Christen Warrington-Broxton

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Apologist and Nearly as Separated from Reality as Gein Himself In an unfortunate missing of the nail, this narrative of Ed Gein's life of lies and manipulation paints a pitifully sympathetic picture of a mentally handicapped country bumpkin driven to cinema-inspiring depths of depravity by the abuse of his mother and grooming of a "girlfriend." While certainly the story Gein convinced everyone of while he was alive, Gein also convinced most in his home town he was harmless for over 50 years of his arguably cushy existence. Gein was handed a bed in a mental hospital rather than super-max. Since then, funding for state mental hospitals has been decimated. Even the criminally insane of our generation can't get a bed in mental hospital, instead being shoved into the general population of prisons, making a stay for minor offenses far more lethal than in Gein's day. Even worse, the writer of this tragic mini-series-not as tragic for its topic as it is tragic in its failings-squares the depravity of a man, Ed Gein, onto the shoulders of the women in Gein's life, while breezing right by the male influences in Gein's life. Gein's father, who passed only five years sooner than Gein's mother, was a physically abusive alcholic. This means Gein and his older brother endured 34 years of physical abuse by their father. Yet, the writer and director only give this deplorable influence on Gein one cursory scene in which a drunk abuser is minimized to a hapless, shrinking victim being emotionally tormented by a puritanical wife. Focusing on the facts, we know Ed Gein was a sick man who is responsible for his pwn actions. We also know Gein and his older brother were frequently beaten by their alcoholic father. Further, we know Gein's mother was puritanical, railing against what she saw as evil and alcoholism, an understandable jump when ypu consider she also endured the physically abusive alcholic husband. Last, we also know that Gein became fixated on his mother. Many of us would expect the culture of the 1950s to place all of the blame on women. But, in our current culture, we understand that Gein was the real problem in all of this. Though he faced emotional abuse from his mother, we also know he faced physical abuse from his drunkard father. Even more, so many of us who grew up in families that dealt with alcoholism. We know the family endures a great deal of emotional abuse and trauma from the alcoholic as well. Meaning, Gein's father was arguably more abusive than his mother. Yet, the writer and director of this series fall into the same misogynist amatuer Freudian psychology as Hitchcock. Since Murphy claims to he more progressive, we would hoped he would have taken this opportunity to challenge the misogynist narrative Gein, Hitchcock, and other writers and directors on past generations got away with perpetuating. But, here we are again. This time, with even more dreamed up women. This installment of Monster is as generationally tone deaf as it is apologist for male violence.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story

17 likes

The Long Walk

This movie was terrible. How did the writer burn this franchise down so swiftly? The female lead changes clothes twice and gets fresh lip stick and lip gloss twice in less than 24hrs. Though neither character was wearing a dress shirt, the female lead is magically wearing a stereotypical men's dress shirt after the sex scene. The female lead also has time and the emotional capacity to reapply full lipstick and lip gloss twice after dark and while suspecting someone is stalking her, while she is also completely alone. Because obviously, we women are out here finding and changing into our men's dress shirts and reapplying all of our makeup right after we sleep with men. Clearly we also do reapply a full face of makeup immediately after showering even though we aren't planning on going anywhere else for the evening and will need to wash it all off again before bed...while on vacation. This movie felt like an immature, Boomer man's collection of corny, outdated, sexist horror movie tropes. It felt like I was watching Friday the 13th. And not in a good nostalgic way. In a bad, haven't we moved on past this same old stuff kind of way. In a deeply misogynistic kind of way. Boo.

The Strangers: Chapter 1

8 likes

Truly the Right Book at the Right Time Let's begin with and let this review center on the elephant-sized Kaiju in the room: that cultural identifiers are mostly unknown, gloriously absent from, and entirely irrelevant to this episode of our main character, Jamie's, life experience. Not only are Jamie's gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and several other cultural identity markers never referenced, they're artfully, intentionally absent from any description of Jamie as a character. Even the name, "Jamie," is so intensely close to neutral, accepting that nothing is truly ever fully neutral in our world. In KPS, Scalzi has cleverly accepted and leaned into the needs of so many us readers. We need to feel seen and included. While it's true that cultural identifiers can make us feel included by allowing us to see ourselves in the characters, those same identifiers so often leave gigantic swaths of us feeling unheard and unseen in the what is supposed to be a limitless universe in sci-fi. By allowing Jamie to exist in this clip of their life as a relatively blank cultural slate, Scalzi has written a nearly universal main character that many of us can live through vicariously without suspending too much of ourselves. The creation and telling of this funtastic and sharp main character is timely, refreshing, and necessary during one of our most culturally contentious times as a nation.

The Kaiju Preservation Society

2 likes

At first, I was put off by the repeated use of "she said," or "××× said." There are also some stereotypical yeah-a-man-wrote-this moments and plot points. As with most science fiction written by white guys, the story fails the Bechdel test. Women are side characters, eat salads, and talk about men. Those points being addressed and set aside, this novel is an entertaining, quick-paced, but still deep thought experiment with time and alternate universes. There are silly Star Trek Easter eggs, puns, and jokes that both pay homage to and poke fun at the series' often-times porous plots and those of us on the more intense end of the fandom. Then, just when you think the thought experiment would come to its more stereotypical end, you get the extra bit of the story that places this book toe-to-toe with the clever insightfulness and heart of the Star Trek series itself. And we get to listen to our talented childhood crush, Wil Wheaton narrating. This is a truly delightful listen.

Redshirts

This novel felt like a glorification of child wives, child labor, forced marriages, rape (nonconsensual sex), and Christian religious colonization in India, all for the sake of a woman increasing her money and "security." I felt like the author was working hard to convince me that these things were just another way of doing things that could also make me happy and content as a woman if I just get out of my own way. Child wives were and still are horrid. Christian colonialism was also grotesque and still is. This book made me feel uneasy the entire time I was listening to it because it made me felt like grooming.

The Covenant of Water

19 likes

Just as any classic American horror film would, the heroine is a young woman who sees the error and horror of so many unladylike vices. The cinematic version of an Evangelical Hell House, A Classic Horror Story contains all of the stereotypical conservative Christian themes one would expect from a nation in the strangle hold of theocracy: antichoice abortion propaganda, disdain for technology, and even the prohibitinesque demonization of alcohol. The female lead character is not safe until she has accomplished all of the tasks of chastity. First, she must realize that giving in to the peer pressure of drinking alcohol poisoned her and left her vulnerable, susceptible, and pliant for the evil people around her who want to destroy her. Second, and most clearly, people who worship differently than her are out to kill her. Slowly. Not only that, but they worship media and technology. After all, it was the evil of the smart phone that enabled her mother to pressure her into the most damning evil of all: abortion. Gasp. The movie's heroine is not safe until she kills the blood-crazed pagans, leaves her cell phone behind her, rebaptizes herself in the cleansing waters of the pure ocean as she embraces the fetus in her uterus. Finally, she sets out to preach the true word to a cynical world. But, the world is so desensitized by and lost to the devil of media that they do not believe. They assume her story is so outlandish that it has to be fake. Though she speaks the truth, a jaded world is annoyed by her chastened ways and wishes her dead. With all of these conservative themes, it is hard to tell whether the numerous men who wrote and directed A Classic Horror Story are trolling American horror movies, or if they have made a propaganda film that could have been funded by The Roman Catholic Church, Al-Qaeda, the U.S. RNC, or a White dude in the 80s. In either case, the movie lives up to its title: Women in classic horror movies aren't safe unless they're pure.

A Classic Horror Story

5 likes

We need to talk about the last 30 minutes of the film because a lot of reviews and comments either skip over that part or brush it off as "weird." There are folks claiming the ex storyline was never resolved. Think about that next to last scene with the reborn tocksick msclnty (TM) blameful ex where our heroine is clearly calculating how she will dismantle that mess with the axe. There are also folks who think the most grotesque and symbolic scene of gory birthings makes no sense. Again, you have to get into the meat (ew and lol) of that scene. It's slap-you-across-the-face-obvious commentary on how men reproduce, or rebirth, the TM that was passed onto them, even down to the traumas, or wounds. It may even be that this scene is commentary on the Green Man even existing in mythology is so utterly grotesque. It's obsurd and inherently patriarchal that a man has been carved into stones and wood around the world as a symbol of nature and rebirth, when clearly women are the only human beings capable of birth. On the opposite side of the stone is the Sheela-na-gig, a figure on whose role scholars cannot seem to agree, which is hilarious considering they managed to figure out the Green Man. One interpretation of the Sheela-na-gig is that she symbolizes pain, a salient message for the film. Yet, focusing just on facts, these pagan carvings highlight a theme among religions, even pagan or tribal religions that are commonly mistaken to all be matriarchal in nature: the reduction of women. The Green Man carving focuses on his face while the Sheela-na-gig focuses on the lady parts, highlighting just how long men have been reducing women. And, it's deeply meaningful that these carvings are found in one of the single most patriarchal and TM places in the entire world: a church. Frankly, just about any major global religious place of worship would fit the scene. The gross scene takes the idea of the Green Man and turns it on its head, as if to say when men do give birth to something, it is the consistent, even monotonous rebirth of generational torment and trauma, eventually causing the woman in the scene to lose her initial shock and horror, and become oddly numbed. The onslaught starts with the Green Man, the oldest stealing away of women's power, going through its many itterations. There is the plain old attacker. The policeman who lets a man go. Besides, all the man did was attack a woman. It's not like he stole valuable property, insinuating women aren't as valuable as property. We also have the passive aggressive nice guy at the bar who forces himself into buying women drinks women dont want. Forgiving the likely mistake in order, they bring in the angsty teenager, thinking a woman owes him her time just because he asked nicely at first. And, without fail, they bring in the religious leader who blames the woman for the abuse of a man. All giving way to the final man, the one who threatens to X himself if his wife doesn't stay with him, the man who violates his wife's privacy to talk with her friends about the emotional abuse, escalating to physical abuse, and the final foolish accidental fulfillment of his own threat when he fails in forcing his way back into her life. The modern woman walks away from the inevitable and pathetic rebirth of toxic masculinity that comes for her: the ex. She goes to wait to prepare herself emotionally, and physically with the weapon her female friend pointed out to her. She must destroy this presence in her life. Now, did I leave the theater asking myself if this would have even been produced if a man had not written it? I sure did. And isn't that the ultimate point?

Men

1.53K likes

This Trek takes on a reliable Star Trek undertaking: being "woke." And in the best way. Yes, many Trek fans are complaining about the wokeness, but hasn't that been the point of Star Trek all along? Perhaps it was more palatable to the majority of White middle class men when the woke ideas were coming from other White middle class male StarFleet captains like Kirk, Picard, or Archer. You might then wonder why so many were fine with Janeway and Sisko. Janeway is still White and Sisko is still a man. Burnham not only takes away all aspects of White or male familiarity, but she also manages to get away with a Kirk, even a Tom Paris level of insubordination and rogue-going. She also brings in the emotion and imperfection that so many other Starfleet captains lacked. Save for unique episodes like Picard crying in the mud, most of the modern Starfleet captains we know and love are emotional ninjas and they regularly show off how they're superbly in control of their own emotions, a big departure from Kirk's regular emotional outbursts. Burnham makes a brave return to the intellectually brilliant and emotionally-driven Starfleet captain of TOS heyday. Discovery brings us back to TOS focus on a diverse (for the time) cast and talking about serious issues indirectly and directly through the storyline of the show.

Star Trek: Discovery

21 likes

The characters and dialogue fell so far short of the books that it doesn't feel like the same universe or story line at all. The PG14 language of season one, especially Avasarala's character and the military, took the believability out too. Maybe I'll try to watch it again once there has been more time between having read the books and then watching the TV series with the books as the foundation of expectations.

The Expanse

2 likes