Emily the Criminal, Don't Torture a Duckling, and Polytechnique (12/19/2022)
Your weekly Josiah update
Full honesty, I’m not really in the mood to write this Monday. However, this little newsletter is about trying to get in the habit of writing and not at all about quality, so I’m going to push through and work on the whole weekly habit thing. Hell, maybe I’ll even start having fun as I go.
New from me
Nothing, again. It appears that sharing a podcast with three college students means that we just don’t really do episodes in December. Which is understandable, of course, but it has made this newsletter a tad embarrassing. Don’t worry, though, we are planning to do one last Mammonburg episode before the year is out, and it’s going to be a mailbag episode. So if you listen (or, hell, if you don’t, that could also be funny), email something to MammonburgPodcast@gmail.com and we’ll read it.
Last week I mentioned that I have a Fruitless episode that needs to be episode, and warned you that it may not get released because I’m lazy. That was true. I was lazy. I do want it out before the end of the year, though, so I will crack down either this week or next.
Lastly, there is another project in the works from me that—if things go smoothly—should be out by the end of January. If you thought it was odd that I write and post a lot about film, but neither of my podcasts are film podcasts, then you are on the right track of what this project should be. Hopefully. We’ll see. Still in the research and development phase, and that’s usually the phase when projects get abandoned.
Film
SPEAKING OF FILM, let’s talk about movie. I watched a bunch of movies over the last week. In my last Substack, I said I was planning to explore Cuarón some more this week. I didn’t do that. Maybe next week.
I watched three films that came out this year, all of which were really great. The first I want to mention is the much lauded The Banshees of Inisherin. The thing is that I’m not sure what to say about the film. It left me with emotions that are difficult to put into words. It is bitter and existential. It’s explores the conflict between different ways of looking at life, and the feeling of a warm friendship going cold unexpectedly. It hung over me for the few days after I watched it like a dark cloud.
The other two films, Resurrection and Emily the Criminal were both very different. Resurrection is a surreal and disturbing look at the way an abusive, almost cult-like, relationship from a woman’s past continues to haunt her. It becomes increasingly absurd by the end. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but it definitely goes a direction I didn’t expect. I’m calling it a surreal film, but it’s rather grounded in realism up until the end, which makes the whole final sequence incredibly strange. I recommend it, but not to anyone who gets queasy from gore.
Lastly, Emily the Criminal is a great crime film that actually feels set in the present. I say that because a lot of films don’t really seem set in the present—they are either located in the past, or in a present that doesn’t really resemble our world. Emily the Criminal feels timely. It’s the story of a woman who ends up involved in the world of credit card fraud due after being turned down by numerous jobs for a criminal record and being unable to pay her student loans. One aspect I really appreciated about the film was the way it treats crime as an unnatural state. Neither Emily, nor her accomplice/boyfriend, Youcef, are criminal by nature. Both enter into this world through the desire to just have economic freedom after being provided no options, and they only resort to violence after being pushed deeper and deeper into criminality. Nothing about it feels natural. Emily wants to be an artist, or at least be paid a living wage that can help pay off her debt. Youcef wants to be stable and established as an immigrant. When provided no options, they become criminals.
Moving away from recent releases, I watched five Cronenberg movies this week and officially became a Cronenberg completionist (not counting short films, anthology appearances, etc). Which means I can finally give you my Cronenberg ranking that you didn’t ask for.
Here you go. My official ranking:
Videodrome
The Fly
eXistenZ
Cosmopolis
Eastern Promises
Crimes of the Future (2022)
Crash
Spider
Dead Ringers
Maps to the Stars
A Dangerous Method
A History of Violence
The Brood
Dead Zone
Naked Lunch
Rabid
Scanners
M Butterfly
Shivers
Crimes of the Future (1970)
Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic)
Fast Company
I’m sure that’ll be controversial to some people, and if you have a criticism of my list, I would like to say that you are probably right and I am wrong.
After Cronenberg, I also dipped my toe back into the world of Italian horror and giallo by watching some films from Lucio Fulci. Of the big figures of this genre (and I am a novice on this subject), Fulci is my favorite. I love Zombie, and I love The Beyond. This week I watched Don’t Torture a Duckling, City of the Living Dead, and Contraband.
Don’t Torture a Duckling is an incredible film. Usually when I decided to watch a Fulci film, I mostly expect gore, absurd narratives, and a strange, dreamlike quality that comes out of the combination of stilted acting, practical effects, and over-the-top synth soundtrack. What I did not expect was to find one of his films genuinely moving, but for some reason this film did exactly that.
A giallo set in an Italian town where young boys are being found dead, Don’t Torture a Duckling follows a detective attempting to find the killer while also being thrown off by the townsfolk’s superstitious and often violent behavior. I don’t want to spoil the film for anyone who intends to see it, but I will say that the film uses it’s exploitative levels of violence and gore to create two genuinely emotionally impactful scenes. The film, like any exploitation film, does not deal gently with its subject matter, but it is also incredibly earnest in its condemnations of antiziganism, the Catholic church’s relationship to children and sexuality, and the way violent figures prey upon the disabled.
As for the other two films from Fulci, City of the Living Dead is a Lovecraftian reimagining of Zombie that I found very enjoyable. Contraband is a good crime film, but far from my favorite Fulci film.
Last two directors I wanted to mention are Michael Haneke and Denis Villeneuve, starting with the latter. Last night I watched Polytechnique. I said that Don’t Torture a Duckling doesn’t deal with its subject matter gently, but it does deal with it earnestly. Polytechnique does both. It is Villeneuve’s dramatization of the Montreal shooting of 1989. It is filmed in black and white, and Villeneuve went through great cares to interview survivors and victims’ families beforehand, to take their thoughts seriously, not to sensationalize anything that occurs, and to make the main characters fictional so as not to make any of the victims in his own image. The film is very straightforward, and it delivers what it’s emotional messages with a lot of clarity. The Montreal shooting was, of course, an explicit act of misogynistic violence, and the film does not try to ignore the killer’s motivation. It is a very moving film.
Aside from that, I also watched Enemy and Next Floor from Villeneuve. I don’t have a lot to say about Enemy aside from the fact that I enjoyed it a lot, and I really appreciate Villeneuve as a director. Next Floor is an absurdist short film that you can find pretty easily, and I’d recommend watching it if you want an entertaining mockery of the upper class that’s about ten minutes long.
Now Michael Haneke is a direct I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never watched. I decided to change that, and began with his first feature film, The Seventh Continent. There are much, much smarter people than me who have written about this film, but I will say that it is likely the most upsetting film I’ve watched in the last few months. It doesn’t accomplish this with gore or anything too explicit, but more in it’s slow, plodding way of going through the actions of a an awful, tragic decision being made by a suburban family. It’s nihilistic and unsettling. Once you realize what’s happening, there’s still a forty minutes of watching them follow through on their plan. It’s a brutal film.
I think that’s about it. I watched some other films this last week, but none that feel worth mentioning.
Reading
Continuing my attempt at catching up on reading for my Education for Ministry (EfM) course through the Episcopal Church, I read Joshua and Judges this last week, and then listened to the chapters of Walter Brueggemann’s An Introduction to the Old Testament on those books. I was a bit surprised just how compelling I found Judges. It’s one of the darkest books in the Old Testament, and usually a book that gets pointed to by atheists as an example of God’s cruelty, but so much of the book is about the slow political corruption of ancient Israel. I’ve joked that I would like to see a film adaptation of it by a director like Verhoeven. I still stand by that.
I’ve also been working on finishing Post-Liberalism by Fred Dallmayr. It’s a good little political book.
I know I usually do a section on music and stuff, but like I mentioned above, I’m really forcing myself to write this week, so I think I’m gonna wrap it up here. But hey, Christmas is coming up this Sunday. Can you believe it? That’s cool.
Merry Christmas.