I have rarely seen a (Bush-appointed!) judge this utterly fed up.

To be clear (because people are losing their minds), that does not mean they are recommending kids not get those vaccines. CDC will no longer recommend getting all four at once. Which few kids did anyway. (Still might be a bad decision; I’m not knowledgeable enough to say.)

And I am sorry to see you bootlick a bully. Then again, do I miss the Washington Post subscription I cancelled after Bezos killed their Harris endorsement? Not really.

Charlie Kirk was the bravest kindest warmest most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

Forgot that NYFF now has an artsy sidebar section called Currents. When I tell you that Milagros Mumenthaler’s THE CURRENTS (screening next month in NYFF) is terrific—best film I saw at TIFF, by far—just imagine how terrific it must be to have avoided being programmed in Currents.

My friends who’ve flown Porter to/from Toronto failed to tell me about their marvelously titled in-flight magazine.

If you see this, reskeet with a picture of you pretending that celebrity is eating your hand.

Romanian *New* Wave is starting to annoy me even more than “Audiences want ambiguity. Like Breillat, or early Baumbach.”

Haven’t been tweeting TIFF reactions (see my Patreon) but THE CURRENTS is easily the best film I’ve seen here thus far. Suspected as much within its first five minutes, and there are extraordinary moments (that Holst lighthouse sequence!) throughout. A tad overexplained, but forgivably so.

HOW TO ATTRACT PRESS & INDUSTRY FIRST THING IN THE MORNING AT THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL. 1. Be HAMNET. 2. Don’t not be HAMNET. (Which is to say that this screening of the new Soderbergh is emp-TEE.)

My first TIFF ’25 hot take (apparently): NOUVELLE VAGUE is almost exactly the same film as ED WOOD. A maverick re-invents cinema, ignoring all the rules, creates something never to be forgotten. BREATHLESS & PLAN 9 might even have been shooting simultaneously. Kinda dug it once that clicked for me.

I’m at the Los Angeles Convention Center. I’m at the crypto.com Arena. I’m at the combination Los Angeles Convention Center and crypto.com Arena.

The death of copy editing means we now get listicles that manage to misspell *both* of an actor’s names and sit there uncorrected for days. (It’s Adèle Haenel, so they’ve got the wrong accent on the wrong name.) Sorry but I’m gonna be pissy about this stuff forever.

Looks like IN THE SHOWER…THINKING or JUST ADMIT IT might’ve been a better bet. #jokesforfourpeople

[flatly, resigned, without turning around] It’s the kids coming up from behind, isn’t it.

Minipax too on the nose?

I’m old enough to have been an AltaVista loyalist. Held out longer than most and only switched when A/B tests made it obvious that Google delivered better results. Now Google sucks so hard that I’m trying to abandon it; problem is the alternatives are no better. Glory days are just gone.

Ironically, much of what Ty reflects upon in this sobering, wistful piece he also articulated 28 years ago in the Entertainment Weekly article that launched my own career. I was among the earliest infiltrators! We all fall in the end… ew.com/article/1997...

Movies called EDEN and TRUST open today and my gut reaction in cases like that is “If you don’t even have enough imagination to think of a *title* that hasn’t been used repeatedly…”

The extent to which Republicans admit “only if it affects me personally, everyone I don’t know can go hang” is really quite bracing.

So this just happened. Not the right Drake song obviously but it still cracked me up (shuffled from a playlist that’s 415 hours long).

Google search just now delivered four videos, three Reddit posts, an AI overview, three Quora posts, four People Also Asks, three images, and then, way at the bottom, one lonely link to a site. That’s the whole first page of results. Switched on mobile a while ago, guess I will on desktop too.

Magical.

Apparently a new location has opened up that, while it’s not as quite as close to the Scotiabank, will generally be close enough. (Google maps claims it’s a 7-minute walk.) So I won’t have to rely entirely upon sausage carts when my schedule’s tight.

“IT’S GREAT THAT @scotttobias.bsky.social HAS STARTED USING LBOX AGAIN BUT HE REALLY OUGHT TO BE POSTING LINKS TO HIS REVIEWS, THERE ARE 29K FOLLOWERS AVAILABLE TO BE ENTICED TOWARD THE EXCELLENT CINEMA NEWSLETTER THE REVEAL WHICH RECENTLY DITCHED NAZI-INFESTED SUBSTACK, HE SHOULD TAKE ADVANTAGE.”

Nobody, even in America, calls Pasolini’s 1968 film starring Terence Stamp THEOREM, Letterboxd. I had no idea what that was until I clicked through.

Hey motherTIFFers why not start your festival with the two Linklaters back to back, since that’s the only P&I screening for either one. What a zoo that’s gonna be.

Possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen is TIFF showing schedule times in your current time zone, so that I know when the films I’ll be seeing in Toronto will be playing if I stayed home.

On exercise walks I often shuffle a playlist of the 100 most popular songs (Billboard) from each year 1950–present—that’s 7,500+ songs, so I don’t get many repeats—and every so often it throws me a curveball. Wouldn’t have guessed that “Lovesong” was among the 100 big charters of ’89. It hit #2!

Remember when the release of a new Assayas film was at least a minor cinephile event that people talked about? Admittedly I’m anti-excited about this one because it’s a pandemic movie, but still. He needs to call SWIMNOT. (Don’t ask if you don’t know.)

For the rest of our lives.

30 years ago today I sent an email that literally changed my life (despite my explicitly deeming it "not that big of a thing"). Not an exaggeration to say that virtually every aspect of my existence would likely be different—for better or worse, who knows?—had I refrained. Rare to have a record!

Not sure why the typesetting felt that final word of the photo caption didn’t fit on line two, which it clearly would with space to spare, but consequently I initially read this as the woman having received a degree in computer. (From Trump University, one presumes.)

Just realized we’re about to get a bunch of pieces ranking all of Spike Lee’s films highest 2 lowest.

For a few seconds I thought Spike was actually gonna play “Prisencolinensinainciusol” over the end credits. (Turns out it’s a new song sampling that groove.)

Bad mail day. All I got was a flyer from a local dentist featuring the Whiteteeth family.

Have rarely been as surprised by an actor’s appearance as I was to see Michael Keaton show up on MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN, five years before NIGHT SHIFT, already giving offbeat line readings.

It’s that time again. youtu.be/AN8hvOXy5Kk?...

Okay, sure. (Anthology Film Archives!)

Is it. Is it unfortunate you unprincipled moronic nightmare-facilitating dipshit. “But he assured me that he wouldn’t” fuck the fuck off fuckhead. “Unfortunate.” Jesus. </steamvalve>

Glad to see NYFF finally create an online archive, though it’s amusing that they retroactively apply “Main Slate” to the many years during which those films were all there was. filmlinc.org/history

My mother gave me a box of my old stuff that had gotten separated from other such boxes somehow. Thereby reminding me what I was doing 40 years ago probably not this month. (I actually have zero memory of the speech or even of winning the contest.)

The wave of relief upon finding that Lav Diaz’s NYFF-selected MAGELLAN runs “only” 2 hours and 45 minutes. (But they threw in the 3.5-hour Pinho and possibly other behemoths, haven’t investigated.)

“Maybe the horse catcher will catch the horse.” “I have fired the horse catcher.”

┻┳| ┻┳| ┳┻| ┳┻| ┻┳| ┻┳| ┳┻| ┳┻| ┻┳| ┳┻| ┻┳| ┳┻| _ ┻┳| •.•) I have never once even looked at ┳┻|⊂ﾉ the Letterboxd Journal. ┻┳|

Greetings from my summer vacation at Lake Tahoe. (In theory we’re going river rafting tomorrow.)

An improbable thing I often forget is that there’s a Wong Kar-wai film starring Ravi Shankar’s daughter.

Always fun to play “Did something strike a chord or is it just that one dude who reads social media person by person and likes everything all at once?” (It was just that one dude.)

At the risk of upsetting people [COSBY ALERT!], I feel compelled to honor the late Malcolm-Jamal Warner by sharing what was at that time quite possibly the funniest thing I’d ever seen on TV (which only works as well as it does because Warner sells the earnest aspect). youtu.be/Pxiigc7454M?...

Anyone in NYC heading to the IFC Center for CLOUD should also see IN MY SKIN, provided you can handle truly disturbing self-harm. This guy loved it!