"Early Wittgenstein or Late Wittgenstein?" is the "Team Edward or Team Jacob?" of the philosophy world. Every philosopher has an opinion on which of the two Wittgensteins is better. His career is bisected into two, with each half represented by a major publication: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on one side and the Philosophical Investigations on the other. They're both very weird texts but they're weird in different ways.

The Tractatus of the early Wittgenstein is a highly-structured work of logic and…

Universal Horror movies are much richer than I had expected. I had been looking forward to iconic imagery, impressive but antiquated special effects, campy acting, and fun chills and adventure. But they are deep texts. Every time I sit down to write about one, I discover that there is so much to think about and say. This happened with The Wolf Man especially: I didn't care much for it at first, but I ended up writing three versions of a…

I enjoyed this a lot more than the previous movie. Instead of a bunch of vignettes, this is a single time travel romcom (one of my favorite subgenres).

A lot of the funny inventions from the earlier movie return to cause plot mayhem. There are so many time fuckery gadgets here. Doraemon wields:

📌 a time machine
📌 a TV that lets you watch different time periods
📌 a handkerchief that can age or de-age anything beneath it
📌 a…

I've said before that I am trying to watch every movie that features an AI character or robot. That's obviously not serious, but hey, you can try to do impossible things. You can try to push over a wall that you know you can't push over. For exercise, for instance.

The thing is: I've tried making a completely inclusive list of every movie with an AI or robot in it... and the task is a lot more approachable that you…

I want to write about a topic that reviewers here often mention in ing but tend not to discuss in detail. Does the family in Sweetie hold a dark secret of incest?

Let me throw a spotlight on a thought-provoking take I came across in a Letter to the Editor from a 1990 issue of the Chicago Reader (the Letterboxd of its time, I guess). This is by Paola Lortie:

Sweetie’s “madness” and pain come from somewhere, are rooted in…

This movie is not a romance. It has some of the superficial overtones of a romance, but the love story here is just a part of the plot; it does not inspire any empathetic engagement or vicarious lust. The feel of the love story is best captured by that shot of George's dirty fingernail slowly creeping toward pale flesh visible through a hole in Ada's leggings. Maybe that slowly stalking finger is sexy for George, but for us, it's gross…