... and the sugar turned bitter.

Like a belated guest, I think soon we might see snow. It's very frosty on the ground, the branches of the trees tilt downwards. Everything looks like a Victorian Christmas card. Since the original pandemic New Year, at the stroke of midnight, I watch the same clip on youtube featuring footage from the 1940 film, Waterloo Bridge, the swell of Auld Lang Syne in the background. This year, several days into January, I actually watched the movie for the first time and found it impossibly sad. I spent the days after pausing in my work from time to time to think of the characters in this movie and just feeling awful for them, which is testament both to the fact that I cry at anything and the sadness and sentimentality evident in the movie. Winter is the season for this kind of thing, I guess. We're all waiting to come back to life again. Amidst the set dressing of an area in which I used to work, I felt haunted seeing the sadness of these characters mount in places where my own little real life dramas unfolded decades later. It is sad to see the Victory Arch of Waterloo station's main entrance filmed in 1940, depicting its shape in 1918, and remembering the moments I had ascended up those steps and passed below without any understanding of what such masonry commemorated. We build up the new alongside the old, and somewhere along the way, we forget to ask what the significance of any of it is.

I learnt what a Billiken was thanks to this movie, and I smiled so much when reading about them. To think that this film records something so present of the moment it was made that I would never have understood it beyond the broad significance of the doll's use as a lucky charm excites the part of my brain that delights in joining the dots between moments. This kind of storytelling, the use of pop culture details known to the audience that gradually become genericised over time as those living who understand the context fall into rest feels like discovering a hidden language. I wondered if one day, someone might feel the same delight discovering what a Troll doll is or a Care Bear due to some casual inclusion in a film. Perhaps it's the same with the way our cities are patchworks of buildings from different moments. Our small, little lives reaching forward, one to the other.

The line from here to Sono Sion's 2005 movie, Noriko's Dinner Table, might only seem natural to me, but I followed this line nonetheless and felt that the way we were talking about slipping through the cracks in 1940s Waterloo was not so different from how we were discussing it in Tokyo, 2005. Perhaps, even, Sono's work is more optimistic, depicting an understanding of the roles others ask us to play rather than becoming mired in them. When watching the movie, I thought about The Idiots by Lars Von Trier a lot, and I think there's a lot of connective tissue between the way both of these movies show finding family by abandoning family. Connected to Sono's earlier work, the influential Suicide Club, I wondered if future audiences will think of that film's Momoi Haruko theme tune, Mail Me, in the same way that I view Billiken dolls, evidence of a past that was real and has now vanished forever. A year after this film debuted, I was a part of that Akihabara scene, albeit briefly.

The past is gone, but we should not be afraid of dressing up in silver and adorning ourselves in fairy lights.

I think that Sony will be the first company to start churning out scripts by AI for superhero movies. I don’t have a good track record with predictions, famously being the girl who proclaimed, ”They could never make a Terminator 2!” yet considering the opinions voiced by executives about the recent writers strike and their desperate eagerness to have their own Marvel competitor—even whilst employing Marvel characters—I get the feeling that Sony will be the first on that particular bandwagon. On a related note, I managed to watch the recent big-screen Saint Seiya movie not on the big-screen over the weekend, and it is... everything you would expect it to be. Perhaps even, with the amount of uncredited hands the script must have passed through, it might even have been improved by giving the computer a crack at it. Still, having said that, I knew exactly what I was getting when I watched it, and I think that, whilst a mediocre effort at adaptation, it wasn’t an awful effort—it was exactly what everyone thought it would be, Saint Seiya by way of every overly filtered Warner Bros. or Disney superhero movie of the last decade. I think the main cast tried though, and I appreciated both Mackenyu’s portrayal as a gentler Seiya and Madison Iseman’s depiction of a bratty Saori. The real standout, however, was Caitlin Hutson and Katie Anne Moy in their joint portrayal of Marin, and whilst the character doesn’t really do as much in the story as you would have thought, she is pivotal, and it in the moments in which she is training Seiya that the film really offers a glimpse of just what adapting Saint Seiya for a mainstream audience without prior knowledge might really look like.

I’m going through this moment where I’ve been revisiting Japan in the late ‘90s, the dream of tokusatsu as an international endeavour, something that was truly pushed forward not only by directors like Amemiya Keita (Zeiram, Mechanical Violator Hakaider), Oshii Mamoru (Avalon, Ghost in the Shell) and special effects artists and mechanical designers like Higuchi Shinji (Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, The Return of Godzilla) and Kawamori Shoji (Gunhed, Macross), but also American directors like Brian Yuzna (Society, From Beyond). I’ve been trying to return to this point where tokusatsu had what I consider to be loftier goals, when it was aware not only of the domestic market but of the popularity of the genre in places like Hong Kong, France, and even America; I want to bring back the feeling of international co-productions, the moment inferred by cyberpunk as a genre when Japanese as a language would eventually become so ubiquitous that it would be spread in neon across the surfaces of Western cities.

Another of my famous predictions was that ”They can never make a Hollywood Akira!” History thus far seems to have been on my side with this, although with 2017’s Ghost in the Shell adaptation, you kind of have to wonder for how long. Watching zinnbuster’s video on the history of Evangelion’s release in the US made me think a lot about the rumours and whispers of ADV and Weta’s planned live action franchise. At the time a lot of the material that was being shared for this project as a means of building up hype, I think a lot of us were already hesitant to embrace it; we might have been dumb white kids, but even we realised that swapping out Japanese characters for “new” Western characters was a bad look, one that was particularly frustrating in the face of such international productions such as Gunhed and Avalon. The mailing list that myself and all my dumb white kid friends were on though was primarily made up of fanfic writers, and there was a natural desire for us to ask questions like, ”But what was happening elsewhere?” When you grow up outside of America, I think that reaction to material is pretty much taken for granted even in licensed material—that’s how we ended up with the BBC Radio play, Independence Day UK, I’m sure. The idea of Evangelion but elsewhere was exciting and enticing, and there were lots of notes passed back and forth on that mailing list about what NERV’s US branch might be really like, what might be happening outside of Tokyo-3. I never got involved myself, not really knowing anything about American military terms or feeling the desire at the time to tell such a story, but I look back now on those ideas fashioned by my friends almost as if they were semi-canonical. It’s interesting that the second of the Rebuild movies, 2009’s Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance seemed to prove that presumably it was something on the minds of Studio Khara also when Anno returned to the story.

I think there’s room for international tokusatsu. With their continual mismanagement of Western releases, I don’t necessarily believe Toei will be the ones to make it happen, just as I don’t really think Sony will get any further mileage out of Saint Seiya, but Anno’s professed goal of ensuring future Khara releases get official English subtitles makes me think that there is at least the possibility of progress in the future. I’d like to believe in Titan’s comic adaptations of Kamen Rider, in its acquisition of things like the Robotech licence, and its ambition of creating original English language content based on these stories, but until they hire me, I probably won’t. As I say though, I’m famous for making bad predictions, so maybe ignore me.

As an aside, wow everyone seemed to have worked on the adaptation of Oshii’s Tachiguishi-Retsuden—Oshii himself, Higuchi, Kawamori, so why have I never seen these movies?

Between Christmas and New Year, several years before the plague, I sat at the back of the Almedia Theatre in Angel with my arms folded across my chest and felt an overwhelming sense of disappointment at the Twilight Zone stage play. Throughout the show's runtime, as expertly performed and enacted as it was, the play felt more concerned with offering knowing nods and sly winks to an audience that didn't really understand the symbolism of what was being presented, the anxiety and the sentimentality of the original replaced with sore stabs at irony and plays to an audience that thought itself too good for genre fiction.

( The Ultra Q Club )

Friends! It's time for your weekly instalment of 'oh-Jesus-Christ-this-girl-still-won't-shut-up-about-the-War.'

( “not even the American hero can save the day this time” )

INT. SHOT - LATE AFTERNOON - A SUBURBAN HOME

The door is flung open, a handsome man in his mid-30s, a quiff of waxed blond hair beneath his hat, a smart tweed suit, prescription spectacles, stands in the doorway. Cue audience applause. In his hand he carries a briefcase, assuring us of his employment status, and his handsome looks suggest a similarity to James Stewart, if we have the budget for such casting. He removes his hat, hanging it on the hat stand, and places his briefcase down, seemingly looking around. Let's call him HANK, for such is a suitable name for such a man.

HANK: Oh, honey, I'm home!

From the adjoined kitchen, we hear noise, something like the rattle of pots and pans. HANK looks confused, a frown forming on his handsome face.

HANK: Honey? Are you home?

Cue audience laughter. The kitchen door is suddenly thrown wide open to reveal a tall woman with a somewhat horsey face and a somewhat fretful manner, several years older than HANK, dressed in a tea dress decorated in a highly unseasonal Christmas tree pattern, her blonde hair partially tied up in a paisley scarf. This is COURTNEY, for whom our show is named. Audience applauds. Hastily, she crosses the room and throws herself into HANK's arms, who looks somewhat taken aback.

COURTNEY: Oh, Hank!

HANK (confused): Honey? What's the matter? (pause) Did something happen with the neighbour's dog again?

COURTNEY looks up, and her expression is momentarily flat.

COURTNEY: No, of course not, he's still buried at the bottom of our yard.

Audience laughs. COURTNEY returns to being fretful.

COURTNEY: Oh, Hank, you wouldn't believe it!

HANK looks worried.

HANK: Well, ah, try me, honey.

COURTNEY looks away from him.

COURTNEY: Well... well, you see, darling, I meant to have the dinner ready for you the moment you came home, only... only...

HANK begins to look annoyed, as if perhaps he has heard this before.

HANK: Only?

Audience laughs.

COURTNEY turns to look at the camera.

COURTNEY: Only I spent the entire day crying about cats and writing about pop culture.

( WandaVision, and the way in which irony is used to make us feel stupid )

Hello. I get bored easily. I think we all do in this, the year of the plague, our attention spans unable to focus easily on distractions because we are so consumed with feelings about what is going on in the world around us. And yet, despite this, I found myself watching 2017's abortive Power Rangers reboot last night, and liking it a lot more of than I thought I would.

( Go! Go! )

Buckle up, losers, we're going to Furby Island.



( u-nye-loo-lay-doo? )

It is gaudy, the music vaudeville, surreal and haunting. The soundtrack is full of the noise of animals, dogs barking, birds calling, whilst on screen, there are people, alone with their thoughts, locked into their own private sufferings. Les Yeux sans visage is full of malevolence, a film that has not grown any easier to watch with the vast distance between when first I saw it, and where we are now.

( spoilers for just about everything and warnings for some nasty real world topics )

I re-watched some monster movies this weekend, namely Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995) and Shin Godzilla (2016), both of which, by the very nature of this kind of movie, deal with social collapse in their own ways.

( Daikaiju!! )

Señor Edmundo Nóbile and his wife welcome you to their home.

( El ángel exterminador )