GOD TOLD ME TO: Anno Domini

This review is the fifth and final in a Larry Cohen retrospective commissioned by Nate Biagiotti. It'll feature some fairly necessary spoilers. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon. All other film reviews in this retrospective can be found here.

Director: Larry Cohen

Writer: Larry Cohen

Cast: Tony Lo Bianco, Deborah Raffin, Sandy Dennis, Richard Lynch

Runtime: 91 mins.

1976

The New York streets buzz with activity. Crosswalks, business suits, herds of hustling feet. Chaos regulated by rhythms of normalcy. This immense dead-eyed choreography is shattered by a gunshot that flings a biker to the pavement. Like divine retribution raining down from above, victim after victim are shot dead as the intermingling throngs erupt in panic.

An unthinkable number of bodies later, police surround the lone shooter. He is hunkered up on a water tower, clinging to a rifle that had no business killing with such accuracy. Our protagonist Peter J. Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco) rushes to the scene, informing his colleagues that he intends to talk with this man. After a nauseating climb, he engages the shooter in conversation, shares facts about his life. "We don't kill people we know, right?" The shooter gives off middle management vibes; he speaks with an alarmingly soft, high-pitched voice. What is the meaning of all the mayhem? "God told me to," he placidly informs Peter as a predatory helicopter hovers in the background. Then, in a confluence of sudden sound and jarring edit, he flings himself from the building.

IT'S ALIVE III: ISLAND OF THE ALIVE - Alive Island

This review is the fourth in a Larry Cohen retrospective commissioned by Nate Biagiotti. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon. All other film reviews in this retrospective can be found here.

Director: Larry Cohen

Writer: Larry Cohen

Cast: Michael Moriarty, Karen Black, Laurene Landon, James Dixon, Gerrit Graham, Macdonald Carey, Neal Israel, Art Lund, Ann Dane

Runtime: 95 mins.

1987

I had held a lit candle of hope that the "It's Alive" movies could be one of the great unheralded horror trilogies. The first impressed me with its psychosocial insights, and the second expanded that scope ambitiously. It's Alive III: Island of the Alive postures at a grander narrative still, yet the end result feels so small in comparison.

The film begins as its best self. A street-level birthing and maiming incident spools out into an intense courtroom scene legislating the fate of the violently defective monster babies. The wonderfully melodramatic scene culminates in a courtroom panic that incites a captive monster baby to escape its confines and menace the Honorable Judge Watson (Macdonald Carey). Bloodshed is only avoided by the intervention of the baby's father, our designated protagonist Stephen Jarvis (Michael Moriarty). This rupturous demonstration of love coupled with the threat of violence convinces the Judge to banish the little creatures to a remote island where they may become... whatever... away from society.

HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS - Somehow, Michael Returned

Other Reviews in this Holiday Tradition.

Director: Dwight H. Little

Writers: Alan B. McElroy, Dhani Lipsius, Larry Rattner, Benjamin Ruffner

Cast: Donald Pleasence, Ellie Cornell, Danielle Harris, George P. Wilbur

Runtime: 88 mins.

1988

Halloween, misshapen and immediately iconic, births the slasher subgenre. Halloween 2 attempts to provide more of the same, with limited success now that Carpenter has vacated the director's chair and indulged in some less disciplined screenwriting. Halloween 3 boldly compensates for Carpenter's total departure by striking off into the direction of anthology; the result is bizarre, and not popular enough to justify the follow-through of that vision.

Thus Halloween 4 emerges bereft of innovation. The top and only priority is a return to the watering hole. The subtitle "The Return of Michael Myers" oozes desperation, as if begging for grace from a jilted lover. Back to formula! Unfortunately, while Halloween 3 was dithering about with originality and Halloween masks melting children's heads into bugs, the formula has grown entirely stale. In all its cowardice, Halloween 4 drinks it down nonetheless.

THE SECRET OF KELLS: Manuscripture

This review was requested by Alexis Howland. Many thanks to Alexis for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Directors: Tomm Moore, Nora Twomey

Writers: Tomm Moore, Fabrice Ziolkowski

Cast: Evan McGuire, Christen Mooney, Brendan Gleeson, Mick Lally

Runtime: 75 mins.

2009

There is nothing that looks quite like The Secret of Kells, the first film in director Tomm Moore's 'Irish Folklore Trilogy.' The prologue dashes primordial shapes and storybook colors across the screen. Character models scuttle about in impossible synchronicity. Geometries natural and artificial compete for supremacy while emulating each other's designs.

What is most stunning (and indescribable) is the way the animation feels so uniquely flat. All 2D animation is flat of course, but Kells cultivates the illusion of ink dancing upon page. The young hero of the story Brendan (Evan McGuire), introduced in the midst of a literal goose chase, radiates a playfulness that extends to the screen's dimensionality. Lacking the proper words, I must show you examples.

This style is fresh, but it is not new. Brendan's quest of artistic enlightenment is based on a real Irish holy book called the Book of Kells. This illuminated manuscript enhances the Gospels with vibrant spiraling illustrations which director Moore describes as "flat, with false perspective and lots of colour." The form of the film about the formation of the book is informed by the form of the book the film is about.

MORBIUS: Mor' bius Mor' Problems

Director: Daniel Espinoza

Writers: Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless

Cast: Jared Leto, Matt Smith, Adria Arjona, Jared Harris, Tyrese Gibson, Al Madrigal

Runtime: 104 mins.

2022

It took Morbius 0.5 seconds to get on my bad side. The film begins with radiating lines in teal, purple, and black. "It's 'M' for 'Morbius,'" I said to my companions. After a further five or so seconds of 'graphics,' we pull back to see that it was indeed 'M' for 'Morbius,' with the embellishment of two vampiric fangs jutting downward. Thus begins the film's visual motif of the letter M. You know. For Morbius.

Morbius introduces the world to the great scientist Michael Morbius, inventor of artificial blood, casual denier of the Nobel prize, haver of a degenerative disease. This disease is never named in the film, which gives the oh so serious Jared Leto and his good friend Milo (Matt Smith) an opportunity to pantomime cerebral palsy with plausible deniability.

ELVIS: Heartbreak Toilet

Director: Baz Luhrmann

Writers: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner

Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Kelvin Harrison Jr., David Wenham

Runtime: 159 mins.

2022

Surprise surprise, the racial politics of Elvis are reprehensible. One can hardly expect a Hollywood film to damn him* for stealing the music of Black musicians who trailblazed Rock N' Roll without recognition, but the gall of proclaiming Elvis's innocence is made all the worse by the Black characters, actors, and extras all being treated as props. We flash back to a kinetic church revival tent so that the Black congregation can lift a besotted Elvis-child atop their shoulders. We see young adult Elvis drawn to Beale Street, eyes glimmering with wonder. B.B. King shows up just long enough to tell the rising star that he's the only one who'll be allowed to make any money off these songs, so he may as well take them. It's cynicism masquerading as community.

*The film also slickly glides over his grooming of Priscilla Presley, who was 14 when they met.

That cynicism comes to the fore in the character of Col. Tom Parker, Elvis's ultra-predatory financial manager. He is brought to life in one of Tom Hanks' worst performances (although a bad Hanks performance is still pretty good on balance). The film is quite shrewd to anchor the narrative in this old roach's perspective. An impossible needle is threaded thusly: Parker's moustache-twirling villainy becomes the root source of all exploitation, making Elvis himself an entirely passive figure. Austin Butler's portrayal is competent but anonymous; The movie must keep the King at arms' length to protect his mythos. The end result is an Elvis absolved of agency, upon which the audience may project anything they please, be it bitter resentment or starry admiration. So much for this botched opportunity to revise the Elvis legend for the 2020s.

MOONFALL: Positively Lunatic

Director: Roland Emmerich

Writers: Roland Emmerich, Harald Kloser, Spenser Cohen

Cast: Patrick Wilson, Halle Berry, John Bradley, Charlie Plummer, Wenwen Yu, Michael Peña, Carolina Bartczak, Eme Ikwuakor

Runtime: 130 mins.

2022

I've done the public service of jotting down Actual Quotations from the feature film Moonfall:

"If the moon really is what you think it is, we're gonna need a megastructurist."

"I hope the moon holds together, at least for a little while anyway."

"I got a lot of my own problems down here." "And the moon falling to Earth isn't one of them?!"

"Sonny, the moon is going to help us!"

"We scanned your consciousness. You're part of the moon now."

These are the quotations of a movie besotted with saying the stupidest shit imaginable about the moon. This is also a movie very much in love with Elon Musk, from which I'll invite you to draw your own conclusions.

NOPE: Nope Man's Sky

Director: Jordan Peele

Writer: Jordan Peele

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott, Steven Yeun, Wrenn Schmidt, Keith David

Runtime: 130 mins.

2022

Jordan Peele: Idea Man. This reputation crystallized after his premier feature Get Out, an allegory for racial trauma, microaggressions, and fetishistic performativity, complete with sci-fi thriller trappings. Peele distills the miasma of racecraft into something sharp and familiar. Peele's preternatural skill as a director is what elevates the film to iconic status. We may trot out the well-observed "I would have voted Obama for a third term" line regularly, but it's the off-kilter delivery of "no no no no no no no" and the clinking, sinking sensory nightmare of the hypnotism that we remember most deeply. Indeed, it is 'Idea Man' Peele who undermines his second film Us, a queasy, slanting audiovisual achievement that falls apart when the script butts in to explain everything with dotted Ts and crossed Is.

So, Nope. OJ Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya) inherits his father's (Keith David) horse training business after a freak accident in which loose change shrapnel falls from the sky. The family ranch has been a mainstay in Hollywood since the original motion picture: the infamous jockey, OJ's great great great grandfather, riding on a horse. OJ's sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) drops by from time to time to leverage her charisma for the good of the ranch, but they both have the sense that their legacy is slipping away from them. A series of terrifying encounters with an alien object in the clouds inspires them to grasp for legacy once more, in the form of documented extraterrestrial evidence.

RRR: !!!

Director: S.S. Rajamouli

Writers: Vijayendra Prasad, S.S. Rajamouli

Cast: N.T. Rama Rao Jr., Ram Charan, Ajay Devgn, Alia Bhatt, Olivia Morris, Shriya Saran, Ray Stevenson, Alison Doody

Runtime: 187 mins.

2022

"American movies could never."

The refrain of our viewing party. Every time a scene of physical extremity was shot with clarity and true impact. Every time an intimate moment was played with blistering sincerity. Every time our heroes worked towards uncompromising anticolonial revolt. Every time the fun was maximized, and then maximaximized.

American movies could never. Is this true? You would have to peer back a few decades in blockbuster history to a specimen like Con Air, or Speed. Mile-a-minute insanity used to be acceptable for a big budget four quadrant movie. Desirable, even. Something poisonous has happened to the blockbuster since then. The movies are risk averse. The studios are afraid. Fun must be ironic, characters must be flawless, consequence must be forestalled, the audience's indulgent power fantasy must escape intact. Although it is not true that American blockbusters never could, perhaps it is now true that they could never.

RRR isn't a blockbuster... it's a ballbuster.

A NEW LEAF: May Flowers

This review was requested by Nate Biagiotti. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

 

Director: Elaine May
Writer: Elaine May

Cast: Walter Matthau, Elaine May, Jack Weston, George Rose, James Coco, Doris Roberts

Runtime: 102 mins.

1971

Between 1949 and 1979, fourteen feature films were directed by women. That's 0.19% of all films released. Before A New Leaf, Ida Lupino was the last woman to be given a directing contract in Hollywood, and the lion's share of her work was in the early '50s. Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino, Elaine May: the only three women to be inducted into the Director's Guild of America for decades.

The irony is that May stumbled into this gig somewhat accidentally. Having found fame in an improvisational comedy duo with (soon-to-be-great filmmaker) Mike Nichols, Elaine May merely intended to adapt A New Leaf from a Jack Ritchie story and sell the script off. Her agent pulled for her to direct, for which she was paid a paltry $50,000. She resisted the studio's preference of Carol Channing for the female lead because she felt the story belonged to Walter Matthau's character and wanted the actress to 'disappear.' Instead of allowing her to select her own lead, Paramount made an ultimatum. May could star in the film if she acted for free.

A fitting backdrop for a story of slimy exploitation. Matthau plays Henry Graham, a trust fund parasite who has been blithely squandering his wealth for no reason beyond shortsightedness. It turns out being broke comes along with a neverending onslaught of unpleasantness. Graham concocts a plan to marry a wealthy woman on a brisk timetable, pay off his debts, then matter-of-factly murder her so that his lifestyle may continue. A New Leaf is a tale of the colossal effort a man will go through to maintain his behavior.

Top Ten 2021

In 2021, film limped back. Pandemic-blighted productions relearned how to bring a movie into the world. Movie theaters opened their doors one by one, except those that had been permanently shuttered. High profile releases oscillated between streaming service and big screen. The theatrical experience struggled for relevancy; the very definition of cinema shifted beneath our feet. Folks who hadn't been to the theater in a year deliberated about when it was safe enough to experience the medium in its finest form.

Yet the art perseveres, as it always does, as it ever will.

THE PRODIGAL SON: Only in Appearance

This review was requested by Arthur Robinson. Many thanks to Arthur for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon. Check out other reviews in this Martial Arts Retrospective.

Director: Sammo Hung

Writers: Sammo Hung, Barry Wong, Jing Wong

Cast: Biao Yuen, Ching-Ying Lam, Frankie Chan, Sammo Hung

Runtime: 100 mins.

1981

[Note: I watched this movie with subtitles. I peeked in at the dubbed version afterwards. I'd go so far as to say that it's so bad, it makes some of the more subtle scenes of the movie actively offensive. Sometimes it's fun to enjoy trash kung fu movie dubs, but this should be experienced in its original form if you can help it.]

Not one minute in, I had to pause the film to watch a sequence again. A camera descends into a freeze frame of a bustling restaurant. The still image then bursts into hubbub. My rewatch confirmed that the still image was actually live action: a dozen actors pack the frame, oh so still, gestures pregnant with motion. An ensemble moment of flawless craftsmanship.

Protagonist Leung Chang (Biao Yuen) is revealed with a fancy umbrella whisked away from his smirking face. He is the local kung fu street brawling legend, boasting over 300 victories. The restaurant burbles around him, including a table of stooges who mean to challenge Chang to a faceoff. They bicker amongst themselves as if deliberating which film trope to use. "Overturn a table," their leader says. "Not this table!" he is compelled to add after a henchman eagerly topples their drinks.

Already the world of the film is so rich. Director (and writer, and costar) Sammo Hung makes sure that each denizen of this restaurant is preoccupied. Whether it's how a customer eats noodles, or how they react to a brawl, every movement is distinct. Another standout blocking moment bifurcates a conversation held at another restaurant-- disembodied chopstick-holding hands pluck lobsters from the center of the frame one by one.

Hung is especially diligent at bringing small details back around. Remember the troublemaking fellows who seemed aware of their own embodied tropes? As it turns out, Chang is an unwitting fraud! His rich father has been paying off the entire village to lose. The self-aware playacting of the goons is thus doubly justified! It's like The Truman Show, but for kung fu.

Signification Overhaul

After an honorable amount of consideration, I've altered my previous rating system to be more coherent and accessible. We now follow a scale of 0-5 BLOBS. Here is what they signify:

5 - Unbridled Masterpiece

4 - Superlative

3 - Above Average

2 - Below Average

1 - Terrible

0 - Unmitigated Disaster

What does it mean to measure in BLOBS? A BLOB is malleable yet taut, singular yet infinite. You cannot pin down a BLOB, but it can pin down you. We measures movies in BLOBS because they do not fit in boxes. A BLOB is gelatinous; its center of gravity shifts. Hail the BLOB, and disrespect the BLOB, accordingly.

GOOD WILL HUNTING: Bad Won't Fishing

This review written with compliments to VideoBlobby's Twitch chat.

Director: Gus Van Sant

Writers: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck

Cast: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Robin Williams, Stellan Skarsgård, Casey Affleck, Minnie Driver

Runtime: 126 mins.

1997

The final image of Good Will Hunting is a credit lingering over an endless highway: "In memory of Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs." These defining voices of the Beat Generation died the year the film came out. The Beat Poets are stereotypically a young man's fixation, and this is a young man's movie. The Beats' writing is suffused with a palpable yearning, a lust for experience, a counterculture defiance, a tremendous and casual misogyny. Damon and Affleck continue in this tradition by smearing their hearts all over the page, messy in youthful ambition.

They tell the story of a young Bostonian janitor with a preternatural gift for mathematics, which gets discovered when he compulsively solves an unsolvable proof sitting unfinished on an MIT Math Department whiteboard. From there, Good Will (Matt Damon) is caught in a system that clashes with his every impulse as he is made ready to be an Important Math Man.

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE: Metareality Materiality

Directors: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert

Writers: Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert

Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis

Runtime: 139 mins.

2022

everything

What does meaning mean?

Around the middle of the 20th century, the gargantuan impact of modernism was being challenged, as the 'grand narratives' were seeming more and more like an emperor without clothes. Structuralist explanations of the world and its machinations began to feel oppressive, flattening human experience into molds that never quite fit. The tyranny of meaning no longer held court. God is dead, and we stragglers struggle with the plurality of perspective, the unknowability of a quasi-infinite quantum universe. Deconstruction eradicated the clichés, traditions, and beliefs that we had held dear. Everything is relative, you see, and meaning is little more than a comfortable shawl that is bittersweet to part with.

The ramifications of this movement oscillated through every aspect of culture. Here were the early rumblings of identity politics, in which our particularity gives us a unique perspective that is not to be invalidated. Here, too, was the primacy of metafiction: art that is aware of itself as art. If meaning is broken, at least we can still mess around with the frame like a child playing dress-up with glassless glasses.

SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME - With Great Power Comes Great Franchisability

Director: Jon Watts
Writers: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers

Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Jon Favreau, Jamie Foxx, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Marisa Tomei, Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, Benedict Wong, Tony Revolori, Angourie Rice, J.K. Simmons

Runtime: 148 mins.

2021

The NEW

J. J. Abrams, who has perhaps done more to influence the last decade of blockbuster cinema than anyone this side of Kevin Feige, did a particularly bad job with Star Trek: Into Darkness. That film, like this one, was the sequel of a reboot. That film, like this one, rehashes the preboot series. That film, like this one, treats the rehash like a reveal even though nobody in their right mind expected otherwise.*

*Star Trek: Into Darkness and Spider-Man: No Way Home also both feature a smug yet perturbed Benedict Cumberbatch.

There is a scene in Star Trek: Into Darkness in which the evil villain kills the father of a main character. She is grief-stricken, she weeps. Thirty seconds later, she is speedwalking down a space hallway spitting exposition. There is no evidence that she has just undergone a traumatic event, nor does her father's death impact anything in the remaining runtime. Drama is the technique of showing growth and change and choice through adversity. If something just happens in a movie and everyone forgets, we don't feel any sort of way about it. Actions hunger for consequence.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 10 - Quilting Point

This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers

Silence Lay Steadily

The finale begins with a revelation: the room behind the red door was not unattainable, after all. It is the promise of attainment. Each child spent time in the red room, each within their own personal safe space. The knockings and scrapings and hauntings were not malicious ghosts, but each other experienced through a shroud of perspectival trickery. The red room channels the power of wish fulfillment, and a space to be alone is certainly a common wish in a family of seven!

"A ghost is a wish." Trapped within their former safe space, each living Crain sibling experiences the sordid side of fantasy. The house spoonfeeds them visions of their deepest desires as it feeds. The past creeps in, and it takes a herculean effort to stay present.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 9 - Regression

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Screaming Meemies

Olivia Crain (Carla Gugino) is the only character in The Haunting of Hill House who isn't double-cast. Finally, in the penultimate episode of the series, the weight of that sinks in. Olivia does not have a Then and a Now. In a show rife with literalized metaphors, this storytelling choice is a quiet blow to our psyche.

Current day Olivia is a phantom limb. She is impossible. This is foreshadowed in the opening scene, when she holds her sleeping children close to her even after her arms grow numb. She asks her husband to leave them be, so it comes as something of a shock when he removes Luke undetected from her dead grasp.

Olivia is no dearly departed saint, nor is she entirely responsible for her own collapse. She is caught in an anxiety spiral, and anxiety breeds neurosis. Is there a word for something that you make true by worrying about it? Negative actualization? Prophecy? A psychotic break? More than anything else in the world, Olivia is afraid of, well, the world, and what the world will do when it gets hooks into her children. "I'm scared. That's all there is. I'm nothing else." This is the story of a woman who would squeeze her children to death to stop them from growing. It's not because she means them harm-- her own childhood trauma has instilled in her a powerful need to prevent them from experiencing the pain she has experienced. Pain that has been dulled by her beloved children, who are small enough to fall asleep in the crook of her elbow.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 8 - Death Drive

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Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers

Witness Marks

Hugh tells Steve about witness marks-- the evidence that repairs have been done to the inner machinations of a clock. They are "the story of the piece." If you can read the scars, you can understand the entire history of that clock. If you can't, it just looks like damage.

Steve of all people needs to hear this the most, since his defense mechanism is to take everything at face value. His avoidance impulses are titanic. He even got a secret vasectomy! Of course this torpedoed his relationship, how could it have gone any other way? But he prefers a torpedo to vulnerability. He clenches up to avoid passing on his family's sickness. "There's something wrong with our goddamn brains." He wants his blood line to die but he isn't strong enough to admit it.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 7 - Phallocentrism

This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

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Eulogy

The episode after "Two Storms" was inevitably going to scale back. You can't blame a show for peaking at the peak. We return to our 'monster of the week' format with a Dad-centric episode. In a way, we are relieved to fall back into the familiar narrative shape, and the prominence of his perspective last episode makes it feel as if we ought to get to know him better.

Can't they just talk to their Dad? Now Hugh (Timothy Hutton) approaches each of them in such a kind, open way. Stubborn, but gentle. The siblings' disgusted rebuffs of him may read as cruel from the outside, but the show is eager to contextualize. They cannot just talk to their Dad. Because he couldn't just talk to them.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 6 - Scopophilia

This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers

Two Storms

We don't want what we see-- we see what we want. Freud used the term scopophilia to describe the resolution of arbitrary data inputs into the sense of sight. We immediately pick out our crush in a crowded room, we gloss over mess despite looking straight at it, we find Waldo. You could consider it the act of deriving pleasure from what you're looking at, but really it's the opposite. Desire dictates the shape of the world.

Cinematography is gaze incarnate. An unmotivated image will feel empty no matter how nominally beautiful. When "Hill House" was first released, the mediasphere was abuzz with discussion about episode 6. No surprise there-- what Flanagan has achieved here is a technical marvel. Yet the truly impressive thing isn't that he pulled off an episode comprised of jaw-dropping continuous shots, it's that he pulled it off without sacrificing dramatic clarity. To go one step further, this particular story feels like it couldn't have been told any other way.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 5 - Memento Mori

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The Bent Neck Lady

We've seen Luke's side of the story: him and Nelly against the world. Nobody listens, nobody understands, nobody can see what they see. But at least they have each other.

Episode 5 treads similar ground to Episode 4: a spirit-sensitive twin bereft of their support system struggles to keep their head afloat in the onslaught of pain that is life. This could have felt redundant, but Flanagan and co. are wise to orient this episode around a key difference... these twins are not equally yoked. They may have been once, but the house and their history have come between them. Luke's coping mechanism leaves no room for his sister, as we see in a heartbreaking scene of Luke pathetically bullying Nelly into buying him heroin on the way to rehab. This is a betrayal of the highest order. It is also a harder and better scene than Luke's struggles with substance abuse in his own episode. Maybe it hurts more seeing addiction through the eyes of a loved one.

Best of the 2010s: Top Ten

Check out the entire series here.

Art is Revolutionary. It can entertain, explain, obtain, and remain, but the most lasting experiences come with some pain. Stories are breakages. Why break if not to build something better from the wreckage?

Electric arcs follow characters who strive. Often they strive against the flow, as when a preacher does his small part to fight climate catastrophe, or when a boy comes of age in a world that wants to erase him, or when a worker refuses to perpetuate the oppressive cycles they are born into. Art has a Revolutionary quality; this may be its most crucial quality of all.

The Haunting of Hill House ep. 4 - Compulsion

This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

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The Twin Thing

At the end of the last piece I mentioned the motif of a tertiary character telling a ghost story every episode. Oral storytelling is the preferred medium of ghost stories, after all. Specters can be inherited, and words are their DNA.

This time the story comes from a military veteran. He recalls gouging his own eyes out on an acid trip because of a charred Iranian girl whose corpse he encountered while overseas. She was all he could see. The eyelessness of the corpse he couldn't forget demanded the eyelessness of the body he cannot escape. Luke is the audience for this story, and the setting is an AA meeting. Why this particular tale from this particular person? The symbolism doubles up when child Luke explains the way he protects his family with little green army men. You have to count them out, a lot, and you have to keep doing it, and you have to believe it will work. Adult Luke is like a disabled veteran, cast off by society, whose PTSD and abandonment issues result in debilitating drug use.

Much like the teller of the ghost story, Luke's problem is that he sees too much. His follow-up problem is that nobody believes him about what he sees. When he was young he was dismissed as an innocent kid. Now that he's older he's dismissed as a cynical junkie. He just can't win.

DON'T LOOK UP: Dope Impact

Director: Adam McKay
Writers: Adam McKay, David Sirota
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande
Runtime: 138 mins.
2021

Dr. Strangelove, Sorry to Bother You, Melancholia: the much better apocalyptic satires that I was reminded of during this film. Do the Right Thing, Catch-22, First Reformed. I found solace in dwelling on the sharpness of these stories, their visual splendor, their human insights, and their gall. Don't Look Up has none of that. This is a Netflix film, which means it is algorithmically gestated to remind us of other, better movies. A thin veneer of style stretched over a boomer facebook screed about how kids are too much in their phones to Get Out the Vote. This is not satire, it is a lecture.

For this is a movie about the Bang at the end of the world, a massive meteor that nobody seems to want to take seriously. Our guides on this journey of misanthropy are PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio). Their quest takes us from the observatory, to the White House, to yammering daytime talk shows, to oblivion. As they try to spread the word that the Earth has six months to live, the airwaves crowd them out with news of celebrity gossip and political scandal.

This is the kind of movie that thinks the height of comedy is revealing that the president of the United States (Meryl Streep) has sexted her vagina to somebody. This is the kind of movie that still thinks jokes about diet culture are cutting edge. This is the kind of movie that interrupts televised celebrity drama with a placeholder character who intones that their phone just automatically bought that celebrity's new single, and oh would you look at that, it did it again.