I saw 7 movies last week. There was something of a theme until the very end:

• Upon seeing Angel’s Egg, Hayao Miyazaki reportedly said it was “not something others would understand.” I’m not sure understanding is what the movie wants or expects, but he wasn’t wrong. It’s intriguing, often stunningly animated, but I could not for the life of me tell you what it’s supposed to be about.
• After the Rehearsal feels like a meditation on sadness and the end of a life—I know, a shock for Bergman!—with bare staging and three compelling performances.
• What makes It Was Just an Accident remarkable is not just its harrowing depiction of the cycle of violence, or what it says against the Iranian regime, or how it was filmed in secret, but its humor and humanity in addition to all of that.
• The costumes and special effects in Planeta bur never rise above classic Doctor Who level, and its grasp on planetary science is questionable at best, but it’s an intriguing glimpse into Soviet-era science fiction filmmaking.

• As with his appearances in other films, Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot character in Mon Oncle usually elicits more bemused smiles from me than full-on laughter, and yet there is a lovely and meticulous craft to Tati’s films, as well as a knowing lampooning of the characters and the society they have built around them.
• There’s a loveliness and real sense of longing in Babette’s Feast.
• Some impressive late-game costume and makeup work notwithstanding, The Boneyard is largely terrible, dull and confused for most of its runtime and a mishmash of tones that are ridiculous when they should be scary, creepy when they should be funny. There’s half a half-baked idea in the mess—and it could have been much worse, given what was obviously a very low budget—but I very much did not enjoy this.

Is this fun for anybody else? Is anybody but the very small handful of people guessing an equally small handful of lyrics the last couple of weeks even reading this? Who can say. Only a few lyrics were guessed last week…

…but maybe this week the throngs of silent readers will fare better. As always, the rules are simple: below are 10 random lyrics. Guess the song and artist in the comments if you know them. Don’t cheat by looking them up.

1. “Daylight is waiting for you”
2. “They beat a Valentine drum”
3. “We’re gonna chug-a-lug and shout”
4. “Dammit Elvis, don’t you know you made your mama so proud”
5. “You gonna take away my energy”
6. “The actors and jesters are here”
7. “Young hearts can go their way”
8. “The radio reminds me of my home far away”
   “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver, guessed by John
9. “Will you join in our crusade?”
   “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Misérables (original Broadway cast recording), guessed by Glen
10. “We’re gonna kick your collective posterior”

Good luck!

I watched 6 movies last week:

• A Touch of Zen is a lush and beautifully shot movie, full of fantastic stunts and wirework.
• To Be or Not to Be is such a clever and well-constructed satire, walking such a fine line between pathos and laugh-out-loud jokes, with a phenomenal performance by Jack Benny.
• I think I can safely say I have never seen a movie quite like The Color of Pomegranates before. This is not a narrative so much as a collection of images—vivid, striking, and strange.

• There is a lot to appreciate about The Brave Little Toaster, but there’s also a lot to reveal how much feature animation changed just two years later with Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Not everything here works, or works well together, and while the movie is certainly a gem, it’s a very rough one.
• I don’t know that I necessarily wanted a longer movie from The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but I absolutely wanted a lot of the character beats, conflict, and plot that was obviously excised to hit its current run time. There’s a lot to like here, from the retro-futuristic set design to the cast themselves, but there’s a lot more than feels underbaked and not given enough room to breathe.
• Sister Midnight isn’t the movie I expected it to be, and that’s in no way the movie’s fault, but I’m not entirely sure it’s successful as the movie it finally decides to be. Still, I can’t fault the movie for not making bold choices, and it’s largely held together by Radhika Apte’s strong performance.

I also re-watched Trilogy of Terror, which I think succeeds largely on the strength of Karen Black’s different performances. While I agree that “Zuni fetish doll” of the final sequence likely would have freaked me out if I’d seen it on 1975 television, none of the movie’s stories, including that third one, are especially well developed. There are some fun twists, some more telegraphed than others, but the whole thing is mostly just slightly above average for a TV movie of the week.

Here’s my February music playlist:

I read 6 books in February:

• Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves
• Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green
• You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson
• What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher
• Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
• Absolute Batman Vol 2: Abomination by Scott Snyder et al.

I read 32 short stories in January. These were my favorites:

• “A Brief Public Announcement” by Eli Brown (Lightspeed)
• “Jennifer’s Daughter” by Sara S. Messenger (Nightmare)
• “The Aquarium for Lost Souls” by Natasha King (Strange Horizons)
• “Medusa’s Ship, or The Thing About Bodies” by Natalia Theodoridou (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
• “The Matriarchs” by Malena Salazar Maciá (Fantasy)
• “Your Hold Is Ready” by Laura Duerr (Cast of Wonders)
• “Doppel Doppel Gang Gang” by Phoenix Alexander (Baffling Magazine)
• “Death Echoes Overlapping” by Megan Chee (Lightspeed)
• “Doctors HATE Her!! Local Woman Is NOT Cursed” by Bree Wernicke (Bourbon Penn)
• “The Spew” by Jeffrey Ford (Reactor)
• “The Things We Bury in Each Other” by Timothy Ngome (FIYAH)