Let's Stay In To-night

I think Eli Roth is the Bill Forsyth of horror movies. I finally got around to watching Roth's debut movie, 2002's Cabin Fever, and I was impressed by how already he had such a distinct artistic voice in evidence. But it's such a subtle one that it doesn't surprise me it has been widely misinterpreted.

Just like Forsyth's famous "gossamer" humour, the balancing act Roth plays with a group of obnoxious college kids, between laughing at them and sympathising with them, is too narrow a path to walk for many reviewers who just found them puzzlingly irritating. One of my favourite moments is when the most obnoxious of the group, Bert (James DeBello), first sees the guy with the horrific skin infection. He accidentally shoots him, thinking he's a squirrel, and he's apologetic. But as the guy with the disgusting skin draws closer, we can see Bert's fear and repulsion in conflict with his guilt and tiny shreds of empathy. And of course he chickens out, runs away, and forgets even about contacting authorities, like he wants to wipe the experience from his memory. His cowardice is funny in contrast to his boisterousness but it's also strikingly pathetic.

The two girls are less interesting possibly because at this point Roth was reluctant to attribute negative psychological traits to women. But both Jordan Ladd and Cerina Vincent are very cute. I just felt bad for the latter when she was threatened by the infection but Ladd kind of worked as a figure in Paul's story, the character played by Rider Strong. He has a crush on her and his physical and emotional compulsions are cruelly mocked by manifestations of the disease. At the same time, even he, despite being more or less the film's moral centre, makes decisions that complicate his moral standing. Some of it's downright Hitchcockian. I loved a scene where he was running around the woods looking for help and he comes across a house where he can see a naked woman through a window. He pauses until the woman's husband comes across him. The husband's understandably angry and as Paul pleads his innocence we're left to think back on just how long he watched the woman. How innocent is he really? Supposedly David Lynch was an uncredited producer and the moment does savour very slightly of Blue Velvet. The moral is, watch your voyeurism, kids.

The last part of the movie doesn't work quite as well. There's a joke about an apparently racist shop owner that doesn't make any sense and falls flat. Like Forsyth, Roth loses his stride when he steps away from that delicate balance. Which could explain Borderlands, though that seems like studio interference is the main culprit. It's a good thing he got Thanksgiving out before Borderlands hit.

If You're Going to The Cave, Bring a Girl

I really struggled with the first half of 2005's The Cave. It seemed like it was deliberately edited to mute all of the tension and suspense. Then, halfway though, a pretty girl in a tube top tries to climb a sheer wall while fighting a gargoyle and it got kind of good.

Piper Perabo plays the girl in the tube top and she barely has a presence in the movie before that scene. I don't even think she gets one closeup as the film mostly focuses on a team of interchangeable bros with a lot of looped dialogue and odd cutting choices that make me think it was all edited down from a much longer cut. This combined with the boring cinematography and featureless glob of action music and sound effects made the first half of the film a torturous purgatory.

Then it seemed like the filmmakers woke up because Piper Perabo took off some clothes and tried something dangerous. It certainly got my attention. Suddenly the pacing became perfectly sensible and logical, the cutting between reaction shots and POV shots of gloom and shadowy movements were genuinely gripping.

The story follows a team of spelunkers investigating a cave system in Romania. They encounter monsters, possibly meant to be vampires, but they're consciously styled on the alien from Alien. Lena Headey and Daniel Dae Kim were the only other performers I recognised and their parts were relatively small. Headey does have a few interesting moments.

X Sonnet #1880

A golden pen was filled with yellow ink.
Arrested leaves prevent the winter's start.
Tomato sauce enticed the present link.
Heroic chains would bind the page's heart.
An icy swim would not appeal to skates.
Corruption turns the rubber blades to props.
Beneath the icy cake, the sprinkle waits.
Sorbet is not sorbet when gummy drops.
The sticky word would track the dough to home.
When nothing sticks, the batter flies above.
The winds of folly scatter salt to Rome.
A squawking metal bird would kill the dove.
As heat decides the time of storms we wait.
Not ev'ry star will take a moon to mate.

Coffee Time

My journey into the world of contemporary pop music continues with Sabrina Carpenter, a singer recommended to me by a student. This one's really current; her biggest hit, "Espresso", came out this very year. I'm feeling so relevant, by gad.

I like "Espresso", the lyrics of which are not grammatically incorrect, despite a claim by a supposed linguist whom Vulture interviewed.

“That’s that me, espresso” has burrowed into everybody’s head. What do you make of that line?
I always believe that pop music, especially bubblegum pop, is not meant to be taken seriously. So “That’s that me, espresso,” that’s not grammatically correct, right? The reduplication of the word that is there to foster a sense of playfulness, to catch attention. I think it also has to do with the rhyme scheme and the number of syllables, to make each word fall into place.

Vulture or the linguist added the comma to the line. Here it is in context:

Now he's thinkin' 'bout me every night, oh
Is it that sweet? I guess so
Say you can't sleep, baby, I know
That's that me espresso

To see how this line makes perfect sense, substitute "Sabrina" for "me".

That's that Sabrina espresso

If that's still not clear enough, replace it with Starbucks.

That's that Starbucks espresso.

"That" here is a perfectly acceptable repeating pronoun accommodating the inclusion of the verb "is" to make a proper sentence. In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson described the manner in which Carpenter uses the first pronoun:

It sometimes serves to save the repetition of a word or words foregoing.

He cites Shakespeare's Henry IV:

I'll know your business, that I will.

Carpenter's second use of the word was described by Johnson as:

Not this, but the other.

He cites Shakespeare again:

He wins me by that means I told you.

And that's that.

I'd recently been comparing Fiona Apple and Billie Eilish. Both singers broke through with trashy, fun songs ("Criminal" and "Bad Guy", respectively) but the rest of their output is more introspective or stream of consciousness, and doesn't seem to reach the public imagination in quite the same way. I guess you could put Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" in the same category though she has other songs that approach "Blank Space" in popularity. All of Sabrina Carpenter's songs seem to be in the trashy fun category. She strongly reminds me of a young Madonna. She even kind of looks like her.

She's also dating talented young Irish actor Barry Keoghan. Another young person I've heard of! I feel so alive. They'll soon remember the vampire I was, Louis!

Bye Bye, Black Bird

In the wake of the inevitable failure of the new Crow movie, I saw Amazon Prime has the original 1994 The Crow. So I decided to give it another shot. I mean, I never really liked it. I remember hating it, actually, though I loved its famous soundtrack, of course (except for the Henry Rollins and Jane Siberry tracks), and its achievement of peak Goth aesthetic is pleasant. I thought maybe I'd like it better now that I've developed a taste for revenge movies thanks to Quentin Tarantino. It turns out, no, I still don't like The Crow.

The thing about Tarantino's revenge movies is that he makes them about characters. Everyone on the Bride's list is fleshed out in varying degrees and it gives some weight to what she's doing. Even Stuntman Mike had something more to him than just being a cartoon character. My dislike for The Crow is about the same as my dislike for Death Wish. Except Charles Bronson was a better actor than Brandon Lee. Even The Crow's legendary soundtrack is largely misused. The Cure's "Burn" is cut all to hell.

At least he's a superhero who fights crime. That's pretty rare nowadays. And when I consider the same people who used to get caught up in the romance of revenge in the name of great love now tend to spend their days posting memes about micro-aggressions I do long for the days when The Crow had cache.

Anyway, it's available on Amazon Prime in Japan.

The Anxious Balance

I honestly thought Kamala Harris was going to just wipe the floor with Donald Trump but yesterday's debate was pretty even, as far as I could tell. He was as bad as I expected. He even said two exceptionally stupid things--I mean, stupid even for him. The first was his claim about immigrants eating dogs and cats. When the moderator said that the mayor of the town in question reported no such incidents, Trump's exceptionally lame retort was to say that he heard someone talk about it on TV.

Harris' strongest point was when she went after Trump's naivete when dealing with foreign leaders who could manipulate him with flattery. Even people in Trump's camp may have been clear-eyed enough to squirm a bit. But they're not clear-eyed enough that Harris shouldn't have categorically denied Trump's claim that she supported executing babies (that was the other exceptionally stupid thing he said). I think Trump sometimes says things so outrageously stupid and ugly that his opponent thinks they don't deserve a response, but Harris and others have to consider that they're trying to sway people who think voting for Trump is a reasonable option. So she should absolutely deign to mention, "I will not support the execution of babies." Might as well cover her bases and say she won't support the genocide of Americans or forcing people to eat snakes. Try to ride ahead of the crazy wave.

Harris was also hampered by having to maintain the Left's picture of the January 6th mob as an "insurrection", though thankfully she avoided using that word. Trump recovered from a blunder some weeks ago when he failed to recall the death of Ashli Babbitt, the only true fatal casualty of January 6th, and she was one of his supporters, an unarmed woman, no less.

Despite the strong handshake at the beginning, Harris' biggest flaw may be that she sounded much weaker than Trump, particularly when she took to using a plaintive tone in the second half of the debate when she seemed to be begging viewers to embrace hope and optimism. She came off as pathetic and, sadly, I think that would be enough to sway some voters Trump's way. A lot of people genuinely feel it's better to be stupid than weak.

X Sonnet #1879

Attempts could crowd the longest amber night.
The dummy pool was still a sloppy string.
Decisive faces chose the floppy fight.
A smokey finger picked the magic ring.
In fact, eternal rain on Venus holds.
Revenge was not a dish for boring oats.
Amazing music fell to painted scolds.
To Mars, let's take the nifty flying boats.
The lava path was later black as night.
The sketch of dogs was traded high and fast.
Collapsing rails displaced the local fight.
Some empty words have drenched the puddle past.
With suits and ties, the figures fumble serves.
The av'rage soup is choked with stringy nerves.

James Earl Jones

The voice is silenced, long live the voice. James Earl Jones passed away a couple days ago; the actor best known for his impressively deep voice was also a fine performer, distinguishing himself on stage in Shakespeare's Othello and King Lear. His two best known roles, though, were solely voice roles; he provided the voice for the patriarch Mufasa in the Lion King movies and he was the voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars films.

He's seen as irreplaceable as the voice of Darth Vader, so much so they convinced him to sign away the rights to his voice so that it could be used for a digitally created performance in one of the Disney+ Star Wars series, Obi-Wan Kenobi. In theory, I'm not against the idea since Vader's voice is supposed to be an electronic distortion anyway, but the performance was noticeably inferior to Jones' work on Rogue One and Rebels. God, it's really too bad Rebels sucked.

All the same, if his voice crops up on the second season of Andor, I'm not likely to complain. It's important that he consented to it, though, and I hope that sets a precedent that continues to be honoured.

If I had to pick a best moment from his work in the Star Wars franchise, it would be in The Empire Strikes Back, of course. He was adept at conveying a sense that he was fuelled by constant rage and yet there's a very subtle vulnerability in his need to connect with Luke. Jones layered these ideas well and the scenes play equally well if you've seen the prequels or you haven't. He was great.

Putting Aside the MacGuffin

I've been reading The Maltese Falcon lately, Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel. I hadn't read it or The Thin Man despite having read all of Hammett's other novels. I suppose I figured the famous films made from both titles were perfectly fine substitutes. But I was jonsing for some Hammett so I started in on the Falcon. I'm enjoying it, of course.

The biggest difference from the 1941 film so far is a long story Sam tells Brigid about a man who abandoned his wife and kids to start over with another life with another name in another state. He does this after a near death experience when he's almost brained by a falling beam at a construction site.

Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life.

I should hope all of us would take such inspiration from nearly dying. He was kind enough to leave his first wife and kids with enough money to support them, so it's not like he completely shirked all responsibility--though Sam describes this as an act of love, just not "the sort that would make absence painful."

One thing I thought was especially relevant for young people to-day was the reaction of the man's first wife when she found out the truth behind his disappearance:

She thought it was silly. Maybe it was. Anyway, it came out all right. She didn't want any scandal, and, after the trick he had played on her--the way she looked at it--she didn't want him. So they were divorced on the quiet and everything was swell all around.

You see, ghosting is unattractive. I think some people do it under the theory that "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and see it as a way of wrapping a someone around their little finger. I'm happy to say that I've gotten to the point in my life where, if someone pulls that kind of thing, it has the effect of them espousing a love for Gallagher or Paul Haggis; I'm actively repulsed and I don't much sweat their lack of attention.

The Persistent Pull of the Absent

A woman disappears from a gas station while on vacation. But rather than a single event, 1988's The Vanishing (Spoorloos) presents the incident as kaleidoscoping layers of suspense. It's a brilliant work, very much in the tradition of Hitchcock. It's kind of a mix of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Rope.

From the title of the film and the picture of lead actress Johanna ter Steege in Criterion's thumbnail, I knew it was going to be about the woman she plays, Saskia, disappearing. I liked how the movie plays with this expectation, providing a series of preliminary events that could result in that titular vanishing. There's a brilliant scene when she and her boyfriend, Rex (Gene Bervoets), run out of gas in the middle of a long, dark tunnel. They both panic, get into an argument, and separate. Already, the film is loaded with issues related to character guilt and emotional need.

Given how brilliantly the movie builds from the point of view of Rex as he experiences Saskia's vanishing, I was surprised that the film shifted to the villain's point of view. Saskia's kidnapper is a chemistry professor called Raymond (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) who, despite having a loving wife and children, is a sociopath interested in exploring the extremes of evil he's capable of perpetrating. He reminds one of Crime and Punishment and the aforementioned Rope.

The manipulations of Raymond and the filmmaker make The Vanishing a brilliantly harrowing experience. It's available on The Criterion Channel.

X Sonnet #1878

The dearly purchased picture turns itself.
To straighten frames, the fella buys a hearse.
As man would die to line a rotten shelf,
The sinking sun was rendered something worse.
Returning rodents foul the phones for weeks.
Exalted mice disturb the dreams of God.
At night, the timely mouse of fortune squeaks.
At parties, none would know the spot was odd.
Intruding sleep, too eager, caught a cold.
Distortion layered words across the box.
In younger cars, the chicken fries the old.
Beyond the boots, you might discover socks.
The empty kitchen fried the ghosts some eggs.
Befuddled beetles wiggle helpless legs.

Making Love for the Pictures

A group of teenagers come of age in a small, amoral town in 1971's The Last Picture Show. Director Peter Bogdanovich's breakout film, it was based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, who was informed by his own experience growing up in a small Texas town. It's a captivating, credible portrait of small town hypocrisy and lust in the early '50s.

Most of the story follows three characters, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), Duane (Jeff Bridges), and Jacy (Cybill Shepherd). Jacy's Duane's girlfriend though Sonny's already stealing looks at her. Sonny's own girlfriend is ornery and inured to making out with the attitude of a lunchlady serving her ten thousandth sloppy joe. The two breakup with little ceremony and only perfunctory rancor.

Jacy's mother tells her straight out she wants her daughter to have sex with Duane so she gets over the idea there's anything special about him and will go off to college. But Jacy ditches Duane to go to a skinny-dipping party where, in a memorable scene, she has to perform an impromptu strip show for the silent assembly of naked teenagers. It's supposed to be a party but there's no music. The silence and lack of chatter emphasises the awkwardness of the moment but Jacy goes through with it. She's looking for this kind of adventure. Well, such pathetic little adventures that can be scraped together in the dusty old town, and of course, most of them involve sex. But it's hard to find anyone who's not thoroughly jaded.

That's the revelation of this movie. There's a scene in which a little mob goes after a religious guy because they think he molested a little girl (amusingly, the camera angle at the end of the scene, in which the little girl trails after the departing mob, shows they don't care nearly as much about her as about punishing the possible perpetrator). But they're barely a peripheral presence in the film which mostly focuses on sex and its impact on the self-esteem of the boys. All the women and girls seem to treat it as an occasional comforting, but more often tedious, task that must be dispensed with. Even Jacy seems more interested in the idea of having had sex than in actually having it. But what else is there to talk about?

There is the movie theatre run by old Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson). We see clips from Father of the Bride and Red River, the former standing in contrast to the reality, the latter reflecting it somewhat. It reminded me of Godard, particularly the scene in Vivre sa vie in which Anna Karina watches The Passion of Joan of Arc. As ever, it's hard not to see the influence of the French New Wave on New Hollywood.

The Last Picture Show is showing on The Criterion Channel's New Hollywood playlist this month.

Maisel's World

I finally started on season three of The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel last night. I'm only five years late. I like showrunner Amy Sherman Palladino's writing but I struggle with this show's point of view on early 1960s America. It's inevitable that it would be infused with the perspective of its creator, and that's how it should be, unless you have a time machine. The influence of an outsider's perspective is inevitable, you can either fight it or embrace it, and fighting it is futile. '70s movies about the '50s feel different from '80s movies about the '50s and that's a feature, not a bug, at least for me.

But I don't share the makers of Mrs. Maisel's evident preference for modern R&B over '60s R&B, as evidenced by the vocal styles of the singers in the episode I watched last night. Midge performs at a USO show in the episode. I guess it's also a problem I never find Midge's standup routines remotely funny. They always seem like careful formulae of theoretically funny material. She's much funnier in dialogue with Suzy. Their banter about being late and dick jokes was much better. The chemistry between the two actresses helps a lot. But another problem with the show is its uneasy mix of a sugary, idealised vision of the period with a desire to say something about the dirty, downtrodden side of the tracks, a world intended to be represented by Suzy and a fictionalised version of Lenny Bruce. In the episode I watched last night, Bruce is forcibly removed by police from a club when he tells some offensive jokes. But while it was a (slightly modified) version of an actual Lenny Bruce routine, it was one that happens to not be especially controversial; he argues that stag films portraying consensual sex do not present the hazards to the mental health of children as much as the publicly condoned depictions of violence in media. It's easy enough for an audience to-day to nod and agree but what if they used one of the routines in which Bruce used derogatory terms for homosexuals and religious minorities? The viewer might then get a better picture of what standing up for free speech really means, that you might also be made uncomfortable sometimes, not just people you don't like.

Speaking of censorship, I also noticed the episode digitally painted out Midge's bare ass. I wondered if this was because I was watching it on Japanese Amazon Prime so I checked to see if the topless scene is still in the first episode. It is, completely intact. Interestingly, this means the first episode is rated 16+ and almost the entire rest of the series is rated 13+. I'm fascinated by the shift that's occurred in Japanese public morals in the past 30 years. I remember my friends and I, in the late '80s and early '90s, being astonished by how casually Japanese shows, even kids' shows, showed nudity. According to Lenny Bruce's ideas, and my own, that meant the Japanese had a much healthier attitude. But that's changed. The remake of Urusei Yatsura lacks the famous nudity of the original. I remember one day in the library at one of the schools I work at a student was thumbing through an old manga. She came to a page where a man and woman were arguing and the woman happened to be topless. It wasn't sexual in any way, just a candid depiction of normal life. The student looked at me like I'd caught her holding a bottle of tequila. I just smiled pleasantly. What else could I do?

It's weird they'd remove Midge's butt, though. It reminded me of the butt in the digital shadow in Terminator: Genesys. Or Daryl Hannah's digitally hairy butt on the Disney+ version of Splash. Somewhere along the line, Americans seem to have become unable to handle the sight of butts.

The Scary One Can't Save Us

I don't like this movie's advertising. But this, of course, is the second version of the second trailer for Megalopolis. The first version was taken down after it was discovered that a series of quotes from negative reviews of famous Francis Ford Coppola movies were entirely A.I. generated. I was, I guess you could say, lucky enough to catch that one before it was gone. I was surprised so many critics didn't like the Godfather movies but, then, of course, they actually loved it. When a bunch of the critics are still living and able to point out the quotes said the exact opposite of what they actually said, of course they'd be angry and of course there'd be a scandal. How could the people who decided to go ahead with the A.I. generated version not anticipate that? I suppose they had no idea the A.I. was hallucinating.

It's amazing how quickly people have been willing to put their faith in A.I. Generally, you'd be more likely to classify it as their "terror of" A.I. Terror is kind of the flipside of faith, isn't it? "Well, if this thing can overwhelm the whole of humanity, surely it can do my job for me." Turns out, now and then, you still have to do some good old fashioned research. You might want to do it anyway. Suppose there'll come a time when the A.I. quotes are given more credence than the humans who deny them?

It's frustrating because I really want to see Megalopolis and I really want it to do well. It was actually a fair point that a lot of critics hated Coppola's Dracula but now it's an undeniable classic, a massively influential entry, in the genre. Don't lie when the truth is on your side, for Pete's sake. It's bad enough when the truth is obscured at the behest of malevolent will, let's not do it just in the interest of knocking off work early.

Another Lively Place of the Dead

Given my fondness for haunted house movies, you'd think I'd be fonder of 1973's The Legend of Hell House. I do enjoy it. It's a lovely, weird old manor. The cast is fine. It feels truncated, though, like too many important scenes were cut.

An old man wanting confirmation of the existence of an afterlife hires three people to stay in the "Hell House", so named because its hauntings are so bad that of the last group who stayed there, only one emerged alive. Sounds like as much confirmation there as the old man's likely to get with the new group.

That one survivor is Roddy McDowall, who's with the new group. Annoyingly, no-one ever asks why he would come back. Or anything specific about his prior experience. There must be some missing scenes, that's all I can think. It's too glaring an absence. I'm thinking back now to Stephen King's Rose Red and how it provided motives even for characters who had very good reason not to want to stay in the haunted house. That's one reason Rose Red is a superior work.

The group in Hell House consists of Dr. Barrett (Clive Revill), Mr. Fischer (McDowall), an angry young medium called Florence (Pamela Frianklin), and Barrett's wife, Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt), tags along. None of them is particularly interesting. The house is a nice enough, gothic monstrosity.

There's a lot of exposition delivered by characters to each other, explaining who the ghosts are and how they operate. There are voices and shadows and falling props. All pretty standard.

X Sonnet #1877

The rocking string was used on many lutes.
For power pots, the time for music came.
Adorn the gnome with special oil boots.
And see the elephant receives the same.
Destruction came with easy charm to them.
In circles, murder fools debate the knife.
A patch of blue would save the rusty djinn.
Immortals rarely fear the end of life.
The boneless roads would serve to stand a man.
Corrupted bets divest the money bags.
Alignment rusts the precious metal ban.
Department stores have started selling rags.
They speak across the pointless fields of stress.
The masters only build a tangled mess.

Death Longs for Autumn (and So do I)

Like, I suspect, practically everyone else, I'm impatient for summer to be over. The summer heat has broken records two years in a row now here in Japan. So last night I sought an autumnal movie to watch and remembered Criterion has a new Giallo playlist. Is it just me or are these films often set in autumn? I picked the first one I'd never seen, 1972's La morte accarezza a mezzanotte (Death Walks at Midnight, and, sure enough, it's autumnal as hell. The writing leaves something to be desired, becoming a bit tediously repetitive by the halfway point, but star Susan Scott (aka Nieves Navarro) combined with the visuals made it a mostly enjoyable experience.

Like a lot of performers in Italian and Spanish films from the time, Spanish actress Navarro adopted an English name in the interest of fooling people into thinking she was an American star and that her movies were American. Criterion presents the film in its original Italian version, though. These movies were always dubbed regardless of language but I'm glad I was able to hear Navarro's rapid fire, Italian harangues as one guy after another has the gall to doubt that she actually saw a vision of a killer when she was on LSD.

She's also exasperated that her journalist boyfriend, Gio (Simon Andreu), for whom she agreed to take the drug as research for his article, published her name and undisguised photos against her wishes. It's all presented as the hilarious fireworks of a lover's quarrel. Everyone's so amused by how angry she is by being in constant fear for her reputation, life, and safety. No-one ever said these were the most enlightened films in the world.

There are a lot of sequences where she thinks she sees the killer and there's a lot of running through crowds and stairways and corridors. The actual killer's identity starts to shift regularly and I suspect a lot of rewrites were occurring throughout production. It follows no logical pattern and starts to become dull. The colour palette is always nice and autumnal, though, lots of rust, yellow, and black with a splash of blue here and there to make it pop. Navarro's hair is glorious.

La morte accarezza a mezzanotte is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Mysterious Rain

The weather goes haywire. A man is murdered in the street. Another has strange visions. Such are the portents that take us into 1977's The Last Wave, a Peter Weir film starring Richard Chamberlain. The first part of the movie is terrific but, the more the mystery was explained, the less I liked it, the more dated it felt. But it's never really a bad film.

The movie begins at a little school, somewhere in Australia, far from the city. The kids are playing outside when suddenly it rains, very unusual in the desert. Their frazzled teacher hustles them all indoors and her already weak nerves are shattered when massive chunks of ice start falling from the sky.

Cut to Sydney and a lawyer named David (Chamberlain) is having strange dreams. He's hired to defend a group of Aborigines (I guess we're supposed to say Aboriginal people now?) who apparently bludgeoned a man to death. One of them is played by David Gulpilil from Walkabout and he gives a very good performance. His character, Chris, shows up in David's dream holding a strange stone.

The more the strange phenomena get tied to Aboriginal spiritualism, the less interested I became. Nothing against Aborigines, but the film's belief in the awe inspiring powers of their traditional beliefs feels very '70s/'80s New Age. The movie's much better when there's little to no explanation for what's going on. Somehow, the bathtub faucets are left on in David's home and the upstairs gets partially flooded. It seems somehow connected to the rainstorm but, logically, could it be? That little tease of a similarity helps keep the mystery feeling alive.

David's father is introduced, an Australian preacher, but David says he was born in South America. None of which explains Chamberlain's undisguised American accent. But otherwise he gives a decent performance.

The Last Wave is available on The Criterion Channel.

Crazy Ricochet

There are gaslight movies, and then there are duelling gaslight movies. 1964's Nightmare is one of Hammer's entries to the gaslight genre and is the only one, from any studio, I can think of where the perpetrator of the gaslighting becomes a victim of gaslighting in the second half.

It's such a nice concept, I wish it were a better movie. It's mainly held back by the performances of the two lead actresses, Jennie Linden and Moira Redmond. It may not even be that they're bad actresses, simply that they made, or were told to make, the wrong choices. I see it in a few other gaslight movies, like Dangerous Crossing; everyone thinks the heroine is crazy, so the actress acts crazy. The key to a good gaslight victim performance is to make her reactions reasonable from her point of view yet plausibly extreme for anyone not sharing her experience. Linden and Redmond both go from 0 to 60 in a flash. Linden's reaction to a phantasmal figure in the night is to suddenly scream like a banshee. Redmond rages like a Saturday morning cartoon villain.

According to Wikipedia, Julie Christie was initially cast to play Linden's character. I can only imagine that would be a hell of a lot better. Though I suspect it would have meant that the whole film would have focused on her character instead of retaining its one interesting feature, the revenge gaslight aspect.

Freddie Francis directs in black and white so of course the film is visually magnificent, a splendid study of light and shadow. Most of the first half has no men. Although I'm glad we seem to have gotten past the "Bechdel Test" mania, it is a nice change of pace, particularly in a movie from this period, to have all the characters be women, especially since I really like women. Janet, Linden's character, goes home to her enormous spooky mansion after a stay in the sanatorium. Maybe she's not cured because she starts seeing a strange woman with a nightgown and facial scar, often accompanied by a creepy puppet that's never explained, and sometimes appearing to have been stabbed to death. The Janet screams hysterically and Grace (Redmond) swoops in to save her. The second half of the film brings in a male character, Henry Baxter (David Knight), who likes kissing Janet even though he's married. But that's just the beginning of his greed.

I've watched this movie a few times now so I must enjoy it. It's mainly the house, you know I'm a sucker for movies about people trapped in haunted houses, which this kind of is. I certainly wouldn't mind inheriting a sprawling manor. In case anyone has one they want to get rid of, with or without ghosts.

There are multiple uploads of this movie on YouTube. I guess it's public domain. That's refreshing, given what a pain in the ass it usually is to get ahold of a Hammer movie.