Category Archives: Story Pile

This Decemberween, Fox and I continued our tradition of watching a Hallmark movie, about Christmas and Dogs, with the amazingly named The Christmas Shepherd. Did we get dog training weirdness like we saw last year?

No.

We got something way weirder!

Content Warning: Dog Theft?

Hey, you heard about the Nicolas Cage Five Nights at Freddies knockoff movie that was made in a single month? Have you heard it’s good?

Spoiler Warning of course, I’m going to discuss things in this movie. But also, Content Warning! This is a movie with a lot of your typical schlock tropes, there’s a needless sex scene where you Don’t Get To See Anything, there’s a lot of splashy, gory, wet violence against angry animatronics.

As with Knives Out, Breaking Bad, and Old Boy, there is some media where I am concerned that by having an opinion, my mere me-ness is very much part of how that opinion is (and should be) perceived. Simply put, there’s a canon of media that I think millenial white guys are a little too excited to talk about, like they’re markers on a talent tree. I feel like there’s an envelope of time, now stamped down into wikis and articles, where people spilled all their thoughts and their feelings and then everyone else who was feeling a bit of the same stepped into the same space and sought some way, any way, to capture that they were feeling the same way, that they were also tangled up inside about this thing and what it meant and they weren’t thinking about it, they were feeling about it, but feelings are hard, and pointing out the reference to Sascha Scheiber’s Hypnose is a fact that can be collected and cleaned and pinned and then…

The feeling has a place to go.

Not going to spoil anything about this movie beyond its broad genre and invocations. You should watch it on your own if you think you can handle two hours of grown men losing their minds in isolation. I’m not going to tell you about what’s in it, as much as I’m going to try and tell you about how I feel about it, and what I feel about what it’s not.

I feel like pre-emptively, there’s a lift I have to ask of you. Bloodthirsty Hearts is a horror podcast. Wait, no, it’s a horror fiction podcast. Wait wait wait no, no, it’s a horror comedy fiction podcast. Oh, wait, no I missed a bit, it’s a horror comedy fiction podcast about zoomers engaging with popular media that feels definitely like it’s millenial stuff.

Did I scare you off?

There is a chance that you never listened to radio plays growing up. You aren’t the kind of person who finds it adorable, charming and narratively acceptable to hear characters giving semi-naturalistic dialogue that’s meant to handle transitions and setting and reacting to oh no! there’s a monster in the room! We’re going to scream in a way that won’t blow out the mic or clip the audio, while still trying to convey meaningful emotion!

I think, inherently, there’s a strong chance, that just this whole form of media, is a hard no for you. And that’s okay. You should not imagine that anything I say about Bloodthirsty Hearts is going to change your mind about it. It is 100% exactly what it is, and it’s not about to elevate the form. If you don’t like fiction podcasts, this is not going to change your mind, and it’s a very classic example of it.

Also I guess, spoiler warning, but nothing too explicitly important, just generalities until right at the end where I mention the way that a plot point is woven around other things. If you’re immediately curious to check it out, and want to talk about it, you can check it all out, for free. I liked it! I think that if you like the style it’s projecting, yeah, it follows up on it, and that’s good!

Y’know how Knives Out is one of those movies that I was concerned about discussing because I knew I was going to be repeating boring details rather than focusing on the movie’s message? That I was contributing to a noise complex because I loved it and I wanted to be able to love it in all angles and share that love for it and hopefully encourage you to love it too? Nobody is a movie in that same genre, but in this case the actual plot, sure, whatever, you’ve seen this, you know the kind of movie it is. It’s a physical stunt based action movie about a Dangerous Man Pushed Too Far. You don’t need spoilers for this, that’s how the movie’s trailer presents it.

And for a movie about physicality in stunts, its physicality is amazing. You can see best-of scenes on youtube, of moments of an entire movie’s worth of holy shit combat scenarios, and they’re the kind of scenarios where you’re meant to regard the world as full of physical objects that are by default stronger than a human’s body, more dangerous to a human than a human is to it. For a surprising number of desks and people using them, you are not tougher than your desk in a straight up fight. That means that when Nobody wants to represent a person engaging in violence with another person, the world around them matters in a wholly material way.

And that makes me think about how easy it is to make a movie like this. Or isn’t.

Today, Fox joined me and we talked about Ya Boy Kongming, one of the many, many, many really good anime from 2022.

Really? That’s what this is titled? That’s awful.

Originally, this anime was going to get released under the title of Virgin Road, which at the very least is a little less cumbersome. Long titles are common amongst light novel stories, but I think in this case it’s especially egregious because the entire secondary clause on the title is a long-form reading of the phrase ‘and such and such.’ This title, for this anime yada-yadas its way through its pitch, which is kinda frustrating. As far as first impressions go, when you bottle it on the title, you’re really not inspiring confidence to start with. First impressions are important! It’s like if the series is full of characters wearing outfits that look extremely silly.

Oh no.

A long time ago, I think discussing The Blacklist I used the term ‘crime wizards’ to refer to television programs that focus on characters who do crime in ways that are interesting and challenging to solve and create the tension or systems necessary to justify about an hour of television that can be solved by a specialised team of marketable weirdoes.

There are a lot of shows in the Crime Wizards genre, in different degrees of grittiness – like you can even point to older shows like CSI and NCIS… and along with them, in the transition between eras of Crime Wizard TV, we have this example, of a drama TV show with a compelling hook:

Fake crimes, but real wizardry.

At least, that’s the pitch.

I guess it’s hard to recommend Inside Job. I mean not in the broadest way, where I can just say ‘it’s a funny adult comedy that doesn’t seem to venerate being a selfish asshole, and it looks like a lot of them these days, with the same general level of competence.’ It’s you know, the way that Rick and Morty pissed on its aesthetic to mark its territory and now any animation that puts in too much effort or has lines that are too clean winds up being seen as ‘like that.’

I don’t know if Inside Job is like that, because I haven’t seen Rick and Morty past the opening of the first episode. Didn’t jam with it, and instead watched other stuff I found more engaging instead. Like Inside Job!

No, what makes it hard to recommend is, and, like, reader – can I call you reader? – sure, okay, reader, the thing is, this is a shortish TV series that draws on modern mythologies of the conspiracy theory griftscape in which I grew up. It uses the ongoing behaviour of an overachieving conspiracy theorist father who doesn’t respect his kid as a plot point. One character idolises toys and franchises from the 80s because it lets him pretend he has an idealised family life that was fun. Oh, and the main character, Reagan, feels like an export of one of my friend’s OCs so closely that she uses Reagan gifs for reactions.

The series doesn’t feature a long form sequence of a character beating a priest to death or a thesis about how game play lets us choose our identities, but like, it’s otherwise hits pretty close to me individually.

Way back when I wrote about The Beginner’s Guide, I wound up talking about a movie called S1M0N3. The basics of that article are that some gamers seemed to be fooled into believing the fictional story of a developer stealing work and putting it up on the internet for sale was a real thing, just as in the movie S1M0N3 people believed that a movie about a fake fictional digital actress was made with a real fictional digital actress. It still stands out to me as an example of the way that modern, immediate anxieties about our relationship to technology are not, in fact, new at all.

In 2001, another movie came out that had a similar vibe to it, a movie about a fear of the changing culture of the now in the light of emergent technology. The fear was about what people would do in a world where everyone had access to a camera, about what a culture of news of spectacle would do, and the assumptions we make about people’s ability to control and express themselves. The movie was called 15 Minutes.

I reread the Johnny Maxwell books by Terry Pratchett, from the early 90s, and this time I had Fox along to help. Then, we talked about it and brought along a microphone so you can listen to us talking about these books.