#alpha's watchlog

[fatalism-and-villainy]

My feelings about Twin Peaks are mostly "this would be so good if it were good" (this does NOT apply to the movie, which is amazing), but it really says something about how little I've been enjoying Interview with the Vampire that I jumped at my friend's offer to rewatch Twin Peaks rather than finish season 2 of IWTV. And I don't think I'll ever finish the vampire show because it's serving absolute mediocrity and I don't give a flying fuck what happens to these people.

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Watching Crazy Rich Asians for some light-hearted fun during this migraine and did this guy just keep his girlfriend in the dark about being rich even up until meeting his family overseas..... wtf

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Glass Onion is just a 2h20min excuse to dunk on Elon Musk. Don't get me wrong, I'm not morally opposed to doing so, but it doesn't exactly make for good art.

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I'm watching the new Knives Out movie and I'm sorry but it's soooooo dumb

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1899 spoilers -

Hmm, yeah, this show was a bit disappointing. Engaging enough in its mystery box twists and turns that I wanted to keep watching, but a bit lacking in concept and follow through.

I really like a good simulated reality plot! I'm a big fan of a Philip K. Dick style plot. But in this case.... I honestly think it was one of the least interesting possible explanations for what was happening? I was initially leaning towards purgatory, given the way most of these people had a troubled past in which they killed someone or did something otherwise morally questionable, or else something like an alternate dimension, given the triangle imagery and the way it recalled the Bermuda triangle. Simulation - and especially the reveal that they're on a spaceship called the Prometheus - just felt kind of rote as far as sci fi twists go.

And the thing that Odar and Friese did really well with Dark was put a fresh twist on a familiar sci fi concept - in that case, time travel. In that show, the stable time loop, and the notion of making something happen via trying to prevent it from happening, perpetuating the loop while trying to break it, were imagined as a cycle of trauma that the character were trapped in. It dug into the emotional ramifications of that scenario, and gestured at philosophically engaging questions, like the nature of free will, as well as entirely mundane themes, like growing up to be the worst iteration of yourself, despite all attempts to do otherwise.

But here, the philosophical inquiry that they mined from the simulation scenario was.... kind of the definition of fake-deep, like with Daniel's overly sentimental and content-less line about how reality isn't about what's inside our minds, but what's outside of us. Otherwise, I felt like Odar and Friese were retreading a lot of the same territory they covered in Dark, and in a way that didn't fit as well with the premise of this show. Once again, we had characters stuck in a perpetuating loop - this is why the purgatory theory would have worked so well! - but the emotional effects of that don't come through for the viewer on a storytelling level, because we only get the barest hints of the repetitive nature of the events. In Dark, having multiple perspectives from different versions of each character really made me feel the oppressive weight of the time loop cycles, but here that aspect was underutilized. I think part of what makes a simulated reality scenario effective is actually showing the multiple loops, leaning into the uncanny effect of seeing the same scenes starting to happen again, feeling the pain of one of the characters not remembering the emotional development they've gone through before. Devoting an entire season to just one loop was a waste, in my opinion, especially since the early episodes were so slow - restarting things partway through would have been more effective, I think.

Like Dark, this show also gestured towards people's emotional tendencies keeping them trapped in the same loops over and over, but I think that sentiment in Dark - that we can't escape our fate because we can't escape our desires - landed much better and felt more earned. Here, it's unclear exactly what the constraints for the simulation scenario, and the desired outcome, were supposed to be, so it's hard to understand exactly how this concept comes to play. Again, this is why showing multiple loops would have worked better.

(It's possible that they're going to expand more on the emotional stakes in this way in later seasons, as certainly worldbuilding and character motivations will be revealed more, and the finale implies there's a lot we still don't know. But.... as a season in and of itself, I'm a bit under-satisfied with a finale that effectively undoes the characterization and emotional context we've had built up for us all season.)

Also, to be honest, I just found the protagonist kind of dull. And the reveal that the emotional centre of her motivations was her child.... yeah, kind of a cliché.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I've been watching Twin Peaks for awhile in my quest to consume the Hannibal Cinematic Universe (i.e. stuff that served as an inspiration for the show in some capacity). I was sick this week and speed-watched the rest of season 2 I had left.

I'm probably in the small minority here, but I actually got more hooked on season 2 than season 1. No, most of it wasn't exactly "good" - the fact that they were grasping for subplots to pad out the rest of the season was pretty apparent - but for some reason I was still more engaged. Aside from "The Skill to Catch a Killer," most of season 1 just kind of failed to land for me - in honestly similar ways to season 2, but I failed to see the former as some kind of masterpiece that the latter fell short of.

I actually think that even though I'd excise parts of it, I enjoyed the Cooper/Annie romance more than most people - when you take out Cooper marveling over her ~childlike wonder~, they have kind of a cute neurodivergent for neurodivergent vibe going on. And I liked the character and I'm frustrated there's not more exploration into her in the revival. The finale was also great - the extended black lodge sequence was just a masterpiece in horror in the way I expect from Lynch - where the scariness comes from how surreal and wrong it all feels.

But yeah, in general, I don't think I love the show much. Possibly Lynch just makes better films than TV, because even in season 1, the subplots felt a bit too extended and stretched too thin. Also it suffered from my bugbear with TV, which is that it felt like a precursor to the bingeable Netflix limited series - that is, it wasn't nearly episodic enough. Hannibal has been my gold standard for a show with an overall arc in which every episode feels contained and like its own artistic statement, and this show fell waaaay short of that. Very ahead of its time (derogatory). I was always curious what Mulholland Drive might look like as a TV series, as Lynch originally planned, but watching this show made me grateful that his wings were clipped in that regard.

Speaking of which - I watched Fire Walk with Me with my best friend, and that film, I absolutely adored. My best friend agreed and said, as the credits were rolling, "That was better than... all of Twin Peaks," and I completely agree. I'm kind of shocked that it was poorly reviewed at the time, because it's one of Lynch's best films for me, right up there with Mulholland Drive. It helps that I was prepared for it to be not a deep dive into the lore, but a character study of Laura Palmer, and in that it's absolutely wonderful. (Though the smattering of cosmic horror and weirdness is also fun and gives it some unique flavour.) Sheryl Lee is absolutely mesmerizing in the main role - her body language and expressiveness is just beautiful and unlike anything I've ever seen.

And the movie honestly made me care about Laura in a way that the characters weeping over her in the show's pilot never did. I was intrigued by the narrative mechanism of a dead girl as the gaping hole in the middle of the narrative, but frankly the way it was done in the show didn't inspire me at all - the premise of a tragic dead girl who was desired by all but understood by none had just been done so many times, and the show, imo, didn't comment on it in a compelling way, narratively or stylistically. But this film, on the other hand, really sold me the narrative of Laura - constrained by forces beyond her control, but still her own distinct person rather than just a symbol; doomed by the narrative but so much more than her death. And the visuals and soundscape of the film just beautifully capture the creepy tension that's so often present in Lynch's work, but also this profound and inescapable melancholy. It's an incredibly visceral movie, but absolutely worth watching.

Right now, I'm three episodes in with The Return (season 3), and I'm... not sure I'm liking that any more than the original show.

I was never sold on the mundane subplots and folksy interludes of the original show, so I was excited for more of a straight-up horror story. But I'm not sure I'm sold on what they're doing with the revival? I think, despite the enthusiastic reviews, that it is falling victim to 21st century TV revival bad habits. My best friend also watched these first few episodes with me, and he commented that Lynch was getting a little carried away with modern special effects technology, and honestly I agree. The Red Room is a great horror setpiece partly BECAUSE of how understated and low-budget it is. It's not elaborate! It's simple design that's rendered uncanny through how familiar its surface-level trappings are to us. Extended sequences of Cooper floating through space and getting engulfed in purple smoke and taken into a weird purple dimension honestly just... feel like they're trying too hard to be out there.

That said, there was a really cool sequence that really relied on visual glitchiness and the stop-motion effect in a way that really mounted the tension in that eerie Lynchian way, and reminded me a lot of the sequences in Inland Empire. One thing I really love about Lynch is the way he explores the concept of simulation, and the horror of cinema itself, and that sequence really captured that feeling for me. So I am interested in what else he does with this series, and in terms of where the plot is heading.

But honestly another problem I'm having with it is that - although I found the more mundane character subplots and soap opera antics of the town in the original series to be tedious - I think that not confining the revival largely to the town itself is a mistake. This revival is making me realize that I actually liked how small stakes the horror story of the original Twin Peaks was - yes, there's an entire eldritch dimension lying alongside the town, but the stakes are mostly confined to how this affects the town and its people. I don't care for the way this revival is stretched out over basically the entire country - it feels, again, like it's falling victim to the 21st century need to make the stakes consistently bigger and bigger, because clearly that's the only way to make people care. The original run of the series was honestly refreshing in that regard, in a way that I didn't even realize as I was watching it. The seemingly larger scale of season 3 just makes it feel kind of emotionally cold to me. As I said, I'm curious about what's going to happen, but I'm not sure I'm going to be very emotionally invested.

Also, as an aside, I don't love the amount of naked women we see alongside clothed men. The big discussion on Lynch is always how much he toes the line between the male gaze and the women's subjectivity being molded via their awareness of, and intentional self-presentation towards, the male gaze. It's a tension that produces an interesting campy effect. But I don't see any of that kind of self-awareness here - the naked women just feel like set dressing, and it's uncomfortable.

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I tried watching Pushing Daisies, but - I'm sorry - I only got about 2.5 minutes in before I found it too insufferable to continue

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Best friend and I watched Jennifer's Body last night, and I was really not prepared for what a piece of 2000's kitsch it is now. The indie bands... the dated cultural references....... the hairstyles and low-rise jeans! The opening dialogue "I get more letters than Zac Effron, Dr. Phil, and Santa Claus combined" instantly jettisoned me back in time.

My other response to it is that it's thematically of a piece with my rewatch of Hannibal, because this film also features a murder scene that scans remarkably like a lesbian sex scene.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

One of the Netflix subtitles for the first episode of 1899 is "[indistinct, genteel conversation]"

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I finished Yellowjackets last night, and between that and rewatching Hannibal, I'm really remembering how enjoyable TV as a medium is. I've been pretty underwhelmed by most of the shows I've watched this year, in terms of quality, so it's a joy to see serialized stories that feel genuinely well conceived and constructed.

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Yellowjackets is an enjoyable watch as far as "terrible women doing terrible things" goes

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I get annoyed with most of the excessive adulation that gets heaped on shows on here, especially stuff that paints them as incredibly subversive and groundbreaking in their storytelling, so I think I'd cultivated a resentment towards Derry Girls on that basis. But watching season 3 made me remember that it is a genuinely entertaining show

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LET'S GOOOOOO

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Nope was a little disappointing. Interesting visuals and sound editing, but the themes were a little too heavy handed for me and the characterization was thin - the sibling relationship wasn't centered or fleshed out in the way it needed to be, and the motivations for a few side characters weren't established enough. The last 20 minutes or so were great though.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Is Yellowjackets like Lord of the Flies but for girls? And does Shauna have a crush on Jackie?

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I’m not against miscommunication as a plot device - especially because that can refer to a pretty vast array of things - but I cannot stand that trope where a character is trying to express or explain themself, but is having trouble spitting it out or putting it in words, and then the other person immediately jumps in and interrupts them with a big honking assumption about what they’re trying to say, and just runs off to act on that assumption without giving the other person a chance to correct them. Just makes me want to tear my hair out