Voiding Into The Shout

Rising Up & Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom, & Urgent Means (Abridged) by William T. Vollmann (Library Book) TW: murder, suicide and torture mentions. Bail! Bail bail bail! I gave up on this after 25 extremely lengthy pages in which he describes a black woman getting murdered and her body decomposing in a dumpster, several suicides, a graphic depiction of human decomposition, and a very blasé overview of violence and murder. I then skipped to the chapter on the Muslim world, since I am a Muslim, and it was the exact kind of post 9/11 stuff that all types of journalists were pumping out back then. I eventually gave up on this book which seems to be trying to invent some kind of moral framework and formula to determine whether violence is or is not justified, because it quickly became obvious that it’s completely subjective based on him as a white American man and what his values are. I will admit that I could’ve tried to read the entire 700 page book, but there is such a plethora of books out there and I do not see the point in spending a small eternity reading something as gory and seemingly pointless as a subjective review of all violence and whether it’s justified and how it is justified. Like I can’t imagine a calm analysis of what type of justification someone is using beating a child to death I just can’t imagine being curious about an armchair analysis of violence and death. Nope. I’m going to move on to a book that’s more my speed: stories about having sex with the devil (Handsome Devil).

A Dangerous Fortune by Ken Follett B+. TW: dog death. The first thing I need to tell you guys about is in the first couple of chapters there is a brutal animal death. It is a pit fight between a pitbull and 72 large rats and the fight is extremely graphic and the dog dies. I'm not spoiling anything, but I need you to know that it's only in there because it's intended to foreshadow the depravity of two of the characters. Their moral bankruptcy. There are less triggering ways to do this, but the book was published in 1993. I'm mentioning this up front, because this is the kind of thing that if I had known, I might not have picked it up amongst the library discards based on how much I like the author’s previous book Eye of the Needle. That being said, if you make it past that section, it is a lovely three-season soap opera turned into a book featuring nobility and common folk from the late Victorian era. The book has ultimately a happy ending, but I did reduce the grade from an A- (some slow pacing, extreme length) to a B+ because of that extremely gross animal fight. People who like shows like Bridgerton would very much enjoy this book, provided you can get past the brutal animal death.

A Safari Romance (Hallmark, 2023) C-. This was one of the few Hallmark movies that doesn't take place in a small quaint American town during the holidays. It takes place in South Africa on a game reserve where… two white people end up falling in love. The plot is clumsy and the characters occasionally do things that I don't think regular people would do, such as not clarifying basic things or feeling like the rules don't apply to them when ranger tells the leading man that something is illegal and he doesn't immediately apologize. Like I know there's people like that, but they’re not sympathetic, so it’s odd that this film centers so many people who feel like the rules don’t apply to them. Like, there’s no conservative stuff in this movie, but it sometimes feels like it was written by a conservative. Like it was was written by someone morally ambiguous who feels like things have become “too political lately”. Something like that. It was OK—but the person who is supposed to be an expert on animals seemingly just likes to take pictures of them and that's it, and the guy who is supposedly creating an immersive big budget safari theme park experience just ends up doing a projector against the wall of safari footage to make it seem like you're in the middle of a safari. Not super impressive.

Everything Christmas (Hallmark, 2023) DNF. This one sucked. Even with the leading man in the movie being someone that I like in these fluffy things, the Plot Device Santa was just really obnoxious. Like any time the writers couldn’t figure out what to do this fake Santa guy would just show up and do something to move the plot along somehow. I just realized that I was wasting my time watching something that wasn’t just light, but was just stupid and I just didn’t see the point in investing any more time in it.

Crimson Peak (2015) B+. OK, so the issue with this movie is that for the first hour of the movie it’s fairly slow, and it becomes really obvious that this mysterious guy is bad. Like you know, he’s a villain you just are watching to find out why—and the payoff is… Fine. It’s fine. The special effects are wonderful and the set is so heartbreakingly beautiful—made of real wood and handmade pieces of furniture… and the idea that all of it ended up just getting destroyed because they needed the set for another production is one of the most notable losses in cinematic history. The actual movie is OK. Like the set is so gorgeous that I’m willing to overlook the fact that it was a really interesting story and all of that, but it felt like a squandered premise to an extent because the actual story of this dooomed family feels like it probably could’ve been expressed a lot better as maybe a miniseries or a limited series where maybe it’s the story of this woman and also a journalist investigating the family in the UK and so they are both telling various stories from the past over the course of centuries, as well as the current story, but what you have in this movie just isn’t enough to do any more than tantalize. Needless to say, the fact that the set has been destroyed, Guillermo del Toro isn’t able to get funding for movies anyway, and this movie was a flop. It’s extremely unlikely we’re actually going to get anything more from this cinematic universe unless Guillermo del Toro takes it upon himself to commission some books.

The Batman (2022) B-. I didn’t really want to like this movie. I didn’t like the fact that you didn’t really see the Batman for the first five minutes of the movie. In 2026. It’s always a bad sign when they play a slow Nirvana song in the first few minutes of the movie as they do here. Like, even though there are a lot of other choices, Kurt Cobain is just an easy shortcut for tortured anguish. The movie was easily an hour too long. Literally when I felt like the movie was moving towards an ending, there was still an hour left. Not to spoil anything, but I was also frustrated that just like Magneto in the X-Men franchise, the Riddler does actually have a point, and apparently Bruce Wayne and his foundation were just letting the criminals loot his father’s fund, and not really doing much about it. It’s not really clear that Bruce Wayne is actually going to tighten the reins on the foundation to stop it from being used for bribery and corruption. The fact that The Wayne family could’ve done something about the horrible orphanage and the conditions they’re in and decided not to is also really shitty. It was an overly long movie that didn’t even do anything to deal with the systemic issues that caused this problem in the first place. This is what I don’t like about the Batman franchise, because in every single version of the franchise (except The Animated Series), Batman seems to be incapable of understanding that you can’t just kick punch your way out of systemic problems. Like I can’t even conceive that a rich, entitled white person like Bruce Wayne could be so stupid as to think he could just punch his way out of institutional issues. I mean, to an extent, the Bruce Wayne here gets a little bit of a pass, because irregardless of how old Robert Pattinson is, he looks barely 30 here so he hasn’t had a lot of time to acclimate himself but also, he is complicit in the crime happening around him, because for a decade of his adulthood, he gave the rich and powerful in Gotham a blank check from his family’s fortune to do what they felt was right and it’s kind of his fault that a lot of this stuff happened because he couldn’t be bothered to pull himself out of his issues and start dealing with the world as it is and at the end of the movie I’m not sure he is still willing to do that. Like good for you that you’re not Mr. Vengeance anymore but you don’t seem to be Mr. Accountability either. But like, there are tons of people in Gotham that are capable of stopping a purse snatcher. What they need is someone with huge amount of money to solve these institutional issues and that should have been you, but instead your neglect made these institutional issues so bad that one bad actor could destroy the entire system like this. Every single institution in Gotham is a one legged stool that any creep can knock over and destroy, and your money should have been fixing that problem. Disgraceful.