Weeknotes 252

Hello! New month new you.

Or is it?

One final push got me over the hump of a project milestone at work. The period since I began writing worknotes is the hardest I’ve ever worked, I think, so it’ll be nice to ease off a bit before the next deadline begins to loom.

This weekend I ordered, received and drank some whisky.

I also baked two more loaves of sourdough. Patient, meditative, satisfying, no laptop allowed.

(“You were on the bus? You were on the bus, watching condensation drip. Mindfulness.”)

As a Halloween treat I relistened to Jonathan Coulton’s Creepy Doll, featuring the scariest lines ever to appear in a song:

When you come home late the doll is waiting up for you
And when you fix a snack the doll says it would like one too

I otherwise had the bloody Corruption music stuck in my head all week. It turns out hearing the original is far more potent than allowing it to play silently in my mind as I cycle around east London.

James reminded me of the 13-year anniversary of Ru3y Manor, which aside from the memento mori was fun to think about again. It was also gratifying to get some kind replies on Mastodon from people who remembered the talk I gave.

I watched Alien: Romulus and found it exciting but ultimately silly. Alien’s one of my favourite films so I thought Romulus would be an easy sell; now that I’ve seen it, I think it’s probably easier to enjoy if you’re new to the franchise.

Here’s one of my many out-of-touch nitpicks: Sigourney Weaver and Veronica Cartwright were roughly 30 years old in Alien, John Hurt & Yaphet Kotto were 40ish, and Harry Dean Stanton, Ian Holm and Tom Skerritt were either approaching 50 or already past it. Grizzled space truckers, okay, I buy it. In Romulus almost everyone’s in their mid-twenties — Isabela Merced’s 23! — and that sucked the last dregs of realism out of it for me. Who even let these kids fly a spaceship?

In a more significant misstep, casting █ ███ ████ of ██ ██ was completely unnecessary and didn’t work at all. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking.

I also watched The Substance which was unpleasant, and mostly not in a clever way.

I’m glad I saw it, it’s inventive and confident and singular, but (like Romulus) I doubt I’ll ever watch it again. The frenetic visual style reads as sophomoric rather than meaningful, and the feminism is so over-the-top satirical that it lurches way past the line into straight-up pandering to the male gaze in a way that I couldn’t trick myself into enjoying ironically.

Its main crime is being way too long, which is guaranteed to make my mind wander into thinking about other films that do a better job with the same ideas: The Fly, The Thing, Requiem for a Dream, Braindead, The Elephant Man, even Delicatessen. There are some good body horror bits, but if you’ve already seen Seth Brundle peel off his fingernails or Lionel Cosgrove go ham with a lawnmower there’s not much to hold your interest here.

I forgot to mention the most memorable thing about MaXXXine: Lily Collins doing the strangest Yorkshire accent I’ve ever heard in a film.

I found the escalating conceit of SNL’s Hotel Detective sketch pretty funny. It’s not exactly Pre-Taped Call In Show but I’ll take it.

Good luck America.