Van Ike

A thread of 10 Bach performances that will turn atheists into believers. 🧵

@atlanticesque The future will forget about Sinners and One Battle After Another but they will not forget about Weapons.

Wow, that was really excellent. In my head, I had grouped it together with Longlegs (2024) as "recent avant garde-ish horror I should really get around to watching," but I watched Longlegs first and that was just terrible. Really an awful film, strongly disrecommend. This, however, was really interesting. Fantastic narrative structure, (sequential vignettes with successive participants in the mystery,) really rich characters, and that rarest of all things: A satisfying conclusion. I won't write all my thoughts, especially since I'm a year late on this, but two things really stick out to me for why this film was great and why many of its peers are not. First, just when I was getting to the end of the first segment, where the viewer follows Justine, I was beginning to think "Okay, I get this character. She's flawed and interesting and all, but if I have to stick with her for the whole movie it's going to get tedious and annoying." And then? It doesn't! We go to another character equally flawed and interesting but who I would equally dislike to spend an entire two-hour film with. And then we do it again, and then again a few more times. Really great way to not wear out the viewer on these nuanced but somewhat unpleasant perspectives. Second, the ending is fantastic. So, so rarely do you get a great ending from these types of films and you get one here. For one, all of my questions were satisfyingly answered, which Longlegs certainly failed at. But more importantly, and without going into detail, (if you haven't seen it I highly recommend it,) I think the major reason why I loved this ending is that we get to see our antagonist—who has been causing so much fear by trapping us in their world—feel an immense amount of fear in the midst of our world. Even in horror pictures with a 'happy ending,' or where the Big Bad is eventually defeated, it's far less common that you get to see them really express real, extended fear at ourselves as much as we felt fear at them. And somehow, it did all that without feeling corny. In fact, none of this movie felt corny to me, which is amazing considering some of what happens in it. Really really well-done. I have a few nitpicks, but compared to nearly every other horror film I've seen which has been released the last few years, this was a treat.

@avidseries This was a fun exchange from a while back.

The turning point for me was that video of the LoTT gal being totally unable to define wokeness — the thing that she had been famously fighting for years. I realized at that point that the most influential antiwokes were now either dimwits or crackpots.

Around 2019, the leadership in the fight against wokeness shifted away from higher-IQ IDW types to normie GOP conservatives and then ultimately to low-IQ MAGAtoids. It has never recovered.

Just finished Barabbas this morning and even the big standard peplum “check it out we’re filming at Cinecittà” gladiator scenes have this kind of strange atmosphere. Fleischer’s whole catalogue is filled with secretly weird movies, and this is his weirdest — and his best.

Imagine making a movie so good Spielberg is like “Nah, I won’t even bother”

@JackPosobiec @AutumnalisVelum Only two when I converted about a decade ago. This year was almost 50.

Did your church have more converts than usual this year?

Yep.

The top two here are really the two best films ever made.

This dude is the best government official currently working for the United States. Follow him.

America is a Christian nation already btw

@ManifestHistory Go read Matthew at least first.

I’ve finally decided to read the entire bible. So far, I’ve read Genesis and Exodus. I’m obviously really interested in reading the Gospels and New Testament. I’m debating skipping ahead to the Gospels. What do you recommend I do: Read the bible from front to back or skip ahead and read the Gospels (or entire New Testament) and then go back to the Old Testament.

It’s Papist now.

Amen

Kanye single-handedly made Hitler cringe so you should be thanking him.

Ok this is pretty wild

Ok this is epic

Golgotha by Ilya Repin

wew lad

Uhh...Happy Easter??