The Confused Impulse

How does one approach normal physical and emotional relationships after a lifetime of only abusive or repressive relationships? A teenage orphan named Shun awkwardly attempts to begin a relationship with a prostitute in 1968's Nanami, The Inferno of First Love (初恋・地獄篇, The Inferno of First Love). It's slightly corny and the end of the film is a stupid piece of melodrama but it's also kind of sweet and has a few moments of genuine insight.

The film opens with Nanami (Kuniko Ishii), the prostitute, taking Shun (Akio Takahashi) to a hotel room. She undresses for him and they kiss and spend some time rolling around in bed but he's too shy to go any further.

So he tells her about himself, how after his mother abandoned him as a child he went to live with a couple who are more or less his foster parents. We learn later the stepfather sexually abuses Shun regularly, something a police psychiatrist unearths but for some reason does nothing about.

He hypnotises Shun in an interesting scene where we see his memories playing like a movie projected on a screen and, when he gets to the scenes of abuse from his stepfather, his stepmother (Kazuko Fukuda) steps in front of the projector, demanding the sessions stop, please.

In another instance where the film uses the concept of film in an interesting way, he accompanies Nanami to her former high school where a friend of hers is showing his student film. Shun initially is very rude to the other boy, obviously feeling jealous that Nanami is paying attention to someone else--Nanami, in a more benign display of immaturity, doesn't understand why Shun is being rude. The film is partially in colour--and The Inferno of First Love briefly switches to colour for it--and we see Shun empathising in spite of himself with the film about the young filmmaker's unrequited love for a classmate. I thought this was a nice way of showing how art and film in particular can be a healing influence.

Shun's best friend is a prepubescent girl he meets sometimes in the park. Although he's attacked by a mob who thinks he's a paedophile in one over the top scene, Shun clearly seems to bond with the child because they're close to the same level of emotional development. He's frightened of sexuality as we see in one overlong scene where he follows Nanami into a basement studio where she poses for fetish photos.

Nanami also tells Shun about herself in that first hotel room scene, how she had started out posing for nude photos before gradually becoming a prostitute. Her parents were the ones who originally sent her to work as a nude model and her life is quite innocent in comparison to Shun's. Though I think the filmmakers may have been slightly more critical of her career than the film succeeded in being--in one funny scene, a crazed food cart proprietor strips down and poses in the street.

A friend calls Nanami outside to laugh at the man and Nanami unconsciously comes outside half naked, nonetheless laughing at how silly it is for someone to be posing nude for the public.

But despite the English title, the film's much more about Shun. Nanami seems to basically be leading a happy, stable life while Shun seems as though he might never fight his way through the fog of distorted feelings life has generated around him.

Nesuko is Classy

Happy birthday, Hunter S. Thompson, the next free chapter of The Casebook of Boschen and Nesuko is online. Here's a healthy way to enjoy whisky:

A lot of interesting people were born to-day: The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Machine Gun Kelly, Nelson Mandela, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins were all born on July 18 as well.

Twitter Sonnet #647

Chipped yellow paint upside drowning wing sweat.
Thousands of hats like Grane's in the fire.
Wrong red chips yellow for the ducat bet.
Conrad Veidt smiled at a spare tire.
Relays through Heaven and telegraph skip.
Broken stops cheapen lacquered periods.
The X axis abducts through the Y's dip.
Squeezed eye graphs then flash stars in myriads.
Repealed Rapunzel cabbage braids wither.
Ordained dorsal cellophane lips dissolve.
Counterfeit red seaweed coils slither.
Gum cholesterol yarn planets revolve.
Faraway freeway elbows launch the boat.
Mobs of paper dragons crammed in the coat.

The Crustaceans Prepare for the Ocean's Return

The water was shut off for five hours in my building again to-day--from 9am to 2pm, and I've been getting up at 10am. So I got up a little early this morning and went out to breakfast--eggs, asparagus, mushroom, and swiss on a thin bagel from Einstein's--slightly more decadent than my usual oatmeal but at least I got my protein for the day. Then I went to the tide pools. The tide had been coming in for some time but the crabs were out in impressive force.

These pictures were taken with a new camera I bought a couple months ago. It's the Canon Elph 115, the new version of what my old camera is, I think--I'm not entirely sure since the label has long since rubbed off my old camera.

It feels like a downgrade, though, because the new version is missing manual exposure adjustment, which is pretty aggravating. Looking at reviews online I see I'm not the only one complaining about this. It has a selection of prefab exposure settings that come along with tinting in some cases. One of those attempts to dumb things down that actually makes things so much clumsier and less personal. The exposure for "daylight" was much too bright for me--I tinkered with the contrast in Paint Shop Pro for some of these.

The new camera does seem to take better macro shots--some of these are through a few inches of water but the crabs and shells still come out nice and sharp.

After this, I still had hours to go until there was water at my place again so I drove around ten miles north on Interstate 5 to Oceanside where I found an enormous comic book store had opened since the last time I was there. I bought two volumes of Moyoko Anno's Happy Mania, seven and eight, a series I've been reading gradually over the past several years. Comic book shops seem like such delicate phenomena, I get excited when I see one. Though I guess it's odd timing considering Comic Con is next week.

Traffic coming back was amazingly sluggish so I took a slightly roundabout route. So much for getting a bunch of work done to-day in preparation for the Con. But I've already decided to put in more time to-morrow and Saturday than I normally do. I had to fight the impulse to wander around Oceanside. I love exploring, that's how I used to spend my free time from 1999 to 2003 or 04, back when I could fill my gasoline tank with ten dollars. It's a much more expensive habit now but moving into a new place in another part of town has kind of rekindled the itch--it's amazing how much of San Diego I still haven't seen.

The Continuing Effort Against Burial

There are traps made of paperwork, bills, and cultural expectations and there are traps made of sand. In an effort to escape one for a few days, Niki Junpei finds himself caught in the other in 1964's The Woman in the Dunes (砂の女 "The Sand's Woman"), a beautiful film about the boundaries that shape human behaviour.

Junpei (Eiji Okada) is a schoolteacher and an amateur entomologist who takes three days off from his busy life in Tokyo to catch insects living in the sands of a remote desert located on the coast. He captures the little creatures and pins them to a board, the parallel to his own capture by the local villagers being rather obvious. When he misses the last bus home, he accepts an invitation to take a rope ladder down into a huge pit in the sand where a woman (Kyoko Kishida) lives alone.

He stays the night, marvelling how the woman, who is never named, spends all her days and nights fighting the sand--using an umbrella to keep sand off the food, constantly shovelling sand to keep it from burying the building, and putting sand into crates that are hauled up out of the pits by the villagers. It's a sort of surreal, sinister cottage industry--people living in pits contribute sand to a criminal organisation that then sells the sand under the table to construction companies who use it to build cheap, substandard buildings and bridges.

When he asks her how she can be a part of such a scheme, she shrugs and says it's not her concern. The world outside the pit is like another planet to her. She doesn't argue with Junpei when he points out the advantages of living outside a huge pit of sand, she's simply and very completely accepted the pit as her reality.

She loves Junpei, wanting to have sex with him right away--he wakes up on the first morning to find her sleeping naked a few feet away--but her love for him is entirely due to the fact that he's trapped in the pit with her. She has no interest in any other aspect of who he is--she listens with smiling indulgence when he talks about insects and she seems curious about Tokyo in the way one might be interested in celebrity gossip. But, really, she's content to accept whatever the pit provides.

She's not the first woman we see in the film--Junpei, before being captured by a villager played by Koji Mitsui (who I remember best as the gambler from Kurosawa's The Lower Depths), thinks about his wife while he relaxes and we see visions of her on the dunes.

A first time viewer might take her as the Sand Woman of the title. His thoughts beginning with a rumination on all the responsibilities of city life he concludes with the responsibilities "men and women" have to each other, saying they're "slaves to their fear of being cheated. In turn they dream up new certificates to prove their innocence."

The woman in the pit is the opposite in that she basically expects nothing from Junpei except to provide a warm, male body. In its references to unions and extorted labour, the film may be interpreted as a criticism of communism. But it's really not that specific--it's a much bigger story about a human compulsion to escape freedom.

A New Day in Meatless Music

Two of my favourite vegetarians, "Weird Al" Yankovic and Morrissey, both released new albums to-day I was able to go into Best Buy and buy physical copies of. I've finished listening to the Morrissey album, World Peace is None of Your Business, and I liked it a lot more than I thought I was going to. Hearing the title track had left me unenthusiastic as it seems to consist of not particularly profound political observations. I think the album ought to have been called I'm Not a Man--that's the name of the third track on the album, my favourite at this point, and the track that most directly expresses the theme that runs through much of the album--an attack on complacency and cruelty arising from roles enforced by society, particularly gender roles. "I'm Not a Man" almost sounds like a rebuke to Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy"--the distorted cries at the end of "I'm Not a Man" sound similar to the distinct backing vocals to "Mannish Boy". And as a rallying cry to gender non-conformity it also reminds me of Ani DiFranco's "Not a Pretty Girl".

Don Juan
picaresque
wife-beater vest
cold hand
ice man
warring caveman
well, if this is what it takes
to describe
I'm not a man.

The track is preceded by the nice "Neal Cassady Drops Dead" about the prominent beat figure. It, too, is a criticism of the bad behaviour that is usually, ultimately excused on account of boys being boys, in much the same way Kerouac expressed a simultaneous love for Cassady's wanderlust while portraying his tendency to abandon women and his children as pathetic and cruelly irresponsible. The song doesn't provide new insight but it works as a musical accompaniment for On the Road.

Morrissey hasn't released any real music videos for the album so far, only strange spoken word renditions of a few songs, which are kind of nice but the album versions of the songs are so much better.

I have to say he seems more like William Shatner every year.

"Weird Al" Yankovic, meanwhile, is releasing music videos for all the songs on his new album. He's released two so far, my favourite being "Word Crimes", a parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines".

Twitter Sonnet #646

Lime pudding oxygen stuck to the plaque.
Nothing escapes the bankrupt stromboli.
Gang broken glasses flutter on the track.
Leather smoke clouds obscure the unholy.
Peppermint tiles stick to the sandal.
Unchanging silver suits pack the ice box.
Sink strainer drains clog the new drawer handle.
Faded pink grasses mark the gameless clocks.
Acre cookies crumble like the clay king.
Bad fractions aren't even like whole numbers.
Not every angel in the bar should sing.
Good sawdust goes to particle slumbers.
One vegetarian's mandate is fun.
One vegetarian broke legs to run.

Never to Go Home

Does a man choose his song or does the song choose him? Is it better to die for the group or to take being asked to die as a sign it's time to go it alone? There is a sense of the inevitable hanging over 1966's Tokyo Drifter (東京流れ者), a Seijun Suzuki yakuza film slightly more conventional than Branded to Kill but only slightly. Not many serious gangster films give their protagonists musical numbers or employ minimalist, blatantly artificial sets. Tokyo Drifter is a beautifully stylised film that revels in its archetypes even as it subverts its genre.

Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari) is a young yakuza soldier trying to be a former yakuza soldier at the beginning of the film because his outfit, headed by Kurata (Ryuji Kita), is trying to go legit. In the first scene, the only black and white scene in the film otherwise shot in brillliant, beautiful colour, Tetsu takes a beating from some toughs in a rival gang who don't believe he's gone straight.

The movie has a theme song, also called "Tokyo Drifter", which is played over the opening credits and then is sung in a nightclub by Tetsu's singer girlfriend, Chiharu (Chieko Matsubara). After that, Tetsu can't get the song out of his head and routinely whistles or sings it throughout the film, including in one memorable scene where, being stalked by the rival gang's enforcer, Tatsu (Tamio Kawaji), Tetsu coolly watches a car being demolished.

Things go sour when the rival Otsuka group gets jealous of Kurata's legitimately owned property and they arrange a trap, forcing Kurata to take his group back to its old yakuza ways. As part of a deal for peace, Tetsu, being Kurata's best soldier, is forced to leave Tokyo, so he wanders throughout Japan as a drifter, fitting, given he's been singing about doing that for the whole movie.

Another inevitability is brought up when Keiichi (Tsuyoshi Yoshida), Otsuka's former top soldier, saves Tetsu from the Otsuka men who try to kill him anyway, despite the fact that he's left Tokyo as agreed. Keiichi tells Tetsu it's only a matter of time before Kurata tries to sacrifice him the way Otsuka betrayed Keiichi.

The broad thematic quality of the story is matched by a heavily stylish aesthetic. The colourful and minimalist nightclubs paired with the recurring musical numbers give the film a Hollywood musical quality. The characters themselves have a larger than life, comic book quality. Tetsu has a strange boyishness and is always in a pale, pristinely tailored suit. Otsuka is always in a bright red suit and his face, covered with enormous sunglasses, is mostly shown only in extreme closeups of parts of it, giving him the quality of an omniscient being.

The sense is that Tetsu is an earnest child lost in a world dominated by sinister, cynical forces.

Fused In a Garish Coffin

If there's a Hell for film noir characters, and it's not their own tortured lives, it might look like 1967's Branded to Kill (殺しの烙印). A satire more cruel than funny, a sincere Post Modern action film, director Seijin Suzuki riffed from a run of the mill yakuza movie script to create a commentary on film noir character tropes. The comments take the form of stripping from the world the characters inhabit any semblance of reason or dignity. It's a clever, nicely shot absurdist nightmare.

The story follows Goro Hanada (Joe Shishido), a yakuza hitman, ranked the third best marksman the criminal underworld. Most of the time he's cool and reserved, except the nostalgic smell of boiling rice seems to make him almost orgasmically excited.

His wife, Mami (Mariko Ogawa), is almost always naked and is almost always trying to get the generally distracted Goro to have sex with her. His attentions, though, are diverted by the cold and untouchable Misako Nakajo (Annu Mari) who hires him to kill someone involved in an overseas diamond smuggling operation.

He meets her in the rain and most shots of her afterwards include raindrops or something that looks like raindrops which she doesn't seem to notice. She collects dead birds and butterflies which seem to symbolise Goro trapped in his obsession with her. "I love you," she says at one point, looking at some dead birds in a cage, to which he angrily responds, "Don't despise me!" A subversion of the frequently portrayed barrier between a male protagonist and a femme fatale where there's a simultaneous sense of rejection and attraction.

The triangle here loosely resembles many seen in great films noir, from Vertigo to Out of the Past--the man, the femme fatale, and the available girl he's less interested in. Only here, everyone's motives are ultimately portrayed as cheap or childish beneath the stylistic veneer.

The movie also mocks the portrayal of alcoholism in films noir--at the beginning of the film, Goro cautions a young yakuza against drinking whisky before a job. One drink, and the young man turns into a cartoonish, stumbling drunkard who dies in a blaze of glory. Throughout the film afterwards, one drink turns even the sharpest character into a gibbering buffoon.

The end of the film mocks the intimacy that arises between two absurdly skilled adversary killers who find themselves in a stalemate. One might almost think it's a parody of the extended standoff in John Woo's The Killer if Branded to Kill weren't a much older film. The mysterious "Number 1 Hitman" (Koji Nanbara) and Goro end up in such an extended standoff, each with a gun pointed at the other, that they call a truce for periods of sleep where they get into bed together handcuffed to the frame.

The film's finale, in a decadent and grim satire of supreme skill in committing violence, drains every last bit of mystique from the trope, even taking the strangely beautiful relationship between Misako and Goro built throughout the film and reducing it to something small, sad, and silly. Though, in making it to be silly in the end, it somehow makes the rest of their relationship more beautiful.

The film has a lot in common with Godard's Pierrot le Fou, which also subverted conventions of action and suspense films by highlighting their artificiality. But there was nonetheless a sense that Godard had an affection for the characters. I think there's empathy for Suzuki's characters in Branded to Kill but I feel like this made him want to pull their wings off even more.

Criterion Criteria

There was a 50% off sale on Criterion movies at Barnes and Noble yesterday, plus another 10% off for members of the store club, so I exercised a little less restraint than I usually do. Not just because it was such a good sale but also because I saw this in the last Barnes and Noble in San Diego county that sells movies two days after I'd noticed Fry's Electronics had done away with their Criterion section. The End, for being able to buy many Criterion films in stores, is nigh, I think. I suspect they'll do the same thing to the movie and music section in the Barnes and Noble that they've done to the other movie and music sections in other Barnes and Nobles--turn it into a second kid's books section, to supplement the one they all already have. Kids are for the most part seemingly the only ones left tickled by the novelty of actually going somewhere and holding something in your hand before you buy it.

Those are all blu-rays I bought, it's nice to see Criterion isn't giving in to the seemingly requisite blue band on the top that makes many an otherwise beautiful example of box art look cheap and ugly. Criterion, as usual, makes the best package art, though I preferred the old DVD clamshell art for The Red Shoes of a drawing of a ballet slipper and the cover of Late Spring really ought to have a larger, more prominent picture of Setsuko Hara.

I'm still amazed I managed to restrain myself from getting the new Picnic at Hanging Rock big box set. I had to cut myself off or I'd be living in an alley under a crude shelter made of blu-rays and cases.

Twitter Sonnet #645

Redeemed barrels bar fake plastic monkeys.
Real plastic anthropoids water the cans.
Anomalous kegs throw unseen donkeys.
Machine of the shrunken t-shirt is Man's.
Multiple computers live for Muppet.
A mind on a knitted lolly grabs fall.
Tom Waits had "a bottle full of trumpet."
Evil's face hid the Doctor in a wall.
Walking Flash is a disgrace to spandex.
No half dollar looks for a floorless fan.
Cookie constellations make an index.
Giant unicycles crush the bike man.
A machine's red eye began with "Daisy".
Doughy bonnets distinguish the lazy.

Nesuko Trusts Noodles

Happy Birthday, Peter Murphy, another free chapter of my comic, The Casebook of Boschen and Nesuko, is online, Chapter Five. Look for Six next week on Hunter S. Thompson's birthday.

I had a dream last night about a triceratops and an ankylosaur which is a good enough reason to talk about the Sirenia Digest, a monthly publication of vignettes by my palaeontologist friend Caitlin R. Kiernan, though the new story in the Digest, "Far From Any Shore", is about archaeologists. It's a nice Lovecraftian tale, not just because it contains Lovecraft's soapstone artefacts which Caitlin has written about in other work--it effectively captures the Lovecraftian impression of minds damaged through contact with the strange, the jumbling of perceptions of past and present, real and unreal. Also included are references to The King In Yellow and anyone who liked True Detective might find reading Caitlin's work a rewarding experience.

There's also a reference in the new story to a Castle Rock which I thought for a moment might be a Stephen King reference despite knowing Caitlin isn't especially fond of King. But it may also be a reference to Lord of the Flies, as it was for King originally, and of course there are plenty of real life Castle Rocks, including right in my home town--this being a Castle Rock that's a Castlerock, apparently the name being so familiar now they've decided it's one word. It looks awkward. I want to read it as "Castler Ock", as though Doctor Octopus has a reputation in chess circles for castling. But it's pretty rare for anyone not to castle in chess. No, no, it won't do.

The Reliable Devil

Morality is a dream and a nightmare, a promise of justice and a cunning trap. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's 1934 film Crime Without Passion is an anomaly in a lot of ways. It has the suffocating snare of guilt inspired by popular morality characteristic of film noir years before the first films noir are generally considered to have emerged; it combines fantasy, surrealism, mystery, and courtroom drama. It's fascinating, audacious, and brilliant.

Despite a title card at the beginning informing us the film passed the motion picture code, and it was released just two months after the code essentially became law in July, 1934, the film features several things that would be absent from Production Code era Hollywood. The nightmarish opening sequence, which Leonard Maltin in his brief review of the film at TCM.com says was directed by Slavko Vorkapich, features footage of three essentially naked women portraying the mythological Furies, in process shots sprouting from the blood of victims of violent crimes.

Brief shots of crimes being carried out are interspersed with rapid cuts to the Furies and human skulls laughing or perhaps snarling, the whole sequence something that would have seemed at home in a Carl Dreyer or Luis Brunuel film.

From this sequence, we go to the offices of criminal defence lawyer Lee Gentry, high above the city where he looks down at the people in the street and wonders how all those people can bear to continue living in this horrible world. It's a strange scene of introspection for a character mostly portrayed as a ruthless, diabolical advocate for villains. In the same scene, his secretary actually tells him he's "too nice" as he describes the difficulty he has breaking up with his girlfriend. He thanks his secretary but says, "Fortunately for yourself, I've never been in love with you. In love, I am a monster."

He says the normal acts of affection like hand-holding and kissing aren't enough--he wants to become intimate with the personalities of the women he loves so, he says, when he loses interest the women seem to feel like wives whose husbands are leaving them. Claude Rains plays Gentry and he does a brilliant job in many scenes, like this one, where his character would seem to be presented as a kind of two dimensional villain that would satisfy the Hays office and yet, to anyone with a slightly more complex view of human nature, Gentry is a man who punishes himself with an unfair self-image and it's this unfair self-image that leads him to make mistakes later on.

The press and law enforcement blame him for getting criminals off the hook in the courtroom and yet the film crucially never explicitly says any of Gentry's clients are actually guilty. Meanwhile, later in the film a man is clearly condemned by false notions on the part of law enforcement, but because the film on its most superficial layer had set up that character as a villain, his punishment by law enforcement is portrayed as right, the vengeance of the Furies in a very subtle mockery of code morality.

In a really amazing tangle of moral layers, Gentry is made afraid of capture himself for the murder of a woman he had in fact been trying to save from suicide. When he finds himself alone with her on the floor, a gunshot wound in her head and he holding the gun, he actually splits into two characters, a panicking corporeal Gentry and a smiling and cool translucent Gentry who, like a devil on his shoulder, walks him through the careful steps of removing pieces of evidence from the crime scene.

The ghostly Gentry is his courtroom persona, the devil created as much by the press and the cops who hate him as he is by Gentry himself. Or rather, and this is really great, its Gentry's perception of their perception. This very nice man is on some level ashamed of this image and yet he also tries to own it, to take pride in it. Rains shows this by giving the persona an even more broadly villainous air than Prince John in The Adventures of Robin Hood.

As fate creates a path for Gentry that brings his psyche to a breaking point he actually even mentions the Furies in dialogue. This broad, unforgiving morality of America, this frantic and relentless drive to figure out a Right that no-one knows while being afraid that other people know. The twisted nature of morality that films noir would brilliantly undermine for decades to come.

Mind the Gap

It's easier for people living in comfort and luxury to say it's because of a fundamental order to the universe that other people don't. But those who live in misery and poverty might also subscribe to such an idea in the vain hope of making sanity from the insanity of life. This is one phenomenon presented in microcosm in Bong Joon-ho's brilliant 2013 film Snowpiercer.

The film depicts a future where a global climate calamity has reduced the human race to less than twenty thousand, all inhabiting an enormous train called the Snowpiercer. Designed originally for a luxury vacations, the train traverses the globe, its enormous cars and almost entirely self-sustaining energy and ecosystem make it a serviceable refuge. Provided, Tilda Swinton's Magaret Thatcher-ish leader Mason informs us, balance is maintained. And, like Thatcher, Mason isn't averse to strongman tactics.

In the rear of the train dwell the bulk of the population living in horrific conditions. Curtis (Chris Evans), the unofficial leader the group, works with his mentor Gilliam (John Hurt) in planning and organising a revolution that means storming the front of the train, the engine, where the train's inventor, Wilford (Ed Harris), lives.

The movie's based on a French comic though one can't help thinking there's some resemblance to Korean politics, at least North Korea, where the difference between those at the front of the train and the majority at the back is stark indeed. But this is a South Korean movie, despite the dialogue being 80% English. One of the stand-outs of the impressive cast is Song Kang-ho as Namgoong Minsu, the engineer who designed the train's security systems and is enlisted to aid the rebels in exchange for a drug called Kronol for himself and his daughter, Yona (Go Ah-sung). I'd seen Kang-ho in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the first in Park Chan-wook's vengeance trilogy, but he doesn't make quite the impression he does in Snowpiercer as the world weary and sometimes strangely reckless Namgoong. He feels no compunction in supporting his daughter's drug addiction along with his own and, considering the state of things, it's hard to blame him.

Speaking of Park Chan-wook, who was a producer on Snowpiercer, and his vengeance trilogy, a scene in Snowpiercer recalls perhaps the most famous scene of that trilogy's most well regarded film, Oldboy--it's exciting seeing American and English stars taking part in the kind of action sequence that has become largely extinct in American action films in favour of lazier motion blurred close-ups to fake a fight. Like the long, messy corridor brawl in Oldboy, Snowpiercer features a sequence in a train car of people fighting with hatchets. It doesn't really attempt to match the brilliance of the Oldboy sequence but it thankfully does come from the same ethic where vigorous and apparently close choreography is shown in lengthy takes of the actors in full frame.

Tilda Swinton's performance is the other stand out--nearly every review compares her to Margaret Thatcher and it's clear Swinton had the infamous Prime Minister in mind, adopting a Lincolnshire accent and heavily patronising tone around obtrusive dentures.

She has unshakeable faith in order, possibly not even aware of how her personal philosophy is founded on selfishness. The small world of the train is, like many great works of science fiction, like a hypothetical exercise distilling large scale social issues to a smaller context. The ugliness of the aristocracy living comfortably at the expense of the poor is thrown into much sharper relief. But here's Margaret Thatcher herself explaining "the gap", as usual apparently not conscious of the horror implicit in her worldview:

Twitter Sonnet #644

Unshaken cocoanut caught the dry heart.
Unattained ice waylays to wet tofu.
Stone dictionary pockets fall apart.
Fire descends at the dizzy curfew.
Older colours spiral across the clams.
Hairless faces watch from the yoghurt shop.
Grasses in the kangaroos shake like hands.
Score is you're not little people you're cop.
Delayed apple heights redden the gully.
Wild turpentine glimmers like a wish.
Metal men's books need water to sully.
Emperors are the penguins on the dish.
Lighter snowflakes'll break the barricade.
Tea and fingers drain from the cold arcade.

Graduation that Never Occurs/Occurred

The past forty eight hours have been the best for unreliable memory that I can remember. I watched Blade Runner on Blu-Ray last night--which is as unbelievably gorgeous as you might expect--and this morning I watched the twenty third episode of Revolutionary Girl Utena, the final episode of the "Black Rose" arc. I'd forgotten how good those last two episodes were.

It's a story arc involving a young man named Souji Mikage who lures students to his "seminar" where he listens through an intercom as the students tell him about their problems from the inside of an elevator descending. They descend to the depths of the Nemuro building, located on the campus of Ohtori Academy, the school where the whole series takes place.

The arc takes up ten episodes of the thirty nine episode series, episodes fourteen to twenty three. Throughout the series, the protagonist, Utena Tenjou, has sword duels with opponents in a duelling arena located in a forbidden forest on the school grounds. The object of each duel is to knock a rose off an opponent's lapel and the winner of the duel becomes fiancé or fiancée to Anthy Himemiya, the "Rose Bride".

Utena, we learn early on, carries a memory of a prince who comforted her when she was a child and gave her the rose seal ring that would mark her as duellist later in life. Utena had been charmed by the prince but, we're told, instead of the experience making her want to marry a prince, it makes her want to become a prince, something which the ongoing duels for the Rose Bride essentially allow her to do.

In the "Black Rose" arc, Mikage gives the troubled students a black rose to wear in their lapels when they challenge Utena. The idea is that the one who finally wins the Bride for Mikage will kill her--it's not quite clear in the beginning why Mikage wants her dead.

The black roses are somehow harvested, it's implied, from the bodies of one hundred students who committed suicide in the building years ago. They're plucked from what looks like an aquarium by a boy named Mamiya, possibly Mikage's boyfriend in what seems to be a reflection of Utena and Anthy's relationship.

The final episodes of the arc make the parallels even more apparent as we watch Mikage's memories of the child Mamiya he tried to save from a terminal illness by compelling the sacrifice of the one hundred students--he tells Utena they are alike in wanting to assert the reality of their memories on the present, and it's at this point the viewer realises that this is the motive that united all of Mikage's previous victims.

And then it gets really great as the memories of Mikage's not only don't seem to be accurate but his realisation of their inaccuracy seems to threaten his existence and everyone's memory of his existence. Like a man composed entirely of false memories. At the same time, the incident offers Utena the opportunity to prove her identity is more than memory filtered through desire.

This is my third time watching through the series, I doubt it'll be my last.