Laughing for No Reason: Some short movie notes

Last updated on: June 9, 2016 at 8:22 pm By Eve Tushnet

Under the Shadow: Iranian horror set during the Iran-Iraq War. The movie opens with Shideh (Narges Rashidi) being told, by a man sitting under a portrait of the Ayatollah Khomeini, that she won’t be able to continue her medical studies because of her political activities. She goes home to an apartment building where the windows are crisscrossed with masking tape in case bombing raids shatter the glass. She fights with her husband about whether she’s unsupportive, taking the disappointment too... Read more

Sad Bible Songs: I review Harrison Lemke’s “Fertile Crescent Blues”

Last updated on: June 7, 2016 at 6:12 pm By Eve Tushnet

at First Things: “Christian pop is unrelentingly cheerful.” That was Leah Libresco’s conclusion when she analyzed the frequency of positive and negative terms (“grace” vs. “sin,” for example, or “love” vs. “fear”) in Billboard‘s Christian pop top-50. Grace and love and life and light are all great things. But if your soul needs a smoke break from the endless Christian pep rally, a lay-me-down instead of yet another pick-me-up, Harrison Lemke’s beautiful new album Fertile Crescent Blues is what you’re... Read more

The Three Theological Virtues And How They Will Help You Cope With Turning Into a Lobster

Last updated on: June 2, 2016 at 8:39 pm By Eve Tushnet

more riffing on The Lobster from me: Last week I saw The Lobster, an extremely sad and violent romantic comedy about a world in which, if you don’t find a romantic partner within 45 days, you’ll be turned into an animal. It’s sort of “Why Our Culture Desperately Needs Spiritual Friendship: The Movie.” I hesitate to recommend it to you guys, because it was really hard to watch, partly because it’s so bleak and partly because it’s bleak specifically about... Read more

“The Lady, Or the Lobster?”: I review a brutal new romcom/satire

Last updated on: May 31, 2016 at 10:49 am By Eve Tushnet

seriously, this is tough to watch, but ferocious (also I sort of spoil the very end, because this otherwise-excellent movie has the one ending I hate most): I hesitate to recommend that you see The Lobster, since this romantic comedy about a man facing transformation into an arthropod is just too painfully realistic. The Lobster, written and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, is brutal and hilarious, with satire so sharp it could cut your wrists. The movie is set in a... Read more

A Short Review of “The Wisdom of the Beguines: The Forgotten Story of a Medieval Women’s Movement”

Last updated on: May 27, 2016 at 3:15 pm By Eve Tushnet

Going into this book I knew basically nothing about the beguines–not even how you pronounce it. (BEG-een, BEY-geen or buh-GEEN, according to dictionary.com.) All I really wanted from Laura Swan’s short popular historical survey was an introduction to a vocation that has been almost entirely forgotten: laywomen, sometimes itinerant but sometimes living in communities from two or three people to a miniature city of over a thousand women, ministering to their neighbors and developing a unique style of Catholic spirituality.... Read more

“How a Mysterious Ghost Ship Brought Cosmic Disco to Cabo Verde”: The Guardian

Last updated on: May 27, 2016 at 10:33 am By Eve Tushnet

and how can you not click?? In a calm morning in March 1968, a shipment carrying the latest Korgs, Moogs and Hammond organs set off from Baltimore harbour, heading for an exhibition in Rio de Janeiro. The sea was steady, the containers safely attached. And yet later that same day, the ship would inexplicably vanish. more (you can listen to one song at that link and it is super-excellent) Read more

Man Is Werewolf to Man: I watch “Dog Soldiers”

Last updated on: May 26, 2016 at 8:48 pm By Eve Tushnet

You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bad werewolf movie. Wolfen, The Howling, Ginger Snaps, the MST3K “Werewolf” episode–all good times at the movie palace. Dog Soldiers is no exception. It’s by Neil Marshall aka the guy who did The Descent (!!!) and it’s super neat to see foreshadowing of that movie in this one. Almost all-male cast instead of an all-female one, lightly-sketched yet memorable characters, sharp dialogue that rarely feels forced, excellent jump scares, and at... Read more

Antisocial Housing: I review “High-Rise”

Last updated on: May 26, 2016 at 8:33 pm By Eve Tushnet

at AmCon: The xkcd cartoon “Logic Boat” shows the familiar problem of the man who has to carry a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage across a river. The problem: “The boat only holds two, and you can’t leave the goat with the cabbage or the wolf with the goat.” There’s a logic-puzzle solution here. There’s also the xkcd solution: “Leave the wolf. Why do you have a wolf?” High-Rise is a dystopian science-fiction flick about an experimental skyscraper in... Read more

Christina the Astonishing: From Laura Swan, “The Wisdom of the Beguines”

Last updated on: May 26, 2016 at 7:09 pm By Eve Tushnet

(of which more soon) Once, while visiting the Benedictine nuns at St. Catherine’s near Sint-Truiden and speaking of Christ, the nuns reported that “suddenly and unexpectedly she [Christina] would be ravished in the spirit and her body would whirl around like a hoop in a children’s game. She whirled around with such extreme violence that the individual limbs of her body could not be distinguished. When she had whirled around for a long time in this manner, it seemed as... Read more

“The Convict-Bourgeois”: My Hans Fallada Rediscovery Piece, Which I Want You All to Read

Last updated on: May 23, 2016 at 10:49 am By Eve Tushnet

The two biggest things I left out here (mostly due to space constraints): Fallada always gives you a laugh. He has the satirist’s eye for absurdity. His humor is pretty much always also horror (you can make a case that Expressionism influenced him, & horror fans will find a lot of scenes that use genre techniques like “the things that should not be“) and so it turns up even in his Nazi prison diary. The whole vignette he opens the... Read more