May 2026 Update

According to Ghost, this is my 150th entry. That's a crazy milestone.

Last month was a bit of a roller coaster. A project at work took over a ton of my brain space and it was really hard to get out thoughts to write anything in the face of it. Now that I have the distance of a week, I'm starting to appreciate just how much it knocked me off my game and how much managing events like that (which I thoroughly love doing) is a skill that I really do have nailed down.

Those pre-day jitters, though. They're real.

But as a result of all that the writing really fell off in ways that have eaten away at my brain in the meantime. I wanted the finale of The Pitt review to go out in relatively short time after the finale, but I missed that by two full weeks. That in itself was creating a major blockage that kept me from focusing on the other series that I want to start (more on that in a minute), and so there's this really unfortunate gap in there where it's just all Pitt reviews and little else to show for it. That sucks and I don't really want that to happen again.

Regardless. This is a check-in and it's worth thinking about what I've done this month. Funny enough, while it felt perpetually like I wasn't absorbing much, just the rundown of stuff below is enough to make my head spin quite a bit.

The other thing that happened was a confluence of events that resulted in a major retreat to serious comfort food. Just writing that sentence quickly spiraled into me typing way too much here so now I cut and pasted that into something that will be another post entirely.

Other things coming up... Hacks is back. Summer movie season is upon us. We're approaching Emmy eligibility cutoff at the end of the month (so I have a bunch to catch up on). And we're two and a half months out from The Odyssey, which means I really need to start putting out these write-ups on the films of Christopher Nolan. Based on my schedule, I'm already a week behind on that (Following should have gone out this week), so... best get to it so I can squeeze in a whole extra week sometime between now and mid-July.

Anyways. Here's what's been up...

Speed Racer

With a new 4K restoration out on home video release this month, Warner Bros. took advantage of a slower April to re-release Speed Racer in a theater. Written and directed by the Wachowskis, it came out in May of 2008 and suffered box office death at the hands of Iron Man. The Wachowski's themselves have always been far ahead of their time, but the moviegoing public have only been on their wavelength once (The Matrix), and every other time they've come out with something it's been super out there, far beyond what audiences are expecting of them.

When I first saw Speed Racer in 2008, it was a couple weeks after its release. Reviews had praised the spectacle and the story's focus on the tight bonds in the Racer family, but the theater I went to (which also happened to be one of the first times I flew solo at a movie) had an audience filled to the brim with kids (and their parents) ready to zone out on some of the brightest, most stunning visuals available to them. The presence of Chim-Chim and Spritle only added to the pyre of the heightened reality's all-ages nature. The two of them specifically bounced off the walls and lived in a world that felt like the anime characters come to life.

It's not that Speed Racer is a movie I dismissed so much as a movie that made total sense as to why it didn't make any money at the box office.

In the nearly twenty years since, it's had a stealth appreciation from those who care. It's become a cult classic, one of those litmus tests of "real ones know". As time has passed, the kid stuff bothers me less (or at least it grates on me less and is probably the biggest turnoff to most audiences) and all of the family stuff really has become the beating heart of the film. Throw in the Wachowski's distrust of systems, business, and capitalism and there's one hell of a movie.

Seeing it on the big screen again (and in IMAX) was an incredible experience. Bright, colorful, an utter delight to look at in every scene, be it the stunning locales of Casa Cristo or the almost noir look to Lover's Lane. It really is one of the great movies in a filmography loaded with incredible offerings.

Weirdly enough, writing about it here made me think I somehow missed putting it in the hopper of films I considered for the Top 250. When I checked my notes, it turns out that Speed Racer came in at #292 on the rough draft ranking, slotting in nicely between Symbiopsychotaxiplasm and Raising Arizona. It didn't even make the list of Honorable Mentions, and... weirdly I feel comfortable in that. For now anyways. There's no real room for it in those 300 movies, and I can't think of anything I would toss out so I could shove it in. (And certainly not while In the Mood for Love's absence still haunts me. No I will never get over this...)

If anything, Speed Racer a movie I respect and appreciate and enjoy and hold up as a good movie, but I can't imagine ever just being in the mood to just put the thing on (which is a major criteria for any Top Films list I make). If I'm going to watch Speed Racer I'm going to watch the racing sequences, which are unbelievably thrilling and exciting beyond just about anything out there. For as good as the family stuff is, it pales in comparison to the visceral response that comes from watching Speed and Racer X blast across the desert, using their tools and weapons and defensive capacities to stave off all the nonsense attacks of their opponents' vehicles.

This imbalance, where nothing else in the movie can compare with the visual feast on display is the biggest disconnect. The Matrix is still my favorite movie, but Reloaded's massive ideas and bold ambition and Cloud Atlas's scribbly epic all appeal to me more than their singular kid's movie. But that's the big reason, really. I usually flinch at things targeted squarely at children and that's not changed in decades. Maybe I'll eventually come around to it enough for it to finally break into my favorite films. It might just get there some day. Unfortunately, it's not there yet, and I don't know what it would take to get there.

The Rip

This Joe Carnahan-directed, Ben Affleck & Matt Damon-starring cop thriller about a money bust gone sideways garnered some minor acclaim when it hit Netflix back in January. Like Crime 101, it's the sort of low-budget crime flick that Hollywood used to make a ton of all the time, and the solid cast helped elevate it to something worth paying attention to.

It's not gonna win any awards. Hell, it's barely cracked my Top 10 for the year and there's little chance it'll even end up in the Top 20. Yet that doesn't matter with an experience so delightful. It's taut, tense, with good twists and turns. Great characters who play in this claustrophobic pressure cooker with aplomb. It's always a blast to watch movie stars do movie star things and... well... I'm a sucker for a good crime movie, especially when there's underlying conspiracies, double crosses, and insanely tense sequences. Even then, there's not a ton of action (at least, not until the end), but it's such a slow deliberate build of labyrinthine plot mechanics and a lot of people sitting around talking that I hardly cared.

Good stuff.

The Night Agent Season 3

Speaking of Netflix, I slammed out the third season of this political espionage thriller from The Shield creator Shawn Ryan. This installment falls away from the central dynamic of the first two but continues the idea of many threads threatening to unravel a massive conspiracy at the highest levels of government.

Immediately, the absence of Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan) left the show with less of a tether for Night Agent Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso). As such, this has rapidly transformed into an almost modern-day 24 (albeit without that series' central conceit). Characters die because verisimilitude dictates they would. Others switch sides when it becomes clear what they're fighting for. At least it's not some right wing fever dream (though there are times where it feels like it easily could be).

If there's a problem with The Night Agent, it's that the scope of the series has ballooned far away from where it started. This season's conspiracy spills out of the end of last season, and this much chaos at the top of the Executive branch over the span of so few years would be enough to rattle even the least informed citizens of the country.

There's still more coming. Netflix picked it up for a fourth season a couple months ago, and it looks like that will shoot in Los Angeles (and presumably take place here). Exotic as the east coast is, it's rad as hell that Shawn Ryan is staging a one-man war to maintain television as a viable medium. Sure, this show has a pretty impressive budget, but it's not breaking the bank like other prestige dramas, and Ryan has allocated that money to make sure that practices that have fallen away (like sending writers to set to help produce/oversee their episode's filming) still have a role to play in making his television series.

This isn't as good as Ryan's big breakout success story, but it's mostly a solid reminder of what television is possible with the institutional wisdom of a dude who came up in the trenches that facilitated the Golden Age of Television™. Every Night Agent episode is a single or a double, and that's a lot more than I can say about most other series (especially on Netflix) where a lot of episodes are lucky if they even catch a foul tip before striking out.

The Drama

Zendaya is going to be in four films this year: The Odyssey, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and Dune: Part Three are all forthcoming. Given that she wasn't in any releases last year (because she was making all of these and Euphoria), the only thing that makes this stat better is that of those four movies, the only one where she doesn't star alongside Robert Pattinson is Spider-man.

They gotta be close friends by this point.

Or at the very least they each have great teams telling them to work on great projects.

The Drama is an A24 film that follows the Zendaya and Pattinson as an engaged couple, and follows them the week before their wedding. That alone is madness, but early in the film Zendaya's character reveals a huge secret/"the worst thing she's ever done". I won't spoil what that is here, but it relates to an insane hot button issue that is absolutely ludicrous to consider putting in even a slightly mainstream movie. Writer/director Kristoffer Borgli doesn't flinch away from the topic's horror, but he also doesn't center on the larger ramifications of its presence in society (except to say "hey this as a thing is bad"). Instead, what he does is use that to explore what it's like for Pattinson's character to be stuck in an engagement where the woman he is about the marry might not be the woman he thought she was.

It's enough to drive him crazy, which it does. But what makes the film so excellent is the way it questions societal behavior and the hipocrisy at its core. Early in the film, during the scene where the two couples share "the worst thing they've ever done", it's easy to miss that Pattinson's character basically cops out. He doesn't reveal anything he's done that qualifies for this game of brutal emotional honesty, whereas Zendaya's character lays her deepest darkest secret bare for the three people closest to her.

It's a film built on hypocrisy, forgiveness, trust, and companionship. It's about how the actions that individuals take are always more important than the ones people consider (however seriously) and then don't act upon. It's twisted and weird and exactly the sort of avant-garde exploration of a fabulous theme that always tickles my fancy. I had a blast.

Mother Mary

Anyways... it's quaint that Zendaya's in four movies this year.

Anne Hathaway is in five.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 came out this weekend and that's already her second. The first is a David Lowery film about the relationship between a massive pop superstar (Hathaway) and the fashion designer (Sam, played by Michaela Coel) with whom she had a falling out with on her rise to fame. It's extremely small, with almost the entire film taking place inside the Coel's character's barn-workshop where they discuss the nature of their respective careers and how they've found each other together now. There's also scenes that take place in massive stadiums where Mother Mary is performing for rabid fans, but those are all on a remarkably small scale and feel like where most of the budget went.

In listening to others talk about Mother Mary, it usually comes down to the strange direction the film heads in the back half, once Mary and Sam start to exorcise their various demons. Lowery described it as "phantasmagoric", and it's easy to see why. The movie gets extremely weird, very abstract, deeply metaphorical. Enough that a lot of viewers say the movie gets away from Lowery somewhat and it's not exactly clear what exactly is going on.

As someone who generally loves when movies travel into the strange and impressionistic, this was right up my alley. The play-like exchange between Mary & Sam is electric, and Hathaway's performance (while very wet) is as of someone haunted by something and who can't seem to escape whatever it might be. Coel's Sam, however, is cold, offputting, and entrancing. When the movie does take a swerve into where it goes, it earns it, and even if Lowery loses the thread of what exactly is happening, there is a truth and honesty and openness to these characters and the situation that it's the sort of thing that does invite interpretation and meaning, rather than closed off, definitive answers. It is, again, the supremacy of emotional logic rather than any sort of tangible, rational, tactile nature of a traditional narrative.

Like The Drama, this is using an element of culture to inform relationships and themes that transcend the pithy concerns of plot and event. Mother Mary is a film about professional partnerships, how they work, the inherent imbalance in them, and the venn diagram of what happens when creative individuals mix their souls together to make something wholly new and unique. These aren't easy questions, but this is also not an easy film, and the more it turns over in my head, the more I find to love about it. The best stories are the ones that burrow into and coil themselves around our brains. If this isn't on my top ten at the end of the year, that's gonna mean that a hell of a lot of great films come out between now and then.

Survivor 50 check-in

Spoilers through the most recent episode...

Last month's check-in centered around the pre-merge game as the show headed into its unprecedented 17 person merge. Since then, the show has offloaded almost half of that number and this coming week's is going to feature a vote with the Final 9.

A bloodbath needed to happen. With 24 players and a 26-day game, Survivor needed to do a major culling, which it did at the merge via the Blood Moon twist: an unprecedented three-tribal, three vote-out night. Just two episodes later it did a first-of-its-kind double elimination, where every tribe member paired with another and then the tribal council votes were for a pair, not individuals.

While the Blood Moon twist was no different from the New Era tribe split that usually happens around Final Ten (albeit with a third tribe), its arbitrary nature made this incredibly frustrating. Sure, it's a bummer to lose those three players, but every single vote out this season has been painful on some level, and there's no one I really want to see go home. But the random draw for tribals meant that the eliminations had very little to do with gameplay and everything to do with what rock they pulled out of the bag. In her exit interviews, Genevieve talked about how being with any other combination of people would have probably saved her, while Jonathan's efforts and success in voting out Kamilla cemented him as the true villain of the season.

None of this is to say Survivor shouldn't have some aspect of randomness. Games thrive on some level of chaos to incorporate and grapple with. But when the twist is actively determining gameplay? The second it affirmed that these groups were going to tribal, the show sealed the fate of these three players without any discussion really happening. That's not good Survivor. That's a fait accompli.

Meanwhile, the tribal with everyone in pairs made for terrific, complicated dynamics. Where people who had inter-alliance pairs made them functionally immune when compared to those who stuck to their alliance (which is really why the vote came down to Chrissy/Coach vs Devens/Aubry). It created true drama, and the best strategic moment in the season to date. (More on this in a minute...)

There's a couple of other things to call out..

The epic fall of Christian to the puzzle on the ocean provided a bitter bookend to his incredible introduction in David v Goliath when he one-shotted that slide puzzle at the marooning. Forcing him to vote for himself sealed his fate as well, but he also had every opportunity to not go on that journey (which is always a risky proposition) and he even won two games of rock-paper-scissors to make it there. Delightful as it was to see Christian this season, his hard gameplay Icarus'd him pretty hard.

Funny enough, it's possible Christian isn't going hard enough. Rick Devens is in rare form, where the Edge of Extinction's absolute chaos agent has gone completely insane. His play to claim his hidden Immunity Idol that he planted at Tribal Council in the pre-merge paid off to lock in his and Aubry's safety for the night. That riding high also made him a serious target, and were it not for Christian's collapse his juicy target might have sent him home instead.

But Devens playing from the bottom as a mad man with house money has always been him at his most entertaining. And that paid off with the most intense mania of this most recent episode, where he takes the information everyone gave him to paint a perfect picture of the Tribe as it exists, blowing up just about every vote and exposing the liars and cross-talkers (like Stephanie) and the ones guiding voting decisions (like Jonathan). All without getting any blood on his hands AND possibly earning Joe's respect because he went and played the pure honesty game? AND on top of that putting his entire game on the line with the coin toss? AND(!) in winning the toss, he doubled the prize pot, earned immunity from the vote, and got an idol in his pocket? With the stakes being "he just goes home if he loses"? What an incredible showing for him.

None of that, though, quite touches the standout player of the season. Because like... how the fuck is Cirie still here? She's one of the most dangerous individuals to ever play, and somehow her name hasn't come up at all? And it's not like she's doing nothing. She won that challenge on Exile and then came back and basically dictated with one sentence that everyone should vote out Chrissy & Coach. She basically turned the most recent episode's vote onto Stephanie (which ended up being a unanimous vote) in the name of saving Ozzy. And she's more or less keeping all the heat off herself while she's doing it?

Her confessionals are incredible. Her storytelling is astounding. She casts shade at every player including her allies and has a total command of everything happening. She is completely in control of this game and no one seems to realize it. And she keeps her threat low by like... eating so much at the auction that she literally vomited and then went back to her charcuterie. And... fuck. The bit where Stephanie literally calls her out and says "you were going to vote for me" and watching her flip that around and completely squirm out of it is one of the greatest things I've ever witnessed in Survivor. Ever. Most people try to avoid people they're going against. Cirie looked Steph right in the face and managed to get out of there without even really lying.

Arguing "you don't know what I was going to do" and then saying "someone says your name as a plan to me? What am I supposed to do? Say no?" God tier shit.

I still have no idea how in the hell Cirie could possibly win even with all of this. She's the sort of player who's an easy mark really soon, and watching her go is going to be insanely painful. But like... god. This is her fifth time playing US Survivor and has still only ever received like... ten votes against her. Total. Ever. And that includes the zero votes she received on Game Changers. I just... I can't believe it. And for all that new player seasons (like China or David v Goliath or Cagayan) can be electric, the storytelling capacity of a returning player season, with all the drama and lore and legend and myth that goes into it and the story these players craft makes this season Exhibit A as to why running nine seasons of the New Era without doing this was a really bad idea.

And also? Stealth great move of the season has clearly been Ozzy teaming up with Cirie and the two of them being Day 1 Number 1's. She's been his guardian angel and he really has no idea.

What an astonishing season. Now they just have to stick the landing...

Coming Soon...

So that's a bunch of what I've been up to. Looking ahead to this month I'm gonna get through a bunch of these Chris Nolan reviews (Following, Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, and probably The Dark Knight) as well as thoughts on Hacks, The Mandalorian & Grogu, the end of Survivor 50, and probably some Criterion films (because I am dreadfully behind on that)...

Oh, and definitely some more Doctor Who. And I'm going to work really, really hard to make sure that this doesn't just devolve into a place for me to expound endlessly about my favorite show. I'll be tempered. Maybe. Probably. Hopefully.