PUSHING DAISIES
Season 1 Episode 8
“Bitter Sweets”
Written by Abby Gewanter
Directed by Allan Kroeker
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

This one’s another winner, as Dilly Balsam (ex-SNLer Molly Shannon, who also voiced Patience the Vampire in The Amazing Screw-On Head), co-owner of Balsam’s Bittersweets Taffy & Sweets Emporium, moves in across the street, intent on crushing her perceived competition, The Pie Hole.
Ned, now officially Chuck’s boyfriend (and preoccupied with his guilt over inadvertently causing her father’s death), is hesitant to engage in the war, the hostilities inadvertently pushed into overdrive by a welcome gift of Georgia peach pie. Olive and Chuck have no problem in getting down and dirty though, and are ready to do so.
They get their chance when Dilly gets health inspector Andrew Brown (Steve Hytner, from The Bill Engvall Show and Roswell) to pay a surprise visit to The Pie Ho (its sign “inexplicably” malfunctioning). Brown discovers the locked room stocked full of rotten fruit (which Ned uses for his ingredients, of course) and shuts the Ho down.

In retaliation, Olive and Chuck break in and release a pack of rats in the Emporium. Unknown to them, Dilly’s brother Billy (Mike White, who starred in The Good Girl and The Stepford Wives, and recently worked with Shannon in his directorial debut, Year of the Dog) is already a floating, taffied corpse in one of the shop’s vats.
When Ned finds out about the rat problem, he goes next door to try and clean the mess up, but instead touches Billy’s corpse by mistake. But Billy can’t talk with a mouthful of taffy, and when the cops bust in, Ned touches Billy again, and he’s caught red-handed, with Billy’s now permanently dead, taffied body.

With Ned in jail, Emerson is forced to sleuth the old-fashioned way, and with Chuck’s (and the coroner’s) help, they find out that Billy bit off one of his killer’s fingers before dying. Sadly Billy’s stomach acids eradicated all trace of a fingerprint, so Emerson and Chuck go to the scene of the crime, and with the help of some flour, lift a pair of handprints (with a grand total of 9 fingers) from a marble countertop.
It turns out that Billy’s killer was Brown, who was rudely demanding to be paid for his “surprise inspection” to The Pie Ho. A scuffle takes place, and voila, dead, taffied Billy.

With Ned in the clear, there’s a welcome back do at the Ho, courtesy of Olive and Chuck. Later that evening, and despite having decided otherwise, Ned confesses that he caused Chuck’s dad’s death. (Dang that cliffhanger!)
There’re also a couple of subplots involving a “carpool doll” (think Lars and the Real Girl), and the return of traveling salesman Alfredo Aldarisio, who is still smitten with Olive, and whom Olive doesn’t realize is right there in front of her, until it’s too late.

At episode 8, we’re winding down on the interrupted freshman season of Pushing Daisies and it’s still going strong. With yet another Hitchcock homage in this episode, “Bitter Sweets” keeps the winning streak going.

Parting shot: We also discover that Dilly is capable of murder, as we see her getting rid of Brown‘s body, which could actually be yet another Hitchcock nod. (If only that 4-fingered hand had been shown sticking out of the trunk of a car as it sank into the muck, then the reference would be undeniable…)

Parting shot: Reviews of The Amazing Screw-On Head and The Stepford Wives can be found in the Archive.

(Image courtesy of pushing-daisies.com.)

PAPRIKA
(Review)

I will freely admit I am not a big anime freak. In fact, I came to anime by way of my being a film geek (and a gaggle of college friends who were big anime freaks).
Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira opened the doors for me, of course, as it did for so many others. But my anime hero is, hands down, Satoshi Kon.
Even since he blew me away with Perfect Blue, Kon has consistently amazed and impressed me with his work: Sennen Joyu (Millennium Actress), Tokyo Godfathers, and the 13-part Moso Dairinin (Paranoia Agent).
Now he’s back with Paprika, and I’m just now picking my jaw up from off the floor.

Paprika opens with a familiar circus gag: a clown unfolding himself from out of a car that is far too small to have contained him in the first place. This is, of course, a visual cue to one of the film’s themes: how something vast like dreams can be contained in the tiny vessels of our minds.
Paprika is about the DC Mini, a groundbreaking invention that allows two individuals to share a common dream. Much like the scenario posited in Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, one person can enter the subconscious of another, and interact, not just with that person, but with his dreaming mind as well.
While a Detective Konukawa—stumped on a murder case he is investigating—is helped by the eponymous Paprika, who enters his dreams to see whether the problem is rooted there, a number of DC Minis are stolen from the company developing the technology. Soon, dreams are used to invade people’s psyches, trapping them in a waking state of delusion and mad ramblings, a chilling precursor to a more widespread epidemic that will threaten the very fabric of reality.

While in past films like Perfect Blue and Sennen Joyu, Kon has mined the idea of fiction intruding on reality (and vice versa) and utilized it as a narrative device, in Paprika, he takes that theme and places it at the very heart of the work.
There, at the dreaming center of Paprika, that theme plays with the other ideas that bubble beneath its animated skin—the parallels between dreams and the Internet; truth that can spring from fiction; dream as film and film as modern man’s repository of dreams—and produces a brilliant piece of inspired storytelling that is the latest gem in Kon’s dazzling body of work.

As with all of his films, Paprika is a visually arresting piece, the dreamscapes on view utilizing motifs from myth, fairy tales, and film (which, of course, serves the same purpose today that myths and fairy tales used to in the past). Appropriately enough, the dreams we get to see in the film are unsettling and disturbing, and Kon rifles through imagery normally associated with children (circuses and dolls and parades) and extracts their inherent sinister qualities to suit his storytelling purposes.

But above and beyond the visual, what probably draws me to Kon the most is his clear love of film and how he draws on that for his anime.
In Perfect Blue, he brought Hitchcock and giallo to the animated film in a razor-edged mindf*ck that constantly shifted between fiction and reality as a J-pop singer trying to segue into acting becomes embroiled in murder. In Sennen Joyu, an aging film star reminisces about her past, her life and her films intertwining to form one long, shining reel of memory. In Tokyo Godfathers (clearly a play on a cinematic tradition that stretches back to the 1936 Western, Three Godfathers), three of Japan’s homeless find an infant during Christmas and become the child’s unlikely guardians.
In each of these anime, film is either a crucial plot element or an obvious inspiration, and it is partly because of this clear love for the medium that Kon’s works play so differently than those of other anime heavyweights like Otomo or Miyazaki. There is also clearly a postmodern bent to Kon’s storytelling that serves to elevate his work even more above the average anime.
What can I say? I love his stuff.

Of course, one could argue that Paprika is not his best work—and I’d agree. But as it stands, Paprika is nonetheless better than your average anime, and is another excellent masterwork from Kon. Certainly worth a look, even if you aren’t particularly an anime geek.

(Paprika OS courtesy of impawards.com; image courtesy of outnow.ch.)

SHADOWS
ON THE
SHOWER
CURTAIN
(A Psycho
Retrospective)

Dedicated to the memory of Janet Leigh, whose final film role was, appropriately enough, opposite real-life daughter (and fellow Scream Queen) Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween: H20.

Note: This retrospective assumes that the reader has seen either version of Psycho, or is at least familiar with its plot.

“Mother! Oh God! Mother! Blood! Blood!”

From the opening title sequence designed by Saul Bass, orchestrated to the screeching violins of Bernard Herrmann, all the way to the final shot of the car being pulled from the swamp, Psycho is a riveting and unforgettable cinematic experience.
By now, nearly 50 years after its initial release, many are aware of it, even if they’ve never actually seen the 1960 original. Some may have seen the color remake by Gus Van Sant, starring Anne Heche, Vince Vaughn, and Viggo Mortensen in his pre-Aragorn days. There may even be some film students out there who’ve studied the editing of the famous shower stabbing frame by frame, and never bothered to watch the entire film. Their loss.
And, barring all of that, you may have just heard Janet Leigh’s immortal shower scream from a nearby cellphone. Ah, the wonders of modern technology.

“We have twelve vacancies. Twelve cabins, twelve vacancies.”

There are very few individuals who may wish to refute, or even debate, the genius of Alfred Hitchcock as a film director. And in handling the suspense thriller, there are even fewer who can come close to his masterful technique and his uncanny ability to keep the audience at the edge of their proverbial seats.
Consider that in the nearly half-century since its release, Psycho has become known as the granddaddy of the slasher film; the daddy, being John Carpenter’s Halloween. But note that Psycho lacks one of the by-now traditional staples of the slasher film: the chase sequence. Nowhere in the film do we see Norman Bates in a cheap wig and his mother’s clothes stalking either of the Crane sisters down the halls and rooms of the Bates house. Think about it, a suspense thriller without a single chase scene.
Instead, what we have is the spectre of pursuit, the feeling of being on the run, as Marion Crane drives down stretches of the American Interstate with nothing for company except the imagined voices of lovers, co-workers, policemen, and used car salesmen, with Bernard Herrmann’s hauntingly insistent string section for musical accompaniment.
Another of Psycho’s brilliant achievements is that it is successful in making the audience identify with a less-than-sterling individual as the apparent main protagonist of the tale. Yes, Marion Crane is no murderer; she is simply a person placed in the barreling way of temptation, and who succumbs, mistakenly thinking that $40,000 can buy off her unhappiness (and her lover’s debts).
Still, this was no Jimmy Stewart, the good man unwittingly pulled into mystery and intrigue and danger (as in Hitchcock’s brilliant Rear Window, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2004). This was not even Tippi Hedren in The Birds. This was a woman who stole $40,000. And she was our heroine.
Until the shower scene.

“It’s not as if she were a maniac. A raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes.”

And here, again, Hitchcock subverts, because, the instant we recover from the shock of Marion Crane’s sudden demise, we realize we are without anyone to identify with.
Then, bizarrely, we find ourselves identifying with Norman, who, after all, is only cleaning up. Only doing what a loving, dutiful son would to protect his mother, regardless of how psychotic she may be. Our breath even hitches, as Norman’s does, when Marion’s car stops sinking into the swamp for a second or two.
It is only once the film is over that we realize, for a certain window of Psycho’s running time, before we are introduced to Lila Crane, that we actually identified with the killer. That, in the end, Hitchcock actually did get us to identify, even if only briefly, with a murderer.

“My mother, uh, what is the phrase? She isn’t quite herself today.”

And of course, there’s the cross-dressing.
Keep in mind, this was 1960. Reportedly, the on-screen toilet flushing was already a big deal. Here, not only did we have a loony stabbing women in the shower, but we had a loony stabbing women in the shower while he was dressed up as his mother!
Thankfully, the psychosexual basis for Norman’s pathology is neatly mapped out in the film’s denouement; in the history of serial killer films, Norman Bates is one of the few whose pathology we are actually privy to.
Additionally, Anthony Perkins’ performance affords Norman Bates a very lonely and fragile vulnerability. We understand the trap he was born in, we sympathize with his predicament, at least until we realize just how disturbed the poor man really is.

“Well, a… a boy’s best friend is his mother.”

It is in Hitchcock’s skilled manipulation and subversion of audience expectations that Psycho finds one of its main strengths, and its influence can be seen in the early giallo of Dario Argento—who, in turn, according to writer Douglas E. Winter, has influenced “more directors of horror films since Hitchcock himself”—as well as more recent works like Satoshi Kon’s razor-edged anime, Perfect Blue, and Takashi Miike’s wildly disturbing Audition (both films also clearly influenced by Argento).
Psycho is a film that holds up well for its age—which is, I suppose, the true definition of the term “classic”—the sort of suspense thriller you can watch repeatedly, even if you already know exactly how it all turns out. According to Steven H. Scheuer’s Movies on TV and Videocassette, it “… broke all of the existing rules for horror films and filmmakers,” and “… set the standard for a generation of new ones,” claims that I can only agree with without reservation.

Author’s note: giallo – moody and violent suspense thriller from the Italian school of horror

(Psycho Italian OS courtesy of movieposterclassics.com and Psycho DVD cover art courtesy of ropeofsilicon.com.)