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.

• 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.

• February 14, 2025

  Killers of the FLower Moon

  I watched this over two nights, which I very much dislike doing, but, with apologies to Mr. Scorsese, it is three and a half hours long. DiCaprio is playing something of a dumbass, with a weird exaggerated downturned mouth, like Brando in the Godfather. Stuffed full of cotton balls or something. He comes back from WW1 to his uncle Robert De Niro, living in Osage Nation - a tribe who discovered oil and got mega rich - and gets a job as a cab driver of some sort. He drives Lily Gladstone around and then marries her. Stuff happens in between.

• 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.