Saturday's new Panty and Stocking was the best of the new series so far. It starts with a parody of Donald Trump, follows it up with Panty using a ghost kitten as a vibrator, and concludes with a satisfyingly surreal homage to Hanna-Barbera superhero cartoons and possibly Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
The term "space ghost", in English, is used multiple times. An alien menace comes to earth and transforms people into various vaguely Marvel-ish characters in the old Hanna-Barbera style. Stocking gets turned into the Thing from Fantastic Four though for some reason Panty becomes a Dragon Ball character. It could be the idea was for the story to be a parody of '80s animation, both American and Japanese.
The Donald Trump parody shrewdly distanced itself from too many distinguishing features but it's not hard to see what they were on about with the blonde man who brags constantly about how he will govern with "business". Of course, he turns out to be a ghost which Stocking must eliminate (which is why they clearly tried to distance the parody from too much resembling Trump).
The second segment was really cute despite having possibly the most explicit moment in the whole series, showing Panty asleep wearing only her namesake garment with an active vibrator on her crotch. This is, unbeknownst to her, swapped out for the purring ghost kitten. She takes a liking to the critter in spite of herself. It was impressively twisted.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.
I've been kind of fascinated by the controversy around the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle jeans ads. At first I was annoyed that liberals were wasting their time over something so stupid when the Trump administration is doing shit that actually affects people's lives. Then I started wondering if it was outrage entirely manufactured by the Right to distract from Trump's Epstein scandal, which seems to be the point of view taken by The Daily Show. But the Daily Show bit only shows looney right-wingers complaining about left-wingers, refraining from showing some of the actual left-wing reaction, like this from The New Yorker:
What, exactly, is Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle campaign selling? “The package is all over the place, a mishmash of tone and intent,” Doreen St. Félix writes. It presents Americana as a zombie slop of mustangs, denim, and good genes. All the clips depict her as supplicant, including the one that you’ve likely already seen: the camera panning over Sweeney’s supine body, as she zips up her pants, cooing, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My genes are blue.” And then the tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”. . . The allusion is incoherent, unless, of course, we root around for other meanings, and we don’t have to search for long: genes, referring to Sweeney’s famously large breasts; genes, referring to her whiteness. The actress has been embraced by a legion of fans who rejoice “in a perceived return to a bygone beauty standard in the wake of all that overzealous feminism they blame on the left,” as Lauren Michele Jackson wrote. But the fawning from conservatives—everyone from Megyn Kelly to J. D. Vance—is reactive, precipitated by the outrage, but dissipated, fairly quickly, into a bored fatigue.
So is the allusion incoherent or an obvious dog whistle? According to a writer at The Guardian quoting a writer from The Atlantic (there's a sewing circle for you):
“The slogan ‘Sydney Sweeney has good jeans’ obviously winks at the obsession with eugenics that’s so prevalent among the modern right.” Dr Sarah Cefai, a senior lecturer in gender and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, agrees. “Honestly, what were they thinking, that a white supremacist fantasy has permission to be aired so conspicuously?”
So I'm afraid the Right isn't just imagining things. Is it possible this is a deeper psy-op? If a "senior lecturer" is dumb enough to see white supremacy in this jeans ad, perhaps she's also dumb enough to be manipulated into the position by bad actors. That's the kind of conspiracy theory that really demonstrates how comforting conspiracy theories can be.
The Guardian article also quotes from an associate professor of gender and women's studies named Aria Halliday who says, "that while 'Black girls are rarely the target audience for ads,' some may still be curious to try the jeans: 'the desire to be perceived as beautiful is hard to ignore,' she says."
Maybe she didn't see this ad:
The ad has less views and has certainly generated less conversation than the Sydney Sweeney ad. Is that American Eagle's fault?
The topic fascinates me because I'm a liberal who loves beauty but those are two things that have had a troubled history. How can you say all people are created equal and say some people have genetic advantages? It's a complex question that hardliners typically try to bulldoze over. You can say beauty is entirely relative but humanity continually gravitates towards symmetry and large eyes. Not always large breasts which were not popular in the 1920s and medieval Europe. But being born in this time and place certainly confers an advantage to Sweeney. And quibbling over details like this, no-one seriously believes there was ever a time when someone would say Marie Dressler was prettier than Mabel Normand (how's that for a timely reference).
However, beauty often defies beauty standards. As Leo Tolstoy put in War and Peace:
Her pretty little upper lip, on which a delicate dark down was just perceptible, was too short for her teeth, but it lifted all the more sweetly, and was especially charming when she occasionally drew it down to meet the lower lip. As is always the case with a thoroughly attractive woman, her defect—the shortness of her upper lip and her half-open mouth—seemed to be her own special and peculiar form of beauty.
There's something mysterious about beauty. All of our algorithms and equations for it often go right out the window. There's this dialogue from Love in the Afternoon:
Gary Cooper: Everything about you is perfect.
Audrey Hepburn: I'm too thin! And my ears stick out, and my teeth are crooked and my neck's much too long.
Gary Cooper: Maybe so, but I love the way it all hangs together
Few would deny Audrey Hepburn was an extraordinary beauty but she's right. According to the rules, she shouldn't be exceptionally beautiful. It's not fair, is it?
One recalls the tendency of Communist countries to put everyone in identical uniforms, to reduce the advantage of beauty as much as possible, except when it's used in propaganda. It's frequently seen as a bedfellow of capitalism, creating industries of beauty products exploiting the desire to be beautiful. But life is more complicated than that and, as history has certainly shown, depriving people of beauty and opportunity doesn't kill their desire for such things.
In her song "32 Flavours" from her album Not a Pretty Girl, Ani DiFranco reminds us,
God help you if you are an ugly girl
'Cause too pretty is also your doom
'Cause everyone harbours a secret hatred
For the prettiest girl in the room
The American Eagle ad is certainly insipid, as commercials typically are, but the effect of beauty is real, however much anyone may want to deny it. I've always preferred to celebrate it. As Oscar Wilde put it:
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
It seems like a simple idea but it takes maturity to allow the existence of beauty without attempting to exploit it, either as symbol of one's superiority or another's tyranny. As Wilde says, it takes "cultivation", and that's sadly lacking in higher education these days.
How's your climate change life going? You may have heard Wednesday was the hottest day in Japan's history, or since records started being kept, anyway. It was 35 Celsius here or 95 Fahrenheit. Did I stay home under the air conditioner like a sensible human being? No, I walked to work for over an hour under that clear, blinding sky and felt oddly at home. Sure, back in my hometown of San Diego, it was not unusual to see the temperature get up to 111 Fahrenheit but the humidity is much stronger in Japan which can feel stifling. Maybe the humidity melted on Wednesday because I found it a lot more comfortable than usual.
I was due at an elementary school. English events are being held at various schools in town and I've been going to different schools every day. No students ended up coming to that event (possibly due to it being the hottest day in recorded history). At around 11am, I left to go to my shift at a junior high school in the afternoon. I stopped by the river and ate some potato wraps I'd made in the morning and listened to Elvis Presley on my iPod and felt really good. Maybe I was delirious.
I say potato wrap but I've been thinking of them of potato burritos. I make mashed potatoes with salt, pepper, cumin, garlic, and habanero powder and wrap them in my homemade wheat flour tortillas. They're pretty good if I do say so myself. Yesterday I added some lime to them and they were even better. I don't use milk for the mashed potatoes, just a little water and canola oil.
Rockabilly seems to suit walking in this weather particularly well. I've been listening to Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis a lot.
X Sonnet 1954
The frozen boiling point was marbled meat.
She tried to step beyond the rocket pad.
The eager smoke was curling round her feet.
The party coloured warnings drove her mad.
Descending paper pierced the humid clouds.
A thousand cuts of colour stormed the launch.
She climbed aloft on gleaming silver shrouds.
She doffed her top, the leaking fuel to staunch.
A press of roaches clogged the vessel's way.
But acid tides conduct a worthy ship.
And so the captain's laser held its sway.
The hopeless quest advanced a healthy clip.
At dusk she found the stash of hearty rum.
A mission fades when other sport would come.
Noir-ish misfortune finds folks in Argentina in 1952's Don't Ever Open That Door (No abras nunca esa puerta). It's really two short films with beautiful, expressionistic, black and white photography. The two stories, based on prose works by American author Cornell Woolrich, feel very much like Tales from the Crypt, both featuring characters in strange and desperate circumstances that end with a cruel twist.
In the first story, "Anguish", a wealthy man's sister is beset by gambling debts and becomes suicidal. The man decides to take vengeance on the people aggressively demanding restitution from her.
In the second story, "Pain", an elderly blind woman living with her niece receives a visit from her long lost son who's become a murderous bank robber.
The stories both revolve around the dichotomy of fate and free will that distinguishes film noir. Both stories feature characters who try to take control of a dangerous situation only for their efforts to have horrible, twisted results, leaving the viewer with the question of how much the capricious hand of fate is to blame or how much is due to the characters' audacity in trying to assert their own wills. It's good.
I've been watching Twin Peaks yet again, though it's my first watch through since David Lynch died, which certainly casts a pall over it. But I was watching an episode not directed or written by Lynch last night, episode 7 of the first season, written by Harley Payton. I always think of this one as the Best of Audrey and the Worst of Audrey. It begins with her naked in Cooper's bed, which I've always thought was ended in an unfortunate but almost inevitable way with Cooper standing on his principles as an FBI agent who will not sleep with a teenage girl. The scene kills the wonderfully weird energy between the two that made their dialogue so interesting in the previous episodes and they never really get it back.
I did notice something new, though. Cooper says to her, "What I want and what I need are two different things." I remembered Mr. C in season three once remarks, "I don't need anything. I want." This implies he would have handled the situation with Audrey in the opposite way in which Cooper did and foreshadows what is eventually revealed about what he did do to Audrey.
I lament the scene for killing the weird energy between the two but, in real life, a girl like Audrey really wouldn't be in the right place psychologically to give away her virginity and Cooper is right to say that what she needs is a friend to listen to her. So he goes and gets some food and it's implied the two talk for hours as she unburdens herself. I've always wondered what they talked about. In the previous episode and later in this one, she was trying and failing to tell Cooper about the clue at the perfume counter at Horne's department store. Evidently she didn't disclose this in their heart to heart but, if not, what did they talk about? Audrey's relationship with her father? Some girl at school? What?
It's a bit sloppy but the previous episode's cliffhanger left this one with little choice. Audrey turning up in Cooper's bed was simply too far too soon for both characters.
Otherwise, the episode does a terrific job establishing character. I love Audrey's cleverness when she hides in Battis' closet and steals the unicorn. But she's not perfect; Blackie sees right through her false identity, recognising her assumed name from The Scarlet Letter, which says something about Blackie, too.
It's the middle of summer. Time to leave your job and family and live on a stolen boat with a dangerous girl, as in Ingmar Bergman's 1953 breakout movie, Summer with Monika. I watched it again a couple nights ago but wasn't sure there was anything I could add to my old blog entry about the film except, searching to-day, I can't find my old blog entry, perhaps meaning I never wrote about this film. I guess I'd better.
It gained fame and infamy in the U.S. for its use of nudity--a brief scene of actress Harriet Anderson cavorting on the beach. Her character, Monika, and her sensuality are certainly the film's central problem. She's the one who inspires her boyfriend, Harry (Lars Ekborg), to reject society and follow their mutual teenage instincts. They live free for a while in that little boat, stopping just to eat, sleep, have sex, dance, or lounge around. They live like there's no to-morrow.
Another young man spots them at one point. Jealous of the two, he tries to set fire to their boat when they're distracted, leading to a fight between the boys. It feels very primal and Monika passionately kissing Harry when it's over feels like a crude portrait of a family dynamic. Do they really need all that civilisation?
Well, yes, of course, the film doesn't refrain from becoming a wet blanket. They come home to reality and the inevitable financial needs that come with their new baby, home, and place in society. Monika seems to lose her mind. There's a moment where the viewer feels compelled to contemplate just what is going on her mind, what makes her act the way she does. Bergman chooses the right moment for a contemplative close-up of her that seems to dissolve out of reality to focus entirely on her soul. And her eyes seem cold and dead. She's like a hunter who'd rather keep killing than settle down and cook the meat.
Like the films he'd made before it, Summer with Monika is more conventional than the movies he's best known for in which the heart of the material is in the dialogue, in how the characters interpret themselves and their lives. Summer of Monika is more about showing a sociological experiment of sorts. Its statement isn't exactly profound but Harriet Anderson's performance and Bergman's compositions make the film extraordinary.
Summer with Monika is available on The Criterion Channel.
Another episode of Panty and Stocking premiered over the weekend, this one containing three shorts. I enjoyed them mostly because I continue to like the characters but most of its parodies amounted to little more than collections of references. The first season was kind of like that, too, though I remember their Transformers parody being one of the best episodes. That was because they actually went somewhere with the concept instead of just showing Transformers drawn in the show's style.
This new episode features references to The Mandalorian, Pitch Perfect, and The Fast and the Furious. Of those, I'm pretty sure The Fast and the Furious is the only one well known in Japan, where the series goes by the title Wild Speed. The Mandalorian parody features Stocking and one of the demon sisters, Scanty, enrolling in a samurai dojo which seems mainly designed for weebs (foreigners who are obsessed with Japanese culture), a group the show seems to enjoy mocking this season. I thought this was the funniest line from the short, in which the "samurai sensei" tells his students that catching a fly with chopsticks is a sure sign of samurai skill.
The guy's dog ends up being Grogu/Baby Yoda. Again, it's all just there, it doesn't seem to be making a comment about The Mandalorian or Star Wars.
The Pitch Perfect parody, called "Bitch Perfect", was my favourite of the three. Panty and Stocking and the demon sisters compete over how many likes they can get from narcissistic posts to an app reminiscent of TikTok or Instagram. The app ends up being a ghost, which I really liked.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.
A beautiful but clumsy young witch seeks a human ear to stay in the human realm in 1972's The Girl on the Broomstick (Dívka na koštěti). Petra Černocká stars as Saxana, the title character, in this amusing and occasionally surreal teen comedy.
A man catches an owl and brings it home in a sack. His son, Honza (Jan Hrušínský), opens the bag and is startled not to find an owl but a beautiful, busty teenage girl. She begs not to be put in a cage.
This is a movie for kids but there are plenty of hints at adult humour. Occasionally, it almost seems to have great artistic ambition, as when Honza's head comes off in one scene and his headless body takes a plaster sculpture of Napoleon's head and places it on his shoulders. He paints it before going outside, as if that would help.
Saxana spends most of her time with three delinquent boys who con her into turning the school faculty into rabbits. There's a lot of transformation humour in this one.
The Girl on the Broomstick is available on The Criterion Channel.
How long has humanity been contemplating the dangers of AI? A couple days ago I was reading John Stuart Mill and I was surprised to come across this bit from his famous essay "On Liberty":
Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery—by automatons in human form—it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilised parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce.
And that was in 1859.
Mill was using the idea to illustrate how bleak it would be to have a world in which humans didn't carve out their own fortunes. "It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself," he says. To Mill, it's incumbent on any human being to make of themselves the best example of a human being they can (he uses "man" and "men" and male pronouns to refer to humanity generally, as was the custom up until seventy or so years ago, but Mill was a noted feminist).
I like this bit:
Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
I used to tell students to not look at life as a train track with just a series of predetermined destinations from which any deviation is a derailment. Instead, life ought to be seen as a large forest in which one can find different paths and opportunities in all directions. Obviously, Japan is well known as a country in which people follow prescribed life paths but somewhere in the philosophy behind the Japanese work ethic someone knew that's not enough. This is why the Japanese love sports so much and why so much care and attention is given to Japanese cuisine. The Japanese are masters of creature comforts. They have the most comfortable toilets in the world, the most efficient and friendly service staff.
Obviously, this isn't what John Stuart Mill had in mind. His idea of hard work for the purpose of self creation rather than for merely fitting in harmoniously with society is a fundamentally western idea and we can see it in both the best and the worst of what the west has produced. Yet many people in Japan are very concerned about AI.
Self-expression is important to me, not just my own but everyone's. I guess that's no surprise given that I'm an artist. I'm always excited by, and I do my best to encourage, students when they express themselves, artistically or otherwise, even on occasions when such expression is meant to insult me. It's these things, these trees "to grow and develop on all sides", that make up the forest of human existence.
But is there objective value in human accomplishment? Can we let machines do everything while we lounge poolside? I could speak to the compulsion for self-definition, to be noticed, to carve out an identity in society. But what if we chemically satisfied that compulsion? What if we had a combination of drugs and virtual reality aimed at satisfying that emotional need? Soma, essentially. Maybe it's time to read Brave New World again.
Suppose machines get to the point where they wonder about the worth of their own expression and accomplishment. Maybe I need to watch Blade Runner again. If we got to that point, when the AI is "more human than human", it could be simply a matter of one humanity abdicating for another. Perhaps current humanity is just the dying body cells to be replaced by others in a continually progressing organism.
I continue to be amazed how quickly quality improved on The X-Files in its first season. I recently watched "Beyond the Sea" from January 7, 1994 which featured a couple notable guest appearances. It was Don Davis' first appearance as Scully's father and he's essentially reprising the Major Briggs role he played on Twin Peaks. How bitter Mark Frost must have been that he couldn't use Davis in Twin Peaks: The Return, that X-Files got all his good years.
I almost typed "Mark Snow" who's the composer for The X-Files. Frost is the Twin Peaks co-creator and Snow is the X-Files composer. Frost and Snow. They're just names, they don't mean there's a big conspiracy. Right?
"Beyond the Sea" features another David Lynch alum, Brad Dourif, who gives a showstopping performance as a medium on death row who gets to Scully. Dourif is a fascinating actor with a lot of great roles under his belt but it seems like he chose this episode of The X-Files to really go all out.
I like his subtle choice to switch accents.
Dourif retired from acting last year except he says he'll continue to provide the voice of Chucky from the Child's Play horror franchise.
The X-Files is available on Disney+
X Sonnet 1953
Contentious stuff contents the content mad.
Abrasive braces break the humble back.
Corruption courts in August's clearance ad.
Remain remorseless rats: effect attack.
No tameless tapered terror pierced the trees.
A needless needle never notched the bed.
The offered gift concealed a bag of fees.
Commercials come to ape the evil dead.
Recessive records reckon vinyl wounds.
A sonic sortie slams the tender drum.
Bombastic bastards lay the founder's boons.
A multitude of muscles scan the sum.
Rehearsing hassles harry out the lie.
Amorphous marbles melt the monster's eye.
Someone ought to come up with a name for the genre in which a young gay protagonist has to deal with various dramas in their extended Chinese-American family because there seems to be an awful lot of these. Last night I watched 2004's Saving Face which, like The Wedding Banquet before it and Everything Everywhere All at Once after it, features a young Chinese homosexual who must deal with a conservative parent and other family members living in America during a time of crisis. So far, I would say Saving Face is the most generic of the genre but it's not exactly bad.
Michelle Krusiec plays Wilhelmina Pang, a surgeon and a lesbian whose mother, Hwei-Lan, played by Joan Chen, comes to live with her. Around the same time, Wilhelmina falls for a beautiful ballerina named Vivian (Lynn Chen, no relation to Joan).
I fear this is one of those movies so caught up in proving gay people and Chinese-Americans are normal that it forgets to make them interesting. The romance between Wilhelmina and Vivian is particularly disappointing. The actresses have decent chemistry but they're written like a daytime sitcom in which Wilhelmina is the clumsy normal guy and Vivian is the self-assured, obvious epitome of all desirous feminine qualities and she calmly knows it. So her mild smirk at Wilhelmina across the room isn't meant to be creepy but an unexpected ray of light from heaven.
The movie labours under the assumption that we all want Wilhelmina and Vivian to live happily ever after but Vivian's kind of a terrible girlfriend. Wilhelmina is a surgeon and although she promises Vivian she will come to her birthday party she ends up having to do multiple emergency surgeries and comes to Vivian's apartment only after it's all over. Despite the fact that Wilhelmina had managed to send Vivian an expensive bouquet of red roses, Vivian is still sulky and hints that she may never want to see Wilhelmina again. At which point, I would have advised Wilhelmina to seek other fish in the sea. But Wilhelmina gratefully accepts when Vivian reluctantly invites her in.
Director Alice Wu doesn't seem aware of the co-dependent relationship she portrays between the two in which Vivian can do no wrong and every problem is due to Wilhelmina's clumsiness and inadequacies.
Meanwhile, Wilhelmina's mother is pregnant. Gossip quickly spreads around the Chinese community in New York and the elder woman in mortified but stalwart. Joan Chen doesn't show any reluctance playing a nagging matriarch after years of playing enigmatic young beauties. At least she's not trapped in a drawer pull.
Saving Face is available on The Criterion Channel until the end of the month.
1998's Wild Things is on two Criterion playlists this month and then it'll be leaving the streamer at the end of the month. These factors felt like mild pressure to watch the film. I couldn't quite remember if I'd seen it or not. I knew Matt Dillon and Denise Richards were in it. I had a vague memory of Bill Murray being in the film and I thought, "If Bill Murray's in the film, I've seen it. If he's not, then I'm thinking of another movie." I looked at the cast list and didn't see Bill Murray so I started watching the movie. Then, at the end of the cast credits was "and Bill Murray." He sneaked in. I had seen it, probably all the way back in the VHS rental days. So at least this was probably my first time seeing it in widescreen.
Few movies are so twisted, by which I mean, it has a lot of plot twists. Characters who are set up as having one kind of personality and set of motives are revealed to have a different, more sinister set of motives and completely different personalities. It all boils down to a pretty cynical idea; you can't trust your impressions of anyone, everyone is ready to rob, cheat, and kill.
It has a reputation as an erotic thriller but there's only a couple sex scenes and a few shots of nudity. I think the label comes from the fact that Neve Campbell and Denise Richards kiss twice and Kevin Bacon has a very brief full frontal nudity scene. But mostly this is a movie in which people scheme and conspire and nurse grudges. Murray plays a cocksure lawyer and he's pretty amusing. The film's clever and decadent but not really insightful or fulfilling. The film manipulates you into thinking one way about the characters before revealing something different and, fair enough, manipulative people exist in real life who manufacture virtuous facades. But it is possible to see through them in life. A better movie than Wild Things might have given the viewer some indications of the characters' true natures. It all feels a bit arbitrary as it is. As Roger Ebert quipped in his review, the film is still explaining itself in the closing credits which are interspersed with new scenes to make it seem more natural that certain characters turned out to be scoundrels. One character is shown to be sailor in order to explain how she new how to pilot a yacht in a crucial scene though, if you come to think about it, it makes very little sense for this particular character to be an avid sailor.
Wild Things is available on The Criterion Channel.
Several years ago, before I moved to Japan, I was in the mood to watch 1952's Singin' in the Rain. So I put in my DVD and started watching, getting about a third of the way through before my DVD crapped out on me. I'd been enjoying it so much for its tight, lively pace that I decided I shouldn't watch the movie again until I could confidently watch through the whole thing without interruption. A couple years ago, here in Japan, I found a blu-ray copy of the movie with Japanese subtitles. I figured I could use the signature song to teach present continuous verbs, which I eventually ended up doing. Not only does he say, "I'm singing in the rain," he actually sings in the rain while saying it, making it a good demonstration of the grammar.
I didn't watch the movie right away after I bought the blu-ray, I saved it for a night I could give it my undivided attention. At last, I settled down, turned the lights off, put it in my blu-ray player, and started watching. Once again, I was really invested in the pacing and enjoying myself and once again it crapped out about a third of the way through. Somehow, this blu-ray I bought in Japan stopped working at almost the same point as the DVD I bought in America, around the "Moses Supposes" song. Fortunately, the problem turned out to be the blu-ray player and not the blu-ray so I waited a few years again and last night I finally got my uninterrupted viewing of Singin' in the Rain.
What a well paced film.
It's directed by Stanley Donan and Gene Kelly but, while I enjoy many of their subsequent works, none of them have the graceful flow of Singin' in the Rain. It's not ashamed of being quick and smart. The visual gag at the beginning at the red carpet movie premiere of beautiful actresses accompanied by dour old millionaires goes by lightning fast, the movie unconcerned with whether or not the viewer gets the joke. And truly, it doesn't break the movie if you don't, so different viewers can have different valuable experiences with the film.
Every scene flows seamlessly into the next, there's scarcely any sense of time passing, a quality exemplified by the "Good Morning" sequence which depicts the characters themselves getting so caught up in the flow that they don't notice a whole night has passed.
Yet the whole sequence is practically a non-sequitur. There's a sweet spot a good musical has to hit with its numbers, somewhere between pertinent and totally irrelevant. The song has to communicate something that couldn't be communicated with dialogue. In this case, it develops the chemistry between the three leads and their comfort working together, revelling in what a marvellous thing good fellowship is. There's no way to communicate that in quite the same way as the song, and it's key that it's not directly related to the film's plot. It fleshes out the world just a bit.
The cast is crucial, too. A fast pace calls for fast performers and all three were quick and clear as crystal. Donald O'Connor attacks the screen with comedy blitz.
Singin' in the Rain remains the epitome of musical brilliance.
I was just a few days ago wondering where all the really interesting anime is. The early 2000s had such a bounty of experimental series and movies, including Shinbo Akiyuki's work at Shaft and multiple series from legendary anime studio Gainax. Then, looking on Amazon Prime, I was surprised to see one of the last good Gainax series, Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, had returned with two brand new episodes already streaming on Prime. Both episodes are good and seamlessly continue in the humour and style of the series that concluded fifteen years ago. God, has it been that long?
Panty and Stocking was a Gainax series but Gainax filed for bankruptcy last year, long after most of the talent that had built the studio's reputation had departed. Many went to Anno Hideaki's new Studio Khara, which produced the new Evangelion movies. The director of Panty and Stocking, Imaishi Hiroyuki, formed a new studio called Trigger which saw almost immediate success with Kill la Kill. Trigger acquired the rights to Panty and Stocking so once again Imaishi's back at the helm, explaining the consistency in tone and style.
Since Top wo Nerae in the '80s, much of the more interesting works from Gainax, including Evangelion, have at least in part been commentaries on and analyses of sexuality in Japan, particularly of common sexual neuroses. From Evangelion, which routinely included direct promises of "fan service", works from the Gainax crew sought to present sexuality as something that isn't shameful to indulge in. One of the most striking aspects that can be seen in Evangelion, FLCL, Gurren Lagann, and Panty and Stocking among others is the portrayal of female libido. Anime almost universally portrays shy virgins and maternal figures as the only positive roles for girls and women. Panty and Stocking, meanwhile, is a gross-out comedy centred on two nymphomaniac angels.
The first of the two new episodes finds the supporting characters of Garterbelt and Brief trying to reassemble Panty, who was cut up into cubes by Stocking, who was possessed by a demon in the cliffhanger fifteen years ago. Once they put Panty back together, they find her personality has changed into the typical blushing virgin of the average anime. It's only after they turn her into a giant and see up her dress that they realise that one crucial cube is missing: her vagina. All of this business seems to be built around the often senseless policies of Japanese censorship, which normally prohibits the portrayal of genitalia. Panty's crucial cube is just a pink brick with one vertical line. The implicit joke comes from wondering at what point this thing ought to be censored.
As with the original series, Panty and Stocking has an art style and fast paced gross-out humour fans of Invader Zim will be familiar with (Invader Zim creator Jhonen Vasquez even commented on it). Shows with that kind of pacing and humour, such as Hazbin Hotel and The Amazing Digital Circus, have been gaining popularity in Japan. Maybe Panty and Stocking will find a new audience.
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is available on Amazon Prime.
For those wondering if the kind of rightwing populism that produced President Trump in the US is alive in Japan, election results for Japan's upper house on Sunday show that it is, in the form of the Sanseito party. The party's leader, Kamiya Sohei, claims to have been inspired by Trump and Kamiya's anti-immigrant, anti-globalist rhetoric bears this out.
Like Trump, though, he seems in some ways to be what he's campaigning against: a child of wealth and privilege. In Japan, it's generally seen as a bad sign for someone to be employed in a variety of different fields throughout their lives. Kamiya majored in math and science in high school, got a humanities degree in college, and then taught English in high school before taking a job as a supermarket manager in one of the stores owned by his parents. That looks like an unambiguously downward path for a rich kid. Few supermarket managers could've done what he did next, which was to then spend four years in law school, obtaining a Juris Doctor degree. Despite his experience as an English teacher, he apparently cannot speak English, judging from interviews with foreign press I've seen with him.
Ironically, given that the loss of seats for Prime Minister Ishiba's Liberal Democrat Party were likely due in part to criticism over his handling of tariff negotiations with Trump, the rise of nationalist far right parties in Japan would likely push Trump into taking an even harder line on tariffs, or make him feel more confident in what he plans to do regardless, considering how he attempted to use rice imports as a wedge issue. If he can portray Japan's national pride over its signature crop as an affront to the spirit of fair trade, he can certainly cite caps on foreign residents as another justification for tariffs, among other policies of Kamiya's party.
But maybe Trump will be deposed before the August 1st tariff deadline. I mean, I doubt it, but he certainly seems to be in hot water over the Epstein thing. This is the thing that has finally nudged so many MAGA supporters into noticing what Trump has so obviously been all along: a tacky, greedy landlord who only looks out for himself.
In America, in Japan, throughout the world, I do feel this plague of ignorant populism is caused by a long, inexorable devaluation of art. Yes, you may as well blame a decline in critical thinking but where do we hone our skills in critical thinking if not in contemplating works of art, either visual, auditory, or printed? You can analyse the news cycle which won't produce much variety from day to day or you can be exposed to the length and breadth of human experience you find in a literature course. I listened to an interview yesterday about the death of English literature in which one of the interviewers actually said he didn't see the justification in offering something as an academic field that should rightly be called entertainment. While students of literature may find the matter entertaining or otherwise pleasurable at times, generally speaking, the student does not choose the texts, which means a literature course exposes students to, and compels them to contemplate, perspectives they might never otherwise have sought for pure entertainment value. These perspectives may not only come from perspectives different to their own but, crucially, from authors of greater experience and insight whose works might instruct the student in ways of using their own critical faculties.
As for entertainment value--let's not sell it short. There may be people who go through their lives feeding at the trough of reality TV or shallow blockbusters never knowing that art can touch them on a more personal level, can produce a transcendent experience that makes their pitiless workweek more bearable. Isn't it incumbent on us to pass on the knowledge of how the next generations can enrich their short lives?
A hard-boiled man about town meets a sultry beauty in a white dress at a bar. No, it's not Body Heat, it's 1994's China Moon starring Ed Harris, Madeleine Stowe, and Benicio Del Toro. It's an engaging enough exercise in the genre until the final act just kind of fizzles out.
Harris and Del Toro play cops, Kyle and Lamar, respectively. Kyle's the elder of the two and is showing the ropes to young Lamar. After Kyle has his fateful meeting with Rachel (Stowe), the sultry dame, he and Lamar find themselves at her home after responding to her emergency calls. It turns out her husband, played by Charles Dance with a ridiculous American accent, physically abuses her. One thing leads to another, and Kyle and Madeleine start talking about murder, just like the leads in Body Heat and Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice and Osessione . . .
China Moon comes up with it's own twist which, without giving it away, amounts to saying maybe things aren't as exciting as you think. Madeleine Stowe and Ed Harris, in any case, may have been miscast or misdirected. They're both solid, all the time. There's not enough heat and anxiety. They generally seem very calm, particularly Harris. Which is kind of interesting. I guess he was playing a guy too experienced to break easily under questioning but there needed to be something ramping up tension in his scenes.
The cinematography is certainly no help. The movie has a lot of outdoor night scenes and no matter where the characters are, whether in a quarry, the middle of a lake, or the woods, everything is lit by floodlights. At the end of the movie, I finally felt like the screenplay was just starting to get to a point and then the movie ended. So I guess that's it then.
I finished listening to the unabridged audiobook of Lord of the Rings yesterday, which I'd been listening to on my iPod when I walked to and from work. It's the 1990 recording in which British actor Rob Inglis reads the text. He took some warming up to but mostly I think he's terrific. He sounds near enough to JRR Tolkien himself that, when I started listening before I knew who it was, I wondered if he was Christopher Tolkien.
Inglis does a surprisingly good job coming up with melodies for some of Tolkien's songs, too.
He's also good at coming up with different voices to distinguish among characters. His voices for the orcs were so much like those in the Peter Jackson movies I wondered if he was an influence.
I don't have any new insight into Lord of the Rings I want to share except to say it is a perfect book to listen to on long, compulsory journeys on foot.
Here's a poem of my own:
X Sonnet 1952
Horizon dots resolve to penguin ranks.
How strange to be bereft in snowy parts.
The ducks could muster guns and icy tanks.
But souls of land must hide their thoughtful hearts.
Away, advised the Beatle, love must hide.
Amidst the freezing space, remain detached.
For every sign and post behind you lied.
And no bernard with brandy's yet dispatched.
And yet a hope arises swift from Thor.
For lightning gods would not abandon clouds.
So waiting eyes would watch the busy shore.
And pierce the falsely lost and milling crowd.
So hold the line and sharpen shining spear.
An angel now is holding Satan's beer.
The series momentum seems to slow and almost stop completely in season four of Ally McBeal. The Robert Downey Jr. character has so little going on that it makes the whole show feel inert. It makes me notice some problems that really had been cropping up even early.
I read a criticism that Ally herself isn't shown to be a competent lawyer. I didn't understand that criticism in the first couple seasons but I see it now. Since some time in the middle of the third season it's rare to see any character other than John, Mark, and now Larry (Robert Downey Jr.'s character) actually try a case. Not just Ally but all the female characters are always in support positions.
I have slightly more complicated feelings about the show's increased focus on LGBTQ characters and issues. It's a bit off-putting when Ally rejects a guy entirely because he's bisexual but she does acknowledge it is her own irrational bias. It's work remembering this show was made twenty-five years ago. Of course I've seen people call for certain episodes to be removed from Disney+ but I'd say these are useful reminders of just how much society has changed in the last twenty-five years. Progressives have a tendency to pretend the right sort of people never at any point in history ever had the wrong sort of opinion. It's ironic for those called "progressive" not to what to mark progress or make an effort to understand it through observation.
Season four has a trans character named Cindy, a trans woman played by cisgender actress Lisa Edelstein. I can see arguments for both sides of the issue of whether cis actors should play trans characters. It may help the viewer see the trans character in a way that agrees with that character's self-perception. But I tend to feel any useful narrative on the trans experience would include the anxiety the trans person may feel at being able to "pass".
There is something ironic about "trans-visibility" in that many trans people for a long time wished not to be seen as trans but as simply men and women. The trans people who tend to show up in supporting roles on Disney and Netflix shows now seem like they might be more accurately called "gender fluid" and many do self-describe that way.
Mark, like Larry, often seem like a pointless character. I really had no idea why he was introduced except maybe to fill Billy's role in scripts that had already been written. His relationship with Cindy is the first time he seemed to serve any particular function.
The best part of the episode I watched last night, "Love on Holiday" from December 4, 2000 is the subplot about Nelle who auctions herself off for a date. The winner ends up being a guy about to be sentenced for life in prison for euthanasia. This was a nice meeting of an intellectual moral quandary with a short tragic romance plot.
Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter have to stop a serial killer imitating other, famous killers in 1995's Copycat. This isn't one for plumbing the psychological depths of criminality or law enforcement but it is a fun procedural.
Weaver plays Helen Hudsen, a criminal psychologist who's attacked by a killer after she gives a lecture on killers. She survives but is afflicted by agoraphobia and chronic panic attacks.
Holly Hunter plays MJ who, along with her partner played by Dermot Mulroney, is on the trail of the copycat killer. After Helen makes an anonymous phone call to give the police some clues, they track her down and enlist her reluctant aid.
Of course, her being agoraphobic means that somehow the killer manages to infiltrate her expensive apartment multiple times. This is one of those killers who seems to be just a little bit supernatural. It seemed the filmmakers had to keep up an even pace of Helen being terrorised. The guy manages to hack into her computer for some of the most astonishingly dated computer suspense drama I've ever seen. After the killer sends Helen an evil AVI file, Mulroney asks her if there's any way they can watch the video again. Helen says, yes, she put it "on tape". But then the killer somehow erased her tape! Maybe she ought to've locked it in the safe.
There are some other problems with details. When the killer imitates the Hillside Stranglers by dumping a woman's body containing semen from two perpetrators, the cops never even discuss the possibility of the killer having an accomplice or even wonder at all whom the other semen might have come from.
Weaver and Hunter both give good performances, of course, and director Jon Amiel keeps up a good pace.
I barely remember these episodes of The X-Files I've been watching recently. Some I don't remember at all. I don't know why I never felt like revisiting the series before but I'm kind of glad I kept it fresh for myself. Last night I watched "Fire", an episode from December 1993. I feel like the writing rapidly improved in the first season. There's nothing really silly in this one like the naked lady episode or the evil computer episode.
This one starts out in England where a gardener with the ability to start fires with his mind kills a friendly aristocrat stereotype.
Let that be a lesson; always have a duck pond on your grounds.
The action moves to Washington D.C. and Boston but, of course, it was all shot, as usual, in Vancouver. I kind of like that, though. It's like an alternate universe where the whole world is perpetually under an overcast sky and everyone has to wear overcoats all the time. That sure sounds like paradise in the middle of another sopping humid summer.
We learn a little about Mulder's past at Oxford in which he fell for a girl who's now a Scotland Yard inspector visiting the U.S. on the trail of the arsonist. Again, I have to applaud the show for making Mulder and Scully so extraordinarily professional that Scully shows not a trace of jealousy.
She's catty about it but not in a way that suggests she feels any ownership of Mulder. It's like the gentle ribbing you'd expect from a male colleague.
Last week came the news that X-Files series composer Mark Snow died. He composed that famous whistling theme that persists in the cultural landscape. I even heard it on Japanese TV recently. It's simple and effective.
