scumbelievable

In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e02: Toil and Trouble

Nothing in ‘Toil and Trouble’, the second episode of Dave Filoni’s lifeless Ahsoka, is framed right. The lightsaber fight alongside the dry dock fails to utilize the empty dock’s depth. Sabine walking down a broad enamel staircase to look longingly at a (truly godawful) mural commemorating her friends is angled to strip all impact from the sight of the young Mandalorian newly kitted out in her ancestral armor. An earlier scene in which Sabine attempts to modulate the power su...

In the Flesh: Ahsoka s1e01: Master and Apprentice

It’s impressive how completely Dave Filoni manages to replicate in Ahsoka the stiff, lifeless feel of the CGI cartoons where he first made his bones as LucasFilm’s diligent, lore-loving, and completely untalented nerd in chief. There’s little lighting to speak of. Prosthetics and costumes are cheap-looking. Choreography is indifferent, blocking a clear afterthought. An early sequence in which Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson, who allegedly assaulted longtime family friend and employ...

In the Flesh: Mother (2009)

There are few forces in human civilization as invested with unreasoning power as the hatred of those with little for those with less. See how contempt and projected feelings of disposability flow downhill in Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, from the local cops eager to fob a murder rap off on unlikable young intellectually disabled man Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) to Do-joon’s entitled contempt for Moon Ah-jung (Moon Hee-ra), a young woman of whose murder he is suspected, and Ah-jung’s casual ...

In the Flesh: The Bear s2e06-7: ‘Fishes’ and ‘Forks’

In the Flesh: The Bear s2e06-7: ‘Fishes’ and ‘Forks’

‘Fishes’

“I make things beautiful for them,” gasps a drunken Donna Berzatto (Jaime Lee Curtis) from the depths of what must be a decades-long depression. “But no one makes things beautiful for me.” It’s a heart-wrenching line reading, Curtis’s voice quavering with a complex mixture of rage, self-pity, desolation, and hopelessness, her lined face flickering from rueful, self-aware smile to expressionless d...

Thank You <3

I just wanted to thank everyone for being so good-natured about all the errors at the start of the month, and about navigating resubscription. Watching a whole year of growth get wiped out by the site neglecting to update its payment processors was so dispiriting, but I'm on the way to clawing most of it back. You guys enable me to support my community and myself, and to choose what I write about. I'm incredibly grateful for you.

Paper Cuts: Vattu

It’s a crime that Evan Dahm’s Vattu isn’t on school reading lists across the country, that it isn’t given to every child beginning to grapple from any angle with the horrors of imperialism and settler colonialism, that its exquisite renderings of alien architecture and landscapes aren’t as well-known as the scratchy linework of Art Spiegelman’s MAUS or the desolate Gothic cityscapes of Alan Moore’s From Hell. Begun in 2010 and concluded in 2022, the co...

WYRM XII

                                                             The Sunken Isle

Lizzie circled high above the burning city, clinging tightly to the pommel of Chauntecleer’s saddle. There ...

WYRM XI

                                                                     Londinium

The city was burning. Stephen watched it from the Tower while in th...

The Deadlights Theater August 2023: Order Up

8/2, 7pm: Eat Drink, Man Woman
8/6, 1 & 7pm: Tampopo
8/9, 7pm: Pig
8/13, 1 & 7pm: Big Night
8/16, 7pm: La Grande Bouffe
8/20, 1 & 7pm: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
8/23, 7pm: Delicatessen
8/27, 1 & 7pm: The Menu

Wyrm X

                                                                Cleopatra

Kate lay staring at the ceiling from her bed, chewing on a stray lock of her hair. It was a filth...

In the Flesh: M3GAN

The evil doll is one of those hoary old archetypes of horror that, in spite of never having been pulled off as anything but campy fun, just won’t quit. Who’s genuinely scared of Chucky? Who still remembers Annabelle from those godawful Conjuring movies? M3GAN, the titular doll in Gerard Johnstone’s film of the same name, written by Akela Cooper, is fucking scary. She has a child’s face but fully adult body language and posture. Her eyes are beady little cameras, pupils consta...

In the Flesh: Talk to Me

“It occurred to me,” rasps Richard Harrow (Jack Huston) in Terrence Winter’s series Boardwalk Empire, “the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don't.” It’s a chilling line, and a perfect description of the cold-hearted, dead-eyed meanness at the heart of Danny and Michael Philippou’s Talk to Me, a film intimately concerned with teenage alienation and cruelty in the emotional wasteland of the modern Australian s...

Wyrm IX

                                            The Merciless Parliament

They rode into London under Mowbray lions and the banner of the Court of Chivalry, a set of balanced scales embroidered red on white. Robert de Vere walked barefoot, shirtless, and in irons behind lord ...

In the Flesh: Barbie

“Barbie has a good day every day,” the divine voice of Helen Mirren declares. “But Ken only has a good day if Barbie looks at him.” Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is deeply fascinated by the ways in which perception shapes self-perception which in turn gives rise to the complex act of being. Ken (Ryan Gosling) can conceive of himself only in relation to Barbie (Margot Robbie), who in turn sees herself at first solely through the lens of marketing copy about the toy industry...

Paper Cuts: Off Season

Is there a meaner writer than Jack Ketchum? God, I hope not. Off Season, his 1980 debut novel, is a nasty piece of work, bleak and cruel and shocking. An adult man dumps hot oil on a group of children. A woman is dismembered and disemboweled while still alive and screaming. No bravery, goodness, or heroism finds reward. No heroic violence redeems its perpetrator. Its climax features a group of cops and deputized Maine yahoos opening up with shotguns on a knot of inbred cannibal women...

In the Flesh: Lost Highway

A man in the throes of delusion, a tulpa living out the addled thoughts that birthed it, a midlife crisis turned rancid and folded back in on itself through occult body-snatching — there are a thousand ways to interpret the house of dust and shadow that is Lost Highway, a film in which every home we see resembles a cold, sterile dentist’s waiting room and every person we meet conceals secrets which multiply, divide, metastasize past the point of comprehension. Fred Madison (Bill ...

In the Flesh: Dunkirk

Shooting emptiness is something at which Christopher Nolan excels. The trackless expanses of sea and sky stretching to the far horizon where they smear together, the endless gray beaches of Dunkirk, purgatorial and grim, where men queue in terrified silence, waiting for a chance at escape. There is a real sense of humanity forced to the breaking point and beyond it by forces far vaster and more alien than they can comprehend, of men removed from all context and thrown into a void of senseless...

In the Flesh: The Sopranos 6.21: 'Made in America'

It’s been eighteen years since I first saw the now-infamous “cut to black”, the end of over half a decade of turmoil, resentment, self-sabotage, and slow decay within and around the Soprano family. Earlier today I watched the scene for what must have been the twelfth or thirteenth time, but far from feeling stale it seems only to have grown in power. My heart pounded as Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’” built toward a crescendo that would never come. My hair stood on end as the...

Playbills: July

Wes Cunningham's (@vvesl) illustrations for each screening in the month of July!

In the Flesh: The Idol

The Idol is satire. It’s black comedy in the vein of Basic Instinct or RoboCop, mean-spirited and sharp, full of babbling record industry morons convinced of their own genius as they orbit deranged starlets and megalomaniacal producers. I won’t waste time speaking to the backlash against its scenes of fairly mild BDSM play except to say that its frank and sleazy sense of sexuality is tremendously refreshing in an increasingly sexless media landscape. The show’...

In the Flesh: War of the Worlds (2005)

The best part of War of the Worlds is something we’ve seen before. In a dank and dripping basement strewn with the detritus of the life of one Harlan Ogilvy (Tim Robbins), a serpentine alien probe hunts father Ray (Tom Cruise) and daughter Rachel (Dakota Fanning) through a labyrinth of crumbling walls. It’s a good scene, tense and imaginative, but it’s impossible not to think of Jurassic Park’s kitchen sequence, a much tighter and more gripping nightmare. The sole im...

Paper Cuts: IT

Sprawling and baggy, deeply flawed, and as white-hot with human misery as anything ever written, IT is the Moby Dick of horror, a reckoning with the interior unknown reflecting Melville’s famous wrestling with the exterior. It fails where Moby Dick succeeds, its turning point marred by heteronormative lack of imagination, its ending overly sentimental, but in its fearless plunge into the underbelly of child abuse in white America and its connection to other forms ...

In the Flesh: Body Snatchers

“By tomorrow it’ll be like it never happened,” whispers Carol Malone (Meg Tilly) to her husband Steve (Terry Kinney) as she lulls him to sleep with a gentle massage. Abel Ferrera’s Body Snatchers cleverly juxtaposes repressed and violent suburban family life with portrayals of militaristic conformity and groupthink on an army base where EPA agent Steve is stationed, linking the two via their shared incentivization of denial and silent obedience. Where’s the line between Ste...

In the Flesh: The Ultimatum: Queer Love

Ten people, treated uniformly as women by the show, sit in anonymous locations, discussing nothing, drinking from silver glasses which obscure both their beverage of choice and how much remains, enabling the show’s editors to stitch its parts together more easily without violating continuity. Instead, like virtually all reality shows, they violate reality, unpicking the flow of events, the rhythm of human connection, to reassemble disconnected parts into a story more coherent and engaging t...

JULY 2023: SEEING DOUBLE

7/2, 1pm and 7pm: US, JORDAN PEELE
7/5, 7pm: SECONDS, JOHN FRANKENHEIMER
7/9, 1pm and 7pm: MOON, DUNCAN JONES
7/12, 7pm: INFINITY POOL, BRANDON CRONENBERG
7/16, 1pm and 7pm: LOST HIGHWAY, DAVID LYNCH
7/19, 7pm: MULHOLLAND DRIVE, DAVID LYNCH
7/23, 1pm and 7pm: INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, PHILIP KAUFMAN
7/25, 7pm: COHERENCE, JAMES WARD BYRKIT 

Paper Cuts: The Marigold

“This is the future,” says Stan Marigold, son and heir of real estate mogul and murder cultist Albert Marigold, builder of the luxury apartment tower from which Andrew F. Sullivan’s novel takes its names, watching a fungal gestalt consciousness consume Toronto. “Imagine owning it.” As the world collapses around him, first institutionally and then physically, Stan continues to repeat things like, “imagine controlling it” and “we own it” and “it’s ours”. As it becomes in...

Paper Cuts: What Happens Next

Comprising the serialized comics Dog Names, Someone Else, No Matter What, and Victim Impact Statement, Max Graves’ What Happens Next is a fiendishly intelligent and relentless sendup of true crime which tells, in elliptical, self-involved fashion, the story of the people involved in and impacted by the killing of teenager Haylie Gorski. Out from the swamp of religious fundamentalist homeschooling culture Graves dredges his characters one by one, ...

In the Flesh: Beau Is Afraid

Ari Aster’s two preceding films — Hereditary, which is good, and Midsommar, which is not — feel very much like horror for the perpetually frightened. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Paranoia is a rich source of cinematic tension, animating classic horror and suspense films across the decades. Where such films can trip up is in neglecting to think through the imagery, actions, and archetypes used to manufacture that sense of anxiety. Consider the naked, el...

In the Flesh: Across the Spider-Verse

I don’t understand casting Oscar Isaac in a role where nobody gets to see Oscar Isaac. The man has good screen presence, he’s incredibly beautiful, but he’s hardly Clancy Brown when it comes to voice acting, you know? He’s pretty flat as edgy, vampiric Spider-Man Miguel, leader of a cross-dimensional team of Spiders-Man tasked with protecting the “canon” of their interlinking stories. Set him next to Shameik Moore, who voices Miles Morales, or Hailee Steinfeld as Gwen Sta...

In the Flesh: The Lure

There’s a strong whiff of Velvet Goldmine and The Rocky Horror Picture Show about The Lure, Agnieszka Smoczynska’s oddball musical/Little Mermaid adaptation about siren sisters Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Gold (Michalina Olszańska) and their brief stint in the human world as nightclub singers in Krakow. The costumes, the makeup, the hair, the essence of glam not just as an expression of rock, sexuality, and rebellion but as an extrapolation from gla...