Thomas the Composer

Thomas came home from Ann Arbor just to see a work of his performed by his old teacher:

Jami's bad car luck continues

Backstory: Jami had a dentist appointment this morning, so I was going to drop F. off at E.'s.  But Jami finished early and E. started late, so Jami ended up agreeing to drop off.  So I went into work.  Then at about 12:06 I got a text from E. saying she could pick F. up from home.  Sadly Jami was already on the way, and about ten minutes later I got a phone call from a Michigan number that I didn't recognize.  What I normally do with strange numbers is that I either don't answer them at all or I press the little green phone button but don't say anything (that way if it's a robocall, it won't say anything either - they're programmed to wait for you to say something first - and will pretty quickly give up).  This time, however, I could hear breathing on the other end, and long story short, it was Jami, and she'd been in another car accident, this time with F. in the car.  And here is what I found when I drove to help (E. got there first and spirited F. off to a day of relaxation and light neck massage, so he's fine):





Turns out they were sideswiped by a SUV-full of teens pulling out of the Taco Bell at top speed.  One of the teens' parents came over to apologize after showing up to take them home.



And here are both cars being towed away, and the tow guy soaking up whatever fluids flooded out of Jami's car:




To add insult to injury, Jami's phone flew out of the smashed window and is now kaput, and of course it has EVERYTHING (including her schedule) on it. And we haven't even received the insurance money for the Yaris yet...

Flint made the New York Times again!

It's never good:

Dietary issues

So I got to see my special doctor who had me do excruciatingly embarrassing stool-harvesting so that we could know all about the workings of my grossest innards.  (To be fair, the stool-harvesting wasn't as bad as the previous time I did this, because I only had to do it once (although I managed to knock over the tube that was to hold the sample and spilled most of the red liquid within and had to siphon it back in with an ear-drop-dropper) rather than three times over a week, and the test is now better because it's all DNA-based.)  I already knew my frail old colon can't handle gluten or dairy (and this was sadly confirmed) but now I learn I can't eat EGGS.  I've been LIVING on eggs, partly because we have the chickens and nobody else in the house eats their eggs.  Well eggs and tuna, which I've also been told to cut out (or down to twice a month) because I may already have mercury poisoning as a result (symptoms: hand tremors and forgetfulness).  But the good news is, I can still eat duck eggs in moderation, so I can keep eating my bread.  And also I tested positive for H-pylori, a nasty gut bacteria that could explain various intestinal troubles that have been plaguing me - and there's a pretty effective cure for that.  And I can eat chickpeas, lentils, kidney beans, tomatoes, potatoes no problem.  So we'll see.  If only my dear old mother were here to cook delicious and varied meals for me...  Maybe she could cook up our chickens.

Film review: A Colt Is My Passport (1967)

This is a super-stylish black and white hitman-on-the-run film that I wouldn't be at all surprised was an influence on Le Samourai (or vice versa) were it not for the fact that they both came out the same year.  But this is definitely very influenced by Western (as in The West) films, given the mod suits and especially the fantastic soundtrack, which sounds very Spaghetti Western (the other one this time), with whistling a-plenty.  Our hero Shuji and his younger (very caucasian-looking) partner, Shun, definitely Robin to his Batman, are given a job to whack the head of a rival Yakusa firm.  Shun gets his nifty little roadster souped up, complete with "extra brake," while Shuji pretends to be apartment shopping long enough to shoot his mark out of the window.  Then they head to the airport.  But there is no getting out that easily.  They're being paged to come to the desk, and when they don't, they get picked up by goons with guns.  These goons, however, do not appear to have their own wheels, so they are driving our heroes to their reckoning when we find out that the "extra brake" is in the back and Shun pushes it and the goons smack into the windshield.  Our heroes contact their boss, a seedy older guy fond of getting "massages" if you know what I mean, and he directs them to hide out in a motel prior to getting a boat out.  But he is approached by the new leader of the rival Yakusa and quickly persuaded to give up our heroes in return for joining forces.  The rest of the film is our heroes avoiding getting killed while being thwarted in various attempts to catch boats out of there and while Shuji and the young woman who works with her grandmother to run the motel fall in love.  As I said, this movie has style to burn, and the final showdown where Shuji faces off with MORE hired goons and a bulletproof car full of the Yakusa bosses on a windswept wasteland is great, but there is a major distraction that I found very hard to get past.  And that is the amazing chipmunk cheeks of the lead actor, Jô Shishido:

I mean LOOK at him.  Serious case of the mumps, right?  Well, Jami did some googling and swears that he was a perfectly normal-looking actor who was getting nowhere when he went for the cheek implants and suddenly turned into Japan's version of Steve McQueen/Charles Bronson/Clint Eastwood.  He certainly goes for the "minimalist" muttering-and-moping style of acting (in stark contrast to Mifune's "big" acting) that one needs for the lone wolf (sorry Shun) kind of role.
Anyway, give it a go if you're a fan of sharp suits, sunglasses inside and a slightly less nihilistic variant on the French New Wave crime films.  (But be warned: he uses just about every firearm except a Colt (including James Bond's favored Beretta) and he actually has a perfectly good passport that we see in action.  So the title is purposefully misleading.)

Film review: Blow Out (1981)

Apparently director Brian DePalma is a huge Hitchcock fan, and people who study these things say he steals from the master regularly.  If that is indeed the case, then I have to say that Hitchcock, like the Marx Brothers or Buster Keaton, cannot be placed in a modern setting, because the Brian DePalma films I've seen (with the possible exception of Carrie, but I was young and innocent then (and watching alone in a house at the end of a road except for my sleeping grandmother)) have had the patina of cheesiness that I remarked on about John Carpenter's films.  It surprised me how cheesy this one was, because it has a stellar reputation, and I was expecting a Three Days of the Condor or Klute kind of vibe.  But, despite this supposedly being one of Travolta's best performances, (he does effective work with a lot of listening, and fiddling with various film-and-audio equipment)

 the stilted dialogue and hammy acting of the others involved (with the exception of a very young-looking John Lithgow as the killer stalking our heroes),

along with the egregious heavy-on-the-super-schmaltzy-sax score, drags it down to definite B-movie level.  The plot is good enough: sound man for schlocky horror films is out recording wind sound effects one night when he witnesses (and records) a car accident where a limo skids into a river.  He jumps in and saves the female passenger, but the driver, a very popular politician and "probable next president," dies.  He takes the passenger to hospital but quickly realizes something is afoot when (a) he is told by a friend of the dead politician not to tell anyone about the woman (she obviously was not the candidate's wife) and (b) the police seem eager to write this up as an accident, when his tape shows that there was a gunshot immediately before the car skidded out of control.

We see a shadowy figure somehow sneak into the police impound lot and replace the obviously shot-through tire with one lacking bullet-holes. And that same figure later argues with his employer, who is angry, because the plan was just to disgrace the politician, hence the female passenger (who later reveals she had been hired to seduce him), before announcing he plans to tie up loose ends.  He (Lithgow) starts by attempting to garrotte the passenger (Sally, who is portrayed as something of an idiot by Nancy Allen (who later played Murphy's partner in Robocop), despite being the movie's love interest).  Well, he does successfully garotte someone with his fancy James Bond-esque watch-garotte, but it turns out not to be her.  He improvises and stabs her in a Liberty Bell pattern, because some celebration of the centenary of its last ring is coming up.  This leads to another prostitute-killing to establish a pattern, so that when Sally gets hers it'll be chalked up to the insane actions of a serial killer and nobody will tie it back to the politician's death.  Meanwhile a sleazy character played by NYPD Blue's Dennis Franz has been peddling stills from a film he took of the accident, and Travolta uses them to reconstruct a film to run alongside his soundtrack and sees a flash at the same time as there is a shot on his tape.  Turns out Franz's character was the one working with Sally and she steals the real film off him so Travolta can take it to a newsman.  But Lithgow sweeps in and convinces Sally that he is the newsman and she has to meet up with him in a train station.  Travolta smells a rat and puts a wire on her (flashback to his previous career as a cop in internal affairs where a wire of his shorts out and gets a fellow policeman killed when he has to take it off because it's burning him).  The climax of the movie is Travolta desperately trying to find Lithgow and Sally before she's killed.  Sadly, although he manages to force Lithgow to stab himself, it's too late and he's already strangled Sally.  But, in a grisly twist, Sally's death screams that are caught on the wire prove to be the solution to a jokey thread that has run through the whole film, where his director is unable to find a plausible scream for a scene in his slasher film.  Dark!
I have to admit that I was not bored, which is the only cardinal sin of a film in my view, and there were some flashy camera moves that are DePalma's MO.  He LOVES split-screens, and there's one scene where Travolta discovers that Lithgow has broken in and wiped all his tapes (including all his special effects, his bread-and-butter) where the camera just rotates for about five minutes as Travolta frantically yanks different tapes out of their boxes, that is pretty effective.  Also, it's fun to see how seedy Philly looked back then, and how primitive the technology appears.  I would've sworn the film was made in about 1975 and was astonished to see it was six year later.  Obviously the Reagan boom hadn't kicked in yet.

Film review: Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

This should have been great.  An interesting premise (based on a real myth (not an oxymoron)) - that the actor who played the original Nosferatu, Max Schreck, was in fact a real vampire - a great cast (John Malkovich! Willem Dafoe!  Eddie Izzard! Cary Elwes!), and for the first half or so it definitely had potential.  But Malkovich is strangely disappointing (rather one-note) and once Eddie Izzard disappears about halfway (presumably he's killed by the vampire, as so many of the film crew are), the film goes rather dreary (although Cary Elwes, who is a replacement cameraman to take over for Schreck's first victim, does his best to elevate matters).  The trouble is, I don't think they decided on what it was.  Occasionally that's okay - films like American Werewolf in London manage to switch gears smoothly and be successfully scary, romantic, funny and then tragic, but this one doesn't pull it off.  Part of it is that Malkovich's Murnau (the director) is both opaque and unlikable.  He sacrifices the lives of his crew and in particular, his star actress, to capture "Schreck" (who is actually Count Orlock, the name of the vampire in Nosferatu, on celluloid.  To be fair, it looks like he had a plan to avoid giving up Greta (it involved a big chain-operated sliding door that would let the daylight in to destroy Orlock before he got to chomp down on Greta), but Orlock outwitted him and sabotaged it, so in the end, just about everybody except Murnau ends up dead.  And Murnau just doesn't seem that bothered.  So is it worth watching?  Well, Eddie Izzard is fun, but it's almost impossible to watch him and not be reminded of bits from his standup.  But mainly Willem Dafoe is amazing (as always) as Schreck.  So if you're a Dafoe-head (which is a thing I just invented), you have to see it.

Film review: Fiend Without a Face (1958)

It being Halloween, we decided to watch a horror film.  But nothing too horrific now we're old and pathetic, so let's see what the Criterion Channel has to offer.  Not much, as it happens, at least that we haven't seen.  So we selected this little offering.  Let's just say that I've seen higher quality films.  It's not that it's an Ed Wood level turkey - the acting is fine and when you finally see the monsters, there're some fun stop motion effects:

...but the plot is just silly on a level that is hard to get past.  Basically, the action is set on an American air base in the middle of nowhere, Canada.  They've got a kind of experimental super-radar that involves communicating between jets flying overhead and the control room, and that is powered by their own personal atomic reactor.  But something seems to be draining the energy from it just as they extend the scanning range to spy on the Russkies.  And at the same time, innocent townspeople keep getting killed by an invisible attacker that chokes them and (autopsies reveal) suck out not just their brains, but their entire spinal columns, somehow through little vampire bites on their neck.  Where do these invisible monsters come from, you ask?  Well you'll wish you hadn't. You'd think, this being an air base, and this being the UFO-obsessed 50s, it would be aliens.  But NOOO.  Instead, the answer is that an eccentric genius professor (that's him, above) has discovered how to do telepathy with a LOT of electricity, and the result was that the power of his mind turned into the kind of things that hold thoughts - you know: brains.  Why are they invisible?  Don't ask me.  Why can we eventually see them?  Because they get more power from the reactor.  Are they made of the brains and spinal columns of the dead people?  Unclear.  That would make sense, wouldn't it.  So it's probably wrong, especially as this is a film where they shut down a nuclear reactor that has had all its rods destroyed by BLOWING IT UP WITH DYNAMITE.  It's very, very silly.  Just look at the gifs above and you've seen all you need to see, really.  Well, except for this (as promised in the poster):