Amazing. Doesn’t even look real.

Most of you haven’t even figured out how to merge onto the highway. Please leave the flying cars to the competent drivers like me, and maybe five or six other people.

Three immediate thoughts come to mind. First, this is awesome. Second, most people are terrible drivers and should not be entrusted with this technology. Third, I’m a good driver so I should have one.

This kind of sloppiness is inexcusable. Why would you publicly announce something as dramatic as a live-streamed execution if you weren’t absolutely sure you wanted to do it and hadn’t already thought through all of the very predicable and inevitable blowback you would get? This makes it seem like they just kind of off the cuff floated the idea of killing someone on a live stream and then changed their mind when people were upset about it. Totally ridiculous, no matter how you feel about the public execution idea. No excuse to handle it this way. You need to go into something like this very thoughtfully, with seriousness of purpose and a sense of the gravity of the situation. Instead we get a casual announcement of a public execution and then a casual retraction on social media a few days later. Absurd.

The Real History of Communism: The Russian Revolution m.youtube.com/watch?v=I5Y5wr…

This is The Most Impressive Democrat in Years m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7rPxm…

This sounds like a dystopian nightmare. I do not want to live off of handouts from my Big Tech overlords. The fact that anyone sees this as some heavenly vision of the future is extremely depressing. Some people (most?) just simply do not want freedom or autonomy. They do not have ambition of any kind. For ambitious, independent minded people, this fact is very hard to absorb.

Nathan Fielder is a genius at generating stakes. This is the trickiest part of documentary filmmaking, and one of the hardest parts of storytelling in any form. The audience has to feel like there’s something at stake. We need a reason to care about what’s happening. Fielder will resort to basically anything, go to any length at all, to create high stakes in the story he’s telling. In the finale of season 2 of The Rehearsal he flies a commercial jet with passengers on board. It’s riveting, completely insane, and one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen in non-fiction (sort of) storytelling. In this film the stakes are built in from the start because Holmes is days away from going to prison for a decade. That would be enough stakes for one film but what I didn’t expect is that the highest stakes would be emotional, for him and the other “characters” in the movie. I don’t know how much of that was “real” — and in a sense none of it can be completely real when a camera is there — but it doesn’t even matter. It’s just great storytelling.

As much as I love being the contrarian, I must report that “You Can See Everything” is indeed an extraordinary bit of filmmaking. Just from a pure craft perspective, it is unquestionably a masterpiece. An effective and emotionally layered psychological thriller in the form of a documentary — and it holds your attention for 3 hours. I don’t think anyone has ever done anything like that with the documentary genre. And I say that as someone who has made two of them. Pretty easily the best movie of the year. It wont be to everyone’s taste but it’s hard to deny that, artistically, it’s a triumph. Other filmmakers in the genre (myself included) need to up their games. Meanwhile, Nathan Fielder — across TV and now film — has never made a bad piece of media. Batting a thousand. Remarkable.

I understand why the genre might not be someone’s cup of tea. I don’t particularly gravitate to it myself, usually. But it’s okay for Christians to tell and enjoy stories that are tense, suspenseful, even scary. There’s nothing inherently sinful about any of those feelings. And the categorical insistence on avoiding those feelings is precisely why almost all “faith based” entertainment is terrible. I would argue that bland, bad, boring “Christian entertainment” — which is almost all of it, truly — is a far greater cultural problem for Christians than any horror movie ever could be. Christians used to be the great storytellers of western civilization. That was back when they told difficult, complicated, sometimes bleak and violent stories. Not anymore. Now the stories are all very nice and pleasant, but they also suck and nobody with any taste can stand to watch them.

I'd actually argue that horror is the most Christian genre of film. Obviously that's not true of the torture porn stuff -- films in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre tradition -- but supernatural horror is often subtly Christian and sometimes very explicitly Christian. It's the only category of film where the supernatural, demons, spirits, exorcisms, the Church, etc, are consistently taken seriously. The only genre where the priest might actually be the good guy. Horror has deep roots in Christian thought and tradition.

It’s one of the worst things to happen to Christianity, culturally speaking, in modern times. And despite reports to the contrary, it really hasn’t gotten any better. Most “faith based” entertainment is bland and flavorless and, worst of all, a display of artistic cowardice. It refuses to take any chances or do anything that might be even remotely upsetting to the audience or even vaguely ambiguous about the message it’s trying to send. The result is an endless catalogue of “Christian” films and shows that are lifeless, pointless, and boring to an almost infuriating degree. What makes this so tragic is that it wasn’t always this way. Christian artists in all mediums for centuries created brilliant, beautiful, inspiring, timeless, sometimes difficult and complicated works of art. But the modern day Dostoevsky or Flannery O Connor or even Michelangelo, if such a person exists, would never get a film made by a Christian studio because their stories would be too upsetting to the middle aged Christian female audience that all of these companies exclusively cater to.

I have never seen or even heard of a horror film thar “glorifies” demonic possession. The whole point is that it’s scary and bad. The whole thing that makes a horror movie evoke horror is that you are scared of the evil thing. This idea that horror movies generally “glorify” evil is really just incoherent and silly. The worst thing a horror movie can do, morally, is not glorify evil but rather depict evil in a bleak and upsetting way and then just leave you there without any kind of resolution or the faintest triumph of good. That’s the criticism you should be making — the “glorification” charge is just not true and makes you seem totally out of touch with the genre you’re critiquing. And as for the valid critique I just mentioned: it does apply to some films in the genre but not all or even most. I’m thinking of a movie like Funny Games (don’t watch it), for example, that is specifically designed to be one of the most depressing and demoralizing viewing experiences you can ever have. I agree that kind of stuff is worse than worthless. But again, that is not how the horror genre typically works. In most cases, the bad guy is bad, you’re supposed to be scared, and then he’s defeated and the good guys win. That’s the classic form these stories take.

The Riots In France Aren’t What You Think | Ep. 1858 youtube.com/watch?v=mUREn2gT…