All dark corners, crooked cartoons, and unmoved toys, Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink had me believing that I was watching something I shouldn't be. Eavesdropper, accomplice, whatever. To some vague but definitive evil. Not so much wavelength as undertow. Not so much point of view as earworm witness. Injury sleeps in the afterlife, it seems, and the stitches have come off. More than likely, the movie is still there, and you've gone by in a blur.
a puppet box prepared for some crucifixion, a dress the exact size of most hands, death and sleep put to touch, a blank glimpse
In the shower, I hold a plastic sword. The ways I am here are few. A neighbor kid says that god hates twins and it’s going to stick. We are years away from our daughter. After church a woman hops softly out of her shoes and walks into the high corn. To her, her shoes are missing. Silence has an extra stomach. The bird can scream if you hear it.
A hand left alive on the floor of a snow-moaned barn. The quiet ice that keeps the still death of a dark orange dog. A boy so recklessly loved that he loses an eye burying spoon’s double. Not the eye that is rain’s last egg. Not the toy car with the baby inside.
We buy mirrors instead of art. The wasps scrape and gather here then drag themselves to a higher emptiness when I hold the baby. Men lose first a button second a broom then love a dog. Everyone outside is sick. A paper cut sets fire to a ghost.
By design too far and too soon, the always intensely casual documentary Bad Axe, as stopped and started by director David Siev, is somehow both uplifting and hopeless. It puts the present in yesterday and plants it in tomorrow. As for its loyalty to now and to family, it does catch the unaware collective who will wear a mask to mouth hate unrecognized but won't cover their face to keep others from getting a sickness that sizes the same world. A must see. Bring the right friend. ~~~~~ Beth de Araújo's Soft & Quiet is a doomscroll of hidden proximity that will tattoo insomnia on even the most thoughtfully awake. I'm not sure I can recommend it but know damn well it needs to be seen and looked away from in equal measure, and vice versa. Difficult and driven, it deserves all be present. Its one-take illusion puts its menace in so many real places that one feels followed, directly beside, winked at, and eye-level with peepholes marked for repair. As art and as document, it is too true to be based on anything, and is instead ripped into existence by an air breathed by characters who sleep beneath empty symbols and make nothing of vandalism save what's already been carved onto the surfaces of their untouched and wrongly examined lives. It's dark here, in the light, and we know these people. ~~~~~ Thomas M. Wright's The Stranger is a bewitchingly downbeat true crime thriller both anchored and spirited away by the eidolic performances of Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris, each of which use a resigned urgency to centralize the haunted hinterland of retroactive pursuit. Edgerton eats worry in his sleep, and Harris sees friendship as starvation. Evil here grows older by being younger than time.
Time will never know how long it took for god to ruin the image. Ask me about distance. I was asleep and my kids were alive. In every city, his gun says the same thing. In Ohio they found bits of rock candy in the infant’s stomach. Angels go through eyelids like water.
Pronunciation deletes every other day of its past. Absence ships death the wrong god. My brother was buried without his ears and that night my sister swam
1999 the devil knows the past only as god and here I am unable to sleep in any space large or small that listens to the earth so instead I invent time travel but call it standstill and tell my brothers all of them that starting tomorrow no one is dead
Our television has been switched on in front of a shared lover. Last year, our sons were fingerprinted by members of the same dissolved swim club. We’re not friends. I do know that your dog lived one summer in the back of my brother’s broken ambulance. Two summers, maybe? Lost its voice afterward. They say a knob fell off a door and became Ohio. It’s not a joke I tell my son. He hears it anyway. Ohio is a sound. The bomb squad here showed me pictures of sleeping positions, then left. Say a word.
kingsoftrain 