CineFix’s Top 10 A24 Films

The YouTube Channel CineFix-IGN, which releases regular and top-notch film analysis and exploration videos this week dropped another of their ‘Top 10′ lists, this time for movies released by those lovers of indie cinema A24.

Consistent with their previous top 10 lists they broke the list down into categories. I found it amusing that I had seen 7 of the 10, a personal record for me I think, and own 3 of them on physical media.

Here is the listing of their top 10 A24 titles.

10) Debut features: Lady Bird (2017) dir. Greta Gerwig

9) Science Fiction: Ex Machina (2015) dir. Alex Garland

8) Fantasy: Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) dir. The Daniels

7) Coming of Age: The Green Knight (2021) dir. David Lowery

6) Survival Horror: Green Room (2016) dir. Jeremy Saulnier

5) Supernatural Horror: Hereditary (2018) dir. Ari Aster

4) Existential Horror: The Witch (2016) dir. Robert Eggers

3) Traumatic Drama: Midsommar (2019) dir. Ari Aster

2) Quirky Character Drama: Uncut Gems (2019) dir. Josh and Benny Safdie

1) Capital ‘D’ Drama: Moonlight (2016) dir. Barry Jenkins

The three I have not yet seen are, Lady Bird, Green Room, and Moonlight. The owns I own are Ex Machina, The Witch, and Midsommar.

Green Room is the film I have the most anxiety about watching. It is a strange quirk of character that fantastical horror, monsters, witched, zombies, cam create dread in me but far from enough to cause any hesitation in starting the film, but grounded realistic horror, such as trapped in a back room while a gang of fanatical neo-Nazis led by Patrick Stewart try to kill you can set my hand trembling. The utter banality and real-world nature makes such a prospect more terrifying than all the zombies or Swedish death cults.

Of the seven that I have seen the one that worked the least for me was Uncut Gems. While exceptionally made and Adam Sandler’s performance was fantastic, I found his character so repellent and unsympathetic that I cared nothing for his fate. Nor was he interesting enough as a character to leapfrog over his repulsive nature. It was not the actor, but the character as written that left me cold.

Still, when the A24 logo appears on the screen I know that quality and vision will follow.

Noir Review: Pickup Alley (1957)

As part of the collection Noir Archive #3 Pickup Alley is a British police and crime film that in the UK was released as Interpol but retitled for its American distribution.

Victor Mature plays narcotics detective Charles Sturgis, a man with a personal vendetta against a major drug smuggler Frank McNally, the incomparable Trevor Howard, who murdered Sturgis’ sister. When drug mule Gina Broger, Swedish Actor Anita Ekberg, shoots one of McNally’s underlings when he attempts to assault her, this creates the crack in the operation that finally

Warwick Films

allows Sturgis to properly begin the chase. With teamwork from Interpol and Across the ocean and the European continent Sturgis follows Gina in his dogged pursuit of McNally, a criminal so talented and intelligent that no police force has even a decent sketch of him much less a photograph.

Pickup Alley is a mediocre film, neither great nor terrible. Mature is good enough as the vengeance obsessed detective but doesn’t rise to the heights of some of his other performances. The stand-out actor here is Howard, thoroughly enjoying himself, reveling in his character’s evilness, with only occasional forays into eating the set. It’s worth watching this film just for his performance.

Ted Moore’s cinematography and John Gilling’s direction are competent journeyman work lacking any particular flair. The film is shot and the frames composed professionally but feel like that are missing that extra bit that elevates work from competent to artistic. That said the budget appears to be fairly limited and that may have hampered the overall look of the production.

Pickup Alley, a nonsensical title, is neither great nor bad but at 92 minutes neither does it overstay its welcome. worth watching once but unlikely to become anyone’s favorite noir.

I’m Back

So, I have been busy these last two weeks looking after my sweetie-wife following her surgery. Everything went very well and today I am returning to my day job. I am also returning to, hopefully, regular updates to this blog and back to my writing.

Here are a few thoughts on recent shows but not full deep dives.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Following the adventures of Captain Christopher Pike, commanding officer of the Enterprisebefore Kirk, this series seems to have found the right balance between honoring the past and original series while striking out for new territory with new characters and fresh takes on old ones. I am particularly enamored with Jess Bush and her take on the underutilized character Nurse Christine Chapel. There are breaks with canon but so far these have created new and compelling storylines that justify the rupture.

Ms. Marvel

The latest MCU series to debut on Disney+ Ms., Marvel follows the life of Kamala Khan a Pakistani-American highschooler and devoted Captain Marvel fan as she navigates life in the MCU, her Muslim family and neighborhood, with varying levels of devoutness, and her sudden and inexplicable acquisition of superpowers. The show’s style is vibrant, energetic, and exploding with energy, much like the life of a teenage while neatly balancing the fantastic with the reality of modern life for a character caught between tradition and the wider American culture.

I have very little actual knowledge of Muslim-American culture, and less that would apply to the specifics of being Pakistani-American teenage girl, but the show feels honest and respectful giving me an insight I have not before possessed. Well worth the watch.

A Response to Jordan S Carroll’s Article Misunderstanding a Classic 60s SF Novel

On May 29th Jacobin.com published the ironically titled article To Understand Elon Musk, You Have to Understand This ’60s Sci-Fi Novel by Jordan S. Carroll in which the good professor misread or misrepresented the novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) by Robert A. Heinlein as a guide to understanding Elon Musk.

I come here not to defend Heinlein’s novel, its philosophies, or its meaning but rather in protest the professor’s inaccuracies and omissions that create a strawman for his argument.

Here from the article is Carroll’s description of the novel core conflict.

It’s about a lunar colony that frees itself, via advanced and cleverly applied technology, from the resource-sucking parasitism of Earth and its welfare dependents.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress depicts a moon colony forced by the centralized Lunar Authority to ship food to Earth where it goes to feed starving people in places like India. The lunar citizens, or Loonies, revolt against the state monopoly and establish a society characterized by free markets and minimal government.

Absent from this recounting and the entire article is the quite essential element that in the novel the moon is a penal colony. It is a prison removed from courts, laws, and governance. Exile to the moon is a one-way life sentence and even the guards and the despotic warden are, due to physiological changes wrought by prolonged life in 1/6 gravity, unable to return to Earth. People born on the moon are not technically prisoners but have no rights save whatever is granted by the warden’s generosity and can never live upon the Earth. It is a despotic, authoritarian dictatorship without any form of oversight. By omitting this element of the narrative Carroll is free to portray the people, for they are not citizens anywhere, of the moon as greedy libertarians indifferent to their fellow man.

The novel takes solutionism to the extreme when Mannie enlists the help of a sentient supercomputer named Mike to lead the overthrow of Earth’s colonial government on Luna

Here Professor Carroll has reversed the cause and effect of the novel’s progression. Mannie is not a revolutionary who enlisted the secret sentient computer into the revolution but rather it was the curious computer, Mike, that sent the apolitical Mannie into the revolutionary meeting because he had no way to listen in on the meeting. It is only after Mannie is won over by the revolutionaries and reveals to the pair that recruited him that the lunar colony’s central computer is aware that they decide to utilize this unique resource. Mike leads nothing, he is a tool and in many ways a child treating the revolt as a game.

When it comes to the revolution itself Carroll is no more careful in his representation that he was in depicting the conditions on the moon.

Mannie the computer technician, designs their clandestine cell system like a “computer diagram” or “neural network,” mapping out how information will flow between revolutionists. They determine the best way of organizing a cadre not through democratic deliberation or practical experience but through cybernetic principles.

Either Professor Carrol is ignorant or has chosen to ignore the history of Clandestine Cell Structure that has been used in resistance and revolutionary movements decades before the novel’s publications. In his haste to prove that everything from the novel that has apparently influenced Musk is tied to modern tech bro culture is has ignored or misrepresented actual history.

And here is another distortion of the novel’s events.

Even when it comes time to establish a constitution for the Luna Free State, the conspirators use clever procedural tricks to do an end run around everyone in the congress who is not a member of their clique. Smart individuals always win out over mass democracy in Heinlein’s fiction — and that’s a good thing.

First off, they did not ‘do an end run around’ the congress they established the congress with their command cell member occupying all the key positions. They attempted to create the impression of a representative government while retaining full control and that’s what happened — for a while.

The Lunar Congress, unaware that they were supposed to be rubber stamps and nothing more, formed a new government and with a stroke undid all of the revolutionaries careful plotting. Because this was not a revolution that shot the most capable revolutionaries after the victory, as so many in history has done, an actual representative government replaced the despotic tyranny of the penal colony. Not quite what Professor Carroll told people in his article.

And that brings me to the final and most critical blindness in the article and in people who hail the novel as a tale of a successful libertarian revolution.

In the novel the revolution failed.

Yes, the penal colony was freed, and a representative government replaced a dictatorship, but that government very quickly transitioned away from anything approaching pure libertarianism into a more conventional form. The novel opens with the Mannie bemoaning the coming of new taxes, and then once the flashback to the revolution is over, it ends with him contemplating immigration to some less populated area. The Libertarians lost the government. The moon did not become an outpost of pure unfettered capitalism and unregulated markets. It became Earth. If Musk thinks the novel points to an unregulated future, he has misread it as badly as Carroll.

Movie Review: MEN

From writer/director Alex Garland, screenwriter of 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Dredd, Ex Machina, and Annihilation and director of the final pair of that list comes the strange horror film Men.

Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley), retreating for two weeks in a rental house in the English countryside following the traumatic loss of her husband James, finds that all the men in the local village, all played by Rory Kinnear, are demanding, disturbing, and vaguely threatening,

A24 Studios

from the tween insisting on playing hide and seek with her to the naked vagrant who follows her home. Harper is confronted by both internal threats, guilt, and sorrow over her husband James, and external, the men of the village, while trying to come to a new emotional balance.

Rory Kinnear’s multi-part performance is non-diegetic, Harper shows no reaction to the fact that all the men she encounters are all variations on the same individual and as such it is a symbolic expression intended solely for the audience.

Garland’s previous scripts can be roughly divided into straight forward descriptive narratives, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Dredd where the images on the screen represent an objective reality, and symbolic expressions such as Annihilation, where the scenes represent emotional, psychological states of the characters. Men lives deeply in the symbolic side of Garland’s creative process. The film follows its own nightmarish dream logic, particularly in its third act when objective reality is apparently discarded entirely. And yet the final sequences of the movie would seem to indicate that the fantastical events of the story climax were also reality the chaos’ detritus is seen by characters beyond Harper.

Men is a brilliantly crafted film that luxuriates in long shots and sequences that layer tension but the open to interpretation and symbolically charged elements of the imagery I found, while expertly executed, difficult to connect with and unclear in their meaning.

This movie is no doubt someone’s jam, and I have no question that it will be divisive, but I found it impossible to lose myself in the film as I was constantly battered by the question if I should be taking this literally or symbolically? Garland never gave me a clear direction on that and so I left the theater confused and without any strong emotional reaction.

Men is highly subjective, and it is a film that is impossible to either recommend or oppose as each individuals reaction is likely to be highly idiosyncratic.

Streaming Review: Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

Doctor John Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) is a talented and empathetic neurosurgeon working in a deeply under-funded southern hospital just before the outbreak of world war II. A wealthy local widow Violet Venable (Kathrine Hepburn) offers to fund an expansion of the hospital, but she wants her niece Katherine (Elizabeth Taylor), currently confined to a Catholic asylum, treated by Cukrowicz’s lobotomy technique. However, when he examines Katherine, he

Columbia Pictures

suspects that Venable is more interested in suppressing the truth of her son’s death while vacationing with Katherine than in her niece’s wellbeing. With the future of the hospital at stake and relatives pressing for the procedure to please the family’s matriarch Cukrowicz is in a race against time to discover the truth that has unbalanced and disturbed Katherine before another specialist, one not so constrained ethically as himself, is brought in to lobotomize the young woman.

Suddenly, Last Summer is actually my fist encounter with the works of celebrated playwright Tennessee Williams, though the screenplay was adapted by Gore Vidal. The film is an example of Southern Gothic replete with eccentric characters, mystery, and a dark heart. The driving mystery of the film is the death of Mrs. Venable’s son, Sebastian, a poet, and charming person adored by all who knew him and portrayed in the film to preserve the illusion of a person uniquely different from the rest of his family and society. While the official cause of Sebastian death is reported as heart attack it is clear that this is a cover story and the doctor’s attempts to uncover the truth and help Katherine confront the terrible memory lay at the story’s emotional heart.

I must admit that my enjoyment of this film was somewhat depressed by the fact that I was already aware of the truth of Sebastian’s demise from the documentary that sparked interest in this film, but I will neither reveal the mystery nor the documentary instead suggesting that you see this film blind and unspoiled for its full effect.

Elizabeth Taylor was 27 when she made Suddenly, Last Summer and, having drawn on personal tragedy to power her performance, was reportedly inconsolable after filming Katherine’s emotionally fraught recounting of the tragic death at the film’s climax. Hepburn dominates every scene she speaks in with a patrician’s command and turns in a stunning performance as the cold matriarch hiding a dark secret.

Suddenly, Last Summer is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel but leaves at the end of May.

Science and Science Fictional Thoughts

Recently, I’ve been thinking about star and star system formation a lot.

The basics, I understand it, runs something like this.

1) A large cloud of gas, the remnants from previous stellar explosions, begins collapsing under its gravitational attraction.

2) Angular momentum spins faster compressing it into an accretion disk. In the disk denser clumps begin gathering and forming the seeds of planets.

3) Most of the cloud is pulled to the center forming a massive body whose center becomes more and more compressed raising the temperature.

4) When the temperature and pressure get high enough the star ignites and blows out the last vestiges of the cloud. Leaving a star and forming planets.

I have questions.

As the cloud compresses into a star but before fusion starts hoe dense does that gas get? Do we get atmospheres of pressure reaching from the core out to the orbital distances of the future planets? Would it be dense enough for aerodynamic forces? Do we potentially have dense enough gas that there is effectively an atmosphere between the soon to be star and it’s forming planets? Could electric charges build up in this massive cloud producing planet-sized or large lightning bolts?

When the fusion starts how fast is that process? Is it thousands or millions of years between ignition and having a star or is much shorter and explosive? What sort of pressure is generating in the remaining cloud as a blast wave that sweeps through the emerging star system?

Welcome to the late-night thoughts of a science fiction writer.

Quick Thoughts on the Leaker SCOTUS Draft

First off let me be plain, I am pro Choice on the issue of abortion. There are lots of arguments why but one I see too little of that to me is hugely determinative is that giving birth is life-threatening, particularly in the American health care system, especially so for people of color and poor economic resources. The decision to rick one’s life should only rest with the person whose life is being risked.

Alito’s leaked draft opinion is some 98 pages long and my summation of his argument will be both reductive and from a non-lawyer’s perspective. From what I can determine listening to sources both left and right his basic argument flows like this.

Abortion is not specifically named as a right in the constitution.

The constitution does protect right which are not specifically named. (The 9th Amendment.)

To determine if something is an unnamed right one looks to history and tradition as it was understood at the time of the 9th amendment and the 14th. (part of the legal dismantling of slavery following the civil war.)

In Alito’s view abortion was not part of the history and tradition of accepted rights in either the 18th or 19th centuries, therefor it could not be counted among the unnamed rights of the 9th amendment nor among the privileges and immunities of the 14th.

Given that Alito concludes that there is no right to abortion and at the time of the leak has persuaded four other conservative justices to agree to this reasoning, terminating, for the first time ever in American history, and individual right.

To me there are several philosophical troubles with this reasoning.

First it presumes that the unnamed rights of the constitution are a close set, limited in number, and restricted to only what could have been conceived of at the time by while male slavers. Rather than interpreting the galaxy of unnamed right to be an evolving set matching culture as it changed it is a static set but one without any definition to guide future person in that determination.

It relies upon reading minds, from a distance of more than two hundred years, of men who recognized no rights for women in self-determination to adjudicate the rights of people in the 21st century.

It presumes that the men who wrote and adopted the constitution were so limited in their minds and imagination that they were incapable of conceiving of rights not yet considered by history and tradition.

There is a school of thought, generally conservative, that rights are not granted by governments but rather recognized by them and that their true source is a divine power. But if you accept this theory on the source of rights then Alito’s opinion is even more insane. Alito is then saying though God, all knowing throughout all time, imbues people with rights he was incapable of granting rights fallen humans were unable to think of in 1789 or 1868.

In my opinion Alito conclusions, and the agreement of his fellow justices, is nothing more than highly motivated reasoning. This is something I have seen in my past time, tabletop gaming. A player has a predetermined conclusion that would benefit their game and suddenly the interpreting of rules becomes quite fluid and twisted logic is employed to arrive at the desired outcome. The conservatives want to overturn Roe and the method of getting there matters very little. As it has been said on one legal podcast the vibe is very much ‘Stare decisis is for suckers.’

Movie Review: Firestarter (2022)

Previously adapted in 1984 from Steven King’s novel of the same title Firestarter is another go at bring the story to the screen and like the 1984 adaptation this one also ultimately fails.

In 1984 the lead role of Charlie, a young girl with pyrokinetic powers, was performed by 8-year-old Drew Barrymore, and, while she has become an accomplished actor and producers, at 7 she was not ready to carry a film, few that young are, and that, along with middling production values and lackluster cinematography produced a lifeless dull film.

The 2022 interpretation is led by 11-year-old Ryan Kiera Armstrong and the three additional

Credit: Blumhouse Picture

years are a multiplier for her to shoulder the burden of lead character in a major motion picture, yielding a more credible performance and with greater emotional depth. 2022’s Firestarter also sports more talented filmmaking, less exaggerated physical acting, and a subtle light touch to the photography that raises the film’s quality considerably.

Sadly, the script in the final act crashes and burns, jettisoning the story line of emotional manipulation and abuse for a fire spectacle for a finale with a final resolution that breaks all disbelief and insults the character’s trauma and breaks entirely with the source material.

At a quick hour and a half the filmmakers still managed to wedge in pointless scenes that had they been edited out no one would have noticed. What should have been a slow burn, pun intended, of tension drags in flat chemistry-less scenes. The story’s antagonists, are both all-knowing in their surveillance, spotting a random heat spike on a FLIR camera when supposed they had no concept of Charlie’s locations, and monumental ignorant of how to proceed.

The film is not worth your time, and I would suggest if you have a burning, again intentional, curiosity to see it, wait for cable or streaming.

How a Conservative Columnist Displayed Both His Ignorance and His Bias

Elements of the geeky internet awoke yesterday when the ironically name conservative writer David Marcus (Also the name of the fictional son of Trek’s James T. Kirk) accused the new slate of shows of going where it has never gone before ‘woke’ politics.

Now many have already leapt into the conversation with numerous examples od how Star Trek from its very inception had always displayed a more liberal political viewpoint. However, I think that there is more interesting facet to examine in Marcus’ factually wrong essay that displays his own quite strong inherent bias.

First let’s look at a blatant factual inaccuracy. Marcus writes.

“Since its creation in 1966 the franchise has had myriad iterations on big screen and small, basically invented the sci-fi convention, and has charmed audiences across every generation.”

This might be true of Media conventions but there were 29 World Science Fiction Conventions dispensing coveted award before the first large Star Trek convention. (Setting aside a smaller gather in a library conference room.) It is clear that the author has very little practical knowledge of fandom or its history.

Next Marcus takes issues with the casting of politician Stacey Abrams as the President of the United Federation of Planets in the streaming series Picard. Stunt casting is a long and stories tradition in Hollywood, when Babylon 5 moved to TNT there was pressure to cast some the networks wrestling stars in the series for cross promotion and Star Trek in its original 60’s incarnation cast famed celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli as a corrupting alien ghost. Star Trek: The Next Generation saw the casting of real-life astronaut Mae Jemison. This sort of stunt casting is hardly new and not at all new to Trek.

But apparently what set this essay in motion for Marcus, and that’s my opinion from reading the piece, is the brief video from the 2021 insurrection and riot at the US Capitol.

Again, from Marcus’ piece.

The second was a weird plot twist in the pilot of new show, Strange New Worlds in which the 2020 capitol riot is depicted and blamed for starting a Second American Civil War and the destruction of the planet. To put it more succinctly, Orange man bad.

It is illuminating that Marcus see it in this light when in the actual text of the show the character narrating the events is hopes of preventing an alien culture from engaging in a global extinction

CBS Ventures (Screen Cap)

level war describe the start as a ‘fight for freedoms,’ makes no mention who started what, or assigns any blame. Only that the fight grew and grew and grew until it nearly destroyed humanity. And there’s not even a the barest of refences to any currently politician.

The video footage from the insurrection lasts a total of six seconds. From this bit of lifted archival footage Marcus constructs an alternate reality worthy of the Daniels’ multiverse where humanity has hotdogs for fingers. He sees the shows creative team putting all the blame for Trek’sWorld War 3 cannon firmly on the conservative shoulders when the text makes nothing like that argument.

Why does he jump so readily to that conclusion?

To me the answer is plain but is to be fair conjecture. It is because he knows that the violence and death are the product of the modern conservative culture. He desperately wishes it were not so, he desperately, like all of us, wants to be the hero and not the villain. Facts are stubborn things, and the facts are clear it was conservatives that stormed the capitol with murderous intent unwilling to accept the legal, fair, and democratic process that had defeated them. It is far more soothing to the ego to point fingers, accuse others of propaganda, and play the victim than to look into the mirror recognize that you are the evil man.

Marcus’ histrionic response to six seconds of archival footage reveals that he is aware that his faction are the villains, and his response is deep and deadly denial.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur