Issue #100: Centennial Swagger 💯

WE MADE IT TO 100!

And it only took us 6 years, 2 layoffs, 4 moves, several breakdowns, and too many hiatuses to count. In all seriousness, writing this newsletter for you has been an extremely fun journey that fed us creatively when we were happy, hurting, lacking and celebrating. We can’t be all things to all people, but you’ve all been everything to us. Thank you so much for granting us the privilege to pop into your inbox and tell you about the movies we love, hate and think are kind of mid.

And in the spirit of celebration, Cate is launching a new newsletter called faint praise* and it drops September 1st! We aren’t going anywhere. But over at faint praise* Cate will be writing more long form pieces about culture — everything from why (other) critics are wrong about Wuthering Heights, to how Wakanda Forever imagines a model of ethical AI. It will be finding its footing for a bit in the first few months, but we hope you’ll enjoy deeper interrogations of culture and criticism, and how we can use pop culture to learn about ourselves and each other. Film and culture criticism is so essential to understanding the world, so hopefully this can do just a little bit to stem the flow of creative anti-intellectualism. And you can get in on the ground floor :)

Starring Adam Scott and directed by Damian McCarthy, Hokum centers on a miserably ill-tempered author returning to the small Irish town where his parents honeymooned to scatter their ashes. He’s in the middle of finishing the final installment of his popular Conquistador series, a project he seems to resent. Shuttered into a small, seasonal hotel, he mistreats the staff, drinks to excess and generally makes himself an unpleasant presence. But he’s intrigued by the local legend of a witch who haunts the community, supposedly locked up in a forbidden room upstairs. What follows is a sinister and creepy tale that takes great care to shock as well as scare. Moody and tense, Hokum takes a formal creative turn that I found inventive if not exactly novel. By leaning into its protagonist’s cynicism and defiance, the movie gives us a step-by-step, minute-by-minute extremely human look at the decisions people make when they find themselves in the extraordinary circumstances of say, the middle of an unfolding horror film they don’t know they’re starring in.

Folk horror seems to be having a bit of a moment, and Hokum is a solid entry in the genre. Combining the unnerving local lore with a ghostly mystery, McCarthy’s script pulls the viewer in many directions at once, dribbling plot developments out at the pace of Ohm Bauman’s (Adam Scott) own ego. His strained relationship to his parents haunts him, having accidentally killed his mother as a child, and become despised by his father as a result. After bartender Fiona (Florence Ordesh) finds him in his room hanging from the ceiling in an apparent suicide attempt, he awakens in the hospital. But when he returns to the hotel some time later to collect his things and apologize to Fiona for traumatizing her, he discovers that she has gone missing. Encouraged by local bum and psychedelic enthusiast Jerry (David Wilmot), whom Fiona had befriended, Ohm breaks into the accursed honeymoon suite and stumbles across her dead body hidden in a dumbwaiter. 

McCarthy frequently centers Ohm in the frame to emphasize his crippling loneliness. He plays with doubles, reflections and symmetry, and draws the eye to Ohm’s hesitation, fear and disbelief. But he leaves time to build claustrophobic scenes too, pushing the camera in close, not just to him and the sounds of his breathing, but to the unsettling, diminutive, decorative flair that haunts the property. Cherubs with cheeky faces and figurines with twisted maws dapple scenes, taunting and terrorizing him in equal measure. 

One of the film’s most effective devices is its use of breathwork, silence and roaring sound. The soundtrack features an affecting wailing chorus, at once a lament and a pore-raising rush of air through an echoey hallway. Through a plot device I will not spoil, Fiona makes herself known over the course of the night, helping Ohm escape after he finds himself locked into the dreaded suite. 

Ohm is haunted twice over – once by his own grief and guilt over his mother’s death, and again by Fiona’s desperate attempts to make sure she isn’t erased in death. The story makes Ohm’s crippling guilt the reason for his continued pursuit of Fiona, and delivers him redemption by making him the one to avenge her. But the film muddies its narrative waters slightly with the addition of its hard-coded supernatural elements. With everything else that’s already happening in the plot, it’s just one step too far in holding the story together. Ohm’s resistance to those experiences help keep the film engaging and suspenseful. The uncertainty of his perception works as effectively as it always does in the horror genre. But perhaps accidentally, it removes some of the heavy emotional weight of Fiona’s story, and makes her merely a plot device in Ohm’s. Without it, it’s a quite meaningful exploration of the way the dynamics of the world can collude to endanger vulnerable women. A ghost story, a superstition and an old wives' tale combine to provide convenient cover for a self-interested killer of women.

Aside from the failure of that tonal shift, the film’s mystery hangs together, and it’s twisted and tangled enough to keep you guessing throughout. It moves at a brisk pace, never languishing in its obstacles any longer than it takes for Ohm to be pissed his plans haven’t worked, then formulate a new one to get him closer to his goal of escape. Hokum is a great turn for Scott, and the way he revels in unpleasantness like a pig in mud pushes the character to the brink of likeability. It’s an effective means of ramping up the tension when things start to go awry. While there are definitely threads that feel unfinished, the film is a genuinely good time. It’s clever, inventive, and well worth the watch.

House of the Dragon is learning from Game of Thrones’ mistakes. I wish it weren’t. 

I am on the record as having been deeply skeptical when House of the Dragon first premiered, nervously whispering on the internet that it seemed good but I wasn’t sure. But before too long I was confidently asserting this fact, recommending the show to my mom (the truest metric for quality). This was exactly what I like about George R.R. Martin’s creations: a world of accidents, both magical and communal. The text of history might be dry, but the reality of it was marinated by personalities. Any personal missteps, happy bits of chance, or misunderstandings were anchored in specific character choices. 

House of the Dragon season 2 dropped the ball, in this regard, caught up as it was in the action—or more specifically the inaction—of the story, only to get neutered by a sudden 8-episode cut-off (which: we’re now openly accepting is some sort of budget/artificial constraint by HBO in response to the strikes, right?). I was willing to write it off as an anomaly that a third season could get back on track. But season 3 was left to start on rough footing; the first two episodes feel so totally rooted in season 2 that it’s hard to ignore how much that season should’ve just been 10. 

Once season 3 starts in earnest, it isn’t quite sure what to do. Thematically this makes a bit of sense: After Rhaenyra seizes King’s Landing and the Iron Throne she is a bit lost. Despite being raised to rule, the circumstances are not ideal, her ascendancy hardly regal and certainly not secure. The precariousness means Rhaenyra is operating from a place of uneasy diffidence, the might of her advisors and armies crushed under her perceived exposures.

The story never really settles into itself. Following a standout third episode zeroing in on Rhaenyra’s queasy brainspace, everyone’s stories feel like fits and starts. Across some dozen or more principle characters, House of the Dragon spreads the wealth and stretches characterization thin. There’s a random attempted rape scene, to remind us (I guess?) that women are still uniquely at risk in the world of Westeros when power structures don’t insulate them. A new villain verges on cartoony because the show indulges every stop off to see him do smug wickedness. Aegon and Aemond are both left to wander the wilderness, metaphorical and literal, but their stories don’t really allow them to change. When they finally revert to some kernel buried within themselves, it doesn’t feel like a surprise—which isn’t to say it needs to be a twist or even ironic tragedy, so much as it should feel like time well-spent. I’m not sure I gained much watching Aegon go through his journey rather than simply finding him whole again on the other end of it. Like The Boys, it feels like every plotline is robbing another without feeling like any tip into feeling like they were being robbed. 

Enough has been said of Emma D’Arcy’s performance as Rhaenyra I won’t belabor the parts here, except to say that the parts that really dazzle me is when they speak High Valyrian. The Game of Thrones universe is filled with people speaking all sorts of fictional languages, but D’Arcy and Matt Smith feel like the first actors to really manage to act in High Valyrian, with D’Arcy being the first one to really shine. The scenes when Rhaenyra and Daemon speak it to each other—at once a joke, a flex, a private bubble, an entitlement—play so well for me every time, even when it involves Daemon doing totally out-of-character things for plot purposes. When Rhaenyra finally sends Daemon to Tumbleton, the rolling-r’s and emphasis of D’Arcy’s Valyrian accent betray the venom that clogs her heart and clouds her vision. 

But again: the content of the conversations too often lets down the actors. House of the Dragon’s story in season 3 feels overfull, unsure of how to balance the many points of view. The result is something that invites readers to read through the lines more than Fire & Blood. Everything makes sense the way Daenerys’s monstrous turn makes sense in the sense that the story is built to get you there, even if the finer details of a couple seasons have gotten fuzzy. 

There’s a case to be made that Ryan Condal, the last showrunner standing and seemingly enemy of Martin’s vision for the show, simply dislikes the players of his corner of Westeros and doesn’t care for their dragons of mass destruction. (I think him saying Alicent(?!) was his choice for the Iron Throne based on all she’s “been through” speaks volumes!) But there’s a distinct sense that House of the Dragon is all too conscious of the blonde bombshell in the room, of yet another Targarayen woman left to go sicko mode on would-be loyal subjects. So every conversation is geared towards how a character’s lines could fit into the bigger picture—with no real regard for how it could actually fit into the scene. There’s motivation in the broader picture, and they’re hoping the current distracts from the lack of meaningful motivation within the scene itself. The result for me felt disjointed, a pale imitation of what the show was. House of the Dragon learned from Game of Thrones’ mistakes; I wish they did something else.

OK: Can we actually cool data centers with our pee? Touch grass, watch a tree, fix your brain. Why do movies LOOK LIKE THAT now? It shouldn’t be this hard to get divorced. Everything you wanted to know about 4DX. Have you already ready the thing about how people (corporations) are snapping up books and feeding them to AI? Not great!

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Zosha + Cate <3