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Penny Dreadful, and a Blade of Grass

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Penny Dreadful, that glorious bastion of subtext-made-text, ended this past weekend, bringing a three-season fascination with Vanessa Ives to a close. The series finale was…a disappointment. I wrote about the problems with this arc in a piece at Salon, so we don’t need to rehash all of it here, but I do want to dig into a few specifics. We’ll start with this picture of The Big Moment, because it gets to the heart of my ambivalence. Is that a stunning, Gothic moment? Hell yes it is, look at that shit. When Ethan lifts her corpse and carries her out of there he’s going to have to keep kicking her fifteen-foot Virgin Queen of Hell train out of the way with his foot, it’s that Gothic. Is that where this season’s narrative was leading us? Oh, it sure was not. I will say this as often as I need to say it, since there’s some weird pushback in the Salon comments that I’m just mad because I didn’t want a downer ending: while there is… Read more »

Nonfiction Catch-up Post: One Wedding and Nine Funerals

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There has never been a fictional wedding/funeral ratio more to my tastes, has there? The wedding happened on BATES MOTEL, which I covered for AV Club; you could not have picked a better week for me to drop in on a show than the week two characters with a deeply repressed slow burn have to marry each other for plot reasons and then trip over their feelings for the next forty minutes. Naturally, I talked about tragedy the entire time. One of the great hooks of tragedy is watching people struggle after it’s too late. Bates Motel is a veritable playground of it—this is a version of the story whose earliest minutes turned out to be evidence Norman’s doomed, and it’s never stopped seeking out impossible things for its characters to rail against. This pall of predestination falls across the series’ of humor (sometimes balancing pathos on a knife’s edge of camp), across its noirish season arcs, and darkest of all across the house on the hill….This show is a tragedy; we know just how… Read more »

A Belated Nonfiction Catch-up Post

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How belated? Well, I hope you’re following me on Twitter if you want news, that’s all I can say for myself; the first thing on this list is from January 5. (I tried to alert everyone to the live-action drinking game that is the Shannara Chronicles.) I’ve been keeping more regular tabs on Reign, which has vacillated wildly between being sort of dreadful and being camp glory, with no real internal logic as to how any given episode reaches either one of those goalposts. (Example: Did it actually kill Francis? It sure did! Twice!) Season highlight so far is probably “Our Undoing”, which decides to take the usual Reign strategy of doing fifty things and just does them harder, and it all works out beautifully. Costume post forthcoming, though honestly at this point I am actually so used to the visual vocabulary of the clothes that I only get angry when one person is in pointedly period wear and everyone else gets Marchesa. I’ve had a more fraught relationship with Elementary, which continues its post-season-one… Read more »

Stuff I’ve Badmouthed Recently

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Well, only sort of. But I realized the last thing I posted here was the Catwoman announcement, and not any of my nonfiction work directly before or since. Obviously I’m still stoked about Catwoman, but I didn’t realize how much time’s gotten away from me in the last few weeks. Yikes. (I don’t think I ever even mentioned how much I enjoyed Snowpiercer! Though the linked piece is more about the function of a particular image than the entire film, which I thought was a marvelously unsubtle parable that worked beautifully in its details and in the sheer variety of tones it took, so that you’re unsettled not so much by the trappings of the world but by the fact that the journey through the train often juxtaposes wrenching horror with grimly gleeful comedy. For a movie as direct as this is, the variety of tones offers some interesting latitude for the viewer to determine what it’s trying to say. Luckily that’s rolling out on VOD in the very near future, so if you just… Read more »

Belle

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It was a good week for movies over at Philadelphia Weekly! I enjoyed both the claustrophobic character study of Locke and the 18th-century period piece Belle, which is otherwise so good about addressing its various long-simmering tensions that it felt like overkill whenever someone gives a heartfelt speech nearly drowned out by the orchestra. (That happened several times.) Still, it’s a solid movie. The main cast is great, to nobody’s surprise, and the supporting cast nearly as good: I’m beginning to really enjoy Tom Felton’s tour of the Aw Jeez Dudes of History. It has the period-piece romantic mainstays I love (they’re standing so close! Extended eye contact! GASP) and does a really good job negotiating tensions within a family that isn’t afraid to call out an otherwise sympathetic character when they need it. And though the speeches can seem pitched to the cheap seats, in the particulars the movie does very well deconstructing the past to illuminate the present. Its very gorgeousness takes on a layer of meaning. The shot above was one of… Read more »

B-movies/Byzantium

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This week, I had the opportunity to write an editorial essay for Clarkesworld that was meant to be something of a personal take on my approach to movie reviewing, with an undercurrent of, “Because sometimes you like bad movies a lot and you should probably explain that.” I ended up writing a love letter to the wide swath of things that get classified, could be classified, and want to be classified as B-movies, because damn, there is a lot going on under that umbrella. “My Own Private B-Movie” is up now! (And no disrespect to The Warriors, but someday I will write about Streets of Fire, because it deserves something all its own.) And it is super timely, because this weekend I saw Byzantium. Obviously, Neil Jordan is no stranger to bloodsuckers; he directed Interview with the Vampire, which has become the unexpected but indisputable model for urban vampire films in the nearly two decades since its release. The unabashedly over-the-top adaptation of Anne Rice’s already over-the-top novel about a dysfunctional vampire family walked a… Read more »
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