The very definition of lean and mean. 🖤

• Tagged: November 2026, film diary, film and television, review, Edgar G. Ulmer
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• You Can See Everything
  Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, 2026, ★★★★½
  Ritz 5, Philadelphia, PA
• And Soon the Darkness
  Robert Fuest, 1970, ★★★

• Tagged: November 2026
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• Tagged: October 2026, listening diary, music, The Misfits, Marina Herlop, Upsammy, The Cars, Holy Tongue, Spread Joy, Crypta, The Everly Brothers, Sean Wolcott, Daniel Bachman, Finn Loxbo
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I finally got around to seeing all the Child’s Play / Chucky movies, and pound for pound, this is probably the most tolerable deep dive of a long-running horror franchise I’ve ever done. A few notes:

• The decision to continue with animatronics and puppetry for the duration of the series is absolutely crucial to its success. CGI would have made these movies unwatchable.
• I like how the series is kind of made up of rhyming couplets: The first movie (★★★) is mostly straight-faced; Child’s Play 2 (★★½) and 3 (★★) settle into conventional slasher rhythm and ramp up Chucky’s wisecracks; Bride of Chucky (★★★½) and Seed of Chucky (★★★½) go waaayyyy over the top into unapologetic camp; and Curse of Chucky (★★½) and Cult of Chucky (★★) take a more back-to-basics approach to horror with a few inventive twists to keep things interesting.
• My family didn’t have cable, so I asked a friend to tape Child’s Play off HBO for me in 1989 or 1990. (Killer Klowns from Outer Space was on the same tape.) I must have watched it a lot back then, because rewatching it now, so many little details that I haven’t thought about in decades were already etched in my memory.
• Grace Zabriskie was in Child’s Play 2 a few years before she had a recurring role on Seinfeld, and Child’s Play 2 is in Jerry’s VHS collection. Coincidence? Probably! But Pretty Woman, featuring Jason Alexander, is in that collection too, so maybe Seinfeld had a set dresser with a mischievous meta streak.
• Apparently Peter Jackson was the first choice to direct Child’s Play 3, which would undoubtedly have resulted in a better film, but the world is much better off with the amazing film he made instead, Braindead.
• Bride and Seed get the highest marks from me mainly because I’m simply astonished they were made at all, and especially Seed, whose Ed-Wood-inspired title character is not only transgender, but the result of two sentient killer dolls fucking. A Universal Pictures release! From this point on, the series embraces queerness more than any other mainstream horror franchise I can think of, certainly helped along by its creator, Don Mancini, who is gay.
• Chucky really benefits from being able to do his thing in a variety of environments and scenarios—apartments, foster homes, mental hospitals, factories, schools, carnivals, RVs, moving cars, etc.—and the budget constraints of the last two movies confining them each to a single location is a primary factor in their diminishing returns.

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• Tagged: October 2026, film diary, film and television, review, robtober, Don Mancini
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• Jennifer’s Body
  Karyn Kusama, 2009, ★★
• Child’s Play
  Tom Holland, 1988, ★★★
• Child’s Play 2
  John Lafia, 1990, ★★½
• Child’s Play 3
  Jack Bender, 1991, ★★
• Bride of Chucky
  Ronny Yu, 1998, ★★★½
• Seed of Chucky
  Don Mancini, 2004, ★★★½
• Curse of Chucky
  Don Mancini, 2013, ★★½

💿 Added to the music library:

• Basilikum
  Holy Tongue, 2026

• Tagged: October 2026
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L very thoughtfully picked up this great little book for me while she was in Scotland a few months ago. Subtitled “AFTER a late start, a first career, illness, raising children, a crisis of confidence, leaving it in disgust…,” it’s a perfect guide for someone like myself who’s returning to making art in earnest in middle age and trying to get past the imposter syndrome. It begins with a helpful reminder that there are many paths into the art ecosystem before offering plenty of good advice about setting goals, developing good working habits, finding and/or building community, and showing and selling work.

I’m in the process of solidifying some long-gestating scaffolding for a new body of work in multiple media, and this book is already helping me keep my head on straight as it comes to life. It’s also inspiring some rethinking of my attitudes and strategies around how I’m currently presenting and selling (or not selling) existing work. There are no easy answers to any of it, but the book’s perspective is both valuable and digestible, and I won’t be surprised if I find myself returning to it often in the months and years to come.

• Tagged: October 2026, reading diary, art, books, review, Hettie Judah
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I’m always grateful for an opportunity to see artful indie animated shorts on a big screen within biking distance from my home, and in recent years the Philadelphia Film Festival’s program has been reliably good. This year’s, though it included some strong entries, was unfortunately sorely lacking in thematic variety: Six of the eight films were about parenting or marriage. I won’t say they didn’t honor those experiences, but few felt especially insightful. Unlike their mainstream counterparts, most of these films made good use of the medium’s expressive elasticity, but it was definitely a less adventurous crop than usual.

Cartoon Physics ★★★

Ru Kuwahata, Max Porter (France, Netherlands, Switzerland)

A mom tries to preserve her child’s innocence, likening it to the forgiving physics of a cartoon world, knowing the harshness of the real world is lurking around every corner. I’m a big fan of some of Kuwahata’s and Porter’s previous stop-motion work, especially Negative Space, and this one is tonally similar and undeniably well-executed, but the writing is sadly unremarkable.

Marble & Lemons ★★★

Anna Katalin Lovrity (France, Hungary)

A snapshot of aging mother and 20-something daughter on vacation together, an alternately prickly and tender relationship as one asserts her autonomy and the other begins to lose it. Not a standout, but elegantly constructed, with a nice palette and angular design.

Terminal ★★½

Alexandre Siqueira (Portugal, France, Spain)

A mother has to learn to let go a second time when her estranged son returns to the nest with a terminal illness. The son’s initial emergence from a pirate ship, covered in tattoos mapping his world travels, hints at a character depth we are ultimately not privy to. He and his mom are flat as a pancake.

Ivar ★★★

Markus Tangre (Norway)

A wicked and ultimately sweet homage to the loathing that coexists with love in a long-term relationship. Its insomniac heroine’s detailed catalog of her husband’s faults appropriately employs a variety of techniques, from live-action puppetry to hand-drawn frame animation.

Busy Bodies ★★½

Kate Renshaw-Lewis (USA)

This, the only non-narrative pick of the bunch, really stuck out, and I was surprised to see that its collection of bizarre Rube Goldbergs powered by automaton gnomes was made by an American, as it’s dripping with eastern European flavor. I like how proudly it flies its own flag, especially when its textured visuals start to disintegrate, but I ultimately wanted a little more from it than it had to offer.

Because Today Is Saturday ★★★★

Alice Eça Guimarães (Portugal, France, Spain)

Easily the best of the program’s reflections on parenthood, depicting a mom trying in stolen moments to reconnect with her essential self, only to have her brief reprieve shattered by one or another domestic banality only she can solve. It moves through its mise en scène with a fluidity live action could never match, and while most stories tackling this topic tend to suggest that motherhood’s rewards are worth the endless and thankless aggravation, I appreciate that this one is caked in despair.

The End ★★★½

Niki Lindroth von Bahr (Sweden, France, Denmark)

I’m never not excited to see new work from this director (executive-produced by Noomi Rapace, no less!), and The End’s apocalyptic trip into air-travel hell with a zoologically diverse cast of characters is a refreshing left turn from the overrepresented family drama of the rest of the screening. Lindroth von Bahr’s signature stew of humor and existential dread is a deadpan delight as always, even if it’s doing a lot more winking at the audience this time. This film’s structure of loosely-connected vignettes makes it feel like a spiritual sequel to her 2017 musical, The Burden.

Living With a Visionary ★★½

Stephen P. Neary (USA)

It brings me no joy to report that this heartbreaking true story of a man caring for his wife with Parkinson’s disease is an assembly-line tearjerker whose visuals do little to elevate the linear literalism of its narration. I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t get the Oscar it is so transparently designed to receive.

• This post is part of a series
• Tagged: October 2026, film diary, film and television, event, review, Ru Kuwahata, Max Porter, Anna Katalin Lovrity, Alexandre Siqueira, Markus Tangre, Kate Renshaw-Lewis, Alice Eça Guimarães, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, Stephen P. Neary, PFS East, Philadelphia, PA
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After many years away, I’m back in the used-CD market, and it feels like home. This isn’t the Cars compilation I had on my wishlist—despite the title, this one is more than I needed—but I could hardly balk at two and a half hours of prime power pop for eight bucks, even if I’ve always been baffled by its product category: it collects the hits for the casual fans and B-sides and unreleased stuff for the diehard fans, two very different audiences. Still, this time it’s probably a good fit for me, someone who loves the Cars classics and appreciates having some additional below-the-radar context without feeling the need to be a completist.

• Tagged: October 2026, music library, music, review, The Cars, Repo Records, Philadelphia, PA
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One way I noticed that the couple rubbed off on each other in that pivotal time was their propensity for a busy, all-over abstraction that tends to give off an aggregate grayscale effect. As much as I appreciate that many of those works reward closer inspection with smaller prismatic bursts, I prefer the works whose bold color is more readily apparent, like the one above, and like my favorite of Pollock’s famous drip paintings, “Convergence: Number 10, 1952.”

I’m not sure I had gotten to see this one in person before, and I can’t overstate how looking at a smaller version now simply does not do justice to the effect of seeing this mammoth painting up close and at scale.

• Tagged: October 2026, art, review, travel, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
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I realize that attempting to appeal to a population’s human decency may be hopelessly naive, that this misguided accelerationism may instead inflame the nation’s bloodlust and further empower the proudly ignorant strongmen who’ve already brought us so much ruin. But I don’t know; maybe this country really does need to properly hit bottom before it can begin to heal. And to be clear, I believe it does deserve to heal. We all deserve to heal.

• Tagged: October 2026, politics
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