scumbelievable

In the Flesh: Mad Men s2e04 'Three Sundays'

“Get out, we’re… sleeping!” shouts Don, sprawled on top of Betty, as Bobby and Sally burst into their bedroom. Kids are everywhere in ‘Three Sundays’, the first episode of Mad Men to split its time between three separate storylines, a narrative move that would become a signature in later seasons. Sally takes her first trip to the office with Don, passing out drunk in the break room after getting into unattended liquor in a funny/not so funny echo of her father’s al...

In the Flesh: Mad Men s1e13 'The Wheel'

‘The Wheel’ is without question the single best-known episode of Mad Men, made famous by the eponymous pitch Don gives to Kodak for their slideshow wheel. It’s a much-analyzed scene, a perennial favorite for cinephiles, and deservedly so. In the space of ninety seconds, with nothing but a few fleeting scenes of Don looking at pictures for setup, we’re thrust into our own memories and held there face-down until we’re drowning in nostalgia. “The pain from an old wound,” D...

In the Flesh: Mad Men s1e03 'The Marriage of Figaro'

A bathroom isn’t a bathroom. A gift isn’t a gift. A house isn’t a house. ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ is where Mad Men becomes Mad Men, a house of smoke and mirrors, a labyrinth of doors and windows leading nowhere, to nothing. At his daughter’s birthday party after being turned down by department store manager Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff), ad man Don Draper (Jon Hamm) drinks too much and starts to see the cracks in the fantasy of his Fitzgeraldian suburban life. Cree...

Sign of the Dragonfly: Chapter II

Captain Hathi i’Mati had served the emperor’s half-brother for almost four years now. The rajah Jahangir Eru Vandifatori, known to his inner circle as Jahan, did not often keep high-ranking retainers for so long. Indeed, Hathi had killed his own predecessor, Captain Indirat, just six months into the woman’s career. He could still see her looking up at him in shocked incomprehension as she knelt on the muddy West bank of the Gris where it cut through Hathi’s village, could still see he...

Sign of the Dragonfly: Chapter I

Slava didn’t like the wizard. She didn’t like his soft, slender hands, or his white skin, unmarred by windburn or the sun. She didn’t like his gentle voice or his long, flowing hair the color of cornsilk. His gold, though, she could tolerate. When they returned to Virk she would have enough to buy a tract of land and a small herd of goats, perhaps even a slave or two. She would find a good stout husband to raise her daughters and tend her hearth, her mother’s axe and shield on the wal...

Paper Cuts: Kill Six Billion Demons

Tom Bloom’s Kill Six Billion Demons is big, ambitious, and omnivorous, a tasting menu informed by hundreds of discrete influences ranging from Hindu mythology to Dragon Ball Z to the illustrations of Wayne Barlowe. Following Allison Ruth, a sorority sister imbued with the power of a dethroned king of the multiverse, Bloom’s comic feints nimbly around every imaginable element of shopworn isekai tedium and dives headlong into a sprawling story of will pitted against destin...

In the Flesh: Heat

Six years ago, I really didn’t like this movie. I don’t know if I was distracted or just in a bad mood, but watching it now I can’t for the life of me understand why I wrote the things I did. This is a stone-cold son of a bitch of a flick, a movie about love and disposability, about living your calling, about what family is and isn’t, and the pain of wanting things we know deep down we’ll only fuck up and destroy. Who knows, maybe I didn’t eat a good breakfast that morning. I’d ...

SIGN OF THE DRAGONFLY: PROLOGUE

Prologue: The Stairs

Hama hated the climb to his master’s rooms. Sixty-seven steps hewn from rough limestone led up to the first landing and its mullioned window of unblemished glass panes looking out over Saffron Bay and the forest of masts that swayed on the water; these weren’t so bad. Then a door to the left of the faded tapestry of the Hunt of Marana, a short walk down a hall, and up one hundred and forty-four creaking wooden stairs, circling round and round the squared ascent ...

In the Flesh: Jason and the Argonauts

Human mannerisms, but no human expressions. A gaze, but no eyes, only empty pits. Animator Ray Harryhausen’s great bronze statue of the titan Talos is chilling as much for what isn’t there as for what is, an alienating collection of the familiar, the discordant, and the conspicuously absent. The high, wailing groan of the statue’s bronze body in motion is instantly disconcerting, as are his stiff, unnatural movements and the metallurgic imperfections whorled across his back and chest. W...

In the Flesh: Clash of the Titans (1981)

Watching this movie makes me feel like Tony Soprano showing his daughter, Meadow, the church their ancestors helped to build on a crew of masons before grumbling, “Go out there now and try to find me two guys who can put decent grout around your bathtub.” People edited the scenes in Clash of the Titans in which human actors fight hand to hand with stop-motion monsters. They labored over sequences of divine retribution in which miniatures are destroyed by floodwaters while hapless...

In the Flesh: The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim

It takes a bold creative team to step into the world of Peter Jackson’s monumental Lord of the Rings trilogy, much less to do so with an animated film. Kenji Kamiyama’s War of the Rohirrim, unlike some other recent efforts I could name, earns its stripes and then some. From its loving animation, marred only by a few rushed effects, to its talented and committed voice cast, Kamiyama’s feature punches above its weight class at virtually every turn. It textu...

Top 10 of 2024

10. DUNE PART 2, DENIS VILLENEUVE

Villeneuve got me at last! The second half of his Dune adaptation is as thrilling and bizarre as the first half was mediocre and visually tame, spilling over with fantastic costumes and great performances. The real lynchpin here...

In the Flesh: Nosferatu (2024)

Eggers’ Nosferatu is beautiful, full of sumptuous shadows and exquisitely dressed rooms. It sports an embarrassment of acting talent, with Lily-Rose Depp luminously ghoulish as the tormented Ellen Hutter and Nicholas Hoult practically coming out of his skin as her broken and terrified husband, Thomas. That Willem Dafoe, more skull-like and ecstatic with eldritch mischief than ever, is fantastic as Van Helsing analogue Albin Eberhart von Franz is hardly a surprise, but his triumphan...

In the Flesh: The Muppet Christmas Carol

How do you write with any kind of objectivity about a film that shaped your childhood so profoundly? A Muppet Christmas Carol is the season entire, to me, a heartfelt plea for everyone to better themselves, to believe, yes, but also to act, to give, and in giving, learn to receive love. I know each of Paul Williams’ songs by heart. I hold hundreds of Brian Henson and John Fenner’s loving shots and beautifully ramshackle sets in my mind’s eye, etched there like Doré wo...

In the Flesh: Smile 2

You don’t usually see good fake pop music. Think of the dead-eyed, lifeless numbers in Shyamalan’s Trap from earlier this year, so non-specific they barely register as music at all, or even the name of the performer, Lady Raven, so clearly at odds with the blandly fun and peppy public image she projects. Smile 2, by contrast, makes you believe that half your friends could be obsessed with Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) and, by some weird twist of fate, you just haven’t heard...

In the Flesh: Heretic

“I keep these women a bit wet and a bit nippy,” says Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), grinning with avuncular charm at Mormon missionary Sister Paxton (Chloe East) from the head of a room full of caged women, “but only for the same reason your church brings Bibles to Haiti in the wake of a hurricane. It’s easier to control people who’ve lost everything.” It’s a brutal button on a cleverly presented thesis, that all religious architecture is fraudulent, existing only to exercise power over...

In the Flesh: War and Peace (1966-67)

The first blush of combat in Sergei Bondarchuk’s monumental adaptation of Tolstoy’s masterpiece is a staggering sensory experience. Thousands of uniformed soldiers maneuver onscreen, forming lines and squares, jockeying for position in the hills of Lower Austria. Smoke drifts in waves from ranks of muskets and the belching mouths of cannon. Horses thunder past at dizzying speed, and Bondarchuk manages with ingenious skill to capture the feeling of hurtling through the midst of this orderl...

In the Flesh: Dune: Prophecy s1e03 'Sisterhood Above All'

Anchored by bravura performances by Jessica Barden as a young Valya and Emma Canning as a young Tula, ‘Sisterhood Above All’ is the series’s nastiest and most engaging episode to date. The centerpiece here is Tula (Olivia Williams) reflecting on her adolescent attempt to exact revenge against the Atreides for her brother’s alleged murder at their hands. Her romance with Orry (Milo Callaghan) and her gentle big-sistering of his brother, Albert (Archie Barnes) are so warm and genuine, h...

In the Flesh: Megalopolis

Take Shakespeare’s Roman plays, a double handful of modern politics run through a blender on pulse for about half an hour, a dash of transcendental psychedelica, and a few decades of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, and you’ve got Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Sprawling, messy, fantastical, oddly hopeful, naive, pointed, insightful, it’s a fitting capstone for such a long and wildly uneven career, which ranges from the generationally influential to the instant...

In the Flesh: Gladiator 2

Never show me Matt Lucas. There is no reason good enough to show me Matt Lucas. He radiates an anti-charisma so powerful that even casting him perfectly as the shrieking, freakish mouthpiece of a dying empire isn’t enough to make his onscreen presence tolerable. Between his presence and the woefully miscast Paul Mescal as the adult Lucius, there are serious weak links peppered throughout Gladiator 2’s cast. Denzel Washington does a great job as charmingly disillusioned fight prom...

In the Flesh: Dune: Prophecy s1e02 'Two Wolves'

It’s one thing to watch a cold and calculating power player like the Bene Gesserit mother superior, Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson), spend human lives like subway tokens. It’s another to see her sister, the reverend mother Tula (Olivia Williams), sacrifice the novice she loves like a daughter for the sake of a few cryptic words. Williams gives such genuine feeling to her scenes with Chloe Lea’s Lila that it’s easy to overlook the slippery emotional manipulation she uses to pressure the...

In the Flesh: Castration Movie Pt. 1

Star and director Louise Weard begins and ends the first half of her operatically-sized Castration Movie with broken people trying and failing to be in love. First there’s Turner (Noah Baker) and his girlfriend Brooklyn (Jasmine Provins), a nominally cishet couple with all the chemistry of peanut butter and mayonnaise, their relationship foundering under the weight of their separate brands of dysfunction. Right from the jump, the acting Weard manages to draw out of her cast is...

In the Flesh: Dune: Prophecy s1e01 'The Hidden Hand'

All the stars are here! Mark Strong, Emily Watson, Olivia Williams, Travis Fimmell, and a half dozen more genre and period stalwarts anchor the exciting and enigmatic series premiere of Diane Ademu-John and Alison Schapker’s Dune: Prophecy. To call a big-budget genre series created, helmed by, and starring women — especially older women — “unique” feels like putting it lightly. It’s incredible this thing got made at all, and from what ‘The Hidden Hand’ shows us, I’m...

In the Flesh: Conclave

Take Paolo Sorrentino’s visionary, brazenly experimental The Young Pope, turn the saturation down about seventy percent so that everything looks more or less grayish brown, as is de rigueur, strip away the mystery, the sexuality, the insight into the church’s nature and its potentiality, and finally remove the humanity from its characters and you’ve got Edward Berger’s Conclave. It offers up a tame and slightly antiseptic view of the election of a new pope i...

In the Flesh: Arcane Season 2, First Arc

Brought to life by French animation studio Fortiche, Arcane remains in its second season easily the most beautiful animated show on the air. Hand-painted cells applied to an underlying scaffold of computer animation smooth away the latter medium’s tendency toward the stiff and the janky while enabling the animators to lay out action scenes on a scale and with a depth of detail unseen outside of the major animated films of the 1980s and 90s. It has a budget to match, and the long pr...

The Raptor

I can hear the pachys working out their morning jitters before I open my eyes. Their paddock is about twenty yards from my window, and the echoing crack when their bony skulls collide is loud enough that I haven’t used my alarm clock in months. I roll over in bed to watch them at it, Brutus and Caesar leaping on the climbing rocks, swinging their armored craniums at one another like warhammers. The five females look on from below without much interest. Finally, Brutus ducks his head and ble...

In the Flesh: La Reigne Margot

“I knew you would be beautiful… luminous,” says the injured and delirious La Môle (Vincent Perez) as he lies bleeding in his lover Margot’s (Isabelle Adjani) arms, believing her to be the angel of death. As in so much of Patrice Chéreau’s La Reigne Margot, death and sexuality are never far apart. This moment of morbid intimacy comes full circle at the close of the film when Margot fulfills her oath to La Môle by taking his severed head with her when she makes her escape ...

In the Flesh: Alien: Romulus

Alien: Romulus doesn’t work without David Jonsson as the android Andy. The synthetic person’s transformation from a shaky, well-meaning adult child who lives only to protect his surrogate sister, Rain (Cailee Spaeny), to a sad-eyed arbiter of life and death aboard the titular space station is far and away the most compelling arc on display here. Jonsson’s body language is exquisitely subtle in both incarnations, first reticent and gentle, then quietly commanding and freighted w...

In the Flesh: Strange Darling

J. T. Mollner’s Strange Darling opens on a protracted monologue straight out of a Feminism 101 pamphlet, with the Lady (Willa Fitzgerald) explaining to the Demon (Kyle Gallner) that women take their lives in their hands with every hookup. Neither Fitzgerald nor Gallner does bad work, exactly, but the hamfisted gee-whiz tone of their back and forth suggests some kind of satirical edge that never really comes. Even as the film’s twisty back-and-forth timeline reveals the reversed g...

In the Flesh: 'Salem's Lot (2024)

There’s a lot to like about Gary Dauberman’s ‘Salem’s Lot, an adaptation of Stephen King’s classic vampire novel of the same name. Bill Camp is tremendously likable as the caring, perceptive school teacher Matt Burke, the color grading is refreshingly vibrant and thoughtful, Alfre Woodard is great as Dr. Cody, and child actor Jordan Preston really brings the character of Mark Petrie alive. There’s an early scene of child sacrifice that is almost unwatchably painful. The f...