Just got back from a Weird Al concert, part of his Bigger and Weirder tour, which I went to with my son. Fantastic experience, but I’m a Weird Al fan. It was my son’s first concert, and I’m worried that they’ll all be downhill after this one.
Found the guy who’s been tipping over our garbage …
I liked it a lot; it’s been a while since a horror movie has scared me that much.
To me, it’s a movie that’s largely about the horror of being in a relationship with someone who is mentally unwell. It was really hitting my “borderline personality disorder” flags, I guess, but a very heightened version of them. Every tiny sign that he might not love her is a betrayal, she’s extremely clingy, and the transgressions and horrors are matched with this manipulation, social pressure, and excuse. He says, “why would you do that, you’re freaking me out” and she says “oh I’m so so sorry, I’ll never do it ever again”. And obviously her having some kind of psychotic break is brought up multiple times in the movie, making it at least somewhat an endorsed reading by the text.
And obviously it’s not all that, because it’s also a very funny movie in parts, and there are layers to it; it would probably have been a failure if there was a single straightforward reading. Bear is a coward as one of his defining features, and goes along with way too much because of that, unable to stand up for himself, to state what he’s feeling, particularly susceptible to this kind of monstrous torture. Naïve too, in a way that makes it all worse for him.
I made the mistake of reading some Letterboxd reviews, and it’s definitely one of those movies that makes me feel like other people watched a different movie from the one I did. There are parts of the movie that feel to me like they were 5% of it, and seem to be getting all the attention, and … I get it, people have different preferences and priorities, but it’s difficult for me to read the movie in those ways. I don’t think that it was largely a movie about autonomy, but that element is definitely there . It’s just not where I felt the focus was, so I feel like it’s a movie I’ll end up talking past people about.
I guess I’ll have to see how it works in practice. When watching the movies, one of the things that I’ve noticed a lot is how plentiful ammo seems to be, and counting bullets is one of the main things I remember from having played the early installments in the series, along with solving the puzzles and opening up the game. I think a movie where you get that Dark Souls style “open a path back to where you were” might be cool, and I definitely think bullet-counting is underutilized. Maybe you don’t need to go full Dirty Harry with it, but there’s drama and tension to be milked there, and it’s definitely something the games play into; it is, in fact, one of the key elements of what puts the “survival” in survival horror.
However, I did watch Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City last night, the forgettable 2021 installment, and it felt in some ways like it was trying to be more faithful to the games … to its detriment, though some of that has to do with it having way too many characters. Still, they did the “single isolated location” thing, and the mansion in particular did feel like a Resident Evil location.
I’m cautiously optimistic on Zach Cregger, so I’ll definitely check it out.
We came home from a family trip to the garage where the robins made their nest again this year, and I don’t know if it was the sounds of our movement or if it was just time, but the nest above our heads exploded with panicked fledgling robins, who all fled at once, in spite of me passing beneath them at least twice a day. So far as I can tell, they were all fine, but it was certainly a much more dramatic departure from the nest than last year, when each of them took a tentative hop and they left one by one.
I think next year we’ll be more diligent about preventing the robin from making a nest there, as I don’t really like living with the birds, and would much rather they make a nest in a more convenient place.
Going to see Obsession , and they carded me, which I found confusing, partly because they said “ID or tattoos” because I guess they accept a tattoo as proof of age. But I just didn’t know what was going on.
Oh, definitely, I think repetition on a theme and the infinite are both central authorial preoccupations (not repeating myself, but the idea of patterns and what happens when you get at the fringes of them, when they decompose). Degenerate cycles and repeating patterns was one of the more central aspects of WtC.
And for myself, getting caught in bad patterns, wearing a rut in the mind, endless rumination, is one of the main things that causes bad mental health.
The main distinction that I would draw with the Backrooms is that the Backrooms themselves seem to be a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy, an imperfect recreation drawn from the subconscious or something. There’s something about our culture in there, the detritus of corporate design output, the way you see a million pale imitators. My read on the movie is that it’s at least partly a Zoomer feeling of living in the shadow of the recent past, but one that’s stripped of any corporate iconography. Liminality is part of the zeitgeist, a feeling of being between places, not quite one thing or another.
And the thing that draws me in is a bit different, I think. It’s more the idea that there are endless, oppressive possibilities, too much media, too many symbols, and the underlying patterns give rise to dizzying variation that’s nevertheless constrained by the generation method. The Long Stairs part of WtC does share some DNA with the Backrooms, and holds some of the same horror, but the directionality of it is different from what the movie is doing, mostly because the things we fear are different.
alexanderwales :
Some Steam Next Fest demos I liked:
Order of the Sinking Star The Button Effect Object Impermanence Dupery The Bird of the North Steam keeps trying to suggest games that are like Factorio to me, and I keep wondering why I would play them if Factorio already exists …
More games:
Legion Was Here (a game where you’re a shapeshifting spy that needs to gain information about the person you’re pretending to be, then pass infiltration tests, really loved that you write things on your hand as reference) Tape Man (little puzzle platformer where you use a tape measure to measure things) The Message From Deep Space (a game where you’re attempting to build up a language through call and response with an alien, starting with math and presumably going other places) Ascenders: Beyond the Peak (climbing roguelite, mostly notable for bringing turn-based grid movement vertical)
Some Steam Next Fest demos I liked:
Order of the Sinking Star The Button Effect Object Impermanence Dupery The Bird of the North Steam keeps trying to suggest games that are like Factorio to me, and I keep wondering why I would play them if Factorio already exists …
alexanderwales :
Ugly babies in the robin’s nest
I might have been spotted …
