Always with the hookers. From "Pretty Woman" to the tarts in "Castle Keep", those ethereal beings who have so much to teach us. At least in the movies. In our mundane reality, their lives are horrible and mercifully short. But that doesn't make for magical cinema, so we skip ahead to the cool parts. Thanks for the review, and I'm sure everyone involved gave it their all, but hard pass.
Funny you should mention that. The one and only time I had a letter published in the print (!) version of our local rag was in protest of a blurb in the "celebrity" news, fresh off the wire service, in which Kevin Costner boasted about the Wild West theme resort he was planning to build (don't think it ever happened), which would be thoroughly "authentic," including real brothels for the grown-ups. This appeared on the inside front page, whilst on the reverse was the paper's report of the latest in a string of female sex workers snatched off the street and murdered in our city.
I worked in Rochester NY media when Artie Shawcross was bumping off girls from the bottom of the local food chain. I compiled a file tape of video from the crime scenes, along with any photos of the victims we could get hold of. The family snapshots of those women still haunt me. They were not the sexy, mysterious creatures from every goddamn movie ever made. They were someone's daughter or sister, and their lives were a downward spiral leading to encounter with a human zero.
After Artie was incarcerated, a local reporter nailed an exclusive with him in the joint. He was no Hannibal Lector mad genius with a quip and a smile. He was a monosyllabic chunk of homicidal beef with no special insight to the human condition. He just liked killing the weak.
The paper in question is the D&C, and my letter was shortly after Shawcross -- remember there was another spate of murdered sex workers? Not sure they were all the same killer. I believe the cops later claimed they knew who it was and he was dead. But knowing the RPD, that could be a complete load. Anyway, that was my point too -- the women who came to a violent end were not Julia Roberts in Pretty Women, with all kinds of options in life, doing sex work for funsies.
Hear fucking hear. I'm even more tired of the "fascinating serial killer who is a mastermind genius" genre than I am with the "hooker with a heart of gold" trope. These are violent and cruel men who simply take misogyny to its logical conclusion.
And dumb. Dumb dumb dumb. I read Helter Skelter as a teen, and of course Bugliosi, the DA, made Manson sound like a wiley genius and a formidable adversary. Then I heard him (Manson) speak. Uneducated, mentally ill, horrific childhood, impoverished in every sense of the word (not an excuse, just a fact worth noting because we continue to make these monsters). DAs and cops (and sometimes the media) are as bad as Hollywood in making myths of criminality.
Bugliosi had a book to sell, so I can understand why he wanted to play into the Manson myth. I may be deeply cynical, but I think a lot of the fascination with serial killers is just certain men displaying a disguised fascination along the lines of "Wow, I'd always heard it said that you can't live with women and you can't kill them. But he managed to do both! Cool." Like I said, misogyny taken to its logical conclusion.
I was friends with a couple of women in the late sixties, both recently out of high school in the northwest San Fernando Valley, both still living, somewhat unhappily, with their respective sets of parents, who went casting about for their own digs. Someone put them on to a “commune” just outside of town, and this they duly visited, but they were put off by the leader, “a weirdo who calls himself Jesus Christ.” Some months later, after the commune and its membership were much in the news, they told me, with pardonable excitement, “That’s him! That’s the weirdo!”
I remain close friends with one of the women; am in intermittent e-touch at intervals of years with the other. The former was and is way too sensible to have been drawn into the cult, the latter (who went on to an administrative career in—wait for it—law enforcement here in Oakland) 𝘢𝘣𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 had in her the makings* of a Manson Girl.
*She once asked me to assist her in murdering her parents. She would bludgeon them in their bed; all I had to do was help her torch the premises afterward. I prudently declined to be enlisted in this undertaking, adding that while I detested snitches on principle I’d feel obliged to relate our conversation to persons in authority should her Pee and Em come to grief under any circumstances the least ambiguous.
Well, Manson MUST have been some sort of magical genius, how else could he persuade so many people to abandon their normal lives and follow him?
I would hope, after the rise of a certain psychopath-President, we would no longer fall into this erroneous line of thinking. Lots of people are ready to chuck everything and follow a charlatan, even when he's not very good at being a charlatan. I can't explain why, but there it is.
The word "charm" is interesting in its double meaning. There's a factoid I want to be true that the root of the word "glamour" is a Scottish word for casting a spell. Do you believe in magic in a young girl's heart takes on a whole new meaning.
Sometimes I wonder how many hours I've saved simply by refusing to watch movies or TV shows about fascinating serial killers. Must be up in the thousands by now.
Also a symptom of the general Amping-Up Of Everything. Hitchcock could get a two-hour movie out of the murdering of ONE person, these days you gotta kill MORE. Producer: "Well, a movie where he kills seven guys has gotta be seven times as good, right?"
Fuuuuuuck. I wasn't in town when all that happened, but I listened to Last Podcast On The Left's shows on it, and I'm not sorry for missing it. The victims are ALWAYS people, real humans, but all too often from the underclass so they're treated as "the less dead".
I’m ok with characters as symbols (see Tarkovsky) and reality shows that people can love a human shit stainwith no redeeming features whatsoever (see Trump), so as usual it’s wise to dismiss any advice that comes up regularly in writing workshops. Now that I’ve gone there, could the Dafoe character be a symbolic ex-President Shitstain? Sounds like they had similar upbringings.
Horrifying to think he might live on as fictional characters long after his corporeal form is rotting in the ground. I said I did NOT want any more of this guy, I wish to speak to a manager.
Thanks for the review, Roy. I adored The Favourite and I like Emma Stone. But the whole Steampunk conceit has always annoyed me, I'm not sure why. I'll probably catch this whenever it lands on Prime or Netflix.
I was in Las Vegas at a conference from last Thursday to yesterday. Talk about magical realism for children, lol. Very glad to be back in the land of reality.
Thank you for watching this, Roy, so I don’t have to. Actually, I would rather be beaten with sticks than watch this kind of movie. Though, because of your description, I have added May December to my queue (!)
I hit this part: "cut the still-living baby out of the corpse’s womb" and then thought, "OK, I'm reading the rest of it because I enjoy Ed's writing, not because there's any chance I'd actually see this." Which, to be honest, is the case with probably 90% of the movies he reviews.
Full disclosure: I once fainted in a doctor's office because I happened to glance over while I was having some blood drawn and saw the syringe with my own blood in it. Out like a light, they had to give me oxygen to revive me.
I saw a Dogtooth. All the thought and work that went into it was obvious. I didn't really enjoy it though. Made me think of Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" -sick scientist father experiments on his own kids with bad results.
Of his movies I've only seen two: The Favourite, which I thought was very humane under all the fun power struggles, and even moving; and The Lobster, which I liked much less and which gave me the feeling that Lanthimos was writing human vectors rather than human beings. He's very fortunate in his actors and in Poor Things they largely fill out the characters, but in The Lobster he appears to have given them a tight brief and their genius only comes out in moments of bitter comedy, which were excellent but not enough to pull me through.
Van Trier's newest film, "Oh God, How I Hate Fucking Americans" will show up at your local indy-movieplex some time after its Cannes premiere. He promises to hold nothing back this time.
Dogville is his ode to America. It’s on Mubi. Watch it, you’ll curse me later. Though I have to say it’s possibly the most visually interesting film I’ve every seen.
We just watched this the other day. I give it a hearty "pretty good". It was a nice night at the moves but I didn't come away wanting to discuss it or anything. Defoe's charachter was the star for me. I think he was hilarious.
Now that Wes Anderson seems to have lost a lot of the juice I was showing up for in his early days I'm glad Yorgos is out here keeping his corner of mainstream movies weird. As long as he keeps dropping in insane dance breaks in the middle of his movies I will probably keep showing up for them.
Seems maybe his actors love the flix more than his fans...? I've seen Grand Budapest and Moonrise Kingdom...and MK was the better of those two, for its humor and its set pieces. But both are stilted (if that term means anything anymore). Oh, and one other thing about Anderson: the whole symmetry deal is soooo overplayed. I know that now after our most recent film club entry – Spirited Away. Late in the movie there is one centering moment that jumps off the screen, when the train pulls into a station. It was almost dazzling to me. Felt really unusual and thus more powerful.
I only said they are not empty. Stilted and symmetrical, sure. But for him those are features, not bugs. Audience can draw their own conclusions. Most films will suffer when visually compared to Studio Ghibli.
I only finally got around to watching it in the last couple weeks and I am not sure I could relate the story now. I really love his visual aesthetic most of the time, and it's obvious actors have a great time working with him but it's nice to be able to remember what a movie was about.
Oof. A mullagatawney of a movie, where you can find whatever you want it to be about. Your description horrified me, and I take your descriptions seriously. I can see the actors having a great time chewing the scenery from here.
It's the time of year again where Roy and I could do a version of the old Knowledge Fight intro:
ROY: I know a lot about movies!
PERE: And I know jack-shit!
I have no clue here. Goin' movie watching is kind of lame by yourself, I have too goddamn much to do on weekends already, and I don't remember WHAT movie I last saw in the theater. I'm just not a cineophile, I just, as Chance said, like to watch. (*ahem*)
That said, I did sit down and watch Cronenberg's Crimes Of The Future last night. And now I have to search out Videodrome because I can't remember much about it and I want to see if it's as twisted as Crimes. Fuck. Ing. Twisted. A pain-free, infection free undefined future. Surgery as performance art. Plastic eating. Landscapes of dried-up seas and abandoned ships, streets empty as if there just aren't enough people anymore to fill them. "Surgery is the new sex", says Timlin (Kristen Stewart), a plain-looking bureaucrat who I found REALLY hot, and I'm not sure why. Saul Tenser, who randomly grows bizarre new organs, cuts his wife Caprice's (Léa Seydoux) flesh with the autodoc she uses in their performances, and she gets turned on by it. It's dark and weird and creepy and ambivalent and I think I rather liked it.
Ooops! Uh uh I meant " lame" in a cool way, yeah that's it 😸
Also too - I forgot you had reviewed Crimes; that might have been my motivation to see it. I kind of worry that the surgery scenes didn't affect me (and am I wrong or wasn't there bleeding from the wounds?), though I did a lot of watching surgical videos as part of my sterile processing training. And, yes, I was VERY quick after the film ended to look up Ms. Stewart.
From reading your review alone, I already have objections to the concepts, the 18th-19th century philosophy and science as the basis for reality. I have been reading too much about breakthroughs in the understanding of how genes are influenced by different environments to revert in a suspension of disbelief for entertainment's sake. I will likely at some point watch this.
i enjoyed watching it, but can't shake the feeling that Poor Things is, ultimately, an inventively designed and beautifully acted and clever and gorgeous movie about sex with a baby
Always with the hookers. From "Pretty Woman" to the tarts in "Castle Keep", those ethereal beings who have so much to teach us. At least in the movies. In our mundane reality, their lives are horrible and mercifully short. But that doesn't make for magical cinema, so we skip ahead to the cool parts. Thanks for the review, and I'm sure everyone involved gave it their all, but hard pass.
Funny you should mention that. The one and only time I had a letter published in the print (!) version of our local rag was in protest of a blurb in the "celebrity" news, fresh off the wire service, in which Kevin Costner boasted about the Wild West theme resort he was planning to build (don't think it ever happened), which would be thoroughly "authentic," including real brothels for the grown-ups. This appeared on the inside front page, whilst on the reverse was the paper's report of the latest in a string of female sex workers snatched off the street and murdered in our city.
I worked in Rochester NY media when Artie Shawcross was bumping off girls from the bottom of the local food chain. I compiled a file tape of video from the crime scenes, along with any photos of the victims we could get hold of. The family snapshots of those women still haunt me. They were not the sexy, mysterious creatures from every goddamn movie ever made. They were someone's daughter or sister, and their lives were a downward spiral leading to encounter with a human zero.
After Artie was incarcerated, a local reporter nailed an exclusive with him in the joint. He was no Hannibal Lector mad genius with a quip and a smile. He was a monosyllabic chunk of homicidal beef with no special insight to the human condition. He just liked killing the weak.
So I'm just a little prejudicial on this topic.
The paper in question is the D&C, and my letter was shortly after Shawcross -- remember there was another spate of murdered sex workers? Not sure they were all the same killer. I believe the cops later claimed they knew who it was and he was dead. But knowing the RPD, that could be a complete load. Anyway, that was my point too -- the women who came to a violent end were not Julia Roberts in Pretty Women, with all kinds of options in life, doing sex work for funsies.
Hear fucking hear. I'm even more tired of the "fascinating serial killer who is a mastermind genius" genre than I am with the "hooker with a heart of gold" trope. These are violent and cruel men who simply take misogyny to its logical conclusion.
And dumb. Dumb dumb dumb. I read Helter Skelter as a teen, and of course Bugliosi, the DA, made Manson sound like a wiley genius and a formidable adversary. Then I heard him (Manson) speak. Uneducated, mentally ill, horrific childhood, impoverished in every sense of the word (not an excuse, just a fact worth noting because we continue to make these monsters). DAs and cops (and sometimes the media) are as bad as Hollywood in making myths of criminality.
Bugliosi had a book to sell, so I can understand why he wanted to play into the Manson myth. I may be deeply cynical, but I think a lot of the fascination with serial killers is just certain men displaying a disguised fascination along the lines of "Wow, I'd always heard it said that you can't live with women and you can't kill them. But he managed to do both! Cool." Like I said, misogyny taken to its logical conclusion.
Yep.
I was friends with a couple of women in the late sixties, both recently out of high school in the northwest San Fernando Valley, both still living, somewhat unhappily, with their respective sets of parents, who went casting about for their own digs. Someone put them on to a “commune” just outside of town, and this they duly visited, but they were put off by the leader, “a weirdo who calls himself Jesus Christ.” Some months later, after the commune and its membership were much in the news, they told me, with pardonable excitement, “That’s him! That’s the weirdo!”
I remain close friends with one of the women; am in intermittent e-touch at intervals of years with the other. The former was and is way too sensible to have been drawn into the cult, the latter (who went on to an administrative career in—wait for it—law enforcement here in Oakland) 𝘢𝘣𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘺 had in her the makings* of a Manson Girl.
*She once asked me to assist her in murdering her parents. She would bludgeon them in their bed; all I had to do was help her torch the premises afterward. I prudently declined to be enlisted in this undertaking, adding that while I detested snitches on principle I’d feel obliged to relate our conversation to persons in authority should her Pee and Em come to grief under any circumstances the least ambiguous.
Well, Manson MUST have been some sort of magical genius, how else could he persuade so many people to abandon their normal lives and follow him?
I would hope, after the rise of a certain psychopath-President, we would no longer fall into this erroneous line of thinking. Lots of people are ready to chuck everything and follow a charlatan, even when he's not very good at being a charlatan. I can't explain why, but there it is.
The word "charm" is interesting in its double meaning. There's a factoid I want to be true that the root of the word "glamour" is a Scottish word for casting a spell. Do you believe in magic in a young girl's heart takes on a whole new meaning.
Sometimes I wonder how many hours I've saved simply by refusing to watch movies or TV shows about fascinating serial killers. Must be up in the thousands by now.
"I wish *I* could get away with that" in broadcast form, for an impressionable public.
(I don't do "true crime" anything--books, TV shows, none of it.)
Also a symptom of the general Amping-Up Of Everything. Hitchcock could get a two-hour movie out of the murdering of ONE person, these days you gotta kill MORE. Producer: "Well, a movie where he kills seven guys has gotta be seven times as good, right?"
"𝘐 𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘩 *𝘐* 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵" 𝘪𝘯 𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘢𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮, 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘱𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘤.
You’ve just captured The Magic of Donald J. Trump.
Fuuuuuuck. I wasn't in town when all that happened, but I listened to Last Podcast On The Left's shows on it, and I'm not sorry for missing it. The victims are ALWAYS people, real humans, but all too often from the underclass so they're treated as "the less dead".
I’m ok with characters as symbols (see Tarkovsky) and reality shows that people can love a human shit stainwith no redeeming features whatsoever (see Trump), so as usual it’s wise to dismiss any advice that comes up regularly in writing workshops. Now that I’ve gone there, could the Dafoe character be a symbolic ex-President Shitstain? Sounds like they had similar upbringings.
Horrifying to think he might live on as fictional characters long after his corporeal form is rotting in the ground. I said I did NOT want any more of this guy, I wish to speak to a manager.
Huh.
Yes, exactly.
Succinct.
After “His Dark Materials” and “Carnival Row,” I’m done with steampunk. But I will watch “Poor Things” because of “The Lobster.”
Thanks for the review, Roy. I adored The Favourite and I like Emma Stone. But the whole Steampunk conceit has always annoyed me, I'm not sure why. I'll probably catch this whenever it lands on Prime or Netflix.
I was in Las Vegas at a conference from last Thursday to yesterday. Talk about magical realism for children, lol. Very glad to be back in the land of reality.
Magical Steal-ism, amirite?
LOL, yeah. And I've never felt more ancient than when I saw U2 now has a Vegas residency. If U2 has become Elvis, that means I am the Crypt Keeper.
Nothing more rock'n'roll than a Vegas residency.
Just ask Mel Tormé.
To which he would reply "Be da bop boo da day ding da ba da ba oobie doobie foo fa fay wah wah wah she da doo ba bay dee boo bop."
About the only steampunk I can stand is Miyazaki related. Anything else just seems weird.
I got my fill from George Pal's Time Machine and the Disney production of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Never really felt the need for more than that.
I think of Original Recipe Wild Wild West when I think of steampunk, so I sympathize.
1960's sitcom writers did a LOT of drugs.
Word.
I think you got that a bit sideways. Miyazaki is weird. The rest is just banal.
Well, it's not *assertively* steampunk.
Relief valve works, then?
I'm just here to blow off some steampunk.
Who you callin' punk??!!
Thank you for watching this, Roy, so I don’t have to. Actually, I would rather be beaten with sticks than watch this kind of movie. Though, because of your description, I have added May December to my queue (!)
Now I'm starting to feel guilty! There's a lot to enjoy in the movie, it just soured on me after a while.
Oh Roy! Don’t feel guilty! You have terrific taste! Besides a terrific talent for writing. I count on your reviews!
I hit this part: "cut the still-living baby out of the corpse’s womb" and then thought, "OK, I'm reading the rest of it because I enjoy Ed's writing, not because there's any chance I'd actually see this." Which, to be honest, is the case with probably 90% of the movies he reviews.
Full disclosure: I once fainted in a doctor's office because I happened to glance over while I was having some blood drawn and saw the syringe with my own blood in it. Out like a light, they had to give me oxygen to revive me.
please do not under any circumstances watch Titane, a movie i fainted during
I saw a Dogtooth. All the thought and work that went into it was obvious. I didn't really enjoy it though. Made me think of Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" -sick scientist father experiments on his own kids with bad results.
Of his movies I've only seen two: The Favourite, which I thought was very humane under all the fun power struggles, and even moving; and The Lobster, which I liked much less and which gave me the feeling that Lanthimos was writing human vectors rather than human beings. He's very fortunate in his actors and in Poor Things they largely fill out the characters, but in The Lobster he appears to have given them a tight brief and their genius only comes out in moments of bitter comedy, which were excellent but not enough to pull me through.
Any thoughts on Lars Van
Trier?
Van Trier's newest film, "Oh God, How I Hate Fucking Americans" will show up at your local indy-movieplex some time after its Cannes premiere. He promises to hold nothing back this time.
Then I'll finally watch him!
Dogville is his ode to America. It’s on Mubi. Watch it, you’ll curse me later. Though I have to say it’s possibly the most visually interesting film I’ve every seen.
This Van Trier fellow interests me and I wish to subscribe to his newsletter.
I'd sure love to see Roy's review of Dogville.
We just watched this the other day. I give it a hearty "pretty good". It was a nice night at the moves but I didn't come away wanting to discuss it or anything. Defoe's charachter was the star for me. I think he was hilarious.
They're all hilarious! And there's plenty to look at, certainly.
Now that Wes Anderson seems to have lost a lot of the juice I was showing up for in his early days I'm glad Yorgos is out here keeping his corner of mainstream movies weird. As long as he keeps dropping in insane dance breaks in the middle of his movies I will probably keep showing up for them.
Seems like the more exquisitely styled WA movies are, the more empty.
I wouldn't call the Grand Budapest empty. Or Moonrise Kingdom. Asteroid City, yea.
Seems maybe his actors love the flix more than his fans...? I've seen Grand Budapest and Moonrise Kingdom...and MK was the better of those two, for its humor and its set pieces. But both are stilted (if that term means anything anymore). Oh, and one other thing about Anderson: the whole symmetry deal is soooo overplayed. I know that now after our most recent film club entry – Spirited Away. Late in the movie there is one centering moment that jumps off the screen, when the train pulls into a station. It was almost dazzling to me. Felt really unusual and thus more powerful.
I only said they are not empty. Stilted and symmetrical, sure. But for him those are features, not bugs. Audience can draw their own conclusions. Most films will suffer when visually compared to Studio Ghibli.
I intend to bring this up if I'm obliged to review Asteroid City.
I only finally got around to watching it in the last couple weeks and I am not sure I could relate the story now. I really love his visual aesthetic most of the time, and it's obvious actors have a great time working with him but it's nice to be able to remember what a movie was about.
Oof. A mullagatawney of a movie, where you can find whatever you want it to be about. Your description horrified me, and I take your descriptions seriously. I can see the actors having a great time chewing the scenery from here.
I’ve been waiting all day for an “oof”. Thank you. We had us a “huh”, but sometimes only oof will do.
Huh (furiously scribbling notes)
It's the time of year again where Roy and I could do a version of the old Knowledge Fight intro:
ROY: I know a lot about movies!
PERE: And I know jack-shit!
I have no clue here. Goin' movie watching is kind of lame by yourself, I have too goddamn much to do on weekends already, and I don't remember WHAT movie I last saw in the theater. I'm just not a cineophile, I just, as Chance said, like to watch. (*ahem*)
That said, I did sit down and watch Cronenberg's Crimes Of The Future last night. And now I have to search out Videodrome because I can't remember much about it and I want to see if it's as twisted as Crimes. Fuck. Ing. Twisted. A pain-free, infection free undefined future. Surgery as performance art. Plastic eating. Landscapes of dried-up seas and abandoned ships, streets empty as if there just aren't enough people anymore to fill them. "Surgery is the new sex", says Timlin (Kristen Stewart), a plain-looking bureaucrat who I found REALLY hot, and I'm not sure why. Saul Tenser, who randomly grows bizarre new organs, cuts his wife Caprice's (Léa Seydoux) flesh with the autodoc she uses in their performances, and she gets turned on by it. It's dark and weird and creepy and ambivalent and I think I rather liked it.
Well, if the government ever wants to give me the Clockwork Orange treatment, now they know which movie to use.
"Goin' movie watching is kind of lame by yourself" guy, that's all I ever do. And you found Timlin hot because she was played by Kristin Stewart. https://edroso.substack.com/p/written-on-the-body
Ooops! Uh uh I meant " lame" in a cool way, yeah that's it 😸
Also too - I forgot you had reviewed Crimes; that might have been my motivation to see it. I kind of worry that the surgery scenes didn't affect me (and am I wrong or wasn't there bleeding from the wounds?), though I did a lot of watching surgical videos as part of my sterile processing training. And, yes, I was VERY quick after the film ended to look up Ms. Stewart.
From reading your review alone, I already have objections to the concepts, the 18th-19th century philosophy and science as the basis for reality. I have been reading too much about breakthroughs in the understanding of how genes are influenced by different environments to revert in a suspension of disbelief for entertainment's sake. I will likely at some point watch this.
Great review as usual.
i enjoyed watching it, but can't shake the feeling that Poor Things is, ultimately, an inventively designed and beautifully acted and clever and gorgeous movie about sex with a baby