Not Settled with Words

Well, that's a clever construction of lyrics from the debate. I don't know if it is deja vu, though. I watched Jon Stewart's reaction to the debate before watching the unedited debate and it says a lot that Stewart's coverage, normally skewed left, makes it look like Biden lost the debate. "This cannot be reality!" Stewart concluded.

It does seem incredible the Democrats couldn't do better than to prop up poor old Biden, whose speech frequently disintegrated to unintelligible word salad. It's all the more striking for those of us who remember the vibrant Biden of ten or so years ago.

So I guess Trump's going to be president again. And, again, it seems like a race that the Democrats lost more than one that Trump won. Biden's evident weak faculties are only part of it. People are sick of the left lying or shading the truth, at least when it comes to things people are paying attention to, like whether or not January 6th was truly an insurrection or whether Trump truly deserves to be a felon for paying off a porn star he had sex with. These stick in people's minds a lot better than climate change or even abortion rights.

What the Democrats need is someone who comes off as both competent and down to Earth. Obama fit the bill. How could he possibly be the only one?

Invitation Solicited

Matt Reeves took a moody, brooding Swedish film and added some of that old Hollywood razzle dazzle with 2010's Let Me In. A remake of 2008's Let the Right One In, it's entirely needless, except for people whose refusal to watch subtitled films could be called fanatical. But it's competently made.

As I watched, I kept thinking, "He's straightening out the Slinky." Let the Right One In is all about mood, about living in this cold space, about the subtle, mysterious, and deadly shifts in reality that make up a lifetime. Let Me In is more of a standard vampire movie about a boy who encounters the supernatural. So Reeves gives us more exposition, more scenes concretely setting up motivation, and a lot more special effects.

This little vampire kid has a cgi counterpart who takes over to clamber over victims at the speed of a piranha. They're pretty good scenes of violent horror. Less is left to the imagination so it feels like a smaller world. This difference is even reflected in the title. Let the Right One In comes from a Morrissey song and it implies a choice, that there is a wrong one, and there's some difficulty in choosing which is which. Let Me In is plain and flat.

The relationship between the leads is effective. Chloe Grace Moretz and Kodi Smit-McPhee have good chemistry. Smit-McPhee plays Owen, this movie's version of Oskar. There's an early scene where Owen wears a mask and wields a knife when he's alone, probably intended to give him the same slightly creepy quality as Oskar. But Reeves rationalises it, drawing a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the bullies and Owen. It makes sense and it's a decent enough plot but the original feels like a deeper portrait for not being quite so logical or moral.

X Sonnet #1858

As needless sleep, a wallet walked to pants.
A masquerade was copied straight with air.
Addendum gold embellished Laura's dance.
A dainty foot destroyed the rotten stair.
The sound of rock announced another flick.
A tempting Fed dispersed the coded dogs.
The pumpkin flame engulfed the brittle wick.
The marshy barrel ran with rampant frogs.
A larger ship diverts Titanic's time.
Recursive coffee stirs itself at sea.
The spoiled ginger can't replace the lime.
The nervous blonde would fain retreat for tea.
The slowly walking brain abandons head.
Another time awaits the living dead.

The Travails of the Psychic

Once again, Stephen King wrote a story about a boy growing up in the late '50s (actually 1960 this time) and it became a movie, 2001's Hearts in Atlantis. It's one of the best ones, too. I'd say it's highly underrated with perfect performances from Anthony Hopkins and the late Anton Yelchin.

The screenplay is by William Goldman, author of The Princess Bride, and the relationship between Ted (Hopkins) and Bobby (Yelchin) somewhat resembles the one between Peter Falk and Fred Savage. Hopkins basically plays himself but that means he has his usual, mesmerising delivery and when he tells Bobby stories it's easy to see how the little boy would get transfixed.

The movie's not subtle about Bobby's issues with an absent father figure. Bobby's mother, played by Hope Davis, is selfish and spiteful. She becomes a victim of assault late in the film which makes her crueller but also somewhat redeems her, a plot turn that many an academic would call "problematic". And, sure, Bobby's love interest, Carol (Mika Boorem) is the only positively portrayed female character and she is portrayed as being totally pure. So it's not the best movie in the world in regards to its depictions of women and girls. It's more successful in its focus on Bobby and Ted.

Yelchin is quite good as he tries to navigate the deceptions spun by his mother and his increasing loyalty to and concern for Ted. Ted turns out to be possessed of psychic powers and he tells Bobby certain "low men" wearing black are looking for him (in King's story, the men wore yellow, which I think would've been more visually interesting). Ted is calm, cool, and odd in a crises and Hopkins always knows just the right amount of distress and calculation to convey to make Ted come across as someone truly wise. Goldman's screenplay is well crafted and King always has a base level of quality but, more than anything else, it's Hopkins and Yelchin who make the movie work.

The Life Scatological

In 2003, critics derided and audiences detested a comedy called A Guy Thing starring Jason Lee and Julia Stiles. But was it really so bad? Well, yes, but Jason Lee and Julia Stiles both have appreciable charisma, even if it's never utilised.

Selma Blair's in the movie, too. It seems to have attracted some smart people. It's a There's Something About Mary type of gross-out romantic comedy in which less emphasis is put on relationship mechanics and more on the increasingly embarrassing misadventures of the male protagonist. Julia Stiles is kind of wasted and has surprisingly little screentime. After she and Lee wake up together following his bachelor party, the only chance they have to bond is when they steal some photos from her psycho ex-boyfriend's apartment. It hardly seems enough for him to leave his fiancee, who's played by Selma Blair.

The best parts of the movie are the jokes related to the title. When Blair finds Stiles' bikini bottom in the toilet tank, Lee hastily concocts a lie about how he bought dirty underwear from a department store bin. Blair calls the store and is surprised when his story is confirmed by the clerk who automatically lies to her because it's "a guy thing". Since this movie was recommended to me by someone in Japan and I wonder if people in foreign countries think this is normal behaviour in the U.S. I feel compelled to note, no, this is not normal. But it is funny.

The more physical comedy is less effective. Lee discovering he has crabs in a business meeting and scratching his crotch or his increasingly embarrassing lie about having diarrhea during a family party are tedious and unimaginative.

Now, as I do whenever I see a Jason Lee movie, I will note again how sadly wasted his potential was. After his breakout role in Mallrats, he ought to have been the king of slacker comedy. But then Ryan Reynolds stole his shtick. In a better world, Deadpool would've been Jason Lee.

X Sonnet #1857

As reason takes the minivan, retreat.
A pair of saucers madly grasps the lane.
Evade the bull careening down the street.
A billion spitting stones contrive your pain.
The egret's shadow gulped a hapless fish.
No planning stops the hungry bird at large.
The angry Rieklings stole a pewter dish.
The drunken crew released an empty barge.
Dimension symbols truly show a map.
A myst'ry lunch divides horizon pangs.
A scribbled cloud was black beneath the cap.
'Twas fear and joy betwixt the spider's fangs.
The restless dead would track the goony bird.
Between the trees there sticks a magic word.

Lightsabres in the Woods

I guess there were revelations and dramatic occurrences in last night's Acolyte but it felt oddly like it was just treading water for thirty minutes.

Maybe if the reveal of Qimir as Mae's master hadn't been so obvious as to be predicted by everyone on the planet. It's not just that it was obvious. I was reminded of Amazon Prime's recent adaptation of Fallout in which characters introduced in the first couple episodes end up being revealed to have important roles in the last few episodes. It's like these shows can hire only a certain number of actors and halfway through they have to shuffle everyone around in order to complete the story.

In case you were wondering, I'm still pretty confident in my theory that adult Mae is Osha's subconscious Force projection. The show made it seem like Mae switched costumes with an unconscious Osha in order to get close to Sol. I'd say it's more like the Mae identity took over Osha's body.

By the way, my favourite send up of the old costume switch trope was on an episode of Farscape, twenty-four years ago, on an arc called "Liars, Guns, and Money". Crichton and Aeryn (the characters on whom James Gunn modelled his version of Star Lord and Gamora) knock out two armoured guards and drag them into a side corridor. They nod at each other and the scene cuts away. It comes back to find Crichton's only gotten a few bits of armour off one of them and is telling Aeryn, "Er, now we take off all our clothes."

One might point out that Han and Luke did the costume switch in A New Hope, though it was obvious they put the stormtrooper on over their regular clothes instead of fulling swapping. Isn't it funny that the mind automatically assumes it's reasonable for Mae to have stripped both herself and Osha naked then dressed both herself and Osha's unconscious body? That's how hack fiction trains us. That's why Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo is so good, because it plays with these conditioned anticipations. I'm actually giving Acolyte a lot of credit by predicting it's doing a subversion.

From the way Sol asked, "Where is your sister?" instead of "Where's Mae?" there's at least an indication that Sol already knows it's the Mae identity in control now. The idea of it being a split personality might also explain why Qimir didn't kill Mae when he had the chance.

I find it really strange that anyone would find the Jedi to be the less sympathetic faction here. Qimir saying he has to murder everyone because the Jedi have a rule against people using the Force who aren't Jedi is the kind of leap of logic that makes him a pretty unremarkably psychotic villain.

The Acolyte is available on Disney+.

Faking It without Making It

I've been seeing a lot of thumbnails on YouTube recently for videos about Terrance Howard's ideas about the nature of physics. Neil deGrasse Tyson thoroughly debunked Howard's labour of love:

I was tempted to say Howard's overconfidence in his scientific acumen is a sign of the times, but, then, we've always had celebrities saying kooky things about the universe. I'm more interested in the attention deGrasse Tyson and other people with real knowledge of, and understanding of, the principles of the scientific process have brought to the concept of peer review. DeGrasse Tyson notes that the proper forum for vetting research is not Joe Rogen's show (on which Howard revealed his treatise) nor even, deGrasse Tyson says, on deGrasse Tyson's own podcast. The sad truth is that many people think of Googling as research while what research actually consists of is a vast quantity of material carefully prepared and examined by a minority of people whose skills have been prepared and examined throughout their lives. Stuff most people have never even considered reading, stuff you might need college enrollment or affiliation to get passwords to read. Not that many college students read it as, in my experience at college, many students resort to good old Google to fill out their citations.

I was not particularly surprised to learn a science teacher at a junior high school I used to work at had never heard of Henry Oldenburg or presumably Oldenburg's part in establishing the Royal Society in the 17th century and the process of peer review. You can see Oldenburg depicted in my web comic, by the way, in a chapter in which he shows off the Society's collection of scientific curiosities. All of my illustrations were taken from an actual catalogue made in the 17th century.

Of course, that doesn't make me scientifically qualified to take part in a peer review. It kind of makes sense that an actor would be susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's his job to imagine he has expertise he does not. Similarly, a writer has to imagine what it's like to be someone with a vastly different body of experience and education. At the end of the day, I really don't know what it's like to be a pirate or an intergalactic bounty hunter.

Anyway, I feel kind of bad for people dog-piling on Terrance Howard but he does deserve it, particularly as there are plenty of people out there ready to swallow what he's spouting. Here's a video on Howard's paper by theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder:

Who are Your Cat People?

Since Criterion has that Paul Schrader playlist up now, I decided to watch his 1982 remake of Cat People again. That movie is a lot better than I remembered. I still greatly prefer the 1942 original but Schrader's version is pretty, wicked fun.

I think I first watched it on VHS, possibly even in pan-and-scan. I can't actually remember if I watched a better quality copy before now. I certainly think better sound helps the film a lot, especially with the jump scares involving growls, or fake growls, like the shot of the bus pulling into frame that Schrader replicates from the first film.

Certainly the score is terrific and though it'd been a while since I watched the movie, I have listened to Giorgio Moroder's score many times, with the David Bowie vocals. Its familiarity makes it even cooler to hear paired with Nastassja Kinski stalking through the woods or kneading bed sheets. She sure does look like a cat.

I also love the dream where she walks through the door and suddenly she's in a desert, talking to Malcolm McDowell.

As much as I love how the cat was kept to the shadows in the original, I love the autopsy in this one where a human arm sudden pops out of the dead leopard before it melts.

It's kind of hard to choose between Nastassja Kinski and Simone Simon for best Irena. They're both vulnerable yet convincingly predatory. Simon seems more heartbroken about it. Annette O'Toole is a better Alice. Having her topless in the pool scene is an improvement to something that's otherwise identical to the original, not just because she has great breasts but because it adds to the sense of her being caught off balance.

Schrader's version lacks the arrogant psychiatrist character played by Tom Conway in the original and adds the brother played by Malcolm McDowell. Although he's basically part of the opposite faction, let's say, it's kind of a similar role. He's there to smugly explain things but it was more satisfying in the original when Irena responded to the psychiatrist's sexual assault.

The end of the 1942 film is a lot better, it's more tragic and noir-ish. The 1982 film's ending is just kind of odd. But you gotta love that Bowie song. It's no wonder Tarantino repurposed it for Inglorious Basterds, saying it was too good just to be played over closing credits.

Toil Unrewarded

Three guys decide to fight their union and the factory that employs them in Paul Schrader's 1978 film Blue Collar. The product of a troubled production, this film is remarkable as an authentic and insightful portrait of a time and place. It's sadly ironic to note how much worse life has become for the working man of Detroit since the film's release, though.

Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto play the three employees. They work in a car factory and belong to a union. They don't have much affection for the union officials who seem unable or unwilling to solve simple problems, such as a broken lock on Pryor's locker. Nevertheless, when an FBI man comes sniffing around, they all give him the cold shoulder.

But things are getting desperate. Pryor owes an outrageous sum in back taxes and Keitel's teenage daughter needs braces. Kotto, who plays the brains of the group, comes up with the idea of robbing the union safe. When they do, they're shocked to find no money, just a notebook with a list of investments. This, though, turns out to be a hotter item than it at first seems.

Kotto and Pryor are both terrific. Kotto is cool as fuck in this movie. There's a scene where he fights a couple guys with a baseball bat that's immensely satisfying. Pryor's character isn't as smart even if he is witty. Pryor's performance and improvisations make him seem extraordinarily raw and real. It's Keitel who disappoints. Physically, he looks out of place, at this point for some reason having a body-builder's physique. He's mild for most of the film, it's hard to understand how he bonded with Kotto's and Pryor's characters.

It's a terrific screenplay by Paul Schrader and his brother Leonard. It's a satisfyingly complex heist mystery drama as well as being an insightful portrait of low level politics. Who'd have believed that 50 years later everyone would be missing these steel hellscapes? As bad as things are depicted in Detroit in the movie, nowadays Detroit doesn't even have it that good, with massive unemployment rates that have turned the town into the wasteland you can see in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive.

Blue Collar is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a collection of films directed by Paul Schrader.

X Sonnet #1856

At rest, the ghost was fond of knitting carps.
Recaptured time indulged the fishy pea.
For how could soup disturb the windless tarps?
A goodness soaked the Irish whiskey sea.
The clunk of stupid joes confused the cat.
But who would relish empty cups for tea?
The jolly blanks replaced the music chat.
The song betwixt the lovers plays in D.
Expensive cloves arranged the fate of mice.
A careless mouse could lose a foot in sand.
Disliking grains, the ronin scorned his rice.
Across the wastes traversed a hungry band.
The work of steel and steam condemned the day.
Pernicious traps pervade the normal way.

Donald Sutherland

Donald Sutherland died three days ago. I always liked this bit from Animal House, despite the fact that I don't find Milton boring. I even think his jokes are funny. I love the one about the crows in his History of Britain.

Sutherland could be quite funny. He could convey tremendous gravity and vulnerability, too, as he does in perhaps his best role as a man grieving his daughter's death, beset by strange phenomena in Venice in Don't Look Now. With those perpetual shadows on his eyes and slightly husky voice, it's never hard to imagine him as a haunted man.

He became a familiar face in supporting roles over the decades, in a wide variety of films, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to Cold Mountain, to The Hunger Games. Generally as a figure of sympathetic authority--sometimes sinister, deceptively sympathetic. There will definitely be a void in his absence.

Audible to Canine Deities

As I said, I don't usually enjoy Russell T Davies finales, so my expectations were low going into to-day's Doctor Who episode, "Empire of Death". And, indeed, it hit those emotional registers that are simply beyond my range. I'm just not emotional enough to keep pace with all the screaming and crying. Eventually I get to the point where I think, "I'm sure this is cathartic for some people, and good for them."

That said, I can't help sensing the cold hand of Disney in the way everyone died and then everyone inevitably lived. I'm thinking of that Ninth Doctor line from Davies' first season, "Just this once, everybody lives!" He could say it because it was unusual. This time, even that security guard who stepped behind the TARDIS lived.

I'm sure most people thought of Thanos when everyone turned to dust. Although everyone came back from that, at least it had dramatic consequences. Of course, half the population disappearing for five years would have an effect which the MCU has mined for good dramatic potential.

The scene where the Doctor meets that woman on a desolate planet would have been more effective in isolation, I think. Taken out of context in which the viewer could assume there had been proper set up for it, that the stakes of the Doctor needing to find a metal spoon had been established. I was slightly disappointed he didn't end up playing the spoons like the Seventh Doctor.

The explanation for Ruby's birth mother was ridiculously unsatisfying. I feel like Davies was trying to show how great it would've been if Rey's parents, in the Star Wars sequels, had truly been nobodies as was suggested in Last Jedi. I do think that is a potentially good idea. But come on. Why was she wearing a cloak? Why couldn't Sutekh, a god of death who could invade minds across the cosmos, identify her? The Doctor has a line about how she was important because they believed she was important. Was there no-one else in the history of the Doctor's travels who fit that description?

I did really like the cgi Sutekh and the return of the original voice actor. I also liked the callbacks to "73 Yards".

All in all, it was an enjoyable season and I'm sorry to hear the ratings have been even lower than in Chibnall's era. Davies, who's been quite candid about that, has pointed out there are additional views to be counted on Disney+, i.e., those view counts Disney keeps buried deep in their electronic vaults. Well, if it's all that can keep Doctor Who alive, I suppose it's worth it, so long as we keep faith.

I suppose Ncuti Gatwa is no David Tennant. I like him but he just doesn't have what Tennant's got. But what can they do? Would they really switch to the Tennant Doctor who's still hanging around? I mean, I kind of assumed that's why they did the bi-regeneration thing, in case Gatwa didn't work out. But could they actually go through with it?

Maybe they should make a Paul McGann season. By the way, the likely reason the Doctor didn't meet up with Susan this season is because McGann's Eighth Doctor reunited with her in a Big Finish audio play. Peter Capaldi also wanted his Doctor to meet up with Susan but it didn't happen. If they really want to honour the audio play, they ought to do a special with McGann as the Eighth Doctor. Why the hell not?

Doctor Who is available on the BBC's iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ elsewhere.

How About Love

Another new Chrystabell and David Lynch song. Like the previous, it seems fixated on a sort of ethereal, relentless love. Listening to the songs, I'm compelled to expand the statement "God is love" to "God is alien ghost love." I keep thinking of "Eternal Love" from the Thief of Bagdad soundtrack.

X Sonnet #1855

The second hand was something slightly worn.
Presumptive shame condensed the statement flat.
You know the way the human need was born.
But sugar flows where buttocks gather fat.
With thirty minutes down, the night concludes.
But nights regain their lives above the grave.
Successful gerunds clog the pit with prudes.
No ending game arrives when players save.
The work began to raise a bony house.
For cooking jobs, the toaster grew an arm.
A thousand tales were kept beneath the blouse.
Expansive tallies skipped the thought of harm.
Relentless strides conduct the vagabond.
A thousand greedy eyes behold La Ronde.

Mae and Osha, Running Through the Forest

We were treated to about 25 minutes of new Acolyte last night, the new Star Wars show nearly everyone seems to hate. I'm a little surprised by that. Putting aside politically motivated critics, I suspect a lot of people are taking out their anger at Ahsoka on The Acolyte. I truly feel like The Acolyte is a better series. Sure, the writing is full of problems but at least the dialogue doesn't drop lines dull as lead at a snail's pace.

The fourth episode, "Day", was made by a team of unknowns--director Alex Garcia Lopez and writers Claire Kiechel and Kor Adana. Kor Adana really sounds like a Star Wars name. I wonder if it's a pseudonym.

I'm feeling more and more certain my prediction was accurate that adult Mae is actually a subconscious Force projection of Osha's. The Jedi deduce Mae was trained by a Jedi from analysing footage of her fighting. I suppose that could mean her red lightsaber wielding master was trained by Jedi. But something about Osha's reluctance to help the Jedi find Mae and the fact that Osha has difficulty using Force powers makes the Force Projection Theory seem more likely. There's also the fact that, as children, Osha and Mae were played by different actresses and as adults they're the same actress.

I'm apparently not alone in thinking Qimir, Mae's sidekick played by Manny Jacinto, is secretly her master. I am enjoying Jacinto's performance.

A lot of people are saying the show breaks canon because of the introduction of a Sith character in a period in which the Jedi were supposed not to have encountered any Sith for a very long time. I feel like there are a lot of outs for that, though. What exactly makes a Sith? A red lightsaber and a bad attitude? Maybe there'll be a line like, "Wow, I'd have thought he's a Sith but he doesn't have the tattoo on his left thigh." Some excuse like that.

The Acolyte is available on Disney+.

Cloudy Mirrors

I finally got around to watching the second episode of Black Mirror yesterday, over a decade after watching the first episode. I temporarily have a Netflix subscription again. I was trying to watch RRR, which Google told me was streaming on Netflix, but I guess the algorithm doesn't know me as well as it thinks it does because it turns out I'm in Japan where RRR is not airing on Netflix.

So that puts a damper on my dystopian daydream. Not that I'd find the cynicism on Black Mirror especially effective otherwise. It took me so long to watch the second episode because I thought the first was dumb, the "pig fucker episode", as a friend of mine referred to it. The same friend told me the show gets better so maybe I'll keep going. I suppose the second episode, "Fifteen Million Merits", was a little better. I liked the first five minutes or so in which we meet a protagonist played by Daniel Kaluuya, going through his daily routine in a technological, Orwellian future. But then it becomes a parody of American Idol which really dated it. Not that I've ever watched American Idol so for all I know it's still popular. Naturally I never hear anyone talking about it in Japan.

The episode is from 2011 and seems to have been inspired by Howard Stern becoming a judge on American Idol. So we have the judges aggressively forcing an innocent contestant into doing porn. Which is the kind of thing people think Stern did who never listened to Stern.

I was listening to The Howard Stern Show at the time. It's strange, such a popular show listened to by millions of Americans mostly exists only in memories now. There are random clips from older episodes but none of them give a real impression of the iconic New York radio show. Stern recently conducted an hour long interview with President Biden. The idea of Stern interviewing a sitting president back in the '90s would've seemed absurd. It certainly would've made headlines. But what the Black Mirror episode failed to understand would be the dystopia would take the form of increasingly sanitised content, not the other way around. Stern's loss of popularity, and access to more respectable public figures, coincided with him toning down the raunchiness.

The cynicism of "Fifteen Million Merits", though, extends to self hatred. The protagonist ends up raging against the system and the system gives him a show to do it on, the implication is that the oppression feeds on the voice of dissent. I'm by no means convinced this is the case. Ideas strike deeper in the human spirit than the cold hands of coordinated or mindless oppression could ever touch. When someone says something everyone knows is true in an environment in which everyone is used to constant lies it tends to leave an impact that lasts a lifetime. You can kill the people but, short of total lobotomy, you can't really change their reality, even if you can occasionally fool them. "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time," as the quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln goes. I suppose the fact that we know no-one's actually sure now where the quote came from proves the point of it.

The Old Double N

In 2002, writer/director Douglas McGrath adapted Nicholas Nickleby to the screen. With an ensemble celebrity cast and pretty, unrealistic lighting, it's cosy viewing.

Charlie Hunnam plays Nicholas. It's funny seeing him in a role that isn't action oriented but to-day's tough guy ably played a fresh faced lad twenty two years ago. The best part of the film is when he's forced to work as a teacher in the boarding school run by the vicious Wackford Squeers, played with stalwart ruthlessness by Jim Broadbent. After that, the story settles into Dickens' notorious sentimentalities and improbable plot contrivances.

Christopher Plummer plays Nicholas' uncle and I appreciated the subtlety he brought to the role. Anne Hathaway is Madeline Bray and she is absolutely gorgeous. She's still pretty to-day but I'd forgotten what a knockout she was back then.

The unrealistic lighting was characteristic of '90s, early 2000s period films. I have to say it looks pretty but it's funny that not one interior shot expends the slightest effort to look candlelit.

X Sonnet #1854

Reflected blinks reveal religious knives.
Importance shrank before the useless weed.
The blessed spider's green for twenty lives.
Surpassing lizard ghosts requires speed.
No absence filled the penguin place below.
In double kind, the bottom snow was old.
On shaky men, the noodles now bestow.
Surrounding land just a little cold.
An apple grows beyond its store of mass.
Imagined sights and sounds were dim but strong.
Effusive stars would sing of frequent gas.
For how could manic tastes be ever wrong?
The vicious dust is burning, lacking thought.
The hidden sun is turning, waxing hot.

Normal Guys Contained for Your Pleasure

A group of young men at an Antarctic research station find themselves increasingly obsessed with food in 2009's Chef of the South Pole (Nankyokuryourinin, 南極料理人. Don't expect to learn too much about what they're researching; this is a movie for people who adore men, people who like watching men run around in their underwear and wear harmless, goofy expressions. It's a movie targeted at women, though I assume there are some gay men who might enjoy it as well. It maintains a restful pace and, although there are a few touches of pathos, it's mostly just a pleasant trip for the viewer to a sort of human zoo.

The guys come from various locations in Japan. It's an ensemble but the film is especially concerned with the chef, Nishimura Jun, played by Sakai Masato. He has a wife and daughter back home and keeps one of his daughter's baby teeth in a pouch around his neck.

Sakai clearly made the effort to convincingly play a professional chef and you can see no double is used for shots of him slicing fish, packing onigiri, or preparing dough for ramen. Watching him make ramen noodles from scratch was particularly fascinating.

When he tells the group that he has no soy beans for the Setsubun holiday, the spring holiday in which people typically throw soy beans at someone wearing a devil mask, he suggest they use peanuts instead. So they do; one of the men runs around in his underwear and a devil mask and they throw peanuts at him. Another time, the group takes a photo together outside in their underwear. In a later scene, one of the men runs around the station with only a hand towel clutched to his privates.

In an early scene, all the men are crowded together in the bathroom and for some reason the toilet stalls have very low doors that do not block the view of the occupant. One man is inside defecating and he repeatedly tells the others not to look. They keep looking. Why was the stall built like this? If the guy wants privacy, why doesn't he put up a curtain? Why does everyone want to watch him poop? Logic isn't the point here, this is for people who find these guys intrinsically adorable and like to see them adorably frustrated and embarrassed. Similarly, you won't find a lot of scientific accuracy. For some reason, no-one ever wears goggles when they go outside so their little glasses are perpetually crusted with frost.

I was not the target audience for this movie but I think a lot of people would find it perfectly satisfying.

Chef of the South Pole is available on Netflix and Amazon Prime in Japan.

Ups and Downs of Wishing

A girls' art school is cast into turmoil when some students start using a magical staircase in 2003's The Wishing Stairs (여고괴담 3: 여우계단). Sometimes, I see a movie and I get the impression the screenwriter and/or director passionately hated all the characters. All the girls in this movie are assholes, giving one a sense of general misanthropy. Combined with the pretty standard Japanese and Korean horror effects (the girl with black hair covering her face, the weird crawling, etc) nicked from The Ring and David Lynch, it was kind of a tedious film to get through.

The plot primarily concerns three girls; Jin-sung, So-hee, and Hye-ju. Jin-sung and So-hee are best friends but Jin-sung is starting to find So-hee's manic behaviour kind of annoying. So-hee's possibly heartfelt affections are oddly aggressive and she seems to delight in frustrating Jin-sung. So-hee crawls into Jin-sung's window uninvited, gives her an unflattering hairstyle, and takes a picture. When Jin-sung idly walks along a stair railing, So-hee grabs her ankle from behind, nearly causing her to fall.

So-hee and Jin-sung are studying ballet and So-hee is the better dancer, meaning Jin-sung won't get a chance to get into a good ballet school. Meanwhile, Hye-ju, whose chubbiness is played for broad, obnoxious comical effect, discovers the magic wishing stairs; if you ascend the stairs while counting them, an extra step appears at the top and your wish will be granted. Hye-ju wishes to lose weight and she does. Hearing this, Jin-sung wishes to get into a good ballet school. But as with the monkey's paw, the wishes come at dreadful costs. Hye-ju gets bulimia and So-hee falls and dies.

The whole school becomes jealous of Jin-sung and starts pulling pranks on her. Meanwhile, the ghost of So-hee possesses Hye-ju. I mainly came away with the feeling that it would be exhausting being around these people.

Wishing Stairs is available on Bilibili.

Desperately Investigating Susan

The finales were usually my least favourite episodes of Russell T Davies' first run on Doctor Who but I really liked to-day's first part of his multipart finale, "The Legend of Ruby Sunday". There was still too much shouting and laughing and hugging for me, people using their roller coaster voices for every conversation. But to each their own.

I loved the Time Window scene. That was just fantastic. I loved the Doctor and Ruby standing in a holographic reconstruction of a grainy VHS tape recording, the Doctor talking about how his memory keeps changing, his mistake in allowing the colonel explore behind the TARDIS. I loved the reveal of the dark cloud with malevolent eyes. The scene moved from being a worthy descendant of Blade Runner to being something genuinely Lovecraftian. A lot of people aim for Lovecraftian but very few works of fiction successfully hit that sweet spot of convincingly malevolent cosmic presence.

The villain was perfect. As much as I think whether or not something is predictable is overrated, it's fun to think of how very few people anticipated this particular callback to a classic episode which, by the way, also achieved some Lovecraftian vibes. The actress who plays Susan Triad is credited as "Susan Twist", leading me to think her real name would've been a dead giveaway. Now that I think about it, she does look a lot like a key actor in that same classic serial, making me wonder if she's a relative in both the story and in real life.

I also liked both Kate Stewart and Mel in this episode, two supporting characters I've never been crazy about. The dread in Jemma Redgrave's reaction shots sold a lot of that big, dark cgi.

The episode left me on tenterhooks for next week.

Doctor Who is available on the BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ elsewhere.

X Sonnet #1853

The council fell before the plate of clams.
With service hyped beyond a hope we paid.
The guests were later sick upon the tram.
The boarding call was clogged and pace was stayed.
A frozen road appeals in summer sweats.
An extra mattress greets the lucky lass.
Another time arrived for making bets.
The public transit braked for multipass.
A blackened carrot cared for many towns.
For burning roots results in kinder stuff.
They turned the quilts around to happy frowns.
The numbered goat revealed the cloven bluff.
Returning gods surprise the puzzle hands.
Revenging swords betray the fertile lands.

The Reasons for Chill

A girl and a guy get stuck on a haunted road in 2007's Wind Chill. Although the conception of the film seems like it was mainly motivated by a kind of incel resentment, it has some genuinely creepy qualities before the final act unfortunately decides to explain too much.

Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes play the two unnamed leads, credited as just "Girl" and "Guy", which gives the sense of the two standing in for a broader commentary on men and women. They're college students in Pennsylvania and she wants to go home to Delaware for the holidays. Magically, she finds a note on a bulletin board offering a ride to Delaware.

As the two embark on their long journey, she reluctantly starts talking to him and starts to suspect he might not be telling her the truth about himself. This problem pales in comparison, though, to the trouble they get into when the car runs off the road and they get stuck in a snowdrift for the night. At first, she's so freaked out she locks him out of the car but as they start to see increasingly weird supernatural occurrences, she realises she was being silly for not cuddling with him for body warmth.

I think the whole movie began as a metaphor for the writers' grievances with "frigid" women. However, I'm not one to broadly paint incels as terrorists. I've certainly been in the position of a guy who wants a girl who doesn't want him back and it's actually really difficult to come to the point where I feel like not everything about the problem was my fault. The ambiguity and the cultural uneasiness about the problem contribute to the tension in the film and it is perfectly credible to think a lot of people have died on this lonely stretch of road in the winter. When the ghosts are just shadowy figures who won't answer their questions, they're pretty effective, but, as is often the case, they lose a lot of their power when their backstory is exhaustively explained.

Both Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes give good performances and they're both very well cast.

Sacred Force Fire, Sacred Force Flame

I really enjoyed last night's Acolyte, I found myself getting caught up in he story. Called "Destiny", it was directed by Kogonada, a man mainly known for making video essays and supplements for The Criterion Channel. He certainly understands pace and flow and that pays off well. Interestingly, though, I found myself reminded more of Star Trek: The Next Generation than of Star Wars. The teleplay by Jasmyne Flournoy and Eileen Shim focuses on relationships and anthropological problems and some of the sets looked like TNG or maybe '70s Doctor Who.

It's a flashback episode, taking us to that incident 16 years earlier that precipitated the events depicted in the first two episodes. The twins, Osha and Mae, are kids living with an all female coven of witches on a planet called Brendok. A lot of people are comparing them to the witches of Dathomir but I found myself reminded more of the Sisterhood of Karn from Doctor Who. The tension between been men and women is fundamental to The Brain of Morbius, the 1976 serial that introduced the Sisterhood, but the reasons for excluding men among the Brendok witches are never mentioned.

I was intrigued to find the episode has an essentially pro-colonial message. The witches are Force users but they call the Force the "Thread". Osha and Mae's mother, Aniseya, tries to explain the difference between their beliefs and those of the Jedi but it's never really clear. She claims it's the Jedi who believe they manipulate the Force while the witches see it as something else. It's really vague and makes less sense when you recall the dialogue between Luke and Obi-wan about how the Force partially controls one's actions but also obeys one's commands. When Aniseya deliberately uses a push power on specific targets, it sure seems to be obeying her commands.

Osha wants to be a Jedi and everyone in the coven turns into a snarling villain about it except Aniseya, who's at least open-minded enough to allow Osha to pursue her own path. I was reminded of Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, a foundational book in the literature examining colonialism. It makes the point that the very presence of missionaries disrupts the native culture not with violence but by simply expanding the perspectives of the local inhabitants. If Osha had never heard of the Jedi, she never would've thought of joining them and there would've been a better chance for the witches to maintain their isolated beliefs. Since they're not immortal, though, they can't have been doing this for very long; I don't get the impression everyone was "created" the way Osha and Mae were.

As in Things Fall Apart, in which culturally sanctioned domestic violence is threatened by the invasion of a gentler foreign philosophy, the Jedi present to Osha an alternative to her xenophobic sister and fellow witches. Considering how dangerous the Force can be, however flawed the Jedi's philosophy of controlling emotions may be, this episode demonstrates it may be necessary and, comparatively, certainly more humane. Of course, if it ends up the Jedi murdered the witches, as some are speculating, that A) wouldn't make much sense and/or B) change the concept of the Jedi fundamentally.

The Acolyte is available on Disney+.

An Empty Room Awaits

Another luckless couple, or a prior luckless couple, 'cause it's a prequel, run afoul of the dangerous motel in 2008's Vacancy 2: The First Cut. It's the prequel to Vacancy, a movie I saw many years ago with Trisa. It had Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson and had some effectively creepy qualities. The prequel starts as kind of an intriguing, wicked procedural but drifts into homogeneous slasher territory.

So here's how it all began, how a couple of pervy guys who video taped their motel guests facilitated a serial killer changing their setup into a snuff film factory.

I have a theory that some people like to watch others in private because they feel out of touch with their own humanity, like they need to see how people behave when they believe they're unobserved so they can learn how to behave when they're unobserved. My thoughts are mostly influenced, of course, by the epidemic of voyeurism in Japan. There's not much exploration into the psychology of the perverts in Vacancy 2 but it is interesting watching them figure out the logistics of putting together a snuff motel.

Then a trio of pretty young people arrive and things start to unravel. At first, the manager doesn't want to touch them because, with three, there's a greater chance of one of them getting away. Yet when the three discover the cameras in their rooms, the killers decide to toy with them, thus increasing the odds of one of them getting away. Of course, it being a prequel, one assumes that none of them do, but it kind of seems like the movie forgets it's a prequel at one point. Anyway, it's a diverting little slasher.

Twitter Sonnet #1852

The blameless, nameless dog devours hands.
A fateful farm conduced the meeting men.
A set of colours blurred above the bands.
A modern law would wash the mind of sin.
A lack of questions turns a hostage back.
A curving pistol spent its round behind.
The hand below the tray is going slack.
Disin'trest crashed the tablet's rind.
Persuasive guests command an extra room.
Withholding candy bars provokes a row.
A sketchy killer shared a fish of doom.
A glass of milk reflects its ancient cow.
The time remained to take recorded beds.
The thought of hands consumed the restless heads.

Reiner Time

I had a little Rob Reiner festival over the weekend and watched When Harry Met Sally and The Princess Bride. Reiner made a lot of good movies in the '80s, a tide that didn't turn until, as most critics have it, he made the unsuccessful North in 1994. He had a remarkable run before that and it's fascinating how different When Harry Met Sally is to The Princess Bride. One is a fairly down to Earth, New York romantic comedy, the other is an ode to high fantasy, albeit also a romantic comedy.

When Harry Met Sally is arguably the quintessential romantic comedy, at least of the latter part of the twentieth century. It still ranks high, often at number one, among the greatest romantic comedies of all time. But as I've been compelled to note while watching Ally McBeal recently, it's remarkable to see how little shame was attached to promiscuity once upon a time. Obviously the contrast for me is even more severe since chastity is pushed in most Japanese media, even while pornography is ubiquitous. I mean, there are adult video rental shops all over the place here. Can you imagine? The internet can't even conquer those in physical media loving Japan.

Could we have a scene to-day like Meg Ryan's famous fake orgasm, or even just the bit where Billy Crystal casually infers she has never had great sex? There are movies and television series now that portray promiscuity but it's increasingly portrayed as something for the distantly privileged and abnormally sinful--I'm thinking of Saltburn, Game of Thrones, and . . . shit, what was that movie I wanted to see so badly last year? It's on Disney+ now, it won a bunch of Oscars. Wow, how can I not remember its name? It was a Frankenstein pastiche--ah, Pretty Things. That's it. All these movies have promiscuous characters but they're so detached from the everyday reality most people inhabit.

The Princess Bride, meanwhile, has two apparently chaste protagonists and much of the tension revolves around Buttercup potentially marrying Prince Humperdink, whom she doesn't love. The loving tributes to chivalry are so charming and the first conversation between Westley and Inigo is great, it makes you long for this reality that likely never existed, one where opponents could nonetheless mutually recognise a code of conduct and respect. Rob Reiner putting all the dialogue in the manner of casual, modern day comedians can be funny on an ironic level but, the more one rewatches it, the more it comes off as simply fine values translated to regular speech.

Our Dogs

Samuel Fuller's 1982 film White Dog is about a young woman, played by Kristy McNichol, trying to cure a dog who was trained to attack black people. It was a controversial film for some reason. I guess corporate stiffs in the '70s felt even contemplating the nature of racism was somehow too sensitive. On the other hand, Michael Eisner pushed for the film's release.

If we only had a few dozen filmmakers with the guts of Samuel Fuller nowadays.

I would say the bolder aspect of the film would be the unaddressed hint that the dog seems intent on sexually dominating McNichol's character. After the dog saves her from a rapist, we see him steal and shred her panties before chasing a rabbit. He also nearly attacks her white boyfriend. McNichol's so tiny in the movie, and the dog so huge, you always feel a little anxiety for her.

I love Paul Winfield and Burl Ives as a couple caretakers of a shelter for dangerous animals.

The editing and composition in that clip are just terrific. I like Ives opening the door, saying, "I am sorry" and, in the same shot, the dog rushing out to attack the man.

After watching White Dog, I watched an episode of Twin Peaks with this intro:

Now that's enough to make a fella downright superstitious.

It Takes Many Dogs to Kill a Tiger

Many's the time the tale of The 47 Ronin has been told. In 1963, it was told with dogs in the animated film Doggie March (Wanwan chushingura, わんわん忠臣蔵). Chushingura is the name of the 47 Ronin tale in Japanese but I'm not surprised it was left out of the English title. The story bears little resemblance to the legend or historical incident and lacks the fundamental problem of loyalty and honour that makes the original so interesting.

In this version, a dog who leads a local community of forest animals is killed by a Bengal tiger. The dog's son, Rokku, travels to the city where he meets a gang of dogs as well as an attractive female dog.

The tiger and his fox henchman are both captured and put in the city zoo so Rokku must confront his old enemy. Now he has an army of city dogs and one resourceful tanuki to help him.

There's nothing about political betrayal or obligatory suicide. What's left is a cut and dry good guys versus bad guys tale with slapstick thrown in.

Apparently Hayao Miyazaki worked on some of the animation as one of his first jobs as an animator. The animation is good, very fluid and Disney-ish, almost like Chuck Jones. Both this and Anju and Zushio felt distinctly like American animations of the 1960s so one can see how deliberately the distinctive style of Japanese anime was developed.

X Sonnet #1851

A training dream has left the class to jump.
The answers lie in strange De Palma flicks.
A million voices cry they see the chump.
But rapture's swapped for sleepy, careless clicks.
The nose of love was right between its eyes.
A canny thought departs between the ears.
To-morrow brings a basket full of pies.
Angelic groups create the sound of beers.
Reactions bind the action piece to blades.
A fancy fighter fenced his way to Earth.
No planet sates the spoiled sun for raids.
The pirates learned a thing or two of worth.
The fall of scratchy sound disposed of clear.
Another day dissolves in bottled beer.

Cosplay is for the Birds

I figured to-day's new Doctor Who would be the weakest of the season since it wasn't written by Russell T Davies or Steven Moffat. It was the weakest but it had its good points and some of its bad points were kind of intriguing.

The Doctor and Ruby go to Bath in 1813. Those familiar with 18th century and early 19th century English literature will know Bath was a place known for scandalous pursuits. It makes sense that some scandal obsessed, cosplaying, shape-shifting aliens would go there.

The fact that they look like they came from a stage musical version of The Three Caballeros considerably diminishes the sense of threat they pose. But the weakest aspect of the episode was all the Bridgerton references. I've never seen Bridgerton so I didn't even know many of them were references to the other show until I read about it a little afterwards.

Bridgerton has an anachronistically diverse cast, too, but there's an explanation for it built into the show's premise; it's an alternate timeline in which George III elevated subjects of African decent to peerage. Bridgerton is a Netflix series while Doctor Who has diversity enforced by the BBC. I wonder if the Bridgerton references were a subtle way to take a dig at the policy. One of the aliens has a line in which she speaks of her desire to take the form of the King so that she can oppress anyone who doesn't look British. Going by the supporting cast in this episode, that would be no-one. All these digs I suspect would come from Davies rather than this episode's writers, Mary Herron and Briony Redman. The very concept of "Dot and Bubble" shows up the weakness in the BBC's policy.

The episode's called "Rogue", its name coming from the character played by guest star Jonathan Groff (the voice of Kristoff in the Frozen movies). He's a bounty hunter looking for the shape-shifters and he and the Doctor end up having a romance. I wonder if it was a coincidence the episode is the first to air during Pride month. Their flirtation was mostly pretty good, the actors had chemistry and Ncuti Gatwa's fun to watch being playful. Though sadly, and speaking as someone who lives somewhere with a lot of homophobes, the reaction to the two of them dancing would not have been stunned gasps but more likely derisive laughter. Although the term and concept of "homosexual" was not yet conceived at this point, there were men known to fornicate with men. For an edifying example of average attitudes to same sex relationships in that era, I recommend reading Roderick Random (1748).

I really did not like the ending and it felt like one of those resulting from hasty rewrites late in production that plague many Marvel films. It would've been more satisfying if Ruby had actually been transported by Rogue and the Doctor had to spend the next episode finding her. From the way Rogue was watching the Doctor shed tears over Ruby's apparent fate (who believed for a second Ruby had actually been killed?), it seemed like the story was going in the direction of Rogue observing that Ruby had too big a place the Doctor's life to leave room for a romance with someone else. Maybe someone figured that wouldn't play well for a Pride month episode.

All in all, a so so episode.

By the way, was that the Valyard?

It doesn't look much like Michael Jayston. Who is that? Someone I've forgotten or is this some Easter egg for something to come?

Doctor Who is available on the BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ elsewhere.

Relentless Love

So that's the new thing David Lynch released this week, which he teased last week. I knew it wouldn't be Twin Peaks related. I kind of hoped it would be a movie announcement. But I'm not surprised it's not.

It's been a long time since he and Chrystabell released a collaboration. I believe this is the first time he's actually shot one of her music videos for a song he's written for her. This song kind of reminds me of "The Voice of Love" from the Fire Walk with Me soundtrack except a little creepier. That makes sense; eternal love would be both creepy and comforting.

"Sublime Eternal Love" is going to be on an album called Cellophane Memories to be released on August 2.

My favourite Chrysabell and David Lynch collaboration (not counting Twin Peaks: The Return) remains "All the Things":

Another Star Wars Cube Comes Down the Assembly Line

There are worse things than The Acolyte. Ahsoka and Obi-wan Kenobi, for example. The first two episodes premiered on Disney+ last night. I went in, like most people, I'm sure, with low expectations but I was genuinely hoping to be pleasantly surprised. The show does have more of a basic sense of competence that I felt was lacking in Ahsoka and Obi-wan, and I was gratified to see that folks behind the scenes were at least taking this seriously. I'm not mentioning Andor I guess because I don't think it's fair to compare (though I guess I just did). You can compare productions based on competence and motivation but the kind of genius at work in Andor is luck. Even great filmmakers, working at the height of their powers, can produce stinkers. Acolyte is just fine so far.

I'll tell you what I liked first. I liked Osha working on that Trade Federation ship. It was cool seeing the Trade Federation out of the context of The Phantom Menace. Mostly the performances were fine. Lee Jung-jae doesn't always seem like he understands the words he's speaking and I wouldn't have cast him in a speaking role unless he were speaking Korean. But he does have a real warmth to him and charisma with Amandla Stenberg.

Stenberg has the challenge of playing two roles, the twins Osha and Mae, and I think she does a good job. I suppose I'm not alone in suspecting Mae is a Force projection like what Luke did at the end of The Last Jedi. I think Mae really did die and Osha is subconsciously committing the crimes like Margot Kidder in Brian DePalma's Sisters. In that movie, a woman whose conjoined twin died some years earlier is periodically possessed by that dead twin's persona, who commits murders. Based on my experience with college lit academics, I think the split in Acolyte was intended as a metaphor for people who code switch between being loyal subjects and instinctively rebelling against the system. Of course, since it seems obvious, and these people hate their plots being predicted more than anything, there's a good chance they're reworking the remaining episodes now. But how would an actual living, breathing Mae be more interesting? If they asked me, I'd recommend lying in the bed they made.

As the mystery unfolded in the first couple episodes, I found myself imagining what the show's release would have been like if it hadn't been a Star Wars series. It's a sci-fi universe in which some members of a magical order are being murdered. A former disciple is implicated but then it seems she has a good alibi. It seems like a pilot that wouldn't have gotten picked up for series. It lacks some essential spark.

Showrunner Leslye Headland wrote the first episode while the rest, as usual for a Disney+ series, were assigned to young, inexperienced writers without Wikipedia entries (there is one other writer with a Wikipedia entry, Jocelyn Bioh, whose previous credits are all stage plays except for contributions to a Hulu series called Tiny Beautiful Things).

The second episode is written by Jason Micallef and Charmaine DeGrate. Mae sets her sights on killing a Jedi Master called Torbin who seems to be surrounded by an impenetrable Force field. Does his beard look fake to anyone else?

The fight choreography wasn't bad. There was an obvious Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon influence emphasised by the rapid drums in the score. I liked how Mae used a cloud of dust to escape in the second episode.

The Acolyte is available on Disney+.

Bad Time for a Transfer

A voiceless horde of hoods descend on a vulnerable police station in John Carpenter's 1973 film Assault on Precinct 13. Among other things, what a cool movie. Carpenter's deliberate attempt to imitate Howard Hawks comes off beautifully, largely because of Carpenter's own distinctive, macho style which fully blossomed in The Thing and They Live.

Austin Stoker plays Ethan Bishop, a police lieutenant on his first assignment at a supposedly easy job. The precinct is in the process of closing down and transferring to a new location so there's minimal staff and supplies and the power's going to be shut off.

Meanwhile, we hear news stories about violent youth gangs terrorising L.A. and we meet some of them, silently cutting themselves in a shabby living room. They rarely speak and they seem to exist in infinite numbers so it's easy to be reminded of Carpenter's other influence for this, Night of the Living Dead. It's really chilling. The implication of a horde of humans who don't seem human is that you likely don't seem human to them. This is emphasised when one of them, without hesitation or visible remorse, shoots and kills a little girl played by Kim Richards.

It all comes down to that police precinct where Lieutenant Bishop and two beautiful clerks (Laurie Zimmer and Nancy Loomis) are forced to team up with a couple of convicts. One of them, a guy named Napoleon Wilson, played by Darwin Joston, has got to be one of the coolest characters in the history of cinema. Joston's performance would've fit in a great Western from twenty years earlier. He has this aura of grim acceptance of inevitable doom at every step, punctuating a running gag in which, whatever he's initially asked, he inevitably replies with the question, "Got a smoke?"

Assault on Precinct 13 is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a playlist of movies with synthesised soundtracks. Of course his one was composed by Carpenter himself and it's one of his most memorable.

X Sonnet #1850

Negation blinks beyond the wooden glass.
Distempered guests dispose of turkey clubs.
The same detritus filled the guilty mass.
Persuasive candles lure the godless cubs.
An owl carried light through pines and firs.
A rapid beat disturbs the course of day.
But time beneath the rain incessant blurs.
Constricting chains restrain the human way.
Decreasing shells reduce the gun to scrap.
Remorseless hordes would fain invade the fort.
With rotten walls, the structure marred the map.
The stranger seeks another des'prate port.
With safety scrapped, the flares become the light.
The dark compels the very air to fight.

Never Assume Catherine is Gone

Watching Twin Peaks last night, I got to thinking about how plausible Catherine Martell's posing as Mr. Tojamura could be. I watched episode 16 last night, a couple episodes after Laura's killer is revealed. A few episodes before that, Cooper remarks that he's only been in town for a few weeks. Web sites with timelines I check tell me Cooper arrived on February 24th, 1989 and the killer is caught in late March. So I would guess that from the time Catherine finds herself lost in the woods following the mill fire, she would have at best two weeks to put together the Tojamura persona.

Jerry Horne goes to Japan to check up on Tojamura's backstory. Ben mentions both Tokyo and Osaka. Tojamura passes the test. How could Catherine have managed to set all this up? The only plausible explanation I can see is that she already had contacts in Japan prior to the mill fire. Maybe the Tojamura plan was a scheme she always had in her back pocket in case of emergency.

Apparently almost no-one else in the cast was aware that it was Piper Laurie under the Tojamura makeup, though Peggy Lipton suspected it was Isabella Rosselini.

I wonder how the subplot was received in Japan. Supposedly Twin Peaks was popular in Japan but I've yet to meet anyone here who watched it. Only a couple of people I've spoken to have even heard of it. But that's kind of normal, people don't seem to like acknowledging memories of anything that happened more than twenty years ago.

Maximum Sydow

I've been playing the main plot of Skyrim for once, instead of getting sidetracked, which is kind of the main appeal of any mainline Bethesda game. But the main plot of Skyrim has Max von Sydow so it's generally worth a revisit. If only Skyrim had better writing. I got to imagining, what if Ingmar Bergman wrote Skyrim? I watched Through a Glass Darkly again last night and mulled it over.

Of course, there's no question about the existence of gods in Skyrim, though what a pantheon means in that world is different to what God means in Bergman's. The Elder Scrolls video game pantheon is basically a set of powerful administrators or, in the case of Daedra, gangsters. The underlying problems of Through a Glass Darkly are the human capacity to perceive God's existence and the absence of consequence for amoral thoughts and actions. The movie concludes with the proposition that love may be proof of God's existence, or God literally is love.

How does that square with Minus and Karin, brother and sister, sleeping with each other? They clearly love each other but in the visual and moral chaos of that literal shipwreck (unless the crew received divine punishment) their impulsive coitus is the kind of act that could ultimately undermine their love in the long term.

I saw a bit of Russell Brand this morning talking about Trump's verdict. He brought in the issue of whether or not you could have true justice in a world in which people don't believe in a loving God. Now that I think Brand is taking money from Russia, I look at everything he says in a different light. Obviously he's getting at the increasing disparity between how reality is perceived by two factions of the American public, a division that may not have been so bad if we had a unifying morality. The question implies the problem; perception of the problem may exacerbate it and thereby be in Putin's interest?

I don't see belief in a loving God as necessary for a moral system. A legal system or a set of moral guidelines within personal relationships can be governed by the imperative to prevent the maximum amount of physical and mental suffering possible, influenced by the recognition that when people suffer they're more likely to inflict suffering on others. This may produce a workable system but is it satisfying? And what if God is a spider, as Karin discovers to her horror? After all, the satisfaction of many is founded on the suffering of others.

Perhaps God, like Karin's father, is both compassionate and predatory.

I also watched Twin Peaks last night.

The Cost of Befriending Bears and Mice

A nobleman is banished in disgrace and his children are sold into slavery. It's an old Japanese folk tale, Sanseo Dayu, and it served as the basis for Kenji Mizoguchi's 1954 film, Sansho the Bailiff. It was also turned into an animated film in 1961 called Anju and Zushio (Anju to Zushio maru, 安寿と厨子王丸. Sansho the Bailiff is considered one of Mizoguchi's best films (Terence Malick is obsessed with it) but I think I might prefer the animated film. It seems like I just saw Sansho the Bailiff recently but I see from my blog it's actually been nine years. Good grief. I suppose I should watch it again before I decide which is the better film. Anju and Zushio is exquisitely designed. Like the original tale, it's set in the Heian period, or the eleventh century, and the art design beautifully imitates artwork from the era. This version has talking animals and it's the family's friendship with animals, particularly a bear who sounds a bit like Ed Wynn speaking Japanese, that gets them into trouble. There's also a mermaid or possibly merman (the being's chest is blank white) who tries to save the children. Kyoko Kagawa plays Anju in the Mizoguchi movie and I love Kyoko Kagawa. But I have to say I prefer her portrayal in the animated film. In this version, she turns into a swan, which comes off really beautifully. Mizoguchi tried to imbue his version with realism but it doesn't quite work with how simplistic the characters are, particularly the women. As a fairy tale, magical plot elements serve to deepen the story, to suggest something more in line with the complexity of real human thoughts and dreams. X Sonnet #1849 A steady rhythm lived beyond its lease. A simple town was rendered round and weird. An older game displays its sprites as geese. The flying fowl were bone and fleshy geared. The right to breeding bugs was kept apart. The hammer men could never use their tools. Inquiries breech the beetle's shielded heart. Beginner scores would not confirm the fools. An early haunted house would hug the heat. Considered time betrayed the egg for salt. Surpassing spice was pepper painted peat. The whisky men would lock the boggy vault. The wily internet avoids his eyes. Connexions fail to link the chain of pies.

Doc and Trouble

And this week's was yet another good episode of Doctor Who. How tragic Davies decided to start the season with what's looking to be the two weakest episodes by a long shot. "Dot and Bubble" was already being compared to Black Mirror before it came out but, let's be honest, Black Mirror took a lot of influence from Doctor Who and The Twilight Zone. A lot of Black Mirror concepts tend to remind me of many Big Finish Doctor Who audio plays. What's Davies parodying with "Dot and Bubble"? Our culture growing increasingly wrapped up in convenient technology. The bubble which gives Pepper-bean directions for her every movement sounds like the GPS in a car. Her compulsive immersion in friend chats and memes pokes fun at people glued to their phones. This is explicitly a community of rich people. I liked how this was made clear because there's a tendency for this class of people to regard themselves as middle class. Pepper-bean bemoaning her two hours of work reminded me of those who confidently expect a "post-work" world. There's a fine line Davies manages to walk well, between laughing at Pepper-bean and sympathising with her. How much of her ridiculous behaviour is her fault and how much is due to the circumstances of her birth? That rock star, Ricky September, she runs into turns out to be unexpectedly cool, someone with the rare independent personality to explore life outside of the algorithms. He's improbably perfect but it also makes sense for a rock musician to be open minded and curious. Even so, the viewer keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something to happen which shows this guy to be too good to be true. This expectation turns out to be a really brilliant bit of misdirection on Davies' part. There's another aspect to the premise not mentioned until the end. SPOILERS AHEAD I figured it out pretty early on. The BBC is so persistent with its diversity quotas, I knew there had to be a reason everyone was white. But this society of future racists was much better conceived than the one Chibnall came up. Davies builds that complicated relationship between the audience and Pepper-bean first. We've felt a little bad for laughing at her, we've felt good for her little triumphs. She's not just a cartoon villain. It's actually fairly reasonable that she and the others don't believe the TARDIS is bigger on the inside. This makes the episode a much better commentary on racism. I mean, Chibnall's episodes weren't really comments at all as much as they were simplistic messaging. "Dot and Bubble" juxtaposes racism with a culture of intellectual complacency, of casual selfishness, and endless, compulsive self-gratification. The only criticism I might have is that Davies ought to have made Pepper-bean's world more appealing to the viewer. It's good enough that the temptations that have rotted Pepper-bean's brain are thoroughly credible, though. Doctor Who is available on the BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ elsewhere.