James Bond review: Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

CUT TO THE CHASE: Bond is back.

BOND, JAMES BOND: My personal favorite of the series. I think I may have said that before, and when I’m not actually watching this one, I might give the nod to From Russia With Love or On Her Majesty’s Secret Service or The Man With The Golden Gun. But when I am watching this, I have such an irrepressible grin on my face that I can’t honestly say it’s not my favorite.

Why? Everything I wrote in my GoldenEye review about how the advantage of three decades of 007 mythmaking works to Pierce Brosnan’s advantage is still true of this film. Brosnan’s performance captures the Ideal Bond that has been taking shape in our collective imagination through all these movies. And even more so than in the previous movie, the filmmakers give him a film that supports that performance perfectly. The story, the settings, the secondary characters, the cast, the camera work, the art direction, the music all epitomize what a James Bond movie should be. Stylish, dark, witty, sexy. The quintessence of cool.

Last time we established that Brosnan has the look. Here the whole film has the look. Bond’s brawl with Carver’s thugs at the party in Hamburg, everybody in suits in a black room with a single overhead light; Bond making his escape through Carver’s headquarters building, all white walls and black girders; Bond and Wai Lin in a junk on the South China Sea at dusk; Bond and Paris in the hotel room, and those garters…the film is full of carefully chosen visual elements, each striking in its own right, that collectively live up to the Bond fan’s wildest fantasies.

What is all lives up to is Monty Norman’s original “James Bond Theme.” It was barely heard in GoldenEye, but here it pops up repeatedly. And it’s the highest compliment I can think of that the visuals are worthy of the music every time.

What Makes Bond Bond: When M suggests he exploit his previous relationship with Paris Carver to get at Elliot, Bond resists. Whatever his critics may say about him, Bond is not a woman-hater. This is crucial. He’s a playboy but not an exploiter. That’s why the best Bond girls are those who match him in sophistication or brass.

What Makes Pierce Brosnan Pierce Brosnan: Drinking alone in the hotel room, waiting for Paris. It’s a nod to two scenes in Dr. No: the one where Bond drinks vodka alone in his hotel room and the one where, having already dispatched Miss Taro, he’s waiting for Dent so he can kill him. Here Bond is drinking alone, looking dashing in his slight deshabille, waiting for some one of Carver’s goons to come for him; part of him hopes it’s Paris, part of him dreads that it might be. And of course it is. Brosnan handles the scene with just the right note of bitter determination. Check out the way he flicks the last few drops from his glass. The quintessence of cool.

BAD GUYS: Back to the classic Goldfinger/Blofeld Bond Villain template. Charismatic lunatic with a mad plot to take over/destroy/extort the world. Actually Carver’s plot isn’t all that much more ambitious than Janus’s in GoldenEye, or Whitford’s in The Living Daylights, but Jonathan Pryce plays it larger than life, unlike Sean Bean, and he’s up to the job, unlike Joe Don Baker. From his veneer of unctuous sincerity to his ridiculous chop-socky mockery of Wai Lin, Pryce is just pure fun to watch. The best Bond villain since Klaus Maria Brandauer’s Largo.

(It helps that Carver’s plot is a very relevant satire of the media’s relation to world events; in that sense Tomorrow Never Dies gets better with every passing year.)

Götz Otto as Stamper, Carver’s main muscle, is at the very least memorable, with his Billy Idol looks. But he has to share henchman duties with two other guys who are more fun to watch. One is the inimitable Ricky Jay as Gupta, Carver’s tech wizard; his deadpan delivery is a perfect foil for Pryce’s fulsomeness.

The other is Vincent Schiavelli as Dr. Kaufman, the courtly pistol marksman. In everything from his silly mustache to his leather gloves to his overwrought German accent, Kaufman is an original, and deserves a seat in Henchman Valhalla right next to Messrs. Wint and Kidd.

GRATUITOUS SEX: GS3 again. Once again we start out with a throwaway Bond girl (one more thing to love about the Brosnan Bonds is that they brought back truly gratuitous sex). This time it’s his Danish teacher at Oxford (Cecilie Thomsen), by which we learn that Bond is a “cunning linguist.” (One of the great double entendres.)

Teri Hatcher’s Paris Carver (a desperate housewife if ever there was one) is the damsel-in-distress type of Bond girl. Hatcher was at the peak of her appeal here, and she has the beauty wattage and the cool to convince you of her hold over 007’s emotions. And she’s every bit as good as Brosnan in their last, doomed love scene.

Then there’s Michelle Yeoh as Wai Lin, a rival Chinese agent. It hardly needs to be said, but Yeoh is the real deal. She's the only actress cast as a fellow spy in the series (and there have been many: I’m looking at you, Halle Berry) who has ever looked like a convincing rival or partner for 007. She more than holds her own both on the motorcycle and in that evening dress. Glamor and guts: she’s got it all. Bond Girls don’t come any better than her.

AND VIOLENCE: The precredit action sequence sets a new standard for the series; they’d go out of their way to top it over the next few films. The motorcycle chase through Saigon is also brilliant, reminiscent of the similar scene in Octopussy but making up for that one’s jokiness. The BMW chase in the garage is also a classic, striking just the right balance of light notes and thrills. And speaking of that garage: here’s why we love James Bond movies, when they’re done right. A bunch of thugs are trying to get into Bond’s car, and they can’t, so they start whaling on it with sledgehammers. But they’re impeccably dressed in suits and ties. They don’t even loosen their ties. The quintessence of cool.

BOYS WITH TOYS: Okay, so it’s too bad that the ‘90s series ditched the Aston-Martin for a BMW, and it was worse that we saw so little of the Beamer in GoldenEye (there’s a Woody Allen joke in there somewhere). At least we get a lot of the car here: that chase through the parking garage. Remote control driving, reinflatable tires, on-board missiles, and best of all a cable-cutter at just the right height. Awesome. I mean, we’re approaching You Only Live Twice levels of grooviness here.

JOIN THE NAVY AND SEE THE WORLD: Supercool Hamburg and Asian Tiger-era Thailand (standing in for Vietnam); yin and yang. Both shown off to excellent effect.

ETC.: Once again the opening credit sequence is a stunner, with all those x-ray effects adding a touch of paranoia to the sensuality. If you’ve ever seen the video for the Sheryl Crow theme song, though, you may agree that it could have functioned equally well as the title sequence; its visuals are just as striking. The theme song itself is all that and more, a heartbreaker, perfectly catching the romance and foreboding that Brosnan brings to this movie. Meanwhile, k.d. lang’s end-titles song is just as good – it’s a barnburner, sleazy horns and all… I’m aware that in rating this the best of the Bonds, I’m kind of alone, and I don’t know quite how to explain that. In the end, perhaps there’s just no accounting for taste; but I don’t really believe that. I don’t think tastes are necessarily either universal or exportable, but you can try to account for them. In fact, you have to try, if your discussions of art are to be anything more than just thumbs up or down. This whole series of reviews is an attempt to do that…

RATING: 007.

Johnny Depp in Public Enemies

Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki and I saw this last night. We'll see Johnny Depp in anything, even if it doesn't look good, and this looked good.

I enjoyed it. I came away with my usual feeling about Michael Mann films (not that I've seen them all): that he's a master of visuals and violence on a par with Scorsese, but he doesn't try nearly as hard to convince us that there's something socially or artistically redeeming besides the visuals or beneath the violence. Whether that makes Mann or Scorsese the more honest filmmaker is something I think is open to debate, but I do tend to feel a bit uneasy with myself after enjoying a Michael Mann flick. And I did enjoy this one.

A couple of interesting links. Here Elliott Gorn tells you how historically accurate the film is or isn't. I like this line:

Good historical movies can't be entirely accurate (though Hollywood publicists constantly invite us to hold them to that standard, hoping that we'll mistake verisimilitude for history).

"Mistake verisimilitude for history": great phrase. True. But I will say that the verisimilitude of this film was dazzling, and very pleasurable.

This review by Stephanie Zacharek made me perk up for a minute, because she calls it

a folk song rendered in visual shards instead of notes, hopscotching through parts of the Midwest as it follows Dillinger's numerous bank robberies and evasions.

Is she right? The folk song that immediately jumps to my mind, because its subject appears briefly in the film, is "Pretty Boy Floyd" by Woody Guthrie. (Here's Guthrie singing it, and here's Bob Dylan singing the bejeezus out of it.) And if this is any indication (and I'm game for questioning whether any song to which we can attach an author can really be called "folk" - let's give credit where credit's due), then a folk song about these events would have had a less ambiguous take on Dillinger. Either he's a hero or a villain, a Robin Hood or a repentant sinner, or perhaps even all of that, but whatever, you wouldn't have to wonder much what the song thought, or wanted you to think.

But I did wonder through this film exactly what we were supposed to make of Dillinger. And I think that's kind of the point. Certainly that's the point of Johnny Depp's performance, which is closer to the vest than he's played in ages. There's that wonderful little speech he makes to Billie, where he sums up his life in about twenty-five words, then says, "What else do you need to know?" Well, everything, and maybe nothing. Maybe nothing can explain him; maybe nothing more than the Zen-like, Wang Yangming-like direct action approach to life that Clark Gable hints at in that last speech in Manhattan Melodrama ("die like you lived, all of a sudden"). Mann shows Dillinger watching this, and he gives a little smile of recognition, and then he goes and gets shot. But is that all the movie's trying to do with him?

I guess it's all about brands of ambiguity. I'm afraid I made it sound there like I think folk songs are simple, and they aren't: the expression is usually simple, but there's psychological complexity to make your head spin, moral profundity to make your heart sink, and enough resonant ambiguity to stun a Tuvan throat singer. But I came out of this film unsure of how I felt, and unsure if that insecurity was an artistically productive one.

But I sure as shooting enjoyed it.

James Bond review: GoldenEye (1995)

CUT TO THE CHASE: Welcome to the Second Golden Age of Bond.

BOND, JAMES BOND: Consider this. The precredits sequence is set sometime during the later years of the USSR. Cut to the present – “nine years later.” Assuming the present of the film is the present of the film’s release, that sets the precredits sequence in 1986. I.e., one year after A View To A Kill. GoldenEye, in other words, is inviting us to imagine a world in which Pierce Brosnan, not Timothy Dalton, had succeeded Roger Moore. Unfair to Dalton, perhaps, but you’ll get no complaint from me.

Because now it’s time to lay my cards on the table. I think Pierce Brosnan may be the best Bond of all. Not to diminish Connery’s achievements: he created the role, and without him, Brosnan would have done nothing. But Brosnan, and the team that re-created 007 in the late ‘90s, had the benefit of thirty years of mythology. Brosnan had a lot more to work with, as it were, and he works wonders with what he’s got. He plays Bond as we’d always dreamed of Bond – and maybe it took thirty years for us to dream him this well.

He’s got the look. He’s handsome in a way poor Timothy, for all his Shakespearean chops, simply wasn’t; and his handsomeness is dark and dangerous in a way Roger Moore’s, with all his latent bonhomie, never was. He looks brilliant in formal wear. He looks comfortable behind the wheel of an Aston-Martin (or that Beamer). He looks at home at the baccarat table. He looks suitably stiff-ass next to his CIA opposite number. He looks tough in a fight and tender in the clinch. He embodies James Bond.

And of course he reinvents him. Connery’s charm was easy-going. He was the ultimate man in a man’s, man’s, man’s world, and his charm consisted in his assurance that the world could appreciate him – that the world was his. Brosnan’s charm is one of smoldering intensity. He’s the ultimate man in a world that is no longer a man’s world, and because he can no longer depend on the world appreciating him – because it’s no longer his world, precisely - he has to reach inside for strength. It’s not just that he has to deal with female authority (and he deals with it gracefully, for the most part), it’s that all of the certainties that once defined his world have crumbled. It’s no accident that betrayal is the key to the villain here: Brosnan’s Bond, more than any other, is about being true to one’s own code, to which the world is either indifferent or actively hostile.

What Makes Bond Bond: Driving the tank through the streets of St. Petersburg, covered with debris, he straightens his tie. He knows what letter the license plates for Ferraris start with this year – even the counterfeit ones. He has no problem with female authority.

What Makes Pierce Brosnan Pierce Brosnan: The scene on the beach in Florida before he and Natalya fly to Cuba. He’s brooding about his upcoming confrontation with Trevelyan – he’s brooding. And he looks sexy doing it.

BAD GUYS: Because of his name we shouldn’t be surprised, but Sean Bean’s Alec Trevelyan/Janus cuts both ways as a Bond villain. As the mysterious head of a crime syndicate with a grandiose plan for world disruption and domination, he’s a Bond supervillain in the classic mold. But as an ex-MI6 agent turned petty bank robber, he’s a grittier, more complex opposite number than the series has perhaps ever seen. And as a former partner of 007’s, he makes the confrontation personal: he knows Bond, and exactly what he stands for, and hates him for it. It’s this intimate knowledge of 007 and his values that makes the character work, and it puts a lot of pressure on Bean. He delivers: he brings to the role a panache that succeeds in suggesting an alternate-universe Bond – a Bond gone bad.

Janus’s co-villain, as it were, is General Ouromov, another well-realized character. Again, the credit goes equally to the writing, which gives us the best Russian character since From Russia With Love, and to the actor, Gottfried John, who’s all menace and no satire. In fact all of the Russian characters here are a lot of fun to watch, due to the restraint with which they’re presented and the skill with which they’re portrayed. No red pajamas here.

Evil Henchman. They go back to the View To A Kill template here, making the main henchman a Bond Girl, but this time it works, because Famke Janssen’s Xenia Onatopp is both one of the great Evil Henchmen and one of the great Bond Girls. The look on her face as she guns down the crew at Severnaya is so hilariously over-the-top - she almost steals the movie.

GRATUITOUS SEX: Let’s count. We start off with Caroline (Serena Gordon), sent to Monte Carlo by MI6 to evaluate Bond, and we end with Natalya (Izabella Scorupco), for an unassailable GS quotient of 2. The question is, can we count Onatopp? From Bond’s perspective, no, but from her’s – judging by the look on her face – we can say yes. In fact, the pleasure was all hers.

Certainly she’s a Bond Girl: a ravishing beauty who engages Bond in innuendo and various other forms of sexual behavior. In fact, she easily makes my Bond Girl Top 5.

As does Izabella Scorupco. Her Natalya is stronger and more competent than the average Bond Girl, even while she displays a girlish accessibility. And she looks fantastic in a miniskirt and tights. We really have an embarrassment of riches in the femme department here, the best one-two punch since Thunderball.

AND VIOLENCE: The opening stunt, bungee-jumping off a dam, sets the tone. We’re in classic Bond action territory with this film. Taut, exciting fistfights and gunfights. All handled with precisely the right balance of humor and suspense. They manage some good sight gags in the tank chase, for example, but they never let the film veer off into jokeland. And the final Luke-Vader moment on the antenna is quite effective, and significant. We get 007 once again exercising his license to kill.

BOYS WITH TOYS: Desmond Llewellyn as Q is the only holdover from the previous regime, and he’s a welcome sight. Certainly by this point he’s showing the strains of age – his comic rhythms aren’t quite as spry as they once were – but it’s nice to have one strand of continuity.

The gadgets, like so much else in this film, are perfect. There are a number of nifty things, but they never overshadow the action. And the one really key toy, the exploding ball-point pen, is effective not because it’s an ingenious device, but because the script used it so well, as a means to bring out the neurotic personality of one character and ratchet up the tension in the climactic scene.

JOIN THE NAVY AND SEE THE WORLD: Monte Carlo, Russia, and Cuba. Can’t ask for a better trifecta of Bond locations than that. It was particularly appropriate that the first installment of the resurrected series take a look at post-Soviet Russia. Not just appropriate, but important: the producers needed to tell audiences where Bond stood in this new world, and why he was still important. The Russian setting allowed that, not only demonstrating the kind of villains and villainy the ‘90s could bring, but also the kind of wealth that would make a tuxedoed superspy just the thing. The Brosnan Bonds would make it a point of being classy and glitzy in a way that the series hadn’t seen since the late ‘70s.

ETC.: As we’ve noted, Q is the only survival from the Dalton years. This means M and Moneypenny are both new. And they’re both excellent. Making M a woman was a wise choice, and making that woman Judi Dench was a stroke of genius. Easily the ballsiest M ever. “I prefer bourbon.” Yes… The new Moneypenny, meanwhile, is excellent, a veneer of secretarial dowdiness over an eminently flirtworthy sexiness; and the actress is named Samantha Bond… I suppose retiring Felix Leiter in favor of a new CIA liaison is a nod to continuity, considering Leiter was maimed in LTK; Joe Don Baker as the new guy is much better than he was as the heavy in The Living Daylights… The score may be the one weak point in the film. It’s serviceable but not memorable, and is a bit ginger in its use of the classic themes. It’s by Eric Serra, who also sings the closing-credits song; he sounds like an ersatz Peter Gabriel, and it’s a forgettable song. The title song, however, is a bruiser: Adam Clayton and the Edge from U2 wrote it, and Tina Turner sings it with a lusty power only she possesses. It’s paired with a brilliant set of title visuals that, more than anything up to that point in the film, tell us we’re in a new age. Gone are the elegant and restrained lighting effects Binder used. Now we get surrealist CG landscapes and morphed human figures, in an allegory of the dismantling of the USSR. Very striking, very sensual… Bond was back…

RATING: 007.

Departures (Okuribito)

Departures (Okuribito おくりびと), directed by Takita Yôjirô 滝田洋二郎. This won the Oscar for best foreign film this year. Got lucky and was able to see it in a theater the other day.

Mokkun plays Daigo, a cellist whose orchestra goes out of business. Instead of sticking around in Tokyo and trying to find another gig, he takes his young wife back to his hometown of Yamagata. There he finally finds work as an “encoffiner” (nôkanshi 納棺師), working for Yamazaki Tsutomu’s character.

An encoffiner, as it’s explained, is sort of a subcontractor to the undertaker. In the old days, families would take care of preparing the body for cremation, and then the undertaker would pick up the bodies, take them to the funeral home, conduct the funeral, and arrange for the cremation. But these days fewer and fewer people know how to properly prepare a body for cremation, and they leave it to the undertakers; the undertakers subcontract this work out (at least in this movie) to specialists, the encoffiners.

The encoffiner cleans the body, arranges it, dresses it, and applies makeup to make it look like it did when it was alive, and then finally places the body in the coffin (no embalming, since in Japan basically everybody’s cremated). The whole thing is done with great solemnity and even ceremony, with the loved ones watching.

Daigo gets the job accidentally. He answers a want ad for a place that specializes in sending people on trips. He thinks it’s a travel agency. By the time he realizes what the job entails, he’s hired – the boss likes his looks, says he was born for the job, and won’t let him back out. At first, Daigo is freaked out; it’s one thing to take care of a person recently deceased of natural causes, but what about a body that’s been lying in the heat undiscovered for days?

Gradually Daigo gets used to the job, and in fact comes to appreciate not only its necessity but its beauty. His boss performs his duties with a dignity and an assurance that provides necessary strength to grieving families, and with a loving care that comforts the bereaved. The families are always better off for having seen someone apply such diligence and respect to the arrangement of their loved ones, and Daigo – along with the audience – comes to see the encoffiner as providing something akin to spiritual solace.

This part of the movie is impeccable. Both Yamazaki and Mokkun perform the encoffiner’s tasks with a grace and economy of motion appropriate to a dancer or a tea master. It’s a thing of beauty, and that it’s being performed on dead people makes you feel the essential rightness of it: you really want somebody to take such care with you when you’re dead. It’s easy to see how this can be an emotional experience for the families, and why in the end Daigo finds the job so fulfilling, so much like a calling. (I don’t know what the discourse on undertakers in Japan is, but this part of the movie reminded me of Taguchi Randy’s Konsento, which portrays undertakers in a similar light. This might be a thing.)

The conflict comes courtesy of Daigo’s wife Mika, Hirosue Ryôko. She accompanies Daigo back to Yamagata, quitting her web-design job in Tokyo; she tries to be a good sport about everything, but when she finds out that his new job involves working with corpses (he hides the nature of his job from her as long as he can), she flips and leaves him. “Unclean,” she calls him. Of course she comes back, and in the end comes to appreciate the nobility of what he’s doing. That’s her whole role: to first fail to appreciate, and then come to appreciate, the encoffiner’s nobility.

It’s a woefully underwritten part, and it’s not helped any by the fact that Hirosue, a teen idol who’s long past her sell-by date, is not just a lousy actress, but an annoying presence, cutesy and cloying every moment she’s on screen, except when she’s calling him “unclean.” Of course that moment is the only reason the character exists, but I didn’t really buy it. Yes, Japanese religion/culture involves ideas of ritual cleanliness that mean contact with the dead pollutes you. And so maybe I buy the fact that Daigo’s childhood friend in Yamagata – a hinterland town portrayed as a bastion of Traditional Japanese Goodness – might reject him for what he does. But Mika’s supposed to be a modern Tokyo girl – again, a web designer, for Pete’s sake – and I’m just not sure I buy her blurting out “unclean” when she finds out what he does. “Gross,” yes, but the word she uses (kegarawashii 汚らわしい・穢らわしい) so specifically ties her reaction to notions of ritual cleanliness that neither I nor my native informant (i.e. my wife) are sure this character would really retain to that extent.

There’s a whole subplot involving Daigo’s relationship with his estranged father, too – his father ran away when Daigo was a child, and they haven’t met since. You can probably imagine how this plays out in the movie, and you’re right. I found this subplot pretty uninvolving.

Which means that the peripheral stuff – the conflicts, the subplots, in fact all the characters besides Daigo and his boss (and his boss’s secretary, a trashy/sexy Woman with a Past, played to perfection by Yo Kimiko) – doesn’t really work.

What does work is the central depiction of Daigo and the job he does. This is handled so well, with just the right mix of poignancy and black humor, that it makes the whole movie worthwhile.

Mokkun is excellent, by the way. Another teen idol, just like Hirosue, but he’s as full and deep a presence as she is vapid.

Mizuki Shigeru: Sôin gyokusai seyo!

Speaking of Mizuki Shigeru, here's one from the vault:

Mizuki Shigeru 水木しげる. Sôin gyokusai seyo! 総員玉砕せよ！ (Die Gloriously - That's an Order!) Originally published 1973. Kôdansha Bunko 講談社文庫, 1995.

This is a manga about the author’s experiences as a soldier on the island of New Britain during the war. Mizuki has always been obsessed, evidently, with his war experiences, and has done a lot for the peace movement and to keep the memory of the war alive; he’s written a bunch of short manga stories about it, but this seems to be the only, or at least the first, full-length manga “novel” he did about it.

It’s only semi-autobiographical: here, everyone in the unit dies, whereas in real life Mizuki himself survived. Names are changed, too, though not places, and the minor incidents seem very sharply observed. He’s clearly writing about life in the army from an insider’s perspective.

The main character and Mizuki surrogate is named Maruyama, but he drifts in and out of the narrative; it’s less his story than that of his unit, which is completely destroyed over the course of the book. At first it’s the dangers of the jungle—illness, animals—then it’s enemy attack, as the Americans close in on the island, and then it’s the stupidity of the unit’s leaders, as its commander has this romantic notion of sending them all to a glorious death rather than letting them retreat to the hills to fight a guerilla action. This is the idea of gyokusai, to die like a jewel being crushed, and it was common rhetoric during the war. It’s Maruyama’s misfortune that his commander bought into it: he orders them all into a suicide charge. Some survive, though, and wander north to where the main body of the army is. This is an embarrassment to the higher-ups, though, who feel that to survive a suicide charge is to bring shame on the army. So they pressure the survivors into either offing themselves right then and there or girding up for another suicide charge. Maruyama takes the latter option, but before this charge can get going an American attack blows the whole encampment to smithereens. The end.

Yes, it’s very dark. But it’s leavened with some humor—very dark humor, of course—and more than that with a cynicism toward war and bushido that refuses to make heroes out of anybody. They’re all victims of a stupid war, fought stupidly.

The story is told in an almost haphazard fashion. It’s really hard to tell the characters apart and keep them straight, and even figure out the organization of the various units involved—but I think that’s kind of the point, the idea that all these guys are more or less interchangeable. Certainly the army thinks they’re totally expendable.

One of the recurring motifs is the physical abuse of grunts by officers—the habitual slapping of rookies, making them wash their superiors' loincloths, cook their superiors' meals, etc. Not only are the conditions awful—soldiers are always hungry and half sick—but the treatment is dehumanizing. Thus much of the story is told in the form of little incidents that serve to illustrate the life of the soldiers, rather than a constantly-building tension as the end approaches. In fact, the end kind of approaches out of nowhere—each step is a surprise, just as much of a surprise as any enemy bombing raid must have been to these guys.

The art is fantastic. Most of the time it’s cartoony, but he’ll shift into a hyperrealistic style for key scenes—most noticeably at the end, when everybody’s dead and he gives us very real-looking sketches of piles of dead soldiers.

This is an important comic.

CSI: Miami and color

Bored on a Monday night, in the mood to be couch – what’s a lazier tuber than potatoes? yuca? – we were being couch yucas, grazing through our basic cable channels, we landed on CSI: Miami, as we often do.

Often, because in our house police procedurals rate a bit higher than most reality shows and all sitcoms. As police procedurals go, CSI: Miami is pretty lame, but it’s not completely useless.

We’re unrepentant fans of the Vegas CSI. Not regular viewers, but we’re always happy to run into a rerun. I think Dana Stevens nailed Grissom’s appeal, and the show’s in general. The characters are pleasantly wry, even when they’re skating over deep waters, and Grissom’s bemused but sympathetic acceptance of all human behavior is a pleasant relief from the reactionary tone of most cop shows. Even with him gone, the show’s still doing alright: Morpheus is holding his own.

Such as is displayed on the Miami and New York CSIs. The NY one I’ve only managed to sit through a handful of times. There’s nothing remotely interesting on it; it lacks the pithy writing of the original, and the striking visual style of the Miami branch. All it has are some tired and annoying New York stereotypes, and these aren’t enough to outbalance the sheer banality of setting the show in New York. A huge part of CSI’s appeal is its unconventional Vegas setting; Miami wasn’t quite as original a choice, but as a setting it’s still nowhere near as overworked as New York.

What CSI: Miami really has going for it is the most inventive visual style I’ve seen on a television drama. It’s all about color. And I mean that literally: you can ignore the story altogether (I usually do) and focus on what they’re doing with color, and have yourself an intense hour of viewing.

It didn’t start out that way. For the first couple of seasons they were presenting the show in a slightly more saturated version of the Vegas show’s steely blues and blacks. But then they got wise to the potentials of their tropical setting, and ever since it’s been a wonderland of cool candy colors.

I’d love to sit in on their planning sessions. Sometimes it seems like they pick a specific color to focus on for an entire episode, and everything will be coordinated around it. The detectives’ shirts and ties, the backlighting in the labs, cars, scarves, flowers… The episode I’m currently half-watching, for example: everything is organized around splashes of yellow. But I’ve seen them do lime green episodes, ocean blue, lavenders, oranges.

I sound like either a stoner or an art critic when I say this, and I’m neither, but I’ve never seen anything quite this visual on tv before. It’s not like, say, Ugly Betty, using bright primary colors to create a comic or comic-book atmosphere. CSI: Miami is gauzier than that: instead of brightly colored things, we often get almost abstract floating patches of color. And because the overall tone is more realistic, it gives the radical color-coordination an almost surrealistic dimension. Really: have you ever seen detectives dress that sensitively? Have you ever seen a police station with lighting that artistic?

It’s mesmerizing enough to keep you from noticing how awful the writing is.

I mean, just boneheaded. Take the viewer by the hand and lead them through the plot awful. Some of the storylines evince a little ambition – the South-Florida-requisite drug gangs and amoral nouveaux riches – but the dialogue is so baseball-bat-to-the-head obvious that it kills any potential interest these plots might have.

Which leads me to what we currently love about the show: Horatio Caine’s koans. David Caruso has become justly famous for his delivery of these one-liners, his desperate longing to be Clint Eastwood saying “make my day.” But Caruso can’t claim all the credit. The writers do their bit, too.

Take this one, selected at random from the rerun we were just watching. He’s interrogating a Miami madam, and she muses about how the risk of murder is an occupational hazard for women in her line of work. It’s time to cut to commercial, so Caine draws himself up and says, “Don’t I know it.” Ooh! Zinger! He sure shut her up, didn’t he? But wait – what can he possibly mean by that? How long has Caine been a prostitute, that he can speak of his firsthand knowledge of the violence facing sex workers? What does he know, or don’t? What can he know? Nothing.

It’s not just Caruso’s overacting that makes these bon mots so delicious: it’s the fact that they make no sense. Like I say, they’re koans. Ponder them long enough and I’m sure you’ll reach some kind of enlightenment.

Mizuki Shigeru: Kappa sen'ichiya

Mizuki Shigeru 水木しげる. Kappa sen’ichiya 河童千一夜 (A kappa thousand and one nights). 1993.

To be precise, this is a 1993 bunkobun reprint. All but one of the stories were originally published in 1969 and 1970 in Action Comics アクションコミックス, then collected in 1970 under the title Kappa kô 河童膏 (Kappa ointment); this was republished under the present title in 1976, then augmented in 1986 with one more story, first published in 1980. The 1993 bunkobon edition I read is a reprint of the 1986 edition. I note all this because the 1993 edition includes none of this information: nothing to tell you that these stories weren’t new in 1993.

In the 1960s, Mizuki had a very popular series about kappa called Kappa no Sanpei 河童の三平 (Sanpei the Kappa); it was contemporary with Kitarô and (caveat: I haven’t read it) was a similar thing, sort of aimed at kids and centering around a cute/creepy monster. These stories are a little later, and they don’t feature Sanpei; they’re all about kappa but the stories themselves aren’t connected, and kappa are depicted slightly differently in each one. Moreover, the stories are a little darker, with more loose ends and rough edges; they seem to bear more or less the same relation to Kappa no Sanpei that Kitarô yawa 鬼太郎夜話 does to the main Kitarô series.

By darker, I mean a couple of things. They’re a little more horror-oriented than his kiddie monster tales. They’re closer in spirit to the stories collected in Kaiki kashihon meisakusen and Kyôfu kashihon meisakusen: bad things happen to characters, and endings are usually downbeat. The first story, “Kyûri jigoku きゅうり地獄” (Cucumber hell), has a kappa getting caught in an endless series of Sisyphean punishments. No exit. Elsewhere we have a fair kappa maiden living in eternal solitude after her fox lover is killed; kappa captured and killed and exhibited by humans; a kappa falling in love with a ghost who eventually rejects him. The style is Mizuki’s patented mix of realistic backgrounds and cartoony characters, but the fates of these humorously drawn ghoulies are as haunted as the legends that inspire them.

They’re also dark in that most of the time the kappa’s fates are sealed by their interactions with humans. There’s broad irony here, in that traditionally kappa are thought of as monsters who, if they don’t always actively prey on humans, certainly make life difficult for us. And Mizuki’s kappa are mischievous, but they always come out the losers in their encounters with people. Take the poor kappa who, overcome with a desire for a human female, hides in the latrine of a samurai’s house to peep at the samurai’s daughter (a wonderfully Tanizakian detail). Okay, this is kind of mean. But to punish him the samurai cuts off the kappa’s hand and holds it hostage, thus enslaving the kappa for years. Hardly just desserts.

In fact, in most of these stories the kappa are a version of Mizuki’s suffering Everyman: average guys victimized by forces beyond their control, plucky but incompetent. Mizuki emphasizes this by depicting several of the kappa protagonists with makeshift glasses held on with string; this is a detail he uses on some of his more hapless human characters, including the soldiers meant as a stand-in for Mizuki himself in his war tales.

Stories like these are why I love Mizuki so much. Greil Marcus writes of Bob Dylan that his treatment of folk songs and folk themes reveals the “old, weird America” that lives therein; Mizuki understands the old, weird Japan. It’s a dark, dank place of creepy-crawlies, squishy-squirmies, and heebie-jeebies.

And, occasionally, uncanny beauty, like this depiction of the kappa’s desire for a human woman. It's a disturbing image, to be sure (it's the title page to one of the stories, and depicts a mood, not a scene; it's far more sexually explicit than anything in any of the stories). Far more disturbing than it may appear at first: I think the swirl surrounding the figures is meant to suggest they're underwater, meaning the woman is either drowned or under the kappa's spell. It's horrific. But it's other things, as well. Beautiful, because of the way Mizuki (a terrific draftsman, among other things) depicts the curves of the woman's body, the arc of her back and hair, the placidity of her face. And comic, because of the imbalance in size and grace between the woman and the kappa, a small ugly monster. The horror, the beauty, and the humor all reinforce each other, making this a potent representation of a folkloric motif. (And more besides: if the kappa is Everyman, then this is a representation of Everyman's desire for Woman. Taken that way, what does it say about male desire? That it proceeds from something small, grotesque, shameful, and is directed at something great and beautiful? This image is perhaps an analog to the little Screamers Munch put in the corner of his Madonnas.)