The Dream Demon in the S&M Club

Freddy Krueger returned in 1985's A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, a film once derided for its homoerotic subtext but is now lauded for it. Directed by Jack Sholder and written by David Chaskin with no involvement from franchise creator Wes Craven, aside from a few suggestions, the filmmaking feels cheaper and more TV sized but Robert Englund in the role of Freddy still makes an effectively threatening impression.

The homoerotic elements revolve around the film's main character, a guy named Jesse played by Mark Patton, who was a closeted homosexual at the time. Apparently he complained that the movie kind of outed him for years but has since kind of embraced it, even writing a sequel to the film from the point of view of his character. No-one ever suggests Jesse is gay in the film, the interpretation mainly comes from his physical interactions with a guy on his high school football team and with the coach, whom Jesse encounters at an S&M club.

Jesse's love interest, Lisa (Kim Myers), does feel more like a best friend than lover. She also looks identical to a young Meryl Streep, which is apparently why she was cast.

Freddy's scheme this time is to take possession of Jesse's body so he can massacre people in the real world. This, too, could be taken as an allegory for Jesse struggling with repressed urges.

It's more interesting to think of this movie as unintentionally homoerotic than as intentionally so. My own opinion is that the movie was probably intentionally homophobic. When Chaskin says in interviews that he wanted to address the homophobia he was perceiving in young men, I suspect the thinking was more like, "Guys are creeped out by gay shit, this will make the movie creepier." But the film does function well as a story about someone who can never face his own subconscious so the film's unhappy ending works better on a thematic level--because the movie ends with Jesse not acknowledging his own homosexuality. The consequences are brutal but, hey, it's a horror movie.

In the Hollow

If you've been following my instagram, you'll know I've been in Sleepy Hollow lately. Yes, it's a real town, exactly where Washington Irving described it as being in his 1820 story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", near Tarrytown, or Tarry Town, as he wrote it. But it only took the name "Sleepy Hollow" in 1996. According to Wikipedia, it was called "Slapershaven" by the 17th century Dutch settlers, meaning "Sleepers' Harbour". Irving wrote the story under a pseudonym he often used to write about the old Dutch communities in New England, Dietrich Knickerbocker. "Rip Van Winkle" is also a story from Knickerbocker. Incidentally, the undergarment supposedly gets its name from Irving's pseudonym.

You can find souvenirs and buildings and institutions with the name of Sleepy Hollow, or references to it, all throughout Tarrytown, and it's no surprise since, prior to 1996, many areas in the vicinity may have justifiably considered itself to be part of the historical village. For my first two nights in the area, I stayed at the Sleepy Hollow Hotel, actually pretty far south of Sleepy Hollow.

Yeah, the Halloween decor was surprisingly lacklustre but I couldn't complain. I'd gotten my room for 150 dollars a night, and it was a really nice room, especially after I'd been staying in a hostel in New Jersey for a week.

Don't get me wrong, it was a nice hostel where I met a lot of nice people, many of them New Yorkers rather than travellers, refugees of the outrageous rent prices oppressing the nation. I ended up paying just over 200 dollars for five days, cheap for the New York area, and close to the same price I was paying my mother to stay at her place in San Diego. One of the people at the hostel told me it was illegal for New Yorkers to stay in the cheaper hostels and hotels located within the city limits, lest it interfere with the city's lucrative tourist trade.

After the initial two days, rates at the Sleepy Hollow Hotel skyrocketed, which seemed only natural given October must certainly be their busiest season, and on the day I checked out the lobby was packed with tourists though it had been fairly empty on the day I'd checked in. I moved to an Extended Stay Hotel about fifty minutes walk away from the Sleepy Hollow Hotel in Elmsford and a 1.5 hour walk from Sleepy Hollow itself.

It's beautiful country and many trees have already turned yellow and red. Broadway, a street running through Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, has Sleepy Hollow themed shops beginning a mile or so south of the Sleepy Hollow sign. There were also many charming local decorations, including a series of scarecrows made by local kids.

I spoke to the proprietress of a cool shop on Broadway and Wildey St called The Legend Shop. The shop sold Halloween decorations and Sleepy Hollow souvenirs as well as vintage records. The soundtrack to the Tim Burton movie was playing when I stopped by. She recommended I visit the cemetery later in the day and also said there was a place that had the costumes from the Burton movie.

Across the street from her shop is a beautiful old library where I stopped in to see what Washington Irving books they had. They had plenty of books called The Legend of Sleepy Hollow but only one tattered paperback copy of The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon. But they did have this beautiful door:

Beeker Street is the main drag of Sleepy Hollow and I was surprised by the profusion of Mexican restaurants. There was one with a Coco theme, based on the Disney movie, which is based on Dia de Los Muertos, a Catholic holiday that shares some DNA with Halloween.

I ended up buying some souvenirs near the Philipsburg Manor; just a scarf, some tea, and a book for my nephew. If you'd like to see more of my photos of Sleepy Hollow, check out my instagram.

Bargain Velvet

The immortal damned show off all their pores in the butt ugly cinematography of 2026's Vampires of the Velvet Lounge. A cast of over fifty year-old guys who used to be in bigger movies and over forty year-old women who used to be in bigger movies help serve up this pastiche of thirty year-old goth movies like Underworld and Repo: The Genetic Opera with a heavy, awkward dose of Sin City.

In one of the movie's awkwardly juxtaposed plots, Dichen Lachman plays Cora, a vampire hunter whose narration she speaks in low gravelly tones, something she clearly has no practice doing because her voice constantly cracks up and down the audible register. She occasionally speaks world-weary, badass lines directly from Sin City. Her assistant, Alex, is played by Rosa Salazar, whom I didn't realise was the girl from Alita: Battle Angel because she doesn't have the huge cgi eyes in this one. Also because she's somehow 41 already. She spends almost the entire movie wearing just a bulky, sparkly t-shirt and enormous black panties, showing this film's attempt to make everything as ugly as possible extends beyond the hair, makeup, and cinematography to include costume design as well.

Mena Suvari, best known as the naked blonde with rose petals from American Beauty, plays the lead, none other than Elizabeth Bathory, who's a vampire in this. It may have been a creative choice to make the woman famously obsessed with youth be the most visibly aged but the makeup and cinematography might have shown her a little more courtesy.

The youngest member of the cast is 32 year old India Eisley who is kind of entertaining and pretty as a vampire afflicted by suicidal ennui but the cinematography even makes her skin look like the surface of the moon.

There's also one guy under 50, 47 year-old Tyrese Gibson who plays one of a trio of guys who used to do higher profile films, the other two being Stephen Dorff and Lochlyn Munro. They're introduced in the most oddly artificial scene in the movie, in a conference room that clearly looks like it was digitally inserted behind them. In fact, I'm pretty sure the three of them were not in the same room for the scene, though we do see them together at a club later on. Tom Berenger and Mark Boone Junior also have small, pointless roles.

The vampires are running an online dating scam in which they lure victims to an absinthe bar. Elizabeth makes a couple of comments about AI to demonstrate this film is bringing this old b movie genre into the 2020s, which would've been nice if the level of insight made me feel like writer/director Adam Sherman had ever spent more than three seconds contemplating the topic.

Oh, yeah, and the effects suck. Its copious computer effects look like a SyFy original movie from 2003.

Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint has died at the age of 102. I had no idea she'd been around for over a century. It's nice to see she wasn't kicked out of her home in Los Angeles before she died. Unlike some actresses of her age, maybe she still had a good income because her last major film role was in 2014's Winter's Tale and she played Martha Kent in Superman Returns in 2005. But of course, she's best known for being in two of the greatest movies of all time, North by Northwest and On the Waterfront.

I'll admit, I'm not a big Eva Marie Saint fan. I love both of those movies, particularly North by Northwest, but comparing her performances in the two films really highlights how On the Waterfront's director, Elia Kazan, deserved his reputation for getting great performances out of actors. Plus, she was partnered with Marlon Brando in that movie, and I think his performance was so startlingly natural it likely provoked natural responses from her. It's no wonder she won an Oscar for On the Waterfront. So it's puzzling that she's so rigid in North by Northwest. It may have been due to that film's director, Alfred Hitchcock's, infamous coldness with his actors, and her performance isn't so different from Kim Novak's in Vertigo the year previous. But as with Novak, the impression of a repressed and emotionally unavailable woman kind of works when analysing the film.

Busy Space Nine

I'm still working my way through a rewatch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and recently I got to the late third season two parter, "Improbable Cause"/"The Die Is Cast", which aired in April, 1995. This is one I used to rewatch a lot when I was in high school. When we were studying Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in one English class, I told the teacher that this set of episodes referenced the play, and it does, at the beginning, when Bashir and Garek are talking about it over lunch. She let me show that scene, but then I told her the whole episode contained references to the play, so she showed the whole first of the two episodes to the class. I tend to cringe looking back on that because the rest of the two parter really has very little to do with Julius Caesar, apart from a quote of the famous "fault is not in our stars" line at the very end of part two. But, when I think about it, she didn't have to listen to one of her students and play a whole episode of Star Trek she'd never seen before. She probably just saw a chance to grade papers or something while the show babysat the class. That's how in classes of all manner of subjects we so often ended up watching Back to the Future.

This is the two part episode where Garek teams up with Odo and they encounter Garek's former boss, Enabran Tain. This two parter kind of ruins Garek for the rest of the series because, before this, although we had a relatively good idea that he'd worked for Cardassian intelligence at some point in his past, he was still an enigma, and that added something to every scene he was in. It seemed like there was a lot less reason for him to turn up after this. But I still like his chemistry with Odo, especially since this episode is mainly Odo being the hardass instead of the emotional puddle, I mean figuratively.

As a teenager, my friends and I liked the big space battle, and used to compare it to the high water mark at that time, the space battle in Return of the Jedi. Of course, there have been space battles in movies since that have at least exceeded those in number of ships a thousand fold, a thousand times over. CGI got good at rendering spaceships a lot earlier than it managed to perfect anything else. The Return of the Jedi battle sequence, with its remarkable practical effects, still looks great, though, but this episode's looks stiff and slow. It still works as a story point, at least, and it effectively establishes how dangerous the Dominion is when they're able to fend off the combined Cardassian and Romulan fleets.

Travel Too Cheap

Rutger Hauer terrorises a young man through various improbable and cruel ways in 1986's The Hitcher. This movie may have been supernatural on accident, or it may have been on purpose, I'm not sure, but I certainly like it.

Jim (C. Thomas Howell) has taken a job driving a car from Chicago to San Diego, not unlike Kowalski in Vanishing Point was delivering a car to San Francisco. But instead of becoming a symbol for doomed freedom, Jim becomes the victim of a man called John Ryder, played by an imperturbable, perpetually amused Rutger Hauer. Jim picks up John as a hitchhiker. When John tries to kill Jim, Jim outsmarts him and manages to drive off. Unfortunately, John somehow has the means to follow and torment Jim wherever he goes. Cars and helicopters are destroyed in fiery explosions, John somehow wipes out entire gas stations and police stations.

When Jim stumbles into a diner with only one waitress in attendance, the only evidence Jim gets that John has caught up to him is a severed human finger in his French fries. How did John get the finger in there? Why did he do it? From a filmmaking perspective, you can say, "Well, because it's creepy." This might bother me in a lot of films but not here. The filmmakers do seem to lean into it consciously, at least in one scene where John somehow has all the bullets for Jim's gun in his pocket. Is John some kind of manifestation of a part of Jim's personality? The film never explains but maintains a nicely nightmarish quality throughout.

The waitress is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh and she's good as always. She's set up as a love interest for Jim but I think this must be the only movie in the '80s in which she didn't get naked.

Rutger Hauer is fantastic and as horrible as he gets it's hard not to get caught up in his sadistic charisma.

The Hitcher is available on Criterion this month as part of a Highway Horror collection which somehow does not include Lost Highway.

Pianos at Night

A college student's ambition to be a great pianist are piqued with a little help from demoniac forces in 2020's Nocturne. Sydney Sweeney stars as a pale ascetic. No-one batted an eye at that back in 2020, and she does a fine job. A lot of people compared this movie to The Black Swan--the Natalie Portman ballerina movie, not the Tyrone Power pirate movie--but there's more of a gossipy tone to this movie. It's not bad, though, and writer/director Zu Quirke delivers a solid little horror soap opera.

Juliet (Sweeney) is the sister of Vivian (Madison Iseman). They're both talented pianists at an elite boarding school but Vivian has been accepted to Julliard while Juliet hasn't. Juliet may have been jealous but it's hard to say how much jealousy comes naturally from her and how much of it is provoked by circumstances, which I thought was a nice point of ambiguity.

There's also recently been a suicide, the school's star pianist, and this leaves a slot open for someone else to perform at an important school concert, and it turns out to be Vivian. Meanwhile, Juliet finds a notebook that belonged to the deceased star pianist and it's filled with strange, demoniac images and symbols. There's the notebook, there's the occasional cruel words from Vivian or their mutual friends, there's the fact that Juliet has sacrificed having a personal life since childhood just to be the best. It's hard to say for sure what pushes Juliet into darker territory in her desire to be the best.

I think this movie would count as Dark Academia if all the characters were attractive boys wearing tweed. Sweeney's believable as someone with a hidden tenacious streak who's not as introspective as she ought to be.

Nocturne is available on Amazon Prime.

Sonnet 2012

For puddles drained, forgotten days recede
As gentle hills of sand dissolve, they slept
A dose of twenty grains, do not exceed
There's secret math in rotten lockers kept
A row of blondes beholds the podgy wight
He disappears across the nightly track
And so the ladies board the pumpkin train
The sky above becomes a jelly black
Their station's gone and now they're left alone
They peer about the strange and empty lot
The chill ignores their coats and hits the bone
A distant howl provokes a gloomy thought
The hungry shapes are swirling round them fast
From here, some cruel and bitter spells are cast

Corpses Seldom Love Wisely

October seems like no time to stop watching Tales from the Crypt. "Three's a Crowd" and "The Thing from the Grave" are two episodes from May, 1990. "Three's a Crowd" presents a love triangle story in which a married couple, Richard and Della, are invited to stay at the cabin of their wealthy friend, Alan. Richard is played by Gavan O'Herlihy, whom most people of my generation will remember best as Airk from Willow. He spends most of the episode in a piping hot rage, convinced that Della is cheating on him with Alan. Both Della and Alan are constantly shocked by Richard's unstable behaviour, yet the two of them do act suspiciously secretive and chummy. When the twist ending comes, we're supposed to think, "My God, Richard's made a terrible mistake!" but I think most people will actually be thinking, "Why on earth did Alan and Della think it was a good idea to plot anything, however benign, behind Richard's back?"

"The Thing from the Grave" features another love triangle but one with more star power. Miguel Ferrer plays the jealous boyfriend of a supermodel played by Teri Hatcher. She falls for her photographer, Devlin (Kyle Secor). This one more sensibly ends with zombies, courtesy of a cursed amulet. Ferrer's good as the angry, entitled boyfriend. I also like the Cryptkeeper's intro for this episode in which we seem to catch him reading a porno magazine of human corpses.

The World is Elm Street

Halloween month has begun so I watched the original 1984 Nightmare on Elm Street last night. The only thing I remembered from the previous time I watched it was that on that occasion I also didn't remember anything about it from the time before that. Watching the movie last night, I didn't even remember stuff from the Red Letter Media review of it I'd watched a couple weeks earlier. I guess this is just a movie that doesn't stick, at least for me.

Heather Langenkamp, the lead, the film's heroine, always seems like her nose and upper lip are numb but she gives a convincing enough, sincere performance. The piece of trivia everyone knows is this was Johnny Depp's first movie, playing Langenkamp's boyfriend. It was weird watching this after watching the Ebenezer trailer.

I see a lot of people saying it looks like an old Tim Burton movie, back when Burton had a noticeably consistent aesthetic. It's directed by Ti West, the director of the X/Pearl movies. It seems he may have learned something from the fact that Pearl received far more praise than the other two movies in that series and decided he has more of a knack for slightly fantastical, Victorian or Edwardian period films. I hope, for his sake, Pearl wasn't mostly Mia Goth's labour of love, as it was reported to be. Maybe she should be a director.

You don't really see any of the familiar zaniness in Depp's Nightmare on Elm Street performance. He was playing the cool teenage boyfriend, that was the job. The arc of his career kind of reminds me of Al Pacino or Jack Nicholson, both of whom have always had a distinctive affect but at some point in their career lapsed into almost exclusively playing broad, exaggerated versions of their former personae. In Nicholson's case, the switchover can be pinpointed to his performance as the Joker.

Freddy Kruger is surprisingly restrained in the first movie, too. He hadn't become the cartoon character yet. At the point he appeared, there was already a series of popular slasher monsters of the '70s and '80s, there was already Leatherface and Michael Myers. You can see why the makers of Nightmare figured Freddy needed a hook, which turned out to be his razor fingered glove and fedora. I wonder why no-one calls me Freddy Kruger when they see me wearing my fedora. I suppose I ought to get a stripey red shirt. People have started in on the Indiana Jones cracks here in New York and New Jersey now, too. It's really strange. Yesterday a fat guy in a Captain America t-shirt yelled "Dr. Jones!" at me. Talk about glass houses.

Two are One

A pair of sisters who often speak in unison struggle in a world inhospitable to their strangeness in 2026's Bucking Fastard. Werner Herzog directs this film loosely based on a real life pair of twin sisters. The film is dedicated to the late David Lynch and in many ways it's reminiscent of My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, the project on which Herzog and Lynch collaborated. Segments of the film that focus on the salacious, real world story are paired with other scenes in which the main character(s) dreamily contemplate the beauty and strangeness of reality. It's an aesthetic attitude that not many people have an appetite for--most critics don't quite know how to appreciate beauty, so many of the reviews for both films have failed to find much of value in them. This fittingly parallels the lives of the sisters in the film, whose difficulties stem from a world that cannot empathise with their priorities. For me, this film was incredible; it is an effective, melancholy meditation on lives cursed with being out of step with society, lives that few are willing to see humanity in.

The first part of the film focuses on the most salacious true story attached to the pair, their obsession with a man who'd been their sexual partner, but who had eventually gotten a restraining order put out on them after their failure to cope with his marriage to another woman had caused them to harass him. We see them throwing garbage bags onto the windscreen of his car and setting fire to his mailbox.

In real life, the pair of sisters were twins--you can see footage of them in TV documentaries from the '80s. Herzog sets the film in the modern day, complete with internet and touch screens, factors that play important roles in the film's story. The sisters are also not twins, as they directly state in the movie, despite the Wikipedia entry erroneously referring to them as twins. They're played by real life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara. Herzog also moves the location from Yorkshire, England, to County Kildare, Ireland.

The Mara sisters give an incredible performance that must have been very difficult to achieve. Their speaking most of the time in unison seems different from how the real life sisters spoke in unison. In the brief bits of footage I could find of them on YouTube, the real life pair watch each other a lot and look for confirmation and cues. When they speak in unison, it comes off as a kind of litany, like the things they say together are lines in a play they constantly repeat. The characters played by the Mara sisters, Jean and Joan Holbrooke, seem often as though they have a single brain operating two bodies. The Mara sisters basically give two complete performances of the same character, standing next to each other, but sometimes they switch to finishing each other's sentences instead of speaking simultaneously.

They're fascinating, the viewer is compelled to wonder how their minds function. A character played by Domhnall Gleeson tries to help them. They have trouble opening a sardine can because it's not something they can do together and he slowly coaxes one of them into doing it alone. But any time one is distinguished from the other, either visually or through actions, it causes them both profound distress. Setting the story in modern times adds another dimension to the story. An old man whose home they're staying in is shocked to find nude pictures of them on the internet, taken by a voyeur on the roof across the street from their bedroom window. When the old man informs them, they can't believe him because, as they tell him, they don't have internet. He slowly realises that they think if they don't have internet, then pictures of them can't be on the internet.

In both real life and in the film, the sisters must lead a very simple life in order to maintain their synchronicity. Though they're taken as simple-minded, it must actually take a great deal of mental acuity to maintain their mirror act, but even so they likely must keep the parameters narrow. So this fosters a very simple outlook on life which is doubtless why they're given to fervent romantic ideas. This is what makes them classic Herzog protagonists. They'll go to any lengths for their goals because they have thoroughly unshakable convictions. They have to, to maintain their unison.

The final act of the film is the cosiest piece of filmmaking I've seen from Herzog. The sisters move out to the countryside to stay with a widow in her cottage. They spend their time around local caves that command a fantastic view of the surrounding countryside. When a local rich hunter tries to slaughter all the local foxes, the sisters keep one whom they name Cupid. Cupid leads them, and the film, into a symbolic realm in which the influence of David Lynch becomes clearer. It also solidifies the point of the story. The same obsessions that allow them to find incredible beauty in the world also cut them off from it.

Bucking Fastard is playing at the New York Film Festival.

'Till Hit Do They Part

When her mobster husband is killed, a woman tries to rebuild her life in Jonathan Demme's 1988 film Married to the Mob. A less comedic tone would've helped this movie a lot, especially since Michelle Pfeiffer plays the lead role so straight. Matthew Modine gives a distractingly broad performance as her love interest and much of the plot is silly without being amusing.

Pfeiffer plays Angela, who's married to Frankie, a mob enforcer played by Alec Baldwin. The boss, Tony, is played by Dean Stockwell and he's got eyes for Angela, which makes his wife, Connie (Mercedes Ruehl) furious. Virtually everyone in the movie is a known name. In minor roles the cast includes Joan Cusack, Oliver Platt, Chris Isaak, and Nancy Travis.

After Frankie's killed, Angela moves to a grimy apartment on the lower east side of Manhattan, where my current hotel happens to be. I'm already noticing what a difference it makes, watching a movie set in New York and actually having spent time in New York. Somehow actually walking around here makes all the dialogue referring to locations come alive in ways that poring over Google Maps never did.

Matthew Modine plays an FBI agent who has Angela under surveillance. After he accidentally bumps into her in an elevator, they start dating and things get complicated. Pfeiffer plays it totally straight, she really seems like she's falling for him, which is really odd because Modine plays his character like a 24/7 goofball. Instead of focusing so much on their relationship, the last act focuses more on Connie trying to prove Tony's cheating on her and on the FBI trying to nab Tony. There are some interesting moments and I liked the scene where Tony starts to realise what's going on. Demme makes his thoughts visual by having the actors perform them without any preamble. It's a deft bit of filmmaking that shows Demme was a master.

Married to the Mob is available on The Criterion Channel until to-morrow.

The Versatile Word "Cafe"

One of the differences between New York and California I'm noticing is that there are far fewer homeless people on the streets. I did some reading and found that this is despite the fact that New York actually has more homeless people than any other city in the US. However, since there's a legal mandate for shelter, the vast majority of New York's homeless are in shelters.

I also noticed there aren't as many restrooms with coded locks. So far I've only seen one, a McDonalds where I bought a small fries just so I could use the restroom. I then tried to give the fries to a homeless man who rejected them. I had half a sandwich leftover from lunch that was rejected by another homeless man. If they can afford to be so picky, New York must be taking very good care of its homeless indeed.

Yesterday I wanted to go to a cafe to read. I walked past a Starbucks that was packed before seeing a place called Union Square Cafe that was totally empty. I didn't know at the time it was kind of a famous New York restaurant. I was bemused when the hostess told me it would be a five minute wait before a table would be ready when I could plainly see behind her an almost entirely deserted restaurant. It was after 11 in the morning. As I waited outside, people with reservations rapidly started turning up.

All I wanted was some tea but it seemed wrong not to order food somehow. So I ordered a salad and a turkey sandwich. It was good, surprisingly greasy. In California, upscale food is usually dry, but I guess New York's not shy with the oils.

I was at a little table that was too close to other tables. I knocked over a pepper shaker on the next table when I was sitting down. While I was reading and drinking tea, a young woman sat at the table next to me and she was shortly joined by a young man. I listened to their conversation instead of reading. He referred to his male partner so it wasn't a date. He and she both work in publishing. He's from Atlanta and she's from Texas. He gushed about Dolly Parton and told her how much he loved the bayou. "That's the first time I've ever heard anyone say they love the bayou," she said. He said he loved the diversity. I'd bet good money he's never been to a bayou. He seemed compelled the fill up the conversation while she mostly said, "Yes. Oh, yes. Right. Totally." I was disappointed they didn't talk more about books.

East of West

That's the arch and colonnade for the Manhattan Bridge, near my hotel in Chinatown. I've been shifting between different hotels in New York and New Jersey for about a week, to get the best prices. I think they're a bit inflated right now because of the UN meeting, or maybe prices are showing lower next week just because they're lower when you reserve earlier. Anyway, it's my first time on the east coast of the US. I'm mainly here for the New York Film Festival and to visit colleges because I want to go to grad school but I also I just want to be able to say I've been here at least once in my life. For most of my life, if someone had asked me if I wanted to go to New York City, I would've said, "Not especially," despite the innumerable movies I love that were set and/or shot in the city. I'd always admired what I knew about the city's spirit and diversity but I didn't see any reason why I should go to the inconvenience of visiting it. But living in Japan made me realise what a potent symbol the city remains for people around the world, even if they can't articulate why.

I've spent two nights in Brooklyn, four in New Jersey, and one in Manhattan. One thing I've noticed is that people are a lot more polite here than they are in San Diego, at least right now. It feels a little like the San Diego I remember from six years ago. I've gotten no rude comments and the few people who have commented on the odd way I dress have done so in what seems like a more natural, less rehearsed, less condescending fashion.

Mostly I've been in New Jersey, in Ridgefield, the Korea Town, which was fine because I could get cheap, filling meals from the local H Mart as well as bottled green tea, which I seem to have a taste for lately. I rarely drank it in Japan. I assume I should have easy access to such things here in Chinatown, too.

Mostly New Jersey seemed a lot more generically American than New York. The layout of the Target was so precisely identical to the one in Santee it was eerie. One thing I found startling was the amount of roadkill. I saw a dead groundhog, a dead canary, and a dead deer on the same short length of road. It took two days for the deer to be removed. I almost became roadkill myself when Google maps directed me to walk on the side of a busy bridge with no sidewalk. The next day, because I wanted to get from my hotel to the Target, I tried to find an alternate route around that bridge which took me onto an overgrown, abandoned subway track, where I saw this live deer:

I took a couple steps after taking the photo and the animal ran away. I followed the track, which runs under the bridge I was trying to circumvent, trying to find a way I could get out of it on the south side, where the Target was. Eventually I came to this pitch black tunnel carved into the rock.

The deer must have run in there so I assume it comes out the other side but it seemed unwise to risk it without a flashlight. It was wonderfully spooky anyway.

I ended up having to go back the way I came and managed to find a somewhat awkward way to the south side of the old track on the western side of the bridge.

Girls in the Pink and Silver Haze

Two beautiful girls meet in an otherwise vacant luxury hotel, one girl famous, the other not. So begins 2026's Her Private Hell, Nicolas Winding Refn's latest rumination on neon, atmospheric beauty and violence. It's a lovely film, which is plenty for me, but not enough for a number of boneheaded critics who are griping about the film's slow pace. The mysterious city seemingly held in eternal night, shrouded in a sinister mist looks like the city in Blade Runner, depopulated and shot by Mario Bava. Refn's visuals echo not only Ridley Scott and Mario Bava but also Suzuki Seijun, Douglas Sirk, and Jack Cardiff. I found it to be a satisfying buffet.

Sophie Thatcher plays Elle, an actress shooting a Sci-Fi action film, seemingly on soundstages in the same hotel where she's staying. Her new friend, Hunter (Kristine Froseth), is also her co-star. She's eager and star struck by the cool and brusque Elle and their contemplations of each other are accompanied by a lush, dreamy musical score by Pino Donaggio, simultaneously injecting the scenes with real feeling while heightening their artificiality, one of several things that reminded me of Inland Empire. So many of Refn's lingering shots of the girls framed in fashionable splendour seem to be saying, "Isn't it artificial and isn't it marvellous?"

It's not really clear what city it is. It may be Tokyo, where Refn originally wanted to shoot, but of course he wasn't allowed--the film was shot in Copenhagen instead. But sometimes when Elle lapses into reverie, the camera descends to the streets in the mist, where we meet an American GI called K (Charlie Melton) who stalks streets with Japanese civilians and signage, seeking the infamous "Leather Man" who kidnapped his daughter. It has a very post World War II vibe yet two mysterious Japanese seamstresses who worked on Elle's wardrobe in the movie also meet with K. There are indications K is a ghost so these seamstresses may be spirits of some kind.

Elle and Hunter witness the Leather Man murder a woman in a building across the mist from their hotel. Of course, it recalls Hitchcock's Rear Window but maybe more pertinently The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The Leather Man's most significant leather is his black gloves which unmistakably mark him as a giallo nightmare.

In the scenes with K, Refn seems to have reacquired his taste for shooting action scenes. There's a memorable fight between K and a fat yakuza. Throughout the fight, a girl kept in an iron collar by the yakuza watches impassively, chewing bubble gum, reminding me of the secretary in Tokyo Nagaremono. The action is very gendered, with the boys inhabiting a realm of sweat, blood, and fists while the girls exist in a reality of languid gestures and glittering gowns. When K brings out his brass knuckles to threaten the seamstresses, one of them smiles gently and informs him, "That won't work on us."

The film's conclusion was satisfying, at least for me. Your mileage may vary.

Sonnet 2011

The pizza legends lead the group of girls
A daily stop invites the playing gangs
She catches cheese before it hits her curls
And brushes back her long and tangled bangs
Her friends describe arrests from yesterday
She shares a slice and asks for certain names
But all's forgot before a Saturday
A pen of lights enfolds the sleepy dames
"It's only twenty five til nine," she says
"They say there's time for aught to catch a soul."
A passing train with lights recalls a blaze
The pizza crust's too thin to fill a hole
"Now where's my scissor set," she checks her purse
Instead she finds the knife that cut a curse

Death Served with Sprinkles

Kids go crazy for the demoniac taste of ice cream in 2026's Ice Cream Man. It's an Eli Roth movie, maybe the most niche movie he's ever made. You really need to be into dark humour to enjoy this one and, considering nowadays people's idea of "dark" is the Robert Pattinson Batman movie or Dark Academia, it's no wonder this one didn't connect with audiences. You may ask, is this the whole reason the original Hostel movies were popular but this wasn't? The real difference is that Hostel worked as a straightforward horror movie while, for Ice Cream Man, you really need to be in on the joke, which is that straightforward horror movies are also, typically, ridiculous if you think about them. Anyway, I enjoyed Ice Cream Man but I didn't find the humour as sharp as what we see in Thanksgiving.

The film feels like a distant parody of Something Wicked This Way Comes. The movie opens on an idyllic afternoon of junior high school baseball. Our point of view character is the nerdy Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), who fails to catch the fly ball that decides the game. A strange ice cream truck appears, operated by a smiling man in a bow tie (Ari Millen). Jared doesn't imbibe the evil ice cream because he's lactose intolerant. He watches helplessly as most of his classmates are transformed into gleeful murderers the next day. He teams up with Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), who threw up the ice cream because she's bulimic, and the delinquent Tommy (Shiloh O'Reilly). The three try to survive as mayhem descends on their school.

It felt a little like Roth was trying to school Zach Creegor and show him how you really make a movie about weaponised children. It's like Roth wrote up a list of one hundred ways kids can kill their parents. They range from the relatively plausible to the appreciably bizarre. One man is scalped and fed his own brains in an ice cream cone, one man has popsicle sticks crammed into every orifice. This is all stuff from the real fan of '70s and '80s horror, both relatively mainstream stuff like the Nightmare on Elm Street movies or the more obscure cult classics, like Cannibal Holocaust.

Over the course of the film, Roth develops the relationships between the characters. I particularly enjoyed the progression of Jared's high school student sister, Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), who's forced to reunite with her ex-boyfriend (Dylan Hawco) amid the mayhem.

The movie concludes with a dedication to several people, including "Angelo and David", presumably Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch. Most people associate Roth with Quentin Tarantino but he also worked with Lynch early on. There's a very lucky man.

The Attorney and the Ham

A movie cowboy marries his pretty lawyer in 1951's The Groom Wore Spurs. This isn't a movie that ever made a big splash, either on its initial release or in retrospectives, and there really isn't much remarkable about it except it's always nice to see Ginger Rogers.

She plays the lawyer, AJ Furnival, and she was just about to turn 40, though she seems to be playing someone a bit younger. Her roommate is played by Joan Davis who's introduced showing off a new hair style, saying someone told her it made her look younger, the implicit joke being that she looks obviously older than AJ, though in real life Rogers was a year older than Davis.

The cowboy is named Ben Castle and he's played by Jack Carson, who's amusing enough. My favourite gag in the movie is when AJ, compelled to stay the night at Ben's place, locks her bedroom door. Then thinks about it and unlocks it. Then thinks again and locks it. Then unlocks it. Each time, we see Carson outside comically take a step toward her door, then check himself, the start again, etc. When she does let him in, she remarks the door had been unlocked and he says, "I lost count!"

There are a lot of little moments that gently challenge cultural norms. The very fact that the young woman is a lawyer is a source of constant astonishment. At one point Ben suggest she talk to someone "man to man" before he remembers himself. Sometimes Jack Carson is a little too broad and it's a little silly that the movie cowboy is such a phony that even his voice is entirely different. Though John Wayne infamously didn't live up to his onscreen persona.

The Groom Wore Spurs is available on Amazon Prime.

Through the House of Backrooms: The Next Generation

The owner of a furniture store finds a gateway to another dimension in 2026's Backrooms. Based on a 4chan meme from several years ago, this is a fun, creepy daydream. Sure, it's derivative, but it's derivative in the way of an urban legend, like something that grew up in communal, half-digested impressions of Through the Looking Glass, Being John Malkovich, and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, the furniture store owner. He may have been influenced by Walter White. Ejiofor comes off as a little too bourgeois to be an average furniture store owner and we learn at one point he had ambitions to be an architect that were derailed by his ex-wife's need for him to be a breadwinner. I wish the film had done a better job making his commercial cheesier in the way of a real world furniture store commercial.

This movie was produced by James Wan and one of my frequent complaints about Wan's films is the noticeably cheap production design. But in this case, the bare, anonymous walls were actually appropriate for the Backrooms dimension. Still, I wish his actual shop had looked more cluttered and lived in, especially since we see that Clark kind of lives there.

It is fun seeing him and, later, his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), running through the halls of the other dimension and seeing weirdly placed furniture and then distorted dream people. It reminded me strongly of dream sequences on Star Trek: The Next Generation, especially "Phantasms", the one where Data eats Counselor Troi like a cake.

Like the corridors of the Enterprise in that episode, it's suggested that the corridors of the Backrooms is really a reflection of Clark's mind.

The film's monster is pretty cool and played by Robert Bobroczkyi, the 7'7" actor from Romania who gives the creature a wonderfully odd shape.