Category Archives: Movies

Dolly and Tim

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For many people, this is a terribly sad week with the passing of Dolly Parton and Tim Curry, a pair of performers who helped define a generation, each in their own unique manner and talent.

As someone who in their childhood and teenage years listened to a lot of country music, Dolly was a fixture in my universe that was always constant. As a man who never fell into the hard rock, acid rock, or other intense musical genres but instead was always drawn to the romantic, Dolly was a natural fit for my inclinations. Here You Come Again is a tune that I shall never not want to hear. (Though I will confess that I prefer Olivia Newton-John’s cover of Jolene to Dolly’s original.)

Tim Curry, I came to through The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a film that I have spoken of many times here on my blog. It was on the sidewalk outside of the Ken Theater that I really learned to socialize with the fans and ‘cast’ waiting for the midnight shows to begin. Of course, Curry’s career is so much more than just Rocky and that man worked with some of the best filmmakers of our generation.

I am not to one to become maudlin over the death of celebrities. Everyone dies, the great and not great, the famous and the forgotten, the just and the unjust, that final end is waiting for all of us and my early experience with it has hammered into my personality an acceptance of that which cannot be avoided. But I want to recognize them and honor the gift that they left this poor world with their charm, their love of life, and their acceptance of everyone is soemthing we might learn from.

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Movie Review: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

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The third feature film from celebrated indie filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, (henceforth referred to as At Camp Miasma) is her most mainstream project but even then this is an arthouse feature that is more of a tributary feeding into a mainstream than the usual mass market summer fare.

Reviewing At Camp Miasma is a difficult undertaking both because some of the film’s most interesting and daring takes require ‘spoilers’ for the events of the feature and because the nature of the film is much closer to the dream logic of something like Mulholland Drive than yet another slasher loose in the woods dispatching adult actors attempting to portray teens.

MUBI

On the most surface level the plot is this: indie filmmaker Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) is getting the chance to pitch to the mainstream studios about reviving a dormant property, Camp Miasma, a slasher from the 80s with more than a score of sequels but source material that is deeply problematic and transphobic. Kris, a queer filmmaker for whom the original films are a foundational element of her own awakening, is aware that the studio interest in her is to ‘woke-wash’ the property in hopes of avoiding a disastrous online campaign against the movie when they release it. She has traveled deep into snowy mountains to meet with Billie Preston (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original Camp Miasmaand who has become a retired recluse in hopes of bringing her onto the project, but Billie is nothing like what Kris expected and soon over the course of a few days in the isolated and abandoned camp where the first in the franchise had been filmed, reality and fantasy blur for the two women as they untangle what the films mean to them and to each other.

On another level, At Camp Miasma is about the relationship between story and audience: is the audience the master of the story, or does the story in fact create its own audience? When reality blurs for Kris and Billie, that blurring also bleeds into the audience watching the film about the pair of women. The outdoor sets throughout At Camp Miasma have a deeply artificial appearance, one that I found reminiscent of the planet set from the original Star Trek series, something so powerfully artificial, particularly to modern eyes, that the effect in this film must have been intentional.

And on yet another level, At Camp Miasma is about coming into your own sexually, fully accepting yourself, with all of your flaws and limitations, and loving yourself for who you are, and in that process finally being able to accept love from others. In the end, it is a deeply committed love story between Kris and Billie where each woman finally finds the half that they have been desperately missing.

And perhaps the most fun level of At Camp Miasma is the rich and keen-eyed satire of the entire slasher genre. I have said before and will likely say again in the future that slashers are my least loved of all horror films. Far too often I find them dull, repetitive, and populated by bland characterless characters to ever be engaged with the often less than intelligent plots as they unfold. I did not find Scream to be particularly witty, nor did I find X inventive, but even with a limited affection for slashers I found much of the meta-humor in At Camp Miasma quite enjoyable. This would make quite an interesting double feature with The Cabin in the Woods as a pair of films commenting on the genre that their film makers deeply care about.

Is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma for you? I cannot say; even for people I know well, much less total strangers on the internet, I would have a hard time knowing if this movie will work for them. I can say that I enjoyed it and that I did not consider my time at the theater watching it wasted, but also I know I am unlikely to watch it again. If queerness is something that puts you off, then this film is not for you. If films that blur their own reality is something that you find that breaks your suspension of disbelief, then this is not for you. But if those things do not apply to you and you find yourself engaged with strange and unusual arthouse fare, then give this film a try.

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Is it the Struggle That Compels Us?

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Recently I have watched the Twitter discourse rise up over the character of Syril Karn from the series Andor with a number of people debating if the show had been disrespectful of the character prompting strong feelings about the man.

Running alongside this discussion is the memory I have of a number of YouTube reactors being quite emotionally torn by both Syril and Dedra Meero, the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) sector supervisor, as they navigate both enforcing the Empire’s authoritarian government and their own interesting romantic relationship. These were the bad guys, Dedra more clearly than Syril as she employed torture to get what she wanted while Syril remained essentially naive to the Imperial law and order that he strove to maintain. Pluck Syril out of Star Wars and insert his character in 70s New York desperate to catch the killers of two dirty cops and you have a classic anti-hero trapped in a corrupt and decaying culture even as he fights to maintain a ‘true’ sense of justice.

But he isn’t a 70s anti-hero. He is a cog in the fascist machine that is the evil Galactic Empire, and yet there is a pull to root for him as he tries ever so hard to clear his name and bring the hero of the story to ‘justice.’ Dedra is an equally compelling character. Her villainy is more evident, particularly her willingness to not only torture suspects but her disregard for their murder once their usefulness has passed. Yet, here we are again, feeling the pull to care about her. What is going on here?

Let’s look at some other characters from cinema and see if we can’t gain a better understanding in a manner that is more general.

Pulp Fiction gave us Vincent Vega, the street-level thug and murderer working for L.A. crime boss Marsellus Wallace. Our introduction to Vincent was his task of retrieving a briefcase for his boss and calmly murdering the boss’s former partners in the process. Vincent is a violent thug and drug user and yet over the course of his story within the film we are drawn to him and concerned as he falls deeper and deeper into trouble that may end with Marsellus Wallace having him killed as mercilessly as Vincent killed Wallace’s former partners.

Nightcrawler (2014), a neo-noir from Dan Gilroy, who also wrote on Andor, introduced the audience to Louis Bloom, a sociopathic man who rises from street-level thief to celebrated ‘journalist’ as he discovers his talent for finding and creating tragedies he can videotape and sell to local television news. Unlike the other characters mentioned here, I have heard of no one that held any sympathy for Louis, but while the audience kept him at an emotional distance, he remained an object of fascination and of deep interest even as he got his partner killed, murdered his rivals, and blackmailed a woman to satisfy his sexual urges. No one showed sympathy for such a cold, manipulative man, but he remained deeply interesting. Why?

There is a common thread running through all of these characters, criminals, cops, thugs, and bureaucrats; all of them have goals and all of them are fighting against forces that are keeping them from their objectives.

Syril wants justice and the killer of his men caught and punished, but a corrupt system would rather have good reports than truth.

Dedra, a novice ISB Supervisor, wants victory and enforcement of the Empire’s authority, but office infighting and backstabbing stymie her attempts to break a system that rewards staying within the line over creative imagination.

Vincent needs to show his boss’s wife a decent evening out, to make her happy, but their unmistakable chemistry and sensuality provide a temptation that is nearly irresistible to the couple and once she overdoses on his drugs, well then he has to save her life to save his own.

Louis desperately needs to prove to himself and the world that he is worthy, to find that success he is certain that he deserves as rivals and the police forces move in on him from every quarter, threatening to thwart his actions.

There is the key to why the characters are compelling. Each of them is facing off against forces larger than themselves and that struggle to overcome, to win, is that magic sauce that makes us sit forward and care.

Twenty years ago while at a Bay area SF convention and before the events of a convention had started, I caught a fragment of a World War II training video on television. An air crew of a fictional bomber had been captured by the Nazis. In captivity the Germans employed trick after trick, device after device to pry from the airmen the secrets that they kept in their heads. By the end of the video, I found myself on the side of the Germans, anxious to see if they were going to manage to get the information that they so desperately needed. This was a training film to teach our forces all of the many ways that the information might be gained, and yet there I was feeling for the enemy and not our boys.

The Germans were the characters with a clear, active goal. The airmen’s goal was a passive one, keep quiet and say nothing. It is the active character, fighting against the odds to claim some prize that hooks us as an audience and as readers. That is the lesson from the training film and all those movies, your characters need a goal and the odds against them getting it must be great. Syril and Dedra are both fighting to make something of their lives, to prove something to themselves and the doubters who surround them and that is why they become characters we can’t tear our attention away from.

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An Art Beyond Words

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Spoilers for Obsession

I recently rewatched the entirety of Obsession, my favorite horror film of the last few years and possibly my favorite film of 2026. Dune part 3 and Avengers: Doomsday will have a very tough time beating it out for that top spot in my heart.

Obsession and its cast, in particular Inde Navarrette, have been getting a ton of praise for their work and this blog post is yet another one to add to that pile but I think this morning I want to dive deep and dissect an element of Navarrette’s performance that I have a difficult time articulating.

Navarrette is not a novice to acting, having been a recurring cast member on Superman & Loisand appeared in the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, but it is unquestionable that her turn as Nikki Freeman, the doomed and tragic object of a young man’s obsession in this year’s breakout and surprising hit, has catapulted her into a very wide and public recognition.

In Obsession, Navarrette performs effectively as two distinct characters: Nikki Freeman, free of the wish’s curse and the ‘Nikki’ that is cursed to love Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey ‘more than anyone in the fucking world.’ I shall refer to these characters as True Nikki and Freaky Nikki to make it clear which is which.

In terms of screen time, the audience has little exposure to True Nikki; she is a voice on a telephone call, a friend chatting happily and teasing Bear at the bar on trivia night, and exposes herself emotionally for a few moments as Bear drives her home, revealing that she is not happy and emotionally keeps her feelings deeply contained saying that when she has a crush on a guy ‘no one knows.’

In contrast, for the majority of the film, Navarrette performs as Freaky Nikki, who is loud, unsubtle, manipulative, and unable to contain her feelings at all, possessing none of the subtlety of the character we were introduced to. So far this might be considered a rather standard Jekyll and Hyde sort of portrayal that has been a fairly standard performance since the 1930s, but there are layers and levels to Navarrette’s approach that I think belie this simplification.

While True Nikki and Freaky Nikki are poles apart in terms of the nature of their characters this is not usually played to exaggeration in the film. Freaky Nikki is a very different character, one the audience is well aware of and possibly would even be aware if there were not instances of True Nikki momentarily and terrifyingly regaining her body. The voices of the two Nikkis are slightly different, using different tonalities in their normal speech. I do not have a particularly well-trained ear, but it sounds to me that True Nikki’s voice is in a very slightly deeper register than Freaky Nikki’s. True Nikki sounds more composed and restrained while Freaky Nikki sounds more ‘girlish,’ perhaps a performance that might be more attractive to a man who lacks the self-confidence to take the emotional risks that courtship and dating require.

Even this, Navarrette’s performance as two different Nikkis, is not the element that astounds me. That moment from the film’s final scene is something I struggle to adequately describe.

Freaky Nikki, certain that Bear doesn’t love her, turns to the same One Wish Willow device that Bear used to enslave, creating a Pseudo-Bear that is obsessed with her as she is with him. This ‘romance’ is short-lived. Bear, seeking an escape from the horrors he birthed into the world, has taken a lethal overdose of pills. (True to Bear’s nature of being unable to commit and face up to unpleasant truths, he had begun to try and make himself vomit up the overdose, but Freaky Nikki’s wish derailed that.)

For a moment the two are ‘happy,’ but then the overdose works its lethal action and Pseudo-Bear dies in Freaky Nikki’s arms. Freaky Nikki wails and cries at the death of her obsession. She nearly ends her own life, but Bear’s death frees her from the wish’s curse suddenly becoming True Nikki again. There is a moment of silence before she throws Bear’s corpse to the floor and sobs.

In a single take, we watch Freaky Nikki transition to True Nikki with both versions warped by the throes of sobbing and wailing, and yet in a manner I cannot quite put my finger on, these are very different wails, very different cries. Freaky Nikki is wailing at the loss of her Bear, and True Nikki is wailing at the horror and torments she has been forced to endure. Both wails are soul-wrenching produced by utter sorrow but are also utterly different, produced by the same actor without a break or a cut to give her time and space to shift emotionally. She wails from two very different reasons, and it is evident in the nature of her cries but in a method so subtle I cannot say precisely why they are different. I can only recognize that they are distinct, that they are two different characters wailing for two different reasons that are easily observed but seemingly impossible to define.

Inde Navarrette has earned every accolade heaped upon her for this performance, and I shall watch her career with great interest.

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And After the Credits?

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Spoilers for Obsession, Longlegs, & Immaculate

When a movie ends, the credits roll, I often find myself wondering about the characters and their lives that follow. For the vast majority of the movies I have watched there is actually little imagining, the story has wrapped up and while life will have its ups and downs, there isn’t a great mystery to what might happen next. But for some, the next phase of the character’s lives seems to hold more trouble than the sequence of events that we had just witnessed.

I recall going to a local art house theater with a friend and watching Blood Simple, a neo-noir from the early Coen brothers’ catalog. It has all the hallmarks of a film noir: love triangle, complicated schemes, betrayals, and of course murder. As we walked out of the theater, we both were amused by the concept of the local sheriff the next day trying to understand and unravel the events from the trail of confusing and inexplicable clues left behind. Beyond the mysteries and noir sub-genres, it is the horror film that more often than not has the most complicated relationship between its resolution and what the characters are likely to face in days following their harrowing experiences.

Neon

Consider Longlegs (2024). At the end of the film, poor FBI Special Agent Lee Harker is at the scene of a mass murder that mimics the scenes blamed on the now deceased serial killer ‘Longlegs’ and with her having been used to murder her superior and her own mother.

 

 

Black Bear Pictures

Another example of the troubles that will follow the survivor of a horror movie is Immaculate(2024) with the physical evidence showing that Sister Cecilia not only murdered at least two of her priests but that she also used a large stone to kill her newborn child, a crime that Italy is unlikely to be compassionate about.

 

 

Focus Features

But it is Obsession’s character of Nikki Freeman that may escape legal jeopardy for the multiple deaths over that terrible night.

After Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey unleashed the enchanted wish-powered date rape magic on poor unsuspecting Nikki Freeman, plummeting the poor woman into unhinged behavior, obsessive need to satisfy Bear’s whims, and a corrosive need for his affection to equal her own towards him, the tale ends with two of their friend group murdered, Bear dead by suicide, and Nikki finally freed of the compulsions but injured, covered in blood, and surrounded by corpses.

What is law enforcement to make of this strange and bewildering scene? A young man, Ian, dead with a gunshot wound to the head, a young woman, Sarah, beaten to death with a brick, and another young man, Bear, dead from a massive overdose of sleeping pills.

The physical evidence will be of actually little help in creating a decent case for the courts. There’s more than enough to put Bear, Sarah, and Nikki together in her car in the park and to establish that the automobile is the place where she was murdered. The blood-splattered trail will clearly show that the pair moved her body but can you build a case that slight, small, Nikki physically overpowered Sarah and pummeled her skull with a brick? A case airtight enough to convince a jury of that?

What of Ian’s murder?

Both Nikki and Bear’s prints are on the pistol that killed him, but only Nikki has the powder residue indicating that she fired the weapon. So, you can establish that she shot the gun, but can you convince a jury of why she murdered her former lover? And why the overdose?

You know what is too terribly common in America today? Murder-suicide.

There’s no need to build a complex and rickety case to try and convict a poor severely mentally disturbed woman like traumatized Nikki if you just put all the blame on the unhinged young man who died by his own hand. Never underestimate the lure of making troublesome issues just go away. The unknown municipality where Obsession takes place is in my opinion far more likely to blame everything on Bear, the ‘quiet’ man who kept to himself, over trying to drag to trial the woman that the physical evidence points to.

It is questions like this that dog me when I finish writing a horror novel or short story. There is rarely a clean answer for how to handle it but I shall never stop trying.

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The Book is not Always Better

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It is a commonly held assumption that a movie adaptation is always inferior to the novel from which it was adapted. Setting aside the rather obvious and massively important aspect that these are radically different media with very different needs to serve to be successful, there are still plenty of examples where in a direct comparison the film version is superior to the prose. Now, ‘superior’ this matter is entirely a matter of personal preference and not an objective one, but here are a few examples of adaptation that in my opinion were better on the screen than on the page.

 

 

Warner Brothers

The Prestige – Adapted by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan from the science fiction novel of the same name by Christopher Priest. The Nolans dropped entirely the framing story set decades after the death of the feuding magicians, the concept of ghosts created by strange quantum mechanical devices, and, in perhaps the best move of all, even the inciting incident that ignited the war between the performers. With a cleaner plot line, only one fantastic bit to suspend disbelief, and a much more powerful reason for the two to bitterly hate each other, the Nolans crafted a deeply powerful story about blinding obsession.

 

 

Universal Studios

Jaws – Adapted from the novel by Peter Benchley by a school of screen scribes that included Benchley, the film which birthed the modern blockbuster, is the straightforward tale of a New England seasonal community that becomes the hunting ground for a massive great white shark. The film deleted all of the novel’s melodramatic cliches, the police chief’s unhappy marriage, his wife’s age-driven insecurity and infidelity, Hooper’s own issues being the little brother to an athlete, and even a mafia sub-plot that drives the mayor’s insistence that the lethal beaches remain open. Instead, the film is very simple and direct, subtracting nearly everything that distracts from the story of a dangerous monster shark but adding depth to Quint’s character by gifting him the USS Indianapolis backstory. Perhaps someday, in their quest to keep the franchise alive, Universal will produce a prestige limited series more faithful to the novel and find the results disappointing.

The Hunt for Red October – Adapted from Tom Clancy’s first published novel, the story of a technologically advanced Soviet submarine being stolen and gifted to the Americans by its defecting officers was adapted to the screen principally by Larry Ferguson, and Donald E. Stewart with additional work by John Milius, launching a franchise that encompasses feature films and television series that continue to this day. Clancy’s novel struck me as overly jingoistic with the American forces hardly even capable of putting a foot wrong and even their reservists out flying the Soviet’s lead air combatants. Stripping away the ‘America can do no wrong’ attitude of the book for a more balanced presentation. Removing Ramius’s ‘denied Christianity’ sub-plot from his motivation streamlined the story and left the audience with something more accessible and which required a much lower level of suspension of disbelief.

Novels and movies are very different media with very different challenges, and it is best if when you go to see an adaptation that you set aside the expectations that grew in your mind from the book and let the film be what it is. It may be better, it may be worse, but what it is is its own thing: accept it as that.

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Exposition is Hard; Obsession does it beautifully

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When Obsession played earlier this year it was one of my best times watching a horror film in the theater in quite a while. Oh, there have been enjoyable horror movies this year and in recent years but the simplicity and execution of Obsession places it far above not only other horror films but many other films in general and one of the key elements in that beauty is Curry Barker’s deft exposition.

All stories be they fantasy, horror, science fiction, drama, romance, comedy, whatever require some exposition, that element where things are explained to the audience. More fantastical stories have a different set of expositional goals to meet, to not only help us understand the character, their lives, and their story before the one we are experiencing unfolds before us but also how their entire world works but stories set in the here and now also have to explain the story before the story to us even if they are free from explaining the greater world because the character world is one we can accept as being like our own.

Focus Features

Barker, quite wisely, actually doesn’t spend any exposition at all on the history of the fantastic and magical aspects of the world of Obsession. Where the ‘One Wish Willow’ items come from, who makes them and why are mysteries beyond the scope of the story of Baron ‘Bear’ Bailey and his fixation on Nikki Freeman. What we learn about these cursed items are the same things Bear learns about them as he struggles to fix the disintegrating situation to his own satisfaction. No, the brilliant exposition of this script is in subtle quick asides from the characters and that amazing monolog delivered straight down the barrel of the camera lens at the film opening.

With the exception of only a couple of reaction shots back to the young woman listening to Bear spill out his heart’s secrets we are fixed on Bear’s face as he practices the speech he will reveal to be too timid to actually say to Nikki. This one speech serves so many expositional masters and all while staying firmly within character. At the very surface level this informs the audience, directly and immediately about Bear’s depth of feeling for Nikki, how in his own words ‘she is in every song’ he hears. Secondly, it gives us vital backstory on Bear himself, but framed in relation to his history with Nikki. He moved to this town and Nikki was the only person ‘nice to him.’ Bear says that when his grandmother died Nikki was the only person who called. From these pieces of information, we can understand that Bear was displaced, never fit in, and was somewhat socially isolated. But there is an even deeper level of exposition that is vital to everything that follows for the rest of the film. Bear is confusing fascination and obsession with serious emotional investment.

This lengthy monolog, this spilling of his heart’s desires and secrets, has not one word about Nikki as a person. Bear speaks only about Nikki as the subject of Bear’s fixation. There is nothing about Nikki the writer, something we learn quickly about in the course of the first act, nothing about Nikki’s kindness to strangers, which we see her demonstrate to the unhoused person outside of the bar, nothing about Nikki’s own tough time in school when she was bullied. The entire monolog is about Bear and how Nikki was nice to him and how he sees her without anything about Nikki as a person. It is a subtle, and many people, myself included, missed this red flag that Bear is a terribly selfish person. But the effect is there and the seeds had been planted so that later, when Bear learns much of the truth of what he has called into being and that it isn’t Nikki that is obsessively in love with him, his thought isn’t to correct his deed, to free the real Nikki from her body’s enslavement and her soul’s torment, but to make it still all about him and getting what he wants. Bear is the ‘nice guy’ whose heart is truly black and whose thoughts right up until the end stay centered on himself, all of which was exposited in the film’s opening monolog.

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Further Discussion on The Griffin Incident

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A friend left a lengthy comment on my post about The Griffin Incident over on Twitter. Since over there I am restricted to 280 characters, I will respond here.

First off, I want to say it was not my intention, nor do I think I stated, that science fiction and horror are incompatible genres.  While most people, and I fell into that easy trap myself, call horror a ‘genre,’ it is more like a mood and an intention. Like a romance (lower case R), horror is about what the recipient of the art is intended to feel and experience over the mechanics or rules of the genre. Science fiction can be horror, with A Dance to Strange Music, the short story by renowned hard SF author Gregory Benford, as a perfect example. It is horror and in the author’s note afterwards, Benford explains all of the very detailed science behind the strange events of the tale.

@gunsandrockets wrote, I think what defines science fiction is not rationality, not an explicable story, but instead the presumption that the universe is a material universe, absent of the spiritual, absent of magic. I agree, but I would also point out that a material universe absent spirits and magics is a universe that is explicable and one that can be understood by reason.

So, is Alien science fiction or horror? It is clearly both, though with the somewhat dodgy science we have allowed cinema to get away with. Aliens is not horror; it is action/adventure. With the ‘rules’ of the creature understood by the audience, it is hard to return back to horror; the films following Aliensdid, but mainly by reducing the once terrifying beast into an outer space slasher.

Horror, as a style of cinema, has terribly fuzzy borders that encompass and exclude based almost entirely upon the viewer’s own internal definition. Is Jaws horror? Is The Silence of the Lambs? How about Seven or Manhunter or Mulholland Drive? What is or is not ‘horror’ is a very difficult thing to nail down and even the filmmaker’s intention doesn’t cleanly answer that question. Both the writer and the director of The Exorcist do not consider either the novel or the film to be ‘horror,’ but rather supernatural detective fiction.

I was also asked what about the works of H.P. Lovecraft, science fiction? horror? or both? Clearly both, but I do think many people confuse the nature of the horror at the center of his work, mistaking tentacles and monstrosities for the horror and not that humanity is not only insignificant in the vast universe but that the nature of that universe is beyond our ability to sanely comprehend. Consider the opening paragraph of his novella The Call of Cthulhu.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Lovecraft is stating, rather plainly, that the nature of existence is, to the human mind, inexplicable. To try and understand it is to invite either madness or willful ignorance. It is why the recent film Backrooms strikes me as very Lovecraftian. In the end, the nature, the reason, of the backrooms lies beyond our ability to decipher. It simply is and that alone is enough to unship a person’s sanity.  To be fair, this is also a point raised by @gunsandrockets.

That the true nature of the universe is unknowable to lowly mankind. An ignorance which is a mercy, since even getting close to the truth either drives a person insane or turns them into a monster.

To my interpretation, this is saying that the universe is inexplicable. The universe is not rational in any manner that is comprehensible by humanity.

The Griffin Incident promises no explanation at all for the ship and its terrifying manifestations. That puts the story beyond the realm of science fiction. It is not a story that exists in a place without spirits or magic of some kind.

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Airplane! and Anita Bryant’s Cultural Irrelevancy

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Last night on YouTube I watched a Canadian millennial couple react to the 1980 absurdist comedy film Airplane! As with the many of the reactors who have engaged with this piece of silly cinema, much of the chaotic comedy still worked 46 years later, and some were too fixed to their time and place to have any meaning to people born more than a decade after the movie’s release. It is a strange quirk of comedy that the ‘Jim never has a second cup of coffee at home’ gag is rewarded with laughs because of the strangeness of the spouse’s thoughts, and without any context to the Yuban coffee commercial it is lampooning.

While references to Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan spark some recognition in younger viewers, and the use of serious dramatic actors in farcical skits has little to no impact on those who are watching this movie from the last century, this is not the issue that is sticking with me today. One target of the filmmaker’s sharp critique stirs no reaction and is nothing but a forgotten cultural relic, Anita Bryant.

Anita Jane Bryant, beauty pageant queen, singer with multiple top-ten hits, and ubiquitous citrus spokeswoman for much of her career, was a popular but not stellar figure in the American cultural landscape, often traveling with the legendary Bob Hope on tours to support and entertain the Armed Forces, and finding herself welcome at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions. She hosted parades, performed at half-time shows for the Super Bowl, and even at the funerals of Democratic presidents, and yet today her name, except for whom politics is a passion or who either in or adjacent to the gay community, is almost entirely forgotten.

In 1977, Dade County, Florida, passed the first ordinance in the nation that prohibited discrimination in housing based upon sexual orientation, protecting gay men and women from prejudicial treatment when it came to renting homes, igniting the ire of Bryant, a fire that would consume her career and, in the end, erase her from cultural memory.

Bryant successfully led a campaign that overturned the ordinance, but that victory raised the issue to the wider culture, and while gay rights were not an unknown thing before Bryant’s crusade, (Stonewall was 8 years earlier,) her actions made the cause much more salient to the national conversation. Sponsors dropped her from their advertising campaigns, networks rescinded offers to host weekly television programs, and her career over the next decade functionally ceased to exist. In order to legally allow bigoted people to refuse homes to those whom she despised, Bryant self-immolated to the point that by the time of her death in 2024 she had ceased to be known by the wider public at all.

Both sides waged the political fight in Dade County with ferocity, Bryant deploying the slanderous, vile label that gay men preyed upon children to ‘recruit’ new homosexuals, while some among the fight for rights resorted to political violence. Yes, that violence was shaving cream pies to her face, but it remained political violence, and in my opinion, one only employs violence when no other path remains open and the physical threat from the dominant political actors is very real. While a direct line cannot be drawn from these pie attacks to the January 6th insurrection, the indirect lineage is there.

Anita Bryant’s obscurity is, in the end, the best of all possible victories over her bigoted political warfare.

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Streaming Review: The Day of the Owl

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We were flipping through the thumbnails on the ad-supported streaming service Tubi when my sweetie-wife, a lover of birds, noticed the title The Day of the Owl, and we stopped to investigate.

An Italian/French crime drama from 1968, the film intrigued us enough to start the stream, but on that evening Tubi’s service must have been pushed to its limit because the film stuttered and stopped. We decided to try again another night, and when we did it played perfectly.

les films corona

The Day of the Owl focuses on the new police captain, Bellodi (Franco Nero), recently transferred from Northern Italy to Sicily, and his investigation of an organized crime murder of a local contractor who refused to play along with the region’s rampant corruption. With witnesses who refuse to come forward and informants who work both sides of the conflict, Bellodi soon moves beyond acceptable police work in his attempt to link the murder to the local mafia leader Don Mariano (Lee J. Cobb).

One of the issues one can run into when discovering a film on Tubi is that the service does not always get the most pristine copies to stream, but this was not the case with The Day of the Owl. Image and sound were perfect, though I had the opinion that the sound mix had the foley track too loud; compared to some of the other foreign films we watched on the service, this was like having a Blu-ray in the player. Franco Nero looked fantastic: his intense blue eyes shone brightly, and he cut a fine figure in his uniform. This was also an exception in that the film was presented with its Italian language soundtrack and not dubbed, as is the case with the majority of the films on Tubi. This is not a story for anyone looking for simply good guys and a world where evil is always and easily vanquished, but for those who like more challenging plots, it is worth at least one watch.

The writing is sharp, with a biting sense of humor present throughout most of the film. Sardonic and cynical is the script, and while this movie was released in 1968, it has the tone and resolution of a movie from the deep, dark mid-70s.

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