My attitude towards people complaining about KPOP DEMON HUNTERS entering the Criterion collection is that no one actually cares. It’s not a thing. The only people who are complaining want attention because they think they’re being good elitists or have had their minds poisoned by the internet.

One of the reasons why I think there’s a huge divide on AI is on one hand you have people who know how computers work saying that the people selling it are snake oil hucksters who lie, and on the other you have the people selling it who are never fact checked or have their track record examined.

In EXCALIBUR, you can see Dame Helen Mirren has a tattoo on her hand. When I interviewed her in 2006, someone else asked if that tattoo was for her character and she said it was her own. Me, with impossible cheek, then asked “so, do you have any other tattoos?”

EXCALIBUR: Love it, temp’d to SUSPIRIA. It and STAR WARS an ouroboros of influences. Though the Arthurian legend has been told a lot, I still yet wait for one (at least cinematically) where the love triangle is actually adults in relationships. Like maybe Arthur’s okay with it, but it’s a PR problem

Watched THE DEVILS WEARS PRADA 2 trailer, and there’s almost an uncanny valley thing with Anne Hathaway. It’s twenty years later and she looks exactly the same but just a little different.

RIP Robert Carradine

Normally Demi Moore’s Oscar nom for THE SUBSTANCE would’ve led to showing up in five or six movies. Part of this is the system is broken (did Jerrod Carmichael just disappear or what?), but I think even with the Oscar nom, 9/10 directors would rather cast Michelle Pfeiffer or Jennifer Jason Leigh.

One thing I’ve run across in home video, both in production and distribution, is that a lot of tech for video stores and DVDs were done in the nineties and were never updated so if your operating system breaks there’s no one really making or updating that tech any more.

The vestiges of a bygone era.

Elvis and The Beatles have a naïveté that you don’t really associate with other musicians. I think a big part of it is that though they were plenty debauched, they weren’t really road musicians.

Watching THE BIG SLEEP and it is so weird to me how sometimes you can be a little distracted by reshoots, but sometimes you don’t notice at all.

A friend told me they put “fan of the film SECRETARY” in their dating profile to signal they were into BDSM. Curious if people will use Allison Oliver’s performance in “WUTHERING HEIGHTS” as a similar wink wink.

Put on THE BIG SLEEP and Bogart walks in and Martha Vickers walks up and just throws herself at him. More films should be this horny from the get. It’s partly why I love UNDER THE SILVER LAKE. Movies where people are horny as subtext tend to be good.

My pet theory is a lot of American racism is fueled by people like Stephen Miller, etc. who went to Ivy’s and were constantly clowned by people who didn’t buy their way in. Lotta people who thought money equals better who found out that isn’t true and are mad about it. Because they were always dumb.

My secret weakness is for actresses who could play Midge in VERTIGO (Barbara Bel Geddes included, she can get it). Jane Alexander, Hope Davis, JoBeth Williams, etc. Or - also, but basically - Dorothy Malone in THE BIG SLEEP. Female Baxters, as it were, so I guess also Parker Posey.

One of the things that makes ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN so resonant is that no one cared or believed until it fucking took down the entire White House.

One of the things that makes Robert Redford so good in ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN is he’s playing a guy who knows he got in the door because of his good looks and charms, and is often seriously out of his depth.

Watching ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN in 4K. Wow. It looks phenomenal. I got to do an episode of @oneblakeminute.bsky.social ‘s “All the President’s Minutes” right before the 2020 election and I think I fucking nailed it. Judge for yourself: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/o...

Me: We’re the adults in the room and it’s embarassing that conservatives aren’t. Also Me: This is funny.

There’s something so tellingly American about prices for soda.

The main thing to understand about the 90s political ecosystem is that this would have caused a weeks long conservative freakout, but one which was highly opportunistic in its volume yet substantively mostly sincere

Was a video store recently and someone called in and said they had something they wanted to sell and were cagey about it. The thing they wanted to sell? A pristine 1977 print of STAR WARS.

It’s not that I want or like smoking, it’s just the absence in a lot of American pop culture is weird because it creates more unrealism. Sometimes you can tell when someone has created a smoking space for themselves. Some people are good at sneaky vapes. Some art makes not showing that a negative.

When “A Little Less Conversation” made a comeback in 2001 (it was the Elvis song included in the new OCEAN’S 11 movie) I thought it was a joke on bad Elvis songs. But it seemed a test to see if people listen to lyrics, so when it became big, it suggested most people don’t listen to lyrics.

I think one of the problems with comparing Hitler to Trump is that Nazism - though not a new thing - could be treated like a fever (which, ugh…). When this is over, his people aren’t gonna be apologetic about being hateful. At what point is voting for people who hate America disqualifying?

Modern superhero films and legacy animated sequels track cleanly to biblical movies and musicals.

I have nothing against stealing from great artists. The Beatles spent their time in Germany playing mostly covers. Covers is how artists often find their voice. I just can’t forgive - at least in cinema - people who steal who miss the point or have nothing to add. DOOMSDAY, BLOW, Mann rip offs etc.

A lot of people think Stephen Miller sitting in a chair in a DC apartment on the third floor where no cameras saw watching Elon Musk trying to get his broken penis to work to fuck Miller’s wife makes him a cuck, but let me tell you about another cuck. His name is Joesph and he was cucked by God.

You have to be a narcissist to be pro-AI. The only other option is being incredibly stupid. Those are the two pro-AI options.

One aspect of THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE is that Ed Crane is a barber, which makes him an artist as he helps people achieve their fashion. But Ed is an artist with no art in him.

Peak “stop calling him Chivo If you don’t know him” cinephelia was over a decade ago.

Watching MAN WHO WASN’T THERE. I think you can say that the Coens made a trilogy of post 9/11 films: INTOLERABLE CRUELTY, THE LADYKILLERS and NO COUNTRY as they were trying to figure out how to make post-9/11.Coen films. CRUELTY is weird because it could and could not be a 9/11 film.

There’s something to Joel and Ethan making different movies that in THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE - where Ed Crain talks about how hair is a part of us - achieves the unity of Coen that I think makes them: The profound/existential/stoner/stupid that comes from two brothers fucking with each other.

All men can act like what we type as “girlish” when it comes to being a fan. We claim women screaming, crying, fainting, etc. at Frank or Elvis is a female thing, but imagine if Hitler showed up at Stephen Miller’s birthday party. You know he would weep from joy, so checkmate: sexual stereotype.

As they are addictive and terrible for you there is a future for America where people have to go to rehab for stuff like social media and reality television. The fact that those rehabs don’t already exist is partly why we’re in this mess.

About to watch PRISON ON FIRE, Better throw her in the water Look at her laughing Like a heifer to the slaughter

I think when this all ends the amount of stupid shit we’re gonna hear is legion (yet no one’s gonna want to read the Haberman tell alls), like that Trump believes hot dogs were originally made with dogs, or weird racist stuff like that black people are unable to do calculus (because he can’t).

NW: The STAR WARS spin-off movie Neil Young’s RUST NEVER SLEEPS.

Was thinking about TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, and most hillbilly horror films - even without black characters - are implicitly about race because Texans killing a van full of black people (even for cannibal desires) plays differently. They have to have white victims to prove they’re psychos.

One of the things about watching disaster movies now is it points out that there’s no adults in the room that holds the modern Republican party. There are no cooler heads.

The Trump presidency is like THE TRUMAN SHOW in that it feels like there’s an entire mass operation to keep one man in his own universe and unaware of reality and we all have to watch, except Trump wants it.

Opening the door to insanity by req’ing the unending screenings of IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS

As politics relates to pop culture, I think a lot of white Americans (more men than women), never really had to think about a lot of things. They watched TV at night, they liked the music on the radio, they went to the movies from time to time. They liked feeling right and normal, so why question?

The two films where the ending made me say “Fuck you!” that came to mind: BREAKING THE WAVES and KINGSMAN (the latter you could swap for the ending of the third film THE KING’S MAN)

Here is the problem with AI, and it’s the plot of a recent movie about AI: “AI is the smartest thing in the world.” *AI makes obvious and total mistake* “AI just needs to learn some more.”

Though some of it may be what I choose to see on social media, the response to the new STAR WARS trailer seems muted.

This year’s movies sees: THE MOMENT THE INVITE THE DRAMA THE BRIDE Just saying, big year for The.

One of the reasons I can weep when watching STAR TREK II is because - even though I know it’s not permanent - the film actually makes you care that Spock died and that’s something lacking from most of what followed.