scumbelievable

Thanks, I Hate It: IT

IT: Part 1, the recent Andrés Muschietti-helmed adaptation of Stephen King's seminal thousand-plus page horror novel, is perfectly good fare for a sleepover filled with 13-15-year-olds. In spite of its intermittent corniness it manages to capture at times the wild and wordless feeling of teetering on a knife's edge between childhood and adolescence, but that same place of uneasy sexual awakening is also where Muschietti's movie falls apart. IT's fatal flaw is its sexle...

SKIN OF IRON, TEETH OF GLASS: Making D&D Characters

I compiled every D&D snippet I've ever written on twitter over the past three years into a single document! Download it here anytime, and consider it a small thank-you for your generosity toward me.

Dear Gretchen: Why Should I Eat Trash?

Dear Gretchen,

You've written about trash recently. Could you talk about what makes trash trash and what makes good trash please?  (p.s.I love your shit)

-Tony

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Hey Tony, thanks for your question, and for the compliment! 

Trash is something I identify on kind of a Potter Stewart "I know it when I see it" basis, but broadly I'd define it as art that doesn't take itself too ...

Thanks, I Hate It: Green Room

Here's a movie I should love. Patrick Stewart playing against type as a dead-eyed father figure to a backwoods Washington state white supremacist movement? Savage, desperate ultraviolence? Punks versus Nazis at a scummy boots-and-bracers music venue? Instead I walked out of the theater feeling like I'd swallowed a bad oyster. The A24-standard blue-green color palette, the ultra-gory absurdity of it taken somberly at face value, the paper-thin characters and mumbled dialogue -- it all feels dr...

Dear Gretchen: On Witchcraft

 Dear Gretchen, 

What role, if any, do the the occult and magic have in your art, writing, and, if you want to get into that, your personal life?

-Sebastian

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Thanks for your question, Sebastian.

I'd say the occult has a prominent place in my fiction. No End Will Be Found is about the witch trials of Würzburg and a young woman tortured and executed by the city's r...

Thanks, I Hate It: Birdman

Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman is exactly the kind of movie that wins an Oscar for Best Picture. Smug, tedious, shallowly preoccupied with the making of art as an endeavor at once grand and grubby, and proud of its technical conceits even as the practical and fictional limits of its faux single-shot format are stretched far past the point of believability. Why structure a film as a single shot at all if you're going to point the camera at the sky to communicate an act break...

In the Flesh: Crawl

It's not often you get to see a solid B-movie these days, but in Crawl director Alexandre Aja delivers exactly that. It's a straight creature feature, its cast minimal, its budget shoestring, its flimsy script buoyed by incredible set-dressing, staggering Foley work, and a rock-solid sense of movement through a single rigorously defined environment. The alligators are rendered competently, but it's the sound design that brings them to life. Their grunts and hisses echo through the cr...

In the Flesh: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood clocks in at a meandering two and a half hours, following an ensemble of freaks, goofy film industry old-timers, and burnt-out B-listers as they circle the uncomfortable truth of their own growing irrelevance. Tarantino's discursive, lived-in dialogue is slightly pruned back here, the gripping intensity and lackadaisical whimsy it can summon exchanged for an equally roundabout visual language heavy on travel and period film clips both real and invented. ...

Thanks, I Hate It: Stranger Things

As my good friend and fellow critic Sean T. Collins says, horror is a genre constantly in conversation with itself. The Babadook echoes Poltergeist and Rosemary's Baby. Midsommar consciously connects itself to The Wicker Man and Kill List. It Follows touches on many of the same themes and images as Halloween and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. These movies draw from their predecessors, repurposing and refocusing their them...

Dear Gretchen: The Best of Boardwalk Empire

Dear Gretchen,

Which characters on Boardwalk Empire stood out to you the most, and what do you wish viewers could’ve seen if they hadn’t done the seven-year time skip between seasons 4 and 5?

-Tim

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Thanks for your request, Tim!

"It occurred to me the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don't."

...

Dreadnought, Prologue: The Pimple

August 3rd, 1994

It was Leah’s thirteenth birthday and all she could think of as she made her way hand over hand along the rope that stretched from C Block to Main, snow up to her knees and more blowing against her in white sheets, was the pimple to the right of her nose. It was fat and red and it throbbed in time with her heartbeat. The snowfall all but blinded her. Her breath hissed hot and heavy in her ears. There was nothing but the crunch of her boots in the snow, the smell of he...

Valkyrie, Chapter III: Golem

Fort Feldkirk’s courtyard was painted in blood. It was splashed in drying fans across the bay doors of the motor pool and dribbled in the shade down the windows of the colonel’s study. It ran in the cracks between the yard’s paving stones and dripped through the sunken drainage grates. Standing in the center of the carnage, the stone golem called Priest thought of the rats looking up...

Thanks, I Hate It: Black Swan

Yes, flat affect is a common symptom of psychosis. No, neither actress Natalie Portman nor director Darren Aronofsky manages to make it interesting to watch. Maybe it's the deeply square nature of her character's descent into madness, which includes a scene in which her going down on Mila Kunis is shot like some kind of lurid PSA against opium den orgies. Maybe it's Portman, who's only been good a handful of times. Whatever the answer, it comes together in a pervasive aura of dead-eyed anxiet...

Imagine That You're Killing Him

Imagine hooking your cruel fingers up into his nostrils, listening to his screams turn nasal and thin as he chokes on his own breath, as his sinuses bend in ways that they were never meant to until with a crunching, sticky ripping noise a chunk of his face comes off in your hand. Imagine his slobbering terror as blood pours over his lipless gums into his braying, panicked mouth. Imagine taking that lumpen head in your hands, wrapping that greasy hair around your fists, and smashing it against...

Thanks, I Hate It: The Conjuring

James Wan's surprise horror hit The Conjuring is one of the emptiest movies I've ever seen. Its threat is a sort of anti-family, a lone woman who preys on children for occult purposes, positioned against the wholesome white picket fence dream of the haunting-afflicted Perron family and the clean-cut paranormal investigators, the Warrens, played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, whom they call for help. The family is stressed out by their nemesis and her witchcraft, then they defeat...

Thanks, I Hate It: Star Trek Into Darkness

The idea that the Star Trek movies have to play as pure sci-fi action to attract an audience has led to some phenomenally bad movies. The franchise's appeal has always rested in its philosophical underpinnings and the overt, thoughtful ways in which it expresses them. Anti-war sentiment, non-human personhood, diversity, and anti-capitalism have been part of the series' creative makeup since its inception in the late 1960s. The original series and its successors  stumbled into an...

In the Flesh: Midsommar

Much of horror deals at a fundamental level with the tension between catharsis and repression. Midsommar, Hereditary writer-director Ari Aster's sophomore horror flick, approaches this elemental subject matter without much in the way of framing, depicting a failing relationship between a needy, grief-stricken woman suffering from anxiety and an avoidant, emotionally stunted man incapable of direct communication. It transplants this relationship to the compound of a remote Swedish cul...

Thanks, I Hate It: Parks and Recreation

If the world's comedians were given my psychological profile, a hundred million dollars, and a mission to give me a rage stroke, Parks and Recreation seems like the most probable result. This show gives me hives. It makes me think less of human beings as a species. It makes me want to dig my nails into my palms until my fingertips burst through the backs of my hands. It's chirpy, syrupy-sweet tone and manic energy function as an effective cloak for an ethos which amounts to little mo...

Thanks, I Hate It: Prometheus

"What if I deliberately watered down the iconic images of my sole good film and its sequels such that building back up to them could be stretched over multiple films and treated as a story worth telling in and of itself?" isn't exactly an artistically electrifying idea. It's sort of like inventing the car and then thirty years later you reveal your next big idea: a car without doors, wheels, or an engine. Prometheus, English director Ridley Scott's followup to 1979's Alien, ...

In the Flesh: John Wick 3: Parabellum

In its centerpiece action scene John Wick's latest outing juxtaposes ballet and bloodshed before bringing the two together. The crack in its analogy isn't that the meticulous and often inventive choreography of the movie's action scenes isn't art but that ballet uses bodies in motion to tell stories, to explore through formal perfection the connection between movement and meaning. John Wick tells a story, sure, but that story is minimal by design, connective tissue ...

Our History Is Written in Both Cum and Blood: Modern Rejection of the Queer Grotesque

Photograph: Phillip, Legs on Toes by Robert Mapplethorpe.

"[It is] the teaching of safe sodomy."

-Phyllis Schlafly on Everett Coop's AIDS education program for children

"All America and all the world will hear what the people have said, and with God's continued help, we will prevail in our fight to repeal similar laws throughout the nation which attempt to legitimize a life style that is both perverse and dangerous."

-Anita Bryant on...

Thanks, I Hate It: Halloween

Halloween isn't a bad movie. It's pretty good, in fact, and in some ways it deserves its reputation as a masterpiece. In Jamie Lee Curtis it has one of the great -- if not the greatest -- scream queen performances of all time, and in its masked and implacable villain it has, if not a particularly creative monster, at least a memorable and frightening one. It has an ending that jabs a knife right into the idea that a woman's momentary safety means anything beyond just that, a score th...

Valkyrie, Chapter II: Parhelion

The airship that would take Anok away from his people and south to the war arrived on the last day of summer as the sun dogs flashed in the sky over the frozen vastness of the pack. The young troll watched its anvil-shaped bulk sail out of the glimmering light from a ridge outside the capital where he sat with Inelu, who was braiding his hair. Anok could hardly sit still. “It’s the shi...

Thanks, I Hate It: Firefly

Joss Whedon remains a successful and beloved writer in spite of the ever-mounting stack of sexual misconduct allegations heaped against him, but if the turning of the cultural tides has not robbed him of his money it has at least shoved him firmly out of coolness and into the realm of simpering try-hard glurge where he's always belonged. Whedon's career has been uniquely awful in so many different ways but Firefly, his twee space western from the early 00s, is perhaps the most tooth-...

Thanks, I Hate It: Friends

I detest sitcoms. The laugh tracks, the visual laziness, the saccharine Special Episodes, the endless deluge of casually hateful jokes -- to paraphrase Mad Men's Abe Drexler, their activities are offensive to my every waking moment. Of all the stupid sitcoms that have plopped wetly into popular culture over the last three decades, none is so odious to me as NBC's genre-defining smash hit Friends.

There's precious little to say about the show itself, a bland succession ...

Valkyrie Illustrations

Tom Horstmann's (@horstmannart) sketches and header concepts for Valkyrie! I'm incredibly lucky to work with Tom.

Thanks, I Hate It: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Jim Jarmusch is not a subtle man. If he wants to imply that vampire Christopher Marlowe was Shakespeare's ghost writer, he will say it. If he wants you to know what his characters' favorite books are, they'll talk about them at length. His magpie approach toward collecting and identity through objects can create astoundingly real and lived-in spaces, but it can also be dull, didactic, and insultingly broad. In Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, his Forest Whitaker-led drama about a g...

Valkyrie, Chapter I: Ursula

Ursula, as she had recently begun to call herself in the uneasy privacy of her thoughts, stood facing the wind on the quarter deck of the messenger ship Musk Ox, the thrum of the slab-sided ship’s stormlord engine reverberating through the steel beneath her boots. A flock of starlings wheeled and circled off the ship’s port rail. Below, the farmland of the Verangian border lay spread out...

In the Flesh: Detective Pikachu

This is not a movie I expected to see, much less review, but when you've been with someone for almost seven years and they ask you to go see Detective Pikachu because the idea of Pokémon being real sustained them through their difficult childhood, you find it in your heart to do so. End result, I sat through a mostly endearing ugly-cute adventure starring awkward young insurance adjuster Tim Goodman (Justice Smith) and a Pikachu voiced by Ryan Reynolds. The unlikely duo must learn h...

Thanks, I Hate It: Skyfall

I love James Bond, and Casino Royale is my favorite Bond movie by a country mile. Craig's thuggish, insouciant sex appeal, the tooth-aching torture scene, the small and dirty plot; it's the best Bond gets. The key to its success, though, is its facade of imperial coldness concealing hysterical personal emotion, both of which Skyfall throws over the rail with its Bond-mythologizing plot and gratingly silly cyber warfare antics. In both expanding its scope and centering its pr...