The Outsiders and Cat's Cradle

Read The Outsiders as reference for a writing project. I think we read a tiny excerpt of it in my 8th grade English class then watched the movie. The book was pretty great, honestly. Tragic. 

After Thanksgiving I picked up a book from my TBR shelf and sat down and read it pretty much all in one go. It's remarkable how you can just forget that it's possible to sit down with a book and read. Cat's Cradle was funny and sad and wonderful and terrible like all the other Vonnegut I've read.

Venom and Dune

 I saw the second Venom movie around Halloween at a drive-in theater. It was neat and I liked it, but not as much as the first one.

 I saw Dune at the drive in! That was not a great way to see it!

Snowpiercer

 I've been meaning to get around to Snowpiercer for years and I'm glad that I finally did.

Maybe I'd let the hype build up too much in my head or maybe I'd just seen the "I know what people taste like" scene lauded too many times, but that was actually kind of underwhelming.

The big train car hatchet fight was not underwhelming and was totally worth the rest of the film, but also the whole thing was just really watchable and engaging and extremely funny in places?

There was maybe a tiny bit too much melodrama in some spots, but overall it was great. 

Also it was just a visual treat from top to bottom. The grime was extremely grimy, the decadence was extremely decadent, the gore was extremely gory. I'm down. Looks great, fantastic. Would watch over and over and over again.

Knives Out again

 I watched Knives Out another time and enjoyed it again. Apparently there's a sequel in the works, and that's nice. I'd like to see more of Benoit Blanc, Daniel Craig clearly had a lot of fun with the character and is just fucking fantastic to watch.

Good shit. This is a perfect chill out on sunday with some cocoa and a dog and a blanket movie.

Midsommar

 I think there were three or four people who told me "I hated this movie but I think you'd really like it" and they were correct.

I really, really liked Midsommar.

I thought the film was beautiful and the gruesome visuals were arresting and memorable in a way that I know I'll be thinking about for years. I understood both why Dani would be so seduced by the cult and why it was so frightening that the cult was seducing her. Christian is delightfully shitty and the constant low-grade background horror is very artfully done.

I particularly liked the hallucinogenic dilation of the flowers on the May Queen crown and the background effects of melting skylines and twisting trees that made the unreality so pervasive.

I am super into this movie. This is a good movie. I like it a lot.

These Final Hours

 I watched this on Prime with my husband about two weeks before my husband was hospitalized and waitlisted for an organ transplant.

It's a very, very depressing movie and was really depressing to watch at that time specifically.

That said, I enjoyed the conceit and I think the movie did a LOT with its tiny budget. It was intricate and complicated for something with such a simple premise ("what if the world was ending today, no ifs ands or buts").

It's a movie I'd have a hard time recommending to someone unless I knew what specific flavor of weird they are, but if you like both Harold and Maude and Mad Max there's a decent chance you'll enjoy These Final Hours.

Birds of Prey

 So this is like a year late but whatever, pandemic.

I liked a lot of this movie, I liked the art direction. A year later I remember a lot of the visuals and a lot of the plot but not much of the dialogue, which always kind of bums me out.

I found the actions sequences really disappointing in the way that I do with a lot of modern action choreography. 

But overall it was plenty of fun and I'd happily throw it on in the background while I was crafting or something. It wasn't a bad movie by any means.

CATS

Oh, god, what a huge piece of garbage.

Terrifying and hilarious. Would not intentionally watch again.

Might casually catch it on cable and be transfixed, though.

The ears were *awful* and the use of dance poses and mimed cat body language was uncomfortable throughout.

Wretched. Can't believe how hard I laughed.

This was my final movie of the decade!
Happy New Year!

The Last Star Wars

I saw Rise of the Skywalker on whatever day it came out.

That movie was a mess, dudes. Pacing was fucked, new major characters were introduced way too late in the series. The "Rey is a Palpatine" plot point was INCREDIBLY stupid.

Major end-beats for Poe and Finn and Rey were okay. The resolution of the Kylo Ren character was alright.

They should have just had Leia die early instead of trying to cobble a character together out of old footage.

It was clumsy, and I expect more out of movies that cost that much and have so many pros at the helm.

As much of a bummer as it is to say I think this is the last Star Wars movie I'm going to end up seeing because of how powerfully I haven't cared about the new trilogy.

You're Worth More than your Productivity AKA everything I saw and read in 2019

I haven't made an entry on this blog for a long time because I got very depressed and did a lot of thinking about this blog.

I started this as an excuse to myself.

"It's okay, I'm not just wasting time, I'm reading and writing about what I read - if I make a blog entry about the books that I read then I'm still being productive!"

I haven't made an entry because I stopped reading when I started getting worried about how many entries I needed to catch up on.

HOO BOY.

Anyway, this is going back to what it should have been in the first place - a reading/viewing journal - instead of what it actually was: a permission slip I signed to myself begging to be allowed to enjoy things.

SO, without further ado:

Venom (2018) - November 2018 - I really fucking liked it
Venom (2018) - November 2018 - I REALLY fucking liked it
Venom (2018) - December 2018 - STILL REALLY LIKED IT

Venom: Lethal Protector - January 2019 - Extremely silly, I enjoyed it

Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse - February 2019 - Hey this movie was fucking perfect, thanks.

Knives Out - November 2019 - I'm really shocked by how much I loved this movie. It was funny as hell and I want to go see it three more times.

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