March 2026 Check In

What's the biggest update this month? My partner and I got a dog.

His name is Agador Spartacus and he's already a gem. A foster family found him on the street and so a lot of my caretaking energy for the past two weeks have been getting him comfortable with his new home, training him to not pee in the apartment, and starting to socialize him with friends and other animals where possible.

It's a lot of work, and it's seriously cut into some of the story-ingesting time I have during my day. As such, I'm definitely behind where I want to be with various projects, but all of the little gradual progresses on things like television make up for me being terribly behind on my Criterion Challenge.

Regardless... here's what I've been up to.

Survivor 50 Premiere

This is a couple days old and there's still a long way to go, but the last time a Survivor season was this exciting out the gate was Winners At War. There's a school of thought that the best seasons of Survivor are the ones with fresh casts. Strangers from different walks of life who have to join up and work together without the benefit of knowing if the trust they feel is a valid feeling. It makes the drama intense.

But there's nothing like a returning player season. They're intensely dramatic and bold and seeing familiar faces return is not just the visceral thrill of seeing old favorites, but also the ability to tell see their in a new way. Winner or loser, there's something to prove. And it's such a unique experience.

Without spoiling anything major that happens... god it's great to see all of these players return. Even the players I wasn't super hot on when the show announced them (Beef Bois like Joe, Jonathan, Ozzy, and Colby) all come with very specific stories or agendas that are more than just "play strength". Unfinished business remains, and there's a hunger out the gate that is absolutely infectious. Every time the show cut to a new character or new pairing I got excited. Every single time. Some more exciting than others sure (blows my mind that Mike White is back holy hell), but the immediate pairings and strategies that come from seeing old nemeses bonding or trying to work together because they have to outlast almost two dozen people...

God. God it's just so good.

Highlights include:

• Devens & Christian teaming up
• Ozzy & Cerie reconciling her voting his ass out in Micronesia
• Coach & Ozzy burying the hatchet from Coach's loss in South Pacific
• Colby judging Rizo super hard on Day One only to completely about face the next day as Rizo's charisma gets to him
• Genevieve & Aubree coming together as people who will probably work well as a pair
• Emily Flippen being a nonstop delight
• The return of a certain game mechanic. The one after the supplies challenge. Seriously. When was it last in play? Survivor 42? People be in trouble.
• Kamilla being like "screw honor"
• Coach being Coach and talking about his own warped vision of honor and regularly spouting out his nonsense quotes. God. He's such a maniac. I love him so much.

If the rest of the season only gets better from here, this is going to be the best installment in ages. It's been far too long since they've done a returning player season, and 10 seasons without any returnees is means as great as this cast is, there's so many other incredible candidates they left behind. While there are some I would have swapped out for others, at this point there's no one I could imagine cutting from the opportunity to play again. They're all supposed to be here.

God it's been a long time since I was this high on Survivor.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

Five films hit theaters on Feb 13. Wuthering Heights, GOAT, Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die, and Crime 101 were all movies that were at least on my radar. But Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie had a bunch of people I trust waving the flag and saying how good it was, how funny it was, and how important it was to see it in a theater.

So I went. With no spoilers and knowing nothing except that blind faith has a way of working out sometimes.

God it was funny.

It was so funny.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is the sort of film that is going to live in obscurity for years. Anyone who's seen it is going to say it's hilarious. But it's also audacious and mad and doing the sorts of things you wouldn't imagine for a rinky dink film following up a two-decades old web series. I don't even want to say anything. Wouldn't dream of spoiling all of the crazy shit that happens and all the directions it goes and all the mayhem that goes down.

More than that... I don't know, man. If you're of my generation you're probably going to have a great time. Recommended.

The Traitors Season 4

The following contains full spoilers for the most recent season of The Traitors...

This fourth season was a bit of a roller coaster. Production made two of the initial three Traitors housewives and the third was someone from Love Island. Because I don't have a knowledge base of any of those people (except Lisa Rinna, who I know from seeing in things but not from Housewives), that made it harder to engage with the most interesting characters on the show. Until now, the show had always placed someone from Survivor in the turret, and given that's my strongest knowledge base, it was a bummer to not have anyone in the turret to root for. Initially, anyway.

Additionally that meant the cast I was excited to see was twice as likely to go out, and a number of them died at the hands of the Traitors. The promise of someone as savvy and clever and well-versed in social deduction games as Rob Cesternino going out on the second murder was impossibly disappointing. It especially sucked to hear his post-game press, where he talked about how he wanted to model what a successful Faithful game could look like. That's a niche the show hasn't yet explored in great depth, and as Faithful strategies emerge as seasons go on, it would have been nice to see a leap forward in that respect.

But... smart players make for juicy targets. And it's why as the show approaches its endgame, it feels like the most gullible people find themselves drawn into the Traitors' web.

The Traitors itself is not a perfect show. Hell, it's not a perfect game. The challenges themselves might be grand and opulent but they have little weight in the grander scope of play. They allow players to win more money in the end, but the game isn't about to leave people with nothing after all their hard work. Beyond that, they offer very little insight or clues into the identity of any Traitors, especially early on.

Because of this, the show is a lot of stumbling in the dark. There are efforts to make the Traitors do risky moves, like murders in plain sight or marking players for death, but in three seasons have any of those assignments ever led to even a hint that's put Faithfuls on the right track? And no, Jam Jam shouting about Lisa doesn't count. He could have done that with anyone and that player would have been toast almost immediatley. Without even the tiniest bits of concrete evidence, it leaves Faithfuls directionless, and any Traitors they find come about almost by landing on names where certainly one of them has to be a traitor. Once a name comes up in any reasonable way, players almost never drop it until that suspect is out and they know either way where those loyalties lie.

There have been some good changes between seasons. Being more liberal with the shields in the first half helps to rein in the Traitors' options for murder. With a tighter focus, it means Faithful don't have to cast their suspicion nets across nearly two dozen players in the early game, and that means the Traitors (supposedly) have to tread a little more carefully.

Also, the idea of a Secret Traitor is a good one. Dropping the audience into the roles of the Faithful helps to show just how hard it is to be a Faithful in the game. Not only that, but it makes it hard for the Traitors to know who they can trust outside of their turret, especially when the Secret Traitor further limits the murder options beyond even what the Faithfuls know. It probably needed to be not someone so completely on the outside like Donna Kelce to be a maximally effective implementation. Still, the mechanic is definitely one the show should explore more as it goes on.

For all those criticisms, though, the joys of the game are obvious.

First, the social strategy of building alliances, trust, and knowledge is inherently, gloriously dramatic. Every time any game like this happens, be it Mafia, Werewolf, Secret Hitler, or Blood on the Clocktower, I'm a hundred percent in. And... I'm usually not even very good at these games (I know too much of the basic rules of strategies, one-eyed person in a world of the blind and all that; that makes me an easy target), but they're just so fun all the time. Just the knowledge that there is inherent deception within a group delivers an incredible tension and paranoia that no one (even those who have actual information) can shake. While Survivor is almost certainly a better game and a better show, that aspect of The Traitors is always going to entice me more than one that's just about building trust and voting people out.

(And not for nothing, but this means the show really doesn't need to try so hard to derive drama from the proceedings. Again, the stakes and intensity live in its very DNA. It took many Survivor players entire seasons to figure out the complexities of that game. Drop anyone into social deduction games and they'll understand what's happening immediately...)

Second: the Alan Cumming of it all. It doesn't matter that the challenges are meaningless or that the show milks every dramatic music sting, significant glance, or casual reference as a potentially cataclysmic incident. The challenges work because they're camp. Alan Cumming works as the perfect host because he is at his most scene chewing. He shows up with the most insane, garish, glorious fashion I've seen this side of the Drag Race runway, and that has incentivized contestants to bring their most opulent styles to the castle. Cumming's penchant for the opera and elevated reality of this twisty little murder game works because he plays it completely straight. He's devious and grandiloquent and four seasons in I still can't get enough of it.

And also... sometimes you get a really great win. Cerie's win in season one was unbelievable, but the two subsequent seasons featured Traitors who turned on each other, Britta'd it, and bungled their endgame. While Rob's win this season felt assured as soon as Candiace went out, that doesn't mean it's any less delicious watching him ruthlessly hew his way through the entire cast to get to an ending where he is literally the last person standing. He played a tremendous game, and has definitely proved that the way to win this game is not by controlling the castle and every vote. It's all about the relationships he built and the trust he earned, and he rode that all the way to end.

Now I have to go watch like three seasons of Canada, three seasons of UK (plus another season that's their Celebrity variant), and two seasons of New Zealand. Because... man it's just a great way to kill some time.

Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir's third book) is a big movie release coming out in a few weeks. Drew Goddard adapted Weir's first novel The Martian into a major motion picture from director Ridley Scott, and Goddard is back on the pen for this big, sexy, hard sci-fi blockbuster. This time, though, directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie) are in the director's chair, marking their first time directing since 22 Jump Street a dozen years ago.

I'll do something bigger when the movie comes out, but I read the book over the past month in anticipation. I won't spoil any of it here (though the film's trailers give away a major development in the story; they have to put it in the trailer, but imagine if they didn't...), but I will that it's a very solid book and the template for a great movie. Lord & Miller (known for their plucky, comic tones) are a much better fit for Weir's big laughs and sardonic voice than Ridley Scott (whose films are rarely very funny; if they ever are, it feels by accident). The stakes of the film are so much bigger than The Martian and such that it supercharges that story's joyous unity of peoples working on a single task into something with a more global scope.

To capture the scope of Earth's impending cataclysm and the solution to the problem, Weir uses math. A lot of math. And also physics. And biology. And while I didn't quite follow some of it, it's surprising how high school science I remember. Dusting off my two years of chemistry helped comprehend the discussions of elements, gasses, and atoms. Sure, my one year of college level physics helped with a bit of the discussion of gravity and motion... and a rudimentary understanding of relativity helped to explain the peculiarities of space travel. But I was remarkably proud of figuring out an aspect of radiation and how it went undetected at a key moment in the story well before the characters.

Though... that was also a thing I learned in chemistry.

Regardless, Project Hail Mary was a delightful surprise and hit exactly the spot I needed it to. Great characters, strong emotional arc, big epic story, lots of math. The imagination to create this problem and how it works was so clever and interesting. Even the "main character has selective amnesia" story wound up justifying itself by the end. Very good stuff, and if the movie is as good as I suspect it will be (and early reviews seem promising) it's going to be a hell of a ride.

It Was Just An Accident

I've watched just about all of the films I'm going to for the Oscars. The only one I haven't gotten to at this point is Blue Moon, and really that's just to watch the Ethan Hawke performance. The current plan is to do a write up next week with predictions and pre-caps and all that goodness. We'll see if I get there.

Of all the films I watched, though, the one that I keep thinking about is It Was Just An Accident.

Nominated for Best International Picture, the film is the dark comic journey of a man with a traumatic backstory who thinks he's found the perfect opportunity for vengeance. A lot of the joy of the movie is discovering it as it goes, but it wound up blowing me away at its balance of humor and drama. It does so much with so little, and really manages to convey the anguish and seriousness of its subject matter and just how difficult it is to move on in the wake of such victimhood.

And it's also about the way minor inconveniences like needing getting gas can really ruin any party if there was already stuff going on.

Surprising that it didn't make the cut for Best Picture (the joke being that there's never room for three foreign language films in the category; Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent took the two this year). It's my vote for the one that should win the category, and there's at least three Best Picture nominees I could easily cast aside for this one.

The other films in Best International are insanely good, but there's something so all-encompassing about the way It Was Just An Accident strives to be about so many different perspectives on one task. As the main character's van fills up and his passengers each bring a small piece of evidence that can help the enactment of justice (or revenge), it shows just how universal the suffering was despite each individual's wholly unique experiences. There are people who didn't have it so bad and even one who only knows of what's going on by proxy. There are people who have only a tangential tie, and the main character refuses to stoop to the level of the suffering of others in the name of his own peace of mind.

It's a terrific film, and as I've done more and more diving into international cinema, I find myself drawn to films from the Middle East because of its culture. Between the War in Iraq starting when I was in middle school or Obama signing the JCPOA or the current President unilaterally pulling us into a war with Iran, it seems insane to think that we meddle as hard as we do without the understanding of what is actually going on. These are rich, modern cultures with values not so dissimilar to ours.

Last summer, I was having lunch with a family member and we were talking about Iran and the geopolitical situation therein. Trump had just ordered the bombing of Iran's nuclear facilities and we were debating the virtues of such a strike. He was very for it, thinking Iran was a scourge of a country and wholly worthy of flattening in the name of global security. Or, at least, he really thought the Iranian government was a terrible entity that needed to go. He celebrated the Iranian people, especially the idea that they, en masse, did not want their head of state. He spoke frankly about how he wished they would rise up and overthrow their government and be the cultural powerhouse and leaders in the Middle East that he knew they could be.

While I don't disagree that we shouldn't be harming the Iranian people, I wonder if he watches movies from Iran. Movies like It Was Just An Accident or A Separation (which, admittedly, I have not seen). I wonder if he even knows about a movie like Chess on the Wind, or seen any movie that's as mindblowing as Close-Up.

I don't pretend to be an expert, but everyone could benefit from seeing this. If movies are mass culture and exist to create bonds of empathy, I can think of nothing better than a film like this, where the primal nature of something like revenge clashes with the complexity of life and its infinite web that connects all of us.

It's the sort of movie we absolutely need right now. It almost certainly won't win Best International. Sentimental Value and The Secret Agent getting Best Picture noms increase their profile so much that any other nominees will have a hard time surmounting those odds. But it's still an incredibly worthy of cinematic canon, my favorite of those three, and one of the best films of 2025.

Coming soon...

Decided to move Criterion Check-ins out of this post. These are too long as is and adding half a dozen mini-reviews is just asking for more trouble at this point. Look for that whenever there's an opening this month.

Other than that... more reviews of The Pitt, something about the extremely not-well-received Scream 7, the aforementioned Oscars Pre-cap, and then probably something about Star Trek Starfleet Academy.

See you out there!