Wednesday, July 31, 2024

On how setting helps tell the story in Longlegs

The mise-en-scène is the message

There’s a debate raging on obscure corners of the internet as to whether Nicolas Cage can act. Some think he’s a hack; I, for one, would like to point the doubters to the Martin Scorsese film Bringing Out the Dead, starring Cage as an exhausted paramedic. Seeing Cage’s other virtues —namely, his admitted and admittedly quite entertaining tendency towards ham rivaling that of Porky Pig— was a big part of the draw for me to see him play a serial killer in 2024’s Longlegs, written and directed by Osgood Perkins, distributed by Neon in the United States and Black Bear International in the United States. Surprisingly, though, Cage turns out to be overshadowed in this film.

‘Longlegs’ is the nom de plume of a man who leaves letters at people’s homes, all in Oregon, spanning the 1960s to the 1990s (the latter being the time of the film’s events) in code, signing them with that appellation. These homes are invariably the sites of brutal murders, where the father ends up killing his entire family, and then himself, via all sorts of grisly methods, but Longlegs himself can never be directly tied to the murders by the worldly methods of the FBI forensics team that has to hunt him down. All these families have daughters of a certain age, with birthdays at a particular time of the month. It is this bloody tapestry that agent Lee Harker, played by Maika Monroe, has to unravel. It turns out Harker has her own complicated secrets, worldly and otherwise.

I had never heard of Maika Monroe before watching this film; upon seeing her filmography, I noticed she’d been in Independence Day: Resurgence, a film I mainly remember for the novelty that I saw it on the day it was set (the Fourth of July, 2016), and with only so many memorable qualities. It also showed me how much in the horror genre I have missed; I’m still a relative newbie and I clearly have some catching up to do. I was surprised to find myself paying more attention to her than to Cage, and indeed was more invested in her character than in Cage’s. Monroe gives Harker just the right combination of inquisitiveness, bookishness, aloofness, and hesitation as she peels the onion of these murder cases and finds more and more revelations she hates but has to know.

Harker is deeply isolated, some would say deeply weird, recovering from a very strange upbringing. In the beginning of the film, you see her house; she lives alone in a building in the woods with very few lights. This, in part, allows the film to create dread by virtue of obfuscation (darkness terrified even our distant ancestors), but it also shows you, very starkly, who she is. She is troubled, intensely so. Her desk is, frankly, a mess, a fact which was incredibly relatable and I suspect will be to a number of readers here.

Harker’s house is a good example of how the film uses place. Most of the environments in this film are residential, cozy, and domestic. These are homes where people can be their true selves after selling their souls to capitalism, and they are homes with families in them, children in them. There is innocence and love in these places, making a contrast to Harker’s home which is itself revealing. Longlegs then saunters into these environments with his wiles like the Mule in Asimov’s Foundation, breaking the script; the place of self-actualization is transformed into a place where people begin to act out of character, brutally so, and to everyone’s pain and regret. He rips these places apart, figuratively and literally, and with plenty of bloodshed in the process.

There is a broader contrast to the FBI offices you see, all spartan, bland, uninviting, with clunky, boxy computers (like those of my childhood) and visible portraits of Bill Clinton to remind you of the setting, and in some cases very dark, where Harker works on the grisly case and falls ever more into its maw. It is very fitting, then, that Harker’s home becomes something an extension of the FBI offices in a thematic sense. The only people she can be herself with are an old friend and her mother, and you get the impression that the relationship with the latter is strained, forced into the comportations of parent and child that do not want to reveal things to each other. That thread of disrupted domesticity runs through the narrative, made particularly effective in a scene set in a barn, which twists that even further in a devilishly disturbing way.

The film’s 1990s setting helps this particular form of tone-setting in that it’s a world where light is a bit more remote than in 2024. You don’t have a shiny box in your pocket that can provide light, or even become a flashlight (although, all too often, accidentally). It’s a small bit, but it’s an effective one, a far more subdued version of the remote cabin in Puritan New England in The VVitch; it is a world where light is something that can be controlled by the main characters only in limited ways.

Monroe’s performance is helped very much by the fact that, unfortunately, the script never quite figures out what to do with Cage. His is a fairly flat character, perfectly good at being unsettling but with not much more than that. He is properly deranged, sometimes quite entertainingly so, especially when in public, or driving, but amusing glossolalia does not a compelling character make. Likewise, the makeup on him is very good and suitably eerie. You leave the theater with the sense that, for all its virtues, the film underused Cage, which is surprising given how much the man can do when he gives it his all. Cage is perfectly good for the part, but the part wasn’t enough for Cage.

Longlegs is a film about home: who is in it, what we get from it, who we let in, and what those people do when we let them in. As real life will tell you, not all visitors are well-intentioned, and Cage’s character is far more sinister than your regular door-to-door huckster. The film’s narrative is bolstered by a main character with a compellingly tenuous relationship to the concept of home, and brought to life by Maika Monroe's stunning performance. If it could have gotten more out of Cage, with the two of them given the chance to really play off each other, it could have been truly great. Unfortunately, the film never gets to that point, with the villain feeling rather caged in, but the end result is still reasonably entertaining.


Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

TV Review: Supacell

The Black Heroes remake you didn’t know you needed—a bingeable adventure amidst larger social issues

Superhero movies and television series have saturated theaters and streaming services lately, often making a once magical concept feel ordinary and repetitive. Many viewers still enjoy superhero adventures as a way to provide an escape from the monotony of everyday life. But with the non-stop changes, chaos, and stressors in the ‘real world,’ ironically it is ‘real life’ that seems extraordinary, while superhero tropes may seem cliché. Some may crave something different—something that reflects the reality of the stressors of life rather than providing a traditional, escapist view. Occasionally, we have seen different approaches to the superhero genre, with stories that show a more cynical side of superpowers. Netflix’s Supacell takes a nontraditional approach to the concept of having superpowers by juxtaposing the fantastic into a world filled with real-life stress and chaos. The series follows five unconnected Black Londoners who each suddenly develop a different superhuman power but still have to deal with both the mundane and the overwhelming stressors of their daily lives.

Before we meet the lead characters, the first episode provides a cryptic glimpse of a sinister scheme lurking in the shadows of the city. The series opens in a menagerie-like prison designed with a long hallway of brightly lit rooms, all comfortably furnished with beds, videogames, books, and even piano keyboards. Inside each glass cell is an ordinary-looking person: women, men, mostly young, but all Black. Despite the comfortable-looking interior, it is clear they are distressed and they are prisoners. In contrast to the inmates, we see white people dressed in suits or military gear. Each cell has a glass wall that allows the white captors and the Black captives to see each other. When one of the captives tries to escape, we get a dramatic visual summary of the situation. The symbolism and references to commoditization of human life, as well as the symbolism of external manipulation, are quite overt.

Blissfully unaware of the hidden drama are the five initially unconnected lead characters: Michael, Sabrina, Andre, Rodney, and Tazer. Michael is a busy, working class, package delivery driver who is ready to propose to his social worker girlfriend, Dionne. They are a sweet, hardworking couple, so you know fate is coming for them. Sabrina is a dedicated and overworked young hospital nurse living with her streetwise sister, Sharleen. Andre is a good-hearted but struggling ex-felon and single father trying to keep a steady job and build a relationship with his teenaged son. Rodney is an unapologetic, energetic drug dealer. He is biracial and has a tragic backstory that explains why he is struggling to survive financially. Tazer is a street criminal engaged in various forms of extortion and drug dealing. Tazer is being raised by his beloved grandmother after the disappearance of his mother. At some point, each person’s unique power manifests unexpectedly. Michael can suddenly teleport, time travel, and rewind time; Tazer can become invisible; Sabrina has telekinesis; Andre has superstrength; and Rodney has superspeed and super healing powers. As in the television show Heroes, the lead characters are flawed and struggling and are (for the most part) more annoyed and stressed by the appearance of superpowers than they are excited and motivated. This bit of realism and cynicism is a refreshing change of pace despite the attendant bleakness.

This first season of the show is an origin story of the people who will become a team. Initially, the five main characters are living separate, unconnected, ordinary lives (for better or for worse) when a sudden physical change manifests and each person realizes that something dramatic has occurred. The manifestation of the superpowers is treated as a fearful or amusing aberration which does not immediately change the character’s day to day lives. Supacell is also clearly different from other superhero series because all the superpowered humans are Black. That basic demographic shift already makes the story unique. It is hard to think of another superhero team where all or even most of the characters are Black or people of color. As the story progresses, we discover that the ethnic connection is not an accident. The superpowers are tied to a real-life genetic trait specifically connected to Black people.

The Netflix series has many nostalgic similarities to some classic favorites in the superhero genre. Supacell is most like the first season of Heroes, with its ordinary, flawed, unsuspecting, and unconnected characters. The show also has the gritty edginess of Luke Cage. A primary plotline is Michael’s attempt to change the past to protect Dionne after his future self warns him. The concept is similar to storylines in The Flash. And, in true superhero fashion, each lead character has a loved one who gives them both a motivation and a vulnerability.

In contrast to the thoughtfully created main characters, the ultimate villains and antagonists in the series are, thus far, somewhat two-dimensional. Instead, the focus remains on the five main characters who encompass a range of troubling to morally gray to earnestly good. Michael is the pure heart center, Sabrina is the caretaker, Andre is the strong supporter, Rodney is the quirky comic relief, and Tazer is the violent wild card.

Beyond the journey of the five heroes, the show addresses a range of social issues including predatory healthcare, racism and racial exploitation, sexism and racial stereotyping, economic disparity, and flawed justice systems. None of it is presented as a problem to be solved. Instead, it is a backdrop for the adventures in this brief series. With only six episodes, Supacell is bingeably easy to finish. However, since the season is primarily an origin story (the tale of how the five heroes connected and found their motivation), the overarching plot does not get resolved, and the motivations of the antagonists remain unclear. There is no pressure to find the big answers—at least not yet, and the final episode makes it clear that season one is only the beginning of the journey.


Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

· Refreshingly cynical approach to the superhero genre
· Vague, two-dimensional villains
· Bingeable adventure amidst larger social issues

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Book Review: Queen B by Juno Dawson

Returning to the world of HMRC for a Tudor throwback with a witchy, lesbian twist

Anne Boleyn, historically accused of witchcraft—what if she really was a witch? I mean, you're not getting points for the originality of the premise, but I can't say I'm not interested. The eponymous Queen B exists in the background of the existing two HMRC novels as the progenitor of what grows into a national, official coven, and this novella purports to give us the beginnings of it all.

And it does well... kinda?

We are not following Anne for this story. Instead, we begin with the perspective of one of her ladies-in-waiting, her closest companions, her coven, watching as the swordsman takes her head. The narrative then jumps backwards and forwards in time between the year of her death and the time, a few years earlier, when she prepared to ascend the throne, and her brief time on it, all from the perspective of Grace Fairfax, transplanted Yorkshire girl, lesbian and witch. Because we couldn't stray too far from the métier of the original two novels, after all. Grace has the proximity to give us an intimate view into Anne's life and goals, trying to get a witch onto the throne of England to make life better for all her sisters in the process, as well as an emotionally invested view into the aftermath of her death—what this means both for the witches of England and for those who were closest to Anne herself. This ultimately leads to some events that in some ways prefigure the world we come to know in Dawson's novels.

But don't go in expecting a story about the creation of an official bureau of magic. This isn't that. This is, instead, a much messier, more personal story about love and people, and wanting and betrayal. It's about the risks people take, the lies they tell themselves, and the things that matter enough to them that they will make terrible choices to get them. Also, lesbian witches. Plenty of that.

As it happens, that's exactly the sort of story I like, so I was very happy reading this. Grace is a great narrative viewpoint character, occupying a half-in/half-out position with the royal household, thus giving us a way to evaluate the events of the story with a slightly more objective eye while still being invested in them. And by god is she invested. We get a good bit of rage, as well as some more complex emotional moments from her, and if nothing else, the woman doesn't go by halves, which is great fun to read.

But despite not being the protagonist or a viewpoint, it's the characterisation of Anne herself, occupying the edges of the narrative, that is the most striking. Obviously Anne Boleyn is a much covered fiction staple—her position in English history, her relationship with Henry and his break from the Catholic church, her ultimate end, all serve to make her a fascinating, shifting character onto whom a number of takes can be projected to suit the narrative need. Temptress, victim, political machinatrix, religious reformer, pawn—all available angles to take, all options explored in fiction already. But Dawson chooses simply to make her... messy. Which I'm absolutely sure has been done before as well, but it's the first time I'm reading it and I rather like it.

Dawson's Boleyn is compelling, charismatic and political, yes, but she's also someone whose motivations and ambitions are a little opaque, even to her. Possibly (probably?) she is lying to herself. The options are left open to interpretation by the reader, but what we are definitively given is a person, someone who exists as more than one thing to more than one of the people around her, and does not do it flawlessly. Someone whose perfection is only in the eye of the ones who love her more than they see her, for a time. We also see her exclusively through the people around her, and her own legacy-making—half of the story exists once she has already gone away, and some of it through what she has left behind, the words spoken to friends and lovers, letters hidden, gifts bequeathed. For a story not told from Anne's perspective, it does an awful lot of interesting centring of her, her interests, her propagandising and her failings.

Particularly interesting is that it does all of that, all of that focus on Anne, her wants and her machinations, while at the same time almost entirely sidelining Henry as both a character and a narrative force. He exists off to one side, reported on, creating change, but rarely spoken of directly or the focus of discussion. And even for the stories that centre Anne elsewhere, this is incredibly rare—as with all of the wives of Henry VIII, her entire narrative is conveyed to us now through the lens of her relationship with the king.

I have mixed feelings about this, as a choice? On the one hand, I deeply appreciate the narrative detaching the story of a really quite famous and interesting woman from the male framing and focus she receives in almost all tellings. More stories of people who get to exist outside of their status as wives, mothers, siblings and daughters of the powerful men of history, please. But at the same time, the story is deeply interested in a lot of things that were going on because of Henry. Anne's death is extremely central, as is the impending coronation and installation of Jane Seymour as her successor. For the women who are telling this story, Henry is an important motive force in their lives. He is the architect of the seismic changes in the world they live in, and will be again. To ignore his presence in the story renders its telling a little strange. We see the ripples in the pond, but never the stone that made them, and I wonder if the story would be less effective if it did not rest on the assumption of knowledge on the part of the reader—is this story less well told for someone not familiar with this bit of British history?

Then again, for all that those dramatic ripples shape the story, they are not the substance of it, and perhaps it truly does not matter—maybe the knowledge of things works against me, distracting me from what is on the page and back to the conventional narrative? Who knows.

In any case, this is a story that lives in the empty spaces, the rooms of women in a court of men, the relationships between women in a world whose documentary evidence largely ignores them, and aside from any concerns about narrative framing, that is wonderful. The moments that focus on the relationship —romantic, in case that wasn't already abundantly obvious from the blurb— between Grace and Anne are few, but nonetheless moving. Dawson has a knack of capturing moments, little frames of view that work as vignettes, as if we're seeing fond or closely guarded memories, sectioned off from the world around them. In those moments, we can clearly see the foundations of Anne and Grace's affections, as well as the faultlines, and they give us a great deal more insight into both characters as much through implication as by actually showing.

What is likewise wonderful is how clearly Dawson acknowledges the limits of the perspective she's chosen. Grace, our narrator, is a noblewoman and member of the court, in the inner circle of the queen, but also someone whose beginning was... if not humble, then rather more middle class than many of her now-peers. She has enough of an eye for social disparity that, when faced with people of much poorer origins and lives through the course of the story, she gives us someone whose sympathy and understanding seems plausible. She's not one of them, but she's those few steps closer, able to exist in the space between, and mediate. And this has allowed Dawson, though briefly, to do some very necessary acknowledgment that, while the problems the witches the story follows are serious and significant, impacting them all deeply and emotionally, at the same time they are living charmed, gilded existences, and their oppression as women and witches exists on a spectrum that continues well past them. This is a story about a Tudor royal court with commoners in it fully willing to speak up for themselves, to name the hypocrisy of the wealthy, noble women and look it straight in the eye.

But it is a novella, so the space for such things is brief. Good, well managed, pleasingly blunt, but brief.

Likewise, Dawson does not go into great depth, but there are glimmers of a very well handled approach to religious belief and witch-hunting in a story that could very easily have leaned into an easy good guy/bad guy approach. We see witch-hunting and the religious fervour underlying it used both cynically and entirely in earnest, by different groups of people with different aims, and understand that for every person using it as an excuse to squash such female power as could survive in the world of 16th-century England, there is another who truly believes that his actions follow the will and mandate of god himself.

Warlocks, too, get an interesting complexity. We have met them in the series' novels previously—typically less powerful than their female counterparts, sometimes resentful of this difference, but fundamentally under the same umbrella of magical ability, if separate in hierarchy. Here we see them before that union, men existing in an explicitly and intensely patriarchal system, using their social superiority in opposition to the witches' magical one. And then again this is unbalanced by class hierarchy—a noble woman witch and a common man warlock exist in extremely interesting dynamics of shifting power in different contexts, and it's a space Dawson is very happy to play in. This is possibly my major criticism of the story; I wanted to see more of this. The narrative is at its best when it plays with the messy social and power systems it has created, but we simply do not spend the time with them to truly explore what they mean to the people living under them. It makes sense: the novella is a novella because the linear story, the set of actions it follows are fairly simple and brief. Extending it would risk wallowing and soggy pacing. But there is so much in what Dawson has created that is fascinating and unusual that I nonetheless wish there had been more story to tell, just to give us the time to spend here.

But it's not, alas, the book we are given. What we do get —an emotionally engaging, historically interesting little snippet into the history of the world of the HMRC books— is still extremely enjoyable. It's a book that's easy to consume in a single sitting, a narrator it's easy to sympathise with, understand and root for, even as she makes decisions the reader may not agree with, and a little insight into how the world of HMRC came to be. If we imagine them as an alternative history, this is in many ways simply a story of the branching-off point, the slight difference that leads to the dramatically different present.

And that's neat. Is it a great deal more than neat? Of that I'm less sure. But if you go in with your expectations set, knowing it's a window into a short period of time, an implication of what's to come after, rather than a thorough explanation, it is very easy to have a great time with it and see some interesting storytelling choices while doing so.


The Math

Highlights: Genuinely interesting choices in depicting Anne Boleyn; brief glimmers of some cool intersectionality; fun backstory and worldbuilding to the existing books

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Dawson, Juno. Queen B [HarperVia, 2024].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Monday, July 29, 2024

Film Review: Fly Me to the Moon

🎵 Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars... 🎵

My father has recalled to me how, just shy of five years old, he watched the first Moon landing on television. He was stunned at how he could be seeing such a momentous event live, and he would dart back and forth between the television and his window, where he could see the Moon in all its austere glory in the skies above Lawrence, Kansas. I have watched space launches on my smartphone, but I can’t imagine that even begins to approximate the feeling of seeing a Moon landing broadcast live. It is so spectacular, so literally out of this world, that a certain sort of contrarian would inevitably want to say that such a landing never happened, that the American government faked it for propaganda (in a sense, it was propaganda, as Richard Nixon wanted something to distract the world from the quasi-genocidal quagmire in Vietnam, but those astronauts landed there all the same). Those involved in such a momentous achievement understandably do not take kindly to such denials, such as when Neil Armstrong punched a denialist on camera. But that, of course, has not stopped the fiction about such possibilities, as they let us vent our anxieties about our distrust of governments and other such things. Today, we shall be discussing an odder example of such fiction: a romantic comedy about faking the Moon landing. That, ladies and gentlemen, is 2024’s Fly Me to the Moon, directed by Greg Berlanti, from a script by Rose Gilroy, from a story by Bill Kirstein and Keenan Flynn, produced by Apple Studios and These Pictures.

This film is powered by its two leads: Cole Davis, the fictional director of the expedition to the Moon, played by Channing Tatum; and Kelly Jones, the savvy marketer hired by NASA to spice up its image in the face of the volatile political issues of the 1960s, played by Scarlett Johansson. The film's promotion is clearly banking on its stars’ presence nearly as much as by its gonzo presence, and it is the characters that make the film as enjoyable as it is. Of the two, I think Johansson has the more compelling role, being given more to do. Tatum’s Davis is drawn well, realized well, but ultimately is a fairly simple character: a driven professional who wants to complete a massive project with integrity, fairness, and honesty.

It is Johansson’s Jones where the writing of the film really shines. She is assigned by NASA, under pressure from the Nixon administration, to create a fake Moon landing to be broadcast on television just to make sure everything goes smoothly. Before that, we see her in her New York office spinning up falsehoods in the name of Mammon. At the beginning, she is a person utterly without any centering morals, who makes her way through the world by telling people exactly what they want to hear. She is the sort of person who would, in today’s world, be a LinkedIn influencer, someone who bloviates on and on about leadership and mindset to the detriment of anything of substance, let alone systemic issues with the economy. It is a triumph of the writing of this film that she becomes more than odious, and indeed quite compelling. This is a character who, by all rights, I should hate with the scalding fury of a rocket engine, but I found myself completely charmed.

There is a dichotomy that powers this film, like two poles in a dynamo: the fight between truth and lies. Davis is a man committed to truth in the proudest traditions of Western science at its best. He wants to explore, discover, and wow the world fairly. On the other hand, Jones makes a living by lying, and she is as cunning and as vicious as Edward Bernays (the man who made women smokers by branding cigarettes as ‘torches of freedom’—but who refused to work for Nixon!). The entire movie is driven by the conflict between the two. The conventional romantic comedy plot is given depth by having the third-act falling out be sparked not by a trite misunderstanding or coincidence, but rather a real clash between values as the whole falsehood threatens to collapse in on itself. It is clever plotting, too, balancing genre with theme, putting the romantic comedy plot in an environment where it makes logical sense.

There’s another character, Lance Vespertine, played by Jim Rash, who I’m conflicted about. The man reminds me of Roger De Bris, the flamboyantly gay theater director played by Christopher Hewitt in Mel Brooks’s 1967 film The Producers. Vespertine is, likewise, something of a diva, a director who has hit the job of a lifetime, even if he’ll be killed if he reveals it to anyone; and is stated in the film to be gay. Rash, his actor, is gay in real life, which adds some verisimilitude, but he is reminiscent of many stereotypes of gay men in the performing arts, with his diva-like personality and his flamboyant outfits (which I must admit are quite the works of art in their own right). Rash, so far as I can tell, enjoyed playing the character, and to his credit, and the writer’s, he gets some of the best lines in the film. I am straight and so am not the most qualified to judge, but it stood out to me, especially given how little has seemed to change from a film literally from 1967 (two years earlier than the film is set!).

You also get a minor but entertaining performance from Woody Harrelson, who plays the G-man, usually dressed as a literal man in black, who is keeping tabs on the whole charade. This is a static character, only fair for someone who is clearly in a supporting role, but he is hammed up in the most delicious way possible. He adds to the film, and he also gets great lines.

The soundtrack is great, a lot of it period music. There are two different versions of Fly Me to the Moon, the tune penned by Bart Howard and made famous by Frank Sinatra (of course, Sinatra’s version is used prominently). There is also a truly inspired usage of Sam & Dave’s Hold On, I’m Coming during a climactic scene in the third act. The music immerses you in this particular time and place, just as the fashion does, and the unpleasantly but accurately portrayed social mores, none of them exploitative but all of them clear.

Fly Me to the Moon is a very strange beast, a romantic comedy that is also something of an alternate history and a film about fictional characters themselves fictionalizing a real historical event. There are layers here, especially when you realize there was never a real Cole Davis or Kitty Jones (Jones is easier to explain as an absence from the history books, but Davis would be prominent just behind the astronauts themselves). But, like the Apollo program itself, a mad dare that cobbled together a wide variety of disparate elements ended up creating something worthwhile with its own profundities. It won’t be as profound a watch as a live Moon landing, but it would be an entertaining watch in its own right.


Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Microreview: Twisters

Strap in and get ready to cure tornadoes with a fun cast and some epic disaster special effects

When I recounted to my mom the plot of the new Twisters after I saw it, she said, "Oh, so it's exactly the same as the first one?" I said, "Well, yeah, but it's a little different!" Yes, the main character experienced a traumatic tornado-inspired event. Yes, she's working on trying to cure tornadoes and prevent small towns from being decimated. Yes, there's romantic tension between the two stars (though Daisy Edgar-Jones in this one is absolutely boring and milquetoast compared to Helen Hunt's charismatic and intense character in Twister).

Look, no one is going to see Twisters for the plot or character development. Heck, a lot of people are going to see it to get water sprayed in their face while their seat gets yanked around in those herky-jerky 4DX screenings. Like horror movies, this type of film allows people to imagine unthinkably scary scenarios for 90 minutes all while remaining safe. It's a tale as old as time. Personally, I like to check in on disaster movies from time to time because it's a way of gauging how good special effects keep getting.

Indeed, disaster movies have a long and storied history in cinema, from old-school classics like The Poseidon Adventure to recent forays like the enjoyable but ridiculous Moonfall. Twister and Twisters are uniquely American entries in the disaster canon, perhaps because the USA experiences more tornadoes than any other place on Earth.

Twisters outshines its predecessor by really doubling down on the rootin' tootin', cowboy adrenaline chasing feel, thanks to Glen Powell's super-fun-and-ridiculous tornado wrangler persona. He's a lantern-jawed, flannel-shirt-wearing rebel, and his pickup truck has anchors that literally screw into the ground so he can chase them 'nadoes without fear. Contemporary country music plays in nearly every scene in the film, further cementing the heartland vibes of the setting. There are literal rodeos, a fire tornado, and enough cowboy hats you may wonder if you're sometimes watching a western. You'll even see Glen Powell shoot fireworks into a tornado, which is the most American thing that has maybe ever happened on the silver screen.

If you have even the slightest interest in a fun popcorn movie, I'd recommend seeing Twisters on the biggest screen you can find.


The Math

Baseline Score: 7/10.

Bonuses: Glen Powell is exceedingly charming as a tornado wrangler; there's fire tornadoes; Katy O'Brien has a small role but is always delightful

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Friday, July 26, 2024

Book Review: Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming

A novella that effortlessly slides from science fiction to elements of fantasy and mythology and allegory to tell a moderate near future story set off the coast of Nigeria.


Yekini has a problem. She is a midder, working and living on the middle levels of the Pinnacle, the last of the Fingers, the last of an ark/arcology built off of the Nigerian coast. She has by luck and dint of effort escaped her lower class origins. Or so she has thought, until an assignment sends her with the higher class administrator Ngozi down undersea, to the levels of the Pinnacle underneath the waves. There Ngozi and Yekini will confront a threat to the Pinnacle itself, a threat from outside the tower, in the deep waters that surround this last bastion of humanity. Something called the Children...

So one finds the narrative in Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming.

Let me start, atypically, with a place I don’t normally focus first, but for this novella, I will. Let’s look at the language and the writing. The story is a mixture of three points of view from our main characters, interspersed with other material, including pieces that are clearly myth and allegory as well as “press releases” and news showing, in flashes a bit of the world before the world of the Pinnacle. Not only are the allegorical pieces well written and evocative, the entire novella rests on the strength of the line by line writing of the author, especially in these sections, short and sharp. Okungbowa is particularly good at making us feel, be it the apprehension of investigating the undersea levels, the conflicts and relationships between our protagonists, divided and yet united by being an Upper, a Midder and a Lower Level denizen. The novella’s voices and its shifting of tense and mood from section to section, from point of view to point of view to the interludes, is as smooth as a well honed manual transmission in an automobile.

I am no stranger to his work, and like the previous efforts I’ve read, reading the first two novels of the Nameless Republic [review here at Skiffy and Fanty]. Those two novels were very definitely a critique of imperial power and the structures of power, blending in myth and magic along with that criticism. So it is here, too. The author is very much criticizing unjust power structures, and the structures that maintain that power and what that does to people and to society as a whole.

Here, however, the author is starting with a arcology/ark science fictional setting rather than high epic fantasy, but the themes and resonances are familiar. The result of starting with a science fictional setting and weaving in allegory, myth and magic, is that the novella has a feel similar to books like Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (which is also set in the same region), or for those who like their science fiction in a cinema mode, Snowpiercer.

Snowpiercer works particularly well, because of the stratification. Like Snowpiercer, we have a constricted, and restricted space for, seemingly, the last of humanity. To wit, there is not even the hint of anyone existing outside of the ark, if they do, they’re not reachable and they are not coming. Plus the “second deluge” maps to the great freeze in Snowpiercer being a grand disaster, isolating the remnants of humanity to one structure. In addition, the world of the Pinnacle is literally stratified. The higher you live and work in the tower, the better off you invariably are. Those who live at the top rule and control everything. Those who live in the submerged levels, live in a world where they never see the sun or the sky. In between are the midders, the ones like Yekini who actually keep the Pinnacle functioning and working. Even the midders are under a lot of restrictions and problems. The opening of the novel is Yekini rushing to work hoping she will not be late, and later in the novel, we get notes about the midders not being really allowed to wander outside of commuting to work. So the political and social allegory is definitely strong and resonant, and part of the point of the novel.

Like Snowpiercer, the setting is evocative and memorable even if it probably does not hold up to strong “hard science fiction” scrutiny as a viable and complete ecosystem. A remnant of humanity stuck in a single building poking out of the ocean? The logistical problems of keeping this population alive are as insurmountable as the ones in Snowpiercer, but the novella successfully manages to deflect the reader thinking about that until well after the novella is done. And, honestly, a rigorous setting would be in the end be beside the point. This is not a novella about the realpolitik logistics of how an ark like this would work, it is about story, and people in that arcology and the story of these three characters and their pivotal roles in that story.

The author keeps the novella ticking along with a variety of the aforementioned interludes interspersed with the action of Yekini, Ngozi and Tuoyo (a lower level head of safety that joins the two and thus gives us a point of view character from each section of the Pinnacle). Some of these interludes are press releases from the time before the Deluges, describing the dreams and ambitions of the constructors, and their callousness in their construction of the Fingers. Other interludes show us some more items from the archives show an upper-level point of view of the history of episodes of the Pinnacle.

And then there’s something else, and here we fully go into allegory and myth. The pieces are written like fragments of story, or sometimes poetry, or song. Who and where they are coming from, and how they are being transmitted to the reader is something that is not completely clear, but it’s a parallel conversation that the text is having with the reader.

Ultimately, this is where the novella comes to its full flower. The story of Yekini,Tuoyo and Ngozi is in the end a conversation with the other residents of the tower, a conversation with the reader, an engagement and an offer of engagement with the reader. It’s a novella about *communication* and the power of communication between the human and the...well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it? There is a lot to the plotting that I would dare not spoil and it does forestall discussing some details of the novella in specific without giving them away. But there is definite intimacy to this story, like if a grandparent were telling you this story as a legend or a myth. It is a novella that again and again reinforces the power and centrality of story as something that helps define who and what you are.

In a real way, then, treading very carefully so as not to spoil the revelation for a reader, Lost Ark Dreaming is the story of how the Pinnacle learned to incorporate new stories within itself, to help change and redefine what it is. The ending is very open ended and unclear, it is best imagined rather than set down explicitly. The author gives you the world and the story, and it is for the reader to ultimately decide what it means and what will become of this new story. It’s an intimate and powerful trust that the author places in the reader, here, in the novella.

In the end, Lost Ark Dreaming is a potent and heady mixture of science fiction, myth, allegory and the power of story and communication, in a short and intense novella format.

--  

Highlights:

  • Strong and evocative use of language

  • Powerful allegory and use of myth and story 

  • Well evoked setting

Reference: Okungbowa, Suyi Davies  Lost Ark Dreaming  [Tordotcom, 2024]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Thursday, July 25, 2024

The Ignyte Award Shortlist 2024 - Selected Discussions

 

The Ignyte Awards have just announced their much anticipated 2024 shortlist, and it is, as ever, a fantastic set of nominees (not that we're biased from last year or anything). There's a huge amount to dig into here, but I'm going to focus on the categories where I've read some or all of the finalists, and so feel like I have something significant to say - this is no shade on the rest, and I have no doubt they're all brilliant, but as someone who doesn't read, for example, middle grade, I'm not sure my uninformed opinion helps anyone.

If you're interested in the full shortlist, you can of course find it here.

But for now, here are the run downs in some selected categories, along with some initial thoughts:

First up, we have Outstanding Novel: Adult

Honestly, this is just an out and out banger of a shortlist. At this point in the awards season, it would be weirder to see a novel shortlist without Vajra Chandrasekera's (excellent) The Saint of Bright Doors, about which many words have already been said across the internet (and previously here by Adri). It's great. This is, I believe, its eighth nomination.

Of the rest, I have read both To Shape a Dragon's Breath, which is a fantastic and fresh approach to the classic magical school trope, with some wonderful characters and captivating worldbuilding, and The Water Outlaws (Paul's has review here), which feels like a pure distillation of a martial arts film into a book, with a clear love on the page for the intricacies of action sequence and the physical. Both are books with a very clear individuality to their storytelling - you could open a page and immediately know it wasn't any other book - and those distinct voices to the prose make both stand out in the memory.

For the remaining two, though I have not read We Are The Crisis (Phoebe's review here) , I have read No Gods, No Monsters (Adri's review here), to which it is the sequel. If it is anything like as good as its predecessor? Well, there's a reason I have just now gone and ordered a copy. No Gods, No Monsters was utterly gripping, beautifully structured and just generally captivating the whole way through as it explores a vividly realised take on an urban fantasy world where magical creatures exist, in all the complexity that would truly mean, alongside some much more real-world concerns. Which leaves Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talabi. This one I have not read at all, but the plot - a nightmare god and a sort-of succubus are tasked with one last job to allow them to leave the Orisha Spirit Company... the catch? It's stealing back an artefact from the British Museum - is instantly interesting. If it's anything like his previous short story, "A Dream of Electric Mothers", the prose will be pretty top tier too.

On the whole, this is a really strong and varied shortlist, and one I'm going to really struggle voting in.

Next up, Outstanding Novella

For speculative works ranging from 17,500-39,999 words

The first thing that strikes me about this shortlist is that two of my favourite small presses are getting some rep - Off-Time Jive by A.Z. Louise is one of Neon Hemlock's 2023 offering, and we've got two entries from Stelliform. Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris got a review in our novella project earlier this year from Phoebe, and they likewise covered Sordidez by E.G. Condé back last September. Both, quite rightly, glowing reviews for fundamentally interesting novellas, both of which tackle climate change, colonisation and family in ways that really grab the heart as well as the mind.

While I've not read Off-Time Jive yet, in my experience so far, Neon Hemlock simply do not miss, and this has been sat in my queue to read for a while now - the combination of magic, detectives and yearning promised here are hard to resist.

Which leaves us with the two Tordotcom offerings. Tor, in their various forms, have been dominating the novella ballots in awards across the board, and while it's great to see their hegemony being broken a little, I am also forced to admit that there's a reason they've been raking them in - they really do put out some good stuff.

The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi manages to capture the mythical tone of an authentic fable, without compromising the human heart at the centre of the story. I absolutely consumed it in reading, and was really struck by how well it tackled its themes of empire, propaganda and control in so small a space.

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older, by contrast, was an absolute snack of a book - the sort of thing that soothes the soul and warms the heart, and can be consumed in a single, hungry sitting. A Holmesian murder mystery with a gentle, tentative and touching romance as two old friends rekindle their relationship, it could not be tonally further from the others, and yet no less compelling for it.

And onto Outstanding Novelette

for speculative works ranging from 7,500-17,499 words

Short fiction is great for the space it has to play around with ideas, contexts and perspectives, and so I'm really glad to see Renan Bernado's A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair here, because it's exactly the sort of cool, strange thing I love to see recognised on shortlists.

It's also a place to let ideas and settings sing, without the need to be tied too tightly to a full-length plot, and its in that creation of a fully realised backdrop that Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down the Moon really sings - in brief strokes and deftness showing us a corner of a world that stands in for the whole.

Or maybe it's a space to play out emotion, as C L Polk does in Ivy, Angelica, Bay, weaving together themes of family, legacy and personhood to create something that touches the heart and moves the feelings in the life of a neighbourhood witch in the aftermath of the death of her mother, finding a small girl who may go on to be her daughter and successor.

In those three, we get a real feeling for the span of what novelettes can do, and so I can only imagine the remaining two on the shortlist, Spell for Grief and Longing by Eboni J. Dunbar and Zhuangzi’s Dream by Cao Baiyu, translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu, take us on similar journeys. I'm particularly pleased to see the latter here, because SFF really needs to get in on translated fiction.

Then we come to Outstanding Short Story

for speculative works ranging from 2,000-7,499 words

Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe gives us some stunning prose in A Witch's Transition in the City of Ghosts - a thing I yearn for in all my stories, and am often disappointed to find wanting. But not here. The story has a dreamlike quality at times, but it is in the moments focussing on the love of the protagonist for the forest spirit that the craft is really on show, and there are some scenes beautifully told that linger in the mind long after finishing reading.

Thomas Ha's Window Boy also has that quality, although achieved far more through lingering creepiness than touching the heart. It focusses in on the small scale, on the experience in a short time of a single person, and yet gives us so much beyond that in the background, almost without noticing.

Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200 by R.S.A. Garcia is funny. We don't get enough funny in our short SFF - and where else is such a good place for it as this? There is a simple joy to a story of a robot trying to outsmart a belligerent goat, but it's told with such a clear narrative voice, and with such well-articulated underlying sadness, that it is easy to be charmed even as you're amused. And it never strays into schmaltz, even as it manages sweet, which is a difficult line to tread.

Kemi Ashing-Giwa's Thin Ice may be only 2110 words, but it manages to cram into a short space a powerful punch of themes, feeling a vibes that makes it feel weightier than the space it takes up. Why bother with plot when you can achieve so much more with a set of vignettes, each slowly adding to the feeling of the story, like a mosaic novel's shorter cousin.

Cynthia Gomez's Lips Like Sugar is apparently a funny and raunchy bisexual vampire urban fantasy tale, and as soon as I can get my hands on it, I will be reading it.

This is a shortlist full of things distilled to their perfect essence, crafted to brilliance, just as short stories shine best at being.

Next it's The Critics Award

for reviews and analysis of the field of speculative literature

This is one close to our hearts, and not for our own win last year, but for the rare joy of seeing an award that celebrates criticism in all its forms. Every single nominee is an absolute standout, and if you can spend some time to seek out their words and opinions, your experience of SFF will be the richer for it.

It is particularly good to see critics here who do occupy a wider variety of spaces and media, whether it's writing in magazines, podcasting, tiktok or instagram, and it's great to see those being treated with equal weight, when a lot of the genre struggles to recognise audio-visual media particularly. I think this is genuinely the first time I've seen someone with a tiktok as their main platform like bookbaddiebri make it onto a shortlist like this, and I am so entirely here for it. There are so many brilliant reviewers like bri on tiktok, and their craft deserves the same respect as the more traditional media.


Then we're onto The Ember Award

for unsung contributions to genre

And here likewise, it's a banger of a list. Sheree Renée Thomas could have a whole essay just on her work. You may remember her for her collaboration with Janelle Monáe on The Memory Librarian? Her work on Black Panther? Her co-editing of Africa Risen, which gave us a plethora of top tier short fiction in 2022, perhaps? Editors are often the underappreciated part of the genre, their work hidden behind the authors, and it is always great to see them appreciated

DaVaun Sanders, as executive editor for FIYAH, deserves nothing less than our great respect. FIYAH is such a brilliant magazine, an endless source of fantastic short fiction, we can only salute those who make it happen, and doubly so when they manage it alongside publishing middle grade fantasy.

I haven't spoken about the middle grade category of the awards, because it's not a category I read in, so the sum total of my appreciation for every entry would be "that sounds cool", but I do note that there are two finalists in the Ember whose work includes children's fiction, the second being Kwame Mbalia. Where YA has its own spaces in SFF, though not the full appreciation it deserves among more traditional readers, middle grade is even less in the spotlight, and so it's great to see authors from that category being recognised here.

I'm only aware of Kate Elliott and A. C. Wise through their novels - particularly Unconquerable Sun and Wendy, Darling respectively - so I'm looking forward to dipping more into their work prompted by their inclusion on this shortlist. And hey, what is a good shortlist for if not bringing to light those whose work needs more appreciation?

And finally The Community Award

for Outstanding Efforts in Service of Inclusion and Equitable Practice in Genre

Khōréō is a stunner of a magazine, and one whose stories I always look forward to reading. They have a great team who do great work and they absolutely deserve all the love. A story that appeared in a 2022 issue - This Excessive Use of Pickled Foods by Leora Spitzer - still sticks with me two years later for the way it evokes the most personal of memories through taste, even while placing the story off in the space future. It was this that prompted me to start subscribing to them, and every issue since has only confirmed this as a great decision.

Sarah Gailey's Stone Soup likewise uses the medium of food to tell stories, varying widely across spectra of time, space and emotion through the different authors and how they each choose to tell their stories through their recipes. Favourites that have stuck with me include Naseem Jamnia's Khoresht-e Bademjoon and Shing Yin Khor's Congee, but there are so many different moods and modes here, as well as Gailey's own thoughtful sections, that there's something that would appeal to everyone. I very much enjoy getting each entry showing up in my inbox as they're released, and wondering what it will be this time.

I spoke above about the need for a place and respect for translated fiction, and so it is great to see Samovar, a quarterly special edition of the great Strange Horizons that focuses on translated speculative works here, getting exactly that, especially as they showcase the translators alongside the original authors, another unsung and overlooked but critical piece in the larger puzzle of the SFF space.

As above, a great awards shortlist gives you new things to discover, and I'll be diving into some of the podcasts at Awesome Black media imminently. I have likewise from this learned about the great work Voodoonauts do in creating a space for Black SFF writers. With one of their alumni appearing on the novelette shortlist right here, clearly what they're doing is amazing.

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And that's our run through. It isn't every category and every nominee, but what I know about the ones I have encountered tells me that the rest can only be fantastic. 

Voting is open now, and you can do so via the link here up until August 31st, 2024 at 11:59PM EDT, and while you're there, dip into the other categories, explore the finalists and their work, and make sure to support one of the best awards in the SFF space at the moment.

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Video Game Preview: Concord by Firewalk Studios

Sony's newest live-service game leaves much to be desired.


The release of Overwatch turned a lot of heads in 2016 (and way fewer with the release of Overwatch 2 in 2022). Many clones were created in and around the time of the original’s release, with claims of copycat being echoed through the halls of the video game community (despite many of the games being in development at the same time). But with the fall of Overwatch over time and the rise of its toxic community, I thought we wouldn’t see much in the way of a new hero shooter any time soon. How wrong I was. And of all the publishers, Sony seems to have taken the reigns. Concord is a hero shooter that pits players against each other in 5v5 matchups. I played a few hours of the beta to get an idea about this sci-fi hero FPS.

Concord
’s intro animations are great, even if the content in its cutscenes leaves a bit to be desired. The characters are each unique and varied, but something was missing throughout the entire experience that Overwatch had in heaps: soul. Something felt missing throughout my time with the Concord characters that I never did with my first Overwatch session. I continued to be impressed by Concord's character animations when selecting a character, but for the life of me could only tell you the names of two of them after playing for hours. When I was coming close to finishing my time with the beta, one question continued to hum in my ear: why does this game exist?

I don’t mean this in a derogatory way, but out of, for a lack of better words, total bewilderment. As I mentioned previously, Sony is publishing this game. They bought this studio in a push for live-service games. They even had Naughty Dog discontinue the huge Factions sequel they were working on because Bungie said it wasn’t good enough to monetize. Yet this game made it through the wringer? How did this game get Sony to open their wallet? I was even more disappointed with the reveal of FairGame$ last year, but this… Well, this is a bit of a letdown. While Helldivers 2 has been a great co-op success, the rest of Sony’s games as a service (GaaS) approach seems to be too reliant on Bungie’s “expertise”. I hate to say it because every triple-A game takes a lot of resources and dedication to make, but Concord seems like it will be dead upon its arrival, especially if we take into account the dismal PC player numbers during the totally free and open beta weekend.


Not all is bad, despite its lack of a soul, the game mechanics feel decent. Once I managed to adjust my sensitivity a bit, the game became playable. Semi-smooth, though not quite on par with Bungie’s darlings (Destiny, Halo) or Respawn’s babies (Apex, Titanfall). Each character has a unique weapon (a la Overwatch) with infinite ammo, and each has unique abilities. Some of these abilities recharge over time, while others must be restocked by defeating enemies. I found some characters were much better damage dealers than others and that the time-to-kill sometimes felt too high for others. I would consistently put up better numbers with Lennox than with Haymar (the two characters whose names I can remember), though my assists were much higher with Haymar. The characters didn’t feel balanced, and I understand that some heroes will be more useful in some game types than in others, but some of them didn’t seem fun, while others felt more polished.

All characters can double jump, while some can even hover after double jump. Some characters can leave deployable items (that are all too obvious to see), while others have throwable items or tracking abilities. Having a mix of these gives players the odds for most success. Unfortunately, the character select screen doesn’t do a great job of dividing characters into classes to make that character selection more helpful. Despite all these characters having varied abilities, I found it quite odd that they didn’t include a practice range or tutorial area for the characters. Quite an odd omission. It wasn’t fun to learn how much damage an ability did while three people were shooting at you.

The few maps I played were decent, pretty much identical corridors that led to an open middle area. A few lanes allow the players to navigate with their team, or to infiltrate (with a fun invisible character, after all, who doesn’t love being killed by a random invisible player). The maps left a bit to be desired, though they weren’t necessarily lacking in the fundamental necessities a multiplayer map needs to be playable. There weren’t any bottlenecks, and players had the freedom to approach enemies from different angles if enemy domination was occurring (though I found it difficult to recover from being far behind). While the setting of the maps was varied in their palette, they didn’t quite live up to the sci-fi space scenes set up in the intro movies.


The game modes I played amounted to some of the same old same old, which was quite unfortunate. Overwatch’s escort maps provided heated, intense white-knuckled firefights. Nothing like that exists here. Though they use different names, the gameplay modes were essentially what you find in other games; clash point (round-based, no respawn, objective takeover), area control (domination), cargo run (no respawn extraction mode), takedown (team deathmatch), and trophy hunt (kill confirmed). I spent most of my time playing takedown and trophy hunt, as I found the other modes underwhelming. Clash point was awful. You have to be the first team to take over an objective or clear the enemy team. But you can never take the objective because it’s just one huge brawl in the middle of the map, and then the round is over. This is a team-based game, but with a bit less synergy than Overwatch or Apex Legends, so you have to work together with friends to have any chance of overcoming the enemy team. No one uses microphones, so you’d better hope you have four friends to help.

I enjoyed the UI animation that plays whenever you level up, and the Job Board which provides players with tasks to help level them up. I think that the customization options for each character are great. In addition to full costumes, you can tweak attachments and clothing articles among other things. Considering this is going to be a $40 game, I wonder what the monetization is going to look like going forward. If the game does gain some traction, this could make or break it.

I’m not sold on Concord. The beta isn’t broken, but it needed much more internal testing and brainstorming. The characters feel diverse for the sake of being diverse, and not as if they are part of a cohesive whole (Overwatch and Apex Legends do a nice job with this). It’s a pity because the studio put a lot of effort into the game, but with a $40 price tag and an abysmal player count for the beta, I don’t see it taking off, giving it much of a chance to improve over time. Who knows, I could be wrong and in a few years, I may know every character and each of their kits. But for now, if I were to rate this beta I’d give it a 6, and that’s quite unfortunate for a new triple-A title. The triple-A space is extremely competitive. A game doesn't have to be better than the best to find footing, but it has to be appealing, and Concord isn't there yet.




Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

Film Review: Longlegs

The scariest movie of the year so far delivers a tense and creepy 1990s-set serial killer procedural that plays out like a long episode of the X-files. (spoiler free)


I saw Longlegs last Tuesday and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it – it's that good. 

As a caveat, I'm a big horror fan, and nearly nothing scares me. The only movies I tend to avoid are over-the-top generational trauma A24 movies like Hereditary. But reviewing (and even recommending!) genre films can be hard because non-fans tend to criticize the very things that tend to be hallmarks of the genre — things like excessive gore, overall feelings of unease, and the common plot tropes (haunted houses, supernatural killers).

But even among people who love horror, one person's yuck is another's yum. Some folks in particular think jump scares are cheap. When overdone, yes, but when they're perfectly timed with a scene and the backing track, they can be incredibly effective. (One of my favorite jump scares of all time is in Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House in episode 8. I still think about it to this day).

Longlegs was for me incredibly effective as a horror movie, though it's less straight-up horror and more of a psychological thriller. The comparisons in the lead-up marketing were correct in that it's like a modern-day Silence of the Lambs. Granted, Silence of the Lambs is a better movie, but if you've been searching for a contemporary vibe-equivalent, it hits the spot. Its darkness and supernatural elements reminded me of my love for the X-Files in the best possible way, especially in some of the more intense, murder-y monster-of-the-week episodes. 

The plot

Lee Harker (played by scream quieen Maika Monro) is a young FBI agent in Oregon in the 1990s, and she's blessed with a psychic ability that allows her preternatural insight into serial killer cases. Lee is weird, isolated, and not quiet right. She gets picked by her boss (played by Blair Underwood) to work on the Longlegs cold case that's suddenly hot again. Over the past 20 years, fathers out of the blue have been murdering their wife and children out of nowhere, and left behind at the grisly scenes are cryptic notes signed simply "LONGLEGS."

Lee goes all True Detective on the case and eventually figures out who Longlegs is, and along the way evil dolls, satanism, family ties, and an ex-glam rocker also get involved. The ending gets wrapped a little too nicely, in my opinion, but not enough to seriously affect my enjoyment of the overall story. There's a twist that's predictable but still extremely spooky and somehow gets even more spooky the more you think about it. 

The vibe

Oz Perkins, the director of Longlegs, is also the son of tortured Psycho star Anthony Perkins. With this movie, he has created an instant classic when it comes to dark, foreboding, and uncomfortable vibes. The film stock is muted and gray, and there's tons of claustrophobic and dark, wood-paneled '90s walls. The sound design — which alternates between complete silence and writhing, atonal, and building synth shrieks — is EXTREMELY effective in enhancing the mood and jump scares. Some of the scariest moments are simple shots that remind of the best moments in Insidious and The Conjuring, which is something I've been searching for now for years. 

Let's talk about Nic Cage

I managed to stay away from most of the wild promotional and marketing material before entering the theatre, so I barely know that Nic Cage was set to be the titular villain. I was a tad worried I'd ONLY be able to see crazy ol' Nic and nothing else, but I'm happy to report that's not the case. Nic becomes Longlegs in a way that's fairly unsettling. 

Longlegs is set to become an iconic villian in the horror cannon. He looks like a cross between Robert Smith from the Cure, Jennifer Coolidge, and Danny DeVito's Penguin in Batman Returns. Rather than wearing all black, he's always wearing dingy white clothes. His face is clearly the victim of botched strip-mall plastic surgery. I read an interview that said Longlegs is so in love with the devil that he's tried to carve his face into something beautiful, and it hasn't worked out well. 

Most of the time, I forgot I was watching Nic Cage, which is a testament to his craft. Occasionally in one of his extra-long villain monologues I'd see him, and in these situations I actually laughed (along with most of the audience). Longlegs is VERY over the top while also still terrifying. 

The Babadookification of Horror Villains

Remember when Netflix's algorhithm made a mistake and accidentally classified The Babadook as an LGBTQ pride film? The internet took the streets and made him into a meme, one that I very quickly loved and appreciated. 

Longlegs himself is going through something similar on TikTok right now for people with very weird For You Pages like myself. There's one part of the movie where Longlegs sings a VERY weird yet catchy song asking to be let in to a family's house, and people on TikTok are adding it humorously to videos of cats asking to be let in and diners waiting outside restaurants before they open. 

I love the intersection of horror and humor, and while Longlegs is a very scary movie, I did find myself laughing out loud multiple times during it. I think that's the sign of an enjoyable horror experience. Laughing at absurdity lets off steam if it's done right (I'm not talking about crap like Scary Movie, obviously). With Longlegs, there's more than enough tense, spooky moments to make up for the occasional scene where you remember "Oh yeah! Nic Cage is doing his thing, huh?"

--

The Math

Baseline Score: 9/10

Bonuses: Absolutely unbeatable spooky vibes; Nic Cage excels as an ex-glam rocker satanist; there are actually even scary parts for seasoned horror fans.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal is a lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

Film Review: Kinds of Kindness

b̷̞̝͓̬͇̲̤̫͂̾͌̾e̵̡̳̲̖̫͚̩̓h̸̜͕̝̪͗̀͆̽̅͋̒͊̄̈̐̐͠͝ò̶͎̩͔͎̝̩̣̙͇͇̞̔̂ļ̶̭̻̪̇̔̃̍̇̐́͘̕̕d̸̺̝̬̬̰̈́͝,̶̛͔̬̭͔̱͆͋̋̋͝ ̶̢̝̦̣̱̖͔͙͚̪͇̼͕̤̬̆̈́̍̈́̓͠h̷̢͎̹͇̯̆̐̏̓͗̅͆̆̎̐̕̕͝ŭ̶̧̺̙̠̤͙̞̥̠̲͇̈́̕͘͜͝͝ḿ̷̫͇̜̥̯̥̗̰͔͚̅̊̓̔̎̈́͘͜͝a̷̜̻̝͓̪̺͕̤̱̐͆͊̀͜ͅň̷̢̫̻͚̥̙̤̙̘̤s̸̢̐̉̐̽̔̂̎͗̿͛͊̕̕̕,̵̡̖̠̠̙̪͉̭̜̳̗̩̮͐͗͋̇ ̴̨̟͉̰̞̞͇̮͂̐̄̋̅̄́̐̓̎͊̏͜t̶͙̮̓̆͛̈́̊ẖ̶̝̀̂̒̂̂͐̌̕ȩ̷̧̟̫̤̲͊͋̏̅̚͝ ̶̢͈̹̜̣̭̲̤̖̼͇͂̀̀̇̀̾̌̚ͅͅF̸̥̟̜̗͙̺͎̩̲͂̎́̈́͊Ǐ̶̻̭̯̦̗͍͍̣͖̜̳͈̤̤̝͂̎́̊̊͊͋͒̏͘͠Ļ̵̛̛͖̫̤̭̌͗̏̉̈͗̎ͅM̸̮͚͇̝͔̩͉̲̠̮̣͙̝͋̏̀͋̽̂̆̉̍̐̅




I for one enjoyed Poor Things (reviewed on this blog by my esteemed colleague Arturo Serrano). It was deeply odd, yes, and I can certainly understand critiques of its gender politics (as a man I feel like it really isn’t my place to jut in on that subject either way, although it did seem to me that the film was portraying some of the happenings as morally dubious), but it was fascinating in its way. The film before that by director Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite, I likewise enjoyed. His most recent project, the subject of this review, is his new film Kinds of Kindness, released on June 2024 in the United States, written by Lanthrimos and Efthimis Filippou, and distributed by Searchlight Pictures.

Kinds of Kindness is a very odd film even in its format. It is not one single narrative, so common as to be assumed by the culture at large as being what a film naturally is, but rather an anthology film of three different segments that share actors but nothing else - no characters, no plot elements, nothing, beyond thematic connections. You could even argue that there is no single genre between them; the first segment has no noticeable supernatural element, the second quite clearly does (although the nature of it is left unstated, and you could stretch it to be solely mundane, but I don’t think that works as well), and the third is such a tossup I’m not entirely sure how to categorize it. I will say something unequivocal right now: this film is fucking weird.

I commented about this film on a forum that I frequent and the response I got called The Favourite and Poor Things as his relatively mainstream films, and that this film marked his return to his deeply odd indie film origins. That comment made me reflect upon just how flexible, how broad, that term ‘mainstream’ is. Those two films had coherent, comprehensible plots that posited a chain of events with comprehensible, if strange, reasons for the courses they take. The three segments in this film, on the other hand, only do so much of that. The end result is a deeply odd, disorienting experience. It brought to mind a friend’s description of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room: “imagine if you described the idea of a movie to aliens, and what life on Earth is like to said aliens, and then giving them the equipment to make a movie, but never actually letting them actually see for themselves what movies are like, or what life on Earth is like.” Wiseau blundered his way into the narrative uncanny valley, whereas Lanthimos has done it very deliberately; both films, via different paths to it, feel like they are bizarre approximations of movies, ersatz movies even, and you wonder if you are even ‘watching’ them so to speak.

The first segment is about a boss and employee at a corporation that has become something of an unhealthy sadomasochistic relationship; the boss has designed his employee’s life for him, choosing a house and a spouse for him, all the way to dictating his daily schedule. The second involves a couple: a marine biologist who goes missing on an expedition, upon whose return her police officer husband becomes convinced she is not really her. The third involves a cult that wants to raise the dead, and is willing to go through a rather bizarre process to find someone who can do it.

As stated previously, these stories are not directly related to one another. They do share certain thematic elements; all take fairly normal classes of relationships and twist them in discomforting ways, so that they are still recognizably what they are, and yet distorted to extreme degrees. They are all about intrusions into the normal by things that are deeply unhealthy, indeed dangerous, for their health and their wellbeing. In two out of three cases, that unhealthy thing has already subsumed their lives; in the remaining one, it jolts into existence with a bang.

There’s a certain emphasis on the unpleasant parts of the human psyche, be it cruelty or lust or the urge to find belonging even in the most unpleasant, dysfunctional places. There is a fair amount of sexual content, nudity a few times, group sex once, and sexual assault once, as well as some occasions of dubious power dynamics (one of these lets you see a naked Willem Dafoe, which is something I never thought I’d see). This is a focus that reminds me of the oeuvre of the Coen Brothers, in their focus on how nobody can ever live up to the loftiest ideals, that we are still creatures of blood and sweat and tears and hormones (lots of hormones). There are all sorts of personalities here, basically all of them dysfunctional in some way. As the Eurythmics put it:


Some of them want to use you

Some of them want to get used by you

Some of them want to abuse you



This film is a filmmaker’s film, and perhaps most of all an actor’s film. Willem Dafoe is deeply unsettling as an abusive boss and as a sex cult leader (that’s why you see him naked). Jesse Plemons perhaps gets to steal the whole show, with prominent roles in all three segments, sometimes meekly submissive and unsure what to do, and at other times losing his mind as he tries to establish control over his circumstances. And, for fans of Poor Things, Emma Stone returns with a raft of more weird, unsettling performances. I have seen comments on Bluesky saying that Stone represents progress in women’s roles in cinema by virtue of letting women play creepy little weirdos; Hollywood should let her do more of that because she’s very good at it.

I’m honestly not entirely sure if the concepts exist in any earthly language to properly describe Kinds of Kindness. It is a film that feels deliberately alienating, as if it employs Bertolt Brecht’s distancing effect, although leaving what social structure it wants to draw attention completely unindicated. I’m not sure there is a genre that this film fits into, or what audience he was going for. I’m not entirely sure I enjoyed this film, but I certainly don’t regret it. It is, however, a hard sell to basically everyone on planet Earth.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: i/0

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.