That Horrible Pen

No grave is animated You’re buried all alone So let her work a wonder And wake your flesh and bone Powerwolf, “Resurrection By Erection” (2009) One “promise” implicitly made by the currently available Mortal Shell 2 pre-release material is that this game will remedy the first’s enemy variety problem. Roughly man- sized or shaped enemies like the ones pictured above are almost certainly easier to implement, but the first Mortal Shell was unfortunately short on true monsters. The new trailer in particular shows off a good many enemies of different sizes and builds (and species?). The 2020 “ Souls -like” action-adventure-with-light-RPG-elements Mortal Shell was a video game I enjoyed a lot, despite its noticeable rough edges—especially “The Virtuous Cycle” DLC expansion roguelite mode. I wrote a pretty big review of the original game and then an even bigger review of its DLC . Those are my credentials, in a sense. Poking around on Twitter and Bluesky for reactions to the Mortal S...

Arguably the centerpiece of the 2023 live-action Barbie movie is what the official “max” YouTube channel has presumptuously titled “America Ferrera’s Iconic Barbie Speech.” This is somewhat late in the film, when Ferrera’s human mother character and her estranged, Barbie-hating woke tween daughter have made the journey to Barbie Land alongside Margot Robbie’s titular doll to find the plastic-y paradise overrun with patriarchy, spread by Ryan Gosling’s love-sick, under-valued-feeling Ken. Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie,” whose only innate gifts have been related to her physical appearance and her baseline status as the doll from which all others may derive some fundamental essence of self, is at her lowest, which inspires Ferrera’s character to deliver a thesis on the challenges and contradictions of womanhood, for which the pace of the film slows to a crawl. Otherwise quite stylistically lavish and even self-consciously Wacky, here it backs off to just let this woman express herself. ...

The title is hyperbole—I did eat the Lunchable—but it captures some of my feelings about the experience nonetheless. I have no memory of eating a Lunchable as a kid, but I am convinced that I couldn’t not have asked for one at some point. They seem to me now like the food equivalent of a toy, or at least an exercise in primarily visual appeal. I was probably, on some level, when I didn’t not ask for one during a grocery store run, interested in the clout it would have conferred upon me in the school lunchroom, and/or the sense of “being like the other kids.” Not that my memories suggest they were swimming in Lunchables either. If my mother turned my request down, which would definitely have been the case, then that’s because, even if she didn’t know it at the time, she could see through the flashy… rhetoric of the Lunchable to uncover its sickly, unsatisfying truth: The money was for the branding, not the food. I was a kid who went to school with lunches packed by a human person, in my...

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...