November 2025 Check-In

Hello again!

Hope you had an excellent October/Halloween/Spooky Season. Now we’re in the Christmas season, which… used to be just December but really November is now Christmas season too only Thanksgiving is a bit of a waylay where it’s Christmas season but with fun-colored leaves.

I got to go trick-or-treating with some friends and their kids. Their oldest just turned seven so he’s at the prime age. It was really fun (though weird) to be decrepit enough where I’m now a chaperone. It made me feel nostalgic for going to my aunt’s house and her short dead end street in the hills. It was lots of kids and every house handing out candy (though I do remember that the house at the top of the street had people who always dressed up like clowns. Even as a kid it’s like… bro what’s wrong with them?).

Funny how those memories remain even if they’re only for a few years. The kid trick-or-treating window is really mostly just elementary school, and memories don’t really start forming until 3-4 years old. So the number of kid Halloweens is really, really limited. You only get like 7 or so outings in a full “perfect age for trick-or-treating” bracket. Time passes so quickly, and yet as a kid the inertia of societal Halloween means it comes around and you just understand it even though the season is likewise short.

Anyways. Got to watch some spooky movies this month though not as much as last year. The hat we drew from kept giving us slasher films with a brief stopover for Train to Busan. The rest of this month was trying to finish a major project (see below) and between that and trying to keep up on the weekly posts (and work, obvi), it’s been a bit of a challenge juggling all the balls in the air.

Blood on the Clocktower

Putting this first even though technically it happened over the weekend. Blood on the Clocktower is a social deduction game game. It’s like a very involved version of Mafia or Werewolf, only it is maybe the best I’ve seen in terms of shoring up those games notable weaknesses.

A friend invited me as part of her birthday and rather than play directly, I volunteered to help run it. Clocktower’s rule set can be extremely complicated and whoever is managing everything happening needs to know the game inside and out in order to oversee it effectively. While board games might be a hobby, my encyclopedia brain has a propensity for memorizing rule books and keeping all the macro and general rules in order. Being this narrator role (the storyteller) plays to my strengths.

Also? Whenever I play these games that “understanding all the particulars including strategy” really makes it so people don’t trust me. In a situation where players do not have information, it becomes extremely easy to not trust the person who seems to know more than them. As such, even when I’m a good guy it’s very common for people to mistrust me when they shouldn’t. And because I know too much, it means that when I’m bad I have immediate tells.

Clocktower solves this by allowing players like me me to put their best aspects into the game. While I’d love to play it as a player (and I’m sure I will at some point in the future, probably many times), the game itself is so inherently dramatic that even watching it has an electric tension to everything going on. The stakes are clear. The information streams mean all relevant information comes out during the voting to execute.

On top of that, it’s not like the storyteller is some passive spectator. Because of the way information works in the game, there are times when the storyteller has to deliver untrue information or misinformation as a result of internal factors.

This happened in our game. Before the game I selected a role known as “The Drunk” and tied it to a role called “The Empath”. The Empath is a powerful character, as they know how many of their neighbors are on the evil team. As players (especially their neighbors) die they learn more and more information. Of course, the person who drew that out of the bag didn’t realize that they weren’t actually that role. They were really The Drunk (who thought they were The Empath), which means that all of the information that I would give to them in the night would almost certainly be inaccurate.

As luck would have it, the host/birthday person (Taylor) happened to draw it out of the bag and ended up sitting next to an evil player basically the entire game. That means that I kept telling her that neither of her neighbors were evil when that simply wasn’t true. Eventually, when her non-evil neighbors started dying, I started giving her correct information, which led her to believe that anyone except her evil neighbor was evil.

The game is a series of big calculations like that, trying to figure out who knows what when and what lies to give at what time. In the games I watch online, the host usually pulls the storyteller aside to ask why they made a particular choice and they’ll receive the reasoning/thought process behind the information. It can be very, very difficult to parse through, and it’s about balancing the scales so that one team doesn’t just steamroll the whole game.

That’s not to say I was perfect. For all my prep, I did make a few small (but not game changing) errors in dispensing information and even 48 hours later I’m still beating myself up about it and thinking about how to do even better next time.

Still, it was a tremendous success, and I can’t wait to own my own copy so I can find lots of other people and turn them all into Clocktower fiends.

Fixed

This came across my radar because Blank Check grandfathered Genndy Tartakovsky in as a stealth miniseries. It gives Griffin an opportunity to talk about animation, and that’s great considering that Tartakovsy is one of the best and brightest animation directors around. I might not love the Hotel Transylvania films on the whole, but he used those films to push digital animation away from the flat realism of Pixar. Considering one of his biggest animation inspirations is Looney Tunes, it’s no surprise to see his characters be more impressionistic, more abstract. Figures contort and change shape in ways that defy physics and biology.

The best example of this is a test animation proof of concept he did for a potential Popeye movie. While this is him pushing this aesthetic to the extreme, there is a large part of me that longs for more studios to deploy this type of animation. The medium itself can be so unrealistic that it seems foolish to not deploy these techniques in at least some outputs.

Fixed, though, is Tartakovsky returning to hand-drawn 2D animation and making an almost modern day Looney Tunes movie only for adult and in the style of a gross-out Judd Apatow comedy.

And while I might really love the animation, it in no way saved anything about this movie.

The film follows Bull, a mixed breed dog who loves to hump everything. The basic premise is that his owners are imminently going to neuter him, and it’s about the maximalist R-rated life he and his dog friends live in the lead-up to that. It starts with him aggressively humping his grandmother’s leg for a few minutes. It then proceeds to have him stick his dick in all sorts of things for a scene or two before finally mellowing out by just showing off his dog testicles whenever they’re in frame. Soon, Tartakovsky introduces the other dog characters, including a dog who loves how his owners have to pick up his excrement and another one who likes to eat it.

It doesn’t really get better. This is a movie where rats nibble on Bull’s balls and he gets high from smoking marijuna. The dogs visit a strip club, and one of the gang goes down on an hermaphroditic(?)/intersex(?) dog. Bull lets his nemesis (a male douchebag purebreed) anally penetrate him so that the adversary won’t impregnate the love interest dog. And it ends with a bear on stage, stripping for a room full of howling female dogs. The bear’s balls bounce all over as he goes because… well. Just because.

If all of this sounds crazy, this is just a brief taste of 90 minutes of pure tasteless filth. If it wasn’t repulsing me, I spent the runtime asking who the hell this movie was even for. Outside of the sliver of teenage boys who would love a movie this horned up, I have no idea.

With it now in the rearview, though, it made me consider my love of Looney Tunes and why that aesthetic has always been so engaging to me. That series came out of vaudeville, where the creators who really popularized the work loved stuff that had both broad humor and also extremely elevated cultural poignancy (like including Peter Lorre and a love of the opera). For Fixed, it feels like Tartakovsky is drafting off the R-rated comedy but for animation.

But… god. It was just so way too far.

The Survivor 49 Pre-Merge

Rough stuff, huh?

I don’t really have much to say here except that I’m looking forward to season 50 and then whatever happens with the show beyond this. These past nine seasons have been up and down, but now that we’re at the end of this 5-year leg, it’s clear that a lot of the “we need to re-invent the game” meant coming up with ideas early and then throwing those into each game without a major innovation to improve the show.

Once again, conditions on the ground decimated one tribe, leaving a 6-6-2 breakdown at the tribe swap. Jeff Probst might say he wants to break players down to see what they’re made of, but that isn’t compelling when it means two-thirds of the cast end up on the cutting room floor and we don’t get to see them actually play until several episodes in. It’s just fluff pieces about people on a reality TV game show. There’s no drama or conflict. And a tribe decimation just isn’t dramatic anymore.

While they did finally swap from three tribes to two, the power imbalance meant the 6-6-2 breakdown split into two tribes of 4-2-1, where each tribe got a majority of one 6-person tribe, a minority of the other 6-person tribe, and then one of the two remaining players from the decimated 2-person tribe. The subsequent votes were extraordinarily boring, where one tribe went to tribal twice (again!) and strongarmed the minority-2 out of the game.

Because this entire era has become predictable in all the ways that matter, there’s been initial tribal unity such that the strongest alliance has ended up winning basically every season since 41. The “3 tribes of 6 player” format sounds good from the perspective of “there’s nowhere to hide”, but players have long since figured out that all they need is to find a strong four (and be within a strong three inside that group) and you’re basically good until the merge. If that’s not finding a place to hide in plain sight, I don’t know what is.

Swaps should happen earlier and with more surprise. Players are going to know what’s up your sleeve, but it matters that they don’t know what production will introduce and when. Without that, the game (like this season) is outrageously tedious and boring. I mean… a dude got bit by a deadly poisonous snake and it only somewhat registers.

Hoping it’ll pick up in the post-merge but… I’m not holding my breath.

The Conjuring

This came up as a watch on Halloween proper for Unspooled. I’ve stayed away from The Conjuring for the better part of a decade because of the way people talk about it. I usually don’t do well with exorcism stories or ones where it’s just some violent eldritch force.

Maybe I was psyching myself out too hard, but this wasn’t as bad as my imagination. It’s certainly a horror movie, certainly dripping with dread. But Wan in horror mode is more about the quality of the scares than the quantity. It also helps that the story of the Warrens provided a strong emotional throughline, and it’s easy to see why this took off to be the most successful cinematic horror enterprise of all time.

In the end, it’s a movie I liked well enough and respected and appreciated more than I loved. I’m glad I finally watched it, and though some of the horror imagery (the clapping shit was fabulous) really stood out, I can’t imagine rewatching this as part of future Spooky Season rotation.

Twin Peaks: The Return

The second half of the month was a blitz of rewatching Twin Peaks: The Return. It felt worthwhile to rewatch Lynch before listening to Blank Check’s episodes about him. His work deserves more than the one pass because so much of the first time is just trying to figure out what the hell he’s doing.

I could go on and on about Mulholland Dr. or Inland Empire. Both are so tremendous in their own way. But there’s something about Twin Peaks: The Return that really captured my thought processes. Even though I finished the series last week, I’m still working on all of these minute reviews I do for rewatches. They’re taking surprising amounts of time, as it’s hard to remember what exactly happens in most episodes and it’s a lot of cross referencing summaries online.

Regardless of that, the series is a transcendent experience. It’s insane that Showtime gave Lynch that much money to do whatever the fuck he wanted and they didn’t seem to give any notes or if they did Lynch never let them dull the edges as he went full madman. As a statement of art, it’s bold and tremendous. It’s a shame we never got more from him, but he poured so much of himself into this final opus that it’s better to count blessings than lament the never-weres.

Mostly, what The Return does is force everyone to slow down. The pacing can be utterly languid, with extended silent scenes. Dr. Jacoby slowly spray paints shovels gold, doing multiple coats, and using a fancy pulley system to move them along as he works on each. A man sweeps the floor at the Roadhouse. Ed sits in his auto shop and stares out the window during a dark lonely night.

So many stories focus on plot. Indeed, movies (even Lynch’s) rush the first chunk to get to their inciting incident so the story can get moving. Economy is everything. For The Return it’s like the economy is aflood in too much money, and Lynch can take what amount to B-roll and just play it. I doubt there’s any deleted scenes. Lynch just found a place to put everything and he always made it interesting. He is not in a rush to get anywhere and puts the audience through a test of patience, making them wait until almost the very, very end for Cooper to wake up enough to be the centralcharacter everyone expected.

But before that, he creates a character in Dougie-Cooper who forces everyone to fill in the world around them. It’s a world without answers, where Cooper’s stoic silence leads everyone to their own conclusions. There are no answers, there is no true meaning. It’s just Lynch knocking down every guardrail for how a story is “supposed to work” and leaving in its place a piece of art that provides within itself a functionally infinite space into which viewers can pour their thoughts, emotions, memories, and imaginations.

All of Lynch’s work is a gift, and while Twin Peaks: The Return is not my favorite Lynch (it’s up there), it’s the one for which I am most grateful. And it’s going to get to a point where I will just put it on all the time in the background, losing myself in this nasty evil world and celebrating all the beauty within it.

Back to the Future (Theatrical Re-release)

Briefly wanted to touch on this, but it’s the last thing I did before putting this out into the world. I’ve been wanting to see Back to the Future on the big screen for a long time. It finally happened. And it didn’t disappoint.

What’s remarkable about Back to the Future is how much of a perfect object it is. I’m not sure there’s any film in existence that more specifically aims for what it aims to be and then basically completely nails the execution this hard. It’s a total bullseye, and forty years later, the staying power is clear.

Because this isn’t just Zemeckis’s direction or his script with Bob Gale. Those are perfect and he modulated his style to just the right calibration. But it’s also the cast. This movie obviously doesn’t work without Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. But more importantly it doesn’t work without Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover, and Thomas F. Wilson. These performances transcend even Zemeckis’s direction and fully inhabits these characters. Glover in particular is magnificent, his inherent weirdness integrating so well with George McFly’s goofy outsider character.

But it’s also the Alan Silvestri score. It’s Keramidas and Schmidt cutting the film. Go down the list, everyone workted together to make an incredible product. They nail every beat, every character arc, every scene, and even every set piece. To watch Back to the Future is to watch one of the great masterpieces of studio filmmaking, where everything works and they make an insane amount of hard work look positively breezy.

Coming up this month…

With the end of the year barreling towards us, a lot of this month is getting ready for the big list-making that’s going to take place in mid December. I’ll be watching the rest of the major movie reviews over the next week and a half (all that’s left is Airplane!, Casablanca, Before Midnight, Moonrise Kingdom, Unforgiven, To Kill A Mockingbird, and Vertigo) and then turning to a bunch of recommendations I fielded to friends of mine to help broaden the scope of this final run. Last time I did it I got recommendations like Rififi, The Handmaiden, Deep Blue Sea, and What’s Up Doc?. This time the list so far includes City of God, The Wedding Singer, Pink Flamingos, Get Shorty, and Brazil.

Considering that there’s a number of high profile releases on the immediate horizon (Wake Up, Dead Man (which I’m seeing next week!), Predator: Badlands, The Running Man, and Wicked: For Good), I don’t expect major reviews for any of those friend recommendations, but if anything tickles my fancy I’m sure it’ll wind up in next month’s check-in as a capsule review or something.

Add in that I’m trying to find time to watch the most recent season of The Diplomat and it’s a pretty full plate.

It’s also funny that I loosely toyed with the idea of doing NaNoWriMo this year (I haven’t done the past few), but with everything going on it would be one thing too many. Though the organization’s collapse in the wake of their embrace of A.I. is truly remarkable. It’ll live on in our hearts. So it goes.

Anyways, gonna be putting out a review of the new cut of S.S. Rajamouli’s sword and sandal epic. Should be out tomorrow.

As always, thanks for reading!