Warm Me Up

I am not happy about this sudden shift to freezing cold weather.

Sure, I knew I wasn't going to be able to continue wearing shorts on my walk indefinitely, but did we have to jump from shorts on Saturday to a fleece today?

Heck, I finally had to turn on the heat today for the first time since March. Not good.

So I have to admit that when I was considering my options for tonight, I decided on a movie and that was it. I was willing to go outside briefly for the sake of some culture, but then I wanted to come back home, crawl into bed and read.

Could I be any more boring or a bigger weather wimp?

At least the movie was worth seeing: "Kuroneko," a 1968 Japanese horror film that was the final screening for this fall's VCU Cinematheque series.

By way of introduction, the film professor told us it was a movie that blended naturalism and surrealism to achieve its effects.

Then he remembered he was talking to a theater that was 90% film students and cautioned, "It's a horror film beautifully shot in black and white. But it's from 1968, so there's no gushing blood. It's more psychological horror."

I could hear the 20-year olds around me groaning in disappointment.

Prof said there's be no Q & A period tonight because of the possibility of snow, more evidence of weather hampering fun.

What none of the audience anticipated was that the opening scene would be of a band of samurais raping and killing two women, and torching their house as they left. A black cat licks their bloody faces.

Heavy stuff.

The story, set in the 15th century, centered on how these two women, the mother and wife of a samurai, come back as ghosts who lure samurai back to their abode, get them drunk on sake and then, cat-like, rip their throats out.

A little like "Arsenic and Old Lace" except instead of tossing the bodies in the basement, they toss them in the bamboo grove where villagers scavenge their pockets.

Unfortunately, scenes of drinking and sex caused tittering amongst the underage set, making me doubt the professor's admonition that if they're going to be filmmakers one day, they need to know more than just independent American films.

Don't they also have to, oh, I don't know, be able to understand drinking and sex in the context of the plot without acting like children?

It truly was a lushly-shot film with odd angles of light, ghosts who could somersault in the air and horses who made loud clopping sounds even when they were walking on dirt and leaves.

Obviously, this was not the naturalistic part of the movie.

Plot-wise, the problem arose when the samurai who approaches is her son/her husband so neither wants to kill him.

The tragedy is that the wife makes a deal with the underworld to make love with her husband for seven days but then she must go directly to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Of course, this devastates him but there's no bringing her back.

Mom then becomes the problem because as part of her deal to come back to life, she was under obligation to kill every samurai, even her baby boy.

He cuts off her arm, she comes back to retrieve it and flies through the roof while he lays dying with snow falling on him.

There it was again, cold weather...ruining people's lives since the 15th century.