I'm three more episodes in on season three of Sandman, episodes that basically cover the Brief Lives graphic novel in which Dream and his sister, Delirium, personification of delirium, set out on a road trip to find their missing brother, Destruction, who abandoned his role at some point before the events of the series. So the show skipped over the Game of You graphic novel, which is not very surprising since Dream only briefly appears in it and it's odd for a conventional television series to leave out the main character for several episodes. So I guess producer David S. Goyer decided to make this more of a conventional series. Characters from Game of You were introduced in season one like they were being set up for an adaptation of the volume so maybe there was a change of plan when Neil Gaiman was forced out of the writers' room.
One character from A Game of You does sort of appear in these episodes, though; Wanda, played by Indya Moore, whom Time named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2019. I guess I fall outside their sphere of influence because I'd never heard of them but they give a good, charismatic performances as someone with a completely different appearance and personality than the Wanda of the comics. Actually, this Wanda replaces a character called Ruby who was Dream and Delirium's driver in the waking world. I don't know why they thought it was so important to crowbar Wanda into this story. If they'd left her out, they could've left the door open for an adaptation of Game of You somewhere down the line.
Actress Esme Creed-Miles plays Delirium as generally dim, which I guess works, although she doesn't seem to change much in the brief scene where her mind clears.
The two begin searching for Destruction by looking up his old friends, the second of whom is Ishtar, formerly a goddess of sex and war, now a dancer at a strip club. She's played by Amber Rose Revah who played Madani on Punisher. She gives a decent performance but I wish they'd gotten a professional dancer who could've done something really special for the dance sequence that concludes her story. The makers of the show did get someone who could sing to play Orpheus, an actor named Ruairi O'Connor, and his song to Hades and Persephone is genuinely effective.
I'm still mostly enjoying the series. The Sandman is available on Netflix.
A free-spirited young woman and her fussy friend go on a madcap road trip in 2024's Drive-Away Dolls. This was the first of Ethan Coen's "Lesbian B-Movie Trilogy", the second entry of which premiered over the past weekend in the U.S. but not here in Japan. So I settled for watching this one which is available on Amazon Prime here. It's good and Margaret Qualley is fantastic in it but, like the lesser Coen Brothers' comedies, its silliness overstays its welcome at some point.
Ethan Coen is half of the famous Coen Brothers, makers of the famed cinematic masterpieces Fargo, Miller's Crossing, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men. Some years ago, the duo split up after more than thirty years together to start directing their own projects. Among other things, this gives us an opportunity to gauge the particular tastes and talents of the brothers whose individual artistic voices were previously always combined into one.
The other brother, Joel Coen, has so far directed just one project, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth starring Denzel Washington in the title role. The vastly different tones of the two projects suggest Ethan may have generally been more responsible for the comedic aspects of their films and Joel for the more sombre. But who can say for sure? Maybe their time apart is to test territory each had previously always left to the other.
Ethan co-wrote Drive-Away Dolls with his wife, Tricia Cooke, and they pitched it originally as something in the vein of '70s exploitation films or John Waters movies. I don't find it has the accidental sincerity of the former or the rambling camp of the latter. It really feels, as I said, like one of the sillier Coen Brothers' comedies like Hail, Caesar or even The Hudsucker Proxy. However, the two main characters are well established.
Qualley plays Jamie, a southern gal who's recently broken up with her angry cop girlfriend, Sukie. Jamie decides to go on a road trip with Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), whom we meet fussily correcting her co-worker's grammar in their workplace of nondescript office cubicles. So the odd-couple set up is clear from the start as the two characters are almost polar opposites. Both are quite charming, particularly Qualley who reminds me here why I thought she was the most impressive of the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Manson girls. Qualley captures the hare-brained, easy-going energy of the Lou Costello half of her double act with Viswanathan. Viswanathan's Marian is sweetly uptight, staying up in their hotel room reading Henry James, only to be disturbed when Jamie returns drunk with some strange girl she'd picked up in a bar.
There's a plot involving murderous thugs and a corrupt senator that's mainly entertaining for another double act, the pair of thugs on the lesbians' tail, a grimly violent enforcer and a chatter-box, reminiscent of Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare's characters in Fargo. Both sides of the story are better in the first half of the film but I found myself restless with the silliness by the latter half. Your mileage may vary.
Drive-Away Dolls is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.
Sony and Netflix are currently drinking Disney's milkshake with this year's surprise hit, KPop Demon Hunters. This simultaneously fresh and derivative film delivers a former hallmark of Disney animation, pretty people falling in love, that Disney has turned its nose up at for about fifteen years. This new movie also presents an LGBTQ coming out allegory that resembles Disney's current fixation. And it beats Disney to the punch by becoming the first animated American film to successfully exploit trendy Korean culture. It's one of those things that seems like it should've been obvious in hindsight but nevertheless seemed to take everyone by surprise. Its songs are genuinely catchy with music by an ensemble of American talent with a score by Brazilian musician Marcelo Zarvos. The film's story is told with economy and sparkle.
The story centres on a K-pop group called Huntr/x (pronounced "Huntrix") comprised of three members: Rumi (Arden Cho), Zoey (Ji-young Yoo), and Mira (May Hong). Each character is voiced by an American actress of Korean heritage while their singing voices are provided by Ejae, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami, all Korean Americans. The characters lead a double life: known to their fans as idols, they secretly also engage in demon hunting as a part of a tradition among Korean singers stretching back generations. However, Rumi conceals a secret from her two compatriots; she is half demon, a fact betrayed by her distinctive body markings which she's obliged to conceal. The girls' mentor, Celine (Yunjin Kum), a singer from an '80s pop group, like Elsa's parents in Frozen instructed the girl to "conceal don't feel", commands Rumi to keep her half demon nature a secret in the hopes of one day obliterating the race of demons entirely and Rumi's markings along with them. Celine instructs all the girls to repress their emotions.
You can, I'm sure, already see the familiar pattern from Frozen, Turning Red, Encanto, Elemental, and numerous others as family pressures and/or traditions come in conflict with the main character's instinctive needs.
Meanwhile, another K-pop group rises to prominence, a boy band called Saja Boys who are secretly a group of demons. Despite her better judgement, Rumi finds herself falling for the group's handsome leader, Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop, singing voice provided by Andrew Choi). It's the kind of romance that really hasn't been spotlighted in a Disney movie since 2010's Tangled but used to be their stock and trade in the Disney Renaissance of the late '80s and '90s. Back then, Disney deliberately presented audiences with sexy characters like Jessica Rabbit, Ariel, Aladdin, Jasmine, and Pocahontas whose stories revolved at least partially around romance. After the success of KPop Demon Hunters and the failures of Elio, Wish, and Strange World, will Disney finally be willing to go back to that well? God, I hope so.
KPop Demon Hunters comes from Sony Pictures Imageworks, the same studio that made the Spiderverse movies. Those movies' idiosyncratic blend of cgi and imitation cell drawings also introduced audiences to a form of animation that seems to have a deliberately rough flow, as though every third frame were removed from the reel, giving the character movements a quality somewhat reminiscent of stop motion animation. KPop Demon Hunters uses the same effect without the conceptual premise of 3D blended with 2D. I'm not sure it helped the movie.
KPop Demon Hunters was directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans from a screenplay by Kang, Appelhans, Danya Jimenez, an Hannah McMechan. Three members of the K-pop group Twice perform one of the film's songs in the closing credits. I wonder if the K-pop industry will take note of this film's success and start making their own movies.
I keep thinking about how funny the New York cover with Neil Gaiman is (on the left). I felt compelled to make that version with the Master from Doctor Who last night. This is kind of separate from what I think of Neil Gaiman or any of his work but just my general compulsion to mock manipulation in media. They chose the picture showing he has bad posture, so they know how they want you to make up your mind.
I still think the evidence against him is extremely weak at best (I've gone over that already) but I do find it ominous that he's gone completely quiet this year and no-one seems willing to say anything in his defense, unless you count Tori Amos saying, "That's not the Neil I knew," when prompted in a Guardian interview. Amanda Palmer, his estranged wife who's also had allegations levelled at her, has spoken publicly about how difficult it's been for her to be cancelled and has posted photos of herself with an assemblage of celebrities to show that she does have friends and a support base. Gaiman seems to be going it alone and I have to suspect that's at least partially his choice. I wonder if he'd gotten tired of being a celebrity and in some small way saw this as an opportunity to get away from it all.
Anyway, I still think his Sandman series from the '90s is among the best comics I ever read. I remember Fridays, pay day, going straight to the mall and buying the next collected volume and devouring the whole thing. His work in subsequent years has been a mixed bag for me and I felt the American Gods television series and the second season of Good Omens even more so seemed like they came from writers who were deeply out of touch. How much of that is his fault, I don't know. But I have Netflix again for the moment and over the weekend I finally started watching season 2 of Netflix's Sandman adaptation.
It's close enough to the original, and the performances are good enough, that I find it engrossing. All the divergences from the source material I've been able to spot have degraded it. I've watched three episodes so far which cover the Season of Mist collection, the story in which Lucifer gives Morpheus the key to Hell and he has to decide whom to pass it on to. He, meanwhile, is on a quest to save a woman he condemned to Hell for 10,000 years. A lot of people complained about this aspect of the story, which was introduced in season one, but one of the things I really liked about the comics is that it felt like Gaiman was writing the Endless, his pantheon of anthropomorphised concepts; Dream, Desire, Destiny, Delerium, Destruction, Despair, and Death; as they were throughout history, not merely as they are to-day. So when Morpheus, Dream, condemned Nada, he was operating from an infant form of human morality that is unimaginably different and more primitive than we have to-day. That's how gods behaved back then. Think of the Old Testament or Zeus. But a failing of the show is its fundamental shying away from that. A flashback to Nada's country in the past was changed from an early agrarian culture to what one article called "steampunk"--though to me it looked more like simply a standard, cheap, high fantasy rig, one that doesn't differ much fundamentally from modern culture. Yes, it's probably impossible to imagine the past with complete accuracy but the attempt can be much more interesting than what the show manages to offer.
When Morpheus does finally reunite with her, she certainly doesn't seem anything like someone who's been tormented for 10,000 years and, in that scene, he does not seem like an anthropomorphised version of human dreams. He stumbles through his apology and she indignantly chastises him for his wording. The tone of the conversation is more like he bailed on the speakeasy when the cops were raiding it and she had to spend the night in jail. Think of articles or documentaries you've read or seen about people who spent two years locked in a basement or people who were held captive for ten years. They undergo profound physical and psychological changes. If you're not going to attempt to show something like that, there's no reason to introduce the concept of 10,000 years of torment in the first place.
Some viewers complained about Death being played by a black woman when she was a white woman in the comic. What bugged me is that the white actor plays Dream in all his dialogue with Nada. There are brief flashes of Dream as a black man, but they're so brief that they're confusing more than successful in conveying the idea from the comic that the Endless appear to be beings from whatever community the beholder belongs to. Which makes sense. When Nada sees Dream take the form of a human, she's never even seen a white man before. He's not really a man, he's a concept, so I always liked how he and his siblings were reflections of the people and animals they interacted with. Outside of those interactions, depictions of the Endless as goth white people frankly seemed to me an intentional reflection of the author.
But enough of the dialogue is close to the original that enjoyed it. The fun of reading the comic was in looking at it two ways at once, as both a fantasy story about these powerful characters in negotiation over a realm, but also as a complex metaphor for how these concepts were operating in the real world. I look forward to seeing the rest.
Sometimes I feel like writing art criticism is the ultimate quixotic endeavour. It's what I do here on my blog almost every day but the hazy line between subjectivity and objectivity seems to render it pointless sometimes. This past week I've been listening to a lot of YouTube critics while drawing pictures. They're not a fair sample if I'm talking about the fundamental quality of criticism itself, I guess. I ought to be be talking about Pauline Kael or William Empson.
Paul Schrader wrote this on his Facebook recently:
AI FILM CRITICISM. It should be fairly simple to program chatgpt to review a new film in the manner of, say, Kael, Sarris or Farber. Chatgpt would need simply watch the film, read every review written by the designated critic, see every film the designated critic reviewed, see every previous film made by every talent (directors to actors to prod designers) in the new film, watch every film in the new film's genre, read every review written about those films and read all other reviews of the new film. That should take chatgpt about thirty seconds.
Ironically, I think the real appeal, at least for me, of criticism is the feeling of shared experience. As seeing a movie in a theatre is a communal experience, reading or hearing criticism is another facet or manifestation of that experience. The balance between comments I agree with and comments I don't are like echo location to map my own feelings while at the same time carving an impression of the other human being. Which kind of describes group communication in general. It seems computers are on the verge of simulating this, the ultimate result being, I guess, that everyone can more successfully lead completely solitary lives.
It's not just the computer's image we mould, though, it's our own. ChatGPT won't notice if you have a pimple or if you're bald. It's Satanic self-creation. I say that as a fan of Milton's Satan. Of course, it's only the rich who will go extinct or upload themselves to a hard drive. There are still vast swaths of Earth's population who have no hope of meeting ChatGPT.
I'm aware a lot of people don't read criticism the way I do. The number of people who do so only to be told how to think are multiplying. So it's important to note how lousy YouTube criticism often is.
I was listening to a YouTube critic called Sheev Talks last week. He mostly talks about Star Wars stuff and is slightly unusual for the fact that he compares criticisms of other YouTube critics. I appreciated his retrospective on The Phantom Menace for how he discussed the ways in which The Phantom Menace is often discussed, singling out the influential Mr. Plinkett reviews on the RedLetterMedia channel and pointing out just how bad and sloppy they are, even though Sheev Talks agrees that the prequels are bad. Personally, as I said before about criticism being for me part of the communal experience, I appreciate RedLetterMedia more for the hosts' rapport and personality than for the insights of their reviews. The original Mr. Plinkett reviews seemed to be me to be partially a parody of criticism itself, of the idea of even spending hours and hours talking about movies that most people supposedly don't like. The channel's content has generally shifted away from parody into doing something more straight-forward.
Despite his tirade against the flaws of other YouTube critics, I find Sheev Talks' criticisms to be equally flawed, as when he says that the houses on Skeleton Crew too much resembled suburban '80s American houses and uses the '50s diner in Attack of the Clones for comparison, saying that the diner was different enough to fit comfortably within the Star Wars universe but the houses were not. The footage he himself provides seems to belie this comparison. I would actually say the diner is more of a diner than the suburban houses are suburban houses.
Despite calling the prequels bad, Sheev Talks says that he loves them and has watched them repeatedly since childhood (he seems to be in his 20s). In a sense, I can appreciate separating what I like from what I think is objectively good--Vertigo is my favourite movie but I think Citizen Kane is more deserving of the "Best Film of All Time" title. But surely how a movie makes us feel should be a vital part of the criticism. If he loves them, why doesn't he analyse himself to see why he loves them? Since art is often popular and effective despite how well they do or don't follow the conventional rules of storytelling, surely our feelings should factor into any judgement of a film's quality. Whatever problems a film may have, do we find it satisfying at the end of the day? Most filmmakers would say that's the only point.
I wonder if, as AI becomes more emotional, human beings are becoming more mathematical. Recently, the YouTube algorithm has been encouraging me to watch this conservative book critic called The Second Story. She has a video bemoaning the omnipresence of sex in women's fiction and lamenting the fact that people repeatedly pursue titillation. Watching her and noting her form fitting clothes and dead-eyed delivery, I couldn't help thinking of Nicki Brand in Videodrome.
Second Story's critiques seem entirely meant for people who are already willing to agree with her and she tends to offer no evidence for any argument she makes. I will give you some evidence for my argument, a particularly amusing one in which she argues with GRR Martin's assertion that JRR Tolkien created the modern fantasy genre.
Second Story goes on at length to say and reiterate that Tolkien, though talented, did nothing new or special. I would think the obvious thing for her to do would be to provide examples of fantasy fiction written before The Lord of the Rings that have qualities that are erroneously believed to have originated with Lord of the Rings. She does not. Meanwhile, anyone watching who knows anything about fantasy will know that, yes, certainly fantasy existed before The Hobbit in the works of Clark Ashton Smith or Lord Dunsany, but The Lord of the Rings nonetheless provided a basic blueprint that was followed by thousands of publications in the fantasy genre ever afterwards, all over the world. The numerous books published under the Dungeons and Dragons banner replicate the party of adventurers depicted in Lord of the Rings of different representatives of fantasy races and specialised professional classes. Martin's work replicates the epic war in a fantasy world that Lord of the Rings introduced. Elements of Tolkien's works certainly existed in a number of forerunners but Tolkien was undeniably the first to put them together into something of The Lord of the Rings' depth and scope, having something of the true war account of Wilfred Owen while also having the grandeur of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. And I have the sinking feeling ChatGPT would've seen this.
X Sonnet 1957
The young macaque is guarding station food.
You hunger now for bread about the cheese.
Around the dairy stuff the tasters brood.
As global honey holds the yankee bees.
Partake and run, the banquet threatens peace.
You have to wait and bid before you buy.
A hundred yen could buy the golden fleece.
And yet a billion fails to budge a fly.
You see the dappled sun become a coin.
The darker spots were never what they seemed.
As owls watch the agent's soggy groin.
The rest of us were watching Orson Bean.
A later hobbit bought his leaf for cheap.
Safari dwarves repaired to Thorin's jeep.
Apparently a belief has arisen over recent years that guys who like breasts are right wing and guys who like butts are left wing. I encountered a few comments referring to this during the Sydney Sweeney ad controversy. A few days ago I saw this article on The Guardian praising the resurgence of thong bikinis. This paragraph from the article is such a bald attempt at social engineering and manipulation that I find it sort of thrillingly revolting:
Gen Z, in particular, are less inclined to restrict themselves to clothes deemed to be “flattering” – a term that has fallen spectacularly out of favour. Thong bikinis, once the preserve of those who conformed to a particular body type, are now being manufactured in a more inclusive range of sizes and marketed more diversely.
Fallen "spectacularly" out of favour? Did someone throw it off building?
Yes, here's another left-winger from a tiny, wealthy percentage of the world's population implying that the vast majority of people are living under the delusion that some people are prettier than others. "Flattering" is so over, don't you know. Meanwhile the article itself only has pictures of fashion models in the bikinis.
As I wrote a few weeks ago in my post about Sydney Sweeney and beauty, I'm a liberal who's forced to watch while my side digs itself deeper and deeper into a rhetorical trench of a rarefied reality perception that makes us seem crazy enough that even someone like Trump seems preferable to many. Please, please stop doing this, folks. I mean, isn't dividing up a woman's body for political purposes inherently anti-feminist anyway?
Well, I'd be lying if I said I didn't see the logic. Large butts are more common than large breasts, making them vaguely more--what?--democratic? Natural butts are not markers of gender, a transwoman has a better chance of having a naturally curvy butt than large breasts. These guys tie large breasts to Nazi Germany and the stereotypical image of the Bavarian barmaid with a lowcut blouse.
However, when you're talking about sociological philosophies influencing impressions of body parts, dividing them up among factions seems to be putting the cart before the horse. People have bodies first and political opinions second. And, as I argued in my previous post, beauty is too mysterious, too full of contradictions, exceptions, and oddballs to be truly adaptable to any box. Beauty has power, but a lot of that power comes from the fact that no-one's really sure how to attain it. All you can really say is . . .
One of the biggest differences between this new season of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt and its first season is that there are women on the writing staff, which seems appropriate for a show about female sexual liberation (or tyranny). This week's new episode featured two for the two vignettes comprising it. Yamazaki Rino, who wrote the teleplay for the first half (from a story by Wakabayashi Hiromi), started as a production assistant before writing scripts in recent years for Darling in the Franxx and Spy Family among other titles. Ueno Kimiko, meanwhile, both conceived the story and wrote the teleplay for the second of the two vignettes in the new Panty and Stocking. Her credits include Little Witch Academia and multiple Crayon Shin-chan movies. Crayon Shin-chan, while not well known outside of Japan, is an enormously popular series for small children. So it's a little surprising seeing her writing for a series with such adult humour.
Ueno's vignette also features a series of references to American culture that I would estimate only a very tiny fraction of the Japanese population have heard of. The story's called "Longest Bitch Yard", a reference to the American film, The Longest Yard, which is about American football, a sport about which the Japanese have very limited awareness, at least based on my experience. In the episode, Panty and Stocking and the demon sisters are thrown in prison where they organise an American football team. Panty makes numerous references to Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday, another American football movie, which she admires for its depiction of locker room genitalia. The episode also features a lot of references to The Shawshank Redemption, which a number of Japanese people I've spoken to have heard of. Interestingly, there seems to be a high awareness of Stephen King works in Japan and both Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption are popular but many people don't seem to realise that King wrote Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. Stocking manages to smuggle in a spoon so they get the idea of digging their way out and hiding the hole with a poster. Instead of Rita Hayworth in Gilda, Panty puts up a poster of hunky guy starring in Cool Cock Luke, a reference to Paul Newman in Cold Hand Luke, which is a movie I think most of the show's Japanese and American viewers are unaware of.
But is the episode funny? Ueno's vignette is pretty good. Yamazaki's, called "Independence Dick", is less so. The title's a reference to the movie Independence Day but the plot has very little to do with it. It features Garterbelt and Geek Boy bonding with the new male angels in a place called Casino City where they go to gamble.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.
Milla Jovovich dons leather boots and a cocktail dress to fight a zombie infestation in 2002's Resident Evil or, as it's known in Japan, Biohazard because "evil" doesn't translate well to Japanese. I'd seen the beginning of the movie years ago and stopped because it seemed lousy but I stuck with it this time because I've become a more generous viewer. It's not so bad once you get used to the fact that it's really bad. By which I mean, if you look at it as watching someone else playing a video game rather than a good, visceral depiction of what it might be like if hordes of walking dead took over an underground lab, you can enjoy it. At least as much as you can enjoy watching someone else play a video game. A lot of people do, there're lots of playthrough videos on YouTube, after all.
Director Paul W.S. Anderson shoots the underground facility with consistent, even lighting and liberally employs some of the worst cgi in cinema history. It is, generally, a very uncinematic film. Season one Buffy the Vampire Slayer felt more cinematic. Resident Evil is all soundstages with basic lighting, camera angles, and compositions. But to Anderson's credit, he doesn't waste time. We get the lab outbreak after introducing a few characters to humanise the place, then Alice (Jovovich) wakes up in a shower with amnesia shortly before elite shock troops break in and take her and her possible amnesiac husband underground. Making her an amnesiac really helps capture the feeling of a video game because we all start video games usually knowing next to nothing about what we're jumping right into or about our own character.
It can be quite fun, again in a very video game kind of way. I enjoyed the security lasers that cut people up. The zombie dogs, though fake looking, were still a cool idea, presumably imported from the games which I never played. Jovovich gives a good performance and was game for the old pulp convention of heroines being scantily clad for progressively insensible reasons. She even gets a creatively cut-up hospital gown, a nod to her claim to fame from Fifth Element. The film also has young James Purefoy and Michelle Rodriguez ably performing in supporting roles.
Resident Evil/Biohazard is available on Amazon Prime in Japan.
A college boy becomes suicidal after being hazed for his femininity in 1956's Tea and Sympathy. Vincente Minnelli directs the film, based on a stage play, as a decadent melodrama with lush, gorgeous colour cinematography by John Alton.
Deborah Kerr stars as Laura, wife of an influential coach who also runs the boarding house where Tom lives. Tom is the boy bullied for the way he walks, the fact that he knows how to sew, and the fact that he's seen talking to women without intending to date any of them. Tom's played by John Kerr who is supposedly not related to Deborah Kerr but, I have to say, the two kind of look alike.
Dig those giant fish cake moulds. The cake moulds all seem to be the same colour as Deborah Kerr's hair. The film has a fairly consistent copper and blue palette. I wonder how much of it was intentional and how much was a limitation of Metrocolor.
The story's in line with a lot of other movies from the '50s about the breakdown of traditional family structure centred on a maladjusted boy like Rebel without a Cause and The Wild One. Like a lot of those movies, it suffers from characters delivering social commentary at each other as exposition but some of it is pretty insightful, as when Laura argues to Al (Darryl Hickman) that virtually anyone can be smeared by gossip for the most trivial, arbitrary physical or personality trait.
This leads to a slightly amusing scene of Al trying to help Tom adopt a more manly stride only to discover Al himself doesn't know exactly what's not manly about Tom's stride, that it was a phantom impression entirely conjured by the bigoted social group.
The original stage play directly referenced homosexuality but the film was not permitted to, despite coming a few years after the Hays Code was judged unconstitutional. It's hardly a surprise the studio was afraid of tackling the issue directly in the '50s.
I don't know exactly what the differences were between play and film but I suspect a character other than Tom turns out to be gay, which would really turn the story on its head.
Occasionally, Minnelli's desire to hit the high emotional notes leads only to awkwardness but for the most part the film's fairly satisfying. Deborah Kerr always gives a great performance though she may be a little over the top in some instances here.
Tea and Sympathy is available on The Criterion Channel until the end of the month.
A spacecraft embarks on a dangerous journey to Alpha Centauri in 1963's Ikarie XB-1. An eerie and influential science fiction film, it was based loosely on Stanislaw Lem's The Magellanic Cloud.
The crew are comprised of scientists, mathematicians, and technicians. A mathematician called Anthony (Frantisek Smolik) has a robot called Patrick who resembles Robbie the Robot slightly so this film was also influenced in turn by films that came before it. Forbidden Planet had some of the eeriness you find in this one but Ikarie XB-1's dark, black and white cinematography evokes something more of the coldness and emptiness of space, a feeling emphasised when encounters prove deadly.
There are two major encounters. First with a derelict Earth ship and then with a mysterious "dark star" that's only perceptible for how it obstructs the view of the normal star field. It's here that the film takes on a Lovecraftian quality that's appropriate for a truly alien environment.
Much of the story is focused on the sociological and psychological impact on a human community adapting to life on a spacecraft voyaging further and further from Earth. Director Jindrich Polak conjures tension really well, especially when one crewman goes mad and the others are forced to find ways to deal with him. There's also a nice bit about the psychological impact of time dilation as the characters muse on the fact that fifteen years will pass on Earth while the voyage seems to be only a matter of months to the crew. This story element isn't explored to its fullest potential as it is in Gunbuster or Interstellar but it's certainly an interesting point of anxiety for the characters.
Ikarie XB-1 is available on The Criterion Channel.
Terence Stamp has passed away at the age of 87. The actor is best known to-day for playing General Zod in Richard Donner's Superman movies and his performance was certainly what solidified the character's status as one of the most famous comic book villains of all time. His vampiric makeup and subzero demeanour give the impression of merciless, unshakable will.
His role in 1978's Superman and 1980's Superman II was by no means the beginning of his career. He had starring roles in films by William Wyler, Ken Loach, and Pier Paolo Pasolini throughout the '60s and '70s. In the 1980s, he transitioned gracefully into mostly supporting roles in films. He played the Chancellor in Star Wars: Episode I and fans of the Elder Scrolls video games remember him as one of the villains in Oblivion, which also featured Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean. Oblivion was re-released just this year with updated graphics so a whole new audience is being introduced to him again.
But his career as a lead didn't end after Superman. He had well-regarded lead performance in 1999's The Limey and 1994's Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. He was one of those actors whom I never looked for but was always happy to see.
For the past couple months, Criterion has had a playlist featuring movies with Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith's con artist character who appeared in a series of novels. I watched 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley last night, based on the first novel from 1955, which had already been adapted as Purple Noon with Alain Delon in 1960. The primary distinction of the 1999 version is that it makes the story's subtextual homoeroticism textual. It has kind of a "straightening out the slinky" effect, rendering the story less nuanced and making the character of Tom Ripley much simpler. It does have some terrific performances.
The film basically renders Tom's compulsion to become another man as entirely a symptom of sexual attraction, which is frankly less interesting than a guy who wants to swap places with another. But Matt Damon as Ripley and Jude Law as Dickie Greenleaf, the man whose life Ripley infiltrates, have fascinating chemistry and there's a lot of tension in scenes where Dickie is trying to suss out Ripley's true motives while also wrestling with his own hedonistic proclivities. Ripley's compulsion rendered as simply a sexual infatuation feels a little too commonplace to be the film's centrepiece, though. I have to say Purple Noon also had better clothes and was better shot. The murder of Freddie, Dickie's friend, was far more effective in Purple Noon, though I was impressed with how gory another murder was in the 1999 movie.
What a cast. Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. This was director Anthony Minghella spending the clout he'd attained from making The English Patient, a movie I was a fan of in high school and the reason I saw his Talented Mr. Ripley and even bought the soundtrack back in 1999. But I guess the movie didn't impress me so much because I didn't watch it again until this past week, I think. I'd kind of forgotten how much I'd loved that soundtrack, though. I think it's what ignited my love for jazz with its inclusion of tracks from Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. I also totally forgot that it has a really beautiful Sinead O'Connor track called "Lullaby for Cain".
X Sonnet 1956
The animal you know is never real.
A phantom fur enshrouds the happy beast.
You see, he takes from cans the chunky meal.
But ever plots to take a better feast.
The friendly pup will watch your wobbly arm.
Your trusted friend dissects your meaty thigh.
So far from thought that Fido ponders harm.
Within his very jaws you mayn't cry.
His seeming size belies a mountain ghost.
The infiltrator damned the friendly house.
You play the gentle human, gracious host.
He eyes tomato stains upon your blouse.
No safety here in friendly furry eyes.
Your mascot suit will choke your startled cries.
On a very special episode of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt this week, a pair of angelic boys come down from Heaven to spank the titular fallen angels and their demon sister housemates, culling half the population of the city in the process. It was impressive.
This week's primary pop cultural reference seems to be John Carpenter's They Live, a movie in which Roddy Piper finds a special pair of sunglasses that allow him to see a significant portion of the world's population are secretly sinister aliens who keep humanity enslaved with media and bureaucracy. In the new Panty and Stocking, the characters get similar glasses allowing them to see that many of the people in town are really ghosts of the variety they're charged by both Heaven and Hell to execute.
Normally, every episode is made up of three vignettes but this story takes up the whole twenty-two minute run time, similar to the first season episode which introduced the demon sisters. That one frankly featured a much more impressive action sequence but this new episode was plenty interesting. The boys from Heaven are given a theme reminiscent of the Backstreet Boys' "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" and are clearly meant to capture the boy band aesthetic which remains intensely popular in Japan to-day.
Not to be outdone, Panty, Stocking, and the demon sisters also get an ultra-sexy new transformation sequence (not yet available on YouTube).
It was around this time I started thinking seriously about Panty and Stocking. The They Live stuff could be seen as basically just a reference without substance and yet . . . We have denizens of Heaven killing half the populace to settle a bet--Panty and Stocking, whose angel names, we learn, are Pantiel and Stockiel, make a bet with the angel brothers that they can kill more ghosts than the boys can and the winner gets to be the official overseers of Daten City. Anyone who's accused the Book of Job of making God look petty for taking a bet with Satan would have no trouble seeing this Panty and Stocking as a true criticism of religion. But in terms of Japanese morality, the angels working hard, putting in the extra hours and effort to actually do their jobs, there should be nothing wrong with them having personal motives that don't necessarily align with Heaven's creed. Though, of course, the makers of the show are relentlessly critical of Japanese morality, too.
This is only the latest example of the Gainax crew simultaneously invoking Christian symbols while criticising Japanese sexual hypocrisy. But the world has changed since the alien attacks on Neon Genesis Evangelion were construed as a war with Heaven. I was watching some '90s music videos this morning, thinking again how amazing Mark Romanek's videos were for Nine Inch Nails and Fiona Apple. But what meaning do "Closer" and "Criminal" have for people to-day in the U.S.? I've noticed that, as fantasy movies have become increasingly chaste, to where the modern version of pulp babes are Florence Pugh's androgynous look in Thunderbolts or the downright masculine portrayal of Peggy Carter in the What If series, portrayals of women in music videos have become decadently kinky. Compare Madonna's "Express Yourself" to Cardi B's "Wet Ass Pussy". That's not just expression, it's secretion. Sorry.
That's Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, the latter of whom guest starred on She Hulk so she could twerk with the title character who, like the other Marvel heroines, was dressed and shot in a doggedly asexual manner otherwise. I guess possibly the difference is that She-Hulk was meant for a primarily male audience (I don't buy that) and "Wet Ass Pussy" for a primarily female audience (I don't buy that either). Of course, when I first saw the "Wet Ass Pussy" video, the first thing I noticed was the apparent Twin Peaks influence of the chevron patterned floor. But those sets bear the influence of Tim Burton, Stanley Kubrick, and we could even go all the way back to Jean Cocteau's Blood of the Poet. The makers of the video wanted to invoke a sense of awe--the pussy may be wet but it's not easy and the ladies who are calling the shots should be regarded as distant, unknowable goddesses. So it makes sense the filmmakers would reach for some of the most arch, sepulchral, and unnervingly cold, imagery of Lynch, Kubrick, Bergman, or Cocteau, even if they were perhaps only subconsciously inheriting cinematic tradition.
But then you have Sabrina Carpenter and her controversial submissive chic.
In any case, the sense of conflicting guilt and desire for liberated sexuality present in songs like "Closer" and "Criminal" crossed a barrier the younger generation only know the resulting effects of. In the '90s, they said let's fight the old sexual morality, to-day they only know it's gone, replaced by new contradictory, half-assed, poorly considered but stridently enforced, morality.
But back to Japan and Imaishi Hiroyuki, the Gainax alum who created Panty and Stocking. If you look at Kill la Kill, Evangelion, or FLCL (which featured an ode to South Park, a series whose satirical portraits of Jesus and Satan used to push more buttons), you can see the idea pushed again and again: Japan needs to be less ashamed of sex. This is a message that seems even more pertinent now as Japan deals with a worsening population crisis due to young people not having sex. Of course, there are plenty of people who blame that on porn, as plenty of people have blamed porn for all sorts of things. Maybe the old Gainax crew was somewhat in agreement with this when they made their "Me Me Me" short film in which a young man gets so wrapped up in porn that he neglects his beautiful girlfriend. The end of the Rebuild of Evangelion movies seemed to drive the message home that young men ought to pay attention to the perfect, beautiful, brilliant, and carefree women in their lives, a sadly far more simplistic message than the brutal and complicated character of Asuka in End of Evangelion who mercilessly took Shinji to task for his simplistic, selfish conception of the girls and women in his life.
In any case, there's more going on with Panty and Stocking than crude humour, perhaps more than was intended by its creators. It's tempting to read a lot more into what it could mean that the horny, unabashedly self-serving babes declare war on the shadow cult of They Live ghosts infiltrating society. Can rampant sexual liberation really save everyone? As with so many things, it feels sort of like Japan is just catching up to 1960s American culture.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.
A pretty, wealthy girl is about to turn 16 and men in their 40s start eyeing her for marriage in 1942's Le mariage de Chiffon. It's based on an 1894 French novel and set in he same period so maybe this attitude should be expected but it's still pretty jarring. The film is a romantic comedy that does occasionally succeed in being charming though mostly I'd say it does a pretty good, unintentional, job of demonstrating why its basic conception of romance is creepy as hell.
I tend to avoid passing judgement on how other people live their lives. Everyone's complex and I think it would be folly for anyone to presume to say they know all the ends and outs of another couple's relationship dynamics. But I really don't like the ideal presented by this movie and my dislike for it is only intensified knowing it was common.
It begins on a dark night in Paris in which a middle aged military officer, Le duc d'Aubieres (Andre Luguet), meets a pretty teenage girl in the street called Chiffon. Chiffon is played by Odette Joyeux who was actually in her '20s at the time, only 12 years younger than the man playing d'Aubieres.
She doesn't look like a teenager, either, especially not with those carefully sculpted 1940s eyebrows but Odette's performance conveys Chiffon's naivete and her strong will that operates from a worldview that has been carefully orchestrated by the adults in her life, one of whom is her uncle Marc (Jacques Dumesnil), another middle aged man who forms the third point in the film's love triangle (he's her uncle by marriage and not by blood).
d'Aubieres carries Chiffon to her home in that first scene because she's lost her shoe (actually, he's stolen it and stashed it in his pocket so he can have an excuse to hold her). They learn little about each other but d'Aubieres is smitten by the sight of her pretty bare foot.
Chiffon had decided to marry Marc when she was six years old but has given up on the idea because she knows about his affair with a prominent woman of society who's about the same age as him. There's a lot of comedy about the confusion surrounding her missing shoe and how it turns up again at a hotel where all three principle characters are staying and Marc's mistress just happens to have the same pair of shoes.
The crisis in the film involves the possibility that it will be left up to Chiffon to decide whom she will or will not marry. Her angry mother, tragically, controls the family wealth, not her kindly father, so it's up to d'Aubieres, Marc, and the family butler to discreetly arrange things so that Chiffon ends up marrying the right middle aged man. That means one of the men is left out of the equation in the end and the pathos of the film's conclusion is wrapped up in his noble sacrifice--despite his desire to be the custodian of Chiffon's physical and mental life, he will allow another man to assume that role after the men have passed around a page from Chiffon's diary that they believe makes the true object of her affection clear.
Maybe that's a fantasy you can enjoy. I wouldn't even say that if you enjoy the fantasy it means it's what you want in your real life. But my personal dislike for this relationship dynamic kind of kills the movie for me. Mind you, I find it just as tiresome when the woman is the dominant partner, as is often the case in modern depictions of relationships. I don't find it attractive as a fantasy though (it ought to go without saying) I don't altogether object to its depiction in fiction, whether for psychological exploration as in the case of the domineering man with the meek German wife in Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander or the case of the domineering wife of the constable in The Lower Depths.
Le mariage de Chiffon is available on The Criterion Channel.
Since most people these days have the urge to spit, literally and rhetorically, in Trump's general direction, I watched the two new episodes of South Park that have particularly drawn the ire of Trump and those in his camp. Unfortunately, South Park generally seems so much better at making fun of liberals nowadays. The new episodes derive a lot of their Trump jokes from showing him naked with a small penis which actually reminds me of anti-Trump stuff from when he was first elected for his first term back in 2016 (God, nine years ago?!). I remember all the giant naked Trump babies at Comic Con and then, as now, the compulsion people have to see Trump naked really seems like it drifts into a zone of subconscious, genuine attraction for the man. The jokes themselves just aren't funny enough so it just seems like these people are lusting after him.
There were some conceptual things I liked in the new South Park episodes. I liked how they portrayed him exactly like they used to portray Saddam Hussein, complete with the same theme music and love affair with Satan. I also liked their portrayal of ICE as a gang of incompetent, hastily recruited unemployed guys of various ages. But the only thing I really thought was funny was the first joke in the first of the couple episodes, in which Cartman is angry that Trump cancelled NPR. It turns out Cartman loves NPR because he sees it as a kind of sideshow. That's when the show's at its best, when it forces you to see the logic in something that is clearly wrong. Oddly, it dovetails perfectly with the show's surprisingly keen instinct for how kids actually talk. It would be a kid who hasn't been instilled with an instinct to save face for one political faction or another who would even chain together a line of reasoning like this.
Last week I was talking to some teachers about the best-selling books of all time. One teacher said she'd heard the number one best seller was the Bible and the number two was The Chronicles of Narnia. I believed the Bible part easily enough but, as much as I love The Chronicles of Narnia, I found the idea that it was number two very surprising. Later, I googled and found a surprising variety of lists of all time best-selling books from different sources. I guess it's really hard to pin down the best-selling books of all time though I think it is fair to assume the Bible really is number one. Most lists, though, seem to have Don Quixote as the best-selling fiction book of all time, which makes more sense to me. The book's had four hundred years to accrue readers, it's widely considered the first European novel, and it basically spawned the whole picaresque genre that was popular in the 17th and 18th centuries.
On lists of series of books, the Harry Potter books seem always to be number one. I remember when I was getting my TESL/TEFL certificate at college, there was a girl in the class with me who was putting together a whole lesson plan to teach in South Korea that utilised Harry Potter and I thought she was going to get a rude awakening when she found no-one in South Korea was into Harry Potter. But, boy, was I wrong because the series is massive in Japan and apparently throughout Asia. That's the real reason J.K. Rowling can't be cancelled. In fact, it may have been the attempt to cancel her that finally revealed the true impotence of cancel culture. It's ultimately another manifestation of the infamous tendency of liberals to eat their own. The left can only effectively cancel people like Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman, people who are icons of progressive media.
Anyway, the truly surprising title I saw cropping up on these lists was H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel She which Wikipedia has listed ninth at 83 million copies sold. Other lists, like this one, put it at 100 million copies, basically making it tied for sixth with The Hobbit, And Then There Were None, and The Dream of the Red Chamber (the site lists The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe at 10th with 85 million copies sold). I'd have never dreamed an H. Rider Haggard book had outsold Edgar Rice Burroughs or Arthur Conan Doyle and, if one did, I would've assumed it would be King Solomon's Mines. But, hey, it is an amazing book. I read it a couple years ago, just looking for an old pulp adventure and was astonished to find it is what I consider a masterpiece of atmospheric, psychological, fantasy fiction. I had seen the Hammer movie with Peter Cushing, Bernard Cribbins, Christopher Lee, and Ursula Andress. That movie was a massive box office success in the '60s but is now all but forgotten, much like the novel is. But as much as I loved the movie, it's not even a fraction as good as the novel.
It goes to show, like Harry Potter's position in the global zeitgeist, how distorted our perceptions of culture can be by forces within the culture.
So, over the past fifteen years, the cost of living has skyrocketed infamously in the U.S. Many wealthy people somehow can't connect this with the concurrent increase in homelessness. Now the chief bull in the china shop, Donald Trump, has taken over the police and deployed the National Guard to deal with the problem in Washington D.C. Is he going to send people to prison for being homeless? These aren't even immigrants, illegal or otherwise, so there's no country to send them back to. I guess like the cops occasionally already do, they'll pick up the most unsightly and drive them to another town where optics aren't quite as important.
This delusion rich people tend to have about poor people is nothing new. I like to repeat the old canard about beggars who go home to their mansions every night in sports cars, because somehow collecting nickels and dimes all day in all kinds of weather can facilitate that lifestyle. It's amazing what defenses the mind will put up to protect itself from cognizance of its own guilt. People will convince themselves of the most absurd things. This is why wealthy countries produce such great horror movies about ghosts and zombies. It's all repressed issues.
Is anyone still under the impression Trump is looking out for the little guy?
Bob Hoskins is a low level gangster who helps a snooty, mysterious call girl in 1986's Mona Lisa. This one's a fairy tale in which prostitutes are all gold-hearted damsels waiting for rescue and gangsters are either villains or heroes waiting to happen. It's not a bad movie and it has some truly interesting ideas at play but expect the insights to be about truth versus appearance and the compelling nature of mystery rather than a hard look at London's criminal underworld.
Hoskins plays George, a thug who's just done seven years in prison for his gangster boss (Michael Caine). We meet George showing up at the door of his estranged wife and teenage daughter. The wife immediately starts screaming and shoving him out the door and we eventually learn that she has basically erased the man from existence within the household. In a movie about appearance versus true nature, George himself is already a man of multiple roles in varied contexts.
For reasons that are never explained, George buys a rabbit for his boss. Maybe Hoskins really had a thing for rabbits (this was two years before Who Framed Roger Rabbit). Presumably it's a code of some kind among London gangs. The film continually poses visual or conceptual puzzles with solutions that may or may not be presented later in the film. George goes to stay with his friend (Robbie Coltrane), a mechanic who has a variety of odd side businesses, which results in George walking into the garage to behold tables covered with plastic spaghetti, each serving having its own hovering fork above it dug into a mound of noodles. Coltrane's character explains "the Japanese have cornered the market" on plastic food, which may well be true because I do see plastic food in the windows of nearly all restaurants here in Japan.
Eventually, George is given a job as a driver for Simone (Cathy Tyson), the call girl, who's immediately angry at George's blue collar appearance and attitude. Her business is providing a fantasy for men at expensive hotels and mansions and George's appearance and mannerisms kind of burst that bubble. George is shown to be very slow on the uptake, so much so it strains credibility. Simone wants him to buy nicer clothes so she gives him a wad of bills. He goes out and buys a Hawaiian shirt and tan leather jacket which actually do look pretty chic but aren't what Simone had in mind and she angrily tells him so. The next day, she takes him to a men's clothing store and he can't figure out what they're doing there. He even asks if she likes to wear men's clothes and she finally has to spell it out for him that she's shopping for him. This happens a few times in the film--we in the audience figure things out a lot quicker than George does. I'm not sure how much that was intentional.
The song, "Mona Lisa", plays over the opening credits but the title also seems to refer to the famously mysterious quality of the painting itself. Simone, like the other various visual puzzles throughout the film, is herself a puzzle whose apparent nature changes throughout the movie.
Vampires fight werewolves and worry about miscegenation in 2003's Underworld. If you ever wanted to see a LARPing session filmed with decent special effects and good performances, this fits the bill.
LARP or "Live Action Role Play" is a role playing game where people actually run around pretending to be fantastical beings, the most famous example being Vampire Masquerade by White Wolf who sued the makers of Underworld for its uncanny resemblance to White Wolf's uncanny publications. The entities settled their lawsuit in secret, an arcane mystery never to be revealed to our plebeian mortal eyes.
Underworld's screenplay by Danny McBride (no, not the Danny McBride who stars in Seth Rogan movies) from a story by McBride and director Len Wiseman has the pure pulp, chicken with its head cut off quality of a real LARP session. Kate Beckinsale is at the centre as a badass vampire named Selene who runs around shooting and shooting and shooting, blam blam, her two pistols at werewolves who run around shooting and shooting and occasionally transforming into cumbersome but visceral practical effects.
If you wonder how beings could've carried on a war for a thousand years like ten year olds playing Cops and Robbers, you're asking the wrong question. If you're asking how come vampires and werewolves are so cool, you're on the right page. You're a long way from depth here, it's best to just go along for the ride and Beckinsale is very cool and sexy. Supporting performances from Michael Sheen and Bill Nighy are also appreciably overwrought.
Underworld is available on YouTube.
X Sonnet 1955
Perdition sliced the angel cake from crumbs.
Divine divided beings were sweet and sharp.
She's perfect made from all her toes to thumbs.
A passive maid could never play the harp.
For perfect pluck an iron passion's right.
A must before the golden bust of gods.
As Heaven holds a ball to praise the light,
The flowers by the floor are gauging odds.
No waitress traipsed betwixt the downy wings.
The seraph sipped their sarsaparilla flutes.
While devils dined on spicy chicken wings.
Below the angels, mirrors laced their boots.
Forgotten parties brought the human cake.
Confusing strippers struck for Satan's sake.
A demon girl tries to have a bowl movement while a gigantic ghost turns buildings into sushi; a ninja turtle parody becomes a violent Gamera parody; and a serial killer inspired by Dario Argento movies is thwarted by the infamous angel who uses her panties as a gun in the new episode of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt.
The first two segments are very short with around half of the episode given over the Dario Argento parody of which, alas, there are no clips yet available on YouTube. It's certainly the best part with odes to Argento's 1970s giallo movies Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red, and, especially, Suspiria. The killer is fixated on slutty blonde girls who all happen to resemble Panty so she and Detective Dario (a caricature of Argento himself) round up all the slutty blonde girls in town and have them stay together in a reproduction of the ballet school from Suspiria. The show even does the scene where maggots start falling from the ceiling.
Maybe the first two segments were funnier, though. The Demon Sisters, in contrast to Panty and Stocking, who are always fighting, are always praising each other excessively. It's the kind of ironic humour that isn't so ironic if you start to think about people who praise one another to excess.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.
I'd heard 1997's Grosse Pointe Blank was kind of boring but it's on Criterion this month so I watched it anyway. It is really boring. But why? I kept watching, wondering, and analysing. I realised what the problem was in the convenience store shoot-out scene where John Cusack's character blasts a cardboard standup of Pulp Fiction characters. This movie was one of many that tried to follow in Pulp Fiction's footsteps but didn't truly understand what made Pulp Fiction work.
There were a lot of imitations of Tarantino's crime movies in the '90s. Some of them were better than others but none ever came close to the original. The trouble is, many people saw Pulp Fiction and said it was a movie about regular people who just happened to be gangsters and killers. No, it's more than that. When they seem normal, when Vincent and Jules are talking about Amsterdam or Harvey Keitel's joking with Julia Sweeney, it isn't that they're behaving normally in spite of being killers, it's that killers naturally have normal conversations now and then. It's like the kidnappers arguing in Shoot the Piano Player.
Grosse Pointe Blank is about a man going back to his hometown after ten years away to reconnect the girl he'd ditched on prom night. And he happens to be a professional hitman and the film occasionally lapses into ludicrous, over the top action scenes. Joe Strummer of The Clash does the soundtrack, throwing in a bunch of nostalgic '80s songs like Tarantino used '70s songs and the filmmakers must have thought they basically did what Tarantino did. No.
Here's what separates them. Pulp Fiction really is pulp fiction. The situations are slightly bizarre or absurd. Think of the chain of implausible violent events that characterise Bruce Willis' story. Think of the drama in the diner as the robbery is interrupted with Jules' epiphany. Grosse Pointe Blank is just random shoot-outs, and they're tacky action movie shoot-outs, where guys unload their pistols at each other and rarely score a hit.
The other problem is character. Tarantino makes Vincent an "Elvis man" who's slightly dumb, a little belligerent, but can be level headed in a tough situation. Butch is a man caught between his sense of honour and his desire to carve out a life for himself and his girl.
Meanwhile, John Cusack's killer wears a black suit and killing doesn't bother him. The girl he likes, Minnie Driver, isn't sure she should take him back. That's it. There's very little tension between the two because there's very little of anything between the two of them.
Grosse Pointe Blank was directed by George Armitage whose Miami Blues was a lot better.
Where have all the goths gone? I found one making Skyrim mods. This lady named Kukielle reminds me so much of so many girls I knew in high school who liked shopping at Hot Topic and listening to Type O Negative. Yeah, I'm calling that "goth" but I'm well aware there was a pecking order and drama over what is high brow enough to be called goth or if something even has to be high brow to be goth. The point is, this Skyrim modder seems like a throwback to another era. The Skyrim community seems to have had a fractious relationship with her, mostly because it's a lot of whitebread types who don't understand her abuse shtick. They take it personally when the follower character she created insults the player character. When she updated the character so that she has a boyfriend, there were angry voices in the community from people who felt she was cheating on them (although they didn't phrase it that way). All this made the mod author swear off Skyrim modding to focus on her music career.
I recently installed her original mod, Daegon, again after setting it aside some months ago. Kukielle voices the character herself and she often speaks quickly in very low tones obliging me to set the volume on music and effects to zero.
Yet this is something I actually like. A lot of my favourite mods come from authors whose personality constantly comes through in the mod, seemingly by accident. It's like method modding. Do I want some AI doll perfectly enunciating every syllable or do I want this chick who slurs her way through every other "is" and "that"? Call me crazy but I'll take the latter.
Before she quit the scene, Kukielle made a number of other follower mods, all with the same voice. They're available on Nexus Mods.
I was watching Spider-Man: Homecoming a couple weeks ago but I found myself jonsing too much for a better Spider-Man movie. So I went back to the 2002 Sam Raimi movie again. It's flawed, it some ways it hasn't aged well. It's great how the costume's eyes express emotion in the new movies. In general, the special effects in the Raimi films only just barely seemed adequate to the task.
What makes it superior is its unfettered artistic voice. Sam Raimi was unafraid to be downright weird. And Peter Parker's experience would be strange. He achieves this weirdness mostly with just good old fashioned direction; composition and sequence. Danny Elfman's score helps a lot, too. Those dizzying shots among the skyscrapers get a lot of their power from those pulsating string sections that sound like "Ride of the Valkyries".
Danny Elfman's theme ought to be used for all incarnations of the character in film, just like John Williams' Superman theme ought to be for Superman. Or Danny Elfman's for Batman. Is there any composer who's made as many memorable movie scores as Williams and Elfman? I can't think of anyone who even comes close. Jerry Goldsmith made a few, James Horner kind of did the same score again and again.
I am excited for the next MCU Spider-Man film. The inclusion of Hulk and Punisher in the story sounds good to me. I'm not sure I can hope for it to pull the MCU out of the terminal banality that plagues it these days. I didn't see the new Fantastic Four movie. I was going to see it last weekend, its second weekend, but the theatre near me had switched to only showing the dubbed version. The next closest theatres are in other towns which I could've gotten to by train in thirty to forty minutes but it just didn't seem worth it. The casting seems bad. I don't know why Hollywood is so in love with Pedro Pascal. There's nothing about him that says Reed Richards to me. All the actors are talented, though, so maybe I'll enjoy what they made when I eventually see it. It's a shame so few people saw Thunderbolts, that one was pretty good.
I watched Seven Samurai again over the weekend. It's like slicing into a cake, it's always satisfying. I'm not sure how many times I've seen it now since my first time in the '90s. Like the Star Wars movies, it somehow remains alive and vital. Also like Star Wars, it creates a world with its characters and locations.
It also has a different impact for me because I'm different, I know more about Japan and Japanese than the first dozen or so times I saw it. Now I know what it means that it's set around 15 years before the Sekigahara battles. Japan was not yet a single, consolidated country and there was a lot of fighting.
Seven Samurai is also a cultural artefact of 1954, the year it was released. Kurosawa's movies are not generally seen to-day in Japan. His period films use a form of Japanese that many people in Japan can no longer understand. It's a bit like Shakespearean English, I guess, which would make sense, given that Kurosawa was a big fan of Shakespeare.
All the same, I'm able to understand enough of it to wonder at some of the choices made on the Criterion edition's translation. In the scene after the youngest samurai, Katsushiro, sleeps with the farm girl, Shino, the leader of the samurai, Kambei, claps the young man's shoulder and says they expect much in battle from him now because he's recently become "a man," and everyone laughs. But what he says is "otona", adult. The line could've been translated, "You're an adult now," or "You've grown up."
The film presents a very different attitude towards women and sex than one finds in Japanese media to-day. Or at the time. When Kurosawa was making movies, he was criticised for being too American. It's often said he has few female characters but Seven Samurai has two very interesting female characters; Shino, and one farmer's, Rikichi's, wife, who lives with the bandits. The latter appears in only one scene and has no dialogue but the actress's performance and the context in which we see her, after the build up of Rikichi's sensitivity about discussing her, compel the viewer to think about her. The film introduces the ambiguity over how much she was a captive and how much she was a willing defector and the torment caused by that ambiguity.
Of course, it's also striking just how enthusiastic Kikuchiyo, Mifune Toshiro's character, is about finding a girl to sleep with. It's extremely rare to hear anyone in Japan talk about wanting sex. In this movie, it's a fact of life that comes up again and again. There's the amusing moment when Kikuchiyo gripes again about not having a girl causing Kyuzo to ponder a moment and declare he's going out into the woods to practice alone with his sword. Kikuchiyo comments, "There are no women out there." Heihachi laughs and says sometimes Kikuchiyo really, "hits the nail on the head," implying Kyuzo might be doing more than practicing out in the woods.
Seven Samurai is available on The Criterion Channel.
Saturday's new Panty and Stocking was the best of the new series so far. It starts with a parody of Donald Trump, follows it up with Panty using a ghost kitten as a vibrator, and concludes with a satisfyingly surreal homage to Hanna-Barbera superhero cartoons and possibly Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
The term "space ghost", in English, is used multiple times. An alien menace comes to earth and transforms people into various vaguely Marvel-ish characters in the old Hanna-Barbera style. Stocking gets turned into the Thing from Fantastic Four though for some reason Panty becomes a Dragon Ball character. It could be the idea was for the story to be a parody of '80s animation, both American and Japanese.
The Donald Trump parody shrewdly distanced itself from too many distinguishing features but it's not hard to see what they were on about with the blonde man who brags constantly about how he will govern with "business". Of course, he turns out to be a ghost which Stocking must eliminate (which is why they clearly tried to distance the parody from too much resembling Trump).
The second segment was really cute despite having possibly the most explicit moment in the whole series, showing Panty asleep wearing only her namesake garment with an active vibrator on her crotch. This is, unbeknownst to her, swapped out for the purring ghost kitten. She takes a liking to the critter in spite of herself. It was impressively twisted.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.
I've been kind of fascinated by the controversy around the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle jeans ads. At first I was annoyed that liberals were wasting their time over something so stupid when the Trump administration is doing shit that actually affects people's lives. Then I started wondering if it was outrage entirely manufactured by the Right to distract from Trump's Epstein scandal, which seems to be the point of view taken by The Daily Show. But the Daily Show bit only shows looney right-wingers complaining about left-wingers, refraining from showing some of the actual left-wing reaction, like this from The New Yorker:
So is the allusion incoherent or an obvious dog whistle? According to a writer at The Guardian quoting a writer from The Atlantic (there's a sewing circle for you):
“The slogan ‘Sydney Sweeney has good jeans’ obviously winks at the obsession with eugenics that’s so prevalent among the modern right.” Dr Sarah Cefai, a senior lecturer in gender and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, agrees. “Honestly, what were they thinking, that a white supremacist fantasy has permission to be aired so conspicuously?”
So I'm afraid the Right isn't just imagining things. Is it possible this is a deeper psy-op? If a "senior lecturer" is dumb enough to see white supremacy in this jeans ad, perhaps she's also dumb enough to be manipulated into the position by bad actors. That's the kind of conspiracy theory that really demonstrates how comforting conspiracy theories can be.
The Guardian article also quotes from an associate professor of gender and women's studies named Aria Halliday who says, "that while 'Black girls are rarely the target audience for ads,' some may still be curious to try the jeans: 'the desire to be perceived as beautiful is hard to ignore,' she says."
Maybe she didn't see this ad:
The ad has less views and has certainly generated less conversation than the Sydney Sweeney ad. Is that American Eagle's fault?
The topic fascinates me because I'm a liberal who loves beauty but those are two things that have had a troubled history. How can you say all people are created equal and say some people have genetic advantages? It's a complex question that hardliners typically try to bulldoze over. You can say beauty is entirely relative but humanity continually gravitates towards symmetry and large eyes. Not always large breasts which were not popular in the 1920s and medieval Europe. But being born in this time and place certainly confers an advantage to Sweeney. And quibbling over details like this, no-one seriously believes there was ever a time when someone would say Marie Dressler was prettier than Mabel Normand (how's that for a timely reference).
However, beauty often defies beauty standards. As Leo Tolstoy put in War and Peace:
Her pretty little upper lip, on which a delicate dark down was just perceptible, was too short for her teeth, but it lifted all the more sweetly, and was especially charming when she occasionally drew it down to meet the lower lip. As is always the case with a thoroughly attractive woman, her defect—the shortness of her upper lip and her half-open mouth—seemed to be her own special and peculiar form of beauty.
There's something mysterious about beauty. All of our algorithms and equations for it often go right out the window. There's this dialogue from Love in the Afternoon:
Gary Cooper: Everything about you is perfect.
Audrey Hepburn: I'm too thin! And my ears stick out, and my teeth are crooked and my neck's much too long.
Gary Cooper: Maybe so, but I love the way it all hangs together
Few would deny Audrey Hepburn was an extraordinary beauty but she's right. According to the rules, she shouldn't be exceptionally beautiful. It's not fair, is it?
One recalls the tendency of Communist countries to put everyone in identical uniforms, to reduce the advantage of beauty as much as possible, except when it's used in propaganda. It's frequently seen as a bedfellow of capitalism, creating industries of beauty products exploiting the desire to be beautiful. But life is more complicated than that and, as history has certainly shown, depriving people of beauty and opportunity doesn't kill their desire for such things.
In her song "32 Flavours" from her album Not a Pretty Girl, Ani DiFranco reminds us,
God help you if you are an ugly girl
'Cause too pretty is also your doom
'Cause everyone harbours a secret hatred
For the prettiest girl in the room
The American Eagle ad is certainly insipid, as commercials typically are, but the effect of beauty is real, however much anyone may want to deny it. I've always preferred to celebrate it. As Oscar Wilde put it:
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
It seems like a simple idea but it takes maturity to allow the existence of beauty without attempting to exploit it, either as symbol of one's superiority or another's tyranny. As Wilde says, it takes "cultivation", and that's sadly lacking in higher education these days.
How's your climate change life going? You may have heard Wednesday was the hottest day in Japan's history, or since records started being kept, anyway. It was 35 Celsius here or 95 Fahrenheit. Did I stay home under the air conditioner like a sensible human being? No, I walked to work for over an hour under that clear, blinding sky and felt oddly at home. Sure, back in my hometown of San Diego, it was not unusual to see the temperature get up to 111 Fahrenheit but the humidity is much stronger in Japan which can feel stifling. Maybe the humidity melted on Wednesday because I found it a lot more comfortable than usual.
I was due at an elementary school. English events are being held at various schools in town and I've been going to different schools every day. No students ended up coming to that event (possibly due to it being the hottest day in recorded history). At around 11am, I left to go to my shift at a junior high school in the afternoon. I stopped by the river and ate some potato wraps I'd made in the morning and listened to Elvis Presley on my iPod and felt really good. Maybe I was delirious.
I say potato wrap but I've been thinking of them of potato burritos. I make mashed potatoes with salt, pepper, cumin, garlic, and habanero powder and wrap them in my homemade wheat flour tortillas. They're pretty good if I do say so myself. Yesterday I added some lime to them and they were even better. I don't use milk for the mashed potatoes, just a little water and canola oil.
Rockabilly seems to suit walking in this weather particularly well. I've been listening to Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis a lot.
X Sonnet 1954
The frozen boiling point was marbled meat.
She tried to step beyond the rocket pad.
The eager smoke was curling round her feet.
The party coloured warnings drove her mad.
Descending paper pierced the humid clouds.
A thousand cuts of colour stormed the launch.
She climbed aloft on gleaming silver shrouds.
She doffed her top, the leaking fuel to staunch.
A press of roaches clogged the vessel's way.
But acid tides conduct a worthy ship.
And so the captain's laser held its sway.
The hopeless quest advanced a healthy clip.
At dusk she found the stash of hearty rum.
A mission fades when other sport would come.
Noir-ish misfortune finds folks in Argentina in 1952's Don't Ever Open That Door (No abras nunca esa puerta). It's really two short films with beautiful, expressionistic, black and white photography. The two stories, based on prose works by American author Cornell Woolrich, feel very much like Tales from the Crypt, both featuring characters in strange and desperate circumstances that end with a cruel twist.
In the first story, "Anguish", a wealthy man's sister is beset by gambling debts and becomes suicidal. The man decides to take vengeance on the people aggressively demanding restitution from her.
In the second story, "Pain", an elderly blind woman living with her niece receives a visit from her long lost son who's become a murderous bank robber.
The stories both revolve around the dichotomy of fate and free will that distinguishes film noir. Both stories feature characters who try to take control of a dangerous situation only for their efforts to have horrible, twisted results, leaving the viewer with the question of how much the capricious hand of fate is to blame or how much is due to the characters' audacity in trying to assert their own wills. It's good.
I've been watching Twin Peaks yet again, though it's my first watch through since David Lynch died, which certainly casts a pall over it. But I was watching an episode not directed or written by Lynch last night, episode 7 of the first season, written by Harley Payton. I always think of this one as the Best of Audrey and the Worst of Audrey. It begins with her naked in Cooper's bed, which I've always thought was ended in an unfortunate but almost inevitable way with Cooper standing on his principles as an FBI agent who will not sleep with a teenage girl. The scene kills the wonderfully weird energy between the two that made their dialogue so interesting in the previous episodes and they never really get it back.
I did notice something new, though. Cooper says to her, "What I want and what I need are two different things." I remembered Mr. C in season three once remarks, "I don't need anything. I want." This implies he would have handled the situation with Audrey in the opposite way in which Cooper did and foreshadows what is eventually revealed about what he did do to Audrey.
I lament the scene for killing the weird energy between the two but, in real life, a girl like Audrey really wouldn't be in the right place psychologically to give away her virginity and Cooper is right to say that what she needs is a friend to listen to her. So he goes and gets some food and it's implied the two talk for hours as she unburdens herself. I've always wondered what they talked about. In the previous episode and later in this one, she was trying and failing to tell Cooper about the clue at the perfume counter at Horne's department store. Evidently she didn't disclose this in their heart to heart but, if not, what did they talk about? Audrey's relationship with her father? Some girl at school? What?
It's a bit sloppy but the previous episode's cliffhanger left this one with little choice. Audrey turning up in Cooper's bed was simply too far too soon for both characters.
Otherwise, the episode does a terrific job establishing character. I love Audrey's cleverness when she hides in Battis' closet and steals the unicorn. But she's not perfect; Blackie sees right through her false identity, recognising her assumed name from The Scarlet Letter, which says something about Blackie, too.
