Recent Posts

• November 11, 2025

  In a Violent Nature

  In 2007, I wrote an article for Cracked.com (still online!, though all the pictures seem to be gone) about easily escapable movie monsters, in which I described the way to escape a Michael/Jason as “maintain[ing] a brisk walking pace in an open area such as a field”. In a Violent Nature is basically rural Friday the 13th, except from the perspective of a Michael/Jason as he walks quietly and very slowly around the woods, butchering people in imaginatively gory fashion. It’s like someone sat down to prove that a large man walking very slowly could in fact catch and kill an entire group one by one.

• November 09, 2025

  His Girl Friday (1940)

  This is a genre I haven’t seen too much of, and doesn’t really exist any more, but I always thoroughly enjoy. That is, the screwball romance, a movie where two people talk at each other at three hundred miles per hour from start to finish while a plot happens somewhere. Cary Grant (have heard of) and Rosalind Russell (have not) are the talkers in question. He is a newspaper editor and she was both his star reporter and wife, and is now neither. She comes to tell him she’s marrying some other dude, tomorrow, so he tricks her into sticking around because he knows she can’t resist a good story. The story is that of Earl Williams, on death row and due to be executed, and the sheriff and mayor are pushing it through because he supposedly killed a black cop, and they don’t want to lose the black vote.

• November 02, 2025

  Hard Boiled

  I watched what felt like a lot of John Woo in the late ’90s and early ’00s, but looking back now at the list it was pretty much just Face/Off, Broken Arrow and Mission: Impossible II. I opted not to go see Red Cliff when I was living in Japan, as it was in Mandarin with Japanese subtitles, so I figured I wouldn’t get that much out of it. It seems now he’s making “Peacock original” pictures, which feels like a step down, but he’s 79 years old so he probably doesn’t have to keep working. Regardless, I had never taken the trip back in time to his Hong Kong heyday.

• October 25, 2025

  Toronto Waterfront Marathon 2025

  Now I’ve done a winter training in -20 and blasting sleet, and summer training in +30 and sweltering humidity, I can safely say that the summer is harder. You can layer up in winter, but there’s a limit to what you can take off in the summer without getting arrested or dying of blood loss. There were several training runs in July and August that I crashed on, or just bailed out early and went home. I would arrive back absolutely drenched in sweat, despite having left the house before 7am, or after the sun went down. Pretty much every single time I tried to go fast, as in under 4 mins/km, I would wipe out. I, to some extent, ignored this, seeing as the race itself was in October and would presumably be at least under 20 degrees. It wasn’t total carnage, “general aerobic” runs, ie just going out and coming back, were mostly fine even when 30+ km, and the Big Test, the 23km at marathon pace in mid September went kind of fine. I did stop during it though, having gotten a stitch and some breathing problems which I put down to the rib I broke in August.

• October 18, 2025

  Triangle

  I enjoy a time loop. Jess goes off on a yacht with a bunch of friends and friends-of-friends, including a Hemsworth, and they get caught in a huge storm and capsize. I will say off the bat that there were very ropey effects here, we’re all just keeping our eyes on the prize until we get onto the actual physical set that we have, which is a giant cruise ship with supposedly nobody on it. Except there is, in fact, at least one person on it, who tries and more or less succeeds to kill everyone. Spoilers, it’s actually Jess from the recent past.