A Day in the Biggest City in the World

Good morning from Tokyo. This is the not especially inspiring photo from my hotel room in Chiba by Tokyo Bay. There is a bull in the lobby, though.

The real selling point for me is that the room was only fifty dollars a night. I might have gone even cheaper and stayed at a manga cafe but I have too much luggage. My room is small but it does what I need it to. If you're in Japan and you're looking for cheap accommodation that's bigger than a capsule or a voting booth, look for an APA Hotel.

I'm leaving to-morrow. Walking through Tokyo Station last night, I felt sorry that I can't stay in this city for at least a week. I noticed a trend of young women carrying around stuffed animals. First I saw a girl with a big lavender rabbit, then another girl with a big pink rabbit, and then a white girl with something I didn't get a good look at. Probably a rabbit. I wonder if it's for Easter. Probably not.

I don't really feel like taking pictures, actually. I often see tourists walking around taking footage. Why should I bother?

Sonnet 1987

As time deployed its friends, the train was slowed.
A secret time was kept in strangers' pockets.
Through dampened cities, crystal spirits glowed.
Their fingers stuck in Heaven's sweetest sockets.
The blazing sun usurps the rite of spring.
The normal coat was now a stifling sleeve.
A veil of sweat enticed the girl to sing.
The point of flesh, to find a place to cleave.
Where winter winds were trampled under hooves,
Untimely summer throttles cherry trees.
Suspicious deer observe from lofty rooves.
A line of sheep were eating morning cheese.
Condensing matter clogged the holy train.
A pleasure pulled the glass beyond its pane.

Reordered Who

I'm in the final stages of cleaning out of my apartment so I have no time this morning but here's a very odd ranking of Doctors Who I watched this morning while eating breakfast. I'd like to know who voted on this one. The hostess disassociates herself from it at several points. If she names the source, I may be too sleep deprived to have heard it. I'm really astonished how far 6 and 13 rank above 3 and 5. Is Peter Davison cancelled or did people think they were voting for Pete Davidson? While I don't agree number 1 should be number 1, I will say he's an unexpected but very worthy choice.

The Worth of Books

Going through the many old and new problems attendant on moving out of Japan, I discovered that Japan Post has a new policy that prohibits sending anything valued at over a hundred US dollars to the US. This is in retaliation to Trump's tariff policies but this is such a new rule that the post office web site doesn't mention it, even though one is required to make labels for all international shipping on the web site before going into the post office. Many employees of the post office are unaware of the rule, too, which means some parcels I'd already sent off end up being returned to me.

This is a problem for me because my last day in this apartment is to-morrow, Monday, and my flight leaves on Wednesday. This means I suddenly have to figure out what to do with a bunch of stuff I thought I'd already taken care of, most of it valuable stuff I didn't want to get rid of. Mostly I'm talking about books.

What books do I have that are so valuable? Well, the sad irony here is that this is a result of me personally setting a high value on books. When the label web site tells me it's mandatory for me to ascribe a monetary value to all objects contained in the parcel, I'm forced to put a price on items that could be valued very differently depending on the buyer and seller. If you collect old books, like I do, then a hardback copy of Bleak House printed in the 1940s is surely worth at least forty dollars. To people who believe books are antiquated objects now made obsolete by digital media, my copy of Bleak House is worth less than an equivalent quantity of blank paper. So I could have been justified in filling in all the price fields with one or two yen. Fool that I am, I wrote what I thought the books were actually worth.

All this to get revenge on Trump. It goes to show, revenge is never quite as simple as you'd like it to be.

And, oh yeah, Happy Easter.

The Irrepressibly Strange Home Front

This past week, I've been spending most of my days carrying things to the post office or to second hand shops, preparing to move out on Monday. To wind down in the evening, I watched 1944's A Canterbury Tale again, Powell and Pressburger's strange tale of three travellers in a small town on the road to Canterbury.

It's a strange sort of propaganda film. I mean, as with The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I think Powell and Pressburger set out to make a propaganda film but they were both too interested in complicated ideas to do a proper job of it. What is the message a British soldier's meant to come away with? "Go out there and fight for the magistrates putting glue in girls' hair back home!" And then there's Erwin Hiller's haunting cinematography. You can't even see the main characters' faces in the first minutes of the film as everyone stumbles about in the dark around the train station.

The three travellers are Sgt Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price), Alison Smith (Sheila Sim), and Acting Sgt. Bob Johnson (Sgt. John Sweet). Peter's with the British army while Bob's an American and Alison's a "land girl". a part of the Women's Land Army that did work on the British home front during World War II. They meet in the small town of Chillingbourne and soon encounter the town's infamous "glue man" who pours glue on Alison's hair as he's done to several other girls. He runs off before they can apprehend him. It's not until the three take refuge in town hall that we get a good look at their faces. The film's loaded with a sense of mystery and danger but it's counterbalanced by the cheerful, affable conversation between the three people newly acquainted with each other. They meet the magistrate, Colpeper, whom Alison immediately suspects is the secret identity of the glue man.

The mystery provides a baseline of tension throughout a film that consists of Bob talking to local woodworkers about wood and Alison trying to find work around town. These scenes bring the little town to life, creating a vivid portrait of rural England. The weirdness of the mystery in the background is somehow a vital part of bringing the place to life. The mystery is not who the glue man is--it's pretty clear it's Colpeper--but rather how the gentleman who gives lectures on British history and waxes poetic on the dreamy landscape and historical significance, could possibly be the glue man. His explanation, when it comes, is hardly sufficient either and it seems likely that Colpeper himself doesn't quite know why he does what he does. The viewer will likely infer that it's a manifestation of his sexual repression and that does seem likely. He's a strange character and yet, then again, is he? How many such gentlemen led double lives, with a second life that they could hardly explain if they tried? Is Colpeper not as familiar, in a way, as the landscapes and Elizabethan inns? Certainly the original Canterbury Tales had its share of bizarre and perverted characters. How many times did people have to reconcile the respected and beloved figure of authority with his messy private life? Nowadays, a guy like Colpeper would've been cancelled but in Powell and Pressburger's vision the three protagonists still like Colpeper despite his inexplicably strange and disturbing deeds.

The first time I watched the film, I remember not liking John Sweet's performance as Bob but I've done a complete 180 on that. He's so Lynchian, especially when he's talking about wood.

It occurred to me the film is a bit like Dracula with Bob being the Quincey Morris character.

A Canterbury Tale is available on The Criterion Channel.

Final Buffy

When I first watched the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I thought it suffered too much from the suddenly very strong influence of the Lord of the Rings movies. Practically all fantasy media since the early 2000s has been in some way influenced by the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter movies so it's no surprise. But suddenly Buffy was at the head of an army, giving speeches while a new orc-like vampire variant was introduced that could swarm up from the Hell Mouth, which became a kind of subterranean Mordor.

I can see the logic of wanting to increase the scale of the drama for the final season but what it really amounts to is a show switching away from what it was good at to fit the mould of an entirely different genre and it falls apart. It may have looked like a good outline at the beginning of the season--Buffy loses the confidence of her army but gets a magic weapon, she returns at a crucial, dramatic moment, and there's a great battle. I've already talked about how Buffy's exile made little sense. I have to say the magic "scythe", which is really an axe, looks so unwieldy as to be distracting. It's very short but has a spiked butt meaning Buffy or Faith often has to grip the spike just wield it. Altogether, it looks like a junior version of an already ridiculous fantasy weapon.

Watching it alongside the final season of Angel really confirms my impression of Angel being the far superior show at that point. When Spike transfers from one series to the other, he becomes more interesting again. In the final season of Buffy, there's little more to him than being Buffy's adoring fan.

I'd totally forgotten Anya dies in the final episode of Buffy. It goes by so fast and the other characters don't seem to react much until Andrew, of all people, eulogises her. I think the first time I watched the episode I didn't even notice she died.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is available on Disney+.

Double DD Day

For some reason, two new episodes of Daredevil: Born Again were released on Wednesday, episodes two and three, written by Dario Scardapane and Heather Bellson, respectively. I have to say, the Heather Bellson episode was much stronger but I'm not feeling good about the writing on this season overall.

Scardapane's episode ended with Karen punching out a guy in full body armour. I've complained about this with Disney Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Disney seems to think the only qualification someone needs to knock someone out with a single punch is to be a main character. One of the most egregious examples was at lease only in a comic, when Princess Leia knocked out a stormtrooper with a single punch. That's something no-one ever did in the original trilogy. I know we've seen Karen training with Matt but even Daredevil usually has to have a fight scene with the AVTF guys. Maybe the intention was to imply that Karen had an extended fight scene off-screen but that wouldn't make sense given that the guy ends up being someone who wants to work with them. At the beginning of the third episode, at least a metallic sound effect was added to imply Karen used some kind of metal object to knock the guy out. I think during editing someone realised One-Punch-Karen was a dumb idea. I thought this season wasn't going to be sloppy.

There was also a scene in the second episode in which Detective Kim shows up at the bar and it's not clear if she's a threat or not. Then there's some obvious ADR in which she hastily praises "the resistance" and being a rebel. Is this one of those things for people who are scrolling through their phones while the show is on? It really doesn't feel like a good idea to use the term "resistance" again.

Okay, there were things I liked, particularly in the third episode. Lili Taylor as the New York governor immediately has a strong presence and seems like a real threat to Fisk. Tony Dalton and Michael Gandolfini both gave exceptional supporting performances, particularly Dalton who's as effective in the extended action scene as he was in the courtroom or in prison.

The similarities between the AVTF and ICE were both stronger and weaker. The AVTF guys seem more driven by ideology while the ICE guys seem more like armed thugs. But as the AVTF seems to be targeting immigrants more and more it's harder to believe the resemblance is accidental.

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.

The Train's Various Occupants

Since I'm leaving Japan to return to America soon, and will be visiting Tennessee relatively soon, it seemed like a good time to watch Jim Jarmusch's 1989 film Mystery Train again, a film I'd not seen since high school. It's one of Jarmusch's best, probably my favourite of his films. It's an anthology film featuring three interconnected stories about foreigners visiting Memphis, Tennessee.

The first story features a Japanese couple. Having lived in Japan six years now, I was surprised at how authentic the characters seemed in terms of dialogue and performance in comparison to depictions of Japanese people from other American films. Then I read that the film was co-produced by a Japanese company and it made sense. The couple's reaction to a fast speaking American woman in this clip is not unlike reactions I've occasionally seen among students when they hear English.

That's Nagase Masatoshi as Jun and Kudoh Youki as Mitsuko. Since this movie was made decades before A.I. we can all be impressed by Nagase's skill at lighting a cigarette:

I wonder how many times he practiced that. He's so nonchalant.

Mitsuko might be classified nowadays as a "manic pixie dream girl" but I've met a lot of Japanese girls like her. They're just as fun to talk to as you might imagine but you shouldn't mistake enthusiasm for a lack of depth.

The second segment features an Italian woman (Nicoletta Brashci) stranded in Memphis and the third story features Steve Buscemi, Joe Strummer, and Rick Aviles as a trio of low-lives who rob a liquor store. Joe Strummer is the same Joe Strummer you may know as the lead singer of The Clash and I enjoyed his performance here. He's from England, of course, but Buscemi is also a kind of foreigner here, being from New Jersey. All the segments are good but the Japanese couple are by far the best. Their segment best captures the idea present in all three stories of cultural exchanges mysterious in their simultaneous intimacy and inscrutability.

Screamin' Jay Hawkins is in all three segments as the hotel night clerk and Tom Waits plays a DJ heard on the radio in each segment.

Mystery Train is available on The Criterion Channel.

Who's the Custodian of a Relationship?

Kim Novak's commented on an upcoming film about her relationship with Sammy Davis, Jr. Apparently she's unhappy with Sydney Sweeney playing her in the movie. Novak complains Sweeney "sticks out so much above the waist," and fears the movie will focus too much on the sexuality of the relationship.

"There’s no way it wouldn't be a sexual relationship because Sydney Sweeney looks sexy all the time," Novak said. There's some irony here because, in her day, Novak was criticised for being all sex appeal with no real acting talent. Even Alfred Hitchcock described her as "terrible" in his interview with Francois Truffaut while Truffaut praised her "passive, animal" quality, which may have been another way of saying she was sexy.

I think Sweeney's a good actress, I enjoyed her performance in The Voyeurs a few days ago. She certainly does "stick out above he waist" more than Novak ever did but I can't honestly complain about that. I mean, she has extremely nice breasts. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the epitome of muscularity in film, Sydney Sweeney epitomises the bust. In addition to this, her face and mannerisms don't much resemble Novak. Better casting might have been a young Christina Ricci. Jeez, can I think of anyone who's in the right age group now? Jenna Ortega? I must have Wednesday on my mind. Well, both Wednesday actresses exhibit that "passive, animal quality" Truffaut talked about. Natalie Portman or Patricia Arquette would've been good.

Kim Novak is 93 years old and it's worth noting that works of film media have become much more preoccupied with overt sexuality than they were when Novak was a major player in Hollywood. She remembers the relationship between herself and Sammy Davis, Jr. as something valuable for having "so much in common." Sex was probably a very small component of the relationship for her. On the one hand, there's a difference in generational values at play, but on the other hand, Novak is quite justified in being offended that a personal relationship of hers is being mischaracterised and potentially dismissive of the thing she felt was truly valuable in it. Instead of just saying she's old fashioned, I think it's worth pondering whether or not our society has become one that prioritises sex too much and has lost the ability to value other aspects of a romantic relationship, aspects that, in the long run, are far more important.

Slayers Excluded

I noticed a lot of positive PR for Sarah Michelle Gellar has been turning up on my Facebook feed. I guess it's damage control after the Buffy reboot failed to take off. Meanwhile, I'm still watching the original and I got to one of the weakest plot points in the final season, coming from an April 29, 2003 episode called "Empty Places" written by Drew Z. Greenberg. In this one, Buffy is kicked out of her house by her sister and all her friends because she wants to attack the season's villain, Caleb (Nathan Fillion).

I feel like the way this happened in the writers' room was that someone made an outline and said, "Wouldn't it be wonderfully dramatic if Buffy was rejected by everyone only to come back at a crucial moment to save the day?" Yes, but can this be accomplished in a sensible way? They're fighting a monster that can overpower their most powerful fighter easily and who apparently can attack them any time, anywhere. So Buffy's plan to go on the offensive isn't preposterous. But even if everyone disagrees with her, it hardly seems sufficient justification to throw her out and shun her.

If they really wanted this particular dramatic arc, they needed to provide better motivation for Buffy's friends and followers. Maybe they could've had Buffy cross a line, apparently break some part of the group's moral code. Maybe she could have acquired some kind of dangerous demoniac power that made her proximity seem a threat to everyone. I don't know.

Anyway, with Buffy gone, the other Slayer, Faith (Eliza Dushku), takes over, the original outcast bad girl. She is a more interesting and concrete character than Buffy overall. It was nice having an appearance by Harry Groener as the mayor in the subsequent episode, her boss from season three, giving her an opportunity to show how she's matured and become more self-possessed.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is available on Disney+.

Sonnet 1986

The milk of knowing plants was rare and warm.
Decisive snails were slowly taking charge.
Collected dolls did not foresee the swarm.
They only saw the gang of crooks at large.
Dalmatians mount the stage of turtle woe.
No spots would grace the pigeon's fluffy coat.
Combustion turned the steamy cup of joe.
Ideas began to overtake the goat.
The placid mammal raised a group of cubs.
Concussive ropes resound about the brig.
No players joined the wood tobacco clubs.
No grabbers took the candy coated cig.
The gentle balance fell between the sheets.
The soap contains excessive boiled beats.

Living In a TV

A young man's moral crisis is experienced in a dreamlike series of events involving video tape in 1989's Speaking Parts, a Canadian film directed by Atom Egoyan. The film's subtext regarding the simultaneous distance and extraordinary intimacy of video media is fascinating and reminded me a bit of Inland Empire or Videodrome.

Lance (Michael McManus) and Lisa (Arsinee Khanjian) are housekeepers at an expensive hotel. One day, Lance finds a movie script in a hotel room and cons his way into getting an audition. Around this time, he stops speaking to Lisa, who was possibly his lover. Lisa claims Lance was her lover but it's not clear if Lisa understands reality in the same way most people do.

Lance has worked as an extra on various movies and Lisa regularly rents them at the local video store so she can watch him in the background of various scenes. Eddy (Tony Nardi), the proprietor of the video store, takes an interest in Lisa. They get to talking about Eddy's sideline as an event photographer and occasional interviewer and immediately Lisa wants to conduct interviews for Eddy. This is a job Lisa is woefully unqualified for. In her first attempt, she interviews a bubbly, happy young bride at a wedding. Lisa is a foreigner with a thick accent and unshaven eyebrows. She's clearly never spent time in Hollywood circles or even among the popular girls at school. She's an introvert and all of her questions sound demanding and uncomfortably fervent. She's the food lover who thinks her love can make her a good chef. But getting people to talk and open up is a skill one has to develop and the poor young bride starts to panic and cry in response to Lisa's existential questions, particularly a strange one about how you "feel your love" in your partner.

So from this, it's not entirely clear if Lisa and Lance were ever together or if it was all in Lisa's imagination. We never see Lance actually speaking to her as a lover.

Meanwhile, Lance gets to know Clara (Gabrielle Rose), the woman who wrote the script he found. It turns out the script is a true story about Clara's brother who donated a lung to her. However, the director wants to fundamentally alter the script so Clara implores Lance to demand changes once he gets the role.

Lance and Clara sleep together but after that they communicate almost entirely through video conference. At one point, they masturbate for each other, Lance watching her on the little CRT television. The director of the film Clara wrote the screenplay for only speaks to her through the same method, signifying the communications barrier he puts between them.

It's hard to imagine what it was like in 1989 now that we live in this world where video communication is common and porn is ubiquitous. But the movie doesn't feel irrelevant. If anything, it makes me wonder at some fundamental aspect of human perception that may have been lost or altered in the years since.

Meanwhile, Lisa begins to experience what may be full blown hallucinations involving video that somehow may make a real link between her and Lance. The line between subjective and objective becomes increasingly difficult to perceive. Which is a point well taken.

Speaking Parts is available on The Criterion Channel.

I Wonder You

I felt bad for casting aspersions on Wonder Man without watching it properly so I went back and watched the first two episodes. It's not as bad as I originally thought though it does fail the test, "Would I Watch This If It Weren't the MCU?"

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Simon Williams. In the comics, Wonder Man was a supervillain who became a superhero who eventually became a Hollywood actor. In the MCU version, Simon watches Wonder Man movies as a kid and grows up wanting to play the fictional superhero. In the first episode he meets Trevor Slattery, a recurring MCU character played by Ben Kingsley. He first appeared in Iron Man 3 and in short films. The director of the first two episodes of Wonder Man, Destin Daniel Cretton, directed Shang-Chi, in which Trevor Slattery also appeared.

In this show, Slattery is a pathetic has-been, a more forlorn version of Steve Martin's character on Only Murders in the Building. Simon's youthful over-enthusiasm gives the two nicely contrasting personalities. Kingsley gives a good performance, of course. Abdul-Mateen II is a little bland but sometimes charismatic. It's nice listening to them trade movie trivia.

Joe Pantoliano plays himself. In the MCU, he used to star on a hospital drama with Trevor. There's a funny scene in the second episode involving him. Pantoliano is so good, gives such a sharp, witty performance, it's kind of a shame he isn't playing a superhero or something. Maybe he will anyway.

Hollywood loves to make movies about itself but they're only occasionally successful at the box office. Here's my top ten list:

10. Tropic Thunder
9. The Other Side of the Wind
8. All About Eve
7. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
6. In a Lonely Place
5. Inland Empire
4. Sullivan's Travels
3. Sunset Boulevard
2. Singin' In the Rain
1. Mulholland Drive

Wonder Man is available on Disney+.

A Human Work

Yesterday, Melania Trump appeared at the White House with a robot who speaks with pronounced vocal fry. I guess if your robot's going to resemble a berserk killing machine from Evangelion, having it sound like a 20 something barista is one way to counterbalance the horror.

Should I say it or she? I don't know, there will need to be a courtroom drama about robot pronouns.

Commander Data provides a Merriam-Webster definition of "android"--"an automaton made to resemble a human being." Melania's robot refers to itself as a "humanoid" which, on Star Trek and elsewhere, typically means an alien life form that bears at least some rudimentary resemblance to a human. I suppose they didn't use "android" for fear of legal troubles with Google's Android phone. Ironically, Google's Android was originally to be called "Droid" until there was the possibility of legal trouble with Lucasfilm because that's the word for robots in the Star Wars movies. So we have a little game of copyright musical chairs to reshape the landscape of our language.

Melania's robot notably doesn't take any questions and it seems like the barista speech was pre-recorded, possibly by a real barista. Though AI and synthetic voice generative software would seem to be far enough along to have such a level of communicative ability in a robot. Maybe there's not enough room for it amidst everything it needs to sense its environment and control its own movements in response. Human bipedal motion is a more delicate and complicated procedure than we're typically conscious of.

It was an altogether unimpressive demonstration, now that I think about it. Why am I even writing about it? Well, artificially intelligent robots seem like an inevitability at this point. Maybe this is a sign we can at least rest easy that they won't be working for Trump.

The Devil's in His Kitchen

The first episode of the new season of Daredevil: Born Again does feel more solid than season one. I don't know if this indicates a better season overall but the pacing felt more natural, conversations didn't feel oddly crammed into blocks of a few minutes. The action scenes are better but still nowhere near the level of the old Netflix series. The performances are good with one new supporting character being a standout.

During the whole Paul Dano non-controversy in which Quentin Tarantino criticised the actor, Tarantino also took a swipe at Matthew Lillard. This basically confirmed for me that Tarantino had not watched Twin Peaks season three because anyone who's seen that amazing 18 hour work of art knows that Matthew Lillard can be really impressive. As a new character on Daredevil, he infuses a lot of life and intrigue into the scenes he appears in.

He plays Mr. Charles, some kind of fixer working for Fisk. A lot of people are talking about how eerily Wilson Fisk's "Anti-Vigilante Task Force" resembles ICE under the Trump administration, especially considering that people who worked on the show claim everything in season two was written two years ago. I don't necessarily believe that. Although the makers of the show obviously wanted to avoid the schizophrenic quality of Born Again's first season, Disney and Marvel are, I think, too addicted to late stage tampering to have abstained from it entirely.

But Vincent D'Onofrio's version of Wilson Fisk was always based on Trump, at least a little, even in the first season of the Netflix series. He was a greedy, tacky landlord in that, just like Trump was primarily a greedy, tacky landlord in the '80s. Though one of the best things about the Netflix Daredevil series was how complex Fisk's character was. I think some people are afraid of making villains too sympathetic so they actively avoid making them complex. But one thing Andor showed was that you could reveal the humanity of your villains without making them enviable. The audience sympathises with Dedra Meero but no-one would want to follow in her footsteps.

So the Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF) resembles ICE because they work for a Trump figure and they're a bunch of chubby guys in bullet proof vests, beating up innocent people. They're a simplistic bunch of comic book thugs; it's not hard for them to superficially resemble something because they're not very complex. So I don't find the parallel very interesting in itself but I do find it interesting that such a broad, two dimensional villain resembles people in the news. Partly this is an indication of the oversimplified narrative presented in modern news media, partly it's an indication of a real moral void in American leadership and law enforcement.

So far I'm not getting a whole lot from the character development this season though I did like the conversation between Karen and BB about her uncle. I really like the line Karen repeats, "The easiest people to manipulate are manipulators." I think that's a line from the old series, I'm not sure. In any case, it's a surprisingly astute observation from a show like this.

I didn't like the dialogue doubling down on the "Nelson, Murdoch, and Page" thing that seems to be retconning the old law firm to have included Karen as a partner. Does she have a law degree now?

Daredevil: Born Again is available on Disney+.

The Malaise of Dangerous Men

Terence Stamp rats on his former comrades in the London mob and is thenceforth marked for death, pursued by John Hurt and Tim Roth in 1984's The Hit. This Stephen Frears film has a surprisingly effective tone of detached, melancholic comedy.

For his courtroom betrayal, Stamp's character, Willie, is rewarded with a new life in Spain under witness protection. However, a pair of hitman working for his old crew track him down, kidnap him, and start driving him to Paris, where they expect to meet up with the boss. At this point the film becomes a road movie.

John Hurt and Tim Roth play the two hitmen, Braddock and Myron. Hurt is cool, detached, and experienced while Roth, whose first film this was, plays Myron as a naive young hoodlum. Willie is surprisingly calm and jovial and subtly starts trying to play his two captors against each other.

Braddock is experienced but he starts making a number of mistakes. He takes a woman hostage, Maggie (Laura del Sol), whom Willie observes ought to have been executed immediately. Both Braddock and Myron seem attracted to her, Myron the more foolishly, but Braddock's hesitation from harming her seems strange when the filmmakers go to such pains to establish him as a cold blooded psycho.

According to Wikipedia, this is one of Wes Anderson's favourite British films and it makes sense with the film's subtly twisted moral comment and delicately comedic chemistry.

The Hit is available on The Criterion Channel.

Who are You Watching?

Sydney Sweeney finds out there's more to spying on your neighbours than you might expect in 2021's The Voyeurs. It's basically a loose remake of Rear Window but it's quite good for that. The moral crisis Sweeney's character finds herself in in the climax is kind of exquisite.

Sweeney plays Pippa, an optometrist who's just moved into a fabulous new apartment with her boyfriend, Thomas (Justice Smith). Their apartment has massive floor-to-ceiling windows through which they can easily see into the apartment across the street. That apartment also has the massive windows but the curtains are never closed and the lights are always on. Inhabiting the apartment are a professional photographer, Seb (Ben Hardy), with a studio inside the apartment, and his girlfriend, Julia (Natasha Liu Bordizzo). The two don't seem at all conscious of the fact that their most private moments are on display for everyone across the street.

One flaw in the film's logic is that it doesn't consider the possibility of anyone else in Pippa and Thomas' building being able to see these neighbours and events proceed as though only Pippa and Thomas can see in. They are thus forced to grapple with the responsibility they have for witnessing disturbing incidents.

Some reviews say the second half of the film is ludicrous but I'd say those critics forget the fact that first part of the film is also ludicrous. It's just that the first part of the film gives us a premise we're more used to accepting in fiction. Hitchcock played with this idea in Vertigo in which the first half of the film gives us a bunch of absurd stuff we're used to accepting from movies, but then Hitchcock pulls the rug out from under the viewer. The Voyeurs doesn't do that but it does go somewhere interesting. I suspect the second half of the film was taken in a slightly different direction than what was originally in the screenplay after Sydney Sweeney was cast because it makes very good use of her famously "good genes". But it works wonderfully.

The first half of the film does a good job of slowly building Pippa and Thomas from characters who can't help watching what's very much on display to actively spying, going to complicated lengths to improve their surveillance methods. It's Pippa in particular who compulsively concocts moral justifications despite the fact that she's primarily deriving sexual gratification from the experience. This shaky moral ground leads to some scenes of impressively sexy subtext when Pippa finally meets the two neighbours, particularly in the case of Seb who, with his photographer's eye, turns the tables on Pippa. What happens to Pippa after that is a bit underplayed in my opinion. She's subjected to such severe physical and psychological violation that I feel like her trauma would've been far greater than what we see. But there is a sequence of Pippa really losing her shit and smashing things and Sweeney's performance does convey the idea of someone being stripped of both confidence in her capacity for rational thought and all sense of moral justification so. She's almost bestial, driven back to a primal motive.

The Voyeurs is available on Amazon Prime.

Homecoming

Nine years later, Spider-Man: Homecoming holds up really well. Yeah, that's right, it was made in 2017, it's been almost a decade of Tom Holland's Spider-Man. I was watching Homecoming last night and feeling really surprised at how much better it's written than the follow up films. I vividly remember how badly written Far from Home was. I guess the late 2010s marks the shift in Disney's policy, away from hiring quality writers in favour of cheaper, more easily dominated young writers.

Homecoming's screenplay is credited to three separate writing duos--(1)Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, (2) Jon Watts and Christopher Ford, and (3) Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers. Watts is the director and he and Ford later wrote Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. McKenna and Sommers are the sole credited writers of Far from Home, No Way Home, and Brand New Day. Goldstein and Daley are the writers and directors of Game Night and Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, movies that have thrived on streaming, the true test of a film's writing quality. When a film attracts regular viewing even though it's either not connected to a popular franchise or it's connected to a franchise audiences had low expectations for (Dungeons and Dragons), it's a pretty reliable metric of quality. That's why Homecoming is so good, that's why Disney won't work with Goldstein and Daley anymore. Yes, I think Disney's current regime actively discourages quality as cost-prohibitive.

Also I wonder if Disney's current administration actively discourages tension in their movies, for fear of movies being too traumatising for young viewers. The set pieces in Homecoming are wonderful back-and-forths between tension and comedy. When Spider-Man has to save his friends from the Washington Monument, the filmmakers squeeze every ounce of tension they can from the scenario. They even use comedy to feed it as when the elevator operator's banal reassurances of safety are directly contradicted by the computer in Spider-Man's suit. They throw in the tension around Spider-Man being actually stunned by how high and isolated the monument is, underlying that if he were to fall, his spider tricks couldn't save him. There's a basic sense of the physical reality at play that's missing from so many newer screenplays.

Anyway, I'm still looking forward to Brand New Day but I wish Disney would prioritise writing. People seem to be complaining about the special effects but the effects wouldn't matter so much if the screenplays were better. Also, I think the trailer is showing alternate versions of shots from the final film in which certain spoiler related elements have been removed. A lot of people seem to think Peter is becoming a mutant in the trailer but I maintain my interpretation that he's in fact acquired the Venom symbiote.

Nicholas Brendon

Nicholas Brendon has died at just 54 years old. Some may find it odd that I mention his death when I didn't mention Chuck Norris. I've never been a Chuck Norris fan and it seems like most of his fans are ironic fans anyway. Even now they're sharing memes showing Norris readying for some smackdown in Heaven. The underlying joke generally seems always to have been, "Isn't it funny that this guy's supposed to be a badass?" I'm not a Chuck Norris fan but I can't get onboard the irony train.

Now, Nicholas Brendon was not among my favourite actors. He was one of the stars of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of my favourite TV series, which aired for seven seasons starting almost thirty years ago. He was probably my least favourite character but only by default. I didn't hate him. He played Xander, one of the core group of high school friends around Buffy who helped her slay vampires. Xander was generally seen as a stand-in for series creator Joss Whedon, who was cancelled a few years ago. In a video streamed a few days before his death, Brendon condemned the recent attempt at a reboot for trying to start the show up again without Whedon, whom Brendon said had been "punished enough". Brendon did voice some support for Charisma Carpenter when she made allegations about Whedon's "toxic" behaviour.

Brendon himself was guilty of unambiguously worse behaviour, having been arrested for domestic assault at least three times, in one case even attempting to strangle his girlfriend. He pleaded guilty to charges at the time. But to-day, Brendon's Buffy co-stars are publishing odes to the actor. Charisma Carpenter qualified her statement by saying, "I will miss the version of the man I once knew."

Meanwhile, I haven't found one article that even mentions attempting to contact Whedon for a comment on Brendon's death.

Sonnet 1985

As shadow shipment passed inspection late.
No citizen arranged the go between.
The crucial figures met, discussing fate.
Some story actions truth cannot redeem.
The tea was poured but all the cups were gone.
And now the table's wet and no-one knows.
The sketchy hostess holds an extra pawn.
His heart, beholding her, now warmly glows.
Some strings of garlic line the kitchen walls.
The water flowing out the door is deep.
Beyond the hills, a cloudy monster calls.
A stolen watch was really very cheap.
Mistaken thieves were taken back in time.
The markets now are all bereft of lime.

It's a Twin Peaks World

I started watching Twin Peaks season three again last night. That first episode is so brilliant. I think most people got the impression, when Twin Peaks first came out, that it was the citizens of Twin Peaks who were remarkable oddballs. Season three makes it clear that it's humanity in general that's odd. There are weird people in New York, in Las Vegas, and in a town called Buckhorn in South Dakota.

One of my favourite sequences in David Lynch's oeuvre is the one around Ruth Davenport's apartment. I wish there were clips of it on YouTube. Lynch shows again how inimitable his knack was for creating weird characters. People who try to imitate him are unable ot strike the balance required for credible weirdness. The characters use common phrases in such a way that you suddenly realise how odd common language is, like when Ruth's neighbour calls the police and can't remember her own address, saying helplessly, "You know I know this!"

I love the conversation between the police and the handyman who's immediately suspicious that police are there for him. I love how the character has a clear line of thought, how he's clearly working things out but from a completely wacked out standpoint, as when he asks the police, "How did you know I was going to see Chip?" Maybe this guy's a conspiracy theorist but he clearly also has something to hide that makes him anxious about the sudden appearance of the police. Even people who aren't up to anything get nervous when the police show up.

It almost seems like Lynch and Frost were trying to set up a spin-off set in Buckhorn. Maybe they were but, with the Roadhouse vignettes, it feels more like they were trying to set up an impression of this world of strange narratives all around us, happening all the time, that occasionally bump into each other leaving odd impressions. Again, it's strange, but also extremely realistic.

Alas, I can't find any Buckhorn clips. There are plenty of short Black Lodge clips though.

If You're Gonna Murder, Make It a Perfect Murder

Michael Douglas and Viggo Mortensen conspire to commit the perfect murder of Gwyneth Paltrow in 1998's A Perfect Murder, a loose remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder. It certainly doesn't improve on the original but its blander title is a fitting indicator of how unremarkable but not exactly bad the movie is.

Douglas plays another Wall Street guy, this time his name's Steven, and he's married to Paltrow's character, Emily. She's having an affair with pre-Lord of the Rings Viggo Mortensen who plays David, one of those bohemian movie artists who live in a massive loft space in a major city. Let's go back to that economy, okay?

It turns out Steven knows about his wife's affair but his reaction is to offer David half a million dollars to kill her. He gradually accepts the offer after some reluctance.

Well, let's get to the obvious question. Is it a perfect murder? The plan is to have David enter the wealthy couple's luxury apartment through a service door using Emily's key which Steven leaves taped under the railing of the stairwell. Steven knows Emily takes her bath at the same time he goes to his normal poker game which puts her in a vulnerable position while he has a solid alibi. It's very similar to the plot of Dial M for Murder and goes awry in basically the same way.

What are the flaws in this plan? Steven doesn't have as much leverage on David as Ray Milland's character has on his stooge in Dial M for Murder. Steven can reveal to people in town that David has a criminal past and an assumed name, but he doesn't have the blackmail material that Ray Milland has in the Hitchcock movie. A Perfect Murder combines two characters from the Hitchcock movie; the man the wife is having an affair with and the con-man who has to commit the actual murder. This makes Steven's proposal much riskier. There's a chance that David really does love Emily, as she apparently loves him, and the two might collude to effect Steven's demise.

Direction by Andrew Davis and cinematography by Dariusz Wolski are standard fare for a '90s thriller. Gwyneth Paltrow is very pretty and gives a good performance though there's not much to her character. She's a simultaneous translator fluent in multiple languages, reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn's character in Charade.

A Perfect Murder is available on The Criterion Channel.

Movie Business

I almost forgot all about the Oscars, even though I made predictions back in January. I was right about One Battle After Another winning in most categories but I was wrong about Teyana Taylor winning Best Supporting Actress. The award went to Amy Madigan from Weapons, which I've not seen. Taylor was also accidentally barred from taking the stage by a security guard. Someone must be sticking pins in her Voodoo doll. It sounds like she was pretty gracious, too, even celebrating the actress who won.

I'd say an even bigger scandal was the absence of Brigitte Bardot from the "In Memoriam" section. If the victory of One Battle After Another didn't tell you about the Academy's political alignment, Bardot's omission makes it perfectly clear. Whatever her politics in later life, Bardot's status as someone who fundamentally changed the global film industry can't be denied. Omitting her from the "In Memoriam" is absurd.

Also this week, a trailer for the upcoming Spider-Man movie has finally been released:

I'm surprised by how prominently the Punisher is featured in the trailer. I really like Jon Bernthal's portrayal of the character on Daredevil and Punisher, I hope it'll feel like the same character.

It looks to me like Peter Parker's going to get the Venom symbiote in this movie. It looks a lot like the comics arc with Peter investigating a spacecraft and then something appears to jump from one bystander to another, altering their personality. If it is the symbiote, I guess it won't be the one from the Tom Hardy movies, despite his cameo in No Way Home.

A Long Time Ago, in an Ireland Far, Far Away

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, everyone, though it's already the 18th now for me here in Japan. I listened to the Dubliners when walking home after work and then I had a bottle of Guinness Extra Stout and a glass of Tullamore Dew Irish whiskey. I also roasted garlic and spread it on wheat crackers with sliced cherry tomatoes, basil, and oregano. Not exactly Irish but it was tasty. For a movie, for some reason I wanted to watch The Phantom Menace. Liam Neeson is Irish so I guess it makes a kind of sense. I fell asleep watching it, though. The last thing I remember was Obi-Wan Kenobi saying, "The negotiations were short."

Yesterday was also graduation day for third year students and my last day at the school I was working at. Also, my last day working at a school in Japan because I'm going back to the U.S. next month. It's been an educational six years but for now I just want to talk a little about the school I just finished working at. This relatively small school has one of the best art clubs I've seen in Japan. The junior high school art clubs are always amazing and the students are always light years ahead of anyone I remember from when I was in junior high school, myself included. But this particular school has an art club amazing even by Japanese standards. Several of the second year students are making what I would call professional quality work. The club leader is a girl with a refreshing reverence for art history and I was pleased to see her interest in Gustav Klimt and a variety of Renaissance artists. I introduced her to the Pre-Raphaelites and I was pleased to see she took a liking to them.

I also hung out with the brass band a little and had some great summer afternoons talking with two students in particular. One girl had an amazing knack for natural language acquisition. I've been telling people for years they ought to watch movies in English but this girl was living proof of the efficacy of doing so. Freely talking to her about English idioms and common phrases felt like the kind of thing language education ought to be most of the time but too rarely is, at least in Japan.

Anyway, I hope all the students have bright futures ahead of them. Many of them certainly have skills and talents for brilliant careers.

A Convergence of Storms

I was watching Kurosawa Akira's 1946 film No Regrets for Our Youth (わが青春に悔なし) again last night. It's the first time I've watched it since reading more about the political situation in Japan in the 1930s. The beginning of the film is based on an incident in 1933 when a professor named Takigawa Yukitoki was threatened with dismissal from Kyoto University after giving a lecture deemed too radical. This sparked a reaction among the students and protests against incursions against free speech. In Kurosawa's film, the students are divided between moderate leftists and outright Communists but they're all actively opposed to fascism, Japan's invasion of Manchuria, and militarism in general. The movie was made under the auspices of the U.S. occupation of Japan so one has to take some of the messaging in the film with a grain of salt and it's worth noting that Kurosawa was unhappy with changes made to the ending of the film.

Still, his dynamic camerawork is already remarkable in this early stage of his career. The rapid sequences of shots of Hara Setsuko are electrifying as Kurosawa frames her as the wild, spiritual counterbalance to the boys' political radicalism. There are few clips on YouTube, this one has French subtitles, but the students are ironically extolling their university's virtues as a haven for free speech and freedom when they're interrupted by the sound of gunshots.

More striking than the gunshots is the angle of Hara's back as she leans on her arms, her head turned away from the camera, before Kurosawa's cut to her face as she turns to face her classmates. Later, there are energetic sequences of her playing piano, low angle shots from behind as she slams the keys, like a goddess of thunder, unable to articulate her displeasure in words. She's magnificent in this movie.

No Regrets for Our Youth is available on The Criterion Channel.

Lost in the Snow

A small community in a remote Canadian town is torn apart after fourteen children die in a school bus accident. Atom Egoyan's 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter is about as cheerless as you could imagine from the subject matter but, although it's really an ensemble film, the whole thing is elevated by a central performance by Ian Holm.

Holm plays a lawyer from the big city called Mitchel Stephens who comes to town to drum up support for a class-action lawsuit against . . . someone. For something. Bruce Greenwood plays the father of two of the kids who died. He was driving behind the bus at the time it slid off the icy road onto the frozen lake and could plainly see it was no-one's fault but bad luck. But someone has to be held responsible, right? Surely there was a screw loose in the bus or the railing was faulty. Once, when speaking with the parents of one victim, Stephens awkwardly uses the word "compensation". Even as he says it you can see in Holm's performance he's aware of how feeble the word is in this case. No-one seriously thinks "compensation" can come of this or of any effort in their power. But something must be done.

I saw an interview with Egoyan on Criterion before I watched the movie in which he said one thing that interested him in the story was the character of Nicole, one of the survivors, played by Sarah Polley. In the interview he explained that he was interested in how the entire community was aware that her father, Sam (Tom McCamus), sexually abused her but never spoke about it. In the film, for the most part, Egoyan allows the viewer to read between the lines, as Stephens has to, instead of directly explaining what's happening to her. I suppose the influence of Twin Peaks is pretty obvious and maybe, to a lesser extent, Fargo. It's almost unfortunate because until one thinks of those influences one doesn't really see the flaws in Sweet Hereafter. Both Twin Peaks and Fargo do a much better job of establishing a sense of community with idiosyncratic characters and layers of secrets and willful ignorance. One can almost hear Bobby Briggs saying, "We all knew she was in trouble."

Again, Ian Holm is amazing in the movie. His character is also dealing with his own family problem, a daughter who's grown up to be a drug addict. One moment, we watch him trying to appear compassionate while trying to convince people to join the lawsuit and in another moment wrestling with his love for his daughter and the knowledge that he can't trust anything she says. It's really a terrific performance.

The Sweet Hereafter is available on The Criterion Channel.

Banish the Boring

Well, here's some good news. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot is dead. Obviously I love the Buffyverse considering how I've been talking about Angel and Buffy here lately. When I heard that series creator Joss Whedon was to be shut out of the reboot, that it would instead be directed by Chloe Zhao, I figured it would be dull, soulless, studio drivel. Well, it turns out the filmed pilot was just dull, soulless drivel that the studio wanted no part of. Good for them.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Twenty years ago, talentless directors like Brett Ratner or Paul Haggis mysteriously kept getting work in Hollywood despite plainly being inept. Now they're both cancelled and Hollywood has retrained their policy to prop up a different group of undeserving rich people. Or maybe Chloe Zhao's used up all of her chances. Maybe we can hope that the Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy directed Star Wars movie won't get off the ground. Or are we to really believe that the one episode of Ms. Marvel she directed really demonstrated that she should be directing a Star Wars movie?

There has been some interesting work on Disney Star Wars and Marvel shows, work done by women and ethnic minorities. Why not work more with Steph Green who directed good action sequences in the second episode of Book of Boba Fett? I also think Deborah Chow deserves a second chance. I think all the problems with the Obi-Wan Kenobi series were down to actor and studio meddling.

Anyway. I'm just happy, at least for now, Buffy's tomb remains undesecrated.

Sonnet 1984

Another voice diverts the normal band.
But who are they when swapping singing birds?
Another name denotes another brand.
No reason now to hum with perfect words.
So people gathered late to hear the songs.
The million dollar tickets sold to gas.
Who are the spenders turning up in throngs?
A jiggling, laughing orange pumpkin mass.
Collaborations melt to single grots.
The alloy brings a crew of ghostly gents.
The naked babes interpret inky blots.
And they must pay their catastrophic rents.
So this was how the show continued on.
Computer art created shadow spawn.

Dare to Believe in Quality

A new teaser for the upcoming season of Daredevil was released to-day. Supposedly Elden Henson's character Foggy can be briefly glimpsed but, if so, it goes by too fast for me. I sure hope they're not going to resurrect him. I continue to be puzzled that fans want him back.

Am I a sucker because I'm holding out hope this season could be good? I watched the first few minutes of Wonder Man and, despite the good reviews, found it to be the usual flavourless gruel. But Disney always buys good reviews.

The original run of Daredevil was so good and I love Jessica Jones, I'm so happy to see Krysten Ritter in the role again. And her and Karen teaming up as Daredevil's sidekicks is a terrific idea. I sure hope this thing ends up being good.

汚名

I discovered Prime Video Japan has a lot of classic American movies but only if you search for them by their Japanese titles.

They're all hard-subbed, which means you can't turn off the Japanese subtitles, but that's a small price to pay for such a treasure trove. I was watching Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 film Notorious last night, which used to be a movie that I watched repeatedly. Watching those conversations between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in the first part of the film felt like coming home.

His performance in this film is often cited as the best in his long career. He's so restrained but you can see what he's holding in. And she's at the end of a long tunnel of despair. I could watch these two talk for days.

The Japanese title of the film is 汚名, "omei", which Google translates as stigma or infamy. It's funny, I've asked a few teachers if there's a word for "infamy" in Japanese, or an opposite of fame, and I've been told no. It's hard to know anything for sure these days. This fog gets me.

30.0 Years

This brand new Neon Genesis Evangelion short was released to YouTube a few days ago, following its screening at a special event in Japan. It marks the 30th anniversary of the franchise's inception. It definitely leans hard into the light comedy side of the series rather than the dark, psychological elements that originally made the title famous. It's effectively funny and cute. I always did like Asuka, she and Misato being my two favourite characters. I remember seeing an interview with one of the creatives involved with the project, I think it was even Anno Hideaki, the director, in which he said Japanese fans tend to prefer the quiet, submissive Rei and Americans like the loud, assertive Asuka. I guess I fit that stereotype. All the same, it's easy to forget that Asuka's supposed to be half-German.

The short features two versions of Asuka, one from the original series and one from the Rebuild of Evangelion movies, amusingly appearing as a comedic double act as they explore alternate realities, presenting different outcomes to the series' events for Asuka. The Rebuild movies did not end with Asuka ending up with Shinji but with one of Shinji's high school friends instead. Apparently this did not sit well with the original Asuka.

Shortly after the release of this short, it was announced that there's going to be a new Evangelion series spearheaded by Tsurumaki Kazuya, a director who's increasingly taken the reins in Anno's Gainax splinter company, Khara. I loved Tsurumaki's work on Gunbuster 2 and FLCL, not to mention the Rebuild of Evangelion movies. His work doesn't have the depth of Anno's original but it's always impressive. I'll certainly watch the new series, even if it probably is a cash grab. I guess it'll have to be in another alternate universe. Hopefully it'll work out better for Evangelion than it did for Marvel.

The Conquering Screen

One of the most spectacular absurdities of American culture is the televangelist. The often flamboyantly dressed, vociferous carnival barkers of televised faith somehow inspire devotion and millions of dollars of donation. To properly examine such a phenomenon, it might help to be a foreigner. In 1981, Werner Herzog made God's Angry Man, a documentary about the televangelist Gene Scott. It's not a moralising film that seeks to come to a conclusion about the nature of American televangelism but, instead, like all of Herzog's films, focuses on the peculiar passion of an extraordinary individual.

Herzog interviews Scott's parents as well but most of the film consists of Herzog's interviews with Scott himself interspersed with clips of Scott's broadcast. In the interview segments, Scott complains about persecution and the burdens of his vocation, even his desire to give it up. The segments from his broadcast fulfill the film's English title, showing a man raving at the camera, occasionally relieved by amateur bluegrass performances. The film's centrepiece is a bizarre tirade in which he berates the audience for not sending the final 600 dollars of a pledge drive. He precedes his rant by quietly staring at the camera for several minutes, threatening that he will remain silent if no pledges come in.

It's hard not to think this man's business owes its existence to masochism. Why else would anyone willingly send this man money? Of course, Herzog is focused on one aspect of Scott's personality. Maybe there are other times in Scott's broadcast in which he provides his viewers with comfort or insight. But Herzog doesn't provide any perspective from Scott's audience, this is not an analysis of the televangelist phenomenon but an exhibition of a bizarre personality. It's certainly fascinating. Scott's presumption of dominance in relation to millions of strangers makes it seem that his delusion is absolutely flawless.

God's Angry Man is available on The Criterion Channel.

Blu-Ray Bebop

Watanabe Shinichiro in The Criterion Closet to-day. He's the director of the original Cowboy Bebop, an anime series that's not widely known in Japan, at least not in my experience living here. I had one student a few years ago who was a fan. He was one of those students whom I wish I could have done more, for whom I wish I could have been a better, more insightful teacher. The fact that he was a Cowboy Bebop fan is enough to show how relatively isolated he was.

Watanabe's picks aren't so surprising. Maybe the Jacques Tati box set is most surprising but Watanabe's work does sometimes have the detached, deadpan quality of Tati's comedy. I didn't expect him to pick Suzuki Seijun's Branded to Kill as the only Japanese film among his choices but if I'd thought about it beforehand I probably would've predicted it. It's a stylish, postmodern gangster film, which is basically what Cowboy Bebop is. I have not met one person in Japan who's told me they've heard of Suzuki Seijun, by the way.

It's funny how the trailer promotes the film as "humanity laid bare" over a clip of one of its most absurd scenes, of a gangster dancing hysterically while under a hail of bullets. Branded to Kill is one of Suzuki's most detached, most ironic films. It's closer to some of Watanabe's post-Cowboy Bebop work than it is to Cowboy Bebop which, though it is postmodern, has warmth to it, a kind of warmth that almost seems to come through accidentally through the characters' chemistry. More like Tati, I guess.

Where's the Harm?

For a season of television that's primarily impressive for how grim it is, Angel season five has a surprising number of fun episodes, really the best comedic episodes of the series. A January 14th 2004 episode called "Harm's Way" uses the short version of the character Harmony's name for a pun, one of several episodes to do so. It must have been a surprise to everyone that Harm turned out to be one of the most consistently funny characters in the Buffyverse.

Played by Mercedes McNab, Harmony first appeared as a background character, one of Cordelia's snooty high school friends in the first seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By season five of Angel, she gets to be the unapologetically shallow character that Cordelia used to be. She fits right in with the new premise of Angel's crew running an evil law firm when she takes the role of Angel's secretary. In "Harm's Way", we see how her job entails fetching Angel's mug of pig's blood and handling the catering for a meeting between two demon clans, resulting in the untimely appearance of a camel. The episode uses a dovetailing of premises to present the audience with something that challenges their complacency in accepting plot formulae. In the standard language of television, we would be compelled to sympathise with Harmony, and we do, in her attempts to please the implacable Angel, complaining at one point that she works extra hard because she doesn't have a soul. And that's the catch. She doesn't have a soul so compliance with the new policy that forbids killing people for pleasure or sustenance doesn't come naturally to her.

Just like with Spike in the middle seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, some of the best stuff in both series comes from when it plays around with its hazy mythology around what defines a character with a soul compared to one without one. This issue is also explored with Spike, now a part of Angel's cast, when he resumes an exploitative, casual sex relationship with Harmony even though he now has a soul.

What the heck is a soul anyway? I'm sure someone will figure it out one of these days.

Who's the Family To-day?

I gotta say, I'm becoming a real fan of Atom Egoyan. I watched his first movie a few days ago, 1984's Next of Kin, which is a fascinating film about performative family dynamics.

Peter (Patrick Tierney) is 23 and lives at home, quietly traumatised by his constantly bickering parents. They go to family therapy and Peter ends up sneaking into the office after hours and seeing tape of another family's session, an Armenian family whose son went missing. So he goes to their home and pretends to be their son.

Not as though he's trying to fool them. They all engage in role play and soon they're engaging in different scenarios and everyone seems to gain a kind of delight or contentment from performing an idealised or exciting family dynamic. There's an absurd, almost manic energy to the last portion of the film as though the characters are revelling in some kind of liberation. Each member of the group is very generous with the other in a way reminiscent of a good improv troupe. When one person starts something, the others support it from the point of view of what kind of emotional impact they're trying to achieve. It's a fascinating perspective on human relationships. Maybe we all ought to live life more like performance art.

Next of Kin is available on The Criterion Channel.

Sonnet 1983

Without a spark, the meaning wasn't clear.
No energy expended lit the bulb.
Conducting thoughts occured through mild beer.
More dreams distilled than little bubbles hold.
We went where dizzy crows discussed their war.
The glowing watchers know what's going down.
"It never changes," says the mutant boar.
A tragic day befell the stormy clown.
Across the beach, he chased the pranksters off.
At sea, his loopy girl was laughing hard.
Zosima told the girl she shouldn't scoff.
Alyosha held a torn and worthless card.
The curtains couldn't catch the sun or moon.
But clouds appeared to cool the heavy noon.

Another Last Day

Tuesday was my last day at one of the junior high schools where I've been working over the past year. I was surprised by the very kind expressions of farewells. One of the second year English teachers I worked with gave me this bouquet of artificial flowers:

She was one of the most hard-working and resilient teachers I've worked with. Another teacher gave me some kind of bread snack, sort of like bruschetta but frosted with a cherry flavoured substance. It was really good. He was one of the most sensible of the younger teachers I've worked with, as was a young woman who also teaches English to first year students. I worked with several impressive teachers.

It's an amazing school, a big one, with a surprising number of non-sports related clubs. It has an art club, a literature club, a handmaking club, a drama club, a brass band, and an English club. Of course I got to know the English club members and I was always impressed by their energy. I also generally hung out in the art club and occasionally in the brass band and drama club. I was continually astonished by the high level of work coming from the art club and I think the drama club has members who'll become skilled filmmakers. I wish I'd had more time for the literature and handmaking clubs. I spent a lot of time talking with a pair of sisters in brass band, the elder of whom was particularly keen on practicing English and was always a delight to speak with.

This was the first school where I spent some time observing classes of other subjects, primarily to see how differently other subjects are taught in Japan and gauge student attitudes toward them generally. I was surprised how often the Japanese language teachers were friendly and interested in talking about English. There was also a really impressive third year social studies teacher whose ability to remember information related to her subject enabled her to display some engaging extemporisation.

The school principal took me to dinner at a really amazing izakaya. It was easily the best food I've had in this town and I've had a lot of good food here. I ate so much sashimi, quail eggs, fried squid, and Japanese style fried chicken. The meal concluded with some incredible green tea over rice. This is normally considered the poor bachelor's easy meal but this restaurant turned it into a culinary masterpiece with a pitted umeboshi on top that combined with the rest for a perfectly balanced set of flavours.

It was a fitting experience to cap off a memorable year at a memorable school.

Unanswerable Questions

The parents of a murder victim and the parents of the killer meet for a discussion in 2021's Mass. It's an effective little chamber piece.

The victim and killer were high school students and the incident was a school shooting in which several people were killed, including the killer, who shot himself. It's an all too common scenario in the U.S. these days. The film stars Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton as the victim's parents, Jay and Gail, while Reed Birney and Ann Dowd player the killer's parents, Richard and Linda. I wonder if that's a Twin Peaks reference. Richard and Linda were the two mysterious names on the note Cooper finds in the last episode of Twin Peaks.

The dialogue goes as you might expect. There's a sense of horrible futility while at the same time there's the unstoppable compulsion to do something. Details of the killing and the killer's motives remain superficial, mostly the focus is on the grief and anguish of the two sets of parents. It's not Bergman but it's not bad.

The film was written and directed by Fran Kranz, an actor, best known for his role as Topher on Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. Mass is available on Amazon Prime.

[REDACTED]

My biological father passed away last week. He was [REDACTED]. Most of my formative years were lived with my step-father, [REDACTED], but I saw [REDACTED] occasionally throughout my youth before living with him for a time in my 20s. I've often wondered if my fondness for Shakespeare's Henry IV was related to this experience of growing up with two Dads. I'm not sure who would be the Falstaff and who would be the King Henry IV.

When I was a kid, I was a fan of Dungeons and Dragons, particularly the Dragonlance franchise. I used to tell [REDACTED] about these stories and he'd listen patiently even though he was a huge Lord of the Rings fan and knew Dragonlance was but a pale shadow of Tolkien's work. I think it was his influence that finally led to me reading The Hobbit in high school. I'm certainly grateful for that.

He was a guitarist and had been in bands. After retiring and moving to Tennessee, he played with a group called [REDACTED]. He gave me two guitars when I was younger but I never got especially good at playing them. He liked Led Zeppelin and Johnny Cash among many other rock groups. I remember he often recommended Mountain to me as a band that was too often overlooked. So this is for him:

Voice of the Hobbit

I just finished listening to Nicol Williamson's 1974 reading of The Hobbit again. Williamson is now best known for playing Merlin in John Boorman's Excalibur but at one time he was well known for playing Hamlet. If you see him in multiple roles, you'll be impressed by what a chameleon he was, able to change his voice and accent and come off naturally. He uses this talent for his Hobbit audiobook to provide distinct voices for all the various characters. I find I quickly forget that Gandalf and Bilbo are voiced by the same guy.

Certainly it's a better experience than any of the film adaptations of the story, though I think the Peter Jackson films had some good qualities. I liked Howard Shore's work on them, particularly the dwarves singing.

The Errant King

After carelessly inciting a violent incident over the radio, a shock jock slums it with a homeless Robin Williams in Terry Gilliam's 1991 film The Fisher King. As much as I love Terry Gilliam movies, I've only very infrequently watched this one but I found it perfectly suited my mood on Sunday.

The main character played by Jeff Bridges always seemed like he was based on Howard Stern to me. Googling now, I see Gilliam tried to get Stern as a consultant at the time but that was a period in Stern's career when being hard to get for any project was part of his shtick. Nowadays, I suspect a good portion of the people reading this probably don't know who Howard Stern is. That would have been almost unimaginable at one time when he was the dominant voice on the car radios of millions of Americans. Now, in this world of fractured audiences and podcasts and audiobooks, it may be impossible for someone to achieve such a status. Stern's interview with Kamala Harris during the last presidential election that failed to attract much if any notice, even among her supporters, was probably a nail in the coffin of both Stern's notoriety and Harris' campaign. But at one time, he was a figure of prominent controversy so people really worried about something like what happens in The Fisher King.

Bridges' character, Jack, tells a listener that rich people are basically non-humans and ought to be disposed of. After the careless remark, a listener to Jack's show takes a shotgun to a restaurant and murders several people. I was reminded of the podcast about Nazis I listened to last week in which I heard that the Nazis had a hatred for aristocrats, tied with Hitler's populist rhetoric that exploited resentment for the wealthy. But The Fisher King never becomes explicitly political.

The story takes Arthurian legend as an influence and Jack's downfall and quest for redemption are linked to the quest for the Holy Grail. I like how the film never explicitly states this motive for Jack but instead compels the viewer to find it through tactics of storytelling and filmmaking. Gilliam and his screenwriter fill the film with symbols and clues. At one point, Jack, drunkenly wandering the streets of New York, is given a Pinocchio puppet by a child. Jack's not exactly a liar but perhaps it's an indication that he is, in a sense, not real. A significant scene before his downfall has him practicing a line from a sitcom he's supposed to play the lead in, a catchphrase that consists of just a sarcastic, "Forgive me." As he practices different ways of saying it sarcastically, one is compelled to wonder if he's capable of saying it with genuine feeling.

Robin Williams is quite good as Parry, a man who loses his mind after his fiancee is killed. His subplot with Amanda Plummer as his love interest is very sweet.

The Fisher King is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Clanker's Clankers

I've been watching a couple of these Star Wars AI videos on YouTube. They're pretty lame. Actually, they remind me quite a bit of Ahsoka. The writing, which seems to linger just a bit too long on obvious dialogue, the shots that ponderously move from dull observations and simple statements, feels identical to the Ahsoka scripts. I wonder if these videos were written by the AI or if the producers of the videos are just exceptionally unimaginative.

I suppose AI will get better and we'll see fewer mistakes like the bit where Lando's spear suddenly sticks to the back of his hand because he needs two hands to take the box. Perhaps faces will maintain more consistent shapes, too.

The concept of "formulaic" writing has long existed in writing criticism. Maybe that's the best AI can do. I bet the reason Disney hasn't asked that these videos be removed from YouTube is they want to gauge audience interest in AI Star Wars content. Of course, formulaic writing has always been good enough for a lot of Hollywood executives and editors, especially risk averse ones. Or lazy ones, like Kate Beckinsale's character in The Last Days of Disco.

The Best Books

My mind is occupied to-day with some things I can't write about at the moment. So here's something I made yesterday after I saw Caitlin R. Kiernan had posted her top ten favourite novels. I thought I'd do the same but some of my favourite books are poems, not novels. So I'll just say top ten fiction books. This is my current list, subject to change, of course:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Beowulf, author unknown
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett
She by H. Rider Haggard

The list is in alphabetical order, it's not a ranking. Books that almost made the list were Moby Dick, Treasure Island, On the Road, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. It seems slightly odd, maybe, to have Roderick Random on the list and not Treasure Island but I asked myself, "Which book did I compulsively read repeatedly?" All the books on the list are books that I could not resist reading multiple times, books that demanded repeat reading. In the case of The Bell Jar, I remember reading it immediately after I read it the first time. While Treasure Island may be objectively a better book than Roderick Random, Roderick Random was the first book, or, really, the first piece of media I was ever exposed to that felt like it was being honest with me about what it takes to pursue a career as a young man. I'd say it's as true now as it was in the 18th century.

X Sonnet 1982

The friendly shades would tell you many names.
You see the shadows cheap across the train.
One circuit holds reflective little games.
The human mind becomes the human bane.
Now other folks are boarding metal doom.
The vet'rans know the demon sprites and mesh.
The imps were real, the Cyberdemons loom.
But no-one trained, no player equals Thresh.
A vanished art of PVP returns.
But helpless mortals fall between the cracks.
Confusing books and ammunition burns.
So gleeful goblins stuff you up in sacks.
For scores of years, the world now changes hands.
And no-one sees the ghosts that roam the lands.

Spike the Ghost

The first episode centring on Spike in Angel, season 5, is "Hell Bound", an October 22, 2003 episode written by Steven S. DeKnight, the writer who later went on develop the first season of Marvel's Daredevil series for Netflix. He takes advantage of Spike's situation, stuck in a ghost state, to have him start seeing of gruesomely mutilated apparitions.

According to the Buffyverse Wiki, this is the only episode in either series to have a viewer discretion advisory, though I think the end result is not nearly as creepy as "Hush". But it's not bad. It's a lot of opportunities for James Marsters to react to things and he was really good at doing that. He had a range of subtle facial expressions that were very effective at pulling the viewer into his character's experience. Why am I using past tense? He's not dead.

Looks like he's mainly doing voice work these days. I wonder why. Wikipedia shows how often he won awards for his work in the Buffyverse. Maybe he's just not ambitious. I can relate.

Nazis and the English

I've been listening to a fascinating discussion on the relationship between Germany and England during the years leading up to World War II on Apostolic Majesty's YouTube channel:

I'm generally not especially interested in World War II. I think it's inevitable for any thinking person to be somewhat interested in that war which I think, more than any other, continues to be a touchstone in any exploration of modern morality and human nature. It's a crucial point in any discussion of what defines society in any of the countries that were involved and an essential topic for discussions of modern human behaviour. So I think, for anyone with serious interest in humanity and society, some interest in World War II is necessary and inevitable. But beyond that, I'd much rather read about the 17th century.

The Apostolic Majesty YouTube discussion freshened my perspective and now I feel like I see the Nazis slightly differently. The idea that they saw the British as exceptionally cold and ruthless is new to me, or if I heard it before, I'd forgotten it. I'm fascinated by the fact that this seems to have been a quality that was at turns envied and deplored, or used as fodder in anti-British propaganda. I found myself thinking of the cliche in American films of British actors being cast in villainous roles and wondered how deep and widespread this idea of the "cold and ruthless" Brit goes. I suppose it's a reputation tied to British imperialism and perhaps the Nazi perspective on the British was not so dissimilar to the Japanese envying the colonialism of western powers. How often does envy lurk behind hate?

Another part of the discussion that interested me was the idea that exhibitions of brutality by the Nazis were not only sadistic or done with the intention of racial extermination but also with the intention to demonstrate the warrior nature of the Third Reich, to show their power in being above the morality that might prohibit such acts. It's an idea obviously connected to the kind of motive that informed Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and similarly calls into question the reality of attempts to transcend morality in this matter. A reaction against something must inevitably be defined by it. Harbouring the conception of a ruthless other may inevitably lead to this conception becoming a mirror. In this way, the one holding this perception may carve the path of their own downfall or moral degradation. Somehow I'm reminded of Macbeth. There is something of the existential doom inherent in free will here.