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Because The Odyssey is pretty uncontroversially the foundational text of Western civilization, it’s natural that it ends up being everybody’s text - and that any interpretation of it, whether it’s a translation, a modernist novel, an Arthur episode, or a major Hollywood epic, is going to feel personal. It’s a story about every-thing, so anyone who tries is going to end up making it about *their* thing. This goes for artistic reinterpretation as well as critical interpretations of those reinterpretations. You stare into the Charybdis of the universal and it’s hard not to end up in your own Scylla’s mouth.

Artists/critics with coherent ideas can successfully escape the almost certain death of this dilemma. You’re probably going to fail, but at least you can dig into an idea and run with it - a single episode in isolation, an application to a new setting, an altered storyline that plays its tension against the canon to maximize new themes. Even James Joyce’s “book of everything” dialed in on one day, one city, one life event to demonstrate how the universal is present in the inane. The beauty of interpreting The Odyssey is that pretty much anything goes. Homer tells the simplest story possible (guy goes to work and comes back), lets it spiral in a million different directions, and then hands it over to his listeners (and eventually, readers) to do whatever they like with it for the next three millennia. The only thing you shouldn’t do is all of it. The hubris of doing all of it is one of the many things the story is about.12

Christopher Nolan isn’t a greatest-mind-of-his-generation hubristic type, and overambition doesn’t wear charmingly on him they way it might a Welles, a Coppola, or a Joyce. He’s also not an artist with coherent ideas, focus, or the capacity to develop themes. This is rude of me to suggest and there are a lot of people who hard disagree with me, I’m sorry, I regret writing it. But I comfortably maintain that none of Nolan’s movies are built around interesting ideas, and that all of them disguise this fundamental absence with choppy editing, incomprehensible sound mixing, and disorganized timelines whose deliberate confusion-making convinces people that something is happening. It’s childish to walk out of a work of contemporary art complaining that it doesn’t make sense and therefore the artist must be full of shit, but this isn’t that, an AMC is not the Dia Beacon. No one leaves a Christopher Nolan movie feeling decentered. Instead you feel like something amazing just happened because the music cues say it did, but actually at the core is an empty narrative that is only made to feel compelling because it’s been told in a way that’s contrary to actual lived experience. Every Nolan movie could be edited into standard chronological order, and all of them would be terrible if you did, because then it would be obvious that there’s no actual tension, nothing actually being said. Nolan built his gravitas on a handful of legitimately astonishing set pieces surrounded by obscurantism and middlebrow themes. If you like set pieces, puzzles, and contemporary literary fiction, then this probably works for you and that’s fine. Christopher Nolan isn’t for dumb people, he’s for normal people, which is everybody sometimes, including smart people. Would anyone thinking about film in a serious way say that a single Nolan movie is better than, I don’t know, Persona? No, but sometimes you want to take a hack at translating Linear A and sometimes you want to do a crossword puzzle. Christopher Nolan makes Thursday NYT crossword puzzles.3

Or at least he used to. The Odyssey, like Oppenheimer, is a low-difficulty Sunday, not actually harder than any other day of the week, just 35 frames bigger. Sunday puzzles are usually the worst of the week because size, when you’re dealing with something that is ultimately without substance, doesn’t make things better - it just means that the substancelessness exceeds the capacity of the construction. Like a Sunday puzzlemaker, Nolan constructs his latest puzzle around a central theme - the loss of civility and the decline of Western civilization - and fills in the gaps with ALOEs and ACAIs and ETAs and ORAs, a bunch of little ideas that fill the space necessary for the soundtrack swell but hardly amount to anything meaningful.

Some of those fillers are narrative, others artistic. One of the latter is the supposed 100% use of IMAX cameras, which Nolan engineered to be silent and small in order to work like handhelds. This is a remarkable technical feat, but one that serves - what? I believe in film as a superior capture medium, I believe in the use of ponderous cameras and the subtle effects they have on the process of moviemaking, I even think it would have been cool if Nolan had said I don’t care, let’s just release this in the forty theaters that can show it and if you can’t see it well, whatever, who said film had to be a populist medium? But how does this camera materially unite with the film that it’s creating? What does IMAX say about The Odyssey other than this story is Very Big? Why ultimately does anyone give such a shit about a 1.43:1 aspect ratio?4

The same goes for casting. There are a million name-brand actors onscreen, a few of whom I was actually able to recognize. All of them are in different movies. Tom Holland is confused why the Avengers wear togas now. Zendaya is confused why she’s being asked to stare pensively into the camera without blue color contacts. Anne Hathaway is in a high school production of Antigone. Charlize Theron is in a perfume ad. Benny Safdie is in a WWE intro. Robert Pattinson is doing something else and we should probably just let him live. And Matt Damon is at the center doing nothing at all, which is all he’s ever done. I imagine filming a dialogue scene would reveal these incongruities, but it’s so rare that a shot of someone saying something is followed by someone in the same room responding to them that it’s not surprising it all got lost.

Everything in this movie is lost. That could have been an interesting theme to explore, the Odyssey is about a guy who gets lost, what if my cinematography, casting, and editing decisions reflected that? Instead Nolan makes it about the contrast between hospitality and brutality with the Trojan horse as his core image, I guess a fine theme to focus on but also the Trojan Horse is not actually in The Odyssey, so why did you make this movie?

There’s so much to work with here, and somehow Nolan wastes it. The Odyssey is a text with lines of staggering beauty like this encounter between salt-scummed Odysseus and teenage savior Nausicaa:

Wonder takes me as I look on you. / Yet in Delos once I saw such a thing, by Apollo’s altar. / I saw the stalk of a young palm shooting up. I had gone there / once, and with a following of a great many people, / on that journey which was to mean hard suffering for me. / And as, when I looked upon that tree, my heart admired it / long, since such a tree had never yet sprung from the earth, so / now, lady, I admire and wonder, and am terribly / afraid to clasp you by the knees.5

There was no part of me that expected the Phaeacian sequence to make the cut, and I knew all the quiet moments would be covered up by Hans Zimmer bwamps. But Homer’s text also contains lines like this:

At the same time, noble Odysseus / shot an arrow, and struck him in the chest, by the nipple, / and the speeding arrow fixed in his liver, and his sword tumbled / out of his hand on the floor, as he, sprawling over the table.

and this:

The floor was smoking / with blood, and the horrible cries rose up as their heads were broken.

Some of the most visceral gore ever written, often in hideous anatomical detail. And though Nolan spends as much time as Homer on Odysseus’s climactic slaughter, his version is a dimly lit fight without a hint of splatter, squelch, crack, or goo. I don’t think there are even any nipples.

None of the beauty, none of the quiet, none of the poetry, not even any of the guts.6 A sexless, bloodless Odyssey isn’t really an Odyssey at all. That’s not exactly true, because what’s left in Homer’s text after you remove the muses and the material is conversation, which, if you want my interpretation, is what the story is actually about. This is a poem about chatting and hanging out. It starts with a meta-textual call to sing and it ends with a diagetic conversation in bed. In between is basically nothing but transcripts of conversations - praises, oaths, recollections, visions, politicking, talk talk talk talk talk. But Christopher Nolan has always been fundamentally uninterested in the way that human beings speak to one another. If there’s one thing he truly can’t do, it’s recreate the audiovisual experience of a conversation.

So of course he couldn’t make my Odyssey, and of course I never expected him to do it. We just aren’t into the same stuff, I can deal with that. But when you’re adapting a text that includes pretty much everything there is to say about humans in the world, you might try to make a film that addresses something about humans in the world. Instead, for all his adoration of analog tech, Nolan’s films are some of our dullest reflections of digital-era alienation - simulacra of interaction, space, and time, decontextualized and mathematically recreated, hinting at some form of connection but obfuscating via false complexity an embarrassment that, at the heart of it all, there’s nothing really there.

This is a mean-spirited review of a movie that should be making me happy - a large-scale, analog production starring many people I like based on a text I care about, transformed into a summer event that is trouncing Minions, live-action Disney remakes, and sequels to James Gunn movies. I’ve been having a wonderful summer and am really not about putting negativity into the world right now, especially regarding something that is allowing a lot of very fine people on both sides to have a nice time.

Clearly, I’m acting out about something. Which is that I am exhausted by the way that the internet thinks, talks, and writes about movies, and I am sick and sort of embarrassed by my participation in it. When I started this newsletter my motivations were 1., create a regular writing practice that people would be interested in reading; 2. create a portfolio to convince Condé Nast to hire me as their first ever part-time employee with health insurance, 3. put something with some intellectual integrity onto an internet that always already killed itself through striving, echo-chamber groupthink, and phony claims at expertise. My private commitment at the beginning of this newsletter was to never write about something as if I knew what I was talking about unless I actually did - no references to movies or things I hadn’t read, no looking things up on Wikipedia as I was writing to fill in elisions/caesuras with quick facts, and - most importantly - no repetition of the inherently commercial claims of mainstream film criticism, which has always been a wing of the studio system whether the writer realizes it or not, a way to take people with some degree of intellectual integrity and transform them into parrots for preferred studio stances in exchange for clout and access. I’ve since broken all of those rules. The worst was when I wrote a review of Project Hail Mary that said, a. this movie is good (I don’t really like it), b. it’s cool that this movie is financially successful (why should I care?), c. Ryan Gosling has a bad face lift (I just heard some people say that, I have no idea what Ryan Gosling’s face looks like), d. that Ryan Gosling has finally become a viable leading man (something he’s been for years, he’s a household name and the star of multiple Best Picture nominees). This last take was the one that embarrasses me most and one that I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night thinking about. It’s clearly a line from Ryan Gosling’s camp that has been fed into the ether, repeated by dozens of film critics, trade analysts, and podcasters, and eventually said so often that people with literally no skin in the game are repeating it just because it seems like its the way to be in the know. At least that’s why I said it.

This is garbage criticism, just as market analysis is garbage criticism, just as listing all the movies you’ve seen that sort of remind you of the movie you’re talking about is garbage criticism. This is sort of a targeted list of sins, if you pay attention to the world of film criticism you might know what podcasting network I’m going after. But I don’t even know why I think competitively about these things, I will never be on a podcast, I’m inarticulate and can’t pronounce the letter L.

In many ways the obligation to write about The Odyssey is the embodiment of the exact form of criticism that pisses me off. I am fundamentally uncurious about this movie and am only writing about it because it’s the number-one film event of the year, and if I didn’t write about it I would be passing up an obvious opportunity to increase traffic/readership. But I don’t think the spectacle is interesting, I don’t have any opinions about IMAX because we haven’t had one in Minnesota since the one at the zoo closed when I was like fourteen. I don’t think Christopher Nolan is interesting for all the reasons I listed above. I’m not interested in what he has to say, how he makes movies, or what they have to do with our culture. I am mildly interested in Oscars and box office numbers but only in a horse-race sense, and horse racing as all movies that feature it will tell you is unconscionably depraved.

This is a lousy review and an uninteresting post that centers on my artistic journey instead of Christopher Nolan’s, which is great if you care about me but not if you came here to read about movies. But this review will most likely get more reads than average, so I will hijack it in hopes that at least some of the people who click on it will read to the end. The point of this newsletter was to write about things that I found interesting in hope that someone else might find them interesting. Along the way it sort of became about trying to get a job. I’ve realized more and more that I already have a very good job and that I am putting all of my creative time into getting a worse one, and that is “fukkin stupid.”7

I would normally keep all this introspection to myself. But the reason you should care is that you perhaps subscribed to this newsletter with certain expectations, and I am going to change them on you now, and that deserves an explanation. The most major one is - I am shifting down from posting weekly to posting every other week. It should probably have been obvious that this was coming as I’ve been skipping off regularly for a few months, but now I’m making it official. If you are a paid subscriber who joined based on the expectation that you were going to get 50-ish newsletters a year, I will be far from offended if you unsubscribe now. If you don’t, you’ll still get 25-ish a year, which honestly seems like a pretty good deal but who am I to say.

Before you drop me though - in the next couple months I am going to start incorporating some other stuff that I’m working on into the BD Tuthill Online Experience. Some of it will be directly related to *life is disappointing* and cinema, some of it less so. I’m going to figure out how to do this in a way that is not going to flood anyone’s inbox with weird crap. It is maybe going to involve learning some HTML. It is definitely going to involve a new URL. It will hopefully require zero effort from you. I think it will be worth it and I think you’ll probably think that it’s cool, but it’s also might not be what you signed up for and I want to prepare you for that.

So that’s what’s up. I promise I will not continue to be this self-indulgent with my word count, this is a one-time outburst I swear. I have some things that I think are actually cool and insightful brewing in the batter’s box. I’m grateful to the handful of people who I’ve talked to this summer that got me thinking about all this. If you’re reading this, I hope you know who you are. Good ideas come from unexpected places and aren’t always explicitly stated. Getting out of town once every few years is good for you.

And also some very equal gratitude, hopefully not for the first time and certainly not for the last, to everyone, from home and otherwise, who has read and supported this newsletter from the beginning. And especially to the people who told me to start it in the first place. I appreciate you all, I’m grateful for your positive feedback, and I genuinely respect your inability to hit a like button. I’m not being passive aggressive, like buttons are fake. You could hit it though, it’s really easy. It might increase my clout.

Thanks, seriously, for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider going to therapy. Or liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!), and (un-)subscribing. Unsubscribing will get you a cleaner inbox. Subscribing going forward will get you . . . something, I’m not sure what, stay tuned. I’ll see you again in TWO weeks.

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I wanted to go to a midnight showing of Gummo at the Grandview before an early morning flight to Japan last week but Florine said absolutely not. To get back at her I went to the Twin Cities opening of Maddie’s Secret while she dealt with some last-minute logistics that included paying a guy to clean up the dead squirrel she found in our attic. This was unfair and I regret it. I can’t imagine a film more crafted to her exact taste - Kate Berlant and John Early star in a dramedy about food influencers with a drag performance at its core - and it was cruel that I got to see it while she dealt with a flat tire, an after-hours work meeting, last-minute flight logistics, and the squirrel thing. So this one goes out to FLORINE, the most beautiful woman in the world and the only reason I survived my flight and am currently alive and well in the country of JAPAN.

Gummo at the Grandview might have been the more appropriate cinematic experience for Our Nation’s quarter-millennial, but Maddie’s Secret hits on a different side of failed-state America. The internet-addled hellscape of L.A. food culture isn’t quite as depraved as Harmony Korrine’s Xenia, Ohio, but John Early’s world isn’t all that much less nauseating. He finds a similar beauty in the grotesque, mostly revealed through alternatingly mordant humor and just-barely irony-tinged sweetness. It’s hard at times to know what’s a joke and what’s genuine, whether he’s making fun of his characters or deeply in love with them. Actually what am I talking about, it’s not unclear at all. There’s no need for separation between these things. Life is very stupid and life is very poignant, I hate my friends and also I love them dearly. Filming yourself making/eating food is pathetic and also captures of one of the few universally acknowledged joys in life. Bulimia is a serious mental health issue that real people deal with but also kind of funny. Lifetime-style movies are cringey but also make people cry. Can you deal with this liminality? Probably, you’re reading about movies on the internet. Edgelord is over, sentimentality is over. Subversion and its opposite, romanticism, are over. We live in a world where everything is dumb and beautiful at the same time and there’s no need to differentiate one from the other. You can call this nihilism or you can call this denial or you can just call it what it is, materialism in a world that is too aware of itself to not acknowledge its discordant possibilities.

Not unlike Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, Boys Go To Jupiter, this year’s Youtuber blockbusters, or even Blue Heron, much of what works about Maddie’s Secret comes from the audience’s familiarity with the people making the movie. The content is great on its own, but parasocial intimacy with the creators is half the experience. What I found particularly lovely about Maddie’s Secret is that we get to watch people primarily known for conversation podcasting actually making something. I spend a lot of time feeling disgusted that podcasts exist and that people get paid to do nothing but chat with their fake friends about inane bullshit, but when I step back from that disgust I’m reminded that all these people are artists who I’m sure would love to be spending their lives making actual art. Our culture is more willing to spend money on moronic chatter than beautiful things that require effort, and wasting your life away in a podcast studio is just a stupid day job, the same way that Nathaniel Hawthorne worked as a customs agent or whatever.

So it’s lovely to see John Early throwing his heart into lighting, hair, and make-up, or Kate Berlant playing a character instead of yammering about face washes. These people are funny and smart and deserve to put their hearts into things they care about. Does Maddie’s Secret make any sense to someone who has never listened to POOG? Is it 10x funnier if you spend your life in LA/NY media, literally or vicariously? Probably yes to both, but it’s also funny for normal, vaguely media-aware people too. Parasociality is a parallel element of art that winds in and out of audience awareness, and we don’t know enough about it to write about it in a coherent way. All I can say for sure is that it’s become a fascinating component of how we experience contemporary films.

And especially film debuts. Maddie’s Secret is yet another 2026 first film that has baked into it an assumption that the audience sort of knows what’s going on with the people who made it. Blue Heron does something magisterial with this - Maddie’s Secret less so, but John Early as creator/friend/character is still part of the fabric of the film. It’s part of an ongoing shift in the art/artist relationship that goes without saying for anyone under 25, is maybe incomprehensible to anyone over 45, and remains the topic of enduring fascination for all the millennial-esque people in between. How exciting that we get to live through and participate in a significant shift in art and its meaning! Maybe this is not actually happening and more likely you don’t care that much. If that’s the case whatever, this movie is funny, go see it.

I’m writing this on David Leitch’s BULLET TRAIN from Tokyo to Kyoto, and though it’s indescribable how much better than Amtrak the Shinkansen is, I have to say it’s making me kind of sick. Some things work just too well. Overall though I am really enjoying the train life in this country, along with basically literally everything else. I didn’t do study abroad and missed the age-appropriate opportunity to fawn over the ways travel opens one’s mind to new ways of living, but after a week in Tokyo I’ve realized it’s true, America is a trash country. I can’t speak for actual standards of living, but I don’t understand why anyone would come from Japan to the United States on vacation. Especially for shopping. Don’t believe the hype, guys. You have it so much better. Everything we sell is garbage, and it’s not even cheap.

As I sometimes do when I’m struggling for content, and in celebration of the current exchange rate, here is the official *life is disappointing* retail guide to Tokyo.

Hario V60 filters (Union Coffee, Kappabashi-dori). These are like 2 dollars a pack in Tokyo. I got 500.

Doshisha Gorilla Fan (Lawson convenience store, Asakusa). Portable fans are one of the silliest additions to summer 2026, but this one is extremely powerful and basically a normal house fan that fits in your suitcase. I am regularly appalled by the lack of fans available at hotels and Air Bed and Breakfasts and will never travel without this again. It came with a bonus gorilla charm who is making a loser sign with his hand. That’s you if you don’t have this item.

Kakimori Frost fine point pen and daruma ink (Kakimori Ink Stand, Kuramae). Surely this is the best stationary store on the planet. I got a fountain pen, five matching ballpoint pens, and a bottle of house-made red ink. I had to stop before delving paper section because I think it would have destroyed me. If it gets better than this I don’t want to know about it.

Korg Volca Beats (Five G Music Technology, Harajuku). At the top of Takeshita Street and four stories up is a dumpy store where anyone able to find it is invited to play with the best electronic music machines in the universe. I’m a beginner in this field and was there to pick up an entry level drum machine, but the store is a maze that opens up with literal toys and ends with a collection of beautifully restored Roland TR series synthesizers. The sound of freaks from around the world playing through the the history of electronic music all at the same time is a beautiful thing.

My Bloody Valentine x Andrew Weatherall “Glider" E.P.” remixes (Disk Union, Shinjuku). Found it between Like A Virgin and All The Right Reasons in the “~80s Rock/Pop” section. I cried.

You should not take my Japanese travel advice, shiranai, watashi wa neko desu. But I have had a variety of mildly interesting cinema-adjacent experiences over here that I’ll share next week. I wish I could go see The Odyssey this week but it doesn’t get here until October. I’ll have plenty to report on that topic when I’m back in North America. I never thought I’d say this but that will be far too soon.

Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. I’ll be back next week with some grab bag travel items. After that I’ll be back to normal movie content with what will surely be the cinema event of the century.

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What a surprisingly great six months at the movies. I have nothing better in the way of a hook than that, sorry. I’m coming off one trip and getting ready for another one and have a bucket of loose ends to dump across this midyear report.There’s plenty to talk about and even more to look forward to, but for now here’s winter/spring 2026 reported in four ways: the state of MOVIES ABOUT STEALING, updates on movies I missed, first-half recommendations, and finally some predictions for the rest of the summer season.

We’ve been blessed? by quite a few MOVIES ABOUT STEALING this year. Starting with what I haven’t seen, we’ve the got Damon/Affleck Netflix slop The Rip, the latest non-existent Guy Ritchie movie In the Grey, the screen-life crypto-heist thriller LifeHack, and I swear something else that I noticed and said “huh they made that?” and then immediately forgot about it. All of these seem to be varying degrees of bad and I don’t make enough money writing this newsletter to see them. Thankfully we also got three watchable theatrical releases this spring about three classic forms of theft that hit on how a director can exceed, meet, or fail to meet the basic expectations of a heist film.

LARCENY. The techniques of stealing, or really the laws of reality in general, don’t get much representation in Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters. Instead we replace materialism with ethics, which is an odd move for an openly Marxist film, but who am I to gatekeep the Left. Instead of expounding on the methods of expropriation, Riley goes straight to the mechanics of dialectical materialism and deconstruction. He gets them both wrong and never gives us any instructions on how to shoplift, but he does pull off a pretty fun time. I knew this would essentially be a propaganda film going in, and I was sort of expecting an evolution from fuck-’em-over, I-get-mine anarcho-libertarianism to organized labor solidarity. It gets there, sort of. Kiki Palmer et al are shoplifters/resellers whose interrogation of the fast-fashion supply chain eventually puts them into contact with (St. Paul’s finest!) Poppy Liu, a Chinese factory worker who has somewhat inexplicably come into possession of a machine that manipulates reality based on the principles of Marxist dialectics sort of. Accelerated by the machine and efficient plotting, Boosters evolves from a shoplifting romp to something more revolutionary, not via a particularly rigorous path but through one that’s more or less satisfying.

Invoking theory and doing it wrong annoys me, but the more serious knock I’d put on Boosters’s theory of revolution is that it skips the hard part in favor of fantasy. A movie that acknowledges the necessity of class struggle needs to be grounded in material reality, and when you skip the labor - and all the setbacks that accompany that labor - and just jump to the general strike, it’s sort of like getting a feast without doing any of the cooking. Organized labor means organized *labor* - every bit as much work as wage labor but reordered toward solidarity, transformation, and a better future. It’s a dodge of the spirit of revolutionary organizing - and also the spirit of the heist movie - to skip over the material details and get right to the results. I realize I am arguing about realism in a film that features a demon that sucks women’s souls out of their vaginas, but I’m not the one who played the dialectical materialism card at the center of my film’s mechanics.

That said, I appreciate that Boosters smashes us over the head with its themes instead of pretending that subtlety matters in the struggle. I like the hammer that Boots is hitting me with, and more importantly I think he wants to hand it to me and start smashing someone else. The question by which all Marxist propaganda has to be judged is: does this work have revolutionary potential? I don’t think Boosters will get anyone out onto the streets, but if it gets a few more retail workers to start reconsidering their economic situations and talking in their too-short lunch breaks about what it might be like to change them, then I think the box gets checked.

BURGLARY. I’m much more suspicious of the politics of Daniel Roher, a documentarian whose most recent contribution to the world of cinema is this winter’s The AI Doc, a film in which Roher sits down with Sam Altman and reportedly walks away saying “he seems kinda chill.“ But it would be silly to rate the success of thrillers by their directors’ politics and general decency, so I was willing to enter Tuner with an open mind, especially after a ringing endorsement from politically awesome and super-decent guy Paul Schrader. Roher sets up but immediately undermines an eat-the-rich narrative and suggests a subplot about anti-Israeli racism I don’t really want to interrogate, but thankfully the only overtly reactionary aspect of Tuner is its plot. This is a straight-down-the-middle, decent-guy-accidentally-gets-in-over-his-head-because-of-his-secret-gift heist movie. It hits every beat you’d expect it to hit: Dustin Hoffman as charming Jewish Uncle character, Tovah Feldshuh as tilted-head “what are you up to” Aunt May, Havana Rose Liu as oblivious but skeptical girlfriend, Leo Woodall as hyper-talented dope with basically the same affliction as Ansel Egbart in Baby Driver. Roher refuses to pass up a crime-movie story beat, and at no point do you ever worry that maybe you’re going to veer into something unfamiliar.

Which doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good time. This isn’t a smart or politically good or even particularly essential heist movie. But is a normal and alive movie that creates tension, maintains bits, and looks decent. It never gets boring, it never gets unbearably stupid, and it ends on a cute punchline. This is the bar, and now that movies are alive and well again I think don’t think we have to make too much hay of that. Watch it on a rainy day and be thankful that Roher is making this instead of ads for Anthropic.

ROBBERY. Right on the other side of the bar is Carolina Caroline, the latest film by Adam Rehmeier, who broke onto the scene with the torture-porn film The Bunny Game, a movie that is illegal in England, and Dinner in America, a Napoleon Dynamite meets Gummo romcom that I wish were illegal everywhere. Caroline Carolina is his grown-up movie, and growing up for this kind of guy is composing a humorless Bonnie and Clyde movie set in the Recession-porn South and shot on cheap cameras like a 2000s country music video.

You need so much more than the Paper Moon change trick, a shiny muscle car, red lipstick, and a Townes Van Zandt drop to make a successful bandit movie. First of all, either compelling characters or an interesting methodology for stealing - preferably both, but it’s tough out there. Samara Weaving is pretty and Kyle Gallner is the sort of dirtbag that some people are charmed by, but Rehmeier’s script gives them less than nothing to work with. They have exactly one trick for robbing banks which I’m hesitant to spoil but it’s Samara Weaving wearing a wig. There’s a scene where she meets her absentee mother at a honky tonk bar and cries. There’s also a scene that is almost shot-for-shot with a scene from the The Bride!. Surely there’s no better sign that you’re playing with dogshit than unintentionally recreating scenes from The Bride!.

I found this movie to be a regrettable watch when I saw it at MSPIFF in April and my antipathy for it has only grown over the past couple months. I thought I was going to forget about it but instead it’s metastasized into a core example of what a heist movie should not be. You just shouldn’t be relieved that it’s finally over when your protagonist goes down in a rain of bullets. Sorry for spoiling it but you’ve already knew it was coming.

Some quick thoughts on three movies I missed this year:

Kyle Balda, THE SHEEP DETECTIVES. Everybody learned the term “four-quadrant blockbuster” this year, but The Sheep Detective hits at least eight, including the obnoxious “don’t put me in a quadrant” quadrant that some people I know like to occupy. If for some reason there was ever an event that brought together my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, their children (boys and girls, ages 6 to 21), Florine’s parents, Florine’s sister, her husband, and probably all of our respective aunts, uncles, cousins, and dead grandparents, I think this is the only thing on earth that would successful make everyone happy other than maybe ice cream.

If you’re mildly Anglophilic and don’t hate animals then this movie will probably work. I don’t think it’s anywhere near the best movie of the year or even exceptionally great, but there’s something to be said for the breadth of appeal that Kyle Balda has achieved with this nonsense premise. I am about as easy a mark as there is so it won’t be interesting to note the points in this film that made me cry, but I’ve received eyewitness reports of the wiping of significantly more impermeable tear ducts that have not been breached since 1999 during the denouement of October Sky. If you accept cinema as a commercial art form then movies like this are an essential piece of that puzzle. The fact that it’s quietly continuing to make money in theaters months after its release speaks to a certain kind of cultural necessity. It’s still playing at the St. Paul Highland (and also on Prime).

Sam Raimi, SEND HELP. This came out at the height of mischief in Minneapolis and I missed it in theaters. I finally got to it last week - quite bad! “What, you don’t like Sam Raimi?” is the response you get when you put this sort of dangerous perspective out on the internet and indicates a crisis of auteur theory. I do like Sam Raimi, really a lot, and I think this movie, like his last three or four, is Not Good. Hokiness, gore, and Bruce Campbell Easter eggs aren’t what made his early films great - humanity and psychotic cinematography were present too. To call this hack #MeToo script and ugly computer-rendering a return to form is insulting to the form. I found most of this film frustrating, but the peak for me is a particularly stupid sequence in which Rachel McAdams slaughters a CGI boar. Evil Dead levels of blood start gushing from the boar’s orifices, but all of it is rendered in Kool-Aid-ad computer goop until it hits McAdam’s face and becomes the real fake-blood deal. The switch from slop, 21st-century definition, to slop, 20th-century definition, only serves to remind me that once upon a time Sam Raimi was the kind of guy who stuck a remote-controlled hand up his best friend’s sleeve and forced him to punch himself in the face with it. I don’t think we’re going back. It’s on Hulu if you want to see it.

CHARLI XCX DOUBLE FEATURE. Charli obviously has as calculated an appearance as any other pop star, but it’s cool that her approach involves a complete lack of concern for angles, skin care, or eyebrow maintenance. It’s great to see someone intent on world domination willing to be a normal mid-30s slob. I liked Pete Ohs’s very small Erupcja, a movie about friendship and bad decisions set in “the most romantic city in the world” Warsaw, a bit better than Aidan Zamiri’s tour mockumentary The Moment. But both do a nice job of establishing Charli’s post-brat career as an artist with good taste and an interest in indie collaboration. Her self-awareness must be infectious, and the highlight of both films is a conversation with Kylie Jenner outside an elite Ibiza (“eye-beeth-a”) facial clinic in which both women lay out the bullshit of what they do for a living without a wink at the camera. This is the only sort of pop stardom that should exist in SS26. Erupcja is on VOD (including Letterboxd’s new Video Store) and The Moment is on HBO Go.

Emerald Fennell, “WUTHERING HEIGHTS.” Berit requested a minute-by-minute psychosomatic report on my theatrical experience of this movie a few months ago. Unfortunately I didn’t get to it in time and had to watch it at home (you can too, on HBO Go). Here are my notes:

0:30: concerned about volume (was listening to Lords of Acid all day and feeling self-conscious about what the neighbors might think)

2:00: generally annoyed

10:00: frustration re: bad reading pedagogy

14:00: yawned

16:00: fidgety

17:00: eyeroll upon first Margot Robie appearance

18:00: thinking about drum machines, forgot about movie

21:00: audible disgust

24:00: wishing I were drunk

25:00: wanting to text someone about how bad Margot Robie is

28:00: oddly compelled by Romeo and Juliet summary

31:00: thinking about how people describe cleavage in writing

36:00: headache

38:00: yuck

43:00: bored

46:00: eating pasta out of boredom

49:00: thinking about how there is more than an hour left

51:00: eyes closed for two seconds

52:00: paused to talk to Florine for 20 minutes

53:00: yuck

53.5:00: wtf

1:10:00: Jacob Elordi is cool

1:17:00: swing making me queasy

1:22:00: sleepy

1:26:00: falling asleep

1:29:00: notes say I was interested, don’t remember why

?:??:??: fell asleep

1:36:00: loud noise woke me up

?:??:?? fell fully asleep

2:10:00: woke up confused

2:14:00: (credits): informed by Florine that Cathy died

Here are five recommendations if you haven’t seen any movies this year and want to get in on the cultural sensation that’s sweeping the nation:

FOR A LIFE-AFFIRMING GREAT TIME: Matt Johnson, NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE. It’s very hard to convince anyone that this is literally in no way about the band Nirvana, grunge music, or really music in general. It’s better to pitch it as a remake of Back To the Future, but set in the real world where pulling off stunts is extraordinarily difficult and mostly results in people looking at you like you’re an idiot. It attempts to bring into real life all of the nonsense that drives the plot of an action-adventure movie and ends up making it all the more extraordinary. It’s available on VOD (including the Video Store) and well worth your time if you want to feel happy and alive.

FOR A LIFE-AFFIRMING BUT PRETTY BUMMER TIME: Mascha Schilinski, Sound of Falling. Sound of Falling is the most under-watched film of the year, the kind of artful, multi-generational epic that would have gotten Oscar nominations if it had been made by Brady Corbet. It’s a tough watch because it’s a pretty bad time, but it’s so beautifully shot and fully conceived that it deserves so much more than to languish on Mubi. Get to it on some day that you are OK with feeling bad for three hours but also a little bit enamored with the continuity of human life. Get a free trial for Mubi and then forget to cancel it, which is something I do every couple years.

FOR A GENERATIONAL MASTERPIECE THAT EVERYONE SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT: Sophy Romvari, Blue Heron. I will keep saying it all year, but this is as good as it gets. I’m still working on a longer piece that I’ll publish when this comes out on Criterion Channel (probably?) this summer, but if you get a chance to see it before it’s well worth ninety minutes of your life. If you live in New York, it’s still playing at IFC. And if you have one of those alien sticks from Disclosure Day, you could watch it playing on repeat in my brain at any time of day.

FOR PARTICIPATING IN WHAT EVERYONE IS ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT: Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama is the most star-powered conversation-starter of the year. It didn’t transform American discourse in the way that it could have if the cards had played out just a bit different, but it’s still funny and fascinating and insightful even if the surprise has been spoiled for you. I wish it could have produced the energy that Curry Barker’s Obsession continues to harness, but that’s not how zeitgeists work. On that front: I’ve heard more people talking on the street about Obsession than anything since at least Barbie. It feels like a genuine cultural reference point less than a “do you watch movies?” shibboleth - not quite monocultural, but about as close as it gets. The Drama is on VOD; Obsession is still in theaters and might be there all summer.

FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE NORMAL THINGS THAT ARE NICE: The Sheep Detectives. But if you’ve seen that one and your idea of normal/nice doesn’t preclude skin flaying and a premise structured on a joke about one of the most prolific sexual predators in British history, check out the Nia DaCosta’s The Bone Temple (Netflix). If normal/nice doesn’t preclude graphic queer S&M, check out Harry Lighton’s Pillion (HBO Go). If you’re a squeamish prude but don’t hate British people, check out Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers (VOD for a lot of money). And if you define yourself as normal and proud of it (no shame), just go see Project Hail Mary, now on VOD and still playing in at least 75 theaters nationwide.

Finally, some predictions for Q3 2026:

The Odyssey will be the biggest movie of the summer and will starkly divide critics and audiences. It will break some sort of record but I don’t know which one. Toy Story 5 will be number two. Spider-Man: Here We Go Home Again will be number three.

The Invite will be good and a small hit. It’s taking forever to get to Minnesota so I probably won’t get to it until late July unless I can force myself into an early screening this Tuesday.

Minions & Monsters will kill the franchise despite embarrassingly positive critical response.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will be awesome and everyone will like it.

Someone will write a Variety article about how movies aren’t back enough and that it’s all hot air, and then every film podcast will talk about it for two weeks.

I will write two essays for the Trylon’s Perisphere blog.

I will watch between six and ten movies on the plane to and from Japan and remember all of them negatively for the rest of my life.

I will not actually post two newsletters while I’m in Japan.

Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. I’ll be back next week if I can manage to get into an early screening of The Invite. Otherwise next time you hear from me will be from Japan.

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Greetings from New York City!1 Actually greetings from the Amtrak Cardinal train, where I’m waiting to depart after a week and a half on the East Coast. I had a disastrous time getting here that climaxed in a 3:30am walk across downtown Boston past a car blasting “Before He Cheats” surrounded by drunk 20-year-olds wearing kilts. I eventually got to Brooklyn and settled in neighborhood that might be called South Slope but I haven’t really looked at a map enough to confirm that this is true. Either way it was pleasant and relatively removed from the carnage of the Knicks parade.

As much as I’d like to hate New York, I have to say that this city is underrated and probably the greatest one in the world. My data set is limited, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this place happier and healthier. The weather is beautiful. I’ve been to not one but two parades. The movie theaters are fun and filled with respectful/enthusiastic audiences. Parts of south Brooklyn are legitimately wonderful and basically what Minneapolis/St. Paul could be if we leaned into better zoning and upped our population by a million people or so. There are children running around the sidewalks, there are parties in the park, there are cordial conversations on the street between civilians and cops . . . did Kendal Jenner give everyone Pepsi? What is going on??

It’s with these vibes I went into Disclosure Day at the world-famous NITEHAWK CINEMA. How did it hold up? Not well!

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24 years ago, Steven Spielberg made arguably his last enjoyable movie, the MOVIES ABOUT STEALING no. 1 seed Catch Me If You Can. You’ve probably seen this movie - it’s about a real-life con man named Frank Abagnale who scammed a wide variety of industries before finally going clean and devoting his life to fighting crime. As you maybe also know, a 2020 tell-all revealed that basically everything Frank Abagnale said about himself was a lie. He never committed any high-level cons, was never seriously investigated or targeted for the federal government, and never worked for the FBI. All of the extremely fun scams described in his 1980 memoir and recreated in Spielberg’s film were fake - he was never found responsible for anything more than check fraud and petty theft. The real victims of Abagnale’s spree is the audience of Catch Me If You Can. And maybe its director. As far as I know, Spielberg has never admitted that his source material, who made a cameo appearance in the film and participated in its promotion, was full of shit.

It’s outrageous to feel sorry for Steven Spielberg, a wildly successful filmmaker who has defined the platonic ideal of an American movie for the past fifty years. But there’s something off in Disclosure Day that’s evocative of the scammed stink of Catch Me If You Can. Spielberg’s final (?) word on whether or not aliens exist and live among us, Disclosure Day is scripted less like a blockbuster and more like an earnest docudrama about life under a government that refuses to admit the truth about extraterrestrial life. It accepts as baseline truth everything implied in the 2025 documentary The Age of Disclosure and attempts to build narrative tension from there.2 It isn’t quite an unqualified disaster, but it feels more than a little bit the product of an old man who’s been had.

First and foremost, I want to make it clear yet again *life is disappointing* is officially an anti-space, anti-aliens newsletter. I am tolerant and even supportive of obviously fake aliens, including but not limited to the Xenomorph, Stitch, E.T., the thinly veiled Mexican stereotype in Return of the Jedi, and Marvin the Martian as drawn by Brittany Murphy. I am really not into aliens grounded in either scientific or supposedly factual information. I find it frustrating that people who write off as Conspiracy Theories things that are definitely true - MKUltra, the career of Allen Dulles, certain aspects of the JFK assassination, etc. - are often completely OK with the possibility that the government is covering up a flying saucer crash in New Mexico. This speaks to an unseriousness about the capacities and practices of surveillance capitalism and American imperialism as much as it does a lack of interest in physics. There are no aliens on earth because that is just not what happens (h/t to my father-in-law Clay Naff on this topic.) I know this is a thing people have strong feelings about and if that’s you, fine. I am happy to agree to disagree because I really don’t care.

For about ten minutes, I was pretty sure none of this was going to be a problem because summer movies are for fun. Disclosure Day’s opening shot is truly inexplicable and exposes what must be a previously undiscussed Spielberg hyperfixation. It jumps from there to what might be the best thirty seconds so far of Emily Blunt’s career in which she announces the possibility of hail to the morning broadcast viewers of the Kansas City metro area. Spielberg does a clever little thing involving Froot Loops, and for a minute it seems like we’re in for something special.

Things go downhill almost immediately when Emily confesses to her boring boyfriend that she doesn’t like being a weather girl and would prefer to report on news about a brewing conflict between North Korea and Russia, a plot that must have come from a script David Koepp abandoned circa 2005. Then suddenly she gets infected by alien consciousness via a CGI update of the robin from Blue Velvet and starts speaking Russian. From here on out Disclosure Day devolves into incoherent silliness that’s equal parts boring, stupid, treacly, and self-important. It’s a movie written in the tenor of the last five minutes of Saving Private Ryan multiplied by the narration of Spielberg’s Netflix documentary Life on Earth that incorporates equal disregard for the mechanics of Midwestern weather, Catholic spirituality, contemporary geopolitics, American television viewing habits, how cars work, and normal people’s interest in UFOs.

Dumb things are forgivable if they look cool. It’s harder when they look like shit. I have qualms with this year’s other alien blockbuster, but I have to give it to its colors, its practical physicality, and its occasionally affecting performances. Spielberg, a guy who is famously good at getting all three of these things, seems to have given up for Disclosure Day. The CGI is awful, the camera work is arrhythmic and boring. The performances are almost across the board leaden, except for Emily Blunt, who is in a different movie that I’d much rather be watching. The best parts of the set pieces are featured in the trailer and otherwise go nowhere. The color sense is the cinematic equivalent of putting grey imitation wood floorboards into a flipped apartment - clearly a deliberate aesthetic choice, but what does it do other than make the world an uglier place? Maybe if you were doing a subtle Pleasantville thing where the aliens bring in color and beauty I guess? but that doesn’t happen - the aliens (spoilers, there are aliens) are also grey.

All of this, on top of David Koep’s typically awful screenwriting and the laziest John Williams score ever created, builds into probably the most boring movie of 2026.3 I love falling asleep in movies but a summer sci-fi blockbuster is not where it’s supposed to happen. I found nothing to care about in this movie and nothing worth remembering. In the post-movie sidewalk conversation things were brought up that I’d already forgotten about. I got up to go to the bathroom mid-movie and briefly chatted with someone about Scary Movie in the lobby just to give myself something to do. I considered ordering a gin and tonic to see how that process works but my seatmate was using the ordering sheets to take notes, so I gave up and just started writing this review using the very helpful under-table light.

There really wasn’t much to write. There’s fundamentally not much to say about a movie so intellectually vacant and artistically unserious. It’s not fair to claim because I haven’t seen The BFG, but Disclosure Day strikes me as one of Spielberg’s worst 21st-century movies, mostly because it’s fundamentally not a movie. It’s an action-adventure with hardly any action, a thriller without ratcheting tension, a philosophical meditation that never gets beyond the intellectual wavelength of an Ancient Aliens episode. Most of the dialogue seems to come from the narration of a cable documentary that keeps suggesting it’s going to reveal something massive after the commercial break but only delivers increasingly tautological rhetorical questions without payoff. It meanders through every bit of shoddy evidence about aliens like a dinner date with Tom DeLonge - Roswell, crop circles, those pictures of dots that say AIR FORCE in the corner of them - and gets nowhere other than a attempt at an elementary-school statement about empathy and the truth.

If it lost the tone of self-seriousness, I would say whatever, it’s just a movie. But as Disclosure Day regularly sacrifices craftsmanship and entertainment for earnest exposition, I’m not willing to give it the benefit of that doubt. I truly think Spielberg believes in aliens and that he made this movie to prove it. And that’s stupid, because this stuff is really just not true. There is clandestine information out there that can and should be disclosed, but aliens are not it. What I do find to be within the realm of possibility is that the US military has performed all sorts of bizarre aircraft tests and that they have deliberately manipulated public interest in aliens for a variety of purposes that I do not understand. The existence of “ex-government” charlatans like Luiz Elizondo and David Grusch, the trotting out of evidence around the time of major advances in military technology, the known existence of CIA psychological manipulation campaigns - this is not a conspiracy theory newsletter, but this stuff is not really in the realm of theory. All evidence suggests that the only thing the government has to disclose about aliens is that they have a history of actively manipulating fringe parts of the public with fake stories about paranormal activity. Which is really stupid and crazy and bad and would be the subject of an actually interesting movie.4 But all Spielberg accomplishes here is to waste his clout to back up what is very probably a 75-year U.S.-government psychological terror campaign against its own people.

In the end Disclosure Day isn’t all that different than Catch Me If You Ca - Spielberg has once again made a movie about exposing some sort of truth that ultimately contributes to furthering the con. There are nods at themes (empathy, universal media experiences, God?), but like the narrative structure and character development, they’re all so mundane that they fade into the background. All that’s left is the message that aliens actually exist and that their exposure will bring us together. That knits awfully well with the goals of an administration that likes to dump little revelations of pseudo-conspiracy every once in a while as they continue to defraud the American people and pour unthinkable amounts of money into military technology. We have been doing this for 75 years. We don’t need the contributions of an American master to keep it going.

But whatever, vibes are still really good here. I saw The Third Man in 35mm at Film Forum, a completely lovely experience, and Do The Right Thing (also in 35mm) at the Museum of the Moving Image, which was somewhat transcendent. If I were here longer and the weather wasn’t so nice there are a dozen micro cinemas and independent theaters that I would have loved to check out. Remember five months ago when we were sure the independent theatrical experience was dying? If there is evidence that a bit of democratic socialism can revive a capitalism-ravaged metropolis, it’s Mamdanistan in June.

Thanks to everyone who has put me up out here - I’m sad to be leaving so soon. I’m going to get a midyear report out next week, and then the next couple will be reports from TOKYO, another metropolis that I’m told is thriving, functional, and appreciative of cinema. We’ll see how it holds up. The bar is high.

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Maybe you haven’t heard, but “MOVIES ARE BACK.” I realized something weird was happening when I got to the Main at 1 pm on a high-70s Saturday and found myself in the middle of a lobby full of people under the age of 25. The momentum carried through the weekend and across the country, and ended with a rare piece of inspiring box office news: two independent-ish horror movies, made by a 20 year old and a 26 year old, took number one and two at the box office over a Jon Favreau Star Wars movie.

Was this Gen Z’s June 1982, or at the very least their August 1999? Young people don’t get excited about this kind of thing in the moment because they are young and fun and free, but there’s a good chance a generation will look back on this weekend for the rest of their lives and reminisce about how good they had it. I missed 1999 due to being a child and and 1982 due to my parents not having met yet, so to make up for lost time I pivoted from my previous plans and caught a double feature on this historic weekend of cinema.

Something I sometimes forget about myself is that I spent a significant part of my growing up at the Mall of America. My father owned an ice cream shop, and I went along with him every Saturday to get out of the house on cleaning day. As magical as the MOA is to teens and foreign adults, it didn’t have a lot to offer to a six year old, so most of my defined memories from that part of my life came from behind the walls. There was an easily missed door next to our shop, and behind it was a winding series of hallways that connected the offices and storage rooms behind the third-floor businesses. Whenever I got bored playing around in freezers or burning through the Windows 95 games suite, I’d get out and run around in the hallway. I was too much of a rule-follower to travel very far and I’d get scared anytime an unfamiliar adult came through one of the doors - but I always had an understanding that the Mall was a much larger place than the famously large place everyone knew it to be.

So when a teenager first told me about the Backrooms in 2022, I felt an immediate sense of familiarity. An ambiguous, empty space behind ordinary, lived experience loaded with loneliness and nostalgia? I get why this makes sense to me - does it make sense to you? The internet has a bizarre relationship with the 1990s and the word “nostalgia” that would take time to unpack, but the original Backrooms picture is an unspoken manifestation of whatever it is. “Liminal photography” - images of empty hallways, atreums, dead malls, parking garages - opens up something for internet kids that summons both longing for a time they never experienced and dread that they might find themselves trapped in it. It doesn’t really make sense, which is sort of the point. I don’t know who dropped “liminal" into the conversation, but for once they picked the right word.

Backrooms, Kane Parsons two-hour film that rose out of a Youtube interpretation of the Backrooms idea, is both a manifestation and a deconstruction of this confused internet nostalgia.1 Parsons’s story binds together a wide swath of lore that you would have to go to the Backrooms Wiki to fully understand. In 1990 a failed architect, Chiwetel Ejiofor, finds a hidden door in the mostly empty basement showroom of his furniture store. Behind it is an endless maze of yellow-wallpapered rooms scattered with familiar, but just slightly off, stuff: chairs, cardboard cutouts, stop signs, seagulls . . . and something else. As he goes deeper and deeper, the off-ness gets off-er, and Chiwetel’s mind gets increasingly warped into the mix of desire and disgust that liminal spaces conjure.

When Backrooms is shot on camcorder, or when it revels in the analogue set design of its increasingly warped Escher-scape, or even when it incorporates its teenage side protagonists wearing very Gen-Z approximations of what people wore in the early ‘90s, it thrives. The bummer is when it delves into the real-movie stuff that seems to have been forced on Parsons to fit the A24 brand. This mostly manifests as a routine 2020s horror script from TV writer Will Soodik, who shoehorns in a standard-issue trauma plot via flashbacks and therapy talk. There are moments of insight in Soodik’s writing, but we really don’t need it. There’s a shorter, more inscrutable version of this movie that offers all the best parts without explanation: the found footage, the incredible set design, the nightmare-slop body horror. It probably could have made $100 million without an extra half-hour of studio notes. It’s hard to hold your own against executive pressure when you’re a terminally online nineteen year old.

As it is, Backrooms is two movies, and like some of the nightmares that occupy it, it’s sort of a horrifically grafted slop combo. Oddly, what weakens Parsons’s movie extenuates some of his themes. The uneasiness of the Backrooms is the sense that it must be going somewhere paired with the gradually apparent fact that “somewhere” doesn’t exist until you decide you’ve arrived. You can only find meaning in liminality by forcing on a definition. What better way to enact that in cinema than to wedge middlebrow integrity into an otherwise formless collection of hallway sequences?

You can do this to real life too. In 2021 I went back to the Mall of America backrooms for the first time since I was a kid. I went through one of those doors, down a hallway, and came upon a giant room that I’d never seen before, decked out in cheap party materials and carved apart by haphazard dividers. If you live in the Twin Cities, there’s a good chance if you did this too - the Mall was one of our biggest COVID vaccine sites. As I left out a different hallway that spat me out in a completely different part of the Mall, I felt a wave of catharsis - not just because a year-and-a-half of pandemic isolation finally felt like it was ending, but because it was happening in this meaningless, vacant place that for some reason felt like home.

When I was a child I wandered the Backrooms blindly. Now I’ve put away childish things and see through an A24 script darkly that grafts a destination onto the end of the hallway. I’ve been lost in the cracks of the MOA my entire life, and all that I’ve been looking for is - the liberal social order! That same narrative brain tries its hardest to make sense of Parson’s vision - to attribute meaning to the rambling, to put into clear therapy-speak something a generation is still processing. It doesn’t quite work, and it’s for the best: if Will Soodik’s script had succeeded, this movie would be a dud. Thankfully the material is too large for a coherent metaphor, and the aimlessness escapes A24’s attempts at prestige. If Parsons has a career ahead of him, that aimlessness is going to be where he finds it. Stay liminal, kid - don’t let anyone tell you where they think you’re going.

If I were to put a finger on what’s irked me about Elevated Horror in the past several years, it’s the tidiness that results from going into a film with a clear thesis. I’m not at all opposed to theses, but what horror can do that maybe nothing else can pull off is the revelation of total disorder. Why should a movie that ends in a chaotic bloodbath have a point? Horror is what happens when you have a feeling that exceeds a coherent thesis, so when everything from The Babadook on fits neatly into a clear idea about human relationships, we cheapen the genre into middlebrow allegory.

Of the millions of takes on Obsession, Griffin Newman’s on Critical Darlings last week was the one that convinced me I had to watch it:

I think there’s something really interesting in this movie in that it is made by someone so young, and that very often when filmmakers are this young and get a chance to make a feature, it’s like a Boogie Nights thing where they want to show that they’re older and more mature. And we rarely see a competently, well-crafted movie, made by someone in their early-to-mid-twenties, that also is kinda of that exact headspace. I think some of the limitations of the worldview of this movie are interesting because we rarely get to see these people express themselves, that usually people have worked through their shit more by the time they get to make this film. And this feels like a movie made by someone in the process of being, like: was I the problem?

What I find novel about Curry Barker’s debut is that, despite operating within the on-the-nose mechanics of 2020s horror, he’s dealing with raw and stupid emotions that only befit young people. You could argue that Obsession doesn’t escape the Elevated Horror mold: It’s very clear what it’s about, and it functions as a taut 90-minute horror comedy with clear set ups and pay offs. Bear has a crush on Nicki; Bear makes a wish that Nicki will love him more than anyone else in the world; the wish works, and predictably bad things ensue. But instead of using that clarity to make a morally acceptable point, Obsession reads like Barker working out what a dumbass he and his friends are, and it ends in a bloody mess. This would be an embarrassing movie to come from a fully formed cerebral cortex, but it’s not - it’s from a kid who’s trying to understand something raw, and it ends up as a vital and potentially generation-defining horror film.

If Backrooms is fodder for teens to argue about in their parents’ basements, Obsession is perfect for 20 year olds to fight about with fake IDs in bars. I would stay very far away from anyone over 30 who empathizes too deeply with Bear. He’s the sort of character that makes you deeply embarrassed about your former self - or if you’re more of a self-love type of person, one you’re proud to have moved along from as you’ve matured and learned a little bit more about the world. But for young people, I’m sure there are rigorous debates about who’s the psycho, Bear or Nicki?; or, what’s worse, toxic male expectations or clingy women? etc.

There’s an obvious right answer here, even if Curry Barker isn’t removed enough to see it. And there’s enough id in this movie to make that answer obvious, whether it’s intentional or not. Barker gives us the worst possible outcome, achieved in pretty close to the worst possible way, which is to admit that when you’re young and stupid there’s sort of no way out except the long road to maturity. Part of me wishes I had seen this movie when I was 22. I think I would have eventually seen Nicki and Bear’s situation for what it is, and I think I probably would have realized a little faster that holding anything in the world to a standard that it can’t meet is a recipe for cruelty. At the same time, I can easily imagine some young/dumb/full-of-cum kid seeing this and thinking that Bear is a tragic hero. But that’s the risk you take when you let young people make art and when you let other young people consume it. Part of the value is letting kids work through the mess.

So I’m happy that Obsession is reclaiming horror for young people. I’ve never been much of a fan of the rawness of teenage horror movies, and I don’t know if I’m actually a fan of this one. But I think it serves its function, which is at least part of why kids are seeing it in droves. Curry Barker has good enough instincts that he should be able to make more spot-on movies as he matures, and my prayer is that he doesn’t get dragged into the edgelord reactionary bullshit that young horror directors before him have plummeted. Hopefully this is the first big step from a guy with ideas and editing instincts as he grows into a generational auteur. I hope he learns a bit more about the world and himself before he makes his next movie, but I’m grateful he was able to get this one out there before he got too self-conscious to make it.

That’s probably what I’m most excited about this weekend: something has shifted, even if it’s just for a moment, that opens up the possibility for young people to get their movies out there without getting dragged through the Hollywood ringer. Instead of paying your dues for twenty years within sanctioned industry echo chambers, you can do your spec work on the internet, get enough of a following to convince a producer that you’re viable, and jump straight to a debut that works like you’re a well-established filmmaker with all the messiness of an amateur films. It’s a new route to doing something messy and cheap that gets seen by more than a scene or a festival audience. I’ve been preparing for post-collapse cinema, but maybe we can do good things again within some semblance of monoculture.

We’ll see what lessons Hollywood learns from this weekend, and we’ll see what happens in the career of these two directors. I can see Curry Barker going the contemporary path from horror debut to big-budget IP opportunities mixed with middlebrow Oscar bait. I have no idea what will happen to Parsons. It’s hard to foresee a future where Backrooms isn’t turned into a horror franchise, run at first by Parsons but eventually getting handed off to someone else - which means that we’ll probably have a mediocre 2, potentially an unhinged 3, and then a rotating stable of secondary and tertiary directors with varying degrees of vision, creativity, and market banality for 4 through 16.

But that’s to assume that previous movie market rhythms apply to something that’s fresh, young, and more or less unprecedented. It’s hard to say this isn’t at least a little bit the start of something new. What’s obvious about this weekend is that everything the experts anticipated about 2026 at the movies - complete IP takeover, elimination of risk, the end of shots taken on low-budget writer/directors - has nothing to do with what the people actually want. For the first time in a decade (I think? box office statisticians, sound off), we have a strong shot at ending the first half of the year with five original screenplays in the YTD top ten.2 Sometimes it’s kind of cool to be alive.

Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. I will be back next week with previously scheduled MOVIES ABOUT STEALING programming.

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Summer movie season is up and running, so what better way to celebrate than with a five-hour double feature of century-spanning movies about inanimate objects and the generations of German people who interact with them? Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend is about a 200-year-old ginkgo tree and three people who sit near it. Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling is about a German farmhouse and four generations of sad girls who live in it. Neither can successfully compete with going outside in late May - but both are delicate meditations on the passage of time and the collective consciousnesses that oozes along with it, which is exactly what you probably want this time of year.

There’s a lot yet to discover in both of these films, but I’m immediately fascinated by the opposing ways their directors use cameras to represent time. Enyedi shoots Silent Friend with three immediately differentiable film stocks to distinguish three different eras. Schilinski takes the opposite approach and films everything with the same camera, color treatment, and frame. Both films jumps between decades almost at random, but while one distinguishes one era from another to clarify the timeline, the other collapses that sense of time into a haze of everything happening at once. Both approaches work, but it’s worth taking some time to see what’s exposed by their differences.

Silent Friend is the sort of movie that lays its thesis out in its opening five minutes but builds into a sprawl so amorphous that it might take you a day or two to realize it. Tony Leung Chiu-wau kicks things off with a guest lecture to the neuroscience students of the University of Marburg about the differences between how adults and babies process the world in front of them. According to Professor Tony, adults process with a spotlight brain, one bright light shining on one thing at the expense of everything else. Babies, on the other hand, process like randomly bouncing glowing balls, taking in many things at once with no capacity to differentiate one from another. Babies, Tony says, are basically high on psychedelics all the time, and it’s only the gradual creep of adulthood that brings them into sobriety. If we got back to processing like a baby, what crazy things might we realize about the world around us? We need that spotlight to be the people we are, but what we give up is a universe of unlimited connection.

A movie that takes on that thesis naturally bounces around with no particularly cohesive thread. Silent Friend presents sort of an “Eleanor Rigby,” four lonely residents of the University of Marburg who would probably love to talk to each other but are crippled by circumstance and communication problems, including but not limited to one of them being a tree. Grete, a turn-of-the-century botanist, studies plants but can’t relate to them any more than she can relate to the men she’s thrown herself in with as the university’s first woman biologist. Hannes, a 1970s literature major, knows the geranium he’s plant-sitting can sense his presence but has no idea how to empathize with it. Tony, a Hong Kong neurologist stranded in Germany during the pandemic, is willing to wear a brain scanner into the shower to better understand plant cognition but can’t get it into his head that he and his subjects share the same existential loneliness. All three of them are towered over by a two-hundred-year-old ginkgo tree who doesn’t have any ginkgo-tree friends and really wants to germinate.

The seemingly eternal ginkgo is the central image, and the surrounding film flits at random through a century of ephemeral humanity. Enyedi takes an overt approach to the passage of time and films each section with a different film stock: black-and-white 35mm for the turn of the century, fuzzy 16mm for the ‘70s, crisp digital for the pandemic. It’s useful signposting, and I enjoyed falling asleep in one era and gently waking up in another. At the same time, there’s something cheap about the reduction of a time period to its representative negative format. There’s nothing essentially true about using black-and-white 35mm to depict an era where cinema barely existed. There’s more of an argument for 16mm to represent the ‘70s, but I wonder if Enyedi is just as guilty of instant-nostalgia as her American boomer counterparts. And as I’ve argued before, there’s nothing inherently digital about our contemporary visual/optical processing of the modern world. We still see and hear things through eyes and ears. Analogue film, which creates images the same way that our brains do it, light passing through objects and landing on receptors, is a better recreation than digital, which processes that light through a binary system that has nothing to do with physical existence or neural processing.1

But this is Silent Friend is about accepting the possibility of a consciousness completely different from our own, so instead of pretending that I could have shot this film better than Enyedi, I can instead watch the movie and figure out what it’s trying to show me. Despite her focus on differentiated media, Enyedi presents three united stories about lonely people attempting to process their confusion about relationships through plants. As their scientific approaches shift from observation to empathy, each character comes to realize that study has very little to do with communion, that the available information technology doesn’t correspond to the information that needs to be communicated. Grete figures out that her photographs of plant reproductive organs are essentially abstract porn, but she can’t connect that any better to what plants desire than she can to figuring out what it has to do with wanting to smooch her advisor. Hannes figures out how to trick the geranium into opening a gate for him, but he can’t find the words to ask its owner out on a date. It’s only Tony who maybe figures it out after analyzing the ginkgo’s sensory pathways next to his own and realizing that both he and plant want more or less want the same thing. He gets there not because of superior neural technology but because of his willingness to open himself to new ways of being and seeing. In the end he gets the tree a boyfriend and maybe finds one for himself, two guys and a girl tree all sitting in silence, germinating together. It’s beautiful stuff, and any lack of satisfaction in a conclusion that doesn’t come together dissipates after spending a few days sitting with it.

Despite their best efforts, Enyedi’s differentiated film formats can’t separate the (non)narrative from itself. A tree is a tree in 35mm is a tree in 16mm is a tree in digital, and lonely humans look and act the same in all three formats. The ways of seeing fade away and what’s left are the souls we’re looking at - not with our spotlight minds but with our mescaline-approximated baby brains, pure sensory experience indifferent to all efforts toward differentiation and nothing more.

Instead of a German tree, Mascha Schilinski gives us a German farmhouse and asks us to watch four generations of girls be lonely inside of it. Her post-film-school debut Sound of Falling is every bit as unsatisfying as Silent Friend and then some. It begins with the incomprehensible action, never really developed, of a teenage girl sticking her finger in a sleeping amputee’s belly button and tasting his sweat. It ends with what ought to be a narratively significant shot of character who we’ve spent most of the movie ignoring. In between are Mouchette allusions, endless keyhole shots, post-mortem photo shoots, the gradual churn of 20th-century German history, and maybe a ghost. Nothing comes together, including a theme. All we get are a century of women, a house, and a 1.33:1 frame: digital, grainy, tea-stained, not dissimilar to the first years of Instagram, or the Polaroids and tintypes against which it resonates.

If Enyedi explores loneliness with an arch of hopefulness, Schilinski keeps us in the dark. Sound of Falling has been criticized with one hand for its oppressive emphasis on women’s misery and for being boring with the other. I’ll counter both, but I don’t really have any evidence. Schilinski dwells on some of the worst stuff that happens to people, nearly all of them women, and she doesn’t offer any sort of hope, drama, or even active interest to get us out of it. But she’s operating far enough outside narrative that her impressionism flips through the mirror from despair to possibility, listlessness to autonomy. Instead of telling her audience how to feel about what she’s showing us (i.e., bad), she lets us explore the thousands of possible connections between four related-ish girls as they grow up in the same farm house. It’s not up to them to figure out how they connect to one another, and it’s not up to Schilinski. There are things to notice and things to do, and neither the arch of history nor a pronouncement from the director-God are going to tell them where to focus.

Banal indifference is the key to Schilinski’s depiction of time. She opts for none of the typical markers of time period to ground her story line, and it often takes a moment to determine where we are in history. There are no shifts in color, no soundtrack cues or allusions to news events, barely even any establishing shots of period-appropriate technology or fashions. Post-WW2 has the same pigs as pre-WW1, GDR ‘80s has the same shorts and summer shirts as united FRG 2010s. At points the lens is so blurred and the situations are so indistinguishable that they blur together, a child in Edwardian mourning dress running through a hay tunnel before cutting to weed-smoking teenagers daring each other to take off their pants.

Schilinski’s lens suggests the perspective of the house, always looking out with the same passive eyes and the same filters. But instead of doing what Soderbergh did last year in Presence (all handheld first-person) or Robert Zemeckis did in Here (all one-perspective static shots), she flits between protagonist perspective shots to intrusive voyeurism to something else entirely. Reality and temporality are never certain. Things happen no matter who sees them, and all of them bleed together to form one continuous history of a place. If there’s a narrative, the viewer has to piece through it themselves, the sweat from one bellybutton into another, a glare across a century to its return, a blur in a Polaroid to its echo in a 19th-century tintype.

It’s reasonable to find this aimlessness nihilistic and boring. But it allows the opportunity for the viewer’s mind to make free range with the connections, which is surprisingly activating if you’re in the right mood. I couldn’t pull myself away even as I felt my mind wander, and after finishing I almost immediately wanting to watch it again despite it being an objectively feel-bad slog about nothing. It’s easy to wish that all these women could just come together and give each other a hug, but Schilinski does us one better and suggests that the resonances of history already do that for you. We live on top of ancestors, related by blood or otherwise, all of whom have dealt with more or less the same crap as we have. Or at the very least, dealt with the same place. Trees, houses, changing film stocks or consistent audio-visual processing nerves or constantly humming extra-visual senses - it’s hard to be lonely for too long when you let yourself be a part of everything that’s happened. I’m pretty into individuation and my own historical circumstance as a consciousness of great importance, but gosh cinema sure can mess with that.

Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. I will be back next week with a kickoff-to-summer MOVIES ABOUT STEALING bonanza featuring I Love Boosters, Tuner, and more.

Sorry for not writing anything last week. Something I sometimes forget is that I have a job. Usually it only exists for eight hours a day, but this time of year it tends to ramp up and eke into my mornings/evenings/weekends/sleep. When I decided to write about movies I forgot that it also require watching movies. It’s sort of hard to do both and maintain some semblance of a life, which I guess is why some people demand they get paid for it.

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I wouldn’t be wasting your time complaining if I was going to provide anything worth reading this week, so I’ll quit beating around the bush: I’m two weeks behind with nothing to share for it. I’ve been working hard on a piece about Blue Heron that probably won’t be done for a minute - maybe that will show up here eventually, or maybe it’ll end up somewhere else if I can convince someone to publish it. I’m also working on some material for the 2026 movie bracket (there are a slew of MOVIES ABOUT STEALING coming out in the next couple weeks - get ready), as well as some travel-themed content for some upcoming trips I’ll be taking this summer. So a decent amount of racket coming down the pipeline, but nothing very much done.

Until then, here are some bits and bobs floating around in my brain to tide you over.

Aleshea Harris, Is God Is (2026). This didn’t do much for me, but maybe you’ll like it. Is God Is is Harris’s first venture outside theater, and her film debut plays it very much at the scripted surface, to the degree that the dialogue taps across the screen like it’s Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. It’s unsurprising that a playwright adapting her own play is going to hang onto her words, but I wish someone else in the room could have convinced her to let go of them. Harris opens her movie with a voice-over that says “Twins; Twins are burning” - and then we see two twins rubbing ice on their burn wounds. You can do poetry or you can do symbolist imagery, but you can’t do both. Maybe I’m quibbling. The visuals are interesting. The action scenes don’t quite work. Kara Young is worth paying attention to. Janelle Monae bugs me. There’s a lot of blood. There is maybe even more peeing. I guess in the end YMMV.

I think I’m pretty done with revenge movies - there’s not a lot left of this particular brand of suppressed id that needs to be exposed through cinema. The only place vengeance can possibly go is everyone either dead or bad/unsatisfied, a theme that was pretty well established by Cain and Abel and hasn’t been further developed since. Harris hits on more nuance than most people and ends up in a place where there’s some sort of redemption, but much of the power of her film comes from the simultaneous satisfaction/disgust of someone you sort of like bashing in the head of someone you don’t like with a rock. It’s one way to bring about instant catharsis, but it’s a movement we’ve seen so many times that I wonder if we’ve run our course trying to intellectualize it.

Brian De Palma, Femme Fatale (2002). Sort of like Mulholland Dr. but hornier and less coherent (!). The two were clearly talking to each other, but we spent too much time listening to one side and missed out on the world’s most fascinating conversation. Femme Fatale starts with the topless reflection of Rebecca Romijn in a TV screen playing Double Indemnity, jumps into a nonsensical heist at Cannes that pauses for over a minute to watch a guy scrub honey off his keys, and then veers into a double-identity plot that includes overflowing bathtubs, long-take split screens, and Antonio Banderas playing 2000s-movies gay best friend. In other words, probably De Palma’s magnum opus. This shouldn’t exist anywhere other than a scratched up DVD with a Blockbuster sticker on it, but it’s currently available on Plex for 100% free. A must watch.

Mario Monicelli, Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958). Kind of like Ocean’s Eleven for losers, or if Good Time was actually a good time. If the heart of the heist movie is the escapism of watching highly competent people transform realism into an escape, Big Deal on Madonna Street is what happens when you and your dumb friends try to do the same thing. Monicelli takes on bombed-out neorealist Rome and proposes that a crew of scrubs can make it into a romp - and then lets ordinary stupidity bring them back down to the rubble. It’s great to see your friends pull off the perfect job, but there’s something even warmer about seeing them spectacularly fail.

Sam Peckinpah, The Getaway (1972). The only film that dared to bring a camera inside a working garbage truck. It’s unbelievable that these things roam around our cities grabbing stuff and crushing it. I’ve never considered what would happen if I got sucked into one, and though I don’t think I’d handle it quite as well as Steve McQueen, I have to hand it to Peckinpah for depicting the experience with unflinching realism. It’s not quite as harrowing as The Brave Little Toaster, but it’s close.

Louis Letterier, Now You See Me (2013). Fascinatingly bad. Essential viewing if you want to understand heist films - the nadir of a descent from realism that begins with Entrapment and The Thomas Crown Affair. I can’t believe I missed this in 2013. I think it would have activated something in me.

Bryan Singer, The Usual Suspects (1995). Also pretty bad! Did adults like this when it came out or is it just something fourteen-year-old boys thought adults liked? Stephen Baldwin sucks. BDT even kind of sucks. If you’ve been thinking “fuck Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer, but . . .” for the past ten years, I recommend a re-watch to absolve yourself of any guilt you’ve held for thinking that this movie was good.

Podcasters saying “the [blank] of it all” (2026). Where did this tic come from? It’s even infected Producer Ben on Blank Check, one of the few voices of reason in this industry. “The Renée Russo of it all.” “The Condé Nast of it all.” “The Grogoo of it all.” What does this mean? Is this happening outside film podcasting? It simply must stop.

The Pensieve Papers (2023). Since I’m not putting out anything worthwhile this week - Florine recently reminded me that I’m responsible for this collection of content that still exists on the internet. I checked my bank statement and discovered that my website license auto-renewed this spring, so I guess I’ll put it out here to make its money’s worth. If you’re anxious for new Harry Potter content and can’t wait until Christmas, or if you just can’t get enough questionably accurate government file drops, or if you just count on this newsletter to provide you with ten minutes of content a week, this is for you.

I’m hopeful I’ll have something worth sharing next week. If anyone can inform me how to see Lifehack without leaving the state of Minnesota, send me a message. Until then, I guess please remember to like, comment, share, and subscribe. It’s worth it sometimes, I swear.

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A useful alignment axis that I am in the process of patenting but will share with you now is Loser —> Winner / Normie —> Freak. A Normie is someone who keeps their clothes on at parties; a Freak is someone who doesn’t. A Winner is someone who doesn’t have to ask what a winner is; a Loser is everyone else.

This is a great way to assess/offend your friends (try it), but I think it’s also a helpful tool for understanding American cities:

Where to place Minneapolis? Usually it lands just northeast of St. Paul, but every year in early May things swing violently to the freak end of the spectrum, and suddenly a city that has been literally buttoned up for months seems to be entirely made up of people who perform in leftist marching bands and keep life-size dragon puppets in their garage.

Usually “anarcho puppeteer” is textbook “loser freak” behavior, but given that we have three professional sports teams in playoff contention (plus a baseball team that’s at least not in last place doing better than the Mets), I think Minneapolis has entered in its Winner era.1 We beat a long winter, we beat Kristi Noem, we beat the Nuggets, we even beat the Stars. The South Minneapolis May Day parade is our ticker tape before our inevitable defeat in the semifinals.

Things that got me at this year’s May Day -

• The newly-wed couple who got married in the morning and incorporated their entire wedding party into the parade.

• Hordes of feral children recreating the opening scene of I Saw The TV Glow under a giant trans flag in the middle of Bloomington Avenue. This will be a formative memory for an entire neighborhood of kids that will forever remind them that the streets are theirs and that their neighbors have got their backs.

• The T.Rex that was parked across the street from where Renee Good was killed, alive and leading off the most fully-functional Battle Train in living memory. It’s crazy to be moved to tears by an animatronic dinosaur. I can’t imagine a better Southside tribute.

I don’t think people living in more meteorologically habitable cities understand just how happy everyone feels here once May hits. Especially after this objectively horrible winter - community and freaks and mobile skate parks/pig roasts/pirate ships are the only way to do it. By this time next week the Wolves will be pulverized by Victor Wembenyama and there will be so much dysfunctional road construction that I’ll regret I ever crossed the Mississippi, but in the post-May Day glow it’s “You Are My Sunshine” forever.

Probably the most interesting thing about The Devil Wears Prada 2 was watching 40-ish-year-old culture journalists spiral this week as their fading career prospects played out on screen. It’s hard to say that DWP2 is anything more than OK, but I can only imagine how seen culture writers must have felt as David Frankel converted their 2006 cinematic avatar into a stand-in for their much less hopeful 2026 selves. I’m a big “Dreams Never End” guy, but - dreams definitely end. Sometimes the best way to drive that conclusion home is to let it enact itself in a lega-sequel.

DWP2 is mostly an excuse to reconsider DWP1, and doing that this week was more rewarding than I anticipated. DWP1 starts with fresh-out-of-j-school Andy Sachs, ready to eat whatever shit she needs to eat to make it in journalism. DWP2 starts with that same Andy getting laid off from her dream job and limping back to the Runway breadline to work as a features editor. The whole gang is still there, led of course by Miranda Priestly, Meryl Streep’s thinly veiled impression of Vogue editor Anna Wintour. The difference is that 2006 Anna Wintour is a whole different devil than 2026 Anna Wintour. The 2006 version was a powerhouse who made the fashion world too scared to participate in a movie that made fun of her. The sequel version is too against the wall to pass up a marketing opportunity, and nearly every fashion house in Europe and America follows. The failure is baked into the premise - the clout of the culture journalism industry is gone, and all that’s left is scrambling for clicks and sponcon.

It’s telling that DWP2 chooses to put a woman in her forties into a 22 year old’s position instead of introducing a new j-school ingenue to take on the changing industry. Why would a young and hopeful person want to get into this business? The only people who can handle the job these days are twenty-year veterans who still don’t get benefits and are willing to get treated like crap by their increasingly irrelevant editors. DWP1 was maybe the last gasp of it being any other way. I was a couple years too young to ever believe that my journalistic dreams would actually come to fruition - I never saw DWP1 as a roadmap to success even though I too moved to New York with multiple journalism awards in college for writing (for fashion criticism, nonetheless). I immediately clocked the landscape as hopeless and spent the year eating pizza and hanging out with my high school friends at Welcome to the Johnsons whenever they came to visit. The journalists of my generation who made it all knew how to hustle the internet. I think I might have been destroyed my life for a few years in a world where gatekeepers were still relevant and print journalism still existed, but I was never funny enough to hack it on Twitter2. The people who defined my life during those years were the Adrian Greniers and the Tracie Thoms who happily took my free merch while giving me shit about how stupid it would be to work more than eight hours a day when you could be hanging out in cheap Midwestern apartments instead.

Rewatching DWP1 and thinking about that time in my life makes me sad and angry that I threw all my dreams away just to hang out with my friends. Watching DWP2 makes me grateful that I did. You know what I got for giving up on my dreams? A pension and health insurance. Do I still want to blow my Midwest American Dream just to get another shot at the cultural criticism industry? Ya, kind of, a little bit. But only in a world where Miranda Priestly is muttering “Why is no one reeeaaady?” under her breath. Not one where she stumbles over the right words for body positivity and has to think about optimized social media feeds.

And honestly, to get back to my roots for a second, not one where Dior looks like this. Emily Blunt’s character looked ridiculous in DWP1, but her styling in DWP2 is a testament to the depths to which the house of Dior has fallen in the past 20 years. I’m not a big Galliano fan, but I was all in on Raf Simon’s minimalist takeover in 2012. His debut couture show was a 21st celebration of the original spirit of the New Look, and everything he put out in his three short years was smart, simple, innovative. Maria Grazia Chiuri’s ten-year reign that followed spiraled the brand through questionable production quality, inane appropriation controversies, and boring deconstruction that ultimately resulted in Blunt’s corset and graphic-polo combo in DWP2. Blunt gives a speech about this reduction of luxury fashion into hyper-capitalist branding, and it’s as clear a thesis for DWP2 as the cerulean speech was for DWP1. It’s fitting that a fake Lauren Sánchez’s delivers that thesis instead of a fake Anna Wintour.

Dior converted hands to Jonathan Anderson just after DWP2 ended shooting, and both his inaugural couture and RTW collections indicate a return to the intelligent precision that once defined his brand. So there’s some promise in the future. But DWP2 is a document of twenty pretty dreadful years of American culture. Less a good time at the movies than a reminder of diminishing returns, it’s not sharp or interesting enough to do much more than enact its own cynicism. I think it ends on the pro-boss capitalist success story that the original ends on, but I fell asleep for the final twenty minutes, so I’m assuming that based on foreshadowing and the general vibe of my standing-room-only theater. The looks are silly, the cinematography is ugly, the script is dull. But it serves pretty competently as a data point for how culture journalism perceives itself in 2026. That’s not exactly a sales pitch, but 20th Century Disney doesn’t need it. They’re selling their movie off 2006 dreams alone, which are maybe this industry’s only hope.

I’m doing extensive research for the MOVIES ABOUT STEALING bracket, and there are a lot of decent movies out there that won’t make the cut. One of those that I want to alert everyone to is the late Orson Welles pseudo-documentary F for Fake. My appreciation for Welles was undercut by early exposure to the champagne commercial outtakes and the trivia fact that his last film role was the voice of Unicron in The Transformers: The Movie. Citizen Kane doesn’t do a lot for me, so it’s been hard to read him as anything other than a guy who went from being a blowhard with great cinematography to a blowhard with a high blood-alcohol content.

F for Fake doesn’t exactly eliminate those presumptions, but it puts a face to the kind of person who might find it hilarious to blow a legendary reputation on late-career crap. Sort of a documentary but more an experiment in postmodern meta-fiction, F for Fake sort of tells the story of Orson Welles making a movie about biographer Clifford Irving writing a book about legendary art forger Elmyr de Hory. The problem is that Irving is himself a legendary fraudster best known for writing a fake memoir of Howard Hughes, and Welles is a self-described charlatan with no interest in telling a straight story. It’s a chaotic experiment in truth and lies that features Welles sloshing red wine all over his fabulous friends, cinematic magic tricks, and tons of footage of 1970s Ibiza. Just as it winds itself into a nihilistic hole, Welles busts in with a Shakespearean monologue about the endurance of the Chartres Cathedral that will absolve any anxiety you might have about the passage of time and the endurance of human society. Really beautiful stuff.

Welles’s particular interrogation of the value of the artist plays with a lot of the things that David Lowery invokes in his examination of parasocial personalism in Mother Mary and sets up the docufiction experiments that Sophy Romvari plays with in Blue Heron. All of this really gets my brain whirring, but I want everyone to have the opportunity to see these movies before I start chatting about them. So 1.) check out F for Fake on the Criterion Channel; 2.) figure out where you can see Blue Heron this weekend. Around here that’s the Main, starting yesterday. I hope you love it.

Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. I’ll be back next week with more to say about Sophy Romvari, Blue Heron, and the next phase in meta-fiction.

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In a universe not very far from ours, Mother Mary is the title of my doctoral thesis on 21st-century pop stardom and not an A24 movie starring Anne Hathaway. If only I hadn’t blown my grad school interview by mentioning how I’d spent most of undergrad doing crosswords in class - I might be doing a podcast circuit right now about how Thomas Aquinas is the key to understanding Lana Del Rey. Instead I’m writing an analysis nobody is going to read about a movie nobody is going to see.

Oh well. You can get into fights about which pop star inspired Mother Mary and whether or not it’s a lesbian story, but all of this is moot - what matters is that David Lowery’s seventh studio feature is the most Catholic movie since Silence. David Lowery is an atheist vegetarian who paints his nails, but he can’t hide the “eldest of nine” stat that kicks off his Wikipedia bio or the fact that his father was a moral theology professor at the University of Dallas. This guy is a textbook Lapsed Catholic, and Mother Mary is what happens when you spend your entire life thinking too much about transubstantiation.

Here’s how you can tell Mother Mary is about transubstantiation: about 20 minutes in, Michaela Coel says, “The transubstantiation of feeling - that’s what we’re doing here.”1 David Lowery is dealing with sacramental relationships - in other words, the coming into physical contact with something that is absolutely beyond you but nevertheless personal. What if God, who is literally everything/nothing/the entire universe/etc., is a real, historical person who loves you so much that he’ll die for you, but also he’s a tangible thing that you can consume every day of the week if you’d like, and also “you” is every single person in the world? What I’m describing is the Catholic Eucharist, but also Taylor Swift’s entire business model. Eventually someone had to notice the similarities and make a movie about it.

In case you need some catch-up: Mother Mary is a film by David Lowery (The Green Knight; the Pete’s Dragon remake) about a liturgically-themed pop star named Mother Mary (played by Anne Hathaway, in her first of two films this month) who needs a new dress from her ex best friend Sam (played by Michaela Coel, in her second of two films this month).2 It’s a YMMV picture with strong performances, some solid Best Original Song submissions, and at least one breathtaking bit of physical acting that convinces me that Florine was right when she wrote “Anne Hathaway is an actress to watch” in a review of Rachel Getting Married in middle school. Transubstantiation is the process by which an unleavened wafer and/or a cup of wine becomes literally the same thing as Jesus Christ, a formerly dead but currently alive human who the Catholic Church believes to be one-in-being with God. It’s a YMMV concept that convinces many people that Catholicism is for insane people, but it also provides us with a powerful metaphor for conceptualizing the relationship between art and artist in the 21st century.

It would be useful and probably fascinating to maybe three people to get into the specifics of anamnesis and epiclesis and whether impanation or transignification are better metaphors for artistic creation than transubstantiation, but for now I’ll stick to the relatively straightforward idea that God becoming an edible piece of bread is comparable to the idea of an artist becoming a consumable piece of media.3 This has been true since artists started signing their work during the Renaissance, but it’s especially true of contemporary performance art in which the audience’s relationship with the artist is a significant component of the artwork itself. There are a handful of people out there who like Taylor Swift’s music and leave it at that, but the vast majority of Swifties love *Taylor Swift.* There’s an increasingly large handful of artists who actively play with this relationship (Lana Del Rey, Charli XCX, Sophy Romvari!) but mostly it’s an inherent part of being an artist on the internet. You can’t consume a work of 21st-century art without coming into contact with its creator any more than a Catholic can receive communion without coming into contact with Jesus.

The ready availability of sacramental contact opens up a central agony in Catholic art. Why bother with an attempt to convey the actual majesty of God when it will be shown up by a piece of bread that carries actual communion with Christ? You can see this tension play out in the structure of any traditional Catholic Church: the excessive art of the apse descends dove-like from the lofted ceiling to the door of the Eucharistic tabernacle. We talk about Gothic cathedrals as soaring testaments to God, but it’s really an architecture of failure - the glory of God undercut by his own Real Presence.

Pop stardom is in many ways a secularization of the cathedral paradox. We go to enormous expenditure to transform pop stars into auto-bio-graphical works of art, all in hopes of creating a meaningful moment of connection between fan and star. But if the art of Taylor Swift is communion-via-self-exposure, is the Eras Tour a more effective work of art than an Instagram engagement announcement? Eras is the cathedral, experienced by over 10 million people over two years; the engagement announcement is the Eucharist, consumed by 30 million people in less than a day. We’d rather celebrate Eras as a major achievement of commercial art, but if Taylor Swift is selling Taylor Swift, then her engagement to Travis Kelce - and the public’s participation in that engagement - is the more authentic work of art.

It should be clear by now what all of this has to do with Mother Mary. The film starts off in Extraordinary Form, Mother Mary a walking Catholic icon (complete with gilt and halo) ensconced in the cathedral of the arena tour. But the glory is immediately undercut by a mental breakdown: Mother Mary hates every new dress presented to her and can’t go on without a change. When Sam asks what could possibly be wrong, Mother Mary responds, “they just aren’t - me.” She can’t identify what that means, and Sam is too proud to figure it out. They spend most of the movie in this mode, Mother Mary feeling the weight of millions of eyes striving to connect with hers and failing, Sam dealing with the disappointment that she’s poured her entire life into Mother Mary only to be left with no acknowledgement of her faith. They struggle with all these feelings until they finally engage in an ancient ritual that creates a ribbon of mystical blood that literally connects them by means of their open wounds. Only then can they experience a genuine connection that allows them to create true art. If you need more proof of what this movie is about, note that Mother Mary is wearing a monstrance on her head, that she starts the movie with a “Burial,” ends it with a resurrection, and sings about the “Holy Spirit” all the way through. Also she has a song called “My Mouth Is Lonely For You.” This isn’t subtle.

As tidy as his metaphors are, I don’t think Lowery is here to develop a thesis about pop stardom. Instead, he’s telling a much more personal story about two women and the artistic betrayal that broke their relationship. And because he’s operating in this theological range, he’s telling a story about loss of faith. If Mother Mary is in her Gethsemane phase, Sam is in her Dark Night of the Soul. She’s poured herself into a person/artwork and she’s longing for the tangible results of sacramental connection. When she doesn’t get them, she breaks. Lowery develops Mary and Sam’s relationship in this theological tenor, creative break-up as loss of faith as seen from both sides, forsaken Jesus and lapsed communicant. Every one of Sam’s moves should be familiar to anyone who has ever left the Church: aversion to liturgical music, physical pain when attending Mass, way too much familiarity with theological terminology that comes out in weird ways - but mostly, a sense of dull absence that can only replaced by over-devotion to art and fascination with quantum theory. Plenty of people can quit the Church and move on, but some people are stuck in the agony of sacramental absence for life.

Based on his background, I’ve got to think David Lowery falls into the latter category. Mother Mary reads as an attempt to fill the absence left by communion with the connections we can make through art. It works for awhile, but it falls apart when Lowery tries to transform the agony of lost communion into something that can actually be solved. Sam discovers that the only way to feel OK is to be literally re-connected to Mother Mary, and in the end she gets what she needs. That’s great for her, but it doesn’t actually make any sense. There is no sacramental connection to pop stars. The relationship between artist and fan will always be unfulfilling, as will the relationship between artist and art. To put yourself into your art is to destroy yourself. To devote yourself to an artist is to go insane. There are no happy blood ribbons to connect you. There are things you can touch and there are things you can’t, and the only in-betweens are sacraments, which for most people are too freaky to think about.

The most charitable reading of Mother Mary is that the silly ecstasy of its concluding shots are Sam’s realization that her dream to hear Mother Mary sing the most perfect song ever just to her is absurd - and that the red dress she sews is a manifestation of their shared open wound, the lack that will always connect them. That’s a tidy conclusion, and I think Lowery lands it. But it’s hard for me to accept a happy ending to this story. The real reason that I didn’t devote my life to figuring out Lana Del Rey isn’t because I’m bad at academia (though that helped) but because I find pop stardom depressing, depraved, and demonic. We ruin these young people’s lives for what? a false communion, the imitation of something we can experience in significantly more genuine ways that don’t require billions of dollars of surveillance and pyrotechnics and abuse. Sacraments or otherwise, communion is available in shared self-sacrifice, executed in boundary-respecting and reasonable ways, between people who care about each other. The opportunities are actually rather abundant if you pay attention for them. You don’t even need a record deal or a stadium. You don’t even need a magic piece of cloth.

In the end, Lowery is a poptimist: he’s open about his love of stadium shows, and I think he’s equal parts Swiftie and Little Monster. Partly out of fear for my life and partly because I don’t really want to be a jerk to people who love this stuff, I’ll say that it’s OK to feel that way. But if you’re going to bring my life’s work into the equation, I’m hoping for some critical bite. Mother Mary ends as a celebration of the capacity for this particular form of art to create meaningful connections. Where I’ve ended up, after thinking about it for years, is that anything that imitates the experience of religion - including, far too often, religion itself - is enormously damaging, both to the figure at the center of it and to the people who devote themselves to that figure. Catholic communion is the playbook for fascism, and it can only save itself when it’s free from the peripherals and focused on the real thing. If you want a non-damaging relationship with God, in bread form or otherwise, it needs to be personal. If you want to love art, it needs to be in a way that celebrates the material realities of the art, not the cult of the artist. And if you want to love a person, you should probably just love the person - not the bits and pieces by which you come to understand them, but the revelation through those bits and pieces of the person who also loves you.

I don’t think Lowery disagrees. In the end we get a stripped-down, halo-free Mary, exposed and loving before a humbled Sam. But it’s still in the setting of the arena, self-exposure as just another component of the performance. That kind of honesty is a brutal expectation to put on an artist. “You give people the gift of giving a shit about you,” says Sam at her cruelest. It’s a pretty spot-on distillation of what it means to be a 21st-century pop star. But it doesn’t say a single thing of what it means for a real person to love or be loved.

Great, now that’s out of the way. Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. We’ll be back next week with even more Anne Hathaway.

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Thank you to the MSP Film Society for letting me go to this festival! We are really lucky to have this organization in the Twin Cities. I am so grateful for the existence of the Main Cinema, a theater where I can’t even imagine someone pulling out their phone in the middle of a movie. If you live here and you go to movies, you should become a member. It is not very expensive and it pays back almost immediately.

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Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir opens with a grainy VHS compilation of children crying, sort of a G-rated Faces of Death but arguably more upsetting. Hayakawa never quite gives us an explanation of where the tape comes from or who’s watching it. Was it created out of empathy? Sadism? Perversion? Either way, it forces the audience to admit that we’re here to watch a movie about sad children. There’s something mystifyingly relatable about the misery of a person who doesn’t know why they’re miserable. “What kind of creep would watch that?” one character in Renoir asks. Turns out, it’s all of us.

Most people can remember childhood sadness, but it’s harder to recall its causes. I have a friend who came home one day from school and broke down sobbing for hours because his mother asked him how he liked his new backpack. To this day I don’t think he knows what got to him, but I assume it had very little to do with weight distribution or center of gravity. Narrative realities don’t click when you’re missing most of your prefrontal cortex. You react to all the wrong stimuli, and your feelings come out in all the wrong ways: school essays about how you wish you were an orphan; fixations on news stories about parents murdering their children; unexplained affinities for French portraiture. To be a child is to check a dozen emotional boxes and somehow never hit the right answer.

Renoir is a movie about something that should be sad - a father dying of cancer - and a child living out her life as if it isn’t happening. Eleven-year-old Fuki might be experiencing grief, but she’s never seen The Babadook and she doesn’t have the words to identify it. As her father scrambles for life, Fuki and her mother silently prepare for his death. Black dresses show up in wardrobes without discussion. Fuki drifts around Tokyo, lashing out at people who dote upon her and making risky decisions about dating hotlines. Her mother explores romance with an anger-management coach/miracle-cure salesman. No one talks about what the current situation might have to do with their their feelings or what those feelings might have to do with their decisions.

The result is a film that sometimes feels aimless and overstuffed, but how else can you tell a story about beating around the bush? Things happen (or don’t) with no narrative purpose - potential plot lines rise and fall, sometimes with edge-of-your-seat stakes but more often with no clear resolution. About two-thirds in, Fuki comes across a Renoir print that for a moment feels like it’s going to be the lynchpin for the entire film. It’s nothing of the sort. There’s a Mouchette quality to all of it, a sense that something is going to happen followed by an almost completely unrelated episode that reminds you that it will not. We never get tears or acknowledgement or true catharsis. In a more Sundance-y movie we’d have some sort of breakthrough moment where Fuki finally breaks down. It probably would have been satisfying, but then we’d be back to the crying tape, the perverse desire for children to mirror our grown-up need for comfort.

Adults who don’t spend much time with children often say that kids are always speaking their minds in bold and obvious ways. What we forget is that childhood is confusing and unsatisfying and almost immediately forgotten. Kids drift from the joy of new socks to the meanness of exposing their neighbors’ affairs to wishing their parents were dead to being distracted by a magician on TV, and none of it sticks because they haven’t learned the big narrative plot points yet. Someday most of them will look back on their childhoods and put those plot points into place to make all their actions cue up with their feelings. But a few will become filmmakers who pick out isolated memories of Impressionist prints that ought to connect to the death of their parents but don’t - and, in doing so, they’ll remind everyone who’s watching that grief, just like love and horror and joy, doesn’t need to make sense.

Renoir was picked up by Film Movement last fall and will be hitting a few more festivals before a theatrical release in late May.

It’s one thing to dig into your own memories, and another to mine someone else’s for what you’ve forgotten - but to dig into your memories of trying to mine someone else’s memories is the sort of meta exploration you only get at film festivals. If Renoir is a formally conventional look back at a parent’s death, Carla Simón’s Romería is an explicit interrogation of the semiotics of loss. Set in 2004, her third film recreates a trip she took at age 18 to learn about her parents, both of whom died of AIDS before she was six. Armed with a digital camera and her mother’s diary, Marina (played by first-time actor Llúcia Garcia) arrives in Vigo in hopes of uncovering the story of her birth. Framed as sort of a neo-realist mystery, Marina encounters obfuscation after obfuscation from her aunts and grandparents, whose useless answers flounder against the blunt reality of Marina’s camcorder footage.

Like most 18-year-old cinematographers, Marina’s footage isn’t very good - and like most real-life mysteries, her secret backstory isn’t especially exciting. Simón doesn’t insult our elevated sensibilities with a puzzle box. Marina meets family member after family member and gets fed bits of nothing: sometimes lies, sometimes muddled memories, never anything useful. Even the most dramatic revelations are treated with documentarian indifference - whenever we think we might be treated to an emotional reaction, Marina retreats into her camera, which she mostly focuses on ocean waves and long shots of the Galician hillsides.

The easy thing to say about Romaría is that it’s boring. Explorations of family history are, more often than not, unfulfilling. We might be personally excited by what we find, but when we recount them to anyone else it’s hard to keep them interested. The story behind Marina’s father’s death is meaningful to her, but it comes off as woefully typical to the gossip-hungry audience. Marina brings her camera to Vigo to document something memorable. What she gets instead are sleepy shots of the beach.

Soporifics make for poor cinema, and Símon knows it, so Romería makes a fourth-act turn that breaks from contemplative realism and finally gives the audience what we think we want. In a dreamlike sequence, Marina steps into her parents’ story and embodies the role of her mother. As another actress’s voice narrates her mother’s banal diary entries, Gracia plays out Marina’s imagining of her origin story through the classic beats of a heroin movie: naked idylls on the beach, psychedelic experimentation, boyfriend shooting up, girlfriend getting hooked, fighting, withdrawal, pregnancy. The imaginary sequence is almost as banal as the diary, a drama that we’ve seen a hundred times in drug movies, mercifully different than Marina’s quiet pilgrimage but so typical that it leaves you longing for a return to realism.

I didn’t particularly enjoy Romería in the moment. There are limits to how meditative and unsatisfying a film can be, and as much as I want to resist anti-intellectualism, I do see the benefits of a movie that keeps you awake. But the more it sits with me, the more I think Romería achieves something that only a boring movie can achieve. There’s more truth in fading in and out of attention than there is in explicit plot exposition based on lies and memories and empty diary entries. If there’s truth to be found, it comes from documenting the present and letting it resonate against whatever tone it wants to for whoever wants to hear it. Words and stories are fallible, but an exploration captured on a camcorder is only beholden to the lies of exclusion inherent to the frame. It’s not the whole truth, but its one unhindered by the limitations of memory.

At the very least, falling asleep in a theater and waking up to footage of dolphins clipping through the Ría de Vigo is about as pleasant as it gets on a cold Friday afternoon. I’d like to re-watch this one when I’m not exhausted, even it just means falling asleep to it all over again.

Romería will be distributed by Janus and will supposedly be coming to New York in June, followed in theory by national expansion.

I was struggling to place why everything in Blue Heron was hitting me like a ton of bricks until it clicked that Sophy Romvari is exactly the same age as me. Not only are her memories of the late 1990s made up of all the same stuff as mine - the same mechanical pencils, the same Tex Mex sofa cover, the same older brother with the same glasses and haircut - but she’s remembering it from the same seven-year-old perspective, with all the same gaps, perspectives, and confusions. Young millennials have long been accused of our nostalgia for the ‘90s, but up until now that’s come out in our enthusiasm for imitations of ‘90s media, re-creations of a teenage experience we only saw in TV shows and movies that we were too young to be watching. We’re in our 30s now, and we’re finally old enough to make movies about pre-Y2K childhood as lived by pre-Y2K children. High school class of 2009 - this is our time.

If Blue Heron was just the first great movie about ‘90s childhood, it would already be an accomplishment.1 That it’s also a groundbreaking work of meta-cinema puts it in a larger conversation that includes Kiarostami and Tarkovsky, which is a really rude place to put a relatively young person making their directorial debut but whatever, I think Romvari can hang. Blue Heron an immaculate childhood film until its midpoint, when it takes a Panahi-esque turn that takes us quite literally out of the movie and asks us to renegotiate not only everything we’ve seen, but what we’re doing in the act of seeing it. I think some people will hate that: like a lot of people in my screening, I was luxuriating in the beauty of the first 40 minutes and didn’t want to leave it. To be told to do so, by means of one of the paradigmatic and most hateful signifiers of modernity, is a direct affront to Blue Heron’s aesthetic sensibilities. Romvari makes her way back, but when she does, the framing is broken, the artifice is exposed, the project has already defeated itself.

Blue Heron is so many things, but one of them is an interrogation of our longing to remember and our compulsion to recreate. We want to go back to the past because we love the parts that we remember, but also because we want to fill in the parts that we didn’t understand, and to find an explanation that makes everything that happened afterwards finally make sense. We want to be a social worker for our vulnerable pasts, ushering our child selves into a VHS haze that will hold together forever. What hurts is that we can only fulfill that role as viewers from the future who know the points where everything will go wrong. To feel the joy of nostalgia is to know that nostalgia is necessary, to know that the memory has limits and that these limits are essential to their capacity to cause pain.

If Letterboxd is any indication, I think a lot of people spent this weekend trawling through every short film Sophy Romvari has ever made and wishing that they’d bought stock in her career back in 2016. This is your chance to get in the game before you see the movie. The miracle of Romvari’s work is her ability to immediately create and exploit parasocial relationships within the traditional frame of cinema. The story behind Blue Heron was first introduced in her 2017 short “It’s Him” and brought to a head in her NYU thesis “Still Processing.” Blue Heron is something of a sequel to those films, and it incorporates many of the elements that people who have been watching for a few years are now familiar with: family photographs, one-sided phone calls, glowing Macbooks. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone who can develop this intimacy between director and viewer so quickly and deploy it so effectively. The economy of Romvari’s filmmaking is a frequent discussion point with regard to her shorts, but the world isn’t ready for how hard it will hit in Blue Heron. By the end I not only felt that Romvari was my friend but also that I care deeply for everyone in her family even though I have only met characters who I have been made explicitly aware to be shallow echos of the people they represent.

This isn’t emotional manipulation: this is a direct interrogation of the role of the writer/director in the creation of a memory, an open question about the utility of looking back on a past that is entirely beholden to what the writer/director focuses on and what they leave out. Which is to say that it questions what cinema is and what it can be in a way that I don’t think has been previously questioned. Which is to say that I feel completely undramatic saying that this movie is Important. Paul Schrader talks about seeing Pickpocket and not being able to write about anything else for weeks. I won’t do that, but I don’t really want to do anything but keep thinking and talking about Blue Heron. Listening to people chatter about Cinemacon and stressing out about whether or not Disclosure Day is going to make money when this is out on the streets makes me question the entire enterprise of commercial film criticism. I have been waiting my entire life for this movie. Drive to New York to see it.

Or just wait until it comes out in more theaters in May. It’s called Blue Heron and it’s directed by Sophy Romvari and it’s distributed by Janus. In the meantime you can and should watch everything Romvari has ever made on the Criterion Channel.

One more thing before I go - tonight is Rental Revival Hype Nite at The Heights, the other best theater in the Twin Cities. Four physical media rental services are coming together to screen MAN v. MACHINE also-ran Event Horizon starting at 8:30pm. Veterans Sloppy Discs and Ant Hill Video will be there, but they’ll be joined by upstarts Saturn Video & Cafe and The Video Store Mpls, two future brick-and-mortar establishments in the hype-and-fundraising phase of their assent. If you’re in town, check it out. If you aren’t, check out whatever is happening in the rental revival scene in your municipality. Rental physical media is arguably good for the environment, probably good for your brain, and absolutely good for your viewer experience of cinema. There are people out there who love movies and who want to make your life better. Go be friends with them.

Thanks for reading about movies you haven’t seen these past two weeks. Remember to comment, review, subscribe, etc. I will be back next week with thoughts on Mother Mary, a movie you can actually see in theaters right now.

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But plenty of great things happened too. One interesting thing about arts festivals is their ability to bring out old people. I guess it’s easier to see four films on a Tuesday when you’re retired? I love the opportunity to watch new films alongside my elders - and I’ve also noticed that the MSP Film Society values representation, because all my favorite features so far have been about people over the age of 70. Here are some highlights from MSPIFF, all of which celebrate people living their best lives into their eighth, ninth, tenth decades.

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I think I’ve come around to Steven Soderbergh’s second career of crapping out terrible-looking half-films every six months. I hate this damn lens he keeps using, but I wonder if it’s just the best way to capture two great actors running through a smart script in a gorgeously dressed London apartment without putting in any directorial labor. I was going to write a sentence about how Soderbergh is old and has earned some shortcuts, but I checked his Wikipedia and saw he’s 63. This is America, Steven - get back to work.

Ian McKellen, in contrast, is 86, well past retirement age and working like he doesn’t have a pension. I’m not sure how much longer we have with him, but his performance in The Christophers reminded my fourth-grade self that I was right to be offended by his 2001 Best Supporting Actor loss.1 Who else can convincingly mumble “I was waterboarded by a deluge of kittens” like he’s King Lear while wearing a fuzzy neon sweater under a chore jacket with a wine bottle stuffed in the side pocket? Michaela Coel holds her own against him, and their chemistry makes up for any number of lacks in cinematography, production, or plot (James Corden shaped or otherwise).

It doesn’t really matter what this movie is about. McKellan is a cancelled boomer painter and Coel is a millennial restorationist. They clash over a variety of generational quibbles, mostly about art forgery. It’s the first movie I’ve clocked that uses the phrase “during COVID,” and its the only one that accurately grasps the idea of a very-online octogenarian. I was charmed to discover that screenwriter Ed Solomon began his career with the original Bill and Ted movies before working his way through Super Mario Bros., Men in Black, McG’s Charlie’s Angels, and the Now You See Me movies. If nothing else, Soderbergh knows how to pick his collaborators.

The Christophers is sometimes trite, sort of nothing, and minor in every way, but as an opportunity for Ian McKellen to have as much fun as he’s ever had before leaving this mortal coil, I’m here for it. If you’re convinced that cinema is going to die because corporations won’t pay to make movies, check this out. When Hollywood collapses there are going to be a lot of out-of-work actors waiting for their close-ups. All you need to do is rent a digital camera with a stupid lens and point it at them.

The Christophers is a Neon property and is supposedly in theaters right now, somewhere? It seems to have made $80,000 last weekend, so good luck finding it.

Right up the street from the Main is the Roy Blakey and Keri Pickett Photography studio, a place you’ve probably glanced at a million times in your life if your bar is Whitey’s and your primary liquor store is Surdyk’s. It’s quite a bit emptier than it used to be, but not long ago it featured: the world’s only comprehensive collection of theatrical ice skating memorabilia; the largest collection of benjarong porcelain outside Thailand; a library of original portrait photography featuring Broadway dancers, pop musicians, and drag queens; an epoch-defining collection of black-and-white male nudes. All of these and more were collected and created by Roy Blakey, a person who doesn’t have a Wikipedia page but who Divine once called his second-favorite photographer.

I don’t have anything smart to say about the craft of Uncle Roy, Keri Pickett’s celebration of her famous uncle’s life, but I can confirm that there were Hamnet levels of sniffling at its premiere. Pickett isn’t trying to do anything new with the documentary form - she’s here to tell the story of her uncle, with whom she shared a home and who was the subject of her passive lens for the final 30 years of his life. More than a retrospective, Uncle Roy is an attempt to preserve a century of memories that are quickly slipping away as a family line without children ages and dies. Near the start of the film, Roy, pretty far along in the dementia process, mumbles, “I wish I could remember any of the things I’ve done in my life.” “Well,” Pickett responds, with a hint of the patient exhaustion of someone who has explained the same thing at least ten times that day, “for that, I’ve got you covered.”

I won’t spoil the surprises that Pickett brings to the surface in Uncle Roy. Blakey’s under-celebrated importance as a gay photographer is the major takeaway, but what I found most astonishing was what I learned about theatrical ice skating, a massive entertainment industry that I assume 90% of people under the age of 40 have never thought about. Blakey began his career as a globe-trotting ice performer, and as he (and the world) aged out he fought to preserve as much as possible of what he considered the world’s greatest art form. By the end of Uncle Roy, it’s hard to say he’s wrong. For thirty or forty years we had a highly developed art form, beloved by millions, and now its gone - except for an obsessive collection of everything it ever produced, stuffed in a not-particularly watertight Minneapolis basement.

The drama of Uncle Roy is the search for a permanent home to Roy’s collection. No matter what happens, it will never be the same as the mess of photos, posters, and costumes that could only be accessed through a private tour with Roy himself. Someone else will pick out the narratives now that he’s gone: curate the labels, decide which photos to reprint, select which pieces of memorabilia to put on display. Is it sad that memories pass, or is their fading into irrelevance a celebration of the continued existence of life? I think we can have both. Lives are lived so we can tell people about them. A documentary like Uncle Roy, the distillation and sharing of a lost life by someone who loved it, is maybe the purest enactment of that.

Uncle Roy doesn’t have distribution yet. If you’re a scout for a documentary distribution company and you’re reading this, you should pick this one up.

Another movie about a dying counter-cultural icon, this one a bit better known but nevertheless at risk of being forgotten. Broken English is whacky documentarians’ Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s tribute to Marianne Faithfull, English folk singer turned New Wave crooner who died during the course of filming at age 78. If you’re paying attention to the wrong things, you’ll see this as a film starring Tilda Swinton and George McKay as two government cogs struggling to keep the doors open on a 1984-esque agency called The Ministry of Not Forgetting. Their first subject is Faithfull, because I guess she’s at risk of being forgotten? I don’t really get it, but they’re probably on to something: I would estimate about 80% of the audience at my showing were women born before 1960.

Forsyth and Pollard’s concept is over-determined, but the bones - get Marianne Faithfull in the studio, show her clips of her 60-year career, let her talk shit - is impeccable. Anyone who’s heard “Why d’Ya Do It” knows what kind of cussing she’s capable of, and even confined to a ham-fisted gimmick she still gets to the gullet. The archival footage is great,2 but the most moving footage comes from the present: Faithfull in breathing tubes and a casual tuxedo, not at all grandmotherly but more than a little doting, shaking her head at six decades of men who couldn’t figure out how to take her seriously. “In spite of all these things,” she spits, “all these stupid interviews, and all these stupid men, I’ve actually lived a lovely life. So fuck ‘em.”

60 years of being fucked over is probably a whole lot better for the soul than unlimited success. Forysth and Pollard present Faithfull as the smartest person in the room, willing to hear out anyone’s opinion but fundamentally disinterested in its value, always interested in making art but never getting precious about it. Faithfull couldn’t be a less annoying hagiographic subject. No need for Dylan’s self-mystification or Bowie’s arty re-invention - Faithfull takes the more baffling route of telling everyone straight that just because she’s a legendary alcoholic doesn’t mean that every song she sang about alcoholism is biographical. To say this politely while still cussing out anyone who is too stupid to realize it requires a certain conversational magic that they don’t teach us in America.

It’s pretty obvious that it’s coming, but there’s a surprise at the end that cements Broken English as an important piece in Marianne Faithfull’s history in and of itself. For as much as I was annoyed with Forsyth and Pollard’s cleverness, they end up documenting a perfect conclusion to a beautiful career. Young men don’t get all that many opportunities to cry along with a room of 70-year-old women. What a privilege to do it here.

Broken English doesn’t have American distribution. It’s hard to imagine it will find its way into stateside theaters, but I imagine it will show up on MUBI or something, so keep your eyes peeled.

Jayendra Ganta’s debut feature Anda is about as low budget as movies get and still looks better than The Christophers. Filmed almost entirely inside a classic Twin Cities Craftsman house (with the occasional shot of Lake Nokomis), it was made by a hyper-local crew of first-time filmmakers who, in their post-film Q&A, seemed almost gleeful about how little they knew about what they were doing.

Amateur hour though this literally is, Anda is a lovely-to-look-at contemplative horror film that holds tension, manages pathos, and weaves together genuinely interesting sonic and visual ideas. “Succeeds at being a film” seems like a low bar, but I can think of quite a few multi-million-dollar dark fantasy films that can’t clear it. A blend of Scandinavian and South Indian folklore with a sprinkle of mothman, Anda tells the story of Norma, an aging woman (theater actress Amy Warner in her first leading film role) who gradually loses touch with reality after meeting a crust-punk-adjacent lady who may or may not be a younger version of her mother. Things start to fall off the rails as Norma flickers between the child, maiden, and crone version of herself, and the vibes don’t improve when a bandaged apparition with a vibe not dissimilar to the Eraserhead baby shows up in the guest bedroom.

The degree to which this completely effective movie was made on the fly is a testament to the spirit of cheap filmmaking in this year of bloated mega-projects. The entire film is shot with shaky handhelds, which for about two seconds feels cheap but almost immediately transforms into an organic intimacy that wouldn’t work any other way. All of the film’s diagetic art was made by producer and co-writer Caleb Bell-Jones, who became de facto art director after a scheduling SNAFU forced him to throw it all together in under three hours. The script was written with minimal dialogue in order to be shot as fast as possible, a strategy that backfired when Ganta discovered that dialogue is much easier to film than perfectly composed silent shots. Somehow, it all comes together. As Bell-Jones put it in the Q&A, “Doing it wrong shouldn’t be a barrier - you’ll find out.”

It would be crazy to say that Anda is a flawless movie. It has many of the problems you’d expect from a movie made with zero dollars in two weeks in Minneapolis. But the creativity of this team, and their willingness to limit their film to those limitations, and their flexibility to fill in the gaps with crazy sound design, meditative creepiness, and longing silences, is a testament to everything that makes micro-cinema a worthwhile enterprise. Ganta and co. have figured out how to make something beautiful and say something true without quitting their day jobs. I hope they’re up for trying it again.

Anda already won Best Feature at New Jersey Film Festival and will hopefully win something at MSPIFF. Keep an eye out for it around the Twin Cities or at your local independent film festival.

MSPIFF keeps rolling through Sunday. Lots more coming this weekend: Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir (saw it last night, thought it was great); Erupcja, the latest stop on the Charli XCX cinematic world tour; Carla Simón’s Romería; and of course, Sophy Romvari’s much-beloved Blue Heron. I’ll be back with all that and more next week.

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I TRIED NOT TO WRITE ANY SPOILERS ABOUT THE DRAMA BUT IT’S HARD. The big reveal comes in the first twenty minutes - this is an assault on critics and maybe has something to do with why this excellent movie has 59 on Metacritic. If you actually want my advice, you should go see The Drama tonight, preferably with your fiancé if you have one of those, because it’s a very fun movie and because you are running out of time for it not to be spoiled by cultural osmosis. Then you should come back on Sunday morning and read my review (and also like it, and share it with 3-10 friends, and leave a provocative comment, and then do all of those things to my Letterboxd account, which you should also follow - thanks). But there are still technically no spoilers, so go ahead and read it today if you want to.

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I spent most of the night before The Drama lying awake in bed, worrying about what was going to happen as if I was actually at risk of calling off my marriage to Zendaya.1 I knew the central premise - bride-to-be reveals something to her fiancé in the “what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” game that threatens to ruin their wedding - but I couldn’t think of a secret shocking enough to hold up a 100-minute movie. I’m familiar with Kristoffer Borgli’s capacity for body horror and social sadism, and I’ve admired the chaotic power of the “what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” game ever since Dostoevsky introduced it to me in The Idiot. But even the best social manipulators struggle to land this sort of operation. The narrative juice springs from the depths you spiral into prior to the reveal, and the actual thing never lives up. Sins are either banal or disgusting, and both of those are boring.

Not to equate Borgli to Dostoevsky, but I think he’s pulled it off. After three uninteresting answers from Mamoudou Athie, Alana Haim, and Robert Pattinson, Zendaya drops a secret good enough to blindside 95% of the moviegoing population. It will make 20% want to leave the theater and another 20% roll their eyes at another Euro-trash provocation. But for the 55% who stick with it, the remaining hour and fifteen minutes of The Drama is the best kind of romcom, a comedy of manners that wonders if love can bloom in a previously unconsidered situation that suddenly feels possible.

From start to re-start to finish, The Drama is a movie about second chances. It starts with Robert Pattinson in a coffee shop testing out a series of meet-cutes, jumping between them with no clear distinction between what’s in his head and what’s actually happening. When it’s clear that his muddled head has finally botched it, Zendaya turns to him and cuts the crap. “Do you want to try again?” she asks. Her willingness to start fresh sets the tone. As Borgli follows the familiar beats of a disaster-wedding comedy (mean choreographer, evil bridesmaid, problematic DJ), he repeatedly cuts between false starts, dreams, and panic attacks, grafting his audience into his characters’ uncertain heads. It’s a perspective trick that dominates his second film, Sick of Myself, but he’s dialed it back here, stepping away from obvious fantasy sequences and letting the muddle flicker through the editing without putting on a show. The cloying and the painful and the horrific flit by with no clear indicators of what’s real and what’s imagined. There are no divergent timelines or multiverses - the reality is both what’s actually in front of you but also all the spiraling possibilities that determine what that reality means. As they process their future together, Zendaya and Pattinson are forced to either forgive the dark thoughts that undergird their shared reality or consign themselves to the superficial surfaces above the carnage.

The result is one of the more empathetic treatments I’ve seen of a topic that’s desperately in need of some grace. It empathizes with Robert Pattinson, who is suddenly stuck in the situation of knowing something horrible about the person he is pretty sure he still loves - but also with Zendaya, who is doing her damnedest to live her life despite having fucked up in a way that goes so far beyond the pale that most of us can’t imagine what forgiveness could possibly look like. It presents as a smirking subversion but somehow ends up an actual romantic comedy, a film about love that cares about its characters enough that it truly wants them to make it.

That it accomplishes all of this and also features two top-of-their game movie stars, as well-styled and beautiful as they’ve ever been, living in a perfectly dressed aspirational apartment, shot on 35mm and backed by good music, makes The Drama into about as good time at the movies as you could ask for in April. If you’re keeping track, we’ve got a (1.) pretty intelligent, (2.) visually captivating, (3.) quite funny, (4.) 90-ish-minute (5.) romantic comedy (6.) starring two of the most famous people on the planet who are (7.) genuinely great actors that (8.) gives you something to talk about over drinks after you’re done. What more do you want?

I’m not particularly passionate about the future of the romantic comedy, but if I’m looking for anything from this genre, it’s the ability to say something new about love while continuing to celebrate its enduring existence. I’m sympathetic to anyone who gets twenty minutes into this movie and finds it completely untenable. But if you’re able to allow a fictionalized account of a bad, bad thing into a cute comedy about beautiful people, you might come to the conclusion that life is actually a whole lot cuter than you give it credit - that the world can be as miserable a place as your anxious brain thinks it is, and that people still love each other in spite of it. As another anxious lover in another Euro-edge 2026 romcom says, isn’t that the whole point, of everything? I want to be a hater, but unfortunately I think he’s right.

Every time a genre movie comes along I feel obligated to return to my perennial bugaboo of “is the [generic beloved film genre] dead?” discourse. The romantic comedy is probably the most broadly proclaimed-dead genre, and I’ve already harped at length that I think this is Not True. The Drama, a reasonably successful romantic comedy starring two extraordinarily famous people, is only the latest instance of this reality. Romcoms aren’t dead -they’re just different, and that’s OK.

I think what people actually mean when they say things like this is that they don’t like A24 and miss the days of big, smooth-brain studio films. There are elements of nostalgia, conservatism, susceptibility to fascism, etc. in this, but more than anything I think what everyone is saying is that they really like genre - and that they like it because it gives them exactly what they expect, and tell them exactly how they’re supposed to feel, before they’ve even entered the theater.

More than anything, genre tells us, without complication, how a movie is going to end. We like this, because we watch movies to regulate our moods, which are often kind of a mess. A romantic comedy is going to end with two people getting together, which makes us happy. An action movie is going to end with a good guy defeating some bad guys, which makes us excited. A slasher movie might have a tricky ending, but its going to lead us through a predictable series of kills that will ultimately make us feel relief. An A24 movie (by which I don’t mean literally a movie released by the studio A24, but a millennial-coded middlebrow movie that toys with genre conventions, seems to make some sort of point, and gets critical attention without any serious awards buzz) denies you that certainty, and that feels weird.

I’m not universally opposed to A24 movies, but I do find genre subversion somewhat tiresome - not because I adore clear expectations, but because genre subversion by its nature reaffirms the need for genre’s existence. In other words, genre continues to control the narrative of a movie that bases all its decisions on defying those expectations. It’s much more exciting when a movie ignores the template altogether. I recently experienced this watching Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3., a fairly inscrutable film about the aftermath of a car crash in the German countryside. About thirty minutes in, I realized that not only did I not have the foggiest idea what the movie was about, I also had no idea how it was making me feel. It was pitched to me as a Vertigo-esque thriller, but the guy in the back row of my theater was laughing uproariously every other minute at things that weren’t funny and two people on the other side were cuddling like it was a romance. For my part, I found myself being gently lulled to sleep. Petzold, who is not someone I’ve spent much time with but is a somewhat famously austere director, only gives us simple framings, diagetic sound, flat dialogue, and shot-reverse-shot conversations about not a whole lot of anything. There’s a mystery at the core of the movie and as far as I can tell it never gets solved. I can imagine at least twenty ways one could read the ending, and I don’t have any idea which of them, if any, Petzold wants us to accept.

I didn’t particular enjoy Miroirs No. 3, but I admire that it really doesn’t care how I take it. It runs past my eyes and doesn’t tell me to do a damned thing. I could feel elated, I could feel broken, I could feel something that can’t be described or spoken. If a movie like this wants anything, its for you to pay attention to something long enough that you start to notice what it does to you. Boredom is a perfectly acceptable response.

I don’t think I have a thesis here, other than that movies are in a chaotic place right now where every bit of evidence that suggests an obsession with genre convention is counteracted by evidence that we’re more interested in blowing those conventions to bits. Cinematic materialism in all its forms - Italian Neorealism, Bressonian Transcendentalism, Berlin School, Iranian docufiction, Slow Cinema, Dogme 65, cinema vérité, whatever - has always been the antidote to this discourse. If you’re tired of A24 movies ruining your hopes for a tidy outcome, consider taking a genre cleanse and trying out Miroirs No. 3. There’s a great chance you’ll be bored and unsatisfied. But maybe there’s some relief in that? Life, after all, is *disappointing*. We should probably accept it and get used to it.

The 45th annual MSPIFF is underway! *life is disappointing* has received its first official press pass - we’re moving on up in this world. I made it out to The Christophers Thursday night but was way too sleepy to stick around for Exit 8. Lots more to come this weekend, including the premiere of Uncle Roy, the Twin Cities arrival of the much beloved Blue Heron, and an appearance from legendary cinematographer Dean Kundey. Did you know that he shot both The Thing, probably one of the best movies ever made about snow, and The Holiday, probably one of the worst? D.P.s contain multitudes. I’ve never raised my hand at a Q&A but maybe I’ll give it a shot and ask about that. All of that and more next week.

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It might already be obvious, but I want it officially on the record that I hate space. I do not care about that place, I do not want to go there, I think it would be best if no one went there.1 I care even less about what people have to say about space who are not astronomers, i.e. podcasters, filmmakers, and tech entrepreneurs. Anyone can say anything they like about what’s going on up there because it’s just a bunch of numbers and words that have nothing to do with real life. Infinity gives you a lot of flex room for your bullshit.

If I were to pick my least favorite part about space, it would have to be aliens, which don’t exist, a perspective I will hold until I die even if it’s mathematically impossible. I guess fine, whatever, they do exist, but what they are up to is none of my business. If someone were to find an alien, my life would be exactly the same as it is now, which is some people saying “look, here is proof of an alien” and some other people saying “no way, that’s fake.” This extremist position has made 2026 in movies something of a distressing prospect for me, with five slated tentpoles about space and aliens. Dune, Star Wars, and Marvel are aliens that I have accepted and learned to live with, but I’m really not looking forward to the impending discourse surrounding Disclosure Day, and I’ve been dreading Project Hail Mary ever since the trailer started forcing its way into my Youtube suggestions last April.

It turns out I was worrying too much. Project Hail Mary is definitely about space and aliens, but it’s such an aggressively pleasant movie that even the weight of the limitless void can’t bring it down. Billed as a rigorous treatment of Andy Weir’s hard-science novel of the same name, Phillip Lord and Christopher Miller’s first movie in twelve years is so grounded in the basics of family-film storytelling that I never once had to think about relativity. It tells the story of Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle-school teacher who gets called up by a mysterious organization to save the world from being frozen to death because the sun is dying. For reasons that are sort of explained, this involves flying alone to the far reaches of the galaxy and partnering up with an alien named Rocky. This isn’t a movie for stupid people, but it is a movie for everyone including stupid people, which is maybe all of us during March. It’s clearly working: families are flooding into theaters, Ryan Gosling’s career has been revived (even if his cheeks have not), and awards watchers are already creating fresh content about the 2027 Oscar season.

There’s plenty of commentary out there about the scientific plausibility of Project Hail Mary, but that’s not why you’re here. All I can offer is an analysis of its various components from the perspective of someone who is skeptical at best about the epistomological viability of the scientific method.

EARTH: Lord and Miller’s earth has very little to do with the planet I currently live on. For one, all the middle schoolers follow basic expectations and know how to read. Ryan Gosling’s classroom management is terrible, so I guess we have to chock his success to either good looks or a phenomenal elementary feeder in his district. Outside the classroom, PHM lacks many components of modern life: smartphones, hamfisted attempts to incorporate AI into the workplace, indicators of anthropogenic climate change, prop bets. The concept of “politics” doesn’t seem to exist. There’s a trans-governmental organization with unlimited money that’s able to put an international super-team into space, but it’s unclear if this is a UN-type operation or a SpaceX/Blue Origin situation.

I’m fine with this. The only thing worse than uninformed space talk is uniformed current-events talk. I do not want the guys who made 22 Jump Street to tell me what to think about global warming or genocide in Gaza. I want them to tell me how they would solve an imaginary problem about space bugs and whether or not it would include using their excrement to power a spaceship. We are better when we don’t trust MGM-Amazon with our opinions. The movies are sometimes for fun - or at the very least, movies can sometimes be made in hopes that they will continue to be watched after the completion of the current news cycle.

THE SUN: How on earth do we live in a world with two hard-science space movies about the premature death of the sun? I don’t find this idea unevocative, but as far as I understand it’s the opposite of actual science. Doesn’t the sun need to get hotter before it dies? I thought it was supposed to turn into a red giant or something. I don’t have any idea what’s wrong with the sun in Sunshine, but as far as I can understand PHM’s sun is being eaten by microscopic bugs. Ryan Gosling sort of explains how this works at one point, but I wasn’t paying attention. I don’t think you need to get it. I’m somewhat more charmed by the stupidity of Sunshine’s solution of just nuking the sun, but PHM’s astrobiological MacGyvering will give nerds stuff to argue about for years to come. If that’s you, great. If not, you can just accept that it’s beyond you and enjoy watching the beautiful man fix it.

SPACESHIP: Based on my experience of going inside a spaceship at the Air and Space Museum in D.C. for thirty seconds, I would say PHM features one of the most realistic spaceships I’ve ever seen. Lord and Miller do a beautiful job capturing the claustrophobic misery while also incorporating features that look sort of fun. All of the buttons seem to have a purpose. I didn’t quite figure out the room layout but there are several sequences of spacial exposition that convince me it exists. Overall the whole thing is much more in line with the tactility of analog movie spaceships than the glossy faux-intricacy of digital.

My only issue is that nothing ever seems to break. The whole thing looks so real that I kept expecting dysfunction à la Dark Star or Apollo 13. Instead everything seems to be in more or less working order. It’s crazy to me that a slob like Ryan Gosling can pull that off. He doesn’t even own a car, universal cinematic language for living in squalor - how has he not broken everything? I can’t even get my oven and stove to work at the same time. There’s no way this dork is both a better teacher and a better machine operator than me.

SPACE: It looks cool. Lots of black - but also, lots of colors. This is fun for the whole family, including the older brothers who candyflip.

ALIENS: There is really only one alien. I think everyone will like it. My coworker said it reminded her of her cat. Its name is Rocky. I believe it uses he/him pronouns. The alien, not the cat. Maybe the cat too. Grace cooks up a fairly believable computer hack that allows Rocky to communicate with humans that is evocative of E.T.’s Speak and Spell, and and the results are almost as cute. I know he isn’t supposed to be a linguist, but Grace at least could have run Rocky’s inputs through Grammarly to correct the translations for standard English syntax. Why do we have such an enduring love for characters who communicate without articles or copulas? Is it racism? Probably.

I appreciate the Rocky character because it doesn’t ask me to put any serious thought into the linguistics of intergallactic communication. We only need one Arrival - PHM lets us relax in the familiar beats of human feelings. If it explores any emotion with particular deftness, it’s loneliness. The bond between Grace and Rocky is sort of like Tom Hanks and Wilson. When you’re stuck alone and almost certainly going to die that way you open yourself pretty quickly to inanimate objects. Rocky and Grace serve as each other’s comfort volleyballs. They find each other baffling and stupid, but they stick together out of mutual appreciation for the other’s need for contact. Drew Goddard’s script never bothers with hazardous divergences in social values and linguistic structures; the closest we get is multiple jokes about fisting. This requires some literal universalism on Lord and Miller’s part, and some forgiveness from the viewer for their reliance on it. It asks the question, are least some people in the universe nice? and answers it “yes” almost immediately.

This is sort of the thing about Project Hail Mary. It’s not an intellectually challenging film. All it asks of its viewers is that they turn their brains off to cynicism for an afternoon. Which is a pretty big ask for some people, so that’s not nothing - but it starts off with a fairly easy-to-swallow hypothesis and finds nothing but confirmation as it runs through its trials. Can you deal with two intergalactic friends fixing space problem after space problem for two and a half hours? It’s nice, but it gets exhausting. There are at least twenty hail marys in here, a pretty stiff penance in any economy, and the conclusion would have hit harder it there had been just a few missed passes.

If it didn’t look so good - if the lights weren’t so pretty, if the ship wasn’t so real, if the puppet-looking alien wasn’t actually a puppet - that exhaustion would be the only thing to talk about. But instead, it’s all beautifully physical. Christopher Miller insists that none of the interior shots are greenscreened. The Rocky puppet is voiced by his puppeteer, non-actor James Ortiz. The whole thing is shot on Arri Alexas but transferred to filmstock and back to give it the textured warmth that makes you not want to rip your eyes out as you watch it. There’s something manipulative about that, but it’s also an acknowledgement from Lord and Miller of their audience’s increasing rejection of digital cinematography. Project Hail Mary might nerf its stakes, but at least it grounds itself in tactility.

I think that’s why I have to give it to this movie in the end. Lord and Miller have maybe made some bullshit about space, but they’ve also told a story about a human touching something. The most tender moments of this excessively tender film are Gosling and Rocky’s attempts at hugging. It’s impossible, because Rocky is encased in a geodesic sphere, and also he doesn’t have a face. But they do their best to touch one another in a world where touch is impossible. In a genre that increasingly relies on computers to artificially animate two actors who have never met into contact, even the attempt at touch - and the acknowledgement of the difficulty - drives home. Do I need to be manipulated into tears by Ryan Gosling pressing his cheek as close as he can to a puppet of a talking rock? Not really - but if it helps the filmgoers of America remember that saving the world requires actual physical contact with something, I’m here for it.

Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. We’ll be back next week with some combination of The Drama, Miroirs No. 3, and a preview of MSPIFF 2026.

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2025 is officially over. I watched the Oscars for the first time in fifteen years to commemorate this momentous year in film. I used to watch award shows religiously but stopped in college for political reasons or something. Maybe I’ve been away for too long but but wow, this was hard to watch. Really awkward and unfunny and frankly rude stuff. Thankfully there was a cute baby and a funny dog at my party and I was locked in a quietly hostile ballot competition with the host, so the night zoomed by.

Production aside, there was a lot to be happy about - it’s cool for a massive industry to take over broadcast television for four hours to honor good art and the people who make it. This was by all means a triumphant Oscars for some nice people who make things I like. But also a lot of it sucked. Here’s my Real Analysis of the 98th Academy Awards.

LOSERS: THE BEAUTIFUL CELEBRITIES

Where were the stars? I didn’t see any of them, but also I realized on Sunday that I don’t know what any of these people look like. Recognizing people out of context is hard. I once had a somewhat involved conversation with Ewan McGregor about a play he was starring in and had no idea who I was talking to until someone cued me in an hour later. I clocked him immediately on Sunday because he was standing next to Nicole Kidman and singing songs from Moulin Rouge, but otherwise I struggled to identify any famous men on stage. I don’t think it’s my fault. First, the copy they were reading was so charmless that it could have rendered even the most charismatic people in history into black holes. Second, they were all wearing glasses. How are you supposed recognize someone when they’re wearing glasses? There’s an entire comic book mega-franchise about this. Timothée Chalamet and Jacob Elordi didn’t wear glasses, but they did have nearly identical mustaches, which is another great way to throw me off your scent. Thankfully Timmy had a white suit and a Kardashian next to him, so I rarely got lost when he came on screen, which was not very often, because he didn’t win anything.

I guess I don’t respect actors. March is Robert Bresson month - mobile eyes on mobile heads on mobile bodies and nothing else. But I don’t think I’m being crazy when I say that the weight of these Oscars swung significantly toward the behind-the-camera awards. Michael B. Jordan was a big win, but otherwise the star-power felt Sunshine-esque. Chock that to a predetermined Best Actress race led by a not-quite-household name, a deserved but nerdy Supporting Actress, and an absentee Supporting Actor. But also, where was Leo? He’s the Last True Movie Star starring in the Best Picture frontrunner, and I barely saw him move his mouth. Maybe he was wearing glasses too.

WINNERS: FILM BROS

Is it giving too much credit to the internet to call this the Letterboxd Oscars? For my money the defining moment of the night was Ryan Coogler running Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s son down the aisle to celebrate his mom’s win for best cinematography. A highlight reel featuring two people who have spent most of the past year talking about film stock can only happen when an art form is shifting away from populist excess and into the “bros saying names of other bros and then explaining what their job is to you” phase. If one of the most talked about events of your night is an upset in the cinematography race then you know that the age of the Oscars selfie is over.

Overall, the Sinners technical love and the big wins for PTA left me feeling hopeful about the future of film. One of the narratives going into this Oscars was that it was Hollywood’s last hurrah before the apocalypse of the Paramount/Warner merger - two expensive studio projects made on expensive film anchored by expensive stars, duking it out one last time before Hollywood consigns itself to the IP slop factory. OK, it’s fine to feel bad about monopolies. But do you seriously believe that Autumn Arkapaw’s career is effectively over? Do you really think Ryan Coogler is never going to make a movie ever again? I’ve said it before, but the amount of talent in Hollywood is out the ears right now. The collapse of the studio system - if that’s even actually happening - is not going to obliterate this art form. If Jafar Panahi can make a perfect movie while being on the run from the Iranian state then I really think PTA will be able figure out how to do it without a quarter billion dollars from a cable company.

Whatever the future holds, this was a night for the nerds who love the art of making movies big adventure. I love to see an auditorium of beautiful people standing up to applaud a bunch of uncharismatic dorks. Ryan Coogler is an uncharismatic dork. PTA is an uncharismatic dork. Even Kim Eun-jae from KPop Demon Hunters is kind of an uncharismatic dork. Joachim Trier, Ludwig Göransson, the F1 sound lady who cussed - none of these people belong on live television, and they’re all making the world a better place by being there. Film is a community art form and if there’s anything worthwhile about this stupid event it’s that everyone watching is forced to remember that.

LOSER: TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET (for at least fifteen years)

Up until last weekend I thought “Club Chalamet” was the collective term for the fans of Timothée Chalomet and that they were referred to using collective singular “she/her” pronouns. Florine informed me that Club Chalamet is actually the name of a middle-aged woman who uses singular she/her pronouns because she is a singular woman. Whatever. Club Chalamet is in crisis. Timmy looked like shit on Sunday. He must have known when he got fitted for that suit that he was out - if he had any chance of winning he’d be wearing a classic black tuxedo, ready to take on the weight of the Academy. Dumping his Miyako Bellizzi styling for Diddy lapels and a Liam Gallagher haircut signals that he’s out of the race and into the backstreets.

I think this is fine. If he knows what’s good for him he’s going to start mouthing off a bit more, shunning the traditional circuits, and trying to shape himself in the Johnny Depp mold while doing his best to avoid a James Franco burnout. Great. Free him up from these savior-of-cinema expectations (Michael B. Jordan is more than ready for that role) and let him be an annoying turd he was born to be. The opera thing was an OK start, but you can do better. Robert Pattinson the Dune 3 press tour. Refuse to work with anyone other than problematic men. Find a few more esoteric art forms to insult. Pick up a confusing and slightly alarming hobby. In ten or fifteen years you can come back and make your imperial return-to-form picture. There’s an Oscar waiting for you on the other side of the wilderness. But for now, you need to learn the art of not-trying-to-make-people-like-you.

WINNER: SEAN PENN

For example, you could learn something from Sean Penn, who pulled off some top-tier calculated disrespect this award season. I watch high school kids do this year in and year out. 1. Say that you aren’t going to show up because you don’t care anymore. 2. Show up at a highly visible event and do something disrespectful and maybe illegal in front of all your teachers. 3. Now that everyone is paying attention to you again, subtly intimate that you secretly need to be loved. 4. Revert to absenteeism right when it counts and reject the nice thing that everyone made for you. It works literally every time. Spicoli knows the playbook. I hate this guy, everyone hates this guy, and look what he just pulled off. Timmy, do you smoke cigarettes? Consider starting. This is how you win an Oscar.

SORT OF A WASH: ME

I made some last minute changes to my ballot on Sunday morning which brought me to 17 out of 24. I got the top score at my party, but after my 100% perfect ballot in 2004 I won’t count anything less than 20 as a win. Per what I posted last week, I got 10 out of 18 (I excluded documentary, animated, shorts, and somehow forgot about editing). I DID say that it would go 6-4 OBAA-Sinners, so I will claim that as a victory even if I didn’t get the categories right. Overall though, I need to do better. As we will say in Minnesota until probably the end of time - next year.

Thank God that’s done. I’m moving on to real-deal 2026 movies next week, but in the meantime I am excited to announce the theme for the 2026 MOVIE BRACKET: MOVIES ABOUT STEALING.

I’m starting things off with four high-seed films in the four categories of theft that I learned in my sixth-grade Government and Law class:

ROBBERY - guns, bombs, getaway drivers, Ronald Reagan masks

• Heat

• Dog Day Afternoon

• Inside Man

• Point Break

BURGLARY - break-ins, safecrackers, balaclavas, tunnels

• Ocean’s Eleven

• Le Cercle Rouge

• Rififi

• The Perfect Score

PETTY LARCENY - pickpockets, shoplifters, purse snatchers, teens

• Pickpocket

• The Bling Ring

• Shoplifters

• The Mastermind

FRAUD - con artists, card sharks, fake accents, scams

• Catch Me If You Can

• Handmaiden

• Double Indemnity

• Paper Moon

I’ll put out a full 64-film bracket sometime this spring. What I need right now is your feedback. What are the essential theft movie that needs to be in this bracket? I’m not interested in movies that primarily center on the people catching the thieves (i.e. no cop movies). I’m also not interested in movies about the life of crime in general (i.e., no mob movies). I’m looking for movies that explore the interaction between material limitations and antisocial transcendence - the plunge into reality and the escapism of watching someone rise above it. Share your favorites in the comments, shoot me an email, or bug me on Letterboxd. More to come, but I think this one will be fun.

Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. We’ll be back next week with a review of Project Hail Mary.

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I simply could not drag myself to Sirāt last weekend. My friend Sophie had an art opening that you should go see (!) and I couldn’t be bothered to watch Euro-snark atrocities on a beautiful Proto-Spring day. I was ready to give up on a post this weekend when another friend, a well-known St. Paul educator, called me up midweek and proposed we make a day of it on Saturday with a double feature of The Bride! and Hoppers, both of which were playing the main floors of the two Mann theaters in St. Paul. I almost ignored him, but I’ve been missing St. Paul lately and I need content and I value friendship, so I said yes. By the time we had a plan in place Proto-Spring was over and we were on the brink of what might be the biggest snow storm of the year. A trip into St. Paul in a blizzard offers a lot of opportunities for review, so here we go.

THE 63 BUS

I took the 67 into St. Paul. My plan was to transfer to the 63, a line that has been rerouted countless times over the course of my life. I was excited to review the latest route, but the 67 was two minutes late and I missed the transfer, which meant I had to walk from Raymond and University to Fairview and Grand. It’s a pretty dull stretch, and March is a terrible time for walking. I made it in 35 minutes - pretty decent time, but the combination of the cold air and my incredible speed triggered exercise-induced eustachian tube dysfunction, a real medical malady I suffer from according to a self-diagnosis I did when I was nineteen. In short the new 63 route made my ears hurt and I do not like it.

THE GRANDVIEW

I cannot undersell my love for this theater. Nearly all of my formative cinematic memories happened here. So when I write this it’s not out of malice and it’s not because I want to discourage anyone from seeing a movie there - but the Grandview is a disaster. If you want to convince people that seeing a movie in theaters is better than watching it at home, you have to make the cinematic experience objectively better than what’s available on a 4K TV. The Grandview main room is so big, and the screen is so small, and the projection is so dim, and the lights are so not turned off, that it’s basically like watching movies on a tube TV in someone’s early 2000s basement.

It’s hard for me to believe that this is what I thought seeing a movie was for most of my life. Has it gotten worse, or did we just have no idea how bad we had it? I’m really not trying to be mean. I want the Grandview to stay open forever as a cornerstone of the Mac-Groveland community. This is a loved one reminding you that you are worth it, and that you can do better.

THE BRIDE!

The teen working the Grandview box office had moved on to the vaping/making-out-in-the-backroom phase of their shift by the time I got there, so there was nothing I could do but saunter into The Bride! without paying. I was fifteen minutes later when I got to my seat, which was easy to find, because no one else was there, and the lights were still on.

The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s second feature, is something of a Frankenstein’s monster of 2025 Best Picture nominees: Jessie Buckley, twisted speakeasies, revolutionary violence, killing a guy on a train track, freaky theater-kid bullshit, literal Frankentstein. There’s really no point describing what this movie is about because it doesn’t make any sense. If it had been written by a high school student I might have been proud of them for trying out some big ideas. Knowing that it comes from an adult brings on secondhand embarassment. Arthur summarized the first fifteen minutes for me and they were so discordant with everything that I’d seen that I didn’t process a word he said. I guess Jessie Buckley is possessed by Mary Shelley, but she’s also an undercover police informant, and also of course an undead corpse revived to satiate Frankenstein’s monster’s sexual longing, and also the result of a relatively experiment by Annett Benning, who is a time traveller maybe? I don’t know, I really lost track. At one point Peter Sarsgaard says, “The public can handle a lady monster, but why not a lady astronaut?” which is when I gave up bothering to think.

You would hope The Bride! was a fascinatingly bad artifact, and it’s such a loaded text that you’d think it would be able to produce pages of antagonistic discourse. Instead it’s only been six hours and I’ve already forgotten 90% of what happened. A movie featuring Christian Bale stomping in someone’s head, Jessie Buckley biting off someone’s tongue, and Fever Ray performing as a goblin in a jazz club shouldn’t make me fall asleep. I’m grateful I didn’t pay for it and I wish I’d been later. Arthur gave it one dead banana that shouldn’t have been revived.

MARIO’S

Our usual spot was closed so we went over to Merriam Park for a late lunch at Mario’s, which was celebrating Pi Day with $3.14 12” thin crust pizzas. What a deal! Merriam Park has been mourning the loss of the Blue Door since 2020, but Mario’s has done a fine job filling the void. Straightforward beer selection, excellent Detroit-ish-style pizza, perfect sandwiches, hockey on the TV. I liked my marinated artichoke hoagie and Arthur ate his entire pepperoni pizza. Unfortunately he was upset to discover that his pink lemonade seltzer had hibiscus in it, which he says has been creeping into more and more drinks lately and making a detrimental impact on his life. For my part, I had an EPA and it tasted like an EPA. Thank you to Mario’s for keeping normal neighborhood dining establishments alive into quarter two of the 21st century.

THE HIGHLAND

My loyalty has always been to the Grandview over the Highland, more as a matter of turf than of anything to do with cinematic experience. In the 2000s they were interchangable, but at least since COVID The Highland has taken on family-friendly programming while the Grandview swings more rated-R. It’s obvious who brings in the money - compared to the Grandview, the Highland looks like Film Forum. Vaccuumed carpets, two! employees working the counter, bathrooms that appear to have been cleaned at least once this month - but the real difference is the theater itself. It suffers from the same vastness problem, but the screen is appropriately big, the sound works, and, get this, they turn the lights off. My only note is the massive brown splotch that becomes obvious any time the screen goes monochromatic.

I hate to cede anything to Highland Park, but side by side there’s really no argument. I don’t need the Grandview to scrub out its Dragon Inn charm, and I want it to continue as a place where Central students can get paid minimum wage to smoke weed and give out free popcorn to their friends. But if they want to keep courting Letterboxd audiences then they’re going to have to get their projection quality at least as high as the Highland. It would be a real shame if all this means that the Manns are planning to reduce down to one theater. The correct number of movies available to watch in St. Paul is four. Some things must never change.

HOPPERS

Arthur and I were joined for Hoppers by another friend and his two- and four-year-old sons, which was great because prior to their arrival we were the only unaccompanied adults in the theater. A mid-30s man going to a Saturday afternoon children’s movie alone feels at least like I can convincingly present myself as a film critic. Two mid-30s childless men going together should probably be illegal.

I don’t care for Pixar movies and find that they trigger my brain in fairly psychotic ways. I was really activated by the Screen Slaver in The Incredibles Two, and I found some of his currents present in the fascist caterpillar in Hoppers, by far the most disturbing cinematic character of 2026 so far. This is the only children’s film that dares to suggest that butterflies, given access to advanced technology, would use sonic weapons to coordinate a mass death event at a political rally. I like bugs but I think Pixar is right that they are probably genocidal and best kept quite small.

Hoppers is a movie about a college student who stumbles into a technology that allows her to upload her mind into a hyper-realistic beaver robot, which she uses to communicate with a group of wild animals to inspire them to move back to a pond she really likes which is going to be drained to make way for a highway. Like a lot of Pixar movies, it builds itself around adult anxieties swathed in cheap sentimentalism and dumb jokes for children. It’s not very funny, it’s ocassionally exciting, and it’s often quite scary. Its most interesting component, other than the blackpilled butterfly, is the interplay between animal-animal communication and animal-human communication. The animals become cartoon-eyed whenever they interact with one another but are rendered with vacant, Balthazar-esque stares whenever they interact with humans. I like this acknowledgement of the cartoon genre’s anthropomorphism, and I agree with Hoppers’s repeated suggestion that humans and animals probably shouldn’t talk to each other. We’d be quite disturbed to find out what they’d like to do to us if they had the technological capacity. And honestly we might be even more disturbed by what they’d like to do with each other.

I’m curious how many of the children at my screening were caught up in this disturbed headspace. Actually I’m not curious at all, children are pretty vocal at movies and at least one of them was shrieking with terror by the end. There’s quite a bit of death in Hoppers and the suggestion of a whole lot more. At one point an astonishing regicide takes place, which led to one teen-adjacent child shouting out, “Why are you laughing?” In our corner of the theater, the response was closer to ambivalence. The child to my right mostly demanded candy, asked “Is it over?” every thirty minutes, and shouted out “Suck!” after a character says “This sucks.” After it was over he reported that he didn’t like it, but then two minutes later he said it was so funny.1 The adult child to my left, who was on his cellphone like a boomer for half the movie and had by this point decided that two mediocre movies in one day was too many, gave it half a child-sized banana. The rest of the children in the audience applauded and ran out of theater cheering, probably because it had started snowing and it sort of felt like Christmas.

SNOWMAGEDDON 2026

Accumulation had begun by the time we left the theater. I got a ride home and am now safely inside. It’s coming down for sure but not at all that furious a clip. So far, not impressed. I hope it goes easy enough that I can get to my Oscars party tonight but that it picks up late so we get a snow day on Monday. Our American Dreams are small in the Twin Cities, but we still hold them.

Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. We’ll be back next week with Oscars thoughts and an exciting announcement.

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I’m finally here to provide what the world needs, a straight, squeamish take on Harry Lighton’s debut gay biker movie Pillion. Up until writing this sentence I thought a pillion was a thing that you tied someone to in order to publically harm them, so that’s the kind of informed perspective you’re getting here.

A pillion is the back passenger seat of a motorcycle, and Pillion is about a guy who likes to sit there, particularly when Alexander Skarsgård is driving. How he would feel about being tied to a pillory is never explicitly addressed, but given some other indicators I’d suspect he wouldn’t object. Harry Melling, best known to the world as Dudley Dursley, is a recently out barbershop quarter singer/parking attendant who stumbles into a Christmas Day encounter with Skarsgård, an emotionally repressed biker who likes to tell other people what to do. This works great for Dudley, who prefers to follow intructions, and soon they’re in a committed sub-dom relationship complete with padlock necklaces, daily wrestling matches, and matching copies of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle.

The central tension of Pillion is whether or not Melling and Skarsgård’s relationship, which regularly features mistreatment (emotional and otherwise), is healthy. A safer, stupider, smuttier movie would let us in on some obvious consent semiotics to assure us that all of this is OK. Instead, Lighton keeps us on our toes, asking us to accept the pithy takedowns and the bootlicking as they come without being told how to take them. Skarsgård gives concilliations of affection - little smiles, birthday cupcakes, check-ins about happiness - but this is classic abuser behavior to keep the needy party locked in. It's hard to identify a red flag when red is the only color you see.

I’ve spent a lot of this winter watching French Poetic Realist films from the 1930s, and it’s bizarre to see depictions of what 21st-century Americans are trained to read as sexual assault treated like high romance. French directors (especially Jean Renoir) use a variety of cues to tell us that an encounter that begins with menacing advances and retreating refusals is actually, for the purpose of the plot, OK for everyone involved. This is not the time to get into the politics of consent in prewar France - the point is we are trained by cinema to ignore explicit statements (it wasn’t until fairly recently that, on screen, “no” actually meant “no”) and instead look for cues outside the diagesis to know how we’re supposed to feel: a swelling score, the camera turning upward to a clear sky, a cut to two people smiling as they button their jackets. Lighton relies on none of that and presents sex without framing, which is risky business when you’re depicting a relationship that exists very far outside the typical boundaries of respect and consent. We’re forced to take the characters at their word when they say they’re happy - which is hard to do when we’re all wise to the emptiness of the word and hardwired to accept genre convention as truth.

The only concession Lighton gives to his concerned/straight audience is Peggy, Harry Mellings’s mum who is thrilled that her Diddykins is dating but not sure she likes that his boyfriend’s whole personality is being an asshole. It’s impossible to her that Dudley could actually be happy cooking his own birthday dinner or sleeping on Alexander Skarsgård’s rug. “That’s very close-minded of you,” Skarsgård rebutts, but is he just weaponizing progressive language to take advantage of an inexperienced lover? It’s hard not to see things from Peggy’s perspective. Lighton doesn’t tell us whether she’s right or wrong - we just have to trust that our boy will figure it out for himself.

There would be something voyeuristic, almost documentarian, about Pillion if it were just about the things some people do in their bedrooms and on the backs of motorcycles. But Lighton’s film is less as a look into kink than an exploration of a much more universal experience of romance, the struggle to figure out when love is opening up a new side of yourself and when it’s asking you to close yourself off to maintain its rush. The depictions of BDSM relationships are extreme, but they’re less about exoticism and more a means to depict a universal experience of love without relying on prescriptive romcom semiotics. I’ve never had the desire to be in a relationship with someone who makes me tie their shoes, but I’m familiar - I think most people are - with the feeling of making concessions for someone who’s better looking than me. What’s essential is finding the space where there’s enough of yourself left to keep on giving - it’s only there that love can happen. “Isn’t that - the point of everything?” Dudley asks at a point of confused desperation. He’s probably right, and finding the place where that doesn’t have to be questioned is something we all need to figure out, no matter what we’re into.

I receive dozens of emails a day asking for Oscars content. I think these awards are stupid but my readers are my Skarsgård, so here is an OK omelet of 98th Academy Awards content.

I’ve given a prediction, a pick, and a swap for each category. I’m skipping animation, documentaries, and shorts, because, to paraphrase Jia Tolentino, that’s none of my business. I’m basing this off a combination of instinct, informed research, and sentimentality. Use this as a guide to see these movies (most of them are streaming or back in theaters), to make your ballot, or as a starting point to get in an argument.

BEST ACTOR

Swap in: Stellan Skarsgård for Michael B. Jordan. I understand that the optics are terrible but I promise I will make up for it.

Prediction: Wagner Moura. I think Marty Supreme is sort of explicitly about how Timmy is never going to win an Oscar. I could see Leo coming back to reclaim his spot, but I don’t think The Secret Agent is going to win anything else and everyone agrees that Wagner Moura is just so handsome.

*lid* pick: Stellan Skarsgard. Since I can’t have that, I’ll go with Leo.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Swap in: Miles Canton for Stellan Skarsgård. See? I made up for it.

Prediction: Stellan Skarsgård. Stellan’s nomination in this category was a maneuver out of a loaded Best Actor mélée. I think it’s going to work. BDT is the people’s choice, but the people don’t vote.

*lid* pick: Benicio Del Toro. This is a newsletter of the people.

BEST ACTRESS

Swap: Amanda Seigfried for Emma Stone. There’s no reason Stone needs to be here again, especially if Jesse Plemmens isn’t coming along with her.

Prediction: Jessie Buckley. I’m not here to lose money.

*lid* pick: Rose Byrne. She’s good.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Swap: Mariam Afshari for Wunmi Mosaku. I don’t hate Sinners. I just wonder if 16 nominations was too many. Afshari, who I believe works primarily as a karate instructor, deserves some credit for what she does in It Was Just An Accident.

Prediction: Teyana Taylor.

*lid* pick: Elle Fanning. In a diverse field of breakthrough actresses, *life is disappointing* goes with the safest brand possible. Playing a bad actress is one thing; playing a mediocre actress and making it into an essential plot point is virtuosity.

CASTING

Swap: Weapons for Hamnet. Is this award just “best ensemble cast?” If so, get Weapons on the board.

Prediction: One Battle After Another. Is this award just created to give to One Battle After Another? If so, give it.

*lid* pick: One Battle After Another.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Swap: 28 Years Later for Frankenstein. Something we’ve never seen before for something we’ve seen plenty.

Prediction: One Battle After Another. Did you know this film was shot on VistaVision?

*lid* pick: One Battle After Another.

COSTUME DESIGN

Swap: The Phoenician Scheme for Frankenstein. Multiple teenagers have told me they think this is one of Wes Anderson’s best movie. Someday critics are going to realize that they’re right, and that they should have at least given it some technical nominations.

Prediction: Sinners.

*lid* pick: Marty Supreme. We’re long past the point culturally where a movie can change the way a generation dresses. But if there’s a film that could reshape Gen Z’s approach to suiting, it’s Miyako Bellizzi’s work in Marty Supreme.

MAKEUP

Swap: Marty Supreme for Frankenstein. What on earth are those pockmarks not doing in this category?

Prediction: Frankenstein.

*lid* pick: Marty Supreme by a thousand. If I can’t get that then whatever, The Smashing Machine.

I don’t really care about these next three awards, so I’m just going to toss out predictions.

PRODUCTION DESIGN: Marty Supreme.

SOUND: F1.

VISUAL EFFECTS: Sinners.

SONG

Swap: Pale Pale Moon for the Diane Warren song. If something else hadn’t happened this summer, Sinners could have just swept this category.

Prediction: Golden. Some things cannot be denied.

*lid* pick: Golden. Even by me.

SCORE

Swap: The Testament of Ann Lee for Hamnet. Maybe this isn’t elligible for some stupid reason. I guess I’d nominate Marty Supreme, then, but that’s probably inelligble too.

Prediction: Ludwig Goransson for Sinners.

*lid* pick: Jonny Greenwood for OBAA. Jerskin Fendrix’s Bugonia score was probably my favorite of the year, but Jonny Greenwood’s minimalism actually serves the purpose of the film, disappearing into the background, ratcheting up the tension, and building up to one of the most affecting dadcore needle drops in cinematic history.

INTERNATIONAL

Swap: I don’t think Guinea Fowl is technically eligible. If it is, get that in there. If not, give it to Resurrection.

Predition: It Was Just an Accident. It better win.

*lid* pick: It Was Just An Accident.

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Swap: Peter Hujar’s Day for Frankenstein. It’s basically just a transcription of a real conversation, but that in and of itself is interesting, and to cut that into a compelling film is a small miracle.

Prediction: One Battle After Another.

*lid* pick: One Battle After Another.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Swap: The Secret Agent for Sinners. I’m not a Sinners hater by any means but I did not find it to be a masterpiece of wit or plotting.

Prediction: If trends persist re: Black directors, this is where Ryan Coogler wins big for Sinners.

*lid* pick: Sentimental Value. Does everyone hate this film or is that just a thing that movie podcasters say? I don’t know why the cool kids turned against it, I think it’s so good.

DIRECTOR

Swap: Jafar Panahi for Chloé Zhao. I do not understand this snub. It looks even worse now than it did two months ago.

Prediction: Paul Thomas Anderson. I don’t think anyone is debating this.

*lid* pick: Paul Thomas Anderson. One Battle After Another taught me that, in the end, I’m just another white boy.

BEST PICTURE

Swap: There is no reason Bugonia, F1, or Frankenstein are in over It Was Just An Accident. It’s stupid but not surprising that Weapons didn’t make the cut. One of the Linkletters, probably Blue Moon, should have gotten in over Train Dreams. Whatever. These awards are arbitrary and ten is basically too many to think about. Just leave it as is, we know who’s winning.

Prediction: One Battle After Another. If you’re counting, that’s six Oscars for PTA and friends. Sinners will slide in with four. Everyone else gets one.

*lid* pick: One Battle After Another. I have so little experience rooting for the winning team and it sure feels nice.

Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. We’ll be back next week, probably with a review of Sirat.

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Oh my goodness, *life is disappointing* is one year old! I’ve observed a slew of first birthdays in the past year, and it seems like prominent trends include the recently developed ability to walk, a handful of monosyllabic words that feature only bilabial consonants, and uncertainty about what to do with cake. I’m proud to say that *lid* can do all of those things and more. It feels good to know that your newsletter is more capable than the average human baby.

My first post was about a months-old Oscar-nominated film that I didn’t see in theaters, so to honor that tradition I’m playing clean-up on three future losers at the upcoming Academy Awards that I finally watched this week: Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, and Craig Brewer’s Sing Song Blue nevermind I don’t have Peacock - sorry Kate Hudson, I’ve heard you were great.

It goes without saying, but I’m really grateful for all the support over the past year, whether it’s obligatory likes, subscriptions (paid and otherwise), nice emails, recommendations to friends, or even confrontational comments. I’d probably keep writing this even if no one was reading, but it’s much more fun to know that at least a couple people are getting something out of it. Keep reading, I’ll keep writing, and so long as Hollywood holds up their end of the bargain we’ll stay in business.

SPOILERS for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You! And Marty Supreme. And for Frankenstein, I guess? but you probably know the plot of that one.

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If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a movie about self-obsessed anxiety so on the nose that at one point the camera nearly gets shoved up Rose Byrne’s nose. If I praised Celine Song for refusing to back down from Dakota Johnson’s mustache hairs, Mary Bronstein deserves at least as much credit for closing in on Rose Byrne’s boogers.

Bronstein’s camera is attached to her lead’s face for nearly all 113 minutes of If I Had Legs. It only cuts away to zoom in on her feet, which are constantly shifting in and out of uncomfortable shoes, or the immediate object of her attention, which is more often than not a gaping hole in her ceiling accessorized by DMT hallucinations. Things we don’t see: her asshole ship’s captain husband; her daughter suffering from an unnamed illness that somehow involves a tube; the nature and anatomical location of said tube; anything resembling an establishing shot. Instead we get close-ups of brow wrinkles, bloodshot eyes, crumbs of weeks-old marijuana, and a very moist nasal passage. Subtlety is not the name of the game: this is a movie about how your world shrinks down to nothing when all that’s left are the immediate disasters of your day-to-day life.

I didn’t find If I Had Legs to be an astonishingly insightful movie, but it’s such useful shorthand for a particular experience of stress that I have to hand it to everyone involved. Fran Hoepfner said it makes essential counter-viewing to Marty Supreme, and I think she’s spot on, not least because they both feature water-related ceiling collapses. Marty (written, notably, by Ronald Bronstein, Mary Bronstein’s husband) is about a man who creates a hurricane of stress and rides it out on the wings of his egomaniacal confidence. If I Had Legs is about a woman with crippled agency who experiences one problem after another and drowns because of it. Everything that happens to Marty is almost 100% the result of his own bullshit, but he’ll never take the blame for it. For Rose Byrne’s Linda, it’s the exact opposite - at one point she stands up at a group therapy for mothers of dying children and screams, “Of course it’s our fault!”

The most simplistic reading of these two films is that they depict the fundamental difference between men and women under the crush of patriarchy, capitalism, etc. It’s unsurprising that most of the critical champions of If I Had Legs are women. As a not-woman, I found myself regularly thinking, “Well that’s not realistic,” which is a stupid thing to think during a movie and is only worth sharing as an example of a certain brain-brokenness that comes out most reliably when men view women’s art. Of course this movie isn’t realistic: very rarely does a person experience a plumbing disaster, a car accident, the near third-degree murder of A$AP Rocky, an abandoned baby, pizza with the cheese torn off, and being married to Christian Slater in a single week. But I couldn’t count the number of times I clocked the expressions of the very stressed-out mothers in my life reflected on Rose Byrne’s face. It’s exaggerated to comedic (I guess?) effect, but the feeling - paired with the undeniable material reality - of being solely responsible for far too many things and then getting blamed when they aren’t all fixed by bedtime is something that my informal survey finds to be a pretty much gendered phenomenon.1

Like Marty Supreme, the most affecting image of If I Had Legs is its final shot. Marty ends with a father’s realization upon meeting his first born that there’s something out there that far exceeds his individualistic obsessions. If I Had Legs ends with the our first revelation of Linda’s sick child looking down at her sick mother’s face, smiling and saying, “I’ll be better, I promise.” A classic affective shot of the father (image reflecting you how the viewer should feel) vs. a close perspective shot of the child (image revealing the visual perspective of the mother). Marty’s expansive cinematography reduces down to the title character’s broken face while If I Had Legs’s handheld myopia turns for the first time toward the child who has spent the entire film as an out-of-frame nuisance. It’s a quick injection of unconditional love at the point of narcissistic collapse - from the father out to his child in Marty, from the child down to the mother in If I Had Legs. For the former, it’s the first time Marty has expressed genuine care for another person.2 For the latter, it’s the first time anyone has reached out in an act of care for Linda.

There’s a selfishness in both conclusions - fathers only think of their children as devices in their own legacy, mothers only think of their children as means of support - and I guess I’d accept that cynicism if I believed in self-reliance and respected the need for people to figure out their shit for themselves. But I think both Bronsteins believe that the point of having family, children or otherwise, is to admit that we are incapable of existing in this world without the love of other people. It goes both ways: family exists to make you cry, to be taken advantage of, to suck up your resources, to solve your problems for you when the world is too much to deal with. We should try to be nicer to these people who opted (or didn’t) into this life of unconditional love, but we all know that’s impossible: we’re too fallen to give adequate thanks to the enormous degree of love that’s been given to us. Thank god we live in a world where people who are so programmed for selfishness get the opportunity once in a while to be pushed out of themselves by the people who care for them - in other words, a world where parents as shitty as Marty and Rose are capable of receiving grace. Who knows if they accept it long term, but they’re willing to hear it out when it enters and, for at least a moment, to let themselves bawl their eyes out because of it.

Frankenstein is a movie about the basic themes of Frankenstein so on the nose that shortly after someone says “you are the real monster” The Creature tries to rip off Dr. Frankenstein’s nose. He doesn’t succeed, which is a real surprise, because he regularly bends steel, survives explosions, withstands Arctic plunges, and throws people though hardwood doors like they’re bowling pins. You’d think he could at least get a hold on some cartilage and pull.

Oscar Isaac makes Rose Byrne look like parent of the year in Guillermo Del Toro’s Netflix adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic. The pedagogical part of my brain was on fire through the first-act depictions of Dr. Frankenstein’s attempts to teach Jacob Elordi basic pro-social behaviors. His failure is remarkable, because Elordi is an astonishingly efficient learner. By the end of his first winter he’s capable of not only speaking in full sentences but demonstrating advanced comprehension of the classics of pre-19th-century English literature. If only we could teach all nonverbal kids to read Paradise Lost in three quarters - the Minnesota READ Act would almost seem viable (This is the quality education-policy crossover content you come here to see.) You simply cannot start hitting even your brightest students with a large piece of metal when they don’t show literacy growth or self-regulation gains. Mia Goth is no better, and her strategy of jumping immediately to explanations of the nature of vocal cords is a classic demonstration of new teacher naïvité. Meet your students where they’re at, guys! But I’ve never educated a child cobbled together from the corpses of public execution victims and casualties of the Napoleonic Wars, so who am I to judge?

I have so many questions about the logistics of Frankenstein. Where did The Creature earn the ability to Wolverine-style instant heal? What happens if his head is cut off? What does he do about bathroom stuff? Maybe these aren’t the right questions, but the most successful parts of Frankenstein come when Del Toro explores the gnarly physiology of building a human from scrap. I was enraptured for about twenty minutes as I watched Oscar Isaac piece together body parts and perform inexplicable experiments with electricity. The best part of clunky thrillers are the logistics segments, and I wonder how much more successful Frankenstein would have been if it stuck with the set-up and never turned itself over to the Marvel-y action sequences that Del Toro has never effectively grasped.

Like so many of Del Toro’s big-budget features, Frankenstein is over-indulgent, waterlogged, and unnecessarily dependent on stupid special effects. This sucks, because Del Toro’s eye for set decoration and shot composition overwhelms his need for CGI or Netflix money. When he’s leaning into his native grotesqueries I could almost forget his failures. But it’s not enough. Frankenstein looks for the most part like a 2005 My Chemical Romance video, made to be watched on the smallest screen possible, colors blaring in tandem with its middle school thematics to drown out whatever other slop screen might try to out-stream it.

I was ready to hate this movie for all these reasons, but I can’t go all in, because in the end I think Del Toro isn’t an evil person. He fundamentally believes in lovely things like celebrating life despite its pains, living out your weirdness, listening to nature, and rejecting one’s base impulse toward cruelty. This leads to extraordinary corniness, but in the struggle between cringe and edge I’m going to have to side with the former. I’d love for Del Toro to break his deal with Netflix and go back to the practical creepiness that made him famous, but there’s a lot more to be mad at in this world than a guy trying his maximalist hand at the story that inspired him to devote his life to art. At the very least, making Frankenstein might have gotten something out of his system. If it means he can finally return to the comparatively minimalist wizardry that brought us Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, then good riddance. That magic is still present in the best moments of Frankenstein. There’s a tender physicality here between the explosions and the body tossing. Netflix might be the real monster, but it’s creatures still have heart.

That pretty much wraps up my Oscars season. If you need some reading material as you prepare your personal ballot, I think this link will lead you to everything I’ve written about the 2025 nominees. I don’t deal with documentaries, animated films, or shorts. I’ll watch Sing Song Blue if Fandango at Home Formerly Known as Vudu drops the price below $9.99 or if I accidentally get some late FYC screeners, which used to happen when I first moved into this house. Sirat hasn’t come out in Minnesota yet - my Euro-edgelord patience has been long depleted, but I’ll probably suck it up and see it in the next couple weeks. My IRL child-in-distress capacity is way too full to see The Voice of Hind Rajab, I refuse to break my James Cameron embargo, The Ugly Stepsister looks miserable, and

I’m politically opposed to watching straight-to-streaming movies about bus disasters. I’d like to see Kokuho if the opportunity arises. Other than that, I've written about pretty much everything. Check it out as you prepare yourself for this very important event that everyone definitely still cares about.

I’ll be back next week with something or other. It seems like Pillion and Wuthering Heights are still the only movies playing in the Twin Cities, so I guess it might be that.

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One of my favorite social interactions is when someone describes a a comedy in excruciating detail and stares at you until you laugh. This usually happens when you’ve been hanging out with your neighbor for the fifth day in a row and normal activities like “give me the controller so I can beat this boss for you” or “hold the camcorder until I land this kickflip” have ceased to hold your mutual attention. The passive party can zone out for fifteen minutes and think about other things, and the active party will continue ad nauseum as long as you catch their eye every couple minutes and toss out the occassional forced laugh. I don’t often find myself in these interactions since becoming a socially functional adult, and I think I’m the worse for it.

I’d love to summon that spirit and describe the funniest scenes from Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, but I was always the beta neighbor and never got any practice. That’s OK - you can use my critical weakness to your advantage. There is no reason to read about Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie. You should just go see it. There’s no way to convince you that you should see it, but you should. There’s this one scene where the main guy, Matt, is drinking this discontinued pop from the ‘90s called Orbitz, but he still has a bottle of it leftover, and he says “What are the ingredients? Sugar, water, corn syrup, and it also says ‘lightning in a bottle’” and his friend Jay says, “that’s just the slogan, it doesn’t actually have lightning,” and Matt says, “Or does it?” And then - boom! Doesn’t that sound funny?

Seeing NTBTSTM in theaters is an essential act of self-care in these trying times, sort of like drinking water or remembering to eat breakfast. According to an anti-burnout training I had at work this week, laughter is essential because of something to do with “the neurosequential model.” I did some further research and discovered that some scientists have gone so far as to say that laughter is “the best medicine.” As an amateur observer, I have to agree: once in a while it's important to sit in the dark for ninety minutes and experience joy. Not Safdie-style horror-joy or Friendship-style wtf joy, but just simple joy in the fact that humans are alive and can achieve spectacularly stupid things for the sake of making other humans laugh. This is healing. You need this.

There are lots of good things already written about NTBTSTM, and I don’t have much to add other than to say that they’re correct. The only reasonable reactions are “how did they do this?” and “this is so funny,” plus maybe a sprinkling of “this is really sweet” if you’re sentimental and “I am so proud of my country” if you’re Canadian. It will inspire you to create the social circumstances to make anything possible. It will remind you that it’s worthwhile to hold onto both your dreams and your friendships. It will clear your brain of the compulsion to think about time travel. And if you are someone who is incapable of experiencing in-the-moment joy, it will at least make you marvel at some of the greatest meta-technical achievements of 21st-century cinema.

If NTBTSTM gets its fair day in court, it will inspire theoretical, practical, and legal arguments for years to come. It isn’t the first unscripted, documentary-style comedy, but it’s a leap forward in a genre that felt decades-buried dead. Our expectation for narrative cinema is that the director controls for most variables but occassionally adapts to disruptions. Our expectation for documentary cinema is that the director captures the unexpected but occassionally manipulates the footage to get what they want. NTBTSTM exceeds both, first by engineering open-ended set-ups that allow extraordinary things to happen, and then by back-building story arcs to incorporate the unanticipated turns. The production stories are insane. Things that look like set pieces are the result of pure happenstance, and things that seem unfilmable are the result of delicate social engineering. At one point during shooting, a news event occured outside a famous Canadian recording artist’s home; Jay and Matt raced to the scene, captured a sequence, and shifted the entire structure of their film to incorporate the footage. For the latter: at one point, a GoPro is attached to an unknowing bystander’s head to capture an indescribably dangerous scene; Jay and Mike manipulate the bystander, convincing him to turn his head at just the right moments to capture what is more or less a David Copperfield act.

You can get on Reddit and speculate what was real, what was faked, what was mythmaking, what was buried to avoid legal culpability. Or you can just experience Nirvana The Band The Show The Movie as a testament to what can happen when you hold life open for the possible. Beautiful things can happen if you put care into your conditions and don’t worry too much about the outcomes. And they can blossom if you open yourself to chaos and build on the unexpected. This sounds like philosophical advice for serious times, but sometimes what you do with the world around you is so stupid, so unimportant, so responsive to the simple joy of being alive that nothing matters but the hilarious moment surrounding you. If you’re struggling to remember what it feels like to live that way, figure out where this is playing and go see it. It might not be quite as funny as your neighbor summarizing South Park, but it’s close.

Someday someone is going to look back on the history of podcasting and wonder when we switched from Serial-style radio scripts to the four-hour chat sessions we endure today. It has something to do with parasocial relationships, something to do with modern advertising, and something to do with Call Her Daddy. Whatever the reason, podcasts have evolved into an excuse to listen to people chat, which is either the lowest form of entertainment ever created or a crystallization of the human need for communication. Or I guess both.

Ira Sach’s Peter Hujar’s Day is a movie about a time one person thought it might be interesting to record herself chatting with another person. The twist is that this happened in 1974. The chat is about how they’re chatting about everything that happened to one of them (the titular Peter Hujar) the day before (his titular Day). Sometimes it’s a recounting, and sometimes its a discussion of the fact that it’s being recounted. Sometimes what’s depicted is the recording of the conversation on magnetic tape; sometimes what’s being depicted is the recreation of the recording being filmed on 16mm cameras. Very little happens, very little is explored. All we get is a cross-media expansion of a fifty-year-old chat.

The original Peter Hujar’s Day was a failed project of writer Linda Rosencrantz. Rosencrantz had hoped to record interviews about the daily life of her interesting friends, the better to understand what she perceived as the inanity of her own life. The project never took off, but Rosencrantz managed to record and transcribe one interview with her friend Peter Hujar, a New York street photographer whose career was just on the verge of taking off. The tapes were lost, but the transcription was finally published in 2021 as Peter Hujar’s Day (the book). Ira Sachs turned it into a screenplay and brought Ben Wishaw and Rebecca Hall along for the ride. Instead of doing the normal thing and recreating the Day in question (which Hujar recounts in excruciating detail, down to what Alan Ginsberg didn’t offer him to eat and when exactly he put on his socks), Sachs recreates Hujar and Rosencrantz’s conversation. And instead of convincing us that we’re watching an authentic conversation, Sachs regularly reminds us - through classic meta-film strategies like double takes, outside-the-set shots, and intrusive boom mics - that we’re watching a recreation of a conversation that should have been lost.

There’s no reason this project should succeed, and if it were longer than 71 minutes it might collapse under the weight of its pretense. But the meta-cinematic elements strip away the disbelief that’s always so hard to suspend in period recreations, and the meta-conversational elements break down the viewer’s indiffference about the subject matter. What’s left are the raw words of a long-past friendship rendered authentic via undisguised artifice. The Day is buried underneath the recounting, the tape is lost to history, the film is self-aware in its status as recreation - the only connecting fiber are the actual words of an actual conversation between actual people that just happened to survive across a century.

Undergirding Peter Hujar’s Day is the impending death of a gay man as he opens up to his friend without fully admitting the pain of his circumstances. AIDS is just around the corner, and the setting sun and the Mozart’s Requiem drops are not astoundingly subtle reminders that this is a record of mortality. It makes a good double-feature with 2025’s other chatty gay artist movie about death, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon. Both films refuse to lean into depression and instead stay alive on the inanity of gossip. You could listen to these men patter about nothing because the sad lives around them are an opportunity for their words to shine. Like a podcast, those words invite you into relation with someone you’ve never met. To capture them on film is to memorialize a potential friendship long passed. For Lorenz to alcohol, for Hujar to AIDS - and both of them to time, their voices lingering and summoning up a long-past New York that now feels impossible.

I think this is true of any record of a conversation no matter when or where it was recorded. A transcript will always be a frozen artifact of a lost moment that only existed between the people talking. The contemporary podcaster’s New York feels just as impossible to me as Peter Hujar’s. It’s a New York created through the sound of a voice removed from the context of ordinary life and caught up in the magic of its own mythology. Even at its most inane, it renders boredom into something special and unique and wonderful. Which is maybe what any good conversation does. The least interesting things are turned into magic when we’re with our friends. If we pay attention to that alchemy, the same can be true of their settings. An ordinary Lower East Side apartment becomes a triumph of Midcentury design. The slats of light from the setting sun render late afternoon into abstract-expressionist transcendence. A casual reminder of the need to eat becomes a cue for the Mozart Lacrimosa. Ira Sachs isn’t the first person to do this, but it’s wonderful to watch something so boring transform into something so beautiful. Someday we’ll look back on the inanity of our current conversations and remember them as the most glorious parts of being alive. You can let the words slide by if you want. Just remind yourself that it could be a memory and be happy to live in it.

Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. Next week I think I’m going to deal with the sloppy trilogy of Gothic novel adaptations that have assaulted our our streaming platforms and cineplexes over the past several months. Either that or Pillion.

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I. I Am The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived.

There are a thousand versions of America. This has always been our thing: “a nation of immigrants,” by choice or compulsion, but there are native people here, so even that doesn’t really work. If anything, we accept individualism as our national identity and self-reliance as our unifying virtue. We are all John Wayne walking out the door, Lesley Gore crying at her party, Herzog’s penguin wandering into the continent.

It’s hard to deny the centrality of the self to a country that invented individual rights and founded itself on as subjective an idea as “the pursuit of happiness.” But if the widespread acceptance of critical histories has taught us anything, it’s the relative insignificance of 1776 to our spiritual DNA. The codification of a handful of documents and the ensconcing of a particular republican ideology by means of war is only one way to create a nation. There are a thousand different Americas, and there are a thousand different starting points.

My family’s America - or at least, one of my family’s Americas - started on Long Island in 1672. I don’t know much about the first Tuthill other than that he settled in Suffolk County under the Connecticut Colony charter. I assume he came over at least somewhat consumed by Calvinist fury. Or maybe he was in love with a true believer, or maybe America was an easy way out of a lousy East Anglian situation. However it happened, he ended up in a radical Puritan community with a strong superiority complex and an unavoidable sense of collectivism. Hate the Puritans all you want, but to focus on their injustices is to deny their obsessive pursuits of education, their efficient urbanity, their celebration of the public good. A bad read of Weber and an over-reliance on Hawthorne has led us to blame them for both capitalism and sexual repression, but the only reason we’re all able to read is because my 14x-great-grandfather insisted upon it.1

Suffolk County was only one phase of the pre-Revolutionary wave of immigration. All sorts of nuts, British and otherwise, came over for all sorts of reasons: dissident, fanatical, millenarian, proto-communist, crassly criminal, genuinely insane.2 You could argue that it was all about colonization with a thin veneer of ideology, and if you look at the ledgers of the charter owners you’d probably be right. But the ordinary people who came here believed in something that could only happen far away from their homeland. The futures that they imagined had nothing to do with imperialism, genocide, federal government, even democracy. They wanted to live their lives under new principles, they wanted to do that without getting harassed, and they wanted to do it in community.3

It took the Tuthill line 250 years to produce my wheeler-dealer grandfather who will always be my paragon of the American individualist. Up to the end of his life, his recurring topics were breaking even on the stock market, getting a condo in Hawaii, dictating his memoirs, and eventually becoming pope (he wasn’t Catholic). If there was ever a Puritan vein in my family it was long buried under the postwar America of frontiers and finance. But the originary spirit comes out in moments of crisis and transformation. In the last conversation I had with my grandfather before he died, he asked me if I thought I was ever going to make any money. I told him I didn’t. He paused for a minute and said, “Good.”

II. I Hunger and Thirst After True Righteousness.

The starting point of another lost America is the subject of Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee. Persecuted for noisy religious expression in her native Manchester, Mother Ann and six other Shaking Quakers secure funding to establish a millenarian church in the New World. They arrive at New York Harbor in August 1774; Lexington and Concord would happen eight months later. Mother Ann is appalled by the commercialism and racism of the city. She sends her compatriots upstate to Niskayuna, where they build a compound and recruit an interracial church that sidesteps the clamor of the Revolution. The community gives tacit support to the Continental Army but refuses to contribute bodies or funds. The only America they believe in engages in kinetic worship, makes beautiful furniture, and refuses to have sex.

Nearly every moment of Ann Lee is loaded with extremity, and different sequences will stand out depending on your focus. If you are currently being abused by a militia that can’t distinguish itself from your average mob but nevertheless claims to be an arm of the American government, you might find Niskayuna’s interactions with the Continental Army to be the most salient moments of the film. The Shakers came to New York to escape brutalization by English authorities, but the primary force that robs them of peace and free expression in the New World is the nascent Revolutionary government. Ann responds to the call to conscription with nonviolent refusal. It leads first to her arrest and then to a physical assault worse than anything she experienced in England, executed by people who call themselves Patriots.

Already, long before the Continental Congress, the Shakers are working out the conflict between national liberty and principled community. “America” offers the possibility of individualized pursuit of happiness so long as you join up with the army and forsake the values of your faith; “Niskayuna” offers an everyday life of community-determined values in rejection of violent nationalism. The Shakers were one particular case, but the entire continent, immigrant or otherwise, would be forced to struggle through this conflict for the next quarter millennium. We’ve never figured out how to cut the tension. It’s the reason American English has come to its abusive relationships with words like “cult” and “commune,” terms that historically reflect faith and community but now connote a disturbed removal from the proper individualism that can only be achieved through submission to the state.

The Revolution ground up the communitarian Americas and blended them into a nation. I’m sure some of my ancestral Tuthills were among the 20% of Connecticut men who fought for the Continental Army, happy to drop their Puritan ideals for the good of the new Republic. But the Shakers held out. If your ideas are crazy enough, it takes more than soldiers and legal documents to drag you into submission. You can walk away from Ann Lee with something less than respect for its title character, but if you let yourself get caught up in the vision you almost believe she’s going to pull it off. As she contemplates Cornwallis’s surrender from her deathbed, Mother Ann dreams of a future when her particular form of salvation, already rooted in the soil of Niskayuna, will spread across the continent. “You must take great care of God’s earth,” she hums. “Yield her increase and develop her beauty. This must be done in a spirit of love. The earth yields most to those who love it.”

The irony, of course, is that it doesn’t. There’s no way a movement that forbids procreation can grow beyond a few hundred followers. Fastvold’s credits tell us that, by 2025, the Shaker population was down to two. But if the spirit of Ann Lee isn’t the triumph of one soteriology but the refusal of all faiths to give into individualism, then there’s a victory behind her madness. There were a thousand different Americas in 1776, and over the next 250 years there would be a thousand more. Some of them never took root. Some of them were choked out by the central tree of liberty, and some of them trellised around it. But most of them kept on growing despite it with no particular interest in the shade it offered or the sunlight it took away. They grew up as one of thousands of trees that would never be adequately documented, trees that would never be measured, trees that forgot themselves until the moment they looked down at their roots and realized that they were still very much alive.

III. I Love Mother, I Love Her Way.

Fastvold differentiates Ann Lee from any number of American biopics by setting it firmly in the key of hagiography. She tells the story of Ann Lee like a religious text, unsentimentally focused on the facts but never questioning that some of them might not be true. Central to the Shakers’ actions is the confidence that Mother Ann is the feminine incarnation of Jesus Christ. Fastvold doesn’t bother with miracles or physical signs of saintliness to prove it, but she never suggests that they’re wrong.

This isn’t the ironized use of “hagiography” that gets thrown around to describe government-sanctioned celebrations of modern saints (or the RBG-candle version that gets sold on Etsy). We’re all familiar with the breathless accounts of great men who earn holidays and half-masts, from George Washington to MLK to Charlie Kirk. Great Man stories treat their protagonists as if they were born with an innate sense of right and wrong. Hagiography, in contrast, tells the story of someone whose achievements result from their openness to something outside themselves. Both stories whitewash the protagonist, but the hagiography covers not a person’s flaws but the components of their life that weren’t taken over by the Holy Spirit.

Fastvold shows her hagiographic hand in Ann Lee’s approach to movement. Most of her blocking is stiff, often verging on tableau. But she breaks from this formalism in scenes when the Spirit has clearly entered the script. This is most obvious in the contrast between sex scenes and worship scenes. The sex scenes, if you can call them that, are passionless and uncomfortably rigid, comparable to the Georgian-era woodcut porn that inspires them. In contrast, the worship scenes mimic the typical cinematic beats of sex: close-up gasping, rolling eyes, quick-cut undulations, cameras that move too fast for the viewer to tell which body part is touching which. They move to Daniel Blumberg’s hymn-inspired score that flows through these scenes the way gilt flows through Orthodox iconography. Music and movement brought on through total submission to God’s will, the film running in time with the spirit.

To toss out an under-researched hypothesis, I’m going to venture that the hagiography is the biography of inaction. Divine revelation enters sometime in the first act, and from there the story progresses to the conclusion without character development, turning points, or plot. In Ann Lee, little to nothing results from deliberate action. The only active character is God, and everyone else is just a component of his work, ready to run through the woods, plane furniture, or get beaten to death for his will. A traditional biopic builds up to a critical decision; Ann Lee climaxes with a pummeling. This sort of passivity is un-American and makes for uncomfortable cinema. It’s at least one of the reasons the woman sitting behind me shook her head as the credits rolled and muttered, “Rediculous.”

It’s worth considering what we lose when we reject this sort of narrative. We’re happy to canonize a martyr when they’re dead, but we’re loathe to celebrate someone’s ability to be a body in life. It’s great to celebrate self-determination and the ability of humans to make choices, but we don’t have many American stories of heroes whose choice was to give their lives over to something outside themselves. We’re missing the sainthood of motion, the hagiography of works, the acceptance of a selflessness that doesn’t only claim us in death. We’re missing an acknowledgement of the spirit that moves through the living, and a celebration of the living who open themselves up to the spirit.

IV. I’m Not Kidding This Time, God Is Actually Real.

By some weird twists of fate that don’t make much sense even to me, my family betrayed my Calvinist forebears and I ended up baptized Catholic. I’ve gone back and forth on how I feel about that throughout my life, and I wish I could say in times of community crisis that I feel closer to God and my church. But I can’t. It’s been hard to make it to Mass this past year and feel anything other than that maybe Martin Luther was right. I’m disgusted with my church that has yet to condemn her fascist appropriation in the upper echelons of our government. I’m embarassed that it’s the Mainline Protestant pastors, not our priests, who are out there shouting in the streets.

I can see how a cold-blooded Anglican in High Church Manchester would come around to the rapture of Shaker worship. I haven’t been crying in movies much lately, but the first worship sequence in Ann Lee is the only time this year so far that I’ve been moved me to tears. Fastvold lets her camera get lost in the communal release of kinetic dance and open syllables, and the ecstasy on Amanda Seyfried’s face is ten times the rapture summoned by all the other actors who got Oscar nominations over her.4 It made me feel something in the cinematic moment and an absence when it was done. What is the point of church if not to get people outside themselves and therefore closer to God? Why would there be a spirit whose primary motivation is anything other than letting scared people dance?

I don’t think Catholicism is closed to this sort of exuberance, but it’s hard in times of crisis to see past the tabernacle. The reminders of what’s inside only makes the gilt doors thicker. The only thing I’ve been listening to lately is Rosalía’s LUX, for my money the most important record of the past ten years. From the first time I listened to it until now, I’m forced to stop everything I’m doing at the climax of “Mio Christo Piange Diamante,” an aria inspired by the friendship between Sts. Francis and Clare of Assisi. “My dear friend, with you gravity is graceful, and grace is grave,” Rosalía sings in breaking Italian. “My Christ cries diamonds; I take you with me always.” This is a particularly Catholic form of spiritual madness: the gleam of the monstrance, the musk of the thurible, the crunch of the host and the sour of corked wine. If you can’t give us dancing, at least give us opera. Instead we get track lights and paltry calls for peace.

This is not a Catholic newsletter; this is not a place to wonder where we could find God again in a broken Church. But I’m looking for my Christ who cries diamonds - or if I can’t find him, then my Christ who plants trees, who exhales in communion and sings in circle dances, who doesn’t hide behind the stonewall of a sacrament whose Real Presence is buried so deep beneath a refusal to act that I can’t take it with the purity of heart demanded by 1 Corinthians. Let me be a Christian, Lord. Don’t bother with my unbelief, but give me something to do.

Divine silence is a symptom of getting older, I guess, and the inability to be moved by voices is one of sanity. And yet, here I am in the godless city of Minneapolis, and all around me I’m seeing people who are neither crazy nor Christian living out the most basic tenets of Christianity with a fervor that has to be equated with holy madness. Love the neighbor, feed the poor, protect the immigrant, defend the vulnerable, all at the risk of indignity and death. Christians can’t claim the virtues of basic human decency (no matter how hard they try), but for years Christian worship was the way a majority of Americans got their weekly reminder to be good to one other. No one got the reminder this time. It just happened, seemingly out of nowhere, as if everybody just suddenly knew what to do, as if they’d always known how to do it. The saintliness that our culture hates the most, this un-American capacity to become a selfless component of a particular community - I don’t know where it came from. Maybe it’s been here forever and we’re only just noticing it.

Scratch that “maybe.” Of course it’s been here. Christ has been crying diamonds all this time. It’s just people like me who were waiting so long for something to happen that we didn’t notice it was happening.

V. We Must Love Each Other And Support Each Other - or, The Only Way to Save Us Is Through Divine Intervention.

We’ve been in some form of national crisis for awhile now. This is obvious. Things are not coming together, and it’s clear that evocations of shared national identity are never going to solve it. Because that national identity is the problem. It will never be the solution. We are not an American people. We were only ever made an American people at the barrel of a gun.

The high point of LUX is “Berghain,” a song named after a place of total inhibition and universalized experience. After two minutes of arpeggiating violins and anxious German, Björk, more or less the voice of God in popular music, appears out of nowhere and howls in English, “The only way to save us is through divine intervention.” It echoes the self-annihilation of the wildest parts of Ann Lee, the moments when Amanda Seyfried gives herself over to God so fully that all that’s left is a body, an aspiration, a scream. What else do we have if the church offers nothing, if the originary American dream is dead, if the Shakers are down to two and the only community we have left is a false national identity under a tattered American flag?

The question is its own answer. What we still have is the madness that brought us here in the first place. Our foundation is a disconnected series of dreams that makes collectivism and the tolerance of other collectivisms possible. We will never unite as an American people, and we have no business doing it, because we are not a legitimate nation. We are a country of states, and more importantly than that, a country of cities within states, neighborhoods within cities, communities within neighborhoods. We survive when we give ourselves over to our originary fervor, the spirit that denies the hope of becoming Great Men and transforms us into saints that will live and die for our neighbors. Where do we find the organization for a General Strike? Where do we find a decentralized network of mutual aid, community defenders, and first responders?5 It’s the same place that brings about collective religious mania - the experience that allows the self to be transcended in favor of becoming the component part it was born to be. It’s something that exists despite all our best work to deny it. We aren’t waiting on salvation. Divine intervention was always already here.

Believing in God doesn’t make very much sense, which is sort of the point, but I can’t knock anyone for saying they aren’t up for it. And I don’t want to be too romantic about the current moment, even though it’s obvious to everyone that something happened in Minneapolis this winter that hasn’t happened in a generation. So I won’t say that this is a Pentecost, that the Holy Spirit is sweeping through the upper Midwest. But I will say that we’re in the middle of something like the collective experience of the Niskayuna dance. We are discovering ways to use our bodies and voices that have felt dead for decades. If the individual rights promised to us are being stripped away by the very nationalism that granted them, the communitarianism that we thought we sacrificed is rising up to replace them both. The city is yielding to those who cultivate her beauty. God is a thousand shouts in the street, and no one is ready to hear their harmony. Where we go from there I have no idea, but a thousand dorment Americas are diamond buds on the verge of spring, and some sort of spirit is singing through all of them.

Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. I’ll be back next week for real this time to chatter about Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, and maybe also Peter Hujar’s Day and Blue Moon.

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Life has been hectic since becoming the first Nobel Peace Prize-nominated Substacker. I’ve been responding to calls, making public appearances, and of course continuing the important works of humanitarian service that got me the nomination in the first place. In many ways, it feels like life has turned into a never-ending meeting: educators, elected officials, local organizers, journalists, podcasters . . . everyone wants a bite of your time, and part of the promotion of peace means giving it away freely to spread the word of justice.

But it also takes a toll on your daily life. Chores are out the window. Eating lunch is more or less impossible. Sleep is a no-go. So as much as I’d like to devote an additional 20 hours to maintaining this vitally important newsletter, I find myself running out of time. Movies themselves take two, sometimes three hours to watch, and when they’re constantly interrupted by atrocities, news alerts, and alarming vehicular noises - and also when the local theater keeps shutting down to protest the murder of your neighbors by the federal government - it’s hard to get in more than one a week.

So once again I’m apologizing for my lack of content. This newsletter was only ever fueled by the desire for attention and undiagnosed ADHD, and now Bruce Springsteen is writing songs about me and my hyperfocus is fucked. I’m cooking up a pretty good essay about The Testament of Ann Lee and American identity that’s going to take another week. I saw The Bone Temple and I’ve got a short review of it here. Also I made this video:

Which isn’t really relevant anymore now that this guy has been put out to pasture, but I wasted an afternoon on it and will dump it here.

I know nobody subscribes to this newsletter for updates about the vibe in Minneapolis or fascist politician mash-up content. I really would like to get back to writing about something else. I will continue to promise that I’ll be on track next week, but the busy life of a future Laureate simply cannot be predicted. Pending a normal-ish week, I’m back on Friday with nothing but movies. Until then, let’s talk about Bone Temple.

Myths start from a million different origins, but they more or less end up in the same place. Is this what A Hero with a Thousand Faces is about? I don’t know, that book seems dumb. Maybe this point is too. But nearly every myth develops a universal narrative out of something local: coyotes transformed into the originary chaos of the universe, Scandinavian volcanic activity spewing out eschatologies, a Mediterranean territorial dispute built up into the meaning of life. The myth takes something specific and turns it into everything for everyone. One reason the modern world feels so much less mythic than the ancient is because we have too many things going on to keep our stories straight. A simple phenomenon doesn’t have the space to echo out its mythic resonances to the fullest.

I think this absense of the mythic in everyday life is one reason that people love post-apocalypse stories. Some calamity eliminates all the distractions the mythmaker doesn’t want to deal with and in doing so reintroduces mythic potential to a few chosen relics. What makes a post-apocalypse story interesting isn’t the cause of the catastrophe but the nature of what it leaves behind. The V8 engine in Mad Max, The Simpsons in Mr. Burns: a Post-Electric Play, a shopping list in A Canticle for Liebowitz - all of these are less about the future and more about what a contemporary phenomenon could mean if we treated it like our ancestors treated interesting-looking rocks.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple asks us to grant that focus to the Teletubbies and Jimmy Savile. What would the world be like if all culture was founded upon two of the most demented aspects of late 20th-century British television? Probably pretty terrible, Nia DaCosta suggests, but the stories it would tell would be more or less the same as the ones we already know. I argued this six months ago when I wrote about 28 Years Later, and I think I got it pretty much right. The 28 Units of Time Later reboot isn’t a horror franchise - it’s a 21st-first-century fantasy adventure, completely with traditional themes, classical iconography, and straightforward narrative. I would love to have more to say, but Bone Temple pretty much picks up Alex Garland’s story where Danny Boyle left off and carries us right up to Act Three. If you can handle a lot of flaying, arterial damage, and schlongs, you’ll have a great time. If you can’t, the plot summary stands pretty well on its own.

Describing what to expect ruins the fun, and talking about what any of it could mean is sort of pointless. Tolkien insisted that the One Ring didn’t represent anything, and I think the same is true of the Dipsy Dance in Bone Temple. The turns in Garland’s script are so playful and straightforwardly mythic that pretty much anyone at any point in history could see this film and more or less know how they’re supposed to feel. DaCosta covers it in Y2K references and dresses it in post-apocalyptic gore, but the story shines without context. You don’t need to know what a zombie is, how zombies function in film, what 2001 looked like, what someone in a blond wig and tracksuit performing an act of “charity” called “pants off” means to the British people. You just need to know that young boys with bow skills are good, princes with bad teeth are bad, monsters with human features can change, girls with face scars will come through, and wizards, no matter what they’re up to, will always advance the plot.

It’s a wild movie, but it’s significantly more hinged than its predecesor. Off-the-wall choices abound, but they’re more alligned with pleasurable absurdity than the demented cinamtographic decisions of Part One. It would be unfair to call it campy, but DaCosta directs with more self-awareness and tropiness than Boyle. The gore is intentionally gratuitious. The references are played for coherent laughs. Even the manic camera work is comparatively dialed in, imitating the uncanny messiness of Anthony Dod Mantle’s iPhone rigs but grounded by the normal perspectives of standard-issue Arricams. If Boyle’s film soars through psychosis into the epic, DaCosta aims downward through snark to the b-movie. The beats land in just the right places to remind you that you don’t need to be scared. You’ve seen this all before. You already know the story.

This is what I expected, and I’m not particularly upset about it. Bone Temple is a tidy second act to an episodic trilogy, but it could easily have been part four or five in a never-ending serial in which Spike Hero once finds himself surrounded by a new cast of freaks who help him experience the vaguest hint of character development. I’m eager for Danny Boyle to return for the finale, but if that was put off a decade so a new director could make a comparably competent entry every six months, I’d be happy. There’s something refreshing about people seizing the opportunity to push an ordinary story to its limits. The world is a crazy place, and at its core are humans living and loving and dying, all the while transforming quotidian artifacts into the meaning of life to help them along the way. It’s the same old story again, just this time with track suits and iodine skin treatments. What more do you need?

That’s all I’ve got. I’m so so tired and I’m barely even doing anything. I love everybody out there devoting their entire days to the fight, and I implore you all to eat breakfast and get at least six hours of sleep every night. It seems like this is going to be our entire winter, and February/March is sick-getting central. We are no help to each another when we’re bedridden. Get sunlight, do some yoga, go to the dentist, drink your whole milk. *life is disappointing* is now a self-care advocacy newsletter. You matter!

I’m hoping to be back next week with a review of Brett Ratner’s glorious return to the cinema, but with all the incredible reviews by totally normal, alive humans it’s getting, it might be hard to find a theater that isn’t sold out. We’ll see.

Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. I’m looking forward to finally getting to The Testament of Ann Lee soon. Go be one of the 75 people in America who’ve seen it so we can talk about it.

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