for America magazine: …Evans has noticed how many of our current conflicts center on how to understand, heal from, punish, honor or make amends for past actions, from “cancel culture” to the freelance demolition of Confederate memorials to the #MeToo movement. In this collection, we meet a white girl who “goes viral” after posing in a bikini with a Confederate flag pattern, an artist who may have realized that shifting cultural sands have turned him from lothario into abuser, and... Read more
Raging Bull: I watched this rise-and-fall boxer epic because Victor loves it so much. And it has every virtue I expected from his praise: plunging, visceral fight scenes; the inevitable, desperate remorse of an unreflective man. If you speak only with your fists someday you’ll have to confess with them too. De Niro conveys this unreflective character perfectly, and throughout most of the movie there are no hints that Jake LaMotta has or even wants hidden inner depths. He pinballs... Read more
I’m at The Tablet (UK): I think I first noticed it when the Star Wars sequels were coming out. Fans had strong opinions, as fans will, about the character Kylo Ren, a son of two heroes who turns to the Dark Side. But they expressed their hopes and fears in strikingly similar language, as if what had once been an array of diverse authorial choices was hardening into a trope: “I hope they don’t redeem Kylo.” “C’mon, they’re clearly setting... Read more
Such short movie reviews! In order of when I watched or rewatched them. X-Men and X2: X-Men United. I don’t care what you think, these are still my favorite superhero films. The first one is very emotional and the second one does more than any other live-action superhero film I can think of to convey the sheer wonder of superpowers: the aesthetic strangeness. Nightcrawler’s attack in the White House, Magneto’s escape from his plastic prison, the death of Lady Deathstrike,... Read more
Spoilerous. # I read my sister’s copy of IT over one day and one night of summer break, sprawled on (I think) her bed in a sweltering DC attic, reading until my eyes burned and I was barely taking in words but unable to put it down and go to sleep. I started it sometime in early afternoon, I think, and finally finished in full sunlight the next day. There’s something in IT–it’s King’s usual compulsive suspense, the promise of... Read more
Doxacon! Doxacon is run by my friend Daniel and will take place November 5 – 6 in the virtual world (next year in person, we can pray), and will include talks, gaming demos, “breakout sessions” which I’m not sure what that means in this context, and liturgical prayer both online and, for those in the DC area, IRL. You can register here and it is ridiculously cheap this year for obvious reasons. I am speaking, even though the theme for... Read more
at CNA: I wrote Tenderness: A Gay Christian’s Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God’s Extravagant Love (forthcoming in November from Ave Maria Press) for gay Christians who found that their relationship with God had been damaged by painful experiences or misguided teaching they’d received in their churches. It’s especially written for people who have feared that their sexual orientation cuts them off from God. I hope to show that the complex experience of being gay can actually help you... Read more
queering: And only now, decades later, I’m realizing how much “the Catholic imagination” and one familiar form of queer imagination have in common. These traditions don’t simply overlap because Oscar Wilde and Steven Patrick Morrissey happened to be baptized in the Church (if such a thing could “happen to be”). They overlap because queer culture preserved and exemplified countercultural truths and unwanted beauties. What I found in the Church was at once strange and familiar—and the familiarity, more than the... Read more
Or, Homo Hominid Lupus. Croupier: Not a great movie but it’s rare to see a depiction of the kind of high-adrenaline, intense-focus job where you get off the clock and you’re literally shaking. Just kind of hanging out, smoking a cigarette, flirting, cooking dinner, shaking. An American Werewolf in London: Surprisingly Jewish. Could’ve been lots more Jewish! …No, I mean, the climactic action sequence with the car crashes is intense, and the hallucinations and gnarly ghosts give this movie an... Read more
reviewin’: A half-century after ARPANET created networks of computers, the “Internet novel” is coming of age at last. Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This and Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits take radically different approaches to depicting the unreal cities we’ve created online: the time-sucks and the comments-box arenas, the sloughs of scrolling despond and the candylands of trivia. Reading either novel will show you something about this shadow-world. Reading both together gets you even closer to understanding the experience—sometimes choral, sometimes cacophonic—of life online. more those who subscribe to... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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