A Retro Prometheus

Lisa Frankenstein (2024, directed by Zelda Williams). I'm sure the name came first. Surely screenwriter Diablo Cody thought of the play on "Lisa Frank" and tailored a Lisa Frank-inflected Gothic to suit the name? I can't imagine it started with the story. The title is too big a cultural allusion. There are plenty of films where this was the order of operations in their creation, including at least one great one. Cody denies that this is the case. She says that this is just a coincidence, that the genesis of the film is as a distaff reworking of Weird Science. Maybe that's true. I have a suspicious nature. Cody is certainly capable of writing stories of great sophistication. Juno and Young Adult are both layered, complex character studies underneath the hipster dialogue that made their screenwriter famous. That's not this film, alas. This is a ramble-y nostalgia piece. It's so savvy about its time and influences that one can't help but be suspicious about its provenance. It has its pleasures, sure. It's just...if you're not a specific kind of viewer, one raised at the right time and in the right place, one steeped in a specific kind of culture from the late 1980s, then this film is kind of a mess.

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Behind Castle Walls

My partner and I were speculating in the course of a long drive last week about favorite authors we would like to have met. We've met a fair few of them, but she would like to have met Toni Morrison and I would like to have met Robert Bloch. I don't know what that says about us. An author I decided I would prefer not to have met is Shirley Jackson. On the evidence of her work and the general outline of her biography, I don't think I would have liked her. The dominant theme of her work is a neurotic paranoia that in her own life was apparently completely justified by the dynamics of her marriage. I watched the recent biopic starring Elisabeth Moss as Jackson and found myself nodding along even when I knew that they were fudging the details (they fudged the details a LOT). Jackson has been enjoying a bit of a renaissance lately, what with the Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House and renewed interest in her last completed novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which serves as an ur-text for Park Chan-wook's Gothic potboiler, Stoker, and which was made into a film in 2018 by director Stacie Passon based on the book itself. Passon's film does an admirable job of meeting Jackson on her own terms, neurotic paranoia and all.

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