I mean… of course I do. Of course I loved it! I’m going to tell you a little about this movie about teenage lesbian dirtbag jackasses, partly because it’s a really fun movie if you yourself are a lesbian jackass, but there’s also a plot twist that may intrigue my less ridiculous Christian readers. So okay, “Bottoms” is about PJ (surly-lookin’ Rachel Sennott) and Josie (soulful shlimazl Ayo Edebiri), high schoolers and outcasts–not because they’re gay, but because they’re “gay... Read more
for The Bulwark: …On the first page of Yale history professor Carlos Eire’s puckish new study of levitating and bilocating saints, frauds, and witches in the early modern era, which has the perfectly provocative title They Flew, he writes that it’s “absolutely impossible” for people to fly without the aid of technology, “and everyone can agree on this, for certain. Or at least everyone nowadays who doesn’t want to be taken for a fool or an unhinged eccentric.” Reading this... Read more
Horror and the 1970s (but I repeat myself! badum-tish). A Dark Song: Grueling, unexpected Irish horror flick about a grieving woman who hires a Satanist to teach her a demon-summoning ritual, for sad reasons which might be sadder lies. The ritual requires them to spend months in a creepy house together, so there’s a strong “you and I against the world” vibe, like The Night Porter without either history or (much) sexuality. Two trapped and angry people resorting to one... Read more
reading European social-media novels: A DOORWAY OR A RIVER, a bad relationship or an act of violence you can’t look away from, a pet that’s also a stalker: The new subgenre of “social media novels” has found all kinds of metaphors for the experience of online communication. Some of these metaphors reassure as much as they unsettle. They suggest that life online is fundamentally similar to IRL, as intelligible as analog life—yes, okay, the more we check Twitter, the more... Read more
In chronological order of when they were released. The Scarlet Empress Josef von Sternberg directs Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great, and yet none of that is the thing you’ll remember about this movie! Dietrich spends most of the film as a cartoonishly wide-eyed ingenue trapped in a castle with stunning, ridiculous, purgatorial production design. Doors so big it takes an army of court ladies to open them! Candelabra in the shape of full-sized tortured human figures! The banisters are... Read more
telling you to be disorderly at the mall: The father of the mall was a socialist. This tidbit always gets dropped in discussions of mall history, and it’s usually deployed for cheap irony: let’s all laugh at Victor Gruen, the left-winger who created the architectural signature of global capitalism—as if he did it by accident! It’s a joke that is funniest if you believe neither in socialism nor in malls. Alexandra Lange’s Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History... Read more
For your pleasure. I Like Bats (1987) Polish vampire film, streaming via Shudder, about a woman who tries inpatient treatment to cure her vampirism and falls for her therapist. Some comedy, often courtesy of her aunt, an extremely auntly vampire; some batty pleasures, including a fantastic bat-winged teacup, for my money the best thing in this film; some graphic sex, because the Poles are the Swedes of the Church. The story is played for romance with a touch of horror-comedy.... Read more
I have so many to write about that I figured I’d do them in reverse chronological order of when they were filmed. Today’s post covers 2023 – 2000. They Cloned Tyrone: This movie is so fun, so joyful in its plunge into a stylized Black cultural world that mixes nostalgia for the bad old Blaxploitation days and hypercontemporary references, that you almost don’t notice how much Afropessimism is in its DNA. Tyrone loves its characters, even though (or because!) they’re... Read more
interviewin’: Keith Wildenberg is a tall man whose hawkish face is topped with a mop of shaggy curls. He is leaning over my kitchen counter and gesturing with a wine glass as he recalls the days of his youth: “So many of the evangelical [Catholic] kids were the queer kids,” he says, meaning the Catholic students who gave witness talks at teen retreats and sought out informal ways to share their faith. “We had the best testimonies!” Mr. Wildenberg first... Read more
As Netflix prepares to end its DVD service, I’ve been plowing through my queue as fast as I can. These are in order of when I watched them. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days: An unbearably tense 2007 Romanian movie, set in the 1980s, about a young woman trying to help her friend get an illegal abortion. From Cristian Mungiu, the director of the also-harrowing lesbian nun exorcism film Beyond the Hills. For much of its runtime it isn’t “about”... Read more
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