Won't Someone Think of the Dolls?

In the "More Things Change, the More they Stay the Same" department, I found it funny that the articles I've read about Olivia Rodrigo's babydoll dress tend not to mention the 1956 film Baby Doll that popularised the garment. At that time, according to Wikipedia:

Baby Doll courted controversy before its release with the display of a promotional billboard in New York City that depicted [the film's star, Carroll] Baker lying in a crib and sucking her thumb. Cardinal Spellman urged both Catholics and non-Catholics to avoid the film, deeming it a moral danger.

The film is about a middle aged man married to a nineteen year old girl. Now, Olivia Rodrigo has been criticised for wearing that same notorious garment. She doesn't defend herself very cogently but she shouldn't have to. That's the job of a critic, not an artist.

The article linked to at Bustle decries the possibility of "sexualising" Rodrigo. The astounding bad faith in this premise makes the enormous leap of ignoring trends of sexually provocative costumes and performances in popular music for the past 70 years. Of course part of the point of such costumes is to look sexy. Sex is part of human nature and so, therefore, is sexual attraction and it absolutely has a place in popular art because it reflects who we are.

But does the babydoll dress somehow encourage paedophilia? Rodrigo is 23 years old but as in the 1956 movie the idea is of course to tease a woman in a juvenile aesthetic. Why is this sexy? Is it normalising paedophilia? Desmond Morris one opined that women had juvenile physical features in contrast to men--larger eyes, slimmer shoulders, higher voice pitch, and less body hair--in order to provoke a protective impulse in men. So the single instinct the human being has to be protective of children triggered by physical features does double duty. One could ask, I suppose, which came first. Do women look like children or do children look like women?

"What is it about schoolgirls?" asked Elias Koteas in Exotica, a movie I talked about last week. In that movie, in which a main character is a stripper whose shtick is to wear schoolgirl uniforms, the answer is that theoretically schoolgirls are pure, they lack the "baggage" of adults. In Oingo Boingo's "Little Girls", a song which, despite how it's typically regarded, really mocks paedophiles, singer Danny Elfman sings from the point of view of a paedophile:

They don't care if I'm a one-way mirror
Well, they're not frightened by my cold exterior
They don't ask me questions
They don't want to scold me
They don't look for answers
They just want to hold me

Of course, anyone who's seen Mean Girls or spent quality time with teenage girls will know that it's absurd to say that young girls aren't judgemental. Part of maturing to adulthood is learning to be less judgemental of people who are unlike oneself, not more judgemental. This idea of innocence in children has little to do with actual children. Real innocence is often cruel. It's only by shielding children from situations in which they would have to make complicated moral choices that we create the illusion of their infallible benevolence. To a child, our adult world is in many ways horrific.

Arguably, the juvenile aesthetic is meant to evoke childish as often as it does childlike qualities. That the idea of an adult acting with the amorality of a child is worthy of punishment. This is a fundamental idea behind S&M and the enticement of the term "naughty" in an adult context. But this is by definition not an encouragement to paedophilia since it requires an adult transgressing by adopting juvenile qualities. To say that the tease of a woman wearing a babydoll encourages paedophilia is sort of like saying the Hamburglar encourages theft. But I suppose I can see how the Hamburglar might be too sophisticated for certain segments of society.

They WERE Amazing . . .

In 1985, one of Steven Spielberg's many projects was the launch of a new anthology television series called Amazing Stories. I hadn't seen it since I was a kid so I watched the first episode again last night. Spielberg himself directed the first episode called "Ghost Train" about a family moving into a big house in the middle of nowhere and the grandfather's regrets about a derailed train he remembers in the area from his childhood. It turns out to be a big allegory about death and letting go of a loved one. It hasn't aged well.

It might have benefited from the "event" aspect of television in 1985 when, if you didn't catch something when it aired, it could be years before you got the chance to see it again. So for many, the legend became bigger than the show itself. Watching it now it feels a bit more like seeing someone imitating Spielberg than Spielberg himself. There's the sweeping crane shots, the ecstatic closeups, the well timed editing beats. The cast feels very much like a TV cast, though, especially the parents. The mother's reaction to seeing the ghost train reminded me of a commercial in which a woman's dealing with a plumbing problem.

The opening theme segment is pretty quaint. I actually remember thinking this cgi looked genuinely cool.

I still find something intriguingly ominous about the weird cave people and the family at the end, presumably meant to be normal folks. I get this vague impression of them being trapped in the stories somehow, like there's this unintended message of how the storytelling began in ancient times and trapped both the teller and the audience and now YOU'RE TRAPPED TOO.

What are Songs For?

I had to get a root canal yesterday and the dentist and his assistant were talking about the recent American Music Awards throughout the procedure. Apparently a number of South Korean artists, including BTS and Katseye, won big, making me wonder why it's called the "American Music Awards". But what are words for? Missing Persons asked this question with their hit song, "Words", back in 1982. That song charted at 42.

I thought BTS were over but apparently this year they already have the song of the summer.

I don't find it half as interesting as former song of the summer "Espresso" but that was all the way back in 2024. Times have changed.

The dentist and his assistant also talked about Justin Bieber. I had no idea people in the U.S. were still listening to Justin Bieber. Again, the algorithms have let me down. I wondered when was the last time I'd looked at the Billboard Hot 100. Actually, I'd looked at the charts recently because, going through my deceased father's things, I'd found a few decades ago he'd paid a research firm to provide him with a printout of the Hot 100 lists going back to the '60s. Nowadays, that information's readily available for free on Wikipedia.

So I looked at the current Hot 100 and saw that someone named Ella Langley had the top two spots with songs called "Choosin' Texas" and "Be Her" (to-day I see she's been unseated by Drake). I checked out both of those songs on YouTube and found them to be surprisingly boring. Also surprising is that "Choosin' Texas" only has 34 million views.

"Be Her", the number 2, has 15 million views accrued over three months while Olivia Rodrigo's "Drop Dead", which was at number 7, has 31 million views accrued over one month. How does that make sense?

According to Google's AI:

The Billboard Hot 100 ranks the most popular songs in the U.S. every week by combining three main metrics: streaming activity, radio airplay, and sales data (compiled by Billboard's data tracking partner, Luminate). The exact formula is a closely guarded trade secret, but the final rankings are generally determined by these core components

Those aren't very good metrics. How many people listen to the radio anymore? Both radio and sales data come with higher price tags--radio play nowadays comes with artificial financial incentives while sales data reflects the small percentage of people who still buy music. But as my father evidently discovered, the top ranking Billboard songs are often dull. How often do people still listen to 1973's number 1, "Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Ole Oak Tree" or "That's What Friends Are For" from 1986? How about 1996's number one, "Macarena"?

Anyway, although I found the Ella Langley songs to be dull, I noticed both of the songs contained the recurrent preoccupation with uncertainty and the difficulty in defining relationships I talked about in a post last month about Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, and Sabrina Carpenter. "Choosin' Texas" finds the singer uncertain about the status of her relationship with her Texas boyfriend while "Be Her" is about wanting to become another person. This may be a generation experiencing exceptional difficulty defining itself. But what are words for?

Here Comes the Idea

Looking for feminism in Frankenstein is kind of like looking for romance in Alice in Wonderland. People really want it to be there and, if they look hard enough, they can find some compelling clues to suggest that it is there, and sometimes they go off and make analyses or adaptations that tease out these hints that turn out, in retrospect, to be largely projections originating from the analyst than anything the original author was probably ever interested in. Maggie Gyllenhaal's 2026 film The Bride! is at least among the more self-aware of those riffs and, in particular, fans of James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein may at least sympathise with Gyllenhaal's passion for that 1935 film. The Bride! is a very postmodern, academic film loaded with a modern political perspective, honestly more akin to Angela Carter than Mary Shelley. The performances and production design make it a delightful ride and I at least enjoyed it a little more than the similarly self-aware Frankenstein pastiche, Poor Things. Jessie Buckley is in the duel role of Mary Shelley and the reanimated Bride and she plays both like a narcissistic, theatrical actress, like Patti LuPone or Norma Desmond, someone at all times palpably enraptured by her own grandeur. Her playing both roles is one of the more obvious nods to Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale's cinematic sequel to his famous adaptation of Frankenstein, both films starring Boris Karloff as the monster. Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley and the Bride in Bride of Frankenstein and she is mesmerising. I certainly don't blame Maggie Gyllenhaal for wanting to build a whole movie around that performance. It made me a lifelong Elsa Lanchester fan and for years I sought out every movie with Lanchester I could get my hands on. It's a different kind of performance than Jessie Buckley delivers, though. While Buckley presents us with a woman captivated by the tragedy of her own unrecognised genius, Lanchester's performance as Mary Shelley is of a self-possessed, subtly perverse woman, amused at an unspoken joke while her performance as the Bride is like that of a terrified animal. Buckley's performance is fun but in a way less connected to her environment and story. Some reviewers compare her to Deadpool and I think that's valid.

It's not only Bride of Frankenstein that Gyllenhaal references. There are scads of references to cinema of the '20s and '30s stitched throughout the movie that I suspect will drastically lower any appreciation the uninitiated will feel for the movie but I could appreciate Buckley's impression of Marlene Dietrich or Jake Gyllenhaal's performance as a Fred Astaire-ish musical star.

The monster is played by Christian Bale with a sense of unwavering sincerity and devotion to his goal. At first he seemed like Maggie Gyllenhaal meant for him to come off as an obnoxious incel, someone who believed he deserved to have everyone bend over backward to satisfy his unrequited needs. But once he meets the Bride he becomes a humble white knight. One of the more distinctly modern pieces of messaging in the film is of the subjectivity of beauty and the injustice of beauty standards, a thread that comes to a head when Bale's monster performs a musical routine referencing Peter Boyle's performance in Young Frankenstein that seems to suggest the audience is the monster for having laughed at Peter Boyle.

Bale's monster is referred to as Frankenstein, Frank for short, by the way, both a nod to the fact that the monster's name and the scientist's are frequently confused as well as the idea that the monster is, in fact, Victor Frankenstein's son so, therefore, he'd naturally carry on the family name.

Frank and the Bride hit the road as the film becomes an extended riff on Bonnie and Clyde which many reviewers have compared to other Bonnie and Clyde pastiches like Natural Born Killers and especially Joker: Folie a Deux. Frank and the Bride are wrapped up in their own worlds, a bubble that's occasionally punctured when one of the simplistic, vicious denizens of our world attempts to kill or rape them. The great failing of this film for many who've viewed it is the lack of a credible world for these two characters to dwell in. They are invariably victims of a broadly villainous world whereas other riffs on the Bonnie and Clyde story at least devote some time to the idea that the self-absorption of the protagonists may do legitimate harm to innocent bystanders. This is is something Mary Shelley herself better understood than both Maggie Gyllenhaal and Guillermo del Toro. Shelley's original monster is by no means a saint.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's fundamental idea is to find the feminism of Frankenstein by taking its depiction of monstrousness as an allegory for the roles women are forced to play in society. But it's ultimately unsatisfying, as allegories often are, because the two things don't map comfortably onto each other. Mary Shelley was more interested in the sanity of self-creation versus the imposition of life. Her interest in this idea was held without obligation to sort characters into consistently moral or immoral figures. Ultimately, that makes her work a more sophisticated rumination on the human experience on a level most adaptations have been unable to approach. But at least Gyllenhaal's movie gives us some food for thought, even if it's mostly only accessible to those of us who have done our homework.

The Bride! is available on HBOMax.

The Movement of Soldiers

Happy Memorial Day. I watched Stanley Kubrick's 1957 film Paths of Glory again this morning, which Wikipedia labels as an "anti-war film", citing an article that no longer exists on TCM's website. I suppose it's a fair label. Maybe it would be more accurate to call it simply an "anti-hierarchy film." Surely any halfway accurate depiction of World War I, particularly trench warfare, will inevitably be an anti-war film. I can't imagine putting a spin on that epitome of the absurd and the grotesque to make it seem reasonable.

The cinematography, the compositions, all of it is just absolutely phenomenal. It's so short and so smooth, it's almost impossible to stop watching once you've started. Sure it's a worthy way to honour the sacrifices of soldiers in war, though some might debate me on that. Is it better to remember true glory or to recall the fact that most soldiers in wars like that are victims in uniform? The film's razor sharp satire of the officers shows the ridiculous lengths of delusion they indulge in to maintain the narrative of war as an honourable endeavour in which the officers are the purest manifestation of virtue. It's just a magnificent film.

Last night, I was watching Oshima Nagisa's 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a film that I did hear talked about in Japan, unusual for a film so old or transgressive, though it's mainly due to the fact that its score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also starred in the film, continues to receive so many accolades around the world. I don't get the impression many in Japan have actually seen it. It certainly hasn't raised David Bowie's profile in Japan, whose name my more homophobic detractors, having heard he's my favourite singer, tended to pronounce as "David Boy", perhaps to conflate him with Boy George.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence never feels like a realistic depiction of a prison camp. Oshima should certainly be commended for showing the infamous brutality the Japanese showed to prisoners of war but the action often feels more like S&M role play than true abuse. It's clearly a movie primarily intended for Japanese audiences. Bowie once commented that Oshima gave extensive direction to the Japanese actors while telling the western actors to "Please do whatever it is you people do." Bowie himself, despite my admiration for him, could have used more direction as he tends always to come off as David Bowie in a military uniform, particularly when he does pantomime. I know his idea was probably to show his character's attempt to evoke normalcy in an abnormal situation but his professional quality pantomime is more reminiscent of Bowie as a performer than of the character he's playing.

Kitano Takeshi is about the only one who comes off as really authentic in the film. I don't know if that makes it a bad film but maybe not an appropriate film for Memorial Day.

Paths of Glory is available on MGM+ and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is available on The Criterion Channel.

True Sue

Self-insert Mary Sue characters are widely seen as a hallmark of bad writing but sometimes they really work, a prime example being 1993's True Romance. Christian Slater's character, Clarence, is clearly modelled on screenwriter Quentin Tarantino himself. He's a movie nerd and Tarantino has talked about how he based Clarence's first meeting with a movie mogul on his own idea of himself in such a meeting. Throughout the film, characters express their boundless love and devotion to Clarence through words and deeds. Dennis Hopper as his father accepts a lethal beating and Patricia Arquette as his love interest, Alabama, is pummelled ruthlessly by James Gandolfini to protect him.

It's worth noting that Tarantino, when he wrote the screenplay, had been estranged from his father throughout his life. I doubt he had a girlfriend at the time, either, and, anyway, no girlfriend is as perfect as Alabama whose devotion to Clarence is inexplicable as written, created almost entirely by the chemistry between the performers and the work of director Tony Scott, the music of Hans Zimmer, and the costume department. Patricia Arquette looks so good in that movie. In True Romance and Lost Highway she's got to be one of the most stunning actresses in film history. How can Clarence be so lucky? Is it plausible? Maybe not, but it's really sweet.

The main reason Tarantino's Mary Sue works is the sheer cleverness of the dialogue. It may not be realistic for Alabama to fall for him so completely so suddenly but it's endearing watching them bond over Sonny Chiba movies and Elvis Presley.

The film bears a lot of resemblance to David Lynch's 1990 film, Wild at Heart. Both are about a pair of young lovers, one of whom is obsessed with Elvis Presley, and the girl is beautiful and devoted. Somehow the couple in Wild at Heart, as weird as they are, come across as more plausible. Both movies also use a Chris Isaak song.

I always had the impression that Lynch admired Tarantino more than Tarantino admired Lynch but I wonder if Tarantino wasn't influenced by Lynch at least a little.

True Romance is currently available on Netflix while Wild at Heart continues to be Lynch's most elusive film.

Sonnet 1993

Galactic dances stomp the shaky stars.
Expanding time has popped balloons of silk.
Escaping roosters head for chicken bars.
Researchers offer birds their dolphin milk.
Encouraged mammals dive for marble dimes.
Diversions stop the miners chipping cork.
Another page was soaked with troubled times.
Another beef was found engorged with pork.
Beside the station stands a troupe of dames.
They carry tickets meant for Saturn ships.
Intrigued reporters take their secret names.
But no-one's handle's worth a hundred chips.
Casinos cash the savings hoards of whales.
Policemen found it stashed in giant pails.

Is This The Cure?

I was watching this new Olivia Rodrigo video yesterday, thinking how endearing it is she likes the Cure so much, particularly for an old Cure fan like myself (don't tell Morrissey). She's referenced the band a few times in her songs and she performed onstage with Robert Smith the two songs she seems to like best, "Friday I'm in Love" and "Just Like Heaven". But this new song would seem to reference an earlier Cure song, the title track off the Pornography album from 1982. It's the one time a Cure song makes any kind of reference to the band's name, concluding a narrative about sexual escapades that have left the participant(s) jaded and desensitised with the statement that "I must fight this sickness, find a cure." Rodrigo's lyrics seem to refer to a relationship or relationships that she ultimately finds unsatisfying despite the effort she's put in. You could read it like she needs an actual cure to a psychological affliction or like the standards of modern romantic love will never match the level of passion or sincerity she imagined listening to Cure songs as a child or teenager.

YouTube's algorithm decided to follow up this Olivia Rodrigo video with the new Rolling Stones video, "In the Stars".

Yes, that's a new song, released this month. The Stones have de-aged themselves. We're at the point now when spellcheck should really know "de-aged".

Maybe the Stones and Rodrigo are on the same record label these days and that's why the algorithm chose it as a follow up but it was also fitting. Rodrigo's song is from a young artist seeking to communicate with the work of an older artist while the Stones are clearly trying to connect with youth. Whether it's to-day's youth or their own past is debatable. I looked at the comments section on YouTube, filled with people either praising or deriding the special effect. One or two people wondered if any young people came across the video and thought this was a new, young band. I don't see any comments that would indicate that.

It's an interesting song, not as great as anything they produced since before the mid '80s. Ideas about things "in the stars" seem to be cropping up lately here and there. Maybe people are concerned about fate. Maybe it's just the Cthulhu lobby again.

You know, throughout human history it seems like we've been looking forward to the day when we can divest ourselves of the disgusting and painful physical body and dwell in a place of eternal youth and beauty. It's starting to seem like Heaven can one day be built and you can live there, if you have the money, or whatever currency turns out to be viable in this new ethereal plane.

That Man

I think Michael Keaton is the best actor ever cast as Batman. Everyone who's played the character since kind of imitates him. Well, who else would they imitate, Adam West? But the boldness of the decision to cast an actor known primarily for comedic roles resulted in a baseline complexity for the character. When Vicki Vale points out he's "not exactly normal" and he replies, "It's not exactly a normal world," it's an exchange not only supported by every frame of the film but one that seems to convey a deeper meaning. In no other film is Batman so weird. It's in his costume, too, especially as the film has aged. They may have been trying to make Keaton look like the imposing hulk Batman is in The Dark Knight Returns but to me he looks like teru teru bozu, little white dolls Japanese kids make to ward off rainy days.

They have round heads and a skirt of tissue paper or cloth. It's because, for whatever reason, Keaton's headpiece is very large and round in the movie so when he's running around with his cape unfurled and his arms down at his sides he looks sort of like a doll.

It's oddly cute yet also somehow spooky and perverted. But there's so much underlying kink in Tim Burton's best movies. Typically the villains are more interesting than Batman himself. I'd say this is the film version in which Batman succeeds in nearly being as intriguing as his foe.

But it's hard to compete with the Joker, whoever's playing him, and Jack Nicholson was the first actor to make people realise what a great role it is. If one looks at him now side by side with Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix, rather than as preceding them in a kind of evolution, it's a little easier to see what he brings to the table. His Joker is an older man's Joker, more self-possessed, less driven. It was doubtlessly Nicholson's own personality bleeding through but the impression his Joker gives is of someone who's been through a lot in his youth and is just happy to be in a place at the end of it all where he doesn't have to give a shit. Both Ledger's Joker and Phoenix's Joker seem like they've got something to prove, Nicholson's is just having a ball.

A Good Place for Obnoxious People

Sam Raimi has used the venerable genre of the desert island scenario to discuss modern socio-political tensions in 2026's Send Help. He does so in a way more complicated than you might expect and it's a film refreshingly free of sympathetic characters. It's basically a cage match between two of the worst examples of both sides of the aisle. It really put a smile on my face.

When Linda (Rachel McAdams) complains about the the systemic sexism that led to her getting passed over for the promotion to vice president she'd long ago been promised, her coworker, another woman, barely seems to listen and kind of shrugs. Another coworker comes by talking about karaoke and Linda tries to invite herself along. Her coworkers awkwardly end the conversation.

Linda's new boss, Bradley (Dylan O'Brien), makes crude jokes about Linda behind her back. He's a spoiled young dick but when he says to her she lacks the people skills a vice president needs he's clearly right. This kicks off a see-saw series of escalating extremes. In one scene, Bradley or Linda does something obnoxious or psychotic that you would think clearly establishes them as the villain and then, in the next scene, the other character does something even worse. Raimi matches this lack of a moral centre with the delirious, cartoonish style he's famous for. Some people complained about the obvious cgi of the boars Linda hunts on the island but the complaints miss the point. These boars are far more expressive than real boars would be because they fit the extreme, stylistic tone of the film. They're more like Deadites than animals.

On the island, Linda has the edge on Bradley because she'd trained and studied in the hopes of becoming a contestant on Survivor. We know this because Bradley and his bros are seen laughing at her audition video on the plane. Bradley gets his comeuppance when he clearly lacks any of the survival skills necessary to get by on the island. Yet he still acts like he's God's gift to Linda. One exchange of dialogue I particularly like is when she points out he'd be dead if not for her and he replies smugly, "Yeah, and then where would you be?" causing her to ask with real consternation, "What does that even mean?" He never seems to realise that what he said was nonsense. Meanwhile, Linda starts to take on a resemblance to Kathy Bates in Misery.

Send Help is available on Hulu in the US.

Her Best Feature

A teenage girl is horrified when her best friend becomes a demon in 2009's Jennifer's Body, which Roger Ebert described as "Twilight for boys." Which is a really funny thing to read at the end of a long Wikipedia entry in which its director and screenwriter spend a lot of time talking about how they wanted to make this a feminist subversion of a male dominated genre. I enjoyed the movie. Its screenplay by Diablo Cody is peppy and occasionally insightful and it's always a pleasure seeing Amanda Seyfried.

It's funny she's supposed to be the unsexy nerd of the duo comprised of herself and Megan Fox. Megan Fox is pretty but, for my money, Seyfried is by far the more beautiful. But in any case, they're both beautiful girls which makes it odd that the movie tries anything like the dynamic it does: the popular hot girl and her mousy best friend. Well, Seyfried did dress as a mouse in Mean Girls.

Her character's nickname in this movie is "Needy", an indication of the abuse she cheerfully puts up with from Fox, the titular Jennifer. The two survive a fire at a tavern that kills nearly everyone else. The band playing at the venue is headed by the evil Nikolai Wolf (Adam Brody) who lures the already obnoxiously narcissistic Jennifer into the woods to perform an unspeakable demoniac ritual to upgrade her into a real demon.

I liked how the populace of the town builds a false narrative around the fire in which the band, which fled the scene almost immediately, is cast as heroes. It reminded me of Donnie Darko and Ghost World and I sympathised with Needy for having to be surrounded by idiots.

The film supports two alternate interpretations, one in which Jennifer becomes a succubus, killing one boy after another to maintain her power, and another in which Needy is losing her mind and turns her friend's repulsive personality into hallucinated demoniac antics. There are things which go unexplained, like the fact that Needy seems to have a psychic connexion with Jennifer. This kind of reminded me of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt but mostly the story reminded me of Carmilla and American Werewolf in London.

Jennifer's Body is available on Netflix.

Wise Mollusc, eh?

It's only been a few years since the UK declared that octopuses are sentient beings and already there's a pro-octopus propaganda film on Netflix. 2026's Remarkably Bright Creatures stars Sally Field as a woman who works as a cleaning lady at an acquarium. She befriends a captive octopus, not knowing about his intelligible thoughts voiced by Alfred Molina. It's a sweet little film, even if it might come from the Cthulhu lobby.

Lewis Pullman, son of Bill, is also in the movie as a drifter, Joan Chen has a small role, and Colm Meaney plays the proprietor of a convenience store. He's also Sally Field's love interest in a subplot. It turns out Meaney's just seven years younger than Sally Field. It made me want to watch Deep Space Nine. I'm glad he hasn't gotten roped into the Alex Kurtzman Star Trek stuff. Or has he? I haven't been watching.

The performances are good across the board. Field's character is struggling with the loss of both her husband and son and Lewis Pullman and the octopus help her work through it in surprising ways.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is available on Netflix.

Legitimate Graphics

I got a Comixology subscription recently through Amazon and grabbed a few titles with covers that appealed to me, like this one:

I'd heard of Fables but knew next to nothing about the series, I was lured entirely by the bodacious naked lady, who turned out to be Rapunzel. Fables is one of those postmodern series that came out of the '80s and '90s that turned classic fairy tales and fantasy into modern pulp fiction. Though apparently this series ran from 2002 to 2015. The issue I got is a story from 2012. I enjoyed it. It felt very Buffyish with fantastic characters speaking in modern lingo to one another between action sequences and sex scenes.

One thing that took me very much by surprise is that the story largely takes place in Japan. Not only that, but a lot of it takes place in Nara prefecture, where I lived for five years. Of course, I noticed things the writers and artists got wrong. Inaki Miranda and Barry Kitson, the pencilers, and Adam Hughes, the cover artist, produced some beautiful work but somehow they generally couldn't make people look Japanese. One of them also depicts raccoons among Japan's mythological creatures despite the fact that raccoons were only recently introduced as an invasive species. I suspect this comes from a mistranslation of "tanuki" as "raccoon". Wikipedia now has a proper place for the "Japanese raccoon dog" which differs significantly from a raccoon. But I've seen old dictionaries that simply translate "tanuki" as "raccoon".

It's funny how errors about foreign cultures are more charming the older a work of fiction is. I'm quite happy to enjoy the 1940 Thief of Bagdad, chock full of British impressions of the middle east, but this early 2000s impression of Japan from Americans comes off as awkward and hokey. I think it's less because I've had experience in Japan and more because I've had experience as an American fantasy writer. I see the errors I've made in historical details on Dekpa and Deborah and I cringe. I feel a sympathetic cringe for the creators of Fables.

I enjoyed how they turned Rapunzel into a Japanese style hair monster somewhat like Sadako in Ring and then had her become a babe again.

Anyway, it was a pretty diversion.

And Then They Went Home

We all know the story. A group of teenagers gets rowdy on prom night, they take a risky journey to somewhere new, and they engage in sexual shenanigans except for one virtuous girl among them. Then a possibly supernatural killer starts picking them off. Now imagine that story but without the possibly supernatural killer ever showing up and you would have something like 1985's Out of Control. There's not much to recommend the film aside from an early appearance by Sherilyn Fenn but there is some life in the dialogue in the first act that deceives the viewer into thinking the movie's going somewhere.

The group consists of four guys and four girls. The rich one, Keith (Martin Hewitt), has a plane and invites the others to join him on a jaunt after the prom. There's a bad storm and they crash land on a deserted island. The only signs of humanity are an abandoned cabin and a crate filled with vodka and Spam. They get drunk and play strip spin the bottle, the real reason for the movie to exist, and everyone ends up at least partially naked except for Sherilyn Fenn's character, Katie. Two of the guys fight over the prom queen, Chrissie (Betsy Russell), after she takes her panties off.

Some bad guys show up, some arms dealers, but they're so ineffectual they're hardly worth mentioning.

The credits say "Introducing Sherilyn Fenn" but she'd been in two movies the previous year, most notably The Wild Life, written by Cameron Crowe and starring Chris Penn, Eric Stoltz, and Lea Thompson. The biography section of Fenn's Wikipedia entry makes no mention of Out of Control and says 1988's Two Moon Junction was her first starring role. Maybe she'd rather people not remember Out of Control. Maybe she'd be happy to know I'm struggling to remember it even now.

Out of Control is available on Amazon Prime.

Sonnet 1992

A tale of frogs is told in slimy chunks.
Entangled tongues would eat the juicy fly.
But whims of wings would fail the saucy hunks.
Their noses dive untimely from the sky.
Selecting clouds results in picture books.
Arrangements brought the fluffy cotton stuff.
Selections cool on giant metal hooks.
Across the bridge, the thief effects a bluff.
A dragon guards his pass from angry trolls.
The snow prevents the beast from winning well.
We put his bones in sacred earthen bowls.
Then digitised his brain to make a sale.
Decisions fell to bearded men above.
Their thoughts reveal the hand beneath the glove.

What is Born in the Wake of Death

I also watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas again recently. I was thinking it could work as a good companion piece to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It helps that they're both buddy films. It's also fitting given that Terry Gilliam, Fear and Loathing's director, was a mentor to Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time's director. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood portrays an America at the point of a loss of innocence and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is set in the aftermath. You can throw The Wicker Man in between and maybe preface the group with Terry Southern movies like Candy, The Magic Christian and Easy Rider. Maybe Vanishing Point would fit in. I should programme a film festival.

Another theme could also be Las Vegas. You could show Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Showgirls and Twin Peaks: The Return. Too bad Kyle MacLachlan's not in Fear and Loathing or it could be a Kyle MacLachlan in Las Vegas festival. I've always thought it would be fun to pair Honeymoon in Vegas and Leaving Las Vegas for a Nick Cage/Las Vegas double feature.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas would work as the epilogue. It has Hunter S. Thompson's narration delivered by Johnny Depp ruminating on the fundamental change in American culture at the end of the '60s, represented by the Manson killings in Tarantino's movie and by the culture of Las Vegas in Gilliam's. When the spirit of transgression is deprived of the spirit of love and benevolence. You could add in Winstanley to show how similar the phenomenon was to England in the 1640s and 1650s. But perhaps no other culture was so burdened by postmodernism as America was. But maybe postmodernism is just another way of saying self awareness. The rage of Caliban seeing himself in the glass, to borrow a phrase from Oscar Wilde. Though in Fear and Loathing's case it's horror. Or, well, fear and loathing.

The Cat will Catch You with His Eyes

A magical cat comes to town and reveals all the hypocrites and envious tyrants in 1963's The Cassandra Cat. It's obviously a political allegory but it also succeeds in being a fairly charming children's film.

The film's protagonist is a meek elementary school teacher named Robert (Vlastimil Brodský) who's dominated by his cold blooded boss (Jiří Sovák) and lover, Julie (Jiřina Bohdalová). Robert's boss tells him to teach the children that individual perspective is irrelevant and that morality is black and white. He also wants Robert to teach the children about taxidermy in what seems to be a metaphor for the senseless preservation of tradition.

One day, Robert invites a charismatic old storyteller and castle caretaker named Oliva (Jan Werich) to the class. Oliva also appeared at the beginning of the film, speaking directly to the camera to preface the film with a "once upon a time" soliloquy. He proceeds to tell the class a story from his youth when he met a beautiful woman named Diana who carried a cat wearing sunglasses. He fell in love with Diana and when the cat's sunglasses were removed they revealed the true nature of everyone in town. People with love in their hearts turned red and liars and hypocrites turned purple or yellow. A commotion outside interrupts the story and everyone goes to see that a parade of performers has entered the town led by a truck bearing a beautiful woman (Emília Vášáryová) carrying a cat wearing sunglasses sitting beside an old man in a top hat who looks exactly like Oliva.

The woman turns out to indeed be Diana and Robert falls in love with her, the course of the film mirroring the story Oliva told.

The surrealistic and fantastic story is aided by pretty colour cinematography. I think I would've enjoyed it more without the political aspect because it introduces a logical contradiction. If truth is relative, then there would be no fundamental nature for the cat to reveal. In the end, the cat would not be much different from Robert's boss.

The Cassandra Cat is available on The Criterion Channel.

Does Anyone Know?

Spicy '90s cinema often seems so quaint now. I watched Atom Egoyan's 1994 film Exotica again, which is his most famous film, though it's by no means well known in the mainstream. Last time I watched it it was because I was so into his Chloe with Amanda Seyfried that I wanted to see the film that put him on the map and, as I recall, I found it nowhere near as satisfying. I still don't find it the kind of visceral, sexy fun that Chloe is but I found myself more compelled to puzzle out just what he thought he was getting at.

It doesn't feel like it's set in anything resembling real life, but none of Egoyan's films do, which is part of their charm. Exotica is the name of a strip club in the movie which I doubt much resembles any real life strip club. Egoyan has said he was interested in the "ritual" of strip clubs, the girl stripping and the man encouraged to look but not touch. The patrons of Exotica are all quiet men, solemnly sitting alone at their tables while naked or partially clothed women's bodies gyrate before them like animated sculptures. It's about as different as you can get from the noisy, party atmosphere you see in other movie strip clubs, like in Anora or even Flashdance. I don't know, maybe Canadian strip clubs are different.

Exotica is set in Toronto. Bruce Greenwood plays Francis whose fixation on a dancer named Christina (Mia Kirshner) seems to go beyond sexual. Actually, by the end of the movie, you may wonder if there's anything sexual about him at all. It's only by default that one figures there must be. Elias Koteas plays Eric, a DJ at the club who provides a ruminating, running commentary. Christina's shtick is to wear schoolgirl uniforms complementing her small frame and youthful looks. "What is it about schoolgirls?" Eric asks the audience and starts talking about innocence and purity.

In a scene with a character played by Sarah Polley, Francis explains that the difference between adults and children like herself is that adults have "baggage" which contributes to certain base level of tension in any extended interaction between two adults. Perhaps this is why he prefers the company of girls to women, or women he can convince himself are girls.

Of all the characters, Christina remains the most enigmatic by the end of the film, which is fairly normal for movies about a man obsessed with a woman or girl, though just about the opposite of what I found so interesting about Chloe. It's the enigma itself the feeds the flame of obsession, the give and take between the fantasy the man projects on the woman and the reality of her personality and motives. Sometimes the two meet, sometimes there's the shock of discord when any difference is discovered. Sometimes it's this give and take that gives a relationship piquancy. In this case, Christina is quite eager to be the fantasy for Francis, temporarily, night after night, but it's most definitely not sexual. Or isn't it? The movie's choice to avoid suggesting it in any way only makes me wonder at it any more. It is a strip club, after all. Crucially, we learn absolutely nothing about Francis' wife. We don't even know if they're separated or divorced.

The information we have about Francis is so tightly controlled as Egoyan spools out the mystery. Not unlike the stripper on whom the patrons project their fantasies, we are compelled to project our own ideas on Francis. Surely we're not crazy for assuming he's horny if he's paying a stripper to give him a private dance. What I'm not sure about is if Egoyan is ultimately saying there's nothing sexual about Francis' motives or if his problem is a vast iceberg of unexamined sexuality. Maybe this movie just needed to be longer.

Anyway, Christina's strip tease to Leonard Cohen is still cool. Though not especially sexy.

Exotica is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Kill that Keeps On Killing

Well, it was nice to get a little decent Marvel content in Punisher: One Last Kill last night, even if it did feel more like John Wick content. Perhaps the key was dialling the ambition way down from where it was on Daredevil and focusing on telling a simple vignette. It helps that Jon Bernthal seems very passionate about the character, enough that he co-wrote the teleplay with Reinaldo Marcus Green, who directed. Green is the director of the Academy Award nominated film, King Richard, which I haven't seen, but One Last Kill does come across as more competently directed and less sloppily edited than a lot of other recent Marvel TV content. And, thank Christ, the fight choreography is good.

A lot of the reviews are talking about how simple the 44 minute special's story is; some are saying it to the show's credit, some to the show's detriment. I liked it. Yes, Frank obsessing over the death of his family is well trodden territory, but it's worth remembering that the thing that defines Frank Castle is that the pain never dulls. I appreciate the perspective from some commentators that it was a mistake to have Frank actually be able to identify and kill the people who killed his family. It is a better idea for him never to get that closure so that the target of his revenge just becomes all murderers. But Bernthal sells the angst and intensity pretty well.

In one of my Daredevil: Born Again reviews, I pointed out how Disney seems loath to portray children in emotional distress nowadays. Despite being very stridently labelled as TV-MA, children play a prominent role in One Last Kill and it's fascinating. I wonder if the people at Marvel were using the TV-MA label with a big wink. After all, it is just ultra-violence, and immature minds never took that as inspiration to do anything, right? And they shouldn't . . . right?

You do kind of see kids in distress in this story. It might be that the limits of the distress shown are more to do with the abilities of these child actors. Good child actors are extremely rare and when one is found they tend to show up in everything, which was why Dakota Fanning was in practically everything during her childhood. So maybe these kids just lacked the chops to show that emotional depth.

But this lack of emotional depth makes it slightly eerie how children are positioned as moral arbiters in this story. It's Frank's vision of his deceased daughter calmly and sternly enticing him away that prevents him from killing himself and it's the little girl hugging him at the end of the episode that signals to Frank, and the audience, that he's done the right thing.

This Punisher story is one of the most reminiscent of Death Wish that I've seen. His enemies are thugs composed of pure malevolence. Perhaps we can thank the fact that the director is a black man that these fodder for Frank's bullets, blades, and ballpoint pen aren't exclusively white guys. But, with respent to the dog that's killed and the shopkeeper that's brutalised, it's worth remembering how the murder and abuse of innocents has been used in political propaganda in the past. It was a key aspect of Battleship Potemkin, perhaps the most famous propaganda film of all time, particularly in the famous staircase shot, which was referenced in season two of Andor. As I said when I was discussing the Punisher a couple weeks ago, I can enjoy the catharsis of Punisher style violence in fiction but I can recognise the difference between reality and fiction. After the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondence Dinner, I wonder if many people lack the critical thinking skills to do so. In theory, that's why we have maturity ratings.

Punisher: One Last Kill is available on Disney+.