Bella likes to break things — in her stiff performance of infancy, limbs flailing in locked form, she finds her joy in smashing plates, slamming piano keys, clapping at God's burp bubble bursting. It's as though from "birth" she is made to disrupt things. Her father, God, is a doctor of anatomy, whose mission is to understand how things work, and then discover the new ways they work, stitching animals together like Dr. Moreau. He's referred to as "dog-faced," deformed…

When Kyon first met Haruhi, it was with a stand-offish aggression in both parties that made them destined to be loners — him a reserved and cowardly young man, and her a buoyantly outgoing outsider. Haruhi announced, at the beginning of the school year, that she would not pay attention to anyone normal; and so her friendship with the most normal people began.

Haruhi Suzumiya as a franchise has often been dismissed as a pandering bit of nerd media, carried…

Castration Movie Anthology i: Traps

What we have of Castration Movie so far is wildly ambitious in its novelistic structure, treating the ugly insecurities of incels and fringe trans people as a cinematic epic, their bodies sprawling out to fill the 2.39 aspect ratio like landscapes without horizons. This low quality digital photography feels like a Brechtian means of distancing the audience, enforcing the barrier between us and the people inside it who feel as though they can't be known.…

There is a germ of an idea here. A fragment of insight. X attempts to mock the form of pseudo-sex-positivity that is only welcoming to young, thin people — these are shallow people who perceive "ugliness" as a horrible state of existence, and feel as though they're above those they find unattractive. I will give Ti West that much.

The problem is that this movie takes that and extends it to being weirdly patronizing about casual sex. It treats sex…