Rob’s Posts

2025 Best Picture Nominees

2026-03-11T00:00:00-05:00

Another year; another list of Best Picture nominees. Here are my rankings from previous years: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

Each year I choose one film I particularly enjoyed that doesn’t quite fit the mold of Best Picture. This year I was considering Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man, which I thought held together better than the prior Benoit Blanc outing, but honestly I can’t quite call it a great film, and if it had fully delivered on what it was trying to accomplish I expect it would have been nominated.

Instead let me praise James Gunn’s Superman. People often talk about superhero fatigue, but mostly I feel like I suffer from MCU fatigue: the canon is now so extensive and the movie-to-movie tie-ins so complex that the weight is oppressive. In only a few seconds of on-screen text Superman assures us we can leave all that behind: no origin story; no elaborate references required; we’re joining a quirky and lighthearted romp with a refreshingly simple (not anti-)hero. Gunn also manages to defuse the fundamental problem with the Superman story in general: in this telling, Superman’s desperate wish not to empower authoritarians is right up front, and that opening text makes it clear that he’s not all-powerful.

I must also say that Rachel Brosnahan offers the first portrayal of Lois Lane who actually appeals to me.

Gunn’s Superman, in production for years before Trump was even elected for a second term, also gets credit for pissing off the MAGA die-hards. Listen, dudes: condemnation of secret prison camps where immigrants are tortured with no due process isn’t new. You’re the ones who decided to cheer on comic-book-villain-level evil.

The Nominees

Unlike most years, I don’t think any of the nominated films this year are truly bad. Fully half of them, however, I consider catastrophically flawed: enjoyable in their way, but so obviously broken that it’s a bit of an embarrassment any were nominated for Best Picture. Two more nominees were well-executed, but not particularly ambitious. The final three were all clever, well-made, and each novel in its way. Within each of these three bands my rankings are somewhat arbitrary; tastes differ. (If you disagree with my three bands, your tastes are incorrect.)

As always, a few words about each film from worst to best, starting with:

The Fatally Flawed

10. The Secret Agent

Let’s offer the worst nominee of the year a compliment sandwich.

The production design was immaculate. I’m sure there are wonks who could find a few details that weren’t accurate to 1970s Brazil, but I found the setting (both time and place) totally immersive. And this isn’t incidental to the film’s themes: you can feel what it must have been like to live in a “time of mischief”, with all the paranoia and confusion and squalor that entails.

That said, it seems like a lot of work to go through just to tell such a dull and meandering story. It’s not just that the pace was slow; there was no real momentum, with the general menace offered by cuts to the hitmen falling entirely flat with not even an attempt at urgency, and the “find my mother’s id record!” quest entirely superfluous to the story.

This was last year’s I’m Still Here with better production values but a much worse script.

The acting performances were excellent. (I assume. I wouldn’t know if they were saying the wrong words.)

9. Sentimental Value

I loved the opening sequence following our lead’s battle with stage fright. I was sure we’d be in good hands for the rest of the film. Unfortunately, that was the highlight. It was all very competently made and performed, but it was both tedious and obvious. The easy dismissal would be that I have a bias against films about filmmaking, but I don’t accept this as mere personal preference: Sentimental Value is just more evidence that filmmakers lose all empathy for their audience when they’re telling stories about their own obsession. Again, there will never be a movie about the importance and drama of software engineering anything like as self-indulgent as all these movies about movies, and that’s not an argument for engineering movies…

8. Frankenstein

This was my biggest disappointment among the nominees. Frankenstein was the project Guillermo del Toro was born to make. Decades of mulling over what he’d do with one of the most remade tales in the western canon seems to have paralyzed him. I think my frustration is that del Toro doesn’t actually pick a story to tell or a theme to explore, but instead merely references all the plotpoints and themes of every incarnation.

Obviously the production design is the best version of Frankenstein that’s ever been on screen. It’s a beautiful film. But it just doesn’t make any sense. To pick a few examples:

Victor’s character. He’s cold, calculating, and focused…but also flies into an impotent rage at his monster. Just because. He’s dedicated his entire life to the single-minded pursuit of science…until he just shrugs his shoulders and gives it up. If you want an explanation for why you have to go to one of the other adaptations; del Toro will reference them but won’t offer a justification of his own. Victor’s aspiration and frustration with his creation is that it’s a brute creature lacking human intelligence, who he swears to save if it could utter a single coherent thought…and when his monster re-emerges speaking fluent English he is neither surprised nor interested.
The monster is attacked, multiple times. Hunters shoot the man-shaped figure in a cloak on sight for some reason. They outright murder the curious creature from afar and then just leave him lying in the snow to recover. And Victor “hunts” the monster to the literal ends of the earth despite the decisive conclusion that he’s no match for it. These are all just things that happen for the sake of setting up the next scene; none of them are part of any coherent premise.
An admittedly minor nitpick, but the moment I fully gave up on the film: the blind man asks the monster to pass him a bottle of brandy, and the creature drops it. It smashes on the floor. Why? “You’re nervous, aren’t you?” That’s it. The creature isn’t clumsy. The poor blind man doesn’t care that his (only?) bottle is gone, and the creature expresses no guilt. It’s just one more tiny event that works only as symbol and metaphor without have any literal consequences at all.

It’s a real shame that del Toro couldn’t choose an angle on Frankenstein, because as 2023’s Poor Things showed us it’s a framework for a skilled filmmaker to tell any number of new stories.

7. Hamnet

Q: The written pitch I got just says the film will be about “the most emotionally devastating thing ever…” What is that?

A: Isn’t it obvious? It’s about a child dying. From the parents’ perspective.

Q: Right. Okay. So this is the culmination of some complex plot during which we learn about the parents and the death offers insight into their characters?

A: Not really. The kid just gets sick and dies.

Q: The pitch also says “…in the most dramatic setting…”?

A: Elizabethan England. And listen: we’re going to need a budget on this one, because I want this to be the definitive take on the squalor of the era. Incredibly historically accurate.

Q: It kind of seems like what makes losing a child so affecting to modern audiences is how rare it is. The sense that you’ve failed as a parent; the judgement, whether real or perceived; the isolation…isn’t that whole experience undermined by setting the story in a time period when fully half of all children didn’t make it to adulthood?

A: We won’t mention that. It’ll be a movie about the modern notion of losing a child as a life-defining event.

Q: I thought historical accuracy was your thing?

A: Not for the theme of the movie. I meant that, like, everybody’s fingernails are going to be really, really filthy. Dirty faces. Freckles.

Q: Isn’t this going to come across as emotionally manipulative and low-brow?

A: Aw hell no, dawg. Because here’s the best part: these aren’t just any parents. The father is William M-Fing Shakespeare. Nobody’s been allowed to call Shakespeare emotionally manipulative and low-brow for centuries.

Q: Brilliant. And we get to learn about Shakespeare’s genius, how he learned his craft, how success and fame changed him?

A: No. I guess we’ll have to mention some of that but we’ll put it off screen. This is really just about how his kid got sick and died. We’ll focus mostly on the mom.

Q: So she has a kid, the kid dies, she has deeply anachronistic emotional reactions, and that’s it?

A: Oh no. The last half hour is excerpts from Hamlet. Which is Shakespeare’s play about death.

Q: They’re all about death.

A: But this is the one everybody’s heard of. Plus Hamlet was the kid’s name. More or less.

Q: Is a play about an indecisive adult vowing revenge for his father’s murder the best metaphor for losing a child?

A: During the play we’ll cut to the parents crying. And if the parents get the parallel, no audience is going to admit they don’t. Seriously, bro: everybody knows Hamlet is the deepest shit ever. It’s got to be at least a little about losing a child.

Q: And you promise the fingernails will be dirty?

A: So dirty.

Q: Sold.

6. Bugonia

I really liked this movie. For a while. It’s not particularly artfully shot, but it’s a fun little romp with crisp writing and great performances. It has a sense of humor. It started developing nuanced takes on class in America, on conspiracy and loyalty and madness, on the price corporate leaders pay for their positions, and maybe even on the ambiguity of “justice” as a concept. For a while.

Less than halfway through, however, a fear emerged from deep within me. They weren’t going to do the obvious thing, were they? The trite, painful copout to undermine everything else? Maybe if they threw in that twist now they’d still have time to atone for it. But they weren’t throwing it in now, so surely that meant they wouldn’t do something so discrediting at all. They’d play it straight. They’d follow through.

And for the rest of the film the themes didn’t really develop. The characters didn’t deepen. The details that could have provided insight didn’t just fail to appear; it felt like they were dodged at every opportunity.

There were a few strange lines that didn’t make sense. I literally groaned when it became clear they were actually going to do it.

Yet they made it to the finish line! They wrapped up the plot without totally ruining the setup! You could squint your eyes a little and still write that think piece about the commentary the movie hinted at without ever quite pinning down.

Then they tacked on the coda. One somehow both crushingly prosaic and utterly incompatible with the plot as we’ve seen it. One just explicitly undercutting any possible depth.

Sigh.

Let’s move on to the films without such glaring problems:

The Well-Executed

5. Train Dreams

What’s to say beyond that I liked it? A simple story, beautifully shot, that successfully makes the constant current of loss feel sweet. I don’t think this is sufficiently ambitious to be Best Picture, at least not in a year with three films that took bigger swings and connected on them, but a very solid entry.

4. F1

I feel like we went through this with Ted Lasso. “An American college football coach goes to England to coach a Premier League team” is a banal premise with niche appeal, but (for one season, at least) the execution was extraordinary and we ended up with a series that pretty much everyone enjoyed. It wasn’t deep like Breaking Bad nor innovative like Seinfeld nor heart-wrenching like Fleabag, but it was a fun story that made a legitimate effort to say something meaningful.

Maybe F1 doesn’t have quite the same aspiration to “meaningful”, but it’s a similarly simple niche premise that derives wide appeal from exceptional execution. Pitt radiates charisma. He’s paired with a attractive but age-appropriate (by Hollywood standards) love interest. The side characters are even more one-dimensional, but they’re likable and the film respects them. The plot is well-paced, with a clear structure for the audience to follow and rising stakes. Finally, the “action” is immersive and exciting, with strategy and detail dumbed down just enough to cater to audiences who have no experience with motorsport without feeling patronising.

There are so many ways this movie could have been stupid, boring, or obnoxious, and somehow they managed to thread the needle between all of them. It’s great to know that big dumb movies can still be well-crafted and lovable.

Art

I usually end up writing more about the best nominees than the worse ones, but my overall thoughts on the three real contenders are similar. These are all beautifully-made films with rich characters and well-developed themes. They’re all novel (or at least quirky) in their own ways, but more than that they all have a sense of fun. Just watch them. They may not totally resonate with you, but it’s difficult to argue that any of them are anything less than great filmmaking.

With that out of the way, a few specific points about each, any of which I’d be happy to see win Best Picture:

3. Sinners

I have this ranked third mainly because despite a strong case that it’s the freshest and most innovative of the three, the themes didn’t quite grab me the way the others did. (I’m sure if I spent more of my life immersed in Black culture and history my perspective would be different—to refuse to acknowledge that is to also deny how many Oscar nominees underserve minority audiences.)

But what surprised me more is that this film is partly a celebration of music…and I didn’t really like the music. If you’d asked me if I was into twangy southern guitar I’d have said I was on board, but for whatever reason it left me cold and disappointed. Sometimes you can’t even predict your own tastes.

Of the many pluses to this film, it has to be mentioned that they nailed the effects. It’s all too common to think that good effects are flashy, but the harder trick is to make them inconspicuous. Jordan’s double act is seamless, and you don’t even realize that things like one character passing a cigarette to another are show-off-level effects work because they feel totally natural. I didn’t notice a single moment compromised to accomodate that you didn’t actually have two actors playing against each other—a tribute both to the overall filmmaking and to Jordan’s impressive (and realistically contrasting-but-similar) performances.

2. One Battle After Another

There is simply “more” in this film than any of the other nominees. Every character has depth and interest, and I think part of the fun is knowing that different audiences are going to have different favorites: the film doesn’t force you to choose. It’s well-written, well-acted, and beautifully shot.

But this nominee has one thing that completely shocked me. I’ve probably seen hundreds of car chases in movies. Some good, some bad. I didn’t think it was possible to do something genuinely new with a car chase any more. This was new. It was gripping. I loved it. All the characters aside, I’d be happy to see this win for that one sequence alone.

1. Marty Supreme

Oddly, my favorite of these last three is the easiest to hate. I can understand plenty of audiences respecting the craft but being left cold by a full complement of generally unlikeable characters. For whatever reason, I was into it. I’ll restrict my comments to two points:

First, the 2019 Adam Sandler drama Uncut Gems. I hated that film. It absolutely nailed its tone of constantly-accelerating catastrophe driven my a manic and deeply broken lead (with an excellent performance by Sandler), but I couldn’t find any redeemable attributes in any of the characters. I quickly found myself rooting for them to lose. And quickly.

Marty Supreme succeeds on all the terms Uncut Gems does, but Marty at least has one thing going for him: he has purpose. You can argue that he’s motivated purely by ego, but at least he’s channeled that ego into being the best at something. Accomplishing something. That may not redeem him as a character or a person, but his singular focus makes it easy to take his side even knowing it’s ridiculous and pointless. And that’s kind of the essence of the film: at the end of the day it’s all ridiculous and pointless, so you may as well make the best of it.

Second, while Marty is clearly our hero I’ve never seen a film that so effortlessly establishes every single side character as an obvious lead of their own movie. All movies I’d watch! And this theme comes to a head in the utterly unhinged “I’m a vampire!” monolog Marty gets from his erstwhile sponsor/enemy. Which Marty totally brushes off as just more nonsense from one more NPC who’s unworthy of serious attention. Marty is deeply unlikeable because he is a sociopath, but that sociopathy is played not as some Hollywood stereotype of sadism; he’s simply constantly surrounded by fascinating characters and never has any empathy for (or interest in) any of them.

(I learned only later that this vampire thing was originally meant to be a plot point and final twist, ala the coda to Sinners. Frankly, I think it works far better as an insane aside that the audience can do with as they like.)

Final verdict: Marty Supreme is the nominee I enjoyed the most, but I’d be perfectly happy if Sinners or One Battle took home the statue instead. Best of luck to all three.

Mastodon Exit Interview

2025-04-10T00:00:00-05:00

I am currently winding down the Mastodon bots I used to post sunrise and sunset times. The precipitating event is that the admin of the instance hosting the associated accounts demanded they be made nigh-undiscoverable, but the underlying cause is that it’s become increasing clear that Mastodon isn’t, and won’t ever be, a good platform for “asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind”. I’d also argue (more controversially) that it’s simply not good infrastructure for social networking of any kind. There are lots of interesting people using Mastodon, and I’m sure it will live on as a good-enough space for certain niche groups. But there is no question that it will never offer the fun of early Twitter, let alone the vibrancy of Twitter during its growth phase. I’ve long since dropped Mastodon from my home screen, and have switched to Bluesky for text-centric social media.

Mastodon is an instantiation of an open standard called ActivityPub, which was built mainly in reaction to Facebook’s closed ecosystem. In the heady days of the 2010s, there was much resentment of digital monopolies, and many techies dreamed of a way to share posts (among other things; ActivityPub contains data formats for far more than just text and pictures) across their “social graph” without being beholden to a single company. The hostility to any centralized “source of truth” that could be owned or co-opted by a single company (the same hostility motivating cryptocurrencies) made “distribution” a, perhaps the, primary design goal. The distribution model chosen was called “federation”: Mastodon would consist of a collection of independent “instances” that were free to “federate” together to form (potentially) a single universal social graph.

The important technical point is that ActivityPub is (again, among other things) a protocol for one instance to tell another “I am interested in the following kinds of posts from you, so please send them to me when you see any” and for that other instance to periodically say “here are some posts you’re interested in”. Obviously there’s lots of technical detail, but what matters is that it’s not (primarily) a mechanism for accessing remote information; it’s a way to asynchronously distribute data so that the data is available locally.

Federation does not work

I’m not saying federation “won’t” work or “can’t” work. Merely that in 2025, nine years after deployment, federation does not work for the Mastodon use case.

I could opine at length about possible federated architectures and what I think the ActivityPub people clearly got wrong in hindsight.¹ But the proof is in the pudding: Mastodon simply doesn’t show users the posts they ask to see, as I quickly learned from my collection of bots.

The most immediate problem is that you only have access to posts that are present on your local instance, and posts are only propagated to your local instance if it has expressed interest in them (to the instance where they originate). It’s a chicken-or-egg issue: how do you know whether you’re interested in something if you can’t see it?

This problem became abundantly clear after setting up my solar bots on the mas.to instance: the mastodon.social instance (where I keep my personal account) had expressed no interest in any of these accounts, so none of their posts were available to my personal account. Crucially, the posts did not exist even if I visited the profile page of the account: even after weeks of daily posts, the profile page displayed by mastodon.social claimed the account had never posted, and the posts would only begin appearing after someone on mastodon.social began following the account.² (And even then, for reasons far trickier to debug, some posts would never propagate to instances where they did have followers. The ActivityPub architecture and protocol are just flaky.)

The federated model simply abandons the idea of a “source of truth” for an account, and as a result it is less reliable (and comprehensible) than mature central-server-with-distributed-caching models used for feeds like RSS (as well as every web site).

Account migration does not work

One of the big selling points of Mastodon was that you can pick which instance your account lives on, but it is easy to change your mind and switch to a different instance later on. This feature was wildly oversold.

Mastodon allows you to post the equivalent of a web redirect: your followers are informed of your new instance and seamlessly migrated over. Your posts, however, do not move with you. Which is kind of a theme: the system simply doesn’t think posts are terribly important.

But worse than that, the redirect is hosted by your old instance. If you are moving because your old instance went down, you’re stuck. If you are moving because the administrator of your old instance decided to nuke your account, you’re stuck.

It is not hard to design mechanisms for accounts to actually “own” their posts and followers and migrate them between instances. Instead, Mastodon picked a single “choosing to migrate from one working instance you’re on good terms with to another” use case and stopped there.

Direct messaging does not work

What other social systems call “direct messaging” is called “private mentions” on Mastodon, and it is simply the worst feature design I have ever seen in a mainstream technical product.

When you “private mention” someone, only you and they can see the post. And they can reply with a “private mention” of their own. But if anyone in that “private” thread accidentally mentions any other Mastodon account by name, that is itself considered a “private mention”, and that person is invited into the thread. It is an absolutely insane UI design that makes it extremely easy to share private conversations with exactly the people you don’t want reading them.

Since announcing that my solar bots had been threatened by the mas.to adminstrator, there were several private conversations about me, and I know this because they accidentally mentioned me in those conversations. And then quickly deleted the messages to re-hide them from me. This happened a half-dozen times.

In short: it would be far better not to have private messaging at all than to ship such a catastrophic implementation of it.³

Content moderation does not work

Content moderation is the hard problem in social media, and it’s been said that moderation (ie what content people see) is the product. As far as I can tell, Mastodon was designed in complete ignorance of all the actual challenges of moderation at scale, and focused only on a weird offshoot of the “federated” religion: the real problem is that people want to opt into a moderation regime based on their instance.

Of course this simply makes scaling even worse: every instance now has to moderate all content across the network (not just their own); every instance has to design, communicate, and defend its moderation policy; every user has to parse dozens of different moderation policies to understand both what instance they want to host their account on as well as which other instances will accept their content (based not just on the content itself but also on other instances’ opinions of the moderation policy of the instance hosting their account). Luckily(?), Mastodon is not (and never will be) popular, so scaling never became much of an issue.

The problem that did manifest is that all of this moderation is entirely opaque to users. If you explicitly follow a particular account, you may not see posts from that account because its instance doesn’t like its content, because your instance doesn’t like its content, or simply because one of the two instances doesn’t like the other. Which is very much a thing.⁴ But the only way to know what you’re not seeing is that…you’re not seeing it. Ie if you follow an account, you’d have to find some (outside-Mastodon) way to find out what they’re posting and then compare it with what you’re seeing in Mastodon. And of course it is virtually impossible to know which of your followers are seeing your own posts. It’s a maddening design.

Many instances do publicly state (in an “about this instance” field) which entire instances they’ve explicitly de-federated, and sometimes which shared blocklists they use, but I’ve never seen this information posted as a feed that you can follow to learn about new (or reversed) de-federations. Content moderation on Mastodon is shadow-bans top to bottom, not as a designed policy but simply because nobody worked out any kind of transparency mechanism.⁵

Live feeds do not work

For all the dumb, anti-scalable ideas in Mastodon, one really stands out: “what if you followed everybody???”

Mastodon’s main UI allows you to see (some) posts from the accounts you follow, but it also offers several other feeds: you can see all posts from everyone on this instance, or you can see all posts (that your instance happens to receive) from anyone on any instance.

It should go without saying that both feeds are utter nonsense once there are more than a few thousand users. But because both have pride of place in the UI, new users (in particular) are convinced that they must be useful somehow. And so a culture has developed of complaining about anything that appears in either feed that is considered “noise”.⁶

This problem could be mitigated by having these feeds follow less than truly “everybody”, but as of early 2025 there is no way to opt out of only these feeds; if you opt out of the feeds then all your posts are also removed from all search indexes and can’t be found by anyone who doesn’t follow you.⁷

Mastodon development does not work

Although I question the fundamental technical premises of the “federated” architecture, there are fairly straightforward ways to address all of the above complaints. As a purely empirical observation, they are not being addressed. No significant progress has been made on Mastodon or the underlying protocols in years, and the development community seems to be content with tweaks around the edges, on the premise that the current system is meeting its primary design goals.

When users cannot find or see the posts they explicitly request, when much of the UI is devoted to features that offer no value, and when comparable services like Bluesky are exploding in popularity while Mastodon’s user base stagnates, I believe more ambition is required. Clearly my early hopes for Mastodon as a platform do not match those of its developer community.

Mastodon culture does not work

This is of course the greatest stretch of my “does not work” conceit. For all my gripes about Mastodon as infrastructure, social media is defined by its communities and content, and the bar for “good enough” infrastructure is (arguably) very low. There are lots of fascinating, thoughtful, kind people who use Mastodon, and I’m willing to believe that there are certain niche subcultures who have built vibrant, active communities on the platform.

My experience, however, is that “the Mastodon community” is simply not something I’m interested in, particularly when compared with the communities I’ve experienced on Bluesky. The platform never achieved a critical mass of contributors in any of my areas of interest (even technology and software engineering), but beyond that it’s just never been fun. I argue that much of this (dearth of) culture is reinforced by the technical design.

Mastodon was explicitly designed to be anti-viral. The absence of quote tweets in particular was an intentional choice to prevent piling-on, and to avoid the Twitter phenomenon of “the main character of the day” having their life ruined. Such harm reduction is a noble goal, but a social media platform that eschews virality entirely is sterile; the day when everyone was riffing on the “skydiving baby” meme on Bluesky felt like early Twitter. Bluesky’s more surgical measures to avoid unwanted virality (the ability to detach your own posts from quote-tweets, and the “nuclear block”) reduce harm while permitting wider conversations.

But more generally, Mastodon culture has taken a scolding, censorious tone. The platform offers a general and open-ended “content warning” infrastructure…meaning that every post can be criticized for not offering enough (or the right) warnings. Both the instance/federated feeds mentioned above and feeds for every hashtag have become curation battlegrounds, with “that content doesn’t interest me; stop posting it” not just a normal but a respected view on Mastodon. And the general “we want a space where we, unlike Facebook and Twitter, can punish Nazis” origins of Mastodon have turned a lot of “political discourse” on the platform into a childish game of virtue-signalling one-upsmanship. It is difficult to imagine any of the substantive discussions of the Gaza war that happen on Bluesky surviving on Mastodon.

Maybe that’s all fine. I’m sure there are plenty of people who just want a comfortable space where enforcing their bubble is easy; where the focus is on smaller communities; where the default is not to see things. The fact that I have concluded that Mastodon is not for me—and that I’m confident it will never be for as many people as Twitter or Bluesky—does not mean it’s not for anyone.

So Bluesky’s great, right?

I really enjoy Bluesky. It offers much of the best of Twitter: with a well-curated set of follows (and a chronological, not algorithmic timeline), I get to hear directly from a lot of true experts commenting in real time on current events. But I see absolutely no reason to expect the platform to avoid the problems that Twitter encountered as it grew (and Mastodon fostered as it failed to grow). Its own “federated protocol”—literally the entire reason it was built, and the main/only technical pitch in its early days—is totally irrelevant. And the platform’s main “we’re not like Twitter” features, the “nuclear block” that deletes all (direct) interactions retroactively and its support for blocklists, have led to a “block first, block often” culture that certainly reduces discomfort but also enshrines it as the most echo-chambery of the platforms, even compared with Mastodon. I’d argue that Bluesky has avoided the rancor of late-days Twitter moderation mainly because it hasn’t reached anything like the size and diversity of Twitter, and consequently doesn’t have the cultural, political, and economic significance for people to work all that hard at ruining it. We’ll see.

There may be relevant discussion of this post on Bluesky.

Footnotes:

I find the comparisons with blockchain particularly interesting, since blockchain addresses the lack of a source of truth directly, at the cost of needing to distribute all data everywhere. Blockchain is wildly inefficient and might never achieve the “nonfunctional requirements” required for its ambitions. It does manage its most basic functional requirements, however, which is more than I can say for Mastodon. ↩
Once you realize how Mastodon actually works, the correct “strategy” for making an account discoverable is completely obvious: create an account on every (large) instance in the entire federation and have every one of those accounts follow the account(s) you want people to be able to find. Only then will the other users of those instances see that the account has ever posted anything, and only then will the posts appear in search results on those instances. It’s so stupid it doesn’t really qualify as a “hack”. And it says something that nobody (including myself) cares enough about Mastodon to do it. After a couple of weeks most of the bot accounts had picked up at least a handful of followers, but the dozenish in obscure locations with few or no followers I followed from my personal mastodon.social account largely so that they were discoverable on the fediverse’s single largest instance. ↩
I am also extremely critical of Bluesky’s DM implementation, which not only lacks end-to-end encryption, but (at the time of release, at least) did not even encrypt private messages at rest. I consider the former to be table stakes in the 2020s, but leaving ostensibly private user data in the clear such that any employee doing routine maintenance tasks can trivially read it falls well short of industry best practices. I consider these glaring oversights indicative of an unserious privacy culture at Bluesky, yet still nothing like as absurd as Mastodon’s private-mention insanity. ↩
“My instance has the correct moderation policy and I will de-federate from instances that have different policies” is a common sentiment, and given that even the largest Mastodon instances tend to be run by ideologues with less-than-entirely-professional temperaments inter-instance politics resemble middle-school drama. My first personal Mastodon account was on the masthead.social instance (chosen because several writers I followed on Twitter migrated there), but apparently its very open speech policy led to an association with Nazis (or something) and many other instances blocked it. Which I only noticed because my feed got sparser and sparser. That instance appears to be dead; cf my concerns that you can’t migrate your account away from dead instances. ↩
An amusing update from 24 hours after this was posted: the admin of mas.to has quietly shadow-banned my personal Mastodon account (hosted on mastodon.social) from that instance. This is the level of professionalism one can expect from content moderators on the fediverse’s largest instances in 2025. As petty and vengeful as Musk’s X. ↩
This is in fact the issue that led to the death of my solar bots: on a server with 100,000 users, 100 bots each posting once a day were deemed to be polluting the instance feed of everybody’s posts. I have neither respect nor patience for such idiocy. ↩
The administrator of mas.to, one of the largest Mastodon instances, clearly didn’t, and possibly still doesn’t, understand this. Which says a lot about the maturity of the Mastodon ecosystem. ↩

2024 Best Picture Nominees

2025-03-01T00:00:00-06:00

It’s Oscar season again, and once again I’ve watched and ranked all the Best Picture nominees (so you don’t have to). Here are my previous rankings from 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

Each year I choose one non-nominee I particularly recommend, and this year I’m not choosing a film (of which I’ve seen quite few over the past year). Instead I’m recommending Severance, Apple TV+’s brilliant (and wildly popular) streaming series. I won’t pretend I entirely understand what the creators are trying to say about work and corporate life, much less that I agree with it. (Hollywood is notoriously terrible at representing any industry beyond entertainment.) The series is, however, the most thought-provoking piece of media I’ve encountered in years, and although it’s really the first season from 2022 that deserves most of the credit, the 2025 follow-on continues to engage.

I wouldn’t say that I found any of this year’s Best Picture nominees outright terrible, but I’d call three of the films at least kinda bad, three mid, three genuinely good, and one outstanding. Here is my ranking, from worst to best:

10. Emilia Pérez

Apparently Emilia Pérez was at one point the frontrunner for Best Picture, and their campaign was completely derailed when the woke brigade discovered some Bad Social Media Posts by the lead. To me this is a damning indictment of wokism, because this should never have been considered a good film in the first place.

The plot outline is genuinely interesting. I’d offer this an Oscar nod based on the one-page synopsis alone. And yet every aspect of that outline’s implementation is utterly terrible. I found myself wishing a competent team would take a stab at making a real version of this story instead of the ridiculous student-film experiment we get here.

It’s a musical, for some reason. I don’t get it, but fine. I’ll run with it. Yet I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out how the musical numbers connected to the main film. The characters are so underdrawn every song seemed to be “here’s a possible way a person in this situation might feel…” even though the actual on-screen events didn’t justify that (always trite) feeling.

Beyond that, apparently the performers were coached to sing terribly? I initially thought that the whisper-talking vocals were merely to cover for actors with no voice training…and then realized I was watching Selena f*cking Gomez not-sing. It just makes me angry.

9. The Substance

Let’s talk about the British television anthology series Black Mirror.

This is squarely in my wheelhouse: speculative fiction; tech (and tech culture); even British. I can’t not watch this show. There have been occasional episodes that I find entertaining or thoughtful (San Junipero was good), but for me it’s a hate watch. I loathe the program and want them to stop making them so I no longer feel obliged to stay up to date.

The problem with Black Mirror is that every episode has one idea. Exactly one idea. Black Mirror worries that the audience will not grasp The Idea, so they make sure to explain The Idea, over and over again, in hopes that the dumbest people they could possibly imagine might catch up. Black Mirror does not introduce The Idea into our world and see how this world is distorted by it; instead it builds an entirely new world around The Idea, to the extent that The World is almost metaphor. A mere scaffold or plinth upon which to display The Idea. To me, this denudes The Idea of any interest whatsoever. It is the antithesis of everything that I find engaging in speculative fiction.

Suffice it to say that The Substance has all the depth and nuance of a (bad) episode of Black Mirror. And without exaggeration, its Idea merited the runtime of one television episode. The indulgent lengths of Oscar nominees is one of my longstanding complaints, but I have never before encountered a nominee that I thought was literally three times too long. Forty-five minutes in I started looking at my watch, and every ten minutes after that I looked down in shock at just how much more I still had to go. Even I eventually get tired of gawking at Margaret Qualley’s ass.

8. The Brutalist

I don’t get it. I don’t understand what the filmmakers thought they were saying. I don’t understand what they expected us to make of the protagonist. Or any of the characters, in fact. I don’t understand why they showed us these parts of the story and not others; I don’t understand why they introduced and abandoned the characters they did at different points; I don’t understand why they chose architecture, or Brutalism, or Philadelphia. I don’t understand anything about what they expected this film to be. The whole thing just struck me as aping the style of old-school great-man (and immigration) sagas without any original substance of its own.

I could dwell on the many specific choices leading to the above-mentioned confusion, but The Brutalist has already stolen too much of my life. Let me make a point that is perhaps more fundamental:

This is a film about architecture, even more so than Citizen Kane is about journalism or Amadeus is about music. And the architecture totally sucks. I don’t just mean “Brutalism is ugly architecture”, although I believe that. I mean we never see any building actually used for anything. We see a beautiful space turned into the most uninviting reading room I’ve ever seen, which gets photographed for a lifestyle magazine but in which nobody ever reads. We get hours and hours of obsession with a theater and a gymnasium and a chapel but not even a hint of how the spaces will be laid out, let alone the suggestion of a human occupying any such space for any reason. We get a brief defense of Brutalism: that concrete is a cheap, versatile, practical material that democratizes large-scale construction…that stands in stark contrast to an entire film about an expensive and elitist project with constant delays and cost over-runs. And a trip halfway around the world for expensive, special-purpose, finicky marble. Which is never connected back to the building they’re constructing? In short, this film does nothing to dispel the strawman of Brutalist architecture as the creation of props for heavily-cropped black-and-white photography.

And that’s without even mentioning the utterly absurd speech about our protagonist’s work that ends the film, again just thoroughly contradicting every single moment we’ve seen.

7. Nickel Boys

An entirely forgettable story made by people who aren’t even sufficiently committed to their gimmicky camera angle to use it consistently.

6. Wicked

I was expecting to love Wicked. I’m no student of Broadway musicals, but I pretty consistently enjoy them, Wicked has a cult following, and “let’s look at this from the perspective of the villain” is pretty central to my worldview.

Wicked is…fine. Plotwise, it’s a huge disappointment because it trailed off almost as badly as 2021’s Dune (Part 1) did. You don’t get a pass for failing to deliver on the story I paid to see. But the part of that story that is delivered is the deeply corrosive fantasy that some people are simply born with great power, and this has nothing to do with any work they invest in earning it.

The biggest surprise is that I thought the music was not good. With few exceptions the entire film was a long recitative: not an actual song with melodies and verses but merely rhythmically-delivered dialog. And what melody was applied to this dialog seemed to apply the same “never repeat yourself” philosophy of recitatives to the music itself. Every time we get close enough to a real tune that I was tempted to (at least metaphorically) hum along the composer switches out the “obvious” note for something more surprising. When there is repetition it is less chorus than callback. In short, it seems like music expressly designed for people who watch/listen to the show over and over again, not to be enjoyed the first time through.

The performances are only okay. The singing is impressive (excepting poor Michelle Yeoh, who apparently can’t do everything), but I can’t see it as a replacement for acting and these are characters so devoid of nuance I’m not sure any actor would have been able to sink their teeth into the role.

Despite these complaints, the production design is magical, and the film achieves the immersive spectacle you get from attending a musical in person. On a very specific note: what a weirdly-shaped book! Good job!

5. Dune: Part Two

I’ve watched both “parts” of this film twice: when they were released and then a couple of weeks ago in preparation for writing this. And it’s the only film I’ve been tempted to rewatch yet again in order to better pin down my reactions.

But it’s just not good enough to be worth another rewatch.

I think the core of the problem with Dune is common to many book adaptations: books are just much, much longer than films, and even almost five and a half hours of runtime is nowhere near enough to give the material in the book its due. It’s not that there is that much plot—the outline is pretty easy to summarize—but the whole point of an “epic” is that each plot point is not an event but an accumulation that builds to the inevitable. The film doesn’t show us Lady Jessica’s growing legitimacy as a Fremen, or Paul’s gradual immersion in and acceptance of his destiny, or the emergence of the love between him and Chani. Instead we are merely told that these things happen, and it’s the viewer’s job to accept them to keep up with the story.

I find this particularly frustrating because to me the most compelling aspect of Dune as a story is the way it plays with doubt about every one of these threads. To what extent are people play-acting their roles, and how much play-acting does it take to break any barrier you’ve constructed between the role and yourself? The film just doesn’t offer me the space I need to consider any of this.

These complaints aside, it’s an immersive universe, an engaging story, and a brilliant spectacle. Dune is not a bad film, and there’s a strong argument that it has far more depth and nuance than Star Wars. But in that depth is an aspiration to greatness that it falls well short of, while Star Wars has more modest ambitions which it far exceeds.

4. I’m Still Here

This is the only film I saw in a theater, and that setting always engages me a lot more. It’s possible that if I’d watched this at home like The Brutalist I’d have been bored.

In the event, I’m not sure how objective I could be about a film like this in any case. I spent the entire runtime thinking about America’s current coup. Of course ours is different in detail than Brazil’s tragedy detailed here, but the echoes—in particular a hopeful faith in the remnants of a judicial system—can’t be ignored.

I think the film was well-made, but all I can really say is that I found it compelling and sad and it’s the film I’ve probably thought about most since I saw it.

3. A Complete Unknown

I’ve consistently hated recent Oscar-nominated biopics, and I’d argue that A Complete Unknown fails as a biopic for a lot of the same reasons as I’ve given before. We don’t really get to know Dylan at all: a couple of pithy quotes about others’ jealousy of his talent and the pressure to be who other people want him to be, along with a somewhat pat “he was a childish, selfish jerk to a woman who loved him” story don’t offer much insight into his genius, relationship with fame, or character. It’s a deeper study than 2022’s Elvis or 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody, but this character is a lot less interesting than Bernstein in 2023’s Maestro.

While I’d argue this isn’t a great biopic, it is a very engaging film about a particular American moment and culture, with Dylan at its center. So much media and commentary tries to conflate (post-)60s politics and art and rebellion without acknowledging that in many ways all three are in conflict with each other.

Two additional brief points:

This Chalamet guy is actually a pretty good actor? With range? Who’da thunk?
While folk music has never been my thing, I enjoyed A Complete Unknown purely as a jukebox musical. Maybe a little frustrating that we got so much of the music as little snippets and not full songs, but still a nice range from the era.

2. Conclave

This is not a complex film, nor one with any terribly deep or innovative messages. But the performances are excellent, the characters all have depth, and somehow a “sit and think and talk” plot is consistently engaging, with a rising momentum driven by several different ticking clocks.

My biggest complaint is that the third-act twist struck me as unnecessary, and it cheapened the investment I already had in the story.

The inevitable comparison is to Twelve Angry Men, one of my favorite films.

1. Anora

I can’t recall a year when I’ve had a clearer favorite. I totally understand some people having trouble getting through the first half hour, which seems like it’s just trying to be salacious. But it eventually becomes clear that this was our only chance to see our main character—any character in the film, really—entirely in control and in her element. Which gives a lot of depth to how she handles situations in which she is less confident.

And that is what I adore so much about this film: it is stocked with archetypes we’ve seen and enjoyed dozens of times before, but it ditches the “they’ve done it all a hundred times off-screen” conceit and turns them into actual humans. They’re never comically inept or unsuited to their roles; we’re merely encountering them hitting the boundaries of their finite experience.

The real trick is that it’s a story about people making terrible choices, but every single mistake feels not just well-motivated but downright inevitable. Somehow I felt like I was on every character’s side. (Igor is hands-down my favorite character of the year.) And like so many truly great films, it made me fall a little bit in love with the heroine, with her trying to politely introduce herself to Ivan’s mother (good filmmaking is knowing we don’t need to see her practicing this little prepared speech) the moment we realize both how much she is and that it’s still not nearly enough. Her final pathetic acquiescence to her station in life in response to Ivan’s mother’s (empty) threats wasn’t just heartbreaking, but a commentary on childhood and class and identity more nuanced than anything I could find in any other film this year.

So yes: Anora for the win or the Academy are a bunch of ignorant jerks.

Client-Side Dot Grid PDF generator

2024-10-04T00:00:00-05:00

I’m a big fan of dot grid paper: it’s much more versatile than ruled paper and I find dots much less intrusive than full grid lines. I’ve been using retail dot grid notebooks and note pads for years, but that’s kind of an inefficient way to get scratch paper, so I decided I may as well start printing my own.

There are lots of “dot grid generators” online, but the vast majority of them embed watermarks in their output, which I find completely unacceptable. The extremely rare few that don’t watermark their output seem to consistently get the math wrong: the grid should be centered between the margins, not just pressed up against one side. It’s also useful to generate two pages of dot grid, with margins mirrored on the second side, in order to print double-sided paper with a single edge suitable for binding. (Side note: “disc binding” is much much better than ring binding, and it’s a travesty that most disc binding supplies are available only for the half-letter/”junior” paper size, which is already absurdly tall and skinny even before you lose a significant margin to the binding.)

So I wrote my own generator, which was also an opportunity to learn just enough PDF syntax to specify paper sizes and write a graphics stream.

Here’s the application.

There’s also a public repository in case you’d like to offer a PR to pretty things up a bit.

2023 Best Picture Nominees

2024-03-06T00:00:00-06:00

Apparently this is my seventh year commenting on each of the year’s Best Picture nominees. Here are my posts for the nominees from 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Each year I pick a non-nominee I particularly liked. That’s a little more challenging this year because I haven’t seen that many films. The big story of 2023 is that the superhero genre has totally lost steam with only mediocre-to-bad offerings recently. I’ve even found the latest entries in the big action franchises—Fast X, Mission Impossible, and Exp4ndables—boring and soulless. So my recommendation for 2023 is the John Wick series (the fourth and final chapter of which was released last year) as a whole. I won’t argue the fourth film was the best, or even particularly innovative in its own right, but the series as a whole is a breath of fresh air in a genre that had grown stale. It’s ultraviolence, but goofy balletic ultraviolence that is hard to take seriously. The movies are just fun.

Anyway, this year we had only one truly bad nominee, five that I’d call so-so, one sorta good one, and three that I actually recommend. Some brief comments on each, ranked from worst to best:

10. Killers of the Flower Moon

This is the only nominee of the year that I think is genuinely bad. The combination of period drama, raising awareness of exploitation of native peoples, a decorated filmmaker, celebrated actors, a glacial pace, and a brutal runtime do not necessarily a great film make.

The fact is the plotting just isn’t very good. It’s effectively a crime film, but the actual plan is never clear to the audience, and the various forces out to “catch” the criminals are so vague and feckless that there’s never any sense of urgency. In a good crime drama the audience can see when our gang’s flaws lead to slips that will cause their downfall, but here we just see dumb people doing dumb things with apparent impunity until they’re kinda sorta caught with no significant evidence.

While DiCaprio does an admirable job of wearing his deterioration over the course of the movie on his face, the script doesn’t give his character much of an arc. He’s a cipher, and moments in which he claims devotion or regret don’t add up to any coherent narrative of corruption or redemption.

9. The Holdovers

I feel like I’ve seen this movie a dozen times before: broken older man and schoolboy facing a turning point in life get thrust together; hijinks ensue and they both learn a little something about life, and a little something about themselves.

I could go on about little niggles—neither the characters’ backstories nor the ending really made much sense—but it was fine. There’s simply not much to say about, or learn from, one more entry in a formulaic genre.

8. The Zone of Interest

I’ll give this film credit for achieving its goal: it’s an effective portrayal of the banality of evil. But it’s no more than that. It’s slow; it’s boring; it feels like assigned coursework. We never get inside any characters’ heads, which I suppose is the point, but there’s just nothing satisfying here.

7. Maestro

Maestro contains pieces of an interesting film examining bisexuality and polyamory and long-term open relationships. There’s a compelling performance over a handful of scenes tracking a fight with cancer.

There’s almost nothing in here about Leonard Bernstein. Nothing really about talent and how it manifests. Nothing about how that talent is entangled with luck. Nothing about how talent and luck interact with the snowballing effects of fame. Nothing that parses an older man’s magnetism into charisma vs wealth vs celebrity vs passion. And obviously nothing specific to Bernstein’s varied musical tastes.

The parts of this film that are good would have been presented at least as well through any fictional male character, and the parts specific to Bernstein, which boil down to a collection of contradictory monologs, are shallow caricatures.

What a waste.

6. Anatomy of a Fall

I found this film the hardest to rank, because I “figured out” the ending (or, rather, the lack of any satisfying ending) from the start. The well-worn incident-investigation-trial structure does a lot of the work pulling the audience through the film, but I still found myself painfully bored as every intentionally-ambiguous back-and-forth seemed like mere filler on the road to nowhere. I don’t know whether this film was actually as pretentious and self-consciously provocative as it felt to me or whether I was merely in a grumpy mood, but I’m not inclined to re-watch it to find out.

5. Past Lives

I didn’t like this film, and it took a few days of stewing on it to articulate why. The “message” and refutation of romantic tropes are appealing…but I don’t think it actually offers much more depth than a (thoughtful) romcom. Minus the com. (One criticism of every film to this point in my ranking is they are all devoid of any sense of humor at all.)

Past Lives has the feel of a student film: a talky script, great comfort with silence, obvious attempts to make use of the full vocabulary of the camera for “mundane” scenes, and a handful of lovingly-shot inserts for cinematography buffs. It’s amazingly good at all these things for a student film. But never for a moment did I forget that I was watching a film. They were always characters on the screen speaking prepared words dripping with meaning for the sake of a meticulously-choreographed camera. They never felt like people we were watching live their lives.

4. American Fiction

This is the first film on the list that I actually enjoyed. It had a sense of humor, it steadily built momentum without ever feeling rushed, and the (second?) ending did get me to laugh out loud despite myself.

I haven’t looked up the source material or its background, but I’m sure I’m not the first person to ask whether this story isn’t serving the precise role the film ostensibly criticizes: it’s all just a little too convenient and appealing a take on race for me to fully embrace. Which the film itself acknowledges with a final declaration that it was made to be enjoyed. I’m off the hook.

So from this admission that it’s impossible to tie off an intractable social issue in a cute little bow, let’s move on to:

3. Barbie

Just about anyone could churn out a few thousand words on Barbie alone, and far too many have.

There’s an old story that when the studio execs saw an early cut of one of my favorite films, Brazil, they said “We’ll market it as the movie of the year!” This was not a compliment. They thought audiences would hate it unless it were turned into a spectacle.

Barbie is not a bad movie. (Neither was Brazil, but that’s a different story.) It is, or was, however, a much better event than it is a film. People dressed up! Mothers and daughters all in pink filling theaters around the world! You’d have to go back to the Star Wars prequels to find such an enthusiastic and engaged audience. Whatever you think of the content of the film, going to see it on the big screen was fun in a way movies seldom are any more.

But that isn’t just a matter of marketing and hype (and an underserved audience). It’s a goofy and fun movie full of hypnotic production design and slapstick and rewarding details. It’s good for many of the same reasons as the Christmas staple Elf: the plot hangs together just well enough to confidently skip over any of the pesky technicalities that would bog it down, and it fully commits to its own zaniness.

Of course, that’s not quite what everyone was looking for in Barbie, and it’s impossible to talk about Barbie without mentioning The Discourse surrounding it. I haven’t engaged terribly deeply with any of it, but I’ll pick at two strands.

First, many feminists were disappointed. Barbie doesn’t lay out any truly coherent model of feminism, nor propose any concrete path forward. Actual feminist theory is confined to a handful of monologs and one-liners that amount to less a critique of society and more a checklist of female-coded affirmations. I think it’s fair to say that Barbie isn’t actually a feminist movie; it’s a movie that uses the social phenomenon of feminism as a setting. The film itself is a lighthearted romp and makes a choice not to bog that down by challenging its audience. Or, at least, not to do so overtly.

Second, the more toxic corners of the manosphere decided it was a misandrist tract. The obvious explanation for this sentiment is that these men can’t handle a movie that isn’t aimed at them. Barbie is targeted squarely at women, trades on women’s shared experiences, and really couldn’t given a damn if a single man bought a ticket. Movies with such an intentional gender skew are not rare—many romcom and pure action films take the same approach—but I suspect the dudebrahs who went to see Barbie for the sake of hating on it don’t sit through many romcoms. I really enjoyed Barbie despite knowing it wasn’t made for me.

Because Barbie is aimed so directly at women, there were lots of complaints that it dismissed (or ridiculed) men’s perspectives…but that’s just flat-out wrong. Most saliently, Ken is a failure in the film’s reality: there is no subtlety at all to the point that merely being a man isn’t enough, and that the vast majority of men are shut out of “the patriarchy” just as surely as women; it is only in the radically-egalitarian Barbieland/Kendom where there is no discrimination on any axis other than gender.

The climax of the film is a monolog laying out an extensive list of the contradictory demands on women, with the implication that it is only women who face impossible expectations. But the most affecting plot thread (for me) throughout was Ken’s desperate attempts to navigate his own minefield, and just two scenes after this “impossible to be a woman” monolog we see Ken feigning dumb indifference to Barbie’s affections before excusing himself to celebrate her interest by shouting “Sublime!” The impossibility of a man satisfying all aspects of the female gaze is right there on the screen; it just doesn’t get a monolog.

The aspect of Barbie that I found most thought-provoking was a little esoteric: what is it with Ken and horses? Horse obsessions are very much a girl thing, not a guy thing. And the explanation gives insight into the rest of the film: Ken is being played with by a horse girl. That is, the film’s depictions of masculinity and the patriarchy are a young girl’s (naïve) interpretation of a man’s perspective. This extends from viewing violence as posing and communal dancing instead of real aggression to a focus on the peacocking performances men put on purely to impress women, as though this is representative of men’s behavior when women aren’t present. (The lack of internecine hierarchy is perhaps the defining feature of both Barbieland and Kendom.)

There was one Best Picture nominee that actually deconstructed gender roles, chose a coherent model of feminism, and challenged its audience to disagree. And if the manosphere wants a truly savage, unsympathetic, and irredeemable straw-man of masculinity to get angry about, there is one available. It was not an “event” like Barbie, but it was a better film:

2. Poor Things

I can’t recall a year in which we had two films that were such mirror images of each other. Barbie may not have been targeted at men, but beyond that it bent over backwards to be inclusive: everyone can enjoy Barbie. Poor Things not so much. Both Barbie and Poor Things are cartoonish, but while Barbie is a mix of Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes, Poor Things is Ren and Stimpy and Rick and Morty. And while Barbie largely ignores sex and focuses on the social phenomenon of feminism, Poor Things is obsessed with sex but ignores feminism as a political movement.

I’m not going to claim this film’s “message” was terribly deep or novel. Even the weird gothic/steampunk aesthetic, the funny camera lenses, and the character conceits weren’t anything that hasn’t been done a dozen times before. (This made me want to go back and watch The City of Lost Children, among others.) But it all came together well: beautiful images, a brisk pace, and most of all performances far beyond what I’d expect for such a quirky script.

It also includes my single favorite line in years: “I must go punch that baby.”

There’s not much point dwelling on this film; if you don’t like it it’s not for you, and that’s fine. I had a great time.

1. Oppenheimer

I’m biased on this film in a couple of ways. First, I read the book. It’s hard to know how some of the blink-and-you-miss-it references in the film land for those who haven’t waded through the (somewhat tedious) text. But more than that, I’m just a sucker for this particular history: one of the two most storied high-stakes engineering programs in history, and unlike the space program this is the one where the scientists were the public heroes. This was the moment in American history when experts were shown the most deference; when brilliant scientific minds were assumed to also offer shrewd political and social insight.

There are interestingly angles in the book that the film omits entirely. Oppenheimer’s elite upbringing, which gave him a leg up on German, which made him the first American to study the new physics and bring it to the US, which made him the natural choice to lead the Manhattan Project, could be told as a story of how privilege compounds. There is no doubt Oppenheimer was a very smart man, but he did not make the groundbreaking theoretical contributions to the field that so many of his contemporaries managed.

That said, I thought the film substantially improved on the book, including/particularly the bits that were completely made up (like the framing scenes with Einstein).

The fundamentally interesting thing about Oppenheimer is something that almost all popular media has trouble conveying. Our stories demand characters who slot neatly into morality tales. But Oppenheimer was neither apolitical nor devoted to any particular ideology. He wasn’t a soulless monster who placed science and progress above all else, nor a luddite, nor a powerless observer of the system. He was a mix of curiosity and ambition and duty and ambivalence and regret, but more importantly he didn’t make parsing these conflicts the center of his existence the way “artistic temperaments” (and screenwriters) do.

I do have gripes about the film. The attempts to inject sex seemed desperate and salacious, and this angle played Oppenheimers’ marriage as far more conventional than it was—Maestro is not the nominee with the most inherently interesting couple at its core. The lack of detail about the bombs themselves undercut the tension of the engineering story; I’m not sure anyone unfamiliar with the history would even have picked up on there being two designs, and only enough nuclear fuel for one test of the riskier one. And more broadly, the Strauss-Oppenheimer conflict is simply the least interesting narrative thread, and every moment we spent exploring that felt like time I would have rather spent on Kitty, or the Las Alamos work and community, or Oppenheimer’s post-Manhattan-Project advocacy.

Regardless, Oppenheimer is the nominee I enjoyed most this year. As an even greater compliment, it’s a three-hour film that felt much shorter, and never bored me even upon rewatching it.

Social Media Bots for Solar Info

2024-02-10T00:00:00-06:00

I’ve always been more interested in the technology side of social media than the “social” side. Twitter, in particular, was originally mainly a broadcasting technology: it was very cheap for anyone to broadcast a message for wide distribution, and other people chose which broadcasts to listen to (via who they followed). This made Twitter not just a way for small friend groups to update each other, but also a medium for any number of broadcasts. You could (and in some cases still can) subscribe to Twitter alerts for emergencies in your area, news events, transport problems, etc.

But this broadcasting infrastructure appears to be the key ingredient for the phenomena we call “social”: large numbers of small-time “creators”, with some vaguely Zipf-like distribution making a few of them extremely influential. The fact that any receiver of a broadcast could cheaply send a broadcast of their own in reply led to The Discourse. And perhaps most significantly, the broadcasting infrastructure companies realized that users choosing what to subscribe to was not nearly as “engaging” (nor as compatible with an ad-driven revenue model) as using An Algorithm to decide what to show people.

I’ve always wondered what the tech could have become if it hadn’t been entirely consumed by the “social” juggernaut. If instead of centralized algorithms and moderation (which, to be clear, seem to be necessary when the infrastructure is used for The Discourse) clients had instead been built out with more and more robust tools for custom filtering of broadcasts—eg subscribe to traffic alerts, but only for these hours a day on these routes—and more and more information sources had been broadcast via this infrastructure.¹

In short, Twitter could have become a universal interface for asynchronous ephemeral notifications of any kind.

Sunrise and Sunset Times

Solar time is fascinating in its own way. It’s not just that days get longer and shorter across the year, but solar noon actually meanders forward and back as well: in most places in the world, there are a few days or weeks of the year during which each day is getting longer than the last, but our clocks show that sunrise is getting later (or sunset is getting earlier) because solar noon is shifting faster than the days are lengthening. (Similarly, sometimes the days are getting shorter but sunrise is getting earlier or sunset later.)

What’s more, solar time depends on your exact location on earth: both latitude and longitude, of course shifted by exactly where you are within your official time zone. People at the east end of a (large) state will see the sun rise when the clock reads an hour earlier than those in the same time zone in the west of the state.

It strikes me that modern people who live by the clock never develop the kind of intuition for solar time that seems like it should be wired into us naturally. This is never more clear than the twice-yearly griping about Daylight Saving Time, which pretty consistently demonstrates a complete ignorance of solar rhythms.

So, Bots

Thank you for reading the above two sections. Or respect for skipping them.

I created a bunch of very simple social media bots that broadcast how sunrise and sunset are shifting every day shortly after sunset. Because this data depends on location, there is a separate bot for each major metropolitan area. Right now I manage bots for about a hundred locations around the world (with a bias towards English-speaking regions). If you live somewhere that’s not in one of these metro regions, then by all means contact me (on either Mastodon or Bluesky) and I’ll consider adding it to the list.² This page will be updated as new bots are added.

Mastodon bots

Update 2025-04-11: The native Mastodon accounts have been shut down at the request of the administrator of the mas.to instance where I’d set them up. (He has also, in a fit of pique, shadow-banned my personal account from the instance.) I’ve written up a longer explanation of why I’m no longer willing to make a major investment in Mastodon. The Bluesky accounts are bridged to Mastodon, however, and the below links should offer redirects to the appropriate Mastodon ids.

North America and US:

British Isles:

Australia and New Zealand:

Asia

Africa

South America

Bluesky bots

North America and US:

British Isles:

Australia and New Zealand:

Asia

Africa

South America

Back-end software engineers will of course recognize the extreme end of this product space: logging. Software systems are constantly “broadcasting” messages about their operation into log files that quickly grow to gigabytes of incomprehensible detail. Operators who maintain and analyze those systems have developed extremely advanced filtering and searching tools for finding useful signals amidst this ocean of noise. There is no direct mapping between these tools and what would be required for the very different kinds of data that flow through social media, but it does make clear just how spartan the tools are for social media users managing their feeds. ↩
Adding a location to the back-end bot implementation is fairly trivial: I just have a big list of locations with their latitudes and longitudes. The hassle is the actual management of the social media accounts (and their credentials), which typically cannot be automated. “Just log in and change this one setting” may be only a one- or two-minute job, but it quickly becomes hours of dull hassle across all the accounts. ↩

Against Metric

2023-08-24T00:00:00-05:00

The standardization of measurement is a prerequisite to a (global) distributed economy. And the grounding of measurement units in physical constants of the universe—time measured by a reliable property of caesium, distance by combining this with the speed of light (in a vacuum), and so on—is one of the great achievements of science, unmooring information from physical representations. This standardization is an unalloyed good. The International System of Units (“the metric system”) in which this standardization first occurred, however, is not terribly well designed when compared with more traditional measures.

Prefixes, scale, and conversions

The metric system (SI) is a “system”, and not just a handful of units, mainly in the sense that its many units are designed to work together. One of its great innovations was the introduction of prefixes for each power of 1000, which turns a single measure, eg the meter for length, into units at many different scales: the kilometer for travel distances, the millimeter for fine measurement, and micro- and nanometers for microscopic measurement.¹ The “derived” SI units, such as the watt, are also defined as straightforward combinations of base units, instead of as arbitrary independent units (such as horsepower), reflecting a clear modern understanding of how different units relate to each other.

The ability to easily convert between these different units using only powers of ten as constants is the main (only?) reason given for the superiority of SI units over fully-standardized versions of non-SI units. The meter and kilometer are “better” than the foot and the mile because it’s easy to convert kilometers to meters (multiply by 1000), while converting miles to feet (multiply by 5280) is arithmetically awkward.

It’s obvious that such conversions are easier in metric, but it’s not clear that such conversions are problems in common use. Humans have no natural intuition for quantities that differ in magnitude by factors of 1000 (or more); it is completely disingenuous to claim that mile users would stand to gain any benefit from knowing the distance to the neighboring town in feet. Travellers develop intuitive understandings of miles and/or kilometers; tailors develop intuitive understandings of centimeters and/or inches. Traveling tailors learn no intuitive connection between the two, in either system.

In short, the primary (only?) advantage of metric units accrues only to specialists: scientists and engineers who perform mathematics to bridge between and beyond intuitive limits. And in fact the advantages of conversions that require only the movement of decimal points are fairly minimal even to them when virtually all such conversions are done with the aid of computers, which gain no benefit from arithmetic using powers of ten and also store “obscure” conversion constants effortlessly.²

Units as vocabulary

While standardization of units is crucial, the actual choice of the units themselves is, in some sense, arbitrary. “The metric system” would work just as well if one meter were the length of your arm, or if it were the circumference of the earth. And most defenses of SI dismiss any critiques of metric on exactly these grounds: anyone can get used to any unit, so SI units are at least as good as any other.

This misses the point that units are vocabulary, and not all vocabulary is created equal. The fact that every concept is expressible in every language doesn’t mean that every concept is equally accessible in every language. Schadenfreude and hygge and majime can all be translated into “standard” English, but the direct availability of these words provides a richer vocabulary not just for expression, but for thinking about the world. The patterns you recognize are in part a product of your vocabulary.

For all their many (pre-standardization) limitations, “traditional” units were designed on exactly this basis. An acre was not chosen as an arbitrary unit of measure: it was the amount one person (and a team of oxen) could plow in a day—a natural and intuitive way to measure farmland. A league was the distance a person could walk in an hour—a natural way to measure travel distances. The intuition behind the use of units trumped arbitrary regularity between them: measuring farmland in terms of how long it would take to walk around it if the land were square is an absurd contrivance.

You can see the yearning for vocabulary even more clearly in modern measures that have defied conversion to metric. Few have any intuition for how far “150 gigameters” is…but “astronomical unit” (the average distance from earth to sun) is a valuable bit of vocabulary. Similarly 9.5 petameters and one light-year.

To declare the choice of unit as arbitrary is to blind yourself to the reality that units have always been designed by humans for human use.

The meter was chosen poorly

The meter was originally defined as roughly one forty-millionth of the circumference of the earth, but surely it was clear even then that what really mattered (why not one thousandth or one billionth?) was that the unit was about a yard long. And I argue that was not a particularly good choice. Unless you’re measuring cloth.

I mentioned above that SI offers prefixes for powers of 1000, but actually it offers a few more for other powers of ten. Only one of these gets common use, and for only one unit. It so happens that humans have an intuitive need for the centimeter.

Or the inch! I’m not arguing that the exact value of a unit matters, but rather that when your units are naturally spaced a factor of a thousand apart, there are orders of magnitude that are more useful than others. We seem to find it very useful to have a measure about on par with a finger’s width. Perhaps that is because that’s a good scale for measuring, with whole numbers, sizes that are relevant to human bodies: clothing, furniture, tools…anything that humans directly interact with. A difference of a millimeter is irrelevant in most such cases; a difference of a meter (or even the rarely-used decimeter) is too coarse. But sizing things to the nearest centimeter or inch is often good enough.

If the centimeter had been the base unit, would that have ruined any of the other units? It would have made a “kilometer” ten meters; I’d argue if that’s the way it had always been we’d consider it a core feature of the measurement vocabulary: there is a natural intuition for the kind of distance you can estimate visually, but not for our current kilometer. A “megameter” would be the equivalent of a current 10k, again an order of magnitude that seems to have some historical appeal: you can run it in an hour or walk it in two. But to speak more directly to the initial complaint, if we had units equal to the current centimeter, 10m, and 10k, I’m skeptical there would be widespread use of centi-, deci-, deca-, or hecto- prefixes for distance. There was a right order of magnitude for the base unit of distance, and SI got it wrong.

Mass

There is one base unit that even SI more or less confesses that it got wrong. The base SI unit for mass is not the gram. It’s the kilogram. Perhaps this is, again, the desire for units on par with human experience: a difference of a single gram is completely undetectable to human senses, while a kilogram is noticeable. If I had to pick a single order of magnitude, then I probably would have gone with 100g as a natural place to round off weights of human-manipulable objects, because rounding to the kilo is just a bit too coarse. (It is no coincidence that there’s a traditional unit of weight right between the two: the pound.)

Volume

This is where the SI “it’s just powers of ten!” story really falls apart. Area is measured in square meters (or square kilometers, which is very different from kilo-square-meters). But volume is measured in cubic…decimeters.

If the claim is that SI makes unit conversions easy, then ask the average user of the system how many liters are in a cubic meter. I’m extremely skeptical that “obviously one cubic meter is one kiloliter!” will be the most common answer.

Force/acceleration

There’s no need to dive into every derived unit, but it’s worth noting another of the non-SI measures that still gets wide use: the force of gravity on the surface of the earth; acceleration is widely expressed as some number of “gees”. If the base unit of length were the equivalent of the current 0.98 cm, the base of mass were the equivalent of 1kg (but without the kilo- prefix), and the second remained the same, then the force of gravity at the earth’s surface would be 1 Newton/g (or whatever you wanted to name the unit). This seems a much more natural physical basis for unit design than the circumference of the earth (which is frustratingly difficult to perceive, let alone measure).

Temperature: Celsius vs Fahrenheit

This brings us to what is likely the most contentious measure: temperature. Technically the SI measure is kelvin, but it is Celsius that is in common use in combination with other SI units.

The sole argument for the Celsius scale is that it’s somehow natural for the zero-to-one-hundred range of the scale to exactly span the temperatures of water’s liquid state. It’s a bizarre contention. For one thing, it’s not even really scientific: while the freezing/melting point of water is relatively stable across human experience, the boiling point varies considerably: where I currently live water boils at just over 90°C. It’s simply an absurd value to treat as a “constant”.

I grant that the freezing point of water is extremely salient to human experience…but in fact it is so salient that it loses value as the basis for a temperature scale. There is not a single Fahrenheit user who doesn’t know the temperature at which water freezes; enshrining this in the scale itself is not a “helpful reminder” to anyone at all. And in fact putting the freezing point at zero is quite problematic, since (unlike all other “metric” scales) it forces the common use of negative numbers.

I’d argue that there is only one significant context in which humans have intuitive understandings of temperature: atmospheric/air temperatures.³ Fahrenheit maps the zero-to-one-hundred scale very well to a “normal” range of such temperatures. 0°F is really (life-threateningly) cold; 100°F is really (life-threateningly) hot. In fact, every Fahrenheit user quickly adopts vocabulary for every ten-degree increment across the range, which correspond astonishingly well to the different ways to dress for the weather. (It’s rather telling that once you’re dressing for <0°F or >100°F there aren’t all that many differences. My -40° mountaineering getup is almost exactly what I’d wear at any temperature below zero Fahrenheit.)

People who have only ever used Celsius don’t seem to even realize just how impoverished their temperature vocabulary is. We can theorize all we want about saying “the low 20s” the way Fahrenheit users say “the 70s”, but the reality (based on experience living in Celsius-using countries) is that they simply don’t employ such usage in the same way. The scale just makes it very awkward. The language works fine for the 20s, gets a little iffy for the 10s (“tens”? “teens”?), feels verbose for the 0s (compare “high single digits” to “forties”) and is barely English for the -0s (it’s not even clear which are the “high negative single digits” and which are the “low negative single digits”; in Fahrenheit these are the 10s and the 20s). There is little more arrogantly self-absorbed than a Celsius user claiming that a rich vocabulary for air temperatures is irrelevant merely because they’ve never had one available.

Time

Time is a perfect example of unit standardization done right, and demonstrates the absurdity of the rationalizations given for metric in other contexts. SI provides a definition of the second grounded in physical properties of the universe, but makes no pretense of replacing intuitive, context-specific units with arbitrary prefix-based derivations. The arithmetic required to convert “one week” to 604 kiloseconds is awkward…but it is immediately obvious that such conversions simply don’t matter in practice. “Years” don’t even have a consistent conversion to a number of seconds.⁴ Humans organize time at scales larger than the second according to solar days and annual climate patterns. It is frustrating that these two systems (as well as the lunar cycle and the culturally-dominant seven-day week) are inherently incompatible, but the collection of bodges that have been cobbled together to formalize a complex translation between these scales is clearly preferable to some unrealistic declaration that we discard solar days and years. What’s more, the metric pretense that subdivision into groups of (powers of) ten is inherently superior to other groupings has been tested with both calendars and wall clocks; suffice it to say that any alleged advantages were utterly dwarfed by the downsides in practice.

Conclusions

I’ve pointed out some of the ways in which SI (“the metric system”) is poorly designed: mainly, it prioritizes rare use cases (conversions) and was dictated with little to no consideration for the “vocabulary” historical unit systems offer for intuitive scales.

But it’s worth highlighting what I have not said. I haven’t said SI is completely unusable (in any context). I haven’t said people can’t paper over some of its shortcomings—the embrace of centimeters being the prime example. I haven’t said people shouldn’t use metric.

The huge advantage that SI offers over competitors is standardization—not that its units are formally defined (this has been done for almost all unit systems), but that SI is in wide use everywhere in the world. Its use in science and international commerce means that even in countries with official allegiance to different unit systems, SI is well-known enough to be relatively accessible.

My main point is that wide adoption does not necessarily imply superior design; in fact often one must choose between the two. There are very few units in SI that are better designed than any of their historial counterparts. Some are not significantly worse (centimeters and kilometers aren’t substantially worse than inches and miles), some are a bit worse (kilograms get the scale just a bit wrong), and some are substantially worse (Celsius is simply a worse vocabulary for describing air temperatures than Fahrenheit). Transition costs aside (which is a huge caveat), I think a US that went entirely metric would probably be a net good: sharing standards with the rest of the world would outweigh using slightly less-well-designed units. I would, however, mourn the loss of Fahrenheit. (In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that transition simply didn’t take.)

It is a huge shame, however, that our single universal system of units was not designed with a more modern understanding of human factors and use cases in mind.

These prefixes have proven particularly useful in describing digital storage sizes, with common usage growing from thousands of bytes (kB) to millions of bytes (MB) to billions and trillions of bytes (GB; TB). There are few (if any) other examples of measurements in common use that are distributed exponentially (and it’s little surprise that there are no “traditional” non-SI units for measuring such quantities). The irony is that standardization for these units is inconsistent: the prefixes are sometimes used to refer to the standard metric powers of 1000 (kilo-, mega-, giga-, etc), but sometimes instead used for powers of 1024 (2 to the power of 10). “Officially” these should be called kibibytes, mebibytes, and gibibytes, written KiB, MiB, and GiB, but in practice kB, MB, and GB are ambiguous. ↩
In fact, computers actually have significant problems with powers of ten: decimal fractions are awkward for computers to process natively, with the vast majority of systems storing “one tenth” as 0.10000000149. While this is a small error on its own, the accumulation of such errors over many calculations leads to substantial inaccuracy. Financial systems, in particular, entail quite a bit of expensive (and error-prone) engineering to ensure price representations that are precise, not approximations. ↩
Temperatures are also used widely for cooking—ie oven temperatures—but in my limited exposure humans never really develop much intuition for this. We learn that a 230°C/450°F oven is very hot and a 150°C/300°F oven is relatively cool for cooking, but to me at least such numbers always seem arbitrary and beyond direct experience. ↩
The use of “leap seconds” to account for Earth’s very-slightly-unpredictable speed of rotation means that exact conversion from years to seconds isn’t even predictable in advance. This lack of predictability is such an inconvenience to automated systems that we’re probably giving up on leap seconds, and merely accepting that the current calendar will slowly drift away from perfect solar time over the course of millenia. If solar noon being a few minutes “off” in ten thousand years is a problem, it will be hard to claim that the legacy date-and-time system will have been anything but astonishingly successful. ↩

2022 Best Picture Nominees

2023-02-27T00:00:00-06:00

After last year’s terrible crop of nominees I am relieved that there are several good films nominated for Best Picture this year. Also a couple of real stinkers, but once they expanded the field to ten that was inevitable.

Beyond ranking and commenting on all the nominees, it’s become a tradition that I also go out of my way to highlight at least one non-nominee as worth watching. I considered Three Thousand Years of Longing, a great little romance, but I suspect I was heavily influenced by the fact that it was the first thing I’d seen in a theater since before the pandemic. Also on the list was Weird, the Al Yankovic biopic, mainly because the moment (surprisingly far into the film) when I finally realized what I was watching left such a grin on my face. Instead my non-best-picture pick for 2022 is Moonfall. It’s a bad film, but to me it is now the quintessential “good bad” film. Every character is a cliché. Every plot point is stupid. And when you think they’ve already packed in so many stupid plot points that you’re just going to have to ride those choices out, they throw more stupid plot points at you. There is so much stupid in this film I’m not sure there’s anything left for other films. It is big and dumb but it’s made in earnest. And my understanding is that it lost a huge amount of money. All of which makes it great fun if you’re tired from slogging through Women Talking…

On to a few quick comments on each of the actual nominees, from worst to best:

10. Elvis

In 2019 I ranked Bohemian Rhapsody as the worst of the 2018 Best Picture Nominees, and the Dick Cheney biopic Vice as the second-worst. I consider Elvis worse than either one of them. I worry that it’s now impossible to make a decent biography—legacies carry such value that you can’t say anything interesting about anyone.

Voiceovers are always a major warning sign of a bad film. I have never encountered worse-written voiceovers than these. And of course this narration is bad for precisely the reason people warn against narration: the whole film is telling instead of showing, and the actual scenes of Elvis (which are competently shot and performed) seem present only to illustrate the text. Add to that Tom Hanks’ truly weird performance—somehow the worst thing in a consistently-terrible film—and the POV the audience is forced to endure is agony.

On “substance”, all my critiques of Bohemian Rhapsody and Vice apply here. We never really learn anything about Elvis as a character, let alone his true relationship with music, money, women, or fame. (Or, in reprehensible elision of the protagonist’s agency, drugs.) Our narrator tries to wrap up the whole tale neatly by claiming that what killed Elvis was his love for the audience…but we never actually see any of that passion or intoxication.

I said that despite its flaws I still enjoyed Bohemian Rhapsody because Queen’s music kept me entertained. I’m not as big a fan of Elvis’s music, so I found this whole film a bore.

9. The Fabelmans

I hate Hollywood making movies about Hollywood, and there’s nothing more tedious than a filmaker given free rein to indulge the story of their emerging genius. I just didn’t care.

8. Women Talking

The script illustrated every unnatural way to write dialog I can think of. You can see on the screen how the actors have color-coded every line with the emotion they’ll pack into it and practiced each one in front of the mirror for hours to make sure they’re acting the hell out of every word.

Until I saw at the end that Frances McDormand was a producer I entertained the amusing thought that she showed up for one scene, realized how terrible the shooting script was, and then forced them to write her out after five minutes of screen time. And fantasized that she’d get a Supporting Actress nod for that choice.

7. Avatar: The Way of Water

It’s hard to rank this against the other mediocre nominees; it’s a completely different beast. I consider it an absolutely terrible film suitable only for stupid people, but an impressive technical achievement. I can think of only two interesting points of conversation about the Avatar series:

The Oscars have separate categories for live action and animation, but that distinction is looking more and more dated. Big stretches of MCU movies are effectively animated, but the intent is to make you think it’s live action. When real humans are cut and pasted from their green-screen shots into Avatar you easily forget that they’re not cartoons. What’s the difference? Would anyone care if Avatar 3 didn’t have a single scrap of live footage?
Is there a plot? Or is it all just rationalization? This is a long film structured much more like an episodic TV series than anything else, and even within those episodes the vast bulk of the runtime is consumed by shots that are meant to be nothing but beautiful. I recall once reading that porn features typically had “scripts” only a few pages long: a few blocks of dialog punctuated by the stage direction [sex]. Avatar similarly hand-waves a clumsy justification for some new setting or action set-piece, and then explores the setup in pornographic detail.

6. Tár

This film pulls off a rare trick: it manages to avoid any nuance or ambiguity while also failing to deliver a clear message about any of its core themes of sexual misconduct or cancel culture or art or fame/wealth/prestige/accomplishment or anything else. Gender- and race-swapped retreads of old stories are big business these days, and the backlash to those efforts are pretty consistently embarrassing and unfair…but it does seem reasonable to ask whether anyone could pretend this would have been anything better than a ho-hum film if the entirely mainstream screenplay hadn’t gotten one quick “but make it queer” rewrite before filming.

5. Triangle of Sadness

This film was definitely more fun than I was expecting based on the title. That said, I didn’t think it actually succeeded in interrogating or commenting on the themes of inequality, wealth, or power that it ostensibly addresses; it strikes me as Americans trying their own take on Parasite and doing it badly. In fact, I’d say that Glass Onion, also released in 2022, provides a far more insightful and resonant American perspective on the same themes.

4. Banshees of Inisherin

I have a personal bias here: I find the particular body horror at the center of this film deeply unsettling and it made it hard for me to focus on anything else. As a personal story I thought it was interesting, but the heavy-handed metaphor for the Irish civil war undermined that humanity.

3. All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet comprises a collection of really good war-movie scenes, but I didn’t feel like they came together to offer either a compelling narrative or any characters that we got to know well enough to truly care about. Perhaps the opaque main character was intentional—these were kids who didn’t understand, and were encouraged not to interrogate, their own motivations—but that only provides more reason to provide some other through-line to follow through two and half hours of fairly miserable watching. I’ll grant that it’s a good film, but there are plenty of other war films I’d be more inclined to rewatch than this one.

2. Top Gun: Maverick

I was surprised this was nominated, and I’m totally shocked I ended up ranking it this high. This isn’t high art, and you’re not going to find deep moral truths in here. I recall the one-line synopsis/review of the original that appeared in a local paper’s TV listings: “Trivializes war by turning it into a music video.” Fair.

The plot requires lots of suspension of disbelief, and we’re not talking just a few details like an ancient jet being all set for someone to hop into and steal: the film is set in an entirely different world order, where some minor unnamed faction has better military hardware than the US, where missiles and drones don’t exist, and where preemptive military strikes have no diplomatic consequences. This is, admittedly, a fun world order. I mean, if you like flying fighter jets and blowing stuff up it is.

The point is that on its own terms, this is a near-perfect film, and it gets so much right that almost all “big” modern films get wrong. It has a simple, easy-to-follow plot that moves along at a good clip. It has a small set of superhumanly charismatic characters. And that pervasive efficiency is never more evident than in the action scenes: instead of a half-dozen independent characters and plot threads cut together into a relentless barrage of visual chaos and clever shots with no relation to the larger story, here we get a full hour of explanation setting up our action set-piece, great visual storytelling so that we can follow exactly what’s going on, and satisfying payoffs that fit the characters’ strengths.

Yes it’s a big dumb film, but it’s a good big dumb film that other big dumb films could learn a lot from.

1. Everything Everywhere All At Once

There’s no simple explanation for what a Best Picture should be, but ideally it should be a film you’d be excited to rewatch, it should have some substance that you end up thinking about long after the film is over, and it should be unique—it should offer you something you’ve never seen before. Everything definitely has all of the above.

There are plenty of valid criticisms of the film. It doesn’t really make sense. The weirdness-for-weirdness-sake schtick wears itself out quickly. And you can definitely interpret some aspects as punching down. It’s not a perfect film. But I don’t think it would be possible to cram so much into something like this and expect it to be perfect.

They had me when they went to the rock world. And when they went back to it.

It was fun; it was meaningful; it was original. I enjoyed it.

The “Blum Mental Hash” Is A Lousy Idea

2022-05-17T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve seen the “Blum Mental Hash” make the rounds several times over the past decade. Although it’s described as a “secure hash function”, it’s really more like a (weird variant of a) digital signature: given a secret key and a character string of length n, it produces a digit string of length n. The claim is that you can compute such output in your head (assuming you have a particularly well-trained head—merely remembering the very large key is quite a challenge). The primary application envisioned is that you can coin a distinct password for each web site by hashing/signing the name or url of that site.

Every time I’ve seen this I’ve been highly skeptical, but didn’t bother digging into it.

John D Cook recently credulously repeated the proposal, and for once I actually took the time to think it through.

In short, I’m astonished anyone ever seriously proposed this scheme and its application, let alone a Turing award winner. More amazing is that it is still making the rounds, despite plenty of people pointing out that it’s not “secure” in any reasonable sense. It took me only a few minutes to write some code to crack it based on a few extremely straightforward chosen cleartext attacks. Upon further analysis, you can exploit the information leaked to reconstruct an entire key from just a few dozen encoded characters!

The key and algorithm

The key consists of two functions: f(Char) -> Digit maps a character to a digit, and g(Digit) -> Digit maps a digit to another digit. The original proposal suggests that g be a permutation (i.e. a bijection), but that’s not terribly important. Based on this key, the algorithm for hashing/signing a character string s into an equal-length digit string t is simple:

The first digit of t is g((f(a) + f(b)) % 10) where a is the first character of s and b is the last character of s
Every subsequent character of t is given by g((d + f(c)) % 10) where d is the previous digit in t and c is the character in the corresponding position of s.

A simple Python implementation:

def blum(f, g, s):
  out = [0] * len(s)
  out[0] = g[(f[s[0]] + f[s[-1]]) % 10]
  for i in range(1, len(s)):
    out[i] = g[(out[i-1] + f[s[i]]) % 10]
  return out

Deriving `g` from partial `f`

If you happen to know f(c) for some character c appearing in an input string, and the corresponding digit in the output string is d preceded by some other digit e, then you can derive g((e + f(c)) % 10) == d. The crucial point here is that you can derive a distinct part of g for every distinct value of e: if c happens to be repeated many times in the cleartext, you may be able to derive all of g from the single value f(c). There are only ten possible values of f(c), so there are only ten possible values for whatever part of g you can derive.

Deriving `f` from (partial) `g`

Suppose that the output string contains the digit sequence ab, that you have used the above technique to determine that g(d) == b, and that the character corresponding to this b in the input string is c. Then you can derive that f(c) == (d - a) % 10. You can thus derive a distinct part of f for every distinct c whose image b you have derived in (the inverse of) g. As above, there are only ten possibilities for d, so there are only ten possible values for whatever part of f you can derive.

Deriving `f` when first and last characters match

If you have an input string whose first and last characters are the same character c, the first character of the output for that string is some digit d, and you have used the above techniques to determine the digit e that g maps to d, then you know that (2 * f(c)) % 10 == e. There are only two possible values for f(c) that meet this condition. In practice, the prior attacks are more than enough to derive the entire key in most cases; it’s merely worth noting that there is information leakage all over the place in this “secure hash”.

A naive cracker

It’s clear from the above that significant information about the key is leaked from any input/output pair. If you can influence the input at all, you can easily manipulate it to produce lots of information. And if you can just craft the input from scratch, extracting the entire key becomes trivial. Below is a naive cracker that uses the first two of the above techniques to derive a key based on completely random cleartext.

def extendg(f, g, cleartext, hashed):
  g = { k: v for k, v in g.items() }
  for c, fc in f.items():
    for i in range(1, len(cleartext)):
      if cleartext[i] == c:
        e, d = hashed[i - 1], hashed[i]
        g[(e + fc) % 10] = d
  return g

def extendf(f, g, cleartext, hashed):
  f = { k: v for k, v in f.items() }
  for d, b in g.items():
    for i in range(1, len(hashed)):
      if hashed[i] == b:
        a, c = hashed[i - 1], cleartext[i]
        f[c] = (d - a) % 10
  return f

def derive(ps, cleartext, hashed):
  out = []
  for f, g in ps:
    while True:
      g = extendg(f, g, cleartext, hashed)
      nf = extendf(f, g, cleartext, hashed)
      if f == nf: break
      f = nf
    if len(f) < 26 or len(g) < 10 or blum(f, g, cleartext) == hashed:
      out.append((f, g))
  return out

def crack(kf, kg, chunk_len=50):
  letters = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
  ct = ''.join(random.choice(letters) for _ in range(chunk_len))
  c = collections.Counter(ct).most_common(1)[0][0]
  possibilities = [ ({ c: i }, {}) for i in range(10) ]
  while (len(possibilities) != 1 or
         len(possibilities[0][0]) != 26 or 
         len(possibilities[0][1]) != 10):
    possibilities = derive(possibilities, ct, blum(kf, kg, ct))
    ct = ''.join(random.choice(letters) for _ in range(chunk_len))
  return possibilities[0]

On average, the full key can be extracted from fewer than 150 random characters encoded! That is extraordinarily poor “cryptography”! (A full implementation used to compute this statistic is available here.)

What should non-cryptographers know about cryptography?

I have no expertise in cryptography, but I have some experience working with “formal systems” in general. That experience begins with one very important lesson: Don’t ask “Why shouldn’t system X have property Y?”; ask “Why SHOULD system X have property Y?”

The former question is a favorite tactic of obstructionist time-wasters. “I’m going to believe any arbitrary crap I like until you produce a rigorous proof that I’m wrong!” Rigorous proofs take orders of magnitude more work than just making shit up.

So I’ve got to wonder: why on earth would anyone think the “Blum Mental Hash” was “secure”? I’ve found absolutely no explanation of any theory. In cryptography in particular, even if you have a solid theory that explains how you’re propagating lots of entropy and no information is being leaked etc etc, and even if your formalization and proof of that theory is rock solid, there is still a high chance that there are factors beyond your formalization or details of the implementation that provide attack vectors. Anyone who describes any algorithm as “secure” without deep vetting by a very large community of experts immediately disqualifies themself not only from “expertise” in cryptography, but also from non-specialist competence in employing it.

When you roll your own cryptography, you look like an idiot.

2021 Best Picture Nominees

2022-03-12T00:00:00-06:00

I won’t dance around this: I don’t think any of the Best Picture nominees this year deserve to win. Some awards—the Hugo awards for science fiction writing, for example—ask voters to rank all the nominees, as well as a “No Award” item; I’m afraid that for the 94th Academy Awards I’d rank “No Award” first for Best Picture.

I’ve been doing a lot of reflection on that opinion: am I getting even more jaded and negative? is watching the films at home (and even occasionally second-screening when my attention wanders) ruining my ability to recognize, let alone appreciate, good films? is the Academy now somehow more motivated to nominate worse films, perhaps to prove some kind of point about “integrity” or “art”? are market forces (eg the elimination of mid-budget filmmaking) conspiring to prevent the production of quality films? I don’t know. Perhaps some of all of these; the list of nominees rules out any one of them as a sole factor.

Every year I pick one non-nominee as an excellent film that just doesn’t quite fit the (Academy’s definition of the) Best Picture category. Candidates I considered this year included Last Night In Soho (a brilliantly, beautifully made film that I enjoyed despite never caring for even a moment about the plot) and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (which somehow offered a lot that was fresh and exciting within a franchise and framework that by all logic should have run out of steam long ago), but I think I’d rather highlight Ghostbusters: Afterlife, mainly because it delivered on what it promised despite a high degree of difficulty trying to reprise one of the greatest popular films of all time. It didn’t try to launch a new franchise; it relied on charismatic new characters and a fresh story instead of merely remaking the first film; and it managed to service my emotional attachment to the first film (and its cast and characters) without making any pretense of getting by on merely nostalgia and cameos. Of course it was nothing like the cultural phenomenon of the original Ghostbusters, but it was a solid and entertaining movie that stayed true to the tone and the fun of the genre that original defined. I had low expectations going in, but left with a grin.

Anyway, talking about films that you don’t like isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) much fun, so I’ll keep my individual comments relatively brief. This is my ranking from worst to best, but that’s particularly arbitrary this year: if I think too long about any of these films I can get angry enough to want to put it last:

The Power of the Dog

Just an incredibly tedious, pretentious slog, with no effort to provide any forward momentum for the audience to latch onto. You can see Benedict Cumberbatch acting the hell out of every second of screen time, and that’s not a compliment.

Instead of this, just go back and watch Brokeback Mountain, which is as beautiful and heartbreaking (if not as ostentatiously bold) as it was when it was released.

Licorice Pizza

I’ve always had a bias against Hollywood telling stories about Hollywood, which is where this starts (although it admittedly doesn’t dwell there). But beyond that it’s not a complete story, just a collection of vignettes of characters…none of whom I liked at all.

Instead of this, watch Almost Famous.

Belfast

I think it was Roger Ebert who said that a great film has two great scenes and no bad scenes. But we can go past that: a great film has some great scenes, which are why the film is worth watching, a bunch of good scenes that offer building blocks to enable the great scenes, and perhaps a few fun self-indulgent scenes that could have been left on the cutting-room floor, but what the heck a great film is allowed a little bit of slack.

Belfast is nothing but self-indulgent scenes that feel like they were pulled from the cutting-room floor of great films.

I was working so hard to give Branagh the benefit of the doubt on both the “he stole soap flakes!” and the “she made him return the soap flakes!” gags…but the plot hinges on a mother literally putting her son’s life in danger over this light-hearted fun.

If you want unreliable child narrators, watch 1987’s Hope and Glory, or even 2019’s Jojo Rabbit.

CODA

I really wanted to like this film, if only because it was mercifully short. But it is an atrociously written mashup of a handful of much, much, much better films. The explanation I finally arrived at for the script’s absurdities is that this wasn’t made as vapid Oscar bait (like the above three films), but rather that it was repackaging several adult films about adolescents for adolescents.

Watch Billy Elliot. Watch Whiplash. Watch The Sound of Metal.

(If you want singing, then I guess people seemed to like Pitch Perfect, and there must be a dozen teen romances with more meat on the bone than this nonsense. I’m afraid my knowledge of those genres is nonexistent.)

As a final note, the lead is a capable and charismatic Emma Stone/Watson knockoff. But you simply cannot base your film on “…but her voice was so spectacular that joining the school choir her senior year was enough for everyone else to push her into a professional singing career” if your lead’s voice is, you know, fine. At best.

King Richard

The Williams story is spectacular.

This film, however, offers absolutely no depth to that story. At all.

There’s one mention that Richard Williams actually has (lots of) other kids, who he didn’t invest his life into making stars. So that fascinating angle on what makes a “good father” goes completely untapped.

There are multiple mentions that he’s a shameless public promoter for his daughters, but this all happens entirely off screen, and what we’re shown is merely what (the screenwriter assumes) he said directly to his daughters. So any possible contradictions there go unexplored.

And I realize everyone likes Will Smith. I realize the Academy’s only hope for making this year’s awards ceremony relevant to the public is for Will Smith to win Best Actor. But his performance felt to me like a caricature.

If you like cringeworthy Will Smith performances that dance with racial tropes in shallow sports movies…then maybe just watch The Legend of Bagger Vance?

West Side Story

If you were going to remake a film, then I’d have hoped you’d have a reason for it. A new angle. Something new to say. But there’s nothing new here. I mean, Spielberg throws the camera around in ways nobody could have managed sixty years ago, but the staging and choreography he’s flying through are straight out of 1961.

I admit I haven’t gone back to watch the original film, but the main change I noticed in the script is that the racist street kids who start the whole thing by vandalizing a piece of civic art also try to gang rape a woman for being the wrong race? And this is, like, explicitly called out? I would have remembered that from the old version, wouldn’t I?

I didn’t enjoy 2016’s La La Land (again, my bias against Hollywood stories), but it at least provided a modern cinematic take on the musical. If you want a musical that suffers all the staging constraints of a theatre production, then just watch the 2020 release of Hamilton.

Don’t Look Up

Adam McKay makes movies for dumb people. He identifies a simple idea he wants to get across, he turns it into a screenplay, he goes through that screenplay line by line, identifying every shred of nuance or subtext, and then he takes those shreds and makes sure that some character in the movie says them out loud so that the audience can’t possibly miss them. It’s insulting. It’s depressing. It’s exhausting.

Some reviews say that Don’t Look Up is a satire. These people don’t know what satire is. Satire doesn’t involve people yelling “that sounds like satire!” at potentially satirical lines. Don’t Look Up is instead a polemic in narrative form. A relevant polemic; a polemic with which I largely agree; but a polemic. And not a particularly deep or thoughtful one. It’s meant as a metaphor for climate change, but all the details that have made that problem intractable—the uncertainty and false steps in developing the science; the absence of objective thresholds to provide unambiguous targets; the inherent inequities not just in impact but in who get the chance to contribute to the problem (and reap the rewards) that complicate any intuition of “fairness”—are totally erased to make some utterly anodyne points that provide no guidance for future action.

“Politicians care only about winning elections!”

“Rich people will risk everyone else’s lives to get richer!”

“Fame is seductive!”

If Don’t Look Up is what it took to get you to really think about those nuggets of wisdom, I have absolutely no faith that applications of your new enlightenment will be anything but counter-productive.

Still, all these are arguments that this isn’t a particularly good film, not that it’s a bad film. And it isn’t bad. It’s well made. It’s fairly well paced. It has a real arc. There are a few good gags (the mid-credits scene got a laugh from me). And Jonah Hill is a delight.

The obvious film to watch in place of this is Dr Strangelove. But the British series The Thick of It and its feature film spin-off In the Loop, as well as the American series Veep, are all much more entertaining critiques of political incompetence.

Dune

Dune is one of the most influential franchises (if not the most influential franchise) in all of scifi. I’ve read the book. I’ve even seen Lynch’s bizarre 1984 film. And I kind of enjoyed both. But at this point the basic structure is so ingrained in the genre, and so many of the details that must have been engrossing in 1965 when the book was first published have been aped by other properties, that it’s very tough to evaluate them as though they are “original”. This 2021 film is beautiful. Worth seeing on the big screen. But it brings no nuance to the story that wasn’t already there, it is utterly devoid of humor, none of its characters have any depth, and honestly I’m skeptical that anyone not already familiar with the plot could even follow what’s going on.

Worst of all, however—what completely knocks it out of contention for being a Best Picture—is that it’s not a complete movie. 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War was conceived, written, and marketed as the first half of a two-parter, but it had an internal arc that reached a coherent conclusion making sense of everything it contained. Even the first half of 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia (a rather obvious parallel with Dune) offered viewers a satisfying story arc. Villenueve’s Dune is merely a bunch of things that happen before the budget and runtime are exhausted. There’s absolutely no attempt to tie up threads; in fact an absurd amount of screen time is spent promising us exciting things that this first part never makes any attempt to deliver. Including Zendaya. It doesn’t even bother pacing itself for some big cliffhanger—it just…stops. Maybe both parts together will constitute something that I could consider Best Picture (in an off year). But this on its own is an insult, and the nomination is a declaration that the Academy cares more about visual artistry than any aspect of story.

On the Dune story itself

Instead of running the film down any more, let me use this space to rebut one common criticism of Dune: that the emperor giving the most valuable planet in the universe to someone he fears is a plot hole. I admit I’m doing a little bit of head canon on this, but I say the opposite. Grokking the emperor’s perspective is the only way to redeem what would otherwise be a miserable story about one man’s greatness saving the galaxy.

The Bene Gesserit, a secretive cabal that has infiltrated every power structure in existence, have spent centuries doing two things:

Constructing a latent army on Arrakis powerful enough to permanently seize the planet, control Spice production, and thus own the greatest bargaining chip in the universe. But an army that crucially will not go rogue.
Breeding a messiah for this army that they can control.

A centuries-long breeding program doesn’t culminate suddenly. Leto Atreides (Paul’s father) is a nutjob with a messiah complex and the ability to inspire loyalty to the extent that his followers lose all rationality. When the book(/film) opens, he’s convinced himself that somehow he’s accrued real power in the universe. He’s convinced his followers of this. They are are all utterly deluded. This is like a middle manager at a giant corporation who suddenly thinks they have clout in the way the founders and primary shareholders do. Just bonkers.

The emperor sees this nutjob, rolls his eyes, and says “man you sure are powerful! Good for you! I’ll give you the most valuable thing in all of existence, and all you have to do is peacefully transfer all your current responsibilities to others, and gather you, your family, and all your fanatics—I mean followers—in one place!”

Leto Atreides does. He thinks “there’s something suspicious about this, but my genius will see me through this intricate game of five-dimensional chess…” He’s an idiot.

Immediately upon making himself trivial to cleanly eliminate, he is cleanly eliminated by the emperor, who hands Arrakis right back to its prior administrator. This was not a squeaker of a battle and House Atreides got unlucky. They had zero chance—zero—of holding Arrakis against the emperor’s will.

And of course the Bene Gesserit don’t care a whit. Maybe they whispered in the emperor’s ear to ease this along to give Paul Atreides even more claim to legitimacy on Arrakis, but after breeding him for the same ability to inspire fanatical loyalty as his father, and then training him (perhaps subconsciously) through childhood to fulfill the prophecies they’d seeded among the Fremen (“he already knows how to wear a stillsuit!”) he probably doesn’t even need that to take control of their underground army.

And the thing about all this is that his visions—the ability to see through a tree of possible futures—may just as well be nutty drug-induced hallucinations related to his messiah complex. Paul is a peg of Bene Gesserit design fitting into a hole of Bene Gesserit design. He’s a kook and doesn’t know it. And, as the Bene Gesserit make very clear to his mother, he is the most easily replaced part of the plan. They’ve been preparing other pegs that would fit just as well.

The emperor’s mistake was not seeing the power of Bene Gesserit long-term planning. Wiping out House Atreides was perfectly reasonable, and went off entirely according to plan.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Nightmare Alley

Guillermo del Toro is on my list, with Edgar Wright, of filmmakers whose films I will watch no matter what they’re about. Nightmare Alley is a beautiful film, in the “every frame a painting” sense. He’s a master of the visual side of the artform.

He’s not a master, unfortunately, of plot, or structure, or character, and Nightmare Alley left me cold on all of those fronts. There is nothing in the first half of the film to pull the audience into the future; it’s just a bunch of things that happen one after the other. When tension finally is created in the second half—there’s an endgame with Grindle to drive towards—the stops and starts along the way seem arbitrary and forced. This felt to me like a result of never really establishing either Molly or Ritter as full characters, just obstacles motivated solely by the need to advance the plot. I wonder whether there were a few scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor that could have helped with that.

Not that I would actually endorse putting back any cut scenes; at 150 minutes this is already far too long a film. The trouble is that there are just so many plot points this film needs to get through it’s a huge challenge to actually motivate them all. Any one of the acts could have been a (good) two-hour film of its own.

If you want a visually stylish film along these lines, I guess the obvious alternative is The Shape of Water. If you’re more interested in the period character study aspect, then I recommend 2006’s The Prestige, a good film that seems to have been widely forgotten.

Drive My Car

I’ve read a handful of Murakami novels, and I see the art and appeal of them, but they’re not for me: four hundred pages of people experiencing ennui and finally concluding that, you know, life is sad. (Sometimes the characters kill themselves. Finally.) But if that’s the kind of thing you enjoy putting yourself through, this is the film for you!

I’ve already mentioned (several times) that I hate films about film culture, and Drive My Car has that in spades. But I also have another bias: I love it when films take details of niche passions seriously. 1994’s Clerks (a bad film) took Star Wars fandom seriously, and 1997’s Chasing Amy (an okay film) had a couple of real conversations about making comics, so I can’t hate Kevin Smith despite considering him a terrible filmmaker. The long, going-nowhere scenes tracking the minutia of theatre rehearsals in Drive My Car leave me torn. There is zero chance—zero—that any filmmaker would allow such indulgent dives into any other discipline. You’ll never see a twenty-minute sequence tracking the emergence of a software architecture or the identification of a programming error, no matter how brilliantly the associated methodology mirrors the philosophy of the film. I’m bewildered that movie folks can’t see that double standard. So there’s that.

I feel obliged to note that there’s an arc on Seinfeld where they make a TV pilot in which a man gets in a car accident and is sentenced to be Jerry’s butler. They take this pilot to a bunch of Japanese TV executives, and the executives ask “Is this common in America? For a man to be sentenced to be another man’s butler?” Similarly, I must ask: is it common for one visiting artist to get in a car accident, and then for all subsequent visiting artists not to be allowed to drive? Because the film makes it seem like that is a normal thing in Japan. I—a westerner unfamiliar with the exotic customs of The East—do not think that is a normal thing.

And finally: the pacing. The nominees this year include several 150-minute slogs, but pushing past the three-hour mark—for a film with very, very few plot points—is ostentatiously advertising that you’re going to take your time. Forty minutes into the film, the opening credits appeared, and I laughed out loud. The car had a sunroof, and they aren’t using the sunroof, and they’re doing Chekhov, right? So they have to use the sunroof, right? And in the last sequence they used the sunroof, and I cheered. Because when the filmmakers have consciously decided that their goal is to trap an audience in a theatre and deprive them of all joy for three hours, you’ve got to find your own, auteur’s intent be damned.

So it was tedious, and pretentious, and self-absorbed, but at least with this film I’ll concede that it was coherent: the digressions and silences and the sheer grinding boredom for its own sake all fed into the theme. They managed to tie it together, and I grudgingly admit that it more or less worked for me.

Could I recommend this film? No. Of course not. Watching it was a terrible experience and I don’t feel it enriched my perspective in any way that a dozen more enjoyable works haven’t already done. Best film of the year!