"It's a crime/horror story about gentrification." Isn't that enticing? Isn't that the first time you've ever heard anything described like that? People are always talking about how surprisingly smart some new genre story is for featuring gentrification as a
Three years ago, after the cartoonist Joe Matt died, I wrote about the depressing metanarrative running through his work. It was probably too soon but it was also something I'd been thinking about for a decade. That ran on my Substack, which I abandoned four months later, as
Occasionally in the 90s, I'd visit my dad's workplace in Foster City, CA. He was a general contractor and the company he worked for occupied around half of a building in a business park. Look at this beauty: In May 1994, in the run-up to
Fair content warning up top. I don't want to ruin anybody's day. Descriptions of violence and death to follow. Thinking about 9-1-1 as violence I can't stand for its weightlessness and for all the overwritten melodrama in its wake, I had to
Two sections here. First one's titled "Finding Art," second one's titled "I Just Got Banned From Another Gymboree." I. Finding Art How do you navigate the cultural surfeit? Genuinely, I'm asking. In theory, I'm mostly fine with being
I saw Primetime, the new movie about NBC’s To Catch A Predator, a couple nights ago. It was a “good time,” a stunning look through ”the drama” of making a TV show that truly brought “water for elephants.” These are all the names of Robert Pattinson movies. He plays
I haven’t revisited Alfonso Cuarón’s great Y tu mamá también in at least ten years, but we don't choose when the art in our mental archive comes for us. We take it in and hold on tight for when we'll need it. At the
It's a metaphor for AI.
Editing some typos in the Doors essay I wrote yesterday, I realized I had a perfect story to relate the way Oliver Stone uses Native Americans in that movie. I don't think I'm going to get a better time to share it, so here it is.
Burning out my subscribers' good will with 4,303 words on a movie that's pretty fun, I guess.
Look, this one's more navel-gazey than anything. You can skip it, I won't mind.
Spoilers for a half-dozen Coen brothers films. A couple newsletters ago, when I was discussing movie titles, I mentioned Fargo, and I'll take any free-associative excuse to think more about Fargo. I had somehow not realized until now that in their first seven movies (their 80s