The year is 2002. I’ve just graduated eighth grade, we spent the day at Great America theme park, and I am terribly sun burned on the bus ride home. The driver and one adult are awake; everyone else is very much asleep. Outside the windows, it’s pitch black. The bus smells like bus toilet, but I can’t get there because people are sleeping across the aisles. I am sun sick and motion sick. I am pretty sure I’m going to die.

After enduring back-to-back watches of The Sandlot, the chaperone has decided to reward herself by watching The Others. I have long since learned that adults want nothing to do with me when I’m feeling poorly at night, so I’m not sure she knows I’m also watching.

Isolated and ill among a sleeping crowd, The Others proceeded to traumatize me FOR LIFE.

There was a lot about The Others I couldn’t grasp as a dehydrated 13-year-old, but I recognized its quiet moodiness and unhingedly terrifying ghost moments. The little girl talking about Victor? Drawing the scary witch lady? All the curtains vanishing? The girl turNING INTO WITCH LADY? And then the kids hide in a wardrobe. “Stop breathing!”

The Others doesn’t get the same cultural recognition as Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense, but it’s every bit as good, and it’s got similar elements: terrifying-to-me as a child, the twist, great kid actors, and a surprising emotionality.

Nicole Kidman’s character Grace is utterly unhinged, in an amazing way. I think this is my favorite performance from her. There is a tightly wound quality natural to Kidman that works with a mother struggling after the German occupation in Jersey. She is tending disabled children alone, with no hope for her husband’s return from the war. She looks like she’s made out of the most frail glass, about to shatter — although we later learn that already happened.

It’s not *really* a surprise to learn the Irish servants are ghosts the whole time. By the time we learn Grace and her family are also ghosts, you can kinda see it coming, too. But I think it would be hard to guess that Grace smothered her children in their sleep before turning the shotgun on herself. The signs are there. The daughter hints at it. It’s just so *horrible*, you don’t *want* it to be true.

As an adult, there are levels to the horror that I never could grasp before.

The husband stumbling out of the fog, confused, suggests that he is trapped in an eternal war. He chooses to return to the infinite battlefront (“sometimes I bleed”) rather than remain with the horrifying knowledge that his wife killed their babies.

The children are stuck with their mother who killed them. It’s hard to call their father cowardly considering where he died and where he is dead, but it’s a hell of a choice to leave one’s offspring with the woman who killed them. It’s not like she’s gotten more even-tempered in death. Then again, maybe he doesn’t have a choice.

I found myself disturbed to realize the Irish servants of the house are…servants in the afterlife? They died before the Irish War of Independence, but they’re still serving a psychotic English woman fifty years later, and presumably will be in this house together indefinitely, based on the last monologue from the Mrs. Mills. Is it any worse than children trapped with the parent who killed them, or a soldier who never leaves the battlefield? Probably not.

But it has disturbing implications for where the lot of them have ended up.

Grace’s family are Catholic — and I would love to hear the filmmaker discuss why they chose Catholic over Protestant, how this faith interrelates to the Irish servants. I think there must be some kind of social implication I am too 21st Century American to grasp. It’s possible they chose Catholicism because it’s just so darn punishing. Catholic concepts of sin and the afterlife are a running theme throughout The Others. I need to watch it a couple more times to guess at what they were saying, but I’m inclined to think it boils down to “they’re all in Hell.”

Even so, it’s got a reasonably happy ending. Grace’s family stays in the house. The children are no longer sick and can enjoy themselves in death. Grace remains isolated, her children are still trapped with her, and the servants are servants, but the tone is one of peace.

It’s a stunning horror movie. A few really terrifying moments overlay the kind of existential questions that can keep you up at night, bothered for hours. It works if you’re a frightened young teen who already knows adults aren’t safe, or if you’re a mom who’s questioned her sanity during the fever of lonely childcare. I personally prefer it to The Sixth Sense. But it’s great we can have both.

(image via Dimension Films)

In Red Sonja (2025), a variety of character actors chew scenery, look super hot, and swing swords at each other. Sonja is a feral horse girl who thinks class traitors should be beaten to death by Cyclops. She is better at bouldering than your college boyfriend.

If this were one of the seven DVDs I had in 2003, it would be my favorite movie. I would have pulled it out of the bargain bin at Walmart by lowering myself into it waist-deep, and selected it exclusively because it has a hot woman with a sword on the cover, only to be surprised I actually liked it.

I would have terrorized my siblings by making cardboard swords and hunting them around the house.

This movie doesn’t have the budget to be anything except what it is: the meat-and-potatoes of fantasy genre that we don’t get nearly enough of anymore. We used to have Dragonheart! We had Mists of Avalon! Then we started getting a lot of dispassionate high-budget money laundering blockbusters. Every fun fantasy concept was stretched out into TV shows that Netflix cancelled after two seasons.

Not Red Sonja. This movie is the chosen one, like Dungeons and Dragons, meant to reunite massive fantasy nerds with other fantasy nerds who deeply care about the genre and will watch it without caring if the armor is made out of PVC.

Is it great? I mean, no, probably not, but nor is it bad outside the limitations of a lower budget movie. The extremely solid story only ever sags in the penultimate act, and there is one cut between scenes that confused me, but literally those are my two entire complaints about Red Sonja.

Its heart is in the right place.

I could entertain myself by watching this in constant rotation with my other six DVDs for years, getting encyclopedic knowledge of the flick, memorizing the lines, and devoting myself to the scary white sword lady.

If you liked those kinds of movies, you’ll like this, and you should watch it. Set your expectations appropriately. Don’t take it too seriously. Have a great time.

(image credit:  Samuel Goldwyn Films)

Any metaphor where marginalized people are represented by something nonhuman is a deeply flawed place to start from, but District 9 is interesting enough to make it worth criticizing anyway.

Twenty-some years ago, an alien mothership essentially broke down over Johannesburg. When nothing happened for a few months, humans busted it open to find the surviving aliens inside had become refugees, starving and needy. Enclosing these aliens in slums turned into a generational problem. Now a local organization is responsible for “evicting” the aliens and relocating them to a concentration camp 200km north of Jo’burg.

District 9 is essentially told from the perspective of Wikus van der Merwe, a bureaucrat in charge of the legal procedural elements of this relocation. One morning he’s merrily genociding the unborn children of the aliens; within hours, he becomes a fugitive.

From a filmmaking standpoint, I have no complaints. I love the world building in the front half of the film. Fake documentary is a delightful format. Foreshadowing with interviews is such a fun way to build tension and grow that sweet, sweet curiosity gap. The back half is such an exciting action movie!

This was not a particularly high budget movie ($30 million in 2009, compared to Avatar’s $237 million), but they made very good use of it. The CGI holds up well. The physical effects are disgusting. I love every revolting minute. And can we talk about how they made insect-like aliens so freakin cute? Those pedipalps sure emote.

It’s hard to get past the metaphor, though. Even though I think it’s a really easy flaw to engage with. I’ve written books that did similar, without intending to say “marginalized people are werewolves,” but I think this is something that someone who comes out of a society’s dominant caste is much likelier to do than the marginalized, yeah?

There *is* something different between aliens/humans (or werewolves/humans), but in reality, humans do this to humans who are not different. We invent lines to fabricate excuses to treat each other terribly. And then we, as creators, decide it’s easier to tell this story with some metaphoric Other to overcome the biases that prevent us from humanizing humans. It’s a problem. I’m not equipped to evaluate whether we can place the blame for this flaw on the stories when they are reflecting the problems of the societies they grow out of.

If nothing else, District 9 isn’t lazy about the metaphor. The characterization of Wikus as a selfish, horrible human is marvelously consistent to the point that I think the filmmaker understood what a bad person he was portraying.

It’s also true that members of a dominant caste are never “safe” from the violence they enact on the marginalized. Wikus’s evolution into an alien hybrid could be compared to what happens when a member of the professional class becomes profoundly disabled. No longer is this person protected. They become “a body” subject to all the same injustices as anyone else. Wikus was married to the daughter of one of the executives making these calls and it still wasn’t enough to protect him.

There are no good humans in this movie. Wikus is given depth–he’s a wife guy, which butts up against endearing until he fokkin destroys all those fetal aliens–but the only characters who behave like protagonists are Christopher Johnson (the lead alien) and his adorable son, whose “humanity” are unfaltering.

It’s sorta fun having an action movie where you’re happy to see all the humans meet terrible, blasty deaths, and Christopher Johnson gives us a reason to remain invested until the end. I wish we had gotten a sequel three years later when he returned. I like to think the movie could have been a complex political thriller about the diplomacy that would unfold between aliens and humans when they’re on more equal footing.

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about District 9 sixteen years later; aside from my reservations with the metaphor on a fundamental level, I think it held up very well. I’d prefer watching this to James Cameron’s contemporary Dances With Wolves a thousand times over. It’s nauseatingly relevant to 2025 America. And there’s a cool sequence with a mecha.

(image credit: Sony Pictures)

Harold Crick is a very regimented, very ordinary tax auditor whose life gets strange when he starts hearing an English woman narrating his every action. It turns out he’s the main character in a literary novel. Unfortunately, it’s a tragedy. He’s going to die.

Stranger than Fiction is a clever story wrapped up in a cozy, charming film, starring a sedate but heartfelt performance from Will Ferrell. Much like the way that Jim Carrey used his comedy chops to provide a lot of emotional nuance to a less-comic character, Ferrell makes us care so deeply about a very tedious man that I cry every time I reach the film’s climax. And I know how it ends!

I’m a writer myself, and you can tell where I am in the process on a book based on how similar I am to Karen Eiffel. If I’ve relapsed on any substance usage, standing on tables, and writing on typewriter instead of a sensible computer program, I am at the hard part. (Side note: I want an IBM typewriter with a type ball. Please let me know if you can hook me up.)

Somehow I am also all the other characters in this movie, too: the anarchist baker, the guy who counts tooth brush strokes, the English professor who thinks a meaningful death is important enough to literary history that it should be allowed to happen, the auditor who wants to go to space camp…

It’s a sweet movie that feels very grounded and colorful, a lot like good literature. It’s a nice romcom. It’s very funny sometimes, though not in the same way as many Will Ferrell movies. It somehow feels much older than nineteen-years-old (almost two decades now!), but also very current — which is, I guess, the very definition of timeless.

(image credit: Sony Pictures Releasing)

Watching “Hero” is just me saying, “This is my favorite part!” thirty times, and then it’s over.

Hero is a martial arts film about a figure called Nameless who claims to have killed three would-be assassins of the King of Qin. By bringing their swords to the king, Nameless can get within ten paces of the throne. The truth unfolds as Nameless tells his story.

This is in my top 10 favorite films of all time, even though I extremely disagree with its politics.

It turns out I actually don’t mind imperialist propaganda if it’s awesome.

In the style of Rashomon, Hero proceeds through three intertwined narratives: the stories Nameless first tells the king, the king’s interpretations of the story, and then the truth.

Every narrative is punctuated by distinctive martial arts sequences with different palettes. This remains one of the most visually stunning movies ever, twenty-one years after its American release. (Fun fact: Quentin Tarantino talked Miramax into releasing Hero in the USA.)

The use of CGI is sparing relative to modern movies. You can see where it’s used (mostly in water effects), but it kinda makes the places they didn’t use CGI even more impressive. The color themes are mostly achieved through set dressing and costuming rather than heavy-handed grading. Huge numbers of extras are used in the king’s palace and battle sequences. The divine casting allows for much of the fighting to be performed by the lead actors themselves.

Such killer visuals and a majestic score demand a worthy story, and the “he said/she said” story is beyond elegant. Most of what you learn about the characters telling their stories is expressed through the differences in the way they’re told. It’s paced brilliantly.

I disagree with the philosophy so much, though. Everything is in service of an autocratic message. Characters die to support the empire. We’re meant to believe this king-led war is noble, the king himself is soft-hearted, and all the dying is worth it. It goes against everything I believe politically.

Even so.

I often say, “I like movies that are good,” and I’m sorta joking…but not really. I will watch any genre. I don’t have a lot of preferences outside seeing art executed with intention, skill, and meaning. The meaning of this one is wholly unpalatable to me, but God, does it do it well.

Not once in my entire life have I looked as cool as Nameless walking away from something. Not even once.

(Image: Beijing New Picture Film)