I spent most of November post-election in a depressive funk. I woke up on Wednesday Nov 6th, checked the internet, and promptly cancelled all my meetings and called out of work that day. Suddenly, watching movies for personal enjoyment didn't seem all that important in the face of being abandoned by a country I wasn't even aware that I loved. Here's what I was able to scrounge together though.

Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot, 2024): 3/5

"Life only makes sense backwards. But we have to live it forwards."

Touching and humane. Snails can only move forward, and so does time, and so must we.

 Goodrich (Hallie Meyers-Shyers, 2024): 2.5/5

Mr. Mom 2: Still Momming After All These Years.

The Penguin (Craig Zobel, 2024): 3.5/5

1960s: he's called the penguin because he's wearin a suit!

1990s: he's called the penguin because he was raised in a damn zoo!

2020s: he's called the penguin because he is disabled and has trouble walking and actually it's really fucked up to call him that. like i am a murderous gangster and i really think you should tone it down with the ableism

Please don’t remind me of any other Penguin performances from now on except Colin Farrell’s.

We Live in Time (John Crowley, 2024): 2/5

A postmodern weepy that's entirely too precious and baity. No doubt the movie wears its heart on its sleeve, but sadly has nothing else up it.

Smile 2 (Parker Finn, 2024): 2/5

This is exactly how It feels when some old geezer in the grocery store tells you “You should smile more”. Except that’s a little worse.

Wicked (Jon M. Chu, 2024): 1.5/5

Interminable. Mindless pop dribble akin to a Marvel movie or the Star Wars prequels. A cliche within a cliche warning us to not bully people because they look different. Filled with trite and contrived drama. The film is exactly the kind of adaptation of an adaptation of a book based on a movie that I expected a mess of IP salad to be. Bloated, asking for you to clap in the movie theater, expecting you to laugh at pedantic jokes that feel juvenile, and chock full of CGI.

I’m a contrarian. I’m grumpy. And I’m a loner with this one. And that’s fine by me.

Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024): 3/5

Like an episode of America's Next Top Model. Soooo silly it's gonna win every Oscar.

Saturday Night (Jason Reitman, 2024): 2/5

If I had made this movie it would have been about the 90 minutes before the Steven Seagal episode.

 

We Live in Time (John Crowley, 2024): 4.5/5

Admittedly I’m in an emotionally vulnerable state at the moment, but this lovely and heart-felt story started working for me right away, and the waterworks persisted throughout. I guess people don’t like this movie as much as I did—too weepy?—but I don’t understand why Pugh isn’t at least being considered for best actress.

 

His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs, 2024): 3.5/5

Not much more than an actor’s showcase, but I was completely emotionally engaged. The resolution in the last 15 minutes was miraculously, magically effective and sob sob sob. Inspired a rewatch of Jacobs’ previous film, French Exit, starring the great Michelle Pfeiffer, and I liked it just as much as the first time.

 

Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024): 1/5

A complete disaster. Muddled themes and characters, and a mish-mashed garbage can of genre and razzle-dazzle that, to me, was horrendously distancing—making the experience not only grating and ugly but also remote and anti-human.

 

Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024): 1.5/5

So hushed and self-serious. And why the hand-wringing about making the Catholic church more liberal? The Catholic church is supposed to be conservative—conservatives need a church too and there are plenty of other churches for people who don’t like it. And the resulting film is so programmatic! "Oh, it’s going to be this guy. No, that guy is bad. So it’s going to be this guy. No, that guy is bad." Ho hum. In the current state of the world, the oh so shocking conclusion comes off as completely tone-deaf and cutely self-satisfied.

 

My Old Ass (Megan Park, 2024): 3.5/5

Sweet, gently insightful and surprisingly moving. The beautiful and talented Maisy Stella is going to be a big star, if she wants to be. (Although, big quibble: why make our protagonist gay in the beginning if she’s just going to fall in love with a man? This movie really isn’t interested in bisexuality, and it somehow feels like a “win” for the character that she can finally have a real love with someone, instead of all that unsatisfying lesbian stuff.)

 

Evil Does Not Exist (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 2024): 3/5

Kind of a slow, deliberate and serious remake of (the great) Local Hero. Does a good job of expressing the value of the film’s prized location through quiet attention.

 

Blitz (Steve McQueen, 2024): 3/5

Well-appointed but curiously unemotional—although McQueen’s other, more successful, films are also characterized by this restraint. The film mostly follows the episodic journey of our young protagonist as he travels across a torn landscape trying to go home, and unfortunately the movie this reminded me most of was 1917 (although this is better). The parts of the film that don’t follow the child are even less engaging. Why does the script devote time to Saoirse Ronan’s singing career? Paul Weller (of The Jam) himself plays the grandfather, and charisma radiates off him like the sun.

 

Challengers, rw (Luca Guadagnino, 2024): 5/5

What I love about Ingmar Bergman’s movies (and this one) is that every conversation is two people really telling one another what they think. The characters are always volleying points of view back and forth, making moves, and sometimes getting their feelings hurt and/or attacking the net.

 

Saturday Night (Jason Reitman, 2024): 3.5

I watched SNL several times in the first season because I was allowed to stay up late when my parents had a dinner party (which evidently was pretty often). Did I mention that one time I eavesdropped on my parents telling their friends that they had gone to see (and had walked out of) Deep Throat? Yeah, really entertaining film—a great cast, and it really moves.

 

Disclaimer, 7 eps. (Alfonso Cuarón, 2024): 3.5/5

Blanchett is stunning, and Cuarón directs the shit out of this OK plot. Whoever put Kevin Klein in his wife’s pink sweater for much of the run-time deserves a raise. Leila George turns in the sexiest performance of the year. More of her, please.

 

Interview with a Vampire, Season 1, 7 eps. (Rolin Jones, 2022): 3.5/5

My daughter Rosa actually wrote her master’s thesis on this season, and I rudely waited until now to watch it. Not bad! They make some good decisions in updating the text, including making Louis (Brad Pitt’s character in the film) a black man, and making the relationship between Louis and Lestat explicitly gay (not quite even subtext in the original book and movie). Rosa can provide the true insight into this content in my stead: “Dissecting lovers Louis and Lestat as psychological, social, and economic doubles reveals how their relationship aids Louis in accepting himself as a queer Black man in a heteronormative, White world through the doubling of his sexuality, race, and class with the vampire. This doubling implicates us in our own historic doubling as well. To explore the framed narrative of twenty-first century America (the audience) gazing in towards twentieth century America (Louis) looking at eighteenth century Europe (Lestat) is to see the present as a double of the past, endlessly repeating itself.

 

His Kind of Woman (John Farrow, 1951): 4/5

For most of the movie, an atmospheric and enjoyable romp with Robert Mitchum in an exotic location with mugging gangsters, Jane Russell singing, romance, comedy, drinks, gambling, and a crack script full of hard-boiled one-liners, ala To Have and Have Not and Key Largo. Then John Farrow was fired, new director Richard Fleisher (and Howard Hughes himself) reshot the final third, and we are abandoned to plot requirements. Still, the long series of shoot-outs is at least enlivened by mugging actor Vincent Price playing a mugging actor and, most importantly, Robert Mitchum stripped to the waist.

 

The Straight Story, rw (David Lynch, 1999): 3/5

One monologue places this firmly within the valorization of the Greatest Generation with their WWII memories and values, their wretched stubborn horizon gazing, and their emphysema. But I doubt Lynch thinks too much about that, and is probably just interested in these humans, with their will, their unknowability, and their dreams. A lot of the zen-like dialogue works great, and the acting performances of Farnsworth and Spacek are just perfect—although all the lyrical second-unit helicopter-over-corn smoothing shots grate. Pair with Herzog’s Stroszek to see more naifs wandering across the American landscape.

 

The Audition, 16m (Martin Scorsese, 2015): 3/5

Did you know that in 2015, Studio City Macau Resort and Casino gave Scorsese a $70m budget to make a commercial for their casino, starring Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt? I hope they all had fun in Macau! A complete trifle, but there’s no reason not to watch it on YouTube.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_KSYIZ61q0

 

Bollywood Film Fest

Joyous filmmaking. Fun fact: The term “Bollywood” is actually a bit offensive nowadays because (1) no one really loves a label and (2) the word Bollywood is based on the fact that once many Indian movies were made in Bombay—but today Bombay is now back to being called Mumbai, since the name Bombay was a corrupted Anglicization of the original name. Stupid English people. All these films were massive blockbusters in India.

 

Om Shanti Om, 2h49m (Farah Khan, 2007): 3.5/5

Contains probably every genre and mood, in a colorful succession—often fun but tiring at its length. Baz Luhrmann has watched and absorbed these films’ sense of spectacle and “moment” over emotional, dramatic and tonal coherence. And he even hired this (female) director to choreograph (the wretched) Moulin Rouge.

 

12th Fail, 2h26m (Vidhu Vinod Chopram 2023): 3.5/5

No genre mixing or dance numbers—just a broad and entertaining drama about one village boy’s attempt to move to the big city and become a regional policeman to clear out the corruption in his hometown. Still, the film’s length let’s one hang out with these people quite a long time, making the finale undeniably moving.

 

Dhoom 2, 2h31m (Sanjay Gadhvi, 2006): 3.5/5

Like the Fast and the Furious, but broad and outrageous. (!?!) I dig the over-the-top self-aware, shiny and plastic quality, which feels like future. I rewatched most of Mission Impossible: Fallout the next day and I recognized the similarity.

 

Sholay, 3h24m (Ramesh Sippy, 1975): 4/5

Lots of influence from Seven Samurai, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, and probably every other epic Western. Two really charismatic buddy protagonists, including Amitabh Bachchan—one of the biggest and most beloved stars in Indian cinema and star of 246 films. As these pages will attest, I have watched many Spaghetti Westerns, and this one is one of the best of the genre, in terms of fun.

 

 

Peter Hyams Film Fest

Hopping from genre to genre, privileging acting and character over narrative imperative—in the vein of Soderberg and Coens, although not nearly as arch and self-aware. Hyams (who also directed my beloved Busting, with Elliot Gould and Robert Blake) writes many of these as well. A staple of my 80s filmgoing.

 

Capricorn One (Peter Hyams, 1977): 3.5/5

A worthy addition to the paranoid government cover-up and assassination films of the 70s. At a little over two hours the narrative is shaggy, even lumpy, for a thriller, but the slower, 70s pace really leaves room for performance, and here we feast on loose performances from Elliott Gould, Hal Holbrook, and (wow) Brenda Vaccarro—not to mention Karen Black and Telly Savalas (!!)). James Brolin makes no impression, despite the screen time, and OJ Simpson is amateurish and has a head that is much larger than that of the rest of the cast. Good stuff on imposter syndrome.

 

Hanover Street (Peter Hyams, 1979): 3.5/5

Poses the question: Would Brief Encounter be even better if Trevor Howard was a wise-cracking but brave bomber pilot who, in the film’s last third, went on a dangerous mission behind enemy lines with Celia Johnson’s husband? Harrison Ford’s acting is a bit wooden, but he makes up for it with pure charisma, plus expert loud-nose-breathing between lines. 

 

Outland, rw (Peter Hyams, 1981): 3.5/5

A solid paranoid thriller that feels like a police procedural and a Western but happens to be set in space. In fact, I greatly prefer this competent, even expert, sci-fi story to Clair Denis’ abstract High Life, so sue me.  Like Alien and Star Ware, it prefigures a world where we have colonized multiple planets and the computers are still green-screen circa 1985. Expert work from Connery, Peter Boyle, and James B Sikking. Today, they complain that you can only get your script made if it can be fit into the Marvel universe, but it was ever so. Post Star Wars, if your genre script could be jammed into space, it was a go.

 

The Star Chamber, rw (Peter Hyams, 1983): 2.5/5

My 57-year-old self agrees with my 14-year-old self that this revenge-o-matic is altogether too moody, somber, classy, and cerebral. Hal Holbrook, James B Sikking, and various featured sweaty, drugged-out, low life criminals are all terrific, but Michael Douglas is too buttoned down and serious to be fun (unlike the more gonzo and enjoyable Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct performances.)

 

Narrow Margin, rw (Peter Hyams, 1990): 3/5

A by-the-numbers thriller when “the numbers” included efficient storytelling, zero CGI, helicopter shots galore, perfect pauses at the one-hour mark for dramatic and character-revealing exposition before the implausible but well-presented action sequence conclusion. The many, many two-shots make the performances central, which is a real pleasure when we’re talking about M. Emmet Walsh, James Sikking (again, here complete with yellow-lensed shades: clearly evil), J.T. Walsh, and Gene Fucking Hackman.

 

The Relic (Peter Hyams, 1997): 2.5/5

Hyams is running out of juice here. Basically, Alien in a museum (The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. I’ve been there!), but then again Hyams’ power is not his originality. Acceptable victims here include local politicians, rich donors, and weaselly Chinese researchers.

America: [1776-?] Some good ideas marred by poor direction and unlikeable characters. Greed, racism, sexism, and gratuitous violence. ★★☆☆☆

(And no, my depression is not getting worse, in fact it is becoming more powerful than anyone can possibly imagine.)

Almost All Horror Movie October

 

2024 in descending order of interest

 

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024): 4/5

There’s a lot of filmmaking going on here, some of it good. The last act gets away from Fargeat, tonally—but it’s all still a pretty fun ride. In part, the movie is about loving the part of yourself that is old and getting older. There will always be a part of you that feels young and timeless, but ya gotta love the aging part too. I also get heavy The Giving Tree vibes, with the younger self taking and taking and taking. Demi Moore earns Oscar nom.

 

Strange Darling (JT Mollner, 2024): 3.5/5

A wild genre ride and, miraculously, satisfying. I didn’t take the flipping of protagonist and antagonist as a surprise twist exactly, just a bit of narrative fun. Both leads are good.

 

In a Violent Nature (Chris Nash, 2024): 3.5/5

There’s a great movie somewhere in here, where we follow 10 feet behind a hulking entity as it wades slowly and inexorably through a series of adolescent dramas, solving through elimination. The viewer’s satisfaction is derived from the commitment of the filmmakers to the formal structure. Unfortunately, this film strays from this rigor too often—like, why is this character lurking!?! It doesn’t lurk!!

 

V/H/S Beyond (Jordan Downey, Justin Martinez, Kate Siegel, Virat Pal, Christian & Justin Long, Jay Cheel, 2024): 3.5/5

I like these VHS movies. Here we have three good ones and three ok ones. No build ups or disintegrations or slow burns. Just all killer no filler. 

 

The First Omen (Arkasha Stevenson, 2024): 3.5/5

This movie is grounded in real characters with their own history, depth and psychology in a way that really makes it stand out from the giallos and Substance’s I’ve been watching recently. Unfortunately, the result is a real bummer, highlighting the real, powerless, rape-y trauma experienced by women in every culture. I heard this very talented director say that Lynch’s Fire Walk with Me is a central text in her artistic life, and this film has that movie’s same equation of violence, sadness, anger, and trauma turned inward.

 

Wolfs (Jon Watts, 2024): 3/5

Floats by on charm alone, but then again so does, say, The Philadelphia Story, and that’s a classic, right? Austin Abrams produces one of the best scenes of the year. And uh yeah, is that fucker Brad Pitt somehow getting even more handsome as he ages?

 

New Life (John Rosman, 2024): 3/5

A nifty first feature that completely delivers on its simple and streamlined (i.e., limited) premise—everyone is after the girl, but why, and who will stop her? 83 mins.

 

Oddity (Damian Mc Carthy, 2024): 3/5

Creepy, but like Longlegs, it never really settles into a kink. Just a bunch of supernatural and non-supernatural elements tossed together. Fun from moment to moment, but hollow all around.

 

Alien: Romulus (Fede Álvarez, 2024): 3/5

In the first half I admired the world building and cast of characters, but the second half is simply overwritten. They somehow can’t figure out how to make one of the best creatures in the history of film scary, so they try to create tension with periodic zero-gravity, plunging elevators, and collisions with planet rings. These hats are wearing hats, friends. 

 

Speak no Evil (James Watkins, 2024): 2.5/5

The first two thirds of the Finnish version had themes—namely, how far one will go maintain civility and how hard it is to make couple-friends. This version glances at these but then adds a half hour of material having nothing whatever to do with these themes. On the other hand, I remember rejecting the ending of the original too.

 

A Quiet Place: Day One (Michael Sarnoski, 2024): 2/5

They made an Alien 3 here—meaning internal, emotional and minimal. But is this the best story they could think of to tell—cancer, pizza, cat and all? At least Terminator 3 had a hot female Terminator. That was cool.

 

It’s What’s Inside (Greg Jardin, 2024): 2/5

Fun premise, but two big things. We should understand the personalities of the characters before they start switching around. And our protagonist should change in some way as a result of her experience. Agree with David Ehrlich who said, “hard to imagine a less interesting film with the same premise.” The eager-to-please filmmaking reminds me that TikTok is changing our culture.

 

 

When Evil Lurks (Demián Rugna, 2023): 3/5

Some folk horror from Spain in gonzo vein—a “cursed” human puffing up and spewing out disgusting bile, etc. But it made me realize how much the The Substance really moved the goal posts on the “gonzo” idea this season, and more power to it.

 

Southern Comfort, rw (Walter Hill, 1981): 5/5

Probably this is a thriller, not horror, but, man, this is the way thrillers should be done—expert action filmmaking, textbook group dynamics, Western and Vietnam analogy, the inexorable pervasiveness of destructive forces from within and out. Movies like this are why I always remain the Bugs Bunny-ish, wry and emotional Captain Hawkeye Pierce (here played by the dream team of Keith Carradine and Powers Booth) in any dynamic instead of the Major Burnses of the world.

 

The Entity (Sidney J. Furie, 1982): 4/5

Classic Sirkian melodrama built around keeping women in the house. Her psychiatrist keeps insisting that the Entity is just her, but she’s saying it’s not her and what she’s really afraid of is the house—meaning conformity to the (rape-y) patriarchy and its repressive models for women’s behavior. Scientists later even recreate her house as a literal cage. It's also— whew—pretty scary in the first half as the world shakes and vibrates around her in a Repulsion sort of way. The myriad split diopter shots also attest to the film’s debt to DePalma (a compliment). The great Barbara Hersey’s best performance? (Or is it Hannah and her Sisters?)

 

Outer Space, rw (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999): 5/5

The Entity, chopped and screwed. Here Barbara Hershey is terrified not only by the penis and the patriarchy but also by the movie frame itself that traps and fractures her. Passes through a system of moods, and ultimately transforms and exalts Hershey ala Falconetti.

 

Il Demonio (Brunello Rondi, 1963): 4/5

A stark tale of a young woman in a sere and superstitious southern Italian town. Is she possessed or just mad, obsessed and harassed? Prefigures some of The Exorcist, including the upside-down spider walk that Friedkin would cut then add back upon re-release. The scene of gorgeous Daliah Lavi writhing on a bed in some unseen ecstasy or anguish is powerful and sexy, summing up the ambiguity of the entire film. Directed by the screenwriter of La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2, which are also equally drawn to and repulsed by women.

 

Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990): 4/5

Droll and narratively dense, filed with intense eddies of memory, fantasy and trauma. Also Lynch’s funniest film. “One time, she found Dell puttin' one big cockroach right on his anus.”

 

Pieces (Juan Piquer Simón, 1982): 3/5

A Spanish giallo full of flamboyant kills and bright red blood. A top ten slasher according to Alex Ross Perry.

 

Cannibal Ferox (Umberto Lenzi, 1981): 2.5/5

Scuzzy, disgusting, take-a-shower filmmaking. The ample machete- and anaconda-kills of actual animals pushes the film to repellent and reprehensible even before the amoral acts, eyeball gouging and murder start. Comes all the way around on the idea that cannibalism is just what colonialists told the world to justify their exploitation of tribes.

 

The Painted Lady, rw (D.W. Griffith, 10.24.1912): 5/5

A primary horror text featuring a trauma that compels obsessional re-creation. Quoth me April 2023: “Key image: the sexy black shawl that “plain” Blanche Sweet once wore to a clandestine meeting with her only suitor and now will never take off again.”

 

 

Giallo Film Fest

All of these films are in Letterboxd’s top 15 giallos, and, hey, they’re all good—although it can be a bit difficult to differentiate them from one another, with their Italian dubs, who-done-it murder mysteries, women in peril, stylish nudity, and driving synth scores. Some are merely more or less colorful, more or less “real” feeling, or in combination with other genres.

 

The Evil Eye/ The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Mario Bava, 1963): 3/5

B/W giallo. A murderer is on the loose, and our female protagonist serves as our detective on the way to a pretty random solution (as usual). In the end, the movie is a series of images of Leticia Roman’s horrified face and her hand turning doorknobs that get her deeper in trouble.

 

The Laughing Woman (Piero Schivazappa, 1969): 1.5/5

Not really a giallo, more like colorful, flirty, torture porn. Unlike the traditional faceless, black gloved killer, here we have a gabby blonde guy who captures a woman and keeps her as his slave inside his creepy overly art-designed mansion while mansplaining the philosophical grounds of his misogyny. In the final third she turns the tables, and somehow the movie becomes even more misogynistic.

 

Don’t Torture a Duckling (Lucio Fulci, 1972): 3/5

Overrated as the sixth-highest rated giallo on Letterboxd. Although it does have a who-done-it aspect (never a giallo’s strong suit), this is more of a folk horror. Kids are being murdered, and everyone blames the outsiders— the so-called witch and the so-called slut. Shot in a relatively lurid, gonzo, pop style.

 

All the Colors of the Dark (Sergio Martino, 1972): 3/5

A beautiful brunette is terrorized in her dream and in real life by a man with ultra-blue eyes, who turns out to run a friendly neighborhood satanic sex cult. Relatively colorful, broad, formal, imagistic, and Lynchian. Also the dreamiest of all the giallos I watched, which I think probably accounts for its high standing, although for me, the making-it-up-as-we-go-along mix of dream and reality denudes the movie of tension.

 

Torso (Sergio Martino, 1973): 4/5

Ample gore and some real moments of horror, a couple of terrific suspense sequences in the last third, and tons of nudity. What more can one ask for? Prefigures so much from (my beloved) Halloween, including an injured ankle, ample killer POV, last girl vibes, and closet-hiding. This one’s a winner.

 

What Have They Done to Your Daughters? (Massimo Dallamano, 1974): 3.5/5

A straight-up police procedural hunt, clue by witness by clue, for a guy who has killed a couple of people. A pretty good, long car chase, some blood, some porno flashed briefly, the killer putting witnesses and then the investigators in mortal danger.

 

Tenebrae, rw (Dario Argento, 1982): 4/5

The second-highest rated giallo on Letterboxd, and absolutely there’s style, suspense, and gore in the extreme. Argento simultaneously cranks up the intensity of the Antonioni/Bertolucci artiness as well as the repulsion and violence. I did periodically marvel at my own ability to enjoy this nastiness, but there’s no doubt of the originality of Argento’s vision and moves.

 

 

Michael Haneke Film Fest

I can’t find Haneke’s (poorly received) most recent film, Happy End, which again features Huppert—even on my scary Russian site. I also haven’t seen the American Funny Games because for it to be meaningful, I would have to watch the original again, and therefore hang out in that sadistic world for almost 4 hours, and just no.

 

The Seventh Continent (Michael Haneke, 1989): 3.5/5

Focused largely on a family’s mundane tasks like shopping, eating, getting a car wash, anonymous tasks at work, and the like, with an alien viewpoint: this is what I have observed in humans. Wraps up with an even-slower-motion version of the end of Zabrinski Point. Ultimately, harrowing in the extreme.

 

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (Michael Haneke, 1994): 2.5/5

Has the fragmentary (we were warned), discursiveness of The Seventh Continent, but here the strategy is used to even less emotional purpose. Both films lead up to a massive act of violence, but this one isn’t as horrifying or potentially meaningful.

 

The Castle (Michael Haneke, 1997): 2/5

Circular reasoning, nonsense, bureaucracy, and stasis. But enough about working at USC. (Did you know that Haneke had adapted Kafka? I didn’t.)

 

The Piano Teacher, rw (Michael Haneke, 2001): 5/5

Passionate and frank—and still shocking. A character unraveling to rival Taxi Driver and Bad Lieutenant.

 

Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke, 2003): 2/5

Perhaps not surprisingly, Haneke finds the post-apocalyptic world just has empty, pitiless and meaningless as our own.