Don't Touch That Dial

I didn't have high expectations for 2023's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and my expectations were not subverted. Well, actually, my hopes were gotten up a little when I heard the present day segment of the movie would start with an elderly Dr. Jones in 1969 grieving for the death of his son in Vietnam, finalising a divorce from Marion, and feeling unappreciated by students. I thought, yeah, good idea. Undo the sappy ending from Crystal Skull, make Indy a desperate old loner. Unfortunately, Dial of Destiny doubles down on all of Crystal Skull's biggest problems and adds a few new ones. I'll give you a spoiler-free list:

Repeated Problems from Crystal Skull:

- Too much cgi.
- A sense of very limited location filming (despite the fact that the film did go to many real locations).
- Plot elements introduced in the first half of the film that are completely ignored or forgotten in the second half.
- Bad cinematography with excessive colour tinting.

New Problems Introduced:

- An annoying new sidekick who functions more as an uninvited new main character.
- The absence of anything funny.
- Shallow, false profundity.
- The misuse of John Williams' score.

A Few Things I Liked:

- The simple fact of a new action/adventure movie with a puzzle for the characters to work out.
- The supernatural event in the climax.

From here on, my review will contain spoilers.

The film begins with a twenty-five minute segment set in 1944 with a digitally de-aged Harrison Ford in the role of Indiana Jones. It's set at night and largely on a train so, with Ford's cgi head, it feels very much like Polar Express. The action sequences are mostly striking in that they lack Spielberg's unique gift for dynamic momentum. The new director, James Mangold, set himself an impossible task and failed. I did like the fact that the initial McGuffin, the Lance of Longinus, turns out to be a fake.

Hopping forward to 1969, we see Harrison Ford has admirably embraced his age. Jones is resentful that all the kids are talking about the moon landing instead of archaeology. The film seems to share his disdain for NASA and goes on to make the Nazi antagonist, played by Mads Mikkelsen, an Operation Paperclip style scientist working for NASA, like Wernher von Braun. If you feel like you've heard this one before, maybe it's because you watched For All Mankind, the Apple+ series about NASA in which von Braun's involvement was part of the plot, or maybe you remember that it's a plot element in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Now, Mikkelsen's character is working with the CIA to investigate Jones, though this is totally unrelated to the CIA's antagonism of Jones in the forgotten, interesting subplot of the first half of Crystal Skull.

It feels like some people really want us to hate NASA, the same people who really want us to like Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

The few people who've seen her series, Fleabag, seem to adore it. That seems to be enough to make her Kathleen Kennedy's own Camilla Rhodes ("This is the girl") and she's pushed her in projects as often as possible. Kennedy has such faith in her that Dial of Destiny goes all in on her. "It doesn't matter what you believe," says Indy in one of the film's most egregiously meaningless stabs at profundity, "It matters how hard you believe it." Kathleen Kennedy believes in Phoebe Waller-Bridge really hard.

We're expected to like it when she consistently outmanoeuvres Indy and delivers a sassy line for all occasions. We're expected to like it when she has all the fun in Tangiers while grumpy old Dr. Jones struggles to keep up. Every time he does manage to hit someone or successfully pull off a difficult jump, John Williams' theme is pushed in loudly to argue that the film is not sidelining the guy we actually came to see. I imagine someone in editing watching like a hawk and periodically shouting, "Look! He did something! Play the theme, play the theme!" With all the cgi, it gives the film a video game quality, like the sound effect you hear every time Mario gets a powerup.

The cgi is only part of the reason the film looks bad. Significant blame should go to the cinematographer, Phedon Papamichael, whose use of colour tinting is largely responsible for the film's lack of visual nuance and complexity. I usually complain about the yellow tint when it's applied to Mexico but it's just as bad here applied to Tangiers. You know what movies didn't use hackneyed colour tinting? The other Indiana Jones movies. Once again, I'm compelled to remember how much of what gave the first three films a sense of visual identity was the late Douglas Slocombe's cinematography.

Perhaps the filmmakers hoped Waller-Bridge's character would be another Furiosa. If you're wondering why these franchises keep trying to replace popular old stars with new female characters, they were probably encouraged by the one time it actually worked, in Mad Max: Fury Road. But I think the people holding Fury Road up as a model underestimate how important Max really is to the story and how his minimal control of the situation functions as a great source of tension. The audience is interested in Furiosa's endeavour but Max's hopeless situation is far more captivating and his escape is more satisfying. Furiosa's story is interesting enough to make it a truly interesting moral dilemma when Max is put in a position to decide whether or not he's going to help them.

Helena, Waller-Bridge's character in Dial of Destiny, doesn't work like Furiosa because she's not as intriguing or as charismatic. We don't know right away why Furiosa is turning rebel but George Miller establishes a sense of a world so quickly and solidly and uses composition and editing to make us interested in Charlize Theron's apprehensive and calculating expressions that we're compelled to study the situation, to try to piece it together. Helena's motives for betraying Indy and trying to ditch him are never clear and seem to contradict other pieces of information we're getting.

Is she really trying to unravel the mystery that drove her father mad or is she just looking for fortune and glory? This is the tension teased for Indiana's character in the first two films and I suspect Mangold was trying to replicate it in Helena. But while the original films clearly show to Indy why he shouldn't go down the fortune and glory route, we never get that for Helena, nor is her pathological hatred of Indy ever credible or interesting. She accuses him of not assuming the role of a godfather, and taking her under his wing when her father died. Since we never know the circumstances under which Indy learns of her father's death, or if someone else assumed guardianship of Helena, we have no idea how negligent Indy's actually been. I suppose it's similar to Marion in Raiders nursing a hatred for Indy because he left her at a young age when she was infatuated with him, but that was more effective because the issues between the two are established right away while in Dial of Destiny we don't get Helena's reasons until some time into the film. The lack of any possibility of romantic tension between the two also makes it less interesting.

One popular recent criticism of Raiders of the Lost Ark is that Indiana Jones, for all his efforts, actually has no effect on the fate of the Ark. If he hadn't gotten involved, the Nazis would have found it and their heads would've melted just the same. The same could be said for Dial of Destiny, When the Nazis do find Archimedes' Dial, their plane would have been shot down in the Siege of Syracuse and any survivors would've had no means of returning to the 20th century. I did actually like the time travel element and the shots of planes flying into time fissures in the sky. I wish the depiction of ancient Syracuse had been more interesting. It kind of reminded me of The Time Monster, the Doctor Who serial that so nicely built up tension and weirdness about the possibility of connecting with the far distant past, only for the latter portion of the story to resort to the usual ancient Grecian style costumes, makeup, and sets. I wish Dial of Destiny had found a way of depicting ancient Sicily that was impressively weird and different from how we've seen the period before. I also wish they'd gotten a more interesting actor to play Archimedes, someone who gives an impression of shrewd intellect. The baffled old gentleman unfortunately gave off Bill and Ted vibes.

This leads to the single most loathsome part of the film, when an apparently mortally wounded Indy decides to stay in the past but Helena countermands his decision by punching him, knocking him out. He wakes up back in his apartment in 1969, Marion shows up and they reconcile, and Helena swaggers off, satisfied that she's saved the day. How do I dislike this ending? Let me count the ways.

First of all, I really hate the lazy plot device of the "punch out". Do you know how hard it is to safely knock someone unconscious? This is why Star Trek invented the Vulcan Nerve Pinch. We don't see punch outs in the original Indiana Jones films, either. Even Marion was obliged to use a frying pan when she knocked a guy out. I guess you could say it was easier for Helena to knock Indy out since he was bleeding from a gunshot wound to the chest. But that just leads us to contemplate the insulting jump cut, the one that tells us not to think about how Helena dragged Indy's body into a plane, departed from the still raging Siege of Syracuse, re-entered the time rift, came back to 1969, found a place to land where she found medical care for Indy good enough to cure a bullet wound to the chest, and then got him back to his apartment without him ever regaining consciousness. No wonder she's so impressed with herself. By the way, she's also the one who kills Mikkelsen's character.

Thematically, Helena's elevation to deus-ex-machina deprives Indy of a story. In the climax of his own final film. In previous films, in which the climax features Indy having an epiphany, what Indy learns here is that he's a doddering old fool who needs to let his superheroine goddaughter make decisions for him. Thank you so much, Miss Kennedy. The film may have cost 295 million dollars, becoming one of the most expensive movies ever made. It may be the box office flop that becomes the final nail Disney's coffin. But at least you made it clear how much you truly hate us. I guess that's kind of punk.

By the way, the movie has Indy framed for murder in the first part of the film, one reason he's forced to flee the country, but forgets about it. When Indy and Helena meet Archimedes, Indy realises Archimedes made the dial specifically to bring people to the past to rescue him from the siege. We never find out how this is resolved or if it is. To be fair, this script was only in development for over a decade.

Twitter Sonnet #1713

Withholding gaps of wire cursed the mask.
In timing rare, regressive faces rasp.
Bizarrely crashed, the car completes a task.
Forgetting why, the bee attracts a wasp.
For missing letters, boards were stripped of keys.
Forbidden doors debarred the cautious duck.
For why resort to giant, cranky bees?
Repulsion lifts the lowest riding truck.
We use the yellow lens to show its hot.
The screen with walls and bridges bloats and sags.
They see beloved friends as what they're not.
Computers force the throats to swallow rags.
The might of magic paste approved a gear.
The blight of digit waste upset the beer.

Julian Sands

Julian Sands' body was found a few days ago. He'd been missing since January when he went hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains, north of Los Angeles. He was an actor with unique presence, capable of being charming or revolting. There was a largeness about him, a sense of physical size that forcefully captured the viewer's attention.

I'd seen him in supporting roles in many films, most recently in a stand out performance in the Stephen King miniseries Rose Red. I believe I first saw him in David Cronenberg's adaptation of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch in which he capably plays a sinister and attractive man. Last night I watched him in his breakout role in 1985's A Room with a View.

It's a gentle story about gentle people and their gentle little dramas. Based on the EM Forster novel of the same name, it centers on a pretty young woman called Lucy (Helena Bonham Carter) who's adorably out of touch with herself. Sands plays the handsome young freethinker she meets in Florence with whom she won't admit she's in love.

It's a tremendously pretty film and it's hard to imagine Florence has ever looked better. It's worth watching for the vicarious sight-seeing. And surely all these locations are better when all the people are in Edwardian costume.

Sands has a standout scene when he comes to Lucy's assistance after she's witnessed a man being killed. Concern, fascination, and passion are all visible in Sands' performance which is nonetheless understated.

The rest of the cast includes Daniel Day-Lewis, Denholm Elliot, Maggie Smith, and Judi Dench and Sands is never overshadowed. He was great.

A Room with a View is available on The Criterion Channel.

Alien Nation, Episode 2

I saw the new episode of Secret Invasion last night and, after some struggle this morning and checking with some reviews and synopses, I mostly remember what happened in it. I didn't fall asleep, though!

Characters spend time talking and brooding. Nick Fury reminisces about segregation (just how old is he?) before introducing an interesting game he learned from his mother, "Tell Me Something I Don't Know". So Talos tells him nearly all the Skrulls are on Earth. How fortunate Nick brought up that game!

What about the Skrulls on the space station Talos accuses Nick of hiding out on instead of helping the Skrulls? Seems like a continuity error. Also, what better place to look for a planet for the Skrulls than space? Have Fury and Captain Marvel really just made no effort in the past twenty five years? That seems very silly.

Now Skrulls have infiltrated positions of power. A secret council decides to make Gravik their official general. One council member threatens to use his authority in NATO to stop Gravik but a security guard chops him in the throat, apparently changing his mind. Why are we to assume he honours a vote made under duress? Why wasn't the one dissenting lady similarly threatened?

Why are all these supposedly important power players wandering around without their own retinues?

Looks like Rhodey's a Skrull. Anyone think he's not? Maybe he did just decide to fire Nick Fury for being in the vicinity of a terrorist attack. Yeah, I can't even type that with a straight face.

This show is like an idiot's impression of an intelligent series.

Secret Invasion is available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1712

With ev'ry egg, the chicken takes a chance.
Reflections burned the future sailing trick.
A blazing light induced the shade to dance.
A cordite candle closed the devil wick.
Behind the morning's not an honest lie.
Between the hollow walls, I hear The Doors.
Perspective smashed the foreign language eye.
A soggy crust sufficed for cheaper floors.
Behind the eyes were hobblers held to see.
Surprising acid shines digestive blotch.
Resentful limbs contrive to sink the tree.
Above the slime, a pair of marbles watch.
Aggressive seeds advanced the plantly cause.
With alligator hands we chucked the paws.

Elfland, Whether You Will or No

One of the things I love about The Kind of Elfland's Daughter is that, for most of the book, none of the characters have any agency. It's not that I'm against characters having agency, but lazy critics so often tend to reach for it as a point of criticism nowadays that it's kind of glorious to read a novel in which all characters, mortal and faerie, are tumbled about in a world of sensory experience.

It is like a dream. Characters take action but the effects of those actions are so arbitrary and have such limited or unpredictable bearing on what follows, they may as well be rolling dice. The book begins with the kingdom of Erl deciding to have the young Prince Alveric marry a princess of Elfland in order to bring magic to the mortal realm. So he gets himself a magic sword, invades the magic realm, kills some antagonistic trees, and meets the beautiful princess. All that sounds like the plot of a novel but it's all dispensed with in the first few short chapters.

As pure luck would have it, the princess, Lirazel, is willing and able to abscond with a total stranger from a strange country. She's the title character and yet the novel spends perhaps the least amount of time with her--and she's also the character with the most agency. Of all the characters, she's the only one who's able to consistently achieve desired results from her chosen actions.

She has a child with Alveric whom they call Orion before she becomes bored with the human realm and her husband's desire that she honour their religious practices. She leaves for Elfland where time doesn't seem to pass. So the bulk of the novel, which is about Orion as a young man, learning to be a great hunter, and Alveric, wandering a wasteland with madmen as companions, takes place over the course of many years while virtually no time passes in Elfland.

Orion learns to hunt and kill unicorns. He enlists the aid of a band of trolls. Alveric is seeking Elfland, which the King of Elfland has caused to recede from Alveric's approach, leaving barren desolation in its wake. In your standard novel, this would all be building to something. Orion would prove himself to his parents and achieve something great for his people by hunting. Alveric would eventually enter and conquer Elfland, perhaps. But the novel's never about that. It's not the effects of their actions that matter but the experience of their actions.

It's a mighty feat for Orion to hunt and kill a unicorn but the achievement has little real meaning. Lord Dunsany beautifully describes the animal, paying particular attention to its powerful neck. But killing it doesn't take magic from the world or anything like that. It's just a really nice trophy. We never know if Lirazel appreciates Alveric's efforts to find her or even understands the sacrifices he makes. They just don't matter next to the glorious, arbitrary and sensual will of Elfland.

One gets the impression that Dunsany worshiped women as beautiful but distant and capricious beings. The only other female character in the book is a witch, also the only other character with real agency.

There's a minor plot about the parliament of Erl becoming suspicious of the magic they invited into their realm yet, like Alveric and Orion's stories, their desires and actions ultimately have little meaning. The book leaves you feeling this may be for the best.

I Forgot Something

I realised I forgot to post my review of The Flash here. You can find it on my Live Journal here.

For those who don't know, I mirror this blog on three sites, on Dreamwidth, on Live Journal, and here on Blogger. The Live Journal is the oldest of the three and it gets, by far, the most views. I've been considering discontinuing posting on Blogger because I was notified one of my posts, a fairly innocuous review of a Kenji Mizoguchi movie from ten or so years ago, was taken down for violating community standards. I have no idea if this was an algorithm at work or if it was due to someone randomly complaining. Since I only seem to have a handful of readers on this site, it hardly seems worth continuing except Blogger has the best search feature, making it easy for me to find old entries when I need to. But I'd advise you to get used to reading on my Live Journal.

She was Tricked

Goldie Hawn meets handsome and friendly John Heard, marries him and has a kid with him, and everything seems fine but we know it's not because this 1991 movie is called Deceived. It's a slightly unusual suspense thriller because we, the audience, always know more than the protagonist. However, despite some exceptionally weak logic at times, this movie does generate some good suspense.

I was reminded of Alfred Hitchcock's famous analogy about the bomb ticking under the table while two people at the table chat obliviously. We know that Jack (Heard) has faked his death, we know that Adrienne (Hawn) has the ancient Egyptian necklace he wants. But she doesn't know either of these things. So as we watch her investigate her husband's phony past, we know all the time about the bomb ticking under her table.

There are about a dozen times in the film where any reasonable person in Adrienne's position would have called the police. When she comes home to find her apartment ransacked and her housekeeper strangled, it's implied police were on the scene but we never get a shot of a detective asking her questions. She would have had no reason to conceal any of the things she has uncovered up to that point so the movie breezes past it.

There are a few too many scenes like that and the audience is also asked to believe she would let her daughter's friend take a piece of her jewellery without even looking at what piece of jewellery the daughter's friend was taking. But a more crucial flaw in the film is its lack of a foundation given for the relationship between Adrienne and Jack. The filmmakers would have been better off not jumping five years into their marriage because we have no idea how many warning signs in that period of time Adrienne might have missed.

This loose foundation makes the film feel less psychological and more casual. It would probably be a good date movie, after which a couple could tease each other about being secret killers without feeling too disturbed about it. For a point of comparison, we could look at Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt in which the signs of a long term relationship between Charlie and her uncle are established before she starts to uncover his true nature. The disturbing thing isn't merely that he's a killer but that she felt deeply connected to him. He's not just in her house, he's in her head and her heart. You don't have that in Deceived.

Deceived is fun, though. I liked the finale in which Jack chases Adrienne through a labyrinth of construction work.

Another Candle, Sans Wax

How's about a real long fight scene? Try 2017's John Wick: Chapter 2. I only thought the first John Wick was so-so but Caitlin's been talking about the movies a lot in her blog lately so I decided to see the next one. I'm glad I did, it's a big improvement on the first.

Where the first felt like the filmmakers were trying to make a simple revenge story about a hitman, the second feels like they were trying to push themselves as hard as they could to make relentless physical action, with a few moments of dialogue here and there.

One might start to wonder why John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is considered an almost supernatural killer when he barely survives most of these fights. Lucky for him the people wanting to kill him prefer to shoot at his bulletproof vest. And why does he so often strut calmly through the middle of the street? He gets hit by a car for that in one instance--it's a stunt I'm getting kind of tired of, though I suppose it was fairly new in 2017, maybe John Wick 2 was even the first time it was done. A character walks along oblivious and is hit by a car coming into frame suddenly. Average people can hear a car coming at least sometimes, you'd think if Mr. Wick has the confidence to walk out in the open he'd at least have some finely tuned senses.

But those are my few complaints. I liked the hit he was forced to carry out, a beautiful woman (Claudia Gerini) who decides to slit her wrists in her decadent bathtub before Wick can execute her (though the scene would have been better if the filmmakers hadn't felt compelled to hide her nudity). I enjoyed Franco Nero's small role as the manager of the Continental Hotel in Rome. I liked how the first part of the climax takes place in a funhouse but an audio recording explains to the visitor that this is actually an art installation inviting you to contemplate reflection and self and blah blah blah. It's a funhouse someone's selling to rich people as avante garde art. Pretty funny.

John Wick: Chapter 2 is available on Netflix.

The Best Summer Friends

It's getting hot around here and humid. That means lots of bugs so I'm trying to court friends like this:

I never got a decent photo of this hefty huntsman spider who was bigger than my fist though I had plenty of up close and personal encounters with it. I was watching a movie a few nights ago and paused it to get up to pee. Turning to my right, I found this fellow sitting beside me, facing the screen as though enjoying Dream Lover right along with me. Maybe I should've said, "His name's James Spader, not James Spider."

I spotted him a couple more times before I finally trapped him in my bathroom. I left my bathroom window open and the next day he was gone. I hope he's patrolling the perimeter outside my apartment. Here's a smaller spider I saw on a tree in the park by my building:

Good Dreams

In the 1990s, it seemed James Spader was always getting himself into one kinky fix after another. In 1993 it was Dream Lover in which he falls for the beautiful but duplicitous Madchen Amick. The first half of this film is intriguing and it's fun watching the two actors together. The second half is very silly but entertaining.

Spader plays a wealthy architect called Ray. He meets Rena (Amick) at an exhibition for his obnoxious artist friend played by Larry Miller.

He runs into her again, seemingly by chance, at a supermarket. Soon they're sleeping together and the film rapidly jump cuts through marriage and the births of their first two kids. Through it all, he's seen little hints of something awry. Strangers seem to recognise her as someone called "Sissy". She fails to remember her college dean. He finds out she's been checking into a hotel room every Wednesday.

The two halves of the film almost feel like different movies. In the first half, he tracks down her parents--in Texas, not Ohio, where she claims to be from, and he finds out her real name. She admits to constructing a whole new name and persona but still claims to love him. In the second half of the film, she turns out to be a complete psycho and Ray ends up in a mental institution where she routinely drops by to taunt him.

To prove his innocence, he can only think of calling Larry Miller to the stand and not her parents or her ex-boyfriend.

Spader's always good in the film, alternating between bemused, increasingly alarmed, and enraged. Amick always seems like Shelly Johnson playing pretend. But that's really cute.

Dream Lover is available on The Criterion Channel until the end of the month.

Twitter Sonnet #1710

As strange was speeding round the bank of stars
Ideas began to pierce the lightning skin
Around the sagging wallet, waiting cars
Remind the dreamer late to squash the din.
A helpful spider spilled a mug of rum.
Reminders blur in double names of maids
With watchful pairs we make a suited sum.
A fertile plain was rife with hornet raids.
Concealing furs requested trade to start.
With options close, desire flipped a mouse.
Incisive grips report the ladder's heart.
With every case, the pencils build a house.
The heart and spade collide for diamond clubs.
In whiskey seas we drown the haunted pubs.

Alien Nation

The latest MCU series premiered on Disney+ last night, Secret Invasion. Starring Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn, it can boast of some great acting talent, if nothing else. I'm sorry to say the episode was pretty bland.

It was written by series creator Kyle Bradstreet and co-written by Brian Tucker. Tucker's only previous credit is writing the 2013 film Broken City, which holds a 28% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Bradstreet has a little more cred, having worked in television since 2009, his most significant work being nine episodes he wrote for Mr. Robot. He wasn't the creator of Mr. Robot and he wrote only one episode in the series' first season. I've never seen Mr. Robot so, I don't know, maybe he wrote the show's best episodes. But considering how badly the Rick and Morty writers from later seasons worked out, I'm thinking this theory of apprenticeship, of supporting writers going on to be showrunners at Disney, isn't quite sound.

Other reviews have talked about plot holes and such, which are significant mistakes in a spy thriller, but I think finding the right tone is more important. The opening of the episode, which features Martin Freeman guest starring to meet with a stereotypical conspiracy theorist, should have established an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty. But since I doubt more than three or four viewers didn't guess that Freeman was a Skrull from the beginning, and the conspiracy guy was such a caricature, the whole section lacked impact. This show really needed to make us feel like the whole world could fall apart at any moment, that no-one is safe, but that never really happens.

Jackson and Mendelsohn are great and they both do their damnedest to make their scenes interesting. Jackson plays Fury as fairly laid back, as usual, and that works in a movie like Winter Soldier, which did build up that atmosphere of constant danger. Here, it's another thing that diminishes the sense of threat. Mendelsohn is a little better. He seems genuinely torn apart inside.

For those wondering why Emilia Clarke is a star, I've been watching Game of Thrones again lately and the answer is that she was really, really sexy on that show, at least in the first five seasons. And she was fun. So she's not really playing to her strengths here.

At least the show is so far avoiding the silly tone of Captain Marvel.

Secret Invasion is available on Disney+.

The Mental and Physical Sexual Landscape

Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel begin a lifetime of troubled sexual encounters after both have sex with Candice Bergen in 1971's Carnal Knowledge. Mostly a very intelligent film thanks to a contemplative screenplay by cartoonist Jules Feiller, it nonetheless has a few gaps in its logic. Still, this is a captivating and satisfying film.

Nicholson and Garfunkel begin the film as students at Amherst College, both desperate to lose their virginity. You can hear them talking about girls over the opening credits and Feiller establishes them as especially intellectual college students entirely from how they talk about the issue. We never need to be explicitly told.

Analysis and philosophy shape their discussions of what they want and how they want to get it. When Garfunkel approaches Candice Bergen at a party, she's similarly an amateur analyst and immediately starts talking to him about the hazy separation between calculated personae and the true nature of the human heart.

But the film primarily focuses on Nicholson's character, who, when hearing how lucky Garfunkel was with Bergen, decides to start dating her, too, behind Garfunkel's back. Nicholson's character is the more emotionally withdrawn of the two and tends to be sexist in the way he talks about women and how relationship dynamics should work. Yet he's intelligent and genuinely attractive to Bergen's character as well as other women.

After college, he meets Ann-Margret who plays an actress from a TV commercial. Aside from being slightly older than him, she fulfills every criterion he's claimed to desire in a woman--a perfect body and surprisingly willing to do anything he asks. I felt like the movie could have further explored the fact that she doesn't satisfy him but it is fascinating how angry he becomes when she simply and very passively says she wants to get married and have children. This is easily the best Ann-Margret movie I've seen.

Carnal Knowledge is available on The Criterion Channel.

He Can't Talk About Elfland

I'm about halfway through The King of Elfland's Daughter, a 1924 novel by Lord Dunsany. It's good. Like a lot of great fantasy literature, its author shows good instincts for what he should linger on and what he should breeze through quickly.

Alveric, essentially the protagonist, is a young man tasked with marrying the Elfland King's daughter of the title. A lot of time is spent describing his visit to a cottage on the edge of Elfland and the old man who deals there but is peculiarly unwilling to acknowledge the existence of Elfland. Comparatively little time is spent on Lirazel, the title character, herself. She kind of comes off as a jerk, actually. She willingly goes off with Alveric, has his child, but after decades can't be bothered to honour any of the most benign human customs. The intention may have been to make her seem like an innocent child of indigenous people but she comes off more like a rich woman who married a poor man who never understands why she can't buy expensive clothes anymore.

More interesting are the humans trying to comprehend the mysteries of Elfland. And that old man, a leather worker, is a really intriguing character and I like how Dunsany draws out the old man's silence on the topic of Elfland.

And Alveric pondered on many reasons for this. Had the old man been to Elfland in his youth and seen something he greatly feared, perhaps barely escaping from death or an age-long love? Was Elfland a mystery too great to be troubled by human voices? Did these folk dwelling there at the edge of our world know well the unearthly beauty of all the glories of Elfland, and fear that even to speak of them might be a lure to draw them whither their resolution, barely perhaps, held them back? Or might a word said of the magical land bring it nearer, to make fantastic and elvish the fields we know? To all these ponderings of Alveric there was no answer.

The Omnipotence of the Courtesan Poetess

Nowadays, we have superheroes. In 16th century Venice, apparently that role was filled by courtesans, if 1998's Dangerous Beauty is to be believed. Which it shouldn't be. This supposed biopic of real life courtesan and poetess Veronica Franco is such a softball, filtered, and sugared treatment, it's kind of hilarious. If you forget about that, though, it's a diverting little romance.

Catherine McCormack plays Veronica, whom we meet as an innocent young woman gazing in astonishment at the courtesans flaunting themselves on gondolas.

Amusingly, this film was lauded for its feminism but Veronica's whole motivation throughout the film is to win the love of a man, her childhood crush, Marco (Rufus Sewell). He's a senator and he feels compelled to marry for politics, as it turns out to an almost unrecognisable Naomi Watts.

Veronica's mother (Jacqueline Bisset) consoles her daughter, explaining she can still have Marco if she becomes a courtesan, as her mother was before her. Veronica is shocked to learn her mother was a courtesan, apparently having never had any hint of her mother's vocation in twenty or so years of associating with Venetian aristocracy. I guess people didn't like to gossip in 16th Venice.

If you believe that, maybe you'll believe the whirlwind training Veronica's put through in apparently a matter of weeks (incidentally, her father's never mentioned). Her mother has to explain to her that courtesans are the only women allowed in libraries but Veronica just takes it in stride when a naked man is suddenly in her home for training purposes.

I was talking to the screen at this point; "Who is this guy?" While Veronica's mother is going on about the importance of a courtesan expressing sensual pleasure in order to give sensual pleasure, I just kept asking, "Who is the naked guy?" Is he a male prostitute? Is he a john? Shouldn't Veronica's first time be something her mother asks a high price for? We never see the guy again or get any explanation. There are a lot of inexplicable things in this movie.

For instance, her sword fight with Oliver Platt, who plays a rival poet. Although this was apparently an unplanned duel, she rips off her skirt to reveal a pair of man's knee breeches.

Yet this is not worthy of comment. The director shoots around it a lot, it was difficult for me to get a screenshot. It's as though he was embarrassed. I wouldn't blame him.

The best is saved for the climax, though, when Veronica is put on trial for witchcraft by the Inquisition. The real Veronica Franco apparently was tried by the Inquisition, a scapegoat for the plague, but while Wikipedia suggests she was acquitted thanks to the influence of some of her important clientele, it's a safe bet to say it did not play out as it does in the film. In this version, Marco stands and declares his love and argues for the rights of women and demands respect for courtesans so convincingly that all the men in the room stand up in her defense. I'd be readier to believe she was rescued by Santa Claus. But if this feminist film accomplishes nothing else, at least it portrays men as pretty terrific.

Twitter Sonnet #1709

Absconding pods of whales abduct the dame.
Ebullient depths beheld the dastard route.
In bed, the stripper 'pined on lingual fame.
But devils die from normal, painful gout.
Above horizons red with jam's the sun.
Adventures sought and tried, the day retained.
Through charnel scuppers, pirate's life doth run.
With ruddy paints the splintered deck is stained.
A ruffled cloud dispersed to show a star.
Rejected ears return beneath the cat.
With waxy time, the fated flame was marred.
Relaxing shade accrued beneath the bat.
The super lady stunned the courtly crowd.
An easy shape absorbed the glitter cloud.

Plastic and Memory

I read the new Sirenia Digest while eating lunch to-day. The new Caitlin R. Kiernan story, "The Moment Under the Moment", is a deliberately Lovecraftian tale, another nice exploration of the tangled psychological space, a portrait of human mental functioning fractured and frustrated by dreams and bizarre trauma. The first person narrator recalls a lover who spoke of the Bering strait land bridge and William Beebe. an American scientist and explorer. The narrator also describes the plastic pollution of the ocean in strikingly vivid and horrifying language, convincingly arguing the horror of this byproduct of scientific progress my equal or surpass that of the atomic bomb. It's a good story. Lunch was a sandwich with lettuce, Spam, and mayonnaise on bread I made yesterday. I've discovered I really like Spam. Another strange product of science.

Club Drawings

Yesterday was my last day at one of the schools I work at, though I'll be going back to this particular school in January. I've been working at this school since 2020 so I've formed a real attachment to it. I said goodbye to the art club and the colour guard, the two clubs I hang out with. I watched the colour guard practice a new dance until 7pm. It's great seeing how committed they are and how rigorously they repeated the same dance moves in the increasingly humid weather.

In the art club, I drew pictures for some students. Here are a few doodles I've accumulated this year, some things I've drawn in the art club:

A dragon.

I was doodling the Fourth Doctor on the right and explaining how to draw a cat to a new student on the left. I told her to study cat skeletons.

I'm afraid I blathered on about John Milton and my take on his daughter, Deborah, for my webcomic.

I was trying to find a way to explain how "view" is used as a noun in English. The text book, written by an esteemed committee of Japanese professors, gets it wrong, as it does many things. Some of the mistakes in the books are hilarious. My favourite is a page from the second year text book in which the students are taught sentences for offering assistance to tourists. One sentence they're encouraged to use is "What's the matter with you?" I found a supercut on YouTube of Robert De Niro using the phrase to explain why it's a very rude, unwise thing for students to say to tourists. For the rare occasion when a Japanese English teacher accepts my authority on a subject over a text book. I'm routinely reminded why Japan has the worst English education in Asia. It's not so funny when you remember how students suffer for it.

Deborah Milton again.

Some Clean Brain Cases

Of all the Indiana Jones films, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull feels the most like DuckTales, or Uncle Scrooge Adventures. I watched it for the third time last week, still jonsing for an Indiana Jones film I haven't seen a trillion times. I was in a mood in which I could actually enjoy it, too. If you go in accepting that it aims much, much lower than the previous films, and consider the available option of watching DuckTales instead on Disney+, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull starts to look pretty respectable.

Harrison Ford is clearly having a ball in this movie. In so many films, he's criticised for being Mr. Gruff-and-Grim but he cracks many a grin here. It's fun to see.

I like how knowledgeable he seems. I was reminded of reading a quote from Michael Waldron, the screenwriter on the latest Doctor Strange movie, who said he wanted to write Strange a bit like Indiana Jones but with the intelligence of Anthony Bourdain. Of all the quotes to make you lose confidence in a screenwriter, that's gotta rank pretty high. Indiana Jones, who walks an unknown language through Mayan, who pieces together other obscure clues to track down an old professor, who speaks, what, thirty languages? He's not as smart as a travelling chef? I'm sure Bourdain was a nice guy, but come on. It's also a bit like when people said Bruce Lee would kick Cliff Booth's ass. Like there's a limit for imaginary characters.

Crystal Skull would've been better without Marion. Karen Allen doesn't seem as engaged with the material as Harrison Ford and their arguments are pretty pedestrian compared to what they were arguing about in Raiders. Of course, in this hypersensitive era, people pick apart their initial dialogue to infer that Indy had sex with Marion when she was a minor. Which is possible, though not necessarily true if you listen carefully to what they're actually saying. In any case, it contributes to the impression that, in the first two films, Indy was clearly conceived as a much rougher character than he was in Last Crusade onwards. Crystal Skull Indy is one who's been thoroughly sanitised by the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which are directly referenced in Crystal Skull. It's ironic, one of the many unresolved conflicts in Crystal Skull is Indy first encouraging Mutt to do what he loves before finding out Mutt is his son, then insisting Mutt go back to school. Dark and dangerous art was good for Spielberg when he was young, but when he makes a movie for the kids to-day, he won't go so far.

In any case, Crystal Skull certainly feels in no way like a final film. It feels like a bonus feature. I suppose another reason is that everyone's an atheist now, or at least Hollywood thinks so, and there's nothing to replace the awe inherent in the religious artefacts of the first three films.

I don't have high hopes for Dial of Destiny, to be honest. I think James Mangold's overrated. Logan was a good movie but it seems to have made people forget he made a string of lousy or average films before that. But I'm open to being surprised.

The Indiana Jones movies are currently available on Disney+.

Twitter Sonnet #1708

The boat was sunk with stacks of sugar sacks.
Required pies were perfect shots of crust.
With wobbly blazers, many pants were slacks.
Admired prows were cheap and saucy busts.
A pot of mussels watched as rain commenced.
Instructive dust disturbed the crystal piece.
They thought their thinking minds could pass the rinse.
But metal chairs detained the handsome niece.
The knowing frogs were singing rapid songs.
With gnawing thirst, the quail deserts a dish.
Ambitious salad rusts its gripping tongs.
Aggressive chickens melt a solid wish.
A crystal thought became a group of guys.
A burger joint retained a million fries.

The X-Movie

It'd been a while, so I decided to watch the first X-Men film from 2000. I was surprised to find I enjoy it more now than I used to. Maybe it's the very fact that it feels dated, it's actually kind of refreshing.

You can see it's from a time when superhero movies weren't popular and there are all kinds of indications of that. From the constant, neurotic need to justify the code names with convoluted explanations and irony, to all the ways the film imitates non-superhero movies from the time. The fight scene between Wolverine and Sabretooth at the end feels a bit Matrix-ish. I've never bought Wolverine swinging around that part of the statue's crown on his claw.

I'd forgotten how dark the cinematography is on this first film. I think maybe it's because the Michael Keaton Batman movies had been the most recent popular superhero movies. And maybe it's there to hide cheap sets, too. Tonally, it's a mismatch with the X-Men. A colourful ensemble demands a colourful palette.

One thing's for sure, the casting remains almost impeccable. It's no wonder Kevin Feige's dragging his feet re-casting the X-Men for the MCU. Hugh Jackman, Famke Janssen, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Marsden, Anna Paquin--every one of them so perfectly inhabited the characters, bringing to life the comic book character or, where they do diverge, offering an interesting interpretation. The exception is Halle Berry who is a terrible Storm.

Like a lot of people, I feel Halle Berry is generally an overrated actress, but her Storm is a letdown for more reasons than that. She was my favourite character in the comics and to see this goddess reduced to an unremarkable young woman in a t-shirt is so sad. When she is finally reincarnated, I hope they do it right. Storm's gotta be big--big hair, decadent costume, voluptuous physical assets. I always though Beyonce was physically right for the part. If they could find someone with that body-type with decent acting chops, it would be perfect.

X-Men is available on Disney+.