You’re reading Boy Movies, a weekly newsletter about movies for boys. Full disclosure: I am barely here today, like, mentally, because there are new photos of both Timothée Chalamet and Austin Butler out for me to look at and I am RUSHING to finish this issue so I can continue looking at them. You all understand.
Nick Frost drops a slur in Shaun of the Dead
And that slur? Is the n word! I’m sorry, I do try not to be too much of a pearl-clutching loser about these things because I have a functioning brain and I understand that this movie came out in 2004 and we basically lived on a different planet, but I did in fact say “Wait, really?” out loud and rewound the movie to make sure I was hearing it correctly. It simply comes out of nowhere! If nothing else, that moment, in which a white British guy randomly says the n word and it goes unacknowledged by his friends (to their credit, they’re in the middle of a mass zombie attack, but they’re also constantly riffing about whether or not dogs can look up, so it seems like they have time to chat), firmly cements Shaun of the Dead in [Dicks: The Musical voice] the year that it is.
At the risk of stealing Geoff’s thunder and getting too Movie Diary about it, I don’t have much to say about Shaun of the Dead by way of insight, but I’d like to talk about watching it. It’s one of those movies that people have been telling me to see for years. Many of those people have been men, because men absolutely flip for Edgar Wright. You know that specific type of guy who has galactic meltdowns over Michael Mann’s oeuvre? Edgar Wright guys are comedy’s answer to that whole group. Honestly, Wright probably deserves his own issue — his 2000s comedies, like Shaun and Hot Fuzz and, later, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (an important movie in my personal lore), are certainly in conversation with the American bro-coms I wrote about back in September, but they’re very much in their own league. For context, Anchorman and Shaun were released within four months of each other, but they sort of feel like they were made in different centuries. I know Shaun, about Simon Pegg’s titular slacker trying to keep his loved ones alive as a zombie outbreak rapidly spreads through London, is very much a comedy, but you cannot imagine how terrified I was of most things up until a few years ago. But I’m brave now, really! Or I’m trying to be, so here I go watching things like Shaun of the Dead this Halloween season, which did freak me out but not for the reasons I thought it would.
When I tell you this movie deeply hurt my feelings… It hurt my feelings so bad. I shed literal tears when Shaun had to shoot his mother in the head after she turned. That, after watching him frantically try to explain to his mom that her husband (played by Bill Nighy, always criminally underused in these movies; I had the same complaint about Hot Fuzz) transforming into a zombie means “there is nothing of the man [she] loved” inside him anymore, was traumatic. And then, what, I’m supposed to find it cute and funny when Shaun resigns himself to a relationship with a woman who hates him because they’re trauma bonded after living through the apocalypse while the actual love of his life — Ed, played by n word dropper Nick Frost — gets turned into a zombie? And now zombie Ed is just chained up in Shaun’s backyard forever, with no concept of what he is or the lovable rat man he once was? Okay. Fuck you, Edgar Wright. Something I’ve discovered while navigating my brave era is that I’m way too sensitive for zombie movies.
Also: “I wasn’t the one who was blowing our cover by having a tiff with my boyfriend” / “He’s not my boyfriend!” / “Might be a bit warm, the cooler’s off” / “Thanks, babe.” That was cute, I liked that. Bring back gentle, harmless queerbaiting. It was good for society.
I’m talking ‘bout Dead Man’s Bones
For years, I’ve been unsuccessfully pitching a piece about Dead Man’s Bones to various entertainment sites. When Halloween season rolls around, I go through the familiar beats of revising my proposal about Ryan Gosling’s weird little spooky rock band, send it around to an array of editors, and reliably get denied or flat out ignored. This is, of course, fine; every writer who has ever lived has been through it. It’s more that I wonder why no one else has hopped on it in my absence. No one, to my knowledge, has tried to interview Gosling about it. No one has gotten the story from his bandmate Zach Shields. No one has written a retrospective on this odd duo and their odd album — album singular; to date, their eponymous 2009 record remains the only music they’ve ever put out. What’s going on there? Is it that the general public doesn’t know? Is it that no one but me and my friends care? Has Gosling banned journalists from asking him about it? I’ve been listening to this album every October for over a decade (I became aware of it, of course, because of Tumblr) and I feel no closer to answers.
I know nothing about music and I have no idea how to write about it (girl, I barely know how to write about TV and movies), but I do know that the Dead Man’s Bones album triggers something so pleasant in my brain. It’s a groovy, strange, haunting record that I can, and do, play top to bottom, over and over. Gosling isn’t an incredible singer, but he adopts a low warble on these songs that works well with the dour, ghostly melodies, creating a satisfying rumble. By my estimation, his participation in Dead Man’s Bones remains one of his most womanly traits, of which he has many. While being a misunderstood creative who briefly toyed with a side hustle as a musician comes off as a classic actor-in-crisis move, the songs are actually quite romantic and sweet, the lyrics full of tender gothic yearning: “I wish that we were magic, so we wouldn't be so young and tragic”; “I'm buried in this house / I'll never leave this floor / A page full of ‘je t’aime’s for you / I know I should have said it more.” Backed by a children’s choir, he and Shields tell vague stories about running toward nightmares and wandering around graveyards. This band is an anomaly in Gosling’s career, a dearly held relic for those in the know and lost to time for those who aren’t.
Thanks to Barbie, we got to hear recordings of Ryan Gosling’s singing voice for the first time since La La Land. This time, he wasn’t forced to recite lyrics written by a pair of domestic terrorists masquerading as musical theater writers (you might know them as Pasek and Paul). Rather, he delivered the ridiculous “I’m Just Ken” and a silly-serious cover of Matchbox Twenty’s “Push1.” I had a lot of fun with both, but they ultimately made me hope, as I often do, especially in October, for Gosling’s return to the Dead Man’s Bones project. He’s good at it! It’s certainly a better use of his talents and showcase for his personality — half his charm — than movies like the absolutely fake Gray Man.
Fourteen whole years ago (how), Gosling wished the children’s choir a glib, “Good luck,” at the top of the video Dead Man’s Bones shot for “In the Room Where You Sleep,” a bouncy, creepy little number in which he moans and wails about dark entities lurking by his beloved’s bedside. The camera roves over the kids, all dressed in Halloween costumes, and Gosling is shot exclusively in profile. He keeps his head bowed, the visible half of his face bathed in shadows in a way that’s always struck me as both unshowy and unglamorous. A reminder, maybe, that as a member of Dead Man’s Bones, Gosling, too, was playing dress-up.
If anyone has any recommendations for scary boy movies I should watch/write about this month, I’m all ears. The only thing I cannot and will not do is body horror. The Thing — which I loved, despite wanting to vomit the whole time — is my limit for films of that nature.
Friend of the newsletter Lyvie Scott asked me to contribute to this beautifully horny piece about desire and pleasure on screen, so naturally I wrote about Jude Law in The Holiday.
Which will almost certainly end up in the top five on my Spotify Wrapped.
have not seen shaun of the dead but i need to make it known that simon pegg and nick frost were also in love in hot fuzz
This gave me the inspiration to finally listen to Dead Man's Bones! Groovy indeed.
Rec: The Sixth Sense; it's definitely a Boy Movie, it holds up really well, and it's not too scary -- more sad than anything else