'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.

The Wages of Walking

The late Hayden Panettiere's final role was in 2026's Sleepwalker, a dismally written, nihilistic film about a woman being haunted by her dead child and her not dead husband. Her performance in the lead role isn't bad and the first third of the film has a little effective creepiness. But writer/director Brandon Auman doesn't have the chops for sustained quality and the film dissolves into a lazy, mean-spirited soap opera.

We're introduced to Sarah (Panettiere) comforting her distraught eight or nine year old daughter, who has had a terrifying experience sleepwalking. But then we learn it is in fact Sarah who's been sleepwalking and her daughter is dead. She still has a little boy of about the same age and the two of them are staying with Sarah's mother, Gloria (Beverly D'Angelo). Sarah's an artist who's been producing a series of disturbing paintings lately (I actually kind of liked her paintings). Her abusive husband, Michael (Justin Chatwin), is in a coma, but his ghost still stalks her to cause her psychological distress. He was still her husband because, the first time she tried to separate from him, he beat her up in front of their little boy and thereafter refused to give her a divorce.

We see Sarah watching the original Night of the Living Dead and Carnival of Souls and I felt like Auman was pointing to them as influences but Sleepwalker lacks the psychological depth of either. The climax of the film falls totally flat because Auman is counting on the impact of a twist that really adds up to nothing. Most of all, Sarah's sleepwalking actively detracts from her character development somehow. I think Auman wanted her to be like the protagonist of Carnival of Souls, whose supernatural problem ties intimately and effectively with her psychological problem but Sarah just seems like a lady being randomly tortured.

Auman's previous credits, I was surprised to see, mainly involved animation. He was a writer on Star Wars: Resistance. So I guess we can't blame that show's mediocrity entirely on Disney's overbearing committee.

Danger Kids

I have a tendency to overestimate people. I think this was my primary barrier to completely enjoying 2025's Weapons. I did like premise and I thought the performances were good but the screenplay bothered me too much, particularly when it came to how Zach Creegor thinks people think and act. But, again, I overestimate people. It's possible most people are the kind of dim witted assholes we see in this movie.

So the movie starts out and we learn that all but one student in the elementary school classroom of Mrs. Gandry (Julia Garner) got out of bed one night and ran into the darkness, never to be seen again (at least that's what the narration says). I do appreciate the poster calls her "Mrs" instead of pretending people actually say "Miz".

It's weird, right? Naturally angry parents suspect the teacher. I say "angry" because none of them seem distraught. The attitude, particularly shown by Josh Brolin's character, father of a child called Mike, is more of the kind of indignation seen in passengers of an airline told their flight is going to be delayed five hours than the kind of soul wrenching grief of parents whose children have been kidnapped. This may have been social commentary.

Mrs. Gandry, Justine, is just bewildered and wants to get answers but she's also not grief stricken. As a teacher myself, I would be heartbroken and morose and spending every waking moment trying to find the missing kids. Justine goes home to her improbably massive and beautiful home for someone living on an elementary school teacher's salary in 2025 and has some vodka and loosens up. People are leaving threatening calls on her phone and someone writes "witch" on her car.

There are a lot of questions people don't ask that would seem natural to me. The most obvious being, was Justine indoctrinating the students on some kind of wacko ideology? Something that would make the kids all behave in exactly the same strange way. Wouldn't police be asking her questions about her religion and political affiliations? What about the one kid who didn't disappear? They question him and he says he doesn't know anything but the movie spends a very long time addressing whether or not the police spoke to his parents. When it is addressed, the police blatantly ignore a number of red flags. Somehow, also, the school principal (Benedict Wong) has never met the child's parents.

Archer, Brolin's character, does his own investigating and discovers that security cameras show the kids running in the same direction to converge at a significant location. Why didn't the police notice this?

There's a pointless subplot about a beat cop played by Alden Ehrenreich that seems to have been inspired by John C Reilly's character in Magnolia, except a lot less realistic. I was reminded of Robert Zemekis' adaptation of Beowulf when Grendel pauses for dramatic effect outside the mead hall for no apparent reason when Ehrenreich's character pauses outside the tent of a junkie he's chasing so he can slowly and silently unzip the tent instead of, like a normal cop, saying, "Sir, please exit the tent" or something.

This is also a movie where people variously have supernatural strength in some scenes and don't in others, depending on what's convenient for the plot. It is an intriguing setup. Maybe director Zach Creegor is like George Lucas, more of an idea guy, a world builder, but he needs someone else to write his dialogue.

Weapons is available on Amazon Prime.

A Dream is the Girl You Make It

A disturbed young man falls in love with his captive sea monster in 2026's Mermaid. I'm so glad we live in a world where a movie like this can get made. While its tonal experiment doesn't always connect, I really respect it for hitching up its own tightrope and walking it wearing fins.

But, okay, what is love? It seems like moviegoers have been interested in that question this year since Obsession. Mermaid, despite not being nearly as successful, actually has a somewhat similar premise. A young, sexually frustrated young man, possibly an incel, is so desperate to have a relationship with his dream woman, he tries to make it work even when it turns out she may be an inhuman monster. Unlike in Obsession, though, the monstrousness of the title creature is never in doubt. The mermaid is played by the talented Avery Potemri whom imdb doesn't even call an actress but instead a "movement artist who specializes in creature work." In addition to Obsession, I also thought of Chappell Roan's "Casual" music video in which Roan is the young woman who takes a sexy murderous sea monster home. But the relationship depicted in Roan's video is far more consensual.

Comedian Johnny Pemberton plays the male lead, Doug, a perpetually dazed and confused young man with a percocet habit, living alone in the large Florida home he inherited from his father. We meet him just as he's losing his job taking care of a fish tank at a strip club, where the owner, in the process of firing him, takes a moment to tell him that he's creeped out one of the girls with the poems his been writing for her.

When he gets home, a couple gangsters played by Robert Patrick and Tyler Rice beat him up for failing to pay up the 30 grand he owes them and they kill Doug's beloved tank full of fish. As Doug later explains to the mermaid, whom he names Destiny, when he has her in a drugged stupor in his bathtub, he knows a lot about fish but not a lot about women. This is comically plain from the fact that he's speaking English words to a being who clearly doesn't know much beyond the instinctive need to consume animal flesh with her rows of gruesome, razor sharp teeth. But Doug found her when he was in the midst of a suicide attempt and the prospect of having a mermaid lover is seemingly the only thing that pulls him back from the brink. It's as though the protagonist of a Creature from the Black Lagoon movie has convinced himself he's really in Splash. Variety's review contrasts the film to The Shape of Water.

Fascinatingly, a couple of reviews can't help but infer some level of mutual attraction between Doug and Destiny. There is a slight hint near the end that maybe Destiny deliberately refrains from tearing his face off but as far as I can see the attraction's all in Doug's head.

The film is a mixture of horror and comedy. The film's weakest points are when it thinks it's a comedy with horror elements. It works far better as a horror movie with comedy elements. Potemri's makeup and costume are excellent and you can get a good look at them on her instagram.

Mermaid is available on Amazon Prime.

These Old Bones Have Life in Them

Three exiled bones find adventure in a fantastic valley in Jeff Smith's Bone, a comic series that ran from 1991 to 2004. People had been recommending this one to me for decades but it was over the course of this summer that I finally got around to reading it. I'm sure glad I did, it's amazing. And I can see why so many people recommended it to me specifically, though many of those people were in social circles that have evaporated over the years for one reason or another. The only person I'm still in contact with whom I remember recommending it confessed to me that she'd never actually read it herself. It's kind of too bad I have no-one I can tell, "Wow, thanks for the recommendation!" Unless one of you still reads this blog.

Anyway, it's funny how well it aligns with the research paper I'm writing on H. Rider Haggard's She and film adaptations of it. One of the reasons I've pinpointed for the continual failure of the film adaptations to capture the magic of the original novel is none of them understand how important the narrator's--not just ugly--but bizarre physical features are. They provide an important contrast to the titular character's supernatural beauty and this is a dichotomy that recurs in fiction. She directly references Beauty and the Beast and in the 20th century you have Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy movies, virtually every family sitcom with a fat, Falstaffian patriarch paired with a beautiful wife, and Bone.

The three bone characters--Fone Bone, Phoney Bone, and Smiley Bone--are based on characters Jeff Smith created as a child but the influence of Disney characters, particularly Carl Bark's Uncle Scrooge comics, is unmistakable. You could look at the three characters as versions of Mickey, Goofy, and Scrooge. They could also be Blondie, Tuco, and Angel Eyes, I suppose. For most of the comic it seemed like Fone Bone was good, Smiley Bone was neutral, and Phoney Bone was evil.

We learn the three bone cousins were run out of their hometown of Boneville after Phoney's disastrous mayoral campaign. So they wander into "The Valley", a place with more of a high fantasy vibe. The bones themselves fit a more cartoonish aesthetic and comedic sensibility. Fone meets a beautiful, relatively realistically drawn girl named Thorn and develops a crush on her. I doubt I'm the first one to get a Roger and Jessica vibe from the two.

The series has been compared to Lord of the Rings because a mythology about the foundation of the valley and dragons and various other magical creatures gradually takes over. The climax involves an all out war with elaborate battle scenes. Also like Tolkien, Smith contrives many smaller, effectively charming vignettes, woven into the larger tale. There's an adventure in which Fone and Smiley have to take a baby rat creature back to its homeland--rat creatures are basically the Valley's version of the orc. There's a gigantic mountain lion called Roque Ja (or Rock Jaw) they must escape with the help of a dozen baby animals. There's Thorn's recurring dreams and her gradual realisation that she has an unexpectedly grand destiny. Through all this, Smith manages to maintain a fidelity to the two contrasting tones. One of my favourite interplays is between Phoney Bone and the world of the Valley. Phoney is constantly contriving petty, cartoon size schemes in this big beautiful fantasy world. He tricks the people of a town called Barrelhaven into following him by calling himself a dragonslayer, knowing full well that the dragons are absolutely no threat to the villagers. When the team are engaged in a desperate, treacherous journey through "Ghost Circles", Phoney is driven on by dreams of riches in the capital city of Atheia, where he eventually enlists Smiley's aid in stamping currency with his own likeness.

All along, the question of how Fone Bone's attraction to Thorn is going to resolve is a constant source of tension. If there is one flaw in the series, it's that Smith ultimately chooses a resolution that satisfies a certain thematic concept while neglecting the logic of the story itself. But maybe he bit off more than he could chew. In any case, the story as a whole is still lovely.

Sonnet 2010

An olive sea was black across the crust
The River Cheese was one that flowed through Gaul
One time, a treasure brought a sword to rust
Some silent shadows wait along the mall
Acrylic night describes a lonesome scene
The moon's a frozen skull above the blur
A fella's nose is like a friendly bean
And down the alley rings an iron spur
His steed was left beside the rotten inn
Inside you'll find a dozen girls and cats
And six or seven scraggly, drunken men
With cards and bullets hid beneath their hats
Before the stroke of twelve, he steps inside
Now here's a town where many ghosts abide

Killers and Detectives Doing Their Thing, '90s Style

Robert De Niro plays a cop who reluctantly comes out of retirement to track down a copycat killer in 2026's The Whisper Man. I say 2026 but this feels remarkably like an average 1996 movie. Not a great De Niro movie like Heat or Jackie Brown, though The Whisper Man does reunite De Niro with his Jackie Brown co-star Michael Keaton. It's more like Secret Window or any number of mid tier Ashley Judd or Michael Douglas movies from the period. It was a fairly enjoyable throwback, though.

Adam Scott's also in the film, playing De Niro's son named Tom. Tom and his little boy have just moved into a massive, gorgeous house with lots of bookcases that I would very much like to have. Then, one day, Tom's son is kidnapped and it looks like the MO of the so-called "Whisper Man". The trouble is, Tom's father, Peter (De Niro), put the real Whisper Man away decades ago. Michael Keaton plays the original killer and in interrogation scenes between him and De Niro, Keaton really hams it up as the psychotic paedophile. De Niro's performance is far more restrained. I assume it's a choice, or maybe he's just profoundly tired, but he's a long way from Raging Bull. All the rage is with Adam Scott in this one.

Michelle Monaghan plays the younger detective working with De Niro's character and it's all a basic, unremarkable procedural except it feels like something that would've been churned out thirty years ago.

The Whisper Man is available on Netflix.

An Ideal Lady

There are two recent news stories the algorithm has been repeatedly feeding to me lately that have become connected in my mind: the manufactured controversy around Sydney Sweeney's nude Novig ad and the Australian woman who had runner's diarrhea during an athletic competition in China. Mostly because the articles about Sweeney's ad tend to collect quotes from actual female athletes about how they disapprove of the false impression Sweeney supposedly creates of female athletes. Surely footage of a real female athlete soldiering on through physical discomfort and public embarrassment is exactly the counterpoint Sweeney's detractors would want to exhibit. But the psychology behind the clickbait of both stories highlights the current state of Puritanism and how it's being exploited.

The Sydney Sweeney controversy wouldn't make much sense in Brazil or Italy or any number of other Catholic countries in which physical human beauty isn't seen as a problem. But it was only twenty years ago here in the US that advertisements featuring naked women with their bits covered strategically, selling all manner of things, were so ubiquitous as to barely rate notice. Even so, the Puritanism was always a part of American psychology, lying dormant, perhaps. But it could still spring up, as in the 2004 halftime show when Justin Timberlake removed a piece of Janet Jackson's costume onstage, revealing her breast. The term "wardrobe malfunction" was born as commentators and representatives tried to explain something as an accident that was clearly deliberate. Despite the pervasive sexualisation in media, this was somehow a bridge too far, and the psychological mechanisms nested deep in media and gossip went to work rationalising how something could have happened between two popular pop stars in public. To contemplate it as anything other than an accident was too close to the nerve, perhaps. It was like Norman Bates having to become his mother to explain his own murders to himself. The rationalisation must be arrived at, however irrationally.

A lot of writers have been having fun finding different ways to joke about the idea that Sydney Sweeney was sincerely trying to present herself as a professional athlete. The conservative writer Caitlin Flanagan amusingly wrote, "I don’t think there’s a single person who saw Sweeney obscure her large breasts who thought, She must play professional football." Sweeney herself posted a series of links to athletes who have posed nude in rebuttal. Yet Flanagan also points to the hypocrisy of feminism for shaming a woman for using her sexuality while also advocating for the right of a woman to "walk through the Mall of America in a pair of pasties and a G-string." This strawman doesn't last a brief perusal of liberal commentaries, like this one at The Guardian, and yet The Guardian also has this one that concurs with the ad's detractors. Conservatives have identified prudishness as a weakness on the left which they can exploit. It's something else that makes the liberals look like creepy zealots. This is a somewhat awkward position, though, as the comments sections on the conservative articles naturally have a number of conservatives saying they're also uncomfortable with the presentation of woman's bare flesh as something beautiful. Yes, even conservatives can be Puritans.

But who is really to blame for the Joanna Wietrzyk problem, the woman who defaecated while competing--and winning--the Hyrox? The Hyrox, by the way is a relatively new sport competition that involves running and various workout stations. It was during a burpee session, after pausing in her 8km run, that Wietrzyk soiled herself and apparently some of the equipment. Who is to blame? Is it the organisers? A number have people have apparently complained to the officials who say they didn't step in right away because, while the rules forbid leaving snot or spit on the equipment or the floor, no-one thought to include any rules about faeces. This is, of course, bullshit, no pun intended. Watching the video of the woman running and her suit bottom changing colour, it's absurd to imagine oneself in the shoes of an organiser spotting this and rushing into the fray in order to tell Wietrzyk to please stop pooping and seclude herself immediately. For one thing, runners soiling themselves in the midst of a marathon is not an uncommon occurrence, it's called runner's diarrhea. Nor is it unheard of for a runner to complete a race while defaecating. Wietrzyk found herself in the unusual position of being in an arena in which she also had to use communal equipment. To expect Wietrzyk or the officials to make snap policy decisions in the midst of the competition is unrealistic. Yet, the morality must rationalise, the morality must have its comprehensible narrative. And so Wietrzyk had to make a public apology which I frankly consider an embarrassment more genuine than her uncontrollable bowel movement.

"I know my actions had an impact beyond myself, and I am genuinely sorry to everyone who was affected. I am learning from this experience and will carry those lessons with me, including remembering that there is more to life than racing and knowing when it is right to step away. On reflection, I have decided to retroactively withdraw from the race and forfeit the points I earned."

I'm compelled to wonder if the outcome would have been different had the competition occurred in, say, Mexico instead of China. Obviously China was never a Protestant country but it has its own form of Puritanism.

What connects the Sydney Sweeney story and the Joanna Wietrzyk story for me is the evident trouble many people have in being able to simultaneously enjoy a fantasy (or allow others to enjoy a fantasy) while having the maturity to realise that reality isn't always pretty, and that it doesn't have to be. The same attitude that shames Sydney Sweeney shames Joanna Wietrzyk--not for soiling equipment but for being unattractively human in public. So often when people insist on more realism in public what they're really insisting on is their own fantasy, and when people are pushing a fantasy they can't consciously acknowledge as a fantasy, it tends to be uglier than any reality and certainly an intentionally crafted fantasy.

Your Average Ironically Average Title

I kept seeing Bob Odenkirk's face in the thumbnail for 2026's Normal on Amazon Prime and I kept wondering, "Why is it showing me this? Didn't I already see it a couple years ago?" But the movie I was thinking of was Nobody, another action movie starring Bob Odenkirk and written by Derek Kolstad, creator of the John Wick franchise. With Normal, Kolstad tries to channel a little Fargo energy but it ultimately dissolves into action that feels even less substantial than Nobody and the later John Wick movies.

Odenkirk plays Ulysses, who's separated from his wife, Penny, presumably short for Penelope, because, yes, this is an Odyssey reference. He comes to the small town of Normal, Minnesota to be an interim sheriff after the town's previous sheriff mysteriously died ice fishing in his underwear. He meets a series of quirky characters and establishes himself as a friendly, easy going guy who leaves a ticket on a local bartender's car parked in a red zone--a ticket that turns out to merely contain a note; "Park better." The bartender is played by Lena Headey whose role in this film is sadly smaller than her billing suggests.

Then there's a bank robbery perpetrated by a nice young couple Ulysses had met earlier in the film and, one thing leads to another, and he's sided with them in a gun fight against all the deputies and seemingly the entire rest of the town's population. All because there's a vault in the bank containing yakuza gold.

Yes, the yakuza. The film begins with a prologue in Osaka in which a yakuza boss sends a subordinate, played by Peter Shinkoda, who also played the yakuza guy on Daredevil, to run things in Normal, which is apparently a stateside location for the outfit's money laundering. The rest of the movie is a long action sequence.

Kolstad and Odenkirk came up with the concept together. I like the concept but it's a shame Odenkirk didn't write the screenplay because, goddamn, Kolstad cannot write dialogue. Ulysses has a voice over narration in the form of voice mails he leaves for Penny in which he explains that Normal is so boring that he spends a lot of time saying, "Nothing to see here." Someone should have explained to Kolstad that police generally don't have to say that unless there is something to see. But I won't spoil the dumbest moment, which is an extremely awkward exchange of dialogue that ushers Lena Headey out of the movie.

The attempts to inject the story with local colour never feel more than derivative at best. There's a moose wandering around town that mostly just made think, "Oh, they saw Northern Exposure." I like seeing Bob Odenkirk, though.

Whew. I got through the whole review without mentioning Twin Peaks.

Normal is available on Amazon Prime.

Digitally Fortified Magic

In all my analyses and contemplations of popular media, I have to admit the appeal of Sandra Bullock eludes me. But I can't deny the amazing longevity of her career and it's her continued popularity that has made 2026's Practical Magic 2 a sort of success. I mean, the 30 million dollars the movie made in its opening weekend fell short of the low end of expectations and it's not at all clear that the movie will recoup its budget. But for a movie like this, it's doing pretty well.

I find it ironic that this movie eschews practical effects in favour of copious cgi. Tonally, this sequel is so different from its predecessor, it's basically a different genre. While the first film, directed by Griffith Dunne with a screenplay by Robin Swicord, Akiva Goldsman, and Adam Brooks from a book by Alice Hoffman, was essentially magically realism, the sequel, directed by Susanne Bier with a screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett, and Kelly Marcel, based on another Alice Hoffman book, is all out fantasy. You'll notice only Akiva Goldsman carried over from the first film's screenwriters. Goldsman's most prominent recent work has been writing for Star Trek series and this new Practical Magic movie has a very TV sized feel. In addition to all the cgi, most of it was clearly shot on soundstages, a stark departure from the first film's reliance on location. And while the first film focused primarily on magic as a metaphor for relationships, the second film's focus on the family curse is used as a pretext for a fantasy quest to England which makes this film's introduction of sparkly, swirly sorcery remind one vividly of Harry Potter.

So confident were the filmmakers in Sandra Bullock's popular appeal that they wrote her as the drag in this one. After the death of her husband--presumably the first film's love interest, played by Aidan Quinn--she decides to live without magic and even has her daughters' memories wiped. So there are several scenes where she stands in stern disapproval of her sister and aunts insisting on being whimsical and magical.

The daughters have been recast with younger actresses, Maisie Williams and Joey King, so that they can be used to appeal to a younger audience. It's Joey King's character who primarily drives the action, going to England in an attempt to dispel the family curse that causes all men they love to die young. So Bullock and her sister, played by Nicole Kidman, have to follow her to England where they meet a professor played by Lee Pace, who played the elven king in the Hobbit movies. There's intrigue and Kidman, playing an American character, mocks her own inability to do an English accent, a joke that really doesn't land for any of us who remember her playing Virginia Woolf.

There are some good songs in the movie, though I see now almost none of them are included on the film's official soundtrack. I was surprised to hear "Fade Into You" covered by a male singer and it was the second movie I've seen this year to feature an Olivia Rodrigo song, in this case "The Cure", the lyrics of which kind of run counter to the scene for which it's played, in which Joey King's character attempts to acquire a cure for her dying boyfriend. It's a good thing the characters in the movie couldn't actually hear Rodrigo singing, "You will never be the cure." In any case, Rodrigo continues to be the young artist that older people are overjoyed (and more than a little surprised) to be able to enjoy.

So, while it'll never be Harry Potter, this movie may satisfy those looking for some snack sized epic fantasy.

Listen to the Sounds

Things start to get bad, demoniac, even, for a young woman alone with her comatose mother in 2026's Undertone. Whether or not you like this movie depends entirely on what kind of viewer you are. If you're an entirely passive viewer who expects a film to fill in every blank, you may be bored by this film. But if you're an active, observant viewer, who interrogates the shadows and the partially open doors and everything that just might be a clue, this movie's a hell of a ride.

Evy (Nina Kiri) is staying at her mother's house to care for her. In the big two storey place, her mother stays in bed upstairs, seemingly unconscious. Downstairs, in the dining room, Evy co-hosts a podcast with Justin (Adam DiMarco), who broadcasts from another location. The sound design in this movie is crucial to everything that happens. When Evy puts on her noise cancelling headphones, we're aware of the sense it strips her of even as the sounds and narratives it supplies take on eerie connexions to her physical environment. The camera often frames her on one side of the screen and places the darkened hallway behind her or a mirrored cabinet showing a reflection of the distant kitchen. Every shot casually introduces a space from which an unlooked for threat might spring.

On the podcast, Justin introduces Evy to some sound files he received in an anonymous e-mail. They're recordings of a young couple undergoing a sinister, supernatural experience.

A lot of people have compared this movie to Paranormal Activity so it's no surprise that the director has been hired to write and direct the next film in the Paranormal Activity franchise. I suppose if anyone can recapture the magic of the first Paranormal Activity film it's this guy. I suspect that multimillion dollar film will not be quite as good as this 500,000 dollar one, though. But he'll always have Undertone. This lovely little creepy treat.

Kill 'em with Kink

Madonna's body is a dangerous, sexual weapon in 1993's Body of Evidence. An amazing cast headed by Madonna and Willem Dafoe brings this once tawdry tale to life, though now it's strangely innocent and adorable.

Madonna plays Rebecca, a young woman into S&M, whose latest sexual partner was an old man who died of a heart attack while she was straddling him. Since he left everything to her in the will, people think she did it on purpose, that she used her sexy body as nothing less than an instrument of murder.

Enter Willem Dafoe as Frank, her lawyer, who seeks to, you know. Get her off. This is in spite of the fact that he's married to a character played by Julianne Moore who, according to Wikipedia, disliked her nude scene, her first ever, in this movie. I watched it last week and I honestly can't remember her nude scene, if it's any comfort to her. Though maybe that's what she meant when she called it "extraneous". She had plenty of memorable nude scenes in movies after this.

But it's hard to compete with Madonna on that score, though all the sex scenes in this film feel kind of mechanical and starchy. Sure, there's lots of nudity (though no genitalia) and bondage gear and hot wax. But every shot feels like the director of photography said, "Okay, I need you two to stay within exactly this area and try not to move your limbs too much out of the initial pose." I actually found myself looking forward more to the courtroom scenes, which are ridiculous. Joe Mantegna as opposing council somehow brings the thing to trial on the claim that Madonna's sexiness is deadly. Frank Langella shows up to testify against her and the movie also has Anne Archer and Jurgen Prochnow. That's quite a cast for such a lightweight piece of fluff.

Body of Evidence is available on The Criterion Channel this month as part of a collection of Madonna movies.