It’s September, or as it’s known around these parts, Wedding Month (Sarah would tell you that it also, mercifully, puts an end to Fantasy Football Draft Prep Month). While I’ve been busy cranking out mock drafts, it seems like the media machine has been a little slow. Maybe everyone is on summer vacation? Sports, movies, TV shows, there haven’t been a lot of buzzy items recently—but as we know, football is right around the corner.

Still, we have enough content out there to make a strong set of “conversation starters,” my weekly roundup of the best, most interesting and most entertaining content on the internet. Hopefully you can read and watch them and get out there to make some great small talk this week. Enjoy!

What’s the coolest story or thing you found on the internet this week? Reply to this email and shoot me a link. Would love to hear from you!

• I had a pair of tennis business stories leading into this week’s U.S. Open. The first is on Filipina tennis sensation Alex Eala (seemingly every outlet wrote about her this week)—I asked her how she’s navigating the pressure of being a national hero, and got her business team to explain how they’re turning her newfound fame into big money.
  

  • Sidenote: My YouTube interview with Eala is close to 400,000 views! Those fans from the Philippines showed up!!

• My other tennis story was a personal highlight, because it was about former World No. 1 and the last American man to win a Grand Slam, Andy Roddick. As a kid, he was one of my sports heroes, so pretty cool to interview him and talk about how Roddick has reemerged into the tennis spotlight with a popular podcast, an ESPN analyst job, and a starring role in a pickleball movie.

• Headlines That Require No Context: Army unit offers re-enlisting soldiers four-day pass to play ‘Grand Theft Auto VI’

• A 37-year-old woman in Brazil pretended to be 12 years old and was adopted by a family—now she’s on trial for “emotionally kidnapping” them.

• If studies show that 20% of people end up with 95% of mosquito bites, why are bugs attracted to some people and not others? The answer, according to this YouTube explainer, is simple yet irreversible.

• I really like these magazine-like videos on YouTube that the Wall Street Journal are doing—great reporting mixed with solid production. This one is on that giant, science-fiction-like city in Saudia Arabia that was going to be like a giant wall across the desert…remember that? Surprise, surprise, the project collapsed. And this gives all the juicy details why.

• I can always count on my guy Dan Toomey to ask the tough questions in tech, like “are smart glasses just for perverts?” It’s a great primer for someone who has checked out from this emerging wearable tech space, though I’m less surprised or scandalized to learn that my privacy is being invaded.

Thanks for reading and sharing! On Friday we’re talking Coyote vs. ACME and The Dog Stars and you’re never going to guess which one I liked more. A lot more! Talk to you then.

Hey movie lovers!

This week: A new Jason Statham movie that’s cut-and-paste from the last. A new Netflix sports documentary that’s cut-and-paste from the last. An old Denzel movie that’s cut-and-paste from that famous online meme (and the one Spider-Man literally cut-and-paste from!). And in this week’s “Trailer Watch,” a potential Best Picture contender standing in the way of The Odyssey juggernaut.

Mutiny

The blessing of the new Jason Statham movie is also its curse—we know exactly what to expect, and that’s exactly what we get. Statham plays a blue collar guy (a “working man,” you might say) who gets mistakenly thrust into the heart of a criminal enterprise where the bad guys find out he’s ex-special forces (surprise!) and he’s murders them all. It’s like a mad lib at this point, all you have to do is swap in a new job (chauffeur), setting (a cargo ship) and the weapon used for the final kill (a harpoon gun!).

It’s emblematic to me about what’s happened to movies over the past 10-15 years. Every filmmaker—and let’s be honest, more importantly, every film financier—has embraced the copy-of-a-copy version of past successes, happy to make something 80% as good as before as long as it captures 81% of the value.

And for a long time, it was hard to truly lose that way. Think about the ever-expanding MCU, and even more so the DCEU that “rivaled” it. Think about the last two or three Fast & Furious movies, the latest Bad Boys or Ghostbusters, or all the legacy sequel reboots like The Running Man or Twisters. Even their biggest fans wouldn’t argue that the new installments are near as good as the old—but they came out for them, they made good money, and the gears kept turning.

Only recently does it feel like this has started to shift. Reheats like Moana, Star Wars and Supergirl all flopped this year, while Obsession and Project Hail Mary soared. And I promise you, this is not another movie fan pleading for Hollywood to make more original movies and less franchises and remakes! This year’s highest-grossers are mostly those.

But even those movies like Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Toy Story 5 created some new, fresh justification for their existence. They took the torch from wherever it was left off and they advanced it forward in some meaningful way.

My point is this, and I know it’s an aspirational one: we may be reaching the end of the era of “good enough” cinema.

Let’s return to the example of Statham. The Beekeeper was a big hit in 2024, and though it was a familiar setup for Statham, it really played into its campy extremity and sold audiences on how unhinged it was. Then Working Man, Shelter and now Mutiny skate on that reputation without bringing anything new to it.

Seeing Statham shoot some guys, stab some guys, and punch some others just wasn’t doing it for me as much anymore. Frankly, I’m not sure audiences take Statham seriously enough anymore for a mission that’s more Captain Phillips than The Meg.

There was a single moment that captured the energy and imagination that this movie called for, and it’s when Statham has the aforementioned harpoon gun. It’s so big and ridiculous looking that as soon as he picks it up, the audience in my screaming starts laughing. He holds it up point blank on the main bad guy and they literally started whooping. Then he blows him into oblivion, and it was full-on applause and cheering. It was a big, bold, kind of ridiculous choice, and it worked.

The rest of the movie felt like a slightly more elevated version of the straight-to-streaming micro-indies starring the likes of Liam Neeson or Samuel L. Jackson (I mention those names because they each have a new one of these out this month), which are by their very design meant to squeeze out enough dollars from a familiar appeal to put make everyone whole, and that’s about it.

This one has slightly better stunts, better dialogue, better acting performances. Statham still kicks ass and saves the day.

It’s “good enough,” but as the disappointing opening week box office seems to prove, that finally feels like it’s not enough.

Something New

Untold: The Testimony Of Vince Young (Netflix): If there’s one thing the “Untold” series has proven to be extremely good at, it’s cutting trailers. Their hype machine seems to be some combination of nostalgia + true crime + great trailer to get us pumped for these documentaries on sports stars from 10 years ago like Johnny Manziel, Manti Te’o or Lamar Odom.

But rarely has the full doc ever lived up to the expectation—especially this new release about former Texas football star Vince Young—for all the obvious reasons. First, the athlete is heavily involved as a producer, so forget about any objectivity, and when it all gets laid out there, it’s not really a very compelling story. A promising draft pick feuded with his head coach and washed out of the league? That’s a story we’ve heard dozens of times by now.

The one thing that this doc did do was the reinforce that the 2006 Rose Bowl was the greatest college football game of all time. By today’s NIL, transfer-happy standards, it feels literally too good to be true. USC was two-time defending national champions with TWO Heisman trophy winners (who came back for their senior seasons!) against a presumptive top five pick in Young who won the Rose Bowl the previous year and also returned to school. There was the storyline of Young getting revenge for not winning the Heisman, Texas returning to the mountaintop, USC trying to become the greatest dynasty in the sport’s history, and somehow the actual game itself was as good as the drama, coming down to a single decisive play from the biggest star. Sports has maybe never been better.

(Quick fun side story: I was 10 years old when that game was played, and my parents made me turn the game off at halftime because it was past my bedtime. The next day at school, all the kids kept talking about how it was the greatest game ever, and what did I think of it? Given that I was a huge sports fan and definitely not a little kid who had to go to bed at 10 p.m., I couldn’t fess up to having missed it, so I lied and said I watched it and it was awesome.)

Something Old

Fallen (1998, Netflix): It’s wild to organically come across a clip in a movie that you’ve only ever seen online—that super famous Denzel Washington relieved meme. I had no idea that was from this movie when I queue’d it up this week with my friends Justin and Hank, we just thought it had a great cast (Denzel, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini). Amazingly, that wasn’t even the biggest revelation. Turns out this was the very literal inspiration for this year’s biggest movie, Spider-Man: Brand New Day. You know how the villain’s power can supernaturally pass from person to person? Yep, that concept came from this movie (that’s kind of a spoiler, sorry, but if you’ve seen Spider-Man this year it’s pretty obvious from the very first time you see it).

Those realizations spice up what is otherwise a really conventional 1990s detective movie, other than its surprisingly fatalistic ending (which I won’t spoil!). Every component part of it has probably been improved upon in the movies that came after it, but those iterations didn’t have a prize Denzel strutting around and flashing that thousand-watt smile.

Something To Stream

Eternity (AppleTV): Boy do the studios love a hook-y high concept for a movie. And, apparently, so does Callum Turner, because the last movie he made before One Night Only was this one alongside Miles Teller as two ends of a love triangle with Elizabeth Olsen…in the afterlife…sort of? The concept is so confusing the movie jokes about it explicitly. They’re in some liminal holding area between life on earth and eternal life, but they have to choose which afterlife they want, and they can only pick once for some reason, even though they can go back, they just get in trouble? Don’t think about it too much!!

The irony is that the best things about this movie exist on the margins, like the broad comedy of John Early and Da’Vine Joy Randolph or the more subtle joke-writing (the Korean war stuff got me), which help to string along the melodrama plot. Metaphorically speaking, I’m not sure hanging a bunch of great ornaments on a haggard pine makes for a great Christmas tree here, but it is a shiny distraction.

Trailer Watch: Fjord

You’re telling me the only thing standing in the way of another Chris Nolan sweep at the Oscars is a Nordic movie about child abuse? It looks that way, but then again, nearly everything Renate Reinsve touches turns to nominations, and it took me a full minute into this trailer to say, “Wait…is that Sebastian Stan??” He’s long overdue to receive his flowers. All the film festival bros say this movie is great, and I have little reason to doubt it at this point. It’ll be one of the event movies of the fall for cinephiles.

Hey movie lovers!

This week: A dinosaur movie that’s trying to be average, and succeeds. Then, a female-led serial killer show, my favorite movie set in Chicago and a Jason Statham classic. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” the darling of Cannes is setting itself up for an awards run.

The End Of Oak Street

Whenever you go to buy movie tickets to a major studio summer drama in 2026, and you see a 96-minute runtime, there should be alarm bells going off in your head.

An hour-and-a-half, for a dinosaur movie starring Anne Hathaway? Writer/director David Robert Mitchell’s last movie was the 2-hour-20-minute meandering mystery Under The Silver Lake, a kind of cult classic for its vague and almost abstract references to conspiracy, power and paranoia but ultimately a movie where not very much happens. Something ain’t right.

Bits and pieces of online reporting seem to confirm some major reworking of the movie, both in its script just before filming (from March to July of 2024!) and in post-production. That’s not automatically a bad thing (everyone could use a good editor, TRUST ME), but it does at least suggest multiple cooks in the kitchen of this movie, which was exactly how I felt walking out of the theater before I even looked up the production timeline specifics.

The End Of Oak Street is a movie that hints at multiple interesting narrative and thematic threads, then casts each of them to the wayside in favor of a pretty smooth-brained adventure story about a neighborhood that gets mysteriously and magically transported into pre-historic times. If ‘man vs. dinosaur’ sounds like a familiar movie premise, you’re on the right track, as the 1982 period setting provides an aesthetic that is so Steven Spielberg cosplay it almost has to be intentionally and absurdly referential—right down to the divorcing parents (Hathaway and Ewan McGregor), children in peril, and backlit tracking shots.

Figuring out when and how much you’re allowed to laugh at the movie is a constant question. On one hand, the dinosaurs basically treat the displaced neighborhood like their own personal snack bowl, ransacking the houses and eating all the people and pets in pretty gruesome and graphic ways. A pretty high percentage of the runtime is spent running from or fighting against these CGI beasts, usually to bloody ends.

But the setups and payoffs in the movie have such theatrical flair, and the acting performances are all played so big and broad that the movie almost serves as campy comedy for the film literate (and you all know how much I love ironic detachment in my movies…).

I have to imagine that somewhere in the many iterations of this movie, there was a 2.5-hour version that explored the hollow promise of the American suburb, or examined the crumbling family unit and Hathaway’s desire for independence, or drew out the possible Covid metaphor of boarding yourself in your house while beasts tear the world apart outside your doors.

And I want to be clear…I have no idea whether that version would be good. Maybe it would’ve sucked! But it’s almost worse that the movie chickened out from trying, and was content to just be, at best, a three-star enjoyable but forgettable romp. Without pointing any fingers, it sure felt while watching it like something JJ Abrams would do—his company, Bad Robot, produced this movie for Warner Bros.

I’ll give you at least one confirmed example. Without spoiling anything (we never do in this newsletter!), this movie does feature probably the most shocking plot twist in any movie I’ve seen this year. My jaw was seriously wide open for 1-2 minutes. The filmmakers deserve major credit for pulling the twist off, it’s the best thing in the movie by far. But then they committed one of my cardinal sins—”The Chewbacca Problem”—reversing the consequences of the plot twist to have a happy ending.

(For those who have seen the movie or don’t mind spoilers, here’s Hathaway stating explicitly that when she signed onto the movie, that twist wasn’t reversed, then it changed just before production. The article also shows how the ending of the movie was sanitized to tie up in a nice bow.)

Hathaway’s central performance alone can probably sustain most viewers through the movie’s scant runtime, and perhaps the mere presence of dinosaurs will be able to muscle this movie to hit status (there are eight Jurassic movies that have proven that point before). But I’m disappointed both by what the movie is, and what it could’ve been.

Something New

Furious (Hulu): I’m usually so game for a gritty detective story but this female-written and female-led story about an FBI agent tracking down a serial killer taking revenge on her former sexual abusers was just a tad too dark for me. It’s really expertly written and so lived in, with great performances from Emily Rossum and Lola Pettigrew in the leads (and we know Scoot McNairy always delivers), but something about sex crimes just makes me sad watching it. I’m tapping out after two episodes, but if you’ve got a stronger constitution than me, this is a very very good show.

Something Old

My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997): Ok so Sarah is coming with me to a wedding in Chicago, and she’s never really seen the city, so I needed a movie that would get her excited to visit. What movie would you have chosen? Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Blues Brothers are the classics, and you do see plenty of the city in The Untouchables and High Fidelity (About Last Night is too wild), but the movie that always makes me want to be in Chicago in summertime is My Best Friend’s Wedding, which may well be my favorite of those classic 1990s rom-coms.

The thing that struck me on this rewatch is how the movie could’ve really only worked with Julia Roberts at the center of it. Her protagonist is pretty clearly the villain of the movie, and repeatedly makes the kinds of poor decisions that are difficult to forgive (as a viewer!), but then she flashes that smile and puts on that charm and your heart just melts.

All of the 2026 rom-coms we’ve talked about in this newsletter have treated the rom-com tropes—everything from the meet cute to the sprinting towards each other at the end—as basically biblical mandate, things you HAVE to do. This movie has almost none of them, and yet still feels perfectly positioned in the rom-com canon. Though to be fair, the one trope this movie does uphold (the gay best friend) is the best part of the whole movie. “Love the bag, love the shoes, love absolutely everything.”

Something To Stream

The Bank Job (PLEX): There’s yet another one of those Jason Statham shoot-em-up movies coming out this weekend (Mutiny), and though this one doesn’t have the sticker irony of The Beekeeper or A Working Man, something tells me he’s going to be an over-the-hill killer who gets dragged into one last job to save some innocent person. They’re fine, we all enjoy them, but if you go back through his career, the best Statham movies are the ones where he’s playing someone who’s a little less heroic, like in Snatch or Lock, Stock or Wrath of Man, and in the case of this 2008 crime thriller, a bank robber.

It’s the same fast-paced action, same voice, same demeanor we love (and this time with hair!!), but this movie is way smarter than Statham’s more recent fare, putting the stratification of the British hierarchy from the criminal underworld up to the aristocracy into play after a big heist goes bad. It’s stylish and fun in that old Guy Ritchie sort of way (even though he wasn’t involved in this one), and if you’re looking to scratch that Statham itch I think this is the one you’re looking for.

Trailer Watch: Club Kid

There are a couple of movies every year that pop up without some major marketing push or hype cycle and just stun people into paying attention. After this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it felt like the only movie people were talking about was Club Kid, written and directed by Jordan Firstman (yes, as in the 4th lead from “I Love LA”). It could be its provocative premise—about a gay man who goes out every night discovering he has a 10-year-old son who is coming to live with him—or it could be the authenticity of a younger filmmaking voice, but the most believable reason why this movie is now among the most anticipated of the fall is because it’s really good. I expect to hear a lot more about it as awards season ramps up.

Hope your week is off to a great start. I’m elbow deep in fantasy football prep, trying to maintain a semblance of normal life around it. The lack of sports and new movies coming out has left me time to do some reading, not just books but also some longer articles, which made the cut in this week’s “conversation starters,” my roundup of the best, most interesting and most entertaining content on the internet. Without meaning to, I stumbled into what makes a good celebrity profile. Enjoy!

What’s the coolest story or thing you found on the internet this week? Reply to this email and shoot me a link. Would love to hear from you!

• NetInfluencer.com interviewed me about why Forbes decided to cover the podcast industry, how my highest-paid podcasters list came together, and where the industry might be headed next. Some of it may look familiar to those who read my Substack on the process, but always a treat to be on the other end of the interview.

• I’m embarrassed to say I was a few weeks late to this utterly fantastic Johnny Knoxville profile in the New Yorker by Molly Young. I love when a celebrity profile actually gets to the heart of why someone’s appeal and motivation, and this did so much to explain how the cast members of Jackass can make a career from destroying themselves.

  • By way of counterpoint, there’s this week’s buzzy Brad Pitt profile in Esquire (because Pitt admitted to “hopping off the wagon” after seven years sober). It pretty much transcribes everything he says with breathless veneration and doesn’t leave the journalist to make any sense of it. What a waste!

• My fiancé Sarah isn’t on social media, but she uploads to Strava religiously (including non-running related photos). But the most creative use of the workout-tracking app is this guy in the Netherlands that rigged his hamster’s wheel to measure distance and speed, then upload to Strava. Turns out, they run far! Six miles one night, four miles the next. So what’s your excuse?!

• The FAA is addressing its shortage of air traffic controllers by hiring 2,000 young video gamers. Seriously. The jokes write themselves. And mom said all the time playing Call of Duty as a kid would never amount to anything!!

• The top editor at Forbes got fired for receiving a secret $6 million payment from an editorial partner. Huh…interesting.

• The University of Michigan announced it will stop releasing official grades for its first-semester freshmen to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding.” It certainly won’t curb the entitlement epidemic (sorry, I know that’s overly cold…but, come on).

• A local TV crew in Miami ran a story about an elderly woman who was enraged to find that her new license plate read “SQZ A55.” But as the clip goes on, it’s quite apparent the woman secretly loves it.

Thanks for reading and sharing! A rather uninspiring crop of movies this week, including The End of Oak Street, but as you all know…I do my best work when the knives come out! Talk to you then.

Hey movie lovers!

This week: How to tell a story about a mythological figure (no, not the trojan horse one…). Plus, the latest attempt to revive big, dumb studio rom-coms, a Paul Newman noir I’d never seen, and a twisty little action movie starring Samara Weaving. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Ben Affleck is back in the director’s chair.

Tony

Anthony Bourdain is nothing less than a mythical figure for a subset of the population, a kind of patron saint for adventurers, outcasts and loners. Nobody mythologized him better than he did himself, but since his premature death in 2018, many people have tried to cash in on that fandom with documentaries, books and scrawlings of out of context quotes on the walls of restaurants. It’s a thorny subject matter, full of complexity and contradiction that both fuels the ongoing interest and makes it impossible to confine within the borders of a single project.

Wisely, writer/director Matt Johnson doesn’t try to do so. While it’s true that he’s capitalizing on Bourdain’s infamy as a kind of IP, he decided to tell this big story through a very small lens, focusing on a single summer when a 19-year-old Bourdain trekked up to Cape Cod to chase a girl and ended up working in a kitchen for the first time.

This is meant to be his “rosebud”—I’m sure Bourdain would appreciate the comp to Charles Foster Kane—a skeleton key to the drugs, food, adventure and friendships that would come later in his life. But it’s also just a classic coming-of-age movie that could be appreciated by anyone who doesn’t know Tony is anyone other than a skinny punk who needs to mature.

Anyone who doubted that Johnson could pull off this kind of movie, because of its stylistic difference from his other movie this year, Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie (a top fiver of 2026 for me), clearly has never seen Blackberry (or been to Waterloo, where the vampires hang out). No, it’s not in that mockumentary style, but it does maintain that gritty verisimilitude that places you as a viewer inside this subculture of a 1975 Cape Cod restaurant. The kitchen can be an intense place (as “The Bear” taught us), and in this rendering it’s very legible as a crucible in Tony’s life.

The 1975-ness is helped immensely by the casting of Dominic Sessa, who in addition to being an undeniable star just looks straight out of a bygone era (played to great effect in The Holdovers). He doesn’t really look like Bourdain, but the sideburns and long curly hair play so naturally on him that nobody is questioning the authenticity. The same goes for Emilia Jones (of CODA fame) who similarly has that retro cool that can’t really be taught.

It’s hard to keep crediting performances, like the other chefs played by Stavros Halkias, Leo Woodall (on pace to be the coolest mf of 2026 after Tuner), and above all the unbelievably charismatic Antonio Banderas, without eventually coming back to Johnson, a guy who seems to have the filmmaking confidence of a Nolan or Villeneuve without any of the appetite for spectacle, instead training that attention to detail onto small human moments that reveal character and keep deepening the impact of the story.

Tony is in the tradition of those high school ‘trying to get the girl’ movies, but the romance is only one of several objects that the titular character’s pinball keeps bouncing off of and falling past, as he continually tries to figure out how he should define his own identity. That search really never stopped for the real-life Bourdain, taking him to the farthest corners of the world on his travel shows, and I’m not sure he ever really solved it during his lifetime. That’s why people love him, and why people will love this movie.

Something New

One Night Only (Theaters): I’m sure the elevator pitch of “The Purge…but…sex” probably killed in studio conference rooms, but try to sell the concept of this movie to the average moviegoer. So, uh, premarital sex is banned in the U.S. (huh? how did that happen) except for one night a year (what? why?). If you can somehow buy into that, try to picture this: On that one night a year, two of the absolute hottest people on the planet (Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro) can’t find anyone to have sex with, no matter how hard they try.

I mean, rom-coms have had absurd premises before—While You Were Sleeping, The Switch, and who can forget Hot Frosty—but you’d be hard pressed to find one that falls apart as quickly as this upon even the slightest examination. The ample charms of Turner and Barbaro are nearly enough to convince you not to, however, as they bop around in an all-in-one-night…dare I say it…odyssey across New York City, just so happening to cross paths over and over again before realizing, wait, are we not both insanely good looking and should hook up? Spoiler alert: they still decide the answer to that is no, a moment that drew audible—in fact, very loud—objection from my audience. “Oh come on!!!”

While that reaction points to the foundational flaw of the movie, it also reinforces what it does right, which is having a ton of fun. Dotting those adventures are a ton of fun celebrity cameos and the kind of “going for it” broad comedy moments that I respect, and in several cases laughed out loud at.

Part of me wonders whether any paint-by-numbers rom-com in 2026, with the meet cute and the break-up and the final scene running through the streets back to a reunion and a final kiss, could impress viewers who have seen dozens over the past couple of decades. As much as I really believe in Barbaro as a rising star, how can she compete with Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock??

Something Old

The Drowning Pool (1975): Technically true, classic “film noir” can only be found in that high contrast black-and-white from the golden age of the 1940s and 50s—everything after that is considered “neo-noir”—but I’m not sure I’ve seen any movie that fulfills every single trope and story beat of a noir story more faithfully than this mid-70s entry starring Paul Newman as private investigator Lew Harper (the other being 1966’s Harper) who drops into New Orleans and finds a web of corruption there. The overlapping narrative threads, to the point of convoluted confusion, is part of the charm of the genre, especially when our detective unwinds them all with an explanation at the end. There’s a femme fatale, a dirty cop, a rich heiress, and basically every other archetype you would expect to see in one of these stories.

Newman is an interesting choice for a noir antihero. He was a functioning alcoholic (check), but he has an irrepressible inner joy and mischief that shines through what’s supposed to be Harper’s world-weary cynic. He may not be the best fit, and yet his sheer magnetism is probably what makes this movie so watchable so many years later. He’s funny, charming, and the kind of audience surrogate into a colorful subculture that makes us want to follow the rabbit hole all the way down. If I had to introduce or explain film noir to people in the future, this may be the movie I show them.

Something To Stream

Over Your Dead Body ($VOD): Most movies have one narrative turn, which we might call a premise. Our characters are going along in life in one direction, something happens, and then they’re suddenly thrust off onto another more exciting path. Others have two narrative turns, the so-called “plot twist,” where savvy moviegoers might predict the arc of the movie and then bam, a reversal surprises and inverts the action. Over Your Dead Body has…wait for it…FOUR narrative turns. I can’t spoil them all here, but let’s just say that the premise of a man who takes his wife on a weekend getaway with the secret plan to kill her only covers about the first 15 minutes of what you’re going to see.

Apparently, Samara Weaving hasn’t fully escaped her “final girl” typecasting just yet, but at least this movie does give her the opportunity for some comedy and some romance before it (like every other movie she’s in) splatters her face with blood. She’s a bit of an odd pair with Jason Segal, and I wouldn’t say they have electric chemistry, but maybe that’s the point since their characters hate each other, and each performer draws plenty of empathy individually.

As you can guess, the plotting is too cute for itself and doesn’t give any room for satisfying character depth—but I’ll be honest, I thought this movie was a rollicking good time. It’s got a kind of tongue in cheek tone that lightens its zaniness and there’s constant action to keep us entertained. And the kicker cameo joke at the end? Hilarious! I really really enjoyed it.

Trailer Watch: Animals

Why oh why did The Big Red Machine pay nearly $600 million to buy Ben Affleck’s AI company? It does what, exactly? Surely the deal couldn’t have been a pot sweetener for Affleck to continue making movies for the streamer, both in front of and behind the camera. No, couldn’t be.

Yet for all the schadenfreude that Affleck gets, the guy has a pretty great track record as a director (Gone Baby Gone, The Town, Argo). His sensibilities are that middle brow popcorn flick for adults that we love around here, and in this later stage of his career as an actor he’s gotten quite good at playing the sin-eater, which he appears to be here. I’d be surprised if this movie wasn’t at least above average.

Ah the doldrums of August. It’s hot, and nobody feels like working. But it’s not stopping me from putting together another edition of “conversation starters,” a roundup of the best, most interesting and most entertaining content on the internet. Take some time to clean up your media diet this week!

What’s the coolest story or thing you found on the internet this week? Reply to this email and shoot me a link. Would love to hear from you!

• I’m as confused as you to find out that scientists apparently discovered a new color? How does that even work?? Especially when they tell us, ehem, that printers can’t print it and photographs can’t show it. But the search for this “Olo” covered in The New Yorker is a fascinating story, and our Long Read of the Week.

• A restaurant in Florida (where else) hosts a monthly nude dining experience—$250 for men, $150 for women, complete with a champagne toast, filet mignon and lobster tail. The owner literally says that people are there for the good food.

• All you Neanderthals are still on AI? Pshhh. That’s so last year. One OpenAI employee quit her job to “build telepathy” at a start-up developing “thought-to-text” models trained on “non-invasive neural data.”

• The very best storytelling I found this week came in the form of a girl with a guitar doing a rap about a hook up gone bad. It’s captivating, funny, and super impressive.

• For some reason, the internet was shocked to find out that the inside of NBA star LaMelo Ball’s apartment in Charlotte was decorated like a vape shop crossed with a Chuck E. Cheese, complete with galaxy countertops, an illuminated Kaws-style figure with its pants pulled down and $10,000 encased in a glass frame with the words, “in case of emergency break glass.”

• A plane over Florida suddenly and mysteriously plunged into a five-second free fall, but investigators ruled out faulty technology or human error. So what happened? A one-in-a-bajillion coincidence so hard to believe that I may not have believed New York Mag’s story about it until they reported that Jet Blue only offered a reimbursement of expenses and a $300 travel credit. That tracks.

• Dispatches From Our K-Shaped Economy: more restrictions on the cheapest airline tickets and an exclusive school in England that trains elite nannies for the wealthiest clients.

• An entire small town in Canada has had a foul stench for 20 years, never able to get the funding to clear out an abandoned fish sauce factory. Can you imagine the smell of fish sauce that has been fermenting for 20 years?!? I can’t imagine how or why anyone still lives there.

Thanks for reading and sharing! We’re talking One Night Only and Tony in Friday’s movie edition…stay tuned!

Hey movie lovers!

This week: In one of the great upsets of the year, I actually liked the latest big Marvel movie. Hell hath frozen over! Let me explain. Then in this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Pattinson is going super weird…is anyone surprised?

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Anyone who has read this newsletter for any length of time is by now quite familiar with my thoughts on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For the past decade, these MCU offerings have been, at best, not my favorite flavor, and at worst an insult to the very term “movies” (which is why I call them BCEs, or Branded Content Experiences, a far better descriptor). It’s fair to say that I’ve demonized Marvel as a symbol of all that’s wrong with blockbuster filmmaking, checking back in whenever a movie breaks through or someone convinces me “this time is different!” Inevitably, I’m disappointed over and over and over and over and over again.

Few readers ever believe me when I say that stance has never meant I reject all superhero movies sight-unseen. The Spider-Verse movies have been among my favorites in the year they’re released; the HBO series “Watchmen” was one of my favorite TV shows ever; Logan was undeniable; and that’s before we get into more oblique entries like Chronicle and Unbreakable.

But to be fair, all of those are a half-step removed from the core MCU experience. To think I would enjoy Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the fourth movie in the franchise that is now the literal lynchpin in Disney’s corporate interests in cinematic storytelling, is a surprise that feels nothing short of miraculous.

It’s hilarious to me that Tom Holland, a now-30-year-old actor who has spent almost all of his career acting against green screens and tennis balls on poles, and gotten incredibly rich doing so, got one whiff of The Odyssey and then had the existential revelation, relayed to GQ. “‘We need to know why we are making this movie beyond the fact that it’s Spider-Man 4 and they make loads of money and we’re going to just have a big summer,’” Holland said he told the producers. “‘Why are we making this movie?’”

(Nobody thought to ask that question for the other three Spider-Man movies?)

Incredibly, this movie does answer that question. Holland’s Spider-Man is entering young adulthood as a lonely workaholic trying to find purpose by putting away as many bad guys as possible, but feels empty without his friends or love interest MJ. For the first time, his superpowers are not an on-the-nose stand-in for puberty (the web-slinging is…shall we say…thinly veiled), but rather a wedge between his duel lives as Peter Parker and Spider-Man, which are diverging as he matures from a boy to a man.

It’s not exactly the deepest theme, but it’s substantive enough to power both the domestic and the save-the-world plotlines. Care was also given to at least trying to solve for many of the glaring red flags I have pointed out in almost every MCU movie I’ve hated on: the lack of stakes or consequences, the plot hand-holding, the fan service prioritization, and the overbearing groundwork set for sequels, spin-offs and team-ups.

Let me be clear: Brand New Day is still a BCE. There is a measure of necessary MCU connective tissue servicing that is either unnecessary (I love Florence Pugh, but her Black Widow scenes grind the narrative to a halt) or damning—the movie suffers from a lack of a true villain, because it needs to introduce Jean Gray to usher in the X-Men characters without making her seem ACTUALLY evil.

Yet despite that gobbledygook, this movie is maybe only carrying like 20 lbs. of franchise baggage rather than the customary 2000 lbs. It is possible for someone who hasn’t watched all 38 movies (38???) and 13 TV shows to fully comprehend what’s going on.

That’s a pretty obvious reason why this movie has escaped this year’s narrative of “superhero fatigue.” The other more powerful one is that two of the biggest movie stars of their generation, who are actually married in real life, are playing the love interests. This stuff isn’t rocket science, it’s the same alchemy that co-stars have been doing or faking from Singin’ In The Rain to Anyone But You.

To its greatest credit, the fact that Brand New Day resisted the temptation to tie everything up in a happy bow and have Peter and MJ hold hands and ride off into the sunset at the end earned so many respect points with me (it’s a temptation that proved even too strong for Chris Nolan and The Odyssey, which ends with a literal sailing into the sunset… “civilization will rise again” *cue eyeroll).

This movie proved that you can use actual story logic to earn some fan service moments. Gray’s inclusion as the faux-villain gives narrative license since her powers allow her to mind control others, so we get surprising scenes where Zendaya’s MJ is the villain, or The Hulk, whose fight with Spider-Man appeals to the base instinct of 12-year-old boys smashing their toys together without it feeling so absurdly staged.

A lot of these praises should be graded on a curve—this won’t end up in the top 10 or even 20 movies of the year for me, still not my flavor—but I walked out of this movie as encouraged as by any I’ve seen so far in 2026, for the simple reason that audiences are responding in a huge way to this movie.

My ultimate condemnation of Marvel has been the way they have retrained audiences to expect to get exactly what they want, when they want it, all the time. And in order to keep the gravy train rolling, it feels like Disney has leaned into that. And yet here you have a movie that is taking some chances, making some actual decisions and reintroducing some of the legitimate storytelling tools we use in movies that aren’t required to be global blockbusters, and still people are showing up.

And loving it! Rotten tomatoes is a flawed statistic but 90% with “critics” (blogboys) and 98% with audiences. Here’s a more objective measurement—$1.2 billion already in like a week and a half, cruising toward $2 billion-plus. Look Disney, you can tell real stories and make money too!!!

Trailer Watch: Primetime

I love that Robert Pattinson was literally in Twilight and Harry Potter, and is literally now The Batman, and yet everyone universally acknowledges that he’s opted out of the race to be the biggest movie star in the world. Nobody is more comfortable presenting themselves on screen as a weirdo, loser, a-hole or all three at once. And he’s bringing that energy to his latest role as Chris Hanson, host of “To Catch A Predator,” in what seems to be a potential awards play. It looks intense, almost horror-inflected, and definitely off-kilter. But Pattinson’s mere presence makes this a really interesting proposition to me. The guard rails don’t exist.

I’m taking a detour from our usual Tuesday “conversation starters” to renew a feature many of you have enjoyed in the past, where I go more in-depth on my reporting process for my day job as the lead entertainment reporter at Forbes. You may have seen that last week I put out the first-ever “Highest-Paid Podcasters” list, which got aggregated out to seemingly every corner of the internet and drew angry comments from at least one celebrity. It was, by the metrics of media in 2026, a big hit.

If you missed it, here are all the component parts: the list, the two written features and the two video interviews.

The Highest-Paid Podcasters Of 2026

How Jay Shetty Is Turning A $100 Million Podcast Deal Into A ‘Conscious Empire’

Why Podcast Pioneer Joe Budden Will Never Sell Out

The idea of doing a podcast earnings list had been floating around the Forbes editorial meetings for at least a year, given the rapid growth of the business (from less than $100 million a decade ago to more than $9 billion per year today). Top podcasters had become as famous as movie and TV stars, and were making just as much money, yet no one had really taken an objective look at the landscape and sorted out its winners and losers. That’s the kind of thing Forbes is made to do.

Yet few people, even among the Forbes staff, truly realize what it takes to pull one of these off. I’d tracked highest-paid actors and TV hosts and showrunners, but when I started this project, I had no sources or contacts in the podcasting industry, and no real base knowledge for how these people made money in the first place. In other words, I didn’t even know what I didn’t yet know.

So how does one begin? I sent out dozens of cold emails back in March—four-plus months ago—begging anyone to give me a crash course. Sources were offered the ability to talk “on background,” a journalistic term meaning I wouldn’t quote them or attribute anything back to them in my other reporting (aka no one would know we spoke), but I could use the information they told me. Most didn’t reply or declined, and the few that did get on the phone got squeamish the minute I mentioned money, regardless of whether seconds before they were praising the concept of an objective earnings list for the emerging industry.

I had zero solid information, but I was able to begin piecing together the framework itself, from the most basic structures—talent are paid a minimum guarantee from a network, with a split of revenues after recoupment—to some insights that felt fresher, like how big video streamers such as Netflix were upsetting the apple cart for existing shows that packaged ads for audio and YouTube.

To translate those things into earnings, I changed strategy and approached the handful of data providers who measure (or estimate) monthly podcast audiences for top shows. They were more willing to play ball—as a way to promote the service, which they sell to podcast companies—and that at least gave me a starting point for which shows had the most listeners. From there I could sketch out my own rudimentary model for podcast revenue (roughly, the cost of the ads and number of ads per episode times the number of listeners) and get a ballpark figure that could sort shows into some rough semblance of an order.

Those variables in my homemade model got sharper as I continued reporting, aided by a handful of candidates for the list whose PR/business partners/agents/managers etc. were willing to share information in order to increase their clients’ accuracy (and who are we kidding, placement) on the list. CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF, this list was not voluntary, and talent reps could not add or remove their clients from consideration based on what they told me. In fact, very few even engaged with me, but every scrap of first hand information was invaluable both as a data and comparison point.

That’s when the real work began, in early June. Industry insiders who first swatted me away started to realize that this list was in fact happening, whether they participated or not, and my calendar soon filled up with phone calls. In my experience, having enough information to sound like someone who has information is a powerful tool for a journalist. It’s as if the person on the other end of the line can relax knowing they weren’t the one who spilled the beans, and then their natural competitive instinct takes over: ‘Oh, no way that guy’s making 20! Because my guy’s making 20 and he’s way more in demand.’

I’ve always felt like this aspect of the job is somewhat similar to a police detective. You’re assembling a whole bunch of imperfect information and subjective testimony and hoping that in the aggregate, the truth will come into focus. And the end point is similarly terrifying (if far lower stakes): eventually you have to publish your findings.

As satisfying as solving the puzzle can be, it’s a far less fun part of the job (for me) than the storytelling. So I turned my attention to expanding the list into a robust package of stories about the industry, which needed to be turned around in time for the mid-July print magazine close date. I went after Jay Shetty, a top 20 candidate who had just signed a megadeal to bring his podcast to Netflix, symbolizing the industry’s effort to replace talk television. Landing him was a big sigh of relief.

The story on Joe Budden kind of dropped into my lap, because he and his business partner have been on a crusade for podcast independence over the past handful of years, and are shouting from the rooftops about their success as the biggest show on Patreon. I think my video interview with them is probably the most candid business conversation I’ve ever had on camera in my career (so far!).

Are the numbers perfect? Of course not. They’re estimates, but I stand by them. I’m proud of how the list and the package came together, and this is only the beginning of my reporting on the podcast industry for Forbes. If the success of the package has taught me and my editors anything, it’s that people really care about this medium! And we’ll put out an even better one next year.

Hey movie lovers!

This week: A grab-bag of movie recs, from a filmed Broadway musical to a pickleball comedy to a 20-year-old blockbuster and more. And then in this week’s “Trailer Watch,” remaking a movie that’s been done quite well twice before…and yet I’m in on it.

Hadestown: The Musical

For a long time, filmed Broadway musicals were about as dynamic as a two-by-four. They consisted of a single continuous shot from wide angle camera in the back of the theater, and regardless of how good the show or performances were, the shows were nap-inducing. But these new “pro-shot” movies in recent years (most notably Hamilton in 2020), which shoot the show with traditional cinema angles and editing, have continued to improve to the point of this past weekend’s release of Hadestown being just as visually engaging as any movie not shot on a stage.

It was in fact so cinematically successful, my takeaway was that I’d rather watch this version than any Hollywood adaptation. The Broadway show was designed and created to be on stage, after all, and each of its characters developed around its original cast. I mean, it’s hard to do much better chemistry-wise than a lead couple (Eva Noblezada and Reeve Carney) who met on the show and are now literally married. Then there’s Broadway legend Andre DeShields, and my two favorite performances in the show from Amber Gray and Patrick Page.

For those unfamiliar, this story gives the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice a modern, New Orleans-inspired spin, casting Carney’s Orpheus as a head-in-the-clouds optimist against a harsh world and underworld run by the industrialist god Hades (Page), with Nobelzada’s Eurydice caught in the middle.

I had forgotten how much the show, which debuted on stage in 2019, is so Trump 1.0 coded, from references to building a wall to the #Resistance “and still we fight!” ethos. The show suffers from a lack of truly iconic songs and an easily spoilable twist on which the entire plot hangs on—but if you haven’t had that spoiled for you (we don’t do spoilers in this newsletter don’t worry!), then you’re probably one of the people in every single showing of the play or movie that audibly gasp when it hits. It’s a phenomenon so consistent it has been named “the Hadestown gasp.”

It’s really easy to see how Hollywood producers could lick their chops at casting some hotshots like Austin Butler and Zendaya in the leads, pay for some voice lessons and stage these scenes in half-built, half-digitally-rendered sets (who knows, they may even shoot one whole scene in New Orleans). But like Dear Evan Hansen to a major extent and Les Misérables to a lesser extent, the project would leak charm out of every orifice of production and arrive in theaters dull and bland.

This version maintains the magic of the original play without completely trumping it (apologies on the word choice there). I had a chance to see this show on Broadway with its original cast during the post-Covid relaunch, and though I didn’t walk away thinking it was one of my favorite shows (maybe not even top five), I still loved the experience. I actually liked the show better the second time around, but this pro-shot made me want to go see this play, or any play, in person more, not less.

That’s a powerful marketing tool for the theater industry (which is really struggling right now, by the way), and a win-win situation both for producers and financiers trying to make more money from their properties and for the millions of people who can’t go to New York City or pay hundreds of dollars to see this show in travelling productions.

And on top of all that…a win for theaters too?! Riding great word of mouth, this movie grossed a surprising $10 million in very limited release this weekend (it’s now over $14 million), an amount impressive enough to get them to extend from a five-day limited run to an indefinite run in more theaters.

So…a rare win-win-win??

Something New

The Dink (AppleTV): It’s hard not to immediately make the comparison between this movie and 2004’s Dodgeball, another obscure-sport comedy produced by Ben Stiller, but the comedy movie landscape is in a completely different place from 20+ years ago—namely, movies are considerably less silly than they used to be. And while this movie is absurd on its face, about a washed up tennis pro who takes up pickleball to stick it to his country club pro dad (…ok), it actually plays that premise pretty earnestly, with jokes kind of hung onto the tree like ornaments.

Luckily, the Jake Johnson shtick just really works on me, so I had a nice time. He’s somehow sarcastic and quick-witted without making others feel bad, which is a helpful trait in a movie where he must befriend older women (including love interest Mary Steenburgen…seriously!). And while non-actor cameos don’t always work, the appearances of Andy Roddick and John McEnroe were both great.

Really the movie succeeds as a comedy more in the “it makes me feel good” sense than in the outrageous laughter sense, though there were a few great little jokes where I could see screenwriter Sean Clements’ poking through (I recently started listening to his Hollywood Handbook podcast, and he’s freaking hilarious). As a streaming programmer…sure, give it a rip. Pickleball on the other hand…just don’t.

Something Old

The Da Vinci Code (2006, YouTube): If I were to ask you the highest grossing movie worldwide 20 years ago, after some hints you may be able to guess Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. But even with a hundred guesses and hints I doubt you would’ve ever gotten to this Dan Brown book adaptation as the second-highest ($700 million+!). Sure, the book was a phenomenon, but this kind of movie today would’ve almost certainly been made straight-to-streaming. Maybe the world was still caught up in National Treasure puzzle-solving fever? Who can say.

The movie got back on my radar a few weeks ago when I got the chance to interview Ron Howard (to talk about Chris Nolan) and looked through his back catalog. In a lot of ways, it’s a perfect movie for Howard, who loves process and competency in all his movies. And he’s got a perfect pairing with Tom Hanks, who sells the more eye-roll worthy bits of dialogue with admirable gusto.

As much crap as this movie has taken over the years, and some of it justified, I’d defy anyone to rewatch it and not get caught up in the sturdy thriller mechanics of the story and the absolute candy of the subject matter.

Something To Stream

Little Brother (Netflix): Unlike The Dink, this movie certainly has no issue going broad and silly, though that’s pretty much a given when casting a shock-and-awe performer like Eric André and a professional ham like John Cena. Cena is the straight man (barely) as an aspiring Property Brother wanna be whose live gets upended when his eccentric, pseudo-brother reappears and starts wreaking havoc.

It’s really the peeing out of cracked car windows kind of humor from start to finish, and when removed from the context of André’s old TV show—in which he performed these kinds of stunts on real people in public, rather than in scripted scenes—it felt strangely sterilized and less funny. When I think about these kinds of movies that worked back in the day, stuff like Caddyshack or any of the Chris Farley hits, they actually felt unsafe (and given the amount of coke going around, they probably were) and had a spirit of meanness, two factors that it’s probably best off to not exist anymore, but may have been essential ingredients to slapstick success. Or maybe I’ve just aged out.

Trailer Watch: The Thomas Crown Affair

First it was Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in 1968. Then it was Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo in 1999. Now it’s Michael B. Jordan and Adria Arjona in 2027?? Count me in! If MBJ wants to use his post-Oscar clout to direct, produce and star in a globetrotting art heist thriller, that’s just about the best case scenario as far as I’m concerned. And though it looks far more John Wick than James Bond, the floor is very high for entertainment and the ceiling for what it could be is astronomical.

“Conversation starters” are back! After a little bit of a summer break our Tuesday edition of the newsletter makes its glorious return to serving up the best, most interesting and most entertaining content on the internet. And this one really is a best-of-the-best from the past few weeks, so there’s a ton of interesting stuff for you to dive into. No excuses for bad media diets or bad small talk this week!! Enjoy.

What’s the coolest story or thing you found on the internet this week? Reply to this email and shoot me a link. Would love to hear from you!

• One of the best magazine stories I’ve read in a very long time comes from The Atlantic under the provocative headline, “The End Of Reading Is Here,” which reported a stat that has stuck with me ever since—gambling has become a more common leisure activity in the U.S. today than reading a book. And if our society is moving away from reading and writing, it will have profound effect on everything from politics to culture to human nature and communication.

  • Another unmissable pull quote from the story, making the case for the value of writing that might as well be a thesis statement for this newsletter: “Writing is the way people figure out what they think, and how to convey those thoughts to someone who doesn’t already share them.”

• Like any good internet list, Vulture’s ranking of the 100 most powerful directors in Hollywood stirred up a lot of conversation and dissent (I found it to be pretty well done). But you would’ve already known who No. 1 on that list was if you’d read my story on Chris Nolan being the biggest movie star in the world for Forbes last week.

• Ever wonder what happens when you don’t put your phone in airplane mode on a flight? It turns out…a lot, according to this Ted-Ed video, but not to you directly.

• There’s never been a better, and worse, time in history to be a celebrity bodyguard. The money is good (Apple reportedly spent $800,000 last year for guards of CEO Tim Cook) and the job opportunities are endless, but the threats have never been more dangerous. GQ talked to a bunch of bodyguards for billionaires about what life is like in the line of fire.

• I’m never one for miracle cures or quick fixes, but this single video about the benefits of simply hanging from a bar convinced me to start doing this every single day.

• I got into “Top Chef” for a few seasons during the pandemic, and the thing that set the show apart was its authenticity—the judges and contestants really worked in kitchens. That all started with the show’s centerpiece judge Tom Colicchio, who continued to cook at his New York City restaurant Craft for 25 years even while he became a TV star. But if even he had to shut down his restaurant, Esquire asks: What chance does anyone else have??

• Speaking of chefs, longtime newsletter readers know I’ve been obsessed with Stefano Secchi of NYC’s Rezdora since I saw him in this 2021 Eater video (I have since visited his restaurants a handful of times…and he follows me on Instagram!). But he did a food blog with New York Mag tracking everything the master chef eats in a week. It’s awesome.

Thanks for reading and sharing! On Friday’s movie edition we’re talking about The Dink on Netflix and the Hadestown pro shot in theaters…can’t wait!

Hey movie lovers!

This week: Christopher Nolan is the star of his own movie…and people love it. His Homer adaptation is a big, fat hit. I also saw a new Netflix movie about stealing Dante’s Inferno, to keep it classical. Plus another Homer adaptation and an AI documentary. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Marvel’s death rattle.

The Odyssey

It is completely contradictory, in the year of our Lord 2026, to be both a movie lover and a Christopher Nolan hater. (I know…I’ve tried.) As I wrote about for Forbes, he’s the biggest movie star in the world, but here in this newsletter I’d like to take that claim a step further—Nolan has transcended traditional fandom and become a cultural totem. (Put another way, he is to film bros what Taylor Swift is to millennial women—I say this as someone who is about to marry a Swiftie).

To like him is to like the aspirational idea that movies can still reign supreme. I’m talking real movies, not Branded Content Experiences. These days, his massive, hand-crafted blockbusters represent really the only example of quote-unquote “cinema” that can compete toe-to-toe with BCEs commercially, and win.

That’s why Nolan and The Odyssey are in some ways above reproach. The mere fact that he chose this story familiar to everyone (the trojan horse, cyclops, sirens, lotus flower etc.), executed it at the biggest possible scale without any compromise, and on the back of his name turned it into what’s likely going to be a billion-dollar global grosser is, as a baseline, an enormous achievement.

No other director could’ve made this movie, and not just because of the juice he has to command the budgets and cast movie stars in every part. The story and themes of The Odyssey are just so Nolan.

I’m far from the first person to point out that all of his movies are about a tortured genius, burdened by the enormous responsibility on his shoulders and haunted by how his actions have affected others, yet also the only person who can save everyone. In his stories, the Great Man is always right in the end. Enter Odysseus, described in Homer’s epic as the cleverest person in the world, who after devising the Trojan Horse and winning the war just wants to return home to his loving wife and son. For those that didn’t read this book in school, spoiler alert: the sea has other plans.

That classic Nolan story has never been my favorite, and frankly, neither has his particular filmmaking style. His movies are not immersive in the classical sense—you don’t feel like you’re living in them because they never really let you forget you’re watching a movie. Part of the reason his talent is so obvious to the average moviegoer is because it’s so showy, with overlapping timelines, frenetic editing style, and relentlessly loud score (dialogue be damned) that when all together beats a viewer into submission of Nolan’s greatness, rather than the movie’s.

This time around, the first 30 minutes setting up the situation in Ithaca with Odysseus gone and his son (played by Tom Holland) and wife (Anne Hathaway) besieged in their palace by suitors (including Robert Pattinson), is assembled so energetically with cuts every few seconds and jumps forward and backward in time that there’s hardly any actual scenes, only fragments of images, flashbacks and a mountain of exposition. This would be destabilizing, if it weren’t done with so much confidence.

Before anyone can complain, we’re on to the set pieces, and Nolan is the best (ever?) at staging spectacle. The Odyssey has plenty of it, from the Trojan horse into the surprise attack, to a middle third that is really just Odysseus and his crew hopping from island to island and facing some new crazy obstacle, each shot in some insane location with practical effects. That may sound nerdy, but seeing the cyclops or giants in this way looks remarkably different from the past decade of CGI slopfests, and feels entirely worthy of its epic scale.

Then there’s this cast, no doubt attracted by Nolan’s star power: Damon, Hathaway, Holland and Pattinson, but also Charlize Theron, Zendaya, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, Mia Goth and more in really thankless parts. The only really good role from an acting standpoint in a Nolan movie is the lead (Heath Ledger’s Joker being the exception that proves the rule), because it’s usually a stand-in for Nolan, but Damon crushes this one not by turning in some crazy acting performance but by being movie star Matt Damon in the center, a planet of charisma, charm and intensity that everyone else could orbit around.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that any one element of these movies is masterful, and yet put together the storytelling leaves me a little cold. Characters are archetypal (great man, weepy wife, snively son, evil suitor) with little interest in deepening, dialogue is occasionally stilted, and seriously, the movie is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. It’s unfair to call it a big, dumb blockbuster, because the movie definitely has ideas, but I’ve genuinely laughed at all the reviews praising the movie’s modern resonance around the message of “war is bad!”

As with all of Nolan’s movies, it takes two or three viewings to fully appreciate, and I know this movie will likely grow on me more over time, because despite my complaints I did like it. I just haven’t really decided whether having to see a movie a couple of times to “get it” is a good thing (art should be studied and thought about and chewed on!) or a bad thing and we’re giving him the benefit of the doubt for ambiguity. Chances are, I’ll go see it a second time anyway. Cha-ching!

Something New

In The Hand Of Dante (Netflix): I won’t belabor the point, because this movie is a clear skip for anyone reading this, which is a real shame considering it’s ostensibly an Italy-set crime drama starring Oscar Isaac, John Malkovich, Gerard Butler, Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa, Al Pacino and Martin Scorcese (woah!).

Suffice it to say that this movie may not even by the best movie in the past year in which Oscar Isaac does over-written, eye-roll worthy voice over on Netflix…and I really was not a fan of Frankenstein. Butler’s performance is so outrageous (and outrageously good) it almost gives me an excuse to recommend it, but then it’s back with the slow-paced philosophizing and nonsensical plot. A sad miss.

Something Old

Troy (2004, YouTube): Lest we forget, Chris Nolan was in talks to direct this movie, before moving on to Batman Begins, a fun counter-factual. I’m really happy to see Troy getting a reexamination from the movie community in the lead-up to The Odyssey. Sure, Brad Pitt’s British-ish accent as Achilles isn’t the best, but this movie really works as the kind of pulpy, fan-servicey thrill ride that gives you everything you could hope from an adaptation of The Illiad in a really conventional, if a little bloated, way (hard to complain about runtime when The Odyssey feels every bit of three hours long). The Peter O’Toole father-son stuff is genuinely emotional, and the hand-to-hand combat that can often be the least interesting part of sword-and-sandal movies is very exciting here.

Something To Stream

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist (Peacock): Given how much I loved Tuner earlier this year, I broke my self-imposed AI moratorium to see director Daniel Roher’s documentary about whether the incursion of AI into every facet of life means the future will be awful or amazing. He gets almost everyone to sit for this project, right up to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and framing the story around the birth of Roher’s own son is a clever way to get these tech bros to think about the implications of what they’re building in a slightly more human way.

It’s a very well-made documentary, a great primer in the big issues the industry is facing (including the extinction of the entire human race), though by its own admission the technology is moving so quickly right now that the movie is basically obsolete by the time it was released.

Quite frankly, I didn’t leave the movie as an Apocaloptimist myself. If the rosy-eyed version of the future—ya know, the one in which we don’t all die—requires everyone sacrificing their personal ambitions to hold hands and work together for the greater good of the planet, I think we may all be screwed.

Trailer Watch: Avengers: Doomsday

My decade-long soap box about this franchise finally has the majority of public sentiment behind it. All it took was releasing the trailer for this unimaginative, uninteresting pile of reheated leftovers the same week as The Odyssey, when moviegoers could see side by side two different ways for a movie studio to spend $250 million (and who are we kidding, Doomsday cost a lot more). Disney is reuniting the ol’ gang back to do what appears to be the exact same thing they were doing 10 years ago, making any enjoyment of this trailer basically just the Leo Once Upon A Time In Hollywood pointing meme. Look look it’s the hammer thing!

It’ll be interesting to see if Dune 3 can dethrone Marvel on the same release date in December, once and for all.

We really thought we were a soccer nation, didn’t we?? I’ve been watching World Cup games every day, getting super hyped at the chance that the U.S. could be in some of these big games….then Belgium reminded us exactly why we’re a little brother nation on the pitch. 4-1. Yikes.

All that soccer—plus the nation’s 250th birthday this weekend!—left me a lot less time this week for internet content and movies, so I’m writing this to let you all know I’m taking a lil’ two-week summer break from the 2x/week newsletter rhythm.

My birthday is on Friday and then I’m going to be on vacation next week. I pride myself on putting out the Tuesday and Friday editions ~45 weeks per year, and that’s the cadence I’m still shooting for in 2026, though I admit it may be tougher with my wedding and honeymoon stacking up in the fall. Appreciate you all following along.

This break times out well, since the biggest movie release this week is Minions and Monsters, and next week it’s Moana (and The Invite going wide, which I already talked about!). I’ve mercifully made it this far in my life without having to watch any movies from the Minions franchise, and I’ve already seen the animated Moana, for which this appears to be a shot-for-shot recreation. Not sure the world is clamoring for my thoughts on either of those titles.

My return will time up really well with a certain Chris Nolan blockbuster that I may or may not have tickets to see in 70mm opening week!!

In the meantime, apologies for anyone trying to read last week’s story about two fans getting paid $50,000 each to watch every World Cup game, I had the wrong link on there but here’s the right one.

You can follow my work at Forbes here, where I had a story last week about Taylor Swift’s wealth boom and have another one planned on Mr. Nolan ahead of The Odyssey.

Thanks as always so much for reading and sharing! See y’all soon.

Matt

Hey movie lovers!

This week: A pretty wild movie about the perils of marriage…just before I get married. Does it revive Olivia Wilde’s career? Then we’re catching up on a handful of new TV shows out on streaming. And in this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Illumination is coming for Pixar’s mojo.

The Invite

“One should always be in love,” reads the opening frames of The Invite, quoting Oscar Wilde. “That is the reason one should never marry.”

That serves as a kind of thesis statement for Olivia Wilde’s (no relation to the poet) new dramedy, which presents one of the bleakest visions of matrimony ever presented in such a widely distributed way. It’s difficult not to immediately associate the subject matter with Wilde’s own public divorce from Jason Sudeikis, obviously, but this certainly does not feel like one of those therapy-disguised-as-a-narrative movies. It reaches for something more ambitious and universal, and though I completely disagree (watching this movie while engaged is a wild exercise), the fact that I’m able and willing to engage with the movie’s underlying questions serves as proof of its quality.

To start, Seth Rogen and Olivia Wilde’s couple are stuck in a marriage that’s not only loveless, it’s openly hostile. They invite over a couple who lives above them in an upscale but aging San Francisco apartment building—Wilde is mesmerized by their bohemian cool and Rogen exasperated by the noise he can hear every night from their lovemaking.

Anyone who has read or seen the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? can guess what happens next, a kind of psycho-sexual deconstruction of their marriage (and all marriage) as the new couple—perfectly cast with Ed Norton and Penelope Cruz—poke holes metaphorically in their union and then offer to do so quite literally when they proposition them for group sex.

That makes it all sound far too heady, and heavy. For most of its 1hr45min runtime, it’s a comedy of manners that has shades of directors like Woody Allen, Nicole Holofcenter and even Noah Baumbach. There’s inherent absurdity in putting on airs for strangers, being fake nice, avoiding thorny subjects, or something as specific as serving a charcuterie board to a vegan. This movie identifies them and then pushes them up to the edge of extremity without tipping over into unbelievability.

Rogen in particular is hilarious in this role, against type. He’s not a blubbering teddy bear fool, he’s a cynical a-hole (still smokes weed tho!) whose dry humor is turned super acidic here. Playing off Wilde’s anal, high-strung obsessive, and Norton’s heart-on-my-sleeve vulnerability and Cruz’s temptress, it’s a really electric dynamic that carries a true all-in-one night chamber piece.

If the one location, extended conversation structure doesn’t remind you enough of a stage play, the costumes (Rogen/Wilde in drab neutrals, Norton/Cruz in black), the blocking and framing (e.g. putting the two women between Rogen’s head, or at another point positioning the women below the men, etc.) will no doubt get you there.

Because of those things, it’s hard for me to take this as some revival in Wilde’s career as the exciting filmmaker we thought she might be after Booksmart, though I’m sure the movie’s Sundance bidding war has probably served that purpose. If anything, this reminded me what a good actress she is, as well as the other three. It’s a true showcase for all of them in front of the camera.

The simplicity definitely foregrounds the ideas, which are purposely provocative. What is the purpose of sex? Why do people get married? When is it better to separate and when is it better to stay together?

This isn’t exactly the newsletter to go to for answers about those questions (though much of my own opinions have been crystalized by reading Tim Keller’s The Meaning Of Marriage during my engagement). But getting audiences to wrestle with their own personal thoughts amidst a rollicking comedy with some electric tension makes this undoubtedly one of the top 10 movies of the year, at least, for me.

What TV shows are people watching these days? I don’t keep up everything, but after “Widow’s Bay” on Apple ended, I was in the market for something new, and these are three shows I gave a try to this week:

The Bear S5

There was no greater advocate for “The Bear” in its first two seasons, which produced one of my favorite TV episodes of all time (“Spoons”), minted a class of new stars, and added “Yes Chef!” to the cultural lexicon. But I think you’d be hard pressed to find a show in recent history that has had so little regard for its fanbase or such little interest in the things that made it a hit in the first place. For the better part of two and a half seasons—and yes, I’m told it comes to a satisfying conclusion in the last four episodes, so maybe I’ll revisit this—every character has been stuck in a place of utter defeat around their trauma and baggage.

It’s meant to be an empathy generator, I guess, but there’s no longer any bait on the end of the hook to reel you in. The show continues to trade on the equity the audience built up with the characters in those first two seasons, but is running out of fuel for that fire. And as the utter disaster of this final day of service unfolds in real time across the first four episodes, I find myself as a viewer not rooting for a miracle to save the restaurant but instead resigning myself that it’s better off if these people all went their separate ways. Ugh, I really hope the show makes me regret these thoughts with its last batch of episodes, I want to love it!

The Agency S2

Michael Fassbender is one of my favorite actors, and though I admit his recent work has become somewhat repetitive (The Killer and Black Bag have him playing almost identical characters as in this show), his faux James Bond shtick just really works for me. The thing I respect most about this international spy show is that it can’t really be called an “international spy thriller” in the traditional sense. Yes it taps into those great tropes—you can’t trust anyone, everyone is watching you—but it’s more about the intelligence and espionage side of things, as this London office of the CIA tries to pull the invisible strings that tilt the world in its favor.

In this second season, more intricately crafted and interweaving plot comes face to face with perhaps the diminishing power of the U.S. as a global bully, which adds a sort of geopolitical stakes to the more personal story of Fassbender’s agent trying to recover his girlfriend-slash-asset. As you can probably tell, it’s a rather dense show and doesn’t hold the audience’s hand through it, but it’s enormously entertaining in each episode and draws a pretty conventional narrative arc across a season that’s very satisfying. Highly recommend.

Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness

Much like Michael Jordan with the Wizards, Brett Favre with the Vikings or, I don’t know, any Bob Dylan concert in the last 25 years (I say this as a fan!), sometimes the best thing a legend can do is know when to sail off into the sunset. Larry David had a prolonged farewell tour during the last season of Curb Your Enthusiasm and a near-perfect approval rating, yet two years later he’s back with a history spoof skit series to celebrate America’s 250th, produced by the Obamas’ production company.

Now, I’m not going to act like Curb was some politically provocative rallying cry, but it was a show that wasn’t afraid to push boundaries (there was an Israel vs. Palestine episode, for instance, and another where Larry wears a MAGA hat around Los Angeles). I’m not surprised this one has its edges shaved off, given the Obama origination, but removing that third rail just makes Larry into an old man yelling at cloud. When, for example, he’s a World War 1 soldier who doesn’t want to leave the trench, it’s both predictable and by extension, not that funny. Unfortunately I think I’m a one and done with it.

Trailer Watch: Not Alone

I’m obviously going to be a sucker for any trailer that uses David Bowie, though previous results vary wildly on the quality of the final product, from my No. 1 movie of 2021 (Licorice Pizza) to whatever the hell Lightyear was. But I have to applaud the originality here of Illumination, who has basically been printing money off Minions sequels and Nintendo adaptations for years, finally making something totally original. Dare I say, it’s a little Pixar-y?

Clearly, it’s going for the same cute, innocent, emotional manipulation as those lamp jumpers over at Disney, and it was able to sign up red-hot Timothee Chalamet and Selena Gomez for the top two roles, so something tells me there may be some tear-shedding in the offing.

It’s July 4th week and the World Cup has me and seemingly everyone else pumping with patriotic pride. Considering how much I sweat out the two PK deciders in Monday’s matches for teams I couldn’t care less about, I can’t imagine the stress if the U.S. has to decide their game versus Bosnia that way on Wednesday.

Until then, there’s plenty of time to catch up on my “conversation starters,” a weekly roundup of the best, most interesting, and most entertaining content on the internet. If that’s not enough, a little birdie told me there may be a new article coming out from yours truly on Forbes on Wednesday. See you on the other side! U-S-A! U-S-A!!

What’s the coolest story or thing you found on the internet this week? Reply to this email and shoot me a link. Would love to hear from you!

• In a new book, authors pursue 100% logical and evidence-based evidence that God exists. But in this book review in The Atlantic, the writer argues that misses the entire point of faith. As she says, “having faith is a vulnerable thing.”

• Headlines That Require No Context: What It’s Like to See Your Nude Portrait Sell for $39 Million.

• To outsiders, Steph Curry leaving Under Armour for signature shoes at Chinese brand Li-Ning seems crazy. But YouTuber Joon Lee says it’s part of a bigger global economic trend—China doesn’t just mean “cheap” anymore, it also means innovation (electric cars, phones drones etc.). What does that mean for brands in the U.S.?

• My friend Allison is becoming a bit of a consistent contributor to this Tuesday newsletter, usually with feel-good stories like this one from my hometown of Tulsa—a senior retirement community is the undefeated, six-time champions of their Wii bowling league. This New York Times video shows them wearing uniforms and cheering each other on in the most heart-warming way.

• Dream job alert: two fans are being paid $50,000 each to watch every single game at the World Cup by tournament streamer Fox One—inside a glass cubicle in Times Square. Why does it feel like the whole world is turning into a Mr. Beast YouTube stunt?!?

• In Australia, an honest-to-goodness town crier earned the Guinness World Record for “world’s loudest person” (insert an infinite amount of jokes here) after shouting at 122 decibels…the same volume as a chain saw or a jet plane taking off.

• I’m pumped to watch Wimbledon the next two weeks, but was weirdly fascinated hearing a historian explain what tennis looked like in the 1500s in King Henry XIII royal court.

Thanks for reading and sharing! We’re talking about The Invite and new TV shows on Friday, see you then!

Hey movie lovers!

This week: Woody, Buzz and the gang are back and beefing with iPads. Plus two other new releases! One sad and in theaters and one happy and on Netflix (I know which you’re going to rush to see). I’m also revisiting Chris Nolan movies before The Odyssey. And in this week’s “Trailer Watch,” who among us asked for more Jane Austen?

Toy Story 5

It’s crazy to think the Toy Story franchise has been in our lives for more than 30 years. For someone like me, born in 1995, I don’t know a world without Toy Story as a cultural reference point. Anyone who was a kid when the first one came out is now well into adulthood, many with kids of their own. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are graying at the temples (and would be elsewhere if not for the wonders of modern cosmetology), and many of the original cast members have long since passed (Don Rickles, Ned Beatty, R. Lee Ermey).

It’s an extremely short list of franchises that have even had five or more movies in one ongoing series (not including spin-offs, reboots or a Cinematic Universe). Those that went five-for-five with mega-blockbusters? None, except for Toy Story, which is pacing for another $1 billion-plus at the box office and near-total cultural ubiquity (thank you for your service, Taylor Swift).

The irony about that franchise longevity is that it plays right into the criticism (or at least commentary) of recent Pixar, that their movies are more for adults than for kids. Case in point: this movie’s simple premise of “toys vs. technology” is brilliantly recognizable…to parents. For kids born after 2010, any conflict for supremacy between to two is hardly a consideration. Technology won that battle a long time ago.

That makes the moral high ground of this movie is really hard to pin down. Technology, and specifically the iPad-like tablet given to our main human character Bonnie, certainly gets identified by the movie as the kind of forbidden fruit that tempts and ultimately poisons all the children in the neighborhood. But the actual issue ends up being an online group chat full of snooty girls who are being mean to her, an issue faced by many girls long before iPads existed.

When, as we all could’ve predicted, the toys and the technology eventually team up together for the good of their kids, the waters become even murkier. If tech isn’t the problem, then what exactly did the toys do to help? From a storytelling standpoint, none of that drama above really concerns the toys themselves, so their confrontation of their own obsolescence (as in each of these movie) and desperate attempt to retain their kid’s attention this time appears more self-interested. Bonnie makes a human friend, in the end, but playing with the toys together feels a bit like narrative charity.

That’s perhaps too deep of a reading for a Pixar movie that is unfailingly cute, funny in a cute, soft smile sort of way, and relentlessly sentimental. If this company and this franchise has a signature, it’s that third act emotional gut punch that always leaves you on the verge of tears. That worked on me, again, to enough of a degree that it made me question why exactly I was squabbling over thematic clarity.

But the previous four installments were good enough to invite that level of scrutiny and thought (let us not forget the existential crescendo of the toys holding hands and accepting their deaths at the end of Toy Story 3). Settling for something closer to just solid, popcorn blockbuster entertainment can’t help but feel like a little bit of a letdown.

Still, I have to give credit to Disney for executing a clever balancing act. While it’s hard to imagine them ever making a movie without Hanks and Allen, this movie certainly de-centers them as characters, and starts to pencil in the outlines of an exit ramp. Woody and Buzz Lightyear have already completed their character arcs, and don’t have much more to offer other than nostalgia and their old age (teased relentlessly here), so this movie really belongs to Joan Cusack’s character Jessie without losing much in the way of excitement.

There’s no question that you have to keep trying to make more Toy Story movies in the future if you’re Disney, but it’s funny to think about the self-fulfilling prophecy that this movie predicted. How do you appeal to future kids when the concept of a pull-string cowboy doll or non-electronic startrooper action figure, let alone a slinky or Mr. Potato Head, seem increasingly antique?

Something New

The Death of Robin Hood (Theaters): I’m all for a good myth deconstruction—Hugh Jackman himself starred in one of the best ones with 2017’s Logan—but this movie about the final, forlorn days of England’s infamous bandit insists on discrediting anything and everything that may be even remotely fun about its central character. It’s less Logan and more Capone (in which Tom Hardy’s most exciting act as gangster Al Capone was pooping his pants). Here, Nottingham Forrest is replaced by desolate highlands, Maid Marian is a fiction, Little John is a savage, and Jackman’s Robin Hood is a haggard old man haunted by all the lives he’s taken. You can only tell audiences that this whole thing is uncool so many times before they believe you, and start to ask why they’re watching a movie about it.

I’m still a big fan of director Michael Sarnoski, who was on a heater after Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One, but this time let his clear penchant for tormented geniuses get the better of him. Jodie Comer is electric in a mostly thankless, manic-pixie-dream-girl role, and Bill Skarsgård is best when he’s inhumane (as Little John), but all eyes are on Jackman, who see-saws his career between smiling song-and-dance man and emotionally heavy sad-boy, giving 110% commitment to either endeavor. As a huge fan of the Disney animated Robin Hood from 1973, maybe I would’ve preferred a little more of the former and a little less of the latter in this one.

Something Old

Interstellar (2014, Paramount+): Breaking my 20 year rule to let you all know I’m doing the work, people! I’ve never been much of a fan of Chris Nolan’s movies (or at least relative to the market think he’s overrated), bn the lead-up to The Odyssey, I’m reexamining some of his most-loved work to make sure my opinions are the same—even if that means watching this one on an 8-inch airplane seatback screen as Sir Nolan surely intended.

I’m sure I’m not the first one to realize or mention that the first two hours of all of Nolan’s movies rule. Matthew McConaughey spend a lot more time on earth than you might remember, but his departure into deep space is super emotional, and his mission there super exciting. Obviously, Nolan one of the best spectacle filmmakers ever, great at action set pieces and setting enormous stakes (Matt Damon’s “This is the most important thing to ever happen in the history of the world!” in Oppenheimer could be attached to almost any of his movies), but that third hour—and trust me, there’s always a full third hour—he tends to get lost in the sauce with puzzlebox plot machinations that sacrifice character development and any lingering themes like pieces on a chessboard to get to some fancy checkmate. Still not my fav!

Something To Stream

Voicemails For Isabelle (Netflix): The Big Red Machine has shown real commitment to resuscitating the rom-com genre, and all of these movies (People We Meet On Vacation, Office Romance) revel in the eye-roll worthy tropes that wore out the genre’s welcome in theaters 15-20 years ago. Seriously, ALL THREE of these movies feature the guy slow motion running to the girl at the end!

This movie in particular presents each of the traditional rom-com stations of the cross (catholic school reference) so shamelessly, almost gleefully, that it literally name checks You’ve Got Mail, Notting Hill, The Fault in Our Stars in dialogue as it steals from them. There is nothing naturalistic about this premise, which starts with one character leaving voicemails for her sister who died of cancer, only for those voicemails to be going to the work phone of a man who is single, same age, hot, and somehow turned on enough by the sad dispatches to stalk her across the country.

But as I always say, this genre has a one criteria evaluation, and the chemistry between leads here passes the test. In many ways, Zoey Deutch is the Netflix rom-com patron saint, having kicked off the movement with 2018’s Set It Up and shown strong chemistry with literally every male co-lead in every movie since. If she wants to, she could rip off four or five more like this and they’d all go to No. 1 on the Netflix charts.

Trailer Watch: Sense and Sensibility

For anyone who hasn’t seen the 1995 version of this movie with Kate Winslet and Emma Thompson, go watch it. It’s good enough to make me question why we needed a remake, especially once I watched this trailer and saw that it’s an incredibly faithful adaptation. Not in the sense of accuracy to Jane Austin’s book (I’ve never read it, I don’t know), but that this movie doesn’t seem to be applying a modern sensibility—such as what Greta Gerwig did so so well with Little Woman. This movie left all the thee’s and thou’s in tact. That makes it about the third or fourth movie that is really relying on Daisy Edgar-Jones being a butts-in-seats star, which I’m not sure there’s any evidence for. Uphill climb for it to be good, in my opinion!

After a wonderful weekend in my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, I’m feeling fired up for summer. Sure sure, sunshine and sand and burgers off the grill…but also World Cup and a red-hot box office!!

As always, I’m hoping to pick through the stream of crap in our algorithms and find for you the best, most interesting, and most entertaining internet content. This is the stuff you can learn something from and chat about later, which is why I call it my “conversation starters” each week. Hope you enjoy them!

What’s the coolest story or thing you found on the internet this week? Reply to this email and shoot me a link. Would love to hear from you!

• The explosion in popularity of YouTube golf has minted a new class of everyman golf stars, who are not only making millions but also working to remake the sport in their own image: younger, looser and less stodgy. The traditional golf establishment has been forced to try to adapt, rather than risk being left behind. Here’s my latest story for Forbes.

• For those lucky people taking their summer vacations abroad, . In coastal towns in France, men who walk around town without a shirt on could get fined as much as €150, and in Sardinia, umbrellas have been banned on a beach for anyone between the ages of 10 and 65. It’s the latest in the recent trend of European tourist fighting back against “hit-and-run” tourism, beautifully captured in this documentary trailer about Cinque Terre (I can’t wait to watch the full thing!).

• A question we’ve all asked before: do we need to rinse dishes before putting them in the dishwasher? And what’s the best kind of detergent? Ted-Ed has a really thorough and entertaining answer.

• Leave it to our pals over in the U.K. to be tough on technology—they just banned all social media platforms for people under the age of 16. Tech companies are making the classic defense that this will lead to unregulated and more dangerous internet use, but circle back in a few years and I think we may notice some amazing side effects.

• Best-selling author Jon Krakauer tells climbing legend Alex Honnold that going on the Everest expedition that led to his signature book Into Thin Air was the “worst decision he ever made in his life.” That’s a shocking statement, but the reasons he gives are sound.

• Technology innovation in…sunscreen? The FDA approved a new ingredient to be added to the U.S. sunscreen formula that’s more effective, and more cosmetically appealing. A win-win??

• A monthslong Consumer Reports investigation found that Uber and Lyft use AI to charge drastically different prices to different customers who order at the same time in the same area—one of many disturbing revelations in this report which pretty much shows the company will push the limit of what consumers can pay and how little drivers can get.

Thanks for reading and sharing! Of course we’ve got to talk Toy Story 5 on Friday…they haven’t missed yet!

Hey movie lovers!

This week: Sorry for the late send! I’m back in my hometown of Tulsa and forgot to schedule the post. We’ve got to talk about the new Steven Spielberg movie, of course, as well as an insane kung fu fight-fest.

Disclosure Day

Hollywood doesn’t really know what to do with its octogenarian masters, it seems. One can forgive, even expect, that the great filmmakers of the 20th Century (which is to say, greatest of all time) would not still be producing the best work of their careers into their late 70s…let alone 80s or 90s (looking at you, Clint). But legends like Ridley Scott, Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola have earned far too much respect to be turned down for projects by actors, crew and studio executives who likely grew up idolizing them.

Among this class, Steven Spielberg is still another level higher, responsible for nearly a dozen of the most iconic movies of all time sand achieving a universal name recognition among even the most casual movie fans. He has a lifetime blank check.

But Disclosure Day is not the same kind of indulgent legacy reflection or passion project one has come to expect from the elder directors and even himself in recent years, including the autobiographical The Fablemans and even the big budget musical West Side Story (which was awesome and should’ve been a hit, by the way). This movie is, from its conception, a big summer spectacle blockbuster, stress-testing whether Spielbeg’s prestige still translates to commercial appeal.

After all, it’s a story about the end of the world, or at least the world as we know it. When undeniable evidence of alien activity on earth over the last 70+ years leaks from a top secret lab, the all-powerful corporation hunts down the people trying to disclose it to the world. So we’ve got a cat-and-mouse thriller supercharged with some strange alien powers wielded by our main characters (Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor).

That blockbuster distinction creates, in my mind, a different set of criteria for evaluating the movie. It is most fascinating in conversation with Spielberg’s other movies about aliens (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., War of the Worlds) or the end of the world (A.I., also War of the Worlds) or faith in God (Schindler’s List, Raiders of the Lost Ark). But it’s also in competition with today’s popcorn movies, and has an implicit contract with the audience to be enormously satisfying.

It’s not that the movie fails at the latter, either. No one who watches Disclosure Day will be able to deny that Spielberg is still one of the best movie-makers in the world, something he was seemingly determined to prove this time around with elaborately executed camera moves, lighting and action set pieces. In any given scene, you cannot take your eyes off of what is unfolding.

Still, it’s almost as if Spielberg is a victim of his own success. He is perhaps more responsible than anyone at creating what we think a “Movie” (capital M) should look like, and importantly, what a Movie looked like 30 or even 50 years ago. So his signature look and style now feels like a bit of a remnant from another time, slightly out of touch with modern sensibility. Keep in mind, this is Chris Nolan’s world now, Spielberg is just livin’ in it.

I’m not sure a younger filmmaker would’ve picked a local broadcast TV station as the site of the climactic Disclosure Day, or used “empathy is the ultimate evolutionary advantage” as a mic drop revelation (Spielberg has always been a softie), but all of that could easily be forgiven if the movie had made an attempt to reckon with what exactly would happen if proof of extraterrestrial life was exposed to the whole world.

While you might expect, like in other alien movies (including Spielberg’s own), that they might be some kind of metaphor or expose some core truth about humanity, Spielberg instead seems to literally believe their contact with earth is a given fact (he has said this explicitly in interviews) and made a movie fantasizing about what it would take to get that information out to everyone.

It’s a testament to Spielberg’s skill that I felt so immersed in the experience of coming face-to-face with alien life—his recreations of Roswell and other alien visitations are incredible—but the movie took me right to the edge of something interesting and then cut to black before I could really find my way to diving in. Maybe I’m just cynical, apathetic or not a Boomer obsessed with space, but I think my lack of interest in that core message limited my ability to love this movie as anything more than a fun thriller with some really really strange ideas about the world…and beyond.

The Furious

In the context of this movie, the phrase “absolutely ridiculous” is the highest compliment. More than two-thirds of the runtime of this Chinese kung fu movie is spent in some of the most insane action sequences you can imagine—people hitting each other with hammers, machetes, blocks of ice, blocks of concrete, and at one point hand-to-hand combat with both guys holding full-on bicycles.

It’s intensity to the point of parody, and though there’s nothing close to a joke in the movie people in my screening were laughing at points at the sheer relentlessness of the action. The fights are exaggerated by sound effects that make it feel like every punch and kick is breaking someone’s bones, but it doesn’t need to, because our heroes literally get run over by a car and fall five stories and still get up and keep fighting.

The intensity reaches such a fever pitch that the climactic fight turns into a 2-on-2-on-1 five-way melee, which at one point pauses for an anime-style, five-panel freezeframe of every combatant’s eyes that literally drew cheers from the audience. That fight alone lasts at least 30 minutes.

In between fight scenes is a melodrama told in the sensibility of Chinese microdramas, made worse by what I have to imagine was AI-assisted lip alterations to match voice actor dubbing. The story is basically Sound of Freedom, about a father rescuing his daughter from abduction into a sex slavery ring, with the help of a do-gooder journalist. The bad guys scale up videogame style, from a local thug to a rich kingpin, all of whom naturally are martial arts masters. The morality is completely black-and-white, and the nationalism is only a shade away from propaganda, but the action is so good the rest hardly matters.

It’s clear the movie was free from western influences because there’s hardly a gunshot fired in the entire movie. The Chinese-ness of it makes what I’d normally call flaws really just interesting cultural exploration. And the action is pretty undeniable, even if after two hours I was exhausted by it. This movie is for a very particular viewer, one who loved non-stop fight-fests like The Raid and The Raid 2, or any of the Bruce Lee movies.

Hey newsletter fam,

It’s true, I scored one of the very rare media seats on the White House lawn to take in what was, love it or hate it, a historic event: mixed martial arts cage fights being held at the White House. And it was as surreal as you’d expect.

As many of you know, the CEO of the UFC Dana White has been a subject of near-endless fascination for me in my day job with Forbes. I’ve written stories about him when the UFC put on an event at The Sphere in 2024, after the Trump election in 2025 for the magazine cover (including a mini-documentary), the day they signed a new $7.7 billion media rights deal with Paramount, on stage at Harvard Business School in January, and in the lead-up to this White House fight.

From Forbes’ standpoint, it’s a no-brainer why. The rise of the UFC is objectively one of the greatest entrepreneur stories of the 21st century. How many others can claim they invented a completely new sport? Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta rescued it from near bankruptcy when they bought it for just $2 million in 2001 (White was given a 10% stake to run the day-to-day). They built it to $4 billion by 2016 and sold it to WME/Endeavor, who built it to $12 billion before it got merged with the WWE in 2023. Now it’s one of the most popular sports in the world, and White enjoys almost complete autonomy over everything in it.

The more interesting part of his story is of course what’s happened since 2023, as White doubled down on his longtime friend Donald Trump and has subsequently benefitted from his return to power and penchant for rewarding his lackeys. Sunday night was the perfect culmination of that, as cameras tracked the two of them walking together through the White House together and out to the Octagon, to raucous applause. If one had to offer up one of the nation’s sacred spaces for bloody spectacle and the other had to pony up $60 million to pull it off, placing them at the center of attention for the 4,300 in attendance and millions watching on Paramount+ seemed in that moment to be worth it.

Comparisons to the Roman colosseum are almost too obvious, as fighters came to pay tribute, in some cases literally bowing their heads, to shake the head of state’s hand after fighting for his amusement on his birthday. And despite what White told me and anyone else who could listen about this event’s universally patriotic appeal, it absolutely was one man’s birthday party—underscored immediately when Trump walked out and waved from the White House balcony and the first thing someone in the crowd yelled was, “Happy birthday!”

All of the Blue Angel flyovers, Zac Brown national anthems, and AI-generated hype videos about the supremacy of our military played between each match could not deflect Trump’s self-promotion. Event sponsors included World Liberty Financial (the Trump family’s crypto company), TrumpCoins.com (which sells commemorative medallions?) and Truth Social (Trump’s Twitter clone)—not to mention Trump’s investment in TKO, the UFC’s parent company.

Was it gross to witness? Mostly only in theory. Once you’ve seen a few fights, it’s hard not to see the ‘sports’ in combat sports, and become desensitized to the fact that a ‘technical knock out’ really means beating your opponent to the brink of unconsciousness, or that the loser of the night’s best fight was headed to the emergency room with a fractured orbital bone.

The event served to normalize the brutality of the UFC, the self-serving cronyism of Trump, and the positioning of the United States as a triumphant byproduct of the two. I think mostly accomplished that goal.

There was no crazy assassination attempt or protest or show of force. Between fights the crowd mingled, chatted and took photos with a vibe closer to a clubhouse, both the billionaire boys club of power brokers like Mark Zuckerberg, Ari Emanuel and David Ellison, and another couple thousand khaki-clad white dudes with mustaches and Polymarket accounts. A mile or two away at the Ellipse, 80,000 people watched the event on a big screen, a crowd that enjoys gambling, violence and corruption in an uncomplicated way.

White either cannot or willfully does not differentiate between what the President of the United States represents, in theory, and this president represents, in practice. Despite his insistence that he has no interest in political issues (which I believe) and would position himself center-left on the political spectrum (which I don’t believe…at all), his personal friendship with Trump has now permanently aligned his entire company with MAGA politics, whether he admits it or not (when we talked a few weeks ago I got him to admit that many “probably” think it’s true, but he insists they’re mistaken).

Maybe he doesn’t realize the long-term cost of this association, or maybe he’s just willing to gamble that it won’t hurt his business in the future (the man does love to gamble…I have seen him bet $300,000 per hand on baccarat). Who knows, he may even double down once again, given the success it’s brought him to this point.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence Marco Rubio has been tagging along to a bunch of UFC events (he and his family walked right past me on Sunday). I’m sure he’d love an endorsement from White’s legion of fans and manosphere influencers—an idea White did not shoot down in an interview with the Washington Post this weekend. If Rubio really wants it, he’d better start thinking long and hard about what exactly he can offer in return.

As for what White wants, the answer continues to be relevance and attention, and this weekend proved there is quite literally no price too high to capture it. As he told me in our last interview, he now thinks his true competition is the NFL and the NBA. Catching up to them seems impossible, but at this point, does anyone want to bet against him??

Hey movie lovers!

This week: How can a John Carney music movie not make you smile? Ask my fiancé. Plus, I got my hopes up about an indie crime flick, and kept my expectations low for a net Netflix rom-com. But hey, at least Spielberg always hits. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Sorkin be Sorkin-ing once again. It’s a beautiful thing.

Power Ballad

Few directors have as strong of a personal brand for their movies as John Carney. If you’ve seen Once, or Sing Street, or Begin Again, you know exactly what you’re getting: a syrupy sweet love story that leans heavily on music to underscore its emotional punch. And let me be clear, I love all three of those movies!

But when I think about the essential quality that runs through each of them, it’s a longing. His protagonists are losers, kinda, longing after a girl or a job or a better life, and that innate sadness tends to set up the payoff when everyone inevitably hugs and sings Kumbaya at the end.

Carney himself is now in his mid-50s, 20 years and a couple million dollars removed from the guy who wrote about a street busker in Once, so it makes sense he’s centering this story on a middle-aged dad with a fairly steady job as a wedding band singer. The issue is that dad, who is pretty great at that job, has great friends in the band, has a wife and daughter who loves him and also looks like Paul Rudd, doesn’t have any real problems.

Sure, you could say that problems are foisted upon him when he meets Nick Jonas’ washed up boy band character, who re-inspires Rudd’s unrealized rock star dreams, only to steal his song and turn it into a global smash hit. That sucks, don’t get me wrong, but it’s just not stakes enough to get too worked up about, especially when Rudd makes his pursuit for justice not about restitution but more about validating his own self-worth.

One major benefit for each of Carney’s three previous gems was that the music itself was really good, borderline great, and that requirement rises even higher when this entire premise is built around one song being an undeniable sensation (call this is the That Thing You Do! Test). In this case, I can’t tell if "How to Write a Song (Without You)" is catchy, or whether it was just drilled into my head by playing it over, and over, and over, and over again. Both Rudd and Jonas are given the rockstar treatment many times over.

Or perhaps the issue is that the forward thrust of the movie is really about intellectual property law. Does Rudd have prior proof that he wrote it, or not? What constitutes a co-writing credit? Interesting stuff but not exactly … cinematic.

All that said, Carney’s saccharine storytelling and Rudd’s innate charm make his sad sap eminently lovable. (Hard disagree to that from my fiancé Sarah, who went to the movie with me. She says his character was a “deadbeat, reckless father who left his wife and daughter one too many times for me to be a fan.” Harsh.) I admit to being somewhat swayed by Carney’s signature sentimental finish, which leaves you feeling like all the problems in the world are solved by the power of love, set to about 25 more choruses of “How to Write a Song (Without You).”

Manipulated? Maybe. Mad about it? How could I be. I too am a sap at heart.

Something New

Carolina Caroline (Theaters): Remember less than two months ago when I said Samara Weaving was a star in waiting and there was nothing she couldn’t do? The former might be true, but I think the unfortunate answer to the latter is emotional vulnerability, and it holds this Bonnie & Clyde-style crime romp from being anything more than an almost-was. She can do action, she can do comedy, she can do the first half of romance—she can’t really do a southern accent, but oh well—all of those skills are on display when a devil-may-care con man (played by Kyle Gallner, an indie fav of mine) comes into her small Texas town and whisks her away into a life of crime that eventually leads to them robbing banks together across the South.

It’s a premise that’s always going to be watchable, pulling many of the elements we loved from Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid and a lot of Hell or High Water. Perhaps my expectations were a tad too high, because the movie does mostly deliver on its swashbuckling and its tête-à-tête. Only when it reaches for that next level of emotional connection do the cracks start to show, and the proverbial ship takes on water as it tries to drag itself to a satisfying conclusion. It didn’t get there for me but still had plenty to offer, so I’d recommend it when it comes to streaming.

Something Old

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977, Peacock): Sheesh, it really tells you how far Steven Spielberg’s star has fallen, and how desperately he wants Disclosure Day to be a hit, to see him promoting it everywhere over the past few weeks. I swear I’ve seen him on every podcast, TV show, YouTube channel or newspaper that will have him (and don’t worry, they will ALL still have him).

This movie is from the era when Spielberg was where Chris Nolan is now. He may not have had Greek mythology or A-bombs, but he did make heavy use of aliens to create the kind of spectacle that brought audiences to theaters. Unlike Nolan, however, Spielberg’s movies are warm and character-forward. In fact, in many ways this movie about the first encounters with alien life isn’t even sci-fi, it’s just a really great human drama. Of course, Disclosure Day will inevitably be compared to this, and it’ll be nearly impossible to measure up to the all-time classic, but you’d be doing yourself a favor to see it (or rewatch) before heading out to theaters this week.

Something To Stream

Office Romance (Netflix): Hollywood has really fallen for Brett Goldstein, who somehow parlayed a spot as the 3rd or 4th lead in a moderate successful show (“Ted Lasso”) into a HBO stand-up special, a starring part in another Apple show (“Shrinking”), and now a new Netflix rom-com he’s co-written and stars in that has him falling in love with Jennifer Lopez.

To tell you just how seriously to take this paint-by-numbers love story about a girl-boss CEO falling in love with her in-house counsel, consider that the inciting incident of the story is the previous in-house counsel (played by Bradley Whitford, for no clear reason other than Netflix had money to burn) choking on a breakfast burrito in the first 10 minutes, and Goldstein’s character responding to the news with, “You can eat burritos for breakfast?”

Yes, yes, the torrent of jokes about how strange the U.S. is for an Englishman living and working here would’ve played far better in 1996 or 2006, which coincidentally was the heyday for J-Lo romance movies. By sheer volume of attempts, the movie does stumble upon enough funny lines and moments to make this a fun little streaming distraction, but I can’t help but wonder what it says about the current state of Hollywood—risk-averse producers, lack of new stars—that we’re still rolling out the same actors in same stories as 20 years ago?

Trailer Watch: The Social Reckoning

Say what you want about Aaron Sorkin’s directorial work (it mostly stinks), but there are few cinematic joys higher than when one of his cheesy, overwritten lines of dialogue hits like a sledgehammer. Jeremy Strong comes on screen with the perfectly smug intonations and facial expressions of Mark Zuckerberg and says, “I’m a professional defendant,” and I promise every single person who has seen “The West Wing,” or “The Newsroom,” or A Few Good Men, or even this movie’s predecessor The Social Network felt their heart do a somersault. Without David Fincher’s icy touch like the first movie, I’m not expecting an all-time classic, but I am expecting 10-15 borderline-cringy-but-somehow-iconic lines just like that one. And that’s more than enough to get my butt in a seat.

It’s hard not to have another sports-heavy week with my “conversation starters,” with the NBA Finals New York mania going on as well as the end of the French Open tennis, the start of the World Cup, and this weekend’s wild UFC White House fight (which. I will be attending in D.C. this weekend!).

With that in mind, here’s my weekly roundup of the best, most interesting and most entertaining content on the internet this week. Should give you plenty of stuff to think about and talk about around the water cooler this week!

What’s the coolest story or thing you found on the internet this week? Reply to this email and shoot me a link. Would love to hear from you!

• I was in Las Vegas last week to talk with the one man insane enough to attempt to host a cage fight on the White House lawn—my ol’ frienemy Dana White. We talked for a half hour about the event, his (ehem) unique relationship with Donald Trump, and also a hilarious few minutes about his behavior during Meta board meetings (“after 15 minutes I wouldn’t shut the f— up!”). Then I wrote a full story about it for Forbes.

  • Shoutout to ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Yahoo and all the other outlets that have aggregated parts of my interview. I don’t resent them for it, but the fact that 1) outlets as big as these ones need to reproduce others’ work in order to generate cheap page views to keep the lights on, and 2) there’s zero system in place to compensate the people who originate content like this, are a big reason why journalism is dying.

• One of my colleagues at Forbes had another story this week that was tailor-made for this newsletter, about an unlikely beneficiary of the AI boom. Apparently in Silicon Valley there’s a new class of escorts who have learned the tech lingo and now charge as much as $6,000 per hour.

• Eric Andre—that absolutely unhinged prankster with a show on Adult Swim—just pulled off a bit that’s so deep there’s actually no joke at the end of it: he composed a legitimately cool classical music album, which he conducted with a live orchestra. There’s no punchline but it’s still hilarious.

• Remember that seemingly impossible rock wall that Alex Honnold climbed in Free Solo. Well, a 7-year-old called “Danger” climbed El Capitan this weekend (with ropes, and with his dad). Yet some insider reporting from Climbing.com shows why the climbing community is angry about what is at best a publicity stunt and at worst, a total fraud. Love some big drama in a little niche community!

• Speaking of little niche sports, the World Cup starts this week (I kid). YouTuber Joon Lee explains how the U.S. opinion of soccer went from calling it girly and un-American to hipster outsider cool to mainstream popularity.

• America’s newfound obsession with protein has led companies to put it into seemingly every product, from shakes and bars to pancakes and coffee. Now there’s a problem—the nation could face a protein shortage. Some suppliers are raising prices and others have completely run out.

Thanks for reading and sharing! I saw Power Ballad this weekend and am going to try to get out to Carolina Caroline before Friday’s newsletter. Come back then for my thoughts!