I've been trying to balance my film-viewing with my work and making time for more literary fiction. I recently read The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. It's an upsetting book, but I appreciated that it doesn't seem like it's trying to go out of its way to shock you. It helped me understand why I got that sense from Alex Garland's Men . The Sparrow is a blunt instrument, but it's horror arises from an underlying, functional world. It also dwells a great deal on the aftermath. The above picture is from the 1943 adaptation of Ordet . Naturally, I was curious about it because of Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1955 adaptation. I was surprised to learn how much Dreyer cut from Kaj Munk's play. The Counselor (2013) I saw this more as a Cormac McCarthy movie than a Ridley Scott movie. The outline of the story is quite similar to that of No Country for Old Men : a capable but naive man tries to illicitly enrich himself by stepping outside his ...
"We are in the world, not against it." - Ursula K. Le Guin