montyterrible

[montyterrible]

East-coast ivory-tower liberal-elite graduate-school-graduate tries and fails to eat a Lunchable

The title is hyperbole—I did eat the Lunchable—but it captures some of my feelings about the experience nonetheless. I have no memory of eating a Lunchable as a kid, but I am convinced that I couldn’t not have asked for one at some point. They seem to me now like the food equivalent of a toy, or at least an exercise in primarily visual appeal. I was probably, on some level, when I didn’t not ask for one during a grocery store run, interested in the clout it would have conferred upon me in the school lunchroom, and/or the sense of “being like the other kids.” Not that my memories suggest they were swimming in Lunchables either. If my mother turned my request down, which would definitely have been the case, then that’s because, even if she didn’t know it at the time, she could see through the flashy… rhetoric of the Lunchable to uncover its sickly, unsatisfying truth: The money was for the branding, not the food. I was a kid who went to school with lunches packed by a human person, in my snug little lunchbox, accompanied by a personal note written on a slip of paper alongside a tiny print-out of one of the original 151 Pokémon, courtesy of a computer program we owned.

Having peered inside one for myself, I see “Lunchable” not as a lunch-like product but as an aggregator of lunch-like products—much like my mother was but without the personal touch. As a kid, I was ignorantly requesting a worse lunching experience because it looked pretty. Maybe that was also genuinely convenient for some kids—an upgrade from no packed lunch at all—but it wouldn’t have been for me.

I don’t understand the decision-making process behind the cartoons on this packaging: Why a tiny flame? Who is that woman supposed to be? (She looks too… specific to be a generic design.) And why does the tiger seem to be the one announcing that this box contains “12g of Protein per serving”? It feels random, like these were just icons/stickers the designers had access to and then plopped down in a rush, and that stand out in contrast to the overall lack of panache. It’s not a dissimilar impression to what one feels re. the contents of the meal, as we’ll see momentarily…

Now, I am struck by how surface-level the branding’s appeal is: Upon opening the box, I was gifted the sight of unremarkable bare cardboard, along with 3 other impressions, 2 of which I will enumerate immediately:

“Man, this unexciting water bottle sure does feel like it takes up fully a third of this box.”

“Man, those sure are two Hershey’s ‘Kisses’ rolling around loose in this box.”

The sum total or perhaps average of these impressions was “disappointment.” There is no aesthetic unity among these items—You’ve got one brand of candy (Hershey) and one brand of water (Absopure) and one brand of flavored mix for said water (Kool-Aid) and one brand of “light” “Mayo” (Kraft) and one brand of potato chip (Pringles), and then the brand-forward plastic packet of meat and cheese (Oscar Mayer/Kraft) and the unbranded plastic packet containing the bun. Lunchables seem like, in the grand tradition of contemporary American business, a conniving middle-man between consumers and the actual products, as you’re paying them to collect the things for you and put their logo on the package. Perhaps the end-result does credibly resemble a facsimile of a human-packed lunch with regard to the odds-and-ends of it all, like a Mrs. Lunchables made a list and went shopping for these items and keeps them around the house and dumps them all together into your box that she sends you off to school with. It’s just that the experience is also obviously lesser (see the cardboard and maybe the disappointment of discovering that Big, Meaty box was mostly water and also how there’s no avoiding the feeling that the semi-thick sealed plastic pouch of bun so clearly recalls mass production, uncaring packaging).

And here’s impression 3: “Man, this plastic pouch of meat and cheese sure is puffy.” And in my house, we translate a puffy package as Do Not Eat. In fairness to Mrs. Lunchables, the odds are not in your favor when you pack God-only-knows-illion lunches like this, and the expiration date was coming up fast, and I’m almost certain this Lunchable came to me from a discount food dispensary where it might not have been stored properly. Still, I let that expiration date creep past me while the opened Lunchable sat in the refrigerator and I considered the demerits of not eating my assigned meat and cheese. I wanted a Lunchable experience, see, and while I had other meat and cheese (and mayo, just to be safe), could I really hold up my head and say I’d “eaten” the Lunchable if I didn’t eat (without quote marks) all of it?

I did not eat the puffy package, which has grown puffier still as I’ve held onto the remains of the Lunchable for reference while writing. I instead made do with my “normal” deli meat (chicken) and pre-sliced cheese product (torn up into bun-appropriate strips), and jar-interred mayonnaise. My impression of the bun visually was that it looked like your usual hot-dog-ular deal. “Default” coloration and texture. Taste confirmed this hypothesis: inoffensive, maybe a bit less flavorful than a non-Lunchable bun of a similar make and model, and certainly a bit denser. I didn’t so much taste the bun as notice its substance in my mouth. For added palatability, I traded off bites of sandwich and Pringles. This worked out reasonably evenly and well. The Pringles were Pringles. The old adage about not being able to stop after popping (peeling, in this case) still held true.

It was with the drink where I actually failed, a little: I (naturally) wanted every drop that was coming to me and assumed that I simply needed to open the little water bottle and flavor pouch separately and then Combine (probably shake, with the lid put back on the former). I did have the sense to undertake this mixing procedure over the sink but not quite enough to know with a cold certainty in advance that adding more contents to an already over-full container would cause it to over-flow. Thus chastened, I sat the bottle down in the sink, my pouch of powder not quite depleted. I put the pouch down beside the sink and put the lid on the bottle and shook it some. It was very much still over-full, I could see from how the water was clearly flush with the underside of the plastic lid, but it did not run over immediately upon re-open-age. I drank some of this home-made Kool-Aid and found it flavor-light, if not -less, though that was more or less as expected for the brand. It struck me then that I probably should have pre-drunk some of that (boring! unflavored!) water before putting in the powder in order to make room, but I couldn’t imagine a kid doing that, and the question that nagged at me was how this process went down in cafeterias across the country. I put in the rest of the powder and finally noticed that my initial attempt to pour it into the bottle had brought the pouch’s ragged snoot in contact with the water and that there was a little dam of gelled flavoring stopping up the opening and extending back in a-ways. I used the pinky of my right hand to extract and consume this unintentional goo, which was much more concentrated and, consequently, flavor-full. My prize was a stained fingertip which still looks, as of this (original) writing, over-full of blood. (A cool enough special effect, had I been nine years old.) I debated wiping the bottle off to take it elsewhere for sipping, but I ultimately left it sitting open in the sink and picked it up and put it back down in there as I drank without much attempt at conservation. I took a break to eat the Kisses, which was an unremarkable process with non-noteworthy results. I ultimately found that the “bottom” of the water bottle had more flavor than the “top.”

The small mess with the water and flavoring was definitely the highlight of my Lunchable experience. While I’m obviously aware there are other varieties out there—with both different packaging and different contents—my final evaluation is as I suggested already, paragraphs ago: unremarkable. My flesh and blood mother was right to see this as a scam, assuming I once asked her for one and she turned me down, which almost certainly probably did happen at some point. Maybe renting out a theater to eat this Packed-Lunch-like would have enhanced it, but I somehow doubt that, assuming you have the critical faculties to separate one bit of an experience from the other and don’t just let everything you see and think and smell and hear and taste and touch roll up into a combination ball of living that you then toss around fondly without a care. It didn’t matter that the box was that (long-desired?) attractive yellow or that it had the Lunchables branding: What mattered was the food inside, which was thoroughly “meh.” It was Lunchappointing.

(And I FAILED to open the box properly, I realized in the revision/editing of this piece—Like an illiterate beast, I went right for the utilitarian, big box flaps rather than the cool designated press, lift, tear spot. In doing so, I rendered the splayed-open product that extra bit less Aesthetic, though I will still contend it did not need my assistance to fail in that regard.)

[montyterrible]

MAN!!

Probably my favorite shot in The Northman: I love just how “staged” it looks (how unnaturally symmetrical). The whiplash of cutting from the film’s protagonist, Amleth, tearing out a man’s throat and howling to this almost contemplative, The Last Supper-ian image depicting the previously berserk raiders at rest is just great juxtaposition. I love the dramatic posing as well and the feelings that the figures’ posture and the overall composition evoke. There’s something unsettled—and not just physically exhausted—about the men post-rampage. They look if not exactly meditative, then quiet: drained. Alone with their post-battle clarity. Perhaps toxically masculine in some vague way.

My current Robert Eggers filmography rankings (sans 2024’s Nosferatu, which I haven’t seen): The Northman (2022), The Lighthouse (2019), The VVitch (2015). In terms of his “The” trilogy, I think the one I watched most recently takes the top spot, though I will admit this is somewhat unfair to VVitch since I haven’t seen it in quite a while. Lighthouse is probably my “favorite,” and I’m not sure if he can top it—As a weird, moody Little Tale and as a claustrophobic showcase for Willem Dafoe’s and Robert Pattinson’s dueling performances, it may be unbeatable, especially by a film as “big” as Northman (or as Nosferatu seems to be). My shameful secret is that I am not immune to big stuff, however. I must needs admit that I took strongly to this movie in part because it does offer the sturdy certainty of familiar narrative beats arranged in comfortable ways. I love The Lighthouse as a whole, but I wouldn’t call its ending “satisfying,” for example. Meanwhile, The Northman is a pleasing, predictable action movie with a little bit of an edge, if I had to evaluate it succinctly.

What The Northman does is essentially compromise between accessibility and mood. In wholly practical terms, that’s what it undoubtedly takes to get a movie made at this scale, but I’m also speaking spiritually. Internally, in terms of its inner self, it has a foot in both worlds: that of easy pleasures (revenge, combat, sex, gore) and that of artisticism, weirdography. I do like that it front-loads some of the latter, with the eventual-revenger Amleth and his father pretending to be dogs and then proving they aren’t dogs, at Willem Dafoe’s urging, by burping and farting before taking a ritualistic father-son drug trip together so that Amleth can see the heart-blood tree that represents his lineage and can inherit the onus of the ruler (just in time for his treacherous uncle’s coup that forces him into exile). The phrase “rent-lowering gunshots” popped into my head during the aforementioned scene and at other points in the film, typically when someone was looking uncannily at me through the screen. I like that there’s a sort of trial-by-fire, stylistically, for… Co-Worker and/or RETVRN types who might go into this to see some blood and some glistening, toned, manly flesh straining in conservatively heroic ways.

If I continue to be utterly honest, I put off watching this movie for three reasons: 1) I am mentally ill, but, also, 2) I was worried it might be middling, and 3) I wasn’t sure just how gory and upsetting it would be. I don’t like entrails or sexual violence all that much, and this sort of stoop-necked, broad-shouldered, dead-eyed Viking Revenge Epic seemed like it might indulge (and so I watched my DVD copy for the first go-round to blunt the edge of anything objectionable via a less clear image). It does have both, but the second especially hangs around like a phantom just out of frame. I never saw anything directly in my line of vision, but there are shots of innocents (women and children) being handled in ways that make you worry about what’s going to happen to them when they’re off-screen. Maybe it’s deliberate use of the visual language of marauderly rapaciousness only up to a point or it’s just my paranoia. The violence is much more visible, but also interestingly not. There is some really gruesome stuff in the film, but The Northman doesn’t feel like it indulges. It often depicts and then moves on. The fight scenes are particularly interesting in this regard because of certain lightly idiosyncratic choices about what is and isn’t focused on. There’s a degree of obfuscation that you might interpret as artistry for how it feels like a small act of resistance in the face of the aforementioned easy pleasures. If I was to sum it up imprecisely, I would say the undergirding philosophy seems to be that not every violent act needs to be seen. The temptation would be to hard-lock the camera (and by extension the audience’s eyes) onto every clash of sharp-edged weaponry and every gouging of flesh and cut, cut, cut to draw out every last drop of excitement, tension, and revulsion, but there’s sometimes a surprising remove that makes me, Le Critic, smile and cross my arms and nod quietly in enjoyment (cuz there’s something Going On here, visually—or, you know, the fights are filmed somewhat seamlessly as a flourish and so must be choreographed in a way that mimes or minimizes blows landing).

In a similar vein, the dialogue and delivery of said dialogue strike me as meaning-full—The film is not mirthless at all, but its drama is often unashamedly straight-faced. Its words are simultaneously wooden and poetic. As much as it hedges where violence is concerned and compromises moodiness/strangeness to provide a relatively conventionally enjoyable viewing experience, its words feel unyielding to me. Whether you see this as Literary or just… approximately “historical” depends on your predilection, I suppose. Tonally, such a stance befits a harsh, uncompromising world. This just makes the magical elements or moments (even if they’re grotesque in some way) feel more satisfying and full by contrast. My latent fantasy-reading teenager delighted at the rules governing Amleth’s revenging magic blade, for example: It can only be drawn at night or at the Gates of Hel, which means Amleth physically isn’t allowed to use it to kill his uncle ahead of fate’s schedule when he’s sorely tempted at one point, and when he later has to fight during the day, he wields the sword sheathed as a bludgeon. As he actively began to take his revenge through nightly acts of killing, it struck me how we were witnessing a VVitch-esque folk horror scenario from the perspective of the monster. The attacks are identified as supernatural by the rattled farm folk, which lends a sense of strength (and, yes, of coolness as well) to Amleth’s actions. Rather than fear, we’re meant to delight in the systematic destruction of uncle Fjölnir’s life, which isn’t all that different from how the settler family of The VVitch were abused. Amleth’s haunting of his uncle and the psychological warfare against his household might be my favorite part of the film for the concept alone.

The most interesting moment in this—familial—regard (and possibly the most interesting moment in the film outright) is when Amleth finally manages to meet with his mother, who has become Fjölnir’s wife, and we learn the truth about his father’s death—That she was in on it is a fine-enough twist if not necessarily surprising. What is interesting and moving is how this conversation demolishes Amleth’s childish understanding of his parents’ relationship. In a way, he has been stuck as a child, never permitted (or forced?) to undergo the process of disillusionment with the people that raised him, and which represents a core of recognizable truth about the human experience beneath the fantastical façade. Literally, he lost his father and had to leave his mother behind to grow up elsewhere; figuratively, he’s still back in that clearing where he watched his father die. He took his parents at face value then and continued to do so into adulthood: his father a good and kind man (and ruler), his mother a loving wife. That she was a slave and was assaulted by Aurvandil, whereas she actually loves Fjölnir and has been with him (and With him) willingly, is a great revelation. Honestly, it might be needlessly undermined by her propositioning Amleth at the end of their interaction. Even as likely just a strategy to get him to drop his guard, that so obviously depraved act makes her a little too wacky and her legitimate grievances, and their significance, easier to write off. It makes rooting for her death too easy.

Yet it’s an interesting subversion for the audience if they think about it—We start with Fjölnir, with his predictably evil dark hair, versus Aurvandil, with his good-guy lighter locks, but, in the end, it turns out the former hasn’t done much of anything the latter didn’t also do. It ultimately adds a tantalizing theoretical ambivalence to Amleth’s quest for vengeance that’s in practice run over, roughshod, in the audience’s mind by the fact that we personally are aligned with Amleth and his interests, so, like him, we’re in this thing to the bitter end, despite watching him quite early in the movie visit an act of violence upon a village that doesn’t look so dissimilar to what Fjölnir wrought back at Hrafnsey. Actually: Fjölnir committed a coup and would conceivably want to keep a lot of what he conquered, seeing as a kingdom needs people and as his purpose was to seize power and set up shop, whereas Amleth was a raider, coldly taking what was valuable while razing the rest before roving on. It’s not that we aren’t also made aware of his regret, as he zeroes-in on the structure where the undesirables post-conquest are being burned alive after witnessing a young boy crying for his mother, and even has a tear-streak-like smear of blood on his otherwise frigid face to drive the point home, but so what? Fjölnir is a friggin’ farmer now! Even if it was against his will, his glory is already gone and he’s left playing at rule in an Icelandic wasteland. At this point, Amleth is grave -robbing and -defiling. And, again, the movie knows—When he won’t leave with the under-utilized witch he loves, Olga, we’re clearly supposed to see the act of returning to finish the revenge as both heroic and tragic. And perhaps the movie could have leaned harder, atheistically, on the tragedy. That Amleth could have finally seen the situation at Hrafnsey for what it was and continued down a path of healing when offered the chance to just walk away but instead took the predictable, stereotypically masculine, path to an early grave by refusing to break a child’s oath of absolute loyalty that was made in (frankly: excusable) ignorance. The promise of a glorious afterlife for him in Valhöll feels like perhaps too much of a certainty.

I will acknowledge the Literary value of this depiction—We don’t watch, say, Shakespeare to see characters make only smart choices, and lots of real people do let some perceived destiny rule them. There’s a distinctly, deliberately “traditional” vibe here, seeing, for example, as the film opens with an invocation and some lines at points throughout struck me as particularly alliterative or featured hyphenation in stilted but also evocative ways. In the credits, character roles are identified by names alongside descriptive titles, like “Finnr The Nose-Stub.” This is arguably not a modern story peddling unacknowledged toxicity so much as it is a deliberate attempt to recreate something hoary and formal with slick modern technology (and maybe comment on it a little), and thus to re-render it as visceral once more for an inattentive, dopamine-deficient audience. At what point does the obvious epic tragedy become trite, though? (Does the injection of intermittent trippy-ness, together with an overall refreshingly guileless approach to the subject matter, redeem it?)

The boring question I’ll end on—and also a secret fourth reason I was a little leery of The Northman—is how much this movie might resonate with white nationalist freaks. Our last image of Olga, with her unassuming garb and blonde hair and pale skin and twin children, isn’t so different from the sort of trad-y, retvrn-y, vaguely Viking-adjacent conservative imagery you see staged or AI-generated online. The woman in the wheat field, barefoot by the cow, a White babe in a sling round the chest, chickens and toddlers nipping at her vulnerable pink heels… Maybe it's for the best Amleth died fighting in an active volcano? (Died fighting naked against his naked uncle in an active volcano. Between this, the kiss with his mother, and the visual of his father revealing his war wound and forcing Amleth to touch it as part of an initiation into manhood, there is an undercurrent of incestuous eroticism in The Northman. Fjölnir’s final strike is a thrust as the two mutually finish one another off. Unable to bed nor blast his mother, Amleth instead takes his heat in hand and abruptly runs through his cousin-brother, the slender and soft-haired Thórir. He comes back later to impale mother as well.) I guess the reasonable take would be that we can’t cede the entirety of this culture and history and iconography, even as abstracted and caricaturized and bastardized and collaged all to death as it so often is, to racists. Furthermore, I’d imagine that Eggers as a notorious historical-detail obsessive couldn’t be fond of the mélange that chuds’ve made of this supposedly quintessentially white culture as they purport to celebrate and revive it. But still I wonder if the action could have been a bit less glorious—that final shot of Olga a bit less idealistic—in the name of undermining in some small way the never-ending video-game-ification of The Viking. I don’t think the mystical or horrific or… unconventionally erotic elements would drive the ignoramuses away. The horror is ultimately empowering rather than exclusively off-putting since it can be of the unsettling screaming and tendon-straining bloodsport sort, and nationalism is often at least kind of fruity and also… focused on the family. I don’t know that the rent-lowering gunshots are effective, I mean! The gunshots might sound pretty enticing to these weirdos, in fact! Assuming they can hack it with the doggy roleplay early on—and certain sporadic… undignified moments throughout (some bear and/or wolf roleplay a bit later?)—there’s a lot here those unsavory types would like, which, reason be damned, makes me ultimately like The Northman that bit less.

[montyterrible]

Reach out and touch fae(ce)

I wrote about FromSoftware's 2018 VR adventure game Déraciné on ze blog: I discuss the experience of watching a streamer play the game, getting annoyed about "Bloodborne 2 lol" jokes, the harmonious relationship twixt hardware limitations and design, the title's significance (plus From's titling practices in general), ETC., which includes me attempting to conjugate a French verb...

Here is the link. Below is a representative chunk:

Déraciné is very modest in scale. It is primarily set within a single school/orphanage map and is not all that long either. It is also modest visually, with only fleeting, limited animations, which heavily contributes to the “static” feeling I alluded to before. It’s genuinely impressive, however, how well the technology and the game design intertwine and complement one another. The core conceit is that you play as a faerie, a being that is invisible to the human characters and that also exists somewhat outside time. Consequently, you perceive the world as largely unmoving. You can find the various characters frozen in place, both in their current physical location and as translucent golden echoes of their recent past so that the game can imply their actions rather than show them outright. A person might move a little if you interact with them, but any major changes will happen after a clean break that takes you into the next “epoch” (read: level or stage). This accommodates a more budget-conscious approach to storytelling while also serving the mood, as there can be uncertainty at times about what exactly you’ll find after a jump that could take you into the near or somewhat more distant past or future as the story progresses. Even the load times can ultimately contribute since they hold you in that moment of chronological uncertainty for longer, and/or can serve as more of a definitive end point or period of decompression for a particular story beat or feeling. It’s a perfect example of how a seeming limitation can serve the artistry better than a smoother, more seamless experience might.

The conceit that the player is a magical creature further justifies the teleportation method of movement that the game employs and that, as I understand it, tends to result in fewer issues with motion sickness in VR. In other games, though, it just looks unappealing and unnatural to me. Here, it Makes Sense for the type of being that you are. Furthermore, the way that you can only shift from one predetermined position to another mimics the perspective that I associate with adventure games, where “exploring” actually meant rooting yourself in front of one scene or the other. I have to imagine this was easier to program and playtest since the player cannot freely move around and collide with things, or potentially slip out of bounds. It also probably makes puzzling a bit easier since it limits the number of potential points of meaningful interaction to just where you are allowed to go. The visual of a quiet, museum-esque world populated with what amount to statues that you approach almost like exhibits or wax-work tableaux adds to the unsettling atmosphere when the game gets a little spooky (see, especially, when it ultimately subverts your expectation by showing you something that can move freely).

[montyterrible]

Mememaw & I

Or—Big Boy, Big Problems: “This might be normal in your family, but it’s not right.”

Actual content aside, “Hillbilly Elegy” is a hell of a title, and I’ve had it stuck in my head ever since I first heard it. (The subtitle, “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” is pure, dry, unwieldy conservative-speak, and I’m going to pretend it doesn’t exist.) You’ve got the unlikely pairing of “hillbilly” with the big-boy poetic noun “elegy”; the rhyme, I honestly could do without (it tickles my brain in an annoying way), but the consonance with the “L” sound is a real treat for how… atypical it is. I find it quite the evocative title overall and think that it’s unfortunate it sits atop THIS: alleged couch-humper, soon-to-be Vice President, and confirmed Online weirdo JD Vance’s 2016 memoir, which I will almost certainly never read, and Ron Howard’s 2020 film adaptation, which I only finally watched this past summer out of morbid curiosity.

The word that now comes to mind, re. that movie, is “pornographic.” For one thing, I think Vance’s memoir could be called masturbatory. For another, this feels like it’s constructed to provide some sense of cathartic release for specific groups of people—almost certainly well-bred conservatives, whose contempt for their own constituents (see their political aims, which uniformly favor the rich and powerful) is justified by the desperate ignorance and incompetence showcased here, but also, probably, liberals, whose own preconceptions about the poor old hillfolk get confirmed as well. You can easily imagine the sympathetic chatter at the black-tie Raytheon-sponsored fundraiser. Just like adult films stereotypically deal in paper-thin character concepts that serve a stock function for pleasurous purposes (The Pizza Guy, The Step-Sister, The Babysitter), here you have the same sort of thing with The Wise Grandma, The Burnout Teens, The Irrepressible Junkie Mother, and so on. Except, like, with tears as the fluid of note.

There’s a line in the movie that made it into the trailer in a really prominent sort of way (once the music swells and we’re being shown all this footage that’s supposed to make our spirits soar on wings of feeling), where the grandmother says “Everyone in this world is one of three kinds: good Terminator, a bad Terminator, and neutral,” and it’s another one of those… artistic choices that agitates my brain. I get that the intent is for it to be the wisdom equivalent of drinking at least two non-diet Cokes per day while watching what has been called “the idiot box,” and maybe it’s even meant to be a little awkward (a little… under-educated) and like something a high-schooler would write down as meaningful; however, I just don’t think it sounds good, even assuming that intent. The “and neutral” deflates the whole thing with its awkward difference and lack of pizzazz. It should have just been “Good Terminator, and Bad Terminator,” is my opinion, and also that it’s like the whole movie in microcosm: just a weird misfire and awkwardly constructed. After the great title, this is the other bit of Hillbilly Elegy that’s stuck with me the past several years. Stuck in my mental craw, more like.

Clearly there’s supposed to be a lot of pathos in all this. Ron Howard doesn’t strike me as someone who’d intentionally approach this particular story entirely as a comedy, but I spent a lot of the movie’s runtime laughing at it because it is so absurd. There’s stuff that’s obviously meant as a joke, but there are a lot of things that seem to function that way unintentionally—like the scene where young Vance’s mom comes in requesting his pee for a drug test since she’s using again, and then they start fighting, and then grandma busts in demanding to know what’s going on, and then Vance angrily explains the situation and ends up storming out to go repeatedly throw a basketball against the side of the house, and then his “Mamaw” comes out and gives him what amounts to a passionate speech about the importance of appeasement, and then she holds out the pee cup for him to take and go fill (and then we watch him go and fill it for some reason)…

If you can imagine some sort of familial ignominy that’ll result in people screaming obscenities and smacking each other, it’s probably here. Or, that’s how it feels, at any rate. Absolutely none of this is actually funny in real-world terms (it’s abuse, after all), but here it’s just like… Jerry Springer. Again, I keep thinking lewd, rude, and bereft of value beyond the basest feelings of enjoyment. What moments of more genuine investment it cultivates are cheapened by the tactless intensity of the whole. It’s so consistently gross and over-the-top in its depictions of poverty and domestic strife—see the mom, Bev, being entertained by the couple next door having their own row at one point, without an ounce of self-awareness on the part of either her or the film—that it just can’t be read as anything other than disgusting comedy. It might be camp, it’s such a critical misfire tonally. I genuinely do not think this impression is a result of the additional knowledge that this is supposed to be the highly affecting origin story of one JD Vance and, instead, that Hillbilly Elegy is just incompetently dramatic.

It feels like people are screaming at each other in every scene, and you eventually hit a point of diminishing returns with that sort of heightened emotion, where it stops being traumatizing and just becomes whacky. Never mind that the story is full of stereotypes and predictable dramatic beats, which also make it harder to take seriously. It puts me in mind of the fake “Oscar Gold” film from the adult animated sitcom American Dad (quick warning for an ableist slur in the fake trailer)—In the episode “Tearjerker” (2008), the titular villain schemes to create a movie so award-winningly sad that it will kill people, with the very intentional joke being that the film in question is nothing but outrageous dramatic clichés piled on top of one another to the point that it wouldn’t actually win awards or make someone cry. Part of what makes the premise so funny, however, is the underlying logic that real hacks and audiences could very well agree with—that more sad stuff equals bigger feels, and what’s “bad” about that? It’s a great bit for a comedy but a bad fit for what is supposed to be a (real) serious, straightforward film.

This sort of overly saccharine construction ultimately works in the favor of a rural horror-comedy pastiche like Ti West’s Pearl (2022), with any more genuine-feeling dramatic moments subsumed into the exploitative, leering whole, but Hillbilly Elegy is much grosser and less… convincing to me due to its ostensible goal of, overall, being some kind of sympathetic, meaningful depiction of real life. Its seemingly, uncritically sentimental (even romantic) conception of the story being told renders it unable to present the absurd comedy of the situations, performances, and writing in a way that resonates if you’re able to parse tone at all. The exploitation eats the film from the inside out, leaving behind a shell of meaning and “representation” incapable of being Of Note. I strongly feel that I could have written more or less this exact story without any direct personal experience with this level of poverty or addiction, just based on stereotypes and hearsay. To me, it reads as inelegant fantasy and as sociologically worthless. As only an off-putting comedy (as a spiritual sibling in derangement to Howard’s 2000 How the Grinch Stole Christmas), it has its merits! It is highly quotable in your most offensive approximation of an American hillbilly accent.

The messaging of Hillbilly Elegy is ultimately as rote and gross as its plot and characters—It’s all individual responsibility, with a bit of family worship thrown in. It’s the American mindset (conservative and liberal) exemplified. There’s all this emphasis on personal strength and overcoming hardship. It literally begins with a preacher on the radio doing that Christian thing of using God/faith and those long-term promises to help bear up under an “American Dream” deferred. In other words, the usual supernatural “Maybe He will and maybe He won’t” excuses for systemic failures that I’ve heard myself since childhood. Movie Vance’s whole character arc weirdly pivots on him learning to put family first sometimes but also to advance his personal goals. This conflicting messaging is established early on with a bullying incident at the “swim hole,” where Narrator Vance shares some old family wisdom about not starting fights but finishing them if they do start… unless you can’t finish them, in which case your family will finish them for you.

It’s a strange tension, between needing to man up and do it yourself but also making sure you have that strong family there to back you up. In the end, Vance has to embrace his mother but also push her away to reap the rewards of his hard work. Of course, within the story, he wouldn’t have had the opportunity without someone (Mamaw) stepping in to berate him into shape, which is a virtue since it happens within the family between individuals but would be a mortal sin, to this worldview, if it took the form of, say, some sort of external social support network. (See also: Mamaw giving a very literal handout to another less-well-off neighbor kid.) The problem isn’t that the healthcare system is a profit-seeking nightmare willing to let you die in the street if you don’t have enough credit cards to charge and/or insurance—No, it’s all about your unwillingness to stop being so got-dang sick!

Movie Vance’s final words to his mother say it all. After spending an entire day, which takes the length of the whole movie in between flashbacks, trying to find a spot for her to recover from her overdose and receive help (and fighting about her not wanting the help, and almost getting knifed while trying to bust in and fight a man who called her a whore…), Vance finally gets her settled at a motel, goes to get some groceries, and then comes back to find her in the bathroom with a needle. Cue the fighting and screaming! After something like a sweet moment—a visual echo of a time when a younger Vance comforted his crying mother in her bedroom—he’s got to go in order to make his big boy job interview, so he tells her that Lindsay, his sister, is coming and that “I really hope you’ll wait for her.” It’s not that working to help yourself and taking help when it’s offered aren't important, even to me, a godless leftist, but you just know that this is meant to be another Individual Responsibility thing. It’s time for his mother to stop being weak and start being strong, like Donald Trump.

The (final) Thing of it all is that there are parts of this story that are recognizable. I actually have a bit of that outrageous drama and dysfunction on at least one side of my own family. It’s not as severe as what’s depicted in Hillbilly Elegy, but it is so ridiculous and seemingly inevitable that it becomes funny in just the same way. The relationship between Fantasy Vance and Mamaw also feels very real to me, in the sense that I’ve taught students a narrative essay in the past, and I eventually stopped teaching it in part because I had to hear so many stories like this one—about kids from “broken homes” who were essentially raised and set straight by grandparents who then died. Whatever the exact ratio of truth to lies in Vance’s story (either version?), I do think there’s probably an element of real feeling in there. The tragedy of JD Vance isn’t what he thinks it is, though: It’s that his rougher experiences, whatever they were, radicalized him in the wrong direction, making him just another Republican dickbag rather than an empathetic person, like I am. So fuck ‘em! Hasta la vista, baby!

[montyterrible]

Unearthing a Friend—True Detective: Night Country (2024) Impressions

After recently, finally, watching the new season of True Detective, I wanted to put together some thoughts, but I’m going to call these “impressions” rather than “thoughts” since I’m not approaching this assessment as really comprehensive/final. If I was to write such a thing, it would probably need to come after some time has passed. I just revisited season three prior to watching season four, and I found my feelings about it significantly improved after some time away. I would assume my evaluation of Night Country could similarly change with time.

Honestly, I’m a little driven to write this now out of relief—My Twitter feed was nothing but negative reactions to the show at the time of its airing, and I was actually surprised that it performed so well in terms of ratings based on the impressions I was seeing. Certain big complaints seemed consistent: that the mystery wasn’t compelling (or didn’t progress in a compelling way), that the show was too overtly supernatural in contrast to the previous seasons, and possibly that the music was worse, though my memory is that the first two were emphasized more. I did wonder for a bit if I had imagined the hate, but having since seen that same vitriol in the YouTube comments for songs featured on the season’s soundtrack, I decided that it was still worth taking the time to put together this Take. In the spirit of Internet Content Creation, I’m going to address my personal feelings about each of those potential issues with Night Country as items in a clearly delineated list.

These impressions will contain spoilers for all seasons of True Detective, to one degree or another, and I’m also going to assume familiarity with the plot of Night Country so that I don’t have to devote space to summary.

GRIPE ONE: THE CASE

Put simply, I did not see the pacing issues with the show. The singular spot where I felt it drag a bit was actually in the last episode, during the interval where Danvers and Navarro are back at the Tsalal station during the storm. It’s where the show… digs in and where it feels like answers are coming or should be coming, but it just seemed to me like either they weren’t coming, weren’t coming fast enough, or weren’t satisfactory. This impression dips a little into gripe two, but I think I was very much on edge about the solution to the mystery surrounding Annie K’s murder and the death of the Tsalal researchers only being answered supernaturally. I wanted the story to show me its hand, but it was still holding back at that point, despite the protagonists finally getting their mitts on the elusive Raymond Clark and this being the finale.

I’ll return to the supernatural elements in a moment, but what I do want to emphasize here is that I’m satisfied with The Case. I don’t think you can quantitatively assess the quality of a mystery/thriller (number of twists per episode? exactly how many members of the conspiracy?), but I’m willing to concede that maybe this case is simpler than the ones from the previous seasons and just has certain elements of obfuscation drawing it out, but I’m also going to argue that I never felt like no progress was being made. Each episode contributes something, and, also, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this mystery not being… mathematically comparable to the others, or something. True Detective has always placed heavy emphasis on character and mood, and while I’m no genre savant, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s probably broadly true of this sort of narrative.

We all know there are only so many stories to be told, so the particulars of who did what exactly have to be embellished in other ways to make familiar beats compelling. You can do that with a playful narrative chronology, which this series has used in the past to great effect, but you can also do it with interesting imagery or through characterization. A big part of what made season one so compelling was not the ritualistic murder: It was the two kind of divergently shitty men who were trying to solve it, and how they interacted with one another. The performances and characterization are a huge part of the appeal. It was about the ways in which the people investigating the case were fucked up, which is both probably a staple of the genre and also a consistent element of this specific series. Night Country is arguably as much about Danvers and Navarro and young Peter and his dirty cop father, Hank, as it is about the case, but that’s in keeping with “tradition,” as far as I’m concerned.

Hank, especially, has this whole sub-plot about getting scammed in a “mail-order bride” sort of deal that has no bearing on the central mystery, as near as I can tell, but that just humanizes him. Ditto the story he tells about when an even younger Peter fell through the ice and had to be saved. When he’s finally holding a gun on Danvers while Peter holds a gun on him and we know he (Hank) is going to die from how he finally reveals his involvement in moving Annie K’s body (but not in her death), I felt something for him because of the work done with his character prior to that moment. The guy is corrupt and maybe abusive, but the goal is to make you feel bad for him anyway when his time in the main plot is up. Thus, we see some investment in him as an individual on the side.

Certain character-specific things, like Navarro’s sister’s struggle with mental illness, have a tangential, potential relevance to the central mystery because of how it is suggested that they flirt with the same supernatural elements or forces. It’s a good “excuse”—which I personally don’t need but that I can understand being seen as a plus for storytelling purposes—to make sub-stories feel more important and less like digressions.

Writing-wise, I did feel a difference in episode one that is very hard for me to pin down, but that feeling ultimately disappeared. I came to love these characters in much the same way that I did the casts from previous seasons: Danvers and Navarro are fucked up in very recognizable ways and for very familiar reasons, but there’s enough style here (via the writing and the performances and so forth) that I became very fond of them.

Jodie Foster delivers some of Danvers’ most crotchety or antisocial lines in ways that I found very funny, and the fact that the character is still sexually active (to the point of it being a professional liability) despite her age and her status as a Bereaved Mother felt like a reasonable subversion. Kali Reis is equally great as Navarro for her own subversive reasons—She’s both The Muscle of the pair but also very sensitive and ironically vulnerable. John Hawkes’ Hank is dirty but not in the same quintessentially slovenly way that W. Earl Brown’s Teague Dixon was in season two. There’s a reserve and neatness about him that is simultaneously more and less suspicious. I had a special fondness for Finn Bennett’s Peter, however, and he might be my favorite character if I had to choose, because of his inexperience. We’ve seen floundering or failed cop relationships and marriages in the series before, but I think his youth makes his struggle with a very familiarly uneven work-life balance more interesting. This season is sort of about the “corruption” of Peter under Danvers’ mentorship, and seeing him arrive at that lowest point in “Part 5” is a big… part of why that might be my favorite episode of the season. Peter’s slow going and/or absence from “Part 6” also contributes to my more mixed feelings about it and how it draws things out.

(Side note: My biggest problem with the writing is the titling of each episode. It’s hard to get excited for “Part 3” in contrast to something like “The Big Never.” Maybe that’s an intentional stylistic break from the past, but I always liked having the Literary titles to go with the show’s marginally pretentious overall style.)

The season could actually have been drawn out further (perhaps to the “standard” eight episodes) and the case rendered more complex-feeling had they gone with a mixed chronology again, like in seasons one and three; however, I think Issa López and her collaborators made the right choice in not going back to that well again. Season one had primarily two timelines, and season three largely focused on three, and I think trying to further escalate that, or else retreading the same ground, would only have made season four feel more derivative. Instead, we have a more conventional narrative structure with rare flashbacks. We receive information about past events from characters in the present and fill in gaps as we go. It’s conventional, but so are the majority of stories. Here, as there, the thrill comes not so much from the underlying structure as it does from the particulars fitted to that frame.

GRIPE TWO: THE SUPERNATURAL

This, as I said before, was my biggest fear: That I was going to get to the end of the season and find out that Annie K’s ghost really did kill the Tsalal researchers. And maybe she did still do that—maybe only metaphorically by inspiring the act of revenge on her behalf in non-literal spirit, or maybe literally instead, since the coalition of armed women sent the men out into the snow and ice to see if they would be taken or if they would survive. What precisely happened out there is still an unknown even after “everything” is revealed. Maybe Annie or some other entity actually did get them. What we are given overall, though, is what I would call “enough.”

While True Detective has always had some element of the supernatural, that was previously almost strictly flirtation. It’s more of a vibe, if memory serves, in season one, but Ray Velcoro has a near-death experience in season two that accurately predicts his own true death in the finale. Season three has these sometimes uneasy, sometimes sad moments where Wayne Hays seems to be aware of himself across timelines, almost like a self-haunting. There’s always also been plausible deniability, is my memory, too, though: In the last example, in particular, the excuse for the occasional trippy-ness is Hays’ degrading memory. As he loses himself in memories and also loses those memories, he’s breaking down, internally, so things get smudged and overlap. That’s the excuse. And season four does still have excuses, even if the flirtation has escalated to, like, sexting or maybe going to first base with the supernatural.

Not everything has a rational explanation (one element the show itself emphasizes being the mystery of how Annie K’s tongue showed up at Tsalal so long after her murder), but I think there’s still “enough.” That first murder and its follow-up act of revenge both have sensical explanations, and the supernatural is left to elements more so on the fringe, which I think was the right call, lest Night Country become an entirely different show. I’m willing to accept that… ratio of explainable to unexplainable events. Furthermore, certain supernatural elements could still be explained away, if you so desire, because of mental illness, strain, wild coincidence, imminent death from exposure to the elements, or maybe avalanches. For me, trying to resolve everything post-viewing has been an ongoing little diversion that I’ve enjoyed.

There’s no accounting for everyone’s personal taste, however, so I’m not saying I can prove with science that the season’s extra emphasis on spiritual phenomena(?) has to be acceptable to everyone. I’ve long been a fan of realism tinged with a certain degree of the fantastical. I like ghost stories and the Gothic sub-genre of horror. In fact, the hyper-specific hook that really got me to buy into Night Country during that initial viewing is what could be considered a throwaway line very early in the season comparing the Tsalal men to monks. Monasteries and monks are staples of Gothic horror (see, for example, Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk), and feeling that link was what endeared this season to me back when I was still getting a feel for the characters and writing and music. I had that impression in the back of my mind for the whole season, and it came to the forefront hard when we finally see the Tsalal researchers kill Annie K as a group. It wasn’t one of them—It was all of them, which emphasizes their shared zealotry and brotherhood, their weird and perverted monasticism, that feels so Gothic to me. Seasons one and three could be classified as Southern Gothic, so there’s an associative link for me here that might not be felt by everyone.

It also has to be acknowledged that the supernatural elements of the season dovetail with its increased focus on what could be summed up as “Exploring Indigenous Themes” (to use the name of a special feature from the physical release). The inciting crime is the murder of a native woman by non-natives who have a conspiratorial relationship with a mining company, harming lands they’ve colonized in the name of profits and science. However, I don’t want to speak too authoritatively on this subject, as I’m one extremely white boy. There’s Stuff to be written in this vein, for sure—how indigenous lives were being essentially sacrificed for these men and their corporate partners to create a potential cure for death that would, undoubtedly, have not been shared freely with their victims even if it could have been accomplished.

As for how this fits with the previously established iconography of the creepy spiral and the theme of time and names like “Tuttle” and “Cohle”: I either groaned aloud (or considered it) when Clark actually brought out the “flat circle” thing in his raving (which has always been a bit cringe/try-hard, tbh!), but I’m otherwise fine with the rest. I would prefer that the series be a True Anthology and have each season as its own, separate entity, but López only walked through a door Nic Pizzolatto himself opened already, particularly in season three. There, one potential solution to the mystery is that it’s part of the same conspiracy from season one, but this is a red herring for the audience. It’s one of the clever things about that season—that it looks and feels a bit like a regression to season one after the backlash to season two, but rather than outright “playing the hits,” it tricks the audience a little bit and instead has its own much smaller and more personal (and sad) conspiracy surrounding the disappearance of its missing children.

Somewhat similarly, Night Country toys with what the spiral even means. It may be a traditional warning about thin ice, and it might be older than human beings. That’s part of the cosmic horror, but it also ties in with the “indigenous” theming: something about the appropriation of native icons, landmarks, and the like. Nominally Christian Tuttle and co. are trespassers in a realm they don’t understand. Maybe it’s Cthulhu, or maybe it’s just the old, very real historical theft we live with every day in this country.

GRIPE THREE: MUSIC, IN ONE SENSE OR THE OTHER

The music is fine? I would perhaps concede that the season has a vaguely “pop-ier” vibe than the previous ones. Perhaps having Billie Eilish for the opening theme feels too “contemporary” and sets a tone the rest of the licensed score can’t shake. You could possibly use math and research to decide if the licensed tracks are too frequent now or too new(?) to be “appropriate” for True Detective, but I have next-to-no noteworthy negative feelings about the specific composition of the soundscape. In fact, I’ve found myself listening to certain songs on my own time as well. I was originally going to point out that I only noticed one on-the-nose needle drop, but a second viewing did reveal more of that sort of thing. Though if having overly literal needle drops is some kind of deeply disqualifying measurement of quality, then there’s a lot of media out there with the same “critical” issue.

What I’m going to twist this final item to be about instead is a “make music together,” collaborative or creative, sense of the word, an admittedly loose association—less the singular element of music and more the end-result of the combined effort behind the show, because that was itself a major element of the discussion around Night Country when it was airing.

I’m somewhat dancing around saying “Nic Pizzolatto’s unprofessional behavior” or maybe “It must really piss Nic Pizzolatto off to see ‘Created by Issa López’ in the opening credits for what is technically the fourth season of ‘his’ show.” What I don’t want to do is get lost in the weeds and/or do a bunch of summarizing (and research!) recounting the, frankly, troubled history of this series. The fact that season one aired in 2014, season two in 2015, three in 2019, and four (with a subtitle and attendant reboot-y vibe) in 2024 says enough, hopefully. While the streaming era of serialized TV-style storytelling has made multi-year gaps between installments more commonplace, this erratic release schedule was once a sign of troubled development or simply would not have been a thing. Season three’s pivot back toward season one, even if only superficially or presentationally, further speaks to the difficulty underpinning this enterprise.

Art in this world is unfortunately, invariably bound up with industry. Pizzolatto could have made True Detective season one a novel and kept more control, but he made it a TV series instead, which made it no longer only his. My opinion is that the show should have had a true creative reset each season, that it should have been a full anthology with a different guiding hand each year. I’m going to go so far as to say that I would welcome a comedy version of the show: Run the full gamut of detective archetypes and mystery sub-genres, with perhaps certain constants, like the emphasis on character and the interplay between at least two leads who are investigators of some sort. But the series has also seemed to struggle with having a consistent creative vision per season after the first, unless you count Pizzolatto’s involvement. This isn’t uncommon for regular television, but it’s felt to me like something of a failure to make good on True Detective’s more artsy side. Whether you agree with López’s vision for the show or not, her name is all over Night Country in a way that I think feels right for the series on a conceptual level. It’s still a collaboration, but you can claim, at least on paper, that there’s an identifiable hand consistently on the wheel in a way that surpasses even season one, with its split between Cary Joji Fukunaga’s directing and Pizzolatto’s writing. If the soundtrack is different than before, then, I’d consider that part of the vision and accept it as such.

We’re past the point now where I think feminist pop-cultural analysis of this sort of media can begin and end with “more women = good” (if that was ever truly acceptable), but it’s hard to ignore that we have a Mexican woman steering the show and suddenly we’re seeing not only a lot more women in prominent roles, but also women with more diverse appearances and backgrounds. Women are a major part of detective/mystery fiction, even if they’re archetypes, but Night Country spotlights, digs into, sits with, and listens to women in a way the show simply hasn’t before.

The standout scene for me is the opening of “Part 3,” which is one of the rare flashbacks and thus incredibly precious for it: Navarro shows up to arrest a still living Annie K, only to get pulled into a birthing. Her presence is initially a discomfort for the pregnant woman, and Navarro herself, to her cop-ly credit, seems uncomfortable too. Over the course of this scene, she sheds her jacket and then her hat, becoming a smidgeon less cop-like. There’s a tension between her role as law enforcement (there to arrest Annie, specifically, and more broadly as an agent of the white supremacist government and corporate entities oppressing these women), as a woman herself, and as someone with an indigenous background who feels a bit alienated from it. She’s close to it and moves with a certain confidence, but a major pain point for her is that she never learned her Iñupiaq name from her mother and so is still cut off in this very personal way. When the woman at the center of all this attention gives birth, there’s an interval where it’s uncertain if the child will survive. Dread builds and builds, but ultimately the baby is ok. Navarro is visibly relieved, and while we don’t see the full interaction with Annie K post-birth, we can assume that maybe she didn’t walk out in cuffs after all.

It's a wildly different scene from anything previously put into the show and something Pizzolatto probably either couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) write, at least based on the available precedents. This is what people who scream about the horrors of “DEI” and such racist nonsense are willfully excluding from their media landscape and from the narratives they expose themselves to: a different perspective, to be blunt. Fucking empathy! I’m not a woman or indigenous, but I’m drawn to the drama and the intimacy and the characterization that occurs in this scene. It has its particulars but still speaks the universal language of pathos. Alienation, sister/brotherhood, love. It’s also very plot-relevant (if you must) given how the increased threat of stillbirths is directly related to the mine and Tsalal. It is compelling “music.”

The highest praise I could offer from my particular experience with Night Country was that I had been watching it one episode at a time during my workouts, which was also how I rewatched the third season, but I watched the last two episodes in the same sitting without any distractions because I wanted to be fully present for them. And, after finishing this (slight?) season, I went back to the beginning and started over. The fact that I was doing this writing probably influenced that choice, but I also wasn’t ready to move on from the characters, the mood (music included), and the mystery just yet. And rewatching the season gave me a better appreciation for how even some smaller things are knit together. It still feels very deliberately constructed and cohesive to me, even if the whole has disappointed some people.

[montyterrible]

“God Grante That She Lye Stille” (Cynthia Asquith)

I’m a little confused as to why this story is in a science fiction collection (The Venus Factor, from 1977, which I’ve had on my shelf forever and which apparently shares a name with a diet book, to the chagrin of at least one Amazon reviewer). This is a pretty respectable ghost story—big house, sins of ancestors, young and sensitive woman, manly doctor POV character. It’s not science fiction in any discernible way, but there’s enough interesting or compelling stuff in there with the familiar to make it worth reading. Its climactic moment of horror, which I will not spoil, is executed in a way that I would call… “classic.” What it doesn’t describe is made so much scarier by the little that it does. There’s a… “tastefulness” to it (a reluctance to over-indulge in luridness but with an in-universe excuse) that I’d casually, unduly associate with old gothic modes, if we assume an un-modern chasteness the way one tends to.

The story also contains the line “Just let me Ancient-Mariner you,” which is a delightful use of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem as a verb, something I have never seen before.

My criticism would be that I think this idea could have been expanded into a novella. There’s some acceleration of events that works well to build tension and to compel you to read it in one go, but you could also imagine it drawn out over more pages as well.

Google prioritizes an adaptation of the story, which I have to imagine could be annoying if Asquith and/or the original “God Grante…” has/have fans. Or I’m projecting my own snobbishness.

[montyterrible]

At least 76% plastic

I’m a consummate defender of Ron Howard’s live-action Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)—and, to a much lesser extent, Bo Welch’s 2003 Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat—not because I think the movie/either movie is particularly “good” but because they are at least not boring. They have an interesting chaotic and even gross energy. I guess there’s a case to be made for them having camp value since the ostensible intent was to mimic the iconic whimsy and color of a Seuss book, but the end-results are just trippy, uncanny, horny, racist, etc. Jim Carrey and Mike Myers are great as the Grinch and Cat, respectively, but I don’t think for the intended reasons.

Meanwhile, the 2012 Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax (another kids’ movie I skipped originally) is just boring and lacks even the off-putting (accidental?) artistry of the aforementioned two live-action movies. Watching it, I felt exactly what I’ve frequently seen other people decry about Howard’s Grinch: That it’s too long, for one thing, spoiling the pristine pacing of the Seuss original and the earlier animated adaptation, which is like a third to a fourth of this newer runtime. The difference is that I find stuff like the Whos throwing a key party delightful but think the many little moments of additional “whimsy” Illumination tries to cram into Lorax are unpalatable violations of the original work’s mood. The difference is almost purely subjective, of course, but I would still argue for The Grinch treatment being more interesting because it is such a wild, wide swing (and a miss). Meanwhile, the added stuff of The Lorax is very safe and sanitized and is just mostly comprised of goofiness that children would probably enjoy (trademark). It is, ironically, as texture-less and vapid as the corporate-controlled façade and endless profiteering the movie supposedly critiques.

One visual that I actually liked was the design of the very important Truffula Trees. Their colorful tufts looked so pleasant to touch (and maybe delicious). Their allure—to the animals, to the Once-ler for his “Thneed”-making, to the deprived people of the flimsy utopia of “Thneedville” as a symbol of hope—is perfectly, primally presented. And the movie kind of does justice to the aged Once-ler’s house, at least on its first appearance, when it’s meant to be ominous, though that feeling does not stick around for subsequent scenes or even for that entire initial visit once The Whimsy kicks in.

I have always been drawn to horror, and the Once-ler and his house as depicted in the Seuss book are early images in that vein that I still feel on a deep, subconscious level. I loved how the book reduces the Once-ler to just his long arms, keeping the body hidden. Of course, The Lorax movie as good as resents suggestion/implication and requires a maximalist telling to make the story fit the feature film outline. The child from the book’s frame narrative now has his own story that trades off with the Once-ler’s, and the two arcs muddy the waters greatly in terms of pathos. There’s a new, additional profiteering capitalist, Mr. O’Hare, to serve as an antagonist for the story, where the original book was more of a parable and less of a conventional narrative with such rote dramatic stakes. The way that it concluded so ambiguously by exhorting the frame narrative child (and, by extension, the reader) to be better than the Once-ler without ending on a conventionally “happy” note is part of what gives it so much force and staying power (and contributes to The Gloom that I enjoyed). I resent the movie’s de-fanging of the original narrative’s criticism by virtue of being too damn long and boring—Because the Once-ler’s story now ends before the movie does, he has to offer the exhortation/moral too early, so they also slap those words on-screen again when the movie finally does actually conclude, with the Once-ler and Lorax embracing as friends. The world gets better because Ted Wiggins cares a lot; you, the viewer, need not feel so terribly pressed to do anything.

Depicting the Once-ler at all is a mistake, and not just because his bland human design sucks all the mystery and fun out of the character. It also bungles his thematic purpose: He is the Once-ler, an embodiment of the mistakes of the past, passing his story and the hope for the future onto his audience. Who he was is unimportant (you could argue that he’s not one person so much as a whole generation and/or class of people), and what matters is strictly what he did (wrong). He and his name are allegorical and vague. We’re not meant to latch onto him and to instead find something familiar and relatable in the child as our proxy. By contrast, the movie now asks us to root for and empathize with the Once-ler as well, and now he’s a concrete personality who was for some reason named “Once-ler” by his parents, which is just extremely odd, even more so when you throw in the stereotypically redneck-esque brothers named “Chet” and “Brett.”

Giving the Once-ler’s audience a name and an arc further dilutes the thematic and atmospheric power of the book, as that nameless kid is now “Ted Wiggins” specifically and no longer all of us. Giving him a motivation for visiting the Once-ler is also bad. In the book, we don’t know all the details regarding why the child is seeking this man-person-thing out, but it works in a very emotionally graspable way: It’s the haunted house, the neighborhood hermit (Old Man Once-ler), a novelty, maybe a dare or rite of passage of sorts. It can, in its vagueness, work with so many different storytelling concepts or frameworks involving children and local spooky mysteries. Having this “Ted” go to the Once-ler because he needs a tree in order to Get With Taylor Swift just feels like sacrilege, on top of being more vibe-wrecking specificity.

What I will give this narrative thread is that I think Ted subtly forgets this motivation in the end in a way that I actually liked: When he finally gets to plant the seed of the last Truffula Tree in the center of Thneedville (after a sequence of animated Antics that includes a radical snowboarding granny!), he’s so lost in the moment that he’s surprised when Swift’s Audrey gives him a peck on the cheek. Shortly before that, he also borrows the Lorax’s language in trying to win over the town by “speak[ing] for the trees.” I wish there was perhaps more of a spotlight placed on this transformation—how Ted doesn’t really care about trees initially (they’re just a means to an end, like they were for the Once-ler)—but he ultimately realizes that the health of the planet matters more than some mammalian milestone. The arc’s there, but it could have been drawn out as a new explicit moral that could have worked with this slick, modern Lorax, as one for the Smartphone Age youth, as it were. I am ultimately saying that this adaptation needed to change even more to function properly as a successor to the original.

The very beginning of The Lorax lulled me into a false sense of hope regarding the overall package, as there’s a movie-original rhyming bit delivered by the Lorax to set the stage that I felt matched ok enough with the source material, but I wish there was more that felt so effortful about this re-telling. There’s some “clever” incorporation of Seuss’ original words at points, and there are also some musical numbers that did not impress me on the first viewing. I lowered the volume a few notches for each one of them, in fact.

I didn’t (and still don’t) think any of these songs needed to be here, though I’ve changed my mind about them feeling what I was going to describe as “perfunctory.” That “you feel every song in [the movie] as a song first and foremost.” The comparison I was going to make was to musical theater, where what you want from a musical number is for the sentiment it expresses or the way that it advances the plot or deepens the audience’s understanding of a character to feel seamless—When you forget that the characters are even singing because it’s such a natural extension of the storytelling that it sweeps you away. Some of the musical numbers in The Lorax are even staged a bit like musical musical numbers, funnily enough. That’s a certain stylization I can respect. And they’ve grown on me over time (and after a second viewing), which also parallels my experience with musicals like Into the Woods. There was a “hollow, like a dead tree” final pronouncement attached to this train of thought originally, but I’m going to amend that slightly: Like a stricken, dying, or dead tree, there are fleeting glimpses of beauty or old grandeur in The Lorax, but also those tell-tale dead branches and unsightly growths that tell you the thing is not totally healthy.

[montyterrible]

Miller’s Actually-She’s-Eighteen

Pithy Letterboxd-style review (read: attempted virality): They finally made a movie adaptation of the YA-obsessed adult’s idea of what adult literature is.

You might get the impression a movie about an inappropriate student-teacher relationship that opens with the line “What is an adult?” and ends with Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” is some kind of self-aware parody or satire. While Jade Halley Bartlett’s Miller’s Girl (2024) certainly has moments of what might generously be called “clarity” (re. subjects like writing and sexual dynamics)—more tortuously: “quasi-didactic”—it feels more or less like a straightforward, even predictable telling of this kind of story. (Or, in an era of excessive self-awareness—“He’s Right Behind Me, Isn’t He?”—maybe this is the radical approach.) I found the film’s tone fascinating, however. There are fleeting notes of horror in the visuals and soundscape, and then there’s stuff that feels artlessly moving or wistful or romantic. It strikes me as, overall, not at all the “slick” sort of movie where I should be seeing pop-ups highlighting messages from people’s cellphones, but there they are.

Similarly, the dialogue is a mix of the sort of awkward, “unrealistic,” strained, “literary” style that I personally enjoy with an occasional frankness or even crassness that borders on parody again by virtue of its extreme contrast. Here are several examples, all taken from throughout the same scene:

“I’m smokin’ now. No plans for it to define me yet.”

“It becomes a conversation about achieving emancipation from your inherited beliefs about sex and age.”

“We’re like the fuckin’ American wet dream. Young girls with ambivalent sexuality.”

“I don’t wanna drop it for some rando jock-twat whose sexual standards are mandated by the shit porn he downloads. That’s deli meat.”

“No, you’re being… Shut up.”

The highest compliment I can pay Miller’s Girl is that I did pause it early on to Google and find out if it was based on a book. I also think it’s risky to write a movie about writing and then have a bunch of characters’ writing shared in it, as the danger is that the audience won’t agree that the work is actually that great. This is obviously a matter of personal taste. As I mentioned before, I… liked it, but the writing uniformly has a tendency toward being “verbose” more than anything else, coming off like the characters are constantly deep-throating a thesaurus. It’s what a lot of people could (justifiably) call pretentious.

Obviously, there’s the question of the movie’s Content: As someone who has worked in education, I always respond negatively to bad teachers in art more or less as a matter of reflex. I recently finished re-watching season one of the 2015 comedy-horror series Scream Queens, for example, and one of the characters has a father who teaches a truly abysmal film class in certain episodes, which seems to consist of him just showing the students movies and then lecturing for a few minutes afterward. In Miller’s Girl, the issue is less how Martin Freeman’s titular Miller teaches and more about the mistakes he makes in handling Jenna Ortega’s precocious Cairo Sweet. It’s a necessary conceit of such stories that the teacher behaves in a way that lets those boundaries ultimately get crossed, but it’s hard not to watch those “slips” happen and not feel like this guy is just terrible at his job, with no sense of propriety whatsoever. Although, obviously this does happen for real. I went to school with someone who ended up crossing that line as a teacher, in fact.

The resonance I feel with stories like this one and also with the way weirdos on the internet talk about girls/women, the age of consent, fertility, birth rates, and so on is just how young people this age actually look. In contrast to the famously skeevy line from Dazed and Confused (1993), teenagers don’t “stay the same age”—I keep getting older, and they keep getting younger. I didn’t know how young I actually was at eighteen when I was eighteen. This here is meant to be a Heightened reality, where predatory teenagers who rattle around alone in their Southern Gothic houses emerge from the mist of the spooky woods to seduce you, but it’s hard for me not to see this Cairo as a flimsy phantasm, this schemer who seduces and then ruins her teacher so that she can write a really bangin’ application essay for Yale about the experience. She’s a sort of mythological figure in a Culture War, MGTOW, incel-ian mode—handled here with a certain ambivalence and enthralling grace even as the film technically panders to boring, old cishet male fears of entrapment and exploitation and degradation at the hands of wily Females.

It's another area where the film threatens to fall into parody—that and how it’s not just Cairo, but also her friend Winnie (Gideon Adlon) doing this. They’re both seducing teachers, but Winnie maybe genuinely likes hers and ends up falling out with Cairo in the end over it. The whiplash of Winnie’s transformation from short-skirted bisexual seductress to frumpy, teary-eyed defeat is also pretty comedic. Meanwhile, the mirrored pairing of Mr. Miller and his friend Boris (Bashir Salahuddin), Winnie’s target, further feeds into that sense of ridiculous excess. Boris’ ultimate rationalization of his own behavior is perhaps frustratingly brief, though intriguing for its moral ambiguity. Again, though, the fact that this is happening twice in the same school, simultaneously, with people this closely connected to one another, feels almost like unintentional comedy.

I’m sure Seth Rogen is a consummate professional, but knowing that he was a producer on this movie made me really want a commentary track from him, or to be a fly on the wall when he read the script. Like, I can just imagine his reaction to the scene where Mr. Miller is whackin’ it to Cairo’s midterm short story in what amounts to a shed. I thought it was pretty funny! I partly blame the “Peterotica” episode of Family Guy for me having this impression, however: You could just not take your shirt off while driving! You could simply not jork it to your student’s writing! That these reactions seem so… involuntary is part of what makes me laugh. Miller dramatically cranking hog does strike an ok balance between eroticism and thrills, I feel, and I don’t want to only disparage it. This is probably the stylistic—erotic and thrilling—high point of the movie. One criticism that could be levied against Miller’s Girl is that there isn’t actually enough of this sort of thing. It’s a real “Yes, and what else?” sort of deal.

Miller’s more successful writer wife, Beatrice (Dagmara Domińczyk), is a frustrating element of the story because of just how off-putting she is. She’s often demeaning toward her husband and only seems more drunk and belligerent as the story goes on. She’s meant to contrast with Cairo, obviously: The younger girl is sweet, whereas Beatrice is not. She lounges around the house in sexy sleepwear, and she’s not not into the story Cairo wrote when Miller shares it with her, which is… problematic. While Cairo is clearly antagonistic after a point and isn’t meant to represent a real option for several reasons (her age, her sort-of madness), the film doesn’t make staying with Beatrice feel like much of a viable choice either. It reminded me of a similar issue that I had with Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011). The fiancée in that film is so obviously a bad match (and person) that there’s not much tension where the question of staying with her is concerned. I think if Beatrice was just a skosh less aggressively dismissive of Miller, then it would make this situation more thrilling.

The film is perhaps surprisingly slight: Not much really happens, and I think it could have afforded to go a bit bigger and darker (embrace more of the grotesque potential of the tentative gothic flourishes), though the slightness of it all might add a smidgeon of verisimilitude or else at least make it feel that bit more Literary. In that sense, Bartlett may understand something about writing that Cairo did not—the value of doing less, in more than one sense.

[montyterrible]

X (2022) x Pearl (2022)—or, The Virtue and Vice of Cleverness

Well, this was kind of timely at one point—I finally watched Ti West’s X (2022) back in June, followed shortly thereafter by Pearl (2022). This essay was maybe going to be done before MaXXXine released in early July, but that didn’t happen, partly due to the Summer Blues and partly because I ended up doing a lot of quoting in this piece that I wanted to double- and triple-check. These are both movies that seem to have been generally well-received but that I’ve seen pretty harshly criticized as well. In this essay, I compare X and Pearl, and I look at the things I liked, the things I disliked, the things I liked but see as potentially dislikable, and the things I disliked that are potentially dislikable.

A brief summary would be that I like these movies but also get why they’re not universally beloved, especially by people with the inclination/ability to look at them as art rather than just as reasonably bloody fun. X, in particular, is SO self-aware! It appeals to me, since I have that creative tendency myself, but it is definitely frustrating if you want a horror movie to just do its best to be that without winking at you. Pearl is less self-aware (I think), yet it’s still far from original in terms of its fundamental design. Though it does get interesting when read as a commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic…

Here is the link. I’ll also include a representative paragraph below, after the spoiler/content warning.

Note that this essay contains full spoilers for the films in the title and, because of the content of those movies, will feature some level of NSFW discussion more or less throughout and will also periodically include discussions of grotesque imagery or graphic violence. I have used vague descriptions and euphemisms as much as possible with the former category of material to avoid explicit content.

As I mentioned before, there is a possible critique of X’s “highbrow” aspirations built into it as well. I would say the most potentially compelling manifestation of that criticism emerges from its treatment of the in-movie movie’s director. RJ’s attitude toward the pornographic film he’s making dramatically changes once his own girlfriend, Lorraine, decides she wants to… Participate. Early on, she expresses discomfort about this project they’re involved in, and RJ tells her off for being “a prude” and insists that “[I]t is possible to make a good dirty movie!” He’s all enthusiasm, with plans to elevate the subject matter through the artistry of his filming and editing. When Lorraine later decides to “act” in the picture herself, she throws his own words back at him as part of her defense: “When did you become such a prude?” While the hypocrisy here is technically just about RJ’s ready dismissal of the movie’s “smutty” nature and his sense of it as art disappearing immediately when his girlfriend wants to be involved, and so could be read as just criticism of him alone, he’s so closely associated with the topic of filmmaking within X that it’s easy to also read as a critique of both the in-film film and the film that we’re watching—a condemnation of treating something prurient as better than it is, or at least of trying to “elevate” material that either can’t be treated as art or even shouldn’t be.

[montyterrible]

Born to Hench, Forced to “Boss!!”

I’m not a Minion hater exactly—no more so than I am, ambiently-like, of anything “mainstream” or “popular.” At the same time, I also don’t tend to engage with any media in a “lol so wacky I’m going INSANE from exposing myself to this!” sort of way either. When I really think about it, you could see the Minions as particularly cynical, like the Disney animal sidekick thing on steroids. They have a simple, pleasant design (emphasizing the body/head, deemphasizing the limbs and fine detail) with room for a smidgeon of individuality/visual flexibility using a satisfyingly limited number of features or elements like eyes, and which makes them more or less Engineered for Marketability as a toy or just plastered on one thing or another. There’s an enormous Minion (I think) sticker around here somewhere that a friend of mine gave me once when I was visiting him that he (I think) got from a cereal box as a “prize.” It’s my understanding that Minion memes were somewhat ubiquitous on Facebook at one point, though I can also easily imagine adults (namely parents) harboring a deep-seated hatred of these things.

Upon initially firing up Minions (2015) and hearing those eminently recognizable chattering voices “singing” the Universal Pictures theme, I thought my fears were going to be confirmed—that this was going to be a very annoying movie for me. I imagined being a parent in one room hearing that tell-tale sound for the umpteenth time coming from a TV in another, and what that might feel like. I didn’t end up following this “lol so wacky I’m going etc.” thread any further, though, because I actually found the Minions (and their movie) pretty easy to like!

On the one hand, yes, they are adorable: visually, but also in terms of personality and thanks to the ambiguity of their emotional and intellectual maturity. The Bob character, in particular, is very child-esque, but all of the Minions are vaguely characterized in this same way, and so it’s easy to feel drawn to them in their extremes of feeling, to want to nurture or at least pet them. “Part child, part dog” may be another intentional element of their design, meant to reach children and parents and childless adults all in some primal way. Ironically, the chattering wasn’t an annoyance, and I think it may actually have made the predictably goofy and usually physical humor I expected from the movie more palatable. Rather than an endless slog of “That was SO awesome!” or other “That just happened!”-adjacent running commentary on every precious goof, you instead get these intervals (sometimes surprisingly long for such a movie) where no coherent sentence is uttered. The Minions speak a winning mix of total gibberish and real language (English, Spanish, etc.), and I’ll be damned if there isn’t a certain… confidence to having that be the medium of communication, visuals aside, of bits and pieces of this movie.

On another hand, I find the very concept of a “Minion” kind of fascinating. The movie starts with an initially wordless sequence showing off Minion evolution—how from their most primitive, water-bound state they’ve always latched onto the largest and most dangerous other creatures without conflict, which is a compulsion that takes them onto the land and forward through history until they gravitate toward humans and then “supervillains” specifically. The Minions are apparently immortal(?) and so, critically, out-live their beloved masters, sometimes apparently killing them by accident. I know I’m late to the Minions party in this regard, but that’s just such a weird and compelling baseline concept. Minions being so “Assigned Henchman at Birth” while also potentially, actually being the superior animal just makes for an interesting hook.

While Minions has a recognizable-enough dramatic plot, I found it kind of oddly… “empowering” to watch. You don’t so much feel tension or stress about the scraps and scrapes the Minions get into, so much as you eagerly wait to see how they’ll easily overcome the inconvenience and defeat their enemies. I’m not joking when I say that the Minions have more in common with Alucard from the manga/anime Hellsing than they do with other protagonists in similar movies. They’re essentially “over-powered.” There are some great, fun bits of action or imagery here, though a favorite might be when the Minions’ boss-turned-enemy, Scarlet Overkill, tries to have them tortured, and this includes a bit where the Minions are gleefully slipping through and playing around with a noose. It’s fleetingly dark, perhaps surprisingly daring.

(Of course, the “3 edgy 5 you” take that I’ve even heard out in the real world about the Minions is “lol Did they work for Hitler? lol” And this movie makes clear that, no, they did not. After serving Napoleon, the Minions were in exile in an icy cave until 1968, thus avoiding the Harry Potter problem of mixing magical beings and the Holocaust.)

I was also just surprised at how twisty the plot of Minions is. I did not expect Bob to pull the mythical Sword from the Stone, or for the spurned, exploded Scarlet to return for one last attempt at the Queen of England’s crown when it felt like the movie was already over. I had a harder time thinking of really distinct swerves than I expected writing this up, but it’s all just kind of inherently Interesting. The way that this world pivots around professional villainy (even if only in secret circles) reminded me a little bit of The Venture Bros. This still isn’t evil evil—It’s easy enough to see the Minions as conventionally likeable if not exactly heroic and Scarlet Overkill as conventionally threatening and villainous, but it’s a fun enough, kid-friendly flirtation that at least sort of eschews predictable plotting.

There are some character designs that rely a bit on fatphobic imagery for their visual identity/comedy potential, but I think the most offensive thing about the movie is its treatment of The Queen, who cutesily throws down with the Minions when they attempt to steal her crown for Scarlet and who is hanging out at a pub arm wrestling after she’s dethroned. Her toothiness might qualify as gentle caricature, but I would have (cruel Leftist that I am) preferred a much meaner treatment. I mean, really, the Minions should be latching onto her, right? What with the whole legacy of colonialism and so forth? Her being a sort of apex thief and whatnot?

I jest—Obviously, that’s far too subversive and cerebral for such a Childish property! The Minions are instead drawn to the biggest cartoon of villainy, which means Scarlet at first but then ultimately a young Gru. Minions almost tells a standalone story using the critters but then has to wrap back around to Despicable Me, which means there’s a heavy Gru emphasis at the very end and during the little credits sequences. I would have preferred that it not do this (and also that Scarlet be an anthropomorphized wolf-woman for the entire movie and not just the “bedtime porry” scene), but I know this isn’t really For me, in the end, and have just accepted that with as good as a shrug. Which is how I’ve felt about the Minions as a property and/or marketing gimmick for years now.

[montyterrible]

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (2005): Sands of Time 2—or, The Compromise Game—or, The Two Tones

In this long—and long overdue—final essay on the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time trilogy, I cover The Two Thrones. I discuss the obvious stuff, like the big addition of stealth and the game’s awkward positioning as a mediator between the tones of the previous two entries in the series, but I also criticize and then praise the statue -moving and -rotating puzzle specifically, craft a little “narrative” about how Ubisoft’s own Sands of Time obsession mirrors the prince’s (ostensible) great crime, and also discuss the game's/series' (mis)handling of Kaileena and sexuality. And more!

I don’t necessarily plan to never play, watch, or read the things I write about again (after writing about them), but it is always satisfying to finally bring all my thoughts and feelings together in this way. It feels like a nice capstone on the experience. Doubly so for these three games that I feel loom large for me in the foggy impressions I have of my own adolescent mind. Sands of Time may be the best balanced or executed in terms of tone and with its blend of storytelling and gameplay, even if it’s my least favorite, speaking as a Combat Freak. I probably like Warrior Within best for its gross and mean vibe (and all that attitude and leather…), but The Two Thrones could ultimately be my true favorite for the overall experience it provides.

Here is the link. Below the content/spoiler warning, I will also include a representative paragraph.

Note that this piece contains full spoilers for the game in the title and its predecessors (Sands of Time and Warrior Within). It contains some NSFW discussion, specifically in the sections for “Day One” and “Day Five.” That fifth entry is much more risqué, of the two. Know also that I’m discussing the GameCube version, played from a disc on the original hardware—at least initially, but with a second playthrough of the GameCube version on a reverse-compatible Wii.

This is where Farah in The Sands of Time feels like she receives so much preferential treatment. She’s physically present in the game world alongside the prince (can even be hurt and killed by him if the player attacks her accidentally or intentionally). She “helps” with certain puzzles and also helps, without quote marks, in combat by stunning enemies with her arrows and sometimes drawing aggro, splitting a hostile group. She requires protection during the fights, which some people might classify as “escort mission”-like and a nuisance, but it also endears her to you, forcefully if necessary, by making her life as critical as yours/the prince’s. If either of you die, it’s a “Game Over.” This equal treatment in the gameplay better mirrors the harrowing fight for survival the characters are enduring within the fiction and creates pathos through something more primal and subconscious than better conversations. There’s a real-time element to Sands of Time Farah that makes her both an active-feeling participant and more like a real, separate entity rather than an instrument of plot or gameplay. This isn’t to say that it “excuses,” or even “balances,” a lack of detail beneath the superficial impressions, but the story and characters function ok without elaboration because the game can fall back on the mechanical experience to knit the bits and pieces together and smooth over the gaps. And on some level Sands of Time may even work better without the additional complications, being so fantastical or romantic. The prince is just “the Prince,” for example. He’s downright archetypal, in a way. We’re not dealing with people so much as splashes of color suggestive of people, and suggestion can be enough when you’re working within a mythic frame. Complexity and moving beyond a tidy “The End,” however, create a need for something more concrete, I feel. Warrior Within and The Two Thrones weave ever more complicated narratives and expand the scope and continue things in such a way that the mythic quality fades a bit. They also do a worse job with the romance because they come to rely more on the story and less on the mechanical experience.

[montyterrible]

“We’re all smart, Jeremy”—or, I Am Not Immune To Propaganda: Thoughts on Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and “Osama bin Laden Has Farty Pants” (2001)

I’m not going to claim that I personally killed Toby Keith, but he did die as I was working on this essay (and was using “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” as a sort of theme song to help calibrate my mood/thinking).

I’ve kind of been unconsciously dismissive of Kathryn Bigelow’s work for as long as I’ve been aware of her, because I associated her with Military Stuff, and I originally half-watched this movie a few years back, which made paying serious attention to it in this way an intriguing prospect. This essay took a while to finish, especially if you consider the initial paragraph I wrote last May.

One problem is that Zero Dark Thirty ended up being more relevant to present day serious stuff than I initially thought. And it also contains plenty of past day(?) serious stuff as well, which meant I spent more time than usual trying to make sure I wouldn’t completely disrespect all that. The subject matter was kind of unpleasant to engage with, but then, also, things kept happening there for a bit that I felt I needed to incorporate into the piece, and work just kept getting busier, and then I got COVID...

All of that has delayed an essay that was meant to be out in February to nearly May, and while I have ultimately “enjoyed” working on it (in one regard or another), I am starting to feel a little Maya-esque, in that my long-term relationship with this particular thing needs to end, for my sake. I went into it imagining a pretty tight, focused piece based heavily on some preconceived ideas about the movie’s artistic or political merits and ended up with something sprawling (again) because of all the complications, which included finding an opportunity for some self-reflection I hadn’t anticipated.

Finally, though, here’s the link. I’ll put a representative paragraph below, after the spoiler/content warning.

This essay contains full spoilers for the film and South Park episode in the title, partial spoilers for the South Park episode “Cripple Fight,” and some discussion of real-world events/morbidity.

As a fantasy of a Strong Woman, Maya (Jessica Chastain) is beautiful, driven, and very smart. In the historical fiction of Zero Dark Thirty, she’s nearly single-handedly responsible for pursuing a lead others are repeatedly dismissive of, and, like I said before, she kind of wills the outcome she wants into being. “We’re all smart,” says the director of the CIA (played by James Gandolfini) wryly at one point, when another man assesses Maya as smart like that’s a distinctive positive quality of hers. But that’s what we’re told—that Maya is just one among many. What we see is just Maya, singularly effective at her job in a classically heroic sort of way. An icon of competence and forward momentum galvanizing a system that had kind of stalled before her arrival. It’s maybe a shock to the (viewer’s) system for her to be out of the way for such a large chunk of the film when focus decidedly shifts to the SEALs as the active players because she feels like the one capable person on earth so much of the time. Critically, Maya is pretty openly dismissive of them when they’re first brought into the fold (regarding the location of Osama bin Laden) during preparations to take some sort of action. Without any sense that she’s joking, she says, “Quite frankly, I didn’t even want to use you guys, with your dip and your Velcro and all your gear bullshit. I wanted to drop a bomb, but people didn’t believe in this lead enough to drop a bomb, so they’re using you guys as canaries. . . .” And isn’t that just my own superior, dismissive attitude reflected back at me?

[montyterrible]

“How do I love thee, Lords of the Fallen 2? Let me count the ways…”

Having somewhat recently finished my first playthrough of the 2023 Lords of the Fallen, and after immediately starting a second playthrough, I wanted to put together some thoughts on the game; however, I also wanted to avoid writing another Mortal Shell - sized epic, so I am going with an internet staple: a clearly delineated list, with five entries just because. There are issues I could talk about at great length—like the enemy variety or how the “rune” system of passive bonuses equipable on weapons feels kind of boring or limited—but I want to focus on the things that I feel led to me ultimately loving Lords of the Fallen 2 overall since that feels more fun and better suited to this intentionally limiting frame than trying to say something comprehensive.

I LOVE THE LEVEL/WORLD DESIGN…

“I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight”

While I enjoyed Elden Ring and Lies of P for the most part, one area where both of those games kind of disappointed me was in their individual approaches to the recursive and generally labyrinthine level and world design people associate with the Souls­-like sub-genre of ARPGs. I thought Elden Ring was too much of an open world game on the whole, with too much empty space and checklist-style design, while Lies of P was pushing in the opposite direction, with conventional linear levels so focused that they lacked a strong element of exploration. Both of those games do have some brilliant bits, but Lords of the Fallen 2023 was just a lot more satisfying to me in this regard.

It doesn’t reach the level of flexibility that the first half of the original Dark Souls has, but it often surprised me with just how consistently good it was at sending me out from a checkpoint, spinning me around five or so times, and then leading me back to that checkpoint again (to my surprise). It’s obviously more focused than Elden Ring since it has the more traditional Souls-y structure, but it’s also frequently willing to indulge in nonessential loops or significant dead-ends, in contrast with Lies of P. Furthermore, if you don’t engage with its system of optional checkpoint creation, that requires a consumable item, then some of these loops feel especially brutal, at least on a first playthrough, given the maze-like levels and the enemy numbers and aggression being quite intense.

“World design” factors in here because A) levels do loop back to one another at times in ways that I did not initially anticipate and B) the total space you explore is so dense. It’s not all incredibly interconnected via traversable paths, but as you explore and gain an appreciation for where each area is in relation to the others, you start to notice just how layered everything is. It’s possible to look up from the bottom of the world and place things at the top (or vice versa) in a really satisfying manner. In the end, you make your way all over, down, around, and under this particular mass of land that the game’s explorable world is situated upon. The effect reminded me most of Dark Souls 3, maybe especially because that is another game of this type where there isn’t an abundance of interconnectivity but where you can see the whole world from very early on and then get to spend the rest of the game traveling through it and visiting all the locations you were shown, while also looking back (often up) at the places you already traveled through.

I LOVE UMBRAL…

“. . . [I]f God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.”

In still images, Lords of the Fallen 2 can look quite impressive visually, albeit in a sometimes “default” Unreal Engine sort of (Maximum Polygons) way, but there is a certain amount of crustiness to it when you dig in and get up close and personal. I’m not some kind of graphics obsessive or someone who really cares about console power and whatnot, but the most distinctive “current gen” aspect of Lords of the Fallen 2023 is probably the element of “Umbral,” which represents both a technical showcase and an intensification of an idea that’s been developing across other, similar games.

In Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, you can die (at least) twice thanks to the resurrection mechanic that lets you revive on the spot where you were killed to continue fighting. In Mortal Shell, losing all of your health causes the “Foundling” to be ejected from whatever “shell” it’s inhabiting, where you could keep fighting in that extremely fragile state or could scramble to get back into your body before a single hit kills you. Lords of the Fallen 2 intensifies and expands on this concept by instantly (without a loading screen) sending you to what amounts to the realm of the dead when you’re killed initially, with true death coming only if you also die in this Umbral zone. It’s actually possible to technically die again and again without resetting an area as long as you can escape from Umbral at one of the designated exit points, which crumble upon use.

Probably the most succinct way to explain Umbral is that it’s the Otherworld from the Silent Hill franchise, but entering and exiting it is completely seamless and freeform. Being in Umbral changes the game world into something more Fucked Up. Some of the changes are just visual, but Umbral does also come with new landmasses, interactable objects, and enemies as well that sit naturally beside, around, and amidst what you could see before, effectively creating the impression of a ghostly land that’s always just out of sight all around you.

One cool concept here is the Umbral Lamp, which has various active functions (like yanking the soul out of your enemies temporarily) but which will passively let you see into Umbral if you just hold it up. Doing this reveals the hidden environment and also allows a limited interaction between the planes. I tested this very early in my first playthrough when I noticed that a wall in Umbral had this grotesque protrusion that I assumed would have collision tied to it. Walking along that wall without the lamp raised was perfectly smooth, but if I held the lamp up, I’d collide with the obstacle. Keep in mind that you can pull out the lamp whenever you want and swing it over whatever part of the environment you like. I’m not technically in the know enough to evaluate exactly how impressive this is, but it’s a neat trick that feels like it might show off the hardware.

Umbral adds so much to the exploration of the game because of how any given area is essentially doubled, though not all spaces have anything meaningful to see or find in the other realm. It’s often used as a puzzle-solving mechanic, where you have to willingly enter Umbral (risking true death) to bypass an obstacle, possibly via a path that only exists in the world of the dead. A fun horror visual you encounter a few times in the game is moving, in Umbral, along the bottom of a body of water, with plant life waving and debris and corpses floating around you like the water was still present. Even when Umbral isn’t used for anything meaningful, looking into it still reveals these extra macabre environmental details, like saintly statues that appear demonic if you shine your lamp on them. I accidentally jump-scared myself at times because I’d hold up the lamp, only to find an enemy from Umbral staring me in the face, or shrieking and taking a swipe at me as I yelped and dropped the lantern, narrowly avoiding being dragged into Umbral from the ghostly contact.

I LOVE THE “DREAD” METER (AND OTHER DISPLAY STUFF)…

“I love thee to the level of everyday’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.”

I’m cheating a bit with this item, but, at least initially, this is an extension of what I was talking about before. When you are in Umbral, you have a limited amount of time to explore, as the number and type of enemies that continuously spawn around you from these little statues/frozen figures intensifies with time, ultimately culminating in the appearance of a very powerful reaper-like creature that starts hunting you down. I had some narrow escapes during my first playthrough of Lords of the Fallen 2, where I entered Umbral (willingly or not) and then only just managed to reach an exit point or checkpoint to escape before triggering the reaper’s appearance, or sometimes even as it was actively chasing me.

The meter that tells you how close you are to doom is a wonderful visual, though: It’s primarily this giant eye icon in the upper right part of the screen that periodically blinks (and that shuts when you’re in a safe zone). This was honestly a huge contributing factor to me getting the game after I saw it in pre-release coverage. Rather than go with some innocuous meter or minimalist bit of design, you have this very lively, large eyeball. It’s both goofy and kind of genuinely unsettling.

Other elements of the UI/HUD have a similar level of stylization, most notably the displays associated with the Umbral Lamp and ranged weapon/magic actions. Every character has the lamp, but then the other depends on whether you’re casting magic or are using a bow or various thrown objects. You toggle between these two options with the up and down directional buttons, and holding the left trigger “opens” the selected one, surrounding the larger icon with a bunch of smaller ones indicating actions and button inputs. These are all very colorful, and the arrangement (where the smaller icons sort of ring and overlap with the larger ones) just struck me as some level of idiosyncratic. Initially, the icons are even kind of mysterious or “confusing” in a way that I liked. When you hold up the lamp, for example, you see all these little options, one of which is a skull and another of which looks like a weird fetus.

Also kind of idiosyncratic is the choice to pull the camera into an over-the-shoulder position when the player holds the left trigger to either ready their aim or raise the lamp. I like this flourish because it seems kind of unnecessarily awkward. It helps with manually aiming, I guess, but the shift also makes transitioning from melee to ranged (or lamp) options a little disorienting. In combat, it obscures your view of the battlefield, for example, and while you can still evade, it feels like exposing yourself to take on this perspective. And maybe vulnerability was one consideration here, as this is the perspective from which you use your lamp, so holding it up and peering into the dark, in a sense, is meant to create this appropriate feeling of tension or horror, which is further enhanced by your slowed movement and more limited view.

Or maybe it’s just willfully different to avoid mirroring FromSoftware’s work too directly? There’s part of me that likes that option just as much (if not more) than the marginally more profound one I described above. In either case, seeing this awkward view change in the pre-release footage also charmed me.

I LOVE THAT IT IS LORDS OF THE FALLEN 2…

“I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. . . .”

While I was initially intrigued at the prospect of a sequel to the 2014 Lords of the Fallen, I kind of… fell out of interest with it when I started thinking about what the massive time jump and the title (“THE Lords of the Fallen,” at the time of announcement) suggested about the relationship between the sequel and its predecessor. I did finish that first game and did continue playing it afterward, and probably would have stuck with it even longer if I hadn’t been constantly stressing about backing up my save to a USB flash drive to avoid losing my data to frequent crashes, so this framing of the sequel felt kind of like a snub to me.

What got me back on board and did push me to get it was watching a little of someone’s stream around the release date. When they spoke to a particular character at the hub and he directly referenced the events of the first game, including outright using the name “Antanas,” that was the point I decided to buy Lords of the Fallen 2023. To someone who hasn’t played the first game, I don’t think any of this stuff is too obviously being carried over and will just feel like the usual Souls-like vagueness around names and events and such being dropped casually, sans context. There is part of me that wishes it was more prominent, but I’m fairly content with what I got: Aside from the antagonist Adyr technically “returning” from Lords of the Fallen 1, there are two other characters carried over and one who has a connection via his ancestry.

Having these little footholds of pre-existing investment is ultimately what helped me get interested in the new stuff, I feel. I started out not really connecting with the new characters in a hard-to-describe sort of way. The writing and characterization were fine, I thought, but there was just something “off,” like they were a touch too generic maybe (but maybe that feeling only comes from having played so many of these games now that I recognize the archetypes). Eventually, though, those feelings changed and I did care when characters started meeting their, predictably, tragic ends. Some of these “quests” were more underwhelming than others, but I started caring at some point I can’t exactly identify. I think I also missed the more conventionally RPG-like dialogue system of the first Lords of the Fallen, which is replaced here with the more distant-feeling Soulsian approach of just having other characters as good as monologue at you.

This sequel’s aesthetic ended up being more consistent with the first title than I originally thought. Some shift in the visuals that I find hard to pin down had me thinking, pre-release, that the game was going in a more grounded direction, where the 2014 Lords of the Fallen had this colorful, kind of goofy, comic-book-like look to it. Having now examined the enemy models in particular up close, I think the perceived shift is just a result of more subtle changes that I’m again not qualified to identify specifically; however, the “Rhogar” (read: demon) designs here definitely look like they belong in the same universe from the first game, so it was just some change in… lighting(?) that threw me at first. The one thing I was hoping for that never happened was for the old enemies or areas to somehow return as well as a surprise finale or something. That would have really delighted me. 

I LOVE THAT PARRYING (AND THE GAME) IS A BIT EASY…

“I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.”

Don’t get it twisted—I died a lot in this game, sometimes in ways that felt fair and other times in ways that seemed like BS, though that’s an element of even the “official,” FromSoftware-made, Souls games. I felt tension while exploring in a way that I believe enhances that exploration, and I certainly didn’t go into any fights just assuming I’d win. The threat was there. And yet, I’d say this game is probably easier than any of the other titles I’ve mentioned above, and even that the exploration and moment-to-moment fights might feel tougher than the big bosses in a way that seems awkward or even unintentional. And yet, the game still feels like a true sequel to Lords of the Fallen 2014 in this way, as my impression of some of the post-release discussion around that game was how it was in some ways a more approachable take on this style of RPG. I think Lords of the Fallen 2 carries on that tradition.

One way it does this is through making grinding an incredibly accessible process. Since enemies spawn infinitely in Umbral, it’s easy to do a little grinding without even necessarily meaning to as you simply cut down the weaker demons because they’re either in your way or just on your way (somewhere). You don’t have to constantly visit a checkpoint and reset the level to get more sources of EXP to appear and can instead just go into Umbral and let the EXP come to you.

Bosses and enemies also have simpler move sets than in the more recent other big-name Souls-ish titles, and since enemies repeat so much throughout the game, you can get pretty comfortable with them individually. Parrying, as previously noted, also feels easier. That’s partly to do with the enemy repetition giving you so many opportunities to learn their attack patterns and timings, but they also tend to attack in simple and more easily readable ways. Most of them are humanoids, so how they hold and swing their weapons (or limbs) just makes a lot of sense even the first time you encounter them. Parrying is a matter of timing a block with the enemy’s attack, rather than performing any additional inputs, which means that you can also accidentally get parries even as you simply raise your shield or weapon to defend yourself.

I thought I’d try parrying out against the first proper boss—a heavy metal angel with her feet out—just to see how it went and found it so satisfying and reasonable to pull off that it became a staple of my first playthrough. I even went with a lighter, very small shield to maximize the risk of mistiming a parry since I felt so confident doing it (and since it’s possible to regain health in this game through certain mechanics I won’t get into here). The sounds and visuals associated with parrying just felt rewarding, as were the effects associated with breaking an enemy’s stance and delivering a “Grievous Strike,” up to and including the perhaps overly chunky wind-up and splattery noises that are meant to sell the power of the attack.

I reached a point years ago, when I still hadn’t played that many Souls-esque games, where I was no longer interested in punishing duels and was more invested in novelty and mechanics (“gimmick fights,” even). I can still buckle down and learn fights if I have to—and I certainly had to when I played Lies of P—but getting to bypass that process of dying over and over and having to come to terms with the fact that you might have an hour or more of learning ahead of you before you make meaningful progress in the game again seems just fine to me. Re-playing some Elden Ring in preparation for its upcoming expansion, I just found myself kind of tired of the Margits of the gaming world. Lords of the Fallen 2 was arguably too easy at points, even for me with this mindset, but I generally just found it fun. The exploration was the thing that really drew me in—that and sometimes feeling like I was trundling through the cover art of a heavy metal album—and the fights were more so the seasoning than the meal itself.

IN CONCLUSION…

“I love thee freely, as men might strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.”

This game was essentially a gift when I bought it, and if dollars and hours are equivalent, I nearly got my money’s worth with my first playthrough alone. However, I think Lords of the Fallen 2023 had the misfortune of being priced into the same associative tier as titles like God of War: Ragnarök or The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom when it lacks a lot of that polish, scale, and detail and would probably feel more at home at 50 dollars instead. It carries on a bit of its predecessor’s jank, and however massive of an undertaking it actually was to create, it has this scrappy quality to it at times when the seams really show. It was very unfortunate for it to release a month after Lies of P as well—a similar game that was both cheaper and more polished and that also had the more audacious and novel premise.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Lords of the Fallen 2 will receive a critical/popular reappraisal in the future. That’s probably just a safe bet at this point for literally any piece of media, but I genuinely think that the stuff with Umbral and the level and world layouts are going to catch people’s attention in a wider sort of way in time, probably after a price drop or steep sale.

(Title based on and quotes above taken from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43, “How Do I Love Thee?”)

[montyterrible]

What did Lords of the Fallen 2 mean by this?

More like "Soles-like," am I right, folks?

[montyterrible]

“This is a (wo)man’s world”: The Excessorious Thinktation of Mr. Monty Terrible, re. Birds of Prey 2020

For a movie so focused on women, one of the most noticeable early design choices in the 2020 Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn ironically concerns a man: specifically Jared Leto’s Joker. The character is present here but in ways that deliberately omit the particulars. The animated Joker seen in the opening is more of a classically… clean-cut version of the character and not really recognizable as the Leto Joker. Ditto the image of his head Harley has as a bulls-eye on the wall of her apartment. The man himself is only seen from the back, in the couple of instances where he does “appear.”

He isn’t even seen breaking up with Harley. We’re just told about it. You can read this as meaningful if you like—Joker’s presence and his influence on Harley being this intangible, malignant thing, like a ghost, maybe, wholly separate from his physical body—though it’s also just blatantly an attempt to dodge using a version of the character that did not exactly win over audiences without outright rebooting him. The obvious brand rehabilitation happening here undermines the art a bit, such as it is: It’s more transparently a product in this way. While there may be artistic or logistical excuses, I don’t think any fully invalidate this point since it still feels like the movie is dodging even the established look of the character in a pretty telling way.

Whatever the exact ratio of intention to coincidence, the result is a message of separation, liberation—*emancipation*—for the Harley character, in-universe and as a valuable asset/property. The title might lead with “Birds of Prey,” but this is Harley’s movie: no Jokers allowed.

Not that the absent Joker is a “bad” thing. While I can find my way to liking other parts of the 2016 Suicide Squad, including Leto’s Joker, it’s inarguable that that film’s contribution to the modern DC universe of live-action films was mainly Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, as well as a certain garish sense of style that does persist here, arguably in a stronger sort of way than in even the proper Suicide Squad sequel that would come later. The impression that I come away with is that this movie’s temperament is more genuinely meatheaded in a 2016 Suicide Squad sort of way than it is crass-but-clever like the 2021 THE Suicide Squad. The fist bump the lady protagonists share at the end (over breakfast drinks and tacos) feels very much spiritually of a kind with the visual of two masculine hands gripping one another, muscles bulging from the camaraderie.

Maybe that is itself a notable feature given that this is a movie principally about women, written and directed by women, and with Robbie as a producer. It’s glittery, ridiculous, violent fun For The Ladies. It’s a movie with a breakup at its center, and we see Harley deal with that in some perhaps stereotypical ways, like giving herself a haircut and eating junk food while crying, but the whole movie kind of has a certain post-breakup anger, determination, and wildness behind it. It’s fast paced but not so much in a deft way and more like the proverbial bull in the china shop. Harley is the narrator, so her typically chaotic perspective is the excuse, in a sense, for the stylistic excess: bright colors, character introductions and sometimes vengeful motivations conveyed via on-screen text, a surreal performance of “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” when she’s hit in the face by mob boss antagonist Roman Sionis/Black Mask at one point.

The overall vibe for the plot is “heist”-esque, with some interruptions and rewinding by narrator Harley to create excitement and a sense of fun and complication. It isn’t exactly wildly original or interesting in terms of the narrative or writing, however, and there are points where the movie seems to more or less acknowledge this: like Harley essentially admitting that Renee Montoya’s suspension (as a cop) is a trope or how Black Canary calls attention to Harley suddenly having rollerblades on for some reason in the funhouse fight sequence. Momentum is the focus here. The Fantabulous Emancipation is a lean sub-two hours, and that feels about right for this concept. The much-missed 90-minute runtime standard of old, which this movie still exceeds, was the exact right length for a disposable bit of entertainment with some highlights. You can practically feel the script (and Harley) trying to force the team together in time for the climax, but it generally does not feel like the story was mutilated to reach this runtime.

Roller derby feels like a good fit for this version of Harley aesthetically (and also jibes with the feminist theming), and it gets paid off with the skates at the funhouse brawl and afterward when chasing down Sionis’ car. Cassandra Cain has been taking things out of people’s pockets all movie long, and then she reverse-pickpockets a grenade onto Sionis to finally end him. Harley’s troubles really get started when she tries and fails to eat an egg sandwich, and then she finally gets to eat one at the end. There’s even a fun bit there where the narrator and on-screen Harleys sync up as the story concludes: “Call me a softy,” says the narration; “I dare ya,” says Harley in the car with Cass. It’s a cute, conclusive-feeling beat to end on.

The real treat here, in my opinion, are the fight scenes, especially a couple starring Harley in a police station where the music is reminiscent of a shriek of rage at times. There’s a moment where she’s hiding behind a palette of cocaine, which is then shot up by Sionis’ mercenaries, allowing Harley to inhale the dust and go a little extra berserk. The funhouse fight is visually pretty engaging thanks to the environment, which also creates opportunities for interesting fight choreography. I can’t compare this to every one of the live-action DC movies, but Fantabulous definitely has some of the crunchier action I’ve seen in these films, with a somewhat higher degree of visual credibility. This section is small, but even on rewatch, I would say that the fights are the main reason to see this movie. They’re at least noteworthy highlights.

The “emancipation” of the title definitely shows in the design and theming of the film in ways that I have to imagine made some people very angry—something something “shoved down our throats,” “childhood ruined,” woke, etc. The women aren’t sexualized in a leering way here, and the focus seems to have been on clothing them to give them a sense of style appropriate to their character versus creating something strictly “attractive” or honoring the designs from the comics. Black Canary gets somewhat more revealing attire, but in a considered way where there’s still more covered than not. Harley’s outfits take the Suicide Squad 2016 foundation and add like 200% more accessories and glitter. Cass is dressed like a kid, and Montoya looks like she’s a living, aging person and just very “normal” overall. Huntress might come closest to wearing something like a super suit consistently.

The theming is very straightforward empowerment stuff and very safe—or it would not be broadcast so aggressively like this—though that fact won’t stop the aforementioned, theoretical, angry viewers from thinking it’s some aberration and step too far. Too “political” and so forth.

It’s laid on very thick: When Harley blows up Ace Chemicals early on, Montoya immediately gets her intent (“She just publicly updated her relationship status”), while her partner (a man) is oblivious. Montoya is overlooked and overruled at work in favor of men; Black Canary is repeatedly referred to by Sionis as his “little bird.” Probably the most high-falutin’ it gets is with Harley telling Canary that “A harlequin’s role is to serve” and “You know, a harlequin’s nothing without a master.” And then Canary saves her from being some kind of kidnapped or trafficked in the back of a van after a man gets her drunk(er). Even Doc, the elderly man who owns the restaurant Harley lives above, sells her out. Some of the most squirmy violence in the film, to me, involves breaking a man’s legs with a baseball bat. It’s a movie that some might claim is misandrist, though, if anything, it feels pretty egalitarian with how hard the blows consistently land. The ladies strike one another and men and are struck by men with quite a bit of oomph.

“Friends, brothers, men of Gotham,” says Black Mask to his army, making what should be simple mercenary/goon work feel downright fraternal. Later, the final part of the final showdown happens on a pier lined with statues of the Gotham founders, most of which seem to be men. This is where Harley and Cass kill Sionis, who had risen to the top of the patriarchal heap in the modern day.

There’s maybe some self-awareness here since, earlier, Harley tells Cass to “blow something up” or “shoot someone” to get respect from boys.

While there are other men characters, two of the most prominent are Sionis and his right-hand man, Victor Zsasz, and the two of them have this very… interesting (read: gay) relationship. Like, Zsasz is incredibly visibly jealous of the attention Sionis gives Canary at one point, and Sionis has this sort of BDSM-adjacent thing going on, which would make sense with the “black” “mask,” in a way. He’s more often associated with gloves (and a fear of uncleanliness despite apparently also having a penchant for having Zsasz remove people’s faces) than with a mask in this movie, however. A fixture of his club’s stage are these two big black hands on either side, with eyes held between their middle two fingers. Which kind of suggests the gloves are the mask. Meanwhile, the mask itself is on a pedestal in a room with this sort of bondage-y art on the walls, and putting it on almost seems to be a last resort and feels like this particularly manic, strained moment for Sionis. There’s at least an association being made.

There’s part of me that appreciates how this could be an intentional assault on a certain contingent of the movie’s audience. “Aggressive” is a good word for it, as is “gay.” Neither of those things bothered me, though I did find Chris Messina’s (Zsasz) and Ewan McGregor’s (Black Mask) performances kind of grating at times. It’s funny that Leto’s Joker is persona non grata here, as both of these men are at points doing things with their mannerisms and voices that remind me a lot of that take on the Joker. You might even call some of the acting that they’re doing “bad,” in fact.

They both have their moments of genuine menace, though, that intersect with the themes and help redeem the oddball stuff—like this pretty tense and upsetting bit where Sionis thinks a woman in his club is laughing at him, so he forces her to dance on a table and her male companion to cut and then tear her dress off. Looking on, Canary sheds a tear of, we can assume, sisterhood. Zsasz similarly gets a bit creepy with Harley’s paralyzed body later in the movie and then tries to get Canary to cut open Cass to prove her loyalty and extract an all-important stolen diamond, and when he dies in this scene the women essentially take turns stabbing him in some form. It is not subtle!

Now, potentially associating male gayness (or at least some shade of queerness) with violence against women seems problematic. And while I can appreciate these versions of Sionis and Zsasz being some kind of cishet male comic fan repellant, and also just the weirdness of the take, it seems like making them more conventionally masculine and straight would have kept the theming tidier. There’s not room in here for too much nuance.

[montyterrible]

Witches, Gangbangers, and Crocodiles

What are we? Some kind of Suicide Squad: Extended Edition (2016)?

In some ways, David Ayer’s much-maligned Suicide Squad movie is kind of a fascinating specimen in amber preserving the flaws of Warner Bros. and DC’s approach to emulating the success of the Marvel superhero films.

I’m not a Marvel guy—or really a DC guy at this stage in my life—but I can agree with what feels like the pretty logical, commonsense argument that Marvel’s titanic success with The Avengers team-up in 2012 was facilitated by the handful of films focused on individual characters they did first. Meanwhile, DC’s equivalent Justice League movie wasn’t preceded by an appropriate amount of scaffolding, so you end up with two of the three major pillars of the team (Batman and Wonder Woman) being introduced in the same film, along with teasers working in still other faces like Cyborg and The Flash. Suicide Squad attempts the same sort of thing in miniature, with some perhaps less well-known and beloved figures who would, admittedly, probably not deserve their own entire films but who still feel kind of under-served by their treatment here.

Erratic or downright recursive is the pacing of the opening act(?) of this movie, as it feels like it’s either on fast forward or is plucking selected scenes from other standalone films from an alternate universe, particularly in the cases of Deadshot and Harley Quinn, who receive substantial backstory attention here, at the expense of the cohesion of this movie. It’s not so much that these are bad bits and pieces of characterization and narrative in isolation so much as they just feel… out of context, and worse off for it. Like, Joker’s seduction and betrayal of Harley would certainly function better emotionally in a complete film but here feels thrown out without much weight behind it. Even the extremely colorful title card kind of shows up without much aplomb, as “Task Force X” founder Amanda Waller is simply walking into a restaurant or hotel after a couple of scenes, before we go into still more introduction and exposition that stalls whatever forward momentum there was.

This first bit is messy in a way that I don’t think even a theoretical “Ayer Cut” with an even longer runtime could fix since, again, the problem is a foundational one—These are simply other entire stories that are being smudged to try to get where we need to go as fast as possible. Once the Squad is on the ground in a post-magical cataclysm Midway City, things settle down and start to cohere better and proceed more smoothly, though there is some further embarrassment to come.

A bit of context: I first watched this movie after critical and popular consensus on it had already been reached. I knew what it was like, and believed it, but I still went into it hopeful since I saw it shortly after watching Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), which I, surprisingly, liked enough to watch twice in two days—the extended cut, at that. As a result, I thought maybe I would find Suicide Squad equally surprisingly good (to me). That, however, was not the case, and my assessment of it at the time was that it was simply “boring,” probably the most damning of states for a film. One moment that actually stuck with me was the one pictured above—Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag eating a chicken leg at night in a hotel room for some reason. Which I found more absurd than anything else.

On re-watch, the chicken leg is still a delightfully odd choice for a late-night snack, but I wasn’t as bored as the first time around. I wouldn’t call this movie “good” (and also don’t call Dawn of Justice that either), but it kind of works for me in certain respects.

For one thing, I found a lot of it shockingly parsable—which is to say that I didn’t think it was obscenely dark and hard to read in ways that I’ve come to associate with modern visual-effects-heavy movies of this sort. I also thought there was a degree of plausible weight and screen presence to most things, with several rare exceptions, like a particularly rough looking VFX shot we see a couple of times of the character El Diablo using his fire powers in a prison yard and (unfortunately) the major antagonist Incubus. The final battle with Incubus and Enchantress is also awkwardly low energy, weightless, and kind of choppy-feeling. It stands out in contrast to the rest of the action.

The writing is similarly a mixed bag. On the one hand, there is an absolutely atrocious bit of exposition from Flag that tries to rapid-fire explain the character Katana and her powers, and which is again emblematic of the movie trying to do too much in too little time. But then, in that same scene, where the Squad is bound for Midway, Flag calls Deadshot “a serial killer who takes credit cards,” which I think is great. Later, Captain Boomerang demands to know “[w]hy is it always a knife fight every single time [Harley] open[s] [her] mouth.” I kind of like the way this is written. It has a personality which dovetails with the distinctive visual design of certain things and is aesthetically and tonally what I might describe as “poser shopping mall… food court gangsta” or some such word salad. It’s a vibe very much of a kind with the Twenty One Pilots song “Heathens” that plays over the credits while various 3D objects like bullets and syringes fly around in psychedelic patterns in a weird void. It’s cool with a capital “c,” edgy with a capital “e.”

See also the look of Captain Boomerang—You can positively smell him through the screen, and he has both a gold tooth and a shocking blue metallic jacket with “Captain” written on it in large letters. Harley’s design might be the example of Suicide Squad’s aesthetic that has stood the test of time best, if only because of how Margot Robbie’s performance was (rightfully) identified as one of the unequivocally good things here and was salvaged and preserved in further films. Her many little tattoos, bleached hair with the red and blue tips, tight “Daddy’s Lil Monster” top, and overall grody stripper vibe is pure Suicide Squad 2016 Chic. She is often reduced to a strutting ass by the camera here, though, and an unfortunate part of the “personality” that I mentioned is a certain sexist streak. Speaking of Flag’s lover-turned-world-destroyer (Enchantress) at the climax of the film, Deadshot identifies her as Flag’s “old lady” and tells him to “Get up there, smack on her ass, tell her, ‘Knock this shit off.’” That is also Suicide Squad 2016 Chic. It’s absolutely unpleasant and not “good,” but it is so nakedly off-putting that it kind of loops back around for me now.

These sorts of movies have come to be associated with sanitized, boardroom-approved slop, and the Edginess of Suicide Squad, which can be offensive (sexist, racist) or just cringe, now feels like… Not a breath of fresh air, but like a really distinctive foul smell coming out of someone’s mouth. It’s not good, but you have to mark its existence for just how singular it is.

Jared Leto’s Joker performance is another iconic element of this movie, for good or bad. He’s the “poser shopping mall gangsta” vibe personified as well, with his notorious “damaged” forehead tattoo and his grillz behind/below dark red lips. However cringe, it is still a Take and is perfectly harmonious with the rest of the film. I kind of loved the Joker this time around, in fact. My meta knowledge of Leto’s real-world behavior combined with the already grimy writing and visuals and the at times too strained or wacky performance to make something off-putting in, I will argue, a positive way. Harley and Joker’s relationship is meant to be a negative thing for her, and you really feel that viscerally here thanks to all of the above. Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight (2008) might read as more Authentically deranged to some, but I think this Joker is just as repulsive (complimentary). Whether this version of the character could have credibly functioned in a Batman story outside of this specific movie, without the complementary stylistic elements, I’m not sure.

Is this Suicide Squad 2016 rehabilitation-ism, then? Maybe. There is part of me that looks at the titling of the 2021 film—“The Suicide Squad”—both as a blatant attempt to manipulate SEO to obscure the worse older title and as a snub: This is THE Suicide Squad, the definitive take! There’s part of me, absent any arguments I can credibly support, that wants to rally for the little guy. There’s plenty to justifiably hate about the 2016 movie, like the frequent and overly on-the-nose needle drops that aren’t exactly deep cuts, but there’s also something about Joker’s men breaching the prison to rescue Harley in the end right as we hear the words “just killed a man” in “Bohemian Rhapsody” that charmed me…

Or how the cylinder of Harley’s gun rotates to display the word “LOVE” as Deadshot fires it to destroy Enchantress’ doomsday device; or how the red and blue ink swirls around Harley and Joker quite evocatively in the chemical vat in the flashback to her transformation; or the surreally “off” dub job for Enchantress’ empowered voice where the words don’t seem to credibly come from her mouth.

“Personality” is definitely the word I would use now, in place of “boring,” even if I might still resist something as audacious as “good.”

[montyterrible]

For the beloved partner who already has absolutely, totally everything: Joker 2016 Grillz! "Baby, let's be 'damaged' together for all eternity!"