Now Playing: December 2024

Our December 2024 edition of Now Playing features watchables that transport and fascinate, all from our contributors!

Brooke Randel

I’ve been on a Miyazaki kick as of late. Most recently, I watched Kiki’s Delivery Service. One of the most remarkable elements of that movie is how it plays with pacing, slowing to allow the viewer to take in a pointillistic painting and speeding to chase an enormous doomed dirigible. I love that slowness and breath and speed and terror, when you can really trust a story to take you somewhere new.

Vanessa Blakeslee

I just finished watching Season 2 of the “Ancient Apocalypse” docuseries on Netflix, hosted by journalist Graham Hancock. Hancock travels to ancient sites such as Easter Island and posits that civilization may be a lot older than we currently think - and perhaps there was global civilization during the Ice Age that was destroyed in a cataclysm during the Younger Dryas period, perhaps by a comet. I find his theory plausible, and with the new technology archaeologists are able to use at the ancient sites, more solid evidence points to human civilization being much older than a mere several thousand years. I was just as engrossed as when I would watch Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack back in the 1980s, and the allure of such topics feeds my fiction even today--as you'll see in my short tale about “Patient X” in this month's issue of Split Lip.