2026-04-05 05:31:15
Since I was thoroughly creeped out by The Blair Witch Project, I got swept up into the later hype around the first Paranormal Activity movie, and went in fully prepared to be terrified. Instead, I spent the whole time being bored and irritated, impatiently waiting for someone or something to come in and murder these painfully annoying people already.
It wasn’t offensive, and I don’t begrudge its success or anything. But I might be the easiest person in the world to scare, and it barely ever registered a blip in my heart rate. I was perfectly happy to write off the entire series as not for me.
But digging through older episodes of the Dead Meat podcast, I found a series where they talked about each installment of the Paranormal Activity movies. I’ve been just curious enough to wonder what they did with the premise, without having to actually watch any more of them, so I listened to the recaps and had my “not for me” suspicions confirmed.
Until I got to the episode about the fifth installment in the series, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones. I was surprised that not only did they like it, but that it sounded like something I’d probably enjoy a lot as well.
There are three big changes with The Marked Ones, which all work together to make it more my thing than anything else in the series:
First, it was written and directed by Christopher Landon, who had written some of the other installments, and who would go on to make the Happy Death Day movies, Freaky, and Drop. Because this was a spin-off instead of a direct sequel, I think this one was freer to break from the existing formula, while Landon’s involvement with the others meant he knew how to tie it into the series in a way that would make fans happy.
Second, it breaks from the usual setup of spooky stuff happening to a white, upper-middle class, annoying, suburban family. This one has spooky stuff happening to a Hispanic community living in an apartment building in Oxnard, California. The main characters are Jesse, a recent high school graduate who’s just bought himself a new camera, and Hector, his best friend. And you’re immediately introduced to their friends, family, and neighbors, making it feel like it’s happening in a real place, instead of all confined to a suburban house somewhere in southern California.
Third, it breaks from the format established by the first one, of a bunch of static cameras placed around a house, inviting you to look for weird stuff happening in the periphery. This one is still a found footage movie, technically, but it’s a bit more like Cloverfield: it’s structured like a traditional mid-budget horror movie, but you’re seeing everything from the perspective of one of the characters holding a camera.
That does lose the sense of verisimilitude that was (at least initially) the core idea of the franchise, and it means fewer opportunities for the kind of eerie moments that the first movie actually did pretty well: like seeing via timestamp that a woman stood next to a bed and just stared at her partner for hours.
The “found footage” aspect of The Marked Ones is more of a stylistic thing than anything else. It’s given an initial justification, but it’s never allowed to become a burden. The movie’s happy to keep using it even in situations where it just doesn’t make sense that someone would keep filming, and complaining that it doesn’t seem realistic misses the point in a movie that isn’t that concerned with rigorous realism.
Instead, we see a couple of teenagers goofing off with a camera, recording themselves doing Jackass-style stunts around their apartment building, as a sinister story about their creepy neighbor Ana (who’s rumored to be a bruja) plays out in the background. It’s an ingenious way to introduce the characters as real, likeable, reckless kids who don’t take any of this stuff seriously. It means that they’re just fun to watch, and that it’s completely in character for them to make all the obviously terrible decisions you need characters in a horror movie to make.
I watched it on Pluto, which is streaming a version that for some reason cuts out several scenes, the most significant of which is one of those terrible decisions: the kids sneak into a local church one night to perform a ritual to summon a demon. You can find the scene on YouTube. It’s not really essential — I didn’t even detect anything was missing until the podcast hosts were describing a scene I couldn’t remember seeing — but it does establish the tone. Teenagers who don’t know that they’re in a horror movie, doing the kinds of things that drive a horror movie into the next act.
A really clever gimmick is when the kids are playing with an old Simon game, and they discover that they can use it to communicate with whatever strange entity is making weird noises in the building. I like it because it does a ton of things at once. First, there’s the simple novelty of using an electronic game instead of the way-overused Ouija board. Second, it drives home the idea that the teenagers think this stuff is weird, but they’re not scared of it: they’re more in sync with a horror movie audience, because they’re not completely oblivious to the fact that things are getting spooky, but they’re also more interested in having fun with it instead of being freaked out. Third, it gives Jesse’s abuela Irma — one of the best characters — the opportunity to be suitably spooked and pulled into the story.
Finally, it just sells the idea that these are bored teens hanging out together without a lot to do. The movie moves really quickly through its initial scenes, rapidly cutting through short clips, and its total run time is pretty short. It’s a difficult pace to establish the feel of bored people with a ton of time on their hands. I like it because it hints at the same feel of It Follows, a bunch of young people in a holding pattern on the cusp of whatever comes next. And it further explains why they’re diving recklessly into this story — they just want something to do.
And I realized one of the biggest differences between The Marked Ones and the first Paranormal Activity: I’d really gotten to like these characters, and I was dreading something terrible happening to them, instead of eagerly looking forward to it.
I don’t want to oversell it. It doesn’t just abandon verisimilitude, but requires hyper-active suspension of disbelief more and more as it goes on. It’s weakest when it tries to be part of the franchise instead of just a teenage slice-of-life story set in a Hispanic community — although I did appreciate the scene where a character (who I’m told is from the second movie) shows up to deliver all of the exposition they need in a couple of minutes, then disappears, with as little as possible attempt made to make any of it seem elegant or even natural. And ultimately, I didn’t think it was ever that scary.
But it’s pretty fun! And that’s something I never thought I’d be saying about a Paranormal Activity movie.
Content warnings: body horror related to eyes, and a dog in distress (but not injured as far as I could tell).
2026-04-04 09:45:56
I’m coming in a little bit hot with this take, so I’m going to say exactly what I mean at the start, instead of trying to build up to it. That way, no one on the internet can possibly misinterpret or misrepresent it!
Any rejection of generative AI in the creation of art or entertainment has to make a stronger case than simply, “a real human being made this.” You can, and often do, have dozens if not hundreds of very talented people make something that ultimately feeds into the “commodified content” mentality that’s making so many business people so eager to push AI onto everyone in the first place.
The impetus for this post was discussion around The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Specifically, someone calling out the complaint that it looks like AI slop, by insisting that comparing it to gen-AI does a huge disservice to all of the people at Illumination who worked on it.
And yeah, there is absolutely inherent value in something simply having been made by a person. Even before you take the obvious skill and talent of Illumination as a studio into account. There is significant artistry involved in taking worlds and characters — even ones that have already gone through decades of refinement and been drawn, modeled, and animated countless times before — and translating them into an animated movie format. Tons of decisions about what works and what doesn’t, what exactly to take from the existing character designs and adapt them for this movie, and likely thousands more moment-to-moment decisions that I’m too ignorant to speculate on.
But then also: what are we even doing here? Can you imagine ten years ago — even five years ago — defending an unabashedly commercial movie release by saying, “it was made by humans?”
The reason I’m fond of the word “slop” as a derogatory rejection of AI-generated content is because it’s all-encompassing. It gets at the heart of why the stuff sucks so much. It’s not just because of the inability to render details correctly. It’s not just because the video can’t retain coherence beyond a few seconds. It’s not just because it’s trained on copyrighted data and decades of people being forced to do CAPTCHAs. It’s not just because it consumes an exorbitant amount of resources, or because it’s driving up the cost of computing resources for everyone. All of that sucks, but even if you could wave a magic wand and make each of them disappear, the root problem is still there.
The push for generative AI is really just the culmination of a decades-long process of devaluing people’s work, expertise, and labor, towards the complete commodification of art. If you find it unsettling that it’s getting more and more difficult to distinguish AI-generated art or video from the real thing, that’s not necessarily a sign that the systems are getting better and better. It’s more a sign that your taste and standards have been gradually chipped away for so long that you think the difference between slop created by humans and slop created by a computer is a meaningful difference. And that is pretty unsettling.
It might not sound like it, but I actually see it as an optimistic take. If there is anything positive to having all of this gen-AI slop shoved on us, it’s that maybe it’s taught us to pay closer attention to the stuff we’re consuming and the stuff that we’re making. I know that it’s made me have a lot more grace towards the stuff I make, simply for having a better appreciation for the process that went into it. Not simply because a person made it, but because I made it.
I should probably acknowledge that I haven’t seen either of the Super Mario movies, and I’m unlikely to until there’s a screening that’s not packed full of members of its target audience, if at all. For all I know, it’s more charming and fun than it looks, and it has touches that justify its existence beyond a marketing campaign.
But that’s also all but irrelevant for the point I’m making, and the reason I’m using it as an example. Everyone knows exactly why these movies exist, and it would be bizarre to the point of nonsense to suggest otherwise. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a blatantly commercial piece of entertainment, and often it gives people a chance to do good, fun, work, but the craft and artistry is still always going to be a happy side effect at most.
Every time I see a trailer for the upcoming Masters of the Universe movie — the second live-action movie capitalizing on nostalgia for a TV series that was itself created for the purpose of selling toys — it feels like spiraling towards an event horizon into a black hole from which no art can escape. It’s important to periodically take a look around and do a sanity check. The balance between art and commerce has always been tenuous; is it shifting so far into the category of commerce to the point that it no longer gives any opportunity for actual creativity?
We’re already in a media environment where fans use terms like “IP” without a second thought, as if that were a normal way for normal people, not marketing types, to talk about art and entertainment.
So whether these movies actually turn out to be good is almost as irrelevant as whether they were actually made without generative AI. The mission statement is already clear: they exist to make money, and everything else is secondary. A project can fail the Turing Test and still be part of the years-long process of training audiences to appreciate Commodified Content, to dismiss any vestigial ideas about there ever having been a balance between art and commerce in the first place. Really, all the push for generative AI does is help speed that along.
2026-04-01 01:00:00
Last week I saw an extended trailer for The Odyssey, showing the Trojan Horse scene, and apart from Bane’s accent, it might be the first time I’ve ever been charmed by a Christopher Nolan movie.
It’s got what you expect from Nolan’s movies — impeccable art direction, and the novelty of “Hey, it’s Matt Damon! There’s Spider-Man! Look, The Punisher!” And it’s done with the weight and gravity that Nolan and his fans believe his epics are due; it’s all played straight. Or at least, as straight as you can be with dozens of shirtless, sweaty, beardy guys piled on top of each other and grunting.
The part that was charming was how silly it all was. The horse looks rad as hell! But then we get shot after shot of all the guys tumbling around and squeezing against each other as they tell you the story all about how this horse got flipped, turned upside down. The whole time they’re giving Matt Damon the side-eye like “oh geez was this the best idea?” or “Are you sure this mythological story element was ever something that was intended to be depicted literally?”
Don’t get me wrong; I’m almost certainly going to see it. But it does all seem a little unnecessary, since the story of Odysseus has already been adapted plenty of times.
My favorite is O Brother, Where Art Thou? because it’s as funny as it is pretty, and it’s got great songs like “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow,” by Dan Tyminski and the Soggy Bottom Boys.
It may not be the most faithful adaptation, but it’s got sirens and an attack from a giant one-eyed monster, and a guy getting turned into an animal (in retrospect, “we thought you was a pig” may have been a funnier line), and that’s pretty much all I know from the original anyway. But then, as I understand it, the Trojan Horse scene shown in Nolan’s The Odyssey didn’t actually show up fully until The Aeneid, so who’s to say what’s a faithful adaptation?
And more importantly, does it even need a faithful adaptation? I can guarantee I enjoyed reading Madeline Miller’s Circe more than I’d ever enjoy its sources.
And I’ve never seen the French-Japanese anime series Ulysses 31, although as a citizen of the internet, I have of course heard the theme song countless times. Based on what I know about 1980s anime TV, I’m highly skeptical the actual series would be my thing if I tried to watch it now. (Watching Battle of the Planets or Star Blazers as an adult was just an exercise in masochism). But it’s neat to look at something and be able to say, “Oh, so that’s why Daft Punk exists!”
2026-03-27 03:56:37
The Long Good Friday12 was made in 1979, and you can tell pretty much instantly. The film is grainy, the soundtrack is synthesizer heavy, and it comes from a time when movies were confident enough to let you go for 10 or 15 minutes without having even the slightest clue as to what’s going on.
That’s before you see familiar actors like Pierce Brosnan at his youngest, Kevin McNally at his most wait-is-that-Bill-Hader?-ish, and Paul Freeman at his most beautiful. (It made me remember that one of the off-putting things about Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark was that he was so distractingly handsome).
In any case, the movie starts with several scenes of dialogue-less intrigue: a suitcase full of money! A clandestine hand-off! Two guys sitting in a remote farm house! A gay hook-up in a pub! Murders! British Airways jets! A widow! Architectural plans! A funeral procession that stops to let the widow get out of the car and spit on a guy! Swimming! And that’s all before we even see our first glimpse of our main characters, played by Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren.
I’ll admit that I’m just far enough into the MTV generation that I rarely have the attention span required for movies made before 1982. And I did have to pause the movie a few times, both to go out for a cigarette — everybody is smoking constantly in this movie — and to let my brain recalibrate to a style of storytelling in which everything is given time to play out.
The Long Good Friday isn’t what I’d call slow; in fact, it’s sometimes disorienting, as it often jumps to a new scene and forces you to figure out how it fits in with everything else. But even once I was able to make sense (mostly) of all the different accents, it still felt as if I were having to translate between the language of film this movie was using, and the one I’m so used to now.
It wasn’t until the brilliant, iconic, final scene that I could even identify what was different. This isn’t a movie that works in symbols and metaphors. In fact, it feels like the kind of movie that would call me a ponce who took too many cinema studies classes in college for even trying to do so. I could conclude that a scene takes place at a stock car race to show how a story about control and order had suddenly escalated into chaos and mayhem. It’s more likely that it was set at a stock car race because that looked cool and exciting.
It’s not at all a shallow movie, but its complexity comes not from trying to pick it apart for meaning, but from fitting all the disparate pieces of the story together to make sense. Which is exactly what the main character, Harold Shand, spends the entire movie trying to do. Someone is trying to take him down, on the day he’s trying to broker the biggest deal of his life, the deal that might take him from “businessman” and head of a “corporation” to becoming an actual businessman and head of a real corporation. Who’s behind it, and why?
Over the course of the movie, you see him transform from an almost cartoonish version of a Cockney gangster into a real character. There’s a scene near the beginning where he’s addressing the people on his boat as it glides down the Thames, and you see him framed by the Tower Bridge as he gives the kind of puffed-up monologue worthy of Johnny Caspar. By the end of the movie, he doesn’t have to talk. The camera stays fixed on him for minutes, as you see him making sense of his situation and figuring out what exactly he’s going to do next.
It’s all allowed to just play out across his face. That’s possible only because you’ve got an actor like Bob Hoskins playing him, but also because just about every scene that advances the plot and gets closer to figuring out what’s going on, also tells you a little bit about who he is and what he values. Loyalty, trust, respect, honor, order, and to no small degree, London itself. The stereotype of “gangster with a strict code of honor” is pretty familiar, but The Long Good Friday and Hoskins’s performance makes it feel legit. He really believes in it.
He’s typically not the kind of guy who’s about playing the angles or secretly pulling the strings, and when he does try a double-cross, it goes badly. He’s the kind of guy who hangs out with an enforcer named Razors. You can usually tell what’s going on just by looking at his face, and if he looks like he’s about to kill you, that’s because he likely is.
And while the movie is spooling out its plot, it’s giving Harold one opportunity after another to tell you exactly what’s on his mind. The thing that they all have in common is that he’s a traditionalist. He reminisces about his friends, his childhood as a petty crook, the past ten years of peace between warring gangs, the good old days before the illegal narcotics trade, everything that London used to be, everything that England used to be.
There’s one scene I noticed in The Long Good Friday that never seems to be explicitly tied to anything else, and I never caught an explanation or resolution. The camera’s in some kind of underground space, panning silently across an entire grid of yellow containers marked “EXPLOSIVE.” I couldn’t tell if it had been established as part of the construction project, or if it was there just as ominous foreshadowing.
In any case, it along with the final scene were the only two cases of the movie inviting you to do any of your fancy-pants “interpretation of symbols and implicit metaphors.” They suggest that Harold is finally understanding that the world is changing, things are getting too complicated and too dangerous, and coming to terms with the idea that he’s probably not going to be part of whatever comes next.
2026-03-25 06:16:06
There’s one scene in Jurassic Park that I hate. It’s the one where Grant and Sadler first see the dinosaurs free-roaming through a field, and he’s so awestruck that he fumbles with his glasses, and then he reaches around and physically turns her head to take a look at them.
Even back in the 90s, when I was much less cynical and more impressionable, it felt like they had put all of this effort into making dinosaurs that seemed as real as they could possibly make them, and then undercut the whole thing by having humans behave in a way that was cringingly fake. I think it’s a huge part of why I’ve never quite been able to really love that movie as much as everyone else seems to.
And it’s perpetually frustrating, because Steven Spielberg is indisputably the master of fun, accessible, action and sci-fi movies, and an absolute genius at executing on an action sequence. But so many of his best movies are undermined with these moments that just feel saccharine, maudlin, or just full of forced awe and wonder.
So the one thing that impressed me the most about Project Hail Mary was that it delivered on those heart-caught-in-your-throat moments of Spielberg’s best sci-fi — I’m not too proud to admit that it had me on the verge of sobbing at a couple of parts — but without explicitly telling you, this is awesome. You should be in awe of this.
Of course, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have established their own style by this point, which is always threatening to undermine everything. With them, it’s “flippant and quirky,” and especially early on, it feels like it’s always just on the edge of going too far.
Ryan Gosling’s character1 sometimes seems like they were trying to create the male version of a manic pixie dream girl, with his cardigans and his novelty science teacher shirts. As he was digging through his belongings, I was dreading the moment he’d pull out a ukelele. I kept thinking “you’re a grown-ass adult. Either put your glasses on your face or push them on top of your head like a normal person.”
But the intensely annoying thing about Ryan Gosling is that it’s all but impossible for him to be too intensely annoying. He’s just unfairly good at comedy and being relatable for somebody who looks like he does. So before he’s allowed to turn into a caricature of Quirky, Relatable Science Genius Guy, he resolves into an actual character. His whole process of trying to remember who he is — “wait, am I smart?!” — means the audience gets to figure him out as the movie goes on. Instead of, for example, the Michael Crichton approach of introducing an expert to us at the start and leaving the process of making them relatable or human as an exercise to the reader.
There’s one moment in Gosling’s performance that I think is the best example of this. He’s just received a container of something of unknown origin, and we get a short montage of him trying to figure out what it’s made of and how to open it, using Science. The solution turns out to be so simple that it’s corny — because this is a movie unconcerned with being “hard” science fiction, no matter how much it may look like it is — but Grace suddenly realizes he got fixated on the puzzle when he should’ve been trying to open it in a safe environment. He shouts, “oh nooooo!” and runs it over to the standard glass-walled-box-with-built-in-gloves that may or may not actually exist outside of Hollywood; how should I know?
That line delivery is just dead-on perfect. And more than that, it sells everything about his character for the rest of the movie. Smart and capable, but also practical, over-confident, and reckless. More interested in finding the solution than in going through all of the steps to find it the right way. That means the movie can lightly skip over all of the impossibly hard — and boring — parts of a real story about First Contact, and get back to its strengths, which are character development and plot.
I’ve seen a few criticisms of the movie that say its tendency to go for laughs undermines all of the awe and wonder that should be present in this story. But for me, the “awe and wonder” in a story like this has already been over-mined for decades. I was six years old when Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out and demanded the audience be struck dumb with awe at the sight of a UFO over Devil’s Tower. That moment is referenced in Project Hail Mary, and it’s already so iconic that they don’t even have to explicitly say what they’re doing; he just hums the tune.
Earlier in the movie, when alarms are going off all over the ship, Grace screams “Shields up!” and the ship’s computer calmly responds that the ship doesn’t have shields. He replies, “Why not?!” The characters, the audience, and the filmmakers have all been steeped in science fiction our whole lives. A movie telling us this is awesome! and demanding that we play along just isn’t going to feel realistic anymore. We need a way in besides spectacle, something that’s going to make us care about the characters and what’s happening to them.
Because I waited too long to get tickets, I had to go several days of hearing people online gushing about how great the movie was, giving it a thumbs-down emoji, or saying “amaze amaze amaze.” So I went in dead-set on not falling into the hype, and I sat there arms crossed, saying, “You’ve got to earn it, movie. Entertain me.”
And it really did. It managed to be charming even after telling me directly how it was trying to charm me. Funny in ways that I hadn’t expected — playing scenes of two spacecraft coming into first contact for laughs instead of awe — but never so much that it felt like it wasn’t taking any of it seriously. Its moving moments and its joyful moments felt completely earned. And despite all of the modern self-awareness of its tone, it still retained that old-fashioned optimism that no matter how bad things get, there’s no problem too big for science and cooperation to fix.
Finally, it’s unrelated, but there’s one detail that I noticed that I have to call out: While he’s trying to remember who he is, Grace keeps a white board list of clues and questions. One of them says “ALWAYS MUSCLES?” And I’m still completely not sure how I feel about it.
On the one hand, I appreciate it as a quiet, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it acknowledgement that for their schlubby, relatable, Science Genius middle school teacher guy, they’ve cast someone with the physique of Ryan Gosling. But at the same time, this movie never shows off his physique at all, much less to Guardians of the Galaxy or Captain America extremes. It’s only because we all had a year of relentless Barbie promotion showing him with his shirt off that we had any idea what was going on underneath the novelty T-shirts and cardigans. So drawing attention to it feels not only unnecessary, but almost rubbing our noses in it?
It’s not a big deal, and definitely didn’t change my overall take on the movie as being pretty great. I’ll just file it away along with Fat Thor as yet another case of Hollywood simply not knowing how to handle its actors being hot without finding a way to make it weird.
2026-03-25 04:01:43
Last week we went to see the House of Kong installation in Los Angeles (which has ended by now), a collaboration between Gorillaz and Meow Wolf that was an interactive celebration/history of the band with a promotion for their new album.
It was pretty neat, although as someone who’s a mid-tier fan of Gorillaz at most, I think it would have had a bigger impact on fans of the band than fans of location-based entertainment. There were a few guys in our group who seemed to recognize everything and were really into it; for me, they had already played the only three songs I know within the first 10 minutes. One of those songs is “19-2000”, and I wish that the superior Soulchild remix version had been the one to get the animated video.1
If it sounds like I’m underselling it, I don’t mean to. It was a pretty ingenious way to not only satisfy fans, but pull newcomers into the elaborate, years-long art project they’ve built up around the music. In particular: at exactly the point where it feels like an overblown hagiography of the band, overstating the depth of its character- and world-building, that’s when the immersive part takes over. It didn’t turn me into a super-fan, but I did think it was a perfectly-balanced combination of promotion/hype-building and interesting experience on its own merits.
(I especially liked my husband’s main take-away, though: “I knew living in London was expensive, but how can you be in Blur and make Tank Girl and still need to share an apartment?”)
Yesterday, I saw Project Hail Mary, which has surprisingly effective music throughout, and uses The Beatles’ “Two of Us” really well. It’s been stuck in my head ever since, because it’s I’m-not-researching-it-but-I’m-99.9%-sure-is by Paul McCartney, who’s cranked out so many unforgettable melodies over his lifetime that even his lesser-known songs2 would be career-defining for other songwriters.
But in my brain it’s always quantum-entangled3 with a song I like even better, which is George Harrison’s “Old Brown Shoe.” The opening combination of bass line and honky tonk-sounding piano was unlike anything else I associated with the band, almost as distinct as “Helter Skelter” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” as making me believe these guys could do everything!
I always wondered why “Old Brown Shoe” never seemed to get the same kind of attention and same level of prominence as the band’s other songs. After reading a little bit about it, it sounds like it was mostly yet another case of John Lennon being a jerk.