knicks nix game six and also some pix

disblowsure day // the right hand comes back in nyc

Fairly similar to my Amtrak transfer in Chicago.

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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Josh O’Connor going through the alien motions in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Days (in most theaters now).

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.

Love to see the word Minneapolis in a movie once in awhile.

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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.

Left hand hate KOed.

1. Actually greetings from the Amtrak Cardinal train, where I’ll be when this posts.

2. I haven’t seen The Age of Disclosure, but I do know it features interviews from such trustworthy sources as Kirstin Gillibrand and Marco Rubio.

3. As borderline household name as he is, I think we need to admit that David Koepp is a *bad* screenwriter. With the exception of Jurassic Park and Spider-Man, two iconic screenplays that I have more or less memorized - and arguably Black Bag, which is tidy and borderline clever - he has written I believe zero good movies. Maybe there are some gems in there, I never saw the Da Vinci Code sequels. I can’t be anywhere near as dismissive of John Williams career, and the fact that he can even pretend to have written this score at 94 speaks to some sort of vitality. Nice job, John.

4. Actually, that’s not necessarily true, the Men Who Stare At Goats is pretty bad.