New Ants In the New Pants

Charlton Heston rubbing bug repellent on Eleanor Parker's back is the closest 1954's The Naked Jungle gets to having nudity. But unlike most other films from the 50s and early 60s with the word "naked" in the title, there is at least some literal justification for it. It's a surprisingly provoking, albeit silly, disaster film.

It's based on a short story called "Leiningen Versus the Ants", referring to the Marabunta, South American army ants who in the movie devour every scrap of organic matter in their path leaving behind a literally naked jungle.

In the final third of the film, Christopher Leiningen defends his sprawling plantation against the ants, though most of the film concerns the arrival from New Orleans of Christopher's mail order bride, Joanna (Eleanor Parker).

Parker gets top billing in this movie though her performance isn't nearly as interesting as the one she gives in The Woman in White. Still, her character functions well as the strong, bold, experienced woman. She's too perfect is Christopher's initial opinion which he feels is confirmed when he discovers she's been married before, to an alcoholic who died only a year into the marriage.

Christopher has a reaction when he learns this that reminded me a lot of James Caan's in Red Line 7000--Caan had angrily pointed at his new shirt and his new shoes, Heston here points at his new piano and talks about his other new possessions, telling her only new things are good enough for him. In this case, though, the woman is given a pretty nice comeback as she tells him, "If you knew anything about music you'd know that the best piano is one that's been played."

But there's more to his reaction than she guesses as he later tells her that when he came to South America at the age of 19 he hadn't had time for women while he was making his little fiefdom. And afterwards, he wasn't the sort of man who'd "go into the villages at night". It's not hard to read between the lines to figure out he's a virgin. When she tells him his flaw is his pride we can see why this is a pretty big stumbling block.

And this is also a pretty extraordinary subject for a 1954 adventure film. I mean, when Red Line 7000 explores the same territory a decade later it seems progressive.

Of course, one can point to the dated attitudes towards race and sex when considering Christopher wouldn't think of sleeping with a South American woman. One could also point out it's actually rather hard to tell it is South America for much of the movie. Some of the costumes and sets actually make it look more like India.

But I found myself genuinely invested in Joanna and Christopher's relationship, wanting them to work through their individual issues. Even the ant attack was pretty good, the ants making little rafts out of leaves to get across the moat doesn't seem quite realistic but it was pretty neat.

The Respectable Robin

It's difficult to watch 1940's The Sea Hawk without thinking of 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood. The films share several principal cast members (Errol Flynn, Claude Rains, Donald Crisp, Alan Hale) as well as a director, Michael Curtiz. Though while Curtiz was the final credited director of Robin Hood, that earlier film actually changed hands several times. The Sea Hawk, while inferior to Robin Hood, feels more like a Curtiz movie all the way through and is a solid swashbuckler with beautiful production design.

Curtiz and Flynn had made another pirate film together in 1935, Captain Blood. The Sea Hawk is a great deal more light hearted and its plot much closer to that of the Robin Hood film. Flynn plays privateer Captain Geoffrey Thorpe, secretly employed by Queen Elizabeth I. Like Robin Hood, Thorpe robs England's enemies in service to her true liege.

Loosely based on some of the exploits of Sir Francis Drake (rather than on the Raphael Sabitini novel from which the movie gets its name), the movie is largely concerned with intrigues leading up to the Spanish Armada's move against England. Claude Rains, rather than playing the usurper Prince John, plays the Spanish Ambassador who manipulates the English court. Rains plays this fellow with more restraint than he played John, coming across as a subtle puppeteer. Instead of Basil Rathbone, his chief cohort is Henry Daniell as Lord Wolfingham and they scheme and talk down their noses at each other.

I love Daniell but he's not as well served here as Rathbone. He and Flynn have a sword fight at the end that superficially resembles the one between Flynn and Rathbone with slashed candles and giant shadows but lacks all the intensity and precision that make that earlier duel so remarkable.

In fact, the swordplay in this film is consistently disappointing, generally looking like the two combatants are waving feather dusters at each other.

Brenda Marshall replaces Olivia de Havilland as Flynn's love interest. She's beautiful, but not half the performer de Havilland is. She has a similar familial relationship with Claude Rains' character to the one Maid Marian had with Prince John though while John seemed to regard his brother's ward as nothing more than a piece of his retinue, the Spanish Ambassador seems to feel genuine pain when he learns of Marshall's love for Thorpe and her sympathies for England.

Unlike Robin Hood, this film was mostly shot in black and white, except for the sequence which takes place in Central America, which is sepia. Curtiz makes use of both formats excellently, combined with the intricate detail on the ships and costumes to give the visuals a genuine antique feel.

Flynn plays Thorpe as a far less jovial character than Robin Hood, far more sensitive to proprieties despite being in the business of plunder. Rather than the extended prank of his feast with Sir Guy and the Sheriff of Nottingham, the dinner he lays out for his captured foes aboard his own vessel feels more like a courtesy he's genuinely extending to honour his defeated adversaries. In comparison to Robin Hood, this performance is sort of charming, but I think I'd generally prefer the man who speaks treason "fluently".

Drinking and Cats

Here's a not particularly good picture I was absurdly happy to take this morning. I've been trying to make friends with that black cat for over a year. She's very standoffish and I think she's a stray though my mother, who lives nearby, said she saw the cat in someone's yard like she owned the place. But she acts like that in my yard too. I see her catching mice and lizards and I think she lives off them.

I saw her drinking from the fountain in the upper right corner one day. That fountain is choked with algae and I know how cats like fresh water so I bought that little bowl for her some time ago. I'd see her drink out of it every now and then but over the past couple weeks the workmen who've been putting new floor in the kitchen had been going through the backyard and had set up their table saw to cut planks outside. They'd tossed the bowl into a big flower pot.

To-day, almost a week after the construction ended, I finally saw her in the backyard again and I realised the bowl was empty. I slowly, cautiously went outside to refill it but she ran around the corner anyway. I came slowly around the corner and saw her staring at me wide eyed about ten feet away. I employed the "slow blink" technique I learned from this video about cat body language posted by my friend Spooky on her Facebook.

The cat seemed subtly baffled but didn't run. So I slowly turned around, took the bowl into the house, filled it with water, and brought it back out, making sure the sound of the bowl touching concrete was audible. Then I went back inside and finished making my breakfast. I didn't expect her to come back--she usually avoids the house for a day or so after she's seen a human. But as I was finishing making my breakfast, I looked out and saw her drinking from the bowl. I got my camera and took the picture above. Maybe I'll try and get her some food now.

The neighbour's cat, Snow, doesn't attack her but seems to feel a kind of adorable social anxiety around her. I saw her once just staring up at him when he was sitting on the fence. His response was to continually look around and cry as though he expected someone else to do something about her.

This morning I also watched Saturday's new episode of Monogatari, a series which so far hasn't been especially interesting, particularly when compared with its predecessor Bakemonogatari. But this arc concluded with a surprisingly Kiernan-esque moment.

Araragi and the child vampire Shinobu have been in an alternate timeline where most of the world's population had been turned into weak, shadowy, zombie-like vampires and Araragi had been dead several years. Shinobu in this timeline was in her adult body, not living literally in Araragi's shadow, and as a consequence she's tried destroying the world before failing in a suicide attempt by burning herself. Araragi and child Shinobu show up planning to fight her but she loses all her will when she learns there was an alternate timeline where she and Araragi ended up together. The nice moment comes when she says the knowledge of everything that had happened and everything she'd done was hard enough to bear without the alternate timeline being shoved in her face.

Twitter Sonnet #545

Nostril bands decipher thumbs as postcards.
The blue serpent recalled the impostor.
Eggs were stolen with snug pipes in scabbards.
Loose follicles foiled the scalp roster.
U turned tallies hook the croquet mallets.
Wolf skins folded four times incubate cells.
Elbows snap in centres of novelettes.
Returned rockets ring the usual bells.
Loaf of Olympus half recalls Hera.
Electric hair massaged a rubber scalp.
Martian glow sticks avoid square old Terra.
The only ones sent in the club are kelp.
Adult and child fold to one scarecrow.
Split straw timelines meet in a brittle bow.

Space Here

It's just after 5pm but 91° Fahrenheit outside. It was 104° earlier. I hope this isn't going to be like last year when summer didn't end until late December. At least the leaves are changing outside.

And at least the construction that was going on here has ended. Since there's good air conditioning in the house where I live, I feel I'm better off sleeping more during the day and maybe it won't be as hellish when I go outdoors. I wonder if global warming will create a large population of vampires.

Carl Sagan mentioned offhand the threat of climate change in the final episode of Cosmos but mostly he focused on the threat of nuclear war. It was kind of sad listening to how charmingly optimistic he was, hearing how he clearly felt he had a reasonable hope in looking forward to greatly advanced space exploration by this time. It was nice, too, listening to someone really excited about the prospect of meeting extraterrestrial intelligence who also didn't buy into any of the publicised supposed contacts with alien life.

Scepticism with hope. What a tragically abnormal combination in the human species.

Well, perhaps hope is in itself not all it's cracked up to be when one considers the pain of disappointment. Yet shutting off hope feels somehow fundamentally self-destructive. I mean, for more than just the obvious reason that it might prevent one from attempting progress. It seems somehow in itself to cause a psychological regression. I suppose I should say there's something fundamentally self-destructive about unreasonable despair.

Connections and Cosmos were two really lovely things to listen to. The Human Animal was good until I remembered how Desmond Morris for some reason asserted in the programme that no-one knows how fire walking is done. That kind of put me off though mainly it's an enjoyable series and he takes care to present unproven opinion, his particular view on humanity, as unproven opinion.

Listening to these shows made me wonder about the absence of science programmes like them on television now. I suppose this is due to the kinds of channels that would normally carry them being given over to reality shows. For this reason I look forward to Neil deGrasse Tyson's own upcoming Cosmos series, though I somehow don't think it'll be as good. Well, maybe I ought to be more optimistic.

Cosmos - Carl Sagan - A Personal Voyage... by Explore2

Nesuko and "Nesuko"

The Casebook of Boschen and Nesuko #2 is now available here. Enjoy.

I underestimated how much colouring I needed to do. To give you an idea, while colouring yesterday (and through the night) I listened to an episode of Desmond Morris' The Human Animal, two episodes of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, three episodes of James Burke's Connections, about an hour from a lecture by Richard Feynman (recommended by my friend Hajar, thanks), three hours of The Artie Lange Show, an unabridged audiobook of The Picture of Dorian Gray in its entirety, Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf in its entirety, and an audiobook of the first few chapters of War and Peace before I got annoyed by the reader. Plus a lot of music. Needless to say, I'm pretty tired.

Citizen Duck

The local duck community at an unusual spot along the river where I found them a few days ago. They'd been forced there by unleashed dogs and children lazy adults had allowed to roam about. One nice thing about when there was no vegetation around here and this part of the San Diego River was little more than a big wet ditch was that people didn't come around so often. I guess I wouldn't mind so much if I didn't find things like the pile of beer cans I found near the ducks. Not to mention all the styrofoam Big Gulp cups and various candy wrappers. The proximity of the Wal-Mart is a big part of this problem. White trash begets white trash.

In the Wal-Mart by the entrance now there's a big display set up for the new reality show about duck hunting called Duck Dynasty. I take it as a provocation.

While colouring to-day, I listened to the second episode of Desmond Morris' The Human Animal, which I hadn't seen since it first aired almost twenty years ago. The second episode is called "The Hunting Animal" and it was nice to hear the subtle derision in Morris' voice as he describes modern sport hunting and its pathetic emulation of hunting for survival.

I spent all day doing pencils and ink yesterday--the last page and cover as well as some redo panels for the second issue of The Casebook of Boschen and Nesuko. I have a lot of colouring yet to do to-day but I expect the issue will be available by to-morrow. Those of you who haven't read the first issue yet can find it here.

Twitter Sonnet #544

Barren shreds of iron scrape the white air.
Porcelain chains shiver against the beach.
Lead dioramas lurk in Frigidaire.
A red wax skyscraper melts out of reach.
Odd lockers shut out a pariah spade.
Octopus room blurred all handshakes and hugs.
Someone's so hungry his stomach said "Quaid."
Bald men kissing combine strength of their rugs.
Regressed television sliced both its flanks.
The light cube clacked onto coffee table.
Riversides always put assets in banks.
So a monkey may grin at Clark Gable.
Swimming land creatures stunned the sleepy fish.
Solid water makes a very cold wish.

The Occurrence Protruding from Under the Editing Rug

The word right now is that it'll be a whole year before we see the first episode of Peter Capaldi's tenure as the Doctor on Doctor Who. Which I find really frustrating as having watched the first two seasons and three specials of The Thick of It I think this guy stands a chance of being my favourite Doctor since Sylvester McCoy. Last night I watched the 2006 episode of Midsomer Murders he was in and I found him not only impressively playing a character very different from his Malcolm Tucker on The Thick of It but easily playing the most intriguing character in the episode. And it's not all his doing.

This is the second episode I've seen of Midsomer Murders, after the 1997 premiere episode. John Nettles hasn't changed much here in his performance as Detective Barnaby except to have a shorter haircut. His bumbling assistant has been thankfully replaced with a partner who's only occasionally, reasonably awkward. Or maybe it's the same partner just written better, I'm not sure, he actually looks pretty similar.

The show's introduced a new, frequently used sting--that muffled single drum beat often used in suspense and horror nowadays to underline a shot of some piece of evidence or some shadowy figure darting among the trees.

This episode uses it a lot, and along with a couple other elements it feels like a counterbalance of modernity for the traditional setting.

Capaldi in this episode plays the tyrannical master of a neighbourhood church choir. He's a perfectionist, demanding through gruelling practice sessions the best performance from the people who joined the choir from around the neighbourhood, among whom is Barnaby's wife. Then a guy in the choir is murdered.

I wasn't able to guess the identity of the killer this time but, despite introducing a lot of characters with a lot of possible indications of motive, the episode doesn't provide a single clue pointing to the actual killer, basically just dropping the culprit's identity on us at the end.

Capaldi's dialogue has him pushing the people in the choir, like I said, but right away I noticed he was playing the character as distracted and quietly boiling on the inside. Someone dealing with issues and of course I immediately thought he was too obvious to be a suspect. We later learn his wife was having an affair with the murder victim and doesn't really seem to have much sympathy for Capaldi's character.

There's a subplot about Capaldi's choir being in fierce competition with the one at a cathedral, headed by Capaldi's rival, a man he's certain cheated his way into the cathedral. And, indeed, we later see this guy spying on Capaldi's choir and using other underhanded means.

But even when the two of them have a fight in the pub Capaldi seems distracted, on the edge of an unrelated breakdown. Then the episode ends very strangely--Barnaby gives to Ellen, Capaldi's wife, a painting made for her by the murder victim. She tells Barnaby that her husband took his stuff and left her finally, even abandoning his choir without a word. She says he told her he, "didn't really care about it." At this point, Barnaby's face falls and he gets in his car and peels off.

He shows up at the choir competition where the choir's decided to perform without Capaldi and wins. And we never see or hear about Capaldi again. I guess we could explain Barnaby's hurry as suddenly remembering he needed to attend his wife's performance in the choir but the impression I had was that there was a scene where Capaldi's character killed himself that was cut from the episode. And thinking back, I realised there were a lot of details that were introduced in the episode to simply never be brought up again, most prominently a pig's heart that was nailed to the wall in the murder victim's home with a note reading "Your Cheating Heart." It doesn't fit in with the murderer's motive but it fits with Capaldi's storyline. Yet the police never bring it up to him.

The strangest and most fascinating thing of all, though, is Capaldi's performance which kind of dwarfs the episode, especially in retrospect.

Another of the World's Funnels

I don't know how much of 1952's Macao was directed by Josef von Sternberg before Howard Hughes replaced him with Nicholas Ray, but I'm inclined to credit Sternberg with making Jane Russell look the best she ever looked.

The movie otherwise is mostly a nice, lightweight romantic adventure. As producer interference goes, Howard Hughes is certainly a better choice than the people who turned a movie like Affair in Trinidad into a dull exercise in rote morality. When Howard Hughes steps in, it's to add more sex and violence, more, sometimes corny, innuendo laden dialogue--the film's closing line is, "You'd better start getting used to me fresh out of the shower!"

Robert Mitchum stars as Nick Cochran, a man who roams the world to escape a potential assault charge from years ago in New York when he got in a fight with a guy over a woman. That's all the detail we get, but Robert Mitchum gives us enough with his usual easy, slightly melancholy, amused demeanour.

He meets Julie Benson (Jane Russell) on the boat to Macao when he rescues her from a guy trying to molest her. For his troubles, she steals his wallet. Later, she's upset when he looks up to see her changing into some new stockings on the deck above for no apparent reason.

Once in Macao, a place woven onscreen with stock footage and decent sets, they get mixed up with the most powerful gangster in town and covert attempts by the law to lure the gangster past the three mile limit so they can arrest him.

This gangster, Halloran, runs a casino where Julie gets a job singing. She has two musical numbers in the movie, the second being the Johnny Mercer/Harold Arlen song "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)". Russell, despite also singing in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was never much of a singer but she looks fantastic performing here--certainly better than in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with no Marilyn Monroe to upstage her.

Gloria Grahame's in the film as a dealer with loaded dice at Halloran's craps table. She's later also, as Nick observes pleasantly, Nick's "warden dolled up in a negligee" after Halloran imprisons him in an upstairs room after mistaking him for a cop.

Nick and Julie have a romantic scene together on a boat where he tells her his dream to have his own farm on a little island and how he has a friend who'll sell him just that if can get the money together. She seems into it at first before suddenly turning cold. She gives him the cold shoulder again the next day and when he asks her again to tell him what he did, she says he, "suddenly registered." She has trouble trusting him, the dream's too big, though she admits being tired of keeping her guard up all the time. It is one nice, if unoriginal, little moment of insight that actually feels like it reflects the minds of the sorts of people who live their lives on the run.

The Vital Punch Line

Danny Rose is a guy so focused on his job he doesn't even seem to notice when he's tied in the missionary position to a beautiful woman. In 1984's Broadway Danny Rose, we watch this manager for various small time entertainers energetically untangling a complex adventure imposed between him and getting his act on stage. It's a good movie with the sweetness and nervous energy popularly associated with Woody Allen films.

Allen directs the film and plays the title character. The story's told with a framing device of a bunch of comedians at a deli telling old stories about Danny and the assortment of acts he handles ranging from ventriloquists to lounge singers.

Finally, one comedian, Sandy Baron (playing himself, like many comedians in the film) starts telling the story that makes up the bulk of the film, of the time Danny had some extraordinary trouble getting a singer named Lou Canova onstage to perform in front of a crowd that included Milton Berle.

Lou's afraid of going onstage without the woman he's in love with watching him--his mistress, a woman connected to the Italian mafia named Tina, played against type by Mia Farrow.

She wears big dark glasses for almost the whole film and has hair piled up on her head to help make her look taller than Allen. But Farrow's performance also does a lot to overcome her natural delicate quality to seem like the tough dame her character's meant to be.

When a misunderstanding leads to Danny being mistaken for the guy who caused Tina to break the heart of a member of a prominent mob family, his tenacious attempts to persuade her to show up to Lou's show are compounded by a chase. There's a hit on Danny--he complains about how he can't stay in a hotel that evening because his medication's in his apartment. He complains about leaving his car at the diner he and Tina have to flee when mobsters show up. But when it comes to the subject of getting her to Lou's show, he makes no complaints for himself and has no reservations.

One of the comedians in the deli mentions how Danny had tried to be a stand-up comedian for a while himself before realising he didn't have what it took. Maybe that's why he fights so hard for his acts. In any case is focus is funny, especially when the situation is as absurd as when he and Tina are tied together and he never mentions sex. But the comedy doesn't stop his focus from being admirable and it's at the heart of what makes this film so good.

Twitter Sonnet #543

Microbe static pushed the eyelid pin-up.
New hair capped the tall returning language.
Bean beer diverts shoppers from the turnip.
Razor lavender plants shroud the mortgage.
Salt fog descends on the stomach city.
Lamps strike and may dislodge in gas protest.
Broken grouting spares tiles no pity.
Needle wigs divide a square scalp harvest.
Autumn ivy wreaths conceal dark matter.
Granite suggests a puddle surveyor.
Soft keys unlock the unsweetened batter.
Ayes put the monocle on the mayor.
Gravity grants privilege to the cat.
Unmarked mallards ducked the hollow orange hat.

Dying to Live Away from Cows

2012's Kill Me (Töte mich) is about a killer who's not really a killer and a suicidal girl who's not really suicidal, despite the fact that one has killed a man and the other has tried to kill herself. It's a rather innocent film about innocent people who've been misdiagnosed by society and family. It's not especially insightful but it's sensitive and some pretty photography makes it a nice way to spend a mellow hour and a half.

Adele is a fifteen year old girl living on a farm with her parents in a remote part of Germany. She herds and milks the cows and occasionally stands on the edge of a cliff to think about killing herself. We later learn this is because she was in an accident with her brother on a moped, her brother was killed and she lived.

Her parents are quiet, humourless people and we see the three of them at dinner in habitual, solemn silence.

I don't believe someone who says she wants to kill herself but doesn't is necessarily not really suicidal. Suicide takes courage, so does skydiving, that doesn't mean someone who gets cold feet just before jumping off the plane never really wanted to jump to begin with. But I never had the impression Adele was really suicidal, just suffering from a smothered imagination. When asked why she wants to kill herself, she says it's because she's tired of being where she is. It hasn't occurred to her there might be something better away from the farm.

One day, she's abruptly grabbed and threatened at knifepoint by Timo, an escaped convict who was imprisoned for the murder of his father. She agrees to help him escape on the condition that he kill her, something she's not yet had the courage to do herself. She helps him to the next town and he seems like he's about to kill her when they're interrupted by a passer-by. One thing leads to another and they end up on the run together, trying to get to Marseilles in the hopes of taking a boat to Africa. As time passes, the adventure seems to put a spring in Adele's step and when they stop at the edge of a cliff in France, jumping off doesn't even occur to her.

And Timo can't kill her, either. We learn the father he killed had assaulted him regularly and his death was likely an act of self-defence on Timo's part. Timo is a violent sort of fellow, quick to anger and he becomes frustrated at any attempt to discuss his past. But Adele starts to loosen him up just as the experience brings her out of her gloom.

They never have a romantic relationship though the tension is there, of course. There's something of the older man/young girl dynamic that's been popular in independent films I think since Lost in Translation. Though to ensure the movie has some sex just for fun, a Frenchwoman shows up almost at random, lets the fugitives stay in her house for the night, and has sex with Timo despite the fact that they have no language in common.

This could be a way of saying that Timo requires a lack of verbal communication to be intimate with someone. I think it was just a bit of pleasant pulp diversion.

Crossing the Hallowed Line

Few would expect a NASCAR movie directed by Howard Hawks to be an exploration of evolving gender roles. Fewer still would expect it to feature George Takei doing a goofy dance.

But that's 1965's Red Line 7000, a movie with an ensemble cast headed by a young James Caan but which mostly focuses on the female characters. Possibly this is because so much of the movie is dialogue about what ought to be expected of men and women in relationships and the men in this movie aren't the sorts of fellows who'd be too loquacious on the subject. It's a good film and a strange film--part progressive social statement, part amazing race car movie with some of the best cinematic car action to be shot before 1968's Bullitt.

Of Hawks' previous films, Red Line 7000 may best resemble Only Angels Have Wings as it mostly features characters in dialogue during downtime between the men performing their death defying jobs. The film begins with Holly (Gail Hire) arriving from California on the expectation of meeting up with her race car driver fiancé only to find he's recently died on the race track.

James Caan plays Mike Marsh, another driver and friend of Holly's fiancé. He comes back to his hotel from the funeral to find another friend has left the distraught woman in his room--his friend took her there to get her more booze after they'd run out of drinks in his room. When Mike arrives, Holly's out cold from sobbing and drinking. So he does the only sensible thing and takes her clothes off before putting her to bed.

Well, no, this of course actually doesn't make any sense except from the point of view that Mike is acting on sexual urges masked from himself by his belief in his own virtue--much like James Stewart in the similar scene from Vertigo which I believe inspired this one.

He doesn't end up with Holly but with Gabrielle (Marianna Hill), a Frenchwoman brought to the country by another driver, Dan, who ends up with Holly. This is a problem for Mike who in one scene talking to another friend about his hesitance to go out with Gabrielle explains, "This shirt is new! These shoes are new!" pointing to what he's wearing. The idea being he needs to be the first man in any girl's life he goes out with. He expresses disdain for the film's embarrassing version of contemporary rock music and is generally meant to represent the insensible old fashioned way of doing things.

There are two other relationships explored in the film--Dan and Holly's and Ned and Julie's.

We first see Julie (Laura Devon) when she drives up on a moped to meet Ned (John Robert Crawford), a beefy farm boy looking to be race car driver. When he sees her on the bike he remarks how he thought she was a boy and the two have an argument throughout the film, sometimes playful sometimes earnest, about how well she embodies the socially accepted conception of a woman.

"I don't want you to go on thinking I'm a boy," she says before a scene cuts to the two of them in bed together. She questions him about the other women he's been with, wants to know what they're like, particularly wanting know what, in his opinion makes a girl "sexy" or not. Ned's the first guy she's been with and when he leaves her without a word after winning a big race she refuses to lose faith he'll return to her. Here Hawks seems to reward one traditional form of behaviour in relationships as Julie's steadfastness is portrayed at first as pathetic but then as noble.

Dan and Holly's relationship is far less challenging than the others--their plot mainly revolves around how Holly thinks she's jinxed because she's loved three men before Dan and all three have had untimely deaths. Dan gets close to being the fourth to die in one spectacular scene where his car is sent soaring over the side on one of the track's turns.

I'm not sure how much of what's in the film is stock footage but it all looks pretty seamless other than Hawks' general reliance on set cars with rear projected backgrounds for close-ups on the drivers. When Holly's fiance dies at the beginning of the film, we see him crawling out of his over turned car, both man and car completely covered in flame.

George Takei's role is pretty small--he plays Kato, the head of the pit crew. It's nice to see that the movie doesn't portray him as an Asian stereotype, though, and the drivers seem to have confidence in and respect for him.

Clear Paint

I had an annoying dream last night. Two or three very large extended families came over to the house for a party. People came into my room while I slept to "clean" it, removing most of my possessions and knocking over my computer monitor to break it. Rambunctious children stole a bunch of my things and opened a secret passage behind my computer which I've dreamed of before--it leads to a long, shining steel corridor, like old fashioned Dalek decor.

I got to sleep just after 11:30 last night, easily getting up just before 8am to-day. The workmen have been getting here even earlier and staying later--until 6:30pm yesterday--but fortunately they've stopped blasting country music so I've stopped blasting Wagner and mariachi music. But they're even here to-day, Saturday. Whenever I get up early on Saturday, an old hard wired instinct manifests again compelling me to watch cartoons. This morning I watched Urusei Yatsura and the second episode of Ranma 1/2 from the new Blu-Ray release. And what an exceptionally nice Blu-Ray release it is.

It's so sharp, it's like looking at a flipbook of original painted cells. The animation in the first season of Ranma, too, remains impressive. There's so much careful little moments of business to help establish character you simply never see in anime anymore.

Twitter Sonnet #542

Peaches collect below the guillotine.
Lemons choke a stained stucco alley.
Pineapples are stripped bare in the canteen.
Tomatoes ride storms and are called Sally.
Oranges jam signals to the marmalade.
Strawberry birth signs lead to the bonnets.
Grape eyes wind up in the bloody Kool Aid.
Pomegranates have seen enough sonnets.
Apricots analyse the bright beehive.
Plums will soak wine in a normal bowler.
Pears can parse the dead from the slow alive.
Dates can get stuck in the second molar.
Cherries crack the bowl not even or odd.
Blackberries write strange numbers in the sod.