I was watching Matt Reeves' The Batman again last night, the first time I've seen it since seeing it in the theatre. My initial impression of it being the most vanilla Batman movie remains. The Tim Burton ones, the Christopher Nolan ones, even the Joel Schumacher ones, always felt like they were trying to do something radical. Reeves' movie takes the radical aspects of those films--Burton's gothic aesthetic and Nolan's grittiness--and deploys them as standard issue. The actual plot is mostly procedural and reminds me more of the animated series than of any of the comics. I'm still puzzled that some called it the darkest Batman movie. None of the main characters die and Paul Dano's performance as the Riddler is about as zany as Jim Carrey's, albeit with Zodiac killer dressing. The ending is certainly more softball than one of Burton's or Nolan's.
I guess the only aspect I really think pushed the envelope was the score by Michael Giacchino which is mostly low key and seems to be built entirely around Nirvana's "Something In the Way". I suspect a lot of the praise for the film was politically motivated as the plot deals with class resentment and touches on privilege, not only financial but also racial. These aspects are dealt with at about the same level of sophistication as an episode of Columbo. Bruce Wayne is shown to be flawed, almost childlike, for his low capacity for empathy. The line "I am vengeance," always seemed like it was meant to be powerful in previous incarnations of Batman; here he's openly mocked for it.
But I find these political elements mostly unobtrusive in the film which is more concerned with how point A connects with point B, with how one clue leads to another, with how one character's connexion to another is relevant to motivation. It has some of the fetishistic qualities of the Burton and Schumacher films as Reeves doesn't feel Nolan's need to maintain a sense of realism at all times. It's fun.
I love how people are obsessively talking about Andor. It's so good having a show like that around again, something intelligent that prompts intelligent conversation.
This morning I watched this video by a guy called the Feral Historian who makes the point that the Rebellion, while largely leftist coded, can be interpreted as a right-wing group since their goal is better described as restoration rather than revolution. From that perspective, you could almost call the Empire progressive. In Revenge of the Sith, Palpatine does make the point that it is the first Galactic Empire. You could hardly call that conservative, reorganising the system of government into something that had never existed before. The Empire may be closer to Soviets than Nazis.
I keep waiting for someone to point it out and I'm sure someone has but the shots of stormtroopers coming down the steps during the Ghorman massacre seem pretty clearly modelled on the famous sequence of Russian troops coming down the steps in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin.
X Sonnet 1947
The laundry waits for sun beneath the clouds.
We hear the steady drip of soapy socks.
An army's worth of clothes defend the crowds.
But maybe sort them towards a prison box.
The river flows with soap as time would clean.
Another year would pass before the suds.
An olive tree emerged from Lucy's bean.
The brittle branches launched a fleet of buds.
Intrusive birds would crowd the fragile perch.
Their talons broke their stockings ev'ry time.
But rarely crows could fail a garbage search.
We took to gest'ring notes by cour'yer mime.
The edifice of useless days awaits.
A foolish block of bone and brain it baits.
A young woman in a foreign country is subjected to psychological manipulations by the locals in 1950's So Long at the Fair. Jean Simmons plays Vicky, an Englishwoman who wakes up one morning in her Parisian hotel to find not only has her brother disappeared but his hotel room has vanished with him. The story that follows, based loosely on an urban legend, is an effective entry in the gaslight genre.
Of course, the hotel staff insist they have no memory of her brother or of room 19 ever being anything other than a washroom. I thought it unlikely that any explanation the film provided could satisfactorily make sense of this. I thought it would be like Dangerous Crossing, another movie with a similar premise in which the explanation ended up making very little sense. But actually So Long at the Fair's explanation, while unlikely, does make sense, so long as one remembers that real people, even communities, occasionally do very strange and unwise things.
There's a nice contrast between the normal, sensible world Vicky goes to sleep in and the nightmare she wakes up in, in which everyone behaves as though all her memories of her brother are her delusions. Matters are made more difficult by the fact that Vicky's command of French is weak. It's rare for a movie of this period to make language differences an important aspect of the story and I certainly appreciated it here.
Inevitably, there are flaws in the elaborate deception, the most significant being a young man named George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde), an artist from England. He assumes an heroic role but the film maintains its tension. He enlists the aid of a doctor played by none other than Andre Morell. It's always nice when he turns up.
So Long at the Fair is available on The Criterion Channel.
A notorious killer marries the daughter of the king of beggars in 1931's The Threepenny Opera (Die 3 Groschen-Oper), GW Pabst's adaptation of the famous stage musical by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. The stage play's socialist message was diminished in favour of portraying humanity of all stripes as thoroughly corrupt. It's grimly amusing with a standout performance by Lotte Lenya in the role of Jenny.
The story's set in Victorian London though, being a German production, everyone's speaking German. Mackie Messer/Mack the Knife (Rudolph Forster) runs a gang of thieves and enjoys the attentions of all the prostitutes in town, particularly the sinister Jenny.
Lenya has such an odd, angular beauty. She really doesn't need to tell us she has secret connexions to pirates; something about her body language and face suggest violence. When she learns that Mack has abruptly married Polly (Carola Neher), it's easy to believe Mack's in real danger of her revenge.
Polly's father (Fritz Rasp) is chief of all the beggars in town and organises them like the head of a workhouse. Rather than a leftist rabble-rouser, he's a cynical caricature drawn straight from that old right wing urban myth about the secretly wealthy street beggars. I remember hearing people still repeating it now and then back when I lived in the U.S. People would talk with a straight face about someone in rags who'd sneak behind the corner and drive off in a Lamborghini.
He demands the chief of police, Tiger Brown (Reinhold Schunzel), capture and execute Mack but it takes some convincing because, of course, Brown and Mack are bosom buddies.
The Threepenny Opera is available on The Criterion Channel.
I was watching some vintage commercials this morning, getting ready for an activity in class to-day where the students are going to write commercials. I found this Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial from 1967 impressively creepy:
Next they'll be wearing trousers!
Amongst the cheap, provocative spam Facebook occasionally puts on my page, I saw that once again the media had its ax to grind with Morrissey. Googling now, I see the Guardian has an article called "Nick Cave says he declined Morrissey’s request to sing ‘silly anti-woke screed' on new song" and Rolling Stone has an article called "Nick Cave Did Not Want to Read Morrissey's 'Silly Anti-Woke Screed' for New Song". What did Nick Cave actually say? The source for the articles is the recent Red Hand Files in which Cave said:
I’ve never actually met Morrissey, which is probably why I like him. He is undeniably a complex and divisive figure, someone who takes more than a little pleasure in pissing people off. As enjoyable as some may find this, it holds little interest for me, but for the fact that Morrissey is probably the best lyricist of his generation - certainly the strangest, funniest, most sophisticated, and most subtle. We had a few pleasant email exchanges last year in which Morrissey asked if I’d sing on a new song he had written. I would have been happy to do so, however, while the song he sent was quite lovely, it began with a lengthy and entirely irrelevant Greek bouzouki intro. It also seemed that he didn’t want me to actually sing on the song, but deliver, over the top of the bouzouki, an unnecessarily provocative and slightly silly anti-woke screed he had written. Although I suppose I agreed with the sentiment on some level, it just wasn’t my thing. I try to keep politics, cultural or otherwise, out of the music I am involved with. I find that it has a diminishing effect and is antithetical to whatever it is I am trying to achieve. So, Astrid, I politely declined. I said no.
A few articles elaborate further to show this isn't actually the beginning of a feud as the article titles suggest. But how many people are going to read past the headlines? With war between Israel and Iran, and ongoing between Ukraine and Russia, the media still has time to kill picking fights with Morrissey. I can't help thinking of one of Morrissey's own lyrics, "There's so much destruction all over the world and all you can do is complain about me."
X Sonnet 1946
A giant kitten's face replaced the wall.
No clocks could count above the critter's eye.
With clouds below, no angel thought to fall.
But something tempts about the earthly pie.
So spiralled down, the airy spirits drop.
About the kitchen crowds the seraphim.
But local gossips call a nosy cop.
The streets were washed in klaxon siren's din.
Their pearly robes would thwart the feet of grace.
In haste, they dash across a private field.
The godly herald falls upon his face.
But fertile ground to gods would ever yield.
As Heaven merged with Earth without a fight,
The morning light reveals a hybrid wight.
A group of women deal with death, sexual assault, and possibly ghosts in 2006's Volver. Writer/director Pedro Almodovar continues to explore his fascination with women in this sweet, amusing, and slightly messy portrayal of a community.
I think I'd seen this movie before. Maybe I saw another Almodovar movie starring Penelope Cruz. I'm pretty sure I saw this at the Landmark theatre in Hillcrest, San Diego when it was new. Or maybe not. I sure miss those Landmark movie theatres. Googling just now, I see the Landmark in Hillcrest closed in January this year. I suppose the wonderful indie movie theatre will probably be replaced by another fake sushi restaurant of the kind that replaced the wonderful bookstore in the same neighbourhood or anonymous office space. Or maybe just lie vacant as the owner of the space awaits some soulless entity to fork over an obscene amount of money.
The poster art for Volver is striking and its style is replicated in the animated closing credits which feature coalescing borders of spinning flowers reminiscent of Saul Bass. There is a kind of Hitchcockian quality to some aspects of the film, particularly the sequence in which Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) must hide her husband's corpse. Her daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo), had killed him after he'd tried to rape her. Raimunda stashes the body in the freezer of the restaurant next door. The owner of the restaurant had entrusted Raimunda with the keys while he was out of town. When a film crew spots her coming out of the place, they ask if they could eat there on a regular basis during production. She can't resist the opportunity and borrows food from other women in the community and opens the restaurant to customers.
Meanwhile, Raimunda's sister, Sole (Lola Duenas), hears the voice of their dead mother coming from the trunk of her car. The title of the film means "return" and seems to refer not only to the dead returning but to unresolved issues manifesting anew. Mostly it's a funny, cosy movie.
Be careful with your intellectual comments; they might get you six years hard labour in a communist country as the protagonist of 1968's The Joke (Žert) discovers. Made during the Prague Spring, a brief period of freer speech, this film by Jaromil Jires employs a fascinating kaleidoscoping of flashback and present to create a sense of dislocated reality.
Ludvik Jahn (Jodef Somr) is a scientist. In narration he sounds bored and disaffected. Returning to his hometown, he offhandedly remarks on how he doesn't really like anyone there. We find he's being interviewed by an older woman called Helena (Jana Dítětová) who rapidly begins to adore him. Upon seeing a photograph of her husband, Pavel (Ludek Munzar), and recognising him, we see Ludvik's memories from years earlier. We see the hearing that resulted in his stint in forced reeducation. Shots of the panel of judges and crowd of people don't cut to reaction shots of Ludvik at the time but to Ludvik in the present, reclining on a sofa with his perpetually bemused expression. The impression this creates is of the airtight world of the communist moralists, a world living in a bubble of editing.
As the title of the film suggests, this is all over a joke. Ludvik made the mistake of falling for the beautiful and passionately communist young Marketa (Jaroslava Obersmaierova) to whom he quite wittily remarked that "Optimism is the opiate of the masses. A 'healthy spirit' stinks of stupidity. Long live Trotsky!" In this, Ludvik shows the not exactly difficult insight that the communists had truly traded one religion for another, even more dogmatic and restrictive, religion of gossip and resentment. In the hearing, Marketa confidently raises her hand when the vote comes to sentence Ludvik to hard labour.
It's not hard to see why Ludvik feels so isolated. How can he find meaning in human relationships? Even revenge holds little meaning and he barely manages the passion to pursue it. How could he feel any of his actions could have a meaningful impact? Maybe that's worse than having to swing a pickax in a quarry for six years.
Last night I dreamt I was with a group of friends and we were lost in a labyrinthine department store. We finally came out through some doors on the north side beyond which there were some blocky apartment buildings. There was some kind of demoniac entity above our heads that had an obsessive hatred of free will. To pass unnoticed, we had to avoid any creative thinking, even fairly simple things like deciding what we might wear the next day.
I've been kind of lagging on the sonnets lately, haven't I? I guess I got tired of writing a quatrain every night. I was operating under the idea that something weird would come out of my brain if I were sleepy, now I feel like crafting them after my morning coffee. You can judge for yourself if they're any better:
X Sonnet 1945
The liberated ghost was wanted west.
The eyes of supermarket lights were peeled.
Suspicion spots a heart beneath a vest.
The diamond brains would see the card repealed.
A savage shade usurped the role of rain.
As pouring lead reduced the land to steel.
Their vital organs beat their chests in vain.
Organic life has lost the right to feel.
A party crossed the guarded mall at night.
Beyond the northern doors there waits a beast.
No question now arose to hazard flight.
For greedy minds on desp'rate souls would feast.
Preserved with blood, the dead assume a name.
A city bleeds to come a drinker's game.
I was pleased to see yesterday that Andor topped the Nielson streaming chart during its final week (for some reason Nielson ratings are delayed a couple weeks so this was only released yesterday). Even a lot of fans of the show have called it niche, something that could only appeal to a small segment of hardcore Star Wars fans but that's plainly untrue. I believe this is the first truly successful Star Wars media since the first season of The Mandalorian. You can see the difference in the way it's being talked about; it's not just a bunch of shills. Even RedLetterMedia mumbled approval for the first season.
The most interesting thing to me about the reactions to the show is that it's touching both political extremes in our notoriously politicised current era. On YouTube, the popular right-wing critic called The Critical Drinker praised the series and a left-wing YouTuber called Jessie Gender recorded a four hour analysis. Both are fairly weak as far as analyses go but, as is often the case with weak but confident analyses, they say a lot about the analysts. I continue to think Syril and Dedra are the best part of the series which has many other fine qualities and it's fascinating how both Critical Drinker and Jessie Gender discuss Syril. Critical Drinker is rapturous over the shot of Syril nearly strangling a woman for rather fishy reasons while Jessie Gender takes Syril's initial behaviour with Dedra, even long before that scene, as a sign of the fundamental need to dominate women in all men. Both reactions seemed wild extrapolations to me and I would've assumed they'd seem that way to the average viewer in saner times. But in any case, it's fascinating that the show provokes such passionate and opposite interpretations.
Maybe it's worth remembering that we all hate fascism, even as we disagree on who the fascists are.
It's hard not to see Andor's relevance to current events. How many people are recalling the Ghorman Massacre when they watch news about National Guard being called in to quell protesters in Los Angeles? And just as with the prequels, it comes from a writer not making the story an allegory of any political event, or chaining himself to a particular ideology, but simply expressing the patterns he saw presented by a study of historical events. It turns out Andor's great and popular. It's a uniquely useful piece of art.
Harris Yulin, who passed away on June 10th at the age of 87, is one of those actors you're bound to have seen at some point if you regularly take in American film and television. I saw him just recently in Night Moves. A lot of people vividly remember him as the ornery judge in Ghostbusters 2. But as illustrious as his film career was, it was on television he indelibly made a mark. He played major characters on Frasier, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The X-Files. He was on Murphy Brown, two iterations of La Femme Nikita, Kojack, Barnaby Jones, Wonder Woman, the list goes on.
For many people, judging from reactions I've been reading, his most impressive performance was on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the 1993 episode "Duet". It's one of those dream roles for an actor seeking a challenge. He played a character pretending to be another character and the effectiveness and psychological motivation for his deception were both integral to the story. He rose to the occasion and the episode remains fascinating to watch.
Such a ubiquitous actor seems like part of the bedrock of an era in film and television media. His death feels like the end of one, or part of a transition to another.
Gene Hackman and Al Pacino are a pair of tramps in 1973's Scarecrow, a film that largely rides on their performances. Well, Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography is gorgeous but, despite a few interesting ideas, the film never quite wholly satisfies.
Hackman was a big guy and it seems most of his roles didn't really take advantage of it. Here, he plays an ex-con named Max, wandering the roads with a pipe dream about opening a car wash. He seems like pleasant enough company but slowly you start to realise that, in most conversations, he's trying to start a fight, something his powerful physique allows him to successfully do. The film gets its title from a sort of joke Pacino's character, Francis, tells him about how crows aren't afraid of scarecrows--they actually find them quite funny and so do the farmers the favour of leaving their crops alone in exchange for the entertainment. Max laughs in what seems like appreciation before remarking on what a stupid idea it is. Francis has the deer in headlights look of someone who's not used to the twists in conversation a compulsive bully might employ.
The two are an effective double act; Max always spoiling for a fight and Francis persisting in his friendliness. The two get brief jobs and meet women on their journey from California to Pittsburgh, most memorably a horny southern woman called Frenchy (Ann Wedgeworth).
The climax of the film calls for an intense performance from Pacino, and he rises to the occasion. There's kind of a Man Who Shot Liberty Valance spirit to the film about the value of peace and human connexion in a world that seems to inevitably demand violence.
Scarecrow is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a celebration of the late Gene Hackman.
I watched Ally McBeal again last night, the March 27, 2000 episode called "Boy Next Door". This one (spoilers) brings the ongoing plot about Ally and Billy to a conclusion with Billy's sudden death by cerebral haemorrhage during his closing argument in a trial. I've said it a couple times now but I'll say it again; I really admire how David E. Kelley handled this problem. Billy was clearly intended to be a character audiences rooted for Ally to get back with but actor Gil Bellows gave such an unintentionally slimy performance that it was actually very uncomfortable whenever there were sparks between the two. Kelley didn't ignore that problem; he took it and used it. He made Billy's sliminess explicit by turning him into an unapologetic chauvinist which was good for laughs. And then Kelley used that for the brain tumour plot, making his death actually mean something. If "good" Billy had died, I'd have just said good riddance. This way, it became something interesting about the human mind and how much control someone has over who they are. A broad comedic bit turned into a real existential tragedy. There's a writer using craft and improvisation remarkably well. I'm compelled to think this is facilitated by the fact that Kelley wrote every single episode.
Ally McBeal is available on Disney+ in Japan, probably on Hulu in the U.S., I don't know.
I was watching Ally McBeal last night and noticed the episode was directed by Rachel Talalay, a director with a very long career in television, perhaps most distinguished for the many episodes of Doctor Who she directed in the Twelfth Doctor era. So I dozed off watching Doctor Who last night, though not episodes directed by Talalay. I started with the first episode of The Ark in Space and then moved on to "The Pilot", the first episode of Twelve's final season, in which we meet his companion, Bill.
How frustrating it is to reflect on how well everything was working in Twelve's final season. "The Pilot" has the wisdom to start small instead of trying to cram a million plot details and special effects into every minute. Bill is introduced and allowed to breathe, the Doctor is allowed to be reintroduced as a mysterious professor. To think it was panic over this season's tendency to be watched by only around five million people that led to the revamp that saw ratings decline to the four million range before settling to-day in the two million range. I guess a lot of what makes a great creator or producer of television is to know when to hold 'em, know when to walk away, etc.
X Sonnet 1944
Spaghetti messes mount above the rim.
The blackened pot could speak in heated tones.
But speaking plain could make the lights go dim.
The kitchen tiles hid the preacher's bones.
Like fingers finding herbs, the roots advance.
A cooking ground defined the lonely house.
A barren garden waits for worm romance.
The lurid scene has shamed the watching mouse.
Some screws of hate are twisting little minds.
With slime, the wretched cauldron bubbles hot.
A des'prate chef prepares some rotten rinds.
A bloated heart would smother infant thought.
The march of stupid men would crush the school.
The imp aspires now to be a tool.
Three separate Predators set out to hunt three different human warriors in 2025's Predator: Killer of Killers, an animated film from directors Dan Trachtenberg and Joshua Wassung. Trachtenberg was the mastermind behind the popular Predator movie Prey a couple years ago and the writing on Killer of Killers is just as ridiculous. The animated format may be better suited to cartoonish logic but I found the third segment of the film too vigorously lame.
Like Prey, Killer of Killers features some actors with tenuous connexions to the ethnicities they're portraying. Louis Ozawa, an American actor of Japanese and Chinese descent, plays a pair of samurai brothers, the only voice role in the mostly wordless second and best segment of the film. Set in 1609 in no more specific place than "in Japan", a detail that may be less obtrusive to those of you not living in Japan, the story follows the lives of the two men whose father has pitted against each other for the right of succession to shogun. The two learn the value of working together against the extraterrestrial foe, who in one shot is visually linked to their psychopathic father. It's not a story that fits well in feudal Japan, nor does it seem right for a Predator movie, particular in its posing the Predator as a thematic ghost of the boys' father. But the action sequences are the best of the film.
I preferred the concept of the first story, in which a Viking matriarch is robbed of her moment of glorious revenge but the sudden intrusion of a Predator. I liked the idea of the alien foe also disrupting culture and tradition.
The third segment, about a young fighter pilot in World War II, was just a relentless stream of stupid ideas. On this kid's first flight, he wears no helmet, everyone in the squadron is able to communicate with each other without apparent headsets; at one point the boy crawls out onto the wing of his plane in midflight in order to fix something. He also somehow knows that the Predator's vision is based on heat so he decides to cut his engines, apparently making his aircraft ice cold. Sure, it didn't make a lot of sense when Schwarzenegger was able to hide behind cold mud but at least he felt constrained to also be still when the Predator was looking directly at him.
It's not a very satisfying film but it's a good accomplishment for animation studio Third Floor.
Predator: Killer of Killers is available on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ elsewhere in the world.
I finally managed to get through 2011's Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides last night. Every time I'd tried to watch it before, all the cgi slapstick and lousy writing stopped me cold. But somehow I kind of enjoyed it this time.
Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz are both fine in it. Depp really disappears into the Jack Sparrow role and, in spite of everything, I see the character and not the very over-exposed actor. Which certainly says something about said actor's abilities. Penelope Cruz was pregnant during filming which would likely explain the excessive number of close-ups she has. Something about her lacked the flair she has in other roles.
I asked Google's AI why Ian McShane, an Englishman, uses an American accent in his role as the English pirate Blackbeard. I received this answer:
Ian McShane's character, Blackbeard, in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, has an American accent, likely due to the character's portrayal as a "North American pirate" or "colonist pirate". The film draws upon historical depictions of pirates who plundered Caribbean islands and were associated with the Americas. While McShane is British, the film's narrative and Blackbeard's characterization suggest a connection to the American colonists and their language.
The interesting thing about it to me is that it's a rationale and not the obvious, actual reason, that McShane, at the time, was best known for his portrayal of Al Swearengen, an American character on the HBO series Deadwood. If he'd been cast as Blackbeard when he was best known for playing the title character on Lovejoy, who spoke with an English accent, he probably would've also used an English accent for his portrayal of Blackbeard. Why can't the AI think of this? It's like it's afraid of offending someone.
Accents in the 18th century would've been noticeably different than they are to-day, whether you're talking about people in England or in an American colony, so any accent would be an anachronism anyway. There's no reason for Jack Sparrow to have an English accent. The rationale for speaking with a modern English accent is about as valid as speaking with a modern American one.
On Stranger Tides was directed by Rob Marshall who went on to direct the live action Little Mermaid remake. Perhaps it was the use of mermaids in On Stranger Tides that made him seem right for the job. The mermaids in On Stranger Tides, though, were certainly much hotter.
I generally find Marshall to be a bland filmmaker and this is a mostly bland film though mostly due to the poorly considered plot than anything to do with direction. The screenwriters seem to struggle to string thoughts together. When Jack tries to organise a mutiny on Blackbeard's ship, Blackbeard hadn't appeared yet up to that point. Jack asks if any of the crew have ever seen Blackbeard and they all say, no, that the captain never leaves his quarters. From this, Jack, reasonably enough, concludes they've all been deceived, and this isn't Blackbeard's ship at all. But after executing the mutiny, who should emerge from the cabin but none other than Blackbeard himself. Why had he never come out of his cabin before? No explanation is given. Had he truly never been on deck during any previous attack or raid? This is left unaddressed. There's a lot of stuff like that in the movie: scenes that depend on you at least half forgetting previous scenes in order to function.
I was delighted to see an old friend, the Surprise, the ship used by Captain Barbossa in his new position as a Captain in the Royal Navy. The Surprise is a replica 18th century ship that docks at the San Diego Maritime Museum, where I was a volunteer hand for a few years, until six years ago. My first day volunteering at the museum, I spent around three hours sitting on the Surprise's poop deck, learning to splice lines, a skill I sadly did not retain. Though I can't imagine when I might next use it. I was subsequently to spend quite a lot of time on that ship and it was genuinely nice to see her again.
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is available on Disney+.
I drew this not exactly book accurate sketch of Bilbo and Gollum in the art club of one of the schools I've been working at lately. I confess, I made Bilbo look a little more cherubic because I was hoping to stimulate the students' interest in Tolkien. No such luck.
I live near a train track. The area north of the track has some factories followed by rice fields, forests, and hills. South of the track are more urban areas. Last week, I was working at a school north of the track and I've been listening to The Lord of the Rings on my iPod. Listening to the tale of the hobbits walking through forests and farmland paired well with actually walking through farmland and forest. I even walked through a very old graveyard which paired well with the chapter on the Barrow Wights.
I was compelled yet again to wonder at the fact that, though Harry Potter is wildly popular, most people I've met in Japan haven't even heard of Lord of the Rings. One teacher I worked with had seen the movies but told me he didn't find them especially interesting. Yet I can't help being struck by the similarities between the Japanese in these affluent rural towns and the descriptions of hobbits. They're a people, relatively short in stature, suspicious of outsiders, passionate about creature comforts, and sticklers for tradition and taboos. Maybe the problem is that it's too close to home. I don't know. Well, I also think the beauty of Tolkien's language probably doesn't translate to Japanese well.
X Sonnet 1943
The worser grass was vast ahead of her.
She chose a certain flower turned away.
The blossom pointed north and pointed sure.
Decision made, she stopped and took the day.
With rations low, she woke and cursed her sloth.
The sun had sunk and now the night was nigh.
She poured her beer and savoured all the froth.
And stuck the floral charm upon her thigh.
Her feet disturbed the dust and gravel path.
Suspicious birds upon her glanced and squawked.
She felt she risked a hidden demon's wrath.
For something through the dripping grasses stalked.
She felt a chill and saw a giant stone.
She wondered now if luck would lead her home.
Well, here's something hot off the presses for you. A mere six hours ago, the Talking Heads finally released an official video for their 1977 hit, "Psycho Killer". So that only took--what. 48 years?
Directed by Mike Mills and starring Saoirse Ronan, the video pleased the band because, "it's not literal, creepy, bloody, physically violent or obvious." Personally, I'd have preferred to Saoirse Ronan rampaging through her workplace, wielding a bloody knife. Come on, it is a creepy song. That's one of its good points. Well, Saoirse Ronan is always a delight in any case.
I was listening to a lot of music last night recommended by students at the latest school where I've been working. There's a group called Man With A Mission that wear wolf masks for all their performances. Unusual for Japanese groups, they sing some songs entirely in English. It's always nice to see a Japanese group try something new.
I see Budweiser has product placement in this music video, which is a really shrewd move on the band's part. Any Americans watching who might feel superior about American music will be reminded how watery and bland American beer is. So let's all accentuate the positive. I like wolves.
I watched an oddly lame episode of Ally McBeal last night, "In Search of Pygmies" from February, 2000. It has two plots; one in which Ally intentionally gets into a fender bender in order to ask out the cute guy in the car ahead of her, and one in which Ling, Lucy Liu's character, is trying to save Orson Bean from getting thrown out of a retirement home.
That's right, the Rankin Bass Bilbo Baggins himself. And he's still fighting dragons, having convinced everyone in the nursing home that such monsters are lurking in the shadows. Ling's heartlessness is usually played for laughs so it's kind of abrupt that she's so passionate about helping this old man. It feels like a stock plot from a standard drama while Ally's plot feels more like something from Seinfeld. It really feels like a phoned in episode, but phoned in from two different eras.
A private detective gets caught up in a sordid tale of sex and murder in 1975's Night Moves, one of the many neo-noirs of the 1970s that's clearly modelled on films based on Chandler and Hammett and novels (Faye Dunaway turned down a role in this movie to appear in Chinatown). With Gene Hackman as the detective protagonist, it's certainly an excellent specimen. An intriguing screenplay helps a lot.
Hackman plays Harry Moseby, a detective whose manliness, prowess, and not quite explicable appeal for every attractive woman and girl he meets maybe makes him more in the mould of a Mikey Spilane protagonist. Harry even used to be a pro football player. I wonder how many pro football players become private detectives. I wonder how frequent blows to the head might improve a man's capacity for deductive reasoning.
Harry finds out by pure chance that his wife is cheating on him. He confronts first the guy his wife's sleeping with and then his wife (Susan Clark). Both become defensive and angry with Harry. Harry even points this out when his wife, Ellen (Susan Clark), starts criticising the very concept of a private detective when he broaches the subject of her cheating on him. The movie stacks so many sympathy cards in Harry's deck, it would be absurd if it weren't for Hackman's performance which, as always, seems effortlessly natural.
The film also has a very young James Woods and an even younger Melanie Griffith whose nude scenes, shot when she was sixteen, necessitated a two year delay in the film's release. One of these scenes is the most memorable in the film and features on the poster--she goes for a nude swim at night and comes across a human corpse in a submerged plane. The eeriness of the shots vies with Shelley Winters in Night of the Hunter.
Night Moves is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a collection honouring Gene Hackman.
I came across my old iPod and charged it up. After more than fifteen years, it still seems to work fine. It has the old audiobooks I put on it to listen to back when I worked at JC Penney, when I really needed them. I kind of need them again these days so walking to and from work yesterday I listened to the entirety of Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney, read by Heaney himself.
I started asking myself if something like this could've been produced by A.I. There's a line I like from Grendel's attack:
He grabbed and mauled a man on his bench,
Bit into his bone-lappings, bolted down his blood
And gorged on him in lumps, leaving the body
Utterly lifeless, eaten up
Hand and foot.
I love the use of "bolted" as it not only carries on the "b" alliteration but also conjures the impression of speed and discourtesy. Apparently it was a choice of Heaney's. The original text has, "blôd êdrum dranc."
Could A.I. one day devise something like this? Why not? You could reduce the work to the rationale under it. Start on the broadest level; it's a story about a monster attacking people. Then go to details; the violence of the attack, the severity of the injuries. Then go to associations of words. What is the percentage of contexts in which "bolted" is used? What juxtaposition would communicate Grendel's character and the savagery of his actions?
It's beyond A.I. now, I'd think. But maybe after a hundred or two hundred years. Maybe only ten. It's fitting to think about with Beowulf which is so much about the achievement and fame of men. It's the fame Beowulf wins through his deeds that leads him to become king. Praiseworthy feats are fundamental to the fabric of Beowulf's society, of organising humans in some manner useful for survival in the harsh conditions of life in the fifth century or earlier, whenever the story was first conceived as an oral tradition before being transcribed. Do we need that anymore? Do we need ourselves?
X Sonnet 1942
Bewildered monsters grin amid the press.
The fire drive was routed back in pipes.
Abducted veins became the ducted dress.
A lady wears them now as nervous stripes.
The frothing imps were dancing 'midst the crowd.
No shame could tame the venom pulsing round.
She hurries on and clutches tight her shroud.
But soon, by hyper tripping hogs she's found.
Her veil removed, the reavers sing and dance.
The engine underfoot becomes a beat.
With vicious glee they seize her veins for chance.
A hectic day dissolves in ugly heat.
The dream of grace dissolves in humid stench.
The frenzied engine breaks for want of wrench.
Last night I dreamt I was in a garage in an American suburban neighbourhood and a pretty young woman with brown hair was distraught because her mother was dead. Her mother turned out to be a large cat skeleton, about twice the size of a normal cat but still pretty small for a human. I told the girl I had a very large tupperware container in which we could put the body and the young woman immediately, enthusiastically implored me to bring forth said container. When I looked closer at the body, I saw it was crawling with very tiny mice, each about the size of my thumbnail. When I mentioned this to the young woman, all signs of grief vanished from her face and she peered at the skeleton, fascinated.
I fell asleep last night watching Total Recall.
I guess the jackhammer could explain why Quaid looks like a bodybuilder.
When I was a kid, I always wondered why the bald guy puts his hand in the air and says "Recall, Recall, Recall." For some time I've suspected he was meant to be singing the commercial jingle only the jingle hadn't been recorded yet at the time of filming the scene so he had to improvise. I think about these things sometimes.
I'd planned to watch the season finale of Doctor Who last night but for some reason it didn't go up on Disney+ as early as it has normally been. So I watched it this morning and it was worth the wait. I thought it was terrific. It was pure ice cream for a long time Doctor Who fan but, again, I have to say that the hypothetical young new fan would be totally lost between all the plot dependent references to old episodes and an extraordinarily complicated plot with fast pace dialogue. Just like the clear political bias, it's something I can appreciate, even though it seems perfectly obvious this is all dooming the show to minuscule ratings and almost certainly a hiatus.
Spoilers ahead for the episode.
I expected the title of "Reality War" to make this a sort of allegory for the ongoing global, cultural/political war between the various shades of right and left. And it kind of was. Maybe it'll seem even more so once I've had time to digest it. I liked the conclusion of Conrad's story, not only because it was less politically polarised but also because it saved Ruby from looking like a complete idiot for falling for Conrad pretending to be her boyfriend. There was something real in their relationship and Conrad did have something more than just smug spite in his heart. On that note, I also liked the more nuanced dialogue between the Doctor and the Rani as the two bonded over being the last of the Time Lords.
With all the timey whimey plot stuff, the episode still managed some truly satisfying emotional beats. The strongest being the thread about Poppy--and Ruby being the only one who could remember her. I loved how Poppy vanished, her jacket, as it's being folded, slowly transforming into a handkerchief before disappearing entirely.
I thought Poppy was going to end up being Susan's mother. But then we never even got an explanation to Susan turning up in the past couple episodes. I guess they didn't want to overwrite that Eighth Doctor audio play after all.
The reappearance of Anita from the Christmas special was good and I liked her visiting the Eleventh and Third Doctors instead of it being yet another reel of every single previous Doctor. The moment of her finding out the current incarnation is gay was a nice character moment though, considering he spent a year with her and certainly wasn't keeping his sexuality a secret, it's hard to believe she didn't know already.
I kind of appreciated the appearance of the Thirteenth Doctor although it didn't make any sense. Maybe it was just nice because she got such a raw deal. Jodie Whittaker never gave a bad performance.
She seems to have taken the spot usually occupied by the current Doctor's former companions who all make appearances when a Doctor regenerates. I'm so glad Davies didn't do another bigeneration, though it may be a pretty clear sign that Ncuti Gatwa really wanted to get gone. He only lasted two seasons. Anything less than three is a sign of unusual circumstances. Eccleston stayed for only one season because that was the plan from the beginning and he was a big movie star there to just help kickstart the show (and, it turns out, there was a lot of bad blood between him and the producers). Notably, Colin Baker only got two seasons because he was so terribly unpopular. Gatwa's departure, given the fact that it was preceded by abysmally low ratings, seems like it was certainly a sign of some form of dissatisfaction with the current state of the show.
I wondered if we would even see the Doctor's new face. Just like the 14th Doctor, it turned out to be someone not so new. I have to say, I'm not pleased with the choice. It really feels like Davies is cannibalising his own work in a desperate attempt to slow a free fall. I don't think it's going to work, at least not for ratings. I can appreciate a fan service fest and Davies is able to inject even that with stimulating ideas. But the show desperately needs a true regeneration.
Doctor Who is available on the BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ everywhere else.
I was showing Tom Waits' "I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love with You" to students a few days ago because it contained relevant grammar and then, last night, I watched an Ally McBeal episode that included the song. That's the second time that's happened with my viewing of Ally McBeal this year. The previous time was when I'd just watched Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart and then an Ally McBeal episode included "Take Me Home You Silly Boy", a Tom Waits song written for Crystal Gayle to sing for that movie.
The Ally McBeal episode I watched last night was "Out in the Cold" from January, 2000, a time when people still generally believed homeless people in the U.S. were mostly mentally ill. In this case, Ally is intrigued by a homeless man who shouts some surprisingly insightful things at her. The two end up bonding over the fact that they both have hallucinations. It sounds more comedic than it was, the show actually takes it very seriously. It certainly plays very differently to-day when many Disneyland castmembers are reportedly living out of their cars.
I like how writer David E. Kelley seems to make writing pivots based on (presumably his own) critical appraisals of the show. Ally's visions were just a comedic effect in season one, then they became vaguely spiritual before finally settling on being an actual, serious mental health issue that she's avoiding taking medication for. And Billy coming off as slimier than originally intended seems to have led to him being an outright creep. I'm still digging that.
Ally McBeal is available on Disney+.
X Sonnet 1941
No reading horses fled the burning barn.
So many bookends burned to keep the books.
No equine readers stayed to read a yarn.
The common hay was held with simple hooks.
McAfee scams disgraced the common box.
No virus worth its bytes was fooled for long.
The vaunted 'lectric ghost was just a fox.
No A nor I exceeds its scary song.
A paper door could never shut at night.
No warming breeze could staunch the dream.
A question ends before the answer's right.
No cookies marred the taste of sweetened cream.
Please send a coffee up for me to drink.
No mighty brew or blend would make me blink.
Last Saturday I went to one of the malls in town, a place called Ario. It has no movie theatre and, unlike American malls, Japanese malls never seem to have anchor department stores. The food court did have a surprising number of American restaurants, including a McDonalds and a Burger King as well as a Subway. I hadn't been to a Subway since leaving the U.S. so I ate there. There were no footlongs on the menu because the country uses metric and because the Japanese don't like large portions. The regular sandwich looked roughly equivalent to a six inch. I got the cheapest one, which was a tuna sandwich at just over 700 yen, with fried potatoes and coke coming to just over 800 yen, a bit over five dollars. So no five dollar footlong here, though I heard the footlong is now just over six dollars in the U.S. Still, since the tuna sandwich was the cheapest on the menu, that means Subway in Japan is on average probably more expensive than it is in the U.S., at least in this town. I imagine it can only be more expensive in a major city.
It was a nice mall and I was pleased to see their grocery store had Guinness stout. I've noticed that the quality of the beer selection is inversely proportional to the quality of the liquor selection in most stores here. If they have a good selection of beer, they have a weak selection of whiskey. If they have a good selection of whiskey, they have a weak selection of beer. I tend to enjoy beer only on hot days and it was a cool, rainy day, so I didn't buy any, opting instead to pick up some Tullamore Dew at an excellent nearby liquor shop (which has a weak selection of beer).
Rounding out my nostalgic Saturday, I stopped at a nearby Starbucks and ordered a tall drip coffee for just over 400 yen, roughly comparable to the average three dollar price in the U.S. Nowadays, if I get a coffee when I'm out, I tend to opt for a vending machine, where it's usually around 150 yen. But a sparsely crowded Starbucks on a rainy day is invaluable. I stayed there reading Marius B. Jansen's Making of Modern Japan, published in 2000, the year of its author's death. Marius B. Jansen shares a birthday with me, April 11, though he was born over fifty years earlier, in 1922. Born in the Netherlands and raised in the U.S., he was a professor of Japanese history at Princeton and in the aftermath of World War II had a role in the Occupation of Japan. He was the first foreigner to receive the Distinguished Cultural Merit Award from the Japanese government.
The book, as its title suggests, is fundamentally teleological, constructed in such a way as to explain why Japan is the way it is to-day (or in 2000), beginning with a narrative of history starting with Sekigahara, a battle in 1600 that began the Tokugawa era. I've been surprised how useful the book's insights are to my own life and situation and, in descriptions of Japanese customs and behaviour in the 18th and 19th century, I've been gaining a better understanding of the culture I interact with daily.
I first heard of the book from a mysterious YouTuber called Apostolic Majesty who has a number of really good lectures on his channel on history, The Lord of the Rings, and Bethesda games.
A few weeks ago, I installed a Skyrim mod that seemed to break the game. I don't even know which mod it was as I tend to install bunches of ten or fifteen at a time. Trying to figure it out, I uninstalled one at a time and then even mods that were already installed when the game still worked. Nothing did the trick. When I tried to start the game, nothing happened, like the computer didn't even know I'd double clicked the icon. So I had to completely uninstall the game and all the mods and start from scratch. It took almost three weeks to get the game back up and running in an acceptable modded state, just in time for me to try Varinia, the new companion mod from Maplespice.
Maplespice is the creator of Remiel, an extremely popular follower mod and certainly by far the best one I've ever installed. Many reviews and forum comments on Remiel are about how amazingly lifelike Remiel's dialogue is. The average follower mod tends to be an embarrassing female simp who becomes obsessed with the player character in dialogue and then is overpowered in battle so that oftentimes it feels like the computer is playing the game for you. Sadly, I think this speaks volumes about the average heterosexual male fantasy these days; a hyper competent girl who's capable of doing any and all of the work and who for some reason rapturously adores you. Remiel, meanwhile, can get knocked down pretty easily (follower characters usually can't die) and, although you can start a romance quest line with her, it's more satisfying to avoid it. Here's some dialogue she has with another mod follower called Thogra gra-Mugur:
It still amazes me all these great mods, into which people have put so much work, are still totally free.
So far, Varinia isn't quite as amazing as Remiel. Remiel feels more well rounded and I wonder if it was the mod author's inexperience that led to Remiel being loaded with a wider range of ideas. Varinia is a spy/assassin character, better suited for evil playthroughs. Maybe it's the narrower focus that makes her less satisfying. Though I wonder if the mod creator is afflicted by a problem I often think about affecting artists, which is a fear of the vulnerability inherent in creation. Art is about communicating something about our humanity and it takes guts to do that, or possibly a lack of awareness of just how vulnerable we're making ourselves. I think this is what often leads to a progression in careers in many media in which artists do their most popular, intimate work earlier on and somehow make progressively less satisfying media even as their skills are refined. Maybe Tim Burton would argue all day that Big Fish is actually a better film than Edward Scissorhands or Francis Ford Coppola would argue Megalopolis is better than The Godfather. On the other hand, I would say his Dracula is better than The Godfather so maybe there's hope for us old artists yet. And I haven't played that much with Varinia, maybe she improves.
An enterprising lad goes from shining shoes to ruling Harlem in 1973's Black Caesar. Fred Williamson gives a charismatic performance in this decently written blaxploitation film.
Tommy (Williamson) starts his way up the ladder when he grabs hold of a man's leg while he's shining his shoe so a gangster can gun the man down. From there, Tommy gets courier jobs before finally taking the initiative and killing someone wanted dead by the local mafia boss. In return, he asks for control of part of town.
The argument is pretty clear; the oppressed black man becomes the oppressor once given the opportunity, a sad, fairly common commentary on the cyclical nature of tyranny. Williamson's performance is good and impressively vicious and the film has a score and songs by none other than James Brown.
Black Caesar is available on The Criterion Channel.
In a post-apocalyptic, post-gender world. a young woman follows her destiny as the "seventh son" of a genealogy of ramblers in 2025's O'Dessa. Sadie Sink is the captivating star of this film which is an entertaining adventure, though not really much better than the kinds of Mad Max knock-offs I remember from MST3k like Alien from L.A., City Limits, and Warrior of the Lost World.
The movie follows modern American leftist ideology so perfectly I was able to predict many things from scene to scene. When a priest shows up, I knew he'd be a villain. When an MC starts introducing a singer about to perform a sexy dance of veils, I knew the dancer would be a guy, and not even a strikingly beautiful guy. Much like the live action Cowboy Bebop adaptation, the movie sets out to be transgressive but can't help putting its gender non-conformists into boxes. So the gender fluid guy has to be a burlesque singer, again.
I assume Sadie Sink does her own singing and she's really good at it. The songs aren't bad at all and I like the willow design on her guitar. From a basic filmmaking standpoint, it's well made and the politics don't get in the way of the storytelling. I was genuinely interested in the fate of Sink's character and was rooting for her. The visuals were typical for the post-apocalyptic genre but not bad, especially if you're a fan of the genre, which I am.
Somehow, movies from the 1930s and '40s seem to do a better job portraying the experience of living in a foreign country. One terrific example is 1937's Pepe le Moko, directed by Julien Duvivier and starring Jean Gabin. Gabin plays the titular gangster, a Frenchman hiding out in the Casbah of Algiers where he has the foreigner's peculiar experience of being welcome and rejected at the same time.
Pepe has a strange friendship with Inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux), the man intent on arresting him. So long as Pepe remains in the Casbah, Slimane is unable to do so and the two carry on a cold but puckish friendship. Fate finally puts the finger on Pepe in the form of a woman, a tourist named Gaby (Mireille Balin) from Paris. Pepe's conversations with her revolve around reminiscences of Paris. In bed with her, Pepe remarks that for all her loveliness and the fineness of her clothes and jewellery, he values her for how she reminds him of the Metro. She seems to recall for him an old familiar world from which he has long been separated.
Pepe's local lover, Ines (Line Noro), is jealous of Gabby but is more frightened of the vulnerability Gaby creates in Pepe. Slimane spots the same vulnerability and exploits it, manipulating both of the lovers. This leads to a remarkable scene where Pepe, at home, believing Gaby has abandoned him, listens to another exiled Parisian as she sings along with herself on a recording from decades earlier, a song about a past and a better life that is forever out of reach for her. I love how there's no reaction shot of Pepe for the whole scene. Her song is so clearly suited to his mood and situation that to show any reaction would be somehow redundant and cheap.
Pepe le Moko is available on The Criterion Channel.
The new Doctor Who was decent, if you happen to share Russel T Davies' politics. And I do, but I can't help lament his decision to take the show further into marginalisation. I mean, does anyone think the show would be converting anyone?
I think maybe the Conrad guy is based on Tommy Robinson. I don't think the simplistic, belligerent character is going to draw away any Tommy Robsinson devotees. I really liked the Rani's ship, though. I liked how everything seemed to be made of bone and those aliens collecting doubts reminded me of the medical alien from Farscape if it were designed by Gerald Brom.
The concept behind the episode, called "Wish World", is of reality transformed by someone seeking a return to a past that didn't really exist, a pretty typical form of political cycle most recently and starkly in evidence from the "Make America Great Again" crowd. But I was also reminded of reading about Japanese history yesterday and how the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century was not really a restoration at all but a radical transformation of the country into something it had never been before, despite many participants being motivated by "kokugaku", a Japanese academic philosophy emphasising the superiority of Japanese culture in earlier eras. You could also look at the Restoration in England in 1660 which certainly didn't return things to the status quo of the 1630s. It's a nice template for the Doctor and Belinda to be trapped in a reality that inevitably has flaws. The guy in the office freaking out because the Doctor called him beautiful could only be aware of homosexuality since, in the time when awareness of homosexuality was less prevalent, it wasn't out of order for a straight man to call another beautiful at all. You can't be constructive when what you're concerned with is destruction at heart.
I was also reminded of the first story featuring the Rani, 1985's Mark of the Rani, in which she takes advantage of 19th century Luddites. I have to say Archie Panjabi falls far short of Kate O'Mara's portrayal. I even prefer Anita Dobson ("Mrs Flood") who at least avoids all the pathetic teeth gnashing.
The scenes with Ruby and the group of disabled people was really, really awkward. It wouldn't surprise me if that scene alone was the cause of many televisions being shut off or channels changed. In any case, I don't think the show's downward trajectory is going to be righted any time soon. But "Wish World" wasn't so bad.
I was in the mood for a Marvel movie last night and I was scrolling through the ones on Disney+ I hadn't seen. I hadn't seen the first Wolverine movie from 2009 because everyone said it was really bad, so much so it was gratuitously retconned in the Deadpool movies, complete with insults. I started watching it and, yeah, it's pretty bad. It's kind of dull. Ryan Reynolds is in it as a distinctly not-Deadpool version of Deadpool. It was like having a movie with a Spider-Man who can't climb walls and has a different personality. Why do it? I suppose writers David Benioff and Skip Woods figured their ideas were superior to the source material. That is the same Benioff who adapted Game of Thrones for television so I guess that was par for the course.
So I switched to the original, 2000 X-Men film that introduced Hugh Jackman's Wolverine to the world. What a difference. How good that movie remains. It still feels fresh that it spends time introducing Wolverine, Magneto, and Rogue in very natural, earthly circumstances.
The recent news from Marvel is they're shaking up their release slate in the wake of disappointing box office performances by Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts. It's really a shame because Thunderbolts is actually quite good. I could've told them it wouldn't do well, though. Florence Pugh is very pretty but she looks like a little boy in all the posters. Everyone wears boring black costumes. I remember months back when Grace Randolph was comparing Thunderbolts to Suicide Squad she called Yelena, Pugh's character, the Harley Quinn of the film. Margot Robbie's sexiness as Harley Quinn in the original Suicide Squad movie single-handedly made it a hit and redoubled the character's cultural icon status. Florence Pugh's dowdiness seems to have drawn no-one to the cinema. The sexy Harley Quinn made the otherwise lousy Suicide Squad a hit, so I think it's fair to say the aesthetically unimpressive hair and makeup on Yelena sank the chances of the otherwise well made Thunderbolts. Yeah, you can turn your nose up at the fact that sex sells. But you do so at your peril.
Mostly I've been pretty pleased with the neighbourhood around my new apartment. There are lots of restaurants and a movie theatre. I've dreamed all my life of living near a movie theatre and I finally got my wish. But there were still a few things I wished were in walking distance, particularly a laundromat, though I've been washing most of my clothes by hand. A few weeks ago, I went to see a concert put on by the brass band of one of my schools and I had to go down a street I'd never been down. Not only did I find a laundromat and a liquor store with a good selection of Irish whiskeys, I found a Makotoya, barely ten minutes from my apartment!
Japan's ramen is legendary all over the world and I've had a lot of amazing ramen since coming to Japan five years ago. But by far, one of the best restaurants I've eaten at is Makotoya.
Their signature ramen has a beef bone broth. Nowadays, ramen generally comes in four kinds of soup bases; salt and soy sauce are the two traditional bases and the popular newcomers are miso and pork bone broth. Pork bone is typically my favourite kind but Makotoya's choice of using beef bone broth is an excellent alternative. As you might expect, it has kind of a milky quality, which is nice for someone like me whose gut no longer likes to digest milk properly. A basic bowl of their beef bone broth ramen without egg is relatively cheap at only around 750 yen, which I think comes to around seven dollars. For a hundred yen more, you can get their 赤辛牛白湯 ramen, a red spicy variant.
The place never seems too crowded and I can always get a seat at the bar with space for my book so I can read while eating. There are a lot of restaurants I want to try around here but it's going to be hard tearing myself away from Makotoya at lunchtime.
What is the central gag of 1987's Spaceballs? It's Star Wars but everyone's regular schlubs from Canada and New York, mostly Jewish (John Candy was Catholic). The 80s was a time of great Jewish comedies. Nowadays, we still have Larry David and Mrs. Maisel but the time of the Jewish comedy superstar is over. Well, comedies in general tend not to be box office hits now.
A lot of Spaceballs' comedy also comes from literalising. Chewbacca was always based on George Lucas' dog, now John Candy is playing a literal half man, half dog. The Millennium Falcon was like a mobile home, now it's actually a Winnebago. There's more to this comedy than simply unmasking creative concepts; it divests the concepts of the poetry of the fantastic and makes them mundane. It's a joke on the characters because that's the joke played on everyone in real life. No-one's ever going to have the Force. You're more likely to be stuck with Schwartz. But, hey, that's life. The vile gangster is more likely to be a pile of pizza than a giant space slug.
It's a galaxy of puerile motives. Everyone is thinking about sex all the time. The pretty female officer smirks at the camera after seeing President Skroob's exposed genitals. Joan Rivers' version of C3PO's primary mission is to protect the virginity of the princess. That actually brings her a little closer to the mute servant girl in Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (隠し砦の三悪人), the movie that was a primary influence on Star Wars. The characters that provided the basis for R2D2 and C3PO were much earthier, much more focused on bodily needs than Lucas' version of the low caste, point of view characters. Maybe Andor introducing sex to the Star Wars universe is a precursor to getting something closer to The Hidden Fortress in a way. I'd say it would need at least fifteen years to develop and I'm not sure Star Wars is going to be financially viable for that long.
We've come all this way and it's still hard to talk about sex without making it a joke. But something like Spaceballs can feel like a breath of fresh air. Or at least canned air.
I finally watched the first episode of House of the Dragon season two last night. It's certainly not as splashy an opening as season one but it's nice to be back in that world of beautiful costumes and dark, mediaeval locations. I appreciated some greater level of detail in this one, especially the scene at the docks where you can see men scraping barnacles off a ship.
I guess the show hasn't reached the heights of Game of Thrones. It seemed like everyone on Game of Thrones started turning up all over the place, especially in big budget movies, but the only star who seems to have come out of House of the Dragon so far is Milly Alcock, who was in less than half of the first season. I guess the legacy of Game of Thrones' rushed final seasons continues to haunt the franchise.
"A Son for a Son", the season two premiere episode of House of the Dragon I watched last night, certainly didn't feel rushed. We spend a lot of time with Rhaenyra grieving for the son she lost at the end of the previous season, setting up her motive for revenge. Writer and showrunner Ryan Condal also takes a moment to lampshade one of the more egregious missteps in season one's writing, when Rhaenys, for no apparent reason, refrained from killing the opposing leadership when she had the chance. I'm sorry to see the writer of that notorious episode, Sara Hess, wrote a few episodes of season two.
Still, even on its worst day, House of the Dragon is a cut above most shows.
I was going to watch Psycho last night because I saw it was on Japanese Amazon Prime but it was some really lousy, unrestored print. Sometimes I wonder if the reason old movies tend not to be popular in Japan is because most movies made before 1970 are only available in copies that look like they came from a roll of celluloid that's been stashed on the floor of a taxi for twenty years. There are exceptions. For some reason my Japanese copy of Secret of the Incas is pristine.
So I didn't watch Psycho. I tried to watch Ally McBeal a bit but the episode, a Thanksgiving episode in which it turns out Ally's father had been flirting with Georgia, was filled with too many lame coincidences and I couldn't keep watching. So I just drifted off to sleep watching Valerie and Her Week of Wonders again on The Criterion Channel. What a wonderful colour palette that movie has.
This morning I woke up to see Natasha Lyonne visited the Criterion Closet practically naked. She chose Mike Leigh's Naked and David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch among other movies. Maybe she was protesting Cannes' recently announced prohibition on people showing up nude on the red carpet. Maybe she just wanted to remind people she's not exactly like Peter Falk.
I realised she's almost exactly my age. She was born the same year and the same month--she was born April 4, 1979 and I was born April 11, 1979. She's definitely aged better.
X Sonnet 1940
Where citizens were nothing more than pies,
The shop was selling cakes and sticky rolls
Of upper crusts, the best were kept with eyes
Obscured in tanks of fish with shaky goals,
Accrued for foggy syrup, placed within,
A filter's clog, to make a sweetened life,
To quickly ravage thoughts of idle sin,
And check the dance of someone's drunken wife
Before the crew of new cadets could dream
Of something bigger, pulling up parades
Above the heads who just escaped a stream
Of molten rock as music now invades
The sound of happy morning coffee beans
Stampeding down a hill of leafy greens.
I forgot all about Doctor Who on Saturday, which says something. But when I finally did watch it on Sunday I was very happily surprised to find it was a pretty good episode. I'm surprised to see many review quotes saying the episode feels "rushed" because, to me, it was the first story this season that didn't feel rushed. In particular, I liked that writer Juno Dawson gave some space for Belinda to panic over the apparent death of the Doctor. It was the kind of human reaction to a dangerous and scary situation the show rarely seems to get around to anymore. It was one of the things that made it feel like a classic series episode.
Dawson has written a number of books, including This Book is Gay, which ranks as the tenth most banned book in America, surely an admirable distinction. Her Doctor Who episode, "The Interstellar Song Contest", features gay characters and possibly a reference to transgenderism (Dawson is transgender). When one character, Cora, is revealed to be a member of species that faces persecution across the galaxy, her partner accuses her of dishonesty. This conceptual conflict tends to crop up more in arguments over trans issues than it does over hidden ethnicity. I thought Cora was an effective enough character, particularly when she was being gracious with Belinda.
I'll go into more significant spoilers for the episode now so, be warned.
Maybe the most notable aspect of the episode, for fans, is a pair of revelations that point back to the classic era. We finally learn who Mrs. Flood is--it turns out she's none other than the Rani, a Time Lady from the Sixth and Seventh Doctor eras originally played by Kate O'Mara. In this episode, she "bi-generates" and becomes Archie Penjabi. I like Archie Penjabi and it's nice to see her getting work though the show's going to have to do some work to distinguish her from Missy now. I also still really hate the idea of bi-generation. I have a bad feeling we're just not going to get an explanation for the Rani's bi-generation. I wonder if it'll eventually be revealed to be a biological response to a diminished Time Lord population. In any case, the Doctor's claim to be "last of the Time Lords" gets weaker and weaker.
Particularly since the episode features another Time Lady, none other than Susan Foreman, with Carole Ann Ford reprising the role she first played all the way back in the show's 1963 premiere. For decades, fans and people working on the show have wanted to see the return of Susan and the fulfillment of the First Doctor's promise to one day come back to her. That actually did occur in an audio play starring Paul McGann and Carole Ann Ford and I always thought this was why it never happened on the show, that the makers of the show wanted that audio play to be canon. Maybe it still will be. In any case, I wonder why Russell T Davies chose now to bring Susan back. Ratings were slightly up for this episode but they're still well under the norm even for the 13th Doctor era. Maybe, despite his optimism in interviews, it's an acknowledgment by Davies that this really is the end for Doctor Who, at least for a few years. The Doctor's reunion with Susan would make for a good bookend.
Doctor Who is available on the BBC iPlayer and on Disney+ everywhere else.
I finally finished watching The Magicians last night, the SyFy series that started in 2015 and ended in 2020. I'd watched every episode and stopped before watching the final episode about four years ago. Why? I don't know. I did the same thing with A Touch of Frost. You'd think watching a whole series would make me want to watch the final episode but for some reason I didn't really feel motivated with either of these shows. But I was recently poking around American Amazon and remembered I'd actually bought the last episode for around three dollars several years ago.
I couldn't completely follow all the various plot strands in the last episode, I couldn't remember everything that was happening, but I enjoyed it.
It's a very cosy show. Something about the fact that, due to its low budget, it's almost entirely filmed on just four or five sound stages, even though it's a story with a scope covering alternate dimensions and timelines and city locales, makes it feel like a group of friends playing pretend in a large house. It also has a true serial feel to it, like a picaresque or the original Flash Gordon. There's no three act or any other kind of structure. It's just; this happens then this happens then this happens then this happens then this happens . . . Maybe that's why it didn't feel appropriate to watch the end. It was kind of an inconclusive ending, anyway. I wonder if the cast and crew expected to get another season some day, somehow. It doesn't seem likely now though, looking at their Wikipedia pages, it doesn't appear the cast has had much work in the past couple years.
It was a good cast. That was what first attracted me to the series. I saw them all live at San Diego Comic Con and they had such a great rapport that I was compelled to watch the show. I was pleased enough by the show which quickly outgrew some initial soap opera water weight to become a leaner Buffy style fantasy adventure with quips. It's good. And Olivia Taylor Dudley is really hot.
The new Superman trailer premiered a few days ago. It's supposed to be the first full trailer though it seems like we've already seen an awful lot, mostly involving the dog, Krypto, which has been effective. This trailer finally gives us some Clark and Lois interaction and I'm disappointed to see she already knows his secret identity. It seems like that fun dynamic hasn't lasted long in any superhero film since the first Christopher Reeve movie. I suppose people feel like it prevents the characters from having meaningful dialogue. I would recommend those people watch the popular anime Spy Family in which two characters have identities they keep secret from each other and it's loads of fun. And it has a kind of nuance because a secret identity can stand in for the inevitable depths and complexities about another person which we're unable to understand however open the person is or however much we might pry into their personal lives.
This is the first time David Corenswet really came across as Superman for me but, sadly, it was when he wasn't in the costume and his muscles were allowed to show through a simple white button down shirt. This Superman costume is all wrong. The high collar looks military and it makes him look smaller. It's thick, too, like Batman's armoured suit. The costume shouldn't look like it's something he needs for protection.
Rachel Brosnahan is pitch perfect as Lois.
I love the saturated colour palette, which is one thing that definitely shows James Gunn was the right director for this material. He usually does go for a rainbow over the more standard two or three key tones. It's more difficult to work with so much colour but the rewards are worth it.
I really hope this movie is good. We need more media demonstrating that altruism is cool. There are too many fucking savages out there, including the big orange one squatting on the White House.
Joe Don Baker has died. He was 89. Like most people of my generation, I know him best, perhaps unfortunately, as the star of Mitchell and that film's appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1993. It's widely considered one of the very best episodes of MST3k, in no small part due to the endless jokes made at Baker's expense.
I remember reading an interview with Trace Beaulieu, who voiced Crow T. Robot at the time, where he said he felt kind of bad about riffing so much on Baker, saying that he was actually a fan of Baker's work. And Joe Don Baker was indeed a good actor in quality, pulp films of the '70s like Charley Varrick and The Outfit with Robert Duvall which Quentin Tarantino praised in his book Cinematic Speculations, commending Baker's performance.
Joe Don Baker had a long career that shifted between cheesy and classy. He had roles in Scorsese's Cape Fear and in multiple James Bond movies. His last film was 2012's Mud. Farewell, Mr. Baker. I promise I'll remember you for the right reasons.
For the final three episodes of Andor, which were quite good, the curious decision to bring a new writer to the series, Tom Bissell, was made. It wasn't a bad idea, it turns out. Bissell is best known for writing video games, according to Wikipedia. Maybe that gave him a good instinct for kinetic suspense.
Kleya's infiltration of the hospital had kind of a horror video game vibe, actually. More than anyone else, these three episodes were really Kleya's story as we see flashbacks from her first encounter with Luthen and how he raised her and trained her juxtaposed with her bringing their operations to an end and finally being coaxed into going to Yavin. Her journey in the three episodes, from an agent of paranoia in a reality defined by consistent despair to accepting the reality of Yavin, a world of hope, stands in for the story of the Rebellion as it progresses from a spark of limited fire to a flame poised to seriously threaten the Empire.
That was great but I think the best parts of the episodes were the vicious, bureaucratic shufflings within the ranks of the ISB, starting with that wonderfully absurd, nightmarish moment when Dedra is arrested at the height of her professional triumph.
I also loved that the Imperial mind couldn't acknowledge that Jung was a spy. In Krennic's interrogation of Dedra, he was obliged to make some awkward verbal contortions to portray Jung as the accomplice of Dedra the data scavenger. She points out that she was forced to be a scavenger, to get access to intel she didn't have clearance for, in order to do her job. The system has absurd rules built in likely for the very purpose of being invoked only when a scapegoat is needed or an officer needs to be disposed of for some other equally sinister or absurd reason.
I noticed Tony Gilroy has been kind of kissing up to Dave Filoni lately in interviews and one of last night's episodes even featured one of Filoni's signature "loth cats". I'm hoping this means Gilroy is trying to secure a place for himself at Lucasfilm. I'd love to see him write a series or movie just focusing on Imperials.
