Temple and Heresy

I watch a picture. I attend an underground VHS screening. I read nonfiction and fiction. I process old and new thoughts about mortality. I read classic newspaper comics.

Film Selections: Still Getting Justly Punished for Not Quitting New Movies

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, directed by Nia DaCosta, 2026. Less-shitty followup to the execrable 28 Years Later. Continues the roving and open-ended storytelling style established in the previous installment, mutating into something significantly different from the pretty good original movie in an increasingly flawed and messy franchise.

Perhaps most interesting about 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the degree to which the fictional universe of this series has become a meditation on Englishness in the twenty-first century, with the zombie outbreak from the 2002 movie representing a 9/11-type event, and these newer installments making oblique references to Brexit and other events instantiating how bewilderingly quickly the modern world is changing.

The story in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple revolves around the chavvy cult who made a surprise appearance that marked a radical tonal rug-pull at the end of the previous film. They are led by a charismatic, murderous nutjob played by the outstanding actor Jack O’Connell, whom I also recently saw in Sinners.

Ralph Fiennes returns in a more robust role as Dr. Kelson, his character from 28 Years Later. The physically imposing Chi Lewis-Parry returns as Kelson’s predator, research subject and eventual friend, the huge-penised alpha zombie whom Kelson has named Samson. Watching one of our greatest working thespians Fiennes perform one-on-one scenes with journeyman O’Connell is the most rewarding part of this picture.

But this movie suffers from the problem that unseated its predecessor: it’s just too implausible and silly to allow for suspension of disbelief, culminating in yet another elaborate, wacky, overcooked ending. The conceptual pitch made to the viewer by the original 28 Days Later was that this was kinda what it might really be like if something like this happened; the new movies barely gesture towards plausibility.

The coda of this one sets up yet another sequel (presumably to be the very last in the series), which draws back in Cillian Murphy’s character Jim, the protagonist of the 2002 film. The next movie looks to be a synthetic and cathartic resolution of the competing visions of Anglopocalyptic society explored in these last two films.

The Wicker Man, directed by Robin Hardy in 1973, is a picture that strictly speaking I likely shouldn’t include as an official entry for a movie I actually watched. This is cuz I watched it on a beat-up old VHS tape shown at an underground artists’ collective/viewing-space in the heart of the Mission, a neighborhood where I have spent so much time working and living on and off over the last thirteen or fourteen years without ever knowing these marvelous bastards were holed up in this firetrap basement hosting these raucous screenings. I found out because a friend from my regular artists’ circle made me meet her and our other friend after work and then surprised us by taking us to this. It was really fun, especially since I had never seen The Wicker Man, despite having heard so much about it for so long.

All I care to say for now is that like 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, it’s a deeply British horror picture, though this one is more of a campy B-movie with a much better story and is responsible for launching the movie subgenre of “folk horror.” It’s also probably the only Christopher Lee movie I’ve seen outside of the Star Wars, James Bond and The Lord of the Rings franchises, and Lee was great filing yet another entry in his portfolio of grandiloquently creepy villain roles. The artists’ collective gave me a free Risograph print of his character from The Wicker Man at the door, and it is now being used to help gussy up my shabby new room in my brilliantly-located new apartment (practically around the corner from where I watched this movie) where I’m cooped up with an unpleasant new landlady. Thank goodness for Christopher Lee, underground VHS collectives and Risograph machines.

New Additions to the Complete Reading List

True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor from 1997, written by David Mamet. Playwright, screenwriter and film-director Mamet produces nonfiction books in choppy, Rosary-like chapters that make his books easy to get through in a short amount of time. I have read about four of his other nonfiction books and lucked upon this one in a Little Free Library while out walking in San Francisco. This is effectively a self-help and philosophy book (which Mamet pretty clearly wrote first and foremost for himself) dressed up as a technical manual for actors. The core message basically comes down to an argument for choosing to embody action in the world, of being not the idea of something but the thing itself, of bravery as an attribute that can’t be faked because acknowledging one’s fears and then doing what a brave person would do is by definition evincing genuine bravery. Or, to put it as Mamet wrote in the The Edge, a movie that was released the same year as this book and in which Anthony Hopkins’s character adrenalizes Alec Baldwin’s character into helping to kill a bear in hand-to-hand combat by forcing him to martially chant: “What one man can do, another can do!” That famously bizarre and stirring line might as well have been the title of Mamet’s acting book, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he arrived at that scene in The Edge through a process of writing both in parallel.

Mamet’s philosophy of life and art is characterized by a healthy institutional skepticism (which has subsequently spiraled out of control in his often nonsensical political loyalties over the last few decades). In his acting book he writes amusingly that “the state these systems profess to cure — anxiety, guilt, nervousness, self-consciousness, ambivalence — is the human condition (at least in the postindustrial age) and, coincidentally, the stuff of art.” He’s right about that much.

What I don’t think his acting philosophy leaves sufficient room for is transcendently great film acting by the type of screen-devouring performers who disappear so thoroughly into their roles, for example like Hopkins himself. (Or see above: Fiennes.) Mamet historically has a big thing about the actor not really having to try if the writer and casting agent have each in turn already done their respective jobs correctly, and I dig this idea in theory. But examples in his own work (perhaps on screen much more than on stage) falsify this thesis. Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin performing Mamet dialogue in a movie Mamet wrote (but tellingly did not direct), or Chiwetel Ejiofor and Emily Mortimer performing his dialogue in a movie he also directed, are appreciably better than some of the stiff and under-directed acting in some of his earliest writer-director efforts, especially when he indulges his enthusiasm for tossing roles to untrained non-actors. Put such performers alongside an Ejiofor or a Mortimer and you see the difference right away. I’m conflicted about it because I find the primalness and poetry in Mamet’s drama so intoxicating on its own, and sometimes the really weird, flattened delivery he peer-pressures out of certain actors even produces unique and interesting results. But more often in my experience, such as when I saw William H. Macy, Raúl Esparza and Elisabeth Moss perform one of his best plays right in front of my eyes, I find that truly great actors do a lot more than simply adhere to James Cagney’s injunction (which Mamet quotes in this book) to “Find your mark, look the other fellow in the eye, and tell the truth.” I think that’s fine advice for actors, but it’s more of a place to start. Your Hopkinses and Mosses and Esparzae are going to take great writing and do a whole heck of a lot more.

The Plains from 1982, written by Gerald Murnane. I’ve been interested in Murnane since first becoming aware of him from reading a splashy article about him in The New York Times in 2018. It was a well-written piece about his career, eccentricities, obscurity, literary output and all-around strangeness. (Makes me feel less uncertain about living along similar principles of frugality, intentional discomfort and professional instability.) As per the article, Murnane has never left Australia, has worked odd jobs to survive, has quirky obsessions and lives in cultivatedly reduced personal circumstances. I like when bright, driven, not altogether happy people who are further along in life than I are doin’ their weird shit. Rightly and/or wrongly, I mine guidance from personal avatars I’ve never met, especially cranky writers.

Now I’ve finally gotten around to actually reading one of his books, and I find that the man is much more interesting than the work. Murnane writes in a constrained, meticulously grammatical, essayistic style that a very smart friend of mine accurately described as “hyper-literary.” In the article it is noted that Murnane sometimes expresses regret at having published his work under the fiction heading, thinking instead that he should have been some kind of experimental essayist. Having now read The Plains, said by some to be his crowning achievement, I think he was right. This novel is just too formal and inscrutable to be enjoyable. It’s the kind of thing one is glad someone as nutty as Murnane went to the trouble to write because that in itself is interesting, much more interesting than actually reading this peculiar and boring short novel about an aspiring filmmaker who ventures into the middle of Australia and tries to earn the patronage of a cartel of wealthy landowners so that he can make a film, which he seemingly never gets around to making. The text itself is made up of bits and pieces of the narrator analyzing the rules and customs of this surreal anti-Australia, and lots of indecipherable longueurs about…well, just what is often hard to decipher. This is the first Murnanical addition to the complete reading list, and will very likely be the last.

Lou Reed: The King of New York from 2023, written by Will Hermes. Marvelously well-written biography of a flawed, ingenious and fascinating musician and songwriter whose work I love (when it’s good; I only know about half of Reed’s records and am informed by Hermes that there are a lot of creative and aesthetic failures studding his discography). I didn’t realize the extent to which Delmore Schwartz was a mentor figure in Reed’s career, which is interesting to me because Schwartz was also a formative influence in the life of Saul Bellow, one of my favorite novelists and whose great book Humboldt’s Gift, which I’ve read twice, is partly about the death and legacy of the Schwartz-like title character. So it was interesting to see my interest in Bellow and Reed - one a great novelist and the other a great rock n roll musician, both Jewish Americans and both geniuses with hit-and-miss careers who sometimes flew too far up their own creative assholes - converge orthogonally in this Reed bio.

Towards the very end of this book Hermes refers via Reed’s third and final wife Laurie Anderson to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which was a bit unsettling for me to read this week because I have had two friends in my life who have both died who attended that institution. My best friend who died when we were nineteen who attended that school for just one year, and a high school friend I knew through him who hosted me for a visit after the first friend died, inviting me up to Rensselaer to attend a Phil Ochs tribute concert. This latter pal, a bright and nerdy mensch’s mensch, finished out his degree, worked in the video game industry and just died suddenly a few weeks ago of an unexpected medical event which left two small children behind. Reading the name of that Institute and about Anderson’s involvement with it in a context around her husband’s death caught me off-guard while I was barreling through the end of this book and processing new thoughts about mortality and the passage of time.

The day Reed died in 2013, I was down the Peninsula at Neil Young’s “Bridge School Benefit” with some friends and family, watching Tom Waits perform what at this rate may turn out to be the last full set Waits will ever perform live. Years ago I read a pretty good Waits biography. I can’t remember if Waits mentioned Reed at the Benefit.

After I finished writing the rough draft of this essay at a bar, The Velvet Underground song “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’,” which some of the artists at the Bridge School show performed an impromptu cover of to honor Reed after word of his passing spread through the festival grounds, came onto the bar audio system. I’m listening to it over the drunken din while I hack out this sweet nuthin’ of a paragraph. My favorite The Velvet Underground album is White Light/White Heat and my favorite Lou Reed album is New York.

Comics Update

I have been making my daily quota of two full pages from a book of classic newspaper comics by studying Get Fuzzy: groovitude, a treasury reprinting the first few years of the strip which I serendipitously found in an LFL. Get Fuzzy concerns a single guy in his thirties who lives with his smug, self-satisfied cat and well-meaning, nebbishy dog. Rather like a latter-day version of Garfield if Garfield was funny, well-written and/or well-drawn.

Cartoonist Darby Conley has an exquisitely sensitive feel for how to let his allotted space on the newspaper comics page open up and breathe, making Rob, Bucky and Satchel’s Ethan Frome-like domestic exasperation feel oddly realistic. (On the comics page, good writing and art can make a talking cat and dog feel more realistic than for example the psychedelic denouement of a too-clever zombie movie.) Conley is a skilled wielder of a pen who draws his characters and their environment in a relaxed, confident, realistic style. He somehow rustles up extra layout space for dialogue that most newspaper cartoonists of the late twentieth century overlooked, using it to flesh out dense exchanges of conversation that elucidate the individual characters’ contrasting personalities — Satchel’s good nature and self-defeating naivety, Bucky’s craven greed and self-absorption and Rob’s quiet desperation and perpetually foiled efforts to lose himself in books, magazines and television.

Conley has a sharp yet discursive writing style that was unique for the comics page of its era. Punchlines are usually deployed across all two to three panels, and individual strips rarely conclude with a final panel in which only one line of dialogue is spoken. In Get Fuzzy the three leads are almost always talking over and past one another, causing the individual strips to blur together more than in other contemporary newspaper comics of Conley’s era. The effect of reading them one after another is a feeling that the reader is really living with these animals day in and out, just like Rob himself.

Conley nods humbly toward his influences, for example by draping the put-upon Rob in a Charlie Brown shirt: Conley, having studied the work of commercially successful predecessors like Jim Davis and of creatively successful predecessors like Bill Watterson and Charles M. Schulz, appears to have designed Get Fuzzy from an aerial perspective rather than from the ground. In this sense he would have been a pretty good fit in the pre-War, full-page cartoonist days of McCay or Herriman or Segar. As it turned out, he cultivated one of the last unique voices to ever break through on the nationally-syndicated American newspaper comics page.