June rhymes with cartoon

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June came in like a lion with the end of the film unit. And then dozens of hours on the road for a funeral and camping, not to mention an internetless norovirus quarantine and, in the end, just the movies you see. And, right now, I Love Boosters and Disclosure Day and Toy Story 5 and Supergirl are ALL in theaters.

Got some catching up to do.

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ELSEWHERE
our dvd

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

Honestly, it does feel sixteen years old. But not in a bad way. It holds up but, for instance, the soundscape can't speak to an audience of 17yrolds the same way it speaks to people who grew up with a great intimacy with certain digital ephemera.

Interestingly, one of my seniors said in her writeup that the sound it part of what makes the movie "timeless" which either means I'm very wrong or she doesn't know what timeless means.

Readings: 1, 2.

ELSEWHERE
our dvd
until it froze on Susie's face
then a series of pirate sites
until we found one that worked

Citizen Kane (1941)

It was great to watch this movie on a higher resolution. It really is amazing, visually. Why don't more movies embrace depth like this. One student couldn't believe it was old because it still feels creative here, now, in 2026. I love to look at it.

But I still can't get behind it as being in the conversation for the greatest film of all time. I can't even be persuaded it's better than Casablanca. I mean. Come on.

But I also want to praise Welles the actor / the makeup team. He ages so much in this film and it holds up great.

Readings: 1, 2.

ELSEWHERE
our dvd
(this particular one,
criterion collection,
found unopened in a free pile)

Stray Dog (1949)

Watching this right after Citizen Kane I'm struck by how both Kurosawa and Welles are into depth. I feel like movies hardly ever use the frame's potential depth as well as these two movies do. I'd like to see more of this.

I also love the protagonist's connection to the gun used in the crimes and how and why that motivates him. That's an emotional and philosophical element frankly not available to an American cop movie.

But Kurosawa's visual sense is the true highlight here. He was good at this already. (This is the earliest of his film's I've seen.)

Readings: 1, 2.

ELSEWHERE
our dvd

Vertigo (1958)

The break between class periods happend as Scottie was catatonic in the hospital. And that made me realize: Vertigo is kinda two movies. Movie one, The Mystery of Madeleine. Then the intermission in the hospital. Then movie two: Judy's Secret. The begin kinda the same. They end kinda the same. And that symmetry is part of what makes this such an astonishing experience.

Some loved it, some were disturbed by it, some were left confused. But everyone had an experience.

Readings: 1, 2.

ELSEWHERE
our dvd
but it froze
so we watched some of it
on the same pirate site
we'd finished Citizen Kane on
but then we finished back on the dvd

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

There's nothing like finishing an ancient movie with a bunch of 17 and 18yrolds and seeing their delirious smiling faces and happy reactions to the bundle of joy we just wrapped up.

May Singin' in the Rain offer its pleasures to centuries of future filmwatchers.

Readings: 1, 2.

ELSEWHERE
Kanopy

Memento (2000)

Fun to rewatch this, first time in over twenty years.

I didn't really remember where it was going, but still, the ending wasn't quite as satisfying. Maybe too much Nolan in the interim?

I bet this is movie is the best when you watch it immediately after watching it.

I probably won't do that this time.

Readings: 1, 2.

ELSEWHERE
YouTube

Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

For the last movie of the year, classes had the opportunity of voting to finish up with a terrible movie so we could discuss what went wrong. Two classes took me up on that. (No readings for the bad movies.)

This is, indeed, terrible. But it does have a handful of cool elements that could be something in a better movie. But the lousy sound mix, laggard editing, and general stupidity keeps the priest's costume or the painting from working. Not that I'm surprised. I head that MST3K held off on doing Manos because they didn't think they could successfully make it entertaining. I'll bet they did just fine, but I'm not ready to watch it again. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

Indeed, if I offer bad movies again next year, I may need to swap the watched ones out.... We'll see how I feel next May.

HOME
library dvd

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

Huh.

I...don't think I liked it.

I appreciated all the Raymond Chandler stuff. It had some funny bits. But it didn't allow us to really like any of the characters. And it wants to be a comedy but the violence didn't work with that. And it seems like Shane Black is to Jeffrey Katzenberg if sexy ladies' nipples are to animated action sequences.

Also, it's very 2005 in that they're addicted to weird color-correction choices. You might think things are yellow because it's a flashback. Or you might think yellow's tied to a time of day. Or to an emotion. And you might be right. Or you just might be a human seeking a pattern because that's what humans do.

Anyway. Are people still watching this movie in 2026?

ELSEWHERE
Internet Archive

Nukie (1987)

I think I last saw this circa 1991. It was so bad. My family is still making fun of it. Its awfulness binds us together.

I made it available as an awful film and the students in one class voted it in.

It's still terrible.

And people worked so, so hard on it. Those alien suits were complex. They went to Africa. They had a helicopter. And they somehow got Glynis Johns. Glynis Johns! She was in Mary Poppins! "Send in the Clowns" was written for her! How did they get Glynis Johns???

You can see all the stuff they're ripping off (most notably E.T. and The Gods Must Be Crazy) but they don't understand what made their source material work in the first place. For instance, Nukie and the kid go flying before Nukie's resurrection. That doesn't work.

Anyway. It's terrible. But it's terrible in the way that forced us to regularly laugh in amazement.

ELSEWHERE
our dvd

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

It never gets old.

ELSEWHERE
Prime Vodeo

Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

Research watch.

Though it didn't take me long to remember why plan had been to take the dvd with me on Amtrak. The wifi...'s not great.

It was interesting watching the last half of the movie with the video twenty seconds ahead of the audio.

HOME
our dvd

Rubin and Ed (1991)

Somehow I haven't seen this (probably) in over twenty years. Which is insane. That's so long that the film was basically a reminder of all the things Lady Steed and I used to quote to each other. Maybe now we'll bring them back. With the help of sons two and three who watched it with us.

(Son One never saw it because Lady Steed kept saying they weren't old enough. Guess now he never will be.)

Besides being one of the most quotable movies I know and hella weird (unless compared to other Trent Harris movies), it's one of the hottest movies ever made, up there with Do the Right Thing and Stray Dog.

Honestly, I don't love it as unabashedly as I once did, but I have nothing bad to say about it. Let's all express our gratitude for Trent Harris and the band of nutjobs he assembled to bring this world to life.

HOME
our dvd

Toy Story (1995)

Seriously, how is this so good? I mean, I know "Luxo, Jr." was a decade earlier and that, for a "computer company," Pixar always cared a great deal about story, but it's still a remarkable achievement. It's such a good movie.

Incidentally, here are a couple great things I recently read about Toy Story. The first is about toy teleology and the second on how they learned to create people immediately following Toy Story.

HOME
our dvd

Toy Story 2 (1999)

Joan Cusack is a national treasure.

Previous films watched. . . .

"The Uncanny Valley of Procedural Language: on Thubrina by Theric Jepson"(reproducing a review by D.W. Baker)

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I have a review of this reviewer’s book published on the same page. It’s a review-swap thing which is a cool idea. Although I misread the instructions and thought you had to give every book five stars. I was, like, what is this, Uber? But I went along with it. Who knows what stars mean anyway.

Really, the engine(idling is just a cool place to read and publish (see my “Were my band to play the Roadhouse” and “Glitter sifts from sky, sifts hell from beauty or beauty“) and I recommend checking them out.

This is the review:

Reading Thubrina, a bag of procedural tricks subtitled “Theric Jepson rewrites Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend,” is choosing to gaze into the uncanny valley: is this language poetry, or something else? Jepson’s tongue-in-cheek romp through the lexicon of Carpenter’s 2025 hit record comprises one 2,600 word story, 12 poems, 15 “oldtimey black-and-white-life-of-Jesus illustrations” (Jepson defines and explains this choice in the foreword: “Like Sabrina, Jesus was a carpenter”), and what might be considered the main draw of this book: a 16 page appendix with a detailed account of the methods used to generate each text.

Jepson’s command of procedural techniques is impressive. There are Dada games such as n+7 and v+7, in which every noun or verb of a text is replaced with the entry seven places ahead on a dictionary page. By applying the n+7 technique to the lyrics for “Sugar Talking,” Jepson offers readers phrases such as “Boy Scout, do you win a probabilism?” and “Yeah, your paralinguistics mean shiver to me.” There is a google translate algorithm (detailed in the appendix using 4 pages of arrow diagrams) which transforms the lyrics for “Manchild,” resulting in a sequence of uncanny lines: “The boy / Why do you always come to me? / The nest of my life. / Don’t you feel sorry for the innocent woman? / I never heard that be careful / Half of the brain was destroyed.” The book’s most imposing read is a short story designed to include every word from an alphabetized list of words from the original lyrics to “My Man on Willpower.” The text is a leviathan abecedarian of strange contortions, as in a fit of confused dialogue that accommodates four instances of “don’t” as they appear in sequence from the list.

Alongside such impersonal procedures, Jepson rounds out the collection with a number of poems that retain a subjective impulse. The crafting procedures of traditional forms result in one sonnet (using the lyrics of “Such a Funny Way”) and one villanelle (using the lyrics of “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night”). Jepson also transforms lyrics using subjective semantics, such as “first deleting three words from every line, then [letting] it marinate in forgetfulness before returning to add three new words per line” (using the lyrics of “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry”), as well as sonics, such as the poem which “attempt[s] to replace every word while keeping the meter intact” (using the lyrics of “Nobody’s Son”). The subjective encounter with language is also prioritized by Jepson’s choice to avoid listening to the album; according to the appendix, “he definitely will as soon as this book’s for sale.”

How does such an oddball, experimental work fare in the world of starred reviews? The readers most likely to award Jepson’s book a 4- or 5-star rating are those eager fellow travelers into language’s uncanny valley, in the tradition of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, hoping to discern not only what animates the poem, but also what delineates it from inert text. Any unprepared readers—wayward Sabrina Carpenter fans, perhaps, or simply those expecting a more traditional poetics—are likely to award a 1-star rating. This review splits the difference to award 3 stars.

You can buy Thubrina many places, including Bookshop and Barnes & Noble. You can use your library card to access it through Hoopla.

 

What he said

 

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Every so once in a while, a student to collect things I say in class then gift me that list at the end of the year. It’s one of my favorite gifts.

(Arthur was not a real person.)

1. Embrace the religion of rewrites

2. You shouldn’t JUST drink urine, to be clear

3. Let’s set things on fire! Not really

4. Don’t let your table walk away from you

5. I do remember it but my memory is false

6. Bomb threats! Oh, my favorite

7. If you are going to call in a bomb threat to cancel a test, my advice to you is to call in a few fake ones to throw them off

8. Good job everybody, you signed your name twice

9. Have you guys beaten a lot of poems in your days?

10. Why is this not alive?

11. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with looking up guns on your school computer

12. Oh no! Is one of you kidnapped?

13. I’ll just suffer

14. The world is filled with printers, you can figure it out

15. I believe in feeding you MIND grapes

16. Your sentences hoped out of the car on the highway and hitch-hiked to albuquerque

17. Their lives all suck equally so they have equal opportunity?

18. I blame school for this

19. Before you know it you have a house full of words and no one wants to visit you because it smells like cat piss.

20. I think I might be broken

21. Tell us about feet

22. Baby’s gonna baby and there’s nothing you can do about it

23. I regret to tell you, that in this world, there is racism

24. You don’t exist, we already established that.

25. Do not write a poem for your mothers funeral in triple rhyme

26. I guess you guys have never thought about Christmas before

27. We should all know when William the Conqueror, Conquered

28. Even the bad babies are still babies

29. They typer typed what the typer chose to type

30. It’s the way you kill a baby, legally

31. Just because you are attracted to dead things, L***a, doesn’t mean you have to kill people

32. I don’t think he’s going to grow up to kill people, I just think he’s just going to commit a lot of white-collar crime and get away with it.

33. My goal is truth and justice, you guys!

34. He was a playwright, which isn’t as bad as being an actor, which isn’t as bad as being a prostitute, but they are all in that sucky section of society

35. Mathematically, at least one of you is probably gonna be dead by the time you are 30, but I can safely say that it won’t be because you caught fire and burned to death in the kitchen.

36. I can safely say that none of you will catch fire and burn to death in the kitchen at any point in your life.

37. Fairies love humans, but they love them in the same way that you love a peanut butter sandwich

38. It’s good to know that that yard will soon have no more plants

39. Americans live on the cusp of just enough sleep, so if you take away an hour, we just die. Let that be a lesson to us all

40. Can’t have too many twins in a comedy. That’s for sure

41. Dick jokes are eternal

42. The best part about smoking is the cigar boxes

43. Some people are less electromagnetic than other

44. Maybe this is how they graduate high school. They turn into a tree. A cathedral

45. I think Arthur has developed a cocaine problem

46. I did not know one mouth could home so much white bubbly goop

47. It smells like someone has opened a dispensary in one of the bathrooms

48. Wow, democracy has failed us again

49. Maybe that’s why you’ve been acting out, Being raised by a couple of desiccated old corpses

50. If I wanted you to die, I wouldn’t have said anything

51. And then I rolled into the other lane of traffic

52. But that doesn’t mean YOU will, you might do terribly

53. Everyone is raising their hands in my peripheral vision, and having nothing to say! I feel very gaslit

54. The past is a foreign country, as they say

55. You can fail, but you can’t embrace failure

56. Everything is far away until its here, and then its closer

57. Get your mind greasy again

58. I could stab you quite happily, D*****k

59. MIT is famously contagious

60. Thats what phones are for, unfortunately

61. Dish soap in my gas can

62. You ever bring home a half dead squirrel?

63. The rest of you can repent and do better next time

64. Its my job to corrupt you with wisdom

65. What is the fun in being attracted to something NORMAL

66. You guys are cursed

67. That’s academia baby. You are going to love college

68. Then you’ve never gone grocery shopping with me in my 20s

69. Shut up G**n!

    
    

I come before you today, hat off, held outward

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Two projects I am working on are currently fundraising.

First, I was accepted to the Mormon Lit Lab’s Book Mentoring Program. I’ve finished my new novel’s rough draft since then and finally found its title:

Honeymoon in Copper

It’s new to this world and I can see that phrase lending itself to some dandy covers.

You can read the pitch on the fundraising page.

I’m tapping into MLL’s funds THIS WEEKEND as I travel to San Diego to hole up in a friend’s backyard cabin to rewrite rewrite rewrite for almost a fullweek of 15-hour days. I’m excited. And MLL is covering my gas which, in 2026, makes a huge difference. I’m so grateful. And you can help lil writers like me pull off our projects by suporting the Lit Lab. It’s a good thing to do! I’ve done it myself!

Second, this Kickstarter won’t actually launch until September, but you can ask to be notified when it goes live.

It was one of the more fun prompts I’d seen so I had to write something. Someone named Glen must die. Gotta use the phrase Crystal Palace. Well, you can’t say Crystal Palace to a Kern County boy like me without visions of Buck Owens coming to mind.

I don’t want to say more about that one now, but I will share the story’s official playlist:

 

Anyway! If you click the notify button now, you can read one of the stories—a comic necromancer piece (what else?).

And if you’re poor, share this post with all your rich friends. That’s what they’re for, right?