‘The Wailing’ and the horror of uncertainty

Posted on by slowdiagonal

wailin

A police officer and his family. A shaman. A ghostly woman. A Japanese drifter. A priest. At the end of its 156-minute runtime, The Wailing puts its Rube Goldberg machine constructed with blood and violence and superstition into motion, sending its myriad forces spiraling into oblivion. It isn’t until these final minutes that the South Korean horror film tips its hand, layering mysteries and revelations one over another, subjecting its audience to the disorienting, oppressive horror of uncertainty.

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Hayao Miyazaki, or: the unexpected virtue of tedium

Posted on by slowdiagonal

I took a feature writing class this past spring. It was a class I really enjoyed that challenged me and taught me a lot about myself as a writer.

One of our assignments early in the semester was to “draw your writing process.” It was totally open-ended and there were no wrong or right ways to go about it. The day it was due, I saw that everyone in my class had drawn these elaborate flow charts and graphs. They wrote paragraphs detailing their editing process and how they made decisions on what to write and how to write it.

I took a piece of printer paper and, with a #2 pencil, drew a comic about a stick figure sitting in bed with a computer doing nothing but typing.

I am terrible at process.

This might explain why, after seeing it the first time about a month ago, I’ve been struck by The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness. Read More