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not_funso i really fell off the wagon writing the last few days of this month x.x sorry blaugust, where i blog each day in august. i did my best and then got overwhelmed with the liminal space between two events being loaded with other chores and things.
i think i was originally going to talk about horror? i've lost my burning furvor over a few days, but i can come back to that.
so i watched Weapons (2025) and the thing is that for its technical prowess and acting prowess i did not like it. nothing against ripping and popping heads, everything against the first kill being a gay man who we never learn the name of. and the second kill being his husband. and then the heavy, HEAVY allegory that cancer = parasite. they were laying parasite imagery on thick from the very start of the film, but by the end it's impossible to ignore.
thing is, i kind of get it. the director/writer admitted this film was done as a sort of excersize in venting a difficult death in his life. he said in interviews that he was the child of a really bad alcoholic and so grew up feeling an inversion of caregiver roles. and i think when you put those together with the cancer imagery, it suggests maybe that parent recently died of a cancer and this was how he coped. which hey fair. but also, please look outside your own grief. the cancer isn't a person and so making the big bad a witch with cancer isn't fair. the big bad is not an allegory for cancer, it's someone who HAS it. and when you say people WITH that disease are parasites... well. you piss me off. as someone who had it. and had family basically later days out the minute i wasnt gonna die.
but even that is like - ok, i get it, youre mixed up and angry and this is about you (the director/writer) so i can forgive that lack of tact. the actress for the big bad is a total show stealer, absolutely carries the final reel and gives such range. her costuming is great. i can forgive that. and i can forgive a sort of no-moral-theatre where floating ak47s mean nothing and where character segments may or may not actually matter to the final piece, because it's more about the ride than the finale. that's horror, right?
but what i don't like is that all his grief at losing this person in his life, all his feelings about cancer as a parasite (its a mutation not a parasite... the call is coming from inside the house...) all his complex baggage of growing up under an alcoholic parent who he had to parent.... why does all this mean that the only two gays in the film - kindly, loving, child-protecting gays - get murdered for no reason at all. no crime at all, no transgression at all. why does your grief involve punching down at the gays. other than the fact that its 2025 and americans are being brainwashed into full fascism so love to see a minority die for their feelings. oh and did i mention that the Only Non White in the movie is one of the gays who dies? yeah. what the fuck is with that man. what the fuck.
and yet, it's still better than LongLegs.
LongLegs is just on its face a weird allegory for THAT director's daddy issues. i am not even extrapolating, he has said this quite openly in interviews. his father was a famous silver screen star. his father was also gay, and forced to live his life in the closet. his mother being a 60s mom i guess tried to just hide this from the kids. the director takes his feeling that his father was a childhood destroyer (WHY, because HE was suffering?) and gives it to an extremely queer coded nick cage. he takes his feelings that his mother was a conspirator (WHY, because she DIDNT support his father?) and makes women in his movie evil and conspiring with the queer coded child killer. and buddy, that's fucked up. you're turning a dead man's suffering into a story about how your FEELS make you think your childhood was 'murdered' because gays exist. LongLegs is nothing but homophobia propped up on a 90s tv nostalgia aesthetic. garbage, garbage film used to excise the issues of a garbage man who can not bring himself to understand why a gay man in the 50s and 60s might try to force himself to live straight and then fail. punching extremely down, because YOU didnt get the heterosexual football tossing daddy you wanted. eat my entire anus, tbqh.
so where am i going with this other than two vague horror reviews? i guess i'm just trying to hash out that to me, horror is always some kind of venting - one way or another. MudBrick from 2023 which i thought ruled was an almost cultural venting, but the sense of estrangement and entitlement and toxic masculinity is all there. you watch the Excorcist and the anxiety of a changing time where catholicism was falling out of favor for science, where you could be divorced, where women found themselves working longer hours and feared what this was doing to their children... it's all there. Sometimes it's much more obvious anxious venting, like Blair Witch being "what if we got super lost in the woods"
but this also means sometimes when a horror film rubs me the wrong way, i have to sit down and examine why it did that. and more often than not, what i find is that the creator was in some way attacking a minority group that doesn't deserve it because of their personal issues that they need to work on. to steal the meme, Men will Literally Write An Entire Screenplay About Their Gay Dad As A Supernatural Child Murderer Instead Of Go To Therapy. but the problem is not every movie goer is /thinking/ about film. so for a lot of people it just washes over them and the bits that are reaffirmed by propaganda (such as "queers bad" usa 2025) stick in their brains like bits of turd glomming to the inside of a filthy toilet. essentially, you need to be responsible for the negative ideas you're putting into the world even IF youre venting.
to bring it back around to Weapons - i've heard some people say the movie is also a school shooter allegory. i disagree, i think instead it's the anxiety that a parent has that their child could BECOME a shooter. even though there are no guns, the idea that these empty placid children could be secreted away and turned into bloodthirsty mobs by the wrong person? I think that's a very normal american anxiety right now. but this brings me back around to 'who dies in this film is a choice' tho.
because the young boy who is caring for his allegorically alcoholic parents? they get to live. he gets to keep his parents.
and the parents of the allegorically weaponized brainwashed children? they get to keep their children. they all live.
but the happy gay couple of the school principal who was doing a mandated wellfare check on the boy caring for his allegorically alcoholic parents??? they must die??? why? why dont the gay couple get eachother after this event? why is there only death and no bittersweet future for them? why did you make the CHOICE, 2025, to bury your gays?
"i didn't think that hard about it" seems to be most of what this writer/director says when asked teasing questions about his film. but to me, "not thinking that hard about it" says a lot about how someone operates on default. his default says gays deserve to die, no struggling forward for us. and more than that, we die as a tool of those who would do our children harm. uhm. what the fuck guy. this shit doesnt exist in a vaccuum. thanks for adding to the general vibe of homophobia in thsi country, which i am almost certain was more an attempt to avoid being critiqued for "woke" choices like "maybe gays should live" than anything else.
this isnt to say every horror movie that offends me and i spend hours turning over in my head comes up as 'what the fuck did you do, man.' Koji Shiraishi is a total fav director of mine. most well known for Noroi, he's got a relatively expansive bench of horror. and recently i watched Record Of A Sweet Murder. it's... pretty fucking dark at points. there's rape, for one, and i really do not like that. but here's the thing. the more i thought about 'why the fuck did he make the choice to put that in the movie' the more i put it together. the film takes place in korea, and the rapists are japanese. they are portrayed as bullish, violent, lowly, just absolutely no regard for any of the people around them. only concerned with themselves and their very base desires. it took until the final reel, when i saw the (japanese) badge of the car that killed a young girl, that it clicked together. this is Shiraishi's commentary on how Japan treated Korea. how japan FUCKED UP a whole GENERATION of koreans, stole a future from them. how the wrongness of that echos through reality for him. in a weird way the film is meant to be his acknowledgement and attonement for that. pretty galaxy brained stuff, to take your anxiety at the brutality of your ancestors and homeland and turn it into horror that ultimately shows your feelings are that you owe great penance for that.
so i guess the moral here is just like... think about the horror as you consume it. ask yourself why choices are being made. why those who die die, why those who are violent are violent. do a little homework after on who wrote it and who directed it and what they have to say for themselves. it is very revealing. and maybe it'll be the start of realizing you need to avoid spreading their propaganda unknowingly.
also finished shirley jackson's The Birds Nest - i really really enjoy how though Elizabeth is clearly mentally ill from trauma and an overbearing forceful caregiver who controls her every move, you can absolutely read it in such a way that she's alternately fucking wth and fawning towards those who control her life in a seesaw of rebellion. there are a LOT of times that Dr Wright and her aunt ask or say very leading questions, or suggest TO her that she is multiple. she herself is never really like yup sure am yup yup sure identify that way unless it's in response to them encouraging her. her personality is fractured, yes, but these people constantly reaffirm its fracture. and they constantly become annoyed not with her trauma or her fractured personality, but with her pushback. it's never when she's dull and fawning that they throw their hands up and demand she see someone else or go away. it's only ever when she does things like take money that is owed to her and buy herself a coat. so really the entire book is about Elizabeth fighting against the very hetero very weirdly sexist status quo to find who she is. that's why even though we get no name in the final chapter, she informs us firmly that she knows who she is. even as her doctor and aunt bicker over this very question.
going to spend most of today painting in hopes i can sell some stuff at the pride festival this weekend.
remember to Think about that which gives you anxious negative feels, especially if youre venting it into fiction. be aware of what you're perpetuating and what you're healing in that accountless realm.
ttyl
i think i was originally going to talk about horror? i've lost my burning furvor over a few days, but i can come back to that.
so i watched Weapons (2025) and the thing is that for its technical prowess and acting prowess i did not like it. nothing against ripping and popping heads, everything against the first kill being a gay man who we never learn the name of. and the second kill being his husband. and then the heavy, HEAVY allegory that cancer = parasite. they were laying parasite imagery on thick from the very start of the film, but by the end it's impossible to ignore.
thing is, i kind of get it. the director/writer admitted this film was done as a sort of excersize in venting a difficult death in his life. he said in interviews that he was the child of a really bad alcoholic and so grew up feeling an inversion of caregiver roles. and i think when you put those together with the cancer imagery, it suggests maybe that parent recently died of a cancer and this was how he coped. which hey fair. but also, please look outside your own grief. the cancer isn't a person and so making the big bad a witch with cancer isn't fair. the big bad is not an allegory for cancer, it's someone who HAS it. and when you say people WITH that disease are parasites... well. you piss me off. as someone who had it. and had family basically later days out the minute i wasnt gonna die.
but even that is like - ok, i get it, youre mixed up and angry and this is about you (the director/writer) so i can forgive that lack of tact. the actress for the big bad is a total show stealer, absolutely carries the final reel and gives such range. her costuming is great. i can forgive that. and i can forgive a sort of no-moral-theatre where floating ak47s mean nothing and where character segments may or may not actually matter to the final piece, because it's more about the ride than the finale. that's horror, right?
but what i don't like is that all his grief at losing this person in his life, all his feelings about cancer as a parasite (its a mutation not a parasite... the call is coming from inside the house...) all his complex baggage of growing up under an alcoholic parent who he had to parent.... why does all this mean that the only two gays in the film - kindly, loving, child-protecting gays - get murdered for no reason at all. no crime at all, no transgression at all. why does your grief involve punching down at the gays. other than the fact that its 2025 and americans are being brainwashed into full fascism so love to see a minority die for their feelings. oh and did i mention that the Only Non White in the movie is one of the gays who dies? yeah. what the fuck is with that man. what the fuck.
and yet, it's still better than LongLegs.
LongLegs is just on its face a weird allegory for THAT director's daddy issues. i am not even extrapolating, he has said this quite openly in interviews. his father was a famous silver screen star. his father was also gay, and forced to live his life in the closet. his mother being a 60s mom i guess tried to just hide this from the kids. the director takes his feeling that his father was a childhood destroyer (WHY, because HE was suffering?) and gives it to an extremely queer coded nick cage. he takes his feelings that his mother was a conspirator (WHY, because she DIDNT support his father?) and makes women in his movie evil and conspiring with the queer coded child killer. and buddy, that's fucked up. you're turning a dead man's suffering into a story about how your FEELS make you think your childhood was 'murdered' because gays exist. LongLegs is nothing but homophobia propped up on a 90s tv nostalgia aesthetic. garbage, garbage film used to excise the issues of a garbage man who can not bring himself to understand why a gay man in the 50s and 60s might try to force himself to live straight and then fail. punching extremely down, because YOU didnt get the heterosexual football tossing daddy you wanted. eat my entire anus, tbqh.
so where am i going with this other than two vague horror reviews? i guess i'm just trying to hash out that to me, horror is always some kind of venting - one way or another. MudBrick from 2023 which i thought ruled was an almost cultural venting, but the sense of estrangement and entitlement and toxic masculinity is all there. you watch the Excorcist and the anxiety of a changing time where catholicism was falling out of favor for science, where you could be divorced, where women found themselves working longer hours and feared what this was doing to their children... it's all there. Sometimes it's much more obvious anxious venting, like Blair Witch being "what if we got super lost in the woods"
but this also means sometimes when a horror film rubs me the wrong way, i have to sit down and examine why it did that. and more often than not, what i find is that the creator was in some way attacking a minority group that doesn't deserve it because of their personal issues that they need to work on. to steal the meme, Men will Literally Write An Entire Screenplay About Their Gay Dad As A Supernatural Child Murderer Instead Of Go To Therapy. but the problem is not every movie goer is /thinking/ about film. so for a lot of people it just washes over them and the bits that are reaffirmed by propaganda (such as "queers bad" usa 2025) stick in their brains like bits of turd glomming to the inside of a filthy toilet. essentially, you need to be responsible for the negative ideas you're putting into the world even IF youre venting.
to bring it back around to Weapons - i've heard some people say the movie is also a school shooter allegory. i disagree, i think instead it's the anxiety that a parent has that their child could BECOME a shooter. even though there are no guns, the idea that these empty placid children could be secreted away and turned into bloodthirsty mobs by the wrong person? I think that's a very normal american anxiety right now. but this brings me back around to 'who dies in this film is a choice' tho.
because the young boy who is caring for his allegorically alcoholic parents? they get to live. he gets to keep his parents.
and the parents of the allegorically weaponized brainwashed children? they get to keep their children. they all live.
but the happy gay couple of the school principal who was doing a mandated wellfare check on the boy caring for his allegorically alcoholic parents??? they must die??? why? why dont the gay couple get eachother after this event? why is there only death and no bittersweet future for them? why did you make the CHOICE, 2025, to bury your gays?
"i didn't think that hard about it" seems to be most of what this writer/director says when asked teasing questions about his film. but to me, "not thinking that hard about it" says a lot about how someone operates on default. his default says gays deserve to die, no struggling forward for us. and more than that, we die as a tool of those who would do our children harm. uhm. what the fuck guy. this shit doesnt exist in a vaccuum. thanks for adding to the general vibe of homophobia in thsi country, which i am almost certain was more an attempt to avoid being critiqued for "woke" choices like "maybe gays should live" than anything else.
this isnt to say every horror movie that offends me and i spend hours turning over in my head comes up as 'what the fuck did you do, man.' Koji Shiraishi is a total fav director of mine. most well known for Noroi, he's got a relatively expansive bench of horror. and recently i watched Record Of A Sweet Murder. it's... pretty fucking dark at points. there's rape, for one, and i really do not like that. but here's the thing. the more i thought about 'why the fuck did he make the choice to put that in the movie' the more i put it together. the film takes place in korea, and the rapists are japanese. they are portrayed as bullish, violent, lowly, just absolutely no regard for any of the people around them. only concerned with themselves and their very base desires. it took until the final reel, when i saw the (japanese) badge of the car that killed a young girl, that it clicked together. this is Shiraishi's commentary on how Japan treated Korea. how japan FUCKED UP a whole GENERATION of koreans, stole a future from them. how the wrongness of that echos through reality for him. in a weird way the film is meant to be his acknowledgement and attonement for that. pretty galaxy brained stuff, to take your anxiety at the brutality of your ancestors and homeland and turn it into horror that ultimately shows your feelings are that you owe great penance for that.
so i guess the moral here is just like... think about the horror as you consume it. ask yourself why choices are being made. why those who die die, why those who are violent are violent. do a little homework after on who wrote it and who directed it and what they have to say for themselves. it is very revealing. and maybe it'll be the start of realizing you need to avoid spreading their propaganda unknowingly.
also finished shirley jackson's The Birds Nest - i really really enjoy how though Elizabeth is clearly mentally ill from trauma and an overbearing forceful caregiver who controls her every move, you can absolutely read it in such a way that she's alternately fucking wth and fawning towards those who control her life in a seesaw of rebellion. there are a LOT of times that Dr Wright and her aunt ask or say very leading questions, or suggest TO her that she is multiple. she herself is never really like yup sure am yup yup sure identify that way unless it's in response to them encouraging her. her personality is fractured, yes, but these people constantly reaffirm its fracture. and they constantly become annoyed not with her trauma or her fractured personality, but with her pushback. it's never when she's dull and fawning that they throw their hands up and demand she see someone else or go away. it's only ever when she does things like take money that is owed to her and buy herself a coat. so really the entire book is about Elizabeth fighting against the very hetero very weirdly sexist status quo to find who she is. that's why even though we get no name in the final chapter, she informs us firmly that she knows who she is. even as her doctor and aunt bicker over this very question.
going to spend most of today painting in hopes i can sell some stuff at the pride festival this weekend.
remember to Think about that which gives you anxious negative feels, especially if youre venting it into fiction. be aware of what you're perpetuating and what you're healing in that accountless realm.
ttyl
