A friend raved about Anora (2024) and I’ve never heard of the movie until this morning. Earlier this week I quizzed my kids about actors and actresses and all they knew were YouTubers. Either movies are dying as a pop-cultural phenomenon or I am completely out of the loop. Quite possibly both.

1. It won’t be close. Most pollsters are hacks who commit even greater statistics crimes than physicians so their 50/50 is most likely to mean a landslide either way.
2. That link above is to Nate Silver’s Substack post, but please remember that he is also a hack who builds prediction models from the polling garbage he describes above while knowing it is garbage. That is even worse than what the pollsters are doing because shouldn’t he know better?
3. Worse yet are economists who excuse the pollster behavior: they see crimes being committed and think yep, that’s how it should be. This is a University of Michigan professor of economics and a senior fellow of some pretty serious Think Tanks who doesn’t realize that fiddling with your results after you’ve collected them in order to better align with the aggregate of other people’s results is scientifically unsound. I’d send all of his papers to Retraction Watch for a close inspection.
4. From 538 to the NYT to Nate, every poll aggregator has for months been fed back its own bullshit. Little wonder then that they all converged to a 50/50: complete ignorance.
5. Prediction “markets” are no better than equity markets in reflecting reality. Which is to say, they reflect the reality of vibes and wishful thinking, not the ground truth. They are best ignored.
6. Sátántangó (2019) by the Hungarian director Béla Tarr is a 7-hour masterpiece shot in black and white; perfect for watching on a crisp autumn evening like tonight’s, no other screens allowed.

🍿 The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020) has some great set pieces in Armando Ianucci’s signature style: too many bodies in too small of a room, yelling at each other; rinse, repeat. This may work well for a short story or a historical anecdote, but a 600+ page doorstopper requires too many corners to be cut and so all that’s left is the yelling. Amusing, and not much more.

🍿 Inside Out 2 chose not to emphasize phones and social media, even though it is a story about the anxiety of a 13-year-old girl. It was the right choice to make, timeless over topical, with real-world stakes being delightfully low for all the turmoil inside Riley’s head. That’s puberty.

🍿 The Hunger Games (2012) came out the same year as our first child was born, and now that the child is old enough to participate it was time to finally see it.

The West Virginia aesthetics of District 12 were fine, but the over-the-top style of the capitol city dwellers was jarring. So was the architecture, which looked like what DC would be if all of DC were one large L’Enfant Plaza. Yikes!

I don’t know how much money Jennifer Lawrence earned from being in this franchise, but it really should be all of it — she was the only reason it was watchable, dare I say even enjoyable.

🍿 Incredibles 2 (2018) made several questionable choices that resulted in something less than the original:

• Picking up right where they dropped off was lazy and showed lack of trust that the audience can pick up the threads.
• Ditto for following the same ally-turned-foe pattern.
• Having the kids be the saviors reeks of typical Hollywood plotting; let kids be kids, even if they have super powers!
• Why oh why did they drop the “The”? Brad Bird’s answer to that one was that “it just sounded stupid”. Dumb it down some more, please, Brad.

At least the soundtrack didn’t disappoint!

🍿 The Incredibles (2004) will be 20 — yes, twenty — years old this October. On one hand it shows, as there are YouTube-only cartoons that now look better than what used to be Pixar’s best; but I still can’t think of a better combination of characters, plot and action in a family movie. And of course there is the soundtrack, Michael Giacchino’s first and probably best (here he is talking about it at the Kennedy Center 6 years ago.

🍿 Father of the bride (1991) started off strong, but Martin Short’s performance, if you can call it that, made it into an unwatchable mess. It did make me want to watch the original, 1950 version, starring Spencer Tracey as the father and an 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor as his daughter (from the poster: The Bride gets the THRILLS! Father gets the BILLS!).

🍿 The Matrix (1999) was as over-the-top cool as I remembered it, though younger generations will now apparently use the word “cringe”. OK, zoomer.

🍿 Inception (2010) was better and more coherent than I remembered. There have been so many variations on the theme since it came out that we’ve become accustomed to the mechanics — enough so that the plot now feels almost too simple for Nolan, but just perfect for an enjoyable movie.