scumbelievable

In the Flesh: Blood for Dracula

Dracula, that iconic figure of bygone and bloody glory, that aristocratic parasite in whom so many national and sexual anxieties are bound up again and again over the decades, is in Paul Morrissey’s vision rendered wormlike and pathetic, more wretched than in any other incarnation to date. At the start of Blood for Dracula we watch as he (Udo Kier) painstakingly colors his drab and faded hair and eyebrows, as he lays the spent remnants of his vampiric coven to rest in their overtak...

In the Flesh: Un chant d'amour

Translated literally, Un chant d’amour means “Song of Love”, but there is no music in Jean Genet’s first and only film. There is no sound of any kind, and so we must understand the song as metaphor, as a way of understanding sublimations of desire. Smoke blown through a hollow reed. Bodies writhing alone in separate beds. Planes of flesh and hair in desperate motion, signaling their ardor to blank walls, to uncaring lovers, to the sadistic gaze of the prison guard (André Rey...

In the Flesh: Priscilla

Elvis (Jacob Elordi) speaks softly. Elvis asks Priscilla’s (Cailee Spaeny) father permission before taking her out to the movies. He won’t take her virginity. He calls her parents sir and ma’am. As his whiteness allows him to smuggle popular and influential but culturally unacceptable Black rock and roll and blues music into mainstream culture, his gentle affect and Southern manners allow him to groom and prey upon a child of fourteen as her parents look on in befuddled dismay, too inef...

In the Flesh: The Curse s1e10 'Green Queen'

“I didn’t really mean it,” Dougie (Benny Safdie) sobs, sitting alone in the middle of the street as fire department personnel, having failed in their attempt to rescue Asher (Nathan Fielder), mill aimlessly around him. “I didn’t mean any of it.” Does he mean the death of his wife in an accident for which he may or may not be responsible? The curse he placed on Asher after they argued a few episodes prior? The lengths he went to in order to paint Asher as unlikable, materialistic, ...

In the Flesh: The Curse s1e09 'Young Hearts'

I’m cribbing from friend and fellow critic Sean T. Collins here, but one of the marks of truly great storytelling is to bring the audience to a conclusion that feels shocking in the moment and inevitable in hindsight. The Curse’s ninth episode delivers that feeling in spades, capping off one of the most intense scenes of protracted humiliation I’ve seen in years with a left field heater as Asher (Nathan Fielder), rather than exploding in rage as he has time and time again, take...

In the Flesh: The Curse s1e08 'Down and Dirty'

Making people say things they don’t mean is the bread and butter of reality television, but it’s one thing to know it and another to see it in action. Watch Dougie (Benny Safdie) coax and prod Asher (Nathan Fielder) through a nightmarish on-camera allusion to and then full-scale revelation of his cuckolding fetish, or plead tearfully with Nala (Hikmah Warsame) to curse him in order to either prove a point or pull an incredibly cruel and Byzantine prank on Asher; the resultant vibe is so r...

In the Flesh: The Curse s1e07 'Self-Exclusion'

Does Nala (Hikmah Warsame) have psychic powers? The show plays with the idea in its opening and closing sequences, depicting the alienated young girl attempting to curse her bully during a rope climbing exercise, to no avail, and later watching  warily as the other girl trips and badly scrapes herself on the playground. It’s an interesting exercise, inviting us to indulge in the same kind of racist fantasies we’ve seen Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher (Nathan Fielder) succumb to at var...

In the Flesh: The Curse s1e06 'The Fire Burns On'

It’s frightening to watch a narrative emerge in real time from the dead skin of reality, splitting desiccated scales to uncoil new and glistening and wholly independent of its inventors. Whitney (Emma Stone) and Dougie (Benny Safdie), confronted with the lifeless, airless void that is their first episode’s rough cut, decide to make Asher (Nathan Fielder) their engine for generating conflict within the fiction. You can see their real world opinions shifting as they settle on the new approa...

In the Flesh: The Curse s1e05 'It's a Good Day'

“The last thing this neighborhood needs is a spoiled rich girl whose parents bought her a house,” says Whitney (Emma Stone). Asher (Nathan Fielder) laughs, then abruptly falls silent at her tight-lipped stare. “I thought you were being self-deprecating,” he says sheepishly. If there’s one thing people should know about Whitney, it’s that even when she thinks she’s joking, she isn’t. Her “playful” back and forth with show tech Remi (Oscar Avila) is an interpersonal...

In the Flesh: The Curse s1e04 'Under the Big Tree'

It’s a real treat to watch the Siegels’ principles roll over dead at the first whiff of money and power. Asher’s (Nathan Fielder) monotone slowly escalating in volume as he rationalizes cutting material on displaced locals from the show, Whitney (Emma Stone) talking herself into and out of increasingly crass and commercial beliefs at lightning speed; it’s an ugly reminder that there’s nothing inside these people but incessant self-regard, that they are incapable of believing or thin...

In the Flesh: The Return of the King

Gollum (Andy Serkis) wins no great victories. He has no coat of arms, no mighty steed, no blade with a fabled name. Nor does he have a home and its simple, honest comforts to which he longs to return. He has no companions and no liege lord, no country and no ethos. His naked malice and grasping, hateful desperation are the only things keeping him upright, and it all bends toward one grubby, pitiful little purpose: the Ring. In the film’s very first moments Jackson takes pains to show how co...

February 2024 Schedule: Unlovable

2/4, 1pm &  7pm: MAY
2/7, 7pm: THE EYES OF MY MOTHER
2/11, 1pm & 7pm: REPULSION
2/14, 7pm: ASH IS PUREST WHITE
2/18, 1pm & 7pm: EXCISION
2/21, 7pm: SAINT MAUD
2/25, 1pm & 7pm: JOKER
2/28, 7pm: NAKED

In the Flesh: The Two Towers

If The Fellowship of the Ring is about grounding us in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, The Two Towers is concerned with showing us what that world has already lost, and what it stands to lose still if Sauron should emerge victorious from the brewing war. This awareness of loss is nearly omnipresent in Jackson, Boyen, and Walsh’s screenplay. Gollum (Andy Serkis) trails Frodo (Elijah Wood) like a living Memento Mori, every garbled line he hisses carrying the unspoken postscript, �...

In the Flesh: The Fellowship of the Ring

It’s hard to overstate the impact of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring on fantasy production design in every medium from film to gr

It’s hard to overstate the impact of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring on fantasy production design in every medium from film to tabletop game books to cosplay to graphic novels. Go into any hobby store in the country, crack open any miniatures game or fantasy comic, and you’re going to find those iconic lines and textur...

Top 10 Movies of 2023

10. When Evil Lurks

Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks is a brutal, relentless nightmare, a bleakly hateful view of a near-future Argentina in which the Church has collapsed and demons roam the countryside, driving people to deranged acts of cannibalism and murder. Rugna’s ...

In the Flesh: Fargo s5e06 'The Tender Trap'

“I want a wife,” says Lars (Lukas Gage) to his very real wife Indira (Richa Moorjani). He says it with real masculine vulnerability, like he’s going out on a limb for her, almost the way Jack Nicholson tells Helen Hunt she makes him want to be a better man in As Good as It Gets. Then he starts in on the incel shit. He wants a wife who supports him, a wife who puts out when he wants her to, a wife who doesn’t make him pull out before coming, a wife who cooks better th...

In the Flesh: Fargo s5e05 'The Tiger'

It’s corny to have Jason Schwarzmann, season 4’s Josto Fadda, return to provide David Attenborough-style narration for Nadine’s ordeal. The writing is corny. Schwarzmann’s voice is wrong for the part, which demands gravitas and bluster he just doesn’t possess. That’s about where my complaints with ‘The Tiger’ begin and end. I’ll forgive good work a lot of fumbles, and Fargo’s fifth season is rapidly angling to place itself among the historically strong anthology s...

In the Flesh: Fargo s5e04 'Insolubilia'

Tiny Tim’s breathless, shrieky cover of ‘I Got You Babe’ blares as Gator (Joe Keery) and his fellow kidnappers, sporting The Nightmare Before Christmas masks, slip into the Lyon household intent on capturing Dot (Juno Temple). It’s an unnerving song, a nails on the chalkboard squealer tackling a feel-good staple, foregrounding the unsavory domestic elements at play in this ill-fated attack. Director Donald Murphy makes hay out of the Home Alone-like scenario, giving ...

January 2024 Schedule: Close Up

1/3, 7pm: THE LURE
1/7, 1pm & 7pm: ALL ABOUT EVE
1/10, 7pm: NIGHTCRAWLER
1/14, 1pm & 7pm: THE KING OF COMEDY
1/17, 7pm: PINK FLAMINGOS
1/21, 1pm & 7pm: VELVET GOLDMINE
1/24, 7pm: HELTER SKELTER
1/28, 1pm & 7pm: BLONDE

In the Flesh: Oppenheimer

“Don’t bring that crybaby in here again,” sneers president Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) as J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), father of the atomic bomb, leaves the oval office. To see the man who made oceans of fire of two cities in Japan sniping like a schoolyard bully at the man who made the bombs he used to do it over the latter’s pangs of conscience is so sickening it made me physically tremble. The dumbest, most hateful idiots in the world are in charge. They’ve always been ...

In the Flesh: The Boy and the Heron

Based on Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel How Do You Live?, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron wrestles with the titular question of its source material as only Miyazaki can. In a world soaked in grief and death, how do you get up and face each day? How do you countenance bringing new life into the world? How do you eat and dream and play and work knowing that death is coming not just for you, but for everyone you love? It’s hard not to see the film as the 82-year-ol...

In the Flesh: May December

Gracie (Julianne Moore) stands before her open refrigerator. A flurry of strings build tension as she stares with vacant, dull-eyed dread into its interior until the music crescendos with a scare chord straight out of Psycho, a sound like crystal cracking under a shroud of velvet. “I’m not sure we have enough hot dogs,” she whispers, her tone that of a doctor informing a family of their child’s terminal illness. Her life is full of little things. Flowers stemmed too short for...

In the Flesh: Napoleon

Isn’t it nice to have a peanut butter sandwich? I don’t mean some horrible gas station contrivance of damp bread and flavorless, dried-out peanut butter. I mean freshly stirred Teddy, salty and rich, with bright raspberry jelly to cut through the nutty flavor and gorgeous whole wheat bread, springy and firm. Napoleon is just such a sandwich. It isn’t reinventing anything, isn’t shattering any paradigms or breaking any new ground for film as an art form, but what it does, it d...

In the Flesh: The Curse s1e03 'Questa Lane'

The idea of goodness as a trait is as comforting as it is elusive and ever-changing. Asher (Nathan Fielder) and Whitney (Emma Stone) congratulate themselves for getting Fernando (Christopher Calderon) a job as a barista at a coffee shop hoping for an endorsement deal with the couple’s prospective HGTV series, then congratulate themselves again for hiring the same guy to act as a night watchman when the coffee joint slimily closes down pending a final decision on whether or not the show will...

In the Flesh: Solaris (1972)

Solaris is a masterpiece. Not exactly an original analysis, but so comprehensively the case that the fact of it has endured fifty years of repetition. It will likely endure fifty more. The jaw-droppingly simple special effects (acetone, colored dye, aluminum powder) used to conjure up the titular planet’s alien ocean, the research space station’s battered, lived-in design, the haunting opening sequence in which a broken man shows footage of his own public collapse to family frien...

In the Flesh: Godzilla Minus One

A scarred and warty knot of muscle and irradiated tissue, jaws venting nuclear horror so virulent it boils and burns the creature’s own flesh; director Takashi Yamazaki’s incarnation of the iconic monster is a living avatar of war in the nuclear age, metastatic and relentless. Just as the second World War won’t leave the body or mind of disgraced kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), neither will any amount of violence quell Godzilla’s unreasoning rage. The wa...

In the Flesh: Fargo s5e03 'The Paradox of Intermediate Transactions'

Two brewing bloodbaths, arms and armaments in limbo, a piece of evidence that is and isn’t, a wife offering sexual roles to a silent husband, and a hitman who might be a lunatic or might be a 500-odd-year-old Welsh sin eater; it’s fair to say that the third hour of Fargo’s fifth season puts a lot of pieces on the board. It might be more setup than action, but you can’t accuse it of being boring. The whole thing clips along at a tremendous pace, building a dreadful te...

In the Flesh: Fargo s5e02 'Trials and Tribulations'

“Jesus was a man,” says Rex Tillman (Jon Hamm) in voiceover straight out of a slickly produced neoconservative tough guy political ad. “Not some lady with a beard.” Rex, we soon learn, is still legally married to Dot (Juno Temple), and his good old boy philosophy on law and morality, equal parts hardass Bible thumping and self-serving hayseed corruption, serves as a template for the rest of the episode’s entertaining ruminations on the differences between the two. Is marriage a law,...

In the Flesh: Fargo s5e01 'The Tragedy of the Commons'

What’s Bisquick, if we’re being honest? A brand name attached to a mediocre product and marketed aggressively for decades toward parents and children until, to some of them, it became synonymous with family breakfast. Sweetened glue and sawdust mixed into a nondescript haze of white suburban contentment, generalized and unthreatening. Like Lyon family matriarch Lorraine’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) Christmas card photoshoot in which aides unobtrusively hand each family member a high-powered...

In the Flesh: The Creator

If you excised John David Washington from The Creator and replaced him with virtually any other semi-popular leading man in his age bracket, you might be able to scrape a good movie together around writer/director Garth Edwards’ and writer Chris Weitz’s unappetizing script. Madeleine Yuna Voyles gives one of the most earnest and unaffected child performances of the year as the one-of-a-kind child simulant Alphie, there’s fun world-building and design in abundance, and the whole...