"Moon" (2009)

Had forgotten many details.  Even with the story known, still pretty good.

Tindersticks & Robert Patterson - "Willow"

credit song of "High Life".  Quite moody and fitting.

"High Life" (2018)

film by Claire Denis.

Robert Patterson and others.

 

Criminals are on a spaceship on their way to a black hole.  One way mission.

The doctor is obsessed with fertility.

Strange, slow scenes.

 

"Still - Michael J Fox documentary"

Good stuff.

Sarah Clegg - "The Dead of Winter" (the Demons, Witches and Ghosts of Christmas)

  Good overview of some of the old traditions, Christmas, Krampus, and how they came to be.

 

 

Perchta, a monstrous witch with an iron nose, who travels house to house every Christmas leading a cavalcade of the dead. If she finds a child who hasn't done their chores she slits open their belly, pulls out their guts, stuffs them with straw, and then sews up the wound with a ploughshare as a needle and a chain as thread.
[...]
Krampus, a hideous towering demon with enormous horns who beats children with a switch or steals them away.
In Iceland, there's Grýla, an ogress who comes down from the mountains at Christmas and is inclined to eat her victims, popping them into a giant stew while her murderous cat - the Yule Cat - prowls at her side. InFrance, there's Père Fouettard - Father Whipper - a butcher who had kidnapped, murdered and tried to pickle three young boys, before he was stopped by St Nicholas. As punishment, according to the legend, he was forced to accompany St Nicholas for the rest of eternity, a looming figure lurking behind the saint, whipping children who don't deserve St Nicholass presents.

 

Saturnalia - a king of Saturnalia, and everyone had to obey him/her. slaves were served, and allowed to 'speak freely'

 

A century and a half before Christ, the Romans had moved their New Year's celebrations from March to January (the vestiges of the older New Year are still visible in September, October, November and December, which were - as their names suggest - the seventh, eight, ninth and tenth months when the year began in March) the date when new consuls took office. The festivities originally associated with this festival - called Kalends - were about as exciting as you'd expected for a celebration centred on politicians assuming power. 

 

It's not a coincedence that the word for a Carnival mask - 'larva' - also translates as 'ghost'. 

 

There are other monsters in the Marshfield mumming besides the murderous king and the Devil. After all, while the costumes gesture vaguely towards the characters - William wears a paper crown, Father Christmas is all in red - the main purpose of the outfits seem to be to entirely disguise the players, making them unrecognisable as people and giving them the uncanny impression of being monsters who have decided to put on a performance. This is because the play came second, laid over an older tradition that revolved around dressing as monsters at Christmastime.
    Another element of this earlier tradition is still visible in the bizarre repetition of the play through the village, a fossilised remnant of a time when monsters would go from house to house, parading through the town, knocking on doors and demanding to be let in.*

*) the reason this sounds an awful lot like trick-or-treating is because the two are related. However, it's a sign of how much Christmas spookiness we've lost that it feels genuinely surprising to discover that it was originally a Christmas cutsom that later spread to Halloween. In the Middle Ages, 'Souling' on Halloween was traditional - a ritual begging where people knocked on houses promising to pray for souls if they were given 'soul cakes' - but the terrifying costumes were added later, and seem to have slipped back into the season from Christmas.

 

Famously, Saturn also ate his children whole, a monstrous deed that was blended with the blood libel so that in one image of Saturn from the 1400s the god, shoving a child into his mouth, is identified by his hat and badge as Jewish. By the time that the child-killer was stalking the Nuremberg Carnival in the 1500s, though, the association etween the child-stealer and Judaism had largely slipped away.

[...]how Carnival and Christmas blended into each other, and the slipping back of the child-eater from February to early December seems almsot inevitable - not only was he a monstrous fancy-dress figure well suited to Christmas guising, he was also the punisher of bad children and it must have felt natural to pair him with St Nicholas, the rewarder of the good. In response, the stories told about St Nicholas began to warp and change to incorporate this chidl-eating figure - especially the legend of the murdered clerks. Soon, it wasn't a thieving innkeeper who murdered the boys but a starving butcher during a famine who slaughtered them, carved up their bodies, and had begun to pickle them in a vat before Nicholas arrived to save the day - the child-eater stopped in the act.

 

St Lucy has another side to her. This other Lucy is nothing like the demure, sweet victim of the hagiographies or the pure, white visions. Instead, on 13 December, she is said to ride through the skies with a cavalcade of the dead, of ghosts and sometimes, of children who died while still unbaptized.

Lucy is celebrated well beyond the Nordic countries, finding her way into Bavarian and Austrian tradition where she is known as schiache Luz - bad Lucy - and bluadige Luz - bloody Lucy

 

 

first century BC, a general idea that women were more likely than men to use magic merged with female monsters called 'striga'- screeching demonesses who flew about at night in packs, ate the organs of children, and stuffed them with straw.

 

 

Herlequin. his horder 

 

From the late Middle Ages on, the Christmas witch was as likely to be followed by a parade of the dead as a parade of women. And the legends of this calvacade became part of the folklore for waht would later be called the 'Wild Hunt'. In some places, Odin would take over from the witches to lead the dead, in others there would be werewolves mixed in with the group. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weapons

Fun enough horror film about all childrend from a class, except one, going missing. 

Bit disappointed that it was "just" a witch story without any background, but it was executed well, and the finale of the kids chasing and then ripping the witch apart, was fun. 

28 Years Later : Bone Temple

 Just as good - better? - than "28 Years Later"

Amazing story against the backdrop of zombies, but where they hardly feature a roll.

 

The Radical Stardom of Clara Bow: The First It Girl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTphVMbfmU8 

 

Interesting but really sad life of one of the first super stars and how it ruined her life. 

Emma Kok - "Voila"

https://youtu.be/KdIhq1tb8Co?si=GSIh02EgtVK5Dpts&t=68

 

Holy shit what a song.
Original by Barbara Pravi, less orchestral, but also really good. 

Incendies (2010)

by Denis Villeneuve

 

fucking hell. A mother's will sends her twins on a search.  One to search for their father, whom they assumed died a long time ago.  One to search for their brother ... whom they didn't know existed.

Their brother, brought to an orphanage, taken by a warlord, later rapes their mother, prisoner 72, "The woman who sings".

 

 

What follows is a harrowing story, told minimalistic in the best possible way, hardly any music though Radiohead's songs (had to look them up, "You and whose army" and "Spinning Plates") will keep reminding me of this.

Chuck Palahniuk - "Adjustment Day"

From 2018 (? might be 2019) but scarily preniscient.

People (not the ones in power) kill all the ones in power. Then "redistribute" everyone according to the book by Talbott; blacks in south America, whites in North America, gays in California.  It describes a scarily "plausible" explanation.

 

 

 

Amazing documentary about Disco Elysium

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH6mUTHZ5C4 

 

explaining not just how the game came to be, but its context and background

amazing stuff

 

Sinners

Vampire horror in the south around the 1920's, where music brings the devil forth. 

Interesting scene where music removes the walls between past, present and future. As well as a proper From Dusk Till Dawn scene.

 

Stephen Graham Jones - "The buffalo hunter hunter"

Starts slow, about a manuscript found in modern days (why this?) from a (great?) grandfather, who was a pastor, writing down the story of Good Stab.

Tricky, bit tiresome with all the names of animals, "long-legged," "dirty face"

 

 

It was my firs tstep into the darkness, Three-Persons. My first step into this long night I live in now. When I waded into the cold waters of that pond, I was walking away from my life, my swift-runner, and I could never go back, no matter how hard I tried. It's like if you tore down your dead-man-cross up there and dragged it through the street, then burned it, and made water on the ashes. Your god would leave you, then, and your whole world. That's what was happening to me, and I didn't even know it, was only thinking about a many-shots gun. 

The Roses

Current-day version of "The War of the Roses", with Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman.

Wonderful stuff. They are amazing. 

Gentlemen

Fun Guy Ritchie romp, Matthew MacCounagh etc

Mark Forsyth - "Rhyme and Reason"

wonderful overview of English (British) poetry over the centuries.  How centuries ago, *everyone* wrote poetry, just to enjoy, to write letters, etc.

how slowly it became something "difficult" for the upper class 

Foundation

Amazing, both story and the visuals

 

s3 becomes a bit unhinged.  Got the feel the whole mental part, both The Mule as well as the girl "controlling people" became easy but also plotholes

Then again, the progress of Demelzer was good, and seeing elderly Empire "Dusk" rage and refuse to die, was a good switch.  As well as the hologram Hari Seldon who wanted a real body.. He's living in a "4 dimensional object, projected in 3d space" but can't get himself a body?

 

Also: "the prime radiant breaks down when taking us (girl and The Mule) into account!" yet that's what they have been doing all along.

 

Bit weird.

s1: amazing

s2: good

s3: weird, bit meh, but quite OK for the last two episodes 

Eddington

Gripping "modern western", which starts as an uncomfortable reminder of the Covid years, the craziness, the police killings and following mass protests... then suddenly turns quite a corner.

 

Sad, but good. 

The Beast In Me

Strong series with Claire Danes as a grieving mother and the dude from that Russian spy series as her new evil neighbour who slowly unravels.