Ally Size

About a week ago, back in the US, I decided to get back into watching Ally McBeal, picking up where I left off in the fourth season, only to find that on American Disney+/Hulu, the 4:3 footage has been given a stretch effect to fit a 16:9 screen, whether you want it or not. I hate it when they crop old 4:3 shows but the stretch effect is even worse, making everyone look like they're in a funhouse mirror. I remember the big outcry when it was found that The Simpsons was cropped on Disney+ and Disney eventually capitulated by introducing an option to view the show in original format or cropped. Why couldn't they have just done that for everything?

I could've used my VPN but I travelled all the way back to Japan instead where the show is in its proper format on Disney+. I guess Disney has more respect for the Japanese audience.

I watched "Obstacle Course", an episode from April 16, 2001, with one of the most, let's say, surprising verdicts for a court case on this lawyer comedy series. I'm going to go into spoilers for this one because I need you to appreciate how fucked up it is.

In this episode, Ally and her boyfriend, Larry, played by Robert Downey Jr., end up on opposite sides of a case in which a woman is suing a guy because they had an online romance and he didn't disclose that he's a dwarf. Over the course of trial testimony, we learn that their discussions had more than once revolved around the superficiality of dating based on appearance. Despite this, the woman is so appalled by the idea that she was duped into having affection for a dwarf that she feels she deserves financial compensation.

Ally represents the dwarf and Larry represents the woman and I thought, finally, an episode where we see Ally can be a good lawyer and even beat her brilliant boyfriend, even if the case is low hanging fruit. I mean, who would lose this case?

Ally McBeal, that's who. Yeah, and the show presents it like it's a totally reasonable outcome. The dwarf has to pay the woman 70,000 dollars because he didn't tell her he was a dwarf before they met in person. It's construed as fraud. Has the culture really changed that much since 2001? I don't think so, I think this would've seemed absurd back then.

This is one of the few episodes that wasn't written solely by David E. Kelley. It was co-written by Kayla Alpert who went on to write episodes of Emily in Paris and Wednesday. My theory is that they started out with a discussion about online relationships in which one person does not disclose that they're transgender. And one of them presented the hypothetical that one partner is a dwarf. If it should be fraud for one person not to disclose that they're transgender, certainly it would be fraud not to disclose that one has some other condition that could potentially impact physical lovemaking. I suspect someone stuck to their guns beyond all reason and insisted that, yes, in the case of a dwarf it would also be fraud.

The money awarded to the plaintiff is derived from the fact that she had quit her job and moved to another state in order to be with the man before she found out that she disliked his body. Maybe the stupidity of this idea is clearer in 2026. Who would build a relationship with someone without ever wanting to see what they looked like? Who would completely uproot their lives? Whether we're talking about a dwarf or a transperson or a talking starfish, it should've been child's play for Ally to point out that this woman went out of her way not to see her partner's physical appearance. She threw the dice and she has no grounds to complain about it now. Not to mention the fact that she's a shallow bloody hypocrite.

You'll notice this clip is neither stretched nor cropped but it's 16:9. So it must have been originally shot, like many shows of the time, in 16:3 and then cropped for 4:3 televisions which were still standard. Now I don't understand Disney at either end of the Pacific.

Tokyo in June

Here's a picture from Shibuya yesterday. I'm not in the picture. I see a lot of tourists walking around with selfie sticks. I saw one girl yesterday standing in a crosswalk, smiling serenely into hers. I continue to find it odd that there's evidently an audience for this. It seems kind of kimoi to me, hokey.

So far it's not been nearly as hot as I was expecting it to be, which is good because I no longer have a straw hat and am wearing my brown felt hat.

My brief visits to Tokyo this year have felt very different from my visit just a few years ago. I can see why the locals are so disturbed by the sudden influx of a foreign population but there are points where even people with no ability to speak Japanese are integrating. I took the train from Narita airport into Tokyo where I'd booked a room in Shibuya. I was wandering around on foot, trying to locate a particular neighbourhood. I went into a convenience store and asked a dark skinned young woman of possibly Indian or Indonesian heritage where it was. She didn't understand my Japanese and asked me to speak English. There was a young man, another possible Indian or Indonesian or Nepalese, behind the counter at another convenience store who tried to conceal from me his inability to speak Japanese. It seems this growing service class may be similar to the way Mexicans and Mexican Americans have been siphoned into such work in the US. Still, Japan compares well to my recent memories of the US where a massive visible population of homeless people is in stark contrast to a new population of extremely wealthy people. I have seen exactly one homeless person in my wanderings in Tokyo so far this week.

And here's a giant blowfish.

Doctor Never

I'm back in Japan for a week to handle some unfinished business (interpret that as ominous if you like). So it was here in Shibuya that I read Doctor Who was cancelled. Again. It's 1989 all over again. Well, there are some key differences.

The decline in viewership over the 1980s is generally seen as due to weaker scripts and less popular Doctors. Or it was until fan appreciation for the '80s Doctors was bolstered by nostalgia and audio plays. It's not even cool to say Colin Baker was bad anymore.

The '80s decline was also due to competition from the much better special effects on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Certainly, it wasn't a lack of effects budget that made people dislike the latest era of Doctor Who.

One similarity I would point to is that the '80s Doctors were forever overshadowed by how great the Tom Baker era was. The last couple Doctors haven't been able to reach the heights of quality and ratings achieved in the first Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat eras. Studios don't generally like to hear that the wildly successful thing will henceforth get by on being mildly successful. So they brought back Russell T Davies and they threw more and more money at it. It really is incredible how much that backfired. Russell T Davies now has the distinction of being the man who resurrected Doctor Who and the man who killed it again. I wonder what it'd have been like if Tom Baker came back in 1989 and sucked.

Davies' statement about the cancellation is kind of bizarre:

And so GOODBYE from me to Doctor Who but HELLO to a big new future for the show, as the BBC announces it’s putting the show out to tender. As a result, there won’t be a Christmas Special - we only cooked that up to guarantee a future when no one knew what would happen, but now we do know, there’s no need for it. You’ll have to wait a bit longer for new Doctor Who… but you’ll be waiting for MORE Doctor Who than a one-off. So it’s worth it! For the record: there was no script, I never wrote it, and no actor was ever approached to play the next Doctor. You may disagree; fine, sit in that chair and wait to be proved right. You’ll wait a lonnng time 🪑 Now I’m as excited as anyone to see what comes next! Will they keep the theme tune? Will they lose the blue box? Will they bring back the Drahvin?! It’s all up for grabs, which is so Doctor Who, exciting and unpredictable and new! Here comes the future, vworp vworp

I mean, he directly says that he lied to everyone for months and then mocks anyone for disbelieving him now. Okay, Mystery Master, have it your way.

Russell T Davies has written some great episodes of Doctor Who. Some of the Ncuti Gatwa episodes were great, though I think Davies' last couple seasons will, for a very long time now, be remembered for its lowest points, like the "Space Babies" episode, as everyone now digests it as a period of indisputable decline. Such extravagantly bad moments, along with his bloody minded obsession with being even more woke than Chibnall, seem like symptoms of a massive, if well earned, ego. He got the idea that he could make anything he wanted work on Doctor Who. Turns out some things are impossible for even him.

So we may never find out why Billie Piper's big glowing face was grinning at us like the Cheshire Cat in the final shot of the now final episode. I think more than a few people, more than would care to admit it, predict the answer to the mystery would've been, "Oh, more of this bullshit."

So now what? If Doctor Who returns, it's going to be on a much smaller budget unless the BBC finds a replacement for Bad Wolf and Disney that seems like a surer bet, and I can't imagine what studio that would be. Paramount? And then how do you save face while putting out a budget cut Doctor Who? That's the tragedy of the increased production values that began in the Chibnall era. It became too big to fail. Now it's checkmated itself.

Or they could treat it like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and do an entirely new reboot every three years. God I hope not. I suspect they won't; I suspect we won't be seeing new Doctor Who for at least fifteen years, if ever. Everyone's just too tired and the imagination isn't there anymore.

A Glut of Returners

A lackadaisical young man tends a cemetery where zombies routinely rise in 1994's Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore). Rupert Everett stars in this bizarre Italian film that begins like a pleasantly sleazy giallo and becomes something much weirder, much more impressively surreal.

Francesco (Everett) tends the cemetery accompanied only by a big mute named Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro). Francesco's a crack shot and is accustomed to lazily shooting the occasional wandering zombie in the brain without giving it much thought.

One day, he falls for a beautiful young widow he sees attending a funeral. She's played by the beautiful Anna Falchi, of whom we see quite a lot in this film, by which I mean both that she's naked a lot and she plays multiple roles. Indeed, she seems to take on a supernatural life as the embodiment of Francesco's conception of a desirable woman.

Gnaghi has a love interest, too, the disembodied head of the mayor's daughter. Like a lot of points in the film, it feels like the screenwriter intentionally swerved at the last minute before making a coherent political statement.

Eventually, as Francesco becomes thoroughly desensitised to killing, the world around him becomes increasingly inexplicable. Martin Scorsese named it one of the best Italian movies of the '90s and I can see why. It just gets better and better.

Cemetery Man is available on Shudder.

The Magnetism of Magnani

The Spanish Viceroy in 18th century, colonial Peru orders a splendid vehicle from Europe and is surprised to also receive a commedia dell'arte troupe in 1952's The Golden Coach. This Jean Renoir film is a fascinating and pretty tale of class and romantic conflict starring Anna Magnani. It was a box office failure, which I imagine was due to Magnani's failure to be as charismatic as her character is meant to be--the whole plot hinges on everyone falling in love with her. But there's a lot to recommend about the movie and Magnani's performance.

The set design, cinematography, and costumes are beautiful. The enormous cast of extras fill the screen with so much life and create such a vivid sense of this fantasy version of colonial Peru. The troupe set up their theatre and the first bit of interesting class conflict comes from the reluctance of anyone attending the performance to pay for seeing it. The Italian troupe can't understand this basic failure of protocol but there's a way of doing things in this strange land. It's not until the bullfighter, Ramon (Riccardo Rioli), shows his approval that any money starts coming in but not, of course, from Ramon. Ramon gives a necklace to the troupe's resident Columbina named Camilla (Anna Magnani). A row ensues when Felipe (Paul Campbell), also part of the troupe, brawls with Camilla in a fit of jealousy. And, of course, the Viceroy (Duncan Lamont) is also in love with Camilla.

Magnani was 44 at the time and it never seems plausible that so many men would be in love with her. Granted, I've never been a fan of Anna Magnani, nor did I ever think she was particularly beautiful, even in Rome, Open City. But I can't deny she gives a powerful performance. I can't see why she would attract all these men but I felt a vicarious pleasure when she laughed at the Viceroy and the other dignitaries at the end of the movie's best scene. In this scene, after he's promised to give the golden coach to Camilla, the Viceroy also finds he must promise it to the governing council, who pledge a hefty donation for the use of it. Meanwhile, the Viceroy must attempt to conceal the presence of another mistress in the house whom Camilla has already spotted. Magnani's good when she's kind of vicious. She'd be nice to have on your side in a fight but I can't imagine looking at her and wanting to woo her.

The Golden Coach is available on The Criterion Channel.

Obsession Obsession

I'm really pleased to see Obsession has generated so much discussion. It's nice that a popular movie is so intellectually stimulating. I wanted to talk a bit about it to-day and go into spoiler territory to do so, so if you want to see it and haven't yet, I'd recommend stopping here, unless you just don't care.

Yesterday, Kat Rosenfield wrote about the discourse surrounding the film in an article for The Free Press. Like a lot of people, she uses the film to discuss the nature of love. I don't actually think Obsession is about love. I don't call it love when a girl tricks a guy into eating his dead cat. You could argue it's a film about mental illness. But some would say love is a kind of mental illness.

My idea of love has evolved over time. I think there is truth in the old expression, "Love is letting go." I also don't think of love as selfish. Now, you could say that Nikki is selfless in how she degrades and hurts herself but I see self harm, when it isn't intrinsically related to any solution for a problem in a relationship, as an evasion. Instead of discussing her lie about her father's illness, Nikki's reaction is cause a scene, thereby shutting down discussion. Humiliating herself, as she does repeatedly throughout the film, functions as a form of penance. Penance unrelated to the issue isn't so different, to my mind, from buying absolution, like purchasing indulgences. Of course, Nikki can't address the issues underlying her relationship with Bear because the relationship isn't founded on anything real, only the arbitrary magical forces behind the wish.

Bear's wording is crucial, as it always is in good magic wish stories. He wishes Nikki would "love him more than anyone else in the world." One could interpret this as meaning that there must have been someone for whom Nikki felt slightly less intensely. That, in order for the wish to clear that bar, it had to make her feelings especially intense. It may not be the magic object's fault that Nikki chooses to react to her feelings in this way. She doesn't seem like someone with this kind of personality before the wish takes effect, though we learn very little about her, and there are a few hints that there may be turbulent aspects to her personality.

Of course, we do know that she isn't the real Nikki. The film makes it explicitly clear that the wish device basically traps Nikki's true personality in a non-corporeal realm while some kind of demon or spirit takes possession of her body. From this standpoint, Bear could've rightly argued that the object didn't actually fulfill his wish. He wanted Nikki to love him, not some random demon. But that's a fair idea for a story. How often have you bought something that didn't function as advertised? It's a sensible idea. Though, as I said in my initial review, I found the film was more interesting before it settled on a clear explanation of what had happened.

YouTuber Deep Focus Lens likened Bear to Scottie in Vertigo, which I don't really agree with. Deep Focus Lens herself makes the point that Bear really can't be blamed, at least initially, for what happens to Nikki. He makes the wish without any real expectation that it will actually take effect and, when it does, he naturally doesn't really believe it has. There's no flash of sparkling light, no thunder crack. Nikki just comes back to his car and invites him inside. Scottie in Vertigo does compel Judy to dress as Madeleine, though it's crucial that Judy does agree to do this, albeit reluctantly. Both her reluctance and eventual complicity are derived from her sense of guilt over participation in a crime. They are her penance as well as (possibly) manifestations of affection for Scottie. When Scottie realises that Judy is the same woman he met as Madeleine, he rejects her dramatically, dragging her up to the bell tower to get a confession out of her. Bear, meanwhile, when he realises Nikki is not Nikki, doesn't have the moral fortitude to let her go, which, to be fair, would be no small feat, particularly since what happened should, in a rational world, be impossible, and therefore difficult to incorporate into any rational plan of action.

My impression is that the Wish Willow device is actually malevolent, that it deliberately, not accidentally, twists Bear's wish into something horrific. The inhabiting spirit is under no obligation from the wish to feed him his cat, nor does loving him necessitate taping his door shut or following him around constantly. There's extravagant sadism in her behaviour, both in her treatment of Bear and her treatment of the girl she considers a rival for his affections. We don't learn a lot about Nikki before the wish takes effect but one of the few things we see to establish her character is that she gives money to a homeless man, though she takes the money from another character. This suggests she's generous in one sense but unwilling to pay the cost herself. This is different from how the inhabiting spirit behaves. Yet we do know that the real Nikki had the nickname "Freaky Nikki", and that she hated the nickname, though we never learn why she was given it or why she hated it.

I suspect the nature of the possession was to some extent inspired by Twin Peaks due to one line in the film, when Nikki, apparently regaining temporary control of her body, says, "I'm not me." This is Laura Dern's line from Twin Peaks and, just like in Obsession, it's unclear how much of her behaviour is hers or her doppelganger's, much as it was unclear how much of the behaviour exhibited by the subjects of Bob's possessions was reflective of their true personalities or Bob's. The ambiguity makes it more interesting, at least in my opinion. It's the very thing that makes a work of art, like Obsession, alive in discourse. The ambiguities of the story reflect the ambiguities of life itself, which intensifies the compulsion for discourse and analysis.

Sonnet 1995

A cup of teeth was found beneath the bed.
No other sign of dental health was seen.
But stencilled shadows say the woman's dead.
The story told with flick'ring light was clean.
At Picnic Rock, the stones absorb your app.
Your friendly hollow friend retreats to bytes.
A strange array of limbs is held in sap.
No summer storm, no cold of winter bites.
A rusty bus entombed intrepid boys.
The dusty attic staunched effusive girls.
The Tsar's enforcers march, resembling toys.
In heat, the withered psychic dollar curls.
Exhaustive searches find the bodies lost.
The fire and the land condone a cost.

Anthony Head

Anthony Head has died at the age of 72. That seems young nowadays but it's not as young as his Buffy the Vampire Slayer costars Nicholas Brendon and Michelle Trachtenberg, who were 54 and 39, respectively. But both Head and Brendon died this year and Trachtenberg last year. Head's cause of death was reported to be pneumonia. His wife died last December so I wonder if that was a factor.

Head played Rupert Giles, the elder advisor character to the cast of characters who were mostly teenagers at the series' inception. He was the high school librarian and, secretly, the "Watcher" of title character Buffy, someone appointed by a secret council to guide the young woman born with supernatural powers to fight vampires. He played the stereotype of the stuffy, tweed coated British scholar, but nuance and complexity came to the character via both Joss Whedon's iconoclastic writing and Head's performance. Giles became the trusted and comforting voice of authority, a culturally out of step comedic foil, and one with a violent dark side. Head knitted these contradictions together into an authentic character who was a fundamental component of the series' distinctive flavour. When he was absent for long stretches in the show's sixth and seventh seasons, the tone of the series became drastically different.

Head also made a notable guest appearance on Doctor Who in 2006 and was recently on Ted Lasso.

The Simple Art of Filmmaking

A cowardly young man resorts to a supernatural device instead of confessing to the girl of his dreams and the consequences are disastrous. 2026's Obsession certainly treads on well trodden ground but the performances and filmmaking, particularly in the first third of the film, make for some engrossing horror and comedy.

Obsession is the talk of the town, along with Backrooms, for soundly dominating the box office despite being made for a mere $750,000. Director Curry Barker's background is as a comedy YouTuber and there are many times, particularly in the last portion of the film, Obsession succeeds more as a comedy than a horror film. I was strongly reminded of Get Out, another horror movie from a director with a comedy background. Both Get Out and Obsession lead with a strong concept delivered with effective cinematic storytelling from a main character's point of view but kind of fall apart in the final act. I would say Obsession is slightly better, though.

Aside from Andy Richter in a tiny role, the cast is entirely unknowns. Barker lucked out with his two leads, Michael Johnston and Inde Navarrette, who both deliver good performances. Their performances are crucial because the meat of the story is studying their characters and trying to figure out their real motives.

Johnston plays Bear, a guy who's liked Navarrette's character, Nikki, for some time but hasn't had the guts to confess. Even when he plans it out and has a perfect opportunity, he still chickens out. So he makes a wish on a cheap novelty item he bought at a magic shop and suddenly Nikki is making excuses to come over to his house.

It would be difficult to guess how many love potion stories there are in the history of fiction. Millions, at least. It's been done on every fantasy or sci-fi show from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to multiple iterations of the Star Trek franchise. Barker says he was inspired by one of The Simpsons' "Tree House of Horror" episodes based on "The Monkey's Paw". I found myself thinking of Tristan and Isolde. The point of interest in Tristan and Isolde, particularly in Wagner's opera version, is in contemplating how much of what's happening to the two is the love potion or if the potion only liberated feelings they already had or if the feelings they had before they drank the potion are significant in how their affections manifest.

Obsession forces you to contemplate every subtle facial expression, every small, odd inflection as you wonder, first, is this really happening? Is this a gag? Is it a coincidence? The film's effectiveness diminishes as Barker provides definite answers. He could have kept it going for the whole movie, I think. He kind of channels Bergman. It goes to show how effective just two actors with dialogue can be.

The last two thirds of the film aren't bad. There are a lot of plot details that don't make sense, some things seem like they were thrown together a little to hastily but the jump scares are generally effective. The best parts in the last act are certainly the gags.

Obsession is now in theatres.

Project Hail Ryan and Mary Full of Grace

The old European dream of exploration is often tied to individuals who have failed to find professional or personal success in their home countries. In new, strange lands, perhaps they meet a person or people who are awed by them. This has given birth, over the centuries, to many of the standard narratives of adventure fiction, and we find it again in 2026's Project Hail Mary. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller direct the film from a screenplay by Drew Goddard, based on a book by Andy Weir. Weir also wrote The Martian, which was also adapted to film with a screenplay by Drew Goddard. But while The Martian's director, Ridley Scott, was interested in the "man versus nature" conflict, Lord and Miller take a grain of that to deliver a more traditional Hollywood adventure story about masculine self-fulfillment. It's a less ambitious film but it's enjoyable.

Ryan Gosling plays a character with a name oddly similar to his own, Ryland Grace, a junior high school science teacher who was once a molecular biologist. The story's set in a future in which a strange, alien, microscopic lifeform is devouring stars, including Earth's sun. Grace is drafted into a desperate programme to study the thing and is then pressed into an interstellar voyage to find a way to eradicate the threat. He wakes up after being kept in stasis to find the other two crewmembers have died and that he's alone. Fortunately, he encounters a cute, diminutive alien life form he dubs "Rocky" who's on a mission similar to Grace's. Rocky essentially becomes Grace's devoted servant as the two attempt to save the universe.

I found myself thinking primarily of Robinson Crusoe and Breaking Bad. Rocky is basically Friday, the quintessential manservant, only cuter, while Grace's story, like Walter White's, is of a man who distinguished himself in a scientific field only to be exiled to the public school system. But while Walter White's motivation becomes revenge on the whole world, Ryland Grace exhibits more, well, grace.

One of the strangest things to come out of the film's promotion is that the book's author, Andy Weir, did an interview with The Critical Drinker, who, among right wing YouTube wanks, is probably the biggest knucklehead. I haven't watched the interview myself, nor have I watched or read the numerous reactions to it but I find it intriguing that this happened for a film that seeks to recontextualise the kind of story that, in the past, was used to assuage a young man's sense of resentment and inferiority.

Nevertheless, I found myself thinking a little bit of Lars and the Real Girl, a movie in which Gosling plays an infantilised man who is cared for by a community of sagacious women. Gosling has said that he based his performance in Project Hail Mary on Charlie Chaplin and there is a lot of slapstick as he bumbles around the ship. The only prominent female character in the film is the director of the project who sends Grace off on his destiny, Eva, played by Sandra Huller, the lead from Tony Erdmann, another movie that subverts a male power fantasy, in that case the power of male comedy.

I guess what I'm saying is that Project Hail Mary kind of seems like a conceptual retreat and advance in the ongoing project of trying to deal with the male ego. Grace is still infantilised, he's no Captain Kirk, but this is a story that caters to a man's need for validation through achievement, or recognition of achievement. It seems to have worked, given its positive reviews and box office.

As usual, the film borrows a lot of its sound and visuals from 2001: A Space Odyssey but the starfields are notably bright, reminiscent of Star Wars, for the film's aim of appealing to a larger demographic. It's ironic that Lord and Miller were famously fired from a Star Wars movie. Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling is going to star in the next one, assuming the failure of The Mandalorian and Grogu doesn't cause it to be shelved for a tax refund.

There're a Million Spiders in the City

I finished watching Spider-Noir last night, which wasn't bad, but not at all a show I was inclined to binge. Not even when I finished the penultimate episode did I feel like muscling the rest of the way through, though maybe that's because I knew the last episode would be badly written.

I'm noticing a pattern on Amazon Prime shows. On Fallout, Rings of Power, and Spider-Noir, there was a showrunner who had a proven track record of mediocrity and then some writers in the middle episodes who'd actually written something truly successful. I suppose it must be the competing desires in the studio to have someone they could easily manipulate and yet also to have someone who could deliver a quality product.

In this case, the showrunner was Oren Uziel whose credits include being one of five or six screenwriters in a few somewhat successful movies and being sole writer on the infamously dull Cloverfield Paradox. It turns out that he's good friends with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the pair behind the Spider-Verse movies, which Spider-Noir is kind of a spin-off of (Lord and Miller also directed the recent sci-fi movie Project Hail Mary).

As I kind of expected, the first couple episodes of Spider-Noir feel like they were written by someone whose idea of noir primarily comes from Sin City and Who Framed Roger Rabbit and maybe Chinatown.

Nicolas Cage is excellent as Ben Reilly, a hard boiled private detective who also happens to be a superhero known as "The Spider", an alternate universe version of Spider-Man. At one point in the series, he talks about trying to become human again after the encounter that gave him superpowers. He does so by watching movies and imitating actors. Cage has some funny moments where he does impressions of famous noir actors, even doing a version of the book shop scene from The Big Sleep when Bogart wore glasses and did a funny voice. At other times, Cage's Ben Reilly speaks with a slow, stiff diction like he's forcing out the communication. It works terrifically well.

Brendan Gleeson is excellent as the gangster Silvermane despite some inconsistent writing on his character from episode to episode. The rest of the cast is good enough though Li Jun Li is disappointing as Cat Hardy. She's based on Black Cat, Felicia Hardy, from the comics, which is odd because in terms of personality, background, costume, and physical appearance, she bears absolutely no resemblance to her comic counterpart. They decided not to make Spider-Man Peter Parker so it's puzzling that they chose this route for Cat. She's described as a "femme fatale" but she's written as more of a tsundere in the first couple episodes.

However, the series really starts to hit its stride halfway through when Steve Lightfoot starts contributing. Apparently, part of the way through production, Amazon brought Lightfoot on as "co-showrunner". Lightfoot is best known as showrunner on the first two seasons of Punisher.

This development somewhat resembles the development of Daredevil: Born Again. Disney originally hired a purportedly weak showrunner for that one and then brought in Dario Scardapane, who'd been a writer on Punisher, to take over. I'm starting to wonder if the situation had been the reverse of the one on Spider-Noir, though. Maybe the original writers on Born Again had too much creative vision and Disney/Marvel brought in Scardapane because they knew he'd do whatever stupid thing they told him to do.

Spider-Noir is available on Amazon Prime in both colour and black and white versions. I mostly watched it in colour but watched one episode in black and white. I gather it was originally intended to be only in black and white though it was originally shot in colour. After the decision was made, partway through production, to make a colour version, there were extensive reshoots. This indecision means that both versions frequently look odd. The colour version has too many harsh keylights in some shots and the black and white version sometimes looks too diffuse. But the studios will tell you that sometimes their meddling is really helpful.

Doctor . . . Who?

At least people seem to be interested in Doctor Who enough for rumours to be spreading about the Christmas special, that it might be scrapped. The impression I have is of circling sharks smelling blood. Russell T Davies has announced that there will be an announcement.

This morning I was watching The Hand of Fear, the Fourth Doctor serial. It's amazing how effective it still is, being shot on video tape with ultra low budget special effects. Maybe the trouble with Davies' second era is just that he had too much freedom. I don't think so. A low budget probably does provide incentive for better scripts and performances but there are other ways to provide incentives. The threat of cancellation may be a good one.

The chemistry between Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen was certainly key. The chemistry between the actor who plays the Doctor and the actress who plays the companion was really the heart of the show, particularly in Tom Baker's era. The low budget also compels you to notice the natural quality of it. I don't know how much of it was actually improvised but the chemistry comes off as authentic enough that one suspects lines often were. Well, Baker did marry Lalla Ward. It wouldn't shock me to learn he and Louise Jameson had a tryst, either. I don't feel like Elisabeth Sladen hooked up with him but they are a lot of fun together. I don't think she was going with Jon Pertwee either.

On the other hand, Hand of Fear has a real threesome vibe.

The Latest of the Old

I recently got the eleventh and newest edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. It was released last year and has a number of new editors and significant changes. I've been reading through Volume A, The Middle Ages--thankfully, this latest edition continues to be split up into volumes instead of being all lumped into huge cinder blocks. Volume A is the first of six volumes. Volume B covers the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, C is the Restoration and the eighteenth century (sometimes referred to as "the long eighteenth century" in English history and literature), D is the Romantic Period, E is the Victorian, and F is the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Unsurprisingly, the newer you get, the less culturally relevant the material is. Don't expect CS Lewis, Roald Dahl, JK Rowling, or Alan Moore but you will find Patience Agbabi and Simon Armitage. You know, the absence of comics in the canon of English literature seems increasingly absurd.

Anyway, as I said, I've been reading the Middle Ages. Beowulf is, as always, included in its entirety and it's the Seamus Heaney translation (from Old English) once again. Among the new inclusions are writings from King Alfred and an eleventh century sermon from the Bishop Wulfstan of York which begins:

Beloved men, know the truth: this world is in haste and it approaches the end.

And so the longer things go in this world, the worse they get. It must necessarily be the case, therefore, on account of the people's sinfulness, that our predicament will badly deteriorate before the arrival of the Antichrist. It will indeed be awful and grim widely throughout the world.

Things haven't changed so much. He may as well be talking about global warming. Certainly the Danish invasion terrifying the people at the time was just as real.

The section of Romances has been expanded and yesterday I read The Lady of the Fountain, an Arthurian romance of unknown authorship, though it tells the same story as a French version by Cretien de Troyes (it's not known who wrote the story first or if both were inspired by a third party). In it, Owain, a knight of Arthur's court, goes on a quest to vanquish a fearsome foe, encountering numerous beautiful women on the way. When he's trapped behind the portcullis of the enemy's castle, a maiden named Luned takes a fancy to him and decides to help him, only for him later to ask her to help him woo the widow of the villainous Earl. Generally the story is about how Owain's flaw is that he recklessly courted too many maidens. There's plenty of action, too, including a pretty good fight between Owain and a number of Arthur's other knights. And there's a black lion.

Not Worth Dying For, Even When Death is Cheap

Joe Pantoliano attains a talent for resurrection thanks to a cat's internal organ in "Dig That Cat . . . He's Real Gone", the third episode of Tales from the Crypt from June 10, 1989. Richard Donner directed this zany, dreamlike episode based on a Haunt of Fear comic.

The story just assumes that cats actually have nine lives and there's a rational, anatomical explanation for it. I love how it just runs with that logic. Then it assumes people at a carnival will want to stand around for an hour waiting for Joey Pants to come back to life, and not even in situations that couldn't be easily faked by a halfway talented magician, like hanging or being buried alive without even a camera in the coffin.

Robert Wuhl plays the barker working with Pantoliano. A lot of the episode is him roaming around the tent with a series of fake moustaches, his face crammed in fish bowl, wide angle shots. I haven't read the particular comic but it really captures that feeling I had when reading Tales from the Crypt of exhausted writers turning to whatever random train of thought they could come up with for a grim. vaguely ironic tale. There is something insightful in the story's idea of how human preoccupation works. I can almost believe a crowd would be interested in the show and that the main characters would believe this would work as a viable attraction. There's an emotional logic at play.

Tales from the Crypt is available on Shudder.

Sonnet 1994

The dance routine equation smashed a ham.
With stomping feet, the dancers killed a pig.
A pound of pork was worth a slice of lamb.
Inversely tasty prices fell from big.
A queue of laughing clowns collect the cash.
But money changed to lightning moths at dawn.
The bugs were made of light and something rash.
The fission needed came from hostile brawn.
The priests collected torches round the block.
But bulbs are dear among benighted souls.
So some would use a giant woolen sock.
A talking sword would fill the thing with holes.
The cruise concludes across a silver sea.
The wasps exclude the only busy bee.

Regarding Young Henry

Usually when I watch The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles I tend to skip around to this or that episode that draws my interest for various reasons. Although there is a serial quality to the series with episodes frequently ending in ways that lead into the next, particularly in the case of the reedited version of the series that appeared in the late '90s, the stories all still feel very disconnected from one another, typically featuring Indy meeting a whole new cast of characters and forming new friendships that are rarely referenced in later episodes. But I decided to go back to the first episode, in its reedited form appropriately called My First Adventure. The reedited version of the series typically cuts together two previously one hour episodes to create a TV movie. In this case, My First Adventure takes part of the original 1992 premiere episode, "Curse of the Jackal", and fills out the run time with a story filmed in 1996. Unfortunately, this means that actor Corey Carrier, who plays Indy at ages 8 to 10, looks and sounds markedly older in the second half of the episode than he does in the first. I do think he seems more Harrison Ford-ish than Sean Patrick Flanery but who really wants to see Indiana Jones as a kid? That is maybe the eternal flaw of the show but I was watching the first half of My First Adventure trying to pinpoint the real reason it doesn't work.

Little Indy goes to Egypt with his parents and meets pre-war TE Lawrence (Joseph A. Bennett) taking part in the exploration of a pyramid in 1908. The fact that Indy met just about every famous person in the world in his youth also cuts into the show's sense of credibility though I guess I appreciate the fact that George Lucas wanted to make the show educational. Indy encounters Lawrence again during the war (played by Douglas Henshall) for a better episode featuring a young Catherine Zeta-Jones. Mostly I'd say My First Adventure doesn't work because Indy himself comes off so flat. He's an enthusiastic kid but little else.

The second half of the episode is a little more interesting. The abruptly older young Indy moves on to Morocco where his father (Lloyd Owen doing a Sean Connery impression) has been engaged to deliver a lecture to the Sultan. Indy befriends a palace slave and I liked how the script framed Indy as a relatively sheltered white kid having direct exposure to slavery for the first time. The slave, Omar, has of course been kept ignorant of the world and listens amazed as Indy describes snow and sea travel. But Indy shows his own ignorance when he continually presumes Omar is at liberty to think for himself or express his own desires when asked a question.

One thing's for sure, the massive budget on the show is always visible in the extensive location shoots and enormous local cast.

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?