What the Raptor Said

If Jurassic Park is an udder, then 2015's Jurassic World is the cold, dispassionate hand that relentlessly attempts to milk it over the course of a week producing almost half a glass of milk. It has some entertaining aspects but the most remarkable thing about it is the diversity of bad logic on display.

The concept is there's been a successful theme park operating for years based around the cloned dinosaurs kept on the island. We're introduced to two boys, Gray and Zach (Ty Simpkins and Nick Robinson), from whose point of view we're introduced to the park as they go to spend a few days there with their aunt, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), who happens to be operations manager at the park.

She's busy the day the kids arrive so she has her assistant meet them and show them around the park, a plot point the film dumbly jerks and spreads the resulting liquid thinly to suggest this implies Claire is shallow and the family is falling apart. The kids start to have anxiety over the possibility that their parents are getting divorced and we see their parents brooding over unspecified issues several times but if there was a resolution to this subplot it was left on the cutting room floor. Personally, I imagine Gray and Zach's parents getting a visit from a velociraptor who, after crashing through their living room window, sits them down and helps them work through their issues until the couple decide to renew their vows.

Richard Attenborough is gone so the man in charge of the company that owns the island is now Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), who's also an amateur helicopter pilot and later in the film he inexplicably turns out to be the only man on the island who can fly a helicopter. He enlists Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong), the same geneticist from the first film, to craft a brand new dinosaur named Indominus Rex from the DNA of other dinosaurs and modern animals. When Masrani asks Wu which animals were used, Wu says it's classified. Again, Masrani is the owner of the company. Wu works for. And Masrani doesn't bat an eye when Wu tells him he doesn't have clearance for information regarding a project he initiated and funded.

Chris Pratt plays Owen Grady who's part of a project to breed and train raptors for use in war, I guess to replace the tigers and pumas the military currently uses. Despite this project being his life's work, he's completely against Vic (Vincent D'Onofrio), head of Masrani's elite security company, using them as weapons.

Maybe you remember how in Jurassic Park the Tyrannosaurus was bigger and deadlier than the raptors. The raptors were no match for Tyrannosaurus. When Indominus, bred to be deadlier than Tyrannosaurus and somehow impervious to bullets, breaks loose, Vic argues the raptors are the only way to fight it. Owen finally grudgingly agrees it's their only option.

Even though it doesn't make any sense at all.

But that's okay, something even dumber happens when the raptors do meet up with Indominus.

Spoiler ahead

"What?" you may say, "The raptors stop and have a quiet conversation in some raptor language they somehow know and team up with Indominus?"

To which I'd be forced to reply with a sad sigh and resigned nod. It's a language Indominus knows apparently from race memory as Owen makes a big point of how much he disapproves of the way Indominus was raised in total isolation, stunting its ability to socialise. Well, I guess it's not so bad when you're born knowing a whole language.

End spoilers

I have nothing against Bryce Dallas Howard, I liked Chris Pratt in Guardians of the Galaxy. The two have a natural charm, but I sense we've gone past the point where we can have the rugged, ranger guy and the whiney, neat freak woman for his romantic interest. Even Jurassic World feels compelled to have a scene where Claire suddenly becomes assertive and cagey, though we're still given this fabulous pin-up shot:

If they really wanted to play with the gender roles--which, of course, they really didn't--they could have had her as the raptor trainer and him as the manager. Or maybe just avoid writing character types instead of characters. But maybe that wouldn't leave enough room for a scene of children in a bullet proof glass ball that's easily broken by the tail of an ankylosaurus.

To-day in My Spider Country

I've watched this spider grow fatter over several months where she lived in the area under my hat rack and behind one of my bookcases. Unlike most of the other spiders in my apartment, she flees and goes into hiding usually when I get too near. Yesterday I found that for the first time she'd moved to a position next to the door. I don't know why. There was a smaller, similar spider nearby. A male? An offspring? To-day I saw she'd moved back to her normal spot and there was a web across the little entrance hall at about my nose level. Naturally she couldn't walk back on the floor.

Every now and then I notice a barely visible network of webs just above my head. There was even one over my shower that lasted a surprisingly long time. Though there hasn't been a lot of steam lately since I take cold showers whenever I can get cold water now. Yesterday, as I mentioned, was 100 Fahrenheit again. I'm not sure which news story I've read this morning is more seductive--NASA's plans for a permanent human settlement on Mars or the station in Antarctica where scientists have been hitting the booze too hard.

Twitter Sonnet #799

A centrifuge's gum is gambled first.
Rickety Facebook breaks its bloomin' back.
A plastic bottle dies of soapy thirst.
In Santa's mind there's no abated sack.
A voyage made through cartilage is soft.
Reserved for things not strong as bone we frame.
The wobbly person shaped tin foil croft
Has earned its drifting spider cellophane.
A living tinsel inches up the walls.
Someone's announced a party line haircut.
Beehives and pompadours circuit malls.
It's Bruegel's phone we see in dark woodcut.
A tree like Daphne plays with botany.
An oaken plank has sparked Ent mutiny.

Milton's Vodun

I saw this yellow jacket a few days ago pushing something around I couldn't identify. Maybe part of a nest.

I'm so sick of the heat. It was supposed to start cooling down but it was over 100 Fahrenheit again. I had to finally do my laundry anyway in the laundry room like a furnace. Afterwards, I went out to lunch to enjoy a blessed hour or two of air conditioning. I took my lap top but forgot to bring any of the files I need and I need to write two essays to-day. I may go out again even though it's cooled to 90 here.

For my Milton class, the professor asks his students to make weekly blog entries on a school site about the weekend's reading. Because the heat is killing my verve fast, I'm just going to copy and paste here what I wrote about Milton to-day, specifically on the subject of Milton's God as portrayed in Paradise Lost.

. . .

My favourite portrayal of the Christian God in cinema of the past fifty years is in Raiders of the Lost Ark. One of the reasons it remains the best Indiana Jones film is that it sets up a dichotomy between the overpowering, deadly force of God and the vulnerability and clumsiness of humanity by contrast. For all the Godly power shown in the film, nowhere is there a hint of conscious benevolence. People usually assume Indy and Marion are saved at the end of the film because they're good people and the Nazis are bad. But what if they were saved just because Indy and Marion shut their eyes and the Nazis didn't? Well, an impatient movie goer might brush this aside and say it works out to be the same thing. Indy and Marion knew to show humility, the Nazis didn't. But if God is all about punishing the evil and saving the good, why didn't he kill the Nazis sooner? A question that leads us to wonder why would God allow the Nazis to exist in real life and even further to question why evil exists.

Actually, I also really like Ralph Richardson's portrayal of God in Time Bandits and it's Richardson's voice I tend to hear when reading God's lines in Paradise Lost. Especially lines like this:

Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell. Not free, what proof could they have givn sincere Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love, Where onely what they needs must do, appeard, Not what they would? what praise could they receive? What pleasure I from such obedience paid

And yet again we have Milton's own opinion on free will, the necessity of knowing evil, similar to his ideas expressed in his masque commonly called Comus and his pamphlet against requiring licensing for publications, Areogitica. One might argue that, if Milton was consciously siding with Satan in the first two books, he's certainly siding with God now. Except Satan points out a problem with this in observing Paradise:

One fatal Tree there stands of Knowledge call'd, Forbidden them to taste: Knowledge forbidd'n? Suspicious, reasonless. Why should thir Lord Envie them that? can it be sin to know, Can it be death? and do they onely stand By Ignorance, is that thir happie state, The proof of thir obedience and thir faith?

If God believes in the importance of knowledge, why would he explicitly forbid it to Adam and Eve? My feeling on this, from Genesis, has always been that God wanted the humans to have something to feel guilty about once they did have knowledge. It makes God more frightening. Sure, an all mighty being is scary enough, but how much scarier is he when you know you've done something he told you not to do on pain of death?

Which leads me to C.S. Lewis and his critical piece Preface to Paradise Lost. "Many of those who say they dislike Milton's God only mean that they dislike God," Lewis says in a line that's also quoted by William Empson in his book Milton's God. And, as Empson points out, this is perfectly true and results from a misconception of the Christian God that suggests to me that very few self-proclaimed Christians have actually read the bible. God's wrath in the bible is pretty horrific. One could debate how much free will meant to God when he killed all the first born in Egypt. Lewis also goes on to say that God's love "by its very nature, includes wrath also." Wrath is a sign of love to Lewis and it goes hand in hand with the majesty of mystery in a line describing God from Paradise Lost praised by Lewis: "Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appeer." Like the "darkness visible" of Hell we see a light that is somehow also darkness. It's no wonder that Lewis chose for his own representation of God in his Narnia books a lion, a creature who inspires awe largely because of its inherent deadliness.

Empson goes even further on the subject of this majesty of deadlines and contradiction, ". . . the poem is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions, which ought to be clear in your mind when you are feeling its power. I think it horrible and wonderful; I regard it as like Aztec or Benin sculpture . . ." Benin sculpture being the sculpture of Vodun. In a somewhat badly written but informative book on the subject called African Vodun by Suzanne Preston Blier, the sculpture of the part of West Africa containing Benin is described, "Features of force, fear, shock, fury, disorder, and deception, in sum, play a critical role in [the effect of the sculpture]. These criteria in turn have a role in effectuating particular types of viewer response--be it of mystification, danger, or awe." This indeed might describe Milton's God.

There's a song by Nick Cave which takes its name from a line in Paradise Lost, Book II, where Belial speaks in fear of God's wrath:

Awak'd should blow them into sevenfold rage And plunge us in the Flames? or from above Should intermitted vengeance Arme again His red right hand to plague us? what if all Her stores were op'n'd, and this Firmament Of Hell should spout her Cataracts of Fire, Impendent horrors, threatning hideous fall One day upon our heads

Nick Cave's "Red Right Hand" evokes a sense of deadly mystery and doom:

Guitars aren't Just for Pete Townshend's Who Anymore

I admit I was on the fence about Twelve and his guitar before but now, egad, they will so keep this version of the opening if they know what's good for them.

It's just the kick in the pants this frankly flaccid version of the theme needed. It recalls what was so instantly great about the theme from the First Doctor's first episode--that repeated riff played on one, solitary electric guitar instead of the over produced orchestra.

As for the episode itself, definitely Toby Whithouse's best written episode to date, even if it was pretty predictable--I know I have a nerve saying that when I made a prediction last week that didn't come true but I think we all knew who was in that stasis pod before it opened.

The plot strongly reminded me of the audio play Flip-Flop which is a more intricate version of the paradox presented in "Before the Flood". But the Doctor presenting it as a sort of ghost story was nice.

The atmosphere is one of the best aspects of this episode, aided by a more reserved, low key tone from Capaldi, reminding me a bit of Sylvester McCoy in his final season. Oh, and "Before the Flood" has easily the best new creature design in years with the Fisher King.

I predict some people will be calling him Vagina Face but really it's a beautiful design, almost Farscape quality.

Just One of Those Angelic Devils

Wouldn't it have been great if Diana Dors had appeared in an Alfred Hitchcock movie? She seems like she would have been perfect--sexy, calculating, and, of course, blonde. She didn't appear in any of his movies but did appear in two episodes of his two anthology television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Neither episode, sadly, was directed by Hitchcock but, while neither episode is a masterpiece, they both have merit.

The first, a thirty minute 1961 episode called "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", is the more interesting. Written by Robert Bloch, the gruesomeness of its featured murder proved too great for the censors and it was not broadcast during the series' initial run. Dors plays an assistant to a magician working at a carnival. A mentally impaired young man she rescues wakes up in their trailer and assumes she's an angel and the magician's the Devil.

It works out to be a fairly unambiguous anti-religious allegory as at first Dors' character is reluctant to accept the young man's vision and then she decides to exploit it. She might have done well remembering the course for those who claim to be God's representatives on Earth doesn't always run smooth. Implicit in the story is a comparison of religion to a magic trick and the wondering trauma the young man experiences seeing Dors getting sawed in half isn't far from a rapturous contemplation of the crucifixion.

The second episode Dors appeared in was two years later, in 1963, "Run for Doom", an hour long story and a pretty standard noir setup--a young man falls in love with a beautiful singer who ends up being in it for his money. Though she does tell him this up front and really no one comes off as a half-way decent person. Except maybe Dors who we at least have some sympathy for when we learn she has had one long term relationship with a physically abusive pianist who takes her back every time she runs off for another short romance. Dors sings twice in the episode, standards "Just One of Those Things" and "How Long has This Been Going On?" thankfully instead of faux-standards written for the episode. It's a rare chance for audiences to see Dors actually was a very good singer:

Twitter Sonnet #798

Hut dominoes demand hybrid respect.
Converging moons in frog sighed bubbles wane.
There's nothing hummingbirds cannot inspect.
Detective Aztec corps examine pain.
Incidental royalty muddles grace.
Sterile blank avalanches broke the glass.
A shadow's footsteps kept no fleshly pace.
So haste's queries return a cooler mass.
Awaiting nothing graphite now repents.
Revelation has come with ink to pens.
A whistling dolphin dream not yet resents.
God found obsidian recycling bins.
A melted red tomato covered us.
Computer dinosaurs awoke in lust.

Identity Scrapes

An avalanche approaches a docile group of lunching tourists. It's controlled, one man assures his family, but terror gradually mounts and he runs away in terror while his wife huddles protectively over their two children in a few seconds that dominates the rest of 2014's Force Majeure (Turist), a good film of quiet, sinister psychology.

It turns out there was no danger. The avalanche stopped before reaching the building, it was only a fog that enveloped the veranda. The family resumes their seats. But there's a wedge now in the minds of the parents and the children they can't explain to themselves. The children sullenly demand to be left alone with their video games back in the hotel room.

More serious, though, is their mother's reaction. Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) seems upset to her husband, Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), when they go skiing the next day but Ebba won't admit to Tomas that she is upset and may not be aware of it herself.

The trouble really gains steam when the couple has dinner with some friends and, at first describing the experience casually, Ebba becomes obsessed with the fact that Tomas claims to have no memory of running away from her and the children.

Does Ebba resent him for being a coward? Is it that he's not who she thought he was? Is he who he thought he was? Their feelings manifest in different ways. Ebba angrily interrogates a friend who is in an open marriage as to how she can engage in such a foolhardy lifestyle as though fidelity has become a principle that Ebba now has to defend to the bitter end. She undresses in the bathroom later and seems to completely ignore her husband's lustful looks and it's clear she's no longer sexually attracted to him.

Director Ruben Ostlund uses a lot of subtle blocking and composition to establish this tense, subtly fractured relationship. I particularly liked another dinner scene where the pair have another friend, Mats (Kristofer Hivju), and his young girlfiend, Fanni (Fanni Metelius), over to their room for dinner. After a few scenes earlier where Ebba and Tomas had agreed to the simple story that there was an avalanche but they ended up coming out of the experience safely, Ebba now seems to overshadow the dinner. Her voice is nervous and she's mostly kept just out of frame during the trivial conversations before taking centre frame with her back to the audience, a dark silhouette dominating the image since the light is in front of her.

She finally breaks down and tells the story again, beginning awkwardly in the middle of another conversation. Again she tells how Tomas ran away and the camera carefully avoids putting Tomas and Ebba in the same frame.

It spends a lot of time on Ebba with the two friends and then cuts to Tomas isolated, and holds on him a long time, cutting to Mats and Fanni and leaving Ebba as a disembodied voice for a while. Then everyone invades Tomas' frame when Ebba shows the footage on Tomas' camera clearly showing he ran away.

Not all of the movie works. A scene where Tomas and Mats go skiing together feels artificial and the final scene doesn't ring true for the characters. But for the most part, this is a very nice, very subtle character film.

Live by the Tights, Die by the Tights

One typical solution to a love triangle in melodrama is to have one point of the triangle die, often heroically. What happens if you apply the same logic to a love octagon? You're going to have a lot of dead, heroic people, as demonstrated in 1966's Black Tight Killers (俺にさわると危ないぜ, literally "The Danger and Touch of Men", a stylish gangster ninja film that falls into an obtrusive pattern that is both disappointing and intriguing.

The film's fabulous poster seems to promise a Japanese version of Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! but the influence is more James Bond as the film follows a male protagonist, Honda (Akira Kobayashi), as he makes his way through night clubs and bizarre, complicated villain lairs. In one scene, a pair of dancers painted gold reminded me of Goldfinger and immediately the scene cut to Honda observing to some other people at his table that the dancers are taking a risk because with their skins fully painted the skin can't breathe, the same thing that killed the victims of Goldfinger (this won't actually kill someone, by the way).

Unlike James Bond, though, Honda is on a mission to save his one true love, a pretty, innocent stewardess named Yuriko (Chieko Matsubara). Both the Black Tight Killers, a gang of ninja women, and a gang of American and Japanese war veterans want her. Why isn't exactly clear, it seems to have something to do with a hidden stash of gold that belonged to her father.

For some reason, the Black Tight Killers treat Honda like their enemy. One of them asks him into bed with her and traps him with what she calls a ninja technique, the "Octopus Pot", apparently using her vagina to hold his penis. As if the Killers' motives weren't ambiguous enough.

Honda escapes by throwing a laughing gas bomb, to make the woman's muscles relax, as he explains to his ninja teacher (Honda is also a ninja) played by none other than Bokuzen Hidari.

In case you were wondering if there's a movie where one of the stars of Seven Samurai discusses the use of a vagina as a ninja weapon, here it is.

After this, Honda runs into other Black Tight Killers one by one, at first as an enemies, then as reluctant allies against the male gang, and then as a pair of tragic lovers as the Black Tight Killer dies in Honda's arms, telling him how glad she is she's met him and what a good guy he is.

There comes a point where it really seemed like Honda ought to have remarked on how odd it was this story kept playing out. I'm not sure if director Yasuharu Hasebe was making a conscious point about formulaic story telling though, especially considering Seijun Suzuki was his mentor, it's certainly possible. Though nothing in the performances indicates this story is meant to be taken ironically, the repetition, and the characters' lack of acknowledgement of it, is hard to ignore.

Like a Seijun Suzuki movie, the film's aesthetics are good, filled with Dutch angles of Go Go dancers, dreamlike, overlaid images, and vivid, Expressionist use of colour.

And Every Cat In Between

How's a gangster supposed to carry out extortion and marriage schemes in a world composed of unpredictable, absurd extremes? Romani, Bulgarians, and Serbians alike swim in a sea of washing machines, buggies, flowers, accordions, shoes, and clutter of infinite variety in 1998's Black Cat, White Cat (Црна мачка, бели мачор), an entertaining slapstick romantic comedy about death and money.

Matko (Bajram Severdzan) and Zare (Florijan Ajdini) are father and son, two Romani earning a meagre living trading goods on the river. Matko has ambitions, though, and seeks to make a fortune through a complex plot involving money borrowed from a gang boss friend of his father's, Grga (Sabri Sulejmani) and a heist for a Serbian gangster named Dadan (Srdan Todorovic).

Dadan likes to sing along with the chorus to a song, "Pit Bull Terrier"--he sings "pit bull" and his ladies sing "terrier" back at him. What this implies, I'm not sure, but he takes a great deal of evident pleasure in it and it somehow seems to reflect the influence he has over these women.

Grga's legs don't work and he spends his time in a combination bed and car, watching Casablanca over and over, speaking along with Bogart's final line about "a beautiful friendship".

Eventually, hijinks and incurred debt compel Matko to marry Zare off to Afrodita (Salija Ibraimova), a.k.a. "Smurfette", Dadan's only sister without any suitors. But Zare's in love with a goony blond Romani named Ida (Branka Katic).

Ida upstages almost everyone else in this movie, Katic's comedic instincts and fearlessly broad performance leaving Zare looking grey and indistinct.

She's part of what makes the movie work which is in its overwhelming sense of meaningless goofiness. In one scene, Zare somehow brings an entire orchestra to visit his grandfather in the hospital, in a later scene, the same orchestra is inexplicably shown tied to a tree, still playing their instruments.

Ida puts Zare through the paces to prove his love and one scene has him swimming across the river carrying a bowl of ice cream for her. They end up making love in a field of sunflowers.

Dadan likes to juggle grenades. A runaway bride finds a hollow, stage prop tree trunk in the woods and uses it to escape, only for Grga's driver to spot a running tree trunk cross the road, dropping shoes.

The movie has a plot and an end but it almost doesn't seem to matter, the chaos of visual creativity dominating the experience.

Twitter Sonnet #797

Remote audiences echo on Mars.
A cellular armour came out too pale.
One finds corp'rate offices next to bars.
The pertinent song hid beneath the whale.
Anita's foot was half the size of Crom.
A fresh grapefruit has bruised the warrior.
We know the Krampus movie cribbed from Brom.
Our Gloomy Sunday's in the carrier.
Dismantled railings littered stairways vast.
Another noodle joined the crowded bowl.
Refracted eyes have gathered nerves long past.
No pen could trace the shyly stepping foal.
Unlistening the lions throw prey out.
A frozen train endlessly turns about.

The Walls of Habit

How thoroughly do preconceptions about race permeate a society? Even a black man in 1960s French Cameroon who considers himself the intellectual equal of his white employers finds his personality has become a latticework of repression in 1988's Chocolat. A quiet, meditative film of well composed long takes, it effectively evokes a sense of a stifling and strange day to day.

Protee (Isaach De Bankole) is a "houseboy", essentially a butler, to the Dalens family. He performs his duties in a cool, detached manner, refraining from engaging even in much banter with his fellow black servants. He does develop a mentor relationship with the little Dalens girl, France (Cecile Ducasse).

Here he teaches her how tasty ants can be on toast.

Against his will, he develops an attraction for Aimee Dalens (Giulia Boschi), the girl's mother. Perhaps the feeling is mutual but her face conveys nothing when he helps tie the back of her dress before she goes to meet and English visitor. But he clearly seems to see another significance to the shared moment.

When a white man who works among black servants named Luc (Jean-Claude Adelin) arrives he begins to upset the boundaries, eating with the servants and discussing Aimee's attraction to Protee which seems to become more evident from Luc discussing it.

Both De Bankole and Boschi give effective, subtle performances. The movie tells its story very simply but manages to speak volumes about the characters with just a few small moments. The movie's framed as a flashback experienced by an older France Dalens (Mireille Perrier) who returns to visit a liberated Cameroon. She finds even her friendship as a child with Protee has not prevented a ghost of the preconceptions of an old social order taking hold in her subconscious.

Looking Before You Eat

Why waste time thinking and researching when fighting a social injustice? Well, one might find oneself beset by the misfortunes graphically enumerated by 2015's The Green Inferno, a work of effective horror and devious pleasure.

Unsurprisingly, this film by Eli Roth, the director of the Hostel movies, has been misinterpreted by its critics. Actually, misinterpreted is too kind as it's clear to me from reading reviews on Rotten Tomatoes that most of its detractors did not see the film or if they did they certainly didn't stay for the end. I was surprised, because of the way this film's talked about, to find this movie is nowhere near as gory as Hostel and certainly not as shocking as Cannibal Holocaust, the mid-80s exploitation film among several to which Roth pays tribute with his film.

Justine (Lorenza Izzo) is the pretty daughter of an attorney for the United Nations. New to college, she becomes used to seeing protesters organising hunger strikes for janitor healthcare and other issues. When she meets the charismatic leader of one group, Alejandro (Ariel Levy), she ends up joining them on a trip to Peru and becoming part of a human wall to block bulldozers in the process of deforesting an area where an uncontacted tribe, the fictional Yawa, dwell. They seem to succeed but as they head home their plane catches fire, crashes, and they're captured by the very tribe they'd been protecting, a tribe that turns out to practice cannibalism.

While the tribe is fictional, it's not outside the realm of possibility for cannibalism to be practised in an isolated tribe in South America. Cannibalism, while relatively rare, is known to have been practised throughout South America and Mesoamerica. More prevalent was human sacrifice and ritual mutilation. The civilisations inhabiting the area, the Chimu and the Inca, were known to carry out human sacrifice. The ironic situation shown in the film, Justine taking up the cause of ridding the world of female genital mutilation only to get caught up in saving a group who carries out the very practice, is certainly plausible. However, critics who insist the film is a dangerous work of anti-indigenous people propaganda miss the film's fundamental statement. This statement became clear to me early on when we see Justine retrieve her necklace from where she keeps it underneath a copy of Moby Dick.

Like Captain Ahab's personal vendetta against the whale having little or nothing to do with the reality of the whale itself, Justine and her fellow activists create a world for themselves that has much more to do with proving themselves to their parents or peers than the real issues at the centre of their endeavours.

The film may be at its best in the first act. It builds tension beautifully as we see Justine go from the safe environment at college slowly into a world more alien to her. We see her and the other activists in an unfamiliar Peruvian city and then on the river in some beautiful location footage with which Roth said he wished to emulate Werner Herzog.

It becomes more and more clear that there are a million tiny details that the students hadn't anticipated about their task and each other--how they'll move their belongings, how they'll relieve themselves once they're on the river, how the politics at work are actually manifesting in the deforestation. Each piece of information seems to raise the tightrope higher.

But their imprisonment by the cannibals is pretty good as well though I found the film's minimal use of nudity a little jarring. One needn't look at many photos of actual tribes in South America before getting used to the fact that everyone walks around wearing little more than thin belts. So the rudimentary speedos and halter tops were a glaring anachronism though I can understand the pressures Roth might have been under to keep the film at an R rating.

It's a little funny seeing critics holding up Cannibal Holocaust vaguely as a high water mark and discussing whether or not Roth rises to the occasion. In The Green Inferno you will not see, as you will in Cannibal Holocaust, small animals actually being killed or torn apart, and no sexual assault aside from a priestess inspecting the female captives to determine virginity. Even compared to Roth's previous films The Green Inferno is pretty mild. Maybe he figured he'd have a hard enough time getting people to see it with his subject matter.

I won't spoil it but in case you're still wondering the film at the end clearly, very emphatically, comes out as being against deforestation. I thought of a line from Aliens: "You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage."

Soggy Spectres

Capaldi seems much more laid back this season of Doctor Who so far., despite the funny bit with Clara's cue cards. I think maybe they realised trying to channel Malcolm Tucker wasn't working. I certainly agree, as much as I love Malcolm Tucker, but Capaldi is capable of more than that.

Under the Lake is exactly the sort of story I was hoping for with all the two parters this season--It opens with the new characters, establishing the new situation and some of the new ground elements of this story and then the Doctor comes in, rather than it being about the Doctor. That was part of the magic of the old series--the Doctor was the wandering X factor.

Definitely some nice atmosphere in the underwater base and I like having a ghost story set there. Toby Whithouse's dialogue is a little clunkier than Moffat's and he's not quite as inventive. But I like the sense of unravelling a mystery.

I'm hesitatnt to say I can predict what's going to happen because I'm usually wrong whenever I voice my predictions out loud. I feel pretty sure things will get sorted when the deaf woman dies, though. Somehow I love that it's set in a freshwater lake instead of an ocean. That the Doctor is going back to a period before it was a lake gives a nice sense of scope.

We Owe It All to Coordinated Song

Maybe all a school of problem boys needs is one very special music teacher to inspire them. Probably not, but it's the idea behind 2004's The Chorus (Les Choristes), a completely unadventurous, by the numbers film of the inspirational teacher genre that nonetheless manages some genuine charm.

Clement Mathieu (Gerard Jugnot) accepts a position as the new prefect at a boarding school for delinquent boys in 1949. He finds them under the cruel stewardship of Headmaster Rachin (Francois Berleand) who responds to pranks and tardiness with physical and psychological abuse.

But Clement has a secret love for music the boys soon discover when one of them steals the contents of his satchel--music sheets. He's a frustrated composer. With really astonishing speed, Clement turns the boys into a chorus and trains their voices, apparently having won their goodwill by consistently not ratting students out to Rachin. Only one student resists Clement's instruction, Pierre (Jean-Baptiste Maunier), who also, of course, happens to be a prodigy soloist singer.

It's only a matter of time before Clement has gently coaxed the boy around his distrust of the world that's never understood or been as kind as it ought to be to him and like gooey dough carefully baked in an oven, the movie rises to become as soft, warm, and unremarkable as fresh bread.

Sometimes it is nice to have a sweet little unambitious thing, though, so if you've had a couple glasses of wine and don't feel like getting up from the couch, this movie may assist you in feeling a little tender.

Twitter Sonnet #796

Brains pulverised are then humbled by slime.
A tick on an umbrella border scrapes
Nominal metronome visions of time.
On ears the cricket walks a god's sleep-scapes.
A muffin outpost wells with tartan cloth.
Damask print photographs occupy blue.
Erroneous the evil mountain's moth
Descends to wake the saucer ray anew.
Reflected rain burns up the glass in white.
A blocked ice floe of fingernails applauds.
Choked cotton dreams reveal a mindless spite.
The ants and chickadees fall under odds.
Transparent beds show waiting honey cells.
The air conditioned wind percussed the bells.

Versus Itself

People often mistake strength for control and control for wisdom. It's debatable whether or not there are any heroes in 1956's Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, an effective, morally provocative Science Fiction film.

So many alien invasion films of the 50s made the mistake of over explaining things, firmly pinning the humans and aliens into broad roles. Earth vs. the Flying Saucers steps back and lets us make our own judgements. The humans fire first, unprovoked, shooting dead the first alien to step out of a ship.

Saucers had been appearing for some time, we learn. Not attacking, just flying through Earth skies. When finally one ship lands near a rocket testing facility, they retaliate after being attacked by wreaking massive destruction. It turns out later they'd sent a message ahead that they wished for a peaceful meeting to Dr. Russell Marvin (Hugh Marlowe), the man in charge of some new rocket technologies, but he'd failed to decipher or even recognise the message in time.

The aliens claim to be refugees from a destroyed world and do seem intent on subjugating the human race. The movie doesn't attempt to state what is the right or wrong thing to do, becoming more a straight forward procedural as Dr. Marvin and military officials decide how to combat the invasion. Leaving these questions hanging not only heightens the tension, something that always happens when you're not sure if the protagonists bear a guilt for which they might justly be punished, it also conveys a very human messiness in the behaviour of both the humans and the aliens, who after all are essentially allegorical humans. Very rarely is human wisdom equal to the human capacity for destruction.