• image credit: Screen Media Films
    essays,  movies,  writing

    Say Less: 4 Lessons for Writers from Willy’s Wonderland (2021)

    Have I ever told you about one of my favorite good-bad movies, Willy’s Wonderland?

    Willy’s Wonderland is essentially an unlicensed Five Nights at Freddy’s-like horror movie. If you don’t know FNAF, you probably know Chuck E Cheese. It’s a family restaurant and arcade with animatronic mascots for entertainment. In both FNAF and Willy’s Wonderland, the animatronics are evil murderers.

    Willy’s Wonderland is one of those movies that isn’t good, but it’s kinda great: you won’t be scared by the horror content, but you’ll laugh, and the central performance from Nicolas Cage is one of his good ones. You’re never sure which version of Nicolas Cage you’re going to get. Here, he’s flawless.

    What makes Nicolas Cage so excellent is the fact his character has no dialogue. I’m not talking minimal dialogue like Mandy (2018). I mean, none. Reportedly, Cage agreed to do the movie only if they cut his dialogue completely.

    You’d think it’s a weird choice for the big-name star playing a hero to keep his mouth shut through a film, but I’m convinced that’s the only reason Willy’s Wonderland is any good.

    There’s a great history of low-dialogue characters across media. Gordon Freeman from Half-Life and Chell from Portal are notorious for their silence. One of Jack Reacher’s most common lines of narrative (not dialogue) is “Reacher said nothing.” I’ve used this myself: In my Descent/Ascension Series, Elise Kavanagh is someone whose dialogue is heavily limited to increase mystique.

    You can learn a lot about writing from Willy’s Wonderland.

     

    Lesson One: You don’t actually need character back story.

    Since Nicolas Cage can’t tell us what’s on his mind, or where he came from, we can only make guesses. His hero reacts to the horrifying situations without hesitation. What kind of man doesn’t seem to care about murderous animatronics on a job site? Over the course of the movie, Cage’s commitment to doing the agreed-upon job despite peril gives you the impression of Willy’s Wonderland accidentally hiring John Wick.

    By showing what he hates (bad work/life balance) and what he loves (his soda and a pinball machine), you get a strong impression of a sentimental but practical man who is a bit of a jaded, overgrown child with a hard life. It’s mounds better than anything the dialogue would have been capable of delivering, as evidenced by the back story everyone else shares.

    Give your audience some credit: Write less dialogue, and write less explicit back story. Events can do the heavy lifting.

     

    Lesson Two: Quiet characters provide opportunities for contrast.

    You can contrast a quiet character to more talkative characters, sure. That’s the most obvious utility. If you’re writing for fiction, where it’s a massive wall of text, distinguishing characters can be different; contrasting how much dialogue they use is a simple-but-effective way of delineating them.

    You can also contrast the character’s different emotional states to create a more dynamic narrative landscape. It builds punchlines into the narrative. You can’t help but laugh and get excited when the janitor tears into his animatronic foes.

    It’s shocking when the Janitor goes from working with his head down into a violent, roaring rage, beating the crap out of his attackers. The energy level of the film is also naturally improved simply by going from longer silent periods with occasional action, to a lot of action with less quiet.

     

    Lesson Three: Bolster your writing weak spots by working around them.

    The dialogue other characters have in Willy’s Wonderland is…not a highlight. Every single line could have been cut back dramatically. Nothing can go unstated, the actors struggle with long sentences, and little room is given for emotional displays that aren’t shouted at one another. So much of it is simply unnecessary.

    That isn’t to say the writing is all bad, though! The good in Willy’s Wonderland is general plot structure, the concept, and the heroic character. It’s simply fun to watch. One little edit (silencing the hero) took this from labored to a delight.

    When you’re writing, you can choose to bolster the stuff you’re good at and mostly skip over the stuff you’re bad at, too.

    Where are your weaknesses? If your dialogue isn’t strong, you might find yourself focusing on plot…which is what I tend to do. On the other hand, if you’re great at dialogue, maybe you want to enhance that at the cost of narrative. Play to your strengths! It’s your story.

     

    Lesson Four: Don’t drag everything out.

    Willy’s Wonderland is a brisk 1.5 hours long. Much like the hero, it shows up, does its job, and leaves.

    The story begins when Cage’s hero arrives in town. His work-life balance in this flick is legendary; he walks away from active fights when it’s time to take a break. In the morning, he clears out of town promptly, and that’s where the movie ends.

    My favorite writing advice I’ve received is “Enter the scene late, leave the scene early.” Willy’s Wonderland and its Janitor both exemplify this rule perfectly. It keeps things punchy, focuses on the delightful strengths, and doesn’t blow out its back dragging things out for an extra twenty minutes on the reel.

     

    Even though this campy, low-budget ripoff of a kids’ horror game isn’t “good,” the choices the team made transformed it into an outstanding delight of infinite rewatchability. You can take these lessons into your writing, whatever your format. When you find yourself struggling with a scene, try asking yourself: “What would Willy’s Wonderland do?”

    (image credit: Screen Media Films)

  • sara reads the feed

    Spring in my step and outside, business talk, and frisson (or lack thereof)

    I’m starting to feel a bit better (finally!). I’ve been writing almost every day (albeit not much) and taking care to move more. Seeing how my blood pressure spiked after quitting cannabis has motivated me to make my heart stronger. I’m walking more, trying to do yoga stretches, and just generally avoiding hours-long sessions in my cozy rocking chair.

    Thing is, I’m not sure my life will change dramatically if I’m feeling better. The world is different these days, and I am too. Every time I go out to do something I’m shocked by the prices. It just doesn’t seem reasonable, anywhere, for anything. But there isn’t a ton you can do in my area if you aren’t outdoorsy and don’t want to spend money. I guess I will go back to the library? Actually, the library sounds really good.

    Alas, my little Sunshine is sick, and I have both spring and summer breaks approaching. My time is not mine right now.

    I’m okay with that too. My kids will be 10 and 14 this year, and it occurs to me that I just don’t have much time left with my kids as kids. With an end to This Phase in sight, I feel very comfortable deciding to mostly focus on being with them when they want me.

    Our home is still a really fun place to be since the pandemic anyway. We have no shortage of plants, puzzles, books, games, pets, and virtual reality. There’s family in ~2mi walking distance. We didn’t really choose to hunker down in 2020, but at this point, hunkering down has become so pleasant.

    ~

    Traffic on Egregious has ticked up a wee bit. If I get actual traffic outside my bubble, the site is getting flushed down the toilet. I always threatened this with my Twitter account and it remained obscure. I now apply this rule here.

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    Psyche connects that tingle-down-the-spine feeling with alleviating depression symptoms, but notes it can only help so much because not everyone gets it. I realized I don’t get that feeling anymore…not in any dramatic noticeable way. I wonder why.

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    Engadget: YouTube lays out new rules for ‘realistic’ AI-generated videos. I really don’t think this is because they care about integrity, but because they want to keep AI content out of data sets for training AI.

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    Private capital successfully ransacked JoAnn’s (NPR), which (as a crocheter) I know to be doing just fine. As the article itself says, most stores have positive cashflow. They’re squeezing more value out of it by going bankrupt and keeping the stores open. Normal American nonsense.

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    Ars Technica: The US government seems serious about developing a lunar economy. I used to love this kind of idea. Now that I’m old and jaded, I mostly see this as ransacking a treasure that belongs to the whole world. One of my most persistent fears has become someone/some entity changing the Moon in a way that we can see from Earth.

    ~

    Al Jazeera reports on a new study about Havana Syndrome, which continues to suggest no brain damage in the sufferers. I am so curious what Havana Syndrome is. Theories abound, but so far, we mostly know the symptoms are real and sucky and we can’t find an origin.

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    Anne Hathaway’s movie with Nicholas Galitzine is getting audiences all riled up. (Variety) It looks kinda terrible in the way I might enjoy. I might have to watch it peeking through my fingers if the cringe is too strong. I mean, it’s Harry Styles fanfic!

    Nicholas Galitzine is one of my favorite younger actors working right now. His choices are so interesting, and he’s always fun to watch. Although now I say that, I looked up his age…he’s twenty-nine. I guess he’s one of those guys who just tends to play younger, since I keep seeing him in Young Guy roles.

    ~

    Apologies for the paywalled site, but Kacey Musgraves is around my age (mid-30s) and has also quit smoking weed. (The Cut) It’s always funny to me how closely I track to general trends in the population. I’m often so disconnected from everyone and everything, you’d think I’d be on my own trajectory. Nope. Maybe quitting weed for a while is just a mid-30s thing.

    ~

    EmptyWheel talks about all the ways Ireland has been changing, in ways that sound mostly for the better. I love hearing about a diverse and radical Ireland.

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    NPR’s Goats and Soda section (?!) has a genuinely interesting article about how Coca-Cola made itself feel “local” to Africa.

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    I don’t really follow Doctor Who, but I love Ncuti Gatwa every time I see him. So I will share the info that his first season of Doctor Who will premiere in May. (TSFKA Tor dot com)

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    My tick-hating kids will be delighted to hear that humans are getting an anti-tick pill (Ars Technica), much like the tick pill for pet critters.

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    Maybe Zuckerberg hasn’t had his fill of making countries dance to his song? Meta is killing its misinformation analysis tool in mid-August, just in time for the American presidential election. (Ars Technica)

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    Book Riot shares eleven memoirs by trans and nonbinary authors.

  • sara reads the feed

    Toxic Community, cicada wee, weakly heteros

    My life is pretty boring right now. I’m mostly just sitting around being available to my kids when they need me, aggregating information about the outside world, ignoring mealybugs on my plants, getting wrist pain from crocheting, drawing silly cartoons, and Having A Lot of Opinions.

    I’d still normally have interesting things to say about that, but lowering my caffeine intake has really kicked my butt. If you’re bored about hearing how I am not Getting Anything Done because of multiple successive withdrawals, don’t worry. I’m bored of experiencing it. This crap takes months.

    Plus all these substances are how I’ve self-medicated my neurocognitive issues, so everything I know about Getting Stuff Done In That Condition is useless to me now. I have to relearn like. everything. again.

    ~

    I’ve been banging on the “power companies are going to kill us all” drum ever since the Camp Fire in Paradise, California killed so many people, thanks to PG&E’s unmaintained infrastructure. That was over five years ago now. I wrote a book partially inspired by it called “His Memory in Ashes.” Anyway, the huge Texas panhandle fire this year was…drumroll please…caused by unmaintained infrastructure from the power company. (NPR) This is gonna keep happening. There has been no political willpower to fix it and the people with money don’t wanna.

    ~

    NPR published the most selfish article about how a wife’s desire to have Her Old Life Back is equally (or more) important as her high risk husband’s desire to mask against COVID. You know what, lady? I bet he’d like to have his old life back too. A lot of us would. Public health doesn’t matter to America. We would rather just let people die and be disabled so that people like you can fuck around with the illusion of having Your Old Life Back.

    ~

    In ongoing “Community is a great show that had the most absolutely toxic work environment possibly ever” news, Joel McHale reports he once dislocated Chevy Chase’s shoulder in a scuffle. (Variety) I’m sure nobody was sad he did that, but even so.

    ~

    BookRiot recommended Black Paradox by Junji Ito. I haven’t read that one so I’m gonna pick it up.

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    Cosmopolitan talks about the human rights violations of child labor in influencer families (my phrasing, not theirs).

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    You know I can’t resist Weird Organism Stories so here’s an Ars Technica piece about how cicadas pee in jets instead of droplets. Amazing!

    ~

    Ars Technica also reports on Air Pods Pro possibly getting “hearing aid” mode, which is cool. I actually use the “aware” mode on my noise-cancelling headphones (I have both Apple and Bose) to limit the amount of auditory input I receive from the world, which is kinda the opposite thing, but I already think of them as accessibility devices is the point here.

    ~

    A private space rocket launched in Japan exploded seconds after leaving the launching pad. Bummer for the company, but awesome for those of us who like to watch explosions. (AJE)

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    Colbert’s studio didn’t want him to show KStew’s Rolling Stone cover. (Variety) The heteros really just can’t handle the raw sexual power of gender fuckery. They’re so weak.

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    Netflix is putting Jennifer Lopez in a mecha suit. I’m so happy. (TSFKA Tor dot com)

    ~

    A company is gonna try mining helium-3 from lunar regolith. (Ars Technica) There’s nothing humans won’t try to exploit, even our Moon.

    ~

    Lawyers, Guns, and Money shared a good chunk of an interesting NYMag article about gender/sex. NYMag is paywalled, so the LGM link is the one I’m sharing.

  • A tan pitbull reclined on a white couch, smiling a doggie smile with front paws crossed.
    Rory Links

    Rory’s links #4: Institutional rot

    One of my biggest lifelong Roman Empires is the British Royal Family. I’m hardly unique amongst elder millennials whose moms loved Princess Diana and hated Camilla; Diana’s death was a big moment in my tween years. I paid attention to the major happenings for a while—I mean, I watched Will and Kate’s wedding live—but it wasn’t until The Crown aired and Harry and Meghan’s mistreatment went super public that I realized the depths of the institution’s rot. I made a concerted effort to follow the royals the year leading up to Queen Elizabeth’s death because I could tell that was impending, and I’ve been watching stories somewhat closely ever since.

    That means I was ready for this year, and all the speculation around Kate (and Charles-William to a lesser degree).

    To start this linkspam, I really recommend this Nieman Lab piece from a former Buzzfeed News royal reporter. To understand the BRF, you have to understand how symbiotically parasitic the BRF-royal rota relationship is, and this article breaks it down beautifully in context with recent gossip on and briefings about Kate Middleton. There’s also a timeline of events from the end of December through March 6th, if you’re wondering about the specific current events.

    You also have to understand that, while the BRF will make moves similar to influencers, they’re a major branch in the UK’s political system. It’s why four major news agency pulled a Kate-and-kids family photo posted for UK Mother’s Day after it was determined the photo editing didn’t meet journalistic standards. Will and Kate have long edited their family pictures—this Tiktok has a really good examination of past Photoshop fails all the way back to when Charlotte was a baby. The approach is one thing if you’re an actor or you’re selling something. When your next head of state is pulling this as apparent proof-of-life for his missing wife (and throwing her under the bus after), that’s something else.

    None of this answers what’s actually going on with Kate. The likely answer is probably some variation of the stated one, that she had a major health incident and hasn’t been up to public work. There are other theories both related to this and unrelated that have varying levels of credence, and maybe we’ll find out some of them are true. I personally find it less interesting than why this is so big now: basic lack of institutional competence has eroded public trust (for good reason!), and Charles wanting to hoard more money by slimming down working royals is blowing up in his face big time. The only people out there doing engagements—which are showy busy work at best most of the time, but vital to the monarchy’s survival—aren’t getting press or cameras. Kensington Palace, which should be taking up the bulk of the work in the face of Charles’s cancer treatments, has terrible comms strategies, making blunders minor celebrities with common sense would never go near. It’s a complete trainwreck.

    Maybe this specific event will fizzle out in another couple months, and will mostly be forgotten by the end of the year. But I have seen nothing that convinces me that Buckingham or Kensington Palace have the endurance to keep up what they’re doing in the long term, or that they will learn from this. They haven’t yet.


    A few links I enjoyed from the last monthish of the newsletter She’s a Beast (I think, a couple might have come from other newsletters):

    A journalist tried resume spamming bots, with some level of success. Just another one of those feeling-glum-about-capitalism days.

    Sports bras can restrict your breathing. I use sports bras as soft binding for gender reasons sometimes, so I wasn’t super surprised by this. The study in question seems to suggest that problems arise mostly during hard exercise and because bras get picked while people are at rest and not during most intense physical activity. Not sure how the average person should solve this one.

    On boring problems: an essay considering the way problems change depending on age. Approaching 40 means thinking about this kind of thing a lot, so while it’s a bit of a bummer, I found value in having some level of my experience mirrored back at me.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about how modern life requires reverse-engineering experiences more natural to the function of the human body and brain. A couple interesting links for this: How to rewild yourself, with an aim at reconnecting with nature, and Here’s how to rediscover your childlike wonder, which privileges awe and play as worthwhile experiences.

    Also related to the above, the title of this article (The art of doing nothing: have the Dutch found the answer to burnout culture?) is misleading; I think it’s a better look at Dutch culture and its relationship to burnout than a broader remedy for the problem. That doesn’t bother me, though. I like seeing different cultures’ approaches to work.

    The Case for a Paper Fitness Journal is a specific essay weighing demands of digital versus physical paperwork for fitness, but it’s broader more applicably. There are great uses for apps and programs to track a variety of things and topics. I’ve been using Obsidian lately for information management and broader project conceptualization. But for a lot of day-to-day work, little is more clear and specific than writing in a notebook. If it gets overwhelming, I only need to turn to the next blank page.


    YouTubers broadly have their busiest season in November-December, and they will often take January or even February as time to rest and rebuild. The last month marked the return of a lot of temporarily dormant essayists to my subscriptions page. Here’s a quick glimpse at some recent videos essays (which you can read via the transcript on the page if you’re not adverse to flawed subtitles that are often auto-generated):

    The Queer History of The Lord of the Rings by verilybitchie. I was really into the origins of Eowyn’s story.

    The Rise and Fall of Muppet Cinema by Patrick (H) Willams. “Muppet Cinema” is mostly shorthand to refer to the period in film, especially the 80s, where puppets were a key element. I like the way the essay denotes CG as cartoons and puppets as theatrical without being dismissive about it. Different tools for different uses!

    The American Idol Theme Park Experience by Defunctland. My big theme-park experiences in the last decade were all West-Coast Disneyland, which didn’t have this attraction, but I could absolutely imagine having an annual pass and deciding a day on a trip would be spent on this. Also a valuable look at American Idol as an IP. (So that’s what JLo’s been up to when she hasn’t been making movies.)

    Saltburn: The Tumblr-ification of Cinema by Broey Deschanel. Excellent deconstruction of both Saltburn and the 1999 adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, from which Saltburn takes a lot of its ideas without realizing why they were there.

    Twilight by Contrapoints. The chapter titles say it all here; the essay uses Twilight to explore philosophical perspectives on fiction, desire (both related and unrelated to fiction), fantasy, power, death, and identity. I’m not sure I agree with every point here—and there’s a more glossing over of the racism baked into Twilight than I would have liked—but overall, a meaty three-hour essay that was exactly geared toward my tastes.

    Hannah Montana’s Guide to Life Under Capitalism by Alexander Avila. Glad I watched this one before all the gossip about Miley’s family started making the rounds. I’ve been a big fan of deep dives on children’s sitcoms lately (see also: Quinton Reviews covering iCarly, Victorious, and Sam and Cat), and you can’t talk about Hannah Montana without talking about class. Also made me both laugh and unsettled by using AI politician voices to read quotes.

  • essays,  movies

    Alien (1979) is a great lesson in cinema for horror kids

    Yesterday I watched Alien (1979) with 13yo Moonlight, the eldest of my offspring. I’ve been musing how to review it since. The greatness of Alien is well-understood. Even Letterboxd rates it at an average of 4.3, and I seldom run across movies so uncontroversial.

    On a personal level, as a writer and as a child-bearer, I think Alien is fascinating in how queer it is. Secondary character Joan Lambert is canonically mtf trans per its sequel. Ripley was written to be a man and gender-swapped. (CBR) The order in which people are killed on the Nostromo is “woke” enough to please a modern moviegoer like myself; they clear out the white men (including one android) before killing Yaphet Kotto’s character, then Lambert, and gender neutral Ripley is left as final girl along with her final cat. Horror deaths are known to be moralistic: it is inevitable that the people seen as “bad” in some way (promiscuous, drinkers, drug-users, queers, and often nonwhite people) will be killed first, and the final girl is ultimately the purest of them. Alien’s kill order alone can be seen as a political statement.

    As the movies continued, the pregnancy body horror of it all is further teased out and expanded upon, but even Ridley Scott’s initial outing has undertones of pregnancy commentary. It’s queered up by implanting an unwilling man with a baby alien in this first movie. It reminds me an awful lot of my nonbinary ass exploding my second baby via emergent c-section.

    These subjects have been thoroughly explored by others, and way better than I could. I don’t want to explore them again. I don’t have anything to say except that “There is a shortage of perfect movies in this world. It would be a pity to fail to recognize this one.”

    Instead, I’d like to note that Alien is a perfect horror movie to share with kids as part of cinema education. I think kids inclined toward horror tastes should watch Alien.

     

    Raising conscientious horror kids

    My kids have grown up in an era where horror for kids is an entire *thing*. Mascot Horror as a subgenre (TV Tropes) has been defined, if not outright invented, in the time of my kids’ lives; much like Mommy, they enjoy a dark skew to their content, so it’s natural they would fall in with Mascot Horror.

    Navigating horror for kids as a mother is interesting. I believe a lot of families either ban violent/disturbing content outright, or simply stay hands-off their kids’ media diets, because either options is easier than trying to navigate it with them. Parenting is *always* a matter of too many concerns and not enough time/energy to handle it. Media consumption is low priority compared to the numerous high demands of Life.

    When my peer parents were blocking YouTube so their kids wouldn’t get tangled up in extremely dodgy Elsagate stuff (Wikipedia), we chose to let them stay online, unfiltered, unblocked. We kept our media consumption devices in the same room for many years so that we could keep an ear/eye on what they were watching, and “Pick a different video!” was a frequent call across that room. This spurred conversations about why we thought a video wasn’t appropriate. We told them how to navigate these things themselves, and one of my main urgings was simply: “If it makes you feel weird or bad, don’t watch it.”

    Of course, they watched stuff when we weren’t supervising, and they ended up having to figure out how to filter things for themselves. Multiple times, they brought videos, games, and memes to me with questions, or just generally asking for feedback; knowing that they would never be in trouble created a fertile ground for us to communicate.

    The result is kids who have extremely developed opinions about what they like, what is good and bad, what is safe and what isn’t. They know what to do with themselves on the internet and among media. They like horror a lot. That part has never changed.

     

    Kids’ media is pretty nuts anyway

    What kind of horror is “safe” for kids?

    Critically, I must point out that plenty of non-horror for kids is upsetting as hell. Kids’ media is often much more upsetting than you’d think. Consider legendarily upsetting content like Bambi, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Brave Little Toaster, The Bridge to Terabithia. Kids’ media often goes straight for the places kids are most vulnerable, like death of parents, or separation from family. This stuff is scary already!

    If anything, a movie like Alien is soft for kids. They are in no real, tangible risk of going to a planet in Zeta Reticuli, getting attacked by face-grabbers, and then hunted throughout the Nostromo by a big juicy monster.

    Alien also isn’t all that scary for most of its length. Most of it is tension and build-up, deliciously so. Deaths mostly occur off-screen. The effects are great, but not too egregious.

    I wouldn’t watch an especially gory movie with the kids, but they do play shooter games, and some level of tension and violence is fine. That rules out less-tense horror-comedy movies like Renfield, which loooves gore. The sexualization of Ripley is minimal in screen-time, which is also a concern with kids’ comfort levels. I can’t show them the hilarious Chopping Mall, for instance, because that’s in a much more exploitative tradition of horror. M3gan was a great horror movie for kids (to the point it’s kinda too boring for adults). We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is an amazing queer horror movie for the internet generation, but it’s incredibly slow and vibe-based, appealing more to Millennials.

    Alien stands on top of all of these. It’s not too gory, but it’s a little gross (like the robot exploding into a glitchy white-blood mess). It doesn’t have sex scenes. It’s also, frankly, just a great movie.

     

    A whole cinema culture class in a single film

    I actually watched Alien with Moonlight for the first time when they were eight, maybe nine years old. It’s more a feat of attention span than enduring anything scary at that age. Considering Moonlight was neck-deep in FNAF at the time, and well inured to jump scares, they mostly walked away thinking it was fun to watch a movie with so much space ship in it. (Space ships are awesome.)

    A few years later, Moonlight has seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, and loads more movies for grown-ups. They asked to watch Alien again. A young teenager is capable of thought abstraction in a way that an 8-9yo is not. I realized that Alien was kind of a perfect movie to watch in order to teach them more about cinema in general.

    We had great discussions while watching Alien. It serves as a platform for lots of topics.

     

    Alien has strong visual language. It begins slowly, with long shots of the vessel’s exterior and interior, and shots are roomy. The pacing is methodical. At first, the most dramatic things are considered with a sort of distance; medical procedures performed on the first victim are partially viewed through windows by the other crew.

    Immediacy of the style increases as the emotional intensity does, too. By the time Parker and Lambert are attacked, the shots come quick and tightly framed. Ripley’s survivalist last act loses all the methodical dolly shots and steadycam, shaking more as the camera runs along with her.

    Moonlight specifically noted the use of strobe light as a way to increase agitation in the viewers. Strobe is very unpleasant, but it makes you feel anxious like Ripley does, whether or not you’re paying close attention.

     

    In context, Alien teaches about cultural call-and-response. Not only has Alien influenced countless media that came after it, there are prominent elements in conversation with major predecessors. The style of the early moments are a lot like 2001: A Space Odyssey (ten years Alien’s predecessor) and the long panning shot of the Nostromo’s underside is a lot like the first sight of a Star Destroyer in Star Wars: A New Hope (two years Alien’s predecessor).

    I’d actually say one of its biggest influences is Jaws (four years Alien’s predecessor). I might even argue that Alien is best described as Jaws vs 2001.

    All media is engaged in cultural call-and-response, and this is important for people to understand. It’s how you learn to tell what’s derivative versus what’s genre trope versus what’s a direct reference to add commentary to something else. You could not have Sunshine or Event Horizon without Alien, nor many other SF/horror movies. You also probably wouldn’t have Doom or Half-Life without Alien. The impact is seismic, and accentuating this element to young cinemaphiles can provide context for a whole lotta culture.

     

    The politics of Alien are fascinating. Moonlight is the cusp of Gen Z and Alpha; their generation is not expected to do better than my generation, which is not expected to do better than our parents’ generation. A lot of this is due to runaway unregulated corporations. But this problem isn’t new. In 1979, Alien pointed a finger shamelessly at a parent corporation (Weyland-Yutani) for its unethical practices.

    At some point, the movie reveals that the corporation deliberately sent the Nostromo to retrieve alien specimens and bring them back to Earth, regardless of how many crew died in the process. You can easily tie this to the unethical practices of unregulated corporations by watching a few episodes of John Oliver. It’s always been a practice for Big Money to throw lives away in pursuit of profit. (In this film, Ripley theorizes Weyland-Yutani wants the aliens for military use; it’s expanded upon elsewhere in the franchise.)

    As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, the deployment of horror tropes and who the movie kills first is also extremely political. We often think of the past as being more regressive. But we’re in a time when trans people are spectacularly unsafe and often targeted directly by policies and less directly by stochastic terrorists; more than forty years ago, we had a movie casually throw in a couple of *very* gender nonconforming characters, one of which was trans. These are the kind of people society often marginalizes and feeds to the meat grinder.

    The fight we’re fighting now isn’t new! For all its antique-looking retrofuturism, Alien had a lot of ideas we’re still battling with, right now.

     

    Alien is defined more by what it doesn’t show than what it does. It remains a truism of art that the best stuff happens off-screen (off-page, in the gutter, out of frame, etc), and Alien demonstrates this element of craft perfectly.

    The truth is that you don’t need great special effects to tell the story you want. Alien *does* have great special effects, but a lot of it is never really seen beyond glimpses. That’s not the point.

    The focus remains on a naturalistic approach to the characters–showing them working, in their common life, with minimal backstory. We don’t really know why Ripley is so calculated and intelligent, but you feel like you know her anyway. Natural closure describes everything you have to know. This kind of subtlety is often lacking from blockbuster products in our current era, but understanding the raw power of closure opens up so much media to the viewers, and it makes for better artists, too.

     

    Alien is a perfect movie to talk about cinema and art at large, and it’s a perfect lesson for horror kids in general. This is one of those evergreen flicks that I think should be taught to everyone for generations to come.

  • White text on a gold background that reads "Rory's 2023: Oscar results".
    movies

    Rory’s 2023: Oscar results

    Airing the Academy Awards at a different time slot on the night in the US when we sprang forward in the time change sure was a choice! It worked out for me because I missed the ceremony entirely, and I would have been frustrated if I had been watching livetweets/reactions as it happened. But it also meant I didn’t have a decent outlet for my opinions on winners, and everywhere was quiet by the time I was really ready to talk. Time for a bonus post!

    Here’s the results in full. I’m going in order based on the official site’s order. Some of the awards are split into two prongs of commentary: campaign notes and personal notes.

    Actor in a leading role

    Campaign: Cillian Murphy’s win for Oppenheimer is not remotely surprising. He was the frontrunner the entire season, and Paul Giamatti ever getting any attention was more because he was spotted with his Golden Globe at In-N-Out than actual momentum. (The Globes are uneven as a precursor award: they awards dramas and comedies separately, and their voting pool doesn’t feed into the Oscars.) Oppenheimer getting the most nominations and wins also supported Cillian Murphy’s campaign otherwise.

    Personal reaction: I’ve liked Cillian Murphy in a lot, but this was neither his most interesting role nor my favorite performance in the category. I’m glad Bradley Cooper had no real chance, though.

    Actor in a supporting role

    Campaign: See above, sans the Paul Giamatti meme.

    Personal reaction: I don’t think the nominees in this category were very strong this year. That Robert Downey Jr. was one of my favorites of the bunch is not really a compliment, but as I said in my Letterboxd review of Oppenheimer, supporting actors tend to shine in Nolan films. As far as career awards go, I don’t have the energy or inclination to get mad about this one; I just think the nominees should have been better.

    Actress in a leading role

    Campaign: This was the only acting category with any uncertainty. Both Emma Stone and Lily Gladstone took major precursor awards, and if Lily Gladstone had been white, that she took the SAG award should have been a solid lead. But Lily Gladstone didn’t even get a BAFTA nomination, and that tipped me off to her probable loss (as well as Letterboxd’s fondness for Poor Things; there’s a lot of industry professionals on there). I’m not sure what the overlap in the voter base is between the two awards, but the BAFTAs and the Oscars have one major thing in common beyond who votes in both: a bigoted voter base.

    I’m sure a lot of people will point to Lily Gladstone not campaigning for Supporting Actress for her loss. It’s a convenient excuse, but BIPOC actors, especially with marginalized genders (Lily Gladstone uses she/they pronouns), never have stationary, fair goalposts. I suspect another excuse would have popped up if this one hadn’t.

    Personal reaction: This win was the biggest reason why I didn’t want to watch live updates this year. It’s a terrible, boring choice on the part of the Academy. Poor Things was a visually-beautiful film propping up gross amount of misogyny and ableism. Emma Stone’s performance was obvious in a way the Oscars like. Why award good when you can award big and loud, especially when it props up your own bigotry?

    Actress in a supporting role

    Campaign: This basically had Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s name engraved on the Oscar in advance. Well-run campaign for a deserving performance.

    Personal reaction: I think this was the best round of nominees out of any acting category this year. Saying America Ferrera was probably the most-underwhelming of the bunch is wild when she’s such a soild performer. (I hated her Barbie monologue, but she did what she could with it.) Danielle Brooks was the most obvious nominee out of a massively-solid Color Purple cast, Emily Blunt was one of the better women-in-a-Nolan-film actresses, and Jodie Foster surprised me in a generally-underwhelming Nyad. But Da’Vine Joy Randolph was definitely my favorite.

    Animated feature film

    The Boy and the Heron was a good winner here, even if I think it should have bumped something like Maestro for a Best Picture nod. (I hate how animated films get siloed.) I thought Spider-Man had a solid chance, but I wasn’t a huge fan. Disney-Pixar really dropped the ball this year; I liked Elemental, but very few people did, and it was certainly the most flawed of their nominees in a while. I’m not surprised that my pick of Nimona didn’t win; I’m just glad it seemed to do well this award season. Robot Dreams had a really late, limited release, so it never really had a chance.

    Cinematography

    Another Oppenheimer win. Not a surprise or an insult. I didn’t feel too strongly about most of the nominees this year, but I didn’t even begrudge Maestro’s presence here. Could have been better, could have been worse.

    Costume design

    Not surprised Poor Things won, and it’s one of the least-offensive spaces for it to win, but my pick would have absolutely been Barbie. People really underestimate movies using preexisting fashion for this award.

    Directing

    Campaign: Christopher Nolan won the DGA, and Oppenheimer was always the favorite for Best Picture, and that meant he was a pretty solid lock for this. I’m annoyed and completely unsurprised he won the year he did a biopic instead of genre.

    Personal reaction: I like a lot of Christopher Nolan films! I don’t like Oppenheimer, but it’s better than Maestro and Poor Things. I think my pick out of the nominees would have been Jonathan Glazer for The Zone of Interest, but there was no way a movie that challenging would pick up a major award like this.

    Documentary feature

    I didn’t get to any this year, so no opinions on my favorites. 20 Days in Mariupol is on YouTube for free in its entirety, so I’m curious if that helped its chances. I would love to know if freer access to nominees aids in campaigning, especially for ~smaller awards. (I don’t believe in smaller awards, personally, but the Oscars treats picture, director, actors, and screenplay as their big ones.)

    Documentary short

    The one nominee I didn’t watch in this category won. Figures!

    Film editing

    Another Oppenheimer win, not undeserved; the pacing in that movie and juggling of multiple storylines while staying coherent is not easy. My pick would have been Killers of the Flower Moon—for better or worse, the editing made a long movie bearable—but I’m not mad.

    International feature film

    This is always such a weird category. I don’t object to having more inclusion for non-Hollywood films, but the Academy uses this to silo foreign-language film while often awarding the more palatable countries. I only saw Zone of Interest in this category, but it was good quality, at least.

    Makeup and hairstyling

    That Poor Things’s win here is one of the most palatable options to me shows how bad the nominees were this year. (Thankfully, Golda and Maestro didn’t win.) But I bet they mostly won for Willem Dafoe’s visible scars, and I don’t feel uncomplicated about that. It’s deeply silly to me that Barbie didn’t get nominated here.

    Music (original score)

    I didn’t feel too strongly about any nominees this year in terms of quality; I barely noticed scores in most movies I watched, except Killers of the Flower Moon, which I found a bit obtrusive. Oppenheimer’s an okay choice; Ludwig Göransson did the music on Community and produced some Childish Gambino as a result, so I’m kind of tickled by his win here.

    Music (original song)

    What Was I Made For? was my choice and winner! Wild how young Billie Eilish is with two Oscar wins.

    I watched the I’m Just Ken performance and it was a lot of fun! I wish Jack Black’s Peaches had been nominated so that could have had a performance, too. Shame that Tenacious D’s cover of Baby One More Time can’t be eligible for next year’s awards.

    Best Picture

    Anyone paying five seconds of attention to the campaign would have known Oppenheimer was going to win here. I didn’t agree with the choice, but it could have been worse. (If you didn’t see my last Oscars post, I ranked Best Picture nominees there.)

    Production design

    Again, a Poor Things win I’m not offended by. I think Barbie and Killers of the Flower Moon were also very worthy contenders.

    Animated short film

    Didn’t manage to catch any of the nominees this year. Shame.

    Live action short film

    I only saw Henry Sugar and The After, but The After wasn’t very good, and I think Wes Anderson should have been in longer-form categories for Asteroid City instead, if he got nominated at all. Still, I can’t believe this is his first Oscar win! Maybe Bradley Cooper should go short form if he’s that thirsty for gold.

    Sound

    Basically everyone who saw The Zone of Interest mentioned its sound, and it makes sense; sound was obviously crucial to its storytelling in a way that is uncommon for the average movie. It definitely would have been my pick for the category.

    Looking at the nominees, it’s interesting that multiple people are nominated for multiple movies: Tom Ozanich and Dean Zupancic both got nominated for The Creator and Maestro, and Richard King got nominated for Maestro and Oppenheimer. Hollywood really is a small world.

    Visual effects

    Decent win for Godzilla Minus One. I haven’t seen it, but it was a small team working on a small budget for a non-Hollywood film, and I’ve heard the VFX was very effective.

    This is a category that has a lot of mistreatment built in; a lot of the biggest-budget films will be effects heavy, not hire directors who have effects experience or value things like storyboarding, and exploit their employees to a ridiculous degree. Disney-Marvel’s the worst origin of the problem, so it’s impossible to see a nod for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and not think of it.

    Godzilla Minus One is not immune to these accusations either. This Vulture article has the director speaking directly about mistreatment in Japan and how their in-house studio handled things. (Apologies for the paywall.) With the budget and the probable timeline, it seems likely the workers weren’t paid enough, and the director being one of the winners for the VFX award after prior VFX industry experience meant he probably knew what he could get away with. I don’t want to ignore the probable problems here! That this is a good win in a Hollywood context shows how hard VFX artists have it (and also, how tough capitalism is on its workers both in the US and in Japan), not a sign of positive growth.

    I just think people should aim for better. No, Hollywood shouldn’t have budgets in the hundreds of millions and pay a bunch of VFX teams peanuts with dangerous amounts of crunch built in. But a small team doing a lot of a film’s heavy lifting should get a decent chunk of upfront budget and good backend, too. Pay labor what they’re worth, and don’t kill them in the process!

    Writing (adapted screenplay)

    American Fiction was my choice for this category, so I was happy to see its win! A lot of films have one element that stands above the rest, and for me, American Fiction’s was in its writing. Which is appropriate for a movie about writing. It’s definitely a writers-love-stories-about-writing win.

    Writing (original screenplay)

    Anatomy of a Fall wasn’t my choice, but I’m not surprised it won. Screenplay often goes to writer-directors who get nominated for things like Best Picture/Director but have no real chance at those awards in a particular year. Amount of nominations and how many are in the ~big categories matters for overall wins. Anatomy of a Fall had Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress besides. Screenplay is kind of an honorable mention win, in that context? This also applies to American Fiction a bit: it got Best Picture and Lead/Supporting Actor nods.

    That’s not to say neither screenplay was deserving! Even if I wasn’t into Anatomy of a Fall, I thought it was trying interesting things. And a lot of nominations is no guarantee; Maestro was just bad, and its lack of wins despite nominations suggests that I’m not the only one who thought so. But the Academy loves politics and bigotry more than quality sometimes. Like, I thought Past Lives was a better screenplay than Anatomy of a Fall, but it didn’t get a director nod or any acting nods, and that happening when it was made by a Korean-Canadian director with a Korean-Canadian female character at its center is not a coincidence. Anatomy of a Fall had a female cowriter (who was also nominated for Director), so it’s an easy Diversity Win! for the Academy to point toward.

    Otherwise, it’s worth mentioning that this was an oddly-controversial category this year. I’d like to think May December’s diminished chances for this award and more awards broadly was because of the ethical qualms I mentioned in my broad 2023 movies post, but I don’t give Hollywood that much credit. May December was deliberately mocking the industry in a less-friendly way than American Fiction, and I think that’s what killed it.

    And I saw the Variety article about The Holdovers’s alleged plagiarism right after I put up my Oscars post, of course. (Hat tip to Sara for the link.) I haven’t done a comparison of the two sources myself, but if you’re interested, there’s a comparison document at the bottom. The behind-the-scenes on this was happening right around voting time, and the article’s drop was a big “this is why it isn’t winning” banner.

    A couple last thoughts

    I saw a lot of people say this was a good awards season, and I disagree. The Oscars deferred to a lot of its worst instincts on the majority of its predictable wins (of which there were far too many, if you like a good upset) and its surprises. I didn’t enjoy watching most of the nominees. The word “value” made it into a lot of my reviews, for better or worse.

    Obviously, it’s still early in the year, but I don’t have a lot of hope next year’s Oscars will be any better. COVID and bad practices around short-term illness/long-term disability are still affecting production (even if no one wants to think so), the SAG-AFTRA/WGA strikes have changed this year’s release schedule as much as last year’s, and studio heads would rather strike finished films out of existence rather than share them, to name just a few of the industry’s structural problems. Maybe there will be some actual thought about what’s going on; I do think there were some hints in this year’s nominees that Hollywood knows things are broken. But even if major course corrections happened quickly, it won’t be fast enough to save next year’s award season.

    But I don’t want to be right about this. I love the craft and creative expression of filmmakers, and there are always worthy contenders that get overlooked every year. There’s plenty of room for my doomer instincts to be wrong. I sincerely hope they are.

  • sara reads the feed

    Headaches, other folks review stuff, fundie baby voice

    I have no idea how to make myself write something I don’t “feel like” working on. I know I used to do it somehow. It’s driving me crazy though — whenever I try to prioritize a project I Don’t Feel Like Working On, I just kinda stop working completely. On the other hand, if it’s something I really really like that turns me into a dopamine machine, I can keep it up for hours.

    Maddening.

    ~

    My iPad isn’t charging for some reason, and I use it *constantly* for drawing, so I am a little freaked out. Trying not to panic. I don’t want to already go buy another new one, though. I swear I just got this one…two years ago, maybe? Less? Of course I never do warranties.

    I need to investigate more before really freaking out about it. It’s my drawing machine though. 🙁 I’ve been drawing a lot lately! I cannot do the same style by hand, or using my computer’s drawing tablet!

    ~

    I can’t really do much of anything or emotionally process in a healthy way when I’ve had this stupid headache for so long, though.

    ~

    I wish I had never confessed in private to my family that I was going to miss the George Santos impressions on late night tv because somehow THAT QUEEN HEARD ME and he’s running again. (NPR) George Santos…no. Just no. Please God don’t.

    ~

    Disappointing to see “Cabrini” trending on TSFKA Twitter and learn it’s another weirdo right wing reactionary flick. (Variety) I thought it might be related to Candyman, which partially takes place at Cabrini-Green. On the bright side, looking up Cabrini-Green’s spelling led me to an utterly fascinating article about its history. (All That’s Interesting)

    ~

    Nicole at Thoughts Stained with Ink has been reading/enjoying the Mead Mishaps series.

    ~

    Daniel D’Addario at Variety insists that Bradley Cooper’s Oscar run for Maestro was not thirsty. To that, I reply, lmao. No.

    ~

    America has been trying to airdrop aid to Gazans. One airdrop killed five people when the parachute failed. (AJE)

    ~

    Activision at Microsoft has the biggest video game union: six hundred-some quality control workers have banded together. (Engadget)

    ~

    Mexico brought back bullfighting. I’m never sure what to think about that — I don’t personally love killing animals for sport, period, but I also am an Anglo American who frankly doesn’t need an opinion on an unrelated culture’s practices — so I present NPR’s article about female bullfighters without further commentary.

    ~

    After a three year journey in orbital free-fall, batteries from the ISS are on their way to uncontrolled reentry. (Ars Technica)

    ~

    Mostly gonna put this link here so I can cite it later if necessary: Immigrants less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans, study finds (NPR)

    ~

    WeGovy has gotten FDA approval of semaglutide as a treatment overweight/obesity in order to reduce risks of heart attack/stroke. (NPR) This is surely because insurance companies haven’t been wanting to pay (Ars Technica) out the nose for semaglutide used (until now) off-label for weight loss.

    ~

    Literally *right* before the Oscars, the screenwriter of The Holdovers has been accused of plagiarism. (Variety)

    ~

    I couldn’t watch much of the GOP response to the State of the Union address because of its weird delivery and unpleasant messaging. Digby’s Hullaballoo, however, has interesting insight about the “fundie baby voice” most of us have been agog at.