Recent Posts

• 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.

• May 18, 2025

  The Long Goodbye

  The Robert Altman journey continues. This time Elliot Gould is Philip Marlowe, Raymon Chandler’s private detective, who lives on the top of some kind of tower with a collection of mostly nude women across the bridge in the next one. Marlowe spends the first ten minutes of the movie trying, and failing, to feed his cat; first by putting together some unholy concoction that the cat - correctly - bashes off the countertop, and then by changing the label on a can to try and fool the cat into believing he’s eating his preferred brand. It does not work. Marlowe being outsmarted by a cat gives us a good anchor of what we should expect when his friend comes up the lift and asks for a lift to Mexico. Soon after, the police arrive and say that he’s murdered his wife.

• April 26, 2025

  Boston Marathon 2025

  Training Highlights