#unhinged commentary

1. dessert, baby

i fucking love dessert sorry. my personal favourite is anything chocolate. chocolate cake, chocolate cookies, brownies, brookies, chocolate croissants, you name it. BUT you asked for austrian desserts and i shall deliver.

now first of all what's important to know is that most desserts can be a sweet main course if you up the size. kaiserschmarrn is excellent, it's essentially scrambled pancake but you often eat it as a main course. another specialty is literally any kind of christmas baking. our cookies aren't like american cookies, they're more like biscuits. they're a lot smaller (you know a cookie is good if you can eat it in one go), and they're often made with shortcrust pastry that gets filled with jam or dipped in glaze. i could eat my entire body weight in vanillekipferl, linzer augen and/or kaffeekeksen.

also pancakes?? pancakes are so underrated. any type of pancake. give it to me. i'm hungry now.

3. decisions were made and i hate them

i will actually answer this first because the second question full-on sent me into a rage. i'm still trying to write the roommate!bucky!AU and i hate everything. i know how i want it to play out, more or less, but anything more than the bare bones of it makes me want to sob. i've been at this for five weeks and i haven't even written 900 words.

i might change my idea for another one so that i'll have more time, but i'm also very stubborn. maybe i can still trick it somehow.

2. delete this from my brain

jesus christ okay. let's do this.

the amount of bad movies i have watched because of good actors is, frankly, obscene, and i still have my live talk through of george blagden's blood moon in my whatsapp history somewhere (my friend loves me), but what really took the cake for me was the covenant.

now let me reiterate that i will proceed to make fun of this movie until it dies and then turns in its grave multiple times and dies again; this is simply due to my not believing this should (or really could) ever have been made. i'm sure whoever did this made other things that are good. to me, personally, this was not. spoilers, i guess, if you want to care about that. i wouldn't. don't watch this.

picture this: it's the week before my birthday last summer. i have about ten days left to write a paper i don't want to write. i'm left unsupervised. i decide to watch a sebastian stan movie at 11am.

i'm seven minutes in when i start losing my mind.

now i'd heard about the movie before. i'd, at some point, seen that convention interview where a fan told sebastian they'd been a fan of his since the covenant and anthony mackie then proceeded to make fun of him; needless to say, i was intrigued. the basic premise is that four guys belong to the four surviving witch families of the salem witch trials who made a covenant (hah) that gave them magic powers. alright. this seemed interesting enough for 2006. what's the worst that could happen, i think.

the movie starts with a very long intro that looks like it'd been made with powerpoint. it probably was. it tells you the basic premise again until you want to beg it to finally stop the exposition and continue, for the love of god. it gets worse from here.

we cut to a college party. someone projectile vomits; that is not an exaggeration. i'm starting to feel sick. i watch white frat boys run from the police. someone jumps off a cliff. suddenly chace crawford appears. the dialogue is abysmal. i'm not even ten minutes into the movie and have already started to accept my fate.

from sebastian stan's very first appearance i can already tell he's going to be the antagonist. even at this point, i can't blame him. every other character in the movie is a wet blanket. i never learn any characters' names besides chase collins.

i frankly blank out for a while. the romance between the two main people is tragic, in the sense that they have nothing in common, no chemistry and i don't care about either of them. i guess the girl is smart-ish and the guy is the main magic boy (mmb) of the four. neither have any discernible personality.

sebastian goes all out for this film. it's sad, in a sense, because he's acting for his life and everyone else is like a high school drama teen that's just been weaned off their script. i'm starting to suspect he's contractually obligated to only play characters with big bi energy. i tell this to my friend. she ignores me. i'm left to deal with this on my own.

in a surprise twist, we find out that there is, in fact, a fifth son of ipswich (that's the magic boys' stupid nickname. i didn't google that that just flashed back into my mind like the vivid memory of a nightmare.) and it's chase collins. by talos, this can't be happening. it is. there is no way out.

why is chase collins the only notable character, you might ask. is it because he is played by sebastian stan? well, yes and no. this is the point i start losing my mind.

imagine you're writing a fantasy movie and you have four (i hesitate to say it) strong male main characters plus a bonus female one and an antagonist. who do you give the core character motivation to?

this, of course, is a trick question. the answer should be "all of them", but when in doubt, giving it to your main character should do the trick. that's how children's books work. to paraphrase starkid, "what's that one concrete goal that motivates all your actions? and if you don't have one of those, how is anyone supposed to sympathize with you, paul?"

so what do these absolute units do in this movie? they make their antagonist the only one with a goal, and thus the only one with a motivation, and thus the only person driving the plot of the movie.

you see, it turns out that using magic is actually bad for you. you get "the power" when you are thirteen and you "ascend" at eighteen, which just means you get more power. good. great. thing is, the more you use your power, the more addictive it will become, and the more it will eat up your life, because your power is your life. to quote myself, "sound concept, bit stupid, but works." power is life, life is power. sure.

now our main character antagonist chase was adopted as a child and grew up in a different town, so no one told him this very important piece of information that continually using your power will literally kill you. his natural reaction to running out of power after he turned eighteen thus is "i need more power in order to survive". that is a good motivation for a villain to have.

he is now waiting for the antagonist mmb to turn eighteen, so he will ascend, so that chase can take his powers from him and use them for himself so that he can continue living. again, that is a good fucking motivation for a character.

now, this is the part that truly boggles my mind to this day, the question that is burned into my brain. why the fuck would you make a movie in which your only proper character is the villain. why would you do that. the protagonists don't give me shit. i don't know anything about them apart from the fact that their names are stupid and they don't do anything useful with their powers for the entirety of this movie's overly long runtime. i am baffled.

the final big fight scene happens. it's atrocious to look at. chase temporarily seems to turn into spiderman and utters the fucking iconic sentence "oooh, witchy" and the even more iconic sentence "are you going to be my wiatch". (edit: i apologise. i refused to look anything up apart from my own ramblings at the time. it’s actually "how about i make you my wiatch." somehow i feel this is both better and worse.) mmb wins. i boo.

after it's over, we never see chase's corpse. the possibility of a sequel is frightening me. thankfully, to this day, it hasn't happened. i fear for the day they change their mind.

i don't remember anything that fucking happened that didn't involve his character, so here are some more amazing insane sebastian moments from the movie. there's a locker room scene where he's wearing his shirt open and enjoys getting punched in the face a little too much. in another bad fight scene he does a backflip over a car. he is the fucking god of gymnastics. "just think of yourself as a sacrificial lamb," he tells mmb shortly before calling him "brother" and kissing him on the mouth. he menacingly stands in the middle of a rainy road in the middle of the night, reciting nursery rhymes, waiting to cause a car accident. i think it kills one of the magic boys. he definitely kills another guy, and kidnaps the mmb's "love interest" before setting a building on fire. i don't even remember the details. everyone fucking sucked. i thought about this insanity of a film for a week straight.

if you made it til here and think "i want to see what this is", don't. i can guarantee my summary of this movie was more entertaining than the actual film. if you want a small bite that doesn't taste of cardboard and bile, i can highly recommend this video of interviews intercut with some of the scenes (do yourself a favour and turn on the captions), and this fanfic that continues the story in a coherent way and in that accomplishes more than the film ever did. thank you.

george's here, he's newly wed and his name's jake [i never call him jake for the rest of this text conversation]

why DOES he have his british accent though this is a western

"drink it. all of it." IT'S COFFEE FOR FUCK'S SAKE WHAT DO YOU WANT

skinwalkers eyyyy

oh dear maybe his wife dies i don't remember her being in the trailer. he'll be heartbroken it's gonna be amazing

"in the middle of daytime" THE SUN'S SETTING YOU IDIOT

why do they listen to the weird guy who shot his horse

george staring at some hair for 30sec

HENRY STOP WRITING PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO SHOOT YOU OMG [henry, apparently, was "a young journalist guy"]

robber tried to hit on george's wife. george tried to hit him.

"i have enough protection" whatever you say darling

THE FUCKING SUN IS STILL SETTING. HOW. IT'S BEEN HOURS

now george's calling other people englishmen that's hilarious

george has a knife now i'm excited

oh no handsome robber's dead

some drama queen x widow here

henry's in two he's so dead

"aim and pull the trigger" isn't a good explanation george. she's dead already

WHAT

WHAT'S THAT SUPPOSED TO BE IT'S UGLY AND BAD

no george you really weren't born in chicago and raised in the west 😂😂😂

WHY IS IT ALWAYS DAY WHEN THEY'RE INSIDE AND NIGHT WHEN THEY'RE OUT

only 25 min left and so many people still alive

george is so done with everything. same honey same

NONO ONONO FUCK IS HE DEAD???

his hair looks so fluffy i'm cry

there's a king kong scene coming up

drama queen's dead as well 😭😭

DRAMA QUEEN'S ALIVE

oh beautiful

wait what

he pulled a marius in the end