The Halloween List: Ghoul & Erased

Previously: Thelma, Annihilation, and The Endless

We're taking a brief break from movies today to spotlight two Horror miniseries. One is from India, about terrors occult and governmental. The other is an anime that brings terror into Time Travel. Need something to binge this Saturday?

Ghoul (2018)

In a dystopic future, India has divided into multiple states, some secular, and some religious, cracking down with strict censorship rules. It’s all intended to reduce terrorism and general violence. It has all failed, and the fascistic government continues burning children’s books and searching random civilians to send to black site prisons. Ghoul takes place at one of those black site prisons, where the latest prisoner and interrogation subject has more than knowledge. He’s possessed by a demon that wanted to get in.

It feels like an overdue topic for Horror, which prides itself on grasping reality’s sharp edges. Black sites are real nightmares, scarier than any serial killer. The prospect of the torture crew that runs such a place being mentally toyed with and haunted by an invasive presence could carry its own movie. The tensest scenes are brilliantly constructed, like a power outage during which one worker tries to see around a torture chamber with the minuscule illumination of a blow torch. The show has ample tricks to fill up its few episodes, building to an ending that had my little group cheering.

Bathroom Monologues Movie Awards 2014

It's almost March 2015, so of course we're all talking about the best movies of 2014. Naturally I disagree with some of the Oscar winners. More naturally, I don't understand what some of the categories mean. But nothing shall dissuade me from telling a sizable democratic body of people who devote swaths of their lives to film that their mass conclusions were wrong. So here we go.

The Too Little/Too Late Award
Going to the movie I missed by several years,
but have now seen and wish I'd been on the bandwagon for at the time 

 

Memories (title short film in the 1995 collection, Memories)

The Raddest Scene Award
Going to the raddest scene in a motion picture

The end of Whiplash

honorable mentions: Happy New Year in Snowpiercer,
Xavier-on-Xavier in X-Men: Days of Future Past

7 Chapters in 5 Days

Those pixel-stained technopeasant wretches. Wait, what?

After Thursday, the plan was to write eleven chapters in seven days.

After Friday, the plan was to write nine chapters in six days.

After Saturday, the plan was to write seven chapters in five days.

Thursday was a very difficult day physically, but I managed to make pace that took me through the weekend, and at the urging of friends, took Sunday off as a breather. That’s reasonable because I’m at pace and over the tricky denouement. The remaining seven chapters are mostly shorter and all the composition has gotten me into the groove where I’m terrifically excited to write them. Some of the best bits of the book are about to spill out of my fingertips.

On Saturday night I went out to celebrate by watching The Wind Rises. It’s a wonderful film and a very interesting piece of art if it’s truly Hayao Miyazaki’s last. It’s about the life of a boy who dreams of building airplanes, living myopically towards his goal which lands him a job in pre-World War II Japan. I couldn’t help wondering if I was projecting things onto it, knowing it might be the end of his career, with its ominous treatment of earthquakes, the frequent shots of exhausted engineers smoking to relieve stress, and the finality of so many elements, even the love story that is stricken by tuberculosis we seldom pretend we can beat. It’s certainly the only anime I’ve seen that’s referenced Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.

Then, midway through the film, the engineer’s hero mentions that he’s retiring because an artist only ever has ten years in which he’s creative. That sort of line doesn’t make it into this sort of film by accident. Too funny after a career that touched five decades.

I was the only one in the cinema with a scrap of paper. As immersed as I was in The Wind Rises’s humanoid sound designs of planes and curious depiction of a country at war, I kept drifting back to my novel. Am I passed that ten year period already? I don’t know, but I kept having ideas for what I’d just written and what I’ll be writing next. I tainted my own mind by writing so close to seeing the movie, though it’s a testament to how much The Wind Rises gives that it still caught my attention every time I pocketed my scrap of paper.

Now it’s back to work for me. How’s everyone doing?

10 Insights From A Fan Who'd Never Seen Evangelion Before

This past weekend I had the distinct privilege of watching Evangelion with someone who had never seen it before. The number of otaku (or nerds in general) who are actually Eva virgins is vanishingly small, and given the series’ controversial reputation, I was eager to see how it played to someone with no strong bias. At first I joked that this ought to be a scientific experiment, but eventually I did make a few notes about her reactions. I've included some of them below, though I've stricken her name in case of angry fanboy avalanche. Here are ten highlights from the marathon:

When you find out what's under those bandages...

1. She actually liked Rei Ayanami, particularly as a counterpart to the angst and hysteric aggression broadcasted by Shinji and Asuka. She was vocally waiting for Rei to “flip her shit” on someone and cackled any time Rei shut Asuka down. As I come from a background of every woman in my life hating Rei, this was highly unexpected.

2. She was surprised to learn the series was nearly twenty years old. The animation holds up exceptionally well, though the Director’s Cut additional scenes are clearly done with a higher budget and different sense of lighting. Gainax’s production values were untouchable, which made the still sequences funnier. It was hard not to joke about them running out of budget at those points.

3. She quickly predicted that the Evas were some version of angels being contained by our technology. By the middle, she also immediately caught the hints that Shinji’s mother had a relationship to EVA-01. It was particularly fun watching her pump her fists in the air when she was proven right.

 

4. She quickly predicted that the angels were actually alien invaders, and that all the voices from SEELE who hid their faces were gods, angels or some other non-human beings. That’s what they get for having their Skype avatars set to 2001: A Space Odyssey monoliths. In hindsight, boy SEELE is weird.

 

5. The hypothesis that the series’ mythological roots are harder to contextualize if you don’t know what the Dead Sea Scrolls are was confirmed. Pre-Wikipedia, I know most fans had no idea what they were. Post-Wikipedia, it still holds.

6. She thought it was “adorable” that I needed other people to tell me Kaworu was gay. I have absolutely no sense about these things. He’s still my favorite character.

I'm sure this is somebody's OTP.

7. I never noticed how the show baited every possible romantic pairing. There is at least one scene to suggest fan-shippable tension between almost every major character, and some of them are just incongruous. You want Shinji/Kaji? Here's a watermelon patch. It is as though Evangelion anticipated Tumblr.

8. The only part of the ending that seriously riled her up was the notion that the “School Comedy” alternate universe might have been what was going on all along. I’d never considered the cop-out of the angels all being a dream. Naturally they aren’t, but her threats to “cut a bitch if this is real” made this splendid.

However, this still earned a well-deserved "What?!!"

9. The rest of the ending, particularly the two-part psychoanalysis episode that takes place almost exclusively inside characters’ heads, didn’t upset her at all. Going into the series she said she knew many people hated how it ended; during the actual ending, she kept shaking her head and decrying anyone who didn’t see how this fit. Indeed, the introspection scenes are heavily precedented across the middle of the series, but I’m not used to hearing people care about that.

10. Her positive reaction to the TV finale made The End of Evangelion movie more interesting. We both disliked it strongly. I’d forgotten how poorly written it is, managing in its first half to be more bombastic and violent-for-show than the TV series, and the second half actually managing to become more pretentious. Her only positive takeaway was a one-sentence suggestion of what the angels actually are, which I agree ought to have been dropped into the series.

- - -

My own first viewing was biased as heck. It reached me at a time in my teens when I was struggling with paternal abandonment, serious health issues, and psychological BS. I may have been the perfect American audience for it, but now, at the decrepit age of 32, it held up as a great show. The pacing was surprisingly strong and it harbored atypically progressive storytelling for an anime, especially one that seems like it’s establishing such an obvious episode formula. It was splendid to go through it with someone who was inexperienced, smart and a good sport. Probably the greatest testament to what the show does is I'm considering re-watching it yet again starting next weekend.

Otakon Photo Journal

I'm settling in after a long trip on the road.

Thursday alone was an 11-hour journey that's given me quite the back spasms. It was worth it.

So for today, please, enjoy this photo diary of cosplay from Otakon's 20th anniversary.

For the anniversary, Baltimore lowered the thermostat below 105 degrees for once.

The first photo I took at the convention: he wanted to be a tank, and so he was.

No one on the escalator knows the horror about to unfold before them.

A family of Majin Buus. It was then that I knew I was home.

Lit Corner: John Vs. Don Quixote

One practice I'm going to change up on The Bathroom Monologues is a weekly Lit corner. This may primarily be a venue for book reviews, because I'm lucky to have read many great books and want to discuss them a little. But Sundays can also be a hub for interviews, big topics in publishing, breakthroughs in my own work and, hopefully, something more interactive. If you have a good name for our reading corner, please, drop it in the Comments.

Picasso showing his penchant for detail.

Let's start with something simple: the weirdest book review I've ever written, for Don Quixote. It was such a journey that I turned my review into a journal of climbing through the text. My mother kept a painting of Quixote in our play room as kids, and today's post is dedicated to her. The novel is a classic that I'm uncertain anyone else has ever actually finished. You'll see why shortly, as well as why I think it's closer to Naruto than anything else.


So, Book Review: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The full review originally appeared on Goodreads.


Day 1: Here goes nothing. Here come 1,000 pages of translated text. The opening was insufferably cheeky and the origins of Quixote are slower to unravel than a heroic anime. Still, I see promise here, and the reputation earns it a couple hundred pages before I pass a strong judgment.

Day 2: Just finished chapter two. Couldn't help but notice the dope wearing ill-fitting armor, his sidekick riding an ass, and the party attacking wind mills all occurred within the first two chapters. That about sums up the culturally famous parts of the novel, making me wonder how many people in human history made it to page 50.