@brianjroan.bsky.social
Film critic. Photographer. Single father. BrianJRoan.com
Also, if you haven’t read it already:
www.brianjroan.com/essays-revie...
Thank you for making my Bluesky bluer. More blue? Even more bluer.
31.01.2025 16:38 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0I have an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and a MacBook Pro. Why are none of my devices yelling at me to watch this movie?!
16.12.2024 18:52 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0For how much I love McQueen it is insane that I haven’t gotten around to this because I keep forgetting it exists.
16.12.2024 15:38 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0What one man can do another can do! (I’m going to watch this today)
16.12.2024 15:05 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Got followed by a bunch of new people today so I’m gonna signal boost this thing I wrote last week about Conclave.
12.12.2024 01:27 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
weird interaction with a student this week. they kept coming up with weird "facts" ("greek is actually a combination of four other languages") that left me baffled. i said let's look this stuff up together, and they said ok, i'll open a search bar, and they opened... ch*tgpt
and i was like "this is not a search bar" and they were like "yes it is, you can search for anything in here" the thing that made me feel crazy is like. every kid that's using this as a browser is getting new BESPOKE false "facts." this isn't "a widespread misconception about X that stems from how it's taught in schools." each individual kid is now hooked into a Nonsense Machine with the "widespread misconception about X" you can start at a baseline. like, ok, in tenth grade we all talk about X thing from history, and that leaves us with some misguided concepts about X, but we can correct that as students get broader understandings of the world but with this, each child is getting UNIQUE wrong facts they are SURE are correct... because they did what we told them to do! they "looked it up"! they got it from somewhere! it's not a kid making up a belief on hearsay and assumption... it's something they think they LEARNED
this kid was extremely combative with me, and i understood why. i was sitting in front of him and telling him that the internet, a computer, technology, all these supposedly authoritative things... were wrong. and that i, one person, was right. he basically *couldn't* believe me. 8 135 3.8K 97K ... stillorangecrushed @stilloranged. 7h he decided that i was simply a teacher who'd made a mistake. he could check it, after all! he could look it up! he could find the REAL facts. i obviously hadn't done that, i was just an adult who'd decided i was smarter than him. hence the defensiveness. like i said: i understood 5 760 3.2K 82K stillorangecrushed @stilloranged. 7h ... it was so fucking rough. i did my best, but i am one person trying to work against a campaign of misinformation so vast that it fucking terrifies me. this kid is being set up for a life lived entirely inside the hall of mirrors
Well this is grim
06.07.2024 22:15 — 👍 13452 🔁 5347 💬 380 📌 1110There is never a wrong time to watch this movie. That includes caramelizing onions or any other vegetable.
10.12.2024 03:03 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0He’s blocking me. I assume because I follow you? So that’s interesting.
10.12.2024 03:00 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
I watched Conclave maybe a week ago and I was so gobsmacked by its incurious narrative and weirdly safe ending that I felt compelled to write about it. As a Catholic who likes his potential blasphemies searing hot, this one left me feeling cold.
www.brianjroan.com/essays-revie...
If you're seeing many end-year lists for 2024 movies and feel behind, I humbly suggest my list of notable 2024 films that have been added to streaming services in the US. I tried my hardest to include a variety of genres, represented countries, services, etc. letterboxd.com/msnydel/list...
06.12.2024 18:38 — 👍 21 🔁 9 💬 2 📌 0Saw Conclave. Kinda weird how perfunctory it all felt. Very little investigation of the spiritual and, yes, even political power of the papacy. Fails to work to invest the seat with any meaning and so the (surprisingly pretty tame for how much talk it got) twist lacks punch.
30.11.2024 13:13 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Feel like it’s super fucked up to see a robot and go “ah, very neurodivergent-coded.”
That said, yeah it’s a great movie.
The copyright statement from Ephemeral City which reads in part: No part of this book may be used as data for ‘training’ any large language model or as part of any machine learning or neural network architeture. Human creaivity cannot be replicated by doing maths with stolen art. Altman, Andressen, and all their cronies can get fucked. Enquires should be made to the publisher.
Publisher: Do you want to put an LLM clause in the copyright statement?
Me: Definitely. How specific can we get?
Publisher: As specific as you like.
As a man who loves the book so much (read it three times) I was so nervous for how this film would turn out. The aesthetic framework, Gleeson’s Levin, Law’s Karenin, Vikander’s Kitty. Really everyone in the cast is killing it. And the score! Such a remarkable film.
03.09.2024 13:17 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
It's funny how recognizing AI art nowadays is just the same old rules as recognizing the fae in old tales. "Count the fingers, count the knuckles, count the teeth, check the shadows..." ...and under NO circumstances should you make deals with their kind.
Makes sense.
31.12.2023 22:53 — 👍 2664 🔁 954 💬 19 📌 10
Meme of the guys on the couch. They’re bored at “and to Tiny Tim,” and cheering at “who did NOT die,”
26.12.2023 01:51 — 👍 3737 🔁 748 💬 19 📌 16When I was a boy I got coal once (among real gifts) and it reaffirmed for me the truth of Santa. No harm done.
That said: I wasn’t recorded for internet clout. I was engaging with lore—not being exploited.
So this to me feels like another situation of the internet making this worse.
Over at The Film Stage Show we went deep on wrestling and family to talk about The Iron Claw, one of the best movies of the year.
Consider this my Christmas present to you!
thefilmstage.com/the-film-sta...
FROM: HR@nakatomi.com
What a year! While the events of last Christmas left much of the office destroyed and several of our Nakatomi family deceased, we appreciate everyone’s flexibility with work from home. That said, Nakatomi prides itself on its office culture so effective immediately all employe
📽️ Never really done an intro, so here's a late one. I'm a Chicago-based writer/podcaster who is fixated on streaming culture. You might have heard me on The Film Stage Show from 2016-2021 (my first episode was Ayer's Suicide Squad/last was Minari). Now I run a 1-on-1 podcast called Intermission.
27.07.2023 15:16 — 👍 17 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0
