scumbelievable posts
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In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e02: Toil and Trouble
Nothing in ‘Toil and Trouble’, the second episode of Dave Filoni’s lifeless Ahsoka, is framed right. The lightsaber fight alongside the dry dock fails to utilize the empty dock’s depth. Sabine walking down a broad enamel staircase to look longingly at a (truly godawful) mural commemorating her friends is angled to strip all impact from the sight of the young Mandalorian newly kitted out in her ancestral armor. An earlier scene in which Sabine attempts to modulate the power supply to a droid’s severed head in order to recover point of ...
In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e01: Master and Apprentice
It’s impressive how completely Dave Filoni manages to replicate in Ahsoka the stiff, lifeless feel of the CGI cartoons where he first made his bones as LucasFilm’s diligent, lore-loving, and completely untalented nerd in chief. There’s little lighting to speak of. Prosthetics and costumes are cheap-looking. Choreography is indifferent, blocking a clear afterthought. An early sequence in which Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson, who allegedly assaulted longtime family friend and employee Dedrek Finley, a transgender man, in 2019) walks in a circl...
In the Flesh: Mother (2009)
There are few forces in human civilization as invested with unreasoning power as the hatred of those with little for those with less. See how contempt and projected feelings of disposability flow downhill in Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, from the local cops eager to fob a murder rap off on unlikable young intellectually disabled man Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) to Do-joon’s entitled contempt for Moon Ah-jung (Moon Hee-ra), a young woman of whose murder he is suspected, and Ah-jung’s casual building up of a blackmail database of her many lovers on her ...
In the Flesh: The Bear s2e06-7: ‘Fishes’ and ‘Forks’
In the Flesh: The Bear s2e06-7: ‘Fishes’ and ‘Forks’‘Fishes’“I make things beautiful for them,” gasps a drunken Donna Berzatto (Jaime Lee Curtis) from the depths of what must be a decades-long depression. “But no one makes things beautiful for me.” It’s a heart-wrenching line reading, Curtis’s voice quavering with a complex mixture of rage, self-pity, desolation, and hopelessness, her lined face flickering from rueful, self-aware smile to expressionless death mask in the space of a moment. It’s a tall order for a chara...
Thank You <3
I just wanted to thank everyone for being so good-natured about all the errors at the start of the month, and about navigating resubscription. Watching a whole year of growth get wiped out by the site neglecting to update its payment processors was so dispiriting, but I'm on the way to clawing most of it back. You guys enable me to support my community and myself, and to choose what I write about. I'm incredibly grateful for you.
Paper Cuts: Vattu
It’s a crime that Evan Dahm’s Vattu isn’t on school reading lists across the country, that it isn’t given to every child beginning to grapple from any angle with the horrors of imperialism and settler colonialism, that its exquisite renderings of alien architecture and landscapes aren’t as well-known as the scratchy linework of Art Spiegelman’s MAUS or the desolate Gothic cityscapes of Alan Moore’s From Hell. Begun in 2010 and concluded in 2022, the comic follows the eponymous character, a member of a nameless race of nomads absor...
WYRM XII
The Sunken IsleLizzie circled high above the burning city, clinging tightly to the pommel of Chauntecleer’s saddle. There were fires in Cheapside and along the waterfront. Westminster was burning. She had seen the new wyrms come up out of the sea, surfacing along the Ark’s still-smoking bulk and swimming to shore with sinuous power. Huge. Monstrous. Shaking themselves dry like ostri coming in out of the rain. Dozens of them driving knives of blind, blood-maddened terror into the city’s guts as they left the mouth of the Thames and stalked...
WYRM XI
LondiniumThe city was burning. Stephen watched it from the Tower while in the queen’s apartments sir Godfrey ended Richard’s line. It was an ugly thing. A small and sad and somehow pitiful act, to cut short those little lives into which England had poured all her might and cruelty and malice and in whose blood flowed all the lakes of molten gold that were her wealth. Eight inches of cheap steel was all it took to kill a kingdom. They had drawn straws for it, and Stephen had won. He didn’t feel victorious. There was fire in the streets, an...
The Deadlights Theater August 2023: Order Up
8/2, 7pm: Eat Drink, Man Woman8/6, 1 & 7pm: Tampopo8/9, 7pm: Pig8/13, 1 & 7pm: Big Night8/16, 7pm: La Grande Bouffe8/20, 1 & 7pm: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover8/23, 7pm: Delicatessen8/27, 1 & 7pm: The Menu
Wyrm X
CleopatraKate lay staring at the ceiling from her bed, chewing on a stray lock of her hair. It was a filthy habit, one her mother had tried to break her of for years, but there was a comfort in it, a sense of small, deniable destruction. Her childhood tutor, an aged Greek with a long gray beard and a name she had forgotten, had once shown her an illumination of a serpent devouring its own tail, swallowing and being swallowed. “That’s eternity,” he’d said one day when she’d asked him about heaven, stabbing a gnarled finger at the page....
In the Flesh: M3GAN
The evil doll is one of those hoary old archetypes of horror that, in spite of never having been pulled off as anything but campy fun, just won’t quit. Who’s genuinely scared of Chucky? Who still remembers Annabelle from those godawful Conjuring movies? M3GAN, the titular doll in Gerard Johnstone’s film of the same name, written by Akela Cooper, is fucking scary. She has a child’s face but fully adult body language and posture. Her eyes are beady little cameras, pupils constantly dilating and contracting. Her hands are lifeless silicone...
In the Flesh: Talk to Me
“It occurred to me,” rasps Richard Harrow (Jack Huston) in Terrence Winter’s series Boardwalk Empire, “the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don't.” It’s a chilling line, and a perfect description of the cold-hearted, dead-eyed meanness at the heart of Danny and Michael Philippou’s Talk to Me, a film intimately concerned with teenage alienation and cruelty in the emotional wasteland of the modern Australian suburbs. Jade (Alexandra Jensen) doesn’t want Mia’s (Sophie Wild...
Wyrm IX
The Merciless ParliamentThey rode into London under Mowbray lions and the banner of the Court of Chivalry, a set of balanced scales embroidered red on white. Robert de Vere walked barefoot, shirtless, and in irons behind lord Thomas’s black and white mallard, a rope running from his wrists to the saddle’s pommel, a penitent’s pointed hood stitched shut over his head. Will’s face hurt so terribly he thought that he might topple from his ostri’s saddle. Every step she took sent waves of sickly, throbbing pain through his cheek and jaw. ...
In the Flesh: Barbie
“Barbie has a good day every day,” the divine voice of Helen Mirren declares. “But Ken only has a good day if Barbie looks at him.” Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is deeply fascinated by the ways in which perception shapes self-perception which in turn gives rise to the complex act of being. Ken (Ryan Gosling) can conceive of himself only in relation to Barbie (Margot Robbie), who in turn sees herself at first solely through the lens of marketing copy about the toy industry’s feminist triumph over adversity, later in relation to Gloria’s (...
Paper Cuts: Off Season
Is there a meaner writer than Jack Ketchum? God, I hope not. Off Season, his 1980 debut novel, is a nasty piece of work, bleak and cruel and shocking. An adult man dumps hot oil on a group of children. A woman is dismembered and disemboweled while still alive and screaming. No bravery, goodness, or heroism finds reward. No heroic violence redeems its perpetrator. Its climax features a group of cops and deputized Maine yahoos opening up with shotguns on a knot of inbred cannibal women, one of whom is heavily pregnant, and children before rushing...
In the Flesh: Lost Highway
A man in the throes of delusion, a tulpa living out the addled thoughts that birthed it, a midlife crisis turned rancid and folded back in on itself through occult body-snatching — there are a thousand ways to interpret the house of dust and shadow that is Lost Highway, a film in which every home we see resembles a cold, sterile dentist’s waiting room and every person we meet conceals secrets which multiply, divide, metastasize past the point of comprehension. Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) suspects his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) is cheati...
In the Flesh: Dunkirk
Shooting emptiness is something at which Christopher Nolan excels. The trackless expanses of sea and sky stretching to the far horizon where they smear together, the endless gray beaches of Dunkirk, purgatorial and grim, where men queue in terrified silence, waiting for a chance at escape. There is a real sense of humanity forced to the breaking point and beyond it by forces far vaster and more alien than they can comprehend, of men removed from all context and thrown into a void of senseless, arbitrary violence. His dogfights are a thing of be...
In the Flesh: The Sopranos 6.21: 'Made in America'
It’s been eighteen years since I first saw the now-infamous “cut to black”, the end of over half a decade of turmoil, resentment, self-sabotage, and slow decay within and around the Soprano family. Earlier today I watched the scene for what must have been the twelfth or thirteenth time, but far from feeling stale it seems only to have grown in power. My heart pounded as Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’” built toward a crescendo that would never come. My hair stood on end as the bell over the door in Holsten’s restaurant jangled...
Playbills: July
Wes Cunningham's (@vvesl) illustrations for each screening in the month of July!
In the Flesh: The Idol
The Idol is satire. It’s black comedy in the vein of Basic Instinct or RoboCop, mean-spirited and sharp, full of babbling record industry morons convinced of their own genius as they orbit deranged starlets and megalomaniacal producers. I won’t waste time speaking to the backlash against its scenes of fairly mild BDSM play except to say that its frank and sleazy sense of sexuality is tremendously refreshing in an increasingly sexless media landscape. The show’s depictions of sex range from the absurd, as when Manson-esque manager and cult...
In the Flesh: War of the Worlds (2005)
The best part of War of the Worlds is something we’ve seen before. In a dank and dripping basement strewn with the detritus of the life of one Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins), a serpentine alien probe hunts father Ray (Tom Cruise) and daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) through a labyrinth of crumbling walls. It’s a good scene, tense and imaginative, but it’s impossible not to think of Jurassic Park’s kitchen sequence, a much tighter and more gripping nightmare. The sole improvement here is the addition of Harlan, whose PTSD flashback triggers...
Paper Cuts: IT
Sprawling and baggy, deeply flawed, and as white-hot with human misery as anything ever written, IT is the Moby Dick of horror, a reckoning with the interior unknown reflecting Melville’s famous wrestling with the exterior. It fails where Moby Dick succeeds, its turning point marred by heteronormative lack of imagination, its ending overly sentimental, but in its fearless plunge into the underbelly of child abuse in white America and its connection to other forms of societal brutality it plumbs territory few other major works have dared to to...
In the Flesh: Body Snatchers
“By tomorrow it’ll be like it never happened,” whispers Carol Malone (Meg Tilly) to her husband Steve (Terry Kinney) as she lulls him to sleep with a gentle massage. Abel Ferrera’s Body Snatchers cleverly juxtaposes repressed and violent suburban family life with portrayals of militaristic conformity and groupthink on an army base where EPA agent Steve is stationed, linking the two via their shared incentivization of denial and silent obedience. Where’s the line between Steve seizing his teenage daughter Marti (Gabrielle Anwar) by the...
In the Flesh: The Ultimatum: Queer Love
Ten people, treated uniformly as women by the show, sit in anonymous locations, discussing nothing, drinking from silver glasses which obscure both their beverage of choice and how much remains, enabling the show’s editors to stitch its parts together more easily without violating continuity. Instead, like virtually all reality shows, they violate reality, unpicking the flow of events, the rhythm of human connection, to reassemble disconnected parts into a story more coherent and engaging than life can provide. Or at least that’s the idea, ...
JULY 2023: SEEING DOUBLE
7/2, 1pm and 7pm: US, JORDAN PEELE7/5, 7pm: SECONDS, JOHN FRANKENHEIMER7/9, 1pm and 7pm: MOON, DUNCAN JONES7/12, 7pm: INFINITY POOL, BRANDON CRONENBERG7/16, 1pm and 7pm: LOST HIGHWAY, DAVID LYNCH7/19, 7pm: MULHOLLAND DRIVE, DAVID LYNCH7/23, 1pm and 7pm: INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, PHILIP KAUFMAN7/25, 7pm: COHERENCE, JAMES WARD BYRKIT
Paper Cuts: The Marigold
“This is the future,” says Stan Marigold, son and heir of real estate mogul and murder cultist Albert Marigold, builder of the luxury apartment tower from which Andrew F. Sullivan’s novel takes its names, watching a fungal gestalt consciousness consume Toronto. “Imagine owning it.” As the world collapses around him, first institutionally and then physically, Stan continues to repeat things like, “imagine controlling it” and “we own it” and “it’s ours”. As it becomes increasingly apparent that what he’s saying lacks any...
Paper Cuts: What Happens Next
Comprising the serialized comics Dog Names, Someone Else, No Matter What, and Victim Impact Statement, Max Graves’ What Happens Next is a fiendishly intelligent and relentless sendup of true crime which tells, in elliptical, self-involved fashion, the story of the people involved in and impacted by the killing of teenager Haylie Gorski. Out from the swamp of religious fundamentalist homeschooling culture Graves dredges his characters one by one, dissecting their suffering and the suffering they inflict on others with simultaneous efficiency a...
In the Flesh: Beau Is Afraid
Ari Aster’s two preceding films — Hereditary, which is good, and Midsommar, which is not — feel very much like horror for the perpetually frightened. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Paranoia is a rich source of cinematic tension, animating classic horror and suspense films across the decades. Where such films can trip up is in neglecting to think through the imagery, actions, and archetypes used to manufacture that sense of anxiety. Consider the naked, elderly cultists in Hereditary, or the nebulously consensual mating scene...
In the Flesh: Across the Spider-Verse
I don’t understand casting Oscar Isaac in a role where nobody gets to see Oscar Isaac. The man has good screen presence, he’s incredibly beautiful, but he’s hardly Clancy Brown when it comes to voice acting, you know? He’s pretty flat as edgy, vampiric Spider-Man Miguel, leader of a cross-dimensional team of Spiders-Man tasked with protecting the “canon” of their interlinking stories. Set him next to Shameik Moore, who voices Miles Morales, or Hailee Steinfeld as Gwen Stacy/Ghost Spider and it becomes faintly embarrassing. Shea Whig...
In the Flesh: The Lure
There’s a strong whiff of Velvet Goldmine and The Rocky Horror Picture Show about The Lure, Agnieszka Smoczynska’s oddball musical/Little Mermaid adaptation about siren sisters Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Gold (Michalina Olszańska) and their brief stint in the human world as nightclub singers in Krakow. The costumes, the makeup, the hair, the essence of glam not just as an expression of rock, sexuality, and rebellion but as an extrapolation from glamour, the magical art of making things seem other than they are. The sisters are sex symbols ...
