A woman inherits a hotel in Louisiana and that's about the last time the plot makes sense in 1981's The Beyond (E tu vivrai nel terrore! L'aldilà). Italian horror movies of the period generally don't have the most logical plots but this one feels especially like just a stream of consciousness series of scenes, some of which borrow heavily from earlier Italian horror films.
It's also gratuitously and unconvincingly gory. It's kind of admirable the confidence with which director Lucio Fulci lingers on a shot of an obviously papier-mache head splurting cherry slurpee. But The Beyond has its good points, too, mainly in its cinematography by Sergio Salvati and the ideas behind some of those random scenes.
I love this one. Liza (Catriona MacColl) is driving down a featureless road with empty sea on either side. She comes upon a blind woman named Emily (Cinzia Monreale) standing in the middle of the road with her dog.
It's positively Caitlin R. Kiernan-esque.
I wonder where this road is. Many exteriors were obviously shot in New Orleans and interiors were as obviously shot in Italy on soundstages.
I especially love the hotel's basement. After they tear open a space that had been bricked up, there's a space with planks of wood over water the movie keeps coming back to. I love the lighting and design of this place.
So much of this movie reminds me of playing Doom and Quake in a very pleasant way.
The Beyond is available on Shudder, a seven day free trial of which I'm currently trying to milk for all it's worth.
So somehow I've gone all these years without hearing about the twist ending of 1983's Sleepaway Camp, or how homophobic and transphobic the movie is. It seems like I must have seen it lumped in with that DePalma movie with Michael Caine but if I have I've totally forgotten about it. It's an interesting movie, though. The makeup effects on the murder victims are really good. I like the snake coming out of the kid's mouth.
I was surprised (and, yeah, disappointed) by the scarcity of exploitative nudity in the film. But it's amusing to see how perfectly average homophobes used to wear belly shirts and cut-off shorts.
Nowadays, it seems rare even to see women showing that much belly in movies.
The performances aren't very good, except Mike Kellin as a cigar chopping, slightly anachronistic old salt. But the bad performances have a refreshing sense of authenticity about them. These are lousy actors but they're really from the area it's filmed in. The New York accents are real without the movie trying to make a point about New York. And, as usual with '70s and '80s movies, it's nice to see most of the actors aren't wearing twelve inches of foundation to achieve "normal" skin. I'm pretty sure this guy's moustache is fake, though;
The climax of the film uses some effective camera work and special effects to make its unenlightened point. That adds a disturbing layer to it, though. It's as though, in the attempt to show a scary pervert, they accidentally created a bizarre, supernatural beast. The fact that the observing characters at the end don't see the really strange thing is also disturbing.
Twitter Sonnet #1487
Remembrance dwells in fingers touched to cheeks.
A fragrant night returns a floral wreath.
The acrobat was waiting 'tween the peaks.
Tomato drapes conceal the glowing teeth.
The jelly glasses stuck to azure eyes.
A tiny horse appeared beneath the thumb.
A soccer team was baked in cookie pies.
A score could never taste a missing crumb.
The ancient pen traversed the later seas.
The plastic clam can savour something weird.
We had a tusk, completing laughing bees.
A cool remark became a pointy beard.
The shaky boat concealed a mop of hair.
The floating face arouses special care.
I showed the Sleepy Hollow part of Ichabod and Mr. Toad to two classes of first year students to-day. One class was pretty quiet for it but I was really pleased with some big laughs and gasps from the second class. I already knew they were a particularly congenial, rowdy bunch of kids and maybe it shouldn't surprise me they were more receptive to old fashioned, zany American cartoon humour than some other classes.
It does get me thinking what a strange thing American cartoons were. The kids were saying, "Sugoi" and "sugei" (amazing) when Ichabod was stuffing whole pies in his mouth or swiftly avoiding Brom Bones' punches. Yeah, I realised, these are superhuman feats. It's weird how we tend not to think of it.
I took the opportunity to explain some western superstitions before the film so they understood when Ichabod avoided walking under the ladder and guided the black cat out of his path.
I showed part of Alice in Wonderland to second year students last week, the part where Alice grows big in the White Rabbit's house. Having shown it to a few silent student audiences, I was pleased to hear a group of girls really get into it. One girl laughed at just the right moment when Alice opens the shutters to peer out the window in giant form. I've discovered this girl's English is very strong.
"Why are you so good at English?" I asked her.
She shrugged, "I don't know!"
I followed up with one of my standard questions; "What did you eat for breakfast this morning?"
"Yoghurt, a chocolate doughnut, and hot cocoa!"
I'm used to kids just saying, "Rice," or, "Bread". The more I talk to her, the more I think she's the right audience for Alice in Wonderland. She's also a natural leader, like River Phoenix in Stand by Me. The other girls look up to her and I saw her comforting a girl who was crying after a difficult test. I'm continually amazed by the students I meet on this job.
I saw that The Criterion Channel was showing 1935's Bride of Frankenstein and was seduced into watching it again by Elsa Lanchester's face on the home page. It's such an unsatisfying movie, though, because she doesn't show up as the monster's bride until near the very end and she only sticks around a few minutes. Then there's abrupt destruction, really leaving you with the feeling the film was originally meant to be longer.
Lanchester shines more in the film's prologue segment as Mary Shelley in a gorgeous gown.
She's perfect casting not as the real Mary Shelley but as a woman to stimulate the audience imagination as the creator of horror. She's pretty but also somehow perverse with her prominent teeth, hard jaw, and dark, ghoulish eyes.
In some ways, the film is more faithful to the original novel than James Whale's first Frankenstein film. The monster, played by Boris Karloff, learns some English and starts getting contemplative, though he's not the angsty philosopher of the book. I do get the impression that Lanchester's Mary Shelley might be slightly in love with the monster, more than the Bride is.
That makes more sense for the novel than for the movie. Oh, if only this film were bigger. It's a shame Lanchester never returned to the role, or James Whale to the property. The visuals in this movie remain handsomely gothic.
One thing led to another and I ended up watching Michael Jackson's "Thriller" with a class of fifteen year-olds yesterday. I used to watch it over and over when I was a kid. I remember trying to get friends and neighbours to watch it with me so they could bask in how scary it was. None of them seemed to appreciate it. Yet it is from the supposed best selling album of all time.
I don't think a story needs a character you can identify with to be good but I suspect the love Michael seems to have for horror movies radiates from the song and video in a way I found satisfyingly relatable. He was at a point in his plastic surgery journey where he was still really handsome and charming. Seeing him tease his girlfriend about jump scares comes off as really sweet, certainly for many girls watching. That's one of the great things about beauty, it can elevate the ordinary.
It's still fascinating to watch him move. People can imitate his dance moves but no-one can really move like him. It's so quick and natural. It's like Bruce Lee but without the arrogance. You can see his heart in his smile or his demoniac grin.
Twitter Sonnet #1486
To finish sooner plucks the tardy quill.
To written wings the flight was given shape.
To make a foot's to nab a shoe to fill.
To drop a tail's to turn from monk to ape.
To choose a dream's to nail a track to space.
To go to bed's to shade the meaning late.
To summon ghosts about the road's to race.
To burn the key's to seal the only gate.
To pour the tea, descend the steaming spine.
To drink the blood, descry the drifting barque.
To catch the wind you mend the course's line.
To start the race you find the starting mark.
To speak the word you need a plot of land.
To listen close you need a savage band.
The writing in Angel season two isn't always the strongest. I'm about halfway through and though there've been some strong stand-out episodes, like "Guise Will Be Guise" (one of the best of the whole series, I now think) and "Blood Money", the season suffers from some bad overall arc ideas. After Angel leaves a bunch of Wolfram and Hart attorneys to the mercy of Darla and Drusilla, his staff are all horrified. So he fires them so he can be unfettered by their scruples. This leads to a situation that lasts for several episodes in which Angel and the Angel Investigations teams work separately. The trouble is, I don't buy anyone's motives for this. I don't think Gunn, in particular, would be bothered by Wolfram and Hart's people being eaten. Certainly not season one Cordelia, though, sadly, season two is where the ever delightfully mercenary valley girl became tiresomely righteous, around the same time Charisma Carpenter apparently got breast implants and an unflattering short haircut. It's only Wesley I can see being plausibly aghast, but I couldn't see it being a deal breaker even for him. Angel's decision to fire the three of them makes no sense, too, because it's not like they were really standing in his way before. And it's likely he needed only wait until another screenwriter was at hand for them to come around to his opinion, anyway.
But I liked the past two episodes I just watched, "Blood Money" and "Happy Anniversary". Both feel exceptionally comic book-ish--"Blood Money" feels like Batman and "Happy Anniversary" feels like Tales from the Crypt.
I like how the character played by Julia Lee, first introduced as Chantarelle on Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 2, is re-introduced. Although she and Angel had met on Buffy, neither recognises the other, and that's actually plausible. They both look different, especially Anne, and I don't think they heard each other's names back then. A lesser show would've had an awkward line of dialogue where she mentioned knowing Buffy and the two characters would fill each other in. Instead, we get something much more realistic and strange--two characters whose paths previously crossed who have no idea they've crossed a second time. That's like the legitimate strangeness of human existence.
"Happy Anniversary" is the first to feature the Host as a full on guest star and he drops some fairly insightful lines that Andy Hallett's ever delightful, melodious delivery makes sound profound. The main plot about a physicist whose invention stops time feels very much like the kind of cruel moral tale you'd see in the original Tales from the Crypt comics, except the ending isn't so grim. The way he overhears his girlfriend planning to break up with him after giving him a "sympathy bone" on their anniversary feels so oddly relation-drama for Angel it makes me wonder if this is actually something from one of the writers' (as it happens, show creators David Greenwalt and Joss Whedon) personal lives. Hopefully neither one would have endangered the world to freeze time mid-coitus.
Angel is available on Disney+ in Australia and Amazon Prime in the US.
Two extremely powerful psychic children are chased by Donald Pleasence and Ray Milland in Disney's 1975 film Escape to Witch Mountain. A badly written film filled with too many plot convenient coincidences and vaguely established character motives, it nonetheless has a few moments of magic.
Tony (Ike Eisenmann) and Tia (Kim Richards) are the supernatural siblings, recently re-orphaned after their foster parents passed away. We meet them as they're trying to adjust to life in the orphanage. On an outing one day, Tia spots Donald Pleasence about to get into a car and knows he'll die if he does. She warns him and he avoids getting into the car just before a truck slams into the passenger side. He realises these are exactly the kinds of kids his employer, a powerful and irritable rich man played by Ray Milland, is looking for.
For what nefarious purpose does the sinister Aristotle Bolt (Milland) seek powerful psychic children? He lures them to his fabulous--and, by God, I mean really fabulous--mansion. He gives them ice cream and a combination playroom and bedroom cluster of chambers all to themselves. It all looks too good to be true.
And so Tia says her powers tell her. Yet we never actually learn what Bolt wanted them for. He makes a vague speculation about how they could easily find oil wells. So he wants to use them to make money and all he gives them in return is, apparently, anything they want. I'm not seeing the downside here.
It's weird from that angle but as a point of character development it's also pretty wobbly. Think it through a second. Powerful and absurdly rich Bolt gets it into his head one day he needs someone with psychic powers. He needs that someone so bad he tells his top man to scour the land. In one scene, he angrily promises to fire Pleasence if he fails to deliver once again. All of this would naturally lead one to believe he must have a very strong, specific reason to retain the services of a psychic. You don't launch the kind of manhunt evidently underway because you wake up one morning thinking, "Gee, I bet a psychic would come in handy in the world of business." The performances by Milland and Pleasence are of course the best in the film but, for that reason, I was left wanting knowledge of their motives all the more.
But the kids escape and go on the run. They're helped by Eddie Albert who drives a Winnebago that presumably runs on petroleum from a well that was found without aid of a psychic. It's not hard for them to stay a step ahead of their pursuers because the kids can push cars off cliffs with their minds or pluck pistols out of people's hands. But then a sheriff jumps out from behind a corner after waiting for them at the exact spot Eddie Albert randomly decides to drop them off. There's absolutely nothing about the chain of events that makes sense yet it's almost worth it when Tony thwarts the sheriff by animating his coat rack with his magic harmonica.
There are few nice ideas like this. The kids take on a bear companion briefly, which I liked. But these moments are always couched in bafflingly bad dialogue filled with senseless justifications or conflicts. When Tia wants to free the bear, Tony argues with her that they shouldn't because they can't take care of the bear once they're in the woods. As though the bear is unable to care for itself and would render the children no assistance in their flight from an angry mob that thinks they're witches (of course, the bear almost immediately turns out to be useful for exactly this).
The sequel has a different screenwriter so I might check it out.
A French dance troupe inadvertently takes LCD and horrific hijinks ensue in 2018's Climax. A loosely structured film that was largely improvised by mostly non-professional actors, I'd have thought it'd be fairly boring if someone had explained it to me before I watched it. It's actually not bad, mostly due to the choices made in terms of composition and subjects made by director Gaspar Noe and cinematographer Benoit Debie. I'm not sure it's good enough to justify the effort put into it but it's far from a disaster.
The film begins with interview style footage with the characters as they talk about themselves and the troupe. They're putting together a performance for a competition in the U.S. and each of them talks a little about the work they put into it and their hopes. The interview footage is shown on a television framed by stacks of books and DVDs.
This is the only part of the film I'd really call postmodern as it seems like the director informing us directly on all his influences going into the production. Certainly I didn't need him to tell me Suspiria was an influence--the dance troupe running around screaming in green, red, and yellow light would've been enough.
There's not really a plot. Following a successful rehearsal, the dancers start partying. They're drinking sangria, which looks nicely like blood, and slowly they become aware of being weirdly aggressive and horny. One dancer has a little boy whom she fearfully locks in the power room to protect him from everyone else but then she loses the key. You see her frantically running about looking for it as the camera follows other characters or occasionally stops to focus on her.
You get a nice sense of the party continuing its path to hell outside the camera frame. Sometimes Noe follows a character out of the dance hall back to the dorm rooms or the kitchen. Someone gets lit on fire and runs offscreen. Someone who thinks she might be pregnant tearfully confides in another dancer before being beaten up by a third who wanders in. Everyone has his or her own dramas about sex or relationships that get reduced to something primal under effects of the drugs.
In fact, before the drug took hold, mostly all any of them could talk about was sex. Who would they have sex with, would they consider fucking someone of the same sex, would they have an abortion, etc. And they generally seem a bit shallow, which makes them also seem more vulnerable. They don't have the mental tools to begin to grapple with their situation.
The only people in the film with acting experience are Sofia Boutella and Souhelia Yacoub. Boutella gives a certainly unrestrained performance, particularly in one scene where she screams and pushes her hands down her hose.
I found myself hungry for a little more substance in the material. As it is, it's kind of like watching an aquarium of humans. But I've seen worse movies. The only part of this one that really annoyed me was when the camera went upside down for a few minutes near the end. I guess Noe was going for disorientation but it was mostly just frustrating.
I thought it was a little sad they couldn't get the rights to real music and had to use generic dance beats for the whole film. But maybe that's just what this kind of dance music is supposed to sound like? I can't say I've been in any European dance clubs lately. Or ever.
Climax is available on Showtime.
Twitter Sonnet #1485
The circled scalp completes the headless square.
One time the reeds possessed another name.
We journey down beneath a human stare.
A hamster moon is gliding slow for fame.
Where flocks of gentle pigs ascend she waits.
The inky clouds were thin and partly white.
The carrot cubes could serve as decent weights.
We filled the parchment fast with flower plights.
The gathered flowers spread resources wide.
The verdant board could boast a number crop.
The wooden die accrued an extra side.
We stapled ears to end the naked top.
Computer boards reviewed the docking fees.
The question sheet was fed to hungry trees.
A pretty young woman flees a civil war between the sexes only to run afoul of murderous sheep and a lazy pony unicorn. 1975's Black Moon is a surreal delight, obviously influenced by Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Lewis Carroll, and maybe Andrei Tarkovsky. It never approaches the level of its influences but it's a perfectly decent string of dream logic and the best movie I've seen from director Louis Malle.
I've only seen a few other Louis Malle films, none of which led me to expect something like Black Moon. Viva Maria is a moderately fun adventure film; Pretty Baby (made subsequently to Black Moon) is an interesting drama but not something I'd go out of my way to watch twice. I've only seen part of Au revoir le enfants--I caught the beginning on TV decades ago and wasn't able to finish for some reason. But was already finding it sentimental and annoying in the manner of many prestigious European films of the late '80s. None of those films have the bedrock of perverse fun to be found in Black Moon.
Lily (Cathryn Harrison) escapes from a male firing squad killing female soldiers and from a gang of female soldiers executing a male soldier. She ends up at a beautiful old manor house (belonging to Malle in real life, according to Wikipedia). In the lushly furnished interior, the soundtrack is briefly taken over by a cat walking on the piano.
She meets a bedridden old woman (Therese Giehse) who communicates with a large rat in gibberish and demands women bare their breasts to her so she can suckle. Lily's shirt seems to unbutton on its own throughout the film. In one scene, her panties continually fall off while she's trying to sternly lecture the old woman. I kept expecting them to fall off in a later scene--it would've been a good, potentially very funny, visual callback, but it didn't happen.
There's a gang of naked children running around, chasing a pig Lily occasionally runs into as well as the very handsome Joe Dallesandro who seems to come to kissing Lily. His character's name might also be Lily, or at least that's what the female Lily appears to deduce from telepathy. Is this a comment on the conflict between the sexes introduced in the beginning? It's hard to say.
In Bunuel's surreal films, even if it's not clear what something symbolises, you get an instinctive sense of his attitude about a topic, an argument that can't quite be put into words. Black Moon doesn't have that. It's closer to Lewis Carroll except Lily herself produces as much nonsense as the people in her environment.
Ultimately, the ideas in this film don't run very deep but watching a pretty girl try to navigate weird things in a beautiful manor house is enough to please me.
I caught the second episode of the new season of Kimetsu no Yaiba last night and, as I suspected, it consisted, I think, entirely of footage from the movie. Having it juxtaposed with the animation in the first episode, though, reminded me of how the movie was criticised for looking no better than the television series. Now I can clearly see the direction is at least better in the film footage. There are more creative angles and there are fewer scenes of characters just standing there talking about what they're going to do.
The opening theme was new, though.
The influence of Rengoku's popularity is obvious. Within the context of the overall story, there's no other reason he's more deserving of prominence in the opening than, say, that spider family from the middle of season one or the demon in the haunted house whose drums altered physics. But I do like Rengoku and his weird, constant, unblinking stare, an unrelenting beam of genki.
But my favourite characters are Nezuko and Inosuke. This first episode had one of my favourite moments from the movie--Inosuke riding a train for the first time is like an excited dog in a car. His exultant laughter as he presses his boar head to the window cracks me up.
I noticed he takes off the head in the opening. There's more and more merchandise showing him without it, too, which is disappointing. That boar's head is 60% of his appeal.
I'm currently working at a very small junior high school, I'll be here for a month. I was here for a month last year at around the same time so I'm reconnecting with a bunch of students, some of whom barely remember me. One of the tiniest first year students who had seemed especially attached to me last year, though, is now a tiny second year student who definitely remembers me. She was a little sulky this year because she thought I'd forgotten her name but when I called her by name she immediately perked up and wanted to open a salvo of all her small store of English. I asked her to recommend an anime series to me. First she said, "Kimetsu no Yaiba."
"Everyone knows Kimetsu no Yaiba," I said. "What is something only you like?"
Her friends were gathered round as she thought and thought and they giggled when she finally said, "Jujutsu Kaisen."
"Everyone knows Jujutsu Kaisen!" I said.
Finally, she recommended Beastars, which I'd never heard of. I was happy to find the whole thing on Netflix when I went home.
I've seen the first two episodes now and it's not bad, pretty interesting, even. I'm not a fan of the furry aesthetic but this show doesn't have the super-ironic, anti-sexual, cloying furry humour. It imagines an alternate reality populated by strange animal/human hybrids. There's a social divide between herbivores and carnivores and eating meat is a big taboo. The show is set on a college campus where, at lunch time, the carnivores are forced to enjoy soy burgers.
The interesting thing is how assumptions of predatory instincts underlie all social interaction. The concept is a little similar to Zootopia but with a darker, distinctly Japanese edge.
The main characters are a wolf named Legoshi and a rabbit named Hal. Legoshi is in the drama club where a self-possessed, widely admired stag is at the top of the social food chain, regardless of where evolution may have placed him on the actual food chain. Legoshi is mostly pretty laid back, though he conceals anxieties about his own predatory instincts. When he starts to earn the stag's respect, he finds this respect makes him naturally want to work harder for the stag. This adds to anxiety over his suspicion that he may be a murderer, having found a desire to consume flesh occasionally overrides his conscious mind.
Hal, meanwhile, is ostracised because she's a slut. This is revealed in episode two and I laughed because, I thought, of course. She's a rabbit. But it makes for an interesting juxtaposition when Legoshi is shocked out of his anxiety over wanting to eat her to find she wants to eat him. So to speak.
It's very surprising in a Japanese series. Virginity is considered a virtue here for boys and girls. Girls proudly carry cherry charms on their school bags and boys brag about how they haven't had sex. Any time a character is portrayed as promiscuous in an anime, it's usually an older, often villainous, character, or the anime is out of the ordinary. So this one seems to be.
The animation is an interesting mix of cgi and 2d animation that hasn't gotten old yet but I suppose it might. The opening theme is some nice stop motion animation. The only thing that bugs me so far is that Legoshi wears suspenders and a belt--and his suspenders don't cross or connect in the back.
That video has over 39 million views!
Twitter Sonnet #1484
The yellow grass was hair from golden vaults.
The healthy drink produced a kind of bread.
We gathered late to drink a set of malts.
We cluster early honours fit for lead.
The slower light was waiting back behind.
For reasons lost the circuits took the chick.
You crank the pad to make the tape rewind.
Reversing streams creates a haunted brick.
At table five, the napkin carries weight.
A something schmutz defaced the bent lapel.
A mouth exceeds the mask it quickly ate.
Behold the bill and eyes of M. De Spell.
The lawless meat reflects a hungry moon.
A rabid dream permits a tasty boon.
Only Murders in the Building ended its first season last night with an episode that was both funny and exciting. One could argue the series hasn't achieved the depth to its characters it seemed to be aiming at occasionally but as a comic bookish caper it's a hoot so I see no reason to complain.
Spoilers after the screenshot
And I was right, it was Jan. I'm not usually good at guessing the killer on these things, especially because I don't usually feel like trying, so maybe it was obviously Jan to everyone. I will say my prediction that it was Jan had nothing to do with any clues presented on the show but entirely on story mechanics which, for a detective series, is not a good sign. If you suss out the killer, it should be because you notice something about their schedule not adding up, an object that places them on the scene of the crime, a witness you think is unreliable. In this case, it was entirely because of her level of connexion to the main cast, the point in the season in which she appeared, and the way she was written into the group with a ruse function ("the annoying new girlfriend").
But on the point of story mechanics, remember at the start of the season I talked about the writers secretly wanting a relationship between Mabel and Charles? Well, it turns out Jan was sleeping with Tim Kono--so Charles' girlfriend was sleeping with Mabel's boyfriend. The characters make a point of saying there's nothing wrong with there being such a vast age difference between the two. I still don't think the writers have the guts to pair Mabel and Charles in this day and age but I think this is a sure sign they really want to. Often writers have villains do things they'd like to get away with having their heroes do, like when Steven Moffat had the Master regenerate as a woman on Doctor Who or Simone Simon in Cat People having the greater psychological nuance than the supposed heroes of that film.
It turns out Jan isn't an especially nuanced character, though. But that's not such a bad thing because her scheme to gas the whole building and her maniacal, fixed stare and grin made her a delightfully campy, very comic-bookish, villain. Steve Martin on the other side of the relationship, talking about how he was finally able to open up because of his relationship with her and the podcast team, doesn't quite have the same traction. Neither does the resolution of Martin Short's relationship with his son or Mabel's relationship with Tie-Dye Guy. All that stuff is overshadowed by the brilliant physical comedy of a partially paralyzed Steve Martin trying to use an elevator (and being ignored by his neighbours) or the dialogue when Mabel and Oliver try to break down a door.
I was reminded again of the inevitable Twin Peaks influence when Charles delivered his summation speech about how Tim Kono's murder brought the community together. This used to be one of the primary appeals of the pilot episode of Twin Peaks, how, instead of the shows about weekly murders and the whole thing being about the puzzle, Laura Palmer's death was something with emotional weight for a whole town, something that by itself should be enough to occupy an entire series. Recently I've had two different Gen Z people tell me they like the pilot episode of Twin Peaks less than subsequent episodes. My suspicion is that the episode is still having the same effect on viewers but these two people I talked to interpret that effect differently--that is, they don't know how to interpret their own emotional reactions to a filmmaking style that isn't as Apollonian or as much about dialogue as popular shows and movies tend to be nowadays. I keep remembering how one reviewer of Twin Peaks season three said she is normally able to just listen to shows without looking at the screen but found she couldn't do that with Twin Peaks.
Only Murders in the Building can tell me it was about one murder that brought people together, but it's not exactly what it makes me feel. Even so, it's pretty entertaining.
Only Murders in the Building is available on Disney+ in Australia and on Hulu in the U.S.
The '70s and the early '80s are normally considered the Dark Ages for Disney animated films but I'm starting to think the latter '00s were much worse. 2007's Meet the Robinsons is at least better than Chicken Little, easing up a bit on the cynical, imitation Family Guy humour. Meet the Robinsons chooses instead to ape Futurama with its story of a smart kid who winds up travelling to the future. The strongest parts of the film are the beginning and the climax. The middle, when the main character actually meets the Robinsons, is comparatively weak but still not as bad as Chicken Little. Even so, it's never as interesting as some of the worst of Disney's pre-2000 films. The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Pocahontas might be failures at heart but they both have definite points of interest. The best Meet the Robinsons can manage is to be adequately entertaining. There's nothing memorably bad, good, or strange about it.
The first act introduces Lewis (Jordan Fry), a precocious orphan who invents devices that tend to explode, in one case splattering people with peanut butter and jelly. Fed up with rejections for adoption, Lewis decides to seek out his birth mother. To do this, he decides to unlock his infant memories with a new invention he calls a "Memory Scanner".
Disney shows once again how skilled they are at animating children. Lewis and his roommate, "Goob" (Matthew Josten), have the natural mannerisms and vocal habits of real children, especially Goob.
This is yet another film with a male protagonist. With the one notable exception of The Lion King, Disney films post-The Little Mermaid always fared better with a female protagonist. Why were they trying so hard to get movies about boys off the ground? I suppose that makes it ironic that, after buying Star Wars, they've felt obliged to make the new films about women.
Lewis meets a time traveller at the school science fair, Wilbur (Wesley Singerman), and goes off to the future with him to meet those Robinsons.
It's difficult not to think of Futurama as the soft edged, brightly coloured ship swoops through the soft edged, brightly coloured city. The resemblance deepens as Lewis is introduced to the alien shock gags and antics of the Robinsons.
The cast is light on celebrity voices though it does bring in Adam West again, following on his role from Chicken Little. This time he plays a superhero pizza delivery man.
After the early scenes successfully get you invested in Lewis' endeavour, these middle scenes succeed in divesting the story of all emotional appeal, being a series of lame gags.
One scene in the climax, featuring an evil bowler hat turning people into zombies, is surprisingly creepy. Still, it's not quite enough to elevate the whole film.
Meet the Robinsons is available on Disney+.
...
This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.
It's said David Lynch never intended to reveal Laura Palmer's killer on Twin Peaks and that he only did so when the network forced him. I can see how not revealing the killer may have made for a better show--though it seems like Lynch made up for it by tracing out a million insoluble mysteries within the one. But the episode in which the killer is revealed, episode seven of season two, really is a masterpiece.
I love the sense of disturbing disorientation Lynch achieves with the scene in the Great Northern where Mike tries to identify Bob. It starts with the familiar exterior of the waterfalls which dissolves into a little painting of the falls on a shelf. As the camera very slowly pulls back, we hear strange, percussive sounds along with Mike saying, "No" at intervals in a distressed, somewhat irritated tone. It's not until after the camera has pulled out a good a deal that we see the sounds are coming from people in military dress uniform practicing with tennis balls. Who are they? What are they doing? As is so often the case with Lynch, it's absurd yet credible. Hotels do get all manner of strange customers and a military band practicing some kind of routine with tennis balls in the lobby isn't very far fetched. But it adds to the general atmosphere of urgent, confused anxiety so perfectly.
I like how the killer is revealed to the viewer without anyone on the show but the new victim sharing in the discovery. I love how everyone at the roadhouse seems to sense something is wrong anyway. It's after the buildup that begins with the Log Lady telling Cooper something is happening, that there are owls at the roadhouse. There we see Donna crying for no apparent reason and Bobby looking faintly lost. Bobby's feeling can be explained by his recent fight with Shelly after his reaction to her financial trouble is impulsively to distance himself from her. He's a scared kid. Donna's distress is totally mysterious, like the girl running across the school yard in the pilot.
I notice Cooper touches his finger to see if the ring's there, the one the Giant took in the premiere. His hand is concealed by his mug so we can't quite see if he has the ring or not, so it's not implausible that it turns up a few episodes down the line. But why did Cooper reach for it? I suspect Lynch intended to convey that it had returned, and it's one of the things that makes me suspect the episodes not directed by Lynch or involving him are not part of the same timeline.
Twitter Sonnet #1483
The numbers add to five but minus two
A seven times an eight was half a cup.
In forty feet, a mile's width's the clue.
The twenty axis shifts a little up.
A cycle eye revisits towns for clouds.
Expensive bread was built of cheaper parts.
The flour coats the water's drizzling shrouds.
The seven cards have swooshed beyond the deck.
The cherry curtains push the eyes within.
The ticking vinyl cools the empty flame.
The standing horse betides what must begin.
The bloody cup contains a vagrant name.
Returning beats announced the whisp'ring hem.
The watching wind disturbs the hoary limb.
For what nefarious purpose does the sinister Aristotle Bolt (Milland) seek powerful psychic children? He lures them to his fabulous--and, by God, I mean really fabulous--mansion. He gives them ice cream and a combination playroom and bedroom cluster of chambers all to themselves. It all looks too good to be true.
