Recent Posts

• July 04, 2025

  I Accidentally Adopted a Baby Raccoon

  I got this app on my phone to identify birds, and it was all cool and fun until it became clear that there are precisely three birds in my general area: Sparrow, American Robin and Northern Cardinal. (Side: cardinals are cool and I think they’re great. Fat little red bastards). Yesterday morning I heard a new bird, and grabbed my phone to see what it was. Sparrow? That sounds nothing like a sparrow. This app is bullshit. Cornell will hear about this. I gave up and went back to work until I heard Jones going ballistic out front, and the bird noise getting louder and louder. Shit, he’s trying to kill it. I burst out the door, grabbed him and hurled him inside, and discovered that the bird app had not identified the noise because it was in fact a very distressed baby raccoon.

• July 02, 2025

  Funny Games

  I’m getting more and more annoyed by this movie in hindsight. The set up is a home invasion, two young guys tie up and traumatise a family of three in their holiday home on a lake somewhere. I came into this knowing at least the above, so when one of the guys keeps asking for eggs, and “accidentally” dropping them and then, oops, dropping the phone into the sink so it breaks, the path was clear. I had got the impression, though, that this was a notorious, hard to watch indictment of media violence while also having its cake and eating it by being extremely violent itself.

• July 01, 2025

  Blow Up

  So the “blow-up” here is not a bomb, but in fact a photo getting bigger. The “plot” is that photographer Thomas accidentally takes a photo of a murder while chasing a couple through a park, and catches it when he enlarges the photo. This plot takes roughly fifteen minutes of screen time. What else do we get?

• June 30, 2025

  28 Years Later

  I saw someone make a Brexit comparison here. The setup is that there’s a small (sort of) island that’s separated from the mainland by a raised path but only in low tide. Otherwise they’re completely isolated, agrarian (though I don’t see how they’d have, for example, a tech sector), hunters and, I dunno, maybe gatherers. The mainland is full of different kinds of zombies (someone even says the Z-word), fat ones, fast ones, “alphas”, pregnant ones. I don’t think this quite works as a Brexit metaphor unless you actually consider Europe to be full of rage virus infected flesh eaters. That’s Farage and co, I suppose. I mean, there are good things out there, that’s kind of a major plot point, but it can’t be stressed how much there really are murderous zombies. Maybe it just means the French.

• June 28, 2025

  Klute

  Wow I somehow went more than a full month without watching a single movie. I don’t know if that’s ever happened before, save for times when I was going from Cambodian hostel to Burmese temple complex. Klute is one of those movies I was vaguely aware of as being good (Jane Fonda won the Oscar for it) but knew almost nothing beyond that. Donald Sutherland is the title character, despite not really being the protagonist or the subject of the story. He’s not even curator of the Jebediah Springfield museum.