Mirtha Legrand en "El retrato" (1947)

Motel off Rochester hwy

The Last Matinee

I suppose half a good horror film is better than an entire bowser, but I can’t help wishing the first part of Maximiliano Contenti’s Argentine-Uruguayan neo-slasher THE LAST MATINEE (2020, aka “When the Matinee Dies,” aka “Red Screening”) were as good as its ending. As a small group of people attends the Sunday night viewing of a truly terrible horror film (2011’s FRANKENSTEIN: DAY OF THE BEAST), a slasher called “Assesine Come Ojos” (Eyeball-Eating Killer) dispatches them in various colorful and stomach-churning ways. The final scenes is very well shot, and the suspense is palpable as a young boy and the final girl, an engineering student subbing for her aging father as projectionist, try to get away. The first half, however, seems intended to set up the characters beforehand. Unfortunately, they’re mostly two-dimensional, so it’s rather a slog. Contenti has said the film is a tribute to the slasher and gialli genres and the experience of attending the movies in a theatre. The slasher part is obvious, while the film’s giallo roots can be found in its electronic score, moving camera and intense color scheme. As a tribute to attending the movies, however, it seems a little strange. Beyond the facts that the theatre is creepy as all get out even before people start getting murdered and the movie they’re watching is dreadful (how’s this for a slogan to sell the filmgoing experience: “Movies, they’ll make getting murdered a relief”), the audience is absolutely heinous. They come in late, smoke, talk throughout and even have unattractive sex (without inviting me). Early on an old man trying to get out of the rain gets so mad he leaves. He’s the one character with whom I most identified.

Eve's Bayou (1997), dir. Kasi Lemmons

Church in Eden, North Carolina. K.A. LuxHill336

Past Lives (Celine Song, 2023)

Travel Diary: My journey to The South

a storms coming

Custer State Park, South Dakota

oh damn ok

Burn Gorman starring as Richard Carter in Ransomed, 2023.

35mm film capture from almost 5 years ago

“Toro? Sounds like a load of bull.”

Octopussy (1983)

Fernando Lamas in Vidalita (1949) de Luis Saslavsky

Haunted Summer

I hit a certain number of followers sometime in the past few days, and i know not everyone follows me for my art, but i got a bit sentimental thinking of how long i've been sharing my art online and I visited my old old deviantart account and...

I don't watch Hazbin Hotel, because it just isn't for me (tastes change), but who else here can say that they drew Alastor fanart in 2011? And also gotten a comment from Vivienne on it, because I sure can xD 🤙

Watching all these historian commentaries/butcheries of The Patriot often leaves me wondering if we aren't sending one humanities discipline to do a job as well or even better suited to another one. Obviously, some people do both--I did both!--but when historians criticize fictionalized accounts of history for representing people whose views and actions were not statistically common, maybe they are missing the point? The Patriot does not purport to be a biography. it is a fictionalized account of historical events. It does, however, purport to accurately reflect a historical setting, but it doesn't do that either! The more egregious problem with The Patriot is that it presents very rare views and actions as completely normal and far more commonplace ones as aberrant.

Historians often cite statistics about the pervasiveness of chattel slavery in colonial South Carolina to argue for the ridiculousness of Benjamin Martin not owning slaves. It is a very misleading choice given that Martin is a composite of several historical figures who certainly were enslavers, but there is a reason he isn't called Nathaniel Greene or Daniel Morgan or Francis Marion, and that is to give the writers some leeway in how they represent him. What is weird about Martin not owning slaves is that not one of his peers finds it weird. When he refuses to support the war for independence, none of his fellow assembly members responds with, "Well, what did we expect from a freak who pays free men to work his land?" Martin is in a long-term relationship with a woman who does own slaves, and his children spend most of the movie's run time with her without the issue of slavery ever coming up. When Martin's employee tells Tavington of his situation, Tavington replies without skipping a beat, without so much as a raised eyebrow with "Well, then you are free men who will have the honor and the privilege of serving in the King's Army" when a more appropriate response would have been " . . . What?"

You know what Tavington does find positively bizarre? Colonial Loyalists. He regards James Wilkins with suspicion from the moment he opens his mouth: "How can I trust a man who'd betray his neighbors?" When Wilkins replies that he sees neighbors who would betray England as traitors, Tavington looks at him like he's confessed to having a very niche fetish. And Tavington is his ally! Mr. Howard cannot credit finding Wilkins among the Green Dragoons at Pembroke church even though he exchanged verbal blows with him on the subject of independence years before. In a more accurate setting, they would have employed far more lethal materials than words against each other by 1780. Martin blithely leaves his children in the most obvious place possible without even considering that someone who knows his family might seek to harm them. The problem is not, as some have argued, that the film only has one Loyalist character. When its main focus is on South Carolina Patriots and their families, how may Loyalists does it need? The problem is that Wilkins is treated as a pariah rather than a representative of a population within South Carolina large enough to cause problems for the Patriots.

The South Carolina of The Patriot is absolutely otherworldly: a problem-free idyll until Cornwallis's army rolls up like Satan into Paradise and ruins everything for everyone, apparently. The small biographical inaccuracies seem to me to pale into insignificance against the film's refusal to depict South Carolina as the cesspool of racial and political violence that it actually was all throughout the American Revolution. Other representations of this war also contain numerous biographical inaccuracies--I am talking about Turn, if that's not abundantly clear--but nonetheless do a much better job of representing the diverse perspectives that made up colonial America. It seems grossly unfair to lump these kinds of texts in with The Patriot. Obviously, historical accuracy is important to consider when evaluating even fictionalized representations of history, but historians would benefit from considering character dynamics and narrative framing as well.

Jesus Camp 2006 screenshots.

Short film: “The Last Inca Princess”

About the tragedy and colonization of Beatriz Clara Coya being forced to wed Spanish Captain Martín García Óñez de Loyola.