T. J. Dobbin

I'm revisiting an old favorite tomorrow for my horror column with a lightly personal essay on MAY, which is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel

"I love the Peanuts." -Willow

Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema The History and Future of Transness in Cinema

I'm too fucking tired to debunk every stupid thing that Ryan Murphy said about Christine Jorgensen or how the public response to Ed Gein was catastrophic to the the perception of trans people so I'll just point to my book. We covered all of it.

bookshop.org/p/books/corp...

RidicuLists: The Top Five Literary Works by Ed Wood - Journal - Metrograph Film history is a house with many rooms. In Ridiculists, Will Sloan explore some of its nooks and crannies. For the latest entry, a look at five of the cult independent filmmaker Ed Wood’s finest book...

I wrote about Ed Wood's finest literary works for the Metrograph Journal
metrograph.com/ridiculists-...

Real George Carlin energy (complimentary)

A consistent heartbreak I'm experiencing from reading the early chapters in Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema is how frequently I read a film description, think "ooooo this seems cool" and then immediately after discovering it's a lost film.

Sadly, it doesn't seem to be available. The majority of pink films from the 1960s are lost.

Lewd Priest: Forty-Eight Positions Cutting (1969) Zatoichi pink film parody from 1969

Long before the popularization of "porn parodies", in the early days of Japan's pink cinema, there was once a Zatoichi pink parody! It starred someone who was famous at the time for being a Shintaro Katsu (Zatoichi) impersonator. Daiei even sued this film on the basis of it "tricking" audiences.

Betty Boop and Bimbo are in a dark scary cave, both are looking off towards something off-screen.

Betty Boop and Bimbo are looking ahead at three skeletons drinking mugs of beer in unison.

Close-up of the three skeletons drinking from their mugs, their white bones are turning black.

The three skeletons are white again, and they've fallen to the floor, drunk, a smile on their faces.

Minnie the Moocher (1932, Directed and Animated by Dave Fleischer, Willard Bowsky, Ralph Somerville)

Betty Boop and Bimbo holding each other in fright.

Betty Boop and Bimbo holding each other in fright, same image, but with the black and whites of the image reversed.

Minnie the Moocher (1932, Directed and Animated by Dave Fleischer, Willard Bowsky, Ralph Somerville)

A circle peephole view of Betty Boop in a white dress, gloves and hat.

Betty applying her lipstick: a tiny creature lives inside her lipstick, and has paints and is painting her lips for her.

Betty lifting up the ends of her dress before she walks through a mysterious entrance which magically manifested.

Betty is in the middle of the room which has gone dark, but a spotlight peers over her, showing off the shape of her legs from under her dress. Bimbo and Koko look on.

Is My Palm Read (1933, Directed and Animated by Dave Fleischer, David Tendlar, William Henning)

Four screenshots of a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon. In the top left corner is the name of the animator who worked on each individual sequence - this isn't my video, it was posted on the Cartoon Research blog years back.

I was trying to place the Looney Tunes that's playing on the TV in One Battle After Another when Bob is walking through Sergio's home. The shot of church bells was distinct. I remember it because it was a recent viewing. It's the final seconds of "Of Rice and Hen", it's on a Collector's Choice blu.

Betty Boop and Bimbo are running away in the night as an assortment of witches and ghouls chase after them.

Minnie the Moocher (1932, Directed and Animated by Dave Fleischer, Willard Bowsky, Ralph Somerville)

Blu ray menu for The Raven (1935)

A second short Karloff/Lugosi chiller before bed. It rules when a double feature is 130 minutes.

My TV showing the Blu ray menu for The Black Cat (1934)

Time for an old favourite. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in The Black Cat.

I read it years ago, dug the early narrative a lot, but once the POV shifts, I basically hated it until the end.

Thomas Pynchon’s Strangely Stripped-Back Noir “Shadow Ticket” may be an exercise in restraint. But what is a Pynchon novel without its sense of unruly bigness?

good morning! I reviewed Thomas Pynchon’s latest—and, perhaps, last?—novel, SHADOW TICKET, for the @newrepublic.com. newrepublic.com/article/2010...

My private letterboxd list "Cartoons for Halloween" which has 80 films currently

I've had so much fun building a playlist of horror animations to play in sequence on mute for my upcoming Halloween party that the party either needs to be 8-9 hours, or what I'll inevitably do instead, trim the list down a tad. This genre of cartoon is my happy place.

Bimbo is looking down into a well. In the reflection in the water deep down below is three frightened looking Bimbos staring back up at him.

Minnie the Moocher (1932, Directed and Animated by Dave Fleischer, Willard Bowsky, Ralph Somerville)

Betty Boop is arguing with her parents. Her father's head has been replaced with a gramophone.

Betty Boop is talking to a pair of lips that have appeared on her napkin.

Betty and Bimbo are running away. It is late at night, and there are mysterious dark shadowy figures frightening them.

Betty and Bimbo, worry on their faces, as they are about to head into a cave.

Minnie the Moocher (1932, Directed and Animated by Dave Fleischer, Willard Bowsky, Ralph Somerville)

Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in Wabbit Twouble

Koko the Clown and a ghost behind him in an Out of the Inkwell cartoon

Willie Whopper and his dog are in the presence of the devil and hellfire.

Bimbo the dog is shivering in fear because tombstones are laughing at him.

Two posts I'm aiming on having up on Strawberry Penguin later this month: one on Bob Clampett's debut Bugs Bunny short Wabbit Twouble, and one highlighting the creepy and surreal Halloween-appropriate horror animated shorts of the distant past.

My private letterboxd list "Cartoons for Halloween" which has 80 films currently

I've had so much fun building a playlist of horror animations to play in sequence on mute for my upcoming Halloween party that the party either needs to be 8-9 hours, or what I'll inevitably do instead, trim the list down a tad. This genre of cartoon is my happy place.

Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in Wabbit Twouble

Koko the Clown and a ghost behind him in an Out of the Inkwell cartoon

Willie Whopper and his dog are in the presence of the devil and hellfire.

Bimbo the dog is shivering in fear because tombstones are laughing at him.

Two posts I'm aiming on having up on Strawberry Penguin later this month: one on Bob Clampett's debut Bugs Bunny short Wabbit Twouble, and one highlighting the creepy and surreal Halloween-appropriate horror animated shorts of the distant past.

All This and Rabbit Stew (1941) I normally include a handful of screenshots in my Bugs Bunny essays, but virtually every frame in All This and Rabbit Stew (1941) features a racist caricature that I don’t feel comfortable sh…

And this one on Tex Avery's other final Bugs cartoon, the racist All This and Rabbit Stew. An uncomfortable work of animation, I traced Warner's history of self-exiling its racially problematic cartoons, and the rare occasions in which they allow some of them be seen (home video is vital, folks).

The Heckling Hare (1941) Tex Avery’s slow-talking and slow-thinking hound dog Willoughby makes his third appearance in The Heckling Hare, following Of Fox and Hounds (1940) and The Crackpot Quail (1941). A repeated formula…

September has ended. A productive month for me, I pivoted away from Substack and into old fashion blogging and I wrote what I think are my two strongest Bugs Bunny pieces to date, this one on The Heckling Hare and Tex Avery's subversiveness and the conditions that led to his WB exit.

Tomorrow I will be publishing the next essay in my Twin Peaks series (there's only 4 or 5 more left!!!!!), but in the meantime, here I am on ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. It's great

From the very first frame, it is clear that nothing will be held back in Paul Thomas Anderson’s hilarious, and action-packed One Battle After Another. I’ve gotten so used to modern big-budget Hollywood movies having little, or nothing to say about the worsening and unjustifiable living conditions in America that the immediacy of Anderson’s newest was shocking. We catch up to the leftist revolutionary group the French 75 in the process of preparing to liberate a migrant detention center. The group’s ostensible Alpha is Perfida Beverly Hills (played with motherfucking swagger belying a hidden vulnerability by Teyana Taylor), and she is coaching Rocket Man (Leonardo DiCaprio) on his duty to their mission. He was never the most agile, or the finest at carrying out the on-the-ground work of liberation, but he was the guy who came with the fireworks. He signed their actions in cursive with an explosion after the deed was done. They have chemistry, but Anderson’s camera is preoccupied with more than their lust. His early trademarks for intense continuity and stunning feats of aggressive, and nervous mise-en-scene rumbles with a newfound confidence, and there’s a palpable sense of danger in the freeing of these caged people. His tracking shots—perhaps the hallmark of his style—rush through with an agile sense of purpose alongside the young revolutionaries. It’s unbelievably exciting to see them accomplish what they set out to do, and, in turn, cathartic in its directness of grappling with the unending images of imprisonment and state violence that have become commonplace since the current President’s second term. It is made even more prudent by Anderson’s understanding of history, and with the fact that the film begins sixteen years ago, many years before our present, but looking a lot like right now. It feels like Anderson is getting away with something in the manner of Alex Cox’s attacks on the Reagan administration in the 1980s.

a still image of Leonardo DiCaprio in a bathrobe and holding a gun on a desert highway from ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

i am joining the chorus in cheering for Paul Thomas Anderson's ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. This film is a small miracle considering the state of big budget American movies.

www.patreon.com/posts/140015...

That's the title. I watched through two episodes and I feel strongly that this is terrible and I don't understand what audience would even find this appealing. The characters have no real resemblance to the originals to please the olds, and what kids are gonna get excited for Magilla Gorilla.

There was this horrible joke that implied that Yogi Bear has embarrassing porn history on his internet browser and requested his computer be destroyed, and I was fuming.

I have Boomerang on and they're airing this Yogi revival show from the 2020s and it's ghastly. Such a misguided all-the-60s-Hanna-Barbera-characters living in the same town nonsense, without any of the personalities the characters originally possessed.