Pictures Made Without Intent

Under the Hays Code, movies couldn't directly reference sex, so of course the topic of rape wasn't dealt with directly, either. As the Hays Code lost potency before it was abolished altogether, a couple films were made that finally addressed the topic, the second being 1950's Outrage. The first was 1948's Johnny Belinda which is a better film but Outrage was one of the very few Hollywood films directed by a woman, Ida Lupino. While not as good as her later films The Hitch-hiker and The Bigamist, Outrage effectively portrays some aspects of what a woman went through after becoming the victim of sexual assault in the mid-twentieth century U.S.

Ann (Mala Powers) and her fiancé finally decide to get married as the film opens. It takes some doing for Ann to convince her boyfriend to ask her parents' permission but, in a slightly awkward dinner scene, Ann's father finally agrees and the two young people are excited to announce their engagement the next day.

The sequence in which Ann is raped is oddly stylised compared to the rest of the film's relative realism. She finds herself running through peculiarly quiet and empty streets filled with long Expressionist shadows. The rapist is the owner of a food cart Ann goes to for lunch by her work but she doesn't recognise him. He stalks her wearing a hat and leather coat.

The soundstages and lighting give it a dreamlike quality. But more realistic is the portrayal of the aftermath in Ann's social groups. It's easy to see why Lupino began the film by showing Ann as part of a traditional and normal relationship and engagement with all the undercurrents of male possession--her father transferring the rights to Ann to her fiancé. As Ann suffers from the trauma of her experience, she's acutely aware that whatever the two men say they'll never be able to look at her the same way again. So she runs away from home and, despite the fact that she's an adult, it's treated as criminal with police pursuing her at her parents' request. One might think they're searching for her under the belief that she's been kidnapped but there's still the impression of Ann being pursued and oppressed by an identity for her existing in the minds of everyone around her.

She starts a new life under a new name in another town after Reverend Bruce Ferguson (Tod Andrews) discovers her unconscious on a roadside. She'd twisted her ankle and had passed out from exhaustion. Most of the film takes place in this new town where Bruce slowly starts to fall in love with her and she gets a job packing fruit. The narrative is pointedly similar to a noir like Out of the Past--Ann, like a criminal, has something about herself she feels necessary to conceal and is fearful of the inevitable reactions when people find out. The climax of the film may both be over the top but it also makes clear the fundamental presumptions even the most well-meaning characters have about the submission women owe to men.

Dalek Tolerance

As we learned in last season's episode "The Witch's Familiar", the Daleks aren't on intimate terms with the concept of mercy. This was covered in the 2009 Seventh Doctor audio play Enemy of the Daleks, a nice Dalek story. Not among the best but far from the worst.

The Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and his companions Ace (Sophie Aldred) and Hex (Philip Olivier) arrive on a world where a small research station is hosting a military force who were on the run from the Daleks. The station has a lab where a scientist named Toshio Shimura (Eiji Kusuhara) is developing something that will have far reaching consequences in this particular Dalek war. This is the first Japanese character I can remember on Doctor Who, television or audio (not counting spin-offs), and his name seems to be a reference to Takashi Shimura. The actor associated with some of Kurosawa's best films, I wonder if the reference here is actually to the character Shimura played in Ishiro Honda's Gojira/Godzilla.

This is one of those cases where the Doctor seems to know a lot more than he's letting on to the audience and his companions. He even tells his companions to stay in the TARDIS for once, though of course they don't. He tells them they've arrived at the time and place of one of the war's greatest atrocities and he can't prevent it.

The story deals with the nature of mercy and the potential benefits of granting it or withholding it. One scene has a formerly uncompromising military commander contemplate granting mercy to a wounded Dalek with the ironic fact that she doesn't know the Dalek actually wants to be killed. This is clever though it sidetracks the story a little from actually exploring mercy as a virtue in a substantial way. Though, anyway, this is ground thoroughly covered lately on the television series.

How to Live

When I was in high school, I mostly listened to movie soundtracks. So I discovered Leonard Cohen through the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, a movie about America's obsession with tabloid celebrity turning into reverence for criminality. It's not a perfect movie but that idea certainly remains relevant.

Since then, I've gotten several Leonard Cohen albums and become a fan of this extraordinarily talented and prolific poet and musician who died a few days ago. From the gentle, plaintive melancholy of his earlier, folkish music to his later jazzier, stranger ruminations on sex, beauty, and slow burn despair.

I was surprised to learn he had such a long and established career before his voice became that striking, deep growl I first heard in Natural Born Killers. I knew "Famous Blue Raincoat" from the cover by Tori Amos--and, like Tom Waits, Cohen is a frequently covered artist whose songs sometimes become much better known through their covers.

There are a lot of ways Cohen is appropriate for these days after the U.S. election. Not only for the eloquence with which he expressed helplessness and sorrow but for his true and unwavering faith in beauty and (often physical) love. It is important to remember now how these two perspectives can coexist in one mind.

When I first began to realise Trump's win was going to happen late Tuesday night, early Wednesday morning, I think I shut down emotionally a little bit. The implications are so horrible they can't be taken in one moment or maybe even one day. Some internal mechanism has shut a valve and opens and closes as it cautiously lets one feeling in after another.

The clip I want to leave you with to-day has nothing to do with Leonard Cohen, but something I think of when I think about how to confront this kind of despair. This is from Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru:

Birthday Scene from Ikiru by setsuled

Twitter Sonnet #931

The smells of streets emerge from curtained plays.
A metal wheel is digging through the earth.
The buried temple holds our restless days.
A deal imposed on shades devalues worth.
A purple cord connects the moon to scars.
On every side, the sand is slipping souls.
Too quick, the thoughts resolve to hush the tars.
The deck is slick and hid by smoke from coals.
As plain as rings engraved on masts by blade.
As stars like slugs arrange the moving sky.
A copy sun removes the body's shade.
A horseshoe sets the terms our luck can try.
A bowl prevents the fish from swimming straight.
The vista turns a scalding, pressing hate.

Meanwhile on Krull

Cinematography isn't the only good thing about 1983's Krull but it is by far the best thing about the film. The real star of the film is cinematographer Peter Suschitzky and his expertly balanced colours in smooth shadows. The visual effects are tolerable, the performances are adequate, the story is obviously a deliberate attempt at minimalist fantasy that works out to be accidentally insubstantial. But, egad, is it pretty.

I could see the influence of Star Wars and The Hidden Fortress and, maybe more than anything else, the 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad. Like that film, it has a king and princess who fall in love at first sight and have very few personality traits, the film involves the king's quest to save the princess, there's a scene where a supporting hero faces a giant spider on a huge web, and there's a scene involving a flying horse.

While I think the makers of The Thief of Bagdad did keep character complexity to a minimum on purpose, the characters still had more dimension than the two in Krull. In The Thief of Bagdad, Ahmad is a naive ruler whose overthrow is the beginning of a story that teaches him humility and empathy to temper his rashness. The princess is simpler--she's lonely and is charmed by Ahmad. Her opening song, the charm of the scenes she's in, and the momentum of the story make her work.

Krull doesn't even give its protagonists that much; Colwyn (Ken Marshall) and Lyssa (Lysette Anthony) meet at the beginning of the film for a marriage arranged by their families to unite two kingdoms. They barely have a conversation before the Slayers, an army of powerful aliens, show up, kidnap Lyssa, and kill everyone but Colwyn who's knocked out and somehow wakes up with barely a scratch.

He finds the Old One, played by former David Lynch regular Freddie Jones, is there when he wakes. The Old One is very much the film's Obi-Wan and he takes Colwyn to find the Glaive, this film's version of the lightsabre.

The Old One tells Colwyn not to use it until he really, really needs it but doesn't explain why. On their quest, they meet men who join them until they have a big, proper Dungeons and Dragons adventuring party. Even the comic relief, a magician called Ergo the Magnificent (David Battley), contributes to the film's visual power, his red pantaloons breaking up the general black, white, and green in the scene where he's introduced.

It's the Old One who faces the spider in what also turns out to be the film's most interesting moment of storytelling. At the centre of the web is a sorceress called The Widow of the Web (Francesca Annis). Her real name is also Lyssa, like the princess, and we learn that she and the Old One also used to be lovers. To escape the spider, she gives him the sand from her hour glass which protects him from the spider while it pours from his hand but will kill him when it runs out. The filmmakers are saying something about love and the importance of living life while you can, though I think what they're saying is simply, "Love is good and live life while you can."

Aside from telling us how great and wonderful marriage is in the climax, the only other prominent theme is fate, mainly manifested in an eerie cyclops character (Bernard Bresslaw) who's known the day of his death all his life.

Although the princess isn't developed even slightly as a character, her scenes where she wanders the evil castle and the beast tries to seduce her are among the film's most visually impressive.

A lot of the place looks like seashells with claws. Certainly it all looks very organic and perhaps there's something in it about a youthful anxiety about sex.

The film has Liam Neeson in a small role and a score by James Horner who, even for a composer who was known for borrowing from himself, borrows with surprising impunity from his own score for Star Trek II. Nothing is quite as amazing in this film as its photography.

Blinded and Breaking Down the Temple

So how did this happen? Instinctively I go to news sites and shows to hear polls and opinions but that seems especially pointless now when two days ago everyone but the nuttiest right wing fringe thought Clinton was going to win by a great margin. There was even speculation that traditionally red states would go to her. Well, one prominent person on the left did predict exactly how this would go--Michael Moore.

Moore called Michigan and Wisconsin the U.S. "Brexit States" which is exactly what they turned out to be. Moore calls Trump a con man and that's exactly what he is but he isn't a good enough con man to have succeeded without this anger and disaffection already in place. Yet it was by no means a landslide for Trump--Clinton even held a tiny lead in the popular vote. The bitter truth us Clinton supporters have to face now is that, if Bernie Sanders had been the nominee, he would have won this election. He would have carried every state Clinton carried and he would have tipped the scale in Michigan and Wisconsin, I have no doubt. But would Sanders have gotten anywhere working with a Republican congress? Probably not, but Clinton, known for being able to effectively compromise--and even boasting the public support of prominent Republicans--could have. Sanders was the candidate we needed and Clinton was the president we needed.

We are in uncharted waters. The closest analogy I can think of is Ronald Reagan winning in part by appealing to Sagebrush Rebels. Reagan was an actor and, arguably, that's what Trump is since his whole career has been basically about promoting his personality. At least Reagan had plenty of political experience and he didn't have the heaps and heaps of scandal that surround Trump. So many things that conventional wisdom told us Trump was a no-go--the recording where he bragged about sexual assault, the time he bragged about dodging taxes, his constant, easily proven lying.

So the voters rejected Clinton, a candidate who was pronounced innocent more than once after excessive investigations, and chose a candidate who directly bragged about being corrupt. Who said it was smart to dodge taxes and exploit his employees. On the one hand, this doesn't make sense. On the other . . . I would here like to blame a weakening education system, particularly in the humanities. Trump's corruption was more acceptable to people because he was straightforward about it. That's charming, that's the charming rogue that always wins in people's favourite stories.

I think, as artists, we have an imperative now. I want to give you a prompt. Let's have no more Ramsay Boltons. No more Negans. No more villains who magically win just by being ruthless, no villains whose victories come just by sheer audacity. Or if they do, show the circumstances that improbably brought this about. More than anything, we need to show why ruthlessness is foolish and destructive. Because too many people have forgotten.

Twitter Sonnet #930

A challenge made without intent was met.
The quiet field was took by floating weeds.
The brook to stream beside proposed a bet:
A screaming bat outweighs the stomach's needs.
Repulsive voices blend in echoes canned.
A fire burns like water seeped in stone.
The veins for pale and blinded ancient man.
By falling night reduced to rag and bone.
A stumbling sleeper wants the light of dawn.
A circling thought awaits the single word.
A doorway pain awaits the asphalt pawn.
Behind the voices strained a song was heard.
The sounds become a soured paean tape.
A garbled dawn records a dusk landscape.

The Thin Hair

I took this picture at the mall parking garage a few days ago. I thought it was funny at the time, it's taking on a different significance to-night. I thought this election would be finished hours ago, I guess most people did. I'm glued to CNN listening to John King chatter, rarely taking a breath, talking about Michigan and Wisconsin and all the crucial areas that still haven't reported.

It's such an ominous feeling to-night. I have chills. And I can believe it's happening. Michael Moore predicted Trump would win a while ago and he hasn't changed his prediction. We all keep looking at polls and probability percentages, somehow forgetting how none of these predictions have held up in the primaries.

Previous Republican presidents and candidates have rejected Trump. George W. Bush didn't even vote for Trump. Clinton has the support of the Democrats. Overwhelming evidence of Trump's incompetence has been exhaustively reported on. There seems to be a truly extraordinary, massive cultural divide. Is it really Clinton's e-mails that turned them against her? No, that might be used as an excuse. But it's not enough. This is something that's going to need to be examined carefully. Right now I've just got a very bad, sinking feeling.

Does Daryl See Five Lights or Four?

So on top of everything else, Daryl Dixon is an adulterer! On last night's new episode of The Walking Dead, Negan and his men sought to expose the sinful young man to be shamed by one and all by marking him with the symbol of his sinful deed! Well, not really, the A refers to something else, but last night's Walking Dead did feature Negan's attempt to humble Daryl through physical and psychological torture in another forty two minute episode with about as much story as would properly fill a twenty minute episode. It had its good points, but Negan becomes an even weaker character and plot device the more time we spend with him.

The episode begins with a pretty good looking sandwich. The montage showing how each ingredient was taken from people Negan's bullied into working for him was a nice way of showing the way the system works under him.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Still, it could use some cheese. Where are the cows, have they all become zombie food? Is everyone calcium deficient? How is Daryl maintaining his muscle mass? Well, I guess there are some questions we're not meant to ask. Like, why do people really seem to like Negan?

How has this swaggering asshole with a baseball bat not been shot by one of his own men? The episode reveals how Dwight has essentially been extorted into serving Negan but the show has yet to establish why other characters seem to worship him so much. It could simply be that Jeffrey Dean Morgan's charm is lost on me. I can't forget seeing him on the Watchmen panel at Comic Con and hearing him joke about the rape scene in that movie, but whatever kind of guy he may be in his personal life, I find his mugging and scenery chewing pretty broad and unimpressive. I suppose a parallel could be drawn to Donald Trump whose success also doesn't make much sense. I have to admit, though, despite the fact that Trump continually says stupid things, clearly has no idea how to do the job he's running for, and rashly sews hatred, he does have that plain speaking, common fellow appeal. That's how he gets away with blatantly lying constantly, how he can say he never called climate change a hoax and even though people instantly show evidence he did, no-one is swayed. Trump gives the impression of being this guy who pulls you into the back room of a casino to share this secret with just you about how he's rigged all the games. Negan's manner doesn't invite any kind of rapport. No-one seems to be friendly with him. This is one of the ways the Governor was actually a more effective villain. Though he went over the top before long, the show at least spent time early on to show how David Morrissey with his goofy Elvis Presley accent was a buddy patriarch.

Norman Reedus, though, proves again how much he can do with very little. The new episode more or less revolves around him and Dwight and yet Daryl says almost nothing, communicating much with his silence and facial expressions. Though I wished he'd started hallucinating like he did in season two and maybe we'd get a cameo by Michael Rooker taunting him as Merle. It's been too long since Daryl made a necklace of ears.

The cloying loud music Daryl's forced to listen to every day, the Roy Orbison song notwithstanding, gives a pretty good idea of how horrible it is to be in his place. Still, the episode doesn't quite stack up to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Chain of Command" to show how a torturer might reorganise a victim's psychology.

Broken Brakes and the Hell Downhill

What happens to the femme fatale who knows she's a femme fatale? Otto Preminger's extraordinary 1953 film Angel Face is a film noir that, with fascinating brilliance, weaves a moral knot to challenge the cultural conscience in large part by subverting or extending expectations of the typical noir story.

Jean Simmons stars as Diane, the nineteen year old daughter of a writer played by Herbert Marshall. Marshall and Simmons, both English actors, play English characters here--Marshall's character had recently married the wealthy American Catherine (Barbara O'Neil) who supports the whole family. In the film's opening scene, paramedics arrive at their large Beverly Hills home where Catherine is unconscious from gas poisoning from a possibly sabotaged fireplace.

We learn later that, after the death of Diane's mother, Diane had become devoted to her father and became fiercely jealous of her stepmother. Since Catherine's wealth would go to Diane's father if she died, it's not hard to see right through Diane to her motives. It's not hard for us and it's not hard for the other characters, particularly Frank, played by the film's top billed actor, Robert Mitchum.

The biggest star in the film at the time of its release, Mitchum's character is fascinatingly sidelined at first. He's just one of the paramedics, he's not even framed in shot like the protagonist, the story doesn't seem to be from his perspective. If he weren't Robert Mitchum, the first viewing audience would have no idea he's important until after he comes downstairs from Catherine's room and spots Diane hysterically crying.

He coolly slaps her, explaining that's what it says to do in the manual for a case of hysteria. On the one hand, this was actually the conventional wisdom at the time for responding to someone who seems to violently be losing emotional control. On the other, the fascination Diane seems to feel for Frank after he slaps her seems far from innocent. Does she see someone whom she could manipulate into killing a woman like her stepmother? Maybe.

Except no-one falls for any of Diane's attempts at manipulation. Not Frank, not Frank's girlfriend Mary (Mona Freeman) whom Diane arranges a meeting with to apologise to for keeping Frank the night before, telling her how innocent it was. Of course Diane's real purpose is to inform Mary as to what Frank was doing and whom he was seeing, which Mary immediately calls her on. Mary and Frank have a pretty casual relationship and much more adult than young Diane, who's never even had alcohol, can know anything about. This doesn't stop Frank from sleeping with Diane--something that's implied as much as a movie can imply in 1953.

Frank is clearly older but Diane is past the age of consent and, anyway, it would have looked pretty normal for a man Frank's age to be with a girl Diane's age. But the film does present a clear issue of disparity in maturity. Diane's obsessive manipulations and even her desire to murder her stepmother look like dramatic behaviour of a teenager while few people come off as more adult than cool, worldly Robert Mitchum. Beyond some casual sex, he's not very interested in her but, he adds gently when she asks if he loves her, "I guess it's a kind of love."

But the really amazing thing that happens halfway through the film is that Diane does mature a bit. Unfortunately it comes after an impressively convincing murder sequence. Diane's lawyer, who's more focused on clearing her of all charges, is less interested in whether or not she's guilty.

In the last act of the film, which is told almost entirely from Diane's point of view, the audience is given the task of wondering if she deserves to live or not--as she wonders the same thing. Is she really the same person who committed murder? Does that matter, especially since the law, which in movies at this point was supposed to stand in for true moral authority, apparently says she doesn't deserve to be punished? And even if she's not the person she was, she has to live with what she did. Simmons gives a very good performance and even better is Preminger's direction. He follows her ruminating alone in the mansion with noir shadows and uses a restrained touch as evidence for one thing or another is presented.

Of All the Doctors and All the Games, He had to Pick . . .

The First Doctor hinted he'd encounter the Celestial Toymaker again and, in his Seventh incarnation, he finally did, in the 2009 audio play The Magic Mousetrap. Unfortunately not played by Michael Gough, who'd retired from acting by that point, the Toymaker is instead played by David Bailie, but it is an entertaining story.

Of all the other incarnations of the Doctor, the Seventh (Sylvester McCoy) seems the most appropriate, the Doctor known for being the master game player who's always one step ahead of everyone else. Seven has been tied to chess more than once, most visibly in the television story The Curse of Fenric and so he encounters chess again, now in the Toymaker's realm. But the Doctor doesn't exactly remember who he is--I say doesn't exactly because he references having his memory wiped in other adventures and says he's used to it now.

His companions, Ace (Sophie Aldred) and Hex (Philip Olivier), are separated from the Doctor playing their own games, just like Steven and Dodo in the 1966 television serial. Ace and Hex haven't lost their memories and seem to be part of a plot, posing as different people in the Doctor's memory wiped life. They reference the fact that Seven is usually the one playing the overarching game and now the tables are turned. Well, they would be unwise to underestimate Seven even when he's not himself.

The story seems to be set in Sweden in the 20s in a sanatorium in which the Doctor is a patient. Sylvester McCoy is very funny in some dialogue where he expresses some confusion at calling himself "Doctor" and his doctor "Doctor". He feels his way through to his own identity by doing some funny impressions, for each one saying, "I don't think I'm the sort of person who says . . ."

Another patient in the asylum is Lola Luna (Joan Walker) who constantly makes references to Marlene Dietrich and even performs one of her Dietrich's songs at the end, doing a pretty fair rendition.

Twitter Sonnet #929

A wig approached a warg inclined to bald.
Responses strode against the blankest line.
A fire cooled by cracking cups can scald.
Endangered beverage peels the callow lime.
Tomato tanks partook in tactics red.
A planet crazed for summer heat's too much.
A fear affixed to wings is widely read.
A basket's picnic's not iron as such.
Reverse returns the smartly dress to Earth.
The caterpillar runway lights the way.
A cargo came forgotten, crucial berth.
A surplus wheel could ask but rarely say.
A mirrored chess redoubles bets in space.
There's many games with secret hex or ace.

A Miyu Moment

We all know by now vampires are our friends, right? Well, it used to be a new idea and one of my favourite examples of vampire hero fiction is the four episode, 1988 OVA series Vampire Princess Miyu about a little vampire girl and her companion, Larva, a big voiceless man in a mask and black robe. The understated S&M quality to their relationship being part of the low key eeriness that makes this show so effective.

Mind you, I'm not talking about the 1997 anime series which was made by a different studio, with a different voice cast, and is little more than a formulaic shojo series. The 1988 OVA was pretty low budget, the characters don't seem to move that much, but it more than makes up for this in atmosphere.

The story's almost more like a renegade cop story than any kind of vampire story. Himiko Se (Mami Koyama) is a sort of psychic detective through whose point of view most of the OVAs are told. She's a not a terribly interesting character; she's there mainly to be shocked by Miyu (Naoko Watanabe), who turns up giggling mysteriously when Himiko is investigating the supernatural forces surrounding a dying child. We soon learn that Miyu is also focused on protecting humanity but Himiko won't accept the fact that the girl does it while being a vampire and looking wicked.

Attending university classes now where people seem fascinated by the post-modern transition where previously villainous character types were becoming heroes is a slightly strange experience. For kids like me growing up in the 80s, it was just normal. Already a plot like the one in Vampire Princess Miyu might have seemed unremarkable and safe, a very long time before Twilight. But the OVA successfully creates a disturbing atmosphere from its use of weird, echoing, squishing sound effects, its lingering pacing, and the icy soundtrack by Kenji Kawai.

The first episode has some visually boring moments in the "real" world of buildings painted with pastel primary and secondary colours. But otherwise the OVA has some really nice, strange imagery, from the forest of body parts and dead trees that seems to fade in and out of existence to the art nouveau elegance of Larva and Miyu.

With plots that focus on characters voluntarily and involuntarily losing their souls there's a real sense of menace in the mystery surrounding Miyu's motives and the demons around her.

Running the Asylum

In a society with faith in a rhetoric of perfect love and compassion that owes its existence to exploitation and murder, how can you put a schizophrenic in a position of power? Well, of course it fits like a glove for Peter O'Toole in 1972's The Ruling Class, a very funny comedy that effectively twists itself into a nightmare.

When the venerable Earl of Gurney accidentally kills himself in his bedroom wearing a tutu and his military coat, the family is thrown into a crisis because the heir is in a sanatorium. Jack Gurney (O'Toole) thinks he's God.

The god of love, looking very like Jesus Christ, he comfortable recites scripture only occasionally lapsing into nonsense or showtunes. He comes home after his father's death--he'd been in the sanatorium voluntarily. The butler, Tucker (Arthur Lowe), is his only ally at first. Having been left a large some of money by the deceased Earl, Tucker stays on out of loyalty to the family and is very funny in the liberty afforded by his wealth absurdly mixing with the performance of his duties. At one point he announces Jack's arrival at the house by breaking a large vase.

Arrayed against Jack are Sir Charles (William Mervyn), his wife, Lady Claire (Coral Browne), their son, Dinsdale (James Villiers), and a Bishop played by Alastair Sim, who as usual gets high billing (second only to O'Toole) despite appearing in a relatively small percentage of the film. Well, his role is crucial--among other things he marries Jack to Grace (Carolyn Seymour), actually Sir Charles' mistress, who's talked by him into marrying Jack. The idea is for her to have Jack's child, a male heir who can take the estate--or his appointed guardian can--while Jack is committed.

Unfortunately for the plotters, Grace, along with everyone else, is charmed by Jack whose gentleness and unabashed displays of affection do seem like they couldn't fail to be endearing coming from someone with the perpetual air of vulnerability and earnestness like O'Toole. Eventually, it's Sir Charles against everyone else. Jack's psychiatrist, Dr. Herder (Michael Bryant), in an effort to help Jack tries to shock him into sanity with an extraordinary scene that shifts the film into horror. He brings in another patient, McKyle (Nigel Green), who also thinks he's God, but he thinks he's the wrathful God from Genesis or Kings. Jack's lamblike Jesus version is born down on by the raging man who can somehow shoot electricity by his hands and Jack's placid endurance becomes further and further strained and breaks entirely when Dr. Herder mentions witnessing real life massacres that seem to imply the absence of a benevolent god. In the end, Jack finally consents to being called Jack. But unfortunately, it's not the Jack everyone's thinking of, but another Jack, a certain infamous Jack known for his horrible crimes in Whitechapel.

There are very good performances in the film. Sim channels the intensely comfortable aristocrat he perfected in so many films, a master of delayed and double takes, who by the end of the film is still asking why the late earl had been wearing a tutu. O'Toole takes the transition from Jesus to Jack the Ripper on a very credible path and the extravagantly grotesque and haunting scene in the House of Lords at the end is amazing. I only wish the film were better shot--the lighting is pretty unimaginative and there are far too many close-ups. But there's a lot to make up for that.

Fashionable Birds

Fashion Valley shopping mall seems to've become the It spot for a variety of birds I don't know the names of. This fellow perched quite coolly on a chair by me last week while I was there for lunch. They're all over the food court all the time, the larger ones seem to live in the palm trees and I could hear one on a table getting responses to his calls from an unseen one in the palm fronds.

Not far away a few days before I saw a crow vainly trying to pick a fight with a hawk who just kept circling serenely. This is the best picture I got:

I suppose it would've been better on a cloudy day for scale. We've been getting clouds here in San Diego now and then. One nice thing about Halloween is temperatures got down to 71 Fahrenheit. I was able to wear my black frock coat. Well, it was still a bit warm for it, maybe, but to-day we're back to summer weather, it was almost 90 on my way home from the trolley station. We San Diegans have to take what we can.

I got no trick or treaters on Monday so now I do got lots of miniature Snickers, Twixts, M&Ms and Kit Kats, all of which I'm happy about, but more than anything I have Starbursts which I was hoping to get rid of. It's not too late, by the way, if you want to trick or treat still, I'll make it worth your while to come to my apartment. At least if you like Starbursts.

Twitter Sonnet #928

The blackened shapes of trees can see a rook.
A ghost commits to mem'ry things he guards.
Collisions sound on pressured hulls to look.
A human soul consigned to numbered cards.
A straw unbent delivers Seven Up.
A caper culminates in callous crepes.
All the doughnuts melt into the cup.
The only song was caught between the tapes.
A foot declines a hansom cab for pies.
Absolved of salt a sample weakens coal.
No cape concerned the necks of sluggish guys.
In flight, the grace of gods begins to bowl.
Rectangular trees o'erlooked the pool.
The fish in squadrons never keep their cool.

The Versatile Chainsaw

Saturday's new Ash vs. Evil Dead was more comedy than horror but I still found the tension about Baal, masquerading using the skin of no-one knew which person in the room, effective enough.

I'd completely forgotten season one had established that Ruby (Lucy Lawless) liked women but her suddenly making out with the female cop probably would have been surprising anyway since they were in the middle of such a perilous situation. But I found myself genuinely intrigued by Baal's taunts and I wondered at their relationship. Joel Tobeck who, plays Baal, is pretty good. He looks like a young Meat Loaf but leaner and meaner.

The funniest moment in the episode was something I suspect was improvised; Ash (Bruce Campbell) walking out of the cell and Linda (Michelle Hurd) accidentally walking into the bars. Mostly the jokes otherwise fell a bit flat on me but seeing blood spray as Ash slowly grinds something with his chainsaw is, oddly, endlessly entertaining.

I don't know when these episodes were shot but probably too long ago for it to be an intentional reference to Donald Trump when the psychotic sheriff (Stephen Lovatt) starts talking about law and order. Or maybe not. Then again, Donald Trump probably wouldn't have married a black woman.