Monthly Archives: August 2024

A PTSD Presidency

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I have little sympathy for Donald Trump but ‘little’ reveals that there is some.

Last month a gunman nearly murdered/assassinated Trump at an outdoor rally. This was a colossal failure of the Secret Service and while whatever physical wounds Trump suffered appear to be quite minor, only due to the luckiest of circumstances, emotional wounds could be seriously more impactful.

Nearly being killed, even in totally accidental circumstances, can instigate Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and having another person intentionally set out to murder you I believe radically increases the probability of developing PTSD.

In the weeks that have followed the attempted assassination Trump’s campaign has held few public events and the candidate himself has traveled little from his home in Florida. This could be due to the disruption of their campaign strategy with Harris replacing Biden as the most likely election opponent. It could also be a sign that the man is being weighed down by mental and emotional issues created by his near-death experience.

I have documented several times on this blog that I want Trump and the entire GOP defeated. Ideally, they would lose at ever level of governance, but I know that is not going to happen.

I also wish that Trump would get professional help for whatever emotional troubles have been created by the attempt on his life.

He won’t.

His idiotic obsession with ‘strength,’ his quite limited intellectual capacity, and the probably undiagnosed malignant narcissism precludes the possibility that he could submit to any form of treatment.

Trump may be suffering deep and possibly debilitating emotional pain and for that he does have some sympathy from me.

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Patriarchal Horror

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One of my regular podcasts The Evolution of Horror where each season a particular cinematic sub-genre of horror is examined in chronological order to study its origins and changes over the decades. Some of the sub-genres that have been explored are ghosts, the occult, and slashers to name just three.

Last night as sleep drifted into my brain I thought about another possible sub-genre, Patriarchal Horror. What I envisioned was something closely related to but distinct from feminist horror. I would categorize feminist horror about the claiming of power and agency by female characters but that does not require an explicit depiction of patriarchy to exist. For example, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, a key film in the development of the slasher sub-genre coming a few years before Carpenter’s Halloween exploded in the culture is specifically about a sorority house dealing with a stalker and murderer but the men and the wider world that they inhabit aren’t depicted as subjugating or dominating the women. It is feminist without dealing with patriarchy.

An example of what I would call patriarchal horror is the original The Stepford Wives. In the film the men of small town of Stepford substitute their wives with perfect robotic replacements, ones that never challenge, always know their place, and perform all their wifely duties without complaint. It is the platonic ideal of horror that draws entirely from the patriarchy.

Promising Young Woman is often slotted into the ‘rape revenge’ sub-genre and that’s not a terrible fit even if the principal character exacting her revenge isn’t herself the rape survivor. It also neatly fits into patriarchal horror because the film depicts quite intentional the culture and male dominated systems that create the environment where men escape any form of consequence for their horrible actions.

What got me started on this line of speculation was this year’s outstanding horror film Immaculate. Starring and produced by Sydney Sweeny Immaculate is very much about men exercising power and domination over women’s bodies. About how control over oneself is a fundamental freedom and right.

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Movie Review: Longlegs

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From writer/director Osgood Perkins who gave us the disturbing possession tale The Black Coat’s Daughter comes the occult/police procedural Longlegs.

Neon

After junior FBI Special Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) displays an intuitive sense that borders on the clairvoyant she is reassigned to William Carter (Blair Underwood) to assist with a perplexing series of murders that stretches back decades. Entire families slaughtered by the father without any physical evidence of another person present but at each crime scene as coded cypher signed ‘Longlegs.’ The daughter of a religious mother (Alicia Witt) Lee is troubled by the strange apparently unrelated mass murders but with her added to the investigation what had been cold dead trails blossom with new leads and clues. By the end Lee discovers that ‘Longlegs’ is no garden variety serial killer and families can harbor dark dangerous secrets to safeguard their children.

Osgood Perkins does not make splatter horror. That is not to say his film are devoid of violence or blood but rather that the horror comes from a deeper character and human condition than any sudden explosion of on-screen violence. The adjective that best sums up the sensation of watched Longlegs is ‘unsettling.’ There are scenes where in terms of movement and action literally nothing is happening and yet the composition of the frame, the ingenuity of the sound design, and delivery by the performs combine into a miasma of uncanny dread.

Perkins and cinematographer Andres Arochi makes frequent uses of characters staring directly into the camera lens turning the fourth wall permeable, subtly drawing us into the scene. In The Silence of the Lambs when characters looked straight down the barrel of the camera it was from Starling’s Point of View, we were slotted into her perspective as a woman in what was perceived as ‘man’s world. With Longlegs it is rare that this is from a character’s point of view, but rather it is the audience that the performers are staring at and making complicit in the scene.

Another area where Perkin and editors Graham Fortin and Greg Ng break from convention is in how the film utilizes ‘jump scares.’ In the vast majority of horror cinema, a jump scare is telegraphed long before the director gooses the audience with a sudden sharp cut and sounds. The anticipation of the jump scare is part of the experience, the building dread and certainty that it cannot be avoided. The jump scares in longlegs are sudden and without any buildup or winding of tension. As much as the characters in the story, the audience is caught off guard by the sudden shift in perspective or revelation.

Longlegs in spite of how it begins as a pursuit of a serial killer movie is in fact an occult horror film and that becomes clear in the story’s final act when all is revealed, secrets bared, and terrible truths endured.

This is not a film for everyone. There are no rampaging monsters, nor an endless parade of scantily clad young adults meeting bloody ends for their adherence of drugs and premarital sex. Longlegs is much more akin to Hereditary in tone. It is unsettling, uncanny, and for many people unforgettable.

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Partial Review: The Decameron

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It is the 14th century, and the Black Death is ravaging Europe, a perfect setting for a sardonic satirical comedy The Decameron.

Netflix

With the pestilence turning cities into that scene from Monty Python and The Holy Grail an eccentric collection of nobles accepts an invitation to wait out the plague at the at the expansive and luxurious Villa Santa as guests of Leonardo. Think Masque of the Red Death but funny.

However, Leonardo dies of the plague before they arrive and the servants, desperate to not lose their safe positions in the villa scheme to conceal the fact from their guests.

The guests also conceal secrets and each episode the absurdity grows with social classes thrown into disarray and sexual passions unleashed.

While the series is adapted from an 14th century text of the same name the casting and writing are thoroughly modern.

I have yet to complete this Netflix series and so it may not land this aircraft well but so far it has made for quite enjoyable viewing.

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The Counterproductive Political Nickname

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Apparently because Tim Walz during her term as governor signed a bill into law that provided menstrual products free of change to high schoolers in school the right has attempted to make the nickname and hashtag TamponTim stick the man.

This is an astoundingly stupid political stunt that in my opinion does nothing for the GOP and helps Walz.

Let’s not worry about anyone who was already a dedicated and devote voter for either party. By their very nature there is little that is aimed at them or will sway their vote. The best you can hope for in this case is trying to demoralize your opponent so that they stay home and don’t vote. This nickname doesn’t do that at all.

Okay so maybe there some women out there who do not follow politics closely, are less inclined to vote for a Democratic ticket and may stay home or possibly punch the card for the GOP out of some form of social inertia. Now these people, these women hear that Walz got free period products into high schools for the girls. Two weeks ago, they had never heard this name and you think this, this act of decency, is going to turn them off? What idiocy! The number of women form whom they were undecided and not solid Red Voters that this would be an effective derogatory nickname is fewer than the number of people who purchased my novel.

Any man form whom this nickname is the height of hilarity was already on the Trump Train and this moved them not a centimeter. Men who were torn between Trump and Harris are unlikely to be motivated by name calling or they would already be on the GOP’s side.

Logically I can’t see how ‘TamponTim’ is anything but be a help to the Democratic efforts, but given the modern GOP beyond Cruelty idiocy should always be expected.

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August 6th, 1945

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Today is the 79th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Estimate of those killed by the attack range from 90,000 to 140,000 persons. The bombing was followed up three days later with another atomic attack on the city of Nagasaki. Despite an attempt to remove the Emperor from the throne and continue the war the militarists the twin attacks empower a faction of the government to unconditionally surrender to the Allied Powers effectively ending the Second World War.

The loss of life in the bombings is horrific and, in many minds, looms large as a terrible act that defined the ending of the Second World War. The Hiroshima mushroom cloud is often used as a visual shorthand for technological terror.

While the idea of being subjected to atomic or nuclear bombing is indeed terrifying, I find it hard to consider these attacks to the Platonic Ideal of technological murder.

Millions were killed in the holocaust. Unlike the distant impersonal slaughter that comes from dropping a bomb at enormous altitudes, whether those bombs are conventional or atomic, the murder in the camp was done close up, looking those victims in their eyes, hearing their cries and screams and was no less a product of technology than the enormous energies released by nuclear fission.

With mass production, without the industrial revolution, the ability to murder on the scale of millions simply could not exist. Without the scientific revolution and method, the Japanese barbarous experiments on helpless civilian populations with biological warfare could not exist.

The atomic bombings of those two Japanese cities cost a lot of live, but in all likelihood saved more than they killed. Japan knew the war was lost and that continuing it would only result in more and more of their people, military and civilian, being killed. They could have accepted the unconditional surrender when it was offered and avoided both atomic attacks.

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Movie Review: Deadpool and Wolverine

Marvel Studios/Disney

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After thoroughly enjoying Deadpool and Deadpool 2 I was quite looking forward to Deadpool and Wolverine. Friday night I sacrificed a couple of hours of sleep by attending a late screening of the film at my local AMC and with the seat fully reclined laid back to enjoy the show.

I would have been happier with the sleep.

I can say with all honesty that the screening of Deadpool and Wolverine elicited just one emotion from me: boredom.

The credits list five writers for the screenplay and man oh man does it show. The film is wildly inconsistent lacking in any unifying vision, theme, or structure. It is almost as disrespectful to the Deadpool stories that preceded it as Alien 3 was to Aliens.

Characters exist within the context of the relationships if you break the relationships, you break the character. Deadpool and Wolverine shatters the relationships between Wade Wilson and the previous characters of the franchise.

The nature of Wade’s relationships with the various secondary characters is a crucial element in Wade’s own character. Mind you all these characters are present in the film, in a group scene that has all the emotion of a checklist.

The character disrespected the most, whose transformation is so at odds with their earlier incarnation is beggars belief to accept them as the same character is of course Vanessa.

Introduced in the first film Deadpool’s love interest Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) became an instant favorite for many people. Her sex worker character was neither tragic nor possessed of the trite and cliche ‘heart of gold’ but rather a suitable and equal foil for Wade Wilson’s massive presence. She had the vitality and sprit to occupy the screen and hold her own. The second film’s ending was reshot to satisfy audiences who were unwilling to accept such a dynamic character’s death for mere protagonist motivation points.

In Deadpool and Wolverine Vanessa now an office worker and manager has had all of that fire extinguished. The changes to her character is presented as the reason for the changes to Wade’s but are so totally at odds with what has been established as to make it all utterly meaningless.

Without the loving and interesting character relationships, Deadpool and Wolverine is simply meta references, gags, and pointless combat lacking in all tension.

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Not Every Aspect of a Franchise Should be Mined

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In May, Variety reported that Warner Brothers Studios had announced a new The Lord of the Rings live-action feature to be released in 2026 The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt For Gollum.

To be produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Andy Serkis very little is known about the plot or details of the feature but there are reasonable guesses that can be made.

In the first book of the series The Fellowship of the Ring Gandalf tells Frodo that he and Aragorn had searched for the creature Gollum but that the enemy found him first. In both the film adaptation and the novel this is entirely an off-screen second bit of exposition, but it is a hunt for Gollum and likely the source of the new film. (Though I suppose it is possible that you might build an entire movie around the River folk hunting for Gollum the murderer.)

Making a story work around Gandalf and Aragorn’s search is a tall and tough task. We know they fail; we know they are unharmed and any new or side characters introduced will be treated with life expectancy of a Trek Red Shirt.

I can tell you one thing from Gandalf’s recounting of the hunt that will not make it into this feature, the evidence that Gollum ate babies will be excised.

This is an image, empty cribs left in Gollum’s wake, that haunts me from the novel and one of the reasons why Gollum never achieved any sympathy from me. The wanton murder of children strips any character of any slim hope of redemption. (Yes, I am looking at you Frankenstein’s monster. Life is tough and you were treated horribly but nothing excuses the murder of children.)

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On RDJ’s Return to the MCU

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At the San Diego Comic Con, it was announced after much speculation that the critical role of Dr Doom for the Fantastic Four will be played by Robert Downey jr. This set off debate and speculation about strange possible connections between Tony Stark and Dr Victor von Doom.

Dudes, RDJ is what is technically known as an actor, people skilled in performing characters in fiction. Characters plural.

It used to be much more accepted by audiences that an actor stepping into a role even in a continuing franchise was a new person even if that actor had played someone different in the same franchise before.

Granted this was much more common in television than in film but it was true in film as well. Charles Grey could both be Bond’s contact in one film and then Blofeld in another. Maud Adams could be Bond’s girl in two different movies, and no one asked how she survived her death in the earlier entry because she is playing different characters.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has recycled actor in earlier production. Gemma Chan is both a Kree Warrior and an eternal robot. Alfie Woodward is both a street level criminal and a mother who worked hard for the state department putting her sun Charlie through school. Michell Yeoh is both a Ravager and an elder is a mystic Asian village. Robert Downey jr, while being the most high-profile actor to play two utterly critical and central roles, is following in an established performing arts tradition.

RDJ is a talented actor able to inhabit a number of unique characters. His turn in Oppenheimeris fantastic and I look forward to his portrayal of the vain, villainous, and compelling Dr Doom.

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