My latest Strange Horizons column is live! In Praise of the Glorious Mess is an attempt to discuss how a movie can be exceptionally well-made and totally off-putting, and how a movie’s flaws sometimes don’t stop it from being glorious.

It’s still a concept in process, at least for me (maybe just for me, because most people do not have half the movie neuroses I have, I am guessing). The elimination of all bad films in favor of a series of Glorious Messes would be an interesting experiment, but as a lover of bad films it would leave me weeping into my hands and scrambling to find black-market copies of Earth Girls are Easy.

On the other hand, at the moment we’re in a film environment that’s almost entirely the other way around, and the movies that are bad are just grindingly awful (Transformers THREE, world?), and many of the movies that have a singular point of view are movies made by Woody Allen (in whose worldview I’m completely uninterested) or Zack Snyder (shitville), so even though I can’t say I loved The Tree of Life, I recognize that it’s a Glorious Mess and can let it live happily there.

Plus, I tend to have some Glorious Messes to which I am fervently attached, and if there were too many of those that I loved I would bust a blood vessel.

Speaking of, let’s talk about Sunshine.

(This graphic brought to you by my Tumblr, since I made 100 screencaps and then apparently chose never to upload any of them, which is a completely useful decision for me to have made!)

Sunshine is one of the best SF movies of the last decade. It is also, for twenty minutes near the end, one of the worst horror movies of the last decade. Rarely has such a great cast gathered for so much well-written, tense, character-based, naturalistic, good-looking sci-fi and been hamstringed so fucking painfully in the movie’s third act. (And seriously, this cast: Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Chris Evans, Hiroyuki Sanada, and longtime stealth favorite Paloma Baeza. If that doesn’t make you sit through it, I’m not sure what will, but I’ll try to convince you under the cut anyway.)

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My most recent column for Strange Horizons went up this week! “A Strange and Savage Beauty: Carlos Saura’s Flamenco Trilogy” explores one of my favorite instances of dance as a speculative element – Saura’s trio of flamenco films (Bodas de Sangre, Carmen, and El Amor Brujo) that are linked by their stars, their aesthetics, and the bone-deep exploration of the line between reality and performance, and what happens when that line ceases to matter.

It’s also an excuse for a lot of amazing flamenco, but whatever, this is sci-fi!

This shot pretty much encapsulates the sort of thing Carmen does so well in these movies: the stripped-down set, the mirroring of character and dancer without any distinction which is meant to be which, the dancers in the background who may or may not be in character, and who may or may not be watching.

This one is from one of my favorite scenes from Carmen, in which Cristina Hoyos and Antonio Gades take a break from playing doomed lovers and instead play “Antonio” the choreographer and “Cristina” his partner and teaching assistant, who in this scene is told that she is not going to play Carmen because she’s too old. Here, a glimpse of her epic bitchface:

And of course, the dancers behind them are in character.

The movies really are amazing; they’re not for everyone, and only El Amor Brujo even makes an attempt to be anything like a standard movie musical, but all of them are beautifully crafted, and Carmen is quickly rising through the ranks of my favorite spec movies, and of my favorite dance movies. (Don’t worry, Fred and Ginger, you’re safe…for now.)

Fun fact: someone has been kind enough to seed the entire trilogy on a particular site that shows moving pictures, if you know what I mean, and you’re interested in checking this trilogy out and don’t want to wait forever for Netflix to have it.

SUPER fun fact: my VHS-to-DVD burn of El Amor Brujo that I bought way back when is missing the first minute or so of this movie, pans across – wait for it – the entrance to the soundstage on which the rest of the movie is filmed. Well played, Saura.

Some small, dance-heavy clips for the curious, under the cut!

Here, Gades and Hoyos together in “El Amor Brujo,” to give you an idea of their chemistry:

And here, one of my favorite numbers from the entire trilogy, the fight scene from Carmen, in which a bunch of women dance their asses off, and Cristina Hoyos and Laura del Sol do a lot of loaded staring.

And on a very shallow level, Antonio Gades and Cristina Hoyos have seriously amazing faces – for most people that’s not enough reason to watch a movie, but I have sat through some truly awful films out of loyalty to talented people with good bone structure, so.

Mark Twain is the source of the beginning of the (very long) title of my article at Fantasy, up today: “A silver swan, which had a living grace”: A Brief, Bizarre Collection of Historical Automatons”.

The silver swan in question was John Joseph Merlin’s complicated ornithological automaton, which Twain chronicled with wonder in Innocents Abroad. (You know something is impressive when not even Mark Twain makes fun of it.)

For anyone who wants to know more about robot ducks that poop, give it a look! (You don’t even know what you want to do now, do you?)

So, since the column’s already up, it seems like a good time to announce that I am now a columnist at Strange Horizons!

The name of the column is “Intertitles,” which are the nifty title and dialogue cards in silent films. (Setting the scene, introducing characters, and providing hilarious subtext since 1890!) While not exclusively about film, let’s be real; this column is going to be about film a significant amount of the time.

Like this time!

“Winter’s Bone: a Mythic Marrow” looks at the mythic and fairy-tale archetypes that run rampant through what seems at first glance to be a very realist film.

I was truly impressed with Winter’s Bone on every level, and it stands up beautifully to repeated viewings (don’t even ask what number I’m already on – it was research! Or something!). I even made a little screencap love letter to Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes, who turned in magnificent performances, over on Tumblr (very low on spoilers).

I am extremely pleased to be working with Strange Horizons, and look forward to exploring more movies with them. In the meantime, I highly recommend Winter’s Bone (in a genuine, quality-cinema way, not an “Have you seen Earth Girls Are Easy recently?” way).

Two things for today, which could not have less to do with each other if I had tried.

First, I have an article in Lightspeed this week! It has a lengthy title!

“You Never Get a Seventh Chance to Make a First Impression: An Awkward History of Our Space Transmissions” is as advertised – a brief history of some of humanity’s most memorable attempts to reach out into the vastness of space and hit on other civilizations, and what those civilizations will think if they ever receive one. (I like to imagine a planet of Maggie Smiths receiving a transmission from us, just to see what global disdain would look like. Think about it. It’s amazing.)

(If this interests you, you should check out Launchpad, the astronomy workshop for sci-fi nerds, now accepting applications! I went last year, and though I didn’t have much time to blog during the workshop, I have spent many nights since staring at the sky with binoculars, naming stars and getting a crick in my neck.)

Secondly, Jabberwocky 5 will soon be available for purchase! To celebrate this, and the launch of the new Jabberwocky Magazine, the editors have made several of the pieces available in handy pixel form.

One of said pieces is my Victorian-mourning-rituals story “The Burmese Tailor”. It’s a little dark (even for me), but I hope you enjoy!