Novelist, screenwriter, and Culture War correspondent Lou Aguilar hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “It’s not that women can’t write good films. It’s that feminists can’t.” Exhibit A: the feminist remake of Jane Austen’s "Sense and Sensibility," whose screenwriter Diana Reid, costume designer Grace Snell, and production designer Francesca Di Mottola are celebrating that it’s “GRITTIER.” The sisters wear unpressed gowns and stained dresses that look like they’ve been “picked up and worn the next day,” reflecting how far they’ve fallen since their father’s death. Their cottage is so small that someone has to give up their room when guests arrive. The feminist screenwriter even ages down Colonel Brandon to make him “less of a father figure” and portrays the Dashwoods as “a bit unconformist, a bit less uptight” and at odds with the conventions of their time. And all the promotional materials make it look like a LESBIAN LOVE STORY! And the ONE MALE cinematographer lights everything by candlelight because, “What those girls were living through was super hard and harsh.” He explains that the darkness makes the audience feel something heavy, so they’ll feel more liberated at the end, and it feels "real,” he says. IN OTHER WORDS, YOU DON’T EVER FEEL GOOD WHILE YOU’RE WATCHING IT. Fun fact: PEOPLE DON’T PAY MONEY TO ESCAPE INTO ENTERTAINMENT JUST TO WATCH MORE MISERY - WE WANT TO BE TRANSPORTED SOMEWHERE BETTER. And the box office reflects that. Google reports that the “grittier, candlelit Focus Features adaptation struggled to pull in large audiences” against its $25 million production cost. Maybe audiences wanted Jane Austen, not another exercise in feminist misery.

Halloween is definitely a Christian or at least a Christianized holiday. For many centuries its core point has been to confront ourselves with the *strangeness* of death, the fact that it seems not only sad but also somehow wrong, uncanny, weird, and unnatural. There’s something essentially misshapen about decay and decomposition. They strike us as interlopers in the natural order, not just as a matter of local evolutionary preference but as a firm-stuck reality of the world as a whole. Life is not supposed to dissipate and break down like this, we feel, and the crawling of the skin at Halloween gives us a visceral encounter with that feeling. The ritual goes like this: we confront the weirdness of death, and then we make light of it. That’s the two-part Christian gesture. It’s informed by the confidence that death really is wrong, awkward, gross, and—finally—impotent. It is an awkward, unwelcome, doomed visitor in our saved world. For what it’s worth, I think the second part of that conviction is what we’re losing. We remember that death is ugly. We no longer believe it is weak. Take away the Christian faith in the afterlife and Halloween stops being jolly, spooky fun. It turns into something genuinely sinister and menacing. If you remember the first part of the story—that death is a horror—but forget the second—that it is conquered—then what used to be a jolly romp of defiance turns into a miserable wail of defeat. I can’t prove this, but I feel that the *spirit* of Halloween decorations has shaded over lately into this darker mood. They seem now to assert, not humanity’s triumphant ability to make light with death, but death’s hideous dominion over humanity. There is less whimsy—less cackling and skeleton-dancing—and more real gore, more ugliness in earnest. You see the same thing in a lot of recent horror movies, where it seems like demons are real but God isn’t. Currently I’m seeing a lot of people come out “against Halloween” as “anti-Christian,” or whatever, which seems imprecise. But I think underneath that they’re reacting to a real fact, which is that the Christian promise has bled out of the Halloween idea, turning it from something pleasantly chilling to something existentially horrifying. That’s my sense anyway.

I Watched The Worst Netflix Woke Slop Ever Made, And I Barely Survived The Experience | Ep. 1861 m.youtube.com/watch?v=9tsDO3…

TRUMP: “New York Times Bestselling Author, Andrew Klavan, has just written a great new book, “Find Me Nowhere.” It’s fantastic. Get it now! President DJT”

I also suggest we're overdue for a political realignment like the early 1990s when Boomers Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich picked the lock Republicans had on the presidency and Democrats had on the House. Who'll do it? Link: washingtonexaminer.com/opini…

‘France stares down the abyss of history.’ My column in @TheFP on the descent of France. thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-f…