Here's One Girl Who Knows How to Drive

Cars and sex are all teens seem to think about in 1957's Dragstrip Girl. Among exploitation B-movies of the '50s, this one shines a bit above the rest with its clear-eyed, flirty screenplay and hip conceptualising. There's no heavy handed moral here, just kids who want to race cars and have sex.

Fred (John Ashley) and Jim (Steve Terrell) are a pair of hot-rodding buddies with nothing but blue skies and shiny chrome ahead of them until a chance encounter with the beautiful Louise (Fay Spain).

After an improvised street race, the three know they're going to be fast friends. Except how's two guys and one girl supposed to work? Louise invites them over to her place and suggests they "come together" in one of the film's many suggestive lines.

Surprisingly, Louise's parents like both boys and they even don't mind her drag racing. Louise's dad likes Jim because he knows his way around a car engine and Louise's mom like Fred because his parents are rich.

They fall into an arrangement where Fred takes Louise out one night and Jim the next, alternating. But eventually, tensions flare up. Jim becomes the good guy, no longer wanting to risk racing on public streets, while Fred gets it into his head that Jim has somehow always stood between him and what he wants. But John Ashley in the role remains a charismatic disciple of Elvis Presley and even as he becomes outright villainous no-one loses sympathy for him.

The gang of screwy teens hang around at a pizza shop. Among them is Frank Gorshin who was already captivating with his broad but inventive mannerisms.

But Fay Spain is the real main event as the titular girl. She's beautiful, poured into every outfit, and always has a deadly sparkle in her eye. She's a pleasure to watch.

The Moon's Associates

Last night saw the premiere of Moon Knight, the latest MCU series to premiere on Disney+. It's not a bad first episode, not quite as good as Hawkeye or Loki's first episode but a bit better than Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Writing and direction were decent but most of the credit belongs to Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke, both of whom deliver excellent performances, particularly Isaac.

Isaac has already played one major Marvel character, Apocalypse in the Brian Singer-verse X-Men films, another character involved in Egyptian mythology. Isaac does kind of look Egyptian though he's actually an American who was born in Guatemala to a Guatemalan mother and a Cuban father. Moon Knight's principle alter-ego is the Jewish American Marc Spector, though supposedly his religion is never mentioned on the show, something that has led some to speculate that it's been removed. Apparently it's been enough cause for concern that Isaac has publicly addressed it and confirmed that his version of the character is Jewish. Isaac himself is Christian, another twist in the endlessly convoluted current political neuroses about actors having to play characters who represent them ethnically, religiously, and anatomically. It's a particular issue here because the series' primary director, Mohamad Diab, has criticised DC films for their representation of Egyptians.

Marc Spector has dissociative identity disorder and for 95% of the first episode we actually see Isaac playing Steven Grant, an English identity who lives in London and works at a museum gift shop. I wonder if anyone has complained about someone without DID playing something with DID. In any case, Steven is really sweet and charming with Isaac in the role and you feel for the poor guy who constantly finds himself in strange places and situations with no idea how he got there, particularly because he's such a meek and polite fellow.

I'd seen Isaac in movies before The Force Awakens but he never made an impression on me, nor has he been particularly interesting since then. Moon Knight is the first I've seen him capture some of that regular guy charm that was so effective in Force Awakens.

It's interesting seeing Ethan Hawke in a Marvel project after he famously criticised superhero movies a few years ago. Though, to be fair, he only said that Logan was only great for a comic book movie, not on the same metric as great cinema. I wonder if he's seen anything that's changed his mind or maybe all he saw was a dollar sign. In any case, though he hasn't had much screentime yet, I like the nuance he's bringing to the villain role, making the zealous man seem genuinely compassionate.

When Hawke's character, Arthur, tells Steven he has "chaos" in him, it made me wonder if the writers are consciously aiming for an order versus chaos theme, perhaps a counterargument to Jordan Peterson. The fact that the protagonist's superpower is apparently related to his mental illness, it certainly seems like the show could be taking a pro-Foucault stance. Foucault's History of Madness presents the idea of mental illness being a subjective and political construct and Jordan Peterson has routinely pointed to Derrida and Foucault as being responsible for introducing disastrous ideas into popular ideology. Peterson has also talked extensively about how he feels he's been vilified in recent Captain America comics by H.Y.D.R.A.'s reference to "order and chaos" and "rules for life", these things bearing resemblance to titles of Peterson's books. Although I like some of Peterson's lectures on YouTube, I thought he was imagining things with respect to the order and chaos rhetoric since it had also appeared in Winter Soldier, a movie that came out years before Peterson was a prominent figure. But now I'm starting to wonder if it is intentional.

I think there are a lot of potential problems in portraying a mental illness as a superpower but I did enjoy this first episode. Most of it was action and comedy and Diab does a good job with the action sequences. Despite the cgi being oddly mediocre, I did enjoy the car chase in which Steven steals a cupcake truck.

Recently, the old Netflix Marvel series have been put on Disney+ and I've picked up watching Daredevil where I left off years ago. I'd stopped after the first episode of the second season and over the past couple weeks I've finished watching the second season. I also saw the first season of Jessica Jones and the first half of the second season years ago and I'll probably pick that up again too. I haven't seen any of Iron First, Luke Cage, The Defenders, or Punisher. I'd stopped watching the Netflix series because I was getting kind of tired of superheroes at that point and some of the writing was starting to diminish in quality. I loved the first season of Jessica Jones but was finding the second unbearable. Picking up Daredevil again felt like a breath of fresh air, though, and the discussions in the second season about the differences between Daredevil's and the Punisher's brands of vigilantism were genuinely provoking and intelligent in ways the similar discussion in the recent Batman movie wasn't.

People talked a lot more on those old Netflix Marvel shows because there were more episodes per season with smaller effects budgets. This fostered some good old fashioned good writing, it seems. It also led to some drawbacks and finishing the second season of Daredevil this week I was reminded of why I tired of it. I'd gotten sick of the supporting characters constantly complaining to Matt about the fact that he's Daredevil and there are also many really dumb, contrived plot points, like when Karen decides to break up with Matt when she sees an old man in his apartment and an injured woman in his bed. It seems like a situation in which she ought to have at least been willing to hear him offer an explanation. But I do really like Deborah Ann Woll and I'm surprised to see the action sequences on Daredevil hold up against anything in the MCU to-day, including Shang-Chi. So I guess I will keep watching it.

Twitter Sonnet #1567

Guitars appeared to cook potato strings.
Affronts to falcons fell to pinion nubs.
Assorted stripes were bent to feature rings.
Refraction lights the little candle stubs.
Re-opened cases clutter wooden planes.
But time's a heavy bowl for spoons to fill.
Rejecting flakes, your post some milk regains.
Approach the duck; some sugar iced the bill.
Her thoughts were drawn to globes in outer space.
Acceptance shaved the tops of needle trees.
Revolving slow, the world revealed its face.
Bereft of honey, ships return to seas.
Approaching birds are flying fast in shade.
Declining flocks were fiefs too rashly made.

On the Road to Nowhere

A middle aged man and an attractive young woman bond over their intimate encounters with death in 2021's Drive My Car. It's a Japanese movie but the title is English because of the Beatles song it's derived from, though the filmmakers were unable to secure rights to use the song. It's hard to see where the song would belong in this sterile, overlong, fairly typical Oscar winner.

Drive My Car won Best International Film, the new name for the Best Foreign Language Film category, despite the fact that International and Foreign Language don't mean the same thing. In this case, though, it's appropriate because the protagonist of Drive My Car is a theatre director coordinating a production of Uncle Vanya starring an international cast with everyone speaking lines in their native languages.

In one scene, a group of older Japanese cast members joke about how they almost fall asleep when a castmate is speaking in a language they can't understand. So the film throws a bone to audience members who might not be on board with the idea but forgets to present any argument as to what the technique is meant to accomplish. It comes off instead as a pretentious gimmick. The film itself, with a low stakes, low key tone, is reminiscent of the usual very safe foreign language nominees, superficial and pandering.

The film begins with a beautiful naked woman (Reika Kirishima) telling a story about a teenage girl who routinely sneaks into the bedroom of a boy she has a crush on, a story reminiscent of Chungking Express. Listening to the story is the woman's husband and the film's protagonist, Yusuku Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima). Almost every time they have sex, she usually has inspiration for a television script she tells him the story for afterwards. It seems like the film's trying to say something about the audience and artist relationship but the concept vanishes kind of quickly and I was left with the feeling that the movie was just delivering some softcore porn sanitised with a pretentious veneer of intelligence.

The movie shows its awareness of great works of art. First Yusuke is shown starring in Waiting for Godot and then the bulk of the film involves his directing a production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. It's here he's forced for obscure insurance reasons to employ a personal driver, a surly, shabbily dressed young woman with a scar on her cheek named Misaki Watari (Toko Miura). I knew at some point we were going to get an explanation for that scar that tied directly into the main plot.

The whole film was oddly predictable. I frequently found myself guessing what was going to happen two or three minutes before it did. When Yusuke goes to the airport and his flight was suddenly cancelled, I thought, "Oh, he's going to go home and find his wife is cheating on him." And it happened. When Yusuke asks his Korean assistant director (Jin Dae-yeon) how he knows sign language and is able to talk to the production's sign language speaking cast member (Park Yu-rim), I instantly knew the cast member was secretly the man's wife, but it wasn't officially revealed until Yusuke saw them standing, grinning smugly, next to each other outside their home.

The movie's three hours long and it's filled with scenes that seem utterly pointless, this being one of them. The scene doesn't contribute to the main plot nor does it have any particular artistic value for its own sake. The Korean couple have this peculiar air of serenity despite supposedly being apologetic for having lied to Yusuke.

Really, the only scene in the film that has interesting energy is one in which Yusuke finds himself confronting the man whom his wife cheated on him with, Koji (Masaki Okada). The younger man is a popular and attractive actor who sleeps with a lot of women and poor Yusuke finds out that he knows some intimate details about his wife that he wasn't aware of himself. But this ends up being another point just to shore up sympathy for Yusuke, a man abused by luck who is also just so virtuous that he feels guilty anyway.

In the film's final act, Misaki drives Yusuke all the way from Hiroshima to Hokkaido, to an empty hillside where the small village in which Misaki had grown up had once stood. You can almost sense the filmmakers scrambling as they realise, nearly three hours in, they haven't offered the audience anything of particular value other than to say Chekov was a great playwright. So Yusuke directly delivers a message about death and mourning to Misaki and the audience, a message that, oddly enough, comes across as kind of anti-Ozu. Just a little reminder that Ozu, like Kurosawa or Mizoguchi or Miyazaki or any number of other Japanese filmmakers, deserved to win an Oscar before Drive My Car ever did.

Drive My Car is available on HBOMax.

What's the Pity, Precisely?

Among other the other problems it may cause, incest can spoil everyone's plans. John Ford's early 17th century play, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, shows the far-reaching effects of a brother and sister's decision to enter a sexual relationship. Lacking the depth of insight found in Shakespeare, Ford's play is nonetheless a stimulating thought experiment, an illustration of the dangers inherent in reordering nature according to one's own will and whim.

I sought out this play because of a song on David Bowie's Blackstar, his final album, called "'Tis a Pity She was a Whore". Although the lyrics bear little resemblance to the story of the play, it seems the title was meant as a reference to it. The lyrics of another song on the Bowie album, "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)" bear more resemblance to the play.

I watched a 1980 BBC production starring Cherie Lunghi as well as several actors I recognised from Doctor Who, including Tim Pigott-Smith from Masque of Mandragara, Bernard Archard who played Professor Scarman in The Pyramids of Mars, and Colin Douglas who played the lighthouse keeper from Horror of Fang Rock. For no reason in particular, the setting and costumes place the action in mid-19th century England. The play was originally set in Italy--it was common in English plays of the time to illustrate moral depravity by setting their action in Catholic countries, particularly Italy and Spain, where clergy, like the friar in Romeo and Juliet, can be shown ushering the protagonists to their destruction.

In her introduction to the play in the Norton English Renaissance Drama, Katharine Eisaman Maus draws direct comparisons between Romeo and Juliet and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore in discussing the lovers' rash disregard for their society's expectations. There's a Friar in this play, too, though he does not approve of Giovanni's (Kenneth Cranham) passion for his sister, Annabella (Lunghi), when Giovanni confesses to him.

Since Giovanni has shown no interest in other women, his father despairs of the family line's survival, both in terms of flesh and finance, as he finds himself in desperate financial straits. So he's trying to marry his daughter, Annabella, off to the wealthy nobleman, Soranzo (Anthony Bate). So the loss of Annabella's virginity is a grave matter indeed, in both senses of the word "grave".

Meanwhile, Soranzo is trying to extricate himself from entanglement with his former mistress, Hippolita (Alison Fiske). In this matter, and in the trouble that results when he discovers Annabella is pregnant by another man, he employs his murderous Spanish servant, Vasques (Pigott-Smith).

In contrast to the patriarchal expectations and machinations of society, Eisaman Maus concludes her introduction by saying that one feels "nostalgic for Giovanni's reckless disregard of social laws." I can't say I agree with that. In the name of love, he irrevocably ruins his sister's life. Her father may have been desperate but he specifically says he wouldn't force Annabella to marry anyone she didn't want to. Who knows what would have happened if Giovanni hadn't broached the subject of incest with her? She may have eventually found a suitable match. Maybe not someone she felt great passion for but someone with whom she could have lived in relative contentment. Eisaman Maus makes a point of how both Annabella and Giovanni are inexperienced so she can't be entirely faulted for interpreting her own feelings for Giovanni so disastrously. The title of the play, spoken by an authority figure at the end, is likely meant to show up the exceeding harshness to women of society's judgement of such things, but on the other hand, it is a pity that it was so easy for Giovanni to have sex with her. He was wrong to propose the relationship but she was also wrong to agree to it.

Looked at in the light of nature versus society, it's easier to see the connexion between the play and Bowie's song. He sings about a sexual relationship with a woman that can't be more because of some kind of "war". Since war is a construct dependent on abstract human conceptions of territory and citizenship, it is a contrary force to purely physical love, part of a set of abstract forces that run contrary to human instinct. If you look at the song as part of an album generally about Bowie being on the verge of death, it may be part of a lament, a recognition of his own fatigue, that he must, even at this final stage of his life, adhere to a society's expectations that run contrary to his instincts or desires.

Marquess of Queensberry Rules and the Academy

Comedy is a dangerous business, Exhibit A. No-one's especially interested in last night's Best Picture winner, Coda, but everyone's talking about Will Smith punching Chris Rock at the Oscars. Rock made what he clearly thought was a very softball joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's haircut and Will Smith punched him in the face. Unbeknownst to Rock, and apparently all the other people googling about it, Pinkett Smith had publicly talked about a hair loss condition she has.

For anyone aware of her condition, the joke would certainly strike a sour note, but most people seem to feel Will Smith reacted badly. Indeed, when I watched the clip, before googling the story behind the incident, my first guess was that Rock had been harassing Pinkett Smith for years, been sending her dead animals in the mail, or stealing her underwear, and the joke was the last staw. Something like that would warrant the level of Will Smith's reaction. But actors like Smith have to keep their emotions close to the surface, they're used to imagining themselves in extreme circumstances. That's not an excuse but it's an explanation. It's the same reason the Oscars is a ceremony that increasingly makes viewers gag from its excessive self-importance. People in this business stoke their own emotions routinely.

At the same time, I would say Will Smith couldn't have let the moment pass. The right move would be for him to walk up on stage, lean over and say into Rock's ear, "My wife has a condition leading to hair loss. A joke like that isn't cool." Rock probably would've apologised and that would've been the end of it. As it is, the incident ends with Rock clearly not having a clue what happened, and Smith and Pinkett Smith clearly not contemplating the possibility that not everyone in the room is aware of every public detail of their lives.

The moral of the story is, comedy is dangerous, but so is taking yourself too seriously.

Twitter Sonnet #1566

On brittle fields of green the brothers clash.
On dusty plains the brothers ran ahead.
An ancient bar condoned a heartless bash.
Enough machines were raised to wake the dead.
The sleepy rabbit caught the eyes of socks.
A bloody arrow led the act away.
A crowd of singing boats have choked the docks.
A spotted Rover fed the bones to pay.
The hairless men assembled past the glass.
The clerks arranged the clothes about their frames.
To dress a stone is like to buy a gas.
Between the walls the dummies play their games.
A night of fists distracts from years of lasts.
We trade a hasty deck for diff'rent pasts.

A Sterling Example

Whenever I feel bad about my posture, I can always watch a Sterling Hayden movie. It was his birthday yesterday so I watched 1954's Crime Wave, a noir in the mould of Naked City, featuring copious real location shots of its city setting, Los Angeles. The story's a little absurd but in a way that makes it feel more like a nightmare and maybe a little funny, too.

Gene Nelson is Steve Lacey, an ex-con who doesn't want to go back to robbing banks but doesn't want to be a fink, either. His lovely wife, Ellen (Phyllis Kirk), is always trying to get him to call the cops when things get dicey and Steve, the chump, thinks it's not an option. The best he can do is call his parole officer.

Hayden plays Detective Lieutenant Sims, an irascible, bitter, raggedly accoutered cop. There's a lot of irony in the fact that Sims keeps calling Lacey a slob when Sims is always wearing his tie backwards.

And his hat is oddly crumpled, like he balled the crown up in his fist. You see the same thing on a hat worn by one of the crooks, a boozy veterinarian called Hessler (Jay Novello).

Evidently the costume designer thought some guys really wreck their hat crowns.

Hessler is oddly sweet, especially when you see him taking care of animals.

Another of the crooks is played by a young Charles Bronson. Just look at the muscles on this young man:

Even strongmen in this period usually looked pretty doughy. Bronson was already one of a kind.

Anyone who's been to L.A. will recognise a lot of buildings and streets, even to-day. I definitely know this bridge:

Crime Wave will be on The Criterion Channel until March 31.

From Cash to Damnation

Two brothers flee from their bank robbery south across Texas, into Mexico and into Hell in 1996's From Dusk till Dawn. What a wonderfully fucked up movie. Screenwriter Quentin Tarantino again shows his unparalleled talent for writing bastards, so much so that the criminal world implied by the film feels at least as scary as the Satanic, supernatural world. And director Robert Rodriguez shows why he's one of the best action directors of the past thirty years.

I was really in the mood to watch this movie in October but couldn't afford to rent it at the time. But I noticed a couple weeks ago it's on HBOMax, which I temporarily subscribed to again to watch Peacemaker, so I finally had my fix. I hadn't seen From Dusk till Dawn since the '90s. Probably on VHS. It's a lot better than I remembered.

A lot of the criticism about this movie has to do with its combination of genres. The first half of the film is a fugitive/hostage film, the second half is a zombie apocalypse film--I say zombies despite the fact that they're vampires because they function more like zombies traditionally do than vampires. A lot of critics say the two parts of the movie don't really coexist harmoniously and that used to be my feeling, too. You get invested in the tension between the two criminals and the people they kidnap. Seth (George Clooney) sees himself as a professional thief while his brother, Richie (Quentin Tarantino), is a slave to his perversion. The family they kidnap is headed by patriarch Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel), a pastor who hasn't lost his belief in God but has lost his love for God. It's an interesting distinction.

The underlying tension revolves around Richie, established as a rapist and ultra-violent killer, like Jack the Ripper, potentially assaulting Jacob's daughter, Kate, played by Juliette Lewis. It's kind of interesting seeing her back in an innocent lamb role after Natural Born Killers.

There's an evident internal conflict for Seth. He doesn't like to hurt people needlessly but he also doesn't seem to feel especially bad about the people he does kill. Jacob clearly senses Seth's conflict and you can sense him trying to figure out a way to use it. In the second half of the film, when the group are fighting for their lives against the sudden appearance of vampires, the tension from he first half of the film kind of disappears, not the least because Richie gets killed. That's how I used to feel about it but I feel differently now. I find the vampires much more effective now, especially as I think about their presence in terms of the characters' self-perceptions. Seth is a guy who works completely without a net, morally speaking. He doesn't like to kill but he also has no compunctions about it. Jacob, by believing in God and rejecting Him, lives in a potent state of sin, despite being the film's moral centre. So basically, no-one has any reason to believe they're protected from damnation.

One of the main differences between Rodriguez and Tarantino is that Rodriguez tends to lean more into fantasy. Don't believe for a second Rodriguez doesn't know how absurd the crotch pistol from Desperado is--and it turns up again here, now wielded/worn by Tom Savini. From Dusk till Dawn very nicely blurs the line between the fantasy world of Rodriguez and the more realistic crime world of Tarantino.

The film begins with this gaudy "World of Liquor" shop. It's believably over-the-top, I've seen plenty of places of similar decorative flamboyance in California. But the Titty Twister bar in Mexico seems like something from another world.

Yet it's close enough to World of Liquor that I'm drawn into believing it.

I love how inconsistent the vampire designs are in the film. They're influenced, like every other vampire film since, by Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. But like that film, you can never quite predict the form he vampire's going to take. And it's startling when there's some exaggerated facial feature, like a malevolent parody of the human body.

And Salma Hayek as Santanico is a worthy successor to Dracula's Brides.

If you ever wonder why Hayek is a movie star, watch this movie or Desperado. She really hasn't done anything as amazing since, usually just turning up to help fill out an all star cast. She is a demon goddess in front of Robert Rodriguez's camera, though. When you consider this scene along with Jessica Alba in Sin City and Rose McGowan in Planet Terror, it's clear Rodriguez is genius at this stuff. Three times he's presented actresses in solo dance sequences that have been the high points of their careers. I see now that he directed a a Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande video two years ago. They sure chose wisely.

I love how the film ends, too, with Seth negotiating a percentage of the loot with the local gang lord. The encounter with the supernatural just turns out to be another step in his descent into a bigger Hell, and his conflict comes back just so he can show a moment of kindness to Kate. Of course, that probably is how it would go. Usually in vampire movies, if a vampire shows up, it dominates the lives of the characters. In From Dusk till Dawn, it's just another gruesome permutation of this living perdition. What a terrific film.

Rust in Blue

Violence subtly encroaches on a quiet Baltic island. Four people have a subtly desperate, superficially warm, relationship in 1969's The Passion of Anna (En passion). The English title draws attention to Liv Ullmann's character but this brilliant Ingmar Bergman film also stars three of his other regulars--Erland Josephson, Bibi Andersson, and Max von Sydow.

Andreas (von Sydow) is the point of view character for most of the film. He lives alone, nursing emotional scars from his failed marriage. One day, Anna (Ullmann) turns up to use his phone. She accidentally leaves her purse behind and, inside, Andreas finds notes from her husband about her violent behaviour.

She's living with two friends--a photographer named Elis (Josephson) and his wife, Eva (Andersson). Andreas finds himself at dinner with the three of them and the human contact turns out to be something he desperately needs.

The film features interviews with the actors talking about their characters and von Sydow discusses how he found it difficult to play a man whose experiences have made him naturally reticent to express himself in even the slightest way. Of course, having that interview thrown in does make von Sydow's job a little easier, and I wonder if that's what Bergman had in mind, and if von Sydow was at all insulted. Anyway, he does a perfectly good job. I'm not sure I think the interviews help the film a lot.

Ullmann's is more interesting. She talks about Anna's passion, which is for truth, and her deranged response to a world that contradicts what she sees as truth. The film is wonderfully subtle about it and it feels like you discover the horrifying aspect of Anna's personality by accident. Little things that happen quite naturally, or big things that don't seem connected, slowly take shape. A little dog Andreas rescues from a noose, a bird that Anna mourns after it's crashed into a door, Anna's and Eva's warnings to Andreas about each other.

Andreas has a brief affair with Eva which is really sweet. She gives the impression of being very open and at the same time very distant. Like she has no serious regard for the powerful feelings she has around Andreas.

There's a beautiful rust and powder blue palette throughout the film, except for a few scenes lit by a fiery glow.

The Passion of Anna is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1565

Robotic arms could clutch reactor stars.
The safety glow reminds the brain to sleep.
I'll meet the woman late behind the bars.
But spirit pumps could never step too deep.
The sky's a doom, a blue contained in rust.
Replacing brains with mouths the plan evolved.
A northern speech invites a southern bust.
It's easy now to heighten screen rescolve.
The party crossed a bridge of wicked vines.
Another loading screen awaits beyond.
The ivy crushed a shiny bunch of lines.
A hundred fish explode the tiny pond.
A quiet day appeared amid the ice.
A tiny hat dispersed among the mice.

Eager Trees and Turtles

Spring isn't quite in full bloom here in Kashihara, Japan, but some of the trees have jumped the gun. Also, the annual Turtlepocalypse is here.

The really big birds are back, too. Here one soars over a freshly tilled rice field with Mount Unebi in the distance:

And now a conundrum:

The soccer ball, the orange, or the heron? You must choose.

Someone bade goodbye to winter by tying their scarf to a tree:

Finally, here's some Hiroshima style okanomiyaki I had for lunch a couple weeks ago with my friend, Rizu. Mine was squid, hers was pork.

The whole shiny black surface is a stovetop and the okanomiyaki cooks as long as you want it to.

Lives Exchanged Between Shadows

A metropolis of shadows confounds the human hunger for meaning and stability in 1998's Dark City. Director Alex Proyas' artistic instincts, at least, find a worthy home in this visually astounding feature. Combining German Expressionism with an '80s/'90s goth S&M aesthetic, Proyas brilliantly delivers his existentialist rumination on the human soul.

Is there such a thing as the human soul? Well, the answer is yes, if you want to cut to the chase. At heart, this film is considerably more optimistic than its noir influences, particularly 1946's Black Angel. A lot of people talk about the films that influenced Dark City and a lot of people talk about the films that were influenced by Dark City. Roger Ebert, for one, who was a great admirer of this film. He talks about Fritz Lang's Metropolis and M (I certainly agree) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (I think that's a stretch).

I first saw Dark City when it came out in 1998. I have to admit it didn't make a huge impression on me. Within a few years of its release, I started to hear from people insisting I ought to give it a closer look. I promised I would do so, again and again, and really meant it. Finally, I was in the shower last night after playing Arkham Asylum and thinking, "I'd like to see a good movie about some big, stylish . . . dark . . . city." And voila, a mere 24 years later, I finally remembered to give this movie a second chance. And I like it. More than the first time I watched it. Maybe because I was watching the director's cut this time. Maybe I'm a different person. I should hope so. A fella oughta learn a thing or two between ages 19 and 42.

Experiences that became memories have changed me. The argument in Dark City is whether or not memories completely define us. It leaves aside IQ, nutrition, various anatomical characteristics, deciding just to tackle a dichotomy of memory versus soul. So aliens called "The Strangers" fabricated this city and filled blank human vessels with memories. Then, every night at midnight, they change everything around--buildings, cars, streets, people, and memories. Who is a person without a memory? Well, the protagonist, John (Rufus Sewell) accidentally rejects his memory injection and runs off without memories. There's a dead prostitute in the room with him. Did he do it? Is he the killer of a string of dead prostitutes?

Christopher Nolan, according to Wikipedia, cited Dark City, among a number of other films, as an influence on Inception. He said he was influenced by "that era of movies where you had The Matrix, you had Dark City, you had The Thirteenth Floor and, to a certain extent, you had Memento, too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real"

I was thinking of a kind of progression from Blade Runner (1982) to Videodrome (1983) to Total Recall (1990) to 12 Monkeys (1995) to Lost Highway (1997) to Dark City (1998) to The Matrix (1999). Maybe the reason Dark City and The Matrix aren't as amazing to me as they are to many other people is that I was so familiar with this kind of story. There are about a dozen episodes of Star Trek that cover the same territory. Not to mention Doctor Who which literally had a simulated world called "the Matrix" in the 1976 story The Deadly Assassin--which was influenced by The Manchurian Candidate, a story about a man whose memories are manipulated to turn him into a murderer.

Lost Highway was the real next step in the evolution of this kind of story because it took rational explanation out of the equation almost entirely. The nature of the story puts you directly into the perspective of the protagonist with the unreliable memory. In the balance between telling and showing, Lost Highway certainly succeeds brilliantly on the showing side of the scale. And then, of course, David Lynch delivered again with Mulholland Drive. And arguably, Twin Peaks, with its use of possession and doppelgangers, achieves something like this, too.

But Dark City is a perfectly admirable exercise of this kind of story. Frankly, I like it better than The Matrix due to its superior aesthetics. Jennifer Connolly and William Hurt are both great in supporting roles. Hurt in particular really ought to have been the central character--he's much more interesting than John. And I like how Hurt was evidently an actor willing to let a fantastic hat do some of the work for him.

A lot of actors don't like wearing wide brimmed hats because they don't want parts of their faces covered but Hurt goes for it. The hats in this film are particularly broad-brimmed, too.

I've also seen the movie compared to Brazil (1985) (another movie with great hats). I think Brazil has a much better ending. Dark City has a crowd-pleasing ending but the escape Brazil's protagonist achieves is much more realistic. Most people can't achieve total control of their reality, but maybe a lot of people can achieve control of their perception of reality. Which, of course, is not always a good thing.