What happens when someone with no political acumen and poor education but with a reputation for honesty enters the arena of American politics? You get a madcap comedy like 1984's Protocol starring Goldie Hawn as a cocktail waitress who rises to political fame after saving a Middle Eastern politician from assassination. Oh, the innocence of '80s political comedy.
Quickly, a cadre of political handlers swoop in and try to control Sunny's (Hawn) rising stardom. But she foils them again and again by doing things like taking dignitaries to the local bar for a good old fashioned American time of drinking and carousing, presumably things that are not done in the fictional middle eastern country of Otah.
Despite all the scandal and hijinks that ensue, the public loves Sunny because she seems real and just like them, eventually propelling her to political office. Just imagine something like that happening in real life!
Lots of couples have troubled relationships, few are so lucky to have their woes set to music by Tom Waits. It leads to the dreamy atmosphere of Francis Ford Coppola's 1982 film One from the Heart. It's never been a popular film, certainly not enough to justify its massive budget (a recurrent theme in Coppola's career), but an excellent film if you like Tom Waits and film history.
Waits is joined by Crystal Gayle on vocals and Coppola lets their lyrics play out, accompanied by scenes of Hank (Frederic Forrest) and Frannie (Teri Garr) fighting, reconciling, and sleeping with other people in a deliberately artificial movie version of Las Vegas. This was piano jazz era Tom Waits and the mellow, whiskey lounge vibe of his music pairs smoothly with Crystal Gayle's crystalline vocals.
A lot of people criticised the characters for being too thin. They are kind of archetypes more than characters and I think the film is set in the same universe as the 1941 Thief of Bagdad, a film with which Coppola is obsessed. The artistic artificiality of the film's aesthetic is very similar. There's even an appearance by the All Seeing Eye from The Thief of Bagdad, marvelled over by Nastassja Kinski as a circus girl called Leila. Teri Garr's performance lends a lot of humanity to Frannie but I actually found Kinski's character more intriguing.
While Hank is being unfaithful with Leila, Frannie has a tryst with Ray (Raul Julia), a down on his luck piano player. They have some good moments, too.
Maybe the film is no magnificent epic but it sure put me in a great, mellow mood.
One from the Heart is available on The Criterion Channel until December 1.
Happy Thanksgiving from Japan, everyone, where most people haven't heard of it. Of course, it's actually now Friday here, and most people have heard of Black Friday because shops can't pass up an excuse for a sale. Black Friday sales are pretty pathetic here, though. 30 or 40 percent off, yay.
This week I've been making burritos with roast chicken and boiled pumpkin. Maybe I should call them wraps since they have no beans. I guess they're kind of Thanksgiving-ish. Turkey is notoriously difficult to get in Japan though I've heard kids have been getting it at Universal Studios Japan. I plan to celebrate this weekend with a few glasses of Wild Turkey, as usual.
Last night I watched The Maltese Falcon--it's about a bird, anyway--and some of the annual Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Turkey Day Marathon, which, as I write, is still streaming. This year they're doing some kind of "Potluck of the Stars" with occasional cameos from celebrities. I think Mark Hamill shows up.
X Sonnet #1901
A score of cats began to climb a dream.
My open dream to which the moon was sent.
Some critters caper up the silver beam.
But stooges smelled her sweat and effort spent.
Eternal teens usurped the office ball.
Returning champs were naught but paper bags.
The human beings aped coyote's call.
With stupid games, the sickly morning sags.
Unlucky birds became the blackened toast.
Before the mob acquired sales, they ate.
Another bird was found to slowly roast.
We left an ear of corn as tempting bait.
With thanks, the giving gnomes destroyed the pot.
The oven served to cook the basted lot.
Jim Abrahams passed away at the age of 80 on Tuesday. Best known for directing absurdist comedies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun, Abrahams made a lot of movies I haven't seen since I was a kid but I still remember a whole lot of dialogue from. Watching a bunch of '70s panic movies recently, I was compelled to remember the running gag in Airplane! of Lloyd Bridges ruefully observing it was a bad time to stop smoking/drinking/doing cocaine.
I have a very clear memory of the kids on my street being really pumped to see Hot Shots: Part Deux. I'm not sure if I ever even saw the first one but I was excited to go along with everyone for the second.
Periodically, I have to watch clips from Police Squad, which Abrahams co-created, to maintain my sanity.
Not all of Abrahams' films were absurdist comedies. Last night I watched his 1990 film Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. It stars Winona Ryder as a misfit teen named Dinkie who lives in a small, gaudy town obsessed with a legendary former resident, the Roxy Carmichael of the title. Ryder's performance is great and I found it to be an insightful film about a teenage girl desperate for a role model. It's not Abrahams' typical absurdist comedy and yet there's definitely a surreal element at play. No-one's quite sure why Roxy is so famous, she's like a tall tale that would've been more at home in another era, like Paul Bunyan or Hercules.
Abrahams directs from a screenplay by Karen Leigh Hopkins to make a film that connects a slightly dreamlike reality with a girl's struggle against normalcy and with a simultaneous need for validation. It's nothing I'd have expected from Abrahams. It's available on The Criterion Channel now as a part of a Winona Ryder playlist.
I watched the finale of Ally McBeal season one a few days ago and who should I see but Bob Gunton. I've also been watching Daredevil season one which also features Bob Gunton and I also saw him in Bats, the cheesy '90s sci fi movie in which he plays a prick scientist. He always plays a prick. In fact, someone made a supercut of him being a prick on Daredevil.
And, of course, he's most famous as the warden in Shawshank Redemption, a prince of pricks.
There are rare occasions when he's not a prick. Apparently, he was in Ghostbusters: Afterlife as Egon Spengler--he was the stand-in on whom Harold Ramis' digital likeness was superimposed. And on Ally McBeal he was kind of a nice guy. He plays the rich head of a company whose best friend is a janitor. The two want to have a heart transplant--the janitor wants to give his healthy one to the rich man so the rich man's kids don't grow up without a father. Gunton is kind of not a prick in the episode. It has to be believable that someone would want to trade internal organs with him.
He was also a prick on "The Wounded", a good Star Trek: The Next Generation episode written by the recently deceased Jeri Taylor. He's still alive but I see, aside from Ghostbusters, he hasn't been in anything since 2019. I hope he's okay.
As much as I like the Coen Brothers, I hadn't seen 1987's Raising Arizona in a very long time, not since the early '90s, I think. This month, Criterion has a playlist of Coen Brothers films so I thought I'd reacquaint myself with this one. It's a zanier comedy than I was in the mood for, I think, but still has its charms.
I love the way Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter meet, how he starts flirting with her as she, a police officer, is taking his mug shots. Nicholas Cage in this movie made me feel like I was actually more in the mood to watch Wild at Heart.
The Arizona kitsch aesthetic of Raising Arizona isn't as pronounced as the visual and tonal themes of later Coen Brothers films but I still appreciated shots of gaudy wardrobe set against landscapes of cacti and sand.
Raising Arizona is available on The Criterion Channel.
X Sonnet #1900
A wicked plant deployed its poison seeds.
Across the sky, the thorny stars would run.
A goblin girl was hid among the reeds.
At dawn, the locals found a poison bun.
Abundant killers clog the morning bar.
Beside the train, a hundred villains scheme.
The nearest cop was really very far.
But fools will trade a cap to thread a dream.
Informed dismissals rat the kitchen out.
Regressing staff remind their gods to eat.
Another time recalls a noodle bout.
The deadly pasta built a home for meat.
Arriving meals would break the diner flat.
The truth was writ on someone's welcome mat.
I watched Captain America: Civil War, the first time I'd seen it since I saw it in the theatre when it came out in 2016. Now that the novelty factors have worn off--the introduction of Spider-Man and the concept of superheroes fighting each other--it's kind of a disappointing movie. I never feel convinced the two groups would actually come to blows over the issues at play.
It is kind of neat seeing the beginnings of the romance between Vision and Wanda. When WandaVision came out, it seemed like their relationship was something just barely touched on by the movies. Now I find myself watching it closer, looking for some hint as to what drew these two people together to begin with. I'm still not sure about that but they are a cute couple.
Civil War's based on a 2006 comic storyline. I wish they'd adapt classic stories from the '60s, '70s, and '80s more. Some actual Stan Lee stuff. It'd be great if the new X-Men movies just adapted Chris Clairemont's run that began in the '70s.
Robert Downey Jr. gives a good performance in Civil War and I can kind of believe him going off on Bucky at the end, particularly with the footage of his parents. Ironically, by attacking Bucky, Tony proves the point of his side of the argument that superheroes need some supervision.
Captain America: Civil War is available on Disney+.
A woman is murdered and police are frustrated to find that no two people can offer the same account of her personality. 1950's The Woman in Question is an English film that came out two months after Rashomon, though I think it unlikely the makers of The Woman in Question saw the Japanese film. I guess it was an example of two minds thinking alike though The Woman in Question is not as subtle or profound as Rashomon. In Kurosawa's film, truth seems like an unattainable objective, buried beneath nuance and perspective. In The Woman in Question, it's simply a question of different people having degrees of fondness for a woman, and one of them is lying (the murderer).
Jean Kent gives a terrific performance as Astra, the murdered woman, as she adopts a different persona for each flashback, from the account of each person interviewed by police. There's her sister, who remembers her as a scoundrel; there's the pet shop owner across the street who remembers her as a saint; there's the landlady who remembers her as a refined lady down on her luck; and there's the Irish sailor who was in love with her and remembers her as, er, Irish. At least, she speaks with an Irish accent in his flashback.
Dirk Bogarde plays another of her suitors and at first I thought his American accent was terrible. Then, in one scene, he admits to her that he was born in Liverpool and has never been outside of England. So he was intentionally doing a bad American accent! That's pretty impressive. Compare that to Hollywood movies at the time in which characters from a variety of countries regularly spoke with American accents.
The Woman in Question is available on The Criterion Channel.
Star Trek fans wanting to see William Shatner return to the role of James T. Kirk finally got their wish a few days ago with the release of "Unification", a ten minute film officially produced to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Star Trek: Generations. You can view the whole thing on YouTube:
Obviously the cgi isn't perfect. When you can't even make Shatner's hair look more realistic than his toupee, you know your special effects method is flawed. It was still cool seeing Shatner take on the role again. His face, his particular patterns of expression, are familiar to me from very early childhood and on down the years, which I know is the case for a lot of people. The YouTube comments I've looked at come from people in their 70s and 80s who remember watching the original series when it aired in the late 1960s.
I'm not sure I'd really enjoy the film if it weren't for Shatner. There's not much to it. It leans on a lot of cliche shots, including the one of some guy running his hand through tall grass. Who was the first one to do that, Ridley Scott? I kind of can't believe people are still copying it.
I suspect Paramount is testing the waters for a proper return of Shatner's Kirk, which would seem like an obviously good idea after the success of Picard season three and the fact that Shatner, at the age of 93, is in astonishingly good health. His voice hasn't even changed. I'd certainly watch it though I hope it would be less derivative than Picard was and have the guts to try some new things. Maybe the inclusion of Shatner would even be enough to lure Tarantino back to the table.
Rock Paper Scissors, or Jan-ken, is really important among children in Japan. It's frequently played to make decisions. This morning I saw that YouTube's "The History Guy" produced a video on the game and gives a detailed account of the game's journey from China to Japan to the West.
It's funny he compulsively pronounces the j in Jan-ken like a Spanish j. Otherwise, it's an accurate video, to the best of my knowledge.
Students have taught me various rude gestures, which I'm always delighted to learn. Apparently putting the backs of your hands together in a sort of reverse prayer pose is an insulting gesture. Unfortunately, or fortunately, it's not one available to me as the particular configuration of my joints won't allow me to comfortably twist my arms that way.
A few years ago, a student taught me what seemed to be an extremely rude gesture I copied into a notebook I've sadly misplaced. I still don't know what precisely it meant because she wouldn't explain it. Sounds like a good start of an MR James story. Which reminds me, we're getting into MR James season, I should start reading him again.
It has stars, fabulous international locations, and all the bare bones of a movie. But 1957's Interpol, aka Pickup Alley, hardly feels like a proper movie. It's like a sandwich made entirely of bread.
Victor Mature stars as Charles Sturgis, on the trail of an international drug fiend, McNally, played by Trevor Howard. Howard plays the role surprisingly broad, putting on a cartoon villain's sneering tone and maintaining it at all times. His favourite victim is Gina, played by the always glorious Anita Ekberg. The best moment in the movie is when she shoots a guy who's trying to assault her and there's some hints at a plot revolving around her legal peril in the aftermath, but there's little drama in it.
Mostly it's just a movie about a good cop chasing a bad drug dealer, a procedural but not one with much of a sense of authenticity, portraying its villains as the usual raving madmen stereotypes you see in most '50s movies about drugs. I guess the filmmakers may've felt justified in building a movie around such a plain plot by using real locations in London, Rome, and New York. Maybe in the '50s that would've been enough but I don't think so, judging from all the film's unimpressed contemporaneous reviews.
Pickup Alley is available on The Criterion Channel.
X Sonnet #1899
The biggest sandwich ever fully crushed the shop.
Courageous cads condemn the use of boats.
United suits promote the android cop.
The naked castles sold their stylish moats.
A plane of smoke was flat against the face.
A bunch of bags were burnt to harvest prunes.
The warping deck rejects its only ace.
A vital source was killed and writ in runes.
The shapes if friends were burnt across the glass.
With savage dreams, the pickle cured the roast.
Balloons arise, propelled with magic gas.
No science hat was won with idle boast.
The lying dogs would dream of honest cats.
The walls were filled with stupid, greedy rats.
Yesterday came the news that Japan has fallen even further from its already low ranking in English proficiency. It ranks 92 out of a list of 112 countries where English is not the primary language. Notably, it ranks far below South Korea, which is at number 50. Since the difficulty for Korean speakers in learning English is comparable for a Japanese speaker learning English, this deepens the mystery of Japan's consistent decline.
A lot of articles and videos have been made offering various theories and explanations. One common criticism, with which I certainly agree, is that Japan focuses too much on grammar and translation, leading to a deficiency in oral communication skills. The impression I often have in a Japanese English classroom is of watching an alien autopsy. English is the cold and bizarre corpse on the slab whose minutiae are endlessly described in technical details to an audience which struggles to pay attention.
I intend to write at greater length about my own experiences teaching English in Japan but I want to work in a bigger city before I offer a comprehensive view. I currently work in a town particularly hostile to English, which I think is a useful experience in truly understanding the problem but not enough in itself. I can see this from how Japanese teachers from out of town are astonished by the culture here. I've even heard students ask Japanese people from the city if they're "gaijin", foreigners.
I think one thing that sets Japan apart from other countries with low English proficiency is that Japan seems to believe it's very good at English. One might judge this from the abundance of English signage throughout the country. All over the world. certainly in America, people marvel at the apparently professionally produced signs in weak English. Here's an example from the town I live in:
It's hard to imagine what "For your JUST" is even supposed to mean. In this case, the English is accompanied by Japanese to give us a clue: "あなたの暮らしに、ちょうどいい。" It means something like, "Exactly the right thing for your professional life." The sign is for an electronics store similar to Best Buy.
This sign must have gone through layers of the bureaucracy Japan is famous for. One might wonder, how do signs like these consistently make it through committees of people who have been studying English since elementary school? The problem is that confidence levels are disproportionate to proficiency levels because the whole educational system is geared towards something different from actual language learning. I've frequently noticed that students who are best able to communicate with me in English do poorly on the tests while students who routinely get scores of around 100 are unable to have simple conversations with me. So the vast majority of students must have the sense of working towards something and achieving it after struggle. Who wants to be told that their whole struggle was meaningless? But, of course, the flipside is that students who deserve praise for their English skills frequently receive abuse instead.
A team of researchers face off against cgi sharks in 1999's Deep Blue Sea. If you're looking for an effective shark horror movie, watch Jaws. If you're looking for a big ball of cheese clutched in a massive ham fist, you might enjoy Deep Blue Sea.
What's the best way to research cures for Alzheimer's? Turns out it's to genetically modify sharks into massive killing machines. Well, except when they're small enough to swim around half flooded corridors and chase LL Cool J and a parrot.
What a cast. Samuel L. Jackson, Stellan Skarsgard, and Thomas Jane. I feel like, this late in a solid career of supporting roles, Skarsgard has only recently crossed over into true stardom thanks to Andor. It's funny seeing him in this role in which his character is put through quite a lot that does not require a performance of any quality from Skarsgard. A big chuck of it is him strapped to a gurney with a mask covering most of his face. He has very few lines.
Thomas Jane is the right guy to lead a movie like this. Someone really needs to give him a breakout Duke Nukem kind of role. Maybe he should play Duke Nukem? Does anyone still care about Duke Nukem? I guess I should say, someone should give him a role like Bruce Campbell's in Evil Dead or Roddy Piper's in They Live--you know, one of the characters Duke Nukem ripped off.
I was really surprised by how bad the cgi was. I think there's a "bad cgi valley" from the late '90s to about 2010. Sure, there's a lot of bad cgi now but I think that was a period, after the scrupulous work on Jurassic Park, when people routinely underestimated how much effort it actually required to make cgi look good.
Anyway, who doesn't like some cheese now and then? Deep Blue Sea is directed by Renny Harlin, a man practically made of gouda.
I couldn't sleep a few nights ago and found myself watching Naruse Miko's final film, 1967's Scattered Clouds. I hadn't seen it since coming to Japan and, like all Japanese movies I saw in the U.S., I see it through a much different lens now.
One thing I often marvel at with these older movies is how much they look exactly like the Japan I live in to-day. The trains look different but I see the same rows of wooden posts by the tracks. Apartment buildings look the same with the same external utility boxes and pipe systems.
Scattered Clouds was one of the few colour films Naruse made. It has a lovely, doggedly consistent colour palette. Pale greens like matcha paired with yellowish tans and faded pinks.
I found myself noticing how much the music seems to borrow from Bernard Herrmann's Hitchcock scores. The story is about a man and woman in a strange romance, which is a little like Hitchcock, I guess. There's certainly a lot of tension in it.
Yumiko (Tsukasa Yoko) is a young woman whose husband is killed after being struck by a car. The car was driven by a man named Mishima (Kayama Yuzo). It was found to be an accident but Mishima, a deeply conscientious man, feels the weight of responsibility and wants to give the widow any financial aid he can. She, however, wants nothing to do with him or his money.
Yet, fate draws the two of them together and they have an accidental meeting at a hotel where they deliver drunken speeches to each other. As time passes, they develop feelings for each other. But of course Yumiko can never forget her first husband.
You could look at the movie as a more melodramatic version of Tokyo Monogatari. Is Yumiko really so devoted to her first husband or is her pulling away from Mishima motivated by a guilt over how disloyal she truly is in her heart? She cares for Mishima when he falls ill which excites her sympathy for him. It's suggested also the psychological pain he feels for having killed her husband also attracts her. It's a short step from that to wondering if she's attracted to him, on some level, because he killed her husband.
It's such a sedate, gentle film but the premise ultimately recalls the idea of brides won in battle and how fundamentally a woman might be attracted to status, even against her will. It could be seen as a war between Yumiko's morals and Yumiko's instincts. Mishima's, too. Considering how guilty he felt, surely, every time he takes the liberty of smiling at Yumiko, some part of him must say, "I have no right."
Scattered Clouds is available on The Criterion Channel.
Twitter Sonnet #1898
The little minds would steal a soul a day.
With empty hearts, the bugs devour life.
The ugly stamp of brutal feet delay.
The glacial tackle blunts a lazy knife.
Averted war has left a stock of bombs.
A cloudless sky was choked with ash and ghosts.
Ironic fields distort the peace of psalms.
The wayward lad was took by heartless hosts.
A raven passed through countries sans a name.
A blend of birds obscured the view of God.
A morning song would shift the guilt to Mame.
But luck would spare nor even yet nor odd.
Pervasive sloth reduced the woods to mulch.
The river cut has trickled down to gulch.
A wild grizzly starts eating people but has cute cubs in 1999's Wild Grizzly, an unmistakably made-for-TV movie set in a beautiful mountain town and featuring Daniel Baldwin in a minor role. It's exactly what you'd expect but there's something oddly sincere I found engrossing about it.
So the grizzly eats a guy's leg one night and it's tranqed by a guy inexplicably dressed as Indiana Jones (as a fedora wearer myself, I shouldn't laugh). There's a town hall meeting about having the bear with her cubs displayed in the middle of town. Daniel Baldwin and the mayor (John O'Hurley, J. Peterman from Seinfeld), being villains, oppose this idea. With a grin of malevolent satisfaction, Baldwin plots to kill the bears so that he and the mayor can get rich . . . somehow. The nature of their scheme is never remotely clear.
Rachel (Michele Greene) and her moody teenage son, Josh (Riley Smith), move to the small town from L.A. When Josh accidentally breaks the windshield on a sheriff's car, the sheriff (Fred Dryer) drafts Josh to help take care of the grizzly and her cubs. Naturally, Josh is framed when they escape. In his attempts to capture the bear, which he alone realises is suffering from a toothache, he's joined by a plucky blonde with a captivating rack (Courtney Peldon). The writers give her a lot of stuff that's supposed to be endearing and quirky but come of as psychotic. When Josh is sneaking around the woods looking for the animal, she sneaks up on him with a recording of a bear roar and a bear claw glove to grab him on the shoulder. This is after the bear has killed someone.
Sometimes I thought the movie might be intentionally bad, like someone was aiming for "it's so bad it's good." Whenever a filmmaker claims this about their own film, I tend to doubt their sincerity (to be clear, I don't know if this filmmaker has done so). But there are shots that are so flagrantly lazy that I wonder. In the first attack scene, the man's little boy sneaks out of the safety of the car, ironically to retrieve his teddy bear. We get a shot of the teddy bear and the boy runs into frame, picks up the item with a blank expression, then turns to look off camera with an expression that clearly says, "Okay, I hit my mark. Now what?"
But the weirdest bits were when the grizzly ate people. There are these long, slow shots of people writhing in stage blood and guts and shots of the actual bear and shots of the dummy bear head being shoved in the fake gore. There's something so peculiarly detached about the tone of these shots, I can't explain it. It's like the filmmaker had no instinct for composing violent sequences but decided to just linger anyway hoping inspiration would eventually strike. As though he were gently contemplating his inability to express any feelings in the shots. It's sort of like listening to a tone deaf person sing "Ave Maria" with a total lack of self-consciousness. I guess that sums up the movie.
I read the newest Sirenia Digest to-day, which contains a new series of vignettes by Caitlin R. Kiernan called "THE ULTRAVIOLET ALPHABET". Each vignette corresponds to a letter, from A to M. A few of them are just like nice miniature lectures from a palaeontologist, which Caitlin indeed happens to be. I particularly liked "K is for Komodo Dragon" which discusses the komodo dragon's effect on the human imagination since its relatively recent discovery in 1910. Caitlin also goes into detail about an Australian ancestor of the komodo dragon, a much larger lizard that coexisted with aboriginal humans. I hadn't heard about it and it was interesting.
Other vignettes harken back to the Digest's original purpose, as a showcase of Caitlin's weird erotica. "C is for Clit" is an affectionate rumination on that renowned female body part while "J is for Journey" ponders a strange and exceedingly beautiful naked woman. All the vignettes have good qualities though I was a little puzzled by a reference to An American in Paris paired with a reference to Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. Was Caitlin thinking of Funny Face? I enjoyed the vignettes in any case.
I walked along a river to work yesterday and got this song stuck in my head:
Peter Lorre immigrates to America only to find remarkably evil luck in 1941's The Face Behind the Mask. His luck is so bad as to defy credibility but Lorre is an excellent anchor for this nightmare.
Janos (Lorre) is an improbably talented young man arrived from Hungary in New York. He's an expert watch maker and a pilot so his hopes of getting a job and being able to send for his girlfriend back home are not unreasonable. Unfortunately, the hotel his stays in burns down and the fire hideously scars his face. Unable to find work or even kindness in the law-abiding world, he turns for aid to the first man too kind to be bothered by his looks, a cheap crook hanging out on the docks.
Janos gets a creepy mask and turns his talents to crime like a Batman villain without a Batman. Lorre is vulnerable and tenacious, dominating the screen and breathing a lot of life into this noir melodrama. The sequence of extremely bad luck put me in mind of Detour, though The Face Behind the Mask doesn't lend itself to an "unreliable narrator" interpretation, due to multiple points of view. I suppose it's best taken simply as a particularly cruel nightmare, which it succeeds at being.
The Face Behind the Mask is available on The Criterion Channel and on YouTube.
Above is the only picture on my Instagram so far, real_setsuled. It's a weasel I saw on my way to work recently. "Real" because, if you remember, I was banned from Instagram despite never having used it. I had somehow violated their terms. My best guess is that someone impersonated me on Instagram at some point.
It felt like such a triumph to finally get an Instagram but now I don't know what to do with it. I usually post photos here on my blog. It may end up like my tumblr or other online platform accounts I created which I've forgotten about.
I've seen a few weasels around here but they're usually too quick for me to photograph. The above photo is cropped, here's the full image:
He was jumping back and forth across that little irrigation canal.
X Sonnet #1897
Another Swiftie shook the haters off.
Another frisbee took the schnauzer's air.
Another bug forsook a stranger's cough.
Another army brooked the serpent's dare.
Diminished dimes revert to metal lumps.
A standard gold replaced the running tabs.
Across the stars, we felt the spacial bumps.
A stack of kings control the haunted cabs.
Repeated masks conceal the smothered face.
As digits stick to dials, feathers fly.
The paper birds collide with wooden grace.
There's many tales to scar the storied sky.
A team of monkeys smuggled steel to phones.
Diverging planes could write a cloudy tome.
Christopher Reeve and Kirstie Alley team up to fight a town of white haired kids in 1995's Villageof the Damned, John Carpenter's remake of the 1960 film of the same name. It's not as effective as the original film, and drifts pretty far into camp, but it's an effective premise. The first act is the best part.
One day, for no apparent reason, everyone falls asleep in a small town. When they wake up, all the women are pregnant. That's a great start. All the mystery and dread is both personal and public. Alley plays a swaggering FBI agent who comes to investigate and she, along with Mark Hamill in a small role as a priest, is primarily responsible for bringing the camp.
Hamill almost sounds like he's doing his Joker voice. There's nothing in his dialogue to suggest he's evil, I guess it was an interpretation Hamill decided to bring. I guess maybe he figured there just aren't enough evil priests in American cinema.
Christopher Reeve gives a more earnest performance. That poor guy should've gotten more work. So what if he was really buff. I guess that's what kept him from a diversity of roles. It is kind of odd here that this small town doctor just happens to look like Superman.
Actually, I'd say the most effective performance in the film is Meredith Salenger as a virgin who's impregnated by the phenomenon, something I was surprised the priest didn't make more of. Her husband dies in a car crash and she's unsurprisingly depressed. She was the one sincere note in the movie that otherwise felt very tongue-in-cheek, perhaps unintentionally, once the kids started showing up and being creepy. That stuff is fun, though.
Gloria Grahame is trapped in an extraordinarily tangled web of abuse and misogyny in 1954's Human Desire. Fritz Lang directed this film noir based on Emile Zola's 1890 novel La Bete humaine, deviating from the source material in intriguing ways. The film ends on an oddly ambiguous note but I suppose, in the '50s, it was the best possible conclusion to such an impressively messy human drama.
Grahame plays Vicki, the wife of a big train conductor named Carl (Broderick Crawford). She used to work at a magazine stand where he started flirting with her. The two eventually married despite, as is repeated several times throughout the film, the fact that he was substantially older than her--my guess would be about 20 years. It could be no less than that for it to be seen an issue in the '50s.
One really interesting point where the film deviates from the novel is that, after losing his job on the train, Carl sends Vicki to see his boss, Owens (Grandon Rhodes), who's implied to have once had feelings for Vicki. Carl seems to insinuate that Vicki ought to seduce Owens to some degree in exchange for getting Carl his job. What else could Carl think he was doing by telling her to go see him alone? And yet, when she's gone, he works himself into a jealous rage as though the idea were only just occurring to him.
Vicki is very much at the centre of the film and the problem she finds herself in is captivating as you wonder along with her just how she's supposed to navigate these waters of psychosis, how she's supposed to deal with the man who will hit her for doing what he told her to do, what she'd made clear she didn't want to do. It's hard to be loyal to a spouse who can't control his own train of thought.
Top billing goes to Glenn Ford who plays another railroad worker. He's poised as one of those noir heroes torn between the sweet girl next door (played in this case by Kathleen Case) and the femme fatale (Vicki). But Vicki, while positioned as the deceiving, adulterous woman, always has good intentions but is presented with impossible choices. There seems to be some attempt near the end to morally simplify her, to make the film fit into a more typical framework, but the ambiguity remains strong enough that most people watching will be hard pressed to imagine what Vicki ought to have done.
I was kind of reminded of Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, which has a similar problem of a woman's infidelity arising from her loyalty to her husband. Shoot the Piano Player presents a more plausible and effectively tragic scenario but Human Desire is plenty impressive.
Human Desire is available on The Criterion Channel.
