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Super Mario Brothers (2023)

I don’t play video games anymore mainly because they interface badly with my addictive and obsessive tendencies, with irl return on the time spent slightly worse than, say, drinking alone… wherein I might in stupefied form at least, idk, realize something. Even so, I’m infected by certain games I’ve played in a way similar to favorite movies, novels, dreams, or trips, “as texts.” Where they differ from e.g. 210 page novels (“the 92-minute feature film of novels”) is in their embedding a subtle physical experience of play as part of their texts, in their taking at least ten times longer to tattoo onto my mind (at least 100 times longer in at least one case), and in the demonic demand for “rereading” I feel they present at least to me.

That said, I feel that Mario (i.e. “the entirety of Mario stuff”) is extremely important. It contains a generationally-significant new pantheon and at least three(!!!!!!) new media urtexts (SMB, SMW, M64). Its world-building is at least as large & lush as its nearest peers in popular fiction (LotR, SW, HP), but somehow without narrative or story being important or figuring in much at all… Mario is largely in the realm of abstraction. The simple presence of the characters, the color & design, the feeling of fun bouncy responsiveness… that’s the whole thing. The shared reading is derived from the characters as projectable/selectable as “myth-forms” (like Looney Tunes) and the individual but commonly-shared interaction with the gameplay’s physical “hand/eye” “UX”. The study(?) of this latter piece has been elevated to (and can be experienced as) worship or ritual magic… like if the tactile experience of reading a book was utterly unique to a given text, and came to supersede the the content of the text itself in importance. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch the incredible “SM64 – Watch for Rolling Rocks – 0.5x A Presses” (2016),” “Super Mario World — Credits Warp in 5:59.6 (First Time Ever on Console)” (2015), “The Greatest Super Mario Bros Speedrun Ever Just Happened” (2022), or “FIXING the ENTIRE SM64 Source Code (INSANE N64 performance)”, all on youtube (and all way more worthy viewing), and try to tell me this is different from Hildegaard von Bingen or Agnes Martin or whatever.

Unnnnnfortunately the Mario movie (2023) doesn’t really capture any of this good stuff. Instead it takes the characters, plops in some story and voices, deploys some “References,” and that’s p much it. I watched it totally alone in a theater in Edina with reclining La-Z-Boy style seats, stone sober, and I already don’t really remember it, except for Peach “wielding” a “halberd”, as if in a “Soulslike” “build,” which I saw as juttingly/interestingly not Mariolike. The voice acting situates these iconic characters in the moment in a way that awkwardly flattens their timelessness. The movie itself flattens the active experience of play to a passive one, but worse than watching some sibling or cousin or roommate at the controls, because even tho it may be fine that you’ll never get a turn, it feels terrible to know it’s impossible for anyone to improve, break, explore, perfect, or otherwise make any of it their own by unforeseen strategies, and then in that transformed/reborn way, yours in a new visionary one. Unfortunately instead, it just is what it is… normal-ass preexisting IP setting boring sail for movie franchise money waters, that I paid to see, but probably should have illegally downloaded three years from now.

Eden (2014)

dir. Mia Hansen-Love

bubul's cornerHigh-quality entry in the rave movies category, this one a quasi-autobio of the director’s brother (& co-screenwriter) Sven Love’s “Cheers” night & DJ duo in Paris. Sven is stylized as “Paul,” whose rise the movie tracks from raving teen & budding garage DJ in 1992 thru to an inevitable descent into irrelevance & full-blown adult “regular life” confusion in late 2013. The same actor plays Paul for this 21 year period without visibly aging, and while the cursed Dorian Gray vibes this gives off are apropos, this’s probably more of a lucky function of the production budget than an intentional reference… the actual direct literary refs (Bolaño, Creely) are called out explicitly in scenes near the end.

Daft Punk are in the movie in a few scenes but it’s not “a Daft Punk movie” – they’re just Paul’s peers who happen to rise to cosmic-level stardom. And just as this isn’t Daft Punk fanfic, it’s not an Amadeus-style Salieri story where Paul is made into a cursed witness either. Fortunately it’s the opposite, Paul just loves them too. In one early scene Bangalter kinda shyly puts on Da Funk at a party at his not-home parents’ (incredibly nice) apartment. Paul hears it as he’s coming in and comments, “They finished their track…” and he listens and watches the room, and with a psyched smile creeping on, “It fucking rocks.” It’s great to see a movie that leans into what a proud & exulting feeling it is to be at an event where your peers are tearing the roof off… I can’t wait to feel this again!

From there on, it’s just stuff in this guy Paul’s life happening, grounded in his scene context, passionately for the first time, and then with increasing hollowness thru repetition, as habit, loneliness, and addiction gradually gather. Members of Paul’s crew leave the frame, for families in cheaper cities, workable middle class lives, global stardom, other schemes, death… but Paul keeps going, doing things the only way he knows. What will become of Paul?

Weirdly it kinda doesn’t matter. It’s a lived-in movie with an attention to accurate rendering, and I think anyone who has lived any amount of time in music scenes or spaces won’t be able to help but appreciate it on the basic level of its truth. Paul himself is at best an opaque guy who keeps shruggingly fucking up, at worst a worm with no inner life who’s lucky until not… the movie does basically nothing to invite empathy toward him or his position either way, giving the ending especially kind of a hovering “hhhhhhhuh” quality. And sure, there are a few corny parts, as there will be in all rave movies, especially near the beginning. But even so, I enjoyed it to the point of feeling the need to immediately rewatch, which I almost never do, and which I felt the movie sustained and rewarded. What can I say? I love this music, and I love gratuitous, endless shots of ecstatic dancing in clubs, and how joy and sadness are conjoined mysteriously in the celebration and memory of aging within a practice.

Santa Claus: The Movie (1985)

I grew up in an extremely Christmas house, doing the same Christmas stuff every year, all December long irradiating my brain with the strange ghostlight of Christmas decorations seen from across long expanses of deserted stillness and dark freezing cold street, while driving someplace in silence, or alone, or both. My permanent takeaways from that as an adult person are that I appreciate coziness and seek it in my way, I like to put billions of little flickering colors into paintings, and I’m surrounded by ghosts and spirits constantly. Scrooge sitting in his freezing cold apartment eating oatmeal in the dark in a dusty wing chair in his PJs and tripping out over his old business partner’s head appearing in the fire is to me not only what Christmas is about, it’s what everything is about, and I keep it in my heart all year long. To me the only thing separating this from Jonathan Harker seeing Dracula creeping down the wall of the castle, which I love and identify with in exactly equal measure, is the emphasis on the calendar date of the story and the particulars of the decorations.

Just like all other overly self-concerned genres, Christmas movies are brutal for tons of reasons, okay, we all get this. But as always too there are a couple that flick open the worlds-separating curtain, and move backward and forward between awake and asleep, like a man known only by rumor who is never seen, who enters your house via unknown means to eat your snacks in exchange for tools, books, equipment, or candy he heard you need, freely connecting the cozy and the haunted. Santa Claus: The Movie (1985), Shea’la’s recommendation, is one of these. It was produced by Ilya Salkind, a 3rd-generation Hollywood producer/scion, who married Jane Chaplin (daughter of Charlie); I guess he’s best known for producing the original Superman (1983) and sequels, and was based in Paris. I note all of this because it seems like what Salkind was shooting for was “high-budget visionary 80s fantasy adventure” – next door to the similarly “European”-feeling The Neverending Story (1984) – but what came out was a shapeless chaotic-weird blob of interconnected(ish) stories, versions of each of which exist discretely in other movies, piled together into a confusing and distorted overlay, by way of the vision of a producer who probably never spent a single day in the regular world. It’s a soaking wet freak of a movie from the movie’s actual title and lengthy opening 14th century tragedy sequence all the way through to the closing shot of evil tycoon John Lithgow hopelessly howling before freezing to death in outer space.

It really is all here: A “Santa’s workshop” dealing with quality control problems and automation as it enters the 20th century, that then ends up in competition with a Willy Wonka startup in present-day NYC, controlled by a Slugworth who is introduced at a Senate hearing, whose rich niece falls in love with a streetwise urchin, who sneaks into her house to eat food, just like Santa, to whom he becomes the first and perhaps only friend the titular character has made, through all his endless years. What else can I say… other than that the script has no puns other than one that gets made maybe 10 times, the smash cuts between “workshop/set” scenes and “present day/street” scenes are among the most disorienting I’ve seen in recent memory, they do the reindeer roll call more than once, the climactic sequence is bewilderingly and clearly unnecessary, the reindeer are weird puppets, there’s a good Santa self-doubt sequence, Burgess Meredith shows up as an ancient elf wizard (even though the elves are ageless etc. etc.) for one incredible scene only, Mrs. Claus seems to not mind spending centuries indoors in a community that includes no other women, a PBR gets gnarfed in a ridiculous way, and that I’ve never seen John Lithgow absolutely dominate the screen so hard in any other role? I guess just that it’s 110% recommended to anyone who also enjoys “was that all in the same movie?”/”did I dream this movie?” movies, addressed to a conception of “child viewer” that is impossible to understand, that depict alien versions of the familiar world with a non-winking casualness that is itself a kind of dazzle camouflage. If you watch this definitely feel free to @ me.

Neighbors (1981)

dir. John G. Avildsen. Recommended.

In Neighbors, John Belushi is a married working stiff in a cul de sac, and then Dan Aykroyd and his wife move in next door and unravel John Belushi’s entire life in the course of a single night.

I found this movie to be a revelation, one of the best movies I’ve ever seen “about” latent dissatisfaction with settled working life & the desire to tear it down completely. Tonally it floats somewhere in the gray wastes between Home Alone (1990) and your worst and most haunted anxiety/sex nightmares, while the action is as anarchic and blackenedly nihilistic as The Idiots (1998)-mode Lars von Trier, bizarrely weaponized via it also being an Aykroyd/Belushi joint. If I had a genie I could easily waste a wish replacing Belushi “College” merch everywhere with the final Belushi image from Neighbors, at sunrise in full GBV “motor away” ecstasy/damnation, about to leave his cul de sac forever.

Definitely not a movie for everyone, but if you’re currently thinking “huh” or “whoa” and not “haha woof… pass” then buddy… you gotta watch this one. A great double-feature with Uncut Gems (2019) or Tim Heidecker in The Comedy (2012), both of which use this same “comedy star-power backing an unsettling movie” tactic to create a similar vibe, each with pretty different results.

Some Kind of Monster (2004)

Some Kind of Monster is a documentary about a 50-year-old record producer named Bob Rock whose rockstar aspirations finally look like they’ll be fulfilled when he’s asked to play bass during a 2003 Metallica record’s studio sessions. In Act 1, Bob Rock thinks he’s made it, and is legitimately in Metallica now – it sure looks like all the work he did producing the band since their fifth record in 1991 is finally going to pay off. But in Act 2, Bob Rock is crushed by the realization that the main Metallica guy does not respect him as a peer, and just views him as “part of the business.” Finally in Act 3, Bob Rock sort of skulks away, and is replaced by full-time “real” bass player, Rob Trujillo. Metallica celebrates Rob Trujillo joining the group by giving him one million dollars and debuting his membership in the group during their induction into MTV’s “Icons” series. (To date, the other MTV “Icons” are Janet Jackson (2001), Aerosmith (2002), and The Cure (2004).)

The movie ends happily with Bob Rock and Metallica amicably going their separate ways. Metallica continues to be a business that generates a large amount of revenue, and Bob Rock moves on to producing many more albums for other “successful business”-level bands who maybe appreciate him a little bit more. During a series of asides throughout Some Kind of Monster that don’t include Bob Rock, the other members of Metallica process the particular trauma and cursedness of “having reached success of a certain level” in their own ways. By recording a record together, they also gesture at the one-time importance of the creative process to the matter of their relationships with one another, and to the ongoing business they continue to run together.

Bob Rock’s pathos derives from the extent to which the fact that he is not a true peer to the rest of the group is achingly obvious to everyone but him. He’s a pure industry hand, focused on getting the record done so that everyone can get paid. His contributions to the recording sessions focus on helping the group identify moments in their jams or brainstorms that are or could be developed into song parts that might read as credibly “Metallica.” As he does so, the rest of the group takes on an air of condescension; Bob has a decent palate for what could be credibly Metallica, sure, but he absolutely lacks the ability to summon authentic Metallica himself. In this way Bob Rock reads like a studio assistant who thinks that it is he who is “really” making some artist’s work, while failing to realize that the work is located in the idea, not the gruntwork of rendering it. As Omar S iconically put it: “You cannot copy Omar S style, you can only copy a song that has already been produced by Omar S.”


“It’s really healthy for me to be here, away from anything related to the band or anyone who would remind me of the band.  And recognize what’s real.”

Kirk Hammett (Metallica; lead guitar)

Some Kind of Monster has three ideal audiences. Metallica fans, Metallica haters, and anyone who’s dipped their toes into artistic stuff on any level. All three can find a lot to like in this documentary about a famous metal band trying to make a record, and needing the help of an extremely expensive therapist to finish it.  For the fans, there’s intimate behind the scenes footage of their favorite band making a record. For the haters, there’s intimate behind the scenes footage of a gaggle of fools making a terrible record.  For creatives, there’s a hefty document about a group of people exploring the creative process b/w an illustration of how tying your personal worth to being creative can be destructive.

I can’t take the fans’ perspective, because Metallica are mostly bad (RIP Cliff), and I’ll skip the haters’ viewpoint, though I gotta say that the view from there is very nice… highlights include Hetfield explaining to Urlich that usually the drummer provides the beat; Hammett having a meltdown because they’re removing guitar solos from the record; and the bonus feature where they make a rap-rock song with Ja Rule. As a card-carrying underground musician, though, I’m in a good spot to speak about what Some Kind of Monster means to me on that level. 

I used to say that Some Kind of Monster was the best movie about what it’s like to actually be in a band, which was irresponsible hyperbole (my opinions now though… are very good ). In 2003 the men of Metallica have some good qualities(?), but “platonic ideal of a band” they are not. There’s too much noise between them now, all necessary to keep the business of being in a huge band going. So maybe it’s the best movie about business mediation? I dunno, but it is a pretty good movie about what it takes to get people to do something creatively together when they have completely lost interest in actually doing the “art” part of their successful ostensibly art-driven business.  You get the sense that most bands at this stage would throw in the towel or take a break, but Metallica to its credit soldiers through. After hundreds of thousands of dollars of therapy and two years in the studio, we the people receive the fruits of their sacrifice: one not very good record, and one pretty good movie. 

Some Kind of Monster was in pretty heavy rotation as a source of conversation amongst the dudes of underground music for a while. Probably due to the fact that it’s a very funny movie about a band that the world considers successful who are more or less exposed as being shams, but also because it’s a really deep and honest dive into feelings of male inadequacy that can come from being a musician.  This is the movie that has Dave Mustaine from Megadeth talking about how being kicked out of Metallica and then immediately forming the second biggest metal band in the world ruined his life. It also features the nightmare of Lars’s dad, a wizard with impeccable taste, who can see through his son’s band’s bullshit completely, and has no qualms about calling him out on it, something obviously very hurtful to his son. There’s also the sequence where Metallica goes to their ex-bassist Jason Newstead’s new band’s gig, who they kicked out for wanting to do a record with that band. Jason ghosts Metallica after the show, but they still stick around to mope about how they can’t finish their record, and how the guy they kicked out is playing a gig in a medium/small venue. There are plenty of other examples of this, in this tale of three dudes who tied their self-worth to their band, but have no way of accurately measuring its success anymore.  

I’ve mentioned that the record they make sucks, which is true (see what I said earlier about my opinions).  This is non-important for the music in the world, but great for the film. If they had made something great after this whole thing, I really doubt the the movie would have been such a compelling document.  “Famous band tries really hard to make a good record then succeeds after dipping into endless resources” is not a storyline for a movie. Probably the most important revelation they make is that they realize how bad it is and make peace with it (though it is possible that they’re able to filter out the muted expressions of every person they let hear the record, and the recommendation to “Delete the album” from a certain band member’s dad). What ends up being important to them is that at the end of the recording they seem personally refreshed, and that they like each other more.  Whether or not they’re the people who deserve this is an open question that I’m not qualified to answer (if you’re interested in seeing a similar dynamic play out with genuinely likable people, I recommend Anvil!: The Story of Anvil (2008)), but we definitely deserve what we’re left with – an authentic high comedy about known characters shown to be fools, who receive a happy ending against all odds. In other words, a delightful farce.

Sunshine (2007)

tom bubulIn Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) the premise is that the sun is dying, so seven scientists have to fly a one-chance bomb “the mass of Manhattan […] containing all of the earth’s mined fissile material” into the sun, to “start a new sun inside the sun.” Slight drama ensues when the crew “detects a beacon” from the ship that disappeared on the prior mission attempt, and decide to call an audible to go check it out. It’s kinda 2019-funny that the premise here is “the planet is gonna freeze because the sun burned out” – talk about getting your movie’s climate change disaster endgame scenario upside down. Compare with The Day After Tomorrow (2004), which if I had to choose between just these two movies, is probably a little more on the money.

What results in Sunshine is a body horror/existential dread/outer space crew meltdown/outer space ship logistics/zombie slasher/psychedelic trip movie. This result is interesting not because it’s particularly capable in any of these individual genres, but because of how it grossly combines them to try to create a movie that’s “about” what it’s like to fly into the sun, on both a psychic and visceral level. The movie’s images even warp and distort the closer to the sun the mission gets in a formal parallel of the increasing cosmic hideousness of the crew’s situation. The movie is “good” to the extent to which “enjoy this movie about flying into the sun to your death” is a bonkers premise, and to the extent to which it does everything it can to amplify that central journey/idea, but “bad” in the many ways in which the script and action fail to support it. Apart from as embodied philosophical outlooks, the characters are barely there, and because it attempts so much, parts of the movie frequently free undercooked.

Sunshine‘s body horror aspect is its most pronounced. Throughout the movie, you’re gonna see unflinching (but highly theatrical) depictions of willful engagement with personal physical suffering, often bent around some idea of personal sacrifice as a cost of group survival. People get incinerated by sun rays, a guy freezes to death in coolant, another guy freezes to death in space with “ice freezing and cracking” sounds as his eyes freeze, and then his arm shatters when he floats into something (“Sub Zero Wins… flawless victory… fatality“). I had the strong sense watching all this that Boyle made 127 Hours (2010) because he thought he could do something better with this kind of horror material in a more-limited structure, but unfortunately for both movies, it’s not the suffering that makes either of them good, it’s the anxiety and dread of the premise itself. Feel like “would this movie be better without most or any of the characters” is probably a relatively personal yardstick, but I’d watch a remake that’s just one person on the ship, with no side mission shenanigans, and they gradually freak out more and more as they fly into the sun, and that’s it. I’d also watch a prequel that takes place on earth, and depicts the global logistics of collecting all the world’s nuclear matter and somehow making it into a giant bomb that somehow gets attached to a ship in space.


davey harmsThe year is 2057 and the sun is not doing so hot.  An international crew has been dispatched with a mission to fix it and save humanity.  Their plan… shoot it with a bomb. The specifics of how exactly this is going to help are pretty loose, though the script by Alex Garland (Dredd, Annihilation, Ex Machina) has enough movie science in it that the idea as-rendered is innocuous enough if you’re willing to go along with it.  Even if you aren’t, I’d recommend giving it a go anyway, as this scenario sets the stage for a group of people flying directly at the sun while stakes get higher and margins of error get slimmer the closer they get; a delicious recipe. Having the sun pull them in while the danger rises puts a nice tactile spin on the whole “that which giveth taketh away” vibe.  

That vibe is a very nice spot to be, and when Sunshine is working in this pocket it’s great.  The design of the ship is as well-realized as I’ve seen in sci-fi, with a spacesuit that floored me with both it’s bizarre design and how functional it actually seemed to be for its task. The movie has a particular eye for all types of light, both in showing it and working it into the texture of the film (in one of my favorite instances the chief psychiatrist consults the ship’s AI about the right dose of undiluted sunlight to blast himself with).  There are a great many shots of the sun as well, contrasted excellently with inexplicable light sources on the ship itself. This occasionally creates something of a Space Dogme 95 lighting scheme on the ship, which was one of my favorite things about the movie.     

There’s a lot about Sunshine that’s extremely fresh feeling, working from this backbone of “heat is our chief troublemaker in space” as opposed to the more typical cold void.  To its credit the movie doesn’t commit to some of the more obvious moral problems this kind of situation would afford. There’s initially quite a bit of hand wringing aboard the ship about the dichotomy of personal morality vs. commitment to a greater cause, which has its place, but which the film recognizes in it’s own context boils down to some pretty obviously black and white situations, and thus waves away.  This is exemplified by the Chris Evans character, who gives a great performance, which ties an unyielding devotion to pragmatic solutions to omnipresent anger, in a way that’s both scary and mostly extremely reasonable. Most films would make this “the villain,” but here instead this guy is permitted to be complicated character. 

Sunshine waves away a few other easy avenues of meaning that would have been easy to go down, but unfortunately doesn’t really settle on anything for itself. Ultimately that makes it a movie about some people bombing the sun but having a bad time doing it. Once the hard times take over in the workplace setting, and the movie pivots to “shit show in space” territory, I had a hard time caring. Earth would be saved, or not; something that the film had failed to convince me I had any stake in whatsoever. The characters’ interpersonal issues are replaced with performances of the gasping / wide-eyed-terror combo. Cillian Murphy pulls double-duty in this territory, and while an interesting-looking guy and an ok actor, is extremely ill-suited to looking distressed in this manner.  He looks kinda puffy and odd when he’s upset, which is too bad, because there’s a lot of puffy odd Cillian in the end. Couple this with the inclusion to add a straight-up villain and a lot of what’s interesting about the movie gets erased in the third act.

Although I had soured by the end of the movie I feel like it’s important to impress that there are scenes I still remember clearly several days later.  What’s good in the film was fascinating and often extremely beautiful, and at this point it’s overpowered my memory of being disengaged in the end.  So if you don’t mind something that’s not perfect and has many fully realized moments of wild inspiration, you could do a lot worse than Sunshine.

Wild Hogs (2007)

bubulIn this movie, set in 2007, late in the second GWB term, which I watched at 1.25% speed in the bath, three craven, late-career, white leading men from 70s, 80s, or 90s Hollywood who really seem to need irl paychecks go on a movie motorcycle trip from Cleveland to Venice Beach with their mutual friend Martin Lawrence. They call their movie friend group, which finds its primary expression in weekend rides, “the Wild Hogs.”

Eventually the Hogs run into Ray Liotta in New Mexico. Ray Liotta is the leader of a “real” bike gang, the Del Fuegos, founded by his father, Henry Fonda (Boomer pausing the movie screen to gesticulate and exclaim: “it’s an Easy Rider reference!! I got the reference!!”). Liotta gets mad that the Wild Hogs are poseurs, and steals one of their motorcycles to “teach them a lesson,” which in turn leads to the destruction of his biker bar, creating beef. Then the Del Fuegos and the Wild Hogs spend acts two and three figuring out who’s actually authentic/who’s actually a man via bluster and violence in a town that’s having a chili competition. It blows over when Henry Fonda eventually shows up to chide Ray Liotta, telling him the bar was “a shithole” (Trump vox) and that he made a ton of money on insurance when it burned down. Ray Liotta says “Sorry pop,” and that’s it. The Wild Hogs prove they are the “real men” and finish the ride to Venice Beach, where Gen X and early Millenial women in bikinis smile at them and wave. Over the end credits, Ray Liotta’s bar is rebuilt by “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” into something that looks like a Guy Fierri restaurant or something.

The other Hogs are William H (“Hilliam”) Macy, John Travolta, and Tim Allen. Macy is sort of the central character; he plays “a computer programmer” who is “afraid to talk to women.” He is introduced in a cafe, where he is using a desktop implementation of Siri called “Mac,” via an open interface that looks something like Audacity. When he tries to seem like a cool computer guy, it misunderstands his command to “open Internet” and searches for “alternative sex,” immediately opening a million “popups” for things like “kinky granny” sites, which all play sound. As he struggles to close the popups, he spills coffee on his computer, which resembles a gray-bodied plastic 2003 HP Pavilion (not the aluminum-bodied Powerbook G4, and certainly not a 2007 white MacBook). The coffee spill causes his computer to spark and emit smoke; everyone in the cafe is disgusted at the display. Later, in his enthusiasm for the bike trip, he gets a bicep “tat” of the Apple rainbow logo. The joke is that Macy doesn’t understand that the rainbow is a symbol of gay pride, and that the Apple logo is not a tough enough tattoo for a biker to have; it’s that kind of movie. And the whole thing also just rings completely false because the rainbow logo was retired in 1998.

Macy’s character is portrayed as earnest, loving, and naive. He admires his male friends, and is on a quest for Maleness via getting laid not unlike Chris Elliot’s in Cabin Boy. (At the time I watched this, Macy was embroiled in the celebrity pay-to-play “college admissions scandal,” which felt cartoonishly appropriate to his presence in this movie.) Meanwhile, Travolta plays the group asshole, and goes all-in on straight-ahead, “no homo” bro masculinity, played with zero irony for laughs. Travolta repeatedly dismisses Macy’s naive comfort with his own body and earnest male admiration for his friends in homophobic terms. There’s even a lengthy interlude in Act 1 with a gay motorcycle cop (played by character actor John C. McGinley (Point Break)) who keeps trying to get the Hogs to have an orgy, and they have to figure out how to escape without appearing not-gay, so as not to rouse the ire of law enforcement and get a ticket. The whole thing is about as endless-feeling and lurid as Jack Nicholson in the dentist’s chair in the OG Little Shop of Horrors (1960).

That Ray Liotta’s bar is remodeled from “a shithole” into something completely plastic-looking by an HGTV show is weirdly descriptive of this entire movie’s thing: that artificial suburban consumer reality is ultimately the measure of what’s right, manly, and good. Ray Liotta reenters this reality and signals his true beta status by crying tears of joy; he and his criminal biker gang were cowardly lions after all. And the Wild Hogs were right to be prepared to stand up to them in violent conflict all along: that’s what “real men” do.

Is this convincing to anyone? Who does this fantasy belong to? Does anyone watching the movie actually think the bar is better off after this weird renovation? Do they believe that either model of “the biker” depicted here is somehow “authentic?” Do they believe that any of these men are “real men?”

The last thing I wanna say here is that Davey and I are originally acquainted from being “noise babies” in Philly who also played board games, but we got to know each other by doing a low-level east coast tour together. I had to get out of bed to check if that tour was in 2007, and whether we were plausibly on the road ourselves while the Wild Hogs were fighting Ray Liotta, but it was in 2008. Still, pretty tragic to think that this is the “road movie” we’re left with to describe this time.


harmsFour middle-aged friends hit the road on their motorcycles to rediscover themselves and maybe America.  This is the base outline for Wild Hogs a movie made in the waning years of the Bush administration, right before things got inconceivably weird for the baby boomers.  I’d heard Wild Hogs was something in the vein of Grown Ups 2, a film equal parts psychotically banal and malevolent. While it does share those qualities it doesn’t possess that film’s sheer volume of incoherent bad vibes, leaving it a mere pretender to the crown of that brand of psychedelically-bleak Americana.  So while I mentally group Grown Ups 2 in with Lars Von Trier and similar punishers, Wild Hogs I found more akin to something like Sixteen Candles; a middling comedy with toxic overtones that get more pronounced and poisonous over time. The movie’s only saving grace is to witness its obsessive focus, with every joke and plot development all stemming from the question of “How to be a Man.”

Wild Hogs believes men should be devoted to one another entirely, but express affection for each other sparingly. The two most common responses for those who break discipline and cross these boundaries is derision or violence.  The movie posits one other notable response, typified by its “gay biker cop.” This character’s sole function is to appear whenever our crew of “normal men” get anywhere close to being unguarded with one another. It’s one of Wild Hogs’s wilder fantasies, that a gay authority figure will show up and try to hang out with you and your friends whenever you stray the slightest amount from violently rigid heteronormativity. But there’s something there: the looks of disgust mixed with terror on our heroes faces really capture the white baby boomer fear of marginalized groups attaining authority over them.

I should note here that Martin Lawrence is also a Wild Hog, which to some folks might blow my white boomer thesis out of the water.  There is one reference in the film to him being black, which is William Macy’s character saying that the only thing he could think of was “black jokes” when he was trying to talk to a girl he had a crush on.  The point Wild Hogs makes here, about how racism can be fueled by male fragility, and how a veneer of equanimity will be suspended for any reason, is real insofar as this mindset goes. No one else calls Macy out when he says this, despite dogging him every chance they get for the rest of the movie.  So this isn’t really Lawrence’s movie, and although he’s a part of the gang, the fact that he’s black puts him socially below William Macy’s motorcycle-crashing, accidental-porn-watching fool in terms of worth to the group. 

This idea of openness and comfort being the enemy of discipline which in turn would disrupt a rigid hierarchy enforced by derision and violence is Wild Hogs and the at-large baby boomer take on masculinity in a nutshell. While you can‘t entirely blame an entire generation raised by soldiers (many of whom fought in a war themselves) for feeling that being a man means being a part of an army engaged in an endless war against everything else, it is possible to reject this idea… and many have. However Wild Hogs emphatically does not.  

Luckily we don’t have to subsist on a world filled with Wild Hogs insights alone. While arguably every year in film can be looked at in terms of how it represents a shift in the contours of masculinity, 2007 has it very much on its mind.  There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men both come out, and both interrogate the consequences of this mindset of endless war to different ends. 2007 was also the year that Superbad was released, written by two millennial men, and ending with the two male leads gazing into each others eyes in bed and telling each other that they love each other. At the end of Wild Hogs the gang regained their manhood, but outside the film, what that meant became less valuable and more unrelatable and pointless with every passing year since.

Twenty movies Mandy and Davey can watch together

We might be two peas in a pod but me and Mandy have basically zero crossover as far as entertainment choices go.  Nonetheless, through painstaking research we’ve found 20-odd movies that we both like. Enjoy!

Clueless

Mandy – Davey likes this movie because of the skaters and political activists, I like this movie for the humor and style.

Davey – Great movie that I immediately forget everything about as soon as I watch it.  Not sure exactly why this happens but I’ve seen it at least four times since it came out, always enjoyed it but can’t for the life of me explain what happens in it. Anyways, looking forward to watching this movie again for the first time!

Eighth Grade

Mandy – This is probably one of my favorite movies of the last year. I cried during this movie because boys are gross and stink 🙁

Davey – Watched this again recently and liked it as much as the first time.  A unique movie about a painful period of life that’s treated with the dignity it doesn’t usually get.  Found it quietly devastating that every time the movie’s plot pivots, it’s on a small act of kindness.

My Best Friend’s Wedding

Mandy –  My all-time favorite scene in a movie is the dinner scene where everyone sings “Say a Little Prayer”. Everything I do is inspired by it and I hope that explains who I am.

Davey  – Mandy showed me this for our mandatory Feb Rom Com and I loved it.  Julia Roberts flexes reality in this one, playing a character who is on paper so completely unlikable but that you can’t take your eyes off of or stop rooting for.  Say a little prayer scene is incredible and was used to great effect to pump people to great effect before a party recently. Still thinking about the background kids singing voices full of helium.

Edge of seventeen

Mandy – I deep and loud cried through about a quarter of this movie. Coming of age, mother/daughter conflict movies always really kill me. I can’t tell if Davey enjoyed the movie or my psychotic laugh crying more.

Davey – Very good and watchable while still being weirdly devastating. Hailee Steinfeld’s scenes with Woody Harrelson are incredible, will write a little more about it later, but highly recommended.

Dazed and confused

Mandy – I’ve probably watched this movie at least 20 times. It was my favorite movie as an up and coming alternative youth-child and is probably still one of my favorites.  My favorite character is Slater and Davey’s is Wooderson.

Davey – Technically speaking my favorite character is Darla, but Wooderson is iconic and a close second.  Probably the biggest crossover for us, a movie I also watched many many times in high school and based on recent watches will continue to watch for the rest of my life.  A perfect prism of teenage years that shifts in meaning based on how old you are when you watch. That Linklater could make a 20+ character mini story formatted movie so enjoyable for so many people for so long is a towering achievement.  One of the greatest of all time.

Inside out

Mandy – Davey and I saw this in theaters three times. I cry every time and feel this message is important for all. 🙂

Davey – We could probably use more movies that are overtly about emotional development, the trick is actually coming up with a good premise for one.   This one both did that and made a very good movie out of it.

Booksmart

Mandy – Booksmart was an effortlessly funny movie about 2 cute friends. Seems like the kind of movie you could watch no matter the mood or weather.

Davey – Super funny with a lot of great performances that was woke in a way that didn’t make me feel like I was being pandered to.  Exceedingly breezy, would also basically watch anytime.

A Simple Favor

Mandy – I think i’ll probably elaborate on this at a later date, but this movie really messed with my head in a lot of ways. I recommend watching the pilot or whole Gossip Girls series before seeing this movie, as it does a great job following Serena Vanderwoodsen after her time as a NY socialite and on into her life as a psychotic suburban mom. It’s not really about Serena, but played by the same actress basically acting as Serena because she probably only has one character she can act as. A simple woman in A Simple Favor.

Davey – Me and Tom are gonna write about this coming up so gonna have to keep my powder dry for this bad boi.

Jennifer’s Body

Mandy – This movie rocks the house down and is basically an anthem for women of the world which is chill and I respect.

Davey – Mandy’s mandatory Oct scary movie from last year, been a while since I’ve seen but a really unique and good horror film that was ahead of its time.  Started my reevaluation of Diablo Cody who has another entry on this list.

The Witch

Mandy – This was Davey’s choice for my one scary movie a year at Halloween. It made me really sad and anxious a lot of the time, but an overall success. Would watch again. The goat is weird.

Davey – Another annual Mandy Oct Scary entry, love the puritan vibe, love the sexual politics, love black Phillip.  Works on a ton of different levels.

Step up

Mandy – This movie also rocks the house down. A thing I love is seeing Channing Tatum dance. He’s incredible. Gifted.  

Davey – Channing Tatum is a bad boy from Baltimore on the wrong side of the tracks but Jenna Dewan is a good girl from Baltimore on the right side of the tracks!  Luckily for us they will bridge their differences, through dance. Way better than it has any right being, super tight and fun film with fun characters, actual stakes, and awesome dancing.  

Magic Mike

Mandy- Davey and I have seen this at least 3 times together. Each time with a different group of my girl friends. I screamed and laughed maniacally every single time.

Davey – Easily one of the funnest movies to watch with any group of people who enjoy the male bod.  Put this sucker on and watch the roof get blown off. Also has a lot of Soderbergh’s touches which muddies the waters on the kind of movie it is in a really interesting way.  

Grown ups 2

Mandy – I can’t tell you how many times we saw this one when it was in theaters. Davey talked about it for about three months until I told him I’d had enough and to please stop. I think it may be time to re-watch.

Davey – The first time I saw Grown Ups 2 was on an airplane.  I was watching it with the sound off, but got so curious that I got a pair of headphones to finish it.  I spent several days of that trip trying to explain what happened in it to my brother who was very patient and kind.  When I got home we went to see it at the discount theatre because I needed to verify that it wasn’t a mirage, that what seemed to be happening in this film was actually happening.  It’s since become something of a touchstone for a particular kind of malevolent psychedelic American energy in film. Impossible to describe, must be experienced.

Scott Pilgrim

Mandy – A solid movie about a weiner dude and his relationship issues. If you like nerdy things and computer music, you should watch this. Personally, I could watch anytime.

Davey – Stylistically undeniable but I also think that the actual storyline is deeply underrated and generally misunderstood.  I’d also watch pretty much whenever, deeply enjoyable movie.

Coco

Mandy- This movie made me blubber cry. A beautiful message about keeping people’s memory alive in any way possible and how it impacts their presence on this earth. I have applied this message to my simple life many times.

Davey – A deeply nuanced film about death, complete with practical grieving advice.  Marketed towards kids which is depressing but still important tools for everyone to have.  I honestly get sad thinking about this movie but have been considering watching again.

O Brother Where Art Thou

Mandy – Love this movie and the soundtrack. Didn’t like it as a teen, but now that I’m matured, I enjoy. I think George Clooney has a nice vibe and i like that he’s an escaped bad boy.

Davey – Watched a bunch as a kid, prob not top five or even top ten Coen but still mad good.  Very nice specimen of the Coen screwball style.

Cloud atlas

Mandy –  I’ve seen this movie twice and would watch it a third time even though it’s four hours and extremely confusing. I like the way Tom Hanks talks 🙂

Davey – Watching this movie is like seeing someone dunk from half court and shattering the backboard while still somehow missing the basket. There are scenes where they’re cutting through time and space and you’re experiencing several different climaxes to several different stories all at the same time, which is thrilling and befuddling. Doesn’t always work but still an unbelievable experience and a must if you like movies.

Girls trip  

Mandy – The other best movie I saw this year. I’ve watched this many times with various girl friends and every time we’ve laughed and screamed maniacally. If you want to know how I like to party, watch this movie.

Davey – Hell yeah this movie rules.  Despite the popular myth, I introduced Mandy to this one. The first time we watched, in an act of defiance she immediately fell asleep, only to be woken up 20 minutes later by me and Chrissy laughing our damn heads off.

I Love You Man  

Mandy – This movie makes us think of our friends, Ren and Eric who are endlessly in love. A feel-good movie about men who like each other and aren’t afraid of showing emotion. A rarity.

Davey – Very beautiful and sweet film that is also very funny.  Makes me feel good and gives me hope.

Step Brothers

Mandy – This is another movie that I have a love/hate relationship with because of Davey. When he watches this movie he laughs so loud that i can’t concentrate. I do enjoy the movie though when he can keep it together and secretly it makes me happy to see husband laugh and smile 🙂

Davey – Probably the best movie made about what it’s like to be a man.

Madagascar 3

Mandy – A film that really captures all the beautiful things in this world. I also love Andrea Bocelli and the scene where the animal is singing.

Davey – This movie is good as hell, my boy Noah Baumbach helped write it and it’s got the second best use of Andrea Bocelli of all time (First is in Step Brothers).  The ones got some serious zip, don’t sleep on it.

Tully

Mandy – The only movie I’ve ever seen about post-partum depression and mania. This movie really fucked me up emotionally which I love lol.

Davey – A great movie about post-partum, goes a lot of places you don’t normally see touched on in a film.  Does a really nice job of being non-literal and actually taking advantage of the fact that it’s a movie to help tell its story.  Has a wonderful and strange ending.

Yes, Technically there are 22 but we are not sticklers for the rules or symbols and meaning and we like a nice round number.

Loving Vincent (2017)

Loving Vincent is a hand-painted, animated movie about Vincent Van Gogh. It’s at times quite beautiful, but I found myself more often taken aback by the amount of work it must have taken than by the actual results, several times thinking, “There had to be a better way.” There’s much to be said for using unproven, arduous, and unconventional tools to try and expand what a medium can be capable of. But here, tethering an unlikely tool to a well-established, heavily-worked art style limits the film’s ability to explore the new possibilities the unconventional tooling might afford. Meanwhile, the style is hampered by a lack of commitment to the bit, with much of the film taking place in flashbacks that shift from impressionism to a kind of soft-focus black and white that looks more like old film, or less charitably, a novelty wedding photographer. These scenes, of which there are many, are nowhere near as striking as the rest of the film, but in total the movie’s not a completely failed experiment. A lot of the wider shots bring on a deep, quiet reverence and I never got tired of seeing the brush strokes moving across the scene, a reminder of the invisible human hand absent in most animated works these days. Visually there is something to recommend here.

The story’s appeal, on the other hand, is a bit more elusive. Loving Vincent is about a guy who’s trying to deliver a letter to Vincent’s brother after Vincent’s death. After learning that the brother is dead too, the guy pinballs between different people who were familiar with Vincent in the last days of his life. These interactions all play out in the same way. He says hello, then maybe asks a vague question, and the interviewee launches into an uninterrupted flashback-assisted monologue. The minimal lead in to these flashbacks reminded me of the end-of-season “flashback episode” format on sitcoms, or a video game where idly clicking a prompt would lead to a long un-skippable cutscene.

Through fits and starts the film slowly turns from being a portrait of Vincent’s last days into something of a Marlowe-themed investigation into whether he killed himself or was shot, complete with unnecessary foot chases and three-on-one fist fights. Most of the later scenes consist of the lead character grilling people as to whether Vincent was really unhappy in the last days of his life or if something more nefarious was afoot. The evidence for his mood improving was, he was doing lots of painting and his paintings were taking on a sunnier disposition. The evidence against (barely advocated in the film), was that he was obviously mentally ill, broke, and seemingly refused medical treatment while he slowly died for two days. A criminal investigation into whether working hard on your craft is enough to make yourself happy would be an excellent question for someone working on an animated film where every frame is painstakingly hand-painted. A movie where the main character pointedly grills acquaintances and friends of someone who just died directly or indirectly by their own hand is extremely tacky.

Loving Vincent doesn’t work as movie, sort of works as an accidental documentation of it’s own creation, and definitely doesn’t work as a portrait of Van Gogh (who from the film I gathered to be some kind of painting goblin). The animation can be extremely beautiful but is as often wildly ugly, with the worst character design inexplicably belonging to the character we spend the most time with. However it’s an undeniably unique film, so I really don’t think I can knock it too severely. It’s a slog, but there’s something there.


1. Typical rant about my usual topics

Over the last 15,000 years or so, countless artists have lived difficult, thankless lives all over this planet. Many of them made work that was good, some even eternity-level. Almost all of that’s all gone forever now, mostly without any possibility of “rediscovery;” nobody will ever know who those artists were, or what they did. But that’s fine, that’s everyone and everything else too. Look at literally anything in the built material world and you can see somebody’s worked hour. But whose?

Wouldn’t it be nice if it turned out that all of our little projects nobody believed in or cared about came to be beloved by millions of people, and worth tons of money, guaranteeing our vicarious presence in culture for hundreds or even thousands of years after our small deaths? For this fantasy we have canonical artists, whose lives and work fold together to present an afterlife (“I won’t be forgotten”) that’s also a kind of revenge (“I’m dead, but I was right, and now everyone will have to look at my stuff forever”). The wish for this fantasy to come true is expressed by rubbing the Buddha’s belly of Famous Artworks, by for instance taking a photograph of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” at MoMA. Meanwhile the planet continues to seethe with new activity, new stuff, and new artists living new insane lives, all of whom could use the resources and the attention.

I get that even despite everything wrong with how they’ve historically been defined, canons are meant to serve as some kind of helpful entree to some aesthetic form. My problem with this is that no matter what they consist of, they mainly serve to withhold permission to figure out what forms could be for yourself, by claiming to conclusively pre-define them. As they are, western art canons also tend to reinforce this idea that “The [Insane] [Under-appreciated] [Etc.] Creative Genius” is some kind of rare figure who occasionally occurs in history, and is the kind of person that Great Art Comes From. Both of these ideas are categorically untrue: Geniuses are common, and great artworks are commonly produced when communities of geniuses are given space and resources to congregate. The idea that artwork “only” comes from lonely genius at war with the world, and in spite of the world, denies the world the extreme possibilities it could be enjoying if it were to simply value artists and permit them to freely work without constant concern for, say, being broke, mentally ill, freezing cold, or in need of medical attention.

And art itself’s never been “about” Geniuses, or about revering some specific individual or instance of a form as being “the best.” That’s just boring connoisseurship. What art IS about is openness to an extreme plurality, about being granted something unknown but recognizable about being from the alien creativity that lives behind everyone’s minds. It’s produced at a high cost to do something beyond the boundaries of this world or the basic stuff that’s already constantly swarming around in it. It’s exactly as valuable, and as transferrable to market terms, as looking at a distant horizon.

All this brings me to Loving Vincent, a work of canon-worship focused on “the artist who cut off his ear,” Vincent Van Gogh. I’m not hating on Van Gogh’s paintings here – many have interesting or instructive color ideas, some have great compositional ones, and as an admirer of hand styles, I gotta say much respect. But there’s a lot more going on out there right now – literally right now – that’s more specifically interesting and useful to me, and honestly I suspect to everyone, than yet another feature-length pause to once again consider Van Gogh.

2. Loving Vincent

Loving Vincent‘s conceit is that it sets most of its action “inside” of Van Gogh’s paintings, with that action physically repainted frame by frame into reproductions of those works. Sometimes liberties are taken with the source material, for example to accommodate the scene’s time of day, or to keep the movie’s aspect ratio consistent. Formally, if nothing else, I think this makes the movie one of the most costly and excruciatingly-produced pieces of fan art ever made.

125 painters painted 65,000 cells for the movie, at 12 frames per second; the process involved scraping away parts of each painting between each cell, so few of these individual paintings survived. These painters weren’t animators, and the producers weren’t trying to make a cartoon per se – there are very few sequences of true full-frame full-color animation in the movie. When these appear, in strange, short bursts – such as in a scene where the main character runs to catch a train – visual logic drops to zero with the “falling in sleep” feeling and the movie blooms like a corpse flower, extravagantly and briefly. But otherwise, as animation, it’s a gimmicky and frequently drab movie. The characters depicted in the paintings are moving – gotcha.

I like the idea that movies could be storyboarded entirely using existing paintings – either all from one artist’s oeuvre or not – and I think it would be fun to see this done well. But this movie doesn’t even accomplish that; it interpolates black and white scenes in flashback that do not use Van Gogh paintings as source material. These scenes account for about half of the movie’s runtime and are super dull compared to the ones that take place in paintings. Yet for some reason they were hand-painted too.

In a Facebook post (of course), the producers write:

For some scenes in the film, like Vincent’s early life, there obviously weren’t any paintings of his we could draw from. So we decided to paint these flashbacks in black and white, in the style of photographs from the era.

But… why paint “in the style” of imagined old photographs? Why not use actual old photography techniques, if process is so important? Or why not write a more clever script that’s able to take place fully within the paintings?

And why did all of those artists have to do any of this painting at all? Thru its conceit, the movie shows a deep misunderstanding of the meaning and purpose of labor as it relates to the creation of artwork. 125 painters producing 65,000 Van Gogh-esque reproductions to make a not-great animation is proximate to abuse, and certainly bad process. I don’t make oil paintings because of some attachment to “the idea of painting,” I make them because oil paint applied in layers to a support does optically crazy things when light shines thru it and bounces back that no other image-making media can touch. It’s this unrivaled potential for surface qualities like depth and movement that keeps people working with oil paint. If these qualities didn’t matter to me – or if I cared about them less than the extent to which working with oil paint presents significant logistical challenges – I’d just be working digitally. Paintings aren’t “better” than digital images because they’re more laborious to make, they merely have additional qualities that can only be beheld irl. Movies don’t have a surface or fixed object presence. So why didn’t the filmmakers just work digitally?

At one point the movie itself comes close enough to all of this to embarrass itself: a character describes another character holing up trying to copy finished Van Goghs, because he knew the Van Goghs were “great” even at their most throwaway, and that his duplicates were not. Well, yeah. That very same energy of tryhard, unoriginal emulation permeates the entire movie.

3. Some stragglers

– Why does the movie force itself to pretend that the story it’s telling by coopting the paintings has some valid or necessary relationship to their painter, by making the story about him? Why not invent a more interesting fiction to place inside of these images? This is what we do in the 21st century, after all, we sample. This would have also made it easier to write an accommodating script.

– I know we’re constantly talking about script declamation choices on this blog, but I expected “the world’s first fully-painted feature film!” to have… painterly attention to its production details in total. The last one I’ll rag on here is, the movie takes place in France, yet it’s an English language script, delivered mainly by British actors.

– I’m taking huge liberties with how far over wordcount I’m going here (and with how long it took to get this post up) because I was triggered by this movie so hard, but I’ll add that for “death meditations and the canon” in feature films, I like Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (2005). For a positive example of “hero worship and the canon,” consider Bach authority Teri Towe handling a Bach manuscript, conjecturing about “Bach the person” and crying (Towe rules). And for movies that take place inside of a Van Gogh painting, Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) has a sequence that does this that’s better than Loving Vincent.

Recent bubul movies part 2

I lassoed out the kid’s hair in the photoshop title but then I smudge brushed it, oh well can’t be bothered fixing. Maybe I should photoshop a title image for Davey’s posts? Anyway March is my least favorite month of the year by far so I spent it watching mad movies:

Recommended

Babylon (1980)
Upbeat reggae buddies movie becomes “walls slowing closing in” tragedy for a young british jamaican as he and his friends prepare for the big sound clash. a grand tour of male power dynamics and painfully resonant race/immigration/class stuff, skillfully and empathetically observed, and with at least three incredible nowhere-else scenes. the ending soundclash scene is absolutely bonkers and got me shook. strong recommendation.

Worth watching

Beach bum (2019)
I think we’re gonna be writing more about this one soon.

Elle (2016)
a conflicted, slippery late-era Paul Verhoeven movie where a woman gets into a rape-fetish relationship with her actual rapist en route to getting revenge on him for raping her 😬. with Verhoeven’s characteristic pitch-black humor fully on deck, and an amazing Isabelle Huppert performance. great movie if you want to think abt how consent can transform the monstrous into the beautiful, but jeez, be warned, the kind of movie that’s infuriating because you just know there’re nincompoops watching it and getting a very wrong idea.

Killer Joe (2011)
Pretty fucked up movie adaptation of a play abt a family of bad, desperate people who sex-trade their on-spectrum teen daughter to the devil, here played by hot cop/killer for hire Matthew McConaughey, and the devil ends up taking everything. a “make yourself feel bad and gross” movie (cf. Todd Solondz) par excellence with tons of capital-t Theatre capital-A Acting. with Juno Temple (Kaboom (2010)) once again in the nude.

Mr rogers documentary (2018)
wow mr rogers neighborhood really was a pretty crazy project when you think about it

Yaji & kita the midnight pilgrims (2005)
episodic wacky/surrealist/cartoon-body-horror roadtrip romp nominally “about” two gay Edo men (one with a wife problem, the other with a drug problem) on a pilgrimage to a shrine, with all manner of cra-a-azy diversions and characters, including a testicles gag so gonzo they show it twice. lots of good stuff in here comedically, visually, and regarding love/hate relationships. shoutout Jacob for the rec, on the basis of my loving Funky Forest (2005)!

The rest

24 Hour Party People (2002)
a cute & tragic coogan movie abt having your time and that time passing, that’s also a rave-adjacent movie. didn’t appreciate the glib & jokey way it depicts ian curtis’s suicide but otherwise felt that it aged very well. pairs with fiorucci made me hardcore (1999).

But I’m a cheerleader (1999)
Teen sex comedy set in a dictatorial conversion therapy retreat house, with a color palate out of the Ranaldo and the Loaf “Songs for Swinging Larvae” video, that reads overall like a PG-13 Gregg Araki movie; definitely worth checking if you like those. at one point the teens sneak out to a nearby gay bar called straight-up “Cocksuckers” to slow dance together; insane to think this came out the same year as American Pie. With Dante Basco, Hook‘s (1991) Rufio.

Apocalypto (2006)
We wrote abt this.

Shallow Grave (1994)
The first Danny Boyle movie, a misfire of a corpse-disposal caper(?!) starring a long-haired young Ewan McGregor, managing somehow not to be a hottie at all. Pretty cool that these two got the recipe completely sorted out for Trainspotting just a couple years later.

The lavender hill mob (1951)
Jovial British caper abt smuggling gold to Paris as miniature Eiffel Towers, featuring an almost realtime dizzying descent from the actual Eiffel Tower on a windy spiral staircase (i.e. my actual worst nightmare), as well as a scene where a cop oinks along to “Old MacDonald had a farm.”

Monty python holy grail (1975)
Never been a big Python head and kinda generally dislike John Cleese’s macho creep vibe but I feel doomed to rewatch this one every so often anyway. I enjoyed it this time, the horse riding gag especially grew on me, and I love the mic drop ending. Pairs well with Yaji and Kita as a zany episodic roadtrip movie.

Candyman (1992)
We wrote abt this.

The midnight meat train (2008)
What’s with “agents of the world behind the world” being dapper besuited old-timey guys? I hate this. Here youngish Bradley Cooper is an art world-striving photographer trying to take pics of a besuited madman serial killer who bonks ppl with a hammer in a fake NYC subway, in order, it turns out, to feed the corpses to demonic CHUDs. Bradley Cooper becomes the besuited old timey guy who serves the CHUDs in the end – that’s art world success for ya! A Clive Barker adaptation I watched to prep for writing abt Candyman; it’s bad.

austin powers 1 (1997)
Wild that this dominated culture for what felt like an eternity and is now pretty much completely gone. It’s not good but it’s VERY dated; kind of the best part is how low-budget and underproduced it looks. With Will Farrell in a bit part before his own movie career took off. Austin powers 3 (2002) costars no less than Beyonce, which feels Mandela Effect to me.

Frances Ha (2012)
I completely cannot stand Noah Baumbach or any aspect of his cornball Woody Allen-worship career or his extraordinarily wienery “mediocrity struggle” characters, but I do kinda like Gretta Gerwig, so I watched this back to back with Meyerowitz Stories, the latter on Davey’s rec, to troll myself. NYC portraiture just does not get any more annoying than these goddamn motherfucking Baumbach movies, period. Even within this very specific category-within-a-category you can save time and cover both movies’ bases by just watching relatively-much-better movie Tiny Furniture (2010) instead.

Meyerowitz Stories (2017)
Supremely cloying just like every other Baumbach I’ve hate-watched, tho it has to be said that Adam Sandler is great in it.

Ideal Home (2018)
We put this on cold because we like Paul Rudd & Coogan but it turned out to be a feature length unfunny taco bell commercial.

The trip to spain (2017)
We’d just watched Gavin & Stacey s01-s03, with Rob Brydon as Uncle Bryn, which I found very cute and funny, so figured it’d be good to check back in with him and Coog in the The Trip movies. This one is funnier and less dark than The trip to Italy.

The thirteenth floor (1999)
If you google “movies like the matrix” this is like, the main one, from the same year, but it’s really more like Westworld or Inception. Here, computer nerds have an MRI machine that they use to login to the Matrix for like, two hours, so they can have sex with prohibition-era simulation call girls. Things get nuts when a prohibition-era simulation bartender realizes he’s in the simulation, then even more nuts when the computer nerds realize they’re also in a simulation. It’s not great but it’s funny and crazy to think about this movie being the “primary text” for these concepts in an alternative reality.

The beguiled (2017)
Watched in the bathtub. For “tragedy & shenanigans afoot at the repressed girls boarding school” movies this just doesn’t come even close to the incredible Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), tho it shares a lot of similar costuming, light, and big trees. For “poisoned by a deliciously-prepared mushroom dish” go with Phantom Thread (2017).

Wuthering Heights (1992)
Pure-plot rendition of the classic, with Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliffe, here remorselessly and relentlessly a dickhead to absolutely everyone. I’m not necessarily saying it’s good, but ppl who know it mainly as a Kate Bush song might be well-served; it’s got both the gothic “bad romance on the moors” vibe and the “histrionic billowing dress” energy both on deck.

Us (2019)
Peele is a national treasure and the complete Key & Peele should be required reading but tbh I just didn’t think this movie was that good. We wrote abt it.