Adaptation. (Spike Jonze, 2002)

Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep in Adaptation.

Charlie Kaufman/Donald Kaufman: Nicolas Cage
Susan Orlean: Meryl Streep
John Laroche: Chris Cooper
Valerie Thomas: Tilda Swinton
Amelia Kavan: Cara Seymour
Alice the Waitress: Judy Greer
Caroline Cunningham: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Marty Bowen: Ron Livingston
Robert McKee: Brian Cox

Director: Spike Jonze
Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman
Based on a book by Susan Orlean
Cinematography: Lance Acord
Production design: K.K. Barrett
Music: Carter Burwell

Adaptation.* is a hall of mirrors and a kind of cinematic pun, starting with the title. The word "adaptation" refers to (1) the process of transforming material from one medium to another, and (2) the evolutionary process by which an organism's particular characteristics enable it to survive. So the movie's Charlie Kaufman is adapting a nonfiction book into a screenplay, with all the "fictionalizing" that is normally involved. But he's also writing, or rather wants to write, about the way plants adapt themselves to their environment, a key subject in Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief. Kaufman is trying to do the honorable thing: stay as close to the original material as possible. He wants "to present it simply without big character arcs or sensationalizing the story." As a result, Charlie is blocked. Meanwhile his twin brother, Donald, is also writing a screenplay, but his is an unfettered original, a preposterous tale about a serial killer with multiple personality disorder, in which the one character is both the killer and the detective trying to capture him. To Charlie's great dismay, while he is blocked in his attempts to adapt Orlean's book, Donald's screenplay is gobbled up by the studios. And from this, Charlie learns a lesson: To adapt in the first sense of the word, you must adapt in the second sense. That is, in order to survive as a screenwriter, you have to make compromises with the source material. So, after meeting with Donald's mentor, Robert McKee, who gives seminars on how to write a screenplay, Charlie gives in and takes McKee's advice: "The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end and you've got a hit." So in the last act of Adaptation, which is a film about a screenwriter blocked by his attempt to stay true to Orlean's book about a quirky naturalist in search of rare orchids, he forgoes his efforts at integrity and turns it into a crowd-pleasing story full of sex and drugs and violence. The real Charlie Kaufman doesn't have a twin brother, but he invented one for the screenplay, partly to provide a character who serves as a motivating force for his fictionalizing of Orlean's book. And he gives the moral of the film to Orlean and her orchid thief, John Laroche. The latter says, "Adaptation is a profound process. Means you figure out how to thrive in the world." To which Orlean replies, "Yeah, but it's easier for plants. I mean they have no memory. They just move on to whatever's next. With a person, though, adapting's almost shameful. It's like running away." Adaptation is a movie about thriver's guilt.

*The period is part of the title, both in the onscreen credits and on the poster for the film. But from now on I'm going to ignore it whenever it results in overpunctuation.

Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000)

Yuko Miyamura in Battle Royale

Shuya Nanahara: Tatsuya Fujiwara
Noriko Nakagawa: Aki Maeda
Kitano: Takeshi Kitano
Shogo Kawada: Taro Yamamoto
Kazuo Kiriyama: Masanobu Ando
Mitsuko Souma: Kou Shibasaki
Takako Chigusa: Chiaki Kuriyama
Shinji Mimura: Takashi Tsukamoto
Hiroki Tsugimura: Sosuke Takaoka
Yukie Utsumi: Eri Ishikawa
Yuko Sakaki: Hitomi Hyuga
Training Video Girl: Yuko Miyamura

Director: Kinji Fukasaku
Screenplay: Kenta Fukasaku
Based on a novel by Koushun Takami
Cinematography: Katsumi Yanagijima
Production design: Kyoko Heya
Film editing: Hirohide Abe

In my brief and admittedly superficial exploration of Japanese cinema, I have often been struck by how postwar filmmakers take a rather harsh attitude toward the generation born after World War II. Even so hip a director as Nagisa Oshima paints a rather jaundiced picture of wayward teenagers in films like Cruel Story of Youth (1960), though suggesting that American influence at least helped push Japanese young people into delinquency. Masahiro Shinoda's Youth in Fury, made the same year as Oshima's film, focuses on the student riots against the Japanese-American mutual security treaty, suggesting that the political impotence of the young is to blame. An older filmmaker like Keisuke Kinshita, in The Young Rebels (1980), blamed the rebelliousness on parents, a familiar scapegoat. And then there's Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale, which subjects the problem of turbulent youth to what we might call a final solution: mutual extermination. In an era plagued by depression and unemployment, the government passes a population-control law: Each year, a middle school class is chosen and sent to a remote island where they are forced to fight to the death. If you're thinking this sounds a lot like The Hunger Games, have another drink. In fact, Suzanne Collins, the author of The Hunger Games trilogy, the first book of which appeared in 2008, has said that she never saw the film or read the 1999 novel by Koushun Takami on which it was based. Her claim is plausible: Battle Royale stirred up so much controversy in Japan over its violence that it wasn't released theatrically in the United States until 2011, partly because American distributors were scared off by memories of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Fukasaku's film is in fact like a bloodier, more barebones version of The Hunger Games movies (Gary Ross, 2012; Francis Lawrence, 2013, 2014, 2015). It's also funnier and scarier because it has been shorn of the Olympic Games-style spectacle of  the American movies. Instead, we get a "training video" in which a ditzy instructor, a parody of Japanese game show hosts, explains the rules: Each player gets a bag of supplies that includes a "weapon" -- ranging from a semiautomatic rifle to a paper fan -- and they are all fitted with monitoring collars that will explode if they try to remove them, as well as if the game ends on the third day with more than one survivor. The film, written by the director's son, Kenta Fukasaku, doesn't waste a lot of time on character development, except for two principal combatants, Shuya and Noriko, who fall in love along the way. There are also a trio of villains: Mitsuko, who relishes the thought of killing her classmates, and a ringer, a "transfer student" named Kazuo Kirayama, who is really a psychopath brought in by the sadistic director of the game, the schoolteacher Kitano, to spice things up. There's another supposed transfer student, Shogo Kawada, who is actually a survivor of an earlier game, but he turns out to be a good guy, seeking revenge on Kitano for his girlfriend's death in that game. Aside from these characters, most of the players are nondescript, except for the computer geek, Shinji Mimura, who manages both to hack into the game's system and to construct a bomb he plans to use to take out the game headquarters. There is much vivid killing in the film, but it's paced so fast, and the characters are mostly so undefined that, except for the fact that these are kids killing kids, it's easy to get caught up in it all. It's not surprising that it's one of Quentin Tarantino's favorite movies.

Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998)

George Clooney, Ving Rhames, and Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight

Jack Foley: George Clooney
Karen Sisco: Jennifer Lopez
Buddy Bragg: Ving Rhames
Maurice Miller: Don Cheadle
Adele: Catherine Keener
Marshal Sisco: Dennis Farina
Glenn Michaels: Steve Zahn
Richard Ripley: Albert Brooks
Chino: Luis Guzmán
Kenneth: Isaiah Washington
White Boy Bob: Keith Loneker
Moselle: Viola Davis
Midge: Nancy Allen
Hejira Henry: Samuel L. Jackson
Ray Nicolette: Michael Keaton

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay: Scott Frank
Based on a novel by Elmore Leonard
Cinematography: Elliot Davis
Film editing: Anne V. Coates

When George Clooney left ER in 1999, there were some who thought it was a case of David Caruso Syndrome: a TV star whose ego had led him to think he had outgrown the medium that made him famous and was ready for movie stardom. There was evidence to support this premise: Clooney had done a disastrous turn as Batman in Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin (1997), a film that Clooney himself has disowned, and his forgettable appearances as a leading man with Michelle Pfeiffer in the romantic comedy One Fine Day (Michael Hoffman, 1996) and with Nicole Kidman in the thriller The Peacemaker (Mimi Leder, 1997) had done little to establish his credibility as a film actor. The one exception was Out of Sight, and among other things it cemented a working relationship with the director who had brought out the best in Clooney, Steven Soderbergh. The two have since worked together numerous times, with Soderbergh serving as director and/or producer, as well as mentoring Clooney's own directing and producing career. What Soderbergh found in Clooney was a kind of puckishness and vulnerability that has been further developed into broad comedy by directors like Joel and Ethan Coen in such films as O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and Hail, Caesar! (2016). But at the same time, Soderbergh helped Clooney figure out how to be a romantic leading man: His scenes with Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight have a kind of heat that Clooney never generated even with Pfeiffer or Kidman. That said, the romantic scenes in Out of Sight are probably the least entertaining part of the film. Much better are the scenes in which Clooney plays off against such wizardly character actors as Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Steve Zahn, and Albert Brooks. Out of Sight puts such superb actors as Catherine Keener and Viola Davis in tiny roles, and also supplies unbilled cameos for Michael Keaton -- as Ray Nicolette, the character he played in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (1997) -- and Samuel L. Jackson. It's wittily put together, with such teases as the opening sequence in which Clooney's Jack Foley angrily dashes his necktie to the ground before going across the street to rob a bank -- an action that isn't explained until halfway through the film, after numerous flashbacks and setting changes. It includes audacious surprises, such as the macabre-comic death of White Boy Bob, whose klutziness has been subtly hinted several times before he brains himself with a slip on the staircase. (Clooney's reaction to the death is priceless.)

Purple Noon (René Clément, 1960)

Alain Delon in Purple Noon

Tom Ripley: Alain Delon
Philippe Greenleaf: Maurice Ronet
Marge Duval: Marie Laforêt
Riccordi: Erno Crisa
O'Brien: Frank Latimore
Freddy Miles: Billy Kearns

Director: René Clément
Screenplay: René Clément, Paul Gégauff
Based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Production design: Paul Bertrand
Film editing: Françoise Javet
Music: Nino Rota

The original title of René Clément's Purple Noon, Plein Soleil, which means "full sun," with its implications of something done out in the open, by the light of day, seems to me a better indication of what this adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley is all about. And not just because the first part of the film, including Ripley's first murder, takes place under the bright sun of the Mediterranean. Ripley is the perfect embodiment of Hamlet's discovery "that one may smile and smile and be a villain," that someone can be as beautiful as Alain Delon and get away with murder. Henri Decaë's gorgeous color cinematography and the film's handsome settings are sometimes thought to be at odds with the darkness of the story. Even Ripley's shabby room at the Hotel Paradiso has a kind of glamour to it -- though that may just be the nostalgia of someone who recalls staying in places like that during his first visit to the Continent, a copy of (it is to laugh) Europe on $5 a Day in hand. But that kind of dissonance is very much to the point:  Ripley is almost an antihero, or antivillain, if you will. His victims are the abusive Philippe Greenleaf and the snotty Freddy Miles, both of whom scorn Ripley for his lowly origins. Highsmith disliked the film's ending which, although it doesn't quite show Ripley brought to justice at least implies that he's about to be caught. Her novel ends with Ripley in triumph, though edgy and paranoid, and able to con and kill again through four sequels. 

White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)

James Cagney and Margaret Wycherly in White Heat

Cody Jarrett: James Cagney
Verna Jarrett: Virginia Mayo
Hank Fallon aka Vic Pardo: Edmond O'Brien
Ma Jarrett: Margaret Wycherly
Big Ed Somers: Steve Cochran
Philip Evans: John Archer
Cotton Valletti: Wally Cassell
Trader Winston: Fred Clark

Director: Raoul Walsh
Screenplay: Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts
Based on a story by Virginia Kellogg
Cinematography: Sidney Hickox
Film Editing: Owen Marks
Music: Max Steiner

It still baffles me that Raoul Walsh's terrific crime thriller White Heat received only one Oscar nomination, and that one for the scenario devised by Virginia Kellogg, which was notoriously revised not only by Kellogg but also by the credited screenwriters Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts with much uncredited help from James Cagney and his friends Humphrey Bogart and Frank McHugh. Where were the nominations for Walsh's no-nonsense direction, Cagney's superbly over-the-top performance (especially the scene in which Cody Jarrett goes berserk on learning of his dear old mother's death), Margaret Wycherly's tiger mom, or even Virginia Mayo's tough broad? Mayo was one of the more underrated blond bombshells of the era. She could have been a rival to Dorothy Malone and Gloria Grahame for tough-girl roles, but under contract to Samuel Goldwyn, she got stuck in forgettable musicals and comedies in which she played the foil to fellow Goldwyn contract player Danny Kaye. The good reviews she got for playing Dana Andrews's cheating wife in William Wyler's 1946 The Best Years of Our Lives showed that she had more acting talent than Goldwyn had revealed, but with a few exceptions -- White Heat being the most notable -- she got stuck in movies that played off her beauty more than her acting ability. Edmond O'Brien also shines in the part of the undercover detective who buddies up to Cody, and a good deal of the suspense of the film hinges on his hair-breadth avoidance of having his cover blown. It's to the credit of Walsh, the supporting players, and the fleet of screenwriters that although Cagney's performance fires the film, it never completely burns it up -- there's always someone or something else to watch.

Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944)

Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight

Paula Alquist: Ingrid Bergman
Gregory Anton: Charles Boyer
Brian Cameron: Joseph Cotten
Miss Thwaites: May Whitty
Nancy: Angela Lansbury
Elizabeth: Barbara Everest

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, John L Balderston
Based on a play by Patrick Hamilton
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg
Art direction: William Ferrari, Cedric Gibbons

There is a tendency among critic-historians to prefer the 1940 Thorold Dickinson film of Gaslight to the slicker and more opulent 1944 version directed by George Cukor, partly because MGM attempted to suppress the earlier film -- an absurd and vicious effort that evidently failed. But although I myself went along with that attitude in my entry on the Dickinson version, I have to admit that rewatching Cukor's film has brought me around, partly because Cukor is a director I have more and more come to appreciate for his warm professionalism. He loves actors and showcasing them, which he does to great effect in the 1944 film, winning an Oscar for Ingrid Bergman -- largely, I think, for her wonderful scene in which Paula turns the tables on Anton -- as well as bringing out Charles Boyer's great gift for attractive menace. And perhaps best of all, giving the teenage Angela Lansbury an opportunity to shine -- and to earn the first of her sadly unrewarded Oscar nominations. Lansbury's Nancy is a saucy baggage, and she steals the show from the stars by wielding her sharp little chin like a knife, making Paula's fear of Nancy entirely credible while flirting boldly with Anton. May Whitty as the nosy Miss Thwaites, with her delight in the macabre, provides a needed bit of comic relief, too. Her curtain line, "Well!", when she comes upon Paula with Brian Cameron after Anton's arrest, provides a satisfactory ending, partly because it's delivered in a different tone -- this time one of delight -- than her earlier scandalized "Well!" when she saw Paula and Anton kissing. This is high Hollywood filmmaking at its most satisfying.

Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

Tomas Ericsson: Gunnar Björnstrand
Märta Lundberg: Ingrid Thulin
Karin Persson: Gunnel Lindblom
Jonas Persson: Max von Sydow
Algot Frövik: Allan Edwall
Fredrik Blom: Olof Thunberg

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Production design: P.A. Lundgren
Film editing: Ulla Ryghe

I have to admit that I was seduced into nostalgia by the opening of Winter Light, as the liturgy and communion service brought back memories of my Methodist childhood. But the mood vanished swiftly as the chill reality of the film took hold: The church is cold and nearly empty, most of its congregants brought there by necessity or duty. The pastor is a hypocrite with a head cold, unable to muster enough enthusiasm for his faith to keep a man who comes to him for counseling from blowing his head off with a shotgun or even to console his widow. His former mistress, the local schoolteacher, is as comfortable in her atheism as he is uneasy in his attempts to believe. It's Bergman at his bleakest, though paradoxically filled with a kind of existential affirmation. The message boils down to: Don't sweat the big stuff. That is, don't let theology get in the way of going on with your life. You can respond to this kind of message in three ways: With stubborn denial, with an exhilarated sense of liberation, or with a painful feeling of loss. Winter Light is a talky film, one that sometimes seems more fit for the stage than for the movies, but its characters are alive and complex, its performances uniformly superb, and its images -- supplied by the great Sven Nykvist -- sometimes even more articulate than its dialogue.

The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921)

Victor Sjöström and Tore Svennberg in The Phantom Carriage

David Holm: Victor Sjöström
Anna Holm: Hilda Borgström
Georges: Tore Svennberg
Edit: Astrid Holm
Edit's Mother: Concordia Selander
Maria: Lisa Lundholm
Gustafsson: Tor Weijden
David's Brother: Einar Axelsson

Director: Victor Sjöström
Screenplay: Victor Sjöström
Based on a novel by Selma Lagerlöf
Cinematography: Julius Jaenzon
Art direction: Alexander Bako, Axel Esbensen

In commenting on Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) recently, I observed that its ending, in which Arthur and Doreen plan a wedding and dream of a home of their own, almost took on the character of a parody of a movie "happy ending," given their previous behavior and the blighted milieu in which they live. It's almost certainly what Reisz and Alan Sillitoe, adapting his own novel, intended. They were making a drama, which depends on belief, in this case an ironic credibility in which the viewer knows the story of Arthur and Doreen hasn't really ended. If drama depends on belief, then melodrama depends on feeling: a willingness to suspend credulity in favor of a kind of emotional certainty, a feeling that the way the story ends is emotionally, if not intellectually, right. That's why I can't quarrel with the ending of The Phantom Carriage, even though I know that the supposed reformation and redemption of David Holm is scarcely credible in terms of real-world alcoholism and abusiveness. It feels right in the context of a ghost story. Victor Sjöström's movie is one of the acknowledged masterpieces of silent film, notable for its lasting influence, not only on Sjöström's compatriot Ingmar Bergman, but even on a filmmaker as recent as Stanley Kubrick, who copied the harrowing scene in which David takes an ax to the door between him and his terrified wife when he filmed the "Here's Johnny!" sequence in The Shining (1980). This is also one of the few films by an actor-director in which the actor is as successful as the director. Granted, we may quibble about a few things, such as the fact that 50-year-old Hilda Borgström was a bit too old to play the mother of two small children (who never seem to age during the film). Or that the ghost story gets jettisoned in favor of the morality tale: If David wasn't really dead, then who gets to relieve Georges of his duty of driving the carriage? But this is melodrama and it's enough to say that it feels right.

Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1959)

Katsuko Wakasugi in Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan

Iemon Tamiya: Shigeru Amachi
Oiwa: Katsuko Wakasugi
Naosuke: Shuntaro Emi
Yomoshichi: Ryuzaburo Nakamura
Osode: Noriko Kitazawa
Ume Ito: Junko Ikeuchi
Maki: Kikuko Hanaoka
Kihe Ito: Hiroshi Hayashi
Takuetsu: Jun Otomo
Samo: Shinjuro Asano

Director: Nobuo Nakagawa
Screenplay: Masayoshi Onuki, Yoshihiro Ishikawa
Based on a play by Nanboku Tsuruya
Cinematography: Tadashi Nishimoto
Production design: Harayasu Kurosawa
Film editing: Shin Nagata
Music: Michiaki Watanabe

Keisuke Kinoshita's 1949 version of the much-adapted ghost story, Yotsuya Kaidan, jettisoned the supernatural in favor of the psychological, turning the protagonist, Iemon, into a somewhat more sympathetic, even tragic figure. But ten years later, Nobuo Nakagawa went straight for the horror: a bloodthirsty, ambitious Iemon, who doesn't even need Naosuke's Iago-like promptings to descend straight into murder. In fact, if you try to apply psychology to Nakagawa's Iemon, you'll run up against some blank walls: It's hard to understand why Iemon in this version even bothers to settle down to a life of umbrella-making after his slaughter of Oiwa's father and his complicity in Naosuke's dispatch of Yomoshichi, his rival for Osode's hand. By this time, Iemon is steeped in blood so far that "returning were as tedious as go o'er," to put it in Macbeth's terms. In this version, the ghosts of Oiwa and Takuetsu are particularly real and vengeful, not just phantoms of Iemon's imagination, as in Kinoshita's version. They lead Iemon into slaughtering Ume and her father and finally to his own doom. Nakagawa's film lacks the subtlety of Kinoshita's, but in the end I think that's for the good: What you want from a ghost story is catharsis, not irony.

Jigoku (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1960)

Shigeru Amachi in Jigoku

Shiro Shimizu: Shigeru Amachi
Yukiko/Sacihko: Utako Mitsuya
Tamura: Yoichi Numata
Gozo Shimizu: Hiroshi Hayashi
Ensai Taniguchi: Jun Otomo
Kinuko: Akiko Yamashita
Kyoichi's Mother: Kiyoko Tsuji
Mrs. Yajima: Fumiko Miyata
Prof. Yajima: Akira Nakamura
Ito Shimizu: Kimie Tokudaiji
Yoko: Akiko Ono
Kyoichi "Tiger" Shiga: Hiroshi Izumida

Director: Nobuo Nakagawa
Screenplay: Nobuo Nakagawa, Ichiro Miyagawa
Cinematography: Mamoru Morita
Production design: Shosuke Sasane, Haruyasu Kurosawa
Film editing: Toshio Goto
Music: Michiaki Watanabe

I know what hell is: I just spent two days without internet access. (Hence the absence of recent posts.) A good chunk of those two days passed waiting for the repairman, who was supposed to arrive between 1 and 4 p.m., but of course showed up just before 6 p.m., so my idea of hell is an infinite waiting room. Which is not the idea that director Nobuo Nakagawa and co-screenwriter Ichiro Miyagawa present. It's pretty much the traditional one of fire and torture. Jigoku is a cult film, as many of the better (or at least more arty) horror films become, and while I'm not a member of the cult I can appreciate the skill with which Nakagawa presents his vision. It's a movie that ranges from deeply somber to extraordinarily lurid. The protagonist, Shiro, is a student who, after celebrating his engagement to Yukiko, gets into a car driven by his sardonic friend Tamura. On a dark road, Tamura runs down and kills a gangster, Kyoichi, whose mother witnesses the accident. Shiro wants to stop, but Tamura keeps driving. Since her son was a gangster, she doesn't report the hit-and-run to the police but, along with Kyoichi's girlfriend, Yoko, vows to hunt down Tamura and Shiro and kill them. After pleading with Tamura, Shiro decides to go to the police himself, but on the way the taxi driver -- whom Shiro briefly hallucinates as Tamura -- runs into a tree and Yukiko, who has reluctantly accompanied Shiro, is killed. Shiro's road to hell is certainly paved with good intentions, and after his death he winds up there. He has received a telegram that his mother is critically ill, so he goes to see her at the home for the elderly that his father runs in the country. She's not as ill as he feared -- the telegram was actually sent by Kyoichi's mother and girlfriend to lure him into their trap. He discovers that the old folks' home his father owns is actually run on the cheap, with a doctor who skimps on medicine and food. He also encounters Sachiko, a young woman who looks exactly like his fiancée, Yukiko, down to the pink parasol she carries. She turns out to be the sister Shiro didn't know he had, but by this time revelations are coming hard and fast: Tamura -- who appears more and more demonic -- turns up too, as do the potential assassins, and in an elaborate concoction of circumstances, everybody dies, including Shiro. And everybody goes to hell, which is a fantasia crafted out of depictions from old Buddhist paintings and traditional cinematic imaginings of the underworld. Shiro learns there that the taxi accident killed not only Yukiko but also their unborn child, and he spends much of his time trying to rescue the infant from the torments of the afterlife. The film ends, after much exploration of the more gruesome torments of hell, with Shiro's vision of the twinned Yukiko and Sachiko, both with pink parasols, but although it suggests Faust being redeemed by Gretchen, there's nothing to indicate that this is any kind of redemption for Shiro. In short, Jigoku is complicated, contrived, confusing, sometimes a little cheesy and more than a little morally questionable -- does Shiro really deserve to go through all this? -- but also thoroughly fascinating.