Watched 2 movies for horror movie bingo that both satisfied the Time Loops / Time Travel square… Last Night in Soho and Happy Death Day.
I have now watched so many horror movies in a row that these felt like normal mystery/romance films even though one has ghosts and a serial killer and the other is a campus slasher.
Might need to take a T break 😂
So I watched David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds twice in a row because my guy is back to making weird Canadian indie movies instead of Normal Hollywood Features.
Eastern Promises, Dangerous Method, History of Violence, etc… all fine I guess but when The Shrouds opened with a dentist telling the protagonist that grief was rotting his teeth I cheer-screamed out loud. Crimes of the Future was not a fluke? Weird Cronenberg is back, babyyy.
The Shrouds has such intense Cronenberg-y themes about technological intrusions on bodies, exaggerated surveillance, discomfort with non-mediated perception, paranoia and conspiracies, and unreliable information that I would count it as a cyberpunk movie even though it is set in Toronto’s over-50 dating scene and no one wears mirrored sunglasses.
Minor spoiler alert:
In the realm of David Cronenberg’s contributions to sex, The Shrouds’ woman who is sexually aroused by conspiracies is right up there with Dead Ringers’ gynecological instruments for operating on mutant women.
Today’s horror movie bingo viewing was Seeds, for the Indigenous Cinema square on my card. I had fun!
I always love to hear language, and this had a lot of Mohawk/Kanien’kéha, some by actual Mohawk speakers, in a modern-day setting.
Great idea to explore Mohawk war and revenge traditions in a horror film, yikes / badass.
Seeds reminded me a bit of Get Out in the way that the worst stuff is kept off-screen to get a PG-13/14a rating, and the ending is reasonably happy. I wonder if Kaniehtiio Horn had similar goals as Jordan Peele around making the film accessible for teens and not re-traumatizing people.
It’s so interesting to feel cared for by a horror movie.
Watched The Ugly Stepsister to get my Fairy Tale square for horror movie bingo … Body horror Cinderella from the POV of a stepsister is a very good idea and the body horror was real gross (👍️) but I found it surprisingly dull overall.
Beautifully and intentionally made, fantastic lead performance, but very slow paced and suffers from the same problem as most Feminist Horror: its ideas don’t go beyond Feminism 101.
I did enjoy the inversion of some gothic tropes, with the concerns about inheritance and family legacy all from the women’s perspectives, and a father’s corpse secretly rotting in the cellar instead of a mad wife in the attic.
I would pair The Ugly Stepsister with Sexykiller, which is another alternate-POV horror, this time a slasher where the killer is one of the naked college girls from the opening locker room scene. It is more silly on the surface, but explores much stranger and more interesting feminist themes.
I bet you could guess today’s movie matinee by our horror movie bingo squares.
I got:
And Simon also got:
Love Lies Bleeding did not get me much for horror movie bingo but it did daub the squares in my heart?
As a bonus, now I have Giant Woman in my head.
Finally watched Maxxxine for horror movie bingo.
Unsurprisingly I loved it even if it isn’t as tight as the rest of the series… And wow, self-aware horror that plays with tropes could get you billions of bingo squares.
These ones were on my card, but I found like 20 others on the big list of options that we add to every year.
Alright, Last Voyage of the Demeter was very boring and bad but I did get some squares on my horror movie bingo card.
Speculative accessibility is my favourite. I always pick that square to put on my horror movie bingo cards.
This terrible movie had a great example– giving frequent blood transfusions to a vampire victim to prevent her from turning
Watched Backrooms last night, to kick off a summerween horror movie bingo festival with Simon. Fun!
I would call it more creepy than scary. There should be more movies about the horror of badly designed built environments and furniture, but I think we have enough movies about <spooky voice>your subconscious</>
Scored some bingo squares:
They should stop trying to make Zootopia movies about race and class, which goes very badly, and start focusing on utopian disability accommodations which the Zootopia movies absolutely rule at.
(Not really tho, because movies that try to be about disability almost always trigger weird ableist reflexes in the filmmakers.)
Zootopia public transit accommodates dolphins. We are dreaming too small.
Today in niche problems: why are there no good torrents of Bon Cop Bad Cop
Today’s little pleasure was this ink documentary and a heating pad. Recommended if you like artists at work, foraging, history of pigments and dyes, diy, or ink in particular. It features several inkmakers, cartoonists, calligraphers, artists, tattooists, and even a paleontologist.
Streaming free on CBC: The Colour of Ink
I yelped out loud when the film cut to Thomas Little in a pawn shop. He is a gentle soul who makes truly haunted iron-gall ink by dissolving guns in sulfuric acid. Very cool to see part of his process.
I make iron-gall ink too, using rusty bits of junk, vinegar, and the beautiful native oak trees in my neighbourhood. Amazing how different the vibes can be for similar recipes. I have some of Thomas’ gun ink and I haven’t been able to bring myself to open it, it just sits on my desk and whispers
Anyway I do think the documentary conveys the profound pleasure of making tiny batches of ink out of weird things you find out in the world
At one point Jason Logan from Toronto Ink Company makes black ink for a tattooist out of charcoal from a recent forest fire in the area. Part of what is so moving to me about this kind of poetic or haunted ink is the scale– you can make a bottle of ink out of a couple of grams of carbon dust, which leaves whole mountainsides of charcoal behind. Something about reasserting human scale is such a relief
I made myself a horror movie bingo card for October, and I am trying to think of a name for a trope I love.
What do you call that thing where characters have ridiculous and cool DIY assistive tech? I am thinking about chainsaws as prosthetic hands, homemade motorcycle-wheelchairs, and the other mayhem that shows up mainly in horror movies.
“Fuckin Rad Improvised Accessibility” is my draft so far 😂🤘🏻
I collected a bunch of these for a party. We watched two; I’m saving the rest for later.
The screen’s first lesbian vampire. Ms. Dracula is drawn to young women and tries to get a big strong psychiatrist to cure her. That subtext is almost text. The tag line was “she gives you that weird feeling!”
I was going to quit making movie lists this month, but I keep them for myself on paper anyway. As long as I post other things too, I don’t mind them being on here.
Titles in bold are things I’m especially glad I watched.
Bold means I’m glad I watched it.
This month’s lists are evidence that my neighbours Casey and Jessica are fond of renting entire series of Hollywood movies. I have also watched with them: all the Die Hard movies, all the Rambo movies, Alien and Predator in preparation for Alien vs. Predator, and probably more.
The fact that I go along for these action movie marathons could probably go in the same category as the facts that I only like to watch sports when international championships are broadcast at 4 in the morning, and that if I don’t see the midnight premier of questionable superhero movies I probably will never watch them. Bland content is a good foil for intense viewing contexts.
In her golden years, my mom suffers from Dementia with Lewy Bodies (think Parkinson’s + Alzheimer’s).
Here we are in the garden. She’s calling me Jim (my father’s name) and thinking she’s having a dream…
I expected this video to make me sad, but I felt happy watching it. I spent a lot of afternoons sitting in gardens with my grandpa in his advancing dementia, and our interactions were often like this. Me guessing what would help him or soothe him, just sitting and telling each other we loved each other with words and pats and hand squeezes. My trying to understand his observations but not really getting it; him trying to understand my observations but not really getting it; both of us trying to be ok with that. I’m happy that sometimes when communication breaks down, it can break down into just inarticulate love.
And I just posted about putting ugly things in context to make them beautiful.
“Professionals tend to define independence in terms of self-care activities such as washing, dressing, toileting, cooking and eating without assistance. Disabled people, however, define independence differently, seeing it as the ability to be in control of and make decisions about one’s life, rather than doing things alone or without help.”
— Michael Oliver quoted by Sunny Taylor in The Right Not To Work: Power and Disability
I looked up Sunaura Taylor after enjoying her discussion with Judith Butler in the movie Examined Life. They talked about walking as it related to disability and gender issues, and about the politics of helping each other and asking for help. At one point they stopped into a thrift store to get a sweater for Sunaura, which was suddenly revealed as a Queer Eye make-over scene such as I have occasionally wished for. Queer shopping with politics intact; it was quite beautiful! I had a little thrill, there in the cinema.
Part of the thrill was seeing the two of them act out an interdependent version of shopping, with Judith helping Sunaura try things on and the store clerk adjusting her usual check out techniques. It was very clear that all of the people benefited from working together, and it was also clear that to accomplish that they had to work outside of usual store policies and etiquette expectations.
I have been finding affirmations of interdependence in a lot of different sources lately, and they really cheer me up. I’m hunting for ways to resist competition and hierarchy without resorting to competitive tactics, and in the meantime it is very encouraging just to watch people cooperate within structures that are set up to facilitate competition. Life affirming.
Taking a different angle on accepting all of us instead of competing to find the winners, here is another quotation from that essay. This is especially for Erin and anyone else who is into working less.
The right not to work is the right not to have your value determined by your productivity as a worker, by your employability or salary… What I mean by the right not to work is perhaps as much a shift in ideology or consciousness as it is a material shift. It is about our relation not only to labor but the significance of performing that labor, and to the idea that only through the performance of wage labor does the human being actually accrue value themselves. It is about cultivating a skeptical attitude regarding the significance of work, which should not be taken at face value as a sign of equality and enfranchisement, but should be analyzed more critically. Even in situations where enforcement of the ADA and government subsidies to corporations lead to the employment of the disabled, who tends to benefit, employers or employees?
One more, because I really like this question:
The minority of the impaired population that does have gainful employment are paid less than their able-bodied counterparts and are fired more often (and these statistics are more egregious for disabled minorities). To ensure that employers are able to squeeze surplus value out of disabled workers, thousands are forced into dead-end and segregated jobs and legally paid below minimum wage (for example, in the case of “sheltered workshops” for those with developmental disabilities). The condescension towards the workers in such environments is severe. Why should working be considered so essential that disabled people are allowed to be taken advantage of, and, moreover, expected to be grateful for such an “opportunity”?
I need to organize more time to hang out naked with my friends. I love it so much. In the summer, there is usually night swimming and maybe this year I’ll go to our local nudie lake with it’s one hilariously small dock. But what about winter? What about now? I don’t think there is a women’s bath or anything in this town. I need to organize some nudeness at home. Anybody want to come over and take expressive naked photos? Give me a call.
More old drafts that have been sitting in the archives, more quotations from The Monster Show .
p.200-1
[Tod] Browning spent a lot of time at the ballpark and racetrack in the early thirties, and veteran Hollywood writer Budd Schulberg (author of The Disenchanted and What Makes Sammy Run? ??) had a memory of another Browning pastime. “The marathon dance was in vogue then and we went a few times to the Santa Monica Pier to watch the young unemployed zombies drag themselves around the floor in a slow motion dance macabre,” Schulberg wrote in his 1981 memoir ??Moving Pictures. “Even more appalling than the victims on the dance floor were the regulars, affluent sadists in the same front-row seats every night, cheering on their favorites who kept fainting and occasionally throwing up from exhaustion. One of the most dedicated of the regulars was Tod Browning, who never missed a night and who got that same manic gleam in his eyes as when he was directing Freaks.”
p.292
The rediscovery and rehabilitation of Freaks became almost a cause celebre in the film journals beginning in the early sixties. Once considered crass and tasteless, the film was now “compassionate” and “sensitive.” In a way, the appreciation of Freaks became a politically correct means to indulge a morbid curiosity about thalidomide deformities, while still being able to feel self-righteous and progressive.
In the spirit of spitting things out rather than polishing them forever and driving myself crazy, I’m going through my archives and publishing drafts.
A couple of years ago I was reading a lot about horror and monsters. At some point I saved quotations from The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror.
p.186, regarding WWI vets.
The Frankenstein pictures continued to be a cultural dumping ground for the processed images of men blown to pieces, and the shell-shocked fantasy of fitting them back together again.
That was the first idea I ever heard about horror as a mirror of culture, from a Chuck Palahniuk interview. It doesn’t make me want to watch horror movies, particularly. But this next movie is something I would like to see.
p.205-6
For his unnerving final sequence— completely irrational, but nonetheless a devastating moral statement— [Abel] Gance recruited actual members of the Union des Gueules Cassées, and created a nightmarish montage of all the ruined faces that had been haunting the world’s cinemas for the past fifteen years in the guise of “horror entertainment.” The actual men are nameless, but they could easily be the living models for the masks worn by Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, Lionel Atwill, and others. As a conscious antiwar statement, J’Accuse is superior; as an unintentional revelation of horror’s major subtext in the twenties and thirties, it is breathtaking.
I ran into this while I was looking for info about whether found feathers can have any germs or mites or whatever (probably not). I love the wealth of g-rated porn that has blossomed under YouTube’s anti-nudity terms of service. I don’t think they intended to create a video sharing service where only kinky sexplay is allowed (watching women fart, smelling socks…), but I guess that’s a fairly predictable side-effect of banning mainstream, tab-a-slot-b, show-the-boobs sex in an online space.
So far I haven’t found anything especially subversive— lots of groomed women and muscular men, lots of hypergender, whatever— but I actually like this tickling video because the tickler and the ticklee seem to have actual communication with each other. “OK, OK,” feet flex, feet relax. That’s kind of magic to see on YouTube.
This year’s Mystery Movie surprise screening at Cinecenta was Persepolis! I’d never been before, but the idea is that they screen something anticipated that hasn’t been released over here yet. Our only guess was that it might be that crazy Bob Dylan movie with multiple people trading the lead role… and then as soon as we had any kind of guess, I was worried that when we were wrong it would be disappointing. Surprises are fragile.
Seeing the film come up in black and white animation was so optimal that it felt sort of charming. This was the only upcoming movie I’ve been looking forward to, and almost the only one I even knew anything about. It’s hard to be more fun than anticipation, but I don’t think that accomplishment was the charming part. A guy from the Cinecenta staff had come out and introduced the screening beforehand, so already it was feeling like a human social event rather than a commercial transaction, and then it turned out to be a movie made by people I could picture in my head from watching the little making of feature on the movie website. Lots of people involved, rather than only vague forces of fame and culture and money. I think that was what felt so warm and fuzzy. (Maybe especially after considering a movie about Bob Dylan as a sort of opaque, unknowable icon?)
I don’t understand why more cinemas don’t put an effort into spectacles and gimmicks like this on a regular basis. Surprise movies (old or new) are going on my local cinema wishlist, along with having a human introduce each screening, offering table seating, downloadable mp3 commentary tracks, loveseat-style seating in more places than just the back row of The Roxy, and beer in non-plastic containers.
I’m not much for movie reviews, but I suppose I should mention that I liked Persepolis. Funny parts, sad parts, angry parts, cute parts, and a lot of characters processing ethics out loud, and integrating external wars and politics with internal, personal feelings. The animation was very beautiful. (And boy do I like the various Arabic Persian nose shapes that Satrapi draws.) I think you could check out the books and the movie in any order without wrecking anything.
This whole episode has been a curious test of my 7-day posting lag. When I realized which film was showing, I felt like I’d been hoarding information because none of my companions could read the future archives of my blog, where I’d stashed links and details about the movie. That’s exactly counter to my anti-exclusive motives for posting to the future. And then I felt disappointed that I wanted to write a follow-up post when the first thing I wrote about Persepolis might be due to publish less than a week in the future— my follow-up was at risk of being weirdly late. It turned out to be pretty well-timed after all, but it is hilarious the way media influences real life reactions. This is more disconcerting than the “I wish I’d brought my camera / Kodak moment” feeling.
Interview with Guy Maddin, one of my favourite directors, from October 2006:
GM: I’m also kind of pleased with what I came up with. It was such short notice that I didn’t have time to make anything up, I had to just be very honest. So much so that I can’t really show it to my family. I’d be disinherited, things like that.
TB: It’s kind of funny to hear you say that about a film that involves organ harvesting in a lighthouse.
GM: Yeah, I sort of promised myself I’d never talk about that part of growing up. It’s all there now! But sometimes you can hide things in plain sight.
I watched The Saddest Music in the World three times over the weekend, with and without commentary, and now I find myself hanging on every word out of Guy Maddin’s mouth.
His comments about expressionism in the Saddest Music are helping me with my mission to draw. He did things like shoot the actors making assorted facial expressions against a black backdrop so he could stick them in whenever he needed a shot, figuring that nobody really cares whether the backgrounds are consistent or accurate: the characters are in the movie, that’s enough context. I like that specific tactic, to just stick everything in together and nevermind the accuracy. It’s helping me draw, and design websites. I’m good at thinking up parts; less good at accurately proportioning them.
This other comment is helping me think about giant projects that involve a lot of research:
I know the Japanese had a different way of presenting silent film altogether, with a benshi narrator who would get in to characters or supply their own narratives that ran athwart the text unfolding on screen and that sounds really elaborate. The most I wanted my interlocutor to do was sort of season up, spice up, the proceedings a little bit and, truthfully, clarify some spots where I may not have shot things clearly enough. The benshi thing I found out about just a bit too late to figure out how to work with it and incorporate it myself.
That happens to me a lot, getting into a project and then finding really inspirational ideas right at the end. I have to insist that it’s ok, a good sign even, to be spotting neat ideas all the way through a project instead of having a complete and perfect idea right from the beginning.
And of course I’m looking forward to sometime seeing the organ harvesting movie, The Brand Upon The Brain.
Errol Morris made an episode of his short-lived TV show First Person about Temple Grandin, specifically about her decision to study and design cattle slaughterhouses as a way to understand death and dying. It was my favourite episode of the show— I’m going to watch it again for thesis ideas— and this documentary looks equally interesting.