Projects #002 - "Nothing will die."

Getting into the swing of things, plus A Bug's Life!

Project Updates 1/13-1/19/25

Welcome back! Here we’ll get a better grasp of what my week looks like and we’ll end with A Bug’s Life. But first…

RIP DAVID LYNCH

I discovered Twin Peaks in the common way: when I was 11, I went to the Homestar Runner Wiki to decipher what Marizpan’s “Log Lady” costume was referencing. From there, my life changed forever.

I cannot sum up what David Lynch means to me in a single Substack post. I am devastated by his death, but I celebrated his work each and every day while he was alive, and I know he could feel it. As I write this I’m looking at my special Lynch shelf with all of his films, his weird little book Catching the Big Fish, Lynch on Lynch, and his trancelike (shocker, I know) memoir Room to Dream. I have no regrets other than being unable to tell him thank you in person, but I probably would have freaked out being that close to the man. I will continue to sit with his films, his art, everyone he loved, just as I did before this horrible day. I look forward to my local theaters doing memorial screenings in perpetuity.

Thank you David.

Film & TV

52 Films by 52 Women

3. Blink Twice (2024) dir. Zoe Kravitz

Not a *good* movie, certainly, but at least Channing gives a really strong performance in the back half. Very much “We get it” cinema. Ethan’s son Levon plays the Lucas Gage role ably. The DVD Amazon put out looks like crap.

4. Priest (1994) dir. Antonia Bird

Some very BBC dramatics but a solid gay drama nonetheless. Excellent lead performance from Linus Roache, who shows up all over the place, and tha god Tom Wilkinson. Going forward I’ll be flagging things I want to discuss more than the recap nature of Projects allows. I want to build up consistency before I get bogged down in the individuals. So, remind me to come back to this one!

Misc. Films

Swoon (1992) dir. Tom Kalin

New Queer Cinema I’d been meaning to catch up on forever. Felt like I should be encountering it at MoMA and become entranced. Co-written by Hilton Als??

The End (2024) dir. Joshua Oppenheimer (rewatch)

I’ve been up and down on this thing since TIFF, but clearly it’s stuck with me if I was willing to show it to Elizabeth! I just wanted her to bear witness to what Tilda and Michael Shannon got up to last year. While the songs leave something to be desired and the script is a little too on the nose, I can’t help being charmed by Oppenheimer’s bizarre foray into post-apocalyptic fiction. Plus, the cavernous halls just outside their bunker look like they cost one billion dollars. Still not sure how they pulled it off. George McKay, picking interesting roles only!

Wolf Man (2025) dir. Leigh Whannell

Not an incredible film. Chris Abbott and Julia Garner are two of my favorite contemporary actors, so it’s nice to see them share the screen, even if Garner still feels wayyyyyy too young to be in a mother role. Her business outfit was giving Bugsy Malone. Wish the wolf man design were more wolf than man, but it’s tough to beat American Werewolf in London or The Howling. All I could think during the very dark climax is this film will look horrible when watched on Peacock.

AfrAId (2024) dir. Chris Weitz

Probably the stupidest thing I’ve watched in a long time. Everyone acts like they just took Nyquil. No idea what it’s even trying to say by the end. John Cho needs to get right with God.

One of Them Days (2025) dir. Lawrence Lamont

Keke Palmer, Earth’s funniest person. A cute movie that will hopefully get some theatrical play before ending up number one on Netflix a few months from now. Not sure why SZA totaled her face but it’s not really any of my business.

Exit to Eden (1994) dir. Garry Marshall

So I liked Anne Rice’s BDSM island caper movie starring Rosie O’Donnell. Fucking sue me. Lestat could have shown up and it literally would have been fine.

W. (2008) & Salvador (1986) dir. Oliver Stone

The last of Stone’s POTUS trilogy (until he makes the Trump assassination attempt one, which, please God let this happen) features great performances from Josh Brolin, seemingly possessed by Bush, and noted annoying piece of shit Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney. While it looks like crap and clearly was not given any budget to work with, I’m not willing to throw it in the garbage like many did at the time. The Bush era DID look like crap and was annoying! We did Salvador after, which was a bit of a whiff. James Woods, my favorite evil actor, does make for a fun lunatic photojournalist, but the folks telling others to watch this instead of Civil War are perhaps kidding themselves.

Red Dawn (1984) dir. John Milius

Didn’t particularly love, felt slack in the middle after a strong opening, but when you get Harry Dean Stanton yelling “AVENGE ME” I’m not feeling like my time was wasted.

The Boy (2016) & Brahms: The Boy II (2020) dir. William Brent Bell

I’ve realized my strategy of “put on movies I kind of want to watch but know are bad while I’m cleaning or doing menial tasks” is just going to create more work for me with Projects. Mercifully, as I am my own editor, I don’t need to write anything more than “these movies are butt, I would put Brahms into a wood chipper and leave immediately”.

Anime (No Virgins Allowed)

Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise (1987) dir. Hiroyuki Yamaga

A real lodestar of a film, with clear influences on Mamoru Oshii, Hideaki Anno (who did work on the film in some capacity), Masaki Yuasa, the Eizouken mangaka, and just Final Fantasy in general. The Wikipedia page is shockingly dense, not something I could scroll while watching. I did like it, though more for what it inspired in others than the film itself. Unfortunately this is the second week in a row where Michael and I have watched an anime film with a sequence of (attempted) rape, and I would love to not see that for a bit if possible. I understand this is a big ask.

TV

Harley Quinn is back, hopefully this Metropolis soft reboot will help it recover from a pretty weak season four. Don’t have crazy high hopes though. Severance premiere was fun, but the main thing I’m excited for right now is The Pitt, Max’s attempt at a medical procedural that’s just ER if it were 24. So far it’s got Noah Wyle doing what he does best, legally distinct Dr. John Carter (pending litigation with the Crichton estate), alongside a great cast that includes my beloved Fiona Dourif. Really excited to watch this play out week to week. Fifteen episodes! A luxury! Real TV!

Also Nu-Frasier got cancelled. Sad! Anyway.

Reading

Books finished

None!

Books skimmed

None! See, I plan to be extremely honest in Projects. I’ll have more to report here soon enough!

Manga (No Virgins Allowed)

No real change, but Jump is back this week so I’m getting back into the groove. My Akane-Banashi reread is still going well. Been looking into local rakugo performances and coming up empty… but someday!

I’ve also been continuing to chip away at Fist of the North Star as the special edition volumes come to the library. The online scans are too old for me to read, reminds me of reading scanlations of Fullmetal Alchemist on MSN websites in 2006. Fun to read such a foundational text, even if it reached a natural ending and kept going. Should be about four volumes left?

Podcasts?

This feels like less of a Project and more of a Check-In. I don’t do a ton of podcasts anymore, here’s what I listen to regularly:

A Little Time (with Patreon)
Blank Check (with Patreon)
Eating for Free
Hawke Cast (wink wink)
Seeking Derangements
Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Stavvy’s World
This Had Oscar Buzz (with Patreon)
Who? Weekly
You Must Remember This

I am not looking for recommendations at this time. Or any time. Do not tell me about any podcasts. This is too many already.

Music??

Give me a second with this one, I will come up with something. Currently listening to low-fi beats or nothing.

Videos Game

It is very important that I stop playing Balatro after January… it’s unbecoming…

Nintendo’s long awaited announcement for the Switch 2 is very exciting, though I’m going to need to see the lineup before I make a day one purchase. Let’s get Mario Odyssey 2 or something fun like that!

Cooking???

Stay tuned for some cookie recipes I’m going to try! Does anyone know where to buy mint baking chips? I struck out at like every store!

Apartment Amenities

• I built a new shelf for my various kitchen appliances and my bag full of bags. It looks nice! Definitely more organized than the pile it used to be. Not sure what I’ll do with the extra cabinet space, but there’s no rush. I keep saying I’ll buy a dutch oven but I’m not even sure what you make in those things.

• I got some garbage disposal cleaning pods that made my sink smell like citrus. Was hoping for some sort of foam explosion as was promised on the box, but I’ll live.

Pixar Project #002 - A BUG’S LIFE (1998) dir. John Lasseter, co-dir. Andrew Stanton

This is a great movie! Hope I don’t sound too surprised, but I haven’t watched it in fifteen years. My line about it is that it has the most ‘90s voice cast of all time, which is true. Dave Foley, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kevin Spacey (oh no!), Richard Kind, David Hyde Pierce, Denis Leary, Bonnie Hunt, Brad Garrett, the list goes on and on. On summer break from your sitcom? Come play a bug! What really stood out is the technological leap to this from Toy Story. Packed with stunningly ambitious lighting, gigantic crowd scenes (yes, of ants that all look alike, but there’s so MANY!), actual water effects, A Bug’s Life makes it all look so easy. Antz, on the other hand, looks like a bowling alley TV. We will not be discussing Antz, though it is hysterical that Katzenberg managed to get it out a month before A Bug’s Life. Even as a kid I was repulsed by Antz and compelled by the light blue friendliness of Flik. It’s a nightmare. I am still considering purchasing a Blu-Ray of Antz.

Look at this. I want to die.

Despite the Pixar braintrust saying the film was a riff on Aesop’s Ant and the Grasshopper fable, it should be obvious to anyone with access to TCM that this is just Seven Samurai with ants. The Wikipedia page for the film doesn’t mention Magnificent Seven even once? Bizarre. Randy Newman’s epic score brings us to Great Tree Island, which often appears to be floating in nothingness like a Mario 64 level. Flik (Dave Foley), an individualistic ant with a knack for inventing, accidentally destroys his colony’s food supple, threatening the deal the Queen (Phyllis Diller) has made with a roving gang of grasshoppers led by the malicious Hopper (Kevin Spacey (oh no!)). Hopper loves torture, much like his voice actor, so he gives the ants time to rebuild before he returns for his food. If they fail, he’s going to let a rabid grasshopper called Thumper eat everyone. Thumper is terrifying. He is too scary. Get him away from Princess Dot (Hayden Panettiere).

Princess Atta (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a very good voice actor) gives Flik a fake mission to recruit warrior bugs to fight the grasshoppers, hoping to keep him out of the way while the colony rebuilds. She does not expect Flik to return triumphant from Bug City (a bunch of discarded trash Pixar does not have the tech to explore thoroughly) with a cadre of tough bugs, who are actual out of work circus performers. Don’t really feel like getting into these characters, but they’re fun. Lot of gender stuff going on with Francis the ladybug (Denis Leary) that’s not nearly as offensive as I feared it would be. Don’t quote me on that.

Though Flik discovers his mistake, he hides it from Atta and convinces the circus bugs to help in the construction of a giant mechanical bird, Hopper’s greatest fear. This construction montage is gorgeous, displaying a level of craft that would have caused a grid-wide power outage only a few years before. Naturally this all goes to shit, the bird is set ablaze and fails to scare off Hopper and his gang, who then take the Queen hostage. Hopper plans to squish the Queen, breaking the ants’ spirits once and for all. “Squish” is so visceral, feels worse than just saying he’s going to kill her. Thumper beats the crap out of Flik (his black eye traumatized me!!) before a gigantic rainstorm threatens to kill them all. Can’t even imagine how much work had to go into those enormous rain drops.

I really was like “Oh my god! His eye!”

Humiliated, Hopper grabs Flik and takes flight into the storm, with Atta and the circus bugs in hot pursuit. Disney seems to have put the kibosh on villains for their films, yet another reason they’re falling apart. Hopper is a real threat, making it all the more satisfying when the pillbugs rip out one of Hopper’s antennae out of his head, playing with it as it twitches. I am very pro-mutilation in kids’ movies. Elsa deserves to freeze some kind of warlock and shatter them with a hammer.

Hopper, much like his voice actor, is snapped up by a bird and fed to her chicks while Flik and Atta watch. The colony is safe! 80-odd minutes, we’re done! Feels like I ran a marathon. The film ends with one of the best moves Pixar has ever done: fake bloopers that act as though the characters are real actors. These don’t happen anymore because of how nightmarish and slave-driving modern animation has become, but it really sends you out the door with a smile. I guess bloopers for Inside Out would hurt my brain, so maybe it’s for the best that they’re not forcing themselves.

I do not want to spend these early Pixar films complaining about later ones, but there is an ambition to A Bug’s Life that feels absent when Pixar is more established. We need Pixar hungry and scared again, willing to throw shit at the wall and trust the audience. A Bug’s Life asks the audience to root for these freaky little anthropomorphized ants with humanoid teeth. And they did! Not quite a Toy Story level success, but for the second-ever CGI Disney/Pixar film it’s not too shabby! Now that I’ve said my piece they’re probably going to announce A Bug’s Life 2…

@complexExplaning what "Til the room stinks" means to your mom is crazy work. 🤣 @ebtdubois takes a quick break from his duties as a rapper, DJ, actor, comedian, illustrator, and internet personality to sit with host Yedoye Travis for a conversation about the fall of civilization on #ThatsDeep #zackfox

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A Bug’s Life: Four out of five bouncing lamps

Mary Fran Corner

I write this on the day I saw “It’s Tough to be a Bug” in Animal Kingdom for the last time. While it’s probably too scary for (some) children, it’s a shame that it’s closing down, which was made even more apparent to me upon my rewatch of A Bug’s Life. I fear Disney World will never have A Bug’s Life attraction ever again.

A Bug’s Life is underrated. It’s not hated on but I definitely don’t think it’s given the love and appreciation that it deserves. The characters and the plot are so great. It’s a movie about the power of community. One of the things I liked most about it is even when the main character, an ant named Flik, messed up big time by losing all the food that his colony had collected for their enemy grasshoppers who were extorting them, his colony did not banish or shun him. They did cheer when he left on his own volition to find a solution to the problem he made, but still, they weren’t going to leave him high and dry. And it was truly iconic watching Flik fly away toward adventure on a fluffy dandelion seed head.

I remember my third grade teacher named her car after Princess Dot, Flik’s #1 supporter, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever and that Princess Dot was the cutest thing ever. As a kid, I related to Dot, while Princess Atta befuddled me because her anxiety seemed to be overkill. I now envy my past self for not being able to relate to Princess Atta obsessing over everything that could go wrong and how she could avoid it. She was training to become queen, after all, she had plenty to be anxious about.

Two things that I really hope Pixar brings back: little side character scenes and fake bloopers. The part of A Bug’s Life when there are two mosquitos flying near a bug zapper and one flies toward it in a trance and the other mosquito shouts “Harry, no! Don't look at the light!” And then Harry goes ”I-can't-help-it. It's-so-beautiful” before getting zapped and going “Woo hoo!” is such a nice touch, which I remember cracking up at as a kid. And the fake outtakes, come on. I get that both those and the side scenes aren’t “essential” but they certainly contributed to Disney magic. It made the worlds and the characters seem all the more real and were usually super funny. I lost my mind when I was reminded of the fake blooper of feral grasshopper Thumper suddenly asking to cut in a nerdy voice and strategizing on how to act something out. Comedy gold.

Lastly, okay, so I know before I was applauding the colony for not banishing Flik at the beginning only for them to banish him near the end upon discovering that he had been lying to them. That the warrior bugs he had assembled to save the colony from the grasshoppers were in fact circus bugs. But banishing him on those grounds seemed valid. He had risked the lives of every single ant in the colony twice now and, as Princess Atta pointed out, he put himself—and his ego—before the entire colony. Not cool.

But Flik is still able to redeem himself and help save the day in the end, with the prompting of Princess Atta right after she gets her wings! And the colony prevails because the grasshoppers’ worst nightmare comes to life: the ants realize they outnumbered them 100 to 1. That scene and realization radicalized me as a child: the power of working together and utilizing the strengths of a community in order to overthrow unfair practices. And “It’s Tough to be a Bug” calls back to this when grasshopper Hopper informs the audience that bugs outnumber us humans 200 MILLION TO 1! And Google suggests that is a real ratio. Let’s hope they don’t rise up against us.

From the archives

Image sourced from eBay, but I ate with that color-changing Flik spoon every single morning until the microplastics started sloughing off into my Apple Jacks. And even then I kept going!

Links and Recommendations

• My belated review of Mufasa: The Lion King. Mercilessly depressing. Do not see it.

• Incarcerated firefighter support in LA

• Wuh oh!

• Diversity slay! Gay age gap crack den couple in Boston’s South End!

• All the movies I watched in 2024

• Incredible interview with Mary Reber, the wonderful woman who owns the Palmer house

See you next week!