Still in Gotham

I think at this point we can say Batman "trailers well." Seeing the new trailer for The Batman, I was reminded of the crowd going wild on first seeing The Dark Knight's trailer at a showing of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That's probably no accident. The music almost sounds like Hans Zimmer and, in general, there's a Batman Begins vibe about the visuals. And yet Matt Reeves' take is supposedly less interested in the realism of the Nolan films. Certainly the way bullets bounce off Batman's chest without even causing him to break stride is much further from reality. But Robert Pattinson's Batman seems enough like Christian Bale's that the differences stand out distinctly. The fact that Pattinson's smaller and less macho, almost feminine, certainly boyish, stands out. Yet at the same time, there's a definite sense of tenacity you don't get from the Nolan trailers. More than any other Batman, this trailer makes me think he's a guy who won't let anything stand in his way.

Colin Farrell is unrecognisable as Penguin. In fact he sounds a lot like Robert DeNiro. I'm reminded of how Nolan didn't want to use the Penguin in his films because he considered him too unrealistic. What's so unrealistic about a fat gangster? I suspect it's a sign that Nolan's familiarity with the source material is drawn more from Tim Burton's films than from the comics. Well, however he got there, he made at least one masterpiece with The Dark Knight. The odds of The Batman being anywhere on that level seem slim but I never would've thought Joaquin Phoenix could distinguish himself in Health ledger's shadow.

I feel like they decided not to disguise Batman's voice the way Christian Bale did and yet I still can't make out what Pattinson says when he punches the glass in the trailer. Maybe I'm the only one. Anyway, I want to see this movie.

The Signs are Everywhere

Halloween has definitely landed in Japan, as you can tell from the decorations at the mall to-day. It's even more pervasive than last year.

You'd never guess it only recently started to catch on. I was with a Japanese friend, Shuichi, and he told me he was amazed how quickly Halloween was catching on, too.

We were there to get lunch at a shabu-shabu restaurant with a friend of his. It was my first time eating shabu-shabu, which is a sort of buffet style restaurant where you pick up dry noodles and uncooked vegetables at the bar and then boil them in water or dashi at your table. You're given strips of raw meat sliced paper thin and you swish each piece in the boiling stock, cooking one bite at a time. We had various dipping sauces, too, as well as a small dish of raw egg for dipping the meat in. It was good but I couldn't keep up with the quantities of food my companions were capable of eating. After four trays of pork each as well as noodles and tofu they also had ice cream and fresh waffles for dessert. I contented myself with some ice cream with pineapple.

Here are some more big beautiful spiders I've seen recently lately:

Rengoku Returns

Season two of Kimetsu no Yaiba premiered on Sunday and I finally watched it when it premiered on Netflix yesterday. As has been widely reported, the new season is repeating the same story as the massively successful Mugen Train movie, splitting the film up into seven episodes. But of course that means there will be a lot of new material so it's basically Mugen Train: The Extended Edition. The first episode focuses entirely on Rengoku Kyojuro (Satoshi Hino) and serves to provide an explanation of all the bento lunches he's eating at the beginning of the film. It turns out he bought out the entire stock of a restaurant after rescuing the proprietor and her granddaughter from a demon.

It definitely feels like they're milking Rengoku's massive, probably unexpected, popularity. I can't overstate the reverence virtually every student, boy and girl, of every grade, holds for Rengoku. My young friends in the art club constantly draw him and he's always spoken of in solemn or sadly affectionate tones. Considering the next arc in the manga is evidently a torrid tale of a red light district that has nothing to do with Rengoku, the makers of the anime probably had to go this route.

He is a charming character--pure-hearted and self-sacrificing, his only quirk being his unblinking love for food. The new episode begins with a lovingly animated sequence of soba noodles being prepared for him.

He is almost a propaganda hero, like the men who mutinied over borscht in Battleship Potemkin. Altogether, Kimetsu no Yaiba is a marked shift in anime to a more conservative story about honorable men fighting to protect the women they love. That's not to knock it, in fact I'd say Japan is a lot healthier playing out these stories in fantasy instead of electing strong men presidents (indeed, it seems like there's another prime minister resigning every day).

I'm interested in Mugen Train: The Extended Edition but I have to admit I'm more interested in catching up to the next arc. Maybe I should get caught up on the manga.

Kimetsu no Yaiba is available on Netflix in Japan and Crunchyroll in the U.S.

Twitter Sonnet #1482

The silver catch awaits a breaded fly.
The numbered air reports a water sound.
We built with solid steel a metal pie.
We buried cake beneath a frosting ground.
The bottled water held a gazing fish.
To light the path, a murky mould was dropped.
We gather milk to fill the deeper dish.
You see the image here was clearly cropped.
The gasping nose would hardly load a sneeze.
Collections strongly frame the stuttered tube.
We're selling phoney honey straight to bees.
The answer's writ in form of Rubik's Cube.
The youthful fire burns through tasty treats.
The destined train abides his final feats.

The List of Suspects Contracts and Expands

I caught up on the newest two episodes of Only Murders in the Building last night and they were two of the best episodes of the series. "Fan Fiction" was one of the funniest, featuring a group of "superfans" of the characters' true crime podcast.

Spoilers for episodes 8 and 9 after the screenshot

Episode eight also had a running gag about how Charles' new girlfriend, Jan, is the group's proverbial Yoko, acting like she's suddenly part of the group in order to make suggestions no-one likes. Jan is the bassoonist who, if you remember, was my pick for the killer. Episode eight ended with her apparently being stabbed to death, which made me think I was right and that the stabbing was a fake out. Episode nine begins by revealing the stabbing was indeed not fatal and ends by providing evidence that makes her look guilty. Which makes me think she isn't. I guess we'll find out next week.

Episode nine isn't quite as good as eight but it's still really good. Martin Short continues to display admirable energy levels. And I was amused by the idea of Jane Lynch playing Steve Martin's stunt double.

Seasons

Spider webs shroud the ripe persimmons near the junior high school, a sure sign of autumn here in Kashihara, Japan. Persimmons are associated with the season and persimmon trees can be found at the foot of the hill near the big junior high school where I worked up until to-day. To-morrow I go to a different, smaller school in another part of town but I will be going back to the big one in January. Until then, I'll be missing many of the students, particularly the art club students who all gathered together this afternoon to present me with artwork and say "Thank you!" in synchronous.

I would share the artwork but I'm not comfortable giving anything like personal details of students online. One girl expertly inked a drawing of Nezuko from Kimetsu no Yaiba dressed as a pirate. She knew I liked pirates and she knew Nezuko is my favourite character on the show. I couldn't tell her all the ways it was an appropriate gift for me.

Most of the artwork the students gave me was of characters from Kimetsu no Yaiba or Jujutsu Kaisen, though I have yet to finish seeing all the episodes of the latter. But it's what the students love so I'm very happy to receive it.

The History of the Miss Mystery

I noticed something about all the English text books at the junior high schools I work at here in Japan. They teach the reader that the titles for men and women are "Mr." and "Ms.", the latter pronounced "Miz". No mention is made of "Miss" and "Mrs.". I told one of the teachers I work with that this is by no means reflective of my experience as a native English speaker in the U.S. But as I thought about it, I wondered if I had the appropriate background to speak to the issue. I see "Ms." regularly on online news sites, I'd just totally forgotten it was pronounced "Miz", I always thought it was an abbreviation of "Miss". I'd been disabused of this before and, as I now recall, soon forgot again, probably because I can recall no instance of anyone actually using the pronunciation "Miz" in real life. But how many opportunities have I had? When I was in university and community college before that, anyone referred to by their last names were "Professor" or occasionally "Doctor". When I worked at J.C. Penney, everyone went by their first names, even the store manager. I referred to everyone by first names in my teaching jobs in the U.S. The last time I can positively remember using Mr., Miss, or Mrs. is high school. I don't remember any "Miz" in those days and clearly remember plenty of "Miss" and "Mrs." I graduated in 1997. Could things have really changed so much since then? According to many of the sites that come up in google, they have. But I also see sources which claim they haven't and generally the difference in opinion on sources lines up with their political bias. I checked other countries, too, and found an Australian site where women polled were under the impression that "Miz" was reserved for divorced women and possibly lesbians.

The argument in favour of "Miz", a controversy I thought, until recently, had died in the '90s, seems to be that a woman is made implicitly subservient to men by adopting her husband's name. I know there are occasions where a husband has adopted his wife's name instead, though. Why isn't the answer to give men a marriage dependent honorific? It seems as much a commentary on the value of marriage, the concept of creating a single unit from two individuals, as gender. What last names should the children of a marriage have? Should they have to pick a side when they come of age?

In any case, I'm not convinced the English text books are conveying an accurate idea of native speaker English. I've noticed that ping-pong is referred to as "pinpon" in Japanese but the English textbooks force students to say "table tennis", I suspect because "ping pong" is trademarked. Who knows what other interests are invested in these text books?

Twitter Sonnet #1481

The ghost of curry walks despite its heart.
Thematic trolls traverse the plastic wood.
The panicked horse was hit by poison dart.
Alone, the playful maiden lately stood.
A cube of sand could crush a cherry dream.
The errant knife presaged the ribbon ring.
To lee, the prow's unlike the dame she'd seem.
Electric green permits the car to sing.
The image pizza blurred our waking talk.
A question card was cut to fill the class.
A phase around the mountain heeled the walk.
A team of horses led her 'cross the pass.
Evolving words are clamped in boiling lard.
The language fits a tiny index card.

The Love of a Car

For some people, the only peace they can find is by devoting themselves to projects, away from other people. That certainly seems to be the case for a young man in 1983's Christine. John Carpenter's adaptation of a Stephen King novel I haven't read is partly a nice, raw tale of teenage misery and partly an admirably balls out, violent car chase flick. It's the story of a living car who kills people--and I have to admit, I was rooting for her by the end.

Arnie (Keith Gordon) is a prototypical nerd. He even wears tape on the middle of his black rimmed glasses after a bully crushes them. Yet, the cruelty and insensitivity he suffers from in greater and lesser degrees from parents and classmates is credible. His parents going ballistic about the idea that Arnie would buy a car on his own makes sense, yet their anger also believably crosses the line to disastrously inconsiderate of Arnie's natural need to assert himself.

No, I don't think Arnie is justified in acting more and more like an asshole, but it's also completely understandable. When it comes to the car, I'm inclined to interpret her as something like a wild animal. I've heard in King's novel, the car is definitely possessed by the spirit of a man who killed himself in the car while in Carpenter's film its lifeforce is left totally unexplained. I like Carpenter's concept a lot better. It's far more interesting to study the car and try to discern the nature of its personality and limits of its intelligence than it is to just see some guy's personality in it.

It really is sweet the way she returns the--admittedly compulsive--affection Arnie lavishes on her. And then I also find myself rooting for her because, if you think about it, even if she has the ability to heal herself, it's kind of hard for a car to arrange just the right circumstances where she can kill people. She needs speed and tenacity. My favourite part is when she pulls out of a burning gas station, on fire, to go after the last bully.

That being said, I also really like Harry Dean Stanton as the police detective. I love how sure he seems to be that Arnie's lying about painting the car after it'd been vandalised. As though he's somehow intuited that the car is a demon with healing powers. Stanton completely sells it.

In addition to a lot of '50s classics on Christine's radio, the film also has a particularly groovy synthesiser score from Carpenter.

Christine is available on Netflix in Japan.

Space Shatner

I am kind of pleased about William Shatner going to space. If you haven't heard, the 90 year old is going on an 11 minute, suborbital flight with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin company. I saw a bit of an interview he did on Good Morning America for it where Al Roker called Shatner the "youngest 90 year old" he knows. And it's true--it's amazing how physically healthy and verbally acute he seems to be. Compared with how frail Leonard Nimoy and Deforest Kelly looked years before they died, it's remarkable.

Shatner's flight is scheduled for the 12th, just two days from now. It was only to-day I thought of his toupee and wondered if it would be an issue. Maybe that's why he was visiting a hair transplant clinic, according to the Mirror. That's right, people are still interested in William Shatner's toupee. Since I last blogged about it nine years ago, articles and blogs from others have appeared regularly. Cracked published an article just this year about a Star Trek producer who claims Shatner stole toupees made especially for him from the Star Trek set. Though, if you ask me, I don't see why Shatner should've had to have stolen them. Who else could have or would have used them? If the producers weren't just going to give them to Shatner, that's some pretty epic stinginess. Maybe they were planning to use them for Michael Myers?

I guess if the producer really wanted them back he could've just plucked them off Shatner's head.

Anyway, the news about Shatner's impending space flight made me want to watch Star Trek. Specifically, I wanted to watch him rolling around with a woman wearing a ridiculous criss-cross of minuscule cloth (you see, live action Cowboy Bebop, this is the fun you could've had). I did a search for "Skimpiest costumes on Star Trek" and came across this 2012 article by io9 co-founder Charlie Jane Anders. She would so be cancelled for it to-day, or at the very least given the stink-eye by all the shills currently sheltering at io9. It was via this article I was reminded of the third season episode "The Cloud Minders".

The basic concept is fairly similar to Laputa in Gulliver's Travels, being about a floating city of artists and intellectuals and a separate class of workers toiling on the planet below. "The Cloud Minders" follows a more obvious path of political allegory, though, making some of the city dwellers secretly corrupt tyrants (the others being ignorant) and the workers being kept mentally inferior by regular exposure to toxic gas. It ignores some of the complexities and morally grey areas that Jonathan Swift's version did a much better job with. Still, the episode has camp value and it's nice to remember a show that actually wanted to engage the audience with serious ideas instead of just mindlessly pushing a message.

Also when I searched for "Skimpiest costume on Star Trek", this article came up in which actress Sherry Johnson claims her improbable outfit in "What are Little Girls Made Of" was partially held together by Shatner's toupee ribbon. Could that possibly be true?

Spider Sports

This big lovely lady and her progeny have had their massive webs spread over my balcony for about a month now. And you can see they barred plenty of bugs from entry into my apartment. Looks like they even stopped a wasp.

Here they are in the morning sunshine.

The spider population has appropriately increased with the onset of autumn. If only the days were getting cooler. I took part in the sports festival for the first year students on Thursday and the poor kids had to play for four hours in direct sunlight. It got up to 32 Celsius. But they were genki, giving it their all in tugs of war, relay races, and tamaire.

I'm discovering Azumanga Daioh is pretty true to life. I can't find subtitled versions of episodes on YouTube but I tried YouTube's auto-translate in the settings to-day for the first time. It's about as hilariously useless as you might expect:

"It's been unbelievable since I put it in Bulma after gymnastics", "Rar car ah", "It's okay to invert it, so it's okay, so it's okay", and "Pyaa I love you and do my best It's a," are some of the handy phrases YouTube renders from the Japanese.

Twitter Sonnet #1480

With random milk, create the double cheese.
Dismantled sweets disperse as cubic grains.
The random dots combine to seem as bees.
The squinting man adjusts his tightened Hanes.
Gorilla bathes would slosh the wine abroad.
Another tea could tip the raft to Hell.
A modern phone was all electric sod.
A message moves by cord and paper bell.
Some leaves of green would buy a better end.
Escape was planned behind the metal fence.
The colour stripes desist around the bend.
The frank transmission bleeds too much to mince.
A friendly silk condemns the busy specks.
A spider hand's produced from waxy decks.

How to Build a Shop

I was finally able to show Little Shop of Horrors to students yesterday. Seven students showed up for it. One girl enthusiastically liked it, two others thought it was too scary, and another girl said it was "interesting." I didn't get comments from the remaining two. We watched only an hour of the film--the after school screenings were scheduled for about an hour--and third year students (fifteen years old) are scheduled for a school trip next week and, since most of the students who showed up were third year students, I probably won't be showing the end. I'm kind of happy about that because I've decided I really don't like either of the film's endings.

So I think this is one of those rare instances where a test audience was right and the ending where Seymour and Audrey get eaten by the plant really doesn't work. The problem is that the story misunderstands itself. It thinks the audience is along for the ride for irony but they're really along for the ride because they care about Seymour and Audrey. That doesn't seem like it should be a big revelation. How couldn't it be clear from how Seymour is set up in "Skid Row (Downtown)" or how Audrey's sad dream is shared in "Somewhere That's Green"? Yet the story bets that you will be laughing at Audrey more than you'll be feeling sorry for her when she reprises "Somewhere That's Green" before she's eaten by the green monster.

Yet the happy ending also doesn't really work. Seymour electrocuting the plant and then he and Audrey walking off onto the set of Audrey's dream sequence feel insubstantial after the themes the film's set up about inescapable poverty and moral choices. The unhappy ending brings to conclusion the ongoing idea of the American dream being fundamentally wicked. Having a stroke of luck and making money must, inevitably, land you in Hell if you follow the path to the end of the line.

I can enjoy an unhappy ending, even an ending where characters I like meet untimely deaths. But not when it happens in order to serve a wobbly political ideology.

So I've been thinking this past week--what would be a good ending for Little Shop of Horrors? I think it would be one in which Seymour keeps the plant alive and manages to find more success with it without killing people. Maybe he's able to harvest a fruit from it that cures a disease or maybe he just starts feeding it cows and keeps it locked in a cage. The story's themes would be fulfilled by the acknowledging the fact that the power that comes with success can be dangerous but can be turned into something positive by the individual asserting control based on his principles. This possibility doesn't exist in the current film's underlying philosophy. There are innocent victims and there are corrupt tyrants, the film allows for no real third possibility and I think we all, instinctively, know this is a lie and we resent Audrey and Seymour being killed in service to this lie.

This is why Alan Menken and Howard Ashman were so much better off working for Disney. You could say that by taking money from the growing monster, they were living the ending they denied to audiences with Little Shop of Horrors.

Hot Damn, That Pie is Good

After all these years, the premiere episode of Twin Peaks season two remains absolutely delectable. I've blogged before about how I love the anti-momentum of it. How the finale of season one was plot driven, high melodrama and then David Lynch immediately threw a wrench into the works, bringing us to a full stop with Cooper lying on the floor and . . . Hank Warden shows up with warm milk.

The episode is a sequence of scenes and moments that are just exquisite. Audrey with that mask and her father. The Giant. Jerry and Blackie with the heroin. The wood tick in the path of a bullet. The man in a smiling bag. "What's there to smile about." "Uncle Leland's hair turned white." The stain on the floor. "Mairzy Doats". "These same geese were flying that night." Andy getting that board in the face and his line, "Do you know who it is? Do you know who it is?" which, like the best of Lynch, is simultaneously completely bizarre and absolutely natural. It's my favourite Andy moment in the whole series, and that includes season three.

There's also Pete taking a moment to quietly ponder smoke inhalation. There's Donna playing femme fatale with Laura's glasses--which recalls Laura's "Don't ever wear my stuff," line from Fire Walk With Me, giving the funny scene a darker meaning. There's Bobby playing doctor with an adorable Shelly Johnson.

There's Major Briggs' lovely vision of Bobby shortly thereafter, which has become more poignant knowing where Bobby ends up in season three. There's the Brothers Horne pacing around Hank. And, of course, there's the delicate, nervous nightmare of the Hayward Supper Club.

There's the incredible ending with the first depiction of Laura's murder. Sheryl Lee gives us her great horror scream in that scene but she's just as good earlier on with Donna in that diner booth scene I love so much.

I wonder if this scene was the impetus for all those booth vignettes in season three. This is the first time Maddy really looked good after hair, makeup, and wardrobe were such consistent misfires for her in season one.

I even like the combination of olive green and, what, mulberry? And that massive collar. It's a strange but cosy outfit. You could say that about the whole series.

This Charming Lear

This is something I drew for my Shakespeare presentation. I made one for Hamlet, Macbeth, Falstaff, and King Lear. I had clips for all of them except Macbeth, from various movies. I usually only have time to show one clip so I have the class vote on which one they want to see. Yesterday, for reasons I can't begin to guess, one class overwhelmingly voted to see the King Lear clip. I showed the storm scene from the 1983 Laurence Olivier BBC production and the students actually seemed captivated, despite a lack of subtitles. I suppose a lot of what Lear yells at the storm is pretty simple English.

Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call'd you children,
You owe me no subscription: then let fall
Your horrible pleasure: here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join'd
Your high engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul!

The students know words like "fire", "daughter", "children", and "kind". That might be enough for some students to get the gist. Though part of the reason I wanted to show Shakespeare clips was to tell them that a lot of native speakers don't understand Shakespeare's dialogue now but they go to see the plays anyway--"Because the plays are beautiful," I said instead of, "Because they're poseurs." I'm trying to get the students not to shut down when they hear English they don't understand. A lot of emphasis in Japanese education is typically put on precision and the kids are so afraid of making mistakes it often holds them back from even trying.

Yesterday I also planned to show the 1951 Alice in Wonderland after school. Unfortunately, all of the third year students had gone home early due to the sports festival and they make up the bulk of my typical audience. Only one student showed up, my best friend, the second year student who gave me the higanbana. She's such a sweetheart. But she could only watch the beginning of the film before she had to go home to study. However, I did end up showing it to two special needs classes. That was fun--despite the fact that merchandise from the 1951 film is all over the place--kids have pencil cases, bags, pens, and notebooks with art based on the 1951 film--most of them have never actually seen it.

I also played Go Fish with the second special needs class. This class consists of only three students whose only issue is that they're too shy to be in the normal classrooms. One of them is a little girl I met last year when she was a shy first year student. When I saw her for the first time this year, I immediately spotted her Cinnamoroll mask. I remembered how much she adored Cinnamoroll last year--she'd done an English presentation on the character--so I was excited and complimented her. She laughed and is clearly very proud of her mask.

I taught her and the other students how to play Go Fish on that occasion. Yesterday, I found Miss Cinnamoroll has become an expert at shuffling a deck of cards. It's amazing. This shy little girl with tiny hands can do all the tricks of a Blackjack dealer. She does the thing where the cards flip up under her thumbs and the quick movement where the two halves of the cut deck fan into each other. If she overcomes her shyness, I can see her making good money at a casino. Which is probably not something the other teachers would be too happy about. Still, I thought it was pretty cool.

Only Text in the Episode

Last night I watched "The Boy from 6B", the inevitable deaf episode of Only Murders in the Building. Well, maybe not quite inevitable, but this gimmick of an episode or movie with no audible dialogue has become kind of well worn. Still, it is entertaining watching Steve Martin and Martin Short giving silent performances and the story between the deaf boy, Theo (James Caverly), and his father (Nathan Lane), is intriguingly bitter.

The episode also has an even older device in that it further develops the resident Laura Palmer character, Zoe Cassidy (Olivia Reis). We find out the cause of her death and the reason for her missing emerald ring which, unlike that of Teresa Banks on Twin Peaks, does not have a supernatural explanation. But like Laura Palmer, Zoe is the beautiful blonde girl who's simultaneously a delinquent and the overachiever everyone loves, even revealing a knowledge of sign language in this episode.

This episode heavily hints at a particular suspect being the murderer of Tim Kono (Julian Cihi), which, I think, means we all know it's going to be someone else.

I liked Martin Short and Selena Gomez breaking into the morgue in this episode. I really liked Short's extreme autumnal outfit.

Twitter Sonnet #1479

Dissembled names surround the panda soul.
As burbled streams and heavy chimes do laugh.
A settled dream of chickens filled the skull.
A third of love's more distant yet than half.
The absent cam'ra captured pictures yet.
The burning grass expends the water tank.
We settled sights to place a touching bet.
A crimson font promotes the living bank.
The statement shirt retracts a moon and sky.
Expensive lunches launch the movie night.
A silent sleuth remarks an eagle cry.
Arrange the stacks of green to staple height.
The wordless scramble lays a wooden egg.
A dusty night renamed another leg.

Shall I Not Take Mine Ease?

I was happy to hear this morning that the boy I talked about last week is awake in the hospital. He's been talking with his mother and is apparently doing well. So spirits were visibly boosted at school to-day. To-morrow sports festival starts.

It looks like autumn around here, with all the leaves changing colour, but it's been unseasonably hot, around 30 Celsius. Accuweather is showing no respite until next Wednesday. I'm so done with this heat.

To-day I showed a powerpoint I put together about Shakespeare for first year students. It turns out Romeo and Juliet is very well known in Japan and everyone seemed genuinely interested when I showed a clip from the 1968 movie. A teacher I work with said that Olivia Hussey married a Japanese rock star so that's why she's relatively well known in Japan but I don't think the thirteen year old kids are aware of her. My coworker was surprised when I informed her Juliet was herself thirteen in the play.

I also talked a bit about Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Falstaff. Many of the boys seemed to get a genuine kick out of Falstaff, whom I described as "a knight but he doesn't like to fight. He likes to eat, drink, and sleep." They laughed at a brief clip I showed of Orson Welles in the role. There's life in old Sir John yet.

Take Care How You Whistle

I'm in the mood for ghost stories again, it being October, so I read "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" by MR James from 1904. The title comes from a 1793 Robert Burns poem, a poem about potential lovers, as you might guess from the title. This only remains a faint suggestion in the MR James story, which features another of his academic researchers encountering the supernatural. It's quite good, too.

Parkins is a professor introduced with dialogue in a breezy scene, a scene with a much more casual atmosphere than I'm used to from James. We get to know through the gentle teasing of his friends and colleagues that Parkins is a fellow of weak nerves, strong scruples, and a Puritanical distaste for superstition. It's a good recipe for the protagonist of a ghost story and, in fact, serves as the bulk of the tale's soul.

The supernatural elements are breadcrumbs the mind of the reader is invited to make a narrative of on its own. There's a whistle in what appears to be a grave in an archaeological site. There's a figure Parkins spots following him whom he naturally assumes is not supernatural at all and, indeed, might not be. There are sheets that are inexplicably tousled on the spare bed in his hotel room overnight. You can read into the story a subtext about Parkins' sexual repression, or something about a literal attraction of the supernatural to this unlucky young fellow. James crafts shadows of just the right ambiguity to tease the imagination.

The Clumsiness of the Killer

Just because a guy's a serial killer, doesn't mean he's super strong or brilliant. One of the few movies that illustrates this fact is 1983's Angst, the story of a killer just released from prison who immediately starts seeking out new victims. The point of the film is well taken but as an experience in itself it is a little dull.

Erwin Leder's performance as the unnamed killer is admirably unrestrained and effective. Along with the framing and editing, his wide, darting eyes and jittery movements help create a sense of being in his head.

He breaks into a house and finds a family--an elderly woman (Edith Rosset) and her grown daughter (Silvia Ryder) and son (Rudolf Gotz). The son has a severe mental impairment of some kind and is confined to a wheelchair. As the killer sets about his plan to murder them all, we hear in voiceover how he maps his relationships with his own mother and sister onto them. As the situation changes, his assignment of roles to them shifts.

He has grand ambitions about a number of kills but all those he manages to perpetrate in the film seem due to luck and a strange, inexplicable, persistent lethargy on the part of the family. The daughter is pretty and oddly inexpressive and barely struggles against what seems a pretty flimsy job of taping her to a door. I think director Gerald Kargl may have made a deliberate effort to dehumanise the victims in order to put us more in the killer's perspective. I can kind of respect the idea but ultimately it leads to a less interesting film, especially compared to others that successfully give us the perspectives of both killer and victim, like Psycho or even When a Stranger Calls.

Angst is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1478

Connexions slow again across the net.
Electric plants were wanting space and meat.
Resounding brass proposed a music bet.
The giant legs obscure the tiny feet.
A fax machine digests the ancient bill.
A troub'ling storm rewards the watching mouse.
We carried hearts beneath the sandy hill.
The girl could barely fit the rabbit's house.
Arrangements differ 'cross the ocean deck.
We play for cards to make another game.
A match revealed a deep and empty wreck.
The shaking sand condensed and met the same.
Forgetting days, the child aged in years.
A kitten's sleep persists for deafened ears.

A Shadow on the Field

The junior high school where I work is recovering from a traumatic event yesterday morning. I approached the school at around 8:05am from the south side, to enter by walking across the great sports field. It was crowded on Thursday with students practicing for next week's Sports Festival in their P.E. uniforms. I entered the little foyer in the back of the building and put my umbrella in the stand. I was saying good morning to some teachers and was about to take my shoes off when I noticed another teacher rushing inside and then back out again. I looked out to see a group of teachers huddled in a tight group with curious students clustered in a wider circle of groups. Then I perceived a child on the ground in the center of the teacher group, on his back, his arms and legs stretched out limp. A teacher rushed past me to grab the first aid kit and go back outside.

Some teachers began herding the other students away and the field was soon cleared but, it being early morning before homeroom, there was still a steady stream of students coming in through the back gate. Some of them looked curiously at the group of teachers. I tried to distract some students by giving them the normal, cheerful greetings in English. Part of my job is to chat with students in English outside of class. But I knew that many students were inevitably going to be perfectly conscious of what was transpiring and there was very little I could say to them in any language.

A few other teachers diverted the stream of students to entering on the western side of the school. One of the younger English teachers was standing outside the foyer, watching what was transpiring and I asked him what was happening. "The boy's heart has stopped," he told me. "He is fighting."

I could see they were doing CPR on the student and a stretcher had been brought out though it wasn't used. One of the teachers was screaming, "Ganbatte!", a word that's usually translated as "good luck" but the "te" at the end makes it a sort of command. So it's sort of like saying, "Work hard to a good result."

Ambulances finally arrived and the boy went to the hospital without regaining consciousness. I don't know if he regained consciousness at the hospital. The last I heard he is being kept unconscious but an operation on his heart had been a success. The teacher who'd first sounded the alarm about the student is one I talk to and work with frequently and she told me the boy had been running two hundred meters and wearing a mask. There've been reports of students suffering health problems because they exercised wearing masks, some of them even dying, so normally the students remove their masks while exercising. Some of them have been wearing their masks lately, though. I'm not sure if it's out of habit or out of concern for the recent uptick of Covid cases.

The boy is a second year student, making him thirteen or fourteen years old. He's also a baseball player. The kids on the baseball team are so easy-going and courteous. They wear full uniforms when they practice and when I greet them they always tip their hats to me in reply. This particular boy is a popular and good-natured fellow.

There are three years of students in the school. First year students (twelve or thirteen years old) have their classrooms on the top floor, second years have theirs on the third floor, and third years (fourteen and fifteen year olds) have theirs on the first and second floors. It was strange how blissfully unaffected or unaware the third and first year students seemed while the atmosphere on the third floor was palpably confused and somber within the hours after the incident. Kids started to behave a little more like normal once news came that the boy was alive and stable.

I talked to kids who wanted to talk. Some were in no mood to bother with English and I could hardly blame them. I stood with one of my favourite students from the art club while she cried, even though she barely knew the boy. There were plenty of teachers shedding tears, too, especially the boy's homeroom teacher. This was followed by a general lack of motivation to go about the normal business of the day, which affected me too. Things were a little more normal to-day, though school ended an hour earlier than it was scheduled to and the second year students went home instead of working on their flags for the Sports Festival or doing their normal club activities. We're all hoping for good news on Monday.

Peak as a Colour

My favourite Guillermo del Toro movie is 2015's Crimson Peak but somehow I'd only seen it once before last night. I remember clearly that day in 2015. I wore my black frock coat with a purple tie and a lavender shirt and saw the movie at Plaza Bonita Mall. It seemed the right attire for this stylishly Victorian film.

I saw Guillermo del Toro promoting the film at Comic Con and he talked about the influences on the plot, the kind of psychological gothic romances that are very visible in the story set in a big, strange house. He also talked about the details he carefully constructed for character backstories and the marvellous house itself. He talked about how the rooms reflected the characters who occupied them. Certainly Jessica Chastain's character, Lucille, has a room that shows her severe, pathological madness, including a drawer where she stashes locks of hair from her victims.

I was reminded of Hitchcock's Notorious and one can certainly also see Rebecca or Suspicion. In terms of visual and sound design, no movie had been so lushly phantasmagoric since Bram Stoker's Dracula. I suspect it was a heavy influence--you can see it in all the iris wipes and the unrestrainedly fantastic horror of the skeletal ghosts.

For people who like this kind of story, the movie's a great slice of cake, though I suppose I can understand why many don't see the appeal. But I like this movie so much better than The Shape of Water, which I don't hate. But Shape of Water seems too dominated by political influence, under which the story of a weird romance gets a little muffled. Crimson Peak is 100% indulgence.

Crimson Peak is available on Netflix in the UK.

Cowbop Beboy

Netflix has released the opening for their upcoming live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop.

The attempt to wed live action with a two dimensional style is strongly reminiscent of Sin City. Sometimes it's really awkward, like the first shot of John Cho smoking, in which it seems like his arm was digitally moved about to fit the timing. Though I'm surprised they're actually portraying him smoking.

The original opening for comparison:

The obvious difference is the lack of the fourth lead in the Netflix trailer, Edward. Edward had previously been announced as appearing in the Netflix series but for some reason Netlix has been coy about her. Her actress hasn't been named and no pictures published.

A lot of negative reaction on the internet has been generated around Faye, played by Daniella Pineda. Despite the costumes on Spike and Jet hewing very close to the anime, Faye's costume is notably more conservative and generic. It covers more of her body and also aesthetically looks more like Guardians of the Galaxy than the tweaked 1950s style of most of the characters in the original series. Pineda added a lot of fuel to the backlash by posting a video in which she mocks the fans for their dislike of her costume as well as mocking the idea that she physically doesn't match the animated Faye in the bust department, something I don't remember seeing anyone complain about.

The fact that the makers of this show and many others feel women need to be more covered now makes me feel more sad than outraged. The change in her aesthetic, though, seems like a sign they really didn't understand what the original series was trying to do.

Recently, more images of the supporting cast were released:

Julia and Vicious, on the top left and right, look pretty much the same as they do in the anime. Ana and Gren, on the bottom left and right, make me think that if I ever need to go into witness protection and look inconspicuous I should hope Netlix wouldn't be in charge of giving me my new look. Ana was an apparently ordinary woman working at a corner drugstore and now she's another badass in a leather coat. Gren was a man whose body started to take on female attributes against his will. He was a saxophone player in a small dive bar and dressed in plain slacks and a button down shirt, unsurprisingly inconspicuous given he lived on a world populated almost entirely by men, and dangerous men. Now it looks like he's a flamboyant cabaret performer, which makes me wonder if they're drastically changing his whole story. This seems like a sign of either the clumsiness of wokeness or a clumsy pretense at wokeness (depending on whether you consider "woke" a good thing). Someone trying to show a more positive portrayal of a transgender character clumsily put one in a more stereotypical role in the process.

I'll certainly be watching this show. But so far the boldest things about it are things it directly copies from the original series, which is not a good sign.

Through Cables and Screens

I finished screening Labyrinth for the kids at school to-day. They seem to like it. One girl actually revealed she'd not only heard of David Bowie but she was more or less pressed into being a fan by her mother and had actually seen Labyrinth before. I don't know how much of her love for Bowie is genuine or if she's just an obedient daughter.

The hard part was upgrading the speakers on the school TV. Apparently a lot of big HD TVs come with really bad sound. Fortunately, there's a Hard Off across from the school--a place that sells a variety of used goods. I got some decent computer speakers for 550 yen (about five dollars). I ordered an adapter off Amazon for another five hundred yen and was able to get them working. All for less than ten dollars.

Next I think I'm going to show the kids Little Shop of Horrors. I'm not sure if I want to show the director's cut or the theatrical cut. Normally I'd automatically go for the director's cut but I was watching it last night and I find the nihilism of that ending less satisfying than the buildup from "Suddenly Seymour" makes me anticipate. Maybe I'll let the students choose.