Recent Posts

• 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.

• March 07, 2025

  Late Night with the Devil

  This got a nice bout of controversy for using AI-generated images in the ad-breaks for the fictional talk show. There were what, four or five still images over the running time? AI generated images are garbage, and humans should be used for things like this. It did not seem egregious enough for me to do a hard boycott of a low-budget horror movie, though I worry about the slippery slope.