Pride of Frankenstein : Yorgos Lanthimos – “Poor Things”

Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest,  set in a fantasy-steampunk Victorian London,  is simultaneously his most unhinged and most approachable film. Emma Stone plays Bella Baxter, a Bride-of-Monster-of-Frankenstein creature who- after committing suicide for reasons that Kate Chopin might have related to- has been revived by mad scientist Godwin “God” Baxter (a scarred up, scary, yet fatherly Willem …

It’s Always Aliens: “The X-Files” S. 3

Elsewhere I have commented at length on Seasons 1 and 2 of Chris Carter's "The X-Files," a show that held significant sway over my youthful imagination, but it's now as ancient as the Nazca Lines. And yet in the '90s, "The X-Files" was a presage of the Golden Age of Television, as close to a …

Spare Change: May 5-14 /23

Brief Blurbs on stuff that caught my Eye, Ear, or Heart this week. John Mulaney’s audience knew him for his cheerful, likable, wide-eyed-boy in the big-bad-city routines. But in the last couple of years, Mulaney went through (unnecessarily public) rehabs, mishaps, and divorces. He’s dying for the attention, though, as he says in “Baby J,” …

Bewitched? Don’t Be Bothered, Be Wilder: Caroline Hagood – “Weird Girls”

When poet/novelist/essayist Caroline Hagood reminisces about her defining childhood encounter with L. Frank Baum's Wicked Witch of the West, (green and glowering out of a TV screen), it is not with a sense of fear but a sense of recognition: after all, the WWW is engaged in the grand creative act of writing. SKY writing, …

The Body Electric : Stephen King – “Revival”

Electricity. Life and death magnetic. It shocked science fiction into existence with Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," and almost two hundred years later Stephen King still can't wrap his mind around a lightning bolt. The existence of a "secret electricity" (with magical effects I would rather not spoil)  is the conceptual spark that runs through "Revival," his …