scumbelievable

In the Flesh: Underwater

Underwater wishes it were Alien. Its inability to shake that aspiration undercuts its own very, very modest charms in favor of chasing a standard the attainment of which is, by the ten-minute mark, plainly a pipe dream. Underwater is scattered, redundant, and fatally difficult to follow not because ...

You Love to See It: Deadwood

“Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?” says Wild Bill Hickock to his friend Charlie Utter. Actor Keith Carradine, who played Hicock in the first few episodes of David Milch’s Deadwood, says it like a man holding on for all he’s worth not to life but to the long, slow death by alcohol and gambling he�...

Thanks, I Hate It: The Fighter

There is exactly one interesting shot in David O. Russell’s The Fighter. In it, Mark Wahlberg’s emotionally stunted mama’s boy character speaks to his mother over a corded landline, the cord to which snakes along behind him like a newborn’s umbilicus as she digs her claws ever deeper into his psyche. Everythi...

In the Flesh: The Rise of Skywalker

So there it is. Everyone’s ancestry is established, two extremely chaste kisses have been had, and Disney’s new Star Wars trilogy is over. What was the point of it? I’m not sure anyone involved in the project really knew, beyond “making money.” In three aimless, overlong movies J. J. Abrams and Rian Johnson managed ...

Thanks, I Hate It: Inside Out

Ideally, a metaphor captures a scenario or concept and reinterprets it in visual and narrative language which provides a fresh perspective on that source. Think of the titular creature in Alien and its life cycle as a kind of reimagined rape, a process of penetration, violation, and theft of bodily automony made visc...

In the Flesh: Knives Out

At the center of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is a spirit of social satire, a willingness to jab not just at sociopathic alt-right teens but at complacently liberal adults and the insular, disconnected lives of the rich no matter their political affiliations. That like the prop knife mentioned in the first act and dut...

Dreadnought Is (Almost) Here!

I'm happy to announce that as of tonight Dreadnought's finished draft is sitting in my work folder! Once Tom Horstmann gets the cover ready to go you'll be able to buy a PDF from me on Gumroad or, if you're a $5 patron or higher, you'll get a download link in your inbox first thing! Thanks so much for all your suppor...

Thanks, I Hate It: The Cabin in the Woods

“What if, as the elements of a horror film unfolded, we pointed at them and made excited noises?” sounds more like the backbone of a really lazy episode of MST3K than a credible premise for this thirty million-dollar knowing smirk of a movie. The Cabin in the Woods is a bare frame that thinks it’s a house, a se...

Thanks, I Hate It: Silence

I love Martin Scorsese. Casino is one of the best films ever made; I’m dying to watch The Irishman; no one is better than Marty at using voice-over to add to a scene rather than just explain it. Taxi Driver, The Wolf of Wall Street, Goodfellas, it just goes on and on a...

Manhunt, Chapter I: XX

MANHUNT

Gretchen Felker-Martin

Chapter I: XX

Fran watched the man stoop to drink through her scratched binoculars, squinting in the early afternoon glare. The forest pool, surrounded by skinny pines bare-branched for a good twenty feet under the canopy of needles was dark and brackish, scummed wit...

Thanks, I Hate It: Source Code

Duncan Jones’ Source Code is the kind of film they screen on the bus. It has a score interchangeable with the soundtrack of any gray-blue action movie released in the last fifteen years, a plot like a shitty late-period Michael Crichton novel, and an utterly forgettable pair of leads in Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle...

Valkyrie

Hey gang, the bad news is that I haven't had time to finish this month's chapter of Valkyrie. The good news is that I do have a fun piece of shlocky gore to share with you and that I'm almost done with Dreadnought. There will be a chapter of Valkyrie as per usual next mnth and a makeup chap...

Thanks, I Hate It: The Force Awakens

The Force Awakens, J. J. Abrams' love letter to 1977's A New Hope, clips along pretty well. It has a few thrilling, joyful scenes. The leads are tremendously charming. Beyond that it's a bog-standard 21st century Disney blockbuster which, like the conglomerate's endless reel of "live-action" remakes, relies ...

Thanks, I Hate it: Justice League

You remember when God of War III had just come out on the PS3 and it opened with that super long cinematic where Kratos and the Titans attack Olympus? Imagine if that were an entire movie. Imagine it just kept going and going and happening to you, its greasy two-thirds-real cutscene graphics getting more and...

In the Flesh: The Lighthouse

The Witch, director Robert Eggers' debut film, took the time to depict something complex and beautiful before slowly prizing it open and wolfing down its innards. His sophomore followup, The Lighthouse, takes a different approach, drilling through layers of masculine anger and repression to expose flashes of...

The Blank, Vacant, Dead-Eyed Cinematic Universe

$22,536,782,220. The collective net of all 26 Marvel Cinematic Universe films outstrips an entire year's gross domestic product of the country of Belize by a considerable margin even before merchandising or television enter the picture. 2019-11-05 19:11:30 +0000 UTC View Post

Dreadnought, Chapter One: December 11th, 1998

“Please,” Elaine whimpered. “Please don’t make me go.”

“You’re the pilot on duty,” Hatcher said wearily. She stood at the bedside behind Elaine’s back. The major’s voice was soft, understanding. “We’re depending on you.”

“I can’t do it.”

“Why can’t you do it, El?”

...

Thanks, I Hate It: BoJack Horseman

Lisa Hanawalt's gorgeously idiosyncratic world of loose-limbed people and anthropomorphic animal weirdos, Kristin Schaal's whining, matter-of-factly self-destructive voice performance as washed-up sitcom actress Sarah Lynn, a writer's room smart and inventive enough to spin goofy animal puns into everything from wry one-liner...

Thanks, I Hate It: Paranormal Activity

Is there a blander movie than Paranormal Activity? Are there more generic-looking people than Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat? There's nothing remotely personal about this movie, none of the tight characterization and naturalistic acting that made The Blair Witch Project -- its most obvious point of found ...

Deadlights: Membranes

Permeable barriers hold a special horror for us. They render the line between the known and the unknown tangible while also obscuring what lies beneath them, leaving to our imaginations the task of picturing their denizens and environments. The oil-black liquid into which Scarlett Johansson's nameless character lures a series...

Deadlights: Family Dinner

Cannibalism is a psychologically potent act, a kind of ultimate violation of human social values in which the victim's basic humanity is either denied or disregarded. The meaning of the act, though, depends on the participants and setting. In Antonia Bird's Ravenous, for example, the frontier setting and pos...

Deadlights: That Human Feeling

We all experience dysfunction. Abuse. Addiction. Mental illness. Exposure to a parent's aberrant behavior. None of us makes it through life without being touched by some or all of these things. For some of us, though, that dysfunction penetrates the barriers meant to partition our lives and personalities and envelops us compl...

Deadlights: The Home Front

With his 1981 film Possession, Polish director Andrzej Żuławski took the most commonplace domestic imagery imaginable and dragged it screaming into a mindless, convulsing place of grunting, sweating flesh and impulsive self-destruction. In everything from a child-sized dining table to a tacky electric carving knife...

Thanks, I Hate It: Batman Begins

Batman Begins starts with the self-assured assumption that Batman is extremely serious. From there it proceeds to establish a strictly business version of the caped crusader, one trained by ninjas (and Liam Neeson) in the mountains of Bhutan and crushed under the weight of his responsibility to the corrupt and ailing...

Deadlights: Oh No, I Couldn't Possibly

Robert Wise's 1963 movie The Haunting, based on author Shirley Jackson's famous horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, is a great gnarled tree growing from the seed of a lonely woman's repressed longings. Eleanor "Nell" Lance is a spinster whose adult life was consumed by caring for her invalid mother, rec...

Deadlights: Girls' Night

Women have been the horror genre's subject of choice for centuries. The titular purring lesbian vampire of Joseph Sheridan le Fanu's Carmilla, the hunted and ignored sorority girls of Bob Clark's Black Christmas -- women are horror's most insidious monsters and its most vulnerable, exploitable victims. This ...

Deadlights: From the Gutter

By its nature horror most interface with subversive acts and ideas. The genre has a long history of casting queer characters as monsters and murderers, from Psycho's Norman Bates donning his mother's wig and clothing to prey on unsuspecting women to the transgender vampire Eli in Let the Right One In. Someti...

Deadlights: Grody to the Max

There is no grosser, more decadently rancid movie than Bram Stoker's Dracula, a rock-solid late career classic from The Conversation director Francis Ford Coppola. It's a movie in which the titular vampire is introduced as an obscene and wrinkled ghoul like a candle of melted flesh, a movie in which Dracula ...

Deadlights: Growing Up Is Hard to Do

As a society so much of our collective anxiety focuses on the next generation. This anxiety takes many forms, ranging from agita about media habits (“Times are bad," said Cicero somewhere around 50 B.C. "Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.”) to deeper fears of our own adult mortality, of...

Thanks, I Hate It: Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson has always reminded me of a morlock. He's this pallid, kind of anemic figure hunched beneath a placid little fairytale world and laboring to keep it turning for the amusement of an ignorant public. In lieu of snatching one of us from time to eat and eating us alive down there in the gloomy labyrinth of his domain...