Leg Stars

Here's the double daddy long leg fantasy going on in the corner of my apartment to-day.

I listened to two Doctor Who audio plays this past week, from the last two months of 2002, both good--a Fifth Doctor story called The Church and the Crown and a Seventh Doctor story called Bang-Bang-a-Boom!. I liked The Church and the Crown a bit better, the second one I've heard now with the Egyptian princess companion Erimem who here easily inserts herself into the court of seventeenth century France. It's pretty funny, she sounds like an ideal agent for the Doctor until she starts wanting to execute people.

Most of the story is an ode to The Three Musketeers and Davison gets some fun Errol Flynn-ish dialogue and a bit of sword play like I would have liked to have seen more of in his television run. Certainly a sword fight in audio form lacks a key ingredient but Davison manages to bring to it the right kind of charm to paint a picture. The story also features Peri, who I guess is bound to appear in all of the ones that feature Erimem to keep with the television show continuity unless she leaves temporarily the way Tegan did. In this story, the Queen of France is revealed to be identical to Peri, allowing Nicola Bryant to use her native English accent for once and she proves to be a slightly better actress with it.

Bang-Bang-a-Boom! is another parody story from the same pair of writers who wrote The One Doctor, Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman, which I enjoyed in spite of myself, in spite of not looking for parodies in these monthly releases and in spite of the fact I hate all of Gareth Roberts' teleplays for the Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors. Maybe he's just not suited to drama because Bang-Bang-a-Boom!, set on station "Dark Space Eight" is not only a nice parody of Doctor Who but also a parody of 90s Star Trek and Eurovision. I liked how Sylvester McCoy plays the Doctor in this one more like he did in his first season--slightly more manic and silly and the writers give him the mixed up proverbs I loved so much from Time and the Rani. "Softly, softly catches the worm, eh, Mel?" "Unlike you, Mel, I won't spill my beans until I know how many of them make five."

There's a Dr. Harcourt who constantly hits on the Doctor who's somehow a perfect parody of 90s Star Trek. I loved the mention of an anomaly that made everyone on the station make out with each other until someone figured out a solution that needed to be piped through the air conditioning.

Twitter Sonnet #728

Necks shoulder length'll win the cranium.
A stemming trouble liquidates the glass.
Octagon grief bolts are titanium.
Breezes whistle throughout Insolent Pass.
Unallowed hypothetical breaks snark.
Diminished dimes don't deposit fortune.
Apricot police licked the pitted dark.
Too brave the brows befell the hat urchin.
Useless aces babied a green highway.
Hourglass orbs fell on a seven's head.
Warranted repeats ride the word freeway.
It's time for Dracula to buy a bed.
Computer telephone forks call the food.
A gut's in an abdomen kind of mood.

The Unreachable Solace

It's hard enough for human beings to empathise with one another, add to this war and three separate languages and miscommunication becomes more divisive, more destructive. Roberto Rossellini's 1946 film Paisan (Paisa) shows a variety of ways in which this fundamentally human flaw manifests in Italy towards the end of World War II. An anthology film utilising recently shelled locations and the Italian Neorealist style, the insightful argument presented by the stories is augmented by the sense of immediate reality.

Each of the six stories illustrates clashes of culture and perspective even more than language difficulties. As was frequently the practice of Neorealist filmmakers, Rossellini employed non-professional actors on occasion and this pays off rather well with a teenage girl named Carmela Sazio, playing a character also named Carmela. She's sullen, dark eyed, and inexpressive to a degree an actor would find difficult to achieve. An actor builds a career learning how to communicate to the audience without even looking like they're communicating, Carmela is a wall of teenage insecurity dealing with a group of tired and on edge American soldiers who are only slightly more willing to connect than she is.

A lack of willingness to understand turns out to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks, illustrated perhaps most dramatically in the third story where a drunken American soldier (Gar Moore) is taken to a brothel by a prostitute (Maria Michi) where instead of having sex with her he expresses disgust that there are so many women like her in Rome now and laments losing track of the innocent young woman he met the day he and his comrades liberated the city--never suspecting the young woman and the prostitute are one and the same person. Maybe the most interesting thing about this story is that it illustrates a separation between heterosexual men and women created by the man's preconceptions. That the sexually innocent woman and the sexually experienced woman cannot be the same and cannot have the same value. There's a communication barrier here that's more fundamental than anything created by war or language.

Another story involving a drunk American soldier features another remarkable performance possibly due to the actor being non-professional but also possibly due to the film being Italian--it involves an Italian orphan named Pasquale (Alfonsino Pasca) believing he can purchase the soldier, Joe (Dots Johnson), because he's black. Joe stumbles after the kid, not knowing enough Italian to know why the kid's taken his hand, into a puppet theatre where white puppets in medieval garb are fending off Moors--the drunken Joe immediately starts cheering for the Moor and climbs up on stage to beat the white puppets.

One could say that Joe's childish behaviour reflects prejudice on the part of the filmmakers but a scene that follows, where Joe and Pascale sit talking on a pile of rubble, shows Johnson give a remarkably naturalistic performance. In Hollywood films, black actors were conditioned to perform in ways that reflected prejudices regarding dialect and physical mannerisms--there's none of that in Johnson's performance. He acts like he might have come from a movie made to-day.

The film also contains a vignette in a Catholic monastery where monks are confounded by three American army chaplains who are close friends despite the fact that one's Catholic, one's Protestant, and one's Jewish. Anther story follows a British woman desperately trying to find her Italian lover who's become a resistance leader--all the film's stories show people in dire need, desperately requiring the aid of other people, paradoxically frustrated in their endeavours by human nature.

Herald the Huge Hero, Hercules the Herpetologist

Here's a very tiny spider from my wall last night. With my finger for scale:

I also had some pictures of a headless snake on my camera which I saw on the grounds of the Mormon church across the street from school yesterday but I don't have the heart to post pictures of the poor guy. It looked a lot like a rattlesnake except it didn't have a rattle. Now I see more rattlesnakes are being born without rattles possibly due to the fact that a detected snake is more likely to become a killed snake. Natural selection at work, maybe the people at the Mormon church killed the snake with no rattle out of protest.

The expert quoted in that article is Steve Reaves, not Steve Reeves, a.k.a. Hercules.

I see autocorrect prefers Reeves. Well, a reeve was an occupation in the Middle Ages, a reave is just, well, nothing. You can try to run away from your past, Reaves, but autocorrect will never believe you.

I think I got four hours sleep last night due to some plumbers that were scheduled to be here at any time between 8am and 5pm. I got up at 7am, they got here at 11am, which is when I normally wake up. Oh, well. But I suspect I ought to switch to a more classically diurnal schedule since it's going to be kind of hard to sleep in here when it's over a hundred Fahrenheit outside. So I figured I'd take the hard landing and watched a movie last night. Which I'll talk about on a day when I'm not sleep walking. Now I think I'd like to stumble around outside and glare at things in confusion like a thawed caveman.

A Cold Resonance

I just bought a bag of dried kelp, it occurred to me afterwards I could have gone to the beach and just gotten armloads of the stuff for free. Though from what I read now, getting it to an edible state does sound kind of time consuming.

It seems like I'm eating either Irish or Japanese meals lately. Last night I had boxty and watched The Quiet Man, the night before I watched Tokyo Story again in preparation for a presentation on Japanese film I was asked to give in the class I'm teaching assistant for. I guess I'd mentioned movies enough times to the instructor she figured out I have a thing for them. Tokyo Story seemed an obvious point at which to begin discussion, since it's at number one on the BFI greatest movies of all time list--the director's poll, anyway. You've probably heard Vertigo beat out Citizen Kane for the first time on the critics' poll. I wonder why the critics' poll receives so much more attention. Don't ask me to choose which of Tokyo Story and Vertigo is the better film, though I've certainly viewed Vertigo many, many more times.

Maybe it's because Tokyo Story is a much more brutal film, in my opinion, I don't watch it as often. And yet everything that happens in it is pretty mundane. It's about death, not extraordinary death. It's not Charles Foster Kane dropping his snow globe alone in his pleasure palace, as amazing as that film is. Tokyo Story is about how the dead become more and more distant from the living, sometimes even before they die. And thinking yesterday about what movies to watch for Saint Patrick's Day, I thought of John Huston's adaptation of James Joyce's "The Dead" and I started compulsively comparing "The Dead" to Tokyo Story.

Do the two stories have opposite perspectives on death or the same perspective? One could say "The Dead" is about how the memory of the deceased lingers and Tokyo Story is about how life inevitably pulls us away from any intimacy with the dead.

"The Dead" conveys its idea with a crucial subtlety, ostensibly at first being a tale completely unrelated to dead people. A happy gathering of family and friends. Just as much as real life is usually truly about the dead, which is to say, not very much at all. And that's the essentially horrific nature of it, the haunting quality of the dead in "The Dead" is largely due to an unspoken, natural attempt to connect with a subject, a person who is relevant to a conversation or a loved one's passion, but automatically and totally being blocked from that connexion. "He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live."

Ostensibly Noriko in Tokyo Story has the opposite problem. Played by Setsuko Hara, I don't think I fully appreciated her the first time I watched the movie, I was more focused on Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama. Hara seemed to be gritting her teeth through her roles in the 1950s, and I think a lot about how she said she'd always hated acting when she retired in the early 60s. But in Tokyo Story, the slight bitterness, the odd fervour, in her pleasantness makes sense. There are no villains in the story, the natural needs of life just work out to make the elderly couple's grown children pass them from one house to another when they visit Tokyo, but Noriko seems to be their angel. Noriko, who's not even biologically their daughter but the widow of their son who died in World War II. They beg her to remarry because they're worried about her but they're quietly glad she's there. But we learn, in a really amazing scene from Hara, how much she struggles with the shame of going days without even thinking of her husband.

In "The Dead", it feels like the epiphany is that, even if you're not thinking about them or if you don't even know about them, the dead may manifest at any time because of what they meant to someone you know. In Tokyo Story, it feels like so much effort is expended to make the dead matter because they inevitably slip away.

So on the surface, two opposite ideas. And yet from the fact that both stories are so keenly insightful on human nature, I'm compelled to ask myself if these aren't in fact two different versions of the same idea. There's a lot of discussion of fading to a "shade" at the end of "The Dead" and maybe the really haunting thing about the dead manifesting themselves is in the reminder of how distant they are. The young man Gretta remembers obviously had an extraordinary impact on her but what of all the people who didn't make that impact? What is all that young man's passion worth now? And who will remember him a couple generations down the line? So the two stories, I believe, ultimately strike the same place in the heart. Joyce's tale may be the gentler one for actually showing that people do fondly remember those who are dead sometimes.

When I went to bed, I found myself thinking of the corpses from the opening shot of Werner Herzog's Nosferatu and the peculiarly silent, pleading, hungry looks frozen on their faces.

Twitter Sonnet #727

Cut pickles stuck to bicycles provoked.
A tangerine kimono burns a house.
Cool olives disintegrate if invoked.
A broken branch a mountain might espouse.
Polka dot discussions veer to cellars.
The Strangelove sheep sounds simmer silently.
Propitious winds wallop wand'ring tellers.
Absolute balloons linger pliantly.
Abandoned pelt bracelets purchase the drinks.
A snake arm lazily brings forth the check.
The fog charcoal green forests drunkly sink.
A scarlet limpet pours a tiny trek.
Wakame smothers theory sweaters to-night.
Dry laver vacuums crispy Hells mid-flight.

Better Call Jimmy

Happy Saint Patrick's Day folks, I guess it would be appropriate to talk about James McGill, a.k.a. Saul Goodman, since there was a new episode of Better Call Saul last night and Saul claims on Breaking Bad to be Irish. He took the name "Saul Goodman" for the appropriately slimy reason to sound Jewish to people who assume Jews are genetically disposed to make better lawyers. A couple episodes back on Better Call Saul we saw him use the pseudonym for the first time in a flashback to where he was a much younger man, apparently before law school, where he ran a mugging scam. He told his victim that his name was like, "S'all good, man," which makes me worry they're trying to retcon the motives behind the name change to make the character seem less willing to make a cheap appeal to bigotry.

It's kind of funny the one and only thing it says in the Personal Life section of the Wikipedia entry of Bob Odenkirk, the actor who plays Saul, is "Odenkirk has stated that his wife and children are Jewish, but he is not." Calm down, folks, he plays a character who pretends to be Jewish, no rational person thinks he's Mel Gibson.

I remember first seeing Odenkirk on The Ben Stiller Show, a sketch comedy series from the early nineties which had just four stars--Stiller, Andy Dick, Janeane Garofalo, and Bob Odenkirk. I used to think it was kind of interesting that Odenkirk was the only one who didn't go on to be very well known but I guess that's no longer the case. Comedic actors, particular those known for sketch comedy, generally seem better at doing a sort of perfect mimicry of emotion than they are at conveying it like conventional actors. Some can make the transition--like Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Jim Carrey, or John Candy. More often than not, an actor simply doesn't have both muscles--like Dan Ackroyd, Martin Short, Chevy Chase, Mike Myers, Ben Stiller (and yes I have seen Permanent Midnight), and Adam Sandler. Well, Adam Sandler isn't really good at sketch comedy, either. Anyway, I would have thought Odenkirk was someone who belonged to the latter group rather than the former. Last night's episode wasn't the first time I realised he could do straight drama after all but it may have been the one that really cemented it for me.

I saw one critic remark that the show is shaping up to be about finding identity. Last week's episode, which almost entirely focused on Mike (Jonathan Banks), had one appearance by Jimmy/Saul which seemed to confirm this. Mike asks him to spill coffee on a cop in an interrogation room so Mike can lift the guy's notepad. Jimmy refuses but then does it anyway, later asking Mike how he knew he'd steal the pad. Mike just smirks wearily like someone who's so used to seeing through people he doesn't even question himself anymore.

About that episode--it was good, a nice ode to the dirty cop film noir which wouldn't be particularly remarkable as a stand alone movie but somehow is great sitting unexpectedly in the middle of Better Call Saul.

For the most part, I'm enjoying Better Call Saul quite a bit, I'm finding its quality actually more consistent than Breaking Bad. Last night's episode sees the culmination of a plot thread where Jimmy goes to great lengths to do the right thing. This is where a more conventional story might end--it is very satisfying watching Mike and Jimmy carry out their plan and delivering the high profile criminal couple, the Kettlemans, to Kim (Rhea Sheehorn), a woman Jimmy's in love with who works at a rival firm. What makes Better Call Saul interesting in a way that very much echoes Breaking Bad is the scene where Odenkirk conveys just how much doing the right thing actually satisfies Jimmy.

Clean Your Plate

I would like every movie to begin with this scene:

That's the opening to 1985's Tampopo (タンポポ), a really fun, affectionate, post-modernist ode to film and to food.

"Tampopo" is a dandelion but it's also the name of the film's central character (Nobuko Miyamoto), a young mother struggling to maintain the ramen shop left to her by her deceased husband. One rainy night, two mysterious men drop in, one of them cool, quiet, and gallant, like Clint Eastwood in a Sergio Leone movie.

It's Ken Watanabe--this is actually the first Japanese movie I've seen with Watanabe whom I'm more accustomed to seeing as The Japanese Guy in American movies. He's usually not this much fun, either. He decides to take Tampopo under his wing like an impresario and assembles a team to turn her shop into the best in town.

He finds a soup base making master among a group of hobos who sing to him like children in an old Japanese school film, Watanabe takes Tampopo to an expensive restaurant where she saves the boss from choking and in gratitude he gives her one of his best employees to make noodles for her.

Throughout the film, unrelated vignettes are presented, each offering a perspective on the human relationship with food. There's a man who goes to the dentist to have an abscess removed so he can eat ice cream, there's the frustrated manager of a market trying to catch red handed an old woman who comes in and pushes her thumbs through all the bread, cheese, and fruit. There's also a recurring thread about the gangster in the opening (Koji Yakusho) who engages in bizarre food related fetishes with his girlfriend.

The film will make you hungry but it's as much a tribute to the parts that made good, classic films as it is to the parts that make good ramen. The gangster, the heroic drifter, the genius in comfortable poverty are all presented with the slightly over the top score appropriate to all of these familiar devices of melodrama. Although it's self-consciously artificial, there's nevertheless a real feeling of reverence for these things.

Shadows and Sequels and Reincarnations

I dreamt last night the Guardians of the Galaxy movie was actually a sequel to a movie hardly anyone had heard of. It had starred Ron Perlman as a space adventurer. He wore his Hellboy makeup and horn stubs but had shoulder length, curly blonde hair, the reason being, I think, was that the studio decided no-one would see a movie starring Ron Perlman if he wasn't Hellboy so his skin was tinted red and cgi horns were added in post-production. I also dreamt that Nina Simone was reincarnated as a realtor. I was listening to one of her songs in a model home when she walked in with three prospective home owners. I asked if she minded me listening to her music, she said no but looked a little uncomfortable.

I woke up with a really sore neck. I didn't leave the apartment at all yesterday and I think I needed some more exercise so I went downtown and took some photos. Mostly of Horton Plaza, the shopping mall designed by Ray Bradbury.

Twitter Sonnet #726

Rice cracker scorpions drew lots for grain.
Long restless horse appendages relax.
A phantom mouse sloop spied the feline main.
Dry flakes of cheese are a poor income tax.
Pizza grease Golgotha avalanche falls.
Sisyphean Jesuses gestate sauce.
Satan eschews denim short overalls.
A rolling crucifix cleanses no moss.
Chartreuse Charlemagne management resigns.
A sickly rainbow flattens Dan's egg room.
Untried swimsuits rebel across the lines.
Sea chart chances sever a salty doom.
Strawberries fall below the pineapple.
A glowing foot followed the hand grapple.

Fake Angels and Fake God

It seems cruel that so far in the monthly Doctor Who audio plays I've listened to the Sixth Doctor's stories have been better written than the Seventh Doctor's stories. A good example is the contrast between the two audio plays I listened to this past week, The Rapture and The Sandman, both from 2002, a Seventh Doctor story and a Sixth Doctor story respectively.

As much as I hate to say it, the problem in the Seventh Doctor stories may be Ace. Ace is one of my favourite companions but, since the television series was cancelled in the middle of her arc, the first companion whose story was a large part of the series' focus, audio plays feel compelled to continue her arc. After the events of Colditz--so far my favourite Seventh Doctor audio play--Ace has decided she wants to be known as MacShane, her real last name, in an apparent deliberate attempt to grow up. The Doctor's not the only one who fortunately has a hard time remembering not to call her Ace. For some reason, the writers seem compelled to inject a spiritual, psychotherapy quality into Ace's story, something that came off really bad in The Shadow of the Scourge and only slightly better in The Rapture. This story concerns a pair of DJs calling themselves angels, one named Gabriel and the other Jude, which seems odd since I know Jude is actually an apostle. Anyway, as the Doctor says early on, in his experience anyone calling himself an angel usually turns out to be the opposite.

The story starts off sounding like it's going to be a high handed criticism of drug taking, club going young hedonists. It doesn't quite go that way but it's still fairly embarrassing and a lot of Ace's story has the kind of big melodramatic beats bad writers mistake for real character development, like revelations of long lost family members.

The Sandman, meanwhile, features the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn's encounter with the Galyari, a sentient reptilian race who live in endlessly travelling space crafts collectively called "the Clutch". The Doctor is the one posing as a religious figure this time, as a sort of Old Testament angry god and much to Evelyn's shock he confirms to a frightened Galyari that he wore the skins of dead Galyari and is responsible for mass murder in order to establish his dominance. The audio play becomes an intriguing meditation on the value of fear inspired by religion used in order to enforce morality.

The Sandman features actress Anneke Wills who played the First and Second Doctor's companion, Polly. She's unrecognisable here as one of the Galyari. She was pretty wooden on the television series, I have to say age has improved her acting ability a lot.

The Dangerous Embrace of Tentacles

"It's more than a ship. It's home. It's a world. A breathing thing. Nothing holds it back. The wind takes it and carries it for ten thousand miles and in those miles you're free . . . You run before the wind, you never want to stop." So Captain Ralls tells the woman he loves in 1948's Wake of the Red Witch and while it sounds lovely the film explores the kind of madness that might overtake one for such a feeling of freedom. An exciting adventure film with a satisfyingly morally grey John Wayne at the lead, this film of thwarted love and greed is captivating.

It bears a peculiar number of similarities to 1942's Reap the Wild Wind. Both take place in the first half of the nineteenth century, both star John Wayne as a ship's captain involved in a love triangle and a tangle of doubles crosses in business, and both feature some rather effective giant cephalopods, a squid in the 1942 film and an octopus in the 1948 film.

I had a hard time getting bad screenshots of Wayne fighting the beast. Each one I took seemed to come out as an interesting configuration of tentacles and struggling John Wayne.

Despite the fact that Reap the Wild Wind has a much better supporting cast and was directed by Cecil B. DeMille, Wake of the Red Witch, directed by the not particularly illustrious Edward Ludwig, is a much better film. Partly because it lacks the displays of misogyny and racism (see my review for Reap the Wild Wind) but mostly because Wake of the Red Witch is a more complex and poetic story.

The film begins on deck of the Red Witch, a ship hauling an enormous cargo of gold bullion commanded by Ralls (Wayne) who we see coolly watching one of his men being flogged as a disciplinary measure.

This shocks a new crewman named Rosen (Gig Young) but he soon comes to Ralls' side when he's offered position of first mate. Yet, for most of the film Rosen is a figure of plain, dull virtue in contrast to Ralls' willingness to break rules and ethics.

Ralls has a strange relationship with the owner of the shipping company, Sidneye (Luther Adler), who intensely hates Ralls even as the two men have a respect for each other as fellow wolves. Both, we learn through a long flashback story, were in love with Angelique (Gail Russell).

Told largely through the point of view of Rosen as he struggles to understand the world of the two enemies, we come to see a reality shaped by a desperate thirst for dominance as a key to freedom. A kind of thirst that sees no alternative between death and complete impunity. I love the fact that the ship is called Red Witch, a name that implies violence and magic and, as the title suggests, most of the film takes place after she's sunk, a nice association between lust and death.

Beans and Gods

I'm very sorry to see Terry Pratchett has died to-day although, aside from Good Omens, his collaboration with Neil Gaiman, I've only read one of his books (Hogfather) and have listened to one audio play based on another of his books (Night Watch). But from my minimal exposure to his vast output--forty-one novels in his Discworld series alone--I appreciated his fine sense of satire improbably combined with a sincere attention to character. You cared about the people in these ridiculous worlds. I can't believe he's died at only sixty-six.

I've been meaning to read more of his books for a long time, but there will always be at least a thousand books I ought to have read. I forgot to mention last week I finished reading the King James Bible, which is probably fitting to discuss to-day since religion seems to have been a frequent target of Pratchett's parodies.

The New Testament feels a bit less pragmatic then the Old Testament, which seemed more about "What does God want?" The New Testament deliberately tries to soften some of the more hardline stuff in the Old Testament, particularly in Paul's epistles where he smooths over--I suspect it would be heresy to say "contradicts"--Old Testament instructions about circumcision and generally not tolerating non-believers. Jesus especially seems much more focused on how to be a good person rather than on how to be God's person, but in the end, New Testament seems like another way of making people feel really guilty, a much subtler way. Instead of telling people they're being tortured and killed because they stupidly failed to follow God's very specific instructions, Jesus lets people kill him for no justifiable reason, showing instead of telling just how horrible people are, and hoping it'll be memorable because he's Christ.

I have to admit, I kind of agree, when I look at all the violence and carelessness in the world, people are pretty horrible. But then I remember how much of that violence and carelessness goes on in the name of religion. "All is vanity" as it famously says in the first part of Ecclesiastes which I particularly liked. But look who's talking.

The more credit you give yourself for humility, the more credit you exclusively give yourself. That's how we get Puritans. Attempting to manipulate fundamental human greed into being humble is always going to end weird. It's kind of funny after Paul spends so much time trying to get people to get along we get Revelation and all that wonderfully grotesque description of what's going to happen to unbelievers. And people unlucky enough to be related to Jezebel:

18 And unto the angel of the church in Thyatira write; These things saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and his feet are like fine brass;

19 I know thy works, and charity, and service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works; and the last to be more than the first.

20 Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.

21 And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.

22 Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.

23 And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.

24 But unto you I say, and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as have not this doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan, as they speak; I will put upon you none other burden.

As a reflection of paranoid cruelty in the human mind, the bible is a great work. Even the most peaceful and wise bits work to enhance the terror of it all. If it were all just angels with multiple heads and mass murders of children, it wouldn't be as effectively harsh. Every now and then, the abuser needs to ease up, make the victim come out of foetal position, to get in a really good kick.

But Setsuled, you may ask, what kind of sweets have you been eating? I'm glad you asked--I picked these frozen cakes up on a whim from the Japanese market a few days ago:

They were pretty good. Ingredients include "sugar, navy bean, red bean, trehalose, rice flour, powdered rice cake, maltose, corn syrup, agar-agar, colouring (FD&C red no. 3, FD&C blue no.1)." So completely non-dairy. There, now this entry has a picture.

Twitter Sonnet #725

Pink devils deposit a single hair.
Cool fibre banks are knocking on vacuum.
Incomp'rable apples deride the pear.
Satisfied Satans switched off the heirloom.
Sinister sleeves will elevate shoulder.
Intestinal tin soldiers pay the gut.
A balding pilot bought the mock boulder.
A valuable gourd resembles a butt.
Lavender chequered arms'll hug the rook.
Nowhere the whistle wishes wheat for Gods.
Cold catalogues acclaimed the rusty cook.
A pencil shaped precipitation prods.
Kidney Calliope Passover slew
The heathen blonde toupees and hair too true.

Missiles or Knives?

What if tensions between Japan and North Korea could be decided with a rumble between high school delinquent boys? 2005's Break Through! (パッチギ!) presents something close to this solution, the film imagines two high schools in 1968 Kyoto, a Japanese school and a school of North Korean emigrants. A sincere drama that nonetheless skews reality a little bit, this occasionally over the top in sentiment teenage gang film has a great deal of charm.

The film opens with the entire class of the North Korean school taking revenge on the Japanese school for one of the Japanese students spilling ink on a North Korean girl's clothes. The North Koreans retaliate by tipping over a bus full of Japanese students.

No adult authorities would apparently think of interfering in this battle. Which sets the tone of the film which depicts two worlds coexisting in one reality, a world of adults where tensions between North Koreans and the Japanese are based on very real resentments regarding the past, and a world of teenage hooligans who routinely commit acts of extreme violence to satisfy pride.

This is a Japanese movie, which makes it somewhat surprising that the tale's sympathy mostly resides with the North Korean students, particularly with their brash leader, Lee An-Son (Sosuke Takaoka). We still kind of sympathise with him even after he and his guys beat the shit out of a the Japanese school's martial arts club in a bowling alley and force them to eat marbles.

The film also follows Kosuke (Shun Shioya), an awkward, idealistic young man who wants to form a folk group in the hopes of bringing peace between the two groups after he falls for Lee An-Son's sister (Erika Sawajiri). She's so adorable, when she cries, she makes you want to find the punk responsible and make him sorry.

In the end, the film buckles a bit under some over the top emotion but a lot of it, particularly the conflicts between the violent and insecure youths, has the appeal of a 1950s Hollywood teenage misfit film like Rebel Without a Cause or The Wild One. As for how well all this speaks to feelings between the Japanese and North Korean emigrants in Japan I can't say. The film seems to side step questions of communism with the smoke screen absurdity of a Mao worshipping Japanese teacher in love with a Russian prostitute.

Some Things are Exciting to Lose

Manipulative deception has rarely been so seductive or funny as it is in 1930's Monte Carlo. An early Ernst Lubitsch talkie and one of the first movie musicals, it's a good example of the unabashed sexual innuendo distinctive of Lubitsch and his comedy that in turns relies on people being a bit simple and a bit wicked.

Countess Helene (Jeanette MacDonald) is fleeing by train with her servant, Bertha (ZaSu Pitts), from an impending marriage to a dim-witted, cold blooded Prince (Claud Allister). As Bertha says of the Prince, "He looks dumb . . . he is dumb."

Helene tells the ticket man on the train she doesn't know where she's going so she's going to Monte Carlo. There she meets Count Rudolph Falliere (Jack Buchanan) who talks her into stroking his head for luck before she hits the gambling tables.

There's a lot of suggestive head stroking in this movie, the best being when Rudolph, posing as Helene's hairdresser, offers to cure her headache. This is after she's asked him to leave so when he starts massaging her temples she begins by saying, "No, stop doing that. No, no, no . . ." before dissolving into ecstatic groans and flustered laughter, telling him how good it feels. Then the scene cuts to Bertha listening in at the door.

The movie is considered Pre-Code despite the fact that the Hays Code was already in existence--it just wasn't really enforced until 1934. But this was a pretty sly work around, I thought, that depends much on the filmmaker knowing audience psychology. First of all, we have no idea how long Bertha has been listening at the door, and then we have to use our imagination to realise what she probably would have thought if she'd been listening the whole time. And yet, of course, it's all plain as day.

Rudolph's aggressive and duplicitous tactics to win Helene would be off-putting if the misunderstandings and plot turns weren't so clever. Still, it's nice when he lets Helene make up her own mind, even if he does manipulate circumstances to put the choices before her.

Most of the singing is a little awkward despite both MacDonald and Buchanan being trained singers. It seems like their vocals were recorded live instead of what would soon become the regular Hollywood practice of dubbing the actors over with smoother, studio recorded vocals. Otherwise, the dialogue comes off as remarkably naturalistic for the time.