Words Seem Out Of Place

Art: Matt Anderson All things must pass. I started this blog almost five years ago and now it feels like the time to end it. Everything falls apart, after all. It was a hell of a ride, but I'm ready to hit refresh and begin anew. Now you can find me at my new site, The Starfire Lounge . Susie Diamond sang there, you know. Stop by, catch a performance, and stay awhile. I've been ready to do this for a year or more, and I'm thrilled to make this move. Even so, some part of me will miss it here. After having lost my way for a time, this is where I dipped my toes back into the writing pool and then branched out to contribute regularly at a number of sites, most of which I still write for today. It also gave me the confidence to contribute several chapters to three upcoming books, all of which are still in production, but you can be sure that I'll let you know - over at the Starfire, of course - when they're published. All of this, everything I've done these ...

It's been a while, so I'm overdue for another odds 'n' sods post, rounding up stuff I've written elsewhere in the great beyond we call the internet. Some of these go back several months, into last year even, and others are more recent, but all of them are about one of my favorite topics: cult classic films. And for me there's no doubt the films discussed in these articles and reviews are absolute cult movie solid gold. At times Nurse 3D  plays a b-movie Single White Female on acid. From wisecracking, half-naked interstellar space babes to erotically charged nurses behaving badly, from several different women on brutally single-minded revenge missions to one of the great movie urban legends of all time, these pieces run the exploitation gamut. If memory serves, the great Rhonda Shear hosted a few of these movies on USA Up All Night . For lovers of all things cult cinema—my fellow disciples of Rhonda Shear and USA Up All Night and all yo...

In the rabid movie-loving corner of Twitter known as #filmtwitter, June has become synonymous with "Junesploitation," a month-long celebration of all things exploitation cinema— trashy slashers , blaxploitation , Andy Sideris's bullets and babes flicks , silly space opera , teensploitation , and so many more, including  nunsploitation  of all things. For a lot of us, every month is a celebration of exploitation cinema, of course. Between falling down the rabbit hole that is Tubi's enormous selection of trash cinema , and Joe Bob Briggs's recent season of The Last Drive-In on Shudder, my viewing habits of late are all about trash. Which is just how I like it. Fittingly then, my first "Writing Roundup" of the year consists entirely of reviews of cult films plus a heartfelt appreciation for a woman who played a big role in igniting my love for B-movies in the first place. It's been a long time since I've done one of these roundups, so here a...

Spring has sprung, and as we emerge from our winter slumbers, let's take a breather and luxuriate in some beautiful poetry, in honor of April being National Poetry Month. Because I'm currently reading Ada  Limón,  here's a seasonally appropriate poem from The Carrying . More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open pa...

La Notte , 1961. Mood. A pretty good visualization of life these days: everything's more challenging than it needs to be and I feel contorted into a pretzel for reasons beyond my control when all I really want to do is sit comfortably and enjoy a drink. I just need a minute to think, dammit. Those minutes are few and far between right now, though. So, posting may be lighter around here than it was in October. I do have one or two pieces in the hopper and almost ready to go. Keep your eyes out for those. Otherwise, poke around almost four years' worth of pop cultural and highly personal musings. You're sure to find something you might enjoy. For example, you like Michelle Pfeiffer? I got you covered. Before I let you go, if you're in the United States and registered to vote, please do so today. It's important. Thank you.

As I'm wont to do, I wrote some things for some websites and you can find them scattered across the vast expanse of the Interwebs. Just be careful out there. After all, the Internet kind of sucks these days. ***** Margot Kidder passed away on May 13. She was only 69 years old. She'll always be my Lois Lane. She'd been mostly out of the spotlight for decades, yet many fans were shattered by news of her death. That shows just what a powerful effect her peak work had on our lives. It's difficult to put into words just how integral she was in my young life, when Superman  (1978) and Superman II (1980) were basically tied with the original Star Wars trilogy as my favorite movies, but I tried to do exactly that in a tribute I wrote for Horror Geek Life . Not sure if the article managers to fully express why Kidder was so important to me back then, but I think I gave it a good whirl. Just like she gave me one helluva whirl back in the day. As Lois Lane, she...

I've had three articles published at different sites recently, focusing on three very different actresses: Michelle Pfeiffer, Megan Fox, and Jennifer Lopez. In fact, this might be the only time the three have ever shared a sentence together. You could say I love the films of Michelle Pfeiffer. You might even say I'm one of her biggest (p)fans. I've been engaged in a thorough revisiting of every one of her films recently, writing about some here when I have a chance , so you'd think putting together her top ten performances would be easy for me, right? Sort of, but not quite. While my top five Pfeiffer is fairly locked down, the ordering could easily be rearranged. I agonized over work that I left out of the top ten, and if you checked back with me tomorrow I might include one or two of them at the expense of one or two that I did include. That's how strong her filmography is. She's the best, that's it. And let's not forget, her peak years—roug...

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.” — Joan Didion, "Goodbye To all That The new Joan Didion Netflix documentary, The Center Will Not Hold , directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, is at the center of a well-deserved return to the spotlight for one of our greatest American writers. Countless insightful op-eds and articles have been written about her since the documentary dropped a few weeks ago, and I've read every one I could find. Joan Didion is having a moment, and any time a writer of her import is discussed, our society is better for it. If only we spent more time discussing the written word and how much it gets at the heart of our grand, flawed condition. Can you imagine what that world would look like? Didion's work, her writing, ...

She wants there to be more of her. More space taken by her body, More decibels conquered by her voice, More time by her wakefulness, More equations by her addition. She wants more, I want less. Her blade is rusty, musty, sweaty and vain. I like it clean and sharp and dark-bright. She traffics in surplus, I bare my essentials. Her world is elastic but brittle. Mine is bony but moonlit. Hers flows, she ebbs. Mine ebbs, I flow. She dies in life, I live in death. —Zoe Lund, “Opium Wars”

Over The Edge (1979) Summer is almost over, and I'm ready for fall. I'm not ready for winter though, and I will miss summer, but fall is my favorite time of year , for many reasons . We're having unusually comfortable weather in the Northeast for this time of year, with temps in the 70s and nice cool overnight lows this week. All of which makes it feel even more like fall is already here. How about a nice pumpkin ale? Yes, please. Still, I have no doubt we'll see a return to hot and humid weather before summer's officially done. But those days will become fewer and farther between as we move into September. So, get outside, enjoy the last days of summer while you can. Speaking of summer, I contributed some articles, reviews, and interviews at other sites this summer. Here are some links, for your perusal and enjoyment. Feel free to comment here with your thoughts on any and all of these pieces. Tim Hanley on The Many Lives of Catwoman "What I do is...

I reviewed  Christine (2016)  recently for The After Movie Diner. Wow. A few weeks since seeing it and I'm still processing my feelings. Even though I knew what was coming , it was still a gut-punch of epic proportions. That's because everything leading up to Christine's on-air suicide is so thoughtfully portrayed. It's a compassionately crafted film centered around one absolutely transcendent performance by Rebcecca Hall. In nearly every scene of the film, Hall is riveting, unforgettable, and heartbreaking. I haven't seen a better performance in years . John Carpenter's classic Escape from New York is my latest Cult Classics Review at the Diner, and you can check that out here . Writing that review made me realize there are at least five Carpenter films that could each make my list of all-time top five films: Escape , Assault on Precinct 13 , Halloween , The Thing , and Big Trouble in Little China . Very few filmmakers have ever equaled that quality. I...

Sometimes I think this blog has multiple personalities. Other times I think I have multiple personalities. Synergy! Every now and then I have a moment of cognitive dissonance around here: wait, wasn't I going to use the blog as therapy? Why am I writing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer , then? And not even the beloved series, but the film no one cares about! Writing about yourself has its limits. I've done it a lot here, but usually filtered through popular culture musings. That's how I'm most comfortable doing it, I suppose. Sometimes those reflections turn further inward . Things get real , as we used to say in the '90s. Mostly though, this space is for enthusing about books and movies and music and whatever else I'm hooked on at the moment, or have been hooked on at some point in my life. I've started some recurring features in the last year in order to help organize my thoughts and provide a rough outline for future posts. "It Came Fro...

Sometimes someone helps to set you on a path. If you're lucky, you might even have a teacher who serves that role. We all need a push now and then, after all. I've been thinking about one such person recently. I read an article about teachers who changed writers' lives. Immediately, Mrs. Vernon came to mind for me. Back in the early 1990s she was my English teacher. I'm fuzzy on the years but I think I had her for sophomore and senior English. I also took a film class that she taught my senior year. Mrs. Vernon was not the first great teacher I'd had, but she was definitely one of the first to see things in me that others had not—dueling passions for things like reading, writing, film, and learning. She nurtured and encouraged these passions. I was a shy kid, introverted and often lost in my world. I was also a voracious reader, aspiring writer, and budding film junkie. Mrs. Vernon rather quickly recognized all of those interests and then set about inspir...

Olivia Hussey, the original Final Girl, in Black Christmas (1974). How do you celebrate the holiday season? If you answer with anything other than, "Why, watch Black Christmas , of course!" then you need to reconsider your priorities. Okay, I understand we all have family obligations this time of year. Still, I implore you to take some time out and watch this 1974 cult classic, considered by many to be the birth of the slasher film genre. I wrote about it for The After Movie Diner this week, but the long and the short of it is this: I've seen an awful lot of slasher movies in my lifetime (I'm a child of the 1970s and 1980s, after all), and while several have been as good as Black Christmas , none have been better. I've long held John Carpenter's Halloween as the gold standard for horror/slasher movies, but now I'd slot Black Christmas in right alongside it. Amazingly I hadn't seen the film before this year. Oh I'd been hearing about an...

Joan Didion turns 82 today. As an essayist, novelist, and cultural critic, Didion has long been one of the finest chroniclers of American life over the course of the last half of the twentieth century and beyond. There is much I could write about Didion, a writer whose work has affected me deeply over the years. I'll save that for another day, when I have more time to write. For now I'll just share this from her seminal essay, "Goodbye to All That:" I had never before understood what “despair” meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year. Of course I could not work. I could not even get dinner with any degree of certainty, and I would sit in the apartment on Seventy-fifth Street paralyzed until my husband would call from his office and say gently that I did not have to get dinner, that I could meet him at Michael’s Pub or at Toots Shor’s or at Sardi’s East. And then one morning in April (we had been married in January) he called an...

Now would be a good time to turn around, followed by a better time to run. Before October 31st comes and goes, I might as well share a couple of recent cult classic reviews I wrote for The After Movie Diner . I recently rewatched and thoroughly enjoyed both The Return of the Living Dead and The Slumber Party Massacre . Both are highly recommended from this cult classicist. Enjoy them tonight in between handing out candy to the scary little monsters at your door.

I wrote about Stranger Things this week for Sequart . Go there to read my more thoughtful and nuanced ideas on the series, but stay here first to read me geeking out about it. And let's address the elephant in the room: Stranger Things is so last month , man. I know! But I just watched it (having young children gets in the way of binge watching shows as often as you'd imagine it would) and I need to talk about it , man. First of all, there were times it was like watching myself on screen. I've been in those basements, playing those games, reading those comic books, riding those bikes round and round the neighborhood, seemingly forever. The younger kids in Stranger Things were clearly meant to connect with people my age, and even the teens—especially Nancy and Jonathan—remind us of our teenage selves. I'm duly impressed with not only how much Stranger Things got right about the time and place—1983 in small town America—but also with the ways in which it nails bein...