The True King of Streaming

Criterion Channel has some terrific playlists this month. They've got a Werner Herzog playlist that has all of his most famous movies (Grizzly Man, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and Nosferatu) as well has his collaboration with David Lynch (My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?), his gloriously off-the-rails, Nicholas Cage led Bad Lieutenant movie, and about three dozen other movies.

This month there's also a playlist of four movies with Trent Reznor soundtracks (Natural Born Killers, Lost Highway, The Social Network, Bones and All), and a playlist of "Blackout Noir", that's films noir in which a main character's memory loss plays a crucial role.

It's from that playlist I chose a film last night, 1946's Deadline at Dawn, which I thought I hadn't seen but it turned out I'd seen at least twice before. For some reason I tend to forget its title, I just remember it as, "The one in which Susan Hayward plays a dime-a-dance girl." She's engaged in this occupation when she meets a guileless, good-natured sailor called Alex (Bill Williams) who'd gotten blackout drunk the night before and woke up with a wad of cash. His helplessness finally thaws Susan Hayward's cold front and she accompanies him to the apartment he remembers going to with a lady the previous night. Unfortunately, said lady is now a corpse.

The movie's intriguing opening scene is of this lady (played by Lola Lane) having an argument with her blind but sinister ex-husband. There's so much about it that's unusual for an American film of the '40s, it's amazing I tend to forget about this scene. But maybe I only have eyes for Susan Hayward. It's a shame she was never in a really great movie. I think The Lusty Men was probably the best one she was in, or that South American western with Richard Widmark I can't remember the name of. The movies where she was centre stage, Smashup and that prison movie she won an Oscar for, really don't hold up. But she was a great actress.

Criterion Channel also has an amazing Howard Hawks playlist this month, including not only his great screwball comedies (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday) and crime movies (The Big Sleep and Scarface) but even some of his westerns (Red River, Rio Bravo, and The Big Sky). When I get a hankering for a John Wayne movie, it's very rare I can find one on any streaming service. Now I got two of his best at my fingertips. November somehow does seem the right month for old westerns.

Criterion proves again why it remains for me the one indispensable streaming service. I can go months without Netflix or Disney+ but Criterion's always golden. It doesn't hurt that it's about six to ten dollars cheaper than the big boys, too.

Candye'en

Happy Halloween, everyone. Halloween night was last night for me. I had some bourbon and watched Ghostbusters. I thought about getting candy but my sweet tooth seems nonexistent these days. I feel nostalgic about it. I go to the store and look at candy but then when I imagine what it tastes like it's not remotely appealing. Just a few months ago, I was routinely snacking on chocolate bars but the desire seems to have totally vanished.

Halloween candy is very different in Japan. There's a lot of cookies, cakes, and wafers. Candy corn is totally absent. Unlike candy canes, I can't even order candy corn on Japanese Amazon. I don't especially want any, I guess. I can enjoy a candy corn but two of them generally seem to be slightly more than enough for me. Japanese candy is said to be not as sweet as American candy. I'm not sure that's an adequate description of the difference. American candy tends to more of a waxy, oily, or gelatinous quality while Japanese candy tends to a breaded or creamy quality. KitKats are very popular in Japan and they famously come in a variety of unique flavours here. The chocolate covered wafers fit in pretty well with home grown Japanese products like Pocky and Melty Kiss.

I've been in the mood to watch a Hammer movie but I always get decision paralysis when trying to pick one and end up watching something else (like Ghostbusters). It's easier to just keep moving forward and watching things I've never seen, I guess.

The Hallowed Files

Happy Halloween, everyone. Well, it's the 31st here in Japan. I wanted to watch a horror movie last night but there was no time so I just watched another episode of The X-Files instead, "Tooms" from season one. It's a sequel to an episode earlier in the season called "Squeeze" that introduced the character of Eugene Tooms, a man who can stretch and contort his limbs to fit through any space and who eats human livers to maintain his immortality. "Squeeze" was not as solidly written but it was more satisfyingly weird. "Tooms" seems to run out of ideas for Tooms himself and ends up focusing on show mythology and the relationship between Mulder and Scully.

They actually have a flirtatious moment when Scully convinces Mulder to let her take a shift staking out Tooms.

It's really amazing how natural and effective their chemistry already is at this point. The whole "will they or won't they" tension is different from so many other series because there's kind of no tension in it. They're so comfortable with each other and neither one seems especially driven to seek a physical relationship. There's a kind of serenity in their acceptance of whatever permutation their relationship is set to take, perhaps because the problems they routinely deal with seem so big in comparison. Or perhaps they're just so damned cool. I like the artfully placed curl of hair by Scully's mouth.

The X-Files is available on Disney+/Hulu.

Your Twisted Academic Career Begins

When I came to Japan in 2020, a new smartphone game was taking the country by storm called Twisted-Wonderland. It's a Disney property developed in Japan and created by Toboso Yana who'd previously made the Black Butler series. Twisted-Wonderland ties not only into Alice in Wonderland but several of Disney's more famous movies (though some of them, like Hercules, are not at all well-known in Japan). The concept seems much closer to Harry Potter, though, as it follows students at a boys' magical university called Night Raven College. Five years after the game was released, the anime adaptation premiered on Disney+ a couple nights ago.

The main character is Yuu (I guess in the game this means you are Yuu). He's captain of a high school kendo club, getting ready for a tournament when he's suddenly teleported to the entrance ceremony at Night Raven College. The room, which looks like a massive gothic cathedral, is filled with students. Since the game primarily focuses on collecting and nurturing magical college students, quite a few of the students depicted in this scene, which takes up the bulk of the episode, are familiar to fans and each likely has its own devoted fanbase of girls who have nurtured their own version of the character through an academic career. This results in a scene where the makers of the show feel obligated to give reaction shots to each and every one of the characters after something dramatic happens, and each one of them gives a little, "Ah!" "Eh!" "Hmm!" "Huh!" etc.

Very little happens in the first episode as a result. The character designs are pretty cool, especially Headmaster Crowley, who wears a creepy mask. The students are all the handsome boys you'd expect from a game aimed at girls. I find myself wondering if a female character will ever show up. It'll be a challenge for the writers to come up with a satisfying story while not short-changing any of the many characters. There was one line I thought was funny when one character refers to another as "Juice" and that character indignantly reminds the other that his name is "Deuce!" I also like the aesthetic of the Alice in Wonderland area shown in the trailer.

Twisted-Wonderland is available on Disney+.

Murder and Surgery

It's been a while since I even thought of trying to predict the killer's identity on Only Murders in the Building. Last night's season finale had a reveal that felt particularly arbitrary, as though all the character names were in a hat and one was drawn at random. But it was a funny episode.

Seeing the events of the murder in flashback with all the clues in place was maybe unintentionally funny. Lester running and texting about his murder as though he already knew it was going to happen certainly didn't feel natural. I don't know why they'd bother being so pedantic when the killer's identity wasn't especially tied to any narrative.

The most memorable part was the setup for next season at the end and the characters bickering over what constitutes a murder "in the building".

Only Murders in the Building is available on Disney+/Hulu.

I also watched a second season episode of Deep Space Nine last night on Netflix. I don't like to pay for both services at the same time but my pause on Disney+ doesn't go into effect until November 7th.

"Invasive Procedures" is an episode in which the space station is taken over by a group of criminals headed by a Trill played by John Glover, best known now for his role as the media mogul in Gremlins 2. The Trill are a species that can use large, slug-like "symbionts" to form a consciousness comprised of their humanoid brain and a mass of life experiences contained in the symbionts from previous hosts. In this episode, the John Glover Trill wants to take the symbiont from Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell). I do miss the days when we could have an hour of prime time television exploring what it means for a sentient being to have its consciousness divided between an internal organ and a surgically implanted slug.

X Bugs

Mulder and Scully head to the woods to fight bugs in a 1994 episode of The X-Files called "Darkness Falls" written by series creator Chris Carter. This follows from "Shapes", another episode in which the pair of investigators visited woodland, which makes it feel slightly odd that this one spends more time with buildup. It's a welcome difference, though, as the tension in this episode derives from their distance from civilisation, the state of their vehicle, and the reliability of a cabin generator.

The episode really needs all this because the evil bugs turn out to be a fairly unconvincing glowing green glitter effect. However, the cocooned, desiccated bodies of victims they find are pretty cool. I also like how the episode plays with the relationship between eco-terrorists and loggers in Washington State. Washington is of course near Vancouver, the show's normal filming location, which seems like it should have made filming easy, though according to the Wikipedia entry it turned out to be an unexpected nightmare due to weather conditions.

The X-Files is available on Disney+/Hulu.

Bad, Bad Nun

A nun's frequent, bizarre visions of holy figures and manifestations of stigmata upend the normal life of a 17th century convent in Paul Verhoeven's 2021 film Benedetta. Beautifully shot with great performances, this is one I've been wanting to see ever since it came out. The first half of the film exceeded my expectations but I was a little disappointed in the second half. On the whole, though, this was a very worthy experience.

We meet Benedetta as a child on the road to a convent in Pescia. There, her parents hope to deposit the girl who routinely has wild visions of the Virgin Mary. They're waylaid by bandits, one of whom attempts to steal a necklace from Benedetta's mother. Benedetta calls down the wrath of the Virgin and immediately a bird flies out of a tree and poops in one bandit's eye. They laugh, return the necklace, and leave. I would have preferred at least a hint of awe in their reaction.

The tension between whether Benedetta is actually experiencing and/or causing miracles is one of the driving forces of the narrative. After being accepted at the convent, the film jumps ahead 18 years. Now played by Virginie Efira, Benedetta the young woman is something of an embarrassment to the Abbess Felicita, played by Charlotte Rampling.

Felicita is one of the film's more interesting characters and I sort of wonder if this was due to a stipulation from Rampling. Felicita's daughter, Christina (Louise Chevillotte), is more vigorous in her hatred of Benedetta and is even willing to stretch the truth when making accusations. Felicita is wise, tactful, and prudent and that same doggedly rational thinking prevents her from wholeheartedly persecuting Benedetta.

The film's loosely based on a true story of a 17th century nun. The primary mistake Verhoeven makes is focusing too much on Benedetta's sexual relationship with a novice nun, Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), making it the crux of Benedetta's troubles with church authorities. In reality, it was Benedetta's bizarre ceremonies and possessions that mainly landed her in hot water. Verhoeven transplants too much of a modern attitude about homosexuality to the 17th century. He does avoid using the terms "lesbian" or "homosexual", neither of which were yet in use to refer to same sex physical attraction, the latter not being coined until the 19th century. But part of the reason for this is simply that people just weren't much concerned about what women were doing with each other in bed. The biblical Book of Ruth may even have been used as an example to support an intimate relationship between Benedetta and Bartolomea. Maybe this is why Verhoeven awkwardly chose to add a wooden dildo to their relationship. Maybe he'd have argued that a movie in which Benedetta's claims of being possessed by holy figures would simply not satisfy a modern audience.

I really liked Bartolomea as she's first introduced, running from her abusive shepherd father. She introduces a carnal element to Benedetta's life and I appreciated small details of historical perspective presented by her character, as when Benedetta tells her she's beautiful and the girl remarks that she didn't know, she'd never even seen a mirror. She and Benedetta use the latrine together, the first time for Bartolomea to experience such a luxury. She remarks that she'd normally just go out and shit among the animals. The two women use straw for toilet paper which certainly adds some perspective as to the probable state of their nether regions during the sex scenes.

Benedetta strongly reminds me of Flesh and Blood, Verhoeven's 1985 film. Both films are periods pieces (Flesh and Blood set in 16th century Italy), both feature main characters who adopt messianic roles of uncertain legitimacy, and both feature the characters in somewhat anachronistically extravagant sexual relationships. Both films are otherwise admirable for their attention to, and inspiration drawn from, historical detail. Both films seem to lose focus a bit in the second half. Both were box office disappointments, not even coming close to recouping their substantial budgets.

Both are well worth watching, though. Virigie Efira is a worthy successor to Sharon Stone in Verhoeven's Basic Instinct and Total Recall, delivering a similarly cocksure, slightly unhinged performance.

Benedetta is available on The Criterion Channel in their Nunsploitation playlist.

Chasing the Rabbit

I have to admit, I often don't understand why something becomes popular. I saw the new Netflix series, Black Rabbit, was number one in the U.S. Nielson ratings so I watched the first episode last night. I don't get it. I mean, good for Jude Law and Jason Bateman, I think they're both good actors. But why is this number one and Jude Law's previous series, Skeleton Crew, not? I guess people really like Jason Bateman. Was Ozark this popular?

Black Rabbit focuses on a New York restaurant founded by two brothers, played by Law and Batemen. Law's character is in charge of the place when the show starts while Bateman's getting into trouble out west. A deal where he's trying to sell a collection of coins to some shady guys instead of at a collector's shop for some reason goes sour and he kills one of them. So he high tails it back to New York.

It's not bad I guess but it's . . . not much. No witty dialogue, no interesting plot twists or fresh premise. It's a couple of guys and a restaurant with some crime thrown in. Maybe it's a slow burn. No idea why this is number one.

Black Rabbit is available on Netflix.

X Sonnet 1965

Aggressive white was pushed with chalk and paste.
A green became a faded black by dusk.
The gleeful ghouls of rot patrol the waste.
Their noses root a blackened pumpkin husk.
Unsated by the candle throat, they burn.
They ravage suns from careful patterns stitched.
From nature find they nothing sweet to learn.
At every chance their sour humour switched.
To rule the body, all the heads were guts.
To covet rule, the brain was turned to squash.
On every candy corn, the strawman gluts.
With stinking orange goo, the bastard washed.
A pumpkin patch is sinking 'neath the bog.
To fill the void, there comes a poison fog.

Beyond the Bleachers

I woke up at around 2am and read the latest Sirenia Digest, which contains a new Caitlin R. Kiernan story called "PALE ROLLERS". As Digest stories go, it's uncommonly straightforward, the narrative book-ended by a present tense account of the narrator's trip to sea in a small boat. His destination is a mysterious spot related to an object he acquires in the middle section of the story, in the past, at a curiosity shop where objects choose their purchasers.

By keeping the supernatural and narrative experimentation to more of a minimum than usual, Caitlin achieves a milder, but potent sense of threatening weirdness.

Reading it at 2am, it blurred oddly with an article I read on Yahoo about how Shohei Ohtani is somehow the best and the worst thing that ever happened to baseball. Like he's hit a high point no-one can ever match. Somehow the author's hyperbolic mixture of awe and dread followed smoothly from Caitlin's story of things of abnormal magnitude drawing people in.

Of course, people love to talk about Ohtani here in Japan. I don't follow professional sports at all but I kind of like how Ohtani has an old fashioned, Joe DiMaggio, national hero quality. I guess Ohtani would be better called an international hero.

Wolf Files

"Shapes", an episode of The X-Files from April 1, 1994, is another one to feature a familiar face from Twin Peaks. This time it's Michael Horse who, like Don Davis before him, basically plays the same character he did on Twin Peaks, only now it's in a werewolf story. Not a bad one but this is not generally considered The X-Files' finest hour.

Mulder and Scully go to investigate some killings on a Native American reservation. A naked man is shot by a rancher who claims to have seen not a man but a vicious animal. It turns out to be part of a pattern tied into ancient legends of the manitou.

The episode's Wikipedia entry claims it was criticised for portraying a manitou as essentially a werewolf. The current Wikipedia page for manitou is very short, It begins by describing the manitou as "the fundamental life force in the theologies of the Algonquian peoples." If you check the editing history of the page, you find the word was once considered to have more variant meanings among the Algonquian people. In 2013, the entry said, "Manitou are the spirit beings of Algonquian groups of Native Americans. Manitou is similar to the East Asian qi, the Hindu Brahman or the Japanese kami." There's no citation for this reference while the new version of the entry cites only a book published in 2001.

It's fun watching Mulder and Scully pitted against a werewolf. As usual in pre-cgi movies and television, the werewolf looks more like a gorilla so you rarely get a good look at it. Actually, I still don't feel like anyone's done a proper werewolf in a movie. I do like the one in Skyrim quite a bit.

The X-Files is available on Disney+/Hulu.

The Twin Peaks Loop

In my recent Twin Peaks rewatch, I came to episode 14 a few days ago, the one in which Laura Palmer's killer is revealed. It's been said since that Lynch never intended to reveal the killer's identity and that he wanted it to be a perpetual mystery in the background. I can see the appeal of that. When I watch the show with someone who hasn't seen it, I'm made freshly aware of how much of the show's excitement lived in the uncertainty surrounding most of the characters. Almost anyone could be Laura Palmer's killer. But it's hard to wish for a world in which the perfectly constructed episode 14 doesn't exist.

I love the sense of overlapping realities and perspectives. There's the murder scene which continually switches between the two actors who represent the killer in the dream world and the waking world, there's the shift between the performance by Julee Cruise at the roadhouse and the Giant in that other reality, communicating to Agent Cooper.

I suppose this is the real pivot point, this is where the show stops being a murder mystery and becomes a fantasy series as the driving narrative arc slowly becomes exploring the mystery of the Black Lodge. Before it was the supernatural serving the murder mystery, from here it's the murder plots serving the supernatural. It could be argued that this is what lost the public as much as David Lynch's absence. It's hard to separate the two, I guess, if Lynch truly didn't want the killer to be revealed. Yet it's a very influential aspect of the show, most obviously on The X-Files. In returning to direct the final episode, Lynch manages to make it viscerally as well as conceptually interesting, something he does more fully in the third season.

The other direction could have been something like Fire Walk with Me, using the supernatural as a means of exploring the emotional state of someone involved in otherwise earthly concerns, following in the vein of Laura Palmer's Secret Diary. I'm not sure if that could've been sustained successfully for a full season. The domestic problems haunt the supernatural problems in season three like soil on which strange plants grow. There's Diane's recollection of assault and what it means considering what her character ends up being. There's the contemplation of the relationship between Cooper's moral nature and the fracturing of his identity across multiple characters whose motives and actions vary in purity. One things for sure, none of it would be even half as interesting without Lynch.

The Robot Sees

Last night's Only Murders in the Building was directed by the prolific Jamie Babbit and featured a tighter focus on this season's murder mystery. This season, it's been the murder of the building's elderly doorman, Lester. One of the gags recurring throughout is about a robotic replacement for the dead man called LESTR. LESTR partially narrates the episode. It was kind of funny.

The suspect becomes Lester's human replacement, Randall. Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez all fail to run after him, two of them because they're too old and one of them because she's wearing awkward shoes. Nathan Lane returns to have wine with Selena Gomez. None of it was riotously funny or gripping but it was cosy viewing.

Next week's episode is the finale. This show has been one of the things that mark autumn for me in lieu of an actual change in the weather though the past couple days have suddenly been really chilly. It's amazing, it's like someone flipped a switch.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Disney+ and/or Hulu.

Who is He and Who is He?

A teenage boy discovers his best friend is not his best friend but a mysterious entity that took his friend's place in 2025's The Summer Hikaru Died (光が死んだ夏). I've watched the first two episodes of this intriguing series that conjures a sinister, anxious mood.

Yoshiki (Kobayashi Chiaki) and Hikaru (Umeda Shuichiro) are sitting and chatting one day when Yoshiki casually remarks that Hikaru is not really Hikaru at all. Hikaru laughs sheepishly and admits the real Hikaru died in the woods and that the boy sitting beside Yoshiki is a counterfeit, the creation of an entity that struggles to describe itself. Evidence of its supernatural nature becomes clear when part of Hikaru's face melts into an iridescent fluid mass that begins to reach for Yoshiki's face.

The two remain friends because, with all the normal stresses of teenage life, Yoshiki needs a best friend. I've often observed how important best friends are to students in Japan, which makes sense in Japan's collectivist culture in which self-perception is formed by a continuous feedback loop of perceived impressions from others. This makes the nature of this Hikaru entity all the more intriguing and gives the show a great deal of relevance for the real adolescent experience. As puberty causes the world to seem bigger and stranger, our own identities become as uncertain as those of the people around us. The uncertainty of Hikaru's identity and true nature creates a fundamental uncertainty in Yoshiki's own self-perception.

I can see the influences of Evangelion and a few other things. There's even a touch of Cronenberg in the second episode when Hikaru opens his shirt to reveal a large vertical slit similar to the one James Woods has in Videodrome and the vaginal symbolism is just as apparent and intended. As the relationship between Hikaru and Yoshiki becomes stranger, it seems inevitable somehow that it would become more intimate.

The Summer Hikaru Died is available on Netflix.

The Dangerous but Necessary Guitar

A boy holds onto his dreams of music stardom for a journey into the underworld in 2017's Coco. Among the more beloved Pixar films, Coco succeeds in being more than a Day of the Dead gimmick by offering genuine insight into family psychology at odds with the youthful desire for self-realisation.

I remember in Desmond Morris' Human Animal series a scene of a baby crawling away from his parents and Morris remarked on how from even a very early age the human child has an instinctive desire to run away from safety in an effort to find its own identity. In Coco, Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) is a boy whose passionate desire to be a musician is at odds with his family's peculiar, systematic hatred of all things musical. It's more than just an aesthetic preoccupation, of course, it's an indicator of skeletons in the family closet, both literal and figurative.

Disney, for a long time, was criticised for repeatedly giving us rebellious teenage protagonists but teens are often rebellious. It's simply human nature. If Miguel gives up music, what can he be but just another caricature in the assembly? One could argue life's bigger and more complex than a choice between two extremes, a fact grasped better by adults than children, which leads to their inability to understand the child's polar thinking. But that's as much naivete on the adult's part as it is the child's rashness, because the dichotomy is real because the conflict is real. So it makes sense that Miguel, being trapped in the Land of the Dead, refuses his great grandmother's blessing because it comes with the condition that he renounce music. He runs deeper into the underworld even though it may cost him his life. And he's quite right to. If he can't live according to his principles, is he truly living?

The other side of the coin is existence for adults, whose need to be remembered is here prompted by true existential peril. Just as Miguel needs to define himself, Hector needs to be remembered--crucially for his creative prowess and ability to delight others. What may seem an adolescent vanity to impatient adults remains a crucial aspect of existence throughout life and afterlife.

I found the movie extremely predictable. I knew exactly what would happen when Miguel met the famous singer and how the plot would transpire with Miguel's new friend, Hector (Gael Garcia Bernal). But it didn't matter. The performances and animation are both good and the Day of the Dead aesthetic is fun and lovely. I loved all the marigold petals.

Coco is available on Disney+.

Nuns Tend to Their Needs

When one first hears the term "nunsploitation", one likely imagines something like 1977's Behind Convent Walls (Interno di un convento). It's crazy nuns, running around, indulging in sexual mayhem with themselves and each other. It also happens to be a very well shot film with some stills resembling Caravaggio paintings.

It was a time when people were trying out erotic film as a serious artform and sometimes gave it production values to match. Director Walerian Borowczyk was described by critics as a "genius who also happened to be a pornographer" according to Wikipedia.

The film doesn't really have anything to say that wasn't said better by Black Narcissus or Mother Joan of the Angels but it has a lot of charming moments. In one scene two nuns bicker over the handsomeness of the men they have sketched in their notebooks, hidden between the pages.

Behind Convent Walls is available on The Criterion Channel now as part of a Nunsploitation collection.

X Sonnet 1964

The angry weakened bird was watching paint.
Compelling boredom packed its sugar tight.
A syrup corn has made a cheapened saint.
Some extra chalk can ape a fractured light.
The board was dry as bone by morning crow.
The rooster roots for hens who like to love.
So Cupid draws his modern super bow.
The feathered shaft was just a ragged dove.
You see in dreams, a troupe of troubled nuns.
They divvy beer to stave the hunger off.
And wish for wheat to bake their daily buns.
A fast can pierce the heart in reckless sloth.
The shadows dance a copy caper slow.
What near the chapel has a ruddy glow?

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Billie?

One of my favourite Doctor Who writers, Robert Shearman, has made some controversial comments about the show recently.

“After 1989 we had, for years, a current Doctor,’ Shearman continued. “Now, everything that is ever going to be produced in Doctor Who terms is going to feel retrogressive. At least with the New Adventures and then the BBC Books [original novels published in the nineties] you thought, ‘It’s the current Doctor – McCoy or McGann’. No one’s going to start writing Doctor Who books with a Billie Piper Doctor, because no one knows what that means. In a funny way, the closing moments of The Reality War seem to put a full stop on things. We didn’t have that before.”

Shearman's work for Doctor Who has mainly been the audio plays. He wrote by far the best of them, particularly the Eighth Doctor story Chimes at Midnight and the Sixth Doctor story Jubilee, which he adapted for the Ninth Doctor in 2005 as "Dalek". The Big Finish audios were one of the pieces of supplemental media created in that period between the end of the classic run in 1989 and the beginning of the new era in 2005. I'd say he's absolutely right--fans could feel like they were experiencing a continuing story, even under the threat that that story may end up being retconned (though it wasn't, at least as far as the Big Finish audios are concerned). This time, they can't. If anyone tries to write the Billie Piper Doctor, they'd be obliged come up with some kind of explanation for her, to establish her personality, whether it's a mix of the Doctor and Rose, just Rose or just the Doctor, or something else entirely. So any audio plays, comics, or novels that come between now and the show's return can only be things filling in gaps between past episodes. It may truly turn out to be the nail in Doctor Who's coffin.

Apparently Doctor Who executive producer, Jane Tranter, has decided to take offense to Shearman's comments.

That’s really rude, actually, and really untrue . . . It’s a 60-year-old franchise. It’s been going for 20 years nonstop since we brought it back in 2005. You would expect it to change, wouldn’t you?

This kind of makes me wonder if the Billie Piper Doctor was her idea. Arguably, the gist of Shearman's comments are precisely opposite to how she characterises them--he's saying the problem now is that the story can't change because no-one knows how to go forward.

It's too bad because I'd say Shearman would make a hell of a showrunner. Yes, he has a penchant for the super weird and conceptual and many would argue that the problem was too much of that kind of thing in the recent run. But his stories generally felt grounded and built up slowly to their weirdness by establishing characters and clues.

It would be nice if they decided to do a season of the Eighth Doctor next. Of course they won't but fans have wanted that since 2013. I guess that would be pretty retrogrssive, though.

I would argue the trouble really started with the bi-generation. It makes the obvious path now to go with the David Tennant Doctor who's still around and make the Billie Piper Doctor his companion. The obviously politically correct idea of making the Doctor and companion equals in this way is really lame. Of course, it also doesn't really make sense but I bet that's what they were thinking. The same line of thinking was basically behind Donna and the new Rose's stories.

Here's what I would do. Get a new showrunner, someone well outside the clique, and start the show with someone totally new in the role, stuck on earth in, oh, let's say the 17th century (you know that's my favourite). Have a whole new set of stories, leaning toward a gothic tone like Tom Baker's second season, and slowly bring in clues to explain what happened. Have visions of not only Rose but the Doctor as other past companions and maybe eventually reveal the problem was something contaminating the regeneration process so that it was continually regurgitating familiar faces for a while which the Doctor escaped by finally generating a new face. The story could be a metaphor for the show itself, I guess.

The Long, Lazy Days of Vampires and Crooks

Two beautiful, taciturn young ladies dressed as clowns are captured by a vampire's thralls in Jean Rollin's 1972 film Requiem for a Vampire (Requiem pour un vampire). This is one of the more enjoyable of Rollins' sleepy gothic erotic films.

There's not really a good reason given for why the girls are dressed as clowns or why they're exchanging gunfire with a pursuing vehicle. I assumed they'd committed some kind of robbery but their brief explanation much later in the film is only a vague statement about how they were at a party and got into trouble. But I don't really need an explanation and frankly it's better there isn't one.

It's also not clear why the girls rarely speak to each other. It's almost a silent film before they finally end up at the mysterious chateau where the thralls recruit them. Under a spell that prevents them from leaving the area around the chateau, they're tasked with luring victims to the ruins in the days before they themselves will become vampires.

But when they finally meet the vampire patriarch, he turns out to be a charming, wistful gentleman who says the days of the vampire are coming to a close and his current disciples probably won't even manage to become vampires. Where most vampire movies of the time revel in decadent horror, this one's mostly gentle ennui and sex. There are lots of contemplative shots of the girls wandering the woods. I like this one of the blonde waiting for victims, idly lying on her stomach next to some daisies while the wind sweeps the tall grass about her.

Requiem for a Vampire is available this month on The Criterion Channel as part of a Jean Rollin playlist.

Drew Struzan

Famed movie poster artist Drew Struzan has died. His long and prolific career is most distinguished for his work with Spielberg and Lucas on the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies. But not only did he do a lot more posters than that, he did more iconic posters.

Okay, I'd argue Back to the Future is really more of a Spielberg movie than credited director Robert Zemekis' movie (I say the same thing about Who Framed Roger Rabbit). But I've always liked the wrong geometry of the Delorian in this poster which you don't see in the posters for the sequels (though they were also painted by Struzan).

He also did posters for John Carpenter movies, including the iconic posters for The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China. The latter is one example of many in which Struzan's work kind of exceeds the quality of the film he was promoting.

Kurt Russell looks like he's inviting us on an unabashed decadent pulp adventure which makes it disappointing that he's doing a John Wayne parody in the film itself.

He did several posters for off the wall, '70s sex comedies and horror films. In between, he did a couple of nicely Mucha inspired posters for The Seven Percent Solution and Harry and Walter Go to New York.

He seemed to end up painting Harrison Ford often. Outside of Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies, he also did the posters for Blade Runner, The Frisco Kid, and several Indiana Jones video games and collections.

Of his Star Wars posters, I like the ones where he leaned into romance the best, Empire Strikes Back and Attack of the Clones.

With Attack of the Clones, as with Big Trouble in Little China, Struzan's poster is a bit better than the movie itself. At least it has no cgi.

He worked with Guillermo del Toro as well and his poster for Pan's Labyrinth nicely gives us a preview of the film's symbolic production design with a symmetrical composition of Struzan's own devising.

Here's an artist whose work will continue to be in our eyeballs and minds for eternity.

Meryl ex Machina

An effort to find something for Meryl Streep to do on Only Murders in the Building seemed to lead to her doing everything in last night's episode. She's such a good actress, it feels especially odd for her to be dealing with this TV sized dialogue. But, okay, it was a decent episode.

A "ladies night" in the secret casino leads to Loretta (Streep), Mabel, and Detective Williams going undercover. This allows Selena Gomez to show off her newly skinny body with a stunning little gold cocktail dress.

Loretta claims to have psychic ability and I was amused when it turned out she really did, apparently able to see into Renee Zellwegger's mind when conversing with her. Though, in the end, it felt a bit like the inexplicable mind vision scenes in Ant-Man and the Wasp: In Quantumania. Like the writers just couldn't imagine a more logical plot so felt obliged to randomly introduce a supernatural ability.

But Meryl Streep is so good. I really liked her performance in the airport when she was slightly bewildered by her flight delay. She chews the scenery but it's plausible.

Yet, Dianne Wiest steals the episode a little when she unexpectedly joins the group and completely fails to maintain a poker face when talking to Zellwegger.

Only Murders in the Buildingis on Disney+ and/or Hulu.

Nun's the Word

What do you get for the Devil who has everything? The final film of Hammer Studios (before their relaunch decades later) was 1976's To the Devil a Daughter. Its remarkable cast includes a late career Richard Widmark, Nastassja Kinski in her first role, Denholm Elliott, and Christopher Lee. This month, Criterion features the film on a Nunsploitation playlist but I wouldn't call it a Nunsploitation movie as much as a Satanic possession movie in which one character happens to sort of be a nun. It's not an especially bad movie if you can't watch Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist.

I find my opinion of the film has not changed since I reviewed it in 2012. I didn't find it as confusing this time since I remembered the basic plot from my previous viewing but the film's tendency not to let the viewer in on character motives still has the effect of nullifying the suspense.

I didn't remark last time on how much I like the Satanic cult's Ashtaroth crucifix.

It looks silly, yes, but I don't think that was an accident. It's a parody of a proper crucifix. There is something fundamentally satanic about parody. It's a mockery.

It is kind of disappointing having Ashtaroth without it being Astarte, the apocryphal Queen of Heaven. That would've given the film an interesting spin.

Lee and Elliott give the best performances in the film. Widmark seems a bit checked out. Kinski was very young and not the actress she would become in a few years but she comes across as very sweet and of course very pretty.

Still Vigilant

I'm still playing that Vigilant mod for Skyrim. It's vast, it's like a whole other game. I'm amazed how many assets one modder made. The mod's plot is divided into acts, I'm now in the third which is a completely separate hellscape from the main game. It's Coldharbour, a realm that is part of the game lore. It's the realm of Molag Bal, the Elder Scrolls' version of Satan. Well, one of several as there's a pantheon of both good and evil gods. The creator of the Vigilant mod, Vicn, shows a lot of fidelity to the established lore of the series, though many reviewers say the Coldharbour section is strongly reminiscent of Dark Souls.

As I mentioned before, the modder is Japanese and I found myself thinking a lot of Final Fantasy games. It has a similar rambling plot with lots and lots of flashbacks. It occurs to me memory tends to be a more prominent topic in Japanese fantasy fiction than it tends to be in western fantasy. Much of Kimetsu no Yaiba is flashbacks, more than necessary to provide backstories and motivations for the characters. There's a clear pleasure taken in dwelling in memory for a long time. In Vigilant's Coldharbour, you encounter a series of damned knights whose memories of misdeeds you can enter and alter to absolve them. Though whether time is actually altered isn't clear.

The only area in which the modder seems not to have made everything himself is in animations. Many of the monsters reuse animations from vanilla Skyrim enemies--the giant scorpions are clearly using the animations of the vanilla game's giant spiders and so on. But otherwise, it's a herculean effort for one modder. There seems to be no end of the custom made armours and weapons I encounter, all of exceptional quality which is boosted by a texture upgrade mod from another modder. The dungeon maps are pretty good, too, though they tend to feature puzzles, which I tend not to like. Video game puzzles often seem more about trying to figure out the thought process of their creators than actually trying to overcome an obstacle in a realistic manner. For example, sometimes it takes some time for me to figure out that I'm suppose to find some special switch or key rather than simply going around a certain obstacle. I've found that by doing the latter I've gotten to areas of Coldharbour before I'm meant to, which makes things more confusing.

I'm basically using the same character I was using last time I wrote about this mod though technically she died at the end of an effectively creepy haunted house act. At the end of that plotline, you get the choice to either accept Molag Bal's assistance or martyr yourself. I chose martyrdom which sends you back to the Vigilant headquarters and opens the custom character menu--the implication being that you're now a different person following in the footsteps of your previous character. I thought this was a bold choice though the player really has to make an effort to go along with it because you still have all the same gear in your inventory, all the same quests. I decided to play along and left all my gear in a trunk and changed my character's face and name. Most of my followers are gone and I don't know if I'll ever get them back (except for two followers connected to vanilla quests, which highlights a flaw in the implementation of this idea).

If you want to see the mod in all its splendour without playing it yourself, there are several YouTubers with playthroughs. I recommend the one below though I haven't watched it all the way through myself because I don't want spoilers.

X Sonnet 1963

The rusty metal skins patrol the waste.
Undulled are blades they drag across the dust.
The skulls within now lack both smell and taste.
Above there looms a ghastly bovine bust.
A bull beholds a petty, pricking creep.
But one of many hordes who grind the stones.
They carry ore to fill the devil's keep.
Let none now envy gold that laces bones.
Arrayed about the wall are archers primed.
No respite halts their day and nightly watch.
A wayward mortal up the mountain climbed.
A withered sun becomes a bloody blotch.
The grinning guard await your errant sword.
The rotting ship departs with fools aboard.

Diane Keaton

Diane Keaton has died at 79 years of age. One of the most distinctive qualities of this great actress' performances was their vivacity, their sense of effortless nature. She and Laura Dern, I would say, are the two actresses in the history of cinema whose ability to deliver conversational dialogue best and consistently captures a sense of someone genuinely fumbling through words. Despite undoubtedly memorising and rehearsing her lines, Keaton always seemed fresh and real.

She's best known for her work in the Godfather movies as well as a string of Woody Allen's greatest films, most notably as the title character in what's regarded by many as his best film, Annie Hall. Keaton's personality and fashion sense are well known to have influenced the character we see on screen so she is in more than the usual ways (for an actress) responsible for making it a great film.

In her late career, she shifted to solid and appreciable supporting roles in family drama and comedy movies like the Father of the Bride films and The Family Stone. She was also occasionally a director and she directed an episode of my favourite TV series, Twin Peaks, a decent episode in the popularly disliked latter half of the second season.

It's hard to believe an actress of such natural vivacity could be dead. Her movies will certainly live as long as movies do.

The Motives of Our Attending Spirit

Well, here's some more concrete evidence AI isn't perfect. I was watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull again this week and I felt sure the John Milton quote used in the movie was from Comus, a masque Milton wrote in 1634. I decided to double check and googled "Milton Quote in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and the AI gave me this response:

The AI incorrectly states that the quote comes from Paradise Lost. It does not, it comes from Comus, from a soliloquy by the "Attending Spirit", a mysterious omniscient being whose benevolence and identity are fodder for stimulating debate. As when I pointed out the interpretation Google's AI gave to Ian McShane's accent in Pirates of the Caribbean, I find this a strange mistake for an AI to make. I mean, it seems much more like something I'd expect from human error. Paradise Lost is Milton's most famous work so I can see your average human assuming that's where the quote came from. Why should an AI have such a prejudice? I can find the quote in Comus by going to Project Gutenberg and hitting "control F". Surely AI should be able to go through such a process even faster. Wouldn't it be more difficult for it to amalgamate the common assumptions about Milton, digest them, and regurgitate them to provide something that simulates a human error? I guess there is such a thing as trying too hard.

So it seems the AI is basically a pool of internet content with weak discernment for the relative integrity of its sources. Perhaps it's no more sinister than that, though that's plenty sinister.

One of the things that keep me coming back to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull despite its flaws is the interrogation scene where Cate Blanchett's Soviet character talks about her ambition to harness psychic power from the crystal skulls for mind control, "A mind weapon. A new frontier of psychic warfare. That was Stalin's dream." Apparently Stalin really was interested in psychic ability. Blanchett's lines about forcing Americans to believe the Soviet version of history reminds me of Putin's long history lecture in his infamous interview with Tucker Carlsen. With AI spreading misinformation, maybe it'll wind up to be a real crystal skull. If it hasn't already.

How They Cover Their Hands Now

I've been noticing a lot of sock puppet videos on YouTube lately, floating to the top of my particular algorithm soup. For those who don't know, in internet lingo a "sock puppet" is, according to Wikipedia, "a false online identity used for deceptive purposes . . . Sock puppets include online identities created to praise, defend, or support a person or organization, to manipulate public opinion, or to circumvent restrictions such as viewing a social media account that a user is blocked from." Mostly I've been seeing Japanese sock puppets aimed at foreigners, particularly pro-Sanseito sock puppets, like this guy called Shohei Kondo who has a lot of videos about video games and dating that casually slip in messages about how actually Sanseito isn't as crazy as its reputation suggests and they just want what's best for everyone, etc.

Yesterday I came across this guy called Evan Edinger whom I can't say for sure is a sock puppet but his videos somehow generate over a million views despite being extremely bland. The video I watched part of (and linked to) begins with him explaining how he, as an American, grew up in an environment where guns were a fundamental part of life and Britain introduced him to this novel idea that maybe the average person doesn't need to own a gun. His voice and cadence sound so fake (not A.I. fake just phony shill kind of fake) that I assumed he was a sock puppet before I saw his regular view counts. Could so many people really be interested in a sock puppet's content? Maybe he's just a really good sock puppet. So far I'm not seeing it but I never understood Dancing with the Stars either. Anyway, speaking as an American myself, I never experienced that feeling of having to own a gun and I don't know if anyone I knew did. Even people I knew who owned guns gave me the impression that it was their own particular predilection rather than an omnipresent need everyone in the social group feels to own a gun. I'm sure there are people like that but the YouTuber's description of it as just an every day fact of every American's life is ridiculous and feels like anti-American propaganda.

This is all, of course, why I've always said fiction is superior to non-fiction. Non-fiction, by its nature, asserts truth as its province and implicitly sets itself against that metric. Fiction is just ideas with no pretense at being otherwise.

Now that it's starting to feel like autumn I've been listening to more Elvis Costello lately. I don't know why exactly but Elvis Costello is associated with autumn for me.

Just Because X Doesn't Mark a Spot Doesn't Mean It's Irrelevant

Scully and Mulder find their investigation frustrated by lies and surveillance devices in a February 1994 episode of The X-Files called "E.B.E" ("extraterrestrial biological entity", which doesn't roll off the tongue like simply "E.T."). I like how this episode lays a groundwork of uncertainty for everything else.

For one thing, Mulder finds out there's a limit to how far he can trust his mysterious "Deep Throat" source, who in this episode lies and even deliberately gives Mulder false evidence of a U.F.O. in an effort to manipulate him. Meanwhile, Scully finds a listening device hidden in her pen. That's gotta be a small device to fit in a pen but not at all far fetched. Can you imagine how small cameras and listening devices can be now? Ask someone from a country like South Korea or Japan where voyeurism is at epidemic levels.

Back in the U.S. in the '90s, though, surveillance was something the government used against pesky FBI agents. Mulder tears apart his apartment looking for hidden bugs, finally finding one in a power outlet. He Scully then split up and carefully meet up at a convenience store in another state before embarking on their plan to follow a freight truck that may be carrying a crashed alien ship. But whoever's manipulating Mulder is using his own desire to find aliens against him, a plot device I really liked.

This is also the episode that introduces the Lone Gunmen, those lovable crackpots.

It occurs to me that there's been a massive shift in how Americans commonly regard conspiracy theories and exploring ideas of government deception. Now it's Trump's White House staging bogus inquiries into classified U.F.O. intelligence and it all seems like a sad pantomime. Or maybe they took a page from the shadowy characters who sought to use Mulder against himself. Scully has a nice line in the episode, "The truth is out there. But so are lies."

The X-Files is available on Disney+ in Japan.

Only Trophies in the Building

On last night's Only Murders in the Building, the team confronted the three billionaires in a wonderful faux-17th century manor house.

I want to live in this place so bad. It's better than Major Clive Wynne-Candy's house. All those creepy hunting trophies! The weird tusk table!

It was basically a funny episode, too. Oliver wanders off in the woods and Loretta (unseen in this episode) calls in a "silver alert". This paired well with all the lavender Oliver wears in this episode.

It was funny when Charles and Mabel had to answer Broadway trivia questions with Oliver absent. Do these kinds of life or death situations ever actually occur?

Only Murders in the Building is available on Disney+.

That Old Slasher Magic

A masked man goes around killing people and only one young woman seems to be taking the disappearances seriously. 2004's Toolbox Murders feels like a throwback to slasher movies from twenty to thirty years earlier so it's appropriate that it's directed by one of the masters of that period, Tobe Hooper. It's certainly refreshing.

I found myself thinking of Ginger Rogers' criticism of Saturday Night Fever, that the young people think "they can dance with their faces." Where she and Fred Astaire showed their dancing prowess with full frame long takes, musicals of the '70s and '80s preferred to conjure energy with editing and composition. Similarly, one of the most memorable parts of Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the first attack from Leatherface, when a shot that began of a woman standing at a door transforms when he rushes out to grab her. A typical modern slasher would feel compelled to cut quickly between Dutch angles. Somehow Hooper was better able to convey a sense of watching a real nutcase spring from the shadows and inflict gruesome injury.

Toobox Murders is a remake of a '70s movie not directed by Hooper though apparently it shares nothing much in common with its predecessor's plot. In this one, Angela Bettis plays Nell, a young, recently married woman who's moved into a haunted Hollywood apartment building with her husband. When odd absences start to occur, no-one believes her when she insists something weird is happening.

So it's a slasher film with elements of supernatural horror, though it may just be insanity believing it's supernatural. It's good and creepy anyway. Juliet Landau is also in the movie all too briefly.

Toolbox Murders is available on The Criterion Channel.

A May Dismember Romance

A young woman with a lazy eye has a horrific experience with first love in 2002's May. There's also a creepy doll and many references to Frankenstein but this film mostly put me in mind of Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Like that film, it's anchored by an exceptional performance from its lead actress, in this case Angela Bettis.

The doll works as a metaphor for the young woman, May's, sexual repression. Other kids won't talk to her, we see in flashbacks to May's childhood, so her mother gives her the doll, Susie, in compensation. However, she's instructed to keep the doll in its glass case and not to remove it under any circumstances. As May starts to crack up over the course of the film, cracks start to appear in the glass case.

She works as a veterinary assistant at an animal hospital where the secretary, Polly (Anna Faris), doesn't disguise her lusting for May. But May's fixated on her neighbour, Adam (Jeremy Sisto), whose hands she considers beautiful.

Like Repulsion, May does a good job blurring the line between what might be May's derangement and what might be her bad luck in meeting so many assholes. Adam's character is a slightly implausible form of jerk who makes gory, independent horror movies but completely backs out of a relationship with May when she bites his lip during foreplay.

Bettis' performance is a little more over the top than Catherine Deneuve's in Repulsion and I'd say Polanski's is undeniably a superior film. But May is certainly a pleasure.

May is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Road to Space

A young woman finds her deceased husband apparently back from the dead but with the personality of an alien in John Carpenter's 1984 film Starman. Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen give earnest, focused performances that compel similar focus from the viewer. It's a lovely romance, too.

This is one of Carpenter's lone, oddball man against the world movies, like They Live and Escape from New York. Bridges' alien visitor is certainly the most mild-mannered of the lot. Bridges plays the character with a mechanical, clicking cadence but his natural warmth can't help but come through, giving the character a nice nuance.

Karen Allen holds on tight to every line and Carpenter gives her copious closeups, making use of those massive, communicative eyes of hers. I like how she never for a moment believes the alien is her husband. Watching the two fumble their way through odd but undeniable chemistry is really charming. It's also a pleasant road movie as their journey from Denver to Arizona gives a nice context. Carpenter compared it to It Happened One Night, another romantic road movie, though Bridges and Allen aren't nearly as fractious as Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.

Starman is available this month on The Criterion Channel as part of a playlist of John Carpenter movies.

X Sonnet 1963

A half a line was cut from cookie luck.
Remember spuds when singing songs of love.
Potatoes mashed or stewed could woo a buck.
A patron courts a waitress hand and glove.
Entire scrolls of jokes were rolling out.
The comic court was steps from stately elks.
The forest here is choked with faerie clout.
The instrument at hand was Lawrence Welk's.
The scent of garlic bread pervades the air.
Preserving such was past the ken of man.
The tasty bread would sate an angry bear.
But people still from local grizzlies ran.
The loss of leaves has marked the fall of grace.
Abandoned books have robbed the human space.

Robot Woes

I watched 1987's RoboCop over the course of the week. I kept falling asleep during it. Again, that's just a sign of what a sleepy fellow I've become in my 40s, not a reflection on the film's quality. I'd seen it before, of course, but when I was a kid. I found the two parts I remembered best remain my favourite parts of the film; ED-209 coming down the stairs, and one of the thugs falling apart when his body's exposed to some kind of toxic waste.

The animation on ED-209 was worthy of Ray Harryhausen (but it was actually Craig Davies). You can sense it thinking as it stands at the top of the stairs, weighing the wisdom of actually pursuing RoboCop down the stairs. One can't help but interpret it as hubris when it makes the fatal decision to go ahead.

The thug melting in the big action sequence at the end is one of those random details that effectively push an action sequence to another level. I remember on the Godfather Part II commentary or in an interview, Francis Ford Coppola remarking on the scene where Vito kills that crime boss and a light bulb just happens to break. Having some random but plausible surprise in your action sequence really breathes life into it. The melting man in RoboCop adds to a sense of an untethered nightmare symphony. I love it.

The RoboCop movies are currently available on Amazon Prime in Japan.

Dagon and Dagoth

On Wednesday, walking to and from work, I listened to The Shadow Over Innsmouth read by Dagoth Ur. It seemed an appropriate enough way to begin October. Dagoth Ur is the villain with a distinctive voice from the 2002 Elder Scrolls game Morrowind. Someone doing an impression of the voice has been uploading recordings of him saying or reading various things, including a number of HP Lovecraft texts in their entirety. It was funny at first but now I seem to be enjoying it unironically. Dagoth Ur, as a reader, hits a nice medium between performance and straightforward oratory. I like how he gives the colloquial speech of Zadok just a little bit of an accent instead of trying to extrapolate Lovecraft's theoretical, ancient New England dialect.

One of the obvious reasons The Shadow Over Innsmouth hasn't had a film adaptation that captures the novella's power is Lovecraft's ability to conjure mood through suggestion. The best example being the people of Innsmouth and their famous "Innsmouthian look".

He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm.

It would be difficult to show this in film without going too extreme or too subtle. The human mind has a powerful capacity to quickly rationalise the bizarre in real life but is less inclined to do so when watching a film. In prose, the reader can imagine the Innsmouthian look within his or her own conceptions of plausibility, within the realm in which one might reasonably expect a community of human/fish monster hybrids to live relatively undetected in a seaside American town for more than a century. That line is going to be different for everyone so it would be difficult to capture in film in a way that's as satisfying as Lovecraft captured it in prose.

Only Pop Stars in the Building

Meryl Streep returns in this week's new Only Murders in the Building. She and Martin Short continue to have great chemistry though I found her unexpected bonding with Dianne Wiest over an opera stage dagger a little more interesting.

Meanwhile, Mabel's conflict with her former friend and current pop star Althea comes to a head. Althea's fictional popular song sounds suspiciously similar to Sabrina Carpenter to me and I wonder if there's some real life cattiness at play from real life pop star Selena Gomez, who plays Mabel, aimed at Carpenter.

Charles's trouble in this episode revolves around a dating app. Mabel upbraids him for wearing an earring in a scene that really made them seem like a married couple.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Disney+ in Japan and on Hulu elsewhere.

Enjoy Something Fake

This seems to be the only official video on YouTube of the AI actress, Tilly Norwood. There are more short clips on her instagram. But Norwood isn't the only artificial feature of the above video; everyone you see in the video is AI generated. It's written by AI and I assume the voices are AI generated as well. I'm trying to pick out the patterns that indicate AI writing and one thing I can see is that it's very dreamlike. It's like a dream in which everything makes sense while you're in it but if think for a moment you realise things don't add up. For example, when Norwood, in the video, apparently on a red carpet, says, "Three seasons and a podcast." Three seasons of what? What podcast is she talking about? The company behind the video and Norwood have said nothing about a podcast or series.

Naturally, SAG-AFTRA is on its ear about Norwood. I don't foresee AI performers replacing real ones in the near future but I can imagine them becoming a phenomenon unto themselves. Virtual YouTubers are popular throughout Asia and those are real people using artificial images, essentially like puppets. I can easily imagine totally artificial YouTubers cornering a market.

Yet the writing feels disconnected. Like a lot of people, I've been wondering if Disney has been sneaking AI writing into their productions. I was watching Alien: Earth last night, the fourth episode, and there was a decent scene in which Wendy, the protagonist, is in an operating room and we find out she can hear and repeat the language of the aliens. It's basically a reworking of an idea from Alien: Resurrection but it's not so bad. But it's followed by a scene between her and her brother which strongly reminded me of Ahsoka. The performers spend an inordinate amount of time delivering peculiarly flat dialogue. Wendy asks her brother where he was while she was in the hospital and he assures her that he would have come if he'd known where she was. Is there a reason she'd suspect he wouldn't? Is there a reason we linger on him assuring her? It seems like no. Nothing here is to introduce character nuance or depth but to fill time in a sort of theoretical way, like something or someone is focused more on convincingly creating an actual television scene than on creating or expressing something interesting. I'm not sure if this is Disney employing AI or if the screenwriters actually wrote a few interesting scenes and then just had some software fill in the gaps. Or maybe it's just good old fashioned bad writing.

Let's imagine Tilly Norwood becomes a sensation. I think conversation will quickly become about ethical considerations. It would be possible to depict Norwood doing or saying things no human actress would do. The video above even already has a joke about ignoring consent. I certainly don't think Particle6 is going to be able to stop the creation of unauthorised Tilly Norwood porn. I wonder if the conversation will shift to focus on what people compulsively watch. To what new depths of depravity will AI take us?

The Implied Tormentor

The subjective and arbitrary nature of censorship becomes apparent when one looks at media from the past or other cultures that faced it. 1977's The Devil Probably (Le Diable probablement) was banned in France for viewers under eighteen years of age. This Robert Bresson film of beautiful cinematography and non-professional actors solemnly discussing environmental disaster, religious schism, and the nature of love in their moody love triangle was somehow seen as more threatening to youth than the many celebrated tragic and/or erotic melodramas of the country. People were evidently concerned the film would inspire young people to commit suicide.

It begins with a newspaper headline informing us the young protagonist, Charles (Antoine Monnier), committed suicide. This is followed by another newspaper that claims he was murdered. From there, the film cuts to a few months earlier and we find Charles among a group of attractive, disaffected youth with a penchant for wearing suede jackets while solemnly watching footage of baby seals being clubbed. I don't think the irony in the choice of wardrobe was intentional but it's worth noting the horrific reality in the environmental disasters Bresson depicts in the film.

With these screenings as a recurrent tangent throughout the film, the characters also gloomily discuss the dynamics of their non-traditional romantic relationships as well as the moral fibre of Catholicism versus Protestantism. Something seems to be going wrong everywhere, something fundamental, the characters muse on the bus. A man in a nearby seat overhears them and, when asked who or what is responsible for all this, he gives the film its title, "The Devil, probably." In this we get a figure of ultimate menace along with the perhaps more menacing observation that the truth is not and cannot be known.

Wikipedia has this quote from Bresson:

What impelled me to make this film is the mess we have made of everything. This mass civilisation in which the individual will soon no longer exist. This demented tampering with things. This immense demolition job in which we shall kill ourselves by trying to go on living. This incredible indifference shown by people, except for some of today’s youth who see things more clearly.

It's worth noting this statement seems as fitting to-day as it may have seemed in 1977 or would likely have seemed in 1877 or many other times in history.

Bresson's preference to cast non-professional actors, following in the Neorealist tradition, sometimes yields performances of uniquely raw emotion. Here, it gives us something cold and remote. The characters are more like subjects of paintings than of a film, rendered as they are often silent and still in the gorgeous lighting, particularly in the restored edition on the Criterion Channel (which, sorry, is leaving the service at the end of the month). The horror of this civilisation's decline is emphasised by the ephemeral beauty of humanity.

The Familiar Alien

I finally started watching Alien: Earth, the new series set in the universe of the Alien franchise. I'm kind of surprised by how bland the first couple episodes are, given the kind of talk I've heard about the show. I assume the show must improve later, at least I hope so.

Some have been calling it Andor for the Alien franchise. It does feature an actor from Andor, Alex Lawther, who played the tech guy who wrote a manifesto in the heist arc in Andor season one. I saw yesterday that Andor star Denise Gough got a role on the otherwise unpromising new Narnia movie from Greta Gerwig. So Andor seems to be having the Game of Thrones effect in which actors from the series steadily appear in other projects for years afterwards. We still live in a post-GoT world as far as casting goes. I just finished watching Sandman which had at least two GoT actors.

The primary protagonist of Alien: Earth seems to be Wendy (Sydney Chandler), who's a young woman implanted with the brain of a child who'd been dying. So we get some dialogue about how she thinks it's weird to have breasts now. How can we go back to TNG Lal when we've had Pretty Things' Emma Stone? Anyway, Wendy is among a group of "hybrids", the brains of kids with terminal illnesses transferred into adult bodies with super strength and reflexes. The child in adult body idea has been explored in many other science fiction and fantasy media, this example has yet to distinguish itself.

The other side of the show is a very faithful recreation of the Nostromo interiors, though the ship is not the Nostromo, just another of the same model. We get another crew eating a meal around a table after cryosleep. I know they were going for the nostalgia but mostly what it does is invite an unflattering (I know that word has fallen "spectacularly" out of favour but I'll use it anyway) comparison. It's like a thought experiment--what if Ridley Scott had been fired at some point in Alien's pre-production and a hack studio director had been brought in? It's Alien for ADHD. The pacing is faster, the dialogue doesn't overlap as much, there's no effort to make the crew especially realistic. The "space trucker" vibe is replaced by the usual "office worker" vibe. But maybe that's just a difference between something made in the 1970s versus something made in the 2020s.

So far, I'd say it's not so much the Andor of the Alien franchise but the Ahsoka. Okay, that's too harsh. Maybe the Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Alien: Earth is available on Disney+ in Japan.

Mouse Hand

I was just looking at the Japanese Wikipedia page for Mickey Mouse. I'm fascinated by the profile section which differs significantly from the English version. The makers of the Japanese version evidently felt compelled to describe Mickey's body parts and justify the discrepancy between Mickey's hands and the paws of mice.

A picture of a rat is used to illustrate--the Japanese don't generally distinguish between rats and mice. Both are called "nezumi" despite the fact that they are different species. Of course, English also makes distinctions that don't really exist between animals such as ravens and crows and doves and pigeons.

The Wikipedia entry goes on to explain that since the forepaws of mice are "grotesque" (the English loan word is used) Mickey's hands appear human.

I wonder if anyone had a nightmare about Mickey with true mouse hands.

X Sonnet 1962

Reviving brains renewed the mission goal.
Now many pumpkins pile over land.
A team of bats harass a tricking foal.
Some children rove and raise a rude demand.
You see the bodies playing cut and slice.
Betwixt the webs of mist are spider ghosts.
Your coffee drinks a season's famous spice.
Above the blaze, a captive slowly roasts.
A hill of beans could fill a giant cup.
A percolating thought contains a fish.
The time arrives for ghouls to roughly sup.
A tomb becomes a big communal dish.
The famous feast begins and ends with death.
A glowing face commenced to draw a breath.

Final Garments

This season of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt concluded with two episodes this week. The first contained two stories, the second of them being the first part in a four part narrative that concluded in the subsequent episode. They dispensed with most of their movie references in the first story, which is primarily a Nightmare Before Christmas parody with throwaway references to Gremlins, Edward Scissorhands, and a mashup of Cast Away and Terminal. I know from experience, by the way, junior high school students in Japan generally don't know who Tom Hanks is. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I'd say Panty and Stocking is made exclusively with American audiences in mind. Nightmare Before Christmas and Gremlins, oddly enough, both have cultural currency in Japan.

In this parody, one of the demon sisters replaces Santa for the holiday as the jolly old elf claims to have worn out his hips having marathon sex with Panty. I wish the show had shown what the demon sister then gives to all the world's children but I suppose at that point it would be less of a parody and more of a remake of Nightmare Before Christmas.

The long four parter following this is framed as a Star Wars parody with its titles but there's nothing especially Star Wars about the stories. Panty and Stocking are unexpectedly recalled to heaven by God. Previously, God had been implied to be the live action legs of a woman in lingerie protruding from the clouds. This figure is revealed to be God's wife, Queen Silk, who wears a creepy metal mask, and God Himself is more properly known as Luniere, King of Gods. Oh, I loved it. Especially the design of God as a little old bald man with an enormous beard.

These episodes kind of reminded me of the end of Kill la Kill, another project masterminded by Imaishi Hiroyuki, and his most successful. I think Kill la Kill really evolved from Panty and Stocking in that both are stories are about girls who wear clothes that have or confer on them special powers. The conclusion of Kill la Kill is the most unsatisfying part of that series and Panty and Stocking's is similarly so. It's mainly characters screaming and things blowing up. It all feels a bit obligatory. But some of the action is good.

Panty and Stocking is available on Amazon Prime.

Five Years of the Murder Building

I finally got caught up on the new season of Only Murders in the Building. Every season seems to be a little better than the last. This one is focusing much more on comedy and less on pathos. The murder, this time, is of the doorman, Lester, who turns out to have been tied to an underground, mob-run, casino frequented by the three richest people in the world, played by Christoph Waltz, Renee Zellweger, and Logan Lerman. Each is pretty funny but I was surprised to find Zellweger's character the most effective, a thoroughly cold-hearted media guru named Camilla White.

It feels like Steve Martin has more to do this season. His character is having--I guess it wouldn't be a "mid-life crisis" since he's 80--I guess a late life crisis. This leads to him taking testosterone supplements. He has an amusing date with a mob widow played by Tea Leoni. I still feel like, deep down, the writers really want to pair him with Mabel, Selena Gomez's character. She's lost a lot of weight this season which kind of makes her seem older but I think the nearly fifty year age gap between the two of them is insurmountable. It's easy to forget when the three leads are written at the same maturity level.

Martin Short is good for a lot of gags this season. At least so far, there's no serious side to anyone's arc this time.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere.

Claudia Cardinale

One of the most beautiful actresses in the history of cinema, Claudia Cardinale, is dead at 87. She began appearing in small roles in Italian films in the late '50s before rising to stardom in the '60s with the roles she's best remembered for to-day. She appeared in 8 1/2, The Leopard, and The Pink Panther all in 1963. Audiences were treated to her remarkable beauty and steely performances. There was always something tenacious about her.

These qualities served her well in the role she's most celebrated for these days, the lead in 1968's Once Upon a Time in the West. Sergio Leone's most operatic Spaghetti Western, it stars Cardinale as a prostitute from New Orleans who heads to the dusty western plains hoping for a new life with a new husband only to find her brittle dream shattered by the cruel hand of a villain. It's from the point of view of this profoundly stranded woman that we witness the battle between Leone's distilled extremes of good and bad men, Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda.

She continued to get work throughout the 70s and 80s and appeared in Werner Herzog's legendary Fitzcarraldo in 1982. She was always an indelible asset to any film.

His Hellboy and Yours

I was saying the other day that "self-inserts", as they've come to be called, used to be cool in fiction. It was a variation of "write what you know"; write the protagonist as someone with formative experiences and/or opinions similar to your own. I revisited an example of how that philosophy once held sway over the weekend, 2004's Hellboy.

The first film adaptation of Mike Mignola's great Dark Horse comic, it was directed by Guillermo del Toro. Mignola and Del Toro held discussions about the creative direction of the film adaptation and Mignola felt that, as director, Del Toro ought to be free to express his own creative vision. The biggest change to the story Del Toro made was to introduce a romantic relationship between Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and Liz (Selma Blair). It was a kind of Beauty and the Beast story that he would explore again in his Oscar winning film The Shape of Water. It's not hard to see how this might be a personal story for Del Toro. At the time he made Hellboy, he was married to Lorenza Newton, an attractive young woman beside Del Toro, who grew up a nerd without good looks.

So the film has a lot of angst that's not present in the comic. Hellboy is self-conscious about his looks in comparison to the human, attractive Liz. The satisfying emotional arc of the story is in how both characters come to terms with their respective monstrous qualities and see how they're united by them. Some would say Shape of Water is the more mature film because being monstrous doesn't come with really useful superpowers. Hellboy may be a monster, but he's also really cool and admired as a mysterious and strange hero. But, hey, Del Toro's pretty cool and admired among filmmakers, so maybe that's as valid an aspect of the character.

The modern dislike of "self-insert" characters seems, like the scorn for people believing themselves to be "the main character of their own story," to come from a weakening grasp of what fiction can be. It's almost as though modern armchair critics are jealous of anything gratifying that writers take from their own work.

Which is not to say I think it invariably works. I certainly don't commend Vincent Gallo's unabashedly narcissistic films. But as with many other aspects of fiction, I would say writing about oneself, or using oneself as fodder for character building, will vary in quality depending on the honesty and courage of the individual writer.

Hellboy is available on Netflix.

Skyrim's Multiplying Multitudes

Here's my latest Skyrim character with a couple of followers. I'd been playing as an evil, magic using vampire again and decided to go the opposite route with this one. She's basically a Lawful Good paladin, a crusader against undead and demons. She belongs to a group called the Vigil of Stendarr, Stendarr being an Elder Scrolls god who hates undead and daedra (daedra being the Elder Scrolls version of demons). I wanted to play a character like this because I wanted to try one of the more famous quest mods called Vigilant.

That's a trailer for a mod of the mod. The original mod was from a Japanese creator so another modder got some voice actors together to make an English version. I kind of wanted to play it in Japanese but to switch languages would basically require a complete reinstall of the game and many of the other mods I use wouldn't work afterwards.

Vigilant's famous for being exceptionally grim but it doesn't begin that way. Your first quests when you join the Vigilants are to kill daedra that have been harassing people at various inns. One you encounter is even passed out drunk on the floor.

I also have a follower from another mod called Celestine who is also a Vigilant of Stendarr. The mod author gave her dialogue to make her compatible with the Vigilant mod. This is one of the things that keeps me endlessly fascinated with Skyrim, this new kind of collaborative storytelling that blurs the lines of the authorial voice. There's the line between the different mod authors and the vanilla game and there's also the creativity exercised in choosing which mods to employ. Look at this screenshot from my current playthrough:

In this one screenshot, you're seeing the effects of at least seventeen different mods. My character has a modded head and skin, the armour comes from another mod, the sword from another mod. All the people and the wolf on the lower left are modded followers and all of them, except the wolf, have appearance alterations and/or armour from separate mods. There's a mod to create more natural lighting, to upgrade all the textures, and another mod that adds trees to make the forests denser. I think the only unmodded element in this picture is the horse and possibly the bone shield. And that's just what's in the screenshot. Another player with a modded Skyrim wouldn't have this particular collection of mods so everyone has a unique experience reflective of choices they've made outside the game. There are even different mods with the same intent, like the lighting and texture mods.

Another mod I've been getting a kick out of lately is Jesters of Skyrim which adds jesters to all the courts in the game. I actually find them genuinely funny but the best part is all the awkward laughter.