in 40 minutes you'll love Perfidia and resent her, find her heroic and find her selfish, empathize with her yet ultimately fail to understand her. and then she's gone, and you feel that absence as much as Bob and Willa do. PTA and Teyana Taylor did actual magic.

the first act has the momentum of a bullet train but the indistinctness of a dream. flawlessly captures the way Pynchon's version of this character hovers around the margins of the narrative, incredibly striking yet inexplicable to all who knew her. it's just astonishing.

some of the most elegant and powerful filmmaking of the year (perhaps the best work of PTA's entire career) makes up the first 40 minutes of this movie and i have yet to hear a compelling dismissal of it. though good lord many have tried

Unanimous vote in the House to repeal provision letting Senators sue the US over the Jan 6 probe and get millions of dollars Genuinely endearing how much the two chambers hate each other. A true Legolas/Gimli meme for House members against their true enemy, the Senate (will be part of the minibus)

Today is a great day to read my review of the best movie I saw last year:

Me, after every freaking Mamdani announcement since he got into office: "You... you can do that? You can make our lives better?" <eyes every other politician in the world>

If you book a hotel for $200, you should pay $200. Today, we shut down hotel junk fees and surprise credit card holds. The price you see is the price you pay.

phenomenal day to be me and rob zombie

Also not to project my own thoughts onto a specific section of this interview, but this bit here made me think a lot about the time when the producers of A Certain Floridian Picture talked about how they truly felt they understood poor people because they lived in a motel for two weeks.

Eeveryone is busy posting about awards, and while I am largely against them, I want nothing more than for Annapurna to win the Someone to Watch Award at the Indie Spirits. Can't imagine how lifechanging that cash prize would be for this wonderful movie and filmmaker who spent a decade making this.

I remain in love with Fucktoys, one of the best films of last/this year, and had a great (and very long) conversation with Annapurna Sriram over Zoom after meeting her at a film festival screening. We talk queerness, corniness, and what it means to be "American" nowadays.

I remember getting lost at a horse show aged 5. I wandered off when my mum was in the in the warm-up arena then I couldn't find the woman who owned the horse mum was riding. Eventually someone asked if I was alright and just took me back to the warm-up. Fine. This kid will remember this forever.

Odd people don’t want the “double your electric bill” factory to set up shop.

i feel like this is a leading indicator that the crash is imminent. their valuations are dependent on everyone using this technology regularly and i think growth is starting to stall out

i’m fascinated by this new strategy wjere multiple ai company CEOs have been going on tears tours this year so far complaining about how anti ai sentiment has hurt their businesses

Belting “Delroy Lindo” to the tune of ZZ Top’s “TV Dinners”

ICE’s cruelty knows no bounds. Deporting children with cancer. Shooting moms. And now, using a 5 year-old as “bait” to detain his family. It’s far past clear: ICE must be abolished. Congress should not give it any additional funding. And the people responsible for its crimes should face charges.

- me, busting out these diagrams

just saw that the very good Palestinian film diaspora film To a Land Unknown is available to rent on the Letterboxd Video Store highly recommended

I'll never forget a screening of Gary Sinise's "Of Mice and Men" for college journalists, where some people started laughing uncomfortably during the death of Curly's wife, and when Sinise entered for his Q&A, one clueless kid asked, in all earnestness, "Did you mean for that to be funny?"

I once had a film school lecturer who chastised the whole class for laughing through a film which was not a comedy. It seemed heavy-handed at the time but he was right to do it and teach that lesson. Respect the art enough to at least try to understand it.

I saw "Y Tu Mamá También" in a college class full of immature, insecure boys. I'll never forget how gross I felt when they got loud and *why* they got loud. I'd have a better experience watching it on my phone.

When I taught the grad students at UCLA, two white students cackled at the emotional highpoint of Satyajit Ray's CHARULATA. I gently said after that as UCLA grad students that kind of reaction was problematic and beneath them. One of the students declared war on me for that and never relented.

My reaction to the crowd laughter at Wong Kar-Wai’s AS TEARS GO BY is legendary among my friends

Again reminded of Kundera's understanding of kitsch as the absolute denial of shit

Mark is talking theater & movies, but I just went to a comedian’s show and the same applies. Don’t randomly laugh at non-laugh lines. Don’t “whoo!” at every noun you recognize. Don’t loudly repeat the things the comedian just said. Listen to the jokes and appreciate the art.

Remembering Love Lies Bleeding and the cinema audience that laughed at the moments of lesbian intimacy, which really just reinforced to the *target* audience that they are a joke to everyone else in the room.

Bad laughter feeds on itself. Contempt for art or perspectives that feel alien thirsts for validation from the people next to you. I get the argument that we're all entitled to our own reactions, but actually, no. Not when they're so loud and performative that they cut into the experience of others.

To the justifiable discourse about how the repertory cinema experience is degraded by the smirky laughter of filmgoers who don't know how to process their own discomfort, all I can add is that if you're in a theater with a group of college kids who have been ASSIGNED to see a movie, brace yourself.>

The Music Box in Chicago, after a notorious Blue Velvet screening, have started doing this disclaimer. They did it recently for an old Hollywood melodrama by talking about how melodrama is just different, please don't laugh at wrong times. It hasn't fixed it but helped a lot.

literally, all it takes is saying, "Hey folks, be respectful," and instantly people seem to grok that they can actually just do that

i *know* i'm right about the bad rep audiences thing because i saw what happened when The Revue started asking people not to laugh inappropriately during screenings people just... stopped laughing inappropriately and that's still with loud, often outright raucous crowds!

Mobile version m.xkcd.com/806/

Scrolling through the replies and disappointed not to see even a single reference to XKCD's Tech Support: xkcd.com/806/

I don’t like, ever swear but I have found stringing together enough expletives will cause the AI to hand me over to a human. I’m not proud of this but it was the only way to get my Verizon gateway fixed.

To be more precise, you (are supposed to) make money as a reward for doing something with purpose and commitment to the customer. Unfortunately, the commitment has been redirected to the shareholders instead.

Employees should be considered shareholders, not negatives on the balance sheet. Shareholders who aren't employees should be considered dischargeable debts.

We need to eradicate shareholders and the concept of "increasing shareholder value". Among other things that need to go.

The darkest legal decision in this country is that the ultimate duty of businesses is to their share holders. Not to their customers, the product, anything meaningful. The fact that you can be successfully sued by putting customers/product first instead of shareholder value is.. icky.

There was an article I read way back that criticized some chain restaurant’s mission statement. It said something like, ”leverage core competencies to maximize global marketshare, blah blah.” ”I couldn’t help noticing ‘serve good food’ wasn’t in there anywhere.”

You used to be able to escape phone tree hell by saying representative but now the damn thing wants you to explain in natural language what you want but inevitably says 'uh i didn't get that could you say it a different way" forever. It's like they invented a vampire immune to sunlight and are proud

For one, they all hate the AI assistant getting in the way of simply letting them help people. They're super sympathetic and they hate how it's being forced onto both customers and their work. But also like... it's clear the vibes of [gestures broadly] are sinking in. Depressing, but good.

I am dealing with an absolutely ridiculous customer service issue right now which involves calling a local store and having to talk to a robot each time I do to convince it to let me talk to a person. And in these conversations I'm having with these people, it feels like something is cracking.

UHF erasure

I submit the guy inexplicably throwing a dog into the river in the background of a scene from the 1993 Hulk Hogan movie Mr. Nanny.

Peep Show would like a word

The argument against ICE isn't an especially difficult one to make politically in this moment. The issue is that people who substantively disagree with abolishing ICE prefer having a proxy fight about strategy to discussing that stance. Many such cases.

I must once again emphasize that Bill Maher said this guy was obviously innocent because he wasn't in jail

everything about this reeks of bullshit Gulf state-style planning, and that's not even getting into the "Trump is chair for life" shit or any of the other myriad problems that place Palestinians in a permanently oppressed position

what if the Marshall Plan, but done by the side responsible for the genocide and administrated by the most corrupt people on the planet