I watched 6 movies last week:

• A Touch of Zen is a lush and beautifully shot movie, full of fantastic stunts and wirework.
• To Be or Not to Be is such a clever and well-constructed satire, walking such a fine line between pathos and laugh-out-loud jokes, with a phenomenal performance by Jack Benny.
• I think I can safely say I have never seen a movie quite like The Color of Pomegranates before. This is not a narrative so much as a collection of images—vivid, striking, and strange.

• There is a lot to appreciate about The Brave Little Toaster, but there’s also a lot to reveal how much feature animation changed just two years later with Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Not everything here works, or works well together, and while the movie is certainly a gem, it’s a very rough one.
• I don’t know that I necessarily wanted a longer movie from The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but I absolutely wanted a lot of the character beats, conflict, and plot that was obviously excised to hit its current run time. There’s a lot to like here, from the retro-futuristic set design to the cast themselves, but there’s a lot more than feels underbaked and not given enough room to breathe.
• Sister Midnight isn’t the movie I expected it to be, and that’s in no way the movie’s fault, but I’m not entirely sure it’s successful as the movie it finally decides to be. Still, I can’t fault the movie for not making bold choices, and it’s largely held together by Radhika Apte’s strong performance.

I also re-watched Trilogy of Terror, which I think succeeds largely on the strength of Karen Black’s different performances. While I agree that “Zuni fetish doll” of the final sequence likely would have freaked me out if I’d seen it on 1975 television, none of the movie’s stories, including that third one, are especially well developed. There are some fun twists, some more telegraphed than others, but the whole thing is mostly just slightly above average for a TV movie of the week.

Here’s my February music playlist:

I read 6 books in February:

• Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves
• Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green
• You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson
• What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher
• Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
• Absolute Batman Vol 2: Abomination by Scott Snyder et al.

I read 32 short stories in January. These were my favorites:

• “A Brief Public Announcement” by Eli Brown (Lightspeed)
• “Jennifer’s Daughter” by Sara S. Messenger (Nightmare)
• “The Aquarium for Lost Souls” by Natasha King (Strange Horizons)
• “Medusa’s Ship, or The Thing About Bodies” by Natalia Theodoridou (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
• “The Matriarchs” by Malena Salazar Maciá (Fantasy)
• “Your Hold Is Ready” by Laura Duerr (Cast of Wonders)
• “Doppel Doppel Gang Gang” by Phoenix Alexander (Baffling Magazine)
• “Death Echoes Overlapping” by Megan Chee (Lightspeed)
• “Doctors HATE Her!! Local Woman Is NOT Cursed” by Bree Wernicke (Bourbon Penn)
• “The Spew” by Jeffrey Ford (Reactor)
• “The Things We Bury in Each Other” by Timothy Ngome (FIYAH)

Well, last week’s entry was only what I’d call a very modest success. Here are all ten songs, those guessed and un-guessed:

Let’s try this again. The rules are simple: below are 10 random lyrics. Guess the song and artist in the comments if you know them. Don’t cheat by looking them up.

1. “Well, I don’t want no Abba Zabba, don’t want no Almond Joy”
   “Chocolate Jesus” by Tom Waits, guessed by Glen
2. “You gotta be like Bush and take preemptive strikes”
3. “He laughed at accidental sirens that broke the evening gloom”
4. “Hail to your vast hegemony”
5. “If the sky was synthesized you’d probably know”
6. “Whistle past the graveyard, even the dead deserve a song”
7. “Our love got fractured in the echo and sway”
   “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” by Elvis Costello, guessed by Glen
8. “I notice what matters”
9. “There’ll be no strings to bind your hands”
   “Angel of the Morning” by the Pretenders, guessed by Bill
10. “This baby’s bored and here’s your warning sign”

Good luck!

I watched just four movies last week:

• Contemporary reviews of The Outfit largely seem to agree that the movie doesn’t do anything especially new, but they seem divided on whether or not that’s a bad thing. Roger Ebert, for one, acknowledged “the same things are always happening in action movies,” but he argued that “the people in this movie are uncommonly interesting.” I think there are good performances here, particularly from Duvall, and some nicely observed detail. I’m just not entirely convinced it’s enough to elevate what’s otherwise a very pedestrian story, much less uncommonly so.
• Blue Moon is a lot, but largely because you get the sense that Lorenz Hart himself was a lot. Ethan Hawke plays him, in a terrific performance, as a man almost terrified of ever shutting up, of not having some opinion on which to hold court, of being left behind and devoured by his own worst impulses and fears. It’s a moment in time of a sad life cut short by the man’s own excesses, observed with great humor and kindness.
• Mr. Vampire II has its ramshackle charms, but holy hell did I like it a lot less than the first movie in the series. Not really a sequel, despite several actors reappearing as different characters in the modern day, it’s more properly three very loosely connected movies. Two of them are basically well-staged but very repetitive and over-extended fight scenes, while the other is a kid-friendly but underbaked E.T. knockoff, of the sort the 1980s were lousy with. Like the first film, this leans heavily into the silly humor—it’s just never nearly as funny.
• Eternity is sweet and funny but a little unfocused. Its vision of a bureaucratic afterlife is quirky but not exactly novel, and the movie might have been more successful if it had focused just one character’s journey. Still, it sets up an interesting conflict, and has both very endearing performances and its heart in the right place.

I also rewatched a couple of movies. First was David Cronenberg’s Shivers, which I would probably classify as creepily interesting more than good, similar to a lot of very early Cronenberg. Second was The Tomb of Ligeia, which was an enjoyable rewatch, but which felt slow and more than a little padded, a mishmash of Poe tropes more than a satisfying story of its own.