🍿 Martha (2024) was well worth the time (nearly two hours — long for a documentary). Excerpts from her 30-minute rant to the NYT about why she hated it were the cherry on top. Only in America…

This is explained, sort of, by her being descended from Serbian cat people. At one point in the movie a very catlike woman addresses her, in Serbian, as moja sestra — “my sister.”

I am always on the lookout for an unexpected mention of my people, and Alan Jacobs delivered.

🍿 Wicked (2024) was longer and clearly more expensive than the stage version yet somehow neither as dramatic or as magical. It was just too much CGI. Ariana Grande’s singing was noticeably not up to par with Kristin Chenoweth’s, though her comedic timing was surprisingly apt. Cynthia Erivo was stellar, but again, CGI drained quite a bit out of her performance so the grand not-quite-finale finale (Defying Gravity) felt flatter than the stage version.

Or maybe I just prefer the theater?

🍿 The Wild Robot (2024): beautifully made, needlessly violent. Crazed chases and shootout spectacles push out a sweet children’s story. Too bad.

🍿 Krampus (2015) is comedy-horror fun for the entire family with great practical effects and a clear, if simple, message. Will watch again, this time next year.

🍿 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) is an underappreciated marvel that starts with racism and murder, revs things up with a powerful man’s lust over a young woman and ends with near-genocide, to the tune of Latin chants. Heavy topics for a Disney cartoon! And oh that villain song…

🍿 Twisters (2024) was utter garbage as a movie, but pure gold as fodder for a Mystery Science Theater-like viewing at home. Fun was had, until I fell asleep during the last third. Please don’t tell me who won.

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.