The Invisible Counterpoint

12 Years a Slave (Review Part One) 
I've only seen one film this year that kinda gets at how someone could become a person as sadistic as Fassbender's slaveowner is in this film. Insidious 2 got how a little, vulnerable boy, completely owned by an absolutely terrifying mother, was going to have no chance building an independent self apart from her. His life was on the line, and you can imagine how a six or eight or however old a boy he was, would have a brain formed largely on ensuring he does nothing outside of what she wants. The point of life ... is to not be devoured. And the great homo sapiens brain of his would be using all its evolutionary excellence to contrive means to ensure he manages this--even if this means making him into someone who would be to any sane outsider, deviant, insane ... strangely ill-purposed to what life would confront him with. The rest of the world does not realize that this one brain alone negotiated avoiding oblivion! What of if i...

Kick-Ass 2 When Roger Ebert reviewed the original Kick - Ass , he wasn't primarily taken aback by any one single incident—Hit Girl's being shot, with the audience having to take a moment to remind themselves about her bullet-proof vest, for instance—but by the fact that people behind the movie were so comfortable exploring a whole terrain of something which had pretty much taken him off stride upon first occurrence. He couldn't believe that a movie primarily involving kids could be so comfortable with people dying, being butchered, all over the place, coldly, bloodily, humiliatingly, with this not counting it as beyond fun and games. "This isn't comic violence," he writes, "These men, and many others in the film, really are stone-cold dead. And the 11-year-old apparently experiences no emotions about this. Many children would be, I dunno, affected somehow, don't you think, after killing eight or 12 men who were trying to kill her?" ...

For me, the end of October is always slightly tinged with dread -- provoked not by Halloween spooks, not even by election season, but by the advent of something called NaNoWriMo. If those syllables are nothing but babble to you, then I salute you. They stand for National Novel Writing Month. [. . .] The purpose of NaNoWriMo seems laudable enough. Above all, it fosters the habit of writing every single day, the closest thing to a universally prescribed strategy for eventually producing a book. NaNoWriMo spurs aspiring authors to conquer their inner critics and blow past blocks. Only by producing really, really bad first drafts can many writers move on to the practice that results in decent work: revision. [. . .] I am not the first person to point out that "writing a lot of crap" doesn't sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November. And from rumblings in the Twitterverse, it's clear that NaNoWriMo winners frequently ...