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Showing posts from March, 2018

"Ready Player One," a review

In Monty Python's "the Holy Grail," there's a part where a transvestite young squire shoots a message out his window, encouraging any would-be courageous knight to rescue her. Lancelot discovers the note, goes through -- that is, kills -- countless guards and castle-guests on way to her tower, and meets the "princess" who was being held captive, forced to marry against desires. Clearly he was not expecting her but rather the more traditional sort of princess, and immediately starts backpedaling, cooperating with the lord of the manor's what-not conversations, to pretend whole immersion in them, so that surely THAT has been the only thing that has been on his mind since he entered the castle and so not possibly could he have been expected to notice that the lord in mid-conversation with him is also cutting a rope that his son is using to escape the tower, so to plummet to her death, and so to save them both any subsequent discomfort by his "m

"Unsane," reviewed

What is explored in "Unsane" more than anything else is the horror of finding outside one's class protections and subject to all the hoary hells of abuse that are routinely afflicted upon those society has clearly designated as containers for hopelessness. #MeToo has exposed how society had one large category of them, namely women, who could be subject to harassment and where they'd quickly learn that those they might have come to for support and redress functioned more to confirm that society was rather hoping that all the rage that had been situated upon them by the perpetrator... would remain contained there, to their detriment, or even to their full inability to survive at all, and so to their therefore consequent contemplating and following through with suicide. But our society has another category of designated victim and I think it is actually rather this one that is the focus here in this film, and it is to find oneself removed from consideration fro

"Isle of Dogs," reviewed

Our hero dogs come across probably more just as American. Near the beginning of the film, they take on another pack of dogs over a found cache of foodstuffs. This pack are all homogenous, i.e., "Asian," encouraging the sense of our pack, composed of differentiated, visually distinct dogs, as Yankee. And our pack, wins. I didn't find this particularly generous. And in that it's not hard to imagine Trump satisfied with the outcome of this fight, helpful. Keep both packs full of individuals. Allow the fight to be a toss-up. We don't need to learn more being pleased by associating with scruffy alphas who as off best form as they are, can still kick your ass. The boy in a sense is kept as "othered" in that there is nothing in the personality of the actors voicing the dogs that could in any way be seen as eager to differ and obey, as believably "dogish" -- they're Americans; they're men -- and so when the boy commands our hero, the

Conversation about Agulis at the Gene Wolfe Facebook Appreciation Club

James Pepe New Member  ·  20 hrs I’ve been rereading BotNS (this is my second read of it) and I just finished the part where Sev fights Agulis with the avern. I’m interested to hear what people think of the accusations Agilus levels agains Sevarian. Agilus says Sev has wronged him three times. Are we meant to take these accusations seriously? They're very strange. Is this just a last ditch attempt by Agilus to get out of being killed, or is Sev actually guilty of something, either legal, moral, or cultural. Are the powers that Agilus refers to simply that the avern didn’t kill Sev when it wounded him? Here the quote, “First by entrapment. You carried an heirloom worth a villa about the city without knowing what it was you had. As owner it was your duty to know, and your ignorance threatens to cost me my life tomorrow unless you free me tonight. Secondly, by refusing to entertain any offer to buy. In our commercial society, one may set one's