The Garish Seas of Saturation

The more things change, the more anime stays the same. While most of the world knows anime from outstanding examples like Princess Mononoke and Akira, the vast majority of anime films that get pumped out are like 2016's One Piece: Gold. The thirteenth theatrical release in the One Piece series, following on from the long running TV series and manga, it has all the usual earmarks of franchises that are long past their expiry date--it's overladen with old characters who get spotlight moments and can't be killed and the climax is a by-the-numbers fight that mostly involves characters screaming at each other about how powerful they are or how important friendship is or something similarly trite. Since this is One Piece, there was a fair amount of references to straw hats.

I saw this movie on the bus on the class field trip to and from Mie last week. By the third act of the film, I was the only one, apart from the driver, still awake on the bus. Sure, the kids were tired from the trip but I suspect they could've stayed awake had the movie contained the tiniest spark of life.

I've seen the first couple episodes of One Piece and they were entertaining. I always meant to go back to it. It's about pirates, obviously a subject of interest for me. The creator supposedly researched real pirates but that's so far never been at all apparent. The series is set in a fantasy world with the usual hodgepodge of historical signifiers. The main character is a kid named Luffy who has a stretchy limbs superpower like Reed Richards except he also seems to be nigh-indestructible. Along the way, he picked up a vast crew of quirky characters whom I'm sure all have their own delightful introductory episodes but in Gold are mostly just a roll call of character types.

The few female characters stand out, particularly the popular Nami, but every woman in the movie, without exception, is rail thin with massive breasts. I'm not against titillation and if that's your thing, more power to you, but surely some of the women in the background could have had variant body types at least. They all look like strippers, which I suppose kind of fits with the modern casino setting of the film. The movie's about the pirate crew attempting a heist. That is, until things devolve into the usual battle royale.

Beautiful Soup

Last week, I joined the third year students on a field trip to Mie, a coastal town about three hours away by bus. Students waded in the shallow water near shore collecting clams which were later cooked into a miso soup for lunch.

It was good. A bit salty.

I mostly just took pictures.

There'd been a rain storm the previous day so of course many things had washed ashore. As always, there were many abandoned gloves.

But the most interesting thing I found was this little ray:

It had a big hole in its ventral side.

I carried it around to show students.

One student who didn't want to hunt clams just made this sand castle.

She'd brought that nice straw hat but it was too windy for her to wear it.

We went back to Kashihara early because it started to rain. This was one of the many nice rest stops on the way:

Twitter Sonnet #1586

The spinning magnet wrote a caption fast.
The bullet point was spared a second draft.
To us, the future seemed a distant past.
The captain's compass changed from fore to aft.
Corrected bottles carried notes across.
The cord was kinked to hold an errant breath.
Disruptive winds prevent the quarter toss.
Our choices shift a magnet's life or death.
The swirling net was lost beneath the math.
Again the rain has choked the earnest word.
We tell ourselves the day's a cheaper bath.
Across the Earth, we see the warning bird.
The cloudy beach was rife with packaged food.
We found a little meat to suit the mood.

Ray Liotta

Anyone who's seen Goodfellas knows why Ray Liotta's death last week was big news. It remains one of the greatest films ever made, a miracle of composition and editing. Tight as a drum, perfectly crafted, and it feels absolutely natural. Liotta's performance is key to that natural feeling. Being one of two narrators alongside Lorraine Bracco, Liotta adopted a conversational tone, really sounding like he was Henry Hill just telling you the facts, giving you his reasons, with all the instinct of a natural storyteller.

His eyes seemed to cut right through the screen, bringing focus to a dizzy tavern party or to a messy living room, neglected by drug addicts. He always kept you anchored right with Henry Hill's point of view, making you understand just exactly why a kid would go through life as a gangster, even with its attendant horrors.

Despite the greatness of this performance, Liotta somehow never found another film that connected on anything like the level of Goodfellas. The Place Beyond the Pines was pretty good. Blow wasn't really bad. But whatever his track record since, Goodfellas alone is a far greater legacy than most people could ever hope for.

Violent Worlds

I watched the first episode of the new Stranger Things season last night but I want to avoid making a full review until I've watched through all the new episodes that were put on Netflix. But it was a very strong season premiere and I found myself comparing it to Obi-Wan Kenobi, which it easily outshines. It's funny how a show that deliberately uses stock characters from the 1980s manages to make more complex and interesting characters than most shows.

I couldn't help being struck by two aspects of the show, though, that echo current issues--violence in high schools and a threat posed by Russia. I think the season was more or less in the can before Russia invaded Ukraine though, of course, violence in American schools has become an all too common occurrence. On Friday, a fellow teacher at the Japanese junior high school where I work asked me about the recent mass shooting in Texas. She told me a lot of people in Japan are talking about it. I was a little surprised and admitted that, since it has become so sadly common in the U.S., I hadn't actually paid much attention to the story.

Generally, feelings about the U.S. seem to be positive among the people I meet in Japan but quite a few regard Americans with horror and disgust. Sometimes I overhear things from people who assume my Japanese isn't as good as it is. I remember once overhearing someone at one school trying to mollify a teacher regarding my presence by reminding her that the U.S. is also responsible for Microsoft and Google, companies with a ubiquitous presence in Japan. Then, of course, there's Disney, Apple, Nike, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and various other companies and brands. I wonder if it's really reassuring. Is it a reminder that America is responsible for good things or just awareness that Japan has irrevocably bitten of the same fruit so they better hope American culture isn't inherently corrosive?

I have talked to students with parents who are fearful about their children being exposed to too much negativity. I was reminded of this in the scenes featuring Dungeons & Dragons on Stranger Things and references to the 1980s' "Satanic Panic". Yet I can't remember the last time I saw the level of ultraviolence I saw on the latest season of Kimetsu no Yaiba, which seems to be popular with people of all ages.

I'm long past having any qualms about making or viewing art with dark themes or a willingness to explore the worst impulses of the human heart. But I'm constantly confronted by the debate, both from the U.S. and Japan. I can only hope that people aren't diverted from the contemplation of human nature I think is truly necessary in art for all sorts of reasons, the understanding of real violence being one of them.

Obi-One Third

Obi-Wan Kenobi would be an amazing show if it weren't for the writing. As it is, Ewan McGregor's performance is so strong, and John Williams' new music is so good, that the show just about works. Which makes the bad writing all the more frustrating.

The show has a whole mess of writers, with scripts that went through several drafts, reworked from an unproduced screenplay by Hossein Amini and Stuart Beattie. Disney rejected an early version of the series, desiring better writing, which pushed production back, garnering a bit of bad press. They brought on Joby Harold, a writer whose most prominent work, Awake, which starred Hayden Christensen and Jessica Alba, bombed at the box office, and currently has a 24% on Rotten Tomatoes. He also wrote the Guy Ritchie King Arthur movie and Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead. Next year he'll be able to add a Transformers film to his resume.

At this point, maybe you're wondering if the executives at Disney and Lucasfilm have severe brain damage. Well, the thing about writers with undistinguished track records is that they come cheap. On a production likely to be expensive due to effects and to the salaries of the performers, Disney probably tries to cut costs everywhere they can. Even so, they evidently realised their error in this case and Andrew Stanton, the legend from Pixar, was brought on to beef up the scripts to the last two episodes of the series. Which makes me wonder just how bad it's going to get before that. Stanton, who wrote for all the Toy Story movies, the Finding Nemo movies, and wrote and directed WALL-E, would seem a good choice to write and direct a Star Wars project, if he hadn't also wrote and directed John Carter. I haven't seen John Carter because I heard Deejah Thoris isn't naked in it as she is in the original book but I've heard it's a decent movie. But it lost a lot of money for Disney which likely makes them reluctant to put Stanton in charge of live action projects. Maybe he can redeem himself with Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Ewan McGregor almost makes the show work all by himself, though. He invests the role with a truly effective mix of despair, anxiety, resolve, and just a hint of the old twinkle. John Williams' theme is also, of course, good, filled with melancholy and mystery. Credit also has to go to Natalie Holt for doing the actual score, incorporating the theme into her work.

Director Deborah Chow does mostly unobtrusive work, never really bad, but never really interesting, either. I'm not sure if she can be blamed for the fact that Obi-Wan's hair style changes from scene to scene, probably due to reshoots.

I went in with no expectations in particular and was a little excited. I didn't start to have misgivings until the first scene of dialogue, when the group of Inquisitors walk into a tavern. The Grand Inquisitor (Ruper Friend) gives a line that will, unfortunately, be repeated later; "The Jedi hunt themselves." This gave me pause right away. But I waited throughout his exposition dump to see if he could actually make it make sense. He tells the people in the tavern about how he and the other Inquisitors are tasked with finding Jedi but that the Jedi really do their work for them because the do-gooders can't resist revealing themselves by helping people. So, yeah, that's . . . not hunting. Not themselves or anyone else. That's hiding badly.

So there are weird little contortions of the English language like that but the main problem is that this show was written once again by people who lack the imagination to put themselves, mentally, within the world they're writing for. In the second episode, Obi-Wan lands on some sketchy back-alley world and asks a random passerby why he's suddenly unable to track the ship he's been following to this point. He just straight up asks someone. There are so many other ways they could have done this. They could've shown the tracking device with a red blip representing the ship he's following and had the blip vanish when Obi-Wan sets foot on the planet. Of course, then there are questions like, how did Obi-Wan get on the passenger liner with a lightsabre clipped to his belt? I assumed by using Jedi mind tricks. But considering he was reluctant to use the Force at all elsewhere in the story, we needed to have a shot showing him actually doing it. It's too important of a step for the character.

So far, most of the plot revolves around the kidnapping of Leia (Vivien Lyra Blair). The kid's performance isn't very good but the main problem is the logistical gaps in how her character is written. The problems come to a head when she runs away from Obi-Wan upon seeing that his face is on Wanted holograms. She knows the Jedi are being hunted, so why does this make her think he's not a Jedi? A good idea might have been to establish Leia at this point having some faith in the Empire's rule of law. Her father is a senator, after all. Then her story over the course of the series could've been her realising the truth, thus bringing her a step closer to the Rebel we meet in A New Hope.

The primary villain seems to be the Inquisitor Reva, played by Moses Ingram. She gives a good performance but she's so small and cute for a Star Wars villain. She's going to have to work harder to overcome the lack of an intimidating physical presence. Her motivation also seems to be borrowed from Krennic in Rogue One. Like him, she faces professional resistence due to coming from a lower social class, but in this case it's made a little too plain by the Grand Inquisitor shouting this exact exposition at her.

The show is filled with the beginnings of ideas handled by writers who lack the time and/or skill to flesh them out artfully. It's unfortunate, but there are aspects of the show good enough to keep me watching.

Obi-Wan Kenobi is available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1585

Diverted tourists bought some proper food.
The extra rooms were dropped to make it full.
With stomachs steeled, we sallied past the mood.
A hundred humans rushed the sleepy bull.
The butting teams reduced the grass to mulch.
A spitting clam propelled itself to sea.
A happy mob has claimed the empty gulch.
The day is late and phantoms drank the tea.
A sabre sputters weakly through the dust.
A hasty script was shot behind the snail.
Annoying ransoms do complain of rust.
Perhaps some lines were lost in Jedi mail.
The wrinkles carry eyes across the space.
Entire worlds invest a single face.

Hold His Calls

I was so busy on Tuesday I forgot to watch the new Better Call Saul. And what an episode to miss!

It did two things I really liked. It brought to fruition a subplot from the first season and did so in a way that completely changed the viewer's perspective on the characters. Suddenly there's another dimension to this prank Kim and Jimmy are pulling on Howard. It's not just mischief for mischief's sake.

The episode was written and directed by Thomas Schnauz whose credit comes up at the exact moment when a film student is talking about the importance of the auteur. That was pretty funny.

But funnier was the moment Howard realised he had photos of Saul handing a frisbee to someone. It was such a perfectly delicious moment.

I still wasn't interested in the Lalo plot until he turned up unexpectedly at the end. That was good. The whole thing would've worked perfectly if Lalo's inexplicable trip to Europe had just been left out of it. But, oh, well. However we got here, we're here, and it's good.

Now we just have to wait for July to see the second part of this beautiful piece of television.

Grand Vampire Hotel

Now that I've finished with The Defenders, I've gone back to watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. I've just started season six of Buffy and season three of Angel. Buffy's a little better at this point but I still feel sentimental about that hotel on Angel.

Last night I watched the second episode of Angel season three, "That Vision-Thing", in which Cordelia's visions have started to manifest with physical wounds. Charisma Carpenter's hair has started to grow back from the unflattering short haircut she'd apparently gotten in the middle of a scene back in season two.

Meanwhile, Fred (Amy Acker) is in this episode taking on a more prominent role, still recovering from the trauma of living in another dimension. She's just barely willing to come out of her hotel room, compulsively hiding under desks whenever she can. But still Angel (David Boreanaz) asks her to "take Cordelia home" when he notices Cordelia isn't feeling well. There are lots of continuity problems in this episode. It also begins the subplot of Wolfram and Hart trying to take down Angel with building code violations for the hotel. Gunn (J. August Richards) encounters a crew unexpectedly fumigating the hotel in one scene but then we never see them again nor get an explanation as to how Gunn dealt with them.

There's also the subplot about Darla (Julie Benz) being pregnant with Angel's child, a subplot I never liked, before or after the kid is actually born. It's amazing how much I overlook on this show to still enjoy it.

Angel is available on Disney+ in Australia.

The Mathematics of Cinema

I didn't have a lot of time last night so I just watched Guillermo del Toro's 1987 short film Geometry. What a perfect blend of horror and comedy. And you can see Del Toro's distinctive style already in place with the saturated red and blue coloured lighting, the camera angles, and a kind of pitiless editing.

I don't know why I've been so in the mood for horror movies lately.

Yesterday I also saw the new trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder.

I still want to see it but the trailer isn't nearly as good as the teaser. Christian Bale looks great as the villain but I'm afraid Natalie Portman is going to drag the movie down. The concept of a woman taking over a famous male character's identity is so overdone now and doesn't even seem to be truly feminist. But I have to hand it to Portman for bulking up. She still doesn't look like anyone I'd call Thor but I respect the work she put into it. I might even like this storyline if I saw in isolation.

Twitter Sonnet #1584

A cape interred these eighty years returns.
A bidden shape approached our humble home.
A simple ape incurred what God discerns.
Forbid escape, or must in tempests roam.
A hungry shadow never leaves the house.
Revenge abides between the walls of stone.
A dreamy field conceals the panicked mouse.
The morning hides the ancient mummy bones.
The coffee speaks when tea could scarcely sleep.
Arriving home, the footless boots were wet.
The time to take the stairs was greater deep.
The horses dashed to beat the idle bet.
The running mountain slams athwart its twin.
The antsy sky was ever picked to win.

The Haunted Place is a Mirror

Three wanderers take shelter in a monastery, leading them to a surprisingly intimate adventure in 1934's El fantasma del convento (The Phantom of the Monastery. This extraordinarily effective Mexican horror film was restored a few years ago by George Lucas and it's easy to see how the film may have influenced Star Wars and Indiana Jones.

You could say the protagonist trio is not unlike Han, Luke, and Leia. Alfonso (Entique del Campo), Eduardo (Carlos Villatoro), and Cristina (Marta Roel) have a very different relationship, though. Eduardo and Cristina are married and Eduardo and Alfonso are old friends. But Cristina has been trying to seduce Alfonso, who is attracted to her.

For all that, Alfonso is very much an Indiana Jones/Hans Solo character. From his high crowned, albeit straw, fedora to his insistence that he doesn't buy any of the supernatural hooey while also being intent on exploring the mysterious monastery, all make him a kind of Lucasian rogue/hero and an interesting character in his own right.

Eduardo remains earnest and afraid throughout while Cristina's lust seems to have overridden all her other impulses while on the monastery grounds. There seems to be a very Catholic moral afoot which, very much to the screenplay's credit, the characters actually pick up on. When the Prior tells them a story about a monk who was damned for trying to seduce his friend's wife, Cristina contemptuously points out what seems to her an obvious piece of sermonising.

And yet . . . The room inhabited by Brother Rodrigo is boarded up and blocked with a gigantic cross. It seems Rodrigo's sin was even greater, for he delved into the secrets of a forbidden book, seeking the aid of Satan in capturing the object of his affection. The scene where Alfonso finally dares to enter the cell is astonishingly effective.

El fantasma del convento is available on The Criterion Channel.

Storm Continues. Enter Lear and Fool.

My internet's been bad all weekend due to rain so I watched something I had on file last night, Laurence Olivier's 1983 King Lear. It remains my favourite of all the productions I've seen.

I think Olivier, of all the Lears I've seen, does the best job of conveying the impression of a man going mad but who is also painfully aware of his madness. That's the real heartbreak in his repeated, "Let me not be mad!" line. Not that he's going mad, but that he's aware of it. It's a real horror, especially considering it's one we all may face one day.

His madness really stems from two causes--his age and his grief. It's one thing to say he's foolish for misjudging his loved ones, but then think for a moment about what that must be like. To be brought forcibly to the realisation that your nearest and dearest aren't who you thought they were. It really comes in two layers because first he believes Cordelia and Kent aren't who he always thought they were. He can at least muster confidence enough to banish them. But when he discovers how little he could trust the promises of Regen or Goneril, he learns he can't even rely on his ability to discern revelation. He thought he had a revelation, but he later realises he understood nothing.

This confusion is strikingly mirrored in the subplot about Gloucester and his sons. The poor old man, with his eyes put out, being led to the edge of what he thinks is a cliff. It's ironic that Edgar has the last line of the play, presented like a moral, that we should say what we feel, not what we ought. He spends a lot of time deceiving his father. On the other hand, maybe that was a product of a real temporary madness on Edgar's part. Also, if we interpret the words "say what we feel not what we ought," literally, they don't mean, "Always tell the truth," as they're often thought to mean. Pretending to be Poor Tom and then pretending to have seen a monster has a kind of emotional truth, not unlike the Fool's nonsense. And it's a truth meant to help the old man, not to cut him down, as Regan's, Goneril's, and Edmund's deceptions were.

Still, it's dangerous business. With all of life's ambiguities and confusions, who's really in a position to decide when it's best to tell a falsehood? For this reason, I do think Cordelia made the right choice. Truth is too rare a commodity.

The Other, Other Conan

In my never ending task of catching up with all the things my students are into, a couple days ago I started watching Detective Conan, aka Case Closed (名探偵コナン). It's the new movie all the kids are talking about but I watched the first couple episodes of the TV anime from 1996. It's not bad.

I'd seen a couple episodes dubbed in English when the show aired on Adult Swim in the early 2000s under the title Case Closed. Like most Adult Swim viewers, I didn't have any interest in a show about a little kid, and there's certainly nothing particularly adult about the show, except to the lingering Puritanism of American broadcast restrictions. But I like kids a lot more than I used to and so I can enjoy a kids' show.

The show's about a brilliant high school student detective named Shinichi Kudo who's transformed into a brilliant elementary school student detective called Conan Edogawa. Among other things, this derails his plans to make it with his high school sweetheart, Ran.

In prepubescent form, he goes by the name Conan Edogawa, which comes from combining the names of two famous mystery writers, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edogawa Ranpo. He has a pretty charming obsession with Sherlock Holmes.

The show's funny but also capable of real tension at the right moments.

Detective Conan is available on Netflix in Japan.

Twitter Sonnet #1583

A ghostly people filled the hasty dream.
The happy barge obtained suspicious eggs.
A sunny breakfast bought a reckless team.
The tide can wash a skinny pair of legs.
A fire marked the path of burning snakes.
The rivers bound the ragged edge of day.
They met for bound'ries drawn for lofty stakes.
A dotted line designed the phantom way.
A shame the crownless case should think at times.
The brain provides some facts beyond the pale.
So look ye cats at kings for less than dimes.
But heave and never rue the dainty whale.
The ships were real but oceans turned to coke.
Mistook, a real delight was deemed a joke.

The Devil Returns

Word came recently that Charlie Cox will be reprising his role as Daredevil from the Netflix series. Now, of course, he'll be on Disney+, hopefully with something approaching the quality of his previous appearances, despite Disney once again cheaping out on the writing staff. Showrunners on the new series will be Matt Corman and Chris Ord, whose previous credits aren't nearly as illustrious as the legendary first season of Daredevil. News of the new series came at around the time I finally finished watching 2017's The Defenders, the big team up event series that followed the first two seasons of Daredevil and the first seasons of Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage. The Defenders had some strong moments but overall it was disappointing.

I also recently finished watching the first seasons of Luke Cage and Iron Fist. Luke Cage was by far the superior of the two. The uneven writing on Iron Fist got a little better near the end with an episode about his sidekick, Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick), coming to the realisation that she's been part of a murderous cult her whole life. There was some actual good stuff about how two good people can be fundamentally opposed, with one of them deeply, tragically mistaken. There were also some surprisingly nice moments with David Wenham's character but mostly the series sinks under the ineptitude of Finn Jones as the title character.

I felt like the creative team was actually making fun of him a little in The Defenders. In a scene where Elektra (Elodie Yung) has him tied up in an underground cave, she asks him if he can read some runes on the cavern wall. He angrily asks, "You brought me here to be your translator?" He sounded so much like Derek Zoolander that I laughed. Events that subsequently unfolded did nothing to dispel the impression that he's a complete doofus.

Mike Colter as Luke Cage didn't give an especially great performance but one that's good enough for a series that turned out to be more about its supporting characters. Of all the MCU movies and series, Luke Cage season one is one of the best I've seen for making the hero feel like part of, and a symbol for, a community. It's not artificially jammed in, Cage has a history with people in Harlem. The owner of a barber shop, a couple guys playing chess there (one of whom is a thug from Daredevil), and assorted other regulars on the street. When Luke meets one character, he might also know her sister or someone else might have a brother who was friends with so and so. It all feels like like a neighbourhood of real people.

And, my goodness, the performances on this show were outstanding, to say the least. Mahershala Ali, Theo Rossi, Erik LaRay Harvey are all phenomenal. Alfre Woodard is creepy as hell especially because of how plausible she makes her psychotic politician character. Rosario Dawson is, of course, great as always as Claire Temple, but the real star of Luke Cage is Simone Missick as Misty Knight. Her performance is creative and intelligent, finding real substance even in relatively cliche crime show moments.

I'd seen the first season of Jessica Jones years ago and I loved it. So I was excited for the team-up promised by The Defenders. I can understand the complications behind such an undertaking, weaving so many characters and storylines together while making them dramatically meaningful to the one going on in The Defenders. Unfortunately, this often resulted in retcons, narrative leaps, and and characters just plain not acting like themselves. The biggest crime of this sort was perpetrated on Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) whom we left in Daredevil season two not knowing Matt Murdock is Daredevil but advocating for the usefulness of vigilantes. In The Defenders, suddenly she's known his identity for some time and is trying to get him to stop being Daredevil, treating it like an addiction, a particularly annoying interpretation usually given to the very annoying character Foggy, Matt's lawyer friend.

Still, the series had its moments. It was cool seeing Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) and Matt Murdock together, especially in a scene where they interview a girl about her missing father. I am hoping I will see Jones in the future. Aside from the already promised Daredevil and Wilson Fisk, my list of the Marvel Netflix characters I'd like to see again most would probably be Misty Knight, Jessica Jones, Karen Page (I do love Deborah Ann Woll), Kilgrave, Diamondback, Claire Temple, and Colleen Wing.

Violence in the Fog

A big Frenchman awakens on a barge in California, wondering if he killed someone in last night's drunken haze. 1942's Moontide never really clears that up completely, one of the things that make it such a fascinating film noir.

The Frenchman is played by French star Jean Gabin in his first Hollywood role. He's introduced stumbling into a dockside tavern with a big angry dog between his legs.

There's definitely a lot of symbolism in this movie, most conspicuously during the sequence of Bobo's (Gabin) bender, which was partly designed by Salvador Dali. The most striking image is of a prostitute, Mildred (Robin Raymond), fading in and out of existence but leaving her immodest dress behind.

This dress and its supposed sluttiness play a big role in the film. Sadly, the Hays code prevented the dress from being more risque than showing a little triangle of skin below the breasts. It's worn much later in the film by Ida Lupino, who plays Anna.

Bobo rescues her from suicide and brings her home the barge where he's stopped his life of drifting to settle down with a job of selling fish bait. He has a friend called Tiny (Thomas Mitchell), though, who keeps trying to get him to hit the road with him. It's hinted pretty heavily that Tiny is gay and in love with Bobo, which is part of the reason the film later tries to implicate Tiny in the murder Bobo committed. Intriguingly, though, the film still makes more sense if you see Bobo as the murderer.

Claude Rains is in the film, too, as a night watchmen, oddly taken to wearing a big Boss of the Plains hat. Maybe these two details are to show him as a moral authority of enough gravity to absolve Bobo of the sins that are never spoken of directly.

Director Arthur Mayo heads a nicely gloomy production after taking over for Fritz Lang, who departed early in production. Gabin and Lupino are terrific together.

Moontide is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Queen Stole Her Crown

I don't know why but I expected more from a movie called Queen of Blood. This 1966 American film, produced by Roger Corman and directed by Curtis Harrington, owes a lot to a Soviet film called Mechte Navstechu, including its screenplay and its best footage, which is ripped right from that film. But Queen of Blood does have Basil Rathbone in one of his last roles and Dennis Hopper in one of his first along with the always entertaining, and frequently underrated, John Saxon.

We meet Saxon in some lunar office space chatting up a coworker (Judi Meredith). The two go to lunch, where they run into Dennis Hopper and a friend, before they see a broadcast from Basil Rathbone, who plays Dr. Faraday, leader of this space exploration institution.

Around this time, we also start seeing footage from the Soviet movie of an alien ship. All the footage from Mechte Navstrechu is pretty gorgeous and ominous, filled with darkness and lurid colour.

The Sci Fi business of the humans investigating a crashed alien ship is developed decently enough and the plot turns out to be about an alien blood-sucker, played by a compellingly exotic Florence Marly. But mostly I came away from the movie wanting to see the Soviet original.

Both Rathbone and Hopper seem pretty checked out. For different reasons, of course.

Queen of Blood is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1582

The early rabbit thwarts the trusty knife.
At dusk, a dozen miles stretched ahead.
They gathered works for tea from flowers rife.
Remembered films would put the vamp to bed.
The bank was softer than the magma needs.
A sleeping dragon dreamt of vagrant beers.
Invention chained a row of random beads.
The dusty glen has cooled the demon's tears.
A flying nose rewrote the daisy bed.
With many nails the fingers painted touch.
It happens fate was little like we read,
Contracted hats were always billed as such.
For dames of green the fields of red were tilled.
With brews of black the hefty cups were filled.

Saul Calls Kim

A much better episode of Better Call Saul premiered last night than last week's. Once again, the show's much better when it focuses on Saul and Kim.

We get a little glimpse of Kim's childhood this time and witness something that may partially explain her current compulsion for wrongdoing. She's not the lifelong goody-two-shoes driven mad by repression. It's in her family history.

I love how clearly she hates the classy makeover Francesca gave to Saul's office. I actually kind of like it. It looks a bit like a Bergman film or--probably quite intentionally--like Twin Peaks.

The subplot with Lalo clearly seems to be echoing Twin Peaks this week as we find Lalo battling a woodsman somewhere in Germany. It was a decently directed scene by none other than Gus himself, Giancarlo Esposito. But it's undercut by its silly premise running from the previous episode.

Why the hell did Lalo go to Germany? Why does he care if Gus had secret dealings or an underground structure? Is he planning to get revenge by nailing Gus on building code violations? The show has consistently overestimated how interesting that underground structure is. And I know Lalo attacking the woodsman with the razor was supposed to be badass but it was too implausible. It came off as just silly.

But mainly the episode was a win. I love how Saul actually seems to be the one with the levellest head in his life.

Better Call Saul is available on Netflix.