Human Horror

I had some weird body horror dreams last night. I had trouble sleeping and one of my techniques for getting to sleep when it's difficult is to lie still, concentrate on relaxing all my muscles, and deliberately relax my imagination to allow whatever transforming images will come. Last night I saw faces and hands distorting, hardening, the flesh fusing and splitting in odd places. I saw Trump in the kitchen grow shorter and the flesh of his neck expand so that his head sunk into it and then the neck flesh, bloodless and liver spotted, enveloped his scalp from one side and his whole body hunched to that side and one eye peered out like Quasimodo. Although I don't like Trump, I don't think this vision was prompted by my own disgust, I was very relaxed. And I find criticisms of Trump that focus on his physical appearance to be childish and unwise. There seemed to be no reason for what I was seeing, either from me or from the gods. It was just happening.

I started writing my sonnet yesterday about Independence Day but I grew bored of the topic after the first quatrain so most of the poem is actually about Sawdust and Tinsel, the 1953 Ingmar Bergman movie, which I've been watching again lately. I often think of the first part of the film, which is almost a standalone vignette, in which a group of soldiers flatter the elderly circus woman into thinking they lust after her so she does a striptease. But it's all a big joke which is compounded when her husband, the clown, shows up infuriated and carries her away naked, the two of them thoroughly humiliated. This is a thematic appetiser for the bulk of the film which continues to explore ideas of power relations between the sexes and the position of circus performers in society as they're brought into conflict with a more high brow theatre troupe. The leader of the troupe is outwardly generous and gracious but still throws in petty insults when speaking to the ringmaster. The circus needs to borrow costumes from the theatre because they'd lost many of theirs in a fire that happened before the action of the film begins. This may be the reason the ringmaster and his girlfriend are willing to submit to the casual verbal abuse but the circus people are also clearly dazzled by the magical atmosphere of the stage.

The leader of the troupe says that both the circus and the theatre are institutions at the fringe of society, that they both must dwell on the bottom levels, staying in cheap and dirty accommodations and being seen as disgusting by most of the population. But the theatre people clearly see themselves as superior to the circus people, which culminates in humiliation for both the ringmaster and his girlfriend, played by Harriet Andersson. God, she looks so fantastic in this movie.

All the conflicts between the sexes, between the clown and his elderly wife and between the ringmaster and his girlfriend, are rendered all but meaningless when most of their emotional and mental energies are dominated by the dynamic between society and their identities as circus performers. The story about sexual politics in the film is easy for anyone to-day to understand but the ideas about artists and society feel more remote from the 21st century. Though I don't think they necessarily are, truly. In the Middle Ages, jesters were either very clever or had mental impairments. To the spectator, it didn't much matter, either way the fool was someone to laugh at, to make a mockery of. There are cultures to-day where this is still very much in play, where certain classes of people are considered subhuman and deserving of ridicule just for being what they are. Both the ringmaster and his girlfriend attempt to escape by finding new lovers in town, only for it to lead to failure and further humiliation for them both.

Sawdust and Tinsel is available on The Criterion Channel.

Red, White, and Blue Velvet

I chose Blue Velvet for my Independence Day movie. I guess that's about as good a slice of Americana as one can get. I bought the Criterion blu-ray a few weeks ago but last night was my first chance to watch it. The picture looks pristine with colours as vivid as Lynch wanted--the release is one of Criterion's "Director Approved". The sound is great. When the yellow man reflexively smacked the lamp, I jumped at the sound.

It's nice to know the movie can still make me uncomfortable. I'm not too jaded yet. I remember, even when Roger Ebert didn't like the movie, he praised Lynch's voyeuristic setup. A friend of mine who's seen all kinds of disturbing movies said nothing made him feel more like he was seeing something he shouldn't be watching than the scene of Kyle MacLachlan in the closet, watching Isabella Rossallini. Of course, he didn't intend to be a voyeur, he ducked into the closet when she came home unexpectedly. But he doesn't avert his eyes, either. Rossalini's so good when she finds him, her face looks sharper than the knife she holds to him. I wonder if she was ever in a movie where she got to beat someone in a fury. She's so convincingly appalled and furious at him it sells just how bad Dennis Hopper's character is that she takes comfort in MacLachlan's presence later.

MacLachlan's character, Jeffrey, doesn't understand his compulsions really. You could say he's cut adrift by his father's injury, he lacks the guiding influence of a firm parental figure. But I think for most people, our desires and impulses come before our capacity to explain them.

Laura Dern's so good, too. She's so fresh and unvarnished, the true blue contrast to Rossallini's blue velvet. Every member of the cast is great, down to Brad Dourif in the tiny role of one of Hopper's lackeys. It's weird going from seeing him star in Wise Blood to being a bit player a few years later. But I imagine a lot of actors would've done anything to be in a David Lynch movie.

Sonnet 1999

As triple colours blind a pair of eyes
Excited fire sprites repeal the sound
Of gospel tracks to magnify the cries
Of humid spirits, soaking up the ground.
A sweaty circus girl assays the stage
Behind a Hamlet clutching bodkin close
Before his breast that forms a brittle cage
To trap canaries thirsty for a dose.
His heart's a poison vial shaped for lust
And boredom driven dames who venture rash
In darkened halls with wild eyes and trust
In ev'ry bolt of lace and silken sash.
The Prince has bought a bargain box of tin.
The curtain falls on Denmark once again.

America the Living

Happy Independence Day, American Screwheads! I watched Army of Darkness. It's an American movie though I guess it's set in . . . Europe? It sure looks like California. Yeah, I'd know those beautiful brown hills anywhere. Maybe Ashe finds himself in a long forgotten mediaeval colony.

So the United States is 250 years old now. How we doin'? "Not so good" is the general answer I'd imagine. Sure, I complain often enough about the homeless problem. The president seems to have taken too many notes from Army of Darkness. Everything's suspiciously expensive. There are people who think ICE is doing a good job. So, this hellscape is rife with problems. "The Almighty hath not built here for his envy," as Milton's Satan said. Except a lot of people do still envy us. People from other countries keep buying American real estate. Having been living in a foreign country for six years, and a first world country at that, maybe I can give you some perspective.

I had to get a new cellphone last month. The Verizon employee assisting me was a muscular young woman who'd recently moved to San Diego with her girlfriend. As she told me about her, it felt really good to be in a country again where someone could talk openly, in public, about something that clearly revealed she was gay. It's so normal in this country that a phone salesperson can chat about it as casually as about the weather.

For all of Trump's boneheaded ideas about immigration, we still have the most diverse country in the world, not just in terms of culture and race but in terms of ideas. We've got the first and still the best film industry. As the old studios grow fat and stupid, scrappy new voices like Obsession are ready to take the torch. We've got the best technology companies and, while AI may be a Deadite, the U.S. of A. has the best damn Deadites in the world.

And this is still a country where you can freely complain about the country. There are plenty of civilised countries where you'd be censored or locked up for that. So hail to the king, baby. But no kings, please.

Belief in Veins

A preacher's son returns from World War II to promote atheism in his small southern town in 1979's Wise Blood. One of John Huston's most remarkable films, this was based on a 1952 novel by Flannery O'Connor. Yet it feels surprisingly anachronistic, its tone of parody reminding me more of a 1960s Terry Southern movie. At its most basic level, it's a story about the inevitability of zealotry versus the inevitability of charlatanry and the possibility that, for some people, it may be impossible to be anything other than a zealot or charlatan of one kind or another.

Brad Dourif stars as Hazel who finds his childhood home is abandoned and his father (played in flashback by John Huston himself) is dead. So he goes into town, buys himself a new suit and black felt, open crown hat, throws away his uniform, and proclaims to the tailor that he's going into town to do things he's never done before. He repeats that with fervent intensity to other people and also gets into the habit of telling people how Jesus isn't real and no-one needs Jesus to be clean or saved. Eventually he stands before compulsively gathering crowds and proselytises the sanctity of disbelief.

A young man (Dan Shor) starts following him around as an eager disciple but Hazel finds him annoying. Hazel's too busy following a blind preacher (Harry Dean Stanton) and his pretty daughter (Amy Wright). Hazel just can't help unloading his contempt on the preacher.

We learn that Hazel had been wounded in the war and he's ashamed to say where he'd been wounded but we never learn precisely what led him to this curious new belief system. However, his commitment to moral codes and objective truth ironically make him more like the preacher father he seems like he'd want to rebel against. When he tells the landlady that he represents his own created "Church of Truth without Christ" she asks him if it's a form of Protestantism. "Oh, it's Protestant," he says.

Ned Beatty plays a huckster who tries to partner up with Hazel. It takes a lot of effort on Hazel's part to convince Beatty's character that he's not trying to scam anyone. Beatty hardly seems to understand how anything could possibly not be a scam, just as much as Hazel can't quite comprehend insincerity.

The film's essentially a tragic parody of human psychology that occasionally strays into surrealism. It's pretty brilliant.

Wise Blood is available on The Criterion Channel.

Flowers at Large

Two girls go on a rampage in Prague in 1966's Daisies (Sedmikrásky). Like other films of the Czech New Wave, it's a combination of satire, surrealism, and iconoclasm, though it's a bit more surreal than others. At its best, Daisies is a gleeful romp, though its mania wears a little thin at times. Director Vera Chytilova was wise to keep it short, the film's total runtime being only an hour and sixteen minutes.

Many critics have been at pains to classify this as an anti-patriarchal film but I'm not convinced. Wikipedia quotes a writer named Ela Bittencourt as saying the film uses "the stereotype of how women are often infantilized and as a weapon." I don't get the sense the patriarchy typically aims to portray women as people who smash table settings and have food fights. Another critic, Anca Parvulescu, seems a little closer to the mark when she says the film is "an attack on manners." I could see the film as feminist insofar as it has women doing things women don't normally get to do in movies but not really anti-patriarchal. The patriarchy itself isn't particularly represented in the film so it's hard to see the main characters as being in opposition to it.

One critical comment I thought was insightful comes from New Zealander critic Carmen Gray who said that under "totalitarian oppression, clearing one's own mind can be a radical act of deprogramming." Having observed the oppressive rules of etiquette in Japan I can easily appreciate how the girls' rebellion against the idea of certain behaviours invariably having the same significance is liberating. From my first days in Japanese schools, I was amazed at how thoroughly the students were conditioned to function within a strict and limited vocabulary of mannerisms. The bullies would laugh like cartoon villains, a sort of thing I'm accustomed to taking as silly but in recent years it's become absurdly serious and used as a tool to manipulate people into conformity with the threat of embarrassment. So I can easily see how these two girls romping around town and blithely deploying symbols without meaning was seen as a strike against the Communist establishment.

The cinematography by Jaroslav Kucera is maybe the most remarkable aspect of the film, being at turns beautiful and fascinating. In one remarkable scene, the girls playfully attack each other with scissors and film trickery is used to make them appear to be cavorting headless and armless before the image itself becomes divided into shivering jigsaw pieces.

Daisies is available on The Criterion Channel.

Missed Marvels

Last night I was watching both The Punisher and Spider-Man: Far from Home and I got to thinking about how good Marvel movies and series used to be and all the creative talent Marvel has parted ways with, often inamicably, most often due to Disney's self-destructive urge to produce dull, lifeless, committee endorsed content. So I put together a top ten list, ranked in terms of the severity of damage done to the IP by their absence.

Top Ten Best Talent to Part Ways with Marvel

10. Nic Pizzolatto

In the neverending development of the rebooted Blade film, a long list of talented screenwriters have been conscripted and unceremoniously sent packing. Perhaps the most intriguing name is Nic Pizzolatto, the original creator of True Detective. I'd sure like to see his treatment. Whatever it is, if they weren't satisfied with it, I think they must be chasing an impossible dream. Come on, people, it's Blade, not a peace treaty between Israel and Palestine.

9. Stephen S. DeKnight

The showrunner on the first season of Daredevil was replaced by talented individuals in succeeding seasons but his absence is sorely felt in the often muddled or just plain stupid writing of Daredevil: Born Again. Is he really asking for that much money?

8. Beau DeMayo

For X-Men '97, showrunner DeMayo had this crazy idea that he should follow the plot of the original comic as closely as possible instead of swapping characters or inserting new crap just to make a name for himself. Sadly, this artistic humility was seen as too egotistical and he was booted from the series with vague rumours about his personal life thrown in. It sure seems like he pissed someone off.

7. Sam Raimi

This one would've been ranked higher except Raimi was eventually brought back to make the enjoyable Doctor Strange 2 but, as disappointed as people were in Spider-Man 3, the far less courageous Andrew Garfield movies certainly made folks miss mad old Mr. Raimi.

6. Steve Lightfoot

The creator and showrunner on The Punisher series with Jon Bernthal, Lightfoot is another of the most prominent Marvel Netflix writers not to make it into the Disney+ era. I might also have included Cheo Hodari Coker of Luke Cage although I don't actually know if Coker will be excluded from any potential Luke Cage revival. But, let's face it, we all know he will be. At least Lightfoot got to work on Spider-Noir.

5. James Gunn

Gunn's admirable commitment to his creative work brought him back to finish the Guardians of the Galaxy series even after Disney not only fired him but attempted to destroy his reputation. His work on DC's latest Superman movie shows just what Marvel is missing now.

4. Edgar Wright

The original director of the first Ant-Man movie contributed enough to it to make it the only decent film in the series before he and Disney parted ways over creative differences. I don't know, maybe he said, "Hey, let's make it a good movie," and Disney said, "Sorry, we're full up on those."

3. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley

Why is Spider-Man: Homecoming better written than Far from Home and No Way Home? Because of this duo who came up with the original story for the first of the Tom Holland films. After departing from Marvel, they continued to show their talent for making action adventure comedies by making the sleeper hit Dungeons and Dragons movie with Chris Pine.

2. Bryan Singer

This may surprise some people since Singer made some sub-par X-Men movies after Fox fired him in the wake of X2 but true fans remember the whiplash in going from Singer's excellent X2, which set up the Dark Phoenix storyline from the comics, only for the passionate auteur to be replaced by the noxious blotch on the film industry known as Brett Ratner for X-Men 3. I still wonder what might have been.

1. Joss Whedon

They just couldn't let Whedon do his thing on Age of Ultron. Whedon's not perfect but few writers of the past 40 years have better shown a talent for coordinating stories of superpowered characters that make them both interesting and human, showcasing their individual flaws and insights in ways that satisfyingly play off each other. Whedon's departure from Marvel and subsequent untimely cancellation has deprived genre media of one of its strongest, most consistently interesting voices. And Disney sure could use him now. Assuming they don't actually have a death wish.

The Free and the Guarded

It's been almost two weeks now since I got back from Japan. I was going to talk about the trip a bit more but it's easier just to sit down and ramble about a movie. Kyoto was beautiful, it was great seeing some old students in Kashihara, at the mall.

I deliberately spent all day at the Aeon Mall there, hoping to run into former students, but mostly people were too shy to talk to me and I couldn't be sure I recognised anyone. The students look so different out of their uniforms, which generally seem to be a couple sizes too big for them. Not an error, I think. One function of the uniform is likely to forestall any real semblance of adulthood. It makes it really hard to recognise them when they're in normal street clothes. Plus, many of the students, especially the girls, I'm used to seeing always wearing masks. I remember one year, my fourth year in Japan, I think, I was at that mall and a skinny girl ran up to me, so excited to see me, she hugged me, and looked in my eyes for the spark of recognition. I desperately searched my memory. Finally I realised who she was--she was one of a group of girls who always wore green cardigans to school and I remembered she was interested in art, so I brought that up to show I knew who she was. But I wish I'd recognised her right away during that initial excitement. I wish I'd better shown how much I appreciated seeing her once more. She was much skinnier than I'd have guessed from the big green cardigan she used to wear.

But in my recent visit I talked to two boys from an English club I used to work with and one girl from the Colour Guard at another school was bold enough to walk up and address me. I don't remember if I've talked about that Colour Guard much here but I sure loved those girls. At that school, I regularly went to the art club and to the Colour Guard, the Colour Guard being sort of like cheerleaders, though they're based on a military band group. The girls in the Colour Guard had wooden rifles that they'd throw and spin as part of their routines. There are teachers assigned to the clubs in junior high schools in Japan and the one in charge of Colour Guard at that school happened to be the head of the English department so I initially hung out with them to chat with that teacher. Then they tried to make me an official "kumon", or one of the teachers officially attached to a club, though I insisted on continuing to go to the art club, which I also loved. Both were art forms, as far as I was concerned. The Colour Guard did some pretty impressive routines combining elements of dance and gymnastics. Many of them were aspiring dancers or had training in ballet. It was inspiring seeing them so enthusiastic and passionate about what they were doing. Unfortunately, in a particularly conservative town, me hanging out with clubs with mostly female members was used to discredit me in the rounds of vicious gossip that certain resentful homophobic employees spread about me.

The Colour Guard warm up practice every day was done to the same two songs, Susan Boyle's cover of "Wild Horses" by The Rolling Stones and "Love is an Open Door" from Frozen. From now on, every time I hear those songs I will infallibly think of those students.

Gawain in Vain

It seems like people really hate Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, like so many people are falling over themselves just to kick this mediaeval poem in the groin. 1984's Sword of the Valiant, a film adaptation, is no exception, though it's a lot better than that obnoxious Dev Patel movie, The Green Knight, from a few years ago.

Watching this movie was the latest in an accumulation of abuse I'd perceived levelled at the poem. It got me so worked up I started bullying Google's AI about it, you know, asking it questions to overtax its obsequity, which is, of course, impossible. Questions like, "Why does the Norton Anthology use that terrible Simon Armitage translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?"

It seems what Google's AI actually does is close to what Google's always done, it finds a bunch of web sites in response to a search query. The only difference is that now it plagiarises each source in a manner mimicking human conversation.

This is an interesting breakdown:

The counterpoints are shown like the conversation is 50/50 but I'm confident that any of the young readers Norton was hoping to court with this translation would still feel like Armitage's work hits their ears like a brick.

The Simon Armitage translation has been included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which is the standard text book in American college literature classes, since 2012. Apparently inspired by Seamus Heaney's wonderful translation of Beowulf, Armitage fills his translation with anachronistic colloquialisms, supposedly in the effort to make the poem more readable and to respect the source material's alliterative verse. There are a lot of moments in the translation that just crash into a brick wall, like this bit:

. . . Gawain was embraced by his band of brothers,
who made eager enquiries, and he answered them all
with the tale of his trial and tribulations,
and the challenge at the chapel, and the great green chap,
and the love of the lady, which led to the belt.

"The great green chap"? Did he play racquetball with him? I know "chap" fits with "challenge" and "chapel" for alliteration but there's more to poetry than alliteration. The line in the original version of the poem is "Þe chaunce of þe chapel, þe chere of þe knyȝt." "knyȝt" is "knight" and not "chap" or any mediaeval version of "chap" so Armitage is adding alliteration that wasn't there in the first place and inserting a casual tone where there wasn't one. And "band of brothers" sticks out as a reference to Shakespeare's Henry V, written over two hundred years later.

Anyway, the questions I've put to Google's AI about the differences in quality between the 1984 film and the 2021 film don't seem to jive with my impression that the makers of both movies hate the original poem. The 2021 adaptation obviously aims to subvert the text at every step, which led to me being really pissed off when I spoke to a young woman who earnestly believed the film was a straightforward representation of mediaeval literature. But can you honestly tell me that the 1984 film's makers liked Sir Gawain when they put him in this wig?

They might argue this was a common style in the Middle Ages but no-one else in the movie looks like they scalped Debbie Harry.

That's Miles O'Keefe as Gawain and some would say he gets off easy compared to Sean Connery as the Green Knight whose costume has a belly window:

There was a lame pirate movie from the '40s I talked about not too long ago that also had a character wearing a top with a belly window. Every now and then, I guess a cracked costume designer gets it into his or her head that this is a good idea. I don't care how ripped your actor is, the belly window will make him look like he has a beer gut. I guess it's not the worst costume Connery ever wore, everyone's seen the infamous Zardoz costume at this point, but it's worth asking how Connery managed so often to end up in terrible costumes. Let's not forget the terrycloth romper from Dr. No.

That said, Connery's actually pretty good in the role. He gives it a mixture of majesty and mischief that's just right for the character. The film also has Peter Cushing, John Rhys-Davies, and Trevor Howard, who plays King Arthur, though, for some reason, the characters never refer to him by name. The cinematography's pretty bad indoors but the film actually has some good European locations that could make even the worst cinematographer look talented.

Miles O'Keefe, who got his start playing Tarzan, is maybe best known now for playing Ator, a Conan the Barbarian knock-off made infamous on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. He plays Gawain like a deer perpetually caught in the headlights but the worst part of the movie is by far its repetitive synthesiser score which hammers a trite, triumphal hero melody into your ears over and over and over.

I really loved Sir Gawain and the Green Knight when I first read it in around 2008. Doesn't anyone else feel the way I do?

Sword of the Valiant is available on Amazon Prime.

Triumph of the Freaky

I'm really happy about how well Obsession is doing at the box office. I saw on Twitter/X this morning that it's overtaken The Exorcist for sixth highest grossing horror movie of all time. As usual, that's not adjusted for inflation, but for a movie made for $750,000, that's a clear win. The director has won the lottery, except it's not entirely luck. Though luck has to be part of it because great movies are made and largely go unseen all the time. Obsession's success makes me hope there'll be a new era of funding for arthouse films, that big studios will fund movies that focus more on character and intriguing ambiguities instead of movies that are mostly special effects with screenplays whittled down by committees into boring incoherence. The writing's been on the wall for a long time but even the dullest studio suit can't fail to see how The Mandalorian crashed and burned while Obsession soared.

The key to Obsession's success is the conversation that it instigated. Kat Rosenfield said, in her piece "The Ideologues are Wrong about Obsession", "Feminists think the horror film is about the toxicity of the Nice Guy; the manosphere argues that it proves women are crazy. But it's much deeper and better than that." But Rosenfield's wrong, too, because she and the ideologues are right. David Lynch could've told them. Oscar Wilde told us; "Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself." People keep going to see Obsession because they don't want to be left out of the conversation. And the movie couldn't have done that if director Curry Barker had definitively gone for one interpretation or another in his film. Of course, even if he had, the film itself is ambiguous enough that it could be interpreted different ways even if he didn't want it to be. But if he's smart and mature as an artist, he'll see that as a good thing. Just as Tristan and Isolde compelled its audience to wonder if their love was true or entirely a fabrication of the potion, people will continue to ask if Nikki or Bear or the One Wish Willow is the true villain of the film.

One lesson I hope people will take to heart, as far is their personal lives are concerned, is to be kinder and more forgiving. Life is ambiguous and sometimes the things we interpret as evil are really people being weak. Or their true selves are being suppressed by a demoniac entity.

And I also hope it'll teach some people the importance of examining the primary source for oneself, of making up one's own mind, instead of letting partisans lead them by the bridle.

Sonnet 1998

With interlocking nostrils, nosy wights
Demand inspection seconds daily forced
Upon the weird and maybe prone to fights
Against the right politic'ly endorsed.
The clanking guards conceal the dame betwixt
The chilly stacks of pasty stones that grace
Their dungeons deep beneath the morning mist
That shroud the castle's grim imposing face.
Invasive crowds would read her drops of snot
They find on stolen handkerchiefs and then
Derive predictions made and fortunes got
For bottom feeders taking ev'ry win.
The gleeful crew then swap their stories straight
And tell themselves how fierce they are and great.

Multipurpose Feet

A ballet troupe stranded in a remote Hungarian inn finds themselves fighting gangsters in 2026's Pretty Lethal. You'd think after the recent John Wick spin-off, Ballerina, there'd be some moratorium on ballet martial arts movies but no. In truth, this is a better film than Ballerina but none of these movies have really attained that holy grail of truly blending ballet and martial arts in a visually convincing way. What this film does get right is the relationship dynamics between women and girls, which I don't think is impossible for a man to write convincingly but the fact that this film was written and directed by women probably gave it a leg up.

This is also the second 2026 movie about girls kicking ass in a labyrinthine hotel I've watched in as many days. It seems to be the year for it. I am a sucker for movies in which people get stuck in big houses or hotels.

When their bus breaks down in the woods on their way to a big show in Budapest, the troupe is forced to walk through the wilderness before they miraculously stumble across the enormous inn. Inside, the dim, coloured lighting, casino atmosphere, and anachronistically 1920s gilded decor recall the John Wick movies. The girls reluctantly relax while their manager, Thorna (Lydia Leonard), tries to arrange some transport into town. Meanwhile, the girls meet the sinister owner of the place, Devora Kasimer, played by Uma Thurman, who's certainly believable as a former ballerina, as she turns out to be. Unfortunately, she's also a ruthless mob boss.

The girls are Zoe (Iris Apatow), Princess (Lana Condor), Chloe (Millicent Simmonds), Grace (Avantika), and Bones (Maddie Ziegler). The movie's strongest point is that by the end of the film you're acquainted with each girl's distinct personality, how she functions within the group dynamic, and you're concerned for all of them. Bones shapes up to be the leader because she's established as practical and already given to physical confrontation. Grace is an ultra-religious ditz who's darkly amusing after one of the gangsters drugs her. But her funniest line is near the end of the film when one of the other girls spots some explosives and says, "C4?!" and Grace says, "I see at least sixteen!" Someone should've said, "Say 'goodnight', Gracie."

But my favourite character, by far, was Princess, despite the fact that actress Lana Condor clearly does not have the physique for a professional ballerina. Not that I don't like her physique, I particularly enjoyed watching her run. But ballerinas tend towards the more slender. But while it never really seems credible that the girls can physically overpower their captors, Princess does have a brilliant moment where she talks her way out of trouble using nonsense and misdirection, randomly babbling to a gangster she runs into about the WiFi and a reality show she watches as a guilty pleasure. There are some viewers who might find use of such feminine wiles to be implausible but I suspect such viewers would be precisely the sorts of people who've fallen prey to such wiles more than once.

So the screenplay has the goods, the director is competent, and the cast are great. The crucial flaw in this film is the fight choreography. It's that choreography that has to bear the weight of so much of the film's essential premise, the idea that ballet is so much like a martial art already that a group of ballerinas can just improvise a fighting style from it to fend off a number of experienced killers. Too much of the film's choreography relies on the audience being used to artificial movie fighting styles which employ a lot more spinning than true martial arts tend to do. I suspect the rise in popularity of MMA fighting has made the average viewer too savvy for that now. It's just awkward and sometimes even silly watching these girls succeed in a fight by suddenly going en pointe or adopting some other elegant pose. What they ought to have done is contemplated the famous hallway fight scene in Oldboy. In that scene, the fight is exciting not because the protagonist exhibits astonishing skill, but because he's actually quite sloppy and unpolished and succeeds more by tenacity than by his years of solitary training. I do believe these girls have strong legs so I think some good choreography could have been worked out to make it credible that they manage to gain an upper hand despite a lot of messy setbacks.

It's certainly worth watching the movie for the characters at least. Pretty Lethal is available on Amazon Prime.

Hotel Morality

In trying to sum up the crazed, immortal Satanic cult dwelling in a ritzy New York hotel, Zazie Beetz's character in 2026's They Will Kill You at one point simply describes them as "rich people." This is par for the course when it comes to the intellectual level of the film's social commentary. Mostly it's an unabashed Quentin Tarantino pastiche with some incredible fight scenes and a few appreciably wacky, dark moments. I only wish the screenplay were a little smarter.

Beetz plays Asia Reaves, a young woman who goes to prison for ten years for shooting her father. Once she's released, she goes on a quest to find the little sister she'd been forced to leave with the abusive old man. This leads her to the Virgil, a labyrinthine art deco hotel in garish mustard yellow, saturated brown, and chili pepper red. One impressive fight scene later, chock a block with dismemberment, she discovers the hotel's denizens are immortal and they all want to kill her.

All the snap zooms and forefronted rock and hip hop songs really make it seem like Kirill Sokolov has watched Kill Bill vol. 1 at least ten thousand times. But while the Bride's extreme martial arts proficiency is explained by a backstory of intensive and often painful training, Asia's prowess is put down just to her having been in prison. This seems like a failure of imagination but there are lots of lapses of logic in the story, too. When Asia first gets to her room in the hotel, she sees eyes watching her in the air vent. She goes outside the room, looks around the hall, and the lights go out. When they come back on, she goes back to her room and goes to bed, apparently not caring that there's eyes watching her behind the vent, despite the fact that it'd made her scream and fall back on the ground moments before. Later, when an opponent plants a knife in her back, Asia breaks a mirror and uses it to see the knife while she uses a bookcase to get under the knife's handle so it's pulled out when she steps forward. Why doesn't she just pull it out with her hand? I have no idea. It's like the screenwriter thought the main character was going to be a turtle. Was this originally a Ninja Turtles script?

In terms of the social commentary, it's your standard lazy "rich white people versus poor black people." Unsurprisingly, the director is a rich white guy. He's from Russia, which may explain his meagre insight.

Zazie Beetz, who was the best part of Deadpool 2, is excellent in the action scenes and I really enjoyed the climactic battle. Heather Graham and Patricia Arquette are also in the movie.

They Will Kill You is available on HBOMax.

The Right to Home

Sometimes social commentary in art can be effective. The 1995 two part episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "Past Tense", found the 24th century main characters visiting San Francisco in 2024. That seemed like a far off future in 1995 but 2024 is already a year and a half ago. The premise of "Past Tense", which is one of the more lauded episodes of the series, is that by 2024 in the U.S. people will confine the homeless to concentration camps in major cities. The writers were inspired by observing the strange coexistence of extreme wealth alongside extreme poverty in Los Angeles.

This episode had been on my mind since returning from Japan. Japan seems to be a much wealthier country than the U.S. at this point, or at least a country where wealth's more evenly distributed. Homelessness is extremely rare in Japan, it's certainly far less visible. Coming back to the U.S. feels a little like being a 24th century Starfleet officer being suddenly confronted by the site of rampant homelessness. The same truth is apparent to them that's apparent to me, that the wealthy largely don't seem to regard the poor as belonging to the same species.

It's easy to see why the concentration camps never happened, despite a contemporaneous proposal for "havens" in Los Angeles that caught the show's writers by surprise. Such institutions would require money. It's easier and cheaper to allow private businesses and homeowners to foot the bill by restricting access to restrooms. I've been surprised by the transformation of the restrooms here in the U.S. since I left six years ago. Nearly every business has a coded lock on its door. Upon returning from my recent trip to Japan, I stopped in a Starbucks in San Diego to get a muffin because I realised I hadn't eaten in six hours or so (it's hard to keep track of time taking a ten hour flight across the dateline). While I was eating, a homeless man approached the counter and started chatting with the barista. It was a friendly chat but he clearly had an ulterior motive. Was he going to ask her out? Was he going to ask her for money? Nope, he just wanted the code to the restroom and she refused because he wasn't a paying customer. He left without causing any trouble. I assume he ended up having to piss on the ground somewhere. People complain about the urine stench but what do they expect? In Tokyo recently I sat by a young woman in a smart suit with a skirt before I realised she'd pissed herself and that's why other people on the train were giving her a wide berth. As an American, I sort of wanted to reassure her that I was used to it but I doubt she'd have been comforted.

In the Deep Space Nine episode there's eventually a riot which gets national attention that kicks off a series of events that lead to social change. It's very hard for me to imagine there won't eventually be a violent uprising in the real version of the 2020s.

Listen to the Sounds

I had a double David double feature last night and watched David Lynch's Wild at Heart followed by David Cronenberg's Videodrome. Just a couple weeks after I said Wild at Heart was the most elusive David Lynch movie, generally not to be found on streaming services, it turned up on The Criterion Channel. I ought to speak up more often. If anyone's listening, I'd like to see some more Aleksandr Ptushko movies.

There's a 4k restoration of Wild at Heart. I'm not sure if that's what's on The Criterion Channel but watching it with the volume way up I was freshly reminded how important it is to watch David Lynch movies in the right sensory circumstances. In a dark room without noise pollution and with as few breaks as possible. I'm really happy books are gaining popularity again but I fear there's a diminished appreciation for less expository artforms. To get Wild at Heart, you got to have the volume way up for Lula's screams and the electric guitar while Sailor beats the crap out of that guy on the hotel steps. Or for Marietta's gulping noises when she drinks down that martini. Or for Harry Dean Stanton spitting out the window when he's being talked about. Or the crinkling sound of Sailor's snack skin jacket when Bobby Peru's talking him into the bank heist. Lynch did a lot of his own sound design and it's absolutely crucial.

"Perception determines reality" as Brian O'Blivion says in Videodrome. In Japan they say, "見つからなければいいや", "it's okay if no-one sees you." The trouble is, most people don't realise all the little sensual details that attend on every word and every action. Artists are generally not good at lying because we're aware of how hopeless it is. The hallucinations experienced by Max in Videodrome are always off, in large and small ways, because the masterminds of the hallucinations lack the imagination to account for every aspect of perceptible reality. People who fail to appreciate sensual reality think all they need to successfully lie to someone is words. The truth always has a ripple effect, like a stone thrown into the pond, and the absence of those ripples is a dead giveaway.

It's eerie how prescient Videodrome is. How much the political battle via the television screen depicted in the film resembles the sinister aspects of social media algorithms on the internet to-day, how they push people into increasingly calcified political realities. But they're thin realities, they're not wholesome sustenance, which most people sense without being able to consciously describe.

Opaque Precipitation

A couple American cops escort a Japanese gangster back to Japan only to end up chasing him all over Osaka in Ridley Scott's 1989 film Black Rain. I'm used to western films getting basically nothing right about Japan so I was fascinated by how accurate this movie is about the location and especially the culture. It's almost too accurate because it becomes highly implausible that fish out of water Michael Douglas as the lead cop can ever be even remotely useful on the streets of a Japanese city. But there are some incredible action sequences in this movie complemented by one of the best Hans Zimmer scores I've ever heard.

The action begins in New York where Michael Douglas plays Nick Conklin, your typical maverick '80s American movie cop who's always pissing off his chief. This first act establishes he's really good on a motorcycle with a terrific race sequence along the wharf. You know it's going to pay off later but that makes it no less satisfying when it does.

Nick's partner is a young guy named Charlie (Andy Garcia) and the two of them are in a bar when they witness a group of yakuza execute a hit on the premises. There's a foot chase and Nick catches the leader, which leads to he and Charlie landing the job of escorting the guy overseas. But the guy almost immediately escapes once they're on Japanese soil. Nick, who's anathema to American protocols, is completely at odds with Japanese police procedure and I was amazed he even succeeded in being granted observer status. He's given a minder named Matsumoto (Takakura Ken) who's real job is to minimise the Americans' involvement. They really only start to gain a little ground because Matsumoto warms to Charlie's generous nature and Nick meets an American woman, Joyce (Kate Capshaw), working as a hostess in one of the clubs. She gives him some insight including one line that was so accurate it was in fact a thought I often had working in Japan; "Yes means no." Which in Nick's case, when he's told he can observe, it actually means he's been granted zero access.

Ridley Scott wanted to shoot entirely on location but found the red tape in Japan to be insurmountable, a problem that has stymied many a foreign production attempting to operate in Japan. Although most of the footage was shot in Osaka and Kobe, Scott was obliged late in production to take it overseas and the film's climax was shot in Napa Valley, California. But unlike John Wick, which gives a pretty poor imitation of Umeda Station, Scott recreated the cathedral-like interior of Hankyu Department Store (connected to Umeda Station) so well in Los Angeles I thought it was actually some of the location footage until I read the Wikipedia entry. I bet it would have been impossible to get permission for a guy to ride a motorcycle around in it as we see in the film.

It never comes off as plausible that Nick's able to make valuable contributions to the investigation in Osaka but it's still a pretty exciting action movie with some genuine insight on Japanese culture. Black Rain is available on Amazon Prime.

The Path of Toys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toy Story 5 is now in theatres.

The Serious Life of Playthings

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

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

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

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

Toy Story 4 is available on Disney+.

Sonnet 1997

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

Zombies are Forever

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

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

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

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

This is Not a Test is available on Shudder.