The Naked Gun (2025)

Happy to note that the fourth installment in the Naked Gun franchise, 31 years in the making, carries on in the fine old Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker tradition, at least judging by how much I laughed sitting alone in my apartment. It’s a fast-paced barrage of dad jokes, bad puns, sight gags, slapstick, and outrageous dirty jokes. Random action such as fistfights between principals is often going on in the background. Mug shots are taken by fashion photographers. Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) is always running over things when he drives. There’s even an OJ Simpson gag. If one bit doesn’t get you, there’s another one coming in about 20 seconds. Eventually, you just have to give in to this intense desire to amuse. I love how they mix up the styles and strategies, such as redundancy. Whenever Drebin Jr. shows up at a crime scene or the Police Squad headquarters, some underling is sure to hand him a latte cup of coffee. It just seems like another cop show cliché the first time but then it keeps happening, with slight variations. While he is driving, for example—a hand with a cup of coffee reaches into the window. Drebin Jr. is the son of Frank Drebin Sr. from the original franchise (Leslie Nielsen). Besides sharing initials, Neeson and Nielsen traveled similar screenway paths to fame, from romantic leads to roles as hard-bitten heavies into these surprising turns toward comedy—based in part on their previous sober personas (Z-A-Z did the same for Peter Graves, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges, of course). Neeson does not quite have Nielsen’s deadpan genius, but he’s good enough here I’m willing to give him time to get it (meaning, yes, I hope there are further installments ... the Z-A-Z attack somehow remains reliably fresh). Neeson is good, and so is a game Pamela Anderson as Beth Davenport, Drebin Jr.’s love interest at the center of the murder story. Her brother has been killed using a Primordial Law of Toughness (PLOT) device, which turns rational human beings into savages under influence of their worst impulses. This short movie has a long, long credits reel with extras, including a tender and hilarious love song that Drebin Jr. sings (poorly) to Beth. I recommend sticking around for it.

“The Words That Count” (1976)

This Ramsey Campbell story is purely a gimmick story, but as it happens it’s a gimmick I’m a little susceptible to. It reminded me of a detail I liked in a story by Margaret Irvin, “The Book,” where a possessed man’s prayers come out backward, in reverse word order. In this story, as explicitly spelled out in the last paragraph, the first word in every paragraph is the Lord’s Prayer in reverse word order. So the first word of the story is, of course, “Amen.” The conceit entirely eluded me in a story that wasn’t entirely making sense anyway, so making that explicit at the end is important. It brings home a certain aspect of the story to explain it, but formally it also weakens the story. A lot of things are definitely awkward here, perhaps most notably the first three paragraphs, which read like throat-clearing. The story features a pamphlet, as it’s called, with recognizable words from the Lord’s Prayer (e.g., “trespassers”) and a bizarre fundamentalist patriarch. Mostly it’s muddled, but also desperate and unpleasant, as the pamphlet appears to hypnotize the first-person narrator, daughter of the patriarch. The story may also be another example of a sad case where people had no idea how bad conservative Christianity was going to get. It’s unsettling because it’s unpleasant and confusing, and it gets a nice charge of the uncanny (at least for me) with the revelation of the gimmick. Unfortunately, that does not come until the end of the story, which until then veers between a trite treatment of conservative Christianity and impenetrability. Under other circumstances I might have abandoned it as early as the first paragraphs, which are terrible, and it doesn’t get much better from there. But as I say I’m susceptible to the trick of prayers in reverse word order as a symptom of demon possession. The Margaret Irvin story is much better. Interestingly, the story Campbell compares it to is W.F. Harvey’s “August Heat.” I don’t read that story the same way Campbell does, but I think another story by Harvey, “The Beast With Five Fingers,” has similar effects, featuring a man’s left hand writing with pen and paper unbeknownst to the owner of that hand. Things like that are practically impossible to do, which is where the kick of the uncanny comes in for me. You probably know the Lord’s Prayer. Try saying it backward—“amen, evil, from,” etc. It’s harder than you might think. I don’t like to imagine that religion is part of the effect here, but I suppose it could be.

Masters of Darkness, ed. Dennis Etchison
Story not available online.

Thirteen (1993)

For a long time I knew Teenage Fanclub for Bandwagonesque and that was it. I didn’t even know they had a first album until last year and I didn’t know anything about Thirteen either or the rest of the catalog. Bandwagonesque was a handful for me—one of the best albums of that year, 1991, I was drawn to playing it repeatedly, because it’s good, but at the same time I was embarrassed for the abject aping of Big Star and Alex Chilton (a bit too close for me to the Replacements piling on the pyre of the Big Star legend circa 1987). I didn’t know how many agreed with me in 1993, for example slagging the album’s title as more of same (for the Big Star song “Thirteen”). But if the problem with Bandwagonesque has somehow worn off for me it never existed with Thirteen (which has 13 songs). I only arrived at it last year. Oh, I admit it took sitting with it a few times for the high points to assemble and register. But they are there. File under the slippery label “power pop,” with Teenage Fanclub and Thirteen further landing in the shambolics wing. Even as it comes rumbling in like bad weather with the exquisite five-minute opener, “Hang On,” when the singing starts it’s all homely heart, lovely melody, glowing harmonies, a flute, a lulling orchestra. It’s like that all the way. One of the secrets here is three songwriters, in singer guitarist Norman Blake, singer bassist Gerard Love, and singer other guitarist Raymond McGinley (plus drummer Brendan O’Hare contributes the 1:22 gem “Get Funky,” which comes complete with irresistible handclaps). I can’t say I’ve picked out anything distinct about any one of them. I’m more impressed with how the songwriting blends, like the singing, into something with its own distinct identity. I will say it’s Love who wrote the opener “Hang On” and the closer “Gene Clark,” which strike me as notably apt in their sequencing positions (although the latter has a somewhat annoying two minutes of silence at the end of the song. What’s up with that, streaming service?!). “Gene Clark” bears a worthy name-check by reputation, although I don’t know Clark well enough myself to know how well the song works as tribute. It’s nominally hard rock with an epic electric guitar solo leading the way into a fine round of righteous head-bobbing. Turn it up. Light that Bic. Get with the Teenage Fanclub.

Millennium Mambo (2001)

Qian xi man bo, Taiwan / France, 106 minutes

Director: Hsiao-Hsien Hou

Writer: T'ien-wen Chu

Photography: Ping Bin Lee

Music: Yoshihiro Hanno, Kai-yu Huang, Giong Lim

Editors: Ju-kuan Hsiao, Ching-Sung Liao

Cast: Shu Qi, Chun-hao Tuan, Jack Kao, Jun Takeuchi, Ko Takeuchi, Doze Niu, Pauline Chan, Rio Peng

This confusing but beautiful and often striking picture is the first I’ve seen by Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien Hou. My points to follow may thus (actually, as always) say more about me than the movie or any of its principals. It was released in 2001, and it is set in 2001 (perhaps to avoid arguments about which millennium the year 2000 belongs to), but the premise is that the events are memories of the main character, Vicky (Shu Qi), 10 years later, in 2011. It dwells in the Taipei rave scene, rife with drugs and lowlifes, crime, bad relationships. Vicky and her boyfriend, the overbearingly abusive Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan), live together in a dump. They do drugs and try to get by. She works as a hostess in a popular night spot. They circle one another warily. They are never at ease together.

In a way it did not surprise me to learn that Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai were first offered the roles. Millennium Mambo reminded me a lot of the pictures of Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express) and even more of Hou’s countrymen Edward Yang (Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day) and Tsai Ming-liang (What Time Is It There?). The camera is liquid, often in motion, images may be out of focus, amounting only to blotches of color, though often vivid and always expressive. The pace is slow, studied, deliberate. Hao-Hao is some kind of DJ, and EDM is a pulsing constant, even in the background as if from the next apartment. In Millennium Mambo—in many of these pictures—the style is in direct opposition to the terms of the narrative, which is explicitly, even wantonly, focused on squalor. As cognitive dissonance it is exquisite.

“His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood” (1990)

My first story by Poppy Z. Brite (aka William Joseph Martin) is a pretty good one, all things considered. It was published when he was only 23 but seems to be hardly his first—I’m seeing some 1987 publication dates, when he was 20. On ISFDB this story is classified as belonging to the “Cthulhu Mythos” series, which obviously has many H.P. Lovecraft stories as well as various by others. I did not get a Cthulhu hit off this story, but some of it reminded me of Lovecraft, macabre details like the grave-robbing, a main feature. Brite’s sense of sexuality is miles beyond the timid Lovecraft. Weird editors Ann & Jeff VanderMeer compare Brite to “Decadent-era French and English writers [more] than the contemporary horror scene.” That seems like a reasonable point—are we talking about Baudelaire, Rimbaud, de Quincey? The open perversions here are almost refreshing. Brite is a trans man and takes masculine pronouns, but he may be more nonbinary. I’m not sure. Sexuality is all over this but it’s also indeterminate. The first-person narrator is a man and so is his partner. They start out having sex with others, sometimes together, and end up having sex with one another. They drink absinthe they stole from a grave, which is partly responsible for inspiring them to rob more graves. Finally, apparently, they steal from the wrong grave, as one night a strange apparition of a beautiful boy appears at a nightclub. I love, by the way, how Brite integrates clubbing into the mise en scene of this story. And I like how it’s just out there in terms of “divine decadence” (my term by way of the movie Cabaret). It all comports with my sense of Brite—I’ve been meaning to look into him since the ‘90s—except it’s much better and more natural than I expected. It always sounded a little like a put-on and possibly it is. I still don’t know that much about him. I believe he has moved on from horror since the ‘90s, but I don’t know. This story, which is quite fine in its own right, even if I’m missing the specific Cthulhu elements, definitely makes me think he’s worth looking into further.

Poppy Z. Brite, Wormwood
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Story not available online.

Lou Christie, “Lightnin’ Strikes” (1965)

[listen up!]

What have we here? Confessions of a kissing bandit, episodes in the career of a serial killer, or just plain old date rape? As values changed in the 1960s with the Sexual Revolution, Pittsburgh native Lou Christie (with his long-time songwriting partner Twyla Herbert) decided his best bet leaned toward sexual frenzy, orgasmic release, and his keening falsetto. He duly obtained the rewards. “Lightnin’ Strikes” went to #1 early in 1966 and the similarly minded follow-up, “Rhapsody in the Rain,” hit the top 20 later that year. It’s arguable that these songs haven’t aged well—“Nature’s taking over my one-track mind,” Christie explains himself—but it is equally arguable that they are irresistible. I danced to them madly in my bedroom as an 11-year-old, not really understanding the connotations (having looked at Mad Men recently, I’m not sure how many did in 1966). The hook, a rising crescendo of intensity, features a trio of chick singers crying “Stop!” to his “I can’t stop!” The scene is kicked off in various fashion: “When I see lipstick to be kissed,” “If she’s put together fine and she’s readin’ my mind,” “If she gives me a sign that she wants to make time.” Followed by “Stop! I can’t stop! Stop! Stop!” This three-minute little symphony for the kiddies (apologies to Phil Spector) then spirals off to its insular thrilling self-justifying fugue state in the chorus, with the chick singers and horns at full throttle and a twangy guitar solo too: “Lightning is striking, again and again and again,” etc. There you go. Blame it on the weather. This also applies to “Rhapsody in the Rain.” Not all radio stations were on board with Lou Christie and his swingin’ kinks, but enough to make them big hits. Because of the somewhat rancid lyrical points, we almost certainly have to classify Lou Christie songs now as guilty pleasure. Not that he would likely care much. The pleasure was purely the point with him, guilty or otherwise.

The Hill of Dreams (1907)

I’m probably way out of line to compare Arthur Machen’s short, semiautobiographical novel to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both come from outer precincts of Britain. Machen was about 20 years older. I have no idea where Joyce was on genre writing. Certainly his Portrait is more naturalistic than Machen’s Hill of Dreams. Machen is trying to ground the events he recounts here even though, as a mystic, he can’t seem to help some indulgence of the weird. His young man / artist, Lucian Taylor, is in his early to mid-20s here, raised in rural Wales and eventually moving to London as he begins more seriously to write. In Wales, he is always distracted by the deep woods and by the Roman architecture. He’s drawn to an old Roman fort, in a clearing in the woods, and something happens there. Machen supplies few specific details. It involves Lucian taking off all his clothes and falling into a deep sleep with strange dreams. I have an idea what happened here—masturbation, possibly for the first time. That’s likely more crude and bound to this plane than Machen intends, but there is plainly something sexual about it. Machen wrote this in the 1890s but it was not published until 1907. Surely the rules of the time regarding sexual propriety applied—in short, don’t ever talk about it. So Machen may have felt he had to be coy. Full disclosure, I’m not sure what happens in much of this novel, although it is usually interesting to see Lucian grow and change. In Wales, he writes a first novel. When he submits it for publication it is stolen by another author and published as by him. Incredibly, Lucian doesn’t seem to mind that much. He’s already at work on another. He moves to London to work on it. The woods and nature of his homeland worried and discomposed him but he misses them keenly in the big city. The Hill of Dreams, according to Wikipedia, is “Generally considered Machen’s masterpiece.” That’s news to me—I hear a lot more about “The Great God Pan” (or “The White People,” which is actually his masterpiece). I would not suggest starting on Machen with The Hill of Dreams. But it’s one to get to sooner rather than later if you’re into him.

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

Set the Twilight Reeling (1996)

Lou Reed’s 17th studio album was standard-issue for him at that point in his career—overarching fealty to the rock band 2 guitars bass drums array of sound, with generous bolts of feedback and other rude noise, Fernando Saunders on bass, homely vocals, and densely varying tones of lyrics. New York City references abound. The album opens on “Egg Cream” (“a cold beverage consisting of milk, carbonated water, and flavored syrup [typically chocolate or vanilla] ... [it] originated among Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York City”) and follows with “NYC Man,” rife with twists on cliches, e.g., “I'm a New York City man, blink your eyes and I'll be gone.” “Hookywooky” is just for the infectious fun. The live “Sex With Your Parents (Motherfucker) Part II” (whither Part I?!) has him riffing on the outrage of Republican Party hypocrisy. Pretty good for 1996. He’s cracking jokes but he’s mad too. “Riptide” clocks in at 7:47 replete with howling feedback. For me the centerpiece and center of gravity to this album is the song “Trade In,” where Reed’s much vaunted emotional honesty might be shading over into cruelty. The singer is formally addressing someone he used to be. Namely, at least the way I hear it, the singer in “Heavenly Arms,” which credits Reed’s second wife, Sylvia Morales, with his most heartfelt redemption, calling her by name in an agonizingly beautiful passage. That was 1980. In 1994 they divorced, and Reed by then was already involved with Laurie Anderson. In “Trade In,” he refers to Anderson as “a woman with a thousand faces / And I want to make her my wife.” They married in 2008. I don’t take the song as deliberately malicious, though it veers close. The song has many powerful points, notably when the guitar comes in full, but I think what makes it work to the extent it does is that the singer seems as confused about his romantic reversals as anyone. Maybe he’s trying to atone for “Heavenly Arms,” whose own powerful moment is a little reduced by the failure of the marriage. The singer in “Trade In” is rueful and self-deprecating, saying he wants a “fourteenth chance at this life,” suggesting awareness of many previous mistakes. What feel like attacks on his former lover, and spouse—Reed does characterize the target in this song as a former self, so maybe that’s actually what the song is about ... I’m just spitballing here—are more often result of his own self-lacerations: “A child that is raised by an idiot and that idiot then becomes you / How could I believe in a movie? How could I believe in a book?” Nevertheless, he is stubbornly sticking to his guns. He wants a trade in. Amazing song on a pretty good album.

Belle de Jour (1967)

France / Italy, 100 minutes

Director: Luis Buñuel

Writers: Joseph Kessel, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carriere

Photography: Sacha Vierny

Editor: Louisette Hautecoeur

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Genevieve Page, Pierre Clementi, Iska Khan, Francoise Fabian, Maria Latour, Francisco Rabal, Marcel Charvey

Belle de Jour was sold in 1967 as director and cowriter Luis Buñuel’s “Masterpiece of Erotica.” Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, a young middle-class housewife who seems to be messed up about sex, likely the work once again, per Buñuel, of the Catholic Church. Severine’s sexual interests may or may not lie in taboo directions, BDSM, and degradation, but she has apparently decided her best bet is to present to the world as “frigid”—beautiful, and unattainable. Sha and her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel) sleep in separate beds and she repulses all his advances with sighs and sorrow, which he seems to accept with equanimity. He’s a certain model of ideal husband.

Severine finds an outlet for herself, drawn to it almost by forces beyond her will, as a high-end, “classy” prostitute. She works only in the afternoon, hence her prostitute name, Belle de Jour, literally “beauty of the day.” Presumably this is so she can be home in time to prepare her husband’s dinner. This particular operation takes place off the street, in apartments owned by the house madame Anais (Genevieve Page). No menacing pimps seem to be involved and it feels relatively safe. At first Severine resists the actual work—the undressing, showing her body, physical intimacy. Anais is gentle but firm with her, starting her with the more unobjectionable johns. The sex work seems to be what Severine wants or needs and soon she is a regular with two others, Charlotte (Francoise Fabian) and Mathilde (Maria Latour). We see a few scenes of the fetishes their johns are there to see served. It’s Buñuel and not surprisingly they are bizarre and often surreal, with BDSM themes. There’s even a flashback scene of Severine refusing communion. Ah, Buñuel and the Catholic Church! The eternal romance of opposites attracting.

Rebekah Del Rio, “No Stars” (2011)

[listen up! (7:20)]

I first heard this song (or first really heard it, that is, you know, as if for the very first time) on a bedtime playlist, or what was intended to be a bedtime playlist. My then-new streaming service helpfully kept adding songs to the mix so it played all night (later I figured out how to prevent that because I can’t sleep this way every night). I woke at 3 or 4 with this song playing, Rebekah Del Rio’s clarion, mellow, quasi-operatic vocal piercing the night and my sleep, with an aural vision of a lonesome universe and no stars in the sky. No stars, no stars. Never mind I live somewhere with cloud cover replicating that most nights. Del Rio’s vocal feels every ounce of that loneliness unto desolation in a universe with no light anymore, all winked out, especially when you wake up and don’t know what’s going on. She wrote this song with David Lynch and John Neff in 2001 and recorded it for her 2011 album Love Hurts Love Heals. It was used in the third season of Twin Peaks in 2017. Much like Del Rio’s appearance in Mulholland Dr. the sense of tragedy is at once affecting and slightly ridiculous. It is almost too deep, like a well that takes too long for the stone to hit something. It feels, in “No Stars,” as if the singer has spent a lifetime enduring pain and feeling love. They don’t cancel each other out but rather deepen the experience of both. The pain is palpable, on the long notes especially, which she can hold for a long time, but her love is equally profound, and you know from the grain that it is constant.

Him (2025)

Here’s an odd mashup of sports movie and horror show, carrying on another one of today’s genre-blending exercises that don’t even seem possible. Jordan Peele is an executive producer. The main problem here is that sports movies tend to build toward sentimental heroic upbeat triumphs whereas horror is more like the opposite. Here the sport under examination is pro football, with obvious similarities to the NFL but equally obvious (for legal reasons?) departures from it. The featured team is the San Antonio Saviors—the unlikely nickname captures well the strange vibe of Him. Do any sports teams bear the nicknames of holy figures? I’m drawing a blank. The Los Angeles Angels? New Orleans Saints? San Diego Padres? Not quite the same. We’ve got a veteran quarterback in Him, Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). He’s the GOAT, the greatest of all time. He’s won eight of the picture’s Super Bowl equivalent, as opposed, you can see, to Tom Brady’s seven. Frankly, I’m tired of the whole GOAT discourse, but here we are. The Saviors have drafted a promising rookie QB, Cam Cade (Tyriq Withers). This worries Isaiah, as Brady was worried when the New England Patriots drafted Jimmy Garoppolo (and Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers and Jordan Love, etc.). Isaiah feels threatened and undermined as the starting QB, but shows he’s a good sport about it, in a way, voluntarily taking on mentorship of Cade. But is he really trying to help Cade? Really? It doesn’t seem that way. Things start to drift in strange directions at the remote training compound in the desert, where Isaiah comes on with the snarling drill sergeant style of turning boys into men by taunting and humiliating them. Cade is given transfusions of Isaiah’s blood. Things have been strange even before that, as some rando wearing a goat costume knocks Cade on the head, giving him a serious concussion and endangering his career. Him explores some of the psychedelic implications of concussions and brain injury, which can be visually striking, as in a showdown fight toward the end. But as the title suggests, however—this is not remotely like the movie Her, by the way—the capitalized “Him” is as much a religious reference as anything. Fans are worshippers and the movie goes spinning off to some majestically ridiculous Cthulhu type places in the end. The picture does not work, but it has its overheated moments along with a soundtrack that collects some nice jams. You could do worse.

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863)

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short travel book—“notes” and “impressions” in the title give fair warning that it is closer to a think piece the size of an essay—was written after his first visit to Europe in 1862. He didn’t stay long, perhaps two and a half months in total, a few weeks in Paris, barely more than a week in London. And he came with a certain amount of innate disdain for Europe. Some see this piece as the point where the second half of his career began. The conventional wisdom is that it’s Notes From Underground, which followed the next year. I’m more inclined to go with the latter judgment, if only because this is so much more rambling and unfocused than Notes (and, for that matter, “A Nasty Story” from the year before). Dostoevsky may have been less comfortable with nonfiction, but my hunch is he knew he didn’t have much of a leg to stand on with the actual travels. Instead we get a lot of prejudices, which may or may not be right. He did turn into a raging antisemite as he aged and he never liked Europe much. He was close to a Slavophile, a believer in Russia as such, and even more in the Eastern Orthodox Church. So much faith in one church is really where I depart from him. He gets into some of that here, including some of his boldest statements of (cockamamie) faith. In many ways this is so short because, perhaps, he knew he needed more depth and understanding. He still lets it rip when he wants, notably on the French, but he may understand he’s not very persuasive. He would make a more detailed case against Europe in the novels to come. Here we merely see how early he was committed to Europe being the problem. It’s probably a misnomer to call it a travel book at all as it does few of the things we expect from travel literature. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions probably has to be taken as relatively obscure, and reading it through I think I can see the reason why. File under I read it so you don’t have to. I found a standalone kindle version—note that it’s not included in the Delphi anthology where I read most of his stuff.

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

Chimes at Midnight (1965)

Campanadas a medianoche, Spain / Switzerland, 115 minutes

Director: Orson Welles

Writers: William Shakespeare, Raphael Holinshed, Orson Welles

Photography: Edmond Richard

Music: Angelo Francesco, Lavagnino

Editors: Elena Jaumandreu, Frederick Muller, Peter Parasheles

Cast: Orson Welles, Keith Baxter, John Gielgud, Margaret Rutherford, Jeanne Moreau, Norman Rodway, Alan Webb, Fernando Rey, Michael Aldridge

I was going to say I like director and cowriter Orson Welles as much as the next guy but maybe that’s not so true. I might be more of a dilettante. I love Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil and I like to look at The Magnificent Ambersons to grieve for what might have been (Booth Tarkington’s novel is surprisingly good too). After that it’s certain dazzling shots and moments in some of the others, at least as long as they don’t have very much to do with Shakespeare. My problem there—I’m not proud of it—is I’ve never had a Shakespeare phase, not even in college, and I don’t know his work well, though I generally admire everything I’ve seen or read.

For that matter, Chimes at Midnight is not just a Shakespeare adaptation, it is a reimagining and refocusing of Falstaff, a recurring Shakespeare character, along with his relationship with Prince Hal. Per Wikipedia, the script for Chimes at Midnight includes verbatim text from five of Shakespeare’s plays: Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; Richard II; Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. It is a deep dive into a pool where I don’t how to swim well. And it’s not the first time Welles did something like this. Besides previously making pictures based on Macbeth, Othello, and Twelfth Night, he mounted a stage production on Broadway in 1939, Five Kings, based on nine Shakespeare plays. In many ways Shakespeare was a theatrical medium itself that Welles worked in well, capable of working up pastiche for anyone who would have it.

“Travels With the Snow Queen” (1996)

This story by Kelly Link was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 1999 but ultimately lost to another of her stories, “The Specialist’s Hat.” “Travels With the Snow Queen” is one more example of a fairy tale retelling from the 1990s, a certifiable trend likely tracing back to Angela Carter’s work in the 1970s. But Link’s story is more having a go at what is expected of girls in fairy tales. The tone is jokey and ironic and there is a lot of broad winking about fairy tale tropes in general. It’s also told second-person present-tense, which I would have to count as a strike against it—“you do this,” “you see that,” etc. Seems gimmicky to me. YMMV. “You” is a girl on the move, barefoot and heading north. Perhaps the gist and important points of the story may be gleaned (in a way that I couldn’t) by way of the passages I found highlighted in my kindle edition of the Link collection. I realize I might be taking the easy way out for a story I didn’t entirely connect with, but here are three of those passages. “Where you are, where you are coming from, it is impossible to read a map made of paper. If it were that easy then everyone would be a traveler. You have heard of other travelers whose maps are bread-crumbs, whose maps are stones, whose maps are the four winds, whose maps are yellow bricks laid one after the other. You read your map with your foot, and behind you somewhere there must be another traveler whose map is the bloody footprints that you are leaving behind you” (54 readers highlighted). “You were going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover leaves her. It’s hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is hard on the heart, and you weren’t quite ready to give him up yet” (31 readers highlighted). “You’re sick and tired of traveling towards the happily ever after, whenever the fuck that is—you’d like the happily right now. Thank you very much” (32 readers highlighted). I don’t know the original Snow Queen fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, which no doubt put me at some disadvantage. Honestly I didn’t get much from this story. Someone on ISFDB gave it a 10 so maybe I am the one woefully off the mark here.

Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen
The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Suicide Commandos, “Try Again” (2017)

[listen up!]

The original Twin Cities punk-rockers, the Suicide Commandos ruled the nascent local scene in the second half of the 1970s, an irresistible live act built out of trash rock ‘n’ roll, heirs to the Trashmen, Monkees, New York Dolls, and others. They entered oblivion as the three principals moved and reinvented themselves in various ways. But punk-rock means never having to say you’re old again just because you’re living forever. Approximately 30 years later the trio reassembled to play comeback gigs, pick up the trash on a stretch of highway in Minnetonka, and, eventually, record another album, Time Bomb. They acquitted themselves well there, with all-original songs and an unmistakable dedication to the ideals of rock ‘n’ roll aging grizzled but still effective, with no overreach, like the old friend of a plainly well-used amplifier they put on the cover of the album. The whole thing is worth checking out. “Try Again” may be as good a place as any to enter in—perhaps one of the best. It’s tidy. It can feel almost effortless. And it sets its hooks deep. With only the preamble of a single drum hit by drummer Dave Ahl it locks into a throbbing groove guaranteed to set heads bobbing. You feel it right away. It bears the potential to grow into something much larger and more significant. The doggy yips no one could have expected only signal the freewheeling dedication to fun—complicated fun, the band’s calling card. “Try Again” is a simple exercise in rock, all sustained control, the singer stalking and riding the surging glides with an air of patience and persistence. Declarations of fidelity like this seem likely to last a lifetime, or at least for the three minutes this song goes. Chris Osgood’s squalling electric guitar answers any remaining questions about this song written by Steve Almaas, my old high school mate who died last week. R.I.P.

True Crime Addict (2016)

James Renner’s quasi-meta meditation on true-crime fascination generally, and specifically on the disappearance of Maura Murray in February 2004, is the most un-put-downable book I have read in some time. Renner personalizes his research and investigations, probing himself for the sources of his own interest. It sounds like this is not the first time he has done this. His first book, in 2006, Amy: My Search for Her Killer, is about the abduction and murder of Amy Mihaljevic in 1989 when she was 10. Renner is the same age as Mihaljevic and he was impressed with the case as a 10-year-old and has been ever since. The Maura Murray case is slightly different—a baffling disappearance that remains unsolved. True Crime Addict chronicles Renner’s efforts to solve it. I saw the episode of Disappeared about Murray (from that show’s first season) and was impressed and intrigued by the case. It’s tantalizing and mysterious in all kinds of ways. So among other things Renner’s book rekindled my interest in the case. And then Renner takes an interesting approach to his narrative—total transparency (seemingly). Because there are still so many unknowns to the case, Renner can’t structure it around a resolution. There is still not one, and many questions remain open. Renner works a day job as a college instructor, has extensive editorial experience, has written novels as well as nonfiction, and possesses the whole panoply of podcast(s), a blog, and a youtube channel. We learn of his personal experience with crime and abuse in the story of his predatory grandfather. In many ways Renner is on a righteous mission. He says confronting miscreants is one of his favorite parts of his work, allowing that that is also dangerous. We see a lot of doors slammed in his face and hear about a lot of messages he leaves that never get responses. He keeps the focus on the Murray case and pursues his avenues of information. I don’t know how far I’m going to go with this guy. I’m already checking out his podcast but that may not last long. I’m interested in another of his true-crime books and maybe even one of his novels. I really loved True Crime Addict.

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

Vagabond (1985)

Sans toit ni loi, France / UK, 105 minutes

Director/writer: Agnes Varda

Photography: Patrick Blossier

Music: Joanna Bruzdowicz

Editors: Patricia Mazuy, Agnes Varda

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Meril, Stephane Freiss, Laurence Cortadellas, Marthe Jarnias, Yolande Moreau, Joel Fosse

In some ways it feels like director and writer Agnes Varda grew more carefree and even whimsical over the course of her career. In this century she made gentle, freewheeling, perpetually curious documentaries like The Gleaners & I and Faces Places. By contrast, 1962’s Cleo From 5 to 7 is about a young woman awaiting results of a biopsy. Vagabond, between them, is about Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire), a runaway girl in rural France who finally dies of exposure—a sad and foredoomed story. Mona’s body is discovered at the beginning of the picture and the rest is flashback types of episodes. They follow the last months of her life as she hitchhiked from place to place, set up her tent, and lived her life as she could. These scenes are ostensibly based on journalistic interviews of those who interacted with and knew her—to the degree, of course, that anyone knew her. Varda’s instinct is often to go at least semi-documentary in tone.

We never see Mona in the home she ran away from. The picture is silent on her life before. We don’t hear from her family in these supposed interviews and we never hear why. Perhaps they just didn’t want to speak with interviewers, but it’s never explained. Varda is more interested purely in Mona’s life on her own and how she survives (and doesn’t) rather than potential details of domestic abuse and such. There is one scene here where it appears Mona is going to be assaulted at one of her campsites, but the picture quickly cuts away and we never hear anything of it again. It’s as if Varda wants us to know she’s aware of all the dangers of Mona’s life, but doesn’t want to dwell on them too much, doesn’t want the lurid details to distort what she wants us to see in Mona.

Silver Apples, “Oscillations” (1968)

[listen up!]

Here’s some early—and choice—pop electronica so far ahead of its time it takes some sorting out to get oriented. But the main point, as with Kraftwerk’s deadpan paeans to the PC, is the goofy pleasure of it. The drumming pattern recalls krautrock practically before there was krautrock. Silver Apples is just two guys alone in the studio with a producer. Dan Taylor beats that drum pattern and sings. Simeon works the oscillators and he sings too. They took their name from an album that came out the previous year by composer and electronics experimenter Morton Subotnick, Silver Apples of the Moon. Their self-titled debut LP opens with this song, as if the first order of business were to master the oscillator and now it is time for worship and celebration. The oscillator, Wikipedia tells me, “is an electronic circuit that produces a periodic, oscillating or alternating current (AC) signal, usually a sine wave, square wave or a triangle wave.” The song wobbles into existence on the angled-off tones, like some moist blind newborn amphibian. The drum pattern puts it in motion, granting it life and propulsion, redolent of a dark, throbbing place. A sound like a steam whistle, as the groove sets, lets us know it’s all in fun. The song trundles directly to your heart. Taylor and Simeon sound hypnotized, chanting, “Oscillations, oscillations / Electronic evocations of sound's reality / Spinning, magnetic fluctuations / Waves of wave configurations / That dance between the poles of sound / And bind my world to soul.” Gary Numan couldn’t have put it any better. Silver Apples was so far ahead of its time their patents still haven’t met yet.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this one, a sequel shot at the same time as the original (28 Years Later, itself a sequel), directed by Nia DaCosta (Hedda, Candyman) rather than Danny Boyle. But the story was rarely less than interesting and that helped a lot. Screenwriter Alex Garland has written all the entries in the franchise so far except 28 Weeks Later. That’s good for continuity and he seems to know what he’s doing. Garland also wrote Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Men, which are also interesting and generally worth seeing, especially Annihilation. The violence here is predictably extreme, with lots of horrible screaming and torture and things you’ll want to look away from. Most of them involve a terrible rampaging gang of teens and a heavy Apocalypse Now vibe. Ralph Fiennes is back from 28 Years Later as Dr. Ian Kelson, a scientist making the best of the zombie armageddon and also the architect of the so-called bone temple, which he primly calls an ossuary as he calls the zombies “infecteds.” In his spare time Kelson enjoys listening to Duran Duran and Radiohead. He is working with opioids to civilize one of the new type of zombies, super-creatures he calls “alphas,” who are giant and powerful and quite dangerous. There’s a lingering sense in all this that we may be witnessing actual devolution. The terrible rampaging gang of teens is led by Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), who calls his various hooligan followers “fingers” and names them all “Jimmy” (or, for a young woman, “Jimmima”) They wear blonde wigs. One is our old friend the young boy Spike (Alfie Williams) from the first movie, an unwilling participant just doing what he has to to survive. This gang is pretty sure Kelson is actually Satan, a view he accommodates and affirms with a somewhat unlikely Iron Maiden interpretive dance set to “The Number of the Beast.” On the whole The Bone Temple is fairly predictable, including a big spectacle at the finish. But it was better than I expected. The end leaves wide open the option for further sequels. My bet would be on a first season of a TV series, but we’ll have to see how these movies do at the box office. I am as dubious about further sequels as I was about this one coming into it. But I admit The Bone Temple was entertaining and I have few regrets about seeing it.