Category: Broken Girl Media

Film, Television, Radio, and Gaming

Are there any dark novels that you would recommend? Or maybe authors that have writing style similar to yours ?

The writers with whom I feel a minor stylistic affinity aren’t novelists. They are:

  • Adrian Tomine (cartoonist: Shortcomings, Summer Blonde, 32 Stories)
  • Neil Labute (writer/director: In The Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors)
  • David Baerwald (singer/songwriter: Bedtime Stories, Triage)

Honorable mentions go to Chuck Palahniuk —I’ve never read his work, but a number of people have suggested a similarity— and I’ll also throw in Jennifer Lynch, since I’ve been re-reading The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, and it’s even more fucked-up and insane than I remembered.

Oh, and someone once asked if I’d secretly written Diary of an Oxygen Thief. For whatever that’s worth.

une-fille-stupide:

Cinéma of the Bleak

‘Bleak’ is subjective

But in no particular order cinema my tattered little emotional masochist adores as follows – oh and I welcome additions too please dear followers:

  • Dogtooth (2009) – Yorgos Lanthimos
  • Miss Violence (2011) – Alexandros Avranas.
  • Salo (1975) – Pier Paolo Pasolini
  • Happiness (1996) – Todd Solondz
  • Antichrist (2008) – Lars Von Trier
  • Breaking The Waves (1996) – Lars Von Trier
  • Actually anything by Von Trier
  • The Lobster (2015) – Yorgos Lanthimos
  • Dead Man (1995) – Jim Jarmusch
  • Punch-Drunk Love (2002) – Paul Thomas Anderson
  • LILYA 4-EVER (2002) – Lukas Moodysson
  • Phantom Thread (2017) – Paul Thomas Anderson
  • Shell (2012) – Scott Graham
  • Irréversible (2002) – Gaspar Noé
  • Labrador (2011) – Frederikke Aspöck
  • The Elephant Man (1980) – David Lynch
  • The Night Porter (1974) – Liliana Cavani
  • Head On (1996) – Ana Kokkinos.

Off the top of my head, I guess I’d add:

  • In The Company of Men (1997) and Your Friends & Neighbors (1998) – Neil LaBute
  • Winter’s Bone (2010) – Debra Granik
  • Mystic River (2003) – Clint Eastwood
  • 21 Grams (2003) – Alejandro Iñárritu

You wanna step into my world

It’s a sociopsychotic state of bliss

You’ve been delayed in the real world

How many times have you hit and missed?

Your CAT scan shows disfiguration

I want to laugh myself to death

With a misfired synapse

With a bent configuration

I’ll hold the line while you gasp for breath

You want to talk to me?

So talk to me

You want to talk to me?

You can’t talk to me

You don’t understand your sex

You ain’t been mindfucked yet

What is your favourite book?

I’m not sure, overall.

As a kid, it was Mrs. Brisby and the Rats of NIMH. As a teen, it was The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. In my twenties, it was probably A Brief History of Time, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, or Steven Levy’s Hackers. In my thirties? Um, maybe… From Hell. Or Promethea. Or Persepolis. Or Adrian Tomine’s Summer Blonde. Or Craig Thompson’s Blankets. Today, it’s mostly a dead heat between Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem.

Christmas Movie Marathon: The Aftermath

  • A Christmas Story: Simply the best. There’s really no competition. “In the heat of battle my father wove a tapestry of obscenities that as far as we know is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan.” Every line of narration in this thing is pure gold.
  • Love Actually: Waited fifteen years to finally watch this, and should have waited fifteen more. I feel like you needed to be sixteen or younger in 2003 to think this is anything but a nonsense contraption of a movie. (It’s like the Infinity War of rom-coms, only with less-believable characters and situations.)
  • The Year Without a Santa Claus: Heresy I know, but I prefer this to the Rankin/Bass Rudolph. The stop-motion work is pretty sophisticated for 1974 —the lighting and camera movements are impressive— and it’s unintentionally perverted and weird in places, so I love it.
  • Home for the Holidays: HftH is technically a Thanksgiving movie, but when a film has both Holly Hunter *and* Robert Downey Jr.? Gimme. It’s Peak Rehab RDJ, so he’s manic as fuck, but director Jodie Foster lets him roll with it to great effect. Bonus points for casting a My So-Called Life era Claire Danes as Holly’s daughter, a perfect pairing that didn’t get enough screen time.
  • Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: More RDJ, this time at the beginning of his career reboot. Like everything Shane Black has ever written, it’s most impressive on the first viewing, and doesn’t hold up as well over time. In retrospect, it’s most notable for being the only movie ever made where noted scene-stealer RDJ has every scene stolen from him… Val Kilmer runs away with the movie any time he’s on screen. (I miss funny Val Kilmer. Real Genius was my jam in high school.)
  • Jesus Christ Superstar: Hey, it’s closer to being Christmasy than Die Hard! And Murray Head cracks me up. (I loved One Night In Bangkok as a kid.)
  • Olive the Other Reindeer: Dan Castellaneta as a deeply disturbed postman, Joe Pantoliano as a cranky penguin trying to make a buck, and Drew Barrymore as a well-intentioned, very dumb dog named Olive who allows a flea with a hearing problem to convince her that she’s the “the other reindeer” that Santa needs to make his delivery run.
  • A Charlie Brown Christmas: Man, that Lucy is one huge bitch.