House of Nettles

Review by Natalie Weizenbaum Patron

The Conformist 1970
★★★★★
Watched Sep 13, 2024

A triumph of anti-fascist filmmaking that never allows itself to become complacent or moralistic. Although the film is structured around the personal failings of Clerici, it's not a pillory. It's deeply interested in his own battle with himself, between the part of him that longs to be normal and the part which the Quadris catch glimpses of that aspires to be a whole person. It is the tragedy of a man who has choices and chooses wrong again and again.

Despite this tragic bent, it's also dryly humorous. The set design, particularly in the scenes set in fascist Italy, is quietly but deeply satirical: huge useless empty spaces, people shuffling around lugging gargantuan fascist statues, marble so pervasive it becomes a parody of elegance. Tacky prints mounted like fine art. A room drenched in walnuts. The film is clear: fascism is deadly but it's also ridiculous. For all its supposed grandeur, it was only ever a bully dressing like a Roman to make himself feel big.
Review by Natalie Weizenbaum Patron

Rushmore 1998
★★★
Watched Sep 19, 2024

This film is doing something interesting in presenting Max as an almost unbearable human being—someone who marries total earnestness with total pretension, self-aware enough to put on airs but not quite enough to realize how obvious it is that he's putting on airs, who once heard the phrase "fake it 'til you make it" and decided to make that his entire personality—and then tries to inspire in the viewer an affection for him. He mellows out over the course of the film, but only moderately. He's still essentially manipulative and overbearing, and one gets the sense that the only reason Margaret is even able to cope with him is a tremendous stubbornness in her own right.

The film's real argument is that Max's sheer intensity, whatever his motivations, creates a more vibrant world around him. He's responsible for everything interesting we ever see at either school, he literally speaks Guggenheim back to life, and in particular he brings color into Herman's dull world. This film is an argument for vivacity no matter the cost, for action-in-itself as an antidote to emptiness.

There's even a kind of desperation in it, just under the surface, a terror of what might happen if even for a moment you stop moving. You could even read this as a tragedy of alienation, in which a man and a boy claw feverishly at some kind of real connection only to get subsumed under an endless tide of aesthetics and activities. Are Max's plays an expression of himself, or are they just another thrashing hand seeking something real but grabbing only empty air?
Review by Natalie Weizenbaum Patron

Alien 1979
★★★★★
Watched Sep 30, 2024

The film sets up a dichotomy between the inorganic—the ship and its reactor filled with ornamentation we are to assume is all for the realization of profit, contrasted with its intensely human (and feline) crew. The gorgeously-rendered hull of the ship acts as a prison and its corridors restrict the possibilities of its inhabitants. And yet, among the first thing we hear from this crew is the seeds of organization, of raging against their imprisonment.

But as soon as the film establishes this dichotomy, it begins to play with it. The titular alien's nest is an organic mockery of the ship, and once the xenomorph is aboard the Nostromo it begins to cut (literally) through the metal and plastic bonds, the hyperorganic coming to dominate the machine. Eventually, the crew itself begins taking action against the machine in self-defense but from it and from their pursuer.

Ripley as a character becomes elaborated along with this dichotomy. Although she's quiet at first, not one of the crew who draws attention in the first few scenes, the more we see from her the clearer her values become. She holds life in the highest esteem, even that of Jones the cat. In doing so, she stands in opposition to the "purity" of force represented by both the Nostromo and the xenomorph. In her, we see that purity is intrinsically a false goal—the true value is always in the impurities that make us people.
nex3 BACKER
reviewed Lies of P

★★ Completed on Windows PC

People told me this was "the good one", the non-FromSoftware game to finally execute well on the formula, and I was ready to believe them. I found the "gritty steampunk fairy tale" theme a little tired but I was ready to give it another chance. I really was open to this game being good.

This game is not good.

The bitter irony is that the thing that's maybe hardest about aping Dark Souls is having a collection of fun, compelling, and distinctive boss fights, and that's the only thing this game does right. There are a few boring bosses and one that I think is actively bad, but the majority of the roster are legitimately very fun. The combat's emphasis on perfect guarding and limited support for dodging (including some moves that simply ignore iframes) means they lean pretty heavily towards rhythm memorization, but that's my preferred style anyway. And it's certainly not the only thing going on—the best fights are also about positioning and learning when you can get in what sort of attacks.

But as fun as the boss fights can be, the game surely makes you suffer between (and sometimes during!) them. The first, most egregious sin is the writing. The game is from a Korean dev, so it's tempting to lay the blame at the feet of the localizer, but I'm confident that the underlying writing is terrible. That's not to say that the localization is good—more on that below—but it's very clear that even if the prose were marvelous the concepts being conveyed are insipid, boring, and deeply unsubtle. Nowhere is this clearer than in the figure of Gemini (pronounced like "Jiminy", get it), whose entire role in the narrative is to explicitly describe things that were already completely clear from subtext in gratingly unskippable voice lines. But truly, nearly every line of dialog or lore writing in the game ranges from ham-fisted to outright nonsensical, so that even the lore and character moments that are compelling (and there aren't zero of those!) fall completely flat without any kind of supporting structure.

The writing isn't helped by one of the worst localizations I've ever seen that doesn't straight up break rules of spelling and grammar. Descriptions of the same thing use inconsistent wording, and descriptions of different things overlap. Idioms are misused or overused like someone cribbed writing notes from an 80s sitcom. Major mechanics have descriptions that are flat-out inaccurate to how the game behaves. If you want to understand how the game works, you need a wiki not because the game's descriptions are oblique and left to the player to explore, but because they're untrustworthy.

If you're thinking, "well if it's fun to play I can deal with skipping through the text", think again. Outside of boss fights (and even in them to a degree), the design sensibilities of this game are frequently thoughtless and haphazard. While the core combat mostly works for fighting large, strong enemies, it falls apart entirely for weaker mobs, which die in one or two hits without any resistance throughout the entire game. For a combat system built around the idea that you can essentially parry any attack, parrying is irrelevant to 90% of the respawning enemies. Compare to Sekiro, where even very early mobs won't let you just walk up and hit them until they die without blocking you and forcing you to engage in a microcosm of the mechanics used by the bosses.

The game is just full of blunders like that. The "fable meter", which is used for special weapon-specific attacks, becomes completely irrelevant two or three bosses in once you get an amulet that gives you a huge across-the-board damage boost when it's maxed out and so motivates you never to use your fable attacks. This is one of not two but three different equipment meters you have to keep track of during combat, all three of which are mostly irrelevant. There are some interesting ideas here, but they're all fumbled or half-assed.

So don't play Lies of P. If you must, find a mod that just throws you at the bosses with nothing in between but maybe some build management. And please pray that when there finally is a worthy disciple of FromSoftware's teachings I won't be so burnt out on these failed pretenders that I don't even bother to give it a glance.
Reviewed on Sep 24, 2024

#nat reviews