The Cat will Catch You with His Eyes

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

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

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

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

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

The Cassandra Cat is available on The Criterion Channel.

Does Anyone Know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exotica is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Kill that Keeps On Killing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Punisher: One Last Kill is available on Disney+.

Pardon My Parton

Dolly Parton has been cropping up in my life lately. The executor of my father's estate worked for her and her brother, Randy, and on Mother's Day my mother wanted to watch Steel Magnolias. That movie has an impressive ensemble. In addition to Parton, there's Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah, Sally Field, Julia Roberts, and Olympia Dukakis, though I would say having Olympia Dukakis in your movie is nothing to brag about. Apparently she died in 2021 but her career seemed to really peter out after the '80s ended. There's something very '80s about her, some register of stately smarm that resonated with critics in the '80s but then dissipated around 1990 or so.

It'd been a long time since I'd seen Steel Magnolias so I don't remember much about my original opinion of it. I thought Parton and Daryl Hannah were the strongest parts of the cast this time. I don't think Parton has a lot of range as an actress but she's especially good in supporting roles. I really liked The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, though. I was listening to "Hard Candy Christmas" this past Christmas.

Nowadays, I guess she's known to the younger generation as the old lady in the second version of Sabrina Carpenter's "Please Please Please" music video (not to be confused with The Smiths song of the same name. Yeah, I know, no-one does).

More recently, Sabrina Carpenter was seen performing with Madonna. Nice to see there's a young artist that the pillars of an elder generation are enthusiastic about supporting. One might debate over whether this is good for either the younger or elder artists or if this is a Dial of Destiny thing. Maybe the lesson here is "Seize the moment."

The Ease of Employment

A pair of sisters from a small town find sexual and romantic adventures in the big city in 1931's Working Girls. A quaint and innocent story is thinly layered over a more sinister depiction of the way of the world.

The term "working girl" had already been established as a euphemism for a sex worker by this point, according to various web sites and Google's AI, though it wasn't as well known as it became after 1950 or so.

20 year old June (Judith Wood) is the elder sister, by one year, of Mae (Dorothy Hall). The two apply for the same stenographer job. June proffers Mae as the more educated of the two, having completed two whole years of high school. The employer, Dr. Von Schrader (Paul Lukas), despite having advertised for applicants of exceptional education and experience, hires Mae after examining and taking pity on her for her wet feet. Uh-huh.

June almost as swiftly gets a job at a telegraph office just by getting behind the counter and getting to work, fumbling her way through the technical terms. Strangely, the two women find men to be endlessly accommodating throughout the film though, once they start dating, not terribly faithful.

Working Girls was directed by Dorothy Arzner from a screenplay by Zoe Akins based on a play by Vera Caspary and Winifred Lenihan. That's right, all women, a very unusual thing in 1931.

Working Girls is available on The Criterion Channel.

Sonnet 1991

The throat's as dry as hands beneath the beach.
A message fell behind the meaning man.
A movie made at dusk was starring Stacy Keach.
But horses changed the time to suit a plan.
To scratch a watch is just to feel the time.
Without the candle scope, a flame is dim.
You mix potato paste with juicy lime.
And scatter salt along the bev'rage rim.
A troupe of dancing dames create the night.
The colour moon replaced the greyish ball.
But older orbs now host a random fight.
A politician kneels and heeds the call.
Arenas decked with ducks were wooden bliss.
At centre stage, behold a splendid kiss.

Ted Turner

Ted Turner died four days ago at the age of 87. He's responsible for the formation of a number of prominent American television networks, including CNN and TNT. For me, his greatest achievement was TCM, Turner Classic Movies, to which, as a cinephile, I owe a great debt for introducing me to the world of classic film.

After taking a lot of deserved criticism for airing colourised versions of classic films on his other networks, Turner launched TCM in 1994. When I was a young man coming out of high school and starting college, TCM was a invaluable resource, a basic cable channel that aired films from the golden age of cinema totally uncut and with no commercials. Before internet piracy and, later, the launch of sophisticated streaming services, TCM was really the only pure resource for the history of cinema for the average person. People like Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery, who worked at a video store, arguably had comparable or greater access but for most people TCM was the gateway to education in cinema.

I used to have stacks of VHS tapes I'd used to record movies on TCM. I remember watching marathons of Charlie Chaplin and Joan Crawford movies. Those were formative experiences of mainlining cinema for extended periods of time. The influence of TCM on a generation of cinephiles and filmmakers can be seen in the support the channel's received from prominent people in the industry such as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. So, thanks for that, Mr. Turner.

Initiating Normal Speech Routine, "Common Man Coarse Banter", ENGAGE

We need a rule against Democratic politicians cursing because they don't know how to do it. Bill Maher had two prominent Democrats on his show last night, John Fetterman and Donna Brazile, and both of them seemed like they'd just learned how to speak yesterday. I think Fetterman might be taking too many testosterone supplements or something because in his one on one interview with Maher he couldn't finish a sentence. He pulled himself together by the time he returned for the "Overtime" segment at the end but he was still unable to give a cogent response to the "male crisis" question.

Donna Brazile, meanwhile, seems like she's been training by watching '70s sitcoms. I laughed when Dan Crenshaw called it "weird" when she suggested he was "in Tim Cain's ass". This shouldn't have been Crenshaw's point to score. Brazile didn't use to talk like that, I checked videos of her on YouTube from eight or ten years ago. It seems clear to me strategists are telling Democrats they need to make their rhetoric more natural and "street" as a response to Donald Trump's sideshow carnival barker routine but there are few things more unnatural than people studying very hard to sound natural. It's like a drunk trying to pretend he's sober. We're so screwed.

What Makes a Man to Wander?

A couple months ago, I was talking with a group of foreign teachers in Japan--teachers from the US, Australia, the UK, and Africa--about one of the students I was tutoring in the US before coming to Japan, a Latino man who wanted to pass the English test required to join the US border patrol. The teachers expressed astonishment that such an odd, paradoxical person existed. But they're actually pretty common. According to Google's AI, about 50% of border patrol officers are Hispanic and 30% of ICE is Latino. One might also remember how well Trump polled in Latino communities in the US. A number of reasons could be offered for this, including the fact that many families flee Mexico and other countries because of a perception that lawlessness has freer rein in countries south of the US border. It may not be so surprising that many immigrants or second or third generation individuals might want to join law enforcement specifically to ensure the old familiar problems don't follow them to the US. In light of that, it's particularly a shame both agencies have been guilty of lawlessness and cruelty themselves.

I found myself thinking about this while watching The Searchers again last night. John Wayne's character, despite his clear pathological hatred for American Indians, can speak Indian languages and is familiar with many of their customs and cultural beliefs. The more sympathetic young man played by Jeffrey Hunter, Marty, who's part Cherokee, is actually much crueller to the Indian woman who attempts to take him for a husband than Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards.

What a remarkable film The Searchers is. John Ford's direction, the majestic and anxious compositions, the pretty yet melancholy score, and above all the hauntingly obsessive character of Ethan Edwards make the movie compulsively watchable. A lot of commentaries on the film suggest that Ethan was in love with his brother's wife who's slaughtered in the Indian attack at the beginning of the film along with the rest of Ethan's brother's family, with the exception of the young daughter, Debbie, the captive Ethan and Marty search for throughout the film. I think that's a fair interpretation, but there's more stuck in his craw than that. There's plenty in the sense of his cultural displacement, his disenfranchisement, and the devaluation of his passions, that can make him a sympathetic character to anyone who feels out of step with their own culture. The introspective person might see the flaws in Wayne's character not as alien things but as modes of thought one might fall into if one is not careful.

Dare to Write

Last night's Daredevil: Born Again finale may have been the dumbest hour of television I ever watched. "The Southern Cross", written by Dario Scardapane and Jesse Wigutow, presented nonsensical, overly dramatic events driven by vague or utterly nonexistent character motives and weird, extremely hazy conceptions of legal process.

Someone finally states what Karen is charged with; Matt mentions to the court that Karen is charged with aiding Daredevil. Aside from testimony regarding Karen's character, absolutely no evidence is presented to establish this fact. A witness in the previous episode said that Karen had been seen with Daredevil in Matt Murdoch's apartment. All of it is extremely weak and a halfway competent lawyer should've been able to either get the case dismissed or, at the very least, ensure that Karen received a meaninglessly light sentence, possibly no more than a fine for public disruption or aiding and abetting assault of a police officer.

Instead, Matt throws a hail Mary and reveals his identity as Daredevil to inform a court that he, Daredevil, is actually a hero, corroborated only by extremely suspicious video testimony and the fact that he had saved Wilson Fisk's life. On the grounds that Daredevil is actually a hero, Karen's case is dismissed. On the grounds that Matt Murdoch is Daredevil, he's arrested. They may as well be throwing dice.

Most of the time, when writers have a superhero's secret identity revealed, it's a sign of creative bankruptcy. That's certainly the case here.

So Fisk murders a bunch of random bystanders and, in his rage against the ruthless injustice, Matt gently suggests that Fisk be at his liberty in some other location, away from New York. Yeah, that oughta do it. Good job.

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.

Dead Processing

So, yeah, I watched Evil Dead 2 again. As a cinephile, what movies were coming to mind while going through my dead father's possessions in his home? Yes, of course I thought about The Seventh Seal and Tokyo Monogatari, two of the greatest, most contemplative movies about death. But neither of them really addresses the vicious mockery of death, the betrayal of one's own body. Evil Dead 2's no-holds-barred blend of comedy and horror captures something of the impression I get better than a more literal depiction of physical decline.

The fact that the film is about a man trapped alone in a house (in the first act) in which every object at any point might reveal itself to be a threat or a mockery makes it seem even more pertinent.

It seems like the movie's been on a lot of people's minds lately, judging from how many new videos are coming up about it on YouTube. Or maybe that's just the Evil Algorithm, possessing my reflection to drive me mad.

In the Air Again

The skies were remarkably clear for most of my flight back to San Diego yesterday, which was by far the shortest flight I've taken this year, lasting only about six hours. I was content just to watch the United States slowly scroll by beneath me. I never thought I'd be so happy to see desert again.

I think I'll have to bump the Knoxville airport up in my ranking. They had handy little laptop stations in the waiting areas by the gates, plenty of them so there were always at least four available. I got there plenty early so I actually sat down and played a little Skyrim.

Going though security was easier, too. They didn't even make me take my laptop out of my briefcase. They also let me hold onto my hat instead of putting it through the scanner. I noticed several people with cowboy hats and I bet in southern states there's been a lot of people raising ruckuses about putting their Stetsons through the contraption. A woman had to inspect my knapsack because it had a bag of my father's coin collection inside, which I expected, so I'd put the coins in a clear bag. She complimented me on the copy of Lord of the Rings I had in the bag, though my bags were not inspected due to the presence of books. This was a first--it turns out books generally look suspicious on a security scanner.

Let's see how long I can stay in one time zone now.

On a Mountain

To-day's my last day in Tennessee, I fly back to San Diego this afternoon. I don't know when I'll ever be back again so yesterday I had lunch at the Cracker Barrel because I never had and it seemed like an indelible part of the cultural identity of the U.S. south. I liked it. I love restaurants that have random knickknacks on the walls. And the food was good too, I had the fried catfish. I don't think I'd ever eaten catfish in my life before.

The pictures I'm posting are from the mountain where we, my father's best friend and I, took his and his girlfriend's ashes to be scattered at a campground that had been special to my father as a child. He had gone there frequently with his parents. My father's love for his parents was obvious in the many pictures and keepsakes he kept of them as well as in the song lyrics he'd written about them. He was a musician and had a rock band.

His friend told me how my father had told him about riding his bike downhill on this mountain, which is not a small mountain and it has many dangerous looking spots on its roads. I had an impression of a happy, carefree young life in the '60s in the forest with parents whose love he had absolute faith in. This mental image sits beside my imaginings of him dying alone in his bedroom, his piece of mind broken down by his failing health and declining physical mobility.

Certainly the creek in which his best friend deposited his ashes is a better place than that grim bedroom. He was a great fan of The Lord of the Rings so I read from a large red, leatherbound anniversary edition my mother had given him decades ago.

We didn't see anyone else at the campsite, which was closed off. Even before it'd been closed off, it had for some time no longer been a place frequented by campers.

Stache if you Moust

It's come to my attention that people, both in America and Japan, need to be better educated about facial hair.

I've had a handlebar moustache for almost two years now. I use pomade to make the ends go up. A few days ago, I went into a Subway sandwich here in Newport, Tennessee and a bearded young man said he wanted to grow a moustache like mine but when he tries to the ends grow down. I assumed he meant his moustache tended to look like Daniel Day-Lewis' in Gangs of New York.

It wasn't until later that I realised he believed many moustaches just naturally flip up on the sides. He also complained that hair tended to grow in the very centre, not realising many guys, like myself, shave a small spot just above the mouth.

In Japan, in order to manipulate some students against me, certain teachers induced students to ask me if I use wax or shave the centre of my moustache, in order to mock my vanity. There are many double standards, particularly for foreigners, so the common use of toupees and hair colouring by teachers is not generally mocked (though there were several prominent news stories from five or six years ago about students being punished for colouring their hair or wearing ponytails).

One teacher who didn't like me tried to convince students I modelled my moustache after Friedrich Nietzsche after I showed Nietzsche's picture in a powerpoint. Her implicit argument was that I would therefore eventually turn out to be a cruel and unforgiving teacher if I were allowed to remain at the school.

I think there's an impression among many that those who wear beards are wild men who don't bother shaving. This is not so. When you think of a beard, odds are you picture Commander Riker, so let's look at him.

See how he has a fairly sharp line at the bottom? That's because he shaves there. Allowing hair to grow there results in the notorious "neckbeard". But the grooming doesn't stop there. Moustaches must be cut or they will make it difficult to put food in your mouth, though some still prefer moustaches that overhang the lip, most famously Sam Elliot.

Many people, like myself, for greater ease at meal time, will shave a small area in the centre above the mouth. This also helps create the classic handlebar shape. Even if you don't shave that, many men must also shave the corners of their mouths or hair will point directly into the mouth every time they open it.

The handlebar moustache with the upturned tips became popular in the 15th century and remained so up until the first years of the 20th century.

Sonnet 1990

Antenna times convey the shape of doors.
A whiskered wraith remits a bolt of shroud.
The planet's swamps deploy a fog of spores.
A hunter's shape's revealed amidst the cloud.
A pattern's weak beside the cast of pods.
They cast a coat of tiny talking homes.
They close their doors against the threat of odds.
And fill the cracks that line the ceiling domes.
A painted hero holds a court of hue.
The browser crashed against the broccoli box.
Its Bowser's dash that makes your point of view.
His heavy car is filled with fallen rocks.
An engine pulls itself against a hood.
The maiden never shaves but thinks she should.

Wicker as a Renewable Resource

Did you have a good May Day? I observed it as I usually do by watching the original 1973 Wicker Man. How strange that it's become a comfort movie for me, that I find myself whistling melodies from its score about a month ahead of time in anticipation. One reason is that its among a few works of fiction that most accurately resemble my experience living in Japan.

The Wicker Man is essentially about a cult. Most likely influenced by the Manson Family, this post '60s film finds a conservative Christian cop visiting an island, Summerisle, where the inhabitants follow a New Age religion founded in the 19th century loosely based on the beliefs of the pre-Christianised inhabitants of the British isles. Among their beliefs is in the efficacy of human sacrifice.

Japan's problem with cults has been fairly well established though there is an apparent effort to downplay it in media. It wasn't long ago that former prime minister Abe Shinzo was assassinated by a man angry at how his mother was taken advantage of by a cult to which the prime minister belonged. In Japan's educational system, there's a war between forces eternally seeking to modernise the country and forces that value cultivated ignorance. So it didn't come as a surprise to me that a few years later a poll revealed that many students were unaware that Abe was dead. The reason so many Japanese people are vulnerable to cult indoctrination is that many aspects of mainstream education and morality resemble the qualities of a cult.

Like the inhabitants of Summerisle, many of the core aspects of modern Japanese culture are the result of social engineering. It's an ongoing effort but there were two primary waves, first in the 19th century and then in the aftermath of World War II. A key difference between Summerisle and modern Japan is the existence of the internet and the inhabitants' access to global media. There are many people in Japan who know how deranged the faux-traditionalist subculture is though many are understandably reticent to talk about it publicly. I wonder if Summerisle would survive the introduction of the internet.

What The Wicker Man captures so well is the attitude of the locals to the foreigner. Their shifting goal posts for Sergeant Howie to prove his arrogance in assuming the role of "King for a Day". They lure him in by fabricating a story of a missing child. It's not arrogance that prompts Howie to search for the girl but the inhabitants are so secure in their moral superiority to Howie's barbaric Christianity that the rationale continues to make sense to them. It's still a perfect justification for their efforts to humiliate him and, finally, murder him.

Getting to the Top

A woman's pursuit of adrenaline leads her into the clutches of a deranged cannibal in 2026's Apex. This latest iteration of "The Most Dangerous Game" is pretty good with capable direction by Baltasar Kormakur and uncompromising performances from Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton.

Eric Bana's briefly in the film as Theron's husband. The two are a couple who like seeking thrills around the world. We meet them climbing the Troll Wall in Norway. When a blizzard hits, Bana's character is killed and the film jumps ahead a few years to find Theron on a quest to kayak alone in the wilds of Australia. This gives her some interesting subtext (though one could say this is "fridging"). It's too bad Bana couldn't have stuck around, though. He's such a good actor but you hardly see him anymore.

The film is shot almost entirely from the point of view of Theron's character as she at first grimly paddles through rapids, the rush achieved under the shadow of unrelenting grief. Then, as she meets Egerton's character in the jungle after her pack is stolen, it becomes a story of her fight for survival.

Egerton's performance is impressively deranged and I loved the reveal of his especially abnormal predilections, though it verges on cheesy when it's revealed he wears dentures to conceal his sharpened teeth. I'm not saying he wouldn't sharpen his teeth, I just don't know why he'd conceal it when he's hunting a woman alone through the jungle.

Anyway, the suspense is good and never lets up. Apex is available on Netflix.

Blank Page

Yesterday, ahead of watching the new Daredevil: Born Again, I was seeing a lot of articles crop up about how dismal the ratings are for the series this season, much lower than for the first season. It doesn't surprise me. The show has kind of a cheap aesthetic, less unified and streamlined than in its previous incarnation, and it lacks the amazing action choreography that was a calling card of the old series. But primarily the problem is the writing. It's not the wokeness. Andor had progressive, revolutionary politics but now Andor is the benchmark of quality at Disney+. Daredevil: Born Again, meanwhile, makes me think there's some credence in the theory that Disney's secretly having AI write scripts. Last night's episode was credited to Heather Bellson, but it, and many other episodes, feels sort of like a theoretical model of what a show like this should be.

It's missing all of the character development that made the old series so interesting. The episode focuses a lot on Karen, though it's still a mystery why the law firm retroactively included her name, especially since there's no question of her mounting her own defense when she's in a courtroom in this episode. We get a reference to her brother but viewers will be lost if they didn't see or don't remember the episode in season two of the old series that gave her character a prolonged flashback. Similarly, no-one would understand why Bullseye would want to do a "good deed" unless they saw how his character developed in the third season of the old series. The show leans on this stuff but doesn't have anything new to introduce.

There are some interesting performances by Matthew Lillard and Michael Gandalfini but Lillard's character never becomes more than an extended cameo. Gandolfini has an arc but what motivates him? Is it just his attraction to BB? BB, meanwhile, had only one interesting moment, in the previous episode, in which she felt conflicted about what to do with regards to Gandolfini's character.

I guess you could describe the show's fundamental problem in that way; the characters are rarely in situations where they need to make meaningfully difficult decisions. There's an emerging conflict between Matt and Karen but that's another one that started in the old series and on the old Punisher series. Here's an opportunity for the show to make a meaningful comment on the use of violence in politics but Matt's side of the argument is really hazy. Is he conflicted over whether or not he should kill people? Not really.

Also, what, exactly, is Karen charged with? The courtroom dialogue in particular feels disconnected. The opening statements both conclude with "Guilty" or "Not Guilty." But of what? Out of curiosity, I asked Google's ever diplomatic AI, which responded:

In Daredevil: Born Again Season 2, Episode 7 ("The Hateful Darkness"), Karen Page is arrested and faces charges related to aiding vigilante activity following a protest clash, heavily pushed by Mayor Wilson Fisk. She is processed and held in the 15th Precinct, where Fisk confronts her, seeking to punish her for past actions and current defiance.

The fact that the charges are vague could've been part of the drama. It could've been something her lawyers mentioned. It's almost impressive how well the show evades committing to specific plot details. Why are there so many people at the trial or is it only a hearing? Why is everyone interested in this one woman arrested at a protest?

What Disney needs to do is not only hire good writers but give them time and autonomy to develop their ideas. The impression I get is that's something they really don't want to spend money on.

The sad thing is, especially after the shooting on Saturday, this show about a lawyer who's also a masked vigilante who believes in not using lethal force, could've been the most relevant series of the year. Its irrelevance shows the extent of Disney's blunder.

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.

Media and Punishment

This past weekend, a another man attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, this time at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Also this past week it was announced that Gerry Conway, the writer who created the Punisher (along with two artists), passed away.

The Punisher is famous for being the Marvel character who kills people in the name of justice. Critics on the left have generally disliked the Punisher who was introduced in an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man in 1974. He was similar to a popular character type appearing in films of the period, the uncompromising enforcer, the justified revenge killer, as seen in movies like Death Wish and Dirty Harry. The Punisher is a popular character in the U.S. military and law enforcement, a fact which Marvel writers and artists have long been uncomfortable with.

And yet, for years now, political assassins in the U.S. have almost exclusively been left-wing. Violent video games are often also blamed for inspiring shooters but the White House Correspondence Dinner shooter, Cole Allen, was so opposed to violent video games that he developed a video game he specifically labelled as non-violent. Of course, these correlations are statistically irrelevant and anecdotal.

In his manifesto, published in The New York Post, Allen labels Trump a paedophile and a traitor. The reference to paedophilia is presumably to do with Trump's association with Jeffrey Epstein. There are also claims from individual women that Trump engaged in sexual behaviour with them when they were minors. However, unlike other criminal charges that have been levelled at Trump, it hasn't been proven that Trump did commit sexual crimes against minors.

In that first Punisher story, the issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, Conway, perhaps unintentionally, shows the flaw in the Punisher's M.O. He targets Spider-Man and seeks to kill him because he believes Spider-Man is a murderer. It's only Spider-Man's extraordinary powers that prevent the Punisher from killing him before the vigilante realises his mistake. This is one reason that executions are not left in the hands of individuals. Individuals are more prone to error, are more prone to being biased and influenced by emotion.

Of course, Trump has shown repeatedly that he is above the law. Cases against him, both for personal wrong-doing and overextentions of presidential powers, have invariably melted away, leaving him unscathed. What choice do we have in such a case? Allen evidently decided there were no other choices.

I am someone who enjoys violent video games and I like many Punisher stories, particularly the first season of the Netflix series with Jon Bernthal. However, I recognise the difference between cathartic fiction, which presents a simple narrative, and complex reality, which is often distorted by the individual's need for simplicity and emotional gratification. For real life, I prefer to take the example set by Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings who checked Frodo's wish that the villainous Gollum had been killed by reminding him that even wise people cannot predict the outcomes of such actions. One might ask how often assassinations have led to positive change or how often they've instead merely instigated cycles of violence.

I think Cole Allen's demon was more likely born of news media that increasingly present simplified narratives of good and evil in the political spheres. This is one reason I've always preferred fiction.