Easter Sugar

Christmas is so popular in Japan so it's kind of surprising that people seem barely aware of Easter. I was in the mood to celebrate it this year so I hosted an Easter themed chess tournament and Easter Egg hunt in Second Life with my European friends.

I did find some Easter candy, though, at the department store, just one solitary bag of little chocolate eggs. It's probably just as well, I seem to have completely lost my sweet tooth. I think I may have overloaded myself my first year in Japan. Being an American whose sweets were so often made with high fructose corn syrup, it was kind of amazing to be in a country with so much real sugar. I was eating a lot of doughnuts for a while, now they just make me feel sick. Even if I try to eat just one old fashioned doughnut.

I do still seem to enjoy ice cream. A new shop opened up recently called Blue Seal, apparently a famous chain from Okinawa. I finally had a chance to stop in a couple weeks ago and I immediately ran into two of my former students there eating crepes. They watched me eat two scoops of ice cream--strawberry cheesecake and cocoanut. "Oishii (delicious)?" one of them asked. "Oh, yes," I said. It was some of the best ice cream I'd ever had.

Twitter Sonnet #1573

The living cable clasped the floating room.
And so the house began to build but slow.
The strange events assort the beams to boom.
A wooden voice affixed a word too low.
The eggs were always hid in easy view.
Deceptive bulbs illume the lamps about.
The chocolate dots arrive in bitter queue.
The hands of yellow peeps have traced the route.
Potato lunches stole the breakfast week.
A giant shape condemned the darkened street.
There's many parts of cars exceeding weak.
A helpless song observed a toneless beat.
A carton held a round and limbless team.
The empty egg could yet contain a dream.

Dekpa and Deborah Attract Admirers

Happy Easter, everyone. Your present is a new chapter of my webcomic, Dekpa and Deborah. I guess you could say the comic, like Christ, has risen from the dead this day. Enjoy.

Happy Birthday to the 17th century playwright John Ford ("'Tis Pity She's a Whore"), William Holden, Olivia Hussey, Roddy Piper, and Sean Bean.

And to-morrow, April 18, is the birthday of Miklos Rozsa, who composed this appropriate song:

It Came from a Location

A woman goes somewhere and then there are zombies, sort of. That's about as solid as the premise is for 1973's Messiah of Evil. Written and directed by husband and wife team Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, best known for their collaborations with George Lucas (they were screenwriters for American Graffiti, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Howard the Duck), Messiah of Evil has been called surreal, which in this case I think is a charitable way of saying it doesn't make any sense. But it has a lot of little moments that are effective if one forgets about the context, or lack thereof.

The film begins with an interesting shot of Arletty (Marianna Hill) walking down a corridor in a madhouse. In voiceover, she promises to tell us about the strange events that no-one believes her about. The ensuing flashback, essentially the whole film, leaves her point of view frequently, ruining the whole "survivor's account" quality. One of my favourite moments is when Arletty pulls into a gas station and sees the attendant firing a gun into pitch darkness. Then he walks back to the station and the two have a completely normal, casual conversation about filling her gas tank.

Arletty's going to a small town to visit her father (Royal Dano) but at his house instead finds just a few lazy young bohemians. She finds them lounging on a bed while none other than Elisha Cook Jr. is monologuing for them next to a TV.

He's telling them about the horrors of the zombie infestation but the whole scene is presented like they've hired the famous character actor to give a private performance.

The zombies start picking off the group one by one in ways that only make sense if the zombies are aware of being in a horror movie and know that their job is to be creepy. One of the bohemians (Joy Bang) goes to see a movie and all the zombies quietly file in and fill up the seats behind her.

It's creepy but what the motive is is certainly not clear.

We get a vague back story about how a strange man appeared a hundred years ago and infected the town in some way. The stranger comes from the sea in one scene, one of several things that indicate an H.P. Lovecraft influence.

The disconnect between the movie and internal logic could be taken as a postmodern commentary on horror movies, I guess. But like a lot of postmodernism, it seems suspiciously like the writers were just too lazy. The film does have a lot of interesting shots, though.

Messiah of Evil is available on Shudder.

The Sign of the Red Hair

I've had another English text book make reference to Sherlock Holmes at a junior high school here in Japan. Some kids do seem to be aware of him, mostly through the popular anime and manga Detective Conan. The character was named after Arthur Conan Doyle. This time, the text book specifically references "The Red-headed League". So I read it again to make it into a presentation for the class.

I love the slightly implausible strangeness of it. I don't think it's a story that could be translated to a modern setting. I think now someone setting up a bogus fund for red-headed men would draw too much attention, especially with a line of red-headed men lined down the block. But on the streets of Victorian London, I can picture it working.

It's fascinating seeing the description of the neighbourhood around Jabez Wilson's pawnshop. A vegetarian restaurant is mentioned. I suspect it would've been like the vegetarian menu options here in Japan which usually have chicken broth or bonito flakes.

I started reading the next story, "A Case of Identity", in my copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It starts with one of my favourite quotes from Holmes. It's part of a longer speech about how "fact is stranger than fiction", a sentiment I don't really agree with. But I love this comment from Holmes;

"If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable."

Twitter Sonnet #1572

Enshrined in carrot tubes, the golfers sleep.
With boredom, Holmes could seal a letter tight.
The camping kids were counting ghostly sheep.
Then something strange obscured the forest night.
The room could shake but not dislodge the song.
Emboldened pants would cut the flow of blood.
A sandy path would lead the river wrong.
But hardened salt could stand in rainy mud.
A Gremlin sat alone among the cars.
Electric sparks began the model storm.
A stamp sufficed to sign for absent Mars.
The nurse forgot to fax the patient's form.
A common fire burnt a shadow pan.
The field of metal wheat was made by man.

Moon Jones

Last night's Moon Knight had a good, old fashioned adventure serial vibe. Writers Beau DeMayo, Peter Cameron, and Sabir Pirzada took the show into a slightly different tone but director Mohamed Diab returned to give us quality action sequences again as he did in the first episode. Though again with strangely unfinished looking effects.

I've seen other critics compare this episode to Indiana Jones and I can certainly see it. Layla (May Calamawy) is kind of a more battle-ready version of Marian Ravenwood. Also like Raiders of the Lost Ark, we're jumping into the story between her and the male lead in the middle, rather than starting with their first meeting. Considering how much Raya and the Last Dragon seemed influenced by Indiana Jones, I wonder if Disney is doing this to subliminally seed promotion for Indiana Jones 5

The Marc/Steven (Oscar Isaac) relationship feels more straightforward, more conducive to a pulp story. In the previous episode, Steven mysteriously had aspects of Layla's personality, as though he may have been constructed from Marc's impressions of her. Now he simply seems to be an entirely different person with a complete and plot-useful expertise in ancient Egypt rather than an amateur fondness. The previous episode seemed to imply Layla had equivocal expertise to Steven but that no longer seems to be the case.

I really like the scene where Khonshu (F. Murray Abraham/Karim El Hakim) changes the night's sky though it seems like they could've found a way to calculate the stars' positions. Or maybe Khonshu could've simply conjured a picture of the night sky. But it was a cool effect.

Moon Knight is available on Disney+.

Gilbert Gottfried

Gilbert Gottfried passed away at the age of 67 yesterday, which seems pretty young, especially for a guy who's seemed like he's 90 for the past forty years. He's probably most famous for voicing Iago the parrot in Disney's Aladdin, but those of us who know his comedy, either through his stand-up or appearances on radio shows, it was always a remarkable irony that he ever got within a hundred miles of a Disney production. He had a genius for filth.

In our time of dispiriting political correctness, it is kind of heartening that Gilbert was grinning and harshly cackling right to the end. Something about the relentless monotone of revelling incredulity made his jokes work. The timing was great, too. His version of "The Aristocrats" works mainly for the points where he diverges from the filth for a moment. Because, of course, those are the surprising moments.

Occasionally he could even conjure a bit of atmosphere which I connect to his love of Universal monsters. Surely our world has a great, gaping void for his abscess, I mean absence.

Bases Late

This was the sunset yesterday as I left the junior high school. I'd stayed late to watch the baseball team practice. They stayed practicing long after I left. They really are like monks. When I walked onto the field, every single one of the fifty or so players stopped, took off his or her hat, and bowed. They did that every time a teacher walked onto the field.

I say "his or her" because there are three girls on the team. At other schools, usually there are one or two girls. They wear the same full uniform as the boys every time they practice. The only difference I see is that the girls don't shave their heads.

Their enthusiasm for the sport is amazing. But plenty of them like to joke and horse around. Two of the strongest hitters set up near my seat and showed off their skills. One of them tossed balls to the other who slammed each one into the net or occasionally well over the top of the high fence into the distant rice field. The strength in their hits was palpable. One of them pointed at the other, grinning, and said, "Ohtani-san."

Twitter Sonnet1571

A basic smile cinched the face to full.
And here expression meets a human hue.
With feathers fluffed a love's horizons pool.
A fervent letter starts and ends with Q.
A fire dream was dancing by her head.
A snarling glass was broken years before.
Departed kings remain as restless dead.
The sand was grey along the violent shore.
Another shade of red entangled stairs.
To rap the door a bell constructs a ring.
The quiet pond contained reflected bears.
From early dawn the birds refused to sing.
The air was blurred for lingered petal pink.
Kinetic games displayed the motion link.

Ursa Minor

Long ago, a fraught family relationship is healed after one party is turned into a bear. No, it's not Brother Bear, it's 2012's Brave. After trailers promised a mediaeval action adventure with a flaming redhead princess, I have to think a lot of people were disappointed by a film that was more of a goofy comedy about a mother and daughter relationship. Still, despite kind of a lame plot, it's not a bad film and the relationship between the princess and her mother is interesting.

In mediaeval Scotland, Princess Merida (Kelly Macdonald) is a headstrong lass who'd rather be riding her horse and shooting trees than entertaining suitors. It's too bad this movie wasn't made in an era when they could've shown Merida actually hunting. It would've made sense with all the meat her family is shown eating. As it is, we only get once instance where she shoots a fish when she and her mother (Emma Thompson) are hiding in the woods.

I've heard Merida's kind of an unpopular character partly because she turned her mother into a bear. It's not like she did it on purpose, though. What I don't understand is why Merida has to flee from her family or why she has to sneak into the castle later.

The first part of the film is the best which is focused more on the very sweet chemistry Merida has with her big boisterous father (Billy Connolly).

I really do wish this had been a film about Merida going into the woods and facing some terror no-one else could. That hair of hers really is eye catching and it's fun watching her do trick shots with her bow and arrows. But some of the early stuff about how she and her mother misunderstand each other is nice. Though her mother's shift towards being more understanding of her daughter halfway through the film comes kind of abruptly and without adequate buildup.

Brave is available on Disney+.

Less Machine Now than Man

Watching so many MCU shows lately, it occurred to me I hadn't seen Iron Man since it came out in 2008. So I watched it again on Friday and marvelled at what a remarkable movie it is. The film's Wikipedia entry has lots of quotes from cast and crew about the independent film vibe of the production. Which, as a start for a massive franchise, would make it reminiscent of Star Wars. The '70s had a lot of strange, interesting films until one strange, interesting film, Star Wars, made a blueprint. And that's what Iron Man did. Having this in mind, one looks at those first films and wonders why they couldn't just do that again. Do we really need to hear so many stories about directors leaving MCU and Star Wars productions over creative differences? Didn't they learn anything?

Anyway, Favreau had to push to get Robert Downey Jr. cast in the role and everyone was terrified of the fact that actors improvised their dialogue on set during principal photography! That is remarkable. Especially given how golden the chemistry is between Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Two performers who'd already had whole careers behind them, suddenly they created a new starting point for themselves. Just by goofing off in front of a camera for a few months.

A lot of superheroes movies fail because they have enough material to be a good film but make the mistake of trying to be a great film. Iron Man became a great film by just trying to be a good film. There's no massive, overwrought fight scene, just a couple guys duking it out in metal suits in the end. Tony and Pepper don't roll around on the beach. Even the wonderfully underplayed heart-surgery scene zips by while still feeling critical. A lot of it works because Downey Jr. is extraordinarily believable as simultaneously a reclusive engineering genius and a notorious playboy.

Another lesson this movie taught that many subsequent superhero movies forgot is that it puts the protagonist's motives onscreen and believable portrays the steps he takes to his goal. There's real sanctification in watching Tony build his armour through his messy trial and error process. The way he talks to his robots emphasises that he's not he extrovert he seems so we get some extra filling out of this character along the way.

It's such a tightly made film. I want to say little film. And it's a compliment. It's as perfect as freshly cut norimaki.

Iron Man is available on Disney+.

Fruits of Various Labour

This is a photo from a curry restaurant I go to most Saturdays. Someone had brought fresh strawberries and a young woman, another regular, arranged them into a heart. There were pink, red, and white ones but a tiny elementary school girl carefully picked out and ate all the pink ones. They were damned good strawberries.

In Japanese communities, some restaurants are known places for kids and tutors to congregate so I teach some English, get a free dinner, and feel like I get to know the community a little better.

On a very different topic, to-day I read "Pump Excursion", a story in the latest Sirenia Digest by Caitlin R. Kiernan. It's not a new story, it was in a collection of hers called Frog Toes and Tentacles that I've always wanted to read, but it's a rare and expensive volume. So I was glad to be able to finally read one story from it in Sirenia Digest.

On the one hand, it's a simple story about a woman having sex with a prostitute. But the core of the thing is the strange biology of the prostitute and the weird, subterranean location. References to places and cultures not of our world occur without much explanation and the prostitutes gills and flaps are only mentioned as they become important to the first person narrator--organically, in other words. When blood is described engorging a body part, I was compelled to ponder the very concept of flesh and how it connects to the brain. And then the dirty talk between prostitute and customer, dealing with power dynamics of totally non-existent cultures, invites sociological contemplation as well as psychosexual. It's a really nice story and it reminded me of the days when Caitlin's online community commonly discussed such things, mixed in with generous doses of Farscape and Lovecraft commentary. Good times.

Twitter Sonnet #1570

The mellow moon divests the marsh of sweets.
The baker piles flour back in time.
To make a cake the mistress buries beets.
An ice addition mixed a drink of lime.
The extra spider legs could carry cars.
We timed the trip to make a bonus train.
The babysitter combed the Easter bars.
The thought of trees disrupts the ocean brain.
The back became a front for business lost.
A trade occurred when doors were locked at night.
With gentle damage, rain defrayed the cost.
A gathered crowd observed a tattered kite.
A sun was swinging mad for weighty rocks.
Ideas of days condemned the life of clocks.

The Vamps Around These Parts

In the hot, dusty landscape of New Mexico, James Woods hunts vampires in John Carpenter's 1998 film, Vampires. There are plenty of good ideas behind the film, particularly combining a vampire film with a western, but the whole production is too cheap and too many points in the film weren't adequately thought through. When one recalls that From Dusk till Dawn was released two years before Vampires, Vampires seems even more of an embarrassment.

The film opens with a team of experienced vampire hunters, led by a man named Jack Crow (Woods), raiding a vampire nest in New Mexico.

And right away we're introduced to two problems that will persist throughout the film--James Woods is terribly miscast and every interior looks conspicuously like a sound stage. I mean, every god damned room is practically a high school gym. Just look at this room at a supposedly dive hotel:

I do want that couch and loveseat.

James Woods, the arch-nebbish, is so wrong for the role of the hard-bitten tough guy. Apparently he was last in a long list of people Carpenter tried to cast first--according to Wikipedia, "Clint Eastwood, Kurt Russell, Bill Paxton, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and R. Lee Ermey." Any one of those would have made more sense and R. Lee Ermey, the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, would've been an inspired choice. Can you just imagine? "Are you a vampire, maggot? Let me see your vampire face. You don't scare me, you worthless piece of scum!" That would sure make sense of all the movie's random lines about dicks.

Apparently one of Carpenter's influences for the film was The Wild Bunch and there is something William Holden-ish about James Woods. But the character of Jack Crow is a calloused brute in the way Holden just wasn't in The Wild Bunch.

The team has a whole system set up for yanking vampires into the sunlight with a winch attached to a car. They drive big, specially modified armoured cars, too. I thought, "These guys know their shit so they must hole up in some kind of fortress at night." But, no, the night after the raid they party in a motel with a bunch of strangers, complete with liquor and prostitutes.

And, yeah, that's a cheap motel room and not the living room from Family Ties.

Sheryl Lee plays one of the prostitutes named Katrina and she's the whole reason I watched this movie. Sadly, she's kind of wasted on it. I actually kind of like how Carpenter doesn't flesh out all his supporting characters. Jack Crow is the only one we get some backstory on. And that's realistic--we don't get backstories on most of the people we meet in life, we have to take our measure of them from what we see. It would've been nice if she'd had more lines, though. After a master vampire ambushes the crew, she gets bit between the thighs and gains a mental connexion with him, like Mina and Dracula. So Jack and Tony (Daniel Baldwin) unceremoniously drag her along.

They treat her like shit for no real good reason. Maybe that's to establish that these guys have been turned into sons of bitches by their vocations, an impression that would have been helped a lot with R. Lee Ermey in the Jack Crow role. But some of it just feels odd, like when Tony decides to tie Katrina naked to a bed.

There's a kind of half-hearted romantic subplot between the two but the best part about it is that Sheryl Lee seems to be confounded by the whole thing. I love the look on her face when Tony kisses her in the climax.

She seems just to be thinking, "What the fuck is going on?" Like I said, she doesn't get many lines but Lee shows how excellently she can deliver with just facial expressions and screams.

It really is a crime she didn't get more roles after Twin Peaks.

What to Do About Destiny

A solid new Moon Knight last night. This second episode wasn't quite as extravagant as the first but I felt like I was settling into a decent serialised adventure. It felt a bit like classic Doctor Who.

My favourite characters so far are Khonshu and Arthur Harrow. Arthur's kind of like Thanos, I guess, in that he's operating from a rationale based on helping the world with very tough love. It is nice when villains actually have an intelligible motive. Ethan Hawke is doing a good job in the role, too. It is kind of a drag they're using Bob Dylan's "Every Grain of Sand" ironically, though. It's not like Dylan ever advocated killing babies.

Arthur's argument is basically based on a belief in predestination, like a Calvinist or other hardcore Protestant, i.e. a Puritan. Except he feels he has a direct line with a deity in the know. Steven's (Oscar Isaac) counterargument is basically that you shouldn't kill babies or other innocent people but he doesn't say whether this because he doesn't believe Arthur can see the future or if it's because that doesn't matter or if, like Yoda, he thinks, "Always in motion is the future." Which is fine, Steven is operating on instinct, not philosophy. I would expect Marc or Khonshu to have more of a counterargument, though, and maybe they will at some point.

I don't mind Steven but I'm kind of glad Marc takes over at the end of the episode. I hope we get a chance to know him better next week. The same goes for Layla, who's pretty and May Calamawy gives a decent performance, but she still needs some fleshing out. I would like to see some of her adventures with Marc.

But my favourite thing so far is Khonshu. I love that big bird skull with F. Murray Abraham's voice.

He's a nice blend of comedy and horror.

Moon Knight is available on Disney+.

The Last Blossoms

I took this picture at Shin-Osaka Station this morning. I was in Osaka for a meeting, in a part of northern Osaka called Ibaraki, one station north of Shin-Osaka by Rapid Express.

Here's a street in Ibaraki from an elevated platform.

The meeting involved a whole room full of foreign English teachers like myself. It was strange being in a room with so many native English speakers. The majority of the teachers seem to be either Australian or Filipino but there were a few Brits and Yanks. There were also a few whose first language isn't English. Japan is even more desperate for English teachers now due to Covid.

The cherry blossoms are famously short lived. I noticed some trees were already starting to turn green when I left.

Twitter Sonnet #1569

The easy eyes were rolling tens or twelves.
We counted more than cash to crack the scales.
The heavy tree was thick with Keebler Elves.
The violent sea was choked with screaming whales.
With heavy hair the climber gripped the snow.
From mountain heights connexions froze the frame.
Discussions turned around the things we know.
The wind and rain revealed a second name.
Dessert attacked before the dinner rose.
A field of cake was easy not for sweets.
A candy button pressed the guarded rows.
Assume the kitchen salts the larder meats.
Across the city, green consumes the pink.
The flames await beyond the falling brink.

A Disconnected Web of Shadows

A beautiful young American tourist witnesses a murder in Rome. Perhaps. It's hard to say what's really happening in Mario Bava's preposterous 1963 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much ( La ragazza che sapeva troppo), aka The Evil Eye. But it sure is beautiful.

Italian actress Leticia Roman plays the tourist, Nora, and American actor John Saxon plays her Italian love interest, Marcello. Like most Italian films from the period, a lot of the stars aren't speaking the same language and everyone's dubbed.

One night, Nora's mugged and, lying dazed on the ground, she witnesses a woman being stabbed. Everyone says it's her imagination because she has a habit of reading pulp murder novels. Later in the film, a neurosurgeon she meets at dinner explains that she must have had a vision of a murder that had occurred ten years earlier. He says it like it's the most natural thing in the world. And that's one of the more sensible scenes in the film.

It's a serial killer targeting victims who line up alphabetically--first a victim whose name began with A, then one whose name began with B, then one whose name began with C. Now it's Nora's turn because her last name is Davis (Drowson in the cut called Evil Eye). When the killer's revealed, it makes absolutely no sense of the clues that had led up to the reveal, particularly a fantastically creepy scene where Nora wanders into an apartment of white walls and bare, swinging light bulbs.

Bava brings the visuals to be sure. There are so many gorgeous shots of Roman.

And a few nice ideas, like when Nora decides to make a spider-web of yarn to frustrate any intruders.

If only the writing matched the visuals. Well, I guess it all kind of works in a sort of dream logic way.

The Girl Who Knew Too Much/Evil Eye is available on Shudder.

Time and Gods on Ancient Roads

Two itinerants embark on a pilgrimage across time and space in Luis Bunuel's 1969 film The Milky Way (La Voie lactée). Bunuel uses his talent for surrealism to show up hypocrisies and absurdities in Christian doctrine and interpretation as his two heroes stumble across scenes of importance to Christianity throughout the centuries. It's funny but Bunuel's dry humour also has some of the impressively awful mystery of his subject matter.

The itinerants, Pierre (Paul Frankeur) and Jean (Laurent Terzieff), first encounter Alain Cuny playing a sinister man in a black hood and cape.

Quoting from scripture, the stranger gives Pierre money only because Pierre already has some money, and he makes a prophecy apparently based on Hosea--the two wanderers will have children with a prostitute. The man walks away and a dwarf inexplicably appears at his side.

Bunuel's surrealism complements the strangeness of placing religious ideas in realistic scenarios. Christ (Bernard Verley) remarking that he comes as a sword in a conversational tone highlights how bizarre the statement is. Arguments between a priest and another man in a tavern about transubstantiation show an increasingly untethered rationalisation of ritual. And yet, in episode after episode, the realistic contexts also serve to show how these abstract concepts are deeply connected to human behaviour and history.

My favourite scene is almost pure surrealism, though. Another pair of travellers stay at an inn after one of them has a vision of the Virgin Mary. When the innkeeper takes them to their rooms, he urges them not to open their doors if they hear a knock, not even for the innkeeper himself. They shrug and lock their doors. While one man is undressing, a beautiful woman randomly appears in one of his twin beds and remarks that she hopes she isn't disturbing him. Meanwhile, the priest and the innkeeper knock on the door so that the priest can explain more about the Virgin Mary. True to his promise, the man won't let them enter the room, but the priest randomly teleport in during his improvised sermon anyway.

The whole scene tantalisingly hovers on the edge of meaning. It's magnificent.

Perhaps Bunuel's point is to show how insensibly people keep two ideas in their minds at once. The priest lectures on the purity of the holy Virgin while a man and woman who are total strangers to each other are in bed. Albeit twin beds.

The Milky Way is available on The Criterion Channel.