Inverted Lear

Okay, right off the bat let's get this out of the way: Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres is King Lear told from the perspective of Regan and Goneril (Rose and Ginny). That's fine, but I actually want to approach the book independent of the Lear connection.

The writing is pretty dang great, honestly. I was expecting the book to be dull and slow but I read the whole thing in a single sitting - it was really engaging and brilliantly paced; it also has this stellar midwestern gothic thing going, you know, swaying corn and abandoned charity shops and churches no one really wants to go to. The grimness and drudgery of farm work and the incomprehensible multi-generational dedication to it.

I kept feeling like the book was familiar and it wasn't the Lear thing, it was Stephen King's 1922 and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It turns out that "something evil is lurking in she barn" or "these fields have many secrets" is an aesthetic that I'm super into. Smiley does that aesthetic really well and the faded mysteries of the junk pile and shimmering heat of the fields are tangible and harsh, as is the driving wall of water from the unexpected storm and the cool earthen rot of a cellar unknowingly housing a poisoned pill.

 Nice.

There's an unsatisfying tension at the end of the novel and I think it's actually pretty brilliant. Things aren't neatly resolved, people aren't happy ever after. That kind of makes it stick. I finished this book about three weeks ago but it's been in my head enough that I've been considering rereading it ever since.

Anyway, strong recommend.

Cheers,
Alli

The stance of this blog is "fuck genocide"

Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Paiutes, their Wrongs and Claims is a somewhat controversial book and that's understandable. When it was published it was controversial because it was advocating for Native American rights; now it's controversial because of its advocacy for assimilationist rhetoric.

In spite of its flaws in that regard, the book is still a wonderful thing to hold up when racists claim that manifest destiny wasn't that bad or wasn't a genocide or that white people treated people better than other people did.

I don't have it in me to get super critical here, or to go into detail with this incredibly depressing subject. The settlement of the American West was a bad thing built on imperialism and genocide. There are clear victims of this settlement process and their people are still dealing with the repercussions of the genocide.

I happened to spend some time in Nevada and Oregon last year, when I had just started reading this book. One of the things I was curious about was the tremendous number of places I saw labelled as Paiute reservation land - where I'm from it seems like most tribal lands are fairly consolidated. You'll have a radius of maybe fifty miles, max, before you're out of that group's reservation areas.

The Paiute land stretched across hundreds of miles in a way that was strange to me.

Turns out that's because of forcible moves and multiple separations of the tribe and a whole bunch of other fucked-up shit.

Anyway, I can't recommend the book enough for people who are under the impression that white people settling the continent was somehow right or good.

Cheers,
     Alli

Something moving in the trees

Okay look, Twin Peaks is great and I love it but it's a messy series that has huge continuity issues and that I'm not sure its creators really understand.

And for sure, a hell of a lot of the fans don't understand it and I don't fault them at all for not wanting to delve into twelve supplemental novels.

If you want the bare minimum Twin Peaks experience just watch the original two seasons. That'll do it, that's a totally valid way of consuming the series and it's a warm nostalgia bath of sweetness and horror.

Or you can get fucked up and actually read the books.

The Secret History of Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier go a long way toward making the most recent season of the show comprehensible, but they're also fucking bugshit crazy and have no problem with warping and twisting Original Series canon. (Best example of fucking with canon: the divergence between the book version and the show version of Ed and Nadine's marriage - and Norma's homelife and family get a hasty band-aid that tries really hard to make sense but just kind of doesn't).

Also Secret History is basically all about aliens, which is my least favorite part of the TP lore. It gets better toward the end, but it's a big heavy book full of disparate sources and difficult-to-read pages that's mostly about the alien-filled escapades of a character who gets like five lines in the original series.

The Final Dossier sheds a lot of light on what exactly the fuck was going on in The Return, which I liked and appreciated a lot - though this one got worse toward the end.

Some questions are answered but David Lynch seems to like leaving a lot open-ended. There are still gaps to fill in, there are still mysteries left behind in the wake of reading these novels.

I enjoyed both books to an extent but was also frustrated by both. Only read if you're super obsessively, unhealthily, into Twin Peaks.

Like me.

Introductory Argumentation

Okay, so my parents met at a debate tournament and my dad is a debate and interpersonal communication professor who has taught at CalTech and USC as well as four other lesser known SoCal colleges.

I've also spent the last six years arguing with people on the internet about LessWrong, medical pseudoscience, and how to do basic research (hey, go get a lit degree if you want to learn how to do research go get a humanities degree).

All of that is to tell you that I'm probably not the audience for Dave Levitan's Not A Scientist. It's a really decent introductory book for folks who are getting sucked into family arguments about science on their FaceBook feed. It's just a baby little stepping stone for horrid gremlins who are online ten hours a day (like me).

That said, it's fine. It has some useful and very specific examples that you can draw from if you want to point out how someone's argument is disingenuous or misleading. There are lots of damn decent studies cited and the attribution is off-the-wall awesome, which I really appreciate.

It's a perfectly acceptable book for someone who is starting to get frustrated by arguing the validity of science with assholes online who does not yet have a list of reliable studies to link and refer to in those sorts of arguments. It's also very simply written and it's an easy read that illustrates the value of understanding and trusting science without getting too deep in the weeds of graphs, charts, and theories that do legitimately confuse a lot of people.

Actually I'll say the "blame the blogger" section of the book is probably its best asset because of that. Sometimes it's better to say "that statement you're making is based on a blog written by someone who has no expertise in the field and who frequently publishes crank statements on a bunch of topics" than it is to provide a meticulously researched refutation. (Also it's not an ad hominem attack if you're questioning the veracity of a source - saying "you can't trust Alice because she's a jerk" is not the same thing as saying "you can't trust Bob's knowledge about teapot theory because he hasn't researched teapots and doesn't believe the moon exists.") So that chapter is a useful reminder for everyone.

It's fine. It's just not really for me.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Dodos died for a reason - they were too slow

Hey so The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. was the first book I started reading this year and it took me until July to finish it because I fucking hated it.

Which is a little shocking considering my well-documented appreciation for Neal Stephenson. Nicole Galland co-authored the book and while it's tempting to blame her for what I didn't like that's not really fair because a) I've never read her other stuff and so I couldn't tell you if I like her style or not and b) most of what I didn't like felt like Stephenson bits that weren't landing.

I really dig maximalism done well but this felt like maximalism done badly - it became a slog, it got boring.

Maybe that was because it was supposed to be a journal and collection of documents and the bits of Stephenson's style I like the most are in the narration. Maybe it's because the majority of the book is from the perspective of a character who I feel is really poorly written. Poor Dr. Stokes. I wanted her to be really well written, I wanted to like her - it's clear she was supposed to be sympathetic but she was written as indecisive and insecure and passive-aggressive in a way that was really frustrating to read.

Also the big bad of the book feels poorly developed and everything sort of dissolves into a nonsensical rush in the last 50 pages. Plenty of people have talked about Stephenson's denouement allergy and the fact that he likes to cut things off right after the climax and maybe this book illustrates why that's the case - everything after the last big action scene was kind of shit.

Anyway, long story (and jesus it was around 800 pages and it was a slog for once I'm sympathetic to people who think he's long-winded and dull) short I didn't like this book and actively resented the time I spent reading it and should have stopped after the first hundred pages didn't grab me because I don't feel any better having finished it except that it won't drive me crazy for not making the effort.

Fuck this book.

Fixing Flaws

So up until about a year ago if you asked me about the character Thor I'd go off on a several-minute rant about exactly why I despised him in the comics as well as the MCU. He was too straight-faced, he got caught in really stupid traps, he put others in danger because he was too trusting. It was like someone gave a credulous three year old lightning powers and a hammer.

I've been relaxing about Thor in comics for a while - Squirrel Girl was largely instrumental there - but I'd maintained my apathetic-to-actively-aggressive attitude toward the MCU Thor. The Thor films seemed tedious and overly earnest, the character was inflexibly THOR, confused Asguardian who doesn't understand you silly hu-mans.

Ragnarok fixed that for me. Thor gets to be really silly. Thor gets to talk about his ridiculous history with Loki. Thor puts his foot in his mouth talking to people who are equally godlike and immortal. Thor experiences consequences.

I loved what Ragnarok did for the character of Thor and I actually appreciated Loki's opportunities for growth as well.

The rest of the film, well, that wasn't stupendous. Almost everything involving Hela was tedious and frustrating to sit through, the time on Sakkar seemed to drag on and I actually didn't like the Grandmaster character at all (not as in he's a bad guy and you're not supposed to like him, as in he wasn't even fun to watch and the "whee I'm so zany" writing seemed really forced) though the post-credits scene was pretty great. The "save my people because Asgard is my people, not a place" thing was actually a decent motivation and they pulled it off well.

I also liked the other gladiators and enjoyed watching them but they were perhaps a bit too silly. They weren't awful, just maybe a bit misused or overdone? "Fuck off, ghost" is a great line but "Oh, my god, the hammer pulled you off?" is maybe taking the jokes a bit too far.

The movie as a whole wasn't really that fantastic (it did look great), which is a shame because Taika Waititi is fucking fantastic and I want him to make so many more movies, but it did loads to rehabilitate the character of Thor for me and I'm really glad for that.

Cheers,
     - Alli Kirkham

Flawed mythology

Hey go watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KznZcK7ksf4

Okay that basically sums up my thoughts on Disney's Hercules.

I rewatched this with my sister recently and was really surprised at how manipulative the film was, especially because of the tone problem that Lindsay Ellis discusses so much in that linked essay.

There were at least two moments in the film where I was crying in spite of the cynicism I know was at the heart of the production and the zany song and dance numbers that bracketed the pathos-heavy parts of the film. It's fuckin weird to go from bright and shiny winning battles at Olympus to Meg bleeding to death internally while Hercules watches her die. That is dissonant and unpleasant but it happens so quickly that you can basically ignore it.

It's a weird movie.

BUT.

The songs are pretty great (not Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast great), the animation looks fantastic and the character design is some of Disney's strongest.

I first saw this film as a child when it was released with a big hullabaloo at the El Capitan theater in Hollywood. El Capitan does lots of Disney premiers - they'll set up movie-themed obstacle courses, include a kid's candy combo with a screen-printed cup in the cost of a ticket, and hand out little goodie bags of tchotchkes. I'm pretty sure I still have my deck of Hercules cards somewhere. I know I went through a labors-of-Hercules-themed bounce house.

I've got some pretty solid nostalgia linked with this flick, but even that isn't enough to fix the broken parts.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Jeff Goldblum's shining chest

I recently re-watched Jurassic Park with my family and hot damn is that a good movie.

Some things are obviously a bit dated (the conflict with the park computer system is ridiculous in retrospect but I get that most folks in 1993 had no idea what computers or operating systems did) but the dino effects aren't and really that's a huge chunk of why the movie holds up.

But I think the bigger reason that the film still works and is so resonant is because of how well the characters and their relationships are written. Ellie and Alan are still fantastic, Alan's growing closeness to the Hammond kids is still organic and sweet, Ian Malcom's mania and prophecy is still hilarious and hilariously skeevy. These are great characters and I like watching them get chased by dinosaurs. That's the only reason I can forgive Jurassic Park 3. I still like seeing Dr. Grant run away from toothy monsters. Incidentally that's why I can't forgive Jurassic World - none of those characters are fun to watch surviving, and somehow it's not even fun to watch people getting eaten in that movie.

It's well known as an exciting movie, a scary movie, an exhilarating movie, but on this rewatch I realized just how charming Jurassic Park is. There's more sap to this film than just the stuff wrapped around ancient mosquitos but you hardly notice because your heart is pounding so hard. But Hammond is charming (and all the more terrifying for it). Alan and Ellie and Ellie's cajoling of Alan is charming.

These characters are so cute, so loveable - even the reprehensible Dennis Nedry is frustrated and lost and does little things that make us like him, even as we loathe him.

Anyway, it's still a great movie and the raptors are terrifying. Go watch Jurassic Park.

Hello Goodbye

So I read The Crow for the first time in like 2003 and there's a line in it that turns out to be a lyric from a song by Robyn Hitchcock that goes "It's a Raymond Chandler evening at the end of someone's day, and I'm standing in my pocket and slowly turning grey."

I didn't know what that meant at the time and to be honest I still don't know what it means but I've got a better feeling for it now since I've read a Raymond Chandler book for the first time.

I'll start out by saying that I liked it. I read The Long Goodbye and it's a fine book. It's a fun mystery and it's sordid and smoggy and feels like Los Angeles and that's a vibe I can get behind.

I could do without the racism that pops up occasionally and smacks me in the face.

And that's really my main criticism of the thing. I liked the book, I enjoyed the story, Raymond Chandler had an unbearably brilliant way with metaphors. And there's some racism that totally snaps me out of the mood and makes me not want to read it for a while.

You know when I'm reading Huckleberry Finn I expect racism. Racism is a big part of that story and seeing Huck and Jim face the racists around them doesn't surprise me and destroy what I was feeling because the point of the story is to criticize racism.

But when I'm reading Raymond Chandler I'm expecting sleazy Los Angeles and dramatic people and Marlowe being a cool cucumber in a hot desert, so when I'm suddenly reading his thoughts about big black men chasing white women I've got to take a step back.

Again, it was a good book. I liked it. There were lots of good things about it.

But this was something that I was in no way expecting that made it frustrating to continue reading.

I will probably read more Raymond Chandler but I guess I'll be doing so with something of a cautious eye.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Many Monsters

Pete Von Sholley is an excellent storyboard artist who has worked on dozens of films and TV shows. And he loves monsters. He also happens to be a customer at my job so I had the uniquely lovely opportunity to discuss monsters with him and of course jumped at the chance to contribute to the kickstarter for his latest book, Pete Von Sholly's History of Monsters.

The book went to print late last year and I've only just now had the chance to sit down and read it. It starts with a few pages describing the monsters you'll see on the art plates in the rest of the book and then it's off to the races with the art.

There are 21 plates in the book featuring hundreds of monsters from the dawn of human myth up until the monster movies of the last few years.

While I do appreciate the earlier plates and their exploration of what different monster myths might have looked like it's the later plates from the 60s on that really tickle my fancy - a lot of which is simply down to the fact that I get to have fun recognizing monsters. There's something delightful about seeing fifty monsters on a page and getting a little jolt each time you recognize a particular set of fangs or a pattern of mangy fur.

I really appreciate some of the more unusual choices as well - one of the later plates features a monster from the movie Evolution. That movie wasn't particularly popular and that monster was only on screen for a couple of minutes so it's great to see this extremely creepy but frequently forgotten face among images of cenobites and predators.

If you're a monster geek I'd say picking up the book is well worth it - it's a great collection from someone who has had a major hand in bringing many monsters to life.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Creeping in Castle Rock

Is Gwendy's Button Box the first Castle Rock story in the Kingiverse that's co-written? I'm not sure and at the moment I don't want to google it, but the novella is a creepy little tale by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar that I both enjoyed and was horrified by, which is the best that can be expected when you're dealing with King.

The story is uncomfortable in that it makes you feel the weight of responsibility put on our titular Gwendy, and as she grows familiar with the eponymous button box so do we - it's an object of obsession and control and we become nervous about its use and fate.

The book is short, which places it in a good position relative to some of the other Castle Rock stories. I think the novella format is perfectly suited to our jaunts to the creepy little town. The Body and Sundog are stronger works than Cujo, certainly.

It may well be that Castle Rock is such a known quantity (though not monstrous like Derry) that we don't need to get to know the setting - all you have to understand is that the story takes place in the sleepy little village and you already know the history of misery behind the place.

Bad things have happened here but it is not a bad place.

Anyway Gwendy herself is fantastic and I'm always happily horrifed when we get a visit from the dark man. I never know what Flagg is up to but I can rest assured that nothing good is going to come of it.

Which is exactly what happened here and why I'd recommend picking up the book to see what's going on for yourself.

Cheers,
     - Alli

70s nostalgia and great visuals

I saw a lot of praise for The Love Witch in 2016 and quietly added it to the checklist of movies in my brain under the heading of "I'd watch that but I'm not going to go out of my way for it."

I watched it last week and while I enjoyed it I'm glad that I didn't go to much trouble to see it (it's included in Amazon Prime and all I did was search Prime and then suddenly I was watching a movie.)

If you're into 70s exploitation flicks and witchcraft then oh boy is this the movie for you. It's not a great film, it doesn't have a great plot. But it's impressive for at least two major reasons:

1 - The visuals perfectly nail that dreamy, soft-focus 70s-almost-porno feel and it's beautiful. You have daytime interior shots that feel short and compressed and washed out and cramped contrasted with these beautiful exterior or isolated shots that are fuzzed around the edges and projecting rainbows. It's so pretty, and so well done.

2 - The acting looks like crap at first but when you remember the actors are aiming for that stilted, disconnected style and suddenly it's brilliant. The movie feels like a time capsule when it's really more like time travel.

And that's about all that I can really say for the movie. It does have this nice build of creeping horror and there were some moments when I felt genuinely unsettled, but it wasn't as engaging as I'd imagined from all the hype and I wasn't as invested as I like to be when I'm watching a movie.

If this were the kind of blog that gave stars I'd rate it about a 3 out of five - I probably wouldn't watch it again but I'm not mad that I saw it, and while I was a bit bored occasionally that was made up to me with the really fantastic art direction of the film.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Hey if you've got prime or netflix go watch WWDITS right now

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.

I've meant to watch What We Do in the Shadows for years and just hadn't gotten around to it when finally I made the terrible decision to press play on my prime account at 2:45. I meant to just watch until my coffee finished brewing then go to bed, but then it was so great and I just had to watch the whole thing.

Look, I've only ever heard good things about this movie and as it turns out that's because it's a beautiful, perfect, adorable piece of art that I want to protect and cherish and show to everyone I know.

It's the funniest movie that I've watched in years, it's *so* sweet and charming, everyone and everything about the movie is perfect, it's shockingly well done for its very small budget, and the script is just so unbelievably good that I can't handle that it was written by humans.

This movie is PERFECT. It goes on my very short list of perfect movies (Legend, Galaxy Quest, Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Last Unicorn, Point Break, Dune - I will not argue these, these movies are great and I love them) and I want to watch it again today. THE SAME DAY. TWICE.

I'm so happy that I saw it and I want you to see it too. I know it's on a few streaming services but this is going into my very limited "I actually own this on a physical disc" collection.

IT'S SO FUCKING GOOD PLEASE WATCH IT I LOVE IT OKAY THANK YOU.

Cheers,
     - Alli

A pure delight of a horror/comedy

Hey, here's the entire movie I'm about to praise:

Um? It's fucking fantastic?

Kill Me Now is a low-budget horror/comedy flick written by and co-starring Michael Swaim, whose work I know and love best from Cracked.com. When Swaim left Cracked he started working on a project called Small Beans, and he shared the film on the Small Beans youtube channel.

I'd heard of the movie waaaaaay back when it was released in 2012 but was never really interested in seeking it out - it fell into my lap once I subscribed to Small Beans and I'm delighted that it did.

Kill Me Now is shockingly witty and wry for a faux teen horror flick - I like backwoods slasher movies like the Evil Dead, I like humorous serial killer stories like Dexter, and I like well done parodies like Airplane! (not like Vampires Suck). Kill Me Now manages to mix in a little bit of all of these and add in some of the best dialogue I've ever found in a teen slasher movie.

Michael Swaim is so friggin funny y'all.

It's not a perfectly made film; the acting is stilted sometimes and the staging and sets have a clear, low-budget look. But that kind of adds to the cheesy "we love Evil Dead and Wes Craven and Horror" feel of the thing.

I'm into it. If you're looking for a laugh at a slasher movie this is a good way to spend your time. You should go watch it, I hope you enjoy it.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Still Swimming Upstream

I am of two minds about The Shape of Water.

On the one hand it's a wonderful example of Del Toro's lovely vision of fairy tales - that they are comforting lies that cover up evil in the world, that they are a potent narcotic lulling people into complacency because they are always the princess in the story and they believe they'll win someday even as they support the system that crushes them, that they are a beautiful trap - a dream we want to reach for that sucks us down under the surface and keeps us from breaking free.

On the other hand I had some issues with the framing of Elisa in the film.

Elisa believes that she is broken because society believes that she is broken - she bonds with the Amphibian because he doesn't see that there's anything "less than" about her. She is whole to him, he is whole to her - even though the rest of the world may see them as wrong they recognize that they are fine, it's society that's wrong.

Which is why I was so bothered by the singing scene where Elisa had her voice. The ending doesn't bother me so much - the world isn't accommodating of them so they go off to live in a world where their muteness or alienness isn't a barrier. In the happiest of endings this is perfect for the social model of disability - the other world they go to accommodates their needs. However some people have, correctly, brought up that Del Toro is essentially saying "these people have no place in this world, they are monsters who have to run away, and we cannot have them here." Which is, you know, pretty shitty.

That is why I found the singing scene so jarring: Elisa is acceptable, beautiful, stunning, admired, looked upon with love and kindness from strangers - but only in a fantasy, and only when she has a voice.

Another thing that I found difficult to approach was the sexual framing of Elisa. Disabled folks are frequently infantalized and desexualized so seeing Elisa as sexual is liberating in one way; she candidly masturbates and is sexually attracted to a river god who is attracted to her - neat! Disabled people like sex too. But Strictland's fetishization of Elisa's mutness is all too real a reminder that disabled women are sexually abused in numbers that are frankly horrific. Which is especially upsetting because Del Toro's focus on Elisa's morning masturbation routine feels voyeuristic and fetishistic in the same way that Strickland acts.

And I'm not saying that was an intentional choice to make the viewer feel uncomfortable with how women are seen as sexual objects - I'm saying that seems to have been somewhat subconscious and for a movie that is concerned with commenting on male violence and xenophobia it's a disconcerting viewpoint. The camera lingers on Elisa's body and observes her orgasms in a way that is meant to feel charming, not creepy, but it comes off very poorly from my perspective.

To be clear, I didn't dislike the movie. I was underwhelmed and disappointed, but still thought that it was a beautiful film with powerful moments (in particular I will say that Elisa forcing people to listen to her was painful and raw-feeling and reaffirming); the music and set decoration and creature creation were all stunning (and I love Doug Jones *so* much). Everyone's acting was a delight. But I feel like it could have been more. I think people who are comparing The Shape of Water to Pan's Labyrinth are making a mistake, and I don't think that The Shape of Water will be remembered in ten years the way that Pan's Labyrinth is now because Pan's Labyrinth had something serious to say and said it, whereas The Shape of Water is a love letter to cinema that is sweet and personal, but ultimately not that important.

Cheers,
     - Alli