scumbelievable

Dear Gretchen: The Best of Boardwalk Empire

Dear Gretchen,

Which characters on Boardwalk Empire stood out to you the most, and what do you wish viewers could’ve seen if they hadn’t done the seven-year time skip between seasons 4 and 5?

-Tim

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Dreadnought, Prologue: The Pimple

August 3rd, 1994

It was Leah’s thirteenth birthday and all she could think of as she made her way hand over hand along the rope that stretched from C Block to Main, snow up to her knees and more blowing against her in white sheets, was the pimple to the right of her nose. It was fat and r...

Valkyrie, Chapter III: Golem

Fort Feldkirk’s courtyard was painted in blood. It was splashed in drying fans across the bay doors of the motor pool and dribbled in the shade down the windows of the colonel’s study. It ...

Thanks, I Hate It: Black Swan

Yes, flat affect is a common symptom of psychosis. No, neither actress Natalie Portman nor director Darren Aronofsky manages to make it interesting to watch. Maybe it's the deeply square nature of her character's descent into madness, which includes a scene in which her going down on Mila Kunis i...

Imagine That You're Killing Him

Imagine hooking your cruel fingers up into his nostrils, listening to his screams turn nasal and thin as he chokes on his own breath, as his sinuses bend in ways that they were never meant to until with a crunching, sticky ripping noise a chunk of his face comes off in your hand. Imagine his slob...

Thanks, I Hate It: The Conjuring

James Wan's surprise horror hit The Conjuring is one of the emptiest movies I've ever seen. Its threat is a sort of anti-family, a lone woman who preys on children for occult purposes, positioned against the wholesome white picket fence dream of the haunting-afflicted Perron family and t...

Thanks, I Hate It: Star Trek Into Darkness

The idea that the Star Trek movies have to play as pure sci-fi action to attract an audience has led to some phenomenally bad movies. The franchise's appeal has always rested in its philosophical underpinnings and the overt, thoughtful ways in which it expresses them. Anti-war sentiment,...

In the Flesh: Midsommar

Much of horror deals at a fundamental level with the tension between catharsis and repression. Midsommar, Hereditary writer-director Ari Aster's sophomore horror flick, approaches this elemental subject matter without much in the way of framing, depicting a failing relationship between a...

Thanks, I Hate It: Parks and Recreation

If the world's comedians were given my psychological profile, a hundred million dollars, and a mission to give me a rage stroke, Parks and Recreation seems like the most probable result. This show gives me hives. It makes me think less of human beings as a species. It makes me want to di...

Thanks, I Hate It: Prometheus

"What if I deliberately watered down the iconic images of my sole good film and its sequels such that building back up to them could be stretched over multiple films and treated as a story worth telling in and of itself?" isn't exactly an artistically electrifying idea. It's sort of like inventin...

In the Flesh: John Wick 3: Parabellum

In its centerpiece action scene John Wick's latest outing juxtaposes ballet and bloodshed before bringing the two together. The crack in its analogy isn't that the meticulous and often inventive choreography of the movie's action scenes isn't art but that ballet uses bodies in m...

Our History Is Written in Both Cum and Blood: Modern Rejection of the Queer Grotesque

Photograph: Phillip, Legs on Toes by Robert Mapplethorpe.

"[It is] the teaching of safe sodomy."

-Phyllis Schlafly on Everett Coop's AIDS education program for children

"All America and all the world will hear what the people have said, and with Go...