I Remember Reading A Post About Fencing Once, And How People Who Are New To Fencing Actually Tend To

I remember reading a post about fencing once, and how people who are new to fencing actually tend to win a lot more bouts, particularly against experienced fencers, than most people would guess. The reason? Because people who are new to fencing haven't learned all the rules yet, and they will make absolutely bonkers, unsafe, and chaotic choices that are just not possible for someone more experienced to predict with any reasonable degree of accuracy. So lots of newbies win a surprising number of bouts, not because they are better at fencing but because they are more chaotic and more likely to make objectively more dangerous choices.

It occurs to me now that this makes for a really wonderful analogy to how Oliver ends up "winning" in Saltburn, when Felix and the Cattons were actually much more experienced and subtle manipulators (to the point that a good chunk of the audience didn't even notice how wildly manipulative the Cattons and Felix especially are), while Oliver is out there making wild impulse decisions and then retroactively pretending there was a plan, probably.

Oliver is the chaotic new guy whose understanding of normal social expectations is so far behind his peers that his behavior winds up being not just hard to predict for most people, but especially hard to predict for the wealthy assholes who have made an art form out of manipulating other people to get whatever they want without giving up anything of value from themselves.

And now I'm going to go roll around some more in my endless reams of delight over this movie and these characters and how wonderful and delightful and absurd every bit of it is. Haters can hate, but this movie continues to be perfect and own my whole heart because of it.

I love soulmates but also this-

sometimes you really just gotta say “that’s not my business” and move on

The thing with statistics - via

In honor of Halloween month, I will be watching a lot of horror movies till the month is over.

Well.

I should probably say "Horror" movies. The primary categories of which are:

A handful of actual, fairly solid genuine horror movies with creepy vibes and not a lot of slasher gore-gore-gore.

Some very solid horror comedies, but an eclectic mix that definitely leaves out many of what most horror buffs would consider horror comedy staples.

A few movies that are technically billed as horror and have many horror elements, but also wind up being honestly kind of sweet comfort movies with happy (or at least happy-ish) endings?

A lot of delightfully weird, low-budget romps (where weird, here, very emphatically does not mean anything resembling 'artsy') that only classify as horror in the most technical of senses, such as "Slotherhouse" and "Aaah! Zombies!!" (the first of which is about an animal trafficked sloth murdering its way through a sorority house; and the second of which has a level of effort put into its creation that I think can be best described as, "exactly the amount up to which the people involved were still having fun, and absolutely not one single iota of effort more," which in the case of this movie was also objectively the correct amount of effort).

American Psycho II, which I feel like deserves its own category as a movie that had literally nothing to do with American Psycho, had been fully filmed and was basically on final edits, when it was forced to add a few new scenes and a handful of voiceovers to make it (very vaguely) related to American Psycho for entirely marketing purposes, and then proceeded to absolutely bomb in reviews because it was billed as a sequel but actually has literally 0% of anything to do with the movie it was billed as a sequel to for 100% nonsense publicity reasons. It also features Bill Shatner at his post-Star Trek Bill Shatner-y best, Mila Kunis carrying most of the movie as pretty much the only cast member capable of acting, and a plot that only barely makes sense sometimes, but still makes me laugh in delight every time. Really, the only thing that even remotely justifies this movie's attempt to bill itself as an American Psycho sequel is that otherwise, I might never have encountered it, and that would frankly be a tragedy.

And it occurs to me that if I happen to have any followers who have always vaguely wanted to participate in Halloween Month Movie watchings but also have super weird and often nonsensically specific taste in horror or horror-adjacent movies like I do, I would be totally down to offer personal recommendations from any and all of these categories (with or without plot summaries, insofar as there exists a plot to be summarized).

My credentials are: I love stories, and as a consequence I have consumed a lot of stories over my 3+ decades of life so far; I have extremely random taste that covers the whole range from "matches up with popular expectations" to "I think this movie is genuinely brilliant and do not get why so many people don't like it" to "bad"; and finally I am very good at finding extremely esoteric offerings + having a range of very typical to very very atypical takes on more well known offerings, too.