Frezno's Games Of The 2023 Thing!

Oh my god. We did it again. We somehow made it through another one of those pesky years. And it was the 10th anniversary of this blog, too! What a time we had, you and I. Now we're going to cap off 2023 by talking about some good computer video games I played. It's kind of funny how this started as a video game blog, but I only ever talk about them on here a handful of times now. I guess I save all the talking for this big thing I do at the end of the year. 2024's going to start with some game talking, and you'll even see a bit of that subject matter here. Why don't we just get into it, then? Let the end of year festivities begin, with this here game I played almost a year ago...

Doctor Who First Impressions: 2023 Christmas Special (The Church On Ruby Road)

Well, here we are. I have been patiently (and not so patiently) awaiting this moment for over two years now. After going through 2022 and the final drips of the Chibnall era, and then surviving the roller coaster of emotions and horrors that was David Tennant coming back (the specials were good, as you've hopefully seen me discuss), here we are. Something different. Something new. The 15th Doctor Who era has begun, and what a Christmas party it was. There hasn't been a Doctor Who at Christmas since Twice Upon A Time (which I watch every year, and which never fails to make me weep when Doctor Who remembers Clara), but here we are. Ncuti Gatwa, the new Doctor Who, that charming fellow who ran around in his pants for the last like 15 minutes of televised time travel phone box show. I'm not sure quite how this writeup is going to go, but I'm going to just flow along with it and let it take me to the opinionated truth laying at the end of the river of my subconscious. Christ, that was poetic. Talk about the blue box show, Frezno.

Doctor Who First Impressions: 60th Anniversary Specials Episode 3: The Giggle

Russell just had to throw a curveball on that last one and make my hobby a little harder, huh? Alright, fine, that mild grumble has gotten my foot in the door and now I'm here in my notepad typing about The Giggle, so mission accomplished there. Trying to quantify how I feel about the episode has been difficult. It's gotten near universal praise from all the critics I respect, and yet I didn't come out from the end of the show hooting and hollering about having seen the greatest new piece of Doctor Who ever. I've had to grapple with it and really let my thoughts marinate, and honestly they could marinate for another week before I could have a solid take on the episode. Still, timeliness is timeliness and this is supposed to be a First Impression, so let's get to it. I did like the episode, but not as much as Wild Blue Yonder. It does some neat things, but many of the bold things it does left me conflicted and wanting, really having to mull over if I thought they were good ideas or not. Let me see if I can dig into that confliction and find the nuance of truth within them.

We may as well start with him. the guy, the thing which I kept dreading for all this time until it finally got confirmed. "Beloved" 60's Doctor Who villain, the Toymaker, is back. I don't like that on paper. I do admit, a lot of that stems from El Sandifer being a formative critical voice and her old post on the original Toymaker story pretty solidly cementing my opinion that the repeated re-use of this nostalgic old villain is not a very good idea. Since that post, there's been endless debate and blog post and massive Twitter threads that dig into production notes and scripts and all of that, and even Sandifer herself is just like "I wrote this 12 years ago, leave me alone". I don't want to get into that. I'm not here to do that. Before the bile really builds in me, let's just leave it at "my opinion is that the Toymaker is a bad idea". That being said, at least I understand RTD's thought process here. He came up with the creepy puppet television origin thing, realized he needed a puppet master, and saw a piece of Doctor Who lore that fit what he was doing and pulled it out of the toy box and polished it up for the modern day. That's a better thought process than starting with "I WANT TO USE THE WEIRD GOD MAN FROM 1966", in my opinion.

Well, it manages to clear the low bar of "best Toymaker story I've ever experienced", but that bar is low to the ground considering his original TV story is wretchedly dull and that I couldn't tell you a goddamn thing that happened in The Nightmare Fair. This certainly is a very competent episode of television about a godlike being obsessed with playing games and doing cultural appropriation. There are standout moments I liked involving him, of course. The spooky moment of the episode with the puppets was quite good. I also was quite amused at the Moffat era puppet show, and have been enjoying the various memes of other companions' untimely fates being shrugged off with an "OH WELL THAT'S ALRIGHT THEN". I am not immune to propaganda, especially if said propaganda is a Clara mention. Then there's the dance, and oh my god. As a child of the 90's who had just a bit of an obsession with the Spice Girls back then, it was absolutely buck wild. Rasputin, hold my fucking beer. There's an anarchic glee and malice to Neil Patrick Harris as the Toymaker, and it just about makes one see why people love pitting the Doctor against this particular godlike gamesmaster sporadically over 60 years. Just, shame about the original, you know?

His original scheme in this episode, though, is something original and which just about manages to say something about the world. Everyone believes that they're right, and the world descends into chaos because of it. There's a prickly sense of nihilism that pokes out at you while watching this shit unfold, and the RTD who wrote Midnight comes out a little bit here. There's the grim joke of the politician openly stating WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT ANY OF YOU?, and the horrific moment of Kate Stewart letting herself be affected by it and spouting fire at Ruth Madeley's Shirley. That in particular stings because it's far too real, the kind of thing assholes on Twitter were yelling about her just two weeks ago. The Doctor ends it all with a big speech about how, actually, yeah, humanity kind of is the worst, huh? There's a meanness which is unleashed here, a meanness stemming from the Toymaker playing about in this universe. It permeates not just the show, but the world in which it airs. It permeates not just from the Toymaker as a character, but the unfortunate nature of him as a concept from back in 1966. It's enough to break the show in half, and then it does.

There are two ways to look at the bi-regeneration which literally pulls Ncuti Gatwa's new Doctor Who right out of David Tennant. The first, which is what I was falling into when I first saw it, is abject cynicism. This is breaking the show and its rules into little tiny pieces. How the hell can there be two Doctor Whos? Then the realization dawns. We're going to be following the new Doctor Who, and the old Doctor Who gets to retire on Earth. Oh my god. Oh no. Russell, this isn't fair. We had a deal here. 2023 gets to be the Tennant nostalgia year, and then he turns into Gatwa and we move on to something new. If you have him split off and then retire on Earth... the man we've been following for 60 years just sort of gives up and stays in 2023 circa 2008, trapped in amber forever. More than that, you have just created a big shiny red David Tennant button. At any point while the man is still alive (and even beyond with AI, let's be real) the button can be smashed and David Tennant can come back to Doctor Who. The looming threat of remembering 2008 when the show was good is not exorcised with a regeneration. It's left behind, but it will always be there from now on. Forever. Oh dear God.

On the other hand, this is where I need my very own bi-regeneration. Here's the dark truth of it all: I'm mirroring the Tennant Doctor here. My trauma isn't the Flux, or the myriad of people I've lost in thousands of years of time travel. My trauma is the exact thing this episode marinates in. In 2022 I tried to exorcise these horrible feelings of fear and anger from macrocosmic lore bullshit, and now here's The Giggle and it has a mad Toymaker who is himself a continuity reference playing fast and loose and letting the toybox of callbacks spill out. We've got Mel! Trinity Jones! Archangel network reference! The Master's a tooth and a nail polished hand grabs them! Dancing to a funny song! Moffat puppet show and the Flux and Gatwa and Tennant referencing everything together! THE GODDAMN CHEEKY "CELESTIAL" LINE FROM TENNANT TO REFERENCE THE ORIGINAL TOYMAKER STORY! People love this stuff, and chuckle at it. I have my own private little meltdown in my head, and I'm letting a bit of it out on the page for dramatic effect. I have been hurt by this, in my own way. I flinch on reflex at this referential stuff now, thanks to how worn down I've been by all those betrayals of past. All those sci-fi tentpoles which burned me, this show included. Even when it's good now, I'm still wary and hesitant and untrusting. When you're hurt like this, it's hard to trust again.

That's why I envy the Doctor here. I wish another me, free of that trauma, a shining example of me from a future I've not reached yet, could come to me and give me a big hug and say "It's all going to be okay.". All that pain and trauma that the Doctor has felt over those thousands of years is something that he gets to stop running from. He gets to settle down and heal with the people that he loves, in the place that he loves, and every so often he may have another adventure here or there. The Doctor is healed by the Doctor, as symbolic and powerful a healing as Moffat did for him 10 years prior. Maybe Russell learned a thing or two from that special, and took the message to heart. Regardless, there he is. Ncuti Gatwa, the new Doctor Who, imperious and confident and kind, in his TARDIS. Free of trauma, of his anxiety, of the nightmare of losing so many people and the swirl of continuity. Maybe this is the way that we're resetting back to a new Season One. No angst over the Flux, no worries about Adric or Logopolis or the Dalek's Master Plan. No bi-regeneration or Toymaker influence being used as an excuse to bring all the Doctors back and to fully Marvel-ize Doctor Who. 

There's just this guy in a magic box that's bigger on the inside, making the universe a better place one person at a time, and he started with himself. That's lovely, and I wish I could do that for myself. Maybe I will, someday. I've not bi-regenerated, but those two halves of me make this particular whole. There are so many other utopic idealists who have inspired me before, and there will be many others afterwards. Maybe, just maybe, I won't be burned again if I trust this one. Someone once said that hate is always foolish, and love is always kind. So, I'll follow his example. I'll take the hand of that kind man who hugged the Doctor, and look into his eyes and trust him.

Ncuti Gatwa. The new Doctor Who. I want to remember 2024, when the show is new and strange and brilliant.

Doctor Who First Impressions: 60th Anniversary Specials Episode 2: Wild Blue Yonder

(A note before we begin: This was written on Dec. 3rd of 2023, to accurately capture a true "first impression" of Wild Blue Yonder before the airing of the final episode of the 60th anniversary specials. It has been deliberately withheld to await the results of the SAG-AFTRA vote on Dec. 5th, as an abundance of caution and paranoid anxiety over a strike resuming and maintaining the principles I held myself to during the duration of the previous 2023 strike. If you are reading this, it is either just after that vote or after subsequent striking has been resolved. Whenever you are reading this, I hope you enjoy.)

It is difficult, if not impossible, to critically watch Wild Blue Yonder and not have your mind make comparisons to other pieces of science fiction, or even prior episodes of Doctor Who. I could begin this by rattling off a list of things that popped into my head as I experienced this hour of television, but that's the easy route. I don't want to do that, because taking that track would imply that Wild Blue Yonder is just another mélange of influences thrown together into a pot. That would diminish its impact, and lessen my critique. The biggest strength of Wild Blue Yonder is just how fresh it feels. Ignoring the fact that it's a returning face and returning companion to Doctor Who, this is wholly original stuff. After a good three years of the Chibnall years and its parade of references and cameos and eventual exorcism of all that, here we are. A piece of new Doctor Who that is fresh, original, and incredible. A new high water mark for the show, even in this strange liminal period before Ncuti Gatwa.

Doctor Who First Impressions: 60th Anniversary Specials Episode 1: The Star Beast

(A note before we begin: This was written on Nov. 27th of 2023, to accurately capture a true "first impression" of The Star Beast before the airing of any subsequent episodes of the 60th anniversary specials. It has been deliberately withheld to await the results of the SAG-AFTRA vote on Dec. 5th, as an abundance of caution and paranoid anxiety over a strike resuming and maintaining the principles I held myself to during the duration of the previous 2023 strike. If you are reading this, it is either just after that vote or after subsequent striking has been resolved. Whenever you are reading this, I hope you enjoy.)

Remember 2008, when this show was good? 

I don't recall exactly when I coined that cynical phrase in talking about this show, but it was a realization which struck me some three and a half years ago during Chris Chibnall's second season. A medley of elements in his Spyfall two parter all combined together to be nostalgic callbacks to David Tennant's era of the show, at the expense of ignoring the Moffat years which I quite liked. This annoyed me, as did many other things with the Chibnall years, and it all culminated with Power Of The Doctor last October. I did not hate that episode, but I do not remember it fondly either. It is pure celebratory fanwank, all the Doctor Who at once, and the fact that it kind of worked not only on the fans still clinging to this show but on me says something about how the Chibnall years wore down standards. They did that, and now they're gone. 

In some ways, though, the logical endpoint of the Chibnall years happened before they even ended. First it was the announcement of Russell T. Davies returning as showrunner once Chibnall was done. Then it was David Tennant and Catherine Tate coming back to reprise the Doctor/companion dynamic duo from that era. The final terror of the Chibnall era, revealed: Why just cover 2008 with winks and nods when we can actually bring it back? It horrified me. It terrified me. The final breakdown of this thing I loved into warm oozing ichor and ectoplasm, retro-regenerating the entire goddamn show as... what? The final form of Chibnall's nostalgia baiting? An apology for those years, a desperate plea to please come back, look, we undid all of it, it's the Good Doctor Who that YOU like? Gag me with a spoon. Let me grow up, leave this cloying desperation behind, and move on to horizons which challenge me instead of flailing about in a sad bid to appease me. Wake me when Ncuti Gatwa is on and you're doing something actually new.

That is the apprehension I grappled with for almost two years, and most of it melted away upon watching The Star Beast. I'm not a total convert who's pleased to be back here or anything, but it is only for three episodes. I endured much much worse going through Chibnall. Fine. It may be 2023, but tonally we are back in the world of 2008. It has a whiff of that legacy sequel vibe, the whole "Look! It's your faves, and they're back!" and I still must grapple with that. Begrudgingly, however, I have to admit it. This is a good episode of Doctor Who, one that I enjoyed watching and have nice things to talk about regarding it. After the Chibnall years, this is such a breath of fresh air that it results in me grading the thing on a curve. Let me finally sink into this thing and say some nice things about it.

For starters, the acting is pretty stellar all around and I enjoyed everyone in it. They all play off of each other well, and all the returning folks play their parts how you'd expect for the most part. There's a certain gravity and poignancy to the way they play some parts, though. Catherine Tate is boisterous and fiery as ever, but she has tinges of sadness and regret as well as channeling that bold energy into being a fiercely protective mother. I really loved Tennant's slow and mellow scene with Ruth Madeley (and I really love Ruth Madeley in this, period, what a badass) where he sits and ponders why in the hell he, the 14th numbered Doctor Who, has turned back into this particular face. The actual space alien plot itself, an adaptation of a famous Doctor Who comic from the late 70's, works well here. It hits all the good spacey beats you want it to, as well as following the framework you'd expect if you read the comic. It's all good stuff. I don't want to laser focus on it.

No, what I want to talk about is the bit which really spoke to me. I briefly relitigated all of that stuff about my horror over the return of Davies and Tennant. All of that came to a head a year and a half ago, in June 2022, when I wrote it all out as part of my introduction post to talking about Quantum Leap. Quantum Leap then proceeded to give me everything that Chibnall's version of Doctor Who left me wanting for. It gave me a show about travelling in time, dealing with microcosmic issues that resonate with the real world, and a good man just passing through and doing his best to make a material difference in the world. I have yet to write about it for the blog, but I want to briefly mention an episode of the 2022 Quantum Leap called "Let Them Play". It is a story about helping to create a better future for a trans girl, one where she gets to play the sport that she loves. It is one of my favorites in the new show's run thus far, a beautiful piece about fighting for real material social progress that also lets one of its supporting cast members, a nonbinary character and actor, share their story of the hardships and challenges of being who they are. It is a wonderful 45 minutes of television that has something to say about the state of the real world we live in, and makes one pay attention to these issues.

Yes, The Star Beast is basically a story about a David Tennant Doctor Who and Donna Noble and rekindling the memories of 2008. By comparison to last year's Power Of The Doctor, which was a macrocosmic mess of cameos and references, this is a downright microcosmic story about Doctor Who helping one family out during a wild alien crisis. The most interesting of these, Donna's trans daughter Rose Noble, causes the show to do something that even the best of Chibnall era Doctor Who did in spite of itself. With the deft and talented hand of Davies, Doctor Who manages to have its cake and eat it too. It is a fun space adventure with Beep the Meep vs. the Wrarth Warriors, with UNIT soldiers, with lasers and explosions and rockets and alien mind control. It is also imperious in its swagger as it is about a real something that matters in the world today, planting its flag and forcing the viewer to think about it. That something? Trans rights, baby.

There are scenes which have given cause for much discussion and debate. Rose being deadnamed in the street by passing bullies. Sylvia Noble slipping up with her pronouns while talking to Donna and correcting herself. The whole "did you assume their gender" bit with Rose calling Doctor Who out on using "he" for Beep The Meep before asking the alien for their pronouns. All that "binary binary non-binary" stuff, and the resolution of the Donna trolley problem being one that a "male-presenting Time Lord" could never figure out and we needed two women to do it. Lots have been said about them, and I've paid particular attention to the voices of trans Doctor Who critics whom I admire and respect. They're on board, for the most part, though there are reservations which vary here and there. That last line about the male-presenting Time Lord is the one which has caused the biggest reservations, but look. It's muddled, yes, but let me remind you that we're grading on a curve here. The implications of the line are there, but it's nowhere near as ethically cratering as, say, "The systems aren't the problem" or "Now they'll see the real you". (And while we're dunking on the Chibnall era, let me just say that the fact that the 13th Doctor could have figured out how to save Donna is laughable. This woman couldn't even be bothered to fix Dan's house for Christ's sakes, or even a half-splintered universe from the Flux.)

[INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: There's an irony in me having said that, like half a week before Wild Blue Yonder aired and had the Doctor briefly grapple with Flux angst.) 

Davies does indeed take a cue from Hell Bent, and has brought Donna back to admit that the memory wipe from 2008 was wrong and so it gets undone. The fact that he actually, for a few brief moments, sold to me that he was going to kill Donna off and I bought it says a lot. (It deeply amuses me that the climax of this episode involves a Noble stuck behind plexiglass while David Tennant agonizes over whether or not to save them.) It was dramatic, but this is better. Donna gets to remember Doctor Who again, and remember how she grew and changed from her time with the Doctor. I am surprised to find myself caring much less about that that I expected to. Don't get me wrong, it's good. but it's not exactly revelatory. A fictional character gets a happy ending after having a bummer one for 15 years. That is good, but I'm still worn down enough from Chibnall that this in-universe stuff does little to spark joy within my heart.

What does spark joy is the symbolism and power of the way Donna gets restored. There are a million plausible ways to write yourself out of the Journey's End mindwipe. The one Davies chose just happened to resonate with the imperious confidence of being trans positive in Doctor Who. The technobabble Metacrisis thing passed down to Rose as well, and together with her mom they use girl power to willingly let it go. For Donna, it is a rejection of the macrocosmic, an embrace of the microcosmic family that she loves and is fiercely protective over. For Rose, it's a chance for her to become a more true version of herself, discovering who she is and being proud of the woman she's growing up to become. There's a real beauty to it, a beauty which not only heals a rift in the show but is proud to have it come from trusting in, loving, and accepting your trans daughter. Fuck. That's beautiful.

That's where I want to leave off with The Star Beast. The magic of Doctor Who returned to me, and all it needed was a good fucking writer with a deft hand who had something to say about the world we live in. Who got trans positivity on Disney+, of all things, and who used it to patch up a past regret. Hell, I don't blame him for mindwiping Donna and wanting to walk back his choice. I've done shit like that in my NaNoWriMo projects. In 2010 or so, I decided to kill off a character and I regretted it. I spent 2019 through 2021 building up to a great undoing of that, a redemption that healed a bit of sin from the canon of my own little multiverse. Davies did that while also making it about something, which is more than I can say for my little story, but that's why he's the current writer of Doctor Who. I can live with that, and I can live with this small run of neo-Tennant if it means writing of this caliber.

To end this with a quote from another prominent Doctor Who critic, writing on Davies' very first episode of the show? Doctor Who has returned to television.

Frezno's Criterion Challenge: October 2023 Trip Report

Hey all. So, we're back again with this thing, and here's the part where I'd ramble on about it for about a paragraph or so before launching into the capsule reviews and calling it a month. This time, though, things are a little different. After thinking about it for a bit, I have decided that this will be the last entry in the Criterion Challenge, and that I won't be continuing it for the final two months of the year. There are some reasons for this, which I'll be upfront and tell you about. First and foremost is that I've lost my passion for it. At the start of the year, I had 52 interesting films and cherrypicked ones that sounded really exciting and intriguing to me. Now here I am in November, with 12 or so remaining, and the spark is gone. Combine that with the fact that I cornered myself into not just watching these films, but having to say something about them on here, and you get situations where I look at the clock and go "Do I really want to burn an afternoon throwing one of these on?". It's not fun and exciting cinematic horizon broadening for me any more. It feels like work, and I'm not even getting paid to do it.

More to the point... I got what I needed out of this. I got that horizon broadening, that sense of discovery and eclectic enlightenment. Some of the films I watched for this became new favorites of mine. Even if I didn't like them, I was pushing outside my wheelhouse and found something to write about them. They made me a better writer, and got me to expand and apply myself better. The Criterion Challenge may be counted as a failure, but in my eyes I set out what I wanted to do. I watched some new and interesting movies, got some new and interesting thoughts, and I can say I accomplished something. Instead of making busybody work for myself with movies I feel more obligated to watch than excited to watch, I can spend my last two months of Criterion subscription going onward with my own pace, watching whatever esoteric thing on the channel catches my interest without any arbitrary categories. 

Still, I would feel remiss if I didn't end things on a high note, so I'll push myself through one last time to talk about the three films I managed to get to watch in October. If you've followed along with this journey since January, thanks for doing that! I hope you've seen a real growth and maturation as I explored the finer points of cinema. Let's do it one more time before the end, and we'll start with...

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 16 (Halloween 5: The Revenge Of Michael Myers)

Boo.

Well, here we are at last. It's Halloween, and we have once again come back to that powerful series which usually ends these. The double whammy of circumstances over what to cover, as well as just plain having done most of this series already, has led us to this thing. I covered the film this is a sequel to, Halloween 4, a good five years ago. I did not particularly like or dislike it, as I recall, but the words are back there in the archive. It is a film I let pass into hazy memory. This, on the other hand? I don't despise it, but I don't like it either. Halloween 5 is not a very good film, and let's talk about why to close things out.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 15 (Dracula [1958])

Oh boy! We get to talk about Hammer Horror today! It's got a great beat and it's a lovely tune about performativity, with lots of interesting theatrical dancing-- Wait, shit, sorry, that's the Kate Bush song. No, we're actually talking about the Hammer film studio in England which did a whole bunch of horror films in the middle of the 20th century. Hammer Horror is a catchall for them, and I'd never seen one until now. For a first, I went with one that was both highly rated on Letterboxd and had the two iconic actors most associated with Hammer Horror: those two being Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Here we are, then, in a Hammer adaptation of the tried and true literary classic Dracula. How is it? It's not half-bad.

For a Dracula adaptation it certainly takes its liberties. Like how Jonathan Harker and Cushing's Dr. Van Helsing are in cahoots before the film even begins, and that's why Harker is at Dracula's castle. Or the swapping around of Lucy and Mina's partners in the film. Or how Harker bites it within the first 20 minutes. Or how Dracula's castle and the well-to-do society he invades seem to be like, a half-hour carriage ride away from each other? The broad strokes of Stoker are kept, but Hammer isn't afraid to change things up and make a quick and breezy 80 minute vampire movie. If you want a more literate and erudite adaptation, they're out there. You're here for some spooky vampires and to see splashes of bright Technicolor blood, and this Dracula adaptation cuts right to the chase and gives you that.

Just because it's speedrunning doesn't mean it's a fast-paced film, though. There are plenty of scenes of old British people (namely Cushing and Michael Gough) talking about what they're going to do. I quite like Cushing's Van Helsing, as I find it nails the perfect balance between a proper Victorian gentleman and a scientist/monster hunter who's devoted himself to going after vampires. Christopher Lee's also quite good and imposing in this, but therein lies a bit of a rub: his presence in the film is pretty brief. The glimmers of appearance he has in the Holmwood home, striding with imperious confidence towards the woman he's about to nibble on the neck, are powerful in their own right. I do also dig the effects when he melts in sunlight at the end of the film. For most of it, though, Lee haunts the proceedings from the night. Haunting, and hunting. In the end, it's a pretty neat little speedy adaptation of Dracula. I like it, but I imagine it had more power back in the day. Or maybe the like six or seven sequels Hammer banged out go even wilder than this, unrestrained by Stoker's framework. That could be something to discover in marathons in future, but for now we're at the finale. The stage is set.

Happy Halloween.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 14 (Beau Is Afraid)

(TW: child abuse)

Oh god. Oh dear God in heaven. Once again I find myself returning to an Ari Aster film. Two years ago I did Midsommar for one of these and it was an anxious nightmare of a film, one which reflected back on me and made me feel the life of an anxious nightmare for that day. Things have not gotten any cheerier with his next film. Beau Is Afraid was three hours of Asterian nightmare for me to wring myself through, and it didn't help that I was interrupted 25 minutes in by some stuff and errands which needed to be done. For four hours I marinated in this absolute hell. Four godforsaken hours of this. Now I have to talk about it, and to talk about it I have to relate what I took from it.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 13 (Paprika)

For last year's spooky marathon, I went back to a film I'd only seen once before. It was a film which had left a mark on my psyche, a harrowing and haunting anime. That film was Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue, and it remains just as terrifying as it ever was. In chatting with a streamer friend of mine, they compared it to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and I can definitely see the similarities. Both are quite intense. I put all this upfront to say that Paprika, another film of Kon's, is less intense than those nightmares. Nevertheless, it manages to delve into some of the same subject matters, and what remains is more unsettling and eerie than outright terrifying. It's still a fantastic film, barring like one caveat I have with it, so let's talk about it.

Using Fire Walk With Me as a springboard lets us make a good starting point. David Bowie's one scene in the theatrical cut of that movie is a fractured disjointed mess of images, but one of the many poetic things he says during it is that we live inside a dream. That's Paprika, through and through. Duality is blurred within the confines of this film. The waking world and the dreaming world merge, and you're never quite sure if you're in a dream or not. Dreams themselves seem to fulfill the old Steven Moffat adage of thinking for themselves, and invading the world to blur the lines. The mundane and the bizarre mix, the world shifting its state and us shifting our understanding of things as it happens.

Perfect Blue had a duality within it, the image of the perfect idol juxtaposed with the ordinary performer enduring the psychological terrors. So too is there a duality between Dr. Atsuko Chiba, working on dream diving tech, and Paprika, her other self who delves in the world of dreams and helps dreamers come to terms with themselves. Even this is blurred, as by the end of the film dreams and reality have merged, so Chiba and Paprika exist within the same space. The spirit self coming forth alongside the true self. This merging of selves is what brings about something beautiful. Paprika works as a dream-diving psychologist, hopping into the confusing mess of images in a person's mind to see what it says about them in reality, their worries and their guilts, in order to help them grow and change. It's police captain Konakawa who benefits from this in the film at first, a recurring dream about giving chase to someone being his mind's way of working with feelings of loss and grief from a dead friend of his who was always one step ahead in life.

The blurring of dream and reality helps not just Konakawa deal with his traumas and heal from them thanks to Paprika, but Paprika herself helps to make her own true self in the waking world grow and change for the better. Chiba's relationship and feelings for her colleage, Dr. Tokita (who's the film's one bum note, sorry to say: he's a large man and the film has some cheap shots at the expense of him being fat) are able to blossom and grow as she changes from the blurred reality of dreams becoming real. Paprika's a strange film, reminding me of David Lynch in the way it deals with the hazy ambiguity of dreaming and what it means to us, and some of it is spooky and unsettling enough for a spooky marathon. Either way, as Satoshi Kon's last feature film, it was one hell of a sendoff. It's worth your time, so give it a watch... and dream a little dream, every now and thena.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 12 (The Haunted House)

It's been a strange sort of spooky marathon, what with the strike and all making me think outside the box. In any other year, that might really hamper me, but 2023 has also been the year of broadening my horizons with the Criterion Challenge. I mention that because the two dovetail together nicely for this instance. For the Criterion Challenge, I did a silent Buster Keaton film from the 1920s called Three Ages. It was a pretty good and funny bit of silent slapstick from one of the all-time greats of that particular genre. Somehow or another, in my research for things outside studio-released films, I came across this. A spooky-themed Buster Keaton silent short film? Okay, sure, why not!

It may be lacking in the spooky department compared to some things, but it's all in the right spirit of fun for this thing so who needs to quibble? The titular haunted house doesn't factor in until about halfway of the 20 minute runtime, and for a brief moment I thought I had chosen wrong and would need to pick something else. That's not the case, as you can see from this having been posted. That being said, the ten minutes before the haunted house escapades are still wickedly funny. I don't know much about silent film, but I did grow up watching episodes of Mr. Bean; as it turns out, that was well within the wheelhouse to appreciate this. Buster Keaton fumbling around as a bank teller with glue on his hands and making the money stick to everything, and then everything sticking to everything else, elicited an incredible laughing fit from me. Like, holy fuck. This was funny as hell.

Then the part that we're here for happens, and the setup to get us into the haunted house is surprisingly layered and dense for a 20 minute short. The house isn't haunted, but is a front for money counterfeiters operating in cahoots with a man from the bank, who fake the house being haunted to scare away intruders. In addition, due to a misunderstanding involving bank robbers and Keaton picking up their gun, the cops are after him and so he runs into the haunted house. In addition to that an opera group performing Faust is chased off the stage for being terrible, so they also run into the haunted house, including a guy in a devil outfit. What follows is a thing of silent beauty, as Keaton and the actors and the counterfeiters in ghost costumes and some skeleton men bumble around the house scaring each other and causing havoc. To a modern lens, it's like Mr. Bean crossed with Scooby-Doo. The repeated gag with Keaton and the staircase which collapses into a slide is amazing, especially the payoff to it at the end which I dare not spoil.

Sometimes it's good to just have fun with the spooky marathon. It isn't about getting scared out of your wits or unsettled every time. Every once in a while, let your hair down and watch a spooky-themed comedy. At 20 minutes, this is just charming and wonderful. It made me want to seek out even more short but sweet Buster Keaton antics, and that's no mean feat for a film that's over a century old. You can do a lot worse this Halloween season, so why not give an old classic a go?

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 11 (Train To Busan)

(Just a heads-up, I do kind of "spoil" stuff about this film in this writeup, so if you have an interest after the first paragraph, see the film. It's good.)

Oh my good God. You have to understand, I just sort of picked this one while looking up foreign spooky cinema. All I knew going in was that it was a South Korean movie with a titular train, presumably going to Busan, and that there were zombies. Alright, said I. I can deal with a zombie movie. Sure, by this point I'm more attuned to the subversions and swerves that other pieces of zombie media go for where they focus on things other than the miserable and visceral end of society as they know it. I can handle something more straight-laced. I won't love it, but it will probably be competent enough to give me some stuff to talk about and I only need to bullshit for a few hundred words anyway. Fuck it, let's take the train. So it was that I threw on the movie, and the inciting incident for getting on the train is a workaholic dad with a strained relationship with his daughter. She wants to see her mom, who's separated from this shit of a dad, and so he begrudgingly takes her on a train ride and then we got Zombie Time.

In a moment of calm after everything goes to hell in a handbasket, though, , there was a moment which made me sit up. The little girl gives up her seat for an older lady, and the dad tells her she didn't have to do that: that in a crisis like this, it's best to look after yourself first. Wait. Oh shit, wait. The movie's doing a thing here. Is it... could it be actively rejecting selfish lone wolf bullshit and grim practicality during a zombie apocalypse? Is it actually advocating for being a good person even in crisis, letting empathy and kindness take charge instead of selfishness and throwing others to the wolves? Oh, it is. You bet your ass it is. This zombie train movie is preaching the same scripture as the other most impactful pieces of media in recent years for me. Oh my God there might be something to this shit.

It goes even beyond that, though! The dad is a fund manager and called out on being a shitty capitalist by one or two characters, but there's also this corporate executive on the train who starts taking charge. He is making all the tough "needs of the many" choices that you'd expect from the typical zombie movie, leaving doomed people to die and not letting others in because they might have been bit. The film is not on this asshole's side, and you very quickly grow to hate him. He manages to turn everyone else on the train away from the small group of survivors who got away from zombies, exiling them to the next car. Typical mob mentality horseshit... and then everyone who went along with this gets fucked by zombies. This man somehow continues to survive, and he does it by routinely shoving other people into the path of zombies so that he can get away. He absolutely sucks, the literal sacrificing of other people both a metaphor for being a capitalist shitheel and a condemnation of that mentality in a zombie crisis.

He gets his in the end, but it is not without cost. Not just the people he lets die, but our protagonist workaholic dad gets bitten by him while trying to save his daughter and a pregnant woman. The final goodbye between the dad and daughter, and him thinking about the day she was born as the zombification takes hold, is some of the most heartwrenching shit I have ever seen in a zombie film. Sweet Christ. The ending is bittersweet, but it almost pulls a Night Of The Living Dead on you and for a moment you're wondering if they will actually pull the trigger on this, literally and metaphorically. They don't, and it's certainly something. Good god, this was an incredible film. 

I hardly mentioned the zombies themselves, but everything about them is fast as shit. Not just the speed at which they attack and give chase, but even the infection itself is fast as hell: someone who gets chomped in the throat will be up in seconds to do the zombie thing. The way they all run in a horde and trip over themselves and are just relentless is something to behold. I could say a lot more, but sometimes it's best to leave things unsaid. If you can handle the zombie thing, this one is absolutely worth the time. It almost rivals Zombie Land Saga for how it handles empathy and kindness in the face of zombies, and coming from me? That's high praise indeed.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 10 (Skinamarink)

Right away, I knew that I had to go a little extra with this film in order to create a memorable and intriguing aesthetic experience with it. It all stemmed from the fun little fact that it got a limited edition release on VHS, of all things. I did not have the cash to pony up for one of those tapes, so I made my own. I attained a digital copy of the film, ran it through a video editor to get it in an acceptable format, popped it on a USB drive, put that into a PS3 hooked into a VCR via AV cables, and then played the movie while recording it onto tape. This only got the visual aesthetic, and I needed to do one more thing to really get the effect to work. I went down into my basement with that same VCR hooked to a CRT, and late at night I turned off all the lights and sat back to watch the resultant tape. So it was, then, in illuminated blackness, that I let this wash over me.

Before we get into the film, I would like to share with you two similar stories from my childhood. I could not have been more than 6 or 7 years old when these occurred, and they both involve me waking up in the middle of the night. In the first, I awoke to a house that still had all the lights on but no Mom or Dad around. They were out doing something, and had figured I would just sleep right through their absence. I did not, and the sheer terror of being Alone In The House for the very first time is a memory that's stuck with me. The second is me waking up once again, needing to use the bathroom. While I had slept, there was a power outage and the lights did not work so I could not go. You may wonder why I'm bringing up random nighttime anxieties from a couple of decades ago. Such things are tantamount to what I got out of this film. Such things are what that film is all about.

Skinamarink is many things at once, but the one thing it is not is a traditional film. There is no fancy plot, no three-act structure, no detailed lore explanation for what is happening here (no matter how many goddamn Youtube videos attempt to do such a thing). This is almost an experimental film in many ways, a full-on example of vibes-based storytelling and chasing the unique aesthetic of dimly lit shots of a suburban house at night. Its refusal to be anything traditional can blindside many, and it makes the film what I like to dub a "picket fence film"; that is to say, a film where the Letterboxd ratings graph has a nearly equal amount of ratings for every star possible, from 1/2 to 5. A film that is equally beloved and berated. 

If you are expecting a traditional film, something with a narrative and an arc and an explanation, or you just can't plain vibe with it, then you are going to get jack shit out of this experience other than annoyance and boredom. I get it. I honestly get it more than I do the continued hate and backlash over Halloween Ends for not being what was expected. It's one thing when you whinge about not getting your epic final slasher villain battle. It's another when you go into a movie expecting, you know, a usual movie. If you don't go in knowing what this is, it's understandable that you can't vibe with it. 

I can, however, vibe with it. In a dark basement in 2023, I vibed with what this was doing. It's almost a Rorschach test, in a way. It is a movie about childhood nightmares, of sleepless nights, of the terrors lurking within your little child brain that only come out when the sun comes down. The people behind it had their own childhood nightmares that they see in the film. I have my own which I see in the film, which I told you about. That's why the lore explanation thing drives me mad: do you wake up from a nightmare and then nitpick your own imagination's plot holes? No! God no! This thing, this 100 minutes of whatever it is, is an ambient terror that reflects the darkest parts of your childhood subconscious, spitting it back out in a visual form that resonates with everyone in a different way. All I can do is tell you how it resonated with me, how it made me remember the night I woke up and my Mom and Dad weren't there. The night that the power went and the toilet might as well have vanished into inky blackness. Every spooky night, every terror from my dreams I never told anyone about, all of it pondered as scratchy audio on a videocassette shows me a deserted hallway, flickering with the light of a CRT as I too bathe in the flickering light of a CRT. All of this and more were pondered as I lay in that darkness, letting whatever this was wash over me.

Sweet dreams, kids. 

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 9 (Gamera 3: Revenge Of Iris)

It wouldn't be a spooky marathon without some Kaiju Time, so here we are once again! This is actually a bit of a culmination, as for 2012 and 2022 I covered the two previous Gamera films in this trilogy. I quite liked them for what they were, but they didn't exactly hit the greatest of all time status or anything when it came to kaiju films. Not that that's bad, but it is the truth. Gamera 3: Revenge Of Iris is where that changes. The more I think of it, the more I find to love about it. Revenge Of Iris is a truly great kaiju film, on par with the likes of my favorite Godzilla pictures (the original, 1984, and Shin Godzilla, for the record) and one that was well worth the two year buildup towards.

This is a film that's so much more than just giant monsters fighting each other; in fact, there isn't a whole lot of that to be had in the movie. What is here is thematic and compelling. There is so much going under the hood of this thing, and so much of it is enriched by looking at it with a Japanese lens, that I can't cover it all. I don't have the capacity to, but these are only quickies so I don't have to. The film combines evolution, science, and spirituality together into this uniquely Japanese cocktail about harmony with one's self and the natural world, as well as humanity's place in it as the world moves on and evolves. It's all really fascinating stuff that's going on, with a good three or four plotlines happening in tandem as scientists and spiritualists alike react to the return of Gamera and Gyaos (the kaiju from the first Gamera film) in their own way.

It's the plotline with Ayana that I want to highlight though. The previous Gamera films had a girl form a spiritual and mental bond with Gamera using a magical magatama. Ayana, a new character in this film, is the inverse of this. She hates Gamera, the supposed defender of humanity, because her parents died as collateral damage during the first film's battle with Gyaos. Her dislike of Gamera is what helps her form a spiritual and mental bond with the antagonist kaiju, an evolution of Gyaos which she names Iris after her lost cat, also collateral damage from Gamera. If Gamera was all about finding empathy and understanding by making connections, this is the dark flip side of it. Hate and misery leading like minds to join together for the purposes of destruction. Destruction is rampant through the film, even by the hands of Gamera. More of that collateral damage occurs during the first big battle of the film against a random Gyaos, and it's not a pretty spectacle. Flames and fire engulf the city, debris rains down, and we see incredible losses of life directly because of Gamera's battle. Iris itself evolves into a terrifying creature that sucks the life out of things, leaving them withered husks. 

It's both terrifying, and a metaphor for what hate and misery can do to you if you let it fester: it will hollow you out. Iris's goal is to merge with Ayana, to become a fully evolved being and bring about more destruction. To hate, to kill, to destroy ever after. It's when Ayana is fused with Iris that she sees from its perspective, and sees the horrid truth: a pre-evolved Iris killed her new foster family. Hate breeds hate, misery breeds misery... and it is Gamera, eventually, who saves her from the clutches of Iris and destroys the monster, who shows her the power of empathy and compassion. Holy goddamn. This movie's heavy, and these are but surface level readings. There is so much more going on here, but color me impressed. What a way to close this kaiju film trilogy. Happy trails, Gamera. Perhaps, one day, we'll meet again.  

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 8 (Plan 9 From Outer Space)

Sorry for this one being a day off, I actually went out to a spooky movie night the local town recreation committee was hosting. It was a studio movie, so I can't say anything about that, but the experience itself was certainly something. I made the mistake of sitting in the front row, quite close to the central surround sound speaker. That's one advantage of watching a film in your own home: being able to control the damn volume. That was a very loud movie laden with many a jumpscare and loud noise, and ow did my ears hurt. This, of course, has nothing to do with the movie I watched at home a few hours earlier. Oh yeah. It's this shit.

What does one say about Plan 9 From Outer Space? Well, they usually start with the fact that it is not a very good movie. This is an assessment that I agree with: Plan 9 From Outer Space was not a very good movie. I knew it had this reputation going in, but I was expecting a legendary "so bad it's good" picture, the type where the joke was that it got made and you could laugh at the absurdity of such a thing being filmed and distributed. There are parts to that, I'm sure: lots of people will make fun of the airplane cockpit set or the flying saucer effects or the silly acting. The one amusing line read for me was the alien invader Eros berating humanity and "YOUR STUPID MINDS! STUPID! STUPID!". Beyond that, this is... Well, it'd almost be unremarkable if not for its reputation.

That in itself is a bit of interesting alchemy. This film is a bit of cinematic shlock that was left forgotten, the detritus of the B-movie age, for 20 years until some guys in the 80's dug it up and declared it The Worst Movie Of All Time. For good measure, they wrote it in a book, and so they made it true for a legion of moviegoers. It will be, now and forever, the legacy of Ed Wood Junior. Yet here I am, ages in the future, struggling to agree. Not a very good movie, certainly. But the worst of all time? I don't know about that. It isn't morally outrageous, it's not [[that]] technically incompetent, and its acting is not [[that]] bad. I have had worse experiences with cinema. Hell, I'd watch Plan 9 again over V/H/S. 

Now maybe, if I had a huge knowledge of 50's sci-fi/horror films, I would have better criteria to judge Plan 9. As it stands? This doesn't look any worse than any non-classic of the era. Dig through the detritus of history and you could find dozens of films at least this bad, if not worse. Of that I'm certain. The only reason we're still talking about this one is that some folks who wrote a book dug through the detritus of history and deemed this one the worst. I don't know if I agree. It's a film so unremarkable aside from its history that I have little more to say on it. Moving on.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 7 (Sweet Home)

PART 1: THE GAME

This has been a long time coming. I've wanted to play and cover this game for years on these marathons, but never got around to doing so. Part of this is procrastination, and part of it is intimidation: The mere thought of survival horror being a genre with risk of unwinnable fail states kept me off it. Fitting, then, that I finally give this a try in the year where I conquered my fear of Resident Evil. The two get compared quite a bit, this being the spiritual ancestor to Resident Evil and both sharing certain elements. In both you're trapped inside a deadly mansion of supernatural terrors, solving puzzles and piecing together clues about what happened here from disparate scraps left behind while carefully managing limited resources, both in quantity and what you can carry around at any one time.

For all their similarities, they are different. Treating Sweet Home as just the rough draft of Resident Evil would be doing it a disservice. The experience of playing Sweet Home was just as unique as my experience playing Resident Evil, and I will try to convey my main takeaway from going through the game. If anything, it's one of dissonance. I was dreading it a little, wondering just how mean the game would be... and it was not that bad, overall. At times, it's more generous than most survival horror experiences: Being able to save anywhere you like effectively means that you can be extra cautious and not encounter any real loss from stumbling into a trap, and removes the extra sense of tension Resident Evil attempts to give you by making saves a limited resource as well. Indeed, for the cautious hoarder player like I am, there's also the nature of the RPG and overleveling; you can just run around an explored hallway and fight enemies you know you can take on to make the stronger ones trivial as well.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 6 (Love Everlasting)

(Spoilers for the comic follow. I urge you to check it out yourself and go in blind for maximum effect, as I did.) 

What is love? 

There are two animes which have love as the ultimate motivator of awe-inspiring power. In Symphogear, the titular transformation pendants activate by tapping into the part of the human brain which is the source of love and affection. In Madoka Magica Rebellion, love is a power source greater than either hope or despair which rewrites the universe itself upon the whim of one fucked-up magical girl who captures God herself. Love has multitudes. It can be a thing of beauty which brings about the best in us. It can be a bloodstained banner in which terrible things are done in the name of it. Love is at the center of what I read today, and what I will talk about in brief with you. 

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 5 (Haunted Waters)

That ongoing strike has necessitated a shakeup or two for the spooky marathon this year, so here's one of them. Rather than use a slot on some studio horror film, I am instead throwing a curve and talking about a book of folkloric scary stories from my home island of Newfoundland. It's a different tact for analysis, to be sure, but trust me. I can get in and out of here and pique your interest. I'm sure this is true of many places, but it feels especially true for Newfoundland: this island has a secret history, only able to be told by the old stories passed down from the generations. The nature of folklore and an "old yarn", as they call it here, is very much a thing that thrived here back in the old days when most people lived in isolated little coves and fished all day. By night, some of those little coves were haunted, and a few of these stories are in this book.

This is not the grand master narrative of the history of our fair island. This is a microcosmic set of stories passed down and collected by a professional folklorist, archived for our intrigue and reading pleasure. They span a great length of history, some taking place long ago and others in modern times in modern cities. All of them have haunting in common, an encounter with a ghost. Some are spooky tales of terror which frightened these people on one terrible night. Some are benevolent spirits, of loved ones long gone. They span not just history, but all across the island. Even here, where I am down south, are mentions in the book of shipwrecked ghosts and hidden pirate treasure trapped within deep rock walls. 

Frezno's Criterion Challenge: September 2023 Trip Report

Alright, here we are again. It's a bit late this time, and you have my apologies. Between the end of month vacation shenanigans, and getting through things for the Halloween marathon, I've struggled to find the time to get this out there. I've carved a nice window here, and we will use that window to talk about a handful more artsy films from the Criterion Channel. After the first, we go on a bit of a theme this month! Isn't that exciting? You'll find out just what the theme is, but first we must discuss...

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 4 (We're All Going To The World's Fair)

This is... quite the film to talk about. It's one of the ones that got recommended to me, picked in this case by my pal Sean. As such, I went into it knowing not a thing about what it had to offer. That sense permeated the rest of the film, as it's a mercurial thing that refused to exactly define itself for me. Not only did it have some sense of ambiguity in its horror, but it was subversive enough that it managed to pivot to being about something else entirely. Or maybe I was just slow on the uptake and the movie was actually about this all along. Either way, I went along with the movie instead of being bitter and resistant that it wasn't giving me what I wanted (What? No, this has nothing to do with Halloween Ends trending on social media and the same closed-minded whinging about that film coming back like a vengeful ghost), I let my perceptions change and really sit with what I felt the film was trying to say.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 3 (Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead)

This is an interesting well to come back to, of sorts. I have a little bit of a history with anime involving zombies, which a cursory glance back at the archives will inform you about. This isn't subversive in the same ways as that, as it's telling a story about your traditional zombie apocalypse. It's the way the tale is told that made this a standout for me, though. I have not seen all of the show (it's still airing weekly as I write this) but I watched the first four episodes in a row and treated it as a mini animated movie about the end of the world via zombies. Even that's doing the show a disservice, as this thing is doing some wonderful work with not only its visuals but its storytelling.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 2 (Suspiria)

Oh thank God. That's more fucking like it. I knew practically nothing about Suspiria or Dario Argento's filmography going into this. I expected something fucked up and sufficiently spooky, but what form would it take? Would it be a straight slasher-esque thing or something far more psychological and dreamlike? The film certainly has elements of both, but it's not exactly either of them. It's far more evocative and stranger than that, in ways that I can only try to talk about. This is a film that's better experienced than discussed, if that makes any sense. That may sound like me trying to cop out of talking about it, but I do have things I can praise. They're just things that will have a far stronger experience on you if you turn off the lights and let the film wash over you instead of hearing my descriptors. So, if you can handle the movie, please do that... but I will try to explain.

Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 1 (V/H/S)

(TW: sexual assault)

ooooOOOOoooo!!!! Welcome, one and all, to Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween! It is October now, except it's not. I have to write this a few days before because I'm not going to be at home on October 1st. For you, then, uncovering this post is rather like finding a cursed VHS tape that displays a spooky short story filmed with someone's handheld camera. But I may be getting ahead of myself. Yes, kicking off the marathon is this film, V/H/S. The concept of this excited me, and it seemed to do well enough that there are five more of them. You get the horror subgenre of found footage, and you mix it with the lo-fi aesthetic of the VHS tape? As someone who watched all of Symphogear on tape, I was extremely interested in marinating in this mix of aesthetics.

Coming Soon: Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween

ooooOOOOoooo THAT'S RIGHT WE HAVE ARRIVED AT THE FALL! It is a time of year that usually has me running around like a headless chicken, between trips and this and NaNoWriMo and all sorts of other things. I just took a trip to the capital city and went to some amazing places. Like the one you're seeing on the right here, a very interesting Newfoundland town. I refuse to elaborate further. If you know, you know. Instead I'll elaborate on what sort of time of year we've come to again. Yes, in October it will once again be time for a spooky media marathon, as Sixteen Screams For Halloween comes back for the third time. If you're new here, that means that every other day for the month of October, I'll have a quick writeup on some piece of spooky media. There are a few things I want to do, but honestly I haven't sat down and hashed out a big list yet. That's where you come in! 

Frezno's Criterion Challenge: August 2023 Trip Report

Holy hell, with this installment of the Criterion Challenge, I've crossed the 2/3rds mark. 8 months of this. Absolutely wild. I have enjoyed myself so far, and hope I will continue to enjoy myself. Certainly, I have some enjoyable films to talk about here, and so I will do that right about now. Honestly, it's hard to bullshit enough to get an opening paragraph before talking about these, but... actually, I lied, it's really easy to bullshit enough words to get a paragraph filled. I'm literally doing it right now, and now I pretty much have enough. It's the oldest trick in the rambling raving rants book, and now that the trick is done... Kino.

A Post In Solidarity With The Strikes

Well, this isn't exactly how I intended to return to the blog after the big 10th anniversary fete. Even so, things are how they are, and so I'm here to explain the situation and how things are going to go around here for the rest of 2023 and beyond. I'll try to use some of that 2023 brevity to explain, and really I've just done so to stretch this out to a paragraph or so. Wait, that's the opposite of brevity. Damn it, get with the program. Okay.

You are likely aware of the current strike going on in America, with both the Writer's Guild and Screen Actors Guild Of America currently on the picket line for a better deal with the big studios. They are standing up for their right to fair compensation for their work, and naturally I agree and stand in solidarity with them. Where this goes from just a moral stance to actually affecting my hobby here is when this deals with the notion of promoting struck work. I came across a video from Youtuber Council Of Geeks, explaining how she would not be covering anything Doctor Who-related due to the strike once a statement was released from them clarifying that Doctor Who did indeed fall under the strike order. As someone who's part of a weekly Doctor Who podcast, I was also concerned at the thought that we'd been crossing the picket line, and so I made this video aware to my cohosts. We thus decided that it was only right to stand in solidarity with the strikers and put any Doctor Who related talk on hold until such time as the strike resolved.

The Frezno's Raving Rants Tenth Anniversary Retrospective

Welcome, friends and lovelies, to the festivities. If I've timed things correctly it is August 16th, 2023. Ten years ago today, this blog was created out of the spark of an idea. Ten years. Think of it. A child born when I first crafted those words is now old enough to be in the fifth grade. Ten years. A not-insignificant fraction of a human life. Ten goddamn years. Over that time, this blog has shifted in its mission statement and what it has talked about. To wit, I myself have also shifted and changed in those ten years. I often speak of my internal landscape, and this space represents a decade-long road map of it. Our party, then, is a metatextual retracing of my steps. We're going to go over a brief history of Frezno's Raving Rants. What inspired the posts, what led me to do and say the things I did back then, and what led me to the me I am today.

Whether you've been a constant companion on this trip, or you've somehow just stumbled upon this party, you are welcome to accompany me on this adventure down my metaphorical memory lane. It's alright. I've done this introspective song and dance before. I've never done it quite so thoroughly down my own timeline, but it's a party and one can be indulgent. Take my hand, if you so please, and come along with me. Let us celebrate and discover what made this blog tick, and how it grew and changed as I so did. Let the Frezno festivities... begin.

My Summer Of Symphogear

Alright, so what in the fuck are we doing back here of all places? The astute among you will remember a long-running series on this blog, from 2020 and 2021, where I wrote basically a fucking novel about this dumb show. There are things about it that I'm fond of, and things about it I'm not fond of, but that's basically the kind of creator I am: in my head my writings have the shelf life of milk, and anything past six months I look back at and go "oh my god this stinks, what was I doing?". To wit, then: I was successfully able to express my thoughts and emotions about what the show meant to me. I kind of wish I was able to do it without bloating the word count by giving lengthy plot summaries of what happened in the show. It makes me feel like an out-of-touch Internet reviewer when I do that shit, a Doug Walker or a Quinton Reviews. I don't like it, but the words on Symphogear are out there and are like that and I just have to deal with that regret. These words are not a replacement for them.

We're back here because of my own absolutely ridiculous aesthetic chasing. There's no easy way to admit what I did, so let's just say it outright. One day in the spring, I was fooling around with things in my basement when I got an idea. My PS3 had the option for AV cables, and could play Blu-Rays. What would happen if I were able to hook it into my old VCR via those cables? What sort of things that came out on Blu-Ray, years after the VHS format faded away, could be retroactively ported over to tape? The hookup worked, and then I got a further idea. A VHS tape on SLP mode can hold 6 hours of video, at fuzzy lower quality. The runtime of a season of Symphogear on Blu-Ray is just over 5 hours. The result?

Frezno's Criterion Challenge: July 2023 Trip Report

A very happy welcome to the second half of my Criterion Challenge Trip Reports! It's hard to believe that we have gone through half a year of cinematic wonder. It's also hard to believe that I've dragged my feet a little on some of these. I shall have to try and make September a big one, because August has me doing a lot of writing and we know what kind of madhouse October will be on the blog. Regardless, here we go. Some more movies to try and expand my cinematic horizons and make me better at something or other, and we start with...

The Warring States Of Love And Hate (Inuyasha)

Right, then. Let's get back on the same page, shall we? So, to recap: I found this improbability in late February while cleaning out the basement:

The rediscovery of my long-lost off-air recording of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was a terrifying enough bit of synchronicity, which I talked about last May. I briefly mentioned also watching the last bit of that tape, the spare 90 minutes for taping. What was on there filled me with a pure sense of nostalgia, a longing for a long ago time. Now that Twin Peaks is done and dusted, I can go back and tell you exactly what those 90 minutes were. They were three episodes of anime that I recorded on VHS in the year 2005, specifically off of Bionix, the Canadian youth channel YTV's weekend programming block for older youth and teens. (The astute among you may recall that a chance encounter with YTV two years prior to this taping, in 2003, was my reintroduction to Sailor Moon.) 

Frezno's Criterion Challenge: June 2023 Trip Report

Welcome back, my friends, to the broadening cinematic horizons which never end! It's once again time for a Criterion Challenge Trip Report, and can you believe that after this one we're halfway done with the year and the challenge? How time flies. This month's challenge also took place during Pride Month, so I slotted in some films with queer themes. If I'd thought of this beforehand I would have saved The Times Of Harvey Milk for this month instead. Nothing stopping you from watching it yourself for Pride Month, except for the fact that by the time you read this Pride Month will probably be done. Well, still watch that movie anyway. And probably a few other movies on this list that I watched in June 2023, if they're good. Let's find out together if they were or not, starting with...

On Survival Horror And Spicy Food

Let me ask you a question: Do you like spicy foods?

A lot of people love that kind of stuff, and will eat it up at any culinary opportunity. Bury their barbecue with buffalo sauce, sprinkle some sriracha on their sweet potatoes, confidently chew on a Carolina Reaper. Good for them, I say, enjoy your bold spicy flavor. I, on the other hand, have a low spice tolerance and can hardly muster anything hotter than a spicy Dorito. I remember a few months back, I was on a vacation with family and we went out for dinner on Friday night to a sports bar and grill. I ordered a nice burger with a side of sweet potato fries, but one family member went and ordered some extra spicy wings. When I asked him how in the world he could eat such spicy stuff, he said that it really wasn't that bad, like a 2 out of 10, and that I should try one. So I did. 

I made it one bite in before going "oh fuck no" and spending the next 10 minutes nursing my mouth burn with iced tea. That shit was so hot that a little got on the corner of my mouth and actively burned there too. It was not a pleasant time. Later, just to prove that this man's spice tolerance ratings scale is off the charts compared to my own, he showed off his 10 million Scoville scale lollipop and took a taste. He was relatively fine, just saying it kind of tasted like shit. That terrifies me. On the other hand, spice didn't make the night a total bust: my sweet potato fries came with a side of spicy mayo, and that stuff was actually quite pleasant. Its creaminess with a little teensy kick made for a nice flavor contrast with the sweetness of the fries. 

Let me ask you another question: Do you like survival horror games?

Frezno's Criterion Challenge: May 2023 Trip Report

(TW: brief discussion of actual murder, suicide)

You know the drill by now, I hope. Another month done, and another handful of cinematic hors d'oeuvres with eclectic tastes and vibes for my sampling and horizon-broadening. Where were we? Ah yes, last month we went on a little silent kick, ending off with a bit of gothic horror in black and white. That was wild, but what can we follow that up with? Let's find out.

The Impossible Dream Of A Walking Fire (Twin Peaks: Part 4) [Twin Peaks: The Return]

(Before we begin, a quick little bit of self-promotion. I was a guest on Whowatch 16, with my friend Sean Dillon and his friend David Mann, to talk about the latter half of Series 8 of Doctor Who. You know, Peter Capaldi's first and where I got my start on Doctor Who critique. These two let me talk about Clara Oswald for an Amount Of Time, and I enjoyed the discussion with them and hope you do too. Now, then. Let's finish this journey.)

So far, 2023 on the blog has been a completely unexpected surprise of creativity and invigoration for me. I honestly thought I'd be recapping musical anime and talking about anxiety and my own inferiority complex. We very well might do some form of that someday, but instead a beautiful thing happened. I encountered Twin Peaks, and my inability to write about it in a way that explained it forced me into a new and exciting form of writing, a form that I love. I found my brevity again, and found a new and better way to talk about media. As I write this, it's the 6th of April. I'm currently a little under the weather, which is annoying because I want to bang this entire thing out, but I must take a slow recovery from this cold and pace myself carefully. I at least want to bang out the intro here, while I have enough energy. 

2023 is a quarter of the way through, and what I am about to tell you may very well be the lynchpin of it for my creative era on the blog. It echoes back to what I wrote before, and echoes forward to what I will write after we put Twin Peaks to bed in this (probably massive) blog post. Let me set the stage for you. Let me tell you a story. I already told you, in part 1 of this impromptu project, how I became aware of Twin Peaks. How I found a secret diary and read it, and how that later got me to tape a TV airing of Fire Walk With Me. I know I taped it, but remember very little of it beyond that. The tape was lost to time, probably taped over long since. Ah well. I forged new memories of the show, the diary, and the movie. I moved on to pace out the gap between Fire Walk With Me and The Return with more of David Lynch's filmography. During that time, other things happened beyond me watching movies. Sometimes you can't just sit on your butt to watch movies or write about them. Sometimes you have to do errands.