Family - Josephine Miles

Family

BY JOSEPHINE MILES

When you swim in the surf off Seal Rocks, and your family
Sits in the sand
Eating potato salad, and the undertow
Comes which takes you out away down
To loss of breath loss of play and the power of play
Holler, say
Help, help, help. Hello, they will say,
Come back here for some potato salad.


It is then that a seventeen-year-old cub
Cruising in a helicopter from Antigua,
A jackstraw expert speaking only Swedish
And remote from this area as a camel, says
Look down there, there is somebody drowning.
And it is you. You say, yes, yes,
And he throws you a line.
This is what is called the brotherhood of man.

Chris Abani : In the middle of Dinner

In the Middle of Dinner

BY CHRIS ABANI

my mother put down her knife and fork,

pulled her wedding ring from its groove,

placing it contemplatively on her middle

finger. So natural was the move,

so tender, I almost didn’t notice.

Five years, she said, five years, once a week,

I wrote a letter to your father. And waited

until time was like ash on my tongue.

Not one letter back, not a single note.

She sighed, smiling, the weight gone. This

prime rib is really tender, isn’t it? she asked

Killing Commandatore

My introduction to Haruki Marukami

Bird Box :Another Netflix thriller

Review: Sandra Bullock makes the creepy, derivative 'Bird Box' worth a look
By JUSTIN CHANG
FILM CRITIC
DEC 12, 2018 | 5:30 PM

Sandra Bullock in a scene from "Bird Box." (Merrick Morton/Netflix)
In Susanne Bier’s “Bird Box,” an end-of-days freak-out starring Sandra Bullock, the world is overrun by an inexplicable menace with a clever plan for wiping out humanity. To those of us in the audience, the creatures (or whatever they are) remain entirely invisible, represented by a sudden rush of wind, which makes them about as scary as a leaf blower. But if you were a character in the movie and happened to look in their direction, your eyes would turn blood-red and you would be seized by an immediate, irresistible urge to kill yourself, probably by dashing your head repeatedly against the nearest hard surface.

I am glad to report that the movie itself, creepy and diverting enough on its own workmanlike terms, induces no such impulse. It could have, I suppose, but Bier is too much of a professional to drop a stray reel from “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” mid-picture. Instead, she applies herself — as does the screenwriter, Eric Heisserer (“Arrival”), adapting Josh Malerman’s 2014 debut novel — to the challenge of representing a horror that, in every sense, cannot be seen.

This is a different order of business from the year’s other high-concept sensory-deprivation thriller. In “A Quiet Place,” the characters must avoid making noise to evade the attention of murderous monsters. In “Bird Box,” the survivors must constrain their own senses, which might be even harder. For much of the picture, we watch a tightly wound Malorie (Bullock) and two quietly obedient children (Julian Edwards and Vivien Lyra Blair) make their way around in blindfolds — a task that becomes trickier when they are forced to spend hours kayaking down an icy, turbulent river.

What happened? How did they get here? Where are they going? The movie begins to provide answers — not all of them, but a few — by flashing back to five years earlier, when a wave of mass spontaneous suicides breaks out worldwide. Chaos erupts at the hospital where Malorie, six months pregnant, is seeing a doctor with her sister (Sarah Paulson, gone too soon). Malorie’s frantic drive home becomes a bravura piece of doomsday action choreography, with self-crashing vehicles and people screaming and fleeing en masse, as one after another makes the mistake of laying eyes on the creatures in their midst.

Amid the fiery chaos, Malorie is pulled into a large house whose inhabitants have the good sense to lock the doors and cover the windows. At this point, “Bird Box” effectively becomes a zombie movie sans zombies, in which a motley crew of survivors — Malorie’s new housemates include Trevante Rhodes, Lil Rel Howery, BD Wong, Jacki Weaver and a surly, shotgun-toting John Malkovich — find themselves trapped in a single location.
This one is fairly spacious, all things considered. The usual clash of personalities ensues, plus moments of teamwork, bonding and what-the-hell-it’s-the-apocalypse sex. Rations and supplies run low; the slightest glimpse of daylight can prove deadly. Desperate survivors come pounding at the door at night, including another pregnant woman (a touching Danielle Macdonald) and a man (an unnerving Tom Hollander) who provides a chilling clue about the rapidly evolving nature of the outside threat. And then there are the caged birds, which turn out to have useful perceptual powers where the monsters are concerned, and whose imprisonment is clearly a metaphor for the characters’ own.

The actors give the material an appreciable boost: Much as he did in “12 Strong” and “The Predator,” the handsome Rhodes emerges as a kind of B-movie ensemble MVP — after Bullock, of course, with whom he strikes up a warmly emotional rapport. For her part, Bullock remains an effortlessly watchable action heroine, though her natural comic spark has been tamped down in service of a character who becomes increasingly humorless and raw-nerved as the body count spikes.
Presumably, we will learn how Malorie becomes the joyless, no-nonsense mom she is five years later, someone who denies her poor kids even the slightest moment of levity and, as the movie notes in some overly emphatic dialogue, has sacrificed living for the sake of survival. “Bird Box” keeps cutting back and forth in time, between the house under siege and the boat on the river, a seesaw tactic that opens up the story visually but also undercuts the suspense on both ends. One form of narrative monotony is effectively replaced with another.

More celebrated for the nimble early pictures she directed in her native Denmark (“After the Wedding,” “Brothers”) than for her rickety forays into Hollywood melodrama (“Things We Lost in the Fire,” “Serena”), Bier plunges herself into mainstream horror filmmaking with a gusto that doesn’t always offset her lack of precision. For visceral intensity, she never tops the early scenes of mayhem and mass panic; slow-building, artfully modulated tension in close quarters seems beyond the movie’s interest or purview. The scares keep getting more and more desperate, cranking up the volume with gale-force winds and eerie voices, en route to an ending that’s silly verging on offensive.
Although far better than M. Night Shyamalan’s mass-suicide thriller “The Happening” — scant praise, I know — “Bird Box” never really makes its unseen villains work conceptually. The horror remains strictly theoretical when it should instead be palpable. The movie’s wan, derivative pleasures fly completely in the face of its premise: You’ve seen this all many times before, which doesn’t mean you’ll mind seeing it again.

Game of Zones : Season 5

This is just awesome

Technology in television : The Americans

The Haunting of Hill house

mmmmm..... what can i say about this film. Though it is in an episodic format it felt more like a movie for me.



The main selling point of this piece of art is the mastery involved in the craft of film-making. Mike Flannagan has used every piece of tool available in creating the tone and texture of the film. I would recommend people to appreciate and experience the usage of the color pallete in portraying the emotion and the psychological state of the characters. Some of the points to note esp like the "Red Room" was always portrayed as a place of solitude for each character where they can be themselves without the interference of others/society.The Directors choice to show the Red room as very bright when they are in its trance is an apt choice to convey that it is the room trying to trap the characters eternally within its grasp.

Hollywood has seen a slew of well made horror movies in recent times but The Haunting of the Hill House has managed to create a league of its own. Whereas the other movies seems to highlight the tone and the jump-scare moments whereas this is actually an endearing drama where the ghosts are just an euphemism for the mental struggles which every human goes through.

Not all ghosts are dead people as clearly illustrated by the image which haunts Shirley was not about her dead mother/sister it is actually the image of infedilty. It should be appreciated that the Director painstakingly developed each character and how all the siblings coped with their experience in the hill house during their childhood. It is a story about the emotional trauma of children as much as a horror story.

Each of them has their own coping mechanism -

Steve was able to manage it by denying the existence of the super-natural and concluding that the real ghosts are actually in our heads (he is not wrong!). He also thinks that mental illness is hereditary which lead to his vasectomy thereby preventing further offspring of trauma. The Director has taken the effort to show us why he came to that conclusion by his ignorance to the presence of ghosts in the hill house which saved him from the trauma experienced by his siblings. It has also strained his relationship with the family as he didnt see any issue in writing a book about their experience in the hill house

Shirley did not seem to be much affected by her experience in the hill house and was able to cope with the death of her mother by pursuing the vocation of funeral home impressed by the handiwork performed at her mother's wake.She seems to be the most stable of the children and almost like the matriarch but at the same has her own insecurities.

Theo's character is the issue for me. They have taken the option to portray her as a psychic where she can basically see the experiences of others or even non living objects (really...) by just touching them.There is no background provided on the character on why she chose to stay with her sister or why does she had the ability. There is a decent argument on her coping mechanism by choosing to wear gloves inorder to stop experiencing the ghastly images seen during the last day of her stay in the hill house

Nell and Luke are probably the saddest characters in the series. Their entire childhood experience was traumatic in the hill house which has quickly translated to the struggles in their adult lives. Luke became a recovering drug addict whereas Nell is on continuous therapy sessions after the tragic death of her husband.