Beneath the shadows of indigo-streaked clouds, a young woman strolls through a fog-covered city, stopping at the base of a skyscraper. She looks up, eyes following every square inch of the structure until the point where it juts past the clouds and into the dark atmosphere above, beyond where she can see. She is the princess, and this is the castle she’ll be locked in, an indomitable beast of a citadel fittingly titled the Tower Hotel. 

“How hokey,” you might say, “a modern princess trapped in a luxury high-rise.” But really, everything in “Her Private Hell” is contrivance. Writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn — “NWR,” as he’s taken to branding himself — isn’t exactly known for his subtlety. His previous feature, 2016’s love-it-or-hate-it loony toon “The Neon Demon,” was a modeling industry semi-satire that featured beauties quite literally gobbling up their ingenue competition. It’s really no surprise that his first film in 10 years would arrive with its thematic commentary just as legible.

But that’s where the fun begins. Once the viewer understands where Refn is headed, they can submit themselves to his grotesque neon visions. His appeal as a filmmaker lies in his stylistic flair; the joy comes from watching him marry the aesthetically manicured with the ideologically bizarre. Whether it’s a union of love or force is another matter. NWR’s high concepts and their abrasive execution don’t always coalesce. But when they do, it’s like watching a magic trick play out before your eyes, leaving you so stunned you’re stammering, unable to utter even a single “How?”

(Neon) “Her Private Hell”

“Her Private Hell” is Refn’s greatest trick yet: A beguiling fairy tale for a lost lamb named Elle (Sophie Thatcher). In this story, Elle is the archetypal royalty figure, thrust through a kaleidoscope of Refn’s signature bright pinks and blues and spit back into the tower where she passes her days, waiting for her savior to arrive. But as she greets her fate and rides the elevator to her penthouse prison, Elle strolls past Hunter (Kristine Froseth), a real-life Sleeping Beauty, napping on the lush chairs in the hallway outside. Elle and Hunter are due to shoot a movie together, which Elle’s father, the filmmaker Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), will produce. “The airline lost my luggage because of the Mist,” Hunter tells Elle. Ugh. Of course. The Mist seems to be screwing up everything these days.

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In the extraordinary abstraction that follows, Thatcher finds her ideal role as one of NWR’s stilted avatars, gussied up in couture and spouting riddles. Her energy rises and falls alongside the mysterious mist, which has engulfed the city and brought whispers of a mysterious ancient entity lurking in its haze. Thatcher performs as if this was the part she was born for, and it very well may be. 

Refn’s cold, theoretical violence and Thatcher’s knack for affected, high-glamor drama are a match made in DayGlo heaven. Her work is unlike anything I’ve seen this year, a ruthless and surprising turn from someone who’s struggled to find the right type of script for her unique style and physicality. If there is a God, somewhere amid all this mist, “Her Private Hell” will be Thatcher’s entrée to a new era of hyper-ostentatious, Elizabethan — Taylor, that is — cinematic elegance, a large void in the once-plentiful pool of subgenres that only she can fill.

Thatcher has been searching for her niche for a moment, but the delay hasn’t been for lack of trying. Since her breakthrough in Showtime’s “Yellowjackets” in 2021 — where she plays the troubled teenager Natalie, fighting for survival in the Canadian wilderness alongside her high school soccer teammates after their plane crash-lands — Thatcher’s had more than a few substantive roles. In 2024’s “Heretic,” she played a Mormon missionary lured into a violent theological maze by a wicked Hugh Grant. And in 2025’s “Companion,” Thatcher scored a decent turn as a sex robot with her programming on the fritz after she’s implicated in a murder plot. If those films sound preposterous, it’s because they are. “Heretic” was underbaked and half-thought, while “Companion” tried to create big laughs and bigger action from minuscule ideas. Thatcher, though, was far and away the best part of both films, bringing a striking depth to her thinly sketched characters. 

But one gets the sense that Thatcher’s worried about being pigeonholed. “Yellowjackets,” “Heretic” and “Companion” are all horror-thrillers. And Thatcher’s other film roles in 2023’s “The Boogeyman” and a bit part in the following year’s “MaXXXine” certainly don’t help Hollywood’s perception of her as a wannabe scream queen. The perennial problem with horror, even contemporary horror, is that it’s an extremely difficult genre to migrate from. But Thatcher’s talents extend past genre confines. She conjures a bewitching onscreen presence that many of her contemporaries could only dream of, pulling the viewer’s gaze with a single glare from her steely eyes or the quiver of her chin. The same grin can look menacing or jovial, depending on how Thatcher contorts the rest of her features. What’s more, there’s an ease to all of these things — a soft tenderness that counterbalances the frigidity — as if such intensity comes casually. And maybe it does.

(Neon) Sophie Thatcher in “Her Private Hell”

With “Her Private Hell,” Thatcher has found an auteur who matches her refreshing self-assurance. Here, Refn lets it all go and indulges in his every artistic impulse, drenching a Brian De Palma-inspired deception in neon (and bringing in De Palma’s longtime collaborator, Pino Donaggio, for a resplendent score better than anything you’ve heard this decade). Thatcher isn’t so different from De Palma’s muses either. The naive exuberance of Nancy Allen, the innate sex appeal of Melanie Griffith and Michelle Pfeiffer, the informal immorality of Amy Irving; Thatcher has it all, rolled into one captivating package. When Elle and Hunter witness the brutal murder of a neighbor across the way — presumably by the mist’s fabled entity, The Leatherman — Refn completes the thread that ties his violent vapidity, where pretty girls do ugly things, to De Palma’s voyeuristic dreaminess. If you’re a fan of film and all the places it can take you, you can’t do much better than this. 

That is until Thatcher ratchets up the eerie tension tenfold while Refn builds his gorgeous fantasy around her. When Elle’s father unexpectedly departs, leaving her to finish shooting her movie in the care of her not-so-wicked stepmother, Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), the pair’s psychosexual strain further complicates matters. Before Dominique married Elle’s father, the two were the best of friends. As strange as it is, their dynamic seems to alter everything around them, as if their mutual destiny were written in the stars — not that anyone can see the stars with all this mist, that is.

For a director who’s staked a name on films and television shows that are narratively impenetrable, “Her Private Hell” may feel like a big ask for some viewers. And I get that, I do. The movie sways almost imperceptibly between Elle’s quest for the truth and the haunting story of Private K (Charles Melton), a soldier who lost everything to the mist and its monstrous entity the last time it immersed the city. It can occasionally feel as if Refn is playing a game with you, softly whispering if you’re still there. But though some have complained about what they call “a total lack of plot,” I simply must object, and not just on behalf of Thatcher, whose work is worth seeking out even if you don’t jive with Refn’s aesthetic obsessions. 

There is so much to admire with “Her Private Hell” — too much for just one go-round. It’s not only gripping, but extremely intricate if you’re brave enough to get on its level. Two women witness the strange murder of a neighbor and begin to believe that something could be lurking in the mist that’s enveloped the Earth. When they start shooting a movie together, they begin to understand their connection to this ancient evil, and their place in a cyclical inferno wrought by absent parents and bad weather. They soon understand that to be heartbroken is to be damned to know the exquisite pain of being alive. This film is not merely glittering debris, as some have posited, nor is it style over substance; it’s a campfire story told by Thatcher’s unearthly orator.

As the night grows black and the last embers start to dull, “Her Private Hell” sends you off to bed wondering if it could all be true. Thatcher’s warbly voice hangs in the air; tales of the Leatherman and lost daughters spinning around your brain as you try to fall asleep. “None of this is real,” you tell yourself, turning off your brain for a good night’s rest. But just then, a piercing pink light appears outside, and a low, opaque mist begins to creep through the seams of your tent. As it turns out, the fantastical has much more grounding in reality than we ever want to imagine.

The post “Her Private Hell” belongs to Sophie Thatcher appeared first on Salon.com.

In the dog days of summer, there’s no better place to escape the heat than inside the air-conditioned paradise of a movie theater. Perhaps you’ll even find yourself there with a romantic companion, their uncovered leg grazing against yours as you both tuck your feet in to make room for the annoying person who came in late and is now trying to find their seat in the dark. Your skin touches theirs, trading the dewy moisture of perspiration. How electric; erotic, even. For just a second, the spark between you two is so powerful that it melts away every care outside of that place and time. 

And then, your film — a romantic comedy or dramedy that seems like the perfect date movie — begins, and you’re quickly reminded that no amount of desire can remove you from the context of the world you exist in. The fantasy comes crashing down. Even the fluffy rom-coms are steeped in real life’s anxieties about the social and political, the wars and the wages. But the passion was there; it was real. Maybe the moment was even more charged by the knowledge, somewhere in the back of your head, that these unexpected, carnal joys arrive far less often when so much of our time is spent just trying to make it from one day to the next. Sex, even just the lingering thought of it, can feel like an extravagance. I’d wager that’s a big part of why this summer’s theatrical slate has been so overtly horny: Everyone is trying to figure out how sex fits into this strange modern life.

(Nicole Rivelli /Universal Pictures) Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner in “One Night Only”

No film makes that more clear than Will Gluck’s new romantic comedy, “One Night Only,” where, brace yourself here, premarital sex has been outlawed except for one outrageous annual holiday. Think “The Purge,” but for sex — “The Urge” was right there, but whatever — and just as dystopian, though with quite a bit more charm and fewer dead bodies. In the movie, unlucky-in-love strangers Owen (Callum Turner) and Allie (Monica Barbaro) find their paths repeatedly crossing during the 12-hour sex purge window, as both of them seek partners to get it on with. We know the pair will inevitably end up together. But it’s their journey and all the bizarre autocratic municipal rules they have to dance around that make “One Night Only” a clever, peculiar and head-scratching standout from the rom-com crowd.

“One Night Only” also happens to be the discourse darling du jour, with some suggesting that its unusual fusion of genre tropes and political overtones is an insidious embrace of our backslide toward fascism. Indeed, Owen and Allie quibble less about living under a punitive abstinence edict than one might expect, and the film doesn’t have nearly as much fun with, or fury for, the civic regime as it should. 

But like this summer’s “The Invite” and “I Want Your Sex,” Gluck’s film encourages a compelling and multilayered dialogue about the role of sex and intimacy amid terrifying political fury. How can we find the joy in all of this? Is, say, one hour of fleeting sexual pleasure enough to combat the 14-some others that we spend in waking dread? The solutions won’t, ahem, come easily, but there’s really no more appropriate time to ask these questions and search for their answers than summer, when the heat makes us alternate between f*cking furiously and f*cking furious.

Curiously, “One Night Only” is more of the former than the latter. As the film’s title card tells viewers, the movie takes place three years into “the mandate,” as the characters refer to it. “It’s been . . . a lot,” the card continues. Opaque and jokey as it is, this is the only bit of tangible backstory the film provides about the average American’s response to the forbiddance of fornication. Though a few ideological asides do provide some additional color as the night goes on. Owen’s mother (Molly Ringwald) and her partner (LeVar Burton) get into a spat about the mandate’s legislation — “That’s what happens with single-issue voters!”; “No one voted for it, it was passed by Congress!” — that soon turns hot and heavy. 

It’s a silly but reasonably shrewd way to depict how many of us have landed at some level of complacency in a political atmosphere where, most of the time, we have little direct control and negligible impact over the laws that dictate our lives, no matter how oppressive. We bicker about them, but the majority of Americans aren’t in the streets protesting. As neo-fascist as the country’s become, we still live under capitalism, and the ability to regularly protest is somewhat a luxury. But, then again, so is living in America at all (at least to some extent), even when it’s awful. 

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I realize I’m probably giving Gluck and screenwriter Travis Braun too much credit when I say these are the kinds of questions they wanted viewers to ask. But I find “One Night Only” to be a far more interesting film because it doesn’t answer everything up front or take the blanket optimist’s route. These characters know that the mandate is awful, but they’ve found screwed-up ways to live with it. Anyone who says that doesn’t reflect the modern American way has their head in the sand. And frankly, a film as pleasant but ephemeral as this isn’t going to push democracy any further into the dark.

What “One Night Only” makes so apparent is that our personal pleasure is at stake in this environment. Constant federal surveillance and deeply rooted institutional corruption are simply not sexy, even if being cognizant and fearful of them absolutely is. (Caring is still hot!) And I’ve always said that there is no better place to work out thorny, complex ideas — the kind that are sometimes difficult to devote time and energy to amid the stress of our day-to-day lives — than at the movies. 

Gluck’s film arrives on the heels of a pair of sweltering summer peers that already laid quite a bit of thematic groundwork in the sex space for audiences to traverse. The stickiest of them all, Olivia Wilde’s terrific chamber dramedy, “The Invite,” just landed on VOD after steadily working its way up from limited to wide theatrical engagements — sort of like cinematic release-schedule foreplay. The film navigates ideas large and small, moving between the casual intimacies, or lack thereof, that make up long-term relationships, and the baseline human carnality that points us toward sex even when those relationships aren’t working. 

(A24) Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton in “The Invite”

Put simply: It’s more difficult to maintain the true intimacy than it’s ever been. The prevalence of dating apps and our ability to follow someone else’s every move on social media have zapped the honeymoon period’s lifespan. Throw in demanding jobs, expensive rugs, rapidly changing social mores, the desire to start or maintain a healthy relationship with your neighbors, and the nagging feeling that everyone in the world is having sex but you, and life gets overwhelming fast. Sex shuffles to the back burner. But though the flame might be small, it remains lit. And “The Invite” attests that it’s never too late to dial up the heat, so long as we’re honest about what we want and what we need from our partners. 

“The Invite” is all about communication and open conversation. And that’s a critical strength in both relationships and in the ways we watch and digest art. That this summer has been replete with dialogues not only about our sexual neuroses and compulsions, but real, steadfast love in all its forms, is a sure sign that love and sex are on our minds more than they have been in a few decades. Much like the influx of grief-laden horror movies that followed the 2016 election, one can trace our preoccupation with intimacy back to political rot. Our government directs so much of our lives that it’s impossible to remove its influence completely. Now, we’ve moved past grieving the lost hope and have the chance to create our own using the spark of romance and physical connection.

(Magnolia Pictures) Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman in “I Want Your Sex”

As Gregg Araki’s playful comedy “I Want Your Sex” asserts, crafting the transient delights of the flesh into something stable and meaningful will take some trial and error, perhaps even some sacrifice. We’re living in a moment where people can easily choose to void sex from their lives or pursue it as a ritualistic part of their existence, and the space in the middle is murky and treacherous. If you have questions about sex and where it fits into your life, Araki’s ardent message is to explore them. The answers may come with regret or heartbreak, but they may also come with glorious satisfaction and unbelievable revelations. More often, the resulting discoveries will sit somewhere in between those two emotional polarities. We can’t live our lives to the extreme all the time, but we can do ourselves a favor and become better acquainted with exactly what we want and how to get it. 

That’s the glorious thing about going to the cinema: You’re bound to leave any movie with both questions and answers. Occasionally, one such question might be, “Does this movie covertly support fascism by making totalitarian sex mandates cute and manageable?” And those are queries that must be addressed because, whether we like it or not, even dystopian rom-coms might point us in the right — or even new — direction. The federal government certainly isn’t trying to orient us toward a brighter, more consistently pleasurable future. Why not take matters into our own hands? Or better yet, put those hands on someone we love and care for, even if only for a night.

The post “One Night Only” and the summer of rom-com sex talk appeared first on Salon.com.

Director Matt Johnson’s latest feature, “Tony” — a biopic following a young Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) through his first kitchen experience, slinging cheap fish in a Provincetown greasy spoon — exists inside a quote. The film opens with a pull from Bourdain’s beloved pseudo-memoir, “Kitchen Confidential,” in which Bourdain reminisces about his 19-year-old self, trolling around Cape Cod trying to impress a girl and become a writer, with zero experience doing either. “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” Bourdain writes early in the book. 

From the jump, it’s hard to shake the feeling that “Tony” is mistakenly aligning itself with the public’s idea of Bourdain rather than the man’s reality. When I think of Anthony Bourdain, I think of two people. The first is the enigmatic yet ultimately unknowable chef, whose charm and good nature sometimes dulled a cloud of unmistakable darkness to the eyes of the public; the second is the idealistic version of Bourdain, who exists in half-remembered citations and GIFs of his many travel shows removed from their context — rosy, nostalgic tributes to an image, rather than a person. 

Regrettably, “Tony” operates in the latter state: all sentiment and little practical truth, different from the ways Bourdain’s effusive, colorful work and writing make people feel when they really dive into it. It’s part biopic, part coming-of-age story and all gung-ho idealism, battered and fried until golden and palatable, before being spritzed with a fresh splash of lemon, providing the film a brief, compelling tartness that fades all too quickly. Like a lobster roll made with imitation crab meat — or a guy who lists Bourdain as his biggest inspiration in a prompt on his Hinge profile — “Tony” is economical and satiating, but far less satisfying than the real thing. 

(Seacia Pavao/A24) Dominic Sessa in “Tony”

What’s more, the film is bizarrely undercooked when it comes to Bourdain’s experiences in the kitchen. To be fair, Johnson has his work cut out for him. “Tony” is adapted from only the first 50 pages or so of “Kitchen Confidential,” meaning Johnson and his co-writer Matthew Miller (working from a screenplay originally written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe) essentially had to flesh out a pitch draft’s worth of detail into a feature-length film. And for those who like their biopic by-the-numbers, the finished product is a perfectly serviceable entry into the canon. 

But I get the sense that, in comparing Bourdain’s writing to the film, true die-hards will long for his quippy, evocative storytelling that’s absent from “Tony.” Bourdain gave fellow outsiders an insider’s view of the kitchen. He made people fall in love with food, its rituals and its culture. And though “Tony” doesn’t entirely lack that heady romanticization, its choice to amplify its introductory quote — making Bourdain an even more insufferable lout for dramatic effect — feels antithetical to Bourdain’s raw candor.

Now, I’m not exactly a stickler for precise detail. All book adaptations, whether from novels or memoirs, could stand to embellish the facts here and there, or go ahead and reinvent the wheel when possible. This irks literature purists. But cinema is a different medium, and as such, changes must be made. It did strike me as odd, however, that “Tony” is forged on a factual alteration that diverts Tony from the kitchen far too often — the movie’s cardinal sin. 

After pitching a bogus novel to the Vassar English department in hopes of scoring a writing fellowship that will provide his summer with a sizeable goofing-off stipend, Tony’s sure he’s got the prize in the bag. At a college bar, he drunkenly peacocks for his high school crush and fellow Vassar student, Nancy (Emilia Jones). Tony tells her that he’s going to be a famous writer, before challenging her comprehension of a few five-dollar words. Repelled, Nancy replies that she will be happily spending her summer slinging pizzas in Provincetown.

Surprise, surprise: Tony doesn’t get the fellowship, and instead, flees his childhood home early in the morning to catch a bus and a ferry to Provincetown. With no money but plenty of blind devotion to Nancy — whose character, it’s worth mentioning, has subzero charm and nuance, making Tony’s staunch affection feel like a ruse to the viewer — Tony arrives hapless and hopeless. It turns out Nancy’s got a pizza-slinging beau, so Tony drowns his sorrows in fried fish and cheap beers at the ramshackle clam shack The Flagship. When he can’t pay for his meal, Tony’s tossed out by the head Chef (Antonio Banderas) and his flighty kitchen cohort, Sal (Leo Woodall). Long story short: Tony wants to stay and pursue Nancy, Chef lets Tony sleep on his hammock in exchange for washing dishes at the restaurant, and the film can never decide which narrative to give more time to.

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In “Kitchen Confidential,” Bourdain describes his decision to head to Provincetown as an impulse motivated less by romantic desire than by general apathy. “I went in with some friends on a summer share in Cape Cod. It was what my friends were doing, and that was enough for me,” he writes. A brief mention of a pizza-spinning girlfriend is tossed off immediately after, replaced by vivid stories about his first summer working at the real-life Flagship, given the pseudonym The Dreadnaught. Each member of the kitchen crew in Johnson’s film is as scraggly and unpredictable as Bourdain describes them in the book, teaching him as much about sex and drugs as they did broiling lobsters and frying up clams.

Here, “Tony” is in its element as Johnson crafts the intimidating yet irresistible camaraderie of a kitchen, and all of the misfits who work inside it. But when Tony leaves for the day and is left to his own devices in Provincetown, the movie falls hard into all of the trite trappings of your average biopic. Tony and Sal get into all kinds of trouble, snorting coke and banging broads, but these things often happen in freewheeling montages with little consequence. It’s nearly impossible to get a sense of how Tony himself is actually feeling. Watching this version of him is akin to seeing Sessa bang his hands against the confines of that Bourdain quote, desperately trying to make something substantial out of this thin rendering of a very significant persona.

All of the men who idolize Bourdain for their imagined notions of who he was — who model themselves after the image of him sitting in a leather jacket and tiny sunglasses, with a pack of cigarettes on the table of a Parisian cafe — will love it. Under a clip of Bourdain sitting at this cafe, one person commented (before Bourdain’s death), “When I grow up I am going to be just like Anthony Bourdain.” That’s the perfect summation of the toothless film Johnson has crafted.

(Seacia Pavao/A24) Dominic Sessa and Leo Woodall in “Tony”

“Tony” tries to distance itself from the public’s quixotic version of Bourdain by making the younger depiction casually unbearable, the kind of person you wouldn’t enjoy working with — and especially not mentoring — in a kitchen. But these attempts largely come off as cloying, even silly. There’s one moment where Tony witnesses Sal score drugs before watching him shoot up on the boardwalk, as if to say, “We may not show it here, but Anthony Bourdain will later struggle with heroin use!” The dope is dopey, and it’s unfortunately only a foray into mushier territory. Banderas provides his mentor figure with a delightful vigor, but Johnson can’t quite figure out what to do with him, or how to make Chef feel like a real person. (How fitting we never learn his real name.) Even a few flowery sentences in “Kitchen Confidential” about lessons learned working at The Dreadnaught dwarf “Tony” in comparison. For a film about the origins of a foul-mouthed culinary renegade, beloved for his thoughtful musings on food and life, there’s bafflingly little interiority.

One could argue that’s Johnson’s point: Tony hadn’t yet become Anthony. Bourdain’s singular reflections could only come from a life well-lived and filled with mistakes. But that doesn’t mean that this version of Bourdain has to lack depth. Johnson is so concerned with conforming to the auspicious, nostalgic idea of who Bourdain was that he makes his biopic far too safe. He reduces Bourdain to a zygote who simply needed enough nurturing to become his older, cooler self, when he could, instead, read between the lines to find what makes young Tony special. Bourdain’s writing is far more tender and interested in other people than “Tony” ever is. And as intent on vivifying culture as Bourdain was, I think he’d watch this movie and feel that there’s an authenticity that is deeply missed. But we’ll never know that for sure. If “Tony” must open with a quote and confine Bourdain to his words, as he so often is posthumously, I’ll close with one that appears just a few sentences before it: “The less said about that part of my life, the better.”

The post Anthony Bourdain would have hated his own biopic appeared first on Salon.com.

Just personally speaking, if it were alleged in court documents that I abused my family in an alcohol-fueled tirade that culminated in my children seeing me pour a drink all over their mother’s head, I would not be so cavalier about parting with my very public sobriety. But I’m not Brad Pitt, and no one is doing sycophantic cover stories on me in Esquire.

In the recently published profile, Pitt admitted to getting “back off the wagon,” but “in a more restrained manner,” admitting he can have a few glasses of wine. If he overindulges, he risks losing a morning to a hangover, and thus, the beautiful morning views outside his luxurious Los Angeles home. The piece continues to fawn over Pitt and his generous hospitality, with some observations on his legacy and a quote from Pitt calling AI “an interesting experiment” — which he interrupts to admire the hawks outside his window, a fluffy moment of color kept in the profile.

In a sane world, Pitt would be challenged more, asked about his ongoing legal battles with Angelina Jolie, his children dropping the last name “Pitt,” the substance abuse — even a question about Pitt not having a good film role since before the pandemic would do. 

But we live in a world where sanity is swapped for starry-eyed adulation, where celebrity culture often mirrors the blind devotion for MAGA politicians. Fame absolves stars like Pitt in the way popular politics protects men like Max Miller, who also faces a slew of credible abuse allegations. As long as they stay the course, maintain manhood and weaponize nostalgia, the public will forget and the challenges will stop coming. When a brooding Pitt admits he’s had trouble with “family stuff,” the writer lets the sentiment disintegrate. “We’ll leave it at that,” Pitt concludes.

The post Brad Pitt’s sobriety story deserves more scrutiny appeared first on Salon.com.

In the music video for Ariana Grande’s latest single, “Petal” — the title track off her eighth album, released last week — viewer discretion is advised. A parental advisory opens the clip, warning of the video’s explicit content and depictions of graphic violence, which culminate in Grande taking a chainsaw to the heads of four cigar-smoking, whiskey-chugging record execs. Earlier in the video, Grande’s character, Pepper, receives their written notes, including one that pointedly contains the critique, “Boring on the eyes, a little homely, couldn’t hurt to lose a few pounds.” The power tool to their throats is supposed to be a moment of personal and artistic triumph, echoed by the raucous cheers from the other women waiting to audition outside the blood-splattered boardroom. 

But when Grande emerges from the audition, fake blood glistening from the visible curvature of her sternum beneath her skin, the jubilant, almost extreme response from the rest of the women feels as insidious as the criticisms from the men. They’re blindly screaming their heads off, bolstered by the person who stopped molding herself in someone else’s image, who refused to cater to how the world or the industry thought she should appear. Grande’s defiant self-control over her image is something for them to celebrate, even worship. Her restraint is the commendable trait on which the women hang their devotion. As the chorus of “Petal” puts it, “It’s such a f*cked situation.”

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Shortly after the video was released, the internet exploded with concern about Grande’s noticeably svelte appearance, and the scenes in the clip that seemed intended to exploit it. Grande’s stanbase quickly retaliated, saying that those commenting on her weight were bringing back body-shaming and tabloid-era hypercriticism. Detractors responded in turn, worrying that Grande’s ardent fans were enabling the singer’s unhealthy behavior and speculated eating disorder. The worry over Grande’s visible emaciation rendered the video itself moot. Whatever the message was — a self-aware nod to Grande’s own struggles, a defensive reply to those saying she’s too thin, a criticism of blind idol worship — it was quickly lost. A couple of days later, Grande’s team announced that she’d be taking a break from “public-facing work” following the conclusion of her Eternal Sunshine Tour in September. And while Grande later insisted the break was pre-planned and not “reactive or impulsive,” there’s no doubt the announcement was timed to dull the cacophony of both the jeers and cheers.

(Magnolia Pictures) John Early in “Maddie’s Secret”

Watching the veneer slip from Grande’s grasp during a pivotal moment in her life is eerily reminiscent of the events in John Early’s wonderful film “Maddie’s Secret,” which coincidentally had its digital release the same day “Petal” hit shelves. In the film, Early plays Maddie Ralph, an aspiring test-kitchen chef at a hip food publication. With a major career milestone within her reach and increased appearances in front of the camera, the sudden pressures on Maddie trigger long-hidden patterns of disordered eating: bingeing and purging, secrets and lies. 

And though Early’s film is a melodramatic comedy, it gets patently serious when it comes to the grim realities of eating disorders, taking an unrestrained and, at times, uncomfortable look at the harm enabling can do, and the tragedies it can engender. In a moment when no one can quite agree on how to properly address what’s so clearly happening before our eyes with Grande, a film like “Maddie’s Secret” opens a dialogue. It’s not pretty or easy. But then again, movies tend to make the most sense out of the aspects of life that are neither pretty nor easy.

It helps that Early’s vision of our media-steeped contemporary lives sees through the shiny, digital facade. The company Maddie works for, GourMaybe, functions somewhat like the pre-cancellation “Bon Appétit” test kitchen. It’s so intentionally inclusive and ambitious that it turns right back around to feel limiting, pigeonholing Maddie into a place where she feels in constant competition with her colleagues and herself. While waiting for two of her coworkers to leave a bathroom so she can purge, Maddie hears them discussing an app where you “input all your trauma and it links you up with a therapist, all over FaceTime.” The dance class Maddie attends with her best friend, Deena (Kate Berlant), is “radically inclusive, none of that toxic gym bro stuff.” All of the regimens surrounding Maddie and her illness are purportedly designed to be easily accessible for healthy, honest living. But they’re the same old systems in different clothes. And when Maddie’s disorder tells her she needs to stay in control, she contorts all of this trendy pastel-colored, serif-typefaced wellness to her favor, using it to fuel her harmful compulsions.

Grande moves in a similar space, but without the satire to easily delineate the difference between healthy and unhealthy behaviors. Like Maddie, she can easily cloak compulsions under the blanket of modern body positivity. When her noticeably smaller appearance began to concern people in 2023, Grande took to TikTok, urging the public to be “gentler and less comfortable commenting on people’s bodies . . . [even if you] think it’s good or well-intentioned.” She continued to say this would “keep each other safer” and that “you never know what someone is going through.” Fans have reiterated this messaging as her already thin frame became measurably smaller in the years since. But to turn the other cheek at this point, or even to chalk these changes up to healthful new habits, would be to ignore the obvious. Grande’s music would go on to parrot her sentiments, building a fan-fortified transparent wall between herself and the public — a barrier that would allow us to watch her grow thinner, while blocking every genuine concern. 

(Magnolia Pictures) Kate Berlant and John Early in “Maddie’s Secret”

“Maddie’s Secret” does an impressive job of highlighting the dangers of this kind of enabling. Deena has an almost stan-like preoccupation with Maddie. Her relationship frequently crosses boundaries, but Maddie permits it because the attention makes her feel good and motivates her disorder. When Deena finds Maddie hunched over the toilet one evening, vomit strewn across her lips, Maddie swears that she’s taking steps to get it under control, and Deena assures Maddie that her secret is safe without providing her friend with the necessary action to actually help her. Deena wants to watch Maddie soar, to see her climb the echelons into food media superstardom.

Like Grande to her adoring fans, Maddie is Deena’s idol, and Deena measures Maddie’s success by her work benchmarks and public visibility. If, God forbid, Maddie should disappear — if Grande departed public life, as she’s now planning on — there would be a hole in Deena’s life. She would have to admit that she’s being wickedly selfish. So instead, Deena keeps an eye out in bathrooms and at dumpsters while Maddie purges. She shrugs off Maddie getting faint at dance class because she threw up her lunch. And then, Maddie collapses.

This is where the film becomes its most prickly. Early is interested in the sickly vanity of eating disorders and conceptual femininity, and he explores the danger of these illnesses through a lens that is both uneasy and unique to his film. The stakes are higher and more honest here than in most of the TV movies that “Maddie’s Secret” draws from. Maddie winds up in the hospital after cardiac arrest, a condition she’s far too young for. Her gums are bleeding, her jaw is swollen and there are teeth marks on her knuckles. A hospital psychiatrist, Dr. Kronenfield (Chris Bauer), tells Maddie that she’s at immediate risk of rupturing her stomach or esophagus and dying. “I’ll get it under control,” she tells him. “I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.” It’s the same language Maddie sold to Deena, but a view Dr. Kronenfield won’t buy. “You relapsed before, and you’ll relapse again,” he replies, urging Maddie into inpatient treatment.

Here, “Maddie’s Secret” fully diverges from its semi-parodic path, following Maddie to treatment, which, like many people who end up in mandatory care facilities, she doesn’t take seriously, believing she knows her body best. Her flippancy is only exacerbated by Deena, who fakes a bulimic health scare to join treatment and jailbreak Maddie so she can prepare for a major interview that will dictate her future at GourMaybe. But as Dr. Kronenfield warned, impulsion begets compulsion, and the decision causes Maddie’s horrific relapse and leaves Maddie’s rehab roommate (Vanessa Bayer) alone and vulnerable to her own illness.

(Anna Webber/Getty Images for Cold Stone Creamery & Wetzel's Pretzels) Ariana Grande and Taylen Biggs

That’s the kind of ripple effect that such wanton enabling can have, even if it’s not intentional. Perpetuating these kinds of gravely serious illnesses extends the sickness past the confines of our own bodies, and into the world around us. For someone like Ariana Grande, who has millions of eyes on her at all times, the potential for harm is astronomically magnified. Surely she understands that. But when a fair portion of those millions are telling her that she looks perfect and encouraging her to keep going, keep performing, keep working, all for their entertainment, of course it becomes harder to see that the only thing they really want is for her to keep running herself ragged.

The health of millions of people doesn’t fall entirely on Grande’s shoulders. There are plenty of other ways that our culture has disguised unhealthy behaviors, as “Maddie’s Secret” so cunningly stresses. But Grande does perpetuate a silence, complacency, and enabling by painting genuine concern as gossipy chatter. 

Pro-anorexia and pro-ED content has exploded over the last decade. What was once tucked into corners of the internet is now visible just beneath the sheen of any social media algorithm. A film like “Maddie’s Secret” accurately portrays idolization and enabling with as much horror as it should. Early plays Maddie’s lowest moments with raw sincerity and expressions of utter helplessness — visible cries for help, acted out with total concern and love for the feminine. In its own special way, the film provides an accessible entry point to discussing these matters, one that crashes through the transparent walls Grande, her fans, and the well-intentioned body positivity movement have built around her. If talking about a woman’s body is so radioactive that we can’t even begin to address the issue, leave it to Early — a man channelling his love for headstrong women who get so swept up in the world’s expectations that they risk losing it all — to speak out of turn.

The post Ariana Grande fans need to see “Maddie’s Secret” appeared first on Salon.com.

Are you having sex? Do you want to be? 

These days, there are a million different possible answers to either question. Our culture has confused sex — a relatively uncomplicated, biological thing — with desire, which is an entirely different, much more complex can of worms just waiting to be opened. While the two frequently meet one another on the bed, on the floor or in a back alleyway behind that dive bar on Cherry Street after a few well-tequilas, both of these things are their own animals. It’s act versus thought, performance versus feeling. And yet, sex and desire have become irrevocably intertwined in our modern age, like two sweaty bodies, tangled together, realizing halfway through the deed that they don’t actually have as much in common as they initially thought.

In his first feature film in 12 years, “I Want Your Sex,” veteran counterculture director and perennial cool guy Gregg Araki is looking to have some fun in the technicolor midpoint where sex and desire meet. Sex has played a major role throughout Araki’s filmography, but never in quite such explicit terms as this. His characters — impulsive adolescents and young adults, slicing through their disaffection with sharp bursts of hormonal momentum — typically experience sex as a product of their furious youth. In their eyes, it’s an act of heady rebellion, more in line with the drugs and crime that permeate these underground, nihilistic worlds than it is with true romantic intimacy. So for Araki to dispose of all that to home in on sex itself, rather than building his characters and their worlds around it, there must be a good reason. 

(Magnolia Pictures) Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman in “I Want Your Sex”

In short: There are plenty. The ’90s-era nihilism that threaded so many of Araki’s films has taken a hard slant toward technological despondency. Many young people act as though life begins and ends with the digital ecosystem. And even if that fact might make you depressed, scrolling will deplete one’s cynicism until it’s replaced by another attention-grabbing post. The simple fact of the matter is that, with so much time spent solitary and online, there’s less time for sex — or even the possibility of it. 

And yet, sex (or at least the implication of it) is everywhere. OnlyFans is its own viable economy, with some users raking in millions per year from people who want to live the fantasy through a screen. Manufactured eroticism not only pays the bills but stops the scroll. And, of course, there’s the fact that anyone in the world can access hundreds of terabytes of porn in two measly seconds. It used to be that, if you wanted sex, you had to be forward about it, seek it out to some degree. Now, the proliferation of sex and sexuality has resulted in an ironic prudishness among digital natives, who, as a result of growing up with sex quite literally in the palm of their hands, abstain from intercourse and all the lessons and joy it has to offer. And it’s that reserve that Araki aims at with “I Want Your Sex.” 

Yet, for a film with such a bold, George Michael-ripping title, “I Want Your Sex” is curiously unerotic. The characters have sex, sure, but their coitus is so instantly excessive it veers on silly. But that’s also the kind of frisky fun Araki wants his viewers to remember, the outrageous sexual dynamics that are the byproduct of our wildest adventures — exploits that don’t always begin with carnal intentions. By steeping his film in modern hypersexuality, Araki fashions a humorous how-to guide on finding real, memorable sexual connection in a world where everything is designed to be sexy, but isn’t actually stimulating.

And if anyone knows stimulating, it’s hotshot mixed media artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde, in her second hoot-and-holler role this summer), who’s made a name for herself in the Los Angeles art scene with a dedication to provocation. Her work is suggestive and boundary-pushing, and she’s exactly the kind of person that neurotic Gen Z art scene sycophant Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) would love to work for. After a chemistry-rich interview in her office, Erika hires Elliot on the spot — strange, considering his complete lack of experience and the spate of promising applicants that preceded him in the interview process. But Elliot doesn’t question it. Only later, when he’s tasked with chewing gum to stick onto the outline of a massive portrait of a vulva, does he learn that Erika has a habit of sleeping with her interns.

This piece of gossip soon begins to cloud Elliot’s life and better judgement. His girlfriend, the uptight med student Minerva (Charli xcx, speaking in an accent no one’s ever heard before, with a name no one’s had in 60 years — brilliant), is as cold in the bedroom as she is in the operating room. But Elliot also has no idea how to verbalize his desires. He’s of a generation that overthinks and underperforms. That is, until a wide-ranging chat with Erika in her home results in a proposition: Erika would like to enter into a consensual, primarily physical boss-employee relationship with her inferior, and use their inverse power dynamic to rock Elliot’s world: leashes, S&M, dildos, spanking, the works. But Erika calls the shots. If she says it’s over, it’s over. And there’s nothing like a suspicious, sudden disappearance to pull the plug on a burgeoning sexual connection.

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Araki’s screenplay, written alongside his “Now Apocalypse” series co-writer Karley Sciortino, hops back and forth between the time before Erika’s vanishing and immediately after. Her disappearance is mystifying and arousing — for both Elliot and the police. Elliot is abruptly without his sensual supervisor, and his loss is seismic. Left to his own devices with a new sexual skillset, yet still pining for his boss, Elliot is unsure of how to move forward. And it’s this impasse where Araki fleshes out his clever, if not entirely unique, ideas about the innate limits of the libido.

For as much handwringing as there has been about Gen Z’s attitudes toward sex — and whether they’re having it at all, which is debatable — Araki is careful not to indict the youth. He is, after all, famously still babyfaced at 66, a physical spriteliness mirrored in his bright visual aesthetics and effervescent directorial tone. Araki is very much in touch with what young people enjoy and how they operate. He simply wants more for them. Youth is wasted on the young, after all, and Araki’s mission with “I Want Your Sex” is to make it patently clear that the clock will continue to tick whether they choose to get physical or not. So why not give it a try?

(Magnolia Pictures) Charli xcx and Cooper Hoffman in “I Want Your Sex”

Araki posits that it’s fear holding people back; not just the fear of rejection, but a broader fear of the unknown. As much as I hate to parrot the sentiments of irritable older people who grumble about every kid getting a participation trophy, it is true that we live in a world that caters to our fragile egos. Every possible result for any conceivable situation is spelled out for us via a few quick internet searches. In a time when explainers and how-to guides exist for everything, influencers tell you how to dress and what to buy, and making a phone call has become a Herculean task for many, the margin for error has grown so slim it’s invisible. That also means the potential for surprise has dwindled, too. Humans have adopted an aversion to the casual risks that used to be a part of everyday life. Hazarding heartbreak and embarrassment is too dangerous. But the alternative, as Araki suggests, is an utterly boring existence, where, either way, you’ll always wonder “what if?”

(Magnolia Pictures) Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville in “I Want Your Sex”

But just depicting the pleasures of sex wouldn’t be enough to quell all that fear. Members of Gen Z might just fast forward through those scenes anyway, given that they want to see less sex onscreen as it is. Though Erika and Elliot’s intercourse is raucous and sultry, it’s their unpredictable relationship outside of the bedroom that keeps their fire — and the film’s madcap pacing — fueled. Elliot runs around LA doing Erika’s menial tasks until he drops everything at her beck and call. He upends his relationship with Minerva and screws up his best friendship with his roommate, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders). And he demolishes his own ego by throwing himself into something wild and capricious headfirst. He’s chasing the spark and expanding his horizons in the process. Great sex is no longer the goal, but rather a nice bonus.

To some, it may feel like Araki is flattening complex social mores and misunderstanding the anxieties behind this era of semi-celibacy. And at times, “I Want Your Sex” does sorely miss the sharp, scrappy bite of Araki’s early films, which had far more to say than his one-track-minded latest. But there’s an amiable flair to the way Araki conveys an old adage in a new way. It’s not the destination; it’s the journey — and if anyone knows this, it’s someone whose youth was spent pursuing sex, art and feeling at risk of mistake and failure. Sex is great, but what we remember most is what led up to it. We recall the excitement of shared energy, the potency of possibility, the spark so palpable it culminated in something intimate and naked. That’s the kind of animal electricity that points us toward our purest selves. When we fear the act of sex, we don’t experience the desire that leads up to it. And when we don’t have desire, we don’t truly live.

The post “I Want Your Sex” is deliberately unsexy appeared first on Salon.com.

Early in his extraordinary new documentary, “Remake,” seasoned filmmaker Ross McElwee reminisces with his young son, Adrian, about their travels together, presenting McElwee’s films at various festivals around the world. “What’s your favorite place that we’ve been to, Adrian?” McElwee asks his son in the archival footage. Adrian recalls a snafu from the Munich Film Festival, but can’t quite remember the details. McElwee explains that the numbers on his film reels were mislabeled, causing extended confusion as they tried to put the footage back in the correct, chronological order. Still a child, Adrian looks off into the distance, biting his gelato spoon while registering the information.

Then the footage burns out, replaced by shots of Adrian across his youth, preserved in celluloid amber: raking leaves on an autumn afternoon, waving a sparkler around in the summertime, looking at himself in the mirror as a baby. McElwee’s voice, more mature and stoic than before, fades in. “The story I thought I was telling with my filmmaking, the stories of lives lived over decades, is now disjointed, confused — the reels are all out of order,” he says. “First there is a father, and he has a son: me. But then it starts all over. I am now father, and I have a son: you. But something goes awry. Something goes off-script. And then, suddenly, you’re gone.”

“Remake” is McElwee’s first film in 15 years, appearing like a jewel out of a mountain of life’s rubble. His extended absence from filmmaking was necessitated by Adrian’s death in 2016 and the monumental torrent of confusion and emotional displacement that followed. McElwee’s last documentary, 2011’s “Photographic Memory,” saw Adrian as a young adult, trying to come into his own and figure out his place in life amid a shifting social landscape riddled with digital black holes. 

(Music Box Films) Adrian McElwee in “Remake”

In that film, McElwee set out to reconcile his somewhat fractured relationship with Adrian, who’d become distant and disillusioned compared to his spritely, curious youth, by traveling back to France, where he worked as a photographer’s assistant in his early 20s. In retracing his steps, McElwee sought to understand Adrian better, to comprehend the grasp digital media had on his son in contrast to his own fascination with the analog film camera he frequently used to capture his family, both for his own memories and for his documentaries. In “Remake,” McElwee laments the hope that making “Photographic Memory” gave him, an aspiration that he was depicting his son on the cusp of finding his way through the dark. “The film might’ve been shot as a documentary,” McElwee says, “but now it’s fiction.”

“Remake” may be the story and study of a tragedy. But McElwee’s nonlinear construction and brusque, confessional narration slowly transform the film into something much deeper, a poignant work of art that instantly yet subtly aligns itself with the great stories of our time. His mission is unassuming. This is a film McElwee feels compelled to make, as if it were something living inside of him that had to be excised by any means necessary. 

Like all grieving, it is complicated and disordered, and beautifully so. McElwee stitches together the past and present to find new meaning in their seams, a jagged line that runs through time and points toward the future. To call his latest film a contemporary masterwork would be true, but there’s also no quantifying the magic McElwee conjures here, no comparing it to anything else. “Remake” is a truly singular piece of art, a self-reflexive rumination on life and the result of all its passions. It is memory embodied.

Sometime in the 2010s, McElwee received a call from director and producer Steve Carr, who wanted to explore remaking his breakthrough documentary, 1986’s “Sherman’s March,” into a narrative film. “Sherman’s March” loosely explored McElwee’s hapless search for love during a trip to his native South, where he planned on making a film about a Civil War campaign through the area. Along the way, the movie became less about American history and more about McElwee’s family and his experiences with religion and relationships. 

Carr, the director of fun-for-the-whole-family crowdpleasers like “Daddy Day Care” and “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” didn’t exactly seem like the best candidate to take on something as intricate as “Sherman’s March.” But at the time, a teenage Adrian, hoping to break into the more commercial side of the film business, was vexed by his father’s reluctance to pursue Hollywood money-makers. So, in hopes that a remake might bring the two of them together in some way, McElwee signed the rights to “Sherman’s March” over to Carr, with a condition: McElwee would be granted access to produce a making-of documentary about the new film. McElwee set up his camera to film himself the day he signed the contract. He preferred an easygoing static tripod shot — a point Adrian contested, as is shown in the film. After some back and forth, McElwee relented, letting Adrian try his slow zooms and dynamic shots. The final product in “Remake” is a combination of the two styles, with the loving squabble between a father and his son left in the middle. 

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“Remake” is often startingly honest in this way. McElwee refuses to scrub the truth from his personal histories, choosing instead to confront his own regrets head-on. His regret lingers alongside his grief, allowing the viewer to understand his complex feelings of remorse. Occasionally, McElwee will verbalize his paternal contrition. But most of the time, his choices in archival footage do the talking, asking silent questions. Was he too hard on his son? Did he push him in the wrong direction by trying to reorient his path? Did the fun of the film festival circuit eventually become a blinding limelight, through which Adrian couldn’t see past as he got older? None of these questions have answers. Still, McElwee seeks meaning that may be embedded somewhere in the film grain, revisiting the footage he compiled during the documentary for a remake that never came to fruition, and measuring its tenor against his finished films.

In the process, McElwee creates a patchwork tapestry, comprised of vignettes across time. This one heartwarming, that one agonizing. Together, they form a rich yet incomplete portrait of an existence cut short, which McElwee hopes to broaden by weaving in meaning from before and after Adrian’s life, all captured by McElwee’s omnipresent camera. 

(Music Box Films) Adrian McElwee in “Remake”

But even that begins to feel disingenuous. There’s an elephant in the room in every scene, and its lens follows the subject everywhere. “Remake” stars McElwee, his son and the camera — that one simple tool that connects Adrian and his father through space and time, life and death. What forged McElwee’s passion and helped him establish his life’s work now reveals its dual nature as the wedge that kept him and Adrian apart. For McElwee, the revelation presents a new crisis. Was he so concerned with capturing his son’s malaise as Adrian became an adult that he missed details he might’ve seen if one eye weren’t looking through the viewfinder? Set against the backdrop of our modern culture, where we’re filming everything but listening to no one, McElwee finds himself trapped in irony’s clutches. In his desire to portray Adrian’s immersion in parasocial worlds filled with shadowy, destructive figures, McElwee’s own perspective was equally one-sided. 

Of course, this is a film about life, and nothing in life is ever so simple. Alongside his regret, McElwee wears compassion for himself and even more for his son, bravely journeying into Adrian’s own archives, including footage from a film Adrian was making about his addiction and recovery. McElwee finds images both startling and serene; videos that fill in gaps he couldn’t on his own. He lovingly omits most graphic footage, but commits to approaching his and Adrian’s shared story from a different viewpoint — a remake.

Throughout the film, alongside the contemplation on the sacrifices he’s made for his work, McElwee repeatedly revisits the importance of filmmaking from different angles: as a tool for preservation, for storytelling, for survival. A film, especially a documentary film, can often tell the story of our lives more succinctly than we ever could. It can also distort that same story into something untruthful. It’s both fact and fiction, and the meaning changes depending on your vantage point.

This idea got me thinking about a class I took in college about ethnographic filmmaking, after an extended break from school following some of my own issues that took me off-track and made my life listless. Searching for direction, I found guidance in professor and documentary filmmaker Carolyn Strachan, whose average RateMyProfessor score hovered somewhere around 2.1. She was a stickler for analysis, whose intensive assignments were the bane of many classmates. But her thorough coursework and off-the-beaten-path syllabus of films opened my eyes to countless new ideas and perspectives. Her class reignited my passion for both writing and film, and pushed me back toward a version of myself that I recognized. 

(Music Box Films) Ross McElwee in “Remake”

It took some time to realize how fundamental this course was. But when I understood the connection last year, I tried to get in touch with Professor Strachan to thank her, only to find out that, in 2022, she died after a long battle with cancer. It was a personal matter that never came up in class, but almost certainly influenced her passion for her work and her teaching. Immediately, I thought of how many of my peers complained that her assignments were too difficult, and her film choices were too unconventional to analyze easily, even for college-level writers. She wanted too much from us, they thought. Now I see that she simply wanted us to work a little harder to see how truly beautiful and varied life can be. 

I was upset that I’d never be able to thank her, to laud her for pushing students out of their comfort zones by showing them documentaries that were not easily palatable. There was nowhere to put my grief. So, I’m putting some of it here. As McElwee’s film reminded me, there’s no easy way of making sense of life. But art is our foremost way of working through it, of trying to understand who we are, who we become and how. There’s no better way to honor someone than through art, even if it’s imperfect, even if it can’t reflect their substantial impact, no matter how brief.

Shortly after he and Adrian reminisce about the mishap in Munich, McElwee continues his narration. “So, yes, you’re gone,” he says. “But you’re not gone, not entirely. Because I still have all these moments with you I captured on film.”

The post “Remake” will shift your perspective on grief appeared first on Salon.com.

Throughout all three hours of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” — the acclaimed writer-director’s take on the ancient Greek epic attributed to Homer — I repeatedly returned to one question.

This isn’t entirely atypical. In the past, Nolan’s films have pushed me to ponder ideas both enormous and infinitesimal; much of his work ricochets across this spectrum at a dizzying rate, which is part of why his movies, though always grand in scale, feel different from your typical blockbuster fare. Unlike many of his contemporaries working in the big-budget space, Nolan has no affection for the slow build. His films are designed to be all-consuming experiences, opening in media res, grabbing the viewer by the ankle and dragging them into action already in progress. This technique also makes them difficult to refute based on feeling alone. When you’re swept up into the story immediately and held there for 180 minutes, it’s harder to pinpoint exactly where the film ends and your own impression of it begins. With its exhaustive narrative breadth and action set pieces that only a budget of a cool $250 million could afford, the fact that “The Odyssey” exists at all is intended to feel like a miracle. But that’s precisely why I couldn’t seem to shake that one nagging question: What’s the point of all this?

I mean, I know the point. The point is to dazzle. The point is to convey cinema’s great power. The point is to remind us that there is no filmmaker working today other than Christopher Nolan who can make a movie of this size.

(Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal) Mia Goth as Melantho and Anne Hathaway as Penelope in “The Odyssey”

But do any of those things warrant “The Odyssey”? Nolan, fresh off the success of “Oppenheimer” — a historical biopic about the father of the atomic bomb that became a runaway hit, generating nearly a billion dollars and seven Oscar wins — had a blank check waiting on his doorstep upon returning home from Oscar night. He could conceivably do whatever he liked, go in whichever direction he pleased. And yet, Nolan returned to Homer’s poem, the structural basis of almost all storytelling throughout human record, which, if you break it down more acutely, includes Nolan’s filmography.

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Nolan has called the lack of mainstream adaptations of the work a “curious gap in Hollywood history.” But I’d argue the lack of “Odyssey” films partially stems from the fact that the text speaks for itself. Pursuing an adaptation of this caliber feels like a losing battle, something a filmmaker does just to prove that they can. Without any noteworthy changes that give the source material unexpected new meaning — significance you could only get in a movie theater, and not from the story or any of its scholarly interpretations — that air of self-importance quickly turns to a sour funk. In an ironic twist, Nolan’s own ambition in adapting “The Odyssey” looks something like Odysseus’. Fresh from his latest victory, Nolan reaches for the stars and grazes the Gods. His determination may be admirable, but the sheer, futile arrogance of such a display backfires in equally spectacular fashion.

None of this is to say that there isn’t merit in a filmmaker, particularly one of Nolan’s stature, wanting to explore their artistic desires. But that’s also why “The Odyssey” is such a keen disappointment. Someone like Nolan — who has passed just about every bar there is to pass, raised that bar, and then passed it again — probing his ambition within the context of a work as substantial as “The Odyssey” should prove to be compelling in its own right. To use a recent example operating on a similar blockbuster scale, Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” did this particularly well, assessing humanity and movies together against the backdrop of Spielberg’s favorite themes. One could enjoy “Disclosure Day” as a solitary experience, or measure it against Spielberg’s body of work to explore an even deeper meaning.

Sure, one might argue that in “The Odyssey,” Nolan is studying his own hubris, accepting the innate faults that come with bringing Homer to the big screen. But I don’t think Nolan understands that’s what’s happening here, and that’s because his “Odyssey” doesn’t have anything new to say about the original text or his beliefs as a filmmaker. If anything, “The Odyssey” only waters down every artistic statement Nolan has already posed.

(Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal) Robert Pattinson as Antinous in “The Odyssey”

Like Homer’s poem, Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is told nonlinearly, scattered between the perspectives of Odysseus (Matt Damon), his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and their son, Telemachus (Tom Holland). Ten years after the fall of Troy, Odysseus still hasn’t returned home to Ithaca, and his kingdom has been overtaken by suitors crudely courting his wife’s hand. As their impatience grows, the window for Odysseus to reclaim his kingdom and restore a crumbling world to Zeus’ law — essentially open-hearted hospitality and treating others as you’d be treated — is closing. As Telemachus travels to seek news of his father’s whereabouts, or if he’s even alive, Odysseus recounts his story to the island nymph, Calypso (Charlize Theron): The bloody Trojan War, a cyclops, a sea witch, dalliances with the dead, sirens, and a crew of impatient men.

Nolan makes only a handful of changes to the translations of the original text. Instead of Gods like Poseidon and Zeus playing an integral role in the story, they are left as unseen forces that motivate the characters’ actions. (Every 40 minutes or so, Zendaya appears to Odysseus as the goddess Athena to spout some ethereal wisdom before disappearing, but Athena plays more like a postwar trauma manifestation than an actual character.) Characters speak with a more casual, modern dialect. And, perhaps most memorably significant, the Trojan Horse is discovered half-submerged on the beach, and not outside Troy’s gates on wheels. Nolan uses this adjustment to build out the film’s emotional throughline: an extended rumination on the evils of war and the repugnance of men. And while it’s a smart and novel twist on a colloquial metaphor that has almost come to precede Homer’s poem, Nolan’s Trojan Horse doesn’t inspire any reflections on war that weren’t addressed more directly and cleverly in “Oppenheimer.”

(Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal) John Leguizamo as Eumaeus in “The Odyssey”

Every question “The Odyssey” poses has been asked dozens of times before by Nolan himself, and in far more interesting ways. Here, Nolan once again returns to his pet themes of playing God, human mistreatment, the passage of time, and bearing witness to the world’s slow, painful destruction. All of these things are surveyed with more thought and care in many of his other works, especially “Oppenheimer,” but also in “Interstellar,” “Tenet,” and even translated into the hyper-accessible superhero fare of his “Batman” films.

Many great filmmakers are immersed in the same ideas, returning to them in one way or another with each film. But to do that with something like “The Odyssey” is unnecessary, even haughty. Nolan attempts to assert the text’s relevancy in our contemporary age, but that’s not something any scholar or even the average reader would contest. This is Homer, after all, famously the foundation of all great work. What’s perplexing is that Nolan’s said as much himself. So why try to tackle “The Odyssey” at all, if not only to — as Nolan also acknowledged — be one of the only loyal feature-length film adaptations in history, and have his name forever cemented in the same conversation as Homer’s?

In the second act (that is, the second hour of the film’s three), Nolan gets close to revealing why. Tied to the mast of his ship as he and his crew pass the singing sirens, adorned on the jagged rocks at sea, Odysseus screams out with pain and desire. After the ship has made safe passage and the sirens’ voices have drifted into the air, Odysseus’ second-in-command, Eurylochus (Himesh Patel), asks him what he heard. Odysseus tells Eurylochus that their song contains everything he’s ever known and everything he never wanted to admit to himself. And, in a line of dialogue that will stick with me — one that shot straight to my heart faster than any of Nolan’s oft-repeated contemplations on war or morality — Odysseus says, “Their song told me that what you want the most is what you already had.”

There’s no better summary of Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” Here, a filmmaker who managed to reach the peak of Olympus makes the prideful, ill-fated decision to hoist a ladder toward the stars, trying to get even higher, past where even the Gods can see. He knows there is no foundation to hold him, nothing to prop his steps against, but he tries anyway. And truthfully, there’s dignity in that curiosity, in wanting to know if greatness is all there is, or if there is something more that exists beyond what we can perceive. But both history and myth have proven that there’s no measuring up to the Gods.

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When news of Sam Neill’s death at the age of 78 broke earlier this week, much of the public sentiment for the late New Zealand actor revolved around his humor and charm. Neill was a consummate character actor, hard-working and driven by a love for his craft, with a filmography spanning decades and roles that touched countless lives. And as such, Neill was a fount of fascinating stories and notable quotables — products of keeping his eyes open to all of the world’s strange beauty.

The New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan reminisced on an interview with Neill from 2022, promoting his return to the “Jurassic” franchise alongside former costars Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, in which Neill spun a truly incredible anecdote about his son farting in front of Princess Diana. On X, a user posted a magazine clipping in which Neill revealed how he’d commit a murder. (At the time, he was making the rounds for the BBC miniseries adaptation of “And Then There Were None.”) “I’d use a steamroller,” Neill confessed. “There’s a couple of people I’d put under a steamroller, but I won’t say who they are; otherwise, when they see a steamroller coming their way, they’ll be on full alert. And steamrollers don’t go very fast.”

(Universal/Getty Images) Sam Neill in “Jurassic Park III”

Beyond making us laugh, Neill’s wit was one of those special traits that enhanced all the other aspects that made him so lovable as both an actor and a person. His real-life geniality provides a stark contrast to some of his most famous roles as monstrous men committing equally hideous deeds. His best work tunneled into life’s darkest spaces to excavate ideas about our fears and obsessions, often reflected through dazzling practical effects that matched the naturalism of his greatest feature: a singularly expressive, malleable face. The mixture of satisfaction, excitement and sheer bewilderment that Neill wore in the first dinosaur scene in “Jurassic Park” was so effective that it made viewers feel like they, too, were witnessing something beyond imagination. To convey so much using nothing but the  God-given tools in your arsenal is the mark of a truly great actor.

Though “Jurassic Park” may be Neill’s most loved work, it’s far from his most impressive. To quantify a career like Neill’s is impossible, but “Jurassic Park” points to a trend that spanned his filmography, even defined it. Throughout his career, Neill pitted himself against creatures both real and imagined — or, even more often, somewhere in-between — to reveal humanity’s foibles in the face of the freakish and fantastic. Neill’s penchant for the weird and abstract allowed him to use his unique features and distinct, gravelly voice to create characters who were as devilishly memorable as the beasts they went up against. Few performers could make your blood run cold one minute and have you laughing the next. And Neill relished that ability, returning time and again to characters whose unpredictability mirrored life’s, creating an oeuvre that is both grotesque and supremely human.

It’s telling that Neill’s first major film role outside of a few sleepy Australian movies was as a grown-up version of “The Omen” antichrist Damien Thorne in 1981’s “The Final Conflict.” With his slick black hair and steely gaze, he was practically born for the part. But those features were on far more chilling display — and for a significantly better film — in Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession,” which debuted the same year, making for a pair of roles that supply a sturdy outline for Neill’s career. In Żuławski’s famously imposing psychological horror film, Neill stars alongside Isabelle Adjani as Mark, a young man whose life and marriage are falling apart at the seams after his wife, Anna (Adjani), has an affair and begins to exhibit strange behavior. As the first person the viewer sees in the film, Neill has the responsibility of setting the tone — a nearly inconceivable task for a movie that twists itself into a knot before consuming and regurgitating itself 10 more times. But Neill is up to the task, creating an atmosphere of sheer bleakness with little more than a look that is, somehow, both vacant and teeming with emotion.

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Though many critics and historians have tried, it’s impossible to get to the true root of a work as oblique as “Possession.” There are 100 feasible readings of Żuławski’s film, and just when those all seem to make sense, you could conjure up a 101st. What’s certain is that watching Adjani give herself over to Anna — and the gurgling, tentacled creature that may or may not be a figment of her fractured reality — is one of the most terror-inducing experiences you could have with a movie. But it’s important to note that “Possession” is a two-hander; Adjani’s performance needs Neill’s to sing, or perhaps, screech. He rises and falls at the same pace as his companion in this nightmare, laying the groundwork on which Adjani can create something so enormous. Neill’s performance is as flailing and furious as hers, and together, they turn “Possession” into a radical piece of filmmaking that has deservedly earned its cult following and late reverence. It’s really no wonder that Neill would go on to play characters who echoed Mark’s descent into madness, splitting off into equally extraordinary works of spine-tingling creature feature dread.

(URLI/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images) Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neil at the premiere of “Possession”

While some might cry sacrilege at comparing a filmmaker like Żuławski to Paul W.S. Anderson, the man behind such cinematic triumphs as the “Resident Evil” film franchise and “Alien vs. Predator,” both directors knew exactly how to push Neill to his most frightening limits. Like “Possession,” Anderson’s 1997 space horror, “Event Horizon,” took its time becoming a cult classic. Though the film was initially a critical and box office flop, it contains some of the most captivating sequences of outer-space terror you’ll find in any film, largely thanks to Neill’s petrifying turn as Dr. William Weir, a spaceship designer driven mad by mysterious visions. Weir and a small crew are sent on a recovery mission after the lost spaceship, the Event Horizon, suddenly reappears in orbit around Neptune, issuing a distress signal. When they arrive, they discover an inexplicable massacre has occurred, potentially the result of the ship’s ability, engineered by Weir, to fold space-time and travel great distances in a flash.

“Event Horizon” demonstrates a major theme in Neill’s most gruesome creature feature performances: the slow, onscreen transition from good to evil. Though Neill had more than a lifetime’s experience playing characters who were solely benevolent or entirely wicked, he was remarkably adept at navigating the journey back and forth between these two polarities. Even when they were written simply, his characters were never one-note. Neill seemed to savor the chance to go deeper, to look more closely at our innate capacity for acts both moral and depraved. Often, it’s trauma that changes us, that pushes us past the confines of what we know to be righteous and toward something cruel and unusual — a picture of ourselves that looks unfamiliar.

Dr. Weir, trying to do good for the world while still grappling with his wife’s suicide, reaches that threshold with unnerving speed (and even a bit of camp). But in “Event Horizon,” Neill avoids hokeyness in what could otherwise be an extremely hokey film, finding the emotional center in a character whose inner demons become real-life manifestations of Hell. It’s rare that an audience will sympathize with a character who is almost too nightmarish to bear, but Neill’s ability to consistently humanize the inhuman is precisely the kind of quality that we go to the movies for.

(Manuel Romano/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Sam Neill

Of course, we also go for stories that are larger than life, that traverse beyond this realm into a place that only movies can go. One may argue that “Jurassic Park” is Neill’s perfect example of such a power. But my personal favorite will always be John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness,” a film that, by its title alone, is so fitting for Neill’s career that it’s almost comical. If you watch any film of Neill’s to pay tribute to a life well-lived and a career well-balanced, let it be this one: a hauntingly prescient, brilliant work of horror that perfectly encapsulates Neill’s most notable characters.

In the film, Neill stars as insurance investigator John Trent, who has been hired by the book publisher Arcane to track down their missing horror author, Sutter Kane, whose next book is hotly anticipated by the adoring, obsessed public. John’s work leads him to Hobb’s End, the fictional town in all of Kane’s novels come to life, where a series of strange occurrences that seem to lead back to Kane are happening more and more frequently. But John believes all of it to be an elaborate publicity stunt concocted by Arcane — or, at least, that’s what he tells himself.

Riffing on the public’s fanatical response to Stephen King’s work with a culty, Lovecraftian spin, Carpenter and screenwriter Michael De Luca craft a fascinating tale of how idol worship alters our collective consciousness, in which Neill is an essential component. As an ordinary man thrust into a world of monsters and maniacs, Neill is inherently playing with ideas about art and celebrity that reflect his own career. “In the Mouth of Madness” ponders just how powerful media — and our relationship to it — can be, and Neill gives an electrifying turn as a man caught up in a myth made real.

Neill said that, in filming “Possession,” he “only just escaped with his sanity barely intact.” And with “In the Mouth of Madness,” he once again evaluates the price of making great art, but this time from a safer distance. One could easily read the film as a meta examination of Neill’s work, of the kinds of characters he was drawn to, the ones that no audience member could soon forget. These men were striking figures, as intimidating as they were irresistible. They were characters who made us remember why we look to certain actors for specific things, and how important it can be to pay attention to the feelings they conjure within us. For Neill, it was the passion for complex, wily characters, and how those types of people reacted in situations that were equally complicated. His performances reminded us how easy it is for a person to lose their senses when they come face-to-face with something spectacular and indescribable. And what is life if not spectacular and indescribable? Through Neill’s work, we could explore our fears about what we can’t always understand. He wore the terror for us, making life’s big mysteries seem just a little less daunting — even if they, like Neill, will always be unpredictable.

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Remember that scene in “The Lion King,” where Mufasa calls Simba to the top of Pride Rock and tells his son that one day, everything the sunlight touches will be his? Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos must put that scene on a loop every night to help him fall asleep. That way, it’s also the first thing he hears when he wakes up in the morning, ready for another busy day of using his money and power to make virtually everything so much worse. If only he let the scene play a little longer, he’d hear Mufasa’s critical addendum: “There’s more to being king than getting your way all the time.”

Last week, a still-unconfirmed report in Puck stated that Netflix is entering initial talks to acquire Letterboxd, the film-logging and review platform beloved by hardcore and casual cinephiles alike. Sony Pictures Entertainment, Paramount Skydance, private equity firms RedBird and TPG, and Reddit co-creator Alexis Ohanian have also reportedly tossed their hats in the ring, setting up early sales meetings with Letterboxd. In April, Semafor reported that Letterboxd was also in talks with Comcast spin-off Versant, which owns Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes. As of now, Letterboxd is majority-owned by the Canadian holding company Tiny, which has a 60% stake, while the remaining 40% is owned by the platform’s co-founders Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow.

Naturally, the news of a potential corporate sale hit the very active and very opinionated community of Letterboxd users like the two cars that bounce Brad Pitt back and forth between their windshields in “Meet Joe Black.” Each Friday, Letterboxd posts a prompt on its X account asking users to reply with their last four films logged on the platform. Hundreds of people treat the request like religion, posting screenshots of their recent ratings to find new people in the community to befriend and follow. But last week, the replies were inundated with complaints that Letterboxd had defected to the corporate dark side, along with fearful pleas for the platform’s owners to reconsider. An edited screenshot of Letterboxd’s user interface replaced the four film posters with a concise four-word appeal: “PLEASE. DON’T. SELL. OUT,” with the “N” in “DON’T” replaced by Netflix’s unmistakable red logo.

Some may argue that any platform scaling as fast as Letterboxd is bound to go corporate. Since its official debut in 2011, Letterboxd has amassed a whopping 26 million users. At that rate, the stable yet virtually limitless cash flow that comes from selling to a multi-billion-dollar company could be a boon for maintaining consistent growth and usability. (Letterboxd has become somewhat notorious for its extended server outages in the past couple of years.)

But there’s a major difference between Letterboxd selling to a mass-media company like Versant and a glorified porta-potty like Netflix — the dumping ground for all that is lousy and decrepit in film and television. Since its expansion from movie rentals and streaming into original content, Netflix has made it clear that its sole priority is Netflix, not its customers, and certainly not the art of visual media. For a platform like Letterboxd, which has built its brand on reverence for film and all those who love it, forking over ownership to a company like Netflix would be a cold act of back-stabbing betrayal. And while no brand is exempt from selling out, and tying your affection to a business is a fool’s game in the first place, if Letterboxd must change, the least they can do is change with a modicum of integrity.

Since 2011, Letterboxd has transformed from a simple film-logging platform where you can see what your friends are watching into a full-scale film media empire. The site and app are entirely free, but two paid tiers offer more profile customization, filters and features, all with zero third-party ads. It would be an understatement to say that the site’s library of films available for logging, rating and reviewing is extensive. Letterboxd houses virtually every film you could ever think of: blockbusters, indies, international films, softcore retro porn, short films, TV movies, that obscure film you caught half of on television when you were a kid but never stopped thinking about, and much, much more. A built-in function lets users add films to their watchlist with the touch of a button, and watchlists are easily sortable in case you’re in the mood for something specific.

In recent years, Letterboxd has made a foray into journalism, hiring an editorial team of staff and freelancers, who publish solid film writing on Letterboxd Journal. And on red carpets and film festivals, you can find movie and industry leaders feeding their four favorite films into a microphone emblazoned with Letterboxd’s orange, green and blue dot logo.

But despite all of this swift and massive growth, Letterboxd’s ethos has remained extremely simple: Cinephilia can be a solitary passion, but it’s made better with friends.

I’ve been an active Letterboxd user and one of the platform’s many evangelists for nearly a decade. It’s the only social media platform that doesn’t drive up my blood pressure within 15 seconds of logging on. While some use the site as a social network, I like to think of it as a personal diary. For those who use art to help shade in the textures of their lives — as sticking points to shape a memory — there is no better place to do so than Letterboxd. One of my favorite things about the site is that I can look back at the hundreds of films I’ve logged into one easily accessible archive to see what my opinion was on any given film, or who I watched it with and in what context. It’s an amazing place to keep track of your own opinions and watch how they transform. The first time I watched “Vox Lux” in January 2019, I wasn’t so sure about the Natalie Portman pop-star drama, giving it three stars. By the third time I’d logged it in 2020, “Vox Lux” earned a full, effusive five stars, a heart, and a glowing review.

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Like others, I have my own system of beliefs about how the platform is best used and how films should be logged. That’s one of the great things about Letterboxd: Everyone uses it differently, and those variations reflect a wide array of tastes in film. Some cinema snobs might find Letterboxd a distasteful asterisk on film culture. But if you really adore the art form, Letterboxd’s popularity is a rare net positive in an era when tech is largely being used to pit humanity against art and each other.

So, of course, companies like Netflix, Paramount Skydance and Sony would seek to corrupt that purity in pursuit of power. Netflix and other streamers have already split the film industry down the middle, separating those who venerate the art form from those who venerate the dollar, leaving many Hollywood titans flailing somewhere in the middle. Take Rian Johnson, whose deal with Netflix has led to his “Knives Out” films being relegated to tiny theatrical release windows in limited markets before being tossed onto the streamer. (If the franchise didn’t vie for awards, which require a theatrical release for consideration, it likely wouldn’t play in theaters at all.) Then there’s Greta Gerwig, who fought for exclusive 45-day theatrical releases for her upcoming adaptations of “The Chronicles of Narnia” — one of the first major films distributed by Netflix to break from the streaming model Sarandos pioneered. Sarandos has been openly cavalier about his belief that the theatrical release is “outdated,” going so far as to claim that Netflix saved Hollywood. But with the box office rebounding from the COVID-19 pandemic, boasting record returns over the last year, Sarandos and all media companies that subscribe to the Netflix business model are desperately seeking new ways to market bad films.

This is precisely why dedicated Letterboxd users fear a potential sale: If Netflix, Sony or Paramount gets its hands on the platform, Letterboxd is likely to go the way of everything else those companies touch. A streamer-owned film-logging platform can kiss objectivity goodbye. Letterboxd’s “popular with friends” feature would likely be littered with streaming slop. The recently launched Letterboxd Video Store — a “rental store built for film discovery,” filled with curated selections and unreleased novelties  — would become a synergistic attempt to get users to pay to rent streamer-exclusive films without a subscription. Letterboxd Journal would be replaced by the advertorial “journalism” of Netflix Tudum, or lame writing about the library of films currently available on whichever streamer or studio makes the shiniest offer. Letterboxd, as we know and love it, would cease to exist, transforming into another nu-media ouroboros. Even if nothing gold can stay, must it always meet such a tragic end?

I wish there were a more pleasant answer. Maybe there’s a chance Letterboxd will be sold to Versant, and the company will integrate movie tickets and Rotten Tomatoes scores directly into its interface — it wouldn’t be the worst fate. But if I could log how many times I’ve seen this sort of film play out on Letterboxd, it would be one of my most-watched. MySpace and Tumblr, once spaces for boundless creativity, died the moment they sold out. Facebook revealed itself as Satan’s playground. Twitter opened a floodgate of Nazis and nonconsensual, illegal AI porn the moment Elon Musk took control.

Letterboxd was once a shining beacon among all of these horror stories, which already had their own unique problems before their formal acquisitions. In its 15 years of operation, Letterboxd has only adapted in ways that better serve its users and the film industry as a whole. Sure, it might be annoying that studios are trying to pass off overly enthusiastic five-star Letterboxd reviews as legitimate film criticism in marketing on posters and in trailers. But that’s not Letterboxd’s fault. The site’s only flaw is being a nice place to spend some time online — interacting with friends while finding new movies to watch and adore or abhor — in an age when online joy is punishable by death.

I guess if Letterboxd decides to sell to a media company and becomes objectively worse, disappointed users can migrate to A24’s physical, paper-bound film logs. There’s nothing unsavory there! Oh, that’s right, A24 just took $75 million of Google money to fund AI development. Pencil and computer paper, it is. If Netflix gets into the office supplies business, then we’re really screwed.

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