scumbelievable

Mental Health

Hey all; I can't tell you how touched I am by your support during all this. I wanted to let you know that I've been struggling through a depressive episode but that You Love to See It will be caught up this coming week, and also that I understand completely if you need to reduce or end your pledge during this whole mess. If you do cancel but still want to read my stuff, email or DM me when a new post drops and I'll send it to you. 

Milk Teeth Cover by Oriana Menendez

@omenids' beautiful cover for Milk Teeth, my upcoming collection of short medieval horror fiction! It's been delayed for EXCITING REASONS that I can't talk about yet, but it should be coming soon!

In the Flesh: Brotherhood of the Wolf

What the fuck is this movie? How did it get funded? Why is Vincent Cassell here? Is it even a movie, or did a Mortal Kombat game’s character select screen gain sentience and escape onto film? A zombie-armed French aristocrat with a sword-whip made of sharpened bone, a goth Papal assassin played by Monica Bellucci, a royal taxidermist slash stick-fighting champion and his Native American pal — it’s like someone just threw a bunch of nouns in a hat and then fished out th...

You Love to See It: Addams Family Values

In all of film there’s nothing quite like Addams Family Values, a campy collection of gothic and violently absurd vignettes loosely joined together by a single gleeful, frustrated, malevolent thread. That thread is live-in nanny slash serial murderess Debbie Jelinsky, the film’s antagonist. As played by the great Joan Cusack, Debbie is an inimitable character, a kind of organic Barbie doll animated solely by the most venal, miserable concerns of WASPish square culture. As an intr...

The Erratic

The instructors tell them to masturbate before their drills. Focus is crucial, hard-ons a distraction. They do it together, facing away from each other, looking at the porn they’re given. Sleek teenage girls spreading themselves. Older women with thick hips and heavy breasts looking wide-eyed over their shoulders as though surprised while changing. The fat boy, sitting hatefully naked on his bunk, opens his printout like the others, but he doesn’t look at it. The women inside make him ang...

Old Tran Yells at Screen: Repertory Edition

Hey gang, given that theaters are closed, I'm going to start doing 2-4 repertory reviews a month. I'll be watching and writing about classic and contemporary films, and if there's anything you'd particularly like to see me touch on, feel free to let me know in the comments!

You Love to See It: Jurassic Park

The first forty minutes of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is all domino-setting and wisecracks. Sam Neill humiliates a middle schooler, Richard Attenborough says “spared no expense” a half-dozen times, and we get to slow down twice to let the reality of the dinosaurs sink in and to experience the genuine wonder of their existence. Then, in the middle of a tropical storm and an infelicitously timed act of corporate espionage, the movie starts. It’s not a gradual process. One moment...

You Love to See It: American Psycho

When Patrick Bateman kills women, he uses tools to do it. A chainsaw for the sex workers he lures to his apartment; a nail gun when he considers murdering Jean, his secretary. When he murders men, he uses weapons. A knife for the homeless man he guts in an alleyway; an ax for Paul Allen, a coworker whose popularity and connections inspire jealous rage in Bateman. That a man like Bateman sees women as objects is hardly surprising; he can scarcely maintain even his own sense of interiority. The...

You Love to See It: The Mask of Zorro

The Mask of Zorro, which in 1998 came hot on the heels of the ultra-macho action movies of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and just before the modern wave of snarky, factory-produced blockbusters, is a perfect encapsulation in film of the experience of being eight years old and eating an ice cream cone. It’s a mess, it’s nothing but sugar, and it’s unquestionably the highlight of the day. There’s no deep message here. There’s nothing challenging about it, nothing particula...

You Love to See It: Brother Sun, Sister Moon

Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Franco Zeffirelli’s 1972 film about the life of St. Francis of Assisi, begins with the young Francesco di Bernardone returning gravely ill from war with Perugia to recuperate at his lavish family home. Francesco’s illness is shot like a metamorphosis, his sweating body cocooned in linen bandages, his face shrouded with fine cloth at the height of his fever, as though beneath that fragile and permeable membrane he is undergoing physical changes as profoun...

In the Flesh: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

From the first moment they form, our memories are dying. Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire deals with the illusory permanence of art and the fleeting nature of love and passion, its minimalist restraint and intense intimacy surprisingly well-suited to one another.   It dives into the practice of art without melodrama, devoting large slices of its running time to quiet shots of portraitist Marianne painting the upper-class Heloise, a former nun withdrawn from her ...

You Love to See It: Bram Stoker's Dracula

As horror author Garth Marenghi once said, “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” Nowhere does that philosophy prove out more definitively than in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, arguably the director’s last great film and certainly his most extravagant. Starring Gary Oldman as the titular vampire and Winona Ryder as Mina Murray, Dracula is a lush, maximalist reimagining of Stoker’s novel as a kind of grotesque love story. Ever...

In the Flesh: The Invisible Man

It’s the little things that make for good suspense. A shot of an empty doorway lingering just long enough to let the viewer’s expectations about what will or won’t come through it make a full and anxious circuit. A mirror positioned just right to catch the glint of a knife as it’s raised to strike. The Invisible Man, Leigh Whannell’s 2020 reimagining of the 1933 James Whale classic, has a competent grasp on these things. It plays its cards close enough to the vest in its fi...

You Love to See It: Casino

The soundtrack to Casino, Martin Scorsese’s 1995 gangster opus, is of a piece with much of the director’s other material about organized crime. It’s a collage of towering classical music, rock and roll, Rhythm and Blues standards, and everyone from Roxy Music to Otis Redding. The effect is kaleidoscopic, a moment in time crystallized through the sounds that swirled in and around it. All this changes the moment bookie and casino boss Sam “Ace” Rothstein drives to meet gangst...

You Love to See It: Eraserhead

The baby in David Lynch’s 1977 nightmarish arthouse feature Eraserhead embodies a complex synthesis of fears and anxieties. With its labored, phlegmy breathing, frail neck, and filmy eyes it invokes the specter of crib death — of the terrifying fragility of infants. Its alien appearance expresses the estrangement of the adults around it from their own emotions, their discomfort with weakness and vulnerability. Its cries, though, are insistently human. Not once in the film is it p...

The Sermon

He did not come in a procession. Nor did he come hooded, as was usual, but barefoot and bare-headed, his dark hair cropped to dusty stubble. He was beautiful, thought Giulia de Codico, the merchant’s daughter, who watched him cross the plaza from where she stood waiting for her father outside of the dyer’s shop. Her courses had come that morning and she felt faint after so long spent standing, her belly twisted into burning coils. 

The man carried a six-tongued discipline over ...

You Love to See It: Boogie Nights

"You look at me sometimes." Five words, and in them we can see the entire soul of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Scotty, a lonely, socially awkward young gay man living on the margins of the 1970s California porn industry. Boogie Nights is a movie about trying again and again to spin the love you never got out of whole cloth, and when Scotty tries to explain why he thought Dirk might want to kiss him, that's all he has. A single  thread of human connection so delicate, so insubstanti...

In the Flesh: Uncut Gems

Like its protagonist, jeweler and gambling addict Howard “Howie Bling” Ratner, Uncut Gems is an opaque, abrasive, overwhelming experience. Its fairytale synth score and manic, scrabbling camera sketch a world defined by Howie’s addictive magical thinking. The high of winning, the thrill of spinning a dream out of bullshit and adrenaline and feeling, when it inexplicably manifests itself, that you made it happen, pumps tangibly through the movie's veins. As Howie scuttl...

You Love to See It: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 adaptation of acclaimed novelist John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is an almost pathologically quiet film. Its focus rests not on the knife’s-edge tension and sudden violence of field work but on the banality of tradecraft on home soil, the colorless rooms and colorless people and the colorless stories they tell one another, pick apart, and repurpose. It’s a film about lights going out, about the total heat death of its characters’ emotion...

In the Flesh: Birds of Prey

There are four action scenes of note in Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey. The second of these, in which Harley Quinn (Margo Robbie) stages a one-woman raid on a Gotham police station, is the film’s best. A bean bag launcher complete with colored smoke and confetti packed into each shell punctuates each shot with cartoonish flair, and Yan eschews the kind of back-and-forth cutting so typical of Hollywood action in favor of quick, varied shots from a multitude of angles. The feeling is no...

In the Flesh: The New Pope Episode 4

So much of The New Pope's beauty rests in the conscious physicality of its actors, as obviously unique from character to character as the show's voices, faces, and wardrobes. Assente's curtly effete grace, Voiello's meditative stillness and minimalist gestures, Sofia's teasing, swaying walk and the playful movements she makes with her head -- there's an entire language of physical minutiae underpinning every scene. Every gesture fits within the larger mosaic of its performer's sense ...

You Love to See It: Under the Skin

A silent observer stands on a shale beach in the north of Scotland, watching people drown. A woman is swept screaming out to sea. A wetsuit-clad swimmer pulls her desperate husband out of the surf only for the man to stagger back into the water, leaving his rescuer spent and gasping on the rocks, and join his wife. Through it all a baby sits wailing not far from the watcher, tiny form unbearably vulnerable against the sharp rocks and pounding waves, cries a metronome of terror and confusion. ...

In the Flesh: The New Pope Episode 3

There’s a certain shock inherent in seeing John Paul III proceed with moderation and decorum through the Papal speeches and ceremonies which Pius XIII upended, tore apart, and used as a chance to force his underlings into submission. Francis II, just last week, did much the same as Pius in his own syrupy, iconoclastic way, and now the reassertion of genteel decorum feels like a bucket full of cold water in the face. There is a masturbatory air to it, as when a desperate Ester lets the defor...

You Love to See It: Aliens

Aliens, James Cameron’s 1986 action-horror followup to Ridley Scott’s 1979 sleeper hit, starts twice, but don’t mistake that for a stumble. For the first twenty-odd minutes we follow Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, the sole survivor of the titular organism’s predation in the previous film, as she wakes from decades of cryogenic sleep and adjusts to a world in which her loved ones are gone and she has no place in society. Once she’s tapped as an advisor to a military expedition...

The Five-Saint Strike Delivered from On High By Ishtar, Bound in Silk: Rebirth

“One mouthful per worker,” buzzed the queen’s flickering hologram, looming over the line of marching ants. Rugel advanced past the nearest seer — balanced on her forelimbs and cradling the hologram between her terminal pair like a dying blue-white sun — toward the hill of half-melted pink spun sugar draped over the mossy stone on the far northern border of the colony. The queen’s voice echoed through the soaring grass and in among the dead and crumbling chimneys of aban...

Acrylics

“These,” says Billie, tapping a chewed bio-nail against the glass display case. She blows a virulent blue bubble with her chewing gum, then pops it with a quick flex of her tongue and snaps the sticky wad against the roof of her mouth. The sound echoes in the tastefully underlit salon. Behind the case a shadow moves, taking down the flat she wants, inspecting the lacquered aquamarine claws embedded in its foam surface.

“We’ll have to do lapro to change your sheathes,” says the...

In the Flesh: The New Pope 'Episode 2'

“When I was a boy,” cardinal Gutierrez begins, his melancholy features shifting briefly into a faint smile of nostalgia, “a man took advantage of me.” The way actor Javier Cámara delivers the line is bottomlessly sad and gentle, a fitting end to an episode which takes place mostly inside a titanic monument to deathless, endless grief. But where in Gutierrez’s traumatic recollection we see also the seeds of his eventual inner strength, in the sprawling estate of Cardinal Sir John Br...

You Love to See It: Revenge of the Sith

Space cruisers blast at each other point-blank like ships of the line. Clouds of fighters swirl, disintegrate, and reform amid the flurrying laser bolts and plasma shells as our heroes plummet straight into the maelstrom, looping around the vast hulls of dying warships and skimming the edges of explosions that gut city-sized expanses of armored plating. It’s a spectacle like nothing else Star Wars, or anything else for that matter, had done before, and it remains unequaled. As a sh...

In the Flesh: The New Pope Episode 1

Watching the premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s The New Pope is like inhaling a breath of clean mountain air after a decade spent living in an attic. The cleanly symbolist camera work, the idiosyncratic faces of its cast of ecclesiarchs and power brokers, the rich, brilliant colors and eclectic soundtrack — it’s creative in the most playful sense of the word, constantly shooting off course down unexpected detours. When the deadlocked college of cardinals pause for prayer w...

You Love to See It: Raise the Red Lantern

Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern opens with a close shot of Songlian (Gong Li) assenting with stoic misery to end her university career and marry in accordance with her father and stepmother’s wishes. We never see her parents, just as we never see a clear shot of her wealthy husband’s face. Instead we linger on Songlian as she says what she knows is expected of her, tears running in silence down her sullen but immaculately composed face. For the remainder of the film we will...