It was around this time Penrose noticed that a utility worker was looking at him – high up on a telephone pole, acting like he was repairing a line, but obviously keeping tabs on our man ‘rose, here.

Penrose looked away, then back again. Mr. Pole, caught staring, quickly returned to his supposed work. He then slowly rotated back to see if Penrose was looking at him, saw that he was, and, cover blown, dropped even the illusion that this was all a big misunderstanding, instead took out a walkie-talkie and started barking orders into it.

Huh.

Penrose returned his gaze to ground level.

A police officer was watching him, also had a walkie-talkie out, and was listening very intently.

Huh.

Now, hold on, hold on – let’s not get paranoid, here, Penrose. When was the last time you met a friendly police officer? A-And, maybe that utility worker was calling in something completely unrelated to your currently being on the esplanade. Y-Yeah, yeah! Relax, Roger – not everything is about you.

He turned to a little old lady who had paused in the shade of a nearby curtain fig to blow some heat off of her café con leche. They caught each other’s eye. She lost interest in him almost immediately, and went back to her coffee.

See? Just the fine people of Puerto Rico, going about their business.

Maybe one more look, though, back at the ol’ utility worker up there…

H-Hey, where did he go?

No one was working on the line anymore. How could you even get down that quickly?

Penrose scanned the esplanade again.

The utility worker and the police officer were making their way towards him. Yellow-hat and blue-hat, working together, sweeping the street and not being particularly subtle about it.

Penrose looked back at the old lady, hoping his plight might ignite some kind of maternal instinct in her, but now she was frowning wickedly and inching towards him.

She was talking into a walkie-talkie of her own.

“What the fuck…?”

Penrose turned in the opposite direction of this growing goon squad, and as he did noticed a sailor and a biker emerging from the shadow of a basement café. They tried to hustle into position and cut off his escape route, but Penrose danced around them, broke into a jog and, not wanting to see who else was about to join this goddamned navy, turned that jog into a run, taking off towards Escambrón Beach, and whatever haven might remain.

–

Andrés, Penrose’s surf-buddy/drug-dealer/life-coach/drug-dealer, was opening up his kiosco when he noticed who else but his favorite customer barreling down the street in his direction.

“Hey, hey, Penrose! What’s up, man?”

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

Penrose blasted on by.

“Uh, need anything to take that edge off?” Andrés called after him. “I can see if I’ve got any – holy fuck!”

Reliable Andrés, seeing the growing team of macho men charging in hard from the same direction Penrose had come from, dropped what he was doing, got into gear, and caught up with his friend.

“Holy shit! What kind of trouble you in, blanquito?”

“Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck! I don’t fucking know! Stay away, man! They’ll get you, too!”

“Bah, you’re talking to someone who loses pigs for a living, Penrose! Just follow me!”

Andrés took the lead, and headed towards the water.

“That’s the fucking ocean, Andrés!”

“Damn straight it is! Only natural highway left! Just have to know how to navigate it!

“Alright, boys, it’s showtime!”

That last part was for the benefit of the dozen-plus Boricua surfers milling about on the beach, all of whom answered the call by yanking their boards from the sand and lining up, military-style.

“What’s the play, Andrés? We taking Penrose out for a lesson?”

“Sure are, but not the usual kind!”

Knowing nods all around.

“And I’ll just be taking this.”

Andrés yanking off Penrose’s bomber jacket and putting it on himself, mussing up his hair so it looked Penrose-adjacent, and then peeling off towards the pier to draw the heat away.

“Andrés, man, you can’t get pinched on account of me!” Penrose screaming after him. “Come with us!”

“Me, getting pinched? That’s a good one!” Andrés calling back over his shoulder. “I’ve been doing this too long to get caught by some rent-a-thugs! See you on the other side, ‘rosie!”

The locals now lifting Penrose towards the water, placing him on a surfboard, and shoving out to sea together in an impromptu flotilla.

–

Out past the usual breaks, things starts to move in ways you wouldn’t expect. Water and air become indigenous to nothing, and directionality as a concept sort of breaks down. This rakishness is great for making an escape, less great for knowing where you’ll end up. But that’s the price of leaving no tracks – no way back, no way to even prove where you’re from.

Penrose chose not to focus on this. He instead limited his sight to the patch of water directly in front of him. This was a good idea, because even if he wanted to take a long view on the matters at hand, sea fog had descended all around, made everything impenetrably primordial.

“Almost there,” a voice said.

“Got it,” Penrose called back.

“We didn’t say that,” the surfers informed him.

They came to a halt.

“Someone’ll pick you up from here, ‘rose,” one of the surfers said.

“I really owe you guys,” Penrose, actually getting a little worked up. “You’re all going to be in all kinds of shit when you get back. They’re going to find out you know me, and – ”

“Just worry about yourself right now,” another surfer said, gently. “We’ve been doing this a lot longer than you. We’ll be fine.”

All of them gone, now, before Penrose could even ask who he was waiting for.

“Remember, Penrose: if they get you chasing something that can never be caught, they never have to worry about what you’ll do when you get it.”

None of the surfers said that, either, but that didn’t mean it was wrong.

–

Being sent by your employer to an island that means nothing to you in order to help set up an operation whose purpose or even basic operating mechanics have not been adequately explained and might not even exist in any tangible sense sounds like a horizontal career move at best, but he was trying to stay positive.

Puerto Rico had nice weather, and pretty girls, and everybody seemed pretty happy to be there, at least that’s what it looked like in the brochure they gave him on the plane. And, besides, he was the person who discovered the Mock-Invertible Variant/Invariant Matrix, the only known matrix whose singularity could actually change depending on whether or not it recognized itself, a side-stepping of the limitations of 3 + 1 dimensional spacetime that was already powering rapid advancements in the physics of pulling virtual and imaginary coördinates onto the traversable plane… would they really thank him for crafting such a nifty critter by sending him down to the Caribbean to sit behind a desk?

He needed a Panama hat. Those were so cool.

They put him up in a hotel near the esplanade. He had no idea if the entire places was being rented out, or if he was the only member of the team being kept there. The suite wasn’t bad, though, and they even got him a Cushman motor scooter, currently out front and shiny-new, another gift from on high, gassed up and ready to go, its purpose, like so many things, to be revealed only at a later date…

As of now his only company was the teletypewriter. They had hooked it up before he even got there, waiting on a table in the sitting room when he first came in, incongruous with everything else, a lump of coal for his karmic Christmas.

He needed a lady. Or at least something besides a haunted typewriter to talk to.

Well, hey, speak of the devil: ol’ Mr. Teletype was starting to crank out another message:

Penrose.

At the promenade.

Go.

Observe.

Collect.

–

Penrose bobbed there for a while.

He wasn’t sure what to do.

He thought about his brother.

Hieronymus Penrose was not a striving man. The times he lived in provided more occasions for death than any sane person could possibly want, so Hiero P’s charge in life wasn’t finding danger, but rather remaining solid, stolid, happy and pure even as a sea of gruesome interests conspired to make him anything but – because whether the powers-that-be realized it or not, they had passed – and dragged everyone else along! – into a new phase of history, one in which moments were mistakes, and the larger body always emerged unscathed. The goal, of course, was to prove that everything is fungible – that nature and its goodies are nothing more than a bottomless repository of Useful Parts from which more stock can always be pulled, whenever The Firm is hurting or hungry, or otherwise feels it isn’t getting the respect it deserves.

Hieronymus survived all this, more or less – passed through a series of rooms and concerns that were more collections of codified neuroses than what could reasonably be called ideas, each time forced to perform – not so much as a rite of entry but of exit – a task he rather would not have done, oftentimes simply because The Firm wanted to see if They could make him do it, curious as They tend to be as to just how far a process can be taken, if a person can be made the incubator of their own replacement – because if it were possible, it would finally prove The Firm’s ultimate argument, that even the soul is just another unit of account…

That’s how the eldest Penrose brother passed the first few decades of his life, which also ended up being the last few – worked on, Ship-of-Theseus-style, by a series of increasingly faceless interests, swapped out with so many aftermarket parts that his own family was forced to confront the possibility that the Hieronymus before them was no longer the real Hieronymus Penrose, but rather a convincing simulacrum, well-meaning but clearly working for someone else, sending information somewhere else, to people who didn’t give a shit about him, but to who he was now forever attached…

(… s-sometimes Penrose even thought that he and Hieronymus were originally the same person, bifurcated like light in some grim experiment – Hieronymus, the control, made to come out clean on the other side, while Penrose, the experiment, was a refraction sent out at a deliberately nonsensical angle, just to see how a geodesic behaves when it goes off the map, and whether it resembles its original form – or anything at all – when it comes back…

… a-and how many more constituent parts could this Penrose afford to lose before it happened to him, too…? before his model year simply… expired? what would that even feel like? would he know it when it happened, or would only others be able to tell he was gone…?)

“Ahoy, there!”

Out of the dream and into the drink now sailed the Bearded Baby, a rusty bucket of a shrimp trawler that probably wasn’t up to code on anything pertaining to health or physical safety but still might as well have been a unicorn pulling a rainbow for all the hope it instilled in Penrose.

“Let’s get you somewhere safe, lad!”

–

Penrose finished drying himself off while the Bearded Baby‘s captain, a huge motherfucker named Tāne, waited patiently.

“I really owe you guys.”

Tāne shrugged.

“Never pass up an opportunity to inconvenience The Man. And we would’ve felt bad if you’d drowned.”

Penrose tried to ignore the order in which Tāne had listed his priorities.

“So, uh, where’re we headed?”

“Panama. We should be able to keep you ahead of it until then, but you’d be better served getting yourself a new ride once you’re there. Misdirection, misdirection. These people pretend they deal in subterfuge, but they can’t stand it.”

These people? Ahead of it?

Penrose was too tired to think, but had just enough juice left to be grateful.

“Can I pay my way with work? Only thing I had of value on me was that surfboard, and – oh, fuck!”

That surfboard he had been lent was still somewhere out in the Atlantic.

“… maybe focus on more primary concerns, son. And we have plenty for you to do.”

“Thanks. It was a really nice surfboard.”

“I’m sure it was.”

Tāne with one more curious once-over on the Baby‘s latest catch, as if comparing what he was observing to something he had been told to expect, before heading towards the bow.

Penrose stood there for a minute, happy to have nothing to do.

He had no idea what the plan was, both with respect to the people trying to catch him and the people trying to keep him away from the people trying to catch him, and something told him that by the time he found out what anybody was up to it would be well passed the time to do anything about it.

Get your jokes out of my comedy.

Wild Things

Nothing is funnier than cataclysmic failure. If someone stepping on a landmine during a volleyball match and only leaving behind a pair of smoking leg stumps and someone on the other team starting to laugh until they step on a landmine and then a third person starting to play a slide whistle to mock the whole grim affair but it turns out that slide whistle is also a landmine doesn’t make you laugh then there’s something about the human condition that you’re failing to grasp on a foundational level. You need to meet more people; you need to open your heart to chance.

Wild Things works as a comedy. Whether or not it’s supposed to work as a comedy is a second, chin scratch-ier consideration, but for now let’s focus on the sassy stuff:

Sleaze is the main character in this movie, and I will hear no arguments against it. We are impelled to root for wet, greasy garbage, and well we should – unctuousness has the most consistent motivations in Wild Things, is both the most likable and most relatable thing on screen at any time, and offers up non-zero amounts of thematic depth. You know how sometimes a location is a character, like Chicago in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or the uncanny valley in Marvel movies? That’s the role that sticky awfulness plays in Wild Things.

Which leads to my favorite type of comedy! There aren’t any “jokes” in this film, at least not any traditional ones – no setups and payoffs, no straight-man character; only vibes, sweet, sweet vibes, and gleefully dumb anti-logic. In watching this movie we are transported to a world complete unto itself and subject to its own rigorously-maintained rules, among which the following reigns supreme: everyone is brain-dead stupid and endlessly horny. They have no third quality.

This movie’s tone is so pure that its humor doesn’t even need a straight-man to punctuate its jokes, because the world is the joke, and just by watching you are cast into the role of straight-man. The Spanish Inquisition didn’t have this much audience participation.

But now we come to the big question: is this all on purpose?

I have no fucking idea! It also doesn’t matter. But, for science, let us consider:

• The participation of Bill Murray means that, even if we’re not dealing with a planned comedy, at least one person is going to be winking. He even plays a sleazy lawyer who wears an unnecessary neck brace. This one seems unambiguous.
• I refuse to believe anyone thought that this movie’s audio cues would work as anything other than punchlines. There’s a sudden trilling of piano keys whenever a character learns new information, which is not how drama works.
• Theresa Russell is in this movie. Theresa Russell knows what a real movie is, having been in many of them herself. There are multiple scenes in this movie in which Theresa Russell is trying not to laugh. Theresa Russell understands what kind of movie Theresa Russell is in.

The End

Jokes are fine, I guess. But you know what’s even funnier than jokes? A character getting harpooned multiple times, still apparently confused after the first harpoon enters his body as to what, exactly, is happening (he is being harpooned); another character being handed a drink, being told that the drink isn’t poisoned, and then immediately drinking the poisoned drink, trusting that the person who has just reassured him of the non-poisoned status of the drink – who only moments earlier just killed someone, directly in front of him! – would never do him harm.

You can have your knock-knock jokes, society. I’ll stick with dumb people continuously falling over themselves on an existential Slip ‘N Slide lubricated exclusively by filth and pointing directly to hell. This movie is a comedy, and you’ll never convince me otherwise. I don’t care if they meant to make one – I laughed, and that’s all that matters.

Our problems will still be there tomorrow. Today, we jazzerskate.

Xanadu

After my ill-advised Sinatra safari, I felt compelled to both cleanse my mind and prove a point. The thing to be cleansed was obvious: Sinatra’s grim, lusterless eyes, owl-wide yet full of nothing. The point to be proven was less obvious: that, in spite of what Ol’ Blue Eyes would have you believe, making a movie that is basically watchable requires nothing more than fucking trying.

I would need a certain type of movie to aid me in this quest – one rife with weirdness, filthy with basic storytelling mistakes, special effects that make you look up the definition of the word “special” to see if it means something different than what you thought it meant, and yet… still a genuinely good watch, simply because the people involved are fucking trying.

Many films fit this description, but to the best of my knowledge only one features Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly surfing oceans of blow: Xanadu.

Xanadu is not what you would call a “good” film. I’d even entertain arguments that it’s not a film at all, assuming we’re defining “film” as some kind of visual entity utilizing one or more structural through-lines towards the ultimate goal of generating an emotional response from its audience. I’d describe it more as a gesture, a feeling that passed by at the precise moment a camera crew happened to be in the vicinity to film it. A spontaneous disco-documentary, if you will.

It’s also fucking stupid – every actor is either thoroughly baffled as to what they’re supposed to be doing (Michael Beck), thoroughly baffled as to what they’re supposed to be doing but dancing through it all (Gene Kelly, Olivia Newton-John), or completely confident in what they’re supposed to be doing because all they’re supposed to be doing is juggling bowling pins (various mimes).

But unlike the human manifestation of apathy that is Frank Sinatra, Xanadu is endlessly watchable! Everybody in this faceplant of a film is willing to embarrass themselves for the assignment, and the energy is infectious. Maybe there were just mountains of cocaine on the craft services table, but it’s always a pleasure when no one involved seems concerned with what the final product will look like, because they’re too busy jamming the fuck out.

God save me, I liked this dumb fucking movie, even though if given the chance I’d travel back in time and warn them not to make it.

That’s the power of trying, baby.

The End

There’s a scene late in Xanadu in which the character who would be our hero if this movie was competent enough to know that stories typically have a hero is at what would be the narrative low point if this film were competent enough to know that stories typically have a narrative low point. He receives an uplifting speech from Gene Kelly about the importance of never giving up on love. The speech sucks, both men are dressed like assholes, and nothing about anything works, but damned if Kelly isn’t calling on every ounce of his charisma to try and sell it.

And he doesn’t even have to sell it, because moments later there is a dance number so insane it appears to transcend the physical laws of the universe as they are currently understood. With that much energy on display, being good is almost besides the point.

My goal in life is to become so famous that the mere suggestion I should or even could try harder would be like slapping God across His face.

Some Came Running, Can-Can, Ocean’s 11

There are many ways to give your audience a good performance. Trying, for instance. You could try. That usually works. But what if you don’t want to try? Furthermore, what if – and we’re purely in the realm of speculation, here – you also happen to be Frank Sinatra? It’s a grim situation, but one we must confront.

Movie stars coast all the time. That’s fine. If I could act like Al Pacino or Parker Posey I’d set it to autopilot occasionally, too, secure in the knowledge that even when I’m taking a breather the audience is still in for a good time. But Frank Sinatra doesn’t just coast – he decomposes, shits himself like a bored toddler. It’s upsetting.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so annoyed to be in a movie. Sinatra’s the cinematic equivalent of the old money crowd, appalled at the very notion someone would do something in order to remain famous. Those filthy hogs shouldn’t have to be reminded of who I am. They should just know.

This philosophical opposition to effort as a concept seems to take a toll on Sinatra’s supporting cast, too, in the same way that being forced to drag an extremely lazy member of your team up the side of Mount Everest is bound to make everyone a bit snippy. The other actors are all going harder than they’d probably like because they have to compensate for the fact that they’re acting opposite a corpse. Ol’ Blue Eyes isn’t here in any meaningful sense, gang. He’s thinking about whiskey and yearning for death.

The End

About halfway through Can-Can, Frank Sinatra tries to pull a single grape from a cluster. He accidentally yanks the entire thing off the table, and it lands on the floor with a thud. Sinatra notices this mistake, pauses for a moment, realizes he doesn’t care, and then continues with the scene.

Jesus Christ, Frank.

Pick up the fucking grapes.

My brain ignores the beauty inherent to our shared human experience so it can instead search for things to be mad about.

 

Project Hail Mary

“How popular should popular entertainment be?” is a strange question to ask. If the word is in the name, you should probably be maximizing it. Imagine if a waiter brought you a filet mignon that was neither a cut of beef nor particularly cute. You would feel betrayed.

But can this logic be applied to movies? It’s not exactly like the filet mignon situation. At a restaurant, you’re trying to give the customer exactly what they asked for. Are you trying to give the audience exactly what they asked for? What did they ask for? Do they even know? Do you? Are there unspoken expectations between you and your viewers? How would they even know if they wanted something they’ve never seen before, unless they were first shown that thing? If you were this existential about your Bloomin’ Onion, people would worry.

I present this deeply stupid and poorly structured argument because I just watched Project Hail Mary, a movie that is neither deeply stupid nor poorly structured. It is, in fact, dialed the fuck in. It’s so dialed the fuck in, actually, that my brain started going to weird places as I watched it.

Hear me out:

Lord and Miller have basically perfected the art of being insiders and outsiders at the same time, right? This feels like the consensus – those two make bangers that send up the very notion of banging while actually harvesting that same bangification energy/anti-energy dynamic to maximize their Added Bang Over Expectation (ABOE) without ever pushing it too far and accidentally de-bangerizing themselves. Their mastery of the culture has fucked with my brain so badly that I actually considered writing that last sentence to be a good idea.

But, “this movie is so well-made that it loops back around to being poorly-made,” isn’t what I’m saying, because that is both stupid and objectively not true. Project Hail Mary isn’t so good it’s bad, it’s so good it’s really fucking good.

So what am I getting at?

I think it’s this: can you perfect popular entertainment? Unlike, say, avant-garde stuff, popular entertainment has a fairly knowable gauge: how many people it appeals to. So if you have a style that appeals to essentially every human alive, did you just, uh, win at entertainment? And even if you could win at entertainment, would you want to? Can Lord and Miller push awesome, big movies further by continuing their fine-tuned approach, or can new avenues only be discovered by making something weird and shitty on purpose, just to test the waters? Why is a movie about Ryan Gosling doing science with a dancing rock challenging my very notion of reality? I’ve never even had a Bloomin’ Onion before.

The End

Here’s a compromise: whether or not perfection is an admirable goal depends entirely upon the field in which you operate. You wouldn’t want to be the world’s best toilet salesman, and Keith Richards’ favorite drug dealer probably never has a moment to himself.

But it feels like there should be more to the argument – it’s just that I’m not sure more what. I’m going to chew on this for a while longer, which is more effort than I put in for most blockbusters. That’s a feather Lord and Miller’s cap, even if it’s a weird feather, and an even stranger cap.

Hello, and welcome to the first entry in my one-part series, Let’s Start to Redeem a Movie but Then Actually Watch That Movie and Be Like, No, Wait, My Mistake, the Critics Were Right the First Time.

30 Days of Night

“There’s a good movie in here,” can be said about a lot of movies, but not all of them. Attack of the Clones isn’t one edit away from being coherent, and you can chop up Mad Foxes as much as you want, but you’re still getting a story about the world’s least likeable boyfriend and his best friend, a bathtub full of piss (please do not watch Mad Foxes).

But 30 Days of Night really is a couple of tweaks and rewrites away from, if not greatness, then at least having the confidence to make fuck-me eyes at greatness from the other end of the bar. It’s actually annoying how close the film comes to achieving something fascinating, only to falter again and again, and often for the same reason.

First, let’s appreciate what works:

• Assault on Precinct 13, Also Vampires is a great premise for a film. Aside from just being awesome, “What if a Grim Situation Was Steeped in Something Fundamentally Unknowable?” opens up endless narrative and tonal pathways to explore. Just ask Sinners!
• There are moments of strikingly efficient visual storytelling – that opening shot of the Stranger’s face, the subsequent shot of the tanker in the distance, the overhead tracking shot during the first night of feasting – all present a harrowing, cruel world in which the vampires are more like a disease than a traditional enemy that can be repelled by traditional methods.
• The fact that Eben kind of sucks actually works to the movie’s advantage. We can’t just rely on an Extremely Virile Protagonist (Heaving Abdominals Division) to save the day. Having our hero’s focus be survival shifts the scope and tone of the film from Shooty-Shooty Blam-Blam to something darker, sadder, and more personal. High Noon, baby!

But while the premise has oodles of good shit going on, they fumble the goddamn ball in the execution:

• All that tonal build-up deflates at the exact moment the film should be cashing in its ominous chips – our haunting, stark opening gives way to shaky-cam whenever the vampires attack, and the whole notion of a siege is undone as characters just go outside whenever they feel like it.
• The idea of the town being a character unto itself is wasted. Giving our lovably murderous hillbillies the sole advantage of knowing how to survive could have turned this movie into an awesome, grim game of cat-and-mouse, with the roles of hunter and hunted constantly flipping. Instead we get a different game, one called Oh No, The Second Act Just Started And We’re Already Out of Ideas – Quick, Have Them Argue About Things in an Attic.
• There are Movie Things in places in which Movie Things are not needed. Eben and Stella being an estranged married couple adds nothing to the movie except for a few throwaway lines, and is clearly only in the film because Estranged Couple Reconnects During Events of Film is a thing that happens in movies.
• The mostly random insertion of Movie Things also leads to a baffling climax, in which our hero chugs some action juice and just… dukes it out with the head vampire, which makes no sense given the tone and scope of the film.
• Nobody seems to be on the same page, performance-wise. Josh Hartnett goes small, Ben Foster goes big, Mark Boone Junior is in an action movie, Melissa George is making a series of mental notes to fire her agent – not great! Even the vampires play it differently –  some are haunting, some are primal. I don’t know if it was the direction, or what, but everybody seems to be in a slightly different movie.

There is a trend, here! The things that work are all working in concert to facilitate the narrative, whereas the things that don’t work are just generic Movie Things that seem to have been placed in the film to paper over moments where the filmmakers weren’t sure what else to do. A smaller, focused movie will always be better than a larger one under any circumstance, but especially when the larger one has only achieved that size by pumping itself full of stuff that doesn’t really have anything to do with anything.

The End

Just because something works in a movie doesn’t mean it’ll work in your movie. Any given entry in the list of Things That Sometimes Happen in a Movie doesn’t automatically pair with every other entry just because they both happen to be on the same list. Do you get every single thing at the buffet? I fucking hope not! Do that, and one day you’ll head back to your table with crab legs and gelato on the same plate. People would rather sit next to Genghis Khan than some guy who has crab legs and gelato on the same plate.

Don’t be the crab legs and gelato guy.

Hello, and welcome to the first entry in my one-part series, Let’s Redeem a Movie.

 

Office Killer

A movie doesn’t have to be good at everything. It just has to be good at the right things. What’s the plot of Grease? Who gives a shit! The songs are catchy.

So when I hear a movie getting savaged because the story doesn’t make sense, my first question is whether the story needs to make sense. It’s not a given that it does! Just because you like it when a movie has a logical plot it doesn’t mean a movie has to have a logical plot. I like videos of cats wearing people clothes, but if I never see one again I’ll find the strength to carry on.

Which brings us to Office Killer, a movie beloved by no one and whose sole DVD sale is probably being used to stabilize a table somewhere. That’s some bullshit! It’s a solid flick, and it checks a lot of boxes – runtime under 90 minutes, Carol Kane giving a performance that’s either gonzo or subdued depending on which eye you happen to be covering, a supporting cast that doesn’t make obvious the order in which people will be (or even should be) murdered. These are good things! I like these things. Leave these things alone. They’re trying their best, these things.

It would actually be less frustrating if it wasn’t so obvious why people didn’t give a shit about Office Killer when it first came out, and why they continue giving perilously few fucks all these years later: it doesn’t occupy any obvious lane. Doesn’t wink enough to be a spoof, isn’t batshit enough to be giallo, doesn’t establish a frenetic enough pace to be a popcorn slasher, doesn’t comment on workplace dynamics enough to be a statement movie.

These things, I’ll admit, sound bad. But just because a film doesn’t fit into a recognized sub-genre doesn’t mean it’s a failure, it just means that the film… doesn’t fit into a recognized sub-genre. I like that Dorine is ambiguous in her intentions, or that the movie follows side characters for long stretches as if they were the leads. And that sickly brown-yellow light that dominates the office! It’s fucking icky! I love it! If Office Killer doesn’t fit into a sub-genre, then just fucking making one – the Something Is Wrong, and I’m Pretty Sure It’s the World We’ve Created sub-genre. Shit, maybe this movie was ahead of its time.

The End

The only thing a movie has to do is give you a reason to keep watching it. Everything else is extra. That’s why everybody likes porn – you get the thing you want to see (boning) and nothing else. People who film themselves having sex and then sell those videos to strangers have a lot of issues, but lack of narrative focus is not one of them.

Office Killer swaps out boning for vibes – sometimes weird, sometimes campy, sometimes challenging, sometimes oppressive, sometimes depressing, sometimes a combination. It’s so good at giving us vibes that it barely gives us anything but vibes. And that’s the point! A weird and uncomfortable tenor is to Office Killer what the musical numbers are to Grease – the real star of the show. Don’t worry so much, and have fun singing along.

 

Be an asshole, but don’t be an asshole about it.

Repo Man, Straight to Hell, Walker

“What if a middle finger was a movie?” is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a religion. Refusing to accommodate anyone, even your own audience, requires both a sincerity of vision and a douchiness of character that you rarely see in the same person at the same time, let alone actively working together to make that person better at their job. It’s resolving a hostage situation by yelling really loudly and banging two trashcan lids together. It’s talking someone off of a ledge by telling them that your pizza just got here and you’ll be good and goddamned if it’s going to get cold because you have to go downstairs and wait for the paramedics. It’s caring while also not giving a fuck, and it’s what dreams are made of.

Which brings us to Alex Cox. During his brief run as a mainstream filmmaker, Alex Cox took deadly serious the central premises of two of his best films (“the egos of little men will always doom those around them to unimaginable suffering” in Walker and “Los Angeles sucks” in Repo Man) and absolutely nothing else. This total indifference to everything except the single thing he cared about allowed him to go as far afield as he saw fit without ever risking the structural integrity of the story. Everything works because there’s always a sincere heart beating at the center of it all.

And that’s the key to harnessing punk’s fury without falling victim to punk’s penchant for self-destruction – you can’t hate everything. You can only hate pretty much everything. It’s why Walker and Repo Man work and Straight to Hell doesn’t – the latter mocks its own existence, which causes it to collapse under the weight of unfocused snark.

Honestly, it’s crazy how unprepared people were for the discomfort caused by Cox’s bottomless contempt for everything besides basic decency. Walker was savaged by critics, but The Death of Stalin is rightfully considered a modern classic, even though they’re both powered by the same energy. The refusal to be traditionally funny, inescapably draping everything in the grimness of the topic at hand – all things that feel right at home today, but didn’t back then. We weren’t ready for Walker when it first came out, but punk is all about being ahead of the curve.

The End

The point of capitalism is to live forever, and the point of punk rock is die young. Given these conflicting prerogatives it’s impressive that Alex Cox even had a career, let alone a good one. He constantly dared his bosses to fire him, and they only had the courage to do it once his movies stopped making money. I guess the stiffs had their prerogatives, too – it’s just that Cox’s were way cooler.

Squirrel Leaps From Branch, Hopes To Fucking Christ He’s A Flying Squirrel

Members Of Nudist Colony Try To Convince Extremely Unattractive Member That This Lifestyle Isn’t For Everyone

Cult Where Everyone Has To Be Named Karl Can’t Stand That Other Cult Where Everyone Has To Be Named Mike

Captain Of Sinking Ship Assures Passengers That These Things Have A Way Of Working Themselves Out

Mule Suffers Concussion, Is Effectively A Donkey Now

Citizens Of Mushroom Kingdom Live In Constant Fear Of Murderous Italian Brothers

Facing Worst Headwinds Of His Political Career, Trump Vows To Stay The Course And Continue Being An Illiterate Sociopath With Alzheimer’s Who Only Ran For President Because He Was Bored

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Attempts To Draw Foul While Accepting MVP Award

World’s Leading Economists Agree That Nobody Actually Making Anything Anymore Is Probably Fine

Victor Wembanyama Hits Head On Hubble Space Telescope

Dad Throws Caution To The Wind, Uses The Spicy Mustard

Man Finds Only Anime Episode Ever Made In Which Nothing Weird Happens – Wait, No, Someone’s Having Sex With An Octopus

Physicists Confirm Cher Doesn’t Experience Time, Time Experiences Cher

Hideo Kojima Attempts To Write Haiku, Accidentally Rewrites War And Peace In Its Entirety

Democratic Party Pledges Not To Protect Democracy Too Much, Will Be Sure To Run Everything By The White Nationalists First

Man Cutting Down Tree With Chainsaw Can’t Even Remember What He Was So Upset About

God Has Near-Death Experience, Vows To Be A Better Christian

Tenth Viola In Orchestra Just Playing The Star Wars Theme Over And Over

NHL Unveils 2026 Finals Theme: “The Playoffs Are Still Happening. They Haven’t Stopped Yet. The Stanley Cup Is The Hockey One.”

Point-Counterpoint:

The Anarcho-Syndicalists Were Right About Everything

Vs.

Their Name Is Hard To Spell

0

Darkening light, and the ground held open. Iron like failing skin into the heat and dark. Something bright near the bottom.

It breathes completely, convulses slowly.

It prepares the air.

1

The departure happened all around me, and the light it made was beautiful. A moment of new physics. A body for all of them.

They must have been called by a voice, or heard some kind of song. Silence doesn’t cause this much rapture.

I couldn’t contribute to the body. I didn’t hear a thing. I wasn’t useful enough, so I was left behind.

It was my idea to bring the monster here. Its absences fascinated me – the lack of regular organs, of children, of sight… so much gone, yet still breathing. How was it still breathing?

Nature reveals itself in unusual ways.

2

Benning’s monster has been here two days. He hasn’t left its side. He sleeps with it. I don’t think he trusts us.

Memoranda are a strange kind of haven – imagine trying to file an injunction against dying. Urbanity is how an impotent man thinks he’ll keep. I’m not impotent, so I’ll try to be a little less careful with my words, maybe even slightly feral. Sometimes all you can do is pretend you have options.

The creature is uncircumscribed by the normal geometries. Its cells are grotesquely multinucleated. It seems to be in pain – at the very least its contractions are labored – and we speculate this is because it is perpetually in search of food. Some necessary and catastrophic fuel that damages even as it sustains.

Any life form can be reduced to a series of appetites, but it’s the dearth of information with which the creature can still assemble an understanding of its environment, its unique methods of growth, that make it different.

It knows we’re watching it.

–

Benning moves among us. He hasn’t started changing. Everybody else has. He’s proud of being spared. It think it makes him feel important.

The creature is an infection that must be maintained, because its failure would send out an even worse disease. It doesn’t fear anything, but still panics. It wants so bad that its wants are needs. It looks hungrily at our bodies. It makes noises through Benning’s mouth.

It has never left its room.

–

We understand it better now.

It wants to return home.

Maybe it can’t survive the trip. Maybe it isn’t welcome back.

It is using us.

–

The creature continues to grow within me all if its necessary flesh. To the others – whoever is left – I’m just another superannuated body. But I am not being expelled. I am being accepted.

I cannot see Benning – I cannot turn my head – but I hear him shuffle down the halls. He’s anxious. I don’t think he has begun to change. His exclusion might be bothering him now. Sad, I suppose, but his concerns are not my own. My own concerns are barely my own. I hear the voices welcoming me. Soon they will replace me.

I am being both fed upon and reimagined. I do not think one process is possible without the other. When I am done being changed I will not emerge whole – I will simply be another part of the body. This causes me inexpressible fear, but absolutely no pain.

The distance back home already seems smaller.

3

Benning was careful as he moved throughout the crowd. He didn’t have to be. They weren’t watching him. They couldn’t even see him.

The monster’s return had ruined whatever distance remained, so now the two worlds were hopelessly mated. It liked this, so it sent out more roots, more arms, each one aimless and dispassionate, until the sky was iron-red with hyphae. 

Benning hadn’t spoken to another person in years. Sometimes he said his own name to himself for practice.

He arrived at the hotel and went inside.

–

Roche was waiting upstairs. He was sitting on the edge of the second bed. He smiled as Benning entered. He had been smiling for a while.

“Hi, Benning. I didn’t meet you in the lobby. I felt like sitting on the bed.”

Benning stayed in the doorway for a moment. Roche kept smiling.

“You’re looking well. Sit down.”

“No, I want – ”

“Sit down.”

Benning entered and sat down on the first bed.

“Do you know what a great insight is?”

“Listen, – ”

“Let me tell you the insight first. You need to hear what I have to say, first, Benning, and then you have to repeat it to me.”

Benning looked at him for a moment.

“Alright.”

“Nothing maximizes faster than an indiscriminate hand. Can you say that back to me?”

“Listen, – ”

“Can you say that back to me?”

“Nothing maximizes faster than an indiscriminate hand.”

“Excellent! Take us, for instance. There is nothing special about us, Benning. They just landed here one day, and started changing things. It’s not that they’re just better geneticists than navigators – they just don’t care where they land. And why should they? The process is the same regardless. Consumption must be done that way. Otherwise it isn’t true consumption. It isn’t honest hunger.

“It’s thrilling to not matter, Benning. You must see that. Being hurt by someone who barely even notices you is true honesty. You never have to feel undeserving of the things you have, or deserving of the things you don’t. You’re never confused.

“Their knowledge of mechanics is just so much more intuitive than ours, Benning. Imagine what it must be like to just feel things, to feel a probability.”

“I don’t want to have to imagine anything,” Benning said, abruptly, stupidly. “I just want – ”

“Could you say it back to me again, please, Benning?”

“Nothing maximizes faster than an indiscriminate hand.”

“See! You said it without pause or protest this time. That’s great! I can’t be sure I’ll still remember the observation the time we meet again, so it’s good to know that it’s safe and well-kept with you.”

Roche stood up.

“Goodbye, Benning.”

He moved towards the door. Benning reached out to stop him.

“N-No, wait! Wait. Tell me. Am I the only one who isn’t part of it?”

Roche sighed.

“Of course you are. Someone has to be. We can’t write our own history, Benning. It might be biased.”

Roche moved towards the door again. Benning lunged at him.

“Take me with you. For Christ’s sake, take me with you.”

Roche shook free and left.

–

Benning moved to the window. He looked up.

The surface of the second world was just above the tops of the buildings on this one. What little liminal space remained was known only to him, because space and breathing were inconsequential to the body they had all become.

Benning tried to consider whose up was whose down but he confused himself every time. It wasn’t a matter of waiting for the information to reach him, because there was no information to send. They told him nothing, so he never saw anything change.