Arthur, Shiny and Green

Arrow recently released a cool new box set of John Boorman's 1981 film Excalibur. I bought it last month but waited until I finished my recent repeat reading of Le Morte d'Arthur, the 15th century telling of the Arthurian legends by Sir Thomas Malory, upon which Excalibur is based. Among other things, pairing a reading of the book with the film allowed me to see what a good job Boorman and his co-writer, Rospo Pallenberg, did of condensing and streamlining the tale. Which is appropriate since Le Morte d'Arthur is itself Malory's condensing and streamlining of several disparate Arthurian stories from England and France. One thing one notices about the book is that it's somewhat repetitive, sometimes because Malory is including two stories that shared origins in an older, single story, but also because sometimes two similar stories are both worth including because they have slightly different perspectives on the same topic. The story of Tristram and Isolde, in which Sir Tristram loves the wife of a king he owes loyalty to, is similar to the story of Lancelot and Guenevere, but different enough that both can be included. But you can also see why Boorman omitted Tristram and Isolde and gave some elements of their plot to Lancelot and Guenevere. Boorman even uses the vorspiel from Wagner's opera about Tristan and Isolde for the love scene between Lancelot and Guenevere.

It's funny how differently the stories evolve. Arthur barely seems to care that Lancelot and Guenevere have been seeing each other in the book and it's the brothers of Sir Gawaine that seem to be the angriest about it, with Sir Gawaine being the primary force behind the war Arthur's faction enters into against Lancelot's after Lancelot accidentally slays some of Gawaine's unarmed brothers. This was a moment in the book I thought was actually very insightful about the nature of war. Initially, Gawaine wants no part of his brothers' efforts to expose the relationship between Lancelot and Guenevere, even after Lancelot kills one of Gawaine's brothers who attempts to confront him.

"Why say ye so?" said King Arthur; "forsooth ye have no cause to love Sir Launcelot, for this night last past he slew your brother, Sir Agravaine, a full good knight, and almost he had slain your other brother, Sir Mordred, and also there he slew thirteen noble knights; and also, Sir Gawaine, remember you he slew two sons of yours, Sir Florence and Sir Lovel." "My lord," said Sir Gawaine, "of all this I have knowledge, of whose deaths I repent me sore; but insomuch I gave them warning, and told my brethren and my sons aforehand what would fall in the end, insomuch they would not do by my counsel, I will not meddle me thereof, nor revenge me nothing of their deaths; for I told them it was no boot to strive with Sir Launcelot."

This establishes Gawaine as a man of incredible restraint and wisdom. Yet later, when Lancelot kills more of Gawaine's brethren, this time men that had no quarrel with Lancelot and were even among his best friends, Gawaine urges Arthur to make war. It's a little comical that Lancelot, in the fury of battle, just accidentally kills some of the best knights in the land, including Sir Gareth, whom Malory made into something of a Mary Sue by combining aspects of characters from other stories to create him. But it's also realistic that in war collateral damage often involves the killing of people that the assailant has no desire to kill, and then it depends on an interpretation by the opposite side to recognise the killing as done without malice. Since Gawaine is established as restrained and wise, it demonstrates how difficult it can be to see past the visceral emotion provoked by such a grievous accident.

The biggest change Boorman introduces is in the expansion of the character of Merlin. Merlin's prominence in Arthurian legend really increased in the 20th century, due especially to TH White's The Once and Future King and Disney's adaptation of it, The Sword in the Stone. Then Nicol Williamson delivers such a terrific performance in Excalibur that any viewer is bound to wish there were more of him in the movie, not less. I'd say it's primarily his performance that has inspired so many Merlin heavy adaptations since, including a recent, execrably bad conservative series, Rise of the Merlin, released this year by the Daily Wire on Amazon Prime.

Arrow, of course, delivers top notch image quality on the Excalibur blu-ray and presents the film in its original aspect ratio of 1:66:1, for the first time in any home video release, and I was surprised by what a difference it made. Boorman's compositions are precise and characters whose heads were partially cut off at the top of the frame now just touch the edge. I was marvelling at how expertly Boorman compels the viewer's focus, as in the early scene in which Arthur loses Kay's sword. In the foreground on the left is Sir Ector, then in the middleground on the right is Kay, and finally in the back, Arthur moves just to the left of centre to flip up a fur on the horse's saddle to reveal an empty scabbard, right in the middle of the screen. The enormity of Arthur's error is plain from this composition despite the young man's outward calm.

It's a lovely film, too, and Boorman's trick of using green lighting off screen is so odd and unique to the film that it's really charming. And, by gad, all that gleaming plate armour. It really is a shame modern adaptations are so set on portraying Arthur as a lightly armoured man of Roman occupied Britain, placing him in the period in which Arthur would have lived, even if those adaptations are in no other way remotely realistic. The man, whether he lived or not, is a legend, and that's the way to portray him.

Vision's View

An attempt is made once again to make us feel something by tapping the well worn veins of nostalgia and deconstruction in the first two episodes of Marvel's VisionQuest, which premiered on Disney+ a couple days ago. Showrunner Terry Matalas has established his bona fides after creating a successful third season of Star Trek: Picard that relies entirely on nostalgia, following from his universally panned second season which attempted to get by on original ideas. But his Wikipedia entry says he's best known for co-creating and showrunning the 2015 SyFy series 12 Monkeys, which is a dumbed down remake of Terry Gilliam's classic 1995 film. No-one seems to remember that show, though, because a star of that series, Todd Stashwick, was regarded as a surprisingly talented newcomer in the third season of Picard, and Stashwick turns up again in VisionQuest. He's good in it, too. Also delivering good performances are Paul Bettany, Ruaridh Mollica, and the ever reliable James Spader.

Bettany reprises his role as Vision, or creates the new role of the white Vision last seen at the end of WandaVision, though distinctions between the two characters are unclear at this point except for the white Vision's ability to safely drink whiskey. This occurs during a confrontation between him and Stashwick's character in which the new Vision attempts to assert that he's different from the original and demonstrates that he's able to predict everything Stashwick might do by speaking some of his lines with him in unison. This may be Matalas' nod to real world AI language models, and perhaps his criticism of them considering Vision isn't able to predict anything else Stashwick does. Stashwick plays the series' villain, the Paladin, and gets to wear that character's costume from the comics, but it's as unimpressively rendered as Daredevil's, sadly. There is a very clear difference between the quality of the MCU movie costumes and the TV series costumes.

Most of the story involves an Inside Out (or Herman's Head) style plot in which other Stark AIs manifest in Vision's mind as aspects of his programming or as advisors. Instead of employing the voice actors of FRIDAY and EDITH from the movies, Matalas casts two more of his stable of familiar faces, Orla Brady from Picard and Emily Hampshire from 12 Monkeys. James D'Arcy plays JARVIS. D'Arcy originated the role of the Stark family butler who inspired Bettany's AI. D'Arcy first played the character on the 2015 Agent Carter series before reprising it in 2019's Avengers: Endgame.

Ruaridh Mollica is not Ed Speleers, though he looks like him, and has basically the same part on VisionQuest that Speleers had on Star Trek: Picard. In Star Trek: Picard, the Captain Picard we see is in reality a synthetic recreation of the original Jean-Luc Picard and he discovers that the original Picard had a son who has grown into a petty thief. Picard must connect with the young man who, despite his roguish past, turns out to be crucial to the success of Picard's endeavours and his very survival. In VisionQuest, the Vision we see is in reality the synthetic recreation of the original Vision and he discovers that the original Vision had a son who has grown into a petty thief. Vision must connect with the young man who, despite his roguish past, turns out to be crucial to the success of Vision's endeavours and his very survival.

In reality, he is Tommy Maximoff, whose consciousness, as we saw in Agatha All Along (before Mollica was cast), was placed in the body of a teenager named Thomas Shepherd. Scenes between Mollica and his love interest, Lisa (Lauren Morais), are effective, though they're placed in the usual context of sainted criminal misfits pitted against the cartoonishly evil law enforcement institutions.

Matalas strikes for grand emotional beats on the show but they don't have much substance because the stakes are unclear with most of the drama being in abstract, conceptual space. The conversations between Ultron (Spader, reprising his role from the second Joss Whedon Avengers film) and Vision are pretty good, though, thanks to the acting chops of both involved. As is often the case with fantasy villains in genre movies of the past thirty years, they either die a villain or live long enough to see themselves become a hero, mostly because of the implicit assumption modern writers make that evident amorality is a sign of strength, both of psyche and physique.

VisionQuest is available on Disney+.

Who Deserves Hell?

A young woman kicks an old lady out of her home and earns a curse for it in 2009's Drag Me to Hell. This is the horror movie Sam Raimi made with the cache he'd acquired from making Spider-Man movies and it's surprisingly similar to this year's Send Help, the movie he made with the cache he'd gotten from making Doctor Strange 2. I liked Send Help but I think Drag Me to Hell is stronger, particularly considering how relevant the plot is at the moment when it seems I'm constantly seeing headlines about some elderly person being kicked out of the home they'd lived in for fifty years due to the unprecedentedly cold and cutthroat practices of landlords.

The great thing, though, is that Christine (Alison Lohman) is not a cutthroat. She works at a bank where she's in charge of loans. She's angling for a promotion to assistent manager, much like the character in Send Help, but Christine's a much more mild mannered character. She's told that to get the big job she's going to have to show she can make the tough decisions. After a guy who's barely worked at the bank a few days shows he's clearly the top candidate for the job, Christine holds her nose and denies a loan to the old lady. Unfortunately for her, this old lady can call down the wrath of a lamia and Christine finds herself tormented by ghosts and demons.

This movie is very reminiscent of the first two Evil Dead movies. Raimi even indulges in similar POV shots of the demoniac entity as it rushes in on Christine's location. And, like in Raimi's classic Evil Dead films, although rules are established for the ghosts and demons, there's the sense that they can break those rules whenever they feel like it.

I really liked this movie because, like Obsession this year, it feels like one that would spark debate after people leave the theatre, like the issues of guilt and responsibility would stay in the mind of the viewer long after the credits roll. It's also a lot of grim fun.

The Sting of Life

It's finally here, the first episode of the new Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episodes hosted by Mike Nelson, with Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy voicing the robots, Crow and Tom Servo. You can purchase the episode, which features a Creature from the Black Lagoon knock-off movie called Sting of Death, on the Rifftrax website. Is it better than Joel Hodgson's attempt to relaunch the series? No, but it's no worse, and it is nice to see it back in the hands of Mike Nelson, who truly was the primary creative force throughout the vast majority of the show's original run, and was the host when the series was finally cancelled, after over a decade, in 1999. I've repeatedly expressed my thoughts regarding the mistakes Hodgson made in reviving the series in 2017. You can read them here, as well as read my thoughts on Mike Nelson's strategy in funding his revival.

While I do think Mike is the most important creative voice on the series, I wish the writer's room had hewed closer to the original series' format. Rifftrax, which Mike launched as a successor series to MST3k decades ago, has managed to sustain itself financially all this time (unlike Hodgson's big budget catastrophe), and is typically written by the same people whom you hear delivering the jokes. Initially only Mike himself and then, eventually, joined by his final MST3k co-stars, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy. MST3k traditionally included virtually everyone who worked on the show which led to the show's reputation for having an extraordinarily broad range of topics for its jokes. In particular, I've suspected Mary Jo Pehl was more responsible for some of the show's better riffs than is generally acknowledged, because her videos with Bridget Jones on the Rifftrax site tend to be even funnier than the boys'.

The subject for riffing in this premiere episode of the new relaunch is Sting of Death, a 1966 movie which swaps out the Black Lagoon Creature for a jellyfish man whose costume is basically a wet suit draped with what, as one of the riffers observes, appear to be Mardi Gras beads. The monster, in Scooby Do fashion, turns out to be a creepy local in a mask. His primary targets are girls who rejected him and guys who talked down to him. The most absurd scene is when a girl is killed in a swimming pool at a party and somehow no-one notices the six foot tall weirdo in the wet suit. Mike wonders if he was hiding in the filter.

As I said, the humour lacks the wonderful breadth of knowledge of all things from sports to science to pop culture that it used to have. Even the nerdy stuff feels stale, as in a musical number Mike and the bots put together about tardigrades. When Star Trek: Discovery had an episode about tardigrades over a decade ago, it already felt like a stale internet meme. You can see Hodgon's wisdom in casting a new, younger cast. Yet you can't argue with the success of Rifftrax. It's not like MST3k was ever especially mainstream, maybe it just needs to settle into being more niche than it ever was before.

One Leg at a Time

Now that I'm in the Atlantic Ocean, I can look back on my days in New York City. I got some really good pants on Saturday. There's a mall by Central Park which, like a lot of malls in California, has adopted the generic name "The Shops." I guess it's like with movies sometimes these days, like the JJ Abrams Star Trek movie just called Star Trek. Studios must imagine the guy who'd heard about Star Trek all his life who then hears about this movie and figures it'd be his "one and done." After that, he doesn't need anymore Star Trek, he's seen all the important stuff. Similarly, a mall called just "The Shops" might cause people to think of that specific mall whenever someone says, "the shops." It's a scheme that falls apart when a bunch of malls adopt that name, though.

Anyway, I got some corduroy trousers at The Shops by Central Park, in the H&M. I'd been travelling with just four outfits but I wanted a warmer alternative to one of my thinner pairs of slacks. All the shops at The Shops looked really expensive and high end but I remembered getting some deals at H&M in Japan. Sure enough, these corduroys were just 34 dollars. They weren't even on sale.

I went to the register and found they had the same self checkout stations they do in Japan. I was just finishing when a woman in her late 50s angrily approached me and started telling me buttons to push. The receipt screen came up and the only options it had were for electronic receipts. "It can't print them?" I said.

"Of course not," she said, "it's a machine." I suppose H&M receipts were traditionally hand written. I said I didn't want a receipt then and she told me to press, "Done." She removed the security seal, which trousers in Japan don't have, and said, "See? It's easy," as though she'd helped me with a task I'd been struggling with.

I had a similar encounter at McDonalds yesterday. The place had two restrooms with coded locks, both gender free restrooms. I waited among a large crowd of people at the counter who seemed all to be complaining about mistakes in their orders. An employee paused in talking to one of them to ask what I wanted and I said I wanted the restroom code, which she told me was 2026.

I turned, but before I could try the restroom on the left, and an older woman intercepted me, saying, "Not that one," and she proceeded to show me how to input the code on the door on the right. Somehow she couldn't punch the numbers in correctly, maybe she had arthritis, but it seemed important to her to show me how to get into this specific restroom so she kept at it. She asked me for the code again and I repeated 2026. She finally got it open and explained the other restroom was for employees. It wasn't labelled as such and I'm inclined to think she was remembering the days when the restrooms were labelled "Women" and "Men".

It's a good thing I wear chelsea boots or a passerby might angrily try to tell me how to tie my shoes.

Leaving the Bronx

It's my last day in New York, and I spent the night in the Bronx, so last night I googled "Horror movies set in the Bronx" and 1968's Rosemary's Baby came up. It happens to be on Criterion this month and I haven't seen it in at least a decade so I went with that. Unfortunately, this hotel's wifi is easily the worst I've experienced in the US or Japan and seems to simply not work except a few, secret, select hours a day. Even now as I write this it's not working so I imagine I'll post this at a Starbucks or something later (it's a McDonalds, it turns out). Last night, the wifi shut off in the middle of Rosemary's Baby. At least I know how it ends.

Roman Polanski used to have such great economy as a storyteller. Particularly with Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion, two movies from the point of view of a woman. Both of them seem to immediately attach themselves to the viewer's mind at the natural pace of thought and perception. Knowing he experienced life under a Nazi regime as a child, it's easy to see how he could conjure a world in which everyone you trust could suddenly turn out to have sinister motives aimed at you at the most intimate levels. Given levels of anti-Semitism in the US to-day, I wonder how far away we are from something like what happened in Germany in the mid-20th century. I didn't mention October 7th, either a few days ago or the day of the original massacre, though I think about it often. I found it horrific specifically because it was an attack on a music festival, an event where people attending have such implicit faith and trust in civilised behaviour that they can abandon themselves to experiencing artistic expression. I suppose Jihadists must be offended by anyone experiencing ecstasy outside the confines of religion because it seems concerts and music festivals are often targeted.

Another difference between New York and the west coast I noticed, there are a lot more Jews in traditional attire here. In fact, I wasn't the only one wearing a fedora. There are young Jewish men all over the city wearing black fedoras and I was asked by them no less than 15 or so times, "Are you Jewish by any chance?" The Sleepy Hollow Hotel, where I stayed a couple nights, is a prominent kosher and Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish-friendly establishment and event place.

I wonder why the Jewish population in California isn't so visible. I'm reminded of the scene in Polanski's Chinatown when Jack Nicholson's character pretends to be trying to get his father checked into a nursing home and the attendant tells him the place doesn't accept Jews. I suppose the stereotype of Jews with money must make them natural boogiemen when socialist or communist interests are prominent, or at least, the ignorant version of those interests, as in the case of the National Socialist Party.

Hopefully I'll have wifi to-morrow. I'm leaving for England on the Queen Mary 2. I'd planned on going to Europe and was idly thinking, "I sure wish there were some other affordable option aside from air travel." I've been on a lot of long flights this year. So I asked Google's AI if there was any way to go by sea and it mentioned the Queen Mary 2. Of course, it was much too expensive for me but then I noticed the price went down a few days later. Apparently these things work in the opposite way of airline and hotel reservations, the price actually goes down the later you make them. I waited 'til the price got down to just over 500 dollars. They force you to pay for at least two people, though, so the actual price I paid was just over 1000 dollars for a week's journey. Since it includes food, if I calculate the cost of a flight plus hotels for a week, that's still either cheaper or, at the most, just a little more expensive and I figure it'll give me more time to get work done. It's kind of a nuisance switching hotels all the time, chasing the best prices, though in just the two weeks I've been in the twin city area I feel like I've gotten a much more concrete impression of the physical space of New York and New Jersey.

I have to pay 30 dollars a day for wifi on the ship, which seems to be one of the hidden fees. I may see if it's possible to get it for only part of the voyage.

Sonnet 2013

A stamping crown of rusty nails approves
In office stations made to clear the green
Beneath the street, a steep decline improves
Surpassing soot is nothing truly clean
Potato changes hands to greasy bolts
As pigeon ships descend above the spike
Their tough and grumpy captain slowly molts
Collected birds prepare a feathered strike
In Union Square, the squirrels prepare cake
They crush their acorns 'neath the bench's foot
It's more than dizzy ravens like to take
The surplus in the taxi cab is put
A truly greenish crown ennobles dames
The tired moved and made substantial gains

The Dream Demon in the S&M Club

Freddy Krueger returned in 1985's A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, a film once derided for its homoerotic subtext but is now lauded for it. Directed by Jack Sholder and written by David Chaskin with no involvement from franchise creator Wes Craven, aside from a few suggestions, the filmmaking feels cheaper and more TV sized but Robert Englund in the role of Freddy still makes an effectively threatening impression.

The homoerotic elements revolve around the film's main character, a guy named Jesse played by Mark Patton, who was a closeted homosexual at the time. Apparently he complained that the movie kind of outed him for years but has since kind of embraced it, even writing a sequel to the film from the point of view of his character. No-one ever suggests Jesse is gay in the film, the interpretation mainly comes from his physical interactions with a guy on his high school football team and with the coach, whom Jesse encounters at an S&M club.

Jesse's love interest, Lisa (Kim Myers), does feel more like a best friend than lover. She also looks identical to a young Meryl Streep, which is apparently why she was cast.

Freddy's scheme this time is to take possession of Jesse's body so he can massacre people in the real world. This, too, could be taken as an allegory for Jesse struggling with repressed urges.

It's more interesting to think of this movie as unintentionally homoerotic than as intentionally so. My own opinion is that the movie was probably intentionally homophobic. When Chaskin says in interviews that he wanted to address the homophobia he was perceiving in young men, I suspect the thinking was more like, "Guys are creeped out by gay shit, this will make the movie creepier." But the film does function well as a story about someone who can never face his own subconscious so the film's unhappy ending works better on a thematic level--because the movie ends with Jesse not acknowledging his own homosexuality. The consequences are brutal but, hey, it's a horror movie.

In the Hollow

If you've been following my instagram, you'll know I've been in Sleepy Hollow lately. Yes, it's a real town, exactly where Washington Irving described it as being in his 1820 story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", near Tarrytown, or Tarry Town, as he wrote it. But it only took the name "Sleepy Hollow" in 1996. According to Wikipedia, it was called "Slapershaven" by the 17th century Dutch settlers, meaning "Sleepers' Harbour". Irving wrote the story under a pseudonym he often used to write about the old Dutch communities in New England, Dietrich Knickerbocker. "Rip Van Winkle" is also a story from Knickerbocker. Incidentally, the undergarment supposedly gets its name from Irving's pseudonym.

You can find souvenirs and buildings and institutions with the name of Sleepy Hollow, or references to it, all throughout Tarrytown, and it's no surprise since, prior to 1996, many areas in the vicinity may have justifiably considered itself to be part of the historical village. For my first two nights in the area, I stayed at the Sleepy Hollow Hotel, actually pretty far south of Sleepy Hollow.

Yeah, the Halloween decor was surprisingly lacklustre but I couldn't complain. I'd gotten my room for 150 dollars a night, and it was a really nice room, especially after I'd been staying in a hostel in New Jersey for a week.

Don't get me wrong, it was a nice hostel where I met a lot of nice people, many of them New Yorkers rather than travellers, refugees of the outrageous rent prices oppressing the nation. I ended up paying just over 200 dollars for five days, cheap for the New York area, and close to the same price I was paying my mother to stay at her place in San Diego. One of the people at the hostel told me it was illegal for New Yorkers to stay in the cheaper hostels and hotels located within the city limits, lest it interfere with the city's lucrative tourist trade.

After the initial two days, rates at the Sleepy Hollow Hotel skyrocketed, which seemed only natural given October must certainly be their busiest season, and on the day I checked out the lobby was packed with tourists though it had been fairly empty on the day I'd checked in. I moved to an Extended Stay Hotel about fifty minutes walk away from the Sleepy Hollow Hotel in Elmsford and a 1.5 hour walk from Sleepy Hollow itself.

It's beautiful country and many trees have already turned yellow and red. Broadway, a street running through Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, has Sleepy Hollow themed shops beginning a mile or so south of the Sleepy Hollow sign. There were also many charming local decorations, including a series of scarecrows made by local kids.

I spoke to the proprietress of a cool shop on Broadway and Wildey St called The Legend Shop. The shop sold Halloween decorations and Sleepy Hollow souvenirs as well as vintage records. The soundtrack to the Tim Burton movie was playing when I stopped by. She recommended I visit the cemetery later in the day and also said there was a place that had the costumes from the Burton movie.

Across the street from her shop is a beautiful old library where I stopped in to see what Washington Irving books they had. They had plenty of books called The Legend of Sleepy Hollow but only one tattered paperback copy of The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon. But they did have this beautiful door:

Beeker Street is the main drag of Sleepy Hollow and I was surprised by the profusion of Mexican restaurants. There was one with a Coco theme, based on the Disney movie, which is based on Dia de Los Muertos, a Catholic holiday that shares some DNA with Halloween.

I ended up buying some souvenirs near the Philipsburg Manor; just a scarf, some tea, and a book for my nephew. If you'd like to see more of my photos of Sleepy Hollow, check out my instagram.

Bargain Velvet

The immortal damned show off all their pores in the butt ugly cinematography of 2026's Vampires of the Velvet Lounge. A cast of over fifty year-old guys who used to be in bigger movies and over forty year-old women who used to be in bigger movies help serve up this pastiche of thirty year-old goth movies like Underworld and Repo: The Genetic Opera with a heavy, awkward dose of Sin City.

In one of the movie's awkwardly juxtaposed plots, Dichen Lachman plays Cora, a vampire hunter whose narration she speaks in low gravelly tones, something she clearly has no practice doing because her voice constantly cracks up and down the audible register. She occasionally speaks world-weary, badass lines directly from Sin City. Her assistant, Alex, is played by Rosa Salazar, whom I didn't realise was the girl from Alita: Battle Angel because she doesn't have the huge cgi eyes in this one. Also because she's somehow 41 already. She spends almost the entire movie wearing just a bulky, sparkly t-shirt and enormous black panties, showing this film's attempt to make everything as ugly as possible extends beyond the hair, makeup, and cinematography to include costume design as well.

Mena Suvari, best known as the naked blonde with rose petals from American Beauty, plays the lead, none other than Elizabeth Bathory, who's a vampire in this. It may have been a creative choice to make the woman famously obsessed with youth be the most visibly aged but the makeup and cinematography might have shown her a little more courtesy.

The youngest member of the cast is 32 year old India Eisley who is kind of entertaining and pretty as a vampire afflicted by suicidal ennui but the cinematography even makes her skin look like the surface of the moon.

There's also one guy under 50, 47 year-old Tyrese Gibson who plays one of a trio of guys who used to do higher profile films, the other two being Stephen Dorff and Lochlyn Munro. They're introduced in the most oddly artificial scene in the movie, in a conference room that clearly looks like it was digitally inserted behind them. In fact, I'm pretty sure the three of them were not in the same room for the scene, though we do see them together at a club later on. Tom Berenger and Mark Boone Junior also have small, pointless roles.

The vampires are running an online dating scam in which they lure victims to an absinthe bar. Elizabeth makes a couple of comments about AI to demonstrate this film is bringing this old b movie genre into the 2020s, which would've been nice if the level of insight made me feel like writer/director Adam Sherman had ever spent more than three seconds contemplating the topic.

Oh, yeah, and the effects suck. Its copious computer effects look like a SyFy original movie from 2003.

Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint has died at the age of 102. I had no idea she'd been around for over a century. It's nice to see she wasn't kicked out of her home in Los Angeles before she died. Unlike some actresses of her age, maybe she still had a good income because her last major film role was in 2014's Winter's Tale and she played Martha Kent in Superman Returns in 2005. But of course, she's best known for being in two of the greatest movies of all time, North by Northwest and On the Waterfront.

I'll admit, I'm not a big Eva Marie Saint fan. I love both of those movies, particularly North by Northwest, but comparing her performances in the two films really highlights how On the Waterfront's director, Elia Kazan, deserved his reputation for getting great performances out of actors. Plus, she was partnered with Marlon Brando in that movie, and I think his performance was so startlingly natural it likely provoked natural responses from her. It's no wonder she won an Oscar for On the Waterfront. So it's puzzling that she's so rigid in North by Northwest. It may have been due to that film's director, Alfred Hitchcock's, infamous coldness with his actors, and her performance isn't so different from Kim Novak's in Vertigo the year previous. But as with Novak, the impression of a repressed and emotionally unavailable woman kind of works when analysing the film.

Busy Space Nine

I'm still working my way through a rewatch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and recently I got to the late third season two parter, "Improbable Cause"/"The Die Is Cast", which aired in April, 1995. This is one I used to rewatch a lot when I was in high school. When we were studying Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in one English class, I told the teacher that this set of episodes referenced the play, and it does, at the beginning, when Bashir and Garek are talking about it over lunch. She let me show that scene, but then I told her the whole episode contained references to the play, so she showed the whole first of the two episodes to the class. I tend to cringe looking back on that because the rest of the two parter really has very little to do with Julius Caesar, apart from a quote of the famous "fault is not in our stars" line at the very end of part two. But, when I think about it, she didn't have to listen to one of her students and play a whole episode of Star Trek she'd never seen before. She probably just saw a chance to grade papers or something while the show babysat the class. That's how in classes of all manner of subjects we so often ended up watching Back to the Future.

This is the two part episode where Garek teams up with Odo and they encounter Garek's former boss, Enabran Tain. This two parter kind of ruins Garek for the rest of the series because, before this, although we had a relatively good idea that he'd worked for Cardassian intelligence at some point in his past, he was still an enigma, and that added something to every scene he was in. It seemed like there was a lot less reason for him to turn up after this. But I still like his chemistry with Odo, especially since this episode is mainly Odo being the hardass instead of the emotional puddle, I mean figuratively.

As a teenager, my friends and I liked the big space battle, and used to compare it to the high water mark at that time, the space battle in Return of the Jedi. Of course, there have been space battles in movies since that have at least exceeded those in number of ships a thousand fold, a thousand times over. CGI got good at rendering spaceships a lot earlier than it managed to perfect anything else. The Return of the Jedi battle sequence, with its remarkable practical effects, still looks great, though, but this episode's looks stiff and slow. It still works as a story point, at least, and it effectively establishes how dangerous the Dominion is when they're able to fend off the combined Cardassian and Romulan fleets.

Travel Too Cheap

Rutger Hauer terrorises a young man through various improbable and cruel ways in 1986's The Hitcher. This movie may have been supernatural on accident, or it may have been on purpose, I'm not sure, but I certainly like it.

Jim (C. Thomas Howell) has taken a job driving a car from Chicago to San Diego, not unlike Kowalski in Vanishing Point was delivering a car to San Francisco. But instead of becoming a symbol for doomed freedom, Jim becomes the victim of a man called John Ryder, played by an imperturbable, perpetually amused Rutger Hauer. Jim picks up John as a hitchhiker. When John tries to kill Jim, Jim outsmarts him and manages to drive off. Unfortunately, John somehow has the means to follow and torment Jim wherever he goes. Cars and helicopters are destroyed in fiery explosions, John somehow wipes out entire gas stations and police stations.

When Jim stumbles into a diner with only one waitress in attendance, the only evidence Jim gets that John has caught up to him is a severed human finger in his French fries. How did John get the finger in there? Why did he do it? From a filmmaking perspective, you can say, "Well, because it's creepy." This might bother me in a lot of films but not here. The filmmakers do seem to lean into it consciously, at least in one scene where John somehow has all the bullets for Jim's gun in his pocket. Is John some kind of manifestation of a part of Jim's personality? The film never explains but maintains a nicely nightmarish quality throughout.

The waitress is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh and she's good as always. She's set up as a love interest for Jim but I think this must be the only movie in the '80s in which she didn't get naked.

Rutger Hauer is fantastic and as horrible as he gets it's hard not to get caught up in his sadistic charisma.

The Hitcher is available on Criterion this month as part of a Highway Horror collection which somehow does not include Lost Highway.

Pianos at Night

A college student's ambition to be a great pianist are piqued with a little help from demoniac forces in 2020's Nocturne. Sydney Sweeney stars as a pale ascetic. No-one batted an eye at that back in 2020, and she does a fine job. A lot of people compared this movie to The Black Swan--the Natalie Portman ballerina movie, not the Tyrone Power pirate movie--but there's more of a gossipy tone to this movie. It's not bad, though, and writer/director Zu Quirke delivers a solid little horror soap opera.

Juliet (Sweeney) is the sister of Vivian (Madison Iseman). They're both talented pianists at an elite boarding school but Vivian has been accepted to Julliard while Juliet hasn't. Juliet may have been jealous but it's hard to say how much jealousy comes naturally from her and how much of it is provoked by circumstances, which I thought was a nice point of ambiguity.

There's also recently been a suicide, the school's star pianist, and this leaves a slot open for someone else to perform at an important school concert, and it turns out to be Vivian. Meanwhile, Juliet finds a notebook that belonged to the deceased star pianist and it's filled with strange, demoniac images and symbols. There's the notebook, there's the occasional cruel words from Vivian or their mutual friends, there's the fact that Juliet has sacrificed having a personal life since childhood just to be the best. It's hard to say for sure what pushes Juliet into darker territory in her desire to be the best.

I think this movie would count as Dark Academia if all the characters were attractive boys wearing tweed. Sweeney's believable as someone with a hidden tenacious streak who's not as introspective as she ought to be.

Nocturne is available on Amazon Prime.

Sonnet 2012

For puddles drained, forgotten days recede
As gentle hills of sand dissolve, they slept
A dose of twenty grains, do not exceed
There's secret math in rotten lockers kept
A row of blondes beholds the podgy wight
He disappears across the nightly track
And so the ladies board the pumpkin train
The sky above becomes a jelly black
Their station's gone and now they're left alone
They peer about the strange and empty lot
The chill ignores their coats and hits the bone
A distant howl provokes a gloomy thought
The hungry shapes are swirling round them fast
From here, some cruel and bitter spells are cast

Corpses Seldom Love Wisely

October seems like no time to stop watching Tales from the Crypt. "Three's a Crowd" and "The Thing from the Grave" are two episodes from May, 1990. "Three's a Crowd" presents a love triangle story in which a married couple, Richard and Della, are invited to stay at the cabin of their wealthy friend, Alan. Richard is played by Gavan O'Herlihy, whom most people of my generation will remember best as Airk from Willow. He spends most of the episode in a piping hot rage, convinced that Della is cheating on him with Alan. Both Della and Alan are constantly shocked by Richard's unstable behaviour, yet the two of them do act suspiciously secretive and chummy. When the twist ending comes, we're supposed to think, "My God, Richard's made a terrible mistake!" but I think most people will actually be thinking, "Why on earth did Alan and Della think it was a good idea to plot anything, however benign, behind Richard's back?"

"The Thing from the Grave" features another love triangle but one with more star power. Miguel Ferrer plays the jealous boyfriend of a supermodel played by Teri Hatcher. She falls for her photographer, Devlin (Kyle Secor). This one more sensibly ends with zombies, courtesy of a cursed amulet. Ferrer's good as the angry, entitled boyfriend. I also like the Cryptkeeper's intro for this episode in which we seem to catch him reading a porno magazine of human corpses.

The World is Elm Street

Halloween month has begun so I watched the original 1984 Nightmare on Elm Street last night. The only thing I remembered from the previous time I watched it was that on that occasion I also didn't remember anything about it from the time before that. Watching the movie last night, I didn't even remember stuff from the Red Letter Media review of it I'd watched a couple weeks earlier. I guess this is just a movie that doesn't stick, at least for me.

Heather Langenkamp, the lead, the film's heroine, always seems like her nose and upper lip are numb but she gives a convincing enough, sincere performance. The piece of trivia everyone knows is this was Johnny Depp's first movie, playing Langenkamp's boyfriend. It was weird watching this after watching the Ebenezer trailer.

I see a lot of people saying it looks like an old Tim Burton movie, back when Burton had a noticeably consistent aesthetic. It's directed by Ti West, the director of the X/Pearl movies. It seems he may have learned something from the fact that Pearl received far more praise than the other two movies in that series and decided he has more of a knack for slightly fantastical, Victorian or Edwardian period films. I hope, for his sake, Pearl wasn't mostly Mia Goth's labour of love, as it was reported to be. Maybe she should be a director.

You don't really see any of the familiar zaniness in Depp's Nightmare on Elm Street performance. He was playing the cool teenage boyfriend, that was the job. The arc of his career kind of reminds me of Al Pacino or Jack Nicholson, both of whom have always had a distinctive affect but at some point in their career lapsed into almost exclusively playing broad, exaggerated versions of their former personae. In Nicholson's case, the switchover can be pinpointed to his performance as the Joker.

Freddy Kruger is surprisingly restrained in the first movie, too. He hadn't become the cartoon character yet. At the point he appeared, there was already a series of popular slasher monsters of the '70s and '80s, there was already Leatherface and Michael Myers. You can see why the makers of Nightmare figured Freddy needed a hook, which turned out to be his razor fingered glove and fedora. I wonder why no-one calls me Freddy Kruger when they see me wearing my fedora. I suppose I ought to get a stripey red shirt. People have started in on the Indiana Jones cracks here in New York and New Jersey now, too. It's really strange. Yesterday a fat guy in a Captain America t-shirt yelled "Dr. Jones!" at me. Talk about glass houses.

Two are One

A pair of sisters who often speak in unison struggle in a world inhospitable to their strangeness in 2026's Bucking Fastard. Werner Herzog directs this film loosely based on a real life pair of twin sisters. The film is dedicated to the late David Lynch and in many ways it's reminiscent of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, the project on which Herzog and Lynch collaborated. Segments of the film that focus on the salacious, real world story are paired with other scenes in which the main character(s) dreamily contemplate the beauty and strangeness of reality. It's an aesthetic attitude that not many people have an appetite for--most critics don't quite know how to appreciate beauty, so many of the reviews for both films have failed to find much of value in them. This fittingly parallels the lives of the sisters in the film, whose difficulties stem from a world that cannot empathise with their priorities. For me, this film was incredible; it is an effective, melancholy meditation on lives cursed with being out of step with society, lives that few are willing to see humanity in.

The first part of the film focuses on the most salacious true story attached to the pair, their obsession with a man who'd been their sexual partner, but who had eventually gotten a restraining order put out on them after their failure to cope with his marriage to another woman had caused them to harass him. We see them throwing garbage bags onto the windscreen of his car and setting fire to his mailbox.

In real life, the pair of sisters were twins--you can see footage of them in TV documentaries from the '80s. Herzog sets the film in the modern day, complete with internet and touch screens, factors that play important roles in the film's story. The sisters are also not twins, as they directly state in the movie, despite the Wikipedia entry erroneously referring to them as twins. They're played by real life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara. Herzog also moves the location from Yorkshire, England, to County Kildare, Ireland.

The Mara sisters give an incredible performance that must have been very difficult to achieve. Their speaking most of the time in unison seems different from how the real life sisters spoke in unison. In the brief bits of footage I could find of them on YouTube, the real life pair watch each other a lot and look for confirmation and cues. When they speak in unison, it comes off as a kind of litany, like the things they say together are lines in a play they constantly repeat. The characters played by the Mara sisters, Jean and Joan Holbrooke, seem often as though they have a single brain operating two bodies. The Mara sisters basically give two complete performances of the same character, standing next to each other, but sometimes they switch to finishing each other's sentences instead of speaking simultaneously.

They're fascinating, the viewer is compelled to wonder how their minds function. A character played by Domhnall Gleeson tries to help them. They have trouble opening a sardine can because it's not something they can do together and he slowly coaxes one of them into doing it alone. But any time one is distinguished from the other, either visually or through actions, it causes them both profound distress. Setting the story in modern times adds another dimension to the story. An old man whose home they're staying in is shocked to find nude pictures of them on the internet, taken by a voyeur on the roof across the street from their bedroom window. When the old man informs them, they can't believe him because, as they tell him, they don't have internet. He slowly realises that they think if they don't have internet, then pictures of them can't be on the internet.

In both real life and in the film, the sisters must lead a very simple life in order to maintain their synchronicity. Though they're taken as simple-minded, it must actually take a great deal of mental acuity to maintain their mirror act, but even so they likely must keep the parameters narrow. So this fosters a very simple outlook on life which is doubtless why they're given to fervent romantic ideas. This is what makes them classic Herzog protagonists. They'll go to any lengths for their goals because they have thoroughly unshakable convictions. They have to, to maintain their unison.

The final act of the film is the cosiest piece of filmmaking I've seen from Herzog. The sisters move out to the countryside to stay with a widow in her cottage. They spend their time around local caves that command a fantastic view of the surrounding countryside. When a local rich hunter tries to slaughter all the local foxes, the sisters keep one whom they name Cupid. Cupid leads them, and the film, into a symbolic realm in which the influence of David Lynch becomes clearer. It also solidifies the point of the story. The same obsessions that allow them to find incredible beauty in the world also cut them off from it.

Bucking Fastard is playing at the New York Film Festival.

'Till Hit Do They Part

When her mobster husband is killed, a woman tries to rebuild her life in Jonathan Demme's 1988 film Married to the Mob. A less comedic tone would've helped this movie a lot, especially since Michelle Pfeiffer plays the lead role so straight. Matthew Modine gives a distractingly broad performance as her love interest and much of the plot is silly without being amusing.

Pfeiffer plays Angela, who's married to Frankie, a mob enforcer played by Alec Baldwin. The boss, Tony, is played by Dean Stockwell and he's got eyes for Angela, which makes his wife, Connie (Mercedes Ruehl) furious. Virtually everyone in the movie is a known name. In minor roles the cast includes Joan Cusack, Oliver Platt, Chris Isaak, and Nancy Travis.

After Frankie's killed, Angela moves to a grimy apartment on the lower east side of Manhattan, where my current hotel happens to be. I'm already noticing what a difference it makes, watching a movie set in New York and actually having spent time in New York. Somehow actually walking around here makes all the dialogue referring to locations come alive in ways that poring over Google Maps never did.

Matthew Modine plays an FBI agent who has Angela under surveillance. After he accidentally bumps into her in an elevator, they start dating and things get complicated. Pfeiffer plays it totally straight, she really seems like she's falling for him, which is really odd because Modine plays his character like a 24/7 goofball. Instead of focusing so much on their relationship, the last act focuses more on Connie trying to prove Tony's cheating on her and on the FBI trying to nab Tony. There are some interesting moments and I liked the scene where Tony starts to realise what's going on. Demme makes his thoughts visual by having the actors perform them without any preamble. It's a deft bit of filmmaking that shows Demme was a master.

Married to the Mob is available on The Criterion Channel until to-morrow.