What if Oscar Wilde saw his play of Salome performed in an English brothel? Ken Russell imagined this scenario for his 1988 film Salome's Last Dance. I enjoyed this film a lot more than Crimes of Passion as Wilde's text compels Russell to slow his pace to something a little more contemplative but it's nonetheless disappointing Russell should try to make camp comedy from Wilde's only non-comedic play. But I can't deny the charms of Imogen Millais-Scott, the young woman who played Salome.
She was almost totally blind when she made the movie, too (her eyesight eventually recovered). It's not hard to see why Russell insisted on her casting even so. Her charming mannerisms, particularly the way she widens her eyes for emphasis, are accompanied by a soft, high pitched voice reminiscent of Glynis Johns. Every time she repeats the line, "Bring me the head of John the Baptist," is delicious.
Of course, Salome is not the first or last young woman who wished to degrade the man to whom she's attracted.
She gets a leg up on Herod, who would dominate her. But this is a tragedy so no-one wins.
It's a tragedy despite Russell's decision to include fart jokes and even a banana peel gag. Or I suppose that's another kind of tragedy. I waited with as much eager anticipation as Herod to see the Dance of the Seven Veils but Russell subverted this by having Salome dance with a man who also strips and editing the sequence so frantically it loses any of the beauty it might have had. I suppose Millais-Scott wasn't much of a dancer and being blind likely hampered her, too. But if Jennifer Beals could have a body double dance for her in Flashdance, Millais-Scott could've had one here.
Many of the costumes are directly modelled on Aubrey Beardsley's famous illustrations for the play. It made me want to see a black and white version in Wilde's original French. Without gags.
I started reading Pauline Kael's I Lost It at the Movies last week, a collection of her reviews and essays from 1954 to 1965. It's giving me a lot of perspective. Most books I've read from that period, books that commentated on contemporary life, had a mostly progressive or liberal perspective while Kael seems to have been much more conservative. Although she praises Marlon Brando and The Wild One, Streetcar Named Desire, and On the Waterfront, she nonetheless decries a general trend of "delinquent" cinema.
The romance of human desperation is ravishing for those who wish to identify with the hero's amoral victory: everything he does is forgivable, his crimes are not crimes at all, because he is so terribly misunderstood. (And who in the audience, what creature that ever lived, felt he was loved enough?) This is the victory that we used to think of as a child's fantasy: now it is morality for nursery school and theater alike.
I wonder what she'd have thought of Joker.
More amusing, and slightly embarrassing, are her comments on how women were increasingly being portrayed, arguing a "Calendar Girl" aesthetic was infiltrating art-house cinema.
This female image is a parody of woman--lascivious face, wet open mouth, gigantic drooping breasts. She has no character, no individuality: she's blonde or brunette or redhead, as one might consume a martini, an old-fashioned, or a gin and tonic.
Now I am told that even the junior-high-school boys of America use photographs like these as pinups, and that this is their idea of the desirable female. I don't believe it. I would guess that they pretend to this ideal because they're afraid they won't be considered manly and sexy if they admit they find this image disgusting.
No, Pauline, they really thought these pinup girls were beautiful, I can guarantee it. And boys feeling disgust? I wonder if she thought bug collecting and the scatological humour of 14 year old boys were but poses. If she wanted boys to be disgusted by images of women, she should have shown them pictures of matrons serving broccoli and asparagus.
I recently reread Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", the essay that introduced the term "male gaze" along with Gaze Theory. I was struck again by what an overrated essay it is, and certainly the concept of "male gaze" is no original thought. Even Pauline Kael, writing fifteen or twenty years earlier, wouldn't have been the first to comment on women in media being depicted so as to gratify male lust. I suppose one key difference between Kael and Mulvey is that Mulvey implies the impulse to degrade women is a genetic trait carried by all men while Kael felt it was societal conditioning. Which makes Mulvey sound like the right-winger and Kael the left-winger.
I would agree that women are portrayed degradingly in a lot of media. I would say men are, too, for the satisfaction of women, though less prevalently. The suffering delinquents in the movies Kael talks about would be an example as would, I'd say, the male figures in the Twilight series. Heterosexual men and women want to see the opposite sex degraded. It gives the viewer a sense of superiority, yes, but I think very often that sense is sought for an impression of safety. When the handsome, wounded boy looks up at his beautiful saviour, she doesn't have to worry about him deceiving her into going to bed with him. That mysterious creature on the other side of daily existence suddenly becomes a known quantity, that attractive shape suddenly becomes more easily obtainable.
Last night, Star Trek: Picard boldly went where we'd had already gone before. And I do mean boldly. It's bold for Star Trek to be so blatantly, panderingly conservative. Though I think it should be remembered that it comes from Paramount, the same studio that produced the smash hit Top Gun Maverick, the movie which miraculously poked some Hollywood heads out of the cloud of self-congratulation to see the massive percentage of audience alienated by the deluge of progressive message cgi spectacles. So as Star Wars celebration concludes with announcements of series and films that I think everyone knows with continue the franchise's downward trajectory, Star Trek took aim at that not so silent majority.
I liked some of it. I liked the idea of the Borg rewriting Picard's DNA and infiltrating the Federation through the transporter buffers. I liked Picard and Crusher's son, Jack, struggling to understand how much of his personality was him, how much was the Borg, and if they can even be separated. But it was certainly odd when he wondered aloud if his lifelong fight against bigotry was a symptom of Borg influence. Maybe it would have been more interesting if that had actually been an established part of his character, but I think it still would have seemed cynically aimed at a certain part of the audience.
As does the fact that the Borg virus only affects young people. It's pretty transparent.
The episode culminates with something we all saw coming but I was still eager to see anyway--the return of the Enterprise-D.
They even resurrected Majel Barrett's voice for the computer. The wife of Gene Roddenberry passed away in 2008 but there's more than enough of her voice on file to deploy now, even more appropriately than James Earl Jones' voice was uploaded for Obi-Wan Kenobi. I can't object to a computer playing a computer.
They even turned on the lights. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy seeing the set again, despite Picard still not sounding much like Picard when he says the thing he missed most was the carpet. In addition to being out of character at any time, it's certainly odd in this moment when this is supposed to be a big desperate endeavour to save the entire fleet from the Borg. Oh, well. I guess I should just shut up and enjoy these morsels graciously delivered to me.
Star Trek: Picard is available on Paramount+.
Twitter Sonnet #1687
'Neath stacks of cans the metal eyes arrange.
A cheap and shiny copse condensed a meal.
It's served on pickled plates, it's passing strange.
It's crooked, lean, and sure a losing deal.
Beyond the swamp a choice hotel resides.
Selective veins enlarge the varied limbs.
Confused the ghosts in actors now confides.
The longer dressed all were heavy hems.
Perspective brought a cheese to normal brunch.
With mammal art we duped the birds to sell.
Again the script returned a healthy lunch.
The waitress rang the discontented bell.
The apron's traded last for sweets and fun.
And Easter night against the morning won.
Last night's Mandalorian could've easily been better but it wasn't so bad. It sort of made good on an interesting premise though, by the end, I felt a little like I was watching Power Rangers. I also think they reused some sets from Obi-Wan Kenobi which made me realise this season of The Mandalorian is at least not as bad as that.
We get a holographic meeting among Imperials and Moff Gideon strides back onto the show. I'm not sure if I've said it before but while I think Giancarlo Esposito is a great actor I think he's totally miscast as a Star Wars villain. The reason he worked so well in Breaking Bad was that he seemed like a normal guy and you only got a hint of the malevolence underneath when his face turned to stone. He's not cut out for grandstanding, delivering deliberately cliche villain dialogue (“We shall be rid of the Mandalorians once and for all!”). He looks like a cosplayer in that armour he wears.
We do get to see the live action Pellaeon, though, surprisingly played by an American actor, Xander Berkeley. Pellaeon was Thrawn's right hand man in the old Expanded Universe, in the Timothy Zahn books beginning with Heir to the Empire in 1991. This gives some credence to the rumour that the Ahsoka series will be at least in part an adaptation of Heir to the Empire, which could explain how Dave Filoni plans to get around the fact that he can't write.
Filoni co-wrote last night's episode with Jon Favreau. After the Imperial conference scene established some Imperial officers as cartoonish villains, we go back to Nevarro where Greef Karga presents Din with some liquor all the way from Coruscant which, judging from the time tables of travel between Coruscant and the Outer Rim established in a Dave Filoni episode earlier in this season, must have endured a voyage of at least an hour to reach Nevarro.
The vast assemblage of Mandalorians finally meet, many of them with hair sticking visibly out of their supposedly vacuum sealed helmets, including Bo-Katan's. The campaign to retake Mandalore from, they think, no-one, begins. It's more of a "rebuild" project. It'd been established before that there were no Mandalorians on Mandalore but almost immediately our heroes meet a whole bunch of them, a big group of Night Owls who ply the landscape on a big, slow moving hovership which is quickly destroyed for being too slow to escape a slow moving kaiju. The dialogue continually sounds off. One Mandalorian spots the monster "on the starboard bow" as though it's perched on the railing. Later, Moff Gideon tells his people to "activate" the TIE Interceptors and Bombers instead of "launch". I wanted to get a shot of them all powering up and then tumbling, pilotless, to the ground.
Although I do think it's better than Obi-Wan Kenobi, Din getting trapped on one side of a door really reminded me of that series. I'm looking forward to hearing Favreau's explanation for why Gideon would want to take Din alive. A trade for Grogu, perhaps? He doesn't actually seem interested in everyone's favourite green Mogwai right now, though (Gremlins creator Joe Dante accused The Mandalorian of ripping off Gizmo).
The best part of the episode once again involved Grogu being cute. Now he's piloting around an assassination droid like Krang from Ninja Turtles. It is cute but once again Grogu's actual maturity level is pretty hazy. He clearly understands "yes" and "no" but why can't he say "yes" and "no"? Well, it's cute.
Paz Vizsla's last stand against the Praetorian guards was pretty cool. A sense of him being a real badass was established when he was able to take down all the Dark Troopers, which made the Praetorians seem even more badass when they took Paz down. Retroactively enhancing the fight with Rey and Kylo in Last Jedi.
Two sisters manage a lavish hotel in the middle of a swamp in 1987's Sister, Sister. To enjoy this movie, it may not be enough to turn off your brain because any part of your nervous system may detect the stupidity of this film. Stephen M. Katz delivers some good cinematography, though, and Jennifer Jason Leigh is good as always though she's basically playing a prettier variation on her Fast Times at Ridgemont High character.
She's the innocent virgin, Lucy, whose extremely sexy wet dream opens the film. A collapsing ceiling while she has sex with a faceless muscular man communicates how frightening orgasms are for her, the only interesting character development in the film.
Her elder sister, Charlotte (Judith Ivey), is overbearingly protective and keeps Lucy medicated with mysterious pills. She's afraid Lucy will lose her virginity to Etienne (Dennis Lipscomb), the handyman who apparently keeps the place running.
Nothing about this palace on the bayou makes any sense but I didn't mind that so much. I can accept a fantasy like that, like soaking in a warm bath with a dozen candles, as Lucy does at one point.
I'm less willing to believe that she'd do this, after spending some lush love-making scenes with Eric Stoltz, while she believes a killer is stalking the halls and/or the swamp.
The film's loaded with red herrings but when the twist comes to reveal the actual killer it relies on totally new, retconned information. The last fifteen minutes of the film, which should be the edge-of-your-seat portion, has about all he excitement of a Pepsi commercial. Jennifer Jason Leigh is really pretty in the film, though.
Sister Sister is somehow on The Criterion Channel.
I ended up watching Double Indemnity last night because I received the new Criterion blu-ray in the mail, a birthday present from my mother (to-day is my birthday). It sure is beautiful now.
I remember the trouble I had getting it on DVD for years. Finally, I bought a Chinese bootleg copy which, as you can imagine, was pretty lousy in picture quality. But I was happy to have something and probably watched it a dozen times. Then Universal finally got around to releasing a special edition DVD which was excellent but can't hold a candle to finally getting a blu-ray.
Nowadays, I tend to watch movies thinking about how easy it would be to show to a Japanese acquaintance. I realised this one would be just about impossible. How could a translation truly do justice to the loop-de-loops of colloquialisms in Raymond Chandler's script? Where to begin with a line like the one where Phyllis offers Walter some tea and he's says that'd be fine unless she has "some beer that's not working." You'd have to be aware of the English oddity, "fix a drink".
The dialogue's just filled with stuff like that which the native speaker is just barely able to keep up to. Obviously it's been talked about a lot and it's obviously more stylised than realistic. But I like how it conveys what Walter is trying to do with Phyllis.
All that patter is covert yet obvious. It's so clever it seems meant to be slightly disorienting. He thinks he's toying with her but the whole time he's just painting a picture for her of an opportunity to find an accomplice in her husband's murder.
It's a terrific film, and shot on film so they can continually release higher definition editions. It's one of the good things in life.
Happy Easter, everyone. It was actually yesterday here in Japan but since practically no-one celebrates it I may as well celebrate it to-day. I wasn't yearning for Easter candy this year. My sweet tooth seems to be at an all time low. I tried having one old fashioned doughnut with my coffee two weeks ago and it felt like eating grass. Which reminds me, yesterday I ate a dandelion. That's kind of Eastery, I guess. Did you know dandelions are edible? I didn't. I'd seen dandelions in a lot of sushi bentos and assumed they were just a garnish before I saw this episode of The History Guy on YouTube:
I guess I should've known from Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine.
I can't say I really enjoyed the flavour but I seem still to have some infantile fun at eating something I'm not supposed to.
I'd like to watch a great Easter movie to-night but there really isn't one, is there? I usually default to Alice in Wonderland. For a while I thought Picnic at Hanging Rock was Eastery but it feels more like summer. Maybe I'll just watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy almost sounds like bunny.
Twitter Sonnet #1686
A spinning flower grants her petals breadth.
Recumbent ovens often warm the heart.
A shapely arch can grace the stage with depth.
When freshly baked, what need has bread for art?
Behind the shop, a thousand toys are boxed.
Chaotic heaps of dolls and jacks await.
The eager cricket over piles hops.
But sloppy humans first'll take the bait.
Adventure eggs were gone beyond the shell.
Precocious fingers shaped the yolks to hares.
A ghostly hand produced a bunny Hell.
The basket bears a load of grass and cares.
The rising bunny blocks the vengeful sun.
A wealth of love and fur exalts the bun.
How many successful young workaholic women are prostitutes in their spare time? I can't imagine very many but that's Kathleen Turner's lifestyle in 1984's Crimes of Passion. Directed by Ken Russell, it's called an "erotic thriller" but it plays more like a watered down John Waters film, concerned more with not especially insightful satire than with thrills. It is erotic, not in the intimate, slow burn way of Body Heat but in the way of a Playboy cartoon.
Bobby (John Laughlin) thinks he's happily married to Amy (Annie Potts), a humourless woman who desultorily rebuffs all his attempts at sexual solicitation or affection (a real waste of Annie Potts). One day, he gets a job following a tenacious career woman called Joanna (Kathleen Turner) to find out what she does at night. Turns out, she moonlights as a prostitute called China Blue.
She has a stalker played by Anthony Perkins who piles shaming, religious rhetoric on her when he's not paying for sex. A lot of the movie feels like a stage play when Perkins and she take turns strutting around each other, delivering monologues about sex and roleplay on lurid sets with lurid lighting. The conflict here is between religious hypocrisy and the potential hollowness of women's sexual liberation. It's all obvious and ham-fisted, the worst being a climax of sorts when Joanna is paid to have sex with a dying man.
Russell rushes through the scene at an odd pace as though he knew the argument he was presenting had no substance but he couldn't be bothered to think of anything else. Like a kid rushing through a book report on the night before it was due.
China Blue has great wallpaper. Turner gives a good performance and sometimes it is fun watching her and Perkins play off each other. Laughlin is a total bore and I was not interested in him being the sexual saviour for Joanna that Russell wanted him to be.
Crimes of Passion is available on The Criterion Channel.
The newest episode of Picard was a little better than episodes five, six, and seven, though still not quite hitting the heights of the first four. It certainly came off as a tribute to Next Generation fans and it was nice seeing the bridge crew back together.
Though many of them seemed more like the actors getting back together instead of the characters, particularly Picard. Patrick Stewart has changed his performance of the character so much I just don't recognise him as the same man. There's this constant plaintive tone to his voice now that's really tiresome.
Troi seems mostly the same, though, even if her bangs are distracting. She was my favourite character when I was a kid, mostly because I thought Marina Sirtis was hot. And maybe I also really dug the concept of an empath. They seem to have expanded her powers a lot in this episode, which I suppose they may as well. So much of new Trek involves people having visions and telepathic experiences, it's nice for them to have a character previously established with telepathic abilities.
What a shame cgi isn't cheaper and easier. Brent Spiner's new merged Data and Lore character is hard to see as anything but Brent Spiner in makeup. I also wish they'd dumped the idea of a Data with emotions. The whole "does he/doesn't he have emotions" in TNG has been parodied and had holes poked in it so much, yes. It's not hard to find moments in which Data clearly did have emotions. But because of this, the series concept of Data with emotions feels like Data with extra emotions. And in the new episode of Picard, too. He's unpleasantly zany.
I did like the resolution of his fight with Lore, though, even though I kind of saw it coming.
They have got to do something about the lighting on these shows, particularly since they have so many elderly cast members. No-one wants Patrick Stewart to break a hip on one of the tables.
In addition to reading Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation lately, I've also been reading Pauline Kael. A few weeks ago, there was a rumour Tarantino's next movie, The Movie Critic, would be about Pauline Kael and that he wanted Meryl Streep to play her (which would've been perfect casting). But Tarantino denied that the movie would be about Kael, though he is on the record many times saying what a profound influence Kael was on him.
One of the things I love about Tarantino is that he clearly respects film critics. Many filmmakers, even some of the filmmakers I love, dismiss the whole profession as a gang of impotent backbiters. But in his book, Tarantino has a lot to say about critics he loved and hated, and he has reasons to back up what he says. He dedicates a whole chapter to critic Kevin Thomas who boosted a number of Tarantino's favourite exploitation films of the '70s. And Tarantino doesn't take it personally when Thomas doesn't like a movie he likes.
As a movie critic, or essayist, Tarantino is certainly insightful but, and I'm sure he'd agree, his eloquence can't match Pauline Kael's.
A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre [for a critic]; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn't all corruption. The movie doesn't have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor's scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable.
-from "Trash, Art, and the Movies" by Pauline Kael, 1969
On Monday, I read her review for Ingmar Bergman's Shame. I was surprised to find she thought it a better film than Persona, a film she mostly disliked except for the monologue about the two women naked on the beach (that is a great monologue, and one of the sexiest scenes in the history cinema). She considered most of the '60s for Bergman to be diminished by a "pall of profundity". And though I disagree with her, nonetheless the sentiment in this bit really struck a chord with me:
Shame is a masterpiece, and it is so thoroughly accessible that I'm afraid some members of the audience may consider it too obvious. They have had so many years now of grappling with puzzles that they may consider all that figuring out responding to a work of art; when they devised a theory about what was going on in a film, they took their own ingenuity as proof that the film was art. And now here is Bergman, of all people, making a direct and lucid movie; they may, in self-defense, decide it's banal.
Those words Kael wrote in '68 or '69 are so apt for discourse around art in academia, and the ancillary internet whirlpools of amateur academia, to-day. Especially as critical theories have truly graduated from being merely screeds imposed on works of art to being dogma imposed on life itself.
I've read reviews by Pauline Kael here and there over the years but this is the first time I've really devoted time to her work. Partly because her work is difficult to come by. Most of her reviews that are online are behind various paywalls, particularly The New Yorker's paywall. I got a month's trial subscription to The New Yorker just to read their archives, which I swiftly regretted when I tried to cancel my subscription. I was put into an endless log-in loop--If you'd like to cancel your subscription, log in and click on Manage Subscription. Welcome to Manage Subscription, please log-in. If you'd like to cancel your subscription, log in and click on Manage Subscription . . . I had a New Yorker subscription a few years ago and should have known not to go back to them. That time, what I thought I was signing up for was to pay a few bucks a month for the digital subscription but I was surprised to find I was immediately charged a hundred dollars for a year. But it was my fault, of course, for not paying careful enough attention to the wording on the subscription page. Still, it's funny they have these little fissures in their plumbing to suck up money at the same time the quality of their journalism has nosedived. This time, I was finally able to unsubscribe by waking up early and calling their helpline. At least, the lady on the phone said I was unsubscribed . . .
A good percentage of their archive I looked at was ridiculously useless. Many articles from the '60s are just low resolution scans that are impossible to read. I did enjoy some of the pieces by Kael I was able to read, particularly a complicated take she had on John Boorman's Excalibur. She wrote a four page review which, remarkably, was normal in those days.
There are also just big gaps in the New Yorker archive so I realised the only way to get at most of her reviews was to buy her books, so I bought two. I'm still waiting for one to be delivered next week which I'm hoping has her review of Vertigo. I know she didn't like Vertigo but I'm really curious to read her reasons. It's especially difficult to find negative reviews she wrote for movies that have become highly regarded in the decades since. I guess someone thinks they're protecting her legacy.
Another reason I'd not read much of Kael was the first time I heard of her, I think from my high school film teacher, Martin Johnson, I'd heard she didn't like Stanley Kubrick. So I thought, how much could her opinion on film really be worth? But now that I've read so much of Kael that I respect, I find myself fascinated by her dislike of Kubrick. And Tarantino's--Tarantino is also not a fan of Kubrick. Though I wonder how much of that is due to his love of Pauline Kael and Brian De Palma, whom Kael preferred over Kubrick.
Using my temporary New Yorker subscription, I read a 2003 interview with Tarantino in which he said of A Clockwork Orange,
That first twenty minutes is pretty fucking perfect. The whole non-stop parade of Alex and the druids or whatever they were called: they beat up a bum, they have a gang fight, they go to the milk bar, they rape a girl, they break into the house, and they’re driving and playing the Beethoven, and Malcolm McDowell’s fantastic narration is going on, and it’s about as poppy and visceral and perfect a piece of cinematic moviemaking as I think had ever been done up until that time. It’s like that long opening sentence of Jack Kerouac’s ‘The Subterraneans,’ all right, that great run-on sentence that goes on for almost a page and a half. I always thought Kubrick was a hypocrite, because his party line was, I’m not making a movie about violence, I’m making a movie against violence. And it’s just, like, Get the fuck off. I know and you know your dick was hard the entire time you were shooting those first twenty minutes, you couldn’t keep it in your pants the entire time you were editing it and scoring it. You liked the rest of the movie, but you put up with the rest of the movie. You did it for those first twenty minutes. And if you don’t say you did you’re a fucking liar.
Kubrick may indeed have been dishonest about his intentions with the film. I don't know if I'd put that down to a lack of self-awareness but to a fear of being shut down by institutions or influential individuals, a fear that Tarantino has been remarkable for lacking. I watched A Clockwork Orange again last night and it seems clear to me, not just in the first twenty minutes but in the entire film, that Kubrick is talking about a natural human love for violence and how people who deny that love are truly destructive hypocrites. Who can watch this counselor who visits Alex and not suspect he's more turned on by hurting Alex than by the prospect of helping him?
In Pauline Kael's review of A Clockwork Orange, she derides the film for making Alex the only charismatic character, and making him very charismatic. I would say this is because Alex is the only honest character. The point Kubrick is making about the dangers of social engineering isn't just in how it might malfunction but in how the instigators of such projects may not be honest about their own motives, probably even to themselves. Which would certainly pertain to social engineers to-day.
Twitter Sonnet #1685
The castle stones exude a winter's cold.
To-night, the kitchen fire's green and blue.
The seven dogs await the call of old.
But quiet spirits hide a deadly clue.
Assembled guests were numbered only three.
The sun had set an hour 'fore the game.
But summoned sure, the trio came to see
What pagan sport their wicked host would name.
A purple person put a pin to work.
Reflexive grins aggrieved the sexy nurse.
Assorted games defeat the broken Turk.
A final world expands her tiny purse.
Comparing crimes could wreck a rotten hulk.
So silence kept the evil iron bulk.
With this season of The Mandalorian, Jon Favreau is doing significant damage to his reputation as a writer. To be fair, I didn't think his writing on the previous seasons was great but this season everyone seems to be taking notice. Last night's episode was especially dumb. It was directed by Bryce Dallas Howard who does seem to have good instincts for action sequences but terrible instincts for dialogue scenes, especially when it comes to closeups.
Two cringeworthy shots that stand out in my memory are when the droid coroner turns to Bo-Katan and Din and says, "It's illegal," and the shot of Katee Sackoff looking smug right after she's taken down a battle droid.
Both felt amateurish. But Dallas Howard is a new director so maybe his is good testing ground for her before she works on anything a major studio spends a lot of money on or a prominent IP . . . Well, Star Wars is still kind of a prominent IP. I mean, The Mandalorian is no worse than the Ewok movies . . . right?
There were things I liked about the episode. I liked references to the Separatists and the Clone Wars. I liked appearances from battledroids and Christopher Lloyd. I even liked the royal couple played by Jack Black and Lizzo, though people seem to be complaining about those two a lot.
Black always feels tonally out of place to me whenever he's supposed to be serious but as a potentially duplicitous politician that kind of works. It makes sense that he seems a little phony. I'd never heard of Lizzo so I had no baggage there. I didn't think she gave a particularly good performance but her role wasn't terribly crucial. I did kind of like the Alice in Wonderland vibe to the alien croquet game Grogu was helping her cheat at.
But the plot was one stupid thing after another, an especially bad thing because this episode is set up as basically a police procedural. Right of the bat, it doesn't make sense. Din and Bo-Katan come to this luxury planet run by King Jack Black and Queen Lizzo in order to meet up with Bo-Katan's Mandalorian fleet who now operate as privateers for the royal couple. Black and Lizzo won't let our heroes meet with the fleet until they've rectified a problem with droids going murderously haywire. When asked why their own Mandalorians can't take care of the problem, Black and Lizzo explain that no weapons are allowed on the planet because Black's a former Imperial. However, since Din and Bo-Katan are Mandalorians, and carrying weapons is part of their culture, they're allowed to go armed against the dangerous droids.
So the privateer Mandalorians can't carry weapons but Din and Bo-Katan can because . . . they're Mandalorians.
Din and Bo-Katan go to interrogate a community of Ugnaughts. They won't listen to Bo-Katan but then Din has a go. He mentions being friends with the Ugnaught voiced by Nick Nolte in season one and concludes with, "I have spoken," so all the Ugnaughts immediately open up to him. For a real world correlation, I imagine a white cop going to a black neighbourhood, approaching some guys playing basketball, and saying, "What up, hommies? By the way, I have a black friend."
I did enjoy a scene in a droid bar that slyly echoed the cantina scene in A New Hope where R2D2 and C3PO were prohibited from entering.
After the investigation plot, Din and Bo-Katan finally confront the fleet, who still won't follow Bo-Katan for the sole reason that she doesn't have the Dark Sabre. Din finally realises that Bo-Katan won the sabre after rescuing him on Mandalore. I pointed this out in my review for that episode and wondered why it didn't occur to Din or Bo-Katan. I guess Favreau was saving it for a dramatic moment, banking on the idea that it wouldn't occur to anyone. Even if it didn't occur to me, it really should have occurred to Din and Bo-Katan. Like, right away. Especially Bo-Katan whose whole political career evidently hinges on possessing that weapon. It's hard to get invested in characters whose commitment to their own motives is so nebulous.
There were a lot of nice effects and aliens in the episode.
A new chapter of my webcomic, Dekpa and Deborah, is now online. I hope you like pirates. I know I do.
Happy Birthday to Thomas Hobbes, Walter Huston, Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, Gregory Peck, Robert Bloch, Roger Corman, Nigel Hawthorne, Frank Gorshin, Jane Asher, Yasuhiro Takemoto, Hayley Atwell, and my grandmother Ruby Dean.
The movie I was most in the mood to watch for Saint Patrick's Day this year was 1990's Miller's Crossing, the Coen Brothers' Prohibition era noir about Irish American gangsters. My old DVD is back in California and it wasn't on any of the streaming services I'm subscribed to but I noticed Criterion had just recently released a new blu-ray edition of the film. So I ordered that and finally watched it a week after Saint Pat's. Man, there's a movie that never gets old.
And the new blu-ray is beautiful. And noticeably different in a few ways. In the scene where a kid comes across the corpse of Rug Daniels, I remember the actor playing the dead man accidentally blinking in a shot. That seems to be gone now. Which is nice because it kind of ruined the moment. But the biggest difference I noticed is in the colour, which seems to be richer and brighter. For comparison, screenshots I pulled from various YouTube clips are on the top and the Criterion blu-ray is on the bottom.
It was always a beautifully shot film by cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld but now I think it's even better.
On my DVD copy, I remember often being unsure if Gabriel Byrne's hat was black, charcoal, or brown. Now it's always clearly brown.
The movie's just a magnificent piece of work. When a plot so complicated goes down so smooth, it's a thing to admire forever.
Twitter Sonnet #1684
Without a question, mice assume control.
A hundred keys absorbed a liquid lock.
The rivers shake and hugging banks console.
Completely smooth was rapid water's rock.
A dancing blast was orange and very hot.
Rebounding river currents twist the mind.
But simple boats could ease the noisy lot.
Beneath the rain, the trees were seldom kind.
A stinging eye confronts a shrinking clock.
Rejected dwarves have mined a golden lode.
Above their heads, a mountain cracks a rock.
Below the summit, snakes descend the road.
Escaping hats return to crown a dream.
Escaping ropes contract around a beam.
The writing was so bad on the newest Star Trek: Picard I had to spend several days getting through the episode. But it had one line of the "so bad it's good" variety.
The second half of this season (spoilers) is a rehash of the Deep Space Nine premise of Changelings infiltrating the Federation. Our heroes are uncovering a plot revolving around Frontier Day, a Starfleet holiday in which the entire fleet will assemble near Earth.
The newest episode opens with Seven of Nine speaking with Tuvok (or a Changling pretending to be Tuvok) about the plot. In doing so, she says the immortal line: "The entire Frontier Day ceremony is in danger."
It seems screenwriter Jane Maggs thought the Changlings' endgame, the purpose of their vast conspiracy, their nefarious goal, was to ruin the party. Yes. The buildup of resentment and hostility over the decades since the Dominion War has come to this, a diabolical threat to the Federation's . . . merrymaking! There will be no jolly balloons, no ice cream or cotton candy for the kids! There will be no toasting of champagne! Starfleet's cup shall be filled with naught but tears! And everyone, everyone, will be obliged to go to bed early and face the next day without the promised respite of a grand galactic holiday! There may be other holidays, humans, oh, yes. But not this one! This one now belongs to . . . the Changlings!
So at least that put a smile on my face, I guess. The first four episodes of this season were good. They should've just quit then. A funny thing to say about a season that's only nine episodes, I suppose.
For some reason, starting in high school, and then throughout my twenties, adults started recommending 1972's Deliverance to me all the time. Usually people who weren't particularly interested in movies started recommending it to me. It seemed like they pegged me as having a personality that "needed" to see Deliverance. So, being young and naturally contrary to adult advice, especially advice that seemed in any way patronising, I avoided the film at all costs. But now I'm reading Quentin Tarantino's new book, Cinema Speculation, and he has a whole chapter on Deliverance. And I knew I'd want to see the movie before I read the chapter. So finally, after decades of pressure, I watched it. If you, reader, happen to be any of the people who at one time recommended it to me, maybe you'll be pleased to know I liked it.
I agree with Tarantino, who says the first half of the film is much better than the second half. The energy created by the actors and camera work as the four city guys strut about the labyrinth of a decrepit hillbilly homestead is terrific. The arrogance of the guys--Burt Reynolds, Ronnie Cox, Jon Voight, and Ned Beatty--and the treacherous strangeness of their environment they don't seem quite aware of loads up the movie with tension right away.
When Reynolds arrogantly browbeats his way through a bartering negotiation with one hillbilly, I was astonished by his foolishness, very credible though it was. The four city guys want to canoe down a dangerous river and Lewis (Reynolds) is trying to get two of the hillbillies to drive their cars to their destination. If you ask me, you ought to be as polite as possible to the strangers you're handing your car keys to, especially if said strangers don't have much apparent respect for you or the law.
Lewis' self-confidence is at turns abrasive and admirable. Drew, Cox's character, remarks at one point that Lewis isn't the frontiersman he fancies himself to be and Tarantino explores it further in an interesting discussion about how Lewis is genuine yet at the same time is coping a "pose".
The fish out of water quality of the four guys reminded me of some of the arrogant foreigners I meet who blunder their way through Japan, unaware of just how polite the locals are being. The four discuss lofty topics like the nature of civilisation and environmentalism like gods looking down on this funny little Georgian woodland. They so clearly overplay their hand that it's quite credible when things go to shit. But their charisma, and the vulnerability in their lack of self-awareness, make you root for them, too.
Ironically, the famous shocking scene in the film may have been less shocking for me because of a similar scene in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. I appreciated reading about his perspective, seeing the movie for the first time as a kid in the early '70s and what it meant for the evolution of cinema. It's a good book, by the way.
I still don't know why so many people recommended Deliverance to me.
