Blurbing For The Weekend: 2/9/24

Welcome to my latest attempt at a weekly info dump. While I reserve the right to use Spotify playlists to urge investigation of an artist’s catalogue, this time I won’t be attempting a running playlist to collect random tuneage over the year. The company is just too toxically wack. Instead, these posts will be a chance to write some blurbs and make some comments based on films, songs and subjects that entertained me over the previous week or so, maybe giving you ideas for how to rewardingly waste the next few days yourself. I'll be using the On Cinema-inspired movie rating scale I introduced here, in case you wanna really get what the popcorn bags mean.

Some bright people have noted that my Brilliant Taylor Swift/Madonna Career Arc Parallel Theory failed to specifically acknowledge I’m Breathless. In hindsight, I wish I’d included a paragraph about how Taylor’s relatively cagey attempts at an acting career suggest how she may well thrive where Madonna flamed out. Despite being involved with more than her share of forgettable films and flops - Valentine’s Day, The Giver, that last David O. Russell thing, Cats - none of them were Taylor Swift “vehicles.” Almost all of Madonna’s cinematic efforts could be slotted in that category, leaving the occasional ensemble role like A League Of Their Own a rare moment of humility rather than transparently ridiculous. There’s no doubt producers would leap to back Swift as Sylvia Plath in Bell Jar!: The Musical, or remake My Fair Lady with Tom Hiddleston, or remake Perfect with Chris Pratt (Team Swift, if you like these ideas, have Toodles Blank - or whatever Swift’s underling is named - call me). Despite those temptations, Swift hasn’t risked a true Hollywood Icarus moment the way Madonna did throughout the late 20th century. She’s just too canny and aware of the pitfalls. Never creating a clear corollary to playing Warren Beatty’s comic strip muse or tackling Sondheim with Mandy Patinkin is a potentially telling exception to the parallel’s rule; Taylor Swift may be smart enough to never go away. That new album title, though... Maybe not.

I didn’t really learn about “Lovecraftian” horror - the idea that there’s a world hiding behind this one, and it is nasty - until well into adulthood. While queasiness about his politics keeps me from investigating the subgenre’s namesake, I do love the basic mode in film and TV. With my Dungeons & Dragons group trying out Warhammer: Wrath & Glory (role-playing games another nerd touchstone I didn’t get into before forty), I was inspired to revisit Event Horizon, a DVD-era space thriller that Warhammer fans like to treat as a prequel.

I don’t want to say Event Horizon went "over my head" in the days of discs and late fees, but I didn’t really appreciate the amalgam of influences present. The film involves Laurence Fishburne and a crew chock full of That Guys and That Ladies, zipping off to Neptune so Dr. Sam Neill can find out what happened to the titular vessel he built, intended to revolutionize travel by ripping a hole through the space-time barrier. As you’d expect, this disrespect for the laws of physics was a bad, bad, idea, transforming the Event Horizon into H.R. Giger’s Overlook Hotel (honestly, the ship design was a little Giger from the get-go, featuring more shadows and spikes in the engine room than Scotty would ever allow). 

By mixing Lovecraftian horror with a haunted house plot and sci-fi visuals, plus hiring a cast capable of staying grounded in the absurdity, Event Horizon is exciting enough that its allusions to horror classics from Carrie to Alien to Solaris are more earned than obnoxious. Director Paul W.S. Anderson’s later films keep the entertainingly ersatz energy but lose the adult terror, arguably making this his most serious film by default. I don’t love it as much as people who idealize the millennial era of Hollywood do, but it’s still a POPCORN CLASSIC.

A more recent film about accidentally encountering unthinkable, interdimensional evil is The Empty Man, an even weirder film even more meriting of cultish enthusiasm. You might wonder why yet another flick about teens getting killed by yet another magical boogeyman would be almost two and a half hours long. The reason is that The Empty Man is actually a short film about a hiker in the Himalayas who accidentally awakens an evil spirit, a flick about teens getting killed by a local legend, and a third movie about a haunted private investigator who uncovers a doomsday cult, all leisurely cut together. Unsurprisingly, it’s also one of those thrillers where unrelenting, immortal evil is dicking around way more than necessary with the hapless humans in its path, all answers to “how?” leaving you with “why?” or vice versa. 

The real answer to both questions is that James Prior, who made behind-the-scene featurettes on David Fincher movies, got hired to adapt a graphic novel, only to mostly ignore the source material, instead indulging every grand concept and exquisite lighting design fantasy he’d acquired while watching Fincher rock. Then a weird mix of tax rebate rush, bad test scores and studio shenanigans (made by 20th Century Fox, released by Disney’s Fox mid-COVID) meant the film came out with little marketing but with more footage than the director intended. Theatrical audiences in late 2020 didn’t appreciate the bait-and-switch, but if you like to luxuriate in surreal dread and mystery on the couch, watching a formidable B-actor (James Badge Dale, crushing it) unravel behind his oft-necessary flashlight, The Empty Man is all that and Stephen Root giving one of those monologues that’s terrifying in its genial acceptance of a cold-blooded universe. Did anyone leave Newsradio unscathed? POPCORN CLASSIC.

I fell asleep near the end the first time I watched Treehouse, one of Hulu’s umpteen “Into The Dark” thrillers, and I can’t give it the title of "Popcorn Classic" on rewatch a year or two later. It’s starts out great, with Jimmi Simpson (recognizable as That Dude or Liam McPoyle) spewing charismatic wit so profusely as a celebrity chef with an adorable daughter that you know some shit is up when he visits his estranged sister at his late father’s mansion. More and more women wander into the home with subtext-heavy banter, the hints of looming karmic justice soon no longer hints. Simpson’s chef is simply unable to shut up throughout, providing a terrific display of narcissism in crisis. Unfortunately, where movies like Knock Knock and Barbarian know we’d rather see an unprincipled schmuck overpay for their crimes than not, Treehouse sadly veers towards a redemptive finale, something Simpson’s blubbering motormouth only makes more obnoxious. I’m spoiling it, as knowing what’s coming might make it less disappointing. Directed by the white dude from Psych, which was wilder before one of The Whitest Kids U Know made Barbarian. FOUR BAGS OF POPCORN.

As delightful as their setlists have been, I don’t know if I can bring myself to grab a resale ticket and see Yo La Tengo in LA this weekend. It’s not even the price of that ticket, the distance and the parking that's holding me back, so much as their choice of opener: Fred Armisen. While he can be hilarious as part of a comic ensemble (if you haven’t seen the Thin Blue Line episode of Documentary Now…do), I’d have zero desire to see Armisen perform a bunch of punk covers solo even if he didn’t have a notorious track record as a social climbing sex creep. I reserve the right to say “fuck it, they might do ‘Mushroom Cloud Of Hiss,’ let’s do this!!!” on the day of, but spending a hundred bucks and an hour on the freeway to even risk witnessing Armisen serenading the ladies with “Golden Brown”… Yeah, I can’t commit to that.

Thankfully, the Dischord Records supergroup Hammered Hulls is doing a matinee walking distance from me the next day. Oddly enough, if I don’t see YLT, Hulls will be the first cool act I’ve seen on stage since I caught Maria Bamford doing a matinee stand-up set two Super Bowl Sundays ago. I didn’t plan to be someone who only sees shows early on Super Bowl Sunday - that took single parenthood and a global failure to truly reckon with COVID - but I do appreciate the poetry.

Despite the endless, demoralizing layoffs across the music press, sites have still managed to produce memorials making sure we don’t forget what a charismatic singer/songwriter Toby Keith could be when he wasn’t making millions as a hateful boor pandering to his audience’s xenophobia and misogyny. My favorite.

Mojo Nixon recorded enough bad jokes and foul shit that it might be hypocritical to mourn him right after sticking it to people mourning the artistry of Toby Keith. But as soon as I saw the video for "Elvis Is Everywhere" as a kid (and I might have only seen it once!), I put him on my Christmas list, and my Grandma in Mill Basin was nice enough to mail this then-preteen Coloradan a copy of Root Hog Or Die she'd picked up at Sam Goody (a store that needed no fixin'). I loved it immediately, its version of "This Land Is Your Land" an epic of patriotic social liberalism I should blast every July 4th. I didn't understand what "She's Vibrator Dependent" was about until middle school, at which point it became a mixtape favorite. Just for all that, I wish his spirit well.