It’s December 15, and there’s no snow on the ground. This always irritates me. I live in the Midwest! Christmas time is supposed to be snowy.
I’ve been thinking that it’s good I’ve been building a weekly habit of writing with this Substack, but it’s also a weekly habit of very lazy writing. Earlier this week, I was looking back on my main Substack,
, which I’ve been neglecting. I’m thinking perhaps with the next year, I’ll try to get myself into a monthly habit of writing on there or something. We’ll see. 2024 is full of opportunity.But we’re on the lazy Substack today. The one I don’t proofread before pressing “send.” The one that usually starts with me bitching about the weather or social media, pivots to advertising my podcasts, and then turns to a long paragraph on some Italian horror film I watched. Yes, it’s the media round-up: a newsletter where I tell you about all the media I’m watching, reading, listening to, and producing.
New from me
This week I put out a new episode of Fruitless and a new episode of The Good Apples. Both were really fun episodes.
On Fruitless, Brian Alford of The Worst of All Possible Worlds joined me to discuss HGTV’s Home Town and the politics of Laurel, Mississippi. This is a nice, comfy HGTV show about how nice and comfy small towns are, and how cool it is to renovate broken down houses and make them nice and comfy. It’s so aggressively apolitical, that it’s unsettling to learn that, despite the show presenting the town as almost completely white, the town is actually 60% black. While it seems like the Napiers, the couple starring in the show, are sincere, it’s clear they’re part of a giant HGTV machine and there are explicitly racist calls being made behind the scenes about who to cast.
This tension also nicely complemented a brief discussion of Showtime’s The Curse, which also deals with some similar tensions (sincere or even goodhearted people, unaware that they are just contributing to the problems they hope to help). If you want to listen, you can check out the episode here.
On The Good Apples, we discussed two of the wildest episodes of Law & Order: SVU—the episode where Kyle MacLachlan plays a psychologist who shoots a kid, and an episode where a urophilic peeping tom accidentally helps catch a female child molester. Both episodes end up turning to a weirdly bioessentialist notion of criminality, and I spend the episode arguing that I don’t believe in the concept of psychopaths, to the slight discomfort of my co-host, Jackal. It’s a good time. You can find it here.
Film
So this year I watched a lot of movies. According to Letterboxd, I have logged 393 film reviews this year. I watched most of them in the first half of the year and have slowed down a bit in the second half of the year.
Since I’m not watching movies at the rate I was earlier this year—three movies a day on most workdays—I probably won’t be able to recreate such a high number in future years, unless the drive comes back to me unexpectedly. However, that means I have an opportunity to make this year the year of movies. The year I watched more movies than any other year. I’m so close to 400, so I wanna do it. What is like without meaningless challenges like this?
However, the numbers get a bit weird on Letterboxd here. There’s the “diary” number,” and then the “films” number for the year. The diary number is how many times I logged a movie this year, so how many times I watched a movie. The films number is how many individual movies I watched this year. I rewatched two movies this year, so my film number is 391, but my diary number is 393. If I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do it all the way: so I want 400 individual movies this year. Nine movies to go before the end of the year. I can do it.
If you’re curious, the two movies I rewatched this year were Man Bites Dog (1992) and The Church (1989). In both cases, they were movies I watched on my own and then thought my girlfriend, Kelli, would like them, so I ended up watching them again with her later in the year. Both are strange and upsetting films in very different ways. Man Bites Dog, if you’re unfamiliar, is about a Belgian documentary crew following around a serial killer. It is as unpleasant as that premise sounds, and a bit worse at times, so I’m adding sufficient warning here. The Church is a great Italian horror film from, in my opinion, one of the most underrated Italian horror directors, Michele Soavi. There are so many strange and beautiful scenes in it, although it wouldn’t be my pick for your first Italian horror movie if you’ve never explored the genre.
But let’s return to movies I watched over the week. Last Friday I continued exploring Agnès Varda’s filmography and watched Le Bonheur (1965) which is incredible. I liked Cléo From 5 to 7, but Le Bonheur finally made me get how impressive Varda is as a filmmaker. This is a brutal film. I almost don’t want to say much about it because the end works best when you’re not expecting it. It’s definitely worth a watch.
Also last week weekend, I watched Force Majeure (2014) for the first time, which was absolutely fantastic. I’ve been sitting on that one way too long. I remember being told to watch it in 2016, and I put it off. The premise of the film, if you’re unfamiliar, is that a family on a skiing trip in the French alps gets ditched by the father during an avalanche, but everyone survives. So now the family has to live with the knowledge that, in a life or death situation, the father would abandon them.
Now I knew that pitch for seven years, but what I was surprised by when watching the film is how actually ambiguous the situation is. I assumed they would be out on the mountains, suddenly trapped from the avalanche or something, and then, dramatically, the father makes the decision to abandon his family. No, this avalanche is a controlled avalanche that begins approach the patio seating as a restaurant they are eating at. They’re watching it approach, waiting for it to stop right before colliding with the restaurant, when it suddenly floods the restaurant with snow. It’s just the powdered snow above an avalanche, not the actual weight, and so the screen goes white for roughly a minute, and then slowly you can see the father had run away as he returns to the table.
The ambiguity is part of what makes it work so well. It’s not about the father making a clear, calculated, and cowardly choice, like I had anticipated. There’s a good fifteen minutes or so after the event where the family barely talks about it, and they’re piecing together exactly what happened in their mind. The film becomes about memory. About the way the memory of something small can begin to worm into you and become more and more hurtful, in the case of the mother who starts out confused about what happened and then slowly becomes more and more enraged, and the way you retell a story to yourself over and over, unconsciously adjusting it to vindicate yourself, like the father does. It’s a really fantastic film, and very dryly funny.
After that, I also watched Godard’s 1980 film Every Man For Himself. This is one of the only Godard films I’ve watched that seems to have something resembling a plot that doesn’t get completely sidetracked deconstructing the medium. It’s still shocking at points, and it’s still got weird experimentation, but it has a story! A whole ass story! I enjoyed it.
Now over the week, I started getting a little fast and loose with what counts as a “movie” in order to hit my 400. I think these still count, but some people might object since they’re YouTube videos—I watched two Jon Bois documentaries.
Jon Bois is the guy who makes sports statistics documentaries for people who don’t care about sports, and he’s good at it. I don’t care about sports. I wasn’t raised watching it, and so it never became a major interest of mine.
Over the past few weeks, I have caught myself watching long videos about speedrunning “world records” on YouTube. (I promise this will loop back around to Bois). Now, I am also not a huge gamer and I have about as much interest in speedrunning as I do sports, but I was, for some reason, enthralled by some of these YouTube documentaries about people using strange and elaborate techniques to beat, like, Wii Sports in seven minutes or whatever. I caught myself getting excited watching those when someone beat the record. Because I felt myself opening up to this same type of excitement that I know is the appeal of most sports, and because I couldn’t clock any of these Summoning Salt speedrunning videos on Letterboxd (trust me, I tried), I thought now was the time to finally watch some of Jon Bois’ stuff.
So I watched The Bob Emergency, and then Fighting in the Age of Loneliness (narrated by Felix Biederman). I liked the latter more because, with Biederman involved, it’s as much about the state of politics in the 20th century as it is about MMA fighting. I know Bois and Bierdman have referenced taking influence from the British documentarian, Adam Curtis (a favorite of mine), and I think that influence is what clicks with me.
I also really liked The Bob Emergency, although it’s more focused on sports overall. The premise, if you haven’t heard of it, is that the name “Bob” was incredibly popular in America, and American sports specifically, for a huge chunk of the 20th century and has since declined rather sharply. Bois uses this sort of nonsense way of grouping data (“athletes named Bob”) to tell a story about sports in the 20th century and look to all these athletes of varying degrees of obscurity and see the impact they had. By the end, you find yourself really sad that this amazing group, the Bobs of sports, are on the decline. They’ve contributed so much to their respective sports!
I’m likely going to watch more of Jon Bois’ work in the future. He has some of these long documentaries about the history of various sports teams, and maybe if I watch those, I’ll be able to have a working conversation with people about sports. Imagine that.
Moving away from Jon Bois and YouTube sports documentaries, I watched Black Christmas (1974) last Wednesday. A classic, proto-slasher, directed by Bob Clark who also brought the world Porky’s (1981) and A Christmas Story (1983). I don’t have a lot to say about the film, but I did really enjoy it.
That night I also watched a noir from Criterion’s Holiday Noir collection streaming right now. It’s a seemingly semi-forgotten noir with a supernatural premise: Repeat Performance (1947). This film was honestly incredible. Pitched as “the noir take on It’s a Wonderful Life” (a pitch that sells me immediately), the film is about an actress who, on New Year’s Eve, shoots her cheating, alcoholic husband. While trying to cover it up, she realizes that everything that head lead to this moment had started exactly a year prior—her husband met the woman he would eventually have an affair with that night, he would return to drinking that year, etc. She suddenly finds herself transported back to the previous New Year’s, where she is given an opportunity to relive the year and prevent things from happening the way they did. This does not work out as nicely as it sounds, as you may imagine. Absolutely worth a watch.
Last night, I decided I wanted to watch some more films to get myself to 400, but I was dreading the process of picking out a movie. Luckily, I discovered that the Important Cinema Club’s Justin Decloux was streaming, on Twitch, one of his “movie mind melters,” where he plays cult films or hard-to-find films. He’s doing a 12 hour one on Saturday that I’m hoping to tune in for. But last night, on Thursday, he did two films which I had a great time watching. Both Holiday themed (very vaguely).
The first was Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story (1993). This is a Japanese film about a young girl whose father is a paleontologist that has discovered how to grow a dinosaur egg—it’s a pretty similar set up to Jurassic Park in the beginning, but it changes pretty drastically from there. They grow the baby dinosaur and, when the dinosaur hatches, it imprints itself on the young girl and believes the young girl is its mother. It’s a cute, holiday movie about a young girl raising a baby T-Rex. It’s incredibly bizarre, but also incredibly enjoyable.
After that, Decloux played Femme Fatal (2007), a Korean comedic thriller about a gorgeous movie star with many lovers who all try to propose to her on the same day, before all dying from freak and unexpected accidents which make the movie star look like the murderer. The first half makes me think of Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010), and the second half becomes something resembling Weekend at Bernie’s (1989). It’s a blast.
So that’s what got me here, to 391 films. Nine more to go. Let’s see if I can make it.
Reading
I finished How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney yesterday. I’m not going to say much about it here because there will be a whole podcast of me discussing it on Fruitless sometime next week. What I will say is that I really enjoyed it, and it filled me in on a lot of African history that I’m pretty ignorant of.
Alright, I think that’s all I have. See you next week!