I'm increasingly convinced that filmmakers, including really great ones, have almost totally disengaged over the past 50 years from the idea that movie music can have an intricate, developing superstructure. Thus people like Jonny Greenwood, Ross&Reznor, Z****r vaunted as masters of film scoring.

My copy of @bcwallin.com's monograph - featuring an essay about Danny Boyle's use of digital formats by yours truly - arrived today. Very excited to see it released tomorrow.

Gosh I really did save my own life in a pretty courageous way, huh. That’s pretty great. I’m pretty great.

GET BACK might be the most aesthetically unbearable-to-look-at movie for me personally that I’ve ever laid eyes on. Whole range of factors both contextual and immediate. Been assured there’s oodles of historical fascination and great editing going on, but I still suspect I’ll never finish it.

It's very very important that every one of us goes on some talk shows

The most time-consuming part of my TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME edit combining it with THE MISSING PIECES is easily recolouring those deleted scenes to match FWWM. Despite being widely recognized as canonical and essential, THE MISSING PIECES was very obviously not given much of a colour grade.

When people like a work of art, they’re often not very good at engaging critically with the elements outside the absolute best 10-20%. Visual highlights, florid musical passages of score, elaborate set pieces get cited without regard to the majority of the total experience and structure.

Related to this: I think that, broadly speaking, people should be much MUCH less patient with games wasting their time. (I'm not sure how consensus broadly landed on "grinding is fine" [grinding here defined as "mandatory repetitive actions with little-to-no space for skill improvement"])

I agree, Lucy Liu.

It’s inconvenient but everyone should be comfortable having multiple messaging apps and knowing exactly what they’re all for. And right now one should be Signal.

Broadly, people who claim to be deeply invested in video games as an art form need to become much more amenable to undergoing styles of game design that are painful to get accustomed to (eg difficulty, slowness). It’s recognized a key trait of deep appreciation for pretty much all other art forms!

AVATAR 3 gives us the first unambiguous, in-universe assertion that yes, human beings find Na'vi hot

AVATAR FIRE AND ASH spoilers i guess It's very funny to me that James Cameron has found a way to make multi-billion-grossing blockbusters where you pump your fists as eldritch squid monsters scurry past the heroes on their way to consume screaming humans into their abyss of tentacles.

Just in awe that "This new Game Boy is made from attack drone metal" is a real sell being made with a real product and not as a provocative art piece They really just thought "this is rad"

It’s fucked that there are things that we’ll never know the answer for. “Oh well, guess we’ll never know.” What the hell?! But I want to!

dang my new face is way better than that old purple face

Critical aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have made people overconfident in estimating critical consensus for many reasons, but an important one is their non-measurement of contemporaneous vs evolving critical responses. (Also numbers are a VERY limited tool for this ofc.)

but the sequence of like. Monhun, Mario Kart, Shinobi, Ninja Gaiden 4 all unconsciously apologizing for the name of the game on the box by reverting towards some imagined mean (open world, metroidvania, suck-to-target, high storytelling focus, etc etc take your pick) just really was disheartening

this game sucks

I realized I haven't posted this since doing it back in August. My first 1CC, M.U.S.H.A hard mode on the Genesis (If you want to be a pedant and say this is a no-continues run, fine. Also I effed up and recorded at 30fps, but look at that sweet hand-cam action!) www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj2S...

I wrote about MINORITY REPORT for @letterboxd.social, diving into how Steven Spielberg's cyber-noir masterpiece exposes a world doomed by the hyperreal simulacra of screens and images: letterboxd.com/journal/mino...

Playing METROID PRIME 4: BEYOND and rn the single thing that just completely bewilders me about so many modern mainstream games and the way they're received is the preponderance of cutscenes. So damn many cutscenes ranging from 5 seconds to a minute or two, the vast majority completely unnecessary.

while social media narratives seem to be driven by top players and figureheads bemoaning the decline of majors, the reality for most is that local/weekly Melee has never been better

I really like when I've seen "ports" that are based on an entirely or at least mostly new code base for more limited tech as "demakes". The arcade and NES versions of GHOSTS N GOBLINS fundamentally AREN'T the same game, but the language of "port" has encouraged otherwise in public consciousness.

I've never been so excited. It's happening. #ReleaseTheOriginalTrilogy www.starwars.com/news/star-wa...

Jafar Panahi is the greatest filmmaker in the world.

My list of "What four movies would you see in IMAX for the first time if you could?" is so damn good, I'm so smart and cool, fuck

It's incredible how much less forgivable the poor combat in OCARINA OF TIME becomes when you know the game didn't invent Z-targeting.

this like intuitive impulse that "if a game is not preparing you to play every other game on the shelf it is wasting your time or impeding you"

I saw someone say "Action games should not have combos" (specifying they meant pre-determined input sequences that hold enemies in hitstuns, or juggles, for lengthy periods), thought "What the hell", then realized that when I think of any single player game with combos instead of MELEE this is true.

Look I'll level y'all I'm looking for transfemme friends to compete for score in arcade/arcade-like games and I don't even really care what game it is so long as it's good.

Caillois of Man, Play, Games fame described this natural desire for evaluation that stems from the competitive nature of skill based games. 11 years before Pong.

cracking open a cold can of beans at the party 😩👌

oh shit the ffs is making me really hot

Will never sing the SKYFALL song without singing it like "Let the Sky Fallllll, when it crum-BALLLLS" because i respect and honour the rhyme scheme.

My take on the Optic/Haptic vid is: It tries to develop a unifying theory on a broad thesis with a shaky premise (“Why don’t movies look realistic anymore?”) and inevitably winds up with a mess of cherry-picking, self-contradictions, specious reasoning, along with a lot of individually good points.

This applies across almost every art form, medium, and genre IMO. The more you learn about art, the more capable you become of enjoying it more than ever. People don’t understand that this already is happening to them and that they actually had much longer on-ramps to their media than they realize.

tomb raider 2013 saying "you won't always have a fancy gadget to tell you where you are. learn to read the land and the stars" and then immediately prompting me to press LB for an objective marker is really going to set the tone for the whole experience, I think

*Weakly* Direct cinema is not cinéma vérité and cinéma vérité is not direct cinema... please actually watch the movies from each movement... they're really good, it's worth it...

Well, I finally found time to speculatively tint Lubitsch's THE OYSTER PRINCESS (1919).

I've never seen something that so fully demonstrates my opinion that the primary purpose of industry awards shows is to be self-promotional tools. There is only one game here that was completed and released in 2025.

For those following me who remember me from Twitter, I promise you, my posting is even better than you remembered.

Am absolutely shocked to report that after ten years of being loudly disappointed by del Toro’s visual decline in spite of working with Dan Laustsen, I am totally in the bag for FRANKENSTEIN ‘25

Single-player video games should generally have far fewer mechanics. Having a lot of mechanics should be considered a super risky thing for a game to do, or a sign that the game is effectively offloading design work to players, but it's the widely assumed correct approach by both players and devs.

Playing HOLLOW KNIGHT, getting pretty much all the items and beating all the bosses outside the endgame, all DLC EXCEPT the final, ultra-extended pantheon, and deciding whether to go ahead and attempt that pantheon (would take weeks of practice) is really making me contemplate this game’ merits are.

Folks, we're receiving new updates on this story as it breaks. Apparently, and I can't believe I'm hearing this, the new TRON movie has underperformed at the box office.

checked into my hotel tonight and um

Thinking about the common response media criticism that "art's effect on the audience is subjective and down to individual preference". It tends to be a means of arguing that we shouldn't make declaratives saying people who like something or wrong or that less work like it should be made. thread 🧵

After years of consideration I feel confident saying that I think SUPER MARIO BROS is a substantially better game than SUPER MARIO BROS 3