I made carrot cake for Easter. I used red Japanese carrots so the colour's a little different. It also looks different because I had to use my Japanese grater. The Western style box grater seems to be totally unknown in these parts. The difference is that, while a box grater turns your carrots into thin little strips, the Japanese grater turns it into a paste. This is how the wasabi is prepared for your sushi--wasabi in its natural state is a root vegetable. So I made red carrot paste to mix into the batter. It's not bad.
The frosting is my weak attempt to combine cream cheese, almond milk, and sugar without a power mixer. Luckily, it was improved by dehydrating overnight in the refrigerator.
Here are some cherry blossoms I saw on the way to the grocery store:
Still no cherries in the store, though. I really want to try cooking with cherries.
X Sonnet #1830
The zombie cake was making up the face.
Reminders stuck as cheese to pepper feet.
Remainders sunk equations half a pace.
Surpassing heat defines the mollusc meat.
Intrusive clogs were shoes for runny mud.
No talking showed the cops their honest names,
The soap's reduced to just a single sud.
'Tis jelly all the butter ever blames.
A flash of metal dims behind the dust.
Relayed explosions stop the touching meal.
A sign of hearts dispersed remains of rust.
The only beat corrupts what passed for real.
Discussions break the early birds apart.
But many's the word the blinding day'd impart.
Happy Easter, everyone. As sort of promised, I came up with a list of Easter movies for you. Maybe it'll be especially handy for those of you who are still on Saturday.
There just aren't many Easter movies. When I google "Easter movies" I see things like Veggie Tales and The Last Temptation of Christ. The Last Temptation of Christ is a good movie but I feel like a good Christmas movie isn't necessarily a religious movie so there should be non-religious Easter movies, too. There just aren't any real ones. I mean, there are ultra-cheap cash grab movies about the Easter Bunny but there's no Miracle on 34th Street for Easter. So I started thinking just about tone and aesthetic. It should be a movie with lots of pastels and formal attire. One thing that came to mind was:
The Prince and the Showgirl
Shot by the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff, this movie has lots of soft colours, lots of lavender, and Sir Lawrence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe entering upon a very respectfully scandalous affair.
For something ever so slightly raunchier:
French Can Can
Jean Renoir's film about the Moulin Rouge is a light foray into sensational ribaldry. Springtime scenes feature lots of shiny pastels.
Easter Parade
The only bona fide Easter movie anyone can remember. It's not an exceptionally good Fred Astaire or Judy Garland movie but it does definitely contain scenes revolving around Easter, though a lot fewer than you'd think.
Twin Peaks
It's not about the bunny . . . Is it about the bunny? No. It's not about the bunny. Arguably, Laura's death is the Good Friday preceding an Easter that is teased for thirty years and always remains tantalisingly out of reach. As an Easter movie, or series, rather, this may be for those who have explored the furthest extremes of Easter pleasure and now require psychological restraints in order to push blood into their Easterogenous zones.
Alice in Wonderland
Almost any version is a good choice but for Easter I would most recommend the 1949 French and English co-production. Again, for the pastels.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
If you don't like pastels, here's a movie with a very warm palette with lots of fire engine red. If the movie evokes any season, I'd say it's late summer. But the title character is a rabbit and the film contains a lot of thematic rebirth.
So there you go, there's some ideas for you. I also like to watch Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock on Easter but it's kind of an ironic Easter movie. A lot of people would also recommend Harvey, the movie about James Stewart having an invisible rabbit for a best friend, but somehow that movie doesn't seem very Eastery to me, as much as I do like it.
I had a really good time watching 2024's Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire yesterday. I can understand why all the critics are complaining about it. It's burdened with hackneyed subplots and chained to a scaffolding of rickety set-ups and pay-offs for all of them. But the decision to make the movie like an episode of the old animated series is, on the whole, a good one, allowing the film to finally feel like something that moves on from Ghostbusters II and have a life of its own.
I like the villain, too, the "horny" demon god Garraka. We learn about him in a nice library scene in which Patton Oswalt appears only very briefly. Mostly it's Dan Aykroyd doing the storytelling--he's credited among the other castmembers of the original film only as a "special appearance" but I'd say he has more screentime than Finn Wolfhard or Carrie Coon. He was very clearly more up for this movie than anyone else and he's great. I was surprised by the number of biblical references he makes since Ray was the one in the original film who said he "never met" God. But he did know the Book of Revelation and that quiet moment in the car with Winston was one of the more genuinely creepy moments of the original film. The biblical references in movies of the '80s still had the impact of screening for a largely, if latently, religious audience. In his new movie, there's a whisper of that effectiveness which I think can be further exploited since, if the recent success of small religious films in the US is any indication, the US is not quite as atheistic as Hollywood tends to think it is.
Ray also briefly refers to the Japanese god of fire, Kojin, possibly the only moment that nodded to Sony. It wasn't a bad moment. Meanwhile, I'm not quite sold on this tie-in music video:
"Frozen Summer" is the title in Japan and I actually think it's a better title than "Frozen Empire". I think "Empire" is supposed to be a reference to New York as the "Empire State" but I don't even think most Americans would get that right away, let alone anyone in Japan.
Anyway, when Garraka's past is explained, there's a sort of faux-stop motion mural. I wish instead they'd have used footage of unmoving artefacts to give it the sense of a remote past. You have to create a real sense of death, the impenetrability of it, that fuels the malevolence of ghosts jealous of the living.
A lot of people are talking about the vaguely lesbian romance between McKenna Grace's character and the ghost of a 16 year old girl. Honestly, calling it lesbian is really reading into it, it says more about the culture than the movie itself. I mean, if you want to look at it that way, that's great, I hope you enjoy it, but there's nothing really romantic in it that gets off the ground. It would've been nice--the film could've used some romance. I say that even though it's overstuffed with subplots. Paul Rudd and Carrie Coon are totally wasted. As the two working, defacto Ghostbusters, it would've been great if we'd had a few scenes of them answering a call, nailing a ghost, and then haggling over payment. Coon's character would've been great at that. I could see the dynamic of Rudd leading the way when strategising on how to take out a ghost, and then Coon taking over when it came to squeezing a client for payment. It would've been a whole lot better than the cliche stepdad subplot.
The movie's much more enjoyable as a supernatural adventure film than as a comedy--the difference, again, recalling the contrast between the first film and the animated series. There's a new Ghostbusting research team that includes English comedian James Acaster and he had one line that made me laugh due to its excellent dry delivery. But 95% of the rest of the film's effective comedy came from Kumail Nanjiani and Bill Murray. Nanjiani gets a lot of the kind of mercenary huckster dialogue the Ghostbusters ought to have had. Murray plays Venkman as the same old asshole. A scene where he interviews Nanjiani to determine if he's human is just pure gold.
Otherwise, it's definitely a movie aimed at a younger audience than the bulk of the franchise fanbase but it's an enjoyable little romp.
Happy Good Friday, everyone. The latest Caitlin R. Kiernan story in Sirenia Digest is sort of appropriate to the topic. It's an exceptionally good one in any case, called "STRANDLING", which mixes Lovecraftian eeriness with the melancholy topic of the impending death of a loved one.
It also incorporates the housing crisis as the two characters, a married couple, are able to obtain the seaside property the dying partner longs for because its beaches are hopelessly polluted, driving down the property value. The dying woman finds her reflection in a dying world. Then there are hints of something weird from that same sea, something the mind is not as ready to contemplate. So it's a fairly good story for Good Friday.
I also watched a bit of The Long Good Friday again on The Criterion Channel. It's just a good gangster movie, more of an ironic Good Friday movie, I suppose. I feel like there are more Good Friday movies than Easter movies. Taxi Driver comes to mind, mainly because Martin Scorsese's priest told him the movie had "too much Good Friday, not enough Easter Sunday." Well, really, there are a lot more Easter movies, but still far fewer than there are Christmas movies. I should make a list, maybe I will before Sunday.
X Sonnet #1829
The lovers' cloud obscured a bloody sun.
Logistics change the means of death.
As murder plots or sudden strikes are done,
A million things can stop a hapless breath.
A self-inflicted symbol staunched the blood.
Precocious dolphins damage fish to eat.
The shapes of older cats have changed the mud.
Sequestered bones were long behind the meat.
Condensing hist'ry haunts the lonely brow.
A story's spun to cheat the sane from health.
Despondent souls await the rusty scow.
For extra kelp the sea discharged its wealth.
A jagged isle spotted grants a wish.
But danger lurks behind the eyes of fish.
The animation seemed to be even better in the new, third episode of X-Men '97 than it'd been in the first two. I have to hand it to South Korea's Studio Mir. The story was also exciting with many shining moments, though many critics, quite rightly, are complaining about how rushed it felt.
Why did they feel the need to wrap up the peculiar love triangle so fast, a story that percolated over a much longer period of time in the comics? I was particularly frustrated by the abruptness of the ending, with Scott seemingly making no effort to console the mother of his child, nor did he seem to have qualms about her walking away from him. I suppose it's somewhat true to life considering the divorce rate among parents who've lost their child. It would've been nice if they'd explored that over a few episodes instead of cramming everything into one.
I loved the nightmare horror tone the show took on with animation that seemed influenced by Kon Satoshi. I loved the Goblin Queen though I wish they'd kept her sexy costume from the comics. Still, she was pretty sexy and the fight between her and Magneto was about as kinky as a show can get while still being acceptable viewing for children. Theoretically.
I'm really digging the intro. Something about the unobtrusive way miniature Rogue and Storm creep into the image like ants is pleasantly creepy, sort of reminding me of the little elderly couple in Mulholland Drive or tiny stop motion creatures in a Tool video.
A young African refugee is startled when she sees the man who assaulted her years ago, or possibly just someone who looks like him, in 2021's Our Father, the Devil. There's a lot more to it than that, though, and by the end of the film the edges are blurred between victim and abuser. It's an interesting idea sadly bogged down by writer/director Ellie Foumbi's obvious lack of knowledge or experience in the topics she's chosen to address.
Marie (Babetida Sadjo) is a chef at a nursing home in southern France. She's quiet but seems to be well adjusted to her new environment, having made genuine friendships with the staff and established herself as a reliable and gifted employee. However, she becomes withdrawn and surly when a new priest, Father Patrick (Souleymane Sy Savane), starts visiting the home.
The movie waits a very long time before telling us anything about Marie's past so we can only judge by her physical responses to the man. She thinks he's someone, a warlord, from her past in West Africa, someone who'd done her some grievous wrong, despite the fact that she's read news reports of this warlord's death. Sadjo gives a good performance but it still feels as though there's a wall between her, the point of view character, and the audience.
Then, one night, when she's alone with him in the kitchen, she knocks him out with a frying pan, drags him to a little cottage by a cliff, and ties him up. So many things here suggest the logic of a cartoon or a pulpier action movie. From what I've been reading to-day, it is actually possible to knock someone out with something like a heavy cast iron skillet. TV Tropes quotes Anthony Bourdain: "A proper saute pan should cause serious head injury if brought down hard against someone's skull." In this movie, though, getting knocked out also has no lingering side effects. Then there are questions relating to the rope and the location. Patrick is tied just by his wrists most of the time with a rope run through hooks in the ceiling. From what we learn about Marie's past, it's possible she did learn how to tie someone up like this, but when considering the time and effort required for her to set it up in the cottage, it's questionable whether she could have relied on Patrick to be unconscious for so long.
The cottage is a gift willed to her by an old woman staying at the nursing home and the old woman's grandson is upset that someone outside the family would take possession of the place. This is meant to explain why the police or no-one else checks the place in the days while Patrick is missing, though it doesn't explain why none of the family members visit or why Marie feels comfortable leaving Patrick unattended for days. We also really need a scene establishing that Patrick's escape is impossible. There are many visible knick-knacks about the cottage he could get at with his feet. The logistics become even more strained as further events unfold.
Foumbi apparently has an MFA in directing, according to imdb, but I wish she'd paid better attention in Hitchcock class. The details of a kidnapping are not incidental, they're vital components woven into character motives and state of mind. Emoufi's weak grasp of this storytelling concept are reflected in the more crucial problem of the vagueness of Marie's past. There are references to murder and rape but only superficial mentions of motive, or the necessary layers of perceived motive and reevaluation that are alluded to. The film is competently shot and oddly relaxing at times but, despite dedicated performances, everything feels very thin and dispassionate.
Our Father, the Devil is available on The Criterion Channel.
In the aftermath of World War II, a Holocaust survivor assumes the identity of one of her deceased fellow concentration camp inmates in 1951's The House on Telegraph Hill. She moves to join her new family in San Francisco and a nightmare begins. It's a fine suspense film filled with constant, nicely layered tension.
Viktoria (Valentina Cortese), who takes the name of Karin, finds herself in a beautiful house with a young son--and even a new husband, played by Richard Basehart. There's also a sinister nanny who clearly sees herself as the boy's rightful mother.
You think you have impostor syndrome? Try being an actual impostor! That hangs over Viktoria/Karin's head for the whole movie as she tries to unravel the other mystery, the one that becomes apparent as both she and the little boy are nearly killed several times.
I was impressed by all the location shots in this film, unusual for the time but likely inspired by movies like The Naked City and White Heat. San Francisco is an excellent town for location shots, as many a great film demonstrates (Vertigo, Bullitt, Hulk). Valentina Cortese gives a terrific, vulnerable, and intelligent performance.
I'd sure like to live in a house like that.
The House on Telegraph Hill is available on The Criterion Channel as part of their recent Gothic Noir collection. It kind of stretches the definition of noir but I suppose it is at least existential in a noir-ish way.
X Sonnet #1828
Your quest croissant contains a dot of cream.
Containment failed and sheets have clogged the sky.
When winter stumbles out the summer's dream,
The folks combine to make a metal guy.
A slew of sorry eyes connect the gems.
With riches vast, the walls profusely bleed.
A million wooden toys have clogged the Thames.
A single letter shades a lengthy feed.
Determined gangsters fell before the tea.
No guile serves when simple glaciers walk.
So stolen money's fish returned to sea.
To-morrow toothsome thugs'll scarcely talk.
Acquired beds permit the sleeper's bank.
A rocky spell disturbed the drunken tank.
The new Ghostbusters movie doesn't open in Japan until the end of the week. While I wait, I've been thinking of other Ghostbusters matters. I recently saw a comedy video that trudged up the nitpick about Venkman giving Dana 300CCs of Thorazine. The winking assumption is that Venkman must have been planning to use it to take advantage of her. I really doubt anyone inferred this the first time they watched the movie. It's a bad faith criticism coming from a perverse rationale, frustrating because the people presenting it would call themselves the voices of sane morality.
I spent some time thinking of all the better explanations for why Venkman had the Thorazine, but then I realised there were probably plenty of people way ahead of me. Sure enough, there's a whole Reddit thread from six years ago. In fact, it was even explained in an IDW comic that Venkman wasn't carrying the Thorazine, it was a prescription drug he found in her apartment (one person on reddit comments that this explains why it looks like Venkman had ransacked Dana's bedroom). Thorazine is primarily an antipsychotic medication so perhaps that came from a diagnosis when Dana told her doctor she was seeing ghosts. It's also occasionally used to treat migraines, according to Wikipedia, so she may have had it for that reason also.
People have pointed out that 300CCs would be excessive and probably kill a human, though perhaps Venkman needed a superhuman amount to suppress Zuul.
It's also been pointed out that, as Venkman was not an MD, he wouldn't have had free access to Thorazine. Assuming it was his Thorazine and not Dana's, I can think of two explanations for why he'd have it. Remember, the proton packs are unlicensed nuclear devices. Who's to say the Ghostbusters wouldn't include illegal drugs among their arsenal, to be used for precisely the purpose Venkman uses it, to suppress a subject possessed by a demoniac entity? It seems like a scenario Ray and Egon would consider and maybe all of them routinely carry the drug. Another possibility I haven't seen discussed is that perhaps it was prescribed for Venkman. Thorazine is also used to treat bipolar disorder. Do we see Venkman exhibiting symptoms of mania throughout the film? How about when he starts singing in the jail cell, or his initial flirtation with Dana in her apartment?
Thorazine was used recreationally but it is not commonly used for date rape. That's hardly surprising since sedation is only a side effect and it also suppresses dopamine.
I found myself in the mood to watch 1997's As Good as It Gets yesterday. The scene where Helen Hunt comes to Jack Nicholson's door with a wet t-shirt came to mind and I realised that, for a movie I'd only seen once, all the way back in 1997, in the theatre, there are a lot of moments from it that stick with me and come to mind. Hunt's character, suspicious of the proper spelling of conscience because it looks like "con science"; Harold Ramis showing up as a doctor; Nicholson getting out of a long shower and steam clouds rolling into the hallway about him. I often think of that when I take a long shower. I think, "See? I'm not so strange." I forgot Nicholson plays someone with OCD in the movie.
Obviously it couldn't be made to-day. Nicholson flinging homophobic and racist insults, even if it is clearly portrayed as a cracked device for avoiding intimacy, would never fly. As an author, his career would be over after talking to Julie Benz the way he does. Him being twenty-four years older than Helen Hunt would probably also be a problem but I'd also argue the fact that neither he nor Hunt looked like Greek gods would also prevent them from getting leading roles in a romantic film now.
I guess Hunt's face kind of looks like a Roman statue. She's one of those cinematic "average" looking people who would be exposed as gorgeous if you ever saw her in real life next to truly ordinary schlubs, even the ones that spend 24/7 at gyms and salons. As much as I do like Nicholson in the movie, I find her performance more striking. She's a person with a strong faith in her own reason, a faith easily bolstered by how utterly absurd Nicholson is, but she find herself in a situation in which she gradually has to accept she's attracted to this nightmare and she can't explain it. I really like her lines in the phone conversation near the climax:
I'd be lying if I didn't say that I enjoyed your company... but the truth is you do bother me enormously and I know -- think -- that it's best for me to not have contact with you because you're just not ready and you're a pretty old guy to not be ready... and I'm too old to ignore that. But there were extraordinary kindnesses that did take place. So thanks for the trips...
It's interesting we never learn anything about either character's romantic history except Carol has a kid. But we never learn one thing about the boy's father (there's another thing you couldn't put in a movie nowadays). Melvin's supposed to be a massively successful author of romance novels so, despite his glib reply to Darla, he must have some kind of insight. I also find it interesting none of the other main characters ever comment on the quality of his writing. What happens if she reads one of his books and hates it? I'm suddenly reminded that Amanda Palmer hated Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and look what happened to them.
On the one hand, a lover shouldn't have to love their partner's work, but on the other hand, if you don't love something a person lovingly crafted, devoted their life to over a course of years, can you truly say you love that person on more than a physical level? Maybe at the end of the day, Carol just realises she can tolerate Melvin as her financial saviour, the man who got a doctor for her little boy. But maybe that's as good as it gets.
I didn't even like the old X-Men animated series so I was surprised to find I really enjoyed the first two episodes of its revival, X-Men'97. I'm hardly the first to hand it accolades, it has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, the first Marvel production to get that kind of love in a long time.
The show picks up where the old series ended in 1997--it started in 1992, when I was in junior high school. I remember Saturday mornings when it would come on I would sometimes suffer through it to get to something I liked, like the latest Ghostbusters series, Ninja Turtles, or Darkwing Duck. Duckwing Duck was an afternoon show, wasn't it? Ah, it was also on Saturday mornings, I see from this helpful schedule. Looks like Ghostbusters stopped airing before X-Men premiered. It's funny, I could've sworn there was a Ghostbusters series when I was in high school.
Anyway, looks like, early on, I'd have had to have chosen between X-Men, Back to the Future, and Land of the Lost while waiting for Darkwing Duck to come on, and X-Men was certainly the best choice of those three, even though I hated the awkward animation and the corny dialogue. And I was an X-Men fan before that! Storm was one of my favourite comic characters growing up. I read the comics from the late '80s and I gleaned a lot from other kids who'd read more of the comics than I had. Also, there was an X-Men game at the local arcade I played a lot, so I knew a lot of lore and backstory. It formed an impression of X-Men that told me it was a story that deserved better than the lousy animated series. But it must have been my first exposure to a lot of the classic plotlines I didn't read the original comic versions of until years later.
The first two episodes of the revival have fixed a lot of the problems with the old series. The animation, now courtesy of computers, is much smoother, and the opening sequence no longer repeats the same pull-out from close-ups over and over. The dialogue is still incredibly corny but probably self-consciously so. The most important thing is, when I was watching, I got caught up in the story. I wanted to know what Magneto (who now looks oddly like Richard Lynch) is up to. I want to see if Rogue is going to get her heart broken. I want to know if Jean is really pregnant. So screenwriter Beau DeMayo did his job. Too bad he's apparently been cancelled to oblivion. No-one even knows what he did but he wasn't just fired, his social media accounts were deleted. The guy doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry, despite having worked on both Moon Knight and Witcher. It's like he went into witness protection. I read one article that floated a rumour that it's because he was difficult to work with. Hardly seems sufficient explanation for his social media being deleted.
Anyway, we have two full seasons of his work to enjoy, whatever purgatory he may now be consigned to.
X-Men '97 is available on Disney+.
X Sonnet #1827
A rusty oven swells with soggy toast.
A summer dream oppressed the coming spring.
Piano wire cut the dancing ghost.
The acid ant disrupts the bitter ring.
Repeated ripples scar the simple pool.
A peaceful place became a broken hull.
Another coat was made from golden wool.
A secret song was sung by someone's skull.
A data leak was traced to rabbit ears.
Concoctions ranked revealed a banger gin.
A time dispersed before the woman's tears.
To travel back would mean she'd not begin.
Nostalgic Martian strings return the heart.
Ideas were blank before the dream of art.
M. Emmet Walsh passed away at the age of 88 a few days ago. It's been more than a decade since I saw the Coen Brothers movies he was in, Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, but the performances he gave, particularly in the former, were certainly memorable.
My strongest memory of him is of course as the police chief in Blade Runner. He excellently plays a canny scumbag in that film, helping to set the film's noir tone and lend an air of credible menace to the regular old fellows populating the underworld of L.A.
He was in host of other well known films, including The Jerk and Harry and the Hendersons and he was still working. His final film role was in a Mario Van Peebles western called Outlaw Posse released earlier this month, a film that reunited Walsh with his Blade Runner co-star, Edward James Olmos. It has less than a 50% rating on Rotten Tomatoes but . . . here's to taking risks.
To-day I read what I think is the newest Sirenia Digest, number 214, containing "Night Fishing", a new Caitlin R. Kiernan story. It's a nice blurring of the line between a multiverse story and an unreliable memory story, centring on a narrator menaced by some entity that shifts shape and temporal location in his recollections. It put me in mind of Lost Highway, especially when the narrator talks about whether or not he's a murderer.
Last night I fell asleep watching To Kill a Mockingbird. It's included free on Japanese Amazon Prime with Japanese subtitles I can't turn off. The film's Japanese title is アラバマ物語, literally "Alabama Story". After lousy translated titles for Ghibli movies like "Spirited Away" and "The Boy and the Heron", I guess it's nice to see it cuts both ways. I was sorry I slept through Atticus' closing statement so I went back and watched the last half of the film this morning. I seem to be really sensitive lately because all of the strongest moments in the film hit me really hard. I almost cried when Scout first sees Boo Radley.
There's a movie about perspective. You have two instances of community taking justice into its own hands, first when the racist jury condemns the innocent Tom Robinson, then when the sheriff and Atticus decide they're going to protect Boo Radley. The truth was concealed, some might argue changed, first for a bad reason and then for a good reason.
While I was reading the Sirenia Digest story, I was surprised to find myself thinking of this lecture on Dragons from Gresham College I was also watching this morning. The lecturer, Ronald Hutton, discusses the possibility that some tales of dragons could have been based on actual encounters with snakes, crocodiles, or extraordinarily fearsome people. Perhaps it was the dragons that became snakes, crocodiles, and people?
A lot of the subtitles on To Kill a Mockingbird were wrong, I noticed. Unsurprisingly, there's no translation for "Nigger". "Nigger", "Negro", "Coloured", "Black", are all translated as "黒人", literally "black person". This renders totally different the dialogue in the scene where Atticus tells Scout, "Don't say 'niggers', Scout." This line is translated as "何て言い方だ", which roughly translates as "How can you talk that way?" There are two reasons I can see for this. One is to discourage the dissemination of bad English, the other is the fact that Japanese has no swear words, therefore, no Japanese viewer would understand why Atticus wouldn't want Scout to use any particular word. What the translator ought to have done is rendered the word faithfully and offered a brief note. Or they could have simply translated it directly. An intelligent viewer should be able to glean the cultural meaning from context. A willful mistranslation is symptomatic of the kind of cultural insulation that I believe more and more is at the heart of Japan's failure to learn English. Whatever the motive, though, poor translations like this help create a fantasy "Japanese America" that exists only in the Japanese collective imagination.
In Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, there sits a statue of director John Huston because he made 1964's The Night of the Iguana there. Based on a Tennessee Williams' play, it follows the misfortunes of a disgraced Episcopal minister working as a tour guide. The tale of exasperation in the face of misery is wonderfully entertaining.
Richard Burton plays Reverend Larry Shannon, doing nothing to conceal his English accent though I think the character's meant to be American. Deborah Kerr is likewise plainly English though she has a lot of dialogue about growing up in Nantucket.
Running the hotel where everyone ends up is Ava Gardner as Maxine, my favourite performance I've ever seen from her. The way she cackles at Shannon's desperate attempts to keep a stuffy churchwoman off his back, as well as avoiding the advances of the woman's underage niece (Sue Lyon), is delicious. She's a truly John Huston character, tough as nails and usually in a default state of amusement at the tragedies swirling around her.
It's really Burton's film and we watch him and wonder if he really is a cad or if the world has done him a series of injustices. Mostly he's sweaty and miserable but then comes a flash of some insight and inner dignity, especially in his interactions with Hannah, Kerr's character. The intelligent viewer will be forced to conclude that, yeah, this civilisation of ours can be really shitty to people.
Kerr's character, a woman of compassion and refinement, is more classically tragic, scraping by as a sketch artist as she travels with her grandfather, a poet. She's sort of a worldlier, more compassionate Blanche DuBois. I loved the delicate touch with which her story concluded.
Night of the Iguana is available on The Criterion Channel until the end of the month.
X Sonnet #1826
Amidst the roiling yellow, eyes were blue.
The desert's clean and void of Persian rugs.
A shifting walk advanced a thirsty crew.
But something else the heart still rudely tugs.
Machines so old they're ever new still work.
A dream of flight was seen at two o'clock.
The band together rocked a Scottish kirk.
A healthy, modest salad fills a sock.
The lib'ral lizard steals a coke for spring.
Where sweaty shirts make no impression go.
The dewy palms beneath the wind'll sing.
The hour being blue, the desp'rate row.
A bitter wind disrupts the oven night.
A savage ghost abducts the skittish kite.
I've spotted the first turtles of the spring. They occupy their office with unmistakable dignity.
I was going through some books to-day, getting ready to write the next chapter of my comic. Looking at this book about Robert Blake, I was reminded of one of the reasons I like used books so much.
On the inside cover is this:
That address may still belong to an apartment building. When I looked for it on google maps, I found a website for some kind of educational consulting firm, but given the floating world of American education right now, it could very well be a company operating out of an apartment. This book was likely sold at an estate sale, though. I believe I bought it, like so many, at the long gone Fifth Avenue Books in San Diego, which was largely stocked with books from estate sales. It was one of the most interesting shops in town but, like so many things in the process of turning San Diego into the most expensive city in the U.S., it was replaced by some gringo's idea of a sushi restaurant.
The book was printed in London in 1989 and the only price on the dust jacket is £17.95. This Katherine Aaron may have acquired the book in England or it was given to her by someone who'd been there. The neatness of the signature suggests to me someone fairly young, as does the nickname "Caddie", and the fact that she wrote her name in the book at all. My guess would be fourteen or fifteen, except a book about the leader of the Parliamentary navy during the Interregnum seems like an obscure topic for a girl of that age. Maybe she was a little older. But who knows. It's intriguing, in any case.
Further in, there's another name:
Is this the same person? The capital "A" in Aaron is written the same way but Carolyn is a very different name to Katherine. Maybe she was considering changing her name. The lack of spacing between Carolyn and Rose makes me wonder if she spontaneously decided to add the middle name as she was writing. Or maybe she was Katherine's daughter and she inherited the book.
I wonder what became of them and why they had to sell their book about Robert Blake.
For Saint Patrick's Day Part One I went to see Dune: Part Two. A lot of people I love and respect really like Dune. I think I'm getting to a point where I just have to admit, whatever it is that makes it a phenomenon, it's just not clicking with me. I liked the first book but these Denis Villeneuve movies, which are supposed to be the perfect adaptations, are for the most part bland and sterile ordeals to me.
I went back and read my review for Part One and saw I predicted a weak box office for the sequel. Boy, was I wrong about that, at least when it comes to Part Two. People must really like watching Timothee Chalamet trudging across gloomy orange sandscapes. I still feel like I'm not watching people but chess pieces. Okay, maybe the Fremen don't have access to dyes and textiles but why should the Harkonnens and the Imperial family have such dull, empty living spaces with few signs of culture? The only break we get from visual monotony is the fascinating headdresses worn by the Bene Gesserit and they remain the best part of the story. It's cool just knowing Charlotte Rampling is now part of a blockbuster franchise.
If not for the Bene Gesserit, I'd be compelled to wonder why we need these movies when we already have Lawrence of Arabia. Certainly Hans Zimmer's score can't compete with Maurice Jarre's but Zimmer's score can't even compete with Brian Eno and Toto's score from David Lynch's Dune. When I saw Timothee Chalamet saddling up on his first sandworm, I felt sorry for Villeneuve that he couldn't use the score from Lynch's movie. Repeatedly, watching Dune: Part Two, I had to muster excitement by remembering who was who in Lynch's version. "Oh, that was Sting. Oh, that was Patrick Stewart. Oh, that was Virginia Madsen."
I honestly wanted to like this new movie but, at the end of the day, I have to admit. It pounds sand.
The highlight of the day yesterday was running into some students at the mall afterwards. Last week, the third year students graduated at the junior high schools I work at. Yesterday, I ran into a group of girls from the Colour Guard. The Colour Guard is one of the clubs I hang out with regularly because, up until her retirement last year, the head of the English department was in charge of them. So I was very pleasantly surprised and happy to see them one last time. They were wearing their junior high school uniforms a final time before they were due to get their high school uniforms the next day. I wished them a happy Saint Patrick's Day and explained the holiday to them. I also told them a little about Dune, which the hadn't heard of. Dune: Part 2 opened on March 15 in Japan and there were about ten other people in the theatre with me. So I guess in Japan, at least, it's not likely to strike box office gold.
I saw a trailer for Oppenheimer, which is finally due to open in Japan at the end of the month. They can't put it off anymore now that it's won Best Picture. I was very curious to see how it would be promoted in Japan.
The music and the editing seem to present it as more of a horror movie. The thumbnail is the image from the Japanese poster which I saw in the cinema lobby yesterday. The colour grading is subtly less flattering and the background seems to emphasise something being built rather than something burning.
One of the main obstacles the film faces is modern Japanese movies are usually very morally simplistic. This is why The Boy and the Heron struggled. Most Japanese films now are compelled to have a clear, unambiguous hero so part of the sensitivity around Oppenheimer is that many moviegoers would have trouble grasping a film with a protagonist who isn't morally pure. This may have led to some consternation as to why the U.S. would make a movie about Oppenheimer at all.
Cillian Murphy being Irish, I suppose this is an appropriate Saint Patrick's Day topic. Indeed, I was surprised to see Murphy's The Wind that Shakes the Barley is now highly ranked on many Best Irish Movies of All Time lists.
Happy Saint Patrick's Day, everyone. I've decided, since I'm basically a day ahead here in Japan, I'm going to consider all one day holidays to be two day holidays. So I'll be celebrating Saint Patrick's Day to-day and to-morrow. Though, really, I started on Friday when I watched Miller's Crossing with dinner. It's about Irish Americans so I thought it would be a good way to ease in. Last night I watched a bit of The Butcher Boy, a movie I love just a little more every time I see it. I only watched part of it because I had to get up early to-day for a Second Life chess tournament and I'm frustrated to say I fell asleep while I was watching Miller's Crossing. I've been doing that too often lately. I didn't even fall asleep this often during movies when I was regularly getting just five or six hours sleep in my last days in San Diego.
To-night my plan is to have boxty, corn beef, and cabbage for dinner. I also have some Tullamore Dew. I'll probably watch The Quiet Man but I'm not sure. I'm in the mood for something angrier and darker, I supposed because, naturally, Shane MacGowan and Sinead O'Connor are on my mind, the latter of whom, of course, played the Virgin Mary in The Butcher Boy. I'm slightly tempted to watch The Banshees of Inisherin again, it being right there on Disney+ of all places, at least here in Japan. If you type "Irish" in the search, the top two results are The Banshees of Inisherin and Darby O'Gill and the Little People. Now there's a well rounded double feature for you. Banshees figure into both films, come to think of it, maybe it's not so strange.
X Sonnet #1825
McDonald's passed to us a cup to mark
The war that brought machines to rule the ash,
Remains of waitress lives becoming dark
As lightning struck, the metal skull was smashed.
"Reversing ghosts can make a kind of life,"
The killer shrugged and placed the gun beside
A worthy chump who climbed the ladder rife
With broken rungs and let the floor decide.
At home, the thoughtful lady bakes a score
And twenty cakes before the party kicks
Begin to honour whiskey oaths and more
Than lout or dame can hold for all their tricks.
A troubled rhythm shakes the cooling pie.
The path to-day is doused in verdant dye.
This is one of my latest Skyrim characters, Rahv'ael. She's an orc werewolf. Using the Skyrim Unbound mod, which allows you create many of your character's starting conditions, I had her start in the forest with a bounty of 2000 gold on her head. I'm also using Survival Mode which requires your character to eat and sleep or suffer penalties from hunger and fatigue. So Rahv'ael lives by raiding small settlements and bandit camps in wolf form, knocking people down and devouring their hearts for sustenance. It's so much fun playing as a werewolf in Skyrim. You're fast and very deadly. The trade-off is that you can't access inventory items and you can't heal except by eating more hearts. Though, since Rahv'ael can't go into town anyway, there's not much point looting for items to sell. I have a prison mod installed called Raven's Beak in which your character, if caught with a very high bounty, is sent to mining camp and forced to mine ore in order to get a reduced sentence. It's a really buggy mod but it was fun for a while massacring the guards and inmates. When I tried to actually escape, though, the game crashed.
It's actually really difficult playing as Rahv'ael most of the time. If I go into a major city, as deadly as she is in wolf form, she tends to get overwhelmed by the number of guards. I've tried other, similar "rebels against all civilisation" characters and it's always a satisfyingly desperate existence. The backstory I imagined for Rahv'ael is that she's known throughout the region, hated and feared. She was born as a werewolf in an orc stronghold and cast out, left to die, but somehow survived on insects, rats, and pure malevolent will.
When not in wolf form, Rahv'ael is a sneaking character who uses two daggers. I have another mod that requires your character to be of a certain weight and strength to use heavier weapons and armour so she uses smaller weapons by necessity. So with one character I have two extremes of gameplay.
In a new world where naked people ate apples that made them ashamed of their nudity, one man decided to build an enormous boat. All this and more can be seen in 1966's The Bible: In the Beginning, director John Huston's adaptation of the Book of Genesis starring John Huston as Noah. He's the best part of his own film, too.
Huston also narrates the film and performs the voice of God. He has a fine voice for it, too, authoritative yet also familiar and amicable. It's why I thought he was actually a good Gandalf in the Rankin/Bass Hobbit. So it's mostly him we hear at the start, guiding us through footage of seas and forests and animal herds, 'till on the--what was it?--sixth day, God created Michael Parks.
The man who would one day feed heroin and butterscotch to Audrey Horne before getting gunned down by Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney looked surprisingly elfin as a young Adam. Huston avoided nudity by copious use of shadow which makes Eden seem a dark, foreboding, kind of alien place. Things start to feel more down to earth when Cain and Abel show up, played by Richard Harris and Franco Nero, respectively, though Abel gets wacked so quickly I didn't recognise Django. Harris gives a performance as Cain that's so stylised it seems like interpretive dance. It's only when Huston himself shows up as a head-scratching Noah that it feels like the movie finally has human characters.
A lot of money was spent making arks, so much so that despite being a popular film all over the world, The Bible didn't make back its budget. It hasn't remained much in the public memory, either. After the Flood, George C. Scott takes over as Abraham and Ava Gardner plays Sarah. Scott seems very out of place, a preoccupied general sparing a few moments in his schedule to hear what God has to say. Gardner is better, exhibiting tormented grace as she's forced to attend her own servant bearing the child that she could not.
Peter O'Toole shows up, very creepy as the Three Angels who come to inform Abraham of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
It's a visually amazing film and John Huston brings some welcome humanity to it. I wish he'd brought some more.
Despite always getting in each others' pants, the four titular girls of 2008's Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 remain classy, and that's something I really like about them. The second movie's better than the first.
America Ferrera is the best example. Her plot this time involves getting invited by her actress friend to work backstage at a production of Winter's Tale in Vermont. The play's director is played by Kyle MacLachlan (uncredited for some reason) who unexpectedly casts Ferrera's character as Perdita. The actress friend, Julia (Rachel Nichols), is bitter and does something underhanded by way of revenge but actually not extremely underhanded. And Ferrera's character is upset but never throws a fit. It all stays pretty low key and civilised and I admired that.
Amber Tamblyn has the most dramatic plot when she breaks up with Brian, her boyfriend from the first film (Leonardo Nam, now unrecognisably buff) after his condom breaks and she briefly thinks she might be pregnant. It's kind of a movie about things almost happening, which is realistic. A lot of the things we dread might occur end up never occurring but they still take up space in our lives because we dwell on them so long.
Alexis Bledel almost falls for a sleazy nude model and Blake Lively meets her grandmother (Blythe Danner). There's some mild drama. The girls are cute and the movie never overstays its welcome. It's a nice, mild cup of tea, this one.
X Sonnet #1824
The city's edge was marked with paper wolves.
To dust, the walls would crumble far ahead.
No end was signaled clear as horse's hooves.
The comfort drawn at night was laid to bed.
But dawn arose with crimson cars abroad.
Her body, named "Corvette" by Prince, advanced.
What night had made all right was waxing odd.
And yet the day of fire Earth enhanced.
A lizard wet from swimming early came.
His mistress grins behind the mirror veil.
Colliding stars are really just the same.
The black between was lost within a well.
The night became a lovely breakfast time.
A shame the day decays to hour slime.
Most adaptations of Oliver Twist leave out quite a lot, particularly from the latter half of the book. For those wishing to see a more faithful adaptation there's the 1985 BBC series directed by Gareth Davies. It's good, mainly for the performances, though it's also a reminder of why much of the second half of the book tends to be omitted--it's intensely plot driven melodrama.
Eric Porter plays Fagin, the biggest name in the cast, and for such a sensitive character you need a good actor to have any chance of avoiding an anti-Semitic caricature. That may be impossible anyway but Porter infuses his performance with believably real agony and distress.
Another reason the second half of the book tends to be avoided in most adaptations is that Oliver himself takes very little part in it, staying safely out of sight at the Maylies'. So he does here. One advantage, though, of this more thorough adaptation is to allow Nancy (Amanda Harris) the proper amount of screentime for a character who essentially becomes the book's tragic heroine. Harris gives a good performance too, really the most interesting one in the series, as she has to navigate the conflict between her affection and her morality.
I didn't watch the Oscars because I normally find them nauseating but I mostly agree with this year's winners. Oppenheimer won Best Picture and Director and it was my second favourite movie of the year after The Boy and the Heron. And Boy and the Heron won Best Animated Feature. That's the second one for Miyazaki Hayao and another Japanese movie, Godzilla Minus One, took home an Oscar, too, for Best Special Effects. It seems people are reacting much more strongly to the Godzilla win. Maybe because it's a franchise with a longer history getting Oscar recognition for the first time. It's slightly frustrating, though, because Boy and the Heron is a much braver, altogether much better film. But then, there have been worse Oscar years. It could've been Brokeback Mountain all over again.
I was even happy with Poor Things' wins despite the fact that I do feel the movie's overrated. It won for Costume Design, Production Design, Makeup, and Emma Stone's performance as Best Actress, all of which I too thought were exemplary.
Moments from the ceremony people seem to be talking about are a couple of jabs at Madame Web and John Cena presenting Best Costume while naked. Maybe Sony's doing a better job clamping down on Madame Web criticism in Japan because I mysteriously lost Internet connexion when I tried to google the infamous compilation of bad line readings. Sure, my internet usually goes out when it rains and it's raining heavily to-day but I've heard being a conspiracy theorist is a sign of intelligence so I'm going with that.
While I'm at it, I wonder if some of the Madame Web roasting is covert ops from Disney because they need Madame Web to be more embarrassing than The Marvels in order to keep control of Spider-Man. With Warner Brothers meanwhile burying finished films to get tax breaks we could be entering a very strange new era of competition in the film industry.
X Sonnet #
The herbs and spices came before the beef.
But roasting thoughts were crashing low for days.
A month would pass before the cook's relief.
Before it came, she boiled many ways.
The knowledge came before the fish was caught.
Her wisdom checked the fall of stupid lust.
Forbearance, lest a date be dearly bought.
But trains of steam through metal ribbings bust.
It didn't work but children took the flag.
Regretful tourists dully chomp the roots.
Each chubby hand would fill its owner's bag.
The jig was up when shoppers saw their boots.
For rigging lines above the fly, they won.
For sailing sky around the kite, they're done.
Mori Masayuki reunites with the love of his life and has to confront the fact that she slept with an American soldier in 1953's Love Letters (恋文). The first film directed by actress Kinuyo Tanaka, only the second female director in the history of Japanese cinema, it pales in comparison to the Ozu and Mizoguchi films that obviously influenced her, in terms of shot composition, editing, plot, and performances. It is an interesting artefact, though, of the first year following the U.S. occupation.
Mori plays Reikichi, a former soldier whose fluency in English has gotten him a job translating. He runs into an old friend (Jukichi Uno) who asks him to translate some letters for a group of women under his employ. It turns out, these women are small time gold diggers, nearly prostitutes, who need help corresponding with the Americans they slept with during the occupation. Mori swallows his disgust and helps them out but he boils over when he talks to Michiko (Yoshiko Kuga), the woman he loves, about her own affair with an American GI.
As someone who studied English and presumably at one time had an interest in foreign culture, Mori's character seems poised to make a relatively balanced argument, so when he throws in Michiko's face the fact that her lover may have personally killed some of her compatriots, the cut is deeper.
Ultimately, Tanaka mainly wants to draw a distinction between Michiko and the cheap floozies who were really only after cash, a simplistic morality that comes off as gossipy and compares poorly with Mizoguchi movies like Street of Shame.
Mori Masayuki, who's normally good in Kurosawa and Mizoguchi movies, is bland and uninteresting here. I suspect Tanaka, like a lot of actors and actresses turned director, didn't like to give actors much direction. Maybe she got better at that as she went along.
It's easy to pooh-pooh jump scares, to call a horror movie composed of little else a trite failure. But when I see a movie that completely bungles each and every jump scare, like 1998's I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, I must admit there's some skill in it. We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone.
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer follows on from I Know What You Did Last Summer, in which the killer knows the teenagers almost killed him last summer. It's hard to forget that sort of thing so the Fisherman (as he's called because he's a fisherman) is still trying to kill Jennifer Love Hewitt in the second film. Also, her new friend played by Brandy.
Somehow, the combination of sound effects, editing, music, and shot composition come together in totally toothless shock moments. Every swing is a miss. Jennifer Love Hewitt's at home alone when she hears a funny noise, she creeps up slowly to her closet where someone is plainly inside going through her clothes, and instead of saying, "Who's there?" she continues to creep up until Brandy pops out and they both scream. But we don't all scream. We cannot share in the terror feigned by these pretty young actresses.
Then it's off to the Bahamas for our young heroines as they seemingly win a radio contest--I say seemingly because the killer has played a trick on them in one of the film's halfway clever moments which I won't completely spoil. It turns out it's the off-season so there are no other tourists and the staff at the hotel are reduced to five while all the exteriors conveniently look like they could've been filmed in California. Cheap sets and minimal cast add up to a very low budget, or a budget that went towards certain unmentioned perks. But that minimal cast includes Jack Black in an early role and none other than Jeffrey Combs as the hotel manager. What a trooper. In the grand schlock horror tradition of established great performers in thankless minor roles, he milks all he can from his exasperated lines about hysterical tourists imagining they've seen corpses.
In the end, Freddie Prinze Jr. personally pilots a boat through a hurricane to save Jennifer Love Hewitt but can even Kanan Jarris save her from a killer who can mysteriously appear right behind someone without being seen by the people talking to him? My favourite part is when the killer ties Jennifer Love Hewitt's tanning booth shut and the solution to this contrived by one of the other teens is to pick up a dumbbell and hit the top of the tanning booth. There's the sound effect of broken glass and somehow the thing swings open. It feels like the filmmakers' disinterest in logic extends to a fundamental contempt for physics and cause and effect.
An old, all-girls' private school, deep in the woods, turns out to harbour a horrific secret in 2006's The Woods. I suppose that's inevitable. It's not a bad movie though it feels slightly like it's pulling itself apart.
It kind of feels like the souls of two movies are at war, and one of them halfway devours the other, not out of malice but just blind hunger. There's a spooky little potboiler about a quiet but also rebellious teenage girl called Heather (Agnes Bruckner) finding she's met her match in a quiet but oppressive private school. She's aware her mother kind of hates her and the headmistress (Patricia Clarkson) exploits this with some chilling psychological manipulation. This movie is psychological and melancholy.
The other movie, the one that ultimately wins, is an Evil Dead movie. Bruce Campbell plays Heather's father, Joe, and while it feels like his presence was meant to be minimal in the beginning, by the end he's completely upstaged the whole movie and has basically become Ash. He doesn't say a word of dialogue in his first scenes which led me to notice just how well he can communicate volumes with facial expressions alone. But when one student manages to call him and get him to come pick Heather up, he immediately becomes the hero, ready to hack away at the evil vines that would drag the girls into the woods and to eldritch doom. Not unlike the woods and the vines in Evil Dead.
There wouldn't be such a see-saw quality if Agnes Bruckner could match Campbell's sheer force of personality. But while she was serviceable for all the quieter scenes, she just doesn't have the wattage Campbell has. He's kind of playing on the level of Jack Nicholson in The Shining and I think Shelley Duvall works as a counterpoint because her brittleness is of equal intensity to Nicholson's ferocity. Bruckner is completely drowned out by Campbell even when Campbell has less dialogue and screentime. But I do enjoy me some Bruce Campbell, so what the hell.
Yesterday felt like the god of technology, I guess Vulcan, was doing mischief with me. I had to take an online language test called PROGOS for my company, B*********. Unsurprisingly, it's sketchy as hell. It uses Cambridge score rankings but is not certified by or affiliated with Cambridge and was made in Japan. The test results included numerous spelling and grammatical errors; "Can give clear, detailed descriptions, highlight significant point", "To point out mistakes and other isues," Which is no surprise since the test is instantaneously graded by an AI. I scored "B2" in everything (the Cambridge scale goes A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2 with C2 being the highest) except "Interaction" in which I scored a B1. Interaction consisted of me responding to recorded prompts like, "What documents should I bring to my interview?" My microphone was crapping out half the time due to my lousy internet so I'm sure that was also a factor. Not that it matters to an AI. But, hey, at least no filthy human was paid to grade the test. Every time I think Japanese English education can't get more tragically ridiculous, it finds a way to surprise me.
After that, I decided to make some blueberry muffins. I put copious amounts of cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg in the batter along with a whole lot of brown sugar. I made enough for twelve muffins but my tray only holds six at a time. Smoke started coming from my convection oven when I was preheating it so I turned it off, unplugged it, let it cool, and cleaned it as best as I could, figuring some bit of food got caught somewhere. It seemed to work better so I put the tray in. In less than ten minutes, it was emitting smoke again and the six would-be muffins had become charcoal. So now I guess I need a new convection oven.
Finally, I decided to relax and play Skyrim. Unfortunately, I've hit a point which often seems to happen when I get a character to around level 40--my rickety scaffold of various mods destabilises and shit starts to fuck up. Which can be a little amusing. I was fighting two dragons and one of them got his tail stuck in a frozen lake and couldn't move. When I got his hitpoints down to zero, he didn't die. When I hit him again, his hitpoints refilled for the amount of damage I did. From then on, striking him with my ebony flail while my follower threw ice shards at him had the effect of gradually healing him.
Maybe all this will work as preemptive penance. My internet is running uncommonly smooth this morning. It probably just means all the hidden cameras are off in my apartment. That's enough, Vulcan, can I get another deity?
I kind of feel like I should dislike 1986's Betty Blue more than I do. It's about two attractive young people who are basically just assholes, committing theft and vandalism with impunity between sessions of passionate sex. The movie ends in a fairly cheap, overwrought pathos. And yet, I found the three hour film beautiful and compulsively watchable.
I was going to watch half last night and half to-night but I couldn't sleep and realised I wanted to finish it. There's very little plot to the film. It begins with a long sustained shot of its two main characters, Betty (Beatrice Dalle) and Zorg (Jean-Hugues Anglade), having sex in Zorg's cluttered beach shack. The sex scenes throughout the film are explicit and supposedly a relationship developed in real life between the stars but I'm pretty sure the sex is simulated--the performers are never sweaty or flushed.
Zorg is comfortable in his easy life, his job being merely upkeep of the other nearby shacks for a sleazy but fairly laid back landlord. Betty won't accept a comfortable status quo, though. In addition to violently expressing disgust for the landlord, she vandalises the property, eventually setting fire to Zorg's shack. Meanwhile, she has dogged faith that she can get his notebooks filled with stories published.
As Zorg explains to different people throughout the film, most of the time Betty's a wonderful and charming companion but, every now and then, she has these episodes of drastic psychological aberration. At the beginning of the film's last act, he finds her with her hair cut short and her face smeared with lipstick, a scene that probably would have been more effective if actress Beatrice Dalle had actually cut her hair. As it is, the wig she wears is rather obvious and looks much bulkier than her real hair, making it look as though she'd gained hair suddenly rather than was shorn of any.
I didn't find most of the film's comedy to be funny at all. When Zorg and Betty are working at a restaurant, a customer asks Zorg to replace a pizza she ordered because it has ham instead of the anchovies she wanted. So Zorg takes it to the kitchen and pulls rotten food out of the garbage, puts it on the pizza, and sprinkles cheese over it. We then watch the customer rapturously devouring the pizza. This is clearly meant to be funny but I think only a real sadist would find the humour in it. There are several moments like that in the film where I think we're meant to side with Betty and Zorg because they're young and beautiful.
Dalle is really hot and she's always captivating. It sounds like she's not much different from Betty in real life, too, having been caught shoplifting multiple times. She even once, on very brief acquaintance, married a rapist she met when visiting a prison. Dalle later described the marriage as a disaster though it apparently lasted at least a few years following his release. In any case, it seems like she'd be a stressful acquaintance.
Betty Blue is available on The Criterion Channel.
X Sonnet #1822 To dwell in rotting gaols they rate a perk.
The dizzy, walking fungal men were weak.
So nothing less than zombie crowds'll work.
The ratings tanked in time for sleepy week.
A reigning liar sinks in rancid cheese.
Decisive hate belittles gentle thoughts.
With gestures weak, the paper puppets please.
A rotten sun is seen with fuzzy spots.
A glowing deer was hostile, rushing guests.
The sabre teeth obliged the host with kills.
Their frocks were ranked among the very best.
A dying troupe conveyed their final wills.
Beside the ship's a fish of equal size.
A passion's buried deep behind its eyes.
Everyone's favourite pickpocket prostitute is back and this time she's Alex Kingston. Well, it was 1996 when the future River Song starred as Moll Flanders in an ITV series based on Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel. Kingston, as she was destined to be on Doctor Who, diminished her character with broad mugging but I liked the supporting performances by Daniel Craig and Diana Rigg.
Craig plays Moll's third husband, the one she really falls for. Despite the fact that this was long before he became James Bond, his role was beefed up so that he could appear in all four episodes of the series and thus take second billing. Rigg plays the mother figure Moll tragically encounters in Virginia and she's also quite good.
Unfortunately, it's Kingston at the rudder for the duration and her broad, winking performance, along with several of her costars' similar performances, sap the story of much of its complexity. There's little ambiguity as to whether Moll's path was of her own choosing or one inevitably laid out for her by society and circumstance, though much of the dialogue nods in that direction. Kingston even looks directly at the camera at moments and insipidly asks, "What would you do?"
It is admirable just how much of the story is adapted, though. Fans of the novel will find things to appreciate.
High school kids have to deal with a serial killer and their own hidden connexions to him in 2010's My Soul to Take. The last film to be both written and directed by Wes Craven (Scream 4 was his last film as director), it seems clearly intended to be his magnum opus, like he was just throwing everything he could into the pot. I kind of loved it but it's honestly a train wreck.
The influence of Lost Highway is pretty obvious right from the start. We meet a man working on a hobby horse in the basement who hears a news story about a local serial killer with a distinctive knife. Almost immediately, he trips over that very knife and is confused by the familiar way he picks it up and puts it in his pocket. This is all part of a rapidly told prologue segment that ends with the killer apparently meeting his end--but of course he didn't really.
Sixteen years later, seven high school kids who were born at the time of the killer's death supposedly somehow inherited aspects of his personality or are just considered cursed. The dialogue has lots of references to identity and how identity is defined. The main character, Bug (Max Thieriot), for instance, has some amusing dialogue with his best friend, Alex (John Magaro), about how being a man means pretending to enjoy pain and that being a man is entirely defined by pretense.
Where the departures from plain logic in Lost Highway always work as possible delusions of the protagonist, there are many lose threads left in My Soul to Take that just feel like sloppiness, particularly the many little suggestions that Bug has killed people and his memories have somehow been repressed. The movie totally forgets to explain or follow up on that. I kind of liked, though, how Craven doggedly avoided a lot of exposition, leading to a sometimes bewildering experience, as in one scene late in the film when we suddenly learn two characters had been siblings all along and it wasn't even a secret.
For all its faults, the movie has a sense of an artistic identity you don't often see in movies anymore. It definitely has the distinct flavour of Wes Craven.
Here's a comic I made for students last week when I was stuck at my desk during testing:
I didn't do my usual lousy lettering but instead awkwardly inserted computer text so Japanese junior high school students can read it. In this world of astounding if, at times, inappropriately surreal AI art, my poorly formatted font looks like 1999. You're welcome!
AI art's kind of starting to remind me of William Burroughs' cut-up technique (attributed to Brion Gysin). It's interesting when it makes unexpected deviations. That's now but I suppose, sooner or later, someone's going to figure how to make AI reliably do what they want it to do. And all the artists who have a hard enough struggle proving they have value in this world will have an even harder time. I can see it being particularly hard in Japan where artificiality has long been seen as an intrinsically valuable. I see the young artists at the school where I work and can't imagine the insurmountable challenges as they try to make careers for themselves three or four years from now. It's good to keep in mind it's always best for writers to write for themselves first and foremost but that might be pretty cold comfort.
For a sheltered young woman, meeting a handsome, supernatural boy can be the beginning of a passionate adventure, lasting beyond a lifetime. For others, like the heroine of 2002's Tuck Everlasting, such an encounter may be a chaste and pleasant diversion for a few weeks, or even months, but, well, there's never any reason to become too terribly excited. This anemic fantasy romance will make you feel that it's not worth pondering whether your most fantastic wishes may come true.
In the early 1900s, a pretty young woman named Winnie (Alexis Bledel) chafes somewhat against the strict outline her parents have imposed on her future. One day, she escapes into the forest where she means a nice, clean family who became immortal after drinking from a magic spring.
She strikes up a friendship with the good-looking Jesse Tuck (Jonathan Jackson). The two find each other very pleasant and even dance and swim together. Finally, one day the Tuck patriarch (William Hurt) explains that immortality can be a curse. This sets up a conflict between her desire to share a life with Jesse and her preference to avoid becoming an eternal being cut off from human society in some vague, abstract, intellectual way. Whatever her decision, this movie is always ready to gently remind you that nothing is worth getting excited about.
As Roger Ebert aptly put it, "The movie is too impressed with its own solemn insights to work up much entertainment value," it's a movie burdened with "feather-brained sentimentality." Oh, Roger Ebert, I miss you. I know you'd know how to use eternal life. Indeed, he said so; "I know what I'd do: Spend 10 years apiece in the world's most interesting places." Think of all the things you could learn, all the skills, all the experiences you could have. It hardly seems to require that much imagination, which makes it all the more incredible all of the characters in this movie are completely lacking it.
A group of attractive college students find themselves caught in a serial killer's meta scheme in 1998's Urban Legend. A successful Scream knock-off, it has a ridiculous plot but is a bit entertaining, featuring a nice cast.
The main cast includes Alicia Witt (Gersten Hayward from Twin Peaks), Jared Leto, Rebecca Gayheart, Tara Reid, Joshua Jackson, and Michael Rosenbaum. An impressive roster of supporting performances includes Brad Dourif, Robert Englund, Natasha Gregson Wagner, and John Neville.
For some reason, I knew early on who the killer was. It wasn't like I figured out, I don't think. I just knew. I must have heard about it somewhere but I have no memory of doing so. Maybe I listened to and half-watched a Rifftrax of the movie. Maybe I actually saw it and somehow just blocked the memory. I was certain who the killer was even as I watched the killer do things that ought to have been physically impossible for the particular performer.
I could make a long list of ridiculous things in the movie. My favourite was Alicia Witt's goth roommate who's chatting with who she thinks is a guy, a potential hookup, on an archaic instant messenger via dial-up modem. It's really the killer, of course. In every scene, this girl wears black lipstick except this scene so she can tell the killer, "I'm going to get ready. What room are you in?" before leaving the computer to go across the hall to the bathroom so she can "get ready", a process that involves the sole task of applying her lipstick. When she returns to her dormroom, a mirror is plainly visible in the background. When she sits back down to her computer, the reply is of course, "YOURS". Too bad she didn't have to apply eyeliner, she might've gone all the way to a salon for that.
X Sonnet #1821
Considered plops of cream were sour thoughts.
Replace electric grills to make a light.
A quiet day displaced the talking bots.
A fuzzy tape replaced a bluer sight.
Ignore the pudding name it's really jam.
For making little hill you get a peak.
Upon the sandwich find the porker's ham.
The city mouths proclaim the soundly meek.
With no reflection, words were left to dry.
Contagion blooms for cagey light above.
A watching ghost was cruel and forced a cry.
The hand would scratch and tear its pretty glove.
Without a watch, the pocket tightens guts.
The river's lined with grim and creepy huts.
