The Communist Wants in Your Bed

So you tear down religion and the old social order. Is it only the greedy fat cat who suffers? There's also the more casually sacred, like the beautiful young woman in 1967's Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (Ljubavni slučaj ili tragedija službenice P.T.T.). Made in Yugoslavia when the country was controlled by a communist regime that took power after World War II, this anti-communist film really isn't much different from pro-communist propaganda. Such films also often exploit stories of young and innocent people being brutalised by the controlling order. But taken purely as a work of art, it's a pleasure to admire scenes of actress Eva Ras happily lounging in her apartment with her boyfriend and black cat.

She plays Izabela, a switchboard operator who falls in love with a party member named Ahmed (Slobadan Aligrudić). Scenes of the two happy in bed or around her apartment are intercut with real experts speaking to the camera, first a sexologist and then a criminologist. Shots of Izabela's naked body being prepped for an autopsy are also shown early on, so we know for most of the film that she'll eventually be murdered.

The film's political message is not subtly introduced. Shots of mobs toppling ancient churches and raising flags for the new regime are also inserted into the narrative abruptly. So while you're worrying about this poor young woman, think about the angry mob.

The point becomes one about the lack of the public morals or institutions that would have provided some safeguards to the violence Izabela eventually suffers from. It's a successful emotional argument but not a logical one when one considers that murders like this have occurred under all kinds of regimes and governments.

Eva Ras is physically beautiful but also gives a very sweet, unselfconscious performance. She's the real triumph here.

Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator is available on The Criterion Channel.

Don't Check Your Messages

What is the significance of the demon ghost in your life? 2003's One Missed Call (着信アリ) made an effort to set itself apart from the flourishing genre of Japanese horror films about ghosts in machines by making a psychological connexion between its heroine and the threat menacing her. Critics saw it as just another run of the mill "J-Horror" show but I kind of liked it.

The concept in this one is that people get voice mails mails from themselves in future, moments before their deaths. You hear two or three words in the message and then a scream. It works nicely because, you might think, okay, I'll just make a point of not saying that sentence. But the victim always says it without thinking, and it's always plausible. It creates a wonderfully dreadful sense of inescapable fate.

The last one is especially good. The protagonist, Yumi (Ko Shibasaki), just hears herself saying, "Doshite?"--"Why?" Okay, now she just has to remember to never ask why. She's established as having a history of being abused and this matches well with an abusive relationship of the kind where an abuser might be twice as enraged by his or her victim asking that very question--"Why?"

Yumi's personal experiences seem to help her get some insight into what's happening. But then they also mislead her. She's a psychology student at university and this has given her preconceptions of what an abusive relationship looks like. Just when it seems like everything's wrapped up with a nice little bow, we're reminded of a whole bunch of clues the characters have forgotten about in arriving at a tidy diagnosis.

Director Takashi Miike does a lot of nice things with pacing and tone. I love how he favours letting the audience imagine things over showing a special effect or bit of gore. He uses reaction shots a lot, lingering on an actor's shocked face rather than the shocking thing they're seeing. In one scene, we're even given a reaction shot of a reaction. When Yumi sees one victim dragged into an elevator shaft, she falls down, and we see the back of her head. At that moment, a few guys get off the elevator and stop talking when they see her. We see their faces, not hers. I suppose it could've been a tactic to get around a weak performance but I didn't think Shibasaski was that bad.

One Missed Call is available on Shudder.

Twitter Sonnet #1581

The title waits on paper warped in rain.
The spiky turtle taunts the napless troll.
The tiny text can aging stereos explain.
You must deposit disks beneath the bowl.
The wasted weave was signed in error ink.
Beneath the hole, a waiting wight was kept.
The forest hides a dead but vital link.
In dappled light the knight of trees has slept.
Apparent Irish poems embrace the young.
Confusing phones await the hidden starved.
A can of air replaced a piping lung.
In red and white the clinic's halls were carved.
Familiar birds would carry years to space.
Behind a dream there watched a bitter face.

No Room Under the Big Top

Is it better for art to please audiences or challenge them? Some few of us are pleased to be challenged but usually artists find they must lean more in one direction or another, that satiety and intelligent discourse are often at odds. I don't think there's any shame in either one, though a diet consisting entirely of one or the other is likely to make one psychically malnourished. And then there's the peculiar tragedy of a work of art that thinks it's doing one thing when it's really doing another. Such a movie is 2017's The Greatest Showman.

A lot of people would argue The Greatest Showman knows exactly what it's doing, that it's exploiting the life of P.T. Barnum in much the way P.T. Barnum himself might have. And in some sense, that's true. The best part of the film is the first fifteen minutes or so which takes off at a breakneck pace, efficiently presenting a story of a poor kid with a big dream growing to be an extraordinary man.

There's a lovely scene on a rooftop where Barnum (Hugh Jackman) rapidly improvises a birthday gift for his little girl, a simple lantern he cobbles together which he tells his family is a device designed to make wishes come true. It reminded me of the scene in Fanny and Alexander wherein another great showman, played by Allan Edwall, improvises a story for his little girl about a chair, telling her how it's a rare and fantastic treasure. When he pretends that he's going to destroy it, she shrieks for him to stop, a reaction that clearly more than pleases him but confirms a love he has for her and her imagination. The emphasis on that scene is on the little girl whereas the Greatest Showman scene is on the showman. But it was the girl I was thinking of anyway.

The movie was recommended to me by one of my favourite students at the school I work at. And knowing her as I do, I can see how the enthusiasm of the musical numbers appealed to her, how the costumes and the story of a good man dazzling the world appealed to her. And just like Fanny in Fanny and Alexander, I value her for that imagination. But just like a lot of other critics, I'm cursed with too much knowledge not only of P.T. Barnum but of human nature in general to enjoy the film that follows those exuberant early scenes.

So the film brushes past questions of animal cruelty, of any mercenary motives in Barnum's heart, of any complicating personality qualities in his team of misfit performers. This leads to an obnoxious musical number, "This is Me", following a scene where Barnum quietly shuts out his circus performers from a swanky reception at an opera house. Arguably, what Barnum does in this scene is what the filmmakers do by pruning out any uncomfortable aspects of Barnum's life and career. And in addition to this, the inclusion of one slightly realistic piece of injustice begs the question of why this one was worthy to be included and the others weren't.

I wonder what it would be like to see the movie innocently. I still don't think I could embrace the oddly combative tone of "This is Me" ("We are warriors"? You want to be warriors?). And the film ultimately seems less interested in celebrating spectacle (how could it when it has so much cgi?) as it is about enjoying success, a concept I find entertaining but less interesting. And not quite what the film purports to say.

The Greatest Showman is available on Disney+.

The Menace in the Lake

This morning I read a recent Sirenia Digest, #196, which contains the beginning of Caitlin R. Kiernan's unfinished novel, The Merewife. It's a nice, eerie story told from the perspective of Grendel's mother, the monster from Beowulf.

In her prolegomenon, Caitlin talks about the influence of John Gardner's Grendel, one of the many works of fiction from the '60s and '70s that takes the perspective of a villain from a classic work of fiction. Caitlin started The Merewife in the mid-90s, before recontextualised villain stories became the institution they are to-day with big budget movies running the gamut from the daring and successful Joker or Frozen to the safely declawed likes of Maleficent and Cruella.

The Merewife is a nice blend of vivid visceral detail and an exploration of the psychology of a creature whose mind blurs distinctions between human and animal. There are also fascinating references to Norse gods and how myths organically arise over time. It would be nice to read the complete novel but it actually works quite well as a piece of short fiction on its own.

A Night for a Strange Glow

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone. Last night I watched a very short film, 1933's A Night on Bald Mountain, an animated film not to be confused with the later, more famous, Disney version. This one took 18 months to produce just over eight minutes of animation. It's not ink or paint but a pinscreen, painstakingly manipulated by Claire Parker and Alexandre Alexeieff. The unique sense of motion created adds to the sense of the dead returning to life, or of things otherwise not meant to walk the Earth stealing into our reality.

I particularly like the horse who dies and then returns to life. The initial, repeated shot of it running in silhouette has the quality of a memory, as though we're witnessing a memory of life etched in the corpse's hide. But the gorilla who changes into a bizarre bird is just as impressively eerie.

Twitter Sonnet #1580

Within the hearts of ducks our lives are lived.
As strangers gather high atop the core.
Within the wind of ducts the suctions give.
In ev'ry pig there dwells a noble boar.
The pumpkin sleeps, awaiting beams of death.
As leaves were speaking French the branches crossed.
The moon bestowed upon the tree its breath.
The forest's night is luminous with moss.
An empty box was left for cooking rice.
There's nothing stuck to ceilings hewn of legs.
If dancers rally once they're walking twice.
The basket broke for all the lively eggs.
The final number drops the cloud of bricks.
A clock dissolves in drops of liquid ticks.

The Length of an Escape Tunnel

The logic of war tends to break down on the personal level. 1937's La Grande Illusion uses a German prisoner of war camp to illustrate this. It doesn't find it necessary to make some direct, impassioned argument about how all these people have their humanity in common, it seems to just let events play out along the natural lines of human sympathy. So it's quite subtle and lovely.

A lot of credit has to go to Jean Gabin. Although it's really an ensemble film, Gabin plays the closest thing the film has to a central lead, a French lieutenant called Marechal. His charisma makes him a focal point even when he isn't framed that way in a scene.

He has a sense of honour and decency but he's not a hero or a paragon. The film resists making any of its characters too pure. One of the central relationships of the film is between the prison commandant, Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), and a captured French aristocrat, Boeldieu (Pierre Fresney). Rauffenstein, also an aristocrat, feels an immediate kinship with his French counterpart. In his courteous treatment of the prisoners and of Boeldieu in particular he expresses a belief that war is antithetical to the polite society of the ancient European ruling class. The camaraderie between some of the German prison guards and the prisoners shows a discord between the war and the lower classes as well. The motivation for war is almost totally invisible. One prisoner remarks on how he hates how the German newspapers exaggerate events in the war to which Marechal points out the French papers do the same.

The movie's set in World War I, a particularly useful war for this story as the motivations behind it are infamously vague and complicated contrasted with the real, visceral suffering endured by millions of people.

Marechal eventually plans an escape with a Jewish inmate called Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), a character whom director Jean Renoir evidently included to argue against the rising antisemitism in Europe at the time. One wonders if Renoir could have made such a film about World War II in which war crimes made the purpose of military engagement much clearer. Though, of course, in Renoir's masterpiece, The Rules of the Game, he eloquently explored the differences in how that war came about.

Le Grande Illusion is available on The Criterion Channel.

Better Call Time

Sometimes Better Call Saul is a bit insubstantial. I seriously thought about skipping past the Gus stuff in last night's new episode. I saw his picture in the thumbnail on Netflix and thought, "Gee, I sure hope we get to watch Gus stand around with a blank expression again." Actually this time we got to watch him scrub bathroom grout with a toothbrush.

Like Bob Odenkirk, Giancarlo Esposito is visibly much older than the character he's playing now. And he's put on some pounds, visually working against that fastidiousness we're supposed to be seeing. Which doesn't help his scenes feel like they have any more of a point. I think there's supposed to be tension around the possibility of Lalo showing up but we already know Gus survives. So it's not there.

I may sound like a hypocrite after I've gushed so many times about Twin Peaks and I suspect the makers of Better Call Saul are quite consciously influenced by Twin Peaks. But every episode of Twin Peaks season three felt like a feast while episodes like this of Better Call Saul feel like thin soup. It reminds me of a bowl of ramen I ordered back in San Diego once that was mostly just hot water. I tell that story to people here in Japan to illustrate how much better the ramen is here. Even that infamous scene where a guy sweeps the floor for a minute at the roadhouse on Twin Peaks felt more substantial than watching Better Call Saul once again show us that big underground structure to remind us that Gus has a big underground structure.

I'm afraid there was only one moment I really liked last night, the scene where Kim wakes up at 3:17am and sits smoking on the couch. And we see the bedroom light click on and we see little signs of her frustration that Jimmy's woken up. That was nice and felt like an authentic relationship. But, come on, this is the last season, let's use time a little more economically.

The Fourteenth Time (Give or Take)

Here he is, the hope for the future, the Fourteenth Doctor himself, Ncuti Gatwa. He will be the Doctor for showrunner Russell T Davies' return to Doctor Who next year after making his first appearance in the regeneration special later this year. The official announcement came yesterday. I hadn't seen anything he was in so I watched the first episode of Sex Education, his best known role, a Netflix teen comedy series.

I found the show itself a little tedious. Its humour is a blend of 70% Sixteen Candles and 30% Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But more than either of those, it's one of those works of fiction that assumes anything sexual is inherently fascinating and/or funny. But Gatwa is really good in it. I see from Wikipedia he was lauded for not simply playing the stereotypical "gay best friend" and yet that's exactly what he seems to be playing in the first episode, being best friend of lead Asa Butterfield, sassily giving Butterfield the straight dope about his sexual hangups. It's exactly how that stock character functions. But Gatwa's performance shows creativity, sensitivity, and a good instinct for comedic timing. He comes off much better in Sex Education than Jodie Whittaker did in Broadchurch, and I thought she was fine in that.

He seems physically very small. I wonder if he's the smallest person to play the Doctor. Troughton and McCoy were both pretty short but Gatwa seems short and slender. It's cute. I wonder if they'll be going for the sort of Chaplin-esque vibe of Two or Seven. He may need a Harry Sullivan or Ian Chesterton to do the fistfights for him. In any case, he's another reason us Doctor Who fans are already mentally living in 2023.

Twitter Sonnet #1579

A splintered trap contracts the crimson cape.
Another nod was notched beside the tube.
Erased beginnings stunt the aging tape.
A bulbous sphere could break the tiny cube.
The mountain's choc'late flowed as pure as God.
Confessions bounced behind the broken bank.
The even hooves resent the horse's odd.
The breathless shells would swim in any tank.
A television blur denies a spot.
The colour code denotes a violent box.
A marching three deny a second thought.
Predictions slump and eat the lazy locks.
Another face ascends the person's skull.
Another box becomes the vessel's hull.

Another Fateful Climb

The Criterion Channel is doing a spotlight on Ida Lupino this month so last night I watched 1941's High Sierra, which I don't think I'd seen in 19 years or so. Lupino actually gets top billing which I think is more of a reflection of Bogart not being an A-lister yet than her own clout in Hollywood. Still, it's pretty impressive for a 23 year old actress from England. But she truly was showing herself to be a big talent.

Like a lot of films noir, there are two women, the Good Girl and the Bad Girl, Lupino playing Marie, the latter. But the Good Girl, Velma (Joan Leslie), starts to show a few shades of corruption while Marie is by no means as cutthroat as Kathie Moffat or Phyllis Dietrichson.

I wonder if the name of Humphrey Bogart's character, Roy Earle, is supposed to sound like "Royal". I suppose you could look at the movie as a Royalist allegory. Maybe Roy is Bonnie Prince Charlie. He is in command of the robbers and, in addition to that, he becomes a kind of king to Velma and her family. He's moved by pity before he starts to become attracted to Velma and even after she's rejected his marriage proposal he won't accept repayment for the surgery he'd paid for to fix her club foot. It's notable that Roy doesn't really make any big mistakes or unwise decisions throughout the movie, he just has colossally bad luck.

I think everything might have worked out if he hadn't lost control of his car after he robs the drugstore late in the film. The filmmakers could've done a better job making that more plausible. He just does a sharp turn into some shrubbery, thereby attracting everyone's attention. But the absurdity may have been part of the point, a subtle way of showing up the Hays Code.

It's hard to see how anyone could leave the theatre on the cops' side, though. Especially with the strikingly cowardly shot taken at Roy at the end.

Top Tier Multitasking

A big grin appeared on my face about a third of the way through 2022's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It stayed there for most of the movie. The film has its problems, I guess, but it brings such a hearty bounty of fucked up shit that I barely noticed.

Spoilers ahead

Really, the only problem I had, and it really didn't bother me that much, is that the film was very clearly recut from another, probably superior cut. It's obvious in some awkward dialogue scenes with two in particular standing out--when Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) flies up to talk to Wanda (Elizabeth Olson) above Kamar-Taj, the sorcerer stronghold, and when Strange speaks to the Illuminati. In both cases, the scene cuts between close-ups of actors which don't have quite an organic flow. In the first scene, Strange has an inexplicably emotional reaction to something Wanda says and his expression changes too fast and drastically between cuts. In the later scene, a moment that starts and ends with Strange delivering dialogue with his back turned seems like it was originally meant to have his back turned the whole time but there are odd inserts of him facing forward.

Among other things, the scene was clearly edited to add in Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart). And that's one bit of reshoots I'm definitely not complaining about.

It was during the Illuminati sequence that I went from having a good time at the movies to having a great time at the movies. Leading up to film's release, it seems like it was the cameos everyone was talking about. Who were these big MCU hitters? People from other franchises, from future franchises, from alternate universes? Yes, yes, and yes. And Wanda fucking slaughters them all.

Not only that, she hoists them by their own petards. The moment where she cuts Captain Carter (Hayley Atwell) in half with her own shield filled me with delight, particularly as it came after Carter'd delivered one of those overused, smart ass superhero lines, "I can do this all day!" Ha ha, no you can't.

I loved Wanda in this. After she's done making mincemeat of the Illuminati, she becomes the inexorable approaching darkness as Strange, America (Xochitl Gomez), and Christine (Rachel McAdams) desperately flee down corridor after corridor. And after what she'd just done, you know she's a real threat.

I'm so glad she's a villain in this, that the filmmakers didn't bow to the delusional view that she was a heroine in WandaVision. And what a villain she is. With credible motivation, too. Wong (Benedict Wong) tells her she can't control everything, which is a bit on the nose (Michael Waldron's dialogue isn't great) but, yeah, I can buy that motivation. After all the trauma she's been through, all the people she's lost, I can believe how she's rationalised reordering multiple realities to her own ends.

I love how the idea of dreams being glimpses of the multiverse is played with. I loved the scene where Wanda starts to infiltrate the reality of her alternate self and the innocent, alternate Wanda starts hallucinating. That was a scene right out of Evil Dead 2 and Sam Raimi in horror mode was definitely present.

Usually in the MCU, magic is portrayed as just another kind of technology. Raimi makes magic feel like magic, an artform to manipulate reality along the lines of human thought and feeling. There's a battle involving musical notes that felt more like two wizards fighting than anything I'd seen in the MCU before.

Wanda is glorious for how fucked up she is in this movie and Raimi's smart enough to know that Strange doesn't just need to beat her to make the movie satisfying, he has to do it by being more fucked up. So I loved Strange inhabiting his own decaying corpse, and I was beyond thrilled when he was pestered by the souls of the damned.

I liked America Chavez, although her name got kind of awkward at times. Every line about her sounded like the screenplay was trying to make some kind of point about the U.S. "We need to save America!" "America is out of control!" It got silly. But she's cute and her power to punch star shapes in things was even cuter.

Her relationship with Strange is nice and it further develops a tension between Strange and younger people that we saw in No Way Home. Though I imagine any No Way Home fans expecting a movie with a similar tone were pretty disappointed, possibly even horrified. Oh, well. I loved it.

Return to Osaka Castle

I paid my second visit to Osaka Castle on Wednesday with some friends. I first visited it in 2020, when I'd been in Japan only a couple weeks, and at that time I was unable to go inside due to Corona virus restrictions.

Wednesday was a holiday, Greenery Day, a part of Golden Week, a week where three holidays happen to occur three days in a row. So there were some special performances and festivals in the area.

This woman had a balancing act in which she first balanced a tray of teacups and tassels on her chin and then on a thread.

I went to the top floor of the castle where there's a great view of the park and Osaka.

I bought some ice cream from a nearby shop and decided to live dangerously and get their most expensive flavour, "Gold Leaf Macha".

It was 1000 yen, or about 10 dollars, and as far as I can tell from googling various web sites, it has real gold. It didn't taste like anything but I guess I have the bragging rights. I suppose this proves I'm not a Cyberman.

Twitter Sonnet #1578

The late discussion vanished 'round the curb.
Ignition sequence brought the light to you.
Utilities comprise the breath superb.
And ev'ry shirt reminds the world of blue.
A modern shirt was but the thought of shoes.
And here we stack the pearls to make a snake.
As dancers paint the floor in pinks and blues.
The jealous chef would swiftly stake the cake.
Beyond the twelve we find a week to go.
For what was draining weak for strength we hit.
The pavement boils something grey and slow.
A flattened tyre trapped the killer pit.
The newest brick could never ape the old.
A golden fish was stored in Teach's hold.

Plight of the Mountain Prince

Amid the hazardous mountains of northwestern India, a boy prince becomes the difference between success and massacre for the British in 1938's The Drum. Starring the always charismatic Sabu, as well as Roger Livesey, the film was directed by Zoltan Korda who brings real suspense both to its scenes of dialogue between strategising men and to its surprisingly violent action sequences.

Valerie Hobson is also in the film, playing the wife of Livesey's Captain Carruthers. Her character's pretty resourceful and assertive compared to women in other, similar movies of the time. In one scene, Prince Azim (Sabu) flees to her when being pursued by an assassin and she calmly goes to a desk drawer, pulls out a pistol, and aims it at the assailant.

But Sabu and Livesey are the real stars here. Livesey is wonderfully subtle in his scenes with British brass or Indian royalty, and you can see on his face decisions and assessments without these things being projected to the other players. It helps Korda create the atmosphere of mistrust and danger as one group of leaders is assassinated and another quietly takes over without the knowledge of the British. Until, that is, Prince Azim manages to sneak a visit to a boy he'd befriended amongst the Scottish regimental band.

Sabu's not quite the rousing, charming rogue he'll be in The Thief of Bagdad or The Jungle Book yet. But he comes across as a sweet, very gentle-hearted lad whose speech is oddly soothing.

The Drum is available on The Criterion Channel.

The Moon, Her Magic Be

I guess last night's Moon Knight finale wasn't bad but I'm a little confused by the ecstatic reviews I've been reading for it. It felt oddly rushed to me, like a trailer for an episode rather than an actual episode. There were big chunks of character development still missing and necessary to support what happens and some dialogue just didn't make any sense. It had some nice spectacle, though.

The giant Khonshu versus Ammit fight was some groovy kaiju action. Too bad we couldn't get the starfish from The Suicide Squad involved. Eternals needed a scene like this. It wouldn't have saved it but it would have been a good start.

In terms of the human characters, Harrow is really the only one the feels like he was fully realised. It was interesting when Ammit remarked that Harrow's own scales weren't in balance. Harrow's humility and Ammit's decision to use him were just as interesting and made both characters come off as intelligent.

I was disappointed to see Steven rescued, especially since it didn't make a lot of sense. It reminded me a lot of the end of Frozen when Elsa saves Anna. It made a bit more sense in Frozen, though, and that was one of the weak points in that movie.

The weakest part of the episode was definitely Layla. She rescued Khonshu seemingly only to tell him that she didn't trust him and didn't want to work with him. And then later she agreed to become Taweret's avatar with no explanation as to why she trusted Taweret when she was so set against it with Khonshu. This, combined with her uneven or just plain absent development in previous episodes, culminated in the pathetic moment when a kid says, "Are you an Egyptian superhero?" and she just says, "I am." I haven't seen pandering this shallow since that phoney little video showing an Asian kid disappointed by the lack of representation in the Ghost in the Shell live action movie. But Layla's costume is kind of nice.

When Marc refrained form killing Harrow/Ammit, Khonshu said vengeance was necessary when he should have taken a cue from Palpatine or Mace Windu and said, "He's too dangerous to be left alive!" Then what would you say, Marc the Merc?

But it did lead us to the end credits scene in which we finally meet Jake Lockley, the third personality inhabiting Marc's body. That could pay off in good stuff when this show gets its second season.

Twitter Sonnet #1577

The pressure ball corrupts the billiard game.
To wander films, return the doors and books.
A wadded note imprisoned someone's name.
A passing car awakens sleeping crooks.
A dental thought denies the floss its stripe.
Contain the falling brain to start the lake.
A winding path reports the mild hype.
A single finger pushed the special cake.
A floating bullet cured a magic ham.
Across a sea of coffee lies a heart.
An hour's walk supports a lovely gam.
A glowing liquid filled a special dart.
A sudden flood of shirts surpassed the boot.
To-day, the castle's moat is truly moot.