Happy New Year, everyone. It's already 2025 here in Japan, Year of the Snake. This is usually the time I post my top movies of the year list but I'm going to wait until I've seen a few more.
It occurred to me some of you may be wondering why I didn't say anything about Jimmy Carter's death. I find myself better able to discuss Olivia Hussey than Jimmy Carter. I was born in 1979, so right in the middle of his single term as president but obviously I can't say exactly how his presidency affected me in those couple years. When I was a kid, all I remember hearing was what a terrible, ineffectual president he was and how we needed Reagan to come in and whip the country into shape. He certainly seems to have been a nice man and I'm aware of his many charitable efforts. I remember Ben Affleck's Argo arguing that he was a better president than was generally believed but I don't know if that's anything more than retroactive propaganda. The point is, I don't really know, so I don't have anything cogent to say about Carter.
Anyway. Enjoy the snakes.
X Sonnet #1909
Year of the Snake
Now strike the drum and call the souls to hear.
As clouds, the dragon passed as night's awake.
The vanished sun condemns the tired year.
A smaller serpent shall usurp the drake.
As cool and shaded leaves then clothed the trees,
The garden throbbed with blind and deafened life.
No congress there discoursed but father sees.
A fatal leaf was like a sharpened knife.
Her steps can still be heard between the roots.
The cunning snake had led her searching forth.
Inside her anxious mind the creature roots.
The second bite provokes a third and fourth.
Discarded fruit will plainly show the win.
The Devil takes his loyal serpent's skin.
Do you have a deep, all encompassing hatred for humanity and human nature? Has your pathological hatred of men somehow manoeuvred you into hating women too? Are your finest reserves of hatred reserved for yourself? Or are you just a shallow Hollywood leech looking for an opinion to parrot? Either way, 2024's The Substance is the movie for you.
Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a Hollywood star who's finding opportunities waning as she hits 50. I didn't like this movie but it's not Demi Moore's fault. She gives a brave, no holds barred performance and a lot of reviews miss the fact that she is actually 62 years old, playing 50. I suspect the age of fifty was chosen because it was Gloria Swanson's age when she made Sunset Boulevard. Sunset Boulevard, by the way, is just one of the many works of fiction that did a much better job tackling this same subject matter.
Elisabeth is surreptitiously contacted by someone who suggests she'd be perfect for "The Substance". This stuff, which glows bright green in a syringe like in the film version of Re-Animator (not a coincidence, I think), allows her to transform into a beautiful young woman. The catch is that she has to switch back every seven days. Also, the stuff splits her into two different bodies so while she's out gallivanting as one, the other is comatose on the bathroom floor. For some reason she never thinks to put the inactive body in a bed. Apart from all the extreme body horror that happens in this movie, I'd have thought she'd been waking up with severe muscle cramps.
The younger version of her is played by Margaret Qualley, one of the Manson girls from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, nearly all of whom seem to be showing up in lead roles now. She was a stand out for me in that and she's good here, too. There's a lot of nudity in this over-long movie--a good chunk of time is spent with the women writhing around nude in the bathroom, sometimes horrifically, sometimes prettily, as director Coralie Fargeat consciously indulges in what's lazily termed "the male gaze" (I've already written at length about my problems with the term). One aspect of the term's inadequacy is obvious from the fact that this female director is getting her rocks off photographing Qualley and Moore to a point that goes well beyond irony--and, yes, I know the argument is that this would be "internalised misogyny", but sooner or later in this theoretical hall of mirrors you have to hit the brick wall of honest human compulsion.
One of the more interesting aspects of the film is that Elisabeth and Sue, the name she adopts when in Qualley form, have trouble remembering that they are one person. It's a nice way of showing how someone can avoid taking responsibility for their own actions and addictions.
But Elisabeth/Sue is so shallow, so without any dimension, all the characters are, that there's no tension. There's no sense of professional or artistic pride in creation, in fact the film almost seems to be an attack on the very idea of creativity because the best Elisabeth/Sue can make are cheesy workout videos. How odd this auteur movie would be so dismissive of the idea that there's any intrinsically redemptive value in art. That's one reason Sunset Boulevard is a better film. That's one reason The Picture of Dorian Gray is a better story. Dorian Gray may be the best comparison. Elisabeth effectively becomes the painting rotting in the attic while Sue indulges in all the pleasures of youth. But Oscar Wilde saw value in beauty and the book is a more complex discussion of the relationship between beauty, ethics, and empathy.
Maybe the title of the film is meant to have a double meaning, in that this is a story of people whose lives have no substance. But ironically, it's the film itself that lacks substance. I was already getting impatient with the two and a half hour movie when it suddenly used a bit of Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score. It reminded me of when Kim Novak got pissed off when--what was that forgotten Oscar darling?--The Artist used the Vertigo score. I don't know how she feels about The Substance but I'm certainly annoyed on her behalf. It's played over a scene in which Sue, now in an impressive body horror prosthetic suit, sits in front of a mirror putting on earrings in a grotesque parody. I would guess Fargeat subscribes to the shallowest, commonest feminist reading of Vertigo, a movie which approaches the same ideas of beauty and idealism in ways more complex and interesting than The Substance can ever dream of. Elisabeth/Sue's final form strikingly resembles Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, which I don't think was intentional but brings home just how misguided this film is.
Ultimately, and particularly because of its excessive run time, this film feels like a holy punishment, like the fever dream of the most bible black Puritan preacher, unleashing his fury on the whores of Babylon and impious men. In fact, I was reminded of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God", the 1741 sermon by Reverend Jonathan Edwards.The Substance is entirely populated by damned souls who have no conception of a reality beyond the glitter that attracts them and the flames that consume them.
Three young women struggle with the impending death of their father in 2024's His Three Daughters. A Netflix movie, it's kind of this year's Marriage Story, starring actresses best known for big budget genre fare in a low budget character drama. It feels less ambitious than Marriage Story but it's still a perfectly decent character drama and an appreciable showcase for some of to-day's most luminous performers.
The three sisters are Katie, Rachel, and Christina, played by Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen, respectively. Katie has the A type personality and she spends most of the film fussing over a signature for the father's "Do not resuscitate" form. Rachel is another of Lyonne's hard-bitten, hard smoking, street as hell characters and Christina exploits Olsen's knack for portraying a cheery surface with anxiety bubbling underneath.
It was interesting watching this after Totem, a movie that's also about a family dealing with the impending death of a patriarch. Now that I think about it, I wonder if this was a memo somewhere; "Make media helping people cope with the death of the patriarchy." It would be a new tactic. Anyway, His Three Daughters is a more conventional film, in that it has the characters engaging in dialogue about the central problem instead of meandering through slice of life constructions. And, hey, what's wrong with a little dialogue about the topic? Ingmar Bergman did it, you can do it and still keep your artistic integrity, too.
Katie, Rachel, and Christina are types, to be sure, but the performances give them suitable nuance to keep them interesting. I like this kind of thing; characters just bouncing off each other. It's what Bergman perfected. Katie naturally despises Rachel's laid back manner but it's Rachel's same laid back manner that prevents her from poking the holes in Katie's condemnations, a task undertook by Rachel's boyfriend, Benjy (Jovan Adepo), who appears briefly to set things straight. Those comparing Totem and His Three Daughters as examples of how men and women make art about the same subject would be justified in pointing out that His Three Daughters hints that women need men to save them (His Three Daughters was written and directed by a man named Azazel Jacobs). On the other hand, Totem presents the ailing patriarch as something like a pet being cared for peripherally and we get no sense of his death threatening to have a dire impact on the family.
All in all, His Three Daughters is a solid, oddly cosy experience. It's on Netflix.
Olivia Hussey died a couple days ago, of cancer at the age of 73. She became a star from the Franco Zeffirelli directed 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet and no other role in her long career approached the success of that one. It's not a perfect adaptation by any means. I watched it again last night and found myself growing really impatient with Mercutio's death scene. There are many elements where I felt Zeffireli's instincts were just wrong but the casting wasn't one of them. I've seen many adaptations of Shakespeare's play, I've read the text multiple times over the years but, even now, if I close my eyes and try to picture Juliet, I see Olivia Hussey.
She looked like a John William Waterhouse painting. Juliet is 13 years old in the play and her youth is a crucial part of the story. Hussey was 16 during filming but successfully conveyed Juliet's youth and the natural impetuosity and rashness that might go along with it. A lot of actresses fail to convey these aspects of Juliet's personality. Not Hussey. You could see Juliet was a passionate and unwise girl.
After Romeo and Juliet, she was in a number of horror movies. Her delicate and beautiful features helped her seem vulnerable, a good quality in a horror movie protagonist. Her most famous horror film is probably Black Christmas. So much of this scene's tension depends on her facial expressions as she holds the phone;
America is like the Roman Empire; it's been said before. It's been explored in fiction before, but never before has it achieved the heights of spectacle seen in 2024's Megalopolis. Famously, some would say infamously, financed with over 120 million dollars by its director, Francis Ford Coppola, this movie's a very rare bird; a big budget, purely auteur film. It's a good film though perhaps not as amazing as it needed to be.
I believe there was a concerted effort to bring down this movie. There are multiple reasons why this might be. Coppola has said he went out of his way to cast cancelled actors, including Shia LeBouf, Dustin Hoffman, and Jon Voight. Also, the whole concept of an auteur is odious to the modern crop of internet socialists so they had good reason to want to see this movie fail.
Remember that weird idea promulgating on the internet about how men supposedly think about the Roman Empire at least three times a day or something like that? I feel like that was concocted specifically to diminish interest in this movie. It's the kind of spook story to subtly start getting people's prejudice cords to vibrate. It laid some groundwork for people to consider insights about the Roman Empire to be trivial and, at best, adorable.
Here's how Google's AI explains it when I search for "men think about roman empire":
According to a recent trend on social media, particularly TikTok, many men report thinking about the Roman Empire quite often, with some claiming to ponder it multiple times a week or even daily, leading to a humorous observation that men seem to have a surprising fascination with the ancient civilization; this trend often sparks discussion about the reasons behind this interest, which could include the empire's powerful military image and patriarchal societal structure.
The source is not a formal study but "a recent trend on social media"--The Guardian credits an Instagram influencer named Saskia Cort who asked the women among her 21k followers to ask their male partners how often they thought about the Roman Empire. Fortune refers to the phenomenon as "shocking".
Let's put aside for a moment that 21k is not a very good sample size and the answer to the question would likely be influenced by how it is posed. There wasn't an equivalent survey of women nor was there an earnest explanation of why anyone would think about one of the most crucial chapters in the history of humankind. There was some pushback, like this article in The Spectator. The Spectator is right wing and The Guardian is left wing so it's easy to see how the political sides have oriented themselves on this issue and of course it's a political football because it's entirely unscientific and fundamentally meaningless. Its only purpose is to deride the concept of contemplating the Roman Empire.
Is it really so strange?
Megalopolis reminded me a lot of Star Wars: Episode III, which was also born of its director's contemplation of how a dictatorship can arise from a republic, based on his historical research. Coppola was primarily influenced by the Catilinarian conspiracy, an incident which led to government officials asserting greater authority over the populace. But Megalopolis also presents a narrative about the contrast between progressivism and conservatism, the two poles represented by Adam Driver's character, Cesar Catilina, and Giancarlo Esposito's character, Frank Cicero. Cesar is not Caesar in the Roman Empire sense, that's his name, but obviously it's a name with significant meaning. He's an architect who's developed a new material with which he plans to rebuild the city into a utopia. He also has the ability to stop time.
I really liked this because a progressive leader should be someone who seems like they can or are trying to change the laws of physics. Progressivism is often about trying to progress beyond things long held to be fundamental human nature, as inviolable as a law of physics. As a representative of conservatism, Cicero is less evocative. But despite this, I didn't find the movie unsatisfying. The story becomes much more about the powerful distraction of decadence. Its message is not dissimilar to Joker: Folie a Deux and may be hated for the same reasons.
The character of Vesta Sweetwater, a pop star whose fame is founded on the idea that she's a virgin, is certainly not far-fetched, particularly here in Japan where members of idol groups are punished for any evidence that they've been dating or, worse, been having sex. And just like that phenomenon, the true nature of the obsession with Vesta's purity is itself a fetish, revealed in the less than pure reactions to when the supposed virgin is revealed to be not so much.
On the flipside is Aubrey Plaza's character, my favourite in the film, a TV financial news hostess named Wow Platinum. She's quite comfortable using sex and lies to get what she wants. Plaza's performance and her fantastic costumes really sell the character.
Just like in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Coppola decided to create a sense of a world with costumes more than sets and, on that score, the film is truly magnificent. The editing is wonderful, too, and, as with Dracula and One from the Heart, Coppola masterfully pulls narrative together from the pacing of cuts. He uses transitions of varying speeds, he projects images on others in one way or another. Some people complain the movie is confusing. I didn't remotely find it to be so. I'm starting to think people are losing a degree of cinematic literacy. Or maybe I'm just more accustomed to art films than the average reviewer nowadays.
It is primarily an art film and I'm surprised by indications that Coppola ever thought this was going to be a mainstream success along the lines of his Dracula. For a demonstration of why Megalopolis could never have been Dracula, one need only look to the recent release of Robert Eggers' remake of Nosferatu. Eggers had made art horror films that were kind of known to mainstream audiences. Pairing a director with art movie cred with a classic genre story is a fairly reliable formula and that's exactly what happened with Coppola's Dracula. Star Wars: Episode III will always be a more successful, more famous film than Megalopolis because it was tied to a classic genre story with characters everyone already knows.
I think Megalopolis might have done better with a handsomer lead. All the auteur directors love Adam Driver because he is, quite obviously, the best actor of his generation but I don't think he's much of a box office draw. I'm reminded of David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis which starred Robert Pattinson and also didn't do well at the box office. Pattinson himself isn't much of a draw but you put him with an established character, as in Batman, and the alchemy adds up. But someone with equivalent sex appeal in Driver's place could have made the romance plot with Nathalie Emmanuel more appealing. Maybe an actress capable of a more passionate performance in place of Emmanuel would've helped, too.
I urge you to see this movie for the visual spectacle, to stay for some genuine insight. Hell, see it for cinema.
X Sonnet #1908
As cold as mummies, winter's light arrived.
With morning canes, the walkers jumped a car.
From frozen brains, the talking texts derived.
In telling tales, the sailor lost the bar.
A frosty road arose to windy feet.
Another jaunt enjoined the ragged rat.
A score of years divides from last defeat.
But naval battles churn beneath his hat.
Corrosive snow was froth across the bow.
The mountain path has twisted out of clew.
A dry and hostile wind distorts his brow.
He looks at empty skies where fishers flew.
A hundred leagues from wreck he makes his bed.
And yet there's some who say he isn't dead.
This week's new Skeleton Crew was the first one not written by Christopher Ford and Jon Watts. It's the first of two written by Myung Joh Wesner, another in a trend of Disney hiring inexperienced writers for their shows--Wesner's only two previous credits are for shows called High Potential and Death and Other Details, both series having been released in 2024. She has a web site which includes brief synopses of a number of unproduced scripts. She brags about her perfect spelling in her bio. Her Skeleton Crew episode wasn't so bad and definitely felt like she did her homework, which I assume was watching The Goonies twenty times.
When Wim picked up the lightsabre, though, it was another moment when I knew exactly what was going to happen next; he ignited it when he was holding it upside down and nicked his foot. I might forgive this moment if it's revealed next episode that he's lost all of his toes on that foot. But, good grief, he's just a joke at this point.
This episode was the one that most strongly gave me the impression that the writer has no idea how to write children. Every time they did something, like Wim crying about how frightening everything is, or the group of them suddenly having a pillow fight, it felt like Wesner had a numbered list of "Things Kids Do" and rolled dice to see which one they'd do next. They feel so detached at this point. The only time I felt for one of them was when Fern had to make a decision when Jude Law's character invoked the duel. Unfortunately, there wasn't the tiniest part of me that didn't want Law to win the duel.
His motives are perfectly intelligible and both the writing and Law's performance continue to sell him. I was also pleased to see Kelly Macdonald as a former cohort of Law's character. You might know her from Boardwalk Empire, No Country for Old Men, or Trainspotting. How I wish the series had been about her and Jude Law on a galactic treasure hunt.
It's nice that, once again, Christmas means we get a Doctor Who special. "Joy to the World", this year's special, was written by Steven Moffat and felt a little like a Moffat greatest hits medley. There was the dinosaur like the one in "Deep Breath", there was the Doctor coming "the long way around" like in "Heaven Sent". There was a very subtle reference to Madame Vastra ("The Snowmen" remains my favourite Doctor Who Christmas special, by the way).
My favourite moment in "Joy to the World" was the bookends of the "long way around" bit, when the Doctor meets himself from the future. Future Doctor won't explain to Past Doctor how to get the code for the dangerous suitcase and Past Doctor is enraged by how mysterious Future Doctor is. He ought to have known Future Doctor is holding his peace for good reason. I think I liked the scene because it felt like a rebuke to the idea that the Doctor needs to be less mysterious. The Doctor's not just being compulsively mysterious; he has reasons.
Maybe the most noteworthy thing about the episode is that it ends with an explicit reference to Jesus Christ as someone who existed. I don't recall the show ever doing that in the past 70 years but maybe I've forgotten something. Is this a capitulation in the culture war? Maybe. It's kind of sad that art can't avoid politics without looking like it's losing ground. Doctor Who should be for everyone; art should be for everyone. But that requires everyone having their heads out of their asses.
I'm not sure the end of the episode had its intended effect on me. If Joy turning into a star was supposed to be an unambiguously happy moment, it didn't work. In fact, her speech to the Doctor felt a lot like someone happily explaining why she was about to drink Jim Jones' Kool-Aid. Otherwise, I thought Nicola Coughlan was good, though I was surprised by how small her part was. I thought it was interesting she couldn't specifically mention COVID when she talked about the rules preventing her from being in the same room as her dying mother. Now and then, I wish I knew exactly what fetters Doctor Who writers have to operate with.
"Joy to the World" is available on the BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ around the world.
Christmas just gets Pogues-ier. I finally gave in and bought a bottle of the Official The Pogues Whiskey. I wish I hadn't. I've never had an Irish whiskey that tasted so much like cheap scotch. It burns us, Precious. I was torn between getting this and sherry because I knew Shane MacGowan drank sherry when he wrote "Fairy Tale of New York". I wish I'd gone for the sherry.
The Pogues whiskey starts with a strikingly sweet flavour, a vanilla I'm more used to from bourbons, which may be explained by the fact that The Pogues single malt is aged in bourbon barrels. The finish and the aftertaste have been described in several negative reviews as "cottony". That's the sign of rough alcohol. I could've gotten Bushmill's or Busker or Jameson. I didn't even know there was an Irish whiskey that wasn't smooth. Maybe they figured Shane MacGowan wasn't smooth?
The large family of a man dying of cancer prepare for his birthday in 2024's Totem. Writer/director Lila Aviles endeavours to capture life perched on the edge of terrible change but the finished film fears intimacy with its audience leading to something academic and cute.
The story's primarily told through the eyes of a little girl named Sol played by a decent enough child actor named Naima Senties. With long static shots of mundane activities in the lead up to the birthday party, Aviles tries to convey a sense of real life but, perhaps becoming bored with this, she tries to punch up the film with a series of odd little surprises like the grandfather's artificial voice and a visiting medium who scams one of the young women of the household. Sol reacts to normal situations well enough but she never exhibits the sense of dread Aviles is trying to establish. It seems as though Aviles was aware of this and tried a stunt in the climax of the film that's slightly off-putting but does not succeed in its goal of conveying the impact of the father's impending death.
What might have improved this film? Maybe a sense of how the father fit into the family's life in happier times. Mostly we just watch the women making cakes and gossiping or scolding the kids. The kids are cute, which perks things up here and there, but no one at the reins of this movie had the goods to convey the intended sense of gravity.
Well, it turns out 2024's Joker: Folie a Deux is a good movie. Fuck me for trusting the vast majority of critics and audiences. I mean, it's not a perfect film but its near total rejection by audiences and critics is kind of baffling now that I've seen it. If it weren't for the fact that Quentin Tarantino and John Waters both praised the film, I may have never known its true nature. Now, if I were inclined to look for a conspiracy, and we're told that's an invariably crazy thing to do these days, I might consider the timing of a film that says it's wrong to assassinate people for class resentment being released a couple months before the internet turned Luigi Mangione, the assassin of an insurance CEO, into a folk hero. One thing's for sure, the implicit philosophy behind the reaction to Joker 2 seems to be a 180 degree reversal of that behind the criticisms of the first film, such as Jenny Nicholson's disgust at the people in her screening's audience who reacted rapturously to the first film's climactic assassination.
The conspiracy minded among us might also note that the film has a bloated, 200 million dollar budget despite being filmed on a few relatively cheap sets with a small cast. Might this have provoked class resentment? This film also features almost no political rhetoric.
Tarantino compared the film to Natural Born Killers, the Oliver Stone directed film which Tarantino wrote the screenplay for. I noted the similarity, too. Steve Coogan's character, a journalist who interviews Arthur/Joker, is basically Robert Downey Jr.'s character in Natural Born Killers. Frankly, Coogan's character is a better version (anyway, Tarantino has been vocal about how much he hates Stone's adaptation of his screenplay). His introduction of Arthur for the camera concludes with a mention of the Murray Franklin interview and a wry observation, "We all know how that turned out," at which Joker can't restrain a chuckle. The viewer might be sympathetic to Joker on this point--Coogan's character is likely unaware of his own crassness, which is funny. Funnier than the broad caricature Robert Downey Jr. played in Natural Born Killers.
The other three movies I was reminded of were Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, and, as always, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Lady Gaga's character has a fixation on Joker which reminded me of Scottie's fixation on Madeleine in Vertigo. When it becomes clear Madeleine was a fantasy mutually conceived of by Scottie and Judy, Scottie finds he can't love the living woman. When the fantasy of Joker falls apart, Lee, Gaga's character, finds she can't love the living man.
Watching the film, I was astonished to notice many points in which reviews seem to have been not only wrong but plainly dishonest. In Ryan George's Pitch Meeting on YouTube, he jokes about how Lee couldn't have known about Joker's famous staircase to have met him there. Yet there's a movie within the movie that Lee saw which featured the staircase. Many reviews say the songs have no relevance to the action but I found each and every one was vitally important. The love story between Lee and Joker is totally bound up in the musical numbers, just as it's totally bound up in their mutual fantasy. How could critics fail to see the relevant use of songs like "Bewitched" and "For Once in My Life"? Or, jeez, "The Joker"?
The most significantly used song is "That's Entertainment" from The Band Wagon, a clip of which the characters actually watch. It's the point on which the film most resembles Natural Born Killers as it makes that connexion between an audience's compulsion to turn real murder into an entertaining fantasy.
My main problem with the film is Arthur's ultimate rejection of the Joker persona. It's not that I think it's a bad idea; I think this shift creates a lot of opportunity to explore ideas and I like how this demon takes on a life beyond Arthur. I just wish the movie had better expressed Arthur's motivation for rejecting the persona that empowered him. The implication is that he found it inadequate after he was physically assaulted by the prison guards but, if that's the case, I don't see how he has the emotional strength to take any initiative afterwards. I suppose his love for Lee might explain it. If the movie had made a point about how he'd found a kind of salvation through love, even a love for a criminal accomplice (again, a path trodden by Natural Born Killers), I might have enjoyed the turn more.
Phoenix and Gaga are both great, the songs are great. This is a good movie. Don't believe what they're telling you.
Improvements in communication technology mean you can make a pretty good tech suspense thriller on a pretty low budget. Netflix's 2024 film Carry-On (no relation to the long running British comedy franchise) is mostly just Taron Egerton talking to Jason Bateman on the phone. But it's one of the most intelligently constructed films to have premiered on a streaming service in recent years.
Egerton plays Ethan, a TSA officer who finds an earpiece on the luggage-scan conveyor belt. A text from an unknown source tells him to put it in and, once he does, he finds himself held captive by Jason Bateman's unnamed character. He tells Ethan to allow a suspicious suitcase through screening undisturbed or Ethan's girlfriend, Nora (Sofia Carson), will be killed.
Ethan's given a backstory about his inability to assert himself leading to his complacency in a dead-end job. Bateman's character knows all this and screenwriter T.J. Fixman (boy, does that ever sound like a pseudonym) does a nice job of weaving Ethan's personal issues in with the logistics of Ethan by turns trying to defy Bateman or reluctantly concocting ways to assist him.
It's not perfect but the film's logic holds up pretty well for the first half or so. Then people start doing one or two things that does seem quite natural. At one point, Ethan takes off his shirt and throws it in the garbage for no reason I can ascertain. There's also an ambitiously staged car wreck scene that sadly looked pretty bland due to weak cgi and overused compositions. But on the whole, if you're looking for a Christmas story with decent action and suspense, this one's pretty satisfying.
I had plans for to-day but I think I'm mostly just going to eat snacks. I got a bunch of Christmas snacks and candy from students and teachers yesterday at a Christmas party for the junior high school's ESS or English club. It also happened to be my last day at the school and my last chance to see the third year students at school. I knew I was going to miss them but I don't think I counted on just how much. In the almost five years I've spent as an English teacher in Japan, working with this group has been by far the most rewarding English teaching experience. It was rewarding for their friendship and for the ability to work with them somewhat unfettered by standard Japanese English education procedure. It's with enormous pleasure I can say these third year students are now among the strongest English speakers I've worked with. One boy in particular exhibits an astonishing capacity for communication in English. We'd gotten to the point where we could have real casual conversations every morning that went beyond the usual small talk about the weather into genuinely novel topics such as the particular details of individual interests as well as opinions and perceptions of events and ideas.
But all of the club's students have impressed me in one way or another. Two of the girls are about as good as the boy I mention. I could always rely on them to give intelligible responses to questions that went beyond simple greetings. I can't take all the credit because a lot of their success in learning English comes from their extraordinary individual courage and curiosity. I can only hope I'll be lucky enough to work with another group like that again in such a productive environment.
X Sonnet #1906
A silent beach was mirror flat at noon.
The thought of gulls was naught but fancy's flight.
Ahead, a broken box contains a demon's boon.
Your hand would freeze before its burden's sight.
A buried orange provoked a stranded thought.
As time dissolved the soil, ghosts arose.
A million tides distort the picture lot.
Another Christmas charts how silence grows.
The cakey chalk constructs a lively base.
Detectives gather late to study Yule.
The warmth of life adopts a fleeting pace.
But pockets form to dodge a savage rule.
As candy days depart behind a screen
The metal clouds descend to end a scene.
We have a new Superman trailer. At first I wasn't enthusiast. Shots of Superman bloodied in the snow and flashbacks to the Kent farmstead with golden sunlight behind silhouetted figures seemed like a retread of Zack Snyder. The titles announce it's directed by James Gunn and note that he's the director of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. I thought, yeah, you need to point that out to generate any excitement from this lacklustre trailer. But then Gunn's new angle starts to become clear when Superman is rescued by none other than Krypto, the Super Dog. Miscellaneous superheroes are thrown in including Hawk Girl and a Green Lantern with an unflattering bowl haircut. Gunn's version will, to some extent, and for the first time in any Superman movie or TV series, embrace some of the super whimsy of the comics.
Any tempted to proclaim this will never work would do well to remember than Gunn made the talking racoon work in the Guardians movies. In the latter half of the trailer, an electric guitar version of John Williams' theme from the Christopher Reeve movies kicks in and my hopes were genuinely raised for this movie. Really, that should just always be Superman's theme. Why reinvent the wheel? Bryan Singer used it for his Superman movie, too, and it's one of the things he definitely got right.
I like the concept that's being pitched for the movie in which Superman must show kindness in a world where kindness has become devalued. That's certainly relevant. Rachel Brosnahan looks like a dynamite Lois. I'm still not sold on David Corenswet but I can see him growing on me.
Gunn's The Suicide Squad is a movie I love to rewatch and I think his Guardians movies got better and better. Peacemaker was a terrific TV series, too, so I think there is a fair chance of this being a good movie.
Last night's new Skeleton Crew was fine, I suppose. It mostly felt like filler, which is odd considering it was directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, writers and directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once. This is their follow-up to that awards darling? Well, okay. It was written, once again, like most episodes of the series, by Christopher Ford and John Watts.
The crew find themselves on a ruined duplicate of their homeworld, At Attin, called At Achrann. Immediately I thought, here's a budget minded episode. Sure enough, most of the sets from the first episode are reused here. Gangs, constantly at war, control this world and their costumes are all cobbled together presumably from whatever was lying around the Lucasfilm wardrobe department.
The show continues to not quite succeed at making the kids into Disney's Stranger Things crew. I wish they'd have let go of that idea early in development and reduced the number of children to two. At this point, Wim, supposedly the lead, feels totally superfluous. The kids should've just been Fern and Neel. KB is obviously meant to be the Spock but there's no time to give her the nuance a Spock character needs. They could've just made Fern a little more compulsively logical or dumped that whole aspect of the group entirely.
Now the kids are slightly more reluctant to kill people though they still seem oddly attracted to violence. Maybe it's because I've spent so much time around Japanese children (I've been working in Japan for the past four and a half years) who generally aren't as violent as American children. Still, there's something oddly forced about how into guns the kids are. It reminds me of the really odd moment at the end of the Obi-Wan series when Obi-Wan gave Leia a holster. It's like executives at Disney had a conference that concluded with the idea that kids love guns, no-one knows why, but every show should be stuffed wherever possible with moments of kids expressing their affection for weaponry. I mean, sure, I liked to play with toy guns when I was a kid and I still like violent video games now but the behaviour exhibited by these kids feels alien to me.
Neel's relationship with the girl soldier was cute and I liked the moment where he tried to describe Slap Ball. But the arc ended with one of those moments that often seem to come on Disney Star Wars shows where I know how the scene is going to end from the beginning. As soon as it started, I knew she was going to kiss Neel. At that moment, their whole little arc felt like something that came from a TV writing handbook.
I think Wim's question about the gang war being between children and adults was meant to be a reference to the episode of Star Trek called "Miri", which again shows the problem of trying to do Stranger Things without the ability to use actual pop cultural references. We would know why a kid in the real world would make that connexion but the only way we can get anything from Wim's observation is to see the show through a slightly detached, postmodern lens. It's one of those things that keeps the show from feeling organic and unlike an algorithm produced it.
Two women trying to make careers for themselves in the women's section of a castle find themselves confronting a demon in 2024's Mononoke the Movie: Phantom in the Rain (劇場版モノノ怪 唐傘). This is basically a feature length episode of the Mononoke television series from 2007, which in turn was a spin-off of another series, none of which I knew when I hit play on the movie's Netflix thumbnail. I guess that explains why the animation seemed slightly cheap and the plot felt somehow incomplete despite being a self-contained story. I kind of enjoyed it. It was relaxing.
Asa (Kurosawa Tomoyo) is an ascetic young woman who surprises the gatekeepers of the Inner Chambers (the women's section) when she reveals she has no attachment to objects in this world. This marks the beginning of her meteoric rise in the ranks of these ladies who abjure all worldly things to focus on looking beautiful and being demure. Asa befriends a more free spirited new girl named Kame (Yuki Aoi) who has lots of precious keepsakes from her hometown. In the spirit of going with the flow, though, she gamely tosses her precious snacks from home into the ceremonial pit.
There's a demon afoot and it's up to the travelling Medicine Seller (Kamiya Hiroshi) to investigate and sort it out. I found out later he's the main character of the series but like the women there's not a whole lot more to his personality than his looks. The anime's aesthetic is flat and brightly coloured with few, if any, shadows. I think it was meant to look like a mural painted on a screen. It reminded me of some of the experimental scenes in Shaft anime series though this comes from a studio called EOTA. It's interesting at first but becomes a bit dull after about fifteen minutes. I do like the idea of a demon residing in the relationships of people in a place, though, as this ends up being. Well, there's also a haunted umbrella.
Despite being set in what is essentially a harem, this is a modern Japanese movie so don't expect any sex.
Mononoke the Movie is available on Netflix. This is not to be confused with Miyazaki Hayao's Princess Mononoke. A mononoke is a kind of ghost or monster.
A little girl is critically ill and only one brave canine can save her in 1995's Balto. The last traditionally animated film from Amblin Entertainment, I remember my friends and I turning our noses up at it at the time of its release as just another Disney imitator but now I see it's an excellent artefact of an all but lost art in America.
Sure, a lot of the dogs look like they were cribbed straight from Oliver and Company and Lady and the Tramp. But the talent and dedication that went into such expressive and fluid animation are no less admirable.
Balto is loosely based on a true story. The real life Balto was a purebred husky while the film's Balto is made half wolf in order to give the story a racial conflict theme. It kind of works; the fact that we're talking about dogs and wolves, divorcing the story from human racial groups, gives the conflict a valuable universal quality.
When Balto catches up with the benighted sled carrying the urgently required medicine, he has to deal with the egotistical leader of the dogs who won't hand the reins to a half breed. Then he has to deal with an implausible number of obstacles and action sequences that put a little too much strain on the audience's suspension of disbelief. Still, the animation never stops being amazing.
I think the film is primarily loved now among furries. "Balto head" is almost ubiquitous among male furries. I don't want to kink-shame but I have to admit I've never come close to understanding furry culture which seems to me populated by people who got lost in some intricate self-constructed irony trap. Fortunately, one doesn't need to be a furry to appreciate Balto.
X Sonnet #1905: Viking Raid Edition
Approaching ships were marked with walrus blood.
Their ragged crews digest the frozen north.
The splintered hulls were patched with mould and mud.
To brittle shores the vessels struggle forth.
The breakfast fog admits a single maid.
The cold and fertile beach would yield a clam.
'Twas she who spied the nigh approaching raid.
But ships to her could seem but ghostly sham.
Like grains of glass, the sand was crushed by boot.
Some burning eyes beheld the wayward mouse.
Now tearing dreams of grass conduct to root.
The looming fire dwells in ax and house.
Confusion warps the wooden beams to grey.
A hidden girl discerns no end of day.
Sharon Stone falls for a cheesy voyeur in the sleazy 1993 thriller Sliver. But when I saw the screenplay was by Joe Eszterhas I knew what I was in for and was quite prepared to enjoy his distinctive brand of greasy imitation Hitchcock.
I think the concept here, either conceived by Eszterhas or Ira Levin (who wrote the source novel), was of a world where Marion Craine fell for Norman Bates. Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins would've made a slightly more plausible couple, though, than Sharon Stone and William Baldwin. There's a reason William never approached top Baldwin status.
Stone plays Carly, a book editor who, as one character directly states, likes to be in control. She counters this by saying that she stayed in a bad marriage for seven years. So she certainly has her subservient side, which becomes clear when she succumbs to the advances of the wealthy owner of her apartment building. She stays with him even after she finds out he has a secret room filled with television screens monitoring everyone in the building, including her. So he's seen her doing such things as masturbating in the shower.
Baldwin's character, Zeke, tells her his mother was a soap opera actress and, for him, watching the private lives of his tenants is clearly like watching soap operas. This is Eszterhas world so it turns out everyone does behave as though life is a soap opera in their private lives. The screens show scenes of dramatic revelations and racy sex scenes. One shot of a woman shaving her face with an electric razor is the only nod to the truly embarrassing things people are likely to do when they think no-one's watching.
Audiences and critics didn't go along for Eszterhas on this one, they evidently preferred his version of Vertigo (Basic Instinct) to his version of Psycho. The real problem is that Zeke is never for a moment attractive. Eszterhas wants him to be some kind of dark, Phantom of the Opera anti-hero but he just comes off as a pathetic dweeb. The film originally had an ending more sympathetic to him but test audiences disliked it for being "immoral". I think you can get audiences to vicariously enjoy immoral behaviour, as in A Clockwork Orange. The problem is that voyeurs aren't just immoral, they're pathetic. You can give a worm all the dramatic noir lighting you like; a worm is still a worm. Most people watching this movie are rooting for Carly to dump this guy and it's somewhat satisfying when she finally does. But the fact that she was in any way attracted to him remains inexplicable.
I'd avoided watching 1993's Falling Down for decades. Everything I ever heard about it told me it wasn't something that would interest me and the fact that it was directed by Joel Schumacher did nothing to commend it. But a friend asked me to watch it a couple weeks ago so I finally did. It's pretty much what I expected but I was more entertained than I had anticipated.
I shouldn't dismiss Schumacher out of hand, I did like Lost Boys. Just because I didn't like his Batman movies or Phantom of the Opera adaptation shouldn't make me assume I'd always hate one of his work. I guess it's easy to see the recurrence of a dark or anti-hero in these movies. Michael Douglas' Bill Foster in Falling Down is certainly closer to an actual anti-hero than how the term is usually meant to-day. He occupies the space of a protagonist for much of the movie but he engages in villainous actions. Robert Duvall plays a cop with extraordinary patience and empathy for contrast. As Bill responds to small infractions with excessive violence, Duvall's character, Prendergast, responds with excessive restraint to his extraordinarily abusive wife and co-workers. Prendergast's journey in the film is to somewhere in the middle while Bill's journey is to somewhere further out to sea, "past the point of no return," as he says. Was this a reference to The Phantom of the Opera?
A lot of critics of the movie scold its fans for sympathising with Bill. I don't know how many people actually do. It should take no more than the barest scrap of intelligence to see that, yes, it's silly McDonalds stops serving breakfast at 10am but, no, pulling an uzi on the store manager is not a constructive response.
Both Duvall and Douglas give good performances but I found Schumacher and screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith's manipulations a little too broad to take as anything more than campy fun. It's easy to see that at the start of the filmmaking process they set a rule, "Everyone in this world is an asshole," and proceeding accordingly. It's hot and there's a traffic jam but everyone, from the drivers to the motorcycle cop who stops to get Bill's car out of the road, is about ten times angrier than is natural for the situation. The panhandler who tries to scam Bill by telling him he's starving is actually holding a hot dog at eye level the whole time. It's true, sometimes panhandlers can be surprisingly stupid but they're never as persistent as this guy is when Bill walks away from him. Generally the last thing these guys want to do is cause a big scene.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised to get this kind of material from the guy who's primarily known now for putting nipples on Batman's costume.
There are a lot of pointless remakes out there but I think I've seen the most pointless remake of all time. I got Netflix for the month for a few reasons, one of them being I really wanted to see the new Ranma 1/2 series. It's an adaptation of the same first volumes of the manga that the first anime series adapted back in 1989. In many cases, it's a shot for shot replica of the old series only now it's drawn and coloured on computers instead of with pencil, ink, and paint. Nudity has been censored with "doll anatomy" and it has a new score by a different composer.
Even many of the voice actors are the same. Hayashibara Megumi returns as girl-type Ranma and she's still great. But many of the actors playing teenagers certainly don't sound like teenagers, particularly the character of Nabiki who now sounds like an old woman.
I don't know why this thing was made. I work in Japanese schools and I hear kids talking about Ranma 1/2 exactly as often as I heard them talk about it before this new series came out.
Was there anything I liked? The scene where Ranma meets Kuno has the same dialogue--Kuno demands to know Ranma's name but before Ranma can reply Kuno says it's better form to give his own name first. In the new version there's a slight pause and Ranma says awkwardly "douzo", "go ahead." That was kind of funny but it didn't justify a whole remake.
Ranma 1/2 (the new one) is available on Netflix. Oddly, when I searched for "Ranma", it wasn't even the first title that came up. I'm not sure what that means but if it means the show's not popular I wouldn't be surprised. Some people on YouTube have made compilations of clips comparing the new and old versions. Sometimes the dialogue overlaps precisely:
I guess this is like when Gus Van Sant remade Psycho. At least he had a new cast and shot it in colour so he made some effort to be different.
X Sonnet #1904
Exhausted words for "red" deplete the shade.
Infernal rings diffuse the air and sky.
With phony coins, the counterfeiter's paid.
The only dream became a daily lie.
Surprising spots of time return to mind.
Betrayal lurks in slowly boiled brains.
The ghost of vengeance seeks a kill to find.
The story's told in blood and whisky stains.
Reforming cities never costs a god.
Deserving roads obey the wheels above.
Some greater damage rusts a metal rod.
The lack of lightning killed a demon dove.
A couple eggs were lost beneath the grill.
For making yoghurt, raise a local mill.
Teenagers rebelling against the social order and the demented adults trying to put them down all attract the ironic sympathy of the filmmaker in 1990's Cry-Baby. I don't know if it's John Waters' best movie but maybe it's his most appreciable, coming at a transition period from his wilder early films into his attempts at somewhat more mainstream fare. He's helped immensely by Johnny Depp who makes the titular Cry-Baby a character the audience can feel more than ironic affection for.
It's an affectionate parody of '50s delinquent films. Depp's Cry-Baby is cut from the same cloth as James Dean and young Marlon Brando characters but he's in a movie world that is closer to cheap knock-offs of those movies. The supporting cast including Traci Lords and Ricki Lake recall things more like Girls Town and The Beatniks.
The story's just an excuse for musical numbers and equally ornamental campy dialogue. Allison (Amy Locane) is the good girl from a good family who can't help being attracted to the low life Cry-Baby (Depp). Waters adores Cry-Baby's trashy relatives, he adores the preppy guys who burn Cry-Baby's prized motorcycle, he adores how sensitive Cry-Baby is about it. I suppose you can just take these characters straight on but it's easier to appreciate the movie as fetishised mediocrity. To simply enjoy watching the parade of the odd, awkward, and pretty in their Sunday best, earnestly singing their hearts out at the jailhouse.
Cry-Baby is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a playlist of John Waters movies.
