Hello, the Internet!
I’m writing this on a lazy Sunday afternoon. After a friend’s quiet birthday celebration yesterday, I was reminded that I am now old and, in fact, loving it.
There’s been a flu going around the city, probably down to the erratic weather, and I was laid down by it for the first half of the week. I’m fine now, and got some much-needed reading time to myself.
I’m very happy to note that this week, after a pretty long struggle, my back pain issues have mostly receded. I have now made a one-to-one correlation of the back pain and the time I spend working. I might have figured out a good working posture and taking breaks and so on, but the fact is that the more I work, the more my back hurts.
It’s like the fitness people say these days – sitting is the new smoking – and if I could quit smoking, goddamnit, I’m going to figure out how to quit sitting.
This is going to play a big part in my plans for the next year. They might involve a standing desk, but they might also involve a lot less work full-stop. I’ll keep you posted.
Work-wise, I lettered most of The Oddly Pedestrian Life of Christopher Chaos #7 this week, and sent off the stylesheets for a small project I mentioned last week. Currently awaiting feedback on those.
I had mentioned earlier that New York Comicon was going to see a few announcements of new projects I’ve been working on for a while. The first of these is Hellblazer: Dead in America, which reunites the Hellblazer team of Si Spurrier, Aaron Campbell, Jordie Bellaire and myself. Hellblazer: DIA is intended to be an eight-issue continuation of the story we were telling in the last series, and will begin serialising in January 2024.
Sidenote: Comixology Originals also announced the third volume of All-Nighter by Chip Zdarsky, Jason Loo and Paris Alleyne, of which I lettered the first two volumes. Unfortunately, due to my health issues, I was unable to join the team for this one, and the very able Frank Cvetkovic is picking up the baton for this final volume. I might not be working on this one, but I will be reading it, because I want to know how it all ends!
Till around 2002, it was thought that the average colour of the universe was turquoise. In 2003, the same team figured out, by averaging the colour of the light from over 200,000 galaxies, that the colour of the universe was, in fact, beige. Which was a comedown if we’ve ever had one.
However, I found out a couple of years ago that they named this particular shade of beige (#FFF8E7) “cosmic latte”, which to me absolutely makes up for it. Other suggested names included “cappuccino cosmico”, which I hate with a divine passion, and “primordial clam chowder”, which I’ve got a certain affection for.
As promised, I wrote about We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which is a film I still can’t stop thinking about.
The Shortbox Comics Fair is currently on – a digital independent comics market selling more than 100 finely curated comics. Shortbox is the brainchild of Zainab Akhtar, who, if you know anything about indie comics right now, is a badge of quality.
I bought 38 comics in this one, and honestly might buy more before this thing ends. I believe the Fair is on till the end of October, and 100% of the proceeds from your purchase go to the artists.
You should go buy some comics.
My friend Pranav a.k.a. Floyd is a fantastic cook, but also happens to be a very talented video-maker and (I know he’ll hate me saying this) a burgeoning food influencer.
Last year, he did a month-long cooking challenge wherein he would reinterpret #inktober prompts into cooking videos. He absolutely smashed it (you can watch all of last year’s reels in his Highlights tab), and now has decided to do the thing all over again this year, and it’s just as informative, thrilling and touching as last year’s attempt was. He’s currently almost halfway through, and is posting videos on both his Instagram and his Twitter.
My favourite videos this year were the ones on Railway Mutton Curry, which combined history and food just the way I like, the one where he made chocolate from scratch (I repeat, from scratch), and the one where he made dragon’s beard candy, which was a triumphal redo of his video from last year where he had failed to make it. As someone who’s been following his work for a while now, this one brought tears to my eyes.
Joe Pera (of Joe Pera Talks You to Sleep fame) has a new comedy special, called Slow and Steady, and he has decided to upload it to YouTube in its entirety.
He is a self-described alternative comedian, which means you’d either get him or sit baffled for the entire hour, but I loved this. I enjoy his dedication to character, the way he uses his body throughout, the way he walks the line between funny and sentimental.
Along with We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, The Outwaters (which I’ll talk about below) and a film I haven’t seen yet – Skinamarink – Pera seems to me to fit a pattern of slow entertainment emerging these days. These are all creators who don’t feel that boredom is out of bounds for entertainment, and in fact seem to be reacting to the hypercaffeinated, hyperfixated, overactive relationship between entertainment and audience of the present.
They seem to be saying, it’s okay to luxuriate in quietness, in things not happening. Sometimes the next thing that happens is not as important as simply being within the world that has been created. It is a characteristic that art cinema has used for decades, but I’m seeing more people use it in straightforward entertainment, and I like the trend.
I also think that comedy and horror are good places for this, not just because they’re siblings in how they use the element of surprise as a primal aspect, but because they are habituated to using time as a device of anticipation. A lacuna that in any other genre might straightforwardly register as boring can engender dread in horror and a bigger laugh in comedy.
All of these things remind me that quietness is a valid device for a work of art, and can be integral to a film experience.
On the other end of quietness, there is nervous tension and anxiety-inducing noise, which play a huge part in Shiva Baby by Emma Seligman. This is a very short feature film about a young woman who runs into her ex-girlfriend and her current sugar daddy at the same shiva. It’s intensely grounded in the Jewish experience, and understands the anxiety that only family can make you feel.
It’s also, in the best way, a very stressful experience. I remember when Uncut Gems came out and people described it as stressful viewing. I didn’t get it, and I couldn’t understand how a standard dramatic film could make you feel stress. Well, Shiva Baby did it for me.
A marvellous debut, with a great central performance by Rachel Sennott.
I watched three horror movies and a sci-fi film this week, which is a good hit rate for me (six total if you count Shiva Baby and Joe Pera’s special).
The lone sf movie was They Cloned Tyrone, an enjoyable but fully forgettable sci-fi blaxploitation riff (with shades of Atlanta and Get Out without the facility of either) with Jamie Foxx having a ball and John Boyega being a charismatic, riveting presence for nearly two hours.
You know, it’s a crime what they did to this guy. He was a co-protagonist in a new Star Wars trilogy, a great babe-in-the-woods character, had incredible chemistry with Oscar Isaacs, but instead of centring the films on him, they turned him into a side-character in favour of the insipid Daisy Ridley/Adam Driver pseudo-romance. And after those movies, the world just … forgot that they had a movie star. (I’m sure his BLM speeches had noooooooothing to do with it.)
In his recent video essay “Who Killed Cinema?”, Patrick Willems lays part of the blame for cinema’s decline at the fact that we don’t have movie stars anymore, and with John Boyega, you have a classic example of someone who had all the gravitas and charisma to become a star – he’s compulsively watchable in every scene, and creates that blend of character and personality that makes a good star – and they refused to develop his career, instead focusing on (ptoo) Intellectual Property.
They Cloned Tyrone is fine, but Boyega should be anchoring blockbusters, not (just) working in disposable straight-to-Netflix fare.
In horror, first up was Malignant, which is an enjoyably goofy film. I read in a review when it came out that the reviewer would’ve liked it better if it had been worse-directed, and that was a puzzling assessment – how could added quality detract from the whole? Once I watched it, though, I got it – it is a B-movie script, full of schlock and bad dialogue, and if the direction had been more erratic and less sure-handed, form would’ve suited function better.
Next I watched John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, which, despite not being one of his better-reviewed films, was actually my favourite by him so far.
I’ve always enjoyed his movies, but there tends to be something janky about them, where I feel that the script and execution fall short of what the concept needs. This has been true of everything I’ve watched so far – They Live, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Halloween – all good, but just south of great.
This one comes closest – it sticks to its concept while implying a much bigger world, and executes its Lovecraftian concept with admirable efficiency. It’s a 1.5-hour-long script that feels much shorter, and it’s got great control on its tone. Some of the VFX are on the goofy side, but I find it impossible to begrudge it that.
Sam Neill is great as the eternal sceptic1, and Julie Carmen’s performance might leave much to be desired, but her face has a hauntedness about it that fits the film quite well.
Finally, The Outwaters gets its own section.
As I mentioned to K after I watched it, I had no idea if I liked The Outwaters or not, but I sure was glad I saw it, particularly after I realised that it was written, directed and edited by, starred, and was partially scored by one person – Robbie Banfitch.
After a day or so of thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that I definitely liked it, and this was intensified when I found out that the film was made for about $15,000 and mostly involved Banfitch’s family and friends. I mean, this is exactly the kind of thing one should be making for that kind of money – something only you could make, and something you don’t need anyone’s permission or studio backing for.
If you haven’t seen it yet, I suggest watching it without knowing anything more about it – just brace yourself for one of the strangest film-viewing experiences ever.
(SPOILERS AHEAD. Though that term largely loses meaning with this film.)
The first hour of The Outwaters is your run-of-the-mill found-footage horror film about four friends going into the desert to make a music video. There are strange noises in the night, and the audience has an idea of the kind of horror that might await our protagonists. There is a possible axe-murderer on the loose, and the noises suggest something alien or supernatural. This part of the movie is firmly in the tradition of something like Wolf Creek – letting you come to grips with the characters the horror is going to happen to.
The next hour … the only way I could describe it is as a horror tone poem. There’s around 55 minutes of purely subjective horror lit by a single torch that is largely uninterested in being pointed at the source of the horror. We don’t know whether anything in this sequence is “actually happening”, and we never get an explanation for either what happened or why. Your brain as a viewer is rammed into overdrive by everything the camera suggests … or you might take ten minutes of it and be entirely bored by the rest.
I was riveted for around 50 minutes of this sequence, and it was only when I checked my watch that I realised that I’d been watching, essentially, abstraction for nearly an hour, and it was only then that I got a little impatient for the film to end, which it does on an enjoyably gory body-horror note.
The Outwaters, then, is self-indulgent in the best way, and is going to find an audience that loves it to death or loathes it entirely. If I had to put my finger on why I liked it, I’d say that the second hour is one of the best portrayals of subjective madness I’ve seen on screen. This is what it might feel like to lose your mind or be fully untethered from reality, and it shows how close the possibility is – all you need is a head injury.
On the other hand, this could be single-most dedicated portrayal of what a cosmic horror story would feel like to someone within it. Lovecraft’s protagonists who constantly go mad from the horror? Well, this is what that looks like.
I have, by this point, fully talked myself into loving this movie, but you should watch it yourself and make up your mind. What I can promise you is a singular film experience.
Final bit of news from this week: I’m merging my newsletter with this blog.
I’ve basically been posting what amounts to a newsletter per week here, and not been posting it to my newsletter for reasons I myself don’t understand. The audience for this blog is already healthy and growing, but there are 1,000 people on the newsletter who signed up to hear from me, and currently aren’t.
So from the next Status Update, selected posts from this blog will be going to my newsletter subscribers – all the Status Updates, plus anything new I post here that amounts to a full piece.
You folks don’t have to do anything, and neither do the newsletter subscribers. It’s all happening behind the scenes, and has already been setup.
See you next week!
- I won’t tell you quite why, because it’d spoil that film, but a couple of things about Neill’s character and performance reminded me of the underrated 2020 film The Empty Man – a film I loved mainly because at no point could I tell what was going to happen next, which is a feeling I thoroughly enjoy. ↩︎