I don’t know how to write about mental illness. Partly, it’s because I think maybe a lot of people are more mentally ill than they’re letting on. I know people who have never been in therapy but who suffer from intense bouts of narcissism, people who have crippling anxieties. I myself am in therapy, partly to come to terms with the person I was before prison, and partly to cope with the complications in my head as a result of prison. I can feel irrational thoughts arise and take over my decision-making as I make blind concessions to emotion or sensation. But this is not unfamiliar. Some people feed this sensation by becoming a hold-up kid. Some people just scroll YouTube for hours.

“Welcome To Me” is a true story about Alice Klieg. I assume it’s true. I don’t like the idea that movies require homework. It’s worth judging the movie on its own merits, not by its fidelity to the life of Ms. Klieg, a woman we had never heard about before we knew of the film. The recent “Michael” movie about the King Of Pop has been judged for what is NOT in the film, when frankly I think it’s more productive to determine if the movie is a suitably challenging and interesting story of a complicated person. I also think making a movie about Michael Jackson that doesn’t acknowledge the child abuse allegations is tantamount to dishonestly calling “Michael” simply “the new Miles Teller movie”, so I think that conversation is worth having, but it has nothing to do with a critique of the film as much as critique of a crooked thought process. But my point is that I shouldn’t have to reacquaint myself with the life of Michael Jackson before I see the movie, and I will under no circumstances consider the movie a factual account of someone’s life. But I digress.

This gets knotty when you realize Klieg suffered from borderline personality disorder. It gives this movie a queasy air of mockery even without knowing who Klieg is. In the film, Kristen Wiig plays Klieg as one of those characters who is a dreamer, but also, a waiter – not someone who serves food and drink, but someone who seems to be awaiting her moment in the spotlight without actually taking any tangible steps towards her goals. These people are everywhere. When I was a young kid, I worked at a supermarket for a while, and I stocked the shelves with a nice girl who wanted to be a singer. She did not take lessons, she did not make tapes, but she would stop everything and sing for random people sometimes, demanding immediate feedback. I don’t think she ever became a singer. I also think lack of talent was a factor there, but I’m an avid pop music listener. Being untalented is not a deal-breaker.

Klieg wins a massive lottery prize one day, an inexplicable reward from the gods for patiently waiting her turn. Through a chance encounter with a syndicated television personality named Gabe (Wes Bentley), she is able to pitch her own cable access show. It’s a canny bit of media critique that Klieg is a devoted “Oprah” watcher that when she’s asked what her show will be about, she simply offers, “Me.” On one hand, it’s not much of a pitch – executives played by Joan Cusack (woah), Jennifer Jason Leigh (woah!) and James Marsden (eh, alright) are deeply unimpressed. But the bar is low for a show like this, so when she starts paying upfront with her lottery winnings, the staff has no choice but to offer her airtime. For the record, this is also how Byron Allen got his 11:30 slot on CBS.

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Klieg decides to use her show as a form of live therapy. She cooks dubious meals for the camera and eats them onstage. She stages re-enactments of petty traumas with actors. Untrained for the camera, she rambles on about any and all topics. She’s paying, so she’s the host and the boss, so there’s a twisted wish fulfillment going on. But behind the scenes, she’s in a sexual relationship with Gabe, who is clearly taking advantage of her for the sake of the network. And when her show generates a sort of outre credibility among a certain audience, she befriends a young film student who has an appreciation for her show that’s fifty percent admiration, and maybe 30% mockery, and 20% pity. She sleeps with him too, and he is taking advantage of her vulnerability, but she is clearly taking advantage of the power dynamic that comes from not only being older but being the object of his admiration.

“Welcome To Me” is powered by a series of continually-peculiar details from Klieg’s life (presumably), so while it’s paced like a comedy it doesn’t jeopardize the storytelling for a cheap joke. Still, it’s an open question as to how much of this should actually be funny. Credit should be given to Wiig, who knows how to lean into a laugh, but always plays Klieg as a real person. There are some powerhouse people behind the scenes of this film, but Wiig isn’t delivering a comic performance. This is a reminder that some of the best scenes of “Bridesmaids” with Wiig involved how she found a gag within her character’s very real sadness. Alice Klieg is a runaway train, and Wiig smartly plays her as someone who tells herself the opposite. She irritates her doctor (Tim Robbins) with an erratic use of her meds, but to her, it’s a major key to her happiness. But all her show brings her is a hollow applause and the concern from others.

Which makes it worth asking – is it concern? These executives run a network, and they need to find multiple revenue streams to keep airing infomercials where people advertise goods that won’t sell. They’re acting as far as protecting business interests. They’re aware enough of Klieg’s personality disorder, and they know this is a sick person. But they also understand that the show is providing this woman with an outlet she’s never had. It does ask the question as to what is motivation and what is exploitation. Can their actions be perceived as people who want to help? Or are they just using that as a crutch to keep their own jobs?

It’s a tricky movie, in that you become aware early on that there can be no clean conclusion to this story. Gabe in particular is a complex character, and I would say Bentley’s performance doesn’t properly convey just how compromised he is by bringing Klieg to the network while simultaneously pursuing a relationship. The heart of this movie may come from Linda Cardellini, who plays Klieg’s sweetly undemanding best friend. Klieg seems as if she can’t help but break her friend’s heart, but at the same time, it’s Cardellini who properly conveys that she knows who Klieg is, and what’s best for her. She may be wrong, but her level of genuine affection makes up for it. It’s a complex relationship, and the movie’s too smart to properly place a cap on it. Cardellini nonetheless continues a career of giving forever-underestimated performances against much more famous costars.

Every prison is different, but in little ways, they find the ability to control what you see and consume. I was in low-security facilities – many of us could control the televisions in the unit, and there were enough TV’s to accommodate what anyone wanted to watch. But in my last institution, in the gym, the televisions played 24/7, and played CNN, FX and Fox News. The latter is problematic in the extreme, and in 2026, I don’t have to explain how people who consume zero news programming are less informed than the average Fox News watcher. If we’re still doing false equivalencies in 2026, you’re just not actually watching and consuming the media in question, so, let’s not.

In this particular article, there’s a discussion about an institution where the televisions were controlled by officers. I was in prison for the same cultural shift discussed in the article, where the final days of the Obama administration led to the shift from CNN and PBS to Fox News and the empty-headed Trinity Broadcasting Corporation. I’m sure this happened in many institutions, and it’s part of a larger cultural shift that portrayed Fox News not as a news network but as a symbol of values, values that were now being forced onto inmates. This is never limited to politics, however. I still remember being at a visit with a loved one when the televisions in the visiting room were set to a reality show about inmates in prison. As a stern voiceover rambled on, footage was shown of officers brutalizing and humiliating inmates, handcuffing them, beating them, spraying them with hoses. When I asked an officer to change the channel, in a sea of inmates visiting with their children, their wives, their mothers, he told me to simply “look away.” They wanted us to watch that. They wanted family members to see that. A reminder of who was in charge.

Next week, we enter a world of Bad Taste Sequels!

I don’t really have a lot of time for the “comedy is dead” crowd. Nobody ever stopped laughing except them, and I think the rest of us compensated by laughing at them. So no-talent nobodies like Tim Dillion (this week, of course – every week there’s a new Tim Dillon) are celebrated as being allegedly funny people for their middlebrow mediocrity, but no one wants to acknowledge that Miranda July is one of the country’s great humorists across multiple media. You might have to read short stories and watch independent film to get that, but, you know, god forbid. When parts of the culture gravitate away from you, you should stop being offended and take the hint.

July doesn’t appear in “Kajillionaire”, which she wrote and directed. But you can see her spirit in the lead character, Old Dolio, played by Evan Rachel Wood. She disguises herself in frumpy boy’s clothes, walks with a lurch, and affects a deep croak of a voice. Since she’s been groomed since childhood to be a con artist like her mother and father, there’s an open question if this is who she is or if these are characteristics fromf the scams they’ve pulled, the characters she’s played, and the lies she has told.

It becomes clear early on that this has been a lifetime of cons, each one minor and forgettable. An extra $200 here, $45 there, and hey, these coupons are valuable, save each one. This is one of those ideas where I don’t have to credit Ms. July, but why not – this is a movie where July seems to have done no research on actual con artists, and their schemes are laughably flimsy, which adds to the plausibility that they might work, but also seems like more of a movie invention. A surrender to realism has become a modern priority in Hollywood over the last thirty years, as any time someone has to make a movie about a professional, they have to get perfect advice about what that profession entails. Yes, it’s cool when Michael Mann talks to actual safecrackers to make “Thief”. But if you acknowledge that you’re trying to tell a story, that this is a movie (which “Kajillionaire” is), then you should be free to invent whatever wacky nonsense you’d like. Fidelity to the truth is fine, but it’s not mandatory, and sometimes it just gives people a license to ignore their imagination. All movies used to be like this. Now, if you’ve got a major film set, you have to have a pro onboard reminding you How This Would Really Happen.

These increasingly-absurd cons, of course, are covert shows of love between Old Dolio and her parents Robert (Richard Jenkins) and Teresa (Debra Winger). Old Dolio accepted that as a child, but now in her twenties she’s having thoughts of regret. Though it goes unmentioned, politically she has sublimated the self for the whole, and in doing so she has ensured she is tied to her parents for the rest of their existence. Comrade, this is not ideal! Old Dolio dreams of better opportunities for herself. But she also wants to leave her parents better off than when they made her. One final act of genuine love so she can be emancipated.

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During the planning of one particular scheme, the clan bumps into Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), who contrasts with their family by virtue of simply seeming normal. Melanie tells them a white lie about her actual employment, though it is unnecessary – she is absolutely Martian to them because she has made the choice to try and succeed within the “system.” Melanie connects with the family because being a con artist is alluring, exciting. She could punch the clock every day, or she could live this exciting life of, basically, gambling. Of course, to Melanie, this family is a lot more successful than they actually are. Watching her let herself get seduced by this trio is like seeing someone you know sign up for a pyramid scheme.

But what startles Old Dolio is seeing her family grow closer to Melanie. For years, young Old Dolio (man, do I love typing Old Dolio) saw herself becoming an “equal” to her parents, something of a mixed blessing for obvious reasons. And yet, Melanie is accepted like a surrogate daughter, which angers but also confuses Old Dolio. Has she wasted her time all these years, irrationally thinking they were going to finally become parents, only to see them develop those instincts with another person? I’m not sure if this is universal, but I can understand it, and I feel like a lot of others can as well. Now Old Dolio has to wrestle with being left by the people she intended to leave. And what does she do with the newfound affection coming from Melanie?

July’s previous two films – the winsome “The Future”, but primarily “Me And You And Everyone We Know” – focus primarily on how we often fail to find connection, particularly when it’s in front of us. “Kajillionaire” is a comedy, and it’s often very funny – Jenkins in particular is a virtuoso as a soft-stepping manipulator. But it’s also about finding that light in our life, whether or not it makes a conventional sense. July doesn’t necessarily seem to believe in “destiny”. Through her work, she has emphasized that you have to pursue love and support wherever you can find it. Old Dolio has no “accepted path” towards a partner, a husband or a wife or a friend, because she’s not an accepted person. And in July’s work, women like her get to finally be, if not accepted, at least acceptable.

When it comes to people getting out of prison, it seems to be common for the mainstream to say, “I am glad they are getting a second chance to contribute to our society.” And they will often say it out loud, at least until the ex-con in question wishes to move in next door, or work in the same profession. There are millions of people in the world who have done time and now they are a part of a community, they work at a job that helps others, and they act as law abiding citizens. But perhaps that’s just not enough in some cases.

Calvin Duncan won an election recently to serve as a court clerk in New Orleans. His intention was to target the prosecutorial circumstances that sent him to prison for a full thirty years, until he was finally exonerated. Duncan secured a law license as he fought for his innocence from a maximum security prison, and his exoneration was official – this is the first I’ve learned of the National Registration of Exonerations, which seems to exist specifically for times like this. Yet, as he ran for the clerk position, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry and his successor Liz Murrill have vowed legal action if Duncan continued to refer to himself as exonerated, which… I dunno, Jeff Landry, what’s wrong with you? There’s a National Registration specifically to ensure that guys like you (and you too, Liz) don’t sound this petty and stupid.

Duncan was just sworn in as clerk, despite a threat from the GOP legislature led by Landry. Using an accelerated timeline, Landry and his colleagues sought to actively eliminate the position, claiming they were “streamlining” the process even though this would invalidate the results of a democratic election and eliminate Duncan’s job. What we have here is someone who was unjustly incarcerated and is returning to assist and improve a dysfunctional system, and a group of bureaucrats who not only don’t want this, but they want him to be inaccurately considered a criminal for the rest of his life. And now is the time when I ask you, reader, based only on a hunch: what color do you think Calvin Duncan’s skin happens to be? The hint is that you’ve played this game before, and you’ve been right every time.

I don’t know what rock criticism is anymore – I don’t think rock criticism is really a thing anymore, is it? But there used to be certain cliches of the profession, little go-to’s that reflected, more often than not, a lazy writer or an inarticulate grudge. Something I noticed in my youth was that certain bands would be lauded for a first album that introduced and honed a sophisticated, developed sound, and critics would review that first album by, essentially, automatically reviewing the second nonexistent one, suggesting this would be a career that would grow in a linear, familiar fashion. Which would lead to the flip-side, of course – journalists who would then proceed to abandon those bands or acts because their next, solid albums would recreate the same sound and preserve a predictable baseline for success. Oh no, it’s a great album just like the last great album, where’s the breakthrough ambitious Second Album I forecasted in my head?

Behn Zeitlin seems like a guy who would fall for this imagined sophomore slump. In 2013, his “Beasts Of The Southern Wild” received four Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture. There were controversies surrounding the film, particularly in regarding how bits and pieces of certain cultures were used to create, basically, a make-believe world. But the film certainly stood out nonetheless, an imaginative phantasmagorical tale of a young girl who led her people through dangerous terrain to relocate after their homes were displaced in a hurricane. The picture was driven by loaded notions of place, of belonging, of family, but much about the picture – including its mythological creatures – was homemade, pieced together like Frankenstein art. Though the film reaches tragic depths, it is ultimately a tale of triumph.

Well, his next film, “Wendy” was also a phantasmagorical tale of a young girl leading her people through dangerous terrain. “Wendy” was not so well-received, a problem compounded by the film emerging from the fog of COVID. Despite being the followup picture from a former Oscar wunderkind, it very quickly faded from existence, despite Zeitlin again returning to the well for, basically, his second album. I’m not sure what the critics were expecting, but the knives were out this time.

Maybe it was because, technically, this is IP! This is no ordinary Wendy, this is the Wendy of Peter Pan myth. But don’t expect flying and alligators and Captain Hook. This is the myth, but told through an entirely new perspective, a grounded, believable myth. The cheap, trope-y way to take this approach is to make it “gritty” and “harsh”, but despite the emphasis on realism, this remains an upbeat, hopeful tale. Though those of you complaining about how “woke” this is, then yes, this does make the case that Wendy is the more brave and heroic of the two of them, Wendy and Peter. So if that bothers you, fix your attitude and fix your life, I doubt anyone sincerely likes you, and you’re gonna die with irrational hate in your heart. Also, you’re an idiot and a jerk, I don’t want to leave that out.

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This Wendy is in the South, an adolescent with a mother who works her butt off at a menial job to keep a roof over their heads. Since Mom is always gone, Wendy is the head of a household with two rambunctious brothers who can’t sit still. They need her more than she needs them. But it’s the call she can’t resist, the call to adventure, the bustling train in the horizon calling her name. She chases a boy and they both end up on top of the train, speeding into an unknown tomorrow. The brothers follow their sister, because what would they do without her? They’re Lost Boys.

This is just the beginning of these adventures, but it’s worth noting just how exciting this train sequence actually is. As the stormy sky rages above them, Wendy marvels at how exactly she’s ended up in this position, just as you’re wondering if she’ll stay safe in this dangerous moment. The weight of this sequence is considerable, the idea that she’s never been away from home and now she’s moving faster and faster in the opposite direction with no return in sight. It’s a moment that feels like it lasts years, as if Wendy is experiencing so much in such a short amount of time. In any other circumstance, it would simply be terrifying. In “Wendy” it’s a confluence of so many competing emotions, told primarily through visual language.

Eventually, Wendy and a few Lost Boys reach an island. Those of you complaining about a lack of “magic”, well, you get it here. In very small ways, the island is alive, from its geysers spouting from the ground (which seems fantastical as to be an effect, but maybe not!) to the volcano boys say keeps them young. There is a ship of “pirates”, which are primarily kids who were once Lost Boys who began to age, but they’re hardly adversaries. The proposal, in honor of the volcano they believe is their mother, takes them underwater. In “Beasts Of The Southern Wild”, Zeitlin’s production team memorably created aurochs, which appeared to be wooly mammoths that let a thick head of hair descend onto their bodies. The same detail towards practical effects continues here, as the undersea creatures appear massive, frightening, and tactile. There’s a lot of unassuming deep-sea footage here that doesn’t exactly worry you that these child actors were in danger, but it does make you question exactly how these effects were achieved.

“Wendy” is not in a rush to get to a conventional plot, instead reveling in the sense of play exhibited by the children on this island. I suppose a cynic would be unmoved by these kids running and screaming and playing make-believe on an island that almost seems to respond to their behavior and, in many ways, their spirit. Look, I don’t like rambunctious kids either, I don’t want them in line with me, I don’t like them on public transportation, and I definitely don’t like when they’re responding to sadness or anger or any other emotion they’re not equipped to fully understand. But in “Wendy”, you remember. You remember when you were that age, and anytime you ran outside, you were running towards a gigantic world. And you knew you weren’t protected, but because of how small you were, you would be protected – by friends, by family, simply by the calculus of the universe that preserved the curiosity of kids like yourself.

The movie is largely a sensory experience, and part of that comes from the score. Zeitlin collaborated with Dan Romer on the music for “Beasts Of The Southern Wild” – somehow, that wasn’t one of that movie’s four Oscar nominations, it’s one of the major scores from that era I revisit regularly. This time, on “Wendy”, they worked on a similarly rousing set of compositions that swell and envelope the film’s emotions at key moments, unapologetically brassy and horn-based. Of course Oscar nominations were not a major issue here. “Wendy” was given a desultory theatrical release shortly before the pandemic shut society down. You’d think that would make the film stick out even more considering the very few mainstream films of that year, and yet “Wendy” seems like it’s been forgotten. I’d have expected the score to surface, repurposed, on the trailer for other movies. At least it’s available for you to discover. I think it’s a special one, and I hope you do.

(By the way, both Joe Wright’s “Pan” and David Lowery’s “Peter Pan And Wendy” fall within the purview of this Substack, but I had no intention of seeing them. Should I?)

Most people are aware that the law differs based on each state in America. Sometimes the discrepancies are pretty wild, the same crime can yield different results in different territories. If you’re someone who travels a lot, I would encourage you to learn the laws extensively, should you decide to break one (not that I’m encouraging that, but, you know, when in doubt, jagabando). But on a federal level, there are twelve separate regions across the country. With so few options, it can mean that certain districts have wildly different interpretations of legality. This becomes particularly crucial when appealing your conviction. During appeals, you have to cite some sort of precedent in regards to your case. However, you’re going to want to point to prior cases that were specifically decided in that district, with the awareness that different districts might have a history with certain charges or crimes that aren’t present in others. Specificity seems to matter moreso when proving your own innocence, less so when they have to prove your guilt.

Rarely do you have a difference between districts on the basis of science, however. More specifically, a district has to be motivated to change standards based on more than that apparent truth. In this case, a woman has been serving a sentence for decades now for killing her children through an act of arson. Since that case, the rules on determining what qualifies as arson have changed drastically, particularly in challenging the methodology first used. This woman is not necessarily asking for her freedom, she is merely seeking another trial. Despite knowing that the new standards are the best way to re-evaluate this case, the government is refusing to hear any of it. My knee-jerk reaction is that they wish to simply further their cruelty towards someone in custody. But the truth is much more banal – the reason why they aren’t re-evaluating her case with the proper scientific methods, and establishing the difference between an innocent mother and a child killer, is all for the savings. It’s the cost of having a trial versus how it is just cheaper to ruin a woman’s life and have her branded a child murderer for life. Yes, it’s cruelty, but it’s also just basic. These are basic people.

This is, I feel, sort of a hot take. But at this point in the 21st century, we’re in the golden age of horror. Even in previous eras where we saw classics, there would be certain factions of the audience that were unreceptive and dismissive to the genre. Now, so many studios build entire horror slates, everyone is trying to launch a new horror franchise, and every year, there are unique and challenging takes on what audiences may find scary. I was in prison for the time when A24 turned horror into a boutique item, and the term “elevated horror” went mainstream as movies like “Get Out”, maybe a grindhouse film in 1979, became an Oscar winner today. We may get a year or two without a true horror classic, but it’s the one genre where filmmakers are consistently encouraged by audiences and producers to take bold leaps.

So glory be to something like “Saint Maud”. I don’t get too bogged down in genre because I’m not stacking videocassette boxes at Blockbuster. But I suppose this could be considered horror, even if the story feels pretty familiar, pretty human, to me. This is the story of Maud, a nurse who takes a job caring for Amanda, a dancer who is slowly passing out of this world via terminal cancer. A prior bad experience with losing a patient has caused a transformation within Maud. Amanda doesn’t need to know the backstory to understand that her new caregiver, Maud, was once someone else.

That someone else was Katie, a person with significantly less faith. Not that we know much about Katie, but Maud is an intensely devout Roman Catholic. In an unfamiliar town, Maud now regularly scans the area for threats and concerns, possibly of her past life. She clutches her crucifix. We soon learn Maud has not much of any social life you’d expect for a young woman her age. Her best friend is Jesus. Or maybe a more vengeful interpretation of his dad. Maud has become a creature of habit – her nightly prayers are intense affairs. She’s too young, but continuing on this path, with her furrowed brow and pursed lips, you seem certain Maud is on her way to a few premature gray hairs.

Amanda is a supporting character in this film, but a wonderfully fascinating characterization from Jennifer Ehle. She has regrets in her life, and the pain she currently feels is, she quietly concludes, just desserts. Neither woman realizes that they are in disagreement as to Maud’s purpose. Amanda believes Maud is there to guide her into the afterlife, a hospice nurse who is there to clean messes, provide palliative care, and possibly host Amanda’s friends. She doesn’t realize that Maud is trying to cure her. Not of cancer, but of atheism. In particular, Maud seems to see a connection between Amanda’s disease and Amanda’s homosexuality. Amanda is both aggravated and offended by this, but Ehle plays it with comic amusement. No one will save Maud’s soul from Amanda’s cutting looks, according to Amanda.

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But Maud is a fascinating character all her own. Morfydd Clark, an otherworldly presence, seems to lament the fact that she’s so dedicated to her spirituality. To her, she is not merely a devout believer, she is chosen. At the end of every day, Maud looks into the mirror and prays, waiting to hear confirmation of her beliefs. Naturally, she interprets the silence as feedback, whatever feedback it needs to be to consider her thoughts validated. Maud sees visions, dreams, of losing agency of her body, fully becoming a vessel for the word of the Lord. To the viewer, those visuals are troubling, filled with imagery one could consider nefarious, even Satanic. But to Maud, she feels it’s the final step in her spiritual transition. The movie strikes that difficult balancing act of depicting something harrowing, but directly acknowledging what our protagonist’s ultimate success would mean for her. We’re rooting for her, but through Clark’s committed performance, the audience is divided as to whether she can actualize her potential future in a way that doesn’t harm anyone, or if there’s a chance someone, maybe Amanda, can pull her from a ledge. When Amanda meets Maud halfway, is it a comforting show of camaraderie, or is she indulging a very sick person?

Movies like these challenge storytelling notions. It’s not exactly a revelatory conceit that, as the narrative continues, we trust what we see less and less as we begin to enter Maud’s head. The question is larger than just a narrative, of course, but rather the idea as to whether or not there is a God, vengeful or otherwise. “Saint Maud” begins to spiral into an upsetting finale where Clark further develops Maud into a sympathetic figure without ever making her likable or even, in some ways, rational. The question of faith hangs in the air, preserving a sense of ambiguity. But there is also a very brief moment that seems to definitively answer any questions the viewer might have. It’s not fully endorsed, but it seems like a rather strong suggestion to my eyes. What’s surrendered in ambiguity is rewarded with a vicious punchline. I think it’s worth the sacrifice.

I’m personally sick of society’s obsession with reboots and revivals, and the latest one is particularly distressing. Yes, it looks like we’re bringing back firing squads! There are currently only three people on Death Row in federal prison after President Biden authorized a series of commutations in his final days. But there are forty-four cases in the feds where the Department Of Justice has authorized a pursuit of the death penalty. In case you were wondering, we don’t need to stand on pleasantries – this administration is planning the murder of a couple dozen people. There seems to be no stated rationale as to why firing squads are coming back, other than psychopathic nostalgia. The idea, true or otherwise, was that we stopped using firing squads because we felt we were more humane, less barbaric, we recognized that cruelty was performative and served no other purpose. The current administration’s thought process seems to be that no, we are not more evolved, and why would we be? Frankly, I think it merely reminds us these men are a bunch of performers.

The question does hang in the air: are we more sophisticated than this? We’re talking about federal laws. On a state level, five of them still use firing squads, in Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. But the feds are merely diversifying a portfolio of murder. They’re also re-approving the use of pentobarbital injections, which were used to kill thirteen men on Death Row during the first Trump administration – the Biden administration eliminated the use. In other words, not only was this a strong priority for an administration that has given the American people a host of real problems, but it’s a branding opportunity, it’s Donald Trump tying himself to a method of murder just as he tied himself to steaks, to real estate, to a fake university. It’s the murder of inmates as a misplaced idea of justice, done with the least regard for the humanity of others. These people are murderers, and they’re not even serious about it.

Welcome back to a new week at From The Yard To The Arthouse. This week is gonna be a salute to the Eccentric Women. The weirdos, the outcasts, the ladies who don’t fit any particular box of identification. Women who are unique, odd, maybe off-putting. Women who aren’t here just for the pleasure of men, or even other women. This is what I missed while I was in prison. Talk to men who do time, and they’ll tell you they miss women, but it almost always boils down to sex. I certainly missed physical pleasures, sure. But mostly I missed how women joked and laughed, how they thought and expressed themselves. And in some cases, how they were either wrong, or hard to understand, or willfully obtuse. How they had less qualms being human than insecure men did. Sadly, it looks like these are all going to be white women. Filmmakers don’t finance movies where a non-white woman gets to be peculiar. I’m not counting “Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children”, because dammit, that title was a lie.

Today, we’re spending time with Sally Hawkins. Hawkins exhibited her Eccentricity Bonafides in 2017’s “The Shape Of Water”, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. She lost to a fellow Eccentric Hall Of Famer in Frances McDormand in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”, even though McDormand only sleeps with an aquatic fishman in the DVD deleted scenes of that movie, whereas it drove the entire plot of “The Shape Of Water”. Hawkins still has managed a compelling CV of unexpected and unique performances. It’s hard to say, however, that many of them asked of her what is required in “Eternal Beauty”.

Hawkins’ Jane is a middle class British woman diagnosed with schizophrenia. Since her engagement dissolved, she’s struggled to function in society, surrendering to vast mood swings. The impact is softened by Hawkins being such a darling, and so very British, but she does indeed go from achingly sweet to cloying and harsh. We’re meeting her family at an inflection point of sorts. They were once willing to help her. It is clear she’s become something of a burden. Her sister (Billie Piper) is particularly done with all this, likely having hoped in vain that Jane’s marriage would take the weight off her and place it into another person’s lap. In one of the film’s few bum notes, it seems clear she and Jane are headed for a collision.

Jane is now moving in and out of therapy. The medications on the counter are a ticking bomb – does Jane keep consuming them, repressing a chunk of her? Or does she decide to skip a few, live unencumbered for once, see what it’s like to embrace her true self? Maybe the medicine is holding her back? To hear Jane put it together, there’s really a fifty-fifty shot. Of course, Jane going Off Her Meds is the giant warning sign her entire family is trying to avoid. A sweetie today. A car crash victim tomorrow.

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Part of her emergence from the dark hole of her psyche comes from meeting a man who just so happens to have the same doctors. Now, this is a movie, so we have to accept that connections are valuable, no matter what, and it’s Hollywood, as even the goofier-looking people have a slight amount of sex appeal. But Mike is played by David Thewlis, an excellent but repulsive leading man. While it’s a respite for Jane to find someone with these similar problems in common, did it have to be him? I bought Thewlis as conceptually attractive when he was a young preppie chav degenerate (and not a chavvy prep degenerate) in Mike Leigh’s “Naked” thirty years ago. But when people think of unattractive attributes of British men, they’re thinking of how they talk with their teeth, and no one talks more with his teeth (and that monstrous overbite) than Thewlis. I didn’t buy Thewlis hooking up with Tonks in those “Harry Potter” movies (and that is my deepest “Potter” reference). And I especially didn’t buy Thewlis as an attractive person after his season of “Fargo”, where it felt like those disgusting teeth of his would come flying out. Hawkins is an actress of a “certain age”, and I kind of feel like once an actress like her reaches a certain age, movies don’t try to match her with someone proportionately lovely, they just team her with any man. Then again, back in 2013, Woody Allen hooked her up with Louie C.K. in “Blue Jasmine”, so poor Sally’s been going through this sort of thing for a while.

The movie strikes a difficult balancing act between the alternately deteriorating and encouraging developments of modern day and flashback sequences when Jane’s mental obstacles took full form. These scenes are acted out by the fascinating Morfydd Clark, and while she is not even remotely similar to Ms. Hawkins in physical appearance (she seems entirely too vulnerable to end up becoming Hawkins), it’s still a performance that reveals layers, a young woman grasping at shards of life she doesn’t realize are falling by the wayside. But that bifurcated structure, which tells two different stories, deepens the character without necessarily moving the story forward with new information. It’s a storytelling device that sticks out when the modern day segments lapse in and out of tonal shifts, sometimes low-fi fantasy, sometimes a slight shift in character perspective so that either we’re behind Jane’s eyes or seeing her from someone else’s vantage. A balancing act that would be difficult for anyone, never mind second time director Craig Roberts.

Roberts is a fascinating case study, a character actor who very quickly moved into filmmaking. This was his second film as a director, and he was only 27 at the time, still fresh off playing high schoolers. He was excellent as the lead, opposite Hawkins, in Richard Ayoade’s “Submarine”, and American filmgoers might remember him as “Assjuice” in the Seth Rogen campus comedy “Neighbors”. The guy knows how to play a memorable little weirdo, which might have informed his tender approach here. There are laughs in “Eternal Beauty”, but never at Jane’s expense, and never to the point where the story is compromised. It’s a sensitive little film about a kind middle aged woman who is simply… can we say disordered? Not compromised, just challenged by certain elements, and smart and open-hearted enough to persevere. Without spoiling the integrity of this entire affair, “Eternal Beauty” encourages you to cheer this woman on. As a film, it’s a tremendous act of empathy, and sometimes that’s just enough.

When people bring up restitution and fines in the criminal justice system, the question lingers – where does the money go? Granted, many of those will either fight to avoid paying, or they won’t be able to afford the fines levied on them. But reports suggest that the money often goes to rehabilitative programs and circumstances where victims of crime are treated. We don’t talk enough about this, but at the very least, it’s a good effort to provide alternatives to those at risk of danger, or even those likely to re-offend. Unfortunately, there are ways of closing these avenues for improvement, and sadly the Trump administration has picked one of the worst ones. Due to the pardons he’s given, many of them forgiving massive restitution bills to come from white collar criminals, he has denied the government, by one calculation, at least $113 million, money meant for rape crisis centers, money meant for funds toward victims of violent crime.

The government is pushing a new bill, the Pardon Integrity Bill, that ostensibly will fix a corrupt and corrupted system. Basically, this would allow some pardons to fall under a certain level of scrutiny, after which a supermajority in the House and Senate would have to allow the pardon. Given that a lot of these pardons have been very clearly bought and paid for (probably in past administrations too), I’m not sure why a few senators can’t also be put on the same budget. I presume there is language in the bill that elaborates on what “merits scrutiny” as well, because the pardon process is arduous and often without results – it doesn’t need to be slowed down even further. If you’re not wealthy (and, let’s face it, white), the chances of a pardon are not unlike hoping lighting strikes you just as you’re being hit by a tidal wave. Like every apparatus in the pardon system, I do hope this can help eliminate pardons that are gratuitous and harmful to these reform programs. But this remains a system ripe for exploitation.

When I was in prison, I digested a steady stream of basic cable. The promise of this format has long died out — most channels survive by the ad space they sell during the 100th airing of a blockbuster you’ve seen too many times. And so I digested a whole lot of superhero movies, many times over, to the point where I can nearly memorize them all. As I work on an ambitious side project, I figured I’d share some of the questions I’ve had about the MCU, in mostly chronological order.

Tony Stark has a Barack Obama-themed poster. Is Obama the president in the MCU from 2008-2012?

Since Stark Industries no longer sells weapons, how do they rebrand? Did they have marketing people, or do they outsource to an agency? Was it difficult to find a marketing agency willing to help a weapons dealer with military contracts pivot to… whatever it is Stark Industries makes now?

When Iron Man fights those agitators in Afghanistan, did it cause a national incident? Did the President have to comment on clearly-American automated tech being used to fly to another country to commit violence against locals?

How was Nick Fury able to outsmart the J.A.R.V.I.S. security system? Does that mean SHIELD has more advanced A.I. than Tony Stark?

What happened to the guy played by Stan Lee who gets sick after drinking a gamma-poisoned soda in “The Incredible Hulk”? Does it make the soda more fizzy? Is this a missed marketing opportunity?

If we say “Agents Of SHIELD” is not canon, considering the fact that it featured characters from 2003’s “Hulk”, can we assume “The Incredible Hulk” is a direct sequel to “Hulk”?

What is Doc Samson a Professor of? Professor of Being A Snitch?

Did Harlem ever rebuild after the Hulk/Abomination brawl? “Luke Cage” suggests they did, but how? Was this process contentious? Did SHIELD or Tony Stark step in to find some of it? If not, why does Tony Stark hate Black people?

Canonically, the conversation Tony Stark has at the end of this movie turned out to actually be about recruiting the Abomination, and not the Hulk, onto the Avengers. Why would he do this, particularly if Fury isn’t certain Stark can be a part of the Avengers Initiative?

How did the press cover the hearings on Capitol Hill with Tony Stark? Was he viewed as heroic or selfish for not licensing his arc reactor technology (which functioned, in part, as a complex pacemaker) to the government?

Was Senator Sterns interrogating Tony Stark independently, or on orders from HYDRA?

What is the new element that Tony Stark discovered to fix his poisoning? Did they let him name it?

Elon Musk greets Tony Stark at the racetrack. What does Elon Musk do in a world with Stark? Is he jealous? Are they friends? Why didn’t Obediah Stane ask Musk to reverse-engineer his own arc reactor?

After the arrest of Justin Hammer, did Hammer Industries collapse, or did they fall under new ownership?

Was Christine Everhart fired?

Does Heimdall guard the Rainbow Bridge all day and night, or does he sleep? Are there part-time Rainbow Bridge protectors? Does someone bring him food? Is he salaried, and did he take a paycut for the destruction of the BiFrost, or a raise for rebuilding it?

Do you become worthy of wielding Mjolnir again after you seduce Natalie Portman?

How close is the Red Skull with Hitler? How close would the Red Skull be with Elon Musk?

What was different from the Super Soldier Serum that Steve Rogers takes in America and the one Bucky takes from the Nazis in Germany?

What exactly causes Cap’s VIbranium shield to ricochet back to him?

How did Hawkeye and Black Widow gain admittance into the Avenger Initiative? If they were already SHIELD agents, did they apply, or were they recruited? If so, isn’t that cronyism?

Captain America fired guns in World War II to kill Nazis. Why does he not take up arms against mindless alien hordes in “Avengers”?

What is the relationship between the World Security Council and the American government? Is the World Security Council public knowledge to the world?

Did the American people demand accountability for the greatest act of violence on American soil after its architect, Loki, was extradited to a magical realm?

What happened to all those Chitauri corpses?

Stark gives the Ten Rings his address on live television in “Iron Man 3”, but wouldn’t everyone already know his address anyway?

President Ellis is the Commander-in-Chief. Did Obama lose re-election? Is it somehow tied to what happened in Manhattan, and an alien attack that occurred despite no helpful advanced intel? Did Ellis campaign on the basis of his competitor not foreseeing an alien invasion?

After the Vice President is arrested for colluding with A.I.M. to arrange the kidnapping of the President, does it ever occur to President Ellis to ask Tony Stark to replace him? Would Stark say yes?

Where did Erik Selvig learn that their Earth is Earth-616, as seen on his chalkboard in “Thor: The Dark World”?

Are the portals caused by the Convergence the same as the portals that can be opened by a sling ring?

Why do Volstagg and Sif assume that an Infinity Stone will be safe in the hands of the Collector?

How is Project Insight able to track Dr. Stephen Strange as a person of interest? What does it take for a regular surgeon to become a target?

Did anyone think about recruiting Batroc to be a Thunderbolt?

How did J.A.R.V.I.S. not inform Tony Stark that he was being targeted by Project Insight?

Who made the Falcon’s wings, and was that designer recruited to SHIELD?

Were SHIELD members working for HYDRA brainwashed? Or were they HYDRA hires who eventually infiltrated SHIELD? Is the brainwashing similar to what happened to Bucky? How much would it cost to implement such a plan on a wider scale?

Where is the consciousness of Arnim Zola? Am I off-track if I assume “everywhere”? Was there ever any Zola influence on Ultron?

How did the government hearings regarding the destruction of SHIELD end? Does the American government have a relationship with SHIELD? Was there any accountability regarding the multiple crashed helicarriers that did tremendous public damage?

How did Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver become captives of Baron Von Strucker, a guy who immediately turns rat when he hears the Avengers are approaching?

Do different characters understand Groot’s language, or do they simply hear it differently?

What was Drax in prison for?

The Collector’s slave, Carina, wanted to steal the Infinity Stone. How unhappy was she as a slave? For how long? Did the Collector hire her, trick her, enslave her or buy her? Are there benefits in this position?

What is in the cocoon in the Collector’s HQ?

Who taught Yondu how to use the Yaka Arrow?

Could go either way – does Thanos not like Ronan, or does he have a bias against all Kree because he’s probably racist?

Is Groot eternal? Is Groot an Eternal?

Are the Avengers attacking a HYDRA stronghold in “Avengers: Age Of Ultron”, or a SHIELD headquarters that have been commandeered by HYDRA?

Who rebuilds Johannesburg after the Hulk rampage? Why does the Hulk destroy so many Black-owned buildings and businesses?

How long has Helen Cho had an affection for Thor?

It’s a popular meme but still – why does Captain America try to strangle Ultron?

How does the Scarlet Witch shed her accent so quickly?

SHIELD probably pays for Hawkeye’s house. How long have they been doing this? Is the deed under someone else’s name? How long do you have to be a SHIELD employee before they subsidize your home? Wouldn’t you want a new house after the entity that pays for it was infiltrated by Nazi villains?

What programming makes Vision grow his own cape?

Why can Vision, a synthetic being, lift Mjolnir? And why is he such a showoff about it?

How do Quicksilver’s sneakers stay intact?

Did Hank Pym actually set up his daughter Hope with Darren Cross?

Has Sam Wilson been working as a Stark/Avengers bodyguard or security guard this whole time, waiting for an Ant-Man-type threat to show up?

Does anyone think that Miriam Sharp, who guilts Toy Stark into backing the Sokovia Accords, looks a lot like Mariah Dillard, aka Black Mariah in “Luke Cage”?

Do the Sokovia Accords cover all vigilantes, or just ones with special abilities? Is it only designed for Americans? Would Black Panther be exempt?

What kind of punishment occurs for someone who violates the Sokovia Accords? Are there probation officers for superheroes? Is this high paying or low-paying?

Does the Vision just watch Scarlet Witch eat, or does he mime doing the same thing so she doesn’t feel uncomfortable?

Why didn’t Scott tell the Avengers about The Wasp in “Captain America: Civil War”?

Why does T’Challa bring Bucky back to Wakanda, but turns over his father’s killer, Helmut Zemo, to local authorities?

How was Stephen Strange so much of a speed-reader that he absorbed the texts of Kamar-Taj quicker than most, if not all other students?

Whatever happened to Jonathan Pangborn?

No, really, why DID Ego fall in love with Meredith Quill?

When Ego taunts Peter Quill for wanting a father like the hero of “Knight Rider”, why does he morph into David Hasselhoff’s current physical appearance instead of who he resembled in the 80’s?

Ayesha creates Adam Warlock, though she is the leader of the Sovereign. Does she birth all of the Sovereign? Is this not time-consuming?

It is established in “Spider-Man: Homecoming” that Tony Stark was behind Damage Control. After his death, why didn’t Stark Industries CEO Pepper Potts assume a similar position?

Did Adrian Toomes design his Vulture suit by himself, or is it partially baked in the Chitauri technology he and his associates had been collecting in the wake of the Chitauri attack in Manhattan? How is Toomes able to build an entirely new suit in another dimension to meet Morbius?

Are the “Shocker” gauntlets any relation to those worn by Brock Rumlow in “Captain America: Civil War”? Does this mean HYDRA had obtained Chitauri technology?

Doctor Strange throws Loki through a portal into a realm where he claims he spends thirty minutes falling. But can’t Loki fly? And how do Asgardians use the same units of time as Earthlings when the realm of Asgard does not operate in relation to the sun in the same way? For that matter, why does Thanos casually reference years like “2014” despite living in deep space, where years are likely tabulated in a different manner? Why is every alien so good at English?

The Executioner mentions procuring firearms from Texas that he eventually uses. Is the implication in “Thor: Ragnarok” that an American gun has the same destructive force as Asgardian weaponry?

How can Vibranium repel the force of an attack when it has not been established that Vibranium has ever interacted with said force?

How big is Ulysses Klaue’s Soundcloud? Does it rock? Is he more of a deejay or a beat-maker?

Who created Killmonger’s Black Panther suit? How would he know it wasn’t booby-trapped?

As King of Wakanda, did Killmonger get to enforce any policy ideas beyond exporting Wakandan technology?

How did African Americans react to Wakanda revealing itself at a United Nations meeting?

Thanos’ plan is to eliminate half of all living beings. Is it true that if he were to realistically do such a thing, he would be eliminating the bulk of species that are much more populous than the human race, and thus not many humans should have perished? Or is he eliminating half of each specific species?

If you can only acquire the Soul Stone by ending the life of someone you love, does that person also need to be present on Vormir? Or can you make a pledge and then go off to find that person? Does the Red Skull do handshake agreements?

Did Steve Rogers grow that glorious beard because he is a wanted fugitive and he needed to look less handsome? Because he does not look less handsome.

How does Steve Rogers know about Wakanda?

Why didn’t Nick Fury use his Captain Marvel beeper when the Chitauri attacked?

Given that Thanos committed genocide to “restore order to the universe”, shouldn’t he then be travelling intergalactically to aid people in need in this new reality he created where order has allegedly been established? Why is he selfishly just cooking and farming alone in a field? Guys, is Thanos full of crap?

There is a veiled reference to President Trump in “Luke Cage”, but who is the President when The Snap happens?

As an ex-con with a criminal record, shouldn’t Scott Lang have received a more severe sentence for violating the Sokovia Accords? Did Captain America spring him from prison at the end of “Civil War” as it is implied, or did he leave Lang in custody? If it’s the former, did he return to custody as a sign of goodwill?

How is it that Pym Particles can not only grow a toy car to full size, but also make it entirely operational?

Did Carol Danvers, afflicted with amnesia, believe she was a Kree citizen this entire time? Did this not involve a high level of fraud within the Kree civilization? Or was it assumed she was a human they had recruited?

Whose Flerken was that?

It is implied that at the end of “Captain Marvel”, the Tesseract is in the possession of SHIELD. How did these idiots lose it so they could find it a couple of decades later in “Thor”?

Stan Lee is seen practicing his lines for his role in “Mallrats” in “Captain Marvel”. Who is Stan Lee playing in “Mallrats”? To whom exactly is Kevin Smith awarding a cameo within the MCU?

Did Captain Marvel encounter Thanos during the 90’s or early 00’s? Seems unlikely that she wouldn’t have.

As of “Avengers: Endgame”, are the Sokovia Accords still being enforced?

In “Endgame”, there is a shot of Citi Field, empty. In the wake of Thanos’ snap, did the sports leagues simply disband? Did they have to do a dispersal draft, when teams have to leave players unprotected because other teams have to fill out their rosters after they were depleted due to unforeseen circumstances?

If the plan is to return the Infinity Stones in their allotted time so as to avoid creating alternate realities, wouldn’t said realities already be created upon the Avengers’ immediate arrival in these timelines? If Iron Man time traveled to 2012 and ate a hot dog, therefore removing a 2012 hot dog from circulation, hasn’t that already caused a branching timeline? Or is the return of those specific Infinity Stones an action that destroys a previously-created branching timeline? Isn’t that a worse genocide than whatever Thanos has committed?

If you can acquire the Soul Stone by killing someone you love, how is Hawkeye able to obtain the stone when Black Widow kills herself? Or is “Avenger: Infinity War” establishing that Natasha is a narcissist?

How exactly did Stark build a makeshift Infinity Gauntlet somehow capable of holding and uniting the power of all Infinity Stones?

What was the process of locating which heroes for Doctor Strange to send to the final “Endgame” battle? How is it Strange and Wong decided to provide a portal for Howard The Duck, but not one for the Defenders, who are only located a handful of miles away from the Sanctum Santorum? Strange can study tens of thousands of scenarios that might occur in the future, but he doesn’t know the phone number to Alias Investigations?

What was the body count from Thanos’ furious attack at the end of “Endgame” that seems to lay to waste several miles of property?

Steve Rogers time-travels to return the Stones, an act with an impact he immediately nullifies when he stays in the 1940’s with Peggy Carter. He now exists in a separate reality alongside a second Steve Rogers who is frozen in ice. When he shows up as a 100-year old, is he giving Sam Wilson his original shield, the shield belonging to frozen Steve Rogers, or a brand new shield? What was Steve’s plan for the frozen Steve? Would he tell authorities that he is a future version of a body frozen in ice? Would he pretend to be that person frozen in ice who miraculously just got out? Was he just waiting for him to be thawed out so he could solve the problem later? Is “Avengers: Doomsday” his fault?

Were Nick Fury and Maria Hill Skrulls during the entire time they recruited, and then worked with Mysterio? Or is it possible Fury and Hill recruited him before allowing themselves to be replaced? When Fury is in deep space, where is Maria Hill?

Were the un-blipped people who arrived in 2023 immediately accepted into society? Or were they quarantined and tested first?

Did Quentin Beck just invent gibberish about the multiverse that ended up being true, or did he know something others did not?

In “Spider-Man: Far From Home”, Is Dmitri actually Dmitri Smerdyakov, also known as Chameleon? Is Janice Lincoln actually the Janice Lincoln related to Tombstone?

Do some of the Avengers know the lore of the Night Monkey? Are any heroes surprised that Europe’s Night Monkey hasn’t resurfaced?

Wouldn’t Spidey’s Spider-Sense/”Peter Tingle” have informed him that Mysterio’s creations weren’t real?

Alexi claims that he fought Captain America in the 80’s as the Red Guardian. Was this Steve Rogers, or another Captain America? Or is he lying?

Is Rick Mason/The Agent in “Black Widow” any relation to Phineas Mason in “Spider-Man: Homecoming”?

Given the surgery needed to save Antonia and then imbue her with the ability to mimic the battle skills of other fighters as Taskmaster, is that character functionally a cyborg?

How did Rick Mason secure a quinjet?

Valentina Allegra de Fontaine informs Yelena that Clint Barton killed Natasha. Since the world knows Natasha died as an Avenger, is the public story that she died on a distant planet to secure a magic rock from a Space Nazi with no face?

Why is Wong training the Abomination?

Did anyone publicize the kidnapping of known actor and terrorist accomplice Trevor Slattery by Wenwu?

Why would Bruce Banner know about the origins of thousand-year-old power rings from space?

Did Arishem plant Ego?

Phastos’ son makes a reference to Superman. Do they read DC Comics in the MCU?

Was there an investigation as to whether or not Peter Parker was Spider-Man? The assumption is that Mysterio died a hero, despite Spider-Man not being accused of his murder. But what sort of credibility did Quentin Beck and J. Jonah Jameson actually have?

Since Damage Control was founded by Tony Stark, wouldn’t there be some sort of company-wide mandate to tread carefully around Peter Parker?

Does Matt Murdock wonder why Spider-Man has never once helped out in his multi-season skirmishes with Kingpin?

Could you possibly sue an institution of higher education for bias against you if it turned out you were rejected for admittance because you were a heroic costumed vigilante? Is it possible this is a harder task than asking a wizard to make a spell?

When Peter Parker allows for each villain to return to their reality in “Spider-Man: No Way Home”, isn’t he sending several of them to their deaths?

Does Ned Leeds have roots in magic?

Are we to assume across the multiverse that Spider-Man’s identity is otherwise unknown to just about everyone?

What exactly is the “cure” for Norman Osborn’s condition, and what is the “condition”?

Is the Darkhold used here the same one bandied about by the Agents of SHIELD?

Is the Pizza Poppa a multiversal variant that can appear in multiple places at once?

Is everyone in the Earth-838 Illuminati a mutant?

Is Mjolnir a living biological being? Is it guided by some sort of biological entity?

How many MCU characters are aware of Omnipotence City? Is it not a significant secret being hidden from the major religions of Earth?

What was T’Challa’s cause of death?

Why was Riri Williams developing a Vibranium locator for school?

Would Marvel have been making a strong political statement if Thanos’ snap didn’t affect children still in the womb?

On what grounds were Valentina Allegra de Fontaine and Everett Ross divorced?

How were the Sokovia Accords repealed?

When Cassie Lang was arrested, what particular law enforcement issue was she protesting?

Did Dar-Benn’s manipulation of jump points cause multiversal incursions?

How is it that Carol Danvers can restart a dying sun?

How is it possible that Nick Fury couldn’t locate a planet for the Skrulls to occupy?

What was Fury’s plan regarding the codex containing the DNA of the entire Avengers roster?

How long had Everett Ross and James Rhodes been Skrulls?

Does Cable know his time travel device was used by Deadpool to tear a hole through the multiverse?

Someone mentions that the Punisher passed away in the Void. Why was there only one Punisher in the Void, and which one was it?

Did Deadpool travel back in time to save Shatterstar?

In “Secret Invasion” President Ritson promises a war against all Skrulls. Did this vow of identity-based genocide lose him the presidency to General Thaddeus Ross? Does this make President Ross a pro-Skrull president? Or was Ritson a two-term president? Who was President between President Ellis and President Ritson?

The press are calling the body of Tiamut, left rising out of the ocean at the end of “Eternals”, Celestial Island. How do they know Tiamut was a Celestial? Who would have delivered this knowledge?

Why does the White House employ a former Mossad agent who was also formerly a brainwashed Black Widow?

President Ross has Samuel Sterns develop life-saving heart medication for him, and then he demanded that Sterns make more while simultaneously violating his agreement to release him. What makes Ross think that the evil, irradiated mad scientist won’t manipulate the drugs he is creating? He is a President with strong ties to the Avengers and the military-industrial complex, why can’t he reach out to another genius who can reverse-engineer and replicate the medicine?

When Sam Wilson finds out that Thaddeus Ross, a longtime rival of Bruce Banner, might be suffering from the same gamma poisoning, why doesn’t he get on the phone with Banner? Why doesn’t he get on the phone with a lot of other people?

Why doesn’t Samuel Sterns escape to a nice beach somewhere instead of surrendering to authorities? How in the hell does Sterns predict “Secret Wars” through MATH?

What was the platform for Bucky Barnes as he ran for Congressman as a formerly-brainwashed agent of HYDRA who canonically killed President John F. Kennedy?

What exactly was the science behind Project Sentry?

Reed Richards has turned New York City into a surveillance state with roving drones. Is he some sort of despot of Earth-828?

How does Richards and company convince the entire planet to conserve enough energy so that they can transfer their Earth into another dimension? How did Richards and company convince the entire planet that it’s a good idea to transfer themselves into another dimension?

Is Reed Richards a Latino like me? Can he please be a Latino like me? Why can we not actually confirm this??

I think it’s instructive to understand why some movies become popular. When I was in prison, I taught a film class called “Post-9/11 Popular Cinema”, and it was geared specifically towards superhero cinema. My argument was that, after that national tragedy, audiences developed a hunger for cleanly-defined, straightforward, and juvenile power fantasies under the guise of heroism. Much of the spectacular action imagery of those movies, not coincidentally, borrowed from what we saw on our screens that day. You could argue whether or not it’s insulting or flattering, but the point was that it was clarifying.

When Warner Bros. released “American Sniper”, surely they were confident the movie would be popular. They probably could not have anticipated the movie would collect $350 million stateside, with a worldwide total of $548 million. It’s an interesting result, happening during an era of peace, several years removed by the crash of the housing market. It was a 2014 movie, though it did not have a wide release until January of 2015, historically a dead month as far as box office. Of that year’s twenty highest grossing movies in America, it is an outlier – fourteen of the movies are IP, there’s one original Pixar film (“Inside Out”), an optimistic apolitical crowd-pleaser (“The Martian”), a music biopic that acts as IP (“Straight Outta Compton”), a Dwayne Johnson movie (“San Andreas”) and an animated movie I’m certain no one remembers (“Home” with the voice of… Rihanna?).

Like a handful of late-career Clint Eastwood films, “American Sniper” is built off a contentious and fairly recent event, the death of an Army sniper named Chris Kyle. Killed at a shooting range in an encounter gone awry, Kyle was honored and valorized by a media that wouldn’t have otherwise acknowledged him. His actions at war were touted like sports statistics, the awards collected, the deaths caused. It was an uncommonly-convenient death for a cynical reporter – Kyle died shortly after publishing an autobiography, the contents of which were unquestioningly regurgitated as fact. That same book also provides the backbone for the film’s narrative.

Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is depicted, initially, as a soldier trying to examine and pick-off a threat. He’s armored up, at a sniper’s distance, aiming at a rooftop, somewhere in the Middle East. Eastwood allows the silence to overshadow the scene, letting a false sense of moral ambiguity seep in. Make the wrong choice, and you’ve let a killer run loose, and you’ve killed an innocent person. And that innocent person might just be a child. There is no inner monologue – you are Chris Kyle’s thoughts. Of course, this is a sophisticated storytelling trick. That moral ambiguity is a type of flattery, one that places you in Kyle’s head. It’s as if you are suddenly just as capable as Kyle of making the wrong choice. Of course, the movie is called “American Sniper”. So the pressure of killing a fictional person doesn’t outweigh the thrill of the audience identifying with someone referred to as American Sniper.

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Back in Texas, Kyle cuts a striking figure. Handsome and burly, he’s one of these thicc dudes who values stillness, so his body remains frozen and fixed as he speaks, as if it’s a soul emerging from a dark well. This is immediately appealing to Taya (Sienna Miller), whom he takes home and eventually marries. The way the two of them verbally parry is probably the classiest bar hookup in recent history. I would not besmirch Kyle’s name in this regard, but this was more than likely a fumbling, clumsy hook-up, not a Bogie/Bacall duel of the genders as depicted here. This is the Kyle that Kyle wants to be, for the record. Yes, charming and sexually appealing, but mostly thoughtful, and still, and pleasantly simple.

As he builds a life with Taya, however, he is called away for what ends up being a handful of tours in the Middle East. His skills are depicted as efficiency at the workplace. After each kill, there are plaudits, which Kyle accepts with a cordial but haunted smile on his face. Some targets are taken out during murky surroundings. Others are in the fog of war, and they happen as Kyle has just seen one of his own also fall victim to an attack. Eastwood focuses on the idea that Kyle was an earnest killer in the middle of a violent charade. It’s hard to see if Eastwood necessarily believes we should be in the Middle East. The film flaunts a poker face during a time when it was politically convenient.

It’s emphasized that Kyle is being pulled in two directions. On one side is his expanding family which could use a father and a husband. On the other side, there’s the military – Kyle blames himself whenever his fellow soldiers die on their shared missions. It’s clear Kyle is making a choice – allegiance to his fellow soldiers over his own family. On philosophical grounds, I oppose this. But it does feel like the movie is suggesting he’s selecting both, which oddly places Taya and the government on equal ground. There’s also the matter of making the choice to build a family – too many Hollywood movies promote the false conservative suggestion that, when you find a mate, kids just spew out of women, and a family is just a natural endpoint. No, these are conversations, negotiations, And when there’s the suggestion Kyle did not have these conversations with Taya, the movie inadvertently makes Taya pay for Kyle’s choices.

Which takes us to a ghoulish finale that foreshadows Kyle’s eventual death, a last, affectionate moment with family. It’s the warmest domestic sequence of the film, depicting Kyle as the romantic husband and tender, affectionate father. As he makes small talk with Taya, he’s about to head to the shooting range. Waiting in the distance is a basic bearded bro with a thousand mile stare, a man who looks, most charitably, as bar sports talk, as long truck rides, as quiet resentful Sunday fishing outings. The credits inform us that this is Eddie Ray Routh, who murdered Kyle that day. By keeping Routh silent and unknowable, it’s like a story about a sailor where you see a storm on the horizon, or a pilot who doesn’t see his faulty wing coming apart in the background. It suggests that Routh is just something that happened. A lot of the movie is like that.

Depicting Kyle’s story, as a man pulled in different directions by his own obligations, seems like it could be rewarding. But the question as to what type of movie Eastwood was making is different from the conversation as to what people were watching. There’s no question that moviegoing has shifted in the last couple of decades, and many believe that it’s been in a direction that discourages people from coming to theaters. The kneejerk reaction has been about an allergy towards the onslaught of IP and sequels, which is true to an extent, but doesn’t tell the entire story. Because the appeal of all great art, particularly popular art, is that people came to see a movie they expected, and emerged afterwards with an entirely different response. IP flattens that, but so do a lot of other movies – faith-based films come to mind, and biopics are known for this lack of imagination and nerve as well.

“American Sniper”, however, is about a man who performs sanctioned kills. We’re told that it’s for the government, that it’s for America. It’s notable, and somewhat chilling from Eastwood’s perspective, that we never see the lasting effects of these kills. We never see how the government has decided that we would benefit from Chris Kyle shooting people from hundreds of feet away. But is the audience for a movie like this going because they want to ask questions of the institutions that allow and sponsor killings done in other countries? Or are they going in order to embrace this darkness? Because they like the government acting as a shadowy, unknowable force, feeding us the possibility that this is all for a greater good we’re too ignorant to understand? Do they like the idea of being an audience of people in the stands watching, and maybe applauding “American Sniper” because they enjoy this idea of a global superpower recruiting Chris Kyles (and maybe Eddie Ray Rouths) to kill people for unexplained “patriotic” reasons, flying in the face of Eastwood’s nuanced but non-committal direction? I was in prison, so I was not a part of this America. Maybe that’s for the best.

I want to remind people that, for as distracted we got about a criminal presidential administration’s daily actions today, it’s easy to forget about their ongoing violations. And one of this group’s glowing neon signs of corruption has been Alligator Alcatraz, a brazenly-illegal detention center in Florida. Last year, the facility was ordered to be closed because of environmental lawsuits, but two weeks later it was re-opened on appeal by judges who, let’s face it, favor bureaucracy and procedure over actual human lives. As has been reported here and elsewhere, abuse and mistreatment continue.

It’s important to make certain distinctions when we talk about these things. These detention centers are being operated like prisons, but they are not prisons — they are detention centers. Men and women get arrested every day, and they are held in detention centers as they await legal representation and an eventual sentencing. The men and women in ICE detention centers are NOT being arrested, they are being kidnapped, and in Alligator Alcatraz, they are literally being held in cages. Legal counsel and medical treatment is denied. Because, again, ICE centers are not only being inappropriately utilized as prisons, but as prisons for the most severe and violent inmates, with barbaric treatments like “the box”, where men are shackled and kept in the sun for hours. This is every day, and this is what we know of, what we’re told. Do not let ANYONE try to provide some sort of “acceptable context” for this because there is none. This is savage behavior, and it is illegal behavior.

On Monday, we return for a week of ECCENTRIC WOMEN!

I’ve gone on record as not enjoying what I’d deem “Polite Cinema”. This usually involves period pieces that are so clean as if to be antiseptic, every character is articulate and proper, everyone has beautiful clothes, and people are well-spoken and upstanding until they choose not to be. In Polite Cinema, no one burps, no one uses the bathrooms, no one says anything offensive. There’s no cancel culture in Polite Cinema because there’s nothing to cancel. Which makes it similar to today, I guess, but before I deflate my point any further, let us move on!

“Men Go To Battle” is not Polite Cinema. This is a very low-key Civil War drama short of speeches, virtue or nobility. On purpose, this movie looks like crap. It’s beautifully shot, but every house is a ramshackle shed, every tent looks dirty. The shirts people wear look like they’ve fallen in the mud over and over again. It is the past as unkempt. None of these people have money, and they don’t know anyone who has money. And they can’t read, at a time when the written word is one of the few ways to disseminate information, so they probably can’t even fathom other people having that much more money than them. We all have pretty fixed ideas of what being rich means. For these people, they probably think that someone is wealthy when they get to buy their own new boots.

Zachary Treitz’s no-budget film centers on two brothers, Henry and Francis (Tim Morton, David Maloney). These are not the guys you normally see in Civil War movies. For lack of a better word (because I am bad at vocabulary and terrible at writing, but good at fishing for compliments), they are hustlers. Their latest plan to stay solvent is to farm on their lousy, fruitless Kentucky property. When one of them makes a bad deal for a mule, it’s a real “magic beans” situation. They think each other is an idiot, though this is likely because they see a bit of themselves in each other. There is affection, but it’s been tested by struggle.

Amusingly, much of this movie is spent with the two of them trying to be social while living off the land in the middle of nowhere. They get invited to an upscale party, which impresses them largely because it’s happening in a house with two floors, and the women wear dresses. It seems impossibly difficult to meet a mate for these guys and their lousy shred of farmland, so of course they’re terrible with women. One of them is the great Kate Lyn Sheil, who is also a co-writer on the project. Though it is a small role, it is a dignified one, and it continues the trend of her bringing instant credibility to any movie. But she can’t help these men become viable partners. When one of them is alone with a girl on a balcony, his kiss brings her to tears. She’s embarrassed and devastated that this commoner thinks he has a chance. It wouldn’t be a good look for her!

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Most of the time is spent with these two struggling to get along. They play dumb pranks on each other. They fight over loud snoring. In movies, these are always depicted as contemporary difficulties, but clearly we’ve been dealing with them for centuries. These two squabble enough that eventually, Henry gets fed up and joins the War, fighting with the Northerners. Indirectly, this movie feeds into the contemporary tendency for people in the south to call the Civil War a struggle “about states rights.” While they are most definitely trying to excuse petty, pathetic racism, they’re also suggesting that not everyone involved with the war was motivated by race. Henry opts to represent the north almost on an arbitrary whim. The suggestion is that soldiers today have a lot to say for many different reasons. And back then, they didn’t have opinions on much of anything, and how could they? It’s not a surprise, nor is it a joke, that in his first moments on the battlefield, untrained Henry has no idea what to do.

In essence, this is a mumblecore movie, taking after those 00’s-era indies where inarticulate young people fumbled for the right words to say and the proper sentiments to express. What “Men Go To Battle” emphasizes moreso than other Civil War movies is that no one in that era knew how to do anything, they didn’t even know how to talk. In contemporary mumblecore, you could always at least fake it. There’s nothing to fake in this movie, where young characters stutter over the fact that they may be charming or friendly, but no one ever told them how to talk to each other, whether it was about business or even friendship. As such, it’s a depiction of a relationship between two brothers who can never begin to tell each other how they love, and sometimes hate each other. Very little has changed.

Ostensibly, the money we spend as a society tells us what we need to know about our values, what we consider important. You and I can talk about our principles day and night, but what our state and country consider the cost of doing business is paramount. In Alabama, a place with a lot going on obviously, the money spent on education, public television, state libraries, and Alabama’s historical commission, combined, don’t equal $68 million from 2020 to today. Which in a bubble doesn’t really mean much until you consider proportionality. Because since then, Alabama has spent that amount in legal cases in support of their prisons and jails. Again, this isn’t $68 million to maintain these institutions, this is merely to defend the guards and staff members accused of wrongdoing. That’s taxpayer money to defend guards in cases of excessive force, to use just one example. In case you were wondering if this money was spent towards successful cases, know that there were 124 cases resulting in settlements.

Taxpayer money is spent keeping many Alabama correctional institutions open sadly. But a lot of this specific $68 million was in support of Roderick Gadson. Gadson beat a man to death in Donaldson Correctional Facility in 2019, and was defended by the state. Since then, he has been promoted twice. During this time, he was sued nineteen times for excessive force. When this happens out in the open, most people call it a “crime spree.” I want to ask the taxpayers out there, the ones who pay for hospitals and libraries and schools – in whose best interest is it to pay the legal bills for an actual murderer working within prison walls? Is footing the bill in support of Roderick Gadson’s brutality supposed to be a part of what we consider criminal justice in this country? Who does this help?

When I was imprisoned, I wanted to make a note of Hollywood box office results. I wasn’t a part of society, but I wanted to know what they were seeing, what they were enjoying. Perhaps it would give me a clue as to what was happening in the world. I was startled to see the box office results of 2017. Sandwiched in between “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and “Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2” was “Wolf Warrior II”, which grossed a stunning $870 million, much of it overseas. This is a lot more common now, but it was unheard-of back then. What was this movie, I wondered. And did it involve a warrior who could become a wolf? Or was it a man who fought a war against wolves? Maybe the warriors rode on wolves?

Sadly, it’s none of those. Both “Wolf Warrior” (2015) and its followup are high-octane, big budget blockbusters designed to both suit Chinese audiences and play to international crowds. Like the American movies I’m discussing this week, this feels like an effort to engage with the national military – China’s, specifically – in a way that boosts and celebrates their local government. Which is curious, considering this is basically a re-skinned “Rambo” variant. The Rambo in this case is Wu Jing, a major martial arts star of the East who has been the lead in several blockbusters, particularly “The Wandering Earth”. And it’s his Leng Feng that has already proven to have the right ‘tude for a certain paramilitary group.

There’s a rousing action intro for “Wolf Warrior”, one that establishes Feng as a Renegade™ who Doesn’t Play By The Rules©. Though he’s clearly skilled at whuppin’ ass, he’s punished for taking out a drug lord, sending him to the clink. Fortunately, his adeptness with firearms and fists has attracted the attention of the Wolf Warriors, who are meant to test and evaluate the Chinese military in a series of Just How Bad Is He trials. It certainly beats imprisonment. One such training mission involves heading out to the southern border, in Chinese jungles, and awaiting further instruction. So far, so “Rambo: First Blood Part II”.

But this is an action movie, and bad guys hold grudges. The drug lord that Feng killed has a brother, and that brother seeks revenge. He decided to recruit an exiled American soldier for hire, Tom Cat (!), played by legendary martial artist Scott Adkins (!!). Because when you’re making a heavily-nationalistic Chinese action movie and you need an American villain, you want the baddest British ass-kicker on the planet. Adkins is seen here almost immediately mowing down innocents in the Philippines, so you know there is no doubt as to how he butters his toast. Tom Cat (!) finds out where the Wolf Warriors are located, and his squad picks one off. Now it’s going to be a life for a life, one at a time. Feng is a mess here, bringing his baggage to his new job, jeopardizing his coworkers. Not a great impression you’re making on the other Wolf Warriors, my guy.

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The rest of this film, running at a crisp ninety minutes, is all about violent jungle warfare, Feng taking one mercenary at a time down, by knife, by punch, by thigh. Obviously, China has a long legacy of wild and innovative action films. But the bloody, violent nature of this one is the sharpest reminder yet that this is taking cues from American 80’s movies, with larger-than-life heroes dealing out righteous, Biblical violence to those that might threaten Chinese soldiers. Much of the film is building towards Feng facing Tom Cat (!), and Wu Jing versus Adkins doesn’t necessarily disappoint, but it feels as if there are personal stakes missing from these fisticuffs. This is a satisfying action film weighed down by needless, pandering jingoism (Tom Cat’s (!) beef with Feng feels like beef with an entire country). But if you remove that militaristic angle, it doesn’t necessarily stand out from other Chinese action pictures.

“Wolf Warrior II” is decidedly beefed up, very much in the style of the “Rambo” sequels determined to outdo the last one. Now, Feng and his fellow Wolf Warriors are chastised by locals in an intense show of disrespect, in a manner not unlike the opening of “First Blood”. Feng (and, probably, the viewer) knows that after his heroism in part one, he doesn’t deserve to be spat on, called out like he’s a puppet to the regime. This results in an unavoidable brawl, and Feng killing a man in a moment of self-defense. Yep, back to prison for this guy! This time around, he’s only a Wolf Warrior in spirit – the guys want nothing to do with him.

“Wolf Warrior II” is a full half hour longer than part one, and the decision seems to have been made to fill that half hour with relentless action. While the movie wants to deepen Feng as an interesting character (he’s not!), it’s almost parodic how everything he touches eventually explodes. In the movie’s opening bout of violence, Feng dispenses of Somalian pirates while at sea on a boat to Africa, providing for some aquatic maneuvers that are not only exciting, but captured with some ambitious camera choreography dipping in and out of the sea. In Africa, there’s the suggestion of backstory when he meets a young child hustling with bootleg DVD’s on the streets. Given he was in prison for a couple of years, I’ve no idea when he would have met this child, but it doesn’t really matter. Someone needs to be kidnapped for the proper dramatic stakes!

Turns out this region of Africa is under siege, they’re on deadly ground because a few rebels think they’re above the law. Feng ends up protecting both a scientist and a factory from these African clans (depicted as indelicately as you’d expect from a Chinese action film). The Chinese government show up to help but, in another “Rambo” touch, they’re limited to protecting Chinese nationals and none of the innocent Africans. When Feng stands up, it’s against another American mercenary. This one is Big Daddy. Appropriately, he’s played by hard-as-nails Frank Grillo. Adkins in part one feels as if he’s giving a movie star performance as a hissable villain – he’s having a lot of fun and it’s contagious. But Big Daddy feels genuinely pissed that he’s got to do this job, he hates being in Africa, and, to put it lightly, he thinks this Feng guy is a real piece of work.

This is propaganda, obviously. While the movie takes place in Africa and features African characters in peril, it feels like the movie is structured to keep reminding people that the Chinese characters also in Africa are equally in danger – characters that are given more development than any of the Africans. I’m pretty sure a lot of people from China don’t care for a lot of people in Africa, so I don’t love that there’s a movie underlining this. But I’m watching this from America, a movie that hardly has Africa on its mind, and a country that’s being run into the ground by a President who would consider African countries to be, in his word “s**thole countries.” As an American, I’m not gonna tell you that Africa is always on my mind either, not nearly as much as it should be. So it hardly does me any good to be mad about the popular Chinese movie about kicking and punching because it treats African characters like props. There are bigger problems regarding the perception of Africans than the “patriotic” dolts making government-pandering creative decisions for an action sequel. It’s racism, and I’m telling you about it.

This is an all-terrain action picture, and in its last half hour, all sense goes out the window in a series of chases and brawls. Wu Jing, also the director on both “Wolf Warrior” films, manages to cover up his decidedly-limited charisma with as much action as possible, pushing Feng to his breaking point. And while there are fights going on everywhere here, there are far more vehicles introduced, most memorably a full-octane tank chase that’s the sort of thing that shouldn’t work if you’re really obeying the law of physics– and yet it works, and it’s not too ridiculous. This is the 4 PM buffet of action movies – everything is there, none of it too filling, all of it on the right side of sufficient. There’s a post-credits sequence as well, further establishing just how expansive this world really is, though the world is still waiting for “Wolf Warrior III”.

In Alabama, the Supreme Court just made a curious decision. Apparently, no matter who you are, no matter where you are, a law enforcement official can demand to see your identification. And if you don’t comply, guess what? Hope you like jewelry, because you’re getting cuffed. This absurd ruling comes out of an Alabama Supreme Court session that validated an officer’s verbal request for identification as a legal mandate. It’s incredible we’ve gotten to this point. Now, a police officer can ask anyone for identification for ANY reason, and if no ID is requested, you will be placed under arrest. “Stop-and-identify” laws these are called, and in no way will they ever be manipulated, no sir, not possible.

This case arises from what seems like a very basic situation. In Childersburg, Alabama, 911 was called on a supposedly-unfamiliar man who was on someone’s property, watering their flowers. When asked by the police, the man revealed that he was Michael Jennings, otherwise known as Pastor Jennings – an actual pastor. Jennings claimed he was looking after the home while the residents were on vacation, stopping by to tend to the plants. When the pastor was asked for ID, he emphasized that he was not violating a law, and would not produce identification. And so the cops arrested the pastor, after someone called the police on the pastor. Now, I ask of you, dear reader – what color was the pastor’s skin? The color of the skin of a man who was reported to 911 because he was watering plants, a pastor watering plants, a pastor who needed to be arrested by police officers despite committing no crime? I repeat, what was the color of the skin of a pastor in Alabama who was arrested for watering plants? Your first guess just might be right. I wonder why.

It’s interesting to see the dance that modern Hollywood does with the military. It’s not unlike the studios’ approach towards a lot of other industries – if you let us use your toys, we’ll make you look good. Just as the estate of Michael Jackson can shut down “Michael” if they don’t like how the King of Pop is portrayed, the military can pull back the use of their weapons and uniforms if the script isn’t right. But modern military movies have to be cautious, as you want to avoid depicting a fictional conflict with a country who might actually spend money to see your product (or, conversely, deny the film a release in their region, limiting box office prospects). In other words, military, but not too military.

This is especially interesting when you have a moviestar who is protective of their brand. Chris Pratt has been vilified for his politics even though he hasn’t outright stated them. It’s difficult to see his enthusiastic support for the armed forces in film and TV choices and compare it to his outspoken religious faith and marriage into a Republican family and not draw conclusions. It’s very likely Pratt leans right, but he won’t admit anything, fearful he’ll lose his support on the left. If he weren’t rich, white and good-looking, you’d almost think it was a struggle.

The end result is “The Tomorrow War”, where a desperate situation forces civilians and, in Dan Forester’s (Pratt) case, retired soldiers, to register for a draft. This isn’t just any draft, it’s a draft into the future. Time travelers have come from thirty years from now to warn us that they need additional troops for their ongoing campaign against what looks like certain death against an unknown alien race. It’s amusing that the soldiers decide to make a big entrance by landing in the middle of the field during the World Cup. This is seen by Forester and his family because, of course, they’re having a suburban, Middle American house party where everyone is watching the World Cup. Not a single Spanish speaker in sight. Sure.

Forester ends up training with a motley crew of non-soldiers and over-the-hill retirees. There gets to be a little slapstick tomfoolery, courtesy of “Mr. Show” veteran Mary Lynn Rajskub, “Detroiters” crack-up Sam Richardson and comedic character actor Mike Mitchell. Their screen time is pleasurable, but there’s a sense of desperation that sinks in when you basically surround your stoic lead (who still has the skillset of a TV actor – not as much of an insult as it sounds, but still) with, basically, three sketch comedians. It means that the camera is always, predictably, going to ease off of Pratt specifically for a gag. And it means, inevitably, that if there’s not enough going on in the movie (there’s not), you’re going to start thinking about how it would play with, say, Richardson in the lead instead. (I’ve since heard that there was supposedly once a role for Theo Von, which, yikes).

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The standout sequence in Act Two is when Forester and the others are sent to 2051, air-dropped into an urban warzone. There’s an accident in navigating the time travel dyamics, and as a result, scads of soldiers almost immediately die, plunging the handful of survivors into a hellscape of fire and explosions. This feels like a great opportunity to shift into a horror movie, but director Chris McKay (“The LEGO Batman Movie”) comes from animation. He doesn’t know how to bring the terror out of a sea of pixels so it’s just a rolling wave of augmented, bland sensation, a sequence that feels indebted more to video games than movies. McKay does a bit better once everyone’s on the ground and we get to the aliens. The designs aren’t that exciting – four-legged marauders screeching and athletically thrusting themselves towards their prey tentacles first. But the hand-to-hand combat feels tactile and violent, even though more often than not it’s simply a special effect.

Once Forester is situated in this future (which is, conveniently, just a bunch of underdeveloped open fields and valleys, ideal for CGI manipulation), he matches intel with a Colonel played by Yvonne Strahovski. Look, I gotta make a point – I still believe in the TV/movie divide, and I think some people are just TV actors, in a way the entire industry understands. Strahovski’s always been an attractive and appealing performer, but she’s spent years in television now, and there’s a reason they don’t call her up to the big leagues. TV actors generally over-deliver their lines, and they don’t calibrate their delivery, making every outburst too big, every silence invisible. Pratt became a star on television, where his comedic skills shined. But shifting to leading man stardom has merely preserved an innate jock-ish charisma. There is no depth to his persona. Watching him have a crisis of faith would be the same as seeing him closely read microwave instructions. These two are meant to have a specific type of chemistry, but she’s notably deferring to the leading man in a way that makes her invisible. And as an alpha male soldier, his performance is not unlike when many comedians (which he is not, to be specific) try drama, when they simply think it can be done by faking constipation.

At the very least, “The Tomorrow War” diversifies with an unusual structure, one with a fake-out ending that leads into an actual race-against-the-clock finale. But the effect of the movie’s mid-point, when it feels like the visuals are simply out of tricks, is that the big finale feels much smaller than it actually is. The original plan was to put this in theaters, courtesy of Paramount Pictures, but I can’t imagine the final half hour playing to anything but absolute silence. Instead, Paramount received $200 million to drop this off at Amazon in the wake of the pandemic, where it could be ignored during a few cookouts in 2021 and early 2022. It’s the kind of film that, I feel, Amazon might simply digitally delete by the 2030’s, seeking to avoid considering it an “asset”. I’ll bet no one will miss it.

I have written before about the concerns about artificial intelligence in the realm of criminal justice, in many ways. I don’t think I was severe enough, and even if I was, if I’m the one writing about it and sharing articles, we’re way too late. This is an article that isn’t about criminal justice, until you realize it absolutely is – it focuses on a program created by a disciple of D.O.G.E., the organization designed to weed out corruption and malfeasance by strengthening Elon Musk’s contracts with the government while making sure we don’t give away too many condoms or cure too many sick people. It’s an a.i. tool called SweetREX, named after the adult child Christopher Sweet, and it’s designed to automatically offer re-writes on different business regulations that were supposedly limiting “government innovation” and very likely were simply capping earning potential of major organizations. Naturally, cost is one factor. Predictably, “treats individuals differently based on race” is another, as if whites and minorities have the same earning power, life expectancy, and opportunities across the country. Player please.

This is a two-pronged approach, and it will likely carry over in some regards to the world of criminal justice. It is a system designed to allegedly reduce the need for oversight, so that technology can accurately suss out what laws are being followed, and more importantly what legal arguments can be presented to manipulate the rights of the vulnerable and enrich the wealthy. But it’s also a form of CYA – Cover Your Ass. Because now, there need be no fall guy. Should these practices backfire, there would be no need to hold anyone responsible – one can only blame it on the algorithm, and suggest that it’s a risk we live with considering how uncommon and unlikely it is by a certain percentage point. It won’t be long before A.I. is used to maximize the function of law enforcement by focusing on “hot spots” and cynically anticipating the behavior of those who have a criminal record and live in high-density areas. ICE is already using similar tech, and it’s pretty far from perfect. This hardly seems like a deterrent.

Welcome to MEMORIAL WEEK at From The Yard To The Arthouse. This week, we’ll be honoring movies about soldiers at war. In America, Memorial Day is meant to honor fallen soldiers from the US armed forces, but I hope to add a more universal approach to the idea of armed combat as well. I am an American, but I don’t play favorites, you know. War is hell, unless you’re an elected official who believes it’s the default. It’s a dark world we live in right now. Do you really need any further commentary? You get it.

Today we’re going back to the 1940’s with director Robert Zemeckis. While Zemeckis has a resume that speaks for itself – “Back To The Future”, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, “Used Cars” – I’m in the minority in that I’ve never been a terribly big fan of his work. I feel like there’s a meanspirited conservative streak in some of his movies. Please don’t get me started on “Forrest Gump”, which won him a couple of Oscars. What’s made him stand out in the 21st century is a willingness to experiment and try different ideas. Specifically to a point where it has severely torpedoed his career, an almost-willful self-immolation.

It was fascinating to see him go all in on unpopular motion-capture animation with “The Polar Express”, which was followed by “Beowulf” (actually hilarious) and “A Christmas Carol” (completely unnecessary). I thought, with “Flight”, he made a really strong Denzel Washington vehicle, but his loss of nerve in the final ten minutes of that film feels a lot like Roy McAvoy at the end of Ron Shelton’s “Tin Cup” willingly hitting the ball into the water repeatedly on the final hole– a true devotion to a clearly-bad idea. And “Welcome To Marwen” was both squeamish and grotesque about its subject matter, probably the one American movie from the last decade with the most aggressively-unrecognizable human behavior.

His string of hit movies let him play fast and loose on a studio dime, which leads us to “Allied”, a World War II drama that, save for some foul language, could have plausibly been made decades earlier. Brad Pitt is Max, an Air Force pilot sent to France on espionage duties. His mission involves pretending to be the spouse of Marion Cotillard’s Marianne, but the two of them very quietly, but very quickly, submit to their desires. This is a nice throwback touch – in many modern movies, you are told about the attraction between two people because the camera is closing in on the actors, telling you what body language to observe, one match-cut at a time, with plenty of shot-reverse shot. Here, as it would be in an older movie, you just watch two sexy moviestars, the best-looking people in the room, subtly undress each other with their eyes.

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The mission is successful, and the two of them quickly elope– why not make your work wife your actual wife if you’re involved in spywork? It’s years later, with a child, before tensions set in. Max receives a piece of information that suggests Marianne is posing under a false identity, and is actually a German spy pretending to be French. Of course, it’s not as simple as asking her (or, as in “Mr. And Mrs. Smith”, firing weapons at her). So begins an investigation, finding those who might know of Marianne’s true identity. There are stakes beyond selling out your wife, of course – Max is operating under the possibility that having been found to be shacking up with a German spy during WWII would be treasonous on his part. He ends up interrogating more than a few people, who can only send him down dead ends, none of them confirming his worst fears. At a certain point, Pitt plays this desperation as if he honestly wishes that she were a traitor, because the absence of proof will never let him sleep comfortably in bed next to someone who sold out his country. Alternately, Max suspects this could be a long-game test provided by his superiors.

Pitt, to his credit, is fairly good at playing to this desperation. He has improved as an actor, though he still has limited range – his moments of curt professionalism with the supporting cast come across as stiff and unconvincing, making this a performance of extreme polarities, one of which conveys no electricity. It would be a very modern touch were we to get to know Marianne a bit more before the allegations, though an experienced screenwriter would have been able to fill in blanks with only a few lines. Here, acclaimed scribe (and sometime director!) Steven Knight keeps her a cipher, which is meant to be a strategy playing off Max’s paranoia, but instead creates a female character whom we are only told is hiding a shadow self. The movie gives us nothing, through the screenplay or performance, to suggest we might suddenly be watching a hypothetical secret Marianne, hiding away from Max. In other words, this isn’t a two-hander, it’s a Brad Pitt film, and a not-that-eventful one.

Zemeckis, usually a risky storyteller, can’t enliven a story about a professional trying to weed out corruption. Max’s approach starts to reach scorched earth territory in that he starts forcing others to place their neck out on the line to confirm his household suspicions. But this is mostly accomplished between one gentleman and another, and the temperature only rises when we see others experience the ramifications of his investigation. It’s a compelling idea, the beleaguered professional forced to offer sacrificial lambs in order to procure the truth. But Zemeckis can’t find a way to make this visceral without abandoning this restrictive period-friendly shooting style. Surely a film buff like him would know Steven Soderbergh tried this sort of thing with “The Good German” years ago, with a little more commitment to the bit.

I genuinely like acting and actors, I enjoy watching most of them, and I can respect when a consistent, unglamorous character performer shows off their talents. But when you’re watching a movie from start to end, you need a cast that compliments each other and who can draw some chaos out of the material. You don’t want to be stuck with an entire cast of “professionals”. “Allied” takes on an episodic structure, which means Pitt’s going to confront one new character after another, and they’re played by the likes of Jared Harris, Simon McBurney and Matthew Goode. I like those actors just fine, particularly the first two. But they’re hardly the type to jumpstart a dry, lagging film like this, where most of our time is spent with Pitt’s furrowed brow.

The closest this movie comes to spontaneity emerges from the arrival of Max’s sister played by Lizzy Caplan. In addition to giving Pitt someone with an anachronistic energy to throw him off, Caplan’s Bridget is actually an out-and-proud lesbian. Sadly, she’s absent for most of what the climax is (a melodramatic showdown that is admittedly effective and affecting). Now, imagine a WWII movie where Lizzy Caplan is a lesbian who finds out her brother is married to a spy, but revealing that information would expose her brother to prosecution as well as blow her cover as straight-presenting? I would prefer to see THAT.

I’ve written plenty about the understaffing at prisons, how it’s entirely avoidable, and how it results in lockdowns that keeps inmates in their cells and rooms, denied the necessary recreation to stay healthy and remain sane and functional. It’s cruel and inhumane to deny inmates a chance to move about the compound, seek education and self-enrichment, and keep them from spending their entire day in bed. Which, by the way, is not a concern of the staff – as long as you stand up for count every day, you can be on top of your mattress twenty four hours a day, and no one will come to check on you. Of course, it’s irrelevant if they’re understaffing, particularly if it’s on purpose in order to pocket extra cash.

This is a fascinating case about how Mississippi prisons were being staffed by a company out of Utah, who used taxpayer funds to hire employees for several institutions. Except that those c.o.’s were never hired, and these prisons remained understaffed, leading to lockdowns and institutional violence, all the while checks were cashed. Now, an independent adjudicator is requesting that $7.4 million be paid to the taxpayers who were billed for nonexistent services at three separate prisons. The company in question has been in trouble before, and yet, they continue to draw these state contracts that they quite obviously do not fulfill. This is just one of many reminders to the general public: when there is corruption and mistreatment of inmates in prisons, it very directly means that YOU’RE the one, on the outside, being exploited.

Dev Patel has swag, he’s got drip. I didn’t expect that after having seen “Slumdog Millonaire” a bunch of years ago, a “crowd pleaser” that I absolutely loathed due to its cynical capitalist heart. There, Patel was a skinny little dweeb who couldn’t attract the girl of his dreams until she was able to see him on a game show, in which he won a million dollars (which is one of those questionable, misogynist touches in the mid-00’s that some confused for romance). At the time, I figured Patel would go on to a respectable career as a character actor, possibly in blockbusters as the nerdy hacker helping out some MMA-jacked leading man infiltrate the enemy’s headquarters.

I did not know he would be the man casting a handsome shadow in David Lowery’s “The Green Knight”. Derived from the poem “Sir Gawain And The Green Knight”, obviously one of the hottest IP’s in the industry, this is an epic fantasy that counterintuitively does what a lot of great films do –it presents a hero in need of a lesson, hopeless in over his head against unbeatable odds, and yet it also depicts the coolest and most suave dude of the medieval era in suddenly-fit, suddenly-badass Dev Patel. I’m glad we could close Fashion Week with a dude who really knows how to rock a cape. We need to retake capes from the superhero genre, people. Capes are fire.

“The Green Knight” begins with Patel’s Gawain as a dude with the Juice. It’s Christmas, and he wakes up at the same place we all do on December 25th – a brothel, where he must be rescued by his lady love, Essel (Alicia Vikander). Since this is the 14th century, no one is really bothered that a dude has some questionable gender politics, so it’s not long when he’s back in the kingdom of Camelot, chugging brew with King Arthur (Sean Harris) and the gang. Into this walks a revenant, a specter glowing green and indistinguishable from the Earth surrounding him. It’s the kind of visual that’s a trick to the eye in modern filmmaking – possibly CG-enhanced, possibly practical, possibly just a creature that wandered onto the set from the depths of Hell. He is played by Ralph Ineson – he has played this type of character before. “Played” feels like an inefficient word.

The Green Knight presents Gawain with a bargain. Hit me, he says. Because, really, when you’ve had some drinks on Christmas, who among us doesn’t start asking this of those around us? Hit me, Gawain, and you’ve got my axe, but in a year I’m gonna hit you too. Christmas was different in medieval times. Gawain, fresh out of waking up in the brothel, says that he’s down with this nonsense, and gratuitously takes off the Green Knight’s head. That’s a wrap on Ralph Ineson! Or is it…? As Gawain soils his medieval trousers, the Green Knight’s body stands and collects his fallen head, peacing out. Man, Christmas next year’s gonna be litty!

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A year passes, during which Gawain lets his freak flag fly a bit more than usual. It’s assumed he wakes up in a few more brothels, possibly on other holiday mornings like Halloween and Arbor Day. Because he has yet to become a man, and now, it’s coming at him real fast. At year’s end, he’s off on a journey to locate the Green Knight and to accept the same blow he delivered. It’s a suicide mission. Perhaps one’s acceptance of maturity usually is. Surely everyone can relate to diving into the breach unprepared, overmatched, and certain of failure. Patel cuts a heroic figure, but you can see the guy sweating every moment.

The rest of the film, divided by chapters, is of a grand odyssey that Gawain must undergo, meeting monsters and manipulators and just plain tricksters. If I told you this was a 2020’s A24 movie about a journey, you’d probably guess that somewhere along the way he’s going to bump into an unwashed Barry Keoghan. Side quests match him up with a talking fox, a pack of marauding giants, and even a severed head that needs to find her way home. At a waystation of sorts he meets a lord and lady. The lord is Joel Edgerton, who provides the mixed blessing of telling Gawain where he can find the Green Knight. But the Lady is Alicia Vikander in her second role in the film. She does not seem to be the same person, but it’s understandable how this can seem to Gawain. The test is a moral one, which he must pass before fulfilling his destiny. Essel, the girl from home, is a much more modest dresser. This Lady has a more ornate fashion sense, with a distractingly-large headpiece (Lowery uses a similar one in this year’s “Mother Mary”). There’s probably a thematic reason for this, but either way, it’s a great look.

Director David Lowery’s films always have the taste of fairy tale, the flavor of fable. His Malickian crime film “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” feels as if it’s consistently about to untether from the rest of the world, an exploration of mood and vibes. His first sojourn into Disney, “Pete’s Dragon”, feels like like a recreation of the original film and more like a meditative take on straight-faced eighties fantasy like “The Neverending Story”. “The Green Knight” is not narrated, there is no framing device beyond the chapter breaks, but it is like a half-remembered story told by the fireside, filled with awe-inspiring digressions and deceptively-simple moral complications.

And it must be said, even beyond the gorgeous fashions, this movie captivates the eye. Part of that comes from casting, like Vikander’s pallid period visage, or Kate Dickie’s grave countenance as Queen Guineviere. I saw this movie before really giving a long look at Ineson’s actual face – not as much of a special effect as I would have guessed. Every scene is like a new location emerging from a primordial fog, every surface, every building seeming to tell a thousand stories within the frame. This is truly so much more than a movie, a completely immersive experience, an adventure with a wide scope and intimate stakes. Not just a movie; “The Green Knight” feels like so much more, a departure into the mists, no guarantee of a return, a world that feels both tactile and real, but still populated by monsters and mysteries beyond our grasp. And it makes all the difference that it’s got a leading man with swagger, a Gawain acting like he’s grippin’ medieval grain, even when he knows he’s got a beheading in his future.

I wanted to stop and acknowledge an incredible story I’ve just heard about – you can click here to read this fascinating story. Those of us, of certain generations, have an inaccurate perspective on history. We assume some facets of our society have been here forever. Rock music is one example – actual live rock music performances were uncommon in the 1970’s, even though mainstream rock and roll was given that pop culture boost a decade earlier with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and if you attended a rock concert before that era, the band was playing standards, not original music. This is not an exact historical moment, but what I am trying to say is that an actual rock concert is a relatively fresh phenomenon in the history of recorded music.

Similarly, the idea of reporting the news was once a novelty (and might be once again, if the disintegration of legacy media continues). The idea of the news as fun and flattering isn’t something the invalids at Fox News dreamed about – it existed around the formation of CBS News in 1927. Back then, radio news was more about celebrity guests and lightweight human interests. News was what newspapers were for, after all. News affiliates were not tasked with up-to-the-minute updates, which is how it seemed like an opportune position for anyone, even a penitentiary lifer named Otto Gardener. Gardener, serving a life sentence for murdering his wife and sister-in-law, was largely tasked with introducing music acts broadcast from the prison. Maybe the most dangerous deejay in history, coming out of the Ohio Penitentiary.

It was April 1930 when a couple of inmates attempted an escape by starting a fire. The flames spread, overtaking an entire block of the penitentiary. Hundreds of inmates died, in what was considered the worst prison disaster in American history. As the fire could be seen from a distance, listeners needed to be alerted as to the severity of the situation. The CBS affiliate opted to report straight from the scene, in what was the first instance of breaking news in the storied history of CBS News, straight from Inmate X-46812. So when people talk about the legacy of CBS News (particularly in regards to who is in charge of currently diminishing it), they are celebrating Otto “Deacon” Gardener.

On Monday, bow your heads, we celebrate Memorial Week!

Even when a director seems like they’re up their own behinds, I can always respect a guy with a distinct sensibility. Michael Bay has an ugly, hateful mindset that results in movies made for cretins, but there’s only one Michael Bay, and he’s unique enough that his toxicity deserves a begrudging respect. As you can say that about a filmmaker who makes billion dollar “crowd pleasers”, so too can you offer a similar critique to someone like Eddie Alcazar, who apparently charmed Steven Soderbergh enough so Soderbergh would produce two of his excessively extra-low-budget genre exercises in style over substance.

In “Perfect”, Alcazar wants to chase, and complicate, the idea of self-improvement. Oddly enough, the voice of “reason” in this film is a maternal ice queen played by Abbie Cornish. Looking stunning in a white dress, seemingly miles away from the events of the film (the senior billing in the credits suggests she filmed her material in a day), she is wealthy and image-conscious, which is why she takes an active interest in grooming her teenage son (Garrett Waering) to become the perfect genetic creature. The film begins with him disposing of a woman’s corpse found in his bed. He’s disturbed by what he might be. Mom just thinks that’s a good prompt to broach this conversation.

The boy, seemingly unnamed, is taken to a far-off facility in the jungle where he will be the subject of experiments. The idea is that imperfection is sort of a program implanted in us, and it must be removed for the body to recover and reach its natural idyllic state. Which is funny in a movie where everyone looks like a supermodel, but maybe that’s the irony implicit in this airless installation that plays like a music video with the music removed. Flying Lotus provides the score, but its impact is minimal on the subtle body horror being depicted, the cutting and flaying of flesh, the injection of crystals, the internal footage of cells and chemicals shifting and churning inside the body.

Plot isn’t a key component to a movie like this, which merely vibes from one dirge-like trance to another. Better to emphasize how this facility is a breeding ground for illicit sex between the subjects, while similarly-ageless beautiful people overlook the results. I recognized Tao Okamoto from “The Wolverine”, but I was not at all certain what she was doing. There were screens involved, I think. Most of the movie consists of slow-motion shots of skin melting and reforming over voiceover about how their bodies are being freed from an unspecified higher power. Perhaps chaos over conformity, though it feels more like shedding the body in exchange for another corporeal form. Credit to the production for finding a killer location to shoot, even if the movie seems interested in eventually placing characters within a VR Tron simulation. This is an experiment, and as such, it’s a treat for the eyes, but there won’t be much else for you to grasp.

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“Divinity” is a bit of a maturation of the themes of “Perfect”, this time with a larger, but still small budget. Again with Soderbergh on-board, this is a more-explicitly science fiction tale of a futuristic wasteland, this time where the world has gone away, leaving only self-care. Jaxxon Pierce (Stephen Dorff) seems to be having a better life than most, benefiting from sales of his live-forever substance Divinity. But it’s a flawed formula passed on by his late father (Scott Bakula), and he is determined to perfect it, building new codes and formulas to find the exact result so the substance™ can no longer mutate its subjects. He also has a considerable amount of sex with his assistant Lynx (Emily Willis). Priorities, people.

Again, Alcazar is obsessed with bodies, shapes, physicality, and idealized versions of perfection. There’s a lot of that in regards to two barbarians, nameless drones played by Moises Arias and Jason Genao, who seek to obtain Divinity for themselves. They are brothers, and are at each others’ throats for most of the runtime – Alcazar is fascinated by each digressive moment of the two of them attacking each other. One does not need to know this movie was largely filmed without a script, according to Wikipedia, to see how Alcazar’s roving eye was interested in capturing any spontaneous moment rather than furthering a morose, thin concept.

“Divinity” is intended as a wild visual experience more than a cohesive narrative – these sorts of movies get lost in the modern marketplace, but I would have excitedly rented this from the video store as a teenager. In an experience about surfaces, it’s understandable that social gadfly Karrueche Tran would pop up as some sort of deadly futuristic prostitute. And when Bella Thorne arrives as some sort of off-the-grid general of a fembot army, it makes an inexplicable cosmic sense. “Divinity” is entirely in black and white, but it’s low-fi editing and formatting of shots and sequences creates a layered visual outlay that excites the senses, even when you’re pretty sure this movie is adding up to a nonsense denouement where the movie’s intentions are spelled-out via an incoherent info-dump. Eddie Alcazar has made two wildly inventive experiments – it’s easy to mock their self-seriousness and sometimes-obvious budgetary limitations. It’s easier to surrender to their multi-layered horny-dystopia imagery.

It’s exceptionally easy in America to be labeled a gang member. In prison, it’s an simple label to affix to someone, as the burden of proof is low when you’re talking convicted criminals (it can come from just playing Dungeons And Dragons!). But on the outside, all you need to do is associate with gang members to be placed on a database, a database that ends up affecting the rest of your life should you ever develop your own criminal record. The standards are low, in some cases nonexistent – designation of a gang member might stem from associations, plus hunches. In some cases, being a gang member is defined as simply being a member of a gang. This is no way to be serious, and yet, this affects hundreds of young Americans.

Of course nobody is in a rush to re-define what law enforcement might consider a gang member. Calling every minority who wears certain colors a gang member is of course racist and ignorant. But pushing back against these topics may also require an indelicate language as hairs are split to determine what is gang behavior and what is culture – a reminder that a lot of these conversations happen between white people in white-dominant spaces. As the article above notes, only recently have some been able to actually challenge and appeal their gang member designations, which seems like a wild loophole, the idea that law enforcement can label you a gang member with no repercussions. It’s a reminder to everyone told by their parents and authority figures that, if they followed the law, they would never get in trouble. It should be exceedingly clear that anyone who hears this is being told a fairy tale. You’re only as good, to the criminal justice system, as they declare you are good.

Hi, I’m a Latino, and I have good genes. Now that I’m out of prison, I also have good jeans. I’m proud to say both of these things, and I’m aware these things are now politically loaded, and I am okay with this. Because I’m taking them back from wherever they came. I have excellent genes, and I’m from Puerto Rico, and I love wearing jeans. I’m not sure how many Puerto Ricans have genes as good as I do, but I assure you, we all have good genes, which makes the idea of “good genes” kind of redundant and empty, kind of what it’s like to compare jeans to genes in hopes of using questionable terminology for the sake of wordplay. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, jeans!

“Slaxx” is a slim-fit horror comedy from Canada, directed by Elza Kephart. The promise is as simple as denim: it takes place almost entirely inside a well-regarded jean outlet called Canadian Cotton Clothiers. Behind the store’s reputation is a false mission statement about ethical jeans production, which is entirely a pose, because this is clearly just another outlet store paying their undertrained staff minimal wages so a fortune can be made with crap product. The movie keeps the budget minimal not only with the single location, but by asking a leap of faith from the audience that this is a major outlet, and not some empty forgotten space the production secured on the cheap. When you watch low budget films, you shouldn’t grade on a curve, but you should be mindful and appreciative of attempts to stretch the dollar. The illusion is mostly worth it.

Into this mess walks Libby, a young woman thrilled to work for a brand she worships, but transparently the naive young woman that’s about to receive a lesson in cynicism. As Libby struggles to find her footing with her pushy new boss, she doesn’t find a lot of olive branches coming from her self-absorbed co-workers. Most of them see her as just another obstacle to clear out of the way from their own desires. She’s not glamorous, she’s not posing for selfies, she’s too… earnest. She wears, ugh, glasses. Libby is more than prepared, however, as the store is on lockdown for a brand new product release, and mum’s the word.

The new product is basically magic, a type of jean that immediately contours to fit any body type. I don’t know if they can handle my genes, but that’s irrelevant. While they have to be unpacked and stocked, literally everyone on the staff wants their own pair, they want to try them on and luxuriate in this new fashion tech. And while the public isn’t meant to interact with these new jeans, there’s a fancy influencer marching in for her own exclusive chance to try them on and model them for her followers. Real Rex Manning Day vibes. It’s not long before everyone’s getting a hand on these new slick trousers.

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And it’s not long after that before those jeans start chopping it up with everyone, and by “chopping it up with” I mean chopping them up. The denim comes to life and begins taking out each person, usually constricting around body parts, but these jeans aren’t afraid of a little “Final Destination”-type stuntwork. Most of the film’s comedy comes from how there’s really no baseline as to how dangerous these jeans really are. The limitations on what exactly they can do are unfixed and maybe even contradictory. It’s not really a complaint that sometimes the jeans can walk, and sometimes they have to sliver across the ground. The easiest comparison is the immortal Quentin Dupieux comedy “Rubber”, about a pyrokinetic tire that rolls through a western town setting people aflame.

“Slaxx” never tries to be as clever as the Dupieux movie, and as such, it doesn’t even reaches the eighty minute mark. At first, this seems like a gag movie, based around the one joke about a killer pair of jeans that no one really asked for. But in the third act, rushed as a joke, there’s finally an explanation as to why the jeans are on a rampage of revenge, and why it kills certain people and not others. The answer involves how the film wishes to take certain irresponsible business practices to task. Though the briskness of the explanation, itself a joke about the film’s sudden requirement for backstory, is a chance to enlighten the viewer, yes, but also to plant a small joke about how a killer jeans movie simply cannot be JUST a killer jeans movie. “Slaxx” is purposely ridiculous, but there’s no joke about the spectacular gore effects and imaginative death scenes. You can really only make fun of yourself if it’s clear you’ve done the work, and in that regard, “Slaxx”, in its take on listless retail hell and its cynicism about shameless clothing production, qualifies.

As you can imagine, I am positively irate over the recent news that Colorado governor Jared Polis was commuting the prison sentence of Tina Peters. Everything about this decision, which has earned ire in Washington, is based in bad faith assumptions. In her role as a Republican county clerk, Peters was reportedly upset over the results of the 2020 presidential election. It is why I still see headlines describing her as a ”election denier”, as if it’s tied to the actions she took following the results. Despite her position of authority in protecting and overseeing the election machines, she allowed the software to be accessed by third parties, responsible for the copying of hard drives in a violation of the trust the community placed in her. The sentence she received was for nine years. The judge in the case is believed to have given out a harsher sentence (but not, it should be noted, the maximum sentence) due to what we forget is a judge’s job — he believed that, in being convicted of these crimes, she still did not show the proper remorse or consider the gravity of her violation of trust in a powerful position. Given my experiences in prison, a lot of guys are like this.

I have written about this before — plea deals and mandatory minimums take the job and the responsibility out of the hands of judges, streamlining the process of a criminal case by grouping defendants under the same umbrella. It’s the judge’s responsibility to determine if a person understands the severity of their misdeeds. It’s the judge who looks at a defendant and determines whether or not they’re a threat to re-offend. It’s the judge that determines whether a defendant has learned or will learn from their experience. The rhetoric that stemmed from Peters suggests that she remained under the shared delusion that Donald Trump had won the 2020 election. Which is not a crime. But it did lead the belief that she was justified in her illegal actions in granting a third party access to confidential voting information.

Was her nine year sentence “unfair”? I don’t actually think this is a simple question. A person like this, under these reckless delusions of grandeur about her role in America’s democracy, needs treatment. One can easily make the argument that she will not receive this treatment in a Colorado prison. It is not so simple as “this amount of years is appropriate, but this amount is not”, because the length of the sentence is not relevant to the argument over the betrayal that Peters’ crime represents. At the same time, this has nothing to do with the First Amendment, and everything to do with the exact rules of conduct a county clerk must follow. All it takes is a handful of Tina Peters’ to jeopardize the fragile state of American democracy. If we’re going to have a functioning criminal justice system (which we don’t currently), then it should be about getting to the root of Ms. Peters’ transparently-illegal actions. Putting her in a prison for a handful of years where she’s coddled by prison guards, a demographic sympathetic to her cause enough to give her preferential treatment, is not something that will help Ms. Peters.

Governor Polis is making this decision with the stated mindset that her sentence was egregious and unfair. I neither agree nor disagree with his judgment as it pertains to the amount of years (which was his only consideration, it appears). But I have two major problems with this. One is that we have an entire political party who doesn’t think anyone should be penalized for interfering with the results of the 2020 election, whether they were cloning hard drives or illegally marching through the Capitol with stated desires to kill the Vice President. There is no nuance to the argument, and elected officials with right-wing politics have gone on record equating people who have been “cancelled” for questioning the 2020 election to people who actively attacked and assaulted Capitol Police officers on January 6th (who, for the record, are now free and awaiting millions in payments from this administration). With Polis, now you have both sides feeding the beast that is election denialism in a country that may never have “reliable” election results again. Which is how democracies die, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

But rooted in Polis’ actions and words is a more fundamental issue. Put simply, Polis doesn’t believe that Peters’ lengthy sentence has any relation to “justice”. These could be just words, given that President Trump has threatened state funding for Colorado over this issue — profiles in cowardice all around. But herein lies the core of that argument — jails and prisons, in Colorado and elsewhere, are filled with people who have received inappropriate and egregious sentences. In a country with a quarter of the world’s incarcerated demographic but less than 5% of the nature world’s population, the biggest miscarriage of justice involves Tina Peters? I would think Polis is now going to make a concerted effort to commute the sentences of hundreds, maybe thousands of other inmates (particularly the disproportionately-imprisoned people of color). Instead, he’s cherry-picking a right-wing hero and martyr instead of those facing interminable sentences that cripple families and communities, instead of people who are sick and waiting on compassionate release, instead of people who are managing life sentences. You’ve chosen Tina Peters over people who actually deserve far more mercy and relief.

In other words, Jared Polis, this is not at all about injustice, and if you ever imply otherwise, you’re heartless and gutless.

I have a friend who, a few years ago, made a no-budget film. I had a lot of issues with it, but some of my unease felt like I couldn’t articulate it, I couldn’t piece it together. I soon realized one of my problems was with the wardrobe. He has decided to dress the character indifferently, the clothing said nothing about the characters or the story. None of the clothing looked like it was chosen specifically for these people. And none of it looked good. None of these characters were meant to be slobs, but that’s how they were dressed. It was wardrobe for hanging around the house. None of it popped, not even accidentally.

Seeing something like that makes you appreciate just how much a costume designer goes through for all professional movies, not just the movies about fashionable people. But when you do see those movies about fashionable people, it really does require a visual pop, and Dan Gilroy’s “Velvet Buzzsaw” definitely has that. It helps that he’s hired a cast of excessively hot people, but these gadflies of the art world are definitely people offering one new lewk per scene, even when it seems like far too many outfits for just one day.

The action revolves around the hallowed hall of the Haze Gallery, a Miami art museum run by Rhodora Haze – by the way, in some reviews I get very lazy and I never name the characters, but in this case I absolutely have to. Haze, a former punk rocker in the band Velvet Buzzsaw, has helped shepherd an entire art scene, a world orbited by a chaotic coterie of glamorous ass-kissers. She’s played by Rene Russo – Gilroy is her husband, and he certainly makes sure that, in her sixties (!!), the former model casts a compelling figure. In her first scene alone, she’s prowling around one particular exhibition in a form-hugging tiger-print dress. Now that’s characterization through costuming.

Her assistant, Josephina (Zawe Ashton) seems worried that she lacks the bloodlust to become Haze’s successor, and the feeling is mutual. She is almost there, of course – though she’s introduced crying, it’s in an incongruous glitter blue suit jacket. But soon Josephina discovers a ghoulish find – her reclusive upstairs neighbor has been found dead, and no one but her knows that he’s left behind several eye-catching paintings. Each depiction is immersive, dark, haunting. It seems impossible for anyone to separate the darkness of the work from her method of discovering it, but Josephina nonetheless sees an opportunity in her career. She no longer has to curate the art, now she can present it too. She can represent it. And, of course, she can let it corrupt her.

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The work complicates the lives of everyone around her. That includes her on/off boyfriend Morf Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhaal), a vain art critic who commands a perhaps-disproportionate amount of screentime for what seems like a supporting role. Gyllenhaal feels like he’s striking a pose the entire film, his fashion sense being Aggressively-Present Nerd, and he steals more than a few scenes. Toni Collette is Haze’s frenemy Gretchen, and like a few Collete characters, she’s all wigs – from her first scene onwards, she’s itching for comeuppance. The paintings generate jealousy from a newer artist, Damrish (Daveed Diggs) and a former legend turned contemporary disappointment, Piers (John Malkovich). If you’re familiar with Diggs and Malkovich, you know that these are two actors who won’t miss a minute if they want to show off a fresh look.

None of the outfits are overly implausible – this isn’t “The Hunger Games”, there’s no ludicrously over-designed Shingleberth Engleberry, or whatever their names are in those movies. Which is what makes it funny when the movie shifts from art world satire to outright horror film (full disclosure – I’d avoid the trailer I posted below, but it’s there just in case). Those who become enraptured by the work are soon menaced by it, as the work comes alive in various nightmare variations to kill those who might exploit the paintings. It’s a bit of a confusing message – is the now-animate artwork distinguishing between people who want to use the work for their own gain, or those who genuinely appreciate it with full sincerity? Gilroy, a veteran writer and director (this followed “Nightcrawler”), seems to suggest the line separating the two seems awfully thin.

The movie never abandons its arch sense of humor, however. One particularly nasty kill is treated as an exhibition for the audience before anyone realizes what’s happened. A reveal that the expired artist actually used real blood for paint is emphasized as a particularly on-the-nose choice. This is a movie where a hand going up a woman’s skirt is scored, via match cut, with the hooting of a train engine. The attitude seems to be that there is a crisis going on, and art is killing people, and how long can this go on before we treat it as serious? Given that one victim is named Jon Dondon, the answer is “a good long while”.

“Velvet Buzzsaw” feels as if it could commit in either direction. The critique of the art world feels so insular (perhaps the point) and we never see how these cartoonish people exist in the outside world. There’s a short moment where Morf is seen exiting a gym after a workout, and it looks like they merely filmed the actor in a way to keep him outside of the actual building, lest the character be seen among commoners. Intentional or not, the idea feels like a missed opportunity to comment on the role of art in the larger world. And once people start being killed, it feels as if some are dispensed with imaginatively, and some are merely grist. “Velvet Buzzsaw” feels trapped between two casually-entertaining movies, reluctant to commit. But at least it looks good while doing so.

I’d love to look like any of the male characters in this film. For my years in prison, close to eight and a half, I wore largely the same outfits. In the federal prison system, you get one jumpsuit, and then you get khaki pants and khaki shirts – some short-sleeved, some long-sleeved. Underneath is supposed to be the same short-sleeved brown t-shirt. You’re issued a handful of shirts and pants, as well as pairs of brown bower briefs, made of a thin, hard substance, and a pair of black steel-toed boots. This was the official uniform, and you were meant to wear this from 7:30-3:30, which was, more or less, work hours. Most people either had a job or were attending classes during that time. If you were doing neither and you weren’t leaving your dorm building, you could wear a t-shirt and shorts (the latter purchased off commissary). The colors were always flat and muted. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ve amassed a bunch of extra shirts and pants, though the khakis typically have your name and, more importantly, your number printed on them. In case you were wondering, your federal ID number in prison, the number one form of identification with staff, is generated by where you originally hail.

In the feds, the only variation from this outfit was in the SHU, when you had to wear bright orange pants and a t-shirt, and if you had to talk to staff outside your cell you’d have to have this under your jumpsuit. While the SHU was a test for anyone, I can’t lie about a part of me appreciating the color variation, getting to look bright, to stand out, after every other day was spent with brown on brown. In prison, it meant that you were supposed to be segregated, and for some, the suggestion was you were dangerous. But those outfits usually had spandex waistbands, and the t-shirts were comfortably large. It was a fun getup. When I got out, I immediately wanted to become a clotheshorse, I wanted to wear loud colors, t-shirts with insignia, suit jackets for no reason. I haven’t found the salary to accommodate this sort of shopping spree yet (and, sadly, I remain unemployed since the end of last year), but it’s long been a desire to look good and stand out, for once, after a decade of invisible browns.

There’s an archetypal story about Heath Ledger throwing shade at Philip Seymour Hoffman during the Oscar race for Best Actor, in the year they competed with each other with “Brokeback Mountain” and “Capote”, respectively. After Hoffman had won the Academy Award, Ledger supposedly made a crack about how the award was for “BEST Acting, not MOST acting.” Philip Seymour Hoffman was my favorite actor, I still miss him terribly, but Ledger’s catty little comment stings with truth. I love it. I hope Ledger sashayed away after dropping that one.

I kind of believe the same philosophy goes for directing, except that I don’t think it’s an insult. I LOVE when guys over-direct something (and it’s almost always guys), when they go over the top and eschew certain accepted sensibilities to mark their territory over an entire film. Sometimes it’s done in a tacky, grotesque manner, and sometimes someone just has that drip. It’s FASHION WEEK at From The Yard To The Arthouse, and we’re talking about Peter Strickland. The outfits in his movies scream, and “In Fabric” might be one of his loudest efforts. For Your Consideration, Peter Strickland, Most Directing.

During Fashion Week, we’re going to be talking about movies with an aggressive and distinct sense of clothing and style. But “In Fabric” is very specifically about one red dress. It’s a perfect match for Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), it’s bright, it’s ornate, it stands out at the store. Sheila, recently divorced, sees its transformative power and decides to make a purchase. The staff seem more than eager to part ways with the wardrobe. Later, they’ll resist a return attempt.

This dress, for lack of a better word, is haunted. Her date, a dud, doesn’t even seem to recognize her in her new garb. She doesn’t want to admit she is intimidated by her adult son, who lives with her, and his older girlfriend (Gwendoline Christie, a lovely presence cast likely because her towering frame makes Sheila fragile in her own home). The dress has no such qualms about expressing its dissatisfaction with this living arrangement. The dress is unruly. People stare. It obliterates the washing machine. It takes revenge on those making Sheila’s life hell. When it is destroyed, it reforms easily. You can’t keep a good fabric down.

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Strickland employs a unique structure to this picture, spending a great deal of time with Sheila. Jean-Baptiste is a British treasure, and here, she’s slipping into the persona of a forgotten middle-aged woman eager to prove she still functions, she still finds pleasure. The dress is her license to travel outside the invisible world she normally occupies. It’s also, quite violently, bonded to her. She is marked before she can protest, and soon the dress is levitating, dreamlike, over its next victims.

I don’t want to give up too much information, but the film takes the unusual step of shifting away from Jean-Baptiste into another narrative, allowing the dress a third act completely divorced from the first two. Now the dress bewitches someone else, seeping into the dreams of the innocent, fluttering and threatening to remodel one’s life. I don’t want to say more about this – it does indeed pay off the themes and motifs already introduced, but it also takes us into a more experimental storytelling realm. In horror movie terms, the dress is growing more powerful, feeding off the latent, buried emotions of its owners. But it’s also growing more reckless, and less devoted to consistency. A dress can truly change your life. But even though it maintains its form, no one ever wonders whether you can change a dress.

It’s campy, yes, but with a straight face. Strickland typically operates from a distance many consider ironic. But his fetishization of mirrors, scaffoldings, sheets and surfaces is completely sincere. Yes, Strickland really enjoys this. The wardrobe in this film is particularly strange, but Strickland keeps all eyes on that single dress, photographing it lovingly even as it proceeds to become an instrument of death (and perhaps fate?). He doesn’t skimp on the gore, though it seems to be in the spirit of Italian horror films of the seventies, red blood on red surfaces that feels as if it leaks off the screen and into your eyes. “In Fabric” is entrancing and maddening, an indulgence for the senses that vibrates quietly to a subterranean beat.

There was a recent interview with the newly-appointed Attorney General Todd Blanche that’s been rolling around in my head as far as what it says about criminal justice today. Let’s ignore the fact that Blanche is yet another under-qualified stooge – Blanche has been quoted telling the media he would say “I love you” to President Trump, which is troubling to hear from an AG, but also just plain pathetic. And let’s ignore the sweetheart deal that Blanche previously negotiated for Ghislaine Maxwell that seemed to provide Maxwell relief in prison in exchange for… gosh, I guess we’ll never know. But more specifically, he was recently interviewed regarding President Trump’s open, and illegal plea, to begin investigations on those that had previously investigated him. However you wish to spin it, it was a Truth Social post made by the President where the subject of the complaint was his own “reputation and credibility”.

In responding, Blanche claimed, “That type of communication from President Trump should make people happy,” adding that it is based in the idea that the President is mindful of how hard those who work under him (presumably to prosecute his enemies). His following quote was that the President’s active guidance towards the Department of Justice was, “what being the commander in chief is all about.” As far as answers go, it’s illiterate, ahistorical and, if we’re being honest, it’s also evidence. But the phrase “make people happy” is interesting. He’s conflating Criminal Justice with a McDonald’s, with the theory that the customer is always right, suggesting that arrests and prosecutions alone (and not justice) drive the excitement (and perhaps entertainment) of the American public. It’s ghastly in how cynical it is, the presumption that most Americans want to see people in cuffs (I wonder which people…) and therefore the excitement of making an arrest is what galvanizes the people.

And this I wrestle with… is there a kernel of truth in Blanche’s blubbering balderdash? Is the concept of justice so obscured into the abyss that people simply want real life to reflect an episode of “Cops”? This administration seems to think so – using social media to disseminate perp walks, even if they have to be digitally altered. To a normal person, footage of ICE’s inhumane kidnappings is a distressing example of illegality, but to the White House, it’s a sort of cultural retribution, a notch in the “W” column for broken manbabies who have been aggrieved their whole lives. If their peacocking embrace of criminal behavior was turning off the base, we’d be hearing more about it, and not just from the pop stars who hear their songs repurposed for the corresponding footage. Is the general public so far at sea that they think this is a functional criminal justice system simply by a theatrical (and fairly campy) embrace of cruelty? Is Todd Blanche onto something when he says it makes people “happy” to see Trump chasing his enemies, threatening prosecution for made-up crimes? Is criminal justice in 2026 really just all about petty revenge?

It turns out and other fellow Substackers have been going long on King this spring, with every day sparking a new essay on films based on the work of Stephen King. For me, I drew the recent adaptation of “The Long Walk”, which you can read, and share, below.

I’m getting tired of kids getting shot in the face.

Let’s back up.

When you get older, you find that you’re scared of different ideas. When you’re young, it’s ghosts and goblins, masked killers who can’t be stopped, monsters and ghouls. You reach a certain age and it’s taxes. It’s your decaying body. It’s the realization you really don’t know your neighbors. It’s waking up one day, checking out the news, and wondering how you got here, how you live in this particular world.

My view was skewed even further by incarceration. I spent several years in federal prison, having to watch my back, having to act like I was always ready for a fight, having to mind my surroundings. I briefly considered writing a zombie movie set in a correctional facility, really the perfect location. But the scariest element was that the zombies would distract me from keeping my wits, and staying safe from a stabbing. And now I’m less scared of, say, a vampire than I am that I am exclusively defining myself by my former associations with prison. Is this my whole identity?

I need a cigarette.

“The Long Walk” is based on a work by Richard Bachman, one of Stephen King’s pseudonyms. Bachman lived an unusually-long life for a fake person, writing novels from 1977 to 1985. In addition to “The Long Walk”, he also penned “Rage”, which concerns a school shooting. Another Bachman effort, “Thinner”, closes with the shock of a father accidentally placing a curse on his daughter. Bachman seemed concerned about the death of a child. Probably because, in his “bio”, his son fell down a well and drowned. These deaths are in print because, ideologically, there is a stigma that is attached to the death of a child. There used to be.

I was in the theater watching “The Long Walk” last year. A couple of days earlier, there was a school shooting at Evergreen High School in Colorado. A student opened fire, shot twenty rounds, hit two students, and then killed himself. When the news reported school shootings in the past, the media chased a motive, they wanted an explanation. By the time of Evergreen, even though the shooter’s Neo-Nazi leanings circulated through his writings, they were overshadowed by the cultural assumption — people, usually white men, like to shoot firearms at schools. “School shooting” had become a combination phrase like “ice cream cone”. It’s two ideas, inexorably intertwined. There are schools, filled with children — people with access to guns will shoot at them. And we will all pretend that this has nothing to do with the fact that everyone has access to guns. In a country where the government is trying to criminalize abortion pills delivered through the mail, just about anyone can roll out of bed and go buy a gun, either through legal means, or in untraceable ways, like a purchase made at a gun show that requires no paperwork.

I need another cigarette.

Anyway, America very quickly moved on from Evergreen. A child obtained a gun and used it in an attempt to murder other children in a place where children congregate, and it wasn’t all that important to the media. Instead, they reported on the shooting death of a right wing podcaster and public speaker whose sole claim to fame was lowering the national discourse by sanitizing and mainstreaming hate speech. A man who stood for nothing, which allowed his supporters, in turn, to pretend he stood for whatever pet cause they embraced today. Kids were shot at, but it was more important to affix angel wings to the corpse of a grown man who had turned white nationalism into a respectable worldview that should be granted a seat at the table. Meanwhile, people shoot at schools now. Schools have active shooter drills. They don’t even have active shooter drills at army bases or gun shows. We’ve come to expect school shootings, we’ve penciled them into our annual schedule. Newspapers and websites have templates for writing up the next one. We’ve accepted this.

We’re not twenty minutes into “The Long Walk” when a child, a competitor in the title event, is facing the camera, shot in the back of the head. It is a computer effects, obviously and thankfully, but a believable visual. His features are distorted from the blast. Before we’ve seen the title, this boy’s destroyed face flies towards the frame, towards us. Thankfully it’s not a “comin’ atcha” effect like the ones you’d see in 80’s 3D horror movies. It’s disorienting, it’s upsetting. It’s an indictment. They’re throwing it in your face. You deserve it.

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Francis Lawrence is the director. Technically, he’s done this already. He’s currently in post-production on his fifth “Hunger Games” film. That franchise is derived from a popular book series that are indicative of a larger wave of post-Columbine YA books that, collectively, suggest a future where teenagers must vie for survival among the ashes of a future that adults have decimated through vanity and impatience. “The Hunger Games”, “Divergent”, “The Maze Runner”, three book series’ that became blockbuster franchises, three of an endless parade of books aimed towards a demographic of youngsters who feel hopeless because their elders abandoned their responsibilities. They didn’t act after Columbine. They didn’t act after 9/11. They didn’t act after the housing crisis of 2008. They long ago stopped acting.

In making most of the “Hunger Games” films, Lawrence has been the one in charge of channeling that hopelessness cinematically. In those movies, kids kill each other to stay alive, many of them equipped with resources and weapons provided to them by adults who watch from positions of privilege, enjoying it as a detached entertainment. It’s not much different than what’s happening in real life — after every school shooting, sales of the firearm used in the shooting start to climb. That blood money then reaches lobbyists, before landing in the pocket of politicians who actively endorse widespread murder as long as gun companies collect profit. In “Hunger Games”, they have an announcer. That’s the difference.

Of course, Lawrence is making this bleak, depressing dystopia for mainstream audiences. He’s making it so kids can go with their families to watch these films on holiday. And it’s palatable because it’s tasteful, and it’s tasteful because you don’t have someone’s face being shot off and flying towards the camera. Don’t worry, the bludgeoning and widespread slaughter happens slightly off-camera. Bloodless. Killing kids used to be a taboo, moreso if kids were doing the killing. Now, it’s mainstream entertainment. The taboo is if it upsets your tummy.

Where are my goddamned cigarettes already?

None of this is lost on Lawrence. Surely he’s aware that Bachman brought us “The Running Man”, where a broke man signs up for a “Most Dangerous Game” reality show, where being hunted by killers might earn him a chance to pay for his daughter’s surgery. A man unable to afford to provide medical care, turned into cannon fodder for an audience hungry for blood, thanks to a corporation ready to provide it. Again, Bachman and the dying kids. Even as someone who doesn’t exist, he’s got more concern for kids than the aforementioned politicians.

“The Long Walk” stands out onscreen because Lawrence, while adapting Bachman, is making a companion piece to “The Hunger Games”. In those films, children are empowered to murder children in glamorous, outlandish ways, with absurd and camera-ready methods. “The Long Walk” looks like crap television. It is, essentially, kids walking, in sneakers, for days. There are only so many ways to film that. If “The Hunger Games” is “Survivor”, then “The Long Walk” is maybe the cheap, uneventful, more-obviously-Orwellian “Big Brother”. Or maybe it’s one of the even seedier reality shows of the 00’s, like “The Swan”, where sad people signed off for ready-for-TV plastic surgery makeovers.

These are young boys, they’re chipper, they’re sarcastic. Much of the dialogue comes from the source material. One kid makes a “Candid Camera” joke, which is a funny idea. Can you imagine someone under eighteen today making a reference to the work of Allen Funt? Why wouldn’t you have jokes? There’s relatively few jokes in the “Hunger Games” movies (a pity considering Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson have repeatedly flexed comedic muscles in other fare). But the boys of “The Long Walk” are cutups as they March towards their sudden death. It feels more believable. Much of the horror of “The Long Walk” has already happened. People fought and they lost. “The Hunger Games” still carries a flame for a revolution that might be possible. The kids in “The Long Walk” will joke themselves into an early grave, filmed competition or no.

Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson are the two we get to know the best. Hoffman is a heartbreaker, a good guy, a sturdy guy. Someone you can rely on. If he wasn’t onscreen marching to his death, you’d imagine his Ray would lend you twenty dollars while he works on his mother’s engine, even though he’s a kid. You sense that he shouldn’t have to do that, but in this world, it’s expected of young people. In real life, Hoffman’s father was the world’s greatest actor. Even in his most forceful roles, there was a sadness to many of his performances. You sensed that he wanted a way out, maybe he wanted it. Bless him, the poor man was chased by demons. Onscreen his son is the opposite — he seems to want to fight for his life. Which makes his presence here all the more shattering.

Jonsson has established a reputation as being a charisma firecracker. It’s a necessity in a film like this. You need Jonsson’s charming Pete to crack jokes and flash a smile to avoid the sensation you’re watching a snuff film. Characters march forward until they cannot. Each one who stumbles takes several bullets. One youngster drops his pants and begins to uncontrollably relieve himself while trying to keep pace. The fact that he is a kid desperately trying to hold onto the smallest sliver of dignity in what he knows are his final moments claws at one’s conscience. But watch the others. The child’s despair means nothing to the soldiers walking/riding by, because they have orders to execute. You can’t expect humanity of the foot soldiers, otherwise they would cease to be foot soldiers. But it’s the acceptance from the kids that guts you. They know he has to keep walking. They know those are the rules. They know he doesn’t want to die like this. They are not fighting against his apparent need to die. They know his fate is baked into their reality, it’s a natural cause and effect. They can only beg that he prolong his fate. They don’t attack those that make it his fate. They egg him on as feces spill from his rear. They scream as he takes a bullet. He did it to himself. If only he could just die in pants.

Death is the inevitability. Lawrence wants to shock you with that opening salvo, so by the end, you accept what the kids accept — they are made to die, destined to die, and now on television, they’re scheduled to die. When it is their time, they’re going to beg before they fight. They’re not going to greet brutality with brutality, but with pleas of mercy. It’s good TV, because it’s kids wishing for something that doesn’t exist. It’s kids dreaming of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I hope that this year, for the holidays, I don’t get shot.

There is a flashback. Ray at home, soldiers busting in. Ray’s father never pledged allegiance. He didn’t participate in the performative reverence that involves saluting our leaders, whomever they are, whatever their names might be. He’s given one chance at gunpoint, a chance to capitulate and surrender his morals. He won’t do it. He is alone, which makes it easier to kill him. The question hangs in the air — if there were a lot of him, you couldn’t truly shoot them all, which is why soldiers need to go door to door, overmatching each individual. Maybe there weren’t a lot because there never was a lot, no one could bring themselves to stand up, no one had the bravery to stand on principle when the world began to decay. But the question still haunts the viewer: Maybe there were a lot, and they were shot anyway. This is what Ray saw.

And so the winner of “The Long Walk” gets a “wish”. We’re told the title competition has been running for a long time, and people have gladly, willingly signed up, not only for a cash prize, but for the promise of that wish. We’ll take everything from you, but one of you will get to live out a dream. Ray’s wish is curdled in bloodlust, it’s crooked. You get the sense it’s not your average wish. But it’s still a wish all the same, a small concession people in power will make to imply a false sense of mercy. We’ll step on your throat, but we’ll wear comfortable sneakers.

We don’t see the audience for this show, possibly because it would be too cruel. Because it would show the transactional nature of delusions under fascism. We’re at home cheering as one kid marches towards a wish, a wish and some cash that might as well have fallen out of the government’s pocket. And because we want to celebrate the wish, we watch kids get shot. They are shot in the head, shot in the chest. There are guns on them for the entire walk, and they’ve grown accustomed to being a potential target. They take bullets, explode into gore, and crumble to the ground. And we cheer the survivors. To Richard Bachman, this was horror. We should probably asks ourselves today if it still is, or if it’s simply “the order of things.”

The Scarestack Society’s Spring of King Schedule:

5/1 It miniseries - Sahar Khan

5/2 Pet Semetary - JHong

5/3 Pet Semetary 2 - Horror Hangouts

5/4 Cujo - Kyle Ryan

5/5 Creepshow - B-Movie Tea

5/6 The Outsider - Sean Mo

5/7 Gerald’s Game - H. H. Duke

5/8 The Mangler - Timothy Atkinson

5/9 Maximum Overdrive - Yanni Hamburger

5/10 Salem’s Lot 2024 - Meat Head Media

5/11 Silver Bullet - George R. Galuschak

5/12 Creepshow 2 - Thehumangaze

5/13 Carrie - Hellish Views - Harry Evans

5/14 Christine - Emma

5/15 Big Driver- Molly O’Blivion & Stand By Me - Matt Cyr

5/16 The Shining - Jamie B.

5/17 The Long Walk - Decarceration

5/18 King Of Home Video - Jean-Pierre Diez

5/19 The Langoliers - Beverley’s Horror Corner

5/20 Sleepwalkers - Brandon Rae

5/21 The Running Man - Stevie Duffy

5/22 Misery - Skyla

5/23 The Night Flier - Bryan Wolford

5/24 The Shawshank Redemption - Genevieve Brock

5/25 Dreamcatcher - Kimberly B🌴👻🌴

5/26 The Mist - Cedric

5/27 The Dead Zone - Stephen’s Offscreen Screams

5/28 Cat’s Eye - Backyard Movie Critic & Graveyard Shift - Liam Palmer

5/29 Rose Red - Kristen (Blood,Blush ,& Guts) & Storm Of The Century - Adam Hunter

5/30 It Chapter 1 - That Horror Lesbian

5/31 Dolores Claiborne - Kimberly Ramsawak & The Lawnmower Man - Mike smith

This has been a week of doubles, doppelgangers and clones, but we haven’t had proper monster representation. Many doubling-type stories build upon the Jekyll-Hyde framework, where a character isn’t aware that they are two wholly distinct personalities. Unrelatedly, there have been dozens of kaiju movies made over the decades. So what if someone attempted a Jekyll-Hyde tale, but with kaiju? That’s the tonal gamble that director Nacho Vigalando makes with “Colossal”.

Technically, “Colossal”’s most important story is that there is a giant monster attempting to destroy Korea. But the movie, by and large, is about real people on the ground who have other, more specific interpersonal problems. I’ve always wanted to see more of that. Just because asteroids are hitting the Earth or creatures have climbed out from the Earth’s core doesn’t mean that someone isn’t having girlfriend problems, or a mother can’t afford to feed her family, or a kid needs her driver’s license validated. I’d love to see a “Jurassic World” movie that brings back Alan Grant, trying to sell his archeological finds so he can buy a boat in a world where velociraptors are breaking loose in downtown Manhattan. There’s a bit in “Moonfall” where the moon is falling – I won’t say when, that’s a spoiler – and, when recruited on a mission into space, Patrick Wilson turns it down and says, “I got a lot of my own problems down here.” Those must be some pretty big problems, guy! I wanna see THAT movie.

Instead, we’re in New Hampshire, where Anne Hathaway’s Gloria is crashing out. Her boyfriend in New York not only dumped her, but fully kicked her out, leaving her with no recourse other than to go home with nothing in her pocket. An underemployed writer, her only option is to go see childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), who runs a bar and is happy to employ her as a bartender. Which is a terrible idea, because Gloria is an alcoholic, and she cannot hold her beer like Oscar, basic Joel (Austin Stowell) and conspiracy theorist Garth (Tim Blake Nelson), who all shut down the bar every night with several rounds of drinks. Oscar wants to help Gloria, and he also has fairly fond feelings towards her, but he is quite obviously indulging bad behavior.

In what I assume is simply movie magic, Gloria discovers that she might have a relationship to these monster attacks halfway across the world. She wakes up long after they’ve occurred, though she soon realizes the monster is acting out her blackout-drunk behavior during a certain time of the night when she’s absolutely blitzed. Personally, I would think the booze is doing this, but apparently it’s the playground across the street where she’s able to create the beast, which then causes such a manifestation appearing elsewhere. Gloria is amused that she has this sudden ability to control a scaly beast laying waste to Seoul, until she grasps the severity of that devastation. Hundreds are dying under the monster’s foot, all because Gloria can’t control her consumption issues.

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What’s novel is that the New York boyfriend, Tim (Dan Stevens) returns, seeking Gloria’s help. And then this becomes something of a romantic comedy, though within the framework of a kaiju movie. Tim, British, persnickety and well-off, is technically an upgrade over slovenly Oscar. Of course, he’s a stiff, and Oscar’s the life of the party – it’s irrelevant, but this is not a great use of Dan Stevens. And as she decides between her two suitors, her beastly avatar is finding select moments to lay waste to urban Korean environments, just as Tim and Oscar are squaring off like Godzilla and Ghidorah.

It’s a wild genre hybrid, and because of these authentic performances, it works. It’s atypical to see an Oscar winner as a screw-up drunk in a monster movie, but Hathaway is tremendously game to play a mess while grounding her fear of her monster shadow in a recognizable reality. Sudeikis has that young Chevy Chase charm – not that he’s secretly a jerk and will be outed in a few decades, but that he’s charming despite little-to-no effort. You kind of wish Tim was more drawn in – these romantic triangles usually have one under-defined angle, and from some perspectives Tim seems like a guy destined to be left behind. But as we learn about Oscar, we realize he’s not necessarily a catch either, and Gloria ends up wrestling with his role in her past. “Colossal” has many easy storytelling off-ramps it can take, and to it’s credit, it ignores most of them.

Vigalando is a truly slept-on genre filmmaker, a man who matches low-budget big-stakes genre filmmaking with intimate character interactions. “Colossal” reminds me closely of his second film, “Extraterrestrial”. That picture, a Spanish thriller, is about a man who wakes up after a one night stand in an unfamiliar home only to realize an alien invasion is going on, trapping him inside with his lover from the previous night and the accompanying hazy memories. It is a great example of the dramatic genre picture boiled down to interpersonal dynamics, as much about the couple’s survival as it is about the impending apocalypse. Few filmmakers are capable of this unique balance, which is disappointing considering that Vigalando is a guy that should be working more, on a larger budget. But “Colossal”, his first and last time with above-the-title American stars, is proof that our big action spectacles no longer have to be about the same people in the same repetitive situations.

Restitution is a concept that many hear about in the world of criminal justice. As a condition of your charge, you may be asked to provide restitution as repentance for your crime, either towards the victim or towards the government. But collecting the restitution proves to be a challenge for many municipalities. This article focuses on the struggles in Oregon, where the collection rate for restitution has hovered just under 40% for years now. Not only is that a lot of money not accounted for, but it’s money that’s sought with a receipt – it gets expensive to pursue the convicted in search of money, money that might not even plausibly exist. In Oregon alone, this shortfall in restitution, and the accompanying failed attempts, has cost the state $1.4 billion.

Much of this money is sought from people who could never afford it in the first place, the suffering of victims boiled down to a number that the perpetrator cannot provide. So it becomes a challenge to chase the paychecks of the poor to fulfill these needs. White collar crimes frequently carry restitution penalties as well, but the people accused are typically men and women skilled at hiding their earnings and wealth. Beyond that, I don’t have a particularly clear idea how someone is further rehabilitated, and the public trust is upheld, by forcing those convicted of crimes to cut a check. It’s yet another rickety part of our justice system that has endured for decades despite a faulty mechanism and dubious gain for our society. When states see situations like a missing $1.4 billion in Oregon, it’s likely they begin considering practical solutions to this problem.

On Monday, you’d better freshen up. It’s FASHION WEEK.

I happen to think that, if you show me a respected actor who only shows up in leading roles in small indies, I’ll show you a guy struggling, and failing, to sell out. For a while, Ryan Gosling and Jake Gyllenhaal were looked at as leading men with “integrity”, but both infamously auditioned for “Green Lantern”. Tom Hardy is no different in my eyes – after comparing his villain role in “The Dark Knight Rises” to “working at a Starbucks” in an interview, he walked across the street to punch the clock at McDonald’s, starring in a ludicrous trilogy of “Venom” films for Sony. I don’t judge it (ok, maybe a little), but it’s worth being honest about how little raw talent and a penchant for wacky accents don’t pay the bills.

Before he stepped in as “Venom” (during a period where he was also making weird cameos in the world of “Star Wars”, “The Matrix” and, conspicuously, “Spider-Man”), he had a remarkable 2015, appearing in five movies. Two of them, “Child 44” and “London Road”, were not well-received. One of them, “Mad Max: Fury Road”, might be one of the greatest cinematic experiences of the 21st century – I do wish I could have seen it on the big screen, and not bootlegged in a prison TV room. And then there was “The Revenant”, which earned Hardy his first and only Oscar nomination. But none of those movies represented the workload he took on in “Legend”.

In “Legend”, Hardy stars, and co-stars, as Reginald and Ronald Kray, a couple of brothers and infamous British crime lords in the 1960’s. They’re both distinct types, giving Hardy a chance to really toy with different characterizations inside the same narrative. Both of these men are cruel and bloodthirsty, quick to challenge with violence. Reggie is the brother with the more thoughtful, methodical approach, mindful of his surroundings as he badgers and bludgeons underlings. Ronald, mentally disturbed and prone to fits of violence, is the less-predicable and more volatile of the two. Ronald is also openly gay, in a time and milieu that would be uncharitable toward his inclinations. It’s notable that he seems to use his homosexuality as a weapon, and his desires seem less about arousal and more about dominance.

Reggie ends up in a semi-steady relationship to young Frances, who narrates the movie. She’s played by Emily Browning, and though she was the younger woman in real life, the film accentuates this by having the slight-of-frame Browning shrink in the presence of the much-older Hardy (who is maybe a decade-plus older than either of the Krays during the film’s runtime). Frances can never get through to Reggie, who has less chemistry with her than he does with his own twin. Reggie cares for Frances, but it seems as if he actually, deeply loves Ron, a short fuse eternally ready to go off. I suppose it’s a bit of narrative playfulness to note the homoerotic incestuous tension between a single actor and himself. Tom Hardy, eternally a weirdo.

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Much of “Legend” consists of meetings with various crime figures who disagree with how the Krays do business. You’re just waiting for the burst of violence that’s going to end every interaction. Is it going to come from Reggie, who is going to slowly eye everyone opposing him, and consider whether or not someone needs a punch in the face? Or is it going to be Ronald, who will pull out a gun and attempt suicide by pointing it at eight other armed men? Director Brian Helgeland (writer of “L.A. Confidential”, director of “42”) doesn’t always make this cinematic, but he doesn’t need to do much work when you have two wily Tom Hardy performances sharing the screen. This is a familiar rise-and-fall story, only the rise is notably more brutal (and thus, darkly funny) than your usual true crime tale.

While Hardy is always dominating the frame, there’s plenty of time for a few fun faces to show up. Paul Bettany appears as a former boss usurped by the Krays’ local power, and David Thewlis brings his smarm to the part of a Krays’ associate. Taron Edgerton makes a surprising appearance as one of Ronald’s boyfriends, and goony character actor Sam Spruell (you know the face more than the name) is a sadistic underling who proves to be a liability. Most interestingly is Chazz Palmentari, who feels like he’s been playing mobsters since before any of us were born. He appears as a Philly mob boss named Angelo Bruno, a fast-talking glad-handler trying to develop a crossatlantic business relationship with the Krays. There’s a great moment where oversharing Ron describes his sexual tastes to Bruno in great detail, in the midst of a meeting where Reggie has already had the tightest of sphincters. The way Palminteri drags out the suspense before responding in a warmly receptive way is a reminder that Palmentari has been denied some of the good roles his peers have received over the years.

But this is primarily Hardy’s movie, and he misses no opportunity to chew any scenery still standing. From early on, the Krays control the narrative completely, they are aggressors and enforcers from the movie’s first moments, and little arises to challenge their throne. It’s true of the Krays as it is for the two Hardys, and the movie, to its credit, features a number of scenes where he gets to physically interact with himself in ways that test a common but still tricky special effect. You can tell these brothers care for each other, but they’ve also likely read the script. They know that they’re headed for a fiery ending, and they’re wondering who is going to be responsible, the too-trusting Reggie or the reckless Ronald. The tension between the two is enhanced, metafictionally, by both of them being played by the same guy. It’s a spirit, an attitude, an actor, at war with himself, and the collateral damage is considerable. “Legend” never rises up to become a Cockney classic, but isn’t it enough to see a great actor ram his head against himself right before he entered his sell-out phase?

This is an interesting news story that, again, reflects the changing priorities of the FBI. An arsonist protesting our current political situation in America was arrested for setting fire to a warehouse in California. The US attorney who prosecuted the case was quoted comparing this fire as an attack on “our values, our way of life, our system”, which is fascinating to me. No one was injured in the fire, so I’m personally wondering which of my values were attacked by a warehouse burning down across the country from me. It’s a revealing comment because of that last part – a “system” that was attacked, a system that did not involve the lifestyle of the arsonist (who worked for a third-party contractor), does not involve my lifestyle, and probably has nothing to do with yours. Of course, the system they’re talking about is capitalism. None of this is a secret.

I’ve written about this before, but it’s clear we’re seeing a massive shift in our federal law enforcement apparatus to focus on politics and free speech. Apparently, it is not only un-American to criticize a system that places an absurd and society-crushing amount of wealth in the hands of an upper 1%, it’s now criminal. Homeland Security has already labeled “class-based or economic grievances” as a mark of extremism that can be classified as a threat. And why not? The closest thing for the goons in charge to religion – the idea that they’re not responsible for their own cruel actions, which include the suffering of the less-fortunate – is capitalism. Capitalism, a magical system where money, run through banks and business, is actually distributed through destiny and birthright, through magic and mystery, based on forces far beyond the control of those who literally control and command all the wealth. In this America, the law doesn’t think you matter. In this America, only the system matters.

“Enemy” was winding its way through festival screenings in the period before my incarceration, though I didn’t pay much attention to it. By the time I was in prison, cracking open Jose Saramago’s “The Double”, it’s adaptation “Enemy” was far from my mind. I was delighted to find it was a rather playful, lightweight tale of a man completely taken over by the idea he may have a doppelganger. Of course, that’s how I interpreted it – books don’t typically announce their vibe so loudly as other mediums. Though I had previously consumed Saramago’s “Blindness”, which was notably more bleak and pessimistic, “The Double” is largely about that impossible-to-scratch urge to know more than you ever possibly can, to provide answers in a universe that doesn’t make sense.

Consider it a surprise to me that Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of “The Double”, now aggressively named “Enemy”, was a dark and severe bit of nastiness, starring maybe the most intense leading man of this era. “Enemy” isn’t as explicitly conveyed as his “Prisoners”, nor does it benefit from the massive canvas Villeneuve would adopt for his later bigger-budget efforts. This is a movie openly defiant of a simple answer, focusing on a man who is determined to attach a precise meaning to a cosmic impossibility.

Jake Gyllenhaal is Adam, who lives a comfortable middle-class life in Canada. He is unfulfilled, and therefore susceptible to suggestion, like a specific movie recommendation from a coworker. This leads him to a movie, a generic programmer he watches at home that nonetheless contains an upsetting wrinkle. The bellboy in this film is a carbon copy of Adam. He can’t recall any family members who would be actors, so he immediately wonders, who is this person? After catching this man in a couple other movies, he reasons, it must be me, or someone who has become me. In the 2002 novel, there was a satisfying sequence of research and study through stacks of VHS’s. Unfortunately, this more modern version loses that analog touch.

Instead of this being a cute story he can share with his girlfriend Mary (Melanie Laurent) (or maybe a goofy obsession he hides from her), Adam surrenders to the mystery, looking this man up and trying to grasp his significance. He tracks Anthony down, seeing that he’s a working actor with a pregnant wife Helen (Sarah Gadon). Oblivious to the notion that he is intruding on someone else’s life, he begins to lurk on the periphery of Anthony’s world. Wasting no time, Helen begins to track this man making suspicious phone calls to her apartment and she discovers Adam at work. But it’s the boys who become consumed. Anthony downplays the incidents to his wife, though soon Adam and Anthony are meeting in person, trying to hash out how the two of them are, improbably, exact doubles.

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“Enemy” takes place in a Canada that feels cloudy and yellow, the cinematography a bleached honey color that allows for multiple shades of shadow, but only one hue of brightness. It feels as if characters are always either on their way into a darkness, or just emerging from one. The movie is bookended by a curious idea of a hidden room, where events occur that I will not describe (an addition I believe was not in the source material). The entire movie, you’re waiting for someone to return to this room, subterranean, maybe sulfurous, possibly an attempt to womb back, a vestigial retreat. The punchline for this idea, perhaps this whole movie, is a shocking visual concept, a metaphor for how one can be subsumed by an idea that once felt they could control. It’s enigmatic to the point of unsatisfying. Somehow, I think it works, though it’s an idea I’ve been wrestling with ever since.

“Enemy” plays the conceit straight in a way that made me think, perhaps, there’s a comedic intention somewhere. The idea is inherently absurd, though Villeneuve grants the tale his customary intensity – his other work suggests it’s not a put-on, and yet I can’t rule the idea out that they’re all goofing on us. The film spirals into one specific psychosexual direction, absent the inner monologue of the book, and it runs the risk of being in-line with any number of sillyy tales of doubles switching places, pulling a trick on those around them. Maybe I just find Villeneuve’s maximalist intensity more than a little funny – “Prisoners” feels like a parodic version of a Lifetime thriller at points, compelling on one level and absurdly belabored on another. His ponderous “Dune” movies are similarly indebted to their form, unable to break from their forceful genre restraints. Are his movies, particularly this one, a little funny? Or am I just eager to laugh at them? Or am I laughing with them? “Enemy”’s oblique exit, the most confounding conclusion of any of his films, keeps me guessing. I like that.

I’m not sure if you need a subscription for this (DM me if you can’t read it), but I couldn’t get over this wildly fascinating New Yorker article about Alex Friedmann. Friedmann had done time in his youth, addicted to the idea of being a stick-up kid in spite of his obvious intelligence. During his time, he refined his interests, studying law and understanding the criminal justice system, enough that he merged as an activist. He wasn’t decarceral, exactly, but he believed in steps that were required to make prison a more tolerable experience for those who seek to better themselves and seize opportunities. He developed respect and a reputation for a plainspoken analysis of the system from a legal perspective, not that of an ex-con. His story is inspiring to me, at least as long as you stop telling it at a certain point.

In a crime no one can accurately explain, Friedmann was caught placing a gun within the infrastructure of an institution that was in the process of being built. The belief is that, decades after his incarceration, he was haunted by the possibility he’d be arrested once again, taken into custody and forced to defend himself. He was institutionalized, in other words, forced to confront that his future would be his past, spent in custody. I am troubled by this story, as he was outspoken against the system’s inequities, but still mentally imprisoned by it. It makes me wonder about a thought I have fought against – the idea that when you are imprisoned, you are in many ways imprisoned forever. I am sitting still, out in public, typing this. But is a part of me still sitting in a bottom bunk in a prison dorm? Is my freedom an eternal delusion?