The Fantastic Force Field Woman

Sue Storm, with help from the other members of the Fantastic Four, works tirelessly to fend off an attack from a gargantuan space alien in 2025's The Fantastic Four: First Steps. This latest attempt to adapt the Fantastic Four comic franchise to film doesn't seem to have done much better than previous versions. I think public appetite for stories about the characters has always been pretty low. The film also suffers from the blandness that has infected many of the recent MCU films but the cast is solid, particularly Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach.

The special effects for Moss-Bachrach's character, Ben Grimm, aka "The Thing", are some surprisingly weak computer generated animations. Moss-Bachrach, who'd already played a character in the MCU, memorably on the first season of Jon Bernthal's Punisher series, really is a talented actor and he makes up for the deficient special effects somewhat. His subplot involves a flirtation with Natasha Lyonne. Lyonne is one of the more refreshing rising stars of the past fifteen years and it's always nice to see her but she's oddly underused in this film. Maybe they're setting her up for a larger role later.

The most emotionally effective dialogue scenes are the tense encounters between Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn) and the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) which successfully combine anxious, adolescent chemistry with the pressing need to address a cosmic threat.

Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards creates a submissive and guilt-ridden character beside the calm wisdom and authority of Sue (Vanessa Kirby). Her power in this film is primarily creating forcefields while the ability to turn invisible is occasionally shown as fringe benefit for comedic effect. Overall, she's basically the same as the Wasp in the Ant-Man movies.

I've been watching X-Men'97 again recently and it's a shame Kevin Feige couldn't have learned from Beau DeMayo's decision, in his capacity as showrunner of X-Men'97, to directly adapt the comic books stories that made the characters popular in the first place. Thunderbolts was a better movie than the other two MCU movies this year, despite being the least financially successful. I can only hope Marvel learns the right lessons.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is now available on Disney+.

Diane Ladd

Diane Ladd died on Monday. She was 89. Mother of Laura Dern, Ladd was herself a prolific actress who worked with Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski but, of course, I remember her best for her roles for David Lynch, appearing alongside her daughter in Wild at Heart and Inland Empire. It's in Wild at Heart that she had, for me, her most memorable role as the impressively villainous Marietta, mother to Laura Dern's character, Lula. Consciously modelled on the Wicked Witch of the West, Ladd rose to the task of being tremendously creepy, aided in no small part by Lynch's sound design and composition.

Those gulps she takes from her martini have always been one of my favourite moments of unsettling mouth noises from Lynch's films.

Yet her character is not entirely unsympathetic as the audience is compelled to see from her distressed and bewildered perspective when she encounters the mystery of her boyfriend's disappearance.

She was also good in Inland Empire as a nosy talk show host and in her role as the fake Mrs. Mulray in Chinatown she certainly made an impression. Inland Empire is currently available on The Criterion Channel but sadly Wild at Heart remains Lynch's most elusive film, as far as availability on streaming goes.

Take Me to Your Manager

Sometimes I wonder how much of the apparent progress of AI is an illusion conjured by human regression. I've talked before about some of the inaccurate or oddly subjective responses I've gotten from Google's AI, such as misattributing the source of a John Milton quote or supplying oddly diplomatic opinions in place of factual responses. How often are such things taken as accurate responses by people who obviously don't know any different since they were googling the question in the first place? Is quality control even possible, since it would likely mean someone whose breadth of knowledge is comparable to a computer database?

I noticed recently that Google Translate isn't as good as it used to be. Google used to be better at translating English to Japanese than it was at translating Japanese to English since Japanese relies more on context. Yesterday I was checking the translation for a word for alien in Japanese, "宇宙人", which I've always heard pronounced as "uchuujin." But Google now insists it's pronounced "uchuubito". Except when I hit the "sound" option, in which case the AI voice pronounces it as "uchuujin". I'm guessing the sound option is still drawing from an old AI framework while the text is drawing from a new one.

Google's own AI overview in its search function apparently also disagrees with its choice of pronunciation.

When you try to translate "alien" from English to Japanese, the first option you get is just the English word "alien" written in Japanese characters, which seems suspiciously lazy.

Hopefully this won't impact interstellar diplomacy.

The Music Life

Yesterday I went to a three hour concert for the brass band of one of the junior high schools I currently work for here in Japan. It was special because it was the last concert for third year students in the band (junior high school is three years in Japan). Now they have to focus on studying and getting ready for high school. One of them I talked to said she doesn't want to go to high school and instead plans to immediately pursue a career as a musician (high school is not compulsory in Japan). I'd say she has a good shot, given how good this particular school's brass band is, but all the junior high school brass bands I've seen in Japan have been amazing.

I suppose I don't have much frame of reference since I can't remember paying much attention to my high school brass band and my junior high school didn't have one. But I always enjoy watching the band's planning, procedure, and practicing. Unfortunately in this town, it's more difficult to build a rapport with students than it was in my previous town since I tend to be assigned to schools for only two weeks at a time with occasional longer or shorter spells of one to four weeks. I go back to the same schools--I'm working in only three this year--but I miss how in my previous town I'd be with the same school for four or five months at a time. This made it easier to get a sense of where the students are in their studies and decide what material to use or develop.

Yesterday's concert also featured students from another school I haven't worked at and I was delighted when they performed "Brazil", the same song featured in Terry Gilliam's great film of the same title. Though considering how that film skewers bureaucracy, it may be a little too close to home for Japan. But the students are of course unaware of that association. The students from the school I work at played a medley of Deep Purple songs, including "Smoke on the Water". I wonder how it got in their repertoire. I've seen their archive of music sheets, some of it looks very old. At one point someone must have been a rock fan, or maybe it was an inherited repertoire from some other source.

I discovered to-day Deep Purple released an official music video for "Smoke on the Water" just last year, much like Talking Heads only recently made a video for "Psycho Killer". I dig this trend.

X Sonnet 1966

As questions raised regarding hope arose,
We found a book describing black despair.
The channel page was choked with buggy prose,
But seemed to show a dance from Fred Astaire.
The group recalled that Rogers followed suit,
With cherry syrup squibs she laced her shoes.
This was a fact to grief the girlish moot,
We know the secret sauce was blood and booze.
Arise, o floor of dancing digit tombs.
Your kindle now aglow with burning veins.
Above, a falling flock of ghosts resumes,
Their haunt above the bay of rusty chains.
No blame could chase the turkey 'cross a year.
So gather feathers, make a poultry bier.

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.