Author Archives: alexlovendahl

ANIMAL WELL

Posted in Games by

Animal Well
Billy Basso
NS, PS5, XSX, PC

The insular popularity of Fez, your favorite game designer’s favorite game, has haunted me for twelve years. Designed primarily by infamous director Phil Fish and Renaud Bedard, the puzzle platforming of Fez dominates the cosmos of Animal Well, which trades Fez’s tone of post-Vonnegut observational comedy for a lonely, haunted malevolence. Instead of the hypercube tearing the cosmos into black holes, instead some dark, spiritual energy sends malevolence into the already carnivorous world of Animal Well. Your little blob darts into the remains of somewhere obviously forgotten.

Structurally, Animal Well has much in common with Metroid or Zelda, though it lacks either of their focus on combat. A 2D exploration platformer with a map so dense you’ll eventually fill all but the barest walls, your simple leap helps traverse abstract non-places filled with creatures and critters dangerous and benign. You navigate puzzles across four animal kingdoms, collecting tools which help you delve deeper into these mazes. My favorites of these are the yo-yo, which can hit switches down pits and around corners as it rolls on its string, and the thrown disc, which is sometimes a frisbee you throw or ride and other times a distraction for dogs and wolves quite a lot larger than yourself.

Animal Well has become known for its multiple layers of completeness – anything past the first makes Symphony of the Night’s inverted castle look like Porky Pig’s Haunted Holiday. The game contains 64 (or more?) eggs (like easter egg, get it?) which are the currency required to reach the game’s second ending and some of these fuckers are devious. Anything past the second layer requires Getting Online And Getting Help (or, at least, there’s one solution that factually requires that.)

An early puzzle room in Animal Well.

I’ll be honest – I watched FuryForged’s explainer videos for the later secrets of Animal Well, which I found too frustrating and minute to track. I have no interest in this kind of map combing, especially without the additional hint of at least highlighting where more secrets lie. Especially compared to Fish’s Fez, which this game owes so much debt it grants Gomez a cameo, this game went past my patience. The secrets started to be less about having insight into how the game works and more about willingness to poke and prod every corner or wall of the map. In my opinion, you should stick to the core conceit – find the four flames, each buried within an animal kingdom, and collect as many eggs as you can find. The game’s core puzzles really reward explorative play, with the items you find allowing for creative play without requiring the hyper-athleticism of a game like Super Metroid. There are sequences which encourage reactive thinking, sequential logic thinking, intuitive and deductive reasoning, simple navigation, and pretty successful platforming.

But for my money, Animal Well’s real triumph is the aesthetic. There are so many delightfully rendered pixel art animals in here. They make so many good noises and have such charming animations. They are shaded so damned well. Some are adorable and others are very threatening. And yet, despite the population of critters around, this game feels very lonely. The user interface stays out of your way and immerses you in this place’s darkness. Even compared to a game like Hollow Knight, there’s a sense that this well was something more. I admire the achievement of this game’s nonverbal narrative, its evocation of a world that once stood.

A whale!

There’s also wonderful sound design in here. There’s a lot of rushing water and machinery, but the highlight is the number of creative animal sounds. Occasionally, something like the flapping of wings is produced more faithfully, but the vocalizations of animals are typically synth bloops very similar to Pokemon cries. However, unlike that game series structuring those cries as musical jingles, Animal Well tends toward short, evocative noises, like the gulp of a chameleon or the brief chitter as a squirrel shuffles away. A lonely cooing sounds off in the distance every so often, and finding its source is immensely satisfying.

Animal Well communicates everything it wants to say nonverbally. It occasionally will prompt you with a button to interact with something, but there are not text boxes explaining how to use your frisbee disc. That isn’t to say it’s entirely shy of language – there are pictograms, there’s musical notation, there’s gates associated with specific switches and keys. But unlike some puzzle games, Animal Well celebrates the notion of discovery as play by cutting out that form of communication. That it does it pretty intuitively, especially in those first two layers of play, is pretty impressive to me.

People smarter than me, like Balatro developer LocalThunk (who unsurprisingly will make an appearance later in this series), have declared Animal Well the Game of the Year. I say they are smarter than me partly because this game did not surpass the realm of solvable in their eyes and also because they have made some works I am awestruck by. I both wonder if I’ve had my eyebrows blown off by my one experience with Fez and just don’t care to get out the pen and paper again and wonder if I’m just not programmer-brained enough for this particular puzzle logic. But even not being able to go the full distance and embrace Animal Well as a masterpiece like they have, I still find the game to be quite memorable, affecting, and creative, in ways that make it an easy recommendation for my friends who love to stare at a game screen and wonder aloud if they’re stupid and know the answer is “probably.”

ASTRO BOT

Posted in Games by

Team Asobi
2024
PS5

Astro Bot has been a Game of the Year finalist just about everywhere you can look, including taking home the prize at Geoff Keighley’s The Game Awards. The successor to PlayStation 5 pack-in game Astro’s Playroom, Astro Bot takes that game’s high-polish 3D platforming and blows it out to a full game, each level a fun, playful celebration of motion. In the way that Wicked or Dune Part Two is the film of the year, Astro Bot represents the peak of industry investment. It is everything your expensive game console wants to be able to do without any of the open world cruft, microtransactions, or cinematic storytelling. This is a celebration of video games as video games rather than as an alternate vehicle for an HBO miniseries or a pure capitalist skinnerbox.

It’s pretty good!

Even compared to some Mario games, Astro Bot’s jump, speed, and responsiveness to its environment is really satisfying. If you have love for running around in this kind of space and bonking orb-shaped baddies, this game has it in spades. When you land on the ice, rather than taking on that somewhat frustrating slippery-foot feeling Ocarina of Time players know all too well, Astro Bot starts ice skating, giving you propulsive forward motion but also a fine degree of control. The air hover allows for precise landings in a way the Super Mario Sunshine F.L.U.D.D. dreams of doing.

There are nine different upgrades you can find midway through a level, and each of them gives you a new way to experience the platforming and exploration of the game. Some are fairly simple – there’s a rocket boost, a racing charge forward, a boxing glove that lets you punch harder and farther. But they also have surprising uses – the boxing gloves also let you grab onto certain objects and swing farther. One highlight is a shrinking device that lets you get through small holes and navigate new spaces – it lets you get real small and see the levels in entirely new ways. About half of them feel directly ripped from Super Mario Sunshine or Galaxy, but they are all perfectly well implemented.

One of Astro Bot’s bosses, which are generally fairly standard pattern repetition bosses with some charming animation and a sense of large scale.

These upgrades help diversify the game’s many levels, each about five minutes in length and containing somewhere between 8-12 hidden secrets to obtain. Sometimes, like in Super Mario World before it, there are secret exits that unlock new levels. Sometimes, navigating the overworld map menu in your little spaceship gives you a chance to unlock new challenge “meteorite” levels. All of these are largely really well designed platforming levels, and if you’re someone like me who laments the fact that open world games often contain kind of haphazard play spaces where you’re meant to “find the fun,” Astro Bot rejects the idea that connective tissue is what helps attach you to a video game.

In fact, it basically rejects any kind of connective tissue. Astro Bot is constantly ping-ponging between different visual pastiches on its little planetoids. You’ll play a desert tomb level – a jungle level – a tundra level – and there’s no real effort made to try to sell these as places rather than video game levels. The enemies rarely receive any more personality, meant to be pretty interchangeable between levels.

The only real sense of cohesion comes from the PlayStation brand. In every level, between one and three of the rescuable fellow bots will be costumed as a character from a different PlayStation game. It starts with you rescuing Ratchet and Rivet from the Ratchet & Clank games. Then, it’s Solid Snake, Psycho Mantis, and Gray Fox from Metal Gear Solid. This experience does not exclusively contain cameos from games as beloved as these or as distant in the past. When you complete a world, you end up playing an entire level based on one of these properties. Some of these game series have been dead for decades – others feel so new that it’s a little giving Poochie.

A host of bot cameos, including Parappa the Rapper, Kratos from God of War, The Hunter from Bloodborne, and many more.

All along the way, there is a nonstop chattering of these bots. They are constantly chirping, whining, woo-hooing. It is a lot like watching the Minions from Despicable Me. I find them completely exhausting. I started to get a headache. Despite the game having a pretty good soundtrack, I had to turn the sound off entirely after an hour to shut these damn bots up.

As curmudgeonly as I know I sound, I want to give some generosity to “loving the brand.” Not because I think it’s virtuous, to be clear, but because I remember being a child. I remember playing Super Smash Bros. for the first time, encountering Ness, and being fascinated by the concept of Earthbound, a game I would eventually play and fall in love with. I remember booting up Super Smash Bros. Melee and just wanting to hang out in its non-worlds to listen to the music and experience more of these games. I remember my dad declaring war against Banjo-Kazooie because of the non-stop squawking every time you took a step in Talon Trot.

I did not want to spend more time puttering around with the (quite intricate) physics simulations in Astro Bot’s world. I was not filled with wonder playing a level inspired by LocoRoco, a game somewhat unimaginable under modern Sony leadership where their games are either live service megaliths that are too big to fail (or will be shut down the moment they do) or are better suited to an HBO TV series. I did not enjoy seeing Kat from Gravity Rush, whose developer Sony Japan was gutted, the remainder forming Team Asobi and making Astro Bot. I can only imagine what a game without all these cameos might be like, given more space to develop its own identity like Shadow of the Colossus or Okami. And yet Nintendo never released another Mother game in the US – hell, it took decades to even get Earthbound available again on the Wii U or Switch. F-Zero and Kid Icarus were given one more chance before being resigned to ports of classic games. That didn’t stop me from chasing them down.

But there is a new Okami coming out! A new game from Shadow of the Colossus developer Fumito Ueda! The Gravity Rush director, Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, came out with a new game this year, a reimagining of Siren called Slitterhead. Slitterhead, dude! Whatever problems the game industry might have – and there are many – Astro Bot is not responsible for them. I hope it inspires young players to seek out these old classics, and I hope it inspires Sony and its colleagues to make those classics readily available.

INDIANA JONES AND THE GREAT CIRCLE

Posted in Games by

MachineGames
2024
Xbox Series, PC (PlayStation 5 Spring 2025)

At times, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle follows in its publisher Bethesda’s lineage as the year’s best “turn your brain off and follow these waypoints” game of the year. With three major open world hubs, major sequences of your playtime will likely be dedicated to opening your questlog, heading to a section of the map, knocking unconscious every fascist guard in sight, and picking up whatever quest item you need to bring back to the quest giver to unlock another segment of your health bar. I cannot stress enough that unless you enjoy this kind of play, the game does not require it, and in fact the gameplay may even get worse by your process of unlocking overpowered disguises, upgrades to your health and ammo, and having explored cool locations before the main story intends you to do so.

This stuff is here because it allows the game to function as a mystery. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle takes place somewhere between Raiders of the Lost Ark (barring an incredibly misguided intro where you play that film’s opening) and the Last Crusade, the Nazis still spreading influence throughout the world but not quite openly at war, Marion Ravenwood having dumped Dr. Jones. A giant played admirably by the now-deceased Tony Todd (not quite his final screen appearance thanks to this year’s upcoming Final Destination: Bloodlines) ransacks Marshall College and sets Indiana on a globetrotting trip to uncover a classic fascist plot to weaponize one of history’s great artifacts.

One of the puzzles found somewhere in the Vatican City.

Ultimately, while you spend a lot of this game knocking out or killing fascists (the game is not shy about identifying Blackshirts, Nazis, or the Empire of Japan) the game is more about exploring the environments, solving puzzles, and trying to figure out what the overarching mystery is going to be before the game gives away its own story. (Yes, it involves Jim Alison’s obscure Great Circle conspiracy.) The game gives Indy a sounding board in journalist Gina Lombardi, a nemesis in Nazi archeologist Emmerich Voss, and a collection of local friends more knowledgeable about what’s going on in their city (think Sallah.) It’s propulsive enough to dollop information to you regularly, and in the early running of the game, solving puzzles captures some of that staff of Ra feeling. It’s very satisfying, and the game’s lack of emphasis on combat and gunplay helps keep things feeling like the better movies in the series.

I also think the little worlds MachineGames (who are previously known for their Wolfenstein reboot) has built for Jones to explore are quite compelling. For one thing, while they make use of negative space at the ground level for wide streets, gardens, and open deserts, the maps are very thoughtfully vertical in design. There are tunnels under, roofs over, and so much scaffolding set up alongside buildings. When you’re infiltrating enemy camps, there are often watchtowers, multi-floor buildings, tunnels underneath, and ziplines between parts of the camp. It creates a running tension of always having reasons to look for pathways, and then the game still manages to surprise you when a secret was right under your feet the whole time.

I also think this game is notable as a really impressive use of a limited scope. While the budget obviously hasn’t been reported, I think it’s evident playing the game that MachineGames largely knew where to invest the highest fidelity graphics and where to use fairly limited character animation. There are some effects that are less impressive than others, like when you burn a cobweb or when waves splash against a boat. And yet this game still often feels huge, that promise of “next generation” feels achieved, even where a game like Cyberpunk 2077 still feels “more expensive.” The way sunlight hits in this game is pretty consistently incredible.

The game’s maps exist as an item Indy pulls out, and you’ll often find your nose deep in them walking past the citizens.

Jones is played pretty admirably by Troy Baker (among other credits, Booker DeWitt from BioShock Infinite and Joel Miller from The Last of Us) who does a fairly impressive Harrison Ford impression without being afraid to sound like himself at Jones’s louder cries of pain or distress. I admit, as much as I love Raiders and Last Crusade, as people discuss rebooting Indiana Jones I’ve lamented that he’s a pretty thin character without Ford’s charisma to anchor the role. I’d say MachineGames landed on an interesting characterization – they’ve made him a little more of a cad, slightly flanderized his fear of snakes, and they settled on a refusal to face his personal problems as part of the call to adventure.

If I hesitate to put this game higher, it’s because the game’s back half really drops the ball. While the actual spectacle gets way higher – this link is to a MASSIVE spoiler, but it’s the coolest goddamned image in the game – the gameplay gets messy. The third hub forces you to pilot a boat that’s unpleasant to control. A late temple gives you a really noxious enemy to escape and sneak around by trial and error. The characterizations the game has been emphasizing don’t quite come to satisfying conclusions. And the climactic cutscene, while narratively communicating enormous stakes, really drops the ball in terms of the game’s visual effects and cinematic storytelling. I like the denouement pretty well, and while the actual grand mystery was perfectly acceptable, I wish it maintained the quality of what had come before. The Great Circle does not stick the landing, but I was hoodwinked enough to finish the game – and, well, I also like to run around a hub and knock out guards, sue me!

The Best Games of 2024

Posted in Games by
25 games, not all of which I played!

Hi, gang!

I’m doing a Game of the Year write-up again!

It’s been four years since my last one, but I just feel like getting writing. I already had done drafts for a bunch of these games, but I figured, what the hell, lemme just get these out now. Unlike in 2020, I don’t have them combined into themes. I’ll be doing twelve write-ups in total, one per day, through February 1. I’ll tell you now, the top 3 of this list are interchangeable, and all of the games I wrote up are very much worth your time, so don’t fret too much about placement please.

It’s a weird, transitional year for games, but I also fully admit I delayed on a bunch of games that are extremely up my alley. A hearty “play you later” to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, Metaphor Re:Fantazio, Alan Wake II: Night Springs, Arco, CLICKOLDING, Crow Country, Cryptmaster, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, Dragon’s Dogma 2, Duck Detective: The Secret Salami, Fate/stay Night, Indika, Infinity Nikki, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, Nightmare Kart, Open Roads, Penny’s Big Breakaway, Satisfactory, Shadows of Doubt, Silent Hill Short Message, Slitterhead, Splatoon 3 Side Order, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, The Rise of the Golden Idol, Thrasher, and Unicorn Overlord.

Hauntii.

SOME BULLETPOINT GAMES I LIKED AND WANTED TO SAY SOMETHING ABOUT

  • Go Mecha Ball: The first new game I played in 2024, it’s a roguelike where you play as a mech that can turn into a ball. It feels really good! The mechanics and animations are really high quality, too. I did not end up digging that deep into this game, but I’m surprised it’s gone so completely unremarked upon.
  • Hauntii: This game’s art style really is the best thing going for it. An adventure game with a sweet tone, I have a hard time believing I’ll go back to it, but I was immediately charmed by the look.
  • Home Safety Hotline: I actually can’t stress enough how impressed I am with the user interface and the quality of everything that’s in Home Safety Hotline, a game where you assist customers with problems they’re having in their home that quickly veer into the supernatural. The voice performances of some of these customers, especially if you fail to address their problems and they call back, are some of the best in any independent game. I honestly think if this had some sort of remixed/endless/community content function, it would easily be on this list, as I find the core gameplay loop and the basic diagnostic project so entertaining. As it is, I found it just a little short.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: This game is really cute! We finally get to play as Zelda, and it’s in a full-blown 2D style Zelda! I played the first dungeon and a half before getting distracted and playing other games. I think this game will be looked back on as quite underrated, and I keep meaning to go back and play more.
  • Mouthwashing: Mouthwashing tells the story of a space trucker delivery gone wrong, with the crew of five getting cabin fever and finding out that the circumstances of their crash are worse than they seem. I really like the things this game does with perspective and jump cuts – at times, it is using filmic editing techniques in real time gameplay to poignant effect. I also think, in terms of story, that it’s a worthwhile, adult game with literary story concerns, and its characterization is strong for such a short few hours. I just also think it’s more in the camp of “the best sci-fi story in this monthly magazine” than “one of the best stories of the year.” Look forward to seeing their next project!
  • Persona 3 Reload: I’m farther than I’ve ever gotten in any version of Persona 3, but I’m still too early to really write up what makes Persona 3 great outside of “it’s a Persona game.” I’ll probably circle back to this one, but I think they’ve made a lot of smart quality of life improvements that make Persona 3 a lot more approachable. I maybe prefer the rigid weirdness of the PS2 game, and I definitely prefer the original game’s soundtrack, which has been re-recorded for Reload with almost universally weaker vocals. Look forward to catching up with Metaphor sometime, too!
Mouthwashing.
  • Pokemon TCG Pocket: I want to give props to simplifying the Pokemon Trading Card Game, and I want to give props to the fact that just by logging in every day and playing through the single-player content I’ve managed to collect the vast majority of the cards in the game so far. I get happy whenever I see a Pokemon card from my childhood – some of the new art is really good, too! I wish the game balance was at all fun for multiplayer, but anyone playing this can tell you immediately about the three decks that only got stronger with the new expansion. Still, fulfilling my ever-present Fartstone needs.
  • Princess Peach: Showtime!: The second of Nintendo’s princess game experiments of 2024, I think this is a really admirable sampler platter for game mechanics and design. Peach participates in a number of stage shows inspired by different genres, and each show plays differently enough to keep things fresh. If someone said “I want to get into video games but I don’t know where to start,” this is a pretty good entry point, and based on their favorite of these shows, you could make recommendations for what to play next. Probably a lot more fun if you’re relatively new to video games than if you’ve been a gamer for decades.
  • Shadows of Doubt: This procedural indie mystery game, where you play a private detective and collect clues and evidence to find murder suspects for cold cases, is a fascinating work of design. It unfortunately just runs like crap on my computer and every streamer I’ve ever seen try to play it is a combination of impatient and incompetent. Can’t wait to have a device where I can play this myself!
  • Tekken 8: I played like two hours of the campaign and a little online play when I borrowed this from the library and it rocks, dude. I love fighting games but haven’t ever really invested time into Tekken game. In a world where I got to play way more of this, I can imagine it being toward the top of my list.
  • Thank Goodness You’re Here!: Maybe wish I’d played this myself rather than watch a bunch of someone streaming it, because the jokes are the appeal of this game! Thank Goodness You’re Here! is basically a “touch everything for a laugh” game, sort of comparable to Untitled Goose Game, except with pretty gorgeous hand animated cartooning and a hundred times more British. There’s a running joke about your weird little gremlin going down a poor guy’s chimney that really took me out.
Thank Goodness You’re Here!

AND THEN, MY LIST:

#12: Kevin (1997-2077)
#11: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
#10: Astro Bot
#9: Animal Well
#8: Tactical Breach Wizards
#7: Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
#6: Nine Sols
#5: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
#4: Caves of Qud

#1a: Balatro
#1b: UFO 50
#1c: 1000xResist

KEVIN (1997-2077)

Posted in Games by

Kevin Du
2024
PC

A friend messaged me to ask about an IGF finalist they’d not heard about prior – nominated for the Nuovo Award, Kevin (1997-2077) released to the public on February 2 and otherwise dropped off the face of the earth. We were both intrigued by the premise – a translation cipher game which lacks the clean, concrete solution logic of games like Chants of Sennaar. However, it was impossible to gauge the game’s difficulty or quality from the outside, so we waited for a review or stream – to no avail. Apart from one gamedeveloper.com interview and some non-English streams on YouTube, this game remains almost entirely uncovered in public visibility.

I bit the bullet and decided to investigate, the game’s low price point and unique presentation pulling me in. My first experience was overwhelming – I am not good at language learning, so I bounced off some of the syntax rules Kevin lays forward in the early part of the game. Furthermore, the game offers no advice in the way of navigation, simply offering you a map without boundaries to scroll for ciphers. This is not a game for those who demand a ten minute hook – your first real experience needs to be with a preparation to embed.

An untranslated story in Kevin (1997-2077.)

The play experience is relatively simple. Using the arrow keys or your mouse, you can scroll the “map” (in early areas, literally topographical maps – in others, photographs in collage) for written short stories or letters, always in pictographic cipher. You are given a pencil (which you can change to many colors and erase) to write your annotated translation. There are occasionally small markers of spots named “friends” you can open which combine a new visual collage element and more letters. Over time, you get a sense of the “story” told in some of these letters, and eventually the story of developer Kevin Du and the people in his life.

The game offers what amounts to an introductory workbook (including short love stories, a story about a dog bite, and more standard “i you they/he she them” grammatical lessons,) and it also offers the ability to create fast travel points and return to that opening lesson at any time. After a brief attempt to translate the early lessons, I scrolled over to the broader map and decided to learn what exactly we’re translating. At first blush, most of these stories are about encounters with fellow academics, coworkers, or potential romantic interests. Even before completing the “tutorial,” it’s possible to get the gist that Kevin’s telling a story about an awkward encounter getting coffee with an old girlfriend, or a boss asking about his vacation.

In both the Steam page and the gamedeveloper.com interview, Kevin Du expresses that he is sharing deeply intimate, sometimes uncomfortable feelings and stories in this game, but he wants to see the players put in the work if they’re going to try to understand him. The mechanics also embody this hedgehog’s dilemma – unlike other cipher games, there is no automatic translation possible. Like in English, symbols change meaning depending on context – “feel” and “body” share a symbol. In addition, your ability to zoom in and out is limited to very specific areas, meaning it can be difficult to see an entire story at once. You don’t have an in-game scratch pad, either, so any ideas you want to carry between stories have to be written in a real-life notebook.

My attempt to translate the above story. How do you think I did?

However, the experience this game most evokes for me is Yume Nikki. At first, the lack of direction and inscrutability seems openly hostile, defying the player to just go ahead and close the game rather than engage any further. But adopting a more patient perspective, choosing to simply enjoy being in the game’s space rather than automatically assume control of the situation, and picking up little bits as you see patterns creates a sense of melancholy connection. Unlike Yume Nikki, someone who masters this language is going to have a relatively concrete idea of each of these stories’ meanings, and this game is expressly a memoir, so its final interpretation is not likely to shock the player. But from the sheer density of the game (the Steam page cites “200+ friends to meet,” but there’s also loads of text just on the overworld) it will take months if not years to beat.

I will almost certainly not be the player who ends up solving Kevin (1997-2077.) I very nearly flunked out of Latin 2, and didn’t fare much better in Spanish 3. I still plan to poke my head in every so often and see if I can grasp at a new story. I am confident in saying this game’s design is brilliant and sound – right now, it is beyond me to advocate for its quality as a work of memoir literature. From this year’s games, I’m not sure I can point to a game throwing down the gauntlet more openly. Indie loving game academics like myself have clamored for a text this dense, literary, and open to player rejection. I worry gamers only want language learning games if they have the dopamine rush of Duolingo.

R.I.P. David Lynch

Posted in Film by
David Lynch (1946-2025.)

Lynch was not a filmmaker first. He’d gone to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as a painter, and only began filmmaking out of a desire to see his paintings move. His first “films,” Six Figures Getting Sick and The Alphabet, are mixed media exhibitions that, even after the rest of his strange and wonderful career, come across more as museum pieces than cinema. Six Figures Getting Sick, notably, was originally presented on a sculpture “screen,” complete with plaster heads bubbling out of it. Working contemporary to Warhol and the evolution of video art, Lynch diverted from that path with the AFI funded The Grandmother, which signalled many of his anxieties, thematic concerns, and stylistic flourishes from the very start.

But my favorite of these early shorts is actually The Amputee, a two minute film (with two different takes, on two different filmstocks) in which an older woman writes an opaque letter about a convoluted series of relationships. It’s a very simple, one shot film, where the titular amputee is played by Catherine Coulson, better known as Twin Peaks’s Log Lady. Coulson was working behind the scenes on Eraserhead when they decided to shoot The Amputee as a film test – she’d been brought on board with her husband Jack Nance, though they divorced before Eraserhead debuted. This short, to me, is emblematic of the way Lynch works with fellow artists, takes these little diversions, and discovers something magical. While Eraserhead is this moral shock, this exorcism of Lynch’s demons around city life and the family unit, it’s The Amputee that paints the way forward as an empathetic look at the frustrations of internal life and the gaps between people.

Lynch described himself as an absent husband and father, saying himself in Room to Dream that “film would still come first.” The safest way to stay in Lynch’s life was to be an artistic collaborator first and a friend or lover second. His loyalty to Coulson and Nance was lifelong – perhaps the most profound moment of David Lynch’s final mainstream work, Twin Peaks: The Return, is Coulson as The Log Lady, eulogizing herself. Her words come to me regularly, reminding me “about death – that it’s just change, not an end,” words that I’ll be thinking about for many days to come. Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Naomi Watts, Grace Zabriskie, Sherilyn Fenn, they all joined Lynch’s repertory family. Jack Fisk, Angelo Badalamenti, and Mary Sweeney, among many others, were collaborators over several decades. When he became largely homebound with his emphysema, sometimes the greatest collaborator was his own family.

“What Is David Working On Today? 5/5/22,” in which David shares the barn he made to teach “Farm” during COVID isolation.

One of the greatest things about David Lynch was that, so long as the art was not “taken away from him,” he did not consider any of his artistic endeavors unworthy of love and attention. When David Lynch fell in love with Flash animation, he made Dumbland, which is not some intellectual exercise but is just as puerile and funny as anything on ebaumsworld or Newgrounds. When David Lynch made a barn for his daughter, he shared it with the world. When David Lynch did daily weather reports, he did it with pride, and when he had to stop, he did so apologetically because he knew they brought people joy. Some people voiced frustration with David highlighting an announcement only for it to be more experimental music with Chrystabell – but it’s his love for all this creation that made him the man who never thought twice about taking the personal path.

I don’t want to catalog what the films and Twin Peaks mean to me right now – I’d like to give them all the space they deserve, each a treasure worthy of being unpacked on its own, each not painting the full picture of who this man is to me. I named my newsletter The Horizon Line after his final on-screen appearance as John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. As I shared in my Blue Velvet piece, Lynch’s work is at the heart of so many of the relationships I have in my life. He is at the fundament of my worldview and identity, my belief in a person’s ability to grow, my belief that the inexplicable can also be human. Like many, every time he made a public statement or new work of any kind, I was happy to hear his voice again. I’ll miss him so dearly.

brat

Posted in Music by

brat
Charli XCX
2024

Monoculture is fried. That’s rarely more apparent than looking at the Billboard Hot 100, where I’ve tracked Chappell Roan slowly clawing her way since May toward the top 10, which has for weeks now been a few songs I’ve heard a lot (“Not Like Us”, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” and “Please Please Please”, “Birds of a Feather”) and the “different America” country of Morgan Wallen, Benson Boone and Teddy Swims. There’s a Hozier song, “Too Sweet,” that’s been lodged there for weeks, and I’ve had conversations joking about Hozier that never mention it (it’s pretty good!) Songs by major artists like Cardi B, Doja Cat, and Travis Scott seem to hide on the charts for months without me ever knowing they exist.

The friends I have who do keep up with new releases are largely hooked on Chappell Roan, Four Tet, or Charli XCX’s new album brat, the last of which has so far peaked outside the top 40 with the Lorde remix of “Girl, so confusing.” It’s not bizarre that Charli XCX isn’t a chart-topper – it’s actually incredibly impressive that her arena tour is selling out 70% of all tickets given her previous sales history. But “The Algorithm” (or, more accurately, the four or five different algorithms) is feeding me new takes and memes on brat daily. It’s the biggest album since Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. if you’re on My Internet.

Part of that is that I’m queer. Charli’s association with hyperpop artists like SOPHIE, 100 gecs, and Rina Sawayama keeps Charli front of mind for queer pop music despite being straight herself. Among gay icons, she’s quite different from the more wholesome discopop yearning of Carly Rae Jepsen (straight,) the ethereal otherworldliness of Bjork (undefined), or the relatable fanfiction decoding of Taylor Swift (despite what the Gaylors will tell you, straight as far as we know.) Her music is about driving fast, doing party drugs, and having good sex – at least, when it’s not about the comedown.

Charli XCX, producer A.G. Cook, and fiance/collaborator George Daniel discuss album closer 365.

Executive producer A.G. Cook anchors a dance-forward collection of electronic beats alongside a host of collaborators, including Hudson Mohawke, Easyfun, Gesaffelstein, and Charli’s fiance George Daniel. Some of it is on the accessible, dancy side, like the city walk friendly “360” where Charli declares she’s “so Julia.” It’s unsurprising that “Apple” has gone viral on Tiktok given its bouncy vocals and the delightful trip to the airport in the hook. Other songs are down in the pit, like the driving beat of “Club classics” or the groove of “B2b.” brat is cohesive without being repetitive, ensuring something like the piano riff at the end of “Mean girls” or the harmonies on the hook of “Talk talk” create a texture for listening through the full album.

What makes brat so remarkable is its more emotional side – and I actually don’t think it’s consistent throughout the album. Songs like “Sympathy is a knife” and “I might say something stupid” match similar songs on Charli (2019) and how i’m feeling now, somewhat abstract about an emotional experience, expressing something that marries style and substance. This is a traditional pop vulnerability, as it expresses a relatable feeling with a very pointed form of artistry. “Sympathy is a knife” and the album closer “365” are probably the most obvious instant classics from the album on the more serious side.

It’s in the back half, opening up with “So I”, that Charli abandons abstraction entirely. Charli’s elegy for SOPHIE is incredibly direct about their relationship, emotionally vulnerable about how Charli actually wasn’t always an especially good friend, vulnerable about not wanting to sing the songs that survived. It maybe never gets more startling than on “I think about it all the time,” a bouncy, delightful melody very explicitly about Charli meeting her friends’ baby and questioning her career against opportunity for motherhood. This isn’t dressed up poetically, isn’t guarded in platitudes. It’s more direct than most people would be with their own therapist. The “Girl, so confusing” remix with Lorde defusing their “beef” and hearing Lorde just as directly address their relationship and her own battle with fame and anorexia exposes just how radical this style feels.

When people describe lyrics as “anecdotal,” they usually just mean that they describe an experience you can relate to – that story is still usually told using the rhetorical devices of storytelling, with entertaining jokes, clever rhymes, strong imagery. They do not usually just involve phrases like “She’s a radiant mother and he’s a beautiful father/And now they both know these things that I don’t” to end verses. It’s beyond conversational, because if you had a conversation with someone this unguarded you’d usually be uncomfortable. This kind of radical transparency isn’t 100% new, especially as you dig into album-oriented artists’ deep cuts. But even within the context of a great pop album like brat, it feels revolutionary. If brat is an all-timer (it’s been a month, folks – I’m not ready to commit to that yet!) it’ll be one that marks transition into an authenticity you can’t mistake for another submission from the tortured poet’s department.

KEY TRACKS: “Sympathy is a Knife,” “Girl, so confusing,” “I think about it all the time,” “365”
VERSION: the three more songs so it’s not version – the three songs are all really good!
CATALOG CHOICE: Vroom Vroom, Charli
NEXT STOP: 1000 gecs, 100 gecs
AFTER THAT: Chris, Christine and the Queens

R.I.P. Shelley Duvall

Posted in Film by

Watching Shelley Duvall’s 70s work, I find myself confronted by an unvarnished truth. In a movie like 3 Women, Duvall plays both the underlying frustration and the surface level facade of genial perfection with equal honesty. Neither should qualify as a spoiler – compare first this clip of Millie’s genial side, and then this one of a milder snap. There is a truth to what many consider a mask – it is a presentation of the idealized self, sure, but our ideals can also be part of us. Duvall performs a psychological complexity that many misunderstand. The ugly things we say are not truer than the kind ones just because our politeness holds us from saying them. The things we say to wound based out of rash impulse are not inherently “more honest” than the ones we use to glide above anger and social mismatch. I think Millie is being honest in both clips, and it’s given to us as the audience to read her reaction to Mildred (Sissy Spacek) for what she’s feeling.

Duvall’s Millie, like many of her characters, isn’t psychologically complex because she’s an obvious intellectual. If anything, Duvall’s characters are often defined by a sort of cluelessness, either by living simple lives or ignoring red flags. Part of it is just that she’s damned funny. She was funny in Nashville as an outrageous boy-crazy It Girl flown in from L.A. Funny as the disreputable (and insightful) Countess Gemini in Jane Campion’s otherwise po-faced The Portrait of a Lady. Funny as the Astrodome tour guide who hooks up with Bud Cort’s Brewster McCloud in her first on-screen role. But she was also funny in real life, in profiles like the 2021 THR piece Searching for Shelley Duvall, a profile in which she dispels some of the more despairing images of her struggles with mental health and trauma. (I’m saving thoughts on The Shining for its own piece, but Duvall is the real masterful performance in the film. Suffice it to say that I believe her repeated account that Kubrick was warm and friendly and that the work of making The Shining was emotionally exhausting for almost everyone involved.)

Duvall in Vogue.

Maybe more than anything, the throughline of Shelley Duvall’s canon confronts our understanding of who gets to be iconic. Part of it is the colorful aesthetic that defined her personal fashion – it’s no surprise looking at her combinations of color and pattern that she’d become invested in children’s programming and fairy tales. That aesthetic means a lot to me. Looking at some of Duvall’s choices of clothing invokes a sense of comradery. It’d be too simple to call it “camp,” but there are choices in her makeup and her wardrobe that expand my own sense of queer euphoric fashion.

It’s also her choice in roles, bringing that complex version of emotional vulnerability to characters of all classes, levels of status, and ranging from victims of abuse to literal cartoon characters. I haven’t seen a couple of the landmark Duvall films. Many of my friends mourning Duvall have posted scenes from Robert Altman’s Popeye, a reclaimed gonzo blockbuster adapting the classic cartoon – it’s hard to imagine a more obvious Olive Oil. Two of her 70s Altman collaborations, Thieves Like Us and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, remain on my queue. I’ve heard a lot of love for her work in the original live-action Frankenweenie, and I’ve seen none of her children’s programming at an age I’m old enough to remember. I’m thankful for a little more Shelley Duvall on my horizon. I’m glad she passed celebrated by her friends and community for all the beauty she brought into the world.

Shelley Duvall on her birthday last year, celebrating with a fan turned friend.

ZARDOZ

Posted in Film by

ZARDOZ
Dir. Jon Boorman
1974

Above is the trailer I made for the 1974 film Zardoz when we at WUD Film screened it about a decade ago. If you’ve never seen it, that’s my pitch. I really haven’t felt a need to adjust it. If that sounds fun, please watch Zardoz before reading any more.

If you’d like to know why I think Zardoz is, quietly, one of the best, most intellectually provocative science fiction films of all time before watching, go ahead and keep reading. (I also just bought a brand new book on Zardoz, Anthony Galluzzo’s Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today, so I may be writing about Zardoz again soon.)

Every time I’m reunited with Zed, Consuela, May and Friend, I find myself thinking two conflicting thoughts:

1. This really isn’t that abnormal for New Wave science fiction or post-Tolkien fantasy fiction, its concerns of sex, godliness, immortality, colonialism and the dangers of both capitalism and collectivism, post-humanism, and embrace of pseudosciences and philosophy. A man believed to be born of relatively low status is actually the chosen one who will destroy the evil empire – he makes allies within the enemy, becomes a powerful superman, and ultimately conquers.

2. This is pretty wild in terms of presentation, formally adventurous, but also just thrilling and unique in its tone and performance – nothing is quite like Zardoz. Everything along this hero’s journey takes place in ways that are extremely unexpected, and the film’s conclusion is a shockingly ambivalent revenge play bordello of blood. 

I think that balance is struck in Boorman’s comfort with a tale “most satirical,” as Arthur puts it in the intro. Oh, yes, it all “takes itself so seriously,” except for the whole “he draws on his own mustache and beard and flies around in a stone head because he was inspired by a children’s book” thing. It’s “playing itself straight” and also has an extended soapy titties “how do boners work” gag.

Zed in the Tabernacle.

All these things work within the same general framework because Boorman knows that life is silly, technology is silly, and therefore embraces just how absurd things would get with the boredom of eternal life. Friend being our first anchor into Eternal society is key for that reason – he gives us the frame with which to watch the rest of the movie, one Zed himself has been hunting for because Eternal society is the only thing he could not possibly learn about in all his reading.

The more I pull at any given question in the film, there’s character logic and thematic reasoning to back it up. The fixation on boners is a great gag because Eternal society went to space and abandoned sleep to try to answer The Big Questions about God, love, emotion, and happiness, and now they’re so cowed they spend their days meaninglessly meditating at second level and trying to figure out boners for the tenth time. The stuff about the dangers of collectivism also stems from the origin of the Vortex – founded by capitalists who taught their children to harden their hearts to suffering, usurped by those heartless children who watched the founders realize the error of their ways, then turned back outward into the world to create an oligarchy. This place bred and led itself into oblivion.

The Apathetics, who have lived too long and lost to psychic warfare.

The pacing of the film rewards multiple viewings. There’s an extended almost-wordless sequence of Zed first exploring the Vortex’s mills – this is enjoyable because Connery is very funny being scared by jack-in-the-boxes and projected videos, but it’s even more fun when you know what The Vortex is and how it’s giving away the sham much earlier than the rest of the film. Friend takes a while to figure out, but on rewatches, he instantly pops, his arc already in motion at the start of the film. Watching Consuela’s arc over the film, from total monotone (“you’re hurting me.”) to more and more emotional outbursts, it’s a great performance. Connery and Rampling both really are great in this – they’re asked to do some impossible scenes and they sell them.

And, yeah, it’s a fuckin riot of silly stuff, too. Any of the mirror falling, jumping around, fantastical editing, psychic violence and the video trial of Satan, the entire reveal of the book sequence – this stuff is, I assume, meant to be laughed at. There’s a lot of funny stuff in this movie! I think most people, even if they’re not capable of getting on its wavelength thematically, can enjoy its pretty solid pacing for memorable scenes, its wonderful aesthetics, its sheer volume of small breasts, and its laugh out loud absurdity. I tend to sell it on that absurdity, knowing many will not come along to celebrate what is, in my book, one of the great works of cinematic science fiction.

But those who do – welcome to paradise.

BOTTLE ROCKET – UW CINEMATHEQUE

Posted in Film by
The short film version of Bottle Rocket, available in higher quality on the Bottle Rocket Criterion disc.

BOTTLE ROCKET
Dir. Wes Anderson
1996

These notes originally ran to supplement UW Cinematheque’s screening of Bottle Rocket on July 25, 2014.

Though Wes Anderson is best known for the diorama-and -dollhouse-like sets of The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and the almost literal dioramas and dollhouses of the stop-motion film Fantastic Mr. Fox, viewers will see the intricacy of production design and specificity of detail pared down in Anderson’s first feature film, Bottle Rocket. The story of bumbling would-be bandits who happen to be would-be brothers grants us a naïve and vulnerable look at the filmmaker’s relationship to his home territory and fellow dreamers.

Bottle Rocket marks the feature debut of screenwriter/actor Owen Wilson, who co-wrote the script with Anderson. The two lived in a small home and shared two beds with the other two Wilson brothers, Luke and Andrew (also debuting as protagonist Anthony and John “Future Man” Mapplethorpe, respectively).  Anderson and Wilson would write three films together, culminating with The Royal Tenenbaums. They stopped writing together as Wilson became in higher demand as an actor, and Anderson’s films took a somber turn, beginning with his meditation on irrelevancy with The Life Aquatic (co-written by Noah Baumbach.)

Not until The Life Aquatic would an Anderson film be as sun-drenched as Bottle Rocket. Few films look as warm in their depictions of summer without saturating their oranges and blues; Bottle Rocket instead highlights its yellows, from Dignan’s jumpsuits to the bedsheets of the motel. Few turn of the century filmmakers captured yellows and warmth with the same enthusiasm as Anderson and his go-to cinematographer Robert Yeoman.

Though Bottle Rocket’s visual style is less meticulously staged than its successors, the production design is outstanding. The trademark Anderson handwritten insert – Dignan’s seventy-five year plan – utilizes multiple colors of markers not to reflect Dignan’s inability to plan the heist quickly, but rather his highly capable organization (note that only headers and prefaces appear in blue, whereas actual “plans” appear in red). However, don’t mistake that organization for capability; Dignan’s plans remain vague, often suggesting simple ideas like “odds” as keys to living successfully. Consider that the scenes at the Mapplethorpes’ house were filmed in Frank Lloyd Wright’s John Gillen Residence, a home designed by an architect out of time for a Texan geophysicist.

Though laughs permeate all of Anderson’s films, Bottle Rocket is consistently funny. The majority of the staff deliver these lines casually and conversationally, making the absurd seem normal, nondescript. None relish the opportunity more than James Caan, who chews his way through a rejection of Anthony and a total shutdown of Future Man in his first ten minutes on screen as Mr. Henry. Given a short amount of time in the film, Caan chooses to make the most of what he’s given.

I claim the true star, of surprise to no one who has seen the film, is Owen Wilson’s Dignan, the excitable obsessive and one of Anderson’s iconic characters. Hungry for adventure, he wants to live on the edges of normal life, an outlaw with a heart of gold. He rejects the simple, the casual, the conversational, always “calling his gang” with a birdcall or launching into another layer of his scheme, alienating himself to the point of ignoring his friends’ happiness. But, unlike the self-destructive Max Fischer of Rushmore, Dignan refuses to advance without his companions. Though he storms off angrily, one request from Bob to be on the team is enough to make Dignan declare his one ultimatum; the slightest hint of interest from Anthony is enough to make Wilson flash a beautiful smile. Without the combination of Wilson’s belief in the character’s beauty and his failings, both in the writing and the acting, Bottle Rocket could not exist in its current form.

The film performs a balancing act. It is about the naïveté, adventurous spirit, and social ignorance of Dignan and his love for friends and brothers. Simultaneously it carries the “Born to Run” spirit of living in a town too small for one’s dreams. Each viewing, I have come away feeling differently about its core, though Dignan runs away with my affection each and every time.

The final heist is as ridiculous as an amateur heist could be. It is truly amazing that Bottle Rocket and Fargo were both released in the first months of 1996 and that one film could not have directly inspired the other. How else could the absurd misconduct of Dignan and Steve Buscemi’s Carl Showalter reflect the same ridiculous misunderstanding of the importance of masks and the value of awareness? But where Fargo damns its kidnappers, facing the darkest elements of their psyche, Bottle Rocket absolves them. Dignan/Wilson’s last lines in the film foreshadow the fall from innocence Anderson and Wilson would explore in their next, more well-regarded film, Rushmore.