131: October 2025

I’ve got a few writing ideas that I can’t talk about just yet; they need more time to proof, and then to bake, and hopefully they’ll all work out okay (I’m bad at following recipes). Fortunately one thing cooking that I can talk about is a guest appearance on Authorized Podcast, a podcast about movie novelizations I’ve guested on before to talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien: Covenant and a few other movies. Every Thanksgiving they do a special that involves a movie tie-in cookbook; this year, we’re picking recipes from the utterly deranged A24 Scrounging cookbook, which, rather than being loosely thematically tied to a particular movie, provides recipes for actual dishes in actual movies, like the mushroom omelette from Phantom Thread, the divorced-dad peanut butter sandwich from Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and the Pixie Stix sandwich from The Breakfast Club. You know, normal recipes.

Because I am who I am, I decided I wanted to actually cook something, which meant taking the sandwiches off the table except as a last resort. The recipe I went with was the oily cakes from First Cow, a movie I adore, and crucially also mostly involved ingredients that were already in my pantry. The lone exception was a sourdough starter, which I intended to start myself but discovered I didn’t have enough time to ensure the starter would be ready by the time I needed it. Out of a desire not to resort to making a sad peanut butter sandwich, I took to BlueSky to ask if anyone I knew in Chicago had a starter. Miraculously, someone I knew did, and they offered to try reviving it for me. I took them up on it, which is how I ended up driving across the city on a Sunday afternoon to collect a living flour/water.yeast cocktail from a person I’d never actually met in person before. I love Chicago, and I love having the opportunity to meet interesting people and to recommend that they watch First Cow, and I love that writing about movies is what got me here in the first place. Fingers crossed the oily cakes are good.

What I wrote:

For Seeing & Believing, I reviewed Tron: Ares and A House of Dynamite. We also covered the Chicago International Film Festival, which had some overlap with the titles I covered at TIFF in September. This gave me the ability to see a few movies that have been flying a little lower under the radar, including a few documentaries. CIFF coverage will be up this weekend over at the Seeing & Believing newsletter; hit that subscribe button if you want it in your inbox as soon as it’s out.

Finally, this month I had the opportunity to interview Mona Fastvold, the director of The Testament of Ann Lee, which happens to be one of my favorite movies of the year. It’s out on Christmas Day; I highly recommend that you go see it, and in the meantime, you can whet your appetite by reading the interview, in which we talk about community, leadership, religion, and dance.

What I talked about:

The Broad Sound crew had me on their podcast to talk about One Battle After Another, particularly how it works as a loose adaptation of Pynchon’s Vineland, which I read this summer. I love having in-depth conversations about movies that make me appreciate them even more; this one was a good one.