• sara reads the feed

    SRF 16: Drawing romcoms, timely prose, and nerds in space

    I think I might spend next year writing what kind of Obsession Days I have in my annual planner (I use Hobonichi). Lately I haven’t really remembered what I’m up to in retrospect because I’m getting all swept up in whatever creative pursuits, and if I just wrote “movie day” and “drawing day” and “crochet day” on these entries, I think it would cover a lot of bases.

    It would also explain why I’m frowning at my yarn stash, wondering why nothing has gotten crocheted. Honey, you were drawing the last few days. A lot of drawing! And writing movie reviews.

    Of course sometimes the Obsession Day is going to be “[insert name of video game here]” and right now it’s Baldur’s Gate III. I keep kinda going back and forth on whether I *love* it or not. It’s obviously an outstanding game. It’s so good. I would not say two negative words about the game as a product overall: it does such a marvelous job bringing the TTRPG feeling to my computer, with incredibly detailed graphics, and in such an optimized way that it runs *really* well on all sorts of systems. I don’t love the story itself, but the complexity of execution is utterly fascinating.

    So when I say I’m not sure I love it, it’s entirely personal. I was actually feeling this way about Skyrim (of which I’ve probably played at least 1000 hours) so I don’t think it’s about the game itself. There is something aesthetically or thematically that is frictious to me, but in a way that I’m still very interested and want to explore.

    I almost wonder if I’m getting sick of the way video games nonproductively hijack the dopamine pathways of my brain and make time vanish, especially when it’s a game I reeeaaally like, like a fantasy RPG.

    ~

    Speaking of drawing, you’ll now find three reviews of mine also have illustrations attached: The House Bunny, Last Holiday, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Like I said, I’ve been having a couple drawing days. I’m picking movies kinda arbitrarily based on which heroine I feel like drawing. The aesthetics of movie heroines are really catching my eye lately!

    ~

    My favorite read this week was probably Who Gets to Play in Women’s Leagues? on The New Yorker. I’m keyed enough into trans and intersex issues that I caught a whiff of transmisogyny from this, but it’s written by an intersex cis woman talking about her experiences, so I think it’s just a cis person doing her best? The information is good, as far as I can tell, and I haven’t seen such a complete debunking of myths and explanation of science/society behind gender and athletic competition.

    ~

    The French TV industry crew is thinking about striking. (Variety)

    ~

    A story about nontraditional families stepping up for each other in traditional ways in Korea, focused on a woman adopting her best friend. (AJE)

    ~

    I am absolutely fascinated by José Lerma’s heavy impasto, and I lament that these paintings would absolutely not be safe to lick or chew on, for multiple reasons. (Colossal)

    ~

    What do you think is the top worldwide box office winner? Hunger Games? Nope, it’s called Animal, out of Bollywood, and starring the talent of Ranbir Kapoor. (Variety)

    ~

    Scrolling through some really dark news in my feed, there was also this bit of prose from Only Fragments in the middle. My emotions felt really validated seeing this. Like, hey look, someone with some of the flavor of my mind.

    ~

    Queen Latifah, Billy Crystal and others celebrated at Kennedy Center Honors (NPR)

    I’m going through a tiny Queen Latifahssaince in my life and I always adore Billy Crystal, so just seeing their faces together makes me happy. <33

    ~

    Will nuclear fusion work as an energy source in the imminent future? (NPR) Idk I’ll ask my 13yo. They’ll know.

    ~

    Why Indian Buddhism has gardens, not monasteries (Psyche)

    I’ve been studying Buddhism here and there while I try to grapple with my mortal body. I also started gardening about the same time. So this is an interesting read for me.

    ~

    Ars Technica talks briefly about Star Trek voices in video games. Heh, I played a lotta these.

    ~

    Wait, someone watched Halo Season 1? Enough people watched Halo Season 1 for us to get a Halo Season 2? Someone wants this? (Variety)

  • credit: Universal Pictures
    movie reviews

    Review: My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 (2016) *****

    If there’s any criticism to be had of this entire trilogy, you won’t hear it from me. I’m so attached to this fictional Greek family that I really just say “my cousins” when I’m talking with my actual family about the people in this movie. I love my cousins. As far as I’m concerned, sequels to the original are just like, getting another newsletter about what my Greek cousins are up to. (I am of Irish descent, but probably seeded by Alexander the Great tbh.)

    Years after the first movie, Toula’s little girl is in high school and looking at college. Toula’s feeling empty nest vibes real hard. She’s struggling to fill the void in her life by running around and pining for others’ babies, but Ian is looking forward to more time with his smoking-hot wife. The two of them are so hot, I’m rooting for Ian here. Don’t get me wrong: my youngest is nine years old as I write this review and I’ve been dying for babies for *years*. I get Toula *completely*. But Toula and Ian have only gotten hotter since the first movie, and in my soul, I believe they deserve to spend the rest of their lives railing each other without getting cockblocked by children.

    Anyway, Toula is mostly hoping her baby will go to college nearby, while Paris (not actually a baby) feels the urge to escape the smothering behemoth of her family. Paris lovingly endures her family really well. Enduring the scrutiny of family who don’t care you’re not their whole entire property is A Lot, and Toula *does* understand. Mostly.

    Then scandal unfolds! Toula’s Dad and Mom aren’t legally married! The wedding certificate wasn’t signed, so these adorable elders are ~living in sin~. Yet Mom is reluctant to marry him for realsies, because Dad is a pain in the ass who doesn’t appreciate her. Drama! And also an opportunity for a second big fat Greek wedding, thankfully.

    Little new ground is covered here, but it’s done so nicely, I couldn’t care less. The sequel is a series of homages to the first movie, adjusted to fit different characters or different times. Toula’s visual transforms again; Toula and Ian get spicy in the car again; harassment about boys is a problem for Paris now; wedding beats happen again, but transposed over Mom.

    We also touch bases with Ian’s parents. I think it’s such an interesting detail: He asks his parents to rely on him more, and they seem sorta confused. Ian wants to be tangled up in *all* his family. As an “Anglo” married into the family, Ian is seldom the focus, but his characterization really grows in moments like these, so he’s also never background.

    Predictability is reassuring when you mostly just want to see your cousins have a good time, and they do, so we do too. Love radiates out of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2.” When Toula and Ian go through the ritual of marriage again, I’m beaming with them.

    Shout out to Joey Fatone, the best member of NSync, who is also revealed to be my Gay Greek Cousin. We love you Cousin Angelo!

    (image credit: Universal Pictures)

  • source: Netflix
    movie reviews

    Review: May December (2023) *****

    Read the comments on a news story any time you see a “hot” older woman having assaulted a young boy. You’ll see loads of people claiming that it’s ridiculous to treat this as a crime. “In my time, this was our fantasy!”

    May December has zero patience for this toxic, abusive, nonsense narrative, and spends two hours showing us how absolutely no glossy perception will change the fact this is a way lives are utterly destroyed by child sex abuse.

    The actual experience of watching May December is mostly one where you see a monster of a woman become mirrored by another monster of a woman, and it’s done with such high camp – from the soapy piano to the lingering angles and hilarious choices of scene cuts – that it’s easy to get lost in how much of this is just Natalie Portman vs Julianne Moore.

    They’re riveting when they go head-to-head, and they provide all the entertainment that brings us back to psychological suspense as a genre. These two give us every ounce of complex-horrible-milf drama that pulls us back again and again to the likes of Gone Girl and Girl on the Train. The long dialogues with a strong focus on slowly unspooling these characters’ glass houses of self-identification is riveting enough to make me giggle-clap.

    And then May December gives us Joe.

    Joe is in his mid-thirties now, the same age as when he was assaulted, and the children he had with his abuser are all flying away from home. Joe has grown up to be a painfully nurturing soul. He is only allowed to exist in support of Moore’s needs, but he’s found ways to love deeply elsewhere; his protective adoration for his children is as heartwarming as eviscerating, he’s taken a job in medicine, and he nurtures monarch butterfly eggs to adulthood.

    We’re given no time to wonder if Joe is okay. He’s not. Moore speaks to him in a clipped, demanding, motherly way, which turns into simpering babygirl talk the instant things aren’t going her way. Joe barely knows how to talk, period, because he’s internalized the fact that he’s not supposed to. He follows Moore’s precise commands from the moment we see him, and that’s before he spends a while crying on the roof because he’s not sure if he’s parenting his son or traumatizing him. Joe has genuinely no idea. He doesn’t know how adults and kids are supposed to interact, but he fights to nurture because Joe wants to protect others from what happened to him.

    Julianne Moore’s character was 36 when she began grooming and ultimately assaulted 13-year-old Joe, who was picking up hours at the pet store where she worked. Moore’s character uses a lot of justifications for this: Moore has always been “young” for her age, and Joe has always been “old” for his age as the primary driving factors. This is overwhelmingly a racialized valuation. White women are allowed to be little girls for basically ever, but most others (especially men of color) are burdened with the costs of adulthood immediately.

    Bringing in Natalie Portman’s character – an actress who will portray Moore, and is now researching her – isn’t really what starts making everything fall apart, but maybe she makes it happen faster. I’d say it’s not because of what she’s revealing. Everyone in town knows what’s going on, no matter how broadly they smile about it. They carry on the story that everything is great with Moore’s family. They pity her for being so mentally frail at best, and loathe her for being a manipulative psychopath at worst, but everyone is letting the illusion of a happy family persist.

    No, everything is already on a trajectory toward disaster before Portman arrives. Joe’s texting a friend about leaving. The kids are leaving too. Moore doesn’t have a real career. Things are fraying. Portman only makes it go faster because she’s on a self-servicing mission of her own. She claims that she’s looking for some massive truth. In fact, she’s looking for an identity to adopt. She begins mimicking Moore so closely, Portman begins drooling over casting photos for the children who might play Joe, and herself becomes a continuation of the abuse against a now-adult man who still hasn’t ever had a relationship on his terms.

    Portman is just as insecure in her sense of self as Moore, just as broken. Without an apparent identity of her own, Portman seems like a vampire getting her first drink of blood in months whenever she can slurp up another of Moore’s characteristics. She’s not here to show the skeletons in Moore’s closet. She’s here to build a version of herself that is powerful and will use other people.

    The tension surrounding everything builds and builds. It’s obvious things are going to go bad to a nail-biting degree, but where? How? Moore’s character may have a history as an abuse victim. She has a gun. Portman and Melton got close. Moore’s first son is circling. The graduation is coming. The storm is here.

    This grand build-up leads where?

    Joe’s most mature butterfly ecloses and leaves. His twins graduate high school. He’s relieved he got them to adulthood without the same extent of abuse he suffered – in that they had childhoods at all, period – and we have to cry with him.

    And we see Natalie Portman filming her flick. It’s low-budget and tacky. The grandeur collapses into a woman repeating the same seductive line in a baby-lisp to a young model. She put all this work into preparing herself for a flick that ends up with the “hottest” (??!?!?) of young boys as Joe, and she won’t move on from the seduction scene. She wants to keep doing it and redoing it, living in that moment forever of being perfectly powerful, completely powerful, and feeling zero guilt about it.

    ~

    It’s masterful to have us dragged along, enjoying such a soapy, pulpy presentation of characters by two actresses, and then exposed to Melton’s incredibly human performance. May December suggests you might also enjoy the drama these women are enjoying. Is this not fun? But then it points to him and says, “That’s the cost.” It never flinches away from the fact that our tabloid drama comes at the expense of an actual human life. The news stories, the biopics, the miniseries, the movies running for awards, the ravenous hunger artists have to make others’ trauma their gain. At the center of it all is a man whose innocence was stolen and he is not okay about it. And we don’t really get relief on that point. We don’t know he’s going to be okay later. He’s probably not.

    This director previously brought us Velvet Goldmine, and I wouldn’t have thought he could create such a masterpiece again, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t pull it off with this one.

    (image: Netflix)

  • sara reads the feed

    SRF 15: Brain rest, alloparenting, and cosmic horror

    I’ve been keeping my head down and writing a bit, which calls for supplementary activities that turn off my brain. I’m crocheting a lot. But I’m also playing more video games again because 1) fiction wears me out, 2) my wrists/hands/arms can use rest, and 3) Baldur’s Gate III is a lot of fun.

    I like storytelling games as a genre. BGIII makes me think about fantasy combat RPGs like Skyrim, sure, but it also makes me think about Crusader Kings and Dwarf Fortress, which are generative storytelling games first and foremost. The dynamic story elements in BGIII means it’s possible to play out the story in a ridiculous number of different ways. It’s more constrained than my favorites, but there’s enough leeway to echo the vibe.

    The higher level of mental rest also means fewer reviews (well, I’m still going daily, but I’d been doing 2-4 for a little while and that’s nuts) and less link spam. I know you understand, void.

    ~

    From Publisher’s Weekly: The Scholastic union reached a tentative agreement!

    ~

    NPR: Bringing up a baby can be a tough and lonely job. Here’s a solution: alloparents

    “Even the most adorable, sweet, easy babies are a ton of work,” says psychologist Kathryn Humphreys at Vanderbilt University.

    In Western societies, much of the responsibility often falls to one person. In many instances, that’s the mother, who must muster the patience and sensitivity to care for an infant. And a lot of time she’s working in isolation, says evolutionary anthropologist Gul Deniz Salali, who’s at the University College London. “I just had a baby 9 months ago, and it’s been really lonely.”

    “There are these narratives [in Western society], that mothers should just know how to look after children and be able to do it [alone],” says Chaudhary, who’s at Cambridge University.

    But human parents probably aren’t psychologically adapted for this isolation, a new study with a group of hunter-gatherers in the Congo suggests. A “mismatch” likely exists between the conditions in which humans evolved to care for babies and the situation many parents find themselves in today, says Salali, who contributed to the study.

    Together with a handful of previous studies, this new one suggests that for the vast majority of human history, mothers had a huge amount of help caring for infants – and even a lot of support with toddlers as well.

    My kids are being raised by 3+ parents. Three of us live in the house, anyway; they’re also really close with my husband’s parents. The third in-house parent is sibling Rory, who moved in full-time when Little Sunshine was embryonic, and is our agendered tertiary parental unit.

    Any human has a right to a full life, and I think that includes Moms of Younger Children. I often benefited from Agendered Tertiary Parental Unit in my twenties, when I needed to do some hot bitch 20-something stuff, because losing agency in pregnancy and breastfeeding made me totally snap. Call it postpartum, call it fomo on the young people experience, call it enjoying the fact I suddenly had money. A support system meant I got to be there for my kids a *lot* but I also got to run off and live my own life a *lot*.

    I have just as many memories of going out to concerts with my friends and taking vacations with my spouse as I remember long snuggly weeks chasing toddlers, and I feel really lucky for that. I couldn’t have done it without a community of alloparents, including the one I live with.

    I’m definitely not the most present mother in the world, but I’m also far from the least. Nowadays, my availability is a sine wave based on how my cognitive disabilities are going, basically. I am available every day for routine things (bedtime, making meals) and having nice chats, but I’m not the mom who is organizing playdates, structuring activities, etc. That’s really all I have and, frankly, all I want to give. I’m not interested in most traditional Mom Stuff that was expected of the parenting generation immediately before mine.

    Sunshine has said that Rory is as good as Mommy; Eldest Moonlight feels Rory is like some very special Gay Yoda who lives in the house and also adores them. I love the very special relationship I have with my kids and I love that they are lucky enough to have close special relationships with other adults who love them too.

    ~

    Here’s a bit of Variety puff about Sarah Sherman on SNL. She’s the “body horror comic.”

    I’ve been thinking about her a lot because horror hits Gen Z differently than it hit my generation – like, remember how it was dangerous to be a nerd for Boomers and Gen X, but Millennials made nerds cool? Well, Millennials were kinda uneasy with horror as a cultural movement, and Gen Z has made it their Thing. I love it.

    I am okay with Sarah Sherman. It’s actually not her gross bits that bother me, but the fact that she sometimes screams straight through other sketches, and she just doesn’t have a lot of dynamic. I personally like comedians who can do dramatic roles as well as comic ones, and it’s still too early in her career to call it. I don’t even know that’s in her interests. Maybe she’ll go in a more technical or production direction?

    ~

    Lawyers, Guns, & Money have a good read about Kissinger’s hatred for India and how he was a scummy scumbag, not a pragmatist.

    ~

    One of The Weeknd’s songs is doing that thing where it gets a belated TikTok revival (Variety). He has a lot of really good music, Die For You included, but I’m not over the general disappointment of his live concert and that hilariously bad tv show. We’re still on the outs, Mr Tesfaye. Sorry.

    ~

    Here’s a review of Bill Watterson’s new book (The New York Review of Books) which spoils it so thoroughly, you kinda don’t need to read it, but I’ve got it on order anyway. It sounds like it needs to live with my art books.

    If you recognize the name Bill Watterson but aren’t sure why, he’s the legendary elusive hermit artist responsible for Calvin & Hobbes.

    Billed by the publishers as a “fable for grown-ups,” The Mysteries is structured like a picture book, slim and square, with a sentence or two on every left-hand page and a single image on the right. The words are spare and, especially at the beginning, seem simple. The time is “long ago,” and the people live in fear of “the Mysteries” that dwell in the woods, “shrouded in mists,” unseen but apparently “everywhere.” Stories are told of them, paintings painted of the sufferings they cause, walls built to keep them out. Finally, “the desperate King” sends his knights out into the forest to hunt down these Mysteries and bring them back.

    ~

    A short read about ghostwriters behind the YA and middle grade books of my era from BookRiot.

    ~

    I wasn’t planning on reading Liz Cheney’s anything, so I appreciate this Balloon Juice overview of the bits I’d find mildly interesting.

    ~

    Ars Technica talks about an innovative geothermal power plant that is…not very far from me. Somewhere northeast ish. Like if I headed out to the farm town where I used to do corn mazes, I might trip over this power plant.

    Instead of drilling into a natural hydrothermal system, Fervo dug into rock that is completely dry and effectively created an artificial hot spring by pumping down water that returns to the surface much hotter.

    That strategy piggybacks on hydraulic fracturing techniques developed by the oil and gas industry. Fervo drilled two wells that each extended more than 7,000 feet down before turning fully horizontal. It then connected them by fracking, producing cracks in the rock that connected the two boreholes. Water enters one borehole cold and exits the other at a temperature high enough to drive turbines and generate power.

    Fervo announced that its experiment had been a success this summer after a monthlong testing period that saw temperatures at the bottom of the boreholes reach 375 degrees Fahrenheit (191 C) and enough water torrenting through the system to produce an estimated 3.5 megawatts of electricity.

    It’s cool to hear we’re trying different kinds of energy. Nevada has always been a testing ground for things whether we like it or not, and this is one I like more than usual.

    That said, using fracking to connect the shafts sounds scary to me. I don’t think it’s a rational scary? I’m not sure what the risks of fracking can be in other contexts, but I’m sure that this is creeping me out because I’m imagining some Junji Ito scenario where I get shot through these cracked rocks. The hole is mine! It was made for me!

    ~

    Deadline reports that Disney is up to the usual garbage where it takes every excuse possible to hoard money, which they especially love doing to writers. Where are the dragonslayers when you need em?

  • movie reviews

    Review: The House Bunny (2008) ****

    There is something caustic and bright and bitter and totally unhinged about 2000s comedies, especially college comedies. Every movie asks you to enter a fantasy world of its construction; comedies of this era made a fantasy where there was only Hot Girls and Ugly Girls. One type existed visibly, with value, and the other type was a makeover away from becoming the first kind, which is important. All women exist relative to their importance to heterosexual white male boners.

    The House Bunny resides firmly in a more sympathetic corner of this universe, but nonetheless the same universe, and as a femme who was unlucky enough to turn 20-years-old in 2008, it’s hard to react positively to *any* corner of it. In many ways, The House Bunny externalizes so many of the most toxic ideas that I had managed to internalize from my environment.

    It’s remarkable, then, that I could receive The House Bunny without any protective nostalgia (I hadn’t seen it before now!), and still manage to fall smitten with a whole lot of it.

    I don’t think there’s much point in talking about anyone but Anna Faris. That’s not to say that there weren’t a lot of great performances – the ensemble is stacked to a ridiculous degree, including Adam Sandler’s favorites and a few smart picks from the outside – but that Anna Faris-with-character-appropriate-fresh-lip-fillers delivers a once-in-a-lifetime performance so singular, I wonder why she never “blew up” bigger in the industry.

    The exact same screenplay would have been radically different led by anyone else, and I can’t imagine *anybody* with the combination of comic talents that Anna Faris has. Her warmth, vulnerability, and good humor are matched by a propensity for also suddenly scream-snarling and staggering away from a grate with second-degree-burns. She goes from saying everyone’s names in a monster-voice to being irresistibly sweet to cackle-shriek funny within the same sentence sometimes. I don’t understand how it’s possible to do it in a way that feels lovably authentic.

    I want this woman to be my best friend, my mom, my wife, etc.

    Also, having always seen Anna Faris in more normal contexts outside of this, like holy shit she’s so banging? Her body? Is? Ridiculous? She looks better than Playboy Bunnies do, and in fact looks better than the beauty standards of the era, which were pretty anemic. I don’t wanna get gross out loud about her physique but, just, damn. I could go on for a while. I will be going on for a while, privately.

    (What the hell is wrong with Chris Pratt?)

    I’ve never seen Emma Stone this good, either. With the excellence of Faris, nobody should be able to keep up with her, but Stone is actually a perfect foil. They’re such a good girly comic duo, more similar than different, though with wholly different results. Faris’s character is usually sexy when she lets loose because she’s a Sexy Person, but when Stone tries to sexily let loose, she’s off on a rant about mice dressed as Abraham Lincoln, and I like both of them so much.

    If I wrote paragraphs about every actress who murdered in this movie, I’d be doing a master’s thesis. Beverly D’Angelo is in the movie. BEVERLY D’ANGELO! Oh my God, I wish she would punch me in the tit. So I just wanna add that Adam Sandler’s friend Dana Goodman playing a Zeta member who is essentially a human yeti is entirely glorious.

    I love women too much not to love this movie, basically.

    I get the sense that The House Bunny wanted to love women more than the culture of 2008 did, too. Maybe this was the start of something new and better? Most tropes could have been performed more offensively, for however much that means. They veered away from homophobic representations. In fact, in The House Bunny, anything other than heterosexuality is utterly nonexistent, even for the gratification of the male gaze. (Think of how many comedies you’ve seen with excuses made up for straight girls to wrestle and/or kiss.) It’s possible they chose zero gay rep over homophobia. It’s *so* aggressively straight. Again: Zetas may be ugly, disabled, not white, or very hot but pregnant, but they may not be queer.

    The movie, my life, and society in general would have been better if Faris and Stone’s characters were capable of seeing how they helped one another become better, and if they could have had a romantic resolution together. Instead, there are two random dudes to reward the girls for their personal growth. Okay fine whatever.

    (Yes, I really do think every movie from the 00s would be better with more lesbians and trans women, and considering how brutal that decade was to live through as a girl romancing girls, I shall make no apologies for my unchecked rage.)

    The bitterest pill to swallow in retrospect is the myth of Hefner and the Playboy Bunnies, as we know everything happening there was greasy, gross, exploitative, and not nearly as fabulous as the reality show sought to portray it. You have to accept that myth to enjoy this movie because The House Bunny relies upon the idea that Anna Faris could be a pure soul because she was so loved and accepted among her hypersexual sistren at the always-partying Playboy Mansion. It’s gross. It’s all so gross.

    And yet.

    Remembering details of The House Bunny makes me want to rewatch it already, just because I don’t think I can get enough of Anna Faris in this role. Or Kat Dennings! (Lesbian coded until she becomes Lizzie Maguire coded.) Or Shooter McGavin. Or… But it’s also gross in ways that bother me personally, so I struggle to turn off enough to enjoy it. I bet I would love loved it in 2008.

    I think it would be fair to say this is a great comedy made by huge talents in an era that was a cultural wasteland for America. I don’t love revisiting my young adulthood’s pop culture, but I’m glad I did for this one specifically.

    (illustration credit: me)

  • Rory Links

    Rory’s links #2: A darker side of the moon

    Cloudy, dark day today. The Northern Hemisphere decrease in sunlight this time of year is really punishing; no wonder there are a few festivals featuring lights around now. I just wish we pushed it into January and February.


    Links

    1. World’s richest 1% pollute more than the poorest two-thirds, Oxfam says: It’s impossible to talk about climate change without talking about wealth inequality and labor exploitation:

    “The super-rich are plundering and polluting the planet to the point of destruction, leaving humanity choking on extreme heat, floods and drought,” Oxfam International’s interim executive director, Amitabh Behar, said in a news release on Monday. He called for world leaders to “end the era of extreme wealth.”

    If you want a specific example of mega-rich pollution, the Guardian has a look at private-jet emissions for 200 celebrities since the start of 2022: “Jets belonging to entertainers, CEOs, oligarchs and billionaires produce equivalent to emissions of almost 40,000 Britons”.

    2. How to Maintain Mental Hygiene as an Open Source Researcher: This guide is geared toward potential researchers looking into war crimes in Ukraine, but I think the tips have a use for everyone in unmoderated or poorly-moderated spaces online right now. Additional thoughts not in the link that I’ve seen elsewhere online: curate your feeds aggressively, invert the colors on your screen and flip images around if you need to look closely, maybe play Tetris (one study, there are probably more)?

    3. Andre 3000’s new flute album, New Blue Sun, has been making the joke rounds on social media and late-night comedy. I like the album, and I like this profile about the album and Andre 3000’s career from the New Yorker: Andre 3000 disrupts our sense of time.

    4. I’m honestly sharing this one because summarizing can help me understand a topic better: ‘What the heck is going on?’ Extremely high-energy particle detected falling to Earth. Apparently, something like a supernova isn’t strong enough to create a particle like this, which makes it strange enough, but scientists have only been able to trace it back to empty space, which makes it even stranger. (I have also now learned the specific empty space bordering the Milky Way is called the “Local Void”.)


    Videos

    (Remember, if you prefer to read over watch, you can read transcripts on YouTube! See my first link post for more.)

    1. Why Dark Side of the Moon Still Matters by Polyphonic: This is the joined-up, hour-long version of a video series Polyphonic did on the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon, which is one of my all-time favorite albums and a moving treatise on life, death, and modernity (in the ‘70s, but it still works). The video is a beautiful blend of visuals, audio snippets, lyric and musical analysis, and production review. Even if you don’t feel like watching the video, consider giving the album a spin.

    2. Three Specific Kinds of Terror by Jacob Gellar: An overview of horror as seen in the games Amnesia: The Bunker, Who’s Lila, and The Utility Room. What do you find more horrifying, how the gargantuan size of the cosmos renders choice meaningless, or having to live with the consequences of your own decisions?

    The video and comments left me most interested in Who’s Lila for two reasons. The game mechanics are largely built in unnatural facial expressions you control, and that, for better or worse, rang a bell with autistic viewers. Other commenters referenced another video essayist, Flaw Peacock, who made a 7.5+ hour analysis of the game. Whether I get to game or long summary first, I added Who’s Lila to my Steam wishlist, and the two “Similar to games you’ve played” listed are Disco Elysium and Phasmophobia. Promising!

    3. I Bought the Same Dress for $4, $30, $60, and $200 by Safiya Nygaard: An interesting look at the unchecked scam ad market on Tiktok (and although it wasn’t the video’s main focus, apparently things are similar on Instagram). Like, this isn’t (just) covering dupes of higher-end fashion design. This is hundreds of ads made from stolen videos, hundreds of fake reviews that steal pictures from Instagram and reviews from Amazon, and dozens of online shops that vanish before you can tell them they sent you the wrong product or that you never received a product at all.

    I’m not sure if the problem here is a lack of vetting or inadequate vetting. Either way, even if Tiktok and Instagram put more work into the process, things are still dire in the ad space as a whole. The video only touches on it briefly, but I was alarmed that Steve Madden (an actual company I’ve known about for decades) used a Markiplier overlay in an ad without his knowledge or consent (Safiya asked him directly). If a personality with his level of fame and clout has little recourse, what about the rest of us?

    4. You wanna see an edit where it looks like Cookie Monster is singing Tom Waits’s “God’s Away on Business”? (Trust me, you do.)

  • credit: Apple
    movie reviews

    Review: The Tragedy of MacBeth (2022) *****

    I can’t rapture over this flick without some visual aids. All images in this post are credited to Apple.~

    Storytelling is the most ancient human art; acting out those stories is presumably equally old. In such terms, Shakespeare’s stories aren’t *so* old, and we certainly have older. But the kind of story that Shakespeare tells through MacBeth is a very ancient story indeed, about hubris and power and the ability of a breathtakingly badass monster wife to make her husband dance. The play is a now-historic look at even more historic tropes.

    I’m not the only one who never gets tired of getting yet another look at these stories with the newest iteration of storytelling sensibilities. I mean, at this point, I’ve seen a lot of “new” takes on Shakespeare!

    When I grew up, the Hot Current Take on Shakespeare was emphasizing how much of it easily transposed to modern drama. 10 Things I Hate About You, She’s the Man, and even the anachronistic Shakespeare in Love all have a very particular delighted way of playing with the tropes, for instance. The Lion King gave us Hamlet for Kids. We also got dramas transposing the entire social culture of society upon street gangs in West Side Story.

    Joel Cohen, sans the Other Cohen, expressed his appreciation for this most ancient story in a fascinatingly retrocontemporary style. The Tragedy of MacBeth is as much a love letter to the golden age of cinema as it is to theater, Shakespeare’s work, and the art of acting.

    Visuals are compelling and minimalist. It looks like they filmed in a Los Angeles mansion, part brutalist concrete architecture and part Spanish colonial, but research* informed me that these were all sound stages. (*My research is “Rory told me they read it in an article.)

    Perhaps Coen wanted old world of Macbeth to look like somewhere that a king might live in modern California, transposed onto the fashionably bleak surfaces. It reminds me of Old Hollywood. If Gene Kelly had tap-danced into the technicolor universe of Oz, he probably would have originated from this black-and-white palace instead of Dorothy’s Kansas farmland.

    We never make it to Kansas. The world always feels very small, like you’re either sitting in a black box theater or Duncan was ruling from a walled enclave in the apocalypse. A snowglobe of staring trees, biting archways, and hollow hallways that hear every single whispered monologue. It starts small and it irises tight around MacBeth until he chokes.

    Rory had an interesting observation about the extremely stark cinematography in this flick: it’s a lot like the effect the cinematographer of Villeneuve’s Dune sought to get across, except mostly with sandstone faces.

    We both agree that it’s taken further, and more effective, in The Tragedy of MacBeth.

    Committed performances from some of our generations greatest actors are, of course, fantastic. Just listening to Denzel purr, chuckle, bark, and menace his way through the character arc is a treat. If this was just an audiobook of Denzel Reads MacBeth, I’d be basically just as happy. It’s impossible not to love MacBeth early in the play, fraternally affable, just as it’s impossible to feel bad for him once he loses. And my God does the man deserve to lose.

    Any of us could be swayed by the ravenous cruelty of Frances McDormand as Lady MacBeth, and we’d deserve to take the same fall that both of these characters do–literally, in her case. It’s stunning to watch her ambition build a fragile house of daggers around her husband, who is ill-suited to wear the crown, and then watch every single knife gash this woman to the bone as her house falls apart. Some actresses were just born for the role I guess. She kills.

    Though none carry the dramatic responsibility so much as these two leads, the witches portrayed by Kathryn Hunter are a deeply unsettling modern dance act, and it’s sorta crazy that Moses Ingram brought so much character to Lady MacDuff with so little time. The actor playing her kid was soooo cute and seemed to be having fun, so I couldn’t get too mad about the MacDuffs getting offed, but the performance makes it seem extra-stupid for MacDuff to leave them behind. What a MacDick. I still rooted for him against Denzel though, and that’s saying something.

    Generally, I guess, my favorite part is how well this movie really does interpret Shakespeare’s dialogue-only scripts in a way that makes the intrigue so clear. Every character feels well-understood. Their roles are defined. In the hands of Joel Cohen, an ancient story I’ve struggled to parse sometimes in the past becomes clear as Game of Thrones.

    And I don’t even need the characters to be in high school, sarcastic, and dressed fashionably to care about the story anymore. I think that means we (myself, the culture) are growing up.

    I posit there are really two ways you should watch this movie though:

    For the first time, in a normal way, paying attention, enjoying how badass the story is and how great the performances are. The spacious sound design is eerie. The beating heart-type sounds drag you into madness right with MacBeth. This is a horror movie, and it’s incredible.

    And then watch it a second time muted. No sound! Just visuals.

    Look at the rhythms of the set design. Just as spacious and eerie as the sounds. As beautiful as paintings.

    A rapture!

    I love this damn movie.