Jacob

By Jacob Mertens. Can images invoking a sense of awe bring a man closer to God? If so, then Ang Lee’s Life of Pi could have rested easily as its titular character raged aloud to an unseen deity, watching as lightning struck the ocean, its light spreading through the water […]

By Jacob Mertens. A woman sits on her living room floor, lips parched, transcribing Henry David Thoreau’s Walden by hand. Each time she finishes a page, she folds the paper into a loop on a paper chain and takes a sip of water. Lately, she shares her house with a […]

By Jacob Mertens. For those who love film, there will always be seminal viewings that helped foster that love. And I do not mean watching classics on Blu-Ray or DVD, or even cassette tape, digesting the film long after its vibrant beginnings. I mean seeing a film in its theatrical […]

By Jacob Mertens. Allow me to begin this review with a truism: life is complicated. We are born and we die, and everything we build within that span of time grows lonely with our passing. Without ever being a religious man, I have always held the utmost respect for the […]

  By Jacob Mertens. Several hired thugs stand idle in a parlor holding shotguns and revolvers, while two gentlemen put the final touches on a bill of sale for a slave girl in the adjoining library. The civility they maintain stands in stark contrast to the brooding men waiting just […]

By Jacob Mertens. In history classes, we follow the path of society from one war to the next, from one tragedy to another. Slavery and a civil war bleed into the Holocaust and the assassination of JFK, and so on. Eventually we come to rest on a current climate of […]

By Jacob Mertens. In a town buried in the jungles of Grenada, there stands a small cocoa production facility. Inside, Mott Green tinkers with equipment in a frenetic way that recalls the image of a mad scientist bringing some creation to life. However, what Green brings to life is cocoa. […]

By Jacob Mertens. Many times, a film is most compelling inside that beautiful moment of transport evoked by the flickering lights cast across a white canvas. Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is not one of these films. The auteur’s latest demands a great deal of attention from the audience and […]

By Jacob Mertens. Imagine the breadth of daily life changed by a single important innovation: the ability to travel through time. In order to breathe life into this story, a writer must allow the detail of time travel to slowly distort the world around it as if dropping a pebble […]