Seth Harris

Movie Review – Day of the Locust

Day of the Locust (1975)
Written by Waldo Salt
Directed by John Schlesinger

There’s an exhausting sunbaked feeling surrounding Day of the Locust. The music and the soft lighting make conflicting claims, but if you pay close attention, you notice the rotten smell wafting up from underneath. You see it in the cracks in Tod Hackett’s apartment, hidden by a framed quote claiming the presence of God is protecting the people within. This is shown as the landlady tells Tod about the earthquake of 1932, where she and her tenants were spared while others died across the city. Tod ends up covering the crack with his artwork, slowly building a fresco of Hollywood in flames, hollow, empty faces screaming out.

Movie Review – The Landlord

The Landlord (1970)
Written by Kristin Hunter & Bill Gunn
Directed by Hal Ashby

Hal Ashby was an unlikely person. His films reflect that, focusing on the buffoonery of the privileged class, always giving the upper hand to the vulnerable, people of color especially. Ashby grew up in a dysfunctional family in Utah that culminated with the suicide of his father. The young Hal dropped out of high school and never got a degree. Years later, when the studio would put out biographies of filmmakers in press packets, they lied and said Ashby graduated from the University of Utah. Unlike his contemporaries, like Francis Ford Coppolla or Martin Scorsese, Ashby had no formal academic background.

The State of the Blog 2020

2019 was a year of changes with the shutting down of Google+, a venue where I grew the current iteration of the blog starting back in 2015. My views recovered and they grew by 3% from the previous year. I had my longest consecutive streak of 1,000+ views per month (June through November). Here’s what I have planned looking ahead into a new decade.

My Most Anticipated Films of 2020

The Grudge (January 3, directed by Nicolas Pesce)
I quite enjoyed Nicolas Pesce’s 2016 horror flick The Eyes of My Mother. It was disturbing and gory in just the right ratio for me, there wasn’t an over-reliance on the violence, and when it happened, you definitely felt the impact. I didn’t realize he was directing the reboot of The Grudge, which makes me much more interested to see the film than before. If Pesce is allowed to inject some of his own style into this picture, it could rise above a throwaway January release. It also helps that Andrea Riseborough (Birdman, Mandy) has a prominent role, and she always does a great job.

December 2019 Digest

Features
Short Film Showcase #7
Short Film Showcase Christmas 2019 Special
Favorite Music of 2019
Book Update – November/December
Favorite Books of 2019
Most Anticipated Films of 2019 – A Look Back

[Best of the Decade]
My Favorite Television of the 2010s Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Best of the 2010s – YouTubers
My Favorite Comics of the 2010s Part 1, Part 2
My Favorite Films of 2010
My Favorite Films of 2011
My Favorite Films of 2012
My Favorite Films of 2013
My Favorite Films of 2014
My Favorite Films of 2015
My Favorite Films of 2016
My Favorite Films of 2017
My Favorite Films of 2018
My Favorite Films of 2019

My Favorite Books I Read in 2019

Friday Black: Stories by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Ever since I read Civilwarland in Bad Decline and Pastoralia, both by George Saunders, I have been searching for that sort of literary voice, and I think I’ve found it in Adjei-Brenyah. The most obvious connection is the short “Zimmer Land,” a theme park where people come to act out their aggressive fantasies while mostly ethnic minority employees (wearing high tech protective gear) become human punching bags. “The Finkelstein Five” continues that exploration of contemporary race conflict as the narrator becomes caught up in the reaction to the acquittal of a child murderer who took the lives of four black children with a chainsaw. There’s a duo of stories about the Thunderdome like conditions of a future shopping mall, where customers kill each other over insulated parkas. My favorite was the closing story, “Through the Flash” and it brought me to tears while reading it. That tale features a teenage girl caught in a dystopian time loop where she and her neighbors have lived the same days for thousands of years. It was an oddly hopeful and heartbreaking story. Of all the fiction I’ve read this year Friday Black gets my most enthusiastic recommendation.

Movie Review – Old Dogs

Old Dogs (2009)
Written by David Diamond & David Weissman
Directed by Walt Becker

How does one end a year and a film series about forgotten terrible movies? Well, the best way, in my opinion, is by subjecting yourself to one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. Yes, this is the second time I’ve watched Old Dogs. Do you see what I do for you people? Old Dogs came out a decade ago, a film that marked the movie duo we’ve always wanted to see, John Travolta & Robin Williams…? This is a film with so many strange things happening on the screen, and I have some theories about what the picture was originally going to be. Let’s not waste a single moment more.

Movie Review – Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2019)
Written & Directed by Bi Gan

There are two starkly separated halves to this film. The first half is nothing too remarkable, some beautiful cinematography and a noir story that will feel very familiar, no real surprises. The second half is a shock; the visuals are the focus, yet somehow they still keep the narrative going. Bi Gan takes some significant risks in this latter section, banking his entire film on what could easily have just been a gimmick. Instead, he turns this into a remarkable feat, something rarely attempted in filmmaking, but Bi Gan sticks the landing.

Movie Review – Lucy in the Sky

Lucy in the Sky (2019)
Written by Noah Hawley, Elliott DiGuiseppi, & Brian C. Brown
Directed by Noah Hawley

In 2007, NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak was arrested for the attempted kidnapping of another female astronaut who was involved with a mutual male colleague. Lisa brought a BB pistol, pepper spray, and a wig to the Orlando International Airport, where she assaulted the woman. The piece of this story that got the most traction in the news at the time is that Nowak wore adult diapers so as not delay her arrival time. This is what Lucy in the Sky is loosely based on, an incident does occur at an airport in the finale. There is a lot you could do with this story, delving into the psychology of Lisa Nowak, trying to figure out how someone so accomplished, one of few humans to escape the bonds of Earth, had such a profound and public mental breakdown. Director Noah Hawley decided he would rather play around with aspect ratio than tell that sort of story.

Book Update – November/December 2019

Fiction

Insurrections: Stories by Rion Amilcar
I had heard a lot of hype about Amilcar after his latest collection, “The World Doesn’t Require You,” was published earlier this year. I went back and read his first anthology and was a little underwhelmed. When Scott is at his best, he channels the urgency of Flannery O’Connor. Most of the stories fell flat for me, and it did cause me to move his new book down my reading list in favor of other titles. My favorite story in this collection was “A Friendly Game,” which follows a high school student caught up in an incredibly toxic male friendship. This is paralleled with the story of a mentally ill homeless woman in their neighborhood who lost her son years earlier, which led to her breakdown. The antagonist in the story is great and really gets you inside of what the main character is having to deal with daily.