Aug 2025 Check-in

It feels like a lot’s going on, but it’d be more accurate to say everything needs a bit more organizing and focus.

The current state of the ‘stack is such that things are going okay. There’s always stuff to focus on, though I talk a lot more movies than I was expecting when I started this whole thing. Then again, it’s been a major part of my media consumption for the past few years and that’s probably not going to change too much until the end of the year so I might as well embrace it.

The Friday reviews are going well, and I hope paid subscribers are enjoying those. The original plan was to get far ahead on those in terms of watching/writing so they’re not as last minute as most of these write-ups. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind killed that a bit, but hopefully August provides an opportunity to get ahead again. Looking at the ones coming up, they all are ones I have takes for as opposed to, say, Midnight Run, which is a good movie about which I can’t imagine many would have things to say. Luckily, looking ahead it feels like that’s the last one that’ll be like that. Watch, I’ll get to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and there’ll be nothing again.

Anyways. Here’s what I’ve been up to…

How To Win Friends & Influence People

I started this based off my dad’s recommendation. It’s not that this has a big Narrative Looking Glass energy, but it’s funny because what he handed me was the revised 1981 version which (he didn’t realize) got less good reviews than the original. I tracked down the original on Audible and I’m about halfway through listening to it now.

It’s a good book, the sort of self-help book that can really help people out if they need to hear about altruism, thinking about others, and improving themselves by minimizing their own self-importance. Everyone could benefit from that. And, sure, there are good examples in there to specifically show what Dale Carnegie means when he makes claims about how the world works. None of it feels as revolutionary as it probably was on first publication. Nevertheless I can already feel my influence growing and my winning people over skills honing.

The only reason I bring it up is because… well… the book is almost a hundred years old. Not being someone who’s read a lot of self-help books (it’s a genre I always approach with a certain degree of trepidation), the ones I’ve read are mostly fairly modern. This, though? Man. It’s wild to listen to go to an example of a successful President and their go-to is Theodore Roosevelt, or to talk about a political scandal and go to Teapot Dome. There’s a lot of quoting about the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, titans of industry who came out of America’s industrialization and the subsequent anti-trust cases. It’s so apocryphal and so bizarre. In the section about how smiles will help people like you more, it uses telephones as an example, talking about the vague psychology of it improving your disposition while the person on the other end can probably hear your own confidence and warmth. Considering that generations since the book’s release has grown up with the telephone, it’s a technology we inherently know how to use (more or less). But here’s this book, talking about telephones like they’re an inscrutable technology and American business within the context of local shops and grocers like they’re, well, grocers.

Good advice can be good advice, and the 1981 edition is probably more sleek and streamlined. But the rugged “hey here’s this new way of looking at the world” of the mid-1930s and it makes this such a strange curio because of how much these ideas percolated into the culture such that very little is a surprise.

Also, did you know Franklin Delano Roosevelt is running for re-election?

Criterion Challenge Update

This one is still hanging over me. This is my third year doing the Criterion Challenge on Letterboxd and the only year where I hit my goal of finishing by the end of June. My first year I finished by the end of June. Second year I finished by the end of July. That became the goal this year, but life got in the way. With only six left it should finish this month, and what’s remaining is really exciting1.

The ones in July, though, were really great. As the end nears, they generally get better. Standouts this month were Real Life, Close-Up, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Real Life is an Albert Brooks comedy that predicts reality TV. Fabulous. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is a Pedro Almódovar film that’s one day in the life of a recent divorcé.

Close-up, though, is a fascinating mockumentary drama about a fraud case in Iran. It’s extremely hard to describe but it’s mind wrenching to think about. It stars a man who impersonated a famous Iranian film director and used it to endear him to a family who knew of the director but didn’t know him well enough to know what he looks like. A lot of the film is actual footage of the court case against the defendant (who pled guilty), but they also use the real people to re-enact certain scenes from the events surrounding the fraud. It’s a surreal experience, thinking about these people replaying this span of time despite the pain and confusion it caused. It’s one of those pieces that’s asserted itself in this generation of film afficionados as one of the great films of all time. Having seen it, that’s a hard position to argue against. Though I can see it really not working for most people.

Paul Quentin Thomas Tarantino Anderson Corner

Preparing for the forthcoming One Battle At a Time has me considering the works of Paul Thomas Anderson. My PTA knowledge is fairly limited. I saw There Will Be Blood in theaters and then a couple years ago I watched Boogie Nights, last year was Magnolia, and then Punch-Drunk Love was in the Criterion Challenge this year. Considering he’s one of the great filmmakers of the now, seemed a good time to close out the catalog.

In my head, PTA is one of those great visionary directors who came out of the 90s. For whatever reason, he also connects in my head to Quentin Tarantino, given that they make personal, passion projects that qualify as indie film and they’ve never really strayed outside of that lane.

So… because they’ve made about the same amount of films, I’m more-or-less alternating. Next Tarantino is Death Proof while next PTA is The Master.

This month, though, three things happened here.

First was the rewatch of Jackie Brown, a movie that I’ve always appreciated but always considered one of Tarantino’s weakest films. I’ve even watched it a few times before this, but this time I took all the Tarantino out of it and watched through the prism of “great movie.” In this context, it’s remarkable. Just an extremely well-told adaptation from a great novelist. If anything, it’s almost like the muted response compared to Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs sent Tarantino to the comforting arms of genre pastiche. And that’s too bad. Jackie Brown is an incredible film by an incredible filmmaker. Doubtful it’ll land at the top of the rankings I’m re-doing as I go, but man is it a movie that’s so worthy of the re-evaluation it’s been getting over the last few years.

On the flip side of this was Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, which I was lucky enough to catch when it was screening a few weeks ago at the Vista theater in Los Angeles. This is the four-and-a-half hour cut that Tarantino screened at the Cannes Film Festival, where there’s no credits at the midpoint, but rather an intermission. Most excitingly, this is also the version that features the entire Crazy-88 fight in glorious color. In the original film, Tarantino flips the fight to black-and-white to help keep Vol 1 from an NC-17 rating. It’s a wild experience in color. Much as it’s probably better, the black and white was stylish, sexy, and helped to break up the monotony of an excellent fight scene by providing signposts during a fight that can feel a bit samey at a certain point.

The Whole Bloody Affair is probably the superior product to the Vol 1/Vol 2 version. Emotionally, the final act of the film plays totally different because of a choice Tarantino makes for the intermission cliffhanger, where he knows people will be watching the second half in a few minutes rather than in a few months. Kill Bill is plenty enrapturing regardless of the watching experience, and on a big screen it’s a fabulous time at the movies.

Coming off Jackie Brown, though… the earlier film is just a better film that shows how good Tarantino is when he’s not trying to make all the sendups you’d expect from him.

Finaly, There Will Be Blood was a phenomenal second watch. PTA is one of those dudes born to make movies, and coming off his previous work, which were all relatively contemporary (Boogie Nights is in the 70s and 80s), seeing him do a turn-of-the-century oil man was fabulous. So much of the film’s strength is the excellent character portrait of Daniel Plainview and Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning performance. It’s a film that uses Plainview as an exploration of America’s love of business and enterprise and the tension it has with religion and family values, and watching Plainview descend into the bitterness of his business being all is… god it’s so good.

That said, it’s a totally worthy Oscar nominee for Best Picture. Had the Coens not utterly smashed it with No Country for Old Men, PTA should have won that year. For me, the joy of There Will Be Blood is an incredible filmmaker working with one of the great actors to make a rich film. But most of the success is down to PTA and DDL, whereas No Country is such a feat for multiple performances while telling a rip-roaring Cormac McCarthy yarn and finally giving everyone the purely violent crime epic that fans had wanted since Fargo (which still had that lovely screwball quality). It’s a close race, but I’m still a Coens guy.

Excited for more though.

The Pitt/ER

Finished The Pitt season one and… man everything you’ve heard about that show is good. It’s a fantastic drama and it’ll probably win the Emmy this year. It deserves to (though I’d put a couple others before it). It’s remarkable how deeply technical the show can be while also sneaking in metric assloads of character work. By the time that all hell breaks loose towards the end of the season, the show reveals just how well it’s built up these foundations. Truly one of the best shows on television. Incredible props and makeup effects. Incredible acting. Incredible character work. Just… god what a show.

It’s so good, in fact, that it encouraged me to finally buckle down and start watching ER. Teamed up with a friend and we’re getting together to watch two(ish) episodes a week. We’re five episodes in. It’s very, very different to The Pitt, and it helps me appreciate that a big reason that more recent show is fantastic is because of its structure and focus. But ER is good so far, and it’s nice to have a procedural to check in on.

And also it’s got a young George Clooney. What a snack.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Finally, the new season of Star Trek; Strange New Worlds has aired. Most aren’t Star Trek fans, I’m sure, and I’ll be writing about the season when it ends. First though, I must say that it’s really cementing itself as one of the great Treks, and the only one that’s really since Trek’s return that’s managed to couple modern storytelling to the classic Trek format. Even though the seasons are ten episodes there’s no sense of wasted space. It’s almost like the writers map out the whole season, come up with 26 episodes worth of ideas, and then go and make the best ten.

It’s very different from Discovery, which tried to make a modern Trek in a modern world and ended up with some multiple personality disorder (almost certainly because of behind the scenes showrunner changes) and never quite figured out the best possible version of itself.

This season has already done the second half of a two-parter, an episode that prequels “The Squire of Gothos”, a zombie runaround (with good character work at the center), and one of the great holodeck episodes that sends up another classic (“Elementary Dear Data”) but makes it totally its own.

Make your shows fun like Strange New Worlds. If you’ve never watched Trek before, this show is the one that will show you just how great Trek can be. And without dated effects!

Now if only they could do a show that adequately follows up on DS9 now that they’ve done modern takes on the other pre-Discovery series….

Punch it!

(That’s what Captain Pike says when he wants the ship to go to warp…)

Hope you have a great August. I’ll be back Wednesday with something new and then on Friday with a dope review of Dunkirk for paid subscribers.

Onward!