Spider-Man : Across the Spider-Verse (2023) dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, Kemp Powers
What the heck, I’ll give it a shot.
How bad could it be?
Guys I’m not ok
Do tell
Oh jeez where to begin
Ok, First of all, Dorothy Gale is played by a young Fairuza Balk.
These pictures do not do justice to the raw Traumatized Child energy she brings to this role.
A bit of plot: Dorothy Gale won’t sleep. She’s always talking about Emerald Cities and Talking Scarecrows and Ruby Slippers. At her wit’s end, Aunt Em decides to commit her to the sanitarium for electroshock therapy.
Disney made this.
It is strongly implied that her journey back to Oz is a hallucination caused by the electroshock treatment. Herr Doktor flips the switch, lightning flashes, and the supernatural part of the movie begins.
Ok. So. Dorothy gets to Oz by almost drowning in a flash flood. She rides to safety in a produce crate with one of her family chickens.
This is where one of the core Uncanny elements of the film first appears; this movie does not share continuity with the 1939 Judy Garland film.
It is a much more faithful adaptation of L.F. Baum’s Books, but despite being a sequel both objectively and canonically, it really just pretends the ‘39 film doesn’t exist.
They land in a desert that turns people to stone called the Deadly Desert. They get food from a Lunch Pail Tree. The chicken can talk. The Scarecrow is King of Oz, allegedly.
But, like,
Here’s her house from the first movie.
The one that landed on a witch? Right smack dab in the middle of a whole dang Munchkin Village?
There was literally a whole song and dance!
Where did the Munchkins go, you might ask?
Well, while Dorothy was away,
There was an Apocalypse.
OZ HAS FALLEN
And this is where we meet the nightmarish Eldritch spawn of Roller Disco and David Bowie:
The Wheelers
Alright. The fucking Wheelers.
I don’t-
What is-
What these pictures don’t convey is that, as they move, they make the exact same sound the gurneys in the sanitariums make. The Wheelers are played by the same actors who play the orderlies. Oz is the sanitarium.
Now, let’s discuss Jack Skellington Pumpkinhead
This is one of the Good Guys
He’s just a guy. Like, really, very much, Just A Guy of a character. His entire personality, such as it is, is comprised of
- His quest to find his Mom (we’ll get back to that) and
- Commenting on his lifelessness. For example, when faced with death, he comments calmly that he won’t miss eating or sleeping, since he does neither.
His mom ends up being this girl:
We’ll get to her.
I had this fever-dream memory of the Army of Oz in the Hall of Ornaments from when I was a kid as well and I gotta say it’s kinda nice to finally put that memory in some kind of context. A horrible, terrible, awful context, but a context nonetheless.
One and the same, friend.
I LIVE TO PLEASE
Ahem. Sorry. Anyway.
So. I mentioned an Apocalypse.
Behold! The citizenry of Oz!
They have been turned to stone by the evil Nome King! Why, you ask?
For stealing his Emeralds, of course!
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I forgot to introduce The Army of Oz, affectionately referred to as Tik-Tok!
This guy
That’s… apparently the whole army?
He’s spring-wound. Has 3 winding keys: one for moving, one for talking, and one for thinking. At one point his thinking gears wind down while his action and talking gears are still tight and he creates a lot of trouble. He has a… spin attack…
I really don’t know what to make of him to be honest.
Ok so like fully half of what makes The Wheelers so unsettling is the audio so I found a clip:
Hospital gurney noises and echoing, mocking laughter. The way it’s cut doesn’t help. Nor does the… craft store kitsch of the Wheeler outfits. I genuinely have no idea what they were going for. David Bowie vibes, a little bit, but not in a good way.
Oh this film. This isn’t even the end of it.
This is one of the few films that tried for, and managed to succeed for the most part, at capturing the same sort of dark magic of films like Labyrinth, the Dark Crystal, or the Secret of NIMH. That time when some creators were willing to tell stories to children that reflected the darkness that we already saw in the world.
It’s got some problems, but Return to Oz is honestly great. I also never felt like it was patronizing me when I watched it as child, which seemed like an awfully hard ask for most movies.
Yeah this is absolutely of its era, when it comes to terrifying 80’s children’s films.
I used get dad to rent this film for us when I was 8 or so. Mostly because I knew it was the only film my tough little sister was visibly scared of. Children are brutal.
This breakdown doesn’t even touch on Mombi, who scared the living daylights out of me. She is played by the same actress who plays the nurse at the sanatorium. And she is the reason the citizens of Oz up there are missing their heads. She keeps the still living heads locked in glass cabinets in her palace and swaps them out for her own head depending on her mood.
There is a later scene where all the heads are screaming as Dorothy makes a run for it. Mombi’s original head bellowing ‘Dorothy Gale!’ It is genuinely disturbing. I love this film so much.
I’ve never heard of this movie before, and all I can think now is
WHAT THE FUCK
It has been such a long time snice I saw this. I remember reading the books and being terrified of it. Because this is part of more than one book.
I love this movie! WAY better than the first OZ movie, I wanted a Lunch Pail tree SO BAD as a kid.
Karliene wrote a great song about it too!
Scissor Sisters also used it as inspo!
I love this movie so much. It’s weird as hell, but also really charming. Plus the visuals can’t be beat.
oh i loved this movie as a kid!
sure your book is a new york times bestseller with a diverse and unique cast of characters, positive reviews from multiple well known authors and agencies, "ideal for fans of [popular published work] and [other popular published work]" and rated 4.99999999/5 stars on goodreads but does it have, like, a plot
i don't need to read your book's entire resume okay i really don't care about any of that i just want you to TELL ME what the STORY is ABOUT
I've walked past the Barbie branded selfie booth, sat through the reel of old commercials that precede the previews, and watched Margot Robbie learn to cry, and I’m still not sure what “doing the thing and subverting the thing,” which Greta Gerwig claimed as the achievement of Barbie in a recent New York Times Magazine profile, could possibly mean. This was the second Gerwig profile the magazine has run. I wrote the first one, in 2017, which in hindsight appears like a warning shot in a publicity campaign that has cemented Gerwig’s reputation as so charming and pure of heart that any choice (we used to call them compromises) she makes is justified, a priori, by her innocence. This is a strange position for an adult to occupy, especially when the two-hour piece of branded content she is currently promoting hinges on a character who discovers that her own innocence is the false product of a fallen world. But—spoiler alert!—the point of Barbie’s “hero’s journey” is less to reconcile Barbie to death than to reconcile the viewer to culture in the age of IP.
“Doing the thing and subverting the thing”: I haven’t finished working out the details, but I think the rough translation would be Getting rich and not feeling feel bad about it. (Or, for the viewer: Having a good time and not feeling bad about it.) One must labor under a rather reduced sense of the word “subvert” to be impressed with poking loving fun at product misfires such as Midge (the pregnant Barbie), Tanner (the dog who poops), and the Ken with the earring, especially given that the value of all these collectors’ items has, presumably, not decreased since the film opened. Barbie may feature a sassy tween sternly informing Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie that the tiny-waisted top-heavy billion-dollar business she represents has made girls “feel bad” about themselves, but if anyone uttered the word “anorexia,” I missed it. (There was a reason Todd Haynes told the story of Karen Carpenter’s life and death with Barbies, and it wasn’t because an uncanny piece of molded plastic has the magical power to resolve the contradictions of girlhood and global capitalism.) There’s a bit about Robbie going back into a box in the Mattel boardroom, but Barbies aren’t made in an executive suite; they come from factories in China. On the one hand, it’s weird for a film about a real-world commodity to unfold wholly in the realm of ideas and feelings, but then again, that’s pretty much the definition of branding. Mattel doesn’t care if we buy Barbie dolls—they’re happy to put the word “Barbie” on sunglasses and T-shirts, or license clips from the movie for an ad for Google. OK, here’s my review: When Gerwig first visited Mattel HQ in October 2019, the company’s stock was trading at less than twelve dollars a share. Today the price is $21.40.
Christine Smallwood, Who Was Barbie?
I want you to write for pleasure—to play. Just listen to the sounds and rhythms of the sentences you write and play with them, like a kid with a kazoo. This isn’t “free writing,” but it’s similar in that you’re relaxing control: you’re encouraging the words themselves—the sounds of them, the beats and echoes—to lead you on. For the moment, forget all the good advice that says good style is invisible, good art conceals art. Show off! Use the whole orchestra our wonderful language offers us! Write it for children, if that’s the way you can give yourself permission to do it. Write it for your ancestors. Use any narrating voice you like. If you’re familiar with a dialect or accent, use it instead of vanilla English. Be very noisy, or be hushed. Try to reproduce the action in the jerky or flowing movement of the words. Make what happens happen in the sounds of the words, the rhythms of the sentences. Have fun, cut loose, play around, repeat, invent, feel free.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft
Helping the Earth.
One of the wonderful side effects of having a partner whose special interest is Godzilla (and kaiju in general) is that I now have the context to know that this is literally the stated motivation of a huge portion of kaiju in the franchise
