On the Edge of Sex

After watching so many Italian films from the 50s and 60s about the harsh lives of prostitutes and hustlers, it was kind of fun to watch the silly, lightweight 1963 comedy Yesterday, To-day, and To-morrow (Ieri, Oggi, Domani). The film's comprised of three short films, each starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, and each having to do with a romantic relationship between the two being complicated by trivial or absurd developments. I would've liked the film's characters to have had a little more to them, but a lot of mileage is gotten just from having these two attractive movie stars being so diverted from their goals.

In the first story, Loren and Mastroianni are a married couple whose only income is that which Loren makes illegally selling cigarettes. When authorities come to repossess their furniture for Loren's failure to pay up on debts, the couple hides their furniture in other homes. When it seems Loren might be arrested instead, they discover that Loren can avoid prison time so long as she's pregnant or nursing a child, which leads to Mastoianni's stamina being tested as he's required to impregnate Loren constantly. Somehow Loren manages never to look dirt poor or like someone who's given birth to seven kids in rapid succession.

It's the longest and weakest of the three stories--it's no fun seeing Loren pregnant, however unconvincingly, and there's a lot of business about everyone in town helping the couple for no apparent reason.

The second story, the shortest, involves Loren driving Mastroianni around in a Rolls-Royce. She's the wife of a wealthy politician and spends the vignette trying to seduce Mastroianni, while meanwhile she's amusingly unaware of what a bad driver she is, hitting the rear of every car she stops behind much to Mastroianni's consternation. They both look great in this segment and the comedy's mild enough you can just enjoy the coolness.

In the third story, Loren's a call girl and Mastroianni's one of her clients. The story opens with the best bit in the movie; a young man training to be a priest accidentally spies on Loren arranging plants on her balcony while only wearing a towel.

I suspect Loren must have very small nipples.

But I don't know--the movie ends with one of the most frustrating strip teases in history. Though I imagine it would've been ten times as aggravating if I thought there was any chance of Loren getting naked. But not only do I know Loren's always been morally opposed to this, there's a punchline I saw coming a mile away that I knew would make her stop just before removing her bra.

Great, thanks. It's hard to laugh at Mastorianni's frustration when you so sympathise with it.

The movie was released in 1963 but for some reason it won the Academy Award for best foreign language film for 1964. Which is well for it, as in 1963 it would've been up against Fellini's 8 1/2 and Kurosawa's High and Low. Though I would say 1964's Onibaba was a superior film.

Disguises Becoming the Form of Intent

I ate lunch at Denny's to-day, which is next to the Wal-Mart, which I walk past almost daily and where I think I'm seeing some of the negative reaction to Obama's support of gay marriage in the increase of guys calling me a "fucking faggot" when I walk past (I think because I wear a hat). While eating lunch at the Denny's, I caught bits of an old man who was possibly a minister or priest explaining a lot of things to an elderly couple. I couldn't tell if he was using crazy religious stories to justify intolerance or tolerance but the bits I heard were intriguing. Something about an entire tribe of virgin women, something about how black people donate blood and most people don't care, how God split humanity into tribes, something about how we have an extra organ in our bodies, something about infections, which are made up of "basically vitamins and amino acids."

It was rather appropriate I was reading the rest of the latest Sirenia Digest, which I'd printed out for myself. "HIGHWAY 97", a good Dancy story where the sanest person around is a talking dog who sings hymns followed by a footnote to a story in the Digest's previous issue, "Cages". This footnote dealt with legal and religious concerns regarding the humanity of severely genetically modified people. I would suggest, legally, a jury would find the man who killed such an individual guilty of murder on the grounds that the entity he killed was in all respects human at one time and had to all appearances retained human intelligence.

Speaking of not being sure who's who or what's what, I watched a 1988 production of Twelfth Night. I'd started watching another one from the BBC in the 80s but the performances were so remarkably bad I had to stop. I had to choose between that one, which had period appropriate costumes and scenery, and the one I watched, which had good performances but had Victorian costumes and sets. I guessed I couldn't have everything.

This one had Frances Barber as Viola, who Doctor Who fans may recognise as the lady with the eye patch in the recent season. I'd also seen her as Goneril in Ian McKellen's King Lear from a couple years ago, and in all cases she puts in a very good performance, though, actually, close to the same performance in each case. But not bad.

In fact, aside from the anachronistic mis-en-scene, the only problem I had with this Twelfth Night--which was directed by Kenneth Branagh (the production of the play, not the video)--was Feste, the Fool. It was decided the Fool in this case would at all times seem world weary, wise, and bitter, and these are all qualities that are present in the character as written. As Viola observes, "This fellow is wise enough to play the fool; And to do that well craves a kind of wit." But I feel like she ought to be delivering the line with some surprise, as though it's an insight she's suddenly had into this man. Anton Lesser plays Feste less like an agile entertainer and more like a reclusive inventor. His singing is painfully 80s rock ballad-ish;

But, this was my other option;

I think I made the right choice.

Twitter Sonnet #389

Simulated dog cries strike the night cloud.
Wicker arabesques scratch the old blackboard.
With laser thorns, new roses rip the shroud.
He who rides the pogo stick shall be Lord.
Bottled mousse chains enslaved the blonde Tribble.
Same swords centre flashback camera coverage.
Shields go out after the hundredth nibble.
Concrete consecrates nuclear cleavage.
Yoda's greatness lies not in war but soup.
Rebel carnivals hide at the bookstore.
Water warped wood takes a billiard cue loop.
Sleepless Jupiter tongues Venus's poor.
Rubber blood donations shoot cheddar spice.
If you butter your toast, better think twice.

The Road to Hell Paved with Cops and Cash

She looks so peaceful when she's asleep, but Ida Lupino not only starred in 1954's Private Hell 36, she co-wrote the screenplay. She plays Lilli Marlowe (perhaps a nod to "Lili Marleen"), a nightclub singer whose lust for wealth leads already reckless cop Cal Bruner (Steve Cochran, namesake of Steven Patrick Morrissey) to steal from a crime scene, though she doesn't know it. The only one who does know is Cal's partner, Jack Farnham (a Howard Duff improved greatly from his appearance in The Naked City), who's torn up with existential noir angst from the knowledge. It's a good little B-movie noir.

Oh, yeah, Dorothy Malone's in the movie, too, as Jack's wife who's mainly there to worry him about how they don't have as much money as they'd like to support their kid.

I've yet to find a movie that uses Malone as well as she was used in that tiny scene as the bookstore clerk in The Big Sleep. It's a shame, because she was so gorgeous, and had such nice mischief in her eye.

Lupino is great, as always, coming off as very sharp, psychologically more together than "loose" women were generally allowed to appear at the time. When she does get some idea of what Cal's done near the end, she asks, hey, why not, cops work hard for less money than they deserve anyway. In one line she brings in the moral ambiguity that somehow wasn't quite working with Duff stewing over having to play by the rules when he has a kid to worry about.

This movie doesn't really make any missteps, though. Lupino sings at one point, and you can hear the cigarettes over her frequent inability to hit the right key, but maybe Lilli's not such a great singer. She sure looks great, though.

Worlds Small Enough

I saw this beetle on the way back from my parents' house last night. I see them on the sidewalk at night every now and then. This one was alive because I saw it wiggling its leg but they don't seem to move much.

A lot of ducklings have graduated to young duck--they don't seem to know bread is edible yet and mostly just stare at it when I throw it while the one or two older ducks still around make grabs for it. These young ducks stay together in big clumps.

The lizard's complex world of shadow and grass blades.

Finally, here are some flowers;

This last one I took at school while waiting for class to start;

I started the third season of Star Trek last night with the first episode in production order, "Spectre of the Gun". Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Chekov, and Scotty are caught in a recreation of the O.K. Corral shootout. The episode wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be--Chekov has a rather adorable subplot where he falls in love with an illusory woman in the saloon. Also, Shatner premieres in this episode a slightly fuller, fluffier toupee.

But it was impossible not to think of The Gunfighters, a Doctor Who serial from a few years earlier. I don't know if the makers of Star Trek got the idea for "Spectre of the Gun" from watching The Gunfighters (as they very obviously got the idea for the Borg from the Cybermen), but I did notice The Gunfighters, considered one of the weakest Doctor Who serials in the history of the series, was more interesting than "Spectre of the Gun". Although the accents were obviously more authentic on Star Trek, the Doctor Who version of the Earps and Clantons--and especially Doc Holliday--were better performed and written with more nuance. They were more like assassination robots on Star Trek which, to be fair, they were intended to be as they are illusions created by an alien race to test the commitment the Enterprise crew has to peace. Sort of an interesting idea, but one that was already played out better in the first season episode "Arena".

It mainly emphasises again for me the superiority of writing on Doctor Who, especially when it comes to the integrity of characterisation.

Paper Kids

For all his apparent obsession with analysing the negative impact non-traditional families had on children, Nicolas Ray really didn't seem able to get past an artificial idea of childlike innocence. It's one of the things that diminishes Rebel Without a Cause, and it's an even bigger problem in his first film, They Live By Night, a Bonnie and Clyde-ish couple on the run story. It's beautifully shot, expressionistic noir black and white, and the two young leads are remarkably vulnerable. But the film loses its way with a rather mundane plot about a young man being destroyed by choosing the wrong side of the law.

Farley Granger as the young man, Bowie (pronounced like "booey" in "Bababooey") comes off very much as a blander prototype for James Dean's character in Rebel Without a Cause. Granger's not committed to the performance like Dean was, so it leaves bare Ray's rather uninteresting equation of boy's mom gets divorced, boy heads to ruinous bank robber lifestyle.

The main reason to watch the movie is Cathy O'Donnell, who plays Keechie, Bowie's girlfriend. He describes her when she wakes up one morning as looking like a kitten and, damn, she sure was that cute.

But she also gives a much more effective performance than Granger. The innocent girl who runs away with the first guy she falls for, and the young wife whose 1940s maternal and housewife instincts tragically kick in, Keechie's not the most excitingly written character, either, but O'Donnell kind of breaks your heart. She manages both to come off as credulous and smart. When things go wrong, the looks on her face show complete understanding of what's happening even as you know she was never really equipped to deal with it.

I just want to hug her.

Granger, meanwhile--looking at Wikipedia, I see I've seen him starring in two Alfred Hitchcock movies, Rope and Strangers on a Train, and on each occasion I've seen him in a movie, I've totally forgotten about having ever seen him or heard of him before. This guy cannot make an impression.

Twitter Sonnet #388

Fillings falling are in lieu of tooth rain.
White and hollow jaws stroked drool cookie ink.
Brunnhilde knew not to feed Pop Rocks to Grane.
Decade crosses scratch the sides of sin's sink.
The same blue belongs to torches alone.
Knee jewels need no Naples but take Venus.
Accattone vanished in a live Rome.
The squid asteroids rent a record Linus.
Textures tranq the free pastel turkey's plan.
Reserves allot automatic almond.
Sobbing Red Bull cans spill for the green man.
Infected wire art goes uncaptioned.
Tapioca codifies Skittle might.
Cold shores tilt pinball tides after midnight.

"There is No Point Saying this Again"

So far this is the only video on YouTube from the Morrissey concert I went to last night;

That's the most people I've personally witnessed rushing the stage to hug him, though that's been a practice among his fans for more than twenty years. Maybe they tried extra harder because it was his birthday, May 22. Which is also, as he told the audience, the day of Saint Rita, the patron saint of impossible causes, which does seem strikingly appropriate for him.

For a guy with so many songs about being alone, I noted with some amusement that I appeared to be the only one who'd come to the concert alone. No-one even bought the tickets for the seats next to me, or they never bothered to find the seats--the numbers on them were these little brass embossed things that were difficult to read when the lights were on, impossible in the dark. Otherwise, it was a nice venue--the same venue, Morrissey, remarked, in which he began his solo career. It was the first time, I think, I've seen him in San Diego when he didn't seem upset by the acoustics.

He performed a lot of his most popular songs, starting with "How Soon is Now?", and also getting to "Everyday is Like Sunday" and "You have Killed Me". He changed the lyrics slightly for that last one--Instead of "Pasolini is me, Accottone you'll be," he sang, "Pasolini is me, Pasolini you'll definitely be." One always has the feeling he's singing to someone specific with statements that only have meaning between the two of them.

He performed two of his new songs, "People are the Same Everywhere" and "Scandinavia". The lyrics to "Scandinavia" are strange and provocative, expressing outrage at the whole of Scandinavia for the massacre in Norway before expressing a love for the whole of Scandinavia. This has apparently provoked some outrage, I guess simply for the fact that someone would sing about what happened. There are no official lyrics online, but worldofmorrissey.com has this audience transcript.

The combination of love and horror is certainly not atypical of Morrissey's work. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. It seems a little unfocused. I may need to wait until I've seen official lyrics. It certainly didn't seem to go over well with the audience--among the otherwise screaming and standing people, many sat down or went to the restroom during the song.

I'm pretty sure someone shat their pants near me, because that's what the stench was like, but otherwise I enjoyed myself. Morrissey concerts I guess have gotten to be a bit of a touchstone for me, since I've been seeing him once every couple years for nearly a decade. There's a strange feeling of continuity and a reminder of all the things that have changed in my life, heightened by the fact that this venue was in a part of town I lived in ten years ago. I parked a mile or so away, and up a hill, so I had to walk through old familiar streets. I saw a Taco Bell and a Jack in the Box I remember having to get quick meals from on my way to work in the morning, or when I was dashing between my two jobs. I sure eat a lot healthier now, yet it seems like I used to get sick less back then. Maybe I ought to go back to fast food.

There are a lot of bars, sex toy shops, and strip joints in the area, one place having a sign that said, "The only gentleman's club in San Diego that sells liquor" which was rather surprising to me. Maybe liquor licenses are really expensive around here, or maybe the place is the mayor's personal harem.

The Feline Missile Solution

When sabotaging nuclear warheads, most people neglect to bring a cat. This is just one of the many ways Gary Seven is more on top of things than most.

I watched the first episode of Assignment: Earth a couple days ago, a 1968 spy series. The twist was that Gary Seven was a human raised on an alien world and given alien technology to use in general espionage for justice.

The show features Terri Garr as Seven's kooky Earthling secretary Roberta. Apparently Garr was extremely upset by the shortness of the skirt she had to wear, but if I were her, I'd be more concerned about looking like a sherbet vender from the Renaissance.

It's hard to say much about the quality of the show from one episode. I do like the cat, especially in humanoid form;

Seven comes off as cool, despite the fact that he accidentally blows his cover with Roberta and she's easily able to figure out the combination on his safe which conceals his teleportation device. Still, he does have fake IDs which all use his real name;

A technology surpassing even that of the Enterprise crew, as shown when Kirk and Spock are of course immediately taken into custody and their devices confiscated, because that's what always happens when they try to pass undetected in an undeveloped culture or in Earth's past.

Oh, yeah, "Assignment: Earth" was the season finale of Star Trek's second season in addition to being a backdoor pilot to the unproduced spy series. But you'd hardly know it; Kirk and Spock are pretty constantly sidelined. There's a pretty hilarious Captain's Log entry while they're captured, which apparently Kirk just makes with his mind.

I think my Japanese final went all right last night, but even if I failed, my grade was good enough I'll still pass the class. To-night my only class is taught by one Morrissey-sensei. He's always at a different venue when he comes to San Diego, this time at the Sports Arena which wants twenty dollars for parking. I think I'd better get going soon so I can park in the closest residential area.

When Spear Meets Grail

I guess I'm not the first person to say Richard Wagner's Parsifal is entirely about sex. Sex and guilt, or a devastating confrontation with one's own inadequacy, and I'm not just talking about impotence. The thematic conflict of the opera is between a sexual existence that respects truth and a sexual existence that fears and avoids truth. It was Wagner's last completed opera, which is no surprise to me as the understanding of self loathing on display could only have come from a smart person with enough years behind him to have inevitably faced his own unworthiness.

I don't for a moment think the sexual subtext was unintentional. Wagner takes the Arthurian story of Percival and makes Parsifal's quest one to recover the Spear of Longinus rather than the Holy Grail. In fact, the Grail remains in possession of the Grail Knights throughout the opera, and significance is made of the separation of the Spear and the Grail and how it is at the root of general chaos and confusion. The two artefacts comprise a set, both of them drip with the life sustaining blood of Christ.

Dripping of its own accord with blood underlines the Spear's phallic quality and one sees it as a potent symbol of Christ getting fucked. Which brings a sexual element to his story--Christ didn't just die for everyone's sins, he was raped for them. This comes with the complex of damaged masculinity which is personified in the opera by King Amfortas, custodian of the Spear and Grail. The wizard Klingsor not only steals the Spear but wounds Amfortas with it, a wound that won't heal and eventually renders Amfortas totally unable to face the Holy Vagina or Grail.

Klingsor castrated himself in an attempt to join Amfortas' knights since he had difficulty adhering to the required chastity. Obviously this didn't fly with the knights, and Klingsor is understandably bitter about being denied his goal after going to these lengths. That his revenge takes the form of stealing his enemy's masculinity and turning it against him is rather appropriate.

So much of this opera is about what to do with a penis, but by far the most interesting character is a woman, Kundry, whose seduction of Amfortas allowed Klingsor to take the Spear. She's introduced at the beginning as a "wild woman" who serves the knights with sincerity, travelling to Arabia for a balsam to ease the pain of Amfortas' wound. Gurnemanz, an elder knight who serves as the opera's deliverer of exposition, says that Kundry is cursed. In the first act, we see the curse take the form of a mysterious self hatred. When she's praised for her goodness in bringing the balsam, she fiercely denies ever having done anything good. In the second act, she reveals that she once mocked God, and has since been bound by the curse. She's trying to seduce the virgin Parsifal, to violate his chastity and render him vulnerable to Klingsor, as she tells to him the facts of her curse. At the same time, it's obvious she has a real affection for Parsifal.

Wikipedia quotes Nietzsche as saying, "Parsifal is a work of perfidy, of vindictiveness, of a secret attempt to poison the presuppositions of life - a bad work. The preaching of chastity remains an incitement to anti-nature: I despise everyone who does not experience Parsifal as an attempted assassination of basic ethics." This seems like a fair reading, unless one takes the Spear and Grail as symbols of a healthy sex life where the self-respect of neither participant is diminished, though this might be a creative reading, and the sexual quality of the artefacts may have simply been a statement of a divine sexuality being superior to any mortal, physical sexuality.

In any case, I can't agree with the position that Parsifal is a wholly bad work. Nietzsche also apparently praised the music, which is indeed amazing, but I would also say the complexity of Kundry's character has psychological layers quite apart from any promotion of chastity. I think it's certainly valid to read the opera as a quest for self-acceptance and harmony in conflict with unavoidable self-hatred.

I chose carefully in my first exposure to a production of Parsifal, googling to find the best one on DVD, and I was sold on this production from the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1992 when I read it had very traditional sets and costume designs. So it's actually set in the middle ages instead of on a space ship or in a pizzeria. And it's absolutely gorgeous, particularly the scene where the flower maidens attempt to seduce Parsifal.

I support the idea of ballet and nudity in opera, though I'm not sure any of them were actually naked. Closeups on a couple reveal bodystockings. Personally I'd be more embarrassed to wear fake nipples than to be naked on stage. But otherwise, again, an absolutely gorgeous production.

Twitter Sonnet #387

Sacrilege plagues the old nude organist.
Underwear supremacy was revoked.
Blurred rainbows belch boiling cannabis.
An Elvis saw a Block face a big bloke.
Axial zippers seal belly buttons.
Horus hogwash wafts over Brando's brain.
Wonka redecorates for rich gluttons.
Finally God's new wrists break for all the grain.
Tommy gun tomato tombs teleport.
Nutrients nationally are squashed straight.
Snake squirrel hybrids have built the strongest fort.
Old portcullis pens seek an inkwell mate.
Pepper figures stalked the hundred month year.
Copper rainbows poison top soil beer.

新鳥を勉強する

The bridge frog to-day. After he swam away from me, I saw three bird swimming nearby, another new kind, I have no idea what and I didn't manage to get a good picture of them. I almost thought they were large ducklings, but they had dark grey, parrot like blunt, curved beaks. They had white circles around their small black eyes and as I watched, one dove underwater and swam like a penguin before coming up with a fish or a small frog the other two birds immediately tried to get from him.

I also saw some ants to-day.

I don't know what they got, but it's not getting away, that's for sure.

I need to study for my Japanese final exam to-morrow. I've already been going over flash cards--I just took all the flash cards I made for the different tests this year and put them together in one big bundle. I think it's the flash cards more than anything else that have helped me this year. I'd never used flash cards before this year--turns out they work like a charm for me. Before I even look at the study guide, I always just memorise all the chapter's vocabulary words.

Anyway, I'd better get back to it.

Proof Through the Night We Can't Get Away from That Fucking Flag

For a show about a mission to "seek out new life and new civilisations," a persistent problem with Star Trek is its repeated use of alien peoples that, for convoluted reasons, just so happen to not only look human but exactly mirror human cultures. In the second season alone, I've seen a Roman world, a 1920s gangster world, and a Nazi world. These aren't necessarily bad episodes, and I can sort of play along, though it's basically depressing. The episode I watched last night, "The Omega Glory", finally just annoyed the shit out of me.

It starts off well enough--The Enterprise encounters a Federation ship devoid of its crew, though the crew uniforms appear to have been left behind. Eventually they discover that the crew contracted a disease that obliterated all water in the human body, turning the people into just, as McCoy says, "a pile of chemicals."

The only survivor is Captain Ron Tracey, whom Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and a Red Shirt discover living among the natives on the planet in violation of the Prime Directive. The basically medieval culture is comprised of people Asian in appearance, and they're locked in an ongoing struggle with white barbarians. Mainly the story seems to be about how the people were descendents of countries that had engaged in devastating biological warfare centuries before, and the disease is a remnant which the contemporary inhabitants had inherited immunity for, as had the natural food supply, which provides the Enterprise crew with the cure they need (except the Red Shirt, who gets shot).

So far, not so bad. Kind of interesting. Then, in the last act, there's this;

Yeah. Turns out the "Yangs", the barbarians, are descendents of "yankees", Americans, and the Asian culture, the "Kohms", are descended from communists.

There's nothing about how these are descendents of Earth settlers, or how an interfering historian or godlike alien implanted Earth cultural information. It's just the champions of liberty apparently are inevitably white and their flag was inevitably red, white, and blue, stars and stripes.

Kirk has this big, grandstanding, growling, Oscar clip speech when the barbarians take over about how liberty isn't just for the Yangs but ought to be for the Kohms as well. But the damage is done. Yech. This is not Star Trek at its best.

The only good thing about the episode is that Sulu is left temporarily in charge of the Enterprise instead of Mr. Scott for some reason. Maybe in an effort head off accusations the episode is racially and politically motivated as it in fact is. But it's nice to see Sulu again--watching the show in production order, I went through ten episodes where George Takei was away shooting The Green Berets. A film which is also not a sterling example of anthropological wisdom.

Pod Racists

When I was a kid, I had some tiny novelty six sided dice. They were almost like grains of sand, they were so small. I dreamt last night I was marching with an army across a cold, northern country. There was little flora, just mud for miles and as we passed a lake, I spotted some of the tiny dice in the mud and immediately had to dig for more. In the middle of the lake, on the bottom, was a glass walled pod wherein lived a small group of aristocrats and Audrey Hepburn, who was wearing a bright green wool dress. They couldn't leave the lake.

I found a handful of the dice and I gave them to a tall, important man in our army who was wearing a purple robe and the demon mask from the movie Onibaba. He used the dice to make himself invulnerable when he fought an enemy who remained invisible to me for the duration of the dream--not quite invisible, actually, but like he cast some kind of spell that prevented me from looking at him, like The Shadow.

I think the dream was influenced by my viewing of Revenge of the Sith last night. The past few days, I've been watching the prequel trilogy on Blu-Ray. In spite of their flaws, I think I've come to the point where I have to say I like the prequels. I suspect more people like them than are willing to admit it.

I won't say they don't have some serious problems. Attack of the Clones is really just a bad movie, but even that one has elements I respond to. The Phantom Menace, I think, is the most underrated, the one that gets the most undeserved hatred. The only genuine problem I have with it is Jar Jar. Yes, kid Anakin's story isn't as interesting as the protagonist stories of the other movies, but I don't necessarily think it's bad, especially not if you're watching the movie as a little kid. I sympathise with criticism that the kid stuff doesn't sit well with the complex political story, but I can kind of forgive Lucas for making this mistake. After all, the original trilogy films were considered simultaneously kid films and films for grown ups. Maybe it was in deliberately trying to play to both audiences that caused Lucas to stumble with Phantom Menace.

But there are at least four elements that make Phantom Menace good enough for me; Darth Maul, the visual design of Naboo and Coruscant, the pod race, Qui-Gon, Obi-wan, and, especially in Blu-Ray, Queen Amidala's wardrobe.

Gods, I love all her outfits.

In comparison, Attack of the Clones is a complete mess. Visually, it's mostly the noise of too many digitally created environments with no particular coordination, almost rivalling the BioWare games ugliness. Except Kamino--I like the eerie sterility contrasted with the constant rainstorm outside.

But the screenplay, co-written by Jonathan Hales, a television writer, has the superficiality of a television script. Most of the dialogue doesn't resonate with characterisations. I actually don't mind the infamously bad line Anakin has about how coarse sand is--it is bad, but it's bad in a way a teenage boy talking to a girl he was a hard-on for would be. Is it really worse than "scruffy looking nerf herder?" Too many people seem to want these kids to be more badass and adult, and they seem to forget what makes Empire Strikes Back work so well is the youthful vulnerability of Han, Luke, and Leia. The problem with Attack of the Clones is its lack of consistency in the characterisations, particularly in terms of Padme, who the movies seem reluctant to give any character flaws, even in the otherwise very good Revenge of the Sith. But in sort of wanting to like the movies, I started reading more into her character last night than maybe is actually there.

One of the laughable moments in Attack of the Clones is when Anakin tells her he slaughtered sand people children (sand children?) and her response is to kneel beside him and say, "To be angry is to be human," and basically seem to forget about it afterwards. Yet the big deal breaker for her in Revenge of the Sith is when she finds out he murdered younglings (if the word "younglings" had been replaced with "children" throughout the film it would've worked eight times better). I laughed to myself and thought, "It's like she's racist."

And then . . . I thought . . . what if she is racist? It makes sense, after all--although by the end of Phantom Menace, the humans of Naboo were working with the Gungans, but the two peoples had obviously been segregated a long time. I'm not saying Padme was slobbery Tea Party racist, but instinctively. Think about that line again, "To be angry is to be human." It's not so bad, because it's human, unlike the sand people.

I thought more on this and this points to an explanation for another problem--why she falls for Anakin at all. It's clear why Anakin does--he imprints on her after he loses his mother, she's a child in an adult occupation, and he needs to catch up and posses her. It's mixed in with his ambition.

For her--she didn't have a childhood, she's all ideals, but no grasp of things on a ground level. For this reason, Natalie Portman is right for the role--I've come to the conclusion she's not a bad actress but a boring person, someone whose imagination can only create emotions and reactions for boring characters. That's also why she worked so well in Black Swan.

Padme's probably aware on some level that she's led an isolated, stilted life, and her brain computes giving into passion with Anakin as the way of touching the other side of life. Now I start to see how they both have these tragically flawed motives, it actually heightens the effect of the whole trilogy for me.

Twitter Sonnet #386

Gods deliberate Spanish dial tones.
Oxygen jumps the leather nostril pin.
Fogs of cheap blue cotton beset Bones.
Cartilage jello jams up Castro's gin.
Allocations of lozenges deplete.
Manufactured chicanery checks out.
Computers can't casually compete.
Please imagine what pretzels dream about.
Bulbous Elbow language bends the blotter.
Drowning teeth take one last drink of pink gum.
Insulation dripped with nacho solder.
Haitian sake's sex with Osakan rum.
Chance's sand sinks with cocoanut sprinkles.
Pine-Sol's why the wooden star still twinkles.

Animal Catalogue Rebellion

I haven't been able to get any lizards to sit for me so far this year. Not since that baby one a few months ago, anyway. I guess he didn't know any better. The one above scrambled off his post when I stepped up for a macro shot.

After a day of having had too much sleep, to-day I didn't get enough. But I managed to draw a page of comic anyway. I think it's taken me well over a month to draw six pages, ink three and a half, and colour two. I do so hate inking. The pace'll pick up once I'm done with my Japanese final on Monday.

I currently have a 91% in the class, so I guess I don't have a lot to worry about. The teacher spoke to me after class on Monday to compliment me, and asked if I had Japanese friends who were coaching me. I said no, and that I actually felt like I was really struggling. I guess I'm doing better than I feel. Maybe it's just that I want to be so much further than I am. I still can't watch anime without subtitles, and if I can't do that, I haven't won anything, have I?

I'm three episodes into the new GAINAX series, Medaka Box (めだかボックス). The seventh episode aired in Japan yesterday, so I'm a little behind on this one, but I only just heard about it a week and a half ago. I'm reminded of Dantalian no Shoka, GAINAX's previous series, in that it's a much more typical series than what GAINAX is normally associated with, certainly it's a lot more normal than Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt. But at the same time, its consistently good animation and characterisations that don't neatly snap into moe (萌え) cookie cutter patterns set it apart. In fact, it reminds me a bit of 80s high school comedy anime.

It's actually not a harem series. It's a shonen series not about one guy who has a bunch of girls in love with him. Crazy, I know. It has a cast of boy and girl characters in roughly equal number and so far neither sex acts dumber or hornier than the other. At the centre is Medaka Kurokami, head of the student council, and her childhood friend, a boy named Zenkichi Hitoyoshi. There is plenty of fan service, but in sadly almost totally uniquely GAINAX fashion, the show doesn't treat sexuality like something that should never be directly acknowledged by decent women and Medaka's a bit of an exhibitionist. Which is nice, except they've drawn her with breasts so big they're at the point for me where my brain stops taking them as breasts and starts taking them as tumours.

The show is funny, particularly the second episode where Medaka tries to catch someone's runaway dog by dressing as a dog. I'm definitely looking forward to watching more of this show.

To Be Kirk is to Always Touch Kirk

Never separate Shatner from himself. It's too cruel. It's like in the old south when husbands and wives were sold separately to different plantations.

This is from "Return to To-morrow", a pretty good episode about dead, godlike aliens who ask members of the Enterprise crew to allow them the use of their bodies temporarily while they built new android bodies for themselves. Things go horribly wrong, believe it or not. The alien in Spock's body ends up wanting to keep it and convinces the one in the body of Doctor Mulhall to try to keep hers too. This is Doctor Mulhall, who only appears in this episode.

Kirk meets her in the transporter room for the first time when they're about to beam down to the planet. Her appearance interrupts his pre-beam huddle with Spock and McCoy and she's given a close-up from his POV with Most Beautiful Woman in the Galaxy strings on the soundtrack. And she was a looker, which made me almost throw up when I realised she was played by the same actress who played Doctor Pulaski on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Boy, it feels cruel saying that, but it is what it is. Well, to be fair, Pulaski was very boring and she did have a lot of dumb dialogue.

I'm running pretty late to-day because I forgot to set my alarm clock. Fortunately I don't have a very demanding day. Class to-night is just watching the rest of the presentations we didn't get through on Monday. The assignment was to give a presentation based on some aspect of Japanese culture with some visual aid--I did mine on actress Setsuko Hara and I showed clips from Ozu's Late Spring and Kurosawa's The Idiot. They seemed to go over well--I'd post them here, except studio Toho had YouTube send me an angry e-mail about a clip I posted from one of their moves a little while ago. Frustratingly, it was a movie that's not even available in the U.S. Even under the, to say the least, dubious idea that a free clip on YouTube is going to dissuade people from buying the movie--rather than encouraging them to buy it--it makes absolutely no sense and smacks of just a general blanket of corporate meanness.

Career Opportunities

A lot of people seem to be satisfied by a cleverly constructed plot. Last year's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (no commas, commas frighten people) aspires to do more. It doesn't accomplish anything very extraordinary, but it's a perfectly enjoyable spy thriller.

The movie mainly consists of an incredible cast of British actors trying to get information out of one another with casual conversation--John Hurt, Ciaran Hinds, Tom Hardy, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch and, of course, Gary Oldman in the lead role of George Smiley who, as the film opens, is second only to John Hurt's Controller in British Intelligence.

Smiley's story provides an insightful distillation of the whole international cloak and dagger business. He's a cool customer, rarely raising his voice or cracking a smile--his name apparently being a dry bit of humour. He opens up in one scene to his subordinate, played by Cumberbatch, about how he tried to get his nemesis, spymaster Karla, to defect. He tells Cumberbatch that he asked Karla if it wasn't time to acknowledge that the system he served was as meaningless as the system Smiley served.

It's the most emotional part of the movie, which is appropriate since it addresses the buried heart of the whole affair, which is a bunch of men just playing a big chess game with, in the end, little more significance than an actual game of chess except people sometimes get killed while playing.

We learn Smiley's weak spot is his wife, Ann, with whom he has a difficult relationship and whose face we never see. This helps emphasise for us his isolation for his inability to connect with her and therefore helps convey the lonely, disconnected quality of Smiley's business.

Twitter Son6net #385

The three buttons balance in counterfeit.
Cylinders stack in a noisy jacket.
Bubble wedges divide the alphabet.
Streamers stick in the red rusty bracket.
Joke suits excel at storing backup food.
Sins cue yak rook suns to start Doctor Who.
Corduroy token names lighten the mood.
There's nothing a tomato guy can't do.
Taxes interrogate the Latin text.
Orchards of feather dusters sweep the sky.
Unripe limes pelt Tyrannosaurus Rex.
CAT scans of Thor inevitably fry.
Little men pour albums in a young pond.
Rafters taped the film cat auteurs have conned.