Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 88

Phase IV

When scioscribe informed me that Saul Bass, the noted movie credit sequence and poster designer who worked on everything from North by Northwest to Casino had also directed a horror movie about ants that was free on Amazon Prime and had an ending so bizarre that the studio cut it and it was only released a couple years ago, I promptly watched it over lunch and liveblogged over email.

Ants begin behaving strangely in the desert, building towers and cooperating to kill predators. Two scientists move into a geodesic dome to study this phenomena. This goes about as well as you'd expect.

Phase IV was released in 1974 and OH BOY can you tell. It's essentially a '50s monster movie filtered through an incredibly '70s sensibility, so it swerves between standard horror moments (dialogue like, "Oh my God, they're huge! ANTS!!!!!") and a dreamlike, allegorical trippiness.

There are moments that are genuinely haunting and beautiful, such as the towers built by the ants, a girl stumbling barefoot through the desert and singing hymns in a wobbly voice, and a lot of the ant photography.

The ants are real ants, and they're shot to highlight their strange beauty and to tell little stories about them that make sense within the plot but also function as self-contained stories. An ant relay in which they drag insecticide to their queen, one ant taking over for the next as they succumb to the poison, is halfway between Viking saga and the Chernobyl repairmen; a sequence involving a praying mantis is a perfect little masterpiece of misdirection, suspense, and a satisfying reveal. When the scientists try to kill the ants, we see it from the ants' perspective and it's shot like a classic war movie. All these sequences are like movies from an alternate world in which ants are the dominant species.

[Note: ants are most definitely harmed in the making of this movie.]

And then there's the human story. There's a scientist who wants to communicate with the ants, a scientist who wants to kill them, and a teenage girl who survives an ant attack. (Despite the massive 70s-ness of the film, there is no sex or romance THANK GOD.) I think it may have been an allegory of the war in Vietnam. It's definitely an allegory of war and how men who'd rather wage war than make peace ruin everything.

The movie as a whole was so 70s that I kept emailing scioscribe moments that I thought were peak 70s, only they kept getting topped.

"2 dudes and a girl naked in a decon shower wearing nothing but giant goggles while ants fall in slomo = quintessential 70s."

"On second thought, glowing pink crystal pyramids next to a geodesic dome is the most 70s thing ever."

And then I hit the ending. Both endings.

Cut for spoilers and ant-related body horror movie poster. ( Read more... )

Phase IV[image error]

comments

Stephen King Exchange - King of Exchanges

kingofexchanges is open for signups and nominations! (We decided to do them simultaneously this year.)

The tag set is here. Take a look at what's already nominated, and add whatever you like. All Stephen King-related canons are eligible.

I'm modding the exchange, along with sholio and scioscribe . We had a wonderful time with it last year, and it produced some great stories that I still re-read. Come on in! The water's fine. Except for the thing lurking at the bottom...

Who's going to do it this year?

comments

The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kiernan

“I’m going to write a ghost story now,” she typed.

“A ghost story with a mermaid and a wolf,” she also typed.

I also typed.

My name is India Morgan Phelps, though almost everyone I know calls me Imp.

A gorgeous, intense dark fantasy about mental illness, myths, and memes. Not memes in the internet sense, but memes in the older sense: ideas that get passed around like a virus, taking on a life of their own.

Imp is a sweet, earnest, sheltered young painter with schizophrenia, which is well-controlled with medication. She lives with her girlfriend Abalyn, who is transgender and writes video game reviews. All of this is relevant.

Imp is trying to write the story of what happened when she met a woman named Eva Canning, who might be a siren and is certainly supernatural, on a hot evening in July. She is also trying to write the story of what happened when she met a woman named Eva Canning, who might be a werewolf and is certainly supernatural, on a cold night in November. One of those stories must be wrong, but which one? Whenever it happened or whoever Eva is, meeting her led to the breakup of Imp and Abalyn's relationship, and also to something that Imp thinks was much worse, but which she can't bear to write down.

Imp is not a reliable narrator. But this isn't a "magic or madness" book. It's a "magic and madness" book, and is largely about the commonalities between certain aspects of mental illness and certain aspects of myth. Imp's schizophrenia involves seeing connections between things, intrusive thoughts, compulsive writing, and obsessions. The call of the siren is an intrusive thought consisting of an ear-worm that's a poem about the ocean, and can only be banished by half-drowning yourself. The siren is an urban legend or maybe a real woman who drowned and became a ghost, who inspired a painting called "The Drowning Woman."

Everything is connected in Imp's mind, and reading the book makes you start connecting the dots yourself. As she gets more and more involved with Eva Canning, the connections multiply, weaving a web of urban legends, myth, folklore, history, art, literature, and delusion.

It's extraordinarily well-done and immersive. Imp is very likable, vulnerable, and innocent, which means that I spent much of the book in a state of "don't go in the basement!" The basement is Eva Canning, but it's also her own mind.

The book is often eerie, but not terrifying along the lines of The Red Tree. Except for one bit where Imp psyches herself to keep on writing by telling herself, "It's not like someone's looking over your shoulder," and I immediately thought, "What if someone is?" and promptly terrified myself.

( Read more... )

The Drowning Girl[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

My shower looks like someone murdered Blueberry Violet Beauregard.

While looking into dying my hair at home, I found this hilarious set of bad reviews for a blue hair dye aptly named Splat.

These are all from different reviews:

Disaster in a bottle

This will color everything except your hair blue!

I look like a blueberry.

THANK THE BABY JESUS WE ARE “SOCIAL DISTANCING”

Don't do it!

BLUE DISASTER!

Jesus christ blue!!

WOULD MAKE AN AMAZING GIFT FOR SOMEONE YOU HATE

Week 2 and I’m still trying to get my daughter to not look like the wicked witch of the west!

EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHED WAS BLUE.

Most temporary colors say to wash until water runs clear. THE WATER NEVER RUNS CLEAR Y’ALL.

my shower looks like i butchered a smurf.

My tub look like we killed a smurf when we got done.

I guess i’ll get used to my bathtub looking like a smurf massacre.

If you were ever curious what it would be like to clean up a murder buy this hair dye.

comments

Denali’s Howl, by Andy Hall

In 1967, twelve men climbed Denali. Seven of them got caught by a storm and died; their bodies remain on the mountain. Hall was five years old at the time, the son of the park superintendent who was involved in the rescue attempts. While his father was waiting for news of rescue efforts, he and Hall had a strange encounter with a descending climber in distress that helped sear the whole event into his mind. Years later, he wrote a book about it.

One of the things I like about mountain disaster books is the meticulous recreation of a contained event, and all the actions taken that led to or prevented or ameliorated the disaster. This book is very good for that. It details the personalities of the men, their preparedness or lack thereof, and exactly what went down on the expedition, up to the point where the seven who were caught in the storm vanish from all but others’ later attempts to make sense of what happened.

For most of the way through the book, you can track everything that went wrong: the Wilcox expedition was actually two groups joined awkwardly together, one member sounded like a walking source of aggravation and problems, and they dumped all but one of the shovels they could have used to build ice caves to lighten their load!

Buuut, it turns out that none of that mattered. The seven men who died were basically just unlucky enough to be caught in an unsurvivable storm that lasted for seven days and made rescue impossible. They could have been perfectly prepared and equipped, and they still would have died. There was an element of judgment involved—several of them had altitude sickness, but only one chose to forego the summit because of it—but once they were in the path of the storm, their fate was sealed.

It’s an interesting and readable book, but definitely an example of how real life does not always have the “this leads to that” shape of fiction.

As for the strange encounter with the Denali climber, which isn’t referred to again until the end of the book so you spend the entire book thinking, “But which of the men was that?” it’s even more like that.

( Read more... )

Denali's Howl: The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

Locke & Key 3: Crown of Shadows, by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez

Another excellent installment, in which Kinsey makes new friends and nearly gets them all killed, Nina descends further into trauma and alcoholism, and Zach and Tyler use a pair of new keys.

The writing is excellent, but the art is incredible. I need to look up what else Rodriguez has done.

( Read more... )

Locke & Key, Vol. 3: Crown of Shadows[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

A Song for a New Day, by Sarah Pinsker

In the Before, rock singer Luce Cannon is just starting to hit the big time when the world is hit by the one-two punch of massive terrorist attacks and (apparently unrelatedly) a pandemic. In the After, gatherings have been banned to prevent violence and viruses, life is lived mostly online and under the eye of huge corporations. Rosemary, a young woman who loves music but experiences it only in virtual reality, is hired by one of those huge corporations to scout musicians at illegal underground concerts.

This novel starts with a bang and had me completely engrossed for the first third. The second two-thirds were well-written, but for me lacked the propulsive power of the first part of the book. I say “for me” because I’m not sure if that was the book or me. Given that my favorite part was Luce’s first-person narration of her pre-pandemic tour, I’d happily read a contemporary novel about musicians by Pinsker, no sf content required. Luce is Jewish and her relationship with her family and community, which she's mostly estranged from, is a small part of the novel but very well-done. I'd also have happily read a novel focusing on that.

Luce and Rosemary are both queer, and have romantic relationships with women (not with each other). Their own relationship felt like it should have been the center of the book, but wasn’t; they had a few powerful scenes early on, but later their interactions felt more like a clash of worldviews than like a clash of two people.

Generally, the longer the book went on, the more didactic and abstract it felt, with the vibrant and very human Luce of the beginning giving way to an iconic figure. The more the book is about its actual premise (a young woman scouts for talent in a world where live concerts are banned), the less interested I became. I don't think it was because of anything inherent about the premise, but because of how it was treated.

The early parts about Luce's band were really funny, among other things. Afterward, music and music-making was treated much more seriously, with no goofing around and playing pranks. I'm not sure it's true that people doing illegal things with huge consequences if they slip up actually do stop being silly-- they probably just channel it into areas that won't attract attention outside of their own group. At least, the second part of the book would have been more interesting if they had. The second part also was primarily Rosemary's narration, and she was very very very serious. The book ended up feeling solemn and weighty in a way that didn't play to Pinsker's strengths as a writer.

I still recommend it but not as strongly as I thought I would when I started it.

There’s a big and still-ongoing discussion here which delves a lot into the worldbuilding.

A Song for a New Day[image error]

[image error] [image error]

comments

Pandemic Pretty

Aquatic.

I've been trying to keep my rainbow going, but since I can't go in to see Tea Cup and I have been strictly warned not to bleach at home, it wasn't coming out very well. So I tried just dying everything. There's enough of the bleached hair left that this came out pretty good.

I think I'll do a new color every two months or so.

I would really love to get a short cut - it's way too hot for even this much hair - but I don't trust myself to do anything non-horrendous. On balance I decided that my spirits would be lifted more by looking good than by having the back of my neck cool. At some point it will get long enough for a ponytail.

comments

My least favorite holiday

My cats are so high right now.

It's very hot (so I can't close the windows) and very noisy. Hence the catnip.

I was going to cook but it's too hot. Instead, I think I'll eat ice cream, crack open a cold one, and watch Jaws on a friend's HBO. Somehow that feels appropriate.

comments

Tragedy tomorrow, Hamilton tonight!

This is the discussion/reaction post for the filmed version of Hamilton, premiering today on Disney+. Feel free to comment at any time.

This is such a special work for me, tied up with so many personal moments. I discovered the soundtrack at the absolute low point of my life, and it literally helped me staaaaaaay aliiiiiiiive. I remember...

...Listening to "Hurricane" for the first time while on the way to a CT scan.

...Getting some "Hurricane" lyrics tattooed on my arm, my first and only and not-regretted tattoo.

...Waiting in line for eight hours to get tickets to the Los Angeles performance. I had barely been outside except to doctors' offices in years, and I looked at the familiar streets as if they were new to me. In the lobby, tired and footsore and hot, I realized that I was happy. It was the first time in years.

...Going to a party, also for the first time in years, and talking Hamilton with Halle's son Max, who was back from college for the summer. He had the sheet music and a keyboard. We hauled the guests into his room to make them listen to us singing the opening song. And then we kept on going. One by one, the guests slunk back to the party. We kept on going. Max and I stayed in his room for the entire rest of the party, singing through almost the entire show and emerging long after everyone else had left.

Me: "Let's do 'Guns and Ships.' I wanna be Lafayette."

Max: "Seriously?"

Me: "YES."

What Max did not know was that in college, me and a friend used to sing Sondheim's "Not Getting Married Today," which is also insanely fast. Afterward:

Max (surprised): "Hey... that was pretty good!"

...The Los Angeles performance. Halle bought me a fancy dress and we went together. It was glorious.

...The pandemic. Max missed the last two weeks of his senior year in college, and also in-person graduation. I wrote him a congratulations card on a Hamilton postcard, reminding him of our singalong and telling him to never stop being scrappy and hungry.

...I'll watch it alone in my room, in spirit with everyone else watching alone or in small groups.

...Someday I'll watch it on Halle's couch with her and Max, like we watched so many things, back together again.

comments