I have been absent from this site for a couple of months. I went from gung-ho about starting up a membership program to being scarcely able to string a few words together. I guess you could call it a 2020 fatigue, a depression brought on by, among other stresses of 2020, my cousin’s suicide. When I woke up on November 6th, I thought the worst of the day was the knowledge that I’d failed to watch and write a piece on V for Vendetta; then I got the news of John’s death.

 

I’ve been here before, to this place of abrupt hiatus and (triumphant?) homecoming. It’s not a cycle I enjoy.

I deeply regret my inability to follow through on the promises I made when I set up the membership program, although thankfully almost, no one actually signed up. Probably because my site wasn’t producing any content. Go figure. I will most likely be discontinuing the membership option for the time being. If anyone who paid into the program would like a refund, that will be arranged.

So  I’m back. I hope this is the last time I have to type those words. The passing of 2020 into 2021 has invigorated me to start the slow, steady process of healing. I feel like the writing I should have produced throughout November and December is ready to spill forth. So here’s some of what I’m planning, in addition to many works in progress previously mentioned that have in large part turned out to be more demanding than expected.
Expect a post very soon on my 2020 film of the year and a general wrap-up of the year in film (perhaps the strangest year in cinema history). Expect posts possibly even sooner on Tremors, as well as (maybe) a mashup of Ghost Dog and The Fisher King. Why? Because they’re there. I also have been planning to work on an essay about my late cousin, a more personal piece than I typically try to write for this site, but one that I think would be cathartic. It’s been difficult to work on.
I have an old school paper that I’m working on repurposing for this site, but that, too, has been far more involved than I expected. An article on the modern wave of transgender cinema is forthcoming as well. It’s the kind of article I’m never quite done with and will eventually simply have to push the button on publishing. I want to publish something on the Parasite graphic novel. Maybe I’ll write that V for Vendetta post after all, too.
I had several things in the hopper that are too little, too late, but which I might publish anyway, because fuck timeliness. A marathon of every single Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode? Check. The Magic: The Gathering / The Walking Dead controversy? Check. A piece on South Park‘s Pandemic Special? Check.
And much, much more. I hope anyone who has enjoyed my writing thus far will continue to do so.

 

For obvious reasons, I can’t hear, read, or think about the film Upgrade without bringing to mind the character Upgrayedd from Idiocracy, “with two D’s, as he says, for a double dose of his pimping”. Sadly, Upgrade was not the Upgrayedd-centered Idiocracy spinoff fans have (I assume) been clamoring for; it is, instead, a laughably bad and immensely entertaining sci-fi horror film from the writer-star of Saw, Leigh Whannell. As the credits rolled I likened it to a SyFy Channel original movie with better production values, and then my friend likened it to a Black Mirror episode, which is apt enough. While the film is nothing if not a Twilight Zone-esque fear of technology feeding into our worst human characteristics, the film is also as much about disability as it is about a pretty dick-ish supercomputer. Continue reading “Desire Ability: Upgrade and Me Before You”

It’s the year 2020, and true to Larry Cohen’s ahead-of-his-time genius, I have to clarify that I’m writing about his 1982 film QThe Winged Serpent, not the conspiracy theory that’s currently proliferating just about everywhere like some kind of pandemic (a figurative one, not the literal one that’s currently proliferating). I wasn’t sure exactly what this piece was going to look like as I typed out the title, but now I think that this is the article. Larry Cohen’s prescience is not limited to God Told Me To (which really demands its own article); in fact, with Q, Larry Cohen predicted QAnon 38 years ago. Continue reading “A Short Love Letter To ‘Q’ (The Winged Serpent, Not The Conspiracy Theory)”

It’s been nearly six years since I first saw South Park‘s “The Cissy”, in which the series explores transgender issues in a real way for the first time in years. I had a lot of thoughts on the episode at the time, thoughts which never really manifested into an article in itself. Still, I consider “The Cissy” a landmark in transgender media, and as such it’s worth a revisit. Continue reading “Revisiting The Cissy, by a Tranny”

In my most recent article on Scarface I talked about liking the film for the wrong reasons and others I had seen liking the film for similarly wrong reasons. As I was talking to a friend of mine about that first piece, they mentioned something I failed to address in the article, and it’s something I can’t not address now that it’s been pointed out to me. Here’s part of what my friend texted me: Continue reading “The World is Theirs: Scarface Follow-Up”

[The following essay is derived from some journaling I did recently while confined to a mental health care unit following a suicide attempt. I have cleaned up some parts of the texts and added some new ones even as I have tried to keep most of what I wrote intact.]

I stare down a couple boxes of movies. None of them appeal to me. The few I see that I like, Toy Story among them, feel so irrelevant to my present circumstance that I can’t bare to watch them.

I’m currently locked down in a psychiatric facility following a suicide attempt. There is a way to watch movies that I don’t have any connection to. Sterility is the watchword. Nothing may offend.

Continue reading “Psychic Palindrome: An Anti-Cinematic Odyssey”

The best and worst thing I can think to say about Tenet, a film based upon a book that hasn’t been written yet, is that it is very, very Christopher Nolan. It’s arguably peak Nolan at a time when that seems least needed. “Big movies are back”, I recall one trailer announcing proudly, even though I think thematically Nolan wold have been better off to rerelease Following, which is the Nolan film we need right now, even if Tenet is the one we deserve.

Continue reading “Based Upon a Book That Hasn’t Been Written Yet: Tenet”

“Each image of the film (each shot or each frame) is reflected by a shard of mirror; one single body, for example, could thus be represented according to its parts, each part needing a shard of mirror. … The arrangement of the fragments of mirror, and not the character of what is reflected in them, is such that this banal spectator can in no way glimpse a reflection of himself: he is thus situated on the site and on the geometric point that render him absolutely invisible.”

—Jean Louis Schefer

1. Remember Sammy Jenkis

I have an affinity for Leonard Shelby, Guy Pearce’s character in Christopher Nolan’s Memento. Like Leonard, I rely on routine to live. I sometimes wonder if Memento is where I cribbed my coping skill to organize the minutiae of my life, the difficult stuff for me to do, in to steady routines. I know this works because when those routines are broken, those activities are more psychically painful and often don’t get done at all. Changes of time and setting disrupt the routine and make it harder for me to think, to collect my thoughts into something recognizable, to focus my energy on a creative task.

At one point Leonard narrates, “we all need mirrors to show us who we are sometimes”. Like Leonard, I need those mirrors more than most. I look at the self-inflicted scars on my arm, reminders, like Leonard’s tattoos, of things (people, places, moments) I feel at risk of forgetting.

Continue reading “A Brief History of Staring Into Mirrors”