Hello everyone!

Apologies for getting this newsletter out late, things have been a bit hectic in February, though I will have some cool things to share with you in that month’s edition! Without further ado, here’s everything I got up to in January.

As the anti-trans bills were being discussed in the UT senate, they have since unfortunately but predictably passed, I began to hyperfixate on the song “If I Had Words,” which was popularized in the movie Babe. I wrote an essay about it.

This month on The Safe Room, we covered survival horror classic Dino Crisis, which is basically just Resident Evil but with raptors instead of zombies. It’s as lean and sharp as a talon though, a talented team flexing their muscle on a genre they’ve already defined. It’s pretty fun stuff, as far as absurd video games go.

For Edwin Evans-Thirlwell’s review jam, I wrote a memoir/review of Pentiment, based on the schedule of monastic hours present in the game as well as the proscribed schedule for LDS missionaries. I put this together pretty quickly, but I think it ended up having some bite and poetry.

That’s it for January in terms of pieces and projects. I've wanted to expand the content of the newsletter a bit each month, but have struggled a bit figuring out what to do. My current solution is to write a little bit about books or movies or games that I didn't actually "cover" in my regular writing. Hope this is a nice little treat for interested readers, as well as something to acclimate me to writing and sharing takes with the pressure valve off. Until I come up with a better name, this will be called...

War And Peace (1965): My brother and I watched the entirety of the seven hour Soviet War and Peace. It’s such an massive thing that it is actively difficult to talk about, as it is possibly the largest film project ever undertaken. It has a cast of literally tens of thousands of people. The amount of immaculately composed frames with thousands of extras in this movie is absolutely mind boggling. (Don’t worry, there are also plenty of shots that take advantage of the sheer chaos numbers like that can provide.) It’s impossible not to talk about it in hushed, dramatic tones and not to say things about it that feel like a bit much until you actually watch the thing. Beyond the scale, it’s fiercely experimental and strange in a way that no American epic would dare to be. In some sense, the movie translates the novel’s immense size by lingering in immense emotion (as well as plentiful voiceovers). It’s film-making that attacks the throat and the heart and the mind all at once. You don’t have to watch it in seven straight hours (+ brief breaks) like I did. It’s split into four regular movie sized entries and each of them do have their own particular arc and character, as well as adding up to a cohesive whole. It’s definitely worth a watch and is also incontrovertible evidence that sometimes it’s good when movies are long.

Somerville (2022): Much of the past few months has been me catching up on Xbox Game Pass games I’ve downloaded but haven’t played, which resulted in me picking up Somerville. It’s a weird one, the product of plenty of iteration on “cinematic” narrative indie games like Inside or What Remains of Edith Finch. The narrative here is largely gestural: a man, his wife, and their child living in the English countryside get caught in the midst of an alien invasion. A chance encounter with a mysterious being gives the dad strange powers he must use to find his family. You know. Video game shit. The thing is that, Somerville is sharply crafted. It deploys its slow, horizontal tracking shots with deliberate care, often letting an image come into focus as your little guy moves across it. It’s not exactly daring visually, but it is often striking. Its set pieces in particular are thrilling, sharping cutting or extending a shot exactly when it needs to. The thing is, despite the game's delicious ambiguity, Somerville is a little thin. Despite some interesting gestures, including a diabolical puzzle that unlocks an ending, it's still mostly a game about being a sad dad. That is probably a bit unfair to it, but I am very tired of the thinly-sketched, archetypical family unit. At some point, video games must outgrow heterosexuality right? Right?!
 
The Waste Lands (1991) : I’ve been reading along with Just King Things more or less since they started. I’ve read almost every novel they’ve covered thus far, so last month I read The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands. It’s a weird one. I’m simultaneously pretty exhausted by most of the Tower’s plot and completely entranced by its scant details. An Arthurian order of religious cowboys, a world that has, in the parlance of the novel, “moved on,” meaning both time and space are stretched out, mythical creatures that were actually created by some corporation, evil supercomputer trains who are obsessed with riddles. Roland is a hard man willing to do hard things, but simultaneously has a devotion to higher ideals of fate and honor. This are not original ideas, but they are potent ones and King has enough verve and confidence to let them sing a little. The Waste Lands is my favorite Dark Tower novel so far, partially because it just sits in these ideas, letting the vast timeless emptiness of the world settle into your soul. Unfortunately though, Roland has a job to do. I almost wish he didn't.

Thanks for reading everyone! Let me know if you enjoyed the extra dalliances and if you would like to see more. You'll get the next newsletter sooner this time around I promise.