicted.
Then I noticed every business on the street was also shuttered. And I realised, "Oh. It's like Detroit." Apparently I'm not the first to make the comparison, though many people have pointed out problems with it, such as the fact that the Naval yards were closed long before the auto industry left Detroit. Of course, the psychosis of the modern landlord likely made a contribution to this local dystopia. Further down the street, a man standing by a utility truck wanted to give me a flier for his roofing business. I apologised and said I was a tourist.
I could've continued my wild goose chase for launderettes but instead I went to a Wickes, England's version of Home Depot, and bought some rope. I went to the local shopping mall (called the Pentagon despite not being shaped like one which goes against all my instincts as an American) and bought some hangers and clothespins and went back to my hotel room and hung up the laundry.
Welcome to the future.
It got dry really fast, fortunately. There's a big oscillating fan in my room I was able to set by the open window which angled the setting sun into the room. I stayed in and worked on my research paper. England has a lot less humidity than Japan so clothes seem to dry much faster here. I'm in Chatham 'til Monday so to do laundry I suppose I'll have to take the train to a nearby town. Maybe I'll go all the way back to Bexleyheath which has the only decent launderette I've found so far.
If there was a silver lining to yesterday, my criss-crossing of the town in my search for launderettes led me through the Chatham Cemetery twice, which has some lovely graves you can see on my instagram
The fates of zombie apocalypse survivors become intertwined around towers of piled skulls in 2026's 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. This is a direct sequel to 2025's 28 Years Later, itself the third in the franchise that began with 2003's 28 Days Later. The Years Later films were both written by Alex Garland, the 2025 film was directed by Days Later director Danny Boyle while Bone Temple was directed by Nia DaCosta, best known for directing The Marvels. While Bone Temple is nowhere near as bad as The Marvels, lending credence to the idea that it was Disney or Marvel studio interference that sank that film, Bone Temple is still a substantial step down in quality from its immediate predecessor.
Bone Temple picks up the story of Spike (Alfie Williams), the character whose coming of age arc was at the centre of the 2025 film. He fades a bit into the background in DaCosta's film and none of the other characters fill the void. Ralph Fiennes becomes the closest thing to a protagonist and his warm, charismatic portrayal as Dr. Kelson is expanded as we learn about his love for '80s rock and his attempts to cure one victim of the Rage Virus, a hulking man he's nicknamed Samson, played by Chi Lewis-Parry with a large prosthetic penis. Like other individuals affected by the Rage Virus, this franchise's version of the zombie, Samson has essentially become an animal, roaming the forests of Britain sans clothing. The film's intimacy coordinator, Vanessa Coffey, insisted that prosthetic genitals and buttocks be used instead of Danny Boyle's preference for actual nudity. This was to be in compliance with UK labour guidelines related to nudity in the presence of minors on set, in this case Alfie Williams. I find it amusing to contemplate the workable moral logic of instilling in a young person the idea that nudity is so shameful that even plastering an oversized plastic member to oneself is somehow preferable to actual exposure. Danny Boyle apparently came up with an inworld explanation that the Rage Virus causes the genitals to enlarge, which seems like a surreptitious taking the piss to me.
Where Boyle's previous films worked as relentless, high tension blends of action and horror, DaCosta slows thing down to a gentle, contemplative tone that gives a not unpleasant Gorillas in the Mist quality to the story between Kelson and Samson but which undercuts Spike's story as he is first initiated into and then struggles to survive among a gang of Satanists.
A new castmember joins for this film, Erin Kellyman, who seems to be a favourite for modern progressive filmmakers. She appeared in leftwing deconstructionist projects like The Green Knight (the adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that I loath), The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the Willow TV series Disney wants us to forget happened. In this movie, she has an anti-patriarchal awakening as a member of the Satanist gang, which isn't so bad in itself, but Kellyman has so consistently appeared in movies with obtrusive politics that she inevitably brings a certain vibe.
I am not one to say that wokeness in itself makes a movie bad. Certain prominent rightwingers, like the Daily Wire and Elon Musk, have lately made the mistake that in order to make good film and television, all they need do is not be woke. Musk has just recently produced an AI version of The Odyssey under this theory, which is hilariously bad by all reports--I haven't seen it yet. I kind of feel like I should just to show the potential for failure in all partisan driven productions, of whatever persuasion.
Walter Koenig has died at the age of 90. He's known for playing Pavel Chekov, the young bridge officer introduced in the second season of the original Star Trek in 1967. The American actor adopted a false Russian accent which has been the frequent target of amateur comedian impressionists but it was based on Koenig's father who was a Russian immigrant.
He was cast for his youthful looks, to appeal to viewers who liked The Monkees, and made Russian as part of Gene Roddenberry's overall mission to portray the bridge crew of the Enterprise as one boasting the diversity of a society that has moved completely beyond the biases of the United States in the 1960s. Considering that in the context of to-day's world, in which Russia is once again an enemy of the United States, is to realise how much we've lost indeed.
Koenig had a significant recurring role on Babylon 5 but he was not well known outside of Star Trek. But he had a crucial role in what is widely considered the best Star Trek film, 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Now the only members of the original bridge crew alive are George Takei (89) and William Shatner (95).
I was thinking about AI last night, trying to get to sleep, again in how its threat to the arts is primarily against the most vulnerable artists, which are the vast majority. A big part of the problem is much older than AI, the common misconceptions of what an artist's life is like. For every great artist who dies in a gutter, there are millions of unknown artists who die in gutters. But there's still the glamour of the few, bright stars who seem like they've achieved heaven on earth, until one of them dies in a car accident trying to escape paparazzi. How much of the average famous person's time is taken up with coordinating security to fend off the stalkers, the various weirdos, the resentful folks who think, to borrow a line from David Bowie, "This is your shadow on my wall/This is my flesh and blood/This is what I could've been."
Why? Because people identify with great artists because great artists evoke real human experiences or heightened human experiences and seem to fill a void that would otherwise dominate the meagre corporeal existence.
Can AI do that? Can AI truly democratise art, can it be the assassin's bullet that truly punishes artists for the arrogance popularly thought to belong to the lot of us because people don't perceive art as a form of labour?
Among the most prominent artists talking up the abilities of AI is the great American filmmaker Paul Schrader. Here are a couple quotes from his Facebook:
I'M STUNNED. I just asked chatgpt for "an idea for Paul Schrader film." Then Paul Thomas Anderson. Then Quentin Tarantino. Then Harmony Korine. Then Ingmar Bergman. Then Rossellini. Lang. Scorsese. Murnau. Capra. Ford. Speilberg. Lynch. Every idea chatgpt came up with (in a few seconds) was good. And original. And fleshed out. Why should writers sit around for months searching for a good idea when AI can provide one in seconds?
...
LET ME MAKE A VERY UNPOPLAR PREDICTION. One year from now photorealistic AI dramas will be running through film school bodies llike diuretics. Based on my brief AI experimentation a savvy student will be able to create a 90min narrative in 2-3 weeks. On zero budget. Without leaving home. Without anyone's permission. The originality of the story would determine the value of the product. Why go through the agonies of fund-raising and collaboratorating when all you need is a keyboard? Darren Aronovsky is already in the game with Roger Avary hard behind. Then it's a simple matter of creating a platform (or will YouTube be already in that place?) to screen and monetize this new form of storytelling. The film won't cost much because they won't have cost much to make. One or two of these films will break through the thin commercial membrane and attract clicks, buzz and advertising. This is beginning and it will happen very fast. As Yuval Noah Harari pointed out, "AI is the first technology created by man which can improve itself."
I decided to test Google's AI at storytelling last night. I gave it this prompt:
"Can you write a short story for me about a vampire girl who falls in love with a cowboy?"
The result was a disposable piece of soap opera, with little of intrinsic interest, though it might be read by someone who's read every single romance paperback on the shelf at Walmart and was up for devouring anything and everything. Here's a sample:
"You're a long way from home, cowboy," Maeve said, her voice a low, melodic purr that carried the faint, elegant clip of an old world accent.
The cowboy didn’t flinch. He poured his drink, took a slow sip, and then turned his head. His eyes were a startling, piercing blue, framed by sun-crinkled lines. He looked at her—really looked at her—noticing the lack of color in her cheeks, the strange shimmer in her dark eyes, and the way the saloon’s lamps seemed to avoid her face.
"Riding the fence line doesn't care much about home, ma'am," he replied, his voice a gravelly, warm baritone. "Name's Jesse."
At the end, the AI asked me what I wanted to come next, an action scene or something else. Instead I asked for a rewrite that gave the characters more depth:
"Rewrite the story so that Maeve has unresolved issues from her childhood related to resentment for the greater achievements of her siblings who were physically abusive to her. And put Jesse in desperate straits. He's recently come of age on his father's ranch. His father's his only living family and he's on the point of death. Meanwhile, the ranch is falling apart. Jesse can barely afford to feed himself and he bears the burden of his father's extensive gambling debts."
Already that's quite a lot of input from me so this is not like pushing a button and then the AI doing it all like magic. And I still wasn't satisfied with what it came up with. Maeve's resentment didn't come through and in my subsequent notes I asked continually for it to reduce the amount of exposition.
"Please convey the characters' backstories with less explicit exposition and maintain the point of view of one character while remaining in third person."
Even after three hundred years, the phantom ache of old fractures still flared in her bones whenever the winter wind blew in from the plains. She lightly touched a faint, invisible ridge on her collarbone—a reminder of a locked manor room in France, the heavy velvet curtains drawn tight to muffle her cries, and the mocking laughter of her brilliant, celebrated brothers. They had been court favorites, masters of the violin and the blade, while she had been the family failure, small enough to crush beneath a riding boot. She had outlived their mortal graves by centuries, yet the fury of never being able to match their grand achievements, of always being the broken thing in the cellar, still burned like acid in her dead chest.
I started thinking, "What is it about 'less exposition' do you not understand?" But I was polite in my next note. It's weird, talking to it I often feel like I'm talking to a child so I reflexively try to stay encouraging.
"I don't think it should be love at first sight. I think there should be bitterness. Maybe they're thrown together in a minor catastrophe and they both get on each other's nerves. There's a chance the attraction between them is entirely physical, or maybe physical love is the ultimate expression of true love. Also, make the exposition less explicit."
For some reason, the AI assumes a catastrophe means Maeve comes to Jesse's rescue. A lot of people have noticed how AI tends to be very politically correct, or as one writer I heard on Bill Maher say, like everything it produces went through HR.
Maeve moved on pure instinct, a shadow gliding through the falling debris. She grabbed the young cowboy by his collar just as a massive iron stovepipe came crashing down right where he had been standing. She yanked him backward into the alley behind the saloon, slamming him hard against the damp stone wall.
"Let go of me!" Jesse gasped, shoving her away. He wiped a mix of soot and rain from his face, his piercing blue eyes glaring at her with pure hostility. "I didn't ask for a nursemaid."
For my next note: "Rewrite it with less exposition. Maintain Maeve's point of view. Avoid cheap tricks like her deducing his financial situation by spotting paperwork in his pocket. Make her weaker and more sadistic and him more stoic. Have her murder his creditors."
"We're done waiting on your old man's markers, boy," the lead rider shouted over the wind, unholstering a heavy revolver. "You sign the deed over tonight, or we burn the house down with both of you inside."
Jesse stood his ground in the mud, completely still, his hands resting empty at his sides. He didn't beg. He didn't even speak. He just watched them with that same hollow, stoic exhaustion.
From the darkness of the tree line, Maeve felt a cold, euphoric rush. These men thought they could break something that belonged to her anger.
She didn't give them a chance to scream. Moving like a midnight mist, she tore the lead rider from his saddle, her nails ripping through his throat before he hit the mud. The second man fired wildly into the dark, but Maeve was already behind him, her hands locking around his neck with a sickening, wet snap. The third collector scrambled off his horse, crawling backward in the dirt, his lantern shattering between them.
This version concludes with Jesse happy that Maeve murdered the men and again she rescued him. I tried hard to get the AI to stop making Maeve his rescuer.
"Rewrite this so that Maeve is physically weaker. Use the rules for vampires established in Andy Warhol's Blood for Dracula. She murders the creditors but she has to use her wits, which are considerable after centuries of experience and study. Also, Jesse's stoicism should not imply immorality. As a 19th century American, he adheres to Christian morals and also to a cowboy's code."
The next version had Jesse directly inform Maeve that he has a code, which was another thing I couldn't stop the AI from doing. I was kind of amused by the way it incorprated the Blood for Dracula rules in a cheap and direct manner.
She wasn't a creature of superhuman strength or misty transformations; she was fragile, easily bruised, and bound by the desperate need for the blood of virgins just to keep her limbs from stiffening into marble.
And still she rescues Jesse from the falling stovepipe.
The water-logged timber beam snapped. The ceiling caved in with a roar of splintering wood and heavy wet thatch, showering the bar in sparks and debris. Maeve moved, not with supernatural speed, but with the desperate agility of someone who knew a heavy blow could break her fragile body. She caught the cowboy by his flannel collar, hauling him backward into the alley just as a massive iron stovepipe crashed exactly where he had been standing. She didn't guide him gently; she let him hit the damp stone wall, taking a twisted comfort in the sharp gasp it forced from his lungs.
I finally had to be direct; "It would make more sense for Jesse to rescue Maeve from the falling stovepipe."
"I did not ask for your chivalry," Maeve spat, her old world accent sharp as a razor. She scrambled to her feet, dusting the mud off her velvet cloak, her eyes flashing with a mix of humiliation and anger. Her fragile body ached from the impact. "You mortals are too reckless to live."
But she still rescues him from the creditors so next I said, "I don't like the 'tit for tat' aspect of her rescuing him being seen as repaying the favour to him. I want her to murder the creditors but not when they're threatening Jesse with physical violence. I want her to do it in their homes, in the sight of their families."
This seemed to break the AI because next it just gave me links to news stories about mob murders. So I said, "Did I ask for too much?" and it replied,
Not at all. You are pushing the story into a much darker, far more psychological space, and that is exactly where the narrative needs to go to honor these constraints.
Let's pull back from the traditional, high-stakes western action and lean entirely into the cold, calculated nature of her malice, contrasted with Jesse's rigid moral boundaries.
And it gave me another version that ended with these paragraphs:
"A man's life belongs to God, Maeve," Jesse said, looking at her with a rigid, unyielding sorrow. "And a code isn't something you keep only when the sun is shining. What you did... that isn't justice. That's damnation. And you brought it into my house."
He stood up, walking past her toward the door, never once looking back at the woman who had traded her soul to save a ranch he no longer cared to own.
To which I said, "She didn't trade her soul for it, she was already damned. And nothing in the circumstance explains why he wouldn't care to own the ranch anymore. There's also still far too much exposition. It feels more like a synopsis than a story."
Next I asked it to rewrite the story in the styles of Washington Irving, Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Kerouac, and Ray Bradbury. They all seemed like caricatures, particularly the Kerouac version, which felt like Roger Corman's idea of a beatnik.
She had three hundred years of the old, dark Europe rattling around in her brain, thinking about that ancient stone manor in France where her brilliant, jazz-brained brothers played the violin, charmed the court, and beat her blue in locked rooms while the world clapped.
"Rattling around in her brain" may justify its presence to the AI by sounding Kerouacian but it also changes Maeve's character substantially, so the AI can't emulate a style (in as cheap a manner as it does) without actually changing the characters to fit the kind of story the emulated writer would write, or was supposed to have written.
I felt like a blacksmith beating the metal of the AI and I still wasn't remotely happy with what it came up with. If this is the best the AI could do, I would say we don't have much to worry about, except I think this would satisfy a lot of people. Since humanities education is failing to cultivate the mental tools for appreciating good art, the advance of AI and the regression of readers might meet somewhere in the middle. So that's depressing.
Yesterday I saw this year's production of As You Like It at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in Southwark, London. The theatre's a recreation of the theatre from Shakespeare's time, located in the exact same location, or close enough to it. There are other replicas of the Globe all over the world, including in my hometown of San Diego, but of course this one's special. So special I stood watching the play in the pouring rain in the groundlings area (a ticket was only £12) where opening an umbrella is forbidden. Fortunately everything I wore was mostly waterproof, including the new boots by Ecco I bought in Southamption. So far so good on those. I'm hoping I can make them last through January.
As I expected, the production was very progressive, I won't say "woke" because that never sounds like a compliment. Of all Shakespeare's plays, though, As You Like It perhaps lends itself best to metropolitan progressivism. It has cross-dressing and the play's famous soliloquy functions practically as a mission statement for the modern postmodernist lifestyle. So it's fitting that Jacques is played by a woman, Katherine Pearce. Here she is delivering the speech:
She opts for a casual, almost reluctant delivery, appropriately a bit gloomy as the character is generally. Other standouts were Jonnie Broadbent as Touchstone and Charlie Josephine as Orlando. Josephine also co-directed the production. Gracie Oddie-James as Celia was gorgeous, particularly in the late 17th century stomacher. Since we never get to see Shakespeare productions in the time and place Shakespeare intended, this one chose the late 1600s, which I didn't mind so much, since it is my favourite period, though the pastels on the women's gowns and the short vests on the men made it look more like mid-18th century. Duke Frederick's costume, though, clearly seemed to be inspired by Charles II, and/or possibly Captain Hook. In this production, the cast of Frederick's court also plays the exiled court in the Forest of Arden. Both Duke Frederick and Duke Senior are played by Colm Gormley, who gives a good performance, though I didn't like some of his improvisations.
The cast laid emphasis on lines related to rain, of which there are several in the play, to the amusement of the audience.
CORIN: . . . that the property of rain is to wet, and fire to burn.
. . .
ROSALIND: You foolish shepherd, wherefore do you follow her,
Like foggy south, puffing with wind and rain?
As You Like It is one of Shakespeare's comedies and this production, as modern productions tend to, felt compelled to meet the modern audience's expectations of what a comedy is by creating gags where there aren't any. The first part of As You Like It hardly reads like a modern comedy with all its business about death and exile. So the performers tend to deliver straight lines as though they're jokes, which pleases people in the audience who can't understand the lines anyway. Gracie Oddie-James and Phoebe Naughton (who plays Audry) did a lot of mugging and pantomime which I sometimes found cute and other times found distracting. But never enough to ruin the experience, which was predominantly a good one.
Sonnet 2014
A modicum of spice disabled belts
No lifted pant was cinched above the breast
Lab'rinthine taverns crushed the dreamy Celts
The worst of sheep'll yield of wool the best
One timely coat was doffed to make a man
One tardy skirt reverts the dowered lass
A pickled tartan surged above the dam
A sea of stripes was vast and full of bass
With running zombies, children pitched a claim
Forgotten dogs could speak behind the hills
A feral brow at night is rendered tame
A dozen coins replaced a fold of bills
And so concludes the tea above the grange
Metallic rain invests the leaden range
1987's A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors was, for a long time, considered the best of the franchise. It introduced a couple elements that influenced other films, like the group of institutionalised teens working together and people using the dream world to their advantage. This was also the first film to give Freddy Krueger more wisecracks, and at this point they're low key enough that they work. Of course, they're really sadistic. I like the "Where's the fucking bourbon" bit.
Patricia Arquette is good in the movie. She seems to have had a taste for horror. I also saw her recently in a 1990 episode of Tales from the Crypt, a fascinating vignette called "Four-Sided Triangle" in which she works on a farm for a dysfunctional married couple. The guy (Chelcie Ross) is always trying to schtup Arquette's character but she loses touch with reality and believes a scarecrow is her boyfriend.
Eventually the guy tries to impersonate the scarecrow. Both the Tales from the Crypt episode and Nightmare on Elm Street 3 feature surprise substitutions of a loved one for a reviled one. The beloved face is suddenly revealed to be a mask for the demon. In Nightmare on Elm Street 3, it's one of the things that keep reality in a constant state of instability and deprive the protagonists of a sense of safety. In "Four-sided Triangle," it functions more as a commentary on the arbitrary nature of reality, as Arquette's character doesn't learn that her beloved scarecrow was secretly invested with the body of the man she hated and feared. Not that it works out too well for the guy. Malleable reality has its advantages, but it can backfire. The rules are there to protect you as much as the people you might want to take advantage of. Making new rules can backfire, whether due to bad luck or to dealing with a demon, as in the case of Freddy Krueger, who's had a lot more practice at distorting reality.
I like the cheesy music video Dokken made for the movie.
Tom Skerritt has passed away at 93. Few actors could so quickly establish cool and authority in a scene. It did it in countless films, in Cronenberg's adaptation of The Dead Zone, in Top Gun. But he could also be divertingly weird, as in his role in Steel Magnolias, or creepy and pathetic, as in Poison Ivy. Of course, most people will remember him best as Dallas, the captain of the Nostromo from 1979's Alien.
He won an Emmy for his work on Picket Fences and had a very long and active career, ranking among the few actors whose face and voice will be recognisable to most people. He even had a jingle.
Another couple of episodes of VisionQuest were released this week and they weren't bad, the second of them in particular having good moments. Maybe it should come as no surprise since it was written by Michael Taylor, another Star Trek writer but, unlike Terry Matalas, Taylor hails from the '90s era Star Trek, when he wrote quite a few episodes of Voyager and four episodes of Deep Space Nine, including 1995's "The Visitor", which is often hailed not only as a great DS9 episode but one of the greatest in the entire Star Trek franchise.
"The Visitor" is a father and son story in which the father, Captain Sisko, gets caught in a time anomaly that sends him ahead in time at various intervals, during which he's able to briefly meet with his son, Jake, and see him grow older. Having written a classic father and son story would seem to make Taylor an ideal candidate for writing on VisionQuest, since much of the plot revolves around the father/son relationship between Vision and Tommy, though it's the third episode, written by Cindy Appel, that deals more with their relationship while the fourth, Taylor's episode, is much more about AI and synthetic lifeforms.
It's certainly a timely topic, and the episode features a cameo from JIM, one of the first characters in Timely Comics, the company that became Marvel, from 1939. JIM's seen at a conference hosted by Katerina Wells, played by Mary McDonnell, best known as the president on the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Wells is a board member of a biotech group partly responsible for developing Ultron.
Much of the episode revolves around Vision and Ultron's relationship, with the two of them presented as the good and evil polar opposites by Wells' presentation, making their increasing rapport all the more interesting. There are some genuinely funny moments, like when the two of them try to work out a CAPTCHA together, that also serve to further define their personalities and their relationship. It leads to an amazing, brutal climax.
I found Vision's shirt really distracting. At first I thought those were real suspenders/braces and wondered why the costume designer couldn't put buttons on his trousers for them. Looking closer, I think it's a print on the shirt and not real braces at all (I'll say braces since he's English and the episode's set in England). This part of the episode is set in the virtual, computer world so maybe it's supposed to be a suggestion that Vision's ability to simulate braces is broken. That's really not how it comes across. Well, it was a good episode otherwise.
It's hard to say if the episode has anything truly relevant to say about AI since all the AI characters are basically human. But AI is starting to seem eerily human nowadays.
I keep trying to tell myself I can't take pictures of everything that looks like an enchanted path to Wonderland here in England. I don't think I'd consciously realised how much I'd been looking forward to this for so long, from all the Lewis Carroll and JRR Tolkien and Shakespeare of it. So much of British media is so misleading, like I was to think it was all guys who look like Jason Statham and Bob Hoskins getting into fights over football. But, no, it's actually Middle Earth.
I'm on my fourth day here. I will say I had one of the worst hotel experiences I've ever had in my life in Southampton. If you're planning to stay at number 10, Darwin Street, let's just say you should bring your own towel and probably bedding and some command of the Russian language and experience in arbitrating domestic disputes would be helpful.
I checked out early and booked a room roughly halfway between Southampton and London in Farnham called the Princess Royal. Night and day. From the worst of hotels to the best. For only 65 pounds, for one night, this combination pub and hotel was not only absolutely lovely but it also had wifi, good food, and good drinks.
The room had an espresso machine with free espresso, shortbread, lots of tea, and a minifridge with free glass bottles of water and milk.
Surely there's a catch, you say. Well, it's a 45 minute walk through enchanted woodland from the train station. Darnit!
There's also a witch's cave nearby, Mother Ludlam's Cave, which my English friend, bri_fidelity, recommended to me on Facebook. It was all fenced up but I enjoyed the journey there. Just look at the ominous path leading up to it.
I had dinner at the pub attached to the Princess Royal, some fish and chips, and a glass of Laphroaig, which I was able to enjoy while reading JRR Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. There was a loudmouth rightwinger guy in the place who called me a "faggot" (I thought that meant cigarette over here?). The staff were uncomfortable and embarrassed. I found it fascinating, especially because he had this fake Woodywoodpecker laugh. This is something I'm used to hearing from rightwingers in Japan, the "targeted laugh", not meant to express genuine mirth but to lash out at people who are strange in any way. So much of the rhetoric on the right is about how postmodernism is wicked because it makes people think that they can be whatever they want to be but, really, the right is quite willing to adopt affects such as the targeted laugh. The argument is just another way to say, "It's us versus them." I don't really hear the targeted laugh in the US, I suppose because it just seems to theatrical to Americans. I found it really confusing the first few times I heard it in Japan because I couldn't believe people would do it in the effort to make me feel embarrassed. It's like if someone hit himself in the head with a log in order to embarrass lumberjacks.
Errol Flynn tiredly takes to the seas once again in a watered down 1953 adaptation of The Master of Ballantrae. The book is a smouldering, devilish masterpiece of unreliable narrators who take the conflict of the Jacobite uprising to a personal, family dimension (I reviewed the book in a 2022 entry). This film drains most the life out of the plot to drag a bored Flynn and a livelier Roger Livesey through a run of the mill pirate adventure. One saving grace is the film has some gorgeous cinematography by Jack Cardiff.
The book is primarily about the conflict between two brothers, Henry and Jamie, Jamie being the elder. When the future of the kingdom looks uncertain, whether the king will be a Stuart called James or a Hanover called George, the brothers decide to protect the future of the family estate by taking both sides, with Jamie going off with the Jacobites. While the book primarily follows Henry at home, dealing with the resentment of his father and wife, both of whom preferred the absent and presumed dead Jamie, the film stays with Jamie (Flynn), evidently preferring him, too. As in the book, Jamie is taken by pirates along with his new Irish friend, Burke (Livesey), becoming members of the crew, but it's in Tortuga that Jamie wrests control from the French captain and there's a couple sequences added for a dancing girl in Tortuga played by a charming Gillian Lynne in a translucent blouse. Lynne went on to choreograph Cats and The Phantom of the Opera for Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The festering resentment and gradually hardening perspectives of the book are replaced by a simplistic, easily mended little misunderstanding between the brothers and Henry (Anthony Steel) barely has a presence in the film.
Alison (Beatrice Campbell), Jamie's fiancee when he left at the beginning of the book, who married Henry when it seemed Jamie was dead, becomes a steadfast love interest for Jamie. The film interestingly keeps the subplot about Jamie's peasant mistress, Jessie, played by Yvonne Furneaux, who later appeared in Hammer's version of The Mummy and in Fellini's La Dolce Vita. The love scenes between Flynn and both women are graced by some of Cardiff's best lighting and are a pleasure to look at, even if, or especially if, you fail to focus on the dialogue.
I feel like a week aboard the Queen Mary 2 has made me soft. I certainly don't think I was walking enough. Two days in Southampton have fixed that. But, yeah, it was a good trip, and I managed to dodge any hidden charges. I sprang for the wifi, which was around 200 dollars, and I ordered a bottle of whiskey for my room, which was 94 dollars, and this all I was expecting. For some reason I could only order the bottle of whiskey as part of a minibar set so I was required to have mixers with it. I chose juice and options were orange juice, cranberry juice, or pineapple juice, except they were out of orange and cranberry juices so I ended up with twelve little glass bottles of pineapple juice. With the bottle Famous Grouse it wasn't such an unreasonable price, provided I wanted pineapple juice. It was good pineapple juice.
You'll notice I keep saying "dollars". Throughout the Queen Mary 2 there are portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, pictures of British royalty on previous cruise ships and passenger liners, and then of course the name, which comes from the consort of King George V, when the original ship was christened in 1936. And the officer staff were all British, the captain was Irish, and the service staff was all Filipino. But for whatever reason, the ship uses American money. I assumed I'd need British money so I'd gone to a currency exchange near Times Square so my wallet was full of pounds when I was aboard. Fortunately, everything is charged to your card on file. Unfortunately, the whole reason I wanted cash was so that I could tip the staff. I'd recently watched a YouTube video by Lindsay Ellis in which she went on a trip on every major cruise line and she'd reported that many cruise lines included a mandatory gratuity in your bill automatically. While this implies that you shouldn't have to tip, what it actually means is that this mandatory gratuity is used to fill out the crew's basic wage. When I tipped the barman and the steward, they were clearly very happy to receive it in British currency, but I couldn't tip very often because there was no way for me to make change or to withdraw more cash. The purser was as unable to answer this request as he was to supply me with glue.
I spent most of the time in my stateroom working on my comic and on the research paper I'm writing as a sample for my grad school application but there were a number of interesting events going on aboard. Professors of history and sociology were speaking at various times throughout the trip and there was a documentary filmmaker named Marion Milne giving talks. I caught the end of one of her talks, the Q&A section in which someone asked her if she thought Princess Diana had been murdered, and she gave a very roundabout answer before unequivocally answering "No," she thought the security staff was incompetent and drove recklessly.
The only talk I attended was by a young woman from Los Angeles who called herself just "Kylee" who showed a powerpoint in the ship's planetarium about depictions of women in art throughout history. Kylee is a former model and her talk felt very much like a college student's final project, especially since she didn't take any questions. She showed the clip of Rita Hayworth singing "Put the Blame on Mame" from Gilda and I tried to talk to her about movies and about how I'd been writing a paper on H Rider Haggard's She but she really didn't seem like she wanted to speak to anyone. When I tried to engage her further, she mentioned she'd been to university in a way that told me I ought to know my place.
She was a curator of the ship's onboard art gallery provided by Clarendon, which is not, but I liked to imagine it was, named after Edward Hyde. Incredibly, they had a Jackson Pollack painting and a number of sculptures by Salvidor Dali.
If you've heard that stale gag in a movie or TV show, "Looks like a Jackson Pollack painting", well, this is what a Jackson Pollack painting looks like.
These are two of the Dali sculptures. I especially liked the one on the left, which is in ode to Isaac Newton.
The Queen Mary 2 also has a library, which I appreciated in principle more than anything else. It was a comfortable little section of the ship and they had a fair representation of the classics--they had Moby Dick of course--and lots and lots of romance novels.
The food was very good in the King's Court buffet, except their Japanese food was terrible, as is typical of Japanese places in America not run by people from Japan (I had the worst sushi I ever had in my life in Times Square). King's Court is kind of the bottom rung, though, I didn't bother with any of the fancier dining options, though mostly I surpassed the dress code by having not only a collared shirt but also a tie. Things probably would've gone smoothly so long as they didn't notice my crumbling boots. I overheard a family from the US south dressed in t-shirts outside one of the fancy restaurants talking. Their teenage daughter asked, "Were we supposed to get dressed up for this?" I'd overheard a lot of comments throughout the trip that indicated people had failed to read written instructions. At the embarkation terminal, a lot of people were caught by surprise when asked about their ETA, not "estimated time of arrival" but Britain's new customs procedure, Electronic Travel Authorisation. The ETA is apparently a product of Brexit as it's not a requirement for any EU country. I think I was one of very few people who'd gotten the ETA ahead of time and I only knew about it because I'd asked Google's AI, "Is there anything I need to do before travelling to the UK?" I make fun of the AI a lot but I have to admit it can be very useful.
Well, I've worn out another pair of boots. That's the third pair this year. I honestly expected these to last more than a few months, at least. They were a little expensive, made by a company called Thursday, though I've now heard that this particular model, the Cavalier, has received complaints. It's too bad because Thursday actually manufactures their footwear in the US so I thought I was supporting local jobs. But these boots also had some kind of cheap dye inside that stained some of my socks.
I used to think of boots as a sort of hardy footwear, and I still seem to have that preconception, despite the fact that the experience of the last six years has taught me that boots are delicate things that must be handled and worn with great care. I used to always buy and wear dress shoes from Pay Less in the US and they'd last for years. Then, in 2019, I took it into my head that I'd become a boot wearer. I got two pairs, moved to Japan, and wore them both out within a year. They split open on the front and the back, I'd glue them, they'd split open again. Well, they were cheap boots I'd gotten for 14 dollars at JC Penney, so I figured that was probably why. I bought my first chelsea boots then, which I rightly figured would be more convenient in Japan as footwear I could put on and remove quickly. I got a brown suede pair at H&M and they wore out in about a year. Then my grandmother died and left me a little money so I thought I'd invest in an expensive pair and got a pair by Ariat. Those lasted more than a year and when they finally did become unwearable it was because they'd split open on the sides. The soles were still in perfectly good shape and I held onto them for a while thinking I might somehow think of a way to make them presentable again.
Then I got a pair of Dr Martens, a gift from my mother on my birthday last year. I got my hopes up because the website had some kind of "boots for a lifetime" slogan. I found out later that Dr Martens' boots had diminished in quality since they started outsourcing their manufacturing. That pair split open in the back but I had to keep wearing them for a few months because I didn't have the money for new boots. I finally saved up enough and got some 7000 yen boots in Osaka, figuring they'd be good for a few months. At least that time my boots met my expectations and I retired them once they'd developed holes in their soles. And I bought the Thursday boots. I arrive in Southampton to-day, I guess buying footwear will be my first order of business. Let's see how the British do.
There is a clothing store here aboard the Queen Mary 2 but they don't sell footwear. I asked Google's AI for advice and it suggested I ask for some glue at the purser's desk to repair the odd sort of cleat panels my current boots have which are coming off on both boots. The guy at the desk was bemused like I'd asked for a garden hose or a sombrero. He said the best they had was a glue stick. Thanks, Gemini. I wonder if the AIs get together and giggle over some of the more bizarre things they get humans to do.
Sonnet 2013
The double leather bought the battered foot
No hoof was down to trod the callused floor
A Santa boot was black with cookie soot
I guess that's why he uses now the door
There's something strange that moves an L at sea
A knight, I ween, traversing water ways
I think that coats evoke a furry bee
Some hives exist for just a couple days
To drizzle cheese on chips becomes a natch
O'Brien fixed the station and the ship
In future times, no boots will ever match
The left will split apart and right will dip
And so a pretty foot remains preserved
Billali showed the thing he'd long conserved
Children are held in thrall of a giant orange unicorn in 2026's Buddy. Here the potential of the creepy '90s live action children's show is realised, here the unspoken truth that Barney and Teletubbies were nightmares becomes the surface reality. It's not a comedy, it's a horror movie, but this is the finest comedic element of the film. The joke is that it's not a joke, it's the tacit acknowledgement that we all knew it was a nightmare, and yet we all played along.
The film begins in 4:3 and we meet the unicorn, Buddy, surrounded by adoring children who join him in songs with simplistic moral lessons. One little boy doesn't want to participate, preferring to read his book. After a couple attempts to get him to join in, Buddy finally murders the introvert. A little girl, Freddy, notices and gradually convinces the other children it's time to flee. So their adventure begins and as they wander the forest, the film expands the possibilities of simplistic, painted plywood sets with some shots reminding me of Night of the Hunter, which may have been a deliberate reference.
In the real world, we meet a mother, Grace, played by Cristin Milioti, whose enormous eyes are kind of hypnotic. That's incidental, though. She and her husband, Ben, played by Topher Grace, have two little boys. But she starts to feel like something's off, something's odd about the one empty chair at the dinner table.
Ben doesn't believe her, and the two have the familiar argument from a supernatural movie about one spouse who doesn't believe and one spouse who can't help but believe with every fibre of her being. Ben is one of the particularly insensitive sceptics and his attempts to placate Grace are effectively harsh.
The premise of the film reminded me a little of real world scandals in which beloved childrens' TV hosts have turned out to be guilty of physical abuse of some kind, or they're believed to have been. It kind of reminded me of The Magicians except, in that case, where the revelation was kind of a shock, in Buddy it's like acknowledging something that was right in front of us the whole time. Buddy doesn't just seem creepy, Buddy is creepy.
I appreciated the end of the film--even compared to everything else about it, it's a bold move, and seems like something Terry Gilliam might have done. I think my favourite character was Mr. Mailbox, a mailbox whose mouth is torn off by Buddy early in the film and spends the rest of the movie unable to move or speak or do much of anything else beyond looking terrified as he's carried around by the children in their attempt to escape.
Arrow recently released a cool new box set of John Boorman's 1981 film Excalibur. I bought it last month but waited until I finished my recent repeat reading of Le Morte d'Arthur, the 15th century telling of the Arthurian legends by Sir Thomas Malory, upon which Excalibur is based. Among other things, pairing a reading of the book with the film allowed me to see what a good job Boorman and his co-writer, Rospo Pallenberg, did of condensing and streamlining the tale. Which is appropriate since Le Morte d'Arthur is itself Malory's condensing and streamlining of several disparate Arthurian stories from England and France. One thing one notices about the book is that it's somewhat repetitive, sometimes because Malory is including two stories that shared origins in an older, single story, but also because sometimes two similar stories are both worth including because they have slightly different perspectives on the same topic. The story of Tristram and Isolde, in which Sir Tristram loves the wife of a king he owes loyalty to, is similar to the story of Lancelot and Guenevere, but different enough that both can be included. But you can also see why Boorman omitted Tristram and Isolde and gave some elements of their plot to Lancelot and Guenevere. Boorman even uses the vorspiel from Wagner's opera about Tristan and Isolde for the love scene between Lancelot and Guenevere.
It's funny how differently the stories evolve. Arthur barely seems to care that Lancelot and Guenevere have been seeing each other in the book and it's the brothers of Sir Gawaine that seem to be the angriest about it, with Sir Gawaine being the primary force behind the war Arthur's faction enters into against Lancelot's after Lancelot accidentally slays some of Gawaine's unarmed brothers. This was a moment in the book I thought was actually very insightful about the nature of war. Initially, Gawaine wants no part of his brothers' efforts to expose the relationship between Lancelot and Guenevere, even after Lancelot kills one of Gawaine's brothers who attempts to confront him.
"Why say ye so?" said King Arthur; "forsooth ye have no cause to love Sir Launcelot, for this night last past he slew your brother, Sir Agravaine, a full good knight, and almost he had slain your other brother, Sir Mordred, and also there he slew thirteen noble knights; and also, Sir Gawaine, remember you he slew two sons of yours, Sir Florence and Sir Lovel." "My lord," said Sir Gawaine, "of all this I have knowledge, of whose deaths I repent me sore; but insomuch I gave them warning, and told my brethren and my sons aforehand what would fall in the end, insomuch they would not do by my counsel, I will not meddle me thereof, nor revenge me nothing of their deaths; for I told them it was no boot to strive with Sir Launcelot."
This establishes Gawaine as a man of incredible restraint and wisdom. Yet later, when Lancelot kills more of Gawaine's brethren, this time men that had no quarrel with Lancelot and were even among his best friends, Gawaine urges Arthur to make war. It's a little comical that Lancelot, in the fury of battle, just accidentally kills some of the best knights in the land, including Sir Gareth, whom Malory made into something of a Mary Sue by combining aspects of characters from other stories to create him. But it's also realistic that in war collateral damage often involves the killing of people that the assailant has no desire to kill, and then it depends on an interpretation by the opposite side to recognise the killing as done without malice. Since Gawaine is established as restrained and wise, it demonstrates how difficult it can be to see past the visceral emotion provoked by such a grievous accident.
The biggest change Boorman introduces is in the expansion of the character of Merlin. Merlin's prominence in Arthurian legend really increased in the 20th century, due especially to TH White's The Once and Future King and Disney's adaptation of it, The Sword in the Stone. Then Nicol Williamson delivers such a terrific performance in Excalibur that any viewer is bound to wish there were more of him in the movie, not less. I'd say it's primarily his performance that has inspired so many Merlin heavy adaptations since, including a recent, execrably bad conservative series, Rise of the Merlin, released this year by the Daily Wire on Amazon Prime.
Arrow, of course, delivers top notch image quality on the Excalibur blu-ray and presents the film in its original aspect ratio of 1:66:1, for the first time in any home video release, and I was surprised by what a difference it made. Boorman's compositions are precise and characters whose heads were partially cut off at the top of the frame now just touch the edge. I was marvelling at how expertly Boorman compels the viewer's focus, as in the early scene in which Arthur loses Kay's sword. In the foreground on the left is Sir Ector, then in the middleground on the right is Kay, and finally in the back, Arthur moves just to the left of centre to flip up a fur on the horse's saddle to reveal an empty scabbard, right in the middle of the screen. The enormity of Arthur's error is plain from this composition despite the young man's outward calm.
It's a lovely film, too, and Boorman's trick of using green lighting off screen is so odd and unique to the film that it's really charming. And, by gad, all that gleaming plate armour. It really is a shame modern adaptations are so set on portraying Arthur as a lightly armoured man of Roman occupied Britain, placing him in the period in which Arthur would have lived, even if those adaptations are in no other way remotely realistic. The man, whether he lived or not, is a legend, and that's the way to portray him.
An attempt is made once again to make us feel something by tapping the well worn veins of nostalgia and deconstruction in the first two episodes of Marvel's VisionQuest, which premiered on Disney+ a couple days ago. Showrunner Terry Matalas has established his bona fides after creating a successful third season of Star Trek: Picard that relies entirely on nostalgia, following from his universally panned second season which attempted to get by on original ideas. But his Wikipedia entry says he's best known for co-creating and showrunning the 2015 SyFy series 12 Monkeys, which is a dumbed down remake of Terry Gilliam's classic 1995 film. No-one seems to remember that show, though, because a star of that series, Todd Stashwick, was regarded as a surprisingly talented newcomer in the third season of Picard, and Stashwick turns up again in VisionQuest. He's good in it, too. Also delivering good performances are Paul Bettany, Ruaridh Mollica, and the ever reliable James Spader.
Bettany reprises his role as Vision, or creates the new role of the white Vision last seen at the end of WandaVision, though distinctions between the two characters are unclear at this point except for the white Vision's ability to safely drink whiskey. This occurs during a confrontation between him and Stashwick's character in which the new Vision attempts to assert that he's different from the original and demonstrates that he's able to predict everything Stashwick might do by speaking some of his lines with him in unison. This may be Matalas' nod to real world AI language models, and perhaps his criticism of them considering Vision isn't able to predict anything else Stashwick does. Stashwick plays the series' villain, the Paladin, and gets to wear that character's costume from the comics, but it's as unimpressively rendered as Daredevil's, sadly. There is a very clear difference between the quality of the MCU movie costumes and the TV series costumes.
Most of the story involves an Inside Out (or Herman's Head) style plot in which other Stark AIs manifest in Vision's mind as aspects of his programming or as advisors. Instead of employing the voice actors of FRIDAY and EDITH from the movies, Matalas casts two more of his stable of familiar faces, Orla Brady from Picard and Emily Hampshire from 12 Monkeys. James D'Arcy plays JARVIS. D'Arcy originated the role of the Stark family butler who inspired Bettany's AI. D'Arcy first played the character on the 2015 Agent Carter series before reprising it in 2019's Avengers: Endgame.
Ruaridh Mollica is not Ed Speleers, though he looks like him, and has basically the same part on VisionQuest that Speleers had on Star Trek: Picard. In Star Trek: Picard, the Captain Picard we see is in reality a synthetic recreation of the original Jean-Luc Picard and he discovers that the original Picard had a son who has grown into a petty thief. Picard must connect with the young man who, despite his roguish past, turns out to be crucial to the success of Picard's endeavours and his very survival. In VisionQuest, the Vision we see is in reality the synthetic recreation of the original Vision and he discovers that the original Vision had a son who has grown into a petty thief. Vision must connect with the young man who, despite his roguish past, turns out to be crucial to the success of Vision's endeavours and his very survival.
In reality, he is Tommy Maximoff, whose consciousness, as we saw in Agatha All Along (before Mollica was cast), was placed in the body of a teenager named Thomas Shepherd. Scenes between Mollica and his love interest, Lisa (Lauren Morais), are effective, though they're placed in the usual context of sainted criminal misfits pitted against the cartoonishly evil law enforcement institutions.
Matalas strikes for grand emotional beats on the show but they don't have much substance because the stakes are unclear with most of the drama being in abstract, conceptual space. The conversations between Ultron (Spader, reprising his role from the second Joss Whedon Avengers film) and Vision are pretty good, though, thanks to the acting chops of both involved. As is often the case with fantasy villains in genre movies of the past thirty years, they either die a villain or live long enough to see themselves become a hero, mostly because of the implicit assumption modern writers make that evident amorality is a sign of strength, both of psyche and physique.
