MOVIE DIARY 2023: YOU'RE WONDERFUL, IN A LOATHSOME SORT OF WAY

Hello! Another MOVIE DIARY 2023 post this week? That’s right, it’s a double post week on MOVIE DIARY 2023 baby! This time around, I’ve got illustrator and designer (and my beloved sister) Anna Strain joining me! I absolutely love this post from Anna, so let’s just get into it!

Pulse (2001) - dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: ANNA STRAIN

For all the recent fetishization of early 2000s culture and aesthetics, it feels like an oversight that Pulse isn’t having its moment in the sun. This movie is supremely of 2001. It begins with a dial tone, announcing itself as the reverse Tarot to You’ve Got Mail and carving its spot in the history of early internet. There are ample silhouettes pulled straight out of a Limited catalog, when everything was shaped like )( , the capri jeans had cuffs deep enough to store a passport, and everyone got the chance to sport a flattering boat neck collar.

It’s a particularly on-the-nose watch in 2023, the other year 2001, where once again the anxiety and grief of economic uncertainty, war, and technological overwhelm can only be contained behind the full coverage of silver wrap around sunglasses. Pulse prophetically wrestles with societal loneliness and the catastrophic potential of new, omnipotent technology, but from the more grounded perspective of an era when you could “get into” the internet, like it was decoupage. If you’ve ever been dumb and high (call me) and had a panic attack over how little you actually understand the internet, this movie will be scary. Pulse sinks into the fear of the weird empty nowhere/everywhere space of the internet and takes it up a notch by filling that bad boy up with ghosts. If you are not afraid of the internet or ghosts (who’s dumb now) Pulse will still be scary.

The movie follows the converging storylines of two 20-something groups of babes haunted by the internet. Their journeys are all propelled by many spooky happenings that make this movie great, but would take too long to summarize in full, so I’m going to stick to following Harue and Ryosuke, a college student crafted by the lord to eat Doritos. When Ryosuke uploads the internet to his computer using a CD(!), a  browser window pops up, uninvited, with what’s essentially spooky Omegle (RIP). His screen flips between pixelated, lagging live videos of people alone in their poorly lit bedrooms, all in quiet but clearly unsettled states, all set to the hum of the computer fan. As someone who should be exposure therapy immune to found footage scares after watching all but one of the Paranormal Activity films (don’t worry, I’ve seen the Oxnard one), I can not wrap my head around how these scenes are so to-the-core terrifying. Lighting? Editing? Probably! I don’t want to know how the sausage gets made, don’t tell me. Absolute horror, major pins and needles, it’ll mess you up for days, great stuff!

An unsettled Ryosuke meets Harue as he tries to get answers about his Internet troubles through analog google—walking into a university computer lab and asking the closest computer science student. Preceding the concept of a legacy social media account by 14 years, Pulse anticipates the internet as a place where the living and the dead coincide in perpetuity, and Harue’s smarts and  melancholy ultimately lead to the hypothesis that ghost dimension is at capacity. There are simply too many ghosts, and they are now using the internet to both overflow into the living world and hold people eternally hostage in their loneliness rather than clog up ghost realm further (smart).

Horrible things are happening throughout this movie, and everyone is drowning in grief and fear and isolation. Ryosuke is not immune, and the videos he sees are so scary. While visiting an arcade, he begins to realize that everyone has dematerialized. He has an AHA moment that he and Harue can evade the endemic loneliness by becoming roommates so they can hang out more. Harue is so far gone at this point that the optimism of this suggestion is both funny as hell and tear inducing. The world is falling apart, but there is also free soda from the broken vending machine, and maybe the stranger slumped over the steering wheel would like one. Ryosuke tells Harue he wants to live forever, which makes sense for someone living in small happy moments. In any other horror movie, he would have just been the dope to go first, and I love Pulse for recognizing his effort to talk to people and enjoy things is a survival skill, even if it only takes him one day further.

Moments of lightness carry throughout the movie in other ways too, despite its supreme scariness and overarching bleakness. A group of soon to be traumatized friends work in a beautiful and bright greenhouse together, surrounded by plants, later processing their grief in a bright and sunlit cafe. It’s both really refreshing in a horror movie to have some beautiful scenery that’s not a mysterious lake, and also contributes to some of its scare factor, grounding it in an unbalanced reality.

Less grounding is the movie's ending, which is an apocalypse? Pulse ultimately succumbs to the late 90s fear that the year 2000 would, in collaboration with computers, ’splode us, and becomes Pulse: the 1812 Overture (Full with Cannons).  A plane crashes! Buildings are burning, and there’s nowhere to turn but the sea! Despite its chaotic ending, Pulse absolutely rules, and is best watched on a laptop in a dark room with headphones in for a terrible little treat.

Welcome to the internet!

*Trigger warning/heads up
As with many horror movies, there is a lot of death, and in Pulse it’s almost exclusively death by suicide. It’s not something I really feel up to discussing in the context of a “theme” or movie viewing, but I do think it’s important to know before deciding if you want to watch the movie.

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Anna Strain is an illustrator getting over a fear of being online. In a month you can find her at heyjulydesigns.com, and for now you can say hi at  heyjulydesigns@gmail.com.

The Day of the Dolphin (1973) - dir. Mike Nichols

I mostly remember the movie poster of this circulating on Tumblr during Tumblr’s first, pre-Yahoo acquisition heyday. It’s exactly the kind of thing that would take off on Tumblr c. 2008-ish—the painterly pulp art, the bizarre tagline that perfectly lends itself to ironic appreciation, George C. Scott’s craggy mug scowling as you hit “reblog” and absentmindedly check on your Tumblarity. I finally saw the actual movie in full recently, and it definitely gestures at being the movie you might expect it to be if you’d only seen the poster on Tumblr, but it’s actually something else entirely.

George C. Scott plays Dr. Jake Terrell, a marine biologist (lol could you imagine?) and he’s leading a research team that has been learning how to communicate with dolphins. It’s actually going pretty well. He’s got a great set up with his team of scientists off the Florida keys where it looks like they just sort of spend their time cracking open some cold ones and chilling with a couple of dolphins. Sometimes they have to check on a big computer or go on a boat. The team presents their findings to some interested government types, and through some finessing and subterfuge, some shady organization finds a way to separate Terrell and his team from their dolphins. Terrell and his team learn that this shady organization plans to take advantage of the language training that these dolphins have learned, and use it to tell them to kill the President. Essentially they are going to turn the dolphins into suicide bombers targeting the President’s boat.

It’s a totally out there premise, a visibly and perpetually soused George C. Scott playing a marine biologist. I mean the dolphins suicide bombing the President too, but come on man—George C. Scott does not look like a man who would ever voluntarily put on a wet suit. A really goofy premise to be sure, but I think what really makes this interesting is that it’s played completely straight. There’s no sly, self conscious winking about it, just a bunch of professionals taking this seriously and playing it like a 70s paranoid conspiracy thriller. I think that sort of juxtaposition is really interesting. Taking something that’s so silly and having everyone play it with a straight face is always fascinating to me. I don’t know that it works 100% of the time, and I’m not really sure that it works for The Day of the Dolphin, but it definitely makes it more interesting than seeing the movie poster on Tumblr would have made you believe.

Mike Nichols really seems like he wanted to make his 70s paranoid conspiracy thriller, and I think he sort of does it successfully, but there’s like a solid hour of sitting through marine biologist stuff before you get to what Nichols wants to actually do with this movie, and by the time I got to that I felt as exhausted and in over my head as George C. Scott. Once you do get to the meat of the movie though, it feels like something good is there, it just comes too late in the movie to really develop satisfyingly. This is probably projecting, but I was kind of thinking that George C. Scott felt the same way. Throughout this great and very weird performance, George C. Scott looks sweaty and visibly annoyed. Like, you can tell this man is being short with people, and maybe he’s snapping inadvertently at them because it’s hot and he’s tired and he just wants to be inside with the air conditioning and shoot the conspiracy thriller he was pitched on. That being said, while maybe I don’t so much believe him as a marine biologist with a passion for his field, I do believe George C. Scott as a big grouch whose gruffness melts when he gets to spend time with a dolphin and he feels himself humbled by the grandeur of the ocean.

His Girl Friday (1940) - Howard Hawks

I really loved this, but I also found it to be kind of insane? I love Carey Grant, I think he’s incredible and just one of those actors who can do absolutely anything. He’s magnetic. He comes on screen, and I just gotta see what sort of shit he’s gonna do. This is the only Rosalind Russell movie I’ve seen but I was so impressed by her. She’s a perfect match for Grant in this movie, the two of them just fast-talking at each other, quipping and scheming and undercutting each other. They work so well together, and it’s so fun to get caught up in the fast and clever dialogue. That one scene where they’re both in the press room making phone calls and shouting at each other was phenomenal, my jaw was on the floor. Have you ever tried to talk as fast and as much as either of those two in that scene? The amount of breath control you’d need! The concentration! I’d simply pass out if I were to attempt it, and I don’t even smoke cigarettes the way these two do. What were they putting in cigarettes back in 1940, adderall??

Carey Grant is great in everything, but he’s really incredible in His Girl Friday. His Walter Burns is so cunning, so vindictive, but he’s also extremely charming and funny. The way he works over Hildy’s fiancé Bruce (played by Ralph Bellamy, a perpetual Baxter) is like something out of a Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd cartoon. He’s a real stinker! The stuff that Grant does to Bellamy in here seems particularly disrespectful, even for someone who’d made a career of being a nice guy who gets dumped. Then when you finally do see Walter doing his job as a newspaperman, that charm and humor flips to pure power and intimidation. You really see how Hildy can be drawn to and simultaneously repulsed by this man, but the truth about Hildy is that she and Walter were once married because she’s just like him—someone who will do anything for the scoop. It’s that dogged persistence that gives Hildy a thrill that she’ll never find with nice, normal Bruce who wants only to move to Albany and have a small family.

I think what sort of made me crazy about this movie was that it feels like it’s actually two completely different movies thrown together. I mean, I guess it works, but the amount of tonal whiplash that this movie puts you through is just incredible. One movie is the zany screwball romance where Walter Burns (Grant), a newspaper editor, tries to win back his ex-wife and best reporter Hildy Johnson (Russell) by serendipitously luring her away from engagement and into reporting on a murder case. The other movie is this sort of intense human drama about this murder case where a man is on trial for murdering a police officer. The case isn’t as open and shut as it seems, though. The suspect possibly has a history of mental illness, but the sheriff and the Mayor are looking to execute the suspect because they think it’ll set them up for reelection. On top of that, there’s this whole angle about newspaper reporters sensationalizing the story and twisting the truth to sell more papers. Each movie is really great, but when both the screwball romance and heavy crime drama begin to crossover with each other it feels really jarring. It does make sense in a way, though. Hildy is the sort of link between these two movies, and it’s really affecting to get a glimpse at the seedy, morally questionable world of newspaper reporting that Hildy is trying to escape by marrying her fiancé Bruce. There’s a particularly upsetting scene where a woman forces her way into the press room to confront the reporters about the lies they’ve been telling about her and the murder suspect and they just flat out call her crazy and ignore her while she shouts in anguish. While things like that seem like they come with the territory for these reporters, it’s also clear that this world is where the real excitement is for Hildy, and as much as she wants to deny it, it’s easy for her to play right into Walter’s hands and sink back into the thrill of seedy journalism. It’s really interesting to see Hildy get sucked back into the world of reporting and to realize that part of the reason why she’s so good at it and so well-respected by her colleagues is that she’s as a big bastard and a snake as anyone in the room.

The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord

Our MOVIE DIARY 2023 end of year wrap up will be coming in January! I know, it’s maybe not exactly an “end of year” thing if it’s happening at the beginning of the following year, but I didn’t tell Michael Mann to release Ferrari on Christmas. If you’re interested in participating, join up with the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord and you can get more info. Deadline is 12/29!

Did any of you watch A Murder At The End Of The World? I just finished watching that and I thought it was a lot of fun. Does this mean I have to finally watch The OA and become one of those BRING BACK THE OA types?

Are you guys pumped for the new Kristen Stewart gay body builder crime movie? I think it looks tight.

I loved Conner O’Malley’s The Mask (2023).

I’m just going to write down this list of December movies that I still want to see event though I doubt I will have the time to roll out for all of them. It should be illegal for December to be this busy.
- Godzilla Minus One
- whatever that new John Woo movie is called (I’ve probably already missed its theatrical release haven’t I?)
- American Fiction
- Zone of Interest
- Holt McCallany vehicle Zac Efron wrestling movie
- Ferrari
- Eileen (actually I’m not even sure if this is coming out in 2023, or if it already came out and I missed it? Time isn’t real when it comes to movies at the end of the year.)

That’s all for now, see you next time! I think next week we’ll be wrapping up MOVIE DIARY 2023 proper, then in January we’ll get started with the 2023 wrap up. It’ll be great, you’ll like it. It’s all your friends talking about movies, what else do you need? What else is there?