This Fisk

There was some exciting stuff in the new episode of Daredevil written by Chantelle M. Wells whose previous credits include Yellowjackets and Echo. I wonder how much of it will stick.

The big event was in the very end of the episode in which Wilson Fisk's wife, Vanessa, was seemingly killed by Bullseye. I have a bad feeling it's going to turn out she miraculously survived. But the nice thing about the episode is that many people had easily discernable motives. You can see why Bullseye would want revenge on her.

Though, now that I think about it, there are still a lot of characters with murky, inexplicable motives. I liked seeing Lili Taylor again and it's interesting that she and Vanessa hit it off, I just wish I understood why. Maybe the fact that they were about to have an alliance for no apparent reason is a sign that Vanessa won't survive.

I liked seeing Karen interviewing people and for a moment I thought we were going to see her being a journalist again. But she's kind of a black hole in Born Again. Her motives were always clear in the old series. Here, I don't even know what her job is and apparently she's been retconned as a partner in the old law firm.

Matt investigating while disguised as an AVTF officer was interesting though it felt really Batman-ish.

I feel like if he put half as much effort into stopping Fisk as he puts into saving Fisk then Fisk would already be behind bars. Though he does have a point that making Fisk into a martyr isn't a good idea. One can draw parallels to real life once again and ask whether the killing of Charlie Kirk did the American Left any favours.

I kind of liked the one-upsmanship in the Matthew Lillard scene.

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.

In Pursuit of Time

I'm in the third of four airports I'm visiting to-day. I left from Tokyo's Narita Airport on Wednesday afternoon and arrived at Seoul's Icheon Airport Wednesday evening and then went back to Wednesday afternoon to arrive here, at LAX. My final stop will be San Diego to catch up with Wednesday evening again.

Even just being in the Korean airport, I started to notice all the Japanese mannerisms I'd gotten used to. I went to a beer stand to buy a bottle of water and the girl working there looked incredulously at me. I swiped my card wrong and she gave me the bottle for free without saying anything. There's something that would absolutely never happen in Japan.

Yes, a beer stand. Icheon airport has dozens of shops with signs that just say "Liquor and Tobacco". I guess they didn't have the wave of social engineering Japan had to wipe out cigarette smoking.

Koreans are so pale. The airport buggies constantly play electronic music, like it's a Disney parade. Mostly The Nutcracker. I had to restrain myself from laughing the third time a pretty, straight backed young woman with very serious bright red lips drove by with the carnival music. I pictured to myself what it would be like if she was really having a ball, laughing and waving and bobbing along with the music.

Final Ramen

Okay, I took a couple pictures. For my last full day in Japan, I went to Shibuya and wandered around. Looks like the future doesn't it?

It started to rain and I didn't have an umbrella. Since it was almost lunchtime, I went into a ramen shop, Ichiran Ramen. I'm sure glad I did. I got some tonkotsu (pork bone broth) ramen because it's my favourite standard variety of ramen, not knowing the place is famous for its tonkotsu. It was divine. I had a beer with it and the combination was exquisite beyond my capacity for words to convey. They should've sent a poet.

Now I have an 18 hour flight ahead of me. At least I have lots of books to read.

A Day in the Biggest City in the World

Good morning from Tokyo. This is the not especially inspiring photo from my hotel room in Chiba by Tokyo Bay. There is a bull in the lobby, though.

The real selling point for me is that the room was only fifty dollars a night. I might have gone even cheaper and stayed at a manga cafe but I have too much luggage. My room is small but it does what I need it to. If you're in Japan and you're looking for cheap accommodation that's bigger than a capsule or a voting booth, look for an APA Hotel.

I'm leaving to-morrow. Walking through Tokyo Station last night, I felt sorry that I can't stay in this city for at least a week. I noticed a trend of young women carrying around stuffed animals. First I saw a girl with a big lavender rabbit, then another girl with a big pink rabbit, and then a white girl with something I didn't get a good look at. Probably a rabbit. I wonder if it's for Easter. Probably not.

I don't really feel like taking pictures, actually. I often see tourists walking around taking footage. Why should I bother?

Sonnet 1987

As time deployed its friends, the train was slowed.
A secret time was kept in strangers' pockets.
Through dampened cities, crystal spirits glowed.
Their fingers stuck in Heaven's sweetest sockets.
The blazing sun usurps the rite of spring.
The normal coat was now a stifling sleeve.
A veil of sweat enticed the girl to sing.
The point of flesh, to find a place to cleave.
Where winter winds were trampled under hooves,
Untimely summer throttles cherry trees.
Suspicious deer observe from lofty rooves.
A line of sheep were eating morning cheese.
Condensing matter clogged the holy train.
A pleasure pulled the glass beyond its pane.

Reordered Who

I'm in the final stages of cleaning out of my apartment so I have no time this morning but here's a very odd ranking of Doctors Who I watched this morning while eating breakfast. I'd like to know who voted on this one. The hostess disassociates herself from it at several points. If she names the source, I may be too sleep deprived to have heard it. I'm really astonished how far 6 and 13 rank above 3 and 5. Is Peter Davison cancelled or did people think they were voting for Pete Davidson? While I don't agree number 1 should be number 1, I will say he's an unexpected but very worthy choice.

The Worth of Books

Going through the many old and new problems attendant on moving out of Japan, I discovered that Japan Post has a new policy that prohibits sending anything valued at over a hundred US dollars to the US. This is in retaliation to Trump's tariff policies but this is such a new rule that the post office web site doesn't mention it, even though one is required to make labels for all international shipping on the web site before going into the post office. Many employees of the post office are unaware of the rule, too, which means some parcels I'd already sent off end up being returned to me.

This is a problem for me because my last day in this apartment is to-morrow, Monday, and my flight leaves on Wednesday. This means I suddenly have to figure out what to do with a bunch of stuff I thought I'd already taken care of, most of it valuable stuff I didn't want to get rid of. Mostly I'm talking about books.

What books do I have that are so valuable? Well, the sad irony here is that this is a result of me personally setting a high value on books. When the label web site tells me it's mandatory for me to ascribe a monetary value to all objects contained in the parcel, I'm forced to put a price on items that could be valued very differently depending on the buyer and seller. If you collect old books, like I do, then a hardback copy of Bleak House printed in the 1940s is surely worth at least forty dollars. To people who believe books are antiquated objects now made obsolete by digital media, my copy of Bleak House is worth less than an equivalent quantity of blank paper. So I could have been justified in filling in all the price fields with one or two yen. Fool that I am, I wrote what I thought the books were actually worth.

All this to get revenge on Trump. It goes to show, revenge is never quite as simple as you'd like it to be.

And, oh yeah, Happy Easter.

The Irrepressibly Strange Home Front

This past week, I've been spending most of my days carrying things to the post office or to second hand shops, preparing to move out on Monday. To wind down in the evening, I watched 1944's A Canterbury Tale again, Powell and Pressburger's strange tale of three travellers in a small town on the road to Canterbury.

It's a strange sort of propaganda film. I mean, as with The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I think Powell and Pressburger set out to make a propaganda film but they were both too interested in complicated ideas to do a proper job of it. What is the message a British soldier's meant to come away with? "Go out there and fight for the magistrates putting glue in girls' hair back home!" And then there's Erwin Hiller's haunting cinematography. You can't even see the main characters' faces in the first minutes of the film as everyone stumbles about in the dark around the train station.

The three travellers are Sgt Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price), Alison Smith (Sheila Sim), and Acting Sgt. Bob Johnson (Sgt. John Sweet). Peter's with the British army while Bob's an American and Alison's a "land girl". a part of the Women's Land Army that did work on the British home front during World War II. They meet in the small town of Chillingbourne and soon encounter the town's infamous "glue man" who pours glue on Alison's hair as he's done to several other girls. He runs off before they can apprehend him. It's not until the three take refuge in town hall that we get a good look at their faces. The film's loaded with a sense of mystery and danger but it's counterbalanced by the cheerful, affable conversation between the three people newly acquainted with each other. They meet the magistrate, Colpeper, whom Alison immediately suspects is the secret identity of the glue man.

The mystery provides a baseline of tension throughout a film that consists of Bob talking to local woodworkers about wood and Alison trying to find work around town. These scenes bring the little town to life, creating a vivid portrait of rural England. The weirdness of the mystery in the background is somehow a vital part of bringing the place to life. The mystery is not who the glue man is--it's pretty clear it's Colpeper--but rather how the gentleman who gives lectures on British history and waxes poetic on the dreamy landscape and historical significance, could possibly be the glue man. His explanation, when it comes, is hardly sufficient either and it seems likely that Colpeper himself doesn't quite know why he does what he does. The viewer will likely infer that it's a manifestation of his sexual repression and that does seem likely. He's a strange character and yet, then again, is he? How many such gentlemen led double lives, with a second life that they could hardly explain if they tried? Is Colpeper not as familiar, in a way, as the landscapes and Elizabethan inns? Certainly the original Canterbury Tales had its share of bizarre and perverted characters. How many times did people have to reconcile the respected and beloved figure of authority with his messy private life? Nowadays, a guy like Colpeper would've been cancelled but in Powell and Pressburger's vision the three protagonists still like Colpeper despite his inexplicably strange and disturbing deeds.

The first time I watched the film, I remember not liking John Sweet's performance as Bob but I've done a complete 180 on that. He's so Lynchian, especially when he's talking about wood.

It occurred to me the film is a bit like Dracula with Bob being the Quincey Morris character.

A Canterbury Tale is available on The Criterion Channel.

Final Buffy

When I first watched the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I thought it suffered too much from the suddenly very strong influence of the Lord of the Rings movies. Practically all fantasy media since the early 2000s has been in some way influenced by the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter movies so it's no surprise. But suddenly Buffy was at the head of an army, giving speeches while a new orc-like vampire variant was introduced that could swarm up from the Hell Mouth, which became a kind of subterranean Mordor.

I can see the logic of wanting to increase the scale of the drama for the final season but what it really amounts to is a show switching away from what it was good at to fit the mould of an entirely different genre and it falls apart. It may have looked like a good outline at the beginning of the season--Buffy loses the confidence of her army but gets a magic weapon, she returns at a crucial, dramatic moment, and there's a great battle. I've already talked about how Buffy's exile made little sense. I have to say the magic "scythe", which is really an axe, looks so unwieldy as to be distracting. It's very short but has a spiked butt meaning Buffy or Faith often has to grip the spike just wield it. Altogether, it looks like a junior version of an already ridiculous fantasy weapon.

Watching it alongside the final season of Angel really confirms my impression of Angel being the far superior show at that point. When Spike transfers from one series to the other, he becomes more interesting again. In the final season of Buffy, there's little more to him than being Buffy's adoring fan.

I'd totally forgotten Anya dies in the final episode of Buffy. It goes by so fast and the other characters don't seem to react much until Andrew, of all people, eulogises her. I think the first time I watched the episode I didn't even notice she died.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is available on Disney+.

Double DD Day

For some reason, two new episodes of Daredevil: Born Again were released on Wednesday, episodes two and three, written by Dario Scardapane and Heather Bellson, respectively. I have to say, the Heather Bellson episode was much stronger but I'm not feeling good about the writing on this season overall.

Scardapane's episode ended with Karen punching out a guy in full body armour. I've complained about this with Disney Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Disney seems to think the only qualification someone needs to knock someone out with a single punch is to be a main character. One of the most egregious examples was at lease only in a comic, when Princess Leia knocked out a stormtrooper with a single punch. That's something no-one ever did in the original trilogy. I know we've seen Karen training with Matt but even Daredevil usually has to have a fight scene with the AVTF guys. Maybe the intention was to imply that Karen had an extended fight scene off-screen but that wouldn't make sense given that the guy ends up being someone who wants to work with them. At the beginning of the third episode, at least a metallic sound effect was added to imply Karen used some kind of metal object to knock the guy out. I think during editing someone realised One-Punch-Karen was a dumb idea. I thought this season wasn't going to be sloppy.

There was also a scene in the second episode in which Detective Kim shows up at the bar and it's not clear if she's a threat or not. Then there's some obvious ADR in which she hastily praises "the resistance" and being a rebel. Is this one of those things for people who are scrolling through their phones while the show is on? It really doesn't feel like a good idea to use the term "resistance" again.

Okay, there were things I liked, particularly in the third episode. Lili Taylor as the New York governor immediately has a strong presence and seems like a real threat to Fisk. Tony Dalton and Michael Gandolfini both gave exceptional supporting performances, particularly Dalton who's as effective in the extended action scene as he was in the courtroom or in prison.

The similarities between the AVTF and ICE were both stronger and weaker. The AVTF guys seem more driven by ideology while the ICE guys seem more like armed thugs. But as the AVTF seems to be targeting immigrants more and more it's harder to believe the resemblance is accidental.

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.

The Train's Various Occupants

Since I'm leaving Japan to return to America soon, and will be visiting Tennessee relatively soon, it seemed like a good time to watch Jim Jarmusch's 1989 film Mystery Train again, a film I'd not seen since high school. It's one of Jarmusch's best, probably my favourite of his films. It's an anthology film featuring three interconnected stories about foreigners visiting Memphis, Tennessee.

The first story features a Japanese couple. Having lived in Japan six years now, I was surprised at how authentic the characters seemed in terms of dialogue and performance in comparison to depictions of Japanese people from other American films. Then I read that the film was co-produced by a Japanese company and it made sense. The couple's reaction to a fast speaking American woman in this clip is not unlike reactions I've occasionally seen among students when they hear English.

That's Nagase Masatoshi as Jun and Kudoh Youki as Mitsuko. Since this movie was made decades before A.I. we can all be impressed by Nagase's skill at lighting a cigarette:

I wonder how many times he practiced that. He's so nonchalant.

Mitsuko might be classified nowadays as a "manic pixie dream girl" but I've met a lot of Japanese girls like her. They're just as fun to talk to as you might imagine but you shouldn't mistake enthusiasm for a lack of depth.

The second segment features an Italian woman (Nicoletta Brashci) stranded in Memphis and the third story features Steve Buscemi, Joe Strummer, and Rick Aviles as a trio of low-lives who rob a liquor store. Joe Strummer is the same Joe Strummer you may know as the lead singer of The Clash and I enjoyed his performance here. He's from England, of course, but Buscemi is also a kind of foreigner here, being from New Jersey. All the segments are good but the Japanese couple are by far the best. Their segment best captures the idea present in all three stories of cultural exchanges mysterious in their simultaneous intimacy and inscrutability.

Screamin' Jay Hawkins is in all three segments as the hotel night clerk and Tom Waits plays a DJ heard on the radio in each segment.

Mystery Train is available on The Criterion Channel.

Who's the Custodian of a Relationship?

Kim Novak's commented on an upcoming film about her relationship with Sammy Davis, Jr. Apparently she's unhappy with Sydney Sweeney playing her in the movie. Novak complains Sweeney "sticks out so much above the waist," and fears the movie will focus too much on the sexuality of the relationship.

"There’s no way it wouldn't be a sexual relationship because Sydney Sweeney looks sexy all the time," Novak said. There's some irony here because, in her day, Novak was criticised for being all sex appeal with no real acting talent. Even Alfred Hitchcock described her as "terrible" in his interview with Francois Truffaut while Truffaut praised her "passive, animal" quality, which may have been another way of saying she was sexy.

I think Sweeney's a good actress, I enjoyed her performance in The Voyeurs a few days ago. She certainly does "stick out above he waist" more than Novak ever did but I can't honestly complain about that. I mean, she has extremely nice breasts. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the epitome of muscularity in film, Sydney Sweeney epitomises the bust. In addition to this, her face and mannerisms don't much resemble Novak. Better casting might have been a young Christina Ricci. Jeez, can I think of anyone who's in the right age group now? Jenna Ortega? I must have Wednesday on my mind. Well, both Wednesday actresses exhibit that "passive, animal quality" Truffaut talked about. Natalie Portman or Patricia Arquette would've been good.

Kim Novak is 93 years old and it's worth noting that works of film media have become much more preoccupied with overt sexuality than they were when Novak was a major player in Hollywood. She remembers the relationship between herself and Sammy Davis, Jr. as something valuable for having "so much in common." Sex was probably a very small component of the relationship for her. On the one hand, there's a difference in generational values at play, but on the other hand, Novak is quite justified in being offended that a personal relationship of hers is being mischaracterised and potentially dismissive of the thing she felt was truly valuable in it. Instead of just saying she's old fashioned, I think it's worth pondering whether or not our society has become one that prioritises sex too much and has lost the ability to value other aspects of a romantic relationship, aspects that, in the long run, are far more important.

Slayers Excluded

I noticed a lot of positive PR for Sarah Michelle Gellar has been turning up on my Facebook feed. I guess it's damage control after the Buffy reboot failed to take off. Meanwhile, I'm still watching the original and I got to one of the weakest plot points in the final season, coming from an April 29, 2003 episode called "Empty Places" written by Drew Z. Greenberg. In this one, Buffy is kicked out of her house by her sister and all her friends because she wants to attack the season's villain, Caleb (Nathan Fillion).

I feel like the way this happened in the writers' room was that someone made an outline and said, "Wouldn't it be wonderfully dramatic if Buffy was rejected by everyone only to come back at a crucial moment to save the day?" Yes, but can this be accomplished in a sensible way? They're fighting a monster that can overpower their most powerful fighter easily and who apparently can attack them any time, anywhere. So Buffy's plan to go on the offensive isn't preposterous. But even if everyone disagrees with her, it hardly seems sufficient justification to throw her out and shun her.

If they really wanted this particular dramatic arc, they needed to provide better motivation for Buffy's friends and followers. Maybe they could've had Buffy cross a line, apparently break some part of the group's moral code. Maybe she could have acquired some kind of dangerous demoniac power that made her proximity seem a threat to everyone. I don't know.

Anyway, with Buffy gone, the other Slayer, Faith (Eliza Dushku), takes over, the original outcast bad girl. She is a more interesting and concrete character than Buffy overall. It was nice having an appearance by Harry Groener as the mayor in the subsequent episode, her boss from season three, giving her an opportunity to show how she's matured and become more self-possessed.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is available on Disney+.

Sonnet 1986

The milk of knowing plants was rare and warm.
Decisive snails were slowly taking charge.
Collected dolls did not foresee the swarm.
They only saw the gang of crooks at large.
Dalmatians mount the stage of turtle woe.
No spots would grace the pigeon's fluffy coat.
Combustion turned the steamy cup of joe.
Ideas began to overtake the goat.
The placid mammal raised a group of cubs.
Concussive ropes resound about the brig.
No players joined the wood tobacco clubs.
No grabbers took the candy coated cig.
The gentle balance fell between the sheets.
The soap contains excessive boiled beats.

Living In a TV

A young man's moral crisis is experienced in a dreamlike series of events involving video tape in 1989's Speaking Parts, a Canadian film directed by Atom Egoyan. The film's subtext regarding the simultaneous distance and extraordinary intimacy of video media is fascinating and reminded me a bit of Inland Empire or Videodrome.

Lance (Michael McManus) and Lisa (Arsinee Khanjian) are housekeepers at an expensive hotel. One day, Lance finds a movie script in a hotel room and cons his way into getting an audition. Around this time, he stops speaking to Lisa, who was possibly his lover. Lisa claims Lance was her lover but it's not clear if Lisa understands reality in the same way most people do.

Lance has worked as an extra on various movies and Lisa regularly rents them at the local video store so she can watch him in the background of various scenes. Eddy (Tony Nardi), the proprietor of the video store, takes an interest in Lisa. They get to talking about Eddy's sideline as an event photographer and occasional interviewer and immediately Lisa wants to conduct interviews for Eddy. This is a job Lisa is woefully unqualified for. In her first attempt, she interviews a bubbly, happy young bride at a wedding. Lisa is a foreigner with a thick accent and unshaven eyebrows. She's clearly never spent time in Hollywood circles or even among the popular girls at school. She's an introvert and all of her questions sound demanding and uncomfortably fervent. She's the food lover who thinks her love can make her a good chef. But getting people to talk and open up is a skill one has to develop and the poor young bride starts to panic and cry in response to Lisa's existential questions, particularly a strange one about how you "feel your love" in your partner.

So from this, it's not entirely clear if Lisa and Lance were ever together or if it was all in Lisa's imagination. We never see Lance actually speaking to her as a lover.

Meanwhile, Lance gets to know Clara (Gabrielle Rose), the woman who wrote the script he found. It turns out the script is a true story about Clara's brother who donated a lung to her. However, the director wants to fundamentally alter the script so Clara implores Lance to demand changes once he gets the role.

Lance and Clara sleep together but after that they communicate almost entirely through video conference. At one point, they masturbate for each other, Lance watching her on the little CRT television. The director of the film Clara wrote the screenplay for only speaks to her through the same method, signifying the communications barrier he puts between them.

It's hard to imagine what it was like in 1989 now that we live in this world where video communication is common and porn is ubiquitous. But the movie doesn't feel irrelevant. If anything, it makes me wonder at some fundamental aspect of human perception that may have been lost or altered in the years since.

Meanwhile, Lisa begins to experience what may be full blown hallucinations involving video that somehow may make a real link between her and Lance. The line between subjective and objective becomes increasingly difficult to perceive. Which is a point well taken.

Speaking Parts is available on The Criterion Channel.

I Wonder You

I felt bad for casting aspersions on Wonder Man without watching it properly so I went back and watched the first two episodes. It's not as bad as I originally thought though it does fail the test, "Would I Watch This If It Weren't the MCU?"

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Simon Williams. In the comics, Wonder Man was a supervillain who became a superhero who eventually became a Hollywood actor. In the MCU version, Simon watches Wonder Man movies as a kid and grows up wanting to play the fictional superhero. In the first episode he meets Trevor Slattery, a recurring MCU character played by Ben Kingsley. He first appeared in Iron Man 3 and in short films. The director of the first two episodes of Wonder Man, Destin Daniel Cretton, directed Shang-Chi, in which Trevor Slattery also appeared.

In this show, Slattery is a pathetic has-been, a more forlorn version of Steve Martin's character on Only Murders in the Building. Simon's youthful over-enthusiasm gives the two nicely contrasting personalities. Kingsley gives a good performance, of course. Abdul-Mateen II is a little bland but sometimes charismatic. It's nice listening to them trade movie trivia.

Joe Pantoliano plays himself. In the MCU, he used to star on a hospital drama with Trevor. There's a funny scene in the second episode involving him. Pantoliano is so good, gives such a sharp, witty performance, it's kind of a shame he isn't playing a superhero or something. Maybe he will anyway.

Hollywood loves to make movies about itself but they're only occasionally successful at the box office. Here's my top ten list:

10. Tropic Thunder
9. The Other Side of the Wind
8. All About Eve
7. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
6. In a Lonely Place
5. Inland Empire
4. Sullivan's Travels
3. Sunset Boulevard
2. Singin' In the Rain
1. Mulholland Drive

Wonder Man is available on Disney+.

A Human Work

Yesterday, Melania Trump appeared at the White House with a robot who speaks with pronounced vocal fry. I guess if your robot's going to resemble a berserk killing machine from Evangelion, having it sound like a 20 something barista is one way to counterbalance the horror.

Should I say it or she? I don't know, there will need to be a courtroom drama about robot pronouns.

Commander Data provides a Merriam-Webster definition of "android"--"an automaton made to resemble a human being." Melania's robot refers to itself as a "humanoid" which, on Star Trek and elsewhere, typically means an alien life form that bears at least some rudimentary resemblance to a human. I suppose they didn't use "android" for fear of legal troubles with Google's Android phone. Ironically, Google's Android was originally to be called "Droid" until there was the possibility of legal trouble with Lucasfilm because that's the word for robots in the Star Wars movies. So we have a little game of copyright musical chairs to reshape the landscape of our language.

Melania's robot notably doesn't take any questions and it seems like the barista speech was pre-recorded, possibly by a real barista. Though AI and synthetic voice generative software would seem to be far enough along to have such a level of communicative ability in a robot. Maybe there's not enough room for it amidst everything it needs to sense its environment and control its own movements in response. Human bipedal motion is a more delicate and complicated procedure than we're typically conscious of.

It was an altogether unimpressive demonstration, now that I think about it. Why am I even writing about it? Well, artificially intelligent robots seem like an inevitability at this point. Maybe this is a sign we can at least rest easy that they won't be working for Trump.

The Devil's in His Kitchen

The first episode of the new season of Daredevil: Born Again does feel more solid than season one. I don't know if this indicates a better season overall but the pacing felt more natural, conversations didn't feel oddly crammed into blocks of a few minutes. The action scenes are better but still nowhere near the level of the old Netflix series. The performances are good with one new supporting character being a standout.

During the whole Paul Dano non-controversy in which Quentin Tarantino criticised the actor, Tarantino also took a swipe at Matthew Lillard. This basically confirmed for me that Tarantino had not watched Twin Peaks season three because anyone who's seen that amazing 18 hour work of art knows that Matthew Lillard can be really impressive. As a new character on Daredevil, he infuses a lot of life and intrigue into the scenes he appears in.

He plays Mr. Charles, some kind of fixer working for Fisk. A lot of people are talking about how eerily Wilson Fisk's "Anti-Vigilante Task Force" resembles ICE under the Trump administration, especially considering that people who worked on the show claim everything in season two was written two years ago. I don't necessarily believe that. Although the makers of the show obviously wanted to avoid the schizophrenic quality of Born Again's first season, Disney and Marvel are, I think, too addicted to late stage tampering to have abstained from it entirely.

But Vincent D'Onofrio's version of Wilson Fisk was always based on Trump, at least a little, even in the first season of the Netflix series. He was a greedy, tacky landlord in that, just like Trump was primarily a greedy, tacky landlord in the '80s. Though one of the best things about the Netflix Daredevil series was how complex Fisk's character was. I think some people are afraid of making villains too sympathetic so they actively avoid making them complex. But one thing Andor showed was that you could reveal the humanity of your villains without making them enviable. The audience sympathises with Dedra Meero but no-one would want to follow in her footsteps.

So the Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF) resembles ICE because they work for a Trump figure and they're a bunch of chubby guys in bullet proof vests, beating up innocent people. They're a simplistic bunch of comic book thugs; it's not hard for them to superficially resemble something because they're not very complex. So I don't find the parallel very interesting in itself but I do find it interesting that such a broad, two dimensional villain resembles people in the news. Partly this is an indication of the oversimplified narrative presented in modern news media, partly it's an indication of a real moral void in American leadership and law enforcement.

So far I'm not getting a whole lot from the character development this season though I did like the conversation between Karen and BB about her uncle. I really like the line Karen repeats, "The easiest people to manipulate are manipulators." I think that's a line from the old series, I'm not sure. In any case, it's a surprisingly astute observation from a show like this.

I didn't like the dialogue doubling down on the "Nelson, Murdoch, and Page" thing that seems to be retconning the old law firm to have included Karen as a partner. Does she have a law degree now?

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.

The Malaise of Dangerous Men

Terence Stamp rats on his former comrades in the London mob and is thenceforth marked for death, pursued by John Hurt and Tim Roth in 1984's The Hit. This Stephen Frears film has a surprisingly effective tone of detached, melancholic comedy.

For his courtroom betrayal, Stamp's character, Willie, is rewarded with a new life in Spain under witness protection. However, a pair of hitman working for his old crew track him down, kidnap him, and start driving him to Paris, where they expect to meet up with the boss. At this point the film becomes a road movie.

John Hurt and Tim Roth play the two hitmen, Braddock and Myron. Hurt is cool, detached, and experienced while Roth, whose first film this was, plays Myron as a naive young hoodlum. Willie is surprisingly calm and jovial and subtly starts trying to play his two captors against each other.

Braddock is experienced but he starts making a number of mistakes. He takes a woman hostage, Maggie (Laura del Sol), whom Willie observes ought to have been executed immediately. Both Braddock and Myron seem attracted to her, Myron the more foolishly, but Braddock's hesitation from harming her seems strange when the filmmakers go to such pains to establish him as a cold blooded psycho.

According to Wikipedia, this is one of Wes Anderson's favourite British films and it makes sense with the film's subtly twisted moral comment and delicately comedic chemistry.

The Hit is available on The Criterion Channel.