THE BOOKS OF "AMONG OTHERS." I've read maybe 28 of these, but my real interest is in the changing--often sublimely weird--conventions for sci-fi pulp paperback covers. Via Jesse Walker.

COTTON-GIN PUNK.

FOUR SWIFTLY TILTING PLANETS: My thoughts on the new Battlestar Galactica, over at the spoilerous blog. I mostly agree with Sean Collins's takes on the series, which you can find here, here, and here, so this post will basically ignore anything he said with which I agreed. Makes my job easier!

(I did not watch any of the supplemental stuff or extended episodes, nor did I watch the "webisodes," nor did I watch The Plan nor any of Caprica. I liked the series a lot... but man is mortal.)

DISCO PURGATORIO: I have finally listened to all of Janelle Monáe's Metropolis: The Chase Suite, and I can tell you what I was pretty sure I'd tell you: You need this. Monáe is an opera-trained lady nerd who's created an amazing pop album centered on the story of an enslaved android who falls for a human, endangering both their lives.

"Many Moons" is still the standout, unstoppable song. You can get a taste of the song, with amazing video, here; the album version is actually better, believe it or not. But "Cybertronic Purgatory" is beautiful and haunting, and in general, Monáe's versatility of style makes this album a unique history of the past fifty years. ("Smile" I like mostly for the quick Elvis "thank yuh" at the end, but that gesture retroactively reshapes the whole song, makes it even sadder and even more obviously an attempt at reclamation of and reconciliation with the American past.)

"Mr. President" is a classic of retrofuturism, as if the 1970s had time-traveled into the Obama administration. I'm not sure it succeeds as a song, rather than a document, but Lord how it made me ache--and ache, also, for Obama himself, who is called upon to be "Moses" and who is generally treated, here, like a Shakespearean king and not an American president.

Anyway, I'm about to order the new album, "Archandroid," about which I've heard nothing but good. "Metropolis" is an amazing reinterpretation of more or less everything I love, Metropolis itself crossed with Invisible Man (the Ellison one) crossed with BET's Gospel programming. Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler and Q107, Washington's Top 40!... and the black man at Union Station with the saxophone, playing "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms."

THE MADDEST STORY EVER TOLD! I watched Spider Baby (1968!) two nights ago and zomg, is this the best movie ever made?? Lon Chaney Jr. is the tenderhearted guardian of two We Have Always Lived in the Castle-style crazy chickadees and their manchild of a brother. Mayhem ensues when a conniving aunt arrives, lawyer in tow, to steal the family manse by having the kids committed. There is spider-, cat-, and person-eating. There is scream-queen lingerie. There is a theme song!!

Seriously, I adored every single minute of this. Like all the greatest camp, it knows when to add real poignancy--Chaney's final speech to the kids apparently wrung tears from the crew on set--and the performances, especially from the blonde daughter, are amazing. She has this tilt-a-whirl smile that's way too long for her face.

If Richard O'Brien has not seen this movie two hundred times I'll be knocked down with a feather boa.

It's available on Netflix Instant Viewing (though you can't order it from them on dvd), so you have your assignment, people!

DON'T LOOK NOW: Mini-reviews, mostly horror. I realized that there are a lot of books and movies I'm glad to have read or watched, even though I don't have enough to say about them to warrant a full-length post here. So this is a roundup of a bunch of things you might want to know about.

Hugh Kennedy, Everything Looks Impressive. Yale in the '80s; is the protagonist supposed to be unlikable and unwilling to learn? Class resentment, demi-dykery, survivor guilt. I've been reading a lot of college novels lately, and I'm surprised by the regularity with which survivor guilt surfaces as a theme. I note that Everything Looks Impressive is oddly reminiscent of The Sterile Cuckoo, a college novel written some 30 years earlier. The books' narrators are equally narcissistic, but Kennedy's guy isn't as sexist in his narcissism, so... that's something?

Bonus POR mention on page two or three, as a "neo-fascist organization." I love you too!

Recommended for Yale obsessives (boola boola!) and people with my intense interest in the college-novel genre.

Deadgirl: I watched this on Netflix Instant Viewing after reading this description at Kindertrauma. This is a horror flick with a truly rancid premise: Two high-school losers are exploring an abandoned asylum when they find a naked woman strapped to a bed, behind a door which hasn't been opened in so long that it rusted shut. What follows is gross and cruel and immensely sad.

This is a horror movie about misogyny, and abuse of power more generally, which isn't itself misogynist. It's extremely hard to watch. I found it totally effective. (I'm not convinced that it fully earns its ending, but I also don't think it could really end any other way, so I'm willing to go along.) The color scheme is appropriately raw, moldy, and corrupt.

Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching: Experimental horror novel in which a house in Dover, England develops a malevolent power and personality, which it uses to destroy the local immigrants and the women of the house. There are some real shivers here, and the fragmented, multiple-narrator style makes the mystery more compelling and frightening rather than serving to distance the reader from the events.

Sudden Fear: Joan Crawford's husband is trying to kill her! She's so fantastic in this, with her giant eyes and man-face and her telenovela acting style. There are some nice noir shots as well, including a gorgeous shot from above as Crawford runs down a dark street. Very easy to watch despite the relative predictability of the story.

The Experiment: German suspense flick based on the Stanford Prison Experiment. Moritz Bleibtreu is terrific! Unfortunately, the film doesn't get over the most basic hurdle: It's really hard to make a fictionalized version of the actual events which is even as horrifying as what really happened. So despite some raw moments and tough-to-watch scenes (I was struck by the early glimpse of the prisoners' feet unprotected in sandals while the guards wore heavy boots) the movie still feels tarted-up and tinfoil compared to the visceral events on which it was based. The romance subplot is also distracting and kitschy.

My Little Eye: Fluffy C-level horror movie about a group of twentysomethings recruited for a reality-show webcast which requires them to live in a creepy old camera-riddled house together for six months. If anyone leaves, everyone forfeits the million-dollar prize money. I enjoyed the Breakfast Club echoes, both explicit and implied.

And had I known, Blog Watch, she said,
What this night I did see,
I'd ha' ta'en out your twa een
And put in twa of tree...

(...Sorry.)

Camassia writes the only interesting post I've read on the theology of Twilight!

Jesse Walker lists the ten best movies of 1989.

And Jesus, a wealthy young man: "'That's so pathetic, to say that Jesus was struggling alone in the dust and dirt,' Anderson says. 'That just makes no sense whatsoever. He was constantly in a state of wealth.'" Thanks--I think--to the Rattus.

IN WHICH A NATURE DOCUMENTARY COUNTS AS "AVANT-GARDE" FOR SOME REASON: Thoughts on Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and '30s: Disc One. This is the remainder of the first disc. As before, no accent marks.

Brumes d’automne: Same guy as “Menilmontant,” but only 12 mins long. Does what it says on the tin. Falling leaves; parallel between fire and rain. He leaves her, she burns his letters, she stares soulfully, she walks through fallen leaves. Blur effects felt kind of cheap (unlike e.g. the underwater, Monet blur effects in “L’etoile de mer”). Really cool singing on the soundtrack, which is original I’m pretty sure, not new.

Lot in Sodom: Biblical retelling; old-fashioned music; shirtless boys leaping about in makeup. The opening is fantastic, with “Bride of Frankenstein”-style electricity effects lancing down through a clouded sky; then mists part like fire from Heaven, and we zoom down onto the city. Unfortunately, the flick itself doesn't live up to its opening. …Does “Mulier templum est” really mean “Woman is a temple”? (Or, “The woman is a temple”? Or something completely different?) Snakes, doves, blossoming flowers = sex. No trains into tunnels, sadly. A hilarious beard which looks like the cotton-ball concoction we used at JCC day camp to play “Pin the Beard on Mordecai.” There’s a lovely moment with Lot’s wife running, just before she looks back at the city. Her transformation is done in a way that reminded me a bit of the original Star Trek crossed with modern “become a flower” dance.

Rhythmus 21: It’s a Severed Heads video from 1990, only seventy years too early! …No, actually, it’s three minutes of rectangles. Ohhhhhkay.

Vormittagsspuk/Ghosts Before Breakfast: “The Nazis destroyed the sound print of this movie as ‘degenerate art.’ It shows that even objects revolt against regimentation.” Charming, playful imagery—hats flying upward, a shirtcollar baffling its wearer, an assassin’s target making his head fly around to defy the assailant, men stroking phantom beards. Kind of “Monty Python” animation meets children’s television, with (new) cabaret music. There are a lot of guns here, giving a sense of menace, but the overall tone struck me as lighthearted… for now. This is the same guy as “Rhythmus 21,” but this one is delightful and more than a little foreboding.

Anemic cinema: Marcel Duchamp, anagrammatic. (We’re so proud that little Marcel has won the Surrealist Spelling Bee of 1922! His wonderful prize is a dictionary in which all the definitions have been replaced by pictures of alley cats.) The new music is slightly Doors-like, hypnotic, paired with what I found predictably hypnotic and willfully-nonsensical imagery. Possibly the wordplay is a lot more fun if you’re French.

Ballet mecanique: The new music is lovely, thin and shivery, but I admit I zoned out for most of this. It’s, you know, gears and stuff. There are some really fun shots of women’s eyes opening—women’s eyes are made for the movies, but maybe especially for the avant-garde. There’s a nice if heavyhanded bit of imagery-punning as the O’s in a newspaper-style headline become the pearls of the stolen necklace which is the subject of that headline. There are some odd shots of a stocky woman walking up a road; not sure what those are doing.

Symphonie diagonale: The director’s first name is “Viking”!!! TOO MUCH AWESOME. Ooooohhh I’m loving the new music. I’m not sure how it would play with the original soundtrack (if any?), but with this music it comes across as a study of pacing. The kind of thing fanvid makers often talk about: matching visual movement to music beats. (I may be over-influenced by the pre-title here, which talks about how the piece explores time in film. Don’t worry—only two of the movies have pre-titles, and both are decades old, so you’re more or less allowed to come to these movies raw.) Man, this music is hot. If Sue Harshe composed this specifically to mirror the beats of the visuals, rather than simply adapting original music which did the same thing, she’s a stone genius.

Le Vampire: Original music, very jazzy and cool. Nature is bizarre! “Fully articulated appendages suggest a supernatural being.” At first I thought that meant that anytime you find fully-articulated appendages, that articulated critter is like a supernatural being in some way, but actually I think it’s intelligent design theory. Oh well. This short quotes from “Nosferatu” and locates the origin of the vampire myth in the various eldritch horrors of the natural world. An intelligent designer need not be a benevolent one!

Animal was harmed in the making of this picture. (Guinea pig, playing a guinea pig.)

The Hearts of Age: Orson Welles!!! …and also William Vance. Parodic Southernisms including blackface and much grotesquerie. It becomes a thing which might be a protest against lynching, without sacrificing its avant-garde artistry in the service of politics.

SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE: Here is an amazing video--the cheap, reductive slogan would be, "Blade Runner via the black Atlantic." It's an android auction as scored by the Fugees. It's smart and hard and everything you, as a devotee of Octavia Butler and Kanye West, might've hoped for... only more. I mean for real, are you kidding me--if you think about how to convince other people of your personhood, and if you worry that no one will listen when you try to make futures which know the past without loving it or assuming it ... this is for you. It bends gender and genre.

But for real, it's just phenomenal. Metropolis plus racial and sexual politics plus incredible angular dancing plus... look, why are you still here? Go to the YouTube link, before I beat you with a bat.

I'M AFRAID PHILOSOPHY IS JUST TOO MUCH RESPONSIBILITY FOR ME: One of the most awesome links I've ever had the privilege to click.

UNQUIET GRAVES: Horror movie reviews. Or, really, snacks. In the order in which I saw them:

Audition: Japanese horror; incredibly scary and suspenseful until the climax begins, about 20-30 minutes from the end. After that it devolved, from my perspective, into standard-issue icky-creepy-ouch. I loved the setup (widower auditions women for role of next wife, but becomes enthralled by intensely frightening beautiful lady with a secret) but the climax felt way too horror-movie, rather than actually horrifying. Still: scariest gray bag in movie history, you ask me.

May: I feel like I must have been missing something. It struck me as utterly predictable indie-Psycho. I'm pretty sure that people liked this movie for a reason, so if you did, please don't think I'm saying you're wrong: I'm saying I don't get it, and I'd be interested to hear what you think I didn't grasp here.

...I also saw Session 9 around the same time I saw these two movies, and between the three of them, I got thoroughly sick of "being hurt by others makes you a bad person" storylines. "I live in the weak and the wounded"--an idea that's more cruel than it is true; anti-Christian; and, three movies in a row, just wearying.

I actually got a lot out of Session 9, and I'll say the following four things with certainty: It looks absolutely amazing (it was filmed in a real, abandoned mental hospital, an enormous complex of sorrow--this setting is the reason to see the movie), it has a terrific blue-collar setup, the actors are great, and there are too many red herrings. It's a memorable and beautifully-shot movie. I'm not sure what, if anything, I have to say about mental illness in horror; Session 9 equivocates between being a movie about past suffering and being a movie about creepy people. I didn't like the fact that the movie didn't even seem to realize that it was exploitive.

It's a powerful B-movie, basically. I love B-movies, but a lot of them... not so much with the thinking.

Ringu and then The Ring: It's probably easier to talk about these two together, even though it might well be true that people generally prefer whichever one they saw first. I strongly preferred Ringu.

Some of that was because, compared to the American remake, it maximized horror elements that always work for me (shots of the black and churning ocean) and minimized horror elements that never do (lugubrious children). I will say for certain that the soundtrack of Ringu is just miles beyond the predictable soundtrack of The Ring--Ringu's inhuman noises genuinely kept me up at night afterward, jolting awake at every little rumble or squeak. I'm pretty sure the acting is better, more physical and horrifying. Ringu is a scary, scary movie, with an awesomely uncompromising ending. (And yes, I realize there's one way in which the American ending is actually more merciless. I'm not sure why I still preferred the Japanese one--possibly just because the ending is deeply character-centered, and I cared about the Japanese characters more, see below.)

Sean Collins writes about the way in which the American version has certain culture-war/cautionary-tale elements. And I mean, yes, your parent is not your pal; but the addition of this cautionary element is the main reason I disliked the American version from the start, and only slowly got over myself and started noticing ways in which it was also good, and even the occasional improvement over the Japanese version. (You should see both, btw, although I agree with the friend who strongly urged me to see Ringu first.)

Anyway, the American characters are just so incredibly unpleasant! They're rude and annoying (yes, the kid too, very much so), and I didn't want to be around them. The Japanese characters are kind of generic, but generically likable. The lady even remembers to take off her shoes when she enters a creepy scary cabin she's casing! I think that makes the indictment of the story's ending more universal in the Japanese version: Cautionary tales are inherently less scary if you don't do the bad behavior in question, and I, you know, don't cuss in front of children, and I try not to do that obnoxious American "*sigh* I'm sorry, but not really" vocal inflection. Or maybe I can phrase it as: "Be as bad as you want, it doesn't matter" is less scary to me than, "Be as good as you can, it won't matter"....

ps: Possibly wrong, or banal, oversimplifying thought: Could it be said that The Ring turns its merciless storyline toward the horror of children as moral equals, and Ringu drives the same story toward the horror of family as hierarchy?

MORE FLIES ON GRAY VELVET: I should just give up and blogroll the Horror Roundtable, you know? This week's entry, on favorite horror locales, gets several terrific responses. (Someone else likes The Bat Whispers!!) I'm adding those Venice movies to my Netflix queue, pronto.

I also keep thinking about my if-only horror anthology. I'm going to talk more about it, which I hope will spark more comment or something rather than diminishing the concept. These are some thoughts on why I hooked each director to their especial trope.

Alain Cavalier, werewolf or serial killer: Therese is probably the best movie I've seen about a saint; and therefore it's a movie about the longing for Heaven, for theosis, for divinization. Werewolf is the opposite trope, man descended into animality rather than raised up into the Divine. I would love to see a werewolf movie with theology. Why is a wolf less terrifying than a werewolf? I think Cavalier could show us.

As for serial killer, Therese used tight close-ups and beautiful, high-contrast darkness/white light shots to convey an enclosed world with few, but intense, relationships. I'd love to see how Cavalier would convey a serial killer's world with many but shallow relationships, nothing below the surface except horror; or a world in which every other person is viewed, by the killer, as just another empty mirror.

Marc Cherry & Alfonso Cuaron, evil carnival: I, uh, loved Desperate Housewives s1 (and liked the next two seasons quite a bit), and also Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and also evil carnivals in all media, from Something Wicked This Way Comes (novel better than movie, though I like both) to "--And The Horses Hiss at Midnight" to Carnival of Souls to Siouxsie's Carousel. Also, I wanted some comedians.

Julie Dash, zombies or anything vodoun: I've said before that I prefer vodoun-style zombies to the Romero-and-after kind. There aren't too many of the kind of zombie movie I like, and all the ones I've seen have a colonialist overtone, even when they also incorporate implicit critiques of colonialism, as White Zombie does. Dash could do zombies without racism, or vodoun used in the way that Catholicism is used in The Exorcist. I'd love to see that.

Hirokazu Koreeda, ghost ship: I've seen two movies by this guy, Maborosi and Nobody Knows. Ghost-ship movies get much of their resonance, for me, from those images of the brooding, anti-meaning ocean, an unintelligible sublime that's the opposite of God. Maborosi proves that Koreeda (? not sure which is his surname, actually) could do that. Ghost-ship movies also require the contrast between the ocean outside and the tight, enclosed, human-infested spaces of the ship--"terra firma in inner man"--and Nobody Knows proves that HK could do that part too.

Richard O'Brien, sometimes they come back: Heh, this was more random: I wanted O'Brien, because he's awesome and hilarious, and I wanted "sometimes they come back" because I'm obsessed with it yet find few examples of it done the way I want.

Pet Sematary (novel, not movie) was amazing, King's best work; but most "came back wrong" stories rely on an over-easy assertion that it's wrong to cheat death without any sense of why that might be true. My most blatant example of this is the Buffy episode right after "The Body"--I can't remember the title, but if you've seen it you know the one I mean--where there's an explicit conversation about why bringing back the dead might be wrong, but you never get anything beyond, "Uh, it might not work."

Pet Sematary, I think, actually shows the protagonist's confusion of love with self-comfort and self-projection from fairly early on in the story--what he wants back is only partly the dead beloved. Mostly he wants to stop hurting--which is incredibly sympathetic... but not quite the same thing. And so it makes sense to me that he gets back nothing but a familiar skin filled with projected horror. It resonates with CS Lewis's observation, in A Grief Observed, that death replaced the real and surprising beloved with cliched, sentimental, self-projecting and predictable memories and fantasies of her: It's just false to say she "lived on in his memory."

THE REAGAN HORROR PICTURE SHOW: Shock Treatment. This is "the other Richard O'Brien movie," basically: a quasi-sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And if you're thinking there's a reason lightning didn't strike twice, you're right--but Shock Treatment is still immensely, totally fun, and you guys should see it! I loved it.

It opens with a fairly tame satire of feel-good television and local boosterism, at the Denton (Home of Happiness) TV station. Even at the start, three of the most notable aspects of the movie are in place: The tunes are incredibly catchy (I have "Denton, Denton U.S.A.!" ringing in my head right now...), the style is '80s rather than '70s (it's incredibly fun to hear O'Brien tackle the first hints of MTV pop and New Wave), and the satire is much broader and more open than in RHPS. Rocky Horror isn't fundamentally satirical; Shock Treatment is. I'm guessing that's one reason the much more protean RHPS is the one that became a cult hit. You would definitely not find lyrics about Denton's "tolerance for/the ethnic races" in Rocky. Similarly, there's a later, really fun song, which ends with the lines, "Faggots/are maggots!/Thank God I'm a man," which: too broad for Rocky by a country mile.

Its themes are almost eerily '80s in their specificity: marital breakdown (Brad and Janet are in trouble, and the shock treatment of the title is intended to make Brad a better husband), anxieties of masculinity, and the nexus of consumerism and televangelism. This is a much more bourgeois movie than Rocky. (And, sadly, much less gay.) It's less sexy, too, with the exception of a brief, fondly perverse interlude between O'Brien's character (not Riffraff) and Patricia Quinn's (not Magenta).

Random note: Susan Sarandon was replaced by Jessica Harper as Janet. This works not only because Harper is good enough to handle the fairly blank role, but also because her voice is much darker and huskier than Sarandon's, which is a fun, unexpected interpretation of Janet's changed personality after marriage. She's certainly not an iconic actress like Sarandon; but she doesn't have to be.

THE RATTLE OF THE CASTANETS: Horror movie notes. In the order I saw them.

Soylent Green: Should be remembered as the great Edward G. Robinson's last movie, since not only is he the only standout in the cast but his death scene is the only genuinely poignant and frightening moment in the film.

Admittedly, this is one where pop culture may have ruined it for me. And there are some powerful images of overcrowding--casually jumping down the staircase packed with bodies, for example, or the fight scene in the dormitory. [eta: Also liked the creepily dissociated priest.] But I loved Charlton Heston in Branagh's Hamlet (as the Player King--he was the star of that movie as far as I'm concerned), and hated him here, overblown and ripe with cliche. Robinson is terrific as always--especially impressive considering that he was almost completely deaf by this time, and had to time his lines from memory rather than by ear.

White Zombie: Well, I may be learning that I prefer really old-school horror, and especially old-school zombies, to the new brain-eating kind. I did like this, and found it frightening (the shot of the zombies marching across the top of a hill is terrifying), despite its melodrama. It's a less-good version of the phenomenal and far more iconic I Walked with a Zombie, I think; or you could say, what I think is the same thing, that it's a magic-and-science version of the religion-drenched IWWAZ. It has fairy-tale elements (why do white women on filmic Haitian plantations always dress as medieval houris?) and creepy postcolonial horror-of-dehumanization.

The Leopard Man. This Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur flick may have been my favorite of the lot, largely due to the charismatic women at its center: a local New Mexican cheapie flamenco dancer named Clo-Clo, an exotic Chicago import named Kiki, and a sweet, nicely underplayed fortuneteller. All three actresses elevate the movie--Clo-Clo's introductory scene is kind of static (I may be totally weird, but I found her flamenco... strained, insufficiently sinuous), but after that, she becomes incredibly fun to watch and listen to; Kiki is a brassy Rosalind Russell knockoff; and the fortuneteller is played for empathy rather than exoticism. The movie really revolves around women, and not only women as victims of the Leopard Man.

It's a well-paced mix of horror and suspense: The plot is more suspense, while the imagery (including the soundtrack) is more horror.

The Ghost Ship: More Lewton-as-producer. More misleading Lewton titles! I know it's the studio's fault really, but I love ghost-ship movies, and this... isn't one. It's an overdone petty-dictator thrillerish thing, long on melodramatic invocations of "authority!... authority!" and short on thrills. I'm guessing they didn't have the budget to do any frightening shots of the restless, formless, anti-rational sea, but those shots might be what I like best in ghost-ship movies, and to be trapped on a thoroughly static shipboard set felt forced and gimcrack rather than effectively claustrophobic. The only Lewtonish thing I've actively disliked so far.

If you want shipboard authority drama combined with the uncanny, read The Secret Sharer; if you want a ghost-ship movie, you might check out two movies from 2002: the psychologically interesting but not quite addictive-enough Below and (my cliched but addictive preference) Ghost Ship. (If you know of genuinely good, rather than merely satisfying, ghost-ship movies, please email me, since I crave them and have found none!!)