scumbelievable

Fiction!

Hey guys, so since we passed the $500 mark I've been thinking hard about the choose-your-own adventure, and I just don't think I have the steam to run it on top of my other work. I'm still very much interested in publishing original fiction on here, though, and I'll have more to say about that very soon!

Thanks, I Hate It: Captain America: Civil War

Writing film crit about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is sort of like trying to scale a sheer thirty-foot wall built around a vacant lot: difficult and unrewarding. Kevin Feige's near-algorithmic house style is so visually, audibly, and thematically lukewarm as to provide no real handhold  for analysis, and few of the series' entries have problems distinct from any other. The aimless camera, tepid, quippy dialogue, and lifeless special effects all run together after a while. 

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I Don't Wanna Grow Up (And Neither Can You)

You can't show women being hurt. You can't show child abuse. You can't show rape. You can't show incest. Pedophilia, self-harm, intimate partner abuse, necrophilia, violence against children; if you're going to so much as talk about any of these things you need to do so at a 5th-grade level and behind the dual firewalls of safe, pastel-colored animation and explicitly education-based presentation. The art has to show you in painstaking detail the exact way in which to behave. Even then there'...

Thanks, I Hate It: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

I don't understand what it's like to be a dung beetle. There must, you know, be some underlying structure that impels their simple neural nets to roll big balls of shit, but whatever that structure is it's so far outside my experience of existence as to be functionally indecipherable. To me, Brad Bird's Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol embodies the mystery of the dung beetle's world. I recognize the work of some sort of complex process in that the film exists, but the end result ap...

Thanks, I Hate It: The West Wing

I'll admit that this is low-hanging fruit. Lots of people despise neoliberal jerkoff Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing for a multitude of well-articulated reasons. Still, I feel that even if I have no fresh insights to bring to the conversations, the depth of my hatred for this show still justifies ranting  about it. Has anything ever been so smug, so self-assured in its goodness and importance, so soppily sentimental about the people who wield power of life and death over the powerl...

Thanks, I Hate It: Jessica Jones

Maybe the most scathing thing I can think of to say about Jessica Jones is that it proceeds from the notion that David Tennant is scary. I understand that he's supposed to be this whiny, entitled creep, but his face and demeanor are so cartoonishly ineffectual at projecting menace. You couldn't have purpose-built a person less suited to play the show's villain, Kilgrave. And that's only the start of it. Inconsistent handling of super powers weighs down Jessica Jones' genre t...

Dreadnought: Leah's Body

Leah hung weightless in the dreadnought’s flooded cockpit. Diodes blinked around her in the gloom, but she hardly noticed them. Her attention were elsewhere, her thoughts burning in the dissociative chemical soup of her link to the great machine. Through its bank of synthetic eyes she watched the wind scour the glacier’s surface, clouds of powdery snow blowing forty and fifty feet high over the ridged seracs and broken chasms. She felt the pack shift slow and vast beneath her feet of synt...

In the Flesh: Us

Rich, buttery golds, washed-out blues, dried-blood reds and sepulchral greens. Us, Jordan Peele's sophomore horror feature, is one of the most richly colorful movies I've seen in recent memory. The sound isn't slacking either. Its hair-raising soundtrack by Michael Abel, the best in horror since Mica Levi's score for Under the Skin, is revolutionary, mixing high-pitched choral music with hide drums and whimsical chimes to create a kind of demented, primal throb of fairytale ...

In the Flesh: Climax

Gaspar Noé's films always give the impression of trying to get closer to their subjects, of pressing up against skin and hair, of gripping warm flesh with rough fingers. Climax may not carry this as far in a literal sense as Enter the Void did with its warm, almost angelic interior depictions of penetration and ejaculation, but its grasp is if anything tighter and more intimate. It's a movie about isolation, about the essential incoherence of the human personality, and abou...

Thanks, I Hate It: Inception

"You've got to dream a little bigger, darling," says Tom Hardy's character to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's as, pinned down in a gun battle with faceless dream goons, Hardy pulls a grenade launcher out of nowhere. Aside from its folding cityscapes and the storm-wracked ruins it uses to represent the psychological bedrock of human dreaming, this is the closest Christopher Nolan's Inception gets to actually depicting something that would happen in a dream. The movie's failure of imagination i...

In the Flesh: Alita: Battle Angel

There's not much to Alita: Battle Angel, which can of course be fine for an action movie. There's not much to Drunken Master when you get right down to it, and that's one of the most balls-out fun and exciting movies ever made. Drunken Master, thought has clean, fast-paced, inventive fight choreography and a traditional Cantonese score that absolutely rips. Alita has some alright action, some good action, and a sappy, sentimental soundtrack that never fails...

Thanks, I Hate It: Zodiac

They're watching Zodiac on the set of Zodiac.

I don't like Jake Gyllenhaal, who looks at all times like he's reciting "acting, acting, acting" in his head as he says his lines. I also don't like David Fincher, a man with the emotional depth of an earwig. I thought perhaps in combination that Gyllenhaal's wide-eyed staring and Fincher's clinical, antiseptic style would result in something interesting, some blank and deeply vacant caricature of humanity that might give F...

Dreadnought

Going to post the opening of my new giant mecha novella, Dreadnought, sometime next week! I'm so excited to share this one with you guys!

Thanks, I Hate It: The King's Speech

Tom Hooper doesn't really make movies so much as calculatedly inoffensive hagiographies of people whose family owned half the planet in recent memory. There's so much that's morally repugnant about giving a multi-million-dollar blowjob to the memory of a man who, at the time, was one of the foremost political powers in the world that I'm not even going to attempt to tackle it here. Suffice it to say I'm curious just how many young Indian men with stammers died so that George VI could live in ...

Thanks, I Hate It: Avatar

Well, here we are at the end of this year’s Week of Loathing, and what better note to end on than a movie that shattered every box office record of note to become the highest-grossing film of all time and now, just a decade later, might as well never have come out at all for all the impact it had on popular culture. James Cameron’s Avatar is a McMansion in the form of a film, a blandly extravagant way for Cameron to tell the world that the most exciting thing he can imagine is Di...

Thanks, I Hate It: Wall-E

Image caption reads: “Fat bulging over edge of ATMAT”

For about forty minutes, Wall-E is the story of a sad-cute robot roaming an endless wasteland of junk. It’s a good movie, more or less. The Dr. Seuss-esque towers of trash are whimsical and otherworldly, Wall-E’s lonely life heartstring-tuggingly adorable. There’s an inquisitive cockroach sidekick and a tender robot romance. There are a few odd notes—the live-action sequences in which Fred Willard speaks...

Thanks, I Hate It: Thor

This is low-hanging fruit. I admit it. The Marvel movies are about as worthy of thought as their own promotional lunch boxes. But, you know, sometimes you want to give the work your heart, meet the artist in the void between your own mind and their vision, experience what it’s like to live in the luminous prison of their skin and reflect on that deeply enough to risk altering your own personality, and sometimes you just want to grab a bat and fucking whale on something. 

Thanks, I Hate It: Blade Runner

Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic has its high points. The intricate, grimy sets, Darryl Hannah as the repulsively, tragically vulnerable android Pris—whose hellish death scene still gives me the shivers two decades after I first saw the movie—and Rutger Hauer’s justly famous “tears in the rain” monologue are all fascinating cinematic landmarks. The problem is that once you move past the black ziggurats, the endless monotonous gobbling of the rain, and the hypnotic sprawl of an L.A. w...

Thanks, I Hate It: Pacific Rim

There is an undeniable appeal to the old Toho Godzilla movies. Rubber monster suits, singing faeries, fat dollops of exposition about Shintoist compassion—it’s a creative palette you’re not going to find anywhere in American cinema. Toho’s monsters have personalities, motivations, ties to the world around them. They represent the advent of unprecedented technologies—in particular the atomic bomb—and destructive imbalances between man and nature. Even at their silliest, they have a...

Thanks, I Hate It: The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson is the greatest horror writer of the 20th century. Barker and King come close, and their imagery surpasses hers, but they lack her depth of empathy, her subtle gift for understanding and depicting the dark machine of the human subconscious pursuing its own destruction. Mike Flanagan’s loose adaptation of her most famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House, is to Jackson’s work as that image of Christ burned into the side of a grilled cheese is to the beatific agony ...

Week of Loathing

Hey gang, so next week I'm going to write a new Thanks, I Hate It every single day. Those five essays, and those only, will be open to the public. I so appreciate the support you show me on here and I hope it's alright with you that for a short while I'll be opening up some of the stuff I do for this user base. Please let me know if that gives you any concerns!

Thanks, I Hate It: Gladiator

Thanks, I Hate It: Gladiator

More than for any other reason, I hate this movie for killing Oliver Reed. One of the greatest actors of his generation, Reed’s career had been ruined by his alcoholism and womanizing in the 80s and 90s. At the time of Gladiator’s filming he’d been sober for almost six months, but locals pressured him into a drinking competition during which he handily destroyed all comers before dying of a heart attack a few hours later at the age of 61. Scot...

Thanks, I Hate It: Man of Steel

You know, I’m seldom impressed by Zack Snyder, but I couldn’t say I hate him. 300, for all that it’s a jingoistic, morally repulsive screed about how totally heterosexual and democratic the Spartans were, is a great action movie. The opening ten or fifteen minutes of his Dawn of the Dead remake are legitimately fantastic, the rest of the movie notwithstanding. He has his own style, which counts for something in the age of Disney’s ruthlessly bland stranglehold on blo...

Ego Homini Lupus Download

For my $10, $15, and $25-dollar patrons, PDF and .epub files of my new novel. I hope you enjoy it <3