How to Make Canada

Thousands of furs, a daring Frenchman, and an enterprising English prince, all came together to give birth to Canada. This is more or less the legend presented in 1941's Hudson's Bay, 20th Century Fox's attempt to turn the formation of the Hudson Bay Company into a swashbuckler. Sadly, the film is bogged to tedium by too many expectations imposed on the story. It's a shame because it has a really terrific cast, with top billing going to Paul Muni as the real life entrepreneur frontiersman, Pierre Esprit Radisson.

Not that you'd know it without the title card because most of the plot puts the fictional Lord Crewe (John Sutton) square in the middle. He functions more like a companion on Doctor Who, someone to follow Radisson and Gooseberry (Laird Cregar) around and ask questions.

He's also there to be the romantic lead opposite a radiant young Gene Tierney who, despite getting second billing, only appears in a couple brief scenes.

She never leaves England and most of the action is in Canada. There, Radisson extols to Crewe the virtues of treating the local Indians as human beings, not just because it's good for business but also because it's the right thing to do. Radisson's attitude is surprising for an American film from 1941. The real life Radisson did work and live among the Native Americans, though he wasn't quite the saint presented in the film. He did treat the Indians like humans, insofar as he was willing to take part in their conflicts and kill if he needed to as much as he might have in Europe. A lot of the dialogue he has in the film is also weirdly skewed towards the creation of a land where people can one day live in peace, clearly pandering to Canadian patriotism. Odd for a story set in 1670 but it makes sense when you consider the real life Hudson Bay Company, which survives to this day, promoted the film in their stores.

Maybe that's why the filmmakers didn't dare give Radisson the romantic subplot though watching Muni romance Tierney would've been far more entertaining.

Cregar as Gooseberry--the real nickname of Radisson's collaborator Medard Chouart de Groseilliers--is a great presence as a gregarious giant. But I mainly tuned in for the royalty.

Vincent Price plays Charles II! It's such weird and yet also such surprisingly perfect casting. More puzzling is Nigel Bruce playing Prince Rupert.

That's the bumbling, good-hearted Dr. Watson from the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies. It's hard to look at him and see the Civil War leader, the veteran of the Thirty Years' War, the pirate who fled England for the Caribbean, the co-founder of the Royal Society, and the co-founder of the Royal African Company. Otherwise, though, this film has terrific casting.

Twitter Sonnet #1492

A dozen snacks could never make a meal.
The newer visions beat the lonely old.
Forgotten fires burn behind the wheel.
Repellent beauties urge the arms to hold.
A thoughtful wait recalled a rootless hair.
In solvent times erosion marks the wall.
We carried hoops to play the pensive bear.
Extinction birds deploy the epic stall.
The central point was lost behind the words.
He wrote a country's name in charter ink.
To learn to fly, a cat instructs the birds.
A world of tests has clogged the bloody sink.
Expensive furs have bought the country bay.
Returning coats have paved the ribbon way.

Crumbs on the Mouse's Chin

I've been looking at the material from "Disney+ Day". Everyone's been talking about the scarcity of Star Wars material, most of it consisting of a behind the scenes video for the Obi-Wan Kenobi series.

The concept art looks good. Ewan McGregor looks oddly younger now than he did in 2005. I'm still suspicious of the fact that no-one is addressing whether or not James Earl Jones is on the series. Commentators hoping to stay in the good graces of Disney aren't mentioning him as though collaborating in a project to make it seem like no-one is particularly interested. James Earl Jones appeared in the Coming to America sequel last year so it seems unlikely health problems kept him from doing a voice role. It seems like delay for negotiation, if you ask me, and, just like the absence of John Williams music from the new shows, it makes me think Disney is being stingier than legacy Star Wars talent or their agents anticipated. It's going to be really lame if Obi-Wan fights Darth Vader without a mask. We already had that in 2005, when it made sense.

Something a lot of people have commented on is the lack of enthusiasm Disney seems to have for promoting The Book of Boba Fett. Ever since Robert Rodriguez directed an episode of The Mandalorian, I've suspected Jon Favreau sneaked him in. I remember Favreau saying in an interview that Rodriguez was a pinch hitter for another director who was originally scheduled to direct that episode. That's like getting Darryl Strawberry to play for Homer Simpson.

There's a reason top grade talent tends not work for Disney. Look at how Edgar Wright left Ant-Man. Disney believes in ploughing a level field rather than having a few impressive peaks and ditches. Few great directors are willing to bow to the rule of homogeneity. There've been reports now of reshoots on the only Marvel movie I've looked forward to recently, the Doctor Strange sequel, directed by Sam Raimi. I think Raimi's at a point in his career where he has to accept whatever hand he's dealt but I do hope there will be a #ReleaseTheRaimiCut campaign. He's far more deserving of it than Zack Snyder. And it might teach Disney a lesson they really need to learn. But as Mr. Gettys said to Mr. Kane, they're probably going to need more than one lesson.

JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson are both decent directors. I don't hate the sequel trilogy. But for Star Wars, the best choice from the beginning would obviously have been someone like Robert Rodriguez. Someone with a real talent for directing action and a passion for fantasy or swashbuckling. Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino might also have been ideal choices. Both would have required Disney to bend much further than they have the guts to.

Marvel series had actual teasers on Disney+ Day. I'll probably watch all of them despite the fact that I haven't worked up the energy to watch Black Widow. Somehow getting the Marvel gruel fed to me in fifty minute spoonfuls makes them seem less like a waste of time. Anyway, I retain a modicum of interest in the zeitgeist.

I find it hilarious that the crappy '90s X-Men series is getting revived. Why don't they bring back Time Trax while they're at it? Or WildC.A.T.s?

The Willow teaser is actually pretty charming and it's nice to see Warwick Davis having such good rapport with the cast.

Anyway, I remain intensely happy about The Book of Boba Fett. At least the title makes some effort to break away from the boring trend of these shows just using a character name.

What Mind Breaks Away

Just how split can a personality really be? 1945's Hangover Square is a film noir about a man in a Jekyll and Hyde dilemma. Most of the time he's a respectable, prominent composer but sometimes he's a serial strangler, though he retains no memories of his crimes. This is an exceptionally good example of the fine point to which noir sharpened questions of free will and fate.

Laird Cregar plays George Harvey Bone, an excellent name for a noir protagonist and Cregar is perfectly cast. An enormous man with big facial features, he usually played villains. Here he was finally able to tackle something more morally complicated. His threatening physical presence adds weight (pardon the pun) to questions about his innocence. It was his final role before his death from a heart attack at just 31 years old.

We meet him staggering home after one of his lapses of memory during which we see him murdering a shop owner. He goes home to his fiancee, Barbara (Faye Marlowe), who knows about his memory lapses and commiserates with him, eager to help him solve the problem. She's beautiful and rich, too. Packaged with her extraordinary depth of sympathy, there's no reason in world Bone would take interest in another woman. And yet . . .

An exquisitely sleazy Linda Darnell walks into his life playing a small time musical hall singer called Netta. She sees Bone as her chance for the big time and starts buttering him up. George doesn't seem to have the will to resist her. He starts blowing off Barbara so he can spend time being played for a chump by Netta.

But he doesn't just blow Barbara off. When he tells Barbara he can't go with her to see a performance by the philharmonic, he goes to Netta and asks her if she'd go with him to that same philharmonic performance. He knows Barbara will be there with her father. Why would he set himself up this way? We don't find out because Netta blows him off.

All through this he behaves with an air of perfect sincerity, like he really believes he's an innocent man with blameless intentions. Which isn't so different from Dr. Jekyll, really. Anyone reading Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde is likely to notice that Jekyll isn't the good man, he's the restrained man.

But Hangover Square takes another interesting turn when it really becomes about Bone's passion as a composer. This is especially effective because the film has an especially effective score from Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann composed the concerto that Bone finds himself obsessively needing to perform in the film's climax.

This is a really good choice because the music is a lot more interesting than Barbara. Instead of Bone being torn between a desire for Netta and Barbara, he's really torn between his muse and his lust. For those of us who know real artistic achievement requires discipline as well as passion, this is a pretty good story.

George Sanders has a small role as a Scotland Yard psychiatrist trying to help Bone and he's really good, turning what might have been a pretty dry "expert" role into something more interesting. And there's a really good use of Guy Fawkes Day as Bone encounters some kids in hodgepodge masks that are nothing like the uniform V for Vendetta masks most of the world knows to-day.

Of course the visual is another small piece of the film's rumination on persona and the amount of responsibility Bone has for his actions. Joseph LaShelle works up some marvellously gloomy, ghoulish cinematography, too. This is a great one.

Hangover Square is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Old Camera

At the end of the day on Tuesday, I was in the school gym and saw one girl practicing with a basketball, dribbling and shooting hoops. On the other side of the gym, around twelve boys were engaged in fierce basketball practice. The girl's basketball team at the school I work at now is really small and on that day only one team member had come to school.

So I started practicing with her, taking turns shooting hoops. I think it was the first time I'd touched a basketball in thirty years. I was terrible. As I made one shot, my camera jumped out of my pocket and hit the floor. It seemed fine. Yesterday, though, I was on a hike with first year students through Asuka and discovered the focus is stuck.

It can take pictures of things really far away or really close but nothing in the middle. So I guess I need a new camera or I need to fix this one somehow. In the meantime, this is the best I can do:

I thought this fellow was a bit Lynchian:

It seems to be for an artist's studio. The sign says, "Peaceful Space, Light Dream Atelier".

Twitter Sonnet #1491

The flower's mouth expelled a child's hat.
A question flew from boiled eggs to heads.
The burning pan created cakes of fat.
The lonely bird was blue and stripey reds.
A lizard ladled soup to little scales.
Accounting clenched the ink receipt and vowed.
A shiny helmet shook the faith of whales.
The brave and mighty bull was lately cowed.
The talking date replenished days and weeks.
The floating shoulders now suggest a dress.
The sputtered car recalls a set of peaks.
An inky rain creates the runny press.
The basket takes the floor along the way.
A million pieces formed a heavy clay.

The Day Between Conflict and Peace

It's easy to say Japan surrendered after the United States used two atomic bombs on Japanese cities. The reality was much more complicated and delicate, as can be seen in Japan's Longest Day (日本のいちばん長い日). A 1967 film from Toho, it features almost every major and minor star from the studio, including Toshiro Mifune and Chishu Ryu, playing Minister of War Korechika Anami and Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki, respectively. Mostly consisting of scenes of men arguing in comfortable rooms, it's nonetheless constantly propelled by suspense.

Taking place over the course of 24 hours, from noon, August 14 to noon, August 15, 1945, it presents two groups of players in the drama--Japan's highest officials, debating the correct course for the country, and a few lower ranking officers who decide to take matters into their own hands. Masataka Ida (Etsushi Takahashi) and Kenji Hatanaka (Toshio Kurosawa) attempt to perpetrate what was later called the Kyujo incident, a coup.

To do this, they murder one official in one of the film's few action sequences, using swords against the old man who's too indignant at what his subordinates are doing to be afraid. The scene uses arterial spray to great dramatic effect.

Following this, the conspirators search madly for the recording of the Emperor announcing the surrender before its broadcast. They ransack the Emperor's palace, invading the rooms of all the women staying at the palace as well as high level servants. Watching them tear apart the carefully arranged furniture and decorations, I realised these guys must have been intensely unsympathetic to the average Japanese audience. If having the pro-surrender officials played by actors who typically played popular heroes didn't already make it clear which side the film's sympathy is on. This is perhaps what keeps the film from being truly great, it makes little attempt to show why the conspirators were doing what they were doing.

The exception is the Minister of War, played by Toshirio Mifune. He puts forward the argument that to surrender now, however inevitable defeat might seem, would be to dishonour the hundreds of thousands who died believing in Japan's victory. But he can't disobey his Emperor. He's not a madman, he doesn't attempt a coup against the sovereign whose sovereignty he's attempting to defend. But it's also not hard to see why he would commit seppuku after signing the surrender.

The film was directed by Kihachi Okamoto who might rely too much on close-ups but his editing keeps everything moving at a brisk pace so that the two and a half hour run time feels more like one hour.

Dean Stockwell

Best known for playing Al on Quantum Leap, Dean Stockwell, who passed away yesterday, had quite a long career before he became Scott Bakula's hologram buddy. He was already a child star in the 1940s with roles in Anchors Away and Gentleman's Agreement. He plugged along, always doing solid work. And he often experimented. I still fondly remember his brown corduroy coat and big black moustache from The Dunwich Horror, one of the more entertaining HP Lovecraft adaptations I've seen.

That was in 1970. It would be over a decade later David Lynch cast him in Dune, an appreciably strange performance followed up by something more magnificent in Blue Velvet.

After all this, his biggest role was as the most down-to-earth character you could expect to find on a Sci-Fi series. And year after year, he was a reliable presence on Quantum Leap, and certainly the reason I ever feel like going back and watching the series.

Potatoes Will Roll

I'll say this for "War of the Sontarans"--it's not the worst episode of the Chris Chibnall era. Also, a big part of what makes the episode bad is that the Sontarans aren't really threatening and it was really in the Moffat era that they became purely a joke. However, "War of the Sontarans" was dependant on some sense of real threat not only when it comes to the Sontarans but to violence and war in general. All efforts were sabotaged by ridiculous writing.

To be fair, the ability to stun Sontarans by wacking their helmet vents was established in the classic series. But they were much creepier back then, too, in The Time Warrior and The Invasion of Time especially. Now, especially after Strax, they're basically an ongoing Mr. Potato Head joke. It doesn't help that Dan's parents are able to take out two Sontaran warriors with frying pans. This unfunny, intended humour is followed by the unintentionally hilarious scene of the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) trying to convince people that the Sontarans are an unstoppable, unbeatable foe.

She's talking to this episode's Horrible White Man, General Logan (Gerald Kyd), who's only slightly less of a strawman than Chris Noth's thinly veiled Trump parody in Chibnall's first season. You can be sure that whatever he decides to do, the Doctor will berate him for being stupid or wrong, even if it's something the Doctor does herself in another scene. He loses most of his men in a battle against the Sontarans because she told him the Sontarans were invulnerable, and then he manages to destroy all their ships with gunpowder because she told him not to kill them. The Doctor also somehow failed to notice Logan's men rigging all the explosives.

Meanwhile, Dan (John Bishop) is back in the future, giving the same kind of toneless performance we had from Ryan and Graham. He's already boasting about his experience dealing with aliens in only his second episode. He hasn't even had time to develop chemistry with the Doctor so I can't even form an opinion yet on their relationship.

Yaz (Mandip Gil) is transported to a place apparently related to the season long story arc. There's dialogue about all of time and great danger and the need to repair things and the calavera sugar skull aliens show up. At least this episode didn't feel as muddled as the premiere. I like the little curl in Whittaker's hairstyle.

Doctor Who is available on the BBC's iPlayer in the UK.

Twitter Sonnet #1490

The empty room presumes to place a bed.
But never nothing holds the sheets aloft.
The morning watch removed the evening dead.
No braver men about had ever scoffed.
Gorilla painters paint the lizard blue.
The mountain suit was morning pink and grey.
We talked of skinny stripes and useless glue.
The bucket saved some ice to chill the day.
Electric plans were hid beneath the fur.
A wooden chair is common stuff at home.
A certain king was never really sure.
We piled pillars up constructing Rome.
The laser hat was useless, hot, and cheap.
The rental wine was never brewed to keep.

The Loosened Bolt

Maybe there needs to be a name for the genre wherein the protagonist thinks their TV show is real life. I watched another one of those last night, 2008's Bolt, a Disney animated film that drew many comparisons to The Truman Show. I'd say it's closer to Toy Story, though. It's an improvement, in any case, on the preceding three Disney films, but still nowhere close to even a lesser film from the Renaissance. It's a bit less ironic than Chicken Little or Meet the Robinsons, less pathetically trying to imitate Family Guy, and improvements to the cgi technology help enormously. It actually has some heart, though it pumps a bit too weakly to overcome the cholesterol of muddled writing.

Bolt (John Travolta) is a little white dog who thinks he's a superhero. Actually, unbeknownst to him, he's the star of a TV show on which viewers can see him rescue Penny (Miley Cyrus) every week.

The success of the show is purportedly based on the fact that Bolt believes everything is real. Camera crews are kept out of sight and Bolt is carried into his trailer in a dog carrier. How does a dog not notice a camera crew behind some cardboard foliage? Why doesn't he smell or hear them? How doesn't he realise all the story locations are on sound stages in close proximity?

Here we come to an existential question. What should I question about the reality presented and what shouldn't I? I feel like I'd be told I'm an obnoxious knit-picker. On the other hand, isn't the point of stories like The Truman Show to pay attention to the details, especially the details you're not supposed to notice? Sadly, Bolt lacks the clarity of The Truman Show when it comes to its intentions.

In the film's climax, Bolt is able to hear someone screaming for help because he's a dog and his hearing is sensitive enough to hear over a great distance and inside a burning building. So the film asks you to ignore something and then builds plot on that same thing. And I'm well aware a little kid could care less (no, young pedants, it's could care less not couldn't care less. It's not the literal meaning of the words, it's how they scan). But it kinds of sucks to grow up and find the movies or TV shows you like don't hold up because of lazy writing (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for example).

This also may be the ongoing curse of postmodernism in Disney that began with 101 Dalmations. Just as animators no longer felt the responsibility to finish their drawings, so you could enjoy their rough draft appeal, maybe the writers of a movie like Bolt figure we'll all enjoy the rough draft quality of a screenplay.

But it's not a rough draft, far from it. The original cut of the film was directed by Chris Sanders, co-director of Lilo and Stitch. After producers didn't like two screenings, Sanders was fired and Chris Williams and Byron Howard were brought in. This may explain why we have one scene in which Mittens (Susie Essman) extols the wonders of normal domestic bliss to Bolt followed by another scene in which Mittens condemns human families as invariably vicious frauds, worth no cat or dog's time. Things happen from scene to scene to keep things on target for artificial story requirements regardless of whether they flow naturally from previous scenes.

Bolt slowly discovering he's not a superhero is at the heart of the film, a heart, to be sure, transplanted from Buzz Lightyear. Toy Story had more consistent story logic, though, and that movie has a reputation for inconsistent logic.

All this makes the point of Bolt especially murky. There's a strange condemnation of show business--it's presented as something Bolt and Penny need to escape for an average life in middle America somewhere. Pinocchio also has an implicit condemnation of show business but in Bolt the problem isn't that filmmakers are encouraging a life of indulgence in cheap pleasures, but that they're asking Bolt to participate in pretending. Certainly that's a strange moral for any work of fiction to present. I can't believe anyone who made the film really believed it which is likely why it feels so half-assed.

But the movie's certainly easier on the eyes than Disney's previous cgi efforts. And at least it shows an awareness that it's necessary for a Disney film to have a heart.

Bolt is available on Disney+.

...

This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
Fantasia 2000
Dinosaur
The Emperor's New Groove
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Lilo and Stitch
Treasure Planet
Brother Bear
Home on the Range
Chicken Little
Meet the Robinsons

Death Amid the Temples and Lists

I'd been thinking about death since this morning because the big beautiful spider by my balcony finally died, her enormous web having quickly grown tattered. So it seemed appropriate coming to the end of "The Knight's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales this morning and Theseus' speech about death.

Lo the ook, that hath so long a norisshinge
From tyme that it first biginneth springe,
And hath so long a lyf, as we may see,
Yet at the laste wasted is the tree.

Considereth eek, how that the harde stoon
Under our feet, on which we trede and goon,
Yit wasteth it, as it lyth by the weye.
The brode river somtyme wexeth dreye.
The grete tounes see we wane and wende.
Than may ye see that al this thing hath ende.

Of man and womman seen we wel also,
That nedeth, in oon of thise termes two,
This is to seyn, in youthe or elles age,
He moot ben deed, the king as shal a page;
Som in his bed, som in the depe see,
Som in the large feeld, as men may se;
Ther helpeth noght, al goth that ilke weye.
Thanne may I seyn that al this thing moot deye.

This is part of grim, beautiful speech that caps off a story about two knights battling for the love a woman, Emelye, they've never spoken to. I'm sure I'm not the first one to point out this is a story in which almost no-one gets to make their own decisions. Only Theseus and the gods, really. Theseus' speech is about "the great mover", or God, and perhaps he thinks of himself as the "small mover", a Duke occupying a different part of the same hierarchy.

Palamon and Arcite are captured by Theseus and, trapped in Theseus' tower, fall in love with Emelye, seeing her in the garden below. And the two men who swore a bond of brotherhood with each other very quickly become bitter enemies over the right to wed Emelye. Every time either one tries to get what he wants, the effort ultimately proves in vain. Even getting out of prison seems to make them both miserable.

We don't hear from Emelye until much later and then it's to find out that she would rather be a virgin the rest of her life than know the company of man. Diana herself manifests to tell Emelye she can't have what she wants, either. Diana, Venus, Mars, and Saturn engage in indirect negotiation. Death is the grand finale of a life over which one has no control, a final, immutable twist of fate. Theseus says it's admirable, at least, for a man to die in his prime, though he says this of a man who died falling off a horse. I suppose one could say that, since he fell due to hellfire summoned by Saturn himself, it was a pretty remarkable demise. Cold comfort for a burned man.

But I suppose all that background negotiation was a fair mirror for how marriage often really works in many cultures, past and present. Political or financial realities play a big part. Princess Mako might be marrying a lawyer but most people would agree a lawyer is still a good catch, bank-wise. In that light, all the fanfare and drama Theseus deliberately builds around the contest between Palamon and Arcite--and which Chaucer describes in beautiful detail--is a really lovely thing to do. By such art Theseus enriches the necessities of life.

I trowe men wolde deme it necligence,
If I foryete to tellen the dispence
Of Theseus, that goth so bisily
To maken up the listes royally;
That swich a noble theatre as it was,
I dar wel seyn that in this world ther nas.

Immortal Teen Drama

As I make my way through Buffy the Vampire Slayer season five and the show becomes more and more about Spike, I keep finding myself thinking about this recent interview with James Marsters:

Yeah, apparently Michael Rosenbaum, Lex Luther from Smallville, has a podcast. Anyway, I love how he and Marsters seem to be tuned into two different realities on the interview. Rosenbaum clearly wants Marsters to divulge juicy details about Joss Whedon terrorising women and Marsters either doesn't see this or quite convincingly pretends not to. He's stuck on talking about Joss the Genius and laughing about what a hardass Joss could be. This is a follow up interview, too, in which Rosenbaum is trying to get clear on Marsters' earlier statements about Joss pushing him up against a wall, angry about the fan reaction to Spike. Rosenbaum keeps trying different ways to ask, "But was it real?" and Marsters keeps laughing and saying, "Yeah!" And you can see the smoke starting to come out of Rosenbaum's ears, probably because he knows exactly the situation Marsters is talking about but is trying to decide if he's supposed to be morally outraged about it now.

But I've been thinking about it because I've been trying to decide if Whedon's idea of the vampires as an allegory for teen problems really works. In the first couple seasons, yeah, I can see it in some moments, especially when Buffy was keeping her identity as a Slayer secret. All the dialogue she and her mother had about Buffy dealing with issues her mother couldn't help with did work a bit that way. A teenager watching who, like most teenagers, sees their individual problems to be about the size of the whole world would probably be quite ready to accept the Vampire Slayer drama as relatable. But I would say it operates most obviously in terms of Angel and Buffy's relationship, the relationship Whedon apparently only established reluctantly. It makes me wonder if he planned for Angel never to return from Hell in season three.

Frankly, if things had panned out in the way it seems Whedon originally wanted, according to Marsters, it would've been a deeply unsatisfying show, maybe even a slightly creepy one. So the world is divided between good people and soulless, irredeemable wanderers? That's pretty puritanical for someone who calls himself an atheist.

I suspect Whedon grew a lot as a writer over the course of the series, though, so maybe he abandoned the allegory idea as it made less and less sense. Allegories do, generally, have very limited utility.

One Step Too Far to the Street

When's a tough guy too tough for his own good? Dana Andrews finds out in 1950's Where the Sidewalk Ends, an Otto Preminger film noir that re-teams Andrews with Gene Tierney, his costar from Preminger's classic Laura. Where the Sidewalk Ends is grittier, filled with desperate men in dark, dirty streets and back rooms. The ending feels forced but can't dispel the gloom accrued by Ben Hecht's masterful screenplay, giving us a prototypical noir protagonist, caught in a tragic snare of circumstance and his own choices.

This one is definitely more of a showcase for Andrews than Laura. Like Night and the City from around the same time, Tierney has a small, barely consequential role. It's her husband Andrews accidentally slugs to death.

Andrews' character, Dixon, is a police detective and he was just being a little rough with the man. How was he to know he had a silver plate in his head? Unfortunately, Dixon has a track record of getting too rough with suspects so he knows this incident is likely to get him canned or worse. But it's not just his own skin at stake--Dixon seems to be the only one on the case who's pegged the real culprit of a murder. So Dixon has to cover up his own manslaughter.

It's not such a far fetched sequence of a events. I didn't really like Andrews in Laura or in other movies I've seen him in but he's pretty good here. Maybe Robert Ryan would've been better but there's something more vulnerable and panicked about Andrews. You watch those wide eyes of his, fervently glaring from under his hat brim, wondering if he's going to get caught or come apart every second. It's a great nightmare.

Where the Sidewalk Ends is available on The Criterion Channel.

Twitter Sonnet #1489

The hardest work was only counting licks.
The centre reached, the sugar passed to gut.
A tiny roll was parsed reward to tricks.
We gathered late to build the witch's hut.
The battered felt could say a thing or two.
The nervous gaming mouse was glowing bright.
We understood the printer's out of blue.
A fence's got the desert bolted tight.
Repeated bands were blue and slightly red.
A woven shirt repeals a scattered code.
We wonder early 'bout the weightless dead.
They tied balloons along the ribbon road.
The knocking fist was floating out the door.
A tightened skull condemns what thinking's for.

An Eternal Instant, a Quiet Cacophony

That picture in Gordon's office makes perfect sense and yet is also totally absurd. And that's the essence of David Lynch at his best, as he was with Twin Peaks season three. I'm now on my fourth viewing since it premiered in 2017 and am further confirmed in my impression of it as a masterpiece. At this point, I do think it's better than the original series, though I wonder if I'm biased by factors like how many times I watched the old series. A lot of the power of Lynch is in how he surprises the viewer with sounds and images and the more you rewatch his works, the less potency there is in that power. Yet the mysteries on Twin Peaks yield their own rewards for repeat viewings.

It's a sensory experience above all, though. And facts and clues have value insofar as they contribute to that sensory experience. I still come to the end of every episode with that delicious, transformed feeling I normally only get from watching an extraordinary, particularly good movie.

What Lynch crafts is something about the energy between people and the strangeness and improbability of human life. To take an example, the scene where the Buckhorn police are examining the body in Ruth Davenport's apartment. Detective Macklay (Brent Briscoe) walks into the bedroom, holding his hands in the air, which are covered with blue latex gloves. Talbot (Jane Adams) looks up and says, "Good, Dave. You're behaving yourself." It makes sense when you think about it--she's in charge of forensics and maybe in the past Macklay wasn't very careful about putting on gloves to avoid contaminating a crime scene. But without this context, we're forced to contemplate the strangeness of the moment of a man holding his blue hands in the air and a woman expressing approval with slow, careful words.

Even the little moments force you to pay attention, to figure out what's happening not from the standpoint of what you expect from a TV show but what you expect from life.

In this way, the show is a perfect antidote for narrow thinking. It requires a receptive viewer, of course. But if you're willing to sit quietly with it in a dark room, it can help you breathe like few other things in media can these days.

The Party is Pleasant

Women in their 20s playing teenagers gather at night while an insane serial killer is on the loose. You can guess what happens next in 1982's Slumber Party Massacre, a slasher film in the heyday of slasher films. This one bears the distinction of being written, directed, and produced by women and, perhaps for this reason, there's no coyness or nervous energy about its titillating elements. That is nice and the film is altogether easy to watch but ultimately it may be a little too comfortable. It never manages to generate a real sense of anxiety or any especially exciting sexual energy.

Originally conceived as a feminist parody of the slasher genre by screenwriter Rita Mae Brown, it was made into a more sincere horror film by director/producer Amy Holden Jones. It retains a post-modern, tongue-in-cheek quality signaled immediately in the first scene of the protagonist, Trish (Michelle Michaels), waking up at home. She's listening to a radio show in which a woman winning a contest asks how much money the prize is--and replies with an angry, "What?!" when she's informed that the prize is a free t-shirt.

Later, during the titular slumber party, the only scene of guys peeping at girls is constructed with deliberate artificiality. Moments after the two guys approach the open window, the girls immediately gather into easy view and start undressing. The window frame emphasises the self-awareness of the film as a film designed for men to enjoy. As usual for post-modernism, what may have been intended as profound or intelligent is really just redundant. Yep, we're watching a movie, all right.

The killer, with the obviously significant name of "Russ Thorn" (Michael Villella), gets an obviously phallic weapon, a power drill. He's a particularly weak villain--the actor is never very expressive but he's never inexpressive enough to be a creepy Michael Myers type.

Trish starts the film by throwing away some dolls, obviously a symbolic coming of age gesture to which the film is obviously responding with the hideous rite of passage of an encounter with demented masculinity. But the film's heart is in the right place, putting a clear dividing line between healthy sexual play--such as the gratuitous nudity in a slasher film--and the mental aberration of a man whose fetish involves genuine harm to women. It's a shame the film couldn't manage to be as exciting as it was evidently game for being.

The Slumber Party Massacre is available on Shudder.

Plaster of the Doctor

Halloween also brought the worst premiere episode of the Thirteenth Doctor era of Doctor Who. Which makes it the worst premiere of the relaunched series. The worst of all time? Hmm. The Twin Dilemma aired near the end of a season, despite introducing a new Doctor. I suppose the 1996 TV movie counts as a premiere. But at least that was interesting. "The Halloween Apocalypse" doesn't really feel like it's even trying, it's so bland. I wonder if Chris Chibnell has just completely lost heart. It wouldn't surprise me.

I was curious to see if any criticisms from Jay Exci's YouTube video would be reflected in the writing. The five hour YouTube analysis has over a million views and for a while came up first in a search for "Doctor Who" on YouTube. Even now it's only five results down. As studios and producers are growing more and more sensitive to social media, I'd be very surprised if several people at Doctor Who hadn't seen the video. But the only thing I saw in the new premiere that may have come out of Exci's analysis is that Yaz now starts creating a profile of Dan by observing the scene of his kidnapping. She's actually drawing on her established background as a policewoman.

That's something, I guess, but she's still pretty bland, especially for a relaunch companion. I watched "Partners in Crime" on Sunday, the Tenth Doctor's third season premiere that re-introduced Donna. That episode features a bit of Donna's home life with her mother and grandfather. In the middle of everything else, we hear the resentment Donna's mother has for her for not finding a steady job contrasted with her granddad's optimism. Both Davies and Moffat were interested in exploring what it is that makes someone want to be the Doctor's companion. None of the companions Chibnall's introduced have been explored this way. They all have the mild enthusiasm of a family member being prevailed upon to accompany the kids on a trip to the amusement park, not the madness of someone who craves dangerous, extraordinary adventure in a totally alien environment.

This episode gives us a new companion, Dan (John Bishop), whom we meet being a volunteer tour guide at a museum in Liverpool. His friend, an actual employee, expresses disappointment that he has taken it upon himself to speak glowingly about Liverpool to a bunch of tourists. Yeah, he's clearly on a downward spiral.

I can tell his enthusiasm is supposed to be endearing to the viewer but everything comes off as one of those generic stock videos sold to advertisers.

We learn Dan's out of work, too, which sits oddly next to the episode's attempted joke about trick or treating when an adult without a costume attempts to trick or treat at Dan's house. Dan, who's just come home from working at a soup kitchen, is disgusted by this guy at his door asking for food and using trick or treating as a pretext.

They just didn't care.

A cute dog alien shows up, tears down Dan's wall, kidnaps him, and keeps him in a cage. Later, the dog alien reveals to the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) that he's actually trying to save Dan. Why didn't he explain this to Dan? Why didn't he try? The dog explains it's because he doesn't like Dan but he's sworn to help him anyway.

They just didn't care.

This is the first of a six part episode--the whole six episode season is supposed to tell one story. But this episode, with so many completely unconnected bits--including an unexplained flashback to the 1820s, a shot of some Sontarans planning an invasion of Earth, and a woman encountering a Weeping Angel--feel suspiciously like they were separate episodes that were arbitrarily chopped up and reconstituted into one. This felt especially awkward when the woman with the Weeping Angel problem runs into the Doctor and Yaz and the Doctor brushes her off, claiming to be "too busy". As though the woman who runs up to the Doctor, knowing to call her "Doctor" without knowing why, couldn't possibly be part of the mystery the Doctor is currently investigating. Wouldn't it be sensible to take her aboard the TARDIS, run a scan or something? Or would two stories then bleed too much into each other? Too much of a bother?

They just didn't care.

Director Jamie Magnus Stone returns to bring us an overabundance of closeups. The villain, in an apparent attempt to play off the episode's Halloween setting, has a skull like face.

Normally the monster makeup in the 13th Doctor era has been one of the few good points but this guy looks like Frank Langella as Skeletor in Masters of the Universe.

They just didn't care.

Well, brave heart, Tegan, Russell T. Davies is the light at the end of this tunnel.

Twitter Sonnet #1488

The pumpkin nails denote a northern test.
Exchanging days the holiday is on.
We ate a bird to show we wanted rest.
We put the figures 'cross the candy lawn.
Amour amoral can't amount to beans.
Per building codes burritos lately burst.
Emphatic ends embrace the shapely means.
A sunny Venus reigns for best and worst.
The papers blank were written drawers to pulls.
To pick a slender sheet we rally crumbs.
I thought of other words to pique the bulls.
I want another group to rate the thumbs.
A reed was rat'ling 'bout the music pit.
A broken string adorns the beefy mitt.