Liberate Your Plate

Happy Fourth of July, everyone, which was of course yesterday here in Japan. I celebrated it, in spite of Donkey Kong occupying the presidency. I still believe in America's ideals. So I put together an American dinner last night comprised of American imports and locally brewed products, of which there are plenty, despite what Trump says. I had some pork chops from America, a common sight on the grocery store shelves here. I snacked on some California raisins, one of my favourite snacks over the past few years, along with American peanuts. I had some Coca-Cola and a can of Budweiser, despite it being my least favourite beer, but I kind of enjoyed it this time. I made some french fries from locally grown potatoes although I have seen produce from the U.S. In fact, I remember seeing blueberries that were grown in the U.S. I found this amusing considering, when I lived in the U.S., I typically found blueberries that were grown in Mexico. It's a funny musical chairs game, this international trade.

And, last night, I had rice grown in California, which has indeed been imported to Japan for a couple years. Yet it's misleading for so many news sites to claim Trump is wrong when he says Japan won't take American rice. Last month, the powerful retail company, Aeon, started putting Calrose rice on the shelves, the same brand I used to eat when I lived in California. Previously when Aeon put Calrose on the shelves, it remained there as the Japanese preferred to spend extra on Japanese rice, even as the prices of those have skyrocketed due to bad harvests and price gouging. Ahead of Calrose being put on the shelves again, I started asking students if they would eat it. The high rice prices have been a sore subject for a long time now so I figured a few would say, sure, they'd eat the rice from California, considering it's roughly half the price of Japanese rice on the shelves. But not one did. Every student I asked said they'd refuse to eat American rice. It may seem odd considering I routinely hear them speak rapturously of McDonald's or KFC. But rice is a sensitive commodity and it's bound up in national pride. Japan has rarely exported its rice. Every Japanese person I've talked to about it claims that American rice is too different from Japanese rice, that the grains are thicker and not as sticky. Personally, I can't tell the difference and I suspect it's an illusion clung to as part of a common mythology. It's for this very reason that Trump calling out the Japanese for not eating American rice is a particularly low blow, especially since not acknowledging someone else's physical or mental dysfunction as a burden is part of Japanese cultural protocol.

However, at least at my local Aeon, the Calrose rice did sell. Bags rapidly disappeared over the course of a week. I suspect they were mostly bought by restaurants who serve American rice to customers unawares. It's a bit like tricking Michael McKean's character on Better Call Saul into going near an electronic device. There's something faintly cruel about it.

Michael Madsen

Michael Madsen was found dead in Los Angeles to-day. The American actor was 67 years old and reportedly died of "cardiac arrest". His filmography is extensive, including roles in film, television, and video games. He was in Thelma and Louise and Donnie Brasco but he's best known for his work with Quentin Tarantino and it was Madsen's role in Tarantino's first film, Reservoir Dogs, that raised his profile to stardom--and it played no small part in doing the same for Tarantino.

He later made memorable appearances in other Tarantino movies, including Kill Bill, The Hateful Eight, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino seemed to know best how to deploy Madsen's talent for cool, understated delivery.

Maybe it was his role in Kill Bill that had the most depth. His repeated line about how the Bride deserves her vengeance and "we deserve to die . . . but then again, so does she," in a way encapsulates the moral void that builds the tension in so much of Tarantino's work. Madsen's contemplative delivery brings it home like no other actor's could.

The Clones and the FBI

Mulder and Scully investigate the murders of people drained of blood with two puncture wounds on their necks in "Eve", a 1993 episode of The X-Files. Mulder thinks it's aliens. Not one person ever brings up vampires, which I found odd, but it's still a pretty good episode.

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson's chemistry is always a delight. I also like how patient they both are and professional. They end up having to watch over a pair of cloned little girls called Cindy and Teena (Erika and Sabrina Krievins). At one point, they're chasing the kids through a rail yard and Mulder (Duchovny) has to grab them. A couple of people nearby assume Mulder's a kidnapper and angrily point a gun at him. Scully (Anderson) runs up and neither she nor Mulder seem exasperated with the couple. They both urgently but calmly explain that they are the police and they're looking out for the kids' best interests. That level of professional attitude is almost Star Trek-ish, I guess, but it's really nice to see.

The two kind of seem like an old married couple in the episode, driving a couple of kids around, especially when they stop to buy cokes. Who stops on a road trip just to buy cokes? Weren't they hungry?

The X-Files is available on Disney+.

Improbable Musicians

I watched the last two episodes of Ally McBeal's season three a couple nights ago. The season ends with an interesting plot about Nelle (Portia de Rossi) scheming to leave the firm and start her own, manipulating Elaine (Jane Krakowski) to steal client files for her. The point made by the plot is that heartless, scheming people may end up successful but they also end up with no friends. To make this point, the show seems to forget that Ling (Lucy Liu) is her best friend. She's in the episodes but the show just glides along, leaving her motives and reactions to Nelle keeping this big secret from her unaddressed.

The episodes feature Alicia Witt as a cold-blooded lawyer advising Nelle on how to betray her firm. Witt is a performer who always manages to be a pleasant surprise for me. She generally turns up in things I had no prior knowledge of her being in. When I watched Vanilla Sky again a few weeks ago, I'd totally forgotten she was in the movie and was pleasantly surprised when she turned up in the climax. Witt got her start as a child actress in David Lynch's Dune and had a memorable appearance as Gersten Hayward on Twin Peaks in 1990 at the age of 14.

She had a musical number on Ally McBeal ten years later, this time singing:

The show has really exceeded the plausible number of lawyers in Boston with musical talents.

Earlier this year, a friend of mine lent me a DVD of Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King, a 2004 German television movie based on Norse mythology in which I was surprised to see Witt playing Kriemhild, the badass from the Nibelungenlied. Unfortunately, there was something wrong with the DVD or it disagreed with my player somehow so I was only able to watch a third of it. I haven't been able to get my hands on it digitally from any venue but I'd love to see it, even though it is extremely cheesy with a Xena: Warrior Princess vibe.

Yeah, that's Robert Pattinson before he learned to brood all the time.

The Norse myths are really overdue for a proper film adaptation though Fritz Lang's Nibelungenlied movies from the 1920s remain spectacular, in my opinion.

The 2020s have not been kind to Alicia Witt. Her parents died because their home was improperly heated in the winter and she got breast cancer. She's still working, though. She appeared in last year's lauded horror film Longlegs and she's been recording music. Here's a music video from three years ago:

Versions of Bird Stories

Two girls work through their issues while honing their skills as musicians in 2018's Liz and the Blue Bird (リズと青い鳥). The deft touch of storytelling and insight into human nature recall Japan's golden age of filmmaking and the likes of Ozu and Naruse. It's a treat.

Mizore (Atsumi Tanezaki) and Nozomi (Nao Toyama) are members of their high school's concert band. Mizore plays the oboe and Nozomi plays the flute. The piece the band is currently practicing calls for a duet between their two instruments, symbolising the relationship between a woman named Liz and a bluebird that takes the form of a human girl. The music is based on a fairy tale which is shown as a film-within-a-film, depicting Liz as a young woman in a fantasy European town and the bluebird as a chipper girl with blue hair. Liz finds the girl injured one day and takes her into her home.

As someone who's worked in Japanese junior high schools for the past five and a half years and has frequently hung out with the school brass bands I can tell you the film is remarkably true to life. A lot of manga and anime are set in schools but rarely do they feel so authentic. I've known plenty of students like these. Mizore in particular is soft spoken in a way I very often see in life but rarely see in anime. There are many girls who rarely speak and when they do they can be very difficult to hear. This is often interpreted as shyness, and some of it is shyness, but a lot of it is tact.

I often see pairs of girls like Mizore and Nozomi. In America, too, it's not unusual for girls to have intensely important best friend relationships which you don't see among boys but I think such relationships are more important in Japan because of the collectivist nature of the culture. Looking for social guidance among peers is more important and the Japanese are much more afraid of embarrassment. So for many, having a best friend is a crucial life raft in the troubled sea of social interaction. I was impressed with how well the film captured this while also conveying a sense of just how new relationships with complex psychological depths are for the girls.

The movie is a spin-off of Sound! Euphonium, which I saw a few years before I came to Japan. You don't need to have seen the series to understand the film since it focuses on different characters but, for those who have seen the series, it's fun to spot the main characters in the background. It helps create the sense of a living world.

Liz and the Blue Bird is available on The Criterion Channel as part of their Queersighted: Coming of Age playlist. The filmmakers have stated they did not intend the relationship between the girls to be homosexual. I suppose it's fair to read it that way though it's a bit like saying Frodo and Sam are gay in The Lord of the Rings. Maybe that's satisfying if it's what you're looking for but it misses the cultural differences between western culture to-day and the one Tolkien is depicting. The same goes for the differences between American and Japanese culture. The Japanese do many things Americans would regard as clearly homosexual. It's very common, for example, for boys to sit in each other's laps. But the Japanese don't see it as gay so, of course, it's not. I'm a firm believer in art being open to interpretation and of people being able to have multiple, valuable experiences for one work of art. But if you see Liz and the Blue Bird and Lord of the Rings as gay, you may be oversimplifying from your cultural perspective and missing a glimpse into another facet of possibility in human relationships.

The Old Trek Footage

I put in Star Trek II on Saturday night expecting to fall asleep during it. I dozed off once, backtracked a little, and ended up watching the whole movie. Unlike Star Wars, which, especially lately after Andor, always seems to be vital and new, Star Trek is beginning to feel more and more like a time capsule. It was really smart for George Lucas to set Star Wars in another galaxy, in the past. So much of Star Trek is about a vision of the future and that's just the sort of thing that can be horribly dated. When Star Trek II came out in 1982, we thought maybe the future could be somewhat like that. Now we're all wiser (of course, I was three years old in 1982). We can enjoy the movie as a fantasy, but now the audience is compensating for the film.

All this is ironic in light of the film's themes of youth and rebirth. Admiral Kirk is starting to feel his age, something that's also ironic as to-day actor William Shatner is a 94 year old of remarkable mental acuity. So seeing him play old in 1982, a mere lad of 51, is another instance of the audience doing some work for the film.

The film is still a pleasure to watch for its enthusiastic venture into a slightly different pulp genre for the series, away from science fiction and more towards Horatio Hornblower style, naval battle suspense. In this, it's sort of like Andor--revivifying an old franchise by shifting into a different genre. Star Trek II set the tone for all Star Trek films to follow, one wonders if Andor won't do the same for Star Wars.

Khan's a good villain. Ricardo Montalban hams it up but he comes off as truly mad rather than cheesy. I think about what it must be like to be so obsessed with making someone else suffer. I've met a few people like that, who seem to be so overcome by resentment that they think nothing of compromising their own integrity, mental health, and reputation in the pursuit of causing pain to a specific target. I do have an obsessive personality myself, which can be useful if properly applied, but the last thing you want to get obsessed with is anything as unpredictable and mysterious as a human being. It certainly does Khan no favours.

Rebekah Del Rio

And now Rebekah Del Rio has died, the singer who made two significant appearances in David Lynch media, first in Mulholland Drive and then on Twin Peaks. Her performance of "Llorando", a Spanish language version of Roy Orbison's "Crying", is one of the highlights of Mulholland Drive, a movie which just this past week ranked number two in a poll for the best ten movies of the 21st century. Mulholland Drive has topped many such lists and anyone who's seen the movie knows Del Rio's performance is key to the film's impact, thematically and viscerally.

So many people from the show have died since the final episode of Twin Peaks aired in 2017. For so long I hoped to get another season, now I really hope I don't. Maybe Mark Frost, Twin Peaks co-creator, could make a spin-off series. I'd be down for that. But there's no Twin Peaks without David Lynch. Lately I've felt kind of angry that he's dead. He wasn't finished, he was making something called Unrecorded Night for Netflix. It bothers me he didn't get to complete that.

At least we'll always have season three and Rebekah Del Rio's incredible, haunting, and piercing performance of "No Stars". The lyrics of the song, which Lynch wrote, seem be from one lover to another, imploring them to return to a good time in their mutual past. Somehow it's a night with "no stars", and this is somehow comforting to the singer. It tends to remind me of the scene in the first episode of season three when the young couple are killed mid-coitus by a demoniac being, presumed by the show's analysts to be Judy, the series' hidden antagonist. The fact that there are no stars may be an implication that no observing, sadistic, antisexual being will impede the will of lovers. It's a beautiful song lamenting, like so many Twin Peaks songs, a love out of reach. And Rebekah Del Rio sang it beautifully.

X Sonnet 1949

An idle question stopped the talk at lunch.
The workers glanced around and sipped their tea.
But then, below they heard a sloshy crunch.
The devil's sun would melt the frozen key.
A sense of dread disturbed the gathered gents.
It seemed the railings changed to shady spies.
And floating eyes emerged from cooling vents.
They pooled some cash and left uneaten pies.
Another year and now the caf's a bust.
The noisy devil drove the crowds away.
And so the diner trappings gather rust.
And only tacky ghosts within will stray.
Another business bites the phantom shot.
A bullet aimed above but hit the spot.

Iron Falls with a Thud

I finally got through the first three episodes of Ironheart that premiered on Wednesday. I find it very dull. I think the main problems for me are the characters, performances, and plot. The special effects are okay. It's not, and I want to be emphatic about this, it's not bad because it's woke.

It is woke. Ironheart was filmed some time ago, before Disney reportedly decided it was going to backtrack on some of its stridently progressive politics. I haven't actually seen evidence they're doing that but, anyway, Ironheart has Riri Williams join a group of thieves planning a heist, three of whom just happen to use they/them pronouns. And, you know, I might not even have cared a couple years ago but now I was really happy to see them. Back when I lived in the U.S., gender non-conformists had gotten to be a pretty normal sight so the inclusion of three in a group doesn't feel strained to me. It feels perfectly normal, at least in a major city (kudos to the series for being set in Chicago instead of New York yet again). Now, it feels refreshing in Trump's America, where transphobes seem to be having a moment in the sun. I was watching the Critical Drinker's review on YouTube and I was disgusted when he showed a still image of one of the three characters in question and he gave it a long, protracted, fake laugh. Maybe he lives in some rural, far-flung hamlet in Scotland and has never had a barista with blue hair and chrome lipstick but he's a grown man living in the modern world. Laughing at someone for wearing something unconventional for their sex is like laughing at someone for wearing sandals at this point. It's the forced laugh of a bully and it made me really want to champion this series.

But, fuck, like I said, it's dull. I remember how good the first episodes of Ms. Marvel were because it was aggressively creative, the star was charismatic and surprising, and everyone had clear motives. Somehow or another, Riri Williams doesn't pop. I saw Black Panther 2, which I liked, but I don't remember her presence being all that noticeable there, either. Now it's not really clear what's motivating her, why she's committed to this knock off Iron Man suit. No-one even talks about her using it to catch murderers or thieves. Well, I guess she is a thief.

Ironheart is available on Disney+.

The Elven Beauty Tragedy

Sometimes I type questions into Google just to gauge how many people are asking the question. This morning I started typing, "Why are Elder Scrolls--" and before I could get any further, Google autocompleted for me, guessing exactly the question I was going to ask: "Why are Elder Scrolls elves so ugly?" Of course, I already know the answer; it's poor design. Well, to be exact, it's a bad 3D interpretation of a 2D design. Here's some original concept art from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind:

They're not pretty but they're clearly inspired by Brian Froud, intended to have a mischievous forest creature quality. Somehow in 3D, it just translates to all hard, blocky angles. I remember Caitlin once said they all looked like Beavis from Beavis and Butthead.

Of course, one of the things the modding community has been busy with is making the elves pretty, as they are in pretty much every other high fantasy setting. One of the modded companions I've been playing with lately is the very popular Auri, a wood elf.

In terms of writing and voice acting, Auri is much better than the average Skyrim follower mod. I like how Auri makes canon aspects of the wood elves, a.k.a. Bosmer, interesting. They're a tree-hugging people, in love with the forest. Sometimes in fantasy settings, this means the people are vegetarians but, logically, it makes more sense that they avoid eating plant matter entirely. So Elder Scrolls wood elves eat only meat. Even humanoid meat. Auri takes it a step further by filing her teeth to sharp points.

Default Auri is still ugly but there are plenty of visual replacers for her. Yes, there are mods of mods.

When Straight Shooting Won't Suffice

A rural Arizona lawman heads to New York City to extradite an LSD fiend and killer in 1968's Coogan's Bluff. Clint Eastwood stars and Don Siegel directs. It's an entertaining crime thriller.

Coogan (Eastwood) garners mockery for his cowboy getup and expectation to transfer custody of the killer, James Ringerman (Don Stroud), without much paperwork. NYPD Lieutenant McElroy (Lee J. Cobb) explains to him he's gotta talk to the D.A. and then the New York supreme court and wait an indeterminate amount of time for the doctors to release Ringerman from Bellevue, where he's recovering from LSD withdrawal. So Coogan waltzes right into the hospital and bluffs his way all the way to Ringerman's doctor whom he convinces to release Ringerman to his custody without any paperwork whatsoever.

You might expect this to be a conservative fantasy about a lone cowboy navigating the waters of liberal lunacy, bureaucratic and psychedelic, and you'd be right. But the politics here aren't so obnoxious, though when Coogan decks a guy for fondling a woman's breast against her will, I didn't believe that she would've chewed Coogan out for it the way she does. But I suppose for a particularly avant-garde psychotherapist it wouldn't be out of the realm of imagination. Susan Clark plays Julie, the psychotherapist who wants to obstruct Coogan's attempts to track criminals with relationships to Ringerman. But she succumbs to Coogan's charm and what she doesn't give up to him he steals from her filing cabinet.

The movie takes a page from Yojimbo--establishing its protagonist as a kind of ultimate badass and then having him ambushed and worked over by a couple of lowlife thugs. Coogan's Bluff does this early in the movie and it works as a great source of tension and motivation. I think most viewers will be incensed by the injustice and the film firmly puts us in Coogan's corner.

Coogan's Bluff is available on The Criterion Channel until the end of the month.

Bring Your Own Values

A couple years ago, I attempted to watch 1993's Addams Family Values, the first time I'd watched it in the 21st century, but found myself too distracted by how it's been co-opted by modern politics. Over this past weekend, I enjoyed watching it through, after having talked about it with a student. Of course, any political co-opting among Japanese junior high school students will be different than the kind you'd find in the western cultural landscape. But at its heart, The Addams Family really has no philosophy but comedy.

Those seeing Values as pushing progressive ideals conveniently overlook that Morticia talks about naming her baby "Benito" or "Mao". When I was a kid, I saw Wednesday's assault in Indian cosplay for what it really is--an amusing pretext for violence and mayhem.

This month, Criterion is presenting Addams Family Values as part of a playlist of "Queer Sighted Cinema". I had an inkling of how the film's inclusion on such a list, despite having no gay characters, might be justified but I watched the playlist's introductory conversation between curator Michael Koresky and filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow, We're All Going to the World's Fair) anyway. Schoenbrun discussed how Wednesday at the summer camp is placed in a faction of outsiders--ethnic minorities and disabled kids. In this sense, the film is "queer" in something like the older sense of the word which, sure, can absolutely also function in the modern sense. But the student rebellion against the faculty is a standard plot that can speak to many different political perspectives. Certainly in recent years, the voices of students rebelling against an ideologically progressive academic faculty have been very strident.

I will say the film certainly adores BDSM. Morticia even rapturously praises the pain of childbirth as she maintains her perfect poise. It's odd to watch in this particular cultural moment. The troubles surrounding Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer seem to me a massive blow against the cultural acceptance of BDSM. Regardless of which party you believe or if anyone is lying, it leaves the impression of a practice where consent can be withdrawn at any time and the joyous exploration of the relationship between pain and pleasure can be recast at any time by participants and observers as criminal and perverse. The Addams Family, of course, are basically immortal so we can laugh along with them as they're electrocuted and crushed and stabbed. There's a liberation cartoon characters can enjoy that perhaps humanity never can.

Addams Family Values is available on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet 1948

Illusion makes the forest teeth of woods.
A splintered 'chomp' resounds between the hills.
A fungal crowd demands the algae goods.
There's always ghostly Ken to pay the bills.
In error's season, grains were glued to bread.
Refusing food's the right of rich and dumb.
The dancing bones made sport of fleshy dead.
Museums compete to show the precious crumb.
A jungle wrought of lies condemns its kids.
A singing orphan swings from vines and brains.
In chorus, little monkeys offer bids.
But cheaply goes the blanket marked with stains.
The heavy golden dawn reveals her leg.
A sexy limb shall crush the safety egg.

The History of Sex on the Internet

It's always fascinating, at least to me, going back and watching media from the early days of the internet that tried to deal with some of the more radical cultural changes on the horizon in the new arena of human interaction. Last night I watched "Do You Wanna Dance?", an Ally McBeal episode from May 8, 2000 in which Ally has "internet sex" and later discovers that her partner was an underage boy, played by guest star Jonathon Taylor Thomas.

It seems absurd to-day that Ally would be arrested for this and, of course, when it goes to trial, her innocence is quickly established. With all the anonymity on the internet, a rendezvous like this probably happens millions of times a day. It's not so much an issue of teenagers displaying unexpected sexual maturity but people expecting lower sexual maturity from adults.

It seems unfortunate kids are always in such a hurry to become adults. I imagine this leads to lifelong repressed sexual issues as teens have experiences their own immature prejudices will compel them to regard harshly. I'm reminded of watching Evangelion again recently and the penultimate episode in which the Human Instrumentality Project is implemented and everyone--man, woman, child, friends, family--is forced into becoming the same entity. In the segment focusing on Misato, the young woman who cares for 14 year old protagonist Shinji, she finds herself being watched by the boy while she's having sex. As a child insecure about sex, he's disgusted, and now their relationship is different. How is humanity supposed to function when adults aren't free to be adults, when they're under constant potential surveillance by children? It would be a world in which no-one could escape high school.

The Ally McBeal episode aired just two months after Kirsty MacColl released her song "Here Comes that Man Again" which is about her having online sex with a Dutchman.

Both the song and the Ally McBeal episode imply a certain enthusiasm about the potential in this new form of sex but I think we can all agree that sexting isn't quite as satisfying for the observer or third party as more conventional forms of media. Without the excitement of actually being a participant, it's not visual enough or imaginative enough in its description. I think in the '90s people were thinking online sex could one day be an end unto itself but, for the most part, sexting still seems to be something people do only when something physical is off the table. At least that's the impression I have. Maybe there are some people who'd be content with sexting all their lives.

Force versus Jedi

I was lying in bed, thinking it was nice how Andor made the Force obscure, something that it was reasonable for Cassian not to believe in. It's unfortunate that Rebels is considered canon, with two Jedi wandering around in the same period, part of the same organisation, even visiting the same Rebel base where Cassian is living. I was thinking about that then I opened YouTube and saw this video was recommended:

Are algorithms using the Force to read my thoughts?

Anyway, the premise of the video isn't very well thought out. Han says he doesn't believe in the Force, not that he doesn't believe in the Jedi. You can believe the Knights Templar existed without believing in God. Since the Empire had to justify slaughtering the Jedi, it's probable Han was exposed to propaganda throughout his life labelling the Jedi as frauds. One might think it strange that Palpatine and Vader would preside over a system that discredits the Force, especially since Vader finds lack of faith "disturbing", but reserving true knowledge for an elite class is the sort of thing a fascist government might do. Common people being able to read the bible for the first time in the 16th century was a major part of the changes reshaping Europe in the period. I often think of the scene in The Thief of Bagdad in which the Sultan shows Jaffar his clock and Jaffar says that the common people must never have such a device or the Sultan will cease to be the master of time.

Anyway, the Jedi were a relatively small group. A crucial point of the prequels is that the Jedi were not an army. Yoda said that Jedi could use the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack, so demonstrations of their abilities would've been relatively rare. Han may have seen some telekinesis on holovids but he could easily right that off as "simple tricks and nonsense."

The idea of an old, true religion replaced by a new one lacking demonstrable power seemed to be a recurrent theme in a few examples of '80s fantasy. I'm thinking of Excalibur and Dragonlance. Both were influenced by Star Wars but I wonder if this preoccupation was part of the cultural longing for a unifying belief system that had been effectively abolished in the '60s.

Default Man

I was watching Matt Reeves' The Batman again last night, the first time I've seen it since seeing it in the theatre. My initial impression of it being the most vanilla Batman movie remains. The Tim Burton ones, the Christopher Nolan ones, even the Joel Schumacher ones, always felt like they were trying to do something radical. Reeves' movie takes the radical aspects of those films--Burton's gothic aesthetic and Nolan's grittiness--and deploys them as standard issue. The actual plot is mostly procedural and reminds me more of the animated series than of any of the comics. I'm still puzzled that some called it the darkest Batman movie. None of the main characters die and Paul Dano's performance as the Riddler is about as zany as Jim Carrey's, albeit with Zodiac killer dressing. The ending is certainly more softball than one of Burton's or Nolan's.

I guess the only aspect I really think pushed the envelope was the score by Michael Giacchino which is mostly low key and seems to be built entirely around Nirvana's "Something In the Way". I suspect a lot of the praise for the film was politically motivated as the plot deals with class resentment and touches on privilege, not only financial but also racial. These aspects are dealt with at about the same level of sophistication as an episode of Columbo. Bruce Wayne is shown to be flawed, almost childlike, for his low capacity for empathy. The line "I am vengeance," always seemed like it was meant to be powerful in previous incarnations of Batman; here he's openly mocked for it.

But I find these political elements mostly unobtrusive in the film which is more concerned with how point A connects with point B, with how one clue leads to another, with how one character's connexion to another is relevant to motivation. It has some of the fetishistic qualities of the Burton and Schumacher films as Reeves doesn't feel Nolan's need to maintain a sense of realism at all times. It's fun.

The Batman is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.

And More

I love how people are obsessively talking about Andor. It's so good having a show like that around again, something intelligent that prompts intelligent conversation.

This morning I watched this video by a guy called the Feral Historian who makes the point that the Rebellion, while largely leftist coded, can be interpreted as a right-wing group since their goal is better described as restoration rather than revolution. From that perspective, you could almost call the Empire progressive. In Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine does make the point that it is the first Galactic Empire. You could hardly call that conservative, reorganising the system of government into something that had never existed before. The Empire may be closer to Soviets than Nazis.

I keep waiting for someone to point it out and I'm sure someone has but the shots of stormtroopers coming down the steps during the Ghorman massacre seem pretty clearly modelled on the famous sequence of Russian troops coming down the steps in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.

X Sonnet 1947

The laundry waits for sun beneath the clouds.
We hear the steady drip of soapy socks.
An army's worth of clothes defend the crowds.
But maybe sort them towards a prison box.
The river flows with soap as time would clean.
Another year would pass before the suds.
An olive tree emerged from Lucy's bean.
The brittle branches launched a fleet of buds.
Intrusive birds would crowd the fragile perch.
Their talons broke their stockings ev'ry time.
But rarely crows could fail a garbage search.
We took to gest'ring notes by cour'yer mime.
The edifice of useless days awaits.
A foolish block of bone and brain it baits.

The Gentleman Vanishes

A young woman in a foreign country is subjected to psychological manipulations by the locals in 1950's So Long at the Fair. Jean Simmons plays Vicky, an Englishwoman who wakes up one morning in her Parisian hotel to find not only has her brother disappeared but his hotel room has vanished with him. The story that follows, based loosely on an urban legend, is an effective entry in the gaslight genre.

Of course, the hotel staff insist they have no memory of her brother or of room 19 ever being anything other than a washroom. I thought it unlikely that any explanation the film provided could satisfactorily make sense of this. I thought it would be like Dangerous Crossing, another movie with a similar premise in which the explanation ended up making very little sense. But actually So Long at the Fair's explanation, while unlikely, does make sense, so long as one remembers that real people, even communities, occasionally do very strange and unwise things.

There's a nice contrast between the normal, sensible world Vicky goes to sleep in and the nightmare she wakes up in, in which everyone behaves as though all her memories of her brother are her delusions. Matters are made more difficult by the fact that Vicky's command of French is weak. It's rare for a movie of this period to make language differences an important aspect of the story and I certainly appreciated it here.

Inevitably, there are flaws in the elaborate deception, the most significant being a young man named George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde), an artist from England. He assumes an heroic role but the film maintains its tension. He enlists the aid of a doctor played by none other than Andre Morell. It's always nice when he turns up.

So Long at the Fair is available on The Criterion Channel.

Get Your Threepenny's Worth

A notorious killer marries the daughter of the king of beggars in 1931's The Threepenny Opera (Die 3 Groschen-Oper), GW Pabst's adaptation of the famous stage musical by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. The stage play's socialist message was diminished in favour of portraying humanity of all stripes as thoroughly corrupt. It's grimly amusing with a standout performance by Lotte Lenya in the role of Jenny.

The story's set in Victorian London though, being a German production, everyone's speaking German. Mackie Messer/Mack the Knife (Rudolph Forster) runs a gang of thieves and enjoys the attentions of all the prostitutes in town, particularly the sinister Jenny.

Lenya has such an odd, angular beauty. She really doesn't need to tell us she has secret connexions to pirates; something about her body language and face suggest violence. When she learns that Mack has abruptly married Polly (Carola Neher), it's easy to believe Mack's in real danger of her revenge.

Polly's father (Fritz Rasp) is chief of all the beggars in town and organises them like the head of a workhouse. Rather than a leftist rabble-rouser, he's a cynical caricature drawn straight from that old right wing urban myth about the secretly wealthy street beggars. I remember hearing people still repeating it now and then back when I lived in the U.S. People would talk with a straight face about someone in rags who'd sneak behind the corner and drive off in a Lamborghini.

He demands the chief of police, Tiger Brown (Reinhold Schunzel), capture and execute Mack but it takes some convincing because, of course, Brown and Mack are bosom buddies.

The Threepenny Opera is available on The Criterion Channel.