scumbelievable

500

Some of you may know this already, but when I started this Patreon I was dirt poor and had just barely scrabbled my way out of stealing to eat and digging change out of the couch to pay rent. I spent a decade of my life regularly unable to afford essentials, and I never once imagined 500 people would care enough about my work to subscribe in support of it. I have so many exciting things planned for the rest of 2020 and the start of 2021, and hopefully more original work I can legally share wi...

In the Flesh: Raised by Wolves

Raised by Wolves is deeply strange by the visual and thematic standards of American science fiction. It feels much more akin to something like The Prisoner, spare and arresting, its human drama both direct and primordial, or like the wildly inventive symbolist comics of Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius. Bronze-skinned androids soar unassisted through the air, their mere gazes reducing men to bubbling ash. Battered soldiers in conical helms wander the wastela...

You Love to See It: Downfall

“Show the man inside the monster” is, as Hitler-focused art and scholarship goes, about as prosaic as it gets. A little sentimental music can make you feel sympathy for a rock with a face on it, so conjuring up a few tears for little Adolf’s troubled boyhood or whatever doesn’t amount to much beyond basic narrative competence. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall takes a similar path at first, giving us a deeply emotional view of the Führer’s last days, but it doe...

You Love to See It: Dredd

When movies employ slow-motion shots, the point is almost always to emphasize how cool something is within the context of an action scene. The Matrix’s influential “bullet time” and its slow pans around martial artists suspended in time mid-strike are effective methods of guiding viewer observation toward a single action, infusing a single kick or leap with additional tension and thus a greater sense of kinetic payoff. Zack Snyder’s 300 does much the sam...

You Love to See It: Vision

Vision, horror cartoonist Julia Gfrörer’s third and latest graphic novel, is a once-in-a-decade piece of art, a pitch-black story of domestic suffocation set at the end of New York’s Gilded Age. Eleanor, a not-quite-widowed spinster whose fiance's death has left her socially and economically adrift, lives with her brother Robert and his sickly wife, Cora, for whom she serves as unwilling caretaker, in a house Gfrörer renders in her trademark intricately tapered style, thin line...

You Love to See It: Princess Mononoke

“Life is suffering,” the leper Osa husks from within his caul of soiled bandages. “It is hard. The world is cursed, but still you find reasons to go on living.” On his deathbed, his body rotting, this quiet man finds words of clear-eyed guidance for a visiting stranger. This single moment of human connection is as moving as any glimpse of spiritual transcendence, as powerful as anything the film has to say about war, loss, or the rape of the natural world by industry. It�...

You Love to See It: Mulholland Drive

Two women writhe and gasp in a coolly modern bed made up with the kind of crisp linen sheets and dark comforter ubiquitous in the late 90s and early 00s. Like all of Lynch’s love scenes it has a florid, almost soapy quality to it, the kind of emotional hyper-realness — think BOB’s demented laughter in Twin Peaks and Frank Booth’s pitiful, seething whine of “baby wants to fuck” in Blue Velvet — that so frequently renders his work both trans...

Fuck Moral Art

In Melanie Tem’s under-read werewolf classic Wilding, a brutalized and neglected young woman named Deborah struggles to find the strength to abandon her newborn child. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, banned for obscenity for many years in multiple countries, a married man estranged from his wife by the death of their infant son masturbates while watching a young woman near the shore until he notices her clubfoot, which repulses him. What is the moral of these stories? Who is g...

You Love to See It: Seven Samurai

In a raging river, the self-declared samurai Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) holds a child to his armored breast as he flees downstream from a burning mill. Then, slowly, the shock of adrenaline fades. Kikuchiyo freezes. “This baby... is me,” he cries out loud. The blunt-force generational trauma of one war orphan rescuing another hits like a hammer, the river’s pounding flow emphasizing that these forces of cyclical violence are in some ways irresistible, that they move un...

Skin/Bone

You dream of completion behind acid-etched glass, the water cloudy with disintegrating matter shed during your rehab. Something went wrong when you were Iterated back from Muscida. You've been floating here ever since while smeared faces and muffled voices circle you.

Locked joints quiver beneath baggy skin and coils of atrophied muscle. Tendons creak and beads of white-hot pain crawl up your wrists as your fingers twitch for the first time in -- weeks? months?

Machines chime in t...

You Love to See It: Hagazussa

The rape scene which marks the beginning of Hagazussa’s final act takes place both on and offscreen, the goatherd Albrun’s body below the neck and the man violating her both excluded from the suffocating close-up on her face and the face of the rape’s orchestrator, Swinda. The moment’s significance exists only between the two women; the man is an accessory. In this way, first-time director Lukas Feigelfeld paces the boundary line of rape as a physical act and rape as an emoti...

You Love to See It: Come and See

Elem Klimov’s Come and See ends with a grief-stricken and traumatized Belarusian boy, Flyora, shooting at a picture of Adolf Hitler he finds lying in a puddle. The scene is intercut and overlapped with footage — both real and fabricated — of Hitler’s life, which plays in reverse until the dictator appears as an infant in his mother’s arms. Flyora ceases shooting. He starts to cry, misery and frustration twisting his chapped and weathered features. What are we m...

In the Flesh: The Skin I Live In

The Skin I Live In is a horny, nasty two-hour soap opera of hidden parentage and surgical forced feminization larded with Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s signature twists, reversals, and protracted hostage situations. Where Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face — the film’s most obvious inspiration — plays its emotional material close to the vest, The Skin I Live In is broad and melodramatic. Given the film’s preoccupation with gender performance and ...

In the Flesh: Jennifer's Body

A stylized, vision-driven mess is always preferable to competently made factory shlock, and no matter the failings of its hokey CGI and Diablo Cody’s limp and convoluted screenplay, Jennifer’s Body still has something genuine flickering at its core. Its story about the thoughtlessly exploitative relationships young women form with one another and the role of boys as psychosexual proxies for those connections is occasionally compelling; the flash of raw emotion when Jennifer (Mega...

You Love to See It: Showgirls

There’s nothing quite like Elizabeth Berkley’s performance as Nomi Malone, a human tsunami of desire, anger, mental illness, and almost primal stubborn independence. As the heroine of Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas’s cult classic Showgirls she’s half Gandolfini, stormy emotions and powerful but fragile confidence, and half feral cat, though both comparisons distract from the uniqueness of Berkley’s screen presence, which can shift from hypnotically magnetic t...

A Town Full of Babies: Queer Life and Children's Media

Image taken from Strange Suspense Stories #60, artist Jack Kirby, pub. Fawcett Comics, August 1962

Over the past two decades, “adult who consumes primarily children’s media” has gone from a reviled fringe identity — think Bronies, adult male fans of the My Little Pony revival, monopolizing cons and fanart forums meant for actual children — to a more or less normative way for grown people to relate to art. In the queer community especiall...

In the Flesh: Stalker

Three men stand on the threshold of a place of power, a place where by the manifestation of inner desire the nature of the self is irrevocably exposed. One fears that to enter would mean facing his own venal nature. Another uses the same thought to cloak himself in sarcasm and worldly ennui. The third contemplates destroying this place, the Room, which is the object of the film’s meandering journey. To him it is a hopeless thing, a place where unhappy people are brought face to...

You Love to See It: No Country for Old Men

“The coin don’t have no say,” the widow Carla Jean Moss explains to the hit man Anton Chigurgh. “It’s just you.” Coming as it does at the end of a film concerned primarily with the primate ingenuity and mythologized moral codes of violent men, actress Kelly MacDonald’s quivering line read hits like a broadside, splintering Chigurgh’s conception of himself as a force of fate and principle without agency in his own actions. At once his game of flipping coins to determine whether...

In the Flesh: Sonic the Hedgehog

I walked in on our houseguest (long, irritating story) watching Sonic the Hedgehog earlier this evening and decided to stay for the last forty-five minutes, so now you all get to suffer with me through this incomplete review. First and foremost, Ben Schwartz gives the most obnoxious, charmless voice performance I’ve ever heard. There is not one ounce of genuine emotion or chutzpah in anything he says — it’s like he’s delivering five or six hundred consecutive takes of one of ...

Sales Tax

Hey gang, starting June 1st Patreon is going to be charging sales tax on pledges. If you could go to your pledge settings and adjust for taxation (it’ll walk you through it) before the 1st, I would so appreciate it, though I understand if you need to reduce or delete <3 Thanks, as usual, for everything <3

EDIT: If your pledge already says "+applicable taxes" you should be all set

EDIT no 2: Next month you will hopefully NOT be taxed for your pledge. I'm sorry I couldn't fi...

You Love to See It: Wake in Fright

At first it seems as though Wake in Fright, Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 thriller about an English schoolteacher stranded by bad luck and dumb decisions in a desolate mining town, will be a familiar kind of story. A small town with a sinister secret, good-natured locals concealing some conspiracy behind their ruddy faces and welcoming smiles. As one scene of rural monotony and stupid viciousness blends into the next there is a sense that all of this must be leading to the revelation of some...

You Love to See It: In the Mood for Love

Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love is a film composed almost entirely of minutiae. It has no dramatic set pieces, no driving plot. It’s a movie about the formation of an emotional state and the slow, quiet failure of that state to manifest in life. It’s a movie about two people passing on a narrow staircase, about the slow sway of a woman’s hips as a man watches her walk away and the quiet tension of whether or not she knows he’s watching. Kar-wai’s shots of...

You Love to See It: Tampopo

A young man reaches around his lover, cracks an egg on the edge of a bowl, and deposits the yolk in his mouth. He holds it on his tongue as he passes it to her with a kiss, the golden membrane slithering over the irregular surfaces of their teeth and tongues, conforming to the shifting flesh and jostling bone of their intimacy. For an almost unbearably tender minute they twist their bodies to exchange the glistening yolk until, inevitably, its membrane ruptures and it spills down the woman’...

You Love to See It: Madeline's Madeline

For most of the runtime of Madeline’s Madeline, the titular character’s (Helena Howard) life is a shuttlecock swatted back and forth between her mother Regina (Miranda July) and the director of her experimental theater troupe, Evangeline (Molly Parker). The two maternal figures alternately berate and exploit the teenage Madeline, who suffers from an unspecified but volatile mental illness or illnesses. To her white mother she’s an unsolvable problem, a difficult child constantl...

You Love to See It: Men In Black

Vincent D’Onofrio’s grotesquely oddball turn as a gigantic extraterrestrial cockroach wearing the hollowed out and rotting skin of an asshole farmer and abusive husband is perhaps the most memorable aspect of Men In Black, a cynical and pro-surveillance state but otherwise unimpeachable ‘90s action flick. The leprous makeup and subtle CGI and practical effects used to show his disguise’s gradual decay, D’Onofrio’s jerky movements and garbled, glottal voice �...

You Love to See It: Batman Returns

Batman Returns, Tim Burton’s odd and piquant superhero film, is about the pieces that compose a person. Outside of this film I’ve never much cared for Batman or his beloved rogues gallery, or for superheroes in general, but something about Burton’s movie just feels right to me. It breaks the character of Batman into its component parts which reveal as separate entities his nature and place in the world far more effectively than they could in synthesis. The first of...

In the Flesh: Shin Godzilla

Shin Godzilla’s meeting scenes — and there are a lot of them — are among the funniest, most crushingly honest depictions of bureaucracy in action that I’ve seen. Watching the Japanese government hem and haw about what might or might not be a gigantic radioactive marine reptile plowing its way through an urban center is as blackly hilarious as director Hideaki Ano’s (of Neon Genesis Evangelion fame) fissured, dead-eyed take on the titular king of monsters is disturb...

You Love to See It: Manhunter

A serial killer brings his blind girlfriend to the zoo to touch a sedated tiger. It sounds more like the setup for an off-color joke than the premise of one of the hottest psychosexual scenes of the 1980s. Manhunter, Michael Mann’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon, makes the scene its centerpiece. Mann shoots it with a tender, tightly wound intimacy that feels as though at any moment it could disintegrate into a welter of blood and claws and shattered bones...

You Love to See It: Possession

Anna sits on the couch beside her husband, Mark, who wants to talk to her about her sudden dereliction from their family. As he whines and wheedles she remains expressionless, listening without comment or affect. Actress Isabelle Adjani’s mouth is open just the slightest crack, her huge, pale eyes only mostly focused. The scene begins to fade. In Anna’s mind she walks through a nearly deserted subway station, her footsteps echoing from the tiled walls. She’s carrying grocer...

You Love to See It: To Live and Die in L.A.

The car chase in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. is so instantly engrossing, so visually inventive and muscular in its pacing, that since seeing it I’ve struggled to engage with other chase scenes. Asshole secret service agent Richard Chance’s 1985 Impala careens down the concrete embankment of the L.A. river culvert like a comet roaring from heaven, its tail a plume of boiling dust and grit. You can feel the sweat, sour and slick, between flesh, cotton,...