I usually lay these links out in roughly chronological order, but I’m instead going to start with my favorite piece of the week for Spectrum Culture. Part of the household agreement made when I took on this fairly time-consuming side gig dictated that I would routinely, though not indiscriminately, request horror films to review. This led to the acquisition of The ABCs of Death, a gimmicky anthology film that never escapes its gimmick. I decided to adopt a modified version of the film’s conceit for my review starting each sentence with each successive letter of the alphabet, from A to Z. I’m pretty pleased that I don’t really call attention to it in the course of the review, at least until the last three sentences make it very clear that’s what’s going on. Best of all, the exercise forced me to write in a different way, thinking through each sentence when I couldn’t rely on starting with simple statements like “The film….” over and over.

Elsewhere, everything was about movies this week for me. I wrote on one of the films that lost to Amour in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Oscars. I also penned the latest entry in our Oeuvre series on Brian De Palma, writing about a dismal comedy that may be his nineteen-eighties low point. I get another turn in the rotation in a couple weeks and it’s going to be a doozy.

Finally, I took care of a couple of the blurbs in our latest List Inconsequential, which is actually the first created under slightly different, hopefully more mindful approach. Inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s claim that he’s going to retire before he starts making subpar work as a “old man filmmaker,” we tallied up great films made by directors over seventy. I got efforts by Stanley Kubrick and Clint Eastwood in the draw.