Magic and Soul

What once was fun, sexy, and romantic has become painful, violent addiction in "Wrecked", a 2001 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is the episode where Buffy and Spike finally have sex and Willow's compulsion to use magic becomes a full blown After School Special.

Willow's Magic Addiction is a sterling example of how bad allegory can be. Willow meets a dealer, she starts losing track of time when she gets high--in this case, literally getting stuck to the ceiling.

She loses her sense of priorities and gets Dawn in danger just to get a fix. It all ends with a car crash and a summoned demon. Magic, which just last year was the symbol of Willow's bond with Tara, has now just become drugs. Tara no longer has anything positive to say for magic, she's basically a different character. Wouldn't this all work better if they'd made Willow literally a drug addict? Yes, it would.

However, I quite like the Buffy/Spike plot. I heard the network insisted on the pairing but I think this actually works to the show's benefit. You can sense the writers trying to justify it as they go and they struggle as much as Buffy does--which makes her dialogue much more natural. Life isn't often a neat and tidy allegory, people do things that fly in the face of their self-perception, things that contradict how other people perceive them. Though, actually, it's not so out of character for Buffy who for several seasons has been built up as having a carnal side, and as having increasing trouble forming and maintaining emotional attachments.

It's also another interesting route for the show's premise of vampires not having souls. We can't help sympathising with Spike a little, even when he's being a jerk. It's almost like the concept is propaganda designed to make the Slayer more comfortable with genocide.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1703

A watching ghost arranged a sheet to walk.
By just a beard the being was spotted late.
For here the restless dead at times may talk.
Such pretty spectres want a special gate.
Another place displays her face for me.
Projected thoughts or maybe flesh and bone.
The forest hides beneath the fossil tree.
A treasure's safe beneath the mossy stone.
"The Devil's Way"'s a song of darkened frames.
Disordered art was pushed at ev'ry side.
In hasty blood, his claw records the names.
A budget movie set's a place to hide.
Another bug absorbs the sugar sky.
Another wing's tattooed with how to fly.

Make Way for Mitchum

A frontier town is ruled by a murderous gang. Robert Mitchum comes to sort them out in 1955's Man with the Gun. It's not a bad film but I'd put it pretty far down the list of good '50s Westerns. It's always nice watching Robert Mitchum anyway.

He plays Clint Tollinger who rides into town wearing what looks distinctly like a modern sport coat.

Costumes are certainly one of the weak points of this film. Alex North's score is also pretty weak, or at least its juxtaposition with the action is.

Director Richard Wilson fragments the scenes too much with excessive close-ups but there are nonetheless decent action sequences. Mitchum shows he can mount and ride a horse quickly while giving a performance and I readily believe he's a marvellously quick draw.

Tollinger is a "town tamer", a hired gun whose job is to clean up towns like this. In this case, though, he was visiting just to see an old flame, the manager of a dance hall troupe of girls and possibly the madam of their brothel. She's played by Jan Sterling who's moderately attractive and gives a moderately good performance.

Man with the Gun is available on ScreenPix.

Of Fighters and Drinkers

I've been watching Henry IV, Part I piecemeal over the past couple weeks, the BBC Television Shakespeare version. It just kind of happened, I never have time to watch the whole thing but I've been itching to watch it again so I watch a little bit here and there. It occurred to me there's a sequence of scenes in which one guy does a verbal take down of another guy. There's Hal and Falstaff, then Hotspur and Glendower, then the King and Hal.

Although Anthony Quayle plays Falstaff as just starting to get some inkling of Hal's ultimate betrayal of him, and he acts indignant at first, the beauty of Falstaff is that eventually he takes it all in good humour. What really matters to him is coin in his pocket and sack in his belly. Hotspur unwisely makes his rebel ally, Glendower, the butt of a series of very funny but vicious jabs. The King is deeply disturbed by his son's loose living. The rashness of youth and the bitterness of political responsibilities hang over the latter two. It's easy to see why Falstaff was such a popular character, he longs for the human comforts we all do. Few of us appreciate the gravity of the King's preoccupations and only a few more people will have experienced Hotspur's profound restlessness.

I was watching the Hotspur and Glendower scene last night. One sympathises with Hotspur and his disdain for pomposity but it's astonishing how little thought he gives to the precariousness of his situation and his need for allies.

MORTIMER.
Peace, cousin Percy, you will make him mad.

GLENDOWER.
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR.
Why, so can I, or so can any man,
But will they come when you do call for them?

GLENDOWER.
Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command the devil.

HOTSPUR.
And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil
By telling truth; tell truth, and shame the devil.
If thou have power to raise him, bring him hither,
And I’ll be sworn I have power to shame him hence.
O, while you live, tell truth, and shame the devil!

MORTIMER.
Come, come, no more of this unprofitable chat.

GLENDOWER.
Three times hath Henry Bolingbroke made head
Against my power; thrice from the banks of Wye
And sandy-bottom’d Severn have I sent him
Bootless home and weather-beaten back.

HOTSPUR.
Home without boots, and in foul weather too!
How ’scapes he agues, in the devil’s name!

Storm and Murder

These old Stephen King miniseries directed by Craig R. Baxley are consistently enjoyable. They always look cheap and Baxley has little to no creative flair, which I think may have been a good thing in King's opinion. But it's fun watching King's characters play out on screen in long form. Yesterday I watched the first episode of 1999's Storm of the Century.

Tim Daly stars as a sheriff in a small, northeastern coastal town bracing for a massive storm. Meanwhile, a sinister man with monster teeth comes to town and starts killing people.

This guy somehow knows about all the secret crimes people have concealed in their pasts. King gets a lot of nice tension out of the hazardous situations involving people who might deserve a comeuppance.

It's a nice, cosy watch. I think I might have enjoyed it more on a long, lazy day during winter vacation.

Twitter Sonnet #1702

A line of ghosts invade the hidden train.
Besiegers settle not for partial terms.
Museums amount to ancient grinning pain.
Escape we never shall from many germs.
The human heart was stuck in liver town.
For after schnapps, the belly shook a boast.
Frames abide to chop the forest down.
The risk returned to bread, you're eating toast.
No cake was shaped of only syrup yet.
Determined eggs return the flying pan.
With safer yolks your breakfast's sooner bet.
A bigger meal attracts a larger fan.
Surrounding trees conceal the lives of birds.
The heart was washed away with heartless words.

The Men are Bad

Some women may be manhaters but I've always said few women can hate men as deeply as men can. It shows in a lot of movies and television, an example being Robert Altman's 1993 film Short Cuts. A three hour film that weaves together nine short stories and a poem by Raymond Carver, Altman offers portraits of malicious and cruel or pathetically selfish men from all walks of life and the women who love them and suffer for them. The incredible ensemble cast give good performances and some of the punchlines are funny but too much of the film sinks under a shadow of a cynical, sexist diatribe.

The characters are mostly grouped as married couples; Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin, Andie McDowell and Bruce Davison, Matthew Modine and Julianne Moore, Chris Penn and Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Robbins and Madeleine Stowe, Robert Downey Jr. and Lili Taylor, Peter Gallagher and Frances McDormand, Fred Ward and Anne Archer, and Lori Singer and Annie Ross play a daughter and mother. Jack Lemmon, Lyle Lovett, Buck Henry, and Huey Lewis play supporting characters.

Fred Ward along with Huey Lewis and Buck Henry provide the most egregious caricatures of male rottenness. The three go on a fishing trip and find a beautiful young woman's nude corpse in the river. Unable to decide what to do, they end up carrying on fishing for a few days before reporting her. Altman skirts over a lot of logistics in order to portray these men as terrible as possible, most notably the issue that it occurs to none of them, or to the authorities to whom they eventually report finding the body, that they may face legal troubles for not immediately reporting an apparent crime.

I'm not saying there aren't a lot of guys who would be stupid and selfish enough to react like these three guys but Altman has nothing in particular to say here beyond, "These men are horrible." They're like cartoon characters. The crowded cast may be partially responsible for the fact that most of the characters feel two dimensional but by the nature of the story showing how all these lives are intertwined, Altman could have taken the opportunity of showing how people show different sides to themselves in different situations. Which would have been a lot like Twin Peaks, which I suspect was an influence on this film. It's as though Altman heard about men crying over Laura Palmer's corpse washing ashore and said, "No. Men would react like monsters if no women were there to witness them." The time frame would've been right, even if it's true, as Wikipedia says, the script for Short Cuts was completed in 1989--Twin Peaks was first pitched to ABC in 1988. Altman could have then chosen the Raymond Carver stories that would best suit his rebuttal to Twin Peaks.

One portrayal of simplistic, selfish, horrible men is one drop in a sea of portrayals of simplistic, selfish, horrible men, blurring together in a dull catechism of self-flagellation.

Robert Downey Jr. plays a guy who brags about drugging women to have sex with him. Matthew Modine is nursing a grudge because he thinks his wife may have kissed a guy at a party a few years ago. Tim Robbins cheats on his wife with Frances McDormand, who's separated from her husband Peter Gallagher, who nonetheless is so enraged by the fact that she's dating that he breaks into her house when she's away and destroys all her clothes and furniture. Bruce Davison is a Bill O'Riley style TV demagogue, Lyle Lovett makes harassing phone calls to Davison and McDowell while their son is dying, and so on. Out of all the men, only Tom Waits comes off as kind of okay, I guess because he's basically playing Tom Waits. He wears a suit and goes to the bar and drinks against Lily Tomlin's wishes while he listens to Annie Ross sing.

A lot of reviews noted the surprising amount of female nudity in the film and essentially no male nudity. Julianne Moore has a dialogue scene where her vagina is exposed for almost the duration, Madeleine Stowe poses nude, Lori Singer goes skinny dipping while Chris Penn peeps at her, and Frances McDormand and of course the corpse are also naked in the film. Altman isn't doing this on accident, he's clearly making a point, the point being, I suspect, "Look how beautiful and vulnerable women are while men are morally ugly and aggressive."

One moment I thought was effectively funny was when Buck Henry, who took pictures of the corpse, goes to get his photos developed at the same shop as Robert Downey Jr. and Lili Taylor. Downey Jr. plays a movie makeup artist who did a photoshoot of Lili Taylor made up like a murder victim. Henry, who can see Taylor is very much alive, must have assumed it was some kind of kink and he decides to write down the couple's license plate, presumably to report him, while Taylor and Downey Jr. write down his, due to the photos of the real corpse. That one made me laugh. That and Tom Waits were some of the few bright spots in this generally grim exercise in cynicism.

Death Rides a Clown Car

Those who narrowly escape death may find it is only to suffer a sillier fate down the line. So it is for the doomed souls of 2000's Final Destination. I'd heard how goofy this film is but I guess fate finally tapped me to watch it. It is fun, in an unintentionally whimsical way. Young Ali Larter is pretty cute.

A young man boards a flight to Paris with his 39 classmates. Dozing off, he has a vision of the plane exploding. He makes a scene and is escorted off the plane along with his teacher and a handful of other classmates. Then the plane really does explode.

It seems the boy and his friends are granted a reprieve. Little do they know the ghost of Loony Tunes lurks in the shadows. One kid is strangled by a lively shower cord than the phone cord in Detour. The teacher is caught in a deadly cycle of bloody slapstick in her kitchen to rival the opening cartoon from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

My favourite, though, is when the boy gets pinned under a tree, his face somehow forced down into a puddle. We're meant to believe that the tree is so heavy that he can't even turn his head but he's somehow able to escape from it without any apparent injury. I guess Toons are governed only by the laws of comedy.

Final Destination is available on Netflix.

The Old Ship's Old Ship

Star Trek: Picard gave us starship Enterprise lovers a good nostalgia trip this year but last night I felt like admiring Star Trek on its true merits. So I watched the third season Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise". Boy, it sure holds up.

It's such a lean, smooth hour of television. Every scene flows smoothly into the next. From the moment the Enterprise-C comes through the time rift, an effective cloud of doom hangs over everything.

Most Next Generation episodes introduced a problem the crew slowly solves over the course of the episode. Yesterday's Enterprise does that, too, but right from the beginning the audience knows a lot more than the crew. Guinan is almost on the same page as the audience but even she only has a feeling that something is wrong, that they're now in an alternate timeline.

Patrick Stewart is so good in the episode, so subtle. I love how his voice changes when he tells Captain Garrett the war with the Klingons in this alternate timeline is going very badly for the Federation. The menace is so well established, implicitly and explicitly, it sets up the worth of Picard, Yar, and Castillo's sacrifices. It's just a brilliant piece of storytelling.

Star Trek: The Next Generation is available on Netflix and Paramount+.

Twitter Sonnet #1701

A silent void awaits a sign of life.
Appearing fast, the ship pursues a course.
Intruding minds refer a glowing knife.
The pretty frame advanced a stellar horse.
As matter flows it meets at crystal points.
Combined with anti-matter warp's achieved.
For five initial years the fleet appoints.
On distant worlds, the Enterprise received.
Advancing past the dock, she journeys forth.
Beyond excelling foes, the ship embarks.
Deflector shields sustain a blow of worth.
Enough was told to buttress engine works.
To boldly go, the vessel plots a path.
To final distant space, to love and wrath.

Tornadoes of Our Lives

One of the greatest directors possessed of pure instinct for cinematic language was Samuel Fuller. 1957's Forty Guns exhibits his genius beautifully.

Barbara Stanwyck plays Jessica Drummond, a wealthy landowner on the vanishing frontier who rules over a retinue of 40 gunmen. Meanwhile, a grim, infamous gunfighter named Griff Bonnell (Barry Sullivan), along with his brothers, comes to town and is compelled to bring justice to one of Jessica's men who's murdered the local marshal.

This surprisingly doesn't put Jessica and Griff at odds, in fact they seem to have an immediate attraction and respect for each other. This culminates when they're out alone on her property, looking for places her renegade employees can hide out, and they're caught in a tornado.

It's a terrific scene. Fuller makes the brilliant decision to omit any mention of the tornado in dialogue. We just watch these two badasses struggle in a sudden, increasingly deadly situation. Fuller piles on wind and dust, Jessica's dragged by her horse, Griff's coach is destroyed. They crawl on their bellies into the ruins of a tiny home. We catch up with them later, laying beside each other, chatting about the past and the future as two people who've obviously just had sex.

The production code was gone at this point, Fuller didn't need to have the tornado as a code for sex. He has it because it works so damned well.

Griff has to be one of the great, grim, solemn old gunfighters in western history, which he proves in a breathtaking finale.

Forty Guns is available on The Criterion Channel until the end of the month.

Raiders of Raiders

Those looking to cash in on the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark could look to many of the works that influenced Steven Spielberg's film. And that's what Golan-Globus did for 1985's King Solomon's Mines. Bearing very little resemblance to H Rider Haggard's novel, the film is almost a beat for beat remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark with cheaper sets and costumes. It does have a surprisingly nice score by Jerry Goldsmith and its stars, Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone, have a campy charm.

The filmmakers decided to jump right to the Cairo scene from Raiders and we catch up with Allan Quatermain (Chamberlain) and the beautiful Jesse Huston (Stone), a character invented for the film, as they arrive at a north African city.

We won't learn who the characters are or their relationship to each other for some time, the film seemingly content to let the audience read them as Indy and Marion. The fight choreography almost replicates the Cairo scene with Jessie getting kidnapped and carried off in a rug instead of a wicker basket. Later, the film will have versions of other famous Raiders set pieces, including the truck chase (moved to a train) and a grounded airplane fight.

Jesse and this film's version of Allan are always improbably clean. Jesse's hair and clothes always look like she just stepped out of Bloomingdale's. Considering how I remarked on Stone's unrealistic hair in the opening of Gloria last week, I wonder if she had a regular clause in her contract, something like, "My hair shall always be crimped if I say it's crimped."

Chamberlain has a certain sparkle in his eye that makes him fun to watch. Still, this is no match for the 1950 adaptation and certainly doesn't approach the greatness of the book.

King Solomon's Mines (1985) is available on YouTube for free with ads.

All Roads Lead to Television

I haven't written about my dreams in a while. Last night I dreamt I was back in San Diego, walking east on Fletcher Parkway in La Mesa. I was on the south side of the street though I knew I needed to be on the north side. I was carrying a glass mug I'd stolen from the trolley station (where one does not usually find mugs). I found my path, and the path of every car in the street, was impeded by a new concrete parking garage. Cars had to turn around and go back the other way. I went inside and found an entrance to JC Penney and a little waiting room for the department store's optometrist or photo studio. There was an old CRT television, old enough to have a wooden exterior. It was showing new movies.

Last night I watched a bunch of old music videos. Wouldn't it be nice to have someone feel this way about you? Or about anything?

Twitter Sonnet #1700

Ahead of silver cars, a horse advanced.
Bereft of gas, the final car desists.
Across the road, a nervous critter danced.
Delicious dots in space for some exist.
For kings, the birds could bow and scrape the seeds.
Effacing spirits move the dial down.
Replacement fluff has choked rewarded deeds.
Upholstery broke from rotten feather down.
Mistaken arms mislead the leaden leg.
Extinguished tombs contain the beat of death.
Expensive glue repaired the ugly egg.
On iron hills there sounds a banshee breath.
Beneath the teeth of auto parts they fall.
Returns are cut behind a diesel wall.

Return to Rose Red

The haunted history of Stephen King's 2002 miniseries Rose Red was expanded on in the 2003 TV movie The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer. The usual, delightful moral chaos of a Stephen King story is replaced by something closer to a typical romance novel. But it's still a lot of fun.

The movie's based on a book by Ridley Pearson, for some reason writing under the pseudonym of Joyce Reardon, PhD. It follows Ellen (Lisa Brenner) on her Edwardian adventures in an unspecified West African country where she has a menage a trois with her husband, John, (Steven Brand) and an unnamed African woman.

Ellen and John return home to Seattle and Rose Red manor along with Ellen's new best friend from Africa, Sukeena (Tsidii Le Loka), who, it is understood, will of course be a household servant. Eventually, both of them will have to have increasingly kinky sex with John in order to keep up their secret investigation of the house's haunting. This movie really needed to be rated R. As it is, there are lots of shots of topless womens' backs.

People disappear but it's only because the house wants to please Ellen who, like many a romance novel heroine before or after her, sits at the centre of everyone's universe for no particular reason.

I loved watching her and Sukeena investigating secret passageways.

Jim Brown

Jim Brown died a few days ago. Having recently read Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation, in which he expresses admiration for the actor he watched onscreen as a child, it's hard not to feel like this is the passing of a giant. Even though I hadn't seen most of the movies Tarantino talked about in the book. I have a great fondness for 1968's Dark of the Sun, which I downloaded a copy of seven or eight years ago and has had a permanent place on my hard drives ever since.

Brown is one of the leads along with Rod Taylor. It's really Taylor's film but Brown is good as the more level headed counterpart to Taylor's mercenary. Each man is unscrupulous in his own way but with Brown's character it's because he has a bigger picture in mind. He's fine in the role, not the least because of his physical presence, the former Cleveland Browns player being a legendary athlete.

Last night I watched one of Tarantino's favourite Jim Brown movies, and one of Brown's most successful, 1972's Slaughter. It's a low budget blaxploitation film but it doesn't really feel low budget because of good performances from Brown along with Stella Stevens and Don Gordon.

Brown plays a former Green Beret who's set on avenging his murdered father. As an actor, he's far more interesting here than he was in Dark of the Sun. Captain Slaughter is a quiet, self-contained man whose sudden wry smiles or bursts of violent anger are more arresting than the well timed gunfire in the film's copious shoot-outs.

Tarantino used music from both Dark of the Sun and Slaughter in Inglorious Basterds. Slaughter is available on Screenpix on Amazon Prime.

Worthy at Heart

One title conspicuously absent from Criterion's David Lynch playlist is 1990's Wild at Heart. Although it's generally been ranked among the films definitive of Lynch's most celebrated stylistic preoccupations, discussion of it has been scarce in the past fifteen years. Perhaps Straight Story is more neglected but at least it's available on Disney+. Wild at Heart isn't stocked on any streaming service and there's been no talk of a director approved blu-ray release, whether by Criterion or otherwise. Nicholas Cage, one of the stars of the film, randomly brought the film up on Stephen Colbert recently to a crowd that didn't seem to know what he was talking about. I found a copy on Japanese Amazon for just over 900 yen, or less than eight dollars, so I bought it and watched it.

It's been at least fifteen years since I watched it, I think. I certainly hadn't watched it since first watching Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017. I might have drawn a comparison between how Lynch comments on American culture in both projects. They're both road movies with lots of hotels and motels. A trip to Texas seems like a trip to an underworld in both.

Wild at Heart's Texas is filled with demons led by Willem Dafoe in one of the roles that established him as an excellently revolting bad guy. The scene where he intrudes on Lula (Laura Dern) really crystalises the film's themes.

He seems like he's going to rape her but instead he ends up making her say, "Fuck me," and mean it. In a movie about liberation, where Sailor and Lula's sexual freedom is shown as a means of expressing their love honestly, the idea that Lula could actually respond physically with as much arousal to anyone else is devastating. The tension in the movie is between freedom and anarchy. Is freedom the potential for all people to realise their good will and pursue happiness, or is it chaos in which all needs can be boiled down to chemical compulsions?

A film that specifically comments on culture and media would seem inevitably to be a postmodernist commentary. But it is in the Texas segment that I think Lynch takes aim at the dehumanising tendencies of deconstructionism. Jack Nance, as one of the Texas demons, is the only character in the film aside from Lula and Sailor who references The Wizard of Oz. He tells her he has a dog and points out how she's compelled to picture a dog before he describes one, and suggests perhaps she imagines Toto from The Wizard of Oz. She seems intrigued before he laughs in apparent mockery of his own insight.

Bobby Peru, Dafoe's character, similarly possesses intelligence and insight when he perceives that Lula is pregnant. But he does so only with the intent to degrade and destroy. Much as deconstructionists, in their analyses, also exhibit insight, but generally only with the intent of undermining the substance of narratives, sometimes even, as Laura Mulvey stated in her essay on the gaze, with the express intent of extinguishing the pleasure of the viewer, "to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film."

Although it wouldn't be the first or last time Lynch referenced The Wizard of Oz in film, Wild at Heart is certainly the Lynch film that's most explicitly concerned with The Wizard of Oz. Lula and Sailor refer to their path as "the Yellow Brick Road". Lula has a vision of the Wicked Witch (in the form of her mother) and Sailor has a vision of the Good Witch (played by Laura Palmer herself, Sheryl Lee). The Wizard of Oz is the closest thing Lula and Sailor have to a religious text, a narrative anchor they use to keep their lives from spinning into chaos.

The dying girl played by Sherilyn Fenn functions a little like one of the demons. The brain damage she incurs after the accident reduces her to complaining randomly about her purse and her brush, her concerns disconnected from the reality at hand, an apparently damning demonstration of how the human mind is compelled to create narratives at variance with reality. Lula recalls a story about her cousin Dale, played in flashback by Crispin Glover, who had paranoid theories about aliens destroying Christmas. His compulsion to make hundreds of sandwiches in one night is not a practical method of satisfying his stated goal of making his lunch. But both of these fractured, counterproductive narratives arise from exterior or chemical forces doing damage to the brain. I wonder if Dale was also meant to be a reference to Mark Frost, Lynch's co-writer on Twin Peaks, who was interested in introducing a story about aliens to the series. Dale may have been a parody of Twin Peaks' protagonist Dale Cooper under that scenario.

A big part of Wild at Heart is devoted to Lula's mother, Marietta (Diane Ladd), who may serve as an example of someone without a narrative or with a very weak one. She's characterised by wildly inconsistent motives and indecision. First she wants to have sex with Sailor, then she wants to kill him. First she sends Harry Dean Stanton after Lula and Sailor, then the hitman, Santos. She regrets doing both. She ends up following Harry Dean Stanton but can't seem to decide if she wants to commit to a relationship with him.

Sailor and Lula are as wild at heart as Lula accuses the whole world of being. But their wildness is coupled with love, vulnerability, and compassion making them one of the more appealing, and romantic, couples in film history.

Twitter Sonnet #1699

Adornments swamp the swanky sobbing ball.
Aggrieved, the lizards pass the skull around.
Behold the drinking tree, a mile tall.
Revenge a penny begs a vengeful pound.
Of shattered webs, the stars have softly told.
Traversing roads of words, the riders go.
Derived from books of death, the angels hold.
Defense against the ice demands the snow.
Purveying phony jackets doomed a man.
Disaster beans were counted dead and dark.
Embedded fire roasts the coffee can.
Excited birds erased the actor's mark.
Abusing baubles close blockades ahead.
Enchanted claws enclose the frightened dead.

Thor's Day

I guess the MCU has a history of bad hairpieces. I watched 2011's Thor again last night, for the first time since it first came out. It's about exactly as good as I remember: better than the average MCU movie to-day but none to rank among the best.

The main attraction is the relationship between Thor and Loki and Loki is still the best character. Director Kenneth Branagh allows Tom Hiddleston's performance to suggest quite a lot about the nature of his internal conflict.

Hiddleston's the right actor for that. He has such expressive facial features, you could pick up on a twitch of his eyebrow from a hundred yards.

I wish the films had allowed us to spend more time with Anthony Hopkins' Odin. I like how he always seems locked up. Even in the end, when he's telling Thor he's proud of him, you don't sense he's being totally open, you sense this dialogue is just one part of the vast calculations going on in his mind.

Jane still feels superfluous, a typical girlfriend character from a standard superhero movie. A more interesting film might have made Kat Denning's supporting character the love interest. Intellectually, she's a better match for Thor. Jane is almost more suited for Loki.

Thor is available on Disney+.

Bad Jobs and a Dangerous Dame

A handsome drifter finds his life changed when he takes a job as a hotel handyman in 1969's The Big Bounce. Ryan O'Neal and Leigh Taylor-Young star in this clever crime film based on an Elmore Leonard novel.

O'Neal plays Jack, the drifter who's fired from his day labour job in cucumber fields after hitting a co-worker in the face with a baseball bat. The local justice of the peace, played by Van Heflin in the best performance in the film (by a long shot), takes a liking to Jack and gives him the job at the hotel.

It's implied that Heflin's character likes Jack at least partly because he doesn't like Mexicans and seemed to enjoy watching footage of Jack hitting the man. Jack seems wary of Heflin but is too down on his luck to pass up on the gig.

Then he meets Nancy, the adolescent secretary of his former boss. She's supposed to be no older than 18 though actress Leigh Taylor-Young looks older than the 24 years old she was in reality (too much 1960s foundation on her face, I think). But it would've been hard to find many actresses willing to do all the nudity required by the role. Nancy seems to want to be naked at any and all opportunities.

Everyone warns Jack she's trouble. Jack knows she's trouble. But he plays ball anyway with her harebrained and increasingly psychotic hijinks.

O'Neal is bland as usual but the film is a nice blend of '60s madcap comedy and a grim drama of human compulsion.

The Boys are Men in Town

Those little hooligans are all grown up in 1941's Men of Boys Town, the sequel to 1938's Boys Town. An admirable perspective is presented, that of meeting misdirected youthful passion with kindness and understanding. The effect is nullified, though, by an excess of moralising and a lack of any real sense of complex humanity.

It's been a really long time since I saw the original Boys Town though I dimly remember finding it a little more effective. It focused more on Spencer Tracy's crusade to create a healing environment for delinquent boys. In the sequel, he doesn't have much to do aside from replaying a few notes.

Most of the plot focuses on Mickey Rooney's character, Whitey, who's briefly adopted by a rich family. Despite his theatrical sobbing when he's parted from his friends, Rooney still gives a decent performance. He was past his child-actor glory days and one can see to-day he was in 1941 the kind of actor who'd have been perfect to play a Peter Parker or Marty McFly. It's a shame that kind of teen role just didn't exist yet in the '30s and early '40s, when everyone was either a baby or a full fledged adult. And by the time They Live by Night came around, Rooney would've been too old.

Some of the kids are really cute in Men of Boys Town. But there's not much of substance here to satisfy the viewer.

Twitter Sonnet #1698

A name presents a title stamp for call.
A heavy horse retired late to-night.
A bathing tale concludes the tardy fall.
But never can the ogre know respite.
A silent trumpet choked with pens and ink.
A rabbit face absorbed the hidden chick.
An April rain returned to drown the sink.
But burning, bottled blood has done the trick.
A running car awaits the baker's whim.
Between the nuts and bullets, screws abide.
Respectful bulbs in blanching earnest dim.
Electric brains with metal strings collide.
The blinking toad concealed a choc'late house.
The brains of cats define the famous mouse.

All the World's a Song

Criterion has a David Lynch playlist currently streaming so last night I watched Mulholland Drive again. Not for the first time, I found myself comparing and contrasting the Club Silencio scene with Jean-Luc Godard. I suspect a lot of people who watch Mulholland Drive take the Club Silencio scene as a commentary on movies and art in general. I'd say it's more of a commentary on a commentary, specifically the kind of postmodernist deconstruction Godard made.

In Mulholland Drive, the two protagonists visit an avante-garde stage performance in which a sinister man maliciously reminds the audience that all of the music they hear is not truly live, that it's just a recording.

This reminds me of the musical number in Godard's Une femme est une femme in which Godard repeatedly removes the music from the soundtrack.

Godard's point, as it was in similar moments in Vivre sa vie and Pierrot le fou, is to show audiences how they're being manipulated by the music. The key difference is that Lynch argues there's something sinister about it, that it clearly disturbs Betty, who experiences a seizure. As I was saying in my recent Vertigo analysis, fantasy seems a necessity for maintaining sanity. One could argue Betty/Diane shares some blame in making her fantasy so precarious as to lead to her own destruction. But the ambiguity of just how much control she has over herself is fundamental to the tragedy.

Combo Unlocked

What's the best time of year? Christmas. What's the best place conceivable? Heaven. Put them together for maximum value and you get "Christmas in Heaven". I watched Monty Python's The Meaning of Life again last night and, like a lot of people, I find the Pythons' wit has taken on a new life, their work is a refreshing dose of intelligent, brash comedy in an entertainment landscape increasingly concerned with piety and greed.

The final segment of the film shows a heaven resembling a floor show at a swanky restaurant. The lyrics promise creature comforts including the latest video games, Sony walkmans, and a TV channel that plays Jaws I, II, and III. It's this last promise that tips the hand slightly. It's all so wonderful, surely you should be grateful to watch Jaws III, right? Well, Heaven's taken funding from Universal so you'd better like it.

You could say that it's bad form to mock a desire for a life of ease. Should we begrudge a factory worker in China stealing a few minutes of pleasure from a video game? Or this Australian guy in an advertisement that, according to an article on Dark Horizons that by no means received payola, has drawn "acclaim"?

I would say that societies that consume lives with menial labour or with soulless office drudgery are both guilty of leaving the only scraps of human imagination left over fit for solving puzzles in a video game. We all need to shut off our brains sometimes and just mellow out but I think we all, if even only in some deep recess of the brain, realise that this is not the pinnacle of human experience, that true Heaven would be more than being pampered or coddled with the dopamine breadcrumbs of simple puzzles or team sports of the political or athletic variety. But I wouldn't blame the average person for not having the imagination to know what that something might be under the auspices of forces who see no profit in widespread individual thought. When everyone has the same thoughts, they'll buy the same lines, and that's how institutions can properly take root. But to borrow a line from Groucho Marx, who wants to live in an institution?

Dream Contained

I've discovered another Stephen King movie is vastly underrated. 2003's Dreamcatcher may not be the best Stephen King movie ever made but I think it deserves better than its 28% Rotten Tomatoes score.

I really like the cast, for one thing. Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Timothy Olyphant, and Damian Lewis play a group of old friends who also all have psychic abilities owing to an encounter in their childhood. In this, the story resembles numerous other Stephen King stories, such as It and Stand by Me. The twist here turns out to be an invasion of toothy alien eels that burst out of peoples' colons.

But not before giving them lots of gas, something Jason Lee's character laughs at as merrily as his breakout character, Brody, in Mallrats. If you're amused by fart jokes, you'll probably find this movie a lot of laughs. I tend to see farts as a mundane human function so I get bored of them quickly. That doesn't matter, though, because I don't think they're played wholly for laughs here. The reflex to see them as comedic helps put the viewer off-balance as they start to work more as a sign of these victims losing control to their bodies. It becomes a malevolent sign of the parasite asserting physical dominance.

I really like the interplay between the characters' abilities and the alien menace they fight. It almost feels like an X-Men movie except, since it's Stephen King, anyone can die at any time. Any resemblance the characters have to superheroes only adds to the horror when their fingers are getting chewed off or their guts exploded.

The dialogue isn't always great. William Goldman and director Lawrence Kasdan's screenplay is absorbing enough when plot stuff is happening but their attempts to make the four friends sound like regular guys fall flat. Lee tells a joke about a Meg Ryan movie that seems like maybe they were trying to tap into the sort of nerdiness Lee exhibited in Mallrats. But it comes off more like an insider reference from a screenwriter who's worked in the industry for a long time and has no clue how regular people process his work. The movie also never really justifies its title.

But I liked the alien design and Kasdan capably threads all the scenes together. Thomas Jane and Jason Lee are two actors very good at playing one, specific kind of guy, and they're not quite playing to their specialties here. Still, it was nice to see them, especially knowing how underutilised both have been throughout their careers. Morgan Freeman and the recently deceased Tom Sizemore also have nice supporting roles.

Twitter Sonnet #1697

A foolish phantom crossed the edge of dreams.
His paper boat absorbed the ink of night.
A darling face was nothing like it seems.
And so the Eyes of Green put out the light.
The pirate building sailed to take a yam.
A ruddy whale was miffed at spinning ships.
The gummy candy crossed the mental dam.
The ducal fleet is little glowing blips.
With shrinking foam, potato heads depart.
Decisive glass divides the tile space.
What fog condemns the shower crushed a heart.
For running deer we hid the monster face.
A Janus language clogged the mirror spark.
A pixel storm has turned the glasses dark.

Who is Your Brain Voice?

Sometimes I wonder how my voice sounds in people's heads when they read my blog, or if they hear their own voices. I wonder if the tone I intend is coming through, though often I suppose it doesn't matter if it does or not. It seems more important for my comic.

Every now and then, I have an experience that reminds me of how differently people experience prose. I was reminded again reading an article by Terry Eagleton this morning on the recently crowned King Charles and a comment Charles had once made about Eagleton. The article, entitled, "Why doesn't King Charles like me?" seemed one that shifted between mildly bemused and idly contemplative. Then I scrolled down to the comments and found people taking Eagleton to task at great length for misunderstanding the general perception of the monarchy and for throwing "a hissy fit."

When I took a literary criticism class in college, I had to read a book by Eagleton detailing the history of critical philosophy and thought going back to Aristotle and reaching through the various, splintered concepts and theories of 20th century analyses. Throughout, I found Eagleton's tone to be unobtrusive and congenial, only occasionally offering his own point of view on different theories. It seemed as good as any source I could think of to inform myself on the topic and even kind of a pleasant read. I was surprised, then, in class discussion when many of the students vocally resented having to read the book and angrily accused Eagleton of hating literature and art.

It seems King Charles feels similarly, so I'm with Eagleton in wondering at this mysterious antipathy. I can't think of much to explain it beyond there probably being political connotations I'm unaware of. I remember some years ago watching a debate between Eagleton and Roger Scruton and Scruton coming off better in the debate but Eagleton never inspired the loathing in me other people seem to have for him. Even Scruton seemed to get along with him though he disagreed with him. Maybe I need to hear his book read by someone whose manner of speaking inexplicably sets my teeth on edge, like Olympia Dukakis.

Lately I've been listening to a YouTube channel of Dagoth Ur reading various short stories, mainly HP Lovecraft stories. It's part of a trend I've suddenly discovered of Dagoth Ur parody YouTubers making content such as tier lists and general commentary in the guise of Dagoth Ur. Dagoth Ur, in case you've never heard of him--and he is very obscure at this point--is the villain of the 2002 Elder Scrolls game Morrowind--the predecessor of Oblivion and Skyrim. I doubt Morrowind gets many new players these days and even people who played it twenty years ago might not rank Dagoth Ur as among its most memorable elements as he only appears briefly in the game. But he did have a distinctive voice. I remember my friend, Tim, and I used to like to imitate it. Apparently we weren't alone.

Listening to him read Lovecraft, though, I started to unironically enjoy it.

Another One Rides the Bus

Their train is delayed so a handful of strangers decide to take a bus across a dangerous mountain route. Director Seijun Suzuki squeezes every drop of tension possible from this premise in 1957's Eight Hours of Terror (８時間の恐怖).

Suzuki's instincts for cutting fat from every scene are always admirable. The film begins with the chaotic situation at the train station as people swarm the station master with various complaints about the delay. One man must get to a board of directors meeting, one is a student who assures everyone the meeting he needs to get to is important to the future of Japan. One young woman needs to get to an acting audition.

There are two young Communists, a man and a woman. The man is revealed later to be wearing women's underwear, something that's never explained but may say quite enough about Suzuki's thoughts on Communism. One woman with a child is looking to find a suitable means of suicide.

Everyone's motives and commonplace delusions are established efficiently. There's also a detective transporting a handcuffed murderer and a world-weary prostitute called Natsuko (Harue Tone), who turns out to be the film's heroine.

As if the mountain roads aren't dangerous enough, there are also two dangerous bank robbers on the loose. So much is going wrong, so many improbable things are coming together, it might have all been too much to establish credible tension. But Suzuki manages to make it a kind of rapid opera of editing, framing, and bizarre vignettes.

Eight Hours of Terror is available on The Criterion Channel.