About 20 minutes into the annoying Boarding Gate, I was wishing Olivier Assayas had made something like Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim instead. The two films really aren’t all that dissimilar, working within the form and generally limited grammar of the crime / thriller genre. (Assayas did tell the audience, before the film started, that he wanted to make a B-movie with a “French independent movie budget”. I’m sure the French have different conceptions of what a B-movie is like, though.) All the right elements are intact in Assayas’ film—the gun in the handbag, international airports, the shadowy company that traffics in vague semi-legalities, the package of drugs hidden in the furniture, a chase that involves scurrying through the warrens of a restaurant’s kitchen—and, most important, “a woman in trouble”, as David Lynch would put it. (The said girl in peril comes in the form of a disappointingly greasy-looking Asia Argento, who looks sleep-deprived for most of the film.)

But while Hartley (and Assayas’ fellow countryman Godard) understood the inherent narrative silliness of the genre, Assayas overcooks Boarding Gate, immersing it in a queasy sordidness that fools the audience into thinking that there’s a grander, more serious undercurrent behind its vacuity, that there’s something larger at stake. There isn’t. And if the sleaze was indeed the point, it misses its mark; it’s not even enjoyable sleaze. (Some guy was talking angrily with another in the Pacific Film Archives bathroom after the movie, shouting, “Abel Ferrara makes ten of these films and nobody gives a shit!”)

I had high hopes for the second half of the film, when Argento’s character slips bloodily from the sweaty clutches of a fleshy Michael Madsen (in the sort of role that Mickey Rourke would have played twenty years ago) and ends up lost and disoriented in Hong Kong, but no such luck; Boarding Gate remains a cold and humorless genre exercise. (It’s even more disappointing considering the fact that the last time I saw Assayas in the flesh was for a Q&A session after his magnificent Irma Vep. Plus he had Maggie Cheung standing next to him. I remember very little about the Q&A, actually, except my thoughts at the time: OH MY GOD I’M BREATHING THE SAME AIR AS MAGGIE CHEUNG.)

Actually I take “humorless” back: the one funny moment in the film comes when Kim Gordon makes a cameo appearance, stomping angrily into the movie and barking orders in Cantonese. But if you didn’t recognize Kim Gordon, or didn’t know who she was—oh well.

It’s something of a paradox to state that Daniel Day-Lewis’ towering, fiery oil derrick of a performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is both the best and worst thing about this film. His acting, as oilman Daniel Plainview, is amazing, both subtly nuanced and overpowering—so much of the latter, really, that it tends to swallow the entire epic whole. Plainview is also impenetrably amoral, a man of few sympathies, and consequently the viewer has none in return for his character. It’s a tough hook to hang an entire movie on, but the film succeeds despite of it.

We see Daniel Plainview first as a gold and silver prospector (and not a very successful one) in a nearly wordless 20-minute opening sequence. Toting along his cherubic adopted son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), Plainview begins to buy up land, practically for pennies, from under unknowing farmers’ feet. It’s not a pleasant sight, and it is testimony to the power of Anderson’s movie that we find ourselves cheering, at least in the first half, for this robber baron. By 1911 Plainview has become one of the most successful oilmen in the region, though (in a crucial distinction) significantly small fry in relation to the big oil companies.

Plainview is approached by Paul Sunday (played by an excellent Paul Dano), who offers not oil, but information: his family’s farm in Little Boston, California, is floating on an “ocean of oil”, and would he be interested in scoping it out? Father and son, pretending to hunt for quail, arrive at the Sunday ranch and find not only oil seeping from the ground, but Paul’s twin brother Eli Sunday (also played by Dano), a young, charismatic preacher and faith healer, against whom Plainview wrestles for Little Boston’s soul. (Full confession: when my friend Eloise and I saw this the other night, we completely missed the point about the twin brother.)

It’s clear early on in the film that Plainview and Sunday’s different brands of hucksterism run on parallel railroad tracks. But Anderson seems to lack the confidence in his audience to appreciate what little subtleties there are in this presentation and chooses to bludgeon us with this obviousness. The abrupt tonal shift in the last twenty minutes, as Plainview descends into Charles Foster Kane madness, simply seems different from what came before; let’s just say that “There Will Be Blood” isn’t just the title, but a promise as well.

There’s little in Anderson’s previous work that suggests the heft of There Will Be Blood, unless you count the Old Testament metaphors made flesh in Magnolia, or the scams in Hard Eight, or Tom Cruise’s penis-evangelist in Magnolia. The movie is beautifully photographed, lingering over the fires of hell spurting uncontrollably from the earth, or the sere, rocky ground out of which such black bounty must be forced (and on which Jonny Greenwood’s Ligeti-like score falls like rain). It’s the visual antithesis, in more ways than one, to Days of Heaven.

This will be the film that Anderson will probably be most remembered for—for its epic breadth; the conflict between God and Mammon, or of fathers and sons; the invocation of Welles, Polanski, and Huston, or of West and Sinclair; the way it has Great American Movie written all over it. But if you ask me for a favorite Anderson film, I wouldn’t hesitate to name the brilliant but flawed Magnolia; despite its stylistic cleverness (and “clever” isn’t necessarily a compliment), glib spirituality, and full-on ripoff of / homage to Short Cuts, there was at least something questing, something more vitally human, about Magnolia and its ruined characters. It’s certainly more alive than the cold, dead heart in Daniel Plainview.

Richard Wong’s exhilarating movie Colma: The Musical (2006) is set in a town south of San Francisco most famous for its cemeteries and the fact that it has more dead residents than there are alive. Colma’s writer and actor, the ridiculously talented H.P. Mendoza, who plays Rodel, gets a lot of mileage from this central metaphor. The suburban deadness that infects the characters—fresh high school graduates with nary a clue about what to do with themselves—is only a little more vital than the graveyards all around them.

Colma revolves around the lives of three characters: an aspiring actor working “the highest-paying shit job” he can find at the mall, an aspiring writer thrown out of his house by his homophobic father, and a woman—well, it’s not really clear what she does, but as the emotional center of the film, the lovely Maribel (L.A. Renigen) does have the best monologue (and taste in interiors, for that matter).

What elevates this from your run-of-the-mill comedy is the fact that it’s a musical, perhaps the most cinematic of forms, the combination of its general grounding in reality—in the case of Colma: The Musical, the enervating flatness of suburbia—and the unreal compulsion to burst into song. This unaccustomed exteriorization of the characters’ emotions, erupting into the narrative, is part of the technique; the viewer is always aware that she or he is watching a movie. But Colma is also quite conscious, and not just in a mocking way, of the absurdity of the genre. (The digs at regional musical theater, for instance, are particularly funny.) The mawkish, sometimes unbearable honesty that accompanies teen angst is lovingly recontextualized here.

“We are so mature for our age,” Billy (Jake Moreno) sings to himself after kissing his brand new girlfriend-to-be for the first time. It’s something of a joke in the context of the movie: a kind of late-adolescent inflated sense of self, made funnier by the emotional immaturity constantly on display. One has the growing awareness that the way they torment each other, sometimes affectionately (or, in some cases, rail against the shallowness around them), is proof of a couple of things: 1) that there really isn’t much of anything else to do in the burbs anyway, and 2) that it reflects their chafing at the bit at the lot that the suburban deities have dealt them.

Colma: The Musical shows Mendoza to be a prodigious wit, both profanely funny and incisively smart, if a little too reliant on a synthesizer, probably recorded in a basement. (This may indeed have been the case.) Lyrically, the easiest comparison that comes to mind is Ben Folds. The writing, in any case, is sharp and all too real, from the stern immigrant father to the cluelessly hilarious way Renigen says the N-word with too much relish. It’s hard to pick a favorite scene: the eight-minute uninterrupted camera shot orchestrated by Wong at a drunken college party (ostensibly, a bunch of SF State hipsters), the cheerfully vicious sing-along in a bar, the unexpectedly poignant dance sequence in a cemetery, or even the goofy montage that introduces the movie.

Yes, it’s a first film, and it looks like one, and if my mention of that fact makes it sound like a disclaimer, it’s not. A weaker comedy would have cast “a lovable pack of misfits”—or if this were a drama, a group of Abercrombie & Fitch models—so it’s quite refreshing to see normal-looking people in this movie. Sometimes they’re not entirely lovable, sometimes they sing off-key, but I’d take this over any new Hollywood musical any day.

(If I do have one minor quibble, it’s the way the screenplay takes liberties with the geography. Sure, it’s fine to pass off The Bitter End or Java On Ocean as being in Colma—though that’s not necessarily implied in the film—but Serramonte Mall and Westmoor High and all those fogged-out little boxes are in Daly fuckin’ City! Plus the cast should have fought to have their real butts on the DVD cover.)

The excitement here is seeing a very young Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimizu—Mifune, in particular, looking oddly like an even more dissolute Bryan Ferry circa 1982—gain each other’s wary trust. Shimizu is a doctor who lives in the slums not out of any commitment to the downtrodden; it’s because he is downtrodden, reeling in a drunken haze most of the day and with no one to call family except for a former gun moll / bar girl he is harboring in his house. That is, until Mifune arrives, as a similarly dissipated Yakuza gangster who has been diagnosed with tuberculosis.

It has all the elements of noir, and it’s filmed that way, with oblique shadows and pinstripe suits. In his pre-color films, Kurosawa seems to have a visual fascination for soiled squalor, suggesting the indignity of the proceedings, and there’s a knock-down, dragged-out fight scene in spilled white paint, the equivalent of all that mud in Stray Dog and The Seven Samurai.

Drunken Angel has the muscularity of a “character study” film from the ‘70s—you can almost imagine an alcoholic Paul Newman or Jeff Bridges (or Nick Nolte, later), gargling with vodka in the morning and flailing around in impotent rage the rest of the day—and if it sounds somewhat hackneyed, it kind of is. Shimizu, in his inexplicable eagerness to save the dying gangster, will inevitably save himself in the process as well, and he does. In the end, it’s probably lesser Kurosawa, which—considering his body of work—means that it’s better than ninety percent of the films out there.

Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, in their book Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots, write that South Korea’s relationship with the United States, much like that of the U.S. and the Philippines, vacillates on the love-hate continuum. “Through military and civilian contacts,” they write, “the United States became at once an object of material longing and materialistic scorn, a heroic savior and a reactionary intruder. Material desire and moral approbation, longing and disdain, have been twin responses to many of the trappings of American culture….”

One wonders what they would have thought of Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host, one of the finest movies I saw last year. Monster movies are said to be symbolic of anxieties burbling up from the depths of a murky id, writ large: postwar fears of a rampant industrialism (Gojira), nuclear annihilation (also Gojira), the savage Other (King Kong), Communism (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), untrammeled adolescent sexuality (The Exorcist), or the simple money-driven compulsion to destroy New York City again (Cloverfield). The Host needs no metaphor to hide this fear of the “reactionary intruder”: the monster here is a paranoid, militarized American chauvinism gone awry, the teratological result of the deliberate dumping of formaldehyde bottles into the Han river. (Something also happens to the protagonist three-quarters of the way through the movie, which I can’t reveal, but how much of him (and what is done to him) represents the Korean body politic is not clear.)

The Host is Bong’s third feature film, if I’m counting correctly, and like the first two, he takes a well-worn genre (the police procedural, the urban yuppie comedy) and injects it with unsettling social critique. (Memories of Murder, which I saw the year before last, is actually a finer, more nuanced work. Incidentally, practically the entire cast of Memories appears in The Host in various configurations, which, I swear, already feels like a full third of the entire Korean film industry.) But Bong’s forte is the way these films slip uncomfortably into different emotional registers: thus the incongruity of a perfectly-timed pratfall (there are two), or the slapstick of a grief-stricken family collapsing clumsily to the ground and hounded by camera-bearing reporters.

But enough about analysis. The Host is genuinely frightening, and Bong knows how to deliver the thrills in the classic monster movie tradition. The second time I saw the film, grown men in the theater were screaming like little girls. (On my third viewing, I was still holding my breath during an entire sequence—let’s just say it involves a girl, a boy, and a tail.) It’s also grimly funny—with visual gags involving squids here and there—but it’s not funny in the same, schlocky way that American (or British, or Australian) horror-comedies are. Bong has a way of undercutting the sober scenes with humor—if only to make the genuinely horrific scenes even starker.

But the personal, as they say, is also about the political, and Bong’s decision to focus on a family unit (rather than, say, a group of attractive college students on vacation) is a wise one, as it adds an emotional heft to the movie. (Contrast this, for instance, with the young interchangeable heroes’ inexplicable decision to return to midtown Manhattan in Cloverfield, to save some woman I barely remember.) Our protagonist—the perpetually sleeping owner of a food stand, portrayed by the always good as something of a simpleton—is motivated by nothing less than the rescue of his daughter, whom he has witnessed being abducted into the water by the monster. Despite its horror movie trappings, the emotional core of the film, seen most eloquently in its quiet scenes, is a simple family reunification. There’s one such scene right in the center of the film: a quiet, haunting, one-minute scene that says more about grief than words could express.

I’ve never been particularly taken with concert films: they inevitably pale in comparison to the experience of being at a live venue, and the cinematography usually runs the gamut from queasy oblique shots to cameras zooming in and out while sitting on tripods. Teppei Kishida’s MONO: The Sky Remains The Same As Ever sidesteps the usual cliches for a largely impressionistic and immersive experience into MONO’s European tour and on stage.

Instead of the usual shots of the musicians setting up their gear (or generally static shots of the lead singer, interspersed with shots of the lead guitarist as she or he goes into the solo), Kishida’s fluid camera swoops unobtrusively over the proceedings, lingering over the tangles of wires on scuffed floors, the blur of the hi-hat, the top of the guitarists’ heads as they hunch over their guitars. (MONO is an instrumental band, which naturally diffuses any focus on any single member of the band.) Perhaps most interesting (at least from a cinematic point of view) is the way the director pointedly includes the audience in the film during the performances: people drumming on the monitors, a couple swaying with their eyes closed—an acknowledgment, perhaps, that they matter just as much as the music itself.

But this is all at the expense of any kind of insight into the Japanese post-rock quartet’s impenetrable (or completely opaque, depending on your views) music: we vaguely hear interviewers asking questions on a voiceover track, but they aren’t exactly answered. There’s an inconsequential piece of footage with Steve Albini at the mixing desk, and another short scene while they rehearse with a string section, but there’s nothing else about the creation of the music. The hyperbole on the MONO website doesn’t exactly deliver, and maybe that’s a good thing. The suitably moody, beautifully shot scenes of wintry landscapes, the sun’s glare through leaves, freeways through rain-spangled windshields perhaps illustrate the emotional pull of their music best.

I realize that the words “for fans only” sounds like I’m panning the film, but it won’t necessarily make a convert of the casual listener; the best way to do that is to take your friend for a drive outside of the city and put “Yearning” on really loud. In the end, the viewer gets what should have been promised in the first place: a solid and fascinatingly filmed visual souvenir of their concerts. Everything is thrillingly here: the ritualistic swaying, Taka’s wall-of-sound freakouts, the 10-minute monolith of pure feedback in the middle of “Lost Snow.”

(Some mild spoilers follow.)

Like Neil Marshall’s The Crying Game, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is all about the penis. (Actually, come to think of it, so is Cronenberg’s adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly.) Or at least that’s how friends, co-workers, and the non-movie critic media characterize the film, especially since the said penis is attached to one Viggo Mortensen. (Actually, come to think of it, vaginas, or substitutes thereof, play supporting roles in Videodrome, Dead Ringers, and Crash as well. Plus there’s a talking anal sphincter in Naked Lunch, but that doesn’t count.)

Okay, I’m just kidding about the penis. Featuring easily the best naked male wrestling scene since Larry Charles’ Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Eastern Promises is, on its surface, a fairly conventional thriller, in much the same way that Mortensen seems like a fairly conventional Russian gangster. You probably already know the story: an underused Naomi Watts stumbles upon a child prostitution ring run by the Russian Mafia after a young pregnant woman dies on her operating table. (The temptation here is to call it the structural (but not thematic) inverse of Cronenberg’s far superior A History of Violence—same director, same lead actor—but I won’t reveal any plot spoilers. Suffice it to say that, like the Asian American Studies grad class I taught for four years or so, it’s about Family and Identity.)

Critics (okay, David Denby, the only review I’ve read so far) have singled out the gore in Eastern Promises—and how it simultaneously detracts from the film’s seriousness, as well as confirming Cronenberg’s more lurid impulses—but I’m wondering whether that may be part of the point. What’s odd about the film is that the gore doesn’t seem real somehow, and I wonder, again, whether it’s deliberate. There are a couple of throat slashings in Eastern Promises that look like they came right out of a Herschell Gordon Lewis film—in other words, patently, stupidly, fake—and then there’s the eyeball-stabbing scene, which results in a rather chaste (and cinematically classic) pool of blood growing underneath the victim’s body. (The way the throat cuttings are shot—front, center, and very slowly—don’t help but foreground their artificiality.)

Contrast this with the oeuvre of another North American director who makes “serious” films but similarly traffics in gore—see Casino, Goodfellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, Gangs of New York—and you’ll see what I mean; Scorsese clearly enjoys this stuff, and makes sure to pummel us with its nauseating realism. Compare this again with Cronenberg’s earlier splatter-filled work in Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and Scanners; despite their horror / fantasy-based context, the scenes of violence in those films are excruciatingly detailed.

But more instructively, compare the odd fakery of Eastern Promises to A History of Violence, which is itself bookended by a kind of staging of the fake: the wholesomeness of Small Town America that, upon a second viewing, takes on a surreality that borders on Blue Velvet; the John Woo-stylings of the cartoonish bloodbath at the end. Eastern Promises also seems set in a London that (deliberately?) doesn’t look like the moviegoer’s London (but probably familiar to its residents); the fact that the film is populated by a cast and crew (Cronenberg, Mortensen, Watts, Cassel, Mueller-Stahl, Cusack) that seems like they’re from pretty much everywhere except Russia or London—well, I don’t know where this is going. Maybe some grad student can figure this out.

About 20 minutes into the annoying Boarding Gate, I was wishing Olivier Assayas had made something like Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim instead. The two films really aren’t all that dissimilar, working within the form and generally limited grammar of the crime / thriller genre. (Assayas did tell the audience, before the film started, that he wanted to make a B-movie with a “French independent movie budget”. I’m sure the French have different conceptions of what a B-movie is like, though.) All the right elements are intact in Assayas’ film—the gun in the handbag, international airports, the shadowy company that traffics in vague semi-legalities, the package of drugs hidden in the furniture, a chase that involves scurrying through the warrens of a restaurant’s kitchen—and, most important, “a woman in trouble”, as David Lynch would put it. (The said girl in peril comes in the form of a disappointingly greasy-looking Asia Argento, who looks sleep-deprived for most of the film.)

But while Hartley (and Assayas’ fellow countryman Godard) understood the inherent narrative silliness of the genre, Assayas overcooks Boarding Gate, immersing it in a queasy sordidness that fools the audience into thinking that there’s a grander, more serious undercurrent behind its vacuity, that there’s something larger at stake. There isn’t. And if the sleaze was indeed the point, it misses its mark; it’s not even enjoyable sleaze. (Some guy was talking angrily with another in the Pacific Film Archives bathroom after the movie, shouting, “Abel Ferrara makes ten of these films and nobody gives a shit!”)

I had high hopes for the second half of the film, when Argento’s character slips bloodily from the sweaty clutches of a fleshy Michael Madsen (in the sort of role that Mickey Rourke would have played twenty years ago) and ends up lost and disoriented in Hong Kong, but no such luck; Boarding Gate remains a cold and humorless genre exercise. (It’s even more disappointing considering the fact that the last time I saw Assayas in the flesh was for a Q&A session after his magnificent Irma Vep. Plus he had Maggie Cheung standing next to him. I remember very little about the Q&A, actually, except my thoughts at the time: OH MY GOD I’M BREATHING THE SAME AIR AS MAGGIE CHEUNG.)

Actually I take “humorless” back: the one funny moment in the film comes when Kim Gordon makes a cameo appearance, stomping angrily into the movie and barking orders in Cantonese. But if you didn’t recognize Kim Gordon, or didn’t know who she was—oh well.

I’m a little puzzled about Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff. A much-anticipated viewing left me cold, and I wonder if it’s a reflection of the high expectations that always attend Films That Are Supposed To Be Good For You. (Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante was one of those, but I should probably watch it a second time.) Or perhaps it’s one of those films that make more sense after an accretion of various elements (life experience, “wisdom”, a more expanded filmic vocabulary), like L’Avventura, but I’m not sure about that either. It makes me wonder, then, about the film’s critical reception in the West upon its initial release, and whether its entry into the Canon had extra-cinematic reasons beyond my ken, but who am I to question this, really?

I recall reading a list compiled by Errol Morris in some magazine recently where he rather fatuously proclaims something to the effect that there were no such things as great movies, only great scenes. (The Thin Blue Line was a great movie however.) There are certainly a number of great scenes: the parallel crane shots that show the siblings gathering wood, the painful finale on a seaweed-strewn beach. (Foremost in my mind, though, is the scene when the indentured daughter, Anju, violently separated from her mother years before, hears a newly-arrived slave singing a song about Anju and her brother—singing her life with her words, essentially—and realizing it must have been learned from her long-missing mother, mourning for her children over the miles and years.) But I’m not convinced that Sansho the Bailiff is a great movie.

I think Mizoguchi’s much-vaunted “feminism” is perhaps lost in translation here, especially due to the passage of time. There may, of course, be something completely deliberate here on Mizoguchi’s part. The men in the film, when they’re not being malicious (and the titular character himself is only a slightly bigger honcho than others, but not by much), are merely ineffectual. The brother is shown to be capable of abusing his power once he starts working for Sansho, but then foolishly squanders that power when it comes to his family. The bailiff’s son is depicted as clearly possessing a sense of righteousness, and Mizoguchi sets him up as a potential savior and hero—only to have him literally walk out of the film. The governor (and father of Anju) is exiled precisely because he has shown too much compassion for the peasants of his prefecture—but chooses, even as he upholds his principles, to abandon his wife and children. Unlike the more stately Life of Oharu, where the dignified courtesan of the title faces her suffering with something that could even be called “empowerment”, the women characters of Sansho the Bailiff are grimly handed over to abuse and suicide. Perhaps Mizoguchi’s films should be called “female-centered” instead—centered, anyway, on the fates of women and the cruelty they receive at the hands of men.

There isn’t a single boring moment in Abbas Kiarostami’s Five, but it’s difficult to convince people of this when the “protagonists” of the film are, in order of appearance, a piece of driftwood, the crashing surf and a railing, sunbathing dogs silhouetted against a glaringly bright sea, a platoon of ducks walking one way and then the other, and finally, the moon reflected in a pond just before a rainstorm. (After giving her this synopsis, my friend Jane paused for a beat, then said, “You really need to start dating again.”)

I write “in order of appearance” because this merely pertains to the visual elements of the film; the sounds of waves crashing and frogs croaking are as essential to the comprehension of the movie as what the audience sees. (In short, the film enacts a re-privileging of the sense of hearing, which perpetually plays second fiddle to the gaze. If people talk about sound in cinema nowadays it’s always about THX vs Dolby Digital.)

Five’s secondary title is “5 Long Takes Dedicated To Ozu”, but I haven’t seen enough Ozu to see the similarities, I’m afraid (and I’m not familiar with the whole transcendentalism thing either). And I won’t attempt to philosophize over the meaning of the piece of wood being buffeted by waves and the odd dramatic tension when it disappears from the camera and returns, a few minutes later, already (tragically?) swept out to sea. Or the ducks, intent on waddling to a destination off-screen, only to return en masse to the other direction.

It’s a little easier to write about particular segments and how they work. My favorite is the fifth: a barely visible reflection of the full moon on a pond, with an oppressively loud chorus of frogs (and a lone barking dog, followed later by crowing roosters) croaking on cue. The otherwise perfect circle of the moon is stretched, sliced, and chopped by the ripples on the water; it’s hard not to think of the instability of light and chemicals on celluloid in this scene. Sometimes the turbulence, and clouds across the moon, render the light into a milky gray. When the rain comes down, only the intermittent lightning on raindrops is left to illuminate the scene. It’s an impressive aesthetic minimalism—cinema literally reduced to nothing but sound and flicker—and all the more conceptually interesting in its technology because Kiarostami relies only on the vicissitudes of nature to prove his point.