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super cool to see this for the 50th anniversary of the film and the 100th anniversary of The Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, with actor Keith Carradine in attendance for Q&A no less! what a special afternoon with a packed house.

so much about this was completely outside the realm of what I'd expected that I think I'll need to see it again several more times. for one thing, I didn't know it was going to be 3 hours and so my sense of pacing was completely cooked by hitting 90 minutes and assuming things were probably wrapping up. I did find it ittedly difficult to track with characters and feel invested in their lives when there was so much bouncing around, but those last 5 minutes brought everything into harrowing focus. I know I'll appreciate it more with every viewing. and better still: it was evident within just a few scenes that it was one of the most immaculately edited films I'd ever seen.

This is neither as tight nor as subtle as Past Lives, but I'll be damned if I didn't adore it all the same. there are some truly inspired choices here that continue to prove that Celine Song is capable of depicting modern love (and the contemporary world in general) with elegance and wit while interweaving something that feels ancient, spiritual, and poetic. the way she captures New York City here is enough to make you want to stick around another 3 hours; it's just always breathing. god I love how this thing looks and sounds, and Daniel Pemberton's score is characteristically wonderful too (I just about died of shock and excitement when I saw his name in the opening credits.)

this is very much in conversation with Past Lives in ways that I can't wait to write about more soon; suffice to say, both are sort-of multiverse movies in a strange and unspoken way. Pride and Prejudice is also clearly a big influence, and it feels well-timed for a world longing for sincere stories again (hence the massive turnout for that movie's 20th-anniversary re-release last month.) Evans still has a great comedic impulse in him. the final shot here was one of my favorite things I've seen all year.

Howdy y'all. I thought I'd share an interview that I did recently about A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers for a publication called Mere Orthodoxy. Read on for an in-depth conversation about the making of the film, the themes of hospitality and community, the value of engaging art and culture, and some pieces of extra meaning in various scenes. And click here to read the piece on Mere O's website.

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The following is an interview with filmmaker Houston Coley, conducted by Jeremy Bugh. The contents have been edited and condensed for ease of understanding.

Jeremy: For those who aren’t familiar with your work, can you tell us more about who you are and what you do?

Houston: I’m Houston Coley. I have been on YouTube since I was 11 years old, which started with LEGO stop-motion animation videos, and eventually transitioned into film analysis and video essays, and finally into some short films. A friend of mine said that my videos are about “cultivating spiritual imagination around current pop culture,” and I’ve sort-of internalized that. In 2020, I went to this place called L’Abri Fellowship in England and had a very profound and transformative experience there. From that point onward, this documentary called A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers began to take shape—and that’s been the last 3 years of my life, alongside writing film & culture thinkpieces on Substack, doing a podcast called The Art Within Podcast, and living and creating in Nashville. I am also the Artistic Director of a nonprofit called Art Within, which my dad founded 30 years ago and I resurrected—initially to make this movie, with the hopes of continuing to make more documentaries that show surprising images of faith and community in the world.

J: Can you briefly summarize what A Kingdom of Tea and Strangers is about?

H: The funny thing about this movie is that it’s about this place called L’Abri, which is notoriously hard to describe, and that’s part of why we wanted to make the film. L’Abri was founded by Francis and Edith Schaeffer in the 1950s, as a shelter where people from all backgrounds around the world could engage with their deepest questions, thoughts, and doubts surrounding faith, philosophy, and human life while living in community for a short term stay. This film is a portrait of one summer at L’Abri, focusing on five particular strangers from around the world who are wrestling with some questions of their own, particularly about how to find community and spirituality in their ordinary lives. So in a sense, the film is about these characters having a profound short-term experience and then figuring out how to translate it back to their lives when they go back home. And I think that’s the universal thread of the movie: while not all of us have been to L’Abri, many of us have had a profound spiritual experience somewhere, found it really rich, and wanted to take it back with us somehow but not fully known how to do that. The film wrestles with those sorts of temporal community experiences and how we take them with us, as well as struggles with being human in the midst of modernity. We released the film in August at The Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, and have toured it since then all around the US and Canada before releasing it for free on YouTube in May.

J: You have said that “Art has the power to give us common ground and shared understanding as we behold the same beauty together. Art has the power to generate empathy for experiences that are not our own. It can call forth a vision for what a good and righteous world can look like.” You said that this is why you’ve made documentaries and shared them with groups of people. Tell me more about that.

H: I believe it was Robert Redford who said, a few years back, that the most important medium for the future would be documentaries. At the time, he was talking about our media landscape, fake news, and basically saying that documentaries help show us what’s real. But he couldn’t have predicted the rise of AI that will continue to place us in a sense of unreality where we even don’t know if the photos and videos we see every day are real. In that way, I do think that documentaries are going to continue to become a really important medium because they give us that common ground. But even outside of the AI issue, I think that at this moment in history, we are living in different universes from other people—partly because of our algorithmic social media bubbles, partly because of the isolation of the modern world, car dependency, and a hundred different issues. And I think that when you gather in a room with others and experience art together, it suddenly gives you this common ground—in the sense that you are part of a community with everyone in the same room, sharing the same common truth that is up on this big screen in front of you that you can have a conversation about.

In that way, I believe art, and documentaries in particular, can give us language for the mending of community so that we can live in the same universe again. And even from a faith perspective, we often live in different faith universes. People have very skewed perceptions of what ordinary Christianity is or isn’t, especially based solely on the kind of faith that makes the headlines. A big part of my heart has been to make documentaries that show some of the surprising hidden work of God that usually goes unnoticed and makes people go “oh, I didn’t know faith could look like that. I didn’t know Christians could engage with that. I didn’t know they could have that opinion, or that faith could look that way.” That is very much what L’Abri was for me.

J: In regards to how you actually made the documentary, I was intrigued by what you said in a previous article on The Rabbit Room. You said that when you and your wife were making the film, when you first began, people were really hesitant around the cameras and you really struggled to have people seem natural on camera. Then some of the L’Abri workers encouraged you to set the cameras down for a while and just be with the people and then eventually start filming. Can you tell me more about that experience?

H: I think it was a process of learning to put people over project, and trying to make the film in a way that was in accordance with the values of what the movie was, and with the values of this place that we were capturing. L’Abri in French means “the shelter,” and many people come there for shelter, even from technology. And so we had to do our best to try and honor that. In hindsight, I'm really grateful that the workers forced us to take three or four weeks without filming anything and just get to know everybody, because the trust and relationships we built during that time really come through on camera and on screen. You see the relationship that we have behind the camera with the people in front of the camera, and just a comfortability and ease that wouldn't have been there otherwise. And in that way, I think it almost invites the viewer more into the film. There's a moment in the movie where one of the characters, AJ, leaves L’Abri and he hugs me as I'm holding the camera. Some viewers have said that it almost feels as though he is hugging them as the viewer, and that they are almost one of the characters in the movie. And I think that sort of relationship and the immersive perspective it provides wouldn't have existed if we hadn't taken the time to really gain trust.

J: One theme of the film seems to be the ways that community mirrors music making. From how you created the sections of the film to the beautiful message you filmed culminating with Antonio Lotti’s Crucifixus in Eight Parts. Was that something that you knew you wanted to focus on when you went into this, or was that something that just sort of revealed itself as you began?

H: No, we had no idea. It was totally either a coincidence or God thing, and I would lean towards God thing. The workers at L’Abri had told us we could film one lecture that term. We saw that there was one about harmony and music, so we sort-of casually decided, “eh, I guess we’ll film that one.” Little did we know that that lecture would end up being this incredibly revelatory cipher for the thematic of the entire movie. Not to mention, that lecture was towards the very end of term. And so we filmed that at the end of the production, having no idea the ways in which it had already been rippling out in the interviews that we'd done prior to it—where already you'd had several characters talking about needing people to sing the harmonies in their lives, characters playing music together and that being a source of community, a lunch discussion about dissonance, etc. So it really rippled out in these big ways that we hadn't planned. And when we got into the editing room and we were watching that lecture again, we realized that this was actually the key to the whole movie.

J: It does seem like L’Abri really celebrates and prioritizes the arts and allows space for artists, too. Do you think that is something that is an intentional decision made by L’Abri workers, or is that just a natural outcome of living a slower style of life?

H: Yeah, that aspect of L’Abri was definitely one of the things that attracted me to it when I first went. I had grown up with Christian parents who very much valued the arts, but in general, in my church community, that wasn't really something that was valued that much. And there was certainly a reticence against the “sinfulness” of worldly art or secular art or that sort of thing. When I came to L’Abri, I being shocked at how much there was an engagement with art and culture—and not just that, but a prioritizing of excellent art. The first term that I was there in January of 2020, there was a film festival, which they have every year. It was a weekend long festival where people came from all around the area and stayed for two days to watch and discuss films. And I seeing it on the schedule and thinking “Oh gosh, what's it gonna be? Like, God's Not Dead or something?” But it wasn’t. We watched Marriage Story, and Lady Bird, and several excellent foreign films, and A Hidden Life by Terrence Malick and one of the Before Trilogy movies. And it was just really excellent, excellent art by actual art standards. That was huge for me, to see how L’Abri understood the common grace and goodness of God in real beauty and excellence rather than just in preaching a message.

I think you see that in the movie, with the flowers and candles being meticulously put on the tables and the idea that God values beauty, and that this extravagant aesthetic hospitality is part of bringing dignity to everyone at the table. And that doesn't mean that you have to spend a bunch of money on it. It doesn't mean that you have to put on a show or a performance. I almost want to say it’s a scrappy sort of beauty, a humble beauty. It's about how we can make this place and this space beautiful using whatever we have.

J: Do you feel like that is one of the main things the church could learn from L’Abri and how it embraces artists and the arts?

H: One of many things, yeah. I think there is still this tendency within the broader church of seeing a divide between the sacred and the secular. I really wish that we could open our hands a little bit more and see that God is the ultimate creator, and all creativity ultimately comes from him and all beauty glorifies him. I think one of the things that L’Abri does really well is just taking the ideas and art of our current moment and saying, “We don't have to agree with all of this, but we should engage with it.” It’s a little ironic because you might look at L’Abri from a distance and think that they're doing almost an Anabaptist or Amish kind of withdrawal from the world, compartmentalizing themselves off from things. But actually, L’Abri is a place where people come to lean in, to engage with ideas, and current culture, and arts, and philosophy, and the things that we're all thinking about, rather than escape them. And I think the church should be the same. I think the church should not just be a sanctuary where we get away from everything going on. It should be a place where we figure out how to engage it well. That’s one of the many things that I think L’Abri models very beautifully.

J: That's actually one of the paradoxes that I noticed and wanted to hear your thoughts on. I'll start with one aspect of it. In the movie, Ellie said that entering L’Abri feels like going into another realm and she associated it with feeling like Narnia. Yet in the film, the people of L’Abri push back against the idea that when you leave L’Abri you’re going “back into the real world.” How do you see L’Abri as being both a different realm and an experience of what’s real in the here and now?

H: I mean, partly you just can't deny the beauty of the space itself. It's a 1600s manor house in the English countryside. It's unimaginably beautiful. Almost all of the L’Abri locations were gifted to L’Abri by donors, and all of them are exceptionally beautiful in their own way and exist in exceptionally beautiful places. And I just think that's such a gift of God. But I love that you identified that as a paradox, because it is. I think there are things that do make L’Abri feel larger than life. Obviously, short-term community itself is a moment where it often feels like you can sort of lean into things in a way that you couldn’t sustain for a long, indefinite period of time. I think there's a sense of getting outside of your comfort zone and even engaging with your hands and doing things that you're not good at, and feeling your mind sort of re-center and not just be scattered across a hundred different things while you're there. As one of the L’Abri workers, Joel, says in the film: when you get home, your attentions are just more dispersed. But at L’Abri, your mind is able to focus in on ideas and the things that you've been thinking in the back of your head a little bit more. You feel yourself having original thoughts again. Suddenly you’re hearing from God, because you finally allowed the silence to exist and slowed down a little bit.

And so I think some of those things do give it a heightened feel; the beauty of the space, the slowness of it. At the same time, I had some of those heightened experiences at other places when I was a kid, and they didn’t always stick the same way. I went to church summer camp every year when I was in youth group growing up, and I wouldn't totally diss that experience. I think there were really meaningful parts about it. But I do uniquely at the end of every summer at church camp, I would think, “well, I guess I’ll have to wait until next year to hear from God again.” It really seemed like God was only truly present in his concentrated form at camp—and I think camp programs can really try to cultivate that kind of mountaintop smoke-machine lightshow experience, which feels great in the moment but makes everything else pale in comparison.

On the other hand, I think L’Abri really resists pushing for that sense of dramatic spiritual encounter. I think one of the things that people often take away from L’Abri experiences is a finding of God in the ordinary. I when I came home from L’Abri for the first time, it felt like God was in more places in the world, and not less. And so there is an element, as you see in the film, of L’Abri still feeling realer than real life. It can be hard to go back to “real life.” But by having the third act of our film go back to the outside world, hopefully it confronts the viewer with the reality that this is just a “way of being” that can be embodied anywhere, and that L’Abri doesn't have the monopoly on this way of life. My hope is that it would make God bigger rather than just putting him in a box, which is what L’Abri did for me.

J: I resonated with that a lot because I can romanticize the idea of community and I'm very much an idealistic person. And so when I watched it, I thought that my wife and I were going to want to drop everything and move to L’Abri. But I was surprised and delighted to see that I left the film realizing that I also really just wanted to be hospitable in my daily life. And I wanted to enjoy, to borrow a phrase you used earlier, the “humble beauty” of the things around me. I found myself enjoying my cups of tea in the morning a little bit more as a result, and have found myself wanting to really lean into and build community this summer. But I think it was because of that third act that I was able to respond in that way. So can you tell us more about that transition from L’Abri back into one’s daily routine? What have you noticed about that transition in your life or the lives of those you filmed?

H: Since my time at L’Abri, there's definitely been a desire to integrate some of those rhythms of community into life. So we have regular dinners on Sunday nights similar to AJ, the character in the film who has dinners open to any and all people that he knows. A big thing that I've learned in cultivating community in my normal life is inviting people to do things side by side with you rather than trying to put on a show for them. So rather than making dinner and inviting everyone over to have it, I say, “Hey, come over and help us cook dinner.” It’s helpful to us, but it also leads to more community because you're doing something side by side together. There's a quote from Wade Bradshaw in his book By Demonstration: God, which is the best book about English L’Abri, in which he says that hospitality is not entertaining people, it is simply including them in what we do. So many people, when they want to be hospitable, they think that they need to put on a performance and invite people into this perfectly curated, manicured sort of vision of what their life and home are. But actually, the real community happens in inviting people into the messiness and allowing them to participate rather than making it perfect before they arrive.

J: In your screening guide, you asked maybe my favorite question about the whole documentary. “Have you ever had an experience similar to L’Abri in your life? What did it look like for you to translate that experience back to ordinary life?” Can you tell us more about the response from audiences to that question?

H: Many people, of course, bring up a summer camp experience that they've had. Some people have brought up fraternities or sorority situations. Some people have brought up other kinds of retreats or monasteries that they've been to. I've heard people say really good Bible studies. I've also heard people say boarding schools or just all sorts of different things. But the common thread tends to be living in close proximity with other people, sharing meals together, and having a sense of structure and rhythm to when they would see people regularly. And I think it's really sad, in a way, that almost all of those experiences tend to be associated with something that you do when you're young and then that stops when you get older. I've heard people say the reason Americans romanticize the college experience is because it's the one time we live within walking distance of all of our friends rather than having to drive everywhere. I think that's so true. It doesn’t have to be that way, and hopefully the film gives some handholds for overarching ideas of ordinary spiritual community that can still be a reality in daily life. I think L’Abri definitely gave me a greater sense that the church has a big role to play in that.

J: Is there any other common theme or individual story that stuck with you from the responses of people as you shared the documentary?

H: Oh, man. One thing has been just how much I've heard from non-Christians, agnostics, or people who were raised Christian and have sort of drifted away, who have really connected with the film. Many of them particularly connect with the honest wrestling of the character of Ford in the movie—and how he says at one point that he is “sitting on the front porch of Christianity.” That image really seems to resonate with those folks, and lots of folks have told me that it gave powerful language to how they feel. Many of those people have told me that they expected this to be some cheesy Christian movie, but instead, they felt like it was surprisingly accessible and invited them into the dialogue. That has been music to my ears, because it was the hope from the start. We hoped that it would feel accessible to a variety of audiences, that it would feel like it gave dignity to all of the characters regardless of where they were coming from, that it would allow them to speak honestly. And some of that isn't even my doing. I'm just very grateful for Ford's honesty on camera and how open he was about his questions and doubts about the church and God, and yet he still put himself in this spiritual community that was pushing him and causing him to really wrestle with those things intentionally.

ittedly it’s been interesting because some people walk away from the film saying, “Well, I don't know about all that God stuff, but the community stuff was great. That's what I connected with.” Part of me wants to say “No, you need to understand, the community flows out of the God stuff. It only exists because demonstrating the reality of God is at the center of it. And that's why it's able to be as good as it is.” But at the same time, I've met plenty of people who come to L’Abri not for God but for the community itself—and L’Abri doesn’t try to force anything on them. So at some point, you also just have to release the fact that people will respond to what they respond to. And that's also been one of my great joys, hearing from people at the discussions, reading their Letterboxd reviews and getting to see how every single person connects with the film in a completely different way and takes something different from it. I love it when someone teaches me something about my own movie.

J: On the flip side of that, is there anything that you haven't heard people discussing much about the movie that you wish they would highlight more?

H: I talk about this in my commentary track on DVD and Blu-Ray, so maybe some people will get it from that…the precious few who buy the DVD and Blu-Ray and watch the commentary track.

For me, one of the most crucial sequences in the whole movie is the Winnie The Pooh read-aloud sequence. For those who haven't seen the film yet, it’s a sequence where several of our main characters are all sitting in the backyard after dinner and they all read a story from Winnie The Pooh together, with each of them doing the voice of a different character. I think some people will watch that and think, “oh, the point of the scene is that it's a fun and whimsical community read aloud. Read alouds are good.” And yeah, yeah, I think so. It definitely shows how the act of play is important to community.

But I think it's also deeper than that, because for me, that read-aloud sequence embodies everything that the lecturer, Jonno, is articulating about harmony later in the film. Harmony is when every person is completely different, and yet they are fully one. He says, “the parts serve the whole, but remain distinct.” So you have all these characters who are reading for a character in Winnie The Pooh and they're just fully coming alive, expressing themselves as this cartoon persona, and each of them really suits the character they’re reading in a delightful way. And you're seeing the joy of the diversity of all of these different people's personalities, and how God made them each uniquely. But at the same time, they are bound by this common story that they're telling in the shared text that they're reading together. And so there's this mutual individuality and community, this pairing of self-agency and submission to the form. I think ultimately, it's a model of the Trinity. The Trinity is a picture of community where all of the are fully themselves and yet fully one. And that is sort of the deepest cosmic meaning of community. So ya know, this scene seems like sort of a whimsical, cute little moment. But to me, it's deeply theological and actually a really important cipher for the whole movie.

Watch A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers by clicking here.

Click here to read this piece on my Substack.

I’ve been thinking a lot about change and identity recently. Partly, the thought has been a result of my own life—but more broadly, I’ve been thinking about it on a national and even global scale.

You’ve probably heard people talk about the “vibe shift” ever since the 2024 election; across corporate, religious, political, and personal spheres, many causes and virtues that would have been fairly widespread just a few years ago have suddenly become taboo under the new istration—namely anything involving diversity, equity and inclusion of marginalized groups, or ability for men in positions of power. The Overton Window has now rapidly shifted to the point where statements and actions which are blatantly cruel and soaked in animus will often lead more to success than failure. Just pay attention the careers of Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Nancy Mace, or Charlie Kirk.

Of course, this “vibe shift” didn’t happen overnight; it’s been brewing for years. Some would even argue many of these patterns have been core to America since our founding; they’d say this is not some sort of foreign virus disfiguring America’s true nature, it’s who we’ve always been to one degree or another.

ittedly though, I can’t help but see the trajectory being thoroughly accelerated by the emergence of Donald Trump in 2015. For the past decade, we’ve been given a firsthand glimpse at what happens when a narcissistic reality TV host turns the whole country into his next ego-fueling entertainment enterprise—and the way the content of a leader’s character can seep into the very roots of all public discourse, transfiguring normal people beyond recognition. “Christians” were first labeled as such in the Roman Empire because they were a people perceived to have been transformed into “little Christs.” In a strange twist of fate, we’ve seen the Republican Party increasingly transformed into a party of Little Donald Trumps.

That’s not to say the whole country loves Trump. Every election with him as a candidate has been very close, splitting the population in two. Even his own voters don’t unilaterally worship him; in my own personal experience, everyone I know who voted for Trump (either in 2016, 2020, or 2024) still employed language of “the lesser of two evils,” regardless of how misguided I think that language might be. But even for those who don’t worship the man, his presence on the world stage has brought about a dramatic reckoning of identity on a national level—with some figures oscillating as far away as possible, and others inching closer and closer to the same tone and behavior patterns which have proved successful for the president.

One thing that’s really been troubling me recently along this trajectory has been the death of shame, particularly for leaders on the right. Take one glance at the official White House social media s—or god forbid, Elon Musk’s Twitter last month—and you’ll be treated to a barrage of “trolling,” half-serious-half-ironic memes making mockery of the suffering of others under the new istration. An ASMR-style video of immigrants being deported, with handcuffs clinking rhythmically. A meme in cutesy AI-generated Studio Ghibli style of a real migrant woman in tears as she’s handcuffed by a grim-faced ICE agent. Another AI-generated video of “Trump Gaza,” imagining the Gaza Strip completely rid of Palestinian people and transformed into a luxury resort littered with golden statues of Trump while he sips margaritas with a ghoulishly grinning Netanyahu on the beach. Then there’s Elon Musk waving around a chainsaw on stage as a representation of mass federal firings, and his statement that he “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood-chipper,” which will result in the deaths of thousands if not millions worldwide. And I’ll never forget seeing El Salvadoran President Bukele post “oopsie, too late!” online, in response to the fact that hundreds of men with no criminal records had been deported to life in prison at CECOT against a judge’s orders.

If there has been a vibe shift, it has been a shift away from shame. This shift has been felt even outside the borders of the US; it has manifested in brazen ethnic cleansing and genocide by Israel funded by the west, in legislation targeting LGBTQ people in places like the UK and Central Europe, and in authoritarian leaders following the mold of Trump worldwide.

I think the moment this “post-shame” swing really hit me was when I saw a video of the director of ICE onstage at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, proclaiming that ICE needed to be treated more as a business “like Amazon Prime, but with human beings.” I couldn’t help but wonder: how might a person find themselves at a point where they feel comfortable uttering these words onstage and don’t feel any semblance of guilt or conscience? And is there any way to bring back shame in anyone after it has been silenced?

This has been a long prelude to an essay ostensibly about a movie—and that movie is Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, a rom-com thriller starring Glenn Powell and (unfortunately) released straight to Netflix one year ago in May of 2024. Linklater has long been one of my favorite directors, and it was disheartening to see one of his movies released to almost no fanfare on streaming, where it was quickly buried despite glowing reactions from those who did see it. Since seeing Hit Man initially and then revisiting it recently, though, I have felt ionately that it has profound things to say about this cultural moment which went largely unacknowledged upon release.

Very loosely based on a 2001 true story originally featured in Texas Monthly, Hit Man follows a college teacher named Gary Johnson who moonlights part-time as a fake hitman, meeting with suspects who think they’ve found a killer-for-hire and recording the conversation until each person offers to pay for the murder and incriminates themselves enough to be arrested by the police waiting outside. The rom-com element kicks into gear when Gary comes face to face with a woman named Madison (Adria Arjona) who wants him to kill her abusive husband—and after talking her out of it to prevent her arrest, Gary begins secretly dating her while maintaining the illusion in her eyes that he is a real hitman named Ron. Double-life deception-comedy hijinks ensue.

Spoilers for Hit Man, which I highly recommend: when Madison does eventually murder her ex-husband herself, empowered by “Ron’s” confident and blasé attitude toward killing, the two end up realizing that they’ll both be sent to prison unless they also kill the only other dirty cop who has figured out their whole story. In the penultimate moments of the movie, the two of them drug the cop and asphyxiate him with a plastic bag, ionately making out while he suffocates to death in the background of the shot.

If you haven’t seen the movie, what I’m describing might seem fairly dark—and it is. But in execution, and in the way many audiences have reacted to it, many of the darker elements initially come across more “rascal” than sinister. Just survey Rotten Tomatoes and you’ll find phrases like “cheesy and easy-peasy,” “purely entertaining,” “old-fashioned sexy caper,” and “darkly funny screwball noir.” Reviews at the time of release broadly heralded Hit Man as a rollicking romantic comedy that felt more Bonnie & Clyde than anything else. In spite of this, I’ve argued often since its release that the movie is more intentionally disturbing than many people seemed to perceive—hiding behind the veneer of a good time to work its dark magic on the audience and confront them once they’ve dropped their guard.

The difference between Hit Man and Bonnie & Clyde is that Hit Man has an ostensibly happy ending. After Gary and Madison have killed the only witness to their crime, we fade to black and return after an indefinite timejump, showing that the two have settled into a picturesque suburban life with children, puppies, apple pie, and the occasional lighthearted reminiscence about their unconventional meet-cute.

As the film comes to a close and Gary takes a bite of pie, Madison brings back the coded message they used to identify each other in the cafe when they first met to discuss a murder:

“Are you enjoying your pie?” she asks.

“All pie is good pie,” Gary grins knowingly.

“It sure is,” Madison beams. And the film cuts to credits.

Throughout the rest of the movie, the vast majority of people Gary arrests seem to be acting under the highly American belief that eliminating one person from the picture will allow them to finally “live their best life.” The deep irony to this, of course, is that this is exactly what Gary and Madison believe when they decide to murder a dirty cop at the end of the film—and worse yet, it actually works out. The two of them having embraced their darker selves for the purpose of love, they are allowed to have a happily ever after.

But is all pie good pie? Surely not. Certainly not. To truly say so would be to characterize bad as good. And it’s the emphasis of this final line that confirms for me that the movie is not actually as unquestioning toward the sunny disposition of its ending as it might seem.

Rewatching Hit Man recently, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a perfect portrait of a post-shame moment: Gary and Madison successfully delude themselves into believing that a violent act was justified—and not just that, but they don’t seem to feel much remorse or regret about it. The two of them should feel shame, but they don’t—and through the evolving (or devolving) of both of their souls, their life together seems to end up working out perfectly fine. I have to concur with writer Timothy Lawrence when he said in his review that “the concluding ages feel like an unblinking dare to the moral relativist crowd: ‘so, you good with this?’”

At the core of Hit Man is a question of change and identity. Glenn Powell’s Gary Johnson starts the movie as a comically dweeb-ish philosophy teacher who lives alone with his cats (“Id” and “Ego”) and tells his ex-wife that he doesn’t believe people really have the capacity to change their core characteristics all that much. In voiceover at the start, Gary says “I could never get worked up enough to kill or die for anything.” As the film goes on and Gary begins to play a hit man to coax suspects into itting their murderous intentions, though, he starts to morph drastically, with the line between himself and his uber-sexy and hyper-confident persona as “Ron” beginning to blur.

The question of how (and whether) we can truly change has been central to Richard Linklater’s work for decades. School of Rock features a washed-up rock musician masquerading as a substitute teacher and finding a new man within himself in the process. Boyhood is a movie made across 12 years exploring the evolution of one kid as he grows into an adult. Bernie is a story of a widely-beloved funeral director who somehow convinces himself to kill an older woman, leaving his community shocked and confused at how such a friendly person could have violence inside him. And of course, the Before Trilogy explores a similar evolution of one relationship at 9-year intervals—and how both individuals develop in certain surprising ways while also retaining some of the stubborn patterns and immutable traits of their younger selves.

Where Hit Man continues and elaborates this exploration of change in Linklater’s work lies in its portrayal of the change that comes from performance; Gary’s descent into a real killer starts by convincing himself to play one for a greater good. Eventually, that greater good—if what he was doing ever was good—is subsumed by a desire for romantic and sexual love, and the fumes he’s breathing as the fake hitman Ron start to become intoxicating. He becomes who he was pretending to be. But at what cost?

The road to the cult of MAGA has been paved with people pretending to be coldhearted killers until they actually became them. I was deeply struck by this quote from Ezra Klein on a podcast with Hasan Minhaj recently:

“When JD Vance was on my podcast back in 2012, back in the Hillbilly Elegy days…virtue was really important to him. Decency was. It was something he didn’t like about Donald Trump. And one of the things that frightens me about the modern Republican Party is watching people give themselves personality transplants in order to get ahead in it. Watching them unleash a cruelty and anger that maybe was always inside of them, or maybe it’s put on for show and then it becomes real. So many of them have imitated the worst part of Donald Trump’s character, to come up behind him. But you’re not cosplaying. Because you become what you force yourself to be. The parts of yourself that you exercise get stronger.”

This is exactly what Hit Man is about.

It’s this transfigurement, highlighted by Klein’s description of Vance, that has beguiled me the most in the last decade—particularly since COVID. Some people have always had the makings of little fascists inside them; as best any of us can tell, Donald Trump hasn’t known real shame or conviction since he was a much, much younger man, if he ever did. But what about the rest of the leadership of the Republican Party—those who challenged Trump initially and eventually got over it? There are myriad examples of Republican leaders who said just a few years ago that they didn’t have anything against trans people, who now make it their life’s mission to paint them all as dangerous outsiders. Listen to a Republican politician speaking about immigration 20 years ago versus today, and it’s almost like comparing two completely different parties. And what about the ordinary American citizens who were radicalized in the last few years? What about those people we know to be generally good, honorable folks who have been somehow caught up in a bloodthirsty MAGA cult of personality?

The idea that even fairly ordinary, mild-mannered people can still have latent, violent demons lurking within them is present throughout Hit Man. Richard Linklater is an empathetic and often humanistic director, and an interesting thing about the film is the complex space it holds for the individuals who find themselves caught in Gary’s web of undercover assassin performance. On the one hand, some characters do seem borderline irredeemable—like the teenage “future school shooter” who orders Gary to kill his “b*tch” mother, seemingly with no hesitation or remorse. But far more of the characters feel less than sinister and more misguided and pathetic. When the cops swarm them and they realize the trust they placed in Gary as a savior was misplaced, you can’t help but feel pity for some, who will now likely spend life behind bars. And more challenging still, some of the suspects end up finding forgiveness in court with the people they’d planned to have killed. Without Gary as a fake hitman coaxing their worst impulses out of them, would their violent desires have ever amounted to anything substantial? Linklater takes pleasure in forcing the audience to sit in that icky human complexity—while illuminating the ways that we must be vigilant of both who and what we allow to coax us toward change, and how our tactics to achieve a desired goal can begin to change ourselves.

In our world, this issue of change and identity now goes beyond the political right. An identity crisis has been central to the Democratic party since even before Joe Biden stepped down and Kamala Harris took his place, and it’s only become more prominent since her loss. I’ve listened to about a dozen various podcast conversations about what the identity of the party “should” become in a time where its public is breathtakingly low, the failure of its previous approach has been laid bare, and winning back the American public in 2028 feels like a necessity. I do not consider myself to be a loyal member of any party, but I’m certainly in agreement that the identity and approach of the Democrats needs to change for the good of the world and democracy at large. But is change possible? And more importantly, what is to guide that change? If, for instance, Democrats were to simply decide to give up moral vision and embrace petty retribution as a unifying goal, what will differentiate them from their Republican counterparts? If the party is motivated not by principles but by finding its “own version” of a Trump-like figure, what is to prevent the little virtues that still exist from being corrupted by a desire to win?

Toward the end of Hit Man, Gary gives a lecture to his philosophy students recapping what some might take away as the fairly obvious themes of the film: namely, he says that “there are no moral absolutes,” and “to seize the identity you want for yourself.” I’ve had a few friends tell me that they hated Hit Man because of this truly sinister moral relativism, and if I believed the movie actually agreed with it, I’d probably concur with that distaste. But I think Linklater knows what Gary is saying is total bullshit. Rather than didactically contriving an ending to show that this path leads to destruction, Linklater is depicting something far more challenging: sometimes, it doesn’t. Sometimes, abandoning morals and contorting your identity to suit a primal desire to win or dominate will get you ahead and earn you a happy ending, especially in America—but you’ll lose your soul in the process.

We live in a world now where a multiverse of potential identities can be embraced, and many are left paralyzed by the malleability of their performed self. Maybe, Linklater ponders, people are capable of true change, and we all contain within us many possible selves which can be embraced and stoked. I don’t think Linklater (or myself) would argue that this capacity for a changing identity is entirely bad, or that making active choices about who you want to be and become are wrong. We’re all faced with those choices, and we can choose with wisdom.

But when we’re untethered from any sense of moral framework to guide us and curb us, what is to prevent us from deciding to change for the worse? Without such a guiding vigilance, we can all become monsters—and not even how to be ashamed of ourselves for it.

I've been working at Regal Cinemas recently, and yesterday there was a middle-aged couple leaving this film who came up to me in the hallway and said, "have you seen this movie? Can you explain to us what happened and what it was supposed to be about?"

film literacy is dead. I enjoyed this a lot. not as much as Asteroid City tho.

totally fine! I saw this because I heard Prague was in it, but not nearly enough; really enjoyed the whole Austrian village setpiece tho. De Armas is competent here, but even with all the dragged-out lengths to establish an elaborate backstory in the first half, she's just not very compelling as a character. it's sort of funny when you think about it that "you killed my father" will just never be as effective motivation as "you killed my dog." I won't anything other than the flamethrower scene in another few days.

wow. it's unreal how stitched-together this feels. sauceless as hell. it wants to be Winter Soldier so bad, but the thing that made Winter Soldier great was the interiority it offered for Steve Rogers, finally letting us into his personal life even right from the opening scene. it's baffling that after The Falcon and The Winter Soldier established such a rich world of Sam's family relationships and home in Louisiana, this movie decided to just ignore all of it; he's barely a character here, and we rarely see him alone with his thoughts rather than just talking plot logistics. and then there's the score, which throws out every previous Jackman/Silvestri theme for the series (including Sam's theme, which TFATWS kept going and evolved!) and channels totally generic paranoia thriller vibes. it's so crazy that the majority of the action sequences here are just eyes glaze over punch punch shootouts with goons, and then a couple big CGI atrocities right near the end. SO unbelievably funny that Giancarlo Esposito shows up for no reason and then leaves. dullest movie ever, will never ever rewatch!

my god, what a sloggy stinker! I didn’t think it was possible to exemplify the phrase “lost in the sauce” so precisely, and I can’t think of any other finale that so neglected and overlooked everything that was ever good about the preceding series in the first place. a couple impressive sequences and stunts, but overall there’s *nothing* here that hasn’t been done with better stakes (and for the love of god, with more fun) in other entries.

many have talked about how it all came together in the third act for them, but for me even that didn't accomplish much. and the more I think about it? the more I realize that it's because Ethan Hunt is barely a character in this movie. unlike previous entries, there are precious few personal stakes for him here. where Fallout felt like it painted a picture of an exhausted Homerian hero with a desperate and almost self-martyring need to hold the world together for the sake of those he loves, and Dead Reckoning portrayed an Ethan who had finally been rattled by an adversary pressuring him to act without his crucial heart—Final Reckoning's Ethan is simply a man who instantly knows exactly how to singlehandedly solve the impending doom and needs everyone else to just let him go do it. in this world, the people around Ethan are no longer friends to trust or enemies to reason with, but simply obstacles to letting him go get everything done himself. there's probably an interesting commentary on Cruise and his relationship to Hollywood there, but in practice as a character, it makes this version of Ethan Hunt profoundly lacking in internal conflict or intrigue. at the end of the day, when Ethan is once again hanging off the side of a flying object to once again fight the guy to once again retrieve the tiny item on a ticking clock that will once again stop nuclear armageddon while once again Benji and co are cutting wires to defuse a bomb, it doesn't even feel like the irony of this cyclical pattern is even part of the subtext. instead, it just s as if we're going through the motions. and don't even get me started on the fact that Ilsa Faust is literally not even acknowledged or mentioned once in the entire runtime. they had a softball opportunity for intense personal-vendetta stakes and totally ignored it.

this movie (and some parts of Dead Reckoning) feel to me almost like one of those sequences in prior Mission installments where someone is wearing a mask, or where we flash-forward to a version of “the plan” only to reveal it’s merely been an imagined outcome: something feels off, and you keep waiting for the rug pull that shows you the characters (and the filmmaker) were one step ahead of you. in most Mission movies, when that feeling hits, it’s pure movie magic. here, it never comes. there was nary a moment when I felt like McQuarrie, or Cruise, or Ethan Hunt, somehow did something I didn’t already expect, or where a payoff felt rewarding and warranted rather than obvious. for a movie that never stops explaining its convoluted plot, I can't get over just how nonsensical and thrown-together this plot feels; it completely lacks the graceful twists and turns of something like Fallout or Rogue Nation. those were movies that were confident enough to trust the audience to follow a grown-up mystery without holding their hand through everything with flashbacks to scenes from 15 minutes ago. I love this series and felt myself zoning out multiple times here. it lacks heart, it lacks humor, it lacks espionage, it stops to exposit every 5 minutes, and even the grand scale stakes feel yawn-worthy. honestly a crushing defeat.

"I HAVE GREAT WOULD-YOU-RATHERS!"

I didn't expect to see this again, but friends were going and I like laughing with friends.

maybe I'm being presumptuous or over-reading here, but I feel like the lens that makes the most sense to interpret this movie is not "male friendship" but "neurodivergence and social cues." the real horror of the movie is in a person searching for a way to learn the rules of engagement in friendship but finding that they are consistently contradictory or confusing. it makes an interesting companion piece to The Rehearsal, which similarly contains an undercurrent of a man trying to find a way to feel and experience what others seem to feel and experience so naturally. in that sense, maybe you could just as easily say it's a metaphor (or just a textual example) of social anxiety more generally, and I wouldn't claim that either Nathan or Tim Robinson in this are actually verifiably autistic, but both certainly serve to provide more empathy (in their own strange and absurd ways) for that experience nonetheless.

anyway, I wish this had more of a distinct "vision" behind the camera (the accusations of "A24 house style" are accurate) but it works for what it is. Kate Mara is really good here!

pure joy to see this in a packed theater with an audience of many generations of parents and children. one observation: way back when, movies used to be raucously funny without being comedies. I found myself laughing through almost every minute of this at every brilliant little facial gesture and saucy retort, and then crying all the others. transcendent, unreal, etc. also *way* too real right now. feels like I'm seeing way too many Rolfs around these days and not enough Captain Von Trapps. strangely though, the moments where I found tears inexplicably running down my cheeks were in the pure joy; Maria taking the children out to Saltzburg in their playclothes, the children's first performance for their father, Maria and the Captain in the gazebo...it's pure goodness and beauty and tenderness distilled. I got full body chills and sobbed during Edelweiss. I can't imagine being behind the camera for some of these shots. majesty. all my love.

watched with a completely packed sold-out theater for the early screening at The Belcourt. the whole room was laughing within the first 30 seconds and didn't letup for the next couple hours. a truly electric comedy experience. definitely see it with a crowd, if you can!

I will say, I almost felt like the movie could've gone...further? there are moments where it feels like it's going to branch into some heightened magical realism or absurd horror, but it never quite gets there. aspects of the constructed world at times feel unsettlingly dreamlike or comical, but it rolls credits before anything has a chance to really go off the deep end. maybe I just had my expectations raised by the staff member who introduced it by saying "if you've seen the trailer, you have no idea how crazy this gets." I don't know, I thought it was about as moderately crazy as the trailer conveyed.

anyway, I laughed a lot, but there's not much going on beneath the hood beyond a general sense of suburban/masculine malaise. maybe I'm a fool for expecting more, but I sort-of hoped it might have more to say about the "male loneliness epidemic," either sincerely or ironically. but hey, it's nonstop funny and I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe basically every couple minutes, so maybe that's enough. there's nobody doing it like Tim Robinson. this is very The Art of Self-Defense core.

I can't believe we're finally here. My feature documentary, A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers, is officially available on YouTube! Link here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iyGVHUrI

I've written about it quite enough already, but suffice to say it's been a long road to this point: 3 years of production since starting shooting around this time in May 2022, and 8 months of touring showings since our original premiere in August of last year. I'm glad that we gave the film some space to breathe rather than dropping it online immediately; those in-person screenings and discussions were some of the most meaningful gatherings I've ever gotten to take part in. Even so, I knew from the start that I wanted the film to ultimately be accessible and free to watch online, in the vein of the folk filmmaking movement—not because all art deserves to be free, but because I wanted to make sure this particular film could be shared with a wide and diverse online audience rather than being confined to a platform that might only serve a certain crowd.

That's a vague way of mentioning that we got some offers from "faith-based" streaming services to feature this exclusively on their platforms, but I turned them down because I wanted this to be seen and enjoyed by more than just people in that subculture. At the end of the day, we didn't make this film for religious folks—we made it for the people who, as one character so aptly describes in the movie, are "sitting on the front porch."

If you're interested, I'd still recommend buying the film for $10 on Blu-Ray (link here) for the closest intended experience. Despite my best efforts to compensate, YouTube compression has a way of screwing with textures and colors, and the physical media version is the only one I can say I'm fully satisfied with when it comes to the look and sound. Plus, it has 4 hours of bonus features including a commentary track! That said, as long as you set the quality to 4K, it should be a solid enough experience online.

A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers is a movie largely about community, and it was designed to be watched in community with others. There's something that happens to art when we experience it in relationship rather than on our own time; collective attention tends to enchant the art object beyond what it could ever be alone. That's why I've tried my best to provide some materials throughout the release to help folks host their own showings and have some interesting conversations afterward. If you're interested in those, there are some resources on our website and inside the Blu-Ray case too.

Now that this plane has been landed, I'm going to be processing and coming to with what life looks like without such a significant project and commitment anchoring my entire being for years on end. Finishing things definitely gives you a sense of confidence and dignity, but nobody ever mentions how it also feels like a loss, too.

More than anything, I'll be continuing to read y'all's Letterboxd reviews here with tenderness and gratitude; I'm always eager to see what particular insights might be revealed by people who see something in my art that I didn't even see myself. I think often about what David Lowery said on a Reddit AMA about The Green Knight: "hey, you just taught me something about my own movie! I'm going to own that interpretation!"

I'm interested to see what kind of life this movie takes on as the years ; I hope that it stands as a time capsule of a particularly beautiful place with particularly lovely human beings during a particularly special summer. But I also hope it serves as an imaginative glimpse of a certain "way of being" that can be embodied anywhere, regardless of when and where it's watched in the years to come.

unprecedented levels of "my shit" here, very much in line with the values and sensibilities of films that I've made and would want to make. temporal art within physical space, gathering people who are forever connected by the time they shared in a little heightened realm of their own making, bending the rules of an anti-human adult world to better serve whimsy and community. others have noted it, but more than anything, I was left feeling melancholic (and radicalized) by the realization that our social media generation has all-but abandoned truly embodied acts of playful creative community like this. people used to get together with their real-life friends in the real world and do things, ya know? and not for the sake of attention online, but for friendship and the love of the game. some of it may be "cringe" to look back on now, but I much prefer a world of flash mobs and parties and pranks and street art to the disintegrated isolation we're experiencing today. our current position is not entirely our fault, but if we want to survive in the tumultuous years ahead of us, we're going to need to find each other again, embrace a collectively acted-out sense of humor, and become the "barnacle on the whale" so aptly described here. inspiring stuff.

a few assorted rewatch notes:

- Surprisingly invigorating to see this in IMAX and realize that the intentional expanded aspect-ratio sequences had been very well thought out. I'd have to rewatch some other MCU entries to compare, but this one looked great in the format and never once jumped between ratios for a cutaway or anything; the first 10 mins or so are all 1:90:1 and look excellent.

- Truly a privilege to hear Son Lux's score in full surround again; some of those dark melancholic cellos in a few places really got me tearing up again.

- I concur with what I said in my previous review and what others have noted since: this thing sticks the landing, but it does completely lack a second act.

- I really like that John Walker is just an asshole. it feels like a rare case where the whole "team of unlikeable washed-up antiheroes" thing actually commits to the bit

- I didn't feel much about Sebastian Stan's Bucky reprisal on the first watch but on this one I was actually pretty swayed in his favor. love how well he portrays the layers of how far the character has come and what he carries, even as he's slowly become a hero in his own right. I just wish he had a slightly more interesting interior life/subplot than just being a senator for some reason.

- Ditto on Ghost, who I feel like could've used a little more fleshing out than the scattered expositional one-liners about "growing up in a lab." but even so, I actually think Hannah John-Kamen is charming and likeable in the role and I love the way the character quickly becomes the one everyone doubts but somehow always comes through.

- Lewis Pullman is so so so good.

- Julia Louis Dreyfus is so aggressively fine, but she does have that line about how "righteousness without power is just an opinion" and "there are bad guys and worse guys" which pretty perfectly encapsulates the Republican ethos right now. so maybe there's something there.

- Ya know, I gotta credit Feige: even when Marvel has seemingly dug themselves into a hole they can never climb out of, somehow he's always got a trick up his sleeve like this that shoots another shot of adrenaline into the whole endeavor. it's probably telling that he's shifted increasingly from a Nick Fury figure to a Julia Louis Dreyfus; an earnest do-gooder assembling a team for a purpose, to an organizational leader in over their head trying to salvage their reputation by finding the most appealing marketing tactic. but maybe Dreyfus/Feige was right: the B-Vengers were the only solution to saving this universe from its malaise.

- Speaking of climbing out of holes: my favorite sequence is probably still the "climbing up the air vent in a circle" one. I wouldn't have minded a whole movie of stupid team problem solving.

- Crazy that we got a Marvel movie which quotes Kierkegaard. I'm actually probably gonna be thinking about shame for the next few days...

I have never soyfaced as much as I did when Julie Delpy suddenly showed up in this movie

very enjoyable, even touching and poignant stuff! I haven't cried in a movie in a while (other than Sinners) and this got me several times. that's not to mention that it looks and sounds great! Schreier really has some sauce, and this cast is charismatic—spare for Julia-Louis Dreyfus, who realllyyyyy feels like she's phoning it in. but god, Florence is electric and her father/daughter chemistry with Harbour is just as resonant as it was in Black Widow. the two of them really know how to walk a line of camp/comedy without becoming caricatures, grounding the whole thing in genuinely believable emotion. I do think Harbour is one of our great actors right now, and few projects have used his tenderness to full effect since the first season of Stranger Things.

the thing that holds the movie back for me is some of the plotting/pacing and structure. if we're comparing this to the first Avengers (which it really seems determined to evoke) then it's worth noting that this is about 20 minutes shorter, and feels even shorter than that. it's really lacking a mid-act setpiece that continues to establish and develop the team dynamic, similar to the Helicarrier rescue in Avengers. as it stands, we sort-of jump from that "Thor/Tony/Cap fight in the woods" sequence almost straight to the Battle of New York without a whole lot of time for to breathe or flesh everyone out. the fact that the story takes place in a timespan under 24 hours is another thing that makes it feel a little rushed. and then there's the constant jumping to boring-ass expositional "these are the stakes, I guess" scenes with Julia-Louis Dreyfus and her assistant, who kinda-sorta has a subplot that pretty much gets dropped by the third act. a little sloppy!

and yet...part of me actually appreciates the sleekness and simplicity of this. in contrast to some of the more bombastic setpieces of Avengers, some of the best moments in this movie are the ones where it leans into smaller-scale stakes—like one of my favorite scenes, where the group has to somehow climb out of a giant cylindrical airvent using awkward teamwork. it's those points where the film really feels like an intentionally-reversed version of Avengers that it really shines. even the final action sequence is almost an inverse of the Battle of New York, with the whole purpose focused on saving civilians rather than fighting a faceless army. I did find the extended "let's go through the therapy flashback mind palace" element slightly contrived; it just felt like something we've seen before both in Marvel (WandaVision, Loki, even Legion) and in popular media. that said...the final catharsis of an embrace saving the day hit me hard. that was one of my multiple cry moments in its sheer sincerity and realness, and Pugh/Pullman really sell it. loved.

my dad commented that he felt like this movie was a couple years late to the game when it came to depicting the "void" of depression and social isolation through sci-fi framing; so much of this was touched by Everything Everywhere All at Once back in 2022, and it hit much harder then because we were all just coming out of COVID. if this had released around the same time, I think it would've felt even more prophetic. that's not really a knock against it now, because I think these themes remain pretty relevant to Gen Z and were handled with resonance, but it's just an interesting timing/movement thing.

I was one of the first in line to say this would be a banger due to the creative team and the trailers, and I'm glad to say it came through. at the same time, I'm a little perplexed by the people acting like it's the second coming of Christ in the MCU—as if Marvel has never made a movie with a soul before, with poignant characterization and thematic ideas at play. y'all seen the Guardians of The Galaxy Trilogy? Black Panther? Winter Soldier and Civil War? heck, even Iron Man 2? there's some good, thoughtful, even soulful stuff in there that I think many people have decided to forget for some reason. granted that this is the first entry in a good while to scratch a similar itch. regardless, it's a fun and emotionally-affecting ride, and I'm glad we'll see more of these guys. I'll probably see again sometime soon!

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

absolutely chilling stuff. every day lately, it feels like I watch more and more seemingly ordinary people say horrifically cruel and dehumanizing things with a grin on their face and no shame. I saw it when the director of ICE said they needed to treat the operation "as a business, like Amazon Prime but with human beings." I saw it with every justification of throwing hundreds of innocent Venezuelans into a torture prison for the rest of their lives with no trial. I see it with every tweet from the official White House mercilessly gloating at whatever grief and pain the istration leaves in its wake. and here, you see it every time a Zionist settler opens their mouth and claims with matter-of-fact certainty that Palestinian people do not and should not exist. some of the things said on camera with a smile in this doc sent shivers down my spine.

how do we bring back shame? how do we re-instill a sense of wrongness to saying and doing the things that are being said and done?

everything in me wants to say that the answer is turning to God, acknowledging a transcendent universal morality that governs us all and asks us to love our neighbor as ourselves because we're all made in the image of the divine. to accept that like the trinity, we can be different and yet we can be one.

watching this documentary, I don't know how to square that deep-seated belief with the reality that some of the people who perpetuate the most horrific dehumanization also somehow claim to follow God. and yet I still feel deeply that the belief in the Image of God in every human being—the Imago Dei—is all we've got.

well, the Imago Dei, the character of a loving God, and expectation of Judgement Day. when I was a child, the idea that God would someday judge us all for our actions felt like bad news. but in the face of so much injustice, righteous judgement increasingly feels like something to hope and plead for. may we all find healthy shame and repentance before then.

Watched on Monday April 21, 2025.

anyone who thinks autism didn’t exist until vaccines needs to pay attention to all the men in this movie and report back

fairly overwhelming to see this in a theater for the first time. it's pretty eerie how relevant much of this political commentary has continued to become; it feels worth noting how successfully Palpatine manages to employ the argument that "actually, stopping me from becoming a fascist dictator is the real fascist dictatorship." that bad-faith reverse logic which claims to uphold the importance of democracy and rule-of-law while simultaneously undermining and dismantling them is all too familiar right now. and all throughout, the film is keenly perceptive of the ways that fascism occurs most successfully as a virus grown within a liberal democracy rather than a rule imposed from outside it. I think Lucas really knew what he was doing when he made the Jedi completely dysfunctional; it's such a complex picture of the marriage of religion with politics and militarism, and the way fascism will use these helpful little neolib enforcers as much as it serves its interest and then exterminate everyone with a heart when the deed is done.

anyway, I still don't find Anakin's descent into the dark side particularly believable. the idea that this guy who was so upset when he found out Palpatine was a Sith would be willing the same day to go slaughter children just doesn't check out, unless you're willing to view the Dark Side almost as a demonic entity which takes over as he becomes Vader. the visions of Pé dying in childbirth being the primary catalyst for his turn just feels so contrived. but I don't know; despite all that, I still found Hayden more compelling than I ed.

my theater was packed but not particularly vocal; the one moment when everyone burst out laughing was when Yoda walked into the Emperor's chamber and immediately knocked out the guards. physical comedy! good times. this still looks and sounds great. fun to see a vision that was initially panned only get better and more relevant with age.

"and he knows in that moment that time is a lie."

crazy how quickly this flies past. I don't think there's any other movie that better captures the existential angst of recognizing that time has ed, feeling like you're essentially the same person you were "back then," and yet also knowing that the experiences you've had since have also changed and shaped you in drastic and subtle ways. and even as much as you might feel you're the same, there's an underlying grief at the person you once were who has now gone. it's classic Linklater, grappling with how much time can really change us and how much we'll stay the same. it's interesting, too, how much more of the conversation between Jessie and Celine here hones in on practical life details rather than grand cosmic ideas; even in that moment when Jesse first asks her to tell him about her life and what she's doing these days, it almost feels like a step away from the romantic dream space in Vienna and toward ordinary day-to-day reality. it's beautiful nonetheless, but something has shifted and both of them are the same and yet changed.

I will never not be grinning from ear to ear while watching this.

glad to properly correct this blindspot in a theater. I was unprepared for how much it would feel like the prototype for Gerwig's take on Little Women, from the spirited and modern tonal interpretation of decidedly unmodern dialogue to even some of the esoteric visual language. literally kicking my feet and giggling and beaming the whole time; I forgot movies could be this romantic. nobody is doing it like this anymore. bring back keira knightley. bring back piano scores. bring back love. bring back beauty. bring back crash zooms.

well, y'all better call me Jesus of Nazareth, because I loved Sinners.

it might be strange to say given that the film has a complicated relationship with religion, but that scene felt to me like one of the purest cinematic distillations of the communion of saints and the cosmic glory of the New Creation—a place where the previously excluded run the party, the music of the spheres allows a celebration of perfect individuality and perfect community, and the bounds of time itself finally fall away to reveal a transcendent symphony (and jam session) from every tribe and tongue, their joyful diversity not erased.

anyway. this exists in the same universe as The Devil Went Down to Georgia. more thoughts on the rewatch tonight, I'm sure.

the fact that this was shot, edited and distributed all within the last year is a miracle—and as you’d expect, some of the most serendipitously moving sequences are those led by Mahmoud Khalil, whose gentle and yet unwavering and firm presence anchors the film. given the quick turnaround, I think I’d expected something that might just be a bunch of talking heads, but credit where it’s due: the coverage here is pretty staggering, spanning from embedded veritè footage of the Columbia protests to several other campuses and even a small unit in Gaza. 

the film does a pretty good job of covering some of the reality of not just the protests and their impact but also the parallel reality transpiring in Gaza; it’s a compelling connection that while all these major universities in the US are protesting, every university in Gaza has been destroyed. even the contrast between the tent city of students at Columbia with the tent city of refugees in the strip—I found the solidarity from miles away strangely moving. and there was a good amount of affecting historical pre-Nakba footage that I’d never seen before, too.

I’m not exactly sure how successful the film will be at changing anyone’s mind. I did feel like there were certain critiques of the protests that could’ve been more persuasively disputed…and while skillful, so much of this could easily be dismissed as “biased propaganda” by the opposing side just as I would dismiss those “2020 Stolen Election” right-wing documentaries as the same thing. granted, I think so much of this relies on firsthand footage that it’s pretty hard to dispute the reality of a movement that—if nothing else—very clearly welcomed Jewish collaboration and the many gifts of the Jewish voice. but ya know, I’m perpetually stunned at what people in the other “camp” can nevertheless dismiss as fake or irrelevant these days. regardless of whether it works purely as persuasion, I do think the film will ultimately serve as a very valuable time capsule of something I can only hope will be ed as a positive turning point in history generations from now.

I expected this to feel heavy and grim, which it was—but what I didn’t expect was the genuinely touching portrait of a short-lived community of people coming together across religious/cultural/racial barriers to take care of one another and stand together for basic comion and morality. in spite of the circumstances, some moments of music and laughter and sharing of food in the encampments genuinely felt like a glimpse of heaven. to gather together with others and take a risk for what matters most—what’s more real than that?

toward the end of the film, after the encampments have finally been forcefully (and brutally) dismantled by the NYPD, we jump ahead to fall 2024 and see one of our lead activists reflecting back on the protests as she sits in her dorm room—with a small piece of art of their short-lived occupation of “Hinds Hall” on her desk. for whatever reason, the moment touched me; just that feeling of melancholy of the apparent short-term fruitlessness of the protest, mingled with the sense of fondness (and pride) at having really dared to fight for something that mattered—together with friends and strangers. and then, to see the way that the children and refugees of Gaza themselves were heartened by these protests, to know that thousands of young people across the ocean cared and saw their injustice, that their deaths aren’t invisible…in the midst of everything right now, that should give us all enough fuel to face another day.

ever better the second time—particularly in all the little details that start to clue you in toward the constructed reality and the ways it was created specifically to toy with Isabel. I think my favorite section of the film is the initial sleepover when Owen/Isabel steals away to Maddy's house and stays the night; something about it perfectly captures some of those ethereal childhood memories that stick with you for decades because you can still how you felt, doing something outside your comfort zone that feels dangerous and scary but liberating. the age of time as a horror device here is magnificent. I don't have much else to say, but this is something special. something really new.

Solid stuff. It's been a rewarding thing to watch this whole story culminate and finally get a version of The Gospels onscreen (maybe the first?) where we actually know the names and personalities of each disciple individually. In almost any other Bible adaptation, you've mostly just got "Simon Peter, Judas, and all the other guys." I've been very pleased with how they've handled Judas here, not as a cynical unbeliever but actually as the zealous believer who is so sold out that he can't believe Jesus isn't maximizing his success better and wants to give him one final test. I've really loved every point where the show has connected itself to a broader historical context, too; the mentions of the Maccabees and Antiochus in Season 1, and here the flash-forward to the bloody destruction of the temple in 70 AD, which was particularly affecting. The decision to start each episode this season with a flash-forward to the Last Supper sequence was smart, too; it allows that conversation to have a presence that covers the whole week. And I loved the way the entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was handled; as always, the lively and unconventional musical score here is its strongest single element of craftsmanship by a country mile.

It's the culminating sequence of this first part, but I wasn't fully sold on the "Jesus drives out the money-lenders in the temple" sequence. Partly, I think it's because we've seen him come and go and teach at the temple several times in the show so far and never witnessed this anger before; because of that, the sudden switch-flipped to casting out merchants feels like he's almost doing it out of obligation rather than real anger or upset. Growing up reading the original text, it always felt to me like Jesus's anger was spontaneous and sincere, motivated by being genuinely shocked at seeing his father's house desecrated. But here, he's been to the temple already so many times that this outburst feels more premeditated as part of his mission. It's even stranger to me that the show goes out of its way to show one of the merchants as a sympathetic character—which just makes it even more off-putting for Jesus to turn over his table. Maybe that's the point—God's anger is off-putting to us sometimes?—but it feels like a weird reverse "Save The Cat" choice in framing. I'm normally one of those people who loves that Jesus gets mad about greedy money-making schemes being attached to religion, but this version of it just didn't feel particularly in line with the Jesus we've seen in the show thus far. But I don't know, again; from what I've seen of the future episodes, it seems like the disciples being unsettled by seeing this side of their Rabbi might be the whole point of it.

I'm intrigued to see how the rest of this season goes. ittedly though, I've been disappointed by the way that the show's increasing embrace of theatrical release has killed any sense of episodic storytelling; so much of Season 1 felt so focused, with each episode succinctly telling a specific story (usually straight from The Gospels) while also continuing the ongoing narrative; there were even several bottle episodes, which were among my favorites and made extremely accessible jumping-off points to get newbies onboard. As the show has continued, everything has started to blur together to the point where it's just one longform thing, with little distinction between episode breaks. Sometimes, the cuts to opening titles and credits can feel almost entirely arbitrary and haphazard. Leave it to us Christians to finally start embracing the binge storytelling model right when episodic is coming back in style! But I guess that's what happens when grassroots stuff like this gains great success and must satisfy audiences with a faster release schedule; it's still good stuff, and I really liked lots of choices here, but it's just undeniably sloppier than it once was. Season 1 is still the best the show has ever been, in part because it felt like they really had to refine their craft and storytelling to prove it was worthy of crowdfunding.

needed to revisit after finishing Sunrise on The Reaping. it's wild how many of the casting choices here were truly generational; Harrelson as Haymitch, Banks as Effie Trinket, Sutherland as Snow, and of course Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss are all inspired and genre-defining.

I am ride-or-die for Gary Ross's directorial choices in this movie. it's a prime example of show-don't-tell with so much of the exposition of the book being conveyed through images and wordless montage/intercutting rather than anything spoken or explained. another thing this gets right, mostly through its (comparatively) low budget and shooting on-location in North Carolina, is the deep Appalachian roots of the series and Katniss's connection to the forest. a film with more greenscreen (like the other 4 in the series) would never feel quite as earthy, and barring a few CG shots here and there in the Capitol, this one just feels so real and grounded in the not-too-distant continent of North America. particularly during the games, everyone looks muddy and dirty and hungry and injured, and nothing feels polished or glossy in the way it will in later entries.

the movie gets tone right, too. there are the occasional moments of dry comedy which work well, but so much of it feels bleak and grim and viscerally upsetting in a way that never stoops to being a blockbuster. Catching Fire has great merit as a blockbuster, but by my judgement, this is the only entry in the series that really refuses to give into spectacle and never feels overly Hollywood. choosing to play the initial cornucopia bloodbath with no sound was inspired, and I'll say it: I think the shaky cam achieves exactly what it intends. even the score, which in future entries can feel manipulative and saccharine, here is used sparingly and often to haunting effect. that's to say nothing of the iconic music cues pioneered throughout, from the "Horn of Plenty" theme to the way the film beautifully orchestrates "Deep in The Meadow."

I've written about it before, but one of my favorite things about this movie is that way it captures the distinct sense of providence present in the book; somehow, despite the dire circumstances, there is often a distinct sense that greater forces are conspiring to eventuate the fall of the empire through tiny coincidences and blind actions of rebellion and love, "for such a time as this." to his credit, Snow seems to be the only one who recognizes the way the dominos can all fall unless every act of resistance is swiftly crushed; his brief dialogue with Wes Bentley's Seneca Crane (also great) about "underdogs" is tremendous and chilling stuff.

this is a very good movie with a tactile and distinct style, and I think it stands out greatly against the generic blockbuster direction Francis Lawrence implemented in all the other installments to follow. can we get Gary back for the Sunrise on The Reaping film, pretty please?

watched this back when it released in January. it was staggering to see Andrew's work and storytelling level up so significantly from This Places Rules, going from a general "look at these weirdos" type beat to a far more focused parable of radicalization...which provides empathy and understanding for some of the circumstances but never lets that empathy mean total absolution. I was deeply invested in this story and found myself uncontrollably sobbing at several moments near the end, especially during the intervention sequence. sure, there's a conversation to be had around the invasion of privacy—as well as the lack of discussion about a mental health diagnosis?—but the story about a father being stolen away from his children nonetheless feels indisputably universal and vital. Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and the whole conservative media industrial complex are taking advantage of the vulnerable and actively destroying families.

Watched on Sunday February 23, 2025.

Watched on Sunday February 23, 2025.

really touched by this one. I love sweet coming of age movies that come to uncomfortable and melancholic adult conclusions without being cynical! lovely stuff. I laughed so much. I guess people seem to have mixed feelings about Raiff casting himself in this role, but as someone who didn't have any of that context, I found his character to be a refreshing take on "giving" masculinity that is almost never represented in film; it really reminded me of a few people I know and love. wish this had opened in theaters.

Watched on Sunday April 6, 2025.

“Careful! A wolf’s severed head can still bite.”

Would that we all saw our hatred and bitterness as a curse to be freed from, rather than a weapon to be wielded. Humans and nature are not in opposition; we are all nature, in its majesty and violence. We must find a way to live, and pursue the impossible dream of seeing with eyes unclouded.

people are so strange and different from each other and it's a real pain and a real delight. wonderful movie.

lots of choices here that feel more adult and less saccharine than it so easily could've been. really feels like I needed this story about moving into the scary and wonderful unknown rather than desperately clinging to the safety of the romanticized past. Carey Mulligan is just marvelous here.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the age which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
- T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

Richard Linklater understands the way true romance always feels like sticking your hand into the guts of the universe and reshaping the cosmic reality of time itself. Before Sunrise is in most ways a fairly straightforward walk-and-talk romance without any direct science-fiction angle. But straightforward reality itself is science fiction sometimes, and viewed another way, this whole trilogy feels almost like a dreamlike glimpse of the invisible spiritual reality that exists wherever there is love. even the characters seem to be aware that their evening represents some kind of thin place between states of being—a frozen moment in time where they might turn into pumpkins when the clock strikes twelve. in this way, whether actually true or not, everything in the film feels mysteriously soaked in eternal, almost cyclical significance. the fact that our two lovers are driven together by a bickering couple at the very start. the ambiguous, esoteric interactions with eccentric Vienna locals who always seem to speak some kind of truth or prophecy into the night. the various conversations and intimate details and glances, which echo and twist and rhyme throughout all three films, highlighting the lessons learned and left unlearned and the persistent questions and feelings that never go away. Celine's vision of an old woman watching through her life on her deathbed feels strangely accurate—and yet so does Jessie's vision of a young boy imagining what adulthood might hold. what we see here might be what flashes before both of their eyes in birth and death, the moments of mundane transcendence arrayed in all their inexplicable brilliance.

I'm not saying this movie is "secretly a dream" or something, but the fact remains that the series itself—and especially this first entry—uses the medium of cinema to communicate how real, spontaneous love can feel very dreamlike. and how contained within our present moment is a glimpse of all the moments to come, with all the ways we may change and the ways we may stay the same. everything there is to know about Jessie and Celine is contained in this first movie. even as the two of them grow and change, they still contain these 23-year-old versions of themselves—just like Jessie contains the 5 year old boy who saw his grandmother in the mist of the garden hose, and Celine contains the old woman she will become someday.

Linklater has said that Sunrise is about "what could be," while Sunset is about "what might have been," and Midnight is about "what is." I don't think it's a coincidence that these three states of being are inherently linked to time; one focuses on the future, one on the past, and the other on the present. maybe that's why, despite its mostly straightforward nature, the Before Trilogy still feels so strangely cosmic: as the movies interplay with each other, we experience what it is to step outside of time and see something transcendent with omniscient eyes. something beautiful, something transitory, something real.

so many "guys I know from that other thing" in this! marisa abela is a star! very fun times.

this is kinda perfect until just around the halfway point, when it pretty much loses the emotional core and descends into expositional action involving alphas and dragon armies and mind control. the hook of "Hiccup finds his long-lost mother and she's a dragon-tamer too" has soooooo much rich emotional juice—enough for that to be almost the whole focus of the story. the movie gets good mileage out of it with the tender family reunion and wonderful singing sequence, but once we go for the big third act spectacle stuff (which comes way too soon for its own good) that element is dropped almost completely; Valka plays basically no part in the finale, which is crazy. killing off Stoick (the heart of the whole series) was such a big mistake, too, and it really doesn't feel remotely earned. mind control plotlines are the worst! "it's me, who you are, come back to me bud, this isn't you!" shut up!!!

this movie also suffers from what I'd call "age of ultron syndrome," where what is meant to be an epic and sweeping narrative loses its grandiosity because it only takes place of the course of a day or two. once you notice this in movies, you can't ignore it: the ones that feel truly epic always have some form of extended age of time. think about Lord of The Rings or even Harry Potter; they're always long-running narratives and that's what makes it feel like the characters have come a long way from the beginning. even the first How to Train Your Dragon has several montage sequences that make it feel like it's taking place over the course of at least several months, as Hiccup gradually trains Toothless and becomes a star student in the village. because this sequel takes place over what looks like a weekend, it ends up feeling more like a little one-off episode rather than a significant event—which makes it all the more anticlimactic for Stoick to die under those circumstances.

anyway, lots to complain about but somehow (?) I'm still giving it 4 stars (??) because the whole thing is just so unbearably cool. teenage Hiccup with his fire sword and dragon wingsuit has gotta be one of my favorite character designs of all time—and the introduction to him with the "Where No One Goes" flying sequence is just a classic case of wonder and magic for the sake of wonder and magic. transcendent. the "flying with mother" sequence is similarly wonderful, and the cinematography and texturing in this one feels like such a step up from the original. it's just gorgeous to behold. sucks that the narrative is so weak, but I can't deny that living in this world is always a delight!

seeing and hearing this in 4K IMAX was transcendent, as you'd expect; that "journey to the west" needledrop in full surround gave me reason to keep on living, which is good because that's what the movie is about. I'm still never one to find myself preferring dubs in general, but Minnie Driver as Lady Eboshi really makes it all worth it.

this obviously hits pretty hard at the present moment, when it truly feels like everyone in power is only interested in burning the world down to feel the short-lived warmth and cutting the heads off the old gods because they can. even more convicting, of course, it's a time when it's so easy to succumb to unceasing hatred on a daily basis. in the face of that world, seeing the grace and peace of ashitaka as a mediator is almost otherworldly.

the ending, too, is remarkably powerful. obviously miyazaki isn't working from any kind of judeo-christian framework, but the image of a god dying to bring new life, and the destruction of the old, corrupt city of man to make way for a new, better city—maybe even a garden city—certainly calls to mind some of the most beautiful images from The Book of Revelation. it's powerful to see these things embedded in our collective imaginations and hopes, even cross-culturally.

that's to say nothing of the obvious poignance of watching a movie delicately crafted by human hands on the big screen during a week when people are lazily plagiarizing the "ghibli aesthetic" using AI without any understanding of the meaning or intention behind it. this is one of the most gorgeous movies ever made, undoubtedly. and contrary to the cutesy images on the timeline, Miyazaki's work is more frequently gruesome and disgusting and macabre than anything else. there's hardly a filmmaker alive today who so eagerly depicts the ugliness of the human condition right alongside the beauty and joy. as we descend into an era of rising fascism, with even our government co-opting this famous pacifist environmentalist artist's empty aesthetic for the purposes of their propaganda, it's strangely comforting to know that they'll never grasp what any of it actually means. despite their moral bankruptcy, we continue to live. we must. we must live to see the flowers grow again, and build a better city together.

"Can I get a towel? I'm drenched."
"Yeah right. Dame Judy."

lovely stuff, and even lovelier to see early at The Belcourt with the cast in attendance! this slots nicely into the Sing Street category of cozy plucky UK musical comedies...and makes a nice addition to the "miserable bros on an island" genre of Banshees of Inisherin, too. so basically "very much my shit." I was laughing with the whole theater pretty much nonstop throughout—and unexpectedly cried a couple times, too. despite Carey Mulligan's mostly-limited presence in the film, she leaves a very resonant rippling impact; and of course Tim Key is a comedic revelation. I don't know if the movie (or pacing) sticks the landing completely, but there are a few intentionally unsatisfying choices that also made me really respect their boldness. we all think returning to the safety of the past will somehow heal us, but that only happens by embracing the dangerous possibility of the future. see it! it's such a good time!

farmer jim switching from static paintings to completely fluid animation for his emotional death scene got me good. kinda wish bugs was in this!

"Want some dinner?"
"Whatcha got?"
"Wieners."
"Wieners?"
"Wieners. Wanna try one?"

I couldn't wipe the smile off my face for 90 minutes. everything about this premise screams sappy Disney melodrama but Lynch directs it with such down-to-earth simplicity that it's high art. thunderstorm scene goes crazy. crash zooms go crazy. the scene with the rifle goes crazy. pregnant girl at the campfire scene goes crazy. WWII ptsd scene goes crazy. might be an all-timer for me; a real Kiki's Delivery Service level neighborhood hospitality banger. the american dream is built on the myth of self-sufficiency, which is how Alvin Straight's story starts. true community, though, is built on exposing your own vulnerable needs to others and asking for help. that's the only way Alvin Straight's story arrives at its end.

seeing this in a theater with a packed crowd was fun; the production is so huge and lavish, it's no wonder it lived up to every expectation of audiences at the time. sort-of fascinating to observe that it's basically exactly the same movie as Star Wars, obviously on a narrative level but also sort-of on an archetypical aesthetic one. I mean, it's literally got the "Han and Luke disguise themselves as Stormtroopers to save Leia in the Death Star" sequence.

I'm still resoundingly lost at what this story is really meant to convey, and what audiences at the time gleaned from it. The Wicked Witch dies from water being poured on her, which feels incredibly arbitrary and basically happens on accident, not really demanding any real change from Dorothy as a character. The Wizard is a fraud and the main characters are all fairly gullible to his swindling even when they find out the truth, but this is never confronted. Dorothy learns from her adventures that she should remain in a cherubic childlike state and never dream about leaving home ever again. what is this movie about? I don't know. but it's proven elastic enough to serve as a powerful modern American mythology which can have just about anything projected onto it. it's no wonder Wicked saw ripe material for a more cynical/deconstructive adaptation, because the bones are already here for that reading but somehow it maintains its rosy sincerity nonetheless. maybe that's part of why Lynch loved it, beyond the dreamlike quality: in moments, the movie feels like an inside joke that refuses to ever it or acknowledge its sharper edges. an enigma, and a defining work in the medium of cinema.

Watched on Sunday March 16, 2025.

me during half of this movie: god, this is such a beautiful picture of the spiritual discipline of caring for creation and paying intimate attention to the vulnerable creatures that others overlook

me during the other half: okay this hummingbird lady needs to go make some friends with human beings

there's basically nothing I could say here that wouldn't be cliche or oversaid, but I am astounded at how much I loved, felt, laughed, and inexplicably resonated on a primal level with every second of this. in a vacuum, I'd only ever think that I would be annoyed by "this kind of thing"; there are so many ways you could do it that lack weight or universality. and yet Lynch's direction is so elemental and real—in its artificiality—that it can't be anything other than profoundly human. I felt like a child again, in both the visceral curiosity and terror. this is the medium of cinema playing to its core strengths. seeing it in a dark, packed theater was even better. I feel like I've experienced a nexus event. there is only "before Mulholland Drive" and "after Mulholland Drive." what a picture.

incredibly unrewarding rewatch, unfortunately. there are so many little setups and loose threads here that never really receive satisfying payoffs, and extended sequences of book backstory which extend the runtime but add virtually nothing to the actual narrative. why do we spend 7 minutes showing the history of the psychopath scientist who created multiples just to establish that they're illegal? why establish the character of Kai so intentionally just to drop her in the third act? what's up with the thread of Mickey picking up on other women's shampoo? obviously it's something to do with his mother, but it all just feels like characterization that doesn't ever come full circle. the movie feels simultaneously like a hacked down 5-hour movie and a bloated extended cut of a good 90 minute movie. sadly, there's just not much more meaning to be gleaned on the second viewing beyond revisiting some of the better laughs and general technical proficiency. truly strange, given that a movie like Parasite is so precise that every rewatch yields even more rewarding subtle setups and motifs. also: I know it's sort-of a nerd nitpick, but I find it strange that the movie never really engages the unsettling truth that each Mickey is clearly dying for real, and reprinting a simulacrum with the same copied memories does not actually mean his same consciousness is actually continuing; it only feels that way for the new version. Mickey 1 fully died and never came back—only a copy of him with imperceptible difference to anyone else! the existence of 17 and 18 simultaneously proves this! just feels like it would've been a logical dark twist to explore, but alas. not sure what happened here!

Bong goes silly goose mode again...and finds perhaps his most worthy silly billy muse in Robert Pattinson. I enjoyed and laughed with every minute of this, but I can't say it ever fully coheres...so many things are totally stitched together and undercooked in a way that almost feels like it was cut down from a 4 hour version. sometimes the movie wants to be a love story between Pattinson and Ackie, other times it halfheartedly circles back to Pattinson's barely-seen friendship with Steven Yeun's character, and then there's the relationship between Mickey 17 and 18 which doesn't ever quite culminate. plus there are ing characters like Kai (?) who feel worthy of exploration but almost completely vanish from the narrative in the third act? even the expositional narration tying it all together reads sort-of like one of those original Blade Runner studio demands, as a way to save time by telling instead of showing. and that's to say nothing of the soup (or sauce?) of social commentary, all of which was a delight but doesn't really say anything beyond broadly gesturing towards the idea that fascist/capitalist/colonial regimes devalue life and use media/religion/cults of personality to do it. a worthy point, I suppose, but there are so many moving parts that never feel fleshed out—particularly the religious piece, which is funny but only surface-level.

anyway, it's kinda fascinating and funny overall to study the difference between American Bong and Korean Bong, and the idea that this same guy made both Parasite and Mickey 17 is sort of a mindf*ck. a versatile artist and an enigma, truly. I wasn't expecting this to be Parasite, but the level at which it is truly just Snowpiercer and Okja again was a little underwhelming. the saving grace is Pattinson himself, who is never anything less than magnetically goofy. I laughed at most of his line deliveries, and somehow he even sells the awful narration most of the time. even so, talk about ending on a whimper!

I'll see this again and maybe I'll raise my rating. hard to say. dinner scene was hilarious. I had fun.

"We are here to destroy. That's what the law says."

saw this awhile ago and still haven't come up with many words for it. without question the most important (and miraculous) film of the year, so it stands to reason that it hasn't secured distribution. harrowing and jaw-dropping and at times even touching and funny, as life can be. a marvelous portrait of the humanity and resilience of a people, with shots and sequences that often feel literally death-defying in their bravery to stand against a force that would destroy every camera if they could; sometimes the film itself feels like an SOS message in a bottle that only swept ashore by sheer providence.

this is a shining picture of the documentary medium and its ability to spotlight reality and make it tangible for those who are far away—and yet even the filmmakers involved earnestly question onscreen whether it will make much difference in the long run. it's that tension of "this needs to be captured and documented for the sake of dignity and common reality" with "ultimately, the only people who watch this will already agree with the thesis" that makes it such an enigmatic art object, interested in wrestling and questioning its very existence. I wish the world could see it. Basel Adra is a courageous, heroic storyteller.

• Mission: Impossible – Fallout
• Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
• Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
• Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
• Mission: Impossible
• Mission: Impossible III
• Mission: Impossible II

watch the film here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iyGVHUrI

• A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers
• Short Term 12
• A Hidden Life
• The Secret Garden
• Into Great Silence
• American Movie
• When Harry Left Hogwarts
• High School
• The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
• Impressions of

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Theater Camp
• American Movie
• 31 Days in Marshall, North Carolina
• Chef
• Sing Sing
• Sing Street
• Short Term 12
• A Kingdom of Tea & Strangers
• Secret Mall Apartment

sorted by release year. some bangers in here. what a year 2022 was!

• Sinners
• Challengers
• No Other Land
• Dune: Part Two
• Ren Faire
• Hundreds of Beavers
• May December
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
• Oppenheimer
• The Holdovers

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Joker
• Baby Driver
• The Social Network
• Whiplash
• Deadpool
• Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
• Elvis
• Forrest Gump
• Drive
• The Whale

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

with notes!

• Impressions of

  the landmark theatrical experience of my life. a 200-degree panoramic movie that plays inside Palais du Cinema in EPCOT's Pavilion. it's an 18-minute dream of sight and sound. I want to make something like this someday.

• How to Train Your Dragon

  I seeing this with my family multiple times on the same weekend at Parkside Main 8 while we were vacationing at Lake Oconee. I think it was one of the first and only times I'd seen something in 3D that felt like it warranted it. those flying sequences were magic. it's been one of my all-timers ever since.

• Hugo

  I can't which theater we saw this at, but my whole family went on Thanksgiving Day (as I'm sure many families did) in 2011. probably one of the most vividly magical movies I seeing at that age. I the 3D being good, too.

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

  one of the defining theatrical experiences for me. my mom read me all the Harry Potter books as a kid and when this came out we went to the midnight premiere together at AMC Parkway Pointe 15. so many fans were there, dressed up in costumes, taking photos, playing trivia. the applause when the movie ended lasted for several minutes. it was unreal, the end of an era. you could feel the joy and the sadness in the crowd.

• The Avengers

  saw it on my 12th birthday in 2012. I'm pretty sure it was at AMC Phipps Plaza in ATL. when the movie ended we went to the LEGO Store and I bought the "Loki's Cosmic Cube Escape" set. I still vividly the action sequence with the Hulk on the Helicarrier and the Battle of New York. I've often said "this was my Star Wars" and it's kinda true.

• Pacific Rim

  saw it with a group of other 13-year-old friends at The Picture Show Merchant's Walk, which back then was a cheap $1 theater for movies several months after they came out. I the theater being packed, and the action being so huge. it was the perfect teenage boy movie.

• The Lego Movie

  this is the first movie I seeing a bunch of times, mostly at Park 12 Cobb Cinemas in Marietta. I think by the end I'd seen it 7 times? it was just so exuberant and I wanted to see it again and again to catch all the jokes and see the detailed textures of the plastic on the huge screen. that theater closed down during the pandemic. I really treasure the times I spent there.

• 10 Cloverfield Lane

  another movie at the Picture Show $1 theater. I saw this with my dad and went into it with zero expectations. I coming out as a changed person. the scene with "HELP" scratched into the glass send chills down my spine and I still it so clearly. I felt helpless and scared and thrilled in theater all at once, and it ended up becoming one of my favorite movies on the spot.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey

  saw it in IMAX at Barrett Commons 24. I during the intermission it was just a black screen and pure silence for 10 minutes, and I sat in my seat without moving or checking my phone, just thinking about what I'd seen. one of those classic cases where seeing a movie in a theater made me give my full attention to something that would have tested my patience on a laptop.

• Vertigo

  saw for the very first on the big-screen at AMC Barrett Commons 24 during a theatrical re-release back sometime around 2018. blew my mind.

...plus 33 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

not at all certain about the logic of this. it's entirely vibes-based

• Dune
• The Hunger Games
• Knives Out
• Parasite
• Star Wars: The Last Jedi
• First Reformed
• Ren Faire
• Oppenheimer
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
• A Hidden Life

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

(technically, every movie ever made should be on this list. not really sure what my logic even is here)

• Hundreds of Beavers
• Hello My Beautiful Creatures
• Napoleon Dynamite
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
• Everything Everywhere All at Once
• RRR
• The Dark Crystal
• Wolfwalkers
• Princess Mononoke
• The Muppet Movie

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Annie
• Beauty and the Beast
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
• How to Train Your Dragon
• Hugo
• James and the Giant Peach
• Matilda
• Napoleon Dynamite

...plus 37 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• A Hidden Life
• The Secret Garden
• Into Great Silence
• The Biggest Little Farm
• Honeyland
• American Movie
• The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
• Short Term 12
• When Harry Left Hogwarts
• High School

• Fast Five
• Fast & Furious 6
• Furious 7
• The Fate of the Furious
• Fast X
• The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
• The Fast and the Furious
• 2 Fast 2 Furious
• F9
• Fast & Furious

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Searching
• Missing

• Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Bo Burnham: Inside
• Eighth Grade
• The Mitchells vs. the Machines

1. Tangled
2. Encanto
3. Moana
4. Wreck-It Ralph
5. Zootopia
6. Frozen
7. Ralph Breaks the Internet
8. Frozen II
9. Big Hero 6
10. Raya and the Last Dragon

There's something these movies have in common and I don't know what it is. All hidden gems though.

• Sing Street
• Chef
• Begin Again
• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

a comprehensive list!

• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
• The Lego Movie
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
• The Mitchells vs. the Machines

• Song of the Sea
• The Garden of Words
• I Lost My Body
• The Breadwinner
• The Little Prince
• A Silent Voice: The Movie
• Modest Heroes
• Mirai
• Castle in the Sky
• Porco Rosso

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I mean...it's basically just a list of my favorite movies.

• s Ha
• Kiki's Delivery Service
• How to Train Your Dragon
• Sing Street
• Blinded by the Light
• The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
• Midnight in Paris
• Your Name.
• Amélie
• About Time

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Cats
• The Lion King

• The Lego Movie
• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
• Hoodwinked!
• Megamind
• Shrek
• Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
• Flushed Away
• The Emperor's New Groove
• Horton Hears a Who!
• Chicken Little

• A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
• Doctor Sleep
• Klaus
• The Last Black Man in San Francisco
• The Art of Self-Defense
• Ad Astra
• A Hidden Life
• I Lost My Body
• The Crystal Calls - Making The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance

All snubs considered, it's still a very good year.

1. Parasite
2. Little Women
3. 1917
4. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
5. Marriage Story
6. The Irishman
7. Ford v Ferrari
8. Jojo Rabbit
9. Joker

• Us
• Parasite
• Ready or Not
• Joker
• Fyre
• The Laundromat
• Hustlers
• Knives Out

1. Cinderella
2. Pete's Dragon
3. The Jungle Book
4. Alice in Wonderland
5. Maleficent
6. Aladdin
7. Beauty and the Beast
8. Dumbo

• 10 Cloverfield Lane
• American Animals
• Amélie
• Bad Times at the El Royale
• s Ha
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• How to Train Your Dragon
• Kiki's Delivery Service
• The Lego Movie
• Life Is Beautiful

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Tangled
• Wreck-It Ralph
• Moana
• Zootopia
• Frozen
• Ralph Breaks the Internet
• Big Hero 6

• Aliens
• Blade Runner 2049
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier
• Creed
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
• Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
• Skyfall
• Spider-Man 2
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

You know what I mean.

• (500) Days of Summer
• Amélie
• Blade Runner
• Brooklyn
• Fantastic Mr. Fox
• Finding Nemo
• Kubo and the Two Strings
• Kung Fu Panda 2
• La La Land
• Life of Pi

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Here are a few sequels that actually beat out the original film and/or bring something new and better to the franchise.

• 10 Cloverfield Lane
• Aliens
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
• Fast Five
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Kung Fu Panda 2
• Logan
• Mad Max: Fury Road

...plus 9 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Dark Knight
• Hot Fuzz
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
• Iron Man
• Gladiator
• X2
• Spider-Man 2
• Casino Royale
• The Bourne Identity
• 300

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Skyfall
• Mad Max: Fury Road
• Inception
• Logan
• Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
• Edge of Tomorrow
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
• The Dark Knight Rises
• X-Men: First Class

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I love movies set in one location involving someone who is trapped there.

• 10 Cloverfield Lane
• Room
• The Shallows
• The Martian
• 127 Hours
• Disturbia
• Gravity
• Rear Window