Hoo boy, I’ve had kind of a rough time lately.
After I got back from my trip last month, I got sick with COVID before I even got back to work, which lead to me feeling like I got cheated out of half my vacation. Then, a couple weeks later, I got sick again! Just a regular cold this time, but still very annoying. I’m finally getting over that now, and the last month kind of feels like a blur. But I still had time to read and watch things! So let’s get into it.
The Meiji Guillotine Murders
Not quite done with this yet, but about 2/3rds of the way through, so I feel like I can reflect on it a bit.
This is another book recommended by a friend of mine, it’s a Japanese mystery novel from the ’70s that was just recently translated. I picked it up with another one of those Su Lin books when I visited Powell’s down in Portland.
This is a very episodic book, in a way I wasn’t expecting. It’s not a series of murders all done by the same person, it’s a series of individual crimes solved by a particular crime-solving duo in the chaotic period right after the Meiji restoration. There’s a ton of historical context for this specific moment at the beginning, which I found really fascinating, though it does also have a bit of the old “here’s a cavalcade of historical cameos, none of whom you recognize” problem.
Though it does also contextualize those in funny ways sometimes, like when you meet some random official and then the narrator says “he joined the Saga Rebellion two years later and was executed for his role”.
The basic premise is that Japan is rapidly modernizing in the face of external and internal pressures, and part of that is creating a new police force, thought they don’t call it that quite yet. The Imperial Prosecutors Office is an old Heian period (1100s) institution that rooted out corruption among imperial officials, which has been revived along with the supremacy of the emperor. They’re mostly investigating the rampant corruption going on, but also any murders that cross their desk.
The name comes not from the method of murder, but the fact that one of the protagonists, the eccentric Kozuki, spent the civil war in France and brought back both a guillotine and the descendant of the family that invented the guillotine, Esmeralda Sanson. This is what they decide to use as a novel method of punishment, as it was invented as a more humane and consistent option compared to older methods.
The mysteries are pretty straightforward, the point of the book is the historical texture of it, I think. It’s more historical fiction than anything else. Fun, it’s not exactly grabbing me by the shoulders. I had trouble following things at first because it throws so many names of various people at you, but once it gets into the actual episodic mysteries that kind of fades away, it’s a lot easier to follow.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Rewatched this for the first time in probably 20 years for Blank Check a couple weeks ago, and god damn, what a great movie. If you’re not familiar, it’s a movie directed by Peter Weir about naval action on a specific ship in the Napoleonic wars off the coast of South America, based on a series of novels by Patric O’Brien.
The thing that really struck me on this rewatch, which I remember thinking before, is that it does feel like dropping in on the middle of an ongoing story, which has earlier entries and will continue long afterwards. It’s not adapting any specific book in the original series, just kind of picking a bunch of events and mashing them together in a very coherent way, kind of giving the feel of what happens in those books. I haven’t read them, but it seems like it does a very good job.
It’s not really about the specific things they’re trying to accomplish, chasing down this one rogue French privateer that is looking to prey on ships in the Pacific, but more about Life On A Boat. And me being the internet’s foremost Moby Dick Liker, I ate that shit up with a spoon. The strange tension of discipline on a ship, the rituals, the superstition, the way interpersonal relationships have to be carefully managed, it’s all there.
Also, as a movie, it feels like a miracle that it exists at all. They apparently shot it in the gigantic tank that James Cameron built for Titanic down in Baja California, which was starting to deteriorate. A few years later and it would’ve simply been impossible to make, at least not with an even bigger budget. Shooting on the ocean is famously difficult, bordering on impossible, but they really made it all seem incredibly real and immediate. You never doubt the reality of it for a second.
It’s one of those movies that I simply consider a classic and good, but not even in a big and superlative way. It doesn’t feel flashy and demanding of attention, everything about it is kind of understated but incredibly well done.
The Two Towers
Continuing my journey through Lord of the Rings, I’m about 3/4ths of the way through this one now, and it’s been a true delight. There’s a lot of stuff that I thought was added in the films but was there the whole time, like Gimli and Legolas being obviously in love or Gollum’s affectations, but nope! Those are fully present here. The main things that are different are like… where the focus is, what gets to take precedence in the action.
As I read this, I’m really trying to divorce myself from the Jackson movies, to not just go back to that familiar imagery in my mind. The only thing that really is stuck is Christopher Lee as Saruman, he looks exactly as that evil old wizard is described in the books, it’s wild. It’s been really hard to imagine a different Gollum, but I’ve had some success thinking of the froglike creature from the Rankin Bass cartoon.
Anyway, there are two big ideas I’ve been thinking about as I read, one is: what do these different fantasy races actually look like? And is this actually just post-apocalyptic fiction?
For the former, people are always confusing things for each other in ways that don’t make sense if these differences are as obvious as they are made in artwork based on the books. Elves aren’t even described as having long ears, orcs are apparently shorter than humans, people mistake Hobbits for dwarves and orcs at different points. It all feels a lot more fluid and less set in stone than is usually portrayed.
For the latter, this whole plot feels like it’s relitigating some ancient war and how things fell out before, and the world feels empty. There are not major connections between the different places, there was a big fall of the old kingdoms but nothing has yet come up to take their place. Maybe it’s just that we spend so much time out in the wilderness, but even back in Bree it’s talked about as a small town in the middle of nowhere, with only distant and occasional contact with the rest of the world.
Maybe that will change with the last book, when the story reaches Gondor and its great city, but we’ll see, we’ll see.
I was ruminating on doing a big blog post about Tolkien and race, but that’s been done so many times already it feels pointless. The thing about the orcs is… I want to know about them, but Tolkien refuses to tell me. One of the things he failed at, in these books, is humanizing the enemy. You get little bits and pieces of it when Merry and Pippin are captured by the orcs, but that’s it.
What is Sauron telling people? How is he rallying the men of the East and South to his banner? What is it like to be a farmer in Mordor? What do the orcs think about men and elves and dwarves?
The orcs are the ur example of the Evil Race in fantasy fiction, so of course we don’t get that. It does seem like Tolkien himself was a bit troubled by this, which is nice, but still, it’s a bit disappointing, as a reader. I always prefer it when the enemy is interesting and engaging in its own right, y’know.
Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo
This is a fun little VN I’ve been meaning to get to for ages.
The basic premise is that someone does a magical ritual to activate an ancient curse in the city of Honjo (which is in Tokyo). This gives a bunch of random people a curse stone related to both an ancient death and a specific location, granting them a power to kill others with said curse if they meet certain conditions. They are told that if they get enough “soul dregs” by killing others, they can bring one person back from the dead!
Where it goes from there was very unexpected and intriguing. Lots of different things going on, with a bigger cast of very well-developed character than you’d think. It’s not even very long, about 10 hours, but it packs a lot in there.
The game has sort of a branching timeline, where you’re bouncing between different characters, and that’s used in some fun, meta ways. For example, one storyline sort of peters out after you pick the next location to investigate. What you have to do is pick a location that other characters can also travel to, so they can meet up and exchange information, allowing the plot to continue.
It’s sort of turning the act of reading and processing information into the gameplay itself. A really fun way to make a mystery VN more interactive without relying too heavily on extremely game-y things like dialogue choices or navigation.
Disclosure Day
The new Steven Spielberg movie! I went and saw it yesterday at the Grand, and came away somewhat underwhelmed. It just didn’t work for me.
I put this one at the end so I could get into some more spoiler-y thoughts on it. Skip down past this section if you don’t want to know about what happens in this movie!!
So, there are a couple things that broke this for me. One is purely aesthetic, which is that making the aliens just classic greys with no elaborations or anything just took me right out of it. Those are pop culture objects that have been chewed up and spat out a million times. They don’t have the ability to fulfill this role on a story that is trying to be soooooo self-serious.
The part where you see a live interrogation video, which is supposed to be so shocking that it convinces the skeptical Jane to join in with this mission to reveal the truth to the world, fell completely flat. It just looks so fake and shitty. You don’t even see anything particularly bad happening, it’s just an alien on a bed that kind of gets hit, maybe?
Also this movie does the really annoying thing where it’s allergic to just saying the thing out loud and straightforwardly. I’m not sure if anyone even says the word “alien” in the whole thing! It’s all “visitors” and “these experiences” and whatnot. Talking around it because it would insantly deflate the whole thing just allows it to be deflated by the audience as they sit there. The premise is aliens are real and a corrupt non-governmental corporation has been keeping the secret for 80 years, but nobody can just say that, because the whole thing has to be loaded up with more weight and importance than anything can bear.
Speaking of, the villains feel completely toothless. They’re caught with their pants down as a dozen high-ranking members quit and steal all the secrets they’ve been keeping for ages, and two of the magical alien wands that they were keeping in a vault. Why they didn’t just take all three is never explained.
The villains feel completely toothless, especially after the opening scene where Josh O’Connor’s Daniel Kellner gets out of being surrounded by them by simply holding up his alien wand at them. Then they don’t even tail him or anything, he just drives away totally free, they have to track him a different way. At every turn, they’re baffled by the simplest tricks, feels like something out of a kids movie in the 80s or 90s.
The worst bit is late in the film, at the local TV studio where our heroes are going to reveal the truth of aliens to the world. The evil corporate goons in tacical gear carefully rush in and… cut the power cables and then bomb the emergency generator too. Then they rush in with guns drawn at everyone. But Margaret, the weather girl heroine with magical alien empathy powers, is given another magic wand uses it to… power up the TV station. Then the goons are defeated, and simply ordered to leave by their boss, while he sits down to witness what is about to happen.
They’re just not threatening enough. They constantly pull their punches, they don’t have any powers or abilties that feel inescapable. They’ve supposedly been making money based on alien technology for decades, but we never see any of that. I guess it’s the classic conspiracy thing of like “ohh cell phones or computers are too special for humans to invent, we piggybacked off alien technology for them!” or whatever.
Beyond the aesthetics and nitpicks, the themes feel incoherent to me. There’s this idea of empathy as the ultimate power and the aliens are here to… enable that? But they keep getting shot down or crashing? What exactly is stopping them if they wany to do this?
Then there’s the religious angle. Jane, the girlfriend of one of the protagonists, is a former nun and immediately upon learning about aliens decides a) they are the true supreme being and b) we have to keep the secret because people can’t handle the truth. Neither of these makes a lick of sense in context, she’s seen aliens getting beaten up and interrogated, not doing anything that would make them seem powerful. This whole thing feels like it’s dismissed when she goes back to her old convent and an old nun tells her like “why do you think God didn’t create aliens too?”, which is the most obvious counter argument but there are million more.
The late revelation that David and Margaret were both adbucted as children and given the “gift” of their powers, him being able to understand math intuitively and her being able to understand other living being intuitively, landed the opposite of the way it was intended, to me. That makes the aliens feel incredibly sinister. They’re just snatching random kids and doing things to them? This ended up ruining David’s life and getting him sent to prison!
It’s like… I guess I’m not supposed to judge them like that, for whatever reason. They are some unknowable outside force akin to God, with their own reasons for doing things. It either collapses the stakes, because the aliens are just in control so nothing bad could actually happen, or makes them seem evil or stupid.
I could go on and on, but it just feels like a movie made for a different era. They reveal aliens on the local news and everyone just believes it, immediately. This somehow seems to end an imminent world war 3, as well. The whole thing feels absurd and naive.
But also… it just kinda lacked The Juice. There were no sequences that stuck with me. The action felt anemic. There’s a scene where Josh O’Connor drives a car into the cabin he was hiding out in, and it felt like seeing footage of a ride at a theme park. It felt real, but entirely controlled and lacking in impact or danger. The bit with the invisible house and fire truck was… kinda fun, but that’s it. And we simply don’t get enough aliens. Close Encounters had more aliens, and that was in the god damn 1970s! Why are you hiding the aliens doing cool alien shit in your alien movie, dude?
It’s a boring movie, fundamentally. It’s not saying anything interesting or new, and it’s not showing me anything exciting or novel.
Alright, safe to come back now!
Ahh, felt good to vent my spleen a little bit. I did write a letterboxd review, but didn’t go into quite so much detail. I really went in with an open heart, even after not liking the trailers, and it had me for a while, but then it lost me.
Oh also the CG animals looked like dogshit. I know that’s kind of the point, but whoof. It’s been a while since I saw stuff that looked that plasticky and bad.
Ough, it’s gonna be hot today, the summer is really getting started early this year. Not a good sign. Might have to set up my little portable AC soon…. but for today, I’ll probably just go hide out at a coffee shop.
Until next time, shipmates!
The Beige Moth 