Prosaic Ponderings

Spoiler alert: this post will talk about plot points and themes of The Substance, Babygirl and Companion. I assume readers have either watched these films or are OK with vague references to them, as I will not be going into great detail about the plots but will also be pulling out random references from beginning to end.  At first, I thought that The Substance (2024), a sci-fi/horror movie starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, would be merely supplemental to my appreciation of an erotic thriller with similar themes of aging and worth that I watched back in January and loved immediately: Babygirl (also 2024). A relative newcomer to the horror & thriller genres, I've found that good films in these categories stick with you in a trauma-bonding kind of way, where you walk away feeling like you just went to a really exhausting but cathartic therapy session that you don't quite know what to make of. Both of these films got at something really deep for me and continued to perc...

Although they are of equal length, January somehow felt longer than December. January always feels like the come-down month from the holiday season; the long, gentle runway back into our routines after the holiday hysteria that is December. In this dry, frigid month of reflection and reinvigoration, we also find ourselves in the wake of an election year, where nearly everyone's gaze is fixed, like the eye of Mordor, on the incoming administration. It makes sense: elections serve as a place to direct our hypervigilance, ennui, and vague sense of 'something's not quite right' every four years. (Making a mental note to myself to talk sometime about the interesting timing of our national elections with the holiday season/winter.)  I know we were all starting to wonder if January would ever end, but the long month at least gave me an opportunity to slip a blog post in more or less in time to make my monthly posting goal. Although it's been a significant month in the war ...