I will defend the artistic and technical merits of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof while being skeptical of its themes and ideas. Death Proof is usually people’s least favourite Tarantino, with its slow first half and talky-even-for-him vibes. The fact that it was paired with Robert Rodriguez’s much more cartoonish and high-octane Planet Terror in its original release made this worse for a lot of people; going from constant scenes of zombies and violence and girls with prosthetic legs that have guns to girls talking in bars was a bit of a letdown to audiences.
As a guy who likes talking about how movies work, I loved it, and I think both it and the reaction show how to write stories. The first half – and this is not an original observation by me, but by Todd Alcott – is only loosely driven by cause-and-effect, with the characters basically floating from one place to another. The second half is about characters chasing goals, finding obstacles, getting around them, and suffering consequences that they then act upon.
I find them both compelling, but general audiences inarguably found one more fun to watch than the other. What I find fascinating about the movie is that, unlike Tarantino’s other films, it’s not a potpourri of ideas – it’s a movie with a single point and with every element geared to making that point. The first half uses cinematography, sound, music, setting, costume, and also incident and dialogue to explore the nature of women being objectified.
The first half very much leans in on the ‘male gaze’, where the female characters are lovingly objectified from the first frame (and then that’s fucked with in different amusing ways). This is where I become skeptical; this movie is about how women can and should throw off the shackles of objectification. The split structure, in which one group of women are killed by an evil stuntman serial killer whilst another group of women survives and then kills him, creates a very easy good/bad narrative.
I will be fair: there is an essence of revenge on behalf of those first women, and Tarantino simply can’t help but create sympathy with them. The details of their lives are so specific and cool; Jungle Julia has one of the coolest jobs in the world. Tarantino’s argument is that these women are deliberately allowing themselves to be objects; Julia sets up Arlene to do a lapdance for Stuntman Mike, and Arlene herself negotiates with the whining Omar who wants to make out with her.
There is a line from Kim in the second half where she remarks that she likes girly movies like Pretty In Pink as much as the girly-girls, but she also loves movies like Vanishing Point. I find this line a bit of a half-assed attempt to create nuance; for the most part, it seems like women must love masculine movies in order to survive being around men, and this feels like a secondary side effect of it arguing that women cannot and should not identify as victims. Which is where we get to the crux of my skepticism here: who the fuck asked Quentin Tarantino?
The things I like about Tarantino’s movies and the things that can rub me the wrong way – and that I know rub other people the wrong way – is his very masculine and very American arrogance. One way this is wrapped up in his movies is how he can frequently be making stories for an audience he’s not actually a part of. Inglourious Basterds works very well as a Jewish revenge narrative; interestingly, he’s noted in interviews that he saw the movie also worked as a kind of cleansing for German audiences, as if burning off their country’s Nazi past.
You can even see this early in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction – not that they’re as politically charged, of course, but his thoughts are always on the audience’s attention, and he’s working out how to lay the breadcrumbs to lead them down a path they didn’t expect but seems totally logical in retrospect. This ability to drag me along a surprising and often frightening journey is what I value in his films; I’m willing to be manipulated by him and taken on a path I’ve never seen before.
When it comes to the subject of female oppression, however… I’m not sure he knows what the fuck he’s talking about. This is a situation where I’m skeptical about myself and projecting that onto Tarantino; I know that however sympathetic I am to women being oppressed by the patriarchy, whenever I try and lock down what they’re thinking and feeling in any situation, I’m usually wrong. The big picture is pretty easy to grasp, but there are always nuances, specifics, and of course individual ego and history (theirs and mine) to try and understand.
With Death Proof in particular, there’s a scene in the second half where the women leave their girliest member behind to deal with a revolting hillbilly, with the implication that she’ll be sexually assaulted, which doesn’t match many female narratives that I’ve heard about (and also, as fellow Magpie Lauren James pointed out, doesn’t end up going anywhere). The question of what Tarantino is missing hangs over the narrative in an unpleasant way.
Surely the problem of female narratives is a problem women can solve themselves, right? The solution is to give women the money and support to get those narratives made and put into popular consciousness – and again, not only am I far from the first person to point this out, this solution is already being put into practice and has been for a few years. Women and other marginalized groups have always made movies, and those movies have even done well; the problem was overcoming systemic bias, something that has slowly been overcome with the rise of the internet and marginalized voices that can’t be shut out of mainstream perception.
That said, I think it’s a brilliant demonstration of a film-as-essay; it has narrative, but this is an element of a non-narrative aim. I’ve often said that if Death Proof had been made by some twenty-something filmmaker named Tintin Quarantino, it would be wildly loved by film nerds; to an extent, this has happened under a wave of annoyed indifference. I think the climax of film points to my mixed feelings; the central point is that women need to own their lives and not be victims, which I find is consistently neither an effective thing to say to someone who has been victimized, nor the morally correct thing. But the movie so effectively makes its point in an emotional way that it reduces me to a hysteria that I get from no other film.
“I’M THE HORNIEST MOTHERFUCKER ON THE ROAD!”
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
The Evil Dead: The Musical
Live theatre! This was a great time, despite the fact that I didn’t bother to watch the movie beforehand; it follows the plots of the first two films with a heaping of self-aware comedy (at one point, Ash notes that the demons are inconsistent, and my favourite musical number is from a character who is clearly a bit player in the actual film – he is interrupted every single time he goes to speak). It’s delightful to watch Ash slowly lose his mind until he’s basically the worst person in the show, indifferent to human life and boasting his way through things he was full of shit about. I also enjoyed the special effects, which largely consisted of offscreen actors firing fake blood from water pistols; I did not know this would be a performance where I might get wet, though it mostly missed me.
Hoping there’ll be a production here sometime, sounds fun as does Reanimator the musical.
Season of the Witch
Romero version! This was a Movie Club pick by our own John Bruni, but I had to miss the discussion, so I typed up detailed thoughts in advance:
This is a fascinating film that felt much bleaker than I expected, albeit in a way that doesn’t draw too much attention to its bleakness. But I was expecting a kind of power fantasy, with Joan seizing witchcraft as a way out of an emotionally and intellectually claustrophobic suburbia–and while it feels like that’s certainly what she wanted, I’m not convinced that it’s what she got.
This feels like a film where the counterculture is only marginally less debasing and devitalizing than the mainstream. Her most visible option for an affair is Gregg, and while he has some ideas that can challenge her and while they have chemistry–both good, and it’s apparently enough to make the sex good–he doesn’t have much empathy (obviously not towards her friend, because even though she’s an easy target, that’s a cruel prank, but also not even towards her–he won’t connect with her when she’s scared about summoning Virago). And her most visible option for female companionship, for an organized pushback against her stultifying world, is the coven … and in her initiation ritual, they really do put a leash over her head, a la her nightmare about her husband. It doesn’t feel like it’s an accident that one of the incantations we see her writing out involves BIble verses turned backwards: it’s like she can’t find anything actually new to her, just her same familiar world twisted around. There’s no escape here. (Also, nothing with having a married name, but when her marriage is so unhappy and she still uses “Joan Mitchell” to form her witch’s name, it’s notable.)
This isn’t a traditional horror movie, but it feels like sociopolitical horror all the same, and the terror is that there’s nowhere to go, no fringe that–because of sexism, because of influences, because of capitalism, etc.–hasn’t already been colonized or even created by the same forces you’re trying to escape. She can pare away parts of her life that aren’t working–ker-blam, Jack–but she has trouble adding anything new that promises to be really sustaining.
I was looking at Wikipedia, and I noticed the summary ends with Joan “smiling wryly” when people at the party at the end refer to her as Jack’s wife, but she didn’t do that in the cut I saw–her face was very (deliberately?) still. I’m interested if there are multiple cuts out there, because more enthusiasm from her at the end could have really shaped my reading of it in a different direction.
Very curious on whether or not other people think her spells worked. There’s some interesting ambiguity there, especially with the spell on Gregg–does he come to her because he’s compelled to, or because he’s already told her he’s attracted to her and open to sex, and then she calls him? Is the spell just what gives her confidence to call? It’s cool to think about it working in psychological ways–freeing her up to do certain things–but maybe also in some interesting magical but non-obvious ways, creating and then literalizing her dreams to give her the chance to shoot her husband without guilt.
Some really cool editing in this, and I think that helps immerse us in Joan’s psychology. Same with the dreams, and you can see Romero’s eye for vivid imagery here: those branches whipping back into her face, over and over again, were especially great.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
Halloween night viewing! I fully acknowledge that the original Halloween is a masterpiece and the best of the franchise, but this is my actual favorite of the franchise. The pacing is so shaggy that even I, who like an ambling film, have problems with it, but I have a blast watching Tom Atkins’s alcoholic doctor inexplicably involve himself in this murder and unravel a Halloween mask conspiracy. Often hilarious, but has some great atmosphere too. And Dan O’Herlihy is an incredible urbane villain. I want to watch a spinoff where he and Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle hang out together.
Sincerely one of my all-time favorite horror movie endings.
Ghostwatch
Also Halloween night viewing! This was robbed (robbed, I say!) on the recent Screen Drafts for female-directed horror: its “special news show” pastiche is spot-on, and it builds up the tension and dread so well. I love the local folklore feeling: these are some effective and chilling ghost stories. The call-ins are also used perfectly. And again, a banger ending–I just realized the theme of my Halloween viewing was “network decisions cause apocalyptic mass horror,” and it’s a good one. Those last lines from Parkinson (or “Parkinson,” more accurately) always give me chills.
The King of Comedy
Masterpiece. I lean towards Rupert Pupkin’s newfound fame being real–it’s a vicious satirical turn to go from one unwell individual to a whole unwell culture; this is a nation of Pupkins–but his post-release stand-up being either a fantasy or a nightmarishly condensed vision of his new life. Being introduced over and over again to thunderous applause is a kind of fantasy loop, but here it feels suffocating (shades of Peele’s TZ and “Ovation”). De Niro’s expression in those last moments is perfect: either the face of a man frantically hold on to a fantasy he can’t sustain or the face of a man experiencing a mass adoration he knows he can’t sustain either. (And if he’s not enjoying it much now, he’ll still miss it when he’s gone.) He never put the work in, and he has nothing to hold onto. Whatever’s true, he can’t see what comes next.
Heh, our movies are companion pieces to each other!
I definitely want to see The Entertainer now!
I need to watch The King of Comedy, maybe that’s next.
As was brought up in the Movie Club discussion last night, the ambiguous ending of Season of the Witch (Romero version) fits with another early-70s film, The Heartbreak Kid (1972). In both films, the last scene features a close-up on the protagonist as they cycle through feelings about what it is that they think that they’ve lost/gained. Joan is still referred to as “Jack’s wife,” the title Romero wanted for the film, which would’ve better set up the social commentary angle.
Did Joan’s spells work? It’s perhaps more significant, in the film’s riffing on ideas of belief (that are central to any system of religion), that Joan believes that they work. That we may be, at any number of times, in Joan’s headspace intensifies the psychological horror, which sheds light on some rather scary existential fears, such as the fear of being lonely, or no longer feeling attractive. Such fears were also being addressed in the second-wave feminist movement in the early-70s. And it’s certainly no accident that the depiction of feminist ideas in this film is ambiguous.
Jack’s Wife is a much more thought-provoking title! (Though I do like the song.)
Joan’s belief–and how it potentially strengthened her, giving her the courage to do things like call up Gregg and initiate the affair on her own terms–was the key part of the spell for me too. And I certainly thought a lot about second-wave feminism while watching this: maybe that it’s a second-wave work that anticipates the need for the third wave and its broader perspective?
Really appreciate this pick, and I’m sorry again about having to miss the discussion.
Lake Placid — god dammit, how hard is it to make a good killer crocodile movie? This is better than Rogue but not by a whole lot, it is actively painful to watch poor Bridget Fonda spit out David E. Kelley’s Ally-McBeal-but-a-scientician dialogue. My memories of Kelley had largely been supplanted by Futurama’s version and I forgot just how terrible his women are, brittle and flustered and huffy, like he wants to write screwball but leaves out the sinew and muscle to just have a skeleton. Awful! And the stacked cast — Fonda, Pullman, Brendan Gleeson (his attempt to not use his actual accent is the real horror here) and the great Oliver Platt, with of course Betty White on the margins — turns out to be a liability. The movie’s one big strength is some surprising gore for a mainstream pic and yet this largely goes away (Stan Winston’s croc rules though) as the movie picks off a few nobodies but leaves that main cast alone, and considering where the croc comes from this becomes really offputting — it is one thing for a person to get away with shit on their own accord but here the movie just shrugs its shoulders to keep all the top-line people alive and laughing while killing scrubs who obviously don’t merit. John Sayles would never.
World Series Game 7 — what a damn game and what a heartbreaker. Made all the worse by the detestable Will Smith hitting the winning homer, his vibes are bantam rooster bullshit and we despised him on sight, and his counterpart, the wholesome chunky Alejandro Kirk, grounding into the game-ending double play. So many missed chances, so many great moments (Guerrero both smoking a liner and snagging one, that faux-brawl with the relievers of course jogging in from the bullpen) and yet it ends in mundanity and that’s all she wrote — a certain movie from earlier this year called it.
The Simpsons — Treehouses of Horror of course, Homer3 was such a weird and unsettling thing to see live and the ending “real life” ending is still superbly animated and odd. This was also my introduction to the concept of “Tron,” the disdain of the time has clearly not been listened to. I was also young enough at the time to watch the end of Treehouse of Horror II and wonder if the show really would continue with Burns’ head attached to Homer (and Burns’ “Look at me! I’m Davy Crockett!” is an amazing thing to get on prime time TV, disgusting but in a register designed to be comprehensible to young people). Who Shot Mr. Burns Part 2 is one of the episodes that was brutalized the most in syndication, it’s great to watch the full version and see all the stuff I don’t remember as clearly (Dr. Colossus!).
Aww, I absolutely love Lake Placid, and the screwball dialogue is most of the reason (the stacked cast is most of the rest of the reason, with a bonus shout-out to it being Really Short)
I went in with high expectations (and that running time definitely helped) and was hyped after the bitten in half opener, but deflated pretty much immediately with Fonda (again, not her fault). I think that thwarted expectation put me in a sour mood but this really does lose a lot of steam in terms of rad croc kills. Besides having more interesting characters, Sayles’ Alligator also does the opposite, an OK beginning ramping up into delightful carnage at the end — the whole “we should SAVE the croc!” shit here is utter nonsense. I did like Platt and Gleeson’s grudging friendship and obviously Kelley did too but too fucking bad, kill your darlings bud.
An American Werewolf in London – Halloween night viewing, girlfriend hadn’t seen it. I always forget how weird this is for a movie generally seen as a horror classic – it’s packed with bizarre decisions and performances and the pacing is very strange (which is just a Landis thing, I think). None of that is a criticism, it’s an extremely fun movie, and I’m glad it leans into a bunch of quirks even if not all of them work for me – it’s a very strange vision of England through the eyes of an outsider, for one thing. The FX are fucking awesome, obviously.
Live Music – local music festival, mostly a good time although the general approach that the organiser seems to take with it is “bands that are too big to play at the venue he runs the rest of the year because they’ve been around for 25+ years”, which is fine up to a point but at some point I wouldn’t have minded seeing an up-and-coming band rather than one trading on past glories. Many of these musicians had been playing since the 70s and I respect that, but can’t help feeling like mixing in some younger bands might have given the event less of a… tired vibe? Anyway, I really enjoyed the all-female tribute to The Monks, scottish cult band The Yummy Fur and prog weirdos a.P.a.T.T. but struggled with the band made up of ex-members of the Fall, punk “legends” 100 Flowers (formerly and more charmingly known as the Urinals) and left before The Monochrome Set.
Woo, live music! The Urinals might have one good song but I’d have to check.
Woooooo live music! And yeah, I like a band of survivors but some balance is usually good in a situation like that.
And yeah, AAWIL is a real weird movie, it goes equally hard on humor and horror until the ending becomes all horror and a restaging of The Blues Brothers as total apocalypse, all cartoon violence replaced by extremely real violence. For a while, before he murdered people, Landis was extremely good at melding tones and using actual directorial chops to make the whiplash work, even though stylistically they’re pretty different I think Edgar Wright took a lot from this.
I have to begrudgingly hand it to the murderer, the sketches and news segments in Kentucky Fried Movie really ape the fuzz of analog television and kung-fu movie angles.
Woooooooo live music!!
Friday we watched Alien, which is very good and the kind of movie I wish I’d been able to see without knowing so much about it in advance.
I’m gonna have something longer for all the movies I’ve watched of late at some point, but I don’t really feel like writing that up and posting it until I can get here sooner than 8 hours after publication.
Most of the rest of the weekend was sports. And some TV, which of course I’m holding onto for the Thursday recaps now.
The Entertainer (1960) – A really bleak, small tragedy of the British New Wave that feels like a precedent for Follies and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, even the desperate “Look at me!” flop sweat comedy of David Brent. Jean the visiting daughter is a bit of a wet drip, and the movie doesn’t always know how to cut away, leading to scene after scene of cruelty and drunken joking, so I can’t call it a great movie. It’s a bleak film and I don’t necessarily want to watch it again. Still, Olivier as Archie Rice, this lecherous, pathetic music hall vaudevillian way past his expiration date, the great classical thespian wearing bad, goofy makeup, stripped of all vanity, will stay with me.
Kentucky Fried Movie – Speaking of trying as hard as possible with every joke – but largely succeeding! Obviously these guys are all doing a rough draft of the gag a minute style. But the deadpan full movie theater experience sketch also predicts 4DX, as does the general idea here of endless channel surfing through the trash stratum of American pop culture via the local news, Bruce Lee ripoffs (the slowest part that has also not “aged” well), porn, and Blaxploitation. Best sketches: Cleopatra Schwartz, the News segments descending into chaos, the Sex how-to, and You and Zinc Oxide. The last is incredible escalation. (“Oh my god…”)
In terms of aging well, how about the daredevil? Holy moly…
Hey, I’m in the article!
Excellent write-up of a movie that, while flawed–yeah, the bit where they trade Lee for the chance to drive the car is loathsome and seems cruel and out-of-character–is still a blast. Zoë popping up like a meerkat–“I’m okay!”–never fails to make me laugh, and the sheer brutal triumph is hilarious and engaging. I’m here for all the talking–they’re great conversations!–and Stuntman Mike is a terrific bad guy early on.
On the “women cannot and should not identify as victims” front, Pam’s death is probably especially notable. You can see her sizing up whether or not it’s safe to take a ride from Mike, factoring in that the bartender (whom she obviously knows) also knows him: he’s a guy in the community, someone also in the community knows he’s giving her a ride, etc. She’s trying to protect herself against “ordinary” kinds of danger, and she’s doing a pretty good, smart job of it. She’s foiled because Stuntman Mike isn’t a “normal,” opportunistic bad guy but a calculating, audacious, and well-prepared serial killer, and I … don’t think Tarantino sees that as her tragically meeting circumstances no one could realistically be prepared for as much as he thinks that a cooler person would’ve been prepared for it anyway?
Like, women should not have to think about these things, and if they don’t, it’s not their fault if something happens to them, but Pam is obviously thinking about them and trying to guard against them, so if there’s a lesson about not being a victim–which, like you said, is not all that useful a lesson anyway–it’s not even implemented in an achievable way. In order to win, you have to basically become capital-h Heroic and capital-c Cool, and your opponent has to get a sudden narrative downgrade in his skills and luck. Nice trick if you can do it.
But, of course, it all is capital-c Cool, and this is kind of a banger, with spectacular stunts, great dialogue, and incredibly fun performances. I would happily rewatch this whenever. (And Arlene’s dance was, well, formative, to the point that where my mom noticed I’d rewound to watch it again and got incredibly suspicious about that. Awkward.) Oh, and killer music, too.
“She’s foiled because Stuntman Mike isn’t a “normal,” opportunistic bad guy but a calculating, audacious, and well-prepared serial killer, and I … don’t think Tarantino sees that as her tragically meeting circumstances no one could realistically be prepared for as much as he thinks that a cooler person would’ve been prepared for it anyway?”
It has been a looooooooong time, but how much do our heroic quartet prepare vs. how much are they already prepared, i.e. being stunt driver Zoe Lund? I think Stuntman Mike is in some ways the protagonist here, and it’s he who runs into something he’s not prepared for. The movie’s title is an ironic comment on him, right? Because despite his arrogance, he sure ain’t.
I was thinking about it through the lens of Tristan’s idea about their fondness for Vanishing Point being a kind of protective talisman against male violence, but that’s a good point: defining Mike as the protagonist picking the wrong targets this time (as opposed to the right ones the first time, where all that matters is that they’re drunk) is an interesting slant on it. It probably makes the gender commentary better, albeit at the cost of narrative primacy.
This is why I think Tristan’s view (which I’ve heard from others) doesn’t hold water. Pam is playing it smart. Moreover, Lana Frank, who is barely even a character, also dies in the crash. Is that supposed to be a statement about her complicity in her own weakness? No, it’s just a statement about how women are victimized by men. And then (prefiguring the climax of the future Basterds and Django) we are treated to the fist-pumping revenge fantasy, which we know is not sufficient, but at least it’s something.
Oooh, bringing up Basterds and Django is good company here. Because they are also “you are not the protagonist, things are not just going to go your way” movies for their characters — Shoshanna to a certain degree in how she gets fooled by an actual movie protagonist, and especially Waltz in Django, where he is taking “heroic” actions that actually fuck things up greatly for Django himself (and Django is extremely smart about who is facing off against whom in the final showdown, people who have been seen as objects by the white guys asserting themselves as subjects). This is why I think Stuntman Mike is the protagonist of sorts here — he is a man who victimizes women and while Tarantino is in grindhouse mode I think he’s making less of a judgment of the women than of Mike, and like so many Tarantino leads Mike thinks he’s the hero and finds out he is not.
Got maybe halfway through Rich and Strange, a very early Hitchcock film about a poor (but pretty bougie) couple given the money to take a long cruise by an uncle. Things move glacially slow and the characters are not even a little engaging. The internet tells me that by the end of film, things get, shall we say, problematic. So I don’t think I am returning to this, Hitchcock or not. (It was my day for stopping in the middle. I could not get through an episode of Frasier, “The Bad Son,” where he is using his dad as a pawn to meet a retirement home director. Been a while since I encountered that level of Frasier Cringe.)
Doctor Who, “Battlefield” – Not entirely sure why I delayed watching the final season of Classic Who other than it’s the end of the era, but finally getting around to it. Though in this case, I’d seen this before, long ago before streaming and after the show dropped from public TV, when I found a VHS of it at a discount store. My memories of this are pretty fond, and why not? We get the last go round of the Brigadier, we have Jean Marsh chewing the scenery as Morgaine la Fey, we get McCoy and Aldred at the tops of the game. But dear lord, this is overstuffed. Too many plot elements, too many characters, and too little sense to a plot that involves, among other things, a Morgaine and Mordred from an alternate timeline (where a future version of the Doctor is Merlin), an UNIT unit escorting a nuclear missile, Excalibur on a spaceship, a dotty archaologist, and the Brig coming out of retirement even though a new Brigadier, Winifred Bambera, is doing a good job. Still, for all its messiness, it’s fun, with Nicolas Courtney playing well off yet another Doctor and Jean Marsh chewing scenery nicely.
The Practice, “Home Invasions”/”Infected” – The main case in both episodes is a murder case where a husband killed his wife and the only witness is their son. But during the trial, the son changes his story, and Helen is left with nothing. Desperate and worn to a frazzle, she goes after the son not for perjury but for murder. Lara Flynn Boyle is effective if not quite scintillating as a lawyer on the verge of nervous breakdown. In the first episode, there are also invasions of privacy as Lucy learned her super has hidden cameras all over her apartment and is posting vids to the Internet, and as Judge Kittleson and Jimmy discover their affair has also been posted online. This culminates in a very David E. Kelley scene of the judge making the super expose himself in open court. Once again, Kelley wants to give Kittleson sexual agency rarely seen for an older woman on TV and wants to make her agency look a bit deviant. In the latter episode, there is a lawsuit involving a woman who dies of sepsis following plastic surgery and a hospital cover-up, and I think we can say that Kelley is borrowing a plot from his doctor show, Chicago Hope. Guests include David Ogden Stiers as a judge, Lawrence Pressman as the guilty doctor, and Saul Rubinek clearly typecast as a lawyer since he was still on Frasier as Niles’s divorce lawyer.
MASH, “Soldier of the Month” – The camp faces its first outbreak of Korean Hemorrhagic Fever (known now to be caused by a hantavirus), and an order to do a “soldier of the month” contest with a trip to Tokyo as the prize is sent down to boost morale. For the most part, the fever is not played for laughs but when Frank gets it, we of course get a glimpse into his insecurities once more. Of note is Klinger in dress tans, complete with tie, since he will do anything to win that trip, even wear the right clothes. (Radar wins, and strangely comes back from Tokyo utterly sloshed.) Fun but most noteworthy for the use of the disease and for Father Mulcahy reading from a journal recording its history in Manchuria.
The point of Death Proof is extremely important and made with great, arguably too-great skill: Don’t put your leg out the passenger window of a moving car.
Probably his worst movie but I thought Planet Terror – a film seemingly designed for me and my sister when we watched it, both of us Rodriguez heads – was terrible and Death Proof at least actually fun and interesting, but the memory is also of a confusing and gross statement too. Hateful Eight got shit for misogyny, maybe not wrongfully, but it is plainly ABOUT hatred of women and other races and anyone else breathing for that matter. (Daisy is also a sadistic, murdering fuck with the best, most title-appropriate line in it’s sheer joy and hatred.)
I’ve seen one or two places where Tarantino himself has acknowledged that it’s the least of his movies and he seems to be very conscientiously trying to keep it as the floor of quality.
What Did We Play?
Pac-Man 2025 Halloween Google Doodle on Chrome
Not much time for gaming this week, but I did play a few rounds of this. It’s very well done, colorful, with interesting boards, and with great seasonal vibes. Pac-Man is pretty much perfect as it is, so all you need is a few twists on the boards to make it feel fresh and have a good time, and that’s exactly what this is.
Dragon Quest I, 2D Remake
I was a little resistant to buying this when the I-II remake came out on Thursday, having played the original Dragon Warrior (and I think even the mobile remake many years ago) so many times. But then after a few drinks I decided to treat myself, and here we are. Turns out, the game is vastly expanded and reimagined from the original– the basic outline of the game, the story, structure, and world, are the same, but the actual gameplay has been significantly expanded with more quests along the way, a much bigger array of equipment and powers, etc. It’s actually been pretty great if you want something that’s got the kind of simpler throwback turn-based JRPG gameplay, but still has enough fresh and new to experience to be worth the money.
I reject this reading in the most strenuous possible terms! I do not think that there is meant to be, nor is there, this bifurcation in the moral scheme of the two groups of women. It just happens to be that Kim is a better driver than Stuntman Mike. But theat group talks about boys and parties and being fucked up just like Julia and her friends do. But Mike catches them on a different day. I don’t think QT is meant to be hectoring women about how to deal with negative male attention. It’s strictly a revenge fantasy.
Also my wife once sold Tracie Thoms a couch.
Year of the Month update!
This November, you can write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al from 2018!
Nov. 7th: Gillian Nelson: A Wrinkle in Time
Nov. 9th: Cori Domschot: Book Club
Nov. 10th: Bridgett Taylor: Aquaman
Nov. 12th: Ben Hohenstatt: Bark Your Head Off, Dog
Nov. 14th: Gillian Nelson: Christopher Robin/Mary Poppins Returns
Nov. 21st: Gillian Nelson: Ralph Breaks the Internet
Nov. 28th: Gillian Nelson: Legend of the Three Caballeros
And in December, we’ll be taking pitches on anything from 1948, like these movies, albums, and books.
Dec. 20th: Lauren James: The Lottery