Trollhunter (2010)

Fans and possibly even sworn enemies of found-footage pictures should not miss the mockumentary Trollhunter. It has a friendly sense of humor about what it’s doing, some pretty good special effects, and a minimum of shaky camera, though it’s there. It’s a Norwegian movie, set in the far northlands, where three college students have traveled for a story about bear poaching in the region. It’s going on, and suspicions have fixed on a strange man with no bear hunting license and no obvious reason to be there—Hans. Our intrepid documentary crew tracks Hans down, but he won’t talk to them, so they begin following him everywhere he goes. Come to find out, Hans is a “trolljegern,” a government agent responsible for controlling the troll population in a secret program. Hans is willing to blow the cover of the program because he is a disgruntled worker: “I'm tired of this shitty job. I have no rights whatsoever. I get no night bonus. No overtime. No nuisance compensation. Maybe it's time for a change in troll management.” The picture has a lot of fun with the legends of trolls from fairy tales, for example using billy goats as bait to lure one out from under a bridge. Hans scoffs at many of the filmmakers’ questions, but on the other hand he insists on knowing if any of them is a Christian, as trolls are specifically attracted to the blood of a Christian man (I don’t know my troll fairy tales that well, but it rang a bell, and so did the goats). The trolls in this movie are rogue beasts approximately as big as Godzilla or King Kong, rendered in stop-motion—this is where the special effects come in, and they do the job. Things to know: Trolls grow extra heads as they age. They aren’t really heads, more like appendages. They love to gnaw on old car tires. Daylight turns them to stone, or makes them explode if they are younger (Hans says trolls live to be 1,000 to 1,200 years old)—these occurrences come with a scientific explanation by someone in a lab coat. Hans or the Norwegian government agency has rigged up a way to hit them with powerful light. The machine, mounted on a jeep-like vehicle, uses a lot of power and it doesn’t always work, but when it does that’s it for the troll. Trollhunter is full of the details of its concept, and the found-footage enables it to proceed past gaps and keep the action moving. It also has one of those abrupt endings with title cards explaining that no one in the footage was ever found, etc. I’ve had a lot of fun with this one.

“Lost and Found on Haunted Plum Island” (2021)

I thought this story by John Waterfall was pretty impressive, perhaps partly because it’s from 96th of October and typical of their fare—literary, artistic, hip, sometimes experimental to a fault. “Plum Island” is in much the same vein, classified on the website as “magic realism” and “spirituality,” selling us a heady take on the afterlife. It reminded me of Lost and also of the patient explorations required in role-playing games. A man dies in a plane crash (I think) and lands on an island as “Crasher,” more or less a human being but with red mist swirling a light source instead of a head. He is befriended by a chatty stuffed teddy bear named Ruggles, who accompanies him and is able to explain some things—this also reminded me of video game setups. But try thinking Toy Story too because, in fact, there are lots of stuffed animal toys on Plum Island, which have all been lost and/or abandoned by their child owners. This detail veers toward precious but all is saved for me by Crasher’s regard for Ruggles, who suffers a setback. The idea, stop me if you’ve heard this, is that children’s stuffed toys have unsuspected souls that suffer by being thrown away. There’s a certain safety in staying on the shore of the island. Crasher paces out the circumference of it but eventually ignores Ruggles’s warnings and heads inland. Going inland is freaky and all the freaky stuff is artful and thoughtful and above all weird and never comforting. This is no Christian paradigm except it’s a little like purgatory. Waterfall is fearless about pursuing the details of this story, but what I think makes it work, circling back, is Ruggles and his fate and how it affects Crasher. In spite of all its “cute” signifiers, this story is never cozy but more often unnerving. It comes partly of the fact that Crasher’s head is red mist, which Waterfall leans into with an effective touch. But it’s the Ruggles character that grounds the story and makes it feel vital in a way so many contemporary horror stories I’ve seen don’t. There are flaws—the language is high-blown and can be turgid—but in its totality it basically works. It’s weird and unsettling and also kind of beautiful and of course horrific in places without being gross or strained. A nice surprise.

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Carrie (1976)

USA, 98 minutes

Director: Brian De Palma

Writers: Stephen King, Lawrence D. Cohen

Photography: Mario Tosi, Isidore Mankofsky

Music: Pino Donaggio

Editor: Paul Hirsch

Cast: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, William Katt, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, John Travolta, Betty Buckley, P.J. Soles

Carrie the novel was Stephen King’s first published book and Carrie the movie was his first film adaptation. Unlike The Shining, he was quite happy with it even though director Brian De Palma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen changed the ending. King’s fingerprints are more evident here than in Kubrick’s Shining, which might be part of his reaction, as he was getting such a big boost at that point in his career. In many ways Carrie launched King into the mainstream. The movie was a big hit, earning back its original investment nearly 20 times and snaring a couple of Oscar nominations, one for Sissy Spacek as Best Actress in the title role and another for Piper Laurie as Best Supporting Actress playing Carrie’s mother. To this day Carrie is regularly ranked high on lists of greatest horror movies made.

It still has a lot of its punch. Laurie as a demented Christian evangelical trying to protect her daughter Carrie from the sins of the world is extraordinarily unpleasant. She misquotes the Bible to make her insane points. She calls breasts “dirty pillows.” She locks Carrie up in a closet to pray. She didn’t bother to explain the menstrual cycle or periods to Carrie. “You’re a woman now,” she only says coldly, after the alarms and humiliations Carrie suffers from her first period. It was interesting to find out that Laurie reportedly never took the picture seriously during the shoot. She thought it had to be a black comedy and made a personal project of chewing the scenery. It shows, but that isn’t to say her performance doesn’t work. She’s one of the best parts of the picture but she could barely hold back her laughter at her own antics. Another disquieting element is the amount of hitting and slapping, which I take more as artifact of 20th-century quasi-slapstick style than anything. But it frankly shocks me (as does the same in Saturday Night Fever, another picture with John Travolta). It might be more evidence of how uneasy Carrie was making me as I watched. But people are hauling off and slapping one another around here a lot—teachers and students and parents and kids as well as kids on kids.

“Where the Woodbine Twineth” (1964)

Davis Grubb’s story was evidently a hit in its time, published originally as “You Never Believe Me” and the same year under the present title in a collection of Grubb’s stories. Then the following year it was adapted for an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (directed by Alf Kjellin). Unfortunately, at the moment that production is a property of Peacock and hard to see if you’re not subscribed (but a nice sample of nearly 12 minutes can be found on youtube). Grubb is perhaps best known for writing the source novel for the 1955 Southern gothic film, The Night of the Hunter. I would say the story is also more of a Southern gothic than horror, strictly speaking, with indeed much the same vibe as The Night of the Hunter. In many ways they feel like fairy tales or perhaps fables. The phrase “where the woodbine twineth,” meanwhile, has murky origins and even definitions. I like the one that says it comes from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883, where it is used as an evasive answer to mean “obsolete” or “dead.” Typical Southern effusive overdoing it. Others look for and find fragments of it in older sources, including Shakespeare. The story has a little of the modern style—acknowledging racism exists, for example—which doubtless explains its TV adaptation in 1965. It is actually quite old-fashioned Southern business and even retrograde in its casual acceptance of child mistreatment. Eva is an orphaned girl now under the care of her Aunt Nell, who does not understand her and has no patience for her vivid imagination (and/or psychic abilities, as the story attempts to both eat and have its cake in terms of the supernatural). Nell is even seen shaking Eva at one point. It’s a sad story when you think about it, even Dickensian. Eva is lonely and has many imaginary friends, but Nell disapproves of all that. Eva’s descriptions of her encounters do sound a bit dissociative. Nell thinks it’s unhealthy or morbid. Eva’s interactions are so vivid that Nell thinks she hears others talking with Eva. The story turns and races for its end when her grandfather gives her a gift he bought in New Orleans—a large African-American doll that Eva dubs Numa, claiming her arrival was foreseen by her other imaginary friends. Or faeries and whatnot, now that we’re into it. Numa is a nice touch, taking the story to its next level and ultimately the twist end. In terms of the shock twist ending sweepstakes, it’s not bad. It holds out not only until the last paragraph, but until the final clauses of the last sentence, to deliver it. On the other hand, you might have already guessed it and checked the last paragraph for verification (something I never do, by the way). The problem, starting perhaps about here in the ‘60s, is that shock twist endings themselves can get to be a bit rote. Much the same is true for the Hitchcock episode, as I recall, as well as various others and also Twilight Zone and the underrated Night Gallery episodes while we’re at it. That youtube clip is a good representation of the show, which had a kind of stillness that wasn’t common then and isn’t seen very often now, a matter of budget as much as direction, I would guess. It was always a nice mood when I watched the late-night reruns of them.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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Listen to story online.

City (1952)

I had high hopes for this sci-fi novel by Clifford D. Simak, for nostalgic reasons as well as due to some surprise recommendations in recent years. It turns out to be a “fix-up novel,” as Wikipedia labels it, meaning it’s a collection of previously published stories revised and worked up with connections and transitions and such. Ray Bradbury did a few of them, like The Martian Chronicles. I will say Simak’s connective tissue is clever, with notes for each story by some obscure far-future academic putting them in a context of scientific debate and history. The title is somewhat misleading as the very first story argues that the city as a social structure has become obsolete through technology, and from then on it is. People live everywhere on multiple-acre estates. Humanity has fallen by the second story, replaced by intelligent, speaking canines—dogs. I love animals but I had a hard time feeling this plot point. The scope of time across this novel (“novel”) is vast, some 12,000 years, twice our entire recorded history. That gives Simak a lot of opportunity to stretch out, and indeed there are often centuries between these stories. Interesting mutant humans and immortal robots also appear. I felt Simak’s humanity—the pathos of City is richer and deeper than most SF work I know from the ‘50s. Or maybe I just love dogs, or haven’t read enough SF from the '50s. Even I thought the dogs felt like an eccentric device in the end. Still, I’m touched one of them was modeled after one of Simak’s own. My nostalgia is from being a neighbor of Simak’s in the ‘60s when I was growing up in the western suburbs of Minneapolis. He was on one of my paper routes. I know now he worked for the newspaper I was delivering, but I actually recognized his name then as an SF author. I’d seen his byline in anthologies though they none of his stories ever stood out or stuck with me. I thought of introducing myself but had no idea what to say, so I never did. I don’t remember his dogs. Anyway, when I saw the book talked up on social media in recent years—this era of distraction makes it harder to remember specifically where some information comes from—I bought a copy and finally got to it. I’m sorry I didn’t like it more. At the same time, I’m glad something like this, so earnestly compassionate, with such random strange ideas, is as popular in SF circles as it appears to be.

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

Electric Warrior (1971)

Conventional wisdom gives this milestone T. Rex album a lot of credit for kicking off glam-rock in the ‘70s, which is a pretty big claim. It seems like overstatement now, but among other things Electric Warrior was the bestselling album of that year in the UK. It also contains the only hit T. Rex ever had in the US, the glorious “Bang a Gong (Get It On).” It’s more a milestone to me because it’s the turning point where main man Marc Bolan and producer Tony Visconti hit on the sound that would be perfected on The Slider. I should say I came to T. Rex late, well after Marc Bolan’s death in 1977. And full disclosure, little that I’ve heard by Tyrannosaurus Rex has ever held a candle to Electric Warrior or The Slider. Those first five (!) albums by the Tyrannosauruses are more like twee J.R.R. Tolkien hippie exercises full of wizards and dragons and such. T. Rex by contrast hits with sinuous, droning grooves, strange off-rhythms, menacing texture, and naïve electric guitar. Strings may be on hand for sweetening. It’s not Bolan’s sensibility that has changed as much as the musical context. The singer is routinely filled with awe by the sights and sounds around him. “Cosmic Dancer,” for one, showcases the still gentle priorities: “I was dancing when I was 12,” “I danced myself right out the womb,” “I danced myself into the tomb,” he warbles in his soft undertone. In a way he is still putting on Midsommar festivals, but the focus on dancing suggests a hedonism that is notably developed in the hit. “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” is a rock ‘n’ roll original, late-arriving, though with the wit to pay homage to a key source of glam, Chuck Berry, quoting “Little Queenie” as the song fades. There is a whole lot of essence of rock ‘n’ roll packed into it and sometimes catching it on the radio can even start to feel like an act of worship somehow. I have to say all my T. Rex favorites are on The Slider—“Metal Guru,” “Spaceball Ricochet,” all the second side in one big gulp—so I would have to recommend it first. But here's your second. Bang a gong. Get it on.

Dressed to Kill (1980)

USA, 104 minutes

Director/writer: Brian De Palma

Photography: Ralf D. Bode

Music: Pino Donaggio

Editor: Gerald B. Greenberg

Cast: Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen, Keith Gordon, Dennis Franz, David Margulies

Director and writer Brian De Palma’s trashy, seductive ode to Alfred Hitchcock movies is full of twists and turns—however ludicrously unlikely they may be—so I will necessarily be letting slip some spoilers. The Hitchcock movies overtly saluted here include Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window, the latter two of which had been out of circulation for decades when Dressed to Kill was made. Clearly, De Palma had the resources to study them. The most obvious homage, and perhaps the best sequence in the whole picture, takes place in an art museum and compresses an amazing amount of Vertigo into it.

Angie Dickinson, like Janet Leigh in Psycho, disappears from the picture not even an hour in, the result of murder by a mysterious slasher. Here’s where Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack goes “weet - weet - weet” in Psycho, but De Palma has turned instead to Italian film composer Pino Donaggio (Don’t Look Now as well as many other De Palma pictures), who generally brings more ripe, luscious, and swooning pathos. Dickinson plays Kate Miller, a middle-aged and sexually frustrated rich housewife in psychoanalysis with Dr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine). Here we collide with the most unbelievable developments in the thriller as well as its most unpleasantly dated, transphobic aspect. Fair warning: The telling of it reveals all.

The French Connection (1971)

I don’t think I had caught up with this one since it was new, although I recall I was so smitten then I saw it a few times. It was the big car chase that kept me coming back, a total thrill at the time. The whole thing holds up pretty well, particularly if ‘70s action, car chases, and/or Gene Hackman are your thing. The Road Warrior spoiled me for car chase scenes ever since, but the epic one featured here, racing to keep up with a subway train on elevated tracks overhead, is at least as good as anything you might find on Rockford Files reruns (RIP Stuart Margolin btw, who played the extremely annoying Angel Martin and died last month). Hackman, of course, is always excellent, one of the best we’ve got, going all the way back to Bonnie and Clyde and at least through Unforgiven and maybe The Royal Tenenbaums. He’s a dirty cop here, and one thing that has changed for me since 1971 is that it doesn’t seem as heroic—his busts and investigations routinely go over the line and I have considerably less sympathy for him now. The narrative is somewhat hard to follow because of director William Friedkin’s frenzied and fractured style, which in many ways rivals the work of his peer Nicolas Roeg. It’s hard to follow, but basically all you need to know is there’s a big drug deal going down—a large shipment of heroin coming in from Marseille (which makes it the French connection, see). Popeye Doyle (Hackman) is on the case, working off his various insane hunches, which unfortunately for everyone often (not always) prove out. Owen Roizman’s camera is as restless and energizing as the New York streets he is shooting on. The edits are crackling sharp. The French Connection is gritty, it’s hard-school knocks, and it’s still reasonably entertaining. Also of note is a soundtrack by Don Ellis, which is edgy yet unobtrusive, fitting itself well into all the noise of this picture. The Three Degrees get a cameo performing in a club too and it is terrific. I didn’t remember it from seeing this when it was new, but now it seems almost worth the price of admission alone.

Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)

I can be as impatient as anyone with the way Sherlock Holmes is portrayed as capable of the most uncanny feats of deduction. Look close in those stories and you see it’s usually a bunch of lucky guesses, though yes based on close observation. We don’t even get that much in Mark Twain’s sendup, just the wild guesses served in a lukewarm stew of familiar tropes: twins separated at birth, riverboat culture up and down the Mississippi River, and Huck Finn narrating admiring stories of that rascal, dreamy-headed Tom Sawyer. This was one I meant to get to as a kid (the cover above was on the on the copy I had). Somehow along the line I got the impression Tom was grown up in it, an adult. Turns out that’s not the case. It’s Huck and Tom at home in St. Petersburg (based of course on Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri), and unfortunately it is the worst of all the Huck and Tom novels and/or stories I’ve seen so far. Tom Sawyer Abroad at least has some charming moments. Tom Sawyer, Detective just felt tired and uninspired. At this point, I resent a little the way I imagine Twain must have rationalized things like outrageous coincidence as just part of the parody. It’s more like just part of the laziness. One good thing here is that Jim is spared the indignities he suffers in most of the other Huck and Tom tales. Detective feels like a hurry-up job in many ways. The last chapter is four times longer than any other and intent on tying up all loose ends, unconvincingly—because that’s part of the parody! It just seems empty of any goodwill. It’s also quite short—maybe 70 or 80 pages?—and I’m a little mystified to see it referred to as a novel. But then I’m the one usually complaining about designations like “novella” and “novelette.” Maybe Twain was jealous of Arthur Conan Doyle’s success with Sherlock Holmes (note to self: read a Twain biography). Because it fails so abjectly at it, Tom Sawyer, Detective is a practical demonstration in how difficult it actually is to construct a mystery story that passes the smell test. Never mind that it doesn’t seem to understand the appeal of them at all, let alone Sherlock Holmes. Disappointing in every way.

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

“The Swords” (1969)

I’ve been revisiting and looking further into horror stories for a few years now. Partly it has been to get perspective on what I was reading of horror that affected me so much when I was a kid, how those stories shaped me. Now I have a better understanding of the sectors of horror I did and didn’t know then and how they fit in the larger history. I have many gaps I still have some interest in filling, particularly in the ‘70s and beyond, when I mostly stopped reading it. Robert Aickman is one such gap. Basically, I had never heard of the guy and his self-designated “strange” stories before, missed him completely in his time. Now I think he’s one of the best horror story writers of the ‘60s and ‘70s (he died in 1981 at the age of 66), if not the one best, and he wrote some good ones in the ‘50s as well. He worked a day job as a conservationist, cofounding the Inland Waterways Association in the UK, which works to preserve England’s canal system. Not all his stories are as stellar as this one and others, but they nearly always at least contain great fragments. And a surprisingly high number of them are pure little masterpieces, such as “The Swords.” Everything about this story—its plot, its characters, its symbols, its setting, the very title—suggest it is about sexual awakening and initiation. It blatantly trucks in horror cliches, notably the carnival setting, yet makes them work and even vitalizes them. A lonely traveling salesman (yes!) finds himself in an unpleasant hotel in a strange English city. He goes out walking to tire himself and help sleep. He finds a tiny, shabby street carnival, set up between two apparently abandoned factories in a vacant lot strewn with rubble. It has one ride, a merry-go-round operated by a disquieting woman, and not even a dozen stalls altogether. It is indeed a sinister carnival. And where does our traveling salesman go? To the sideshow, of course, which is marked “The Swords.” Here he finds seven other men sitting on rickety chairs, all singles, no one together. On the stage is a young woman who is thin and doesn’t appear to be that healthy, sprawled in a chair, wearing green makeup and a costume. The MC is wearing navy blue and our man begins referring to him as “the seaman” (yes). And then, the show. It all gets to be so ham-handedly phallic it’s practically comical. Aickman’s accomplishment is that what he describes in the show is impossible. In fact, the narrator doesn’t believe it and takes it as some sort of stage magic trick. We probably would too if we were seeing it for ourselves. And that’s what it might be, somehow. But somehow it feels fantastically, irrationally real—among other things, Aickman is uncanny at evoking dream senses. The narrator is fascinated and repulsed and flees before he is forced to take part as a volunteer. But there is still one more encounter for him with the woman wearing green makeup. You come away feeling almost infected or consumed by the events, which Aickman was capable of doing often in his stories.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine
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Slint’s Spiderland (2010)

With this title in the 33-1/3 series I was at something of a disadvantage because I didn’t know the album until about the time I read the book. In my little 33-1/3 project, I started with some of the most obvious titles and eventually settled into polling the internet at large with google searches on a periodic basis. This one by Scott Tennent has a reputation for being well-researched and written, which is true. Tennent has no Wikipedia article, but publisher Bloomsbury’s bio puts him at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a senior writer who runs a blog on the side, now apparently defunct (Pretty Goes With Pretty). Lots of names associated with Slint and Spiderland were well familiar to me: Steve Albini, Gerard Cosloy, Homestead, Touch and Go. The ‘80s indie scene in Chicago reached out and interacted with Slint’s hometown Louisville as well as mine in Minneapolis. A lot of Tennent’s work is the story of how Slint came together, by luck and happenstance in the middle of a vibrant time for, uh, post-rock. All the members of Slint played with lots of different bands, and for that matter their two albums don’t entirely even sound like the same band. They were together more or less for no more than three years, made two albums, flew apart, attempted reunions, flew apart again, made more reunions. Slint has roots in punk-rock by way of altern-America at large but they’re far more musicianly than I’d ever been led to understand. In a lot of ways it’s hard for me to believe that Albini went for this so much. Tennent does a good job telling how the band and album came together, and makes a respectable turn when he goes through the album track by track. I’m less inclined to believe him when he gets to the importance and influence of Spiderland, but maybe he's right. He uses the word “scene” a lot like I do above for small groups of people interacting obscurely, but again, this could all be true. If you’re already inclined like me to accept Albini and Husker Du and many of the other figures here as key players, then you likely know Slint and this album and how you think it all rates. I’m still trying to figure it out and appreciate a lot of the information I picked up here.

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

Colossal Youth (2006)

Juventude em Marcha, Portugal / France / Switzerland, 156 minutes

Director/writer: Pedro Costa

Photography: Pedro Costa, Leonardo Simoes

Music: Nuno Carvalho, Os Tubaroes

Editor: Pedro Filipe Marques

Cast: Ventura, Vanda Duarte, Beatriz Duarte, Cila Cardoso, Alberto “Lento” Barros

When it came time to look again at Colossal Youth, which I saw first maybe 10 years ago, I found I had virtually no memory of it. Alas this is not unusual. For a long time I had good habits of looking at movies most days—at least six days a week, and some of those occasions were double or even triple features. At some point, however, I realized I was not always retaining that much of them. But I kept blazing through anyway—second impressions often remain clarifying. So it was not entirely surprising not to have even a vague impression of Colossal Youth. But as soon as I put it on I saw the problem right away. There are very few helpful handholds in this long and very slow picture.

In fact, I’m not even sure now exactly what it’s about. Or maybe I should say, my main sense of what it’s about comes not from watching it (twice now at last count) but from reading about it on the internet. There you find it likened to documentary, chiefly I guess because most of the players are amateurs possibly playing themselves and the picture is focused on the fallout of a Portuguese coup in the ‘70s. It appears to be scripted rather than improvised. The best evidence may be that director Pedro Costa also takes a writing credit, but the action mostly feels performed. The picture consists largely of long takes, often shot in long and with darkness or light poured over like spilled paint. The dialogue is unfocused, oblique, and repetitive, but the talk revolves around poverty, drug use, attempts to salvage ghetto housing projects gone to ruin. Colossal Youth is another one that premiered at Cannes and saw a lot of people walking out.

Jacob’s Ladder (1990)

My Halliwell’s Film Guide is quite firm on this picture. “Exceedingly silly on every level,” it notes, “particularly in its supernatural dabblings.” Zero stars. For good measure, it tacks on a blurb from Variety: “Dull, unimaginative and pretentious.” Well, I admit the word “pretentious” did occur to me the first time I saw this, when it was new. I was dragged there by a friend who had already seen it and was nutty about it. I wish I could remember what he said he saw in it. At the time it was not hard to give it up for Adrian Lyne’s ‘80s version of sexy stylish direction, which he had already established with Flashdance, 9½ Weeks, and Fatal Attraction. It also has puzzle-box movie elements, particularly in the way it ends, which is more confusing than surprising, but you still may not be able to expect it. Jacob’s Ladder is a mashup of deranged Vietnam vet movie and paranoid antigovernment thriller with several kitchen sinks strewn in for texture and stuff. It’s exciting and well edited, with some good car chases and explosions—fetishizing cars this way already feels like a dated relic of the 20th century. But at the same time I’m boomer enough to get a kick out it (which reminds me, I need to check out The French Connection again). Friendly golden retriever guy Tim Robbins, then in his imperial phase and doing movies a mile a minute, has the lead here and galumphs along as an empty movie star shell, the way he does. Among other things the movie is a certain experiment in how far charisma can take you—YMMV. He is yuppie Vietnam vet Jacob, who has been having flashbacks or delusions lately, or, yes, there are vague hints of demons and such. More explicitly Jacob and his band of brothers, rounded up for the occasion, try to recall the details of a fierce firefight they were involved in in the war. They can’t seem to remember it very well and ultimately they come to believe they must have been being experimented on by the government. Bingo!—apparently. The case never goes to trial, not least because it is outlandish and they have only their own flashbacks as evidence. The obviously low-rent shyster lawyer they turn to is played by Jason Alexander, who is not bad but also unshakably George Costanza. Poor guy. Ruined his career with a brilliant turn in a sitcom. May the residuals carry him forever. As for Jacob’s Ladder, I don’t know. It’s cheesy entertainment, worth it if you can find it free and feel like zoning out for a couple of hours. Some good action stuff in here.

New Year memo

Happy new year everybody, it’s that time of year again when we have to remember to use a new number from now on. I know you people are out there dating things. Get it right. Traditionally, for this New Year post, I put up pictures of my cats—Sam (gray) and Golly Gee (tuxedo)—one at a time in alternating years. That’s Golly over there contemplating light. The late Esme, Annabelle, and Charlie also made appearances likewise. But this year (with my first smartphone!) I got a good picture of Sam and Golly, actually together (below). So it’s been a big cat year and smartphone year too, among other things. As for blog stuff, it feels like I have been slowly falling behind in my reading (and a current slump is not helping anything) so I may be missing some Sunday book reviews here and there this year and/or there may be more stories. I looked up one day and suddenly realized how short-story-intensive this blog has morphed into being over the years—horror stories, for example, will continue on Thursdays. I’m also going to spend another year, on the last Sundays of every month, on a decade-by-decade tour of horror stories, this year starting in the 2020s and finishing in the 1910s. Don’t worry, I won’t make a habit of it—next year (‘24) I plan to use those last Sundays to focus on Hemingway stories. I will still be doing at least one album per month (on Saturdays), but albums are no longer the main focus they started out being here. Maybe streaming did it to me. I have so successfully replicated the programming styles of radio between 1965 and 1981 that shuffling one playlist with songs going in and out is mostly the way I do it now. My heart is in those quarterly Top 40 installments, which will continue, Napster willing. What else? Looking forward to the shakeup the Sight & Sound poll will have on the They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? lists. I thought that poll landing on Jeanne Dielman as the greatest movie ever made was brilliant (inadvertently, of course, by way of statistical calculations that merely suggest a kind of consensus) and I was sorry to see people I want to admire like Paul Schrader getting grumpy about it. Everyone, please stop using the word “woke” immediately. I promise that’s the last time I will ever use it myself. Anyway, TSPDT classic movies and 21st-century picks will continue to dominate the longer Friday reviews. Monday reviews became a little problematic as the pandemic proceeded. They’re supposed to be new movies but have turned more into whatever is around on streaming that’s both affordable ($6 top price, preferably free) and interesting to me, however fleeting. I’m also in a little bit of a slump about watching movies now—it’s harder to finish many of them. I lose interest and drift away. I’m hoping to brave theaters again circa April and may get back to that “new” mode then. OK, yeah, so I think that covers all the days of the week that I publish. All the best to all for a happy new year!