The year was 2009, and Olivia Wilde was ranked No.1 in Maxim Magazine’s Hot 100. Magazines once had a sizable cache in our culture, and lad mags were no exception. During this peak, this genre had actresses, models, and any female celebrity posing on each issue’s cover, scantily clad, looking desirable to the male reader. Maxim is often rude, sometimes lewd, and the girls were almost nude. Wilde looked like the girl next door and a Victoria’s Secret supermodel, and she has just broken the ceiling.

Seventeen years later, Wilde reminisced about the time on the Call Her Daddy podcast and admitted that while it was a bit cringe, it brought her validation for someone who. During the interview, she brings a sardonic side of herself, as she promotes her film The Invite, where a couple invites their sexually charged neighbors to their apartment. Wilde plays Angela, the wife of Seth Rogen’s Joe, who used to be a musician and is now a grumpy teacher at a prestigious music school. As the hosts bring Hawk (Edward Norton), who’s in a relationship with Pina (Penélope Cruz), for dinner, they, in return, invite them to a sexual initiation, which rattles their innate conservatism derived from the aspects their marriage sorely lacked.

The Invite is Wilde’s third feature film, and the first of which I really liked. I detested Booksmart, a poor woman’s answer to Superbad, and felt that Don’t Worry Darling squandered too much of its potential, leaving aside the on-set rumors and controversies that marred the film in its release. But The Invite does something different, which is to intensely pin down the awkwardness of her characters trying to do something refreshing for once. Of course, not everything goes to plan, because either they try too hard or too little. Angela here is tired and often frustrated by Joe’s stubbornness, while Hawk often hides his drawbacks with a bit of toxic positivity.

Out of the foursome (heh), Wilde is the least naturalistic. But it’s also worth noting that there’s a layer of self-awareness that followed her previous appearance with Seth Rogen in The Studio, in which she played herself stealing a print of film, because she convinced therself hat the cameo she made was the finest performance of her career. There, Wilde makes light of the rumors that marred the release of Don’t Worry Darling, which painted her as a narcissist who cannot look after her actors.

The Invite is not only one of the best movies of 2026, but there’s also another better one that happens to star Wilde, which is I Want Your Sex, a comedy from the independent queer cinema pioneer Gregg Araki. Wilde in both movies has a lot more in common than you would expect. In these films, sex is central to Wilde’s characters.

If The Invite sees Wilde being sexually frustrated, then I Want Your Sex gives her the freedom to be raunchy, chewing a lot of scenery, as Erika Tracy, a self-interested artist who uses a Gen Z employee for her sexual needs. The power and gender dynamics are flipped, but the conceit is simple: her employee Elliott, played by Cooper Hoffman, is too much of a goon er to understand what he really needs. Araki’s witty comedy is perfectly suited to what some would call the post-woke era. It carries an allergy towards moral policing, lampooning people using political activism for their own means. Wilde here is the dry object of desire, and it succeeds by using the millennial cynicism that has shaped her image and turning into a moral paradox, which is that you can exercise power for the most vapid virtues.

Think of why you would be drawn to Olivia Wilde, a woman known to be the feisty sex kitten on The OC and House, taking challenging roles afterwards while slowly adopting liberal activism into her personal image, and pursuing filmmaking that is centred around getting the perfect shot. Connecting it is the self-consciousness of being the centre of attention, and it’s the key to understanding her, whether you like it or not.

The Kino Around The Corner: The Doom Generation

I do not like using the phrase “this aged well”, since it’s a lazy way to dismiss a film from another time period that fails to reconcile with the morals of the current period. But the Doom Generation holds up well in two directions. The first is that young people cannot experience a better world than previous generations set up for them, and what they got instead is a world where they are unable to enjoy their youth. The second instalment of Gregg Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse trilogy is a time capsule that only Gen X could understand and indulge in, but it fits very well with the nihilistic brainrot of Gen Z. Hence, you get a trio of twenty-somethings so detached from the norms and rules of America that they descend into their own comfort zone, filled with self-hatred and meaningless pleasures, involving killing and sex sprees. I find commentary specifically focused on generations, especially when it’s between young and old, very stale, and this is no exception. The dialogue is undeniably juvenile, and the characters are self-destructive. But despite being viscerally opposed to Araki’s thesis and its amoral implications, I ultimately accepted that this film has a counter-cultural value that few would ultimately earn. The one aspect that Araki was surprisingly prophetic about is the fact that sexually confused neo-Nazis (or groypers) exist, as seen in this image that looks funny regardless of the context.

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In Case You Missed It:

• I wrote a review of Stop! That! Train!, one of the parody movies of 2026.

Required Reading:

1. I have never received an introductory page when subscribing to another Substack newsletter before. That is until I came across magazines. Hua Hsu’s newsletter is about the old issues of magazines he collects. The latest from the New Yorker writer is about the travel magazine Monk, whose pages dedicate the bars to settle down at and where you can actually buy an issue. As someone who used to collect magazines from time to time, like they were the newest edition of a comic book, this is a must-follow.

2. Continuing on the topic of magazines, JJ McCullough has a really interesting video on how every magazine in America covered its 250th anniversary.

1. I will have to launch my Ozstack very soon, because there aren’t a lot of Australian Substackers to go around. Here’s an essay from the author Oz on the current state of the country, which is, to put it mildly, bleak.

2. While I am not the most anti-AI person on the planet (seriously, data centres do not deplete water, compared to golf courses), the replacement of physical books by AI is a grave level of concern about what the technology could be capable of. Pedro Gonzalez writes in the Washington Monthly:

Anthropic apparently proceeded believing that Project Panama could brew into a scandal, opting for secrecy instead of transparency. Selling the public on the largest destructive-scanning endeavor in history indeed seems like it would have been a tall order; taller still when you must explain why there is a premium placed on books published before 2022—the year OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT became available to the general public.

5. Chuck Pahaniuk looks back on 30 years of Fight Club, the novel. In 2019, I wrote ($) about the film of the same name and why it captivated America.

   Lack of Taste is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Jane Schoenbrun’s films are deeply autobiographical and liminal to a fault. Their directorial debut, We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, could arguably be the best and worst case depicting the pitfalls of online interactions exclusively within the aesthetic of Internet platforms, as a habit of loneliness. The poignancy of a young girl’s descent into participating in an alternative reality game is offset by the confusing lack of stakes. I Saw The TV Glow got overpraised for showcasing nostalgia as a sign of arrested development, with emotionally stunted performances being confused for a sincere cry for help, instead of a wailing of mindless drones.

But overall, the fundamental flaw linking those two films, both about the alienation that comes from using media to escape, is that they rely heavily on vibes, which carry a lot of dead weight. Nothing about these characters or their emotional development is especially interesting, and the crescendos are ultimately banal. This weakness carries into Schoenbrun’s latest effort, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which serves as the filmmaker’s ode to the campy horror antics of the 1980s, presented through self-love, both figuratively and physically.

Schoenbrun parodies the precocious conversations they had and felt about the medium by indulging in much of the hubris. The opening sequence shows a lot of promise, portraying Camp Miasma experiencing the life cycle as a franchise: it initially gained larger publicity, establishing a beloved following, before devaluing itself with critically and commercially unsuccessful sequels. The films are depicted as if they’re a VHS to be borrowed from a video store. But carrying with uncertainty is Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a queeer filmmaker, who is hired to reboot the franchise and then meet the franchise’s original lead actress, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson).

The filmmaker’s surrogate is Kris (and admittedly, the outspoken actress Einbinder herself), who in any other film would be a massive turn-off. She introduces herself with she/they pronouns, calls James Bond problematic, and then, as she watches the movie with Anderson, she calls Zack Cherry’s character in Camp Miasma transphobic (unironically, she then calls herself a “filmmaker”, followed by an “intellectual”). On top of that, Kris is extremely anxious about the movie getting a launch, to impress a group of studio heads she knows would not accept her vision. The scoldmongering is offset by Presley’s passion to retain the film’s qualities as it was, indulging in much of its pleasures through her devil-may-care attitude.

It is at this point that, once the film enters the horniest aspects (which got an annoying critic into a non-controversy for even pointing it out), it embraces being the mess that Kris is. If I Saw The TV Glow, it has an idea, but doesn’t provide it with depth. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma has too much, so Schoenbrun doesn’t allow any of it to breathe. For one, Camp Miasma is supposed to be a vessel for Kris’s development as a filmmaker, by applying subversion to the film and falling for Presley, who embraces whatever seems troubling with the movie, compared to the present day.

As with so many other movies bringing in their own gaze, it seems to uphold the male gaze while trying to have its own cake. Rather than pushing forward the future of cinema, its viewpoint is ironically retrograde. But it reveals Schoenbrun’s morale of embracing and critiquing nostalgia, through their own neuroses, as a way to escape.

The Kino Around The Corner: The Searchers

I’ve rewatched this at a free film screening at the Hayden Orpheum, provided by the US Embassy as part of their series celebrating the 250th anniversary of America’s independence. There’s a clear reason why it was picked for the program. Bookended with its opening shot, the VistaVision cinematography is second to none, and John Wayne’s vengeful Ethan Edwards remains incredibly complex, even when he makes choices that don’t match rational thinking. John Ford’s take on violence is the closest that I have felt to an objective approach within the medium that has been emulated numerous times. Whatever’s justifiable for revenge, it will have a huge effect on your individual reality.

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In Case You Missed It:

• I have made a list of Christopher Nolan’s ten most defining shots. This didn’t include The Odyssey, not only because the grabs are yet to be available, but because there aren’t a lot of compositions that stood out.

• I have written about the rightward shift of the UFC for Junto:

The personalities of MMA fighters are as loud and boisterous as they come, and they get more publicity. One example is Sean Strickland, who reclaimed the Middleweight Title by split decision over Khamzat Chimaev in May 2026. There was anticipation for this title fight, primarily because the two threw back-and-forth insults during the press conference. Strickland’s persona involves equal opportunity insults and would sometimes throw conspiracies to get a rise out of his critics. Strickland’s support for Trump is notable, but the boisterousness from the contracted players matches seamlessly with Trump’s pugilistic persona and plays a larger part in his appeal as an American redneck hero. (Ironically, Strickland missed out on being included in the Freedom 250’s main card, but says that he would have rejected it, because he would have mouthed off about the Epstein files.)

Recommended Readings:

1. I have subscribed to Sean Fennessey’s newsletter, and you should too. Fennessey, who is the host of The Big Picture podcast at The Ringer, has recently started a newsletter because he loves the game of writing (after all, he has written for a number of magazines for two decades). Here is his take on the box office hits of 2026 and how they compare to the movies he watched when he was 12. As with his podcast, it is filled with optimism and passion; you can’t help but say “WE ARE SO BACK” in ten different languages.

2. I have not had a fully fledged opinion on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey yet, but Sarah Ditum’s write-up on the overblown backlash against Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is worth reading.

3. “Meta-narratives slipped into the conversations around art. It was not enough to serve up a well-put-together story with great characters; you had to subvert the expectations of the audience. This term “trope” became a recurring, bright red stinging word thrown around by scholars as something to avoid. If your story succumbed to tropes, then this was a ‘bad’ thing. It showed a weakness to lesser impulses on the part of the writer. You weren’t as clever of a storyteller as you thought.” - LowResWunderbred on how artists embraced criticism, and how its awareness of possible implications became a feature of pop culture.

Welcome to the first edition of a series that’s dedicated to the cinema of Sydney, Australia. Sydney is well known for its beaches and harbors, but the city is central to the country’s prosperity. It’s also a criticism from some detractors who live outside the city, especially if they’re from Melbourne, Australia’s most populous city (by significant urban area). Whereas Melbourne is known for its love of culture, especially in the arts and sports, Sydney is simply the biggest economic engine in Australia, which is also why it’s very expensive to live in. These challenges are also why Sydney is rich in substance in how the movies have depicted them.

The series will consist of the following: first, there will be a guide to Sydney’s cinemas that shows current and repertoire releases, and how much Sydneysiders go to the theatres. As of writing this, the Art Gallery of NSW has relaunched its cinemateque with a lineup of movies either set or filmed in Sydney. Hence, there will be a focus on Sydney, according to the pop culture set there, from Priscilla: Queen of the Desert to Mr Inbetween. Finally, a new entry into the 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, and this will be

Before these essays, I’ll would like to post something that I previously. Last year, I wrote a book review that was published by the Institute of Public Affairs, Australia’s largest free-market think tank, in their volume of essays called Essays for Australia. It centered around a book called Sydney: A Biography by playwright Louis Nowra. The organization has permitted me to republish this here, but the idea of the review is to demonstrate how the city is very much foundational to the idea of Australia. The review doesn’t dive much into the pop culture specifically set in Sydney, but I thought it would be useful to set the stage for this series.

This is also an opportunity to announce that I have created another newsletter called Ozstack, which I’ll cross-post over there, as well as the other pieces. Ozstack exclusively looks at the quirks and features of Australia’s modern culture and its way of life, ranging from politics, sports, places to its history.

Louis Nowra is perhaps one of Australia’s most prominent writers, having penned numerous works, including novels, plays, screenplays, and memoirs, in both fiction and non-fiction genres. His most recent book, ‘Sydney: ’, is an invitation to his second home. The work is the third part of a book trilogy on the city, which also includes ‘Woolloomooloo’ and ‘Kings Cross’, two of its striking inner-city suburbs. Each of the books sees Nowra treating every aspect of its location like a mosaic, comprised of colourful public figures and assertive architecture, exploring these in vivid detail and their impact on Australian culture. ‘Sydney’ is no exception. Each place and figure is a character in Nowra’s mind, and the sandstone comprises some of its most age-old locations, upholding its inherent values.

Born in 1950, Nowra first experienced Sydney by riding the Harbour Bridge at the age of nine. He compares his life growing up in Melbourne to that of Henry O’Farrell, the first Australian to attempt a political assassination. In 1868, O’Farrell shot and wounded Prince Alfred, the fourth child of Queen Victoria. O’Farrell was found guilty of attempted murder and hanged at Darlinghurst prison. O’Farrell’s life in Melbourne was marked by failure and a lack of accomplishments. He wanted to become a priest, but couldn’t and had suffered a severe mental breakdown. But he moved to Sydney because his sister gave him money, and his actions would bring decades of societal dismay towards the city’s elites. This may seem like an unusual parallel for Nowra to draw between Sydney and himself. Still, it’s part of its extravagant personality, and it’s one reason why he feels a deeper connection to the city.

Nowra’s eyes opened up to the city; the city’s bluer skies were far preferable to his birthplace’s bleaker and greyer skies. Nowra writes:

For a Melburnian who has never been on a ferry, the story gave these harbour workhorses a magical aura, and as the cruise boat moved out into the deep water, every time I saw a ferry, I thought of the story.

As he settled into Sydney, Nowra realised that it was the pinpoint of Australia’s founding, a critical aspect that reveals its true historical legacy. He writes:

After Circular Quay was completed in 1844, it became the central docking place for shipping, and shipwrights moved further west. Wharves and jetties crowded the shore from the Quay to Pyrmont. For Sydneysiders, the ships were links to home, the carriers of news, cargo from across the world, and new settlers. When Joseph Conrad visited in 1880, he declared, ‘Circular Quay is an integral part of one of the finest, most beautiful, vast and safer bays the sun ever shone on.’

The book’s exploration of such a legacy is complex, without becoming overtly preachy. While Nowra’s politics – his condemnation of the White Australia policy, as well as the treatment of Indigenous Australians by the colonialists – are bluntly spoken, it does not distract from what is, overall, a love letter to the city, flaws and all.

The book begins with the arrival of the First Fleet, establishing the city, named after Thomas Townshend, Viscount Sydney, who approved the voyage. Each chapter depicts a particular topic and begins with the earliest event that occurred in the city related to that issue, ultimately concluding that the aspect has directly permeated the modern culture of the city. Nowra argues that the British colonialists did not reclaim the country, but instead reappropriated parts of Indigenous Australian culture, upheld by the Gadigal tribe, took advantage of the state’s geography, and shaped the city the way it is.

One person who had a grandiose vision of what Sydney could be was Governor Lachlan Macquarie. In recent times, Macquarie has been criticised for his treatment of Indigenous Australians. Nowra considers the statue of Governor Macquarie in Sydney’s central park, Hyde Park as ‘the worst public sculpture in Sydney.’ However, the majority of the public views him as a person who believes that Sydney has the potential to become more than just a colony. While he gagged some of his enemies and threw them in jail, resulting in a military coup known as the Rum Rebellion, his governance allowed convicts and settlers to redeem themselves and make new lives. In his own words, he wanted Sydney to become one of the greatest and most flourishing Colonies belonging to the British Empire.’

Around the 19th century, the world began to take notice of Sydney. Nowra credits several books published in the 1850s and 1860s, such as Handbook to Sydney and its Suburbs: A First Traveller’s Guide and The Stranger’s Guide to Sydney, which drew tourist attention to the country, and hence, its cultural value also improved. Theatre actors such as Barry Sullivan and Gustavus Brooke arrived from England to perform in Sydney-produced plays.

If you want invigorating air, then Manly was the fashionable bathing place to visit [...]. If you wanted some intellectual stimulus, then there was the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts on Pitt Street. Established in 1883, its library had 13,000 volumes, including all Australian newspapers and many leading English ones.

As Sydney’s population grew, so did its economy, with industries booming and attracting many entrepreneurs eager to establish their presence in the city. One of these industries was alcoholic brewing, particularly Edmund Resch, a German immigrant who earned a fortune making beer with his brothers. This brand of beer has recently experienced a resurgence in popularity among beer enthusiasts and is considered one of Australia’s most iconic beverages.

Nowra expressed some reservations about Sydney’s drinking culture, but it is more reluctant than you would expect. He quotes author J.C. Byrne’s otherwise glowing assessment of the city from 1849, which mentions a large number of licensed places of spirits. Australia’s drinking culture usually attracts shallow critiques from politicians and its sensationalist media lackeys, because it’s strongly connected with socialising, projecting shame on those who participate.

But for Nowra, drinking has its convict roots, which he derives from D.D. Mann, a convict who witnessed colonists experience excessive drinking and described it as a ‘fertile source of social disorder [...] and death.’ Yet he believed that any regulation, like the closing of the six o’clock swill, had terrible consequences for the city, which included the rise of razor gangs in the 1920s that took advantage of it by distributing illicit drugs to its residents. Recently, alcoholic consumption has dwindled, thanks to an interest in non-alcoholic brands and people being aware of their health.

Sydney is known to be a hub for the most corrupt elites to congregate, and it is something Nowra would not want the reader to forget. From the mid-twentieth century onwards, politicians like Robert Askin were embroiled in cut-and-dry scandals, either linked to the infamous gangster Abe Saffron or engaged in dirty factional warfare against their opponents within the party. Saffron launched the first legal strip club in Kings Cross at the end of the 1950s, boasting the seedier segment of Sydneysiders. Nowra also includes the Fairfax and Packer dynasties, who competed in shaping Sydney’s media landscape. John Fairfax helped establish the modern newspaper in Australia, while Clyde, Frank, and Kerry Packer became media moguls in their own right. But times have changed. Fairfax and Nine, Packer’s companies, have merged to form a single conglomerate.

Amid the COVID pandemic, we see how Sydney and Melbourne faced the most significant challenge in living memory. Since 2020, the capital of New South Wales has attempted to keep things open as much as possible. In contrast, the Victorian city kept their citizens stuck in their homes for an extended period; Melbourne is listed as the world’s most locked-down city.

Nowra makes a few mentions of COVID, but he does dedicate a chapter to the Bubonic Plague that emerged in the early 1900s. In some ways, that is similar to the NSW government’s approach to COVID. The rat plague caused public hysteria, despite causing fewer casualties. This response does have some terrible effects in blaming Chinese migrants and removing slum residents from their homes, but Nowra argued that ‘in some respects, the rats transformed Sydney for the better.’ For anyone who is liberty-minded, this seems like a justification for increasing or maintaining the nanny state. For others, it seems like the best governance that anyone could hope for, especially if they disregard the fact that bureaucracies can be complacent when it comes to policy.

However, one of the few mentions of the pandemic pertains to Sydney’s beaches. He talks about how thousands of Sydneysiders flocked up to Bondi and Manly, eschewing any pandemic restrictions. These beaches are deserving of their glowing reputation, and in this context, they are a symbol of cultural freedom, pushing back against the wowsers who are offended by any activity that crosses moral lines.

Nowra describes the beach:

The beach and the swimming costumes convey an air of easygoing informality, where the beach belongs to everyone, regardless of their social station in life. Most of all, there is a pervasive sense of communal happiness, as if the sand and the sea are the sacred site of an Australian paradise.

Nowra credits the release of Puberty Blues, which is based on the autobiographical novel by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey about two pre-teen girls living in the Sutherland Shire, for highlighting a darker picture of the surfing culture.’ He also notes the lamentable aspects of that culture, which culminated with the Cronulla Riots in 2005, when the racial conflict between the beach’s locals and Lebanese youths arriving from the Western suburbs intensified. These events reveal how territorial the culture could actually be and how fraught migrant relations can become.

But immigration has to be maintained so that any sense of displacement cannot be felt by its own citizens. Currently, high immigration net rates are fueling further demand for new homes, making house prices less affordable for young and potential owners. Nowra describes such discussions surrounding multiculturalism as a ‘widespread moral panic,’ yet an issue like that must be as complex as the other themes he wrestled with.

Architecture is prominent in the book because it shapes the civilisation of its citizens. Roger Scruton, the conservative philosopher, remarks that architecture ‘is precisely getting beyond the shed to the settlement, in which the earth is transformed from a mere habitat to a lasting habitation.’ Sydney boasts a wide array of fascinating architecture, ranging from modernist skyscrapers to Art Deco to age-old sandstones, and there’s a legacy to be preserved. Landmarks like the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House are rightly mentioned as attractions that have become a part of Sydney’s intellect, with the former being seen as a symbol of Australia recovering from the Great Depression, when it was opened in May 1932, and Nowra describing the latter as majestic sails, representing the waves.

He highlights places within Sydney that are often overlooked, given that the city comprises hundreds of suburbs and streets. The abandoned tunnels beneath Hyde Park go deeply into Woolloomooloo. In 1961, it was seen as a signpost of Sydney’s future public transportation and was considered the longest moving walkway in the world. But these tunnels are one of numerous parts of Hyde Park, which Nowra says is where criminal gangs lurked in the 1890s and protesters currently congregate. It also contains murals, which overlap with Nowra’s book in achieving similar objectives by collecting every individual aspect.

Nowra is also critical of individuals who wish to tear down certain buildings and ignore the city’s past. He cites Harry Seidler, one of Australia’s famous architects, as someone who wanted to demolish the Queen Victoria Building, because it didn’t match his modernist outlook. He defends the building, describing its design as something significant. Nowra also mentions Premier Robert Askin, who then succumbed to Abe Saffron’s influence, and alleged that his decision to allow developers to tear down buildings was ‘hyper-capitalist’ and ‘had no interest in history or culture.’ This is perhaps a Burkean view, where these institutions are sought to be preserved from outsiders who would like to destroy them for various reasons.

Some of Sydney’s hidden architecture was designed by Francis Greenway, a convict who arrived in Australia in 1816 and became the country’s first government architect. Greenway was considered to be an ill-tempered person whose vision did not gain support from his colleagues, except for Lachlan Macquarie. Under his patronage, Greenway designed a fort called Fort Macquarie, which was built on sandstone and situated in the Domain adjacent to the construction site, alongside many administrative buildings, including the Hyde Park Barracks, Government House, and St James Church. Nowra identifies these three places as ‘Georgian architecture’ and reminds the reader that these buildings serve as a reminder of a bygone era. The design borrows elements from other architectural styles outside of Australia, becoming a distinct class of its own.

However, Sydney’s architecture also complements the city’s natural features, and much of it is built from sandstone, specifically from the Hawkesbury Basin. Otherwise known as Hawkesbury sandstone or yellow block, it was a significant building block for New South Wales architecture until the end of the 20th century. As Nowra suggests, it provided housing for Aboriginal Australians, where the Eora tribe used coloured clays to paint stories on its walls. However, it has been the foundation for many of Sydney’s oldest and most famous buildings, including St Mary’s Cathedral, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Quadrangle at the University of Sydney. Sandstone was in high demand during the 1850s, but it posed a significant challenge for the Scottish quarrymen, who had to shape the material to match the building structures.

Compare that with the postmodernist building at Melbourne’s RMIT University, which resembles a giant blob and is situated next to the State Library of Victoria. You’re reminded of which city values its past as much as its present and future.

There is a presumption that, in contrast to Melbourne, Sydney falls short of its artistic and intellectual ambitions. After all, Melbourne is home to the predominant and bureaucratic public sector, which intellectuals and academics proudly accommodate. But Nowra demonstrates that such an opinion is not true. It is the home of artists such as Russell Drysdale and Brett Whiteley, as well as thinkers and writers like Patrick White, Les Murray, Clive James, and Germaine Greer.

The book conveys many stories of these figures. White would usually host parties at his house, and artists and actors were invited to come. The intellectual group to which James and Greer belonged, the Sydney Push, played a pivotal role in shaping the Australian political landscape. It had a variety of thinkers and combined its academic wit with the city’s pub culture, pushing back against cultural authoritarianism and censorship. It is also believed that the Push thinks that political involvement should be kept to a minimum, even if it feeds into a new kind of elitism that Sydneysiders still feel today. However, it also shaped a particular trait of the city that one would usually associate with larrikinism: its individualism and openness.

But these figures are more politically complex, as shown by the poet Henry Kendall, whom Nowra describes as:

One of the most imposing and eloquent men at the bar. His success in the court was legendary, except for two celebrated cases: one was his failed defence of the bushranger Frank Gardiner, whom he had known as a boy; and in 1867, he tried to save Henry O’Farrell from the hangman after he shot the Duke of Edinburgh, He was a member of critical social committees, hated animal cruelty, opposed the death penalty and was a defender of the Chinese at a time of White Australia hysteria. A strong nationalist, he was also a fervent supporter of our ties to Britain.

These creative minds are hard to find today, as they are more interested in identity politics and pushing forth social justice, without showing any real compassion to the world in which they live.

Sydney was once Australia’s biggest and most well-known city. Recently, Melbourne became the country’s most populous city. Yet nothing has changed after that fact. Melbourne is still considered the country’s cultural capital, where many progressive elites fancy themselves living, whereas Sydney is Australia’s biggest economic engine, albeit one that is rife with corruption and expensive to live in.

There are things specifically worth improving about Sydney Nowra could have elaborated on. If we were to sing the praises of previous governments in shaping Sydney, one should criticise it for its draconian policing, particularly during its lockout laws aimed at preventing further alcohol-related crimes, as well as its disinterest in fostering a strong culture surrounding freedom of speech. Political corruption remains rife as ever, and the city has some of the most expensive house prices in the world. These were the kind of things that the Sydney Push likes to counter, and while they proudly define themselves as left-wing, it feels like a relic of the past that is no longer replicated today. We are missing the larrikinism that those folks like to uphold.

Sport is an aspect that is absent from the biography. Nowra only makes mention of this in a chapter about the Packer family, in which Kerry Packer introduced One Day Cricket with the World Series Cricket, as an attempt for the Nine Network to reclaim broadcasting rights for cricket. Missing is the Sydney Cricket Ground or the stadiums that hold other professional sports. While the Melbourne Cricket Ground hosts a test every Boxing Day, a boat race from Sydney to Hobart is happening. Sydney has also hosted one of the most successful Olympics in modern history, significantly contributing to Australia’s cultural image. Melbourne brings many sports to its Cricket Ground and was the first Australian city to host the Olympics. Still, the events it holds annually – the AFL Grand Final and the Melbourne Cup – would be hard to overshadow any of Sydney’s events in terms of enhancing Australia’s cultural image in a positive light.

You can try to pick and choose the things about Sydney that you like to think about, but the one thing that you can’t deny is that it is the crown jewel of Australia. It is the site where the First Fleet landed, and the convicts were given the freedom to cultivate their own lives. Yet the data and history are almost relative to the anecdotal experience that Louis Nowra provides about Sydney. It is a personal account, one that is richly intricate, rarely dull, and appealing to all readers interested in the evolution of Australia.

By the end of the book, a journalist from Brisbane named Frank Robson claims that Australia hates Sydney, describing it as a ‘smug and superficial’ city. Nowra doesn’t care if critics think that way, because it remains dazzling to anyone living there. There is no immersive and novelistic overview of Sydney that hasn’t shown the city as the country’s icon or a place of dreams. In Nowra’s eyes, it’s a place of prosperity and envy.

Pop singers are beyond human. They project a manufactured avatar to make their voices heard, and in some cases, their creativity stands out to the public that they’re not sure that they’re human. They can’t simply be the girl you meet at a nightclub, or the man you finally have coffee with on your first date, but a celebrity who manages to make everyone pay attention to you, with corporate backing. One can argue that it’s a direct result of certain factors, from capitalism to any word that comes before the term “capitalism”. But this all depends on how much people will care, and the greatest musicians end up justifying this incentive, even when it peaks to its extremes, which comes with vapid results.

Social media has dramatically changed the scope of being a pop singer. It cultivates a fertile audience that goes beyond record-label coercion and welds identity politics by factoring in demographics predominant in the artist’s fanbase. Traditionally, women and gay people have always been the main target for this kind of music. As a result, the songs and lyrics would bring a self-conscious layer to their own role in a music landscape that is currently fragmented but less intellectual and accountable. It is also why when a pop artist becomes big enough that they can’t fail, they want to expand their ambitions beyond their own lane. They could become more central within a narrative in which they’re already a main character.

The Weeknd, whose real name is Abel Tesfaye, is one of the biggest singers of his generation. His credibility as an artist started with the release of a trilogy of mixtapes that brings a downtuned, if not hedonistic and nihilistic, approach to R&B. Mostly inspired by the culture of the 1980s, particularly Bret Easton Ellis and Michael Jackson, the music follows the descent of a Heathcliffe-esque man who seduces and manipulates young women. There’s a saying that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and Tesfaye has repeated these themes once he became big.

His cameo in the Safdie Brothers film Uncut Gems was a turning point. Tesfaye previously contributed to soundtracks (he even got nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song in 2016), but it was playing himself, during the roots of his career, in which he got into a fist fight with Howard Ratner, that made him interested in integrating film qualities into his music to pave the way into acting. His albums After Hours and Dawn FM, which are inspired by films like Uncut Gems, combine the best of both worlds: a maximalist production deep into his mainstream phase with the heartbreak from his mixtapes. It transports you into a world that seems uncertain and liminal, and as a result, it turned Tesfaye into the deeper artist that he wanted to be.

Tesfaye’s venture into film and television, however, was far from well-received. His HBO series The Idol, which he collaborated on with Euphoria’s Sam Levinson, was widely panned, particularly for Tesfaye’s central performance as a guru attempting to seduce the pop star into his sex cult. The show was riddled with numerous on-set controversies (some of which are hard to verify), but in my opinion, it’s hilarious in its self-aware and campy qualities, much of it coming from Tesfaye himself. That hasn’t stopped him from pursuing this doomed venture, as he releases Hurry Up Tomorrow, a film directed by Trey Edwards-Shults that serves as a supplement to the album of his same name, supposedly his final album under the moniker of The Weeknd. In that film, he lost his singing voice, went AWOL during a live performance, and met a fan who took him hostage. But most importantly, it’s a funeral of The Weeknd, or at least, what it represents for the artist. Unsurprisingly, the movie was slammed as an extended music video, and his performance turned him into a laughing stock.

As the critic Nathan Rabin summarized:

There are two complementary sides to Tesfaye. There’s the mainstream hitmaker whose synth-heavy New Wave pop captured the imagination of the masses. That half of Tesfaye’s personality is popular enough to play the Super Bowl halftime show.

There’s also the off-putting arthouse weirdo side of Tesfaye.

That could also apply to Charlotte Aitchison, otherwise known as Charli xcx. Like Tesfaye, the English singer-songwriter emerged as a promising pop-indie darling in the early 2010s, appearing on a few hit singles. Both artists have more than a decade of commercially and critically successful albums and singles. Unlike Tesfaye, Aitchinson has chosen to experiment with pop further, away from making radio-friendly hits and becoming an Internet-exclusive darling. Her careless and often deadpan persona has cemented that fanbase.

She released her recent album Brat, a collection of the surreal electronica that she experimented with fellow hyperpop luminaries like Sophie and AG Cook, and sounds that come from a mid 2000s rave. Brat, with its light green color and its Arial Narrow font as a cover art, became her most critically and commercially successful project to date. The concept of the “brat” phenomenon has been exhaustively documented, with some predicting its eventual decline.

While Aitchison declared Brat Summer to have died in September 2024, she wants to destroy it again in The Moment. In the same way as Hurry Up Tomorrow, she wrestles with the stresses of the Brat phenomenon, leading up to her big concert. This unfunny mockumentary aims to present a version of Brat that would inevitably be her sellout moment. That phase, under the direction of Johannes (Alexander Skarsgaard), deviates from her raw vision and towards a version that is friendly with pre-teens. It has all the underlinings of an overlong YouTube video essay that bemoans the media through the lens of “late-stage capitalism” and “neoliberalism”. There’s needless anxiety throughout, beginning and ending with an Anthony Fantano cameo.

Aitchison and Tesfaye are shameless cinephiles. While Aitchison documents all the movies she watches every day on Letterboxd (to the gushing of the platform’s witless commenters), Tesfaye documents the movies and TV shows he has seen through interviews and his Instagram Stories. When The Idol premiered, you could find him telling Vanity Fair that his favorite movie at the time was Tar. Such information seems sufficient in establishing their credibility to switch or multitask with different media.

But both artists demonstrate a comically woeful understanding of the films they try to emulate. Much of The Moment’s aesthetic borrows liberally from Gaspar Noé1 and Oliver Assayas, where the compositions are often shaky. It is, after all, a mockumentary. In the case of Hurry Up Tomorrow, it’s a psychological horror film that aims to combine the dual personality of Persona, the obsessiveness from Der Fan, and Misery.

These films ultimately fail to meet their ambitions, but come off looking compelling to their fans, already invested in whatever lore it implicates, but lacks depth for anyone who isn’t, and the introspection both artists undertake reveals hubris, if nothing else.

Brat demonstrates Aitchinson at her most vulnerable in an environment that makes it difficult to separate her party and private personas. But the concept surrounding it is not deep enough, which is made even worse when it has been bastardized by more people, including political parties adopting its aesthetic. Perhaps I’m not part of the target audience, but from what I read about the phenomenon, it seems likely that there’s no unifying consensus on the concept. Instead, it’s a concept that serves as a [choose your own adventure] type for anyone who encounters it. The Moment never seems to fill in the gaps and makes Aitchinson (and the people surrounding her) even more insufferable.

The flaws of Hurry Up Tomorrow, the album, stood out in the movie. Because its length is 90 minutes, Tom Breihan from Stereogum compared the album to The Brutalist, an epic about a Jewish Hungarian architect who is commissioned to build a grand community center named after a wealthy industrialist. If anything, Hurry Up Tomorrow reminds me of the vast, incoherent building in the film that is yet unfinished, due to the creator’s fatal self-perception as an artist, and he ends up suffering throughout his process. We don’t feel for Tesfaye; we only like to see him destroying himself.

That much of their music from these albums is absent, which is the narrative key to these films, is telling. There are already films centred on performers that manage to merge fiction with non-fiction seamlessly, sometimes including a live concert. A Hard Day’s Night, Stop Making Sense, and Justin Timberlake and the Tennessee Kids all show the performers under pressure to give their best show, and both demonstrate that they also enjoy their own public image. A director like Jonathan Demme invites the spectator to feel involved with their stunts, but more importantly, it is accompanied by their music.

It’s inaccurate to say that Aitchinson and Tesfaye have low “media literacy” from interpreting great filmmaking. But it’s safe to say that they engage with these high-brow films because it makes them look cool or relatable to their fans. They can scream “absolute cinema” many times, in the same way the meme with Martin Scorsese says it. Being a cinephile requires a rigorous engagement with the medium’s numerous techniques, its history, and its role in upholding the soul of society. For both of these artists, watching movies, in an age where theatres are declining and streaming services continue to dominate, makes them fashionable. They do not take into account why the sexual violence in Irreversible and the emotional unravelling in Climax can be so meaningful, which gives them the licence and liberty to be careless about it.

Perhaps the main difference is how Aitchison and Tesfaye are perceived differently by the public, despite their overlapping qualities. The former is a multi-layered ugly duckling whose mess is seen as a swan by music critics, whereas the latter, despite being more commercially successful, has always been an ugly duckling and nothing else.

Aitchison’s ability to be overtly detailed (all the way to her Substack) is praised for changing perceptions of pop stars, where music seems to be the back seat to their creative personality. Any sense of laziness is now part of her charm arsenal. For that, not much can be lost, especially when she has more projects as an actor and a composer. She contributed a few songs to the soundtrack of Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell’s loose adaptation of Emily Brontë’s gothic novel, and her next project is a soundtrack to David Lowery’s Mother Mary, which stars Anne Hathaway as a veteran pop star. She’s also set to appear in Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex and a Takashi Miike film.

Tesfaye has already shaped the landscape of pop music earlier in his career.2 Once he became the biggest artist in the world (going as far as to hold a Super Bowl halftime show), except for some subtle shifts in his character, the substance of his music never deviated. This can be a good thing. In a review of After Hours published in The Fader, Tesfaye compared to Kara Walker, a multi-disciplinary artist, who depicts race and sex, evokes mystery. Every artwork she makes evokes the same feeling and effect. He can make music good for the public, but not good enough when his personality is more introverted and two-dimensional. His music survives by taking different forms while maintaining the same persona. Aitchison can use social media as a way to pump up an attention economy; Tesfaye uses vague messages to promote his work, and he’s only a cog of the system. So far, there is no sign that Tesfaye has more projects that are connected with his pursuit of film, given that they often attract controversy that does not give him the best kind of publicity. But it seems that Hurry Up Tomorrow was Tesfaye’s last chance to become an actor, and his limits as an artist have already been exposed.

As albums, Brat and Hurry Up Tomorrow are, overall, compelling listens, but they don’t translate smoothly into film. This is not because they are not filled with ideas, but that they give hints of ideas. Most particularly, these artists are not just great, but want to be seen as human. These people weren’t the first, nor will they be the last artists to enter into cinema beyond their music and bring their vision from one medium to another. But in their attempt, they become the most pretentious at it. And as a result, cinephiles suffer too.

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One of the biggest memes of 2025 was the ‘performative male’, which satirizes men who attempt to attract the opposite sex by consuming things associated with femininity. One of those objects is the tote bag, which has become synonymous with conveying a sense of responsibility. It is reusable, making it environmentally friendly; however, a logo on such a bag signifies being part of a club, even if it doesn’t exist. For professional and creative outlets, merchandise has been a driving force for their capital, and tote bags have become a crucial factor in the stereotype of the urbane and educated type.

One of the most notable tote bags comes from The New Yorker; now more than a hundred years old, the magazine has distributed 500,000 bags in 2017. The magazine leaned towards a progressive bent, with critical coverage of Donald Trump after his election in 2016, seeing a rapid increase in subscriptions. This means their tote bags, which served as a complementary gift for new subscribers, have also grown in popularity. Anyone who carries it is more likely to be either a paying subscriber devoted to the kind of sophisticated intellectualism found in their pages. Which, considering the quality of their output in recent years, is few and far between.

Another brand that has capitalized on the tote bag is Mubi, a streaming service dedicated to world and arthouse cinema. Before that, Mubi was a small forum for dedicated cinephiles to log movies they had seen or compartmentalize them in a list. It then added a vertical for long-form writing about film called Notebook, which eventually expanded as a print magazine (one of its chief film critics was Ignatiy Vischnevetsky, who was one of the co-hosts of the revamped Ebert Presents: At The Movies). Eventually, it expanded its operations that largely involved streaming and later towards production and distribution. Films from Akira Kurosawa, Wim Wenders, and Agnes Varda have been curated on the platform, as well as numerous obscure titles. Still, their most famous titles distributed include The Substance, which was nominated for numerous Academy Awards. Recently, it has acquired the distribution rights to Die My Love and Sentimental Value, the latter of which has garnered significant festival buzz, as well as No Other Land, a documentary directed by a team of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers about the state of the settlements in the West Bank following the October 7 terrorist attacks.

Such expansions mean more potential investors, and one of them is Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with a portfolio that includes numerous startups in various sectors, such as internet services, healthcare, cryptocurrency, and robotics. It also has many Israeli startups, and in 2025, it launched Kela, a startup specialising in military defense that raised $60 million.

Sequoia Capital has raised $100 million on Mubi this year, and for some of their subscribers, it felt like an incredible betrayal. The activities of Kela were linked to the ongoing Gaza conflict, and many felt that Mubi was funded by “Zionists”, a betrayal of the service’s mission of “discovering wonderful new cinema or classic masterpieces.” Speaking to New York Magazine, Mubi’s CEO and founder Efe Cakarel said that the service lost 10,000 subscribers over this revelation.

Put aside your perspectives on the conflict for a moment, and you realize the controversy surrounding Mubi is a non-story. Much of the backlash is insincere at best, and the story is more about the response rather than the action. As New York Magazine’s Will Tavlin noted, A24 has raised investments from Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Jared Kushner, and has opened a behind-the-scenes division for artificial intelligence. This got some notice on social media, but the damage was quite minimal, as they are larger than Mubi and their fanbase is broader.

The challenges facing small and independent cinema have been affected by geopolitics and artificial intelligence, but it’s clear that many cinephiles don’t want to take any of these seriously and instead throw blanket dismissals at the problem as a pretense of taking it seriously. Certainly, there is a valid concern about artificial intelligence overtaking the human capability to create great art, but some will go about boycotting any smaller films that have used a fraction of artificial intelligence, either as a way of saving costs or to enhance production, as opposed to replacing it, but are gleefully promoting piracy.

The narrative surrounding Gaza has not just captivated but also indulged cinephiles to complement the perception that they are radical activists. The complexity of the Israel-Palestine conflict, compared to feminism, anti-racism, and other progressive causes, has rougher implications on film, as some actors have historically been accused of antisemitism, get cancelled, and in response throw a fit that they are just speaking out against a genocide.

Filmmakers such as Aki Kaurismaki and Ari Folman, whose films have been curated on the streaming service, have signed an open letter calling out Mubi over its ties with Sequioa. For his part, Efe Cakarel has denounced the events occurring in Gaza, but says that “these accusations are fundamentally at odds with the values we hold as individuals and as a company.”

But Mubi subscribers have nothing to lose from any of this. Much of their content caters to their politics anyway. I realized that I watched fewer movies on Mubi in 2025. But over the years since I’ve subscribed, the films I’ve seen on the platform have a hard-left focus, from the Cuban propaganda film I Am Cuba to the radical feminist mockumentary Born in Flames. Both of these films have been critically acclaimed and were given the Criterion Collection treatment. Their politics are exhaustively analyzed for how they break the boundaries of filmmaking.

This also raises another problem with the controversy, namely that activism is now perceived as a social club, particularly in the arts and entertainment sector. The culture of film, which includes film festivals, magazines, cinemas, and awards shows, has always leveraged politics as a way to sell itself to the broader world. Virtues in being seen as an empathetic person who sees everyone as equal is a massive currency within these communities. And raging against a nation and its adherents, to which the discourse surrounding it has not just started with the founding of the former in 1948, but through centuries of discrimination towards one religion, has enhanced it further, especially in the social media age.

Virtue signalling is a slur, not because the user is indicating that they agree with the virtue, but because there’s an air of piousness when they uplift it. The virtue of inclusivity is now exclusive, and it signifies that they have better politics, and you, who either don’t agree with it or are just outside of the landscape, don’t. Therefore, I get excluded for going against the ideological grain, while they exclude themselves if they don’t abide by their demands. Jeremiah Johnson puts it best when he wrote that “activism is not about making that point, but is about winning, power, and changing the world.” And if any stunt doesn’t lead to substantive change, it’s not winning. The loss of Mubi’s subscribers means that arthouse cinema would regress and become an enjoyment for people who are otherwise fringe. All because its ideologically committed subscribers are happy to conflate unconscious financial backing with malicious intent.

Many activists reading this piece would be inclined to disagree with what I am trying to say. They will argue that they’re just raising a conversation that no one wants to touch, and it’s necessary to separate themselves from those who are silent about horrible events. A niche streaming service making a business decision to expand its operations, which involves getting the rights to prestige films made by notable auteurs that would inevitably be a darling during awards seasons, is not inherently an activist stunt. What is an activist stunt is not attempting to get out of a bubble that they have contributed to. Before the boycott, Mubi currently has 20 million subscribers globally, and losing more than ten thousand is only a small cost for the film company.

Unsubscribing from a streaming service is already a needless culture war battle. There are many instances of streaming services facing a wave of subscribers who lost patience with the platform over the content it distributes. Right-wingers often boycotted Netflix numerous times, and more recently, aimed their ire at a show that has a transgender character. At these times, they have lost subscribers from these controversies, but their base continues to grow. Certainly, the number of subscribers cancelling it would affect their stock. Presuming that any of these streaming services has gone bankrupt, these specific stories would not explain the big picture of their decline, as Netflix continues to increase in revenue with new subscribers.

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There’s no public data on how many Mubi tote bags were sold, but it is part of a deal that subscribers will receive one if they invite three of their friends to the platform. One of their former senior employee told New York Magazine that “Mubi is not a film company. It’s a lifestyle brand. And if you’re a lifestyle brand, but your customers’ personal lifestyle includes caring about human rights and children not dying in a war, then bringing in Sequoia was always going to be a huge problem.” One has to wonder if it’s a confession in capturing the company and turning it into a “No Homers” club. But this is the endpoint of making everything personal into a political argument. And all it takes to become a narcissistic radical is to watch a bunch of movies.

Another year. Another conversation with my favorite journalist and the repository of wisdom Matt Labash. If you are a regular reader of this newsletter, I recapped the year before the New Year, going over aspects that I find interesting and what he find interesting about the events that happened over the year. I ask all the questions, he answers with numerous blocks of texts. I ask him about the collapse in Tucker Carlson’s sanity, of whom he’s formerly a friend of, what TV shows and books he enjoyed this past year, why everything’s stuck, and whether he’s optimistic about the future that this decade has to offer. But this one is personal. Being a very small newsletter in a large pond of writers, I also asked him about being absent on Substack, after he asked me why I have not been writing that much.

You should subscribe to Labash’s Slack Tide newsletter. I am happy to count him as a guide to all things good, and I am glad I spoke with him about it.

How do you feel about the year overall?

Oh, it’s gone great. If you’re in the chaos ‘n’ dysfunction business. And who are we kidding -- I sort of am. I warned of this before the 2024 election, even if the reality on the ground was much worse than I imagined it would be. But at least it’s allowed me to use, over and over again, one of the sweetest phrases in the English language: “I told you so.”

Ten months ago, you would have told me that America was OK with Trump. At least, until he proceeded with the tariffs, and now he’s no longer seen as America’s greatest economic manager. At the moment, I witness conservative influencers tearing themselves apart on X and conferences over who holds the mantle for Trump, his ideas, and after he leaves office. One of those people is Tucker Carlson. I currently have a book of his magazine writings on my bookshelf called The Long Slide, which includes his encounter with Hunter S Thompson, his famous article he wrote for Esquire where he was on a trip with Al Sharpton. Having read it, I find it difficult to reconcile his erudite prose with the nihilistic, sloppy version that has manifested this year. You were friends with him early in his career, and we had once talked about that friendship. What has changed?

Well, I don’t really like to talk about Tucker in print, which is no easy feat, since I make a living popping off in print, and he’s in the middle of every other news cycle these days. I get asked about him all the time, of course. Usually in the form of: “What the fuck happened to Tucker?” But as I said, we were good enough friends for a long enough time (decades -- after starting together at The Weekly Standard in the nineties) that I don’t fire on him in public.

Mind you, I used to fire contentious emails at him plenty. And he fired back. We tussled quite a bit from about 2016 on, while staying friends. But we don’t talk anymore, and haven’t for some time. Which was never formalized. There wasn’t a dramatic final shootout. It just sort of happened. And it’s sad. Because I really liked Old Tucker, especially when he actually was Old Tucker, before becoming New Alex Jones. I pray for my old friend’s return to the guy I used to know, sometimes. Literally. He once tie me a fly out of my Bernese Mountain dog’s fur and framed it. I genuinely miss that dude.

As for what changed with Trump and his influencers? He got harder to lie about and shill for, because he has proved himself -- nearly every day of his second administration -- to be as incompetent and corrupt as we, his faithful critics, warned people he’d be. He’s never really been a populist. Just a narcissist. And even with the crushing amount of precedent people had to go on (refresher: he tried to overturn the will of the people when he lost an election), they still let The Demagogue-in-chief ride them like the village teeter-totter, and fell for all his screamingly obvious horseshit. Remember his promise to reduce prices on day one? He doesn’t care about their grocery prices. He eats plenty of groceries, apparently, but has he ever even been to a grocery store? And what do grocery prices have to do with his big, beautiful ballroom? Or getting handjobs from tech billionaires? Or accepting fake peace prizes from FIFA? Or making sure his grifter kids run all over the world securing even more billions from shady foreign interests for the family slush fund? Trump’s always been a con man, and they’ve always been his marks. Some of them, cynically playing the part of a mark, rake profits out of other marks who didn’t get the irony memo.

And this is much of the reason I think the MAGAbots now spend more time clawing out each other’s eyes. There’s a lot of displaced aggression. Like when your boss humiliates you at work, but instead of telling him off or quitting, you go home and kick the dog. Or Candace Owens. Not that Candace Owens doesn’t deserve a good kicking. Sorry -- I shouldn’t speak that way about the mentally ill. But, except say Nick Fuentes, who has a lot of other problems (being a Hitler-loving incel, for starters), but who will actually call bullshit on Trump these days (even if he ignored the truth for a decade prior), they’re almost all too cowardly to criticize The King directly. So they criticize each other instead. Though I applaud that impulse, since I’m truly enjoying their circular firing squad. They all deserve each other.

Politics has transformed into entertainment, and that in turn becomes infotainment. It’s why, compared to my past self, I have not been interested in the contest of ideas and have been focused mostly on sport. (At the moment, I’m following the oldest rivalry in cricket, and it’s fascinating.) One could make the “bread and circuses” position, where most of it is a distraction. But in absurd times, a ball game makes more sense, and this feeling is still felt by the current generation, carrying it on to its future generations.

If you’re interested in a “contest of ideas” in American politics, you might as well go back to watching cricket. Ideas haven’t had much to do with anything since, I don’t know, 2014? The only idea that animates our politics these days is whether you are for Trump or are you against him. (And Trump’s animating idea is to change his mind about everything every five minutes, from tariffs to elective wars.) Or in what’s left of the Republican Party, the contest is whether you are for Trump, or are really, really for Trump. When he dies, they’ll probably just have him stuffed and shuffle him around Weekend-At-Bernie’s style, until Barron is old enough to run for office. If Barron’s not too busy Zooming Andrew Tate, who we just found out is his hero. Which.....figures. We are definitely in our late Idiocracy/bad-reality-show phase. By the end of this ordeal, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Mike Johnson and Candace making out in the hot tub.

Pop culture has become stuck during this decade. Most of the songs on the Billboard Hot 100 have hits that are not released in 2025 (the song below came out in 2019, then had a music video in 2025). Young people are bad at reading books anymore, and box office revenue for movies released this year has been declining because streaming remains a convenient option for most people. Are you optimistic about the future, and if so, what’s the glimmer of hope that everybody like me is missing?

“Optimistic” is an awfully strong word. I wouldn’t characterize myself as that, exactly. More like a John Mellencamp fatalist, in that I think life goes on, long after the thrill of livin’ is gone. Now, more than ever, the internet has eaten everything. And AI is eating the internet. So our already overly artificial world is getting an extra layer of artifice piled on top of it. At this late date, I’m not even sure about myself. I might be AI. Better check to make sure I don’t have eleven fingers.

I hear what you’re saying about pop culture being stuck. And I largely agree. Although I think that comes with plenty of qualifiers. The monoculture is dead and gone, of course, and I don’t think it’s coming back. We have too many choices in every department to have to share the prison of each other’s taste. Which might be a good thing, since I’d rather eat a live puppy than have to listen to K-pop. But I, for instance, read more books than ever, if you count audiobooks as “reading.” Always have two or three going at any given time, on top of my other reading chores. I know Peak TV is supposed to have peaked, but I still find I have more viewing options than ever -- things I genuinely look forward to getting to, while I’m waiting for the next season of say, Seth Rogen’s The Studio (which is deeply funny) to roll around. I do find myself being drawn to actual movies less and less -- I probably go to a movie theater twice a year, when I used to go every few weeks. And when I do catch up with the films I’ve eagerly anticipated -- this year, Eddington, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, and the universally-jizzed over One Battle After Another come to mind -- I find myself either aggressively disappointed (Eddington and Highest 2 Lowest) or thinking that something was good, but that it was wildly overpraised. (One Battle After Another). And I’m not trying to be difficult -- I generally like everything Spike Lee and Leo DiCaprio/Sean Penn do. But I do think that there’s enough mediocrity out there, that critics start grade-inflating, often without knowing it. There might be some age bias at work here, but I don’t think most theatrical releases touch even the high middle tier of the eighties and nineties, let alone the true age of the auteur in the seventies. I made one of my sons watch Barry Levinson’s Diner the other night (1982) -- a film I’ve loved since I was younger than him -- and it knocked him on his ass.

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But then, I turn around and get pleasantly surprised by something I didn’t see coming. Like Rebecca Miller’s five-part docu-series Mr. Scorsese (about Martin Scorsese, which was just released on Apple TV+). Which was great from start to finish. I didn’t want it to end. I’ve written about Scorsese’s jihad against cape-and-codpiece films (which, in my book, are rotten — I hate them all, or would if I ever watched them), have read Scorsese on Scorsese, and am a lifelong fan. Yet there were all sorts of things in Mr. Scorsese I either didn’t know or long ago forgot.

My point being that there’s so much culture getting produced that it’s still easy to get sucker-punched by something good if you’re not too lazy to hunt for it. A few things might not matter to everybody the way they once did. Can’t remember the last time I heard everybody talking about the same novel. (Maybe Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections? Which is 25 years ago, now.) But a lot of smaller things matter to a lot more people, even if they no longer pack the same culture-wide wallop. So it’s a bit of a tradeoff.

That said, I’m reading a delightful new memoir by the director Cameron Crowe (of Almost Famous fame), called The Uncool. It focuses on his stint as a rock’n’roll journalist for Rolling Stone and others during his teenage years. And it doesn’t get much cooler than taking off for ten days at a time to go hang out with the Allman Brothers or Led Zeppelin in their prime. And I was thinking about what the equivalent of that would be with a Cameron Crowe of today. And there’s just no matching it. Either the music got smaller, or we did. Which might explain why so much of our culture is reverting to nostalgia acts.

So I look back at this year, and there were plenty of movies and TV shows I enjoyed. I’ve watched The Studio twice, and I am more appreciative of Eddington than you are, and as appreciative of One Battle After Another as you are. Those movies felt like they spoke about how absurd our political moment has gotten. Eddington, which I’ve been meaning to discuss at some point, is about how doomscrolling and phony online activism have heightened our anxieties, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. One Battle After Another, which I think is Paul Thomas Anderson’s worst movie, sympathises a lot with the ideas of the revolutionaries. It had me thinking. In the current age of political violence, it seems like there wasn’t ever a vibe shift that many pundits predicted following Trump’s reelection. I think things will still be the same. But thank god for Eddington for evidently bucking that orthodoxy.

I feel like I should like Eddington more than I did. Plenty of people I respect felt the same as you about it. Though I don’t think I was just having an off-night. Watched it with my family, and my wife quit out of boredom about a third of the way through, one of my sons fell asleep, and the other was as frustrated as I was with it being meandering, slow, and dull-witted, with lots of convoluted subplots and cardboard characters. All while Joaquin Phoenix (who I usually love) was gratingly mumbly, killing off early the only character who actually interested me. (I won’t say who, in case anyone still cares enough to get angry over spoilers.) But to be honest with you, I’m not qualified to mount a sustained argument against it, because though I only saw it a month ago, I’ve already forgotten almost everything about it.

I suspect I would’ve liked it more if it actually was the film it was described to me as: a real examination of our COVID-era madness and division. When a crisis that should’ve brought us all together instead revealed just how deep our fissures are, as plenty on both sides of the issue went out of their minds. But this is why dystopian novelists are now being rendered obsolete. Because the madness of our everyday headlines in the Trump era often surpasses whatever their dark imaginations can conjure. A buddy of mine likes to say, “Who needs to read Philip K. Dick when you can just read Drudge for all the real-life dystopia?”

As for whether there was a vibe shift into revolutionary or government-inflicted type violence, I got out of the predictions business a long time ago, since it often now feels like the craziest thing that can happen, will. But believe it or not, even though it feels like the second Trump administration has already dragged on for twenty years, it’s only been one. And we have three more to go. (Possibly longer, if he refuses to relinquish power.) So every day is still an anything-can-happen day. I do concede that it feels like some air has been let out of his tires lately, with even isolated swaths of his base expressing disillusionment and resentment. (Which is a good thing.) And I’m glad that liberals and moderates, by and large, prefer nonviolent King’s Day protests to armed revolution. But just as our entertainment culture has fractured, so has our oppression culture. And not all of us are experiencing it the same way. I might snow myself into thinking things are business-as-usual (I don’t -- see my last year’s worth of writing, where I strive to be diligently clear-eyed about Trump’s abuses and norm-shattering). But if you’re a brown person here legally, and are afraid to go to your construction job because you’re worried masked ICE goons might pile out of a van, offer no ID or warrant, and round you up and take you to some dog-kennel detention center without letting you notify your family or attorney, and it could be weeks or months before things get straightened out, well then, you might think you’re living in a very different America than you were 12 months ago. And you’d be right.

On a personal note, I can announce I’m done with 2025. It’s another year of a clown decade where most of our culture and politics are not cut to dry. But more importantly, you reached out to me on why my Substack is drying up after many years, and it’s because I am living a very quiet life doing a rigid and boring desk job that has nevertheless left me financially and emotionally stable. It’s quite calm, in contrast to the chaotic and cutthroat art of content and commentary, which is something I can do and have tried to break out as a regular job numerous times, but have missed every opportunity when it comes. I would like to go back to writing regularly on my newsletter, but after my writing has constantly been passed, breaking my balance with my other life, it was inevitable for me to feel that Lack of Taste was less a sea of original thought and more of a dumping ground of backburned and pitiable work that only a few people read.

So I’ll leave you with this. Have you ever felt this malaise, and how do I keep moving forward from succumbing to such malaise?

Well, jeez, man. No pressure or anything, asking me to turn your frown upside down. I guess I’d start by saying I can see a lot worse outcomes than being financially and emotionally stable. I’ve known plenty of writers/journos who are financially-unstable nutcases. And I don’t think wanking off for a living in print or on a screen is more noble work than digging ditches or assembling Big Macs or being a corporate drone. Though it’s saved me from having to get a real job my entire adult life, thank God. Especially since I’m not qualified for much else, keep odd hours, and really suck at taking orders.

If you love to write, I’d say do it anyway, regardless of the outcome or audience size. (And by the way, if you don’t, it doesn’t make you a moral failure not to write. The world, by my lights, has enough writing to last it for a good while.) But it can be its own reward. Even if it’s more rewarding to get rewarded, theoretically. And I say theoretically, because there are a ton of people who will gain more fame and money than you’ll ever know, who end up in rehab or who have to pay princely sums to their shrink every week to stay emotionally solvent. Or worse, they end up barking mad like Candace Owens, prattling on about her transvestigations or about who really killed Charlie Kirk. (Is Erika Kirk off the suspect list? I’m behind.)

I’ve often said to my wife that I actually tend to be a better person on the page than off of it. Because it causes you to bear down on your best self, and allows you to edit out your worst one. But more importantly, writing forces you to clarify thoughts and to find order in the chaos. Or to possibly refine the chaos that constantly swirls about us, making it funny or sad or beautiful, or maybe even just giving voice to it while raging against it, helping readers who feel it too, but maybe haven’t quite articulated to themselves just how or why it’s eating them alive. A lot of the writers we like, we tend to like for a common reason: because they make us feel like we’re in good company in what can be a lonely, forbidding world.

So do I ever feel this malaise, you ask? About five or ten times a day, give or take. But we don’t always get to choose the color palette we’re handed. Sometimes, there are more dark colors than light ones. That’s okay, though. Use those colors to paint your picture.

Actually, here’s a final question. What are some things that have inspired you this year?

When you ask me that, my mind naturally goes to books or songs or poems or to Taco Bell’s new Avocado Ranch Crispy Chicken Burrito, which you really ought to try if they have those in Australia. But I’ll tell you what actually inspired me this year: my father-in-law, Vic Peruzzi.

We saw him off in October, at age 90. I wrote a huge piece about it on my site. But here’s a story I didn’t tell, that left a real impression. Vic was an active, robust guy his entire life. Even well into his mid-eighties, my kids and I would go out with him to clear brush on his property. He used to own his own construction company, so he’d be working his big Bobcat with his shirt off in 95-degree-heat — refusing to take a sip of water — then would jump off of it and join us when we hit a snag, grabbing another chainsaw to help us buck some fallen oak. He’s like 85, when he’s doing this. But by the end, he was suffering from interstitial lung disease, and esophageal dysphagia, and just plain old age. He was a shell of himself.

In the last months, he was on oxygen and having trouble even getting to the bathroom, and so his daughters, who were basically his caretakers, had to station a piss bottle next to the recliner where he was parked all day. But he was having trouble even getting directed into the bottle to get it done.

But Vic was also always an irreverent, hilarious sonofabitch. So rather than sit in defeated, passive silence, he announced loudly to the room, “Hey, if anyone’s gonna be touching me, you need to wash your hands first! I don’t want you getting it dirty!”

I laughed until I cried upon hearing it. It was A Moment. He took his defeat and humiliation and physical indignity, and made everyone else feel less uncomfortable about it. There went a dude who knew how to paint a beautiful picture with the darkness he’d been given. May we all do the same.

The film theorist Andre Bazin has said that “the role of cinema here is not that of a servant nor is it to betray the painting. Rather, it is to provide it with a new form of existence.” Bazin argues that cinema is not meant to be a copy of a painting, but to serve as an alloy for a new set of storytelling and become a new way to convey the human experience.

The coming-of-age story is a classic tale in storytelling that continues to be redefined by closely reflecting societal trends, and it benefits movies as much as literature or any other cultural medium. Rebel Without a Cause intended to rebel against the norms that cause young men to be troublesome individuals. These Bildungsroman narratives have set benchmarks for cinema worldwide, inspiring a movement of maverick filmmakers. The 400 Blows, centred around a delinquent boy, established the French New Wave, while The Graduate, about a college graduate’s uncertain prospects in life, planted the seed for New Hollywood. The best entries of this genre often mark these standards, because not only can the ideas driving the filmmaking be radical.

Edward Yang’s Yi Yi: A One and a Two is one of the greatest coming-of-age stories told in the 21st century. On the surface, the film does not resemble a typical narrative one may find in the genre, yet it retains a familiar essence. It is a sprawling epic of the Jians, a middle-class Taiwanese family, where each character grapples with their own sense of inadequacy. The father, NJ, is experiencing a midlife crisis when he bumps into a former lover; the mother is struggling when her mother goes into a coma; Ting-Ting, the eldest daughter, falls in love for the first time; while Yang-Yang, the youngest son, is driven with curiosity by the things he encounters.

Yi Yi explores the natural transformations of adulthood, adolescence, and childhood, and brings grandiose ambition compared to most coming-of-age tales, which reconciles the transition experienced by its younger characters with the search for closure among its older characters. And it does so by capturing the realism of growing up in its plain form. As the film begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral, it signifies an old generation settling down while the new generation succeeds after them. It’s a coming-of-age story because it’s set in Taiwan, as the country enters the 21st century as a large, democratic, and modern economy.

Yi Yi was Edward Yang’s final film, before he died of colon cancer in 2007. It was also his first film to receive worldwide recognition outside of Taiwan, winning Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival. But it’s characteristically no different than any of his other films in his oeuvre, which includes Taipei Story, Terrorizers, and A Brighter Summer Day. At three hours, the film treats time and aging with grace. But it also observes Taiwan’s transformation with great detail through its immense visual finesse, influenced by Yasujiro Ozu, Jacques Tati, and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Before he became a filmmaker, Yang was trained as a software engineer, working in the United States with a focus on microcomputers and defense software. He then moved back to Taiwan to focus on filmmaking after watching Aguirre: The Wrath of God, becoming a part of a film movement emerging in the 1980s known as the Taiwanese New Wave, whose films closely examine the lives of ordinary Taiwanese people amid the nation’s modern developments.

Taiwan’s economic miracle played a critical role in boosting and enabling this new wave of cinema. Taiwan is considered one of the Four Asian Tigers, a name given to small East Asian countries whose economies profiterated in the 21st century, thanks to a mixture of Confucianism, the belief in collectivism, and investment in education and engineering, Filmmakers such as Hou Hsaio-Hsien, Ang Lee and Tsai Ming-liang would utilize these newfound resources were able to experiment with newer narratives, which they couldn’t do under the Kuomintang government led by Chiang Kai-shek, where political dissent is often suppressed.

The Taiwanese New Wave also examined that period’s authoritarianism through a critical lens. The events of the 228 Incident - where the Kai-shek regime killed anti-government protesters - and the subsequent White Terror serve as a backdrop to Edward Yang’s other famous film, A Brighter Summer Day, which tells the story of a night school student who gets involved with the town’s teenage gangs in the 1960s. In one scene, the father, a public servant, gets interrogated and grilled by the government. Other films made by that movement, such as Dust in the Wind and Eat Drink Man Woman, portrayed Taiwan’s interconnected identity, where various characters of different generations reckon with its changing customs. These films are distinguished by a visual delicacy that’s defined by empty spaces and slower pacing with careful attention to detail.

Yi-Yi sees Taiwan’s globalized modernity challenging the traditional beliefs held by older Taiwanese generations. We sometimes see Western brands linger over younger characters. Ting-Ting congregates at an American-style cafe called NY Bagel and Yang, wearing clothes with Mickey Mouse, Batman, and Astro Boy. The film begins with the wedding of A-Da, where several Taiwanese customs are observed: the groom is dressed in red, which symbolizes happiness and success, and gratitude is expressed towards the elders. But the circumstances are what make it unconventional: the marriage occurred when the bride became pregnant, and A-Da uses a specific day to hold the wedding, as it symbolizes the luck they had with being married. Yang eats at a McDonald’s with NJ, rather than at the venue, after several girls tease him there. And some of the film’s most important conversations, mainly between NJ and Ota, are spoken in English.

The illusion of A-La’s accomplishments is soon shattered when we learn that he actually owes a large debt to many people, including his brother-in-law, NJ. It hits further after the birth of his son, and when his ex-girlfriend attends a gathering uninvited. A-Da is driven by the belief that having good luck would not just resolve most of their spiritual problems that the Jians overall face, but also make him immune.

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After Min-Min’s mother fell into a coma, each family member experienced loneliness in various ways. NJ attempts to secure a client named Ota, a prominent game developer, but is often undermined by his colleagues when they discover new business. He grows morose upon being reunited with his ex-girlfriend, Sherry. Their relationship, when they were younger adults, was disrupted when they went their own ways. Sherry is married to an insurance broker and lives in Chicago. But NJ reveals that nothing would have changed if the two had remained together. NJ’s wife, Min-Min (who is given the least screen time out of the Jian family), undergoes a midlife crisis and goes to Tibet for a spiritual tour. Ting-Ting feels guilty for her grandma’s current state after she did not take out the garbage, as she was instructed. That guilt is carried over when she enters into a relationship with a boy who was previously sexually involved with her next-door neighbour. As the introverted Ting-Ting matures into a teenager, she discovers love in a way that he doesn’t understand, leading to heartbreak.

Yang-Yang is the one member who feels the least sadness, because he has yet to mature. When his mom asks him what to tell his grandmother, Yang is unable to express how he feels. It is only until the ending, when Yang finally delivers an eulogy at her funeral, that this emotion pays off, because he finally endured the same level of pain his family underwent.

Part of this is Yang being ready to mature and have initiative. His penchant for discovery, common in ordinary childhood, is unlocked when NJ gives him a camera, and he becomes observant of every event he’s in. He also learns to confront bullies, go to the shop by himself, and, like Ting-Ting, feel attraction for the first time. Many of the photos he takes are of people’s heads, driven by NJ’s claim that human beings can only know half the truth.

This moral is very important to the film, as it often invites its viewers to spectate certain events from the outside. These are frequently observed through reflections, usually through windows, CCTV footage, and digital cameras. Places such as offices, apartments, hotels, and cafes serve as vessels for these characters, strongly expressing painful emotions. Sometimes, we aren’t close to them, but we empathize with them more than we should. One scene features a couple next door arguing, while Min-Min becomes distraught about her mother’s pain. These visual choices emphasize distance and are deliberately less direct, but in effect, allow us to feel directly with the film’s characters.

Yi Yi emphasizes transitions to blossom in various ways, demonstrating the complexity of the otherwise mundane aspects of slice-of-life. One scene cuts back and forth between NJ reunites with an old flame named Sherry, and Ting-Ting goes out on a date with Fatty. This shows how love and connection manifest. As Ting-Ting experiences love, she views Lilli and Fatty together as someone to emulate, especially when it’s from her point of view, the camera sees them.

Yang often takes a narrow angle to capture a conversation, with the background lively, but the viewers are positioned as outsiders. When Ting-Ting talks to Lilli, we also see a teenage boy reuniting with his friends after serving a year of military duty, who tries to pursue them. All the events are statically filmed behind a cafe window, as we can only see what’s on the surface.

Yang’s thesis often raises questions of what coming-of-age and romanticized stories should be and the responsibility that movies usually bear in elevating these emotions. When Ting-Ting asks, “Who needs movies”?, Fatty says that they are “lifelike” and “give us twice from our daily life”. Despite living in the best possible time, NJ and Min-Min’s jobs are bureaucratic and unexciting. That is a part of adulthood that Edward Yang does not look away from, but he also suggests that certain responsibilities, such as caring for your elders and being financially careful, can’t be abandoned; otherwise, the consequences would be more destructive. When Yang gives A-Da a photo of the back of his head, he tells him, “You can’t see it yourself, so I’ll help you”.

At times, the film feels devastating, with a focus on the Jians’ struggles. And yet it pertains to an optimistic worldview. Upon their meeting, Ota and NJ quickly became friends after they shared their love for classical music. Ota, who is often sage and wise and is roughly NJ’s age, tells him in English, “Why are we afraid of the first time? Every day in life is a first time. Every morning is new. We never live the same day twice. We’re never afraid of getting up every morning. Why?”

Yi Yi demonstrates that coming-of-age stories aren’t strictly focused on youth, their culture, and their proclivities, but rather about gaining emotional closure as one transitions into a new phase of life. This can evolve into adapting with or breaking societal expectations. By adding a particular weight to familiar tropes that earn their importance and feel unforgettable to the family, it created more possibilities of what a coming-of-age story could be.

John Anderson, in Film Comment magazine, wrote that “Yi Yi is a work of maturity in which the pent-up frustrations of youth have given way to an acceptance of human frailty and life’s various possibilities.” As the film ends with a funeral for the grandmother, it poses itself through rebirth. Many of the characters finally receive peace. NJ is offered to return to his old job at the video game company after communications with Ota fell through. He refused, and the story would begin again, either in weddings or in funerals.

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For fun, I have submitted the ballot at the time, but I feel that it would change at any moment, and if I have the ability to resubmit it, I can do it in a heartbeat. Still, given that I watched more than 3000 films in my lifetime, I wouldn’t be satisfied with my picks.

But The New York Times’s list is just a list. It’s not an authority on what kind of movies you should be watching. And with more commentary on film than ever before, The New York Times has lost its standing as the arbiter of entertainment commentary. A great list of the greatest movies out there should not seek to complement a particular kind of view but to elevate the medium immediately.

These lists require a lot of critical thinking. The granddaddy of film podcasts, Filmspotting has a Top 5 list at the end of every episode, which specifies a particular detail of a film that makes certain lists extinguishable. When looking at a list of the greatest movies of all time, the criteria are simply what makes it great.

I discussed this previously in my old newsletter about how the old guard of canon has shifted, that it has overcompensated by emphasizing ideology over art. Nothing has changed since I wrote it, and the observations surrounding the online democratisation of film culture remain astute.

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The 21st century has allowed numerous precedents into cinema. One of them is the relinquishment of digital technology, which has overtaken film grain as the default for filmmaking. Some technologies, like on-charging 3D viewings, were a fad, whose effectiveness was only achieved by filmmakers who understood the best possible opportunities that came out of it and were permitted to utilize them. With artificial intelligence posing a credible threat to artistry, whether it has proven to meet the standards set by David Lynch or Martin Scorsese, will ultimately become a long-term strategy.

The past quarter-century has seen intellectual property explode with reboots, remakes, sequels, and follow-ups of beloved titles, particularly in the 2010s. It has also seen entertainment shifting to paradigms from physical media to streaming services. If you have told someone from the 1980s that a direct-to-video movie could actually be given prestige status in the lead-up to the Oscars, they would think you’d be mad. But it has happened.

The most important aspect of this current century is identity. For as long as humans live, this has always been the case for art and discourse. While the push for diverse stories is remarkable, such endeavors must not forget the traditions of filmmaking that have advanced the medium to unprecedented levels. How one achieves this breakthrough from the first principles would be provided by the eye of the beholder. The result of pushing this has allowed the shame brought upon established norms, in ways that few can recognize, the accidental consequences, such as the degradation of commentary, in the name of detecting what’s underappreciated, even though such perception could be just.

Which is why I am starting a series dedicated to 100 great movies of the 21st century. These essays will be deep dives into films that are essential to understanding not just cinema, but the 21st century and all its possibilities. These movies won’t just be reflections of a particular time period, but the elevation of storytelling.

The criteria go like this:

• An exclusion of films that’s the subject of this Substack exclusive series will not have received any more than a passing mention on my newsletter or elsewhere. E.g. - I have written about Todd Phillips’ Joker (which wouldn’t be considered for my Top 100 movies of the current century) numerous times. I have written specifically about Tar here and American Psycho in another publication. That will not be part of the series. What will be covered are films I have not covered here or anywhere.

• These films need to have a theatrical or streaming release within the 21st century.

• A maximum of two entries per director.

• These films must qualify as films. Therefore, there will be no deep dives on Twin Peaks: The Return.

From established classics to forgotten gems, this is not going to be a definitive series. What I am hoping to achieve in this series is that this will be an exercise in thinking deeply about the medium of movies, beyond the surface of aesthetics, and its future. All of these essays (I hope) will strengthen a discourse where the quality you find in film commentary is barebones. The year that this prologue was published, mainstream film was in a stuck phase. But we can always learn to move forward through history.

Coming soon: Yi Yi A One and a Two (2000), Edward Yang

Traditional storytelling has always emphasized the battle of good and evil. To watch a movie is to see these constructs already established and determined. In cinema, the genre of film noir popularized a cynical and morally ambiguous area between its heroes and villains. While their less trustworthy traits are emphasized, the hero’s righteous virtues are recognized when they finally triumph over the villain. As the genre evolves into neo-noir, it retains much of its rough edges for the modern day. But some films take an internal approach that transforms the landscape of crime dramas.

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Heat is a neo-noir movie that serves as a study in contrast between professional thief Neil McCauley and Detective Vincent Hanna, who follows his every move. It was conceived by Michael Mann in 1979 and rewritten upon his feature debut, Thief, in 1981. After he found success directing Miami Vice (which he later adapted into a 2006 film), he turned the script into a 90-minute pilot. The major television networks did not pick up the story, so it was turned into the TV movie LA Takedown.

Mann decided to remake the story as Heat, retaining the complexity that was left out of the TV film. It became a commercial and critical success, but thirty years after its theatrical release, its popularity has continued to increase. Heat’s realist approach to the heist film has been cited as a major influence on action-oriented pop culture, from the video game Grand Theft Auto V to films like The Dark Knight, which have emulated its grittiness to varying degrees. It inspired a podcast called “Heat One Minute,” in which the film is intensely examined in 60-second increments. Mann has co-written a follow-up to Heat as a pulp novel, which follows a narrative similar to that of The Godfather Part II. Heat 2 is both a prequel, exploring the origins of Neil McCauley’s crew, and a sequel where the crew is hiding out, with more focus on Chris Shiherlis, a member of McCauley’s crew escapes from Hanna and starts an operation in Mexico with a Taiwanese-Paraguayan crime syndicate. As of writing this, a film adaptation is planned, and a cast has yet to be announced.

Heat is known for its realist approach, which gives it a hard visual edge. Mann adds to this approach by ensuring that scenes are as technically accurate as possible. A shootout between McCauley’s crew with the LAPD after their bank robbery is an example of this. It features a loud, yet meticulous sound design, particularly in the application of gunshots. Such realism was also enhanced by the fact that the narrative was inspired by actual events, in which an ex-Alcatraz inmate named Neil McCauley, who was also the subject of a 1964 investigation by Chuck Adamson (the inspiration for Vincent Hanna), paved the way for the character of the same name. After retiring as a detective, Adamson became a television producer, creating the serialized crime drama for NBC’s Crime Story. The show owes a lot to Michael Mann, with some critics claiming that it was a darker version of Miami Vice. It shares a very similar plot to Heat, in which detective Mike Torello chases down a Chicago mobster named Ray Luca.

Heat’s emotional pathos turns some of its characters into tragic heroes. Heat stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, two of the greatest actors who emerged from the New Hollywood era. Both had a knack for playing some of the most conflicted, if not violent, characters in cinema through concentrated intensity. De Niro was well known for playing Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, with subtle finesse. These are men who lived beyond the fringes of society, until their self-importance is gestured with graver consequences. Pacino, especially during the 90s, had also played men detached from their own realities, such as Tony Montana in Scarface, Richard Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross, and Charlie Simms in Scent of A Woman, with loud bombast.

Heat documents the contradictions in such detail that it is not just a film about a professional heist taking place, but about the romantic longing of finding one’s sense of purpose. Such undertones offset the brutal realities faced by many of the characters.

For many decades, the crisis of masculinity has been documented and examined relentlessly. In 1958, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. documented the malaise in a famous essay in Esquire called The Crisis of Masculinity, where he points to the expanding role of women in the household and the workforce, and ambiguous sexuality that is causing men to be “more conscious of maleness not as a fact but as a problem”. Schlesinger notes the theatre and movies that pointed to the shift, with one of the examples being High Noon, the revisionist Western starring Gary Cooper as Will Kane, a retiring town marshal in Hadleyville, New Mexico, confronted with making a difficult decision: face a murderous gang of outlaws terrorizing Hadleyville or flee with his pacifist and Quaker wife Amy.

Released during the era of McCarthyism, High Noon added something new to the theme of a man being left in his own devices. Kane’s choices conflicted with his duty as a protector of the town. If he accepts Amy’s femininity, it implies that he becomes more open to the increasingly liberal shift reflected in America. If he fights criminals as expected, then he’ll retain his rugged stoicism. But whatever choice he makes, the town doesn’t support him, leaving Kane to take on his own battles.

Schlesinger Jr concludes by saying that there is a path for recovering lost vestige:

“For men to become men again, in short, their first task is to recover a sense of spontaneity. And to do this, a man must visualize himself as an individual apart from a group, whatever it is, which defines his values and commands his loyalty.”

High Noon confirms this conclusion, as it finishes with Kane killing the outlaws, while some of the town’s residents are escorted safely, and Amy returns to help him win. He drops his badge, and the couple leaves Hadleyville for good, having finally earned the identity that he wanted.

There’s a significant parallel between Heat and High Noon, where both movies reconcile a man’s duty with maintaining human connection. Like Kane, Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) are extremely competent in their line of work, but face separate emotional crises. McCauley, a professional thief, is struggling to keep the team together, with Chris (Val Kilmer) experiencing marriage difficulties and gambling addiction, and is constantly undermined by rival gangs. McCauley is the only person in his crew with no family, partner, or children. He needs to maintain focus on the job, stay away from personal commitments for survival. Competence among his crew ranks high in McCauley’s priorities. Predictably, though, he presents his vulnerability to Eady, a woman whom he meets at a bookstore and becomes attached to, and inevitably breaks his own rule.

On the other hand, Hanna is a detective who is in his third marriage, with an emotionally unstable stepdaughter (Natalie Portman). He’s assigned to investigate the robberies caused by McCauley and is desperate to catch him and break through his deception. When the two men talk at a diner, Hanna opens up about the issue, and McCauley tells him that he never lets himself get emotionally distracted if he feels the heat around the corner.

The cafe scene finally brings De Niro and Pacino, two of the biggest acting heavyweights of all time, together on screen. Previously, they played two Corleones in The Godfather: Part II. De Niro won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as a young Don Corleone, while Al Pacino never won for his performance as Michael Corleone. While the viewer sees Michael become cold and calculating upon being the Don of his family, the young Don Corleone was shaped by tragedy and misfortune. A don killed his family, and he escaped to America, where he became involved in crime, by stealing and murdering others. As he became the leader, he was seen as a protector in the streets. De Niro and Pacino would then share the screen again in the forgettable B-movie Righteous Kill, where they both play detectives looking for a serial killer, and lastly in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. De Niro, as Frank Sheeran, is typically subdued, while Pacino chews the scenery as Jimmy Hoffa.

Hanna remains committed to catching McCauley, but they ultimately have mutual respect for one another after opening up about their personal lives. This is not unusual for Mann to reveal the hidden warmth of these men. Thief contains a sequence where Frank (James Caan), also a professional thief, tells his date about the dreams of settling down and starting a family with her. The pattern continues in Collateral, where Max Durocher, a taxi driver, tells a federal prosecutor, his dreams of starting a limousine business in a postcard that he keeps during rides.

Upon the announcement of an adaptation of the sequel novelisation, Mann had already cemented a cult following for his recent movies, which never had the same level of reception as Heat. He experimented with digital filmmaking, beginning with Collateral and Miami Vice, where they were shot with Vipers. But Heat proved that cops and criminals can retain a human urge, and that makes for a mesmerizing experience at the movies.

Whenever I want to find the best take on the latest music, movies, or TV shows, I go to The AV Club. At least I could say that more than a decade ago. Previously owned by The Onion, it has some of the snarkiest pop culture coverage that you can ever find on the Internet. There were capsule reviews, detailed columns of artists and art, with the average news item almost layered in deep smarm that one would have confused it with The Onion’s satirical articles. Much of the content seems like a prototype of what you find on clickbait websites that has that pious pretense of intellectualism you’ll find back then. But The AV Club, at its peak, made readers in tune with what was mainstream, under-the-radar, and you can sense the passion within whatever was being written. This was before streaming services competed with movie theatres, CDs, and other physical media for pop culture supremacy.

In 2013, Pitchfork Media launched a website that would be its film equivalent: The Dissolve. Marketed as “a playground for movie lovers”, it brought into its stable The AV Club’s Chicago luminaries like Scott Tobias, Keith Phipps, Tasha Robinson, Noel Murray, and Nathan Rabin. Their features, beyond their movie reviews, ensured that the publication is regularly read, and for that, it was one of my regular bookmarks. The Dissolve became a reliable barometer of cinema quality while The AV Club became more unbearable.

The comments sections within both publications were larger than life. Both held a higher standard for pop culture criticism, but more importantly, they maintained a well-knit community that shared not just the passion of these critics but has the whip-smart energy to talk about the movies they’re talking about. Comments sections normally get a bad rap from content creators nowadays, but these sections were a valuable aspect of what made them enduring.

This didn’t last long. The Dissolve closed its doors in July 2015 for the simple reason that it did not make any money. The staff tried their best to make the most of the situation, but Pitchfork has decided to drop them (later in the year, they were sold to Conde Nast. Last year, they merged with GQ and laid off most of their employees). This was a wake-up call for anyone interested in writing about movies or anything else.1 The economics were always stacked against intellectually stimulating writing, but this was more pronounced in the Internet age. Meanwhile, pop culture coverage has become increasingly favorable towards mainstream franchises and corporate artistry (see also: poptimism). At the same time, commentary has become more performative, to signal that there is something much more beyond the movies and the arts.

Some writers at The Dissolve’s former team, including Tobias, Phipps, and Robinson, are still together doing a podcast under the Filmspotting network called The Next Picture Show, examining a current release and tying it to an older film with similar themes. But if you want to closely read their work, you’ll have to find them elsewhere. Some of them are either in-house staffers at another pop culture website or freelancers. To find their work, you have to follow them on Twitter (or in this case, Bluesky), which means that you have to follow them and delve into their heavily left-wing politics, while they share links to their reviews of the latest releases, and retrospective columns of old viewings. Whenever they post about that topic, I thought that it was a waste of their talents, and I previously called out Scott Tobias on this Substack for contributing to this rotten culture. They are not as capable of being measured as they were for the average Rian Johnson movie.

But my expectations increased when he and Phipps launched The Reveal on the Substack platform. While it wasn’t the same as The Dissolve, it hoped to revive the spirit that website once had. They were holding conversations about the greatest films of all time, according to Sight and Sound’s 2022 poll. Tobias has rebooted his New Cult Canon column that I had once enjoyed, and more importantly, they were writing reviews together like the old days. I was optimistic that written film criticism could prosper in an avenue that was flourishing, beyond the declining wretches of Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok.

I recommended The Reveal in my newsletter. And to their credit, both were good at separating their partisanship from their social media accounts in most of their film criticism. They can detect that movies can have good intentions and courage, but what matters is whether they’ve earned their bonafides from the viewing, and if it doesn’t, it fails. Execution matters more than the message.

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But then, the authors’ politics have crossed over The Reveal’s content. Both writers signed the open letter of New York Times contributors objecting to the newspaper’s coverage of transgender people, even veering towards scepticism of the evidence that puberty blockers do not work on gender-transitioning children.23 Immediately, the signs were showing that The Reveal is going to be exclusive in substance. They don’t care about the integrity of journalism, but how their chums feel about the integrity of journalism.

Later, Tobias expressed reluctance in being published on Substack, objecting to their lax content moderation policies. And then they signed an open letter, inspired by Jonathan M Katz’s inflammatory article saying that Substack platforms Nazis as well.4 How do they express their objections? By saying it’s complicated.

Do Tobias and Phipps believe that deplatforming works if they think the most extreme people are tangential to their tent? Why does it matter that morally bankrupt assholes like Darryl Cooper or Patrick Casey share the same platform as them (or I, for that matter)? They were never honest about it. Eventually, The Reveal has now migrated into Ghost, a platform that is more open-sourced and, ironically, more laissez-faire in content moderation than Substack could ever have hoped for.5

The Reveal

A Note to Our Readers: The Reveal is moving.

Dear Revealers…

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a year ago · 85 likes · 2 comments · Keith Phipps and Scott Tobias

Tobias’s and Phipps’s stance on the issue of content moderation, compared to their past positions, is not complicated. It’s a gross distortion of the truth, where they participate in an unnecessary backlash to virtue signal to their audience, but it also betrays their duties as a film critic, which is to be more open-minded when art encounters ugliness. You know that scene in The Social Network, where the fictional Mark Zuckerberg tells his attorney that the Winklevoss Twins sued him, because “things didn't go exactly the way they were supposed to for them?” That’s what happened here, but in this case, Tobias and Phipps acted like children because they presumed that the most extreme people were playing with their toys when they weren’t. They just happen to be in the same daycare centre.

What happened with The Reveal is indicative of a larger problem that I’ve seen with commentators, all across the board, but especially within those interested in pop culture discussions, where cocooning is pretty much an inevitable path in creating content. Individual branding makes for an immediate experience between them and the observer.

Pop culture criticism has never been more ideologically diverse than when The Dissolve was around. On YouTube, you’ll find people like Broey Deschanel, Sarah Z, Maggie Mae Fish, and Jack Saint reviewing or talking about old or new releases from an anti-fascist lens, while the anti-woke side is represented by The Critical Drinker, Nerdrotic, Mauler, and The Quartering, among thousands of others.

In the past, there were a few critics like Kyle Smith, John Podhoretz, Ross Douthat, and Armond White writing about movies in the back pages of politically charged magazines and newspapers. Now, that brand has exploded. I sometimes object to The Critical Drinker’s approach to reviewing movies6, but understand why he got popular in the first place. These camps operate on complementing expectations on their platforms. For anything that glorifies intersectionality to the user’s face, he’ll counter-balance that with a middle finger and get thousands of subscribers out of that, and vice-versa.

Traditional criticism, especially in the written word, cannot emulate or compete with the breadth of video essays and discussion livestreams, where franchises are sometimes frequent targets, sprinkled with biting critiques of corporate liberalism, while carrying a specific lens personal to the creator. For them, art is a gateway to committing to a shallow cause, because according to them (very particularly, the left side of politics), “art is political”, “the personal is political”. Mega-blockbusters are favored because that’s the trendiest thing to talk about, but they can be weaponized for their self-effacing pleasures. Meanwhile, filmmakers and their mid-budget projects, according to a passionate community, are the hidden, revelatory secrets that should not just distract us from the sins of modern life, but revel in them. Same outcome, different tactics.

There’s a term called ‘‘audience capture,” which implies that a creator has become worse because they are now catering to a terrible part of their audience. This does have a grain of truth to it, especially when one’s ability to weigh the pros and cons of certain topics is outmatched by the flashy desire to drive views, clicks, and metrics, leading them to become cynical and insincere in the principles they once represented. However, there’s also “criticism capture”, which, as the sports journalist Ethan Strauss describes, is the creator’s vulnerability to criticism that results in unforced errors, leading to the decline of their content.

An example of “criticism capture” is when the YouTube personality iDubbbz apologized for his fans saying the n-word towards another creator, before he surrounds himself with D-list left-wing livestreamers, then capitalizing on their popularity by bringing back his most popular series Content Cop, and turn it from an teenage edgelord drama bait, into a lecture about “empathy”7. Except for one has-been internet plagiarist, no one liked the video; iDubbbz’s fans turned their backs on him, and his detractors had more than enough schadenfreude to distract them through the day.

The Reveal isn’t captured by an audience. After all, it’s business as usual to gather an interested crowd. But they made this decision because they are drawn in by their audience’s major ick; people who they think are extremist weirdos, through six degrees of separation. If they stayed in Substack, they are “part of the problem” as one would condescend. They want to nip it in the bud, even though it would be more than eighteen months after the original article.

Weird dissidents with their niche beliefs are a feature of Substack, and if the algorithm of the app indicates, there won’t be a shortage coming soon. Some are interesting, dull; sometimes I feel indifferent about them. But they have a platform, and like the fictional Zuckerberg attests, they couldn’t have the power to do anything about it, except leave. That’s why, when people migrate to a platform whose user base is even more insane than X could ever be, the outsiders correctly see them as emotional micro-managers, like they were when they were populating it.

Here’s more of The Reveal’s justification:

And yet in the time since, there’s been too much evidence of Substack’s complicity in platforming far-right extremism. We have heard from many cinephiles who refuse to subscribe to The Reveal due to its Substack connection, and we have witnessed many examples of writers and friends who have felt marginalized or attacked due to the company’s editorial priorities and policies. The bottom line: Substack has made its choices. We have now made ours.

The irony is that a day after The Reveal left Substack, the platform’s founders have demonstrated it will continue to defend the free speech of everybody. Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie went into the defense of Alistair Kitchen, a user who got deported back to Melbourne, Australia, after he wrote about the Columbia University pro-Palestine protests. Would they defend him if he were a Ghost user or a MAGA supporter? Who knows and who even cares? They defended him because they believe in an open platform and have spent blood, sweat, and tears not to contradict this mission. For Tobias, Phipps, and their followers, it wouldn’t be enough because free speech moderation is way too complicated. They also don’t have the courage to mention who was being marginalized from a lack of content moderation.

Tobias and Phipps are free to make their decision, and if they want to leave out of fear, I won’t stop them from doing so by returning to Substack, being very critical about it, and believing it’s an unforced error. But it has validated my overall feelings about film culture, which, as I’ve written before, has become more siloed and less literate. Siloed conversations make for dishonest art and commentary, and The Reveal, while they do not embellish this in writing, are controlled by an intensely focused community. If the two men did not sign up for the shenanigans at Substack in the first place, I certainly did not become interested in The Reveal or The Dissolve or The AV Club for reasons other than the fact that we all watch and talk about movies. If it doesn’t work out, what was this journey all about?

It was realizing that the soul of film criticism has been hollowed out, and the people who represent it are vain themselves. It’s often a stereotype that critics, who do this for a professional living, are bitter and envious of artists who dare to create, when in reality, they are just normal people going about their lives carrying that same passion. But the cliche is proven time and time again, and now it’s from those who want to think they’re immune to misinformation, when they have willingly spread it. To any discerning reader, that would be a breach of their trust.

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In 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten depicted the Islamic prophet Mohammad in a series of cartoons in response to comments the author Kare Bluitgen made about being unable to find an illustrator to work on his children’s book about The Quran. Most of the illustrators he approached were afraid of the backlash they’ll receive, as Islam notoriously prohibits any blasphemous portrayal of the prophet. As the broadsheet faced the wrath of the Muslim world - from mass protests, death threats of public hangings - Jyllands-Posten's decision to stand by the cartoons became a symbol of defiance against blasphemy laws.

Charlie Hebdo has portrayed Muhammad numerous times, and for every depiction, extreme violence has been sprung towards the French satirical magazine. On 7 January 2015, the head office was met with a barrage of bullets by the Kouachi brothers, both of whom identified as members of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. Twelve people were killed - including eight of its staffers - and ten were injured. The deaths include the editor-in-chief Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier, and the cartoonists Jean “Cabu” Cabut and Bernard Jean-Charles “Tignous” Verlhac.

There were many differences between the responses to the events surrounding Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo. One of them is that Jyllands-Posten, is a conservative broadsheet, whereas Charlie Hebdo often leans to the left-wing of politics (Charb was a member of France’s Communist Party and wrote cartoons for the anti-racist NGO MRAP), albeit its comedic approach feels very countercultural, in contrast with its Western peers in America and the UK.

But the most important difference is that many newspapers around the world, regardless of whether they agree with their stances, reprinted the Jylland Posten cartoons in their original forms. Only one newspaper, Hamberger Mortgenpost, a far-left German newspaper, reprinted Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad cartoons. No newspaper in the Western world has since reprinted theirs in solidarity, with some feeling conflicted in whether they should be republished.

The reactions to the Charlie Hebdo attacks were polarizing. The hashtag #JeSuisCharlie was evoked across social media, with millions of people sending condolences to the victims. But many were shocked by its content and refrained themselves from supporting their freedom to publish these cartoons, over the fear that the Islamic followers would be harmed. Journalists like Mehdi Hasan and Glenn Greenwald claim that while the cartoonists have every right to publish these cartoons, they have no right to offend innocent Muslims or publish it in the crude manner that they are notable for.

Responses from the Muslim community across the world were more severe. There were deadly protests held in Niger, following the publication of the Survivor’s Issue, where several churches were burned down and five people were killed. The Islamic Human Rights Commission in the UK has also crowned the publication Islamophobe of the Year.

More notably, over 245 authors - which included Teju Cole, Junot Diaz and Joyce Carol Oates - have written an open letter to PEN America, not to encourage support for Charlie Hebdo over its “objectionable” drawings. The publication has been accused of “punching down” with Slate’s Jordan Weissman saying that the $300,000 donation from Google says that it’s not the kind of expression a government should be paying for. Arthur Chu, a famous Jeopardy champion, wrote in The Daily Beast saying that "Charlie Hebdo is a crap publication and people need to stop celebrating it and making martyrs out of its staff."

This shows that some commentators, particularly those of the Anglo-Saxon sphere, failed to understand Charlie Hebdo’s satire and how often the controversies they face serve as an obstacle to whether the cartoonists deserve to have their freedom of expression defended. Look past all the detractors and you’ll find that they not only won’t stand with Charlie Hebdo, but refuse to understand the context of which it was published. Understanding it would not only justify the defence for the magazine’s commitment to freedom of speech, but to show that the smears are far from warranted.

Charlie Hebdo is the successor of Hara Kiri, a satirical monthly magazine that was infamous for mocking French President Charles de Gaulle following his death at his home in Colombey. The caption for one of its issues in 1970 says Bal tragique à Colombey : 1 mort, which means in English as "Tragic ball in Colombey: 1 death". Gaulle after his passing, had a higher reputation among the country’s population as the leader of the Free French Forces against Nazi Germany.

From 1981, Charlie Hebdo has been relaunched numerous times due to the lack of funding, yet throughout its existence, their editorial stances and cartoons frequently took swipes at the political and cultural establishment. After all, its motto is "bete et mechant" which means “mean and nasty”, aiming to provoke wherever is possible.

The magazine’s dark humor combines the morbid and absurd to lampoon social taboos. But that has long been a tradition in French humor. It is derived from Sigmund Freud’s idea that humor is liberating and rebellious, with the surrealist author Andre Breton describing it as “the opposite of joviality.” Both men see this as a way to expose the rotten roots of established norms that benefit its oppressors. So, for example, Hara-Kiri’s tasteless depiction of Charles De Gaulle shocked the public, but he was drawn that way, because he was seen as an enemy to the New Left for his authoritarianism and political conservatism. Scholars have been quite sceptical of this approach, with some calling it “reactionary" and “self-aggrandizing” as it saw how it could marginalize the people these humorists are attempting to protect.

The magazine had a wide range of targets. Charlie Hebdo had mocked various politicians from Emmanuel Macron to Barack Obama and Donald Trump. It even went as far as spearheaded a petition from Charb to ban the National Front, France’s hard-right political party led by Marine Le Pen, whose condolences were rejected by the magazine (its founder Jean Marie Le Pen, who recently passed away, refused to send condolences to the victims of the 2015 massacre). They remain one of their biggest targets, when one of its members was revealed to be gay. Other people they mocked over the years include Boko Haram slaves, celebrities like Michael Jackson (when he passed away in 2009), as well as various politicians.

It also sets its sights against various religions like Judaism and Christianity. Every year, Charlie Hebdo holds an international competition for writers to mock religion and its oppressive tendencies. In 2022, the topic of Islam is revisited with the hashtag #MullahsGetOut, condemning the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini and encouraging freedom activists in that country to resist against the regime. Laurent Léger, an investigative journalist and a survivor of the shootings, told CNN that “we want to laugh at the extremists—every extremist. They can be Muslim, Jewish, or Catholic. Everyone can be religious, but extremist thoughts and acts we cannot accept.”

These cartoons, no matter how vulgar they are, have to fit Hebdo’s left-leaning libertarian ideology, very specific to French thinking. Some of them, like its jabs against Le Pen and the Pope, are easier to explain. They are obvious targets that progressives would support, but they are also elite figures who influence society top down. On the surface, these equal opportunity jabs do not sit neatly into the punching up/down dichotomy that the critics perceive Charlie Hebdo to be, and become more complicated once the lives of the satirists are at stake.

Islam seems to be a topic that should be out of bounds from any discussion. Immediately after the Jylland-Postens controversy, Charlie Hebdo released an issue of a cover of Muhammad covering his face, with the caption of “Mahomet débordé par les intégristes”, which means “Muhammad, overwhelmed by fundamentalists,” criticizing Islam for being saturated by radical followers and terrorists. The then Prime Minister Jacque Chirac condemned the issue.

It would continue to lampoon the Islamic prophet, in spite of many controversies. In its most famous issue from 31 October 2011, the magazine depicts Muhammad telling the reader “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing.” Two days later, Charlie Hebdo’s offices were firebombed and their website was hacked. In September 2012, Muhammad was depicted on all fours, while another shows an Orthodox Jew pushing him in a wheelchair, spoofing the film The Intouchables, in response to when the anti-Islamic short film Innocence of Muslims was released. The French government increased the security of its head offices to protect them from any possible violence.

The smears of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons, this time, from all sides of the political spectrum, still continue. According to The New Yorker, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt condemned Charb and Le Figaro, France’s conservative daily newspaper, says that they were “silly provocations” and the Roman Catholic newspaper La Croix condemned them for “fuelling the flames to show one’s noble resistance to extremism leads to offending simple believers.” The then Foreign Minister for France Laurent Fabius accused the cartoonists of “pouring oil on the fire” and the then White House Press Secretary Jay Carney claimed that the material was “deeply offensive.” The last two responses established Charlie Hebdo as a divisive avatar for free speech (America’s approach to free speech is more libertarian compared to France’s, which has put in many hate speech laws, including the criminalization of the denial of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust), where both politicians will say that they will defend their right to be heard, but that the content is ultimately objectionable, because it would marginalize innocent Muslims, and put themselves in danger. The former editor-in-chief Charb objected to both police calls to pull its content, as well as the critiques. He told Le Monde “when activists need a pretext to justify their violence, they always find it.”

Charlie Hebdo’s intuition to mock religion, especially Islam, comes under the influence of Laïcité, which stands for full secularism in France. When the country banned the burqa, it supported the decision by depicting a topless woman with the caption “yes, to wearing the burqa… on the inside.” Immediately after the attacks, Charlie Hebdo released a survivor’s issue, in which it shows a frowning Muhammad holding a Je Suis Charlie sign with the caption Tout est Pardonne, which translates to All is Forgiven. Its new editor, Gerard Biard called for the continued commitment to laicite and said that “the first victims of Islamic fascism are the Muslims.” This position demonstrates how unapologetic and shameless the magazine can be, in the face of its detractors that object to their humor, in France and elsewhere.

Months after the attacks, Charlie Hebdo faced outrage with a series of cartoons depicting Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian refugee whose drowning in the Mediterranean Sea was photographed as a symbol of the European migrant crisis. Kurdi’s drowning was juxtaposed by the artist Riss, with a billboard of Ronald McDonald (the caption translated to “Welcome Migrants. So Close to Making It)” and Jesus (the caption is translated as Christians Walk on Water, Muslims Drown), but its most incendiary was depicting Kurdi as a sexual harasser of women, in response to the sexual assault attacks in Cologne, Germany in 2016.

The imagery is as cruel and tasteless as you could get in depicting a dead child and to its detractors, it was a vindication that Charlie Hebdo not only deserve the criticism of Islamophobia, but that all the defense of “free speech” following the January attacks had rang false.

Yet this was an indictment of the failings of the government, not an endorsement of outright anti-immigration rhetoric or that the toddler deserved to die. The first two cartoons are rather critical of the materialism and privilege of liberals using Alan Kurdi’s death as a way of virtue signaling against racial intolerance, which makes anti-immigrant sentiments possible. The Alan Kurdi photo is seen as a symbol of the migration crisis, and a dead body is emotionally sufficient to shut down the debate on that topic, having been appropriated by many artists and spread all across the Western world. As Brendan O’Neill wrote, “it’s a snuff photo for progressives, dead-child porn, designed not to start a serious debate about migration in the 21st century but to elicit a self-satisfied feeling of sadness among Western observers.”

It had also depicted the British Royal Family kneeling on Meghan Markle, in a parody of the George Floyd killing, with the caption “Why I Left Buckingham Palace”, implying that Markle is the one being silent. It has also depicted Emmanuel Macron sexually assaulting Gisèle Pélicot, the woman who was gang raped by 72 men, with her husband filming the act. These cartoons, of course, sparked headlines, with the belief that they are mocking the victims, even if it’s clear that they are mocking the perpetrators.

As the debate about whether Charlie Hebdo should depict Muhammad intensified, the magazine had internal issues of its own. Months after the attack, the cartoonist Renald ‘Luz’ Luzier, who drew the 100 lashes of Muhammad cartoon in 2011, resigned for personal reasons, and felt exhausted. This is in contrast with one of its star writers Zineb El Rhazoui, a human rights activist and an outspoken critic of Islam. El Rhazoui has made several cartoons lampooning the prophet, including a cartoon retelling its life in 2013, resulting in continuous death threats against her from ISIS to Al-Qaeda. She was one of the most prominent faces of the attacks, when she spoke at the University of Chicago Law School, becoming the first journalist to speak on American soil. Rhazoui then accused Charlie Hebdo and editor Gerald Biard of capitulating to extremists by refraining from drawing Muhammad and eventually resigned in 2017.

But on 1 September 2020, the Muhammad cartoons were finally reprinted again, on the day that the fourteen accomplices were put on trial over the attacks. It has the caption “Tout Ca Pour Ca”, which translates to “All of that, just for this,” In its editorial, Riss states that “We will never lie down. We will never give up,”

Days later, two people were stabbed outside Charlie Hebdo’s headquarters and the responses were unsurprising. The Muslim community in France called to boycott its nationally-made products, while journalists at Al-Jazeera, sympathetic with their concerns, condemned Charlie Hebdo for perpetrating Muslim Hate. Emmanuel Macron, one of the magazine’s biggest targets, condemned the attacks as “terrorist-related”. Simultaneously, he praised the cartoons and claimed that the right to blaspheme ties hand in hand with freedom of speech. “Satire is not a discourse of hate,” Macron said.

To commemorate the tenth anniversary, a book will be released called Charlie Liberty: A Diary of Their Lives later this year, which pays tribute to the eight staff writers who were killed, with a collection of their cherished drawings.

The courage from Charlie Hebdo to continue lampooning its targets never went away. To this day, it continues its duty to offend, with no sense of boundaries or lines to be crossed. It’s perhaps a feature in Charlie Hebdo, whether you like it or not. But when people move forward to the next target, things haven't changed.

The January 2015 shootings and its aftermath has demonstrated a large dichotomy between courage and cowardice. The latter shows how Charlie Hebdo’s critics recklessly shift the arguments when they are asked to defend the free speech of content they find objectionable. But the former is represented by fearless persistence and resilience, and it is much more sorely needed in the most outrageous satire we currently see.

Once it is no longer about free speech, it is about the safety of people they feel are oppressed by the magazine’s existence, even if their religion is the motivation behind the attacks. Mocking a religion and calling out its radicalism, leads to people believing that the murders of the cartoonists is somewhat lawful. Thus, they deliberately misunderstand its substance, resulting in open letters and op-eds blaming them for the attacks. Charlie Hebdo’s opponents did not take them seriously, but literally.

It’s tempting to say that this is part of the safetyism that has afflicted modern Western culture during the better part of the 2010s, where the needs of the oppressed outweigh the need for a free flow of ideas, in contrast with the openness of the French, which is more secular and less burdened by offense-taking. This also affects the state of American comedy, which is destined to break taboos, like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin did, but cannot go further than that. Being offensive for the sake of free speech can be a double edged sword. This emphasis means the withering of strident rules and norms of a civilised society, while creating a partisan feedback loop to mindlessly break whatever seems like a taboo. But to offend still works, because being a happy warrior has been part and parcel in the fight for free speech. And the ability to offend without any threats of violence remains a necessary key to a functioning democracy.

A terrorist attack should mean that the discussion surrounding the victims needs to be simple and not complicated by other potential conflicts. Unfortunately, the gloating of victims being murder, based in part on a toxic ideology, is now a sad aspect of the predominance of social media, allowing punditry to be relentless and outrageous.

In order to restore sanity, you have to increase courage. Charlie Hebdo commemorated the series of November terror attacks in various areas of France, with a cover saying “F**k them. We have champagne.” They retained the joy of life, rather than become burdened by fear. While the slogan Je Suis Charlie (which is translated as “I Stand with Charlie”) is meant to evoke a universal feeling, it doesn’t capture what it means to read Charlie Hebdo and the death defying stakes they face when an edition is released. Fighting for the free speech of your political opponents doesn’t mean you have to wholeheartedly accept the nature of said speech. It means that you are grateful for the arguments that challenge yours.

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If I have to describe 2024, it’s possibly peak content. More pieces, more outlets, and hopefully a larger audience. If you are new to my writings or newsletter, I would like to share with you my favorite pieces I wrote this year, ranging from art to politics. It’s a cliché that good writing is hard to come by, and conducting research to make up for that quality is almost as difficult. I hope these essays and reviews will leave this impression:

Hayao Miyazaki's War

One of my first write ups of 2024, written in the midst of The Boy and The Heron’s release, explored Hayao’s complex feelings with war and conflict. On the one hand, he hates its destruction. On the other hand, he loves those Italian fighters. These ideas not only shaped the animator, but the medium of anime itself, which approaches violence in such an intense manner.

Australia Day: A Contentious Celebration ($)

This has been on the backburner for a while, but I’m happy that it’s now published. Australia Day remains an important day for its country and its people. That it remains divisive and all the arguments to change the date, means that the longevity of the essay is intact.

Love Lies Bleeding and the Limits of the Inclusive Gaze ($)

Another concept that grinds my gears? The inclusive gaze. With films like The Substance and Love Lies Bleeding, the question of whether that can inevitably turn into the old-fashioned male gaze, will continue. But my take is that it rewards and embraces exclusivity, and Love Lies Bleeding can’t rely on it to compensate for its limited storytelling and character drama.

Buddy Duress Was The Most Brilliant Actor You've Never Heard of ($)

One of the all-time biggest scene stealers, sufficient enough to warrant an obituary to someone who could have made it big in acting and nothing else. We all know someone who was like that.

For We Are Young And Unfree

A screed I wrote in The Critic arguing that, in the wake of Elon Musk’s fight with the eSafety Commission, Australia is innately inclined not to care about freedom of speech and how its elites still uphold hate speech, because the public sure do enjoy being conformists. Between the proposed misinformation bill (which has been slapped down) and teenagers not being able to access social media (which passed), I fear that our relationship with freedom will be as confounding as the rest of the world finds it to be.

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The Matrix “25 Years” Later and Fight Club 25 Years Later ($)

The Matrix is not just a film about transformation. It is transformation, and it has turned popular culture into a cyclical feedback loop, with right-wingers proclaiming their redpilled, while left-wingers (with the Wachowskis as their mascots) claim it is about taking advantage of their own bodies. Similarly Fight Club has an issue with media literacy, but can you really blame those who couldn’t get it, when they share the emotions of its deluded protagonist. As I wrote:

This is what a lot of fans interested in analyzing “The Matrix” miss. By dressing their film up as a story about a marginalized minority, the Wachowskis presume that only they have control of their art; that the culture surrounding it should not shape it into something they don’t want. As modern film culture becomes nothing more than permission-seeking, it values virtue over truth and moralizing over pathos.

Obamacore was Cringe

An assessment of the Obama era pop culture and the reason why people look back at it with cringe, is because the President’s ideals of equality and fairness had lost to a strongman. I wrote this before the election, and rereading it, it still holds up. My prediction that the losers will be in despair, immediately after Donald Trump won re-election, has already been confirmed, but the impact will depend on whether these artists truly want to be creative and transcendent, rather than virtue signalling about how much they hate their political opponents.

America Will Be Fine

A piece I wrote while I was travelling in the US, observing the tumultuous election cycle. It has been a consistent theme for my writing, considering that the bleak mood in the US, which dominates and influences our culture, is seen as a form of sloppy entertainment by the likes of Ian Miles Cheong and Aimee Terese. I argue, however, that the country, with its robust economic growth and its historical resilience, will not collapse under the incoming Trump administration.

Why The Apprentice Still Holds Up ($)

A review that I wrote after travelling in the US, in which I make the case that it’s accidentally a pro-Trump film. Following the election, The Apprentice is certainly the Donald Trump biopic America deserves.

Civil War and the Ideals of Apolitical Art

As someone who is very interested in art and its relationship with politics, it often frustrates me how so many writers desperately attempt to find political meaning in pop culture, and dismiss any artists who want to stay away from politics. The discourse surrounding Alex Garland’s Civil War was so boiled, that it basically demonstrates how no one, not even its champions, can actually tackle its aim to be the least political movie. Being apolitical, I argue, is political, but it doesn’t mean it has to be complacent. And it’s a challenge that Alex Garland, nobly, wants to take.

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Film

This year has been quite underwhelming for movies, especially if you limit it to the “supply and demand” side of the medium. I’ve written that moviegoing has always been a communal experience, one that doesn’t necessarily require internet-driven events like “Barbenheimer”, but art requires attention, as much as anything being sold in commerce. Had Furiosa, which is my favorite film of 2024, took that as an opportunity over its shortcomings as an entry in the cult franchise that aren’t necessarily box office bonanzas. That, however, doesn’t override many of its greatest setpieces, all of which consist of a simple and quintessential revenge story; a vital and energetic lead up to one of the greatest action movies of all time (even if Fury Road has to be compressed during the end credits). Even prestige season isn’t hitting the same levels of hype as the last two years. The only one I can recall is Anora, which won the Palme D’Or and is expected to be nominated for lots of awards. Despite being exceptionally funny and containing a breakout performance from Mikey Madison, it is Sean Baker’s least memorable film, lacking the consistent pacing of his previous filmography (Red Rocket had better buildup than this one). But the film that deserves some recognition should be Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour, a sprawling romance set in 1918 Rangoon, where it transports the viewer from the past and the present in such a transcendent manner. Meanwhile, Kinds of Kindness is Yorgos Lathimos’s best film, a return to his Greek New Wave roots and designed to turn off the Academy after two consecutive films of awards pandering. And for all the buzz surrounding Sebastian Stan’s bravura performance in The Apprentice, his other film A Different Man - in which he cures himself from his body dysmorphic condition, only to be outwitted by the same person with that condition - should be receiving further notice. Fingers crossed though for Look Back to get a Best Animated Feature nomination at the Oscars. We need more anime representation over there!

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Music

While I haven’t listened to a lot of music this year, but the pop genre is having its biggest moment that I can recall, and having heard a triptych of incoming pop starlets - Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX - it feels like I’m already on the bandwagon. I’ve listened to Charli XCX’s brat multiple times, and have even written about how the Democrats were attempting to co-opt its messy, don’t-give-a-fuck aesthetic. It’s an effort that, if you just accept it as a bare bones collection of dance tracks (one that has been remixed with several collaborators, thus expanding the title to “brat”), it’s decent. But personally, having listened to her from the beginnings in the early 2010s, it is essentially an artistically mature work of art from someone who is a student of pop into one of its most charismatic veterans.

The other two new releases that I quite liked this year are Tyler the Creator’s Chronokopia and Schoolboy Q’s Blue Lips, which also has similar cases of presenting creative and personal maturity that’s purely compelling. Chronokopia shows Tyler at his most uncertain, the male equivalent of Brat. But whereas that album demonstrates the finity of being immature, this one is about the challenges of getting mature. The opportunity that Schoolboy Q takes advantage of is expanding his flow and turning into something more compelling as his peer Kendrick Lamar. Hip hop hasn’t had its day in the limelight and you can thank Drake and Kendrick Lamar beefing. Kendrick’s GNX is his least memorable work, more forgettable than Damn. It’s a rather competent victory lap, yet compared to Good Kid Maad City and To Pimp a Butterfly, it doesn’t explore the human condition in further detail. He’s more capable of looking at his own shoulders like with Mr Morale and the Big Steppers.

Television

The best television I’ve watched has been very varied. And for that, I’m going to annoy some of my readers about an anime I really enjoyed. But I haven’t watched a lot of anime that came out this year, and Dandadan stands out as the best show I’ve seen then. Centering around two teenagers, who become best friends due to their interests in aliens and ghosts, this colorful show defies all sense of narrative logic and accommodates its search for meaning.

Similarly, the second season of Smiling Friends is colorful and powerful. As I wrote:

One might argue that commentary by “Smiling Friends” on current issues like cancel culture and mental illness, particularly when the Friends have to rescue an entertainer named Mr. Frog from a career collapse, is timely, but it’s never quite on the nose. And this makes for some hilarious punchlines. Examples include the Halloween special, where Pim gets chased by a demon and ends with the creature being obliterated because the partygoers think he’s wearing blackface. There’s also when Mr Frog saves his career by eating the executive producer who fired him.

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But there are other highlights. I have written about the greatness of HBO’s Industry and why, with the faith of the studio and a growing fanbase, the show has more than creative legs. This show is a mixture of stressful trade deals and entertaining gossip, but more importantly, it’s about how these young adults evolve in this cutthroat environment. The Penguin was a pleasant surprise. I expect it to be derivative of other superior crime dramas, but slap it with an IP sticker. However, Oz Cobb’s villainy is consistently compelling and Cristina Miloti is revelatory as Sofia Falcone.

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Around January 2017, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation interviewed Richard Spencer, the white nationalist, as he was in Washington DC to celebrate the beginning of the first Trump administration. Midway through the interview, Spencer was knocked out by an ANTIFA activist, and the reaction was significantly split between common sense and fantasy. The common sense response was to condemn the attack, because it would embolden Spencer (his irrelevance withered dramatically following the Charlottesville riots later that year), but the idealist answer had been to celebrate the attack, because he is formally a part of the alt-right. This allows licence those who call themselves “anti-fascists” to target anyone of the centre-right as an extremist.

I remembered that praise of the attack was sometimes littered with pop culture references. The most prominent of which was an image of Indiana Jones punching a Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Ark or Captain America doing the same in the comics. It has now infested in response to the assassination of a CEO of the United Healthcare named Brian Thompson. Like with the knock on Spencer, social media users and pundits were giddy about the man, who looks after thousands of insured families, being shot dead via CCTV footage. It not only looked like a scene out of a crime drama, but it also has characters you could quickly identify with. The alleged shooter involved (who is identified as Luigi Mancione) is fetishized by his looks, his book reviews, and is considered a hero for shooting a nobody that happens to be the head of a health insurance provider. Anyone else, who would cooperate with the police in finding him, is a corporate bootlicker.

I’m not going to go into the topic of American Healthcare, which is a can of worms itself. I live in a country, where single payer healthcare reigns supreme, while private healthcare is just only on the fringes. (In other words, I believe mine is better than yours). What I am going to talk about is how the reliance of pop culture in our discourse, is pretty much dumbing down any possibility of seriousness. Not just on the topic of an assassination of a rich guy, but almost everything in politics.

There were many films and TV shows I’ve seen referenced by social media users to justify the killing, and some of them include:

• The Batman, due to the Riddler killing elite figures and receiving a cult fanbase, as he’s exposing corruption to Gotham. He also becomes a cult figure among a few Internet commenters.

• Joker, because it involves a guy killing three wealthy men while they were out and about. Also, the guy’s welfare checks are going to be cut. He also becomes a cult figure after killing several elite figures in Gotham, including a talk show host.

• Breaking Bad, because Walter White’s lung cancer could have been solved if it wasn’t for the fact that the US doesn’t have the world’s best healthcare system.

There’s a plethora of pop culture that relies on scarcity to justify the immoral, if not irrational actions of their “heroes”. But there is one problem. The Riddler in The Batman, did not earn any social justice points, because he then flooded Gotham, as the city is about to vote for its most progressive mayor yet. He was adored for his disturbed personality that was masquerading as a “voice of the people” kind. As with Joker, that would take up an entire essay. As with Breaking Bad, the premise is that Walter White had chosen to become a drug lord, and not to take generous money from former colleagues to treat his lung cancer, because of his ego that he’s a misunderstood genius. It has nothing to do with the lack of health insurance (although it certainly helps if he did, based on this one meme I saw where the show is set in Canada).

I have previously spoken about the politicization of the arts and why I strongly object to application by its proponents. Now let’s talk about using art to justify extreme politics. It often come with the misuse of “media literacy” to ideologically gatekeep any interpretations of the media from audience members who would be too gullible to understand the characters and their manifesting anxieties. The “you’re missing the point if you idolize these characters” starter pack, which includes Joker, Rick from Rick and Morty, Tyler Durden and Patrick Bateman.

But these people who make these arguments certainly rely on the same characters and pretending that their anxieties are not just rationalized, but are useful for desperate and ideological ends. Popular culture is no longer a reflection of the trends and shifts in societal norms. For entry-level activists, society should make it an active part of our lives, informing both our tastes and politics.

This also occurs on the other side as well. My social media feeds are saturated with Donald Trump’s picks for his administration, and dressing them up either like the Justice League or The Avengers. Douglas Murray, an author who I like to read, had a piece that did the exact thing I described. MAGA fans who photoshop Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard as Superman, Batman, Cyborg, The Flash, Aquaman and Wonder Woman is akin to an eight year old who spends way too much time playing with his toys.

Adam Serwer of The Atlantic, wrote a piece about Trump players using Dredd and The Sopranos to embolden their agenda. For as much as I despise his writing (he’s the guy who first made the argument about Trump voters, which is “the cruelty is the point”), I agree with him on the following:

The collapse of trust in institutions is one of the stories of the past decade or so. But so is this moral degeneracy, motivated by the need to ideologically justify the place of a corrupt authoritarian strongman in the most powerful government in the world. What looks like declining media literacy may be something much worse—an affirmation of the underlying values in dystopian literature that inevitably lead to the dystopia itself.

I do want to add that this has less to do with improving media literacy, a phrase that used to be spoken about in quasi-academic circles and is now uttered by the gutters of social media to scold other people. It has more to do with our relationships with the movies and TV you watch, record the music you listen to, or the podcasts you enjoy. But more importantly, it’s up to the consumer to decide what to do.

When I spoke with Matt Labash, one of the best points he made is that everyone wants to be a rebel. This forms a weird paradox. Agree or disagree with Labash on his politics, you can’t deny that if you think you are a rebel, you wouldn’t be relying that much on the mainstream institutions. But just the ones that are big and heterodox enough to make you think you are one. Which is why Joe Rogan, to his followers, is a common man, despite living on a $140 million contract and shooting the shit. And a rich guy, like Luigi Mancione, is basically Arthur Fleck who, despite his immense levels of privileges, can be a folk hero. It’s also why the movies and TV you watch, the music you listen to and the books you read are entrenched with a centre-left-liberal orthodoxy that permits you to think of the ideal and “correct” way of thinking.

Although it helps to call it out, the solution to this dumb state of play, however, is not to scold people for not getting the thing they’re citing. People will always misunderstand the things they enjoy and citing poor standards of media literacy and telling them to increase it reeks of smugness that you’re better than everybody else. I would say the power is on you. I understand that politics is really difficult and pop culture is the most accessible way to comprehend complex ideas. But the nuances begins with you, and without applying them, you become susceptible to the dumbest ideologies imaginable, specifically made for a low-brow audiences, who are the elite equivalent of that guy who thinks he’s a free thinker after listening to Russell Brand’s podcasts.

The influencers who rely on pop culture references to push forward their ideology are too stupid to be called propagandists. We’ve seen people rely on art, so they can ban them. But we now see pop culture used to spearhead a political agenda, where potentially, we could see more copycats. And none of them (*cough* Taylor Lorenz *cough*) have the willpower to do the thing Luigi did. It will inevitably embolden him, and the people who cheerlead him are as morally bankrupt.

On a last note, Luigi Mancione happens to be a guy whose family had started a healthcare provider, had a building in their surname, so this feels more like a turf war than a traditional class conflict. I’ve seen people appropriate the image of Tony Soprano saying that he’s a hero. If we want to get specific with a Sopranos analogy, I’d say it’s like if AJ Soprano succeeded in killing Junior Soprano for shooting his nephew. Except AJ does not have pretty privilege.

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In 2022, I did two interviews with Matt Labash, a former magazine journalist who now writes on his own newsletter Slack Tide. With his surreal prose, I found him to be fascinating, larger than life and often have the answer to everything, even to questions that are far from his expertise. Hence, I spoke to Labash again about 2024, particularly with the electoral comeback of Donald Trump, a person he, to put it mildly, is not a fan of. In relation of these events, we also talk about podcasts, masculinity, being a heretic and round things up with his favorite things from the year.

Previously, I did an interview with Jay Karales, a filmmaker who supports Trump. At the risk of being ideologically captured by one aisle, I thought it would be best to capture the other side. As with that conversation, I am hoping that we know where culture is going, as we enter a new era of politics and culture.

This is a condensed, shorter version of our conversation. The full thing, with more questions and answers, will be simulcast ($) on Slack Tide.

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As an anti-Trump conservative, what is your mood nowadays following the election? Did you understand how he managed to win, not just the electoral college vote, but the popular vote, in spite of everything that was against him?

My mood’s dark, as I’ve probably let on by now. Though what’s bad for the country is often good for me personally, if I’m being honest, because I’ve long been in the writing-about-chaos business, and nobody produces more of it than Captain Chaos himself. My sub numbers have probably increased 20 percent since election day, and I’m about as anti-Trump as they come. So I’m not about to stand and salute the Dear Leader, as so many others seem ready to do out of fear. Though even if my numbers were sinking like a stone, my attitude would be the same, because I can’t stand authoritarian bullies. And it would make me hate myself to pretend otherwise.

I kind of understand how he won, though. Libs have been losing their way for a long time — too many of them couldn’t even admit the border was a disaster or seem to keep basic biological gender distinctions straight. (Though Kamala ran a shockingly moderate campaign — aside from all the abortion talk — so that’s not a legitimate critique of the race she actually ran.) But more important, I think hulking swaths of the electorate were grouchy about getting raped at the grocery store for the last half decade. I know I am, even if I don’t blame the Biden administration for high prices since it started on Trump’s watch during the pandemic, and occurred the world over. (I also think a butt-ton of companies are price-gouging, still surfing off “supply chain interruptions” or whatever other feeble excuse they can invoke from four years ago to camouflage their greed.) Would inflation have looked any different under Trump? If he had any good ideas about how to curtail it, he forgot to mention it during two years of campaigning. Slapping 20 percent tariffs on imports or whining a lot doesn’t count as a plan.

But — and this is not a popular answer even if it’s a gong I sound regularly — one of the real reasons he won is because too many Americans are as decadent and depraved as our leaders, who, after all, we elect. We used to at least pretend character counted. Now, we don’t even bother. As George Carlin said in an old bit I ran on my site a few weeks back:

If you have selfish ignorant citizens, you’re gonna get selfish ignorant leaders. So maybe…. it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here. Like the public.

It's safe to say that Trump is the culture, and always has been a shrieking aspect of American vulgarity for almost his entire career. And he has been influential with that, way before he became interested in politics. Rappers love to mention his wealth, he's a game show host with the pretence that he's a successful businessman, he has his name across Golden buildings; he appeared on TV physically destroying Vince McMahon. That's reported fairly often, but there's another aspect that's quite critical of Trump's comeback I don't see people talk about. Trump is a heretic and everyone loves to break heresy nowadays. They aren't victims, and they are often corrected by institutions that are losing trust, which means that they think these people are lying to them. These people are akin to the silent majority that Nixon and Ronald Reagan attracts, except they express loud vibes on podcasts and alternative media. After all, it's why RFK Jr hates vaccines and corporations, and Elon Musk pretends that they are pushed away by the "woke mind virus" and it's heresy to say that in polite society. But now, with Trump re-elected, these positions won't be anti-establishment positions anymore. Andrew Breitbart says that "politics is downstream from culture", and these decadents feed off a decadent ideology. Whatever happens to Trump, they can live in comfort that Western Civilization is saved for the next four years. Any thoughts?

I like rebels as much as the next guy — I used to root for Luke Perry’s character on Beverly Hills 90210, for instance— but everybody can’t be one. Even if they’re all trying very hard to be, because it’s a good branding strategy. They all want to be outsiders even if they spent half their lives as insiders. Megyn Kelly, who used to be the primetime poster girl for the Fox establishment (back when Trump was still disparaging her and she wasn’t yet stumping for him), who then left to go try to be White Oprah at NBC (before they made her worth more than the Sun King by paying her not to work for them anymore), now seems to want everyone to think she’s a MAGA badass because she drops an f-bomb here or there and yells about The Establishment a lot (whatever that even is these days. I’d submit that Joe Rogan and his hundreds of countercultural knockoffs are the culture, now.) I don’t actually know what Kelly believes, mind you. Though in fairness to me, I’m not sure she does either.

But everything about our culture has been atomized and decentralized. It’s getting harder to find Old Orders to rebel against. Especially when your rebel-in-chief has ruled one of the country’s two major parties with an iron fist for the last decade, and is the twice-elected President of the United States. In the early ‘70s, the counterculture wanted to stomp around chanting, “Fuck Nixon.” Now, they want to be Nixon. But it’s kind of hard to be an outlaw and the sheriff at the same time. Unless you’re a dirty sheriff. Which Nixon kind of was, come to think of it, as is the felonious Trump.

Which is why I reject that Trump is saving western civilization. It’s more like he’s debasing it, turning even normies into narcissistic, belligerent, cos-playing tough guys, not unlike the WWE wrestlers he used to hang out with. I’m as pro-Western-civ as anyone out there. But it’s not like he’s saving the culture. I don’t think the guy’s ever read a book, including the ones he had ghost-written. I mean, if manosphere morons like Andrew Tate are now our idea of saving the culture, our culture is pretty screwed. We might as well all just go join the Taliban.

You really want to be a rebel these days? Say you religiously read the New York Times, generally trust medical experts, and have full confidence that 9/11 wasn’t an inside job. The Roganauts will look at you like you just took a squirt in their Liquid Death can. It’s fine to buck conventional wisdom, because conventional wisdom is often wrong. But it’s also often right. Sometimes, a stitch in time really does save nine. Sometimes, my bird in my hand is better than someone else’s bird in my bush. (I might have that wrong, but you get the idea.)

Professional heresy has become its own kind of orthodoxy. Asking questions is good. But asking stupid, dishonest ones just to muddy the truth and create an alternative reality where all facts are negotiable is a less worthy enterprise. You’re basically just whacking off your audience, and turning them into even bigger conspiratorial cranks than the one you’re pretending to be for clicks.

I gather that you don't listen to a lot of podcasts, because the medium does prove your point that culture has become atomized and decentralised. I'll get to the topic of 'young men', but people listen to Joe Rogan and Hawk Tuah girl because they're lonely (Believe me. I listened to a lot of Joe Rogan after I finished university and having to spend months looking for my first job). They listen while they are at work, or at the gym or when they need to go for a hike. They're not deigned to become a political soldier, but the moment your grievances are accommodated by the vibes of the podcast, it seems that your identity and opinions are shaped by hearing what the host has to say.

Is that a nice way of telling me I sound overly-judgy about podcasts? Because if so, you’re right. I don’t mean to slag the entire podcasting juggernaut. Which would be stupid on my part, kind of like saying “books are bad.” When I should be saying, “these particular books are bad.” I hasten to add that most of my journalism friends seem to have two podcasts apiece. And even if I just semi-slagged someone like Megyn Kelly, she’s extremely good at what she does: smart, a compelling communicator, etc. I might sound like one lonely man standing on the beach, trying to hold back the podcasting storm surge. (Though not so lonely that I’d ever listen to the Hawk Tuah girl.)

But I was just trying to make the point that a lot of smart, compelling communicators dumb themselves down to splash around in the bogs of conspiratorial thinking and paranoia and rank demagoguery. Which their often youngish male audience seems particularly susceptible to. My largely apolitical college-age son rolls his eyes at the crap that finds its way into his feed all the time. The algorithms seems to think he’s an easy mark. He’s a wise kid, so I don’t think they’ll get him. Still, I suggest to him that he do something more useful with his free time, like listen to audio books, or watch Loudermilk, or hit himself in the head with a hammer. Anything, really.

You have written a lot about masculinity in all its forms and I want to know how you felt about the current gender polarization in America. I was in the US for two weeks in the lead up to the election and we had the executive director of a Clintonite think tank as one of our speakers. Of the questions I asked, I pondered about the podcast landscape during the election cycle and why young American men are displaced in daily life. They don't go to university, they're dropping out from the workforce, compared to women who now make up more than half of the professional workforce. The growing majority are not making families or dating. And men have drifted further to the right, as polls have suggested, compared to women who are moving leftwards. I asked him what the Democrats could do to win them over and he told me "I don't know the answer." We had countless thinkpieces diagnosing the problem, but not giving the solution, and it feels that solution now has been, as you say, listening to podcasts, looking up to Donald Trump or Elon Musk or Andrew Tate or [redacted]. Anyone who is roughshod in any field will be an inspiration to them, rather than the David Frenches and Sam Harrises of the world, whose moderate approach is considered to be uncouth and preachy. A masculinity crisis has to be felt throughout this election. But is there a masculinity crisis and what's the remedy?

As with most complex, multi-faceted problems, I don’t think there’s one easy, clean solution. Also, I’m not sure the problem isn’t a wee bit overstated, becoming reality because commentators constantly assert that it is. Yes, most of the things you mention seem to be statistically true. And it’s a tough time for young men. Then again, when aren’t times tough? As a Gen X’er, I don’t remember feeling like I had life licked at 23, nor did most men who came of age when I did. Was it easier during World War II, when ten million American men were drafted, and over 400,000 were killed in combat? Was it easier in 1860, when you were lucky just to make it past 40 years old? Those seem like much bigger problems than college-male enrollment rates to me. You just didn’t have as many people whining about them on social media.

Yes, the cost of living sucks. So it’s as hard to get launched as ever. Yes, college debt — which has become sinfully ridiculous, especially for what you’re getting for your money (which is not much) — sucks. Yes, it sucks that the wokesters have spent the last couple decades trying to erase all gender distinctions, though those tend to naturally reestablish themselves pretty quickly when men and women meet between the sheets. (Marriage rates have actually rebounded a bit from historic lows around 2019.)

I do hear lots of talk about how women are more financially independent than ever, making men more extraneous than they used to be as stereotypical breadwinners. Or about how traditionally male jobs have been offshored or automated away. But less often talked about is the spiritual malaise that seems to have set in. Some of this is due to all the ideological extremism of both sides. One extreme, ratcheting up its opposite’s worst tendencies, which is almost always the case. So one side gives you imaginary pronouns in order to erase masculinity, and the other gives you the cartoonish version of masculinity, starring Andrew Tate and the rest of the ball-tanning knuckleheads.

But any half-sentient observer can sense not just overcompensation, but demoralization and exhaustion. And I truly believe a lot of this springs from our technology, which has overrun our lives, and encourages passivity because so much of a younger person’s life (as well as that of middle-aged and older persons, for that matter) is lived vicariously. You feel like you’ve played in the game before you’ve really gotten on the field. And even when you do get on the field, so much of life is lived performatively, so you can show it off on Instagram. Life, once removed.

Meanwhile, while exhibitionism rages stronger than ever, the unsexy things we used to associate real manhood with: duty, sacrifice, honesty, stoicism, empathy, love for your fellow humans — those virtues get short shrift. Which goes to the spiritual malaise I just mentioned. There are still plenty of people around who exemplify these things, but nearly none of them are front and center. Our faith leaders have failed us in droves. (See Christian nationalism, which as a Christian, I positively detest.) Our fathers increasingly don’t give moral instruction, like say, my dad did, whether I wanted to sit through it or didn’t. (He didn’t ask my permission.) Our politicians are so awful, that they’re not even worth discussing. Although it is worth discussing that they are a reflection of us, since we elect them. They are a mirror of our souls, which have grown deeply, seriously ugly.

But all of this dysfunction is put on steroids because we, generally — and young men more specifically and especially — are constantly filling our minds with horseshit. If you hook yourself up to a poison drip all day, you’re gonna go toxic, sooner or later. And that is a lot of what we’re seeing.

Why and how do we underestimate that algorithms can determine or undermine our culture, where vices triumph over virtues?

Because whoever the evil geniuses were who invented the recommendation algorithms know that at heart, the human animal is a dark one. And darkness breeds addiction: to conflict, to tension, to anger, to hate-reading-or-watching. You can’t entirely blame what you’re getting fed, because chances are what you’re getting fed is what you’ve already sought out and binged on. Social media architects just want to keep you hitting that pellet lever in your Skinner Box. So they’re built to prey on our own worst, most addictive instincts. Which isn’t too difficult since there’s a lot more bad news in the world than good news. (The latter, so often going unreported, or being regarded as no news at all.)

There’s a verse in Philippians I’ve quoted quite often in print, that says: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

But as we both know, that ain’t how the internet works. Hell, that isn’t how I work, for the most part. There’s a reason so many Silicon Valley types who hooked the world on the fentanyl of the mind keep their own children away from it. Because they know better.

How do you think the second Trump wave will affect pop culture? I don't think there's gonna be another "resistance" against him, although if there is, it's gonna be quite muted than before. I predict that there's neither a celebration nor a condemnation of the man as much as the first wave, because the mainstream elites are still wrestling over their wounds.

Maybe. But I’m going to swim against the tide on this. Though there’s undeniably less resistance energy this time around than there was at the same point in 2016, I think it’s way too premature to think it’ll stay that way. Right now, we’re seeing sheer fatigue. The novelty is gone. Not only are we coming off an endless election cycle, but people get bored of anything after a decade. And it has been almost ten solid years of watching Trump lie his ass off while serving as a perpetual outrage machine.

But the outrages will indeed keep coming. He’s made more iffy decisions in a couple weeks (with his cabinet-appointments clown show) than most presidents do in their first year, and he hasn’t even been sworn in yet. Wait until whatever stooge he inserts at Justice starts prosecuting his enemies list, or he slaps 20 percent tariffs on our imports, making the last several years of inflation look like a fire-sale at the Dollar Store. There will be plenty of pushback then. Or else we’re further gone as a country than even I think we are, and maybe deserve what's coming to us.

How does it affect pop culture? Who knows ? I’m not sure there’s gonna be a lot more Handmaid’s Tales, i.e., things that are read as commentaries on current events. The escapism might become more escapist — people truly wanting to get away from politics when they’re not deliberately focused on politics. We have now seen Elon rent himself out as Trump’s catamite, and Mark Zuckerberg seems to be following suit. So I don’t expect social media will get any better. And there will be waves of low-rent MAGAtardism shoved down our throats. (Donald Trump Jr. has his own publishing house! Apparently, the titles aren’t even scratch’n’sniff!) But these things won’t catch the culture’s imagination anywhere outside of MAGA. Much the way you don’t see too many normie Americans walking down the street in gold Trump high-tops while holding their leatherette Trump/Lee Greenwood Bibles. Those are just cult collectibles.

If people think they’re bored by the dug-in opposition, how much more boring will it be to say, watch Fox commentators praise everything the Great Leader does for the next four years, while trying to pretend he’s not unhinged? That’s about as tiresome as it gets. Plus, their aged audience is dying off a little more every year. So CNN and MSNBC aren’t the only ones in trouble.

So a bit of a lightning round, to summarise the things 2024 has to offer. What was:

• The most iconic cultural moment in America, outside of the 2024 election cycle.

The Most Iconic Cultural Moment?: I’d say it’s Matt Gaetz going from AG nominee to taping birthday greetings on Cameo for 500 bucks a throw faster than you could say, “Do you know any hot 17-year-olds who like to party?” It proves just how shameless America has become. And by the way, I don’t expect Gaetz is done in public life by a long shot. He’ll still probably be made head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Because we are no longer even an Idiocracy, but a sad parody of one.

• The best pop culture you enjoyed. It could be music, movies, TV, whatever.

The best pop culture I enjoyed?: I hate to sound like all the other sheeple, but I have enjoyed every second of The Bear, even when some say it’s off, as many critics did during its latest season. But it is hands down the best writing/acting on TV at the moment. With one powerhouse performance after another: Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edibiri, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Jon Bernthal doing dead-brother flashbacks. And speaking of Bernthal, he also has a great podcast called Real Ones, in which he sat down with one of his old buddies/co-stars, Shia LeBeouf, when the latter was at the bottom of a pit after personal scandal, and they did a riveting two hours, the likes of which I’ve never seen anywhere else. In fact, I like The Bear so much, that I’ve taken to cooking the restaurant’s family-meal spaghetti they featured in one episode, which someone recreated on the internet, with a few modifications. The two tricks? You have to use real San Marzano tomatoes, and not the knockoff version, which I learned the hard way. (Too much acidity otherwise.) And you have to sauté and then puree your fresh basil, garlic, and olive oil before pouring it into the sauce. It’s now my wife’s favorite, and her people hail from Cortona in Tuscany, where they don’t take such matters lightly.

• The best fish you caught.

It’s mostly been a horrible fishing year. One fishery after another of mine has collapsed. My striper fishery. My smallmouth bass fishery. Even the largemouth numbers in my regional ponds are off. Trout are fishing okay, but I live so far away from my go-to trout streams that I don’t get to them nearly often enough. So shad really saved my ass this year. Which is good, because they’re my favorite fish to catch anyway. They push up our rivers from the sea for about two months in the spring. They are slutty as hell, and they run and jump like a poor man’s tarpon. They’re not monsters. A big hickory shad maxes out at around 24 inches. But they keep my soul solvent, and for that I love them.

• The best and worst piece of journalism you've read this year.

Let’s start with the worst. I had quite a few email tussles this year with a “friend” who insisted on repeatedly sending me Gateway Pundit articles. They were the worst. Dishonest, shamelessly hackish, proudly stupid. Though not much different than what many of my old friends in right-leaning-journalism (where I made my bones for a long time) have become. The best? I came up as a long-form feature writer, and I’m not reading too much of it that knocks me out anymore. So let’s go another way. This is going to sound hopelessly square and old-timey. But Garrison Keillor is 82-years-old, cranks out a column or two a week on top of his live shows, and that guy still makes beautiful, funny, humane sentences as easily as he puts on a pot of coffee. I’m not sure anyone else pays attention to him anymore besides me and his devoted readers. But if it’s so easy to do, why is hardly anyone else doing it? A long time ago, he used to be a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a New Yorker friend of mine said the legendary writer/editor Roger Angell once told him that Keillor “was the best natural writer The New Yorker had published since Thurber.” Am pretty sure that claim still stands.

• The person who gave you hope this year and the person who disappointed you the most.

The provenance is a bit murky, but whoever coined the phrase, “This too, shall pass.” The person who disappointed me the most? So many to choose from. I’m not at liberty to say on the personal front. But in the public sphere, let’s go with Nikki Haley. She thumped Trump as hard as she could for a month or two in the Potemkin primary, but not nearly as hard as she sucked up to him after the fact. She’s my old party in a nut. These people no longer even know the meaning of shame or principle.

• The greatest sports moment?

By far, it was your fellow Australian Raygun’s breakdancing performance at the Olympics. She inspired me, proving that you don’t have to have anything like natural talent or craft to perfect your art. You just have to have a green sweatsuit and a dream. She so restored my appetite for life, that I polished off an entire Bloomin’ Onion at The Outback all by myself.

• Who is better? Beyonce or Taylor Swift

I’ve had more than enough of both. So let’s go with Chaka Khan.

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Let’s try something different here.

Jay Karales is a filmmaker, novelist and comedian, who goes by the alias Lowres Wunderbred. He’s also the co-host of a movies podcast called //MOVIES: A Podcast about the act of cinema.

I first interacted with him, when I was writing a piece for The Spectator about the Criterion Collection. Karales was a critic of its current slate, in contrast to a dedicated fanbase who have been more adoring about any movie that makes it into the boutique’s catalog. He’s also an outlier with the film community in another way: he’s a Trump supporter. Not a person who reluctantly held his nose and voted him in the ballots, but someone who’s an enthusiastic endorser of his ideals. I did not realize that until the election, when Donald Trump pulled a comeback not seen since Richard Nixon in 1968. I thought it would be interesting to ask how someone quite articulate about cinema, can support someone who does not fit with the culture’s progressive instincts. So I went ahead and asked him some questions about that, which he was quite happy to answer. Plus, his upcoming projects which includes Mass State Lottery featuring the late Buddy Duress.

What’s supposed to be achieved in this kind of conversation? Not the kind of kumbaya to become more unified in the next four years, but to know where the culture is going, which I believe will be quite different compared to Trump 2016 when everybody was shellshocked by the results.

We’ve followed each other for a while, and it wasn’t until recently that I learned that you are a Trump supporter. Why do you endorse him and how did you feel about his landmark election victory?

I endorsed him because Donald Trump is the only legend that post-9/11 Americans have been anointed. I have a framed photo of Donald Trump on my wall. Donald Trump is an American hero. I was thrilled by the results.

If you have any advice to the Democrats and their supporters to re-emerge again, what would you tell them?

To Democrats, I would advise being less convincing when lying to yourself. This party doesn’t appeal to anyone but mentally troubled people and it is currently a coalition of desperate numbers. That is going to make them especially dangerous in about three to six years when they figure out how to rebrand.

Do you embrace being an outlier in film spaces that does seem susceptible to smug liberalism?

I’m not sure if I’m an outlier so much as I am casually transparent about my politics. I have many like-minded peers, they just keep their opinions limited to their ‘Personal Friends’ Instagram stories.

How does your politics affect the way you view entertainment?

I find myself sickened by about ¾ the movie trailers I see and can sus out a ‘lib lesson’ piece from any 1 second of entertainment.

Do you judge films solely on a political lens or do you look for more than that?

I try not to let the politics of a film sway my opinion on it as creatively successful or not. But left-wing films have historically been more impressive than culturally right-wing ones.

How do you discern whether or not there are political elements within a film?

Most movies have political elements. It’s more about the film’s conduct. Working Class Goes to Heaven uses the texture of its politics to illustrate a society that its lead character would spawn from. And what we’re given is engaging, even when divorced from its political leanings. This is something that socially activated filmmakers today struggle with.

How do you think the new era of Trump is going to affect the way people like David Ehrlich or some freelance writer nostalgic for Gawker criticize movies?

A: We’re about to pull the ripcord on a microwaved-into-deformity version of the comfy, cozy conservative America of the early ‘00s and the Reagan 1980s. I can’t imagine the playbooks of most of these people who have compulsively dissented will change much. When the media environment around them changes, they’ll either fade out or they’ll become more popular than ever. I suspect it’ll be the first.

Which movies do you think represent the world's love for America, and which ones represent Americans’ disillusion with their own country?

Any Korean film made in the last 20 years has basically been in honor to the United States of the 20th century. hey all do it. (The only one who doesn’t have a grasp is Bong Joon-Ho. He needs to stay in his lane and strictly direct Korean films. Every cross-language film he’s made has been a mess and I expect the new one with Robert Pattinson to be no different). Champion from 2018 is a pretty bad movie but it understands America better than Americans do. The Witch Part 1, also from 2018, feels like a Harry Potter-esque American blockbuster from the late ‘90s or early aughts.

On the flip side, Oliver Stone used to be the master of the ‘disillusioned American’ perspective. You get a less sophisticated strain of that now in anything that wants to serve as a commentary on the collapse of the American dream. Usually, it’s in TV shows. That’s where you find actual idiots in the audience who’ll allow their opinions to be reshaped.

You wrote something in your newsletter about conservative cinema and why it never seems to critically emerge. Do you think it will happen in Trump II?

I don’t think so. Not in the way that I meant in that article. You would need a genuinely talented artist and true believer. But, then again, what we’re seeing is that those people are ‘made’ - they are not born. When people get tired of being pushed around, they throw on a new costume to distinguish their ‘don’t fuck with me’ persona. Conservatism, or Trumpism, just happens to be it right now. I appreciate what Dallas Sonnier has been trying to do with Bonfire Legend, because he’s probably the only guy - at least from what I can see - that wants to make explicitly American conservative films that do not live on the God’s Not Dead reservation. Shut In, with a few more swear words and a theatrical release, could’ve really been something.

What has been the best film criticism that you’ve ever read?

I must admit, I don’t value film criticism as a medium in any significant way. When I do read or watch film criticism, I appreciate it most from sources that are often inconsistent or contradictory with their reviews. I think inconsistency is underrated. Roger Ebert is my favorite example of this, and he was probably the best – even if that’s the Walt Disney / Coca Cola answer.

Who are some of the best critics and content creators on movies out there?

A: James Hancock and Marcus Pinn are the only two modern film critics whose opinions I have any interest in. Jack Mason, Ryan Jackson, and Darius Csiky – I don’t primarily consider them film critics but they wade in film criticism - but I would highly recommend their programs.

What movies would you recommend for people to understand both Trump eras?

For the first Trump era (2017-2021), I’d choose Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt (2012), which reveals a time of paranoia and depersoning. The incoming one (2025-2029), I’d probably say Bob Guccione’s Caligula (1979), when the empire finally peaks and we tip over into indulgence.

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So can you tell me a bit about Mass State Lottery?

Mass State Lottery is a comedy starring myself and Hans Lam Barboza, based off of real missing persons cases that struck Boston, Massachusetts over a period of about 6 or 7 years in the 2010s.

So how’s Mass State Lottery is going to be distributed?

It’s up for grabs to any distributor who wants to offer a fair deal. I’ve gotten plenty of offers, I don’t like any of them. If I continue to dislike them, I will distribute it through my own company Forgotten Genres.

If Mass State Lottery is released, and some major outlet finds out that you’re a Trump supporter (and potentially downgrade the film), how would you respond?

I would tell them they should cut me a thousand dollars

Buddy Duress is in this film playing a very important character. Can you tell me what it’s like to work with him, and why he never had the bigger opportunity to branch out into acting?

Working with Buddy Duress was a dream. I was very fortunate to obtain that and exact my vision when I was originally writing the script. I wish I didn’t have his final performance, because I would’ve loved to see 100 movies with him in it. I’ve been on the record as saying that before ever even meeting the man. He didn’t branch out into other films because he got comfortable behind bars and it wasn’t a severe enough consequence for him.

He plays two different characters in Mass State Lottery - Ivan, the older brother of the primary missing person and Helmutt the Clown - one of the murder suspects.

What’s going to happen after Mass State Lottery?

Hans Lam Barboza, who was my main co-star in Mass State Lottery and is the other half of the comedic duo I am in, just starred in my second feature film. We wrapped principal photography on it in Queens, New York a little over a week ago. It’s called Disorderly and it’s about a man suffering from a terminal illness using his last days to explore cannibalism.

Besides that, my own personal Project 2025 is just to make and put out as much stuff as possible this coming year.

There are three ways to make it in Australian media: succumb to the local landscape and never leave, or enter the international realm. The third way is to franchise yourself; adapt an international institution, and localize it like it’s your own. 

It’s surprising how most of our Australian media, politics and entertainment tends to be derivative of its American and British counterparts. Sky News and The Spectator have their versions down under. Even CPAC, the garish conservative conference, has an Australian edition. It is a highlight of what is a rather dire landscape, so it makes sense why The Office would have an Australian version. 

The Ozfice (is that how you go about it?) is the 13th reiteration of the popular British TV series from 2001 created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. While it’s quite faithful to the template - even the gender flipped David Brent/Michael Scott and Dwight Schrutte/Gareth archetypes is on par for the course - it falls short of any of the qualities either the British or the American counterparts have to offer. And because of the standards those Offices had made, no one expects this one to work. Almost all of the similarities are just surface-level, and there’s minimal depth about the local workplace that could have made it unique. 

Felicity Ward, who is a stand-up comedian here, is a natural as Hannah Howard, the oddball manager of Finley Crannick’s Western Sydney branch who barely works (most, if not, all of the characters barely do any work, let alone increase productivity) and it doesn’t feel too forced. There are moments where the difference lies in its subtlety, but doesn’t stray from the effect that it has. In this instance, the Finch counterpart is not only her close colleague, but also her work crush, and Hannah is a rather lonely person. One highlight was her scheme to turn the branch into a religious organization to gain tax exemption, and it gets more ridiculous as it goes on with a couple of jokes that had me chuckling. But she doesn’t live up to Michael Scott or David Brent.  

The characters are paper thin, but so is the desk environment. The Ozfice is shaped around a Western Sydney office, worked in a Western Sydney cubicle and near a plant, none of this rings true. The UK and the US have either made their settings hell or purgatory, and this brings nothing to the table.

The show is pointless, but why waste time on it? Who needs an Australian version of Jim and Pam, when there’s already a Jim and Pam? Why make female Dwight Schrute autistic Lorde, with a mean streak that barely makes sense? These are questions that the cast and creator have actually been asked themselves, so there’s a nesting doll of pointlessness that we are dealing with. But that’s the overall problem; if there’s no intent, what’s good to even have an Australian version of The Office?

Sometimes, there’s a piece in me who thinks that The Ozfice has potential, but there’s plenty of great Australian comedy like Utopia that filled the void of great workplace comedy and it should bring more passion than this one. Describing the Australian version as the Raygun of comedy is an insult to Raygun, because at least she’s having a ball and making (some) people feel good about themselves being oddball. But it’s an indictment of the Australian industry that this is the kind of thing that gets government funding, and be put on a worldwide streaming service, not to laugh with them. But at them. 

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Look Back is Great and It Turns Out I Didn’t Waste My Life

As a semi-professional writer, it’s quite painful to create something. It’s even worst when another person in the same medium does a much better job than you do and you grow anxious of his next step. But once you get along with him, he’s now a front orbiter in your network of friends, editors and thinkers. And yet, he’s an emotionally stunted obstacle. Now, what can you do?

Look Back is adapted from the manga by Tatsuki Fujimoto, well known for writing Chainsaw Man. In fact, he wrote this after the first part of Chainsaw Man, that you can tell, just by the fact that it’s very autobiographical. Fujimoto is an author who’s well-known for being a chaotic weirdo and is prone to integrate these traits into his work. So it strikes me that Look Back is more mellow, but still true to the author and is still, in essence, has the same brutal honesty as the characters you find in Chainsaw Man. 

The main characters are Fujino and Kyomoto, a mashup of his first name, and their main title is a riff of Chainsaw Man. Fujimo is a student who writes a gag manga for her school newspaper, but then encounters Kyomoto’s strips, which has detailed backgrounds and better timed jokes. Fujino tries to catch up with her, but struggles to match her talents. Instead they become creative partners, and Fujino realizes that Kyomoto, despite her shut-in personality, is entirely influenced by her artistry and work ethic. So they make Japan’s next big manga, but Kyomoto is still afraid of the world around her and they both take their separate ways.

Look Back is not just about creating and fulfilling your passions. It’s about fulfilling it with people who are more alike than you expect. Look Back is very faithful to Fujimoto’s messy aesthetic of the manga. In both mediums, you’ll find that it can evoke very raw emotions, especially during the film’s climax. What makes the film different to the manga is that director Kiyotaka Oshiyama makes a visually flourishing depiction of creativity and friendship. While the animation may feel that it’s missing some detail that Fujimoto adds to the original source and Fujino and Kyomoto’s chemistry is told sometimes in non-diegetic montages, this is not to their disadvantage. In fact, the vibe makes the whole film look more alive. 

Mangakas are, for the most part, well-adored for their dedication to their work and are part of a greater industry with billions of young and old readers. But, like their anime peers, it is very cutthroat. There’s so much editorial and artistic pressure that one can handle into one chapter before they go into a long hiatus. Without spoiling it, Look Back shows one of the characters finally getting her big break before she experiences a burnout that makes her lose faith in her dream job. All that’s left now is the job that’s keeping her alive. It is this struggle, which enables the loss of connection, that Look Back captures so well and for that, it's one of the best films this decade has to offer so far. 

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The Kino Around The Corner - Adaptation (2002)

If you want a movie about the difficulty of creating something that’s darkly funny, but throws oddballs at you, check out Adaptation, the sophomore effort and collaboration between director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who is embodied by Nicolas Cage, and who also embodies his dim-witted fake twin Donald Kaufman. Kaufman manages to make this vesting and complex, but Spike Jonze hones that in by making it emotionally curious. Chris Cooper and Meryl Streep are both fantastic in their roles, with the former getting an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. But the major highlight is Brian Cox, answering Cage’s Kaufman’s question about writing with no conflict, because nothing happens in the world. Not only is it so masterful, it’s essentially my philosophy in art. 

I’m more interested in culture rather than the pure mechanics of politics, but through my experiences in both, I learned that the two have a relationship that’s as inseparable as a car and its engine. Andrew Breitbart once said that “politics is downstream from culture,” which meant that to change politics, one must change the culture. 

In August 2024, New York Magazine published a long list of pop culture items that were definitive of the Barack Obama era from 2008-2016. This is what they call Obamacore. (As I write this, I attempt to type in “Obamacore” twice before Google docs completely gave up on autocorrecting it to Obamacare, the legislation promising some sort of single payer healthcare in America). These include, but are not limited to the following:

• Girls

• Parks and Recreation

• The Fight Song

• Katy Perry

• TuNeYaRds

• Hamilton

• The Daily Show

• The Buzzfeed listicle

• The Good Place

Regardless of whether or not its political subtext was intentional (after all, most of these entries would have already identified with the overt liberal orientation of pop culture), it is pretty clear that the Obama period gave these people license to exert their cultural powers and make it their own. Ideas like “cultural appropriation”, “rape culture” and many more crept into the mainstream, as we indulged in the victimhood of its creators. 

In response to the overconfidence of this type of identity politics, the backlash against the tide has been remarkable, whether it’s the incomprehensible phenomenon of Gamergate or how it manifests itself in YouTube compilations of colored hair feminists losing their minds. We can either laugh at this trend and move on with our lives or embody a new political identity. Or you can do both. That’s at least how it's analyzed by mainstream institutions like NYMag, which identifies, but not fully understands how it led to Donald Trump then becoming the next President of the United States.

Trump’s election win in 2016 should have caused much more introspection from the broader Left and immediately, the reactions were very split. Mark Lilla and Jonathan Haidt say that their embrace of identitarianism and their abandonment of classical liberalism or class analysis is what resulted in Trump’s win. Jamelle Bouie, who seemed more happier watching and talking about movies than he does as a political pundit, strongly disagrees, saying Trump’s supporters are, at the end of the day, white nationalists.  

The bitterness of the Left losing to Trump, meant that Obama’s legacy (which had a mixture of more highs and lows than one could have imagined) was brushed aside like a copywriter being made redundant after three years working at a desk job making ineffective slogans. What that means for the pop culture of 2012-2016 is that something like Hamilton, which was immensely popular at the time among theater kids and liberal normies, looked more questionable in hindsight.  

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Obviously, the induction of Trump meant that film critics also need to have a say in what they really think. Indiewire held a symposium of how critics and filmmakers should react to the upcoming Trump era. And not to waste your time, the answers are very underwhelming, from one saying that critics would need to check their privilege to another asking that their media literacy needs to be improved. David Ehrlich, ever the banal critic at Indiewire, says that they need to survive, because of their resentment to Trump and resist anything that he does. Instead, I’ll leave you with the best input coming from Vadim Rizov, an editor at Filmmaker Magazine: 

It is obviously true that every film is, or can be, a political object, but don’t force it. However, I’d suggest that when you’re forced to write about the week’s big garbage release, that you dive in. Hollywood films are overloaded with useless subtext: all that money, all those resources, contribute all kind of unintended frissons. Do the plot summary as fast as you can, then get to what’s actually interesting. J. Hoberman’s idea that any film can be treated as a “found object” is useful. Avoid or engage with authorial intent at will: this is all an exercise anyway.

The point, I think, is that analytical and critical thought is something we just don’t teach very well in this country. Be rigorous with your thoughts, avoid cant, and, when the moment is right, go deep in some weird direction. The point is not NOT NOT NOT NOT to latch onto the most obvious thing that’s Wrong with a movie – its latent sexism, casual imperialism, all those CGI extras dying by the hundreds, whatever – but to demonstrate some kind of ability to think something through. I know this sounds frustratingly vague, but it’s important to be able to demonstrate that original paths of thought are available. And if you can call out embedded hegemony, that’s fantastic, but be clear and targeted. The worst kind of liberalism is the kind that knows exactly when your ideal reader is going to nod in useless agreement.

The reason why this is an excellent answer is because those tics in thinking remains a challenge in cultural criticism. The reader can interpret the nuances however they like, but the critic has to determine these nuances and persuade them to give it a chance. Whenever I read a long or short review of a film, I get underwhelmed by the fact that there is none of it happening and Rizov’s thesis is  proven again and again. The unfortunate thing is that these cardinal sins are exactly provoked by an essay in Filmmaker Magazine.

The symposium was inspired by a screed of an article called “All Movies are Political Movies. We Need to Do Better”, written by Jane Schoenbrun, who would go on to direct We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw The TV Glow. Schoenbrun’s prose in this piece is shrill and her arguments are very simple: all films should be political and that their utility in entertaining the audience is to be weaponized. So essentially:

Doctor Strange is a political film. Trolls is a political film. Sausage Party is a political film1. Hacksaw Ridge is a political film. Finding Dory is a political film. Suicide Squad is a political film. Sully is a political film. Star Trek Beyond is a political film. Deadpool is a political film. Ride Along 2 is a political film. Don’t Breathe is a political film. Zootopia is a political film. Captain America: Civil War is a political film.

I can push back this argument easily with something that I wrote in The Critic:

Anyone who has written about or engaged with pop culture should be tired of hearing that the landscape should be politicised. The refrain that “all art is political” hides a deep dishonesty that misleads its followers. While art can be used for expressing political thought, what the slogan usually expresses is that it ought to be political — and not just political but partisan and progressive. 

Reading this argument, it makes it clear that film critics can be weary of films that have certain political tendencies that they disagree with. How many reviews of Dragged Across Concrete have to put up with the monologue about “political correctness being the new McCarthyism”, before they dissect what they think are the motivations of S Craig Zahler. Is he a crypto-MAGA supporter? Who knows. But it’s the responsibility of the critic and filmmaker to be honest with their readers and viewers. And what happened is that viewers would have missed out on a very honest, but brutal, piece of cinema, because the person they trust has told them it’s secretly a propaganda film that either repels or brainwashes you. 

Tastemakers are more politically motivated than ever and the agenda they proceed with, make their content harder to read. Radicalised, but often with the touch of a feather. One example I would touch on is Michiko Kakutani, formerly a book critic for The New York Times. She was surprisingly ubiquitous; Her critical pans were widely read, even to the point where she took a stab at fictional characters like Brian Griffin and Holly Golightly. Immediately after Trump’s victory, Kakutani quit her gig that she held since 1983 so she can write a book about his failures. Her most recent book The Great Wave, which is about how much she despises Trump, was slammed by Slate for its incoherent use of pop culture references and her simplifying complex moments of history.

Another example is Brie Larson, an actress who bemoaned that her movies like Captain Marvel are overly reviewed by straight white male critics. This, of course, created a culture war that was unnecessary on Larson’s hands, since creators like the Quartering made content that benefitted from anything she says just so he can purchase a shed to own her2. One can argue that it’s overkill to depict Brie Larson as a villain in their reviews, but it wasn’t as if her outspoken cause wasn’t a cause for all of the useless criticism against her. If the critic is the stereotype of the tasteful hater and the creator represents dreams, then these two merged as someone who despises other people. 

Being outspoken is all well and good, and expecting a backlash, regardless if it’s in good faith, is an expected consequence in doing so. Cultural criticism has been divided into political factions, where virtue and vice-signalling is rewarded and gratified, but refuse to grapple with the implications of their published content if it turns out to be misleading. Thus, as Rizov notes in the symposium, it “is currently defined more precisely as the process of aggregating trending topics with zero reference to anything that can’t be found on Google in 30 seconds flat.”

So what does it mean, once the United States votes in their new president? Are we going to see a repeat of Obamacore if Kamala Harris wins or when Trump is able to get into office again, the content creators will double down on wokeness?

At the moment, I will say that for the past four years, some entertainment has softened a bit on the woke stuff. Shows and films like The White Lotus and Tar are really good at capturing the moment, and allowing the viewer to be challenged, by challenging itself when their characters use progressive platitudes to self-fulfil and harm others. Rather than being a screed about the woke, they integrate these politics into something really insightful about our human psyche. 

And however you feel about its qualities, songs like “Rich Man North of Richmond” and “Try That in A Small Town” do prove that anti-establishment counter-narratives can be popular. But entertainment remains institutionally left wing and modes of criticism will follow along as well. However, its relationship become increasingly disparate, when it doesn’t really complement the specificities of the writer’s personal ideology. 

Trump has been influential on our pop culture way before he became President. Hip hop is a fascinating influence; rappers love to reference him, because he carries a lot of wealth and surrounds himself with beautiful women. Now they’ve turned their backs against him, despite some artists endorsing him for whatever reason it benefits them. Likewise, there’s a sense of shame from spectators that it has to end up like this, that they don’t want to give The Apprentice a chance, in spite of how it had no right to be surprisingly solid in depicting Trump as a complicated human being. 

That could be said about the Obama period as well. Progressives who spent much of their hours writing the next think piece on their politics or the last piece of pop culture they consumed feel dread that the products of that era did not prevent Trump or any of his acolytes from winning. It’s why John Oliver’s Drumpf schtick made him look like an idiot. It’s why Parks and Recreation is seen purely as a product of that era, because Leslie Knope’s influence is Hillary Clinton. Presuming that Trump wins again, this needless despair is bound to repeat itself again, except this time, asking why Knives Out: Glass Onion didn’t speak truth to power enough. But if Kamala Harris wins, there won’t be introspection before it’s too late to do so.

The Obama era is filled with disappointment from left-wingers who were ecstatic in voting for him in 2008. The economy is still running on a free market basis, conflict in the Middle East continued, and was not the moderate coalition builder he believes himself to be. This sequence of despair is not circular. It’s a perpetual slope. The late Andrew Breitbart once said that “politics is downstream from culture”, and by that logic, culture is derived from material conditions that influence them, which means that it has a circular relationship. Politics is a cutthroat art that artists and critics probably won’t understand. And you don’t get to achieve what you want, just by calling a Presidential candidate “brat.” 

(500) Days of Summer is a relentlessly misunderstood movie. It’s centred around Tom Hansen’s romantic journey with Summer Finn, the assistant to her boss at a greeting card company. Tom falls for her, because she’s the enigmatic human version of the soundtrack he plays on his MP3. But Summer is not interested in him, nor does she have a long-term relationship on her mind. When they hook up, Tom was certain that she was the one, even if Summer did not respond to him. The film is structured in non-linear fashion, piecing together the red flags that Tom did not catch.

At the time of its release, Marc Webb’s directorial debut was hailed by critics as the subversive rom com that flips many tropes its genre peers took on. Considering that the romantic comedy was very saturated in the 2000s, it’s a bold claim to make, and an independent movie made for $7.5 million very easily fits the expectation. The film is hardly romantic nor that comedic, but it is a coming of age story. 

I had multiple experiences with this film. When I first watched this, midway through high school, it was one of the first ‘great’ movies I saw, when I started taking film more seriously. Not only did one can identify with Tom - his tastes in music and movies, the preferences for a romantic partner - but the twists and turns made it feel witty and alive. Multiple viewings later, I hated it. I thought it was witless and phony, that I elaborated my thoughts in it on Letterboxd (that review remains one of my most popular posts there). Now, 15 years later, it seems like most people retrospectively had a similar view as mine, in a sense that it was about as messy as the story could get.   

And then you realize. (500) Days of Summer didn’t change. I did. 

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The first interpretation is that Summer was a hellraiser to Tom. To arrive at this conclusion, you’d wholeheartedly accept its surface function: that Tom is a main character, and you’re automatically sympathetic to most of the choices he makes and thinks they are just to maintain his romantic illusions. Given that it’s from Tom’s point of view, we are only seeing a limited perspective of Summer. After all, Summer was artificial, and he has to know this himself, after ignoring many warnings from her, his friends and his younger sister. 

But as one matures, they encounter the second interpretation, strongly supported by Joseph Gordon Levitt, which is that Tom was in the wrong. Tom, being a craftsman of taste - he loves arthouse movies, mopey anthems - sees love in the way that is no different to a lot of men, who treat women with the most pornographic sense (he did describe her looks and Summer did say she was called an anal girl). If she likes The Smiths, then it’s an affirmation to get her. This is seen, by proxy, as the perspective of Summer. She’s quite cynical of romance and its fateful consequences. So when Tom miserably defends Summer against a fratty guy in a suit getting her a drink, she’s visibly offended that he did it on her behalf. Worse, she sees this as an extension of him controlling her. 

All of this is by design and it is why the third phase clarifies a lot of things. As you lay out each day, one by one, you understand the circumstances surrounding Tom. Once his superficial philosophy on love slowly disintegrates and reveals itself to be as false, it also demonstrates its roots from beginning to end. 

One of (500) Days of Summer’s main influences is The Graduate, and the narrator states that Tom mistook the final seconds of that film as a happy one. In there, Elaine Robinson and Benjamin Braddock escape from her wedding and the uproar of the crowd. They enter on a bus, only for that thrill to quickly fade, letting uncertainty set in. It’s reinstated again, as a precursor to the breakup, when Tom and Summer sat down to watch the film, and it left her devastated. Did that turn her against him? Probably, but it definitely left a profound impact on her approach to life. The Graduate is a coming of age story, particularly for people who are in the midst of young adulthood and are still uncertain.

Summer’s cynicism does have its downsides and the film is also aware of that. As much as Tom’s outlook is childlike to a fault, it does make herself look naïve and selfish, when accounting for her contradictions. While it masks her uncertainties, it does make some of her choices questionable, like making the first move on Tom at the printing room, or leading him on, for the sake of having a casual fling. 

Emotional devastation has been the film’s biggest strength. The scene in which the film weighs Tom’s expectations and reality is an example of taking advantage of the right circumstances at the right time: a split screen of the two situations, and right as Regina Spektor’s Hero reaches its crescendo, you feel Tom collapsing and failing. It is also at that point that he has to evolve out of his hollow shell.

The film is also owed to the excellent performances from Joseph Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Deschanel was made for the role, and she was known to be the deadpan hipster dream girl. (at the time of the film’s release, I remember reading a poll of Most Desirable Women by a website named AskMen and Zooey Deschanel was described as “Megan Fox for the hipster set). Summer was unfairly maligned as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (including myself) that was quite common with the type of indie flicks, but she’s not there to relinquish her male partner’s malaise. The character carries her own agency that could only be realized in the climax and be open about her humanity once she reunites with Tom. Since I went through the second phase, I had a bad impression of Joseph Gordon Levitt. Levitt’s build had restricted him to play the mopey, neurotic wimp (my suspicions were confirmed when he played the same personality in 50/50, the indie comedy about getting cancer, but uninteresting). Here, is an awareness charm here that makes him interesting. He talks like he has no idea of what he is doing and his body language is incredibly defensive.

(500) Days of Summer was released in a sea of independent dramedies featuring urbane, lonely millennials. I have strong reservations against those kind of movies, as the acting is often stilted, the writing and direction is aesthetically uninteresting and it paves a way for low artistic ambitions by relying too heavily on nebbish awkwardness. But compared to Garden State and Elizabethtown, (500) Days Of Summer does a better job in its intentions. It has a standout colour scheme and the soundtrack - which includes Regina Spektor, The Smiths, The Temper Trap and… Patrick Swayze? - is well-timed and more listenable. But it pales in comparison with the likes of Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, both of which are interested in exploring human relationships and its nuances, and more critically, they’re stylistically punchy. (500) Days of Summer, in spite of its non-linear narrative, and its hidden layers of (one) meaning, feels very basic.   

It isn’t enough to justify every intent behind the film without evaluating its execution. Both Tom and Summer remain two-dimensional characters and are unlikeable due to their impulse. It is littered with many tropes Webb and Webber try to subvert; instead, it reinforces the genre’s status quo, whether it’s Tom’s guy friends who give him the vapid advice. (500) Days of Summer is described by screenwriter Scott Neustadter as a revenge movie, and has said that Summer was based on a woman he once dated, (in the opening sequence with calling Jenny Beckman a “bitch,”). If that’s the case, then it undermines the fact that it should be a cautionary tale that you shouldn’t fall in love with the “idea” of a person. 

The ending, which sees Tom finding work in architecture, after reuniting with Summer briefly cements how frustrating it is to watch the film, as it covers its problems like a rug hiding an uncleanable stain on the floor. He meets a woman who is competing for a position and her name turns out to be Autumn, with Tom breaking the fourth wall with a self-satisfied smile on her face. Then the days counter reset. Either the character or the screenwriters have learned nothing from their experiences, or are taking away the wrong lessons. Not that you need to be a fully realized person to earn love (I’ve known some who weren’t at that stage before they found the one), but he may still love the idea of a person and then get disappointed, and the whole cycle repeats itself. 

Ultimately, it’s the story of a particular thirty-year old boy, rather than the person writing this retrospective. I’ll admit that, for as annoying the film can get and how it ends up missing the mark numerous times, I still find some value for this film. Young men are seen as unambitious, unloved and short-sighted for as long as time exists. I see myself in them, the same way I see myself in Tom. (500) Days of Summer is not the first nor last film to challenge tired cliches associated with the romantic comedy genre. They don’t need to be romantic, nor comedic and this one doesn’t embody those feelings with open arms. But they do need to be honest about itself and Webb and co are as honest as it gets. And maybe, that’s all it has to do. 

Major Spoilers for The Bear, up to Season 3 (as well as The Sopranos)

One of Roger Ebert’s most famous quotes is that “It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.” Meaning that regardless of how cliched a story becomes or whether it overuses a trope, critics should approach their review not with what it’s front of them, but by examining its subtleties and nuances used to express their ideas. I cannot find the original source for this line, but there’s a variation of it in a blog post, when he wrote a response to a feedback about a Hillary Clinton documentary in 2008. Still, this is perhaps the most fair approach any commentator should take into consideration.  

I’ve been thinking about this, after I have caught up with FX/Hulu’s The Bear, a show in which Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) returns to Chicago to revamp his late brother’s sandwich shop and transform it into a Michelin-starred restaurant. Carmy face a lot of challenges, from the burden of his brother’s debt to the lack of discipline in his staff, which includes the hotheaded Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), the promising talent of Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), the likable Marcus (Lionel Boyce) and the ferocity of Tina and Sugar. 

For its depiction of a dysfunctional kitchen, The Bear has received a lot of acclaim. On a technical level, it’s a monumental achievement; the show brings quick cuts and jaw-dropping needle drops to precise and intense effect. In terms of themes, the sense of a man returning back to his home and restoring greatness, in an effort to maintain his family’s legacy is incredibly simple, traditional and uncomplicated. For Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo, the goal is to break much of the storytelling boundaries associated with the genres it presumed to be. For them, it’s not just a show about a kitchen, but Carmy becoming the greatest chef he can be. And then there is his trauma.  

What’s particularly new, however, is the intense aesthetic. Much of this is perceived by Carmy's emotional weaknesses, shaped by his bleak experiences working in Michelin star restaurants, when he copped a lot of abuse from his boss David Fields (Joel McHale), as well as escaping his manic family. “Stressful” and “intense” are terms often uttered in reviews of the show, with the final comment reflecting on the cutthroat nature of the service industries. Everybody screams at each other, there are many extreme closeups and wide angles that look like something out of a Cassavetes film. For this, it pretty much becomes a stand-in for the show’s depth. 

The Bear is in its third season, and the response has not been as ecstatic as the previous two. The criticism is pretty much exactly the kind of review that Carmy expected to receive once the restaurant had opened. The blunt of it is that almost none of the episodes drive the plot forward, the characters remain underdeveloped and that there are so many celebrity cameos it detract from the authenticity of the series. If the first season was supposed to show Carmy’s growth as a chef, then the second season was supposed to show the growth of the restaurant as well. So what was the third season all about?

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I held some of these reservations all the way from its first season. As the show received rave reviews, it seems like some reviews overlook any signs of an incoherent identity. Much of the focus is on Carmy and his effort to maintain whatever’s left of the restaurant and build it from scratch. In effect, while this does make for some energetic television and great character moments, the narrative is rather shallow. Hints of any clashes between visions (Carmy’s elitist fine dining vs Ritchie’s localism) are only here and there, and there is so much technical momentum the show could have, before wondering what exactly has any of these characters learned after a series of moments where things could’ve got worse. 

The second season managed to keep these problems to a minimum, delivering a rather humanist batch of episodes. The highest highs of the show have been episodes centered on the development of the characters. Marcus is sent to Copenhagen and works with Carmy’s former colleague Luca, while Ritchie is assigned to a prestigious restaurant owned by Andrea Terry, so he learns what good service looks like. The men learn a lot from their experiences; Ritchie finally possesses some self-respect, whereas Marcus’s passion for pastry increases. But they’re finally able to respect Carmy and his approach. This season has only one episode like this and it’s on line chef Tina. While it doesn’t push the plot forward, it manages to show the hopelessness of searching for a job, allowing her to be a more complex character. But the greatest quality that each of these episodes share is showing the detail of its setting and character, while mixing it seamlessly. Separate it from the context of the show, it is a masterpiece in efficient storytelling. 

Still, that Season revealed some newer issues. Carmy’s romance with Claire (Molly Gordon), is underutilized, and she’s less of a character than a thin narrative device to delve into his psyche. Season Three does not return to this plot until its end, where the Fak brothers interrupt her shift at the hospital to remind her of Carmy. Too little, too late. 

More prominent in the show are the celebrity guest stars. They are not the problem, so long as the performances are on point with the rest of the cast. Olivia Colman and Will Poulter play Terry and Luca, bringing some of the show’s most wistful moments and its highest points. But it can be its most middling issue and no episode demonstrates how distracting they are than in Fishes, where we meet the Berzattos, consisting of Sarah Paulson, John Mulvaney and Bob Odenkirk who are part of the family. They’re not as good as Jeremy Allen White or Colman and Poulter. More critically has been Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays Carmy’s anxious mother Donna and she is overperforming to a fault (add to the mix is Bradley Cooper playing a character in his forgotten relic Burnt). Thankfully, she dialed it down in the Season Three episode Ice Chips in which she consoles Sugar, her daughter and Carmy’s brother, as she goes into labor. 

The hollowness of identity is the metatextual focus for The Bear’s recent season. It premiered with an episode that is an entire montage of Carmy’s life, following the events from the Season 2 finale and jumping from his beginnings as a cook, his departure from his family to move to New York and up his brother’s death. This is curated by an instrumental from Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts albums. Depending on who you're talking to, it’s either a filler or a bold move. Personally, I believe in the latter. But then the structure of each episode changes. The one after that is a bottle episode, with Carmy discussing non-negotiables with the staff. Then, there’s the brutality of the kitchen as The Bear sees perfection, and midway through the season, we finally get the character centered episode that everybody likes. The rest is saturated with diverging storylines, with important information hinted at, but being put in the background while lower stakes dominate the foreground. Any scene with the Faks has been filler and I’m inclined to believe that Storer and company wants to make things light hearted to emphasize the comedy in the comedy-drama. 

Much of the rapid paced editing tends to remind the viewer of previous plot points, not push it forward. Until the very end, where Carmy finally reads the very important review from the Chicago Tribune. Will this make or break him? That’s the question only the show weighs in only at the beginning and the end of the season. 

The Bear is interested in exploring the roots of Carmy’s trauma further that he risks becoming unlikeable and uninteresting. But he is too tormented to be the tortured artist and too rigid to feel change. There’s one scene, however, where he reunites with his old boss David Fields, and from any perspective, it makes him a victim of the cutthroat nature of fine dining, or a feature. Either way, with Jeremy Allen White’s incredible performance, it manages to humanize Carmy and adds a new layer to his personal woes. That is, that he cannot have the confidence to control things, if he doesn’t recognise that the people around him still support his vision.  

Storer and co have convinced themselves that they can forgo any traditional storytelling and they do it to a fault in Season 3. The fact that Season 3 is a stepping stone to Four, which would be the back half of an extended season gives me less hope. The Sopranos had a similar issue where the front half of season 6 is not as intense and direct as the second half. Most, if not, all of the episodes don’t lead to a particular momentum. But what it has, in contrast with The Bear, are the subtleties of character development. Tony becomes an irredeemable asshole, but there was a chance that he becomes redeemable in the first half. It enables the viewer to feel the creative possibilities of the character, but also the show itself. 

If Season Four was the final season, as Ebon Moss-Bachrach predicts in an interview, it will need to pay off in a grand way that serves Carmy and everybody else better. We know enough of these characters, their strengths and struggles, that we ultimately want them to prevail. But there’s limited mileage you can get from detailing their neuroses, when the narrative is rather finite and not a lot to grab out of that. Let’s not hope it becomes a mediocrity.  

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