THE ASSISTANT 2019: SIGNS OF ABUSE

 

Something's wrong within your friend circle, the vibe is off and there are signs of some power struggle. Or maybe it's online; a vacuum of non-information left like a gas signature.

The Assistant (2019) is a movie totally dedicated to the semi-invisible signs left by abuse, in this case, within the film industry. The main character swims through these signs, at the height of the film coming into direct opposition with the source, before returning to normality.

Signs of abuse modeled in the film:

• loud sounds no one will discuss
• misogynisitic jokes/ casually cruel jokes about known persons
  
• exhausted, unhappy people
• confused victims seeking help ineffectually
• the naïve positivity of pre-victims sticking out in context
• people giving up on the possibility of justice 
• direct verbal abuse, and a culture thereof
• threats to destroy people's careers, etc.
• disposability-- a revolving door of people
• new faces being brought in, and the haggard faces of those leaving or on their way out
• things happening where they shouldn't-- typically, sex.

If there exists a pathway for many people to enter, then exit someone's life, this may be a conduit for abuse. Ties of anonymity benefit those who burn through people. And abusers require fresh streams of people constantly.

This is sort of the human condition, too. We are all, mostly, folding new strings of people into our lives, and then watching some of them leave. Abuse, then, may leave patterns visible in the peoples exiting one's life. Outsiders may observe these patterns, subtle, semi-invisible, instinctually perceived...

JOSH SIMMONS’S “THE FURRY TRAP” REVIEW’D: HORROR AND INTIMACY

Horror is a form of self-inflicted intimacy, alike taking a hot bath, it creates intimacy and stimulation between you and your senses. 

 

 

October 18th, 2002: “The Ring” is released. I am 10. Although I only witness the film piecemeal through ads, a parody sequence in Scary Movie III, and through a recounting of the film by my dad on a long hike, the horror of the film settles deep within me.

The idea of “The Ring”’s antagonist Samara hiding in my closet tortures me for months. During the day I am beset by childhood social anxiety. At night I could not rest my ear against the pillow without thinking my heartbeat was, somehow, Samara.

 

I had no hope but to wait. Day after day I would attend long lectures by struggling teachers, and night after night I had no reliable peace. I didn’t get out of the school system for years but my escape from Samara happened sooner.

My family kept a library of Stephen King novels, and despite my childhood knowledge that Horror could destroy my nightly peace for weeks, I took those King books for a spin. Surprisingly, they didn’t terrorize me like “The Ring” did.

 

 

I found myself enjoying the often erotic weirdness and terror the King books spewed out. I got acclimated to whatever Samara struck me with; the nightmares slacked off, though I was still cautious that watching a horror movie risked hours and hours of panic... 

 

Sometime around 2015: I attend a book tour for The Furry Trap at The Cyberpunk Apocalypse, an artist-owned residence and performance space. The author of The Furry Trap, Josh Simmons, is there. I opened this particular graphic short-story collection and was appalled.  Grody Not-Safe-For-Life Alt-Comix were something I was familiar with but I had only to read a few panels from The Furry Trap’s “Cockbone” story before I was once again struck with the knowledge that the media in front of me would give me nightmares. I hurriedly stopped reading and left the event.

A similar thing happened when I looked into The 120 Days of Sodom a few years back. In the main public library’s stacks, I flipped through the original translation of 120 Days, read a brief paragraph about feeding a young girl a special diet for the purposes of coprophagia, and I put the book down. I think I can remember consciously repressing what I had just read.

Naked Lunch may have done it, or maybe it was one of my friends. In my late twenties (2016+) I began to actively pour through stories of the worst horrors. Last Podcast on the Left, “Last House on the Left”, “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” the movie by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and then The 120 Days Of Sodom by the Marquis De Sade, newly translated and released by Penguin, convinced me fully of the virtues of this kind of thing. John Waters too, I guess. (AND many others -ed)

I began to feel curiously at peace with the shocking themes these films and texts presented. Something about these stories would relieve some great pressure and satisfy some curiosity. Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom in particular got me over several intense fears, of coprophagia, one of them.

It’s after all that, in 2021, I returned to Josh Simmons’s The Furry Trap, and can now say I am compelled, to the point where I can’t stop reading this text every time I start. Some great emotional traumas wrecked on me seemed soothed by the demons therein. Is it sympathy, or what?

WHY EXPLORE THE ID?

A hot bath may be tested with a toe, and we discover whether the water is too hot. Responding to pleasant sensation, we might stick the whole foot, and next, the whole body.

The calming effect of horror is a pleasant sensation that I don’t understand, though I have theories and pop-psychology. It feels as if some self-knowledge is being gained, like the simultaneous testing, and relaxation, in a hot bath. It may be just the nerves, stimulated but safely recalibrating and responding, I am alive, I am alive, I am okay.

There is also the tale of Saint Augustine’s curiosity to consider. One of my professors taught this story to me during a lesson on “the abject”. The abject is whatever’s expelled from the body, taboo’d by society, and so on. Literal shit and watching shit being pushed around qualifies as “the abject”; so too gore, horrid sex stuff, and traumas. 

We are more compelled by “the abject” than we may like to admit. St Augustine, my professor taught me, was walking along one day and when he saw, by the side of the road, the corpse of a plague victim.

Feeling the curiousity inside himself, St. Augustine resisted the urge to look at this corpse. However, he noticed his curiousity rising, to the point where he could not resist. “Look then, damn you!”* were his words as he gave his eyes the sight they desired.

The whirling Id inside of us desires information on the forbidden subjects, perhaps to better sort and munch the many horrific fantasies that flit thru our consciousnesses. Am I assauged by the pages and pages of coprophagia in 120 Days? Something happens, and I don’t really know what, but some “assuaging” must occur, because I feel happier and more self-content, often, after reading such a work.

It may just be pride in readership. Facing up to fears. Anyway, The Furry Trap compells me and I think contains a sensitivity the author has been noted to have. Here’s a quote from an interview with Simmons:

“Simmons has an idiosyncratic approach to horror: on the one hand he often employs a take-no-prisoners harshness, on the other he's slyly, darkly funny, and intersperses many of his stories with moments of beauty and even sensitivity (no seriously, check out his Eisner-nominated ‘Seaside Home’ and tell me it doesn't break your heart a little bit).”

There is some capacity for the shock-abject to induce intimacy, like the intimacy that the Marquis De Sade conjured up in jail, the comfort of the interior zone of his mind. The presence of the Id in that interior zone, wild and crazy, can be comforting to a reader like me, who must, as well, live with their own mInD.

This is what can Explain, if we need to Explain, The Furry Trap’s opening story. A thrumming adolescent’s assault fantasy/nightmare. Horror of sufficent strength can speak to our pasts, the scar tissue of a mind burrowing into itself, raised in recongition to the digestion of something similar. 

A review of 120 Days of Sodom: Honey Boy, Love and Mercy, Succession, Nxivm, Hannibal, The Office, and Familial Concentration

 

Keith Raniere, Cult Leader of "Nxivm"

Yes, we're vulnerable. Reporter Barry Meier said the Nxivm story stuck out because it showed how people are always vulnerable. I think the extent to which we end up in situations like Nxivm or Jonestown speaks to our existential fuckedness. It's a family matter, I think.

In "Honey Boy"(2019), Shia Le Bouf plays an abusive father figure raising a child actor, the story being Shia's childhood biography.  Remarkable in the film, I think is a discussion of where the power lies in a father/child relationship, as the child actor wields a "per diem" (an envelope stuffed with cash the kid earned, which the dad wants for strip clubs) and technically employs the abusive father, a technicality which becomes more significant as the child ages.

"Love and Mercy" (2014) had a similar treatment: a therapist harangues and abuses a multi-millionaire depressive artist, who has slid into the therapist's legal clutches. These kinds of situations are not unknown for rich people. 

There is a kind of diffusive, tentative chaos among the rich, if HBO's Succession is as real as it feels. A young distant cousin of a powerful mogul manages to step into the mogul's family, half by accident, and half by dumb resilience. 

Consider what it feels like to move from one conception of power into another. We are always able to wield the valued props of our power's position. These props, wielded by Keith Raniere for example, don't amount to much. A childhood of awards. Some real skill, like martial arts, or volleyball. A degree and years of education.

Yes, they make you into better people: successes. Keith Raniere I think has many successes. But these achievements are fundamentally empty to the extent that they do not guarantee much about the people or the situations these empowered people are in and draw people into.  

Jonestown's communist bona-fides* are another example: not enough to guarantee much. The lives we lead are the proof of their roots; changing the way people live was Keith Raniere's oestensible goal. 

Which is absurd, and what is sad, is the over promise // under-delivering of these cults. Overpromise on bona-fides, under-deliver on results. At least, long-term results. Obscure the meaning. I'm reading 120 Days of Sodom; there's no expression of rich people, dominance, and wealth which is truly significant. Which is why Keith's branding scheme was, in essence, pointless. (ed: he coerced women to ritually brand each other with his initials)

*

There's no expression of rich people, dominance, and wealth which is truly significant. What it amounts to is a coercion of sexual sensation by any means necessary. Inflating their sexual needs in such a way, through exhaustion, eventually deprives 120 Day's "libertines" of the usual libraries of sensation and thus they choose to employ more and more depraved methods to stimulate themselves.

The libertine's pleasure is very close to nothing at all-- the lives of at least 30 people are suborned just for the joys of about four people in 120 Days of Sodom.  It is possible to see the book as a story of a massive amount of waste. Of course this perspective equivalizes human life with garbage; tho this is the perspective of the book's libertines. They view the lives of others as a tremendous barge of garbage which they the privileged may pluck from at will, like seagulls.

The Marquis De Sade's philosophies on life, be that as they are for a version of sexual liberation which concludes the lives of women are pointless but for total subjection, are never convincing to me. I feel that they are arguments the times give context to: conditions are repressed, better to open up then to play slave to god and husband. Ofc the destiny of the women who "open up" is quite bad. 

This brings me back to Keith Raniere. He I think offers propositions similar to Sade: an alternative life to the mainstream-- a life of scientific building blocks for taking control of ourselves and the world. Let me provide some context.

Indie Game Designer Porpentine reviewed the NBC series Hannibal: 

I think a lot about fellow indie game designer Stephen Murphey's essay on Robert Walser, and this quote in particular: (which Porpentine quotes in her standout essay Hot Allostatic Load):

"The dream of an imaginary community that allows total identification with one's role within it to an extent that rules out interiority or doubt, the fixity and clearness of an external image or cliche as opposed to ephemera of lived experience, a life as it looks from the outside." - text sourced here

The dream of human existence is to live a life which is external with no internal living, no warm meatbag slip-and-creak of nerves, guts, digestive systems, psychological troubles, etc. etc. I think, in a way, the mafia sells this identity to its members; "our way", Cosa Nostra, Omerta, an alternative system of control. These of course designed to isolate people and turn them into bodies/soldiers/corpses.

There is no PURPOSE beyond concentration for those who wish to establish something like what Raniere or Jim Jones had, or what Sade imagined, or what Porpentine saw in the story of NBC's Hannibal. I think, in some ways, there is no purpose to FAMILY beside concentration. As concentration is the bringing of people closer together.

Intimacy *is* the goal of the "libertine". "I wanna be married and have 100 kids so I can have 100 friends. And no one can say no to being my friend." A quote from Michael Scott** of NBC's "The Office".  I see the same sort of impulse in Sade's libertines, who with total impunity curate an entire society.

This! Is the point of Raniere's brandings: the (attempted) creation of a society/social truth/identity. I see a similar impulse in the serial killings as depicted in Mindhunter's Ed Kemper:

"You know, women were initially indifferent to me. They weren't interested in sharing. My whole life, no one wanted to interact with me. Not even our cats, when I was a kid. The only way I could have those girls was to kill them, and it worked. They became my spirit wives. They're still with me." 

Ed Kemper, as depicted by Cameron Britton in Mindhunter

A ritual designed to inflict a social truth (the absence of the victim in our society) and a personal pleasure (the memory of a victimization).

I've been studying true crime as an interest for about a year, and I'll admit today that I am fascinated in social situations organized by selfish people. Like Keith Raniere's brandings or Ed Kemper's killings, the point is to create a social reality (scarred or dead victims) as a means to supplement personal experiences (the memories of the murders/ a support network of subordinates).

This was, ultimately, what Jonestown became about. People in charge manipulate societies purely for personal experience.

I think we all have, to some extent, some desire and ability to appeal to society. I think we all have the desire to live an external life, a vicarous imagining of our experience which would supposedly comfort our internal routine suffering. This externality includes opportunity. A person who is famous is widely thought to be so comforted-- an assured external persona, filled with opportunity, is thought to comfort our internal life. An imagined ideal life that includes prospects and opportunities.

Dealing with the future: proposing a revolutionary change in the future: changing your self through practice to create a future, better self. The future stretches out endless and fairly unknowable. Contrast that with the past, which we pretend to know. 

I think, in that imagination of our past, our identities rest.

*Angela Davis was fooled too-- we are all vulnerable, I think!

**These words spoken by the character Michael when he was a child, filmed in an interview with a puppet on a fictional children's tv program, "Fundle Bundle". Episode 18, Season 2. 

Hereditary & Midsommar

The films are mirror images of each other. There's an obsession with sacrifices made by fire. Cults and manipulation in the face of grief. There's a formula:

1. Messy family trauma played realistically
2. Loud crying scene
3. Cult enters; first signs of cult
4. Cult influence and horrid intentions become more obvious
5. Total abandonment of reality as cult reigns supreme 

Like "Rosemary's Baby" or "The Wicker Man" pretty much but with family trauma and loud crying scene upfront. The contrast between grief and the supernatural is what "Hereditary" receives praise for. I think both films don't stick the ending.

"Hereditary" has a perceived resolution with the Mom hanging above her son (Peter) and cutting her own head off with piano wire.  Unlike my mom who would never do that. In "Midsommar" the main character watches her boyfriend burn alive in a bear suit.

I think it's about the cult in both cases-- in "Hereditary", the cult is mostly invisible, and therefore their web of power can be easily imagined. The supernatural flourishes in the dark. In "Midsommar", the cult is very visible.

"Midsommar"s visibility leads to a lot of beautiful and striking crowd scenes. It's all shot in a giant field which, by the end, feels claustrophobic. The utter presence of every building in every exterior shot is a notable accomplishment for the filmmakers.

However, the acts of violence that start piling up feel too extreme for the Swedes. By the end it's a horror movie bloodbath. What we deserved was a more nuanced and realistic tale.

It's a case where utter visibility defines, for me, stricter requirements for my suspension of disbelief.

endgame's spoilers

• meal scenes
• jokes
• void
• dialogue
• 
  
• pretty good action sequences
• mark ruffalo slowly enunciates

Overall this is a comic book movie in a way I can't be mad about. How could I be mad. What is madness, the state of being mad. Is it that there is something we are watching and we feel bored and irritated? I felt that way a lot. The outer-space sequences especially. 

It is cool that there is so much scale in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The space stuff is important like the Los Angeles stuff (there is no L.A. stuff -ed). There are a lot of meal scenes.

This is the basis for fun that comic book superfans extoll. The interconnectedness of all places, and people. Will this freeform fun extend to the machinations of larger studios? Well, the movie is three hours long, and it features Fat Thor.

As the Red Letter Media guys said, the powers-that-be realized that Chris Hemsworth is an excellent comedian. Wisely, they continue to countenance immortality with humour. The project, large scale, could be said to be thus.

Of course, they fail, for the most part. "I get the sense that comic book movie's main struggle is over sentimentality". I said this in a blog review of into the spiderverse and I repeated it for my friends when we rewatched "Spiderverse" last week. There are 3-4 father figures in that movie.

At the end of the day, wringing emotion out of supercharacters becomes a crapshoot based on who the audience actually knows about, the confluence of writing, the "needs of  plot", the acting, and ultimately the editing which has to assemble it all. No wonder the movie is three hours.

jordan peele's us

“Us” is at its core an experiment in acting, wherein the principals are asked to play alternate horror-versions of their characters. I assume that each actor was worked with individually to come up with this character; I might be wrong who knows. 

Anyway that experiement in acting can be judged either to the good or to the not-so-good, that’s probably why this movie is divisive. The other reason it is divisive is due to the gaping blatant holes in the plot and logic. You can really chalk this up to the shitty writing. I tried to find  a sort of neo-camp disregard for plot or logic but nah.

Also J.P. is still not that great of a filmmaker, things were really boring and slow a lot of the time, and the momentum of the film stutters a lot. There are some pretty cool images and scenarios, though.

delivarance 1972: reviewed

a fruity pebbles rice krispies treat… left in a small green plastic bag. It sat on my living room end table for a week. I had run out of money for groceries... no dessert.

I ate the rice krispies treat. Yeah, it was an edible. I was watching “Deliverance” and getting really happy. I eventually understood that I had been poisoned. The best part of the movie is the end, where the author of the book interrogates his own characters. James Dickey played the sheriff who has final call over our protagonist’s fates.

The movie does an admirable job of interrogating american/southern masculinity. “Deliverance”, the title, refers to the process by which the four southern middleclass men scramble their way out of deep deep trouble. Most stories would end with the death of the villain and handwave the police; this one instead sees the entire process through.

And as such this movie has: a dinnertime breakdown in tears, hurried grave-digging, that scene with the sherriff/author, and a very good shot looking at the man who was a victim of assault, back lit by gold walking away saying he’d “rather keep this under wraps”. 

“Deliverance” implying a burden, the relieving of a burden. That scene with the sheriff is very good. James Dickey has thin little teeth. 

marvel studios movies ranked

marvel studios movies ranked

1. sama raimi spider man trilogy
2. daredevil good villain
3. the avengers 2012
4. black panther 2018
5. iron man 2008
6. ant man
7. doctor strange 2016
8. captain america winter soldier
9. camptain america civil war
10. incredible hulk 2008 ruffalo honerary inclusion
11. g of the galxy 2017 #2 

benefits of "into the spiderverse"

1. undeniably a new success in combining film and comic mediums, on several fronts:
1. visuals: there's a wide array of attempts and some of them are pretty successful. and most of them are used sparingly and for emphasis! and often quite elegantly. 
1. in the early part of the film, Miles's teenage anxiety at highschool pairs his developing superpowers via the introduction of comic thought boxes... which Miles remarks on: "why are the voices in my head so loud" (paraphrased)
2. the choppiness of the animation and a lot of the editing singles out poses etc. lends itself to the experience of reading across panels (compare to less-successful previous attempts by filmmakers who would use panel-shaped irises and stuff in like ang lee's the hulk)
3. serialization: comics are by nature serial, and serial narratives have a lot of associations and freedoms. spiderverse summons literal serial dimensions to emphasize these associations and to play with them.
1. it's different than just nostalgia, it's post-modern, we understand the formula and so the movie's often subversive to that understanding
2. in this way the film shows a great understanding for the way comics work. familiarity and ease help u feel good watching it
2. major failings: I get the sense that comic book movies main struggle is over sentimentality. U want that emotional connection to yr characters but if u fuck up the writing or pacing the long slow scenes with Aunt May or whoever are boring and saccharine. 
1. Spiderman 2 (2004) has like an hourlong stretch where spiderman is going thru an emotional crisis and not doing any superhero antics (for example)
2. I was in to most of Spiderverse's emotional relationships but they had 3, count 'em 3 father figures (arguably 4) and that just was too much father figuring for me. The cop father just showed up for no reason in the final extradimensional battle and didnt do anything and so we had to have that many more lingering reaction shots
3. The film's animation techniques get self-obsessed and onanistic in the final fight scene, which takes too long as well... everything's abstract no grounding in reality unlike all the earlier scenes where it's like, Spiderman takes a bus to a forested area and swings around the trees (very good)
4. The fight scenes of the first 2/3 of the movie do a great job of grounding the action in reality or comic book tradition, and play around with that tradition
5. There are many funny jokes
6. It's weird to watch a "kid's film" -style film and be entertained as an adult. Pixar
7. Probably worth expanding the pixar comparison. Most pixar films have a better standard of quality than spiderverse did. Like a wide-eyed and all-inclusive attention to every element of the film, all the overtones neatly paired and the story well-revised.
1. Spiderverse's good moments tho were as good as anything Pixar has done like it, and there's many good moments in Spiderverse

Overall, worth seeing, and a genuine appreciation for Spiderman reignited in my heart, albeit, yeah, by the end of the film, I was like "ain't got time for that". Plus they're gonna make a bunch more movies in this like cinematic universe within-a-cinematic-universe and they're gonna suck, all of the above is EXACTLY how I felt about the first avengers movie

Yorgos Lanthimos "The Favorite" 2018

Oakay I figured it out folks. The issue with the film is Olivia Colman. The centre of the love triangle isn't really repulsive which is what she needed to be for this film to be on par with Y.L.'s other films. This is mostly the fault of the complete movie, Colman included, for not making Queen Anne truly terrible.

Because u see Y.L.'s other films always have that gripping disgust which they make hay with. Dogtooth Lobster Killing of a Sacred Deer all have it. The new film, The Favourite, is pretty well acted, good dialogue, great cinematography, some toppa lighting, costuming, good money but the most gross stuff is Queen Anne's gout, over-eating, and some romantic wounds like a facial scar and a hand burn.

The movie ends with a forced sex act which, to really push the grossness of it, interfades with Queen Anne's pet rabbits. That's not quite good enough dude, Dogtooth did much better, Lobster and TKOASD were much crueler. I need a Queen Anne who is fucked-up to watch, needs to be grosser. This is a less-gross film.

the house that jack built review

Why can't serial killers just relax? It's because we all must build our lives out of materials, local or no, well they become local, don't they.

Von Trier frames most scenes independently like they're little vignettes with versions of the characters, not necessarily continuous, and this is good, liberating, allows for more felt out acting I think, history between characters can be spun way or another to suit the scene.

Whereas u might imagine that the film is purely discursive for this reason-- shifting histories, tropes-- there is a literal physical piling up of these specific encounters, the titular House. More than anything feels likely to me that a good ("" -ed) man's life is a series of killed miniature lives. I feel like I've killed my family friends exgirlfriends and the same weariness a-piling up in a space beyond time. Somewhat clueless about what to do with these except the eventual, nonplussed destination of hell.

And not just friends family and ex girlfriends but protracted relationships with near-strangers. The serial killer life models our own when it comes to getting something out of it. The satisfaction is bullied by near future satisfactions and emptied by previous ones and that the various pleasures will sum up into something ultimately dead, over and over again...

(Although lately no, I'm just happy to be where I'm at... as perhaps Jack was)

critical addendum: this is as much as the above film has to say I think with the added benefits of gore and some uhhhh hit-and-miss comedy. Matt Dillon is beautiful but he's not the best actor, outclassed by "Thurm" Thurman

thirty-four reviews

eric andre.

boiling point (1990)

/psychological realism doesn't have much credo and yet I find a definite gap between some director's ambitions and other's. Credit to the filmmaking practices which honor "the dreamy look" or heighten the everyday boredom we all face.

old forester bourbon

originally I thought it had a nutty taste but now I'm not so sure. all whiskey starting to taste like soda to me. tried "angel's envy" at my friend's wedding and it was like, not top shelf? but it had that tasty burn with the flavor in the high notes

dead man, jim jarmusch

my friend (roommate) kept going gaga over the textures in this film, her friend too, talking about how black and white movies often the filmmakers want to bring out the textures, three or four textures in this film, linear, floral, feathers/hair, and a weird beehive one she couldn't place

edward saint albee's "alice"

I just bought this because it was cheap and signed by the author. the bookstore I bought it from was the fence for theft from the library system I work at.

heaven can wait 1948

old style of gentleman which was a sexuality in this face and lips, delicate and gentle. kind of winning presence you immediately feel like you could trust. don ameche takes this trust and abuses it

the paintings of zak smith

I mentioned this in my "frostbitten and mutilated" review but I don't care for portraits drawn from photographs. it's dumb to say that considering how do I know what is, and what isnt, drawn from a photograph. I usually miss the appeal w.e.

squidbillies-- seasons 2&3 are good

tommy tone "bad to to the tone"

listened to this uhh twenty three times

wigle's rye whiskey

rye tastes like flowers and shit but wigle's is good enough to stay appealing. although I hate rye I can get it

stonecutter volume 5

good

kero blaster

bosses are good played 1/2

bayonetta

hate how the scope of the game narrows to be about this generic classical architecture + industrial setting especially since at the beginning it promises to be world-hopping

simpleflips

what's the appeal of simpleflips? he's sorta rotten at the core and always on the verge of falling over. he's not that good despite being talented. watching him is like someone trying to renovate a too-old skyscraper

tfue (a twitch streamer- simpleflips too -ed)

I keep thinking of david foster wallace's tennis youth in "infnite jest" who have nicknames and have a sort of pecking order eaten away by sheer athleticism, that there's something worth pursuing... comradely sort

communism

talked to some maoists who might see this. afai can tell viewing the cultural revolution in a mostly positive lens is bleh, seeing anything but all the usual negative patterns of communism in the great leap forward is eye-and-ear shutting. plus all the stuff about stalin and like, didn't the bolsheviks establish a secret police almost immediately??

did some research on the movement, learned maybe for the first time that some topics are wide enough to encompass several international views. that being said I feel 48% confident that these maoists are relying on conspiracy theories to wipe clean the slates of their heroes

anarchist coffee down the street

it's actually called "artisan's coffee house". zeke is friendly but the coffee's never been good, and even the good stuff, although the chai is to die for I've heard

kraynick's

best bicycle shop in pittsburgh epicenter I wonder if it's the case that as an artist your job is to go find a budding community and sit over it like a fat toad sharing criticism and free talent

barry lyndon

not actually all shot in natural lighting kinda ruins the movie once my friend john told me this. that being said though:

--the scene with the german farm wife
--the scene where barry throws the glass at leonard rossiter
--leonard rossiter is so hype
--the natural-lit scene with the english flag, like the second scene
--steven berkoff


the duelists 1977

fantastic but the ending sucks

johnny depp

johnny always gives the movie something to work with albeit it's often wasted. that's all there is to say

drive (the movie)

I didn't have much appreciation for the film outside the kissing scene and the opening, however in retrospect I like some of the settings, like the pizza shop, I like bryan cranston although he's underused, and I retroactively like oscar isaac because he's my crush

annihilation (the movie)

there's only two good parts, the first scene where natalie portman is grieving, and then the videotape near the end where oscar isaac is talking to his double. I like the interior of the lighthouse, I like jennifer jason leigh although she didn't save the end

the hateful eight

"quentin taratino can just shit out good movies" - the red letter media guys, paraphrased

el topo (already reviewd, albeit this review was written before the previously published review -ed)

quite excellent and jodorowsky gives a fucking excellent performance especially in the last 1/4

fellini satyricon

I watched the opening of this movie like the first forty minutes that my free trial of wondershare file converter managed to convert every third day for about a month

impressionism about anthropology and history is the way to go!!!!!!!!!!!!

the cook the thief the wife and her lover

I watched the first forty minutes of this film an awful lot, too. fellini satyricon just stays really fucking good the whole movie though and this film only knows how to do 2 scenes

the rum diaries (2011)

this movie only knows how to do three scenes and it just vacillitates between three: johnny depp is doing something, aaron eckhart says "sea of money", amber heard blue balls johnny

aaron eckhart

kind of our george clooney if george clooney had to retire

ex machina (2014)

think about this all the time. not bcause of technology but bcause of oscar isaac weird sexiness he imposes on "domhnall". "I put a port in her and if you fucked her she'd like it". modern male tech sexuality dominance stuff like who else doin that???

the tech industry's full of nerds

guardians of the galaxy vol 1-- bad

a woman under the influence (1974)

a bunch of good scenes and can't give enough credit to how it was filmed, handheld with an attention to and somewhat sloppy focus. think about gena rowlands gesticulations. stopped at the 2/3 point never got around to the end

eric andre show

in the eric andre show, isn't he filming himself grabbing at people's genitals or getting his staff to do that? if you watch the series as I have there's a lot of eric reaching for people's genitals or his staff doing that to irritate the guests/people.

lamentations of the flame princess- good but my developing dm style, the harsh stuff, is drawing criticism... is an instadeath trap so inappropriate?

luke kennard's "cain"
Luke Kennard is FUCKING AROUND with this one. "31 anagram poems [of] Genesis 4:9-12". around each of these is a frame of red text transcribing a fictional DVD commentary. can't figure these out

wuvable oaf: blood & metal

wuvable oaf is good and queer baby

marquis de sade's "juliette"

somewhere within this tome is the chapter wherein juliette goes to visit kinda a bluebeard guy who has a castle full of human furniture. read that excerpt in andre breton's anthology of black humor. can't find that part

brief reviews of some explicit movies

Duane Hanson's "Woman Eating"

visitor q

necrophilia scene is the best, plus all the followup. and the kid who beats his mom with the carpet beater's good. also the opening scene at the love hotel. what's not to like? the quality of the film online is not good as much as I would want it to be. 

caligula

blowjob/marching scene is good, that happens like near the end when caligula is prostituting all of the senator's wives. overall this movie is a boner (the bad kind) and malcolm macdowell's acting which isn't good anyway is destroyed by his makeup. Like there's a lot of sorta porno camerawork where the edit will go to a close up of someone's genitals. But there's also a surprising amount of restriant believe it or not, as much as it's mostly heterosexual it also at times seems like a genuine attempt to bring out some gravitas. the husband/wife newlywed rape by caligula scene is also good at least conceptually.

der samurai

a german queer cinema film, kinda low budget, has some good acting, some really good action choreography, at times, with Pit Kukowski at least. you have to give the queer message credit (the killer is the prophetic lover of the protagonist) but I think there's a more uncomfortable deeper sexuality, animal lust, that the movie doesn't credit or use. I mean yeah in the final scene Pit's dick is out and he's getting a boner but... he's not using it? 

Like, emerging queerness is alike a killer with a sword, cool yeah, it's like a wolf, little more cliche... where's the sex.

bullitt

relentlessly pro-police but still a good movie. one of those films with a really complicated plot; but executed with the as-advertised genuine police dialogue. I love scenes of political power struggle set up by dialogue set up by overlapping and conflicting professional social scripts

letterkenny

dialogue, yet again... but also action, and music. there's a good and complete understanding of albertans and 3-4 different slices of the social pie: jocks, indians, the more traditional farmers, meth-heads. Each group, the farmers especially, has a total patter, a complex, constantly funny, wide social band of emotion. The show often kinda stops there and it's good enough, it's really fucking good.

there's this constant dreamworld of sex and young adults where all the older people are gone; there's a sense and a hint that the main family, most of the family, are survivors of child abuse... and what happy survivors... what a community, an idyll, could be, even with meth.

the show  eventually dissolves into just really good wordplay, which is like saying "my sex life eventually dissolved into just really good nipple play".

westworld 1973

best scene, the loser-turned-hero finds a damsel strapped up in a cell in Medievalworld. he rescues her and offers her water. she refuses, he insists, he pours the water into her and she short-circuits. about half the movie seems interested in drawing out that message but there's a lot of wish-fufillment too-subtly undercut by it. that being said we all know the movie's success is due to the concept which is pretty good; I mean they're running through Pompeii and everyone, robots and guests, are stabbed dead on the ground, there's some shots of them getting all stabbed to death too.

a clockwork orange

did I already review this? more and more convinced it deserves to be watched on a bigger screen, I have a chunky old huge HD crt. U have to watch from the start and focus on the red and then u can kinda not mind as it zooms out and just take the music in. and yea the rape scene that comes in a little later is well-coordinated fersure. But I really like the music am sort of convinced of Beethoven's power. But yeah other than that the social dynamics wherein these mod beefed-up guys are everywhere, are sort of the child protectors vs. ppl like alex, that's cool... you have to get into rape scenes like I'm getting into and then you enjoy the singing in the rain scene pretty much but I think I like the stuff in jail even more, not any prison-rape but just Alex studying the bible, having these slow, procedural conversations with prison officials... kubrick good at bringing those to a fever pitch

eyes wide shut

in 1080p the blue light used behind nicole kidman in the dream confession scene seems super artificial, and if you watch a documentary you can pick out the parts where tom cruise is on a treadmill and they're using front projection. thought about hyperrealism last time I put this together. specifically duane hanson's "Woman Eating", bc, you know, every scene outside of the orgy scenes are built to be hyperrealistic and that's what you can appreciate, depiction of reality with all the cues. Also Tom Cruise is eternally lovely as Bill, I noticed the moral struggle outlined in the semifinal scene for the first time a couple watches ago, Bill in his social script having to outline the moral compromise he is going to make with his superior Ziegler.

the devils 1971

pretty much perfect, the decline starts with oliver reed's limited range but michael gothard swings in and reinvents the picture. trap me in a convent, baby!!!

the plumber

better than I expected, despite the post-bourgeoise leanings it still goes on a great tear with Ivar Kants and it's quite sexual.

I walked with a zombie

hatian houseman with a guitar sings a ballad and walks up to the female white protagonist, and it's supposed to be menacing. really great scene with the white guy's alcoholism, there's drums in the background slowly getting faster throughout a dinner scene confrontation. there's that sequence where the females go out wearing lowing flowing robes towards the voodoo ritual in the woods and its quite magical, like a genre transposition into fairytale. so many scenes with the surprising good lighting. you watch old movies sometimes and this is one of those which is actually good and holds up, it's trying to make horror out of white people having to deal with black people and in the process manages to showcase some black actors / culture which is like, exceedingly rare in 1943, it's what gives the film life

el topo, the holy mountain

recently some buzz in pittsburgh about how row house cinema disclosed to its customers right before a midnight screening of el topo that alejandro jodrowsky apparently filmed live rape which is in the movie. no credit to alejandro for phrasing it that way for fifty years or whatever, and you can't know the conditions of the actress and so on, so who's to say? I'm fading into "never giving a shit about the ethics of the filmmaker, or maybe even of production", trying to figure out the theoretical props for that statement. anyway el topo is through and through a master's movie, the holy mountain is actually worse. u could say "it reclaims the western" for el topo and it'd be fair. I prefer some other movie to the holy mountain I forget what it is

charlotte rampling

you know what's funny? C.R. is really good in "zardoz". in a movie that is overfull of practical fx and a stupid hippy ensemble cast that's used quite well anyway Charlotte has these sharp three second reaction shots, does the dramatic scenes with the full of her vigor, to bikini'd sean connery. and she gets on a horse and rides the fuck out of it, furious... 

privates on parade (1983)

everyone loves postmodernity if it means specifically: taking something old and remaking it but doing it really well. Is that what postmodernity means? yes.

a lot of the benefits are strictly technological, like just the quality and craft. but there is also the reverse of nostalgia there which is so important. it doesn't have to be more than an honest backwards look, because nostalgia is never honest.

this film tho is also really smart as well as honest like I said. it knows all the ins and outs of military stuff enough to get all the actors' military acting right, the military dialogue, the military traditions. the purpose of this accuracy is to better lampoon...

that this film is ultimately not just a lampoon is maybe overreach on the filmmaker's parts. but it's original so... at least it's original for Peter.

essay from last year

Foreward: I wrote this last year after seeing 2017's "It". I'm still a politically searching person and my ideas have shifted if not completely changed since writing this essay. Nonetheless I think it deserves to see the light of day especially if I don't need to edit it or be held strictly accountable for these ideas.  

 a potentially copyrighted image.

The reason we can condemn "It" is because Beverly's depiction isn't good revolutionary material-- despite having agency, she's still
>written by a cis white male
>sexualized as a child
>sexually abused and the sexual attention of all her male friends
>reaches apotheosis through weird, plausibly unhealthy sewer "orgy"

But actually it's probably arch and stupid to pretend that specific books meet some revolutionary standard over others when the practical actions of even just making life better for oppressed people hardly depend on the contents of "It", exactly, except by moving the standard of what children and women should be doing and with what sensitivities they are depicted in mass media, which arguably this standard has purchase on the way people in general behave ?

Like the argument is, if it's just a piece of fiction, not an instructional text that is going to be followed, how does it make life for anyone worse? By influencing people who will be influenced by the {bad way that Bev is written, + the actions she undertakes}?

The movie I can condemn because the way it sexualizes Bev is standard hollywood National Lampoon fare like slow mo shots, maybe appropriate for calling up a standard teenage reaction to: a girl, but unfair for not putting Bev in a box about what she should do with her teenage body??

The movie I can condemn for showing unconsensual kissing as a good thing?? Although, situationally, within the fiction, it worked out? Should movies follow a standard logic that fits within our shared values of what should happen and also what probably would happen, esp. considering the legacy of thousands of years of patriarchy?

Maybe it's that the movie seemed clueless to the issues it raised, while also depicting Bev's individual struggle with school and her father, on that basis I can condemn it:; if you're gonna depict a girl sexually oppressed at her home and by her classmates but if you don't touch on how the sexual attention of her male friends can also be a huge problem then it probably does seem naive, and a disservice to the struggle of women, if and only if the service/disservice to the struggle of women thing is actually in question.

I feel like I'm operating under the assumption that I can know what is, at a reasonable expectation, something that meets the standards of ?a generalized feminist? albeit not everyone at all I can consider a feminist (and I try to get away from that term(

well why do that?
Porpentine talked about how everyone doesn't have to put themselves under the same label, it's a marketing scam, and also how she didn't want to adopt the label of the people who severely abused her and Ill add, caused her nothing less brain damage
Also I've seen tweets that are like, it should be some larger decolonial project, not just "feminism"
Which is like enough. Maybe the struggle to have everyone agree that they are a feminist is sort of past, or passe, considering that even such huge global terms are also subject to what I call in seriousness and in huge abstraction "fashion"
>Suffice to say, if you're not a feminist, it's become the norm that you are the one who has some specific front to describe yourself, i.e. the alternative now is the Alt-Right dude, like everyone I know north and south of the train tracks is a communist by default
>That being said the actual baseses of power are conservative cocklords as much as ever.

...Which is the point I bounced off of, maybe a universal means of address politically is not what's needed, from me at least, Fuck Theory also claiming that the center is a misnomer as most people occupy a place of unknowing, not a specific political band between left and right. And not knowing, a taoist position (what isn't?), is or isn't encouraged by a break from the dichotomy of feminist/not feminist which is already built to be one-sided in Peter Webb's mysterious but sure political response?

Mass line work seems an applicable and more ideal, less "manager of poverty"-style means of activism, like as much as something can "pop off" there is the Serve The People programs, one of which even recommends as a salve to Gentrification they physically exclude and discourage hipsters/ and hipster spaces (with violence). Quaker tenets, "violence is not the answer" absolutely occupies a place of total dogmatic authority which is contraindicated by the need to not tell oppressed people what to believe in. "Violence is not the answer" as: non-proselytizing personal piece of information.

Although-- prostelytizing to march against war? Not exactly "telling oppressed people what to believe in". I believe in never committing violence, demanding nonviolence from those in authority, and never offering oppressed people unsolicited advice. To that end Quakers should organize an a large-scale alternative to the police force, tax revolt, single-issuing themselves out of sociery, or doing the most they can in such a society, attempting to change it from within? Knowledge that this will work/ won't work?

Where does the movie "It" come in? The purpose is, to point out, that the movie reinforced some old tropes that I know at least influenced my youth, like, this picture of abused people, how "love can save" etc., that despite not having a universal take on the lives of abused people, are still pretty bad advice. If you can consider the movie advice, which I sort of see a lot of these tales as in some ways being?

Like, in the original book, there's some ingrown logic of defeating the monster by standing up to your fear (which the movie largely but not totally abandons), and bc the monster exacerbates real social issues like Bev's abusive father, the book kinda functions as a fictional casebook for how people get out of these situations. So there's an implicit instructional aspect to the book, because it depicts a series of cases of real social issues wherein the protagonists follow a common logic (don't be afraid!) to solve, or at least avoid. Also the universiality of that message...

Maybe the book isn't instructional but is rather relying on the apparent and probably universally accepted practicality of the message Don't Be Afraid! to make the protagonists's victories also universally acceptable and even practical, supernatural that they may be. The trick is not to see the books as instructional but to see the common logic of our lives as making the action in a book, if so logical, meaningful. Then you could say, there's also some things that happen in the book which follow shitty logics like at least in the movie the unconsensual kiss, but they aren't instructional, they'r more evidence that the creators of the film were willing to employ shitty logic and maybe use that logic themselves.

Like kissing the unconcious girl to magically and happily wake her up follows a logic which is shitty because the logic fails to take into account that kissing unconcious people is unconsensual, and moreover, fails to take into account the worldwide history-spanning history of women's consent being trampled. Ben was, although we can assume because the moment is obviously a trope (can we assume?) actually forgoeing Bev's consent, taking a risk that he was hurting Bev, violating her boundaries (yes, even when magically unconcious).

BlackkKlansman

Contrast black power with white power and don't say anything that isn't obvious: what's the point? And then Spike Lee has the police come out in favor of black power. The ending has the clips of Charlottesville and the murder of Heather Heyer. The film is very insistent that the white supremacy of the 70's has evolved into what we have today, we see the typical piece-of-shit Klan members and sort of the rituals and banality and the one guy who's actually dangerous, and then a character study of David Duke which is interesting. But the logic of the film falls apart constantly, the writing is flagrantly flat pretty often, Adam Driver apparently decides to stop acting a few scenes in. It's not really the comedy of contrasted positions it could have been for these reasons... it's a mess with some good scenes... I like Laura Harrier a lot and I was shedding tears in the early scene at the bar which is like, she recounts getting molested by a policeman earlier in the evening, and then the whole bar disco dances.

haneke's "la pianeste" = the piano teacher

I want to talk about the face Huppert makes at the end, which I once said I wanted to get tattooed on my thigh. The self-harm and anger as defiant, extreme emotional contraction, I think acknowledging that there is nothing there beneath the face. Like you get the autist's rage and you think, "woah, they're angry", and it's about some bullshit but then you're like there's that sliver of a person underneath there like an angry nerve inflamed and pumped up. And it's only a sliver of person.

I genuinely think part of a person is the lack of a person, the frustrating sense that there is nothing there. I imagine touching like a hollow of skin and feeling nothing but scar tissue and the person knows you're there but it means being apart of someone's trauma and NOT helping.

Having sex with traumatized people and depositing your experience in a apart of them that's just scar tissue and the other people's deposits and the few remaining cells working on breaking it down. Putting work on someone's shoulder's, burning through one layer of scar tissue. You're contributing and you're painful and want they want is not what you want. Knowing this and repressing it.

I have sympathy for the STATE OF MIND, I have sympathy for the KINK. Which is the formation in your brain, which you play around with, you digest like it's a pile in your asshole. You don't mind that it spurts blood, but when it does, when you're fucked, it's painful, and it's EXHILARATING. But it's still something fundamentally dead.

Or is it? Ultimately? Toi Derricote says she bloomed as a person in her fifties after finally processing that trauma. The danse macabre.

The dead dance, the dance of death. I love this dance, I love it's cold claw embrace and the puppeting and pirating. The feeling of something uncontrollably unconscious descending and picking up and rippin at the deeper brain, the inevitable pill thru the grey matter.

"Seul Contre Tous"= I Stand Alone, a Review

Watched this movie because my friend Rachael recommended I watch it. Ok, I've talked a lot recently about my switch over to a more "violence friendly" style personhood, meaning, I'm not totally opposed to violence like I used to be.

I had a friend who talked about beating up someone's abusive boyfriend. This friend was a person of ethics. Obv I'm not sure if beating up someone is even a good way to guarantee that they stop abusing anyone, fiction would say no, but as punishment I think there's a sort of lawlessness or frontier-justice style appeal which is ofc dangerous and likely to target the wrong ppl etc.

As with 'Irreversible' :Seul Contre Tous: opens with the mistaken case of violence ruining someone's life, a buncha ppls, albeit to the film's credit it posits the life of this man The Butcher in a way such that the act of mistaken violence he has committed was in his past and was something he learned from and took into his self. There's a sort of "committal of violence" which I appreciate; the process of picking up trauma in your life years after the fact (and the wounds) in any way, pride or not-pride.

I'm not proud of the butcher but something in my heart really loves him and I think its the film's portrayal of him, which is of credit, he is a man of character in the classic sense in that it's not fucking around, it's a person, o.k. You take a film which has no bones and lightly mocks the offended viewer about the presence of evil, I said to my uber driver later that I think humanity includes evil in a really special way, I would not pick the human world without violence I would not consider with the rage in my heart the evil of ppl etc. There's nothing to gasp out but a cloying service to the statute, "I stand alone", to be a person in destructive motion, is basically admirable, pathetic.

CERA & KNOPE

2010's "Scott Pilgrim": at once, a legitimate ballad to video games, the showcase for about 10-15 of ppl born in the late eighties-nineties, a visual spectacle and faithful adaptation of the (decent and fun and a little deep) graphic novel. And also completely ruined by Michael Cera.

Look at this excited, confused little asshole. Look at his stupid face. Sure, he's projecting a mix of misery and determination, he doesn't have the acting skills to back it up tho... maybe when he's fifty.

.

When he looks like a sad sack of shit, like he is. Michael Cera is a nebbish. A schlemiel. He doesn't deserve the girl. He's a much a son of a bitch as Leslie Knope was. 

Don't get me wrong. I think Leslie Knope is a decent character. She's a schlemiel, and she's lucky. But I don't like the show's treatment of her. It gives her too much success. And not only that, but her success is aspirational. I don't want Michael Scott to succeed either.

It's because I like my comedies dark, and I don't want them moralizing at me. And I don't want the butt of the joke to get ahead. Comedy is for the suffering. 

So who could have played "Scott Pilgrim"? It is Paul Dano.

Paul Dano isn't a schleimel. He just plays one on TV. He actually can act. It's 'nuff said. But basically things have some dramatic weight when you can show real suffering, the comedy is good, baby!! Also... it takes a chad to play a virgin... a winner to nail the loser.