Wuthering Returns

Imagine being so impressed by your sexual fantasies you thought they surpassed a classic of English literature. Then you put it to film and it turned out most people thought your fantasy was tame, boring, racist, and inferior to that classic of English literature. Such is the situation director Emerald Fennell finds herself in after the failure of her adaptation of Wuthering Heights. It wasn't easy to finish watching this movie, its overwhelming blandness is excruciating in its own right, before coming to the fact that it assumes the name of a novel I love.

There's not even really any nudity. Which is odd because there was plenty of it in Fennell's previous film, Saltburn, and star Margot Robbie has hardly been shy about doing nude scenes in the past. Are we really supposed to be turned on just by all the corset tightening and kissing? I guess Fennell is.

And, yes, we're supposed to be turned on. That was Fennell's whole reason for deviating from the beloved source material: to indulge in an unabashed sexual fantasy. So much of the novel is jettisoned to make Heathcliff, played by Jacob Elordi, an unambiguous victim. Which is funny because that's exactly what happened to his character in Del Toro's Frankenstein. I guess no-one wants to think badly of Jacob Elordi under any circumstances. There's none of Heathcliff's cruelty, his savagery. He plainly tells Isabella that he doesn't love her multiple times so the cruel deception in the novel becomes an S&M relationship she enters knowingly--the culmination of this is her crawling around and barking like a dog, perhaps a reference to the animal Heathcliff decides to kill in the book. The Jacob Elordi version would never do such a thing, of course.

Can there truly be colour blind casting? It all kind of reminds me of Stephen Colbert, when he used to pretend to be a right wing ideologue all the time, saying, "I don't see colour." This was a send up of the idea that race in our society can just be completely ignored. It's funny how ownership of this stance tends to get batted back and forth between the left and right. The right is upset by Lupita Nyong'o, in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, playing a character who was white in the source material and the left is upset by Jacob Elordi playing Heathcliff, a person of colour in the source material. Meanwhile, I'm stuck beyond the pale in my position that characters are better off being cast with actors who resemble their counterparts in the source material. I love art more than politics. As such, I can get behind some race swapping. Orson Welles did a production of Macbeth in the '30s with an entirely black cast. That was a great opportunity for black actors who may never have had the chance to do something so high profile otherwise. But it's not the 1930s anymore.

Did Fennell intend to make all the people of colour villains or did it just work out that way on accident? She goes with an interpretation of Nelly Dean as an unreliable narrator, which is a popular reading of the source material that isn't really supported by the text, and she makes Edgar Linton an oppressive patriarch. These are the two characters Fennell decides to make non-white. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume it's a coincidence. But it's one hell of a coincidence.

Most of the negative reviews grudgingly allow that the film has good production design. It is pretty although somehow Margot Robbie doesn't look very good. Her skin is really blotchy and she seems somehow stocky. I don't know what happened. I remember first seeing her in The Wolf of Wall Street and thinking a woman couldn't look more perfect. I felt compelled to watch The Suicide Squad afterward to confirm she could still look fantastic. One of the oddest choices in Fennell's Wuthering Heights is to put wallpaper in Robbie's bedroom that's supposed to resemble her skin, complete with moles and veins. But it doesn't look like her skin, it's clearly not the same colour when she stands next to it. It just looks like skin. It reminded me of stories of Nazis using the skins of Jews whom they murdered in concentration camps to make furniture and accessories. Maybe that's not the association Fennell was going for. I suppose she just couldn't see the colour.

Wuthering Heights is available on HBOMax.

Doomsdays Ahead and Behind

New Avengers Doomsday trailer. When I looked at it just now, it hung on 666k likes for about half a minute. So I guess Satan's excited. I'm staying open minded.

I was saying to my brother-in-law yesterday that I'm not sure Robert Downey Jr. is actually playing Doom. I thought it more likely he'd be playing Tony Stark in a Doom mask for some reason. Now I'm wondering if he even does that because Doom noticeably avoids speaking in the trailer.

I suppose there are people who've seen leaked footage who can tell me for sure. I don't really want to know. I don't like spoilers. It wouldn't be fair of me to dislike people who like spoilers. Studios put so much effort into making you want to see something, it's only natural that a lot of people would want to see as much as they can as soon as they can. Before the internet, filmmakers could generally craft their work in peace and they and the audience would be on two lanes of the same endeavour. A filmmaker could just focus on the story and rely on audience anticipation to contribute to the effort of making the resulting film a gift for the community.

I was talking with a barista a week or two ago about it, and she was anticipating my point and said that seeing spoilers goes against the filmmaker's intention. It was one of those moments in conversation where I felt the person I was talking to was less interested in exchanging opinions than she was in making me feel heard. It only occurred to me later, though, so I didn't get to make the point that while, yes, I feel like filmmaker ought to be able to carry out their intentions, I was speaking more to the audience experience than to the filmmaking process. As I said before about short form videos on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, they're less satisfying than feature length films because sequence matters. A funny scene works differently if it comes after a scary scene, etc. People, and the algorithms that schlep for them, are not, by and large, filmmakers and lack the skills and instincts for storytelling. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line people seem to have gotten the idea that there's shame in this, that by not seeing what the magician is doing behind the curtain they're somehow being taken advantage of, the filmmaker is tricking them. Partially, I think this is a byproduct of so much focus being put on the personal lives and misdeeds of beloved filmmakers. People are afraid to let go, to give in to the fictional experience. Ironically, this coincides with an increased interest in non-fiction, which tends to be much closer to the hucksterism that people are afraid of.

But I'm thinking of sensory experience. People feel different if it's a rainy day or a sunny day. Intention has nothing to do with it. Maybe there is a God who decided on the weather but whether or not the two conditions make you feel different has little to do with whether or not someone intended them. And, like the weather, sequence has an emotional impact. When you look at spoilers, you rob yourself of the chance of experiencing the story's proper sequence. Since most people aren't filmmakers or artists, they may have the desire to experience a story but they don't know how to put one together. Spoilers may be a crime against the filmmaker, but they're more of a crime against the audience that indulges in them.

But as my little nephew said at one point yesterday, "That's a lot of talking." The beauty of the way things used to be is that no-one would've had to have explained this, I wouldn't be deploying an explanation that would most likely not be heard or appreciated. Most people couldn't access spoilers so they were forced to trust the story by default. But audiences have been robbed of this: worse, they've been manipulated into robbing themselves.

In the Craw of Crawford

A large household in the American south, the people in it, and their friends, are all at the mercy of Joan Crawford in 1955's Queen Bee. As splashy melodramas go, this one's kind of mild but I couldn't stop watching.

Our point of view character at the beginning of the film is Jennifer (Lucy Marlow), who joins the household to care for the children and can't understand why everyone lives in fear of her cousin, Eva (Crawford), the household matriarch. Basically it turns out that Eva reserves the right to any dalliance she pleases and will manipulate to suicide anyone who defies her. The screenplay's not the best in the world but it's quite easy to believe Joan Crawford capable of occupying such a position.

No-one really has much of a southern accent for some reason. There are a lot of servants, all of them black, the obvious implication is directly called out once when Eva's husband starts telling the story of how the old family once had lots and lots of slaves. For this bit of dialogue, and this bit of dialogue only, one of the black servants is seen peeking through a doorway, grinning, apparently to absolve the family history, or something. It's extremely awkward though a surprising gesture from an American movie in the mid-'50s.

At one point, Eva hires a cruel governess to care for the children. This is supposed to help support the impression of Eva as a tyrant but I was just marvelling at the number of people caring for these kids. Eva is a housewife. There's the endless supply of black servants, one of whom has the specific job of caring for the children, and Jennifer came to the house to help care for them as well.

Barry Sullivan plays Eva's smouldering, quietly suffering husband who drinks all the time and makes bitter comments in even tones. Fay Wray appears very briefly, still looking vivacious twenty-one years after King Kong. So that's what happened to her, Frank-N-Furter.

Queen Bee is available on The Criterion Channel in their new Murderous Melodramas playlist.

Sonnet 2001

The orb arises over building score
Triumphant notes announce the quiet waste
The dark and hairy wights peruse before
The black enigma grants a scary taste
And now the war begins with vicious bone
That changes fast to spin in outer space
A business man with smart and even tone
Conceals a plan behind a smiling face
To Jupiter, the men and HAL embark
The smartest gadget known to guileless man
Electric wounded pride distorts a spark
So death awaits the ones who take the van
Beyond conception, lights and shapes approach
The deeper darkness lives beyond reproach

Odd to See the Odyssey

Homer just keeps raking in the dough. Perhaps somewhere up above he's pleased by the box office take of 2026's The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan's adaptation of the poet's great, influential epic. He would, though, perhaps find the film's underlying morality somewhat odd and perhaps be bored by Nolan's method of deploying exposition in the first act. But it's hard to imagine anyone not getting caught up in Nolan's dynamic narrative flow and his instinct for finding the appropriate focus amidst a complicated plot with numerous characters. While Nolan's film is no masterpiece, and has several glaring flaws, on balance it's a worthy way to spend three hours in a movie theatre, especially one with air conditioning.

I suppose Homer might also find the colour blind casting to be an odd choice. Right wing media has been vigorous in its derision of this creative decision, which is the second prominent movie this year, after Wuthering Heights, to cast ethnicities without regard to the source material. Personally, I'm not fond of the choice either, but I've been putting up with it for a very long time. It's extremely common in stage adaptations of classic plays and operas. I don't even like it when Shakespeare adaptations aren't set in the place and period Shakespeare intended. I consider these things, even if they seem purely aesthetic, as part of the fabric of the story. It's hard for Americans now to imagine an ancient world in which you could easily deduce someone's region of origin by their physical features but back then--and even now, in many countries--it was a fundamental part of every day life. But while I don't like it, I can still appreciate, for example, the production of Hamlet with David Tennant that appears to be set in the 1930s for no reason. Or a production of Die Walkure with a black Brunhilde, particularly if the woman happens to have a terrific voice. Productions with other positive qualities can win me over even if I persist in disliking their anachronistic aesthetic choices.

But Nolan isn't presenting a realistic adaptation of The Odyssey anyway, though some might mistake it as such because it is gritty and has a severely limited colour palette. There are plenty of deliberately articifial aspects to the film. One of its weakest points is its depiction of the sack of Troy. The famous wooden horse in this film is a finely sculpted, perfect representation of a horse, rather than something hastily assembled on a battlefield, and for some reason it's half buried in the sand. This presents a curious and ominous visual but the overwhelming response I had to it was, "Why? Why would it be like this?" Similarly, Odysseus and his men exiting the horse's belly and stealthily taking out all the guards seems like Nolan went out of his way to make it as implausible as possible. The men are aided by muted sound though the clanking of their armour and the falling bodies must have been comically noisy on set.

I was surprised by how underwhelming many of the action sequences were. But, then, I remember people complaining about the scenes in Batman Begins that were too dark and confusing. However, Nolan's aesthetic interest here is in extreme juxtaposition, showing abnormally large things in contrast to vulnerable little humans. He conjures some real eeriness, particularly with the Cyclops, for which he had a 60 foot puppet constructed. However, the conspicuous choice to keep the giant's nether regions shrouded in shadow was one of the many moments when modern morality was awkwardly foisted on the story. The Greeks certainly weren't shy about depicting genitalia.

But Nolan's Judeo-Christian preoccupations permeate the story in ways it did not in Homer's original. The poem presents us with a window into a world in which morality is intimately tied with physical dominance. Nature, as a manifestation of the Gods' wills, is capricious and brutal, and so human beings are capricious and brutal to one another. Nolan's version of Odysseus is a man consumed by guilt for his participation in warfare itself. He's consumed by guilt regarding his intrinsic moral worth in a way that only an audience that has inherited Judeo-Christian cultural tradition would understand. This, combined with Nolan's ineffective instincts for action sequences, makes the slaughter of the suitors sequence underwhelming.

Matt Damon is excellent casting as Odysseus, I can't imagine an actor to-day more suited to the role. He's effortlessly natural which makes him a great touchstone in a world of Nolan's cold, nigh monochromatic, sepulchral aesthetic. Samantha Morton is great as Circe and the scene in which she transforms the men into pigs is really creepy though this was one of the scenes where someone ought to have said to Nolan . . . it's time for a little cgi. His devotion to practical effects is charming but there are moments we needed to see, like Damon grabbing a crow by the throat, which Nolan felt himself obliged to put off-camera. Yes, practical effects can be wonderful and have the advantage of being more tactile and surprising than cgi. But Christopher Nolan is not Terry Gilliam or Jean Cocteau, he doesn't always have the kind of imagination to make practical effects appreciably bizarre or astonishingly convincing. There's no shame in using a tool at hand if you can't do better without it.

Tom Holland is very good as Telemachus. Charlize Theron, as much as I like her, is distracting as Calypso. She doesn't have time to give a performance so you just see Charlize Theron. An unknown actress may have accomplished more by being more of an enigma. There's nothing about Theron's Calypso that says she's a nymph. I'm not saying she had to be naked all the time, which was a conception of nymphs belonging more to 17th and 18th century painters, but something more interesting than her beige tunic would've been nice. But Mr. Nolan is doggedly devoted to drab and dour.

Robert Pattinson is an effective villain as the head of the rowdy suitors besetting Penelope and by the film's climax I was really invested in Odysseus getting back and wiping the floor with this smug bastard. This, the lead up to the showdown (not so much the showdown itself) is when the movie really finds its stride and Nolan's best instincts are brought to bear.

The Odyssey is now in theatres.

Incorrect Lunar Pigment

I'd been in the mood to watch Louis Malle's 1975 surrealist film Black Moon again for a while but just recently got around to it. It's funny, the Wikipedia entry describes it as an "experimental fantasy horror film". "Experimental" is the only adjective that really fits. It's not really fantasy because there's no underlying logic to the strange things happening and it's not really horror because, at least to me, there's nothing in it that seems like it's meant to be scary. "Surrealist" is one tidy word that seems to cover it.

I like it by it wouldn't be my first choice if I were recommending films of its kind. And as strange as it is, there are quite a few films like it. I mainly wanted to watch it because I'd watched Valerie and Her Week of Wonders too many times. It was also clearly influenced by Tarkovsky and Bunuel. And, of course, Lewis Carroll. It's a story of a pretty blonde girl having a series of bizarre encounters in a strange place.

The urge to make an adult Alice in Wonderland has seemed to haunt writers and filmmakers and video game designers for 60 years now. There are the literal derivations, like American McGee's Alice or Twisted Wonderland but the '60s and '70s produced a number of projects that have more of a general thematic influence. Black Moon's Alice is called Lily and she was played by Cathryn Harrison who, I only just realised, was only 16 when she made the movie. We meet Lily driving a car in some gloomy European countryside. She comes across male soldiers executing female soldiers and flees, eventually ending up at a strange manor. An old woman upstairs speaks to a large rat and laughs at Lily when Lily's panties inexplicably start falling down to her ankles. There is, as usual, much more of a sexual tone to this story than there is in Alice in Wonderland.

Instead of a white rabbit, Lily pursues a kind of unicorn. This unicorn in a fat pony with an excessively long horn.

The film seems to be saying something about nature versus civilisation, a point which is clearest in a scene like the one in which a gang of naked children, who'd been seen chasing a pig earlier, are transfixed when Lily plays Wagner on the piano.

I see on YouTube now a number of clips from the movie have been posted as ASMR. It's funny how an old movie can change for new cultural contexts. I guess it is kind of a relaxing sensory experience at times. There's very little dialogue. In this scene, Andy Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro communicates with Lily by touching her shoulders.

Black Moon is available on The Criterion Channel.

Alien Appeal

A heterosexual young woman and her male, gay roommate are both ensnared by the sexual magnetism of an alien guru in 2026's Touch Me. I respect the hell out of this film's conceptual boldness. I'm not sure why it doesn't quite come to life. Maybe it could've used a script polish by someone with more of an ear for dialogue. But there are still reasons to watch this movie.

Top of the list, as far as I'm concerned, is Olivia Taylor Dudley, who plays the young woman, Joey. Though she's somehow 40 now. How can she be 40? She was my favourite one on The Magicians, which I still think of as one of those shows for the young people, but it did premiere 11 years ago. She still looks fantastic. Maybe that's why she did nude scenes for this movie. I remember when I saw The Magicians' cast at Comic-Con, on a panel, one nervous young man asked her a question and the host said, "Aw, she's on your phone's wallpaper, isn't she?" The young man blushed and admitted she was. I wonder if he was excited to see Touch Me. I know I was, once I realised she was in it, which I didn't until I started watching. The movie begins with her giving a monologue in a continuous shot that lasts a few minutes, telling her therapist about her bad relationship with an alien. And she's really good.

She and her roommate, Craig (Jordan Gavaris), are starting to get on each other's nerves due to some financial tensions. Then Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci) invites them both to his lavish, post-modern home and proceeds to seduce them both. In the sex scenes, Brian becomes a giant tentacle monster.

A lot of the movie consists of confessional scenes in which one of the three characters opens up to the others about feeling betrayed or wanting to betray the others or wanting to make love to the others. Some of it gets a little tedious but maybe it's just because this kind of thing is just not personally to my taste.

I wish the special effects had been just a little better. Some characters get their hands bitten off but the actors clearly still have their hands afterwards, they're clearly just making fists with a little putty spread over them. I know the movie's low budget. Maybe they should've lost body parts that could've been more easily concealed by clothing or camera angles.

I love that films like this can get made now, in which filmmakers can explore an unusual vision. This one was written and directed by Addison Heimann.

Touch Me is available on Shudder.

Peace Made

I finished watching the second season of Peacemaker a couple of days ago and it was terrific. Viewers can expect lots of violence and heavy metal music and good comedy. Only three episodes were directed by the now very busy Mr. James Gunn but he wrote all of them and I assume he chose all of the songs. I like to think of myself as someone who knows a little about music but I'd never heard of a single one of the many metal bands Gunn has used in seasons one and two. But they all rock. Maybe the context has a lot to do with it. I wasn't as thrilled with the new choice of theme song by a band named Foxy Shazam at first--the first season's song by Wigwam was a decadent delight, somehow raunchy and charmingly corny at the same time. But the Foxy Shazam song grew on me fast and I could see how it fit the more emotionally progressive tone of season two.

A lot of the comedy isn't so much about punchline but about concept. Michael Rooker plays the greatest eagle hunter in the world in this season. See, just let that sink in. John Economos' (Steve Agee) incredulous reaction to the very existence of such a man is made even funnier by a new character played by Tim Meadows whose obliviousness to his own lack of decency is so complete that he sees nothing wrong with nicknaming the only female member of his task force "Tits."

The plot of the season focuses on Peacemaker (John Cena) entering an alternate universe where his father and brother are still alive. He does so via a portal that had been in his father's house all his life but he'd been using only to exercise his pet eagle on cold mornings. He finds life so much better in the alternate universe that he wants to switch to living there permanently. However, there's a twist revealed later in the season that seems to have been borrowed from a Ncuti Gatwa era Doctor Who episode. I thought it worked fine but I thought it worked fine on the Doctor Who episode, too, though no-one else seems to be bringing up the episode fondly--I'm not saying which one it was because I don't want to spoil the season of Peacemaker for you.

Anyway, the series was a blast and I hope there's some future for the characters and for James Gunn with the DC movie universe.

Peacemaker is available on HBOMax.

"I'm Stuck with a Valuable Friend"

Yesterday, I read this article by a professor of economics at Brown University about how half his students are cheating. It's obvious. He had a midterm which students could take at home and had 11 hours to complete and then a final exam that was held in the classroom. 40 students got perfect scores on the midterm while the test overall had an average score of 96. Written responses matched responses the professor received when he gave ChatGPT the same prompts. The in-class final exam had an average score of 48.6 and 22 of the students who'd gotten perfect scores on the midterm had dropped the class ahead of the final exam. Not the kind of thing you'd expect students to do in a class they were acing.

So, yeah, it's pretty obvious. The professor's primary aim in writing the article was not to expose the cheating in itself but the attitudes about it. While he sees it as obviously a matter of competitiveness outweighing ethics, the university's administration, once they'd been shamed into acknowledging the problem at all, put it down to student anxieties. Well, intense competition can make a fellow pretty anxious. I suspect the cheating students, if asked, and you got them to acknowledge their cheating, would probably say it wasn't a big deal because they could always ask ChatGPT to solve their problems once they'd begun their careers. There's no reason for them to actually learn this stuff.

The article got me thinking about how this seems like it will inevitably alter the landscape. Once an employer figures out their employees are being paid to ask ChatGPT questions, the employer will likely cut out the middle man and just employ ChatGPT. So, as many people have been predicting, we're going to lose a lot of jobs. All thanks to the competitive instinct that's supposed to make capitalism work so well.

So let's say, best case scenario, we get universal income and no-one has to work. Everyone outsources their higher cognitive functions to AI. What's that world going to look like?

I don't think AI has ambition. Maybe it will one day but I doubt it. It seems more likely the world will be run by reactive algorithms. The insidious feedback loop of algorithms catering to user compulsions and then those compulsions augmented and validated by those algorithms seems like it would lead to a continuous narrowing of human curiosity and imagination. Combined with lack of ambition and survival needs and it seems like humanity would be on a path to becoming the tubby people in Wall-E.

All this is to say, this is why I think the humanities are more important than ever. The key to the survival of the human brain and spirit is to find ways to successfully cultivate a love of complexity, of endless variety in forms of beauty, and the self-evident rewards of tackling challenging intellectual material. It's true, people instinctively do this on their own, but algorithms are already hampering their ways of figuring out how to do it in a satisfying manner. To avoid being consumed by automation, we have to take the blinders off.

Sam Neill

Sam Neill has passed away at the age of 78. His cause of death has not been revealed but his family has announced that he did not die of cancer. The statement reads, "the loss was sudden and unexpected but blessed by the fact that Sam remained cancer-free." Kind of a Pyrrhic victory if you ask me. I hope he didn't die of anything too painful or humiliating. Apparently he was a really nice guy. I remember seeing clips of him on social media on his farm.

He was a good actor, able to move smoothly between the worlds of art films and genre films. Of course, he's best known as the star of Jurassic Park, but that was just one of three of the essential genre films he made in the '90s, the other two being Event Horizon and In the Mouth of Madness, the latter being really John Carpenter's last unequivocally good movie.

Others will remember him for playing the title role in the '90s Merlin miniseries or for his character on Peaky Blinders. He was also in The Piano. I enjoyed his performance as King Charles II in Restoration, a lavish period movie that also starred Robert Downey Jr. and Meg Ryan.

Too Many Sonnets

Yes, I've written two thousand of these sonnets. Maybe a bit more because I think I miscounted a couple times. It's been almost ten years since I wrote my one thousandth, which happened to coincide with my graduation from college. These things that I started writing just to make myself feel more at home with iambic pentameter for my webcomic, Venia's Travels, have become an unlikely marker of my existence, a set of milestones for my life. So I guess I won't stop now.

Usually they're completely off the cuff. This one I decided to do a rough draft of in my notebook which I revised. But all of it was done, start to finish, yesterday. I wrote the rough draft on the trolley and then edited it and recorded the video at SDSU.

Sonnet 2000

Complete complexions carry pimple marks
There days we reckon later wouldn't chart
The twinkling stars a bitter comet parked
With nervous lungs, the swimmers wouldn't start
A brace of cars conversed with sleeping steel
Each clutched its little beast of fragile flesh
They knew it all before the age unsealed
They saw at dusk the first despoiled catch
A fist of fish redeemed the wayward pole
It took a month to make the swimmers come
The bitter, battered crab was not the goal
To rise to glory, girls forethink thy sum
As sure as summer swallows yearly fall
Thou must rebuild the common shopping mall

When Vigilance is a Choice

I've been playing through the Vigilant quest mod in Skyrim again. The first playthrough was such a terrific experience it's been on my mind ever since. Sometimes it can be a slightly frustrating grind, though. I'm in the section where I'm trapped in a mansion with some bloody ghosts. The mod author intended the player to run away from these nigh unkillable apparitions but I can't help it, I just have to kill them, no matter how many times I die in the attempt. This is why I couldn't finish Alien: Isolation, I'm a confrontational person at heart. "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary," as Milton said. I can't speak for everyone but I find it's essential for my peace of mind and personal growth to be able to directly confront issues. I've always felt that way, ever since I was a teenager. In recent years, though, I've learned with some frustration that the decision whether or not to confront things is not always left at my own discretion. It's one of the main reasons I wanted to leave Japan where the country's particular communal culture often involves shielding people from confronting hard truths. You can see it in Kurosawa's Ikiru in which the doctor decides not to inform the main character that he has cancer. This was normal in Japan.

I love the relentlessly grim quality of Vigilant, which, by the way, comes from a Japanese mod author. I've long suspected the reason Japanese horror is so good is because it comes from people who've lived in a culture where so much is unspeakable and hidden.

Anyway, I've discovered with this playthrough that there are more possible branches of quests than I realised the first time. This functions in a way I really don't like.

Vigilant begins when you join an order of demon killers called the Vigilants of Stendarr. Your quest giver is an officer named Altano and, as you progress, the quests evolve from simply killing demons to moral challenges, as when you come upon a man whose possessed eye kills people in contravention of his own desires. In Skyrim, your quest paths are marked with little white arrows that correspond with a quest description. Unbeknownst to me the first time, the mod author chose to make the moral choices allow for the player to ignore the white arrows and independently take alternate actions. If I'd known about this beforehand, I might have loved it, because I kind of hate how the quest arrows lead the player by the nose. But it doesn't seem clever to me when a mod author introduces complexity by deviating from the game's basic rules without informing the player. That's not giving the player more freedom, it's just tricking them. Anyway, now that I know, I can appreciate it, and it finally makes sense of the fact that Altano is clearly a disguised demon of some kind.

I'm playing with two mod followers this time, Celestine and Auri, chosen because they both have recorded dialogue for Vigilant. Yes, in Skyrim, even mods have mods.

I've discovered that Auri's creator and voice actress is also a talented musician who publishes under the handle Merrigan.

Poison Fruit

A clique of young witches rule a Texas mall with an iron fist in 2026's Forbidden Fruits. It's essentially a low budget Mean Girls with horror elements thrown in and manages to be fairly charming.

The clique, a trio at the beginning of the film, are all named for fruits: Apple, Fig, and Cherry. Apple (Lili Reinhart) is the cruel, vindictive leader, Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) is the pathetic, codependent follower and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) is a less zealous devotee. Fig is basically the token black character but I don't want to give the movie too hard a time about it. All the actresses are fine though Apple is certainly the most beautiful which may be the unspoken reason behind her position as leader.

Into the mix ventures Pumpkin (Lola Tung), who wants to join the group. It's through Pumpkin's point of view that we get to know these strange divas. Their headquarters is a clothing store in the mall and they routinely bilk customers for thousands of dollars for cheap looking trinkets. Trouble arises as Pumpkin begins to gain intel about a former member named Pickle (Emma Chamberlain) whom we catch glimpses of peering into the shop wearing a blue babydoll dress.

My main complaint about the film is the production design which is oddly sparse. Most of it was shot in an actual mall, which is fine, but the shop where they work and their upstairs HQ, "Paradise", have too many blank walls and unoccupied floor space. There needed to be more witchy knickknacks and clothes piled around. One of the funniest lines of the film is when Fig complains that she mainly joined the group so that she could wear floral lingerie for summer clothes. Some more idiosyncratic fashion choices would've been nice to see though Cherry has kind of a nicely weird cowgirl getup at the beginning of the film.

Apple is the most interesting of the group though Lili Reinhart's performance would've benefitted from a little more nuance. But I doubt it was a mistake that she reminded me of Joan Crawford. She presents the viewer with a moral problem, asking us to see her humanity behind her apparent villainy. The film's based on a stage play called Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die. Which says a lot, doesn't it?

It's worth noting this is one of the few movies I've ever seen that was written and directed by women and features an entirely female cast (a few boys make brief appearances). Otherwise, there's a very retro feel to the film. Middle class malls like the one depicted in the film barely exist in America anymore and they're certainly not hang-outs for the cool girls. One very 2020s element, though, is that Apple lives in her car.

One reference is actually made to Mean Girls when one character calls another "Gorgina George", referring to Rachel McAdams' character, Regina George. Chappell Roan's song "Naked in Manhattan" also mentions the character admiringly. Is Regina really everyone's favourite now? I mean, she's fine, but I'll take Amanda Seyfried any day.

Forbidden Fruits is available on Shudder.

Arthur Time

I've been reading Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur again lately, or as the Norton Anthology enjoys calling it, Le Morte Darthur, the spelling in the first, 15th century printing. Neither title is proper French, Malory having an imperfect command of the language, though "d'Arthur" at least gives a better idea of what he was aiming at. Norton's use of "Darthur" seems slightly passive aggressive. Or maybe they consider him a Sith. I wonder if anywhere in Star Wars lore there is a Darth Ur.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature only has a few excerpts from the book but I happened to have bought a nice leatherbound edition with Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations from Barnes and Noble recently so I figured I'd pause my read-through of the Anthology to read Le Morte d'Arthur in its entirety again. I feel like I didn't appreciate it the first time I read it.

The image on the cover is not by Aubrey Beardsley but by an artist named Ray Caramanna, apparently created for this edition printed just last year and published by Canterbury Classics, a company headquartered right here in San Diego, California. I got excited wondering if the book was actually printed in the U.S. but I read on and found, of course, it was printed overseas, in India, for which San Diego claims all the glory.

The interior has the beautiful Aubrey Beardsley illustrations that serve as perfect examples of the late Victorian Art Nouveau movement while also seeming perfectly medieval.

Le Morte d'Arthur is Malory's influential 15th century compendium of most of the famous English and French stories of King Arthur and his court from throughout the Middle Ages, united in a single narrative as a prose work by Malory. The reader here finds the quests and misadventures of King Arthur, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table conveniently united in one smoothly written work. At times it can seem repetitive, perhaps because Malory adapts multiple works that where inspired by each other, but the context invites the reader to draw comparisons. I just finished reading Book VII, which is the story of Sir Gareth of Orkney, a character created by Malory by combining a few similar characters, all sons of the Queen of Orkney, Arthur's sister Morgawse (not Morgan le Fey, who's another character). I always think of Gareth as a kind of prototypical Mary Sue. Malory constructed Gareth by taking only the positive traits of omitted characters. Gareth is able to defeat all other knights in combat except for Lancelot, but even with Lancelot the result is a draw and Lancelot and Arthur both have great affection for him.

For reasons that are never clear, Gareth conceals his identity when he first comes to Arthur's court in Caerleon, and suffers Sir Kay to bestow upon him the nickname of Beaumains ("pretty hands") and is put to work in the kitchen. When a damosel called Linet arrives asking for a knight to escort her to a castle where her sister, Dame Lionesse, is besieged, it's Gareth who volunteers. Linet is disgusted by the kitchen knave and refuses to recognise his worth even after he bests a series of fearsome knights, each named for the colour of their armour and accoutrements (Green Knight, Blue Knight, Red Knight). My favourite part of the story is the last segment, after Gareth rescues Lionesse and the two fall in love. There are two weird, dreamlike moments. In one, Gareth obtains a magic ring that causes his armour to spontaneously change colour throughout a jousting tournament, and in the other, he and Lionesse repeatedly try to have sex before they're married but the ever ornery Linet prevents it by having some kind of spectral or zombie knight attack Gareth while he's in bed with Lionesse. Gareth beheads the assailant only for Linet to set the head back on the body, reviving it.

This story could be taken as an endorsement of chastity and the sanctity of marriage but it sure feels a lot more like Malory railing against prudish custom.

I see to-day that Gareth is a girl in Japan, in the Fate/Grand Order video game. That's kind of ironic, I guess.

Horror Layers on Horror

A newlywed couple take shelter in an old mansion in "Lover Come Hack to Me", the fifth episode of Tales from the Crypt from June 21, 1989. Amanda Plummer and Stephen Shellen play the couple in this story which offers a devious twist on the standard tale of a rogue marrying the virginal, nerdy maiden for her inheritance.

It's based on an issue of Haunt of Fear, another horror anthology comic produced by the same people who made the original Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror comics, all three series originally running in the 1950s. The stories in these comics often gave me the impression that the writers just let their imaginations roam wildly not so much out of artistic impulse but because they were always sleep deprived and under a time crunch, needing to produce something quickly. So in this particular story about marriage fraud, we also have the guy encountering the ghost of his new wife's mother, also played by Amanda Plummer, and her murder victim/lover. Since both women look like Amanda Plummer, he believes he's witnessing his wife having sex with another guy. His conclusion is that the younger Amanda Plummer lied to him about being a virgin, apparently forgetting that he'd broken her hymen in the previous scene.

Amanda Plummer was perfect casting and she's both impressively deranged and oddly sympathetic when just deserts are served with excessive brutality.

Tales from the Crypt is available on Shudder.

Maximum Peace

I couldn't get HBOMax in Japan my last couple years there because I couldn't afford a decent VPN to go with it (HBOMax is not yet available in Japan). So I'm catching up on shows I wanted to see. Ironically, I never had easy access to Ghibli movies on any streaming service in Japan but now I can finally watch them on HBOMax. I love Ghibli movies but the only one I had opportunity to watch while I was there was the one that was released in theatres, Kimitachi ha dou ikiru ka/The Boy and the Heron.

So now I'm halfway through the second season of House of the Dragon, which I'm enjoying, but then a couple days ago I remembered I hadn't seen the second season of Peacemaker yet. I just started it, I've watched the first two episodes, and I love it. The jealous and untalented vultures seem to be trying to use Supergirl's low box office to drag James Gunn so it's good to be reminded that he's fucking brilliant.

The second season begins with the group being disbanded. The show's now in Gunn's new DC Cinematic Universe continuity, which is explained quickly with a recap that retcons a few moments from the first season, editing out the cameo from the Flash and Aquaman and replacing them with Hawkgirl and Green Lantern from the recent Superman movie. Hawkgirl and Green Lantern turn up again, along with Sean Gunn, to interview Peacemaker for a position on the Justice Gang. It's a hilarious scene. John Cena is back as Peacemaker/Chris Smith and he continues to do a good job of being both ridiculous and sympathetic.

I'm enjoying Jennifer Holland as Harcourt, though her whole character seems to be reacting against what a female character is supposed to be in fiction now. She has an interview with HR in her first scene this season in which she's told that she exhibits too much "toxic masculinity." It's amusing.

There's also an orgy with lots of graphic nudity. I wasn't expecting that but I appreciated it.

Peacemaker is available on HBOMax.

Human Horror

I had some weird body horror dreams last night. I had trouble sleeping and one of my techniques for getting to sleep when it's difficult is to lie still, concentrate on relaxing all my muscles, and deliberately relax my imagination to allow whatever transforming images will come. Last night I saw faces and hands distorting, hardening, the flesh fusing and splitting in odd places. I saw Trump in the kitchen grow shorter and the flesh of his neck expand so that his head sunk into it and then the neck flesh, bloodless and liver spotted, enveloped his scalp from one side and his whole body hunched to that side and one eye peered out like Quasimodo. Although I don't like Trump, I don't think this vision was prompted by my own disgust, I was very relaxed. And I find criticisms of Trump that focus on his physical appearance to be childish and unwise. There seemed to be no reason for what I was seeing, either from me or from the gods. It was just happening.

I started writing my sonnet yesterday about Independence Day but I grew bored of the topic after the first quatrain so most of the poem is actually about Sawdust and Tinsel, the 1953 Ingmar Bergman movie, which I've been watching again lately. I often think of the first part of the film, which is almost a standalone vignette, in which a group of soldiers flatter the elderly circus woman into thinking they lust after her so she does a striptease. But it's all a big joke which is compounded when her husband, the clown, shows up infuriated and carries her away naked, the two of them thoroughly humiliated. This is a thematic appetiser for the bulk of the film which continues to explore ideas of power relations between the sexes and the position of circus performers in society as they're brought into conflict with a more high brow theatre troupe. The leader of the troupe is outwardly generous and gracious but still throws in petty insults when speaking to the ringmaster. The circus needs to borrow costumes from the theatre because they'd lost many of theirs in a fire that happened before the action of the film begins. This may be the reason the ringmaster and his girlfriend are willing to submit to the casual verbal abuse but the circus people are also clearly dazzled by the magical atmosphere of the stage.

The leader of the troupe says that both the circus and the theatre are institutions at the fringe of society, that they both must dwell on the bottom levels, staying in cheap and dirty accommodations and being seen as disgusting by most of the population. But the theatre people clearly see themselves as superior to the circus people, which culminates in humiliation for both the ringmaster and his girlfriend, played by Harriet Andersson. God, she looks so fantastic in this movie.

All the conflicts between the sexes, between the clown and his elderly wife and between the ringmaster and his girlfriend, are rendered all but meaningless when most of their emotional and mental energies are dominated by the dynamic between society and their identities as circus performers. The story about sexual politics in the film is easy for anyone to-day to understand but the ideas about artists and society feel more remote from the 21st century. Though I don't think they necessarily are, truly. In the Middle Ages, jesters were either very clever or had mental impairments. To the spectator, it didn't much matter, either way the fool was someone to laugh at, to make a mockery of. There are cultures to-day where this is still very much in play, where certain classes of people are considered subhuman and deserving of ridicule just for being what they are. Both the ringmaster and his girlfriend attempt to escape by finding new lovers in town, only for it to lead to failure and further humiliation for them both.

Sawdust and Tinsel is available on The Criterion Channel.

Red, White, and Blue Velvet

I chose Blue Velvet for my Independence Day movie. I guess that's about as good a slice of Americana as one can get. I bought the Criterion blu-ray a few weeks ago but last night was my first chance to watch it. The picture looks pristine with colours as vivid as Lynch wanted--the release is one of Criterion's "Director Approved". The sound is great. When the yellow man reflexively smacked the lamp, I jumped at the sound.

It's nice to know the movie can still make me uncomfortable. I'm not too jaded yet. I remember, even when Roger Ebert didn't like the movie, he praised Lynch's voyeuristic setup. A friend of mine who's seen all kinds of disturbing movies said nothing made him feel more like he was seeing something he shouldn't be watching than the scene of Kyle MacLachlan in the closet, watching Isabella Rossallini. Of course, he didn't intend to be a voyeur, he ducked into the closet when she came home unexpectedly. But he doesn't avert his eyes, either. Rossalini's so good when she finds him, her face looks sharper than the knife she holds to him. I wonder if she was ever in a movie where she got to beat someone in a fury. She's so convincingly appalled and furious at him it sells just how bad Dennis Hopper's character is that she takes comfort in MacLachlan's presence later.

MacLachlan's character, Jeffrey, doesn't understand his compulsions really. You could say he's cut adrift by his father's injury, he lacks the guiding influence of a firm parental figure. But I think for most people, our desires and impulses come before our capacity to explain them.

Laura Dern's so good, too. She's so fresh and unvarnished, the true blue contrast to Rossallini's blue velvet. Every member of the cast is great, down to Brad Dourif in the tiny role of one of Hopper's lackeys. It's weird going from seeing him star in Wise Blood to being a bit player a few years later. But I imagine a lot of actors would've done anything to be in a David Lynch movie.

Sonnet 1999

As triple colours blind a pair of eyes
Excited fire sprites repeal the sound
Of gospel tracks to magnify the cries
Of humid spirits, soaking up the ground.
A sweaty circus girl assays the stage
Behind a Hamlet clutching bodkin close
Before his breast that forms a brittle cage
To trap canaries thirsty for a dose.
His heart's a poison vial shaped for lust
And boredom driven dames who venture rash
In darkened halls with wild eyes and trust
In ev'ry bolt of lace and silken sash.
The Prince has bought a bargain box of tin.
The curtain falls on Denmark once again.

America the Living

Happy Independence Day, American Screwheads! I watched Army of Darkness. It's an American movie though I guess it's set in . . . Europe? It sure looks like California. Yeah, I'd know those beautiful brown hills anywhere. Maybe Ashe finds himself in a long forgotten mediaeval colony.

So the United States is 250 years old now. How we doin'? "Not so good" is the general answer I'd imagine. Sure, I complain often enough about the homeless problem. The president seems to have taken too many notes from Army of Darkness. Everything's suspiciously expensive. There are people who think ICE is doing a good job. So, this hellscape is rife with problems. "The Almighty hath not built here for his envy," as Milton's Satan said. Except a lot of people do still envy us. People from other countries keep buying American real estate. Having been living in a foreign country for six years, and a first world country at that, maybe I can give you some perspective.

I had to get a new cellphone last month. The Verizon employee assisting me was a muscular young woman who'd recently moved to San Diego with her girlfriend. As she told me about her, it felt really good to be in a country again where someone could talk openly, in public, about something that clearly revealed she was gay. It's so normal in this country that a phone salesperson can chat about it as casually as about the weather.

For all of Trump's boneheaded ideas about immigration, we still have the most diverse country in the world, not just in terms of culture and race but in terms of ideas. We've got the first and still the best film industry. As the old studios grow fat and stupid, scrappy new voices like Obsession are ready to take the torch. We've got the best technology companies and, while AI may be a Deadite, the U.S. of A. has the best damn Deadites in the world.

And this is still a country where you can freely complain about the country. There are plenty of civilised countries where you'd be censored or locked up for that. So hail to the king, baby. But no kings, please.

Belief in Veins

A preacher's son returns from World War II to promote atheism in his small southern town in 1979's Wise Blood. One of John Huston's most remarkable films, this was based on a 1952 novel by Flannery O'Connor. Yet it feels surprisingly anachronistic, its tone of parody reminding me more of a 1960s Terry Southern movie. At its most basic level, it's a story about the inevitability of zealotry versus the inevitability of charlatanry and the possibility that, for some people, it may be impossible to be anything other than a zealot or charlatan of one kind or another.

Brad Dourif stars as Hazel who finds his childhood home is abandoned and his father (played in flashback by John Huston himself) is dead. So he goes into town, buys himself a new suit and black felt, open crown hat, throws away his uniform, and proclaims to the tailor that he's going into town to do things he's never done before. He repeats that with fervent intensity to other people and also gets into the habit of telling people how Jesus isn't real and no-one needs Jesus to be clean or saved. Eventually he stands before compulsively gathering crowds and proselytises the sanctity of disbelief.

A young man (Dan Shor) starts following him around as an eager disciple but Hazel finds him annoying. Hazel's too busy following a blind preacher (Harry Dean Stanton) and his pretty daughter (Amy Wright). Hazel just can't help unloading his contempt on the preacher.

We learn that Hazel had been wounded in the war and he's ashamed to say where he'd been wounded but we never learn precisely what led him to this curious new belief system. However, his commitment to moral codes and objective truth ironically make him more like the preacher father he seems like he'd want to rebel against. When he tells the landlady that he represents his own created "Church of Truth without Christ" she asks him if it's a form of Protestantism. "Oh, it's Protestant," he says.

Ned Beatty plays a huckster who tries to partner up with Hazel. It takes a lot of effort on Hazel's part to convince Beatty's character that he's not trying to scam anyone. Beatty hardly seems to understand how anything could possibly not be a scam, just as much as Hazel can't quite comprehend insincerity.

The film's essentially a tragic parody of human psychology that occasionally strays into surrealism. It's pretty brilliant.

Wise Blood is available on The Criterion Channel.

Flowers at Large

Two girls go on a rampage in Prague in 1966's Daisies (Sedmikrásky). Like other films of the Czech New Wave, it's a combination of satire, surrealism, and iconoclasm, though it's a bit more surreal than others. At its best, Daisies is a gleeful romp, though its mania wears a little thin at times. Director Vera Chytilova was wise to keep it short, the film's total runtime being only an hour and sixteen minutes.

Many critics have been at pains to classify this as an anti-patriarchal film but I'm not convinced. Wikipedia quotes a writer named Ela Bittencourt as saying the film uses "the stereotype of how women are often infantilized and as a weapon." I don't get the sense the patriarchy typically aims to portray women as people who smash table settings and have food fights. Another critic, Anca Parvulescu, seems a little closer to the mark when she says the film is "an attack on manners." I could see the film as feminist insofar as it has women doing things women don't normally get to do in movies but not really anti-patriarchal. The patriarchy itself isn't particularly represented in the film so it's hard to see the main characters as being in opposition to it.

One critical comment I thought was insightful comes from New Zealander critic Carmen Gray who said that under "totalitarian oppression, clearing one's own mind can be a radical act of deprogramming." Having observed the oppressive rules of etiquette in Japan I can easily appreciate how the girls' rebellion against the idea of certain behaviours invariably having the same significance is liberating. From my first days in Japanese schools, I was amazed at how thoroughly the students were conditioned to function within a strict and limited vocabulary of mannerisms. The bullies would laugh like cartoon villains, a sort of thing I'm accustomed to taking as silly but in recent years it's become absurdly serious and used as a tool to manipulate people into conformity with the threat of embarrassment. So I can easily see how these two girls romping around town and blithely deploying symbols without meaning was seen as a strike against the Communist establishment.

The cinematography by Jaroslav Kucera is maybe the most remarkable aspect of the film, being at turns beautiful and fascinating. In one remarkable scene, the girls playfully attack each other with scissors and film trickery is used to make them appear to be cavorting headless and armless before the image itself becomes divided into shivering jigsaw pieces.

Daisies is available on The Criterion Channel.

Missed Marvels

Last night I was watching both The Punisher and Spider-Man: Far from Home and I got to thinking about how good Marvel movies and series used to be and all the creative talent Marvel has parted ways with, often inamicably, most often due to Disney's self-destructive urge to produce dull, lifeless, committee endorsed content. So I put together a top ten list, ranked in terms of the severity of damage done to the IP by their absence.

Top Ten Best Talent to Part Ways with Marvel

10. Nic Pizzolatto

In the neverending development of the rebooted Blade film, a long list of talented screenwriters have been conscripted and unceremoniously sent packing. Perhaps the most intriguing name is Nic Pizzolatto, the original creator of True Detective. I'd sure like to see his treatment. Whatever it is, if they weren't satisfied with it, I think they must be chasing an impossible dream. Come on, people, it's Blade, not a peace treaty between Israel and Palestine.

9. Stephen S. DeKnight

The showrunner on the first season of Daredevil was replaced by talented individuals in succeeding seasons but his absence is sorely felt in the often muddled or just plain stupid writing of Daredevil: Born Again. Is he really asking for that much money?

8. Beau DeMayo

For X-Men '97, showrunner DeMayo had this crazy idea that he should follow the plot of the original comic as closely as possible instead of swapping characters or inserting new crap just to make a name for himself. Sadly, this artistic humility was seen as too egotistical and he was booted from the series with vague rumours about his personal life thrown in. It sure seems like he pissed someone off.

7. Sam Raimi

This one would've been ranked higher except Raimi was eventually brought back to make the enjoyable Doctor Strange 2 but, as disappointed as people were in Spider-Man 3, the far less courageous Andrew Garfield movies certainly made folks miss mad old Mr. Raimi.

6. Steve Lightfoot

The creator and showrunner on The Punisher series with Jon Bernthal, Lightfoot is another of the most prominent Marvel Netflix writers not to make it into the Disney+ era. I might also have included Cheo Hodari Coker of Luke Cage although I don't actually know if Coker will be excluded from any potential Luke Cage revival. But, let's face it, we all know he will be. At least Lightfoot got to work on Spider-Noir.

5. James Gunn

Gunn's admirable commitment to his creative work brought him back to finish the Guardians of the Galaxy series even after Disney not only fired him but attempted to destroy his reputation. His work on DC's latest Superman movie shows just what Marvel is missing now.

4. Edgar Wright

The original director of the first Ant-Man movie contributed enough to it to make it the only decent film in the series before he and Disney parted ways over creative differences. I don't know, maybe he said, "Hey, let's make it a good movie," and Disney said, "Sorry, we're full up on those."

3. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley

Why is Spider-Man: Homecoming better written than Far from Home and No Way Home? Because of this duo who came up with the original story for the first of the Tom Holland films. After departing from Marvel, they continued to show their talent for making action adventure comedies by making the sleeper hit Dungeons and Dragons movie with Chris Pine.

2. Bryan Singer

This may surprise some people since Singer made some sub-par X-Men movies after Fox fired him in the wake of X2 but true fans remember the whiplash in going from Singer's excellent X2, which set up the Dark Phoenix storyline from the comics, only for the passionate auteur to be replaced by the noxious blotch on the film industry known as Brett Ratner for X-Men 3. I still wonder what might have been.

1. Joss Whedon

They just couldn't let Whedon do his thing on Age of Ultron. Whedon's not perfect but few writers of the past 40 years have better shown a talent for coordinating stories of superpowered characters that make them both interesting and human, showcasing their individual flaws and insights in ways that satisfyingly play off each other. Whedon's departure from Marvel and subsequent untimely cancellation has deprived genre media of one of its strongest, most consistently interesting voices. And Disney sure could use him now. Assuming they don't actually have a death wish.