The webtoon I’m the Grim Reaper by Graveweaver is set to get an adaptation. According to Deadline, Sam Raimi (pictured above) has signed on to executive produce the adaptation along with Zainab Azizi and Graveweaver, the latter of whom will also be part of the development process.
On earth there are bad people, and then there are REALLY BAD people. If you’re one of the latter, you don’t just get sent to Hell, you get sent to Hell and get assigned a job collecting the souls of some of the worst people on Earth. Such is the career path of a young woman named Scarlet, who dies and is delivered down to the fiery underworld only to find herself in an entry level position as…The Grim Reaper!
In addition to Raimi, the adaptation also has writers Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken on board to pen the script. The two are best known for their work on 10 Cloverfield Lane, where they share a writing credit with Damien Chazelle. They also wrote the script for John Woo’s upcoming film, The Killer.
No news on when the project will go into production, much less make its way to a screen near you. In the meantime, you can (re)read Dreamweaver’s Webtoon here. [end-mark]
Fresh off of 2023’s Poor Things, actor Emma Stone and writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos have teamed up once again in Kinds of Kindness, a very Yorgos Lanthimos-looking film that is set to premiere at and compete in the Cannes Film Festival this year.
Searchlight Pictures put out a thirty-second teaser to commemorate the Cannes opening, which features Stone copying all of my best dance moves in a parking lot next to a purple car and what appears to be a comatose woman in a wheelchair. What’s going on here? I’ve no idea! The synopsis, however, sheds some light on what the plot—and I use that term loosely—may be:
Kinds of Kindness is a triptych fable, following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing-at-sea has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.
Lanthimos co-wrote Kinds of Kindness with Efthimis Filippou, who was also his scribe-in-crime for The Lobster, Dogtooth, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. In addition to Stone, the movie stars Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, and Hunter Schafer.
Kinds of Kindness is set to premiere in select theaters on June 21, 2024.
Check out the latest teaser trailer below. [end-mark]
Russell Crowe is entering his exorcism era! You might remember his turn as a priest in the 2023 film The Pope’s Exorcist. This year, Crowe is donning the clerical collar once again in The Exorcism, a film from writer-director Joshua John Miller, whose father was in The Exorcist in a memorable role.
“The origins of the film stem from my childhood spent watching my father, Jason Miller, playing the doomed Father Karras flinging himself out a window at the climax of The Exorcist,” Miller said in a statement. “If that wasn’t haunting enough on its own, my dad never shied away from telling me stories of just how ‘cursed’ the movie was: the mysterious fires that plagued the production, the strange deaths, the lifelong injuries—the list went on and on. The lore of any ‘cursed film’ has captivated me ever since.”
As the trailer released today reveals, Crowe plays an actor with a troubled past who is hired to play a priest in a horror production that is supposedly cursed. He’s there with his daughter (Ryan Simpkins), who sees him slipping and goes to get help from a priest played by David Hyde Pierce.
Here’s the official synopsis:
Academy Award-winner Russell Crowe stars as Anthony Miller, a troubled actor who begins to unravel while shooting a supernatural horror film. His estranged daughter, Lee (Ryan Simpkins), wonders if he's slipping back into his past addictions or if there's something more sinister at play.
“With The Exorcism, we wanted to update the possession movie formula (‘Heroic man rescues woman from forces she’s too weak and simple to battle herself!’) for a world where no one group owns goodness and decency over another,” said Miller. “We were gifted with an extraordinary cast and creative team to tell a story about how we’re all vulnerable to darkness, to perpetuating it, if we fail to face our demons.”
In addition to Crowe, Simpkins, and Pierce, the movie stars Sam Worthington, Chloe Bailey, and Adam Goldberg. It was co-written by Miller and M.A. Fortin and produced by Kevin Williamson, Ben Fast, and Bill Block.
The Exorcism is set to premiere in theaters on June 7, 2024.
One of the longstanding questions in the Star Trek franchise that has been unanswered since it was first asked in 1995 when we saw our first Breen in DS9’s “Indiscretion.” That question, which remained unanswered despite the Breen becoming major players in the Dominion War arc of DS9’s final two seasons, was: What do the Breen actually look like?
Their initial appearance showed them in full-body armor and helmets that covered their entire persons. (They also bore an unfortunate resemblance to the outfit Leia Organa wore in the opening bit of Return of the Jedi.)
Discovery has finally answered that question. In fact, it turns out they answered it a few weeks ago, as L’ak—whose species was unknown to anyone prior to “Mirrors”—is a Breen. The Breen suits have been redesigned to look less Star Wars-y, and when they first undo their helmets, their skin is translucent, not becoming opaque until the helmet’s off for a while.
A large chunk of “Mirrors” is given over to The Secret Origin Of Moll And L’ak, and it’s a story that’s as old as the hills. L’ak is a member of the royal family, but he’s on the outs with his family, given crap customs duties as punishment for being a ne’er-do-well. Moll is a Courier who takes a shine to this disgraced aristocrat, and they fall in love. When she gets a better contract with the Emerald Chain, she urges him to come with her, otherwise they’ll never see each other again. He agrees, but it puts him on the outs with the royal family, who put a contract out on him.
This is why Moll and L’ak are so hot to find the Progenitors’ tech: it’ll enable them to buy L’ak’s freedom from being a Breen fugitive. They can go to the planet in the Gamma Quadrant where Moll has always wanted to go ever since her father promised it.
Credit: CBS / Paramount+
Ah yes, the Cleveland Booker connection. The prior iteration of the Dread Pirate Booker had promised Moll and her mother that they’d be able to retire to a planet in the GQ. (Presumably accessed via the Bajoran Wormhole?) But he never returned home. Moll, of course, hates his guts, which torpedoes Book’s plan to appeal to their mutual relationship with her Dad.
The confrontation takes place on the I.S.S. Enterprise, which is just hilarious. Apaprently there’s a pocket dimension in Tzenkethi space that has a bunch of busted-up ships in it, and it’s where the next piece of the puzzle is hidden. The scientist responsible is a woman named Dr. Cho, who is actually from the Mirror Universe. She and some others crossed over to the mainline universe in the Enterprise before the Terran Empire fell. We know from DS9’s “Crossover” that Spock-with-a-beard rose to the position of emperor and then tried to initiate reforms, which led to the empire being conquered by the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance. The notion that Cho crossed over and hid the Enterprise in the dimensional pocket is an interesting one.
It also enables Discovery to make use of the Strange New Worlds sets, as the bridge, corridors, and sickbay of the I.S.S. Enterprise are re-dresses of the ones used on the sister show. There’s a lovely moment when Burnham looks with sadness at the science station, as that was “my brother’s” station, though she never saw the Enterprise or encountered the MU Spock in her visit there in Discovery’s first season. (She doesn’t mention that she met Sarek, interestingly enough.) She also finds out that Mirror-Saru—whom she met—was one of the movers and shakers behind getting Cho and the others to safety in the mainline universe, prompting Book to comment that he’s “Action Saru” in any universe…
Burnham and Book find Moll and L’ak on the Enterprise. There are lots of confrontations, shootouts, hand-to-hand combat, and working together, sorta-kinda. In the end, Moll and L’ak still don’t trust Starfleet and are in this to win it, and they escape, while Burnham and Book manage to save the day and salvage the Enterprise. Oh, and they get the next clue/puzzle piece.
(Burnham puts Detmer and Owosekun in charge of bringing the Mirror Enterprise back to Federation HQ, and this is the second time this season that the pair of them have been mentioned but not seen, with this side mission possibly meaning we won’t see them next week, either, which is annoying. Emily Coutts and Oyin Oladejo have done a wonderful job of making these two a compelling pair at the front of the bridge despite scripts that give them almost nothing, and I was hoping to get more, not less, of them in this final season.)
Credit: CBS / Paramount+
Back on Discovery, Rayner is left in charge and he has to enocurage the various science nerds in the senior staff to come up with a way to improve communications with the interior of the pocket dimension and also rescue Book and Burnham. To his credit, he does it well, making sure to get everyone involved. Burnham also is able to communicate her intentions to Rayner by using some Kellerun folklore she read up on. (Yes, Rayner is a Kellerun, one of the two species with really terrible hair from DS9’s “Armageddon Game.” Thankfully, hairstyles have improved among the Kellerun over the last eight centuries…)
Burnham, Rayner, and Stamets’ time-travel adventure last week had one particularly important revelation: the destruction of Federation HQ was accomplished by the Breen—the very people Moll and L’ak want to sell the Progenitor tech to. So now our heroes are even more motivated to stop Moll and L’ak, because they know exactly what will happen if they use the tech to get the Breen royal family off their backs.
I said in my review of the season premiere that Moll and L’ak on the one hand reminded me of other genre Bonnie and Clyde riffs, to wit, Spike and Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Pumpkin and Honey Bunny from Pulp Fiction. But on the other hand, they didn’t quite rise to the level of those other two. The backstory on the pair of them does do some good work in that regard, mostly by showing what’s at stake for L’ak. Moll rescued him from a life he despised, and which he will do whatever’s necessary to never go back to. The source of his love is made abundantly clear in the flashbacks. (Moll’s passion for L’ak is less obvious, but Eve Harlow at least makes the devotion convincing.)
We also get some who-counsels-the-counselor bits, as Culber is having trouble processing what he went through on Trill. Tilly volunteers to be his sounding board, wherein we find out (among other things) that he can’t really talk to Stamets about it. Which is, y’know, bad. But it’s nice to see that having Jinaal occupy his meat suit was something that affected him, and which also dredged up his mixed feelings about dying and being resurrected.
Next week, we’re on to the next puzzle piece, with Moll and L’ak now using an MU medical shuttle to fly around in…[end-mark]
When 28 Days Later first came out, years and years ago, Cillian Murphy was not the well-known name he is now. But the horror sequel series currently in development with original director Danny Boyle and original writer Alex Garland is not taking any chances on its stars. Deadline reports that a powerful trio of actors have signed on: Jodie Comer (Killing Eve), Ralph Fiennes (The Menu, pictured above), and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass).
28 Years Later is a sequel tothe original films, of which there were two: 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. (It is almost enough to make one wonder if the second film in this new trilogy will be 28 Decades Later, and so on.) Nothing is known about the plot, but the producers are already planning ahead: Nia DaCosta (The Marvels) is on board to direct the second film in the trilogy, which will apparently film back-to-back with the first one.
One might, naturally, wonder why a sequel series now, when 28 Weeks Later came out almost twenty years ago (but not yet 28 years). Well, zombies never die—though some people get very testy if you refer to the undead creatures in these films as zombies. Either way, the original was a film about society falling apart after the appearance of a contagious and destructive virus that changed people into rage monsters. Perhaps the filmmakers feel they have something new to say about humanity and rage. Or perhaps they just noticed the infernal, unstoppable, uncountable Walking Dead spinoffs and decided to return to their roots.
No premiere date has been announced for 28 Years Later.[end-mark]
There’s a new documentary on Jim Henson set to start streaming on Disney+ in the near future, and the Ron Howard production has just released its first trailer. In it, we see a lot of footage from Henson’s early years as well as several of his colleagues talking about his boundless imagination.
Here’s the official synopsis for the documentary, which is called Jim Henson Idea Man:
Jim Henson Idea Man takes us into the mind of this singular creative visionary, from his early years puppeteering on local television to the worldwide success of Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and beyond. Featuring unprecedented access to Jim's personal archives, Howard brings us a fascinating and insightful look at a complex man whose boundless imagination inspired the world.
The trailer is a moving one for anyone who has seen and loved one of his creations, whether that be Kermit the Frog or any of the Muppets, the movie Labyrinth, or The Dark Crystal, just to name a few. The project’s access to Henson’s personal files is hinted at in the trailer as well, with images of a young Henson that few have seen before. The trailer also suggests that the documentary will touch on how things changed when Henson’s popularity grew, though it’s not clear how much time will be spent on that versus celebrating his creative mind.
We’ll know for sure when Jim Henson Idea Man starts streaming on Disney+ on May 31, 2024.
The Outlander prequel is coming! Starz has just announced another slew of actors who have joined the cast of Outlander: Blood of My Blood, and some are playing younger versions of characters we’ve seen in the flagship series.
Blood of My Blood centers on the parents of Jamie Fraser (played in Outlander, of course, by Sam Heughan) as well as the parents of Claire Fraser (Catriona Balfe). As such, the series takes place on two timelines: We follow Jamie’s parents, Ellen MacKenzie (Harriet Slater) and Brian Fraser (Jamie Roy) in eighteenth-century Scotland, and Claire’s parents, Julia Moriston (Hermione Corfield) and Henry Beauchamp (Jeremy Irvine), in World War I England.
We’ve already got one additional round of casting news earlier this month, and today we have more actors to add to the list. Sally Messham (A Small Light) will be playing a younger version of Mrs. Fitz, Ellen’s maid at Castle Leoch and Murtagh’s aunt. Terence Rae (Black Dog ) is playing another (albeit younger version of) a character we’ve seen before: Arch Bug, who, in the time of the prequel series, is working as a bodyguard to Clan Grant. The Outlander character Jocasta Cameron, played on the original show by Marai Doyle Kennedy, will be played by Sadhbh Malin (Conversations with Friends). Other additions include Ailsa Davidson (Halo), who will be playing Jocasta’s sister Janet MacKenzie and, in the twentieth century, Annabelle Dowler (The Reckoning) joins the cast as Lizbeth, Julia’s boss at the War Department while Harry Eaton (Extraordinary) plays Private Charlton, Henry Beauchamp’s fellow soldier and friend.
The casting news is ramping up on Blood of My Blood just as the eighth and final season of Outlander is in the midst of production. Matthew B. Roberts showruns both series, with Ronald D. Moore and Maril Davis executive producing on both as well.
We don’t know yet when Blood of My Blood will premiere, but the back half of Outlander’s seventh season, eight episodes in total, will come out sometime in November 2024. [end-mark]
Every week, some very good books are published that could be adapted into very good movies. Every day, probably, someone somewhere is writing a screenplay that could make a very interesting film. But in this timeline, we get Space Mountain instead. The latest adaptation—I'm using that word quite loosely—of a Disney theme park ride has been in development for years, apparently (some of us may have been in denial). But now it has a pair of writers: Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec are facing the task of transforming a roller coaster into an epic movie (one presumably intended to start a whole franchise).
Applebaum and Nemec, most recently, were the showrunners for Netflix's generally underwhelming live-action Cowboy Bebop (pictured above); they were also involved in Prime Video's splashy Citadel (Applebaum is one of the creators; Nemec is a producer). They were also among the writers on Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol and the two 2010s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies that starred just a really weird bunch of people (Megan Fox, Will Arnett, Stephen Amell, Alan Ritchson, Laura Linney, Tyler Perry, what?).
And now they're on top of Space Mountain. As The Hollywood Reporter sagely notes, "The ride has no overarching theme nor memorable characters seen in such rides as Pirates of the Caribbean. In fact, Space Mountain in Disneyland has been turned into Hyperspace Mountain and given a Star Wars makeover on occasion. As such, the story is being created whole cloth with the ride acting as inspiration."
Naturally, plot details are top secret. What I remember about one childhood ride on Space Mountain is basically nothing, except that at some point you are in the dark. Which is where we all are when it comes to Disney and its endless rides-into-franchises machine, I guess. [end-mark]
Killer Plots: Five Books Featuring Professional Assassins
Whether you're pursued by hired thugs, trained assassins, or an unhinged killer, fleeing an attempt on your life is one great way to kick off an adventure...
Who has not found themselves faced with fiscal impediments, treacherous associates, and disappointing rulers? Ordinary methods for evading such complications are often time-consuming, expensive, or unpleasant. Over the millennia, discriminating consumers have turned to one method to fix such pesky problems: assassination1.
Assassination and assassins have always been plot catnip for SFF authors. Herewith five works that examine the topic.
The Republic’s independence depends on avoiding conquest by either of the Republic’s more powerful neighbors, the Alliance (dominated by the Master Race) and the Confederation (dominated by the carlis). The last thing Polar City Police Chief Bates needs is for someone to target consular personnel. What he gets is the cooling body of murdered Confederation protocol officer Imbeth ka Gren.
Working out who ordered the hit proves straightforward: the Master Race. Determining who the killer was may be more difficult, as the Master Race used a human cat’s-paw. Time is of the essence; job stress has left the Master Race’s chosen tool quite unhinged, and he is a danger to more than one consular staff member.
Polar City Blues is a demonstration of the old adage that sometimes it isn’t the crime that gets one in hot water so much as the attempt at a cover-up. The assassin is trying to eliminate every potential witness to the original murder; there may be witnesses to these new murders, witnesses who must also be killed. Result: the killer may have to murder the entire Polar City population one person at a time2.
Disgraced necromancer Ward de’Ath is hired by murder victim Celia Carlyle’s grieving family to revive her just long enough for a final farewell. Once resurrected, Celia has other plans: she is determined to find her killer. Celia drafts Ward to keep Celia necromantically animated.
To his increasing alarm, Ward discovers Celia is not some innocent high-born victim. She comes from a family of assassins. Celia is an assassin herself. Her enemies are also experienced killers. Ward’s talents are sufficient to keep Celia alive(ish)… but who is going to keep Ward alive?
Just to clarify, Ward is not disgraced because he is a necromancer. Necromancy is a respected profession. Ward is disgraced because he dabbled in the forbidden art of mundane surgery...
This Joseon Era Korean historical adventure recounts the doings of protagonist Gildong.
If Gildong’s mother had been Minister Hong’s legal wife, Gildong would be ensured a prosperous life as a senior functionary. But he is just the illegitimate son of a maid, and his state-mandated future will be quite humble.
Minster Hong’s wife Chorang fears that Gildong will rebel against his fate. She employs master assassin Teukjae to kill the youngster. Gildong would be doomed—were he not a boy of sterling character, keen insight, scholastic talent, and sorcerous skills.
As you might expect, Gildong is not in fact doomed. If I were to compare him to Western mythical figures, he would be a combination of Robin Hood and Merlin. Those who oppose him end badly.
Foundling Sirscha Ashwyn escaped from a humble life of servitude by apprenticing to Kendara the Shadow, master spy/assassin for the kingdom of Evewyn. In return for being taught skills of combat and stealth, Sirscha carries out Kandara’s orders without question.
What should have been a straightforward career arc of murdering people until she encounters someone even more skilled is complicated when Sirscha’s slain companion Saengo very unexpectedly comes back to life. Sirscha discovers that she is a shaman and Saengo is now her familiar.
This unexpected revelation has many consequences, not least of which is that powerful people now need Sirscha dead.
While Sirscha is a perfectly sensible person who pursues entirely logical courses of action, this cannot be said for those she encounters. There are a surprising number of opponents who, when confronted with Sirscha, think fighting her is a good idea.
It is not a good idea.
An additional complication: Saengo is surprisingly ungrateful for resurrection, given that his only other option is being a corpse.
Princess Solenn is slated to marry Verdanian Prince Rupert; the alliance may save her nigh-defenseless kingdom of Braiz. But Rupert is being targeted by an assassin (something that Solenn knows but dares not explain).
How does she know? Solenn is a Chef, born with enhanced taste and smell. She can tell when food and drink has been poisoned. This talent could be useful to powerful people, who would be happy to put Solenn on their staff—by any means necessary. She cannot reveal her talents without inviting danger.
Solenn tries to protect Rupert without revealing that she is a Chef. Solenn fails to protect the Prince. Her attempts to protect him inadvertently give the impression that Solenn herself was the assassin. An unpleasant death seems certain.
The discovery that an angry god plans an apocalypse is almost a welcome distraction.
Recipes is yet another fantasy set in a secondary-universe monarchy. It does not make a good case for monarchy as an effective system of government. If anything, it argues the opposite. Braiz’s monarchs treat Solenn as the national designated Redshirt, while Rupert’s father, King Caristo, confuses vindictiveness with prudence. At least the people have the gods to turn to…except in this case, the gods seem even less reliable than the monarchs.
Professional assassins being as useful as they are—not least to authors—they appear in many SFF novels. The five works I’ve discussed are only a tiny sample of assassin-focused literature. Feel free to mention the more obvious omissions—yes, yes, even that Pratchett book—in comments below.[end-mark]
I’m limiting myself to professional assassins here. Amateur assassinations are a subject for another day. ↩︎
Once the Polar City population was down to Bates and the killer, it would be pretty easy for Bates to work out who the killer might be. ↩︎
Predictably, I love the original Road House—who wouldn’t love a movie about a bouncer/philosophy student who does lakeside Tai Chi and can rip a man’s throat out with his bare hands? I went into Doug Liman’s Road House reboot with some trepidation, but I realized there are a few ways that the new film bests the original. First of all, its set in Florida, on the fictional Glass Key. The very real Fred the Tree is featured, there’s a scene where an American Crocodile eats a dude, and in this one Dalton lives on a scruffy houseboat instead of in a ridiculously chic lofted barn. But the biggest difference, improbably, concerns an independent bookstore.
I came to the original Road House like a lot of people of my disposition: endless jokes about the film on MST3K. It was the inspiration for the holiday standard “Let’s Have a Patrick Swayze Christmas” and a good thing to know about me is that every single time I hear Crow T. Robot sing “I’ll have to smash your kneecaps if you bastards touch my car” I’m reduced to helpless crying laughter. (I’m finding it hard to type this sentence for that very reason!)
In the world of the Road House reboot, pain still don't hurt, and it is the indie bookstore that is the Regular Saturday Night Thing.
For those who don’t know the original: Patrick Swayze is great. Genuinely great, no snark here, I’m pretty much always sad that he’s gone. He’s great in Road House. He’s great in the pro-abortion feminist classic Dirty Dancing. He’s great in Ghost. And he’s extra great in Donnie Darko, where he became a bit of a hero to young Jake Gyllenhaal—who now, years later, has reinvented one of Swayze's classic roles.
The bullet points of the original Road House have been covered before: he’s a (famous!) bouncer, who travels from town to town cleaning up bars, like if Shane was an AA sponsor. He also did time at NYU studying philosophy, which he defines as “Man’s search for faith, that kind of shit.” That’s not even remotely accurate as a definition of the study of philosophy. Even in movie terms, Indiana Jones got closer with “Archaeology is the search for FACT not truth. If it’s truth you’re interested in, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall. [undergraduate laughter].” It’s closer to say that philosophy is the study of the nature of knowledge and reality—more man’s search for fundamental meaning, for core reality, for some sort of transcendent truth that underlies individual beliefs—i.e., all the stuff faith kind of handwaves away.
Dalton didn’t have any particular concentration during his studies. Presumably then, he was an undergrad and never when on to graduate work. We also know that in the 1970s, he and Wade were cleaning up a bar in Alabama. But since Dalton is working in New York at the start of the film, and his bitchin’ Mercedes has a New York license plate, I’m choosing to posit that he attended NYU in the early to mid ‘80s, shortly before the events of Road House, as a sabbatical from his strenuous work as a cooler.
If I’m right, he might have studied with James Burnham, and used that professor’s conservative text, The Managerial Revolution, as a key in understanding how evil small town real estate king Brad Wesley supervised a group of henchmen, Monster Truck drivers, and his stripper girlfriend to solidify his control over Jasper, Missouri. Or is it possible that Dalton was influenced by Ferdinand Lundberg and his work on exposing American oligarchy—America’s 60 Families and The Rich and the Super-Rich—in his attempt to route Wesley from his iron grip on the town? And of course, most significant would be his study of the work of Thomas Nagel, with papers like “What is it Like to be a Bat?”, and the deep consideration of the mind-body problem—because what is Road House if not a film-length meditation on the mind-body problem? And what is “consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable” but a more academic way of asking “pain don’t hurt”?
Why have I taken us down this philosophical tangent? The fact that Dalton has a philosophy degree is one of the things that makes the original film so special. It’s an interesting, unexpected detail that gives some depth to a character that might have been another 1980s action meathead. I was worried that the reboot would ditch that kind of quirkiness, but instead, it found its own way to add layers.
More than in the original Road House, the reboot tells a larger story of predation. There are people who want to go to the Road House and have a nice night out, people who want to rent paddleboards and have fun in a light surf, people who love the relaxed rhythms and overwhelming nature of Florida. But always there are the others, the guys who get drunk and belligerent and threaten the band, the girls who get too drunk and dance on a table, the jet skiers who swamp the boarders in waves and exhaust, and the real estate developers who want to raze the state’s natural beauty to build resorts for the rich.
As this is an action movie, it has to end in a big explosive blowout fight to the death. In the original, it’s set in motion after the villain burns down an auto repair shop, threatens Dalton’s girl (in a super gross ‘80s “If I can’t have her, no one can” way), and, finally, murders Dalton’s mentor in bouncing, Wade Garrett.
Yeah. The Wade Garrett.
There are explosions and queer-coded henchmen and a dude gets squashed by a taxidermied polar bear.
In many ways, Road House is a perfect film.
The new Road House goes in a different direction; here, the carnage isn’t triggered by a girlfriend or a henchman—it’s because of an indie bookstore.
Credit: Amazon MGM Studios
Glass Books (motto: Get hooked on books!”) isn’t just a bookstore. It’s the gateway to Glass Key, the first thing you see when you get off the Greyhound. When Dalton comes to town, blood still seeping from a recent knife wound, fresh off a suicide attempt, he’s greeted by Charlie, the teen who runs Glass Books with her dad Stephen. She gives Dalton a book about Fred the Tree, a real icon of the Florida Keys. It’s a little indie-pubbed chapbook that Dalton spends the rest of the film reading between skirmishes. Later, he uses the store’s computer to research his villain’s nefarious plot. He lets Charlie open up about her mother, the one who decided Glass Key needed a used bookstore, and about her mother’s death the previous year. (She meets his condolences with: “It happens. Only here it always happens on a beautiful day.”)
In this bright and sunshine-y movie, Glass Books is a dark haven. The walls are covered floor-to-ceiling in bowed, overstuffed shelves, with books about Florida culture prominently displayed by the ancient cash register. Dalton’s visits to the store are his only truly safe moments, and they’re also the site of his very sweet friendship with Charlie. She compares him to a Western hero come to clean up Glass Key and he lets her riff. When she finds a Western pulp paperback, Death at the Double X, starring the “intrepid” Wade Waco, he tells her that he couldn’t tell her whether he’s “intrepid” like the hero or not, but he’s clearly amused, not irritated. There’s no point where he seems annoyed or condescending—he accepts her friendship.
In the original Road House, Dalton went to the auto parts store a lot because bastards kept touching his car. (RIP to various kneecaps.) He had a cordial relationship with the store’s owner, Red, who also turned out to be his love interest’s uncle. But Dalton and Red weren’t really close, and the auto parts store was just one in a series of places that the nefarious Ben Wesley fucked with, to prove that he ruled Jasper, Missouri. A thing he wanted to do for some reason.
In the new Road House, Glass Books has an actual backstory and personality. Charlie obviously sees it as her mom’s legacy. It’s not just a store, and it’s not even a source of reliable income—Charlie’s dad works another job to keep them both afloat. But the store is their connection to their lost wife and mother. We never see their home, because I suspect the bookstore is their real home.
Obviously, the villains clock Dalton’s friendship with Charlie. Instead of Red’s auto shop, it’s the bookstore that burns in the new Road House. Charlie tries to defend the store with her trusty baseball bat, but she and her dad end up in the hospital. (This happens offscreen, presumably to keep the film fun.) Dalton is already on his way out of town when he sees the burned out shell of Glass Books. He pushes past firefighters to stand in the ruin. The rest of the film is one bloody fight after the next, punctuated by the occasional explosion, as he works his way through evil real estate developer Ben Brandt and all of his dickhead henchmen. (Sidenote: between this and the goddamn instant classic Monkey Man, complicated action heroes have learned how to stab properly again, and it fills me with joy?)
The bookstore is the heart of Glass Key: rather than a damsel, or an older mentor figure, or the Concept of Small Town America, or even the bar Dalton was literally hired to protect, the bookstore is what is avenged, and ultimately reborn. Where the original Road House gave us a redemptive ending for Dalton, here his ending is bittersweet (and a springboard for a sequel, of course), but Glass Books and its keepers get an unambiguously triumphant ending.
In the world of the Road House reboot, pain still don't hurt, and it is the indie bookstore that is the Regular Saturday Night Thing.[end-mark]
We're thrilled to share an excerpt from Dragon Rider, Taran Matharu's debut adult fantasy novel, out now from Harper Voyager.
Jai lives as a royal hostage in the Sabine Court—ever since his father Rohan, leader of the Steppefolk, led a failed rebellion and was executed by the very emperor Jai now serves.
When the emperor’s son and heir is betrothed to Princess Erica of the neighboring Dansk Kingdom, she brings with her a dowry: dragons. Endemic to the northern nation, these powerful beasts come in several forms, but mystery surrounds them. Only Dansk royalty know the secret to soulbonding with these dangerous beasts to draw on their power and strength. This marriage—and the alliance that forms—will change that forever.
But conspirators lurk in the shadows, and soon the Sabine Court is in chaos. With his life in danger, Jai uses the opportunity to escape with the Dansk handmaiden, Frida, and a stolen hatchling. Hunted at every turn, he must learn to cultivate magic and become a soulbound warrior if he has any chance of finding safety, seizing his destiny… and seeking his revenge.
They served candies before the battle started. Men sweated beneath their armour in the fields while the royals of the Sabine Empire popped sugared cherries in their mouths, laughing and pointing from their raised thrones.
Jai’s belly rumbled at the sickly-sweet scent wafting through the grand pavilion. The open-ended tent was built upon a platform, one so tall that, even kneeling as he was, he could see the entire Sabine legion arrayed at its front and the enemy massing on the low, grassy ridge at the horizon.
Jai turned his head and went back to rubbing the feet of the man who had killed his father. The feet of the old emperor. The wizened shell of a once-great ruler, swaddled in silk and kashmere. A man who had founded the Sabine dynasty, and an empire that stretched from the Silver Sea to the Great Steppe.
Leonid the Great. The Lion of the Sabines. He had handed his rule on to his son years ago, for now he, the elder, was half-blind and senile. Leonid sat apart from his descendants here, no more than an afterthought, brought to the battle out of obligation. His progeny owed him everything yet treated the man as a relic. If Jai did not hate him so, he might have pitied the old man.
‘Jai.’
Jai looked up and saw a skeletal finger crook. He let the wrinkled feet fall into the perfumed water of the bowl, bowing his head as he stood beside the smallest of the three thrones. The old man within was hunched and stared ahead with unseeing eyes.
Those once-great hands were knotted with arthritis such that they could hardly brush his long, threadbare hair from his deep-lined face.
‘Tell me what your young eyes see,’ Leonid said, in the half-croak Jai had come to know so well.
It was the croak that instructed him when he washed the man’s back. Chided him when he was slow. Or droned on and on as the old man recounted former glories. Jai was Leonid’s constant companion and had been for almost ten of his seventeen years.
‘They’re gathering now,’ Jai whispered, gazing beyond the arrayed legion. ‘There’s nowhere left for them to run.’
The old man let out a grunt of acknowledgement, one that turned into a hacking cough. Jai was swift to crouch and rub Leonid’s back, feeling the knuckles of the old man’s spine beneath the soft kashmere of his gown.
It would not be long before the old man passed on to the Beyond. Until then, Jai would be a dutiful servant. Not that he had any choice in the matter.
‘These barbarians were fools not to surrender,’ Leonid sighed once he had settled again. ‘We face them with only one of our eight legions today and still they have no chance.’
‘What was their alternative?’ Jai asked, measuring each word with care. ‘To lose their ancestral lands and be subjects to a foreign empire?’
He asked it not impertinently, but in the way Leonid preferred: as a student might question his teacher.
‘To live,’ Leonid replied. ‘And live free. Now…’
A horn rang out, reverberating through the great tent, and silenced even the voices of the emperor and his son, who had been chattering above on their thrones as if at the amphitheatre.
It was the horn of the enemy upon the hillside. The last of the Kuddites.
Even from leagues away, the day was clear enough for Jai to make them out, hastily preparing for battle. Children clutching at the legs of their parents, even as they were pushed back to what Jai knew would be the grasping hands of the elderly and frail.
Swarthy men and women gathered at the front ranks, clutching what weapons they had. There were blades enough, but scattered among them were pitchforks, scythes, even makeshift clubs. These were farmers tools. Not a jot of armour to be seen. This was no army, but the remains of a civilisation. One that had been chased from their homelands to the very edge of the Silver Seas; the waters just out of sight beyond the hillside. The Kuddite army had been slaughtered in battle but a month before, and the survivors taken as fettered, as was custom.
Now, all that was left was the civilians. Those who had refused to be subsumed by the Sabine Empire, preferring migration than to be under the yoke. But the Sabines were insatiable and would not allow them to escape.
This was the Kuddites’ last stand. The end of a culture. Of a way of life. There was something so brave in their refusal to accept defeat. Brave, yet utterly foolish, for any who took up arms against the Sabines were fair game to be claimed as spoils.
Fools, just like Jai’s father.
‘Speak,’ Leonid croaked.
‘They gather for a charge,’ Jai whispered. ‘There are many of them. More than the legion’s five thousand. Perhaps ten times more.’
Leonid waved away Jai’s words with a blue-veined hand.
‘No army can defeat a Sabine legion, let alone this untrained rabble.’
Jai resisted the urge to retort that his father’s army had, once. Instead, he watched the royals, who leaned forward, excited for the upcoming entertainment. There was a nonchalance to the way they were draped over their thrones, with servants surrounding them, fanning their brows, rubbing their bejewelled fingers. It was no more than a show for them. Like the baiting of a cave bear, or the rhyming of a bard.
Then the roar of the charge and the thunder of feet. Jai did not want to watch, but his eyes belonged to Leonid and so he turned them to the battle.
The Sabine legion seemed to hardly move. A dark, fragmented wave of Kuddites broke upon the bulwark of their gleaming front line. Even at almost a mile away, he could hear the clash of steel and the wails of pain and fury. The sound rose and fell with the breeze, but never quieted.
Beyond the front line’s clash Jai could see little of the horror, just the backs of men pressing forward. He could only imagine, drawing on what he had read in Leonid’s diaries, or overheard from drunken soldiers when boasting had ended and the lament of lost friends begun.
Inside the pavilion it was strangely silent and a full minute ticked by as they all listened to the barrage of battle before the chatter of the royals and nobility returned. All the while, Jai willed the Kuddites to break the line.
Finally, a twitch of Leonid’s impatient hand stirred Jai’s lips as well.
‘They fight,’ was all he said. ‘The First Legion stands strong.’
‘A poor tactic,’ Leonid grunted. ‘Where is the encirclement? Why no cavalry? My son has grown complacent.’
He leaned forward, as if his, cataracted eyes could somehow see better that way.
‘Do the men fight well?’
Jai had no answer for him. His eyes had been drawn elsewhere.
A great shadow now swept across the arrayed legion such that, almost as one, thousands paused, their faces turned to the heavens.
And then, a roar. Deep and guttural, reverberating deep in Jai’s stomach. Fear overtook him. A visceral, animal instinct that froze his body, his heart hammering, despite every thought telling him to run.
Yet somehow old Leonid showed no fear. Instead, he spoke mildly, barely audible over the excited cries of the pavilion’s occupants.
‘Ah. My future granddaughter is here.’
It landed at the pavilion’s front not with a thud, but with such grace that Jai barely heard anything. Yet he did feel the gust of its great wings, billowing the fabric ceiling and clouding dust.
This was the first dragon he had ever seen. Indeed, it was likely the first dragon any Sabine had ever seen, even Leonid himself. This must be—if the stories held true—one of the last of its kind.
At first he only saw its shape, surrounded by a dust-haze of its own making. A serpentine neck and languorous wings that folded into its back like a cloak. A tail, curling beneath itself in the tight space between the back ranks of the legion and the platform of the tent. The dragon was as large as three warhorses nose to tail.
Jai took in its colour. Emerald scales that gleamed like burnished armour, smooth but for the row of spikes that studded its back down to the spur at its tail’s tip. A horned head completed the sight, one with a long snout and a hint of sharp teeth at the edges of its mouth, its lips curling wolfishly.
It was all so much to take in that Jai hardly noticed the rider straddling the beast’s back. Only when they leaped onto the platform of the tent did he tear his eyes away.
The figure was lithe, clad in a white muslin dress that clung to her legs as she stalked closer to the thrones. Her face and hair were covered by a thin veil, and though Jai might have guessed the visitor was a she by the grace of her movements—a curl of waist-length golden hair that had come loose from behind the gauze confirmed it.
A bejewelled hand tucked the strand away as she approached the emperor’s throne. The seat of Constantine the Blessed. Or, as most knew him… Constantine the Cruel.
She came to a stop before the two thrones of the emperor and prince, silent as the cries of battle drifted on the wind.
Beside the emperor, guards twitched hands closer to their hilts, and murmuring began when she did not kneel. Even Prince Titus had to bow before his own father, yet the girl stood unabashed, her head slowly turning in curiosity at the spectacle of the raised thrones before her.
‘We bring you a gift, Emperor Constantine,’ she called out.
Her voice was loud and hard, accented with what Jai knew to be the lilt of the Dansk. The people of the Northern Tundra; a kingdom unconquered by the Sabines. Apparently they had chosen to marry into the dynasty rather than fight it.
Constantine motioned with his hands to the guards on either side of him and the tension in the room eased with the emperor’s sudden smile.
‘What gift is that, Princess Erica?’ Constantine replied, leaning forward to look closer. ‘Perhaps the early pleasure of your company? We had not expected you for some weeks yet.’
‘Victory,’ was the girl’s reply.
As if by some unseen command, the dragon lifted its head to the sky. The great mouth opened, revealing a tooth-filled maw that could swallow a man whole. The sight stoppered Jai’s throat.
Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover the first five poems in Marisca Pichette’s Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair, first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead, to the degree poetry makes spoilers meaningful.
Summary
“I braided my hair with eggshells & apple seeds, trussed together under a paisley pashmina.”
This week we cover Marisca Pichette’s “In Parting,” These Days Were Made For Us,” “The Size of Your Fist,” “Like Breathing,” and “Her Ribs Are Apple Wood.” We won’t attempt to summarize them—go instead and read them yourself.
What’s Cyclopean: Water is terrible and vital, and being afraid of it is an impossible paradox: “...tell me that you fear the ocean just like an eye fears a tear and the clouds fear the rain.”
Weirdbuilding:How do we decide what’s not normal? “...the kindness of strangers—the strangeness of kindness—the kind of strange only stranger than kind.”
It was possible to summarize Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” as I did in our previous Poetry Month post—for all that was lost in trimming the rich detail from its narrative, there was a narrative, deceptively straightforward in the way of most fairy tales.
Summarizing the first five poems in Marisca Pichette’s rivers in your skin, sirens in your hair would be a whole 'nother mission, one I’m not willing to accept, but its “impossibility” isn’t due to a lack of narrative. As Pichette writes in her introduction to the collection, she is a prose writer who “in poetry…never claimed to know what I was doing.” Yet, like “all creative work,” the poems “come from a desire to tell a new story, or an old story in a new way.” Compared to prose narrative, poetry offers “freedom from constraint, a space for authenticity.” Not surprisingly, then, her poems are written in free verse, a style that in avoiding set metrical schemes and rhyming patterns aims to imitate the authentic rhythms of speech. Much free verse, I find, more closely imitates the natural patterns and vagaries of thought, which in turn reflect those of a core metaphor of art, the river.
Appropriately, river is the first word in Pichette’s title.
What do rivers—and thoughts—do? They flow swift or sluggish or at just the right speed for safe and efficient navigation. They are deep or shallow, expansive or narrow, clear or murky, straight or meandering, treacherous with rapids or serene, nurturing or toxic. They can stick to one channel or braid out into many. They can flood, to beneficial or disastrous effect. They can collect all sorts of refuse or treasure, whatever falls into them or is dredged up from their beds, to be recombined and deposited downstream. They can run free or be locked into canals or constrained behind dams. They can plunge underground. They can peter out into stagnant marshes. They can make it to the sea, another core metaphor, representing consummation or communion, death or unbounded life.
Try to verbally summarize a river in a way that makes your audience experience it in full, as itself, the thing irreducible. Try to do the same thing with a poem of any depth. Easy enough: Type out the poem word for word, line break for line break. The poem, too, is irreducible, but as a printed work, it’s reproducible. Within the limitations of column space and copyright law, we can’t reproduce Pichette’s work here. As I’ve noted above, I decline to reduce it. The attempt would do nothing to further understanding of our discussion for someone who hasn’t read the poems.
My working theory is that the more prose-like the poem, the more summary can capture of it. Corollary: the more poetic the prose, the less summary can capture. The two literary modes lie on an infinitely subdivided continuum of verbal density.
Somewhere along their academic roads, students of literature may encounter Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” and its closing dictum that “A poem should not mean/But be.” Nevertheless, teachers of literature remain human, whatever some grade-, and high-, and grad-school sufferers may believe, and humans like things to mean as well as to exist. Who among us, then, has not slid under the paltry shelter of a classroom desk when the teacher asked, “So, what’s this poem about?” Confronted with Kilmer or Wordsworth, the earnest (or satirical) student might have replied, “It’s about trees (or daffodils.)” Pressed, they might have added, “And how they’re beautiful!” or even “And how their beauty and perseverance and other anthropomorphized qualities can teach us important moral lessons!” The most advanced responders might go on about the pathetic fallacy, and how pathetic it is.
As for what Pichette’s “In parting” is about, what can I hazard from deep under my desk? Well, it’s about someone leaving home carrying a lot of weird stuff in a lot of weird places instead of more practical stuff in more practical suitcases or backpacks. Maybe this person is deranged, because what sane person braids “eggshells & apple seeds” into their hair and then ruins an expensive “paisley pashmina” by binding it over that sticky junk? Or maybe they’re a witch with magical uses for owl pellets, wax seals, “A doll, felted from my first cat’s fur. The jawbone of an English sheep.” They could even be outright monstrous, if we interpret the “pockets I’d accumulated” to mean actual pockets of skin, flesh and fat into which they’ve packed their miscellany of needful things; these pockets filled, they’ve even lined their throat “with academic papers & diary entries rolled up in rubber bands” and topped off the load with “bookshelves, carefully folded into the creases of my skin.”
Alternatively, we could fall back on the assumption that the baggage in the poem is metaphorical, though we might then feel obliged to figure out what each item stands for. I’d rather assume the weirdness is weirdness. Pichette encourages me to follow this inclination by stating that her collection is one of “speculative poetry,” which “tells a story outside of reality, after all.”
On the other hand, she adds: “By leaving reality behind, we access the rawest truths about ourselves.” Doesn’t that imply that weird poetry, and by extension all weird art, is necessarily metaphorical? That granted, are readers obliged to dig for correspondences between the fabulous and the mundane?
In truth, unless they have to turn in papers on said correspondences, readers can do whatever they want. Closing her introduction, Pichette encourages us to respond freely: “I offer these poems to you. I hope you see in them a glimmer of memory, an echo of home.”
So here are my glimmers and echoes, what the five first poems mean to me:
“In parting:” I imagine myself sitting on the bus next to that grotesquely overstuffed human duffel bag and sharing some of their clementines while listening to their story about why they had to leave home. Clementines are extra juicy when the refrigerator chill has been driven off by body heat. Chocolate, on the other hand, fares poorly in flesh-pockets. I will be supplying the bonbons on this trip.
“These days were made for us:” Here’s a debate that my duffel-bag companion-by-chance has on the bus with the old man sitting across the aisle from us. Night and rain are falling. The old man objects to my companion’s remark that the rain is made for them in particular—he’s just been waiting for a chance to correct our grievous misconceptions about the world. He doesn’t realize my companion may be a witch—or maybe he does, and that’s the problem. We two withstand his fearful arguments. We know that teardrops can be turned to diamonds, and that seagulls love the ocean as an eye loves tears and the clouds love rain. Things bigger than us may be awe-stirring rather than terrifying. Mud lives to mark our passing, and would the old crank like a clementine and some truffles?
“the size of your fist:” After the old man drifts into a snoring doze, I randomly remark that a human heart is indeed fist-sized. This draws from my companion the story of how they labored to replace their heart after it was stolen. Golem clay, though it could hold their incised cri of love me back, proved brittle. Metals all had contraindications: Too cold, too heavy, too weak, too prone to verdigris. A heart of glass cannot be dropped. An oak, storm-felled but with heartwood still sap-dripping life, did the trick for my companion—at least their heartwood-heart has learned to beat.
“like breathing:” That’s what the woman sitting alone in front of us asks: “Like breathing?” She has knelt up against the back of her seat to look down at us. In the lightning flashes the storm has begun to toss, her pupils glow silver. She’s a vampire, my companion whispers to me, but the woman proves to be kind enough in her strangeness and refrains from feasting on any of us mortal passengers, even though I offer her the snoring old man. Only, how well she bears the weight of her centuries makes me think of all the years I’ve toiled through, for what? When I get off the bus, the deluge intensifies. I have to swim home, and fish have taken over my living room. Have they finally drunk enough, I ask them, but fish never will respond to sarcasm.
“Her ribs are apple wood:” My bus companion has followed me home. We float above the still-offended fish, and the maybe-witch tells me the story of an enchantment. There was an apple tree who was dead and slowly rotting and so cold she radiated cold, colding. When bees nevertheless accepted her invitation to hive in her hole-gored heart, she lived again with them. I wonder if my companion was rival-transformed into that apple tree. This, I think, would make sense in light of the story they told earlier about making themself a new heart, and how it was another tree’s heartwood that worked best. What happened to the bees, though? Did they get to keep the apple tree’s hole-gored heart?
And—that’s what the poems mean. I’ve been binge-reading the rest of rivers in your skin, sirens in your hair. The poems are as toothsome as well-buttered popcorn, but more nourishing.
Thanks to Marisca Pichette for the dreams already inspired, and the dreams yet to come!
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Humans birth litters of holidays. Ancient Rome offered two or three per week, their equivalent of our predictable semi-secular weekend. The Catholic Church deals days among saints like cards. And modern governments, non-profits, and random groups of mischief-makers declare observances at will. On our eclipse road trip, we nitpicked Jack’s holiday conquest strategy from The Nightmare Before Christmas. I suggested that one really ought to start with smaller and less well-defended holidays, whereupon the inhabitants of the back seat checked online and planted their flag on International Beaver Day.
All of which is to say, some holidays are tied to seasons and events, while others are more-or-less random in their timing. One could make an argument for placing National Poetry Month in the dead of winter when we hunger for color, or in the fall as an inducement to put short and sweet readings at the start of the school year. But April feels appropriate to me. It’s a liminal month of snow and sunlight. It’s a better time than the January new year for resolutions and novelty. Poems have some kinship with garden seedlings and seed packets, dense compressions of idea. This year April also hosts Passover—my family’s haggadah is about half poetry, and though I find new additions every year, wails arise if I cut any.
I’m drawn to poems about transformation. Poetry can be so intensely visceral in its sensory and emotional detail, cutting to the heart of how we fear and desire change. Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesotasticks with me two years later for the way it links personal, species, and planetary transmutation: all body horror and adaptation and transcendence. Pichette’s poems strike me similarly, though they focus more on the individual narrator. Metaphors and memories are folded into the body—maybe deliberately, maybe out of necessity. The circumstances of heart-crafting and home-leaving are left to inference. What matters is the bookshelves stored in your wrinkles, the pine needles and glass beads between your collarbones.
“In Parting” puts me in mind of sculptures that stuff skeletons with flowers and sparkling jewelry, an aesthetic so common I can’t now find the actual one I’m thinking of. What’s the home being left? Is this a memento mori for parting from life, or the past that comes with us in every transition? Is it the fantasy of grabbing everything that matters in a refugee evacuation? Maybe it’s hoarding, being able to leave a place only by becoming everything it embodied. But I imagine the gloriously chaotic literal: wrists dangling with clattering bangles, hair bound tight with dyed eggshells, throat clogged with everything you’ve dared put to paper.
“The Size of Your Fist” focuses on a single organ, a dark Three Little Pigs of the heart. Like “In Parting,” it makes me think about sculpture, trying different materials until one comes out right—or getting meaning out of the whole series rather than just the final product. It’s telling that it starts with “golem clay”—ove me back the sacred replacement for truth, but golems turn against their creators always. And does the material matter more than the method of creation? Metal is made in the same mold as clay, before moving on to the oven for blown glass and then whittling wood shard by shard. An oak heart makes me think of Sarah Pinsker’s brilliant “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather,” though of course the phrase as a byword for strength is much older. Pichette’s oak heart doesn’t feel impregnable, only just strong enough to function—maybe hearts need to be oak-strong in order to work at all between bruises.
“Like Breathing” blurs the lines between body and water—bodies being mostly water after all, and terribly vulnerable to being either less or more water than ideal. Thunder and lightning are the organs and energy that make them go, pulse and digestion. This poem also brings us “backstroking” back to a home, maybe the one that got left behind in “In Parting.” The living room is full of fish, “washed clean.” Homes, too, are vulnerable to too much water—at least human homes. Perhaps more transformation is in order, to be able to live like fish in that flood, having “finally drunk enough.”
Next week, we begin our new longread with the first six chapters of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.[end-mark]
A-list actors Al Pacino and Dan Stevens (the latter of whom is pictured above getting up close and personal with the Shadow King in Legion) want to get in on the exorcist action, it seems, and Variety reports that the two are set to star in an exorcism horror film called The Ritual.
The movie comes from director David Midell, who co-wrote it with Enrico Natale.
Here’s Variety’s description of the film:
Based on a true story, The Ritual follows two priests—one questioning his faith (Stevens) and one reckoning with a troubled past (Pacino)—who must put aside their differences to save a possessed young woman through a difficult and dangerous series of exorcisms.
That young woman mentioned in the synopsis is Emma Schmidt, and Variety reports that the film is “an authentic portrayal” of her demonic possession and subsequent exorcisms. Schmidt’s case is also apparently the most documented exorcism in U.S. history. Take that, The Conjuring franchise!
The project is still in its early days, so no news yet on when the film will scare its way into theaters. [end-mark]
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) Directed by Steven Spielberg. Starring Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, and François Truffaut. Screenplay by Steven Spielberg.
Everybody knows that the last few years of the 1970s were a pretty big deal in science fiction cinema. It started in May of 1977 with a little movie called—you may have heard of it—Star Wars, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind followed in December. The next couple of years brought in some more heavy-hitters, such as Superman and a wildly successful remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1978, and films like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Alien, and even an unexpected box office hit from Australia in the form of Mad Max in 1979.
Sci fi movies had been popular for decades, but the one-two punch of George Lucas’ Star Wars followed by Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was considered a watershed moment in Hollywood even while it was happening. Many contemporaneous reviews of Close Encounters reference Star Wars, always with the assumption that anybody watching Spielberg’s movie had watched Lucas’ film just a few months before. Something was changing in sci fi cinema, and people definitely noticed it while it was happening.
American sci fi movies from before World War II tended to be about monsters and mad scientists, whereas the immediate postwar films were often about politics and paranoia, a trend that continued up until the ’70s. In her book Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film, film scholar Vivian Sobchack identifies some genre staples in films released prior to 1977: the emphasis of ideas and deemphasis of characters, an obsession with and fear of technology, the many sociopolitical allegories about what is alien and what is familiar. There were always exceptions, of course, and non-American films had their own trends, but these traits will be familiar to anybody who has spent time watching and reading science fiction—or watching and reading criticism of science fiction, because generalizations like “all idea, no character” are very commonly directed at sci fi whether or not it’s warranted.
But sci fi is always evolving past its own definitions. The breadth of films released in the late ’70s that are now revered as influential and iconic is an example of this, encompassing everything from space opera epics to dystopian miseries, alien invaders to space exploration, out-of-this-world superheroes to claustrophobic horrors.
These days it’s hard to imagine Hollywood without Steven Spielberg’s influence, but in 1977 he was a hotshot newcomer, fresh off the record-breaking success of Jaws (1975). Spielberg had wanted to make a movie about UFOs since he was a kid—in fact, he did make a movie about UFOs when he was a kid. As a seventeen-year-old in Phoenix, Arizona, he made Firelight, a film about scientists investigating strange lights in the sky; the movie was funded by his father (it cost about $500), starred Spielberg’s sister and other high school students, and had a score composed and played by Spielberg on his clarinet. Only a few minutes of Firelight survive, but just over a decade later he would get the chance to revisit the topic with a significantly larger budget.
The wild success of Jaws meant Spielberg had near-complete creative control over Close Encounters, and it became a bit infamous in Hollywood for being a mess of a production. The film ran way over schedule and over budget, and included such wrinkles as the Writers Guild of America reportedly stepping in to arbitrate the writing credit (only Spielberg is credited, but at least five other writers are known to have worked on versions of the script), rumors of the cast bad-mouthing the producers, and filming that ran so late the planned preview press junket had to be delayed because the movie wasn’t finished.
Rushed as it was at the end, Close Encounters became a massive success upon release. But Spielberg wasn’t quite happy with the finished product. So he went back the next year to rework and rerelease it as the Special Edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Twenty years later he would have another go at it in the Director’s Cut, which reverts some changes from the Special Edition—including a change to the ending that had been demanded by the studio but which Spielberg had never liked.
But we’ll get to that in a moment. Let’s start at the beginning.
We begin in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, where we meet Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut, an icon of French New Wave cinema; we might watch his 1966 Fahrenheit 451 in the future). Lacombe is one of those nebulously scientific guys who travels around the world investigating unexplained phenomena. In this case, the five planes of Flight 19 have appeared in the desert decades after mysteriously vanishing in the Bermuda Triangle in 1945.
Then we go to Indiana, where air traffic controllers hear about a plane’s near-collision with an unidentified aircraft, and locals begin to have a very weird evening. A toddler named Barry (Cary Guffey) wakes up to find his electrical toys going haywire and something ransacking the refrigerator; when he follows the unseen intruder outside, his mother, Jillian (Melinda Dillon) has to chase him through the fields and forests around their rural home. A power company lineman named Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss, who lobbied enthusiastically for the part while filming Jaws with Spielberg) is called to deal with outages across the region, and while he’s on the road he has a very close encounter with a UFO.
Okay. Wait. Please excuse my sidebar, but I have to say this one thing. I don’t write these articles wanting to nitpick movies, because there really isn’t any fun in that. And I genuinely like this movie; I think it’s great fun to watch. But this one detail is driving me crazy. The lights in the sky, the sunburns, the music, the weird electrical and magnetic effects, all of that I can accept without the slightest threat to my suspension of disbelief. The disappearances and reappearances too—no problem. UFOs are UFOing. It’s all good.
But for the life of me I do not have any idea why the aliens climb through Jillian’s dog door to go into her fridge and make a mess of her kitchen. What do they want with her fridge? What are they doing? Why do they climb through the dog door? They can travel between stars but they want to crawl around stealing food? I have so! many! questions!
Don’t worry, I also have a theory: The aliens joyriding across Indiana that night brought an alien dog with them and it accidentally got loose and made a mess of Jillian’s kitchen and befriended Barry. Later the aliens went back later to grab Barry because the alien dog missed him so much.
That’s my theory.
Sidebar over. We can now return to the story.
Following the weirdness in Indiana, we rejoin Lacombe and his ever-present interpreter, David (Bob Balaban, whom you recognize from Christopher Guest and Wes Anderson movies). This time they’re in the Gobi Desert, where the SS Cotopaxi has been found, even though it sunk off the coast of Florida in 1925. (Fun fact: In the real world, the shipwreck of the Cotopaxi was found by divers in the ’80s and officially identified in 2020.) They also travel to India, where crowds of people have heard a musical sequence of five tones from the sky. (Now those five tones are stuck in your head. Sorry.) Lacombe tells government officials that the aliens are trying to communicate, and the U.S. military begins broadcasting the tones from Goldstone to communicate right back.
Meanwhile, in Indiana, things are going poorly. Jillian’s son Barry is abducted from their home following an absolutely terrifying sequence of events. Roy’s deteriorating mental health and obsession with UFOs is testing the patience of his wife, Ronnie (Teri Garr), and frightening his children. It culminates in an awful fight—which Dreyfuss and Garr portray so effectively it is physically uncomfortable to watch—after which Ronnie takes the kids and leaves. Both Jillian and Roy are beset with visions of a strange mountain, but because neither of them has ever studied geology or the history of the National Park System, they don’t know that what they’re seeing is Devil’s Tower in Wyoming—not until they see it on the nightly news, thanks to the government’s cover-up story.
The gender politics of this film have not aged well: men get to contemplate the mysteries of the universe, women have to stay home and take care of the kids. I’m not sure how those dynamics were interpreted in 1977 and don’t want to make assumptions, so I’ll just mention it briefly. On the one hand, the Neary home is a noisy, stressful clutter; it’s a claustrophobic space and the scenes are filmed with deliberately overcrowded audio to intensify the discomfort. So one can hardly blame Roy for wanting to escape it into a wondrous cosmic mystery. On the other hand, even before he meets the UFO he’s acting like another child Ronnie has to manage; even his job conveys messages through her rather than speaking directly to him. The family dynamic is one that is common in American media of a certain age—it became inescapable in the ’80s and ’90s especially—and all the more tiresome for it: the playful man-child who desperately wants to escape his boring suburban existence, the humorless wife who keeps trying to make him grow up.
Years later, Spielberg acknowledged the immaturity of Roy’s character. In 2005 he said of Close Encounters: “Now, that was before I had kids. That was 1977. So I wrote that blithely. Today, I would never have the guy leaving his family and going on the mother ship.” So even though that aspect of the story rubs me the wrong way, I have mostly come around to thinking that sometimes a storytelling choice happens when a guy in his late twenties is writing about escaping the suburbs in a UFO, because not that long ago he was a teenager in the suburbs dreaming about escape and UFOs, and he’s just not really thinking very deeply about how it impacts other characters in the story.
Driven by desperation and compulsion, Roy and Jillian both travel to Wyoming, where they meet up again amidst the chaos of a military-enforced evacuation and government cover-up. I laughed out loud when the government agents say they are evacuating 50,000 people from 200 square miles around Devil’s Tower. Fifty thousand! I love when screenwriters who live in Southern California try to estimate population density anywhere else in the country. But never mind that. The military intercepts Roy and Jillian before they can reach Devil’s Tower, but they get away and begin climbing the mountain.
What they find hidden on the far side is a massive operation set up to greet the aliens, compete with a landing strip, a phalanx of white-coated scientists and uniformed soldiers, and a guy on a synthesizer to play the five tones. In the real world that guy was Phil Dodds, an audio engineer and the Vice President of Engineering for ARP Instruments, who was on set to install and program the synthesizer used in the scene. Spielberg liked the way he looked and cast him to play the same role in the film.
This is where we have to acknowledge the work of our old friend Douglas Trumbull and his special effects crew. As the visual effects supervisor, Trumbull developed methods for motion-controlled photography to match the flight of the UFOs—those bright lights that zoom around through most of the film, somehow managing to be both geometric and shapeless—with the miniature photography of the settings and landscapes. Those stunning images of clouds roiling and whirling are the work of Trumbull’s assistant Scott Squires, who created them by devising a method of injecting white paint into tanks of layered fresh- and saltwater. Several parts of the film, including those striking scenes toward the end in which Roy and Jillian are climbing the mountain at dusk, feature matte paintings by Matthew Yuricich (whose work is in everything from Ben Hur to Ghostbusters).
The special effects are great throughout the movie, but there is something about the way they are used that I really love. It’s all about the build-up. I wouldn’t call it restraint, exactly, because this is not a movie that is terribly interested in restraint, but there is a deliberate choice to limit our perspective to make the characters’ experiences more powerful and unsettling. Even though I still want to know what the aliens wanted in Jillian’s refrigerator, that scene is a great example of effectively withholding information. All we see is the mess and little Barry’s face, and he’s too young to convey the precise emotion that an adult character might convey. All we know is that he’s enthralled rather than scared.
Spielberg has talked about how the malfunctioning mechanical sharks used in Jaws made him reduce how much he could show the creature, and he seems to have learned a valuable lesson from the experience: you can convince your audience of a lot if you refrain from showing them so much that it looks fake. So many scenes in Close Encounters work this way, with the same psychological effect: heightening the tension, unsettling the characters, telling us enough that we know what’s going on but not so much that we begin to deconstruct it while watching.
Never quite adding up, that is, until the end. In a story that depends on generating a lot of mystery and expectation around an unseen element, there is always a choice about whether to reveal that element fully. We normally think of this in terms of horror movie monsters and the risk that comes with building up something terrifying, only to have all that terror dissipate when the monster doesn’t live up to the hype. But Close Encounters is doing the exact opposite. There has been tension, fear, and uncertainty building all through the movie; Roy and Jillian, especially, are confused and scared by what’s happening to them. The goal of the ending is to erase that fear entirely and let awe take its place.
That’s a big cinematic challenge, so how do you do it? Well, for one thing, you get Ralph McQuarrie to design and Greg Jein to build a really cool spaceship, and you fill it with color and light and music. The mothership is massive, astonishing, and overwhelming—but it’s not threatening. It’s too bright, too beautiful for that, even before the aliens begin returning the abductees they’ve taken from Earth. They return little Barry into his mother’s arms. They even return a dog! They can’t be threatening aliens if they return a dog, right? The crowd of extraterrestrials that surround Ron before he steps aboard are played by little girls—fifty six-year-olds!—so they are small and cute and humanoid. Outer space has come down to Earth, and it’s friendly, it’s fantastic, and it wants to show a regular guy from Indiana the wonders of the cosmos.
This is where different versions of the film diverge. When Spielberg proposed the 1978 Special Edition, it was Columbia Pictures that asked him to add scenes at the end showing the interior of the mothership. Spielberg preferred to maintain the air of mystery, but he wanted the studio’s money, so he complied. Many critics loved the changes, including Roger Ebert, who raved about the revised film.
But I can see Spielberg’s point about the scenes being unnecessary. It’s enough that Roy is walking into something majestic and unknown; we don’t have to glimpse the entire alien city awaiting him. But I don’t really think those scene detract from the ending either. The interior scenes of the mothership are beautiful, providing a tremendous sense of scale and hinting at a vast society that travels the stars. Maybe it’s just me being wishy-washy, but in truth both endings work for me. Whether or not we peek inside the mothership, the wonder is still there, the cosmos are still waiting, and humanity is still being welcomed into the larger, grander universe.
I want to mention just one more thing, mostly because it makes me laugh but also roll my eyes a little. Close Encounters is a film that has been assessed and reassessed many times over the years; there are a flurry of new reviews and articles at every major anniversary. And some of them (here’s one example) go out of their way to claim that Close Encounters isn’t really a sci fi movie, for all that it’s about UFOs and aliens and first contact. The reasoning is that it doesn’t count because it’s about the humans rather than the aliens.
Now, we’re all familiar with the whole “it can’t be sci fi if I like it” brand of criticism, which is so tired it’s basically a parody of itself. But it’s especially silly in this case, I think, because it misses a rather significant point: every movie about aliens is about humanity.
Alien stories are human stories, right down to their marrow. They are a way for humans to look at ourselves and at each other, a way to explore human hopes and human fears, a way to create allegories of human drudgery and human dreams. Sci fi movies about extraterrestrials are, in general, a genre of film completely obsessed with what it means to be human. That’s why we keeping making them and watching them and talking about them.
What do you think about Close Encounters of the Third Kind? What do you think about showing the inside of the mothership: Yay or nay? I’m sure many of you have noticed that I didn’t mention John Williams’ score, but in my defense I have a really bad reason for that: I don’t actually like it very much (sorry!), so I neglected to look into it. I spent all my time reading about the cool special effects instead. Feel free to share your thoughts on that and anything else below!
This Is Your Mind in the Machine
And now for something completely different! We’ve gone out to space, we’ve brought aliens down to Earth, so next month we’re going to journey into the weird and wild realms of virtual reality. Many thanks to the commenters who suggested a few of the films on this list. This is only a small sampling of what the virtual reality corner of the sci fi genre has to offer.
May 8 – World on a Wire (German: Welt am Draht) (1973), directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder One of the earliest filmed portrayals of virtual reality comes from this German television miniseries. Plan for a couple of nights, because it’s 204 minutes long. Watch: The only official sources are DVD/Blu-ray or streaming on the Criterion Channel, but you’re clever people. Check YouTube and the Internet Archive—there are uploads available. View the trailer here.
May 15 – Open Your Eyes (Spanish: Abre los ojos) (1997), directed by Alejandro Amenábar This was remade by Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky a few years later, but we’re going to watch the original. Watch:Amazon, BFI (UK only). View the trailer here.
May 22 – Tron (1982), directed by Steven Lisberger According to the director, Tron was not considered for a visual effects Oscar because the Academy thought using a computer for special effects was cheating. Watch:Disney, Amazon, Apple, Google, YouTube, Vudu, Microsoft. View the trailer here.
May 29 – The Matrix (1999), directed by the Wachowskis I’m not going to skip it just because we all know and love it. Confession: I saw it in theaters on opening weekend twenty-five years ago but have not watched it since. Watch:Netflix, Max, Apple, Amazon, Google, Vudu, YouTube, Microsoft. View the trailer here.
If someone had asked, "What do you think Zoe Kravitz's debut film as a director will be?" would you have guessed "a film in which Channing Tatum invites people to a private island and then fucks with their memories?" I can't say I would have come up with that—but I'm glad Kravitz did. Blink Twice (which was originally titled Pussy Island) has a certain Glass-Onion-gone-haywire vibe: Tatum plays a billionaire tech bro with a bunch of questionable friends who invites two women he apparently just met (Naomi Ackie and Alia Shawkat) to a debauched gathering on his private island.
At least, that's what seems to happen. At first. But there's a moment where this trailer takes a wild turn, and Ackie's character finds herself the only person who remembers Shawkat's Jess. Jess, naturally, is the one who wonders, "So do you think the human sacrifice is before or after dinner?"
As Christian Slater's character says, "There's something weird going on here." The hints are all there; one guy is desperate to find his knife, while another has a mysterious black eye he seems unconcerned about. Things simply don't track, and in a most intriguing way.
Kravitz co-wrote the film with E.T. Feigenbaum, who also wrote an episode of the Kravitz-starring High Fidelity series. Blink Twice also stars Kyle MacLachlan, Haley Joel Osment, Adria Arjona, Geena Davis, Simon Rex, and Liz Caribel. It's in theaters August 23rd.[end-mark]
