scumbelievable

Close to the Skin

                                                                                   ...

In the Flesh: White of the Eye

The script of Donald Cammell’s White of the Eye never tries to match the fever pitch of what’s happening on screen, but that’s not to say it doesn’t fall short. As towers of blasted earth are heaved up skyward and Cammell’s camera soars over vistas of junk, machinery, and barren Arizona desert or hunches and skitters through the bizarre 1980s-era brutalist homes of the idle rich, the film’s characters mumble and mutter, whisper and sigh, talking about beer and sandwiches ...

I Would Like to See It: Bedevilled

Indifference, more than anything, is what makes exploitation and abuse not just possible but commonplace. Without callous authorities interested only in doing as little as possible and upholding the status quo and a selfish, disinterested public unwilling to involve themselves in the suffering of others, how would men beat their wives and rape their children in broad daylight? Bedevilled crawls on bloody hands and knees through this antipathy for connection with the pain of others, r...

Tom Horstmann's CHRYSALIS Illustration

A triptych by the incomparable @horstmannart of a currently back-burnered Magical Girl story I'm writing 

In the Flesh: After Hours

An unpaid cabbie, a jilted date, a hamburger ordered and abandoned; Scorsese’s After Hours is a veritable spider web of minor social obligations in which hapless everyman Paul (Griffin Dunne) becomes ever more inescapably entangled, tripped up over and over again by his own prior attempts to extricate himself from awkward and unpleasant situations. The woman whose apartment he slips out of kills herself that same night. The cabbie he stiffs later robs him and drives off with a shou...

In the Flesh: The Housemaid (1960)

Nestled between the tongue-in-cheek moralizing of its nearly Leave It to Beaver-esque opening and closing monologues, Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid is a blackly satirical thriller about the fragility of the bourgeois mid-century Korean nuclear family. When the respectable, hard-working Kims take on a housemaid (Lee Eun-shim) to help keep up with the demands of their newly-built home, the unstable young woman quickly seeks to insinuate herself into the household by seducing ...

I Would Like to See It: The Housemaid (2010)

Its final moments are marred by cheesy special effects, its characterization of its protagonist wavers somewhat in the second and third acts, and its typically excellent melodrama sometimes falls a trifle flat, but Im Sang-soo’s 2010 remake of the classic erotic thriller The Housemaid inarguably fucks. Its sex scenes are some of the hottest in recent film, thrillingly raunchy and at once dehumanizing and deeply personal. In one sequence the camera lingers in the shrinking and growi...

In the Flesh: Eve's Bayou

Where does pain come from? Can you run your hand over the shape of it until you leave behind the silted delta of memory and come to the clear water of its source? In Kasi Lemmons’ 1997 drama Eve’s Bayou, an ambiguous moment of broken boundaries between father and daughter rips its way through a well-to-do Louisiana family and their community. Adoring daughter Cisely (Meagan Good) tells one story. Debonair, serially unfaithful father Louis (Samuel L. Jackson) tells another. Lemmon...

Kane’s Son: Sexual Violence and Symbolism in Alien and Aliens

When Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi/horror hit Alien hit theaters, it revolutionized special effects and kicked the wheezing horror genre into high gear. While Alien is without question Scott’s best movie, tightly paced and claustrophobic, Swiss painter H. R. Giger’s legendary creature design is what sets it apart from everything that followed it. Aliens, its 1986 James Cameron-helmed—yes, he used to make good movies—sequel, builds on and exaggerates Giger’s...

I Would Like to See It: A Colt Is My Passport

The double meaning in the title of Takashi Nomura’s 1967 Yakuza noir is plain from its opening moments. A gun opens any door for a man who knows how to use it, but death, in the end, is the only place that it can truly take him. In that light it’s remarkable how little action the film features; almost all of it restricted to a single assassination sequence, a murder by truck, and the jaw-dropping final gunfight. Instead it dwells mainly on travel, craft, and the consequences of its initia...

In the Flesh: Akira (4k Restoration)

It’s been twenty years since I first saw Katsuhiro Otomo’s legendary science fiction/body horror film Akira, hunched breathless and nauseous just a few feet from the television, the volume turned down to a whisper so my sleeping parents wouldn’t overhear. Since then I’ve been drawn back to it somewhere around a dozen times, seeing my own dual puberties reflected in its images of seething flesh and muscle, my turbulent boyhood and adolescence in the brittle, angry Tetsuo’s c...

In the Flesh: Stoker

Stoker is a Gothic story in the truest sense of the word, the barren mansion in which most of its action takes place haunted not by spirits but by human inability to form connection, by the lingering ghosts of dead relationships and family secrets. Every common object is imbued with a cold malevolence — a belt slithers snakelike through the loops of a man’s slacks as he pulls it off to strangle his victim. A freezer hisses forth a cloud of freon gas as though it were a gate to he...

I Would Like to See It: The Mimic

The Mimic is an odd little film, its pacing erratic, its characters thinly sketched and airless, its setting a slapdash mess in which none of its players are firmly situated. It leaps from scene to scene with manic energy, creating empty airtime like a Loony Tunes character revving up their legs and spooling out a heap of rumpled carpet in their wake. Once it takes off, though, the last forty minutes of the film are one long hot streak, a grisly flashback in which a one-eyed shaman s...

You Called for Me: Masculine Pain and Isolation in Akira

The first time we see Tetsuo (Nozomu Sasaki), the troubled teenage antagonist of Katsuhiro Otomo’s legendary 1988 animated sci-fi film Akira, he’s marveling at another boy’s motorcycle. We know it’s not the first time, either, because when daredevil punk Kaneda (Mitsuo Iwata) shows up to find Tetsuo bent over in the bike’s seat, the first thing out of his mouth is, “Is that you again, Tetsuo?”

That Tetsuo lives in the shadow of boys like Kaneda isn’t even subtex...

I Would Like to See It: Compulsion

On paper, Craig Goodwill’s 2016 erotic thriller Compulsion sounds like exactly what I want out of a trip to the movies: elaborate costumes, psychedelics, graphic sex and violence, unreliable memories. In practice it’s a tepid swilling together of second-string catalog models and sensuality ranging from stale to mildly interesting. Its costumes, while gorgeous, are deployed far too thinly and artlessly, and its story is a clot of flavorless relationships and unimpressive twists. I...

In the Flesh: The Passion of the Christ

Mutilation is the mechanism by which torture compels its recipients. Our bodies recognize agony as a sign that soon our extremity will take on permanence, our body’s functions breaking down, ligaments severed, fingers cut away, skin hanging from raw flesh like ragged vestments. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ depicts the scourging of Jesus with almost pornographic intimacy and attention to sensation, lingering over the unmaking of Christ’s body as glass-tipped lashes str...

In the Flesh: Venom

Venom has perhaps the most unearned face turn in all of film. One moment the titular symbiote (Tom Hardy) is snarling that Earth is going to be a game preserve for his people, and the next he’s telling Eddie Brock (Also Tom Hardy, sans CGI and vocal distortion) that sharing a body has changed his mind and maybe Earth isn’t so bad. Along the way there’s maybe a beat, a beat and a half during which these two characters develop any kind of connection. In one scene Venom scales a s...