Phil

Highly recommend Nathalie Leger’s book Suite for Barbara Loden as a companion piece

the movie ends where the inevitable rest plays out in hallucinatory, nightmare fashion

It’s a first person Thompson novel, so the narrator’s tone and increasingly ambiguous grip on reality are a big part of the reading experience, and Dewaere manages to embody that onscreen while Corneau depicts the plot and action straightforwardly. The book has another chapter after where

Have you read A Hell of a Woman? Thats another great, quick Thompson, basis for one of the best adaptations, Serie Noire with Patrick Dewaere as the guy coming apart

Feels akin to (and important to me as) Wise Blood or Miss Lonelyhearts in the American lit tradition, the final, stunning eruption into a sort of religious mania and bleak cosmic vision that has been eating at the character without letting up on the bitter comedy.

Apparently inspired in part by Schimberg obsessing over his cleft palate and dealing with lifelong and getting surgery, and then working with Pearson who is intensely charismatic, outgoing, and confident despite being a much more visible condition

Stan get surgery to look like Sebastian Stan and creates a new identity, but then Pearson enters his life and is super outgoing, cool, and way more beloved by everyone, which slowly drives Stan insane as he can’t match Pearson’s charisma

It’s good! It’s written/directed by Aaron Schimberg, who made Chained for Life, and who grew up with a cleft palate. Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson both play guys with, essentially, the Elephant Man condition, which Pearson, who was in Chained and Under the Skin, actually has.

This is kind of the premise of the movie A Different Man

just under the time limit let's goooooooooooooo

There’s a gift links/free articles feed on bsky you can follow, although even with gift links I’m not clicking through to read an NYT opinion piece

“Kill someone else!”

After killing an innocent woman in Minneapolis Trump’s ICE goons are roughing up protestors and firing munitions into people’s faces.

Original video: www.instagram.com/reel/DTOAPs6...

While everything is bad, I did get to meet Chase Infiniti and Teyana Taylor (who gave me a hug), and break the news to Teyana’s family that, while the OBAA screening was going on, she’d been awarded Best Supporting Actress by the National Society of Film Critics

I really liked the novel it’s (very loosely) based on, On Parole by Akira Yoshimura, which is very flat and numb in an interesting way

That was always my favorite Discworld subseries

Great all banger TCM lineup today. The Set-Up is currently on, then it’s Touch of Evil, Scarecrow, Dog Day Afternoon, and High and Low

A panel from Watchmen no. 4 drawn by Dave Gibbons. Script by Alan Moore.

Goodness me, I stayed up late reading and it’s already Partially Muscled Skeleton Screaming by the Perimeter Fence Day. Hope you’ve all been good this year!

Read After Claude by Iris Owens today. Impressively nasty if subsequently hard to recommend 70s NY black comedy. It’s a book with an abrasive narrator delivering slur-heavy, self-pitying accounts of being horribly unpleasant to know, with an ending that manages to still seem really harsh for her

I was going to say something about the media framing around the book, but I’m a random guy that doesn’t live in PA currently and has no influence on national discourse, so this would be a poor use of time on a Saturday for both of us. I’d prefer to drop this and wish you a good rest of your weekend

I don’t know if it’s stupid framing, who cares to go back to read Hillbilly Elegy to see if Shapiro is accurately characterizing Vance’s attitude to Appalachia, and it fits with the general characterization of Vance as a spineless shit who uses people and turns on anyone at the first opportunity.

Have on Once Upon a Time in China while handing out candy, please appreciate this platonic ideal of “British guy in a Hong Kong movie” delivery

There’s convoluted lore because they killed off Jigsaw early in the series but needed to put him in subsequent entries and he’s not magic, leading to an incredibly bizarre timeline as some sequels are part prequel and/or concurrent to another entry

a photo of charlton heston, holding a shiny cd-rom, his arm resting on top of a monitor that is showing a vague image of himself. caption: charlton heston's first interactive epic will be a double disc voyage through the bible.

photo and caption, cd-rom today, magazine (1995) archive.org/details/CDRO...

Screenshot from King of the Hill Season 13, Episode 10

official space ghost coast to coast website circa 2000

Watched about 15 minutes last night after intro-ing for a film society screening. Pretty early on Landau walks into the record label and someone mentions that they still want Brice to put out his outtakes and Landau does a “yeah, right, that’ll be the day.” In other words, yep

Rubio promised to betray U.S. informants to get Trump’s El Salvador prison deal To secure U.S. access to President Nayib Bukele’s notorious CECOT prison, Rubio agreed to turn over several MS-13 leaders central to a long-running Justice Department investigation.

Washington Post report details deal that I and other El Salvador watchers have been talking about for years: Bukele made a pact with MS-13, DOJ has known about it, and now Rubio’s State Dept is helping him cover it up by handing over gang leaders in US custody to Bukele to be silenced.

Was thinking about how intelligence/military use of AI and similar tech is very hard to gauge actual effectiveness of, because being identified by AI will be taken as proof that you were the person being looked for, true or not, and realized this is just the inciting incident of Brazil

Long story short, an actual Nazi doxxing ring. Enough people reported them that they went away for like 12 hours and then Elon personally brought them back. The site is dead. If you’re still on there, go lock your account right now