managing editor, Washington Review of Books
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Eephus 2024
A bunch of guys from the New England boonies express their love of baseball and their hatred of change by playing one last game of rec league baseball before the town turns the field into a school. (The hatred of having to go to the awful place two towns over to the next-closest field is 100% accurate.) I have met all of these people, and the sentimentalism under ten layers of perverse stubbornness is accurate.
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The Substance 2024
Disgusting both aesthetically and morally. Unbelievably misogynist, and all the worse because it thinks it's doing the opposite.
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The Wicker Man 1973
In the battle between joyless fun-hating Christianity and happy-go-lucky paganism you know which side I'm on.
Speaking of joyless fun-hating Christianity, interesting that basically all the circumstantial evidence points to Howie being not a Presbyterian (as might be expected from the Scottish setting) but a Catholic. (He refers positively to priests and, more tellingly, monasteries, and at the end he talks about dying unshriven. I'm less sure what to do with his flashback/dream—not sure why some random guy is reading…
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