September 2025 Check In

Hello! We’ve gone through another month! Hope you’ve been safe and well!

The first half of the month was hectic. Lots of little trips and life getting in the way of all the work to do. I had almost two months lead time on watching the films for the Top 250 Rewatch Project and now that’s gone. I watched Before Sunset this week for a review that’ll come out next week and the current goal is to try to keep at least this current lead time. Ideally more.

That early disjointedness has also meant a mad blitz of movie watching over the past fortnight. Luckily, I checked everything off the list and this month can be a clean slate of various different projects and hopefully nothing comes up that completely derails things.

So here’s what I’ve been up to…

Criterion Challenge

I finished the 2025 Criterion Challenge! It’s crazy that getting just those six last movies done was a task and a half. Half of them being in a foreign language didn’t help. No shade on foreign language films, but watching them requires more focus than English films. When they’re emotionally complex like Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, it can mean I watch like an hour of the movie before realizing I haven’t engaged with the film like I need to. And so I have to stop and restart it another time.

Regardless, it’s done now, and I’ll do a post in the future that’s a full proper recap of this year and the various highlights (especially in the back half). Hopefully I will get to that by month-end, but we’ll see.

Coens Rewatch

Been rewatching the Coen Brothers movies to coincide with the associated Blank Check miniseries. I’m still catching up on listening to their episodes (more on this below), but it’s nice to only have to dedicate to one(ish) movie a week for them.

The Coens, though. Man what a pair. Fargo and The Big Lebowski are as good as ever, and O Brother Where Art Thou? will always have a strange place in my heart because it’s like… the one movie that I remember my grandfather really liking enough to go to a theater.

The big re-eval came with The Hudsucker Proxy. I didn’t think much of it the first time. The script (which the Coens co-wrote with Sam Raimi) felt a bit on their zanier, cartoonier end, outside of the realm of screwball comedy that they have lots of fun with. Rewatching it, though, the film’s politics and style felt unique within their canon. Also a special shoutout to Jennifer Jason Leigh who absolutely smashes it as a fast-talking reporter (maybe the most fastest-talking reporter in film history) who’s investigating Hudsucker Industries.

Will also add that maybe ten minutes in, my partner blurted out “wait a minute. Is this the film with the hula hoop?” And then got so excited. It brought back childhood memories and ended up being a movie they’ve been trying to rewatch for decades but couldn’t figure out what it was. What a joy of a rediscovery.

Lynch Rewatch

The biggest reason I’ve slowed down on listening to Blank Check (currently stalled out in June 2024) is because I wanted to rewatch all of Lynch’s work before getting to the Blank Check episodes that covered him. It was a really fun idea, but it’s way easier to listen to the podcast than it is to find time to watch an entire miniseries worth of movies. It doesn’t help that this means doing a full Twin Peaks rewatch.

I’ll write more about this soon but Twin Peaks (specifically those first two seasons) is a show I’ve always struggled to love, especially considering its reputation. I’ve made it through the first season, but I’m dreading the back half of season two. That’s going to be a big fat grind of bad episodes after they solve the murder of who killed Laura Palmer (which, spoilers, they do solve), so I’m not looking forward to everything on the other side of that. Especially The Return, which I really loved.

PaulQuentinThomasTarantinoAnderson-athon

One Battle After Another is out this month and it’s almost certainly going to tank at the box office. But who cares about box office? A new Paul Thomas Anderson movie is very exciting. So that’s a nice ticking clock for me to get this rewatch project done. A few quick reviews on this…

Death Proof

The forgotten Tarantino movie. I’d only seen this once before as part of the Grindhouse double feature when it first came out. I rewatched this twice, once as the Grindhouse cut and then as the fully intended two hour cut. The full cut is certainly superior, featuring not just the lap dance (humorously not present because of a “missing reel”) but also an extended introduction to the second half of the movie, where Stuntman Mike first comes across Abernathy, Kim, and Lee while they stopover at a convenience store before picking up Zoe from the airport.

Death Proof will probably always be Tarantino’s weakest film. The first half is less interesting than the second. But the final 20 minutes, with its extended, old school 70s muscle car chase is one of the great action sequences of Tarantino’s career.

The Master

Billed as Paul Thomas Anderson’s take on the origins of Scientology, it’s one of the great leading performances by gone-too-soon Phillip Seymour Hoffman. While the organization at the center shares DNA with scientology’s ideology and cult-like aspects, all of that is window dressing for a film about masters and subordinates, blind-loyalty and self-control. It’s evocative and powerful, though hard to rank in the grand scheme of PTA’s movies. What stands outs is his love for the characters in his movies. He finds them infinitely fascinating. Stoked to rewatch this someday.

Inglourious Basterds

Tarantino’s stone cold masterpiece. His dialogue is as sharp as ever but for all the trappings he’s so good at building tension within every given scene. There’s small explosions of violence especially in the end, but the things I always think about are the extended opening dialogue scene in the farmhouse and Shosonna’s interactions with the various Nazis as they court her theater for their big premiere and the lengthy attempt to extract Bridget von Hammersmark from the underground bar. Like with Dunkirk, Tarantino strips out almost all of the war in the name of long spans of time without fighting. God it’s just… so good.

Inherent Vice

PTA’s crime noir set in Los Angeles follows a labyrinthine plot, but it’s strangely hypnotic. I understand why people didn’t super connect with it at the time, but for all the best films, that first viewing is just the beginning of a conversation. This felt more inscrutable than The Master and I’m sad that I’ve missed seeing so many PTAs in a theater, where I could lock myself in with the meticulous craft of one of the great filmmakers of now. Also I had no idea Katherine Waterson could be so entrancing.

Django Unchained

This is maybe the best of Tarantino mashing up genres to create something new. The performances at the center are all terrific, though it’s wild that Sam Jackson doesn’t come in until the halfway mark (though he perfectly understands the assignment). Really, though, this is the film that cements Christoph Waltz as maybe the best pairing between Tarantino and actor. Waltz is tremendous, but there’s something about his pairing with Tarantino, where he’s almost impish in his motivations. It’s hard to know what he’s thinking at any given moment, and the affable nature mixed with his propensity to do sudden, horrific violence makes for a capitvating performance both times he’s worked with Tarantino. It’s not unfair to say Waltz is the great actor/director team-up of Tarantino’s career.

Honestly, if Tarantino’s next film (whatever it is) will be his last, the thing I want most is one more great Tarantino-directed Christoph Waltz performance. No matter what, it’s gonna be an insane cast. But… man it’s gotta have Christoph Waltz. It just has to.

Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino

Continuing the Tarantino kick, I slammed out Cinema Speculation, which is Tarantino’s book about 70s cinema. His breadth of knowledge is staggering, and a lot of it is him showing off his knowledge and holding court. But getting inside his film brain is fascinating and hearing him be critical or lauding of films I both have and haven’t heard of is worth the time if that’s a thing that interests. It makes even more sense of how he got to making the movies he makes.

Also I’m glad I posted that review of Taxi Driver when I did. I read Tarantino’s essay the day after I posted and if that hadn’t happened, his words almost certainly would have been rattling around in my brain and would have skewed my clarity. Phew.

Star Wars: From A Certain Point of View

Been nibbling away at this while waiting to start Isles of the Emberdark. It’s insane that this anthology of ancillary short stories that all intersect with A New Hope is almost a decade old. Time flies.

As with all anthologies, the stories themselves can be hit or miss. The ones that try to tie too deeply into Star Wars itself always feel a bit sweatier than the ones that don’t. Some are more obvious than others. Like… of course there’s a story from R5-D4’s perspective as Owen Lars almost buys him. And there’s at least two stories (“The Bucket” and “Change of Heart”) that are about members of the Imperial military who find themselves suddenly changed by the power of the Rebellion, the scales falling from their eyes due to whatever it is they experienced via the story. “Screw this, I’m joining the Rebellion” works if it’s like… one person. But more than one and it’s starting to feel a bit schmaltzy and romantic.

Given where I’m at with Star Wars, I’m always going to find myself more interested the farther we get away from the main plot of the film. When writers play scenes out again (even if from another POV), it just invites unfair comparisons. Trying to get their “when you watch this movie you’ll think about me” in rather than using a small bolt as the springboard to creating something innovative. I know they tried to make the Mos Eisley Cantina segment as interesting as possible, but considering we live in a world where Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina exists (regardless of canonization at this point), it feels like well-trod ground.

That said, by the halfway point there are a few standouts so far. “The Sith of Data Work” by Ken Liu and “An Incident Report” by Daniel M. Lavery both explore the bureaucracy of the Empire, where the former focuses on a bureaucrat who uses the Empire’s infinite bureaucracy for her own self-interested goals and the latter is an eponymous write-up formally complaining about Darth Vader committing an act of violence during a meeting of Imperial’s high-level commanders1. Partial as I am to Griffin McElroy, his short story felt very much like a fresh writer, shifting his focus from RPG GM-ing to prose; but the ending really brought it together and made me care for that little Jawa at the center.

Excited for the rest of the book, especially because the next two stories are Keiron Gillen writing a Dr. Aphra story (and I love Dr. Aphra!) and Glen Weldon’s gay romance on the Death Star with special central character that little mouse droid carrying messages between the two (my partner really loved this one).

Sandee Boyz

It looks like we’ll be recording a new episode of The Sandee Boyz soon, with Chris & I wrapping up our read of Gardens of the Moon. Soon as that’s done, we’ll jump right into Isles of the Emberdark and Topher will definitely be joining us for that. After that we’ll get back to Malazan with Deadhouse Gates. And let me tell you. As the various threads of Gardens of the Moon wrapped up then spun out into what’s next… I’m chomping at the bit to continue. God. That series is just so good.

Coming soon…

And… weirdly… I have a loose schedule for the next few already vaguely laid out. So… here’s what you can expect (and… if anything else comes up I’ll probably find a way to slot it in).

• 9/3 - The Abyss
• 9/5 - The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
• 9/8 - Emmys Preview
• 9/10 - Terminator 2: Judgment Day
• 9/12 - Before Sunset
• 9/15 - Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2
• 9/17 - True Lies
• 9/19 - The Royal Tenenbaums
• 9/22 - TBD (but maybe a review of Ryan La Sala’s The Dead of Summer)
• 9/24 - Titanic
• 9/26 - Synecdoche, New York
• 9/29 - Alien: Earth season 1
• 10/1 - Avatar
• 10/3 - Twelve Angry Men

Have a terrific month and thanks for reading!