This is Brianna’s Digest, a (usually) paid-only weekly column in association with BriZigs LLC. If you’d like to join the growing Brianna’s Digest movement, consider a paid subscription, which gets you access to this column forever in addition to my free posts, which are right now just reviews of the new season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but I promise that will change soon. In the meantime, I hope if you’re reading this that you’re an Always Sunny fan.
For this week’s issue of Brianna’s Digest, I’m back in [Matt Berry voice] New Yohrk Cittaayyy, a city I’m more and more convinced, the closer I get to lease renewal, that I will not be living in next year. I love New York, and I worked very hard to finally be able to move here and *make it*. But do you know what I love more than *making it*? Complete and total privacy in my living space. Unfortunately, the city of New York cannot offer me that in my current tax bracket (and I’m sorry but I’m not willing to live precariously paycheck to paycheck to afford a Queens closet for $1,600/month if I don’t have to).
Even if I did choose to weather the storm of living with strangers for another year, in a new apartment, I’m not keen on the fact that anywhere I move in this city comes with the threat of rent increases every year — unless you’re one of the very lucky few to actually find a rent-stabilized building. Am I just going to be hopping from overpriced apartment to overpriced apartment until the city eventually prices me out entirely? Feels like that’s more likely to happen than some promised market crash everyone keeps talking about. I’d rather move somewhere I can afford right now and just stay in one place for a bit and get that pet rabbit I want, and come back to New York again someday when the market has crashed and I’ve made my fortune.
Also, you may have noticed that this week’s Digest is free for all subscribers. I thought I would make one or two free just so regular subscribers can at least get a taste of Brianna’s Digest before they decide whether or not they’d like to upgrade to paid. I’m sensing a portion of my subscriber base is not pleased that my only only pieces of writing to come out of here for the foreseeable future are reviews of Always Sunny and these paid-only posts that they can’t access. I do plan to write other stuff in the near future (obviously, the new season of Sunny is going to end), but this was just a good way to push me to write consistently, and get in the habit of doing it, while giving my paid subscribers something they have exclusive access to. On the other side of this, I’m planning on doing slightly less niche stuff (if I can come up with ideas — ha!).
Thank you, additionally, to my new paid-tier subscribers, which since my last Digest I can now count on two hands. I love you all deeply and on an individual level and I hope you’re all enjoying these Digests and that they’re worth it for you. In the future, I would want to weave in some more articles and essays as paid-only, but right now the big essays I do are unfortunately the only way for me to really draw in new subs. They are the “Blockbusters” of BriZigs LLC, if you will.
Cinema
For the past week, I’ve been watching/revisiting the Insidious movies in preparation for the fifth installment of the franchise — one of director James Wan’s many founding horror franchises — about astral projection and a demon who looks like Darth Maul, among other things. I have a major soft spot for the Insidious franchise even if I can confidently say that I only like less than half of the movies in it. I’m not sure why I feel so attached to the Insidious world. The first one wasn’t particularly formative for me, even though I did watch it and like it quite a bit when I was in high school, and I’ve seen it a number of times since, too. The first film remains one of the very few horror films to still, to this day, really creep me out. I think it’s incredibly effective — the set pieces are strange and unique, the creature designs are memorable, that string score which negatively overwhelms the later films is wonderfully jarring and unpleasant, specifically during the opening sequence, which always unnerves me. I also think it’s a rare film where the jump scares all really work, and linger with you. And then there’s our steady, reliable king, Patrick Wilson, holding down the fort, disbelieving his wife who’s seeing ghosts, just trying to grade those fucking papers with the added stressor of a son who can travel dimensions in his sleep.
The other three Insidious movies, not including the newest one, are all dwindling in returns. I do like the second one (despite it’s admittedly strange gender politics — not going to think much harder about that!), even if, on subsequent rewatches (I’ve seen it three times now), it becomes less a lot effective. It’s that whole thing of overexposure; the creepy old woman spirit is creepier the less we see her, like in the first film, and making a whole movie about her sort of takes away from what made her effective in the first place. But I dunno, I still enjoy it overall, and Patrick Wilson’s physical deterioration as he progressively becomes undone by the spirit who’s possessed him is also really fun, and he plays the evil role well. They should let Patrick Wilson be evil more often. We don’t let Patrick Wilson be evil enough (this is why Aquaman is a great movie).
Third and fourth movies aren’t worth talking about because Patrick Wilson is not in them. They are “Elise” movies, prequels from the few years before the heroic medium helps to save the Insidious family and before [SPOILER] Patrick Wilson-as-possessed-by-evil-spirit strangles Elise to death. I like Lin Shaye, Elise’s actress, but I can’t say I’m too invested in any stories that don’t involve her with the Insidious family. We get two Elise origin stories in the third and fourth Insidious films: how she met Tucker (Angus Sampson — do you think him and Patrick Wilson talked about Insidious on the set of Fargo?????) and Specs (Leigh Whannell), her nerdy ghost hunter sidekicks, in Insidious: Chapter 3, and then basically her entire life story in Insidious: The Last Key. Snoozefest! Don’t care. And while Insidious 1 and 2 are both pretty much films that are just scary for the sake of scary, 3 and 4 start going into that dreaded place….no, not the Further….the “about trauma” place…
That’s where we end up with Insidious: The Red Door. I’ve got a few other things to talk about here so I’m not going to devote this entire newsletter to a review of Patrick Wilson’s debut auteur vehicle, but it was pretty disappointing. The film leans all the way into the “about trauma” angle, which ultimately does make sense and could have actually worked. We find the Insidious family (the Lambert family — sorry I should just say that) nearly a decade after father-son astral projection team of Josh (Wilson) and Dalton (Ty Simpkins) returned from their last trip to the Further and had both their memories of it and their abilities wiped in order to move on and never go back. It makes sense, then, that this choice to forget would come back to haunt them, and that we’d return to them all these years later to see the story truly resolved.
It’s just that what we return to to resolve everything is not good at all and very boring! A huge part of that has to do with the fact that we spend so much time with teenage Dalton, whose storyline of adjusting to college with his annoying new friend and revealing his hidden past through art projects (shout out to Hiam Abbass as the art teacher) is boring, annoying, bad, dumb. Don’t like it! I also feel bad to be mean to Ty Simpkins, because he is so cute, but he is one of the few unfortunate child actors who grow up to be bad regular actors. Then there’s Patrick Wilson’s subplot, in which he’s made to uncover the nature of his absent father’s past. It’s meant to be affecting but doesn’t land at all, because we never spent even an iota of time on Patrick Wilson’s absent father in the previous films, and it’s such a shoehorned B-plot in this one. Rose Byrne, who I quite like and who plays Josh’s wife Renai, is relegated to like five scenes. I suppose this is in part due to the fact that it’s revealed early-on that her and Josh have been divorced for some time, but the reasoning given is so contrived if you know what happened in the second film.
On top of it all — nothing is scary. Absolutely nothing is scary. Not the set pieces, not the atmosphere, not the production design, not the ghosts and ghouls (who I think all look actively like the actors who dress up for Eastern State Penitentiary’s Halloween Horror Nights), and they manage to ruin the look of the Darth Maul Demon (not looking up his canon name) and make him suck too! I’m just dying to know why Patrick Wilson was brought on direct this. Was he personally interested in taking over? Did he want to try his hand doing directorial work for a franchise he had previous experience with? Or did the producers just want a hired hand? The script is credited to Scott Teems, whose past work has included Halloween Kills and the Firestarter remake so like, lol. All in all, Insidious: The Red Door is a devastating blow to Patrick Wilson auteurists everywhere.
Moving on: while I was at my parents’ place last week I also watched Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World for the first time and The Death of Stalin for the fourth time. Master and Commander has, for whatever reason, become very popular on social media and people have become very, very annoying about it. But I thought it was really good — not usually the kind of movie I’m into, but I have to say it surprised me. Disturbing, thrilling, emotionally investing, and absurdly well-paced; the 2 hour and 18 minute runtime feels like nothing by the time you reach the end of it.
I also just think it’s kind of funny that I have seen The Death of Stalin four times now. I just keep watching that damn movie where the events surrounding and after Stalin’s death become an episode of Veep! I had a hankering while my folks and I were watching Doctor Zhivago (which I enjoyed, but didn’t leave enough of an impression to warrant inclusion in this post) — all the Russian stuff just got me thinking about The Death of Stalin. I do just think it’s really fun and an easy film to throw on, and there are so many great actors in it who are giving top tier comedic performances, like Steve Buscemi, and Rupert Friend, and crucially Michael Palin, whose performance here I feel should be cherished as it seems to be the last one he’s ever going to do?
Television
The only thing I have to say about The Idol now that it’s over — a show I neither hate-watched nor loved, but simply enjoyed for the faux-sleaze spectacle of it all — is where the fuck did Dan Levy go? Was he only in the first episode and then never reappeared? The whole thing is funny to me for two reasons. The first is that Levy’s character was a key component of the infamous Rolling Stone interview scene that The Weeknd tweeted following the Rolling Stone exposé on the show that published last year. In the scene, Dan Levy was the one interviewing our good friends Tedros Tedros and Jocelyn, and it was cut from the season entirely. The second reason is because, as revealed by that same exposé, Levy was one of the actors who was only brought on after the show was overhauled in The Weeknd’s image, one of the “trendy” pop culture figures like Troye Sivan and Rachel Sennott who were cast after Amy Seimetz exited the project. And he just wasn’t even in the show at all, in the end. Hilarious! Where did he go? No one knows — certainly not Sam Levinson!
Actually, I have one more thing to say about The Idol. For as entertaining as it was, it was literally just five episodes of people sitting around a house. I started thinking about that at one point — is anyone ever going to leave this house? Can they leave this house? Will they go anywhere else? It’s a big house but like… ok, we’ve seen it all. Let’s move the party somewhere else for once? I think it’s episode 2 or 3 that Tedros, Jocelyn, and uhhh…Rachel Sennott (don’t remember her character’s name not looking it up) go out shopping, and we get that great scene where Jocelyn calls Tedros gay and then they have the least erotic sex imaginable. But I think that’s the last time any of them leave that house. On the one hand, sure, maybe it’s because they’re all basically in a cult so they’ve intentionally sequestered themselves in Jocelyn’s home. On the other, my suspicion is that The Weeknd simply wanted as much air time for his beautiful home, where the show was shot, as possible.
Arts & Crafts
Some may already know that I crochet in my free time, a hobby I picked up a number of years ago while I was in college. I ended up abandoning the hobby shortly after graduating five years ago, when my investment in cultivating my freelance writing career took center stage in my brain, and I hadn’t picked up another hat or scarf or crocheted coaster since. It was also spurred by the fact that, well, crocheting means an accumulation of stuff. And if you have no use for it, then that stuff keeps piling up. I tried selling some of it and giving away a few others, but I was still left with a pile of soft, knit things that I didn’t need. When I moved to New York last year, my mom uncovered my crochet box and a blanket that I had started a long time ago but never finished. I donated my crochet books and insisted that I wasn’t going to finish that blanket, but she persuaded me to bring it with me, just in case.
Ultimately, I’m glad that she did, and I regret giving away all my crochet books. But that blanket, which I started probably 3-4 years ago, has finally been finished — one of the free patterns they have available in the yarn section at Michael’s. Like riding a bike or driving a car, it was easy to jump back into the muscle memory of using the needle and thread. Still, making the blanket was a daunting task, even with the good headway that Past Brianna had already made. I don’t think I’d make another blanket again; at least, not for a long, long time.
Despite the whole '“accumulation of stuff” aspect, I love crocheting because I love the feeling of creating something tangible with my own hands. Also, a lot of that past “stuff” was practice creations I was making in order to learn the craft and progressively get better and better. Since I would say my skill level is at least intermediate at this point, I’m going to try focusing on only doing projects that I know I can use, or that I can give to people I know. So, my next project is a little crochet top. Here’s what it will look like and what I’ve got started so far:
Do you also crochet? Do you have a project that you’re really proud of? I’d love to know! Perhaps I form a community of crocheters on this Substack, and become a crochet blog, further alienating my subscriber base than I already have. Just kidding! :)