Muscling In On Tokyo

Samuel Fuller is one of the most influential directors of all time but it's strangely difficult to find most of his movies. The Criterion Channel just added one of his more fascinating accomplishments, 1955's House of Bamboo. A disorienting and beautiful film noir purportedly shot entirely in Japan, it stars a surprisingly scruffy Robert Stack as an American searching Tokyo for answers.

In fact, he's from San Diego, just like me, as he reveals in one scene. It makes me want to not shave and to swagger around scowling at everyone. That's what he does, finally tracking down the beautiful wife of a recently deceased gangster.

We meet Mariko (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) in a bathhouse where Stack nearly busts in on her. He does get physical with her when he finally corners her in her home. Later in the film, this is all excused because it was all an elaborate act and Stack's on the side of the law. But what happened, happened, of course. Arguably, it's this kind of movie that Hitchcock's Vertigo was riffing on.

It's Robert Ryan as the head of the local mobsters who's the real star of this movie, giving a terrific performance as always. He has an amazing entrance, too, when Stack is thrown through a paper wall, winding up at Ryan's feet.

As Stack is accepted into the gang, the plot starts to borrow a bit from White Heat. It's a bit disappointing as it comes along with the gang of Americans having very little to do with the local Japanese. They don't even seem to speak Japanese. How have they managed to operate in Tokyo so long?

It's disappointing because the film is in many ways light years ahead of other American films of the period in terms of authenticity. It's not just shot in Tokyo, it really feels like Japan when Robert Stack is roaming the streets, roughing people up.

Fuller and his cinematographer come up with some amazing shots. I really liked the look of a heist at some kind of factory.

For some reason I really like this shot of the gangsters running in front of these nearly blank walls.

Among Ryan's gang are Cameron Mitchell and DeForest Kelley in small but very effective roles.

House of Bamboo is available on The Criterion Channel.

Of Robots and Sex

Last night's new Orville, written by Star Trek: Enterprise and Family Guy writer David A. Goodman, wove together four separate plots into a pretty satisfying piece of television. Maybe the weakest episode this season so far but it was not bad.

The ship hosts a diplomatic party from a fiercely matriarchal culture who expect all men to be treated as slaves. This is as good a premise as any but it ends up going nowhere. A few jokes about how Moclans are the opposite in their impression of the sexes come off a bit awkward coming after "A Tale of Two Topas".

Meanwhile, the crew also encounters a Kaylon capable of emotion. This leads to the inevitable question--should Isaac get an emotional upgrade? Those of us who remember how Data's emotion chip changed the character would probably all say, "No." Fortunately, this subplot's best moments are still about contemplating the nature of emotion, and whether or not Isaac's actions without the modification could be interpreted as emotionally motivated.

Throughout the episode, we see flashbacks to the Kaylon homeworld in ancient times, when a biological species created and owned the Kaylons as servants. Most of these scenes focus on a single family and their casual mistreatment of one Kaylon. I'm not quite sure what physical pain could mean to beings incapable of emotion and the fact that they seek revenge for it seems evidence enough in itself that they in fact do have emotions.

This subplot on The Orville doesn't bother me as much as Disney's attempts to reframe the droids in Star Wars as an enslaved sentient species. But in either case, I still find George Lucas' version more interesting--droids that can't truly think the way sentient beings can.

Finally, there was kind of an amusing romantic subplot between Talla and Lamarr. She keeps injuring him during sex because her species has super strength. And apparently insufficient self control. I wonder why they didn't consider restraints.

The Orville is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere.

Twitter Sonnet #1601

The polka dots were caught disrupting threads.
For style points the casa fell to earth.
With pickled fish the shrimps remade the beds.
A sloshy stomach speaks of human worth.
The swirling stream conceals desired flicks.
You'll never watch the darkness yield a show.
As hours pass, your dinner's bucket kicks.
You wait for films but only dreams will know.
The rapid day decelerates to naught.
The static cake was cooked in velvet night.
The dizzy fish is seldom quickly caught.
And now the storm compels the dancing mite.
Companion pictures suffer same as you.
The final soldier's thirst requires dew.

Ms. Mess

What a mess. And a tragic mess when you consider how charming Ms. Marvel was in its first few episodes. But last night's finale was a meaningless hodgepodge, utterly failing to capitalise on any organic buildup from within the series. It did have a couple of cool moments but mostly it felt like such an incoherent rush to the finish line it hit almost Benioff and Weiss levels.

Most of the series was written and directed by Muslim women but last night's script mysteriously came entirely from white guys with tiny imdb pages. As though someone at Disney panicked and said, "Oh no, we need white guys, any white guys will do!" Story credit goes to Will Dunn, apparently not the same Will Dunn who had a role in the Harry Potter movies, while the teleplay is by Dunn along with A.C. Bradley and Matthew Chauncey. A.C. Bradley wrote one episode of Arrow and he and Chauncey worked on an obscure cgi series called Tales of Arcadia. So in case you were worried about Disney's money, don't worry, they didn't spend very much of it on writers.

And where was series creator Bisha K. Ali? Well, one can hardly blame her for not returning to the finale for a show that by this point bears very little resemblance to the one she created. After only six episodes.

I'll talk about what I liked. I liked when the imam (Laith Nakli) quoted Abraham Lincoln. And I liked how when Kamala was finally referred to by her superhero name, her father (Mohan Kapur) pronounced it Miss Marvel instead of Miz Marvel. I wonder if that was intentional. In any case, I'm glad it was sneaked in. Some people are under the delusion that the "Miz" pronunciation is really widespread, like the people who write English text books here where I work in Japan. Any counter-momentum to that idea in media is nice, especially in media as notoriously biased as Disney's is getting to be.

I also liked some of the action sequence when Kamala "embiggened".

Otherwise it was a mess. One of the cornerstones of the story from the beginning was Kamala's tension with her family but last night it was all gone so the plot could happen. Her parents, who feared for her safety when she wanted to go to Avenger-Con, didn't even ask if she was bulletproof when she revealed herself to be a superhero. Her mother is so fine with it she apparently whipped up a costume in a matter of hours, one a far sight more professional and understated than the Hulk costume Kamala's father was wearing.

As our heroes arrive at the high school, Zoe randomly shows up with some lame excuse about needing to film her TikTok there. It felt like the writers were downright flaunting it, winking at us and saying, "Oh, yeah, we can't write!"

The big action sequence felt peculiarly edited down, too.

The big surprises at the end involved a nonsensical reference to X-Men and an appearance by a famished Brie Larson. No-one's sure if it was Kamala shape-shifting into Captain Marvel or if Captain Marvel actually swapped places with Kamala. I honestly don't care.

A side-quibble: Kamran is told to go to "the harbour". Why not name a specific harbour? Maybe even a specific spot on the harbour ("The system of waterways of the Port of New York and New Jersey forms one of the most intricate natural harbors in the world" - Wikipedia). When did screenwriters get so afraid about being specific in real cities? I was watching Double Indemnity a few weeks ago and it was cool hearing characters refer to specific streets an intersections in L.A. That kind of thing helps create a real sense of location.

Ms. Marvel is available on Disney+.

Only Lalo in the Laundry

It was a good night of television last night with effective new episodes of Better Call Saul and Only Murders in the Building. Only Murders in the Building was easily the stronger of the two, though, with an outstandingly funny episode that finally saw Steve Martin's character reunited with his daughter, Lucy.

She really looks more like a granddaughter, doesn't she? Actress Zoe Colletti was born in 2001, when Steve Martin was 56. I guess it's plausible. But I think the idea here was to make sure she was younger than Selena Gomez (born in 1992) because somewhere, maybe deep in the back of the writers' minds, they would still like to pair Gomez and Martin.

Colletti gives a good performance in any case and she's really cute. The scene where Mabel is startled to find how difficult it is to relate to someone just nine years younger than her was pretty funny.

The episode was written by two writers new to the series, Valentina Garza and Rachel Burger. I hope they write many more.

Last night's Better Call Saul, written by Gordon Smith and directed by Vince Gilligan, was mostly good for what it means for future episodes. Because last night's episode seems to have finally marked the end of the boring Lalo plot. To do it, of course, they had to spend the whole episode on him and, except for the nice moment when Jimmy convinces Lalo to send Kim on the mission to kill Gus, mostly Jimmy and Kim were reduced to just pawns in the Lalo plot. The best part of the episode was the shot of Howard's corpse at the end when we join Mike in reflecting on Howard's sad fate. He may have been a prick but he didn't deserve this. "You've come to a bad end, old man," as Dmitri said in The Brothers Karamazov.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ elsewhere and Better Call Saul is available in multiple places, I watched it on Netflix.

The Carefully Edited Song

The lives of an ordinary family in Okinawa are disrupted by belligerent warmongers in 2003's Song of the Canefields (さときび畑の歌). A somewhat formulaic but in the end emotionally effective piece of very late post-World War II propaganda, I watched this movie with an entire Japanese junior high school yesterday.

A well known comedic actor from Nara, Japan called Sanma Akashiya leads the ensemble cast as the family patriarch, Koichi Hirayama. He's a simple-hearted photographer from Osaka whom everyone adores.

He cautiously but, finally, affectionately accepts his eldest daughter's engagement to a handsome young man. But then war comes and the young man is drafted. It's a terrible and frightening disruption for everyone.

Hirayama's young son, Noburo, is played by an actor who would later become more famous, Ryo Katsuji. He's the only member of the family excited to join the war, and he advocates the cause with all the tenacious fervour of reckless youth. Otherwise, anyone in favour of the war is presented as alien, viewed barking slogans through classroom windows or screaming for subordinates to murder wounded American soldiers on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, the film goes out of its way to present Americans as sympathetic as possible for a group of people who are routinely bombing and shooting at the protagonists and their homes. In one crucial scene, Hirayama responds to his wife's impression of the enemy as brutal killers of women and children by wisely observing that the Americans, too, have wives and children and that their lives are probably much like their own. The worst acts in the film are perpetrated by pro-war Japanese soldiers.

Hirayama is presented as the true heart of Japan that never wanted war while strange and violent forces within the military ruined his life and the lives of other good Japanese citizens.

Obviously Japan was the aggressor in World War II and maybe a movie like this isn't a bad way to introduce Japanese junior high school students to the topic. My critical brain can't help dwelling on all the complexities the film ignores, though, and wondering if seeing a movie like this might not drive the hearts of many viewers in the opposite of the intended direction. This crafted narrative can look a lot like manipulative lies in a different light. Maybe that partly explains the existence of films like Ein no Zero (2013), which actually has a similar plot structure to Song of the Canefields but presents a more positive view of the Japanese military in World War II.

Song of the Canefields is available on YouTube.

Twitter Sonnet #1600

The pictures live in trees and lurid paint.
The island breeze was thick as dancing legs.
An episode of cloud rejects the saint.
A tropic pizza's made of parrot eggs.
The aging angel topped a chip with cheese.
Completed hearts await beyond the steel.
An angry pod would mash the sullen peas.
In making soup we fail to make a meal.
The spy's assassin never thinks of pink.
Magenta thinks exciting pairs approach.
The raft observes a clock above the sink.
That water body drowned the pumpkin coach.
Commercial water spilled in double pails.
With words of love we messaged scary whales.

No Angel Angel

Body switch episodes can be hit or miss but I like "Carpe Noctem", a third season episode of Angel, despite the fact that its body switching isn't exploited as well as it might have been. I like it more for how cosy it is with the show's normal set-up at this point.

Angel gets his body swapped with an old man called Marcus. Marcus has done this multiple times--switching bodies with younger, or apparently younger, men to live a brief, wildly hedonistic life outside his retirement home. He parties so hard, and uses such dangerous magic, the young men are turned into empty puddles of skin.

The two actors don't make any effort to imitate each other, probably for lack of time. Rance Howard, the Marcus body, has slower speech than David Boreanaz regardless of which spirit inhabits him. Boreanaz plays Marcus as a quick witted, sleazy guy. Little time is spent with Angel in Marcus' body, which seems a shame because it might have been interesting to see Angel deal more with the realities of human aging.

But I love Marcus wreaking havoc in Angel's life. His shallowness is amusingly horrible as he has an awkward conversation with Wesley, whom he thinks is attracted to him, before shamelessly exploiting Fred's crush on Angel. At the same time, all of this provides a way for the show to reintroduce us to the familiar characters and establish a sense of the routine in the hotel. Which I really love.

Amy Acker as Fred really shines in this episode, first with her adorable crush on Angel and then when she's absolutely devastated after witnessing him boning Lilah on Wesley's desk.

Angel is available on Hulu and Amazon Prime in the U.S. and Disney+ in other countries.

The Days of Brass and Colour

Yesterday I went to see a performance by the brass band and colour guard from one of the schools I work at. This show was the culmination of months of preparation and practice and they were great.

Part of my job is to walk around the school and visit the clubs to engage students in English conversation. In my first year, I spent almost all my time with the art club but I also made one or two visits to other clubs. I'm not really interested in sports, which is kind of a sore spot because sports are really important in Japan. Especially baseball, which, I can say without exaggeration, is like a religion here. But on days when the art club doesn't meet, I had to visit other clubs and I found myself making repeat visits to the more creatively inclined clubs like the brass band and the colour guard. And then it got so I spent half the week with the art club and half the week with the colour guard.

One of the other English teachers is in charge of the colour guard so it gives me an opportunity to talk to her. But the students themselves are also remarkable. All the colour guard members are girls at this school. They and the girls in art club remind me that not all Japanese women are incredibly uptight. The colour guard girls are always fun to talk to. They like horror movies and dance music. I saw one of them last year posing in the hallway like Madonna in her "Vogue" video. When I asked if she liked Madonna I found out she'd never heard of her. I gave her a note to check out "Vogue" on YouTube--I often recommend English music, movies, and books to students. In this case, her wide eyes and words of thanks the next day told me I'd struck gold. I like to think of myself as a media matchmaker sometimes and it makes me happy when I can pair the right person with the right music or movie.

This girl graduated earlier this year and was serving as an usher for yesterday's show. Watching the students on stage, many of whom were getting ready to move on, it occurred to me I was probably witnessing, for many of them, the single greatest moment of their lives, at least in terms of self-fulfillment. When I watch the colour guard practice, a former student who works at a bakery comes by to help train them. Not that there's anything wrong with working at a bakery, and she shows us items from the latest menu with pride. The bakeries around here are fantastic--despite what you may have heard, the Japanese aren't all about rice. But clearly her centre of pride is associated with the colour guard.

After the performance yesterday, I hung around outside the nearby department store to give any students who wanted it the opportunity to talk to me. A couple girls walked up and one of them showed me a short piece of footage on her phone of a boy playing snare drum. He was wearing a hoodie with the hood covering his face--all of the drummers were for a performance of a Yoasabi song. In the footage, he stopped and pulled back the hood and looked at the audience dramatically. He was the girl's boyfriend. She emphatically said, "He's cool. I love him."

Shinzo Abe and James Caan

After former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shot yesterday in Nara City, he was taken to a hospital near the school I work at. So helicopters were flying about most of the afternoon, adding to a general feeling of gloom and dread. I don't know a lot about Abe but he seemed like a good prime minister. The first thing that comes to mind is him dressing as Mario to announce Tokyo as the location of the ill-fated 2020 Olympics. So he had a sense of humour. He managed to be effectively friendly with other countries while at the same time advocating greater military autonomy for Japan, which I do think is past due.

As this is primarily a movie blog, though, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about James Caan, who also died yesterday.

Most people will remember him from The Godfather and he is great in that movie. But The Godfather is more about Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. The great James Caan movie to see is Michael Mann's 1981 crime film Thief. Caan was front and centre doing what he did best, being a regular, yet remarkably magnetic, tough guy.

He was in a lot of other movies, too, generally in supporting roles as a gangster boss. But before The Godfather, he had the distinction of starring in the legendary Red Line 7000, a racing movie directed by none other than Howard Hawks. And he is a big part of that film's driving energy, in more ways than one.

So long, Jimmy Caan and Shinzo Abe. Hopefully we can keep the casualties down in the coming days.

Twitter Sonnet #1599

The marching bees concealed their wings for shoes.
The free and rubber clenched the nation's feet.
And so detectives look for printed clues.
A million toes accost the fleshy seat.
With spacial arms we hugged the starry dust.
A basket dream apprenticed cloudy nights.
The forest holds a wealth of guilty rust.
The wait was torn before the ticker's rights.
A table set's prepared for seven heads.
Between the castle dust a guard persists.
The shaking ghosts were curled in gauzy beds.
A crimson stamp confirmed what dreams insist.
A tropic dream became a sour storm.
The Devil's giant burger lamp is warm.

A Man's Right Place

Last night's new Orville, "Twice in a Lifetime", had a pretty standard Star Trek time travel premise. But it was very sweet and some of the dialogue was surprisingly engrossing.

The Orville is attacked by the Kaylon again and I realised last night the show has managed to make the Kaylon feel truly threatening. As soon as their ships appeared I honestly felt concerned for the crew.

Our heroes escape by the skin of their teeth but Gordon (Scott Grimes) is thrown 400 years into the past, into our modern day Earth. When Ed (Seth MacFarlane) and Kelly (Adrianne Palicki) manage to get to him, he's been living there for ten years. He has a wife, Laura (Leighton Meester), the woman he met back in the season two episode "Lasting Impressions".

This leads to an argument between Scott, Ed, and Kelly where Ed and Kelly try to convince him to return to his own time while Gordon defends his right to live with his wife and kids. Scott Grimes is amazing in these scenes. Considering the danger posed to the timeline, Ed and Kelly are right that Gordon is being selfish but, still, you feel for the guy.

The Orville is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ in other countries.

A History of Confusion

Last night's new Ms. Marvel bit off way more than it could chew, essentially trying to be Doctor Zhivago in the space of about thirty-five minutes. The resulting blend of political drama, romance, and bildungsroman ended up feeling more like an outline or trailer than a proper story in itself, an all too common problem with Disney+ shows.

The previous episode ended with Kamala, having travelled to the past, finding herself stranded amid a sea of refugees amid the British partition of India and Pakistan in the 1940s. Last night's episode backed up to give us a narration to explain how terrible the British were yet never actually managed to do so. The reality is much too complicated as the British departure occurred during a period of intense turmoil and tensions between Hindu and Muslim groups. We get some hint of this when we see Aisha (Mehwish Hayat) pleading with Hasan (Fawad Khan) to flee anti-Muslim bigots in India for the safety of Pakistan. So it was a choice, not a matter of the British forcing everyone onto trains?

The show starts to really stumble over itself, as though it doesn't quite know what it's passionate about, only knowing that it should be passionate, so we get a moment where Aisha is being chased by a British soldier for reasons that are never made clear. This is especially a problem because she kills him. When one of your heroines kills someone, you need to make it clear why. The moment feels like propaganda with its head cut off.

Then there's a meet-cute between Aisha and Hasan that accelerates quickly into their marriage. Both actors are attractive but come off as way too smarmy. There are too many close-ups and hardly any shots of the actors performing together in frame.

Hasan was also introduced trying to convince people that Gandhi wanted them to fight someone somehow, an especially unfortunate choice since the one thing everyone watching is likely to know about Gandhi is that he advocated methods of passive resistance. If this episode knew what it wanted to say, it would have felt really manipulative.

Finally, like a student cramming the night before the test, our star, Kamala, shows up and Iman Vellani once again seems bored and disengaged. The fairy tale at the train station is rushed through--somehow Kamala immediately identifies Aisha and knows where and when she is. Then she's inexplicably shot back to the present where she can speed through a resolution with her mother (Zenobia Shroff) who has no time to remember how she was afraid of her daughter getting involved in magic and fantasy.

What started as a charming series about a teenager getting superpowers seems to have been hijacked by too many big ideas competing for space. It's a shame because when this show was focused on Iman Vellani's earnest performance it was pretty good.

Ms. Marvel is available on Disney+.

The Last of Bunny

I have to say, compared to other shows I watch these days, I really appreciate how infrequently Only Murders in the Building uses close-ups. Despite the fact that it's a cushy project for big name stars, it actually expects them to perform together in frame. I love it.

Last night's new episode, "The Last Day of Bunny Folger", gives a dramatic rendering of our detectives' reconstruction of the murder victim's last day. It expands the character from the two dimensional joke in the first season to someone with a slightly sad life story.

I don't know if that was really necessary but it was nice.

Cara Delevingne's character is more and more looking like the killer, especially since hers was the only acting credit left to the end credits, likely indicating that the silhouette we see attacking Bunny at the end was in fact her. We never see her face in the episode. And, of course, she makes the most sense at this point since she's an art dealer and Bunny's painting was stolen. It really seems too obvious so I'm hoping it won't be her. Poor Mabel if it is her.

I neglected to say happy Fourth of July yesterday to my American readers. I celebrated on Sunday by watching 1776 again, a musical from 1972 about the founding fathers. In addition to being an American myself, I really am fascinated by the country founded on principles instead of conquest or childish dreams. The more I learn about history, the more remarkable it is.

Sonya recommended 1776 to me fifteen years ago. Why's it so hard to find girls who like movies?

Only Murders in the Building is available on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ elsewhere. 1776 is on Screenpix.

Twitter Sonnet #1598

The basket ride affords the child's view.
His glasses never hid the absent stress.
And now the man amends his path on cue.
A rubber joke became a plastic guess.
Prestigious sand evades the hand of God.
The lonely rock ordains the shade ahead.
The cactus breaks for broken baby's pod.
Attractive brains were sucked beneath the head.
The ghastly fountains framed a dusty road.
From here the road is hid behind the trees.
The sound of trains awoke the deadly toad.
A student sought the lost and absent keys.
The proper frame contained entire forms.
Without a breath the summer steeply warms.

Fires in the Desert

A millionaire with a broken leg is left to die in the desert by his wife and her lover. It all would've worked out so well except they didn't count on one thing--that millionaire is played by Robert Ryan in 1953's Inferno. Ryan busts his way through the desert with a makeshift splint in this terrific man-versus-nature film.

The screenplay by Francis Cockrell and director Roy Ward Baker are good at staying smart and keeping the story rooted in a real sense of the circumstances. When Donald (Ryan) spots a car and unsuccessfully tries to get its attention, I thought, "At least now he knows where the road is." Almost immediately, Ryan had a line almost exactly along those lines. It's that kind of thing that makes you feel you're right there with a character; you're figuring things out together.

Ryan is supposedly playing a spoiled brat but he comes off as way too tough for that. I guess that's a flaw but I'm not complaining.

His crooked wife is played by Rhonda Fleming while her lover is William Lundigan, giving a performance decent enough for an action scene. Fleming is pretty good as someone truly shallow with some hidden depths of evil. She rationalises that leaving Donald is not as bad as actually killing him but Lundigan quite rightly points out that a slow death in the desert is much, much worse than a quick shot to the head. Is she really just a coward or does she actually want him to suffer?

Meanwhile, Robert Ryan lurches across the desert sands, surviving on cactus water, deer, and a thirst for revenge.

Inferno is available on The Criterion Channel as part of their new Film Noir in Colour collection.

Two-ly Murders

The second season of Only Murders in the Building premiered last week with two new episodes. It's good so far and the show feels more relaxed than the first season. New castmembers Amy Schumer, Cara Delevingne, and Shirley MacLaine are effective additions.

Especially MacLaine who, at the age of eighty-eight, still brings an effortlessly magnetic performance. I was actually reminded of her very first role, Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry, which is also a comedy about murder.

Mabel's rapidly established romance with the art dealer played by Cara Delevingne is a very welcome shift from a potential relationship with Oscar, who doesn't even seem to be on the show this season. It seems like the show is already heavily hinting that Delevingne is the killer. I hope not. It would be a bit cliche though I do hope Delevingne gets plenty of juicy material in addition to Selena Gomez's lips.

Amy Schumer has more motives. She wants to buy the podcast, so it would benefit her for the show to have more material, and she has an insane desire to become Jan, the murderer from season one. I suspect we haven't gotten the clues to the real murderer yet, though. Anyway, the show's a lot of fun.

Only Murders in the Building is available on Hulu in the US and Disney+ elsewhere.

That Darned Lich

I stayed up late watching the final two episodes of Stranger Things 4 last night, parts of which I liked very much. I still think it's affected by a philosophical shift and beyond that it has some just good old fashioned bad writing. But the performances were very good as were some of the ideas.

There were a lot of scenes between pairs of characters and my favourite was right at the end, when Hopper is finally reunited with Eleven. David Harbour shows why he's become so beloved and he really sells the line about how he stole Eleven's look. It felt like we finally got Hopper back at that point because the whole Soviet subplot never really gained traction. Trying to tie so many plot threads together, the Duffers established some vague idea of the Demigorgons in the Soviet prison being tied to Vecna but it never really became a solid visceral idea.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Eleven's story may have been the most interesting subplot this season and the Duffers seemed to realise at the end they couldn't make Papa a straightforward heroic character. Still, there's a definite shift from the beginning of the series. Stranger Things' first three seasons were about how monsters are necessary to save the day sometimes. This was a theme that manifested not only in Eleven but in how bully characters like Steve and Billy end up being necessary for the fight against the forces of the Upside Down. Stranger Things 4 retcons Eleven to being just an innocent girl with superpowers and also shifts Billy back into a more purely villainous role. That's the difference made by changes in political influence on American media, I suspect, as narratives moved out of the exciting Walter White/Game of Thrones cutthroat era to the mad scramble for certified moral purity.

Instead of a bully, it's Eddie Munson who sacrifices himself this time--very awkwardly. Eddie's fate was a pretty big blunder on the part of the Duffers as this character, whose charm worked fast and brilliant when he was introduced at the beginning of the season, was let down at the end in every way. It didn't make sense plotwise and it didn't make sense thematically. It wasn't clear why Eddie needed to draw off those bat creatures and the belated attempt to make it look like Eddie was trying to overcome cowardice never caught hold because he never seemed especially cowardly. In fact, as the leader of a group of misfits in high school, he seems downright courageous, which seems like the point the show obviously should have made after he's become a pariah. If he really were a coward, he'd have been trying to distance himself from the Hellfire Club.

I liked Max's storyline but I feel like the Duffers could have pushed it further. I love "Running Up That Hill" but it seems like Max would've been into the whole Hounds of Love album. People used to listen to albums in the '80s, it would've been hard for her to repeat the same song over and over on a cassette tape. Maybe they didn't want to pay more royalties to Kate Bush but, considering how things turned out, I bet she or the label would've let the other songs go cheap, if not totally free.

I thought Will's struggle with his attraction to Mike was handled a little too broadly, especially the moment where he was bawling his eyes out right next to Mike. Did Mike think he was dry heaving or what?

The final battle with Vecna was good but overstuffed with monologues. I liked Eddie playing guitar on the roof and Nancy would've been cool with the shotgun if she'd actually used it at the natural moment instead of waiting for a huge dramatic pause. Also, a headshot was obviously in order.

I kept hoping a romance would start between Nancy and Robin. Maybe next season?

Stranger Things is available on Netflix.

Twitter Sonnet #1597

Disputed hues were left between the greens.
The maiden's name was never really blue.
Deceptive calls were played by many means.
The urgent pins denoted which were true.
The dog was running bills to shame the duck.
Beneath the orphan storm we charged a key.
We made a god with pepper, thyme, and luck.
But lemons lost condemned the liquid tree.
Some pointless bats replaced a swinging club.
Beneath the cherry storm some chickens flew.
A hunting bird resides above the hub.
But feathers fell upon the '80s crew.
Confusing spiders belched a cloud of coal.
The action scenes endorsed the nervous foal.

Intrusive Fire

Governments and revolutionary groups spend a lot of time convincing citizens that the ideological motivations behind war are deeply personal. And yet, it often seems that to the people whose lives are affected by mass armed conflict, such phenomena are invariably, violently alien. Ingmar Bergman's 1968 film Shame (Skammen) presents the lives of a young married couple suddenly caught in the gears of war. Bergman's normally quiet and desolate Faro is quite plausibly transformed into a war ravaged hellscape. Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann find the physical and psychological threads of their existence upended and violated by bombs, soldiers, and officers whose motives seem surreal or arbitrary but always terribly human.

Von Sydow and Ullmann play a couple of musicians, Jan and Eva, who have been exiled from the world of concert symphonies for reasons that are never divulged. They dwell in a poor little home on Bergman's desolate island, growing bored and dissatisfied with each other.

Bergman establishes their relationship very effectively in the first scene as they wake up one morning. Beautiful Eva walks around topless and Jan doesn't seem to care and neither does she. He tells her about a dream he had that brought him to tears and she responds only by coldly asking if he plans to shave to-day.

A friend in town talks about his panic at the idea of being drafted and says he knows no-one will miss him if he dies. Jan and Eva's reactions confirm this is probably true and that they only feel faintly sorry about it. They awkwardly excuse themselves from the house.

Troops move about the streets and crowd the ferries. Jan and Eva run into Bergman regular Gunnar Bjornstand, in this movie a wealthy man to whom they sell fruit. Their acquaintance proves lucky when he manages to save them from execution later in the film. But it comes with a price as human psychology is wedded uneasily to the responsibilities retained by military officers in a conflict.

Paratroopers from the enemy faction force Eva to make statements on camera which are later used for propaganda. Even when it's obviously faked and coerced, it seems interrogators think she ought to be executed anyway. Everyone in a uniform seems dead certain but it's never really clear what's happening or for what reason. All that's clear is that people who used to have lives and dignity are robbed of both as they're hustled en masse into small rooms or confronted by random murder and destruction.

Shame is available on The Criterion Channel.