I was so pleased to appear as a guest on Road House Minute, Marcie & Roger Wistar’s podcast dedicated to going through Road House one minute at a time! I pop up during the closing credits, so we talk a bunch about Cody and just generally wax rhapsodic about the whole film. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

In an update of an earlier Vulture piece, I recommended 40 movies and shows to watch if I liked Stranger Things and are jonesing for more.

Not even the desert winds of the planet Arrakis can match the heat around the long-anticipated arrival of Dune, director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s landmark 1965 science-fiction classic. Staring Timothée Chalamet as the young nobleman Paul Atreides, Zendaya as his love interest Chani, Oscar Isaac as his father Duke Leto, and Jason Momoa as his mentor Duncan Idaho, this new version of the old classic has weathered the pandemic storm to finally arrive in theaters (and on HBO Max) on October 22nd. But while Herbert’s dense worldbuilding and inventive jargon has made the book a bestseller since its inception, it can be a notoriously impenetrable work — especially when it comes to adapting its long, winding story for the screen.

Don’t know your Baron Harkkonen from your Bene Gesserit? Don’t sweat it: Our quick and dirty guide to Dune will get you up to speed.

I’m thrilled to be back at Rolling Stone for the first time in a long time with this new Dune cheat sheet.

Speed Racer is a sight for sore eyes. Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s 2008 follow-up to The Matrix trilogy feels like an anticipatory antidote to a decade-plus of same-y superhero blockbusters kicked off by two of that year’s other major releases, The Dark Knight and Iron Man. Where the former was dour and the latter was merely workmanlike, Speed Racer feels like an explosion in a Skittles factory, edited to feel like a dream. From the start, shifting timelines flow in and out of one another, juxtaposing the high-speed auto racing that is the title character’s forte with flashbacks to his troubled childhood and Greek-chorus commentary from a slew of racing announcers in a panoply of languages. At varying points, the film depicts a futuristic city in which airborne vehicles soar between Day-Glo skyscrapers; a cross-country race that rockets from an underground catacomb to a sprawling desert to a treacherous ice cavern; and a boy and his pet chimpanzee getting hopped up on candy and riding a cart through a swarm of factory employees on Segways, while Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” blasts in the background.

What you don’t see: gas pumps. Or fuel tank covers. Or exhaust pipes and the plumes of smoke that go with them. Or cars that either are or resemble real-world vehicles, giving their manufacturers the advertising power of product placement. Speed Racer’s futuristic world (its exact timeframe is unclear, but the dates affixed to various events in racing’s past place it in a sort of alternate future-past reality) has been effectively denuded of the propagandistic power of your average automobile-based movie. The carefree world of Pixar’s Cars looks like a Detroit-sponsored dystopia by comparison. No gas, no masters: The world Speed Racer creates runs entirely on science-fictional fuel.

I wrote about the feel-good fossil-fuel-free future of Speed Racer for Polygon.

I joined Ricky Camilleri and Chris Chafin on the Thirty Years Later podcast to talk about all things The Silence of the Lambs. It’s a wide-ranging conversation about the cornerstone of the Hannibal Lecter Cinematic Universe that I think you’ll really enjoy!

I appeared on the latest episode of the Imaginary Worlds podcast to talk about my Polygon piece on Jurassic Park‘s carnivore capitalism. Enjoy!

Money moves the plot of Spielberg’s Michael Crichton adaptation at an almost molecular level. Both the arrival of outsiders to Isla Nublar and the escape of the dinosaurs are motivated by cold, hard cash. After a velociraptor kills a worker in the opening scene of the film, his family launches a $20 million lawsuit against parent company InGen. We later learn from the park’s mousy lawyer, Donald Gennaro, that the incident gave the park’s insurance company and its investors second thoughts about backing the project, prompting the hiring of outside experts Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, and Ian Malcolm to inspect the park. Without the concerns about continued cash flow, our favorite paleontologist, paleobotanist, and mathematician would never have felt a single tyrannosaurus-foot impact.

“Spared no expense”: I wrote about Jurassic Park‘s carnivore capitalism for Polygon.

2. ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991)

DIRECTOR: Jonathan Demme

CAST: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine

RATING: R

From the perspective of the Oscars, this is the most acclaimed horror movie ever made. From the perspective of a horror fan, the statuettes are well deserved. Anthony Hopkins is a monster par excellence as Hannibal Lecter, the refined cannibal killer whom Jodie Foster’s FBI trainee Clarice Starling consults for help in catching another serial murderer, the virulently misogynist and transphobic “Buffalo Bill.” The Silence of the Lambs is sad, in the way any film that’s seriously grappling with the reality of serial killers must be; it’s white-knuckle thrilling, like any good cat-and-mouse thriller; and it’s a parable of living as a woman in a world dominated by the male gaze. In other words, it’s as good as you’ve heard.

I wrote a quick and dirty guide to horror on Netflix this month for Decider.

‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’

You can’t swing a dead parrot on Netflix without hitting content from comedy’s answer to the Beatles—all four seasons of their Flying Circus series are on there, along with a bunch of documentaries, greatest-hits comps, and the religious satire Life of Brian. But you can’t beat the granddaddy of them all, the midnight-movie masterpiece that put John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam et al in the world of King Arthur and his Knights Who Say “Ni!”—no, wait, his Knights of the Round Table, sorry. The movie’s laconic pace and legendary bits (“Just a flesh wound!”) make for the baked equivalent of comfort food. And don’t forget to stick around until the very end of the closing theme for the best sketch of the bunch!

Celebrate 420 Day with this list of ten perfect stoner movies and shows on Netflix that I wrote for Decider. Comedy, drama, action, horror, musicals, documentaries, you name it!

I’m back on the terrific Struggle Session podcast this week, as the gang and I take a look at a movie close to my heart, Road House. This was a fun as hell discussion and I hope you enjoy it!

Dredging up Nightbreed from the depths of my personal canon at the present moment — imagining us in the place not of the pitchforks-and-torches humans but the gloriously bizarre creatures they choose to persecute — has given me unexpected solace. The post-coronavirus society in which I wish to live is one of herd immunity and mutual aid, one where workers whose vital services we take for granted are justly compensated for their indispensable labor, one where the art that sustains our spirit is created by artists we strive to support, one where health care and housing are recognized as universal rights.

I wrote about the Clive Barker film Nightbreed and our need to reimagine the post-apocalypse for the Outline.

If you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, every week you’ll get a new piece on one of my favorite movies. Here’s what I’ve tackled so far:

• All That Jazz
• L’Avventura
• Barry Lyndon
• Casino
• Darkon
• Eyes Wide Shut
• Heavenly Creatures
• Hellraiser
• Hellbound: Hellraiser II
• The Lord of the Rings
• Lost Highway
• Manhunter
• The Master
• Natural Born Killers
• Nightbreed
• Star Wars
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
• To Live and Die in L.A.
• Velvet Goldmine

Subscribe, read, enjoy!

There’s a wrestler in AEW by the name of Adam “Hangman” Page, who works a cowboy gimmick by way of Red Dead Redemption iconography. (One of his finishing moves is called the Dead Eye, presumably after RDR‘s targeting system.) During one of his promos a few months back now, he promised one of his enemies that in their upcoming match he’d see Page do some real “cowboy shit.” Ever since, fans have chanted “COWBOY SHIT! COWBOY SHIT!” when Page takes the ring or uncorks a successful offensive maneuver. It’s charming.

It’s less charming when I think about “cowboy shit” as the animating force and raison d’être of Vince Gilligan’s El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie.

It occurred to me that despite writing about Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul for years, I never wrote anything about the BB sequel movie El Camino. Well, over at my Patreon, now I have.

Horror is a genre of worst-case scenarios, narrowly avoided or not. The monster must feed, the slasher must kill, the demon must possess, the alien must infect, and we mortals, we normals, must defend and escape or die trying. There’s a reason that one of the most recently popular and influential movies in the category named itself after this imperative, boiled down to two simple words: Get Out.

Not all horror stories work that way. In some, the protagonist does not escape from or kill the beast, but nor is she simply killed in turn. In these stories, the protagonist enters into a state of communion with the very horror that has spent the rest of the movie threatening her life and her sanity. The process may be voluntary or not. The embrace of the evil may be gleeful or reluctant, and the outcome may be triumphant or tragic. But in the end, the dangerous, deranging, demonic forces at work are greeted not as destroyers, but as liberators, freeing the human protagonist from his human concerns once and for all, the life he once led forgotten in favor of a supernatural, superhuman new state of existence.

This is transcendental horror: stories that climax with the protagonist entering a state of ecstatic or enlightened union with the source of the horror they’ve experienced.

I wrote about a phenomenon I’m calling Transcendental Horror for The Outline. It’s extensively spoilery, but if you’ve enjoyed any recent horror movies it’s worth taking a peek!

I’ve made my triumphant return to the Delete Your Account podcast to talk to co-hosts Roqayah Chamseddine and Kumars Salehi about the year in movies, the decade in TV, the horror renaissance, the Star Wars situation, and more!

Ever since he strolled across the landing bay of the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi, ever since I held him in my five-year-old hands as a hefty hunk of Kenner-manufactured plastic, I have adored the Emperor. I’ve tried the other Dark Lords, and much as I might enjoy them, they’re just not the one: Sauron is a giant flaming eyeball, Voldemort is just Ralph Fiennes with no nose, Thanos is a finger-snappin’ Genocide Fonzie. But Star Wars’ Emperor Palpatine, the ruler of his galaxy and the series’ ultimate villain, is a star — pure evil in the form of a weird, wrinkly old fart who can shoot lightning from his fingers.

The Emperor rules. Figuratively, I mean, not just literally. And I didn’t need JJ Abrams to resurrect him in The Rise of Skywalker — now disappointing fans in a theater near you! — to convince me.

Why? Because he’s not just evil. He’s a dick about it. And that’s an evil I recognize.

I’m very excited to announce I’m now a columnist for the Outline! I kicked things off with an essay on why the Emperor rules and why, in The Rise of Skywalker, he rules less.

44. The Return of the Sith (Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker)

Much of director J.J. Abrams’s course-correction of a final installment in the sequel trilogy aims for a grandeur and scale that came much more naturally to George Lucas & Co. a long time ago. But there’s definitely one place he nailed it: in the depths of the temple beneath the surface of Exogol, the Sith home planet. When Rey arrives to confront the reemergent Emperor Palpatine before the Sith throne, the camera whirls to reveal that she’s standing in the center of an entire arena, filled with the emperor’s black-robed acolytes. Much like the absolutely massive fleet of planet-killing Star Destroyers hovering above, it’s a vivid demonstration of the power and reach of the dark side.

I’ve once again revised and ranked my list of the 50 Best Star Wars Moments for Vulture, this time taking The Rise of Skywalker into consideration.

I’ve started a new column about film called My Favorite Movies, which will cover exactly that. The inaugural installment: Eyes Wide Shut. It’s available for my Patreon subscribers at the $5/month tier. I hope you dig it!

With that in mind I’ve experimented with making my pro wrestling column, Sweeping Up the Eyeballs, free this week. I hope you dig that too!

“They will not fail!”

The deluded denialism of Lord Summerisle and his people is made terrifyingly clear. In the nobleman’s piercing, clarion voice you can all but hear him clinging, white-knuckled, to the edifice of ideology he himself helped construct and enforce. He cannot admit that he’s wrong, can’t even brook the possibility. He’s telling himself the sacrifice will be accepted and the crops will return as much as he’s telling Howie or the assembled islanders. He’ll commit murder, doom his community to collapse and his people to starvation, before admitting the truth.

I think about those four words, and Christopher Lee’s perfect delivery of them, a lot. I hear an entire mindset, the complete conservative worldview, in those four syllables.

I wrote about my favorite line from The Wicker Man and why it’s the key to so much that’s wrong with our world for Polygon.

The Joker debuted in Batman #1, the Spring 1940 launch of the Dark Knight’s dedicated comic-book series; it also revealed the superhero’s origin for the first time and contained the first appearance of Catwoman. (Batman first appeared in a separate series, Detective Comics, which gave DC Comics its name and in which he still stars to this day.)

But the creation of the Clown Prince is shrouded in controversy, with the three men involved — writer Bill Finger and artists Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson — each offering a different account of how the Joker came to be. The exact order of events varies depending on who you believe, but in essence, the character was a hybrid of influences. Robinson produced a joker playing-card design. Finger provided inspiration in the form of a clown-face logo from Coney Island and, crucially, a picture of actor Conrad Veidt playing the disfigured, permanently grinning title character in the 1928 horror film The Man Who Laughs. Both Robinson and Kane, who for decades received sole credit for the creation of Batman, designed the character on the page, while Robinson and Finger helped develop the concept of the Joker as Batman’s nemesis. The result was a villain unlike any of the gangsters and mad scientists Batman and his recently added sidekick Robin had ever faced before.

I compiled the history of the Joker for Rolling Stone. I love these assignments because, in a culture that treats corporations and brands as creators, they’re a chance to give credit where it’s really due. (Yes, even to Bob Kane.)