Dune: Part Two, 2024

Sometimes movies transport us to places that just aren’t possible. Other times they shine a light on us that we couldn’t normally see. And then there are times they do both and they transcend

Dune: Part 2: Sometimes movies transport us to places that just aren’t possible. Other times they shine a light on us that we couldn’t normally see. And then there are times they do both and they transcend

Dune Part 1: Rewatched before our showing of Part 2 on Friday– there was a LOT of this movie that I’d forgotten in the haze of COVID.

As he did with Arrival, Villeneuve does a superb job of tying grand epics to the personal.

Dune, 2021

Rewatched before our showing of Part 2 on Friday-- there was a LOT of this movie that I'd forgotten in the haze of COVID.

As he did with Arrival, Villeneuve does a superb job of tying grand epics to the personal.

I liked all the best picture nominees this year, but there were three tiers for me:

Tier 1: Oppen, Anatomy/Fall, Zone/Interest, Killers
Tier 2: Past Lives, Poor Things, Barbie
Tier 3: A/Fiction, Holdov, Maes

It was only nominated for Best Original Screenplay, but I’d put May December in Tier 1

It’s time again for my 100% correct ranking of this year’s Oscar best picture nominees:

  1. Oppenheimer
  2. Anatomy of a Fall
  3. The Zone of Interest
  4. Killers of the Flower Moon
  5. Past Lives
  6. Poor Things
  7. Barbie
  8. American Fiction
  9. The Holdovers
  10. Maestro

2023 Best Picture Nominees RANKED

The Holdovers: There are periods of the year where time gets a little hazy. We need those times to find meaning

The Holdovers, 2023

There are periods of the year where time gets a little hazy. We need those times to find meaning

Lydia Tár as my fantasy baseball avatar is the kind of energy I’m trying to bring to this world

Like to be clear, Britt’s speech was written by a bunch of old white dudes. She’s doing her best to deliver it, but…yeah. Old white dudes

I’ve seen enough college forensics to know that Katie Britt will probably get there one day. But today is not that day

Y’all. Joe Biden seems like he’s up for it

It’s that night of the year where it sounds like helicopters are going to land on my roof

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched cable news but CNN is on in this waiting room and I’m realizing I’m not ready for this election

Killers of the Flower Moon, 2023

…it’s the inevitability of it all. There were people to be exploited, so they were.

Killers of the Flower Moon: …it’s the inevitability of it all. There were people to be exploited, so they were.

Current Things: March 2024

Currently Reading

  • One of these days I’m going to start reading again. But today is not that day.

Currently Watching

Currently In Queue

Currently Listening

  • Apple Music recently released a new daily Mix– Heavy Rotation– that captures what you recently have been listening to. Sounds like a perfect addition to Current Things! I’ll be interested to see if this web embed automatically updates as the mix is updated.
  • I continued listening to Paolo Nutini’s Last Night in the Bittersweet, but as you can see I’ve also been revisiting Maggie Roger’s Surrender, Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS, and Geese’s 3D Country.
  • I also bet you can tell what songs are on my running playlist!
  • Maggie Rogers has a new album out in April! I heard a few at her Atlantis show and couldn’t be more excited for it!

Currently Planning

Concurrently

  • I’m going to try and do a better job of posting about my past and future travels. I added a new dedicated Travel page and a new section in Current Things to help highlight this! Here’s a blog post introducing the new Travel page and a blog post on the logistics of it.

Finished in February:

May December: Haynes always does such a good job of contextualizing sexual power dynamics and its effects on everyone directly and indirectly involved. We think of power asymmetries as straightforward and bad, but they’re often complex (but still bad!)

Also loved the 1990s made-for-TV style this was shot in– especially the score and the graininess of video.

Shout out to these two diametrically opposite, but equally impactful lines:

I don’t think we have enough hot dogs

This is just what grownups do

The Zone of Interest: The movie is in the margins.

We think of these people as monsters. And they were. But they were also humans. Humans did this.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Season 1: I’m a sucker for marriage as war allegories, so I think I liked this more than most. But this was done 10x better and more natural by The Americans

Rick and Morty, Season 7: It’s tough to review entire seasons of shows that aren’t really serialized (thematically or plotwise). Season 7 continues to be successful at what it’s trying to do. Its presentation isn’t my favorite, but it’s inventiveness and just plain weirdness more than make up for it

True Detective, Season 4: While previous seasons have been about masculinity, this one adds motherhood, femininity, and community to the mix with spectacular results. It centralizes on the idea of these concepts as “protectors” in their various forms. This is–by far– the best season of this show.

Maestro: This was fine. I like the ideas of how identity is complex and who owns it isn’t always straightforward. But ultimately I didn’t gain anything more than a surface-level understanding of how this duality affected Bernstein.

Past Lives: We’re not fated for things that are obvious. The allure for the other side of things will always be there.

Anatomy of a Fall: Even the truth is contextual

(The real moral of Anatomy of a Fall is to not find yourself on trial in France)

Previously, in Current Things…

February 2024
January 2024
December 2023
November 2023
October 2023
September 2023
August 2023
July 2023
June 2023
May 2023
April 2023
March 2023
February 2023
January 2023
December 2022
November 2022

May December: Haynes always does such a good job of contextualizing sexual power dynamics and its effects on everyone directly and indirectly involved. We think of power asymmetries as straightforward and bad, but they’re often complex (but still bad!)

Also loved the 1990s made-for-TV style this was shot in– especially the score and the graininess of video.

Shout out to these two diametrically opposite, but equally impactful lines:

I don’t think we have enough hot dogs

This is just what grownups do

May December, 2023

Haynes always does such a good job of contextualizing sexual power dynamics and its effects on everyone directly and indirectly involved. We think of power asymmetries as straightforward and bad, but often they're complex (but still bad!)

Also loved the 1990s made-for-TV style this was shot in-- especially the score and the graininess of video.

Shout out to these two diametrically opposite, but equally impactful lines:
> I don't think we have enough hot dogs
> This is just what grownups do

My first thought when I heard about Richard Lewis: I wonder if he ever did put Larry David in his will.

(I feel like he would have appreciated this joke)

Ten years ago today I left for my most ambitious trip: eleven countries spanning six continents in five weeks. I blogged my way through that trip and will get the archives posted soon enough. But today I launched a new travel blog with the post The Window. I’m excited to write about travel again!

A New Travel Page

I’ve got a new Travel page that I soft launched with February’s ‘Current Things’ and formally launched earlier today with the blog post, ‘The Window’. I want to take a few seconds to talk logistics.

(y’all didn’t believe me when I said I was going to mostly blog about logistics)

Here’s a break down of the new Travel page:

At the top is my Flighty passport. The excellent–but very expensive– Flighty app has a feature that produces an image of all of the flights it’s tracked. This is a log of most (and maybe all!) of my flights since 2010. It makes me happy to look at this and remember the trips I’ve taken. It also reminds me that two places I’ve only visited once– Russia and China– are very big. I will update this image on a completely irregular basis.

An image of my Flighty passport showing all the flights I've taken since 2010

The next section is the trips that I’ve got scheduled for this calendar year. Micro.blog does a good job of allowing me to easily create a category for every trip and then link to that category to show a running log of everything I’ve blogged about a specific trip. Sometimes I’ll write a lot about a trip. Sometimes I won’t. Have to keep y’all guessing.

A screenshot of the 'current year' section, showing the trips I have planned for 2024

The next section– Future Trips– is a rough sketch of my travel plans past this year. I probably won’t take some of these trips, but it’s fun to think about the places I want to go! I also find putting even a rough date to some of these trips helps me decide whether or not to move on to actually starting to plan them.

A screenshot of the 'Future Trips' section, showing the trips I have planned for 2025 and beyond

The final section– Past Trips– is a list of the trips I’ve taken organized by year. As a trip is completed, it’ll move from the current year section down to here.

A screenshot of the 'Past Trips' section, showing trips from 2024 and 2023.

A few other notes:

  • As I mentioned above, I’ve also added a travel planning section to my Current Things page. This will be a list of the trips I’ve got planned for the current year.
  • I plan to write travel-year-in-review-type posts. I’m going to do my best to do that for 2023 at some point, but I probably won’t go any further back than that.
  • I also would like to blog more about travel in general (the industry, my philosophy, interesting links, etc.). I’ve started a Travel category to collect these thoughts in once place, but I want to do a bit more thinking about how I want to present these before I widely publicize it.

As I mentioned in the blog post, this is going to be more of a window rather than an all-encompassing travel log. I tried to do a lot of blogging while on my recent trip to Quebec Charlevoix, but found it difficult due to the nature of the trip (going 40 MPH down a hill is not conducive to writing) and due to some limitations of micro.blog (there’s a video upload limit that’s unclear to me–though I’m sure Manton would tell me if I asked!). There’s still a few processes that I need to hammer out around how to post photos/videos and what I find useful to capture during a trip as opposed to after. But real artists ship so I’ll figure some of these things out as I go.

The Window

Traveling scratches a lot of itches for me, but I think the biggest is answering the question, “What’s next?”.

I fight with this sometimes. I have a bad habit of sacrificing now for next. I like having things to look forward to, but I get consumed with it to the point that it feels like a trip is over when I finish planning it.

It also makes the actual trip feel like a checklist: a neat, chronologically-ordered inventory of the place I’m visiting. I either complete it by visiting all the sights I’m supposed to see or I don’t and I’m bummed because I missed something.

Most places aren’t Disney World: there’s not a finite set of attractions to ride. But sometimes it feels like it! It feels like you don’t see Paris if you don’t visit the Eiffel Tower, and the Louvre, and the Catacombs, and Moulin Rouge, and the Bastille, and and and and

I’m trying to embrace that there’s always going to be an ‘and’. Embrace that travel is more like a window: it’s a peak through to somewhere you don’t normally get to see. I’m trying to learn to enjoy what the window shows me rather than worrying about what’s outside of the frame.

Blogging is a lot like that too. I have such completist tendencies that sometimes I don’t bother if I can’t document everything. But I need to let that go. Blogging isn’t about giving readers a complete picture, it’s about offering them a window into somewhere they wouldn’t normally get to see.

So this travel blog is my attempt to offer a window. A restricted view into where, how, and why I like to go. Sometimes I’ll be philosophical about it. Sometimes I’m going to share some amazing pictures. Sometimes I’m going to recount a cool story. But most of the time I’ll probably just talk logistics.

That’s OK. It’s my window and I get to choose the frame.

Yesterday was the first day of the year where the solar panels produced more energy than we used. That date unsurprisingly keeps getting earlier and earlier