Reading Time: 6 minutes I saw an unusual book offered for free on Amazon last week. Its author described The Whispering Crystals as LitRPG, or literary roleplaying games. The plot involves a young woman transported to an alien world, then sent through trials to learn to survive. As she slowly progresses in essential skills, she updates her character sheet […]
reviews
Posted inFilm/TV
The five Christmas films you meet in hell
Reading Time: 15 minutes How can one properly make a list of bad Christmas films? Is it even possible? When I took on the task of narrowing down a list of films that soften your brain and have the audacity to call it Christmas spirit, I had assumed that certain films would stand out from the rest. I assumed […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘Hell-Bound Train’ (1930)—an ingenious moralizing oddity of early Black cinema
Reading Time: 3 minutes A few years ago, to fill in some gaps left by my formal education, I took a community college course on African American history. The assigned textbook, Freedom on My Mind, contains a still image from the 1915 Civil War/Reconstruction epic The Birth of a Nation. “D. W. Griffith’s silent cinematic masterpiece The Birth of […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Review: ‘Pearl’ and ‘Blonde’: great horror, misleading marketing
Reading Time: 3 minutes If you stuck around through the end credits of Ti West’s retro slasher X this past spring, you were treated to a campy teaser advertising Pearl, a prequel promising the origin story of that film’s horny, homicidal antagonist gamely played by Mia Goth (who also plays X’s aspiring adult film star Maxine. X is a […]