A Big Minus

It seems we've entered a new period of World War II being mythologised. Yesterday I went to see 2023's Godzilla Minus One, a movie that pays homage to the original Godzilla (1954) while adding a new gloss of sentimentality and nationalism. I'm not particularly a fan of Godzilla or of kaiju movies in general, but I do like the original 1954 film. This 2023 movie does offer some interesting food for thought from writer/director Yamazaki Takashi via some editorial manipulation.

I might not be the right audience for this film. Something about kaiju movies doesn't register with me on a fundamental level. I don't mean monster movies; I love a lot of monster movies. I mean specifically the kaiju movie of Japan that took shape in the decades following the first Godzilla in which certain plot mechanics and formulae became entrenched. There are aspects of this movie that I consider flaws but which are common to kaiju films so I think they're considered positive, even essential, qualities by fans of the genre.

One thing that really bothers me is a sense of clear division between "monster attack" reality and "reacting to monster attack" reality. Godzilla Minus One begins with kamikaze pilot Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) abandoning his mission and landing at a small island base. Suddenly, Godzilla, at this point only about the size of a three storey building, attacks. He's fast and brutal, tearing through men, picking some up and throwing them. Then there are reaction shots of Shikishima and others, standing there stunned, watching and commenting like they're seeing it on TV. There are moments like this throughout the film in which Godzilla is presumably patiently waiting just off-screen for characters to conclude their dialogue before resuming his attacks. This is familiar to me from many old Godzilla and Gamera movies so I'm inclined to think it's deliberate.

I would argue the connexion Godzilla had to the atom bomb in the Honda Ishiro 1954 film was as a symbol not only of the terrible destruction caused by the bombs, and the accumulating horrors in their aftermath, but of the terrifying, unknown consequences of tampering with physics at the atomic level. Yamazaki has made a film that's more of a World War II allegory, with Godzilla symbolising the bomb and, to a lesser (but significant) extent, the U.S. He spends a lot of time showing the protagonists' normal lives in the shanty towns of post-war Japan (another plot formula element of kaiju films is that, despite the monster attacking a city of millions of people, somehow it's always the same four or five people who factor into all major decisions and events). In this context, he gives us a very typical, very modern, sentimental story about a handsome young man and a beautiful young woman who, despite living in close proximity, can't confess their love to each other over the course of years. Despite the houses built of scrap, there's never the sense of post-war squalor and desperation you get in a movie like 1948's Stray Dog (野良犬) or 1964's Gate of Flesh (肉体の門). As such, Yamazaki's invocation of post-war Japan comes off as cheap and shallow.

The girl in the story is called Noriko (Hamabe Minami), perhaps a nod to the several characters of that name played by Hara Setsuko in Ozu Yasujiro movies, though Ozu was unafraid to portray some of Hara's characters as mothers. In Ozu's 1960 film Late Autumn (秋日和), Hara plays a mother named Akiko. In Gojiro Minus One, the Noriko character has become foster mother of a baby called Akiko. Despite Japan now being filled with young divorced mothers (I've met quite a few), movies, TV series, and comics shrink at showing one to be a romantic heroine so there are many plot contrivances to explain why a young woman is caring for someone else's child (the starkest example is probably Spy Family). So the heroine can be both virgin and mother. It's surprising Catholicism isn't more popular around here.

I knew exactly what was going to happen to both Noriko and Shikishima at the end of the film about halfway through the movie, the formula was so rigid. The film's handling of the fight with Godzilla is somewhat more interesting.

A scientist (Hidetaka Yoshioka), who just happened to be a crewman on the same minesweeper boat as Shikishima (of course), comes up with a plan to use Godzilla's nuclear blast breath against him, causing him to sink to the ocean floor and then to come back up quickly again to be killed by decompression. As part of the plan, Shikishima must once again pilot a Zero to distract the beast. So now we have a kamikaze pilot fighting a symbol of the atomic bomb. You can guess where this is going but the movie doesn't have the guts to go quite as far as you might think--but Yamazaki lets a moment hang in which you're invited to ponder what if it did. I applaud the audacity of what Yamazaki almost did, it would have been downright Tarantino-esque. By not quite doing it, perhaps he leaves the audience more vividly imagining it. However, given the simplistic, formulaic, and oversentimentalised treatment of the post-war era otherwise, I would question the appropriateness of posing such a question in this context. Maybe that's one way new myths start to gain force.

Godzilla Minus One is now in theatres in the U.S. and Japan.

X Sonnet #1799

A creeping shade perverts the target word.
Above the common folks, a helmet shines.
A billion eyes have traced the lucky bird.
A darkness waits between the verdant pines.
The steady club could beat the head relaxed.
Without a number reckoned safe, we go.
No lion tamed could dodge the carnal tax.
A metal shaft has jumped the shaky bow.
With waiting lizards, life continues drunk.
For conversations, bombs will stop a day.
Enormous rabbits tear the mammoth's trunk.
And after flying, planes have naught to say.
In shades of green, the lover baked a cake.
But after all, preceding shows were faked.

Meanwhile, on Angel

Since I always watch Angel alongside Buffy, I watched the season three finale of Angel last night after watching the season six finale of Buffy a few days earlier (the Angel episode aired on May 20, 2002, while the Buffy episode aired on May 21, 2002). Written by series co-creator David Greenwalt, the Angel finale is a little more suspenseful than the Buffy finale, with tighter writing, though the annoying kid character is a little more annoying.

Connor is Angel's answer to Buffy's Dawn. Dawn works slightly better when the writers are giving her realistic sibling banter with Buffy but Connor's just ornery, his vague backstory involving life growing up in an ill-defined Hell dimension. Maybe the best thing about the episode is that it's the last one with the increasingly dull Cordelia.

She and Angel realise they have feelings for each other and she calls him on the phone to arrange an appointment with him at a scenic location where she can confess her love. It's funny she didn't just come straight to the hotel but, naturally, one doesn't want to have such a conversation over the phone. I thought, what a charmingly dated plot element. Yes, people used to feel it was better to conduct such matters in person. Now I think people prefer to do it via texting and online communication. Why is that more acceptable than phone conversations? I suppose it's because people now feel more like they're their true selves on the internet and via text. It leaves out all that messy biological stuff like blushing, stuttering, and the possibility of exposing unflattering or politically inconvenient instincts.

This episode also features a Pogues song when Lilah goes to meet Wesley at a bar where he's drinking alone. This was the phase when Wesley really becomes the grim hardass, following his attempt to kidnap Angel's son because he was afraid Angel would kill the child. He has a sex scene with Lilah with dialogue that feels like it came from a noir.

LILAH: Don't go making more of this than it is. I'm not one of the doey-eyed girls of Angel Investigations. Don't be thinking about me when I'm gone.

WESLEY: I wasn't thinking about you when you were here.

Angel is available on Disney+ or Hulu in various countries. I had to use my VPN to watch it on the UK's Disney+. It was on Japan's Disney+ for a while but then it was removed, though Buffy's still on.

How to Bring X's Together

Last night I watched 2003's X2 again, Bryan Singer's sequel to the first X-Men movie, still considered by many to be the best X-Men film. I think that's probably true, though I haven't seen all of them. I still haven't watched the third one because I hate Brett Ratner so much and I remember what a betrayal it was when Fox fired Bryan Singer. I remember listening to the DVD commentary and hearing Singer talk about how enthusiastic he was to make the next film after X2's cliffhanger ending, which was inspired by Star Trek II. Oh, what might have been.

X2 is at least one of the best superhero team movies for how it manages to achieve a good balance of various characters using their powers, each of whom is interesting in their own right. Alan Cumming's take on Nightcrawler feels different from any other portrayal of the character I've seen but he's very good. It's an unusually solemn take for the character but that makes sense given his backstory. The way his teleportation powers are portrayed influenced teleportation action scenes in many film and TV series afterwards.

And Storm gets plenty to do this time and actually comes off as a leader more than she did in the first film. I still think Halle Berry was miscast but at least she'd dropped the phony accent. Storm was my favourite X-Men character when I was a kid, She was one of those characters I'd often practice drawing when I was teaching myself how to draw comic characters. X2 is maybe her best live action portrayal though I hold out some hope that one day there'll be a better one, something closer to how she appeared in Chris Clairemont's classic run. I mean, those are the comics that they should be adapting anyway.

I think my favourite scene in X2, though, remains Magneto's escape from his prison. When he pulls the iron out of that guy's blood and gets away with just a couple of floating spheres he can fling like bullets, or use as floating platforms, you get a very good impression of just how powerful this guy is.

X2 is available on Disney+.

Star Wars for You and Me and Everyone

Yesterday I showed Star Wars to the English club at the Japanese junior high school where I work. I mean Episode IV: A New Hope, and that was the first thing I had to explain to them, "This is the first movie, I know it says 'Episode IV'. It's from 1977, Episode I came out in 1999." Attending the club yesterday were three second year girls, one second year boy and one first year boy (ages ranging from 13 to 14). None of them had ever seen Star Wars before. Previously, I've shown them Ghostbusters and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, both of which they seemed to enjoy. So I was surprised to find they seemed to be struggling to maintain interest in Star Wars.

Well, one of the girls seemed to be captivated. She told me later her favourite character was Obi-Wan Kenobi. The rest liked R2D2. Everyone seemed more engaged once the characters got to the Death Star and there was bickering between Han, Luke, and Leia. And they all seemed riveted by the finale. It's fascinating just watching the movie with people who'd never seen it. I can't even remember my first time seeing Star Wars and it's very difficult even to imagine the experience of watching C3PO and R2D2 wandering the desert and not knowing what was going to happen next. But now it occurs to me that people who've recently been saying that Star Wars has to stick to certain formulaic elements are dead wrong. The defining element of the first film is that one scene after another throws unexpected elements at the viewer. The very fact that the first movie is the fourth episode, that it drops you into the middle of the story without really holding your hand and explaining anything, speaks to the franchise's broad storytelling possibilities.

Thinking about why the kids liked Ghostbusters and Roger Rabbit better, I came up with a few theories. Ghostbusters and Roger Rabbit are both comedies, so maybe they're easier for kids to latch onto quickly. Also it occurs to me that they'd never seen anything like those two movies before. Neither one is widely seen in Japan and none of the new Ghostbusters movies are really like that first one. Meanwhile, Star Wars has had a lot of exposure in Japan. So while A New Hope may have been unique in 1977, it's now something the kids would already recognise as a certain type of story from its countless imitators in American and Japanese media. Teaching in Japan, I've had a number of teachers and coordinators here try to sell the idea that Japanese students need more preparation and explanation for everything but I've also seen a few people offer rebuttals to this idea, asserting that one of the problems with English education here is that teachers tend to over explain. There's so much emphasis put on sentimentality and nostalgia in the culture that I suspect the compulsion to explain and prepare is partly a means by which adults can feel a certain ownership of the students' new experiences. Also, it masks some incompetence. The reality is, I believe, that Japanese kids can enjoy surprises just as much as kids in any other country.

Another thing I was thinking of watching Star Wars again was a video I saw a few months ago on YouTube called "How 'How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit' was Saved in the Edit", a delightfully blistering reply to another video essay called "How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit". The original video, posted six years ago, offers various weak arguments and phony perspective to argue that Star Wars was in reality the accomplishment of George Lucas' ex-wife and editor Marcia Lucas. There's been a lot of talk of Disney shills lately. I don't know if these people were actually paid by Disney or if they're just a weird group of corporate simps but they do speak with the lame, phony tones of a Disneyland tour guide. Anyway, the original video has over three million views while the rebuttal, from two years ago, has only 217k. I urge you to watch the rebuttal.

So when I was watching Star Wars again, I was specifically thinking of "How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit"'s argument that the whole idea of the Death Star attacking Yavin IV was something that Marcia Lucas came with and cobbled together with creative editing. The rebuttal video points to the footage of Tarkin referring to "our moment of triumph" which seems to throw cold water on the idea. But I would have to ask further questions, like, before the supposed edit, what was the point of a tracking device on the Millennium Falcon, which was clearly referred to in unedited dialogue? Anyway, please watch the video above.

X Sonnet #1798

Exchanging looks, the elves would sort the bows.
A present mind repeats the morning's past.
A rare and golden gift's a nose that glows.
And here, some fame would hold a monster fast.
Wasabi bears retained the key to home.
Remembered palms were swaying over graves.
Attackers drove the years ahead of Rome.
The face of love submerged beneath the waves.
A child's break became a woman's dream.
Across the sand, a golden servant steps.
Combining fruits unites the scurvy team.
The flattened skirt has lost its vaunted pep.
For trading stars, the gods were put to bed.
The darker space has faded up to red.

Willow the Almighty

I finished watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer season six last night, with the finale episode "Grave". Now Willow, driven initially by vengeance and fury, essentially becomes another of Joss Whedon's godlike characters (though the episode was written by David Fury). It's a decent episode though, in a season filled with several strong episodes, it's not among the best.

Willow gains the ability to sense the pain of everyone in the world and decides to end it by killing them all. Next, on Angel, we'll get Gina Torres as a godlike entity who wants to take away humanity's free will, a motivation Whedon will transfer to Loki in The Avengers and which was Loki's motivation once again in the recently concluded second season of his Disney+ series. Maybe this is the inevitable outcome of a series of stories that began as a supernatural teen dramedy. The recurring problem the characters face could be boiled down to, "How do you deal with a world filled with unpredictable pain?"

Buffy herself is kind of benched throughout the episode, stuck in a sinkhole with Dawn at the graveyard. And, of course, Giles returns after leaving earlier in the season.

No more tweeds for him. I feel like Anthony Head really disliked Giles' initial look.

This was an interesting story for Willow and, overall, I'd say the show is better by this point than it was in the earlier seasons, but for some reason I feel like there was something more fundamentally attractive about her in season three. I'm not sure what happened, maybe Alyson Hannigan and Whedon became too conscious of how charming she was?

Buffy the Vampie Slayer is available on Disney+.

Is Any Diary Safe?

Reading MR James has gotten to be a seasonal tradition with me. This year, my mother sent me a hardback collection of his ghost stories, which makes the experience of reading them even better. When you're reading stories about antiquarians poring over manuscripts and carvings and abnormal adornments in abandoned churches, it's nicer to do so on real pages instead of on an electronic screen.

Yesterday I read "The Diary of Mr Poynter", first published in 1910. A young man and his elderly aunt move into a new manor so the young man purchases a diary of someone who resided in the neighbourhood over a century earlier. Inside the diary, he finds a scrap of cloth with a pattern that enchants his aunt who insists that drapes be made from the pattern. Like all of James' stories, he finds ways of letting the horror elements subtly creep in while you read about a fairly normal, but slightly unstable, academic or domestic situation. This one ends up being a bit more explicit than usual and delightfully so. The ghost that manifests reminded me of Sadako from The Ring or any number of other Japanese movie ghosts with long hair veiling their faces. Or Cousin It, I suppose, but effectively eerie.

Previous to "The Diary of Mr Poynter" I read "The Residence at Whitminster", a story about a young Irish lord who comes to stay in England and brings some kind of shiny tablet with him he apparently procured from a witch. The story ends in a remarkable way with a housemaid, speaking with transcribed colloquial dialect, rattling off suggestive reminiscences. That one may have been too subtle but it was entertaining.

But One Specific Feeling

Jennifer Lawrence is back and naked in the 2023 legitimate comedy No Hard Feelings. Although I suspect this movie was produced primarily as an excuse for Lawrence to be naked on film, consensually this time, it also has some genuinely funny moments.

I'm not turning my nose up at Lawrence. I watched it to see her naked. I was one of the prudes who respected her privacy when nude photos of her leaked to the internet and I avoided looking at them. Perhaps afraid of seeming a blushing innocent, she plays an earthy, hard drinking woman who likes having frequent one night stands.

The film opens with her ex-boyfriend, a tow-truck driver, repossessing her car. She tries to convince him she really loves him but is thwarted when a burly Italian steps out of her front door in his underwear. So much for that.

But look who it is playing her ex-boyfriend!

Yes, it's Ebon Moss-Bachrach, from The Punisher season one and from that episode of Fringe I talked about last week. The guy is stalking my retinas. He doesn't have a big role.

Lawrence's love interest is a blushing, innocent lad, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), whose wealthy helicopter parents hire her to break his cherry before he goes to Princeton. His comical innocence allows Lawrence to come off as even more rough-edged. At least she's a little better at it than Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

This leads to her dragging the reluctant Percy to the beach one night for some skinny dipping. Three hooligans try to steal their clothes but Lawrence marches out of the sea and beats them all up. This is the only nude scene she does, I suppose because it was felt that she comes off as more empowered in a fight scene than she would in a lovemaking scene.

It's not a particularly funny scene. Nothing feels authentic about the setup. The three hooligans feel like characters from a porn parody. But Lawrence looked fantastic and that was the point. It reminded me of Sex and Furty (不良姐御伝 猪の鹿お蝶), the 1973 Pinky Violence film. In that movie, the veneer of an action film was the pretext for gratuitous nudity. In No Hard Feelings, it's the veneer of comedy. Well, Sex and Fury is an interesting film for other reasons and there were other interesting things about No Hard Feelings.

Lawrence's character took this job because she was promised a free Buick as payment, which she needs for her job as an Uber driver. She's also a bartender and she needs to work multiple jobs because gentrification in Montauk has driven prices way up. I could certainly relate as my hometown, San Diego, has recently become the most expensive town in the United States for basically the same reason. But as the film progresses, it became clear the filmmakers had little real understanding or appreciation for the issue as Lawrence's financial problems turn out to be merely a dreamed up excuse for her repressed psychological issues from an absent father in her childhood. It's the old lazy excuse rich people tell themselves, "Oh, the poor could be happy if they just made the effort." Yeah, that's why the rent in my studio apartment became 90% of the income from the three jobs I was working.

There are a few funny moments in the film. I liked the scene where Lawrence manufactured a meetcute at Percy's workplace, an animal shelter. There was a funny moment where she moves the office couch to be nearer his desk. Mostly, though, there's just one reason to watch this movie and, as the Fool in King Lear said, it's a pretty reason.

No Hard Feelings is available on Netflix in some countries.

There's Splitting and Then There's Splitting

Oh, Russell T Davies, you're your own worst enemy. "The Giggle", the final episode of the very short Fourteenth Doctor era on Doctor Who, has some very good ideas at its heart but is almost completely derailed by Davies' good and bad intentions (and I do think he had bad intentions) as well as having to carry an overabundance of plot. The directing and editing were also fraught with problems but I don't think I can blame Davies for that.

Neil Patrick Harris was fine as the Toymaker. He bears a slight resemblance to Michael Gough and he carried the zany, campy vibe Davies came up with for him. The idea of having him use a vaudevillian, broad German accent to make up for Harris' weak British accent was a decent enough and pleasantly silly idea. Not a politically correct idea, but a good idea.

But, oh, boy did Davies want to be politically correct, even when it didn't come naturally to him. I think he's absolutely outraged that people disliked his friend Chris Chibnall's run on the show on the grounds that it was too woke. And he wants revenge. I get it, I'm the same way; I tend to get much angrier on behalf of my friends than I do for myself. All that energy that in 2005 and '06 he put into the Doctor trapping villains in mirrors for all eternity and such he's now putting into getting even with Internet trolls. I get it but I would also put to him the same question that the Fourteenth Doctor puts to the Toymaker in this very episode, "Why are you so small?"

This is no way to bring viewers back to Doctor Who or bring new viewers in. This is how you push people away.

The premise behind "The Giggle" is that there's chaos all over the world because, "everyone thinks they're right". Which is how the problem with Internet discourse is often described. But it's not a good description either for the Internet or for how people act in this Doctor Who special. Everyone thinks they're right, everyone always has, it's just how the human mind functions. You'd never be able to get through a day if you didn't make observations and judgements based on those observations. The problem with the kind of Internet discourse Davies is attacking is that people are unwilling to alter their opinions based on rational judgement or new data. When Kate Stewart demonstrates by temporarily disabling her armband gadget, she angrily attacks everyone in the room, including Shirley, the token wheelchair character, because she believes Shirley is lying about needing a wheelchair. The problem isn't that Kate thinks she's right, it's that she is wrong.

And Davies has an idea there's more to it than an unshakable certitude. The Toymaker says the real motivating desire is to win, and that's where the Toymaker's interest comes in. That's a really good idea and one that might have been great to have play out in character development instead of being explained at us. That's why "Wild Blue Yonder" worked so much better. Davies took these fears and anxieties about AI and turned them into a visceral experience within a story. "The Giggle" leaves no time for that because it has too many other matters to attend to.

Of course, this episode also has a regeneration, or, for the first time, a "bi-generation", in which the Doctor is split in two. The Fourteenth remains while the Fifteenth arrives. And it feels rushed and Ncuti Gatwa, whose charisma immediately grabs the viewer's attention, is criminally short-changed. By having the two of them there, Fourteen feels like the real Doctor and Fifteen doesn't. Fourteen bears the weight of all that experience and Fifteen comforts him. And the last act of the episode is all about Fourteen. Hopefully the Christmas special will do something to rectify the matter but this reminded me of some of the worst moments in Davies' original run on the series.

Having Fourteen stick around to live with Donna is very much like the copy of Ten living with Rose. That wasn't so bad because at least that copy really wasn't the Doctor. The impression I got from that family dinner at the end of "The Giggle" was that Fourteen was going to be happy with them for maybe a month or a year and then he'd be off in his TARDIS again, probably with Donna or the token trans character Rose. "Well, that's all right then!" as the Toymaker said when he inexplicably decided to criticise how all of the companions during Steven Moffat's run left the Doctor (no mention of Yaz but, to be fair, who can remember what happened to Yaz?). Every one of them kind of died, but then every one of them kind of lived, so there was a bit of a cheat. It seemed like Davies was criticising that but then he went even further on the same tack.

Who is this for? The little kids who are too sensitive to handle any character deaths, or the adults who, after all, are the only ones equipped to understand much of the rapid fire, complex plot jammed with references to things from 10 to 60 years ago?

I don't blame Davies for not doing the usual anniversary thing and bringing back multiple Doctors. Chibnall had just done that at the end of his run. But he did bring back Mel Bush. It was nice getting caught up with what happened to her after the end of Seven's first season. Though her confidently proclaiming that she was his first red-headed companion makes me wonder if the Doctor forgot Turlough or just decided never to mention him again. Maybe Turlough doesn't count because he was a boy and the Fifth Doctor was heterosexual? But then does Donna not count since Fourteen is gay?

I thought it was stupid a lot of people on the Internet took the bait and got just as angry as Davies wanted when "Wild Blue Yonder" hinted that Fourteen was gay. This is nothing new. Doesn't anyone remember Nine kissing Jack Harkness back in 2005? I thought he was at least bisexual. But now he's gone to live with Donna and apparently he can't see her as more than a friend. Back luck for her she didn't get the one Billie Piper got.

And what did we get with the new Rose? She's very polite. And she's trans. She's perfectly normal and did I mention she's trans? Also there's a woman in a wheelchair and she's also normal. And that's all we know about her. Davies is doing the exact kind of thing that woke commentators criticise about old progressive corporate media. It's downright tragic. Especially since, if "Wild Blue Yonder" is any indication, Davies could've made something amazing if he could have set aside petty, ham-fisted revenge and concentrated on exploring thoughts and feelings.

The Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials are available on Disney+ in most places and on the BBC iPlayer in the UK.

X Sonnet #1797

The danger dancing broke the candy shoe.
The hour closed with tinsel floors bereft.
Solutions sprang from slyly chosen glue.
The hoof distinctions come from how they're cleft.
For rice we substituted flakes of snow.
The wrapping rose to coat the door and walls.
We judged the book to cover all we know.
As luck departs, the printed paper falls.
Invasive vintage tins restrain the tea.
No thinking time's allowed when draining pools.
A Santa hat could suit a cosy bee.
We hitched the house to twenty braying mules.
Regeneration turns and eats itself.
Ahead, the soldier seeks to meet an elf.

Ryan O'Neal

Ryan O'Neal passed away at the age of 82 yesterday. After rising to fame on Peyton Place, his big box office success was Love Story, but ironically now his most highly regarded film is Barry Lyndon, the film O'Neal blamed for destroying his career.

He was nominated as often for Golden Raspberries as anything laudatory but O'Neal's bland, unimaginative performance becomes a revelation in Barry Lyndon and an essential part of making his character so curiously authentic. The subtlety of Kubrick's satire would never hit so hard in the climax if it weren't for O'Neal giving the naturally, serenely guileless performance he gives throughout the film.

In other films, he could be a serviceable lead. Earlier this year I enjoyed him in The Big Bounce, his first feature film, though it is much more interesting for its femme fatale character played by Leigh Taylor-Young.

As a handsome lad looking slightly perplexed across from a sly young lady, Ryan O'Neal was second to none.

The Supernatural Power of Regret

The beautiful Joan Leslie regrets killing her husband but then has the good fortune to travel back in time in 1947's noir fantasy Repeat Performance. This one is really charming.

After pulling the trigger, Sheila (Leslie) rushes off to a New Year's Eve party where she finds her droll but affectionate friend William Williams (Richard Baseheart) recently escaped from a mental institution.

She asks him if she should go to the police to which he replies, "They'd only arrest you for murder. They've got such one track minds." There are lots of cute lines like that in the film.

Sheila puts the blame for everything that went wrong on a trip to London she and her husband, Barney (Louis Hayward), made the previous January. If only she could travel one year back in time! And then, inexplicably, she does.

Someone at Wikipedia categorised this as a time loop movie like Groundhog Day but it's really not, it only features the single trip back in time. But like Groundhog Day, it's left unexplained. Sheila is walking up to her producer's apartment (she's a famous actress) with William when William disappears and her outfit under her fur coat changes. She doesn't realise what's happened until she's talking to her producer, John (Tom Conway).

She sets out trying to make the year different from the first time she lived it but finds destiny to be a stubborn thing--or, as this is a noir, let's say fate. Joan Leslie is gorgeous in this and a great pleasure for a point of view character.

Repeat Performance is available on The Criterion Channel as part of their Holiday Noir collection.

They Don't Dance On Death Row

A down on his luck tap dancer finds himself even further down on his luck when he's framed for murder in 1948's I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes. This surprisingly well written b-movie noir is a tidy little nightmare.

Husband and wife dancing team Tom (Don Castle) and Ann (Elyse Knox) are reduced to living in a miserable little New York apartment while she supports the both of them working a dance hall. This is an old job that seems to factor in a lot of films noir (Susan Hayward had the same gig in 1946's Deadline at Dawn). Apparently you used to be able to go to dance halls and pay girls to dance with you. Girls in films noir who take these jobs are implied to be just a few steps away from prostitution, something which eventually comes into play in I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes.

Tom's so fed up one night he throws his only pair of shoes at some noisy cats outside their window. He goes out to fetch them but they're nowhere to be found until someone deposits them on their doorstep the next morning. They don't know who it was but whoever it was, it turns out, wore the shoes when murdering a nearby miser (a radio announcer in the movie actually calls the murder victim a miser). Of course, the cops hang their whole case on the footprints at the crime scene. Meanwhile, Tom's also found a wallet stuffed with distinctive old fashioned bills like the miser was noted to carry. Not knowing about the murder, Ann begs Tom to spend the money instead of turning it over to the police, it being Christmas and all.

So quick as a wink, Tom winds up on Death Row and it's only Ann left to prove his innocence with the help of one detective (Regis Toomey) who happens to be one of Ann's dance hall regulars. And he needs coaxing, which Ann does with a kiss and an implicit promise of more later. Ann really is the centre of the film; she has all the moral quandaries. Her convincing Tom to spend the money is like Eve getting Adam to eat the apple and it hangs over her endeavours to get him back like original sin.

I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes is available on The Criterion Channel as part of a Holiday Noir collection.

Ella Fitzgerald also sang about the dance hall:

The New Familiar Face

Last night I watched "Power Hungry", the fifth episode of Fringe which guest starred Ebon Moss-Bachrach as a man who unintentionally causes machines around him to become deadly. I know Moss-Bachrach from the first season of The Punisher, in which he was really good. So it was nice seeing him. The episode itself wasn't bad except it falls prey to the "everyone finds out everything" plot contrivance I dislike so much. Moss-Bachrach has pictures of a girl he likes on his phone and twice an unlikely bit of clumsiness leads to people seeing the pictures, first his boss, then the woman herself.

Otherwise, the episode was good. Walter has a funny bit where he demonstrates static electricity by shuffling around very solemnly in wool socks.

It's starting to get properly cold around here. I was lucky it didn't rain yesterday because I didn't bring an umbrella to school. When I saw about half the students had brought umbrellas I was filled with dread at the prospect of walking home in a freezing downpour. AccuWeather has let me down too many times. Though I guess it didn't yesterday since it didn't actually rain. I sure hope it snows.

X Sonnet #1796

The length of arms bespoke a vicious void.
Reflections change the sound of ancient words.
Salvation burned the cords of ev'ry droid.
Return to air that harbours breathing birds.
The heater teams rebuild the rink for games.
Amassing questions froze beyond the board.
Allowing lets the action rock the dames.
Computers gather more than rubber cord.
Improving trees involves some added light.
We picked the shiny orbs to thwart the mice.
Remember stone when changing suns of height.
To burn them once is not to burn them twice.
The sum of whales could crack the glacial core.
MacGowan's Christmas came the future's score.

Post-Thanksgiving Entanglements

Hope Davis wants to go on a simple quest to find out whether husband has been cheating on her but finds the matter complicated when her parents, sister, and sister's boyfriend all decide to tag along in 1996's The Daytrippers. The ensuing story is a pleasant, mild, holiday diversion.

After Thanksgiving, Eliza (Davis) goes home with her husband Louis (Stanley Tucci) and the two make love.

And I thought, wow, ain't Stanley Tucci a lucky son of a gun. The balding man with average looks somehow got this knockout. But, of course, this was the era when the cheating fictional husband typically wore his inner corruption on the outside.

Meanwhile, Eliza's little sister, Jo (Parker Posey), is with her boyfriend, Carl (Liev Schreiber), staying at their parents' house. When Eliza brings them the clue she found, a love letter quoting Andrew Marvell, Rita (Anne Meara), Eliza and Jo's mother, decides they should all pile into the car and head into the city and find out just what Louis is up to.

Rita is a spectator who is unconcerned with her lack of more than superficial understanding of any of the various people and situations they encounter in the city. Carl, who's in the process of finishing his first novel, frequently pontificates with shallow opinions, at one point mentioning how the middle class is anaesthetised by tabloid media. Oh, for the days when America had a sizable middle class. You don't know how good you have it, Carl. Anyway, the shoe seems to fit Rita in this case.

But although she leads the charge, she's not the focus of the film which persistently maintains a light touch, never allowing any of the little plot threads to get a firm grip, quite intentionally. Life is too messy for any drama to take up the space it might want to. Rita faints in the street and Carl prevails upon a young man to let them into his apartment so she can rest. They discover a little drama involving the man's father who's kind of a prick, but then also kind of a nice guy, at first demanding to know why strangers are in his home and then offering them all lunch and wine. This little episode is followed by a party where Jo finds herself tempted to cheat with a less obnoxious author.

Carl keeps talking about Andrew Marvell as an "Elizabethan poet" and "predecessor of Shakespeare" though Marvell was in fact born years after Shakespeare and Elizabeth I were already dead. I'm not sure if this was Carl's mistake or the filmmakers'. I'm tempted to think it's the latter since what would be the point of introducing a mistake that only the random 17th literary nerd like me would catch? My point is, she should be dating me.

The writing is mainly strong, though, with its deliberately light but canny touch and its credible characters in mildly incredible situations. Hope Davis and Parker Posey are both gorgeous and captivating.

The Daytrippers is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a Parker Posey collection.

The Dangerous Nothing

Now that's what I call a Doctor Who special. Yesterday's "Wild Blue Yonder" was well above average, a wonderfully creepy puzzle reminiscent of The Mind Robber or "Chimes at Midnight".

It didn't start auspiciously. The cold open, with a tone similar to the Children in Need sketch, showed the TARDIS crashing into the tree that dropped an apple on an inexplicably brown skinned Isaac Newton. It led to a recurring gag about how the word for gravity had changed to "mavity" (are they going to remember that forever going forward?). But it was clearly Russell T Davies thumbing his nose at a segment of the fanbase. It was pointlessly flippant, as was the Doctor's disregard for implications to the timeline for disrupting a major historical event. Of course, as Mr. Data told us, Newton actually getting hit in the head by an apple is apocryphal. So I think Davies was making a broader statement about how nothing in art has to be true so long as it's good art. With which I would agree. But this gag wasn't good art, which is a shame because the other 95% of the episode is absolutely amazing.

Just one episode after Davies established a whole new set of powers for the sonic screwdriver, he deprives the Doctor of it, the TARDIS, and even his overcoat from which he might produce any manner of other gadgets. We go from flippancy and no stakes to a palpably grave situation (or mave situation?) as the Doctor and Donna find themselves stranded on a spacecraft adrift in the darkness beyond the edge of the universe.

Ultimately they encounter a species so fundamentally alien, they seem to be manifestations of nothing. Their attempts to copy the Doctor and Donna are incredibly, effectively creepy. One moment they seem to know everything, the next they reveal that their seemingly intimate knowledge is no more than a tactfully deployed echo that seems to be motivated by an extreme, enigmatic malice.

There's a moment I loved where one of the aliens won the Doctor's trust. And as a viewer, I was right there with him, scrutinising the evidence, and I was fooled too. So a little later, when he's kicking the bulkhead in rage at the betrayal, at his own weakness, you feel it. Oh, it was so very good.

The Doctor's methods for thwarting the aliens were even more satisfying for it, but they're quite good in themselves. I loved how he used the salt barrier and his final logical test about the contradictory nature of the human mind was good. That scene was like the next step in an evolution of a particular kind of repeated sci-fi scene, on Star Trek and Doctor Who, of the alien or machine who's finally beaten by the hero's logic puzzle, like the "One person always lies and the other always tells the truth" puzzle. That's not going to work on these things, which makes them all the scarier. And more of an affront. They want to take the place of humanity and they have absolutely no concern for what matters to humanity. The perfection of their mimicry is a really chilling insult. I suppose Davies could be talking about AI but not making it explicitly about AI, as he certainly could have on Doctor Who, makes it all the better.

Wow. What a magnificent early Christmas present is "Wild Blue Yonder".

The new Doctor Who specials are available on Disney+ in most of the world and on the BBC iPlayer in the UK.

Conquest in the Clouds

In a France beset by violent social and political turmoil, one man took control, eventually became emperor, and attempted to take over the world. But who was Napoleon really and how did he do all this? Don't expect answers or much perspective from Ridley Scott's 2023 film of Napoleon.

I knew going in the film had been criticised for historical inaccuracies but that doesn't bother me per se. If artistic liberties are taken in the interest of making good art, I say that's all right and good. But Scott ultimately doesn't seem to have a cogent thought behind this big thing.

The first twenty minutes or so are pretty good. Scott ably shows the final days of the Revolution. I particularly liked the scene in which France's governing committee turns on Robespierre (Sam Troughton). He impotently but accurately denounces their hypocrisy as they rush to murder him. I kept thinking of Werewolf of Paris and of how that novel described the people as a populace of werewolves and it was certainly easy to see that point of view here.

Early on, Scott depicts Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) as a man above this. When an officer tells him he won't let Toulon fall to Royalists or the English, Napoleon laughs at the man's ardent partisanship. Similarly, Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) is at her best in early scenes when she cannily manipulates her way into Napoleon's life by playing on his ego. But both characters and their motivations, as well as the motivations of the people around them, become increasingly nebulous as the movie progresses.

Vanessa Kirby gives a forceful performance but it's never clear why Napoleon is so obsessed with her. I'd have liked a scene that showed the two had some mutual insight or understanding but there's nothing like that, just a lot of oddly inexplicit sex scenes.

Scott seemingly shares Leo Tolstoy's perspective in War and Peace that Napoleon's intellect has been vastly overrated and that it was the force of his popularity that won him his victories. But unlike Tolstoy, Scott never credibly establishes why Napoleon was so popular (or why Josephine loved him as more than just a means of survival). A big part of the problem is Joaquin Phoenix's performance. Phoenix is a fine actor who can play many kinds of characters but as Scott was particularly interested in his performance as the Joker, Phoenix reprises something of that character here. It's a poor fit as Phoenix's take on the Joker, while brilliant, was deliberately off-putting rather than charismatic. When people instinctively don't like him, you get it.

At the same time, I think Scott probably came away with the wrong reaction to Joker's climactic scene. As Quentin Tarantino observed:

The subversion on a massive level, the thing that’s profound is this: It’s not just suspenseful, it’s not just riveting and exciting, the director subverts the audience because the Joker is a fucking nut. Robert De Niro’s talk show character is not a movie villain. He seems like an asshole, but he’s not more of an asshole than David Letterman. He’s just an asshole comedian, talk show guy. He’s not a movie villain. He doesn’t deserve to die. Yet, while the audience is watching the Joker, they want him to kill Robert De Niro; they want him to take that gun, and stick it in his eye and blow his fucking head off. And if the Joker didn’t kill him? You would be pissed off. That is subversion on a massive level! They got the audience to think like a fucking lunatic and to want . . . And they will lie about it! They will say, ‘No, I didn’t,’ and they are fucking liars. They did.

Frankly, I think when Ridley Scott watched Joker, he was one of the people who lied to themselves. His presentation of Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon is never a guy you root for. In fact, one of the best, most charismatic characters in the film is Wellington, played by an almost unrecognisable Rupert Everett. His point of view is clear and, from the moment he starts talking, the film's sympathy is entirely with him. After Waterloo, Napoleon is shown breakfasting on Wellington's ship, regaling a group of boys in uniform with his opinion on cannon placement. And I thought, how sad, he's reduced to forcing kids to listen to him ramble. But then the scene cuts to an officer explaining to Wellington that "the midshipmen", those boys, "love him." Really? Maybe a different actor than Phoenix or Phoenix giving a different performance could've sold that. But this movie never does. And I think it's fundamentally because Scott never allowed himself to love Napoleon.

Maybe it's just because he doesn't like the French, which seems almost amusingly clear at this point. The movie was shot almost entirely in England standing in for French locations and, responding to criticisms of his portrayal of France and Napoleon, Scott said, "The French don't even like themselves." I'm reminded of my 2010 review of Robin Hood, another bad Ridley Scott movie, in which I wrote:

I didn't have a problem with the historical inaccuracies, really--particularly not Marion's costumes, one of which featured a skirt split up the centre for riding. And it was nice seeing her hair uncovered most of the time, instead of always covered in public as per the requirements of modesty at the time. But other deviations from history might have led me to believe that Ridley Scott has a vicious hatred for the French if it weren't for the fact that The Good Year, an earlier film of his, hadn't been such a mud bath in idyllic French countryside.

But if you're going to make a movie like Napoleon, you have to have some honest connexion to the main character. Citizen Kane works because it's not just Orson Welles skewering William Randolph Hearst. Welles put himself in the character, too. When Stanley Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange, he made the atrocious Alex DeLarge one of the most charismatic characters in the history of cinema. Notably, Welles and Kubrick both tried and failed to make movies about Napoleon. Alas for what might have been.

X Sonnet #1795

In aging glands the life was shortly stopped.
A message soap was cancelled after six.
In twenty years, the square is ever cropped.
Computer scans complete the achy tricks.
A broken hobby horse would bandy dreams.
A shiny bottle cheered the gloomy pool.
As ragged yarns would stitch a drunkard's seams.
A frozen bucket night would kill a fool.
Before the break of ice, a cauldron cracked.
Between the stacks of corpses, horses rode.
But 'long the reel, the vision sadly slacked.
Unless the dreamer wrought a subtle code.
Exhausting fights occur as phantom days.
In ev'ry flake the snow reveals its ways.

Shane MacGowan

Shane MacGowan died on Thursday. I'd been feeling grim for several days and it kind of seemed like everyone was. MacGowan's death sort of blends in with it, which yet makes it stand out more. Everyone has kind of expected MacGowan to die any day for the past forty years. The hard drinking singer who never seemed to care much whether he lived or died had all the marks of it in his manner and infamously bad teeth.

Just last year, an interview at The Guardian with MacGowan began, "MacGowan has not talked to a British newspaper for 10 years and there is so much to ask him, not least how he is still alive." And now he's not and it's not such a mystery. Why does that make it hurt more? When he lived, it was an interesting rebuke to all apparent evidence. Now he's dead, it's just ugly grey, dull normalcy. It's the inexorably fulfilled prophecy in his lyrics about being beaten, starved, and abused.

I often find myself whistling "Dirty Old Town" in recent years, a song I first heard in a rendition by The Pogues, MacGowan's band. The town I live in, Kashihara, seems to suit the song with its factories, canals, battered old buildings, and, despite the famous Japanese obsession with cleanliness, plenty of dirt, with many buildings bearing streaks of black mould and rust.

I suppose it's fitting that MacGowan died at the start of a Christmas season since his most famous song, ironically, is a Christmas song. Just last year the song, "Fairytale of New York", was featured on no less mainstream a platform as The Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas Special.

It's kind of fucked up there's a Michael Buble ad at the end of that video right now, especially since it's the uncensored version of the song.

Shane MacGowan was 65 when he died. He collaborated with many other great musicians in his time. He performed as part of Nick Cave's ensemble arrangement of Bob Dylan's "Death is Not the End", which seems as appropriate a note to end on as any: