He was my graduation speaker in college, and my roommates and I were all cracking jokes about them choosing such an asinine retread. That was 23 years ago.

‘Disappointed’ ‘Surprised’ ‘Betrayed’: 12 Dogs Who Were Given a Bath After Being Embraced and Told ‘It’s Time for Your Bath’

In another @criterionchannl.bsky.social miracle, they’re going to be showing the Guyanese film The Terror and the Time next month—I stumbled on it a few years ago on archive.org and it was the best film I saw all year. Check it out!

Tom Waits x Massive Attack just released a brand new single

Big No Kings crowd in Columbus!

Check out my friend Andy Heisel’s great piece about the history of the phone and panic (or lack thereof) over it in the Times.

Really hoping the Mets pick him up so I have lots of opportunities to perfect a baseball/Mulholland Drive crossover joke involving “No Hay Banda”

ICE has recently re-started detaining people after court hearings in Franklin County. Here’s a link to write an automated letter to the municipal Court judges to encourage them to restrict ICE from courthouses. act.commoncause.org/letters/ice-...

Successfully played the long game in always irrationally hating Aronofsky and never seeing any of his movies. Vindicated!!!

I highly recommend “sound on” for this new angle

I wrote about the incomparable Béla Tarr. www.newyorker.com/culture/post...

Columbus, Ohio tonight. There was one counter protester and the police made him leave. #vigil #ice #reneeGood

Big turnout (200 or so?) on very short notice for the Renee Nicole Good vigil at Columbus City Hall this evening. Another one tomorrow.

ICE agents stopped by protesters after the shooting an observer in Minneapolis, according to witnesse. ICE deployed pepper spray and tear gas.

RIP Béla Tarr. Werckmeister Harmonies, in particular, has so many moments and images that will stay with me forever.

1. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (David Lynch, 1992) Eliminates the folksiness of the first two seasons to zero in with horror and compassion on Laura Palmer's actual experience. Knows that the best way of representing trauma is to dispense with realism entirely. Hard to take, but incredible.

2. Leila and the Wolves (Heiny Srour, 1984) The real revelation of the year: a pageant-like exploration of the role of women in Arab liberation struggles in Palestine and Lebanon in the 20th century. Moves effortlessly between realism and abstraction in its vignettes--altogether wonderful.

3. Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes, 1998). Great music, great costumes, the Citizen Kane narrative structure works: just a go-for-broke, unhinged, and somehow wholly successful film--my favorite of Haynes. The sense of despair and missed possibilities at the end really rings true to our current moment.

4. One Battle After Another (PT Anderson, 2025). Always been a PTA skeptic, but this is the movie of the year; I've already watched it twice. The balance of urgency and hilarity works brilliantly--it really gets that these fascists are evil but also ridiculous and pathetic.

5. It was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi, 2025) Panahi x 2. Finding just the right balance between comedy and horror, between formal control and spontaneity, this builds slowly and inexorably to a set of breathless finales, both narratively and morally. Is the man capable of making a bad film?

6. Taxi (Jafar Panahi, 2015). Another Panahi miracle. What seems completely spontaneous and haphazard reveals itself as intricately planned, entirely coherent, and animated by the usual fascinating tensions between fiction/non-fiction, order/disorder. And what a final shot!

7. Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025). Maybe not every single bit coheres, but what a remarkably rich and dense exploration of capitalism, race, and appropriation. And it's fun as hell and made with absolute command and panache. This is what you do when you get a blank check from the studio!

8. Pressure (Horace Ove, 1976) Screenplay by the great novelist Sam Selvon. Both a wonderfully evocative slice-of-life portrait of Black British life in London and a tense and rapidly escalating tale of political awakening and radicalization. Still, of course, relevant.

9. Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004). Never been into Mann before, but this is great. Excellent performances from Cruise and Foxx, a brilliant screenplay, and gorgeous experiments in digital video. Hits the sweet spot between the abstraction of the images and the tightness of the script.

10. Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000). A masterpiece of discomfort: the subject matter, the smeary early digital video, the near refusal to provide any sympathetic characters. The purest distillation of Spike Lee's cinema of provocation: prescient and unnerving.

It's that time of the year again--my list of my top 50 new-to-me films that I've watched in 2025. Counting down: 50. The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2024) 49. Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater, 2025) 48. No Way Out (Roger Donaldson, 1987) 47. Dig! (Ondi Timoner, 2004)

I realized all my favorite films from this year are, appropriately, about attempts at solidarity against fascism/violence: One Battle After Another, It Was Just an Accident, Sinners, Secret Agent. If we widen that to solidarity against sexual predation then Sorry Baby, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl too.

Because of the Christmas Adventurers Club, and the related use of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” One Battle After Another is a Christmas movie. Now added to my annual rotation.

For the online student evaluations, OSU this semester has paid an external company for an AI tool that analyzes student comments and turns them into “actionable” suggestions. It is glacially slow, absolutely useless, and barely lets you see the comments themselves! Enraging.

My book Hieroglyphic Modernisms is a mere $19.98 all this weekend thanks to @edinburghup.bsky.social ‘s sale!

Jimmy Cliff, Jamaican reggae singer, actor and cultural icon, dies aged 81

Making my students read David Denby’s notorious review of Do the Right Thing and of the many enraging things he says the worst is him referring to Radio Raheem as a “black boy.” Bill Nunn was 36!!!

No Bears

[me, yesterday, watching the Arabic Zohran ad] dick cheney would die if he saw this

Big day at U.S. District Court in D.C. where Sean Dunn, the D.C. Sandwich Guy, is on trial for misdemeanor assault of a federal officer. Border Patrol agent Gregory Lairmore is on the stand narrating surveillance video of the sammie toss. 'Now he’s struck me with the sandwich,' Lairmore says.

Here’s what the #NoKings crowd looked like from the steps of the Ohio Statehouse. @colsunderground.bsky.social

Define “perfect ending”

As a long-time Paul Thomas Anderson skeptic I am pained to inform you that One Battle After Another is great.

Man, I'm sorry, but reading all these AI generated essays from students, it just sucks all the joy out of everything. It's exhausting, makes you into a weird paranoid cop, grinds you down, wastes your time, makes you feel like shit about everything. Fuck this shit technology and all its enablers.

Aug 27 in University District History: Strangest Fair lineup EVER. Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and Theolonius Monk--the elite of American contemporary jazz--perform amid the hog judging, horse races, and 4-H kids from Darke County at 112th Ohio State Fair. In 1965.

Agree with #1 as well but, as with everything the Ringer publishes, if you’re only going to include 9 performances from non-English language films, why not just say you’re only considering English-language films? Also, it’s gotta have Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky!

Age verification? I played Ladder on my parents’ Kaypro computer.

when they close it all up, I do believe this will go down as the funniest video on the internet

Columbus folks: my wife and I have gotten three calls over the past month purportedly from the Franklin County Sheriff Department trying to scam us. Wife called the actual sheriff department today to report this and they were like “oh yeah that’s happening constantly. Nothing we can do!” Cops, man.

I remember, pre-Colbert Report, seeing Stephen Colbert recite a long section of Ulysses at a Bloomsday event. He was great! And apparently he’s a longtime fan of the novel.

The full article is even worse; I can’t believe Rolling Stone is just reinventing the section asshole. Guarantee that this guy has read one (1) book, and it’s On the Road. Also probably read the first 100 pages of Infinite Jest and then gave up.

My last one I've already post a few months back about, but holy shit is Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World great. Hilarious, soul-crushing, formally experimental in multiple ways--no film has better captured the hellscape of late capitalism.

I couldn't get in to Apichatpong Weerasethakul films until I saw Memoria. His most accessible film--not saying much!--it keeps eluding one's comprehension, changing and transforming itself until an astonishing climax. Shoutout to his brilliant Syndromes and a Century too!