journal features

movie review - Nightbooks

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kokubunji, 2024.06.09

This is a story about two kids held captive by a witch in the towering apartment building where the boy lives/lived with his parents. He was taken during an attempt at running away, which I think was a clever start. He strikes a deal with the witch to allow him to continue living by sharing his stories with her every night. While attempting an escape, he meets the other prisoner, a girl who seems to have been there a great deal longer.

We enjoyed the story, the setting, the boy's development through the affair, and rather good visuals of the mad-house apartment/labyrinth. The story is not exactly ground-breaking but they put in the effort to make a compelling story. The result was something at the right tone, balancing the lead's perpetual fear with the heroism needed to escape the maze/place down the hall.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)