Puts into perspective the complaint many had about The Banshees being stage-like: The Whale is an underqualified thirty year old writing themselves from humdrum schematics to amateur histrionics and back again, for two hours, with a cast who understands what he is doing all too well. Aronofsky tries to wring a heady elegy out of Hunter's abysmal chamber drama but really there's nothing for it. Even Libatique undermines the exploitative dinginess of the mise en scène by softening everything into…
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Knock at the Cabin 2023
Notes thrown around
It is said that the shortest horror story ever written is Frederic Brown's story Knock, published in the December 1948 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. The story, in its entirety, is as follows:
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door...
The solitude implied by being the last man on Earth is immediately interrupted by the communicational imperative. But this is a communication that can never really take…
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Skinamarink 2022
Finally a found footage poetics of space. The camera is the person, is the house, is the imaginative in-between that brings the space to life. McRae shoots modernist angles made fuzzy with the matter of body memory. Ball's editing matches the heart rate then drags it back 'til it's barely functioning. The analog grain effects glide smooth atop the actual noise of the footage, drawing closer to how the human eye sees at night. This top layer, interpreting noise as…
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The Dark Knight 2008
I attended this really wonderful lecture on superheroes and the War on Terror, and how a number of very important comics post-9/11 became self-critical in their examination of states of emergency and exceptional politics, and the autoimmune system that leads to the violent pursuit of 'order' becoming the greatest source of chaos. Because superheroes respond to 'emergency' situations and operate within a non-legal or extra-legal capacity to inflict sovereign violence on the enemy (the enemy itself prone to slippage e.g.…
