I don’t know who knows to read this, but SORRY, BABY was just released! It’s a great film! However! The trailer promises a dramedy about quarter-life relationships and navigating life’s changes because that’s what the trailer promised.
While, yes, it’s partially about that, it’s first and foremost a film about processing the fallout of abuse. While SORRY, BABY handles it with grace and is certainly a film I’d point as a work that can help others understand the personal aftermath of traumatic events, it may trigger the fuck out of you and leave you stunned for days.
I hope that helps prepare anyone, because I certainly wasn’t!
Armistead Maupin’s series TALES OF THE CITY — which started off as a series of reads in the -San Francisco Chronicle- — is an array of a queer found family to be jealous of. The first collection, aptly named TALES OF THE CITY, follows the antics of naive, very straight 25-year-old midwesterner Mary Ann as she moves to San Francisco.
Mary Ann takes up residence at 28 Barbary Lane, a quaint apartment building overseen by kindly weed-aficionado Anna Madrigal. Living under Ms. Madrigal’s roof is Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, a gay man with commitment issues, free spirit Mona Ramsey, and others who help to weave Mary Ann into the fabric of San Francisco.
As you might have surmised from the title and significant cast of characters, TALES OF THE CITY is extremely Dickensian, even down to adopting some of Dickens’ predilection for the outrageous. Maupin doesn’t go as far as incorporating spontaneous human combustion into the works, but the residents of 28 Barbary Lane often do find themselves in outlandish melodramas fit for a soap opera. (It’s telling that the extreme primetime TV soap MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN is mentioned in the first fifteen pages.)
Yes, the sensational and lurid elements of TALES OF THE CITY are effectively titillating and propulsive, it’s the sense of time, place, and relationships that hooked me: Mary Ann grows more and more comfortable with counter-culture — queer or otherwise —; Mouse’s mood shifts as he longs for a substantial and fulfilling relationship, but instead fills his days with club nights and numerous hook-ups; Ms. Madrigal’s back-story and how she juggles it as well as the needs of all around her. They’re all heartfelt tales, all deeply rooted in San Francisco at the times Maupin was penning the installments for the paper: mid-70s for TALES OF THE CITY, late 70s for MORE TALES OF THE CITY, and early 80s for FURTHER TALES OF THE CITY.
As the TALES OF THE CITY books are being published to this day — although only the first five were previously published in weekly newspaper installments — it remains a fascinating document of cultural shifts, generational schisms, mores, moods, urban changes, and perceptions of societal, sexual, and gender norms. Not to mention reading about the San Francisco imagines it to be — artsy, extremely left, very weird — instead of the dudetechbro nightmare it’s become.
An aside: I’ve only read TALES OF THE CITY, MORE TALES OF THE CITY and FURTHER TALES OF THE CITY. It’s one of those series that I’m trying to slowly dole out, as its emphasis on ever-shifting culture. However, you can certainly feel the specter of AIDS looming over FURTHER TALES, ensuring that I need to emotionally gird myself for BABYCAKES, the fourth volume.
The series was wildly popular for years, was turned into a TV adaptation in the 90s which was resurrected by Netflix for a mini-series, and is one of BBC’s Top 100 Most Inspiring Novels.
However, like how MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN burned so bright in the mid 70s and is almost entirely forgotten today, it wasn’t until recently that I discovered the series. I’m certain that’s partially because some the situations and perspective and language is dated, but that’s a feature — not a bug. As we as society are rather cyclical, it’d be wise to not let the series collect cultural dust.
Lastly? Now more than ever, we need to hear liberating and enlightening and life-saving finding your own family can be, that you can find safety and security and form lifelong bonds with others.
28 Barbary Lane is fictional, but 28 Barbary Lanes exist all over. I’m currently living in my own 28 Barbary Lane, in a queer and weird slice of Chicago that I wouldn’t trade for the world. If you still haven’t found your 28 Barbary Lane, well, let Armistead Maupin pen you a map.
Sampling dialogue from film and TV was a staple of 90s electro/industrial bands. As I was (still am) an avid listener of that genre, there are a number of line readings and deliveries I’ve heard hundreds if not thousands of times without ever been aware of the source material.
That’s why when I’m watching a horror or exploitation film, I’m always delighted when my ears perk up at a familiar line recitation. I finally have true context for the sample and a tiny unsolved mystery from my youth has been solved.
This month was the first time I’d seen THE EXORCIST III — despite the fact that I own it — and I was lucky enough to see a print of it with a packed crowd.
Yes, THE EXORCIST III is skillfully plotted with expertly crafted scares and angles and production design. Yes, it has one of the all-time classic jump scares.
However, what resonated most was hearing George C. Scott’s perfectly paced declaration of beliefs, a declaration I heard many, many times in FRONT LINE ASSEMBLY’s ‘Bio-Mechanic’:
“I believe in disease. I believe in pain… cruelty and infidelity!”
Obviously, with such a memorable, dialogue-driven film, it has been endlessly sampled by other bands such gabber act DELTA 9 and the fittingly named XORCIST. However, it’s Front Line Assembly’s use that has echoed in my head for years, and I organically stumbled upon it on my own.
If it weren’t for the fact that PROM NIGHT featured a post-HALLOWEEN Jamie Lee Curtis, I highly doubt it’d be remembered much at all today. While it’s a serviceable slasher and does what it says on the tin — a whole bunch of students are stalked and killed in their high school on prom night — it does get lost a bit in the deluge of 1980s slashers.
Now, HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II? There’s a film that stands out!
I’ll grant you: HELLO MARY LOU was never slated to be a PROM NIGHT sequel, but it featured a prom queen and murder so the studio appended PROM NIGHT II to the title and that was that.
Unlike PROM NIGHT, HELLO MARY LOU is far more supernatural, focused on the death of a 50s prom queen who, let loose in suburban 1987, inhabits bodies to reclaim her crown by any means necessary.
The result is smart and silly, and has inventively surreal set-pieces that rack up the bodies. Oh, and Michael Ironside is a priest! That’s worth the price of admission alone.
HELLO MARY LOU was followed by PROM NIGHT III, which veers into full supernatural slapstick, but I’ve already featured it! Find a copy of both any way that you can!
If you’re in Chicago on October 18th, 2024? HELLO MARY LOU is playing at the Music Box Theatre and features writer Ron Oliver! It promises to be a night to remember!
French arthouse director Claire Denis’s TROUBLE EVERY DAY is a difficult film to classify, to the point where some misguided souls would argue that it’s not a horror film at all. It is enigmatically subdued but violent. Overt and obtuse. Visually lyrical and strikingly blunt to the eyes. Thick with lust and rarely erotic. Alludes to vampirism but is grounded by human faults.
It’s about feeding bloody need, addiction, restriction, seeking and rejecting assistance, and all of the baggage that comes with all of the above.
It is also a highly unpleasant 101 minutes long that culminates in an act that is incredibly difficult to watch. So much so that more than a handful of folks walked out of the screening I attended.
It is considered part of the New French Extremity for a reason. (Also, it does feature INSIDE’s very feral Béatrice Dalle.)
It’s a film that kept stealing my attention for well over a week, its provocations and intent seeping into me, questions and speculations bubbling out. That may seem overwrought and pretentious, but Denis elicited that from me.
SISSY, from writer/directors Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes, is a vivid horror subversion of the ‘reuniting with childhood friends’ genre. Cecilia, a.k.a. Sissy (THE BOLD TYPE’s Aisha Dee) is a self-care influencer who displays the veneer of a calm, crisp, clean and put-together 20-something, but instead lives for the glow of her phone while falling asleep eating day-old room temperature pizza.
While out-and-about, Cecilia runs into estranged childhood best friend Emma (Hannah Barlow) and the two quickly reconnect. Emma invites Sissy to her very queer bachelorette party in a posh vacation home nestled in Australian woodland. Unbeknown to Cecilia, her childhood nemesis Alex is hosting said hen party. Tensions build, matters escalate, bonds and bones are broken and blood is spilled.
I’ll refrain from saying much more as it’s a wild ride, and best to only know the above. That won’t keep me for noting that, visually, SISSY is yet another in a line of refreshingly vibrant and colorful horror films. A large chunk of the film takes place in daylight, when the sun falls the frame is peppered with pastel neon glows. That may seem antithetical to a woodland-based horror/thriller, but it works.
There are also a number of small little grace notes that I love. One of the party members pouring a glass of a wine from a carafe and — without any sense of shame or self-consciousness — licks the trailing remainder from the lip of the carafe! There’s a playful nod towards slashers and face masks!
Lastly, I’ll note that SISSY was Autostraddle’s Queer Horrorscope Film pick for Cancers, so apparently I was pre-ordained to watch it this month. Perhaps a gripping tale about self-justifying self-destructive self-delusion isn’t exactly the kind of messaging one wants to hear from their filmic horrorscope, but it is very on-brand.
Classic Troma films are cheap and fun gross-out affairs by misfits, for misfits, and CLASS OF NUKE ‘EM HIGH is no exception.
The premise is paper thin: Tromaville High School — a typical 80s high school with jocks and nerds and a clutch of cartoonishly costumed gang members named ‘The Cretins’ — is situated next to a nuclear facility.
An accident occurs at the plant and nuclear waste spills into high school. Mutations ensue! An atomic baby-monster is birthed! The Cretins graduate from traditional bullying, drug dealing and deviant behavior to ultra-violent and psychotic behavior! Boyfriend and girlfriend Warren and Chrissy try to survive! Students cheer the shutdown of the school!
It’s a wild time, featuring all of the colorful camp and good-natured buckets of bodily fluids that you’d expect from Lloyd Kaufman’s scrappy DYI studio that brought you THE TOXIC AVENGER.
The Cretins are ostensibly the film’s villains as it’s the nuclear weed that they peddle that is the catalyst for the film’s mayhem, they punch down literally and figuratively, and their makeup and costumes are garish at best and culturally offensive at worse. However, they’re also a warm representation of smart-but-willful societal dropouts.
See, before they were The Cretins they were Tromaville High’s honor students. Now? Now they’re a whirlwind of disrespectful and abnormal behavior with no tolerance for conventional norms, ready to upend the system in every way they can. Body paint, fetish gear, severe piercings and gender fuckery! They’re society’s gremlins and damn proud of it!
I will note that the reason why these honor students became The Cretins is somewhat unclear. I like to think of them as having voluntarily checked out of normative culture and into fringe subcultures, much like myself as a teen.
Do they commit terrible acts, acts that damn them to gruesome deaths? Yeah, sure. Do we still root for them? Well, I certainly took glee in doing so. That’s because, well, at heart? I’m a dirtbag cretin.
Does SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II feature a slumber party?
Yes.
Does SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II feature the Driller Killer?
Yes.
There you go. It has all of the hallmarks of a slasher sequel. Except…
SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II’s Courtney is played by WINGS’s Crystal Bernard instead of Jennifer Meyers.
The slumber party isn’t as much a suburban high school slumber party but an all-women band and their boyfriends squatting in an under-construction housing lot.
…and the Driller Killer isn’t some brutish escaped mass murderer but a maniacal doo-wop singer who brandishes an outlandish guitar fused with the first film’s comically large drill. He’s what you might get if you took MAD MAX: FURY ROAD’s Doof Warrior and dropped him into GREASE.
The end result is a dream-logic slasher/musical that does not take itself seriously. It’s vibrant and inventive and a lot of fun, especially if you simply let it wash over you.
On paper, Anthony Minghella’s TRULY MADLY DEEPLY reads like a perfunctory ‘ghost romance’ not unlike, err, GHOST: Nina (the ever sparkling and industrious Juliet Stevenson) is recently bereaved after her lover and celebrated cellist Jaime (Alan Rickman, as soulful as ever even though he has a rather distracting mustache) dies far too young.
Inconsolable, partially due to perhaps the most ineffectual psychologist to be portrayed on film, Nina spends far too much time reminiscing on the good times, ruminating on how she’ll never be able to create new memories with him, and just wishing he was still a part of her life.
She gets her wish. One night, Jaime appears in her apartment, inexplicably visiting from heaven. The two quickly intertwine in ways that doesn’t quite make ghostly sense, but the film is sincere enough that you won’t overthink it.
Again, on paper? Reads like a maudlin romantic weepy and, while it could have been that, about a second chance at happiness with your dearest, Mingella imparts how we glorify past time with partners and how when you get what you want, it’s not always what you need, but one can always try to course-correct.
It’s worth noting that part of that course-correction may take the shape of a manic pixie dream dude who has had way too many whimsical and emotionally precious jobs in his life.
TRULY MADLY DEEPLY was originally shot as a TV film for the BBC, but it managed to make the leap overseas to American arthouses and garnered enough praise that Mingella was quickly being courted by studios to deliver something just as substantial but with an even more lavish sheen.
An aside! If the name Anthony Minghella doesn’t ring a bell, well, his biggest claim to fame is following TRULY MADLY DEEPLY with his film adaptation of THE ENGLISH PATIENT. Also? COLD MOUNTAIN and the 1999 adaptation of THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (which is finally getting the respect it deserves). So yes, Minghella enjoyed melancholy romances.
While it was shot for TV, it was visually composed for the silver screen. The recurring visual framing, of trees, of parks, of the sky, of camera angles and windowpanes bolster the emotional intensity; it recreates the sense of a heightened emotional state when everything you see and hear and smell is extraordinarily intense, and the repetition used here showcases how the impact of those experiences ebb and flow for Nina as she navigates life without a living Jaime.
None of TRULY MADLY DEEPLY would work if the chemistry and performances between Stevenson & Rickman lacked resonance and depth. Yes, Minghella did write the part with Stevenson in mind, to show off her energetic quirkiness, and Rickman gets to have his cake and eat it too by being charming and winsome and you can easily see why Stevenson misses him so much, at least until you start to see Jaime’s priggish side. As Rickman becomes more comfortable with his non-heavenly grounding, their relationship shifts in an all too relatable manner, all tension and strife over matters large and small.
While yes, this is a romantic ghostly tale, the relationship dynamics are anything but fantastical.
If there’s any fault to the film, it’s that it often feels slightly padded by the side stories of the supporting characters, especially Nina’s Polish landlord, Titus, who is infatuated with her (until he isn’t). Titus’ storyline dovetails with Nina’s pregnant friend through forced and contrived means that feels rather unnecessary, but perhaps I’m feeling rather cynical at the moment.
I won’t spoil what happens with Nina and Jaime, but I believe there’s more than one way to read the end of this film, neither being necessarily right or wrong. It depends on how altruistic you perceive the characters.
No matter how you interpret the end of the film, it’s a very human movie about coping and coming to terms with some of the most difficult facets of living a life, especially when one is so entangled with another.
Postscript
As noted above, Jaime is a cellist and his cello is the weight that Nina clings to after he’s gone. Nina’s insensitive sister asks Nina if her school-age son can have Jaime’s extremely valuable cello.
Naturally, Nina takes umbrage at this request, noting that it’s all she has left of Jaime and her sister drops the request.
I spent the bulk of my youth as a young cellist and, as someone who started playing in 4th grade — around the same age as the sister’s son — her sister’s request is not just thoughtless, but also completely impractical. A full-size cello would be useless for someone so young, as when you’re that young? You start out with a far smaller cello than a full-size cello, anywhere from 1/8th scale cello to 3/4th scale.
It is a small matter, and perhaps it’s included to showcase how little her sister knows about stringed instruments and youth, but it still irked me.
Part seventeen of an array of CD mixes I made for my wife over a long number of years! Read more about it here!
Yet again a I cover I don’t love.
This cover is a repetitive collage of images snapped while drunk at a posh club, one that I can no longer remember and probably do not want to remember.
That tracks.
I like it as an image though, but I love me my symmetry and striking lighting. It also reminds me of the hallway-facing glass bathroom wall of the first place I lived in when I moved to Chicago, although that was more colorful. (Fun fact? I did shoot an entire short film that only featured that bathroom. Not so fun fact? There was a hell of a lot of shouting and screaming in said short.)
Yet again, the text formatting here — while very intentional — yet again feels like slop to me and I regret it, but nothing to be done about it now.
As usual! Tracklist! (Artist / Album / Song):
WOVENHAND / Consider the Birds / To Make A Ring
OLD CANES / Feral Harmonic / Little Bird Courage
THE BUILDERS AND THE BUTCHERS / Salvation Is A Deep Dark Well / Short Way Home
POLLY SCATTERGOOD / Polly Scattergood / Bunny Club [Bonus Track]
