Tokyo, Vienna, Paris, Houston... (Patreon)

(...everybody talk about Pop Musik!)

As I begin to tackle the backlog of writing, mostly focusing on Media City, I wanted to quickly alert you to some work I've done elsewhere. In particular, through the kind assistance of Morris Yang, I have written some reviews of a few Berlinale films for In Review Online. In the coming days, you'll find my write-ups of Lois Patiño's evocative short film The Sower of Stars, and the new feature from Gastón Solnicki, A Little Love Package. Interesting note: the Catalan Patiño went to Tokyo to make his latest, while Solnicki, an Argentinian, set his new film in Vienna. The magic of international funding streams...

Right now though, you can find me enthusing over Bertrand Bonello's Coma, a project with roots in the Covid lockdown that, to say the least, transcends that conceptual limitation. I had about twelve hours to watch Coma and submit the review, so apologies for the fact that the prose is, as Paul Hollywood would say, "a bit rough-and-ready." But I think I conveyed both Bonello's formal daring as well as the particular way that the film spoke to me.

Much of those "feels" result from what I perceive to be Bonello's frank admission that as parents, we are often incapable of protecting our children, or even fully understanding the world they inhabit. This feels even more pertinent today, as my own son is one of thousands of trans youth who are being, essentially, marked for extinction by Texas's indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton and our craven governor, Greg Abbott. 

I probably don't need to tell you about the horrendous bill that Abbott signed into law today. And while it's infuriating for those of us whose kids are being waved like red meat in front of the GOP's Neanderthal, Trumpist base during an election year, it also speaks to the unique sense of futility that comes with living in Texas. This law is blatantly unconstitutional, and will be struck down the very moment it comes before a judge. But as Adam Serwer argued in The Atlantic, the cruelty is the point, and I don't know how much longer any of us can or should live with a government fixated on demonizing its most vulnerable citizens instead of even pretending to care about our most basic problems. America has entered its Grand Guignol phase, and I'm not sure what, if anything, can bring it back to moderate sanity.

The good news is, if the Texas GOP wants a fight, my family are currently in a position to give them one -- something most other parents of trans kids cannot say. So we remain at the ready, lawyered up, and hopeful we can just go on living the ordinary lives that are so patently offensive to so many. What else can we do?