Bueno, chicas: que tenemos aquí? The longest commercial for Emily Wilson’s (very good) translation of the Odyssey? Nolan’s War-Is-Bad liberal-guilt flick for the post-2023 age (in case you didn’t get the point of Dunkirk) whose biggest twist re: Zendaya’s Athena is cribbed from Resnais’s Muriel?

The slop epic that Prokosch (Jack Palance) ended up producing once he took the Odyssey out of Fritz Lang’s hands in 1963?

Nolan’s audition to be 21st century D.W. Griffith, juggling many narrative balls in the air without dropping any of them?

All this and more.

This is a SparkNotes/ChatGPT summary of the poem. It’s a legit interpretation of the poem, alright. Just as this year’s Wuther—sorry, “WuThErInG HeIgHtS”, quote unquote—is a legit interpretation of Em Bronte’s novel. Legit, as in, “Yeah, you can make those choices. You can have the actors say those dull lines. You can shout them and make it an action-stuffed superhero film.”—his first since he gave up comic books for post-2014 prestige—”You can do all that, and the suits and the discourse will still let your film be called ‘The Odyssey,’ and still make a fuck-ton of $$$.” Good IP never ages.

How can one be so literal and obnoxiously clear yet shoot action and mix time periods and have it all come out looking like a depthless blah, a muddle? The IMAX camera gallumphing through the action sequences lumbers like the dead weight of 1929 Hollywood cameras, which couldn’t move anywhere because staying still, starchy, and stagebound was how you got the best sound. And starch, the tediously cliché and familiar, is how you get a big event, a box-office smash.

I whispered to Braxton as we watched, “He should have made the Iliad first, then the Odyssey? That way he coulda really milked our money, Harry Potter/Hunger Games/Dune style.” Otherwise, why the fuck would anyone who’s seeing this blind and doesn’t know the lore — i.e., a lot of people — care about this Troy city? The people in it getting killed? This Helen with the man-scarred face? These soldiers, Achilles’ comrades, from the dead? It’s all just blah action, thrown at you in a careless heap.

This made me miss the Nolan build. Yes. The awful Nolan build. Oppenheimer: bad, but the time sailed. This? Gruuuuueeeeelingg. Stop-start, stop-start. For three hours. And now the Cyclops (endless). And now the Cannibals (accidentally goofy). And now Circe (fascinatingly grotesque then overconsciously goofy — gotta get those Guardians of the Galaxy/Sinners obligatory yuks in to keep the audience awake). Necessary episodes, dealt like obligations.

He covers scenes of a script as if he was the for-hire director of a TV sitcom. Blurry out-of-focus backgrounds that pay exceeding attention to the human figure. (Note how the gods are absent — barring one goddess, who is dully revealed to be just the anthropomorphized pseudo-Muriel-ish PTSD-evoked vision of a beheaded Trojan subject.) 180-degree rule exceedingly paid attention to. I loved that he tracks into the holes made by the axe-heads, and that all we see is Netflix-y blurry space. Ugly little rack-focuses and close-ups throughout. A blanket of formless dark, from Cyclops cave to Ithakan man cave. All perfunctorily correct images. All taken literally. They’re talking on a balcony? Cut to a random drone shot of them against the vista from a pointless in-the-air perspective—then cut back to the listlessly covered conversation on the balcony. Penelope talks of a ship? Cut to the ship. Penelope recalls her togetherness with Odysseus? Close-up of a couple in each other’s arms: Penelope and Odysseus. The school of bold-italics-underline, and its star graduate. Lines? Penelope: “I have had ENOUGH of being Queen of Ithaka without my KING!!!” Helen of Troy: “Tell her I’m sorry, I’m sorry for Troy and everything that’s happened in my name.” Circe: “I have lots of food.” Odysseus: “Ten years on this FUCKIN’ beach ... let’s go home.” Odysseus, on the sirens’ song: “It was the song of all the promises I never kept.” Again: all correct. All clear as to what’s happening. All impossible to interpret except in one way. And all lifeless. No frisson of poetry is allowed to creep in.

Call me whatever you will, but I prefer the Odyssey riffs that deal with the Odyssey mysteriously, freely, modernly in a non-past-worshiping way — nonetheless making the past palpable. Le mépris. O Brother Where Art Thou? The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. I’m told something called Nostos: The Return is worth seeing as well.

Read Alonso Díaz de la Vega; he’s great, as per usual: letterboxd.com/alonsodvt/film/the-odyssey-2026/

“I spent half an hour in the IMAX theater, noting details in certain shots and comparing them with the traditional screening to see if any information was lost; yet Christopher Nolan is no Jacques Tati. His compositional style consistently plays it safe—leaving so much empty space between objects and the edges of the frame, and rendering settings in such an utterly nondescript manner—that it makes no difference how one views the film. At most, you lose a bit of sky or a bit of wall. The spectacle, then, lies not within the frame, but around it...

Speaking of the spectacle not lying within the frame, but around it: I’m only now remembering how Nolan, in his passionate P.T. Barnum-esque tour of TikTok-ified, Reel-ified ballyhoo, described wanting to do the Odyssey because, according to him, “the genre of Greek mythology doesn’t really exist in movies. What I saw with THE ODYSSEY is a gap that hadn’t been filled.” (Ignore the much crazier and better Troy and 300 for a second; what about the peplum genre that the Italians practically single-handedly developed in the 50s and 60s?? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword-and-sandal) This, to me, is not the sound of a Kubrick-Scorsese-Spielberg-type big-budget auteur who pays excessive attention to the history of the medium; this is the talk of a Silicon Valley start-up founder. A “gap to fill”? Maximizing and extending the Nolan brand for untapped future consumers (i.e., Gen Alpha, off building the real next innovation, modernity returned again, and not the hollowly resuscitated Victorianisms and Griffithisms that Nolan peddles)? I only bring this up because the entire depressing, sloggy three hours suggests a similarly automatic, frighteningly cold sensibility. Movies to be made because they, as a product, fill a consumer gap.

I’ll let Alonso finish, since I couldn’t have said it better myself:

“Nolan seems convinced by David Bordwell’s misstep in calling him ‘our Kubrick,’ but the English director lacks the American director’s spatial intelligence, perversity, sheer intellect, or even his appreciation for color and costume—Kubrick even personally selected the thongs for the ritual scene in Eyes Wide Shut. The only thing they share is megalomania. Bordwell himself actually hinted at this, noting that both filmmakers shared the ability to take prestige pictures and turn their releases into massive events. Nolan is, in fact, more skilled at mobilizing the masses—a talent that culminated a few years ago in the infamous “Barbenheimer” phenomenon—than at producing films that are truly spectacular. [...]

“One question remains, then: where is the spectacle? The text remains archaic, the visuals fail to dazzle, and the impulse to truly show things is diluted. It is a mystery answered by other films and other filmmakers. Nolan is a director who repels me because he never actually delivers the spectacle; he only knows how to promise it.”

(1) If you’re in NYC tomorrow, July 8, come down to Ornithology Jazz Club for a rare presentation of one of Robert Altman’s most underrated gems, Jazz ‘34: Remembrances of Kansas City Swing (1996), his vivid and immaculately detailed recreation of a night (and dawn) at the smoke-filled Kansas City jazz clubs of his 1930s youth. Made for San Francisco’s KQED, designed as a twin film to accompany Altman’s feature film with a narrative KANSAS CITY (1996), and shown only sporadically in cinemas, we will be showing the especially rare 72-minute feature-length expansion from the 55-minute TV film. I’ll also be screening a selection of jazz shorts featuring Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington — come one, come all! Jonathan Rosenbaum calls Jazz ‘34 “Robert Altman’s most neglected major work!” Ticket holders get stamped at Ornithology’s door and get access to the film + 4 live jazz bands and 2 jam sessions all night between Ornithology and Café Ornithology. GET TIX HERE.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/robert-altmans-jazz-34-ornithology-jazz-club-tickets-1993462902203

(2) An unqualified rave of a humble, striking BBC-ian Play for Today: Eric Faris’s Love in America, directed by Annabel Boardman. Gasda et al’s Center for Theatre Research on West 17th Street staged it — as an institution, not quite British Broadcasting caliber, but if they begin putting on plays of Love in America’s sort, a Mike Leigh may yet emerge. I went mainly to support one of the stars, Madison August, who is acting in the film I’m working on — but I was pleasantly surprised and bowled over by the whole venture.

It plays once more tonight, and I would highly recommend seeing it.

What’s stellar about Love in America, beyond its genuine wit of script and great actors — plot: Manson-ish family comes apart over a single summer 1968 day due to a Rules of the Game-ian tangled roundelay of confused relations (who’s fucking whom, is she leaving home, who’s the true wise wo/man, who’s dropping acid to see further and who’s dropping it to cower from Vietnam’s triumph) — is its conceit that the 1960s are not so different from our 2020s. It mixes time periods with the casualness and gentility with which Chantal Akerman mixes the ‘60s and the ‘90s in Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the ‘60s in Brussels (1994), or how Carla Simón juggles adroitly the 1980s, 2004, and 2025 in Romería (2025). In other words, Faris and Boardman are able to look at each period without the requisite, smug, vibe-mad condescension and sloppy cynicism currently in U.S. vogue (Martin Supreme, The Favourite, “Wuthering Heights”, West Side Story, Poor Things). That modernity eternally returns seems like an obvious enough thesis — but it’s not usually done with the intelligence on display among the ensemble (Amy Jo Ray, Madison August, Wiley Bk, Sarah Allen, Salmon Pants, Sam Vitamin — great names, no?). There’s a screwball-comedy fizziness to Faris and Boardman’s overlapping His Girl Friday dialogue, in which characters clamor over one another trying to make themselves heard, with very little real communication getting through beyond stray lines, cross-signals, and the hilariously annoying presence of a straight-edged bearded TV watcher — a Johnny Carson lover who possesses none of the generosity of Carson-lover Brian Wilson — who remains skeptical of free love, acid, and pretty much everyone around him. The skeptic is played by Sam Vitamin, and through him the lovable square Ralph Bellamy archetype of 1930s lore is resurrected at once in 1968 and 2026: a nattering buzzsaw square, analogous to Clémenti in Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, who has walked in from the wrong Dimes Square set and who “ruins” each group scene through his refusal to take the acid, fuck the single women around him, or show even the faintest tremor of chill. There’s always one.

Elsewhere, the play is peppered with great lines about living past the moment, played by actors who are embodying, ahem, characters in that traditional theater sense:

“The Sun is rising,” says a Leslie Van Houten she, hopeful that love will rear its head.

“The Sun also sets,” says the Manson he, self-proclaimed god of the scene and the Sun.

“The American experiment is based on chaos and savagery” — therefore he, a bourgeois drug-pusher, will not provide LSD because it is “CIA-produced” … to the protests of a fellow Protestant Pisces male, who neeeeeds the drug. It helps him check out of reality. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road scroll is already in the process of being tossed away by this gen in favor of a longer, more endless scroll, years down the road…

The Manson figure, Leo, is being doubted by the skeptic: “I thought we were gonna live like Siddhartha.”

“Father,” prays Leo, “if what I’m doing is so wrong, I give you permission to spite me.” He doesn’t think he’s wrong, though. New York is the Jamesian Old World; California is untrammeled, a blank slate, never mind the Central Americans or the Indigenous.

No one here knows what they’re doing. Neither do we. A framework, a narrative, is needed to make sense of the moment: the solidifying of the past and the future, the vividness of the present, must be made to merge. Team Love in America provide the narrative container and manage the merge.

This is only the latest rev, confirming Papa Jean Renoir’s forecast that what we need are constant “revolutions in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the village square, since revolutions make life bearable.”

(What I’m saying may be dismissed by fogeys as the highfalutin claims of a kid reinventing a history that already happened. Well, yes! Exactly! It was done before. Time to do it again, sir! … Madam! Remember “Make it new”?! Remember what Marshall Berman said about modernism’s eternal returns?)

Up is fascinatingly down in NYC. The World Cup (Mexico is up, Latin America and Africa have the edge on Europe) is doing the UN’s job for them. The New York Knicks won in 5 — the first championship since 1973. Mamdani’s dem-socialists have swept the elections — proving that the idea of Marxist human-based politics can, in the popular American imagination, be divorced from the propagandized McCarthyist boogeymen of Stalin/Pol Pot/post-’68 Castro. The Catholic church down the street from me in Gramercy is becoming a repertory cinema — it’s showing Malick films all summer. The sun shines on the weekends. Little ad-hoc cinema spaces are going up: Low Cinema in Ridgewood, Marie Stotz’s 99 Minutes or Less residency at Nightclub 101, home screenings for friends on rooftops. New Yorkers are looking each other in the eye and miraculously asking how-are-you like that scene in Minnelli’s Bells are Ringing (1960).

The previous paragraph describes life. What would describe the parallel wave in art? Cracked Combine.

To understand the history of the Cracked Combine emerging in 2026, one would have to trace its lineage back to Cubism (+John Berger’s excellent 1969 dissection of it), Rauschenberg, Yoko Ono, Jean-Pierre Gorin’s masterfully anti-Master films by himself and with Jean-Luc Godard, Arte Povera, Nouveau Réalisme, and the Fluxus impulse that (with apologies to Mike Fried) all in life is fair theatrical game in art.

Where is the C.C. today?

It’s seen once a week at the Roxy Cinema in Patrick Wang’s A. Rimbaud. (More here on Letterboxd.)

It’s seen when you visit the weaver Marie Hazard’s and the fashion designer Constança Entrudo’s astonishing, funky, hypnotic collaboration “AD HOC” in Studio 2M (formerly the live-work loft of sculptor Jackie Winsor).

It’s seen when you cycle through New Yorkers’ Instagram stories and you begin to see the different reactions to the same event — O.G. Anunoby’s game-winning tip-in at the close of Game 4 to seal last-minute victory for the Knicks over the Spurs — as one collectively hallucinated home movie.

It’s seen in MoMA’s revival of Marcel Duchamp.

It’s seen in the rep-cinema revival of Jean-Pierre Gorin’s still underappreciated, unruly, touching films about vivid SoCal marginals (Poto and Cabengo, Routine Pleasures, My Crasy Life) + his ‘60s, proto-punk, Leninist-Marxist-Maoist explosion of language (Dziga Vertov films).

It’s felt in the body at these astonishing gallery shows that actually make me excited about painting-sculpture-drawing: Stefan Vogel’s Wish You We at Sofia Sominski, the recently closed retrospective of Nicolas Africano’s heart-melting, bold, serene paintings and sculptures at Nancy Hoffman (there won’t be a better show this year, I suspect — more on this in another Substack post).

It’s heard in the street-inspired ambient jazz of Broom, heard playing on MTA subway platforms, blending uncannily with the noises of the incoming and departing trains.

It’s seen in the unexpected collaboration between a dead legend of a father and his living son (the Greaves clan) to finish Once Upon a Time in Harlem, which makes you realize a scene is more than its people, it’s also the cumulative strive towards a basic good.

It’s in scrapbooking, juxtaposing image with sound to create new funky meanings.

It’s in the unexpected Tribeca premiere of Tony Kaye’s Humpty Dumpty X, the dialectical termite-art negation of his iconic White Elephant American History X, a fuck-you to the 1990s-era “indie” movement (Tarantino and the Weinstein darlings), a punk neo-Dada bomb lobbed into Tribeca.

The Cracked Combine is continuity through discontinuity.

Gorin’s excrutiatingly beautiful, moving, and free-spirited Poto and Cabengo (1979) an essay-film whatsit that follows the true-life saga of two twin girls who speak an invented “alien” language to the confusion of all the adults round them, is the key example that points to the sturdiness of the Cracked Combine mode in 2026. It’s a forefather for cinematic and artistic experiments happening now: an assemblage of disparate elements joined without caring whether they harmonize perfectly, prissily, pristinely, neatly (it’s good that ChatGPT-Speak exists so that the robot can talk clean talk, leaving us humans to be messy, therefore real-beautiful-true) … a thickly Americanized French leftie’s wandering, tuneful voiceover that could never be replicated by the robot (“If I was going to make zhis film, I would have to beat zheh clock before zheh kids turned English majors”) … the concentration of friendship and camaraderie (Gorin and the twin girls are in a conspiracy against the world, which wants to Know and Explain and Sell-Out too damn much) … the ego-less idea of collective creation (Gorin is at the mercy of the mischievous twin girls and what they want to do or say; I am at the mercy of whatever Madeleine Hill Fisher or Lauren Guiteras or Sawyer Skipper lay down in rehearsal) … a proud embrace of the Cinema of Poverty, filming with no money, ‘poor’ images yet a rich imagination …. a thoroughly developed découpage (i.e., the philosophy-form-style of the film is strong in the artist’s mind before she’s even picked up her camera), making the actual process of filmmaking not only a breeze, but a fun blast that an audience will pick up on … a paradoxical spontaneity that anything can change, that the film is being invented as it crawls along, and that we the viewer will swerve down a different path with the filmmakers at any moment (c.f., Luis Buñuel’s 1970s films) … cracked surfaces allowed to remain undeveloped, unfinished, cracked ….

Anything can be linked to anything, as long as it’s in the spirit of a one-to-one human connection beyond the blind chase for capital and clout: universal montage, cracked combines, all in response to a seemingly irreparably broken world of violence and mutually assured destruction. The cracked combine rejects such a nihilist vision of the world. I can’t go on, I’ll go on — mere quotation becomes lived-in experience, like feeling the Southern France countryside breeze in Renoir’s Toni (1935), or feeling like the German-speaking-only grandmother of the twin girls in Poto and Cabengo is a dead Proustian ringer for your own grandmother whom you lost years ago, yet whom you will always treasure, who serves as the example to look-love-act kinder, deeper, tougher.

The Cracked Combine form — and I should say I’m making a film now under this rubric as well — is a playful rebellion against certain staid ideas that have, by dint of the idea-pushers’ loudness and terminally online presence, ushered in a deeply banal moral-aesthetic-political state in BK-Manhattan since, hmm, maybe 2020? though the stirrings were there in the late 2010s: the popularity of Safdie Bros. aesthetics, for one, and the elegant, endlessly imitated chaos of their Lopatin-scored, New-Yawk-loud yellscapes, their anxiety-prone scene building, their busily interlocked soundscapes of deals and fuck-overs and nervous-agitated needling, whether from the traditionally put-on wife or rangy eccentrics like Barkhad Abdi, Julia Fox, Abel Ferrara, Luke Manley, or Wayne Diamond.

Briefly, those staid 2020-26 ideas crystallized around, as I see it, four quadrants.

First: the outsized, self-reported antics, the aggressively raw-milk whiteness, of Dimes Square and its diarrheal-theatrical runs of the mouth (powered strongly by the Gasda propaganda wheel) — washed down by coke, fernet, a cringing self-loathing, the struggle of a Generation to see something-anything other than itself in the addicting mirrors made for it. All this, in search of a middlebrow idea of Greatness, symbolized by mythical artist-names whose principles are watered-down by being rechanneled in the 2020s post-postmodern vacuum: Cassavetes in film, Joyce or M. Amis in literature, Chekhov or Albee in theatre, Grove Press or Warhol’s Factory in cultural institutions, etc. In other words: the Dimes set lusts for fame-renown-wisdom (or, as Blake and Amis both wrote, Experience) without putting in the work to make work forged out of the aforementioned Experience. The only pictorial evidence to its existence is gleaned in scuzzy, neo-Vice photographs by certain scene stalwarts like Matt Weinberger, who catalogues the decadence as if early-2020s NYC were Weimar Berlin. All fine and nice, yet where is our Emcee? Who is Sally Bowles? Woah Vicky?

Second: a flatly chic U.S. New Con celebration of dumb talk, smoothbrained GPT thought (robots dream us up, a corruption of Zhuangzi and his butterfly), and a Musk-approved tanking of the mind, viz. X’s evil-surrealist Videodrome juxtapositions — here a Brazilian bungee-jumper hurled off a cliff without a harness, there an Elle Fanning curve, everywhere and nowhere Nancy Guthrie. Everything, from dating to reading to sincerity, is tagged as performative — but the performance does not promise Gena Rowlands or a Scarecrow-era Al Pacino, much less figures outside the NY tastemaker’s metropolitan gaze: Setsuko Hara choosing her family and friends over marriage, Mbissine Thérèse Diop reading a French newspaper in Black Girl (1966) to study the imperialist doxa of her white employers, Arturo de Córdova malely and madly spiraling due to a woman’s naked foot at Sunday Mass.

Third: the Hinge-Raya-Tinder Industrial Complex, which, along with Instagram, normalized the idea that a face was as good as thirty, that the date across the table from you wasn’t quite there, that they were merely a post-Ryan Trecartin bundle of identities served up to you on a flat grid, and therefore, now in the flesh, easily replaceable.

And fourth: the perpetually lucrative value of shares in Nihilism, Cynicism, Dejection, Devastation … the blind acceptance that man is doomed and beyond hope …. accepting that capitalism has permanently fucked up our love and work lives, that greed and consumerist warmongering is the natural order of things, instead of man-made problems (emphasis on “man”) that can be reversed with an ambitious shift of collective perspective.

What, then, is returning?

Simply, that daily life is festered all anew with “the unheralded ripples of physical experience, the tiny morbidly lifeworn detail which the visitor to a strange city finds springing out at every step” (Manny Farber).

Make your own assemblages with friends. It’s the new thing.

Soon: I’m throwing a movie night at Ornithology Jazz next week, Wednesday, July 8. More details on that soon. I’ll also be introducing Antonioni’s ZABRISKIE POINT (1970) at the Quad on Thursday, July 23. Writing forthcoming on Buñuel, scrapbooking, WLYGU….

Last night at the Paris, I had another Robert Altman-induced epiphany. This is routine whenever I see a film by Altman, one of my lodestars. But the film, seen at 9.30pm by a wonderfully eclectic, lonely, rained-on group of Altmanheads, was A Wedding (1978). Now: A Wedding is not a film that is typically brought upon as a Great Altman Film, a title reserved to Good Objects like McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), Nashville (1975), 3 Women (1977), or Short Cuts (1993). I love those films, but those are Great works — works in the Major key. A film like A Wedding is in a Minor key. And this Minor status makes it of the utmost importance to the 2020s filmmaker/viewer.

I don’t use “Minor” in its cliché pejorative sense. I use it as Deleuze and Guattari use it when talking about Franz Kafka’s short stories, novels, diaries, and letters as a deeply profound Minor Literature. They write: “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.” Kafka was a Prague Jew, yet wrote not in Czech but in German; he grew up thinking in German; he spoke in German; and as an upwardly mobile member of the artists’ middle-class, he wrote in a language that ended up resembling neither the status-quo German nor the localized Czech. He wrote, in other words, for a future that did not exist. He destabilized the “major” language from his position as a Jewish observer of European modernity-in-decline, creating new syntactic and philosophical rules for the language. According to Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka’s “minor” status (in his language, in his status as a Jewish writer, in the ways he wrote against the current of his era’s received ideas) opened up his writing, since everything he wrote about (in his fairy-tale, allegorical, nightmare modes) was political. Furthermore, none of his characters existed in and of themselves — they existed in a polyphony, a roving ensemble-like network of meanings that point the way towards a future yet to exist. A future that has collective, revolutionary potential. Kafka was properly a world pointing to ours.

So it was, and is, with Altman. What was the majority language he spoke through his films? Not English, but Hollywood. Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. Clearly delineated protagonists with whom I can identify, heroes in whose eyes I can see myself reflected, villains at whose capes I can throw tomatoes. Clever lines, clearly delivered, that let me know what’s happening at all times. A fetishized obsession with plot over atmosphere, character, or anything else that might distract from the almighty cat-saved Story.

Sure, Altman “spoke” the language of the majority U.S. film mode — he made films with decent-sized budgets, stars like Robin Williams, Elliott Gould, and Julianne Moore flocked to work with him, and this doesn’t necessarily happen when you want to do films exclusively in the tough, out-there, ultracourageous Wieland-Snow-Ed Owens mode. But while working within the majority language, Altman actively, awesomely resisted it every step of the way. Altman questions Hollywood business in each film he does. And when you watch an AMC picture today, or when you watch A Wedding at the Paris, you can’t help but think, Man, why is nobody reflecting the times like this anymore? Not in a nostalgic way, mind you — I want films to reflect the NOW, not what already’s been done — I’ve no use for pure 100% cane-sugar nostalgia, which can rot the teeth and breed the naughty little reactionary that sits perched in our hearts. To rebel like Altman did, and to make beautiful pictures that move with the polyphonous funky rhythms that he moved with, is still possible. It just requires memory, historical consciousness. Look at films like No Sleep Till, The Secret Agent, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, Invention, The Sweet East, or the mammoth La Chimera.

Nowhere in the Altman oeuvre, save for his piece of Minor perfection The Company (2003), is this resistance so stubbornly emphasized than in A Wedding, a film that doesn’t really “work” at all by so many standards of either Hollywood dramaturgy or even anti-Hollywood poetry … and this is precisely why it works, and why it spoke to me last night…

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Well, what does this one-two horror punch mean for us, Obsession (a piece of cheap, well-acted pulp wizardry tapped expertly into the collective unconscious) and Backrooms (the far more interesting film about the collective unconscious)? Will Hollywood learn the wrong lessons from these two not-insignificant hits? Are they the Bonnie and Clyde and Graduate (both 1967) of our generation — bringing in the latest, newest Hollywood? And is it merely coincidence that Spielberg, one of the darlings of the last New Hollywood (1967-81), releases a Late Period Film in the same release cycle — to great attention and not an insignificant amount of (baffling) jeers?

The conventional wisdom on horror films: beside the fact that it’s cheap and therefore simple to make, horror sells, people like being scared, and Get Out of the Black Phone, Insidiously Paranormal Ma proved it. I have to confess, as a romantic whose wish is to see a spate of Lubitsch-Wilder-Micklin Silver romcoms that our generation can see en masse and debate, that I’ve never understood this logic. In the myriad conversations I’ve had around the city at bars and parties and on the street, I’ve encountered scores of people who (a) like going to Da Movies, but (b) hate horror, hate the sensation of being scared. I concur. Though I can stomach and like the thrill of seeing a good horror film, I don’t at all prefer them to the exclusion of all the other genres, modes (i.e., non-fiction), or experimental other types of uncategorizable whatsit that one can conceivably watch. But it can seem like horror there is to offer in the cultural sphere. A mistake as grave as when Hollywood hitched its wagon to Tony Stark and his ilk in 2008. Horror is not best when it becomes an Avengers-type event every three weeks, but when it’s marginal: when Twentieth-Century Fox puts out Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) amid an otherwise prestige-heavy slate of dramas and comedies; when Tobe Hooper makes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and it becomes a cultural landmark thanks to Mafia money that came out of the profits of porno-chic sensation Deep Throat (1972); when Kubrick makes The Shining (1980) and does not subsequently form an exclusively horror-oriented company in the wake of its runaway financial success, instead seeing “the horror genre” as only a sandbox of conventions in which explore his many intellectual and philosophical obsessions that defy all convention.

*note: when you see a film or text in purple, those are hyperlinks to my Letterboxd reviews of the same films.

The truth is knottier.

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There are now too many good and interesting movies, art shows, theater pieces, books, readings, and events happening in New York City (where I live) to resist writing about them in a broader more digressively essayistic context, broader beyond Letterboxd, where I’ve been writing about movies and cultural objects-of-note since 2013.

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I’ve been writing, shooting, and editing a wacky Linklater-and-Godard-inspired film this summer which shares the title of my new Substack: “WE LOVE YOU GET UP.” It’s the last line of a poem by the great Frank O’Hara, New York seer extraordinaire (Vendler-esque analysis of his oeuvre forthcoming). The poem: “Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” O’Hara wrote it after darting around the city one day, doing errands, thinking about someone he had a crush on, and picking up a copy of the New York Post, which had announced that the actress Lana Turner (my favorite film of hers: Sirk’s Imitation of Life, 1959) fainted:

Thus the poem sprang into his head. Here are its last lines:

and suddenly I see a headline

LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!

there is no snow in Hollywood

there is no rain in California

I have been to lots of parties

and acted perfectly disgraceful

but I never actually collapsed

oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Note that in real life the New York Post headline read, “LANA FAINTS; IN HOSPITAL.” Bit too clumping and clipped, right? Doesn’t have the same urgent, melodic tang as “LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!”, with that delicious emphasis on the syllable lapsed, mirroring the time of his 1960s lapsing. As I write, the 2020s lapse. So I march ahead in the ombre of Frank, humbly noting, trying not to get into anyone’s way, and (as Emily Blunt counsels us in the final beats of Spielberg’s best film in nearly two decades, Disclosure Day) listening.

Mr. O’Hara notes only what is directly in front of him, and those notes become his finished, beautiful poem. His philosophy (one should always proceed in one’s creative ventures with a philosophy, however provisional or half-formed) derives from a vague movement he half-seriously, half-jokingly founded, called Personism. Writing a sort-of-love-letter to someone, Frank O’Hara realized he could just as easily pick up the phone and tell the person how he felt. Instead, he wrote a poem. Thus, modernity, love, grace, was salvaged that day from a rush-rush, too-turned-on world. It would be salvaged on the daily a few more times after that. It’s being salvaged again in NYC this summer, 2026. And in your neck of the woods too. And this time, it’s collectively personal.

I’ll write about whatever floats my boat — and will, I hope, float yours, too. I’ll try to write about twice or so a week. Many thoughts always.

You can subscribe below to keep the lights on. When it comes to logging movies, I’ll still be on Letterboxd, but I’ll start posting short CHICAGO READER-esque blurbs there, and save my longer thoughts for Substack.

Coming soon: the new continuity-through-discontinuity, the return of Dada (in what [political] form?), J-P Gorin, Nicolas Africano, Luis Buñuel, some plays I’ve been seeing, notes as I make WE LOVE YOU GET UP (the film), and revisiting John E. Williams’s 1965 novel STONER.

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