Seventy-five schmedium ~ More TK #10

It's been a minute!!

In some respects this is the expected outcome—I got into a weekly rhythm with the blog and then, predictably, stopped doing that due to some combination of work-related exhaustion and a general lack of interest in my own opinions. But I'm back! And I have more of them, about this specific issue!

My fiancée and I started a thing we've taken to calling 75 Fancy—it's effectively somewhere between 75 Hard (a laborious and stressful way of committing to an insane number of workouts) and 75 Caleb (a joke version of 75 Hard from Caleb Hearon that he's already done with)—and it's arrived at the point where it stops being helpful or interesting and starts becoming a box-checking exercise.

There was about a week in there where I did genuinely feel better in my body and my mind—I was (and still am, I guess) going back to the gym, I was drinking more water, I'm actually making my way through books with anything more than scattershot progress—but now I've invariably reached the point that I reach with any hobby or goal, which is that I'm having a really hard time giving a shit and I feel bloated and awful most of the time and I've got a real doom loop in my thought process going on right now that's been very hard to diversify away from. This is in spite of the fact that my partner and I have been good accountability buddies during this whole process, up to and including the creation of a little sticker chart with some fancy paper that I got from Goods for the Study, a wonderful little store I've written about previously. The sticker chart has actually been really good for tracking, largely because we bought really cute stickers and I want a panda at the end of the night god dammit, but there's only so much satisfaction you can derive from that. Eventually...I dunno.

There's always the eventually, I think. I can't ever seem to get my head up and over that eventually and into the doing, yknow? At least not for more than a few weeks. I had a few weeks last year where I was dead set on writing a screenplay—not even a good one, mind you, just...a one—but then my pseudo-writing partner at the time and I couldn't get our schedules lined up so that fell apart and I haven't even sniffed at Final Draft since then. I've had ideas for articles come and go with absolutely no confidence in my ability to deliver on the pitch, or to even formulate one. It's getting a little disappointing, like I'm trapped in my own rut and all I have is a shovel and there's a perfectly good pile of dirt right over there I could use to climb out but instead I dig a little further down and the pile over there gets a little taller and it's not super precarious but it's starting to lean in an interesting way and maybe tomorrow it topples and takes me with it or maybe it just keeps getting bigger and bigger until it's a mountain and I'm stuck far below the summit and the only way out is up.

Anyway. Looking ahead.

Next week is the 64th New York Film Festival! This will be my third NYFF, and I've really enjoyed the festival in past years, and I'm hoping this year's is no exception. There are a bunch of interesting things on the docket for me—I'm particularly excited about the new Lee Chang-dong and Ryuske Hamaguchi outings—that I will be writing about as I see them, hopefully in more broken-out micro reviews or something. Gotta boost those numbers somehow, yknow?

The Watchlist

The End of Oak Street (2026)

This movie is like one of those Red Bull advertising stunts where they pay a lunatic to ride a bicycle on an impossibly thin obstacle course made of like eight PVC pipes and some string suspended over a river, in that it’s constantly teetering on the edge of collapse but it makes it all the way across and that’s really cool but it’s also only cool enough to sustain like a six minute YouTube video. I loved it.

Tony (2026)

After the magisterial brilliance of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, which is a creative feat that may go unmatched this century, I may have set my expectations for a Matt Johnson-helmed biopic of a beloved public figure too high. It’s not bad, per se, but it is a thuddingly pedestrian outing, absent a few moments where you can feel the performers stretching the script to fit their desires. Wish there was more here but I’m not too surprised there isn’t, and I’m not even really mad about it.

Coyote vs. Acme (2026)

Genuinely kinda a masterpiece and I’m not just saying that because a) it’s based on a New Yorker article and b) because of the corporate malfeasance meta-narrative that precipitated the release of this movie. It might make it sweeter, but this was always going to be a delicious little meal, and I’m very happy I got to see it in a theatre, with a crowd, laughing in all the right places.

Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967)

This is effectively the start of my Scorsese Autumn Sicko period, and because I am both a Blank Check listener and insane (read: a Blank Check listener) I decided to start from the top. And would you believe, Marty’s first movie ever is kinda terrible in the way that all first features are terrible, which is to say that there’s approximately three flashes of brilliance here and then the rest devolves into a noisy incoherent amateurish sludge.

Boxcar Bertha (1972)

I’m very sympathetic to these dirty little Roger Corman movies and their roteness. Nothing about this is new—if you’ve seen anything else that bore the Corman name and was directed by a totemic auteur, then you kinda know what you’re getting here. It’s got motion, but it’s a snooze. Probably would do well on planes if not for the sex and the crucifying a union leader.

New York, New York (1977)

Unlike End of Oak Street, which is kind of threatening to be a mess, this is actually a full-blown no-holds-barred attempts-were-made mess. What’s most interesting is the ways in which it keeps almost getting its foot in the door—there are vanishingly brief moments where Liza or DeNiro emerge from their coke haze and remember to deliver a compelling performance or a joke or a look or just something, but then it falls apart again a minute later. It’s ultimately saved entirely by the final forty-ish minutes being a Liza revue, which is brilliantly performed and shot. I loved it, I think, in the end.

Mean Streets (1973)

The Blank Check folks went over this point a few times, but there’s a reason that everyone pretty much treats this as Scorsese’s first film, and that’s because it’s the first time that the guy figures out both What His Thing Is and How To Make That Thing Effectively. It’s pretty remarkable how many lines in Marty’s whole career you can draw from this point, how its preoccupations with men and their egos and their violence and their malformed relationships with God and women and each other echo through the twentieth century and deep into the twenty-first.

Remarkably Bright Creatures (2026)

Sweet enough, I suppose—I think what makes it work is that it doesn't tip into purely saccharine bullshit until like the last five minutes, by which point you really want it to tip there as an audience if only to see our two court jesters (Lewis Pullman and Sally Field) finally, finally break free of their retained anger and self-worth issues and get to something akin to happiness. A mid script performed well can be a beautiful thing.

Practical Magic 2 (2026)

Speaking of mid scripts, jesus fucking christ.

This movie is so lifeless and tonally janky that it really boggles the mind. Which is not to say the first movie is in any way less tonally janky—I was never a major apologist for it or its shenanigans, but I respect the cult following it got after years on cable—but there is absolutely no sense of fun or joy or even much humor to be had here. It lurches from plot beat to plot beat basically without reserve, the performances are entirely off the map, and it essentially sidelines Masie Williams for the entire film (an insane thing to do in a movie about the power of sisterhood, I fear!).

Resident Evil (2026)

Genuinely quite disgusting. Incredibly fun. Cregger knows ball—first, to the degree that I can recognize shit from a bunch of games I have never played (horror video games spook me out and unsettle me to the degree that I effectively never partake in them, my philosophy being that I don't like being in high-tension deeply uncomfortable settings for longer than like two and a half hours which oh would you look at that is how long a movie lasts); second, because he's becoming the kind of horror-comedy auteur that can make something as obvious as a Resident Evil reboot—a thing that was always going to exist at some point in some form—deeply, fascinatingly gripping and funny and nasty and even a little bit charming.

Writing soundtrack

More tk,

Luis