scumbelievable

Dear Gretchen: The Best of Boardwalk Empire

Dear Gretchen,

Which characters on Boardwalk Empire stood out to you the most, and what do you wish viewers could’ve seen if they hadn’t done the seven-year time skip between sea...

Dreadnought, Prologue: The Pimple

August 3rd, 1994

It was Leah’s thirteenth birthday and all she could think of as she made her way hand over hand along the rope that stretched from C Block to Main, snow up to her knees and...

Valkyrie, Chapter III: Golem

Fort Feldkirk’s courtyard was painted in blood. It was splashed in drying fans across the ...

Thanks, I Hate It: Black Swan

Yes, flat affect is a common symptom of psychosis. No, neither actress Natalie Portman nor director Darren Aronofsky manages to make it interesting to watch. Maybe it's the deeply square nature of ...

Imagine That You're Killing Him

Imagine hooking your cruel fingers up into his nostrils, listening to his screams turn nasal and thin as he chokes on his own breath, as his sinuses bend in ways that they were never meant to until...

Thanks, I Hate It: The Conjuring

James Wan's surprise horror hit The Conjuring is one of the emptiest movies I've ever seen. Its threat is a sort of anti-family, a lone woman who preys on children for occult purposes, pos...

Thanks, I Hate It: Star Trek Into Darkness

The idea that the Star Trek movies have to play as pure sci-fi action to attract an audience has led to some phenomenally bad movies. The franchise's appeal has always rested in its philos...

In the Flesh: Midsommar

Much of horror deals at a fundamental level with the tension between catharsis and repression. Midsommar, Hereditary writer-director Ari Aster's sophomore horror flick, approaches this ele...

Thanks, I Hate It: Parks and Recreation

If the world's comedians were given my psychological profile, a hundred million dollars, and a mission to give me a rage stroke, Parks and Recreation seems like the most probable result. T...

Thanks, I Hate It: Prometheus

"What if I deliberately watered down the iconic images of my sole good film and its sequels such that building back up to them could be stretched over multiple films and treated as a story worth te...

In the Flesh: John Wick 3: Parabellum

In its centerpiece action scene John Wick's latest outing juxtaposes ballet and bloodshed before bringing the two together. The crack in its analogy isn't that the meticulous and ...

Our History Is Written in Both Cum and Blood: Modern Rejection of the Queer Grotesque

Photograph: Phillip, Legs on Toes by Robert Mapplethorpe.

"[It is] the teaching of safe sodomy."

-Phyllis Schlafly on Everett Coop's AIDS education program fo...

Thanks, I Hate It: Halloween

Halloween isn't a bad movie. It's pretty good, in fact, and in some ways it deserves its reputation as a masterpiece. In Jamie Lee Curtis it has one of the great -- if not the greatest -- ...

Valkyrie, Chapter II: Parhelion

The airship that would take Anok away from his people and south to the war arrived on the la...

Thanks, I Hate It: Firefly

Joss Whedon remains a successful and beloved writer in spite of the ever-mounting stack of sexual misconduct allegations heaped against him, but if the turning of the cultural tides has not robbed ...

Thanks, I Hate It: Friends

I detest sitcoms. The laugh tracks, the visual laziness, the saccharine Special Episodes, the endless deluge of casually hateful jokes -- to paraphrase Mad Men's Abe Drexler, their activit...

Valkyrie Illustrations

Tom Horstmann's (@horstmannart) sketches and header concepts for Valkyrie! I'm incredibly lucky to work with Tom.

2019-05-27 02:55:41 +0000 UTC View Post

Thanks, I Hate It: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Jim Jarmusch is not a subtle man. If he wants to imply that vampire Christopher Marlowe was Shakespeare's ghost writer, he will say it. If he wants you to know what his characters' favorite books a...

Valkyrie, Chapter I: Ursula

Ursula, as she had recently begun to call herself in the uneasy privacy of her thoughts, stood facing t...

In the Flesh: Detective Pikachu

This is not a movie I expected to see, much less review, but when you've been with someone for almost seven years and they ask you to go see Detective Pikachu because the idea of Pokémon ...

Thanks, I Hate It: Skyfall

I love James Bond, and Casino Royale is my favorite Bond movie by a country mile. Craig's thuggish, insouciant sex appeal, the tooth-aching torture scene, the small and dirty plot; it's th...