movies are dead, long live the movies

introduction added after the fact --

i should note at the top of this substack that every year without fail, my wife and i have engaged in the reliably diseased behaviour of watching the movies it chapter two (2019), followed by when harry met sally (1989) to ring in the new year, because the two together form a curiously perfect diptych of love and regret and leaving the old for the new and my whole life i don’t know what this song means and be true be brave and get a little rock and roll on the radio and anyway it’s about old friends. this tradition has been rendered a strange and extremely sad prospect this year, owing to the recent deaths both of rob and michelle reiner and james ransone, and if this is going to be hard for you to think about then i advise skipping this month’s edition of three stars fine. the gist of the following is simply aren’t things sad, but aren’t good things still possible, and also i love you, and otherwise i promise you won’t be missing much, so if that’s all you need to hear right now then i strongly advise you go with god.

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it has, i recognise, become something of an annual tradition for me to write a christmas edition of this substack in which i specifically express ambivalence towards this or that aspect of modern life and then explain how this relates to the doctrinal message of andy muschietti’s it. very much in the manner of any slightly tapped spiritual leader, it feels incumbent upon me at this, the festive time of year, to spin a broad personal sermon and then remind you all that bill denbrough suffered for your sins and that you ought to be grateful for it. thus, the 2024 and 2025 christmas editions of three stars fine, which you are welcome to peruse at your leisure, should you be vaguely emotionally disregulated or otherwise short of things to do. i love it, and i love the it movies. whilst they may not, in the truest sense, qualify as christmas films, i have said before and will say again that stephen king is one of nature’s great sentimentalists and it is for this reason that all of his novels and most of their adaptations fit quite easily within the bounds of festive classic if you happen to look at them sideways. i will also say that as someone of it chapter 2 mental breakdown experience, it is currently exceptionally weird watching gen z rediscover what might as well be the ancient texts via the medium of it: welcome to derry - a tv show i have not watched but which i understand as mostly a vehicle for bill skarsgard to serve cunt. if i told you there was definitely still an it chapter 2-themed fanfiction by me knocking around the internet, and that you will never ever find it, i’m sure you would not be very surprised, but consider that my christmas gift to you regardless.

but anyway, i’m not really writing about the it movies so much this year, so let’s move on.

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last week - but also in a very real sense, given the christmas temporal breakdown, about four hundred years ago - my dearest friends, my wife and i went to a grindhouse cinema in clerkenwell to watch the movie black christmas (1974). we had booked this with no particular sense of the grand holy meaning of the movie theatre in mind, although in between booking and attending, netflix swallowed up warner brothers like a dying star engulfing a solar system and everyone became freshly hysterical about the palliative state of modern cinema, and so by the time we attended, the whole experience felt sort of newly fraught, and newly meaningful, when actually all we were doing was going to see margot kidder get stabbed with a large glass unicorn at da moveys, outside of our homes, as jesus intended.

i have written about this movie (and also about the actively deadbrained 2019 remake) before and so don’t propose to go into all that again, but suffice it to say that there is something almost metaphysically wonderful about the concept of making a movie entirely about answering phones and then to cast olivia hussey, an actress no more able to convey the sense of familiarity with the telephone than i assume she would be with the act of piloting a harrier jump jet. answering the phone every time with a bewildered cadence of hellooooo?? simply unknown to humanity, followed every time by another, far louder, HELLOOOO???, she brings an affect of such indescribable weirdness to a movie already shot and structured terribly oddly, and i think she is absolutely wonderful, and what a loss she was. (entirely by the way, and only to show that the more things change the more things stay the same, she is also fantastically bizarre in the 1990s it miniseries, delivering every line like someone who has learned them phonetically, via distance learning course, and i love her).

black christmas (1974) is a fantastic movie, and certainly rendered more so by watching it with a loudly gasping audience, and coming out afterwards it occurred to me anew what a terrible thing cinema would be to lose. i love the movies - i love to go to the cinema even when some guy in front of me is opening up his browser every other second during the conjuring: last rites (2025) and finally typing “what time domino’s close”. i love it even when my friend has to lean over and a tell a couple off for fujoing out too loudly next to him during pillion (2025). i love going to the prince charles for a screening of master and commander (2003), firstly to discover that they have put a sign up on the door reading “master and commander is sold out (yes really)”, then to find two guys have become too overwhelmed by the milk of humanity insanity at the bar and are loudly singing sea shanties at each other, then to discover that most of the once-teenaged cast plus, for some reason, lee ingleby, have in fact all come to see the movie together and so are summarily yanked up on stage before the screening to share their recollections on russell crowe and falling over, aged twelve, at the premiere. i love da moveys.

it has been an extraordinarily difficult year to be alive in a world which feels increasingly like every once wonderful thing is being destroyed for no good reason, and we all just have to sit here while people we work with use chatgpt to make their emails politer, and ceos who have never met a human being declare that no one actually wants to leave their houses, and men who have never once felt natural light on their skin clog up every comments section typing “like it or not, ai is getting better all the time” over and over again. every other fucking day i feel like i have to read a headline like “musicians must embrace unstoppable force of ai, eurythmics’ dave stewart urges” and “like it or not, ai is here to stay“ says fifteenth spinal tap drummer directly before bursting into flames”, and every other fucking day i have to be like ok but why though why is this necessary why is this inevitable why do i have to embrace it why. i’m sorry but was aragorn really twatting around minas tirith going like it or not you have to embrace the awesome power of grond. just get a fucking backbone and resist something you fucking animals.

it is, as i have seen people saying, exceptionally tiring to live in a world where everything you love is owned by about three guys who’ve never been outside before and nothing seems to be changing for the better, but i did feel, however briefly whilst watching black christmas with my favourite people, in a cinema designed for freaks, that that world is not actually inevitable, and that things can still actually be good.

it was also fascinating to rewatch black christmas - not a movie that was ever, i’m sure, made with pretentions towards lasting art - and think to myself over and over throughout that fuck this looks amazing, and look at the texture and look at the strange camera angles and think about the pacing and listen to the sound design. i saw someone saying recently that it’s not that all modern studio movies are necessarily awful, but you do sometimes watch, say, jingle all the way (1996) and think jesus was this made by eric rohmer. i do think it has been a largely awful year for modern cinema, but at the same time i have had an absolutely wonderful year going to rep cinema to watch, say, fire walk with me (1992), and empire records (1995), and american werewolf in london (1981) and there is, i think, a certain kind of peace to be found in that. as my wife - who is, incidentally, a very wise woman and currently sitting beside me trying to book barbarella (1968) - said when we were walking back from black christmas, perhaps it is actually ok for a medium - like film or like the opera - to have had its fullest flowering at the point where economic circumstances conspired to actually support it, and for that time to now be over, because we still have all those movies to watch and can always continue to do so, and movies are dead but long live the movies, and so on.

i feel so tired all the time at the idea that everything is ruined and nothing can be done, but also i love the movies more than anything, and i want to continue to believe in passion and invention and creepy guys calling sorority houses at christmas and clowns spraying people with nitrous and then chiselling their beards off their faces whilst dressed as santa, and i want to believe in the enduring power of people and rep cinema and freaks who want to get into a room and watch things together, and i really mostly always believe in those things.

it occurred to me as i was writing this that i had made a spinal tap joke without even really thinking about it, because it is a movie simply so good and so central to me that it has become part of my unconscious lexicon - and then rob and michelle reiner were killed and i struggled to find an appropriate reaction. so much of everything that happens now feels beyond our control, feels violent and senseless and cruel and relentless, and i really do think that cinema and collective experience are, if not a help, then at least a salve against all that. anyway, merry christmas, sickos. as always, i love you all.