Chuck

Literacy 2025: Book 12: The Watchers

AM Shine’s suspense thriller about strangers trapped inside a strange bunker in the middle of a dark forest

Book
The Watchers by AM Shine

Synopsis
Artist Mina is driving through a desolate part of Connemara when her car breaks down, right on the edge of a dense, dark forest. She goes into the woods looking for help. After dark falls, she hears bloodcurdling shrieks from all around, and she finds a stranger urgently rushing her into the only safe place after dark: a plain concrete bunker with a huge glass wall, and a bright light that shines all night to let the unseen creatures of the forest watch the human residents.

Notes
This was another book that was a recommended read in folk horror. I’d say it does qualify as a modern take on folk horror, but I’m wary of saying too much more about it, for fear of ruining whatever it is that makes it work.

And I say “whatever it is” because I’m still not exactly sure how it works. I started the book and was immediately concerned that I was going to have to abandon it, because it was somehow both overwritten and underwritten. It was full of these almost-florid descriptions of things that somehow completely failed to evoke a solid image of anything. It felt as if it were mimicking the action-description-tangential memory rhythm of novels just because that’s what novels are supposed to do. But I thought that’s just the prologue, I’ll see what happens once it gets started.

Then I thought that I was only into chapter 2, but I already disliked the protagonist. The book establishes her as the type of person who takes out a sketchpad in public and stares intently at strangers while she draws them without their permission, and those people are just the worst. And then a few chapters later, I was thinking that the premise seemed kind of implausible, and there had to be a more straightforward way to get a solitary woman alone in a forest. And then I thought that I’m several chapters in, and I still can’t picture the main setting for the bulk of the book from its descriptions, and the only reason I’ve got a mental picture of it at all is from the trailer for the movie adaptation from last year. And then I thought I’m only a quarter of the way through this book, and I can already see the ending coming from a mile away. And then I thought that I was barely halfway through the book, and it seemed way too obvious so there must be something else going on. And then I realized that I’d read three quarters of the book and it was way past my bedtime and I should go to sleep. (And immediately picked it up again and finished it the second I got home).

It’s got this propulsive energy that doesn’t so much make up for my criticisms as it renders them completely irrelevant. I still can’t say I feel any sort of attachment to any of the characters in the slightest, and yet I was desperate to know what happened to them. Does it even make sense for me to complain about clunky passages when I was this compelled to keep reading?

Verdict
One of the damndest experiences I’ve ever had reading a book. My blurb would be “a folk horror suspense thriller in the post-Lost age.” I don’t even know if I’d recommend it, but my experience wasn’t so much reading it as consuming it whole, gristle and all.

31 Days of Scrollitude

Or, Nosferatu Was An Incel. Reporting on my month-long social media hiatus

(featured image is from Steve Purcell’s Toybox comic)

When I decided to try going a month without social media (of the infinite-scrolling variety, i.e. Instagram, Mastodon, and Bluesky), I expected that worst case, I’d break down at the halfway point. Best case, I’d end the month like someone who’d been crawling through the desert and had suddenly found a refreshing spring full of life-giving water, and I’d go right back to obsessively spending hours on the apps.

As it turns out, it’s been more like walking leisurely through the desert and happening upon a can of lukewarm LaCroix. I’ve done my best to respond to the comments people have made to my auto-posts over the past month, but I’m not feeling super compelled to resume my old bad habits.

I’m going to try and avoid veering into an evangelist-vegan attitude and tell everybody that they should do it too because I mean to each their own but we all know that my newfound lifestyle of moderate restraint is kind of, you know, better than yours. But for me, at least, it’s been a complete success.

I went back on Instagram, and I don’t miss it. I just feel bad for the dozens of young single women who have spent a month wondering why I haven’t accepted their follow requests.

Over the past month alone, I’ve read more than I did all last year. I’ve finally watched some movies that have been on my to-watch list for years. I get to dinner time without feeling like my brain is too full for anything more substantial than YouTube videos. We finally started watching Severance! (Yes it’s very good and no spoilers please).

One downside to only having this blog as my outlet is that I have been missing the conversations from those auto-posts. Also, microblogging formats are an encouragement to be more concise. It was only after reading a comment about Nosferatu from my friend Rose that I realized I could have condensed paragraphs of what I’d written into the simple observation that “Count Orlok is an incel.”

So my current plan is to keep it up as best I can. Maybe not maintaining the artificial vow of silence, but using social media for conversations instead of time-killers. Avoid installing the apps and just using the web apps. (Except for Instagram unfortunately, since they’ve deliberately hobbled the functionality of the web interface, almost as if they’re a company that has poured tons of money into ensuring app engagement).

And if I’m ever looking for a distraction, open up a book instead of a “quick scroll” through the apps. The new Reeder has been an excellent way to feel less post-apocalyptic, reassured that people are still out there posting away and I’m reading stuff that was written within the past month.

I’d been hoping that a break would help with whatever mental block is keeping me from being able to do any game development after hours, but not yet. At least it’s paved the way, and I can dive back in as long as I keep up the social media abstinence.

The Future: Beef

I finally watched Phantom of the Paradise, and it prompted me to re-evaluate my snobbery and how I think of movies

There is exactly one moment in Phantom of the Paradise that works for me, without any kind of reservation or qualification. It’s the press conference where our villain Swan introduces the world to his new performer. “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the future: Beef.” The camera pans over to a coffin, which is opened to reveal a curly-haired glam rocker in makeup, who looks to the camera and snarls.

Paul Williams plays it completely straight-faced — as does the movie itself — and even though the previous scene went through a line-up of possible replacements for the nostalgia band that the new act was replacing, the revelation of Beef still came as a surprise to me. It’s a weird, genuinely funny moment that still works over 50 years later.

My enchantment with Beef didn’t last long, since the very next scene shows him to be a stereotype of a queer man that honestly feels too lazy to be offensive. I was going to include a YouTube clip I’d found of Beef’s introduction, but I hadn’t noticed that the description of the video itself has the f-slur. Is it just homophobic, or is it a queer fan of the movie “taking it back?” I don’t care!

I did find an interview with Gerrit Graham talking about the process of coming up with the character, where “process” meant Brian De Palma trying to find euphemisms for what he wanted without actually saying “gay”¹, and Graham doing the first thing he could think of, and then sticking with that for his entire performance.²

It felt gratifying to hear that from someone who was involved in the production — instead of someone writing about the movie long after it’d achieved whatever “cult classic” status it has now — because it fit in with the overall impression I had of the movie: ultimately, it doesn’t really warrant all the re-interpretation and analysis it’s gotten over the years, because it’s just hell of corny. It feels like a comedy made by people who don’t have a very sophisticated sense of humor, that happens to include queer characters without actually knowing any queer people.

Beef’s big musical number seemed to me to be what you get if a bunch of extremely straight people tried to make The Rocky Horror Picture Show.³ I’d initially thought it was derivative, but Paradise came out a year before Rocky Horror, but a year after the stage production that became the movie. So instead of going too far down that rabbit hole to figure out the specifics, I’m content to just conclude that they were two projects drawing from a lot of the same inspirations, made with very different mindsets.

The most obvious is that the musical in Paradise is on a set inspired by German expressionist movies, while Rocky Horror pointedly bases itself on more modern B-movies. Brian De Palma was a movie fan making movies filled with references to his favorite styles and directors, making a goofy slapstick comedy musical version of Faust. The glam rock elements were included not because of any higher-minded agenda, but simply because that was the flavor of the moment in 1974, just like Sha Na Na-style nostalgia bands had been previously.

Really, the whole idea of my trying to categorize everything into groups of Gross And Offensive, Fun But Dated Camp, or Genuinely Funny Absurdism is itself a post-Twitter phenomenon. That’s when I started trying to analyze whether I was enjoying stuff at the expense of other people, which most often takes the form of being offended on other people’s behalf.

1
Including “like Little Richard,” which is almost charming
2
Don’t get too attached to Beef; he doesn’t last long (spoiler?).
3
So basically, I guess: KISS.

One Thing I Kind of Like About Death of a Unicorn

Death of a Unicorn reminded me of the 1980s, in that it’s the kind of movie they hardly ever make anymore

The two most genuinely good and surprising aspects of Death of a Unicorn are the performances of Will Poulter and Téa Leoni as two members of the awful rich family at the center of the plot. They took characters designed to be cartoonishly broad satire and somehow found a hook to make them more interesting.

Poulter does it by taking the familiar rich, arrogant, young dimwit and committing completely to his near-total lack of self-awareness. There’s something vaguely human at the heart of the cartoon, as he makes the character truly awful but somehow understandable: this is the natural result of someone who’s never for a moment in his life wanted for anything. Plus the hilarious detail that he’s perpetually dressed in short shorts.

But I think Leoni is the star of the movie, playing the matriarch/implied trophy wife of the family as a woman who’s spent so long spinning her self-serving nature into a kind of performative compassion that she never turns it off. Her face is perpetually twisted in an expression of heartfelt concern, her voice laden with sympathy as she makes it clear that she only wants what’s best for everybody.

It’s especially neat after seeing Mickey 17‘s much more blunt take on cartoonishly awful rich people. The characters in Death of a Unicorn are clearly horrible, but at the same time personable and even friendly. There’s always a sense that their selfishness and outright evil are enabled by generating enough plausible deniability. And not just for themselves, but for the people who work for them, who can tell themselves that they’re not really that bad, as far as bosses go.

But their performances are really the only inspired aspects of Death of a Unicorn, and nothing else in the movie stands out as original or even remarkable. I definitely wouldn’t call it a bad movie, since it works okay as a violent action comedy, and there are a few genuinely funny moments. It seems like all the elements are there for a can’t-fail, effects-driven black comedy.

You’ve got Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, and Richard E Grant as leads, all delivering exactly on the kinds of things you expect them to bring to a movie.¹ Even the casting of secondary characters is spot on to the point of feeling like overkill: Sunita Mani is always great, Jessica Hynes is recognizably likable even when playing completely against type, and I was initially excited to see Steve Park, who I know mostly from his unforgettable scene in Fargo. But of everyone, only Anthony Carrigan seems to have enough to work with to turn into an actual character.

So I was more left with the sense that I’m impressed the movie exists at all. You just don’t see this much money and talent being devoted to a comedy these days, especially not one that is violent and gory enough to limit its potential audience.² I was actually reminded of Death Becomes Her, and there’s even a similar shot to the well-known one in that movie, where a character is framed looking through the gaping hole left in another character’s body.

Before anybody objects to the comparison: this isn’t nearly as good as Death Becomes Her, because it’s not anywhere near as clever, original, and inventive. Also, Death of a Unicorn doesn’t have nearly the budget, even before being adjusted for inflation, so the effects feel more like an independent film than a showcase for ILM. But it feels like the kind of project that was more common in the 1980s and early 1990s: a one-off comedy project that wasn’t fully horror (like say The Substance), or sci-fi (like Mickey 17), or action comedy (like The Author of This Blog Post Is Drawing a Blank At the Moment), but a mix of multiple genres.

It might be damning with faint praise to say that the best thing about Death of a Unicorn is that it reminded me of better movies, but I think it’s more a case of its reach exceeding its grasp. Maybe the fact that the movie doesn’t feel shockingly inventive and original is a sign that we’ve become spoiled for choice in genre fiction, and that the problem isn’t that the concepts are too weird, but not weird enough.

1
And no more, which is part of the issue.
2
For other people as sensitive to blood and gore as I am: it’s all kept at the Universal Horror Nights level, and I never thought it felt real enough to be upsetting or nauseating. If you’re super-sensitive to animal cruelty, it’s there in the title, and probably the most upsetting scene for me involved sawing off the unicorn’s horn. (Spoiler: it gets better).

Literacy 2025: Book 11: Wylding Hall

Elizabeth Hand’s folk horror novel about the making of an early 1970s album in a remote, ancient manor house

Book
Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

Synopsis
The surviving members of an early 1970s folk rock band speak to documentary filmmakers about the making of their second album, Wylding Hall. In varying accounts, they talk about the summer spent inside the centuries-old manor house, the unsettling things they encountered inside, their former lead singer’s obsession with the ancient woods around the grounds, and the unexplained appearance of a strange girl in the album’s cover photo.

Notes
This was part of a video of folk horror recommendations on the “Sinead Hanna Craic” channel on YouTube, and I was immediately sold on the concept alone. What if all the imagery surrounding albums like Houses of the Holy and Led Zeppelin IV (both of which are referenced briefly in Wylding Hall) wasn’t just inspired by the growing interest in folk and traditional music at the time, but by ancient spirits who’ve lived around forests and burial mounds for millennia, the original inspirations for those traditional poems and ballads?

The mood of Wylding Hall is set with an evocative cover and the clever inclusion of a Dramatis Personae page. The bulk is presented as if it were almost a transcript of interviews from a documentary, cutting between the various characters as they give their own accounts as the overall narrative drives forward through the summer months they spent making the album.

My hyper-critical side had a tiny bit of difficulty getting into the book, since the artificiality of the format seemed a little too evident, and the different characters’ unique voices didn’t feel sufficiently defined. But this melts away very quickly, and within 50 or so pages, it became a case of can’t-put-it-down, must-finish-before-I-sleep. And the decision ultimately works well and feels natural, since we’ve now been conditioned to think of musicians talking about past events in the Behind the Music format.

I haven’t read much (any?) folk horror before, so I didn’t know what to expect. The vibe here is definitely more unsettling than outright horrifying, since it starts its foreshadowing from the first page and repeats it with casual references afterwards, preparing you for something that’s not startling, but inevitable. Once it gets going, it does an excellent job of maintaining the mood.

Verdict
A great concept and a really enjoyable read. The sense of inexplicable creepiness and unknowable forces at work lingers after you’ve set the book down, and you’re primed to be on the lookout for things that simply shouldn’t be there.

All Hold Up

Recap of last night’s show seeing Kim Deal in Los Angeles

Kim Deal is currently on tour promoting her solo album Nobody Loves You More (or is the album promoting the tour? I don’t know how the music industry works anymore), and last night we saw the show here in Los Angeles.

I don’t know if spoiler etiquette applies to concerts, but the show had Kim and her touring lineup — including trumpet, trombone, violin, and cello players — play the entirety of the new album, and then two encores with selected songs from the history of the Breeders and her solo singles.

Morgan Nagler is the opening act for the LA-area shows, and I enjoyed her set a good bit. She came back on stage to sing on the tracks she’d co-written with Deal, and I was especially happy that they did my favorite, “The Root.”

It was interesting, because I’d been wondering what distinguishes a Kim Deal solo album from a Breeders album, and the show highlighted the difference. It felt more like the results of Deal collaborating with a bunch of different people over a long career, instead of a specific lineup. Kelley Deal was there singing backup, but she kept to the back mostly, because this was Kim’s project. The exception was when Kim left the stage to do “Bats in the Afternoon Sky,” an instrumental track that was performed by Kelley and another singer, a keyboardist, and (if I remember correctly?) a guitarist. It was difficult to make out what was said in the introduction, but I think they mentioned that the musicians were from the Kelley Deal 6000.

In any case, it was a really great show. I was skeptical how the tracks from the new album would do live, since to me they feel more produced than any of Kim Deal’s music I was familiar with, but the end result was flawless. Highlights for me were “Crystal Breath,” “Big Ben Beat,” “Safari,” “Coast,” and “Off You.”

Morgan Nagler performing as the opening act

Something I realized during the Soul Coughing concert last year was that it’s actually a good thing that my music tastes mostly calcified sometime in the late 1990s. It means I’m not only aging along with the band, but with the band’s audience. It’s always nice to see creaky graybeards both on stage and in the crowd, to see equal representation of My People. (Even if it is a reminder that no matter how much I like to think of myself as unique, I’m very much a Type of Guy).

That was in effect for the Kim Deal show, but I guess her audience is more cross-generational, since there were a lot of youths there. And by youths, I mean Los Angelenos probably in their early- to mid-30s, likely going through their own premature life crises. As they violated my clearly-defined personal space boundary, pushing in front of us to stand directly blocking view of the stage and with their backs and asses within inches of rubbing against me, I felt myself going into White Middle-Aged Man Hulk mode. (“You wouldn’t like me when I’m cranky.”) Plus I was getting really hot and my back hurt, so I was happy when the midwesterners-in-their-early-60s on stage decided to end the show after around two hours.

My Criterion Closet

I bought too many movies

I’m sure it’s just an oversight, but for some reason the people at the Criterion Collection have yet to send me my invitation to pick movies from The Criterion Closet. Probably a clerical error and nothing to do with the fact that I’m neither famous nor interesting.

But last week they had a sale where every movie in stock was 50% off, and naturally I reacted by going apeshit in their online store. In my defense, I did trim down the list significantly, and if you amortize the cost across the past several years that I’ve been pledging to pick them up someday, then it’s really not that bad.

Have a look at my purchases, won’t you.

Miller’s Crossing
For a long time, this was my favorite movie, and it’s still up there in competition with Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back. It’s a masterpiece, and my experience watching it the first time is still burned into my memory. I don’t know if the story is true that the Coens invented the slang used throughout the movie, because who’re you gonna believe? But I can imagine it’s true, because the scenes of characters firing lines of dialogue back and forth can be every bit as gripping as all the murders and fiery shootouts and tense showdowns.

Blood Simple
An experiment in style and suspense, where you become completely invested in the fates and livelihoods of some of the rock-stupidest people. I already have at least one other copy of this, but I wanted the top-of-the-line edition, if only for the special features.

Inside Llewyn Davis
Not my favorite of the Coen Brothers movies, but I do want to get definitive editions of all of them. I’ve kind of avoided reading too much about the Coens themselves or their process, to “preserve the mystique” as Llewyn Davis would say¹ but also I live in constant fear that I’m going to find out that my interpretation of all their brilliant movies is entirely wrong. But this one has an interview with the Coens and Guillermo del Toro, which sounds fascinating.

Pan’s Labyrinth
My initial reaction to this one, way back when, was that it was excellent, but I hated watching it. I was completely unprepared at the time for how violent and scary it was. I’d probably have an easier time watching it again now, especially since I have a better idea what to expect. Regardless, I wanted to have a Criterion-worthy copy, because even though I didn’t enjoy it, I could recognize that it’s a classic.

Police Story/Police Story 2
Police Story 3 (Supercop) is what started my whole obsession with Michelle Yeoh, but I’ve never seen the first two. And I realized I don’t think I’ve ever seen another non-Hollywood Jackie Chan movie! As I understand it, these are as close as you can get to definitive Hong Kong action movies, so I’m really looking forward to completing the trilogy.

His Girl Friday
A candidate for my short list of favorite movies, I saw this one as a freshman in college and immediately loved it. Watching it felt like it was somehow unstuck in time, since the dialogue and performances and humor all felt so modern, even though the props and costumes clearly come from the late 1930s. I’ve got a copy of this on DVD somewhere, but it was a grainy, low-effort version that most likely came from a bargain bin.

Black Narcissus
This and The Red Shoes are the two Powell and Pressburger movies that have been on my to-watch list forever, but I haven’t yet seen. And based on what I know of the latter, I’m content to rent it or stream it at some point. But every still that I’ve ever seen from Black Narcissus makes it seem gorgeous and intriguing. I got introduced to Powell and Pressburger in my freshman year of college as well, with Stairway to Heaven/A Matter of Life and Death, and I was immediately a fan.

Honorable Mentions

A few others I had in the shopping cart until I regained some impulse control:

The Heroic Trio/Executioners
The Heroic Trio is absolutely insane, a nonsensical spectacle intended to put together three huge Hong Kong stars and a ton of over-the-top stunts. The sequel is not as fun, in my opinion, since it felt like they took everything that made the first movie so enjoyable and then tried to make an objectively good movie out of it. I had this in my cart but removed it at the last minute, and I almost instantly regretted it. I ended up buying the streaming versions instead (they’re available through Apple’s TV app, if that’s your thing, and also on the Criterion Channel streaming service), since I honestly put them in the “watch this crazy thing with me” category instead of the must-own heirloom category.

The Devil’s Backbone
Another Guillermo del Toro movie I saw around the same time as Pan’s Labyrinth. I remember liking it quite a lot, but I don’t remember enough of it to make it something I’d want to keep going back to.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinnochio
I haven’t seen it yet, which feels like an oversight, but I’ve got a backlog of animated movies that I know are likely brilliant, but I still haven’t gotten around to actually watching any of them. I briefly considered getting a trio of del Toro’s movies (I’m not particularly interested in Cronos), but luckily for my credit balance, I decided to stop at one.

The Night of the Hunter
This movie is weird and brilliant, but the only part of the Criterion edition that seemed compelling was an included clip of the cast performing a deleted scene on the Ed Sullivan show.

Incidentally, I think this post violates the whole intended format of The Criterion Closet, since I think it’s supposed to be more than just somebody making a shopping list of movies, some of which they haven’t seen, and saying “that movie was cool.” If anybody’s interested (for some reason) in a list of my must-haves from Criterion’s catalogs, that I’ve actually watched, then I could do that at some point.

1
I think that’s the phrase he uses?

Literacy 2025: Book 10: Enter a Murderer

My second attempt at making sense of a Ngaio Marsh murder mystery

Book
Enter a Murderer by Ngaio Marsh

Series
Second book in the Roderick Alleyn series of detective stories

Synopsis
Journalist Nigel Bathgate is attending a play in the West End that’s starring a casual friend of his, and he’s invited his new acquaintance Chief Inspector Alleyn to tag along. A climactic moment in the play has the star shooting another character at point-blank range, a character who was played by a detestable actor who’d somehow managed to threaten, blackmail, or antagonize every other member of the production. But tonight, the scene ends in tragedy, as someone has swapped the gun’s dummy bullets for the real thing!

Notes
I read Ngaio Marsh’s first murder mystery earlier this year, and while I thought it was fun and engaging, I felt like I could barely make sense of it. The characters all had a rapport that felt a lot more modern than I’m used to seeing in works from the 1930s, but the language was full of idioms and references I didn’t recognize, and even their behavior seemed alien.

Enter a Murderer feels like an author who’s more confident and self-assured in her characters’ charm — I’ve read it suggested that part of that was because Marsh was familiar with the workings of theater and felt most at home in that setting — but I had an even harder time making sense of what I was reading.

The characters are clever and endearingly sarcastic, making the dialogue feel snappy and sophisticated, until one of them makes a reference that was completely impenetrable to me. I felt like a reverse Captain America, having to end every few paragraphs saying, “I did not understand that reference.”

Which wouldn’t be too bad, if the language didn’t often extend into the descriptions of what was happening. There are long stretches where Marsh describes people moving through the backstage areas of theater, or even around areas of London, and it was absolutely impossible for me to form a mental image of any of it. Characters kept doing or saying things that seemed as if they were supposed to be loaded with significance, but nothing was sparking any kind of connection for me. When we finally got the resolution of the mystery, my reaction was simply, “Okay, sure.”

There was a short-lived sketch comedy show called The New Show, and one of its most memorable sketches was called “Floont Artney, Private Eye.” The gag of the sketch was that it was a standard detective story in every way, except that all of the characters had bizarre names. Marsh’s books feel a little like that to me, when a character has a name like “Arthur Surbonadier” and it’s treated with little comment. (It’s not even the character’s real name!)

Verdict
It’s pretty fun and engaging, in that I never hated reading it. But this is going to be my last attempt at reading Ngaio Marsh for a while. I’m used to having to read Agatha Christie’s mysteries while constantly translating back and forth between my time period and England of the 30s and 40s; reading Marsh’s mysteries, I feel as if I’m having to translate not just from the 1930s to the 2020s, but from English to some weird alien language, and back to English again.

Two Things I Love About Nosferatu

Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu strips away all the subtlety and subtext from vampire stories, and then adds a little back. Spoilers.

I absolutely adored Nosferatu for the first hour or so.

I’d heard it was beautiful, and that was underselling it. It seems to have taken “every frame a painting” as a challenge: can you make something with a run time over 2 hours in which you can pause at literally any moment and get a fantastically gorgeous image?

But more than that, I loved that it was so gloriously ultra-gothic in just about every aspect in just about every moment. Every member of the cast was completely committed to the concept, somehow balancing a sense of overwhelming Victorian repression with a director who must’ve ended every take shouting “MORE!!!”

Lily-Rose Depp deservedly got praise for her performance, since it required her not only to be sympathetic and believable in a world in which the melodrama was kept at dangerously high levels throughout, but also to contort her body and give in to violent epileptic fits. But I was almost as impressed by Simon McBurney as Herr Knock, for making the most interesting version of Renfeld that I’ve ever seen. He wasn’t content with the stock actor’s exercise of playing a madman, but took a character that had to be visibly over the top in a movie populated entirely by batshit crazy people, and somehow made it genuinely frightening and compelling.

I was also surprised by Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance, although I probably shouldn’t have been, since he’s well established that he embraces weird parts that don’t just rely on his being impossibly good-looking. His part is kind of a thankless one, requiring him to be the voice of reason and skepticism in a world that is clearly irrational, and he could’ve just disappeared into the background as nothing more than the guy who occasionally drives the plot forward. But from his opening scene onwards, he managed to give off a paternalistic arrogance that matched the energy of everything else. He seemed to love playing a cartoon.

All of the performances worked because the filmmaking itself was so committed to the bit. The story shifts between dreams and the waking world so frequently, and so abruptly, that it was never really clear which was which. Is the entire story a dream, or is the world so weird that the dreams are just as real as anything else? One scene I loved is when our heroine and her husband are at their friends’ home, their hosts bid them good night to take their bizarre children up to bed, and Thomas and Ellen kiss… and it just turns into a full-on make-out session right there. The door’s barely even closed before they’re going at it!

I think my favorite thing about the first half of the movie, though, is how the filmmaking itself becomes dream-like. With rare exceptions, it’s not prone to melodramatic flourishes like cross-dissolves or dutch angles or elaborate camera movements. There are hard cuts, sometimes timed so as to be disorienting, as a scene abruptly ends. And for the most part, the camera is either static or on a slow horizontal pan, as if the viewer is dispassionately taking everything in. When the camera does do something exotic, it stands out as especially significant and unnerving — our first time seeing Knock conducting one of his rituals, for instance, in which the camera sweeps up as if we’re watching him from above.

Survivor: Nope Island

The magic of choosing an appropriate title

I was excited to see a poster and trailer for the upcoming reality series Got to Get Out on Hulu, hosted by a disappointingly shirt-wearing Simu Liu.

There’s a frustrating sense that reality TV is playing it too safe, so I’m glad someone had the stones to Go There and make a series about a bunch of white people competing to be the first to take over a younger black person’s body.

This will be a good sequel to the producers’ earlier cooking competition, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Relatable One

Assorted observations while in my microblogging exile

I’m a few weeks into my social media hiatus, and I have to say it’s been very nice. A month without Instagram is surprisingly calming, and I’ve only checked into Bluesky and Mastodon to confirm my auto-posting is working and then immediately signed off. I can totally see myself making this shift permanent.

The only downside to not having a Dumb Thoughts Collector always an app away is that I can’t share stupid observations like this one:

I still haven’t seen the first season of Andor, and I feel like I’m essentially at the point where I’m throwing a tantrum and refusing to watch it. Just because I keep reading people online say that this is what Star Wars should be, and that rubs me the wrong way. I don’t look to Star Wars for moral ambiguity or parables of real-world political issues or nuanced takes on complex topics; I like it pulpy and referential. To act as if there’s clearly a superior take on the source material, and the others are somehow inferior or more juvenile, seems to be unnecessarily arrogant. Especially considering that the source material is space wizards. Rogue One left me cold, and there’s nothing about the character of Cassian Andor that has me excited to watch.

Until this morning, when I opened YouTube and saw a thumbnail for the upcoming season. And it makes Andor infinitely more relatable to me to find out that he’s the kind of guy who thinks a lot about pizza.

One Thing I Like About Black Bag

Black Bag is a simultaneously 21st-century and old-fashioned spy movie that’s all about trust

Black Bag (alternate title: Spies Be Talkin’) is about George and Kathryn, a long-married couple who work as spies for the British government. The title is a reference to the code phrase that agents use with each other when they’re asked a question that they’re not permitted to answer. The story begins when George is assigned the mission of finding out who within the agency has been selling confidential information, and the short list of suspects includes his wife.

I spent much of the movie feeling as if I had very little idea what was actually going on. For something advertised as a stylish spy thriller, it’s extremely talky, and the combination of accents plus mostly-naturalistic audio meant that I could only make out around 60% of the dialogue. I was certain that it was seeding bits of intrigue that I was missing, and that by the time the double- and triple-crosses started happening, I would be completely lost.

Plus it has such an aggressive sense of affected cool that it felt jarring. It’s all beautifully shot, and the score is excellent. And it’s more or less a given that Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender are going to be flawless and captivating no matter what they’re doing. But what they’re doing here is a whole lot of talking, and it feels at odds with the movie telling us that these characters are some of the coolest sons of bitches you ever saw. That what’s really sexy isn’t shootouts or one-night stands with femmes fatale or baccarat, but just seeing hot people being good at their jobs.

To me, it started to feel like what would happen if spy movies stopped being aspirational and decided instead to be reassuring. Aimed at a certain crowd of wealthy middle-aged people, people who’d reached a point in their lives when they had no desire to hang off of airplanes like Tom Cruise, but still wanted to feel like they had It. Yes, dammit, your quiet, conversational dinner parties are thrilling.

The movie opens with an extended sequence that was filmed as one long, uninterrupted take. It follows George through multiple levels of a crowded nightclub to meet his contact, past dozens of extras dancing, drinking and partying, at a bar and a dance floor below. And to me, it felt like a distractingly unnecessary flourish, a sequence that felt far more complicated to execute than what the movie required.

In retrospect, I could interpret it as kind of a bait-and-switch to set the tone: if you were expecting a spy thriller that would take you through the exotic nightlife of the world’s most interesting cities, this is not that. I can interpret it as setting up the conversation that follows and the theme that runs throughout the movie: the contrast between this loud, hedonistic life and the quiet monogamy of George and Kathryn’s relationship.

And I can even interpret the decision to film it all as one take as being an introduction to George’s character. It sets up the idea that he’s calm, quiet, and professional, and he relentlessly moves towards his goal, immune to any distractions. But this doesn’t read as such in the moment (because he’s not really contrasted against what any other agent would do in the same situation) and besides, the idea is explicitly stated outright by other characters multiple times throughout the movie.

Instead, it just seems like the message of the opening sequence was “Bitch, I’m Steven Soderberg! I do what I want! Just shut up and watch!”

And really, I should’ve just listened and followed instructions. Because there’s such a confident clarity of storytelling in Black Bag that cuts through any feeling of being confused by obtuse twists and turns. The movie is explicitly about trust, and I probably should’ve trusted that Soderberg has spent his career mastering the art of cinematic storytelling. Even the scenes that are straightforward this scene represents that idea moments are so well executed that they don’t come across as too heavy-handed.

For instance, the scenes when George is fishing, the first in particular. He’s out alone on a lake, silently processing all the information that he has so far, when his line catches. He’s methodically reeling it in as images of all the suspects flash in his mind. Just as it seems he’s about to make a crucial connection, both the idea and the fish get away from him.

But my favorite scene in the movie is earlier, and it’s a small moment but it’s executed perfectly. Kathryn has an upcoming trip out of London, and when George asks for any details, she simply responds “black bag.” George has found a movie ticket in the trash, causing him to suspect that Kathryn has already had a clandestine meeting in London that she didn’t tell him about. He asks her about the movie, and she claims she doesn’t know anything about it, seemingly avoiding making eye contact. He suggests that they see it together, and she agrees, without giving anything away to suggest that she might have seen it already.

We then get a shot of George and Kathryn sitting next to each other at the movie, filmed as if from the screen looking directly into the audience. There’s a sudden jump scare in the movie, and every single person in the audience is startled, except for Kathryn. Afterwards, George turns to look at Kathryn, and she nonchalantly offers him popcorn. Then there’s another sudden scare in the movie, and she jumps along with the rest of the audience.

It’s such a great example of storytelling without dialogue, trusting that the shot (filmed without close-up, and if I remember correctly, with almost no cuts) and the performances are going to make its meaning clear, conveying an unsettling sense of growing suspicion that George is not allowed to comment on.

It all means that Black Bag is one of the most passive experiences I’ve had watching anything in a long time. I wasn’t sorting through some complex scheme, second-guessing everything, making predictions about what would happen next, but just absorbing everything I was being shown. And when it’s this well done, that’s not a bad thing at all. It didn’t need to feel like a huge, explosive spy thriller (although there is indeed an explosion), but a smaller, character-driven story that’s simply an entertaining time at the movies.