Joe Pantoliano attains a talent for resurrection thanks to a cat's internal organ in "Dig That Cat . . . He's Real Gone", the third episode of Tales from the Crypt from June 10, 1989. Richard Donner directed this zany, dreamlike episode based on a Haunt of Fear comic.
The story just assumes that cats actually have nine lives and there's a rational, anatomical explanation for it. I love how it just runs with that logic. Then it assumes people at a carnival will want to stand around for an hour waiting for Joey Pants to come back to life, and not even in situations that couldn't be easily faked by a halfway talented magician, like hanging or being buried alive without even a camera in the coffin.
Robert Wuhl plays the barker working with Pantoliano. A lot of the episode is him roaming around the tent with a series of fake moustaches, his face crammed in fish bowl, wide angle shots. I haven't read the particular comic but it really captures that feeling I had when reading Tales from the Crypt of exhausted writers turning to whatever random train of thought they could come up with for a grim. vaguely ironic tale. There is something insightful in the story's idea of how human preoccupation works. I can almost believe a crowd would be interested in the show and that the main characters would believe this would work as a viable attraction. There's an emotional logic at play.
Tales from the Crypt is available on Shudder.
Sonnet 1994
The dance routine equation smashed a ham.
With stomping feet, the dancers killed a pig.
A pound of pork was worth a slice of lamb.
Inversely tasty prices fell from big.
A queue of laughing clowns collect the cash.
But money changed to lightning moths at dawn.
The bugs were made of light and something rash.
The fission needed came from hostile brawn.
The priests collected torches round the block.
But bulbs are dear among benighted souls.
So some would use a giant woolen sock.
A talking sword would fill the thing with holes.
The cruise concludes across a silver sea.
The wasps exclude the only busy bee.
Usually when I watch The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles I tend to skip around to this or that episode that draws my interest for various reasons. Although there is a serial quality to the series with episodes frequently ending in ways that lead into the next, particularly in the case of the reedited version of the series that appeared in the late '90s, the stories all still feel very disconnected from one another, typically featuring Indy meeting a whole new cast of characters and forming new friendships that are rarely referenced in later episodes. But I decided to go back to the first episode, in its reedited form appropriately called My First Adventure. The reedited version of the series typically cuts together two previously one hour episodes to create a TV movie. In this case, My First Adventure takes part of the original 1992 premiere episode, "Curse of the Jackal", and fills out the run time with a story filmed in 1996. Unfortunately, this means that actor Corey Carrier, who plays Indy at ages 8 to 10, looks and sounds markedly older in the second half of the episode than he does in the first. I do think he seems more Harrison Ford-ish than Sean Patrick Flanery but who really wants to see Indiana Jones as a kid? That is maybe the eternal flaw of the show but I was watching the first half of My First Adventure trying to pinpoint the real reason it doesn't work.
Little Indy goes to Egypt with his parents and meets pre-war TE Lawrence (Joseph A. Bennett) taking part in the exploration of a pyramid in 1908. The fact that Indy met just about every famous person in the world in his youth also cuts into the show's sense of credibility though I guess I appreciate the fact that George Lucas wanted to make the show educational. Indy encounters Lawrence again during the war (played by Douglas Henshall) for a better episode featuring a young Catherine Zeta-Jones. Mostly I'd say My First Adventure doesn't work because Indy himself comes off so flat. He's an enthusiastic kid but little else.
The second half of the episode is a little more interesting. The abruptly older young Indy moves on to Morocco where his father (Lloyd Owen doing a Sean Connery impression) has been engaged to deliver a lecture to the Sultan. Indy befriends a palace slave and I liked how the script framed Indy as a relatively sheltered white kid having direct exposure to slavery for the first time. The slave, Omar, has of course been kept ignorant of the world and listens amazed as Indy describes snow and sea travel. But Indy shows his own ignorance when he continually presumes Omar is at liberty to think for himself or express his own desires when asked a question.
One thing's for sure, the massive budget on the show is always visible in the extensive location shoots and enormous local cast.
In the "More Things Change, the More they Stay the Same" department, I found it funny that the articles I've read about Olivia Rodrigo's babydoll dress tend not to mention the 1956 film Baby Doll that popularised the garment. At that time, according to Wikipedia:
Baby Doll courted controversy before its release with the display of a promotional billboard in New York City that depicted [the film's star, Carroll] Baker lying in a crib and sucking her thumb. Cardinal Spellman urged both Catholics and non-Catholics to avoid the film, deeming it a moral danger.
The article linked to at Bustle decries the possibility of "sexualising" Rodrigo. The astounding bad faith in this premise makes the enormous leap of ignoring trends of sexually provocative costumes and performances in popular music for the past 70 years. Of course part of the point of such costumes is to look sexy. Sex is part of human nature and so, therefore, is sexual attraction and it absolutely has a place in popular art because it reflects who we are.
But does the babydoll dress somehow encourage paedophilia? Rodrigo is 23 years old but as in the 1956 movie the idea is of course to tease a woman in a juvenile aesthetic. Why is this sexy? Is it normalising paedophilia? Desmond Morris one opined that women had juvenile physical features in contrast to men--larger eyes, slimmer shoulders, higher voice pitch, and less body hair--in order to provoke a protective impulse in men. So the single instinct the human being has to be protective of children triggered by physical features does double duty. One could ask, I suppose, which came first. Do women look like children or do children look like women?
"What is it about schoolgirls?" asked Elias Koteas in Exotica, a movie I talked about last week. In that movie, in which a main character is a stripper whose shtick is to wear schoolgirl uniforms, the answer is that theoretically schoolgirls are pure, they lack the "baggage" of adults. In Oingo Boingo's "Little Girls", a song which, despite how it's typically regarded, really mocks paedophiles, singer Danny Elfman sings from the point of view of a paedophile:
They don't care if I'm a one-way mirror
Well, they're not frightened by my cold exterior
They don't ask me questions
They don't want to scold me
They don't look for answers
They just want to hold me
Of course, anyone who's seen Mean Girls or spent quality time with teenage girls will know that it's absurd to say that young girls aren't judgemental. Part of maturing to adulthood is learning to be less judgemental of people who are unlike oneself, not more judgemental. This idea of innocence in children has little to do with actual children. Real innocence is often cruel. It's only by shielding children from situations in which they would have to make complicated moral choices that we create the illusion of their infallible benevolence. To a child, our adult world is in many ways horrific.
Arguably, the juvenile aesthetic is meant to evoke childish as often as it does childlike qualities. That the idea of an adult acting with the amorality of a child is worthy of punishment. This is a fundamental idea behind S&M and the enticement of the term "naughty" in an adult context. But this is by definition not an encouragement to paedophilia since it requires an adult transgressing by adopting juvenile qualities. To say that the tease of a woman wearing a babydoll encourages paedophilia is sort of like saying the Hamburglar encourages theft. But I suppose I can see how the Hamburglar might be too sophisticated for certain segments of society.
In 1985, one of Steven Spielberg's many projects was the launch of a new anthology television series called Amazing Stories. I hadn't seen it since I was a kid so I watched the first episode again last night. Spielberg himself directed the first episode called "Ghost Train" about a family moving into a big house in the middle of nowhere and the grandfather's regrets about a derailed train he remembers in the area from his childhood. It turns out to be a big allegory about death and letting go of a loved one. It hasn't aged well.
It might have benefited from the "event" aspect of television in 1985 when, if you didn't catch something when it aired, it could be years before you got the chance to see it again. So for many, the legend became bigger than the show itself. Watching it now it feels a bit more like seeing someone imitating Spielberg than Spielberg himself. There's the sweeping crane shots, the ecstatic closeups, the well timed editing beats. The cast feels very much like a TV cast, though, especially the parents. The mother's reaction to seeing the ghost train reminded me of a commercial in which a woman's dealing with a plumbing problem.
The opening theme segment is pretty quaint. I actually remember thinking this cgi looked genuinely cool.
I still find something intriguingly ominous about the weird cave people and the family at the end, presumably meant to be normal folks. I get this vague impression of them being trapped in the stories somehow, like there's this unintended message of how the storytelling began in ancient times and trapped both the teller and the audience and now YOU'RE TRAPPED TOO.
I had to get a root canal yesterday and the dentist and his assistant were talking about the recent American Music Awards throughout the procedure. Apparently a number of South Korean artists, including BTS and Katseye, won big, making me wonder why it's called the "American Music Awards". But what are words for? Missing Persons asked this question with their hit song, "Words", back in 1982. That song charted at 42.
I thought BTS were over but apparently this year they already have the song of the summer.
I don't find it half as interesting as former song of the summer "Espresso" but that was all the way back in 2024. Times have changed.
The dentist and his assistant also talked about Justin Bieber. I had no idea people in the U.S. were still listening to Justin Bieber. Again, the algorithms have let me down. I wondered when was the last time I'd looked at the Billboard Hot 100. Actually, I'd looked at the charts recently because, going through my deceased father's things, I'd found a few decades ago he'd paid a research firm to provide him with a printout of the Hot 100 lists going back to the '60s. Nowadays, that information's readily available for free on Wikipedia.
So I looked at the current Hot 100 and saw that someone named Ella Langley had the top two spots with songs called "Choosin' Texas" and "Be Her" (to-day I see she's been unseated by Drake). I checked out both of those songs on YouTube and found them to be surprisingly boring. Also surprising is that "Choosin' Texas" only has 34 million views.
"Be Her", the number 2, has 15 million views accrued over three months while Olivia Rodrigo's "Drop Dead", which was at number 7, has 31 million views accrued over one month. How does that make sense?
According to Google's AI:
The Billboard Hot 100 ranks the most popular songs in the U.S. every week by combining three main metrics: streaming activity, radio airplay, and sales data (compiled by Billboard's data tracking partner, Luminate). The exact formula is a closely guarded trade secret, but the final rankings are generally determined by these core components
Those aren't very good metrics. How many people listen to the radio anymore? Both radio and sales data come with higher price tags--radio play nowadays comes with artificial financial incentives while sales data reflects the small percentage of people who still buy music. But as my father evidently discovered, the top ranking Billboard songs are often dull. How often do people still listen to 1973's number 1, "Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Ole Oak Tree" or "That's What Friends Are For" from 1986? How about 1996's number one, "Macarena"?
Anyway, although I found the Ella Langley songs to be dull, I noticed both of the songs contained the recurrent preoccupation with uncertainty and the difficulty in defining relationships I talked about in a post last month about Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, and Sabrina Carpenter. "Choosin' Texas" finds the singer uncertain about the status of her relationship with her Texas boyfriend while "Be Her" is about wanting to become another person. This may be a generation experiencing exceptional difficulty defining itself. But what are words for?
Looking for feminism in Frankenstein is kind of like looking for romance in Alice in Wonderland. People really want it to be there and, if they look hard enough, they can find some compelling clues to suggest that it is there, and sometimes they go off and make analyses or adaptations that tease out these hints that turn out, in retrospect, to be largely projections originating from the analyst than anything the original author was probably ever interested in. Maggie Gyllenhaal's 2026 film The Bride! is at least among the more self-aware of those riffs and, in particular, fans of James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein may at least sympathise with Gyllenhaal's passion for that 1935 film. The Bride! is a very postmodern, academic film loaded with a modern political perspective, honestly more akin to Angela Carter than Mary Shelley. The performances and production design make it a delightful ride and I at least enjoyed it a little more than the similarly self-aware Frankenstein pastiche, Poor Things.
Jessie Buckley is in the duel role of Mary Shelley and the reanimated Bride and she plays both like a narcissistic, theatrical actress, like Patti LuPone or Norma Desmond, someone at all times palpably enraptured by her own grandeur. Her playing both roles is one of the more obvious nods to Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale's cinematic sequel to his famous adaptation of Frankenstein, both films starring Boris Karloff as the monster. Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley and the Bride in Bride of Frankenstein and she is mesmerising. I certainly don't blame Maggie Gyllenhaal for wanting to build a whole movie around that performance. It made me a lifelong Elsa Lanchester fan and for years I sought out every movie with Lanchester I could get my hands on. It's a different kind of performance than Jessie Buckley delivers, though. While Buckley presents us with a woman captivated by the tragedy of her own unrecognised genius, Lanchester's performance as Mary Shelley is of a self-possessed, subtly perverse woman, amused at an unspoken joke while her performance as the Bride is like that of a terrified animal. Buckley's performance is fun but in a way less connected to her environment and story. Some reviewers compare her to Deadpool and I think that's valid.
It's not only Bride of Frankenstein that Gyllenhaal references. There are scads of references to cinema of the '20s and '30s stitched throughout the movie that I suspect will drastically lower any appreciation the uninitiated will feel for the movie but I could appreciate Buckley's impression of Marlene Dietrich or Jake Gyllenhaal's performance as a Fred Astaire-ish musical star.
The monster is played by Christian Bale with a sense of unwavering sincerity and devotion to his goal. At first he seemed like Maggie Gyllenhaal meant for him to come off as an obnoxious incel, someone who believed he deserved to have everyone bend over backward to satisfy his unrequited needs. But once he meets the Bride he becomes a humble white knight. One of the more distinctly modern pieces of messaging in the film is of the subjectivity of beauty and the injustice of beauty standards, a thread that comes to a head when Bale's monster performs a musical routine referencing Peter Boyle's performance in Young Frankenstein that seems to suggest the audience is the monster for having laughed at Peter Boyle.
Bale's monster is referred to as Frankenstein, Frank for short, by the way, both a nod to the fact that the monster's name and the scientist's are frequently confused as well as the idea that the monster is, in fact, Victor Frankenstein's son so, therefore, he'd naturally carry on the family name.
Frank and the Bride hit the road as the film becomes an extended riff on Bonnie and Clyde which many reviewers have compared to other Bonnie and Clyde pastiches like Natural Born Killers and especially Joker: Folie a Deux. Frank and the Bride are wrapped up in their own worlds, a bubble that's occasionally punctured when one of the simplistic, vicious denizens of our world attempts to kill or rape them. The great failing of this film for many who've viewed it is the lack of a credible world for these two characters to dwell in. They are invariably victims of a broadly villainous world whereas other riffs on the Bonnie and Clyde story at least devote some time to the idea that the self-absorption of the protagonists may do legitimate harm to innocent bystanders. This is is something Mary Shelley herself better understood than both Maggie Gyllenhaal and Guillermo del Toro. Shelley's original monster is by no means a saint.
Maggie Gyllenhaal's fundamental idea is to find the feminism of Frankenstein by taking its depiction of monstrousness as an allegory for the roles women are forced to play in society. But it's ultimately unsatisfying, as allegories often are, because the two things don't map comfortably onto each other. Mary Shelley was more interested in the sanity of self-creation versus the imposition of life. Her interest in this idea was held without obligation to sort characters into consistently moral or immoral figures. Ultimately, that makes her work a more sophisticated rumination on the human experience on a level most adaptations have been unable to approach. But at least Gyllenhaal's movie gives us some food for thought, even if it's mostly only accessible to those of us who have done our homework.
Happy Memorial Day. I watched Stanley Kubrick's 1957 film Paths of Glory again this morning, which Wikipedia labels as an "anti-war film", citing an article that no longer exists on TCM's website. I suppose it's a fair label. Maybe it would be more accurate to call it simply an "anti-hierarchy film." Surely any halfway accurate depiction of World War I, particularly trench warfare, will inevitably be an anti-war film. I can't imagine putting a spin on that epitome of the absurd and the grotesque to make it seem reasonable.
The cinematography, the compositions, all of it is just absolutely phenomenal. It's so short and so smooth, it's almost impossible to stop watching once you've started. Sure it's a worthy way to honour the sacrifices of soldiers in war, though some might debate me on that. Is it better to remember true glory or to recall the fact that most soldiers in wars like that are victims in uniform? The film's razor sharp satire of the officers shows the ridiculous lengths of delusion they indulge in to maintain the narrative of war as an honourable endeavour in which the officers are the purest manifestation of virtue. It's just a magnificent film.
Last night, I was watching Oshima Nagisa's 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a film that I did hear talked about in Japan, unusual for a film so old or transgressive, though it's mainly due to the fact that its score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also starred in the film, continues to receive so many accolades around the world. I don't get the impression many in Japan have actually seen it. It certainly hasn't raised David Bowie's profile in Japan, whose name my more homophobic detractors, having heard he's my favourite singer, tended to pronounce as "David Boy", perhaps to conflate him with Boy George.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence never feels like a realistic depiction of a prison camp. Oshima should certainly be commended for showing the infamous brutality the Japanese showed to prisoners of war but the action often feels more like S&M role play than true abuse. It's clearly a movie primarily intended for Japanese audiences. Bowie once commented that Oshima gave extensive direction to the Japanese actors while telling the western actors to "Please do whatever it is you people do." Bowie himself, despite my admiration for him, could have used more direction as he tends always to come off as David Bowie in a military uniform, particularly when he does pantomime. I know his idea was probably to show his character's attempt to evoke normalcy in an abnormal situation but his professional quality pantomime is more reminiscent of Bowie as a performer than of the character he's playing.
Kitano Takeshi is about the only one who comes off as really authentic in the film. I don't know if that makes it a bad film but maybe not an appropriate film for Memorial Day.
Paths of Glory is available on MGM+ and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is available on The Criterion Channel.
Self-insert Mary Sue characters are widely seen as a hallmark of bad writing but sometimes they really work, a prime example being 1993's True Romance. Christian Slater's character, Clarence, is clearly modelled on screenwriter Quentin Tarantino himself. He's a movie nerd and Tarantino has talked about how he based Clarence's first meeting with a movie mogul on his own idea of himself in such a meeting. Throughout the film, characters express their boundless love and devotion to Clarence through words and deeds. Dennis Hopper as his father accepts a lethal beating and Patricia Arquette as his love interest, Alabama, is pummelled ruthlessly by James Gandolfini to protect him.
It's worth noting that Tarantino, when he wrote the screenplay, had been estranged from his father throughout his life. I doubt he had a girlfriend at the time, either, and, anyway, no girlfriend is as perfect as Alabama whose devotion to Clarence is inexplicable as written, created almost entirely by the chemistry between the performers and the work of director Tony Scott, the music of Hans Zimmer, and the costume department. Patricia Arquette looks so good in that movie. In True Romance and Lost Highway she's got to be one of the most stunning actresses in film history. How can Clarence be so lucky? Is it plausible? Maybe not, but it's really sweet.
The main reason Tarantino's Mary Sue works is the sheer cleverness of the dialogue. It may not be realistic for Alabama to fall for him so completely so suddenly but it's endearing watching them bond over Sonny Chiba movies and Elvis Presley.
The film bears a lot of resemblance to David Lynch's 1990 film, Wild at Heart. Both are about a pair of young lovers, one of whom is obsessed with Elvis Presley, and the girl is beautiful and devoted. Somehow the couple in Wild at Heart, as weird as they are, come across as more plausible. Both movies also use a Chris Isaak song.
I always had the impression that Lynch admired Tarantino more than Tarantino admired Lynch but I wonder if Tarantino wasn't influenced by Lynch at least a little.
True Romance is currently available on Netflix while Wild at Heart continues to be Lynch's most elusive film.
Sonnet 1993
Galactic dances stomp the shaky stars.
Expanding time has popped balloons of silk.
Escaping roosters head for chicken bars.
Researchers offer birds their dolphin milk.
Encouraged mammals dive for marble dimes.
Diversions stop the miners chipping cork.
Another page was soaked with troubled times.
Another beef was found engorged with pork.
Beside the station stands a troupe of dames.
They carry tickets meant for Saturn ships.
Intrigued reporters take their secret names.
But no-one's handle's worth a hundred chips.
Casinos cash the savings hoards of whales.
Policemen found it stashed in giant pails.
I was watching this new Olivia Rodrigo video yesterday, thinking how endearing it is she likes the Cure so much, particularly for an old Cure fan like myself (don't tell Morrissey). She's referenced the band a few times in her songs and she performed onstage with Robert Smith the two songs she seems to like best, "Friday I'm in Love" and "Just Like Heaven". But this new song would seem to reference an earlier Cure song, the title track off the Pornography album from 1982. It's the one time a Cure song makes any kind of reference to the band's name, concluding a narrative about sexual escapades that have left the participant(s) jaded and desensitised with the statement that "I must fight this sickness, find a cure." Rodrigo's lyrics seem to refer to a relationship or relationships that she ultimately finds unsatisfying despite the effort she's put in. You could read it like she needs an actual cure to a psychological affliction or like the standards of modern romantic love will never match the level of passion or sincerity she imagined listening to Cure songs as a child or teenager.
YouTube's algorithm decided to follow up this Olivia Rodrigo video with the new Rolling Stones video, "In the Stars".
Yes, that's a new song, released this month. The Stones have de-aged themselves. We're at the point now when spellcheck should really know "de-aged".
Maybe the Stones and Rodrigo are on the same record label these days and that's why the algorithm chose it as a follow up but it was also fitting. Rodrigo's song is from a young artist seeking to communicate with the work of an older artist while the Stones are clearly trying to connect with youth. Whether it's to-day's youth or their own past is debatable. I looked at the comments section on YouTube, filled with people either praising or deriding the special effect. One or two people wondered if any young people came across the video and thought this was a new, young band. I don't see any comments that would indicate that.
It's an interesting song, not as great as anything they produced since before the mid '80s. Ideas about things "in the stars" seem to be cropping up lately here and there. Maybe people are concerned about fate. Maybe it's just the Cthulhu lobby again.
You know, throughout human history it seems like we've been looking forward to the day when we can divest ourselves of the disgusting and painful physical body and dwell in a place of eternal youth and beauty. It's starting to seem like Heaven can one day be built and you can live there, if you have the money, or whatever currency turns out to be viable in this new ethereal plane.
I think Michael Keaton is the best actor ever cast as Batman. Everyone who's played the character since kind of imitates him. Well, who else would they imitate, Adam West? But the boldness of the decision to cast an actor known primarily for comedic roles resulted in a baseline complexity for the character. When Vicki Vale points out he's "not exactly normal" and he replies, "It's not exactly a normal world," it's an exchange not only supported by every frame of the film but one that seems to convey a deeper meaning. In no other film is Batman so weird. It's in his costume, too, especially as the film has aged. They may have been trying to make Keaton look like the imposing hulk Batman is in The Dark Knight Returns but to me he looks like teru teru bozu, little white dolls Japanese kids make to ward off rainy days.
They have round heads and a skirt of tissue paper or cloth. It's because, for whatever reason, Keaton's headpiece is very large and round in the movie so when he's running around with his cape unfurled and his arms down at his sides he looks sort of like a doll.
It's oddly cute yet also somehow spooky and perverted. But there's so much underlying kink in Tim Burton's best movies. Typically the villains are more interesting than Batman himself. I'd say this is the film version in which Batman succeeds in nearly being as intriguing as his foe.
But it's hard to compete with the Joker, whoever's playing him, and Jack Nicholson was the first actor to make people realise what a great role it is. If one looks at him now side by side with Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix, rather than as preceding them in a kind of evolution, it's a little easier to see what he brings to the table. His Joker is an older man's Joker, more self-possessed, less driven. It was doubtlessly Nicholson's own personality bleeding through but the impression his Joker gives is of someone who's been through a lot in his youth and is just happy to be in a place at the end of it all where he doesn't have to give a shit. Both Ledger's Joker and Phoenix's Joker seem like they've got something to prove, Nicholson's is just having a ball.
Sam Raimi has used the venerable genre of the desert island scenario to discuss modern socio-political tensions in 2026's Send Help. He does so in a way more complicated than you might expect and it's a film refreshingly free of sympathetic characters. It's basically a cage match between two of the worst examples of both sides of the aisle. It really put a smile on my face.
When Linda (Rachel McAdams) complains about the the systemic sexism that led to her getting passed over for the promotion to vice president she'd long ago been promised, her coworker, another woman, barely seems to listen and kind of shrugs. Another coworker comes by talking about karaoke and Linda tries to invite herself along. Her coworkers awkwardly end the conversation.
Linda's new boss, Bradley (Dylan O'Brien), makes crude jokes about Linda behind her back. He's a spoiled young dick but when he says to her she lacks the people skills a vice president needs he's clearly right. This kicks off a see-saw series of escalating extremes. In one scene, Bradley or Linda does something obnoxious or psychotic that you would think clearly establishes them as the villain and then, in the next scene, the other character does something even worse. Raimi matches this lack of a moral centre with the delirious, cartoonish style he's famous for. Some people complained about the obvious cgi of the boars Linda hunts on the island but the complaints miss the point. These boars are far more expressive than real boars would be because they fit the extreme, stylistic tone of the film. They're more like Deadites than animals.
On the island, Linda has the edge on Bradley because she'd trained and studied in the hopes of becoming a contestant on Survivor. We know this because Bradley and his bros are seen laughing at her audition video on the plane. Bradley gets his comeuppance when he clearly lacks any of the survival skills necessary to get by on the island. Yet he still acts like he's God's gift to Linda. One exchange of dialogue I particularly like is when she points out he'd be dead if not for her and he replies smugly, "Yeah, and then where would you be?" causing her to ask with real consternation, "What does that even mean?" He never seems to realise that what he said was nonsense. Meanwhile, Linda starts to take on a resemblance to Kathy Bates in Misery.
A teenage girl is horrified when her best friend becomes a demon in 2009's Jennifer's Body, which Roger Ebert described as "Twilight for boys." Which is a really funny thing to read at the end of a long Wikipedia entry in which its director and screenwriter spend a lot of time talking about how they wanted to make this a feminist subversion of a male dominated genre. I enjoyed the movie. Its screenplay by Diablo Cody is peppy and occasionally insightful and it's always a pleasure seeing Amanda Seyfried.
It's funny she's supposed to be the unsexy nerd of the duo comprised of herself and Megan Fox. Megan Fox is pretty but, for my money, Seyfried is by far the more beautiful. But in any case, they're both beautiful girls which makes it odd that the movie tries anything like the dynamic it does: the popular hot girl and her mousy best friend. Well, Seyfried did dress as a mouse in Mean Girls.
Her character's nickname in this movie is "Needy", an indication of the abuse she cheerfully puts up with from Fox, the titular Jennifer. The two survive a fire at a tavern that kills nearly everyone else. The band playing at the venue is headed by the evil Nikolai Wolf (Adam Brody) who lures the already obnoxiously narcissistic Jennifer into the woods to perform an unspeakable demoniac ritual to upgrade her into a real demon.
I liked how the populace of the town builds a false narrative around the fire in which the band, which fled the scene almost immediately, is cast as heroes. It reminded me of Donnie Darko and Ghost World and I sympathised with Needy for having to be surrounded by idiots.
The film supports two alternate interpretations, one in which Jennifer becomes a succubus, killing one boy after another to maintain her power, and another in which Needy is losing her mind and turns her friend's repulsive personality into hallucinated demoniac antics. There are things which go unexplained, like the fact that Needy seems to have a psychic connexion with Jennifer. This kind of reminded me of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt but mostly the story reminded me of Carmilla and American Werewolf in London.
It's only been a few years since the UK declared that octopuses are sentient beings and already there's a pro-octopus propaganda film on Netflix. 2026's Remarkably Bright Creatures stars Sally Field as a woman who works as a cleaning lady at an acquarium. She befriends a captive octopus, not knowing about his intelligible thoughts voiced by Alfred Molina. It's a sweet little film, even if it might come from the Cthulhu lobby.
Lewis Pullman, son of Bill, is also in the movie as a drifter, Joan Chen has a small role, and Colm Meaney plays the proprietor of a convenience store. He's also Sally Field's love interest in a subplot. It turns out Meaney's just seven years younger than Sally Field. It made me want to watch Deep Space Nine. I'm glad he hasn't gotten roped into the Alex Kurtzman Star Trek stuff. Or has he? I haven't been watching.
The performances are good across the board. Field's character is struggling with the loss of both her husband and son and Lewis Pullman and the octopus help her work through it in surprising ways.
Remarkably Bright Creatures is available on Netflix.
I got a Comixology subscription recently through Amazon and grabbed a few titles with covers that appealed to me, like this one:
I'd heard of Fables but knew next to nothing about the series, I was lured entirely by the bodacious naked lady, who turned out to be Rapunzel. Fables is one of those postmodern series that came out of the '80s and '90s that turned classic fairy tales and fantasy into modern pulp fiction. Though apparently this series ran from 2002 to 2015. The issue I got is a story from 2012. I enjoyed it. It felt very Buffyish with fantastic characters speaking in modern lingo to one another between action sequences and sex scenes.
One thing that took me very much by surprise is that the story largely takes place in Japan. Not only that, but a lot of it takes place in Nara prefecture, where I lived for five years. Of course, I noticed things the writers and artists got wrong. Inaki Miranda and Barry Kitson, the pencilers, and Adam Hughes, the cover artist, produced some beautiful work but somehow they generally couldn't make people look Japanese. One of them also depicts raccoons among Japan's mythological creatures despite the fact that raccoons were only recently introduced as an invasive species. I suspect this comes from a mistranslation of "tanuki" as "raccoon". Wikipedia now has a proper place for the "Japanese raccoon dog" which differs significantly from a raccoon. But I've seen old dictionaries that simply translate "tanuki" as "raccoon".
It's funny how errors about foreign cultures are more charming the older a work of fiction is. I'm quite happy to enjoy the 1940 Thief of Bagdad, chock full of British impressions of the middle east, but this early 2000s impression of Japan from Americans comes off as awkward and hokey. I think it's less because I've had experience in Japan and more because I've had experience as an American fantasy writer. I see the errors I've made in historical details on Dekpa and Deborah and I cringe. I feel a sympathetic cringe for the creators of Fables.
I enjoyed how they turned Rapunzel into a Japanese style hair monster somewhat like Sadako in Ring and then had her become a babe again.
We all know the story. A group of teenagers gets rowdy on prom night, they take a risky journey to somewhere new, and they engage in sexual shenanigans except for one virtuous girl among them. Then a possibly supernatural killer starts picking them off. Now imagine that story but without the possibly supernatural killer ever showing up and you would have something like 1985's Out of Control. There's not much to recommend the film aside from an early appearance by Sherilyn Fenn but there is some life in the dialogue in the first act that deceives the viewer into thinking the movie's going somewhere.
The group consists of four guys and four girls. The rich one, Keith (Martin Hewitt), has a plane and invites the others to join him on a jaunt after the prom. There's a bad storm and they crash land on a deserted island. The only signs of humanity are an abandoned cabin and a crate filled with vodka and Spam. They get drunk and play strip spin the bottle, the real reason for the movie to exist, and everyone ends up at least partially naked except for Sherilyn Fenn's character, Katie. Two of the guys fight over the prom queen, Chrissie (Betsy Russell), after she takes her panties off.
Some bad guys show up, some arms dealers, but they're so ineffectual they're hardly worth mentioning.
The credits say "Introducing Sherilyn Fenn" but she'd been in two movies the previous year, most notably The Wild Life, written by Cameron Crowe and starring Chris Penn, Eric Stoltz, and Lea Thompson. The biography section of Fenn's Wikipedia entry makes no mention of Out of Control and says 1988's Two Moon Junction was her first starring role. Maybe she'd rather people not remember Out of Control. Maybe she'd be happy to know I'm struggling to remember it even now.
Out of Control is available on Amazon Prime.
Sonnet 1992
A tale of frogs is told in slimy chunks.
Entangled tongues would eat the juicy fly.
But whims of wings would fail the saucy hunks.
Their noses dive untimely from the sky.
Selecting clouds results in picture books.
Arrangements brought the fluffy cotton stuff.
Selections cool on giant metal hooks.
Across the bridge, the thief effects a bluff.
A dragon guards his pass from angry trolls.
The snow prevents the beast from winning well.
We put his bones in sacred earthen bowls.
Then digitised his brain to make a sale.
Decisions fell to bearded men above.
Their thoughts reveal the hand beneath the glove.
I also watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas again recently. I was thinking it could work as a good companion piece to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It helps that they're both buddy films. It's also fitting given that Terry Gilliam, Fear and Loathing's director, was a mentor to Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time's director. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood portrays an America at the point of a loss of innocence and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is set in the aftermath. You can throw The Wicker Man in between and maybe preface the group with Terry Southern movies like Candy, The Magic Christian and Easy Rider. Maybe Vanishing Point would fit in. I should programme a film festival.
Another theme could also be Las Vegas. You could show Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Showgirls and Twin Peaks: The Return. Too bad Kyle MacLachlan's not in Fear and Loathing or it could be a Kyle MacLachlan in Las Vegas festival. I've always thought it would be fun to pair Honeymoon in Vegas and Leaving Las Vegas for a Nick Cage/Las Vegas double feature.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas would work as the epilogue. It has Hunter S. Thompson's narration delivered by Johnny Depp ruminating on the fundamental change in American culture at the end of the '60s, represented by the Manson killings in Tarantino's movie and by the culture of Las Vegas in Gilliam's. When the spirit of transgression is deprived of the spirit of love and benevolence. You could add in Winstanley to show how similar the phenomenon was to England in the 1640s and 1650s. But perhaps no other culture was so burdened by postmodernism as America was. But maybe postmodernism is just another way of saying self awareness. The rage of Caliban seeing himself in the glass, to borrow a phrase from Oscar Wilde. Though in Fear and Loathing's case it's horror. Or, well, fear and loathing.
A magical cat comes to town and reveals all the hypocrites and envious tyrants in 1963's The Cassandra Cat. It's obviously a political allegory but it also succeeds in being a fairly charming children's film.
The film's protagonist is a meek elementary school teacher named Robert (Vlastimil Brodský) who's dominated by his cold blooded boss (Jiřà Sovák) and lover, Julie (Jiřina Bohdalová). Robert's boss tells him to teach the children that individual perspective is irrelevant and that morality is black and white. He also wants Robert to teach the children about taxidermy in what seems to be a metaphor for the senseless preservation of tradition.
One day, Robert invites a charismatic old storyteller and castle caretaker named Oliva (Jan Werich) to the class. Oliva also appeared at the beginning of the film, speaking directly to the camera to preface the film with a "once upon a time" soliloquy. He proceeds to tell the class a story from his youth when he met a beautiful woman named Diana who carried a cat wearing sunglasses. He fell in love with Diana and when the cat's sunglasses were removed they revealed the true nature of everyone in town. People with love in their hearts turned red and liars and hypocrites turned purple or yellow. A commotion outside interrupts the story and everyone goes to see that a parade of performers has entered the town led by a truck bearing a beautiful woman (EmÃlia Vášáryová) carrying a cat wearing sunglasses sitting beside an old man in a top hat who looks exactly like Oliva.
The woman turns out to indeed be Diana and Robert falls in love with her, the course of the film mirroring the story Oliva told.
The surrealistic and fantastic story is aided by pretty colour cinematography. I think I would've enjoyed it more without the political aspect because it introduces a logical contradiction. If truth is relative, then there would be no fundamental nature for the cat to reveal. In the end, the cat would not be much different from Robert's boss.
The Cassandra Cat is available on The Criterion Channel.
Spicy '90s cinema often seems so quaint now. I watched Atom Egoyan's 1994 film Exotica again, which is his most famous film, though it's by no means well known in the mainstream. Last time I watched it it was because I was so into his Chloe with Amanda Seyfried that I wanted to see the film that put him on the map and, as I recall, I found it nowhere near as satisfying. I still don't find it the kind of visceral, sexy fun that Chloe is but I found myself more compelled to puzzle out just what he thought he was getting at.
It doesn't feel like it's set in anything resembling real life, but none of Egoyan's films do, which is part of their charm. Exotica is the name of a strip club in the movie which I doubt much resembles any real life strip club. Egoyan has said he was interested in the "ritual" of strip clubs, the girl stripping and the man encouraged to look but not touch. The patrons of Exotica are all quiet men, solemnly sitting alone at their tables while naked or partially clothed women's bodies gyrate before them like animated sculptures. It's about as different as you can get from the noisy, party atmosphere you see in other movie strip clubs, like in Anora or even Flashdance. I don't know, maybe Canadian strip clubs are different.
Exotica is set in Toronto. Bruce Greenwood plays Francis whose fixation on a dancer named Christina (Mia Kirshner) seems to go beyond sexual. Actually, by the end of the movie, you may wonder if there's anything sexual about him at all. It's only by default that one figures there must be. Elias Koteas plays Eric, a DJ at the club who provides a ruminating, running commentary. Christina's shtick is to wear schoolgirl uniforms complementing her small frame and youthful looks. "What is it about schoolgirls?" Eric asks the audience and starts talking about innocence and purity.
In a scene with a character played by Sarah Polley, Francis explains that the difference between adults and children like herself is that adults have "baggage" which contributes to certain base level of tension in any extended interaction between two adults. Perhaps this is why he prefers the company of girls to women, or women he can convince himself are girls.
Of all the characters, Christina remains the most enigmatic by the end of the film, which is fairly normal for movies about a man obsessed with a woman or girl, though just about the opposite of what I found so interesting about Chloe. It's the enigma itself the feeds the flame of obsession, the give and take between the fantasy the man projects on the woman and the reality of her personality and motives. Sometimes the two meet, sometimes there's the shock of discord when any difference is discovered. Sometimes it's this give and take that gives a relationship piquancy. In this case, Christina is quite eager to be the fantasy for Francis, temporarily, night after night, but it's most definitely not sexual. Or isn't it? The movie's choice to avoid suggesting it in any way only makes me wonder at it any more. It is a strip club, after all. Crucially, we learn absolutely nothing about Francis' wife. We don't even know if they're separated or divorced.
The information we have about Francis is so tightly controlled as Egoyan spools out the mystery. Not unlike the stripper on whom the patrons project their fantasies, we are compelled to project our own ideas on Francis. Surely we're not crazy for assuming he's horny if he's paying a stripper to give him a private dance. What I'm not sure about is if Egoyan is ultimately saying there's nothing sexual about Francis' motives or if his problem is a vast iceberg of unexamined sexuality. Maybe this movie just needed to be longer.
Anyway, Christina's strip tease to Leonard Cohen is still cool. Though not especially sexy.
Well, it was nice to get a little decent Marvel content in Punisher: One Last Kill last night, even if it did feel more like John Wick content. Perhaps the key was dialling the ambition way down from where it was on Daredevil and focusing on telling a simple vignette. It helps that Jon Bernthal seems very passionate about the character, enough that he co-wrote the teleplay with Reinaldo Marcus Green, who directed. Green is the director of the Academy Award nominated film, King Richard, which I haven't seen, but One Last Kill does come across as more competently directed and less sloppily edited than a lot of other recent Marvel TV content. And, thank Christ, the fight choreography is good.
A lot of the reviews are talking about how simple the 44 minute special's story is; some are saying it to the show's credit, some to the show's detriment. I liked it. Yes, Frank obsessing over the death of his family is well trodden territory, but it's worth remembering that the thing that defines Frank Castle is that the pain never dulls. I appreciate the perspective from some commentators that it was a mistake to have Frank actually be able to identify and kill the people who killed his family. It is a better idea for him never to get that closure so that the target of his revenge just becomes all murderers. But Bernthal sells the angst and intensity pretty well.
In one of my Daredevil: Born Again reviews, I pointed out how Disney seems loath to portray children in emotional distress nowadays. Despite being very stridently labelled as TV-MA, children play a prominent role in One Last Kill and it's fascinating. I wonder if the people at Marvel were using the TV-MA label with a big wink. After all, it is just ultra-violence, and immature minds never took that as inspiration to do anything, right? And they shouldn't . . . right?
You do kind of see kids in distress in this story. It might be that the limits of the distress shown are more to do with the abilities of these child actors. Good child actors are extremely rare and when one is found they tend to show up in everything, which was why Dakota Fanning was in practically everything during her childhood. So maybe these kids just lacked the chops to show that emotional depth.
But this lack of emotional depth makes it slightly eerie how children are positioned as moral arbiters in this story. It's Frank's vision of his deceased daughter calmly and sternly enticing him away that prevents him from killing himself and it's the little girl hugging him at the end of the episode that signals to Frank, and the audience, that he's done the right thing.
This Punisher story is one of the most reminiscent of Death Wish that I've seen. His enemies are thugs composed of pure malevolence. Perhaps we can thank the fact that the director is a black man that these fodder for Frank's bullets, blades, and ballpoint pen aren't exclusively white guys. But, with respent to the dog that's killed and the shopkeeper that's brutalised, it's worth remembering how the murder and abuse of innocents has been used in political propaganda in the past. It was a key aspect of Battleship Potemkin, perhaps the most famous propaganda film of all time, particularly in the famous staircase shot, which was referenced in season two of Andor. As I said when I was discussing the Punisher a couple weeks ago, I can enjoy the catharsis of Punisher style violence in fiction but I can recognise the difference between reality and fiction. After the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondence Dinner, I wonder if many people lack the critical thinking skills to do so. In theory, that's why we have maturity ratings.
Dolly Parton has been cropping up in my life lately. The executor of my father's estate worked for her and her brother, Randy, and on Mother's Day my mother wanted to watch Steel Magnolias. That movie has an impressive ensemble. In addition to Parton, there's Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah, Sally Field, Julia Roberts, and Olympia Dukakis, though I would say having Olympia Dukakis in your movie is nothing to brag about. Apparently she died in 2021 but her career seemed to really peter out after the '80s ended. There's something very '80s about her, some register of stately smarm that resonated with critics in the '80s but then dissipated around 1990 or so.
It'd been a long time since I'd seen Steel Magnolias so I don't remember much about my original opinion of it. I thought Parton and Daryl Hannah were the strongest parts of the cast this time. I don't think Parton has a lot of range as an actress but she's especially good in supporting roles. I really liked The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, though. I was listening to "Hard Candy Christmas" this past Christmas.
Nowadays, I guess she's known to the younger generation as the old lady in the second version of Sabrina Carpenter's "Please Please Please" music video (not to be confused with The Smiths song of the same name. Yeah, I know, no-one does).
More recently, Sabrina Carpenter was seen performing with Madonna. Nice to see there's a young artist that the pillars of an elder generation are enthusiastic about supporting. One might debate over whether this is good for either the younger or elder artists or if this is a Dial of Destiny thing. Maybe the lesson here is "Seize the moment."
A pair of sisters from a small town find sexual and romantic adventures in the big city in 1931's Working Girls. A quaint and innocent story is thinly layered over a more sinister depiction of the way of the world.
The term "working girl" had already been established as a euphemism for a sex worker by this point, according to various web sites and Google's AI, though it wasn't as well known as it became after 1950 or so.
20 year old June (Judith Wood) is the elder sister, by one year, of Mae (Dorothy Hall). The two apply for the same stenographer job. June proffers Mae as the more educated of the two, having completed two whole years of high school. The employer, Dr. Von Schrader (Paul Lukas), despite having advertised for applicants of exceptional education and experience, hires Mae after examining and taking pity on her for her wet feet. Uh-huh.
June almost as swiftly gets a job at a telegraph office just by getting behind the counter and getting to work, fumbling her way through the technical terms. Strangely, the two women find men to be endlessly accommodating throughout the film though, once they start dating, not terribly faithful.
Working Girls was directed by Dorothy Arzner from a screenplay by Zoe Akins based on a play by Vera Caspary and Winifred Lenihan. That's right, all women, a very unusual thing in 1931.
Working Girls is available on The Criterion Channel.
Sonnet 1991
The throat's as dry as hands beneath the beach.
A message fell behind the meaning man.
A movie made at dusk was starring Stacy Keach.
But horses changed the time to suit a plan.
To scratch a watch is just to feel the time.
Without the candle scope, a flame is dim.
You mix potato paste with juicy lime.
And scatter salt along the bev'rage rim.
A troupe of dancing dames create the night.
The colour moon replaced the greyish ball.
But older orbs now host a random fight.
A politician kneels and heeds the call.
Arenas decked with ducks were wooden bliss.
At centre stage, behold a splendid kiss.
Ted Turner died four days ago at the age of 87. He's responsible for the formation of a number of prominent American television networks, including CNN and TNT. For me, his greatest achievement was TCM, Turner Classic Movies, to which, as a cinephile, I owe a great debt for introducing me to the world of classic film.
After taking a lot of deserved criticism for airing colourised versions of classic films on his other networks, Turner launched TCM in 1994. When I was a young man coming out of high school and starting college, TCM was a invaluable resource, a basic cable channel that aired films from the golden age of cinema totally uncut and with no commercials. Before internet piracy and, later, the launch of sophisticated streaming services, TCM was really the only pure resource for the history of cinema for the average person. People like Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery, who worked at a video store, arguably had comparable or greater access but for most people TCM was the gateway to education in cinema.
I used to have stacks of VHS tapes I'd used to record movies on TCM. I remember watching marathons of Charlie Chaplin and Joan Crawford movies. Those were formative experiences of mainlining cinema for extended periods of time. The influence of TCM on a generation of cinephiles and filmmakers can be seen in the support the channel's received from prominent people in the industry such as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese. So, thanks for that, Mr. Turner.
We need a rule against Democratic politicians cursing because they don't know how to do it. Bill Maher had two prominent Democrats on his show last night, John Fetterman and Donna Brazile, and both of them seemed like they'd just learned how to speak yesterday. I think Fetterman might be taking too many testosterone supplements or something because in his one on one interview with Maher he couldn't finish a sentence. He pulled himself together by the time he returned for the "Overtime" segment at the end but he was still unable to give a cogent response to the "male crisis" question.
Donna Brazile, meanwhile, seems like she's been training by watching '70s sitcoms. I laughed when Dan Crenshaw called it "weird" when she suggested he was "in Tim Cain's ass". This shouldn't have been Crenshaw's point to score. Brazile didn't use to talk like that, I checked videos of her on YouTube from eight or ten years ago. It seems clear to me strategists are telling Democrats they need to make their rhetoric more natural and "street" as a response to Donald Trump's sideshow carnival barker routine but there are few things more unnatural than people studying very hard to sound natural. It's like a drunk trying to pretend he's sober. We're so screwed.
A couple months ago, I was talking with a group of foreign teachers in Japan--teachers from the US, Australia, the UK, and Africa--about one of the students I was tutoring in the US before coming to Japan, a Latino man who wanted to pass the English test required to join the US border patrol. The teachers expressed astonishment that such an odd, paradoxical person existed. But they're actually pretty common. According to Google's AI, about 50% of border patrol officers are Hispanic and 30% of ICE is Latino. One might also remember how well Trump polled in Latino communities in the US. A number of reasons could be offered for this, including the fact that many families flee Mexico and other countries because of a perception that lawlessness has freer rein in countries south of the US border. It may not be so surprising that many immigrants or second or third generation individuals might want to join law enforcement specifically to ensure the old familiar problems don't follow them to the US. In light of that, it's particularly a shame both agencies have been guilty of lawlessness and cruelty themselves.
I found myself thinking about this while watching The Searchers again last night. John Wayne's character, despite his clear pathological hatred for American Indians, can speak Indian languages and is familiar with many of their customs and cultural beliefs. The more sympathetic young man played by Jeffrey Hunter, Marty, who's part Cherokee, is actually much crueller to the Indian woman who attempts to take him for a husband than Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards.
What a remarkable film The Searchers is. John Ford's direction, the majestic and anxious compositions, the pretty yet melancholy score, and above all the hauntingly obsessive character of Ethan Edwards make the movie compulsively watchable. A lot of commentaries on the film suggest that Ethan was in love with his brother's wife who's slaughtered in the Indian attack at the beginning of the film along with the rest of Ethan's brother's family, with the exception of the young daughter, Debbie, the captive Ethan and Marty search for throughout the film. I think that's a fair interpretation, but there's more stuck in his craw than that. There's plenty in the sense of his cultural displacement, his disenfranchisement, and the devaluation of his passions, that can make him a sympathetic character to anyone who feels out of step with their own culture. The introspective person might see the flaws in Wayne's character not as alien things but as modes of thought one might fall into if one is not careful.
Last night's Daredevil: Born Again finale may have been the dumbest hour of television I ever watched. "The Southern Cross", written by Dario Scardapane and Jesse Wigutow, presented nonsensical, overly dramatic events driven by vague or utterly nonexistent character motives and weird, extremely hazy conceptions of legal process.
Someone finally states what Karen is charged with; Matt mentions to the court that Karen is charged with aiding Daredevil. Aside from testimony regarding Karen's character, absolutely no evidence is presented to establish this fact. A witness in the previous episode said that Karen had been seen with Daredevil in Matt Murdoch's apartment. All of it is extremely weak and a halfway competent lawyer should've been able to either get the case dismissed or, at the very least, ensure that Karen received a meaninglessly light sentence, possibly no more than a fine for public disruption or aiding and abetting assault of a police officer.
Instead, Matt throws a hail Mary and reveals his identity as Daredevil to inform a court that he, Daredevil, is actually a hero, corroborated only by extremely suspicious video testimony and the fact that he had saved Wilson Fisk's life. On the grounds that Daredevil is actually a hero, Karen's case is dismissed. On the grounds that Matt Murdoch is Daredevil, he's arrested. They may as well be throwing dice.
Most of the time, when writers have a superhero's secret identity revealed, it's a sign of creative bankruptcy. That's certainly the case here.
So Fisk murders a bunch of random bystanders and, in his rage against the ruthless injustice, Matt gently suggests that Fisk be at his liberty in some other location, away from New York. Yeah, that oughta do it. Good job.
So, yeah, I watched Evil Dead 2 again. As a cinephile, what movies were coming to mind while going through my dead father's possessions in his home? Yes, of course I thought about The Seventh Seal and Tokyo Monogatari, two of the greatest, most contemplative movies about death. But neither of them really addresses the vicious mockery of death, the betrayal of one's own body. Evil Dead 2's no-holds-barred blend of comedy and horror captures something of the impression I get better than a more literal depiction of physical decline.
The fact that the film is about a man trapped alone in a house (in the first act) in which every object at any point might reveal itself to be a threat or a mockery makes it seem even more pertinent.
It seems like the movie's been on a lot of people's minds lately, judging from how many new videos are coming up about it on YouTube. Or maybe that's just the Evil Algorithm, possessing my reflection to drive me mad.
The skies were remarkably clear for most of my flight back to San Diego yesterday, which was by far the shortest flight I've taken this year, lasting only about six hours. I was content just to watch the United States slowly scroll by beneath me. I never thought I'd be so happy to see desert again.
I think I'll have to bump the Knoxville airport up in my ranking. They had handy little laptop stations in the waiting areas by the gates, plenty of them so there were always at least four available. I got there plenty early so I actually sat down and played a little Skyrim.
Going though security was easier, too. They didn't even make me take my laptop out of my briefcase. They also let me hold onto my hat instead of putting it through the scanner. I noticed several people with cowboy hats and I bet in southern states there's been a lot of people raising ruckuses about putting their Stetsons through the contraption. A woman had to inspect my knapsack because it had a bag of my father's coin collection inside, which I expected, so I'd put the coins in a clear bag. She complimented me on the copy of Lord of the Rings I had in the bag, though my bags were not inspected due to the presence of books. This was a first--it turns out books generally look suspicious on a security scanner.
Let's see how long I can stay in one time zone now.
To-day's my last day in Tennessee, I fly back to San Diego this afternoon. I don't know when I'll ever be back again so yesterday I had lunch at the Cracker Barrel because I never had and it seemed like an indelible part of the cultural identity of the U.S. south. I liked it. I love restaurants that have random knickknacks on the walls. And the food was good too, I had the fried catfish. I don't think I'd ever eaten catfish in my life before.
The pictures I'm posting are from the mountain where we, my father's best friend and I, took his and his girlfriend's ashes to be scattered at a campground that had been special to my father as a child. He had gone there frequently with his parents. My father's love for his parents was obvious in the many pictures and keepsakes he kept of them as well as in the song lyrics he'd written about them. He was a musician and had a rock band.
His friend told me how my father had told him about riding his bike downhill on this mountain, which is not a small mountain and it has many dangerous looking spots on its roads. I had an impression of a happy, carefree young life in the '60s in the forest with parents whose love he had absolute faith in. This mental image sits beside my imaginings of him dying alone in his bedroom, his piece of mind broken down by his failing health and declining physical mobility.
Certainly the creek in which his best friend deposited his ashes is a better place than that grim bedroom. He was a great fan of The Lord of the Rings so I read from a large red, leatherbound anniversary edition my mother had given him decades ago.
We didn't see anyone else at the campsite, which was closed off. Even before it'd been closed off, it had for some time no longer been a place frequented by campers.
It's come to my attention that people, both in America and Japan, need to be better educated about facial hair.
I've had a handlebar moustache for almost two years now. I use pomade to make the ends go up. A few days ago, I went into a Subway sandwich here in Newport, Tennessee and a bearded young man said he wanted to grow a moustache like mine but when he tries to the ends grow down. I assumed he meant his moustache tended to look like Daniel Day-Lewis' in Gangs of New York.
It wasn't until later that I realised he believed many moustaches just naturally flip up on the sides. He also complained that hair tended to grow in the very centre, not realising many guys, like myself, shave a small spot just above the mouth.
In Japan, in order to manipulate some students against me, certain teachers induced students to ask me if I use wax or shave the centre of my moustache, in order to mock my vanity. There are many double standards, particularly for foreigners, so the common use of toupees and hair colouring by teachers is not generally mocked (though there were several prominent news stories from five or six years ago about students being punished for colouring their hair or wearing ponytails).
One teacher who didn't like me tried to convince students I modelled my moustache after Friedrich Nietzsche after I showed Nietzsche's picture in a powerpoint. Her implicit argument was that I would therefore eventually turn out to be a cruel and unforgiving teacher if I were allowed to remain at the school.
I think there's an impression among many that those who wear beards are wild men who don't bother shaving. This is not so. When you think of a beard, odds are you picture Commander Riker, so let's look at him.
See how he has a fairly sharp line at the bottom? That's because he shaves there. Allowing hair to grow there results in the notorious "neckbeard". But the grooming doesn't stop there. Moustaches must be cut or they will make it difficult to put food in your mouth, though some still prefer moustaches that overhang the lip, most famously Sam Elliot.
Many people, like myself, for greater ease at meal time, will shave a small area in the centre above the mouth. This also helps create the classic handlebar shape. Even if you don't shave that, many men must also shave the corners of their mouths or hair will point directly into the mouth every time they open it.
The handlebar moustache with the upturned tips became popular in the 15th century and remained so up until the first years of the 20th century.
Sonnet 1990
Antenna times convey the shape of doors.
A whiskered wraith remits a bolt of shroud.
The planet's swamps deploy a fog of spores.
A hunter's shape's revealed amidst the cloud.
A pattern's weak beside the cast of pods.
They cast a coat of tiny talking homes.
They close their doors against the threat of odds.
And fill the cracks that line the ceiling domes.
A painted hero holds a court of hue.
The browser crashed against the broccoli box.
Its Bowser's dash that makes your point of view.
His heavy car is filled with fallen rocks.
An engine pulls itself against a hood.
The maiden never shaves but thinks she should.
Did you have a good May Day? I observed it as I usually do by watching the original 1973 Wicker Man. How strange that it's become a comfort movie for me, that I find myself whistling melodies from its score about a month ahead of time in anticipation. One reason is that its among a few works of fiction that most accurately resemble my experience living in Japan.
The Wicker Man is essentially about a cult. Most likely influenced by the Manson Family, this post '60s film finds a conservative Christian cop visiting an island, Summerisle, where the inhabitants follow a New Age religion founded in the 19th century loosely based on the beliefs of the pre-Christianised inhabitants of the British isles. Among their beliefs is in the efficacy of human sacrifice.
Japan's problem with cults has been fairly well established though there is an apparent effort to downplay it in media. It wasn't long ago that former prime minister Abe Shinzo was assassinated by a man angry at how his mother was taken advantage of by a cult to which the prime minister belonged. In Japan's educational system, there's a war between forces eternally seeking to modernise the country and forces that value cultivated ignorance. So it didn't come as a surprise to me that a few years later a poll revealed that many students were unaware that Abe was dead. The reason so many Japanese people are vulnerable to cult indoctrination is that many aspects of mainstream education and morality resemble the qualities of a cult.
Like the inhabitants of Summerisle, many of the core aspects of modern Japanese culture are the result of social engineering. It's an ongoing effort but there were two primary waves, first in the 19th century and then in the aftermath of World War II. A key difference between Summerisle and modern Japan is the existence of the internet and the inhabitants' access to global media. There are many people in Japan who know how deranged the faux-traditionalist subculture is though many are understandably reticent to talk about it publicly. I wonder if Summerisle would survive the introduction of the internet.
What The Wicker Man captures so well is the attitude of the locals to the foreigner. Their shifting goal posts for Sergeant Howie to prove his arrogance in assuming the role of "King for a Day". They lure him in by fabricating a story of a missing child. It's not arrogance that prompts Howie to search for the girl but the inhabitants are so secure in their moral superiority to Howie's barbaric Christianity that the rationale continues to make sense to them. It's still a perfect justification for their efforts to humiliate him and, finally, murder him.
A woman's pursuit of adrenaline leads her into the clutches of a deranged cannibal in 2026's Apex. This latest iteration of "The Most Dangerous Game" is pretty good with capable direction by Baltasar Kormakur and uncompromising performances from Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton.
Eric Bana's briefly in the film as Theron's husband. The two are a couple who like seeking thrills around the world. We meet them climbing the Troll Wall in Norway. When a blizzard hits, Bana's character is killed and the film jumps ahead a few years to find Theron on a quest to kayak alone in the wilds of Australia. This gives her some interesting subtext (though one could say this is "fridging"). It's too bad Bana couldn't have stuck around, though. He's such a good actor but you hardly see him anymore.
The film is shot almost entirely from the point of view of Theron's character as she at first grimly paddles through rapids, the rush achieved under the shadow of unrelenting grief. Then, as she meets Egerton's character in the jungle after her pack is stolen, it becomes a story of her fight for survival.
Egerton's performance is impressively deranged and I loved the reveal of his especially abnormal predilections, though it verges on cheesy when it's revealed he wears dentures to conceal his sharpened teeth. I'm not saying he wouldn't sharpen his teeth, I just don't know why he'd conceal it when he's hunting a woman alone through the jungle.
Anyway, the suspense is good and never lets up. Apex is available on Netflix.
