I read 12 books in January:

• The Carter of La Providence by Georges Simenon
• Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing with David Naimon
• Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker
• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
• Elevation by Stephen King
• The Man Who Japed by Philip K. Dick
• Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou
• Absolute Batman Vol 1: The Zoo by Scott Snyder et al.
• Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre
• What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
• Time and Again by Jack Finney
• The Flash: Book One by Mark Waid et al.

I read 39 short stories in January. These were my favorites:

• “The Sun Globe” by Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw (PodCastle)
• “Give a Dog a Bone” by Richard E. Dansky (PseudoPod)
• “The Versions of Yourself That You’re Better Off Without” by Aimee Ogden (Nightmare)
• “Body? Glass” by Osahon Ize-Iyamu (Nightmare)
• “Stairs for Mermaids” by MM Schreier (Flash Fiction Online)
• “The Doorkeepers” by A.T. Greenblatt (Uncanny)
• “Sing” by Jules Bly (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
• “Mother’s Hip” by Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff (Lightspeed)
• “The Orchard Village Catalog” by Parker Peevyhouse (Strange Horizons)
• “The Stars You Can’t See by Looking Directly” by Samatha Murray (Clarkesworld)
• “Speaking for Those With Obsidian Tongues” by Wendy Nikel (Small Wonders)
• “The Spindle of Necessity” by B. Pladek (Strange Horizons)
• “Symbiote” by Diana T. Chiu-Chu (kh?ré?)
• “Baron Quits the Payloaders” by Renan Bernardo (Escape Pod)
• “The Peculiarities of Hunger” by Woody Dismukes (kh?ré?)
• “Joiner and Rust” by Lavie Tidhar (Reactor)

I watched 6 movies last week:

• Black Fury is a well directed and rousing story of union solidarity, but Paul Muni’s terrific performance really takes center stage.
• Give everyone involved in The Werewolf of Washington this much credit, they’re all in on the joke. I just don’t think it’s an especially funny joke.
• Nia DaCosta’s lush and sensual Hedda feels very much like a reimagining of the original Ibsen play that it almost doesn’t matter how little I remember of that one production I saw back in college.

• They should have sent a poet. I knew Andrea Gibson’s poetry only in passing, having seen them perform their 2023 poem “MAGA Hat in the Chemo Room.” But their final years, captured so soulfully and beautifully in Come See Me in the Good Light make me understand the beauty of language and life that I was missing.
• The Sorcerers feels a little cheaply made, a goofy but interesting idea fleshed out only insofar as the budget and performances will allow.
• I can see why The Trail might seem too slow and not scary to a lot of people, but I thought it worked really well, especially with what was obviously almost no budget. The movie isn’t necessarily subtle in being a metaphor for trauma and its lingering fear, but I think that simplicity actually works very much in its favor.

I watched six movies last week:

• The Detective is largely remembered as a trivia point nowadays, a movie based on a novel whose sequel then went on to inspire Die Hard—which is kind of a shame, because it’s pretty good all on its own. (There’s also no real point of comparison beyond Frank Sinatra also playing a New York cop.) Sinatra’s good in the movie, which, especially for 1968, takes an honest look at issues like police corruption, and while hardly flawless and certainly a little dated, is fairly progressive for the time.
• 1979’s Salem’s Lot is far from perfect—it’s rushed in its second half and limited by its 1970s TV budget—but it’s genuinely scary, works really well when it remembers to take its time, and fundamentally understands King’s novel in a way the 2024 version very much did not.
• Killer of Sheep is a lyrical slice-of-life in a community.

• The pieces, when they start to come together in The Dry, fit, but not in the most satisfying ways, and I’m not sure it ever really gels as a mystery. But the movie has a real sense of place and its characters, of old traumas buried and dug back up.
• The Perfect Neighbor does a remarkable job of piecing together existing footage to tell its tragic story. It’s not a fun watch, even if you’re unfamiliar with the tragedy it’s spiraling towards, but it is a sad document of this American moment.
• I think it’s delightful that Toby Poser, John Adams, and their daughters Lulu and Zelda make horror movies together. And I think it’s terrific that so many of those movies are so interesting and creepy. Mother of Flies is no exception, though perhaps expect more strange and unsettling imagery than any real scares. I don’t think it’s their best, but it grows on you.

I also re-watched The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which is a lot of fun, thanks largely to great performances by Matthau and Shaw, and The Visitor, which is, well, a thing that exists.

I watched six movies last week:

• The Wild Life invites—and greatly suffers from—comparison to Cameron Crowe’s previous high school comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
• Man of the Moment has its moments.
• It’s interesting seeing film noir tropes filtered through a Norwegian sensibility in Death Is a Caress. It’s not that interesting—I wouldn’t say the story really holds together particularly well here—but it’s just enough like and unlike Hollywood ’40s noir to keep you wondering.

• There’s just enough in Bone Lake to suggest that several of the people involved will go on someday to make a good movie. I don’t want to oversell it and suggest the acting and direction are necessarily good, but they show a lot more promise than the script, which trades on the most obvious (and yet also unbelievable) twists.
• Beast is raw around all its edges. Sometimes, like in Jessie Buckley’s primal scream of a performance, that works very well.
• 2021’s Black Phone never felt like a movie that could bear the weight of a sequel, and here comes to Black Phone 2 to prove that point. It’s an admirable attempt, visually chilling and honest about what actually living through the events of the first film would have done to the characters. Everyone involved is trying their best. And yet it’s also kind of an overlong, exposition-heavy exercise that lays more lore upon the framework of the first (decent but also forgettable) movie than it can stand.

I also rewatched The Dunwich Horror, which I didn’t remember well from a few years ago but really quite enjoyed this time around. It’s more than a little cheesy and silly, very much like Roger Corman’s earlier Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, but for Lovecraft, and I enjoyed it very much on that level.

I watched 7 movies last week:

• Jay Kelly is frustrating, because while it’s reasonably well written and acted, it’s also very shallow. Clooney coasts on his charm, and he’s well paired with Sandler, but the movie doesn’t have a lot to say beyond “famous people are kinda weird, huh?” There’s potential here, to actually invesigate the sadness beneath that charm—I don’t want to disqualify the movie simply because it maybe asks you to feel sorry for a wildly famous and rich character—but the movie stops short of really doing that.
• Ghostkeeper doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and you really have to guess at what’s happening near the end, but it really turns its cheapness and simple location into real virtues for a while, with a surprisingly creepy and haunted feel.
• Diary of a Mad Housewife wouldn’t work at all without the central performance by Carrie Snodgrass. It doesn’t always work very well even with it—the movie is dated and often cartoonish—but she’s easily the best reason to watch.
• Silkwood doesn’t fall into any of the traps or cliches of a thriller, and that’s dow to Mike Nichols’ direction and the peformances, espeically Meryl Streep, which just allow us to observe these characters and this story.

• Stallone’s Judge Dredd isn’t very good, but it also isn’t bad enough to be very interesting. It’s 90 minutes of a lot of shouting, some decent but underused set design, and not much else.
• Give Hallow Road credit, it’s very tense for most of its runtime. And that might have been entertaining enough, if the movie had just been a short claustrophobic psychological drama. But, as Matt Zoller Seitz writes, the movie then swerves into “trying on various genre identities to see how they feel,” and none of them feel particularly good. There’s a taut thriller wrestling with moral decisions hiding underneath it all—not necessarily a novel morality play, but an entertaining one, at least—but it crashes into whatever it is by the end.
• Eddie Muller reportedly said that Edmond O’Brien’s performance in D.O.A. “had more animation than Daffy Duck.” He wasn’t wrong. I don’t think the character or story work at all, beyond the basic twist of a man investigating his own murder, but O’Brien’s over-the-top performance is the main compelling reason to keep watching.

I also re(re)watched the delightfully gory Re-Animator.