We had the shortest winter ever, it seems.
It’s warming up outside. All the snow is melting, the grass is visible, and the forecast seems to suggest this trend will continue. But I never really know, and it could easily pivot back into bitter cold at any moment. Climate change or whatever. ENSO and stuff.
Last week, I was sick, as I bitched about on here. This week, I’ve mostly kicked the illness aside from a small cough. I’m tired, though, but I’m always tired.
Welcome to the media round-up, where I (Josiah) tell you about all the media I’m watching, reading, listening to, and producing.
New from me
On Monday, I released a Fruitless Patreon episode featuring reoccurring guest, Alien, about Kissing on the Mouth (2005) and Shortbus (2006). It’s a fun episode. You get to hear me, while really sick, explain how much I hate Joe Swanberg. You can listen to it here, for the low price of $3 a month. That’s right, the Fruitless Patreon is only $3 a month.
That’s all the promotion I have for now. Next week, though, I have some cool episodes coming.
Film
While sick last weekend, I spent my Saturday sitting on the couch with my lovely and also sick girlfriend, Kelli, and watched movies all day. On Sunday, we recorded an episode of The Good Apples (which won’t be out for a while because we’re trying to build a backlog again), and then proceeded to watch more movies. And then on Monday, after work, still sick, we watched even more movies. Kelli called in Monday, so I’m considering it part of her “weekend.” I didn’t end up watching any movies the rest of the week, so this section is just a recap of Sick Weekend.
Before Kelli woke up on Saturday, I watched Reality (2023). This film seemed interesting to me for the last few months, but I hadn’t been in the right mood until the weekend.
It’s a bit of a boring film, but it’s an interesting document. Directed by Tina Satter, the film directly adapts the interrogation and arrest of Reality Winner using the verbatim transcripts of the events. If you’re unfamiliar with the story, Winner leaked an NSA document confirming that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election to The Intercept, who essentially lead authorities right to her—she was arrested, and served the longest prison sentence ever imposed for an unauthorized release of government information to the media.
In the film, Winner is played by Sydney Sweeney, who does a fantastic job with the role. There is a sort of dull tension underlying the whole film. A lot of it is just trying to figure out where to keep pets while the FBI searches her home. Everyone is being incredibly friendly and polite, which only makes the situation more menacing.
One of the most ominous details in the film is how it deals with redactions in the transcript: mid-sentence, when hitting a black mark, the person speaking will abruptly disappear and then reappear when the redaction ends. The film is incredibly grounded aside from this, so this gives it a bit of an unsettling impact that I found effective. Overall, because real life is boring and this film is a direct adaptation of a real life transcript, the film itself is kind of boring, but I also am glad that it exists.
After Kelli got up, we began our movie binge together. We walked three not-very-good movies.
I think I would have liked Hitman: Agent 47 (2015) more if I’d actually played the Hitman games. Although, even then, it was mostly a typical, forgettable action film.
After that, we watched The Pyramid (2014), which was fine. Another found footage-ish film, similar to As Above, So Below, where a group of archaeologists are stuck inside some Egyptian ruins. It gets more and more silly as it goes on, but there are some effective and fun moments. I think As Above, So Below is better. Nevertheless, I wish there were more horror-adventure films like this. Taking an Indiana Jones or Da Vinci Code plot and putting it in a claustrophobic horror movie is a lot of fun.
At the End of Eight (2019) is a movie I wanted to like. It was clearly made a shoestring budget, trying to emulate contemporary horror films like Don’t Breathe or some A24 films. I was rooting for them. The slightly goofy premise seemed like it could still pay off—young people are playing an illegal game where they have to hide inside someone’s home for eight hours, and if they can do that without getting caught or having authorities contacted, they get $10,000. Okay, a bit far fetched, but it could be fun.
And there are some fun, tense action sequences! But most of the film is a slow build toward the incredibly obvious reveal that, actually, the two men living in this home know the game is going on and want to kill the contestants. And then the big reveal: one of them… uh, dresses as a woman!
Yes, that’s right. It’s the Psycho thing or the Silence of the Lambs thing or the Dressed to Kill thing. All of which have their defenders: many people will say that at least some of those films are doing deeper things than just trying to scare the audience with transphobia, which may be true, but that is not the case with At the End of Eight and the crossdressing killer, Lady Macbeth. This film uses that reveal in the most cheap, corny way imaginable, and it genuinely doesn’t add anything. On top of this, it’s a bad twist. It’s apparent that it’s going to happen early on, so I spent most of the movie going “please don’t make the killer a crossdresser, please don’t make the killer a crossdresser…” Only to be unpleasantly validated.
Also, the ending is just Scooby-Doo shit. One of the main characters says he wants to dress up in women’s clothes, Lady Macbeth gets excited about it and talks about starting a YouTube channel with him, and then he beats Macbeth with a keyboard and says, “Like and subscribe, bitch!” This thing sucks so bad. I don’t remotely feel bad for spoiling this whole movie without giving a warning.
From there, Kelli and I moved on to Compliance (2012). We watched this for The Good Apples, so I won’t spend too much time here on it. There will eventually be a podcast episode with me talking about it. After that, the final film for Saturday: The Belko Experiment (2016).
I had a lot of fun with this movie. Written by James Gunn, and directed by Greg McLean, the film is set in an office building in Colombia, with eighty white collar American workers, that one day abruptly locks everyone inside and informs them that they’re in an experiment, where they need to kill thirty other employees or else sixty will be killed. The office breaks into rival factions, and there’s some glimmers of fun, class war imagery. It’s pulpy and fun.
Moving to Sunday, Kelli and I watched Watcher (2022) and Run (2020).
Watcher is a classic, Hitchcockian thriller about a woman who is being stalked. It reminded me a lot of John Carpenter’s film, Someone’s Watching Me! (1978). Despite the pretty well-trodden premise, I think it delivers a lot and I’m excited to see what else will come from the director, Chloe Okuno.
Run has a good premise, but biffs it by the end. The film is about a young, wheelchair using girl who is homeschooled by her mother. She has a number of different disabilities—asthma, diabetes, etc—but has been pretty successful academically and is on track to go to a decent college. Things are fine between her and her mother, until one day she realizes that the pills she’s taking aren’t actually prescribed to her. Slowly, things begin to unravel, as it begins to be more and more clear that her mother has been poisoning her and keeping her ill.
This is certainly a bit of a thorny topic, and I’m not sure I’d feel confident saying whether the film’s take on disability is okay or not. But I do think there’s a fascinating film premise here. Unfortunately, it’s ending kind of ruined it for me.
On Monday, I did it. I finally watched Barbie (2023). Now I can finally understand all the discourse and cook up my own take. Here’s my take: it’s fine.
I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. I mostly liked it. There are a lot of funny jokes, the set design is great, and the whole film looks like what a Barbie film should look like. The political jokes, and there are a lot of them, were always hit or miss. Some were great and clever, others felt like tired Twitter jokes from 2016. But the main thing that rubbed me the wrong way was the postmodern, self-critical attempts to address Mattel and the legacy of Barbie.
Do you remember that Domino’s ad campaign in the early 2010s where they degraded their own product, said their crust tasted like cardboard, and that they were going to make better crust going forward? It was a bold marketing strategy, but it seems to have been pretty effective.
For me, the Barbie movie kind of feels like that. There are lots of self-critical jabs at Mattel, at Barbie toys for giving unrealistic expectations for women, at the male dominance of the board of directors, and even at Mattel’s censorship of the movie. But the film is still authorized by Mattel, and so clearly they crunched the numbers, like Domino’s did, and realized that admitting faults is actually better marketing than ignoring them. Even then, the board of directors is still framed as lovable, dumb men who really do want to be feminists, but just don’t know how.
I think Greta Gerwig did the best she could with an IP project, and I don’t really hold any of these aspects of the film against her as a filmmaker. But there is just something unsettling about all this for me.
One last thought about Barbie that is potentially “problematic,” but I think worth saying. This movie was designed to be a culture war movie. Before watching it, I was laughing at conservatives who were getting really worked up at the film. I still think that’s funny because it is just a movie, but having seen it now, let’s all cut the shit here for a second: it’s a very, very openly liberal movie.
It seems designed to irritate conservatives at numerous points. Which is fine. Again, I had fun with that, and a lot of the jokes that made me laugh were jabs at conservative things, but you can’t really act like a movie that explicitly talks about the patriarchy and feminism isn’t political. You can’t act surprised when the group of people who will riot over a beer being drank by a trans woman on TikTok is going apeshit at your explicitly liberal movie. Of course, they are. I’m a bit baffled at this line of argument framing the movie as just about a toy and not political. It’s trying to be political!
The last film I watched this week was Arctic (2018). It’s a classic survival movie about Mads Mikkelsen in the arctic. It’s pretty good. Nothing really to say about it. I hope I don’t ever get stranded in the arctic.
Reading
I’ve been working on Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll for a future episode of the Fruitless Bookclub. I’m really enjoying it thus far. I haven’t gotten far enough to give a solid round-up of the whole thing, but I’m having more fun reading about peasantry, enclosure, and agrarian land use than I expected to. Look forward to that future episode.
I’ve also made some progress on a book I’ve been off-and-on reading for way too long, The Age of Revolution by Eric Hobsbawm. I’m really enjoying it, I’ve just gotten worse at reading regularly.
Music
I’ve been mostly listening to the same stuff as the last few weeks. A lot of Drug Church. Some Gulch. I haven’t used statsforspotify.com on here in a minute, so let’s see what my top 10 artists of the last four weeks is.
Drug Church
Protomartyr
Indochine
my bloody valentine
Traitrs
Talking Heads
Q and Not U
LSD and the Search For God
Famous
Talk Show
Alright, I’ll see you all next week!