Recent Posts

• March 23, 2025

  La Llorona

  I really meant to look up the history of Guatemala after watching this, but I definitely have not done it. Nonetheless, I presume it’s all factual. Similar in feel to The Zone of Interest, we’re in the house of the bad guys, who don’t consider themselves the bad guys. Specifically in this case, a general who has been convicted of genocide, stuck with his family in his mansion as an enormous protest lives outside. All of his staff (except one) has quit because, well, he genocided their ethnic group, and so he has to hire someone new who may or may not be a ghost.

• March 15, 2025

  Ordet

  Ordet (“the Word”) is a Danish movie by Carl Theodor Dreyer, who made, among other things The Passion of Joan of Arc. I haven’t seen lots of silent movies, but that one was incredible, and here he’s allowed to use sounds and words! Fantastic. Morten the farmer has three sons; one is normal, one is an atheist (he says agnostic, but come on), and one is completely fucking mad. Religious conflict ensues.

• March 15, 2025

  Brideshead Revisited

  Or: Catholicism, you’ve done it again! My understanding is that Evelyn Waugh had complex feelings about Catholicism, at least at the point of writing this book, because he got properly into it later in life.

• March 09, 2025

  Tenebrae

  Only my second Argento, somehow, after (obviously) Suspiria. An American novelist, Peter Neal, comes to Rome to promote his newest book but slightly before he gets there (thus removing suspicion from him at least) a woman is murdered and pages from his novel is stuffed down her throat. To make the point even further, Neal gets a letter saying yes, his books are the reason.

• March 08, 2025

  A Room With a View

  I recently read a bunch of EM Forster’s short fiction, which included a bunch of early sc-fi and speculative fiction, including The Machine Stops, which pretty much covered how everyone lived during COVID lockdown, except a hundred years in advance. People lived in underground bunkers, communicating over (what was basically) the internet, and nobody ever met in person or went to the surface, or even saw the point of doing those things. They relied on The Machine, which eventually, well, you can guess from the title. I’d also like to shout out a story where a bunch of picnickers experience time and space freeze and one of them witnesses the Devil. It was cool. Very unsettling.