Watcher (2022)

Watcher has a good premise and a good start, as our main character Julia (Maika Monroe) finds herself in Bucharest, Romania, with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman). Both were raised in the US and both have Romanian roots, but only Francis can speak the language, and he is there for a demanding job in marketing with long hours. Julia’s isolation is near complete, as she spends most of her time by herself in their excellent apartment, frustrated by the language every time she goes out. Then, actually almost right away, she notices a man in the building across the street, standing in his window. She gets the feeling he is looking at her. She gets the feeling he is following her. She thinks she sees him everywhere she goes. Maybe—we only catch glimpses of him if that. We see a couple of the events she reports to her husband and skeptical police. A man sits directly behind her in a movie theater in one, but we never get a good look at him. He might be some other creep. She might be overthinking the guy in the window (though we doubt that given that we know the chosen genre of our show). Her overworked husband starts to wonder about her. The police plainly think she’s a little kookoo. There are nice notes here of paranoid classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Rear Window. It’s never entirely clear whether it’s all not Julia’s imagination, though the movie gets noticeably more predetermined to an agenda as it goes, particularly in the last third. When Julia waves at the figure in the window and it waves back the picture is all in as a serial killer Psycho kind of show with some strange ins and outs and, ultimately, explaining every last blasted thing, complete with twists and turns that are not that unexpected. The first half is better, creepy and sneaky with uncertainty. We feel Julia’s isolation keenly. The language barrier is done really well. Director and cowriter Chloe Okuno never gives us subtitles for the Romanian and not many Romanians have even passing English. Monroe puts on a good show as someone who might be cracking up from culture shock. Then, well, you might as well stay for the end. It’s not a long movie.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998)

I had a lot of fun with this account of the “New Hollywood” movie industry in the 1970s. Author Peter Biskind had access to dozens of main players and people who knew them. There are so many characters quoted, in fact, that it can get to be hard sorting them out. Some, including Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg, later claimed indignantly that Biskind got it all wrong, which is possible. But I’m pretty sure a lot of these characters are fabulists themselves so take it all with due caution. It took me so long to get to the highly entertaining (and, yes, gossipy) Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that I found myself wondering which came first—the cemented-in legends of the New Hollywood, or this book. At any rate, the ‘70s was approximately my coming-of-age time and, from, say, 1968 on, I was a dedicated moviegoer. I had no idea I was living through such exciting times, though I noticed later how anemic Hollywood fare seemed to become in the ‘80s and later. I still think it’s fair to blame that on Jaws and Star Wars, but Biskind is not blind to that. The most puzzling story for me remains Francis Ford Coppola—responsible for some of the greatest movies ever made, and just as suddenly a nonfactor after the ‘70s. Go figure. I had forgotten about Peter Bogdanovich who, according to Biskind’s portrait, made a couple of good movies and then became as insufferable as the memorable character he played on The Sopranos. Biskind’s treatment of Dennis Hopper is hilarious—this utter incompetent who somehow drew the director credit for Easy Rider. I already knew the general history under consideration, but Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is packed with delicious details and anecdotes. There are some weird gaps. Biskind uses Oscars results as one of his metrics along with revenue figures, reviews, and general consensus. But Woody Allen is barely mentioned. That’s likely because Biskind couldn’t get him or his tribe to talk. But Woody Allen, however reprehensible he appears now (certainly no worse than Paul Schrader and other notable rats here!), is an obvious model of a film auteur, plus he won big in Hollywood for Annie Hall. Strange omission. But an always interesting and entertaining book.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)

Céline et Julie vont en bateau: Phantom Ladies Over Paris, France, 193 minutes

Director: Jacques Rivette

Writers: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Jacques Rivette, Eduardo de Gregorio, Henry James

Photography: Jacques Renard

Music: Jean-Marie Senia

Editor: Nicole Lubtchansky
Cast: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder

Given the surreal rambles of Celine and Julie Go Boating, along with a release date not far past the 1960s, you have to wonder if psychedelic or something like it was the intention here. There are references here to Lewis Carroll and Alice’s adventures with big rabbits and clocks and such. Hard candies falling in the laps of Celine and Julie in dream-like situations (falling literally into their mouths) and provoking visions bears some suggestion of LSD, whose doses at one time were famous for coming on sugar cubes. Today’s viewers may be more likely to think of cannabis edibles, which were largely unheard of in 1974 as far as I know. That works too. I haven’t seen much by director and cowriter Jacques Rivette, but he seems to have some penchant for going long. La Belle Noiseuse (1991) is four hours, a pair of Joan of Arc pictures from 1994 run nearly five hours together, and of course the 1971 Out 1 famously goes nearly 13 hours.

Not until the very end of Celine and Julie is any kind of literal boating seen. The boating in the title is more like the boating found in the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows”: “Turn off your mind relax and float down-stream / It is not dying.” There is a recurring title card in Celine and Julie that in a way tells the story of the whole movie: “But the next morning...” Black screens of a few seconds are used as transitions, sometimes the usual matter of “later that day,” but sometimes mere seconds or less, suggesting powerful epiphanies of some kind to the brain. From over here it looks like a pretty good time, as Celine (Juliet Berto) and Julie (Dominique Labourier) bop about on somewhat mystifying adventures in an alternate reality—looks like they’re having a great time. But merely watching it is not the same thing.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839)

[spoilers] I have to admit Edgar Allan Poe can be a chore for me and here is a sterling example. The action, such as it is, is molecular, the language is dense and requires parsing—practically every sentence in every brick-wall monolith paragraph. Not much in this story makes sense except perhaps as some fever dream of the afterlife. Editor David G. Hartwell in The Dark Descent anthology sees the story as a foundational transition from haunted castle to haunted house, but that’s splitting hairs pretty fine considering this house feels like a castle or at least a mansion. The Ushers live in it, a brother and sister. Maybe I should use the scare quotes, “live” in it. The narrator was college chums with the brother. The chum has come in response to a strange, unexpected, and urgent letter from him. The sister is dying of disease unspecified, and in fact dies while the narrator is there. The narrator and brother transfer the body to some room in the basement. This being a Poe story, it’s little surprise that she is not actually dead but buried prematurely. Furthermore, the brother kinda sorta knew it (parsing the murk) when he enlisted the help interring her. The brother and narrator otherwise appear to spend most of their time reading aloud to one another from great works of fantasy (in the name-checking paragraph I recognized one of them, and suspect they’re all real) or reciting poetry and singing songs while whaling on a guitar. I should have stuck with that Netflix series a little longer to see how they treated these scenes but I was already struggling with the TV gloss. The story itself erupts into a poem of six stanzas at one point. Then the sister escapes her entombment and shows up just in time to die with her brother. The narrator discreetly departs the premises, at which point the house cracks in half and sinks into the lake it was built on. This is all accompanied by extensive excerpts from a fictional Romance tale involving Ethelred the knight. It’s no wonder Hammer Films (and Netflix) felt like they could do whatever they wanted with some of these stories (“The Pit and the Pendulum” another great example). I might have liked “Usher” more on previous readings, but not lately. It’s ridiculously extravagant with the collapsing house. Nothing with the sister makes sense. We find out later they are twins but that is not particularly helpful. It’s not like one of them ate the other in the womb. Yes, it is admirably thick with a good mood of dread and gothic atmosphere but that is almost all it is. Trade-offs: it can also be boring and impossible to believe. The language takes considerable getting used to and was slow, slow going for me. I do get a kick out of Poe’s obsession with premature burial. It shows up a lot in his stuff, like Mr. Mxyzptlk in the Superman comics. Me, my policy is not to think about being buried alive. Not always easy, I must admit.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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“In Another Country” (1927)

After the longish “The Undefeated” in Ernest Hemingway’s second collection of stories, Men Without Women, most of the stories are short and even micro-sized. This one goes five pages. It’s a war story but set in a hospital, where our unnamed main character and first-person narrator is recovering from wounds. The war was obviously a horrific, traumatizing experience for Hemingway—in many ways these stories are about untreated PTSD. Perhaps hard to believe, but they are going on a century old and in many ways it shows. We just think of PTSD differently now—they didn’t think about it much then, with vaguely derisive terms for it like “shellshock.” Hemingway struggled with these mental and psychological problems in a time when people were not very sympathetic, considering them signs of weakness. He bought into that himself to some degree. Much of his work is marred by mawkish repressed self-pity. That said, this story is not one of the worst examples. I like the hospital scenes and the sense of both the war and the detachment from it in the hospital. First line, a good one: “In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.” Perfect! However, the story, such as it is, involves another man getting treatment at the hospital. It turns out his wife died recently and unexpectedly. So it’s a heavy-handed irony. The husband survived a war wound but his wife died from pneumonia and/or the influenza pandemic no one ever seems to talk about in literature. The widower erupts randomly with the narrator, telling him he must never marry, and later apologizes for his outbursts. That’s when we learn about the death of the man’s wife. So, yes, losing a partner is a great tragedy—and often a good story. But it feels more like a device here and somewhat clumsy. The war is terrible and it’s not talked about particularly in those terms. The pandemic is terrible and not talked about at all. The wife’s death is understood as terrible but that’s only as far as it goes. No one is really dealing with anything here, which we are given to understand is the human condition. Maybe in 1927! Not now (I hope). In the past I liked this story more for its concision, and this “iceberg” sense there is much more under the surface than what we see. Now the repressed behavior annoys me more. At a certain point there is little to say about the tragedies of others. You can only witness them. But is that really what Hemingway is doing here?

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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5. P.M. Dawn, Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience (1991)

[2006 review here]

The “utopian experience” on this studio-groove and sample-heavy debut album by P.M. Dawn (aka rapper Prince Be and producer DJ Minutemix) is suffused with an unmistakable melancholy, which makes it a strange and more personal trip. A brief intro yields to a faceful at full force in this laidback landscape, with “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine” setting the tone. It’s more about heartbreak and mourning a time when reality was better, but the double-jointed words lead to the alternate realities lead to the heavenly visions lead to the utopian experience. “Chase the blues away,” Prince Be raps gently. “Take your mind off reality and leave her alone.” Exalted but frequently sad, as the next track “Paper Doll” points up with its sample of “Angola, Louisiana” by Gil-Scott Heron & Brian Jackson and a deepening sadness. It is gorgeous, delivered in bruised purple tones of unknown, secret agony. It also made it to #28 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992 as a follow-on to the freak #1 “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” buried near the back of the album sequentially. “To Serenade a Rainbow,” with its whipcrack sample of Hugh Masakela, is more workmanlike than “Paper Doll,” which in this context may feel more upbeat (“Think I’m gonna fly away / I think I’m gonna fly away,” goes a refrain). It is still a declaration of love that somehow feels futile, and it is followed by “Comatose,” which takes some time getting up to speed and then proceeds like a slow-motion cartoon ambulance, with low-key samples of Sly & the Family Stone and Dr. John squawks and hollers. P.M. Dawn were connoisseurs of the vinyl crates for sure. The first half of this album resolves finally into the first single, “A Watcher’s Point of View (Don’t ‘Cha Think),” which embraces the Doobie Brothers. It goes like that all over this lovely set, occasionally escaping the gloom tinge but never getting too far from it. The biggest hit, of course, was “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” which made it to #1 for a glorious week, sampling Spandau Ballet’s “True” so boldly that it feels more like augmentation of the song than sample or cover. By this point in the album, track 9 of 13, we are deep inside the head of Prince Be and/or his fictional narrator. Our guy, in “Set Adrift,” is tripping exactly on hearing the Spandau Ballet song, which sets him spinning off on memory associations. I know how this goes—it’s a vivid experience that can still occur for me with pop music radio hits. Of the Heart, unwieldy long title and all, has always hit me as psychedelic, maybe just because the person at the center of it feels both real and disconnected from reality, set adrift in his own world. The lofty ambition of the title is absurd but sincere and thus affecting. The anguish is here but measured and precise, funneled into the flow of a larger utopian experience, which somehow feels all the more real for being so unreal, inside this guy’s head.

Terrifier (2016)

USA, 85 minutes

Director / writer / editor: Damien Leone

Photography: George Steuber

Music: Paul Wiley

Cast: David Howard Thornton, Jenna Kanell, Samantha Scaffidi, Catherine Corcoran, Pooya Mohseni, Matt McAllister

My lifelong general policy on sequels—don’t ever, ever bother with them—does not help very much with franchises nowadays, arguably including the whole 16 years and counting Marvel universe. The Terrifier franchise, a canny mix of bitterly sardonic humor and extreme violence, is a good example. It starts with a 20-minute short from 2011, also called Terrifier and also featuring Art the Clown (and also available in the 2013 All Hallows’ Eve anthology picture by director and writer Damien Leone). That short provides a good overture and stake in the ground for what’s to come. Or so I presume because, full disclosure, my gorge rose basically as far as I could stand with this one and I invoked my sequel rules out of fear of what I’ll find in Terrifier 2 (2022, which got good reviews from people who like it better) and Terrifier 3 (2024 and now playing in theaters).

Art the Clown is not exactly a mime, but he never speaks. He is more like Charles Chaplin, using mincing gestures and exaggerated facial expressions to communicate—and, mostly, in his case, to terrify. Which he does quite effectively. He is terrifying and gross and powerful. His unsettling appearance pitches in to the melee with thick black lines of makeup and that stupid cockeyed hat. There is some uncertainty for most of this picture about whether he is just another fictional serial killer in the movies wearing a costume or something perhaps more supernatural. There is no uncertainty about his brutality. One particular scene here, more or less the centerpiece of the picture even though it occurs relatively early, really merits content warnings. Pay attention to them and to your limits because this movie can be very unpleasant.

“The Saint” (1981)

There is no way I don’t like this story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, published originally in 1981 and translated into English in 1993. Part of me wants to register the wannabe literary note that crops up among horror anthology editors. I found this story in a Year’s Best anthology for 1994, which means by the logic of these things stories published in ’93. It’s edited by the durable team of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. This particular story is a Windling pick. With that note registered, I must say with Windling (and Datlow too, no doubt) that Garcia Marquez is always a pure pleasure to read and I don’t know how this story doesn’t stand as horror or weird or fantasy at least, for which “magic realism” anyway might just be an alternate spelling. Setting aside the multiple frames and filters—that’s the literary part, of course—it’s about a guy who, because the cemetery is being moved, has to dig up the corpses of his wife, who died giving birth, and his daughter who died at age 7, 11 years earlier. He discovers his daughter’s body has not decomposed. His wife, by comparison, is “dust.” The flowers in his daughter’s hand that she was buried with are still alive and smell sweet. Also her body weighs nothing now. Lots of good details here. It is obviously a miracle, she deserves to be canonized as a saint, and, because the father has nothing else to live for, he packs it / her into a cello case and leaves Colombia for Rome to meet with the pope. The story is told by someone who met the Colombian in Rome while he (the narrator) was in film school—film school! In Rome! Everyone who sees the corpse of the daughter is impressed, but comically dozens of others are also in Rome seeking sainthood for their own non-decomposed corpses. As Garcia Marquez, or the film school narrator guy, describes it, most of the other corpses are more like mummified. This case—come on, the flowers are still alive. She weighs nothing. Go ahead, put her on a scale. The Colombian stays in Rome for 22 years, seeking audience with four different imaginary popes. The film school narrator guy left Rome long ago and is back for some reason and happens to run into the Colombian. The story is full of memories of Rome when they met, the strange case of the Colombian’s daughter, and just sort of all the wonder and pathos of life. Garcia Marquez is so good it’s no wonder horror editors want to claim him for fantasy literature. In many ways it is where he belongs, though his stories even more are about the sensory joys and mysteries of being alive and sentient.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Strange Pilgrims
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Furiosa is a worthy addition to the Mad Max franchise, which now also includes comic books and graphic novels, video games, and soundtrack albums. For me, it’s also where the franchise veers close to becoming an exercise strictly for continuity freaks, the people who insist not only on seeing all the Marvel or Star Wars or whatever movies, but also in a specific prescribed order. Furiosa, fifth in the franchise, is a prequel to the previous, 2015 installment, Mad Max: Fury Road. I feel like I already know much more than I want to about such geographical points of interest as the Citadel, Gastown, the Bullet Farm, and the mysterious Green Place. Don’t get me wrong. I may sound tired and cynical, but there are plenty of stunts and much glorious action in Furiosa. It pairs well with popcorn. Tom Holkenborg’s score is as moody-good as he gave us in Fury Road. Furiosa attracted stars such as Anya Taylor-Joy (The Queen’s Gambit, The VVitch, Last Night in Soho) and Chris Hemsworth (Thor movies, Avengers movies, etc.). Tom Burke gets the designated Mel Gibson role. Furiosa is a young girl living in the all-women (mostly women?) Green Place who is kidnapped while out in the desert. It was important to Green Place people to keep their location secret. This young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is captured and held for years by one Dementus (Hemsworth). Then she grows older and becomes the fierce and big-eyed Taylor-Joy. There are new vehicles here to enjoy and some impressive new stunts too, as I say. But it’s kind of the same old thing—racing down desert highways and fending off attacks. There’s usually a reason for going from one place to the other, but I kind of lost track of them here. The beauty of Fury Road is the simple clarity of it. Furiosa has complications that don’t bode well for the franchise. On the other hand, George Miller is the creator, director, and single indispensable figure in all this, and he's 79 now, even older than Donald Trump, so we’re not likely to get a lot more from him. It’s possible he will sell it off to Disney or something, but in that case probably only the continuity freaks will stick around for more. Here's my stack-ranking of the five Mad Max movies: 1) The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2, 1982), 2) Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), 3) Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), 4) Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), and 5) Mad Max (1979). Unusual franchise in that the first is the worst by far.

Confessions of a Crap Artist (1959)

This is one of a reported dozen or so non-science-fiction novels Philip K. Dick wrote in the 1950s. It’s the only one published in his lifetime and that was not until 1975, though it was written in 1959. It showcases the deceptive simplicity and clarity of his SF and genre work. He was often writing in a rush before the late 1960s, but his prose style tends toward the lucid, if pedestrian. It’s part of what makes the mind-bending stuff work. If Confessions of a Crap Artist is any indication, stripping away the high concept unfortunately doesn’t leave us with much, at least not in this misogynistic story of Bay Area / Northern California life among the effete, feckless, and philandering. Dick dresses it up with some fancy literary conceits, shifting point of view as well as first-person and third-person modes from chapter to chapter. The crap artist of the title is Jack Isidore, who starts and finishes the telling. He is a connoisseur of conspiracy theories and falls in with a group of UFO maniacs. He’s not the main character, though—that’s his sister Fay, a “bitch” as they say it here, entitled, demanding, generally horrible. She goes around demolishing lives. She married a guy for his money and pursues a younger man and breaks up his marriage. Trying for a female point of view is Dick’s first and main mistake. It feels more like someone’s idea of a woman (say, Philip K. Dick’s idea) than like a real woman. How many times had Dick been married and divorced in 1959? Twice—I looked it up. In fact, in 1959 he was going through his second divorce (of five). So, sure, the hate and miserabilism come from a real place. And it is touching in a way to see how badly Dick wanted literary cred. I think it may well continue into the VALIS books, which I haven’t managed to get through yet (soon!). As I’ve said before, I like the playful goofy SF Dick more than any other. His jousts with reality can produce surprisingly powerful effects. This sour little novel seemed very small compared to the best of his science fiction. The Man in the High Castle is marred by its attempts at literary sophistication, which paradoxically may explain why it is at least close to his most popular. It has grounding elements. Whereas in what I would call his best (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, others) he just lets the weird and wild ideas fly. And don’t get me wrong. I like The Man in the High Castle too. Sadly, there is nothing weird or wild or even very good about Confessions of a Crap Artist.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.