Since I’m noticing trends these days (and why not, I’ve got nothing to do but stare at the ceiling while contemplating civilization and life and the meaninglessness of time), here’s another one. Is it just me or is there a thing about horror movies and thrillers hinging on some kind of subworld? Especially since the year 2000. Stranger Things has the “Upside Down”. Insidious has the “Further”. Coraline has the world of the “Other Mother”. Get Out has the “Sunken Place”. Even Us had a subworld with its secret lab maze under the carnival. I didn’t see Don’t Blink, but I guess that has some kind of Bermuda Triangle thing…
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Bird Box: It’s a Metaphor
Saw Bird Box over the weekend. I know it was good, because I couldn’t sleep last night because I was thinking about it so much. Replaying every scene in my head over and over. It’s just everything. Just good storytelling, good movie-making. I tweeted, while I was watching it, “No one should ever be allowed to make something this good.” Or it could be horror movies. The last time this happened to me was Saw. And that was as much being scared of the irony vs. deconstructing the plot holes (there’s no way that guy could lay on the floor that long and not move). Anyway, Bird Box. The whole…
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Where’s the Other Side of the Abortion Debate? (a.k.a. why media uses the ‘pull-out method’ when it comes to abortion)
It’s time to talk about abortion. And as a straight white male, I feel the most qualified. I’m pro-choice, so if you already know nothing’s gonna change your mind, better skip this article. It would be a waste of your time. My base line is that I have no right to make decisions about procedures I know nothing about and can never experience. Men may have a say, but women need to design the rules. Men don’t get more than that until something makes them obliged to share the consequences of a baby. I’m in favor of giving women choices, but for some reason people think “pro-choice” equates to “pro-death”.…
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Screw Your Misery Over The Last Jedi
That’s it. I’ve had all I can stands, I can’t stands no more. I’m sick of these entitled crybabies whining about “The Last Jedi”. They’re making fan-edits to cater to their own “vision”, they’re making Change.org petitions to remove it from canon. And yet they can’t come up with one good objective reason for this hate. Complaining that’s not how the Force works? Go ahead, make that argument. You do realize that the Force does not exist, right? That it’s a construction of imagination and, therefore, it can do anything the writer wants? You’re all a bunch of fucking entitled, obsessive morons who had every opportunity to succeed in life…
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Coco’s Stupid Anti-Piracy Message Ruins Coco
I saw Coco this weekend. Good movie, emotionally comparable to Up. Seems predictable though (even my eight-year-old told me she’s sick of stories where someone good turns out to be someone bad e.g. Frozen, Toy Story 2, Up, Monsters, Inc., Wall-E, Toy Story 3, etc.) But there was a thing that bothered me — a thing that ruins the movie experience (besides the four year old behind me who can’t shut up and shouldn’t have been taken to a movie if he can’t stay quiet). Before the movie, three people from Pixar are standing outside and talking about how they made the big shot where they feature the Land of…
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What is Saturn from “Beetlejuice”?
So here’s a question I’ve been wondering about since I was seven years old. What the hell is that place in Beetlejuice with the desert and the two-faced sandworms and the moons and time apparently moving faster? What do we know? Well, our first glimpse happens when dead-Alec Baldwin walks off his front porch. The camera whips around weirdly and he’s there. It’s like he’s on a different world–dark blue sky, green planet, weird stone coral-like structures (I assume they’re stone). Something is moving in the sand, something serpentine. He spends about five seconds there. Then dead-Geena Davis pulls him back on the porch and tells him he was gone…
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The Books I Read: July – August 2017
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman I expected this to be like Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. And I got what I wanted. It’s a tightly paced retelling of the old Norse creation myths. Problem is, there aren’t many of them. I suspect that’s more to do with lack of surviving source material, given what Neil Gaiman says in the foreword. Maybe a long time ago there were scrolls and scrolls of Loki and Thor stories. Now all we’ve got are comic books. And if you’re any fan of Marvel’s interpretations, this is required reading. The nice thing is that the re-tellings are up to date. I expected something Shakespearean or textbook-dry, like…
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My Kindertrauma: Faces of Death (Beetlejuice/Poltergeist/Indiana Jones)
No, not actually “Faces of Death”. I wouldn’t learn about that franchise until I was in high school. And then it was more fun figuring out which vignettes were fake and which were real (this was before YouTube). No these are the terrifying moments about kindertrauma to someone’s face, usually in the form of it coming off. The first was in Beetlejuice. I can’t believe my mom took me to see this in the theater. I was seven years old. Did I express some kind of interest in seeing this? I must have. It was the same director as Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. Maybe she just wanted to get me…
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The New Pennywise is Scary, and Thus, Not Scary
I haven’t seen it, but reviews on It are mostly positive. However, some movie buffs I follow had mixed responses. They said it’s a hodge-podge, a “curious mess” (which is much like the book). The characters are given scary scenes with real horrors like child abuse, nightmares, alcoholism, animal abuse, gun threats, pedophilia, psychological drama, etc. And then a clown shows up. So we got some tonal dissonance here. I had a feeling this might happen as soon as I saw the new design for Pennywise. It’s just too scary. And thus, it’s not scary. In 1986, clowns were not scary. They were funny, jovial, friend to all children (like…
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Emoji Movie Follow-Up
I called it, didn’t I?
