Category: General Blog

Q1 Report on The Cinema

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

As March ends, we reflect on what the first quarter of the year brought us. Obviously, when historians look back on this time, they will think of it as a nightmarish clusterfuck (certainly I will), but they won’t be asking themselves the most important questions: what movies did I watch, and were they good? Luckily I’m always keeping this in mind.

My first quarter of movie-watching has been particularly productive because of the introduction of Mubi to my streaming repertoire, and I recommend it for the discerning art-cinema fan. Unlike most major streaming services they are funding and distributing movies that are actually good and so are providing a service actually worth paying for (unlike some people I could name who recently made a shit-ass movie of The Electric State for no reason).

Biggest Ws

Blessedly, this quarter brought a plethora of cinematic Ws to my doorstep, and they were fairly evenly distributed between movies I was hoping would be good and movies that arrived to me as a surprise.

I watched a lot of good movies about people going through something crazy, taking on a new identity, and then becoming a great force for justice? comedy? revenge? something in their new life. Foremost among them was The People’s Joker – if you’ve heard of Batman, you should see this movie. It is a work of full imagination and full wackiness, and thus it is full cinema. This is a movie with so much sincerity and heart and humor that even my mom enjoyed it, and she is actively trying to learn less about Batman every day.

But she’s not immune to the Batman concept, because she was just as excited as I was to go see the new movie adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. Were compromises made with the narrative in the adaptation? Was a lot left on the cutting room floor to make a movie that was still three hours long? Are there moments where the Count deploys disguise technology that definitely hadn’t been invented in the 1800s? Yes, yes, and yes. But as a counterpoint, I offer you this: it’s a movie about a guy going on a big adventure for basic clear emotional reasons, and on the way he perpetrates schemes and travels across glorious vistas. And it doesn’t have any threat of a sequel. They don’t make’em like this (fun to watch for the entire runtime) anymore.

I also watched several movies about video games, which should surprise no one as I am sometimes a leading scholar of cine-ludic connections. However, the two best video game movies I watched this quarter were about human relationships to game worlds, rather than Koopa or Sonic or whoever. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin reveals the World of Warcraft-based life of a young man with a serious physical disability. If you are a gamer who has ever relied on games to get you through a difficult time in life, this film will almost certainly break you. If you are interested in films that challenge popular narratives about gaming or disability, this should move to the top of your watchlist. It walks a very interesting and fine line between genuine melancholy about the limitations placed on its protagonist by his disability, while also completely upending his own family’s belief that his life was one devoid of rich emotion and connection.

Grand Theft Hamlet is the other video game documentary which slayed me this quarter. Much lighter than Ibelin but equally concerned with video games as a place to go away from life’s pain, Grand Theft Hamlet tells the story of frustrated theatrical performers trying to stage Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto Online while IRL theaters were closed for Covid. The struggle to mount the play successfully is simultaneously stupid and tremendous. I have seen some call the behind-the-scenes drama in the film forced or overdone, but as a habitual participant in low-budget theater productions I must emphasize that this is how putting on a play really is. It is always this dramatic, it is always this stupid, you always lose hope just before you put it on and it’s great. This is why people who work on the stage are such toxic people 🙂

Lastly, I must salute our friends at PBS for supporting the film Aurora’s Sunrise. This film is an animated documentary about the Armenian genocide, told from the perspective of a survivor who was heavily involved in efforts to raise the profile of the genocide in the US after she escaped Armenia. It is simultaneously a heartwrenching genocide drama, a fascinating portrait of PR as it was done in the 1910s, and a transporting visual experience. The Armenian genocide has been repeatedly covered up and denied by the Turkish government and its allies. It is good to keep Aurora in our minds now, to remind us of what she suffered and to remind us that our bodies and minds are where we keep the truth alive, even when the powerful deny it.

Biggest Ls

Q1 2025 was not without its horrendous Ls, however. Fewer they were in number, and yet so heavily they weigh upon me. The most mind-boggling of them was Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel. I looked forward to this film for some time: it’s literally a Christopher Walken/Willem Defoe cyberpunk heist adventure, how could it go wrong? But then I started watching it and I remembered that I don’t actually like William Gibson stuff, especially when it is being done in a style that is slightly jankier than a student film. The shots in this film are composed so tightly you know they were just filming it all in the same hotel room, using different corners to play different locations. I acknowledge that the film could be interpreted to have Deep Themes, but I interpret it as horseshit. But it’s not a total L because some of Christopher Walken’s line readings are sooooooo funny.

Most disappointing of all the Ls was Mickey 17. I had such hope when the movie was announced, I had very medium feelings upon seeing the trailers, and then I had such a crushing experience in the theater. It wasn’t a film that was all bad, but it was a film with so many elements that didn’t work. Robert Pattinson is excellent (if you like Robert Pattinson when he’s in his quirked-up white boy mode), and the alien creatures are extremely charming. So much of the rest of the movie is aimless and dopey. Steven Yeun is wasted on a go-nowhere subplot, Toni Collette grinds an unfunny running gag into absolute powder, Mark Ruffalo is doing the least compelling and most obvious Trump impression of all time, and most of the film’s female characters are trapped in an eye-rolling love triangle subplot which is both biphobic and pointless. Nothing comes of Anamaria Vartolomei’s character whatsoever. Her female love interest gets fridged, she hits on Mickey for some? reason?, and then she gets a new girlfriend at the end. To what end, I might ask? Poor Naomi Ackie, putting her all into a character whose most fun scene is her horniness for RPatz. For the rest of the film she is his emotional support GF. If you like Bong Joon-Ho doing broad comedy and heavy social satire, please watch Okja instead.

The worst L I took this quarter was Red One. It was my fault we watched it, and it sucked harder than a rock. Nothing about it was funny-bad. Everything about it was execrably bad. I hated every minute I spent experiencing it. I never want to see Chris Evans or The Rock again.

Hot Takes

I shall leave you with a few hot takes for the road, something to inspire Letterboxd Harvey Oswald to take me out.

Hot take most likely to sign my death warrant: I still think The Brutalist is a pretty good movie. I don’t really care that they used Respeecher. I am slightly less impressed with Adrian Brody and Felicity Jones’ accent work. That’s the sum total of the effect this news had on me. There are better targets to beat up on – for example, the companies making LLMs and Gen AI bullshit engines and roasting the earth to do so. Let’s **** up a ******** instead of blowing up Brady Corbet on Letterboxd 🙂

Hot take most likely to sign my death warrant after the Libertarian takeover: Gerard Butler’s character is unequivocally the bad guy of Law-Abiding Citizen. I can’t believe this is not widely understood. When Jamie Foxx gave the killer a plea deal at the beginning of the movie, he was doing The Right Thing. He was Doing His Job, and not in a Nuremberg way. This is how the American justice system works, and fundamentally we do not actually want a world of vigilante justice, especially when Gerard – and I can’t emphasize this enough – moves on to just killing whoever he feels like to prove a point! He tries to kill the mayor of Philadelphia with napalm when she had nothing to do with his case. He is Dumb Hannibal. He is a serial killer. He is cooked (literally, at the end of the movie <3). Stop thinking killing people fixes stuff. You are smoking that shit that made America post-9/11.

Hot take most likely to make someone explain the movie to me at length even though 1) I watched it, and 2) I have a four-year degree in Cinema & Media Studies from a global top 20 university: Park Chan-Wook’s Decision to Leave is Just Fine. It is a very artfully crafted thriller that looks beautiful and goes on too long. It’s not Vertigo. It’s Vertigo-adjacent, but it lacks the melodramatic heights of improbability that made both Vertigo and The Handmaiden rock. Decision to Leave is great on a craft level and fine overall.

With those thoughts to bear you into cinema-hell, I bring Q1 2025 to a close. What does Q2 have in store? I can’t say with certainty yet, but I pray that it starts with “FFFFFFF” and ends with “rancis Ford Coppola”.

Tags Cinema, Review

Book Review General Blog

Vorkosigan Saga: Mirror Dance

Post author By lnlupa
Post date March 27, 2025
No Comments on Vorkosigan Saga: Mirror Dance

Because they're twins.

Big news in weird decisions by me: I’ve started reading a lengthy novel series by picking up a random installment in the middle. That series is The Vorkosigan Saga, and that installment is Mirror Dance.

Now, in my defense, I didn’t go in entirely unprepared. I had previously read several of the Vorkosigan short stories and skimmed a scan of A Civil Campaign, and most importantly I had received a tremendous blow-by-blow description of every single major event in the series from my sister, Daisy, a certified Vorkosigan maniac. When I happened upon a cache of Vorkosigan novels left out for the taking, I captured them and brought them back home, determined to see what enchanted my sister so.

I started with Mirror Dance because I was going on a train trip and the pile of free Vorkosigans I found included two copies of Mirror Dance, so I didn’t have to fear retribution from Daisy if the book was damaged by Amtrak’s tender mercies. At last, I would immerse myself in Vorkosimania.

The Vorkosigan Saga, written by Lois McMaster Bujold, comprises a number of novels, novellas, and short stories concerning the adventures of one Miles Vorkosigan, the son of space nobility, who is a minor genius and deals with a number of chronic health problems. As he is the son of a major Vor Lord (yeah, really) of the planet Barrayar, he has many terrible responsibilities and constantly confronts the prejudices of a planet set against people with visible disabilities. He also goes through a lot of Drama, on both the interplanetary scale and the interpersonal, as well as sometimes the cringe. The publishing dates on the series extend from the late eighties to the late twenty-tens, so journeying back into the deep archives uncovers its fair share of uncomfortable material. Mirror Dance specifically has some moments of unpleasantness regarding the narration around Miles’ nonbinary coworker, as well as some eye-rolling but comparatively minor moments of orientalism.

On the plus side, Mirror Dance is a truly soap opera or Bollywood-level plot. Miles’ somewhat deranged clone brother, Mark – originally grown by villains to kill Miles and family – comes out of hiding to suborn Miles’ private mercenary group in an ill-fated attempt to rescue other young clones who will soon be harvested for their organs. Miles discovers Mark’s altruistic treachery and rushes off to try and stop him. He catches up to Mark just slightly too late. That’s when it gets complicated.

There’s soooooo many moments of twin hijinks in this. Mark and Miles continually switch identities, including another cover identity of Miles’, Admiral Naismith. One gets abducted and pretends to be the other, then the other gets caught and has to pretend to be the first one. Miles’ friends, romantic interests, and coworkers are tormented by the doubling of their Vorkosigan-related troubles. The Vorkosigans’ enemies are entirely reduced to despair by the end.

Mirror Dance also goes to some very dark places. The tone of the Saga as a whole is interesting. Bujold possesses a solid, straightforward prose style with a wry edge which keeps the reader bumping along comfortably with every plot twist, and she throws in jokes and humorous encounters with near-clockwork regularity. But every so often, she pulls back the curtain to remind us that humans in space are just as capable of depravity as humans here on Earth.

The vessel of much of the darkness in Mirror Dance is Mark. While Miles, despite the challenges of his youth, could count on a loving, powerful, wealthy family to support him through everything, Mark grew up in the hands of violent men with dark intentions and a profound hatred for the people from whose DNA Mark grew. He trained as an assassin, but he was also relentlessly victimized by his creators: bullied, tortured, and eventually sexually assaulted. This damage causes Mark to act in some very unwise and unethical but realistic ways. His trauma around intimacy drives him to nearly reenact his own abuse on someone very vulnerable, which will understandably turn a certain subset of readers against the character and story entirely. But Mark’s journey to redemption gives the story a hard core of genuine feeling which elevates it above a simple space romp, and his tremendous failings make him more poignant and sympathetic in my eyes. As someone who’s made my own mistakes and had my own mental challenges, I felt for Mark, even if some of the mistakes he made were much worse than mine.

I won’t try to claim that Mirror Dance is the best entry point for The Vorkosigan Saga. But it worked for me. More than any of the previous stories I’d read in the series, Mirror Dance captured my interest because of the strong and compelling central relationship between Miles and Mark. This relationship grounded the sillier and soapier moments and leavened the darkest and most serious ones. I would like to read more of Miles’ adventures, if only to make sure Mark is okay.

Tags Literature, Review, Science Fiction

General Blog Television

Intersections in Real Life

Post author By lnlupa
Post date March 12, 2025

Back when I had my Cohost blog, I wrote a post about the Babylon 5 episode “Intersections in Real Time”. This is one of my favorite episodes of B5 and, in my opinion, some of B5 creator J. Michael Straczynski’s strongest writing ever. A total format shift and one of the only episodes to have no sequences on the titular space station, this episode has our hero, John Sheridan, imprisoned by Earth’s fascist government. Sheridan is tortured in the hopes that he will sign a false confession renouncing his beliefs and supporting EarthGov’s xenophobic platform. The episode is functionally a two-man play, a rhetorical war between Sheridan and the bland officious technician assigned to torture him.

The last time I wrote about this episode, I wrote about its most quotable climactic moment, in which John Sheridan insists that he can still win his war, even here, even alone, simply by never giving in to the demands of the state. I’m not going to repeat myself too thoroughly here – this is just set up for what I want to say now.

The torturer casts doubt on the idea that Sheridan’s faith in resistance to the evils of EarthGov will ever lead him to victory. Sheridan tells the torturer that he wins, “every time [he says] no.” Every refusal is a tiny revolution.

Foremost among J. Michael Straczynski’s works outside Babylon 5 is his autobiography, Becoming Superman. This is a book which I would genuinely recommend to almost anyone (over the age of, like, 13; it has some deeply disturbing scenes), whether or not they have any interest in science fiction television, comic books, or the screen arts. The core of the book is the terrifying abuse and misery which Straczynski undergoes as a child and the escape from it provided by his devotion to nerd standbys like Superman.

The insanity of Straczynski’s childhood is engineered and escalated by his father, a man of mindbogglingly low character who subjected his wife and children to an endless reign of terror. Straczynski’s father was a no-shit actual real life Nazi who helped do the Holocaust. That is the level of moral impoverishment we are discussing here.

Returning to B5 episodes like “Intersections in Real Time” after reading Becoming Superman, I saw so much of Straczynski’s personal story in the work. His firsthand experience with day-in, day-out torment. His desire to inoculate against fascism, thanks to a childhood spent imprisoned within it. His certainty that there is value in moral victory, even if that moral victory does not liberate you from your oppressor immediately.

There are other parts of Becoming Superman that I thought while rewatching the episode as well. Late in life/the book Straczynski is diagnosed as autistic, and so I pondered the ways in which embracing one’s abnormal subjectivity is another kind of resistance, one which must be constantly shored up against a world which says “But why can’t you be normal after all?” After Babylon 5, Straczynski collaborates with the Wachowskis, maybe the most prominent transgender film directors in Hollywood, to make work that highlights LGBTQ+ life. That’s not Straczynski’s personal experience, but by then he knows what it means to win just by living and still believing, and so I see how he and the Wachowskis might still be able to connect.

Death of the author is a major critical concept for a reason, and it is worth approaching work on its own merits and for the meanings you the interactor draw from it. It also helps you maintain a little distance from the creator, which is important in our current era of “hero-worship perpetually curdling into misconduct revelations”.

After reading Becoming Superman, though, I just can’t stop seeing the author in Babylon 5. Straczynski is the show in a very real way that’s hard to articulate. Later, if he gets busted for crimes, that’s going to make it suck a lot for us fans, but for now it’s a powerful relationship, a sharpening and a clarifying of what the show is for.

I recommend both Babylon 5 and Becoming Superman, not only for the chance to watch a great show and read a great book, but for the reminder that survival is a kind of bravery, one that is the first step towards achieving everything else we long for.

Tags Science Fiction, Television

Comics General Blog

Life in the Savage Time

Post author By lnlupa
Post date March 4, 2025

Yeah, I know how he feels.

The other day I was watching some of my favorite episodes of the Justice League cartoon. I went straight to the end of season 1 for the the three-part season finale: “The Savage Time”.

In “The Savage Time”, the Justice League (sans Batman) arrives home from a space mission to find the Earth changed in chilling ways. Touching down in Metropolis, they discover jackbooted sci-fi commandos patrolling the streets beneath building-length banners of one Vandal Savage. The League fall in with this timeline’s Bruce Wayne, still a bat-adjacent vigilante, but one who battles the Savage regime rather than supercriminals. The League discover that Vandal Savage used time travel to change the fate of the Second World War, helping the Nazis win while appointing himself the Supreme Leader of the regime. With Bruce’s help, they find the time travel technology Savage used and head back to the ‘40s.

In the past, the League explores different ways to resist Savage. Wonder Woman and the Martian Manhunter get entangled in espionage at the heart of the regime in Berlin. Superman, Hawkgirl, and Flash assist the Blackhawks, a group of airmen from the various countries occupied by the Nazis. Green Lantern, separated from the others after his ring loses its charge, falls in with a group of marines behind enemy lines. Lantern, himself a former marine, fights to prove himself against the hostility and suspicion of certain members of the unit, a plot point I see in sharper relief as an adult with a knowledge of the history of US military segregation. The cartoon show uses the John Stewart incarnation of Green Lantern, who is a Black man. His immediate rejection by one of the white marines of Easy Company makes almost too much sense.

It’s Lantern’s lonely struggle which brings him out of all the Leaguers to have the final confrontation with Vandal Savage. Again, as an adult, I see the choice to make Lantern the one who fights the Nazi overlord with greater poignancy. He takes Savage on one-on-one, without his power ring and without any superpowers, and he saves the world by crashing Savage’s command ship. Savage goes down with the ship, alone except for his bumbling subordinates. Lantern gets rescued by his teammates. They go back through the time portal and find their world restored, no one besides the Justice League able to remember the brief authoritarian perversion of reality.

It’s all right there. I would be insulting your intelligence to go on at length about why I went straight here when I decided I wanted to rewatch some of this show. This three-parter is likely one of the first places I learned about who Nazis were and what they believed. Like Indiana Jones, the other place I first ran into them, “The Savage Time” doesn’t dive deep into their repugnant ideology, but it lays down a couple clear lines: the Nazis are stupid, they are venal, they are violent, and we don’t like them. When we see them, we fight them.

For standards & practices reasons, the creators of Justice League couldn’t show anyone dying onscreen in the cartoon, except under very specific circumstances. They always have to show enemy pilots parachuting back to earth. They really test this rule here. There are several Nazi footsoldiers who definitely fully eat shit at the hands of our heroes, who – as you may know – are otherwise vehemently against killing their enemies.

I’m with it. If you’re a Nazi, Superman would straight up let you die, and he’d be right to do it. Fuck you.

But I was much more moved by another part of the story, the scene where Superman, Hawkgirl, and Flash meet the Blackhawks and hear their story. The show is called Justice League, Superman is the most iconic superhero ever created, but when he hears what the Blackhawks have accomplished and what they want to do to stop the Nazis, he says “How can we help?”

Not “I’m in charge now”. Not “Here’s what we’ll do”. “How can we help?”

It’s easy to fall into hero fantasies in a dark time. I’m literally talking to you about a superhero show; I am not immune to propaganda. But there’s something really important here, to me – Superman sees the fight and he knows which side he’s on. He also knows the Blackhawks have been in it a lot longer than he has. He puts aside his identity as basically the most important person in the whole DC universe to find out what they need from him, how he can give his power to them.

Even Superman knows that saving the world is not about being a hero, a liberator, an icon remembered forever. It’s about seeing those who are already in the fight and asking “How can I help?”

Tags Comics, Science Fiction

Cinema General Blog

Blow Out and Dark Waters Are the Two Best X-Files Movies

Post author By lnlupa
Post date February 25, 2025

Just another day in America in 2025.

The X-Files is an insanely uneven work. Several episodes of the original run make me feel like I am touching God. Several episodes of the original run make me feel like God is pulling my eyeballs out and beating me about the head and feet with them. I don’t talk about the reboot run.

The X-Files movies are not uneven. They are both bad. Truly bad, like extra-long, extra-meandering, extra-dumb episodes of the show. Not as bad as the episodes of the show that William Gibson wrote, but still bad. Every so often, however, I come across a movie that’s smoking that shit that made Chris Carter crazy, and that’s doing it in a good way. I like to pretend those are the X-Files movies and that the real ones never happened to me.

What are the criteria for a good X-Files movie? First and most important, it must have an oppressive paranoid air. A conspiracy is ideal. Every moment must be heavy with anxiety and danger. Secondly, it must have some intention of witnessing the horror at the heart of the American project. This can be metaphorical or theoretical, but it can also be a direct confrontation with American history or the American present. Thirdly, it has to go beyond just making sense. As any seasoned X-Files viewer knows, the show makes no damn sense, especially in its best episodes. I’d argue The X-Files is better interpreted in the same fashion as religious narratives. The literal events are less important than the spiritual or emotional narrative related through the strange and fantastical events depicted therein.

I think the best two X-Files movies are Brian de Palma’s Blow Out and Todd Haynes’ Dark Waters.

Blow Out

Blow Out is a 1981 thriller movie, heavily coated in the lingering 1970s. John Travolta is a B-movie sound man who witnesses a strange car accident involving a prominent politician. After rescuing the woman who was in the car with the now-dead politician, Travolta’s character becomes a target of the clean-up efforts of a dangerous assassin who may be working for the government.

If you like answers, don’t watch Blow Out. Also, stop watching The X-Files: you’re going to be disappointed. The conspiracy is not uncovered, or even explained in Blow Out. We know that someone made a move on this politician, whose poll numbers threatened the sitting president as a primary approached. We know that they covered it up by making it look like an accident caused by a blow out on a car tire. We know that the assassin who did all this, played with a horrendous icy menace by a distressingly youthful John Lithgow, is going to kill anyone who threatens to reveal his villainous activities. So that’s the conspiracy, the paranoia, and, with the lack of revelations, the stop-making-sense. Where’s the ills of America?

This movie came out before most people I know were born, so I’m going to tell you about the ending. If that prospect distresses you, skip this next paragraph.

De Palma’s direction is what brings it all home during the film’s tremendous climax at the Liberty Bell anniversary celebration on the Philadelphia waterfront. Our hero has unknowingly sent the woman he saved, played beautifully by Nancy Allen as a sweet yet streetwise ingenue-type, into the jaws of the rapacious, garotte-toting Lithgow. Lithgow’s character hauls her up before a vast American flag, and beneath the fireworks kills her, brutally. Travolta’s character arrives moments too late, in time to kill the assassin, but not to save his victim. All around the triumphal celebrations of a nation built on violent victories go on, and those who die to make way for that triumph are snuffed out. All we have left at the end of the movie is the woman’s dying scream, used and abused for a B-movie sound effect while her real self falls away.

Little people get turned to meat to preserve big people’s power. Good thing that doesn’t feel familiar at all.

Dark Waters

Dark Waters is my other premiere X-Files movie. A 2019 based-on-a-true-story thriller, Dark Waters is scarier than the scariest episode of X-Files for the reason of being true. The whole world has actually been tainted by unnatural carbon chains developed by the DuPont Chemical Company. They’re in you and me and every person and animal you know, and they will be lingering here long after we’re all dead.

The paranoid air of the film is so oppressive that a zoom on a teflon-coated frying pan is legitimately terrifying. And the view on the violence and horror of the American project is unflinching. Todd Haynes exerts the full force of his mastery of mise-en-scene to present a chilling set of contrasts between the secure redoubts of wealthy DuPont lawyers and the poor, vulnerable, profoundly poisoned people of West Virginia, whose case is taken up by class traitor lawyer Rob Bilott. Bilott is radicalized when he witnesses the tremendous disgusting toll of DuPont’s experiments on people who have no recourse and no resources. He spends more than a decade fighting for the smallest shred of recognition and restitution for DuPont’s victims. In the end, stress nearly kills him and the settlement he secures is paltry compared to DuPont’s profits and he goes back in to keep fighting. But the real bad guys have already gotten away with it. They always will. They’re rich and this is America.

You might now be wondering: where is the ineffable? Something higher than the literal? Dark Waters is modeled on a real man’s real life. It doesn’t get more literal than that. Nothing makes more sense than that.

1) FALSE – real life makes the least sense of all.

2) There is more to real life than the literal. Todd Haynes beautifully deploys the Catholic faith of Rob Bilott and his family throughout Dark Waters to describe and explain Bilott’s resolve to see justice done for the most vulnerable. His commitment to his path, through absolute mortification of the mind and spirit, is what wins the film’s final, perhaps paltry, victories.

But Haynes pushes beyond the spiritual into a kind of deeper well of miracle by featuring, as the viewer discovers during the end credits, the actual victims of DuPont’s poisoning in the film itself. Multiple real figures, including Rob Bilott and members of the families he represented in court, cameo. The most stunning is a man whose congenital facial differences were caused by DuPont experimenting on his pregnant mother, and who plays himself as an adult.

This is where the mysteries of faith and reality intersect in the film. At a moment of absolute despair for Bilott, he stops for gas in West Virginia and encounters a man with a notable facial difference. His unique appearance is immediately recognizable to Bilott, who submitted the man’s baby pictures – part of a secret DuPont file – as evidence of the company’s crimes. In that moment, Bilott is reminded of the urgency and significance of his work – he sees exactly the right person at the right time: the person who is most owed by DuPont. And we see that person, and it is really him. It is a real person whose actual body is a living testament to the blithe villainy of the DuPont Chemical corporation.

Stopped Making Sense

A lot of people think they’re really living in The X-Files because they think that the government is a secret cabal for eating babies. They choose to deal with their beliefs by basically jerking off online all day and night to the idea of government officials getting sent to Gitmo. This is because they misunderstand what both art and religion are for, and consequently have allowed themselves to be possessed by evil QAnon spirits.

The conspiracy in The X-Files doesn’t make sense because it is a device for holding the evils of America, which don’t make sense because there’s no big conspiracy tying the whole thing together. There’s a bunch of smaller conspiracies, piling up inside DuPont Chemical or the CIA or Blackwater, conspiracies that all amount to the same goals: “Get us richer; get them poorer – get us power, no matter the cost.” Those heaving teeming thousands of little sellouts have mortgaged the whole world and everyone on it for just a few billion more dollars.

Mulder can’t solve the conspiracy because the heart of it – his grief over his sister’s disappearance at the hands of the government he and his father serve – is unresolvable. He will be sad forever. The protagonists of Blow Out can’t get to the bottom of the conspiracy because they’re so small and so disposable that they can’t even defend themselves from a man with a cool murder watch. Rob Bilott could see the whole picture of DuPont’s crimes but never get at the real criminals, never punish them in a way that truly mattered.

But he keeps fighting because he’s seen the truth about DuPont’s cruelty.

The only other option is to pretend to have seen nothing at all.

Tags Cinema, Science Fiction

Book Review General Blog

Stations of the Tide: Intimate Apocalypse

Post author By lnlupa
Post date February 19, 2025

This is us in 2050.

Two questions, to begin with: Do you wish there was more Disco Elysium? And do you wish the original Disco Elysium had contained more tantric sex rituals? If you answered yes to both questions, 1) I never want to meet you, and 2) boy howdy, do I have a book recommendation for you!

That book is Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick. Stations won the Nebula for Best Novel some time back in the ‘90s, which is interesting because it is completely nutty and fairly baffling. The protagonist is “The Bureaucrat”, both in that bureaucracy is his job and in that he has no other name revealed in the text. He lands on the planet Miranda days before the vast majority of the planet is to be flooded by a recurrent world-ending deluge. His assignment: hunt the fugitive wizard Gregorian and recover powerful technology Gregorian stole from the floating space government which (apparently?) rules humanity.

Along the way, he has weird and consistently sexual encounters with Gregorian’s friends and family, with various Miranda locals (all of whom are mildly Cajun?), and with a giant monster woman who is the puppet mouthpiece of the AI collective which now rules the Earth (maybe? Or she’s something weirder?). The Bureaucrat spars administratively with his rival bureaucrats, who are all safely ensconced within the Puzzle Palace, their spaceborne headquarters. He becomes obsessed with the species which previously occupied Miranda, a type of fish people called “Haunts”. He gets anally fingered by a hot witch named Undine. Throughout it all he keeps looking for Gregorian.

The reason this book reminds me of Disco Elysium is its cusp-of-the-apocalypse setting and its consequently unusually philosophical take on the science fiction procedural. Throughout Stations, the Bureaucrat is confronted by the local people of Miranda, who, rather than help him with his manhunt, probe his motivation and self-conception until they break him down into something new, someone who sees the limits and flaws of the system he serves. He is forced to confront the destructive vacuity of the culture which formed him. Behind these revelations the hovering threat of the jubilee tides rises. The tides will sweep away centuries of development, restoring Miranda to something like it was before humans arrived. For those of you who would have preferred to see Disco Elysium end with a more emphatic rejection of policing and control, this book may reward you in ways the game did not.

But I must address the elephant in the room: wow, this book has a lot of explicit sex and sexuality in it. I have no objections to the right of authors to include sex and sexuality in their work, including pornography, but the descriptive material surrounding the book did not telegraph this part of the narrative very effectively, so I am telegraphing it to you now. There are several extended, plot-essential sex scenes, and by plot-essential I mean the acts themselves are critical to the development of the Bureaucrat’s character. If that’s something which is hard for you to read, you may need to pass. On the other hand, if you wondered how hard a middle-aged space bureaucrat could get down, wonder no longer.

Aside from the value of a fearless approach to putting the horn one wants to see in one’s own work, I’m not sure what to take away from Stations of the Tide. Swanwick is a very talented descriptive writer (though he shades into the purple every so often), and his worldbuilding for Miranda is fascinating, its true shape revealed slowly and deliberately over the course of the novel. The subtlety of the Bureaucrat’s evolution as a character is impressive, taking the protagonist out of his dogged loyalty to the affectionless government he serves and into…something else, I won’t spoil it. Let’s say, something earthier. The book is a compelling one, and a strange one, and for some of us that alone will make it worth reading. There’s not much else like it, except Disco Elysium, in my estimation.

Oh, and the Bureaucrat’s sidekick is a talking briefcase. It’s no Kim Kitsuragi, because nobody is, but it has a notable supporting turn nonetheless. Its final fate is perhaps the most powerful moment of the book.

Tags Literature, Review

Comics General Blog

Rebuilding My Relationship to Comics #1: Suicide Squad

Post author By lnlupa
Post date February 11, 2025

Batman, hearing everyone thinks the Suicide Squad is edgier than he is, vents his frustration on Squad leader Rick Flagg.

I used to really love comic books. I used to really love superhero comics in particular. But somewhere in the avalanche of movies and tie-ins and reboots I got buried and I never dug myself out. Perhaps the massive increase in volume did not correspond to an equally massive increase in quality.

Or perhaps I just reflexively start hating things when other people like them.

Either way, now I only go to the comic book store by a sort of rote impulse – I look at the books on the shelves, I make eye contact with the familiar cowled faces, I buy nothing, and I go home.

I’m trying to avert this nullification by diving back into my comics collection and reconnecting with the material that made me crazy in the first place. And we’re starting at maybe the worst possible place for this journey to make any sense: the John Ostrander/Kim Yale/et al era of the Suicide Squad.

The Squad has gotten a bad rap in the last few years because of the godawful David Ayer movie, and then the, like, very okay James Gunn movie, and then the video game (I can’t remember if it was supposed to be good or bad, and I don’t care). But back in 1988, the Suicide Squad was just becoming itself, and the awkward wild nasty process of its birth is one of the most fascinating serial narratives in comics history.

The Suicide Squad is the brainchild of Amanda Waller – if you’re reading this, you probably know that. The Wall’s been getting a bad rap of late, with depictions of her in other media tending toward the utterly villainous. But Waller is more complicated than this, and in the hands of John Ostrander and Kim Yale she becomes one of the most challenging and interesting characters in the DC Universe. She’s not a good person, definitely not a hero, and she knows it, but she believes wholeheartedly that she is a necessary evil, that all the ways she’s mortgaged her soul were required to safeguard her children and her country. And she might be right: Ostrander and Yale write with surprising sensitivity (BY 1980s STANDARDS, NOT 2020s STANDARDS) about the struggles she faces as a Black woman in the non-stop white boy winter that is the American government. The dislike other characters hold for her is probed and considered, revealing ugly and unflattering and deeply real aspects to characters who might otherwise get away looking squeaky clean. I appreciate that.

There’s so much shading to each member of the Squad, and many of their adversaries too. Bronze Tiger, Deadshot, Nightshade, Count Vertigo, even Captain Boomerang – the stupidness of their gimmicks and bits elevates the poignancy of their mistakes and failings. The characters of the Suicide Squad, being disposable on an ontological level, are allowed to fail big, much bigger than more mainstream heroes. And they’re allowed to change significantly, sometimes for the worse. They are a mess of competing goals, desires, and schemes, and frequently that mess escalates into a total trainwreck. They do not slide into the currently popular (and perfectly fine when it’s used well) trope of Found Family. The members of the Squad hate each other and their masters at the beginning, and they still hate each other at the very end. Their relationships are all diseased by the power they wield over each other. In that way, this book is very honest about how ugly human relationships can get.

The thematics of power scale up in fascinating ways throughout the story, escalating into a type of late Cold War foreign policy kitsch which I find endlessly fascinating. The decision to depict the actual Reagan and actual HW Bush deploying the Squad to battle Commie superheroes will never not amuse me. The Suicide Squad trots the globe like a CIA-trained circus, wrecking up the place and usually making things worse for everyone around them. Much like the real CIA. This relationship between the Squad and the US government is a beautiful/ugly inversion of the relationship constructed every time Superman mentions that he’s fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Superman uses his god-like strength to maintain the ever-crumbling pedestal of American exceptionalism, papering over American evils with his own incontrovertible goodness. Conversely, anyone who associates with the Suicide Squad is dragged down to their level, made venal and violent by association. And since it’s the US government which invents the Squad, one must wonder who was the really venal and violent one in the first place.

I have to be clear that this book is full of plenty of material which now reads as cringe. Ideas that were progressive or groundbreaking in 1988, 1990, 1992 feel wildly embarrassing in 2025. The decision to color the skin of everyone from South Asia and the Middle East grey is consistently baffling to me. I know you guys had brown ink. All the Black characters have human-colored brown skin. Surely it couldn’t have been that hard to make a slightly lighter brown??? There is a lot of discomfort to be had here.

I still love the book, though, because of the thrill of its best and biggest moments, as well as the fervor of its convictions. Even cynicism was brighter and more alive in prior days.

Very, very, very few pop culture works, especially goofy old comic books, have the strength to confront and condemn their core concepts. The 2004 Battlestar Galactica is one of the few TV shows to risk this, and to my mind the penultimate mutiny storyline is one of the show’s all-time best. Similarly, the final arc of the Ostrander-Yale Suicide Squad is a complete deconstruction of its central premise, a final judgment delivered on the idea of government-enslaved supervillains press-ganged into performing “righteous” violence (and when you put it like that…). I have no qualms about spoilers for a work that concluded before I was born, but if you have that kind of fixation, keep scrolling until you see Batman again.

The last operation is a battle between the original Squad and a new, even worse Suicide Squad developed by another, especially shadowy arm of the US government. In the wake of the conflict, Waller dissolves the Squad and frees its members, admitting that her scheme did more harm than good. Deadshot and Count Vertigo confront each other atop a hill: Vertigo earlier asked for the option to be killed by Deadshot, rather than continue to live with bipolar disorder. Deadshot asks Vertigo one more time whether he wants to live or die. Vertigo hesitates, hesitates, hesitates, and then refuses Deadshot’s offer. They both depart.

This is an obvious literal denial of the book’s title. No more suicide, no more death. Count Vertigo, for all his SIGNIFICANT flaws, gets to live, and wants to. Deadshot, for all his depraved obsession with slaughter, does not kill again, and he makes that choice of his own volition. Both men are better than we have been led to believe.

I love seeing Batman eat shit.

Supervillains are supposed to represent an outsize evil and perversity, the exact mirror to the outsize good of superheroes. But in the Ostrander-Yale Suicide Squad, whatever heights of villainy our Squaddies achieve, none of them match the craven brutality of The State – America, Russia, Israel, all of them that appear in the book.

That idea, more than any other from this book, feels sharper than ever. And yet imagine hearing that from a comic book or a superhero movie today.

Tags Comics, Review

Book Review General Blog

Report on Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2024

Post author By lnlupa
Post date February 4, 2025

Every December (or January) I buy the annual Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy (BASFF) collection. Every year I suffer a certain amount of trepidation, knowing that the guest editor will swing the pendulum on the selections in an unpredictable direction which may or may not align with my tastes. Some years it has been a real trainwreck (for me; I’m happy for anyone who enjoyed the years I didn’t [even though they’re wrong]). The risk is the point. I want to read stories I wouldn’t read elsewhere or of my own volition. Otherwise, I would just edit my own anthology every year.

This year the guest editor was Hugh Howey, the author of the Silo series. I’ve not read the Silo books or seen the Silo show, but my sister hates the show. My trepidation level was medium. Thankfully, Howey pulls it off. I enjoyed about 75% of the stories in this year’s anthology, which is a very solid run. I’ll restrict myself to mentioning only my very favorites here.

There are some big names here doing stylish bits. In “How It Unfolds”, James S.A. Corey pull off one of the only constructive SF stories about a guy being extremely divorced that I’ve ever read. Ann Leckie does colonization, evolution, and most importantly slug life in “The Long Game”. With “John Hollowback and The Witch”, Amal El-Mohtar delivers an account of restorative justice via witch which proves, for the perpetrator, even more painful than retributive justice aims to be.

There are a couple compelling stories in throwback styles. I deeply enjoyed the pulpy refreshments of Jonathan Louis Duckworth’s “Bruise-Eyed Dusk”, with its swamp witches and ride-able gators and hovering sadness. This is a fantasy that is willing to play and explore and surprise so we can enjoy its strange world. Christopher Rowe’s “The Four Last Things” is an explicit Cordwainer Smith tribute, and that’s a great taste. Wild and literary and straining at the edges of conception and perception, Rowe’s story sets all the brain bits sizzling, hopefully to productive ends.

If there was something to criticize in this year’s BASFF, when the vast majority of the stories were ones I enjoyed, it is that most of the work included is Not That Deep. The themes, the meanings, the feelings elicited are Right There. You get it at the beginning, you get it in the middle, and in the end you Get It. There’s nothing wrong with that; there are lots of things that shouldn’t be veiled or disguised or thematized until they’re hard to see. But after a while the thundering horns of right-thinking get a little hard to distinguish from the thundering horns of wrong-thinking. It’s all just thundering horns.

When I think about the best that speculative fiction – sci-fi and fantasy – is capable of, I think of a shadow play. When you watch shadow puppets, you’re not looking where the light is shining, you’re looking at what appears behind, the shape made by the play between light and object. It’s hard to write about real life, what literally is. It’s even harder to write about the things that are hidden behind real life: the abstract, uncertain, and ineffable. The mysteries. The addition of the blatantly unreal is the bright light producing the shadow of a mystery, which is what allows us to contemplate it.

There weren’t a lot of stories about the shadows in this year’s BASFF. But there were a few. Thomas Ha’s “Window Boy” draws up a unique and weird dystopia to ponder the mechanisms which close people off to the suffering of others, ending in an appropriately ambiguous place. Kel Coleman’s “Disassembling Light” confronts the selfishness of mentors who fail their students, using a wondrous and disgusting fantasy discipline as its canvas. The final two stories included deliver an exceptionally strong and troubling ending to the collection. In “Falling Bodies”, Rebecca Roanhorse pushes the limits of what we might consider agency for the truly alienated with a protagonist pinned between colonizers and manipulators on all sides. Sam J. Miller, a reliably strong contributor, closes up the shop with “If Someone You Love Has Become a Vurdalak”, a story that takes the vampire addiction metaphor to a truer and infinitely more painful place as it questions what lengths we ought to go to when imprisoned by poisonous love (and for once, when it comes to vampires, it is specifically familial love).

It’s these last few stories I’m still thinking about after finishing the anthology. They press at uncertain and uncomfortable places, artfully, and ask something in return for the imagining. That’s the high heights to which sci-fi and fantasy can aspire. And the other stories in BASFF 2024 rest comfortably at the medium heights of sincerely entertaining and compelling and interesting, which is a height to which all of us unpublished writers must aspire 😂

If you read this year’s BASFF and have something to say, comment. I dare you. I will respond. Even if you didn’t read this year’s BASFF, comment-I-dare-you-I-will-respond.

Tags 2024, Literature, Review

General Blog Year in Review 2024

Artistic Consolations of 2024, Part III: Ludic

Post author By lnlupa
Post date January 28, 2025

What an awful year, was 2024. What a terrible, rotting, degenerated compost heap of a year, particularly when it came to games and the game industry. I can’t name the last time a major US game studio released a game I was excited about. Pentiment? I think it was Pentiment.

That being said, in other parts of the world they still make games that are good. And in the indie scene they still make games that are good. Pretty soon they’ll have fired everybody out there, and we’ll be left all alone with Product 4: The Contenting – Revenge of IP. Until then, however, let this love carry us.

I have no categories by which to organize the games I’m about to describe. Some may wonder why I am deploying the fewest rhetorical-organizational tools here on games, the subject about which I am theoretically most qualified to speak. What they don’t see is that I have studied games the most vehemently because they are the most mysterious. Allow the games to retain that mystery and we will learn more from them.

I played A Little to the Left for the first time near the end of the year, and it haunts me to this day. I suspect I’ll write a more extended analysis of its apophenic ordering of household goods, but until then think of this game as a metaphorical account of the endless war between God and Satan. You play as God, your cat is Satan, and the teeming masses of men’s souls are the unordered heaps of silverware in your drawer. Riveting.

Another lovely puzzle game this year was Tactical Breach Wizards, undercover as a turn-based tactics game. The brevity of each level, the clarity of each character’s powerset, and the charm of each character’s style and personality come together to make for a game that is fun, exciting, and well-told. More and more as I grow old, I also grow exhausted of the games that are endless timesucks, not only demanding 60+ hours of total play, but 3 or more hours per session to even get fun. Good god. I’m only working part-time and I’m still too busy for that. That’s what I enjoyed most about Tactical Breach Wizards: it’s a game you can boot up and play for however much time is available. In that brief period, you’ll have objectives to complete, actions to take, and amusing character interactions. You’ll have fun.

Rise of the Golden Idol dropped this year. Yippee! I resisted playing the original Case of the Golden Idol game for a while because of the rather grotesque caricature art style, but when it finally caught me, I was caught forever. The mad perverse mystery, the devious puzzles, and the spiraling delicious central narrative imprinted themselves indelibly upon my mind, so I was of course delighted to meet the sequel. Rise is more ambitious structurally and mechanically, with the basic Golden Idol puzzle finding numerous reinventions. The narrative is not quite as compelling, its final revelations not achieving the same thematically rich and terrifying heights of Case, but that would be a startling achievement. Rise is more of the pleasures of Case without being entirely more-of-the-same. That’s also an achievement, and probably a more sustainable one.

Embarrassingly, I also loved Cyberpunk 2077 in 2024. I didn’t play it when it came out, and I didn’t play it while CDProjekt Red flailed about trying to fix their exceptional mess. But then in February 2024 some friends of mine who had played convinced me to try it, claiming the bugs were largely fixed (on PC, where we play). Not only did I have a low-bug experience, I also had a very powerful one, mixing delight and sorrow and beauty in various measures. I’ve spoken at length about this one via other media, so I will say only that the horrific airless feeling of young V watching all the doors of their life close in front of them hurt gloriously. It hurt like the truth. We were fellow travelers on the cold night highway of this killing world. We did not give in.

The best game of 2024 was 20 Small Mazes. I’m not doing a bit here, it was 20 Small Mazes. This is a free game that contains exactly what it claims: twenty small mazes. Each maze is an experiment, an exploration of what a maze is and could be in a digital context. Each maze is a tiny revelation about how to navigate an unknown space. The mazes all live together in a heap on the screen. It’s up to the player to arrange them, adjust them, sort through them, and confront them in whatever order makes sense. The game isn’t long. The game isn’t flashy. But its curiosities and significances and satisfactions are undeniable. It is graceful and humble. It is something that could not be made by the game industry at large. It’s just 20 Small Mazes. Why try to be something else?

That’s 2024. In a time of bombastic spectacle and overwhelming horror, it is no surprise that much of the redeeming came from small, quiet things (and my motorcycle in Cyberpunk). Now it’s 2025; we are in the labyrinth, there’s no way out except through. There will be more consolations. My next post will be a book review. Wait for it.

Tags 2024, Video Games, Year-in-Review

General Blog Year in Review 2024

Artistic Consolations of 2024, Part II: Cinematic

Post author By lnlupa
Post date January 21, 2025

This is where our problems (the cinema) began.

I didn’t spend that much time with fresh cinema in 2024. I went to the theater a decent number of times and most of the movies I saw there were also decent. Except Gladiator II, which was awful. Most of the movies I loved were not from this year, and that’s okay. I am a single point in the rolling river of moving picture history; I let all that has come before wash over me. Soon I will be ground into a nub.

I propose four categories for the cinema viewing I conducted: Films Most to Laugh With, Films Most to be Disturbed By, Films Most to be Moved By, and Films Most to Love for Their Crooked Heart. I did not see any of these films before this year (except probably Muppet Christmas Carol, which I’m sure I did see as a baby). They are fresh to me, if not to the world.

Most to Laugh With

Though I am a goofy bastard, I’m not much of a comedy connoisseur. I watched two outstandingly funny films this year: Smoking Causes Coughing (Fumer Fait Tousser) and Hundreds of Beavers. A French film by noted wacko cinema crafteur Quentin Dupieux, Smoking Causes Coughing is about Tobacco Force, a team of French superheroes themed around the poisonous chemicals in cigarettes. They work for a disgusting rat man puppet named Chef Didier. He drools green slime constantly, and decides to send the heroes on a team-building retreat in a futuristic country cabin. There they tell each other weird, disturbing stories until their nemesis, Lézardin, threatens the Earth. I think there’s a talking fish at one point. A dude gets chewed up in a woodchipper but he’s still alive and conscious in a bucket of blood (until…). It’s wacked out.

Hundreds of Beavers is also wacked out, though more narratologically straightforward. It’s about a disgraced applejack brewer who becomes a fur trapper to win the hand of a beautiful girl dwelling deep within the forests of the Upper Great Lakes. Also, all the animals are played by people in mascot suits. The filmmakers use their absolutely shoestring budget to deliver maximum hilarity in the form of completely surreal open-world-game-esque stunts. It’s a true Midwest original; you can detect the fingerprints of Winter Madness upon every frame. If you like your entertainment to be extremely goofy and a bit provocative in its weirdness, you can’t go wrong with either of these.

Most to Be Disturbed By

It was a good year for discomfort and uncertainty. The first 2024 film I’ll mention here brought both, plus a certain amount of uneasy humor. That film is A Different Man, about a man who cures his extreme facial difference, only to discover that maybe it wasn’t the only problem with his life. The movie has a surreal, retro moodiness that places you in the unsettled, self-loathing mindset of Edward (played with indelible awkwardness by Sebastian Stan; thankfully he has been liberated from the textureless prison of Earth-616). Renate Reinsve as Edward’s beautifully thoughtless neighbor and Adam Pearson as Oswald, a man with Edward’s same disability but none of his dismalism, deliver stellar performances as well. This is also probably the least disturbing of the most disturbing films of 2024. It’s still fairly unsettling, but in a relatable way (if you hate yourself).

More unsettling is Fright Night, the 1980s vampire movie starring Prince Humperdinck from The Princess Bride. It is the most sexual vampire movie I’ve seen since Coppola’s Dracula, and to be honest Coppola’s Dracula is more horny than sexual. Those are two different things. Horniness can exist rupturously and uproariously without mutual consummation. But the sexual is completed, engaged, multi-actor. You can be horny all alone, with no one to see you. But you can’t be sexual without being seen. The Dracula in Fright Night gets it, and you can see why. I saw the new Nosferatu movie and in it you see Nosferatu’s Nosferenis, and it was still less sexual than Fright Night. I don’t know why everybody is not always talking about Fright Night. It is moist with repressed desires and thirsty in the blood and non-blood sense. You will be uncomfortable. It is essential viewing if you are interested in Draculas in any sense.

Also disturbing in the sexual sense is Communion, a 1989 film starring Christopher Walken. He gets abducted by aliens. He has a mental breakdown. He threatens his family with firearms. He returns to the aliens. They sodomize him (what?). Afterwards, he reconciles with his family and realizes he is now closer to God (what?). The aliens are played by funny little dancing puppets. Either you want to see that or you don’t. It was still not the most disturbing film I watched this year. That was Judgment at Nuremberg.

You might be thinking, “Why not The Zone of Interest, a new movie also about the Nazis and their dumbshit sicko ideology?” Everybody’s already said what they need to about The Zone of Interest. Ask a real critic and they can give you some thoughts on The Zone of Interest. And while the stylistic choices made in that movie are powerful and disturbing, it provides a fairly clear takeaway: don’t be the commandant of Auschwitz. Judgment at Nuremberg goes somewhere more existentially disconcerting and equally relevant – what is the madness which has possessed us to surrender our destiny to fascism? What will we do with the regular people who all just go along with it? No answers, only darkness. That’s the theme for 2024: no answers, only darkness.

And yet. There were films to be moved by, and a man who can weep for their fellows might still be redeemed.

Most to Be Moved By

There are many reasons to be moved by the cinema, at least if you are addicted to the cinema like myself. I was moved by the sheer artistry of Andrew Scott’s performance in the National Theater production of Vanya. That’s only barely a film, but it is on Letterboxd and it is a one-man show and it is the greatest acting I’ve seen in my entire life. And I regularly attend live theater by choice. I was moved by the verisimilitude and richness of super-indie film Hannah Ha Ha, which so lovingly portrayed a kind of person who rarely appears in mainstream cinema living a kind of life which receives an extraordinary lack of respect in so much of mainstream discourse. I was moved by the terrible endurance of Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) in Dark Waters, a film which testifies to the cost of faith as well as its power. I was moved by the kindness and the justice of the eponymous princess in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and by the enduring beauty of her world despite its harshness. And I was moved most profoundly, most achingly, and most painfully by The Muppet Christmas Carol. It was too much kindness, too much generosity, too much hope. I was not well again for days. In the darkest times, love is painful, too painful! But it was love also which moved me in and through each of these films, and it remains the good in in the world as well.

Most to Love for Their Crooked Heart

To love the cinema is part of my life’s work, and that includes its most indelicate and malformed iterations. Thus, Films Most to Love for Their Crooked Heart. An easy, obvious answer at the top is Megalopolis. This movie is terrible and I did see it twice in the theaters. I’ve delivered an extended discourse on this film in another venue; I shan’t repeat myself except to say that it is a greater artistic triumph by far to swing and miss so utterly, than to never do much more than bunt (here’s looking at you, Mid-ley Scott). Let’s get more obscure.

The Man From Earth is an ultra-ultra-indie film from 2007 based a script by an erstwhile Star Trek writer. It’s about a guy named John Oldman who reveals to his friends he’s 14,000 years old (John. Old. Man.). They get really upset. I’m pretty sure Tony Todd had to drive his own car for this movie, because I doubt they could afford a single prop. You have to use your stupidest brain and your smartest brain at the same time to follow the exceptional nonsense which comprises this film’s plot. It doesn’t get any better than this, if you can agree that better here means “dumber than The Twilight Zone“.

Last and so most, a film to which I will only link. I don’t want to speak the name of this movie because the director seems like the kind of person to have a Google alert on his name and then go and harass people who review the film poorly. But I have to talk about it because it and the prior installment in the franchise are some of the most significant crashouts of modern cinema. Everything doesn’t work, and it must be seen to believed. And by the end of the film, despite his dopey-ness, his cringe-inducing ideology, and his disastrous directorial decisions, you will love the director’s crooked heart. There’s no art without artlessness, and I am glad for that.

That’s the cinema, for your crooked heart. Next time, games.

Postscript

Consolation of another kind – we do not yet know what our actions today will change tomorrow. That’s what science fiction is for.

Tags 2024, Cinema, Year-in-Review