January 2023 Media Roundup
welcome.
Illustration: The Cat and the Canary
Greetings and happy new year! This is the first installment of what I hope will be a regular newsletter covering what I’ve watched and read in the previous month, along with any writing/illustrations I published recently. Basically a means for me to keep writing regularly in my spare time and chronicling media I’ve consumed. The movies/books I’ve chosen to highlight here do not reflect the quality of the media necessarily, nor are they necessarily my favorites of the month; They just sparked a response from me in the moment.
ICYMI this month, I covered repertory screenings of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of A Doubt (1943) and I Married A Witch (1942), both for Screen Slate. I also had the pleasure of speaking with Kyle Edward Ball, the director of the Skinamarink for Fangoria (my debut there!).
If you’re reading this, thanks for coming along <3
FILMS
Soft & Quiet (d. Beth de Araujo, 2022)
Presented as a single-take (although thankfully not drawing too much attention to this gimmick), this nerve-shattering thriller follows a local teacher from her day at work to her after-school “extracurricular” activity: a meeting of like-minded white supremacist women in the community, complete with homemade pie with a swastika carved into the crust. What starts as a group discussion about infiltrating school boards and building their own fascist homeschool curricula ends as a full blown hate crime as some members of the group forsake wine night in order to torture two Asian-American women in their home. However, while the first half is tense and compelling, it surprisingly loses steam as the violence ratchets up. I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit to depict the perniciousness of fascist ideology among the American middle class, and how white women use their unique positions to spread monstrosity, but I wish this film had higher ambitions than simply showing the very speedy slippery slope from bigoted talk to bigoted violence. That being said, I’m excited to see where Beth de Araujo goes as a filmmaker.
Infinity Pool (d. Brandon Cronenberg, 2023)
There’s been plenty of movies recently of the “eat the rich” variety (Glass Onion, The Menu) that have amounted to not much more than a wink at the audience, an acknowledgment of “hey, we’re all so smart for recognizing these people are bad, right?”. So while Infinity Pool was certainly not perfect, I appreciate its portrayal of the very rich as debased and deranged, and the experience of associating with them as one of dehumanization. The younger Cronenberg achieves something his dad also does well in weaving a sci-fi element into our real world, not as something that overtakes the plot or point of the film completely. It’s very rooted in the human and our alienation / degradation of the soul.
OTHER FIRST WATCHES
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (d. Laura Poitras, 2022)
I Married A Witch (d. Rene Clair, 1942)
The Cat and the Canary (d. Paul Leni, 1927)
M3GAN (d. Gerard Johnstone, 2023)
Skinamarink (d. Kyle Edward Ball, 2023)
La Llorona (d. Jayro Bustamante, 2019)
The Verdict (d. Sidney Lumet, 1982)
Species (d. Roger Donaldson, 1995)
Broker (d. Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2022)
Saint Omer (d. Alice Diop, 2022)
Resurrection (d. Andrew Semans, 2022)
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (d. Melvin Van Peebles, 1971)
REWATCHES
Thirteen (d. Catherine Hardwicke, 2003)
Titanic (d. James Cameron, 1997)
The Fabelmans (d. Steven Spielberg, 2022)
Illustration: I Married A Witch
BOOKS
Without even trying, my literary theme for this month appears to have been women who do truly bad things and narrators whose perspectives you’re almost scared to be sitting in. Gotta say I loved everything I read this January!
Fingersmith - Sara Waters, 2002
Lent to me by my good friend Sara, whose taste I always trust, and initially intriguing to me because it’s the basis for Park Chan-wook’s 2016 film The Handmaiden. I found this utterly engrossing, twisty and pulpy yet still sophisticated.
Tell Me I’m Worthless - Alison Rumfitt, (2021/2023)
I devoured this in just a couple sittings. It’s everything I could want from horror in this current moment, especially amidst a discourse landscape that consists mostly of “it’s really about trauma” takes. A savage and honest depiction of how fascism worms its way into the identity of a nation and into the self-loathing minds of individuals, spewed outward and turned inward simultaneously. All the while being an extremely effective haunted house story. I greatly appreciated how the house is both metaphor and very real, proof that you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other. The content warnings Rumfitt includes at the top of the book are warranted - there are scenes in this book that are truly difficult to get through and reckon with the implications of, but gratuitous this novel is not. Lastly, I can’t remember the last time where a book’s ending left me breathless.
Tampa - Alissa Nutting (2013)
I don’t have the wherewithal at the moment to dive too deep into this one. The subject matter (the POV of a female teacher who is a child predator seeking out her middle school students for conquests) is….tough! I’ll just say this book is disturbing, gross, and hilarious and I can’t believe the author pulled this shit off.
Eileen - Otessa Moshfegh (2015)
Thought I might finally read this considering the film adaptation just premiered at Sundance. I’ve been pretty ‘meh’ on Moshfegh generally but I really enjoyed this. I assume the movie will cut back on the plethora of bowel movements…