123: February 2025

As this newsletter goes out, I'm attending the True/False documentary film festival, one of the highlights of my movie year. More to come; I'll be covering the festival for Bright Wall/Dark Room.

In book news: I spent a chunk of this month formatting the second edition of Becoming Alien. I don't yet know the exact date the book will be available, but I'm hoping by the end of the year. Progress rolls on.

What I wrote:

For Bright Wall/Dark Room, I wrote a piece about Nosferatu (2024) and The Vourdalak, two vampire movies from last year that resonated with me deeply. I wrote the opening lines ("the world's on fire") before the end of last December, before Los Angeles caught fire, before the inauguration, before the current administration started gutting the government. At the time, I was reeling from a family crisis, the kind that ends in wounded feelings and broken relationships, and I channeled a lot of that personal pain into the essay. I meant one thing when I wrote it. Now, this essay means something different, a kind of taking stock of the world we have, and what we're supposed to do with it. I still don't know what to do besides the small things: sharing information that's helpful, donating money to our local food bank, calling up elected representatives to push them to do the work we pay them to do. Maybe that's all we can do.

Over at Seeing & Believing, I wrote reviews of Steven Soderbergh's Presence, the new Captain America movie, and Osgood Perkins's The Monkey.

What I talked about:

The good folks at Authorized Podcast had me on to talk about Men With Brooms, an indie Canadian sports movie/rom-com about a down-on-their-luck curling team. The movie's fun, the novelization is genuinely delightful, and the whole endeavor is the most Canadian thing I've encountered in a while.

I also recorded an audio version of an essay I wrote a few years ago about Avatar: The Last Airbender for Think Christian.