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Dream Scenario

movies

2023, directed by Kristoffer Borgli

Dream Scenario is a movie about a mild-mannered (read: kind of pathetic and outright whiny) professor played by a nigh on unrecognisable to me Nicolas Cage who suddenly starts appearing in people’s dreams. At first he’s not doing anything other than just watching, failing to intervene in various scenarios that you would really want someone to intervene in, but then suddenly they switch to being nightmares where he attacks people in horrifically violent ways, which everyone reacts to by treating him as though he has done or would do those things in real life. The IMDB summary actually says that this is triggered when he encounters a dreamer whose visions of him differ substantially from the norm but I’m struggling to remember who that was… I think probably Molly, who I’ll get back to later.

This set up seemed interesting to me because there’s actually someone in my life who is consistently threatening and malicious towards me in my dreams despite that being the furthest thing from the truth in reality. It’s weird and I have no idea why. Admittedly in the dreams they never get really violent, but you know how much it’s affected my relationship with them? Zero. Zero much. I’ve never even told them about it. But this is a movie, and it’s a movie with a metaphor. It might not be obvious yet but it should be if I bring up the scene where he posts a breakdown video where he cries (literally) that people are treating him badly because of nothing he’s done, just things they imagine him doing, and how that makes him the real victim in all of this. Also notably it’s not literally everyone who’s having these dreams. Quite a few people simply don’t – including the only significant Black character in the movie.

Okay. So there are some major issues with this metaphor. Like, they aren’t actually imagining him doing those things. They’re dreaming them. With the exception of the few people who’ve learned lucid dreaming techniques, we cannot control our dreams (see above paragraph about my person). This naturally removes a whole lot of agency from the people mistreating him, in particular his students who are legitimately traumatised by the dreams and are shown almost universally to be too scared to complete a cognitive behavioural exercise designed to help them see him as harmless and non-threatening. It’s also very one-dimensional with a single exception of the young woman who dreams about him as an exciting sexual aggressor who confidently and assertively takes the lead in their encounters. Fear is a very base emotion that’s designed to be difficult to overcome when it’s strong enough to become panic, and it’s not the primary expression of most racists. Even if there is a layer of fear baked into many widespread social attitudes towards Black people, the ways racism plays out are not as obviously motivated by it as they are in the film. And while for the most part you could take the position that it’s not editorialising on whether people’s reactions to him are valid, the scene with his students very definitely presents their position as sympathetic and understandable – and that’s not just one person, it’s two or three dozen. Between that and the way his own responses range from lashing out in anger to a snivelling, blubbery mess of an apology video that he’s outright told is embarrassing to a persistent and stubbornly confused denial, it’s easy to get impatient with him even though he’s actually completely right that he is the victim. In fact I’d speculate it’s designed for us to get impatient with him, making for a movie which tells us that it’s not everyone else’s fault that they’re scared of him, but it is his fault for being upset about it.

Yeah. Not too impressed with that one.

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Big Eyes

movies

2014, directed by Tim Burton

I didn’t expect to be watching a Harvey Weinstein movie today.

How it happened was, I had a few hours to kill before my regular afternoon streamer came on, so I was browsing Netflix looking for something I hadn’t already seen that didn’t look terrible, and I came across Big Eyes, which purports to be based on true events about a woman who left her controlling husband in the 1950s and promptly married another guy who stole her art, selling it under his name – Walter Keane. I put it on and not long into the credits, there was his name: produced by Harvey Weinstein. Seems like a weird movie for a guy like him to be so heavily involved in and I was curious so I shrugged and kept it going.

If Big Eyes is a decent movie, it owes it to two things: the story and (some of) the acting. Between the movies I’ve written about before this one and a few more that I watched but never got around to writing up I’ve recently seen quite a few subtle, evocative, oppressive performances of both victims and villains (and people who refused to be victims). This movie did not feature any of them. The funny thing is that the movie actually highlights its own flaws, at one point having the narrator question why Margaret stayed with Walter, something we never really get a feeling for. Even earlier than that Walter announces himself that he’s not capable of subtlety. It’s true – there’s nothing subtle about his performance, which is a problem I have with most of the Tim Burton films I’ve seen. At one point when he’s drunk and menacing Margaret in their flash home, flicking lit matches at her and chasing her to her studio, I had a flashback to Jack Nicholson’s famous “Here’s Johnny!” scene from The Shining and almost laughed out loud. Big Eyes isn’t a horror film, but it is a drama about a relationship that should feel horrifying but somehow never once did.

The closest thing to effective cinema we got was probably the court painting scene (the preceding minutes having been another example of Walter being far more ridiculous than unnerving – I couldn’t help but compare it unfavourably to Edward Norton’s film debut Primal Fear in which he also rapidly and suddenly swaps between personas in a courtroom, only far more chillingly), and even that no doubt could have been done better. It’s the sort of scene that you know should be really memorable, but some people know how to produce that vision and some people don’t.

But then that’s about what you’d expect from a film about a woman being controlled and manipulated by a man, produced by a man who’s only ever been on the wrong side of that particular balance of power. With the right director it could have been much better – producers rarely have that much creative influence – but Burton is a German expressionist whose early influences were sci fi B-movies and Hammer horror films. Visually, the big-eyed waifs that Margaret painted might be reminiscent of Burton’s art style, but that doesn’t mean he’s a good fit to direct a story about her emotionally abusive marriage. Abuse is a subtle monster that knows when to strike and when to charm, and Burton… well, he’s just not capable of subtlety.

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Hatching (Pahanhautoja)

movies

2022, directed by Hanna Bergholm

Hatching is a movie that I can genuinely imagine being used to teach film analysis in high school English. I know it’s not actually in English, but unless the rules have changed that doesn’t disqualify it – after the comparatively insipid The Sixth Sense in fifth form my class studied La Vita e Bella in Italian in sixth and the German language Lola Rennt in seventh, meaning I was taught film analysis using majority movies that were not in English. I’ll leave it up for speculation as to whether spending weeks dwelling on a historical tragicomedy and a weird experimental alternate timeline… thing… had any influence on my taste in movies.

At any rate, we’re back to mothers and daughters with this one, but with a whole lot of other things thrown in like society’s perpetual terror of pubescent and adolescent children (particularly girls). There’s really only one explicit reference to puberty where Tinja’s father goes to confront her about her behaviour but spots a bit of blood on her sheets, and coming to the conclusion that she’s gotten her first period he reverses course entirely. But the whole film is basically a metaphor about it, with Tinja essentially moving from childhood to motherhood in the hatching of “Alli” and the way her whole life becomes about caring for this strange, messy creature who manages to subsume her own identity and who she can’t help but love even as it destroys all her familiar routines. “But… I hatched it,” she says helplessly at one point, not long after raging at Alli that, “I don’t want you! Nobody wants you!” She is, of course, far too young to handle the contradictory emotions of unexpectedly becoming a mother – she can barely handle her own emotions most of the time since she identifies herself so much as simply an externalised part of her own mother. Dressing like her, keeping her incredibly inappropriate secrets, taking on her values and goals. She spends most of the movie so anxious she looks like she’s about to burst into tears at any given moment, and while there are signs that she knows full well that she’s not good enough at gymnastics to keep her mother happy she just keeps kicking that can down the road.

Let’s move from motherhood back to puberty though, because at the same time Alli is an expression of Tinja herself, an expression that’s capable of having her own wants and needs and acting to get them. It’s no coincidence that the same young actress portrays both of them. Alli’s actions might not benefit Tinja in the medium or long term, or even really in the short term, but they’re a reaction to her feelings of fear and of not being good enough or of being replaced because of it. Puberty is a time when children struggle to keep their feelings in check, when their actions don’t make sense to anyone around them and often to themselves as well. It can be easy to see them as, well, monsters. Why else would it be such an enduring theme in horror movies? For all the talk of the terrible twos and the subsequent development of a child having their own personality, puberty is the first time children really become unfathomable and uncontrollable, when even one that’s formerly been pressured and pounded and forced into a desired shape will start to scream and rage and break out.

If anyone’s interested in watching this one I will note that there’s a serious emetophobia warning for a couple of scenes, but it’s relatively fleeting. It’ll depend how sensitive you are to it.

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Sissy

movies

2022, directed by Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes

You know that thing where a character just keeps on making bad decision after bad decision as everything goes to shit around them? I can’t stand that thing. Snowballing consequences can be done really well when all of a character’s choices make sense in the moment, otherwise I end up torturing myself for days afterwards thinking about all the things they could have done to prevent everything that came afterwards. I can’t entirely say that Sissy (rather, Cecelia – much of the film is spent with her trying not to be seen as Sissy) could have prevented everything, since Alex was the one to initiate the first major confrontation, but she could definitely have chosen not to go to the entire weekend in a rural area that she wouldn’t be able to escape from to spend time with someone she had an incredibly fraught history with and who had no idea she’d been invited.

But then, while we’re clearly set up to sympathise with Cecelia to begin with, there are signs right from the start that things might not be quite how they appear. Even in the home video when Sissy declares that she and Emma are best friends because they have so much in common we aren’t actually given any examples before Emma launches into the story of how they’ve known each other since birth. There’s a clear delineation in Sissy’s apartment between her filming space and her cluttered, messy kitchen, and then when she runs into Emma in the pharmacy the camera work exquisitely creates a sense of frenetic, manic smothering through close ups on their faces as they over-act their (whether sincere or not) excitement at seeing each other again.

This social claustrophobia carries through until the weekend and it’s easy to feel Cecelia’s stress and anxiety rising as she attempts to re-connect with Emma. It’s when the bodies start inevitably piling up that it becomes clear that it’s not so much about Emma, or even about Alex, as it is about Cecelia and her futile attempt to fill a hole inside herself. (You do have to wonder about the racial dynamics when they choose to cast a Black woman in this inherently damaged role, though at the very least she’s not the only Black character.)

I do think this is a well-made movie, but I found it extremely hard to watch and deeply uncomfortable to the point of struggling to finish it due to the… I suppose it would come under second-hand embarrassment, though it didn’t feel entirely like embarrassment the way you typically get from watching media in which someone deeply uncool tries to come off as suave, or someone tries to salvage a relationship with a person who’s no longer interested in them. Sissy instead evokes something like desperation, almost revulsion, of a kind I don’t like to subject myself to. Maybe that just means it was successful.

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Cheap distracting games

games

Sometimes it’s hard to stop doomscrolling. One thing that can help is having something else to focus on, like video games! I’m not exactly the most tuned in to the industry, but I follow enough variety content creators to know of a pretty decent range of games that are easy to get caught up in and won’t cost too much money.

Note that I’m not sponsored, receiving any kickbacks, or have investments in any of the people behind these games, so I have absolutely no conflicts of interest. All prices are in NZ dollars because that’s what Steam shows me even when I’m logged out – for US prices, halve it and then add a little, or maybe just click on the link and see what it is exactly.

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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.

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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! ↩︎
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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.

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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.

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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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