And we're back! Almost forgot to cross-post this one, so apologies if you're getting this twice.

Originally, I wasn't going to get into Nu Metal for this retrospective. I promised myself I wasn't going to cover any bands I don't genuinely like, and several of the big names in Nu Metal are NOT bands I like. You can guess from process of elimination who that includes by the end of this post. *AHEM*

However, it would be disingenuous of me to pretend none of the music that came out of this particular sub-genre had a profound affect on me. Let me remind you that this is not a strictly linear retrospective, but I was introduced to Nu Metal in the late 90s, which was a big, formative period of my life music-wise. I have many positive memories of this era, of friends turning the radio all the way up on long drives, and learning to play the guitar in my bedroom. (Although I never got good at it, so don't ask.)

First, I should probably set some parameters for what I mean by "Nu Metal." Because even though it's one of the most hated sub-genres among True Metalheads (whom, I remind you, seriously need to chill out), it's also unique enough to have a fairly recognizable style. This was still a time of fusions between genres. Where Industrial was a combination of Shock Rock, Gothic, and Electronica, Nu Metal grew out of the existing scene and stirred in Alternative and Hip Hop. Also, much more radio-friendly than anything outside of Hair Metal.

This one's for you, Chester.

( I Won't Be Ignored )

(Cross-posted to rhoda_rants.)

Studded leather. Hairspray. Fright makeup. Gang vocals. Welcome to the era of Glam Metal.

Also sometimes called Hair Metal, but there are a few subtle differences between the two. What you need to remember is this is when image started to become important. The aesthetic of Glam is almost as central to the genre as the sound itself. IMO, Hair Metal is what happened when the image overtook the sound entirely. To simplify things, let's just call this the Bill & Ted era. If Wyld Stallyns had their t-shirt, it goes in this category.


Bill & Ted playing air guitar with text "EXCELLENT!"
Source.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Remember what I said in the intro post, about Screamin' Jay Hawkins creating a wild, over-the-top style to go with his sound? That tendency towards flamboyant excess was brought to 11 with Glam Metal. Again, the influence of horror movies cannot be overstated. But who says you can't scare people and look good doing it?

( I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night )

(Cross-posted to rhoda_rants.)

For those of you who don't know: the original Jacob's Ladder, released in 1990 and directed by Adrian Lyne, is my favorite horror movie. One of my favorite movies of all time, period. I'm also a big fan of the Silent Hill videogame franchise, which was hugely influenced by this movie. So I was bound to go into the remake a little biased.

Watch on YouTube

Honest opinion: It's . . . fine. Not great, not terrible. Just . . . fine. A little boring and predictable, maybe. But the acting is solid across the board, the cinematography is clean, the pacing is balanced, and it kept my attention for the duration of its runtime.

However. Because I am coming at this as a fan of the original, I was definitely paying WAY more attention than I needed to.

( Let me explain. )

If you're wondering whether you need to see Suicide Squad first to "get" this movie--you don't. All you need to know is Harley Quinn used to date the Joker, and Margot Robbie's "fantabulous" voiceover narration will give you the rest.


GIF: Harley Quinn walking away from rainbow-colored explosion
Source.

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn is everything I never knew I needed in a comic book movie writ large, colorful, and ridiculous. Tone-wise, it has more in common with 2010's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World than anything else DC has produced, with all the absurd funhouse logic that implies. It's loud, fast, action-packed, and gloriously, unapologetically queer. All it asks of you is to get on the ride and hang on.

( Read more. . . )

I slept only three hours last night. It was worth it.

If you somehow don't know this, My Chemical Romance is my favorite band. I saw them live four times in the late 2000s, folded myself into the amazing fan community they inspire, and was devastated when they officially broke up in 2013.

There have been rumors about the band getting back together pretty much since that day. My personal fantasy was that they would come back for a reunion show, sometime far into the future, and end the set with "Welcome to the Black Parade." Everyone fortunate enough to attend--and whoever was at home watching via livestream--would sing out every word of our emo anthem once again.


GIF: The Black Parade float with the boys on board
Source.

Last night, that fantasy came true. My mind is a little blurry since I was up WAY past my bedtime and I'm only just starting to come down from the high of knowing I now live in a world with My Chemical Romance back in it, but I will do my best to document my experience here.

This is gonna be a long one.

( You only hear the music when your heart begins to break. . . )

(Cross-posted to rhoda_rants.)

Happy Devil's Night! Here's Part 1 of this countdown if you missed it. The middle chunk of this list is all about symbolism and subtext. Sometimes what the characters don't say is more beguiling than the dialogue itself.

9 - Twixt (2011)
The darkly funny, surreal, modern Gothic vampire movie no one's seen or heard of but me, apparently. But you should. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, this movie is a phantasmagoria of high-contrast dream sequences, lakeside Goth parties, haunted woods, a mysterious clock tower, and a struggling writer trying to find his next bestseller. The wonderful sequence with Ben Chaplin as Edgar Allan Poe, who appears as an otherworldly muse to help Val Kilmer's troubled author out of a creative rut (see below), is worth the viewing all by itself. At its center, this movie is a strangely accurate depiction of how a mystery writer comes up with new ideas. It's a combination of external stimuli and personal exorcism, and that's what Kilmer's going through here. It's hard to describe but impossible to forget, also featuring Elle Fanning as a beautiful dead girl, and Alden Ehrenrich as a Goth teen who quotes Charles Baudelaire in perfect French. Keep an eye out for it, and good luck!



( 8 thru 5 here )

As a library lady, people occasionally ask me for reading recommendations. As a horror geek, my coworkers will sometimes ask for me specifically if one of our patrons wants to read something scary. It's a great question, one of my favorite duties at my job, because I love talking about scary books. Narrowing things down by age group, scare-meter, and sub-genre is part of it--"What's Your Monster?" is a good place to start. (And I highly recommend NoveList's excellent webinar on this topic if you're not already a horror geek like me.)

HOWEVER.

I thought I'd do something different for Gothmas this year, and just give you some of my personal favorites. Not in any particular order, just a list of solid, scary books. Some of these you've probably heard of. Others I hope will be fresh and new and exciting.

1) Boring Girls, by Sara Taylor
This fell onto my radar purely by fandom association; the author is also the lead singer and lyricist of The Birthday Massacre. I wrote a lengthy review for this book already, so I'll try to keep this brief: teenage heavy metal fan, and her best friend, get violently assaulted at a show and swear revenge. It's tense, gruesome, tragic, and impossible to put down.

2) The Women in the Walls, by Amy Lukavics
Occasionally, I will check out a book just because the cover looks intriguing, and sometimes it turns out great. This was one of those times. The women in this family have a history of vaguely defined mental illness that might also be demonic possession, and is tied to the disappearance of the main character's mother before the start of the novel. Falls into the same realm of "RICH PEOPLE ARE SO WEIRD" as Ready Or Not, but with less humor and more Gothic atmosphere.

3) This Monstrous Thing, by Mackenzi Lee
If Mackenzi Lee isn't already on your automatic "YES" list, do something about that, because she is fabulous. She's gotten some buzz recently for her Gentleman's Guide series, and for her Loki Investigates Murder In Victorian London book (it's even more rad than it sounds), but this one fell to the bottom of the pile somehow. And that's a shame, because it's a steampunk reimagining of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, with Shelley herself as a major character. Revolution, mad scientists, automatons--it's great!

4) The Children's Home, by Charles Lambert
Another one I picked up because the cover was interesting. This is such a bizarre piece of work. It's told from the point of view of a kindly caretaker whose home gradually, mysteriously fills with lost children. The children are uncommonly intelligent and erudite. There's a shady organization searching for them. The revelation at the end completely blew my mind. More conceptual than some, and more literary than my usual, but sticks in the brain like a nightmare you can't quite remember.

5) And the Trees Crept In, by Dawn Kurtagich
This comes across like a standard family curse story, until it doesn't. The most effective monsters are those that blend supernatural threats with real-life horror, and that's where this operates. The formatting and layout are disorienting on their own, and I had to read between the lines and seek out other reviews to piece together what had really happened. This book is upsetting in so many ways. Don't read after dark.

6) House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
Speaking of disorienting! All you need to do is flip through this a little bit to know you'll be in for a very unusual ride. It took me a year to read this. Yes, an entire year. With breaks for less confusing and dense books in between. I'm not kidding. This book made me feel like I was being watched, like there was something peeking out from between the pages. It was worth it, but I don't think I could read it twice.

7) Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire
Technically Book 2 in Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series, also technically a prequel focused on Jack and Jill, but easily my favorite of the bunch. All the Wayward Children books are wonderfully bittersweet. This one just happens to be set in the sort of Graveyard Gothic fantasy land I'd most like to visit myself, all vampires, crumbling castles, and haunted moors.

8) The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
I know it's not new, but it is a classic, and I will always include it on lists like this. A lesson that we as a society seem to keep relearning is that wealth, class, and beauty are NOT signifiers of moral character. This book was a scathing critique of so-called Victorian values in its time. The fact that it stays relevant is scary all by itself. It is my very favorite book, and I reread it every single year.

9) The Girl from the Well, by Rin Chupeco
You've probably heard of Koji Suzuki's Japanese horror series, Ringu, or at least the various movie adaptations, but you might not be familiar with the legend of Okiku's Well that inspired it. This book not only introduced me to that unsettling true story, but gave Okiku a voice, generating empathy for a vengeance ghost without sapping any of her terrible power. The sequel, The Suffering, is pretty great too, but I'm more attached to the mystery in this one.

10) Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer
The first in the Southern Reach trilogy, and the basis for the cosmic horror film starring Natalie Portman and Tessa Thompson, this short but riveting novel is a strange wild beast. I give credit to the filmmakers for evoking a similar mood, but the original story has a lot of memorable imagery we never seen on screen. The tower, the writing on the wall, and the lighthouse keeper's diary are all iconic stops along the biologist's journey. If you've seen the film and want more--or even if you haven't--read this.

There's another terrific article going around about Ari Aster's latest brain-crunching horror film here. That review gets into many of the reasons I found it so moving--yes, moving--but not all of them.

"MIDSOMMAR | Official Trailer HD | A24" (Watch on YouTube)

( Read more. . . )

I went to see MIB: International last week, partially to celebrate getting a pay raise at work, partially because I will watch literally anything with Tessa Thompson. All three previous Men In Black movies are cherished in my family, and have been since we saw the first one in theaters back in 1997. We still quote them endlessly. Yes, all of them, although the first is a definite favorite.

So I approached the new entry with equal parts excitement and trepidation. It was . . . fine. I laughed out loud a fair few times. I liked most of the characters. The plot was straightforward and easy to follow, no surprises really, but it was fun. So yeah, it was fine. About on par with the other two sequels, but not going to overtake the original in a hurry. Pretty much what I expected. It was also one of the most sparsely attended opening nights I've been to in a while.

My overall impression can accurately be summed up with this awkward thumbs-up GIF:


Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson exchanging thumbs-up, her with a slightly pained expression.
Source.

( Let me explain. . . )

(Cross-posted to rhoda_rants.)

Boy, have I had a time trying to watch this movie. I missed seeing it in theaters. I forget why. Although this came out last October, so I might've just been burned out on movies in general. Of course, when there's something on my list that I don't catch in theaters, the assumption is that I'll be able to watch the DVD later.

Except, the DVD does not exist.

It's only available on BluRay and streaming, which I have ranted about elseweb, so I won't repeat it here. There's a tangential rant to be made about the choke hold certain streaming services have on their viewers nowadays, but . . . later.

Someone suggested I check Red Box. I did. Couldn't get it there either. One wonders if the Red Box even had the standard DVD at one point, or if it would've turned out to be the BluRay as well. At some point I resigned myself to waiting for it to come to Netflix, which it would have to eventually, but probably not anytime soon.

Then I made the mistake of watching Nyx Fears' vlog review. She made it sound awesome, and I always agree with her, so I HAD to see it after that. Finally made the decision to just rent the damn thing on iTunes.

Had to change my password, because of course; had to update my billing info, because of course; had to commit to watching it in brief, 30-to-50 minute chunks at a time, all within 48 hours, after which it would disappear from my rentals, because OF COURSE.

After the absolute CHORE that it was to get my eyeballs on this movie, all I could think when I finally hit "Play" was, "This had better be worth it."

Readers, it is worth it.

"Suspiria - Official Trailer | Amazon Studios" (Watch on YouTube)

( This is what happens when you ignore the three-fold law. )