chrismiller

Hellbender

movies

2021, directed by the Adams family

A fun thing about Hellbender is that it was created by a married couple, John Adams and Toby Posey (to clarify, Toby is a woman) and their two daughters Zelda and Lulu. Zelda and Toby play the two main characters and Lulu the main supporting character, while John and a bunch of other people they presumably hired the normal way fill out the rest of the cast. That’s kind of awesome.

Hellbender is a story about mothers and daughters and all the complicated things that go on between them. Its depiction of magic is an interesting one – magic comes from fear of death, something possessed by every living thing, even a worm, and it fills their blood. If you consume the blood, you consume the power. The proxy-ness of it reminds me a little bit of Daughter of Smoke and Bone in which magic comes from pain, and generally speaking the pain is represented by teeth. Baby teeth, in that canon, give only tiny amounts of power because they don’t hurt much to come out, they’re designed to. Adult teeth give more. And for real power you skip past teeth entirely and create pain another way. Unlike Daughter of Smoke and Bone though, Hellbender depicts the magic as specifically dark, which is a major part of the push and pull between Izzy and her mother. Blood ties them together, something that represents both life and death, and as it turns out you can’t ever entirely separate them.

chrismiller

Time Cut

movies

2024, directed by Hannah MacPherson

This is going to be a wild tonal shift in the middle of a bunch of posts about horror movies, probably, because I have a Rotten Tomatoes list of the best horror films directed by women that I want to see more of, whereas Time Cut is a cute teen movie about a science nerd who’s about to graduate high school who’s accidentally sent back in time to a few days before her older sister was murdered by a serial killer. And it’s honestly really funny and entertaining! The end leaves open a lot of logistical questions but it’s not really in a frustrating way because the movie doesn’t take itself all that seriously to begin with – it doesn’t even attempt to explain the science aside from some vague references to lasers touching and being fueled by antimatter. Lucy’s reactions to 2003 fashion (a time period that’s very familiar to me, having graduated high school not long before that) are absolutely sublime as she walks around the school hallways in a very sedate t shirt and jeans checking out the bright colours, mini skirts, boob tubes, glittery embellishments (remember body glitter? I do), and floppy haired boys. At one point she attempts to prove to someone she’s really from the future by showing him her phone, and when he asks incredulously, “You call people on this?” she tries to clarify, “Well I don’t… call people….” before listing off all the other things she does do instead. The one function of a phone that would have been recognised in the 90s1 and it’s literally the one thing using a phone that most people who actually grew up in or after the 90s just hate doing.

I will put a disclaimer here that my judgement of media is not necessarily about whether something is good, especially only shortly after I’ve consumed it because it usually takes me a while to mull it over, but more about whether it entertained me. Time Cut is getting about a 4/10 (or 2/5 or 40%) on review aggregators and the like. It’s not a brilliant story that you’ll be left thinking about for weeks or months – I can even give you a much better movie about the highly specific genre in which a teenage girl goes back in time and tries to prevent her older sibling’s death, 2022’s See You Yesterday. But I had fun, and sometimes that’s all you need.

  1. I say 90s mostly because I had a cellphone before 2003 that was capable of texting, though it only stored 10 text messages on the device both incoming or outgoing and if I forgot to delete them the new ones couldn’t come in. I swear I’m not ignoring you, I’m just bad at keeping on top of my text-box! ↩︎
chrismiller

Don’t Move

movies

2024, directed by Adam Schindler & Brian Netto

The title of Don’t Move is somewhat evocative of Don’t Breathe, another fairly successful horror movie. I haven’t actually seen Don’t Breathe but have it on my “someday if there’s nothing more interesting available” list, and the premise of Don’t Move is a little more interesting to me – a woman is targeted by a serial killer and injected with a paralytic to create a state of induced locked-in syndrome. Locked-in syndrome is specifically, genuinely horrifying to me, so I was both curious how they’d tell a story with a protagonist who literally cannot move for large stretches of the movie as well as interested in some thrills.

Unfortunately while it was well-acted and well-produced, Don’t Move just didn’t work for me. It was an interesting story, but it wasn’t as horrifying as I expected, and after some consideration I believe I came up with a large reason as to why: for almost the entire movie, the camera is focusing on the protagonist Iris from the perspective of someone else in the room. The most we get of her internal experience is close ups of her face, and I think it would be a lot more harrowing if there were more shots of what she could see, where we can hear other characters moving around off screen without being able to turn to look at what they were doing. That’s the horror of locked-in syndrome! But instead of experiencing what she’s experiencing, we’re just watching her experience it, and that’s a massive miss.

chrismiller

Woman of the Hour

movies

2023, directed by Anna Kendrick

Woman of the Hour is… such a weird movie. It’s based on the real life story of serial killer Rodney Alcala, but it’s not a documentary – it’s described as a crime thriller. It’s been criticised by one of his surviving victims as taking liberties with the truth (the supposed main character Sheryl never spent time with him one-on-one in reality but this is a major scene in the movie) but could have benefitted from fictionalising things more because most of the ongoing threads in the movie have no narrative pay-off before the end comes completely out of nowhere.

If this story was actually fictional, at least one of the women who shows up repeatedly throughout the film would have more of a role in his eventual capture. Or, well, any role. If it was actually a documentary, Anna Kendrick’s character would have been less important to the story, because aside from the ‘hook’ of having picked him out of three men in a dating show she had very little significance in the events of real life.

Perhaps it would have been more coherent if it had focused on Alcala himself as the central character rather than Sheryl, but on the other hand I think we’ve had quite enough of true crime that focuses on the killers while sidelining their victims. The issue is just that in this case, if you want to be accurate you need to change less, and if you want to tell a compelling story that actually feels like a satisfying story you need to change a lot more. Woman of the Hour fails to commit to either and ultimately suffers for it.

chrismiller

Empire of the Ants

games

Windows, releasing 7 November 2024

After those first few super chill games I’ve had bad luck getting Next Fest demos to run on my Steam Deck (no shade – none of them claimed they would and they’re not even finished games yet) but of the couple that have I really wanted to highlight this one. It’s available for pre-purchase so we do know what the pricetag will be – a hefty NZ$70, so I’m guessing about US$40-50 – but the graphics alone are impressive. Empire of the Ants is a tactical RTS in which you play as an ant – if you’re old enough you might remember an early Maxis title (the studio that became a division of EA and was responsible for the Sim games back when games had to work at launch) called SimAnt. SimAnt was a simulation game in black and white released in 1991, and while there were regions of a larger map which contained competing red ant nests that you could conquer, and humans living in the house that would eventually pack up and move if you took over enough of the yard, Empire of the Ants is (as you might imagine from the intervening 30 years of game development) both more, and somehow also less, detailed.

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chrismiller

Three chill games

games

Once again it’s Steam’s Next Fest, the regularly occurring event that highlights demos for upcoming games. It’s always a favourite of mine and I try to always participate by playing through several interesting looking titles. Today I tried three that were all extremely relaxed with no real time pressures involved.

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chrismiller

Civil War and the new Captain America

comics

With new trailers for Thunderbolts and Captain America 4 out over the last couple of months there’s been a resurgence of “Bucky should have been Cap instead of Sam” opining, with one of the main reasons given being “Bucky was Cap first in the comics!” Sure, he was, it’s true (mostly – there’s an issue that’s published after Bucky’s Cap run but takes place before it where Sam takes up the shield while Steve is briefly incapacitated, but that’s a somewhat flimsy counterargument), but there’s an awful lot of nonsense that happens in the comics that shouldn’t be used as precedent for the movies. More importantly, if you’re talking about story then the circumstances in which Bucky became Cap don’t support the argument themselves.

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