Film #93 for 2025 is Sleepless In Seattle (1993). It's great. The movie largely rests on Tom Hanks making his considerable charm seem effortless as he defines the kind of non-threatening masculinity that women want from a romcom. Meg Ryan does her best as the woman who's adorably stalking him.

Behind a paywall but a good article if you can read it!

The wildly homo-erotic Nightmare 2 is arguably the only interesting, innovative or subversive instalment in the series other than the original and New Nightmare.

Film #92 for 2025 is My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009). Werner Herzog delivers something halfway between the hallucinatory ominousness of David Lynch's "Lost Highway" and the unintentionally comedic misplaced confidence of Tommy Wiseau's "The Room". Is it weird? Yes. Is it good? Uh...

Just a reminder that the guy who directed the film version of Chicago has Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez (and, notably, NOT Jared Leto) in an adaptation of the musical version of Kiss of the Spider Woman, releasing on the same day as Tron: Ares.

I've always felt the real innovative element of Nightmare 1 is Nancy herself - a protagonist who immediately *believes* what's happening, and immediately sets out to proactively kill Freddy rather than waiting to be hunted. It feels like the start of genre-awareness in final girls.

I have no idea how the default Bsky Discover algorithm works but now it has decided that I am a big fan of elaborately-posed and professionally-photographed pop culture action figures. Like, I don't *hate* seeing some cheesy plastic dinosaurs menacing plastic Sam Neill, but also it's not my fandom.

Rembering that time that Marvel put out a four-image miniseries with covers like this and the story inside is a detailed examination of the treatment of Firestar's breast cancer.

I feel seen.

Watching "My Son My Son What Have Ye Done". David Lynch presents a film by Werner Herzog, starring Willem Dafoe. Oh, I can see we're about to have some *cinema* up in here. Contemporary reviews seem to have expected a traditional detective film and I just don't know why you would expect that.

Half of Australians have no idea that Google and other search engines will be forced to check the age of their users & change their service based on that info. This polling comes as an inquiry into Australia's online safety codes & the teen social media ban kicks off today www.crikey.com.au/20...

Just now discovering that the official USCPSC Bluesky account is wall-to-wall mic drops.

Occam's Razors existentialcomics.com/comic/621

Film #91 for 2025 is When Harry Met Sally (1989), which absolutely lives up to the hype. It initially threatens toxic neurotic romcom tropes, but it deconstructs itself as it goes, keeping up a charming non-stop patter that could work on stage as easily as it does on film. I loved it.

Silent Hill f is out, which means I can now let my love for the franchise and my awareness of its generally positive reviews war against my abiding feeling that if you do Silent Hill in a Japanese village it stops being Silent Hill and becomes either Siren or Project Zero.

interesting bit in a Lancet article re: Australia's teen social media ban: surprisingly the amount of socialising in person hasn't dropped significantly in the past 25 years, and certainly not by the average amount of social media use.

Had a strange momentary vision of fundamentalist Christians excited because it's the Rapture but then it's just David Bowie as the Goblin King singing Magic Dance at them forever and forever. (I wish the goblins *would* come and take them away. Right now.)

Feel like I'm a .json.

Please sign this petition urging the Australian Government to ensure the availability of payment processing to legal businesses. The wording is a little hysterical but the thrust of it is very much in a necessary direction. www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/...

The suckiness of the term "cancel culture" has always been the way it tries to conflate "people formed opinions about you based on your actions and acted accordingly" with "the state is using its power to persecute you for communicating about politics".

The Liberals need to understand that in order to ever win an election they must abandon 100% of anyone who would attend CPAC or be interested in anything that happens at it. But also I'm just as happy if they never win an election. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Film #90 for 2025 is Tamara Drewe (2010). Enjoyably cozy romcom fluff, premised on the very reasonable proposition that everyone in a small town wants to bang Gemma Arterton. Tamsin Greig is the real star, and Jessica Barden & Charlotte Christie as a pair of teenagers run a close second.

If only there were people shouting this at the top of their lungs for the past three years who could have been listened to.

Film #89 for 2025 is Bring Her Back (2025). Everything about this is effective. Too effective. It's unpleasant to watch. Much of the unpleasantness is because you could take the supernatural out entirely and this would still be a horror film about child abuse. Brilliant, but hard to recommend.

Film #88 for 2025 is Talk To Me (2022). I don't often identify with the "Australia" presented in Australian film, but the people are places of the Philppou brothers' debut film were instantly familiar, and the horror was satisfyingly genre-savvy yet inventive. Highly recommendable to horror fans.

Film #87 for 2025 is Dark Water (2002). This is the Japanese original. The anxiety of a single mother unable to keep up with the slings and arrows of fate is very effective. The menace of an upsettingly damp ghost child is significantly less so. Still worlds better than the US remake.

Apparently it is a terrorist act to *checks notes* resist fascism. I'd already resigned myself to the idea that I'll never be able to safely visit the US within my lifetime, but here's another reason.

My pet peeve in basically every movie ever is when someone is choking someone else and they stop as soon as the person stops struggling, assuming them to be dead. No, it takes 5 to 15 minutes to die of oxygen deprivation, and a minimum of two minutes after they lose consciousness.

I was too young to really get this scene in 1987 but I'm impressed how it's aged like fine wine.

Something I have done somewhere on the internet has convinced Bluesky that I am in the audience for gay bear thirst traps, which is dryly funny, and I wish the e-boys the best of luck in their hustle, but also no, I am not in that market, thank you.

The government has responded to public pressure and it now looks like not every user will be subject to age verification. Still time to scrap the ban entirely AND fix our privacy laws to protect users from the rapacious collection of private data

This is the inquiry into Australian age verification, as it applies to search engines. You only have until 22 September to make a submission. Please consider making a submission. Mine will say that this policy is harmful to kids and adults and not based on evidence. www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentar...

Film #86 for 2025 is Hotel Chevalier (2007), which feels like cheating as it's only 13 minutes long. But Wes Anderson's short prequel to "The Darjeeling Limited" is efficient and restrained, with a beautifully tense performance by Jason Schwartzman. Natalie Portman is also there.

Tired of losing every election for 24 years, the Canberra Liberals are continuing their bold plan to finally defeat the Canberra Liberals. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09...

Sex workers and the world's most popular porn websites say that Australia's new porn age check requirements risk data breaches, censorship, and could drive people towards "dangerous" sites that don't comply. www.crikey.com.au/20...

Good morning. It’s incredibly disrespectful to the living when you mourn people who wished them harm.

The Strange New Worlds S3 finale was godawful, right up until the Pike and Batel sequence, and then it was lovely (without in any way redeeming the godawfulness). It felt like a rushed but heartful finale for the show as a whole, which is weird when it still has another season and a half to run.

This was exactly my experience of Casablanca.

Film #85 for 2025 is The 10th Victim (1954). Its pop-future aesthetic is peak 60s and instantly iconic, and Ursula Andress elevates it all to another level. The dry satire of Italian masculinity works; however, the near-future murder games plot never really otherwise satisfies.

Etsy witches don't fuck about... www.jezebel.com/we-paid-some...

Let's be clear - few people have the opportunity to do as much harm in the world as Charlie Kirk, let alone choose to take that opportunity, and he was actively in the process of doing more harm when he died, and the world is a better one without him.

A lot of the brilliance of HK/Silksong is how they teach you the skills that you need to pull off the hard stuff, and I wouldn't want anyone to cheat themselves out of that satisfaction. But also people's fun is their own business and if people want it to be a theme park ride then let them do that.

This is the energy I want to see around social media bans in other jurisdictions.

Film #84 for 2025 is Sing Sing (2023). Absolutely exceptional. A beautifully human prison drama that refuses to lean on cliché at any point, with a powerhouse performance by Colman Domingo. The sort of film where you're smiling the whole way even while you're tearing up a bit. Highly recommended.

Saying "Greta Gerwig's Die Hard" feels like a right-wing joke about Greta Gerwig but I genuinely would want to see that film.

Film #83 for 2025 is The Mitchells vs The Machines (2021), which I saw in 2021 and loved again today on rewatch. Great script, lots of heart, perfectly-timed jokes. Many folks missed it due to a streaming release + COVID, which is a shame as it's a keystone of the current Sony Animation golden age.

Film #82 for 2025 is Bandits (2001). Largely rests on the incredible charm of Willis, Thornton and Blanchett, which makes for an enjoyably cozy heist flick. Bonus points for an unexpected poly romance that (spoilers) survives all the way to the happily ever after.

Gavin Newsom is a transphobic dick, but I admit I absolutely lost it at "just like Little Hands, she is slow and burps a lot".

First they came for the sex workers, and y'all did absolutely nothing, but it's not too late to demand that legal businesses should have access to financial services, before those businesses are made illegal and the deplatforming expands to queer content generally and sex ed.

I'm going to need Labor to stop being so egregriously shit on a daily basis, thanks. The goal of FOI is to encourage government to make material public as part of normal business without needing a request. If it costs them money to fill a request, that's an admission that they've done it wrong.