We used to play Halo CE and Minecraft at school with copies saved on thumb drives. Before that I installed Zoo Tycoon on one of the computers in my elementary school library.

Just nakedly evil, destroying the planet to line the pockets of a minuscule handful of abject psychopaths and calling it ‘investment in our future’. Joe Biden has betrayed or abandoned literally every promise he made during his campaign, but his environmental policy has been particularly disastrous, characterized by deregulation, the expansion of drilling, fracking, and refining, and the neutering of the NEPA to allow for massive contamination of wetlands and other protected areas.

I remember the internet before Google, and how game changing it was to have all of the internet indexed in one place (even if that wasn’t actually quite true back then). If you had asked me 15, 10, even 5 years ago if I would be cheering its downfall and yearning for a return to a simpler, far less centralized internet, I would have called you crazy. And yet here we are.

Do you have an HDMI cable? I have my laptop more or less permanently plugged into the TV for exactly the purpose of watching movies, whether pirated or otherwise.

I am going to be living in my car starting in just a few days, and it is terrifying imagining all the ways that a single encounter with the police could destroy what’s left of my life. America, and my state in particular, is incredibly hostile to its own people, in such a staggering array of different ways that it can be hard to fully appreciate at times. We live in a bad country, run by bad people.

I dig RLM, and I like seeing what they thought of movies I’ve already watched, so I’ll definitely give that one a view once I track down the next few in the series.

Ha! I’m glad you appreciated it :-)

Thanks, I’ll be posting them here, as well as to my Letterboxd and a few other forums. If you haven’t read them already, you can find my reviews of the other Halloween movies (and others) here.

I’m watching them all before the 31st. I am prepared for the high-water mark to be behind me at this point. I remember enjoying H20, but I saw it so long ago that that impression means nothing. I’ve heard good things about the most recent reboot trilogy, but I’ll have to make it through Rob Zombie-land before I get there.

The difference is that ‘color-blind’ liberals who co-opt the language and appearance of the civil rights movement without actually understanding or living the ideals behind it were the target of the joke, it wasn’t supposed to be funny just because it was blackface. I feel that the backlash to that movie is 100% the result of a lack of media literacy. Like, it’s not Citizen Kane, but to accuse Downey Jr. of racism for taking that role is to miss the point so hard it’s hard to imagine that the people who feel that way watched the same movie that I did. You have to be coming from a place of total refusal to engage with the subtext (or really just the text, absolutely nothing about Tropic Thunder is subtle in the least) of the work, and an axiomatic understanding of certain actions as always-racist without regard for context.

God I miss dollar theaters. The last one I know about closed down in 2012, but for about a year I saw movies there almost every weekend. They would get the reels from the local cinemark after they had run there, and they ran two screens all day, starting at 9am. The local film society would screen cult classics there too, and I saw some things I would never have discovered on my own. It’s a little slice of the human experience that is just kinda gone now.

He’s not in a lot of stuff, but every time I see him I’m like ‘That dick, he let all the goddamn ghosts out!’

Edit: Also, “It’s true. This man has no dick.”

It’s a shame they don’t use this song in the film. Most likely due to how much this one leans into the 1980’s techno-thriller tropes, using such an iconic 60’s song might have clashed with that theme, although I’m sure a good director could do it in a way that worked.

I’ve been giving this some thought (far more than it actually merits, but that’s what I’m here for) and I realized that I don’t know how Michael knows that Laurie is his sister. She was two years old when he killed Judith, so there’s no way he recognized her (discounting a supernatural connection, which would be a totally valid explanation in this series) at 17. In the intervening time, he clearly learned some things about the world (like how to drive, and what Samhain means) but I think it would be very strange if Dr. Loomis were telling him anything about his family, at least after the first few years of their relationship, given the way that Loomis talks about Michael. So he should have no idea that his parents are dead, or that Laurie was adopted by another family in Haddonfield. In fact, we don’t know for sure that Laurie is even the same name he knew her by. She was adopted at four, but I can imagine the adoptive parents changing her name to try and shield her a bit from the notoriety of her birth family.

So, Michael shows up at his childhood home, ready to finish the job he started fifteen years earlier, but finds it empty, something he probably never even considered. Then, a girl about the same age as his remaining sister would be, who another person calls Laurie within his hearing (assuming this is actually her birth name here), just happens to turn up on the house’s doorstep? I think he decided in that moment that Laurie was his sister, and that he was going to kill her, completely absent any hard evidence to back that conclusion up. He happened to be right, but that’s probably down to Fate or some bullshit, not any actual knowledge that Michael possessed. From there, the only other people he kills in the first movie are canoodling teenagers, which is what (apparently) set him off in the first place, and he uses them to make a shrine to Judith, which makes me think their murders were really just auxiliary crimes, subordinant to his true goal of offing Laurie and making her the centerpiece of his Idol.

In any case, I no longer know whether this plot element makes any sense at all, but I’m pretty sure I need to just move on to the one without Michael, to wipe my brain clean and smooth again.

I’m happy to have it in my collection for completeness’ sake, but yeah, it does not leave you feeling good about yourself afterwards (or at any point during, really). The closest thing I can compare the experience to is Requiem For a Dream, which I love, but very rarely re-watch because of just how gross and bad it makes me feel. Requiem is by far the superior film though, and actually worth an occasional revisit.

Well, mine doesn’t, so there you go, I guess. You’ll never see me review a film highly just because it is already well regarded, and I try to make a good case for the ratings that I give. That said, no movie is for everyone, and that tends to be particularly true when it comes to horror.

I’ve actually seen it, and that’s probably where I got the idea.

For what it’s worth, this isn’t a particularly ‘scary’ movie. It is hard to watch for a lot of reasons, but having just rewatched the original Halloween, that movie is much scarier than this one.

You know, I hadn’t even though of that. That is an interesting parallel!

The only one without Michael Myers in it is your favorite? I don’t hate 3, but I don’t understand the appeal either.