Category Archives: Films

Against the Tyranny of Low-Hanging Fruit: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Emily Wilson’s ‘An Uncomplicated Man’

Posted on by under Films, Reading

I’m glad Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey exists. It’s heartening to see that a largely analog blockbuster is doing remarkably well at the box office in this age of AI slop and persistently reheated Marvel / DC franchise installments, with a welcome side-effect being that its victory lap offered Nolan a chance to weigh in on the AI-in-filmmaking debacle that made the proponents and apologists for this “glass Trojan horse” look like flailing, petty fools.

For better or for worse, when Nolan talks, people listen. And on this subject, he is thankfully very much on the side of the angels, albeit those of a flesh-and-blood variety, which I suppose makes them both less and more angelic in their composition. This is an awkward, pained metaphor that gracelessly melds the literal and the symbolic. And I think that a similar blight plagues Nolan’s take on Homer’s 3K+ year-old epic poem.

Like most of his work, it is undeniable in its architecturally awesome construction; once again pulling off that seemingly delicate balance of creating a piece of pop-spectacle that at least grasps at serious, high-minded concepts and themes. But it is ultimately a construction bereft of elasticity and charisma, with masterfully crafted disparate elements glued onto a large structure that threatens to topple under its own weight.

But this is fine. I don’t think we should attempt to shame ambition into silence during a time when entertainment of any kind is otherwise rendered utterly banal by algorhitmic repetition and dizzying, distracting and constant availability. I’ve snarkily referred to Nolan as ‘Michael Bay for pretentious normies’ in conversations with friends but when you think about it, is that really so bad? Bay is unlikely to ever accept a paycheck for Marvel, and you can tell you’re watching one of his films a couple of seconds into the experience, even if you’ve stumbled in mid-way by accident.

All of this is to say that Nolan’s take on The Odyssey is very much his own, and that I believe this is to be cautiously applauded because our pathetic times have reduced such individual acts of expression into a rarity, at least when it comes to works at such large and expensive scale that otherwise make accountants and executives so nervous as to either say no off the bat or pull the plug mid-way through the process. And classics exist to be reworked, so Nolan has every right to do his own thing with the material.

(The caveat here being that, alas, I highly doubt Karyn Kusama, Jane Schoenbrun or Celine Sciamma will ever get a shot at their own $250 mill version, with all that that implies.)

There’s certainly stuff in it that I like. The practical effects yielding brain-searing creature work: Polyphemus and Circe’s pig-trick… like both Ray Harryhausen and An American Werewolf in London, all grown up. Robert Pattinson going all-in as the eminently hissable Antinous, proving once and for all that his diet-goth-heartthrob days are very much behind him, even if he’s still playing in the mainstream arena by dint of being our current freaking Batman. That we don’t ever really see Benny Safdie as Agamemmnon because his Darth-Vader-like helmet obscures any distinguishing facial features into oblivion: a fitting design for an obstinately single-minded warrior who sacrificed his own daughter to ensure military success.


It’s something of a relief that the sum of its parts contains just so many intricately crafted bits. It means that most of us will get at least something to enjoy, and that includes the likes of yours truly, who certainly didn’t appreciate the lumbering whole all that much. Which is, really and truly, of a piece with how I’ve been experiencing Nolan’s work of late. Yes, I did see The Dark Knight in cinemas not once, not twice, but three times (in two separate countries) in the summer of 2008. But his subsequent work failed to elicit a similar electric charge. (Imagine if Heath Ledger had remained alive to serve as a returning collaborator?)

Which brings me to my critical touchstone for this whole experience – Emily Wilson’s now-infamous review of the film. Very handy for me, since I can now just shoot a link to it to whomever asks my thoughts on the matter. (Though I’m not sure whether a 4,000-plus article really does the desired trick with the necessary economy).

More than the review itself, however, it’s the online backlash to it that I found to be quite telling of where we are as a supposedly living, breathing, thinking-and-reading species.

***

I won’t quote chunks of ‘discourse’ directly here, partly because I can’t quite be arsed but also because citing such opinions in the same way you would cite a primary source just cuts to the root of the problem for me – I know it’s a done thing in legitimate critical spaces, but this is my own space with all of its particularities, and it’s not down to me to determine how legitimate it actually is – but I’ll summarise some of what I’ve heard in line with what I feel is most relevant to me right now.

And it mainly comes down to:

“Emily Wilson is being irrationally mean towards the film, almost as if she holds a personal grudge against it. Some of her comments and asides just feel like catty insults and are out of place in what should otherwise be a clinical dissection of the film as a standalone piece of art – surely that’s what film criticism is in the first place? To that point, however: let’s remember that while Wilson may be one of the most respected living translators of Homer’s work into English, she is not technically a film critic or reviewer, so for all of the authoritative bluster evident in the piece, isn’t she technically coming at all this as an upstart?”

(This is the kind of summary you would have asked your favourite LLM to churn out, here I am reminding you that even a hack such as myself managed to whip it up in less than two minutes. Believe in yourself, kids)

There’s lots to get into here, and I’m almost tempted to bullet-point my way into dissecting each side of it. But I’ll once again go for synthesis instead.

What I find baffling about this reaction is that it actually reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what film criticism can and should be at its very best. Nay, cultural criticism of all kinds. An engaging piece of writing trumps any ‘points-driven’ assessment of a work. Criticism becomes exceptional only when it exists as an engaging piece of writing, or broadcasting, in its own right. Using it as a barometer of whether you should watch something or not is not the purview of the greats in the field – and nowadays, that function has been delegated to Rotten Tomatoes anyway.

Pauline Kael hated Blade Runner (!) – I still read her and will continue to do so. Because she is an excellent stylist with fantastic verve who happens to have been focused on an area of life that I’m predominantly interested in (cinema). I don’t agree with Mark Kermode’s verdict on every single film he yaps about, but the yapping is irresistible either way. Susan Sontag certainly pulled no punches when her galaxy-brain applied itself to whatever area of cultural production was in her crosshairs at a given time, but her sharpness and precision is precisely why we continue to read her and hold her in such high esteem.

This is not about critics trolling or triggering on engaging in ‘hot takes’ for the sake of it. These are people interested in weaving an argument and contributing to the rolling tapestry of conversation and insight that the original work inspires.

Christopher Nolan undertook the massive task of adapting one of the foundational texts of world literature into a three-hour feature film. A bunch of us gave him it its full attention in a darkened room full of strangers. Our smartphones tucked away on silent. Our brains flitting from one narrative timeline to another as the many nested stories of The Odyssey unfold, ricocheting from character to location, from numinous to profane.

Whatever we made of that experience, I would suggest that we now supplement the film’s apparent mission – made as it is, in opposition to the current tendency towards attention-sapping fragmentation and ‘content’ optimization – by giving the scholars and critics a similar space in our minds.

Wilson’s review appeared in the London Review of Books; a broadsheet specialising in long-form critical reviews of primarily books but also other media, which tend to be written with an unhurried care that feels positively meditative in this day and age. There’s many others like it, of course, but we tend to forget about them in the din generated by their more social-media-friendly counterparts.

But much like Nolan’s most recent film, the fact that they still exist proves that we do not have to succumb to the tyranny of low-hanging fruit.

Hard-Won Agency: Hot Milk (Deborah Levy, 2016; Rebecca Lenkienwicz, 2025)

Posted on by under Books, Films, Life

We all begin from a place of idiocy when tackling family trauma.

This is largely because very few of us can hit the ‘pause’ button on life and explore our damage at our leisure, taking our time with our healing journey and tending to each scar with the requisite care and tenderness.

Like death, trauma is one of the few instances of the ungraspable numinous we still encounter at an alarmingly regular rate in our otherwise secularised existence; it’s slippery and hard to categorise, and you cannot pin it down and name it like Adam was instructed to do when first placed on earth.

And even though we’re popularly guided to apply a cause-and-effect template to trauma (‘I am like this because X happened to me when I was young’), the ghostly after-effects will still linger, and will not be sucked into ectoplasm boxes any time soon. So we can’t analyse. We can’t sit down to calmly pore over things. Still babes in the woods. Still dumb to what came before and what will come next.

Which is why I appreciated Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk: a wry, caustic treatment of trauma and how it seeps down into a mother-daughter relationship, zooming in particularly at a volatile time in both Rose (mother) and Sofia’s (daughter) lives, during which they arguably attempt to undertake what I’ve described above: hitting pause on life so that Rose – but only Rose – may finally heal her ailment (inability to walk) for good.

***

The mixed reception to both the novel – I get a feeling that most people viewed its Booker Prize shortlisting as a perfunctory gesture, riding on Levy’s reputation – and now Rebecca Lenkienwicz’s film adaptation is likely down to a number of factors.

Characters rendered in oblique psychological brush strokes – at times incomplete at best, insufferable at worst. A loaded narrative proposition which never tips into melodrama but offers us little by way of conventional catharsis either. The dangling promise of a queer sub-plot which in the end makes no attempt to say anything politically significant about such an arrangement…

And so on.

I do agree that the novel is somewhat slight, and that other writers would have perhaps filled out the story with a more generous well-spring of empathy towards our characters, particularly the leading female triumvirate that leads the show: Sofia, Rose and Ingrid – the enigmatic, bandana-sporting seamstress who, in the film, appears to Sofia like valkyric vision: astride a horse on the hot Spanish beach: unlikely, unpredictable and ultimately, affected to a fault and hardly the safety raft Sofia needs. But we should all learn to take work on its own terms, and the gaps that both Levy and Lenkienwicz leave out are spaces where discomfort and tension is allowed to grow.

It’s the same tension that grows mushroom-like out of the idiocy of our own thwarted attempts at understanding just what’s wrong with us.

***

Rose has been paraplegic for as long as her aspiring anthropologist daughter can remember, and when we meet them they have temporarily relocated to Almería from London to pursue a last-ditch attempt at treating this ailment for good: enlisting the costly and unconventional services of Dr Gomez, whose methods have more in common with a version of talk therapy than anything resembling a hard medical approach.

Sofia is her mother’s keeper, and has been for a long time. (Her Greek father Christos is out the picture – having flown the coop back to Athens years ago; he now has a baby daughter by his “child bride”). She is prematurely bitter as a result, and her training as an anthropologist only serves to widen the scope of her pain. Crucially, however, this default mode – the paralysing cycle of familial duty and a stalled approach to her academic development – leads to no breakthroughs.

It’s a recipe for an endlessly deferred existence; a purgatory made even more deeply manifest by their stay at the scorching Spanish seaside. Because Rose isn’t keen on solutions either – Lenkienwicz adds a ghost of trauma to keep the clock ticking there too – and finds comfort in endless deferral.

Which is where the matter of tackling trauma by employing agency gets particularly tricky.

***

The most significant coup of the film adaptation is arguably its casting. For all that Emma Mackey supposedly came in late in the day – our screening in Malta was happily accompanied by a surprise Q&A from the film’s co-producer, Christine Langan, who revealed as much – there is something inevitable to the Sex Education star flexing her dramatic muscles here: effectively, she builds on the easy charm of that show by depicting another sensitive and intellectually curious young woman in, however, a far more sombre and mercurial key.

Fiona Shaw makes for an equally obvious fit for Rose: the veteran actress knows her way around that toxic mix of haughty entitlement and whiny dependence and understands that it’s part and parcel of how she wields her power over her daughter.

And I’d be hard-pressed to imagine anyone other than the prolific and dependably luminous Vicky Krieps in the role of Ingrid. Sofia is swept along, and so are we. At least we are at first, until her accumulated deceptions – and the underbelly which animates them – chip away at the implication that she is here to create a welcome oasis of bliss for Sofia.

On this subject, I also have a bone to pick with some of the ripples emerging from the critical consensus on the film, both in mainstream publications and online commentary, namely that Ingrid is yet another example of a ‘manic pixie dream girl’ trope.

In many ways, she is. And that is precisely the point. Ingrid is clearly someone who has internalised, and weaponised, her status as something that could be construed as a real-life manic pixie. But as the story progresses, we see that crumble right before our eyes, and we follow Sofia closely on that journey of realisation.

Like Rose, Ingrid shapes her entire identity around her inability to cope with the defining traumatic incident of her life. She knows it happened and what it implies, but she’s either unable or unwilling to process it, so she gilds and embellishes a persona out of the elisions and deviations she takes to avoid confronting things head on (her being a seamstress feels apt, here).

In the middle of it all is Sofia – whose coping mechanism is neither aggressive self-pity (Rose) or promiscuous hedonism (Ingrid) but repression. In this way, she becomes the perfect bedrock on which both Rose and Ingrid can vent their fears, desires and complaints, assuming that Sofia will stick around to absorb it all.

In fact, Sofia’s troubled and troubling pursuit of agency is the true ticking clock of the narrative, and it’s a strand that resonates deeply, particularly with those among us who have been forced to become parents to their own from a young age.

***

You could say that my parents were a mix of both Rose and Ingrid. Charmingly bohemian and easy to love among the social circle they frequented, they were also inept at managing their own emotional landscapes and taking the temperature of their kids’ true needs. Ridiculously young immigrant parents going at it alone with only nominal support (and at a long distance) from the extended family, and relying on badly-managed improv and reheated cliches to ensure we somehow stayed alive.

It’s no wonder that they took any complaint as an affront. That keeping the peace was top priority. We all took pride in not shouting, even if a good row would’ve released energy that would remain suppressed, set to do poisonous damage many years down the line.

Following a stroke, my mother was left in a coma for ten years; the stroke occurred just a few months before my own father suffered his first, which he survived, only to suffer a fatal one a decade and a bit later… largely the result of unheeded medical advice and the same, Rose-adjacent refusal to comprehend that eternal passivity and dependence on others cannot be a permanent life goal.

As such, I very much identify with Sofia’s default setting: keeping the peace by keeping mum. I felt the ripples of damage her repression causes, and I sympathised with her falling for Ingrid: this is an image of who you want to be – a free spirit; ironically, in my case, the same projection of bohemian freedom modelled by my parents in life.

Watching Hot Milk in 2025, after the fallout of losing both my parents, I’m beginning to understand why I’ve always been drawn to coming-of-age stories, of which this is a finely wrought and arthouse ready reminder (none of the tropey, self-help-booky Hollywood takes on that sub-genre here). I found kindred spirits in these retreating protagonists, but also the hope of some kind of release when they finally gain the confidence to break out of the vicious cycle which defines them.

In a weird way, this is aspirational fiction for me. And Sofia’s small wins – working up the courage to steal a fish from the market; liberating a noisy neighbours’ dog from its cruel confinement atop a sun-baked rooftop – feel as they are presented: welcome irruptions of healthy transgression, the promise that you can change things around.

That agency is more than just a myth.

Divide and Conquer: Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)

Posted on by under Films

SPOILERS all the way. I’m not kidding. Consider yourself duly warned.


The vampires in Sinners do not represent white supermacy per se. At least, not in a definitive form, insofar as vampires CAN be definitive metaphors of any kind.

Because white supremacy doesn’t need supernatural gilding to appear menacing, devouring and oppressive, even in Ryan Coogler’s triumphant and moreish genre exercise – blending Jim Crow-era realism with the baroque stylings of an action-horror romp. The covert Klansmen implanted at the periphery of the film, and whose role culminates in the latter half of the third act, embody the most prosaic kind of evil imaginable. But this doesn’t make them any less of a threat. If anything, they have one advantage over the nocturnal bloodsuckers – they can roam freely over any territory both day and night, invited or otherwise.

No, the vampires here – at least their leader, Remmick (Jack O’Connell) – are simply the manifestation of yet another fallout of systemic oppression. Remmick is of Irish origin and speaks to the suppression of the magical power of his own region’s folk music by the imperialist lurch of both Christianity and the English.

And for sure, a white man wanting to assimilate and fold blues musicians into his ‘rainbow coalition’ project that would seek to upend mundane oppressions with a new vampiric world order does also speak to another layer of exploitation faced by our black protagonists.

But what’s also interesting here is that it’s Remmick who is given the role of ‘too-radical villain’ who may have “a point” but whom nobody in their right minds would follow to the end. Compare this to Coogler’s mainstream breakthrough, Black Panther. In it, we have Killmonger, played by Sinners’ own Michael B. Jordan, who responds to bigotry in kind, but whose actions ultimately have to be dialed up to an unjustifiable extreme for Marvel’s status quo to be maintained.

Sinners never allows for such a boring return to old tropes. Nobody is a saint here, for sure, barring perhaps young Sammie (Miles Caton), but only because this is something of a coming-of-age story for the musically gifted preacher’s son, whom the ordeal leaves “wiser and sadder” and allows him to gradually make a life for himself as a musician further down the line (transforming into Buddy Guy, no less in a mid-credits flash-forward sequence).

Though hardly the ‘alpha’ of the story, Sammie is the hero here because he manages to slink out of the oppressive binaries imposed by his world. He rejects his father’s pious cocoon, but he also grows out of wanting to be like his cousins – Jordan’s twins Smoke and Stack, whose return to their hometown after a stint with Capone in Chicago kicks the whole shebang into being.

But the undercurrent of sadness that we still feel envelop Sammie at the end – which Smoke warned him about, and which animates the spirit of blues either way – is, I think, down to the loss of the rhapsodic community spirit that we glimpse for a brief, glorious moment when the Twins’ project appears to be succeeding in what it’s trying to do – a sequence in which Sammie’s public debut as a musician ushers forth a wall of sound that pulls in musicians from past, present and future; a chorus which busts open the gates of perception and plucks at one of the animating chords of the universe.

But instead, we find him playing to appreciative but fragmented audiences in a cosmopolitan jazz bar in the big city.

White supremacy has allowed for neither the black community to exist and thrive in peace, much in the same way it crushed the pre-Christian Irish communities attuned to a sense of the numinous that would likely be branded heretic at the drop of a Pope’s hat.

It leaves us scrambling for scraps, and we’re often left scrambling alone.

Nosferatu (2024) – Feeding with Friends

Posted on by under Films

“It’s a real film, Jack.”

I keep thinking about this quote from Boogie Nights whenever I watch something that isn’t just fodder for streamers or yet another placeholder entry in a long-running series – be it film or TV – and which instead exists in its own moment and on its own terms, with a lived-in texture we’ve trained ourselves to be nostalgic about. The line is uttered from one pornographer to another, as they marvel – with misdirected smugness and surprise – at how a nominally more ambitious project of theirs appears to scale new heights of taste and credibility.

A similar feeling crossed my mind as I sat down to watch Robert Eggers’ much-anticipated remake of Nosferatu. You may be tempted to think that this is because I consider genre cinema in general and horror in particular to be inferior to other forms of cinematic expression, but anyone who knows me would laugh at the mere idea of me taking such a stance.

No, this is more about the way in which Nosferatu feels like a “real film” – more to the point, a tentpole blockbuster of yore – in the same way as George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road felt like a real film.

Something made with excess, and a sense of abandon and sensation (if not sensationalism) at concept stage. But which then proceeds with an evident care and love as it paints itself on the screen. Just because we’ve evolved to understand how film language works doesn’t mean we cannot thrill to witness it being made with the same tools that evoke the true effort behind the magic.

(Better writers than me have delved into the aesthetics and mechanics of how these auteurs do what they do, so I don’t really feel it’s necessary for me to delve into a granular analysis of just how they achieve that spark).

Audiences understand how a story gets from Point A to Point B, and sure – that should be good enough for you to follow the entry of the latest Star Wars or Marvel Cinematic Universe entry. But the engagement you get from those franchises has less to do with your immediate experience of the individual film or TV series in the now and more about how they can reward you with more entries in the future… and who knows? Maybe someday, one of those entries will give you the same thrill you used to get in the early thrill of Phase One, when you were young to its potential, when you believed you were actually experiencing an Event right there and then?

The irony of Nosferatu’s Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) identifying himself as little more than pure appetite, when in fact it’s Eggers’ film that likely to leave us pleasantly full, sated and satisfied, whereas its erstwhile competitors in the mainstream genre sphere peddle the wares of long-form addiction – an exercise of endless deferral that also speaks to something resembling a pyramid scheme.

Parasites, like the truest of vampires.

Here, have another franchise entry. Just sit through this one, and I promise the next one will be even better. I’ll throw in a couple of cameos for free – you recognise that obscure character in the post-credits sequence, don’t you? Good on you – don’t you enjoy that hit? Don’t you want more?

“It’s a real film, Jack,” is also an acknowledgement that maybe, now, these guys could be readying themselves to make something won’t just bump them into a bracket of respectability previously closed off to them; it could also result in the creation of something socially beneficial… a movie that could be enjoyed as a movie and not just masturbation-fodder to scratch a particular itch, an itch which remains because pornography – and individual franchise entries – exist to leave you craving more.

Of course, anyone who’s seen Boogie Nights will know that the line is poised as an ironic act of hubris. The ‘real movie’ in question is a ridiculous pastiche – what we see from the end product are mostly corny lines pitched purely for laughs. But strip away the trappings of 1970s porn industry that informs Paul Thomas Anderson’s film and you’ll find an earnest beating heart which speaks to the vulnerability of that moment of creation.

To this end, another comparison comes to mind – one that cleaves more closely to the six degrees of separation that lead us back to Eggers’ Nosferatu – is Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. Burton treats the ‘worst director of all time’ with the same compassion and empathy that Anderson reserves for the collection of lovable losers and chancers that populate Boogie Nights, and in doing so makes us feel deeply for someone attempting to make art on their own terms.

Luckily for all of us, Eggers is no Ed Wood. But if you’ll pardon a pun more gross and disgusting than anything you’ll see in Nosferatu (full-frontal Orlok included)… we miss the wood for the trees when the end result is all that we focus on.

Particularly when the well-oiled machine of the rival franchises is all about the result – slick and nicely packaged, but also endlessly deferred with the promise of future packages to come.

What is this if not the same animating force behind art generated purely by AI? And wouldn’t both Wood and Eggers – opposites on the spectrum of quality as they are – stand in direct opposition to such a homogenising machine?

***

Now, the texture that enriches the Nosferatu experience is also the kind of thing that would inspire addiction-adjacent rewatches, but I’d argue that this would be more of an act of communion, a revisitation akin to the healthy time spent with a good friend.

And I think this is what’s baked into Eggers’ process – the weirdly wholesome and probably somewhat anachronistic idea that ‘hard work pays off’; that not taking short cuts by doing all the nerdy occult/folklore research and having thousands of live rats on set will actually result in an appreciative response from the crowd you seek to court.

Of course none of these elements would work in isolation, and one of my own fallacies as a burgeoning artist was in fact the belief that churning ahead with the surface-level, craft-based elements will be what will allow me to eventually be taken seriously.

But when the mainstream morphs into an automated machine that can generate something resembling the shell of what you used to love, it is the humans in the mix who will remind you that what you love can still exist, across the same “oceans of time” that Gary Oldman waxed lyrical about in his own take on the vampire Count that served the basis for all the Orloks that followed.

Annual Batman Returns Christmas Rewatch: Stray Observations

Posted on by under Films

A kiss can be deadly if you mean it.

– My favourite movie Batmen — Burton here and Reeves’ recent outing — are the ones that display at least a glancing affinity with subcultural figures, in contrast to hectoring enforcers of the status quo. Musical choices confirm it.


– Case in point: The Batman (2022), famously, re-introduces Nirvana to Gen Z, and on top of ‘Returns’ pan-freakshow of fetishistic weirdness, let’s not forget that Bruce and Selina kiss under the mistletoe while Siouxsie and the Banshees are snuck into the playlist for the Gotham one-percenter’s schmoozy Christmas do.


– The very ’90s ‘battle of the sexes’ sub-theme just scans as quaintly adorable now.


– Yes, Burton was unfettered this time around in contrast to the 1989 original. But I dream of a world where screenwriter Daniel Waters was ALSO allowed to go full Heathers on this one. Not that I don’t cherish the crystalline nuggets of punny dialogue that do betray his indelible presence. And on that note, last but not least…


– Max Shrek absolutely, positively, has the best lines.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s hardly surprising that a beloved film you love so much and have rewatched so often leaves an indelible stamp on both sub- and conscious mind. And over the past couple of rewatches, it’s become clear to me how strong an influence this movie in particular has been in the creation of Mibdul.

In Defense of Escapism

Posted on by under Art, Books, Films, Storytelling

Following the annual horror binge of October, I tend to slip back into fantasy favourites during the subsequent months in an attempt to close off the year with something of a cosily immersive lilt; to both weather and take advantage for what passes for autumn and winter in this warm part of the world, and to plug into its wellspring of restorative nostalgia.

This often gets me thinking about the vilification of the fantasy genre — broadly speaking — as ‘escapist’, which tag tends to be loaded and, as is often the case, flung around in a dismissive and rather unreconstructed way.

The implication being that, the further we are from a cleanly mimetic representation of reality in fiction, the more ‘irresponsible’ we become in its consumption. That such a mode encourages us to forget the world as it is now, in favour of an ethereal indulgence that numbs us to our day-to-day realities and leaves us in a torpid stupor, the kind that Tennyson detailed in The Lotos-eaters.

There’s of course been endless shadings and nuancing of this argument over the years, but I believe that the core of it has remained with us — throbbing like a planetary core that has lodged itself and become essential to historical ecosytem of the discourse, much like any other ossified truism.

The Rings of Power (Amazon)

I find it to be endlessly faulty, and not just because I’m a fan of fantasy literature (and therefore don’t appreciate being characterised as some sort of head-in-the-sand naive idiot by proxy).

My issue here is far more fundamental. To put it as plainly as I can manage: it assumes that reality is a flat, clearly definable surface, and that we can posit a clean reality : fantasy binary.

The popularity of such an assumption is hardly surprising, given that it’s taken root primarily within the confines of a materialist, capitalist western society. This is a mode of living which at best compartmentalises all that is not tangibly measurable, rendering it peripheral to the day-to-day workings which make the machinery tick.

So that religious practice is tolerated, as long as it can be woven into the fabric of the day-to-day without causing too much offence (and crucially, it is called upon to occasionally prop up the agendas of certain politicians and ratify certain acts of exclusion and social inequality).

Acceptable escapism? Naked Lunch (1991) by David Cronenberg, adapted from the William S. Burroughs novel

Perhaps we accept the intangible when it relates to issues of mental health. There is, at the very least, an understanding that — medication-based psychiatric help aside — the mental realm needs tending to in ways that are suspiciously apposite to the kind of treatments and rituals we would associate with religious and/or magical practice.

But even then — the overarching practise is to simply ‘treat’ any mental health anguish in a way that’ll make it go away so that you can resume being a healthy cog that can help keep the system chugging along. We are hardly encouraged to take its wider implications — that there’s more to life than what’s in front of us — and run with it.

In the same way, fantasy is also compartmentalised, only to be richly consumed by all of us. Literature aside, its popular adaptations litter our screens and the streaming services that have latched onto them like eager barnacles. Adaptations of the works of JRR Tolkien, George RR Martin and Neil Gaiman were some of the most-watched (or at least most talked about) shows of the past year or so.

Chloë Grace Moretz in The Peripheral (Amazon)
Chloë Grace Moretz in The Peripheral (Amazon)

Even something like Amazon’s take on William Gibson’s The Peripheral — ostensibly a work of ‘hard’ neo-cyberpunk from the grandfather of that subgenre — ultimately partakes of fantasy tropes at its root: it’s a portal fantasy with virtual reality and cyborg stand-ins only superficially replacing the mechanics of magic and its adepts.

Ultimately, branding fantasy more escapist than its supposedly ‘realistic’ counterparts is bound to devolve into a fool’s errand animated into being solely by the assumptions of a category error.

Still from The Company of Wolves (1984), directed by Neil Jordan and adapted from the Angela Carter short story

If you’re reading, watching or hearing something — anything — for an extended period of time, you’re lost in that experience, and at least somewhat disconnected from the real world, by proxy. Whether this is an epic adventure quest populated by dragons, elves and goblins, or a kitchen-sink drama of an immigrant family trying to make ends meet in present-day Munich, is really beside the point.

That’s not to say that there are no distinctions to be made within the minutae of experience to be had in each, of course. But the moralistic tone that is often taken against the allegedly more ‘escapist’ of the two still betrays at least a hint of lazy thinking.

For all that the more grimily realist fiction can illuminate and raise awareness — political awareness which, it must be said, is thinner on the ground(s) of that genre’s more navel-gazing counterparts — the fantastic acts as an extension of that experience.

Let’s give voice to what’s easier to defend here, for starters. Boundary-pushing works of the fantastical — the kind you’ll find among the likes of Kafka, Angela Carter or David Cronenberg — will exaggerate and amplify with the aim of exploring loftier points. The flinty realists are largely on the side of these non-escapist works of the fantastical.

Tom Sturridge as Morpheus/Dream in the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman

But I would submit that even the most reactionary or nostalgic of fantasy works can have a purpose which isn’t simply redolent of intellectual vacuity or laziness, of a kind of distracted quietism that numbs the intellect and reduces its consumers to little more than sludge.

At the end of the day, even the knockiest of Tolkien knock-offs will be better for your mental hygiene than hours spent doomscrolling through the social media platform/s of your choice… and the degree of actual, conscious choice involved in that experience is questionable to begin with.

Because if distraction from reality is what makes fantasy such an ‘irresponsible’ intellectual pursuit, what is the doomscrolling impulse of the 24/7 news cycle, which has now emigrated beyond the relatively confined space of the television screen to also latch themselves onto our mobile phones? (Yes, Gibson and Cronenberg have been warning us of this with grotesque gusto for decades).

Haunted by this reality, I submit that anything which promotes immersion of any kind is a better and more meditative alternative.

***

Re-read of the season: The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany
Currently reading: The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson

A Vipers’ Pit | Press Coverage & Reviews

Posted on by under Films, Malta, Writing

With A Vipers’ Pit (Is-Sriep Regghu Saru Velenuzi) enjoying a healthy run at Eden Cinemas, I thought I’d compile a little guide for prospective viewers before they take a chance on our political thriller-family drama-literary adaptation.

Response has been better than anything I had every hoped for: reviews ranges from ecstatic to ecstatically disappointed, but indifference was never the least bit part of the equation. For a low-budget debut based on a beloved book which attempts to treat national wounds, it’s just the kind of response you want.

So here’s a handily collated list of some previews, interviews and even reviews that the film has already amassed so far.

*

Interviews with director-producer Martin Bonnici

Martin Bonnici. Photo by James Bianchi/MaltaToday

Times of Malta

MaltaToday interview

Eden Cinemas Interviews: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 (video)

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Cast & Crew Interviews

8.97 Bay interview with actors Chris Galea Joseph Zammit, Gianni Selvaggi and Erica Muscat and myself.

Newsbook interview with actors Joseph Zammit and Gianni Selvaggi.

LovinDaily interview with Erica Muscat (video)

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Chris Galea as Noel Sammut Petri

Reviews & Critical Essays

MaltaToday

Times of Malta

Ramona Depares

David Hudson

Virginia Monteforte (Italian / English)

Mark Vella (Maltese)

Ad Lib Talk (video)

Letterboxd

*

…aaand we’ve even made it to Malta’s ‘most serious’ news site.

The film is currently showing at Eden Cinemas. Book your tickets here.

Lifting the Lid on the Vipers’ Pit

Posted on by under Books, Films, Writing

Starting from this Friday (6 August), those of you based in Malta can watch a film I wrote at Eden Cinemas in St Julian’s.

This is the first feature film script of mine to be produced, and suffice it to say that I’m excited about how audiences are going to react to our adaptation of Is-Sriep Regghu Saru Velenuzi (literal translation: ‘The Snakes Are Venomous Again’; our translation, ‘A Vipers’ Pit’) by Alex Vella Gera, a novel whose trajectory I’ve followed from a very early stage back in 2012.

Director-producer Martin Bonnici called me up to ask if I’d be on board with adapting the novel back in late 2015, by which point the book had been established as a landmark of contemporary Maltese literature. This had partly to do with its thrilling core conceit – a group of ultra-Catholic nationalist insurgents plan the assassinaton of firebrand socialist prime minister of Malta, Dom Mintoff, in the 1980s – but also for more formal reasons.

Vella Gera’s novel is written in the bilingual register which reflects how a large part of the Maltese population speak; a linguistic schizophrenia that stands in for the binaries of social class on the island. The middle classes speak English, the working classes speak Maltese. At least, that’s the boilerplate belief, which has of course always been more nuanced on the ground than on paper. Middle-class born Noel Sammut Petri decides to break with that tradition after a move to Brussels, insisting on speaking Maltese in Maltese company.

It may seem like a small detail, but it speaks volumes. Where the English-speaking Maltese are either coded as elites or subject to gentle (and not-so-gentle) ridicule for the most part, Vella Gera chooses to depict this reality honestly, filtering some of this understandable distaste through the now liminal figure of Noel.

It’s one of the many ways in which the book resists an earnest, try-hard attempt to flaunt an idea of Malteseness that can be packaged and sold, and it’s probably the reason why it felt so refreshing to so many. Despite the attention-grabbing Mintoff plot, at its core the story is about the emotional landscape of the people trying to navigate the uncertain morass that is Malta: an infant Republic in its early segment set in the 1980s – following Noel’s father Richard as he’s pushed to serve as triggerman for the Mintoff assassination – and an EU member state at the cusp of regime change in 2012.

Vella Gera himself told me as much while we were conducting an email interview about the book prior to its publication in 20 October, 2012. Here’s a quote that didn’t make the final cut:

“I wanted to steer away from narratives dictated by the political parties. In a way, this book is a direct challenge to that bipolarism. Not that I’m propagating a “third way”, which is really conservatism by another name. However, like Noel, I too am aloof from the tug of war of local politics, so if my book were to be “unofficially boycotted” I think in a way it would be a success because it would underline that aloofness and continued lack of understanding of where I really come from

[…]

“Obviously, I have my political opinions, which to a certain extent continue to validate that aloofness, because I find very little in Maltese politics to rejoice over. I wonder who Noel would vote for. Probably [Green Party] AD, or perhaps he wouldn’t vote at all, or then again, he’d vote Labour just to spite [his property magnate friend] Roger. But I never get into these intricacies, because I find them very dull to deal with […] Personally I tried to steer away from getting too specific about anything except the gut feelings of people, which is what I’ve always felt is missing in most Maltese political fiction. That gut feeling that cannot be brushed aside or censored, or made more palatable with a joke or a witty aside, or some satirical tone.”

Despite its many changes to the source novel, I also sincerely hope that our film adaptation manages to convey a similar commitment to the complex emotional spaces the characters occupy, in favour of safely packaged assumptions, and jingoism by any other name.

Is-Sriep Regghu Saru Velenuzi (A Vipers’ Pit) will be screening at Eden Cinemas, St Julian’s, from 6 August. True to its bilingual source novel, the film will be in both Maltese and English, andcome with English subtitles. Book your tickets here.

Thursday Afternoons on the Sticky Seats (Or: I Miss Being a Film Reviewer But Not Really)

Posted on by under Films, Life, Malta, Writing

When you spend a large chunk of your adult life going to the cinema during weird lonely hours as part of your job routine, something alters about the way in which you view that space. Working as a film critic for a national newspaper since I was 18 years old – albeit the nation being the micro-island state of Malta – while being blacklisted from the local distributor critics’ screenings for… reasons, meant that I got to watch films for review with a general audience, though rarely a full house.

A Friday deadline meant that I would need to get my films in by Thursday latest – leaving me little wiggle room as new films tended to make their way into cinemas on Wednesdays.

So aside from those rare occassions in which I could convince partners and/or friends to accompany me to watch a film that’s not entirely baker-fresh but which still remains reviewable after a weekend viewing, I got to spend a lot of lonely, torpid midweek afternoons in a darkened room with only a creepy trickle of strangers for company.

Looking back, it’s kind of jarring to think just how uninterrupted an activity film reviewing was for me.

There *was* a brief respite at the peak of my university years – during which I still maintained a nominal relationship with the newspaper, slotting in bits and pieces for the cultural supplement while one of Malta’s more veteran film critics took over – but I was soon back at it, penning a review for the then much-hyped Kate Winslet-starring middlebrow Oscar-courter, The Reader while starting my MA.

(How I would have loved to delve into Winslet’s richly devastating and utterly enthralling turn as the titular Mare of Easttown in HBO’s deservedly beloved recent mini-series. Or maybe that’s not true. Maybe I’m finding a new appreciation for just leaving things be).

The only thing that could stop me, it turns out, was a murderous global pandemic. Between mandated cinema closures, the paper shortening its culture pages, and me opting for a return to full-time employment to stem the resultant economic haemorrage, reviewing films made for one unfeasible activity too many.

Last one for a while: The Invisible Man (2020). Dir: Leigh Whannel


It would be romantic to say that I miss the darkened rooms, the creak and pull of the seats, the crunch of popcorn (crushed by both tooth and boot) and the promise of the possibility of total, immersive storytelling, with the auditorium as a dark womb keeping the world at bay while beautiful lies are spun across a screen as large as six or so people and accompanied by deafening sound.

The reality is of course far more prosaic – even if you’re after that level of immersion, your fellow punters are unlikely to be as committed, and the advent of the smartphone, coupled with the tendency to view the cinema as an extension of one’s living room, are just additional punctures. I don’t think I miss anything about being a regular film reviewer.

If anything, I honestly appreciate the unwitting benefits of this covid-induced break. A treadmill implies thoughtless forward motion. Now, I can finally think about what I was doing all these years. Or rather, what the process has done to me and for me.

***

When all is said and done (though it never, of course, truly is) what film criticism gave to me was an opportunity to work on my craft as a writer. This was hardly a pre-planned process borne out of specific ambitions and career goals (I was not too young to dream, but I was certainly too young to do so in anything resembling a structured fashion).

Yes, I did love movies as far back as I could remember. Yes, I did make a habit of leafing through Empire Magazine whenever I saw it on the shelves, sometimes even buying my own copies with pocket money. Yes, I can sheepishly confess to Marilyn Manson’s autobiography being a trigger for me here, a particularly embarrassing confession given the has-been shock-rocker has now joined the ranks of the justifiably ‘cancelled’.

But at the time, he was a gateway drug into a more flamboyant universe which openly flouted the shit-steamed sauna of the boys-only secondary school I attended. I saw something in his early forays into zine culture and freelance journalism which clicked with me. That possibly taking his path could serve as a stepping stone to more fully-fledged creative work.

So sexy it hurts: The Handmaiden (2017). Dir: Park Chan-wook

Reviewing films on a weekly basis also gave me a glimpse at the inner workings behind a key truism that’s often bandied about in the general direction of so-called ’emerging’ writers: That it ‘never gets easier’, and that every subsequent project will be just as tough to think through and execute as its predecessor. But I found this truism to be both true, and not.

Certainly, it’s shocking – and hilarious – to me to think back on those early all-nighters as I desperately battled with my inner demons to churn out 800 words before deadline day. Social media as we now know it did not exist back then, so I would take to the then still-extant IMDB forums to temper my own critical insecurities by parsing through the smogasbord of public opinion: deluding myself into thinking that this is how I will get a feel for the consensus opinion so that my own review will be more far-reaching in scope… but really, I was just shit-scared to committing to my own ideas and opinions because I felt they were lackluster and inadequate.

Appreciating urban fantasy: John Wick 3 (2019). Dir: Chad Stahelski

So while the amount of required concentration and effort to execute an effective review did not diminish with time – much as I fantasised about it as some sort of romantic possibility, I never got to a stage where I could thoughtlessly churn out a review and submit it in under an hour – I did learn to quieten at least some of those demons to a whisper.

Coupled with the fact that my career path subsequently forced me to learn to juggle far more than just that one 800-word review a week – between writing other articles, curating a culture section, copy-editing commerical press releases and proofreading the entire paper, I was left with little room to be precious about *anything* – submitting one review a week over a long stretch of time meant that I learned to predict how my thoughts pan out across the process while also picking up on new tricks that would help me save time and effort.

The first of these was learning to relax into the viewing experience and doing all that I can to take it in as an audience member, not through some sort of strained ‘critical’ eye that favours a rarefied perspective.

One step at a time: first comes the viewing, then the retrospective critique. This was a crucial lesson in respecting the stages of the writing process and giving them their due. When writing a script, it’s wiser to consider the outline and treatment before jumping into the scene… in the same way, I picked up on how it’s best to just let the film unspool over you before the critical demons start puncturing through to cloud the experience. This also had to do with knowing your audience and understanding the parameters of the job.

After all, I was writing for a national newspaper, not an academic journal or a magazine that specialises in cinema, so the core purpose of my review was to give readers a full picture of what the given film is about – not just in terms of plot (and I always endeavoured to keep spoilers at a minimum) but the overall feel and tone of what they’d be experiencing if they choose to watch it.

Once I twigged to this function of my reviews, it became easier to focus on the task at hand at sentence-level, instead of worrying about how my piece will fare in some imaginary hall of fame of cuttingly perceptive analytical studies of contemporary mainstream cinema. The advent of Rotten Tomatoes and aggregator-culture in general would have plunged the knife even deeper anyway: who the hell is going to actively seek out my review when a three-second Google search will likely resolve the question of whether or not they should waste their time with any given new release? Had I let this get to me, I would be toast.

Instead, I learned to appreciate the more immediate pleasures at hand: the possibility to reverse-engineer my experience of watching a film and to assess its entrails for what’s worth cooking, what should be discarded… and what could be used to map out my own future as a writer.

***

I’m sure there’s tons more of my kindred spirits scattered around which I could find if I deigned to look hard enough, but so far the only prose works to make me feel a frisson of recognition when it comes to all this are Caitlin R. Kiernan’s short story ‘The Prayer of Ninety Cats‘, and Gemma Files’ haunting novel Experimental Film. Though Kiernan and Files can broadly be said to form part of the upper tiers of the international genre fiction community – with those works in particular mining a vein of elegantly disturbing horror – their approaches differ even in the works in question.

But there is something in both ‘Cats’ and Experimental Film that speaks to me: the idea of criticism as a starting point for keener existential immersion that goes beyond meta-ficitonal games. The idea that regularly putting films under the microscope means abandoning yourself to a labyrinth that could, by definition, go either way.

From Dafoe to Dafriend: The Florida Project (2017). Dir: Sean Baker

Looking back on it now that I am no longer in the grind and can finally afford to take a broader perspective on things… the greatest value of criticism for me lay in having to fully visualise and reverse-engineer an entire film while writing about it. It sounds like the kind of phenomenological minutae that can dovetail all-too-easily into banality. But it’s something that I think, in the end, gave me the tools I needed to help picture plot outlines and arcs for myself in a more solid and grounded manner when it came to writing my own stuff.

In many ways – and to risk banality once again – the clue is in the name: review. You are forced to run through the film once again in your head – because no, I could never spare the time or expense for an *actual* rewatch – and that does train your visualisation muscles. You begin to create a mind palace of story – reflecting somebody else’s, sure, but also adaptable to your own, eventually. It’s a retracing and remapping process, where you skim back over your memory of the film to rediscover what was notable, or to confirm or disprove and assumptions that you hold. In this way, the process is also useful to assess your own knee-jerk reactions and inbuilt prejudices.

Was that bit of dialogue really that bad? Could it have simply been functional to the story, or a reflection of the character’s state of mind at the time? Was that bravura mix of swelling soundtrack and magic-hour cinematography really great filmmaking, or does it fall apart upon reflection? But is the reflection a moot point anyway? Could it be that the reviewing process is not always the right approach to these things – that the ephemeral should be valorised as such, that its immediate experiential result is what should be placed under the microscope, and nothing else?

My favourite star war: The Last Jedi (2017). Dir: Rian Johnson

These are things I learned only gradually, and in small steps. ‘Learned’ is also too definitive – it implies a completed process: signed, sealed, delivered. It would be more accurate to say that I learned to internalise certain lessons by glancing at them and making a note of them for next time. But when the next time rolled around, I may or may not have forgotten what I was supposed to have learned. And the process starts again without the luxury of reflection, because the tickets have been bought, the voluminous Thursday afternoon seats are beckoning, and the Friday deadline is looming.

***

Film reviewing taught me to write. It could have been film reviewing, it could have been something else, but that’s what I was handed and it was a privilege in its own way. I entered in medias res – I did not start reviewing after a stint in film school (there was no such thing at the time in Malta, and there still barely is), and I only learned to pick up on film history further along the line, and in my own time. So there was no chronological development here for me – my training trenches were the early noughties releases from mainstream Hollywood, for the most part.

Truth be told, I don’t miss it terribly. Being a semi-professional opinion-haver is a thoroughly unsexy thing to be in this day and age, when social media has democratised such chatter to oblivion. (Actually, oblivion is too kind as it once again implies finality – a feverish vortex would probably make for a better fit).

But I am glad to the Hollywood behemoth for giving me a training mat on which I could jump, fall, and make a fool of myself before getting up again to fight another day. Its steely chassis will barely have registered the clinking and plinking punches from tiny Malta, so my necessary mistakes were allowed wide berth and shame was ever a stranger.

My Better Half Has Bitten Me | Revisiting Jennifer’s Body

Posted on by under Films

That Karyn Kusama and Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body (2009) is now a re-excavated post-#MeToo classic has become a bit of a trope, albeit one rooted in undeniable truths. Buzzfeed’s picked up on it two years ago, so that just about seals the mainstreamification of that take, and I’m glad it all panned out that way, don’t get me wrong.

But neither should that smoothen out its punkier bona fides. This is a film whose title and overall thematic contours are drawn from a song by Hole, after all… one that’s culled from its early-90s sophomore album Live Through This (1994), itself a solid-gold piece of early post-grunge whose inherent quality transcends any reputational iffiness that the legacy of Courtney Love carries with it. 

In many ways, I think it also course-corrects the riskily schmaltzy elements of Diablo Cody’s breakthrough, Juno (2007), by passing them through the B-movie horror lens. Yes, the film’s marketing department contributed to its initially dismal box office and critical performance by relying too much on the cheaply exploitative Megan Fox-isms; playing to the peanut gallery of horny teenage boys by presenting her demonically posessed man-eater character as something akin to Natasha Henstridge’s murderous alien seductress in 1995’s Species.

Apart from the now-documented sexism and idiocy that underpinned this entire marketing debacle, it must also be said that they missed a trick in other ways. There is certainly a schlocky exploitation element to Jennifer’s Body, but it’s informed by the same strain of subversive, tongue-in-cheek humour and cheekiness that characterises a lot of the vintage horror cinema that Cody and Kusama doubtlessly draw energy from. That its overlaid with Cody’s now-trademark crackling dialogue provides an added layer of cool, self-aware appeal, but its dark, disemboweling overtones ensure that it doesn’t slip into Juno’s sometimes grating over-cuteness. 

megan fox

Sated and well-fed: Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body (2009)

After demonic-Jennifer claims her first on-screen victim, the unfortunate teenage boy’s father responds to the police’s promises that they will do their utmost to catch the perpetrator (whom they automatically and tellingly assume to be male) with a hilarious counter-missive: “I’ll get him myself! I will! You hear me, you bastard? I’ll cut off your nutsack and nail it to my door! Like one of those lion doorknockers rich folks got! That’ll be your balls!” 

But Jennifer’s Body will also continue to survive by dint of its sneakily truthful exploration of female friendship, and problematic ‘sisterhood’ as expressed during the turbulent high school years.

jennifers-body

Don’t you know that I’m toxic? Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body (2009)

It’s rightly hailed as a feminist film, but it sugar-coats nothing, in a way that ties into its erstwhile spiritual predecessor: John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps (2000), in which this time literal sisters are forced apart when one of them succumbs to lycanthropy – a metaphor that once again plays out as the supernatural pushing already-latent hormonal angst into overdrive. (Film Geek Six Degrees of Separation Time: Ginger Snaps’ Emily Perkins has a cameo as a memorably disinterested abortion clinic clerk in Juno). 

Even prior to her demonic posession, Jennifer is a domineering, gaslighting presence for Amanda Seyfried’s aptly-monikered Needy – and it is Needy’s arc that we end up rooting for in the end, after she sheds her co-dependence on Jennifer to truly claim her full agency.

But the undeniable toxicity of their relationship does not in any way dampen the violation Jennifer suffers at the hands of the Satan-courting band Low Shoulder, who attempt to use her assumed virginity to seal a demonic pact that will secure their future success. That they get their just desserts by Needy’s hand in the end is not down to the mousy protagonist pathetically avenging ther domineering ex-friend. She does it for all womankind, not just for Jennifer’s sake. 

needy

A heroine we barely deserve: Amanda Seyfriend as Needy in Jennifer’s Body (2009)

Now it wouldn’t be entirely right to cast Jennifer’s Body as some sort of all-out gritty underground cult gem: while a lot of us agree that it was misunderstood and maltreated both from within and without upon release, it remains a sleek piece of mainstream horror top-billed by then white-hot Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried (both, let’s be frank, squeezed a bit too tightly into teenage roles that we’ll have to squint a bit to believe).

But even then, the very fact that it was produced by 20th Century Fox and given the spit-polished star treatment is likely what it led to it being shish-kebabbed on arrival, as this inevitably leads to it being catapulted into a rarified atmosphere of corporate bullshit whose baseline expectations have zero to do with memorable storytelling. Kusama and Cody did NOT play ball with this one. And thank the demonic deities for that. 

*** 

I rewatched Jennifer’s Body after a day of packing more of our flat into boxes and suitcases for an imminent move to another apartment, in the peak of summer no less. This is both a physical and emotional struggle in many ways, so a degree of rawness at the end of the day is to be expected.

It certainly made me more vulnerable  to the  layers of nostalgia that this 2009 film is now riddled with: the references to MySpace, Low Shoulder tapping into the emo craze (see also: the Fall Out Boy poster on Jennifer’s bedroom wall), Needy’s schlubby boyfriend Chip using “everyone [at that bar] has a mustache” as a pejorative. 

A lot has changed in 11 years.