Seth Harris

Movie Review – The Double Life of Veronique

The Double Life of Veronique (1991)
Written by Krzysztof Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz
Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve found the idea that people shouldn’t have regrets incredibly strange. I know that on my deathbed, there will be things I look back on with shame or think about what I could have done differently. I do these things now, and I believe I have quite a while before I pass. In my opinion, to live and never regret is to have never lived. It means you avoided the tough choices, one thing that lets us know we are alive. So many of those choices aren’t even up to us; they remain in the hands of chance. Why did I end up living where I do, married to this partner, and working this job? If I could go back in time, I would certainly change some things, but I would want other things to remain the same. Yet, those changes would make me a different person living a different life, right? Is our existence just a series of possible realities collapsing into a single material reality as we encounter each moment?

Movie Review – The Spirit of the Beehive

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)
Written by Víctor Erice and Ángel Fernández Santos
Directed by Víctor Erice

Despite the best efforts of Hollywood and Peter Pan, childhood is often a melancholy, mysterious experience for most children. They are born into a world already in flux, expected to adhere to systems & institutions they had no say in creating, and shouted at when they hesitate or show fear. The Spirit of the Beehive is a film that lives in that space, told through the eyes of a child living in the early years of the Franco regime in Spain. Filmmaker Victor Eric pulls off this dreamlike atmosphere by letting us pivot between the complicated world of the adults and the rich, imaginative inner life of our young protagonist.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – Starforged: Messiahs Part Two

Read Part One here

[Begin a Session: Important character is put in danger or suffers a misadventure]

Dreng Wraithus wakes with a gasp for air. He is lying on a cold metallic floor. A hand reaches down and lifts him up by the scruff of the collar of his black robe. Wraithus’s legs still flop about like cold noodles as he’s drug through the halls of this strangely humid vessel.

Comic Book Review – X-Men Forever: Once More…Into the Breach

X-Men Forever: Once More…Into the Breach (2010)
Reprints X-Men Forever #21-24 and Giant-Size X-Men Forever
Written by Chris Claremont
Art by Tom Grummett, Rodney Buchemi, Wil Quintana, and Mike Grell

Chris Claremont’s strange & fascinating experiment X-Men Forever comes to the end of its first of two acts. The story thus far has revealed that mutants die younger than humans due to the intensity of their powers burning up their bodies. Wolverine was killed by a strange copy of Storm while the real Storm was revealed to still be a little girl. Rogue seems to have permanently absorbed Nightcrawler’s powers and appearance. Nathan Summers is still in the present and living with his grandparents in Alaska. Kitty Pryde accidentally absorbed one of Wolverine’s claws and part of his personality while phasing through him just before his death. Sabretooth has joined the team, and Nick Fury has embedded SHIELD agents in the school. Jean Grey seems to have struck up a romance with Beast. All the while, the Consortium plots in the background how to take down the X-Men.

Movie Review – Happy as Lazzaro

Happy as Lazzaro (2018)
Written and directed by Alice Rohrwacher

Since I saw Season Two, Episode Five, “The Betrayal,” of the Italian drama My Brilliant Friend, filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher has shot to the top of my must-watch list. That is hands down one of my favorite single episodes of television ever made. It so beautifully captured the transition of the show’s main character from a childlike perspective on the world to a more adult & fraught viewpoint. How Rohrwacher shot this character’s epiphany was one of the most realistic portrayals I’ve seen for that coming-of-age moment. I fell in love with her most recent film, La Chimera, which led me to put this film on the watch list for December.

TV Review – The Prisoner

The Prisoner (1967)
Written by George Markstein, David Tomblin, Vincent Tilsley, Anthony Skene, Patrick McGoohan, Terence Feely, Lewis Greifer, Gerald Kelsey, Roger Woddis, Michael Cramoy, Roger Parkes, Kenneth Griffith, and Ian L. Rakoff
Directed by Don Chaffey, Pat Jackson, Patrick McGoohan, Peter Graham Scott, and David Tomblin

As a citizen of the Western World (born in the States, residency in the Netherlands), I have been told from birth that I am free and those outside my sphere are not. For many years, I took this to be the truth. Why? The people who told me I was taught to see as correct in all things. These are the institutions responsible for my freedom, after all. But as I got older, the more I read & observed, it became clear that I wasn’t free. Well, I was free, in about the same way as a dog chained in a backyard is free. I can move up to a point, but then the chain chokes me and reminds me of the limits of this supposed “freedom.” I am as free as the establishment that controls my world allows me to be. I don’t think that can be defined as actual freedom.

Solo Tabletop RPG Actual Play – The Electric State Part Six

Read the previous chapter here

One Year Ago
Stella Shaw lays on her back, combat boots up on top of one of several monitors she’d spent months scavenging for. With a little help from Lester, a local tinkerer, the teenage girl constructed a makeshift antenna she installed one of the watchtowers in the compound for the best possible reception. It was just her luck that she picked up a broadcast of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air coming from somewhere to the west. Down in what Stella’s aunt nicknamed her “hidey-hole” she was quite cozy. These series of reinforced tunnels might have triggered claustrophobia in the adults, but they were the perfect fit for Stella.

Patron Pick – Anora

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Anora (2024)
Written and directed by Sean Baker

Of Sean Baker’s films that I have seen (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket, and this one), it is pretty clear he has an interest in sex workers. More specifically, Baker is fascinated with the class politics of being a sex worker. It is a job where the class divide is screamingly evident every second of the transaction. In this way, sex work is one field of labor that highlights the contradictions in the United States, where lies are fed to us from birth about the “American Dream” and meritocracy. It is also very important to Baker that these characters be presented as human beings so that the audience sees the desperation of our protagonists to escape their economic lot in life. He also doesn’t fear these characters being deeply flawed and often unlikable.

TV Review – Disclaimer

Disclaimer (2024)
Written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron

Alfonso Cuaron is a filmmaker who has delivered some art that wowed me over the years. Children of Men is one of the best post-9/11 films to have come out. Watching it now feels prophetic as a study of social collapse in Western societies that cannot handle the refugees they created. His Harry Potter film is the only one with merit outside of being part of the franchise. I was slightly less impressed with Gravity, but Roma is a fairly good movie told from a privileged point of view. I don’t always love his work, and Disclaimer falls into that ambivalent category.

Movie Review – Johnny Guitar

Johnny Guitar (1954)
Written by Philip Yordan and Ben Maddow
Directed by Nicholas Ray

By 1954, Joan Crawford was in the latter part of her career. She debuted in 1924 after receiving a contract from MGM that paid $75 a week. This was during the silent era, which Crawford was able to transition from into sound. By 1938, she was one of several actors labeled “box office poison” for declining revenues. That didn’t stop Crawford; she got bought out of her contract to move to Warner Brothers. It was here she starred in Mildred Pierce, one of her most well-regarded pictures of this era. She would branch out to other studios, and it was with Republic Pictures that she collaborated with Nicholas Ray to make the cult classic Johnny Guitar.