That Horrible Pen

Probably my favorite shot in The Northman : I love just how “staged” it looks (how unnaturally symmetrical). The whiplash of cutting from the film’s protagonist, Amleth, tearing out a man’s throat and howling to this almost contemplative, The Last Supper -ian image depicting the previously berserk raiders at rest is just great juxtaposition. I love the dramatic posing as well and the feelings that the figures’ posture and the overall composition evoke. There’s something unsettled—and not just physically exhausted—about the men post-rampage. They look if not exactly meditative, then quiet: drained. Alone with their post-battle clarity. Perhaps toxically masculine in some vague way. My current Robert Eggers filmography rankings (sans 2024’s Nosferatu , which I haven’t seen): The Northman (2022), The Lighthouse (2019), The VVitch (2015). In terms of his “The” trilogy, I think the one I watched most recently takes the top spot, though I will admit this is somewhat unfair to VVitch since I...

  Im confused how you can go from making bloodbourne, to this.   This has to be boring. Really really boring. The music and the nothing happening gameplay. Accidental poetry by a YouTube commenter who shan’t be named (ca. 2018)   O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm That flies in the night In the howling storm:   Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy.             William Blake, “The Sick Rose” (1794) The worst part of watching someone stream FromSoftware’s Déraciné (2018) was the consistent, uniformly unfunny comparison to the studio’s other, more action-heavy recent titles, especially the 2015 role-playing game Bloodborne : “Is this Bloodborne 2 ?!” “When do we get to the poison swamp?” “ Bloodborne sequel??” And so on. Granted, the game’s developers encouraged this attitude with what could be references to their other work, includi...

  Or—Big Boy, Big Problems: “This might be normal in your family, but it’s not right.” Actual content aside, “ Hillbilly Elegy ” is a hell of a title, and I’ve had it stuck in my head ever since I first heard it. (The subtitle, “ A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis ,” is pure, dry, unwieldy conservative-speak, and I’m going to pretend it doesn’t exist.) You’ve got the unlikely pairing of “hillbilly” with the big-boy poetic noun “elegy”; the rhyme, I honestly could do without (it tickles my brain in an annoying way), but the consonance with the “L” sound is a real treat for how… atypical it is. I find it quite the evocative title overall and think that it’s unfortunate it sits atop THIS: alleged couch-humper, soon-to-be Vice President, and confirmed Online weirdo JD Vance’s 2016 memoir, which I will almost certainly never read, and Ron Howard’s 2020 film adaptation, which I only finally watched this past summer out of morbid curiosity. The word that now comes to mind, re. t...

After recently, finally, watching the new season of True Detective , I wanted to put together some thoughts, but I’m going to call these “impressions” rather than “thoughts” since I’m not approaching this assessment as really comprehensive/final. If I was to write such a thing, it would probably need to come after some time has passed. I just revisited season three prior to watching season four, and I found my feelings about it significantly improved after some time away. I would assume my evaluation of Night Country could similarly change with time. Honestly, I’m a little driven to write this now out of relief—My Twitter feed was nothing but negative reactions to the show at the time of its airing, and I was actually surprised that it performed so well in terms of ratings based on the impressions I was seeing. Certain big complaints seemed consistent: that the mystery wasn’t compelling (or didn’t progress in a compelling way), that the show was too overtly supernatural in contrast...