Poor, obscure, plain, and little. Writer, critic, comms & events at The Sidney Poitier New American Film School. Former books editor with too many bylines at USA TODAY and The Arizona Republic.
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thank you for coming to my big announcement that was planned for weeks and not thrown together at the last second to get ahead of speculation that my health is in decline. alabama (taking a huge huff of a mysterious gas like dennis hopper in blue velvet) is in charge of space
the 26.2 sticker on my car is for how many la croix i drink per day
Oh I fully yelled âno!â and then watched the scene through my fingers
2025 watch #119: Pump Up the Volume. Devastated for adolescent Barbara that she never saw this as a teen, when she would have fallen head over heels for Christian Slaterâs devil-may-care pirate radio DJ. The flip side of his character in Heathers - he wants to save the teens with naughtiness.
the virgin common sense rationalist: erm, everyone knows that the universe is a cold and uncaring structure of blind chaos the chad aperture of the universe witnessing itself: wow, i live here? splendid
lol they actually did it
bases are loaded. we got a triple on deck
Chilling on the porch in Payson reading Stephen Kingâs The Long Walk before the movie comes out. Halfway through and Iâm locked in, King is so fun when he runs with an absurdly simple premise like, âWhat if everyone had to keep walking?â
NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE. Also, DETROIT IS A CRIME-FREE ZONE.
Also if you haven't read The Grapes of Wrath, it feels perfect for this specific moment in a way that is both scary (because of how little has changed) and comforting (because Steinbeck hates businessmen so much and spends whole paragraphs talking about how their souls are dead)
This is like in Peter Pan where the audience tries to revive Tinkerbell with applause. Except, you know, the opposite.
It's going to be the weirdest thing watching every news network trying to sell "a nation in mourning" while Kool & the Gang's "Celebration" becomes the new national anthem.
Everyone on Bluesky is poised like we're waiting for the DVD logo to hit the corner of the screen
Videogames are a waste of time. But so is your job.
Unbelievable run, not a single whiff in the lineup.
Just give us quaaludes back, fuck
Found, saved and returned a scared lost dog on my post-monsoon walk tonight. Everyone say hi to Buddy!
5 albums with the biggest impact on me (keep in mind I am a deeply uncool elder millennial and I don't fight it): Tidal - Fiona Apple Modern Vampires of the City - Vampire Weekend Fumbling Towards Ecstasy - Sarah McLachlan OK Computer - Radiohead The Postal Service - Give Up
Some weekends you just gotta sit around and have a big olâ cry about your dead mom.
One thing I wish more people were consciously aware of is that we live in a society that is constantly trying to control you by framing every decision asked of you as a choice between two bad options in order to convince you that you are powerless to either understand or pursue moral clarity
Dad was always proud of me and bragged to everyone I was a journalist and voracious reader and has never listened to *a single goddamn thing* I tried to tell him about media literacy and propaganda, not a fucking word
Once again encouraging everybody to read The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
There are shirts! www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/7922...
bsky.app/profile/trav...
2025 watch #118: The Naked Gun (2025). A tight 85 minutes with a gag every 5 seconds and Liam Neeson punching dudes in the nuts to Fergalicious? Movies are back, baby.
About 500 pages in and it's one of the best books I've ever read
the problem with twitter isnât âthereâs a lot of mean and racist stuffâ the problem with twitter is that itâs an algorithmic fascism promotion machine
What Iâm reading this weekendâŠ
be on the lookout for a very small dracula
This is the most powerful photograph in Cinema. That they filmed Oldboy around the corner from Memories of Murder would be like Da Vinci taking a break from painting the Mona Lisa to go check out this David statue his buddy Michelangelo was making.
(Because people are dumb and have poor media literacy!)
I will fight anyone to defend its honor
I was so angry he misunderstood the movie so egregiously I made it a mission to write movie reviews for that same paper some day. And I did! For years! Spite is a great motivator.
Literally I stayed up all night after seeing this waiting for my local newspaper to hit the driveway to read our criticâs review, I was so drunk in love. He panned it, I was so confused I went out and saw it again at the earliest matinee.
Spielbergâs A.I. was a real lightning-bolt-to-the-brain experience, I became so obsessed and was so upset nobody liked it at the time that you can draw a line from this film through the entirety of my career as an arts journalist, film critic and now storyteller and curator in film academia
2025 watch #117: High and Low. Christ, the compositions in this. You could write a dozen dissertations on the way bodies are arranged in the first halfâs single-location setting, and thatâs before it turns into one of the best police procedurals youâve ever seen.
Heads up, Home Depot fully stocked on 12-foot skeletons if anyone wants to win my hand in marriage
There is a large category of letters from Union soldiers who first encountered slavery aristocracy that could easily be summed up as âwe should kill all these fuckersâ
Respecting the dead is a luxury a civil society can afford, and thanks to James Dobsonâs lifetime of work against it, we do not have one, so it's acceptable to dance on his grave. www.splinter.com/good-riddanc...
NFTs were a bubble, AI is a bubble, but small carvings of large hipped women have remained popular with unsettling lighthouse keepers for 200 years, invest with confidence
I am clinging to the promise of Halloween like a life raft
2025 watch #116: Singles. Cameron Crowe: âHere, I made you this mix tape.â Everyoneâs kind of a loser except for that redheaded chick who lands Victor Garber, sheâs got life figured out.
A $160 bribe is great. She did all that work with the chip bag to be like âthis should cover half your electric bill.â
Why do they do this?? Every electronic device in my bedroom is covered in electrical tape to make it stop.
Bob Iger is not gonna like this third Avatar movie that James Cameron is cooking up.
La Strada is elite
Which one?
2025 watch #115: The Shrouds. Surprised to find I hated this. Tonally incoherent, less about grief and more about a man's obsession with having access to a woman's body even in death, the future tech is almost as painfully awkward as Cassel's phonetic-sounding line delivery.
A thousand blessings upon his head
Iâm creating an even bigger monster
The missing piece of the equation explaining why so many critic positions are being eliminated is the little AI summaries at the top of Google results, which reduced click-throughs drastically. Once again, a tech company has stolen human labor and monetized it and doesn't care about the impact.
Sam Altman: I see humans achieving omnipotence using dark matter by⊠2030 maybe? Thatâs if OpenAI is given a quadrillion dollars Theo Von: Yeah Altman: Or, we may become a race of slaves, genetically modified to be harvested by robot spiders. Thatâs if OpenAI doesnât get the money Von: Right
The most science-fictional thing in The Fifth Element is how it depicts an American city with abundant housing.
My friend, the most Leo of Leos, requested a homemade Dubai chocolate cake for her birthday. I looked at the recipe and begged her to pick something less difficult, and she said, âIâm giving you the gift of making you a better baker.â This took me 3 days and itâs the best cake Iâve ever eaten.
I know the weak/strong thing is core to fascism but it's so exhausting to experience in real time. Like these guys run on platforms of being manly men and then once elected all they do is talk about how they're afraid to walk through Kroger and we need machine gun robots in every 7/11.
No bites, it had BrontĂ« by the throat for a second but sheâs got so much dense fur it didnât reach skin. I got knocked down in the tussle and kicked it and it ran off, havenât figured out yet who it belongs to but Iâm on a rampage
Every picture of Altman looks like he just got the worst news from a ghost
At a thing and people who I generally consider to be very smart are talking about how they are running all their family photos through AI to make them move and talk gibberish. "You can see her as she was in the 80s!" an era in which we have actual home videos. I feel like I'm going crazy.
2025 watch #114: Princess Mononoke. Forget your zodiac sign, your favorite Miyazaki tells me everything I need to know about you. My favorite animated film, neverendingly urgent, as rapturous as it is mournful of humanityâs capacity for love and violence. A spiritual experience.
Also the thing these AI evangelists don't understand about art is that it's joyful and rewarding to make bad or totally average art, just like there's joy in playing tennis or softball with your friends without going pro. The reward is in the living! Not the end product! Fucking ghouls!
gavin newsom is mitt romney's tyler durden
This man is one year older than me and I still get carded wtf
Saw a Waymo completely sputter out today, it wanted to merge into the left turn lane at the last minute and nobody would let it cut, so it just sat stalled in its lane, blocking traffic because it couldnât readjust. I fuckinâ hate em, man, they canât read the room like a human.
Iâm a bit banged up but ok. BrontĂ« doesnât have a mark on her, thank Christ. I thought I was about to watch my dog die and I turned into Cujo.
Oh I was in full a vibrating adrenaline freakout
Brontë and I were just attacked by a full-size loose doberman. Brontë is ok because I dropped and kicked that fucker in the face, which I didn't know I had in me.
He deserves his dinner and a little bit of your dinner
The way to be a CEO is to say that AI will solve whatever problem it is youâre currently discussing and then casually mention you are firing 5% of your employees
My dear friend Kathrynâs mother-in-lawâs house burned down. Sheâs 83 and lost everything she owned, including the lives of two dogs. Please help her meet her insurance deductible or share the link if you can. www.gofundme.com/f/help-our-n...
Wow, wild. Anyway, here's a photo of Atlantic Owner Laurene Powell Jobs having a nice time with Ghislaine Maxwell.
I donât know, sounds to me like he really needs to take a humanities class
As in Steven Spielberg, literally the best to ever do it?
Billy Wilder is one of the best to ever do it, and The Apartment is a miracle of sparkling, nimble script work. It as at once so heavy and so effervescent. Dark without being cynical, romantic without being sentimental. I'm in awe of it every watch.
2025 watch #113: The Quilters. A really lovely short documentary on Netflix about incarcerated men making quilts for foster children as part of a prison program. So much common humanity on display, the desire to do good for others even when society has defined you by the bad you've done.
this is a great example of what happens when unserious, nihilistic people get in charge of actual institutions whose ostensible job it is to provide real services to real people. these people are LARPing their way through everything. trolling as govt bc they have no respect for the work of it.
Post one of the most haunting shots in movie history from a film made before the year 2000
The job market has never been better for shills, stooges, and toadies of all stripes. Linkedin absolutely buzzing if you're a sycophant, a flunky, or even an unctuous little worm
spending $8.45 billion to watch another man fuck my wife.
Albert Spica, the monstrous gangster in THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER portrayed by the great Michael Gambon at one point is in the restaurant and says "Gold! Everything should be sprayed gold!" This has been on my mind of late.
Itâs been 2 years since I left and I still have so many conflicted feelings, but mostly Iâm just so sad that so many avenues for cultural critique and conversation have been and are continuing to be demolished
It was incredibly painful to get to a position I was so proud of, believed in so deeply, as a champion of books who could help bring great reads to a bigger audience, and feel it disintegrate on my hands because of short-sighted and cutthroat metrics.
Every book I wanted to write about that wasnât a celebrity tell-all, I had to make a metrics case to justify the labor. I was told by a high-up numbers guy âWe shouldnât even have a books section, we lose money on every books story.â
When I started as books editor at USA TODAY, I had to commission a certain number of reviews a month. I had a healthy freelance budget and a whole roster of novelists and writers I could commission for literary criticism. Four years later, I had no freelance budget and had to fight for every review
Zuzuâs all tuckered out from half-murdering a rat I then had to mercy-kill with a brick. Maybe finish the job next time, you little free loader?
usually if you ask experts why an empire fell theyâll say itâs nuanced and multifaceted, so i think itâs kind of cool that with America future historians will get to just say like âoh they took the idiot train to moronsvilleâ
Iâm so sad because we hosted a preview screening of Megalopolis at our film school and it was on the one night of the entire month I had an unbreakable commitment and couldnât go.
2025 watch #112. Weapons. I laughed so hard during the last 5 minutes of this movie I thought I was going to die right there in the theater. An immaculate time at the movies.
NW:
Initially built a big buff dude, played for two hours before I realized I didnât want to look at him for 300 more hours then started over.
Made a new lilâ sweetie for Karlach to throw around
Needed this
Keep writing that stupid book
Just a girl gazing longingly at the $800 Mondo 40th anniversary She-Ra set.
Absolutely!
2025 watch #111: Pinocchio (1940). I am being deadly serious when I say the original Disney Pinocchio should be alongside Citizen Kane and The Godfather in any discussion about the best and most important films ever made.
2025 watch #110: The Infiltrators. A docu-drama account of the efforts of young Obama-era Dreamer activists infiltrating ICE detention facilitates to help liberate those about to be deported. 10ish years ago and it feels like different lifetime given what we're up against now.
