Recent Posts

• 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.

• January 31, 2025

  MaXXXine

  Had to finish the trilogy I suppose. X was fun, Pearl was OK (and almost worth watching entirely for the monologue near the end), and now Maxine is a porn star trying to pivot into serious acting in the ’80s. Also there is a serial killer going around. That is to say, two serial killers. There is the Night Stalker, who was a real guy, but there is also another one going around taking out friends and associates of Maxine specifically. Neither of these are the guy who menaces her in an alleyway near the beginning, only to have the tables turned and his balls graphically stomped on, never to be mentioned or referred to again, but leaving quite the lingering image. It makes the point that Maxine is herself dangerous, which would have tied in well to the ending that didn’t actually happen but I half expected. More on that below.

• January 26, 2025

  Nosferatu

  Troy McClure: Yeah. It’s a good idea, Homer, but they’ve already made some movies about World War II.

• January 24, 2025

  I Finished Watching Season 3 of From

  If you, the reader, have not finished watching season 3 of From, a very enjoyable show with one of the worst names ever devised, probably don’t read this.

• December 25, 2024

  Home Alone 2

  This is almost certainly the first movie I’ve watched from start to finish on broadcast TV in over fifteen years, easily. An interesting thing, economically, is that RTÉ didn’t show any ads during this Christmas Day screening of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. I can only imagine the amount of money they could charge to sell ad space - on a day when everyone has no money left - is lower than the cost of people switching channels to somewhere else and staying there in a bloated haze for another twelve hours. I realised this while waiting endlessly for a bathroom break. Since it was Christmas, obviously this was the second Home Alone movie I’d watched in the space of two days. Doing it that way really highlighted what a really beat-for-beat remake it is, just more brutal. The opening is at least winkingly duplicating, power goes out to the alarm clock again and they wake up late. At least the family don’t forget Kevin at home this team, they all make it to the airport and then get separated. Kevin manages to get on the wrong flight without getting his head caved in because Homeland Security doesn’t exist yet. His family end up in Paris, once again having a dreadful holiday, and he ends up in New York. The Wet Bandits, now the Sticky Bandits, run into him and try to roll a revenge plot into their main plan to rob a toy store that inexplicably keeps all its cash in the register overnight. Simpler times. Kevin does the Angels with Dirty Faces trick again, except this time in a hotel room. He gets room service and runs up a bill, using his freedom to have basically wholesome fun by eating ice-cream and watching movies; essentially identical to what I, an adult, do when alone. Donald Trump - now infamously, formerly famously, appears for a few seconds. Despite being Lost in New York, and not actually Home Alone, he still manages to find a house to booby trap. Except this time, instead of relatively innocent traps like crunching up Christmas decorations or gently placing a generally harmless spider onto Marv’s chest, he’s up on the roof hurling fucking bricks into their skulls, crushing spines with bags of cement, and I think there was a nail gun? I’m writing this a month later. The Home Alone traps were funny - even the paint cans wouldn’t straight-up murder someone - but these were downright sadistic. Eventually, Kevin, being a child, gets caught this movie has Pigeon Lady instead of Shovel Guy, who comes in and saves him at the last minute, he learns not to judge by appearances and that maybe his family are good to have around after all. The only reason this movie even needs to exist is to give us around twenty minutes of Tim Curry being Tim Curry.