What is a QuickTrip, and what does it have to do with A REAL PAIN, ANORA and SATURDAY NIGHT?

We're trying out another new format to find ways to get you guys more

I think that’s it for me and social media.

I don’t think I’ll erase my presence entirely, but I will be deleting Elon Musk’s Oops! All Nazis from my life sooner rather than later, and I’m going to do my best to curb the habit overall and invest my time and energy elsewhere. The last year has been too depressing for me to think there’s any ongoing value in giving my attention to these weird digital haunted houses where people scream their opinions at each other.

I’d rather figure out a more regular format here. Whatever happens with the Big Secret Thing That Is Frustratingly Still Secret, I don’t have any plans to wrap this or The Last ‘80s Newsletter (You’ll Ever Need) any time soon. I may not have a clear picture of what Formerly Dangerous is right now, but I know I want to keep trying new things and doing the one thing that brings me joy: writing about movies.

Even more than actually writing or making movies, surprisingly. At least, I find it surprising. The dream was always making movies, not writing about them. The industry has beaten the pleasure out of that process for me, though, and while I am invested heart and soul into the project that has occupied so much of my attention for the last few years, everything about the business carries a built-in stress for me. I need this show in so many ways, and that means there is a real danger that anything that impedes my making of this show is going to take an emotional and physical toll on me. Again. As it does every single time I invest all of myself into something that doesn’t happen.

Writing about movies, on the other hand, feels like there are no stakes at all, and even though I’ve been doing this for over a quarter-century now, I feel like there is so much more I’d like to do. More than ever, it feels like there is value in helping people navigate over a century of movie history. If you’re a young person interested in movies, it is daunting to start figuring out where to educate yourself. You could pick a specific decade, or a genre, or a filmmaker, and you could absorb filmographies and history that way. But the sheer volume of stuff that’s out there can be overwhelming. I see people criticize younger viewers for never watching anything made before the year 2000, but honestly, that’s how most people start their film education. New films are the ones that draw you in, and then you start working your way backwards. It is a strange irony that the more of film history you have access to, the harder it is to know what to watch. What I do, hopefully, is offer some kind of curation that inspires people to explore even more, or, for those already familiar with the films being discussed, to revisit things that you haven’t thought about in a while.

I’ve recorded about half of the second season of The Hip Pocket now. You can find the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts already, and I’m going to start adding new episodes of the warm-up season there every week, working towards a launch of our second season, where we bring guests into the mix. That should be towards the end of January. I’m excited because I can feel the show starting to snap into place. With any new show, I think you’re going to fidget about with format a little until you find the version that feels right, and I think we’re almost there. Adding guests to the mix has been delightful, and everyone who has come on has over-delivered on what we expected from them. Being a guest on the first season of a podcast is a matter of trust. They haven’t heard the show. They don’t know what they’re getting into. So I am deeply grateful to everyone who took that jump with us, and I think these conversations are really lovely and illuminating.

My underlying theory with the show is that people tell you who they are when they tell you what they love, and when you get someone talking about things that are special to them, they can’t help but open up about themselves. Anyone who has read my work over the years knows a lot about me, more than I ever intended to reveal, and that’s inevitable. You cannot fully engage with art and then share those reactions without also outlining your feelings on the world, other people, love, politics, and everything else. Art covers so much ground, and it works to describe so much of the human experience, which is why you can spend your entire life writing about it and just barely scratch the surface.

I see less and less point in the kind of coverage I used to do at HitFix or Ain’t It Cool. I don’t feel like feeding the pre-release hype monster anymore. There are so many places that cover every trailer, casting rumor, photo, running time, and whatever else you could possibly know about a movie before actually seeing it, and they all feel exactly the same, so I can’t imagine spending any of my remaining energy on that kind of thing. And if you want junket interviews, there are plenty of outlets for those as well, and there are people who use that format well. I always recommend Jake Hamilton and Kevin McCarthy as examples of how to take that limited window of time and use it well. I can’t see ever returning to that format myself, though. Besides… it’s the film or the show that actually matters to me, not the hype.

So what is this newsletter? It’s something I think about a lot right now as I eyeball a complete change of my creative focus. If this thing I’ve been working on happens, then this newsletter will primarily be news about that project, but that doesn’t mean I’d stop recommending things I enjoy. I’d like to have a way to drop a few quick thoughts into a newsletter in a breezier format, and to that end, I’m going to start sending you guys what I call a QuickTrip, or a quick triple-feature, from time to time.

Simply put, it’ll be three quick impressions of new movies, or three quick impressions of three new 4K releases. Or three quick reviews of new books I enjoyed, or three quick comic recommendations. Or, basically, whatever trio of things I have ready in a particular week. I’ve allowed the sheer backlog of things I’d like to talk about to derail me completely, and instead, I’d like to find a way to send you shorter things more often. There is so much chaos in the world right now that I’d like to use this newsletter as a place you can come and set that aside for a few minutes. Let’s share the things we’re holding onto right now, the things that bring us joy or that provoke us or that simply make us feel better. And let’s see if I can check in more often to help set up a corner of the Internet where you guys can talk about all of these things in the comments if you’re so inclined.

I’ve seen so many films lately that I’m a little dizzy. There’s a lot of great stuff in theaters, and with release dates collapsed as much as they are, a lot of it ends up at home very quickly. You can already see my favorite film of the year, The Substance, at home via PVOD or Mubi, and if you want to check out the one-two punch of The Apprentice and A Different Man, two radically different films with great Sebastian Stan performances, they are both available at home now. Maybe it’s cheating to point those out before we do a quick QuickTrip, but they’re both striking works of art that make their points with a startling degree of craft. A Different Man co-stars Adam Pearson, the actor who made such a strong impression in Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, and the entire film hinges on the idea that we think we know what would make our lives better, but we’re wrong. We want quick fixes instead of doing the work it takes to transform ourselves in genuine ways.

The Apprentice is, of course, “that Donald Trump movie,” which makes it a doubly bitter pill to swallow right now. But just watching this film as a film, I was struck by how nimble it is at establishing time and place on a limited budget. They make fantastic use of stock footage and different film stocks as a way of creating a shorthand that transports us to a particular turning point in NYC history. I respect Jeremy Strong’s choice to play Roy Cohn as Nosferatu. No notes. What Stan does as Trump goes beyond impression, though, and it surprised me. He plays Trump as a guy who is constantly workshopping his personality. If something works, it sticks. If it doesn’t, it’s gone. By the end of the film, we recognize this creepy grab bag of tics and mannerisms that Trump has adopted as his public persona, and we see how clearly there’s nothing else to him. He is only the public persona. All he cares about is that image he has created, and constantly burnishing it into this idealized thing, no matter how big a piece of shit he has to be to accomplish it.

If you guys like this format, this seems like a good way to give you content more often, so let me know in the comments below. First up today, let’s look at three recent films I’ve enjoyed, all of which you can see in the theater, and one of which is already available to view at home…

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Saturday Night

I did not expect to like this as much as I did, and to be honest, some of the things that made me nervous about it were indeed part of the finished film. Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan pack so many characters and so much incident into their relatively short film that it feels a little bit like people never stop introducing themselves and announcing their intentions. If you’re covering this much ground, no one’s going to have a chance to dig into the people they’re playing, yet to some degree, that ends up being part of the film’s charm. This thing never stops moving, and it definitely wants to entertain you.