Recent Posts

• September 30, 2026

  A Bunch of Books

  At some point over the summer I picked up a second hand copy of Bleak House. Whenever I read Dickens, my brain continually reminds me that these were serialised, and he got paid by the word. This one sure made him a few pennies. There’s two narratives in parallel: Esther, done in first person, and everyone else, done in third. Esther is an orphan (Dickens loves orphans) whose secret parentage (likewise) emerges later on, entwined with the other plot. At the same time there is a lawsuit (Jarndyce and Jarndyce) that has been going on for years, and has got so convoluted that nobody understands what the actual state of it is. There are wills being contested, which is about as specific as it gets really. One of the litigants who no longer wants anything to do with it is John Jarndyce, and living with him - in Bleak House - are cousins (who later get married [it’s 1837]) Ada and Richard. They are also potentially in line for some payout from the suit. Richard gets obsessed with it and goes a bit mad. Esther also lives with them.

• August 25, 2026

  Caveat

  Interesting perspective coming to Damian McCarthy’s first film after having already seen the next two. A lot of overlap, particularly with Hokum. The setup is so absurd that it’s hard to get past and take on its own merits. I had to look up their relationship, because it isn’t clear and also doesn’t really matter, but landlord Barrett hires his old tenant Isaac to effectively babysit his niece Olga for a few days at £200 a day. She is a fully grown adult, and what goes unmentioned until arrival is that a) she’s severely mentally ill and has a crossbow, b) her house is on an island with nothing else on it, and c) Isaac has to wear a harness that is chained to a peg in the basement that restricts which rooms he can enter in the house.

• August 24, 2026

  Skinamarink

  “It can’t look like this the whole time,” I think as the movie shows me an extremely fuzzy shot of part of a corridor in a family home, while some children’s feet walk through it. Then we see a bit of a ceiling while the children kind of talk to each other. There’s also a demon in the house, maybe. Reader, it did look like that the whole time, I’ve never seen such commitment to the bit. Every frame is a sea of grainy visual soup, making you work to figure out anything that’s happening. I saw it in the most ideal circumstances available to me at home: alone, quiet, dark, other than when Jones jumped in the sink to lick up some grease seconds before a pivotal moment.

• July 29, 2026

  The Odyssey

  Alright fine, I went to the IMAX. Not one of the fake ones where they make the screen a little bigger and double the ticket price, but the only legitimate IMAX in Toronto proper. I got a single ticket in the very back row, and while normally I’m a seat placement purist (a few rows back from the front, dead centre) it was totally fine. Screen was big, sound was loud, place was packed.

• July 13, 2026

  East of Eden

  I’m still out here reading books. I read The Grapes of Wrath when I was about 17, didn’t like it, and remember none of it whatsoever (other than “here’s the grapes, and here’s the wrath”, which was Nelson in the Simpsons, to this day I still say “yes, yes, very good wrath”) so I’m going to consider myself as not having read any Steinbeck. Now that I have, I can safely say he’s pretty good at this. I expected the poverty, the struggle to survive and make ends meet out in the American west. I did not expect how constantly funny this was. I definitely did not expect Cathy. He will drop an all-timer paragraph or character interaction, and then do it again on the next page, hit after hit. I always thought you can pick out the best, most enduring fiction by plucking any two characters and getting deeply invested about how they would interact, because they have clear inner lives and motivation.