Tag: Keeping It Short

Keeping It Short Week, Day 7: The impeccable heartbreak of Douglas Sirk

It’s the grand conclusion of Keeping It Short Week, 250 words per post no matter what!

Melodrama is fundamentally uncool. When you think of the word, you think of overwrought tears, exaggerated gesture, implausible goings-on and a story that attempts to throttle your feelings. 

Yet sometimes, we all want to get swept away a bit. Sometimes we just want to feel. And when I crave a bit of melodrama, I’ll skip your soap operas and Jane Austen and go right for the straight stuff – the Sirk. 

Douglas Sirk is here to wring your emotions out like a wet dishcloth. His handful of shimmering colour movies are glittering gems of 1950s restraint, heartbreak and bombast. If you can overlook their more dated aspects, you’ll find some smart, subtle criticisms of privilege, power and wealth that don’t seem all that out of place in 2023. 

Watching gems like All That Heaven Allows or Written On The Wind is like viewing a lush painting coming to life. His frequent star and muse Rock Hudson, a closeted gay man, brings a lot of hefty subtext to his presence in Sirkland. It’s impossible to say how this much colours our impression of him in these movies, but in them he combines the chiseled handsomeness of a Cary Grant with a slightly fragile, insecure veneer. In Sirkland, his characters are all taut with suppressed emotion, and through their fumblings, we learn a little something about our own. 

Oh, and Sirk apparently liked to call his movies “dramas of swollen emotion”, which is way better than melodramas. 

Thanks for reading along this “short” week of posts, I hope we’ve all had life changing lessons as a result. Normal long-winded posting will resume next week!

Keeping It Short Week, Day 6: Still can’t figure out if I love or hate The Doors

Hey, groovy cats, we’re still in Keeping it Short Week, each post 250 words or your money back:

Everyone has bands they love, but what about the ones you kind of love and don’t love? The Doors and Jim Morrison hold a very singular place in my tastes.

I’ve owned their albums and CDs multiple times and then gone through a phase of being so over the Doors that they went… well, out the door. I felt sometimes like being a Doors fan over the age of 21 was embarrassing. The anguished “Mother/Father” oedipal stuff in “The End” is a prime example of how the Doors could swing from ominous to awful in the space of a few lines. 

Morrison was, by all reports, a fairly reprehensible human being in a lot of ways, and his sexist stoned messiah complex wears thin fast. How we feel about an artist as a person can affect how you view their work, and that’s not cancel culture, it’s just being a human. 

And yet, I still find myself humming along to the Doors. They were pompous, overwrought, exciting and ridiculous all at the same time. A broody epic like “Riders on the Storm” still gets me, while trippy psych-rock like “Light My Fire” and “People Are Strange” are both timeless and time capsules of what we think the ‘60s meant. 

Maybe I overthink The Doors, and in the end they were just a solid rock band with a tendency towards bad poetry. But for a band I sometimes hate, I sure end up going back to them an awful lot. 

Keeping It Short Week, Day 5: Creepshow and why short horror still creeps me out

Bwa-ha-ha, it’s still Keeping It Short Week, every post 250 words or less or else:

I took years to actually see horror movie anthology Creepshow when it came out in 1982. I first saw the graphic novel adaptation by the late great Bernie Wrightson in a shop, but as a wee pre-teen I was too scared to buy it, so I’d end up flipping through the pages every time I went to that store, scared stiff. 

Creepshow is a great little mix of gore and cheese, filtered through the sensibility of ‘50s horror comics like EC’s Tales From The Crypt. Throw together a few segments, toss in a cackling host to link them together, and off you go. The beauty of an anthology format is, if you don’t like the current bit, wait a few minutes for the next. 

Horror seems to lend itself to an anthology format more than any genre, really. Much of my favourite horror is short and (not so) sweet – those EC comics, TV series like Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone, Stephen King’s deliciously nasty short stories. 

My favourite Universal Horror movies from the 1930s-1940s rarely hit more than an hour’s length, a lesson to those who think you always need three hours-plus to tell a story. Bride of Frankenstein is a mere 75 minutes long! 

Horror can be longer format, of course, such as many of King’s hefty doorstop books like It. But for me, the best horror hits you hard and quick, leaving you gasping for breath before you even quite clock that it’s over. 

Happy Halloween! 

Keeping It Short Week, Day 4: Matthew Perry and the spiky heart of ‘Friends’

It’s still Keeping It Short Week, with every post 250 words or less:

I wouldn’t say I was a huge Friends fan … and yet, I watched nearly all of its 236 episodes.

It was in the air in the 1990s, a candy-coloured fantasy of twentysomething life. It began in 1994 just a few weeks after I spent a pinched, impoverished summer living in New York City, and its sitcom world of waitresses and unemployed actors living in luxurious lofts was not reality to me. 

Still, Friends was diverting and served up an image of life as breezy comic fun, and honestly, the main reason I ended up watching as much as I did was always Matthew Perry’s sarcastic Chandler Bing, the prickly joker in the deck of shiny gorgeous faces. When Perry died this weekend at just 54, it stung. He was my favourite Friend, the one I could most imagine having a beer with, in many ways the most human of the lot. 

The wisecracking guy was already a well-worn sitcom trope when Perry came along, but he added a bit of Gen-X irreverence to Chandler. Sure, he had the same romantic misadventures as the rest of the Friends, but Perry added a slight wink to the role. “Could this be any more cliched,” you could almost hear him saying. 

In real life Perry was battling addiction for years and maybe, just maybe, those inner turmoils gave him a little more weight in the role of Chandler. The joker jokes to keep the tears from coming, you see. 

Keeping It Short Week, Day 3: Why Mystery Science Theater 3000 is still the best comfort food

Hey hey, it’s still Keeping It Short Week, no posts longer than 250 words:

I heard of Mystery Science Theater 3000 long before I saw it, this obscure cable TV show that screened old terrible movies with robots making fun of them. 

I finally saw it in, of all places, a hotel room in Florida. I clearly remember one movie was the Soviet fantasy Jack Frost. It was the damn weirdest, funniest thing I’d ever seen. 

But boy, was it hard to actually watch more. It aired on cable channels I didn’t have money to watch, or weren’t carried locally. I finally found a few VHS tapes, and then DVDs, but even then, they were hard to find or crazy expensive. They were like buried treasure for quip-happy trash film fans. MST3K made me realise just how many awful, hilarious obscure movies there are in the universe. 

It’s all much easier now to watch MTS3K, thanks to the internet. A couple of times a year I get into a real MST3K mood and binge away. For days, I keep imagining myself as Tom Servo or Crow, yelling stupid stuff as life goes by me. Before hateful trolls took over pop culture, MST3K was good-hearted snark. 

I do miss the hunt. Kids today have no idea how hard it once was to find things you’d heard about that sounded cool. I can watch any episode of MST3K I want with a few clicks now, and I love them, but part of me misses the mystery part of that theater. 

Keeping It Short Week, Day 2: Who’s my favourite superhero?

It’s Keeping It Short Week, 250 words or bust:

The question is fraught with peril for any comics nerd: Who’s your favourite superhero?

I’ve clearly got too much time on my hands because I think about this a lot. One of the first comics I ever remember reading was Amazing Spider-Man #200 and for years Spider-Man, web-swinging worrywart, was my choice. He was a geeky teenager and then a harried student! I identified!

For a brief while I succumbed to the bristly charms of mutant Wolverine, before overexposure and dire 1990s comics ended that affair. Then for a long time, I’d go with Batman, because pound for pound I think he’s probably had the most great stories written about him of any superhero. 

There’s others I adore, of course, like the endless duelling personalities of the Hulk, angst-ridden Daredevil, lumpy everyman The Thing. 

Yet, these days, when I think of the superhero I dig the most, it’s always the most basic – Superman, the Man of Steel. He may be uncool compared to edgy Punishers and Spawns but honestly, the older I get, the more I like his fundamental decency.

I love lots of superheroes, but when it comes down to it, the one I’d really like to see in our troubled old world, the role model – well, Superman was the first for a reason. He’s also still kind of the best. I’m old now, and superheroes don’t just have to be cool to me. They have to actually be kind of super, too. 

Keeping It Short Week, Day 1: In which I attempt to write less words

If there’s one problem the internet gives writers, it’s the lack of the end of a page. I constantly have a problem with keeping my blog posts short. Thus, as an experiment, it’s time for Keeping It Short Week, where I attempt to make my point without banging on for 1500 words. 

Yessir, 250 words or less, that’s my motto for the next seven days. It’s also a clever attempt to clear out my “blog drafts” folder which has stacked up a bit with half-assembled fragments of hot takes over the five years I’ve been doing this website. 

I left the hellsite that was once Twitter a year or so ago and have few regrets about it, except for one thing – sometimes it’s fun to write something concise and witty and then move on, and the endless trolling and hate speech kind of obscured that. 

My role model in all things brevity is old mate Bob from Temuka who somehow manages to post almost every single day and raise small humans, and for the most part, keeps his posts about half as windy as mine are. 

Writing short is good training for the brains, too, and something I generally manage in my paying journalism work. The freedom of the internet is great, but sometimes, a little discipline is good too. 

So, onwards, for a week of brief surveys of topics that are of interest to me! And if I happen to go past 250 words well then I’ll just