The Biggest Baby In the World

Last night I dreamt Ahsoka Tano and I went to help a remote village contained in a pale blue cube. Half the residents were werewolves and in an alternate timeline, which Ahsoka and I barely remembered, we killed all the werewolves. But it ended up being the wrong move so we came back in time to do things differently. We could remember very little about the old timeline except one middle aged werewolf guy with a black beard was more of a main character in that timeline than he was proving to be in our current timeline. I only remember bits and pieces of what happened next--I remember discovering I was a werewolf but wondering if I was supposed to act like one or not--running around killing people in wolf form seemed like the wrong thing to do except I knew if the werewolves weren't allowed to act like werewolves, something vague would go wrong. There turned out to be a Sith Lord in the village played I think by Ethan Hawke. I remember trying to catch a spinning red light sabre by its handle as the village cube slowly filled with water.

There seems to be extraordinary consensus of opinion regarding Sony's decision to cancel its North Korean set comedy The Interview. I saw Mia Farrow retweet Mitt Romney to-day--and not ironically. "@MittRomney .@SonyPictures don’t cave, fight: release @TheInterview free online globally. Ask viewers for voluntary $5 contribution to fight #Ebola." Devin Faraci of Badass Digest tweeted: "A country run by corporations is a country that is cowardly and exclusively profit-driven. Fucking capitalism." Well, if it's the profit motive at play, all this coverage is sooner or later going to make someone at Sony say, "If we release this movie, it'll be the single biggest hit we've ever had." There's no doubt in my mind we'll be seeing The Interview eventually. I think we're probably also going to go to war with North Korea. What better way to get our minds off the torture memos? After all, Kim Jong-un tortures a lot more people than we do, I think it's safe to assume. Gods, I hope that's safe to assume.

I have to admit, I was from the beginning rather surprised that a comedy film would depict the assassination of an actual leader of a country, however infamous that leader may be. Though its not without precedent--I remember the bomb landing on the lap of Saddam Hussein in Hot Shots! Part Deux. And even Daffy Duck had a crack at Hitler:

Of course, in the examples I just mentioned, Hussein and Hitler were both men whose countries the U.S. had been at war with. In his blog to-day, George R.R. Martin mentions Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, which was released before the U.S. went to war with Germany. And it did actually generate controversy at the time--Chaplin was one of the few directors who had complete control over his films as he was in charge of his own studio. Quite a few people at the time said Chaplin had gone too far. As far as I know, no-one was saying that about The Interview except North Korea. But we live in a climate that takes satire more for granted.

But now I read that Sony screened the film for State Department officials who okayed it, who even okayed a graphic depiction of Kim Jong-un's death. An activist planned on dropping DVD copies of The Interview into North Korea, something he's done regularly. The movie Titanic apparently had such a profound impact on a North Korean woman named Yeonmi Park that it led to her decision to flee the country with her family, a dangerous undertaking and her father died in the attempt. Now she's a minor celebrity in South Korea where she regularly mocks North Korea on South Korean television despite threats to her life, apparently possessed of a lot more guts than the higher ups at Sony.

The Interview looks like a good movie to me. I loved This Is the End, another movie from the same director, writers, and stars. It seems to me that The Interview may have been inspired by Dennis Rodman's trip to North Korea--Rodman came back seemingly brainwashed and hearing him talk about how Jong-un was a good guy, just misunderstood, was eerie and ridiculous and certainly ripe for ridicule. Jong-un, like his father, of course, is evergreen fodder for jokes, as anyone who takes himself that seriously usually is. I don't think the movie was orchestrated by the U.S. government--I can believe Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen would come up with the idea to push the envelope in just this way. But I wouldn't be surprised to learn there's more to this than meets the eye.

Twitter Sonnet #697

The winged spinach overwhelms the olive.
A glassy traffic cone misled the cord.
Santa's female saint is real suggestive.
A coke has broken across the blackboard.
Scuba portents precede the hollow step.
Tow cables will distress the white mammoth.
A coal ignites on a high godless steppe.
Imperial troops landed on Plymouth.
Isolating plum pastes appear in eels.
Blue rust occurs when oxygen won't breathe.
A question of stilts punctured the weak heels.
An alarm arose when sock puppets teethed.
Pipe straws dip into the turtle drama.
Thin stalks fall to illusory kama.

Vader's Deja Vu

Finally got around to watching yesterday the Blu-Ray copy of The Empire Strikes Back I bought a few months ago. I wanted to watch it in the middle of the day so I could have the sound up to a proper volume without being incredibly rude to the neighbours. Though sound doesn't seem to travel at all through the walls of the apartment and the people upstairs with their routine random jackhammer noises at 2am don't exactly seem like courtesy is a priority. In addition to being the Blu-Ray, this is the first time in a long time I'd watched George Lucas' special edition--unfortunately what I call the "classic" edition (like it?) has of course not been released in high definition.

I at last had definite confirmation on something I'd suspected for a long time, which is that the special edition shot of Darth Vader coming off his shuttle into the Star Destroyer landing bay is in fact footage from Return of the Jedi--the detail on the Blu-Ray is enough that you can see the face of the officer in front and he's clearly the same guy Vader terrifies in the Death Star hanger at the beginning of Return of the Jedi.

I doubt I'm the first person to notice this. Which makes the already seemingly pointless addition of this scene seem even more pointless. Of all the Star Wars nitpicks I've heard in my life, I don't think I've ever hear anyone say, "How did Vader get to his Star Destroyer while Leia, Lando, and Chewie were rescuing Luke?"

I wonder what Irvin Kershner thought of this--the director of Empire Strikes Back. He's no longer alive to tell us but cinematographer Peter Suschitzky is--I can't seem to find any comment from him by googling, though. Certainly his distinctive style is visible in Empire Strikes Back when contrasting it with the other Star Wars films--David Cronenberg, who would beginning in the late 80s hire Suschitzky as cinematographer on all his films, called Empire Strikes Back the only Star Wars movie that looked good.

If you compare the above shot with other Imperial interiors that were shot by Suschitzky, one can detect a more sophisticated use of shadow, for all of the even lighting on shining grey that Imperial interiors allowed.

It probably really was a pain in the ass to light these sets, actually. But light really does distinguish one location from another in Empire Strikes Back rather well, from the misty murk of Dagobah to the perpetual red sunset on Cloud City, exterior and interior.

Petals and Leaves

Becoming a stripper isn't enough to replace a signed Balzac novel. Brigitte Bardot has to become the best stripper in 1956's Plucking the Daisy (En effeuillant la marguerite), a distractingly sexist yet undeniably adorable movie about a young woman who runs away from home and shacks up in a museum.

If it had been anyone other than Brigitte Bardot, this film would be pretty run of the mill and I wouldn't be able to get past the fact that the smug male lead, Daniel Gelin--who appeared in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much the same year--is incredibly annoying. I can't remember ever wanting the guy not to get the girl as much as I wanted him not to get her in this movie.

But damn me, Bardot carries it. The film was co-written and produced by Roger Vadim, who that same year directed Bardot in her big breakout role (though she was already famous) And God Created Woman, a movie which also bugged me in its rather retrograde attitude regarding the roles men and women ought to inhabit. I think roles Bardot later took, like Viva Maria and particularly Contempt, were reactions against the attitudes of these Vadim movies. But nevertheless, watching her absently taking up residence in a Balzac museum, wearing Balzac's robe while she drinks coffee, all because she believes it's her brother's home, just could not fail to put a smile on my face.

Her brother's an artist who's written home claiming to be a big success but is in reality an assistant curator at the museum. He's played by Darry Cowl, who gives my second favourite performance in the film with a hazy, stumbling, double taking interpretation of the role and seems to be even more lost in the woods than his sister.

Before he comes to the museum to find her living in his work place, Agnes (Bardot) innocently sells what she thinks is a book from his personal collection in order to pay her expenses while in Paris. Daniel (Gelin) works for the paper and he misinterprets Agnes' meaning when she says she "sold a book" and shows up wearing expensive clothes--she is a writer, having previously published anonymously a book about the people in Vichy, where she grew up.

Daniel has a habit of kissing his female editor to get her to do favours for him and he has another girl he's seeing. And he looks down on strippers but comes on real strong to Sophia, Agnes' masked alterego she adopts when she enters a stripping competition, hoping to buy back the Balzac books with the prize money.

You don't see Bardot naked in this film but there's plenty of nudity--sadly, despite ostensibly having a story about how Daniel ought to accept Agnes as she is, the regular, experienced strippers are all portrayed as caustic and dumb. One of them strides along the catwalk grinning broadly to display her gaptooth which reminded me of something Roger Ebert says in the Criterion commentary for Ozu's Floating Weeds, that characters in movies with bad teeth have a tendency to have big, open mouthed grins to show off their teeth as much as possible.

Daniel's obvious duplicity in promising Agnes she's the only girl for him in one scene and then wanting to schtupp Sophia in another is forgiven a little too easily and there's a clear attitude about the film that there are two kinds of women in the world--overgrown babies or trash, even as the film indulges in displays of beautiful naked women, a pathetic double standard.

Father of Father of Mother of Dragons

Did you know George R.R. Martin once ranked 1981's, Dragonslayer ahead of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Pan's Labyrinth, La Belle et la Bete, and Raiders of the Lost Ark in a top ten list of fantasy films? His description of the film on the list contains a major spoiler so read at your own risk but I'll quote this bit:

It's surprisingly dark, and delivers some nice twists and turns along the way. Vermithrax Perjorative is the best dragon ever put on film (the dragons in Reign of Fire are a close second) and has the coolest dragon name as well.

I suppose Vermithrax may have been the best dragon created on film to that date though I found the variety of techniques used to create the monster--switching between different models and stop motion animation--and the brief space of time in which the dragon actually appears in the film sabotage attempts to establish the dragon's personality. I would certainly say Maleficent in dragon form in Disney's Sleeping Beauty was more impressive. But Dragonslayer is also a Disney film--co-produced with Paramount--surprising perhaps because of the relative darkness of the material Martin mentions. This was before Disney had Touchstone or Miramax so graphic, bloody violence and a scene establishing that Peter MacNicol is rather well hung were a bit jarring to see in a film bearing the Disney name. It is interesting for its moral ambiguity but unfortunately it fails for its lack of solid characterisation.

A problem particularly apparent in MacNicol who plays the Luke Skywalker-ish lead, apprenticed to a dying wizard played by Ralph Richardson. We can take the film as a coming of age story only by default. When MacNicol takes up the mantle of wizard he does so without hesitation and his self-confidence never seems to be challenged. He's sort of a blank.

More interesting perhaps is his costar Caitlin Clarke who plays a peasant daughter of a blacksmith who lives her life disguised as a boy in order to avoid the lottery which demands virgin women be sacrificed to the dragon periodically. When it seems MacNicol's character has vanquished the beast, she comes out as a women in a scene that's kind of sweet.

The film also features some gorgeous location shots form North Wales and Scotland.

Twitter Sonnet #696

No survey came for the dashing receipt.
It takes good treats to tease a toucan right.
The rubber thread glove is yet incomplete.
The coaster collapsed for the wrong man's height.
Echo's laser pointer caught Narcissus.
A one cracked a thirty's ribcage in half.
Adventure is harder than Calculus.
The danger came on a tray to George Raft.
When sixty shochu weddings steamed we drank.
Wheat police turned to milk in cereal.
Carbon abandoned the caribou tank.
Ben Franklin's gotten too ethereal.
Wheel cuff link bailiffs spend for sleeves.
Miracle juices beguile the reeves.

From Bamboo to Koto

The appeal of nature, the inherent sympathy many human beings feel for it, is contrasted with the human compulsion to create artifice, to make cities, technology, and art, things which diverge from the world of forests and animals. Is one world truly better than the other? The typical answer is that the natural world is superior. Yet 2013's The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (かぐや姫の物語) provides a more complex and more interesting answer. It's also a truly extraordinary and gorgeous work of animation.

When most people think of Studio Ghibli they think of director Hayao Miyazaki. But there's another great director associated with the studio, Isao Takahata, best known in the west for his beautiful and brutal portrayal of the lives of a couple Japanese children during World War II, Grave of the Fireflies. The Tale of Princess Kaguya was his first full length feature in fourteen years and features a more stylised approach compared to Grave of the Fireflies, its imagery bearing a remarkable resemblance to art from Heian era (tenth century) Japan, the period from whence came the original folktale upon which the film is based.

In the forest one day, a wood cutter finds what appears to be a tiny girl sleeping in a bamboo stalk. He takes her home and he and his wife raise her as their own child. The beautiful Princess Kaguya grows up to be courted by the most affluent men in the country.

I loved the old fashioned fairytale feel to the movie, I love how the film preserves the story of how each suitor compares the Princess to a mythical item and so she tasks each one with finding the item he mentioned in order to win her hand. It has the feeling of The Three Little Pigs or Goldilocks and the Three Bears where a character follows a pattern of trying one thing and then another. Takahata successfully teases out a theme inherent in the original story about the relationship of the beauty of the natural world with a colder, more artificially refined beauty and makes an interesting aesthetic statement.

The intensely stylised quality of the film itself supports this statement as it contains renderings of nature that celebrate nature while inherently reflecting a human impression of nature arising from the same aspect of our brains that separates us from nature. The Princess, while loving the rough world of the country and living precariously by subsistence farming and the meagre earnings of her father seems to be imbued with a reverence for the artificial. She exhibits early unusually refined natural singing ability and seems to know the lyrics from birth of a song about birds, beasts, and trees. Her adoptive father finds gold nuggets and silk kimonos inside the bamboo in much the way he found the Princess and takes it to mean that he ought to take an expensive home in the capital and raise the girl like a real Princess. And who could argue with him? Why else would the bamboo be producing gold and kimonos?

The Princess seems to chafe in the new ornamental lifestyle, deliberately disobeying her new tutor and cultivating a garden with a tiny reproduction of the family's old home in the woods. And yet when company arrive, she demonstrates a masterful ability to play the koto and an inherent, unrivalled grasp of manners and decorum.

Ultimately, the film seems to suggest the thematic contrast is a movement from birth to death but it doesn't portray death as a negative thing any more than it portrays clinging to nature as infantile. Death is the truth behind artificial beauty and so there is an inherent sadness and yet also a grace to it.

The "Bad Wolf" Rubs Elbows In Wolf Society

It's Saturday and it still feels like Doctor Who day so . . . This past week I've listened to a couple more audio plays, Loups-Garoux and Dust Breeding, a Fifth Doctor story and a Seventh Doctor story, respectively. I think I preferred Loups-Garoux but I enjoyed Dust Breeding very much. Loups-Garoux sees the Fifth Doctor and his non-human companion, Turlough, visiting a future, deforested Brazil that has become a dustbowl. I love the rare occasion when Doctor Who portrays a grim future that actually seems likely and it gives Turlough--next to Jamie my favourite male companion--an opportunity to grouse about how stupid humans are.

I found this image of Turlough with another non-human companion, Nyssa, on this Live Journal which appears to be entirely devoted to Nyssa.

I actually feel like none of the Fifth Doctor's companions were explored deeply enough. Certainly this picture makes me long for a story about a secret affair between Tegan and Nyssa;

Anyway, Turlough is also a companion whose potential I never thought was quite tapped in his run on the show. Most of his stuff is related to the second Guardians of Time story arc. But I liked how flawed he was without being a villain or whiney. He was a kid who had slightly sinister motives and some unexamined self hatred.

Loups-Garoux turns out to be about a secret society of werewolves and feels rather like White Wolf soap opera. The queen of the werewolves is played by Eleanor Bron, marking her third Doctor Who appearance after the television stories City of Death and Revelation of the Daleks. Here she has almost a romance with the Doctor who's given dialogue about how women aren't his field, how he knows little about this romance stuff, one of the few times I've heard the fact that the Doctor rarely has an acknowledged girlfriend addressed. Though, honestly, there are several Doctor and Companion pairings where I think the two absolutely must have been having sex, it's just never mentioned on screen (Romana, Sarah Jane, Jo, Liz, Jamie). The dialogue between Peter Davison and Bron is unfortunately a bit stilted, stuff about him being her champion in a ritual fight. There's far too much of the Doctor being flustered and the Queen Werewolf stating political reasons for marrying the Doctor. A real flirty back and forth between the two--like in the audio play "The Land of the Dead", would have been nice.

Weird Jolla

The latest of the many bees who've come to rest on my car. I guess 'tis the season of bee dying.

I took this at Plaza Bonita mall which is pretty far south. I had lunch at a bank owned Italian place called O's American Kitchen (previously Pat and Oscar's before they went bankrupt). I was approached by three people asking for money. I guess that's what I get for wearing spectator shoes. I finally gave one guy my breadsticks.

For the other end of the spectrum, I drove up to La Jolla to see the tide pools but the tide was high.

These seagulls were pretty funny. They just sat there screaming, totally unafraid, at everyone walking past, wanting some food:

I hate this camera. I'm tired of trying to trick it into giving me the exposure I want by pointing it at a bright patch and then trying to whip it quickly over to the dark area I'm actually trying to take a picture of to get around its insistence on only letting me use a set of prefab exposure settings. Canon knows best, I guess, so this is why I end up with these lousy washed out shots.

I need a proper camera. One that takes pictures at night without a flash. Though I've noticed the trick to doing it with this one is to keep the camera really still. Which is tough because I have an unsteady hand. People point at the squiggly lines in my comics as evidence I use Paint but, sadly, no, it's these lousy analogue hands. They give me no end of trouble in video games, too. I did manage to hold it steady long enough to get this photo of a church, though.

Across the street from the church was a slightly weird piece of motorised modern art, an eleven or so foot tall statue of a blacksmith pounding at an anvil. It's the sound I love the most, the rhythmic, undulating metal scraping mixed with the sound of the sea.

Twitter Sonnet #695

Unseen salamanders fade through the cloth.
Pinned tapestries unveil the old printer.
Yellow clouds roll through the enormous moth.
Magenta stars burn the coming winter.
The wheels without ears won't heed the corp.
Expected spirits quicken each branch proved.
Antique brown curling antlers thank the boar.
A gable eyebrow pointedly was moved.
When George's sun came it brought the rabbit.
Silhouette android workers pound the beach.
Regressed troopers wore an iron habit.
Wan pilots fly from the atmosphere's reach.
A bald perplexed intern reversed health.
Dark faceless smurfs make mechanical wealth.

The Case Goes On

Last night I dreamt I was riding in the back seat of my friend's family's car and was asked to provide some Christmas music. The CD player was in the back with me so I put in the soundtrack to David's Wedding, a television musical produced for the Disney Channel in the late 1970s by David Bowie and members of The Pogues. The opening song began with slightly jubilant but elegiac flutes, accordion, and drum and bass like the beginning of The Pogue's "Broad Magestic Shannon" but it ended with David Bowie chanting "David's wedding" over and over. Of the television production, I remembered the song corresponding with David Bowie, in full Ziggy Stardust makeup and costume, curled up in the middle of what looked like a Sesame Street back alley set with artificial rain pouring down. Disney was criticised for racial insensitivity for airing the programme while David Bowie was praised for making an insightful and generally healing comment on the state of race relations in America in the late 1970s. In fact, the term "David's Wedding" became synonymous with Christmas. People didn't say, "Happy David's Wedding," but if you said, "David's Wedding is coming up at the end of the month," people would know you meant Christmas.

I also started watching the BBC's 1985 adaptation of Charles Dickens' Bleak House last night, an eight part series of one hour episodes with Diana Rigg as Lady Dedlock, Peter Vaughan as Tulkinghorn, and Denholm Elliot as John Jarndyce. Mostly I like it so far. I love the literally bleak quality of it, all the darkness with murky lanterns or candles feebly illuminating faces.

The casting is the best part, though, except for the overly slimy guy they have playing Guppy. Peter Vaughan, too, might come off as a bit too sanguine for Tulkinghorn but Diana Rigg as Dedlock seems perfect. However, the casting of Denholm Elliot as John Jarndyce cannot be rivalled in its perfection. Few actors would more perfectly and genuinely convey the combination of generosity, modesty, and deep, barely repressed sorrowful frustration.

To Pick Up Some Power Converters

One of the enigmas of Star Wars: A New Hope is that Mark Hamill wasn't much of an actor. If you're like me, you've watched the first film enough times to become well acquainted with all the beats where Hamill reacts too early--his disappointed shoulder slump a split second too early when C3PO says, "There's not much to tell," his sometimes grating, whiny delivery. George Lucas isn't an actor's director and the only actors who come off well in his films are those with a massive cache of their own talent brought to the table. Yet the first Star Wars film not only works, Hamill works in it. Maybe his lacklustre performance actually helps foreground the world a bit more, but even that doesn't quite explain it. As I said, it's an enigma.

Hamill's since improved at least as a voice actor as his celebrated, long running career as the Joker in various animated and video game incarnations of Batman has shown. But the proof that Hamill in the late 70s didn't have what it takes to carry a film himself is in 1978's Corvette Summer. A poorly written adventure road film with not incompetent but truly dull direction, Hamill's uninteresting teenage gear-head navigates a nonsensical coming of age story with nothing particularly interesting to say.

Kenny (Hamill) is coming to the end of his last high school semester and he and his auto shop class wander a scrapyard, looking for a car to restore as a class project. It's Kenny who spots the Stingray Corvette and from then on he seems to regard the car as his.

But all the students take turns driving it when its finished, only classmate Danny Bonaduce for some reason taking it out alone and when he leaves the car parked on the curb to pick up some burgers and cokes, of course it's stolen. So begins Kenny's odyssey as he alone seems to have the urge to track the car down. Eventually he learns it's in Las Vegas and it's on the way there he hitches a ride from the person giving the best performance in the film, Annie Potts as Vanessa, a would-be prostitute.

Here in 1978 Potts is the sexy young woman and eight years later she played the old lady character at the age of thirty four in Pretty In Pink, which goes to show how Hollywood regards actresses over thirty. She invests real belief in Vanessa even though she's no better written than Kenny, and she's genuinely entertaining when scolding him for the various hijinks he gets up to in attempting to retrieve his car, or avoiding retrieving his car. For his part, he whines about her and everything else and complains when she tries to have sex with him. He's generally insufferable. I was just about out of patience for the film when Dick Miller showed up for an interesting cameo.

All too briefly, though.

The dull slog that is the remainder of the film features as villains the guy who played Leon in Blade Runner and Kim Milford, the star of Laserblast, the final film mocked on the Comedy Central run of Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

As bad as Hamill is in the movie, this guy is worse and it becomes a showdown between the mediocre and the inept in a high stakes etcetera.

The Monster In the Words, In a Look

If we're going to talk about fear, the question shouldn't be, "How do I make a movie scary?" but rather, "Why am I afraid?" And very fortunately for all of us, director Jennifer Kent gets it and she made her 2014 film The Babadook accordingly, a movie so good it's been bringing a smile to my face all day. It does exactly what a horror movie ought to do--it's personal; the supernatural elements are reflections of the crises experienced by the people involved. It's beautifully, stylishly shot, the performances, which are crucial, are very good. I'm so happy I saw this movie.

I kept thinking of the line from the Nine Inch Nails song "The Downward Spiral (The Bottom)": "Everything's blue in this world." Everything in The Babadook is either blue--usually a dark navy blue--or pale pink or beige until a red pop-up book called The Babadook mysteriously turns up on the shelf in the two storey Victorian home occupied by nursing home attendant Amelia (Eddie Davis) and her six year old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman). Samuel's father, as he matter of factly likes to tell anyone exhibiting the slightest curiosity, was killed in a car accident the night he drove Amelia to the hospital where she was to give birth to Samuel.

There is something vaguely oedipal going on--Samuel causes his mother no end of vexation with his obsession with weaponry. He builds himself a backpack mounted catapult, acquires firecrackers from the Internet, and is finally expelled from school when he brandishes a small crossbow. He constantly tells his mother how he plans to protect her, how the weapons are for killing "the monster".

Meanwhile, his behaviour is alienating all of Amelia's friends and causing her to lose sleep and general piece of mind. The fact that Samuel's violent behaviour is motivated from anxiety over the possibility of losing his mother makes it all the more difficult for Amelia to confront the issue. But when Samuel starts to believe in the Babadook, Amelia's inability to confront the issue starts to become a big part of the problem. Without giving too much away, I loved how this movie to some extent made Amelia into Jack and Wendy Torrence rolled into one character.

And director Jennifer Kent was quite consciously influenced by The Shining among other great movies. I would have liked her after reading this interview even if I hadn't just watched a movie by her I loved. Some quotes I especially liked;

". . . I really believe we need to face our darkness. We have this naïve illusion that life is meant to be perfect, and I think the sooner we realise that that’s never going to be true, the happier we’ll be."

"I think if people think sensitively and seriously about films in this canon, like The Shining and Let The Right One In, even going back to Vampyr and Nosferatu, there’s a real depth to those films – and the Polanski films as well, the domestic horrors. I guess they were my inspiration."

"Mythical stories run through all of us, and films like The Thing and Halloween are films that I love for their simplicity. Les Yeux Sans Visage, Eyes Without A Face, is a really beautiful film to me. I could rattle off many. But I love films like Texas Chain Saw Massacre as well, because that is a really shocking film, and it has a deeper reach to it than people really give it credit for."

And she apprenticed under Lars von Trier. Gods, I like her. I hope people fund all her movies for the rest of her life. See this movie, preferably in a theatre, if you can.

Twitter Sonnet #694

The bee tongue settles oddly by the pearl.
Liquorice rain'll stain the cloudy pink.
The bike chain bar admits a sprocket girl.
Recursive oils wait under the sink.
Robot skeleton shopping malls provide.
The steel livestock drift through red sleep.
Relax if iron and protein collide.
The metal hopes to buy electric sheep.
The grander rug released an abridged night.
Leaf meds clogged in an accident poultice.
Old paper clip cobbled claws rust on sight.
The red sky's His bellyflop for solstice.
Black conical fingers indexed the blue.
Pink good for movies gave some quarters too.

Undated Homogeneous Moving Figures

Why not try, Michael Bay? Just a little, just for fun. Does the universe seem too devoid of meaning? Do you find comfort only in the vague status conferred by piles of money and the sycophants who respect it? Is that all you need? Or have you given up hope that there can be anything more? Bay only produced 2014's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles--it's directed by Jonathan Liebesman which might explain why it's better than Bay's Transformers: Age of Extinction. More coherent, anyway. It's every bit as stupid but it has a more uniform voice, a consistency in tone to its particular form of utter vapidity. It has three credited screenwriters but it feels like one solid half-assed vision. Like the many other reboots of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it was pretty much guaranteed a certain amount of profit. But in the continuing Looking Glass World absurdity of modern American cinema, this was the most profitable reboot of the franchise and it reflects the lowest amount of creative impulse.

Well, let me say there was something I liked about it--I liked the design of the turtles themselves, which I know a lot of people hated. Film critic Peter Howell of the Toronto Star called them "grotesque as a Terry Gilliam cartoon" which I think was meant to be a disparagement. I should only hope my art would one day be compared to Terry Gilliam's and it occurs to me that Gilliam would rock the shit out of Ninja Turtles. That should happen. I mean, there are other projects I'd prefer to see Gilliam handle first if he were given the kind of budget to work with this movie had. But a Terry Gilliam Ninja Turtles--that's a marriage made in Hell and it's undeniably seductive.

But, no, we have the Michael Bay/Jonathan Liebesman one instead. With Megan Fox, who I kind of applauded when she talked shit about Bay's manners on set of the first Transformers where he reportedly saw her only as a sex object. I guess as revenge they decided to put her in the role of a complete moron.

Imagine the dumbest, most misogynist portrayal of Lois Lane you've ever seen. Now lower it by 100 IQ points and you have Fox's April O'Neil, who works for a local New York television news department and she's absolutely stunned no-one believes her story about the six foot tall talking turtles whose existence she has no tangible evidence of.

Even when she finally has a photograph, she doesn't share it with her boss (played by Whoopi Goldberg) who is enraged that April would bring in this story. Which is weird, too--if your employee starts talking to you about seeing giant talking turtles in an earnest manner, do you get angry under the suspicion that they're trying to fool you? It's like cartoon cave man psychology: "Wait minute! Me know turtles can't talk!" I say "cartoon cave man" because think this movie would be a little low brow for Australopithecus afarensis.

In the old series, April O'Neil is basically a surrogate maternal character for the turtles. Here, she's the object of Michelangelo's sexual come-ons that she replies to in the same way she replies to everything, with a dim, vaguely worried expression.

I couldn't help thinking of this:

One could say the low level intelligence of the script is because the movie's aimed solely at young children. It clearly isn't when a big part of its target audience are thirty-somethings who grew up with the original series and the sexual titillation and the flirting between Fox's and Will Arnett's character would be generally meaningless to prepubescents but I guess insofar as anyone can say anything you can say that.

Arnett gives the best performance in the movie. He seems to accept the role with a noble work ethic, putting as much belief into his lines as he does with the good material he had to work with on Arrested Development. William Fichtner as villain Eric Sacks chews scenery like it's rubber celery, evidently intent on taking this opportunity to prove he's another Christopher Walken. The turtles themselves . . . At least they sound like they're from New York this time. Once again, Raphael is the focal point, his surly exterior with a heart of gold proving again to be cheap pathos fodder while the other turtles are one dimensional types. Sometimes their dialogue drifts from dumb to completely meaningless, like someone took apart a bunch of jokes and mixed the setups and punchlines around in a hat. At one point Raphael tells Donatello his shell is cracked, apparently speaking metaphorically, and that Donatello is his bandage. Donatello says, "not for the first time" before leaping out of the speeding truck to help save Leonardo as they all tumble down cgi-friendly snowy mountainside. Is Leonardo particularly Raphael's responsibility for some reason? Or maybe Raphael's shell really is cracked and watching Donatello save Leonardo would have a healing influence?

Or maybe they just didn't care. I can imagine one of the actors saying, "You know, this line doesn't make any se . . . Oh, never mind."

Ill Fitting Humanity

One perennial problem with a society that strictly prescribes degrees of sexual freedom among its strata is that inconvenient babies tend to result. There are a lot of stories around this topic, 1972's Pakeezah (Pure) is a beautiful one with lovely cinematography and set design and great musical numbers.

It was released in 1972, just weeks before its star, Meena Kumari, died from cirrhosis of the liver at the age of thirty nine, but the movie took almost fourteen years to make. There was a big gap in production when its director, Kamal Amrohi, and Kumari divorced in 1964 when the movie was half finished. The differences between footage from the mid-sixties and the footage from the early seventies is noticeable not only for Kumari's noticeably hollower cheeks--she was fatally ill when filming resumed--but for a change from lavish indoor sets to use of realistic location shots.

Most of the musical numbers were shot in the earlier block of production with Kumari in top form. Here she is as the young prostitute, Sahibjaan, singing a song to an admiring patron:

Her mother, Nargis (also Kumari), was a prostitute as well--a "tawaif", a sophisticated courtesan institution which its Wikipedia article compares to the Geisha saying, "their main purpose was to professionally entertain their guests, and while sex was often incidental, it was not assured contractually. High-class or the most popular tawaifs could often pick and choose among the best of their suitors." Though I tend to agree with Roger Ebert who said in his review of Memoirs of a Geisha, "Here is a useful rule: Anyone who is 'not technically a prostitute' is a prostitute."

Certainly Nargis is close enough to a prostitute to be rejected by her lover's Muslim family. She dies giving birth to Sahibjaan in a graveyard where the baby is recovered by Nargis' sister, Nawabjaan (Veena), who raises her in the brothel. She allows a maid to sell off Nargis' meagre possessions among which a note the woman wrote for her lover is discovered only by the time Sahibjaan has grown into a teenager. It's delivered to her father, Shahabuddin (Ashok Kumar), who attempts to meet his daughter but is rebuffed by Nawabjaan, now in charge of the brothel.

The whole brothel flees to another town. On the train, a handsome young forest ranger played by Raaj Kumar, who has a profile like John Barrymore, stops in the sleeping Sahibjaan's cabin to warm himself by her furnace.

He falls in love with her bare feet and leaves a note between her toes telling her so but not revealing his identity. Now, this may sound really creepy to you, but this is an old fashioned fantasy romance so Sahibjaan takes this note as a treasure from her soul mate.

There is a great feeling of unselfconscious fairy tale to the story. My favourite fairy tale moment is a cobra that is shown sneaking into Sahibjaan's room at one point but is never mentioned in dialogue. It just takes up residence on top of her birdcage early in the film and then strikes a man who's trying to attack Sahibjaan later in the film. The friendship of a cobra is invaluable.

The movie ends up being a pretty effective tale of the injustice in ostracising women for having unmarried sex. The climactic musical number is surprisingly punk--not in the kind of music but in its staging and middle finger given to orthodoxy. The whole movie is available on YouTube with English subtitles here.