if i had a chance to write a john madden screenplay, i'd make it a screenlife film of him selflessly programming the madden games all by himself as the ungrateful and ignorant public complains about their bugs and glitches

F1: The fascination of its attention to/foregrounding of technical detail and the queasiness over its celebration of a particular form of capital basically battle each other to a draw, and Kosinski isn't able to find the strongest dynamic, but this is entertaining enough.

THE LOVE THAT REMAINS: Consistently intriguing in its delicate state of emotional suspension, all the little strands of anecdotal and fanciful details contributing to Hlynur's vision of family and art; not sure if it all comes together but often truly lovely.

Twitter dot com: Bedford Falls X dot com: Pottersville

My final review of 2025 is appropriate for anyone who has mixed feelings about seeing family over the holidays: Jim Jarmusch's tender, brittle FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER.

my son got two different toy fire trucks for christmas. two. and despite being considerably more familiar with their purpose and operation, i didn’t receive a single fucking fire truck

you know, these days, many people time of year. but this season, try when to everything a special time — it just might become which with you

me, my wife, my son and my dog all have our christmases on the exact same day of the year. the odds of this are approximately 1 in 48 million

thank you for resurfacing this ancient lore www.sbnation.com/2014/12/30/7...

Happy birthday @whateverokay.bsky.social!!

Happy Holidays Eve! Just because we love you we dug up three obscure, gritty, violent and HOLLY JOLLY Christmas thrillers for you to enjoy (us talking about)! That’s right, it’s SHOCKING STUFFERS! Hickory dock, dirtbags! #nakedcitykillerchristmas #riot #rxmas podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Wrote a bit about three of the best films I saw at this year's AFI Fest—Milagros Mumenthaler's THE CURRENTS, Jim Jarmusch's FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER, and Radu Jude's KONTINENTAL '25—for Taipei Mansions. taipeimansions.com/2025/12/24/a...

Checking in on the oomfs these holidays

Pope Leo said in a Christmas Eve sermon that the story of Jesus being born in a stable because there was no room at an inn should remind Christians that refusing to help the poor and strangers today is tantamount to rejecting God himself. For @reuters.com

For my third and very belated final dispatch from this year's New York Film Festival, I reviewed Kleber Mendonça Filho's THE SECRET AGENT and Gianfranco Rosi's BELOW THE CLOUDS, two brilliant films about a city's relationship to time, for Taipei Mansions. taipeimansions.com/2025/12/23/o...

Happy birthday @brianjh.bsky.social!!

Here's a thread of some of my favorite writing this year at The Chinese Cinema. Starting with this final trip to the venerable Grand Illusion Cinema for a 35mm martial arts triple feature www.thechinesecinema.com/a-martial-ar...

I vowed to write more in 2025, so I started a substack titled Old New. This is a thread of my favorite pieces I was able to publish there and elsewhere.

FOOL TIME, part 3 of 4 now free to watch on youtube www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl4E...

this game is an escort mission for the colts. they have to gain yardage in small chunks and wait for philip rivers to walk up to the line. every couple minutes he spits out some dialogue like "hurry – we have to reach the satellite uplink so we can deliver evidence of the ambassador's wrongdoing"

a solid 25% of generative ai responses are "how would tom waits answer this question"

the most cursed nfl franchise is pretty obviously the diamondbacks, who in 1998 were transformed into an arizona baseball team by an evil wizard. i'm surprised this is ever debated

would anyone like to discuss mlb trade rumors

i actually don't have a lot of trouble believing that god returned for his flock and the refs were the only ones to be raptured

texas a&m fans right now: "dang it! we lost a playoff game! this one's a heartbreaker, no two ways about it. i guess that's a wrap on this season, but the upcoming offseason at least represents an opportunity to reflect on what we did well this year – and what we need to do better next season."

for retired nfl star pat mcafee, life in the world of broadcasting is a real “kick”

let’s admit - as the 27th letter of the alphabet. i mean why not? just look at that little squirt. c’mon

lots of good players in the nfl these days

FOOL TIME, part 2 of 4 now free to watch on youtube youtu.be/WmC9fmEOwus?...

it’d be so sick if the super bowl was chargers-rams but they had to go play it in san fran because they were one year off

@jonbois.bsky.social watching basketball

so wait, do you get worse at football as you get older? it seems to me like you would get better at it since you'd have more time to learn football facts

i think philip rivers is gonna stare down that seattle defense and take it to 'em today. young folks might not remember this, but he could really sling it back in his time. now there's one guy who really knows how to wheel and deal out there

the weird two-year stretch in which i was older than every nfl quarterback is finally over. hopefully that will never happen again

“The hustle and bustle of the holiday season.” - Jon Bois

started playing cyberpunk 2077 and it's still got some bugs after like five years, but i kinda get it because the open world is so bewilderingly expansive and sophisticated with tons of crazy ideas crammed in there. ea sports has spent decades screwing up a flat rectangle with 22 guys and a ball

watching football

i'm writing a screenplay called Heart Of A Champion about a guy who has a cold and has to sneeze and blow his nose all the time, but still gets a lot of work done on the computer. not sure yet but i think it'll probably wind up being a christian movie

FOOL TIME, part 1 of 4 now free to watch on youtube youtu.be/zmyBSrQodnI?...

Pulp fiction: on the murderous paper chase of Park Chan-wook's NO OTHER CHOICE, starring Lee Byung-hun in one of the year's great performances. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

THE THINGS YOU KILL: Formally quite strong and the central gambit isn't a far cry from Khatami's influences, but the narrative is far too familiar for this to feel like too much a deviation from a standard social problem film; still definitely things to latch onto.

PILLION: Stays fairly well on the right track, only rarely indulging in some more hoary sexual awakening clichés; Lighton has a good sense for gradual evolution within a semi-static relationship, appealing and funny without one taking away from another.

Continuing to translate new subtitles for the Golden Princess catalogue until I finally explode.

SOUND OF FALLING: Schilinski uses the severity of her parallel narratives not just to highlight a century of exploitation, but to capture a free-floating unease, as the film modulates between rumination and withholding in surprising ways; a little limited but quite promising.

"I Wasn't There": Deceptively complex in Hirschkron's three/four-part presentation of snatches of life, where truth is made inextricable from both performance and analysis of said retellings; appealingly compact and reminiscent of sly plays with storytelling.

Johnnie To hasn't been following the news of Kiwi Chow's film Deadline being denied release in HK because of perceived threats to national security, but says nobody should find this surprising. This climate doesn't impact his ability to work but does make him depressed. 5/5

Johnnie To knew both Stanley Fung and Benz Hui during his days in TV. He wasn't very close to Fung back then but respects him as a director. As for the death of Hui, "Geez, I don't know why the hell he left us just like that." He thinks he lived a happy life, though. 4/5

Johnnie To mentioned last year he's going to work until he's 80 (he's currently 70). He hasn't made a movie he loves yet but he's dead set on following through. He's always writing screenplays but never ends up filming his own. 3/5

Johnnie To kind of denies the hotly anticipated Japanese co-production starring Tony Leung. He says he never said he was working with Tony and it was all the media, but he would like to work with him again. There's no screenplay and even filming in Japan isn't a done deal. 2/5