Sharks daydream dogmas

This post title is a sentence, if you think about it. What would a shark's catechism be? Anyways, I watched some cool things and wrote some cool articles lately, so here they are! I even give you a little insight into my writing and research process. And yes, it's all related to the title.

I got that DOGMA in me

I wrote a 2,159 word feature about Kevin Smith and Dogma (1999) for MovieJawn. For the feature, I rewatched Clerks (1994), and I watched Mallrats (1995) and Chasing Amy (1997) for the first time. I also dug into a lot of old footage from Dogma's marketing campaign in 1999. Weirdly enough, Ananda Lewis died a few weeks after I was watching old "Hot Zone" footage of her for this. I also finally checked out the Neshaminy theater for Kevin Smith's Resurrection Tour. It's a long drive, but it might be worth it for the IMAX because the Neshaminy theater is a lot nicer than King of Prussia or Cherry Hill.

Here, I talk about the Catholic Leauge controversy, what it means to deny your film has any ability to affect people emotionally, and how Kevin Smith's earliest films reveal a slacker-but-trying lifestyle that isn't available to young men anymore in our hustle-and-scam culture.

My grandmother often told me an apocryphal story about myself. Once at Mass when I was young, as she held me, I asked where God was. She patted her chest over her heart and said, “He’s in here.”

Immediately, I looked down her shirt.

I don’t remember this happening. It could be true, or it could be a false memory my grandmother repeated to understand her strange granddaughter who didn’t take to Catholicism how she had hoped. Either way, it’s now a story I repeat to understand myself as a skeptic from birth.

I don’t recall exactly when Dogma (dir. Kevin Smith, 1999) came into my life. I was 10 years old in 1999, and I’m certain my parochial Catholic school did not arrange any field trips to the theater for Dogma. If they had, we would’ve been protesting it. I entered high school unaware of Kevin Smith, survived young adulthood, and exited my mid-20s having acquired Dogma as one of my favorite movies. I loved it as a celebration of nonconformity and a skewering of religion, and until recently that evaluation made sense because, as my grandmother knew, I’d always been a skeptic.

Dogma, for the uninitiated, is an irreverent, potty-mouthed, slur-filled, bi-curious road trip comedy in which infertile divorced abortion clinic worker Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) is tasked by dickless Metatron, the Voice of God (Alan Rickman) with preventing no-homo gun-happy Wisconsin-banished angels Bartleby and Loki (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, respectively) from bringing about the end of the universe by walking into a New Jersey church.

Read the full feature here

Also, I didn't make up that anecdote at the beginning. Here's a tweet of mine from the year 2009 letting the whole world know I tried to look down my grandmother's shirt when I was very young.

DAYDREAMERS more like slayyy screamers

My first review for MovieJawn was Daydreamers, a Vietnamese vampire (!!) movie that is a kinda confusing mix of campy cuntiness and a serious mother-vampire-son-detective drama. It should've been two different movies, honestly.

Most stories with swanning, sexy, villainous vampires like Marco and Triệu revel in the sexual allegory of a vampire bite, but Daydreamers has a confusing relationship with sexuality and villainy. “No kissing. No biting. No licking. No humping” are rules Triệu’s vampire coven must follow to interact with humans. Vampires who swan around sexily but cannot feed on, kiss, bite, lick, or hump embody all the sexual threat of a goth Barbie. This bewildering sexy non-sexuality is reversed in the only sex scene in the film, which is less sexy and more reminiscent of being woken up at 6 a.m. by a jackhammer outside your window. There’s no threat that these vampires might awaken unspoken desires in your heart.

Read the full Daydreamers review here

HOT SPRING SHARK ATTACK pretty much says it all

My second review for MovieJawn was a Japanese shark attack comedy, which means both of my MovieJawn reviews so far have been Asian horror-comedies. I hadn't expected to make that my niche, but I don't hate it. To prepare for this review, I watched Jaws (1975) and discovered to my surprise I had never seen Jaws before. It was great, obviously, and now I have context for that scene in Chasing Amy where Jason Lee and Joey Lauren Adams are comparing scars they got while eating pussy.

The second movie I watched to prepare was Sharknado (2013). It was bad, obviously, but the opening scene where a leather daddy boat captain shakes down a business man for a tackle box full of cash in an IKEA showroom at the bottom of the world's smallest fishing vessel was great. As it turned out, I would've been better of watching The Meg (2018), but Jason Statham will have to wait his turn.

Is there any better way to spend a weeknight than watching an extremely buff, half-naked man punch a rubber shark?

The mixed media visuals in this movie are really fun. Hot Spring Shark Attack entertains with hilarious miniatures like a tiny yellow submarine, obvious practical effects like red-orange paint for blood, and sharks built out of multiple craft store aisles. After enjoying the sleeper hit Hundreds of Beavers (dir. Mike Cheslik, 2022), I’ve been hoping to find more movies that loosen their grip on reality to have a little fun, and this film provides. You know it’s not real, we know it’s not real, so let’s lean into the unreality and get creative. The zippy camerawork and all-in keyed-up performances carry this over the finish line. Nobody is phoning it in here. They know what kind of movie they’re in and they’re giving their all to entertain us today.

Read the whole Hot Spring Shark Attack review here

What's that jawn?

As you may have figured out, in April I got accepted as a staff writer for MovieJawn, a Philadelphia-based writer's collective about movies. MovieJawn prints four zines a year, plus we have daily reviews and weekly features going up on our website. You can sign up for a yearly zine subscription, or you can join the Patreon. Given that I'm extremely online, I offered to help out with the MovieJawn Bluesky account, so I also post there a few days a week.

Nothing but blue skies

Speaking of Bluesky, I'm getting really comfortable with making feeds for Bluesky on graze.social. I even gave an interview to the Graze newsletter a few weeks ago, where I talked about how important feeds can be for making social media less addictive and more informative.

What do you think is the future of social media?

The future of social media is less social media. Social media should inform, energize, and connect you with people who share your interests. Social media should not be a black hole where you spend hours ingesting propaganda while searching for a signal in the endless noise. Bluesky and the ATProto are an opportunity to do social media differently, with fewer addictive features and less FOMO. Feeds are an excellent way to help people find the signal without doomscrolling through hours of noise.

Coming Soon

I'm working on two reviews to be posted mid-August, and I'm very excited about them. I won't tell you what movies they are just yet, but I will tell you what I'm watching to prepare. For the first movie, I'll be watching Red Sun (1971) and The Bushido Blade (1981). And for the second movie, I'll take a stab at A Knight's Tale (2001) and as many episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess as I can.

Coming up very very soon, in the next day or two, will be a longer feature on the movie trends from the 1980s up til now that reflect the American anxieties of the time around eminent domain, corporate raiding, what if George Clooney was bad but chose to be good, and enshittification. [Edit: here it is on Welcome to Hell World: When will my reflection show who I am inside?]

I have some thoughts rattling around in my head about James Gunn's Superman (2025), particularly it's weak portrayal of Lois Lane. I'll also be seeing Eddington (2025) tomorrow so I can have a mostly clean opinion of it unburdened by the Online Takes Economy. I'm experiencing the beauty of long-form writing again; it's a better way to organize my thoughts and strengthen my arguments than shooting 300-character skeets from the hip. So look for some thoughts about those movies and others I've watched and loved recently, coming in the next week or so.

Til then, stay cool, and if you can't stay cool, stay out of the way of small planes crash landing into your secret greenhouse slash mad scientist's laboratory and rocket launchpad.