Christopher Smets

It's been so long, there were people excited about seeing a sequel to TRON LEGACY who by now have died of natural causes.

I ran into a friend on the street today who managed to get the last available seat for one of the final 10pm screenings of ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER in 70mm IMAX. I asked him if he liked it and he just laughed and said, "I mean, we're so lucky to be alive when PTA is making movies."

It's Finally Time to Give Pizza Its Due

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems... SIMON: What? SHAPIRO: ...Or saying... SIMON: You imagine that? SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over. SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level. SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this. SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

Trump to get a 'routine yearly' medical check-up — his second in 6 months The White House said Trump would be at Walter Reed Medical Center and undergo a checkup after a planned meeting with service members in the facility.

Quite a headline
www.nbcnews.com/politics/don...

A funny thing about their characters, which took me a few viewings to clock, is that their two cop names said together sound like "Nickels and Dimes."

It would be like a news story about talent agencies fighting over which one of them was going to sign up "funny and versatile" CGI ogre Shrek.

Play Dirty | VERN'S REVIEWS on the FILMS of CINEMA Man, this new straight-to-Amazon-Prime movie PLAY DIRTY is some kind of monkey’s paw shit for me. It’s the great Shane Black (THE NICE GUYS) writing and

@outlawvern.bsky.social's review of PLAY DIRTY is, typically, both bang-on and hilarious. (And I agree with him, just make this book series into a lean, mean TV show.) outlawvern.com/2025/10/02/p...

Vern is maybe the biggest Parker fan there is, and he's 100% right about the way the character comes across in PLAY DIRTY. The backstory stuff with Parker -- a huge divergence from the cold-blooded, present tense tone of the books -- made me think of this passage from Sidney Lumet's Making Movies.

Man, I love Shane Black, but the more I think about PLAY DIRTY, the less I like it.

what you fail to see mr pope is going to live in my head forever

There's a record store I go into -- sometimes it's also a book store -- and there are records there that don't exist by bands I love.

I just found out today that Russell Vought is yet another member of the Trump Administration who, improbably, is younger than me. (This man is 49.)

Slight spoiler for the Q&A but Spielberg and Anderson both had things to say about cannabis that I found, well, rather surprising.

Steven Spielberg is momentarily interrupted from gushing over One Battle After Another by the film's director, Paul Thomas Anderson.

The ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER post-screening Q&A that Spielberg did with Paul Thomas Anderson is up and it's very sweet, probably 75% of it is just Spielberg describing cool things that happen in the movie and PTA laughing.

In my head I'm hearing those little kid voices singing "You're not hardcore/Unless you live hardcore" from School of Rock.

My crazy idea would be to re-adapt Westlake's Dortmunder novel Jimmy the Kid, include the Parker sections, and have Michael Shannon play both guys.

Werner Herzog gazed upon the "empty and soulless" abyss of AI-generated movies Werner Herzog gazed upon the "empty and soulless" abyss of AI-generated movies

“I have seen movies, short films, completely created by artificial intelligence,” Herzog said. “Story and acting and everything, they look completely dead. There are stories, but they have no soul. They are empty and soulless.”

Get their ass, Werner.

I laughed out loud.

This is exactly how I took it, too.

My Thoughts on the Riyadh Comedy Festival I’ve been asked for my opinion on the Riyadh Comedy Festival and rather than answer the same question 23 times, I’ll just put this out here. Oh, and I should preface this with the fact that I was not ...

"Holy shit, I remember the backlash I got for appearing in Alvin and the Chipmunks! You would’ve thought that I had taken money from a bunch of people responsible for funding Al Qaeda!"

Terence Stamp wanting to go out with this, then pushing to make sure he did, is yet another reason why he's one of the coolest actors who ever lived

I also have advice. Everybody loves reading advice on the computer, so I'll share it: the best thing you can do right now is log off as hard as you can. Go outside, talk to people in real life where it's actually kind of rude to talk about the news, try to actually see the friends you usually just text message. Go for a long drive and turn the phone off while you do it. Get back into your hobbies or pick one and learn it for a while. Watch one of those studio movies that reviews called "wildly miscalculated" and you haven't seen since high school. Play an album you like but find embarrassing. Go to free community events even if they sound stupid. If you take the freeway, try the surface streets. Go to a bad diner and just order some bad coffee because even bad coffee is good coffee. You can't help anybody when you're exhausted and keep posting one million college-educated rewordings of "I would love to be dead right now" on the computer. Walk away from the thing and try out some of those normal things you hear about and if you get bored that's wonderful because we're not supposed to get bored anymore. It turns out boredom is the Cadillac of feelings.

RIP Kaleb Horton
kalebhorton.ghost.io/2025-so-far/

It made me think of being a kid and seeing The Empire Strikes Back in 70mm; when the snow speeders are looking for Luke and Han at the beginning, there are these POV shots flying over the snowy mountains that always made my stomach drop out. I wonder if that effect was in PTA's head at all.

I am begging Canadians to understand that Canada Post, like public transit, should not be a business - it's a service.

Canada Post is a lifeline for rural, remote and Northern communities and overall, we need to re-evaluate why people think they "need" random shit delivered ASAP.

A few of the remasters are also available on Kanopy right now, but the Criterion selection is more extensive and it'll be great to have those old extras available again. This Shout Factory deal has been a real win all around.

The headlines are getting more exasperated. Interesting.

When I finally saw the clip, I thought it was funny that he didn't just laugh it off and walk over to the one RIGHT NEXT TO IT that was still working perfectly. He'd rather suffer and be a whiny little bitch.

The thing I couldn't figure out when I finally saw the clip was, why not go over to the one right next to it?